"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Sharad Mehta. Sharad is an investor that has built out a CRM system used by thousands of other investors across the nation. We're going to do a deep dive into the most important metrics to track in your marketing real estate investor. How you doing today?"
"I'm doing really good, man. How are you doing? Excited to be on this, you know, call."
"Good. Yeah, likewise. I've been following what you've been doing for some time and heard things about you and ReSimply. Is it ReSimply? R simply? How do you say it?"
"Either is fine. Yeah, I said ReSimply just because it takes less time to say than R simply."
"Fair enough. I'm noticing a lot of people, most people call it R simply."
"Yeah, okay. Fair enough. I'll call it R simply. I'll be one of the good ones pushing it in the right direction. But yeah, I've heard tons of things about ReSimply and you, and we just had a chance to meet for the first time in person in Tampa probably about a month ago."
"Yeah, about a month ago or so. Yeah, like six weeks or so."
"And I definitely learned that you have a lot of wisdom and everything to share, so I'm super excited to dig into you and your experience. For anybody not familiar with you, tell me a little bit about your story, what you're doing, how you got here."
"Sure. Yeah, so I used to live in Chicago, and that's when I started investing. Bought my first rental property in 2010 and then just bought a few more properties after that. In 2013-2014, I started flipping houses more actively. Around that time, I was doing about 40-50 deals a year. Then in August 2015, we ended up moving from Chicago to Carmel, California, where I live now."
"I still had this business to run with 40-50 flips going on, and I started looking at the software that I would need to run my business. Being an accountant, the KPI tracking part was really important - data tracking, you know, where we've been making money, which marketing channel and whatnot. I didn't really see anything back in 2015. Pretty much everyone was using Podio, you know, and then like Globy Flow, doing all these integrations. It just... I didn't really like that idea."
"So I thought I'd hire a couple of developers, you know, have them make something very specific for me. So I did that in 2016-17 and then started using it for myself. From there, you know, go to masterminds, just talk to people about kind of what I'm doing, and they're like, 'Oh, it's pretty cool what you're using.' I said, 'It's something I created for myself.' Then it started growing from there in 2019 and 2020, and you know, grew into what we have now, over like thousands of companies all over the country using ReSimply."
"ReSimply is basically like your all-in-one CRM for business management. Everything from your data management with list stacking, your lead management, your buyers management, your disposition website, seller websites, and bookkeeping, accounting - everything in one."
"Okay, yeah. That's fantastic. Are you still actively running your business in Chicago today?"
"Indiana. Like, I used to live in Chicago, but I started investing in Indiana, which is about 30-40 minutes drive from where I used to live. Yeah, I'm still doing that. I'm not doing 40-50 deals. I would say at this point I'm doing about 20-25, but I'm very hands-off in that business. I have a couple of people on my team that manage the day-to-day operations."
"I understand. That's so interesting that this came from a place of personal need, and that's kind of how you came up with the idea and the software and everything like that. Personally, I'm really curious to hear... it seems like everybody I've known who's gone through some similar experience to what you're talking about, it was a lot harder than they thought it would be. Was that your experience? That you thought like, 'Oh, I'll just hire a couple developers, it'll be easy,' and then..."
"Oh, 100%, man. 100%. I thought it would be like, you know, I'm just going to tell them exactly what I need. But then once you get into it, like, 'Oh, the developers... okay, what does the design need to look like? You know, what should we do after this?' I didn't think about it, just figured it out. And then once you tell developers to figure it out, that's never a good idea. So it took many, many iterations."
"You know, initially it was going to be like a strictly project management software. Then it was going to be too complicated, then we're like, 'Okay, let's do basic project management with lead management.' That's kind of like the basics of what I needed, just to have it as simple as possible."
"Yeah, I mean, anytime you know, even now we think about, 'Okay, this should take about two months,' it ends up taking double the time, double the money. It just never... you know, it's very difficult. There's so many moving pieces with software. With, you know, you change one thing and then you have like 10 other things are dependent on that one thing you're changing, so you have to factor in everything in that. So yeah, it's definitely way more work than I initially anticipated, but it's been... it's been worth it, so I can't complain at this point."
"Fair enough. I get it. I get how it's worth it when you're building it for everybody, right? If you're building it just for yourself, like that's where it's... it's a crazy..."
"Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, then yeah, then it's just like never-ending thing, right? You then like, 'Okay, what else should I do for myself?' Like the basic questions... initial version that we had was like very, very simple. I had never wholesaled any property, so the first system that we rolled out, first version, didn't even have a column for contract assignment, you know, stage for contract assignment, because I'd never done that. And everyone that started using it, they're like, 'Hey, I'm wholesaling properties. Can you add a stage?' I'm like, 'Okay, we'll do that.' So it kind of just started growing on there as people started using it and giving us feedback."
"Yeah, okay. That is super helpful to know. And kind of... you tell me if I'm right on this or not. Let me tell you what I tell other people when they ask me about CRM options. Basically, like the relationship that I'm aware of generally for most CRMs, you have extremely robust CRMs but very complicated. So that's going to be like a Salesforce, for example, where like you could do anything your mind could ever dream of in Salesforce, but at a cost, right? Most people who use Salesforce, they usually end up having somebody on their team dedicated to managing it, or you pay a lot of money to a third party or something like that because there's always things breaking, all new stuff that needs to be built, etc."
"Exactly. On the other side, like complete opposite of the scale, you have much more simple CRMs where maybe you can't do anything you could ever imagine, but they're a lot better out of the box and have a lot of... like, they're easy, right?"
"Right."
"And that means you don't have to use all your time and resources just trying to figure out how to make your CRM work. It just works, and your business can function, and it's pretty good. And that's kind of the bucket that I put ReSimply in. Do you think I'm thinking about that right, or would you give anybody any other advice as to why to choose one CRM versus another?"
"Yeah, I mean, no, no, you're right. I mean, ReSimply is built specifically for Real Estate Investors and investors only. It's not built for people that are doing investing, like wholesaling and like other investing you can do like Fix and Flip and all that, but if you need like fully customizable... like you have very, very specific needs in your business, then honestly, ReSimply, it's not the right solution. It's for people that honestly just... they want something that just works right out of the gate, built specifically for their business, and everything is already built in."
"You know, that's how we look at it. I started, you know, a couple of requirements for my own business. That was that everyone on my team should be able to use the same system. You know, I don't want to do any integration, none of that. And then it should track really good KPIs for that. So that's what we do. We don't use anything else. Everyone on my team is using ReSimply. But yeah, for anybody that needs like very, very specific customization, they want to have like 50 different stages and they... pipeline, it's not for those people."
"It's... think of it like, you know, like iOS and Android. With Android, you can like fully customize, do anything. I would say with like iOS, where it's like limited, you can do some customization, you can, you know, change few things, but it's... it's within... it's within certain limits that you can change things. So yeah, I would say that it's not like you come in, you're like, 'All right, I want to change colors, I want this pipeline, that pipeline, you know, have like these 50 different stages.' No, it's not built for that purpose."
"It's built for people that want to come in, you know, work through a system that we know... we have teams that are doing 15, 20, 30 deals a month using our platform. It works for them, and then they love it. Everything is... everything... everyone on their team can be there. But they're like, 'Hey, I would like this... this is my business, I do this special thing in my business, can you do this?' No, it's not for that."
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