11: Ben Rubenstein
Chris Suarez (00:00):
Welcome back to the experience growth podcast, where the collective mission of our community is to build big experiential businesses and more importantly, big experiential lives. And we do that by ultimately learning leaders are learners, and whether we're leading ourselves, leading our families, leading small businesses, we're leading massive.
Companies being on the forefront of leading a movement toward experiential living is our goal. I am your host, Chris Suarez. And today we will introduce you to a talented and very real human being. Ben Rubinstein. Not too many of our community. He needs no introduction. He's had multiple startups with nine figure nine figure exits he's landed himself on Inc 30 under 30 list and was recently named the 20, 20 Austinite of the year in his hometown of Austin, Texas.
He co-founded Yodel. An online marketing business that eventually sold to web.com for $350 million. He then went out and founded up city, a tech platform for the real estate industry eventually purchased and acquired by news Corp for over 200 million in dollars. But perhaps more importantly, Ben is a giver.
He's an active member of Casa, which is a court appointed, special advocates nonprofit Casa helps abused and displaced children in the court system. Ben's been incredibly active all while currently serving as the chief revenue officer of realtor.com really responsible for overseeing all the combined sales for that entire organization.
So today, take a moment and learn from, and meet Ben Rubenstein.
Chris Suarez (01:53):
All right. Ben, first of all, I wildly appreciate you taking some time out and just sharing some perspective and thoughts on on what's going on in, in not just an industry but in the business world. I'd love to actually start by going all the way back to the beginning. You had a really interesting.
Start to your career while finishing up college, I think at the university of Pennsylvania buddy won a business plan competition, and you were selected for that Wharton venture initiative program. Tell us a little bit about what led to that, what was that program and then what did it turn into?
Ben Rubenstein (02:26):
Yeah, so a good friend of mine we've known each other since preschool. His father had a number of car dealerships in Connecticut and his dad put in this in the early days of the internet in charge of all the internet stuff for the car dealership. And yeah, and we were talking a lot in the found that people are more and more people were coming online and wanted information.
And that's where a lot of the ideas from the business came from. People go to the worldwide web for searching for a local business. As you said, we want a business plan competition. We're in the small business development center at Penn, the Wharton venture initiation program. And they didn't give us a time.
They didn't give us money, but they did give us free office space and some advice. And let's see, I was in college at the time. And then right when I graduated, actually made my first sale the day after graduation I was going door to small businesses in Philadelphia signing them up for online marketing your local dentist, doctor plumber salon owner.
And again, as I was saying, people didn't believe that people went to the internet to find a local dentist. Now it's yeah, it's very obvious. But back then they didn't. And our big competitor was say the yellow pages. And say you don't need to spend money in this print book anymore. People are going to the internet.
Those first few years were hard. Nobody wanted to give us any money because we had no track record. I was living on an arrow bed. I moved every two months for two years to different friend's houses. I had my whole life and kind of two handfuls of stuff. And and friends, let me stay there because I put every dollar I had into the business and didn't have money for rent.
And we scaled that business to about a million dollar annual run rate. Small business customers are paying us on a monthly basis
Chris Suarez (03:51):
As perspective, what year?
Ben Rubenstein (03:52):
2005 till the end of 2006. And then at the very end of 2006 we said, Hey, we want to raise venture capital money. We think we have enough credibility.
Now we have Ton of customers on, we were at a million dollar annual run rate. And so we pitched a different number of different VCs and ended up going with Bessemer venture partners in New York. We moved our headquarters from Philly to New York, kept our Philly office and started to build out our entire team.
I know at that point we thought we were going to replicate the yellow pages. And say, they have this outside Salesforce, we're going to build an outside Salesforce, a small across the whole country selling instead of yellow pages, they will sell online marketing.
Chris Suarez (04:29):
That will be the future and buyout out outside sales, just as explanation, the strategy was. To have more view, right? To have people knocking and connecting door to door, face-to-face open up their door and sell them on your product.
Ben Rubenstein (04:45):
That's a tech. I knew the streets of Philadelphia. Very well. I had walked up and down every street, talking to every small business, walking in a meeting face to face, having them sign a contract for online marketing instead of yellow page advertising.
But we also tested, and this was the early (00:05:00) days of WebEx and go to meeting demos over the phone. And we found that the phone salespeople were not only more effective and efficient they were much easier to manage and it was a much easier business to scale from inside then a lot of our outside sales teams.
So we decided, instead of having lots of little sales teams across the country, we're going to have larger inside sales groups. We opened a large office in Charlotte one in Scottsdale and then in 2011, a big moment happened. We acquired our first company in Austin and the company's called profit fuel.
Now this company, they had started as an outsource call center. So they had built amazing tools and technology to be very efficient on the phone. And they had morphed into the largest independent provider of SEO services for small businesses. And our company, we were maybe, our average price point was six, seven, $800.
And a lot of small businesses couldn't afford that. And they had a product. Their average price point was, $150. And so we were able to significant, it was a match made in heaven, right? They had all these customers who wanted to spend money on a larger product. We had all this demand for, we needed to be able to expand our addressable market.
And our culture is meshed really well, especially really strong inside sales cultures. And that really shot us off. And we started growing really quickly. I was a big part of the integration. So spending about half my time in New York, half my time in Austin spending more and more time in Austin, we decided to make our sales and service center in Austin opened up a hundred thousand square foot facility, but 850 people plus calling from that facility.
And we grew incredibly quickly and I decided, spending so much time in Austin to move to Austin. I met my wife here and yeah, then I just, I stayed here.
Chris Suarez (06:35):
So the company then was based in Austin, right?
Ben Rubenstein (06:39):
No, our headquarters was in New York, although our largest office was Austin.
So a lot of our engineering and product was also in Austin as well, but the corporate headquarters in New York. Yeah.
Chris Suarez (06:49):
Awesome to two things about me. One you were in the business of behavioral change, right? Changing business owner's behavior and their thinking. And you had to sell that, right?
Like behavioral change is so much about sales. Neval often says we only need two skills. We need to be able to sell and we need to be able to build. So you took your sales skill, but then you'd be able to begin to scale and to build anything you had to do different. Did you have to think differently?
Did you have to learn differently? Did you have to partner with different people or to build or you were already a builder?
Ben Rubenstein (07:22):
Look, I learned a tremendous amount along the way. I think I always was a builder, but that doesn't mean I was building the right thing. I'll use sales as an example.
So I was telling you that story of how originally I thought we, the best way to scale sales was hire yellowpage salespeople. But I found that these people were not that good at selling online products. And so I hired all these sales pay sales people, and they weren't being very successful. And I was selling and I was like, you know what?
I just need more sales people like me. So then I started hiring all. You had to have a college education, and I was kinda like almost replicating myself. But then I found people who are as hiring. Maybe they thought they were too good for the job, or maybe they just didn't scale the way I was teaching sales.
And I remember so when I used to teach sales, I used to have people say, Hey, let the other person talk, ask them questions. So we buy profit fuel, which they had built all the sales technology, amazing on the phone. And the first day I get there and I listened to their training and it's stick to the script.
Don't let them speak. Make sure you so it's the opposite of everything I was saying. I said, Oh my God, this is an incredibly successful sales company, doing the little opposite of what I had always taught people to do. And I look around and they're able to scale a lot more. And so I said there is a new way to do this.
There's a better way, just cause I was doing something, doesn't make it wrong, but there's a better way to do that. And so that allowed us to scale a lot more, right? Because now what we started to look for is people who could follow a process really well. They were incredibly coachable. They had an amazing work ethic and a great attitude, and it's much easier to find those people,
then those very specific things that I was looking for before, which allowed us to scale so much more because we've built a really scalable, repeatable process.
Chris Suarez (08:58):
The second thing that jumps out at me is if we care about the lives that our people are living, you actually provided a process and a system to your people.
That would allow them to live better experiential lives and make more money in a faster amount of time. Door knocking. Great. There's a purpose for it. There's a business strategy around it. And yet you take those door knockers and either convert them into right on the phone and online sales or find a different group of people and they're able to make more sales faster.
Did you find that did the sale 100%.
Ben Rubenstein (09:31):
Oh, and so one windshield time's a killer, right? I think all of us during COVID are saying to ourselves, did we really need to travel that much? Do we need to spend that much time away from our families? Did we need to go spend all that money on hotels and flights?
And so COVID has forced us to do business a different way. That's made us more efficient and actually a lot happier in many ways, because we're not traveling as much in terms of making the lives of people in that role better. I got so much more joy. (00:10:00) From helping people who probably were not successful and other potential jobs, but because of the system we had built, made them wildly successful and made lots and lots of money doing it.
Where before, when I'm looking for a very specific person, that person has had some success on their resume. They've had success where, when we interviewed people, I didn't care about your resume. I cared about who you were. And as I was just saying, if you were coachable, had a great work ethic and a phenomenal attitude, we can make you successful and then allows us to open up to so many more people help.
So many more people who others wouldn't hire because of their resume. Yeah. Great
Chris Suarez (10:33):
People have great outcomes. It's interesting as is you built organizations based on people. W we won't go too deep into it, but right. One of the things that you say you're most proud of is being named as, best place to work by the Austin business journal top workplaces by Austin, American statesman, like your organizations and companies have been recognized by the actual people within those companies saying, Hey, my life is better, right?
Hey, we're working here. And that is because you're bringing people down the path to their preferred future. Which, which bit builds culture. So fast forward. And you sell that organization how from start to finish, how long did you work on that business? Like how long were you involved there?
It was 2005 ish that you began?
Ben Rubenstein (11:16):
Yes, the auto started in 2005. I left the company in 2015, late 2015. And when we were, and we sold early 2016 and I left cause I been over a decade and I really missed the entrepreneurial world. I wanted to get back into starting something, myself and another thing with Yoda because we started that were fairly young.
One of the reasons we were able to get venture capital financing, as they said, Hey, we'd like to bring in a CEO with more experience. So I wasn't the CEO of Yodel and I felt to myself, Hey I want to prove that I could run this thing. And I want to prove that I can start something from scratch. So I looked into a bunch of different opportunities really took some time and thought through what has a large total addressable market.
What's an industry I'm passionate about. And I think I can do a lot of good and take my skills from before. And a friend of mine had started a residential real estate brokerage in Austin, Dallas, and this brokerage wasn't huge. There may be like 2% of the Austin Dallas market, but they were buying like 40% of the online leads and they were converting these leads at two to four times the industry average.
And they had built a brokerage, not around any top pagents right, but about giving the right lead to the right agent at the right time. And I saw this, I said, wow, this is really interesting. What's happening at the small scale. And we could scale this to brokers across the whole country, using software, using technology, using data science, using machine learning, and using our ability to scale teams.
And that's really where the ideas for up city came from. Of within this brokerage. And so I think we had a huge competitive advantage compared to most startups and that we had three things. I think all startups need. The first one was a great product market fit. No, a lot of startups fail because they try something, but nobody wants it.
Nobody wants to buy it doesn't work. We were doing something that was in an existing real estate brokerage for the last 15 years. They've been doing this and it was proven that it worked in this brokerage. At least there's some product market fit. The second thing we had huge advantage was team. I brought over some people I'd worked with, from Yoda.
We had worked together. We trust each other. I'd experienced doing something like this before. And the third thing that was critical for us to seed was money. I was telling you about Yodel. It took us two years to raise our first round of venture capital financing. And with OpCity we raised a million dollars from friends and family and a week.
And then we raised the largest series, a in central Texas history of $27 million a little over about a year and a half later. Now it's probably the largest series that is much bigger than that at this point. Cause they've been going crazy. But yeah, so we had some real advantages.
Chris Suarez (13:43):
Do you think that is why on the first first company, right?
You get that, that million and on the and the length of time it took and the second company, it showed up much faster.
Ben Rubenstein (13:54):
Credibility, right? Like people are, if someone's you some random 20 year old, you just met, who's got nothing. You're going to give him any money. Probably not. That's a big risk.
Somebody who's just had a successful exit. That's somebody who you're probably more likely to take a risk on. That's why the first time around is oftentimes the most difficult because you don't have the the luxury of credibility. Yeah.
Chris Suarez (14:14):
One thing I just want to point out is I think credibility is built over time.
Oftentimes people hear about exits and sales and see people are successful. And. And they think it's fast. And the reason why I asked you, Hey, when did you start? And when did you leave? When was that? Exit is 10, 11 years. And not have Oh, I'll work hard in the beginning. It's 10, 11. Like we've talked before.
It was 10, 11 years of just hard work. Like it, it didn't get easier as it went on, it was still maintaining and being patient and consistent and no good business lacks that.
Ben Rubenstein (14:49):
Hey OpCity, didn't get easier. It's just because it was maybe a little bit easier to raise money. Doesn't mean there's less work.
Doesn't mean it's the business itself is (00:15:00) easier. It just probably means the expectations are higher. Your second time around the expectations are much higher of how long is it going to take and your probability success, when you're 21, starting a company, nobody's got any expectations.
It's all it's all upside. Cause people think nothing's going to happen. So there's a lot of there's pros to that first time round in post the second time around. Yeah.
Chris Suarez (15:18):
Let me ask you this. You don't have to start that second company, right? I, it's some people work their whole lives, hoping for that first company to, to gain an evaluation or to sell or to exit or to make a certain amount of money.
What do you think? What do you think drove you, you share part of it. Just wanting to prove that, Hey, I can launch something. I can start something. I can be that CEO. Was there anything else that drove you or continues to drive you even today?
Ben Rubenstein (15:41):
Look, I think I'm fairly driven in general. I don't know a lot of successful entrepreneurs who have an exit and go move to an Island.
I don't think I've ever met anyone like that. And I know a bunch of successful entrepreneurs. What made them successful in their first company? Is innate to them and they, it makes them want to go do something else. So I think that whole start a business, sell it and move to an Island thing is a myth that doesn't really make logical sense because a lot of people, what made them great at getting to that point drove them to the next step.
I think for up Sydney, he was actually a little different in then I first, so I was talking about that first million I've raised. So I could have either potentially self-funded that or gone to some different VCs and investors to get that first million bucks, but I know how hard it is in the beginning and how many times you're going to want to quit.
So I intentionally actually went to about 25 to 30 of my friends and family from high school in college to all write smaller checks and to all of them. And especially like my parents, those a big amount of money to write and. That really. And have you heard the story of burn the boats? Do you know that story?
That, that was my burn, the boats moment, right where I said I am taking my friend, my whole network of my whole life. I'm taking their money and I'm responsible for it. There are going to be two options. I'm going to succeed or die because I am not going to burn every social connection I have in my life.
And I, that put that extra pressure on me that you don't get by getting to go into an investor or to yourself that I had to win.
Chris Suarez (17:13):
Remember at dinner you shared that story and you said something that I, I remember in, gosh, that was maybe a year and a half ago now, but that those relationships and those commitments upfront caused you to make decisions differently, caused you to act differently. Perhaps you wouldn't have made decisions the same way or at the same time, but it was always remembering that. The first round, those friends, those 25 or 30 close friends, family members, and knowing their future depended on the decisions you made out. It is level of accountability that you can't recreate that.
And I think that's a real value for us to take away. No, one of the thing I wanted to ask you about as I look at, I truly driven humans. And those that do it again and again in a Ted talk that you delivered, you shared something from one of my favorite books and author Shawn Achor.
Oftentimes we think that that success in the business will lead to happiness. And so in our mind, we're like, okay, you have success now. You're happy. Then you go to the Island, talk us through your perspective of that.
I know you've read the book. Why does it work backwards according to his research and your perspective?
Ben Rubenstein (18:18):
Yeah, it's great book where he studied all these people who were successful and what made them successful. And he talks about happiness. And as you said, so many people believe that success leads to happiness.
All I need to do is this next thing, and I'll be happy. I'll just make this much money. But when you get there, the goalposts move. And so when studying all these people who were successful, it wasn't that, they were successful. And then, because that became happy, it was actually the reverse.
It was their happiness led to success and their positivity. Led to success, in the job of an entrepreneur, really, I think anybody in sales or in most jobs, you're going to get much more failure than success, right? You're gonna get beat up many more times and you need to be in that positive mindset to be able to take that hit and step back up and keep going.
And those, I think the most successful people are people who are happy and we're able to deal with some of those difficult times and persevere through them. That's what led them to this success.
Chris Suarez (19:18):
Yeah, there's probably nobody better to have a conversation with you around building an organization within an industry built on failure, right?
A big portion of your business is working with people that are on the phones. Yes. W like how does that connect to failure? What is their success rate?
Ben Rubenstein (19:36):
Oh, it's a very similar model or sales realtor or the CSR role, if you're a great baseball player, right? Great baseball player.
You're battling 300 right now. Great baseball player, 300, the best players, about 300. That means of 10 times you got up to the plate. You failed seven times. So the best hitters in baseball are failing 70% of the time (00:20:00) in cold calling. If you make a hundred phone calls and you make one sale, a hundred calls and they made one sale a day, that's a pretty good day, right?
That's you know, 20 some sales a month. That's still you make, that means you failed 99 out of a hundred times. So you were the best at what you're doing failing 99% of the time. That is a lot of failure to handle. And how do you mentally it's much easier said than done, right? How do you mentally push through that failure?
And stay positive through that failure? I talk a, to new hires about this all the time. You make a hundred phone calls and nobody picks up right. Does it happened to code? Cause it's two ways I made a hundred phone calls. Yeah. This sucks. Nobody's picking up or you could look, the odds are in my favor, I made a hundred calls.
The other, the next person has to pick up the same event happened, but how are you approached that completely determines what your next move is going to be? Yeah,
Chris Suarez (20:54):
It's funny. I, the one thing that I won't forget in that book is Sean says that The ancient Greeks definition of happiness, right?
Which it's, if we're trying to experience growth and success, happiness is the joy. We feel moving towards our potential, which is what better training for people on the phone? What better training for people building businesses? What better training for salespeople? There every call they make good, bad or indifferent.
If they're focused on moving towards their potential. That's happiness. And that's what drives people to start again. And that next business, or launching that next business, some people say, gosh, aren't you satisfied? But I think we need to separate that conversation of sadness.
Am I satisfied? It isn't lack of satisfaction that drives us to start it. Is that commitment to continuing to reach potential?
Ben Rubenstein (21:42):
Yeah, I think it's when you link satisfaction money. You go down the wrong path, right? Because that'd be your question of, I want you to go to an Island that's because you have enough money.
So you are satisfied enough. But if it's not about the making of the money, that's bringing the satisfaction, then you could be satisfied by building another company. So it's yeah, so much of sales as well. It's just a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? So many people believe what happens on a sales call has to do with the other person on the other end of the phone, but it's got nothing to do with them.
It's everything to do with you. Like we teach our sales people have a mirror in front of them, so they can see that they're smiling right. Or stand and have energy. Why would any of that matter if it only matters who's on the other end of the phone, right? There's the people who think that it's all because of luck, those are the ones who are always making excuses, the people who know that it's because of hard work. And because of that attitude, those are the ones who are the most successful. There's another book I think we talked about before is talent is overrated. Yeah. Yeah. And it talks about like, why are some people it's not that they're more talented that made them successful.
It's that work ethic got them. They became experts faster. There's another book called the outliers where he talks about how they become a, it's a knock on Gladwell is an expert. He's done something 10,000 hours. And how do you get to that 10,000 hours faster than anybody else. And that's going to come from failing a lot within that 10,000 hours and staying positive to get there and keep going.
Chris Suarez (23:00):
That, that brings me to a conversation I wanted to have with you. There's there are some people that they're just idea people, right? They have brilliant ideas, but yeah, some people would look at you and say, gosh, he's a visionary. He has these great ideas. I love that you have great ideas, but you also execute right.
Ben Rubenstein (23:21):
You dive in and you execute on those ideas. I think I'll push back on you. I don't think I have great ideas. Yodel was selling pay-per-click and searching and optimization. Small businesses would be, companies were selling pay-per-click advertising, SEO to small businesses like everyone in their garage that they could be your SEO expert.
Like we weren't selling anything incredibly novel. It was our execution and it was their ability to connect with small businesses and have a great product and have a great price point that allowed that to happen. You know what we built it up city was that novel, right? How we did it may have been novel the way we connected consumers and agents, our matching model.
There was a lot of, but the concept itself was not that new. It was about doing it in a better way. So then.
Chris Suarez (24:07):
If that's accurate, then what advice shows up for those that they have a great idea and they just don't know where to start, where they think they have a great idea.
Ben Rubenstein (24:19):
Look, people talk to me all the time who think they have a great idea.
And a lot of people come in and they do have good ideas. And you know what I typically say, at least for what I'm doing, that's a great idea. Let me stay focused. I think the hardest thing for any startup to do. Stay focused and focus is not what you do. It's what you don't do. So I, I think advice I would give to an entrepreneur is make sure this is the right thing you want to do and then stay laser focused on it.
And you got to prove out what I was talking about before. Is there a product market fit here? Just because there's a need for something doesn't mean there's any money in it, just because you have an idea doesn't mean other people will want it and will they pay for it? The best way to figure out whether it's (00:25:00) something, someone wants to buy something to ask them for their credit card, and then you'll see that they really want it.
So if you have an idea, figure out if there's a product market fit, figure out. If there is a first, you got to see if there's a total addressable market. That's big enough with your time, to do this. Then if there is a big market, are there enough people within that market who will actually buy the service uses service and is meaningful to their life?
And then if so now it's time to execute and stay focused on that and making that happen. Yeah.
Chris Suarez (25:26):
I, what's interesting as you look at what you've done within an industry and people have been doing you're right. People have been doing it for A century, decades, definitely. You just executed differently.
And so some might say that's the idea, but you executed the same thing that other people do. I often say you've gone into industries and you've just beat industries at the industry. Yeah,
Ben Rubenstein (25:48):
I would say we use technology in a way others didn't right. I think there were plenty of people who had ISS before, but we built a system that made our.
ISA is infinitely more productive than anybody else. We built a matching. Everyone has had people who connect consumers to agents, but we built our matching model better than anyone had using real data science, real machine learning and real technology. Everyone, plenty of people have had referral models.
We'll collect referral fees, but we built a system that makes it so much better. So it's not just about having a better idea. It's about actually using technology for that idea. And I think there's a lot of people in our industry here who try to, there's some ways where I think that grit and that force and brute force can get a lot of things done to get going.
But there's some point where you can't just do everything by brute force. You've got to build software and technology and automation to really be able to scale.
Chris Suarez (26:42):
So you're in Austin. Incredible city for talent, incredible city for, honestly like the launching ground for a lot of business right now. One of the things that I've appreciated about your city, having actually having businesses there and spending a lot of time there is there's this incredible network of mentors.
That helped to cultivate entrepreneurship and you've benefited by some of those intentional mentors that you've shared. And you've also been an intentional mentor to many. Why is mentorship and strong networks so important? What have you experienced,
Ben Rubenstein (27:15):
I couldn't be where I am today without mentors.
I don't have the answers to everything. I haven't experienced everything before. And having a good network around you of amazing mentors allows you to pinpoint different problems you're having and run ideas by people who've solved these problems. Who've thought about these problems who are experts in these situations, right?
And so who your network is. Is how you scale is how you, you use your network and partner in that work to find great people to work with. You use your network to throw ideas by your network to find the right people. And then, I'm a investor advisor board member to a number of different companies.
And I do it partially to pay it forward because so many people help me. But also to learn, and it's a great way to learn about so many businesses and see that all the problems people are having in very different types of businesses are all the same. And there's a lot of commonality in a lot of these.
And so many of it comes down to the same stuff over and over again. And yes, I can learn a little bit about a different type of business, but I can give my advice that worked in my business that I know will work in another business as well. Cause I've seen it. I've seen it happen many times.
No just the other day yesterday, actually I was talking to a guy he's a CEO of a company and he said to me, and this is our plan and we'll be there in 18 months. And I said, why 18 months could this be done in six months? Probably, but we need this and this. Okay. So you said that 18 months number, cause that's what the VC, whoever you were talking to before, but what's possible let's work from there.
How would you make that happen? What would we need to hire? What would we need to do? And the commonalities between industries are amazing. And so I find that really interesting, too.
Chris Suarez (28:52):
Growth, right? Like you talk about even challenging time. Mentorship takes time, it takes time off of The future of businesses I've found that to be the case.
I often refer to mentorship as platforms. It gets us a little bit higher, a little bit faster. Sometimes we're scared of partnerships or scared of mentorships because the commitment and yet the most brilliant business people have chosen their mentors carefully and it's really propelled them and gotten them to their end or to their future faster.
Ben Rubenstein (29:22):
Yeah. I would add, choose your mentors carefully and be a mentor. Sparingly, you only have so much time in your day. You only have so much bandwidth help people who you think are really going to listen, that are coachable. And we'll actually put this into play now and seek out people who there could be that mutually beneficial relationship.
You're helping them and they're helping you. You don't want to mentor just for the sake of having a mentor. You want just to have a diverse set of mentors, too. You have your person you'd go to for technology, your person you'd go to for sales person, you'd go for leadership. Like the different people that you go to for specific things. Instead of having a lot of the same awesome advice.
Chris Suarez: (29:56):
Let's switch gears just briefly. Clearly you've been (00:30:00) successful in business. You're, well-known in Austin for that but perhaps equally well known in Austin for what you do it. With and for the community. I think I shared earlier, you were named Austinite of the year in 2020.
Not a small feat by the way, in the city, in which you live. Just incredible talent, incredible human beings in your city. And you've been highly involved in Casa, right? The cost of organization. I would love for our audience and community to hear about that organization.
What is it? What is its mission? How are you involved? What can you tell us about it?
Ben Rubenstein (30:31):
Yeah. So Casa stands for court appointed special advocates. We help kids who've been abused or neglected through the court system, which is a really scary and painful time. We raised money to train and assign volunteers, dedicated volunteers to each of the kids to help investigate and help them lay into the best situation possible.
Oftentimes, when kids are removed from their family, they don't have anyone to turn to or anyone who is got their best interests at heart and they can get lost in the court system. And so our volunteers investigate what their schools, they spend time with the foster parents or biological parents.
They investigate different programs that they're in and coaches that they talk to and they spend a lot of time with the kids themselves to understand what would be the best situation for the child. It's not like a big brother program. You can be a mentor, but you're not a mentor to this kid.
The purpose is to help them. And B. Do what's in their best interest, not necessarily what they want to find their permanent placement situation. I was a volunteer. I was assigned to a 13 year old kid going through a really difficult time. I've been the president of the board of directors.
Vice-president treasurer pretty much on almost every committee and it's something that's really important to me because I can't think of anyone who's going through a harder situation than a child who has been removed from their parents due to some form of abuse or neglect who needs our support more.
And I can't think of a scarier place to be than a courtroom. With a judge who's deciding where you're going to be. CPS is typically completely over loaded and they have a lot of cases and there's a lot of turnover there. They may have a lawyer assigned to them. Who's doing what's in their client, wants to their best interests.
So there's no kind of. Responsible adult to help them through this difficult time. And that's what we do. We train volunteers to help the community. And so I, I was the president of the board directors of cost of Travis County here in Austin, but there are costs of programs across the entire country.
So anyone who's listening, I would highly encourage you to look to see if there is one in your community.
Chris Suarez (32:26):
Awesome. One of the things that we'll do then is we'll put some information in the show notes about that organization, as well as the Travis County chapter there. I'll ask you this Incredibly busy. You have a family yourself. How do you carve out that time? How do you carve out the time and the energy that isn't just a, Oh, let me volunteer a little, that's a lot of emotional energy that goes into that organization as well.
How do you do that? How would someone do that?
Ben Rubenstein (32:50):
It is a lot of emotional energy. Look I think fortunately this volunteer activity can is during the times when the child's available. So my, my My case that he was 13 years old. So I typically go and see him either in the evening or on weekends when he wasn't in school.
And that's when I have some of my free time is in the evening and weekends. Also a lot of that volunteer role is not, it's being an investigator so I could call the school. I could call the parents, I could call their people. And from when I had a free slot the only thing that is set in stone is the court date.
So that only happens every three to four months. But look, you will you will find time if it's really important and it's amazing how many things you do in your life are not that important. I probably don't watch, I don't watch very much TV. I'm not saying watching TV is a bad thing.
It's just something I haven't prioritized. So there are more time in the day than you think. If it's really important and there's more things that you do that aren't that important I was talking before. Focus is not what you do, it's what you don't do. And I see a lot of people who run their business, try to do everything and not delegate to people.
And thus, they get completely burnt out and go crazy. And I've been fortunate enough to hire some really strong people. Who've helped me lead. So I haven't had to do these companies myself. I don't think would have been possible to do them myself. So I have. Had some bandwidth and look there's many other charities that I care about that I haven't been able to dedicate the time that I would have liked to.
But this is one that's super passionate. I'm super passionate about. And I dedicate the time again,
Chris Suarez (34:12):
It shows up maybe one follow-up on that. You obviously make a difference in, in that experience for the child. What has that experience done for you? How has that impacted you being involved with the organization or maybe even that specific having jumped in and been a court appointed special advocate for that child, that 13 year old?
Ben Rubenstein (34:30):
It makes me appreciate tremendously. The people involved in Casa, every single volunteer, we have 800 volunteers and the time that they give and the emotional. Strain that puts on them. I have deep appreciation for them, for everyone who works there, it makes me incredibly appreciative. It makes me incredibly appreciative for my upbringing, where I had, did not have to go through some of the things that these kids go through.
I don't have the exact stat, but a very high percentage of people who are parents in the child protective service world were (00:35:00) children themselves in it. That's the saddest part. You see all these cases of kids who are removed from their parents? Those parents were the, when they were kids removed from their parents.
And so I'm very passionate about trying to break that cycle. And with my, the kid whose case I was on, he had a really hard upbringing, but was still really positive. And that was amazing to me too, of all the ways other kids he interacted with it had it better than him. He didn't see it that way.
He wasn't down on himself. He was, he didn't wasn't feeling sorry for himself. He was just a kid going through a hard time and having an adult around was the quietest best interest was very helpful to him. But that optimism was very Yeah. Th there's just so many good things you see all around from this.
And at the same time, you see a lot of bad things that are happening and you want to figure out a way to stop them. Yeah.
Chris Suarez (35:48):
I think there's some powerful life lessons in that in, in that child, that, that he actually taught you and can teach us as well.
Ben Rubenstein (35:58):
Yes, I I learned. That no matter how bad you have it, as I was saying, he was so positive.
So how could I ever complain about anything? And that yeah, it's even if I can't talk too much about the case, but really it was an amazing story. That's awesome.
Chris Suarez (36:13):
You're a father now yourself, which I think is awesome by the way. Congratulations. You have a two and a half year old little girl you're continuing to play a major role.
See your CEO role in, in op city. And through that transition and sale of that company you're involved. How do you build we, we believe here in our community that you can grow and build a big organization and a big company and a big business while also living experientially and focusing on what's important.
Any advice that you can give our community on, on being able to do both well.
Ben Rubenstein (36:43):
Yeah, look, I, first of all, my two year old daughter, she gives me more energy. She gets me excited and optimistic to do more good things. I actually, so I'm now the chief revenue officer of realtor.com which is actually even more responsibility you could say then.
And obviously given how large the org is and the year we sold up Sydney was the year she was born. I also moved that year. There was just a bunch of crazy things happening in my life that year. And you realize, wow. If I could go through all of that at that time, it's all downhill from here. And th and so I think crazy stressful times.
Actually make you feel like you have more bandwidth for the other times, because I got to see if I could handle that. I got a lot more time now. I tried though to have dedicated time for her. COVID has been a real, a lot of negatives to, COVID obviously many more bad than good. The one positive that it's had on my life at least is she eats dinner at six and I really had a hard time getting home before then with everything I had going on.
And now I arrange my schedule because I'm home to always eat with her. And then I have plenty more to do that I can do after she goes to sleep. And I think that is one positive. I've heard from a number of people who are now working and spending more time at home is they're able to arrange their schedule, to see their family more.
And so I've made that a priority just because you're busy. Does it mean you can't rearrange your schedule? And that's, it that's been really important and spending time with her and watching her grow up is really important.
Chris Suarez (38:11):
I think one of the things you shared earlier is a demonstration of that that, everything we do are there choices, right?
So if I'm not at dinner, that's a choice. If I am at dinner, that is a choice. And really just being able to adjust those priorities and make that choice. You're right. You're there at dinner. Awesome. Guess what, she's going to go to bed before you do. And if you need to put in some time or you need to get something done, you can, but making those choices around what matters most and making life choices and businesses, choices that, that sort of create this woven fabric.
I, I challenge a lot of times people like to use this word balance and I don't love that word. Balance. I love the word integration. Like we live growing businesses, you're living an integrated life. Life is important, businesses important. And it's those choices we make in between that, that show people.
What is important to those around us too? I think you do that well.
Ben Rubenstein (39:03):
It's interesting. It speaks to me of integration of your life and work at Yodel. So many of the people who worked with me were my close friends, right? Some of them were friends before they worked there. Some of them came friends after and opposite.
He, same thing, realtor, same thing. And so I'll be hanging out with a friend and we will like in just the same sentence, talk about something personal and it just seamless flow. And I think some people think that's really weird like that there's no line between your work and your life, but it is all one thing to me.
And I feel very comfortable in that. And there's nothing I'm shying away from. And I could talk about work and personal things, all, all in, in one breath. And then in terms of time, Look, I actually treat time. I think time is like my enemy that I'm trying to figure out a way to conquer. And I'm constantly thinking about the opportunity cost of things and optimizing my time.
And it's this what I want to be spending my time on and thinking about like my daughter, that's something I really want to be spending my time. So that's what I (00:40:00) do. And other things like maybe watching television of saying, Hey, I would've fallen in the habit, but when I stepped back, I'm like, is that what I want to be optimizing that what I want to be doing?
And so treating time as like this enemy that you're trying to conquer is something that I haven't mastered, but I'm working to do optimize.
Chris Suarez (40:16):
That I think it's a perfect place to end. And allow me to thank you for your time, right? We've looked at this as incredible optimization of your time because we're able to share your journey and in some ways, some valuable lessons , to a group of people that are in a place in their world that.
Yeah, they want to build big businesses and yes, they want to build big lives and sharing that journey with the community. We'll help them get there. So I appreciate your time incredibly. Thank you for being a mentor to many whether you realize it or not through this conversation.
Ben Rubenstein (40:46):
Oh, I'm happy to help and thank you for the invitation. And it's really, if anybody, who's listening to this as extra questions for me, feel free to shoot me a note and I'm happy to respond. I really do love being a mentor and helping other people yeah, thanks for having me.
Chris Suarez (40:59):
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate it greatly.
