How to Build a Title Sales System That Wins | Title Agents Podcast Ep15

Whether you're in sales in real estate or you're in title, you need to focus what amount of time and energy am I putting on investing in the relationship with these amount of individuals because when they have the need, they're going to come to their friend, they're going to come to the person that in relationship. In a world where change is the only constant, Mo Shamil stands at the forefront, guiding title professionals to not just grow their businesses, but to master the art of innovation. With every episode, you're handed the keys to unlock unparalleled growth and stay ahead of the curve. Get ready for a transformative journey. Hello and welcome to the Title Agents Podcast, where we dive deep into the minds of industry leaders who are reshaping the real estate and title landscape.

Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Ryan Dupriel, a seasoned entrepreneur and founder of Dupriel Properties, which became a powerhouse in the Midwest real estate market. Now, Ryan is taking on a new challenge with his latest venture, Zanello, a company focused on revolutionizing title sales through cutting-edge digital systems while maintaining the human touch that builds lasting relationships. Get ready for an inspiring conversation about innovation, leadership, and the future of our industry. Welcome, Ryan. Well, thanks for having me.

I appreciate it. Well, as we start, I would love to hear your life story, what shaped you, your background, your history, and just get to give our audience a little peek on your life. Sure. So, as you mentioned, I had a real estate brokerage, a mortgage, a title company, insurance company, which I sold a couple of years ago, coming in two years ago. Prior to that, I began my real estate career in 2005 after a successful career in executive search on the supply chain manufacturing side of things.

And so, I learned a lot from that business that carried over into my real estate business. So, I started as a real estate agent, sponsored myself right out of the gates in 2005, built a small team. And then in around 2010, 2011, I decided I wanted to grow the real estate company and the businesses. So, I pivoted from selling to focusing working on the business and scaled it from a handful of us to about 12 offices selling over a billion dollars of real estate annually, something I'm very proud of. And along the way, we got into the mortgage business, the title business, the insurance business.

And so, that's a brief little window of my history there. That's awesome. What does that translate to transaction-wise, a billion a year in revenue, just for our title audience? I think in 2011, it was around 6,000 transactions for just the real estate side of the business. But then we obviously had the mortgage side and then we had the title and insurance side as well.

That's awesome. Very proud of your success. So, the Prill Properties became a powerhouse in the real estate market through a strong sales-driven culture. How do you instill a disciplined approach to sales with a new team? And how do you ensure this focus on sales excellence continues to honor the legacy of your company?

So, it's a great question. And I'm going to try to relate this to some of the audience members that are in the title industry about this as well. We built it from scratch. I think it's almost easier to build than to recruit. One thing I'm really proud of is when we sold our company, approximately 80% of our individuals, our salespeople at the company, right?

We're going to talk about sales here for a minute. 80% of them, maybe a little more, started the career with us. And we coached and we trained them up. And so, there's a couple of really good books out there, the Toyota Way and E-Myth, and I'm sure books you've all heard before. And I really enjoy, especially giving back my previous background in the supply chain manufacturing, I really appreciate the Toyota Way and the Toyota production system.

And one of the things that drove me a little batty about sales is the lack of structure and the lack of visual flow, which they call Kanban in the Toyota production system. And so, what I started to do is I started one by one. We started off with real estate agents. And then again, I went to mortgage to title, teaching individuals, here's our approach to selling. It's relationship-based.

And let's process and systematize the way you either create or nurture or maintain relationships. And now it's 13, 14 years later, and we developed the system. With it, companies are using, real estate, mortgage, and title companies are using. And a lot of people call it a CRM. And CRMs are kind of funny.

Most CRMs today are marketing platforms. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management Tool, Customer Relations Management. There's no marketing in there. And I don't want to come across somebody who's anti-marketing. Marketing is important and building a brand is important.

But I think today's day, everybody's like 95% marketing and branding, and they're forgetting that important part of the relationship. So, what I did back then and over the course of 10 years and continue to do today is to try to keep people's eyes focused on the process of maintaining and nurturing very important relationships to your business. That's awesome. One of the big knock on a lot of brokerages, especially to traditional brokerages, is the lack of training. It's amazing that you actually focus on that training and recruiting new agents.

Everybody wants the mega agent, the producer that does a lot of big revenue attached to them, but it's extremely difficult to build from scratch. Can you give us a little step-by-step how'd you go about it? I know it's a lot of patience, a long time, and also it's going to probably cost you a lot of money as well. It is. I mean, it is and it isn't.

And so, I think as we evolved as an organization, we then started dipping into the recruiting side of real estate, right? And title, even mortgage, for that point, it's almost easier to create than to recruit, quite honestly. So, your question was, how did we do it? How lovely. Yeah, exactly.

Again, I think, especially for the listeners on the title side, it's almost easier and actually, I think, more cost effective to build versus to recruit. In the title side of business, customer service is incredibly important. That's what we all do well, but we don't realize that that's a reactive versus a proactive approach. So, we have to take a proactive approach to nurturing the relationships. Customer service is only going to get so far.

So, we have to really streamline that. Back to your question, I did the same thing with individuals that joined our company. I told, on this real estate side of things, it's your network is your net worth. It's the expression that's out there and we- Amen. Right?

And so, I was always teaching everybody, these clays, your network is your net worth. It's not what you know, it's who you know. And so, I literally started off with little spreadsheets and helping people organize their database. I think one of the things that most salespeople do very poorly, and the cause of this is they get some business, they kind of go out and then they plateau, is they do terrible database management. Your database is your most valuable asset.

I could prove to anybody who's in our business by sitting down, take any of their assets and I could compare it to the cashflow that their business is producing and then eventually get to realize, wow, I couldn't really put a number on my database like you put on my database, a six plus a year cashflow coming from it. So, I tried to visualize it coming from that Toyota production system and we did visualize it. That is a lot about what I do and I, which we'll really get into, but it's about visualizing the process of contact relationship management. And so, I just started by teaching individuals one-on-one, like good to great. What you can't track, you can't improve.

And so, we have to track. We have to track our activities. We have the time block for continuous improvement. Again, the Toyota production system, right? Kaizen.

And this is a culture we had at our company. The number one thing that you have to continually improve on is yourself and really look within. That is the way you're going to get the biggest results is managing your internal controls versus external. When you say visualize, are you talking more like bubble charts? Because I'm all about visuals.

Yeah. I learn, I can see things better clearly through visual than kind of auditory or written. I'm a visual person as well. And think of it as a flowchart, right? Yeah.

Think of it as a flowchart and how are you flowing with the contacts and database? Where is it? So, in ours, we have, I'll have you, Mo, write in your information. I have notes on you and maybe information about your significant other or children or whatnot. However, on my first floor, if you, your contact information, I'll have hyperlinks to your social media pages.

Because a lot of things that people are doing right now is they're doing a lot of social media marketing and advertising. I think they're losing focus on the most powerful part of social media is that people in your database are posting and it's not about you, it's about them. Yes, we need to brand ourself. And I understand the importance of that, but what is Mo posting about? What's important to Mo, right?

The Ford, the family occupation, the recreation, right? What are you doing for vacation coming up and whatnot? Social media is going to give me that information to create a rapport with you. So, we just kind of process flow. marketing and advertising.

I think they're losing focus on the most powerful part of social media is that people in your database are posting and it's not about you, it's about them. Yes, we need to brand ourself and I understand the importance of that, but what is Mo posting about? What's important to Mo, right? The Ford, the family occupation, the recreation, right? What are you doing for vacation coming up or whatnot?

Social media is going to give you that information to create a rapport with you. So we just kind of process flow on our system, like what's going well with their contacts? What was the last time we communicated with them? Giving us a proactive way of how do I stay in flow with you? Because again, real estate and title have two different sales cycles, so the systems are designed differently, but since you're asking on the real estate side of it, right?

And it's important for title executives to understand their referral partners, real estate agents and lenders. It's really important for title executives to understand their customers or referral partners sales system. So I think this is just could be really beneficial for your listeners here. 16% of a real estate agent's network transacts every year, 16%. And the person lives in a home for an average between seven and 10 years.

So if you have say 200 people in your database that are your network contacts that you're taking care of, you just can't throw names in a system and never look at it, right? If you're nurturing those contacts, you're looking at anywhere from 32 to 64 transactions in a calendar year. That's 16% if they transact once. A lot of people transact twice, they sell the home and then they buy a home. So it's bringing that awareness to the real estate agent's consciousness, bringing it up and then visually showing them that and then seeing, well, here's how you'd have to flow with these individuals consistently over the course of a calendar year, really two, three years, you should be doing it in a row to be then, yeah, seeing that, hey, I'm capturing 80% of those 32 to 64 transactions.

So it's kind of like the Kanban. The Kanban in the Toyota production system was a very simple red and green letter to break it down very simply, right? Break it down like red, stop, greens, go and help them in the production line. Zanello is the exact same thing. Just making very simple visual cues for people to understand where their business is coming from and how they're getting it.

Everybody that on the real estate side, I mean, 90% plus their businesses, they'll say referrals. That means your network, right? They'll say severe of influence. Well, that's your network. So most of their business is coming from there, but then you look at a lot and they don't have any visual flow, any way of tracking those relationships and how they can squeeze more from that orange.

How do you keep your team focused and disciplined? You know, you can have all the best tools in the world, even like now it's even getting easier, even scarier with AI. But at the end of the day, you and I were talking yesterday, the human touch, the end of the day, that's the core of the relationship. So how do you keep your team motivated or just hire motivated people that I don't believe you can motivate people? Either they're motivated or they're not.

They're motivated or not. Exactly. And some of the things that I'm going to say, I've heard all the places. So you're going to listen to every say something. It's like I heard that somewhere before because that's where I heard it.

But motivation is like a shower. It's not going to last. You have to do it every day. And there is a big part of drive that's incredibly important. In the title sales side, I really, truly think you can to our listeners that don't have a sales culture or they don't even have a sales department right there.

That's not hard to build at all. And that personal drive that you're talking about is not so much required as it is on the real estate side. And I could get into that if you want to dig a little bit deeper on that, but how I focus on my dashboard, we have what we call the dashboard. I would actually look at that every single day. We have a coaching platform through Zanello and we just held each other accountable.

So if they would ask him, we'll meet you in the 50 yard line. You got to come here. We'll meet you halfway. But if they're willing to engage the time, we could see it. And then we're going to see who's engaged and who's not engaged.

So again, just the exact same way I'm answering how I felt myself accountable as a salesperson. I, as a manager, as a leader, I wanted statistics. Say how often are there a CRM? Where are they at? What's their goal?

We had a forecast of where they are, their goal, right? What's in their pipeline. And then we would dialogue with them sometimes biweekly, sometimes monthly. And we'd have real specific conversations about their business, about the communication approach with where the biggest part of the business is coming from, how they're incubating their particular leads, the lead sources, the percentage of conversion rate on the very particular lead sources. So we're able to have very detailed conversations with each of our individuals, I think, because we were able to see what they saw.

How do you see the sales process in the title industry evolving in the next few years? And what disciplines do you believe will be critical for professionals to master in order to thrive in the future? As you know, you're talking, but I'm probably going to guess the majority of title companies will not have a sales team or sales department. It's highly fragmented, especially in the East Coast. It is.

It's cross country. And so we work with large title companies with large sales teams. We work with somebody with just one office and they don't have a sales team. And we're helping them allow that. And we could get into that a little bit later on and how that looks.

And again, I think it's better to create than recruit there. I think you can get more bang for your buck and you're going to create some really good habits. Again, we created some of the Chicagoland's biggest producers that were never in the business prior, and they just have got just stellar habits that we really instilled 10 years later. Again, now there's some of the biggest producers in the marketplace. So for title companies, like you said, there's a couple of things.

One, I do not think, one, I know for a fact that the relationships are not going to go to the wayside. And I don't think people are putting enough emphasis on relationships. I also tell a lot of my clients when I start working with them, Mo, you ever been to London? Yes. Mind the gap.

Mind the gap. Did we talk about this yesterday? You said it yesterday and I was going to say, that sounds like the Metro. It's like the two. Mind the gap.

I think to people, technology- That's funny. Yeah. And I think technology could become a gap. And so I will work with title companies. I'll work with the sales organization and I say, Hey, listen, Jimmy Realtor here just got a new listing at X456 Apple Street.

I'm like, yeah, well, he has got our seller net sheet app. I'm like, well, let's create one for him. He said, well, they have the seller net sheet app. Well, the seller net sheet app, great tool, but could be a gap because now you're creating a gap between you and the person you want to create a relationship with. AI in sales, right?

I understand there's AI and how powerful it can be. It's potential. Excuse me. I don't understand it, right? I don't know who understands it, but I understand there's huge potential for it.

But what does AI stand for, Mo? Artificial intelligence. Artificial, right? I don't know a relationship that I have that's artificial. And when we are selling a commodity, which title is a commodity, right?

Well, how do we differentiate with good service? You better have good service. Everybody has good service. What's your true differentiator? You're expected to, correct?

What's your true differentiator? It's the relationship that you have with the individual. So like, again, there's always the new shiny object and what can we do? And I just tell everybody, Hey, mind the gap. Don't create a gap between you and your customer that's too big.

And it's great to automate and do all these things. But somebody who comes in your marketplace that could forge a relationship with human beings that you want referrals from, and you're not doing it, you're going to lose your business to that person. I think organizations that don't have a sales culture and might say can sales person, a sales culture are under a massive threat right now. And they have to be like the days of just doing really great title work and great service. Those days are coming to an end.

More affiliated businesses and whatnot are coming into the marketplace. So we have to start to pivot and become focused on what is our revenue and our market share plan, in addition to our compliance and our operations and our security. Let's say first things first, let's say you don't have a good sales culture, don't have a sales team. What can a title company owner or managers do to start a sales culture or to build a sales culture? First, it's going to come straight back to that visual flow.

Who are your customers? Where does the majority of your business coming from? Is it 20 individuals, 50 individuals? Who are they? So that's the first thing, right?

And the second thing is, the easiest place to grow your business is from your existing business. And I cannot tell you how many companies that I'm working with that are just not paying attention to that non-directing agent. And I don't care if you're in a market where there's split orders or not, there are ways for you. Everybody's looking at how do I get that door open? Every title transaction has four to six weeks.

That's four to six touches. Again, I don't care if it's a split order and you are on the sales side, the listing side, and there's a buyer's agent or they're with a different title company. You still have an opportunity to talk to somebody about the most important part of their life, who's a real estate agent, is their actual transaction. Even if it's on their side, giving them simple updates. And I'm going to say, please, you have.

for you. Everybody's looking at how do I get that door open. Every type of transaction has four to six weeks. That's four to six touches. Again, I don't care if it's a split order and you are on the sell side, the listing side, and there's a buyer's agent or they're with a different title company, you still have an opportunity to talk to somebody about the most important part of their life who's a real estate agent, is their actual transaction.

Even if it's on their side giving them simple updates. And I'm gonna say please you have the human give the update right with the text message. Let's not try to over automate because you know it's real estate agents and I'm a real estate agent. We're smart. We know what's a drip campaign.

We know what's an automated text. It's like find the gap. It's simple, right? It's just not easy and it takes work. And if it was simple and if it was easy, well then all the human beings out there that respond to sales, we wouldn't have a role.

We wouldn't have a job. So be grateful for that as well. That it's simple, it's just not easy, it takes work, and it's just getting everybody to understand, hey what is your job? What's your role? Now that again your question, right, for a company that doesn't have, right, a sales team, well first let's build a sales culture, right?

And let's know our numbers. And then how do we create a process? And that process is not complicated. In fact, I flowcharted it all out through Zanello. How do we work five days a week, right, and a couple hours a day on this flowchart?

It's like a river, right? After a while it's gonna just start to carve out and you're gonna start seeing massive results. But you got to put time into it. You got to put a good year, 18 months into it. But you'll all of a sudden pivot from reactive and what's coming our way to say, well we know what's coming our way and we have a percentage increase we're expecting next year because we're targeting these 200 people.

If we could capture 5 to 10 percent of those relationships based on these transactions, we can get this. It changes everything from licking your fingers and putting your hand in the air see which way the wind's directed to a KPI, right, metrics that are incredibly important that are very rarely discussed in the sales side of our business, in our industry, mortgage, title, and real estate. We need to treat, in my opinion, that part of the business just like we are treating the operations and the finance side of our business and the compliance side of our business. Yeah, as they say, like sales is the oxygen of every organization and I've always been focused on sales to my, for better or worse, like I'm more of a sales guy at heart. So, there are no sales, there was no business at the end of the day.

Well, and then sales is, you can systematize and process the sales. Whether you're an agent or you're entitled, you could process, right, you could process orient how you create a relationship and a sale is just a byproduct of your relationship, period. Absolutely. Right, and so let's go to the NARS settlement, okay. In one of the things that I was reading on, they're saying people cannot comprehend why the percentage of real estate agents income has not decreased with the social media, online and everything over the course of 20 years and hence the DOJ gets involved and everything else.

Well, we're in a free market, still I think, right, and the consumer values the real estate agent. And what is the value that the real estate agent is providing to the consumer? It's emotional intelligence at the end of the day, right. All the thousands of customers I've served, I'm talking about their family, why they're moving, where they're moving, what they want to do. It's not just filling out a contract and taking them to homes, it's a consultive sales approach and it's based, they worked with me or any of my agents because they had a relationship with us and the consumers were willing to pay for that and they still are going to be willing to pay for that.

But it's the relationship, so you need to, whether you're in sales in real estate or you're entitled, you need to focus what amount of time and energy am I putting on in investing in the relationship with these amount of individuals because when they have the need, 9 out of 10 times, at the low end, 8 out of 10 times, they're going to come to their friend. They're going to come to the person that they have a relationship. I remember in 2015, 16, and 17, saying to one of our group of our agents, I said, guys, I think the coolest app out there is Redfin. I don't even worry about a website as a real estate broker. I had it, right?

But because my clients will go to the Redfin app or Zillow, then they'll call me and say, can I see this? Oh, why? Because of the emotional intelligence I invested in the relationship and because of the relationship, a byproduct is just a sale that I have. That is the same in any consultative based type of sale. Absolutely.

You touched on consultative selling. I'm very big on consultative selling. Thanks to our mutual good friend, Dr. Cindy McGovern. She instilled that in my head years ago.

She's brilliant. I was listening to her podcast with you. By the way, I've been diving into your podcast and been loving it. One of the things that Cindy said in the podcast that I just loved, she said, you got to track communication and see the client journey. She's right.

You said earlier, like some title companies, okay, we do good service. Well, great service. What you expected to be in a game, you have to have excellent service. What's the best consultative selling for? What's the best advice to give title agents from the realtor perspective?

What kind of value can you add as a title agent? Instead of like, hey, we have the best service. Hey, let me take you to lunch. Maybe buy you coffee. Let me do whatever those gimmicky things are.

All those things count, right? I'm going to give you some other gimmicky things that work. The first step is focus on creating relationships with somebody. Let's start with the existing business that we have. I have a title order.

Let's say it's a full order and it came from a listing agent. The listing agent I could see represented 14 sellers in the last 12 months. We're in a sell side market right now, for example. There's buy sides. Yeah, again, we'd only have some run time in the podcast.

I'm not going to dive in and be like, in Chicago, there's an attorney. I'm not going to get in. I'll just say we have a list side that a listing agent brought us a deal. But then the buyer's agent, we went, this buyer's agent's got five active listings, three deals under contract, and they're representing eight sellers in the last 12 months. Well, they actually are having an uptick in business.

I could see that right away. That's why these visual cues, this visual flow of this con bond is so critical. So then how do I start to bridge the gap? First of all, hey, buyer's agent Joe, I'm Ryan. I congratulate your buyer.

Hey guys, look at the contract. Look at the contract that came in, right? And you're going to see the buyer's agents, the buyer's name there. Use that name, referencing it to that buyer's agent. What's the most important to that buyer's agent is the address, right?

Because it's going to bring it up to their conscious and that buyer's name. Hey, buyer's agent Billy, congratulations to your buyers at Callahan's at 456 Apple Street. That is great. Just want to let you know I'm the head of executives on this deal. If at any time you have any questions, this is my cell phone.

Reach out to me at any time. I'm doing it in a simple text. Yes, there's all these automated systems that could do this. I want to create a relationship with that buyer agent Joe, right? Who's got five active listings.

He represented eight sellers last 12 months. He's got 300 contracts. That's incredibly important to me. Now, I'm going to then use sources like a property report. You could get it from a title pro or a data trace, right?

I'm going to generate a property report. It's simple, you know, not a full in-depth property report and I'm going to send them a property report on one of those properties, right? Plus a seller net cheek that I'm going to create. And then I'm going to use this verbiage here. Hey buyer Joe, it's Ryan.

We're working together on 456 Apple Street. This is like two, three weeks later. We're still in the transaction, right? So remember, I'm trying to germinate a relationship here. I got four to six weeks during the, I don't want to say loading process, during the title transaction side of it.

And then I got a good year, two years to court the person afterwards. But in that four to six week journey, right? As Cindy talks about, right? Two weeks after my initial text introducing and giving my cell phone, say, hey, I just saw a 456 Apple Street. Here's a property report.

If you have any questions on this, feel free to reach out to me. By the way, if you're going on a listing presentation, if you'd like this information, feel free to reach out to me. I'll get this information for you. Also, I included a seller net sheet. The seller net sheet is based upon your listing and the asking price.

To get an offer on this property, feel free to reach out to me. I'll update it with the offer price that you got and I'll give you two other options, right? In that way, I'm starting to create a mold, right? A bond with somebody and somebody's going to take me up on that. And then now we're jiving.

But now we have a relationship. Now, I don't even really have to worry about the report building you started to create. That's the differentiator. When that happens, I know I'm going to get that person. And then somebody will say, well, I don't want them calling me on Saturday for a seller net sheet.

I get it. As I said, you have to be strategic. You can't be tactical. Like that's very kind of intentional, very strategic. There's touch points and added value, every touch point.

Then when you ask for a coffee, when you ask me that person, there's probably 95% chance they're going to say yes. I've noticed if you do this good well enough, you don't even need to ask for the coffee. You start getting business. It's like now maintain report. That's what I do like more.

Like I'm not a huge social media fan. What I do like about social media is I can maintain relationships. Yeah, I just I'm not. But I can maintain relationships with two, three hundred people. I don't want to have my reels.

I'm not a big poster, right? I think I posted my daughter went to college the other day, but like I'm not doing that stuff and I never did. But I always had successful business because I was able to see what they're posting about and I was able to connect with them. Yeah, it's the mistake majority people make in real estate mortgage title is they I think they post. do like Mo, I'm not a huge social media fan.

What I do like about social media is that I can maintain relationships. Yeah, I just – but I can maintain relationships with two, three hundred people. I don't have to have my reels. I'm not a big poster, right? I think I posted – my daughter went to college the other day, but I'm not doing that stuff and I never did, but I always had successful business because I was able to see what they're posting about and I was able to connect with them.

Yeah. The mistake majority of people make in real estate mortgage title is they – I think they post for the sake of posting to make them feel significant versus added value. And I mean, I'll challenge anybody. There may be some influencers that are sort of leveled become that can drive sales, but it's really all about kind of building that brand. People know who you are, but you still have to go and build that relationship one-on-one.

You still have to make that call. You still – exactly. Yeah. You could have all the content in the world, but if you're not connecting, you're not going to convert. So you got to think of the three Cs, contact, connect, convert.

Most people are doing content and they're leading away the other two Cs. Well, then don't even do the content if you're not doing the other two Cs. Do you mind if we switch over to the NAR again? The lawsuit and the impact. What's your perspective on – I know you touched on it a little briefly.

What do you see coming? What's the future of especially the buyer-agent side? And after that, I'm going to ask you what the impact to how the companies can be proactive and kind of prepare for all the changes coming up. Yes. I feel my heart on hard tape.

I'm connected with real estate agents across the country. And I had over the course of my 10 years, a thousand real estate agents coming in and out of my doors over the course of 10 years. So I'm very connected to the business. I personally think what's going to happen is there are trend chasers and people that come in and come out. Whenever the market dips or goes up and down, they get in and they get out of business.

In 2008, the Great Recession happened in Chicago. I think we had 40,000 real estate agents in the Chicago Association of Realtors. By 2011, we had 27,000. And by 2022, 2021, we're back up to 40,000. So you're going to have both people that are just kind of fickle.

They'll come in and out. That being said, I don't think we're going to see much of a change except for how people do the work and that they send the buyer agreements, the things that they have to follow according to the settlement. But the consumer still wants the service. And until we are no longer a consumer free market, our demand is not, when I say our, I'm not a real estate agent anymore, but real estate agents demand is created by the consumer. It's not the other way around.

It's not how free markets work. And so I just think for people, keep your nose down. Okay. Focus on the most important part of your business, which is nurturing those relationships. And those conversations I've watched, because my wife's an agent, they're not difficult to have.

And I think it will just work itself out, quite honestly, both. And does that affect title companies in any way, or besides being diligent and watching- I don't. I don't. There's always going to be distractions. There's always going to be things.

It's like we got to keep our nose down and focus. Again, the person or the title company, the title executive, the title agent, the real estate agent, the loan officer, that prioritizes their relationship with the individuals that generate business for them. The ones that prioritize it and focus on it during the past 12 months of noise we've had and the next 12 months of noise, they're the ones that are going to come out on top. And the other ones that are kind of wringing their hands and worrying about it, they're wasting precious time worrying about something that I don't think there's going to be changes, but I don't think it's going to be a seismic shift in the business at all. That's awesome.

Can we shift to Zanello? What kind of inspired you to launch there? I know you said you told me yesterday it was a bootstrap. I'm very proud of you. You're kind of taking a huge leap.

I'm all about taking the leap and a strong belief in the vision that you have. What inspired me is I needed a place to show people visually. I had to visually teach people. And everything that I've seen from real estate to mortgage to title, let's call it off the shelf, which I guess I'm an off the shelf product now, right? It's all about marketing, marketing, marketing.

And it's all about wowing you. Mine is kind of hard work. If you work on mine after some time, it's going to start releasing dopamine and get you excited, but it's not going to give you the dopamine that a pretty cool, sexy new CRM with all the bells and whistles are going to give you. It's not going to produce the stuff. So I had to teach individuals, this is the sales cycle.

This is the process. This is how it works. And going back to the previous industry that I was in, and I was recruiting supply chain manufacturer folks that had their black belts at Six Sigma. And I learned so much from that business and started reading up on it. I recognize there is no visual flow product out there for salespeople like there is for QuickBooks for accountants, right?

Or any other accounting software that might be, or TPS systems, right? Where's your salespeople's TPS system? Where is it? And then, so like if you as running a title company, you look at your TPS, what are you looking at for sales? That should scare you if you don't have something to see that.

You're like, holy cow, then you're telling me you're, you know, it's my first NS3 event two years ago. I saw every operating system and everything else under the sun. Where's the forward-facing, proactive sales tools out there? So that's what inspired me when I started back. I'm like, I got to teach people how to sell because I'm not going to recruit.

How do you say my name? Well, I don't even know. Right. And I didn't have a brand name. Like it's the Prill, the April, right?

That's the joke for any listeners. I don't need to say there, but the point is I'm in Chicago and I built one of the largest real estate brokerages without a franchise or a well-known brand name. It was my last name. I didn't really think it through. 10 years later, I think in 2022, we did just under 1.3 billion in transactions.

And again, like I said, in the beginning of the podcast, 80% of my agents started with me. Probably 80% of them had less than five years experience at that time when we did over a billion dollars of sales. So I needed something to train and to teach people. And that's where Zanello came from. That's what inspired me to kind of take it to the next level.

You're right on the money. Our industry is so minuscule. It's 20, 30 billion a year. It's like literally no big players pay attention to it. That's why there's a lot of focus on real estate, a lot of focus on mortgages, but not title.

You're 100% correct. There's definitely a need of the product that you... From what I saw... It's understandable. I'm getting very excited.

And like you talk about TPS, I would keep them nameless, the one of the dominant player in the industry. I keep, I mean, butting heads, like, Hey, when are you going to have a CRM? When are you going to have more like a sales driven kind of a dashboard? It's like we're talking about, it's stuff you're doing. And literally it's at the bottom of their priorities.

It takes somebody innovative like you. Well, it takes, it's, it is. I look at myself as I'm a sales coach. And so I process mapped it out so that you can actually scale it. And I work with individuals like, look, you don't have sales that's okay.

We're going to start very slow. And this is a scalable. And then I have larger organization. Like there's how you could scale even more by doing this because it is a training. It's a training tool as much as it is anything else.

But it's a conversation mode that I could show you. That's awesome. There's a lot to it. I'm looking for future conversations one-on-one and maybe meeting you in person in Chicago. Yeah.

We're getting very close to wrapping this up. For those looking to take the leap in their sales career within the title industry, what advice would you give on maintaining discipline, staying motivated, and consistently driving growth in challenging market? For those starting their careers in it, you ask me? Yes, correct. The first thing you have to conquer is yourself.

I mean, that's really what it is. And that's never going to change your life. It's mindset and it's discipline. It's like, people value money more than they value time. And that is the majority of us and the majority of us are not wealthy.

The wealthy value their time more than they value money. And so, you are never going to get your time back. And what anybody who's listening to this has to understand is the majority of us are just wasting so much valuable time. Sharma, gosh, I think it's Robin Sharma. I may be butchering his name.

He's got an awesome saying is, I like to be busy being productive versus busy being busy. Most people are just busy being busy. So, if you could control your schedule, if you could control your 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and you could focus that on you.

And I'm not talking about gym time and the self-healing and caring time that we do from six in the morning to nine. I'm talking about the career, right? If you could time block that two hours of the relationship nurturing part of your business, which is the most important part, and then you could get over to the... Because customer service is going to come naturally. The client's going to call us, we're going to call our processor, we're going to call our order action people.

That's natural. There's no thinking that needs to come into that. It's important, but we all do it. You have to have a mirror that you could look into and say, what am I doing and how am I managing my time? That's the best advice I can give anybody.

And it's anybody getting in the business or anybody who's mid-career or close to the end of the career, it doesn't end. It's like you are your work in progress. It's the adage of how do you fill the glass? You put the rocks, the big rocks, then mill hocks and put the foundational things, the most important things, like the hired producing the activities first, then you trickle to the servicing or... Right.

And don't be hard on yourself. I don't have a... am I managing my time? That's the best advice I can give anybody. And it's anybody getting into the business or anybody who's mid-career or close to the end of the career, it doesn't end.

It's like, you are your work in progress. It's the adage of how do you fill the glass? You put the rocks, the big rocks, then middle rocks, then just put the foundational things, the most important things, like the hired produce and all activities first, then you trickle to the service in or... And don't be hard on yourself. I don't have a perfect and nobody does.

Also, give yourself some space. Be aware of your self-talk. I'm brutal to myself. I noticed this morning I was at the gym and I'm ripping myself apart. We're all doing this.

We're all in the same boat. You got to take it easy on yourself and celebrate the small... I work a half an hour and say, kick ass, congratulations. It doesn't have to be two hours, block two hours, get a half an hour production on, but great, good for you. And then celebrate that.

Stop beating yourself up. And that's at the top for myself more than anybody else. All right. Do you have a favorite quote, Ryan? So I have two that I like.

One is, and I started this saying this quote a long time ago. I don't remember where I heard it from. Everything I say and repeat from somebody wiser than me that I learned from, a year from now, you may wish you started today. A year from now, you may wish you started today. And everybody overestimates what they can achieve in a year and they underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.

And those two quotes, Mo, go to grit. And grit is so important to the success of your career because you're going to get punched in the face and the gut. You're going to get knocked down. You got to get back up. We all experience failure a lot more than we experience success.

And those two expressions or sayings relate to grit. A year from now, you may wish you started today. And everybody overestimates what they can achieve in a year, but they underestimate what they can achieve in a decade. You got to stick with it, man. It's important.

How about a favorite book or books? I have an idea. One or two are going to come up. I mentioned those two. So instead of the two that I mentioned, the E-Myths and the Tutorial Wave, which are not my favorite.

They're great books. But one of my favorite business books, obviously, is The Happiness Advantage by Sean Aker. Have you read it? No. That's why I asked this question so we can put books to listen to.

Yeah. He's a Harvard professor in psychology. It's a great story. He's from Texas. He wanted to be a firefighter.

Happened to go to Harvard, so clearly he's a brilliant guy. And he held a class on happiness. He had a waiting list at Harvard for his class, and he discovered like 75% after doing some more studies, like 75% of the student body at Harvard was depressed. Like, here are the people in the top 1% that every door is going to be open to, but they're comparing themselves to everybody else. And this is a track we all fall into it.

I still fall into it regularly. And so The Happiness Advantage, I think I'm going to pull that book out and read it again. It's just such a great book about one of the things that Sean says is people think happiness orbits success. It's the other way around. Success orbits happiness, and you got to be happy first.

So kind of to the point where it's like you got to be easy on yourself. You got to celebrate your Wednesday. This stuff's not easy, right? This human experience we're having is not easy. So that's one of my favorite books.

I'm not sure if you're a Tony Robbins fan or not, but in a couple of months, I'm going on this happiness retreat with Tony Robbins, Platinum Club. I've never done it. I've done a Tony Robbins. I've had a lot of people have done it and gone, I've never done it. So I'll happiness retreat, it's called.

That's great. Yeah. So just in line with your book. So I cannot wait to read that book. That's awesome.

Well, thank you, Ryan. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Talent Agents Podcast. I hope you found our conversation with Ryan Dupril as insightful and inspiring as I did. If you enjoyed today's discussion, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. We've got some exciting topics and incredible guests lined up for future episodes, including deep dives into innovative sales strategies, cutting edge technologies shaping the title industry and actionable tips to help you stay ahead in this ever evolving market.

Stay tuned and let's take the leap together towards greater success and growth. See you next time. And that's a wrap on today's journey with Mo Shamil from the Title Agents Podcast, reminding you that mastering the art of innovation is key in the title industry's fast paced world. If you're finding it tough to keep up with the changes and challenges, remember, you're not alone. Our calendar is open for you.

Find the link in the show notes and let's connect. Make sure to hit subscribe to not miss out on strategies that elevate and insights that empower. Together, we'll navigate the future of the industry. I look forward to our next meeting in the upcoming episode. Keep pushing, keep innovating and see you in the next episode.