A Steady Stream of Probate Listing Appointments, with Matt Milia of Appointments Today

0:01 The goal of every business is to create a steady stream of business. So one way is that marketing systems are predictable and consistent. One of the vendors that offers that a tool to help that happen and particularly appropriate in the probate space, Matt Milia from Appointments Today has a as a service that will help create a more consistent steady stream of appointments. Matt, thank you for joining us today.

0:24 Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on. So I think I read you founded the company in 2015. You're about 11 years old in the business as a company.

0:32 Yeah, we're like senior citizens in this space. So, yeah, we've been at it for quite a while in the inside sales space. Yeah, a lot of people started that in COVID and then disappeared when COVID was over. So,

0:43 Yeah. So, you started that, you must have seen a gap in the industry. What was that gap that you saw that caused you to generate the business and start the company? Well, so at the time, when I first actually got started, I was the inside sales rep for Al Stac, who's a very well-known great agent here in Cleveland, Ohio.

1:02 And, when I first legendary agent Yeah, he is. Absolutely. And so I worked I was actually Al's ISA. And the funny thing is that at that time we were a part of a mastermind called the National Association of Expert Advisors.

1:19 Yes. Yes. They're remember that? Yeah. NAEA. So, they're not around now. They've kind of used that as well. I mean, you're eXp, so yeah. I mean, they basically if you're in their downline, you still get all their amazing training. But at that time, we he had gone out to a mastermind and one of the big talking points was, yeah, we got a lot of leads, but we don't have anyone to call those leads. And so, Alan and I were kind of spitballing. We're like, why don't we create our own company that hires and staffs people for it? And at first, it was kind of something we were just going to build locally. And we're like, yeah, let's do something here locally. Well, what we, what we did, we, you know, mind you, again, this was, you said it, 2015. It was a long time ago when we first got started. And so, we didn't have the knowledge that we have today. And so, when we first got started, we said, well, what's everybody else doing? At that time there were about three companies that were pretty much kind of the go-to. It was my outes and it was like a thousand calls a day. Both great companies. I don't know if both of them are still doing stuff today. But what I do know is at that time they were all hiring overseas. I said, "Well, guess we'll start hiring overseas because that's what everyone else is doing." what we realized very quickly, we hired we interviewed probably she 20 30 people. Out of the 30, we found two that we were just dead set kind of tied on. We're like, I don't know which one's going to be better, which one we want to keep. We said, well, you know what?

2:56 Let's just hire them both. So, we hired them both. And what we found out very quickly is that we actually ran out of data. We didn't have enough leads for them to call. And so what ended up happening is when we ran out of the data, I said, "Geez, we got to make a difficult decision here." at the time, Al was coaching for NAEA. I was doing the seller roleplay calls. He was doing the he was doing, you know, individual coaching with agents. And so he reached out to one of the agents and said, "Hey, do you know, if we can get this guy on for you, well trained, good on the phone, would you be interested?" He's like, "Oh, absolutely." So, he brought him on pretty much at zero cost our caller, which was nice. So, we were able to essentially still have this caller on, pay him, keep his job. And of course, the agent at the time absolutely loved it. He made well over $100,000 in commissions and closings. So he was thrilled. But what I've learned in that time was that going into the Philippines was a very challenging endeavor. We those were like the two successful people that we had found and that was kind of it and when I say successful averely average moderately successful they it wasn't like hiring somebody here. So we learned very quickly that in order for us to grow we had to find you know folks that have lived in the US knew our culture knew everything. And so that's really where we grew from you know going from the Philippines hiring you know internally and then over the years the business has just evolved greatly from expireds FSBOs and now what brought us on probate

4:35 You know I have eight virtual assistants two are in the Philippines I think two are in Pakistan and India but they're just doing administrative work and I tell people I usually hire three or four to find one for particular job because y

4:49 There's a process and part of it is the person, part of it is the systems you have to you have to nail down. And so you have to have a system make it work. And I don't have anybody doing phone calling. So that's a whole different skill set that to me makes, you know, I'm sure make a lot more sense. I know one of your core tenants is that you need to nail things down before you scale that. And I see this all the time that people go on to different podcasts or masterminds and say, you know, can I just hire somebody to cold call for me? Okay. But you'll know how to convert, you know, a hot lead or somebody's ready to even how to list a property, even how to sell the property once you listed it and close it once you have it sold. So to me, it seems like you there's a lot to nail down before. Talk a little bit about your nail and scale philosophy and how you apply that in your business.

5:35 Yeah, it's a great question. I mean I think the most important thing is making sure that you have a set of guiding principles, a set of standard operating procedures and that you have kind of a framework and a road map to get from A to B. One of the things that most people mess up on is that they'll bring somebody in and they're like, "Oh, hey, here's a script. Have at it." And that is the probably one of the worst things you can do because imagine giving somebody you know a road map for example and they don't know how to read a map. They're probably not going to get to that destination. And so a lot of times what most people do is they take for granted. They say, "Oh yeah, just say these words and it'll all work out." Well, the problem is most of the time if these guys aren't very well trained or well versed, they're basically trying to read a script on the phone. And we all know that scripts only go so far. And it's one of the reasons, and I won't I could go down a really deep rabbit hole on this, so I'll stay away from this talking point. But it's also one of the reasons why a lot of the times AI calling doesn't necessarily go over as well in a lot of cases, and I've tested out a lot of those, but because it's scriptbased, it's not necessarily hey, if this person says this, it's going to throw off the entire process and the entire system. And so one of the things that we always train our guys up on is that we make sure that when they come in, you know, not only do they go through at least two to three rounds of interviews, but in addition to that, we make sure that we roleplay with them, they know how to say, so like if we're calling for a specific area, like where I live at, I'm in the greater Cleveland area in Ohio. So if someone calls,

7:16 Is there a greater Cleveland area? I thought it was all pretty tough when I went there. What? Oh, yeah. Sorry. No, you're good. Yeah, but no, we're I mean it's like on the out we're on the outskirts of Cleveland basically like sub.

7:28 I'm just teasing out if we're paying Cleveland. Oh, you're good. So the but there's some weird towns over here like Tuscarawas or like Cuyahoga or I mean Medina like if you saw these and you're like reading these you wouldn't really necessarily know how to say them. So you know we have an entire framework and a system. We make sure the guys know how to pronunciate annunciate where they're calling. We make sure they learn the ins and outs of the city the marketplace. And then, you know, in addition to that, of course, we make sure that these guys are well-versed, skilled. We train them prior to getting on the phone. And usually, we'll train people for, you know, up to a month before we even let them touch a phone because in a lot of cases, what ends up happening is people just rush them in too quickly. And, you know, you're setting yourself up for a you're setting yourself up for disaster. It's the reason why our average tenure of ISA is about 24 months, which I mean, in this industry is unheard of. Because most inside sales reps come in and they're gone almost instantly because they, you know, they throw a script at you. They throw some really old training videos, they throw maybe like the really old Mike Ferry stuff, which don't get me wrong, still some great Mike Ferry stuff. Shout out to Mike Ferry and all that, some great tenants, some great things, but they'll they're not even giving them access to the coach. They're giving them access to old training material. It's like, all right, they're doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. It's important that you as the as the person that's hiring them, you know, have that back and forth, that role play, have that back and forth where you're training them as if and you got to know how to convert those leads yourself. If you don't know how to convert them, it's going to be really challenging for you to train appropriately. So that's in a nutshell what we do from kind of A to Z. So, you're setting you're taking data and from that pre-qualling to some level and then setting an appointment for the real estate agent to take over.

9:16 And again, the key is the Realtor® needs to either know how to convert that or I guess they could hire you and learn how to convert that, but at some point if you're not converting, it doesn't matter how many appointments you have, you still have to have and if you don't have a value proposition, if you're not good at what you do. Oh,

9:30 Yeah. So many agents focus on the marketing. They only focus on the delivery. To go back a little bit, when you talk about ISAs failing, seems like there's two types that fail. A lot fail because they don't get any training at all. But the ones who are good and figure out in a lack of training environment how to grow and improve, well, they don't need your company anymore. They're going to go on their own, right? So, it's really one way or the other. If you throw them in that environment, you're only going to get them for a few months at best. And so, the only alternative is to train them. And I imagine you must have some upward path for those that want to become lead team leads or supervisors or trainers or maybe agents on their own. And if they're in the United States, that's a possibility, right?

10:11 Yeah, I'm glad that's a great I'm glad you bring that up. It's a really good point because there are a lot of times where an inside sales rep will grow out of the position, so to speak. One of the things that I put on for all of our callers is there's no cap on their earnings, which basically the great thing about it is that I have it actually set up. So before, you'll appreciate this. So before eXp, before the downline, I built this out probably back in like 2016. I had this brilliant idea. I don't even know where I came up with it from, but it worked out very well. So, one of the things that I've always told my guys, I said, 'Listen, you know, you probably know good people locally. I don't know good people locally. I've got to run ads on Google. I got to run ads on all these different websites because we've got about probably 30, 40 different sites that we would use in addition to running Google ads to find people. It gets expensive to find good people. And so what I would tell my guys, I'd say, "Hey, if you know someone who you think is well spoken, who fits the bill, who's really good at this, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make you accountable for them essentially, and I'm going to basically give you I think the way I built it when I first started it was like a dollar for every hour that person worked. So I would have guys that would bring me six, seven, I had one guy that brought me like 10 guys.

11:31 And this these people were working with me for, you know, a couple of years. This guy was making probably close to $30 an hour, mind you, living showed you,

11:40 Right? And I mean, I got most of my people from him, so I was happy to pay it. I'm like, "Hey, this is great." Because by the time you break down the price for, you know, the replacement for the retraining. Now, I did learn over time, yeah, I was probably paying out a little much. I mean, I adjusted those figures now to be a little bit more reasonable, but I mean, of course, I mean, giving these guys that ability to make that passive of income and, you know, of course, I mean, they still had to be in good standings with me. If they got written up, if they got, you know, put on any type of thing, then of course, that went away. And I told them, you know, look, this is a this is a benefit. This is a bonus. It can be taken away at any time. And so but it kept these guys motivated to stay around and not try to go find something else. And so when they got really good, they stayed on and they continued to train these other guys up to be really good because hey, their income relied on that. If these guys were good, they stayed on. They weren't any, you know, they weren't getting into any trouble. Like I mean the hires as well. If they brought people on and I had to write that person up because they weren't showing up to work or whatever the case may be, obviously I'm not going to pay them for that person. But I just built that system so that it motivated these guys to really want to stay. And then you know of course the normal trajectory if somebody wants to become a like a team lead so to speak they would have to go into management we would you know give them kind of a bump in pay but in most cases what a lot of our guys found was that hey if I just recruit people I'll make more money than I would even being a team lead. So, it worked very well for that for all intents and purposes, just getting people up to speed, getting them where they need to be so that they wanted to continue to work hard and stick it out.

13:15 I was listening to a podcast of I don't want to name the company to insult them, but they were a CRM company and they were saying, "Well, we you can track the stats on our, you know, clients." And they were laughing. They felt customers would buy leads, primarily Zillow leads in this case, but it could be any bot leads. And in their system, they would say that in order to have a certain conversion ratio, you had to have 10 contacts to get to get a $10 to get a contact. And then I think it was something like another 10 contacts to get an appointment. Again, just these are just the numbers of their system.

13:50 Yeah. And they're laughing that real estate agents would make one half phone calls and give up on leads. And I was thinking, well, on one hand, it's funny. On the other hand, you know, the people you're paying to do this, you're paying them 10 to 20 bucks an hour or something.

14:03 I make a lot more than that. So, for me, you can say you need to make your phone calls, but if you're telling somebody like me, I'm going to spend you 90% of my time dialing and then 90% of the time they're not ready to do anything, that's a lot of time not getting paid. And so, I think that at some point the math becomes compelling. If you can convert, then you can delegate the dialing and the automation of the dialing and then the follow-up numbers. So, talk a little bit if you can about what's it going to cost me to get those appointments and then what kind of conversion ratio do I have to hit in order for it to make sense.

14:42 Yeah, it's I mean it's a definitely a top of- mind question for most when they make these kind of hires. And so, and let me just let me say for those listening, the reason I have Matt on because he's want to share some misinformation because in my experience, most people selling the service will sell to anybody. And they know that they're throwing you a life jacket while you're going downstream the river and you're going to drown anyhow, but they'll sell it to you before you go. Whereas, I can tell is really accountable to trying to help their customers come successful. So, that's the purpose of my question is what does it take for the what kind of numbers does make does it take in order to make this whole thing make sense?

15:16 Yeah. And so I'm going to I'm going to take this down to a very I'm going to I'm going to kind of go based on like first almost giving you a few different thought p thought patterns here. So when you're going to make a hire like this, I think the most important thing is to number one look and assess and say, "Okay, how many leads do I currently have?" Because that's the most important thing, right? You got to keep these guys busy. If you don't have enough leads, and I mean it's so funny because I've had people before where like, "Yeah, I have a hundred leads. Do you think you could turn out I don't know like 15 16 appointments? I go what are you out of your mind? I go are these like people that you know raise like do they just raise their hand recently? You're like oh no I mean yeah I'm thinking you probably get what like maybe 20 out of there. I go I mean what kind of leads are these? Oh yeah they're expired. Okay. I go that's not going to get you where you want to go. So nothing against expireds. Our guys call expireds and bismos and still do a very good job on those. But I mean, as far as like KPIs and numbers go, you need to understand like number one, you got to have enough leads. You've got to also be at a point where as far as your results, your performance goes as an agent. I always tell agents, hey, if you're not doing if you're not doing it at minimum like $3 million a year in volume, and that's a bare minimum, at $3 million, and I'm not talking $3 million in gross commission income. I want to be very clear on that.

16:42 $80,000 gross, $90,000 gross, maybe range. Yeah. I'm talking like $3 million in sold volume. Like that's kind of the perfect starting point for this,

16:51 Right? And the one thing that's great about what we do is we don't have like we don't have people starting off at, you know, if you were going to get like a full-time person. I mean, you'd be looking at, you know, three to $4,000 a month. Where if you're going to get somebody for only a couple of hours, you're looking at maybe anywhere between, you know,$600 to like $1,000 a month. And so I always try to recommend and say, look, start off a little bit smaller, but realize that, you know, the goal and the objective of this is to essentially help you grow your time. It's not so that you just sit there and then don't do anything like, okay, well, cool. They're making the calls. I'm going to go ahead now and go take a nap. I mean, yeah, you could do that if you wanted to, but it's not going to be the highest and best use of your time. With that additional time, you should then, you know, spend that maybe doing some sort of like calling your sphere of influence, for example, or, you know, like following up on past clients. I mean, that's going to give you a little bit better of an overall return. And even if you don't want to do that, okay, fine. Work on your marketing, work on your email, work on your drip content, but do something that's productive during that time. And of course, we'll take the heavy lifting of the making the calls off your plate. But yeah, I always tell everyone, I mean, and I've had people come to me and say, "Hey, you know, I just want you to know, I got these really cold leads. I'm really struggling right now. I got to make this work. I might be able to pay you for a month." I mean, Bill, I tell them point blank, I go, "Listen," I go, "We're not we're not the place." And they're like, "What do you mean?"

18:15 I'm like, "Look," I go, "I don't have the heart to I don't have the heart to take your money. I don't feel right about that, especially if you're telling me that this is your last." I just tell them I say, "Look, what's stopping you from physically picking up the phone and calling?" And you know, usually it's limiting beliefs or there's this or there's that getting in the way. That's why I tell them, look, your very best bet is you pick up the phone, you make those calls, take that money that you have, maybe reinvest it in some coaching, some training. I tell them, I even happily train you and coach you. I'll take that for coaching. I go, but I'm not going to take the last of what you have to hire callers because and one thing I always tell everybody, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint, right? When you h when you hire someone, it doesn't mean all of a sudden instantly you're going to get results. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time because the inside sales reps got to learn the way you do things, your platform, your systems, your tools, your training. They have to learn all of that. And so I really always tell everybody that, you know, the most important thing is make sure that you're at a place financially where you have a few months of reserves. You're not stressing that a deal has to close instantly in order for you to pay for this. And you know, once you have that dialed in, I mean, it all becomes much easier. Well, to me, I think the thing that I always tell agents is you should you course have your sphere of influence. And then you get to a point where you can't talk to new people because if you call, you know, say you talk to 10 people a day, in a quarter there's maybe 60 work days, that means you have, you know, 600 people a quarter is about as many as you can handle. Maybe 800 if you want to call more, maybe 1,200. But at some point, you've met so many people that you know that and you if you recall them every 90 days or every six months, there's only so far you can go with that, right?

20:00 And then the calls, the Appointments Today can be the supplement. Meaning, if I if I actually made my calls regularly, I make enough money, I can invest $4,000 a month because frankly, one listing pays for three, four, five months worth of business. Oh,

20:15 Yeah. And it's a supplement to what I'm doing. It's a new appointment stream, a new marketing stream, not the fundamentals. If you aren't in business making money to start investing three, four thousand a month. It just doesn't work. And I've seen so many competitors, I again don't want to name all of them. One I'll name is Mike Furry. They'll take your last thousand dollars and send you for coaching and then turn your collection when you can't pay the bill in 90 days and they'll say that's your problem. You need to figure it out.

20:40 That's not a winning solution. No, I don't think. And I don't think that's the way to treat people. I not to say that the miracle can't happen and everybody can sell five million dollar house tomorrow theoretically but you know all things are possible but it's not it's not a good business plan to go that route.

20:56 No it's not. I mean that's why I mean anytime that you know when we first got started in the business I mean we didn't know what we didn't know. I mean so I would take if you had a credit card and you're oh yeah we'll help you but I mean I'm a lot more selective now. I mean, and quite frankly, we make everyone that we work with go through some type of training, some type of coaching. We actually make So, we do a lot of cash offers. One of the big things that we do right now, in addition to probate, of course, but the cash offer side, I mean, we make people literally go through a certification. I say, "Look, you're representative, me, or representative of the organization you're going out on behalf of. I don't want you going out there and, you know, messing it up. You need to know what to say, you need to know how to say it. You need to make sure you're presenting it the right way, right?

21:44 And so I'll tra I mean I'll train people up to make sure that they're saying things and doing things the way they need to so that they can have more results because when we've taken people on that I have a credit card, you know, in two months time they're absolutely infuriated and they're like, "Oh, this isn't working." And it's like, "Well, we set you up on 20 appointments. How did you not convert any of them in two months?" you know, and then the excuses come out. And so I know that if we train people up the right way or, you know, they at least have a coach or they have somebody that's kind of helping guide them along the path, I know there's going to be a much higher likelihood and propensity that we're going to continue to work together for years to come. I'd rather have 50 clients that I work with for the next 10 years than have, you know, a 100red or 200 clients I'm constantly cycling through and trying to find new ones because, you know, they couldn't stick it out or because they, you know, they just weren't the right fit. I had a CRM company years ago wrote a detailed data report on their numbers, which I thought was great.

22:40 And they were a company that would help agents buy the leads and then they would, you know, track the activities until closing. And they put out a number which has been like a truism ever since for me, which is the average time from first contact to paycheck on a lead is about two years. That's the average.

22:57 Wow. Which means half hour sooner and half are more, right? And if you don't, so if you don't play to at least halfway, if you don't play at least to I can last two years of this, you're giving up over half of the potential or half of the value, the equity of the leads you're working on because people just take time. They're not ready. They haven't worked it out. They're fighting with their kids, whatever the reason is. And yet probate I think has unique alternative method which is if you gave me a probate lead and I booked an appointment to meet the client and they're not ready yet but they've picked an attorney. Now you've introduced me to somebody who can be other referral source and that one lead potentially can be a whole gateway of business. And to me that's why I think well generally I don't like appointment setting for standard retail or expired for other than very successful agents. I think for probate if you can make a commitment for six months and you can last two years without closing any business or much maybe one a month after six months or so but you also have the other relationship you create. So talk a little bit about you know when you have agents successful what are they doing that's helping them not maybe making their lifeline your business but supplementing a business and adding to what they're doing. Yeah, that's a really good question. And I mean really I think the most important thing with probate and this is why I tell everybody with probate is that you've got to understand that it's a long cash conversion cycle. But you're doing probate because you're building towards a more predictable future and not so much on relying and hoping and praying that, you know, the $10,000 a month that you're handing off to Zillow or Realtor.com or the new one now, which is, oh, I'm a I'm a Zillow Premier Agent and you know, they only take 75% from me when the deal closes. And I'm just like, oh my god. Okay. Sorry, I shouldn't talk. I don't have many great warm fuzzy feelings for Zillow.

25:02 They have a whole podcast about I hate Zillow. I hate Well, all right. Cool. Well, good. See, we didn't talk about all they want until they do something worthy of my respect. They did when they started a company the book and the original concept of transparency and data was great and then they sold their sold to Wall Street and now they're just goblins. So, I'm you're not gonna

25:20 Yes. And so, and so with probate, what I love about probate, and it's so funny because a lot of agents, every time I talk to agents, the first thing I say is, "Well," I'm like, "Hey, so you know what's kind of stopped you from calling these?" And they go, "Well, I don't want to be looked at as an ambulance chaser." I mean, Bill, do you like I've we've done this for years on this and let me tell you, I've maybe had our guys get called ambulance chasers once, maybe twice, and our guys are making like tens of thousands of phone calls per month. We have, I think right now like 130 or 140 probate clients all around the US. And so one of the things that we do that's very unique with the probate calls and what I like about the probate calls a lot is that there is a absolute 100% need to sell that house.

26:09 Very rarely are you going to come across someone now? Okay, let's unpack that a little bit. If someone is let's say you have a surviving spouse, right, that's living in the property. No, then there's a high likelihood they may not sell or they might hold off for a couple of years. But I can't tell you how many times we've had people say, you know, it's getting tougher and tougher walking around the corner seeing, you know, and it's sad to even go into this, but like, you know, people say, you know, I see visions of like, you know, my wife, my husband, you know, I feel I almost don't even feel it doesn't feel like home anymore. It's just I'm missing them constantly. I think I want a fresh start. It's, you know, it's gotten to a point where it's a little too much of a house for me. There's so many reasons why someone, you know, that's a surviving spouse now. A lot of times they're so overwhelmed. They don't know what to do. They're griefstricken. And so, you know, that conversation up front with them is usually very challenging. But, you know, the kids on the other hand that are living, you know, like the outofstate ones, like those are gold because I would probably, if I had to venture to guess, and I don't know this exact number, but I'd say it's probably 95% or more of the time that when you've got kids that are out of state, that home is being sold because they can't, you know, at first the house may not be causing them much pain. Oh, mom and dad's house is paid off. Not a big deal, right? Oh, now they get a bill for the taxes. And the taxes are $5,000 a year. Yesesh, I wasn't expecting all that. Oh, now they get a bill for the insurance. Oh, man.

27:42 Insurance is three grand a year. Wasn't expecting all that. Now all of a sudden, you got the maintenance, the upkeep, you got all these things. In a matter of one to two months, they come to their senses and go, "Gee, this house is a lot more than what I expected. I don't have the I don't have the patience to rent it out and I don't think I'm going to be living there since it's a state away. We're just going to go ahead and sell this thing. And so, you know what we find with probate, what I tell everybody with probate, I say, look, make probate one of the main staples of what you do, but find something else to fund the probate while the time is being taken. Because, you know, if you could figure out a way, look, even if you got another job, I mean, whatever it is you got to do to make ends meet while you're working probate, because if you work probate the right way, there's no reason that after year one, you can't close one probate deal a month in the first year. I feel like after two years, you could be closing two to three every month. You're just building a never-ending pipeline of predictability, and you're essentially building a never-ending revenue generating stream that's going to support you from, you know, going forward. Because unfortunately I mean people don't stop dying. So it's it is a really good niche and in my mind it's probably one of the better lead sources but most agents don't want to you want to take all that time in between and again I get that.

29:03 Well also you know the surviving spouse who is selling and going to live there. My experience with probate and it varies I guess by state but this is a universal truth. 90% of the customers love their attorney the day they hire them and for the first 90 days and after 90 days they hate their attorney. And so one of the things I tell agents are very focused on I want to get the newest probate filings. I want to be first in line.

29:30 Sometimes people haven't yet discovered why they need to take action. And you caught them like you mentioned early. They still think they can manage the house. They're property manager. Oh, and mom's living by herself now. And then when mom needs medicine or mom has a problem, you know, I had a case where I hurt my knee. I couldn't put my sock on my right leg by myself. My wife helped me. My wife was, you know, I was widowed. She couldn't be there to help me. What am I going to do? And so these are things that happen in real life, but they don't start day one. It takes time before you realize the problems. And probate is one of those things where I would say, as long as you go back and keep the data in the loop, oftentimes the probate that was filed a year ago, that's where they need more help. Hey, we our attorney abandoned us. Attorney doesn't know what he's doing, right?

30:14 We need money to sell the house. We need money to kick the squatter out. We need money to secure the home and fix the heater and pay the property tax and stop foreclosure. So, it's one of those things where I think when we look to solve problems rather than just to sell houses again, that's where I think the transactional agents like the micro agents are very focused on transactions versus using these appointments to meet people and then try to see where the problem is, try to help them along the way. So, one of the things I guess I'm going to give you a little underhand pitch here is you talk about I know I heard you previously talk about your triple digit ROI. Talk about with an with an ISA talk about what does tripledigit ROI mean?

30:51 So yeah, it's a great question. Triple-digit ROI is like I knew you like that one. I like that one. Yeah. So if someone So if you get like a 2x return on investment, I mean that's essentially like a 200% return on your money. You doubled your money. And so, you know, in a lot of cases, like with probate, for example, I mean, probate, and the great thing about probate, and this is why I tell everyone the first year, I said, "Look, the first year you do this, you're going to find that it's going to be a little painful. You're going to close three may three to five deals is kind of what I tell people within year one. And I tell them the first six months are going to be like a ghost town. You may not close as many the first six months, but after that and especially when you have calling, you have a calling service, you've got, you know, all somebody basically doing the heavy work and the heavy lifting for you. When you have somebody to do all that heavy work for you, it becomes exponentially so much easier. And so what we do on our end is we come in and we do the grunt work. We make the first set of calls, the stuff that no one wants to do. And so when we come in, all of our guys go by Alex. So, it makes it real easy, super simple handoff. And all of our guys are very well trained on like what to say with probate. And so, and I'm happy to go into the script, too, if you feel like that would be helpful to your viewers. But yeah, as far as the as far as the approach goes and you know how we go about doing this and getting that you know triple digit return, I would say that at the end of year one you're usually going to get somewhere between a three to 4x return on investment or 300 to 400%. And then you know year two which is kind of where the magic happens. Year two we see people between 10 and 15 times return. And the reason why is because we've built up a pipeline for you. So, remember how we were talking at the beginning of the call, hey, if you only have, you know, 600 people, what else do you go off of?

32:45 That number doesn't grow unless someone is doing the actions that need to be done up front to make that number grow. And so, one of the things that I always tell our agents, I say, "Look, they'll ask me, they'll go, "Hey, will you nurture the leads for us, and will you continue to follow up?" I go, "Yes." I go, "But do you really think that Alex who lives in Costa Rica or Alex that lives in Panama or Alex that lives in the Dominican Republic is going to be able to build better rapport than Bill Gross, the local probate expert?" And usually like, "No, they

33:18 I can say for a fact no." In my case, you better be the answer better be no. And if the answer is not no, you need to make it no, right? You know, for sure. And I don't mean to be disrespectful to your callers. I was listening to this the other day on with AI. People say, "Oh, we have these call agents and they get like 50% better ratios than real estate salespeople." Well, not better than me. I mean, it might be better than average. And I better get better at my game because the answer better be no. It might be it might be 50% more phone calls as maybe what they're Yeah. What they're alluding to because yeah, obviously machine can dial a million calls. I will tell you and I mean I don't want to go down the I wouldn't go down the rabbit hole with you like I look I love AI. I use AI for just about everything. I've I mean I've gotten to a point right now, one of the things that we're offering up and actually I mean I didn't even think about talking about it here, but I mean one of the things that we're doing right now, so the magic with probate is being willing to meet them on multiple verticals. What I mean by multiple verticals is so a lot of people are like, "Oh, I send mailers so I don't need to do anything else." Okay. Or I make phone calls, so I don't need to do anything else. Okay, a lot of these guys have it where they're just doing one thing. You can do so many different things with these leads. And one of the things that we find to be wildly successful, we actually, this is something that we're actually we got a Black Friday special on it right now. You know, shameless plug. Whenever you send this out, but the something I mean, we're still going to be working on it for a while. We're actually going into people's like the back end of their Facebook and we're running ads for them doing retargeting. We're building these like amazing AI videos that will essentially retarget these folks and it speaks directly to them. One of the one of the hooks that we use for probate, and I think this would be massively beneficial for anyone that's, you know, tuning in, is that when we make the

35:22 Calls, we don't go, "Hey, Bill, we I'm calling on behalf of XYZ Realty. Hey, we'd love to buy your house. We want to make you a cash offer, a top dollar offer on your home." Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I want to be super crystal clear here, okay? Because I know we're getting into some controversial stuff. That could work. I'm not saying it doesn't work in some cases, but you really kind of got to know your audience. And so when we go in, we go, "Listen, I know you're probably overwhelmed. You got a lot of stuff on your plate. Did you know though there's a ton of free resources that are readily available to you, including I could actually get you access to your inheritance right now prior to this getting out of probate? If I could show you I can get access to cash right now, would you be opposed to a quick conversation?" By the way, little thing there I did. Would you be opposed? Opposed to would you be open if you're would you be open to it? Everybody says that, but hey, would you be opposed? It kind of happen.

36:18 Say no. You got to say no. And they booked the appointment, right? And so in a lot of cases, what I do with that is once we go into that segue, I go, great. Hey, by the way, while I got you online, who else would be anybody else that would that benefit from this information? I could probably tell you maybe one time out of 10 they might say, oh yeah, my brother, he's on this, too. And they give you, but usually it's just that one person like, "No, I'm the one making all the decisions." Great. While I have you on here talking about decisions, you know, what have you kind of thought about like as far as the future plans with the house? I know it's kind of a difficult subject and topic, but I don't know, you thinking about possibly like living in it yourself, renting it out, or I don't know, maybe even selling it. And again, you see how I kind of like maybe, yeah, possibly. I'm trying to use these words that are not pushy, that doesn't trigger these guys to be on edge, trigger them to be upset or anxious or whatever the case may be. It's very non-confrontational, very like, hey, I'm just here to help. I'm the guy that's going to just point you in the right direction. And people love that. I can't tell you how many times I've had investors that have argued with me and they go, well, you know, we have great success by calling people and offering to buy their house immediately. And I'm like, okay, well, how long have you been doing that? Well, a couple months. Great. How many appointments have you gotten? Well, I don't know. We should have some conversations. I mean, I don't really make a lot of calls. Usually the people we talk to call us. I go,

37:42 "Oh, so they're replying to something." So, you're telling me that the people you have this experience with using this aggressive script, right,

37:52 Have actually reached out to you about wanting exactly what you offer to them. Is that right? They kind of look at me like I'm like, "Yeah, that's why it works." So what I'm telling you pretty much works in a grand scale with the people that want the offer and the ones that are still on the fence. So it's just it's creating yourself as an absolute you talked about having a good unique selling unique value proposition. Your unique value proposition is I'm going to connect you to all of the people that you need to know because right now there's a lot of moving parts. Your attorney is probably going to do about 15 to 20% of the work. Everything else is on you. And once you tell them that it the light bulb kind of turns on and they realize that they got to do something a little different.

38:35 And attorney's not going to tell them that because they don't want they don't want the customer not to sign up with them. No, the smart ones do. The smart ones go through the whole thing top to bottom. The high volume ones, but the 90% of the time the not told them all the mis work they have to do.

38:49 Yep. And all available. And the other part is I think the probate advance is a fantastic tool that I used to teach a class called probate cash. Probate get ProbateCash where they would they'll get money right away and I taught agents how to do that and different vendors I work with.

39:06 But I think that's right that having multiple ways to solve the customer's problem gives you multiple ways to be in the conversation. That just makes a lot of sense. And one of the things too, Bill, that we do when it comes to like the retire, so Facebook retargeting, by the way, is an absolute gold mine when it comes to probate and you don't have to spend a lot of money. That's the beauty of it. When I was So, we've kind of adjusted our system. I kind of go to the biblical reference of, you know, the you give a man a fish, he eats for the day. You teach a man to fish, he you know, he's eaten for life. And so we like to actually teach people like how to run the ads, how to do the Facebook retargeting, what are the right settings, and then we just create these like amazing AI videos for them. And with these videos, I mean, they perform extremely well, you wouldn't even know they're AI. I mean, they look like real people. The crazy thing is AI has gotten so good. I mean, I remember there was when it first got started, they had Will Smith in there. Will Smith looked like Mr. Ed. His teeth were like massive and his face was all off to the side. It was like so absurd. But now, I mean, you can't even tell the difference between I mean, unless you're really sitting there studying it, most people feel that message is going towards them. And so, you know, like we've got a bunch of different videos that we run for probate, just retargeting them. And I mean, it really it gets people to actually raise their hand and say, "Yes, I want to have a conversation about my house and, you know, what you guys can offer and the, you know, the free resources." And so it's a great way to bridge the gap between, hey, you don't just have to make phone calls. You can you can do other, you know, other things too to get those leads up and going.

40:45 You know, I know I've taken here to the end of the time that you promised me. I really appreciate if I can ask one last question though. Just drawing on your expertise for the agents who aren't going to use your service now because they're not making enough money now but need to. So many of them are reluctant to call their sphere. Some of them reluct they have people to call that they bought data. They never made those phone calls. Talk a little bit about what you would do, you would say to them, encourage them to just get started and get in the process.

41:11 I Yeah, that's I'm still always working on this encouraging side of it, but that's good. I think the most important thing is to is to basically kind of remind these guys of hey, every single person has challenges, right? Some of the challenges that we have are, you know, time challenges, time constrictions, time restraints. Some of the other challenges we have are money challenges, money, and there's challenges in being rich and there's challenges in being poor. You need to choose which challenge is the most impactful one that's going to help drive you toward your goal. Most people when they say, "I became a Realtor® because I be I did it for free time." I laugh. I think it's hilarious. I'm like, "Wow, if you only knew, you're going to work pretty much, you know, when you first get started, you're going to work double or triple what somebody who is working salary, and you're going to probably make half or a third of what they make in the first year, but once you get it going, you're going to have a business for life, even in down markets." And that's why that's what I love about probate. It's not geared towards the economy. It's kind of a and for lack there are better words, it's kind of a recession proof business because if you if you do the right things in probate, you're going to absolutely maximize your opportunity. And so what I would say for someone to get going is choose your hard. Either the hard is, you know, you're not going to make money and you're essentially going to be out of the business within the next six months to a year. Or you're going to be massively successful and you know, because you're doing the grunt work.

42:43 And you know, this too shall pass. It's all temporary. Meaning that tough part of making the phone calls and doing what you got to do. It's going to be a short-term thing, but eventually it will get better. You'll have deals coming in and you won't have to do it as much anymore.

42:57 Golden advice, Matt Milia. Appointments today. Thank you so much. I know I went a little overtime timewise. If you want get more Matt, Appointments Today is the website and there's all the details and down below with the contact information. If you're getting us an item, just reach out to me. Be more glad to forge you Matt's phone number 444 or the phone number for the company [phone number] and it's appointmenttoday.net is the website appointments with a plural today.net for more information. Matt, thank you so much for joining us and helping us learn how we can build a business using appointment setting for business whether we do it on our own or do it with your service. We need we all need more appointments and quality people to build our business. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much.

43:39 Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. And for the rest of you, this is Probate Weekly. We get together every week, usually with probate attorneys, oftentimes with other vendors to help us build our business, whether you're an attorney or a real estate agent. Hopefully, today you learned a little bit about appointment setting and marketing and how we can build our business together. If I can help anyway, please reach out at Bill Gross Probate on social media. And as always, make today your best day ever. Thanks so much.