Clay Lehman on Scaling with Systems, Automation, and AI That Prevents Burnout

Steven Weinstock: 0:01 Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Wealth Clock podcast with Steven Weinstock. I've been investing in real estate for over 20 years, from single family homes to multi-family properties, to launching my own real estate investment fund. This podcast is brought to you by my company, We Capital and the Goethals Capital Fund, where we buy properties in cash. We lock in deep discounts. We eliminate the mortgage risk in year one, and we refinance later to scale all without asking investors for more capital. This show is not about me, it's about operators, founders, closers, who are building real results in real time. Today I'm excited to have with me Clay Lehman, founder of Lehman Strategic Partners, who has built a reputation for helping real estate professionals and business owners create systems, strategies and automation that scale their operations without burning out. Clay, welcome to the show. Hey, man, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. No problem. Okay, so I looked at your bio from a high level. Maybe just give a minute or two, tell us about yourself and then we'll get to it. Clay Lehman: 1:14 Sure. So I've been in real estate for 20 years. Prior to that, I was in corporate accounting and corporate finance. I'm actually a licensed CPA, although you wouldn't want to ask me for any tax advice. I haven't practiced in 20 years. I've done a lot in real estate from retail brokerage REO, brokerage property management. Now my latest venture is in title company, and then I know your group and you are real estate investors. I'm a fellow real estate investor. And I've mostly single family. I've had a couple of multifamily investments and a couple commercial buildings. But yeah I'm just, I'm stoked to be here. Excited to talk to you and your audience. Steven Weinstock: 1:53 Where are you where are you based out of, where are you from? Clay Lehman: 1:55 I'm in central Florida. I'm in Ocala, Florida. A little north of Orlando. Steven Weinstock: 1:59 Been there your whole life or your transplant? Clay Lehman: 2:02 So I grew up in Florida, Tallahassee to Jacksonville, to Orlando, and now I've been in Ocala for just about 20 years. Steven Weinstock: 2:09 Okay, so you're a real Florida native. Unlike the rest of my neighbors here in the northeast who are making Florida the new home. Clay Lehman: 2:18 Hey, it's great. Bring 'em on. Steven Weinstock: 2:20 All right. Tell me about some of your automation, some of your business systems, and how they were key to scaling. Clay Lehman: 2:28 Sure. So I, it start, my introduction to all this started with automation in my property management business and we were just finding that. We were having trouble scaling in the manner we wanted to, and I didn't like our inconsistent messaging. One of the things that was counterintuitive that I discovered about automation, a lot of times you hear the word automation and you associate it with. A reduction in customer service levels, but I found the exact opposite to be true because you can automate make, for example, we want to send an email out every time we lease a property, and that seems like it would be an easy thing to make sure happens every single time, but it didn't always happen. Or even, more important to the owners, like if if a renter was late on their, a tenant was late on their rent. An owner wants to know that and we want to communicate it, but property managers get busy. So automation was a huge lift for us in making sure that one, the messages went out. But two, the other benefit was I didn't have to worry about is Timmy saying the same thing as Bobby or what? We've made sure that the message that we wanted sent went out so that. Was the introduction to automation. And in the last couple years, AI has ramped things up to 11. And now that you can incorporate ai, you can personalize your automations that much more. Plus it helps designing the automations for people like me who, that's not my background. AI can help me. It can be basically my design partner. It's incredible what it can do. It can watch you creating, Google AI Studios has a screen share function where it can watch you work and then you can, with natural language ask it, how do I get it to do X? And it'll tell you. And it's, it is just ramped my ability to create and automate and anyone's not just mine, but through the roof. Steven Weinstock: 4:17 Yeah, AI is really entered into everybody's sphere for real estate investors as well. Although I think most people when they think of ai, they're just thinking chat, GPT and how they could write emails that look a little better than their education allowed them to output on their own. What does your typical client look like? Are they entrepreneurs? Are they feeling overwhelmed? How do they get to you? Yeah. Why? Why are they calling you? Where are they holding in their business at the time? Clay Lehman: 4:47 No, that's such a great question. It's typically people that have hit a ceiling, so the reason that I relate so well to that person is I was that person. Most of us when we get into business, whether that's real estate or another business, but really frequently in real estate. You follow the same trajectory where you get into the business and you mine your sphere of influence for business, and that gets you to a certain point and you do a good job and you get referrals, and that gets you to another point. But most people after three to five years realize that if they want to grow a scalable, valuable real estate business. They're gonna have to step outside of their sphere and start, really marketing. Most of the time when we get into real estate, we're not coming from a marketing background, nor do you learn much about marketing or strategy in your real estate classes. And that's where I step in, is to help them understand, how to build a strategy, which starts with, and this is true for anybody. Knowing who is your target audience, but not just knowing like their name or what they are, but what motivates them? What are their pain points? What are their aspirations? But truthfully the key is knowing their pain points, which then helps you design your marketing strategy to speak to those pain points. It's almost if you don't know who you're talking to, how do you know what to say? So that's where we start. And then we reverse engineer from where do we want people to get to and what's their journey from where they are to where we want them, and then we build our strategy to take them from place to place. Steven Weinstock: 7:47 Okay. So first of all continue lecturing because my audience comes not for me. I found out they're not coming for me. They're coming for the people who I'm interviewing. And so definitely feel free to lecture. Just to noted, highlight you mentioned before the, no and trust. I know we spoke about this offline but I actually only heard about this concept a little while ago. I was talking to a guy named Yonah Weiss. Who was a big cost segregation guy at Madison specs. And just for our audience, he explained to me that it's like a triangle and, there's three parts. There's KNOW and trust. And in order for somebody to do business with you, they have to know and trust you. And he asked me at the time, what do you think the most important, of those three are, and I was, oh, trust or maybe and he said, no it's, no, they have to know you. Why? Because if they don't know you, they can't like you and they can't trust you. So the first step out there is to get them to know you and then after that they can like and trust you. Clay Lehman: 9:05 First I want to piggyback on the know and trust briefly. One he nailed it about knowing, being the most important thing. One of the quotes that I read and I wish I could remember where I read. But was that the biggest threat to your business? Isn't your competition, the biggest threat to your business is your obscurity. And I, when I first started my business I used the what I like to jokingly refer to as the Field of Dreams approach, where if I built it, they will come. And after about five or six years of basically no one coming, no one's showing up, I learned that, the knowing is the key. Steven Weinstock: 17:55 What would you tell someone like me and there's a lot of people in my audience who are, I guess like me. What could we do to help with raising capital? Clay Lehman: 17:55 Steven, I'm glad you asked. That's actually a great use case for ai and I'm gonna give you a little bit of a multi-step process to follow that I think would be very effective. So I would start in chat or whatever your kind of favorite base model is, and I would ask it to create a deep research prompt to create a report. On and whatever your target, like you mentioned, mom and pop investors that are on the sidelines. So I would use that exact language That will give you a prompt that I would take to Gemini. Gemini Google's Gemini has a deep research function that, in my opinion is the best, gives you the best results. Chat has a deep research function that is also really good. I tend to use Geminis because as a workspace user I have more capacity or usage or whatever. Steven Weinstock: 21:27 Just to go off topic a second and not to get into politics, but if anybody's watching this interview you look exactly and I'm sure you've heard this before, so don't say it and let me say it, but you look like a guy who is Donald Trump's best friend. The guy who runs the UFC, Dana White. Have you heard that before? Ever? No. That's funny. I haven't heard that before. I don't know. That's a compliment. He's a Yeah, sure. Clay Lehman: 21:49 He's a tank. He's a billionaire. He is popular. Yeah. Yeah. Steven Weinstock: 22:02 A lot of entrepreneurs, especially myself we are, I hate to use the word control freaks that we, we just love to do everything. Yeah. And we feel that we're the best at everything. And sometimes, and I find this happens to me on a regular basis, we get down to the weeds and I'm just doing things that are just penny ante. How do you deal with, somebody who's an entrepreneur? For the most part, he is an owner operator of, some real estate that he owns, and he's doing it for, 10 years. He's successful, he has money, his, he is living his best life. And how do you tell a guy like this who is doing well, that hey, you could do much better. You just have to let go and let the processes get automated or just hire out some of your, lower hanging fruit to somebody else. Clay Lehman: 23:44 No, you nailed it. The big thing is getting 'em a quick win upfront, but first of all, I. I make sure that aligns with their goals. Meaning if I'm working with someone, I'm not gonna force on them the idea of delegation. But if their goal is to scale their business, it's the one of the first places we're gonna start. I always encourage people, whether I'm working with them or not, to read Dan Martel's book, Buy Back Your Time. It is honestly my favorite book is, seven Habits, but that buy back your time is probably number one a because it's just such great practical advice around not just delegation, but. One of the things he talks about that you nailed is the you knowing your buyback rate. So he encourages you to take what you want to make in a year. Divide that by 2000. So let's say you wanna make $400,000 a year. You divide that by 2000. That's $200 an hour. Any work that you're doing that's significantly less than $200 an hour immediately delegate that. Steven Weinstock: 29:53 There's there's so much AI out there. What automations or what tools could you tell our audience that are, essential in today's business environment? Clay Lehman: 31:20 It's such a challenge. There's so much noise in AI in our world. What I would encourage people to do is focus on one tool at a time, and I would start with the most versatile tools. If you are a workspace user, I would say start with Gemini. Which is a different answer than I would've given six months ago. Used to be start with chat, which if you're already in chat and have some level of comfort, then just lean into that. But Gemini, they, it's really incredible how much it's improved. Going from there, the next thing I'd look at is the automations that live in the existing tech stack you already have. And then the next thing I would say is I think probably Manus is my next favorite sort of thing to check out for people getting into AI. Manus is an agentic AI, meaning that you can give it tasks. The next thing that just came to mind, which is again, another newer tool, but unbelievably powerful is the Comet browser from Perplexity. Perplexity has replaced Google for me and for a lot of people in the AI space. Steven Weinstock: 38:02 What's the hardest lesson you learned, in your own journey? You're in business a long time. What's the hardest lesson you learned? Clay Lehman: 38:09 I don't know, man. There's been so many le tough lessons. I still the hardest, I remember the hardest day of being a business owner and that was in, and I don't remember the date. I just remember, and it's visceral, the feeling I get when I think back to this day. I've been run my first business was a REO asset management company. So we managed foreclosed foreclosures for hedge funds nationwide. And that business model isn't great. You manage the property for sometimes up to 10 months, 12 months, 14 months. You get paid at closing. But a little secret about employees, they wanna get paid every two weeks. So I had ridden waves up and down where I had borrowed money to pay. We sold houses, paid down the line of credit, just things went up and down. But in, I was in a season where my line of credit balance was climbing, and I remember the day I looked at it and it had gotten over $200,000, which for me was, could have, might as well have been a billion. And I didn't have the business to pay it off. What I learned from that is one, diversification of client base, but two diversification of revenue. You have to as a business owner, going back to our conversation around doing this sort of smaller tasks. You can't build a million dollar business doing $10 tasks. So you have to ruthlessly eliminate those tasks from your day so that you can be focused on growing the business and paying attention. Steven Weinstock: 41:24 What are you most excited about in the next 12 months when it comes to tech and your business? Clay Lehman: 41:25 Every single day it feels like some new thing, tool, application is being released. That changes things immensely. As someone who enjoys continuous improvement in learning, that's really exciting. So I'm excited to see where this tech continues to grow. I am excited in my business that I didn't. I don't know how this happened, but it feels a little bit like I'm with an, a group of people at the forefront of AI and real estate. Steven Weinstock: 43:07 For someone listening right now, maybe they feel stuck, overwhelmed, they don't know how to scale. What's the first step you'd recommend? Clay Lehman: 43:16 It's not sexy, but it's documenting your processes. When you get to a certain point in your business and you are overwhelmed with the storm around you the day to day, and you can't lift your head up to two. Strategize, you're never gonna come out of that. And the first step of coming out of that is documenting your processes. Because in doing that, even just in the exercise, I 100% guarantee you're gonna see something without any effort on your part other than the documentation where you go, wait, why am I doing this? And you'll be able to adjust it. But once you've documented it, feed it into AI and say, Hey, act as a best in class process documenter or process designer. What's missing from my process? How can I improve my process? What can I delegate? And just build on that. Steven Weinstock: 45:20 Clay tell our audience where they could find you, learn more about you, how they could reach out. Clay Lehman: 45:33 The easiest thing is probably connect with me on Facebook, clay Lehman, L-E-H-M-A-N. I'm, I put a lot of stuff out there. My email's easy to remember. It's Clay at I am clay lehman.com. Those are probably the easiest. I have a, my Facebook group is Unstuck ai. If you look for that, you'll find it. There's a ton of great content in there. And then finally on my website where you can find my blog. www.iamclaylayman.com. Steven Weinstock: 46:05 Clay, I had a great time talking to you and honestly you really told me a lot you really said a lot here where after I, we finish here, I'm actually gonna take this raw video, before it gets edited, and I'm gonna send either the audio or the video to my partner. Because you really taught me a lot. I really want to test out some of these ai programs that are out there. And I really got tremendous value out of this last whatever it is, 30 minutes that we're talking. So I really want to thank you. Clay Lehman: 46:35 Oh, I appreciate that. Steven Weinstock: 46:36 Yeah, it taught me a lot. I hope our audience finds it as well. Clay Lehman: 46:57 I appreciate that so much. I'm so happy to hear that's, one of the reasons I love doing this is to hopefully bring value to your audience because, I want to connect with people. And on that note, as you get started, please reach out if you have questions or if you're like, Hey, I thought it could do this, but it did that, or whatever, right? I'm not a, I don't know everything far from it, I'm just a little further down the road than you are. But one of the great things about ai, it's so easy for you to catch up. So yeah, just let me know if you need any help with anything. Steven Weinstock: 47:23 Clay, I really appreciate you coming on. For our listeners, if you found value in today's conversation, make sure to connect with Clay Layman and check out what he is building at Lehman Strategic Partners. This has been the Wealth Clock with Steven Weinstein podcast. Please share, subscribe until the next time. Keep building wealth, keep building systems and keep the clock moving forward in your favor. Clay, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, sir.