7 reasons why I agreed to become CEO of Kingston Lane

After growing Teles 10x in 5 years and the fairytale acquisition by Douglas Elliman, I reflected on the highs and lows and captured 37 big lessons that I learned through that journey.

Today I start a new journey as the CEO of Kingston Lane… a push-button execution software platform designed for real estate agents and brokers to supercharge their sales and marketing capabilities. Yes, that was a marketing-speak of sorts… in english that means “you push a few buttons and we do all the work”. You can check out the features of the platform here.

Here are the 7 reasons why I agreed to become the CEO of Kingston Lane:

1. Big Impact: Everything comes down to execution. Execution is just not sexy. Nobody wants to tackle it because it is extremely complex and lots of things can go wrong. But I know that if we can help real estate agents with execution, it will change the very financial bloodlines of their families. That fires me up.
2. Natural Progression: I started as an advisor to the company, then became an investor and then invested some more, and since I loved it so much and saw so much potential the next natural step of responsibility was for me was to jump in with both feet.
3. Beyond the Box: After cutting my teeth on wall street at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, and learning the real estate business from the inside out at Teles, I got used to worked within constraints of time, resources, technology, money, and the overall brand structure. Constraints help you become resourceful and innovative but I always wished for a world with no (conceptual) constraints where I could do anything, create anything, and build anything that I thought could help agents have better careers.
4. All-Star Team: Very rarely do you get an opportunity to pick your team from the start. Everything changes when you have great people. Yes, everything. Great people can make great things happen. (I cant wait to introduce you the team in the coming days… many of them you already may know!)
5. Where excitement intersects with capabilities: After the acquisition, I started to have that hokey conversation with myself about what I am truly passionate about… blah blah then I just stopped and reverse engineered it. What are the things that I am actually good at and which of those do I love doing? I love results. I love doing anything that gets results. I love helping people get results. And, when I realized that my whole “job” could be to think about how to get people results everyday at the push of a button, it made me insanely happy.
6. Product Built on Pain Points: Let’s be real…most people don’t want to talk to real estate agents who whine and complain. Truth be told even I used to get irritated sometimes… but now I love it. I welcome it. I want to talk to agents who whine, moan, and complain in order to perfect their game. That allows Kingston Lane to learn about the pain points and build push button solutions to solve them. Every feature that is currently in Kingston Lane was built from pain points that agents have shared with us. I want to create an environment that allows agents to share their struggles and frustrations…I want to hear it all because that is the only way we can truly solve day to day operational and execution pain.
7. 10x is not good enough: After the last 10x story, I needed something much bigger… something that went beyond scale and economics. I knew I wanted a gigantic opportunity to have impact. I realized it doesn’t need to be sexy. I realized it doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needed to solve daily pain…a lot of daily pain, by increasing joy and reducing stress in the lives of real estate agents so that they can go out and be great advisors to their clients.

All that said, today we are launching the public beta of Kingston Lane (defined as: the software works but please be gentle) and we are offering a FREE version for you to check it out.

>> Now I need your help:

1. Sign up for a FREE version of Kingston Lane. Check it out. Take it for a spin and I know you will love it.
2. Give us feedback and ideas (be kind, but whine and complain) so we can build additional push button solutions to solve your daily pain points.

If you are in the real estate industry in any where in the world, you should sign up for a free Kingston Lane account now.

I am ready to partner with you, work with you, collaborate with you, and crush it with you. If you would like to chat (after you get a FREE Kingston Lane account, of course) send me a direct email at sharran at kingstonlane dot com.

Lets go!