If you are obsessed with cold marketing and promotion because you believe it’s the only feasible way to help your business grow in today’s times, think again. The guest for this episode, Jay O’Brien, built an undefeatable real estate empire without any of that, thus breaking age-old myths with the principles of hard work and sincerity. Investing generously and gratefully in his existing customers from the beginning of his real estate career, Jay realized the massive growth he could achieve just through referrals and word-of-mouth marketing – and all he had to do was to respect and reward loyalty. As Client Giant’s Founder and Chief Day Maker, Jay helps “business professionals deepen relationships with their existing clients and partners to drive unparalleled repeat and referral business.”
(00:00:18) Investing in Clients for Long-Term Success
(00:01:01) Investing in Personalities for Sales Success
(00:06:26) The All-In Drive: Addiction to Work
(00:09:44) Finding Success in Real Estate
(00:15:08) Creating a Personalized and Memorable Real Estate Experience
(00:23:30) Personalized Automation for Client Care
(00:31:40) Embracing Uncomfortable Conversations for Real Estate Success
Transcript -
00:00:00 - Bill Risser
Hi, everybody. Welcome to another Real Estate Sessions rewind episode. This week, we're going back to November of 2022 with Jay O'Brien, the Client Giant founder and chief daymaker. If you're looking for a way to deepen relationships with your clients and drive, unparalleled, repeat, and referral business, you've come to the right place. Enjoy.
00:00:18 - Jay O'Brien
And I'd say when things are going really well, very important to not just ride that wave, but double down and invest in your people. And on the other side of things, when things aren't going so well, it's natural to claw back on expenses, right? I encourage everyone, whether it's Client Giant or anything you're doing, taking care of people or like charities you're donating to, whatever it is, I really encourage people not to claw back there because it's not an expense. It is an investment in so many different ways. And the solution to saving your business during a downtime is not abandoning your customers.
00:01:01 - Bill Risser
You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions podcast. And I'm your host, Bill Risser, executive Vice President, Strategic Partnerships with RateMyAgent, a digital marketing platform designed to help great agents harness the power of verified reviews. For more information, head on over to Ratemyagent.com. Listen in as I interview industry leaders and get their stories and journeys to the world of real estate. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 335 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As I always say, thank you so much for tuning in, and thank you so much for telling a friend today I'm going to be talking to Jay O'Brien. Jay is the co founder of Client Giant. I saw Jay speak at an imminent event back in 2018, and he talked about how he's providing seven star service in a three star world. And a big piece of that was really taking care of the customer in a very consistent way by delivering value added items to the transaction. I'm telling you, you've got to hear what this is all about. I'm not going to spill the beans here. I'll let you listen in and hear Jay's take on how to take care of clients, how to provide exceptional service, and how to get them talking about you without you even really trying. So let's get this thing started. Jay, welcome to the podcast.
00:02:17 - Jay O'Brien
Thanks for having me, Bill. I appreciate it.
00:02:19 - Bill Risser
Yeah, I met you well, I take that back. I learned of you in August of 2018 when you were doing a presentation for Inman, and it was a really cool presentation. I was an ambassador at the time. I know. I tweeted out a bunch of stuff about it. I thought it was very cool, and we'll get back to that. We will talk about that. I'd love to start, though, at the beginning with my guests. And for you, it's going to be I know you're based in Southern California, more specifically Orange County. Are you a native of SoCal?
00:02:52 - Jay O'Brien
I am. I've never left. If I ever leave it'll be to Hawaii, but I was born here in Orange County, and, yeah, I've never lived anywhere else.
00:03:01 - Bill Risser
Wow. I got to ask you this question, then. Dodgers or Angels? Because you're really close to the Angels, but the Dodgers have a thing.
00:03:08 - Jay O'Brien
Bill, you're not going to like my answer. Oh, no, but the answer is neither because neither of those teams play golf. I'm not a sports guy. I'm not a big fan of either. If I had to choose one, I'd say Angels because I grew up going to Angels games and stuff. So I enjoy going to a hockey game, a baseball game and what have you, but I couldn't tell you what's going on unless it's like the World Series or something got you. And even then it could be dicey.
00:03:40 - Bill Risser
Okay, well, let's switch then. Golf. So you played, like, in school, that kind of golf?
00:03:47 - Jay O'Brien
No, in fact, I used to play once or twice a year, like, on vacation, and it was fun enough, you have some beers with your friends out on a golf course, but in 2020, it was one of the few things you could go do. So I got very addicted to it, and now I play like, three times a week.
00:04:03 - Bill Risser
Nice.
00:04:04 - Jay O'Brien
So I'm addicted to the sport now.
00:04:07 - Bill Risser
And there's some great courses up your way, so I'm sure you've had some fun.
00:04:11 - Jay O'Brien
Yes, absolutely. Beautiful courses.
00:04:14 - Bill Risser
Yeah. Let's talk about a little bit just a little bit more about me because it is its own unique place. It's not La. It's not San Diego. It's Orange County. Besides, well, the amazing weather that Southern California enjoys. Tell me, what do you like best about where you grew up?
00:04:33 - Jay O'Brien
Yeah, one of the reasons it's hard to leave I mean, obviously the weather is the easiest one, but the convenience, I mean, I could go to an Angels game and then be home in 15 minutes. I could go to Disneyland, be home in 20 minutes, san Clemente, La, Long Beach, really all over the place. And in Orange County, it's kind of got the best of everything, especially in the last, I'd say, ten years. There's a big food scene that's popped up, so you don't need to go to La. To get the best restaurants or anything like that. You got great cocktail bars. Everything is really here, great beaches, but it's also very close to Big Bear if you wanted a mountain kind of vibe as well as the desert, like, it's it's so optimized that it's hard to leave it.
00:05:27 - Bill Risser
Well, you got to talk about Balboa Island then. If you're talking about a place that's kind of cool and got some great stuff and really just blown up over the years. Right? Yeah, that's a cool place.
00:05:36 - Jay O'Brien
Yeah, Balboa Island. And also, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Lido Marina in Newport Beach, but that area, it's one of the few harbors I've seen that is just, like, really beautiful. And they did a great job with this one stretch that used to be kind of desolate and blown out. And they did a whole development there. And they've got great restaurants, great shopping. All the stuff right there on the marina. So, yeah, I mean, if you're in Newport Beach, you grab a Duffy, you out with your friends. It's good living.
00:06:04 - Bill Risser
Yeah, I like that. Well, let's talk about business a little bit. You become a realtor around 2010, I think, looking at your history, but you had to be doing something before that. It seems like real estate is always a second gig, or sometimes third gig for some people. What were you doing before?
00:06:21 - Jay O'Brien
Yeah. How much time do you have?
00:06:23 - Bill Risser
As much as you need.
00:06:26 - Jay O'Brien
Yeah. I mean, I've kind of always been addicted to work. I'm a type A personality through and through, so anything I do, like golf, I just go nuts for. So my first job ever, you're going to laugh. I was nine years old, no bullshit. So I went to my local video store, the video rental place, and I begged the owner, Kevin, to give me a job. And he told me a million times, you're too young to work. You can't work here. I was like, I'll work for free. I just want to work here. And eventually I brought my mom in, and she's like, Look, I don't know what to tell you. He wants to work here, he'll work here. He'll do everything he's got to do, and he'll do it for free. And so that entire summer of my fourth grade summer, my mom dropped me off at 09:00 A.m. With a sack lunch. I did everything. I took money in the cashier. I built these cardboard cutouts. I was a full time employee. I worked till 05:00 p.m.. My mom would pick me up, and I did it five days a week, all summer for nothing. He would buy me lunch sometimes or let me take Nintendo games home, but I was just addicted to the work. And so when I was actually able to work when I was 14, that was the first job I could get with a worker's permit. I got a job as a caterer. So those jobs were brutal because there's a lot of manual labor, loading, like, semi trucks, going to company picnics, unloading, doing the whole setup, doing the lunch gig, packing up. So my mom would drop me off at 06:00 A.m. Placentia, and then she'd pick me up at 09:00 P.m. On the weekends. So I'd do that in my freshman, sophomore year of high school, and that was brutal, but I was working, and then from there on went Dairy Queen, Best Buy valet, and I never, ever had a gap in employment. Fast forward to college. I got my bachelor's degree in economics and business administration, and I left eight year tenure at Best Buy, went through their management program, everything great company and lots of good learnings from that company, and decided I wanted to get into corporate America. So 2010, I did that, and it was the only job I needed that required a college degree. And it was the worst job of my life. Wow. It was the most toxic, gnarly environment. I mean, just like backstabbing. I've never seen anything like it. And at that point, I'd been around the block. It wasn't like a green dude from college like, oh, what's this all about? I knew this is know, I stuck that through for about a year and a half. I was interviewing other places, and I got turned on to a lot of authors at that time from a buddy of mine that I was working with. Gary Vaynerchuk, Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, you know, who were just coming out, really, with their first books at the time. Probably not Seth Godin. But I got addicted to the idea that maybe it's not that I have the wrong job. Maybe it's that I don't want a job. Maybe I need to create a job for myself.
00:09:43 - Bill Risser
There you go.
00:09:44 - Jay O'Brien
And one of the easiest paths I shouldn't say easiest, I should say the lowest barriers to entry to do that is real estate. It's one of the few occupations that you can get into for very little money in terms of getting a license and getting up on your feet. You can do a lot of the grind through your hard work as opposed to needing money to get started. And what I did was I got licensed. A friend of a friend who survived through the recession was opening up a remax brokerage. I talked with him, and I became his very first agent. And basically I knew it was going to be a grind to make that jump. And so I left my corporate job to go back to Best Buy, which was very humbling. And the reason I did that was because if you work retail, you can work all hours, right? You can work super early. You could work really late. So I could still get 8 hours a day, five days a week with a super flexible schedule while doing real estate 8 hours a day. So that's what I did. I started the day at 06:00 A.m.. I worked about till 02:00 P.m. Doing real estate. And then I'd go to Best Buy and work there until ten or eleven at night. And I did that for eight months until finally it got to a point where I had closed, I think, three deals in those eight months. And so I had enough to say, okay, I'm going to make this leap. And then in the next eight months, I did like 14 deals. So it made a lot of sense to take that time and put it into real estate. And that was 2011.
00:11:33 - Bill Risser
2012 ish nine year old Jay came back and decided to do whatever it took to get it working.
00:11:41 - Jay O'Brien
Yeah, I'm no stranger to the hard work. That's awesome.
00:11:44 - Bill Risser
I love that. I want to bring up that inman Connect again. It was in August. Was it in San Francisco, or was it the first one in Vegas? It might have been San Francisco.
00:11:54 - Jay O'Brien
The last one, if you're talking about August 2018, that was San Francisco, and I had done another inman Talk prior to that January 2018 in New York.
00:12:04 - Bill Risser
Okay, got you. So I think it was the San Francisco one I saw. And yeah, first of all, how did you get the gig to give the Talk at? I mean, it's not a closed space, but they don't put out know calls for speakers. Generally. Somebody knows somebody. How did you get that connection first?
00:12:25 - Jay O'Brien
Yeah, so this path was basically this kind of all ties together. So I'll rewind when I became a full time real estate agent. You do everything you can. You do anything and everything for a deal, right? I mean, I was going back to the nine year old Jay, like Grinder. I would go on Craigslist on Friday nights, and I'd look up every garage sale in the area, and then I'd run those addresses against tax records to see if that person owned or rented their house. And then I'd just say, hey, if they're having a garage sale, maybe they're looking to sell their house.
00:12:56 - Jay O'Brien
And then I'd reach out to all those people and doorknock them and just see what I could shake loose. Now, nothing ever came of it, but that's not the point. The point is you have to try everything, right? So I was trying everything, doing everything. And like many people do, once you close a deal, you ask for a review, hopefully you post that on your website, it goes on yelp, Zillow, whatever.
00:13:18 - Jay O'Brien
And after a couple of years of this, it was about 2013, 2014, when I think a lot of agents I mean, not just agents, people in every industry, people in life suffer from imposter syndrome, right? So even when you're doing well, you think, yeah, but I'm not that great. I'm going to get figured out. You know what I mean? And for me, it was very real, because at the end of the day, if you said, why hire Jay instead of the agent down the street? You could say whatever you want, I'm more knowledgeable, I have better service, whatever. But it's like, yeah, I mean, to the layman who's just online, you're the know, and you might never even get to have that conversation, which is, I guess, even more of the yeah.
00:14:07 - Jay O'Brien
So I started to comb through these reviews, these five star reviews on Zillow of myself, right, to see what are people saying? Is there anything unique in there that they actually do perceive to be different above and beyond the competition? So there's things that are commending me for how punctual I am organized knowledgeable about the area, and I'm like, Shit, man, I'm in trouble. Anyone could do those things, right? So it really kind of put things to the test where I was thinking, okay, well, what are things I can implement that are going to make my business truly defensible? Where not only can I grow the business and sell more homes every year and see success there, but be defensible so that some of these tech companies that are coming in aren't going to wipe me off the face of the planet. And it ultimately came down to remembering my first real estate experience, which was awful. And it just boiled down to customer service.
00:15:08 - Jay O'Brien
When we go to an insane hotel, like an Amon resort or like a Ritz Carlton or something, where they see every detail, montage, where there's gifts in your room when you get back from the pool and they've just covered every little detail. It makes you feel special. It makes you feel a certain way, you remember it. And when you're made to feel special, you'll tell anyone who will listen. And I figured, well, I already do that in a lot of segments of my life. I'm a very philanthropic person. I believe overly generous with my time and money, and that's just in my nature. It's how I was brought up.
00:15:45 - Jay O'Brien
And I think I'll just double, triple, quadruple down on that in the real estate space. So I started to dissect, what would that look like? What would it look like to just have an insane experience? And I started to write down pain points. What sucks about moving, buying moving boxes sucks when you go to U Haul or Home Depot. That's annoying. It's costly, but it's more annoying. It might not even fit in your car. Transferring your utilities and your forwarding of address and all these things and the stress that it carries all the while while the loan's going on, all these things.
00:16:19 - Jay O'Brien
So I just started thinking, what are ways to fill the pits and raise the peaks through a customer journey with me when they hire me? And so I started to implement a lot of those things. And so there'd be things going out to my clients constantly. None of it had any marketing that would tie back to me. None of it had any branding on it. It was just genuine, thoughtful things. The way I would treat my friends to help the experience be amazing, like a montage. So fast forward and this starts to really pick up steam. And my clients are posting all about it on Instagram and social media tagging me, and I'm talking 30 days post close.
00:16:58 - Jay O'Brien
They would get a call from my favorite local restaurant. Hey, congratulations on the sale or purchase of your home from 30 days ago. Jay wants to send you and your husband, you and your wife, you and whoever, dinner for two on him, round trip transportation included. When can you come? And that would all get done in 30 days. Post closed. They're taking pictures of themselves having dinner. Tagging me all things I didn't ask for, because I just really wanted to make the experience amazing. But it doesn't take a genius to know that what goes around comes around. And pretty soon, this was fueling an army of repeat and referral business from Raving fans. Raving fans that turned passive referrals of what once was probably, yeah, you should use Jay. He was great.
00:17:40 - Jay O'Brien
This is the only guy you should call. If you're thinking about working with someone else, you're wrong, hire him kind of stuff. So that helped thrive the business. This is all a long winded way of getting to answering your question. No worries. So in 2015, that kind of put a few things on the map for me, and I was named 30 under 30 by the National Association of Realtors, summer of 2015.
00:18:02 - Jay O'Brien
So...
