Partner & Profit Podcast

Gavin Ekstrom has been in the mortgage business since 1993. He still originates today while also running a branch and a region, but the way he builds relationships with real estate agents looks a little different than the traditional loan officer model. Instead of relying entirely on one-on-one meetings, Gavin has built a one-to-many approach around educational events. What started as lunch-and-le...

Ricky Carruth has had quite a journey in real estate. He made his first million, lost it all during the housing crash, and eventually rebuilt his business to become the number one agent in his market for eight years. He also became the number one RE/MAX agent in Alabama for three different years. Over his career, he closed 1,000 properties as a solo agent before retiring from sales in 2022 to focu...

Dave Fanale has spent more than 40 years in real estate. He’s built properties, owned a brokerage for 21 years, invested and flipped homes, and today works as a growth manager with the Align team while helping agents grow their businesses. Through all of it, one question has stayed pretty consistent: What can I do to help you? In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant sits down wi...

You can have the right 10 people in a room and have a $5,000 to $50,000 day. Matt Fagioli and I spent some time unpacking why events can be such a powerful way to build relationships and grow a business. Matt has been in and around real estate for about 25 years. He started as an agent, built a top-10 team in his state, sold the team, and later moved into the technology and industry side of the bu...

Ricardo Bueno has spent more than a decade in real estate tech building partnerships, communities and customer experiences for companies including Diverse Solutions and Follow Up Boss. His approach goes beyond selling the product. Ricardo believes customer adoption and retention deserve just as much attention as acquiring the customer in the first place. Educate people. Help them get more value fr...

Aaron Martinez has been making videos online since he was nine years old. By 15, he had received his first check from YouTube. Today, his work sits at the intersection of video content, organic marketing and paid advertising.  In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant and Aaron dig into what actually gets someone from watching your content to becoming a customer. Aaron explains wh...

Lisa Chinatti sold 8 homes in 2015. One year later, she sold 81. The shift wasn’t one magic strategy. Lisa got serious about the business, learned how lead generation worked, figured out online lead conversion, and as she sold more, her confidence grew with it. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant and Lisa get into what happened next: building deeper relationships, earning tr...

Justin Nelson has spent nearly 15 years in real estate and business, and over the last six years has grown his virtual assistant company to nearly 12,000 placements across roughly 5,000 business owners.  But some of the most interesting ways he uses virtual assistants have nothing to do with cold calling or checking tasks off a list. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant and J...

Josh Orzech is the Regional Operations Director at Enercare, managing businesses in Calgary and Winnipeg under A1 Chesney and Winnipeg Supply. He’s spent 23 years with Enercare and its predecessor companies and has built some incredibly productive partnerships along the way including one with a Calgary real estate office of 80 agents where he gives partners his personal cell number and makes it a...

Luke Acree runs Reminder Media, a marketing company that has helped over 160,000 small businesses stay top of mind with their database through print and digital marketing. His own real estate team is the number one midsize team in Virginia, and 54% of their deals come from referrals. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant and Luke get into why most agents are losing clients the...

Tara Limbird told her husband starting a real estate team in 2010 was an absolutely terrible idea. He did it anyway. She came along. And together they built one of the top real estate teams in Arkansas with agents who have stayed on the team for 9 and 12 years in an industry where retention is almost unheard of. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant and Tara get into what it a...

Daniel Beer didn't like his job at 23. So he ran straight into real estate, spent years making mistakes, not being in the right rooms and not understanding what he could actually build. Then he figured it out. He built what became eXp Realty's number one producing team across 60,000 agents. Then partnered with the team that eventually passed him. Last year Whissel Beer Group sold over 1,...

Geoff Talbot started as a veterinary surgeon, ended up in the entertainment business in the U.S., and eventually built a business using the internet to build relationships, help people tell their stories, find their audience and grow their businesses.  In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant and Geoff get into how to use social media to start actual conversations and turn those...

Bill Davis spent nine years as an agent on someone else’s team before starting his own. Now 16 years into real estate, he’s built one of eXp’s top teams but the path there wasn’t quick or straightforward.  In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Bill to talk about what he learned from those nine years, why chasing the commission early in his career hurt his c...

Nelson Quest built AgentFire from a mattress on the floor of his parents' house. No employees until 2015. Today he has thousands of clients and 80 employees. But this conversation isn't really about that. In this episode of Partner & Profit podcast, Grant and Nelson get into what most business conversations avoid entirely. The loss of authenticity in a world drowning in AI content, w...

Aaron Wuthrich once got a lead, called them within minutes, and got told to stop calling. That's what happens when you're one of ten companies bidding on the same purchased lead. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise talks with Aaron, owner of Absolute Moving and Delivery out of Calgary, Alberta, about the difference between chasing bought leads and building rea...

Real estate sales, communication and trust-building take center stage in this episode with Renee Funk, co-founder of The Funk Collection in Orlando, Florida, and a sales communication coach who trains real estate agents and teams across the country. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Renee to unpack what most agents get wrong the second they walk into a...

Isaiah Colton's AI agent made 671 phone calls in two hours. It booked 7 appointments, and the follow-up alone generated dozens of additional inbound calls, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional outbound sales team. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Isaiah, a 14-year real estate veteran who built and exited a brokerage before founding an AI-pow...

Five and a half years ago, Koby Sway's real estate team had about 10 agents doing roughly 300 units a year. Today, that same team runs four separate businesses, real estate, mortgage, insurance, and title, with 60 agents closing around 1,000 units annually. In this episode of the Partner & Profit Podcast, Grant Wise sits down with Koby Sway of the Briley Team to unpack how a former 20-yea...

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 do...

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 dow...

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, G...

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...

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 f...

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...