PropTech Disrupted | How PropServ Is Automating Maintenance, Cashflow & Client Experience

In this episode of The Elite Agent Masterclass, James Humphries-Stone and Jack Durkin sit down with Sam, the founder of PropServ — the platform that’s changing how estate agents handle property maintenance, client care and cashflow.

What started as an idea inside an agency is now a fully built PropTech solution that’s solving a huge pain point for lettings agents: repairs and maintenance.

Sam shares the behind-the-scenes journey of building PropServ from scratch — and how they’ve combined automation, AI and financial forecasting to make property management easier, more efficient and more profitable.

Inside this episode:

🛠️ The origin story of PropServ — from frustration to solution
📉 How maintenance is hurting client retention & reputation
🤖 The systems behind PropServ’s AI-driven maintenance automation
💸 How agents are generating passive income from the platform
🔁 Why agencies need to think beyond sales and diversify
💡 Lessons on launching a tech platform while running a business
⚙️ How PropServ integrates into the agent and landlord experience
🚀 The future of PropTech — and what agents need to watch for

If you’re running a lettings book, looking for smarter systems, or thinking of launching your own tech-enabled product — this episode is full of real-world lessons on execution, automation and growth.

🎧 Available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube
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Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the Elite Agent Masterclass. Today, Jack and I have the great pleasure of having Sam from PropServe joining us on the show. Sam has got a background in estate agency, but he now has moved into the side more so of what would be deemed PropTech. And so, Sam, welcome to the Elite Agent Masterclass. How are you? Thank you for having me. I'm good, thank you. And believe it or not, I'm actually in the office. That's not quite as nice as it looks behind me for anyone who's watching. I was going to say, are you in a safara? Just took a quick break, you know. I mean, it is almost as hot as a safara out there at the moment. It's about thirty odd degrees today, isn't it? It is warm, so yeah, the air conditioning is nice, but... Sam, before we dive in, I think it'd be really good for those that are listening to understand a little bit more about your background and kind of how you got into prop tech. Am I right in saying you were at Countrywide for a while, property management, and also you're working with a furniture-based business? Yeah, yeah, exactly that. So I actually started my career at Countrywide at seventeen. And it was actually at the time my girlfriend's dad at the time that said to me, so he was always around, he was always available and it was a nice car, a nice house. And I said, what do you do for work? And he said, oh, I run my own property management company. I thought, yeah, I want to get myself into that. How do I get going? So at seventeen, I walked away from school. I was doing a BTEC, which I was probably failing well I was fading miserably out um and I went straight over into spoke to this recruiter and he put me in touch with countrywide went from there and I was like okay here we go I'm gonna be having all the spare time in the world I'm gonna be driving these lovely cars put me on a ten grand basic with no commission and all I could do for the first like six weeks was answer the phones um which even they weren't keen on me doing that to start with and then moved over to an independent agency in that towards Essex sort of way and then eventually worked up in the city for another agency and then went into interior design and furniture off the back of that which is kind of where the idea for prop that the well prop serve came into fruition interesting So how did that transition happen then, Sam? So from estate agency to a furniture-based business and then setting up your own prop tech business, how did that come about? Very much so on accident. Do you know what? Funnily enough, I think you two are going to prove me wrong here, but I was probably one of the only people that wanted to be an estate agent when I was I didn't. No. Yeah. I did. So, um, so yeah, so my, my family have always worked within property. Um, but I remember being, being really young and after the idea of playing football kind of fizzled out, um, I really wanted to, I just knew that I wanted to wear a nice, nice suit, be super smart, have a, carry a nice briefcase and be a businessman. And the only thing I could think that I knew that family talked about all the time was property. So I was like, estate agency would be a good fit. Um, But I'm probably, like you, probably one of the few that many others just fall into the industry. It was that. It was the fact that at such a young age, I'd seen what my opinion of what financial freedom could have looked like at the time without realising as a self-employed estate agent. But obviously, you've got to jump through the hoops to get there. So I was happy to do it when I was that young. And I ended up being quite good at it, which is why I carried on doing it. I think I did it for five years in total. But yeah, to answer your question, I actually got approached to go and work for David Phillips, the furniture company I was working for. And I remember at the time, David at the time, who was like my account manager when I was working in agency, he walked into the office and I was like, I'm leaving because it was when the tenancy fee ban had just come in. And I thought, I'm going to lose fifty quid per deal here. Like there's a lot of money to be made up here from just fees basically so how can I look at moving away and I wanted to get into software sales at the time and I had a job offer from a software company I can't remember what they did now and this guy used to be an estate agent himself he handed me a book about this big literally And I went, oh, great. Okay. He said, look, read that, come back to me, but I'm going to offer you a job because you remind me of me. And I was like, brilliant. Looked at this book and it was just jargon. I was like, yeah, I don't know what any of this means. So at the same time, my account manager at David Phillips at the time, David had walked in and he said, come work for us. And I was like, you're all right. I don't want to sell sofas for a living. Software machines instead of software. Exactly that. Then, yeah, five years later, I think I'd sold something like five point five million pound worth of furniture in my time there. I traveled all over the world with the company and absolutely loved it. And that's kind of where. With any business, you have to learn, there has to be a problem, there has to be a solution, there has to be a way to get the solution out to the market, so to speak. So without having all three of those, there isn't really a business. If you look at estate agency for an example, want to move homes you have the homes as the estate agent you market that through portals sometimes or sometimes through discrete marketing but either way there is a way to get that to somebody um and that's kind of where the idea came from I thought when people are coming to me for furniture packages and interior design what else do they need they must if they don't need interior design they need removals soil furniture need removals they don't have that many utilities they'll need painting they'll need this and need that and I thought There must be some platform that all the agencies use and refer it automatically to say, congrats on your new property. Here's a link to all of our contractors because we've got over a thousand properties that we manage. So we've got all these contractors. You can use our trusted contractors to make your move easier. And then every single time that was going through, you could guarantee two things, really. A, the client's using trusted contractors that you've recommended, and B, to make a referral fee every time they're using them. Because in terms of the cost of doing business, again, we're back to a state agency, the cost or the customer acquisition cost a lot of the time is linked back to your subscription with Rightmove or Zoopla, which is huge. But for a contractor, they've got the relationships of the agents. They've been working with you on managing your units for however long. They then want to try and get in front of movers, but they can't do it because there isn't a really easy way to do that. So that's how the business began. It then turned into being a full property management solution. So property management companies were coming to me and saying, Sam, all of our movers can use your system to arrange a plumber to come round tomorrow. But every time we want to do that, we have to call the plumber, get the quote, send it to landlords. If we just use your system, it would just speed up all of that. I thought, yeah, good idea. So went down that route. I think for a lot of agents, I can certainly vouch for this. I want to be out there meeting with clients, speaking to clients, getting the marketing done. One of the biggest frustrations I've had over the years is the admin that comes alongside that. James will smile because he knows how much I hate admin. So the fact that there's a platform that we can literally- What's admin? um there's a the fact we've got a button we can literally just click and it sends it over to the contractors just makes things far easier rather than finding the the contractors details emailing them out waiting for an email to come back and it's just all been um yeah a very long process to actually get anything done um so I suppose for agents out there it's great because it's going to streamline the business it means you don't need that additional admin support to have to deal with all that so potentially it's going to reduce costs and overheads and it's just a much more streamlined process isn't it Sam, I've got a question for you. So PropServe, how long ago did it become a thing? How long ago did you create the business? I had the idea in November, when I was really hung over one day, walking back to my car. As you do. As you do. No good story starts with a salad. And I was just thinking on the way back to my car, it was like exactly what I just said. Well, How do people, how do movers get hold of these contractors? They have to go on to check a trade, trust a trader. That's just a big network of unvetted contractors. They might get a recommendation from their neighbor, but then you want to compare another quote. It's such a long winded process. Why not utilize these trusted contractors that the agencies already have? So it's just basically from their point of view or from the agent's point of view, should I say, having the ability to unlock A, a revenue stream, and B, an additional service. So yeah, so officially November, had the idea. We launched the MVP in, April, I think it was. And then all these ideas that I have, what the system should look like, completely went up in the air because the best thing we ever did was we launched it before it was ready. And I'm not a tech CEO sort of by nature. You have to learn everything about it. I did a lot of YouTube videos. ChatGPT helped me set up a lot of it. in terms of what the next steps were. And everything said, just release the product as soon as you can, and then you'll start gaining feedback from there. So as time was going on, we got close to the agents that were using it. I think we had like, thirty people signed up for the first month using the system and just call them, message them. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? And then funnily enough, when we created the property management side of the system, we also created an AI tenant reporting side of our system. So quite literally, you can go out all day not having to worry about anything apart from prospecting, doing valuations, doing viewings. Your tenants report problems through our system. Our AI then triages what the problem is, notifies you saying, this is the problem. Do you want to get some quotes from contractors? You say yes, take it from there, and then you instruct all through our system. But we modeled this on the self-employed estate agency. the model on that front. So we work quite closely with an agency called Hume Homes. So I sat with Nick for about an hour on a call, me and my business partner, and we understood and we learned what the pain points were of being a self-employed agent. And exactly as you said, Jack, it is ninety percent admin and property management admin. Because if you look at lettings and property management as an output, as a revenue stream, It's what makes you money. It's the consistent revenue coming in with the doors being closed. So if you can manage it seamlessly, makes sense, right? A hundred percent. So in amongst that, you explained that you ran with the MVP five months after the conception of the idea. So that's a very, in tech, that's a very short window. And I love what you said in the middle of that there, where it was a case of, you weren't ever likely to be truly ready. So get it out there, test it, refine it as you go, get feedback. And I think there's a lot of transference in there around people that are considering becoming self-employed estate agents. There'll never be the perfect time to do it. You'll never be totally ready. There'll always be life events. There'll always be challenges, financial and otherwise, that will get in the way. And I think there's a certain amount of people out there that will probably say, anyone that does it and they're not ready is crazy. I prefer to be in camp crazy because at least you move forward faster, right? You've also said we quite a few times. So who is the second part to this? And you said that by no means are you a tech CEO. So presumably they're the tech part of this relationship. They are, yeah. I'm the sales and Charlie, my business partner, is the tech. I'd be very surprised if you listened to this. He's so deep in his coding most of the time. But yeah, Charlie was introduced to me and he used to work for Howden's Group, the insurance company. And he used to create basically different platforms for Howden's to compare insurance companies. So because the idea of PropServe originally was almost like a marketplace, it was quite natural progression for him to then come on board with me. But I think talking about the sort of encouragement of going self employed and taking that leap, you can't do everything and if I would have tried to even learn how to code I'm I've never been tested but I'm probably dyslexic dyspraxic all the above I can't really count or write very well so I can't imagine that I would ever have learned how to code and it would have just been a one day maybe one day if I did that um but actually funny enough I remember at the time and I guess this could be transferred quite easily into the self-employed state agency model is What if someone else went off and did this? What if someone created the same platform I've created after two years of me having this idea and thinking about it, and then they signed up all the agencies that I'm working with? That's what kept me up at night to start with. And I think you can probably compare that to if you're the local expert, if you know that within your patch, you are the best at what you do, why wait for someone else to open up their own self as the agency business? Yeah, I think it's so true, isn't it? I think so many people just wait to get started. The hardest part is actually just getting started. And then once you get started, you can refine things and tweak things as you go, can't you? I read something recently that really testifies to that as well. It's like one of these positivity phrases. Hayley's got one in our kitchen. And it was something like, it was like this flip chart thing. So every day you turn the page and it's like this new positive thing. And it was something like, getting started is the hardest part. The rest is just pure tenacity. Yeah, exactly. I wasn't sure if you were going to tell me you've got live, laugh, love. No, no. Sam, just coming back apart, so obviously we spoke about the benefits to agents around reducing the workflow and reducing admin as well. But you also mentioned that there is a way of agents through Propster being able to build an additional revenue stream from that. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that and what that looks like for agents? Yeah, it's similar to the property management sort of piece that obviously if your tenant's reporting a problem, it goes through to the property management company or your property manager and then it's dealt with from there. But the real key part that was the missed opportunity for me that was what stopped me from sleeping for two weeks was How does the mover, how does the average mover or homeowner, how do they deal with their maintenance requests? And that is exactly, as I said, check a trade, trust a trader. Who are these unvetted contractors? Why not work with the same contractors that your management company are using? So the average, another benefit of prop serve go for hours on this is we offer analytics back to you so you can show your landlords and you can show movers what the average spend is for certain services. So the average property has between three to five maintenance requests per year. or maintenance issues per year, shall I say, which then lead into requests through our system. For all five of those a year, let's just say to the movers, the first time buyers who have just moved into a new property who think it's all ready to go, how are they going to arrange for a plumber to come round? There's Again, there's another marketing piece around this too, because the PropServe portal is branded per agency. So subconsciously, they're constantly using your system and logging into things. So being able to log into PropServe as an agent, sending your affiliate link out through to buyers and to sellers to arrange contractors accordingly opens up that revenue stream as well as the marketing opportunity. But we did some work with Simon Gates on this, and something like that, between thirty and forty percent of people get quotes to have their property redecorated before they'll get property valued by an agent. so if you think about it this way if you've sent out your market your affiliate marketing link to your buyers your sellers your prospective clients as well they log into the system they log their details on there and they say they want to get three quotes for repainting their living room and then you call them at the same time or the day after it's so convenient oh any chance you want to have your property revalued that's exactly what we want to do actually how did you know because listen to this podcast That's a very clever way of keeping an eye on what people are doing, isn't it? I'm sure there was some research as well around, I'm sure it's Tesco with the club cards and tracking what people are doing and understanding their buying motivations based on what they're purchasing, i.e. if they're buying baby stuff, then they might need to upsize in the very near future. So I suppose it's similar to that, isn't it? It's smart. It's a smart play, and that's the whole point of the Elite Agent Masterclass. And it was why Jack suggested you would be a great guest to have on, not only because of your entrepreneurial journey, but equally because of the fact that you can add a revenue stream to your business just by inadvertently introducing people to the platform. And like you say, you know, I'm envisaging it through the software we use to communicate with our clients, you know, setting up nurture sequences where, you know, when we book a new MA, the client then receives an email from us at some point in that nurture sequence to say, hey, you know, as part of the process of preparing to sell your home, did you know whatever percentage of people look to redecorate before they sell? here's a great resource that we can put in front of you that might be useful. And you're starting to build the relationship and be really helpful and useful before you've even entered the property. Yeah, that's what I think a lot of people miss out on. A lot of the, get the elephant out of the room, a lot of people will go, well, how come, but then we're getting a fee for it, therefore, is it in our best interest? And sort of to answer that question is for a contractor to appear in front of as many movers that you're dealing with as a estate agent, they'd have to be paying thousands in Google ads. to get anywhere close to that amount of warm leads. So yes, the contractor is losing ten percent of their margin because it's being paid back to the agent. But believe me, it's way cheaper. And it's also no win, no fee for them. So it's just connecting all relevant parties together without the contract spending tens of thousands of pounds. I mean, I don't know if you've had a look at Google ads before. thousands, literally thousands. So you can pick yourself as a plumber and then half of those inquiries that come through, they're non-motivated leads. It's, oh, I was just seeing if you could give me some advice on what tiles I should go for. And it's like, that's not a hot lead. We're supplying them with hot leads. And so it is. Yeah, it's a smart play. The relationship, we quite often, the way we look at the brokerage side of our business, the avenue is very much when we do anything, it's got to be a win for three parties. It's got to be a win for us. It's got to be a win for either the agent or the client. And it's got to be a win for the brokerage. Right. So in this scenario, it's a win for everyone. Yeah. Contractors get the win because their marketing spend is going to be a fraction of what it ordinarily would be. And they're getting warm leads and they don't have to pay for that lead unless it converts into something that's worth anything. So how do they lose? The agent has got an extra string to their bow in terms of income source and a referral network. It's a win all the way around. I think it's great as well to see the agents being able to recommend people. They've become the local mayor, essentially, like Chris Watkins talks about it very often, becoming the local person that they go to if they need a removal quote. So I suppose one thing to be really clear on, we're looking at... getting all of our agents set up on this as well it's also great for sales agents as well not only lettings agents because they're able to refer epcs removal companies just a whole host of things anything property related that you can refer through the the tech and it's great because I said it means that you're local it means that you've got an additional revenue stream as well coming in um and it's just really simple and easy to use one simple platform Yeah, that's just sold it for me, really. Sam, there was something I wanted to touch on a little bit because obviously with the platform now, you are building AI into the platform as well. And AI is something that me and James have spoke a fair bit about and we've had other guests on the pod to discuss and talk about AI and how it can be useful. How do you see AI with PropServe and also how do you see it benefiting the industry as a whole? It comes back to the original point that you made straight away was how much you hate admin. It's taking admin away. I think that there's a lot of people that are worried about AI in the industry. And what it's going to do is it's going to create everything's going to be way more customer service based. Because let's be honest with in terms of the industry. You've got a certain standard that the government are keeping landlords to, so a property has to look a certain way, has to have a license, has to tick all these boxes, renters rights bill comes in towards the end of the year, beginning of the year, more boxes to tick. You're then going to have AI coming in at the same time, meaning that everybody's customer service is going to improve from an agency point of view, meaning that that property manager that's dealt with however much admin for maintenance over the last few years can actually now focus on building relationships with the landlords and the tenants. And it's not a question of who does the best. Everybody's properties will look the same to a degree. Of course, there's not going to be everyone with the same sort of look and finish, but it's more who has the best customer service, who is going to replace human relationships. But I can't imagine you'll ever be interviewing an AI bot on this podcast. Or maybe this is maybe I am an AI bot. Very smart. Maybe we are. It's very unlikely that sort of thing's gonna happen, but in terms of what PropServe has already got within it, it's asking the right questions. So for example, when an inquiry comes through our system from a tenant or a maintenance report comes through from a tenant saying, I've got no hot water, our AI will ask the questions that the property manager or the contractor would ask over the phone, meaning that by the time the maintenance report comes through to your inbox, it's already been pre-vetted you already know what the questions are you already know what the problem is it's just a question of who you want to instruct and how much it's going to cost to instruct them So that side is already within our system. Same as a mover. If they go, they want the living room painted. It'll ask what square footage it is, what colors you want. Do you have any inspiration, any sort of photos that you like? Please add on to this directly for us to have a look at. So by the time it comes through to a contractor, it's like, oh, I know exactly what I'm quoting for. Two days work, white paint. needs it done by next week it's going to be five hundred quid just make it really simple the next stage for us in terms of ai is um the chatbot function so actually having something within our system that rather than someone calling our team or myself mostly myself, to say something like, Sam, how do I change the color scheme on here? That's what AI will be able to be doing next through PropServe, just minimizing contact, unless it's something urgent, of course. If it is something urgent, it will triage and list it as an emergency problem. And that's pretty much where we're going in terms of all businesses now. You will have that ability to tell AI what you want. It will bring everything to you rather than you having to scroll through it. That's the bottom line. Brilliant. Brilliant. It's a really solid advancement. And I think there's a really key point you made in there as well is we are a people business still, aren't we? And I think solutions like yours make our side, the agent side, easier, more streamlined. We had a conversation with someone the other day. I feel like I share this a fair bit at the moment because it's just so relevant. I had to call our business banking company. And it was an AI agent that took the call initially, and it was very helpful, asked the right questions, got to the point where it knew what I wanted and said, hold the line, we'll put you straight through to someone who can deal with that for you. And I'm thinking, cool, you know, forty five seconds in and this AI agent has done exactly what I've asked it to do. The problem then came where it tried to transfer me to the human because I'm then sat on hold for twelve minutes waiting for a human. Now, my version of that is a lot of people say, I don't know that I'll ever embrace AI because, you know, you're not talking to a human being, are you? Now, had that AI agent continued the call and been able to fix my problem, I'd have been off the phone in ninety seconds and I would have been happy. In fact, I probably would have been on a conversation like this one going, you need an AI agent in your business because this is the experience I had. But by contrast, I'm going, the human part of that lets that business down now. for something as transactional as what you've just mentioned, I do agree. But for something where it's about building rapport and being a people first business, which a state agency is, that's where it does get a bit tricky because they're never going to, the AI is never going to replicate, back to the conversation a minute ago, it's never going to be able to interview somebody and have sort of a personality. I don't know actually now. Yeah, I was about to say, don't clip that. Yeah. Your point is right. I do think that there is still going to be a very, very strong need for at least the next decade. Let's be as bold as to say that estate agents will be necessary in the process to nurture the relationship, to support it through, to come up with the creative ways in which to move things forward. AI is just there behind the scenes to make all of that much easier. Yeah, that is it. Because think about it from an estate agency point of view. If you can be out all day doing ten vows and ten viewings at twenty different properties, how easy would your life be? Not having to worry about any admin. And that's where we're going. think on both your points there as well I suppose the ai is getting better and better isn't it fixing fixing problems and if you can fix nine out of ten problems and the agent has only got to then deal with with one issue that's a little bit more intricate then they're going to have far much far more time on their hands to deal with that problem properly effectively whilst the ai can fix the other problems that are probably much simpler and easier to do quite quickly imagine introducing ai into the conveyancing process wow Completely different topic for a different day. So what's next? What can people look forward to, Sam, from PropServe in the near future? I know you've obviously talked about more AI, making it more efficient. Are there any other little gems that you can let us in on that are coming in the future? The next big update for any of our users, I mean, we have something like a thousand monthly users. So they will, when they log in, they do see this when their change log, which we update. But the next big change that you're going to see through PropServe is going to be the ability to almost have a service book of property's history so to be able to have the ability to pass on exactly that exactly that so to pass on a property you've managed for the last five years through prop serve to almost copy and paste a url to send to prospective buyers to say look I know you're about to look at buying this property we just want to give you the heads up here's all the maintenance that's ever been done at this property whilst we've been managing it to empower you to make a smart decision on buying it but as you can see gas that's been done every year we had it repainted last year that washing machine's new so it's still under warranty here you go have a look through this car log well service log book for you to uh to work out yourself if you want to go with this smart play yeah clever yeah thank you Thank you. That was actually from one of our contractors, Daniel, so I will shout him out on that one. It's back to the feedback point. The more you speak and the quicker you release something, however raw it may be, you'll get better feedback and more ideas. Yeah, that's the one thing I really like about, well, we've been using you guys for a short time, but even in such a short time, I've already seen some of the changes that have happened. I know that the system looks very different when we first spoke. So you can see how quickly things are changing, which is great to see. And I know innovation is one of your values, isn't it, as a company? Yeah. That's one of my final questions, I think, is in regards to the fact that I'm piecing your timeline together from what you've shared. So initiated the concept November, twenty, twenty three whilst hung over, walking back to your car by April of twenty, twenty four. We've got the MVP out there. We're now recording on the eleventh of August, twenty, twenty five. So your business is fourteen months old in its truest form. And you're talking about having a thousand users on the platform. So not necessarily talking to the volume of clients you've got, because it's sizable, but talking more to those out there that are looking at getting a business off the ground. A lot of the people listening into this are aspiring self-employed agents or already are self-employed. So what you said, one of your main skill sets, one of your main things was just to get on the phone, start talking to people. But what led to such growth in such a short period of time? Because that's exceptional growth in a short period. Exactly. Thank you. Exactly. The growth led to me speaking to people. And do you know what? This sounds ridiculous. And it's such an easy thing that we just don't do. Just ask. Just ask for referrals. Just ask for recommendations. Just at the end of every sales pitch being like. Would you use this? Yeah, I'd use this. Would you use it next week? Yeah, I'd use it next week or wouldn't use it. I'd use it next month. Cool. I'm trying to grow this business. This is me. This is off my own back. I've quit my well-paid corporate job to go and do this. I need more clients. Can you help me with that? And when you ask, people very rarely say no, especially if they like you and you're not a total dick, bit of a dick. Yeah. we we actually uh well we we got introduced off the back of uh referral recommendations so ross mckenzie and we spoke um to a little while ago we've known ross for a long time and he recommended we we reach out to him and speak to you as we're getting the lens business off the ground so um it's clear that you are being recommended and referred and yeah it's clearly working as a growth Yeah, but that's it. That's that's it. Anything if you if you're an estate agent and someone says that I've really enjoyed using you. Great. Do you have anyone you could refer me to? And nine times out of ten, you don't need to give them fifty quid voucher to do it. If you've done a good job, they will refer you. And if they get on with you, they will refer you. It's the best type of lead as well, isn't it? Because that lead is already in. It's already born. You've already done the introduction. You've already kind of done the sales pitch because you've been introduced already from someone who's already using the platform and already bought into the platform. Well, if someone they know and trust is making the referral, like we know and like and trust Ross. So therefore, we were coming into a conversation. Jack was coming into a conversation with you in a headspace of positivity. And I think that is in its simplest form, something that people that are whether they're self-employed or not, in fact, you know, if they want to grow their business in their corporate world that they're in or not. just by simply asking the question, because sometimes you have to sow the seed, don't you? Sometimes there are businesses that I've interacted with that have never asked me for a referral, but what they've done is so good, so compelling, so enjoyable to experience that I've naturally, what am I like, Jack? Whenever I experience something positive, everyone around me knows about it. I will. But on occasion, there are businesses that have given me a really good experience, but it's been in line with what I expected. So it hasn't blown my mind. It's just been in line. And unless they ask me for the referral, I might forget. And so what I'm trying to say to those listening in is always ask for a referral. You deliver mind blowing service and experience and everything else, but always ask because you just never know where that might lead. And if you can sow that seed in someone's mind, they're going to think of you. If someone is coming to you going, I need a really good tech based property management business. Hmm. I think it's something we were very similar when we first launched The Avenue. It was something we did very similarly. We leaned on the network we had and the people we knew and the people that we'd worked with previously. And I call them our sales team, essentially. They're our sales people. They've worked with us before and they were the best people to sell what we were doing because they'd already experienced it. And it wasn't even us having to then pitch it to clients. So, yeah, I think that's... One of the biggest takeaways for a lot of people listening would be make sure to ask for those recommendation referrals from those people. Definitely, definitely. I would say that we're on the other side of that now where we've exhausted all avenues, but we're pretty close to in terms of recommendations with the networks that we have to a stage now where there's twenty five thousand estate agencies in the UK. We work in total with two hundred of those. So there's a hell of a lot more that we can go after to the stage where it's not physically possible for us to do that anymore. So, weirdly enough, actually back onto the AI point, we tried using the AI outreach tools where they'll reach out to businesses for us, try and get me through the door. And that's an example of my experience. Hopefully someone can prove me otherwise. Honestly, drop a message on LinkedIn or email me about this. But I have yet to find a system that works well for outreach. um there's always problems with them whether the message is slightly wrong or they make a slight error that's not quite as good as human output right now but I do think yeah as time goes on that will change but it's definitely a pro a nice problem to have when you you sort of your referrals are coming in and you've done x amount it's not going to be a problem there well it might be a problem in the self-employed estate agency worlds but certainly if you want to try and grow it to more than that that's kind of the sticking point that we're definitely having a prop serve right now So I'm now having to bring on a salesperson to manage more people, to get on more inquiries, to hit the phones a bit more and take it from there. It's an interesting challenge, isn't it? And I suppose you're at that next phase. And I suppose that leads quite nicely to what I feel is a really good part in question. And that is you've just shared that in order to get your business off the ground, picking up the phone, leaning on those people you knew and gaining referrals was really important. Besides that, what would your number one piece of advice out there be for people that are at that start in their journey to getting their wheels and momentum turning? Because everything in business is transferable no matter what you're selling, right? So what else beyond that, if anything else, would you say would be a really valuable takeaway for someone to take from this? really find the pain. Don't eliminate the nice to haves versus the pain. The nice to have from a PropServe point of view was the ability to refer contractors using our affiliate marketing side of the system. The pain was property managers having to find their own contractors every single time. So it was by accident, but we found the pain into something that needed to be sorted versus a nice to have. And then we put them together and it all solves one big pain point. And I guess you can look at that again, relating up to a state agency. If there's somebody that doesn't work well, there isn't a local independent agent in the area that you are. That's the pain point. People don't want to deal with corporates all the time. I've got to be careful because obviously we have corporate agencies that use our system. But a lot of the time, people want to work with an independent person. People buy people first. And if you know you're dealing with that person independently, that's the pain point there. They don't want to call the office and have to call a landlord. They want to WhatsApp you a lot of the time. So I'd say that's probably the best advice I'd have. Find the pain point. What a nugget to end the podcast recording on. Find the pain point. But it's so true. It's so true. Find what truly matters to that person. They aren't just selling their home. There is an underlying reason for the sale of that home. Find that, serve that point, and you win more business. Brilliant. Sam, it's been a real pleasure. You've shared a lot of value in here. For anyone out there that is looking at adding a maintenance arm to their business and wants the addition of tech to make their life much easier, whether you're a sales agent or a lettings agent, then we at The Avenue and at the Elite Agent Masterclass highly recommend Sam and PropServe. So on that note, Sam, thanks for joining us. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you.