In this episode, Lee Woodward provides an introduction to STAFFLINK and discusses how we are impacting the Real Estate space with company CEO, Bryn Humble.
Episode transcription:
[00:00:00] Lee Woodward: Hello and welcome to today’s program. My name is Lee Woodward and we’re discussing the efficiency of sequence and how you bring the processes of any business together. It doesn’t matter if it’s sales. It doesn’t matter if it’s property management, you could be arranging a wedding. Everything needs a sequence.
[00:00:24] Everything is a process. I’m one of the most famous stories in the country right now, here’s what’s been happening at staff link staff link of not only mastered the property management process, which everyone thought was there, but it obviously wasn’t because there was something missing between the tech, the people and the result,and the burnout that we saw in property management has now been embraced with a platform from staff link, which has been used in the property management department. And also now in the sales department, I’m very proud to announce the prospecting world has also got its own prospecting sequence. The brains, and man behind all that is the CEO of STAFFLINK.
[00:01:06] He joins me today, Mr. Bryn Humble. Bryn, welcome to the program.
[00:01:11] Bryn Humble: Thanks for having me, Lee.
[00:01:12] Lee Woodward: Now Bryn, what a journey you’ve been on. You’ve been right through hands-on property management and sales, looking at that process for many, many years. When you had to make that decision, that we need to bring this together into a system.
[00:01:28] And I’ll look at your STAFFLINK, property management system first to discuss. Why was that needed to be created and then we’ll discuss what the platform that you actually ended up building that on, but why was it required when we’ve got all these property management software out there?
[00:01:43] Bryn Humble: Lee, when we started the process, it was because we were setting up a team in the Philippines.
[00:01:47] What we were finding is as we were starting to scale that team and also have the business grow so quickly at the same time, the sort of traditional tools out there like Excel and Google Sheets, it just, it wasn’t responsive enough. It wasn’t fast, it was just getting too complex to be able to use.
[00:02:05] So we needed to find a new piece of technology that could sit in the middle of all the different team members that were involved, but still have really powerful, you know, business intelligence and automation tools that were possible to use without having to teach anyone anything crazy. We just needed to be surfaced simple for them to use on a day-to-day basis, but still have all the perks of big enterprise tool software.
[00:02:28] Lee Woodward: I think a big word there is the integration into all these different systems, so I’ve been reviewing your platform nonstop of late, and how you’re embedding tables into websites, how you’re embedding the processes into web links. It’s amazing how you can have a carrier.
[00:02:48] So I might shoot someone an email, but they open that up and they’re filling in the live active table. That’s going into the workflow, which is just amazing the way you pulled that together, which is probably my next question. In this framework that you’ve built. It seems you can have tasks, videos. Multimedia, it can open up and do sub tasks. What is the capability of the platform? What can it actually do if you give it that stretch?
[00:03:20] Bryn Humble: It’s very easy to think of it as just another piece of technology. However, The Hub allows you to focus your business on what’s important. Now, historically, there’s always been multiple systems in businesses.
[00:03:32] You’ve got whiteboards, Excel spreadsheets, group text messages, lots of disjointed tools that all assist you, achieve your business goals, whatever that might be. They all give you visibility on what’s happening and compliment the source of truth, which is typically the CRM to The Hub, it’s no different to that.
[00:03:48] However, it allows you to build your own custom workflows set up alerts by automation and give you the visit visibility on who’s doing what, and when that is happening without constantly having to bother each other with, you know, text messages to get updates on where things are up to. Best of all, that actually sits the standard operating procedures for all of your workflow and for all your different teams.
[00:04:08] So when someone new joins, they have a really clear workflow to follow to ensure they’re actually compliant with how the rest of the team are already operating. So it can plug in with any tool that you want to essentially, if you’re willing to go out and build an API, which we’ve done with a number of different tools already And what it allows you to do is add an extension to all the products that you already know and love, or you have no choice of moving away due to legacy issues or, you know, existing agreements or whatever it might be.
[00:04:36] Lee Woodward: So give me an example of that in the, in the sales world. Because the property management build’s been enormous. And I will ask you that question. How long did it take you to build the workflows, processes and systems of PM, which is now used by many of our Australian real estate businesses? What was your build time of that?
[00:04:55] Bryn Humble: We’re still going so constantly, constantly evolving with we’re looking at key tracking, scheduling notifications and starting to share data between sales and property management a lot more now, however, we’re constantly refining each process. So can’t really say it’s ever going to be done.
[00:05:15] Lee Woodward: And that initial build, how many years have you spent on that?
[00:05:19] Bryn Humble: Probably took us about a year from when we found The Hub to get it to the point where we realized that it was something that, that we could build out for our own agency for more than just property management or more than just sales. That really became the main software that ran the whole business.
[00:05:34] So probably about a year.
[00:05:36] Lee Woodward: And one of the big projects you’re working on at the moment Bryn is the listed to settled process that the agents will use. What’s been your learn on that and what will The Hub allow our agents to do?
[00:05:50] Bryn Humble: So with sales, it’s a, it’s, it’s quite different. We don’t, we don’t want to give sales agents more technology.
[00:05:55] We want to give them less. So that way they can stay extremely focused on just listing selling and dollar productive activities. So when we go into agencies, what we typically find is with the sales administrators, they’re always the ones who are, you know, effectively the life, and a lot of the team.
[00:06:11] And they’re constantly doing all the running around between different people. So if we can free them, What it actually allows us to do is have them be a little bit more operational within the teams and add to those existing sales teams by becoming a leverage agent or a virus or whatever it might be.
[00:06:27] So what you’ll typically find is the issues that agencies have on the sales front is she’s just coming down to admin and sales agents, not necessarily wanting to do it because they’re not good at it, which is fair enough, because if they’re good on the phones typically, they’re not going to be so great at administration
[00:06:41] so, what we can do is actually set up custom forms and they change for every agency that we’ve ever worked with. They’ve been slightly different. And it’s basically, if a, if an agent goes out, signs up a property, we have a form which they can access on their phone, their tablet, whatever it might be for them to put all the information in for sales administration to start processing that listing.
[00:07:02] And it’s not, it’s not your typical compliance information. It’s more process-driven around what do we actually need to do to get the listing online? Can we send off the VPA agreement straight away through that form? And what are the other automations that we can link to it? It’s not just about, do we have signatures where they need to be?
[00:07:20] It’s what as a customer experience do we need to provide. So that way, the listing can go online in the best fashion in line with what your agency wants to do. It also means that your sales administrators, will receive all the information that they need to actually perform those actions for the sales agents, rather than the front and the back of an agreement with a couple of signatures missing
[00:07:43] Lee Woodward: Bryn, for the agents out in the field it’s mobile responsive. There’s an app for the agent cause, the biggest question for an agent who is running at a fast pace is, where is that property up to? What visibility will the agents have of where that property is up to without going through email, slack, back and forth, back and forth, making phone calls and texts.
[00:08:02] How have you been able to facilitate and manage that part?
[00:08:06] Bryn Humble: Yeah, it’s just one link. So you can basically set up a view, which is filtered for that agent’s listings and it can be completely different for every agent. You might have one agent who is very, very detail orientated and they want to know absolutely everything about where the VPA, the forms, the authority, the sign board, whatever is involved in any of the processes, any field that we have, that we can put data entry into as part of the listed to settled steps.
[00:08:35] If they want to see every field, they can see every field. If you have other agents that only want to know, you know, the very basics, you know, when, when does the authority run out? How much is the commission and when does it settle? They can just see those three things as well. And so what you can do is you just set it up as a link on their phone as an app effectively, and they can press that button whenever they want to see all their current listings and all their upcoming listings that they have loaded into the system.
[00:09:01] And they can see exactly the fields they want to see, not necessarily everything, which might be just information overload.
[00:09:07] Lee Woodward: So if I’m an agent and I’ve been to a wonderful Lee Woodward course and see that there’s 138 actions from listed to settled, is it possible that I can have visibility over that? So if I’m calling my owner, I can say “signboards been ordered. The photographs have just come back. I’m going to shoot those to you.” How much do you believe they need to see? Or can they see everything?
[00:09:30] Bryn Humble: Yes, they can say everything. If that’s the way that you want to run it within your agency or for that one particular agency or that one particular team, the other big benefit as well is it’s not just a tick box.
[00:09:40] And that’s the biggest difference that we can have with The Hub outside of any of the major CRM is when we’re talking about a task and we say the photography is booked in most CRMs, it would just have a tick box saying that task is completed. However, is our system, it works as both the task, but also the date and time field.
[00:09:59] So we can see it’s booked at 10 30 next Tuesday with open to view or whatever company that you would want to have as your, your company provider, and then any of the other items. So the dropdowns for brochures, it’s not just ticked, it’s ordered, it’s ticked, it’s awaiting approval from owners to confirm whatever steps and that’s, that’s all completely customized to the flow that that agency might have and they want to use.
[00:10:23] Lee Woodward: That’s a big shift forward, isn’t it? Because a lot of the CRMs just got the paper checklist, put it on the screen with a checkbox, which is not automation at all. It’s just, we digitize the paper-based checklist that was on the Manila folder. And now it’s on screen, but you’ve got to go manually in and check that every time.
[00:10:43] I’m seeing things with your platform now that if that happens, this can happen, and this can happen.
[00:10:49] Bryn Humble: Yeah. Correct. If, if you’ve got, if you’ve got a, you know, a stack of Manila folders or your CRM, it’s always, if you want to know where something’s up to an agent will come up to administration saying “what’s going on with my property?”
[00:11:01] You have to check properties, go into tasks, go into the notes, check your emails, check WhatsApp groups that you’re in with the vendor, whereas what we do in The Hub, it works much the same as Excel. It’s all the properties just in a, in rows. And you can see all the columns with all the fields that you want to see and you can create a share link through to the agent.
[00:11:20] So they don’t even need to come and ask that question in the first place, because they can open up that link on their own phone and get that information and not have to waste anyone’s time because it’s self serve then to find that out.
[00:11:32] Lee Woodward: And it’s also got that accordion style checklist where you might have a milestone, like activate property, and then there is a task underneath that and then sub tasks. Explain how that works.
[00:11:45] Bryn Humble: You can really make it work however you want to make it work. So if you want to have 10 tick boxes within, within one actual task, you can do it that way. And you can also attach a percentage completion to that as well.
[00:11:59] So you don’t even have to expand it. You can just go and see that 89% of the multi, multiple check boxes for this item have been completed. So there’s, there’s, there’s 15 different ways. You can actually skin how you see visibly, what has done and what is not done. The idea is that we just take what the agency is doing or whatever process they want to follow and shift it into this.
[00:12:21] So that way it’s very, very visible from day one. And you can start setting up the alerts because it doesn’t matter if something is, is not done. If it hasn’t triggered anyone to find out why it’s not done, or if it hasn’t triggered anyone to actually do the task and get a call back up
[00:12:38] Lee Woodward: Bryn, what’s been your biggest learn about workflow management of traditional, because a lot of people are asking you to take over their workflow, but actually what they’re doing is a little bit out of date, there’s better ways to do it. What’s been your professional, learn on the efficiencies of how this can be done. And that was just a good example. Something’s done, but something is a number. No one knows it’s not done because there’s no flags or triggers to it. What’s been the learn?
[00:13:06] Bryn Humble: Well, so although you’re completing tasks in workflows, that you set, what you’re actually achieving as a byproduct of that is capturing lots and lots of data, and that goes back to what we were talking about with not just the paper, paper checklist, which has been uploaded and you can tick boxes.
[00:13:22] It’s actually a case of what is the status of all of these items. And so it’d be because you’re collecting all of this data, it can be tracked, it could be graphed and it can be made visual. And that gives you the ability to make really quick decisions. It reduces the amount of audits that’s required and it identifies issues prior to them actually happening.
[00:13:40] So all of that, and it also, it creates a permanently live handover to your business for that person’s role or that particular workflow at all points in time, because there’s nothing worse than having a staff member go away on holidays. And on the first day dreading the two weeks until they return, because you don’t know where things are up to and you know that you need to take over all of that work.
[00:14:02] So it’s just about making it visible, which it never really has been before and using the data that you’re capturing in ways that helps you move your business forward. Faster.
[00:14:12] Lee Woodward: Bryn, what can live in a table, for example, does a video file live in it, or the link to the video, can an audio file be load loaded?
[00:14:23] We know you can have text and sub-tasks and so forth. What else, or what is the full capabilities of loading to the table?
[00:14:30] Bryn Humble: Pretty much everything mate, so you can, you can upload any sort of files. So if you want to upload video files, picture files, text files, you can have star ratings. You can have single select fields, multiple select field.
[00:14:43] So all sorts of stuff, any, anything that you would have seen from any sort of project management software, all of those things are in built, but there’s also additional features such as staff utilization and their, and their time. So if you set tasks that take, they should take three hours to complete, but it ends up taking four hours.
[00:15:02] You can start tracking those metrics as well. There’s also formula fields, which are really, really powerful because it lets you really expand on that. Outside of that,, there’s also a whole workspace of interfaces, which can be built, which just captures all of the data that you’ve used and just spit it out on to graphs for you and the flexibility behind all of these is just, you can pretty much chart anything that you want to say.
[00:15:25] Lee Woodward: And that’s been achieved in your one dash,
[00:15:28] Bryn Humble: Correct. Yep. That’s one of the ones we’ve used. Definitely
[00:15:31] Lee Woodward: Just for our listener. Explain one dash.
[00:15:34] Bryn Humble: So one dash goes to basically a layer that lives on top of air table. The point of it is to have a, a one screen interface for all of the different workflows that you have in motion. As you’re going through it, you’ll notice when we, we haven’t really gotten to the color side of things as much, but basically you can set up alerts on, on records or properties. So that way, if a, for example, an arrears phone call was meant to be done and it has not yet been done. It will have a red color flag appear. So in one dash, there is actually, there’s a lot of colors that we use because there’s are different alerts and each color has a different reason.
[00:16:11] So the items that will appear in one dash we’ll have, here’s your properties that have red flags is loom video embedded. So that way it explains how to remove that flag. And he’s a description of what that task is. So it’ll say it’s red because there’s an overdue or arrears phone call here’s the loom video of one of our staff members or one of your staff members recording exactly how they’ve done that call.
[00:16:35] So when you plug in a new staff member from another business, they’re not bringing habits over from their previous businesses or processes from their previous businesses. They know red color flag on this table means that I need to do an arrears phone call. And here’s the script that I’ve been told to use.
[00:16:50] Obviously, they need to work that in with, with their own style and their own flow, but you’ve given them the road to follow.
[00:16:57] Lee Woodward: So if I click on a script or a video explainer on how to do that part of the process, where is that living? Is that all web based or is it going to a link? How’s that going?
[00:17:11] Bryn Humble: It lives in The Hub as well, but it’s just the link that will expand on the screen.
[00:17:15] And you just keep a catalog of a lot of library videos in an The Hub base.
[00:17:20] Lee Woodward: Fantastic. So, there’s no weight on my phone or on my computer. It’s embedded in the table, will play in the table and that could be an . MP3 an MP4, which is really powerful if I’m going through my procedures and I don’t know how to do something I could actually watch, or it could even be a project note that I’m saying to someone, this is how it has to be done.
[00:17:42] And that could live in that table for that part of the process.
[00:17:45] Bryn Humble: Correct.
[00:17:46] Lee Woodward: Do many people use the multimedia features or are they just going through their tasking and workflow?
[00:17:53] Bryn Humble: We have some agencies that have been starting to catch up and do things with their marketing. So now that they’re getting comfortable with what they’re doing with [00:18:00] property management sales, they’re really looking to expand their marketing, their HR, their operations, their finance.
[00:18:05] So across that, especially within the marketing space, we’re starting to see a lot of people use those functions a lot more. Um, but definitely when it comes to just property management and sales, having the basic videos embedded next to where the process needs to be done, it’s a big, big help for people joining their business.
[00:18:23] Lee Woodward: Yeah. I think a lot of people spend more time trying to find out where something lives than “I’m in here now. Can you put it to the right of me?” Which brings up another point. I love the notes on the fly. Explain that to our listener.
[00:18:35] Bryn Humble: The comments against the record. Is that what you mean?
[00:18:37] Lee Woodward: Yeah. So there’s a task that didn’t get done or did get done.
[00:18:41] And there’s a stack of little notes of why or what happened at that moment in time. So notes on the fly or notes on the actual action that, that commentary again, saves so many phone calls, investigation, emails.
[00:18:55] How’s that set up?
[00:18:56] Bryn Humble: Yeah. So on every single workflow. You’re able to [00:19:00] comment on it. And so what that means is if I’ve jumped off the phone with an owner, I can open up that record, leave a comment there.
[00:19:07] And if I need to notify someone, I can go @leewoodward. Please call John later this afternoon at three o’clock, he’s asked to talk about the photos that we’ve sent through, so that will then trigger an email through to you. But what it’s actually doing at the same time is keeping a track of all the commentary that we’ve ever had on that property against that one record.
[00:19:25] So if, if you’re away on holiday, Someone can jump back through and see the history of information that’s been sent or discussed without the vendor, buyer, seller, or whatever it might be, about that campaign at that property. They don’t have to give you a handover. Like I was discussing earlier, all the information lives against that workflow item.
[00:19:43] So that way it’s exactly in sync with “this task was completed”. Then I can see this comment was left because Lee had a phone conversation with the landlord.
[00:19:54] Lee Woodward: Incredible. And Bryn I’ve been chatting with some of the agents out there in the field who have obviously come through this whole process, but their speed to learn was pretty quick.
[00:20:04] And if they’re filling in the forms and there’s not that many forms or tables they have to fill out, but for the agents on the road, they’re pretty much doing all of it from their mobile
[00:20:15] Bryn Humble: yeah, that’s correct Lee. One of the big things that we noticed is if you’re looking at typical processes, agencies have currently, if you want to submit a, an authority or request for something to be done, normally you’ve got quick parts in outlook, or you have a page that you have to print off and write out.
[00:20:33] So, what we’ve done with the air table forms is made it very, very quick for an agent to open it and put the information in. So you don’t have to write your name out in full, you press a button to get a dropdown list of agents, and then you click your name and it’s the same way throughout the whole form.
[00:20:50] So what we are able to do is if it’s, if it’s seconds that we’re talking about, but just the, the natural tendency to shy away from it because it’s [00:21:00] administration is very, very common. And so if you’re able to make it really easy and really good experience to use the forms, people actually want to use them because they know if they fill out that form, they have given everything that they need through to the administration team so that the administration team can actually perform tasks on behalf of the sales aid.
[00:21:19] Lee Woodward: Would an example of that be the listing input form?
[00:21:22] Bryn Humble: Correct.
[00:21:23] Lee Woodward: So the listing input for. Right now it would be drawing from the CRM. Where else would it draw from to minimize that input or input points?
[00:21:34] Bryn Humble: So the listing form is basically anything relating to compliance, VPA, marketing, instructions, who’s renting the property, all the information that doesn’t exist on the agreement that the agents still needs to provide to administration for them to be able to launch the property.
[00:21:51] And so all of that information is put into the form. You hit submit, it goes to the administration team so they can actually contact the other real estate agency, that [00:22:00] organized notice to the tenants that the landlord will be selling. It’s not just a case of here’s the authority, this is the address, and it’s tenanted.
[00:22:07] Lee Woodward: Bryn I know a big project for you coming up, for some of the most biggest brands in the country is to build the agent prospecting table, and we’re not talking about the CRM. They can have whatever CRM they want, what will be the structure of that? And what will you achieve in the digital prospecting program for agents?
[00:22:28] Bryn Humble: Lee, with the digital prospecting The Hub, what we’re hoping to do is just, like we said, with all the other The Hubs have one really, really simple place for agents to be able to go, to perform their prospecting.
[00:22:40] We’re not trying to take data out of the CRM and have an orphaned and separated for good. It’s just a place for things to be actioned. So for example, if an agency’s working in a service area, if they could be notified that a listing has come online in their service area, and it will automatically give them a list of all the contacts that they already have in that service [00:23:00] area with a date that it needs to be pulled by and tracking the outcome of that call.
[00:23:05] Those are the sorts of things that we’re able to do. They are achievable in some of the existing tools that are out there. However, the visibility of air table is what agents actually really enjoy and makes it rewarding to call through. It’s not just clicking through tasks in a CRM because we’re also able to use data that’s available via APIs to enrich the contacts that they’re working through and create a bit of competition between the agencies that are working on those sorts of platforms.
[00:23:31] Lee Woodward: So if I’m an agent and I’ve just dropped into my new, complete sales prospecting table, the activities that I will be doing different to say what I traditionally did in scheduled tasks, how’s my life different?
[00:23:45] Bryn Humble: We’re really just trying to separate dollar productive activities away from the typical administration tasks and provide them the ability to make additional leads out of places they wouldn’t have thought to previously.
[00:23:58] So not having to rely on just, open up your CRM and look at your 200 overdue tasks and pick out which ones are the ones that you should call, actually giving them a reason to call based on things that we’ve received. So, property is sold, we’ve received that through an API. Properties listed, we’ve received that through an API.
[00:24:16] Someone’s picked up the keys for our rental property in your service area, off the rent roll of the business. Here’s a call to make to that landlord, all of those sorts of things that, that data is being captured every day in the business, but it doesn’t actually make it off the key sign out over to the sales agent.
[00:24:33] They should be servicing that listing.
[00:24:36] Lee Woodward: On a leadership level. A lot of principals for many years have felt in the dark. There’s so many systems here, the tech stacks, fifteen high and that was, uh, a fact we picked up the other day that the average real estate business is using 15 to 30 applications to run the business.
[00:24:55] Whereas air table can synchronize so many of those that you wouldn’t need [00:25:00] these separate small redundancies in technology, but the Principals struggled to gain visibility. And one dash was a huge eye opener for myself. It was like, wow, that thing’s live. That’s not been inputted by admin, who is like behind the scenes trying to make it work. With this type of technology and this type of visibility, the lead that actually can see the full company
[00:25:23] for the first time.
[00:25:24] Bryn Humble: Yeah. That’s correct Lee. Like a really good example is if you look at utility connections for the sales or property management. There’s a really key moment in the journeys there where the chance to refer your client and be compensated for it if they take up the services, if you look at the conversion rates of the services, the same with any other service that’s around the real estate industry, you’ll see, sort of say the typical rollercoasters, the motion of success, management will identify there’s an opportunity to make money through referrals. Trainings performed, staff are held accountable for a short period of time. You start to see improvement. The metric gets forgotten about because there’s a new shiny [00:26:00] distraction to focus on for management, and then you’ll see that the numbers start to drop and then you get a new staff member in, they don’t even know the process. And then you’re back to square one and management are questioning why the utilities referrals have dropped off again. So how are staff to know, if you’re not able to actually provide one really clear process, and say, when you move a tenant into a property, or when you move a buyer into the property, you press this button and here’s the workflow?
[00:26:27] And this is why we do every single one of these steps. And if you can control the workflows in the agency and identify all the opportunities to make those additional sales, you can embed those steps into all of the workflows and make sure they’re actually completed each and every time. And if they’re not completed, you’ll know that because you actually have the dashboards that show you that they’re starting to dip. So that way you don’t have to wait till the end of the month to get a report saying that you didn’t, you know, you didn’t do as well on your connection referrals as you should’ve, you can actually check every [00:27:00] day and say for any tenants that are moving in at the moment. or any buyers that are moving in the next week.
[00:27:05] Have we organized the connection or thoroughly yet? Yes or no. And if you haven’t, organize it straight away and get the training done straightaway.
[00:27:13] Lee Woodward: Bryn, how many companies have now adopted the new STAFFLINK platform?
[00:27:20] Bryn Humble: Um, we’re probably working with about 150 agencies across Australia at the moment (that are directly working with us), and then there’s probably about another 50 companies that we know of that aren’t customers, but have taken up The Hub and are using it on a day to day basis.
[00:27:34] Lee Woodward: That’s an amazing proof point. And for a lot of people listening to this audio right now, they’re considering coming onto the platform and they had that question in their mind, what’s this The Hub thing? And I just want to give some clarity to that. The Hub is one of the world’s biggest international workflow management platforms that leading organizations are now using. But it comes to you as a [00:28:00] blank canvas. It’s got all these capabilities and functionalities, but STAFFLINK has built the real estate platform on one of the most stable platforms internationally, everyone’s talking about the capabilities of the platform, but the actual work that you have done is the workflow and all the sequences that make this all come together.
[00:28:20] So for our listener, who’s thinking, okay, this is now starting to give me an understanding of what we’ll be working in and the work that you guys have done, what’s been the adoption like for the industry? Property management would be different to sales, I imagine that, Bryn what have you learned about bringing that to the table of a company?.
[00:28:41] Bryn Humble: It’s really interesting to say how different companies will either see it and love it, or might sort of see it as a threat. And so the companies that we want to work with, are the companies that realize that they can scale their business, because you have visibility, you have consistency of process, and you have your departments working together because [00:29:00] automation, and just clear workflows, makes it really easy to do those things.
[00:29:05] You’ll typically see that the sales administrators fall in love with it very, very quick, because it’s everything that seen inside their head, you know, on a screen in front of them, sales agents also fall in love with it very quickly because they’re not going digging around their in trays to try and find the latest version of the paperwork that they need to use to submit listings or submit contracts of sale, and property managers as well.
[00:29:26] The property managers who are very, very processed driven, and want to offer the best service and they want you to be able to know where all of their properties are up to, and basically see, how far from being completely up to date am I? Or am I up to date and can I help the rest of my team? Those are the sorts of businesses that we work really, really well with, because they are forward thinking and they are wanting to grow.
[00:29:49] Lee Woodward: Now, you mentioned before that the platform or the The Hub platform in its functionality is a CRM. But that’s different to a CRM such as [00:30:00] Rex or agent box. What is that difference?
[00:30:03] Bryn Humble: So Rex and agent box, will be able to obviously have all your contacts, all of your listings, have your tracks, have some of your activities – very, very, very powerful, not trying to replace that at all. Those are very specific tools that are used to get your listings online and run all your buyers through, and things like that. So it doesn’t have, those features necessarily built into it from the ground up. You could go down the path and do those sorts of things, however, The Hub is more there to be a workflow tool. So it’s not necessarily always going to be the source of truth. We’ve seen a number of agencies that have actually put all of their agents over to The Hub for all of their contacts, and then just using another third party tool to upload listings because they like the simplicity of it.
[00:30:49] However, it doesn’t come naturally hooked up to email marketing software or text messaging software, but it does let you build whatever you want to build.
[00:30:58] Lee Woodward: That’s such a great clarity moment because many people being asking me that Bryn, cause obviously everyone’s talking about what STAFFLINK’s achieved, how fast it’s growing, but the order you’ve brought to businesses, I know there was one person asking me about, you know, what do I think?
[00:31:14] And I said, well, what do you do at the moment? “Oh, it’s complete chaos, is a mess. There’s tech everywhere. The spreadsheets, no one knows where anything is”. I said, well, that’s your current situation yet, if you move on to the STAFFLINK platform, That’s all been thought out for you, tested, and you’ve got that proof that another 150 companies are now operating this way.
[00:31:36] And that’s a lot of companies that you guys have brought on in quite a short period of time. It would take easily a decade to get up to that sort of user engagement for workflow. But the fact it it’s a bring it all together, tool, a workflow tool for the entire organization. And I think that’s an important point, Bryn, this is across business. It’s not, you know, property me’s over there, Rex’s over here, this [00:32:00] is sort of the middleware that brings it all together.
[00:32:03] Bryn Humble: Yeah. Correct. And it allows you to report on anything, basically. So, you know, we’ve got APIs with it, with a stack of different softwares, and there’s always been that, that degree within agencies of, “I want to be able to report on this, but my CRM or my trust accounting software, doesn’t allow me to do that”.
[00:32:19] Because we’re pulling all of that data it makes it much easier to create custom reports for exactly how that agency wants to do those things, because you just can’t do that at the scale with these other companies. Sometimes there might be a fantastic idea, but it’s going to impact what are we saying, two to three thousand properties that might use that system. So it’s not as fast to implement, however, with The Hub, because it’s your platform that you own, it means that you’re able to be very, very, very customizable with it.
[00:32:48] Lee Woodward: And I think that’s another great success. You’ve been able to get the way people work now, digitize it, and they still feel they’re working in their same environment versus “I’m sorry, off the shelf. You must use it this [00:33:00] way”. It’s a little bit like Play-Doh or plasticine. You can mold it to be how you want it to be.
[00:33:06] Bryn Humble: Yeah, that’s correct. And we have customer success managers that do meetings for that client every single week, and they’re basically there to hold your hand and help you roll out your processes into the business, because we’ve seen it before, and initially when we were starting, it was very much, here’s the videos of how it works, we’ll explain it to you. Here’s the The Hub, here’s an understanding from start to finish of how everything plugs together. But when it comes time for the leader of that business to go, I really liked this. I understand it. It’s going to work.
[00:33:34] It doesn’t mean that they’re going to have the time or the skillset to be able to plug it into their own team, because they’re also still learning how to use the platform at the same time, and that’s why we have staff that will meet with teams every single week, roll out the process, help to document it and stored in a place so that way if future staff members want to see it, they can come back to see it in the future.
[00:33:54] Lee Woodward: Bryn Humble, an amazing interview, and one I’ve been really looking forward to doing as so many people ask me about you, and it’s like, you know what? Let’s do a deep dive review of what’s going on, but you’ve just answered so many great questions there that for anyone wanting to consider moving forward in this direction versus their current situation, it’s all done, it’s there. And one thing I love that you said in the interview is we’re still working on it. This is a progressive platform. It’s moving with the industry as the industry changes. I know I was chatting with yourself and Joel, only a couple of weeks ago about building some sales tables from the training that we do, where people have loved the training, but they get back to the office and go, I have no idea how to implement this versus follow the table, and we would just love the opportunity to be doing that type of work, where not only the information is there, but the implementation and activation is follow the table, versus having a sales person build a table is not recommended, uh, not the best use of their time, and it’s a different skill, building tables is not what people think.
[00:35:03] Bryn Humble: Yeah, that’s correct Lee. It’s very much a case of, you know, “I wouldn’t be a good sales agent, but I’m really good at this”. So it’s the same with a lot of our teams. We’ve been working with so many different businesses. So when something works well, we know it because we experienced it across all of the client bases that we’re working with.
[00:35:19] So whenever there’s changes that happen within the industry, because we do have that knowledge of what works well and what doesn’t work well, it means that we’re able to basically roll out our idea or our workflows that we’ve seen with other agencies, across everyone very, very quickly, rather than what we’ll see typically, when someone goes on the path of wanting to get more into The Hub and understand it and build their own things. It’s just missing a small understanding of basically just the way to structure their bases, which can make it the difference between having a product which you love to use, and having a product which just feels like an Excel spreadsheet with a lot of different tabs that you pay a subscription fee for.
[00:35:56] Lee Woodward: Bryn Humble, great interview, and congratulations on what the entire team’s doing, in all countries, I was visiting your premises only a couple of weeks ago, and you’ve expanded and expanded and expanded, and you’ve got some great, brilliant people here and Brisbane’s where the headquarters is, but they’re all from real estate, so that they were used to doing those processes the other way, and now they’ve got the The Hub modern way of doing it- I think that’s been a big breakthrough for you of having agents work with agents.
[00:36:27] Bryn Humble: Yeah. Correct. Especially having staff members from around the country as well, so we’ve actually had a number of staff members that have moved interstate. So for having them on zooms and saying, “I know the exact challenge you’re facing, I come from Melbourne, I’ve done property management in Melbourne for 15 years, myself. Let’s go through this together”. It’s just that really big shift of thinking away from, it’s not just a tech product and we’re saying this is the way that you have to use it. It’s a piece of tech, which is in your business, which is moldable for the way that you need to use it right now, based on the current market conditions.
[00:36:58] Lee Woodward: Bryn Humble, thank you for joining us. And we look forward to checking in with you in the future and also seeing the latest parts of the platform as you roll all of them out, but really appreciate you doing the interview
[00:37:09] Bryn Humble: No worries mate, thanks very much for having me.
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