Partner & Profit Podcast

Levi Lascsak lost his entire business in 2020 with nothing to fall back on. Within his first year as a brand-new real estate agent, he'd closed 64 transactions worth $33.5 million, and $1 million of that was commission.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Levi Lascsak, real estate agent, YouTube creator, and author of Passive Prospecting, to break down exactly how he built an entire real estate business from a single YouTube channel, starting with almost no following, zero sales experience, and a personality that never wanted to be a typical door-knocking, hand-shaking agent in the first place.

Levi walks through the actual mechanics behind it: why he picked YouTube when nobody in real estate was using it, the concept of parasocial relationships and why it's the real reason strangers trust him enough to call, and the exact content system he still uses today to dominate an entire market.

Here's what we got into:

• Losing his financial services business overnight in 2020, and reluctantly moving into real estate at 41 with no other options left - 00:54
• Why he chose YouTube specifically because nobody else in real estate was using it, and spent 2 months studying the platform before posting a single video - 03:50
• Getting his first phone call after just 30 days, from a million-dollar client, with only 48 subscribers on his channel - 06:16
• Closing 64 transactions and $33.5 million in volume in his very first year, after a first quarter with nothing at all - 05:49
• The concept of parasocial relationships, and why people buy from creators the same way they root for their favorite sitcom character - 09:04
• Why he never talks about himself on camera, and only earns the right to make an ask after delivering value repeatedly - 14:33
• His exact content system: 4 repeatable video buckets and how to build a searchable, bingeable library for any niche or industry - 19:22
• A simple, step-by-step plan for building a YouTube channel around a full-time job or family, without quitting anything first - 24:28

Whether you're in real estate or any other relationship-driven business, this episode is a real blueprint for building trust with strangers at scale, long before they ever pick up the phone.

Connect with Levi Lascsak:
Get the book Passive Prospecting on Amazon or grab the ebook version at passiveprospecting.com.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode if it brought you value!

Jason Cheperdak made his first $1 million at 30 years old, half of it from a real estate team, the other half from a job at Target that almost nobody in his real estate life knew about.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Jason Cheperdak, founder of Shepherd Homes Group, now the #1 real estate team in the DMV (Maryland, DC, and Virginia). Jason breaks down the philosophy and systems behind a team known for insane agent retention, insane personal production, and a culture that runs on zero drama and zero excuses plus how he still finds time to personally sell around 100 houses a year, run a 1,000-door property management company, and flip houses on the side.

Here's what we got into:

• Jason's backstory, a Target store manager during COVID who got licensed almost by accident, sold nothing for 6 months, then closed 9 homes and never looked back - 01:16
• Hitting his first $150 million year and his first $1 million personal income at 30, split between real estate and his Target paycheck - 02:25
• Why he tells his entire team that being a "salesperson" is a bad idea in this industry - 05:23
• How his team pairs the right agent with the right client by knowing their own people deeply, not by profiling the consumer - 07:17
• Selling $97.7 million individually last year, and why staying in the business himself is what actually builds trust with his agents - 08:27
• Why he keeps business and personal life deliberately separate, and how winning together builds the relationship first - 09:34
• His actual daily schedule, working 9am to 9:30pm most days, with Sunday morning as his only real break - 11:24
• The 3 pillars of consistency (vision, personal, and culture) he credits for his team's growth - 14:24
• The 4 non-negotiable culture rules: zero drama, zero assumptions, radical authenticity, and no complaining without a solution - 15:03
• His 3-step process for letting someone go, where the person often ends up firing themselves - 16:28
• Why trust is all-or-nothing in his world, with zero grace once it's broken - 18:53

Whether you're building a real estate team, managing a growing agent roster or just trying to build a business people don't want to leave, this conversation is full of specific, repeatable systems you can use immediately.

Connect with Jason:
Follow Jason on Instagram (@jasoncheperdak) for real estate tips and tricks and ask about his free real estate course for agents struggling with production.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode if it brought you value!

Most real estate agents are so focused on getting more leads that they completely ignore the goldmine already sitting in their database. Ryan Young built a team selling around 500 homes a year and a tech company working with around 3,000 real estate teams to solve exactly that problem and in this episode he is laying out the entire philosophy.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Ryan Young, team leader of the Young Team in Northeast Ohio and founder of Fello, to talk about what separates the top real estate teams from everyone else, why contribution beats commission breath every single time, and how genuine curiosity is the most underrated relationship tool in real estate today.

Ryan also opens up about his journey from culinary school at the Culinary Institute of America to building a listing-heavy real estate team with his parents to launching a tech platform now used by over 50% of the Realtor Top 1,000. This is a conversation about contribution, curiosity, and building something that lasts.

Here is what you will learn in this episode:

• How Ryan went from culinary school to building a real estate team selling around 500 homes a year and founding Fello - 01:00
• Why the best way to turn relationships into revenue is to stop trying to monetize them - 07:30
• How Fello identifies homeowners inside your buyer lead database and turns them into listing opportunities - 01:30
• Why putting too much pressure on the if versus when conversation is costing real estate agents listings every single day - 24:07
• How internalizing your script so deeply that you stop thinking about it is the key to having genuine human conversations with prospects - 22:39
• Why most real estate agents are filling a leaky bucket with new leads instead of patching the holes they already have - 25:32
• How Ryan seeks out forward-thinking relationships with people who push him toward where he wants to go - 12:31
• Why sharing personal passions like cooking and running on social media builds deeper real estate business relationships than posting about listings - 18:55
• Why commitment gets you in the door but contribution is what keeps you in - 27:25

Whether you are a solo agent, team leader or broker owner, this episode is a reminder that the leads you already have and the relationships you have already built are worth far more than anything new you could buy.

Connect with Ryan Young:
Reach out directly at [email protected] or visit fello.ai to learn more about how Fello helps real estate teams generate listings from their existing database.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode if it brought you value!

Justin Benson's company has analyzed 3 million real estate and mortgage sales calls, not to grade tone or coach scripts but to find out, statistically, what actually separates the deals that close from the ones that don't.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Justin Benson, founder of Shilo, a conversational AI platform built for real estate and mortgage teams, to break down the data-backed tips his company has uncovered for closing more deals. Justin shares which habits actually move the needle, which ones don't hold up under real data and where his team drew an ethical line on what the AI could tell them about a person.

Justin also shares his own unlikely path here: a biochem major who dropped out of med school, built and sold a tech company, ran a real estate team, got signed to a record label off a song written for his dying father and eventually landed on building AI for the real estate industry he now calls home.

Here's what we got into:

• Justin's winding path: biochem major, dropped out of med school, a real estate team, and a signed record deal off a song written for his father - 01:02
• Why setting a defined next step on the first or second call is the strongest predictor of long-term deal success, and the 74% drop-off Gong found when teams skip it - 04:42
• The restaurant cancellation study - how one word change to a confirmation script cut no-shows dramatically overnight - 05:48
• The 3x increase in closing rates Shilo found across 7,000 users when a clear next step gets set early - 07:18
• Why asking 9 or more discovery questions on a call outweighs even asking for the appointment - 07:50
• The moral line Justin's team drew when they realized how much they could infer about a person's fears and psychology after just 10 calls - 11:08
• Whether routing leads by personality fit could outperform how most teams distribute leads today - 13:22
• The two unglamorous values Justin says have quietly built every company he's ever run -  16:51

Whether you're leading a real estate team, scaling a brokerage or just trying to close more deals with fewer wasted conversations, this episode hands you real data you can put to use immediately.

Connect with Justin Benson:
Find him on Instagram at @JustinBenson or learn more about Shilo at shilo.ai.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode if it brought you value!

Most agents assume you need a big ad budget to keep the leads coming. Alec Cheplak has built two companies from zero to a million dollars without ever buying a single lead and in this episode, he breaks down exactly how.

On this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Alec Cheplak, marketing coach and co-founder of Cheplak Wellness, to unpack the system he now runs for top real estate team leaders across North America: how he turns borrowed audiences into hundreds of new leads a month, fills event rooms in cities he's never even visited and converts cold viewers into buyers live, on camera, during his webinars.

Alec also shares how he got here, a path that runs through finding sobriety alongside his father through fitness, a decade as a personal trainer working 12-to-16-hour days, a stint smiling-and-dialing timeshares out of a Wyndham boiler room and one accidental favor for a friend, Dustin Runyon, that turned into a marketing coaching business now serving real estate team leaders, mortgage companies and tech firms nationwide.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• How a decade in personal training and a boiler-room sales job led to launching Cheplak Wellness from $0 to $1 million in under 20 months then a marketing company that hit $1 million in under 12 - 00:54
• Why finding your "who" has to come before any of the tactics and how Alec had to build credibility in an industry he'd never worked in - 04:14
• The lead-trading system that took him from 600 leads in 18 months to nearly 4,000 leads in 16 months, including 432 new leads in his most recent 30 days alone - 04:57
• Why it's not just about people saying you're great, it's about who says it and how borrowing the right person's audience can change everything overnight - 08:16
• Why most of the money in a webinar is made or lost in the marketing before and after it, not during the pitch itself - 11:03
• The exact structure of Alec's monthly webinar, from the opening selfie that turns attendees into live promoters to the teaching format that keeps drop-off rates low - 11:24
• How Alec uses existing clients and supporters inside his webinars as live social proof so they end up selling for him in the comments - 17:10
• The real-time hard close Alec ran on a longtime lead, live in front of the entire audience - 17:41
• Why speaking to a room should sound exactly like speaking to one person and what happens the moment you stop doing that - 20:00

Whether you're a solo agent, a team leader or a broker-owner, this conversation is a real look at how to build an audience, trade leads the right way and grow through webinars and live events without losing what makes people trust you in the first place.

Download Alec’s free marketing resource at www.cheplakmarketing.com/download.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode if it brought you value!

Most agents spend all their time networking inside real estate. Josue Soto spent 20 years proving that the most powerful connections happen everywhere else.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with his longtime friend Josue Soto, co-founder of the Married in Real Estate brand, team leader, and 20-year industry veteran, to talk about the relationship philosophy and personal growth mindset that has taken his business from local to global. Josue and his wife Rebecca have built a team, a brand, two books, a podcast, and a referral network that now spans Dubai, Spain, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and beyond, all by simply showing up with a giving heart and getting into rooms that feel uncomfortable.

This is a conversation about partnerships, personal branding, faith, running, and what it really takes to build a network that lasts.

Here is what you will learn in this episode:

• How Josue and Rebecca built the Married in Real Estate brand and what keeps their partnership strong after 20 years - 02:38
• Why understanding each other's strengths is the foundation of any great business or personal partnership - 03:33
• The Rule of 100 and how 15 minutes of focused daily discipline puts you ahead of 95% of people - 04:17
• Why there is no such thing as time blocking when you are truly building a business - 05:33
• How Josue uses running and personal interests to build relationships that convert into real business - 15:53
• Why going into a room and saying nothing is sometimes the most powerful networking move - 00:00
• How waiting two hours before a marathon corral led to 30 new professional connections and a relationship that is still active today - 20:02
• Why building relationships around personal life rather than transactions creates deeper and more lasting business connections - 21:25
• What kind of partners Josue is actively looking for and how to get on his calendar - 24:22

Whether you are a solo agent, team leader or broker owner, this episode is a reminder that your network is your net worth and that the most valuable connections are often made in the most unexpected places.

Connect with Josue Soto:
Josue is always open to new partnerships including title companies, lenders, home inspectors, roofing companies and anyone looking to collaborate. Reach out to connect and get on his calendar.

Facebook | Instagram | Married in Real Estate

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode if it brought you value!

What if your leads could get every question answered before they ever talked to you and show up to that first conversation already ready to move forward? That is exactly what Riley Vanderkaay and his team at Speculo are building for real estate agents right now.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Riley Vanderkaay, founder of Speculo, to talk about how agentic AI is transforming lead nurture, relationship building, and the way real estate professionals convert conversations into closings. Riley also opens up about his entrepreneurial journey from carrying golf bags at 10 years old during the 2008 recession to bartending through Ohio State to cold calling a tech founder and convincing him to merge his AI technology into Speculo instead of taking the VC route.

This episode goes deep on what AI actually means for relationship driven industries like real estate, why consumers are smarter than ever, and why the agents who embrace technology without losing the human touch are the ones who will thrive.

Here is what you will learn in this episode:

• How Riley went from caddying and bartending to founding one of real estate's most exciting AI companies - 00:57
• What agentic AI actually is and why it is fundamentally different from tools like ChatGPT - 06:06
• Why AI has created a high expectation consumer and what real estate agents need to do about it - 07:00
• How Speculo's AI nurtures leads and gets them ready to talk before agents ever pick up the phone - 05:20
• Why hallucinations happen in AI and how the right data and prompting prevents them - 09:48
• How to use the information AI gathers to have better and more trusted conversations with clients - 15:21
• What most agents get wrong when they finally connect with a warmed up lead - 15:59
• Why giving people relevant answers instantly creates more demand for human connection, not less - 08:15
• How relevant value exchanged between two people is the one thing AI will never replace - 20:51

Whether you are a solo agent, team leader or broker owner, this episode is packed with perspective on how AI can strengthen your pipeline, help you provide better service and build the kind of client relationships that actually last in today's market.

Connect with Riley Vanderkaay and Speculo:
Want to experience the product for yourself? Head over to the Speculo.ai, drop your phone number in and their AI will reach out and walk you through what it can do. You can also catch Riley at industry events where he loves connecting with people and talking about how to integrate AI into their business.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode if it brought you value!

How do you turn relationships into revenue in today’s fast-changing real estate market? In this powerful episode, property management coach and consultant Jason Hull shares the secrets to deep, authentic connection as the foundation of business growth.

Key topics include:

• The journey from struggling web designer to the world’s leading property management coach - 00:52
• How revamping company branding, pricing, and processes transformed over 322 property management businesses - 06:21
• The impact of AI on real estate marketing and why meaningful, in-person relationships are more valuable than ever - 08:01
• Going deep vs. going wide: why scalable success comes from doing the unscalable, like thoughtful onboarding and personalized client touchpoints - 10:00
• Real estate team gifts, contribution, and the “giftology” strategy for long-term loyalty and client referrals - 17:02
• The four reasons to start a business beyond profit: fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support and why aligning with these drives lasting success - 24:49

Hear inspiring stories of mentorship, overcoming adversity, and the mindset shifts behind real estate and property management growth.

Whether you’re an agent, team leader or entrepreneur, you’ll leave with actionable strategies to deepen relationships, maximize your marketing, and build a business that’s both profitable and personally fulfilling.

Resources mentioned:

• DoorGrow.com: Property management business growth coaching and consulting
• Key books: “Giftology,” “The Goal,” “Profit First”

Connect with Jason Hull:
Social media: @kingjasonhull

Subscribe, rate and review if you want more real estate marketing and partnership insights designed to help you partner and profit!

What if the key to building a thriving real estate business was not closing more deals but giving more without expecting anything in return? That is exactly how David Kurz has built one of the most respected networks in the industry over 21 years.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with David Kurz, Marine Corps veteran, real estate team leader with LPT and partner at World Title and PRMG Mortgage, to talk about the relationship philosophy and partnership strategies that have driven his career across multiple states and business ventures.

David gets candid about a major pivot he made heading into 2026, shutting down his coaching academy, cutting back his calendar, and becoming incredibly selective about who gets his time and energy. It is a conversation packed with hard-earned wisdom for any real estate agent, team leader, or broker who wants to build a business that lasts.

Here is what you will learn in this episode:

• Why David built his entire business by getting out of his local bubble and traveling to meet people - 03:27
• How giving with zero expectation creates an abundance of people who naturally want to see you win - 06:52
• The one question David asks himself that keeps him in a contribution mindset - 05:24
• Why he made 2026 more purposeful by getting selective about who gets his time and energy - 09:59
• How he shut down a coaching program with nearly a thousand members and what it freed up for him - 10:53
• How David handles agents who leave his organization without ever burning the bridge - 15:19
• Why putting your phone on the table face down still sends the wrong message - 17:58
• The exact process David uses to vet a partner before committing to any joint venture - 20:45
• How real estate agents can earn more by owning a piece of the ancillary businesses they already refer to - 24:08

Connect with David Kurz to learn more about mortgage branch opportunities and title partnerships in your market.

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode if it brought you value!

Most entrepreneurs are so focused on the sale that they completely miss what actually builds a lasting brand: integrity and the persistence to see it through even when nobody is saying yes.

In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise is joined by Markus Kaulius, founder of Magnum Nutraceuticals, bestselling author, and founder of Five Talent Capital. Markus spent over 25 years building one of the most respected supplement brands in the world before exiting three years ago. Now he invests in entrepreneurs and teaches people how money really works at the highest levels.

This is a conversation about way more than supplements. Markus opens up about growing up poor, being bullied, and using those early struggles to fuel a business career built on integrity, relentless persistence, and genuine relationships. He shares the exact mindset and daily habits that carried him through the hardest years of building Magnum and the lessons he wishes he had known before his exit.

Here is what you will learn in this episode:

• Why five years of rejection from his top partner ended up becoming his greatest business story - 11:03
• The 80/20 client rule and why cutting the wrong people transforms your energy and revenue - 10:03
• How asking for a favor instead of the sale completely changes the dynamic of a business relationship - 21:16
• Why protecting your energy is the most underrated business strategy - 25:09
• The daily routine Markus used while building Magnum to consistently show up at his best - 18:00
• What nobody prepares you for when you exit a business and how to prepare for it - 07:11
• How billionaires actually invest and the one rule Markus never breaks - 29:46

Connect with Markus Kaulius and learn more about his investment philosophy at fivetalentcapital.co

Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode if it brought you value!