00:27 Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Growth and Scaling Podcast. Today we have got Roy, and he's gonna tell us all about what he does and why he does it. Roy, give us the story, man. Who are you?

00:39 Hello. I thought I liked the blunt question. Who am I? I'm Roy Dekel. Now, if you want to be too technical, I'm Roy Dekel, born and raised in Israel and actually immigrated here in 2002, but I'm the co-founder of Makros.com and Makros.com is the Greek word for macro. So it's M-A-K-R-O-S.com. The old brother of the word makro is basically, the parent brand to what most people associate me with, which is basically co-founding and being the CEO of setschedule.com. And then that's who I am. Started 2014, we built this animal, this crazy company for 10 years almost, and that's who I am.

01:24 10 years is a lot of fun. You can learn a lot in 10 years.

01:27 Absolutely. It's been a great ride.

01:33 So just to get this straight, so says schedule was kind of your first launch and then as you got that going, you found ancillary products that kind of built into this makros animal you're talking about.

01:43 Absolutely. So we started with a basic hypothesis and a vision of making business easier for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, right? Wherever they are, starting with the United States. And in 2014, we actually kind of like slipped, we crashed face first on the opportunity to basically solve or address the real estate industry problem, which really revolved around business development, social networking, and really highly focused, highly focused office, I mean, Setschedule is a good term for business development and office automation because you want to have predictability over your path in life and especially in business. And that's kind of how setschedule was born. But what we realized throughout this high growth trajectory and 70,000 companies after, we realized that we can and we should expand our offerings. And we, in the last couple of years, we acquired Runtastic.io, we acquired Taskable.ai, and we created this really true strong mix of companies that solve a lot of problems to entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, and we decided to rebrand the parent to Makros, which basically operate those three entities.

02:58 Nice, smart, very smart. Nice to keep it organized into one brand.

.03:04 Thank you.

03:05 So with the Setschedule, I mean, to me, that says a lot about a lot of industries, but you said it's really focused and geared towards the real estate industry. Tell me about that and how do you serve them versus other businesses?

03:34 So it's a very good question, Todd. Thank you for it. SetSchedule evolves basically, we'd like to say that we make business easier for entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, but providing three product modules. One is social media. The other one is business development product, and the third is office automation technologies. SetSchedule.com and a SetSchedule app basically encompasses all three. If you think about it, setschedule.com, I like to say it's a better version than LinkedIn for the real estate universe. Sometimes I get around when I speak publicly and I say I'm the CEO, co-founder of LinkedIn and people say, what? And I say, no, I mean, I'm the CEO and the co-founder of a better version than LinkedIn for the real estate universe. So when you download the Set Schedule app, you essentially have the ability to create teams and start immediately networking with thousands of thousands of agents and lenders and escrow officers and even credit repair companies and movers around your area. And we kept that hyper-focused approach of the pro-to-pro relationship around the real estate universe, meaning the real estate agent can talk to the loan officer, can talk to the title officer, and so on. And that's kind of the foundation of the setschedule.com. And what makes setschedule.com better than LinkedIn for the real estate universe is the business development product, which is built into the app. So essentially with a toggle, a flip of the switch, you basically can go to a product we call the Fro-Waider. And that's inside a SetSchedule app. And you are able to basically consume leads from 12 different sources in real time and you can take them, you can dispose of them, you can replace them, you can comment and critique them. And based on that, you're basically able to build your business by consuming leads and there's a lot of other features, but ultimately we created a very strong defensible mode and 3% of the real estate community is using set schedule.com because they can network and business development at the same time and do this development.

05:12 Wow, wow, that is a big deal. I mean, there isn't really a good place for them all to get together and network like that. So it's a little misleading. So that schedule at the out front, to me, sounded like it was something for a calendly or something like that. But what you're saying is this is a place for all real estate and its appendages to connect and set up referrals and set up appointments and make things happen. It's an action network. Is that what you're saying?

05:41 Well, essentially, yes, we've heard that before. You know, SetSchedule, you're a Calendly? And we said, no, we bought Taskable for that. So now we have Taskable.ai that has a complete, complete time augmentation and AI that creates your personal assistant for tasks, project, and calendar management, and integrates with 15 different, you know, project productivity tools. That's Taskable. SetSchedule.com has always been a real estate business development and networking environment for the real estate pros in the US. So, when you are in the real estate industry, you know Setschedule, you know Zillow, you know Realtor.com and you know set schedule. But yes, the name was a bit misleading because the original concept was to schedule appointments for realtors. And what we realized is that the value is not in the appointment, the value is in the entire journey to get to the appointment. So we kept Setschedule, but we expanded it to a networking platform. 

06:37 Gotcha, gotcha. Now, I gotta ask, I mean, the origin story of the company, were you a real estate agent? Were you in real estate? I mean, tell us how that idea even evolved and why did you, if not, why did you choose real estate?

06:50 So it's another good question, right? And I'm gonna keep it short. When I came back, when I came from Israel, I really knew nothing about real estate. I mean, I knew I was an officer in the military and I knew that I love business and I love entrepreneurship. And I basically essentially got into real estate investing. That won't even show it a bit. So the origin story of Set Schedule really revolves around key three players. It's my business partner, Udi Doner, which is my co-founder. And actually my wife, Shayna Goldburg, which was actually the first real estate agent and real estate broker of the firm. So Shayna Goldburg and Uri Dorner, kind of like we've congregated, I was in a real estate investment universe for lack of a better term. So I managed portfolios of hundreds and hundreds of residential properties in Texas and California. And I constantly I've noticed this constant stress and inconsistencies around real estate agents production and real estate agents abilities to run their business and work ethics and etiquettes and follow-ups and follow-throughs. And actually my business partner, Udi, I've been friends with him for many, many years. He was always in a tech world and he was always techie and they actually built different software to automate loans and loans origination and escrow documentation and basically the one plus one equals two we We realized that we can do a whole lot more using technology and build the technology System for brokers and agents and that's kind of like when he and I started to talk about.

08:20 I love it, I love it. All right, all right. So now we got a good idea of what your business does and we kind of got a picture of your three products that have come together in one suite under macros. Tell us about the journey. I mean, when you started this thing, there's always a point after launch where you kind of, something clicks and you're like, okay, we got it. Is there a decision or something you did at some point along that journey where it was like, all right, we got this figured out, now we can move?

08:52 So the short answer is no. You never think you've got it, you never think you reach it, you never think you're at the end of it. This is not a baseball game with multiple innings, right? I don't know how many innings we have for the life cycle of a company. But we decided that we're gonna build this business the moment I saw a check for $20,000 from Keller Williams in Los Angeles, when they said, hey, if you have this product, we'll pay you. Better yet, we're gonna pay you now in advance. Do it for us. And it was basically a simple question. If we built an environment where you can consume your leads or we can schedule your appointments or be more predictable on your appointments with sellers, would you pay us? And the answer was, here's the check. That was the really overarching moment. We said, okay, we're actually gonna incorporate it by a website. That's how far behind we were when we got the first $20,000 check. 

09:38 That's hilarious.

09:39 Yeah, that's.

09:40 That's not the norm, by the way.

09:42 Yeah, I acknowledge that. I understand that.

09:44 Okay. Wow. I mean, I don't get a lot of people throwing checks at me just for being good looking, but I guess I'm not as good looking as you. So, that's awesome.

09:55 Thank you! Why do you think I go to the gym? I'm kidding!

09:57 Exactly! Dude, so I mean, this is really cool. So you literally attracted clients before you even built a website and even talked about what you were doing. What was the pitch? I mean, you were just telling them, hey, look, there's an easier way to do this. I think if we plug some stuff together, it'll work for you.

10:18 Well, the short answer is yes. It was an easy conversation by basically thinking about the clients pinpoint first. And we said, and I remember to this day, right? I mean, we sat down with the first agents that we knew and we said, it's pretty simple. You'd go to Zillow and you buy a subscription or you sign a six months contract with Zillow, you go to Realtor, you sign another six contract with, you know, month contract with them. How about us aggregating all this? What if we're able to centralize all of this? We would purchase those leads. We would purchase the lead from Zillow, we will nurture them, we will confirm them, and we will basically dispatch, we use the term dispatch at the early stage of the company, kind of like almost like an Uber, but we will dispatch the appointment to you in real time. Would you be willing to pay for that? And like I said, the answer was absolutely yes.

11:01 Okay, okay, that actually makes a lot more sense and that actually makes the names make a lot more sense to me. So that is a cool story. I really like that. So you became a lead aggregator, lead distributor, and as you started building that business, there's a ton of money in lead aggregation and lead qualifying. How did you get the word to spread? I mean, were people willing to share the goods or do they kind of want to hoard it to themselves?

11:26 Nope. The short answer is nope. They do not want to share the goods and it wasn't word of mouth and we never make the word of mouth. Even the best clients that we have trying to hug the fact that their clients have set schedule and they all admit it because they don't want to create competition. So they may talk to an agent in a different state, but they're not going to want to create a local competition. But the funny thing is that we identified that agents work better in congregations. So we birth the idea of social networking for real estate agents and making a better app than LinkedIn for the real estate industry because we believe that agents are very cagey with the information to protect their territory. And that's fair. And it's completely understandable. But they do a much better job when they network their listings, when they network their referrals, when they have a buyer who doesn't speak, you know, English. They can find an agent that speaks Spanish on a set schedule network in a community. So we've kind of like we've grown because quite frankly we have a great inside sales staff and we've grown because we provided a great product and we're providing a great product. So inevitably there is a certain function of brokers introducing the idea to agents, but the vast majority was tough guerrilla marketing.

12:37 captainscouncil.com14:16 I love it. So now take a step back. As we talk about your growth and makros, why makros, tell us a little bit about your growth strategy because there's a lot of different ways to grow. You can grow through acquisition, you can grow through developing your own product or additional services. Why did you choose the path of acquisition and were there just some opportunities that popped up? I mean, how did this work out for you?

14:40  So that's an awesome question, right? I mean, you always ask, do you build or do you buy? Do you build or do you buy? And you cannot always afford to buy, but then sometimes you realize you can't really afford to build because it's gonna cost you in time, in a long, long period of time. So for example, Runtastic, which is better than QuickBooks for the real estate investors universe in the US, I should say. So basically think of it as QuickBooks real estate investors. We fell into this opportunity for a better term, but we were introduced to this opportunity by sheer luck. And we fell in love with it because that software came with 5,000 investors and 50,000 or so bank accounts, credit card accounts, and properties connected. So that's the golden ticket for the setschedule users, for real estate agents, for real estate brokers, for even lenders, right? 

15:30 No kidding, yeah.

15:31 Loan officers from Bank of America would love to finance investment properties of our investors over in Tacitec. So there was a very strong symbiotic relationship between the two and we said we have to buy it. And at the time, the founder wanted out and we really liked the founder. We have a great relationship with the founder. We said, hey, why not? You know, we'll acquire that. And it was a decision of opportunity, really.

15:52 Right. And has it paid off?

15:56 Well, the short answer is yes. Very much so. We have a lot of plans for, again, we have the communities of agents and lenders and brokers in set schedule. We have investors in Runtastic that are reporting the financial data and are tracking their profit and loss and their balance sheet. We're going to introduce payment systems, meaning you'll be able to take tenant payments and be able to have a unified inbox to manage your tenant payments and to manage your contractors' invoices. And ultimately, we're going to also introduce lenders marketplace where lenders are going to be able to participate in underwriting and picking properties to finance. So if you think about this 360 between a set scheduling ecosystem and a fantastic ecosystem, it's just ultimately sexy. I mean, it works.

16:39 Totally, that is a very sexy, very, very sexy match there. I love how you put that together. And then the taskable piece, why?

16:48 Well, the taskable piece is a little bit stepchild because it is not a real estate centric child. It is actually completely global widespread. We've acquired a product. It's actually the least mature product that we've acquired. It's a phenomenal product that we're building a lot of AI around. Essentially, what we're saying is we want to take your calendar and create prediction around certain habitual schedule that you need to have automatically put into your schedule. So we're going to manage your tasks, we're going to manage your project, we're going to manage your calendar, and there's like I said in the beginning, there's multiple, multiple integration points where you can connect your monday.com into Taskable, you can connect Trello into Taskable, you can connect your Slack into Taskable, and Taskable using AI is going to become your digital personal assistant that personal assistant is going to say you have to sleep six hours a day. And this is usually the time block where you sleep. And it's going to put it as a repetition in your calendar. And it's going to be a much better, easy, friendly UI to do all of this for one mobile app and desktop app. So again, it's the step job because it's, it's essentially we have users from all over the world using already taskable. And we intend on really sending this to the set schedule ecosystem of agents, brokers, lenders, and so on. But, but taskable is a wild spread, a wild spread product.

18:10 Cool, cool. So it fits multiple industries, not just the one you're in, but it makes sense. It's very adaptable to your existing ecosystem of clients.

18:16 Absolutely. 100%.

18:17 Awesome. Growth is always fun when it works. What about what it doesn't? What are some mistakes that you've made along this way that you would hate someone else to hit along the journey that you've done? Whether it be acquisition or whether it's just your initial product development, what are some things that you wish you hadn't done?

18:39 Well, there's a little bit of a wish I've done sooner. So when we started the company in 2014, we conceptualized the idea of 2014, we really started in 2015, but we didn't have a mobile app till April of 2018. So we really didn't account, we didn't account for mobile or desktop app or even engineers in the first really three years of the company. We had some outside contractors and it was always a struggle. You tried to outsource, you tried to outsource, but you really don't have the founding team that engineers your product. And that was something that I wish we addressed it earlier. Obviously we have now an engineering center in Dukka with tens of engineers and, and we have engineers in Philippines and we have engineers in the US. But the point is that I wish we started sooner accounting for the development thoughts and, and roll out the app. Cause the moment we rolled out the app. For one reason or another, we came from 10,000 agents on the platform, we came from 30,000 on the platform in a matter of like a year. So 30,000 agents, right? I mean, we're bigger than the biggest real estate agency in the US. So that was the function of mobile apps and desktop apps.

19:55 Awesome, awesome. So the bad thing, the biggest challenge you've had to face is not pulling the trigger on certain things earlier. How do you think you would have known that though? I mean, what would have driven you to do it sooner? Did you raise money? Is this all bootstrapped? Like, how does that side of the equation work?

20:12 Well, this is all bootstrap. This is all our money. This is, I mean, we have a couple of really good institutional debt friends now, and then they're doing a wonderful job with us, and we're grateful, but ultimately, we never had this buddy-buddy of mine that I was able to shake hands and say, hey, give me $25 million in the first, you know, 12 months of the company. So first, hindsight is 20-20. You never know if you don't do it. So go break it, and then don't feel guilty that you broke it. Just fix it and do it. So, I'm answering your question in terms of what I would have done earlier, but I wouldn't change a thing. At the end of the day, I had to go through this experience to form the DNA of makros.com and setschedule.com and retesting and taskable. But ultimately, you have to do and you have to, as they say, better done than perfect. You have to learn what doesn't work and you usually learn what doesn't work very fast by doing it. So I don't regret that and I would have done it again.

21:07 That's awesome. Now, take a half step back. Let's talk about the acquisitions for a minute because a lot of companies make mistakes here when they're trying to acquire and there's a different leadership team, there's a different structure, there's a different culture sometimes. How did you adapt to the new cultures and what did you do to kind of unify all three companies in our makros?

21:33 So it's a tricky question because again, it depends on what kind of company you're buying, what size of company you're buying. When you acquire a company, I like to say you acquire three things. You acquire the people, and if it's not the people, you acquire the product, and if it's not a product, you acquire the revenue. So in our case, we really acquired products and a little bit of revenue, but primarily products. We acquired good products that we didn't need to build. So, remember how I told you that I would have liked to engineer the product much earlier in the evolution of the company. So we essentially wanted to buy the product so we can have it faster and then we can improve upon it with our engineers. So we didn't have DNA problems. We didn't have really staff that we needed to account for. And clients were pretty solid and satisfied with the product. So the Net Promoter Score was good and we knew that the clients are happy with the product. So now it's for us, it's just a game of beautifying and improving the product, which we are. And then we're going to get into aggressive promotions and marketing around the product.

22:35 Love it. And obviously cross promotion and all the other good stuff. Bundling services together. Is that part of the layout there?

22:42 Absolutely, we call them Makros architecture. We're planning, even though primarily all of the staff and the team members, employees are all set schedule and set schedule operates everything because that's been a baby for 10 years. We kind of getting used to the idea of rebranding our own mindset to the Macros architecture. So set schedule, I mean, think about it where a fantastic real estate investor can press a button and say, I need to sell this property. And within two seconds, they have 10 agents from set schedule bidding on that property.

23:10 Totally.

23:11 Right? 

23:12 I love it.

12:13 Just as an example of cross-network between set schedule and retastic. So again, we call them the macro, the macro-seq system. Or for example, if I get it, I need to get a loan on a property and that projects itself into a post on a set schedule network, hey, is there in a lender that is able to provide a loan to this kind of property in that kind of location? So yes.

23:29 Right, right, right. Well, I love this. I love the conversation and honestly, for those of you listening, you don't always need to get other people's money. I mean, truthfully, the fact that you have built this in 10 years, bootstrapped and acquired companies and built your footprint larger and larger without the need of a VC or PE is fantastic and I congratulate you all the way. I find that a lot of people feel like they need to just rush to raise money before they even have a paying client. And as you expressed earlier, Roy, getting that first $20,000 check before you even had a product solution for them is how to really start a business. You know you're solving a problem when people are paying you before you've even created the solution. So, Roy, what suggestions do you have for other people out there who are thinking, I just gotta go raise some money, I just gotta raise some money? What do you suggest to them?

24:24 I love this question because I have plenty of suggestions and I also have plenty of analogies. Some are bad but I'm going to say it anyways. In some instances taking venture capital funds is almost like taking steroids when you sign up to a gym membership. So when you sign up to a gym membership you need to go to the gym and start working out. I wouldn't want you to go and take steroids because you just want to look buff and you want to have your six-packs very fast. That's what venture capital fund is. more likely than not, 10 out of, or 9 out of 10 companies or VCs fail because of the pressure and the stress that VC puts on companies.They look at it as an asset class and they want to trade them. The reality that as a founder, your passion and love needs to be with the clients and the product and employees, and employees. But product and clients, when you're, you know, it's you yourself and Irene kind of thing, it's just you and your co-founder. You really want to focus on clients and products. Find a way to make the product. And if you can, maybe borrow on credit cards and build your product and then find the first 10 clients, right? And, and, and perfect your pitch and perfect yourselves pitch and your elevator pitch because a, all of the VCs are going to ask you for this elevator pitch, you know, and they're all going to criticize you and tell you that you're wrong. So you need to be comfortable in ignoring the Naysayers per se. But, but your focus needs to be and not be discouraged by the Naysayers or VCs or even PEs. Your focus needs to be in the product and in the clients.

25:55 Totally agree, totally agree. I love it, I love it, I love it so much. If anybody out there listening and you haven't raised money yet, make sure you're servicing a client that's willing to pay you what you need for what you do. And if you don't have a client willing to pay for what you do, it's only a harder lesson later because you've already sacrificed equity, you've already given into all the things that you probably didn't need to do until you knew whether or not you could solve a problem. Now, there are times to borrow. And there are times to raise money, but generally it's not when you think. So, I appreciate so much your comments today, Roy. Is there anything you'd like to kind of leave off with the people at the end of this conversation to last tidbits of advice you feel like they should know when trying to grow in scale?

26:42 I'll minimize it to one thing. You know, I'm a product of a SEAL training and I'm a product of the Officers Academy in Israel. So I'm a product of a lot of tough classes and a lot of tough training and tough love. At the end of the day, every training that I did in the military, I started with X and I ended up with basically one tenth of X, if not lower than that. And the reason being, the overall, you know, unified reasoning behind it is just basically giving up on your dream that you had just two minutes ago when you joined this SEAL team or Officers Academy. Don't give up on your dreams and do, don't just dream. When you do and you don't just dream, you know if your dream is worthy of doing, right? And at some point, I mean, there's a big gap between doing and quitting it and just not doing it. So do what you set to do. Don't wait for external validations from even family and friends or investors. Just do what you need to do and see what the clients are saying.

27:42 Love it. That is some great advice. Now, most founders and operators tend not to do things alone. Even though you feel very much alone, most of us have a mentor or a group or somebody they go to get some advice that they may not have otherwise get on their own. Roy, is there somebody that's been kind of an impact or an influence on the way you've done things and the way you've built what you've done?

28:03 Well, outside of the obvious, which is my wife, Shayna Goldburg and my co-founder, Udi Dorner, which obviously have been pivotal partners and friends and lifesavers, it's an interesting question. And if I'm taking it specifically to the set schedule, the outcome ecosystem and the real estate agents and teams world, and considering the fact that we're in kind of like inflation slash interesting cycle of economy and news or whatnot. I would probably give the shout out to Tom Ferry, which happens to be, in my opinion, one of the best coaches in the real estate industry. For the single reason that a lot of agents out there are in a very serious need of his mentorship and training, and he does a wonderful job. Usually, his narrative is very strong and very interesting and very correct. I think that that's something that a lot of our clients can feed off of and a lot of clients need. Shout out to Tom Ferry.

29:01 Love it. Thank you, Tom!  And Roy, thank you so much for being on the show today. So grateful for your time and so grateful for your insights. Appreciate all you do, buddy.

29:10 Thank you for having me, Todd.