I'm Wes Snow, president and CEO of Ascendix Technologies, a CRM product and Consulting Services Partner in the commercial real estate space. We're a certified Consulting partner for brands like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and work with countless other CRM tools over 26-year history. We spent the last 16 years devoted to working with commercial real estate brokerages across the globe including tenant rep, landlord rep, and investment sales brokerages. As well as Capital Markets firms or what might also be also be referred to as commercial mortgage brokerages which is the focus of our discussion. Today we are facilitating a discussion with Revel Stark, the Director of Business Development at Innovative Capital Commercial about some of the work we've done with them on this technology front. Hello Revel!
Revel: Good afternoon, Wes! Wes: How about we have you introduce yourself formally and the firm Innovative Capital. Just get started that way. Revel: My name is Revel Stark I'm with Innovative Capital. We specialize in commercial lending and leverage everything from private money to institutional capital in order to provide our clients really the right loan for their business. So when you're working with us, you're gaining the knowledge that we have amongst our team which a lot of us are previous commercial bankers really wanted to provide more options to their clients and more solutions. You're also leveraging our
network of lenders, our volume of business that we introduce to those lenders and the technology that we've built with Ascendix to really provide our clients a better lending solution. Wes: So you probably partially answered this question in those opening remarks, but obviously this is about technology in the commercial real estate sector. And if you don't mind, maybe more acutely defining some of the fundamental issues and results that you were hoping to address or achieve by leveraging technology? That would be helpful for the audience - just kind of knowing where we started and we'll talk about where we ended up. Revel: When we started this process, we looked at really the pain points that we were experiencing as an organization and as as a commercial lending broker. I mean, ultimately, we're helping people
that are looking for capital and introducing to the people that have the capital. And the better that we can serve the borrower and the lender. You know we're doing our job. So, ultimately, in the beginning of it was like: " Well, hey, how do we house all this information of our lenders and our borrowers? We obviously need a CRM to do that, right? How do we continuously market to our clients so that they remember that we exist and we don't talk to them one day and then the next day they forget that we're an organization or forget that we can provide solutions to help them, right? So, obviously the answer is we needed a robust CRM. So we started shopping around for
the different CRMs and we're recommended to really take a hard look at Salesforce. Salesforce isn't the most cost effective option, but in the world of fintech it's it's definitely one of the best if not the best the ecosystem around Salesforce is very robust and really it comes down to the challenge of connecting all those technology solutions within your tech stacks, so they work well you know for not only your internal team but also anyone engaging that system. So everything from our marketing strategy to bringing in our clients and all their loan documents, their loan application, everything is built in one system so that we can create efficiency within that system and ultimately speed and obviously anyone that's looking for money would like to have that money you know sooner than later, of course. Wes: Excellent, thank you. There was a comment about marketing and I do want to get back to that but before I do: you know we've been doing this for 26 years and there's always this measurement stick of if we're going to invest this in technology what's the return on investment? And it's candidly been a very elusive goal for many to achieve. In your opinion and, perhaps, in your experience,
what do you think needs to be in place in order to maximize the chances of getting a solid return on investment on this technology? Revel: You know, it's definitely a challenge. You know first when you're building the technology you know you're telling the software what do you want what do you want it to do, right? And we're working hand in hand with Ascendix to ultimately create strategies within software to serve our loan officers and help them achieve more bandwidth, so they can take on more clients. they can do more loans, and ultimately drive more revenue. So one of the biggest challenges that we have is really only creating the tech, right, which that seems to be an easier challenge at this point in time but the one of the harder challenges is to get your team to adopt the tech ,so that they can ultimately achieve that return on investment that you're looking for. So in our personal scenario we
have leads being developed through our marketing efforts, and then we're handing those leads over to our sales teams, and now we've identified the new challenge which is "hey, how do we process these leads most effectively? How do we engage these new referral partners or borrower contacts and ultimately move them through a process of a) achieving that they know we exist; b) achieving if they understand our value proposition, right? And then gaining their trust over time so that they refer us business or they come to us to you know serve a loan request that they have, so that we can you know, hopefully, really impress them through that process and they want to not only come back and do it again with this, but also you know bring some friends, bring some referrals. So it's really the adoption of taking new strategies and marrying it to people that have ultimately run a race, one specific way. You know, in the past, they're used to running the race on you know their own two feet and you're giving them ultimately you know, for example, an e-bike, where they can run it faster and more easily, and you know smell the roses along the way, if you will, as they're you know cruising around on e-bike. So it's just it's breaking down those concepts to them and hopefully having really a growth mindset to so they pick up the tech and start utilizing it to achieve that return on investment. Wes: Yeah, married to that and maybe going off
scripture a little bit. I think one of the lessons that we've learned doing this for years is that if anything we're in the change management business they're analog and very manual ways in which people are doing business today and we're trying to make them better by leveraging technology. But that's necessarily change and we're moving some people's cheese. In your mind's eye you know what are you doing to make that change management easier and more consumable for your users as you continue to progress this technology roll out? Revel: I'm always looking for answers to this question but really it's getting our team involved, so that they have insight into the solution. And then, you know, from my perspective, you know, I kind of have a service mentality of
leadership. So when I'm talking to my team it's not like "hey do this because I I say to do it this way." It's like I listen to their pain points and I create solutions around those pain points and then introduce it to them saying: "Hey, these are the ways that we're looking to you know speed up your processing, remove administrative tasks that you don't really like doing, right, through automation. But ultimately, trying to get them as much as we can involved in the solutions so that they have buy-in to that solution because ultimately you're going to need them to test the system that you built for them and then always feel free to give you feedback, so that you know they're in a safe space where you're not going to be like: "Oh you know don't make excuses do it this way. But it's like: "Okay, I hear you, right? Let's see what we can do to improve the process to make it faster and better for you, right?" And ultimately you know big picture you've got to create that synergy, if you will, or that company culture, where people are feel free to be able to provide feedback and nobody's, you know, feelings are going to get hurt if you know your idea wasn't a good one or it didn't execute as you might have envisioned it to do so. Wes: Very good, yeah. I think putting a safe environment for people to be freely and willingly
sharing their perspectives is important here so it sounds like you've got some of that going on so. Let's circle back to your decision on Salesforce. You've made that decision for Salesforce and you had a partner that you were working with. Clearly, we were not there first, shame on us for not having marketed ourselves to you sooner. But can you walk us through you know what led to parting
ways with the initial partner and, maybe more importantly for this audience, why you selected Ascendix? What was the background, the DNA strands that you saw in us that felt would allow us to help more successfully see this project through? Revel: Yeah. So our original partner, they're a great partner and they were referred over to us, very technically smart with Salesforce was able to, you know listen to the Vision that I had, and help me create structure around that vision to ultimately start that build. You know what anyone will find out you know building software it's going to take longer and it's going to take a little bit more money than you might have wanted to think about in the beginning but you know if it was easy everyone would be doing it. But the fact
of the matter is it's not easy but it creates, you know, a lot of opportunities to differentiate yourself from your competition. The reason that we ended up parting ways with our original developer and they're a great developer, a lot of knowledge about Salesforce and they were able to help me take my vision and build structure around it so that we could start that build. Their business model had began to change, where they're focusing on different aspects of what they're wanting to create. Some of that was creating different applications and whatnot. So they had spoken with
me and said: "Hey, we want to kind of change how we're doing business" and I said: "Hey, you know, we also, you know, it's taking longer than we expected. We're going to also need a little bit more horsepower in regards to building what we need to build or more manpower. So we decided, you know, it's a good time to potentially look at other opportunities. Lucky for us, Ascendix had reached out to one of our partners and said: "Hey, you know, we specialize in commercial real estate commercial lending and we're a Salesforce developer. We think would be a great resource for you." So, I had saved that email and or sent over to me and I'd say that email and flagged it and
when I heard that ultimately I'm just gonna need a new Salesforce developer, I had reached out and spoken with yourself Wes, which was fantastic I learned that you're from Dallas, I'm from Tulsa, Oklahoma, so that was an easy conversation. So it is ultimately as I start to inform you about what we're wanting to accomplish and listening to what your guys experience was, it just seemed like "oh, well, this is a kind of a layup relationship, if you will, this could be really good. One other aspect I really liked is you had local support in Dallas and you also built out of team throughout Europe. And I, you know, personally we use our website is developed out of the Philippines and I'm used to working with international teams and understand the opportunity to, you know, stretch your dog a little bit and get great work at a more favorable cost to the business. So ultimately, we joined forces and you introduce me to your initial team and we started getting to work and it was kind of you know the first month's always a test phase of getting everybody brought up to speed, but you know the team asked great questions, I could tell that they're very proficient and we started having a lot of a lot really a lot of fun working with each other and knocking down the different challenges that we were identifying to ultimately build a faster and more efficient tech stack. Wes: I remember Revel it was this time last year
I was making phone calls to you from our offices over in Europe and that was the day that you said: "Hey, I got the green light, let's go forward." And that's literally almost a year to the day. It's kind of an interesting thing that we have this interview scheduled for that day there but I remember right now having that call. Revel: I knew it. I mean time flies, when you're so busy. Wes: You know, it's interesting. As you know we've built a product on top of the Salesforce platform called AscendixRE for Capital markets. But when we arrived into discussions with you, it was clear that you had already moved in a really progressive way in your own direction on the platform and I think it's it's really great for us to be able to pivot and change the hat that we're wearing from being a product provider to going back to our old days of just simply being a CRM consultancy. but when you learn as you develop these products a lot
of the lessons that you're learning in building your product and I'm hopeful and it sounds like you're echoing this that some of that journey that we've been on has been highly leverageable for you not necessarily as a product. Although there is a derivative products you're using. Moreover, just as an advisor and a consultancy on the Salesforce platform that happens to be deeply immersed in the commercial real estate sector. Revel: Yeah I would say not only do you guys build solutions for me, but I'm constantly in communication with our developers to ask questions almost as a that almost has it's Salesforce support continuously. We have two aspects that we work with you guys: one on the marketing front advising us on our Pardot marketing platform, but also you know Salesforce Conga templates that we're utilizing, action documents that are being you know all of our information is emerging into those documents. So I do my best on a regular basis to try to stump your team and if they don't know the answer, right, within about 24 hours they come back and we'd be like we've done the research we've got the answer for you. And we'll create an
actionable plan around that. So, you know, we've got it down to a nice rhythm, it's very easy to communicate, there's always a quick response and sometimes I get a response I'm like: "What time is it in their world? And are they still working?" So, it's you know, it's really it's been a lot of fun and we've made so much progress and I can't wait to see really the fruits of our labor. Wes: Well without revealing quote unquote secret sauce there, perhaps there are some major milestones that you can convey to the team to the audience here as to what you've accomplished in this journey and that it has it's been a journey this these projects never are not you know one and done there's a an evolution to them. If there were maybe one or two things that you're
most proud of having accomplished in this journey, whether that be with us on your own or otherwise, maybe you could share that with the audience here? Revel: Yeah, I mean the first aspect of our business is we want to be able to let people know that we exist, right? I mean obviously we can solve different commercial lending challenges, leveraging private money and our knowledge, and our network of lenders. So that's you know that's one of our biggest challenge in the beginning is to make sure that people know we exist. So we have our own database of clients well we need to make sure that we're marketing to them so that they know the services that we provide, they can see the loans that we're funding, and then we remind them that: "Hey, if you have a commercial lending challenge reach out to us. We're your advisor." So one of the first things
was to create great content that goes out to our current database of clients. And the other aspect is to start to leverage you know social media and email marketing, to reach out to new prospects and ultimately bring them into our business so that we can introduce ourselves, become known to them, become liked by them, and ultimately become trusted by them, right? So with that you know we've built that application within Pardot and ultimately automated the lead generating process that comes in and introduces those leads and auto assigns them to different loan officers within our organization. So it's a constant process of automation where lead comes in hand it off to a loan officer. We've automated the process of teeing up a phone call for the loan officer, where they can then click to dial within the system and reach out to that person with the opportunity to engage with them and have a good wholesome conversation with the new person, right? After that we've automated the process of following up with that person providing them resources of who we are, what we do, why we do. Ultimately, our goal is to ,you know, with some of these features is to automate the administrative tasks that you know kind of look at it like you know tipping dominoes over but you're manually having to tip each domino over right rather than tipping one domino and it runs to a certain stop point, where it needs input from the user again. We want to take as
much administrative tasks that really no human likes to do off their plate, so they can spend more time being humans and connecting and engaging with other humans, right? And when we do that in a really good way, we have great conversations, we're able to uncover challenges that we consult and ultimately drive more business. That's a really you know it's easier said than done, but when it's working and when you overcome all the challenges associated with that, it's really something that's quite impressive. And then there's another aspect of our tech stack is the ability to you know securely transfer information between us and our clients. So, we've created a digital loan application. We use a program called "Community" to do that. And that allows us to securely ask for information from our borrowing clients, any financial documents that need to be protected. So we can securely bring those into our system and then ultimately quickly extract that information, underwrite the loan in-house, and then introduce that loan through a what we call "a loan summary" which takes all all the documents or all the documents and all the data points of those documents and ultimately does all the homework that a lender would want to do, if they had a new loan on their desk. So by doing that in-house and introducing that to
multiple lenders that have an appetite for that type of deal, we can quickly get "a yes" or "a no" from our lending partners, if they can do the deal and get a quote, so that we can offer multiple quotes back to our client and give them options. And that's a really neat process for them because if you've ever been in a loan scenario and you've applied with one bank well in that scenario it might take you four to six weeks to learn that you're not going to get the loan that you're looking for. So you went through all this process of uploading all this information, working with your Banker to ultimately get told "no". Well four to six weeks that's a long time, it's a lot of work to get told "no". We can get that time down into at least one week because the relationships we have with our lending partners saves our clients from a lot of headaches and ultimately gives them options. And when they have options, they can choose a loan that's best suited for them. Wes: Well, there's a lot going on there and you
know that one of the things that we've tried to instill in each of our implementations is always focus on the end-user here and making their lives lives easier. And the question that I have to ask is why wouldn't someone want to use this? You've automated a lot of the marketing up front, people talk a big game there, but very few want to actually make the investment and put in the work like you've done. So you've knocked that ball out of the park there and then you've got all the automation you use the word "automation" about 10 times as you're going through this and I think that's what I like to call "broker candy" or what's in it for me with that factors that we always want to have laced into our conversations as we evangelize this to have people really see that we're not just training you on a new tool we're actually transforming the way that you do business with you in mind that you're working hard. Not working harder but smarter in doing the
job here And then that last piece about being able to digitize the experience that that you have with these folks that are outside of the firm that you're doing business with the loan application process and being able to take what was traditionally been analog and/or relegated to email and attachments and forms being filled out. There's I think a lot that you've got on that front to not only speed up and expedite that process but other things that are feedback loops that in the past have been slow burn and because they're manual and slow, you sometimes make bad decisions or at least on bad on dated information or you're trying to close that loop so you can react much more quickly to the data as it changes over time. Revel: Well I think any business has typically a process of refinement to improve. The challenge is when you're doing it outside of software could it can be very slow right and there's no system to create guard rails and or repeatable processes that have metrics around. So that you can see:
Are we speeding up? Are we slowing down? Where are we getting stuck? How can we refine that process to move faster? But absolutely the whole idea is to continuously have that feedback loop and continuously find that software so it's more efficient, right? That takes time, it can be a little bit frustrating for people when they first get the you know version 1 compared to version 10, but I think we can all think about our iPhones on you know version 1 compared to what we have now with our iPhones. That didn't come overnight that was a lot of hard work from a lot of developers. But the things are our smartphones can do now, compared to what they used to be able to do. You know I look at that and I think where are we going to be in 10 years? How refined will this process be? How much automation will we have built into it? Well we definitely have the blueprint and the opportunity to achieve that goal basically built. Wes: Well, Revel, you've accomplished a lot and I have to say just you are a big part of this I talk with a lot of people and it's the people within the firm and their vision, do they have it or do they not, and do they have the intestinal fortitude to see that vision to reality. And it's been a pleasure working with you on this and the success that we've had together is in no small part due to to your efforts there, I appreciate your partnership. Accomplished a lot but there's still things that you want to accomplish. Maybe
without you know again disclosing too much, maybe share what you see on the horizon with regards to your future investments in technology? Revel: Yeah, I think, you know for us we're based out of San Diego, California, we just opened an office in Scottsdale, we've got an office up in Orange County and we've got, we're starting an office in Michigan as well. But when I look at our future vision I know that you know ultimately about 30% of commercial loans get funded, right? So there's 70% of people that are trying to get money that they can't find the right lender to ultimately provide them the money to support their business or support their real estate investment goals, right? So, if that means to me, there's a lot of pain in the market. People are getting turned down and they ultimately are stumbling through this process and they don't ultimately know where to go. Well, we receive a lot of our referrals coming actually from lenders that work with us because we introduce business to them, and we're a soft turn down for their clients that they know it's a good client, they know it's a good business, they just their credit department doesn't have an appetite for the deal. So they introduce them to us. So yeah Wes when we look at the future of what we're wanting to accomplish, you know, one of the things that we look at is pain in the marketplace. And we know about 30% of commercial loans they're funded that means they're
70% that are not those clients obviously are feeling defeated or frustrated when they aren't getting the capital they need to support their business or the real estate investment goals. So with that pain and we provide a solution to help those borrowers find the right lender to get the right loan, right? And we also help our lending partners receive business that they might not have known about or that client would have never known about that lender, right? So for us it's really to refine our current process you know we have an office here in San Diego, we just opened one in Scottsdale, we've got one in Orange County, and we're opening one in the beginnings of one in Michigan. But it's to refine our current process with marketing driving in new business to our loan officers, supporting the loan officer to package up the deal, develop and underwrite the deal, introduce that to our lending Partners efficiently so that when our lending Partners receive that information, they know it's very trustworthy, they know that they can depend on it, to give us a quick quote back. We've perfected that at our smaller size. Really ,my goal is to scale the operation and provide this solution to more cities. So I know you're based out of Dallas,
I think that would be a great market for us, we'd love to be working in your backyard, but you know ultimately, we know that there's pain in the market, we solve for that pain, we're marketing to that pain, it's bringing in the lead volume so that we can ultimately serve those clients and do a really good job for them. At some point in time that's really our goal is growth. Wes: Well, going back to that question I mentioned earlier about ROI, I think the word "scale: comes to mind. I don't think that you could, your aspirations are high and I think, if you try to think about doing this without technology, you just simply can't scale, at least not very quickly. And I think that's done by eradicating or removing the inefficiencies in the organization, increasing the accuracy of the data and not getting a higher use of it by turning it into just not data collection, but business intelligence. And at that point you've now,
obviously, got champions in the organization that are starting to leverage this. I think that's all fantastic. So in closing, you've learned a lot of lessons along the way, I'm sure, and perhaps for those that are listening in you might be able to provide them some takeaways, top three lessons that you learned or pro tips, if you will that you could provide to the audience. When they're considering implementing technology, whether it be in capital markets or mortgage brokerage, or banking. Some universal, you know, pro tips and lessons that you learned would be great. Revel: Yeah, one would be: it's going to take a little longer than you wanted to, right? And you don't know what you don't know and really until you know it. So
it's kind of like you know driving down the freeway, you can only see so far ahead of yourself and as you know get to the rise and you get to see all the new challenges in front of your other all the new hurdles that you just could not know that they were going to be there based on your current level of development and where you were within that development journey. So you know having patience is key. Continuously just putting one foot in front of the others and working through challenges and it's kind of fun, you'll come up against something that's just stumps you and you'll have to kind of chew on that challenge and talk about it, you know, with your team or whatever, to ultimately find a solution. Even the first rendition of the solution might not be the end solution, but you will you get there, right? And then once you build build this solution you've got to test the solution. So one I guess my biggest Pro tip is make sure everyone in the organization understands that this is not going to be an easy task, but it is one that is very worthwhile. There's a lot of organizations that are going through this
process to improve their business and it's going to you know, at some point in time, exponentially help them do their business faster and better. So in my opinion, if you're not taking this necessary step, you're really going to be behind the development curve and not be able to compete with some of your competitors that are putting these strategies in play. So again: set the right expectation with your team, be patient and make sure everyone really has a growth mindset, so that they can provide feedback and be part of the solution and you know not part of the problem, like for example, if the system didn't work perfectly in rendition 1 where they throw their hands up in the air and they're like: "oh, it's broken, it'll never work." We identified a challenge. let's fix it and move forward. Wes: I love that setting expectations is key. I think also setting very clear goals of what you want to accomplish and getting alignment all up and down the organization in that. There will be challenges and if you're not aligned,
and you don't have that clear vision of what you're trying to accomplish, those ebbs and flows, those valleys can end up becoming skirmish points there that end up stall if not killing the project. And so you can always lean on the alignment and the clear "hey we this is all worth fighting for. We knew this wasn't going to be be a quick win" and being able to have that as I called it "the intestinal fortitude" to see through those valleys that you can get to the peak. So I just echo everything you said there. Revel: I will add one more thing to that too. Oftentimes you might want to change the goal post, if you will, right? So you have the idea of what you have one in mind right and you build to that and then halfway through the build you change, right? And that for developer it can be hell, right? So you really want to, you know, if you're building something, it's like the old idea of, you know, measure twice and cut once. So that you can
really think through what you want to build and then build to that and you can always make changes in adaptations, but we you know in our scenario we change something mid build that ultimately changed about how 30% of the logic of the system worked for us. And it really derailed us for a good 6 to 8 months of having to deconstruct, to reconstruct, to make ultimately a better solution and arguably it is a better solution. But it was a painful lesson to learn for sure. Wes: Yeah. So have a general heading but also be willing to, you know, swallow some pride and perhaps some energy to course correct, if you see data is telling you to do something different.
2022-09-10