The Billion-Dollar Real Estate Disruption with Robert Price

Welcome to episode 272 of the Business Development Podcast.

And today we're diving into one of the most entrenched industries in the world, Real estate.

With a leader who's shaking it to its core.

Robert Price, the founder and CEO of Bode, a peer to peer real estate platform that has already helped Canadians complete over 1 billion in property transactions by putting control back in their hands and challenging the way that homes are bought and sold.

And stick with us, you don't want to miss this episode.

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Let's do it.

Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Hello.

Welcome to episode 272 of the Business Development Podcast.

And today it is my absolute pleasure to bring you Robert Price.

Robert is a visionary entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Bode, a groundbreaking peer to peer real estate platform that's redefining how Canadians buy and sell homes.

With a passion for disrupting outdated industries, Robert and his team built BODE to empower homeowners by directly connecting buyers and sellers, cutting out the agents and saving users thousands in fees.

Since its launch in 2019, Bode has facilitated over 400 home transactions, offering an innovative user driven solution that puts control and cost efficiency back in the hands of people.

Robert's bold leadership has earned him a spot on avenue magazine's top 40 under 40, solidifying his reputation as a true disruptor.

Before founding Bode, Robert was a senior executive at Axia Net Media, a telecom trailblazer that revolutionized fiber infrastructure for communities across the globe.

With a track record of building high performance teams and delivering game changing results, Robert took his talent for disruption and set his sights on the real estate industry.

Now he's on a mission to upend traditional real estate, empowering everyday people to take charge of their home transactions.

And he is just getting started.

Robert, it's an honor to have you on the show.

Fantastic to be here, Kelly.

You're better at selling my company than I am, so maybe on the payroll.

Yeah, well, I've read a couple introductions.

By this point I better be getting better because if I'm not, I need to quit.

One.

One item on the number side actually is you mentioned 400.

We're actually closer to 2000.

Holy cow.

So a little over a billion in total property value sales.

I know we've.

We scheduled this many months ago, so we've been.

We've been growing fast.

Wow, that's huge.

Because I took that data from our last conversation.

So you guys are really, really rapidly growing.

Absolutely.

That is incredible.

Robert, it's awesome to have you on today.

We actually haven't had anybody from the real estate industry for a while.

I had the Hollow, which is on.

I had Aaron Hollow, which on from Home Free Real Estate very close to the beginning of the show.

I want to say that they were somewhere within the top 40 or the first 40 episodes.

Since then we have not talked real estate, man.

And real estate is crazy in Canada at this point.

So I'm excited to dive into that with you today.

But you know, before we do, who is Robert Price?

How the heck did we end up on this path?

Yeah, no, it's really, really love entrepreneurship.

I have.

Have family roots in a variety of businesses.

Been getting, I like to say my informal learnings from my.

My dad since I was 12.

I think I bought my first stock when I was 13.

Wow.

Of his company and just.

And then got through to the university phase and said I want to get my actual practical training now and jump into.

I've always been excited about seeing opportunities to impact big topics that truly improve people's lives.

And that sounds kind of big and audacious, but that is where my passion lives and the companies I've been involved in have always been, yes, they're for profit, but fundamentally driven by customers because I think that's ultimately what changes industries.

I don't think companies change industries.

I think customers and people that consume those services are the ones that actually make that decision.

So yeah, entrepreneurship is fascinating, challenging for me and it's always of course about building a team around it, but it's.

It's also one of the most rewarding things you can do at the same time.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So your dad was an entrepreneur.

Take me into that.

What?

Tell me about your dad.

Yeah, he was actually.

You mentioned Axia in the intro.

So he was the founder of Axia and so he, he.

If you've heard of the Sunter group of companies, he's also had a family business as part in that domain as well.

So his, his parents Started that and the brothers himself included have worked at that company and made basically were working on it when they were kids.

Very humble upbringings.

And then also was the CEO of Husky Oil.

So.

Oh wow.

So experience across technology and commodities and agriculture and is now also the chairman of boat.

So we're closely together at Axia.

But I've always and continue to be a sponge and learn as much as I can from him and others.

But certainly one of the more notable entrepreneurs in Alberta as well.

That is incredible.

That is.

Okay.

I'll tell you what.

At this point we're what272 episodes.

You are the first person to have a background like that.

That's incredible.

You're a third generation entrepreneur.

You are from like a serial entrepreneur family.

Yeah, it seems to be.

It's.

Whether it's.

It's nature, nurture or a blend of both.

We there's there and beyond.

It's a big family beyond like with his, my extended cousins and an extended family.

Tons of businesses getting built around the startings of the first and second generation and seeing the success of.

It's interesting.

Most people don't know but family businesses outperform on average all other businesses.

And I think it comes with obviously a level of complexity of family dynamics and.

And there's some obvious challenges there.

But the loyalty and the commitment that a family connection brings to a business actually outperforms other companies that don't have that.

I've always enjoyed working with family.

There's family at this company as well.

So it's been.

It's something you're always paying attention to but also a big part of my learning experience and my motivation to make this company successful.

I love that dude.

My opinion on creating a family style relationship in a business gets naysayed on a little bit.

But I really believe in it man.

I believe that the closer and more tight knit that you can build, your staff, your company, you know, your brand, the better off it's going to be for your company.

I really believe that.

I think, I think if people can feel really great about coming to work, they like the people they work with, they have a great relationship with them.

They feel care cared about.

There's power in that.

And there's so many companies like big corporations who say ah no, like that's not good, we don't want that.

But like you're absolutely right.

I think, I don't know, maybe it doesn't work at a certain scale but I don't know how like I feel like that scale's Got to be pretty big to the point where it doesn't work.

I think there's a lot of power in, in a family run business.

Yeah, my, my biggest point on this whole topic is starting with what does the company need?

So what is you've got a vision for a business, what do you need in order team wise to drive the success of that company?

Of course always comes back to people and the team to win.

And if you start there and then say what roles do I need and with what expertise and complements strengths, weaknesses to fill out that team and that is the criteria, then you say well actually my sister or my cousin or my uncle can really fit those domain expertise and those roles to complement a high performing group.

That's the, I think that's the key way to think about it versus the inverse which is, well, we're family so let's do something together and then we'll figure it out.

Which is actually what I see.

I see a lot of, a lot of companies start that way.

Family, friends, we're all, we're all have a great relationship and we all think this is interesting and then we'll figure out who does what kind of as we go that's a mess.

So it's, it's really keeping the discipline of what the company needs and then if family fits into it, fantastic.

If they don't, then don't take that step.

That's in my opinion.

What is the secret to working with your family?

Right.

Like you know, I mean obviously we know we've fought with our family, we have disagreements with family.

It's also really hard to quit family.

So I think on the other side of that, that is huge plus in the building of a business.

Right.

You can be really pissed off at your family but you're probably not going to quit them.

And I think maybe that can play off into business a little bit, especially when you run a company together.

So I think there is that like willingness to find your way through.

Right.

Which maybe you don't get if you're not working with family.

But I think there's that other side where there's maybe a leader that you need to have in a business who really is the be all, end all this is what we are doing.

And, and maybe in a family environment it's like the hell we are.

And then what?

You end up at a bit of an impasse.

Talk to me, what has made, what has made your third generation family businesses, big companies, successful businesses?

What is the secret to working with family effectively?

Not sure.

I have even remotely all the answers.

But I think mutual respect of the capabilities of your, whoever is involved and making sure that the broader team is aware that it's not a family business, like in Bode's case, family works at the business.

But I don't classify it as a family business because I don't want people to feel like they're disadvantaged beyond the family that works.

I want everybody to feel fully engaged and involved as they are.

And that comes back to my previous point about the discipline of the roles.

So I think that's a key thing for me.

And then, you know, over time you're going to have disagreements.

Disagreements are healthy as long as there's the mutual respect of what everybody's bringing to the table.

And then more broadly, have big audacious goals like Bode has to modernize an industry.

The most successful companies that have done this have a strong leader that is willing to be bold and is able to see ahead and anticipate where the market is going and then be first to aggressively pursue that avenue and be committed and communicative and passionate enough with that purpose that they're able to really drive the motivation of a team around that purpose.

I don't think the partnership structure is as good a fit, for example, for that kind of company.

It fits in a bunch of other very successful companies.

But if you're really trying to build a big, high impact industry changing company, you need a leader that is really putting all that together, in my opinion.

Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right.

Like every good company is following typically a pretty great leader or they don't become good companies.

Right.

They have to go hand in hand.

I just, I definitely see, for instance, me and my sister.

I love my sister to death, but she will challenge me.

Right?

She's my big sister.

That's just the way it is.

And so I could see me working, you know, directly with my sister.

That would be a challenge.

I think we would really struggle to get things done because when, you know, when things need to get done, whether she's the leader or I'm the leader, it doesn't really matter.

There's going to be a challenge.

I just, I wonder if it's different for you and I wonder if it's potentially different for you because you grew up in a business with your father at the helm of many large businesses.

You kind of got to see it from a different standpoint.

And I wonder how much that that affects the difference.

Because, for instance, my dad also ran a small maintenance company.

It was Just him.

He was a contractor business.

He did his own thing.

Right.

He might as well have worked for one company his whole life, but it was his business.

But I never saw it that way.

I always kind of saw it as, you know, he's out there as an employee working for this one company.

But I wonder if you're seeing a different type of leadership as a family, if that also can affect the way and your willingness to work together.

Yeah, I think I certainly learned a ton from him.

One of my favorite lines that he said early in my employment at Axia was, you know, you do your, your typical around the room introductions in an external meeting.

We had a big call, a complicated meeting with a number of partners.

There's whatever 15 people around a board table.

Everybody does their intro and he says with their title and everything, he says, I'm here and I work for everybody else.

And that was a really impactful statement.

Everybody in the room knows he's a CEO, but he actually, that's his style of leadership.

It's looking.

The true leader is actually about making everybody else, helping everybody else be ultra successful in their capacity.

Because when you can do that, that's how you actually win.

Doesn't matter how brilliant you are, if you're at the top of this, of a business, you need the team to feel fully empowered and your job is to help make them successful and in turn the company benefits and you win.

And that's also the best culture because everybody feels empowered and feels like they have a true capability to drive success and feel the success of, of their work.

So that one stuck with me a long time and I'm, I'm still youngish, still learning all the time.

Far from perfect.

But that's a, a key principle that I've applied.

Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense, right?

Like no CEO can run the company on their own.

At the end of the day they do, they work, they work for everybody else in the room.

I love that.

It's very humble and, and it shows that down to earth, right?

It shows that your dad was really down to earth.

He understood the job at hand.

Absolutely.

And you see, you see these big tech CEOs, guys like Elon Musk, there's a bunch of different ways to be successful.

Obviously he's much more top down my way or the highway aggressive American, although he's not American, but American style leadership, that works too.

But I all.

But I think I'm more attracted to the really having that team, that purpose driven business.

In our case, anytime we post A role.

We have something like 500 people apply for it because they can see the purpose of what we're doing is just quite obvious, right?

It's.

It's a super important topic for Canadians.

It's a big expense, It's a big challenge.

It's our most important asset.

And the experience is so obviously analog.

And there's.

It is so, at least to us, clear that the application of technology is the way that this is going to get more affordable, more efficient, easier.

And so I find once people join our business, it's actually interesting.

It's hard to make them take vacations.

Like, we have more days than typical companies of our size.

And I'm like, you gotta take some time.

People won't take time off.

They care too much about what's in front of them and what they're doing and their contribution.

So I think that not all companies have this level of purpose in the sense of the magnitude of impact, but it's really, you know, when you have that kind of business, this kind of leadership style, to me is where people are so motivated, they're so intrinsically bought into that, then it's just about supporting them.

And often I'm having to pull them back.

Having.

You can relax a little bit, take some time.

Yeah, I love the passion, but we also don't want you to burn out.

We want.

Want to make sure you're healthy and have a healthy and balanced lifestyle.

Because that's another belief of mine, that there's, you know, this is a.

This is a big deal, what we're working on, but it doesn't compete with family and friends and personal life in that sense.

It is.

It is a.

A passion, but it is not your life.

It doesn't define who you are.

So we need.

So I want that balance for the team as well.

Would you say that you've been able to find balance as the leader?

No.

No, I would say it ebbs and flows because in certain circumstances, the team looks a certain way and the challenges that you're facing require you to be directly in the mix.

For example, we have over 50 now, large developers and builders that are clients of ours in the early days.

I'm right there with my other founders leading these or involved in these conversations.

My other founders are.

We're leading them, but I was heavily involved.

And, you know, you're in.

You're in presentations.

You're basically a traveling salesperson for a period of time.

And then we get that part of the business really rolling, and then we staff that part of the organization and now I don't have that same time commitment externally.

I've got other strategic partnerships, other things I'm working on going forward.

So there's kind of.

Our organization has basically changed every six months for four years.

Different people recalibrated design and that's the nature of software.

At software companies that are malleable to the extent ours are, you're just going to have to always say what does the company need on a regular basis to continue to win and grow and perform?

So there's been periods of time where I'm working seven days a week and there's no way around that.

There's periods of time where I'm, I have something, something less than that and, but at the same time I'm, I, I'm a believer in my own taking some time off.

I, I find if you take 365 days of the year, if I'm able to actually take two to three weeks off a year, fully off or almost fully off, I'm going to net, be more productive.

So I believe that for me in the same way I believe it for the rest of the team.

I love that because I've, I've struggled with the work life balance thing a lot and I find that we all struggle with it, almost every single one of us when we get to the work life balance.

Some that I've talked to are like, yes, I got there later.

Like they are 10 years into their business and who knows, maybe they've been through a divorce, maybe their kid won't talk to them, you name it, right?

But the conversation kind of usually ends up, especially with my long term founders, yes, eventually.

Now I have a very balanced life.

I work four hours, four hours a day or whatever and life is great.

But there was always a price to be paid.

There was always a 10 year price or whatever, however long that was to get there.

And yeah, I've talked to some man that were like, it wasn't worth it, it wasn't worth it.

I lost my relationship with my kid.

I've gone through two divorce.

It's like I've been through it and almost everything that I work for, you know, it's great.

I have the accolades, I have, you know, this amazing resume, but I lost what mattered.

And I don't know, man, I struggle with it because I also, I also am very ambitious and I want this to succeed and I put in a lot of time and I work on my own business and I work on this podcast.

But you know, at the end of the day finding balance is something that I've struggled with.

And usually what I kind of find is it's not balance.

It's.

Some days you got to give more to the work, and some days you got to give more to the family.

And it just is what it is.

And I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe I got it wrong, maybe I got it right.

I have no idea.

I'm just doing the best I can.

Well, we're all trying to figure it out, as you say.

I think, you know, one thing that people should know, getting into a company like ours and I, and we say this in the interview, we make sure that people understand this is high pressure.

This is every day, it's a sport this way.

The analogy I think about is every day I'm walking to the office, I'm heading into competition for the next 10, 12 hours, full tilt, whatever it takes to win today, have more things go right than wrong in a day, and then that cascades over weeks, months and years.

But if you're not excited about that pressure and inviting of that pressure, then not a great place for you.

There's lots of other companies that will be less pressure than this.

But that.

But I think there is a.

There's a line there of pressure versus stress.

So if you're past the point of being able to control the pressure and enjoy the pressure, that's when you start to lose some control and you get into this stress mode.

That's not healthy for anybody.

So, of course, we all dip into that spot from time to time.

But over the course of a year, we should.

We.

The job as leaders is to have everybody be in that high pressure, high performance zone as long as possible.

So I found for me, I really enjoy that pressure.

Turns out I just, I've just always enjoyed the.

I come from sports, I like the opportunity to do something big.

And I find just coming back to your balance point, the lifestyle of.

I've.

Throughout the course of these four years, I've added a bunch of different things to my regimen that has helped me in that respect.

For example, during COVID of course, you can't leave your house, you're stuck at home, have a small gym in my house.

Ended up just saying, I'm going to work out every morning and I'm just going to do it 6am every morning.

I used to kind of do it more sporadically after work, what have you.

You're tired, you're, you know, you have all the things going on, but in this case, every morning and found that I was a totally different level of mental focus and energy.

And overall just felt amazing.

Amazingly different from when I didn't do that even for a day or two.

So that was a Covid thing.

And then of course, the world opens back up and I've just kept doing it because.

Just amazed at the results.

I've also been big into vitamins.

I went from never consuming a vitamin to I have five different vitamins I take every morning.

I now walk to work instead of driving.

I find that outdoor just getting fresh air and circulation and listening to an amazing podcast like yours just gets my.

Gets my train of thought going.

I won't bore you with my whole whole routine, but I. I've just found that that making those and then a few other adjustments helps to stay in that performance zone much more than in the past.

I just didn't do really any of that, not religiously.

And now it's a key part of staying in.

Staying in the balance zone for me.

Yeah, no, I. I nearly hit a wall like two, two, three weeks ago.

Dude.

I did a show talking about the need to just get the hell away because I. I think I was producing my Friday show.

Fridays are always busy.

Typically Friday I do one to two interviews, plus I produce my.

My Sunday episode.

So it's always a full day.

It's always packed.

And I was just finishing up that day and I looked at my, like, we need to get out of here.

And I mean, like, get out of here.

We can't be in this city.

We.

We're going somewhere.

So we ended up going to a visitor family in Saskatoon.

It was awesome.

I just needed to get away and reset.

So I totally get where you're coming from.

It's like people don't realize how fast burnout can sneak up, but it can just.

It can just be there one day.

And if you need to pack up and go to.

To survive another week or another three weeks, just do it.

It's worth every penny.

It's 100%.

That would be one of the additional things I would have added in my.

My monologue there.

But just popping to.

In Calgary, we have the advantage of.

There's the mountains right there.

Canmore is 40 minutes.

Yeah.

A hike outdoors for me feels like I'm living in a different city for an entire weekend or long weekend.

Like it doubles.

It feels like it double or triples your weekend.

And then I come back to Calgary and remember the life that I have and all my responsibilities.

But it's a huge advantage for us in Alberta to have this beautiful natural oasis that we can take advantage of.

Absolutely.

We love Kananaskis.

We get off to the Kananaskis Mountain Lodge every chance we get.

That's our.

Yeah, it's a bit of a drive, but it's worth it every time.

Well then adding steams is another, another example.

The Nordic steams and saunas are game changing for me.

I'm doing that now three times a week.

I didn't do it at all before.

So that's another part of the regimen and that's again a transformer for me.

So definitely nerdy note on the science of the.

On the mental side and physical side over the last few years because that's, it's.

It's the call it burnout or call it level of exhaustion or push that you have to make every day is, is on a different level in a new company, as you know.

So pushing myself to the limit and then finding ways to re.

To increase the size of that limit basically in every way that I can.

Yeah, man.

Not to mention when you launched Bode right before the world went to shit.

Hey, we fully anticipated it.

Walk me into that.

How did you end up in real estate from telecom?

Yeah, in my case it was actually telecom was.

And our model at Axia was part of the inspiration for Bode.

But it was really my own experience buying and selling property myself.

Back in 2017, I was selling my house and wanting to buy and upgrade in Calgary and assume that there was an online way to do that where I could just have the data.

I could book showings myself, I could list the property, negotiate, sell the property directly.

Quickly found out that wasn't the case and did what, what most of the market did at the time, which is hire a friend.

And in this case, Jeff Jackson, a close friend of mine, owned a brokerage of 50 agents.

He was the managing broker, the top guy, the founder of it, really smart guy, really talented guy and helped me through this sell and buy experience.

But I found not Jeff, but the model itself was just totally broken.

It was me saying, here's the pricing that I think makes sense.

It was me telling him how to negotiate.

I actually found the house that I ended up buying online myself.

All that manifested.

Yeah, and then you write a $50,000 check at the end.

And Jeff basically told me, you know, half.

Half of his deals feel like this.

Half his deals felt like he was kind of in the way and doing what he could to help, but wasn't offering value.

And the customers was frustrated, not because of his efforts but because of the way the model works.

And then half the time, yeah, the person valued his, his the way that he offered the service.

So.

But that was a year before we sold Axia.

So move on from that.

Come back to selling Axia on a global basis.

And a couple months, I took three months off.

Three told my friends I'm retiring.

But turned out that didn't last very long.

But right at that point came back to Jeff and said, are you still experiencing.

So now a couple years later he's still experiencing the same thing.

And he said yeah, in fact if anything it's worse.

And once I dug into the data it was pretty clear that about half his intuition was exactly right.

About half Canadians would prefer to sell directly and half enjoy the or would stick with the traditional model.

And so I'd come up with about 20 business ideas in that time.

This one went right to the top of the list.

And Jeff sold his brokerage and joined me as a, as a co founder.

Wow.

Which is awesome.

As well as a couple other Axia people and friends from around the world.

So we had a very kind of international eclectic team and I took a bit of a unique approach where I started with a pretty big team and a full board right from the start, including Art, my dad and, and some other seasoned directors because I wanted to get the company flying right out of the gates, get to market fast and be bold and be ahead and, and be the industry setter for this service.

So that was, that was the story of the transition.

So it's been, it feels now like a long time ago, but that's how we got it all going.

It's incredible, dude.

It is very forward thinking and you're right, there wasn't really much else in that space and even to this day there's really not much in that space.

I wanted to just chat with you a little bit about it though because essentially what you started was a tech company, right?

Like we're talking real estate, but the reality is you started a tech company.

What was that like?

Did you have experience in tech before or was this like a fully ground up learning experience?

Yeah, we had experience in our fiber in Axia.

We, myself and the team were building the first residential gigabit services in rural Alberta.

So we had, we were building 40 fiber towns, the likes of Vulcan and Nanton and, and there's 400 communities outside of Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton of course.

So we are, we were going after and building gigabit speeds to those markets and that was a Very much a ground up new business that's building fiber, that's new electronics to support it, that's an online ordering and management system, that's a website, that's the brand that goes with it, subscription services.

So while not a, I wouldn't say a highly complex software as a service platform, it did involve the convergence of setting up a bunch of systems and an online experience for ordering and acquiring our services.

That was, I would say, pretty representative of where I wanted to take boat.

Bode is in a totally different category.

The complexity of the platform, the data, all the different customer journeys, the partnership integrations, the multiple markets, the different contracts, the different property types, selling residential and in some cases commercial.

Way, way, way more complex.

But have learned a lot through that process of, of building the platform.

And, and one thing I will say, and I think I'm sure many of your listeners would hopefully relate with, is it's always going to take when it comes to tech.

It's going to take twice as long and be twice as much money than you.

So just anticipate that, get ahead of that, build that into your budgets.

Because while something looks, can look quite simple when you're mapping it out, it's always more complex.

There's so many gotchas, there's so many nuances in business logic that you have to iron out.

And so that's my, that's one of my big learnings for sure.

If you don't mind, I'm going to add to it and I'm just going to make that much more broad and say for business in general, it's going to take longer than you think, it's probably going to cost a little more.

So plan for it.

We're really, really great at thinking how amazing we are at building things.

And then it's like, oh, we're probably pretty good, but it is going to take longer than we planned.

Well, we, we definitely took the approach of, you know, another principle we applied is get to market fast and then iterate.

And there's an adage that says if you're not in the market, if you're not embarrassed with your first product, you waited too long when it comes.

And I will tell you, we were embarrassed.

Everybody was very nervous about our alpha product that we launched with, had a big Calgary launch event, had 300 people, had all of our tech on display and media coverage and everything.

And our platform at the time was a tiny, tiny fraction of what it is today.

So get it to market and then have customers drive what their experience is because you can easily spend, I see this all the time, companies spending three to four years building something in an echo chamber like with your own views, your own internal views of it.

And then by the time you get to market, one, the market has changed and two, you have no third party validation of, or lack thereof of what you're building.

So get to market early and then iterate with customer feedback as much as you can.

Oh, 100%.

100%.

Like it doesn't matter how amazing your product is, the first one's probably not where it's going to be, right?

Look at any like long term company.

Let's look at like Ford, right?

Sure they started making vehicles, but the vehicles they make today are 1000% different than the ones they started with.

Every company evolves, Every company's products change, every company service evolves, right?

Like it just is what it is.

Nobody is right the first time.

And even if you are right, it's only for a moment.

It's only for a moment because tomorrow is a brand new day.

There's a new technology coming, there's something else that's to going to throw a big monkey wrench in your entire plan.

And so if you aren't in the market, like that's it.

You're absolutely right.

Just get started, just get started.

The rest will, will fall into place and you're going to have to evolve anyway.

So you might as well do it when you're making money.

Exactly.

And I think exactly to your point on the date that we're recording this podcast, AI is such a huge weapon now that it has changed business, especially tech business forever.

And so the conventional venture funded model of you got to go revenue, revenue growth at all costs.

I don't care if you burn cash for 10 years, think of big tech, Amazon, Uber, even Apple and the like, they all burn billions and billions of dollars at the call it global grabbing of market share, knowing that they could at some point become profitable.

I think that with AI and how much productivity that actually delivers and changes your cost structure, I think that equation has changed.

To stay lean, leverage AI and get cash flow positive as early as possible and then iterate from there.

So it is where it used to just be pure revenue.

It's now, I think and I've had this conversation with many venture funds know even, even in the last three years before Generative AI really changed the game.

If I started talking about getting to profitability, they just said don't even say that word.

I don't care about that word.

We're Only talking about revenue and fast forward to today, that's a totally different equation.

You can't, you basically can't raise aggressive series A, series B capital without being profitable is the conventional wisdom as we sit here today.

So exactly to your point, world changes fast.

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree, I agree.

I think if you're in business, you have to be profitable.

Right.

Like it just is what it is.

Business doesn't run on, on good faith.

It just doesn't.

Right.

It, it runs on good product and someone who's willing to pay for that product.

So I think you're absolutely right.

I think, I think the, the faster that a company can figure out their way to profitability, the better their long term success because nobody can fund something that's do that's losing money forever.

It just, it doesn't work.

That math doesn't work.

Yeah, you have.

And that highly depends of course on.

We'll see.

Maybe the pendulum swing swings back.

It's prone to in these capital markets, but the capital markets are hot.

People are paying 20, 30, 40 times revenue multiples and they don't care.

They're just spending money.

The capital market conditions we have in Canada, which have been declining for the last two and a half years, which were, which is where we were raising money with the exception of Alberta, has been on the upswing, which is great.

Now it's compressed multiples and it's focused on efficiency and it's focused on profitability for early phase companies like ourselves.

I'm just making the broader point that AI totally changes your cost structure to get a company going and therefore that amount of time, that amount of Runway can be significantly accelerated in terms of getting to profitability.

It can just happen much faster now.

Yeah, no, absolutely no.

I wanted to chat with you about Bode.

The reason being is that you've been pretty bloody ambitious with it.

You're trying to disrupt an industry that has been around probably as long as humans have been building anything.

Talk to me about that.

Like it's a pretty big goal, dude, starting in 2019, to be like I'm going to, I'm going to launch something that's going to completely destroy the real estate market, change it forever.

Talk to me about that because that's ambitious, man.

Well, really.

And we get called disruptive often and that's.

And I don't disagree with that, but I do think we are more focused on modernization is the way that I like to characterize it is basically saying a, a homeowner, if there's enough pain with A way that things are being done in terms of lack of value and a new option is put on the table that it's up to that in our case that homeowner to change the industry.

Right.

If they select that option, they change the industry.

We are just putting an option on the table in front of them.

And then I would also say overall I don't have.

I'm sure one of your questions will be do real estate agents hate us?

And some do, but it's been interesting to break that kind of break that into three different categories.

Some are, some just outright hate us.

Sure, that's, that all goes with the territory.

But then we work with thousands of them.

I think we have 7,000 accounts on our platform where they're using our data or they're making offers on platform or they're interacting with our sellers.

So that's actually the biggest catchment is agents working directly with us on a day to day basis.

And then there's another pretty big group that wants to work for us because they basically have seen what we're up to and saying I knew this was going to happen at some point.

Are you hiring?

Because I want to be part of the modernization.

I feel a lot of the pain.

And that really was part of our original, if you look at our original business case, it was also licensing our platform to other brokerages so that they could bring the modernization, the transparency, a better experience to their customers and at the same time for them less administrative work, less of the back and forth logistics because that's where technology is really powerful.

So we are now actually where we sit today in active conversations with several large brokerages that say I'd like your technology.

Can I license it, Can I white label it?

And that was always part of our plan and now our platform is to a maturity where we can do that.

Setting out to make this a better experience for all parties essentially lift the tide of the industry as opposed to setting out to say I don't like agents because that's really not the passion of the, of the company.

Agents are fine.

It's an industry that needs choice and tech, the application of technology to create a more competitive marketplace which is beneficial in any industry to the consumers.

I love that as somebody who has recently been through the rigmarole that is going through real estate and buying a house.

It was, it was a process and multiple times like this is actually what's kind of cool.

This is super fitting actually because this is my last recorded episode in this house.

We're moving to Stony Plane.

I Don't know if you guys actually put fiber line in Stony Plane yet, but I'm hoping so.

But yeah, we're out of here.

And this is my last show for now.

But I've literally just been through the whole process, the whole real estate process.

And I wasn't a huge fan, Robert.

I wasn't a huge fan of the whole real estate back and forth garbage that frankly I felt, dude, I'm in business development.

I could have negotiated this whole thing.

I could have done the entire thing myself.

Probably better than what we got through a real estate company.

And I'm not knocking real estate agents.

I know lots of them.

They're incredible people.

You get what you get.

Some are better than others.

It is what it is, but it's still one of those things where you're kind of having this weird middleman that you're dancing with and you're kind of like, why, why are you here?

Just a little bit.

Right.

I can get it.

Like, if I was really, really busy and I didn't have the time, it makes a lot of sense.

But if you have a little bit of time to yourself where you could have done some of these conversations, it really did feel at times like, why is this part of the process?

Yeah, and I think just structurally because I again, lots of good people involved in all this, some better than others, as you say, like any industry.

But I feel like that relationship with the two buy side and sell side agents, like two agents involved in the transaction, is structurally broken because the buy side agent is paid variable compensation by the seller.

So in fact, your buy agent Kelly is negotiating against you.

Yeah, like they may be aware, not aware of that, but they're going to get paid more if you offer more money.

So that doesn't create a strong negotiating value driven conversation that creates collusion between the sell agent and the buy side agent.

Yeah, really, that's a relic of 50 years ago when it was a human network instead of a digital network where the sell agent would hire a buy side agent to go find buyers, go walk neighborhoods, go knock on doors.

If you bring a buyer to me, I'll split my commission with you.

We're in the same brokerage.

Yeah, that's the, that's where that was born.

From fast forward to today, there's 120,000 agents in Canada.

There's no relationships like that, but they've kept that same structure.

And really that's.

You may be aware, but there's litigations happening in the United States and in Canada against that structure where A buy side agent claims to be free.

That's often the party line.

Right.

The seller pays me, so I'm free.

Well, in reality, it's Kelly's money going to the seller, who's then paying your buy side agents.

So now there's $20,000 in that deal.

Yeah, so that was really the inspiration, part of the inspiration for our model, where it's 1% to sell.

So on the sell side, where there's costs of signage, of marketing, of photos and measurements, we're investing in the success of the sale.

That makes sense that the seller is lined up with that and they only pay if they sell.

So it's free to list.

It's 1% upon sale, so they're already saving significantly on the sell side.

And then it's free to buy.

And so in your exact example, if it was a boat listing and you found that property, you can message the seller, book showings directly and then make offers.

And coming back to your timeline point of being busy, we find buyers that take that action.

It's actually, it's actually more efficient because it's on your phone.

It's.

You're sitting on your couch.

It's not a game of phone tag.

It's taking advantage of the direct value of technology.

And that's really.

Now you have the right incentives, you'd have no costs on the buy side and you have the seller with a variable rate.

So if they sell for more and we're helping them sell, they're better off and we're better off.

But that's the model that I believe to be the future.

And it's also taking inspiration from companies or countries around the world that have no buy side agents at all.

The uk, New Zealand, Australia, parts of Scandinavia, they all have no buy side agents.

It's not a profession that exists.

And it's because of this dynamic we're talking about.

It's so funny because literally midway through the process, I remember sitting down with Shelby and I'm like, this seems like a massive conflict of interest, the very conversation we just had.

I'm like, because you're absolutely right.

Like, I recognize midway through that, I'm like, wait a second.

Like, obviously if he's getting part of the deal, it makes sense for him not to negotiate our best price.

And so it got me thinking, why is there not a fiduciary responsibility of a real estate agent, of a buyer to get them the best possible price?

Like, why is there no incentive for that?

It made no sense to me.

It seems crazy.

There is the fiduciary responsibility, there's just the wrong incentive.

So there's two ways to solve this.

One is make it a flat rate.

It's regulated, so make it a flat rate.

Don't set the flat rate, but make it flat.

And then also have the buyer pay the buy side agent directly.

And what other industry does the money go in a huge loop like that?

It makes way more sense to say all right, I'm Kelly, I've got, I want to work with you to help me buy this property.

What are you offering?

What's your service for how much money?

Yeah.

And now you have a direct value conversation and that should be in that instance a flat rate or an hourly rate.

And then now you've got incentives that are aligned as opposed to good people having to go against incentives.

Right.

It's people fundamentally operate with incentives so make that structural difference.

And that's really what's under reviewed right now in North America on this topic.

And I think has the opportunity if that one change was made, not setting prices, not price fixing, not overly regulating the market, just fee for value of service would totally change this whole conversation.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Talk to me about the Canadian real estate market.

You are your ears to the ground now.

You know what's going on.

Today was a big day.

We had a what a 50 basis point drop again in Canada today.

The biggest one we've had in many, many years.

So real estate hopefully market's getting better.

Yep.

I think there's.

It's a really unique kind of offset from the pandemic.

So when we launched just to to walk through how, how much these markets have changed.

Alberta was icy cold and Toronto, Vancouver, you couldn't list a property for more than two hours without getting a dozen offers.

Wow.

That's the.

They were on an absolute bull run in both cases those markets decade long bull run.

And in Alberta we have our various boom bite bust cycles that are driven by our macroeconomic picture.

But as we sit here today that equation is totally backwards.

It's totally.

Vancouver and Toronto feel like the sky is falling.

It's not quite but.

But that's the sentiment that happens in markets change in the way that they have.

And Alberta is hitting record pricing numbers and record overall driven by migration of course, but mainly affordability as those interest rates have climbed over the last two years and have recently declined.

If you're able to take the average homeowner or condo owner in Toronto is call it a million dollar condo.

And they've built up almost all equity in that Place you can sell that box in the sky for a beautiful detached home in Calgary or Edmonton for half a million bucks, buy it with cash, put half a million in your pocket.

The average Canadian retires with 700,000 of additional capital.

So that's basically your retirement in one deal.

And that's, I think, really what's driving the change at the national level.

Yeah, and you know, a big part of why I'm excited about Alberta and part of the passion of boat, of course, is also diversifying our economy.

So we have more of this called modern economy building off of our traditional economy at the same time.

So I'm a big believer that Alberta is well positioned here.

I think both B.C.

and Ontario will come back around with these interest rate changes over the next year.

It won't happen overnight, but that will be an important factor.

And then getting the other effect of that, having worked with all these builders, interest rates going down for them gives them a lot more leverage to catch up on the supply side.

And that's really, from a pricing perspective, Canada's biggest challenge.

We are, we are well behind our per capita supply per person in Canada versus the other G8 countries.

And so no matter how you cut it, we need more homes at the rate that we're growing.

And so getting, having a more efficient way to do that from a builder perspective is also important.

I'll tell you, as a millennial, as somebody waited way too long to get into this market.

You know, about, I want to say like five or six months ago, me and Shelby sat down and we're like, okay, we've been waiting, we've been waiting.

We're thinking like, oh, the market's got to come down.

Right?

Like it's Alberta.

Like eventually this whole mess, we came to the, we came to the conclusion it's not coming down.

And if it doesn't come down, we gotta get in now or we are not getting in.

Because you're absolutely right.

All these people who are buying million dollar properties in Vancouver, in Toronto.

Absolutely.

Like, why would you do that when you could sell that property for a million dollars and come here and buy, you know, a half a million dollar house, that's twice or three times that house.

It just makes sense.

And so in my mind I just started thinking, that's exactly what's going to happen and we're going to have a massive influx from eastern Canada and western Canada right into the middle provinces.

I don't, I think Alberta, it'll happen.

Alberta, I think it'll happen in Saskatchewan.

Nothing will happen In Manitoba.

And all of these people are going to influx.

Why?

Because they're going to have a better standard of living here.

Right.

But what will happen is it'll just even out the whole score and next thing you know our houses are going to be a million bucks.

So if you want one, now's the time.

Yeah, no, I, I think that I, I, that all sounds logical to me.

I more or less agree.

I think and when we were telling that story, we're not talking about, you know, an apartment on the ocean in Vancouver overlooking the harbor.

We're talking about one that's 45 minutes drive out of downtown in the suburbs which is also, also can be beautiful of course, but that's the comparison.

So if you're talking about the downtown property, you're now talking two plus million.

Yeah, two to three million.

But I also think over time, you know, Canada are, Vancouver and Toronto are entering into where big global markets end up, likes of New York and London and Singapore.

They ultimately end up becoming consolidated and more rental driven markets.

Just because it's too expensive.

They become too expensive, they have too much demand, they're too attractive.

Yeah.

In that sense in Alberta we're not landlocked like those, like all those cities I just mentioned are.

So we can grow as far as the eye can see in all directions in Calgary and Edmonton.

So that comes back to the supply side.

If our supply can really keep up.

We know we have really good builders here that are aggressive and, and effectively doubling their businesses right now to keep up and even catch up with where other global standards are that will help keep the affordability more reasonable.

But now we're then getting into the details of speed of approvals and zoning and how fast that can happen because that's another big challenge.

But that's just the way that I would characterize it overall.

So I think you made a good decision and concluded.

I hope so because there's both.

It was a bloody expensive decision.

Even at that, even at that rate, we're over 600 grand in our, on our place.

But you know, long term, long term plan, we bought the place we wanted.

We bought a place that we could be happy at for 20, 25 years.

And that was, the idea was like, okay, look, if we're going to spend half a million plus dollars on a place, we're going to get a place we want to stay at.

And I think that would be the recommendation that I make to anybody at this point.

Buying property in Canada.

Buy a place you are willing to spend the next 20 to 30 years.

And if you can make that choice, you can't really make a bad choice.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then you also have more ways to, to make money off it.

Right.

There's going to be, obviously have Airbnb and Verbo and, and that whole option, if that's attractive to you.

In terms of income generation, there's also fractional ownership startups that are continuing to build momentum where you can sell portions of your property and free up liquidity.

As long as our tax structure stays on.

Principal residence, tax free equity, that's the biggest tax advantage we now have.

So with all the other additional taxes going up over the past couple years, so it's an attractive asset in different ways than it was for our parents where they were just riding this, this big up into the right curve in terms of price and, and I benefited from that and that's great.

But that really created a, a whole generation of wealth in that space.

We, we'll have different ways to profit and make sense of these, these deals over the next 10 years than our parents did.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I, I, I look at growing up in my household and the idea being, you know, your, your home is your asset, it is your like nest egg.

Buy that home and ride that, ride that, that graph forever.

Right.

But I don't think that that's even sustainable or realistic.

Right.

So in my mind it was like, I'm just going to buy the place that I can be happy to live in and all paid off that I made a good choice.

Right.

Like, and I think we just have to make that choice as millennials, as people, you know, that are making that, that crazy decision.

Especially when you consider that my parents would have bought an equivalent home to what we just bought for probably about $250,000, you know, in the 90s.

Oh yeah.

Different world, right?

Different world, different problems.

Well, and to your point, if you, if you put all the numbers together, it actually, if your property, if you don't believe your property is going to appreciate, you're better off renting because you have all the other costs that go with it.

You have property tax, you have all the maintenance, you have everything else that goes into that.

So that's, that is what happens with these more mature cities I'm referencing.

They get to a price point where they're no longer affordable to the people that need to live there.

So they become rental markets.

We're just a long ways away from that in Calgary and Edmonton now.

Correct.

Essentially half the values that we see in Vancouver and Toronto.

But that's that balance, I think where.

It's where historically, as you say, your parents, parents are saying this is the best investment you could ever make.

Well, they got that 500% appreciation now we're entering in a much more expensive part of that curve.

If you think of a stock that trades at a more mature number, it's a mature stock, more mature dividend stock now than it was, than it is a scale up startup stock that's got lots of Runway to double or triple or quadruple against the income that's available in the market.

Yeah, no, for sure, for sure.

I don't know.

It's a tough call, right?

At the end of the day, I think every Canadian dream is to own their own home.

Right.

And I think on a certain level as millennials, we got a little screwed because we came in on the tail end of that and we didn't get that gigantic wage increase that came along with those doubling of house prices.

Right.

Like wages have been pretty stagnant for the past 10 years.

So we didn't get that like massive doubling that the real estate market did.

And so on a certain level we're having to make some tough choices.

I'm happy we made the choice we did.

I'm happy that we did it.

I think that if we waited another five years, might have been a, might have been a rental market.

Right.

Like that's literally how fast the whole thing is changing.

So I think we made the right choice in the moment.

I'll let you know in 10 years.

Keep me posted.

Yeah, that's a big part of our belief in the democratization of data.

If you go to our platform, we've got community level data.

So your exact community within Stony Plain or Edmonton or wherever you are, so you can see what's going on.

Because in certain Edmonton is not all one real estate market.

It's made up of several micro markets.

So tracking transaction dynamics at a micro market level matters.

And then we have all the sold data and then we have all the comparables information in terms of active versus sold values.

So we've designed our tools in a way where you can now track the value of your property on, on a recurring basis so that you've, you know, you have the confidence and the information that was previously hidden by the traditional service is now available just with a, for free, with an account.

And that's another one of our passions, is this is an asset exactly as you described.

This is one of your biggest assets, most likely for most Canadians.

So why are we in the dark on its value month to month, quarter to quarter, year to year.

You know, we've typically been stuck with property tax assessments or paying a bunch of money for an appraisal or asking an agent, but an agent doesn't really do that work.

Not really.

So this is taking the belief that, you know, you should be tracking this like a stock.

It's, how's it doing?

What's the value?

Does it make sense to refinance based on that?

Maybe it makes sense to sell earlier than you might have if you've got that information at your fingertips.

So that's another big part of our, of our purpose is to democratize that information for all Canadians.

That's amazing, Robert.

You know, we're talking to a lot of people right now, a lot of Canadians who may be entering the real estate market now, whether they're buying, whether they're selling and they're catching the show on the right day.

Walk us through both.

How does the whole system work?

Who's it for?

Yeah, it's a simple online experience.

If you think of the Airbnb experience, we've taken a lot of inspiration from a lot of the technology we use every day in our lives, whether it's, and you know, whether it's on your phone or through apps or your online banking or what have you.

Although online banking is typically pretty bad.

Still better than going, going into a branch.

Still better than going in.

Yeah, so we're much better than that.

But really it's a simple listing process, takes about 10 minutes.

As part of that, we will include your professional photos and measurements into your listing.

Once that is all put together, that typically the photos typically take 24 hours to turn around.

We'll get your property listed right away on not only our platform, but on Realtor ca, on Zillow and on thousands of other listing services that we've partnered or syndicated with.

96% of buyers start shopping online.

So we put your property in all of those places and then when a buyer wants to take action, they're able to find boat through those BO directly or through those other listing sites and message book showings and make offers directly on platform.

And then it's 1% only upon sale.

So list for free.

It's 1% when it sells and if the buyer is self represented, that's also free.

We've done several of those deals recently in Edmonton where in the area that you were in and now you're talking 10 to $15,000 of savings.

We've also seen an interesting dynamic of selling for A higher listing to sold ratio.

Just because the homeowner we find is actually more equipped to maximize their value because they understand the data, they know their place.

And our model doesn't force them to take action.

It sets them up to make the decision, the one that they want themselves.

Where.

So for that last $50,000 on a $600,000 home, as you were just mentioning, you know that last $50,000 matters a ton to the seller, but to a real estate agent is hundreds of dollars on their tens of thousands of dollars of earnings.

So they're more inclined to want you to take a lower number and push you into, or persuade you into a lower number.

Where in our model it's, you've got all the information you get to make that decision.

We've made that all simple and convenient for you.

So value maximization and cost savings, which can turn into $20,000 per deal and that's tax free equity.

That's like we were talking about.

That's, you know, you put that into an index fund over the next 30 years as a millennial, that can turn into 3, 4, $500,000.

Yeah.

So that's the brief explanation of what we've done.

I think we said at the top of the show, almost 2,000 transactions now.

So we've, we've got a lot of volume working across Canada, understanding how all these markets work.

And especially right now with the migration, we've been talking about lots of Ontario people moving to, to Alberta.

So we're, and same with people from B.C.

so people are often selling on boat in Vancouver or selling in those provinces and buying in Alberta at the same time.

So now you have a national understanding of, of the market as well.

That is incredible.

And you know, the more I think about this, there's a lot of advantages to selling your home this way.

And it's not just the lack of the real estate fee, but it's also your ability to even negotiate a little better with the current, with your current customer.

Like you have more room to play with to close that deal quicker if you want to, that you may not have if you're trying to factor in a 20 or $30,000 commission.

So there's a lot of advantages to this.

Yeah, we, and we very much are just obsessed with customer feedback.

And most people that sell with us or a common theme is I've been told this is really hard.

And then I did it and I never thought that it would, I never really believed that, but BO just proved that it's actually that easy.

This is the future of real estate.

This is simple.

I'll use this every time going forward.

And I've referred all my friends like that's, that's the typical sale just because it's, we've been fear mongered for decades.

I would say on don't screw this up.

You know, you got to go with an expert, make sure you hire an expert, make sure you have the traditional service.

And in reality when you add up all these numbers in this experience, a much a better experience for way less money is the way to not screw this up.

And so it's a bit of a mind shift for people to undo a lot of what that aggressive marketing has been where of course agents are making more and more money as all these properties have increased in value as we've been talking about, while doing less because there's just more online capability now in general.

And then with boat, it's all you, you can do it all fully on one platform.

Yeah, our, we, we have hall of fame customers.

We every month have a hour and a half to two hour meeting where we review all customer feedback across our entire business and take action on continuing to evolve the platform because they should ultimately be the driver of value.

Wow, dude, that's incredible.

One of the things that's got my wheels turning and I have to ask you, are you going to, do you currently have or are you going to have a commercial side to this?

We do, we have sold some office properties.

It's all very similar in the sense of the way our, our platform works and the way the market works.

We have been focused primarily on residential, but we often get asked that question and we can, as of today we can list as much commercial property as anybody would like to.

So that is, I would say it's in our roadmap to be more proactive in that segment.

But in the meantime we're absolutely open for that business.

Amazing.

Amazing.

And obviously we're talking about Bode Canada, but is there a, is there a bode United States?

Is there a bode worldwide?

What's next?

Not yet, but we do have the US in our sites.

Very similar market there in the sense of number of agents, per capita commissions paid, how it's regulated at the state and national level.

Nobody has done, has built bode down there.

Alternative models are more like a Redfin, you know, discount agent based service.

So we are, we look at it and say there's a huge opportunity, obviously not expanding to the United States as a whole.

It's, it's picking two or three states to start and then building from there.

But certainly very similar market dynamics.

Just 10 times the size of Canada.

And of course Canada itself is, is a big market on this topic, but 10x that of course in, in the United States.

So that is certainly on our road map and comes back to our, our broader vision of, of building a significant industry influencing and changing company not only in Canada but beyond.

So US is next up in our plans beyond that?

Good question.

I think we'll have our hands full with the US just given the size of the market.

But that's, that's currently where we're at.

And if people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way?

Where do they find Bode?

Yeah, Boat ca.

It's all designed for you to just be able to take full autonomous action on, on any.

Whether you're checking out data or you're shopping or you're planning to list and sell your property.

It's all designed for you to never need to talk to us.

We do have AI support 24 7.

Interestingly, this, this support of ours passed the realtor exam.

Got 10 out of 10 of the toughest, toughest questions correct.

So that's also a resource to anybody that has an account which is a simple email.

So bo ca.

That's where it's at.

Amazing.

And me and you met over LinkedIn.

So is that a place where you spend some time?

Yeah, if you, if I'm, I'm active in, and our company's active and just looking at what's going on in the market.

Market data, regulatory change.

And people are fascinated by real estate, myself included, because it's such a big part of our, where we live and our lifestyle and our financial portfolio.

So continuously commenting on and looking really to talk at a national level about what's important to Canadians and fighting for home affordability and democratization of information.

So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well.

And Robert, we're talking to a lot of entrepreneurs today, business owners, maybe they're like on the fence, they're just getting started and they need a little bit of advice.

You know, if you were to go back and you were to give yourself advice now instead of talking to Robert saying, hey, you're about to disrupt the real estate industry.

What advice would you give to Robert today after going through it all and kind of launching Bodega, is there like a lesson you've learned along this way that you could impart some wisdom to our listeners today?

So much, so many mistakes.

I think that, I think Maybe that's one of the keys is staying in that performance zone.

We talked a little bit about it, but don't get too high on a big win.

Don't get too low on a.

When a number of bad things happen all in a row because that happens all the time.

It's weathering.

It's weathering the storm of that roller coaster ride.

Just to combine a whole bunch of metaphors together.

But I think that being stable as a leader, being the solid foundational presence in the business and keeping everyone focused on the right things, start with the customer.

Always, always focus on the customer.

It's easy to lose grasp of that with all the other operating things you have to do internally.

Have the customer drive those decisions and also make sure that you keep the future in mind.

Don't get too lost in the, in everyday kind of dynamics, big things happening, small things happening.

You know, it's about staying stable and continuing to keep the team focused on what's important and the purpose that you have.

I love that.

You're absolutely right.

The roller coaster can be pretty brutal if you can't figure out a way to level it out.

I totally get it.

Amazing.

Robert, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been amazing chatting the future of real estate.

I think Bode Canada is going to make a pretty damn big impact and I'm excited to see what's next.

Loads of fun.

Kelly, we should do it again sometime.

It was awesome.

Absolutely.

Until next time, this has been episode 272 of the Business Development Podcast and we will catch you on the flip side.

This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists.

For more, we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.

see you next time on the Business Development podcast.