AI and the Transformation of Business with Leo Pajera

When a lead converts through ChatGPT, it closes at like 600 times better than Google.

Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business.

Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mellow.

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Now let's go back into the interview.

All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert.

Today is awesome because this happened to be by chance.

I've got Leo Pereja in town, and he's an expert in sales, business, real estate, based out of Miami.

You guys might have heard of eXp Realty.

He's the CEO, and it's one of the fastest-growing real estate brokerages in the world and a core subsidiary of eXp World Holdings, the cloud-based company with market capitalization of around $4 billion.

Appointed CEO of April of last year, 2024, Leo now leads a company that has transformed the traditional brokerage model through its virtual first platform and innovative approach to agent growth and community.

With deep experience as both entrepreneur and industry leader, Leo is uniquely positioned to talk about the future of real real estate, the power of technology, and what it takes to thrive in a shifting market.

Thanks for having me, Tommy.

I'm excited.

And like you said, this was a happy coincidence.

I really appreciate you being here, brother.

You want to just tell us, I always like to start with a story about how you made it and

where you're at today and what you're interested in the future.

Sure.

So I'm

born and raised into real estate, even though I didn't come from a real estate family.

Most people enter the residential real estate space as a second or third career.

I feel lucky enough that I fell into it at 19 years old while I was in college.

I got my license and sold.

My first transaction was to myself at 20 years old.

I bought a property with an FHA loan.

My dad was my co-signer.

I used my commission as my own down payment and rented out three rooms and house hacked before it was a thing.

And then that summer, I ended up selling my fraternity brothers and any sorority girl who took my call 11 homes during my summer vacation and made $60,000.

And

as they say,

that was that tipping point in my brain where I said, this is what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.

I then went on to have a pretty awesome couple of years, thought I was special and thought I was, you know, God's gift of real estate and realized I had a license during the greatest bubble in the history of the world.

Got my ass handed to me, lost everything.

And the financial crisis turned out to be one of those

very important educational processes processes of my life because that's where I went from being

a solopreneur, a self-employed person to a business owner.

And I scaled and I learned how to win government contracts and do RFPs and became one of the top agents in the world.

Then I went on to do a lending fund and then I did a tech fund where I ended up raising close to $50 million of venture and private equity and scaled that business to be 80% market share in the United States from a distribution standpoint to real estate agents.

And after I exited those businesses, I got a cold call from the founder of eXp.

And this is my first job in my 40s that I've ever had.

And I lead a publicly traded company and we're about $4 billion in revenue, about a $2 billion market cap company, but NASDAQ, you know, S ⁇ P 600.

Oh, that's great.

Where's the real estate market ahead?

What are you excited about?

I've been a really big advocate for transparency.

I think if you have a consumer-first strategy, and again, this is agnostic of industry.

I think if you do what's absolutely best for the consumer, in the end, you win.

And that's been my philosophy, whether I've been in real estate, tech, or finance.

I think the goal of capitalism is to remove as much friction as possible so they pick your product and service over everything else.

I think human beings go for the path of least resistance, right?

Whether

it's my Apple Watch and my Apple phone and my Apple wallet and my AirPods that are in my pocket.

It's like four pieces of technology.

And it's not that I'm obsessed with what Steve Jobs built as a human being versus the frictionless ecosystem he designed.

And think about your favorite products and services.

That's like the reason Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world is because he made it painless for us to get what we want when we want it as soon as possible with the least amount of friction.

So

real estate is one of the most frictionful experiences an American consumer makes.

It is not simple.

It is not painless.

There's a ton of complexity from title and mortgage and all the other things.

So

I don't, you know, I believe that consumers will still over-index on having an expert advisor help them through a super expensive, highly infrequent, highly emotional thing that they only do on average three times in their whole life.

Wow.

But

where I think of the future right now,

I think AI is going to fundamentally change everything.

And that's not just hyperbole.

hyperbole.

I actually founded and scaled a tech company.

So

I'm more technical than the average CEO.

That's not

an engineer.

But

where I think everything's about to shift is the gatekeeping of technology is not what it used to be.

So once upon a time, when I founded a tech company, I relied solely on engineers to build everything, versus with the advent of large language models where you can vibe code, even if it's just like the first

wireframe and the layout, and

I can verbalize with context what I want it to look like and then give it to an engineer.

That's a game changer.

The speed at which we can do stuff.

And I believe that in the next three to five years, most B2B SaaS products will no longer have the UI experience that we're used to, right?

Most B2B SaaS products

are an interface that sits on top of a data layer.

And I think what it's going to look like is more like that little talking bubble where you either type into it what you want to know, like tell me how many garage doors we have in inventory.

You don't actually now need to go to a display that has these predetermined visuals.

Like you like, how many customers did inbound calls did we get?

Who have we not talked to in a while?

Like what supplier?

pick your industry and pick your KPIs and you'll be able to contextually talk to it.

And so I spend,

you know, I speak at conferences often and most as of late, I feel like I have anxiety.

I can't go fast enough.

I have anxiety that everything is moving at a speed that

I haven't felt before.

Right.

I'm 43 and I've experienced two gigantic tech jumps in my professional career.

One was high-speed internet.

Yep.

And again, I grew up in the real estate business, but prior to high-speed internet, I actually had to drive into the office physically to look up listings.

Yep.

Like Zillow didn't exist, right?

Oh, yeah.

It was like this gatekeeping of information.

I had to physically drive somewhere and then print stuff out and give it to you if you wanted to buy a house.

And high-speed internet democratized that.

And then the next giant step that changed everything in my industry was mobile, right?

I went from having to print maps on MapQuest, like that's how old I am.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And we'd drive around with those like multi-page books that

remember those days.

And so that, what both of those technologies did was actually compress time,

So if it used to take me

three to five days to schedule appointments and get information to people back and forth, fax stuff, I could do it in minutes now.

And then mobile made it even faster because I didn't have to go back to the office to look stuff up.

I could just do it on my phone.

I could schedule an appointment.

I could get

instructions on how to show a property from my car.

And so if something used to take days or weeks, I could now do it in minutes or hours.

That's the gigantic leap forward that I'm I'm seeing with AI.

And

something I'm hyper aware of is everything's overhyped in the short term and everything's underhyped in the long term.

Right.

So like, I think everyone's, it's, it's exhausting to hear AI as much as we do,

but

I think over the next five or 10 years, it'll be more impactful than we ever dreamt.

And so it's this balance of staying in curiosity and testing and trying and not getting kind of lost in the hype.

You know, we spent millions and millions of dollars building probably one of the more advanced data lakes with power of AI and pulling in from APIs.

And I just went through 20 hours of advanced AI training and learned a lot more.

Like I use ChatGPT 80 times a day.

It knows me.

I do complex IRR, all this stuff.

But now I'm starting to give it way more complex things.

And you've heard of N8N.

We're going in and I'm hiring the top minds.

I can't pay $100 million to get one guy, but I'm paying the top minds that I could get because speed is everything.

Speed of implementation, who's going to go first, who's going to fail faster.

And

we're building ChatGPT Enterprise over the top of all of it.

And that's,

you know, I know a lot of private equity.

I know a lot of these guys doing venture capital.

They're looking at this stuff, but lawyers are going to be out of work.

I'm so glad 20 years ago, I fell into garage doors.

I didn't know that it was going to be, because everyone was going, be a developer, go into dentistry, da, da, da, da, da.

And I'm like, man, I really like what I do.

But now we're essential.

I mean, during COVID, we were essential.

Now everybody I know that's a developer, most of my real estate buddies, a lot of the people even doing SaaS products are like,

we want to go into HF.

We want to go into Roofie.

We want to do this.

Because I don't think even though Tesla is going to have the robots next year, they're not going to be doing skilled labor anytime soon.

But that's what's scary to me.

And I'm not considered.

the smartest guy in the room per se, but when I just heard Elon might be doing a home service fund,

those aren't the type of guys I'm used to going against.

So I got to move quick, quick, quick.

The one thing I found in our industry that you'll really appreciate is private equity guys can never build this company.

They don't know, they kind of look down upon blue-collar people.

They don't know how to keep the culture.

I would argue that private equity looks down on operators because they're not.

And so they still, private equity doesn't exist with the practitioner as an operator.

And that's you'll want, I was at this panel, and there's five of the top PE guys in the world.

And they said, what we've learned is you got to figure out how to keep the founder in the business and still excited.

And I think that they think, well, you can't cut your way to higher profit margins in EBITDA.

And I think that that's what they just said, hey, how hard could it be?

You're replacing garage and HVAC units and mowing lawns.

You know, we can hire anybody out the street.

If they're not on time, fire them.

And it's like, no, there's a lot more to this.

Some of our people that didn't have a mom growing up, you know, some of them didn't pass 10th grade, but they're really good, faithful, like hardworking, loyal people.

But you're right.

I'm very nervous.

I'm skeptically.

I guess I'm cautiously optimistic.

I was with the founder of ServiceTen.

He goes,

I'm so sad because my kids won't have a purpose like I do, to build something from nothing.

What do you think is going to happen?

I mean, AGI, when is this happening?

Nobody knows, but what's your speculative?

Yeah, and what happens to society and wanting to grow yourself?

That's a a very open-ended question that no one actually knows the answer to.

So the one thing that I do know,

and again,

I'm an optimist, and I think we have to be to be entrepreneurs.

Like it's not a choice.

It's a DNA thing.

So one is I would go back over 2,000, 5,000 years of recorded human history.

And, you know, the printing press fundamentally changed society.

And knowledge was gatekept by scholars and the church.

And when the first books were printed,

it allowed for literacy at scale, right?

And then the,

you know, the railroad and the

engine, right?

There's been these dramatic jumps in productivity.

And if you actually read headlines from, you know, the eras of when this happened, it was the end of

the end of the world as we knew it because these jobs were being eliminated.

So one is,

I think we're a tribal species.

And what that means is we crave human interaction.

So I think as

certain repetitive jobs go away, and when you look at any advancement in technology, it's normally that.

It's some logical process.

So I think over time we will over-index on human experience.

And I was recently, about six months ago, at an event with a bunch of private equity and some of the biggest direct-to-consumer brands in the world.

And it was super interesting because the capital allocators were investing in in-real life events from sports teams to arenas to non-replaceable human experiences.

And then the direct-to-consumer brands were actually investing in similar

opportunities that had direct-to-consumer live events, meaning that

people are going to want to gather.

People, well, and do stuff that machines just won't be able to do.

Like live venues, live music, live performances.

What you're having this week.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And,

you know,

let's talk about the last couple of hype cycles you and I have been a part of.

I live in Miami.

That's the epicenter of the crypto hype.

Oh, yeah.

And five, six years,

five, six years ago, I couldn't go to anything in Miami and have some tech crypto bro tell me about how everything was going on-chain.

NFTs were going to replace all smart contracts.

And like,

again, I live in the epicenter of it.

And like six years ago, I was like, oh, this is happening definitively.

And someone would come up to me and say,

title insurance and settlements won't exist because everything's going to be a smart contract.

And again, kind of like you just said, just fire them.

I'm like, do you realize that title is kept across 3,500 disparate municipalities in this country with different rules and states?

And do you know that that's all like government regulated?

And like, there is no magic button wand, anything.

And so

when I hear, you know,

we won't have a purpose, like,

A, I don't see it from a technology standpoint.

and two

like

we designed this stuff and we built it and i think we'll still crave certain parts of the human experience so um

i have a a habit of not worrying about stuff i can't control well that's smart i mean it is it's tough i mean when you think about a gi when you think about

this code

is smarter than all humans combined.

And people think it's 10 years.

Some people think it won't happen in our lifetime.

But I still feel like it's the best opportunity I've ever had.

10,000 baby boomers a day retiring, 12% of them own a business.

Most of them don't have a next of kin.

There's so much opportunity, but it is to me is like I enjoy myself.

I go on vacations.

I do fun stuff with my fiancé.

Never been married, no kids.

So I haven't started that chapter yet.

But it's a race and it's speed.

And I'm out learning all the time.

That's why I love this podcast because I'm learning so much from you.

Have you seen all that show about Uber?

Yeah.

Is they had to cheat.

What did they call it?

The gray zone or whatever, where they used to get around regulations in Portland and some other areas.

Like, you got to break glass to get these things through, but somebody's always going to figure it out.

I was watching this investment panel.

Some of the smartest people in the world on AI, they said, I wouldn't invest in what's hot today.

You're not probably going to rebuild Chet GBT, but there's something next coming.

And that's what venture capitalists do.

They take 20 shots and hopefully one of them score.

And those are

verbalized it to someone this morning when we were talking about AI.

I said, listen, we're playing with Napster and MySpace.

I don't believe Instagram and YouTube have showed up yet.

And so what I'm encouraging everybody is to stay in curiosity, try taste, right?

Oh, I like that.

I like that analogy.

Like, look, MySpace was first and Facebook improved upon two or three things.

And like, you know, my kids and

folks that are Gen Z have no idea what I'm talking about when I say Napster or MySpace.

Or LimeWire.

And

let's just go down to that analogy.

LimeWire and Napster failed because they didn't understand copyrights, right?

It was simple stuff.

And then YouTube basically, right, a distribution of content came up about and said, hey, we're going to only do it with unique stuff that you give us the rights to.

And then boom.

But LimeWire and Napster were first before YouTube.

And then, you know, Facebook and Instagram, MySpace was first.

So

go back to

the end of the 1800s with the Gilded Age in the United States.

We had 118 railroads.

And then like 30, 40 years, we had three.

So there's this like crazy boom in opportunity.

I like to say that capitalism, I said about the removing friction, but the goal to create opportunities or a lead funnel in any business is to have an outsized return on effort or dollars.

Meaning if I spend a dollar and I can make $5,

whatever a funnel is, whatever customer acquisition channel you go after,

you do it for as long as possible.

And to quote Gary Vaynerchuk, marketers ruin everything, right?

Because if you do it very successfully, every other competitor goes, well, Tommy's crushing it with this one strategy.

And you will be able to do that for three, six, twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months.

And then everybody else will catch up or

the platform will monetize it differently, right?

Like

you can sell data.

That's what I think a Pizza Hut 20 years ago said they make most of their money off of data.

So I heard this stat yesterday that when a lead converts through ChatGPT, it closes at like 600 times better

than Google.

And the reason intuitively people trust it more.

Intuitively, we trust it more because as of right now, they haven't put sponsored ads.

Right.

Right.

But they will.

I promise you they will.

Why wouldn't they?

They haven't figured out how to make money yet.

So when you look at

almost every product, go to market, you know, land and expand, get as much reach as you can, and then you try to figure out the optimization for monetization but I'll give you a sample size of one question in your sphere of influence Facebook

Facebook and LinkedIn probably the two most prolific ones for this example have you noticed in the last six months friends that you know couldn't string a sentence together are now Shakespeare I have noticed that and instantly intuitively right like you can you can you can see the person's name and then all of a sudden you read the first two sentences you you maybe see the m dash or you see the emojis and oh yeah yeah yeah how quickly do you go?

You just skip, like you don't actually read it.

Well, the way you do that is, right?

You teach ChatGPT how to write like you.

No, no, no.

Hold on, hold on.

I'm going somewhere with that.

Okay.

Immediately, you invalidate the robotness.

You're right.

Exactly.

So right now, the reason leads convert so much higher from a Chat GPT response is because we still trust it.

Like we will build a reaction.

So 1999, email open rates was ridiculous.

It was like 20, 30, 40, 50% on a cold list.

We loved email so much, Tom Hanks made a movie about it.

Yeah, no honest.

And do you remember how excited you were when you got a phone call?

Oh, man.

Like in 2002?

Or even the doorbell rang.

The doorbell, text message, email.

Like, you know, we're over bombarded right now.

We're like elder millennials.

Yeah.

Right.

Like they said, we were the first generation not to see the sidebars in a browser.

Right.

Because to the left and top were the ads in Google.

Google, right?

So this is a moment in time.

Nothing lasts forever.

No, you know, funnel conversion metrics.

Because what happens is if somebody hacks it and figures out how to get a five to one return, that's called arbitrage.

Everybody runs towards it.

Either the platform monetizes at a better clip, right?

Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Instagram ads.

or everybody does it and you get down to like a one to two return, a 1.5 return, and then that's diminished insurance kick in.

Well, yeah, you know, in the garage drawer industry, you know, I studied

2017, I decided I'm going to go study HVAC because it was a $250 billion market cap.

GarageDrawers was a 10 at the time.

And I said, who's got all the private jets that I know?

They're all HACA guys.

So I went to every $100 million shop in the country.

I learned what financing meant.

I learned service agreements.

I really studied arbitrage.

and EBITDA, EBITDA, EBITDA.

And that's, so we built in the same framework, but now we're building all these tools like AI dispatch.

Like now it could do regression testing.

It could actually dispatch for dollars, put Tom Brady in the Super Bowl at the right time.

It could understand the best person to run that job.

Like if you're an elderly person that was a vet and we can match that up, we know we're going to be more successful.

It's really not

bad things to do.

This isn't like black hat wrong things to do.

And I'm trying to stay above board with everything we do.

And it's a race, I think.

And you're right.

A lot of people try to rip off and duplicate, but it's very hard to, I always say we're a technology company that does garage drawers.

The problem I have with most of my vendors is it's very hard.

If you think about a garage drawer, how many different variations, permutations, and just you can get different sizes, different installation, different styles, different window sections, different radius track.

So a lot of it's made on demand.

And you can't, there's no small machine that like can make your gutters.

Like these are massive 25, 30.

Each machine's a $30 million machine.

It's got to be warehouse.

Somebody Somebody might come up with something to keep it a little bit closer, like Amazon did.

But that's why I like this industry because the combinations and everything else.

So it's like, how do you get the product quicker, better, faster for your clients?

These are all the things I'm thinking about.

This is like right up my alley.

I've always loved industries that have a higher barrier of entry or legal complexity.

A higher barrier of entry.

A high barrier of entry.

That's the problem is anybody can start a garage door company off the streets.

You know, there are not much licensing.

But maybe for the installers, right, versus the manufacturers, versus how much you can vertically integrate or there's not a lot of great manufacturers that could compete.

Yeah,

what I like, what we're trying to build right now, is systems to talk to their systems.

Like, I want to know what's on hand.

Did you have a mess-up order?

Like, then I could call my client and be honest with them and say, this was a order that messed up with the manufacturer.

I could get this in the ballpark you were thinking because they're selling it to me for pennies on the dollar.

And those are like the advanced thinking.

I love this stuff.

Have you ever heard of a guy named Greg Hag?

72 Soul?

Yes.

So Greg lives down the street in Paradise Valley.

Know him pretty well.

He's starting a company.

He's all over the TV, only here, I think.

He used to be.

Mostly, yeah.

But he's like, you know, Tommy, he's like, the way I'm running this is I'm not going to take any fees to sell a house.

He goes, I own the title companies.

Most of the time, they don't have to use my title companies.

I also now own, you know, the pest control companies.

When you move in, I got access to the pool company.

He's like, I'm playing the long game, but he goes, I'm making it a lot easier.

You know, sometimes they'll use my lender.

And

so, and he's like, even if they don't, he goes, eventually someone's going to do it.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, no, I believe in capitalism.

If you build a better mousetrap, good for you, right?

I think, especially like specific to our industry, we actually have had multiple forms of doing things, right?

There's companies that do it for a flat fee.

companies that do it perfect for percentage.

There's companies that will do it a la carte fee.

It's pretty straightforward in business.

and this applies to your business.

If you are too expensive, you go out of business.

If you do it for too cheap and don't have that magical IBITA word that neither one of us can pronounce well, you go out of business, right?

And there is a happy medium between the product and service you're willing to render a consumer for the product and service they're willing to accept, right?

So both Walmart and Whole Foods will sell you ahead of lettuce or blueberries or paper.

And, you know, at Whole Foods, Foods, it's going to be like organic and, you know, disintegrate when you're trying to wipe your hands versus bounty at Walmart.

And both are phenomenally multi-billion dollar businesses.

Right.

They serve a different consumer sector.

It's a different experience level, right?

Front of the bus or a PJ versus spirit and frontier.

Right.

Both get you to where you're going.

They service a different customer.

And I think the argument of like, I'm playing the long game, I'm like for a certain segment of the market.

And this is the one thing I love.

And

it's very an American ethos, right?

So

Canada, the top four banks in Canada service 80% of the purchase mortgage business in Canada.

Wow.

Four banks, 80% of the market.

Number one in the U.S.

is Rocket, right?

We all know who Rocket is.

Yeah, my cousin works there.

They have 8.6% market.

Are they out of Detroit?

Out of Detroit.

Yeah, that's where I'm from.

By the way, remind me, if you want a tour of their campus, it's Disneyland for entrepreneurs.

It's one of the coolest

physical campuses.

I haven't been there, but she gives me the, well, I can't even say, but yeah.

Yeah.

I will, I'll remind you.

But let's go, U.S., right?

88.6% is number one in market share.

Yes.

We have thousands of lenders, and then it goes down from there, right?

So

no real estate company, no garage door company has 100% market share.

No, it would be a monopoly.

Well,

forget that we have the Sherman Act, but by the way, which is 70%.

Yep.

That's why you need a strong competitor.

That's why Bill or Steve Jobs gave Bill or Bill Gates gave Steve Jobs the money.

Right.

And when, I don't know if you know the story of Japanese cars in the U.S., but like when Honda was growing so fast, they actually launched Acura as a sub-brand to create a competitor.

So

it's part of our American ethos as a culture.

And so I don't, I don't like, good, let him create a differentiated product.

And, you know, again, one of the things that we do as a company is I look at myself as a platform.

So like, I want to be the iOS in the app store and let my agents build their own apps, right?

Versus I'm not trying to build a super app.

And so

72 Sold has their own mousetrap and they'll capture some market.

And so will other agents, you know, with ranging business models.

You know, I always talk.

Last week, I was in front of my own group, 1,500 people, and I said, listen, McDonald's is right across the street from our office.

You go there, feed a family of four for 40 bucks.

But if you go to stake 44,

you got to wait a week to get in there.

And it's going to be very, very, very expensive.

And you cancel, you still pay the down payment.

I'd rather be, but man, if you go in there, they greet you by your name, they sit down, a manager stops by, you're halfway done with your martini, they reshake it.

It's an experience.

So, how important is the brand?

Yeah.

And

so, brand especially,

I just listened to something.

Gary interjected.

That's the second time I'll quote him today,

where

it resonated and hit very personally with me.

He said, when you talk to skilled salespeople, they kind of disregard brand and marketing because they're really good at closing, right?

So it's like, can I generate a lead, convert it down the funnel, and turn it into business, which again applies to everybody, versus companies who very successfully have leaned into marketing and brand.

And then it's more of a

pull attraction versus hunting and gathering.

Right.

And so, you know, the answer is both, but it's, you know, it's that branding experience that differentiates.

Like you have this little thing on here that just sold for a billion dollars to Coca-Cola.

Yep.

And it was, it was a brand play that appealed to a specific consumer demographic

that made them.

infinitely more valuable than other commoditized products, right?

So I think a brand differentiates a commodity in a you know typically

for an ex for for to make it a premium product have you ever heard of the wizard of ads no his name's roy williams he was the first guy to build the ad for rolex

and it sounded something like imagine yourself and he's got you know you're going to the mission impossible you've got a quest

You are going up this impossible goal setting.

And he goes through it and he's done it for me live and he knows it by heart and he goes you've reached the pinnacle

you've accomplished mount everest role x you deserve a role and it's just like that whole brand so he did every major jewelry store he's doing a little bit of home service but what i found is people want to do business with me even though we've got a thousand people my coworkers that we work with is they want to know that i'm going to back it up they want to know that i'm going to make you happy they want to know that the story instead of being transactional like we can do it for less or or we're slashing all prices or, you know, it's these are our values.

And now I've realized more than ever, I need to be up front and center.

I do all the radio, TV, billboard.

And it's not a, it's not a, uh, a vanity thing.

It's just I wanted to get to, I'm not going away anytime soon.

No one could quit and say, hey, I'm taking away all of my clients that, that I helped build with you.

So do you think you need to be as a CEO, more doing Instagram and LinkedIn post?

And, you know, call call it TikTok, X, whatever.

What is your theory on that?

Yeah, yes, 100%, right?

So,

and you know, I joke that I blame Elon and Zuck for this, right?

Because I felt that before that, I couldn't name too many

publicly traded CEOs, right?

But we've moved our attention, right?

And

TV killed the radio star, right?

And

then Google did it to TV ads,

and social is doing it to every other form of paid consumer push media versus consumption media.

And

the thing that I think is extremely exciting is we are switching from a social graph to an interest graph across every one of those platforms.

So when social started exploding 10 years ago, and

I was told very much to my face I needed to do that and I ignored it.

But the game was create a following and then sell to that audience.

The algorithms, and by the way, the reason the algorithms have been able to move to a social, an interest graph versus a social graph is because the AI inside of the algorithms is getting much, much better at pairing people.

Right.

But you can open up a brand new Instagram or TikTok account today, which by the way, this didn't work 18 months ago, where you hit the right product market fit on message and you go viral.

And so

to answer your question is,

where is the attention?

That is the most basic construct of lead funnels and conversion and commerce.

And I don't care what industry we're in or what century we're in, right?

You need like 200 years ago, you needed to be in the town square because there was no direct mail.

So if you weren't at the right block, no one saw you, right?

And once upon a time, it was the billboard on the highway, then the right Instagram ad.

The audience, and again, I'm in the real estate industry and my goal is to partner and attract the best agents in, you know, the world because we operate in 27 countries.

So

what better ROI as part of my time to speak to the audience

I'm talking to, right?

So

I've been very focused on social and yesterday in front of the whole group, somebody said, take out your phone and see, you know, what is the views on your content over the last 30 days?

And it was at 394,000, right?

And at a minimum, we post once a day from my Instagram account.

We post the same content on LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Threads.

And we do a lot of, I say yes to a lot of this because then we repurpose this same content into shorts that drive to another, you know, CTA.

But think about that.

If I open up my Instagram right now, it says in the last 30 days, there's been 394,000 views on my content.

What would you and I pay for that?

Oh, yeah.

Right.

Like

that is, well, and it's hyper-targeted.

It's to my sphere of influence because the people that like it, non-followers, it's because the algorithm is showing them it's being shared quite a bit.

And so

how much longer will the platforms let me get away with that level of free viewership?

I actually don't know, right?

Because Meta's got a pretty good track record of putting some paywalls behind it.

But like, why wouldn't I?

Well, you take advantage why you have it, but I know a guy that's like smartest guy in the room.

He's a developer.

He controls 800 million queries through Google.

Like he figured out, kind of knows Google's algorithm better than them.

And he goes, Tommy, can you imagine an organic,

you're going against every major programmer in the world because their job is to get you to pay something.

That's how the platform makes money.

So you could make it work, but it's not long-lived usually.

Like, that's what's so hard about building a budget is we're so good.

It used to matter our domain authority, right?

And now it's crazy, but things are changing.

And so we got to be willing to learn.

And I think it depends as to, you didn't ask me the question of like, what is the goal?

What is the goal?

In my role, because you asked me specifically as a CEO, it's visibility, right?

And the speaker we had at our event yesterday said, visibility Trumps ability in today's attention world.

What was the speaker?

His name is Jared James.

He's a good friend of mine.

That's awesome.

Visibility Trumps ability, right?

And I'll ask you this.

Is there a chance that there is a better technical garage door installer in a a local market than you?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But do they know he exists?

No.

Right.

So visibility trumps ability 100% of the time.

Well, a lot of companies that spend, there's better products in Silicon Valley than the network effect.

But I mean, somebody could come up with a better Facebook, but they got the network effect.

But, you know, the fact is no one knows who they are.

Marketing is like essential.

If I had to pick one skill that trumps everything, sales and marketing are all.

Does that Rolex do anything better than this $600 Apple Watch?

No.

Tells time.

This actually tells me text messages and emails and my heart rate, right?

Function, this actually does more.

But if I had a Philip Petek, you know, right?

Like that, that tells society something about me.

And that's where you're paying for brand and status.

I will say that those watches, amazingly, not the last two years, but they go up in value too.

So they kind of hold their value.

I bought these two amethyst rocks, massive amethysts.

And my cousin's a geologist, he sourced them through Uruguay.

And I said, how long?

He goes, it'll take me a year to get these.

I said, all right.

I think I paid $70,000 for both of them.

He said, I could sell them each for $100,000.

And he goes, they're only going to go up.

Those aren't like rocks you find very often.

So everything I look at is like, is it going?

I have some fun stuff, but

rarely,

I showed Scott the, I got a kit from Knight Rider.

There's not a whole lot of those out there.

It's kind of a collector's piece.

So I hope it goes up in value.

That's a whole different topic.

But where where do you spend your money?

I mean, literally, like, you've probably got enough money where you don't need to work.

So

the fun part about being a human is like, there's no rule book or rule set that has to happen.

Right.

And I'm a, I'm a husband and a father, and my kids are 10 and eight.

And the, one of the thoughts that I've been really hyper aware of right now is that

there's seasons to life.

Yeah.

Right.

In my 20s, all I cared about was awards.

Like I wanted to be the number one agent on the planet right and i actually achieved it by the time i was 28 at the largest company in the world um i wanted you know 30 under 30 i wanted number one in the world on this list and number and like i was actually very highly driven by that and the craziest thing is i actually i i the dog caught the car like i actually did it And it was the most empty and meaningless feeling of my entire life because I didn't feel any different.

My EBITDA was not higher.

It was actually probably lower than other years where I was optimizing for net profit.

And so I feel very lucky that I got my ass handed to me in my 20s.

I lost everything and rebuilt it before I had kids.

And

what it put me is in these really interesting relationships and rooms at a very young age.

And I asked every single older man or woman who had made hundreds of millions of dollars what they would do different.

And they were all super clear.

Like it didn't even take two seconds that it was don't screw up time with your family and your loved ones.

You can't get it back.

And so the other thing they told me is there is an indifference point past a certain number.

And I've had friends exit from 20 million to a billion dollars.

And by the way, as long as you don't have a car watch or now I'll ask

rock habit.

Rock habit.

So, you know, we, the last two companies, my wife and I exited,

we already had the house we we have.

We live in a very nice neighborhood in Coral Gables, Miami.

You know, we, I have a Model S with everything on it.

She has a Model X with everything on it.

Our kids go to one of the best schools in Miami.

Nothing changed.

Like past a certain indifference point.

What is that point?

The reality is it's for the lifestyle that you optimize for.

So one of the things that I can tell you as an entrepreneur, I held resentment to the words lifestyle business or SMB.

Yeah.

because it felt not big enough.

And then I went and did one where I raised a bunch of money and had big big numbers involved.

But the reality is, I think most of us, and again,

I blame the culture and the glorification of the entrepreneur and the massive eggs and the massive raise.

But at the end of the day, it's like, how much money do you actually need to live the life you want, to experience the things you want to experience?

And so

I, and, and I am eternally grateful for the stuff I can't control, meaning like my DNA, my IQ, the parents I had, like living in the United States.

Exactly.

And I actually lived overseas for six or six countries before I was turned turn 15 okay so I have a lot of context to that statement and so you know I don't think we can control certain parts of the DM but I like I don't need or want for stuff right like I don't I don't have sports cars I I love spearfishing in the water but I don't buy a boat because I've done the math and like charging is cheaper yeah so

that that question I think is like

how do you how do you prioritize time and effort like for for me, time with my 10 and eight year old and my wife, my siblings, my parents, my cousins is actually the most valuable thing on the planet for me.

And back to the DNA thing, it's probably because I'm Latino and I was bred to do that, but it's how I prioritize things.

So for me, it's experience over things, right?

Like we spend two to three months every summer on the road with my entire family.

I run a global company, so we spend time in the south of France and Barcelona and wherever we want, all the way to, you know, the west coast and surfing in Costa Rica.

And, and again, like that is expensive, but I don't, you know, have a Ferrari habit.

So I think it's, and, and by the way, there's no right or wrong.

Yeah.

Like this is like, there's no rule set here.

And

the one thought I go back to all the time is in two generations, no one will remember to you or I lived.

Oh, yeah.

So just really enjoy the ride.

That's really good, man.

I really like that.

So, but you still, you know, Gino Wickman, you familiar with him?

Yeah.

He was on a podcast recently, and he said, I sold my EOS system, 87.5% of it.

And he owes Tommy a massive pot of gold.

I won't even go into numbers, but I felt so empty.

And a lot of people have that when they sell their business, they got freedom, they can do whatever they want, but they kind of lose purpose.

There's a great book of Man Search for Meeting.

I talk about it in every podcast, I think, but I still want to like,

like some people are like, man, I retired for a year and I just was like driving myself nuts.

Yeah.

So, so A, I love his stuff and we actually have a partnership with EOS that we preach in our in our ecosystem.

B is

part of the entrepreneurial experience is that it becomes your identity.

So I've exited three times

and you know, after the first one, it was painful and traumatic.

And then the second one, you're like, okay, now I like

simple things like, like, hey, my email is now Leo at Leopreha.com.

It's no longer at the business.

Right.

Right.

Cause that's like that email was with you for five, 10, 15 years.

Like even just little things of how you log into the bank, you have to change that email because that domain no longer belongs to you.

Yeah.

Right.

And so one is identifying who you are outside of the identity you've built as an entrepreneur.

And by the way, I spent about six months spearfishing.

I got really good at it.

I'm a rescue diver.

But, you know, as I was on my third spearfishing trip of that week after we sold the last business and I was contemplating buying the spearfishing charter, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Like my brain's doing that thing where like, I think when you are a builder,

you, that's your thing, right?

So look, I know people who sold their business and buy a ranch and become like really good at that, but then they optimize and love and play and do that.

So again,

most things you, you can't know it without experiencing it, right?

So like that famous Jim Carey quote is to that, it's like, I wish success and money and fame on everybody so they know how empty and meaningless it is.

Right.

Right.

Like you don't know what you don't know.

And there's a principle that I talk a lot about.

I did a keynote about it yesterday where I said progress over perfection, progress over destination.

Yep.

Because like there is a body of psychology that says that the only commonality on happiness comes from progress, right?

So take the woodworker who can take a piece of wood and turn it into a chair.

Take the steel worker who can take raw and turn it into a sword, a hammer.

There's actually a documented amount of happiness in manual labor and blue-collar work of taking something that's raw and turning it into a completed product.

And,

you know,

I view myself as highly creative, even though my canvas is business and sales and conversion.

Like if we can go from X to Y, I like that.

And it's that iterative process that I enjoy.

And so again, I've been pretty fortunate to do it in multiple industries and experience it.

But once you zoom out and you understand like demand, CTA, CAC, LTV, EBITDA, margin, gross, net, all that stuff, like to me, it's like colors and a palette and I'm painting.

Yeah.

Right.

And so like, and I say that because I have an art degree.

And so I actually did paint and do sculptures in college.

And then I went into the business side and enjoyed that 10 times more.

So I think it's just finding out

what gives you joy and passion in the season of life.

Like

I don't miss my kids' jiu-jitsu when I'm in town.

Like I travel very little.

And

when I do travel, I concentrate and try to do as much as possible, like fitting this in because we were in town.

But

what I care about in this season over anything is making sure I can take my son to jiu-jitsu, my daughter to her singing class, and make them breakfast and dinner, right?

I, we, we have people who help, but I choose to.

Yeah.

Right.

Because

I have, and math drives everything in my brain.

Like my daughter's 10 years old.

I probably have, I don't know, 700 put her to bed nights.

If she's like, dad, leave me alone.

I got it.

Like, think about that.

And so that's a finite resource that I can't buy more of.

I love that, man.

Yeah.

Well,

I was on the this stage and I said, listen, guys,

when I die on my casket, I don't want to say best garage drill guy, best entrepreneur, best leader.

I wanted to say best dad.

And I don't have kids yet.

Well, I would one up that and said, when I take my last breath, I want those people in the room because they care enough to be there and hold my hand.

I love that.

I love this, man.

I want to talk, just a couple of quick things.

Then we'll get you out of here.

You know a lot of people.

Who do you look up to a lot in the business world and why?

Because a lot of them are frustrated.

They're just not not happy people.

Yeah, no, I think that is a fantastic question.

And I've been asked that a lot.

Like, who are the two people historic and all that stuff?

And honestly, the question I always go back to is my dad.

First of all, we are all flawed human beings.

Right.

So do not put anyone on pedestal, including me, right?

Like I'd say to my people, we're like, oh, you're this and that.

Or like, look, at the end of the day,

we're just trying to figure this out as we go along.

And

you shared fatherhood as a goal.

And it's, by the way, it's like central to my identity and what I love to do most.

And I was super clear I wanted to be a dad from the like since I was six years old.

I was talking about my future wife and kids.

Yeah.

When you take that child home, that is the scariest moment of your life because you like, there's no manual.

There's, there's no nothing.

Yeah.

But the comforting part is 100 billion humans have done it in recorded Homo sapien version of the species that we we are right now.

And so

to me, it's like, look up to the folks that you can learn from, but don't put anyone on a pedestal.

Like when I look at someone I would admire, I want to look at like, how are they seen as a father, husband, brother, son?

That's way more interesting to me because everything else is just a skill or attack director system, in my opinion.

You know, there's a guy you should meet.

He's 80 now, 81, Robert Chadini.

I don't know if you ever heard of him, wrote the book Influence.

He's an amazing guy, amazing dad, amazing grandpa.

Is there one book that other than the Bible, the e-myth, the richest man in Babylon, I was just going through a few here, but is there a book that's kind of out of the norm that really just changed your life?

Yeah, you have a couple.

So again, real estate, right?

Like the one that, and by the way, the

question asked differently is like, did you ever, do you remember reading the picture of Dorian Gray in high school or college?

It was by,

oh my God, I'm I'm forgetting the name of the author, but

it's a book about

a character who reads a book and it fundamentally changes the course of his life.

And for me, it was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, right?

Super basic real estate book.

A lot of people in real estate said that business changed their life because, again, being millennials, like we didn't have the glorification of entrepreneurs growing up.

Like we were basically told to go to college and get a good job and hopefully climb

the ladder.

yeah the corporate ladder yeah um but that was the first book that explained leverage of people time and money for me yep so you know kind of almost in that category of like that's too easy but I'll give you a fun nerdy systems one that fundamentally changed everything in my brain which is David Allen's Getting Things Done and it's it's really

like a framework of how the brain works from short-term memory to long-term memory storage and how to create a for for folks who have the schedules we have where I've officially ran out of time right I lead an organization of 83,000 agents in 27 countries with 2,300 staff people.

I will never get anything, everything done.

And so it's the radical prioritization of do, delegate, delete

and being at peace with stuff not getting done.

I love that, man.

I always say, I got to delegate to Elevate.

I'm working right now getting ready to start with,

oh, man, and my let.

And I always used to listen to him say, I can work three shifts in a day.

And I just always looked at him and I always say, I'll out-delegate you all day.

Like, I don't want to be in control.

Like, and I want my people to fail fast.

I mean, failure is not an option.

We need to fail.

Just fail quicker.

Why they're still loading the gun.

We've missed the target 80 times.

Now we're hitting bullseye every time.

But again, going back to my seasons, like when I was 21, I did work like 8 in the morning to 10 p.m.

at night.

And that was the right season for that.

Now I like don't want to and don't care to.

And that's okay.

Yeah.

Right.

Could I be more productive or more successful?

Sure.

But, you know, I want my kids to be there at the end.

That's so cool.

How do people get a hold of you if they want to reach out, Leo?

Social, Instagram, my name at Leoprehao.

I'll let you close this out, man.

I know we should have talked more about EXP and everything, but I just kind of went with this and just wanted to know more about you.

No, absolutely.

And

that's the beauty of this era, right?

Like once upon a time, in order to get to know people, like we happen to be able to do it in person, but even the ability to be in each other's orbit is because of this visibility Trump's ability.

So I would tell people to stay in curiosity and taste and play right whether that's ai or social i think there's this paralysis by analysis of i i have to get it right and in this era i think volume trumps everything and that's probably true in every era but it's i'm hyper aware of it in this one well it was a pleasure to have you on i really appreciate it this was killer thank you so much thank you for having me all right Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today.

Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy.

I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states.

The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization.

It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service.

So, if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700-plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book.

Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.