Building an REI business that runs on Autopilot

John Harcar (00:00.974)
Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Your host, John Harcar. I’m here today with Keith Gillispie. And what we’re going to talk about today is how to build and create a real estate business that runs on autopilot. You know, guys here at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, real estate entrepreneurs, and service providers, 2 to 5X their business. And we do that by giving resources and tools that help folks build the business they want to build and live the life they want to live. Keith, welcome to the show.

Keith Gillispie (00:29.347)
Thank you so much for having me. What an honor. Greatly appreciate it, John.

John Harcar (00:31.65)
Yeah, man. I’m I’m no, you’re very welcome. I’m glad to have you. I’m excited about the autopilot thing. I mean, you ask anybody, everybody would want to do less and get more. mean, but before we get into all that, because I know we have a lot to cover, tell us a little bit about yourself, right? Tell us about who you are and you know, overall, what got you here?

Keith Gillispie (00:50.351)
Cool. Well, I would say that everyone asks, how did you get started in real estate? And like 99 % of people read the Purple Bible, read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kisaki. And it came at really good timing. And the reason for that is because we had just found out that we were pregnant. Me and my wife had been married for a couple of years. we found out that we were going to be pregnant. And I had been working on my credit. And I was going to buy us a house.

John Harcar (01:11.512)
Congratulations.

Keith Gillispie (01:19.543)
And, instead of buying a house, decided to leverage all of that credit to start a real estate investing company. And the main reason for that is because, I actually didn’t know that we were pregnant at the time I was active duty in the Marine Corps and I was overseas. Absolutely. Thank you. So I was overseas and my wife kept it a secret. She wanted to tell me in person.

John Harcar (01:28.289)
Interesting.

John Harcar (01:39.822)
Thank you for your service.

Keith Gillispie (01:48.591)
And so we would talk, you know, when we could. And she never told me that she was pregnant. wasn’t until literally I get home, see bags in hand, swing open the door. Yeah. And hey, surprise, we’re pregnant. My wife even recorded it. It’s up on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it. And so baby number one, total surprise, had no idea it’s called surprise, you’re a daddy. And then,

John Harcar (01:58.926)
coming off the plane, you know, the picture they always see about everybody coming off, you know, yeah.

John Harcar (02:09.282)
That’s awesome.

John Harcar (02:15.148)
Yeah

Keith Gillispie (02:17.249)
And then about a year and a half later, I found out a second time coming home from another trip, surprise, you’re a daddy number two. And so on both times, my wife was pregnant and I didn’t know because I wasn’t in the country. And for the next two years, my wife actually had to reintroduce me to my children.

John Harcar (02:27.694)
two times.

John Harcar (02:37.443)
Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (02:43.135)
on multiple occasions because I was gone so much that they didn’t even recognize their own father. so that was my start was reading Rich Dad Poor Dad. And it was really important to me because I wasn’t raised by my dad. And the reason for that was because he passed away when I was young. And the thing was, is I’m doing the same thing to my kids, except I don’t have the excuse of being dead. You know, like I am choosing to not be in their life.

John Harcar (02:54.594)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (03:01.646)
I’m sorry.

Keith Gillispie (03:12.545)
in the beginning in the early years, which is the most important years to rear your children, you know? And so I made the decision to, that I was going to get out of the Marine Corps. stayed in for another enlistment after even more than one enlistment after that. And, and continued to build the business until it was successful enough for me to leave the old W2 and, and be doing this full time.

John Harcar (03:17.294)
Mm.

John Harcar (03:32.492)
Okay. So let’s talk about that. So you’re, you’re still in the military and you started doing real estate. Okay. you were, were you just doing wholesale? What were you doing?

Keith Gillispie (03:39.534)
Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (03:43.92)
Yeah, at the time, our only exit strategy was wholesaling. did do my very first deal was a flip. And at the time I was stationed in Washington DC near Stafford, Virginia. And it’s a big thing in DC and in Maryland to do what’s called pop the top, where you find a little three bedroom, one bath house, and you just add the same exact square footage on top of it.

Drastically increase your ARP. Well, that’s what I was gonna do on my very first deal in hindsight probably not the smartest move and Especially not knowing anybody and being mentored by anybody. I just I’m gonna figure this out, right? Apparently there’s this thing called the soil density test that you have to do to make sure that house doesn’t collapse and I didn’t pass it Anyway, I learned man. Did I learn this thing was supposed to be a huge six-figure profit and I literally Yeah, I literally made $2,000

John Harcar (04:21.592)
Yeah.

John Harcar (04:31.854)
The School of Hard Knocks.

Keith Gillispie (04:38.075)
on that deal and I said, golly, if I’m going to screw up that bad, we’re just going to go wholesale houses. so first deal was a full renovation. It’s absolutely beautiful. I’ll remember it forever and ever. We over rehabbed the house. was gorgeous. And then for the next four, four and a half years, roughly, we just exclusively wholesale so that I didn’t have to deal with raising private money and the scope of work, change orders with the contractors and everything like that. It was just simpler to wholesale.

John Harcar (04:42.784)
Yeah.

John Harcar (04:50.87)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (05:01.59)
Yeah, got it. Got it. Okay. So in this time of building your business, what happened? Like where was that shift to say, I need to start a CRM because you are the owner and creator of REI automation, correct? Automated. Sorry. Automated.

Keith Gillispie (05:10.831)
Thank

Keith Gillispie (05:18.479)
Yeah, automated. Automation is somebody else. Yeah. I think REI Automation is a company also by a former Marine. But REI Automated, yeah. So in what year? 2021. So I started Real Estate in 2016. And really, REI Automated, although on the books, you know, it was created in 2021, it actually started three…

John Harcar (05:27.074)
hmm.

Keith Gillispie (05:47.919)
three and a half years prior to that. And the reason for that is because I just created it for me. It was never meant to be for anybody else. It was truly never intended to be a product sold outside of my own walls. It was just my own solution to my own problem. And my own problem was this. I started in Virginia, but then my second duty station, I was in Hawaii. So geographically,

John Harcar (05:55.712)
Okay.

Keith Gillispie (06:14.831)
There’s two things that are unique about Hawaii. Number one, it’s a tiny island and I love Hawaii. It holds a very dear place in my heart. However, it is difficult for somebody who is young, white, and in the military to buy houses from local Hawaiians. It’s not very common. And so I struggled with that. And then the second reason was because geographically, you know, it’s three hours to

John Harcar (06:24.621)
Me too.

John Harcar (06:38.061)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Gillispie (06:44.239)
Pacific Standard Time and six hours to Eastern Standard Time. And so when I was having troubles locally purchasing properties, I would get kicked out of people’s houses, like more than 100 times. I would show up to somebody’s house and they love me on the phone. You know, can speak Pidgin. They really enjoy talking to me on the phone, but then I show up at their house to give them an offer. And they’re like, how old are you? You know, at the time I’m 20 years old, 22 years old, and I’m here to, yeah, clean shaven, baby face.

John Harcar (07:06.722)
Yeah, right.

Babyface.

John Harcar (07:13.109)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Gillispie (07:13.455)
in the Marine Corps and they’re like, how old are you? Like, this is some sort of scam. And I’m there to give them a cash offer, $750,000. And they’re like, $750,000, who are you? Get out of my house. And so they, I got kicked out of a lot of people’s houses. Made the decision to do it virtually. And so now I’m investing, continental United States. And then the next problem that I have is I’m already waking up at like 5 a.m. in order to be at work.

John Harcar (07:20.492)
Right. Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (07:41.133)
or to leave for work at 5.30, be at work by 6.30. We have PT and physical training and stuff before work even starts. So in order for me to get in a little bit of time calling, I don’t have to wake up at five. Now I’m waking up at four or even 3.30 or three. Golly, I am a mean person at three o’clock. Like it’s just not sustainable for me.

John Harcar (07:57.678)
330. Yeah.

Is anybody a happy person at 3 o’clock?

Keith Gillispie (08:05.271)
Right? It’s just, it’s terrible. And so, but that’s the only option if I want to call prior to work. Now after work, I’m getting home, I would typically get off maybe six, 530 to 630, but let’s just call it six. Well, I’m getting home 30 minutes later and that’s 630. Well, that’s 930 on the West Coast and that’s 1230 AM after midnight on the East Coast. Try calling somebody. Yeah, you’re not going to buy a house. You’re just going to get cussed out.

John Harcar (08:11.182)
Sure. Sure.

John Harcar (08:27.815)
Mm-hmm way past hours to reach out. Yeah

Keith Gillispie (08:33.999)
And so the only time that I could feasibly make calls wasn’t before work or wasn’t after work. And I wasn’t allowed to have my phone on me during work, but there’s one magical moment in time that the government can’t tell me what to do. And that’s during my chow, during my lunch break. And I needed to build this business. I had already, mind you, made the decision to get out of the core, but I needed to build this business enough

John Harcar (08:44.088)
Mm.

Keith Gillispie (09:00.951)
so that my outputs, my results was more than my nice cushy job with basic allowance for housing, big allowance for sustenance, basic pay, all of this, I needed to be able to replace that, and some, for me to feel comfortable. And I only had one hour. So that’s really my story for more than four years of I’m trying to build a successful business with one hour of inputs that yields eight hours of outputs.

John Harcar (09:06.262)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Keith Gillispie (09:30.349)
so that I can escape my nine to five. Well, that’s the birth of REI automated was I just need this one hour to be number one, as effective as possible, number two, as efficient as possible, and number three, as automated as possible. And so I started building out mind maps and it started with like basic stuff, like follow-up sequences, and then got a little bit more ingrained of

John Harcar (09:33.57)
So what did you do?

Keith Gillispie (10:00.417)
initial text messaging when somebody fills out a form, it starts engaging this person in a conversation so that they’ll stop filling out people’s leads and start talking to me so that when I call them on my lunch break in two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours, they’ll actually pick up the phone. And then building out automated purchase and sales agreement, automated deal analyzer, automated this, automated that, And so that was the creation of RE Automated.

John Harcar (10:16.184)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (10:26.584)
Did you have a background of knowing how to like do set up all this stuff, a computer background, any type of background or something that taught you? You and me both.

Keith Gillispie (10:33.485)
Heck no. I’m so technologically illiterate, it’s not even funny. I can barely operate an email.

John Harcar (10:42.606)
So, so the system that you’re using, did you develop it? Did you white label it? How did you come up with that? And then, and then more importantly, I think I want to maybe figure out is what do you just jump in and start playing with stuff or how did you figure all that out?

Keith Gillispie (10:47.972)
Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (10:58.073)
Great question. well, I just bounced from CRM to CRM to CRM. Every major CRM from 2016 to 2019, I went through. We were doing two to three CRMs per year during that time. And if you’ve ever migrated CRMs, you know what a humongous pain in the butt this is. And the learning curve is steep as you’re navigating new technology.

John Harcar (11:14.382)
Cheers.

yeah.

Keith Gillispie (11:26.475)
And so constantly putting myself through this was just super stressful. And it was as much of a blessing as it was a curse because every single one I would go to, I’d be excited because it had this one or two features that I was really missing from the old one. But then I would move over here and it’s like, well, frick, now I need this thing. Now I need this solution or you’re not allowing me to do this. And so at the end of the day, I hired a company to do a custom build out on Podio and

John Harcar (11:38.089)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (11:43.149)
Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (11:56.259)
They did an all right job. It laid the foundation. It laid the groundwork. But then after that, my business partner at the time, also former Marine, he is incredibly smart at building these things and building systems. And he’s not a programmer or coder or have any technology or anything like that. Just like YouTube University hopping on consultations with people to figure this, that, and the other thing.

John Harcar (12:15.938)
Hmm.

John Harcar (12:22.03)
Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (12:25.199)
But yes, we did build it from scratch. Now it’s built on Podio, but Podio really is just a skin of it. Like we have our own database, we have our own servers, so that we’re not reliant on Podio’s uptime and downtime, nor their servers in order to compute calculations or anything. We kick it out, we do everything in our own environment, our own servers and our own database, and then we patch the information back in. So there’s all the things that people say that they don’t like about Podio. We’ve solved all of them.

John Harcar (12:28.835)
Awesome.

John Harcar (12:32.663)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (12:40.632)
Sure.

Keith Gillispie (12:55.247)
in ours is just incredibly automated compared to anything else that is out there.

John Harcar (13:02.382)
Okay, so now you have this CRM. Where percentage-wise does your business lie as far as wholesaling, making that type of investment money versus the CRM type of business? Okay, but are you focusing more on one now than the other? Are you still just kind of operating on both on Streamline?

Keith Gillispie (13:07.268)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Gillispie (13:18.904)
Two totally different companies. Yes.

Keith Gillispie (13:25.807)
gosh, man, I told you I was gonna give you straight up transparent answers and I’m gonna hold true to that. I flip-flop back and forth and here’s the, the end of the day, no business is going to grow without a driving COO and a visionary CEO, right? And so when you’re newer in these companies that are two, three, four years old,

John Harcar (13:48.759)
Mmm.

Keith Gillispie (13:53.987)
you really have to push. so often I will find myself flipping back and forth and I pretty consistently will spend one month growing one while the other remains stable. And then I will, the next month, now I focus on this one while this one remains stable. And I go back and forth and I’ve been told by many people, Keith, you really shouldn’t do this. You should focus on one thing. But truthfully, at the end of the day, my real estate investing company is,

John Harcar (14:05.133)
Yep.

Keith Gillispie (14:21.389)
I don’t really have to touch it. It kind of runs on its own. There’s just four people that do quite literally everything. And frankly, I don’t like making the calls or dealing with any of that. And the Real Estate investing software and coaching and education is fun. It’s new. It’s exciting. So I get a fresh win when I’m working on this. And then over here, I’m just focusing on.

John Harcar (14:25.774)
Mm.

John Harcar (14:35.31)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Gillispie (14:49.741)
really refining systems and scaling and developing new technology that helps us.

John Harcar (14:53.494)
Well, and what you said in your bio and what we talked about before, all-in-one solutions without cold calling or what was it? Blowballing offers. So let’s talk about that because nobody likes to cold call. mean, who likes to pick up the phone and beat people up for 1,000 calls a day? So how does your system allow someone to be able to not have to do those type of tasks?

Keith Gillispie (15:03.67)
Lowball offers. Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (15:12.109)
Right.

Keith Gillispie (15:18.573)
Good question. the first thing is that there, well, gosh, there’s a lot of things actually that I would love to talk about. The first would be a mentality shift of like, I love it when people make an offer because I will come in and I will, without ever being disrespectful or demeaning or throwing shade or talking down about them, I will plant seeds of doubt of whether or not this person really knows their numbers. And I will call things into question that

the seller, and ultimately it’s the seller who’s the one answering, like asking their own questions, and then I’ll have them answer it. So it’s like in the movie Inception, where you’re planting the seed and they think it’s their own idea. So that’s really what I do. I love it when people give an offer, because then I will plant seeds of doubt in order to question the validity of whether or not that person will perform. And I do that without ever giving a number. I will…

My very first deal was the very last deal that I gave an offer on. And literally the last nine years, every house that I’ve ever bought across the nation, I don’t give a number. I will have the seller tell me what they need to walk away with. I don’t care what their house is going to sell for, because that often includes a mortgage and the realtor fees and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How much do you need to walk away with? Like cash in hand as you’re walking away from their check, whatever.

John Harcar (16:37.505)
Sure.

Keith Gillispie (16:43.523)
She’s walking away from the closing table. How much do need to walk away with? And then that’s the number that I’ll negotiate. This also sets me up for creative financing, entrance strategies as well.

John Harcar (16:50.402)
Yep. Okay, and I was gonna be another one of my questions. you now, have you broadened out some of the extra strategies that you’re doing? Okay. Okay.

Keith Gillispie (16:56.737)
Yes. Yeah. So, so we buy every, every normal way, you know, we buy it sub two, we buy owner financing, a hybrid of both cash. will wholesale, whole tail, retail, wrap, rent, innovations, lease options, the whole shebang when it comes to exit strategy. So it’s really like, well, what first, what’s going to serve the seller the most, obviously, if it’s not a win for them, then we’re not going to go down that route. So we need to clearly identify what’s a win for the seller. Okay, great.

John Harcar (17:13.069)
Got it.

Keith Gillispie (17:26.403)
Now that we have this entrance strategy in mind, what exit strategies do I have in mind in order to squeeze out every last drop of equity in this and really make it so that we’re serving the seller while at the same time maximizing our profits?

John Harcar (17:39.394)
Yep, exactly. And the big thing we talked about is autopilot, right? How does your system set it on autopilot? What tasks, before I have your system, what tasks am I doing until I get your system, then I don’t have to do those anymore? What are the main automation parts, pieces?

Keith Gillispie (17:47.193)
Cool.

Keith Gillispie (17:58.023)
Literally everything is auto here’s the the Statement that I will stand by anything it used to be anything that can be automated is Automated and then I change that to anything that can and should be automated is Automated and the reason why I say that Yeah, and the reason why I say that is because a I use AI probably for

John Harcar (18:16.078)
Not everything should.

Keith Gillispie (18:23.983)
two to four hours every single day. I’m very adept with using AI. And AI has come a long ways just in the last four, five, six months. And so we have all these callers, and I’m not here to judge, and I’m not trying to pass any judgment or tell you what to do or anything like this. Just for me, when I’m calling, the people that I target with my marketing is people who are going through a divorce, people who have recently inherited a house, people who are going through foreclosure, pre-foreclosure, tired landlords, they have some sort of health or safety issue.

And if you just put yourself in their shoes, we’ve all experienced at least one of those things in our life or know somebody very close to us who has, that is so much pain that they are going through right there. And I understand that on a scalable level, having an AI caller is really, really wonderful for us as a business. However, I personally cannot stomach it on an ethical level. I believe that we are lowering our standards.

John Harcar (18:59.586)
Mm-hmm.

Keith Gillispie (19:20.175)
As a community really of real estate investors to have AI be doing this that seller in these certain situations they want nothing more than to have somebody who will hear them have somebody who will help them have somebody who really has a genuine conversation and I’m telling you John like Yes, I recently I recently let go our acquisition manager and I’m hiring

John Harcar (19:40.448)
Empathetic curiosity.

Keith Gillispie (19:49.741)
by the way, if anybody is interested. But I sat in the last couple of weeks, been about five, six weeks now, and I’m having these conversations, and I have to tell you, the level, the feedback that I get from people, Keith, you are just, you have just brightened my day. You you are just so fun to talk to. I love talking with older people too. I just, I vibe with them. And…

John Harcar (20:11.757)
me too.

Keith Gillispie (20:15.951)
And genuinely, it’s lot of fun and I kind of make that my passion project, if you will, just to make that person smile. Like they’ve just been dealt with such a tough hand of cards in that moment. And for me to be able to present a solution, articulate it clearly, give them light at the end of the tunnel, hope that there is an end here, you know, soon and that I’m the solution to that problem. And then it’s just smile a couple of times, crack a couple of jokes, be, I don’t know, I wouldn’t consider myself witty, but just have a little bit of…

John Harcar (20:21.976)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Harcar (20:44.745)
you

Keith Gillispie (20:45.913)
charisma when you’re on the phone, I really like that. And so going back to your question, anything that can and should be automated is automated. And so really there’s two things that should not be automated. The first is going to be the phone calls. In my opinion, you shouldn’t automate the phone calls. I don’t care how good AI gets. It’s not going to replicate, nor is it going to give you a purpose.

You can make money, but if it’s purposeless money, then what are you even doing this for? Then the second thing is I feel, I feel that it’s.

John Harcar (21:16.738)
Right.

Keith Gillispie (21:23.893)
It is irresponsible to have ARV determined by some proprietary formula. You know, just think about like Zestiman or PropStreams, whatever. And so, you know, one of, who wrote Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Stephen Covey wrote the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And one of those habits is begin with the end in mind.

John Harcar (21:37.516)
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.

Keith Gillispie (21:50.893)
And for you and I as a real estate investor, the end that we have in mind is what is the sales price that I’m going to have when I go and sell this house and we’re going to reverse engineer from there? Well, if you screw up that one number, everything afterwards is also screwed. You’re destined for failure. And so I do not think that we have tons of systems around this. Do not get me wrong. We have SOPs and training videos and systems, and we have tools like our ARV finder.

John Harcar (22:05.288)
Also, right

Keith Gillispie (22:18.403)
that will make it so much faster, so much easier. me anywhere, I swear to drop me anywhere in the nation, within 10 minutes I will give you an accurate ARV. Yes, using our ARV finder, however, there will always be a manual double check, if you will, like quality control checkpoint, if you will, to ensure that that ARV is accurately depicted before we move on to the deal analysis. So those are really the two biggest things that should not.

John Harcar (22:18.467)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (22:24.652)
And this is part of your CRM.

John Harcar (22:47.64)
Where do you find these leads? mean, are they in your system as well? Like, are you pulling these type of divorce, probate, default stuff? Are you buying them? Are you county scraping?

Keith Gillispie (22:48.111)
in my opinion.

Keith Gillispie (22:54.569)
No, great question. yeah, great question. should have, I don’t want to elude that these are part of our software. For the first four years, I did nothing but outbound. So I did the text message and the ringless voicemail and cold calling, bandit signs, newspaper ads, TV, golly, yeah. And the last four, four and a half, actually five years?

John Harcar (23:14.71)
everything.

Keith Gillispie (23:22.851)
I’ve been really spoiled. Now I only have inbound leads coming in from PPC and PPL. That said though, so that’s just for me. I’m answering for me specifically. It used to be outbound, now it’s been inbound, but our clients do everything. We have some clients who run PPC, some clients who do social media, some people do direct mail, some people door knocking, some people driving for dollars, whatever. As long as there is an API or a webhook,

John Harcar (23:46.734)
Sure.

Keith Gillispie (23:51.737)
for us to integrate it into the CRM, you are free to do anything. And if there isn’t one already built, then we’ll create a form for you, like for a cold caller, for example. If you’re software, we can’t hook into it, then we’ll just build that form. First name, last name, phone, email, subject, property address, done. Send it and it comes into your CRM.

John Harcar (24:01.038)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (24:09.75)
Nice. Anybody getting into this business new, what kind of advice would you give to them? If they’re looking at CRMs or looking at all this other stuff, mean, where do I, you know, where do I start?

Keith Gillispie (24:22.415)
I am going to just be really controversial right now and say that if you’re completely new, your ass doesn’t need to be on a CRM, your ass needs to be on a dialer. Call people, that is how you’re going to do some, listen, I own a software company and it is in my monetary,

John Harcar (24:39.95)
TTP.

Keith Gillispie (24:46.467)
Beneficial interest to tell you yes listen to all this sexy stuff that our CRM does it’s absolutely amazing right I’m here to tell you you can do plenty of deals Without a CRM and in the beginning do not waste your time learning a new tech stack and all of this stuff You need you need my advice to you is invest in your education invest in your systems early I’ve seen a lot of newbies try to wing it they get burnt out learning all this technology. They just get swamped with busy work and

John Harcar (25:02.51)
Mmm.

Keith Gillispie (25:15.649)
I’m here to tell you if you just have a basic, basic lead gen system and a script to talk with sellers, which ours does have a script and it is dynamic and it is built into the software, but all you need basic lead gen system, a script to talk to sellers, you will save yourself so much money, so many headaches and you will actually get deals done. Just as a Tom Kroll always says, put revenue in first position. If you can just put, just keep,

John Harcar (25:27.406)
plug.

Keith Gillispie (25:44.621)
you know, Gary Keller, the one thing, or Pareto’s principle, the 80-20, like, what is the one thing that I can do today that will make all other things obsolete or unnecessary, or something like that.

John Harcar (25:47.649)
Yep.

John Harcar (25:54.286)
Well, and things that are money making activities, right? Things that are going to move the needle forward, not sitting there and getting stuck, you know, watching YouTube you. I mean, you got to get there. You got to get on the phone. Brent Daniels, TTP. mean, talk to people. That’s how you learn this business. What trends are you seeing in the business right now?

Keith Gillispie (25:57.559)
Yes.

Keith Gillispie (26:04.269)
Yep.

Keith Gillispie (26:11.118)
Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (26:17.871)
Too many people switching to AI. I swear to you. Yeah. just not, listen, people ask me all the time, hey Keith, you build this? And I love, I love, love, love, love, love getting requests. I listen to our users and genuinely, typically there’s only a couple of week delay from when they pitch me an idea.

John Harcar (26:21.486)
Too many people relying on that AI part automation?

Keith Gillispie (26:44.367)
Keith, it would be really nice. I’m gonna make this request to do this, that, or the other thing. Great, I go back to the dev team. We put out a, I forget what it’s called, like a scrum board or something like this, of how it’s gonna come out. Here’s phase one. Preliminary testing is done here. Then here’s phase two. This is minimum viable product. And then here’s the improvements that we plan on making in this order, phase three. And so we’ll do that. So I don’t wanna…

Pretend like I don’t listen to our clients. Like it’s largely built by our clients and all of the improvements that we’ve made haven’t been my ideas, it’s been their ideas. However, the biggest theme, asked me, trends, Keith, can you have AI do this? Keith, can you have AI do that? So here’s the thing. Yes, we can have AI tell you the best entrance and the best exit and even give you a justification for why. I’ve literally built this in, for example, I just built out a…

John Harcar (27:16.344)
Sure, yeah.

Keith Gillispie (27:43.575)
our rental analyzer in December of 2024. And it looks at, you know, what is the DSCR ratio? What is your cap rate? What is your cash flow? And it tells you deal or no deal. And it gives you a justification for why or why not if it’s not a deal, right? And this is wonderful. However, truth be told, this can become enabling where you don’t know

a smokin’ deal if it slapped you in the motherfreakin’ face because you’re not in front of your computer with your AI telling you if it’s a deal or not. I don’t want to enable people like that. I want them to invest in their education and know how to talk to a seller.

John Harcar (28:19.64)
Yep.

John Harcar (28:23.724)
I look at it, I look at it like ways, know, ways that the guy, the, the, app that you give it. And my wife sometimes gets lost when ways isn’t on it’s like, you, you were now you were relying on ways to get you to work. Don’t just remember where you went, you know? So, and, and that’s true. And it takes away some of that personal touch because AI might tell you it’s not a bad deal, but what happens when you talk to the seller and you really find that pain.

Keith Gillispie (28:28.472)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Keith Gillispie (28:35.789)
Yeah. Yeah.

Keith Gillispie (28:48.835)
Yeah, that’s absolutely right. There has to be a skill set within you, like within your heart, your mind, whatever, it has to be coming from you. Otherwise, I see it’s kind of laughable. These people who are like applying for a job and they’re in the interview and they’ll turn the voice thing on when their interviewer asks them a question and then they’ll read the prompt or they’ll read the answer of how to answer the question. It’s like, okay, yeah.

Go do that in person and you lose that ability. You can only do that because you’re hiding behind the screen and you have your phone up in front of the computer. This is disingenuous and literally that that’s quote-unquote skill set goes away the moment you have a face-to-face belly-to-belly interaction with somebody. You can’t fake that. So embody this skill. Work on you.

John Harcar (29:19.882)
so fast.

John Harcar (29:24.93)
Hmm.

John Harcar (29:35.625)
No, you can’t.

Man, we can go on for days, dude. A lot of tons of stuff to talk about. If anyone wants to get a hold of you or learn more about your CRM, wants to learn more about, and we didn’t get a chance to touch on your coaching, I know you do some coaching and stuff, but if anybody wants to really find out and talk more about you besides, I’ll put all your bios or your links in the notes, but how do they reach out to you? What’s the best way?

Keith Gillispie (29:57.839)
I would direct you to two places. The first is going to be my website. I just redid my demo video. It’s 23 minutes long, shows you exactly what we do, how we do it. I kind of pull back the curtain and show it to you. So our website is www.reiautomated.io forward slash demo. That’s going to show you a little bit about what we do behind the scenes and everything like that. And then you can always check out

John Harcar (30:25.23)
Perfect.

Keith Gillispie (30:26.959)
our YouTube or LinkedIn and that’s just my name at Keith underscore Gillespie

John Harcar (30:34.498)
Yeah, and like said, I got these on your bio, so we’ll go ahead and put those on the notes. you know, guys, I hope you get, know, take a minute to reach out to him. You know, really understand, know.

Coming from the old school days of all that cold calling and all that stuff, and now seeing the flood of automation comes in, mean, it’s really taking over and making things a lot easier as long as you have the right tools and the right equipment and the right guidance, right? So Keith, thank you very much, man. You dropped a bunch of nuggets. Never know, we might get another and do another one here.

Keith Gillispie (30:57.71)
Yes.

Keith Gillispie (31:01.411)
Thank you.

Keith Gillispie (31:05.931)
I would love to, it’d be great.

John Harcar (31:07.022)
Cool. Well, everyone, I hope you guys had a good time on this episode. Hope you learned a lot. Got a lot of good nuggets. And we’ll see you on the next episode. Cheers.