Why? I'm scared of rejection and mean people. So every single lead gen activity does nothing but create a list of people for you to call. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for Ricky Garoo! He is an investor, a speaker, and soon to be remembered, in my opinion, as a legend in the industry. The cool thing about what he was doing was he was documenting everything. Like he would post his calls, his work he was putting in, his strategies. He was sharing everything.  Because you're not going to push everybody through the funnel, okay? You're not going to get everybody to close today. It's not going to happen. Email's going to hit 90% of the people in your database. You don't own the database. You don't own your following on social. And you can't make sure all your clients are there watching your stuff. You guys have situations that are very interesting to your clients in your database. When you show up to this conpoiment, you should be like looking around like, why are you selling this place? This is amazing. Ricky, what's up, man? Hey guys, how are you? Great. How are you doing? Really good. Good. Yeah. I appreciate you jumping on the call. I've been following your stuff for a while and been doing the handwritten letters and cold calls and all that stuff and on a team out here in Colorado. So figured I'd spread the knowledge to everybody else on here. Yeah, man. So you make you write in the letters and then call in after the letters? Yep. Yep. It's not really cold. We're going to consider that a cold call, right? Yeah. Or what is a cold call? Let's define that. Yeah. I mean, I guess that's true. I mean, it's definitely a little, it's warmer since I've sent the letter. Yeah. But what would you say the definition of a cold call is in general? I guess just calling somebody who doesn't know who I am. Right. Right. And so agents don't want to do that, right? They're scared to do that, correct? Yep. So what do they do instead? Buy Zilla leads and do all the other stuff to get around it than talking to people. So let's just take Zilla leads, for example. Okay. So when you get a Zilla lead, what do you got to do? Call and talk to the person. Right. And then when you do, have you ever talked to them before? Nope. Okay. So you just said the definition of a cold call is calling somebody you never talked to before. Right. So I'm trying to figure out how that's getting around cold calls when it's literally the same thing you just defined. Yep. I'm not coming at you. I'm just like trying to make a point that guys, it's the same thing. It's funny because I did a video, I did a training last week and I said, you know, you guys want listings, right? I mean, you know, is there, is there anybody in the call you can put it in the comments? Is there anybody on the call that would rather have 30 active listings or 30 active buyers? Would you rather have, let's just say, if you would rather have buyers, I'd love to hear from you. I don't think I'm going to see anybody that says buyers. Okay. So let's just say a hundred percent of you would rather have listings and buyers. But there's probably, I'm not saying combination, I'm saying one or the other, right? One or the other. You don't get the, you don't get both. Okay. If you got one or the other, what would you want? And it's funny because there was like 400 comments because there was a thousand agents on the zoom and there's 400 comments listings and like it's funny because it's a combination. There was like two or three that said both, but nobody said buyers.  Why are you not going after listings if in fact that's what you want?  I just don't go after them. They're going to come to you naturally, organically sellers that sell and then buy people that want to buy your listings and referrals. They're influenced, whatever.  Why? I'm scared of rejection and mean people. I said, okay, well, then put in the comments right now. If you've ever had one of these buyers that you spent all this time, money and energy to get who was mean to you or rejected you, 400 more comments. Yeah, it happens all the time. These buyers are mean to me and reject me all the time. So let me get this straight.  Your business is confused. We need to line up what we want with what we're getting because at the end of the day it's the same thing guys.  But 10% of this buyers you call are going to be mean and reject you. It's the same thing. Same thing. So every single lead gen activity does nothing but create a list of people for you to call. Think about it. You know, open houses, Facebook leads, Zillow, YouTube, you know, cold calling, sphere of influence, networking events, like name something that's a legion activity that isn't designed to try to help you create a list of people for you to sit down and call. Am I am I am I am I am I crazy? Nope. Okay. So that's the end result of every single lead gen activity. No matter what, you're going to have to call people for the first time anyway. 10% of the people are going to reject in and be mean to you anyway. Why not go for what you want? So I'm just trying to help you guys maybe, you know, come to the realization that your perspective on your business in terms of this whole buyer versus listing thing is completely backwards. It's the same thing. So let's just start there. How are you guys doing? Literally. We can all go home for that. Thank you, man. Sit around and think about this stuff all day long. I eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. So I've been an agent for over 20 years now. I did 1000 deals as a single agent. I was the number one remix agent in Alabama for a while. And now I'm just a coach, travel, speak a lot, do a lot of social media and I'm more of a digital marketer now than a real estate agent.  These are different chapters. Got back on real estate, realized how to actually be the best agent out there and crushed it, you know, then the next chapter, you know, I started writing, speaking, coaching and I think, I think that it's about that. And I think most agents, the horizon, the horizon that they see is, I want to be number one, I want to make a million bucks a year, but they're not even looking past that. They're not even thinking that there's another chapter.  I watched them. I watched two agents die from old age. They made, they called for cell boners and expires till three days before they actually passed away, watched it with my own eyes. Legendary agents, mentors of mine, it was very eye-opening. But anyway, I've done a lot of things. So, you know, made it lost at a young age, came back number one single agent. I, you know, did it through cold calling. I'm like big on social media, wrote books, travel, speak, invest, develop, flip, everything. I've done a little bit of just about anything any of you guys want to accomplish in a big, big way. And so I'm just here to help you.  So I can dive into a lot of things, but let's maybe do some Q and A here because I think that's where the most of the value is probably going to be. Yeah, Ricky, I watch all of your, all of your content. So I'm very familiar with like probably the answers that you'd, you'd give. One question that I had was, as a team, is there something that you would like, if you were an agent on a team, is there something you would do? And then the other thing is I know you're like super big in the weekly email, and I'm guessing your answer is probably going to be just take, you know, take the time to write my own email. But is there, do you think there's a way to leverage the weekly email as a team, or do you think that's more of a personal thing? Is this one huge team I'm talking to? Pretty much for the most part. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I shouldn't answer that what you should do if you're on a team part then, right? You can say whatever you want to say. Maybe leave the team. Yeah. No, it's, listen, here's the thing. Every single little thing works. Okay. Like I know guys that built teams that do 8,000 transactions a year.  They make millions and all that stuff. It works. So that may be what you guys are, are doing. Um, for me, since I was never on a team and I just went out there and just made it happen. I find the disconnect between the goal of the team and the goal of the agent, the goal, the agent normally the way I see it is to learn everything they can so they can go on their own. And the, the goal of the team is to retain them forever. And unless those expectations are set and met and, and, you know, put in place, then it could be super disastrous. But since you've got such a big team here, I guess you've done a really good job of setting expectations and get everybody in the roles they need to play in terms of the weekly email. I think that there's so many like situations. It, it just depends on what everybody's roles are. You know, it's like, it's a team of agents that go out and listen, sell properties versus a team of buyer agent, section, listing agent, division, marketing division, right? If we're kind of around like a brokerage where we're on a team, but we're all listening and selling and we'll have our own clients, everybody should do their own email. If it's more of a true team where here's the buyer agent team, here's the listing agent team, here's the ISAs, here's the, and you have these different divisions, then quite possibly one email, you know, could be the thing, right? So it just kind of depends. There's a lot of dynamics. Yeah.  So that's probably the way I'd look at it. My name is David. I'm the director of agents over here. So, you know, one of the questions I had for you, if you could answer this is, you know, a number of us on the team here have a lot of clients that are sitting in the, you know, kind of just the purgatory, if you will. And it would be maybe helpful if you give us some insights on really the best and most efficient way that you've done is in how to push people down and out of the funnel, right? Because I think what we do is we kind of sit them there and there are a lot of them that we can probably convert, but we're spending time getting new deals through Zill or wherever, and then we're letting these guys go and then they get old, right? But they still sit there, hovering, and we just got to get them all the way down to actually closing and signing, right? And so, yeah, give us some insights on how you've been successful in moving people down and out of the funnel. Well, these are all buyers. It could be, that's a good question. I would say yes, the majority of them. So when you say Zillow, then I'm thinking buyers. Yeah, so yes, we do have Zill listings as well, but those ones aren't probably in the purgatory. We're working on those. So yes, I would say buyers is that would be helpful. And then so what you were talking back to, how big is your database right now?  Basically, like they work their own thing.  Because five years from now, one of these Zillow leads that didn't buy liked you a lot. Okay.  You're going to have forgotten about them. And now we did all that work for nothing in the beginning.  Okay. You're not going to get everybody to close today. It's not going to happen. You can get some to close, but not all of them, right? So, so first we got to accept the foundation. Okay. When people come into our funnel, how do they never forget about us? So what, what's your guys' answer there? Are you doing anything to maintain relevant relevancy with the clients forever? I mean, in the past, I'd always just call and follow up, but after listening to stuff, the weekly email, I mean, makes a lot of sense. I mean, anybody in the call, is anybody doing anything effective in terms of relevancy with clients that don't buy forever? For me personally, Ricky, I send what I call a deal of the week. So it's just a deal that I find just some basic information that's like, here's some, some perks about the house. If you're interested, just reply, I'll get you all the details. And so there's that. And then I will send a monthly market update to everyone I'm attached to. And it just like, you know, layman's terms like talking to a fifth grader, explain what's going on in the market and those two things. I understand. So then I have a, then I have a, yeah, then I have a VA that follows up with a text message to a certain segment of people on the database just checking to see if we can do anything to serve them. That's it. Gotcha. So, so the weekly email, is it on the same day of the week? Um, I send one on Monday and then I send one on Friday if I'm doing it. So Mondays, Mondays is, well, sorry. One week, the one a week and then the monthly, the monthly update. So monthly updates on a Friday. Okay. Um, and then the deal of the week is on a Monday. And then the monthly ones like the first Friday, the month or something like that. Yeah. All the data comes out. Got it. So that's really, really smart. Because email is going to hit 90% of the people in your database. Like they're going to see it in their inbox. So doing that Monday, deal of the week email is brilliant. Something that you could add to it is here's the deal of the week. And by the way, here's all the new listings in the area last week. Click here. Just add the new listings of last week. Right. That would just really enhance the value because like they may not be interested in that, but hell and call it like Matt's deal and new listings of the week. Call it the same thing every week. That way people, you're branding the subject. Right. Matt's, uh, you know, Matt's deal and new listings of the week or Matt's deal and new listings and the date now Matt's deal and new listings and use a little symbol for and you want to shorten these, these things up as much as you can. Because when you notice when you're looking at your email, there's only, it only goes so far and then it cuts off the words. Matt's deal and new listings date that way. They know it's fresh when they see it in their inbox. That's really smart. Um, so when you think about relevancy with your database, you can't call them all. What if you had 5,000 people? Text is okay. Text is okay, but normally when you do it in a bulk fashion, it's from a different number than your cell phone. So it, it's okay. It's okay.  If they're all pieces of the puzzle that fit together, but, but guys, email should be the foundation because, you know, social media gets a 5% organic reach versus emails 90 and it's your database. You don't own the database. You don't own your following on social and you can't make sure all your clients are there watching your stuff. Harlene of them see your stuff. It's great because it's like this rotating, you know, there's like a new audience every couple of weeks that's kind of coming into your social you're getting the same amount of views, you know, say you get a thousand views of video, you know, and you just keep getting a thousand views. Well, in three weeks, it's a different thousand people seeing the video than three weeks prior. And it's like this rotation of a new audience every couple of weeks. That's what that's what Instagram and Facebook does. It's called the algorithm. It's called the algorithm, you know, if they don't like your stuff, they're going to quit showing it to them, even though they're following you. But if you can, if you can grab their data while they're there, as soon as they, as soon as they follow you DM them, say, hey, I see you work at Jesse's or cut hair at this place or I see you're entitled or you're an insurance, you know, I'm a local real estate agent. How you doing to see if you can get back and forth to get their get their email. Now they're in your database. Now they're a real follower. But anyway, I'm getting back to David's question here, right down the funnel. The first thing that has to be in place to get them to the closing table is something that's that keeps them keeps you relevant to them forever because let's just say what do you think the conversion rate is David on this? You know, the amount of buyer leads you get or whatever leads. What's the actual conversion rate of people that actually do a deal with them? Let's just say the first three or four months. Yeah, it's pretty low. I mean, call it three, five percent. Okay. Maybe 10% if we're really good closers, but yeah, we got 90 to 90. Listen to this guys. 90 to 95% of the leads that come through. Are going to do deals later, not today. Later. If you don't have something in place to close those deals, then you're just going to make 200,000 a year forever. You're just going to close deals off the five or 10% that are converting now and you're going to throw away the 90%. You did all that work to get them and now we're just going to throw them away if we don't have anything to stay relevant with them. Weekly email on the same day of the week forever should be the just complete foundation of your entire business. And when you realize that that if you put five people a day in that database, 250 working days a year, you've got 6,000 in five years, how big is your business if they've been getting a weekly email on the same day of the week forever? You know what?  That needs to be number one. Like if you're not doing it, then just don't even worry about getting any leads until you get that in place. You're just throwing, you're throwing your business away because 95% of the people you talk to aren't doing a deal today and you don't have anything in place to close the deal later. So therefore you're never going to get to a million bucks a year. This is how you get to a million bucks a year is closed in the 95 in three years. Alright, so backing up, okay, getting people in the funnel, getting them to close, it's all going to come back to not trying to close them, which kind of sounds funny to say it, right? But the whole thing about it is, is when I, when someone inquires on a property or if I'm calling them because their home expired or I have a buyer for their home or may have a great rental, you know, investment property for them, I'm not calling to try to sell that property. To sell them a property, you know, they inquired about a home. I'm not calling them to try to close them on that deal. What I'm doing is I'm using that home as a excuse to get into a conversation with them to see if there's a working relationship because there's a million agents guys, agreed? There's a million agents. They, they, they can pick, they've got, they've got their pick. So why are they going to pick you? Just because you, they were a Zilla lead of yours? That's not going to be a good enough reason for them to pick you. Now there's data behind a study that like 80% or so of buyers and sellers go with the first agent they talk to. That's a real stat. So there's a little legitimacy there, but still at the same time. It's not just that deal. It's the 10 to 20 deals over the course of your career that you're going to get from that client through repeat business referrals and referrals over for us that again is going to get you to a million dollars a year. So think about this. The 95% of people who don't do a deal today out of the leads.  Okay. That's one path to a million. Another path is doing such an amazing job with the ones that do close that they never want to use another agent to get into their life. They're going to refer everyone. They know to you and then they turn into 10 to 20 deals over the over the course of 15 years. Right. As what's the word for it? You know, it turns it multiplies into that because of the service you gave everybody's like what kind of closing gift never really got any elaborate closing gifts. You know, I would give them like gift cards to restaurants. They would go have a nice meal or you know, I gave people like gift cards to Home Depot when they're finished remodeling a house or something because I didn't have to because the closing gift was how smooth the transaction went for them dealing with me and now when a discount broker comes in, they're like, I'm not even going to risk not having the same experience I had with Ricky on this possibly saving a couple thousand bucks. I'm willing to pay him whatever he wants because I know what's going to happen. This dude's like clockwork. He answers his phone. He handles situations immediately. Like he took care of me. He threw in a little money to get the deal that blah, blah, blah. So bringing it back. Funnel closing deals. When you when you reach out because they inquired about something use it as an excuse to see if you can really get to know them. How do we get to know them?  What's the first thing you would ask her why? Yeah. You wouldn't say you wouldn't say, well, by golly, our team is sold like 15 houses this week. When can I come by and take a look? That's not what you're going to say, but your mom. You're going to say why mom? You love this house. I grew up in this house. Why are you going to sell this house? It's amazing house. That's what you need to be telling your clients. When you show up to this disappointment, you should be like looking around like. Why are you selling this place? This is amazing. And then understand what's happening in their life. That's causing them to make the decision to buy or sell something. That's that's the only thing that matters. Like what property they want to buy, what they want to sell, when they want to sell, how they want to sell all that stuff is irrelevant. When you understand why they're making the decisions, it's like and you can't take anything at face value because a seller will say, Hey, I'll sell in six months. Call me then. And most agents are like, All right, I'll call you in six months. Look at all the phone and call their buddy and say, Oh, I got one. They're going to sell in six months. The whole time the seller has no intention of selling six months.  They they've told that to so many agents that never heard from again. And they know it works. I'm going to sell in six months. Call me then. And they know they'll never hear from this agent ever again. No intentions of selling at six months. When they say I'm going to sell in six months. I'm like, Great. What's what's going on in six months? What's got you thinking about selling in six months? As soon as somebody tells me they want to do something. I'm like, Why? What's going on then? What's happening? If I call a Zilla lead and they inquired about this house, I'm like, Hey, I see you are looking at this house online. Just calling to check on that situation. See if there's something I do to help. And then I'm listening. And then they're like, well, yeah, we're looking at it. We like it. Cool. What's got you thinking about buying? I immediately got to know because again, guys, this is my mom. This is my dad. This is my brother, my cousin, my best friend from high school. I got to know. I got to know what's going on, but it's like a doctor. A doctor is not going to bring you in and say, Oh, your stomach hurts. Okay. Lay down right here. Scalpel split you open and look in there and start doing stuff, right? They're going to start asking questions. They're going to start doing tests. They're going to start diagnosing the situation before they come up with a game plan around how to attack the situation. Right. That's what we should be doing as professionals. Okay. You want to buy? Tell me more. What's got you thinking about doing that?  You want to be on the water in a smaller house? Just you and the wife now? Awesome.  You don't even know what they're trying to do. So again, go back through the funnel, getting these deals closed.  You're here to help them through whatever it is. You got them, right? And when you can dig into the depths of that and listen, when you say why and they tell you why ask why that, you know, they tell you why that. Ask what keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Don't just, don't just play on the surface. You know, as the one that's going to represent them at the highest level, the way they want to be represented, you got to know the whole story. It's almost like, it's almost like a lawyer representing you, right? He's got to know the whole story. Even the part, you don't want to tell them, right? Same thing here. They, you got to, you got to be honest with me. I got to know with the whole thing before I can really help you. So that's how you get them through, man. Is really digging into that, understanding what the true motivations are, the timelines, et cetera, and then putting together a customized game plan around them and their situation. You know, and then listen, if you've got the backend weekly email in place that you're writing every week, giving your opinions on stuff, not generic stuff. Don't let a company write them for you. You, you will lose. You, your brand will be demolished. If you let a company write an email for you. Go ahead. This is great. Yeah, this is great stuff. Hey, so talk to us a little bit more about this email. Train us up on this. So like, what, what do you put in your email? Do you mix it up every week? Is it the same thing every week? Yeah. Train us up a little bit on this weekly email and in keeping people involved or on it. And then also, do you just add everyone that you ever come into contact to on this email? Fill us in on. Train us up on that.  Maybe people that haven't even ever heard of me to be getting this email. All right. Okay. When you, when you open up your phone, okay, where's my phone? When you open up your phone and you pull up Facebook or Instagram, right? What's the physical motion that you make when you're, when you're, when you're looking at your Instagram, Facebook? You doing this? Is this, is this the motion right here? Okay.  It's the same thing. Guys, email is a social media platform. It's the same thing. It's a newsfeed that they look through like this to see if they see anything interesting that stands out for them to click on. It's the exact same thing. So once you understand that and how powerful it is because it's a 90% organic reach versus two, three, four, five percent on all the other platforms. And if you can use these platforms to funnel people into this platform where you've got them for life over here, you don't know if you got them for life over here. You got them for life. If they unsubscribe. Awesome. They don't want to do business with me. That's great. That's my job is to filter through the population and find the 10 to 20 to 30% of people who love me, who want to do business with me forever. The other 70% I love you too, but you have an agent or you don't like me. That's okay. That this is business. That's why there's so many agents that are successful because you know, you can't do all the all the work. Let's see. Let's see. Hey, Ricky. Can you give us an idea of do you have the same pattern of a weekly email? And if you don't mass produce these, what would the email say every week? If I don't mass produce them. What do you mean mass? Right. Like you said, don't have your company send those emails. Oh, absolutely not. Right. So what kind of content do you put in some of those weeks? Dawn, Dawn, how many buyers did you show in the last week? Five. Okay. Did any of those write a contract or make any offers? Two are about to two are about to. Okay. So picture this an email with a a landmark some kind of something that's like people know it's your market, right? Some kind of right. And then it's got new listings and property search links right there. And then you're like January market on fire.  Just want to let you know I showed five buyers in the last week and two of them are about to make offers. We're still looking for properties for the other three.  You know, above are all the new listings in the area. Here's a great deal. I thought you might be interested in. Have a great rest of your week. Let me know if we need anything. Boom. Now, when you give clients, was that good? Yeah, when you give clients inside information about the market that they can't get on Zillow. They can't find on Zillow that Don showed five buyers last week and that two might make offers. You can't find that anywhere. Yeah, even the new agents. You guys have situations that are very interesting to your clients in your database.  Dude, when you get a listing after you get a listing, what do you do?  When you get a buyer after you get a buyer, what do you do? You go show property.  And you're sitting here saying buyers or it's the same thing. What I'm talking about here. New agents think they don't have any value to add. Yes, you do. You're on the frontlines of the market. You probably got more. You got more. You got more to give than the experienced agents. You just don't even know it because you got all the time in the world. The experienced agents or their time is so clogged up with doing deals and servicing people. You don't have any deals going on yet. So your your mind is free to research the market. Your mind is free to do all these things that these experienced agents don't have time to do. That you could add value to to the to the general public and your prospects in your in your database. You know, there's there's new agents to say I'm too new and there's old agents to say I'm too old. Well, who's right and who's wrong? It's all up here, man. We're just we're just putting these.  I guess the gospel or something and we're lying to ourselves and don't even know it. All right. On the email. So I just put a link in the chat. Where is it? Where the heck did it go? I don't see it. Oh, that's oh, here it is. Bam. Okay. So let me go there. You can go there and create a free account. When you create the free account. It's at zero to diamond.com. Okay. When you're here, you have all this stuff here. Okay. So this is like a social media platform. We got 8000 agents here. We just started this two months ago, less than two months ago, six weeks ago. And this bronze area, this is all free right here. So my scripts, email business planning, this business planning is fire. That's an hour long deal. There's a workbook that goes with it. Okay. But if you go to scripts and email templates right here and you go to email templates right here, weekly email templates. If you go here, there's a training right here. A full training, a screen share, do an email, answer questions. You need to go watch it. Is really, really good. It explains the whole thing. This is literally how I made a million bucks a year, sold a hundred properties a year as a single agent. But right here, you can see every email. They actually, I still do my weekly email even though I'm out of production. My dad does the listings and sales. The only part I have in the business still is doing the weekly email. I just, I won't let that go. But you can see everyone I did for over a year right here. You can click on any of these. Let's see. There we go. It's always got a nice high resolution picture. Something people can recognize. My market. I've got new listings at the top. And then, you know, condo sales down 25% in August. Average prices though were up 9%. And then I write all this. This is nothing can and then from here down is always the same. Normally our pictures are there. My computer has some storage. There we go. There's mine. Let's see if I can get dads. There we go. But anyway, you can go here. Like I do a restaurant giveaways. Reply back to $100 gift card. Y'all get a hundred people to reply back. And so I have this four week template system. You can get right here. And that's through constant context. So I have stats of the month. It's plug and play. I have four templates that you can just use and reuse every month. Stats of the month. Restaurant of the month. Deal of the month and news of the month. Like development, the building, the bridge.  I made it really, really simple because most people try to do the weekly email and they put too much stuff. Like it's just like you scroll forever. I'd still be scrolling on some of you guys's emails because you put like just put one thing in there. You're going to send them another email in seven days. You don't have to get them. What you don't have hit them with everything. Hit them with the most important stuff. All right. I'll show you guys the back end really quickly of. So it looks like you use constant contact as your source to send emails out. Yeah. Yeah, it's real user friendly. I got my I got my templates in there for you guys. But I'll just show you guys the back end analytics real quick. Just to show you like real numbers. Okay. So like last week hits 19,000 people. Seventy three hundred opened it last week. The week before seventy two the week before seventy four the week before seventy three seventy four seventy four seventy seven seventy seven seventy eight seventy two seventy seven seventy eight. So it's always like between seventy two and seventy eight hundred people opening it. Not to mention the other seventy seven hundred who saw it in their inbox appreciated it. That's like that's like people that scroll through your open house on Instagram. It's like people that scroll through your open house on Instagram. They don't double like they don't double click to like it, but they saw it right. So they see you working. That's called an impression and impression means they saw it. They didn't necessarily engage. They may amount out of engage, but they saw it. So when they see your Instagram post that you're at an open house or you got another listing or you're out here making calls or whatever you're posting about and they didn't engage. That doesn't mean that it wasn't powerful.  Same thing. You saw it and you appreciated it and you said, wow, that person's getting after it or working hard or whatever you thought.  Same thing with the people. So you understand, guys, impressions mean a lot and we're undervaluing impressions. You know, we're thinking, oh, if they didn't open it, then we need to take them off our list. No, you don't.  Yes, they do. They see you working just because they don't like it. Doesn't mean that they don't appreciate the fact that you're out here getting after it. Impressions mean a lot, guys. Engagement is another factor, but it's not the only factor. Does that make sense? I'll put the link right here directly to the four-week template. Rick, you had a quick question for you. Yeah. So I use Mojo as my dialer of source and on Mojo, I can also get access to people's emails with the expired listings. Although they don't know me directly, would you recommend that I input those emails into my email campaign as well or is that frowned upon? Just the ones that you call. Just the ones, okay, gotcha. Yeah. So like if you call 200 people today, only have those 200 people in there. Would you recommend I ask if they be perv you to it?  So how are you going to ask them if you didn't talk to them? I meant the ones that I did talk to. Like, What if you did talk to them? You're not going to act like you have their email because you don't know if it's right or not. It's in Mojo. Okay. So you're going to pretend like you don't and you're going to use my scripts, which are right next to the weekly email templates at zero to diamond and you're going to say, Hey, matter of fact, let's do a role play, right? And you're, you're what an expired. Okay. You're the property owner ring ring ring. Nope. Hey, Gaggin. Hey, Hey, is this Gaggin? Yeah, this is him. Who's that Gaggin? Ricky Carruth over here at whatever real estate company and whatever area. How are you doing today? Doing well, man. How are you? Cool, man. Me too. I'm enjoying the day. Isn't it gorgeous out there? It's beautiful out here. Yeah, man. Listen, I want to take it too much of your time, but I see you were trying to sell this house on whatever road it was on the market. Now it's all fight. Yeah. What's, what's going on with that? Oh, yeah, we, you know, we're just going to get some repairs down their property and then we're probably going to relist the property back in the spring market with the same agent sweet art. Do you have an agent you're going to work with on that? Yeah, we're just going to relist it with the same agent. Got you, man. Cool. And who was that? By the way, it was, uh, it was Jordan. Well, got you. That's a great agent, man. You are in good hands there. I'll tell you what, I still love to stay in touch with you. If that's okay. Yeah, yeah, sure. Why now? Cool. What's a good email? You got some, see now. Okay. At gmail.com. So, so you guys got to understand the flow for there. But the point I was trying to make is, is that when I get to the point where they may or may not work with me, they may or may not do a deal today. I'm like, great. Do you have an agent you're going to work with? If they don't, well, listen, I sure love to work the opportunity to work with you. Is it okay if I stay in touch? Boom. They say yes. Verbal confirmation. Then I'm like, great. What's a good email? I'm not just saying, okay, cool. What's a, what's an email or I'm, don't ever say you're going to send a market report or a weekly email. They will, they will probably hang up on you.  They don't want another one, right? So make it feel like you just want to stay in touch with them directly, personal, personally, not a bulk situation, right? But even if you have their email there, you still go down that road and ask them what it is. And then you can kind of compare to see if that data is real or not. You know what I mean? Yeah, I got you. Yeah. And then, and then also in that scenario, see, you know, if your circle prospecting is kind of a different ball game, you know, if we then expire where they're fixed, they're like, well, we're going to realize it in the spring.  I'm going to go down that whole road. Like I was telling you guys, I mean, I would have immediately went that direction. I just didn't want to go there. You know, I wanted to get to the email part to show you guys what that part of the script looks like. Plus, you know, gagging here might not have been able to come up with some kind of fake reason why he was going to sell in the spring that quick. So I didn't want to put him on the spot either. I appreciate you. Anyway, that makes sense. If you were, I know you're like really big into the handwritten letters and I've, I've loved it and I've had really good conversations with people. I've had a few listing appointments. I mean, I guess is that more of like a way to just get people feeling more comfortable and making it feel more warm? Like, would you recommend just calling the people or do you still think like the handwritten letter is the best way to go? Dude, I'm, I'm a guys. This is real important. I'm posting this YouTube video right here. You have to grab that and go watch that. It's it it's good. I do a full blown presentation and it touches on some of what you're asking there. So for me, what I would do is yes, the handwritten letter because handwritten envelope handwritten return address, they're going to open it. Okay. When I make calls, 10% are going to answer on average. So if I call 100 people, I'm going to talk to 10. I'm going to probably have five great conversations. That's why I want to use a dialer to get through the numbers. But nevertheless, if I call 100 and I talk to 10, whereas 40 people open the letter. Okay. You guys see where I'm going? The letter is going to hit people that I didn't get on the phone didn't have their number, etc. I'm going to get people to call me on that. I normally get a 5 to 10% callback rate. So when I send out 100 letters, I'm going to get five to 10 people call me and say, Hey, what's up with this buyer that you have? So that's going to make the phone ring and make people call me, which is what you guys have with Zillow with buyers. I'm just doing it cheaper and more effectively with sellers. And then I would use RedHex ad builder to run ads to all the sellers in my market, whereas they've already I've already forced them to see me on Instagram and Facebook before I call them. So you essentially can do the same thing you're doing with buyers with sellers handwritten letter makes the phone ring running ads and then calling as more of a follow up call. Hey, it's Ricky the realtor from Facebook.  Right. That's what I would do. Yeah, absolutely. No, the handwritten letters have been gold for me so far. So I appreciate that. If you guys go to the zero to diamond dot com. See where is it? Where am I? Here we go. Down here in this listing challenge, literally step by step, right, creating the buyer list, exporting the data, writing the letters, daily routine, conversation, follow up calls, scripts, the whole nine yards, um, expired list. This was gold. Actually made live calls on this one expired script. We have a listing leaderboard. We keep up with everybody's listings. We do prizes every month. So we're competing as a group. We do weekly calls. It's today. It's always Monday at five o'clock Eastern. Today I'm doing it's actually right here. I'm doing transition into luxury listings. So I'm going to teach our group how to target the luxury listings, how to approach them, what to hit them with marketing wise, what to say, how to close on the whole nine yards. So, um, everything's right here. Hey, Ricky, uh, Jordan here. I'm actually in Scottsdale at a mastermind, but I'm the team leader. I'm so grateful for you doing this. This is really solid stuff. I, um, a couple of questions. One, um, is, is gold bar, like I saw that you are part of gold bar. Is that like a platform? I thought there was a guy named like one or something in Florida that created that. Or I just was curious to your connection to that. And then two, um, how much of this, uh, of your success with all these strategies comes down to you just having your voice, meaning, uh, like, uh, obviously there's a ton of strategy and all the things that you're doing the different tactics and the emails and the, you know, the handwritten letters, all that kind of stuff. But how much of it comes down to you just being able to be a human and connect with humans like and not be a weird real estate agent that says weird, real estate, real estate things, but actually just connecting people on a human level and building that trust. Is that the key component combined with the consistency? Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's see when I, when I lost everything, uh, when I was in my mid twenties, I made a million loss at all and it was literally because I sounded like a robot. Like it's funny because like what you're saying is exactly why I lost everything. I could not maintain my business through the market shift because talking like a robot worked when things sold in a day and the market was on fire, but the only thing that works through any market is actually building a brand around being a real human. And, um, because when, because here's the facts and what I learned through the crash is that closings happen every day, no matter what you go back to 2008 and look at the data. There were tons of closings happening every day far less than than what was happening. And you know, what's so funny is last year, we had less closings existing home sales that we did in 2008. We had, we had fewer home sales last year than we had in 30 years, which included 2008. We're lower than 2008 last year. But yeah, all of us are still in this zoom call and still in business. We still closed enough deals to survive. And there's a lot of agents that actually did better last year, which is incredible, um, which just goes to show you even in the worst of markets because that, that's his work. That, I mean, it's a 30 year low per number of transactions. How much worse can it get? It could get worse. I mean, sure it could happen. Um, who knows, but, but how much worse could actually get? That's pretty rock bottom and to be in the situation that we're in where we, you know, there's a stat that 49% of agents closed only one deal or less. I don't know if you saw that close one deal or less last year. Literally half the agents out there are not even real estate agents, right? But the other half, you know, um, are and, um, and what made it through like a market like last year is treating people like family. You know, and like people are like scripts and all this stuff. Yeah, I got script and I know where I want to go with the conversation and I know where I want to end up and I know my goal is to get them into my weekly email, whether they want to buy or sell or not. And if they do want to buy or sell now, I want to understand why they want to buy or sell and help them buy or sell. That is it. And then you come back to, okay, if this was my mom or dad, what would I say? It's just like, it's like this one. I'll throw this one at you guys. Like if this, if, if you were headed to your mom or dad's house or mom and dad, would you take a listing presentation with you? Would you do a listing presentation for your mom? I'm going to open it up so I can, I want to see your faces. Would you do a listing presentation for your mother? Okay. So then Michael would like, when I answered that question for myself, I said, why am I doing a listing presentations for my prospects when I want to treat them like they're my mom or dad? And so I, I, and I never did listing presentation. I never did a listing presentation. I never did like a PowerPoint or sit down or go through this, go through that ever. I'm walking through like this is my mom. So I'm walking in and I'm like, Hey, show me the house. Right. We're walking through the house and I'm like, God, this place is incredible. Why in the world would you sell this thing? And then what I want to do is create conversation that's non real estate related. I want to relate to them on some human level, which is really easy to do. Go ahead. Ricky, how would you coach like you clearly have the, you have an amazing personality. You can connect with people. You can walk into somebody's house and just say, there is no listing presentation. Yup. I just want to talk to you about your house. How would you coach a new agent on your team that needs a little more structure is not going to just be able to kind of ninja their way through that because I'm with you. I don't like, like I've never been a flip book guy or a, you know, I just talk to people and try to understand what they're trying to accomplish. But how would you train a newer person that needs that structure? It's a, it's a, it's a testing thing, right? You know, they got to figure out what works best for them.  I mean, they're going to go online and like, you know, if they really want to succeed, they're going to like search on YouTube. They're going to like listen to all this stuff. They're going to hear a lot of things and what they got to do is they got to test out things in the beginning stages and see what works best. I can't tell you that not having a listing presentation is going to work great for you just because it worked great for me. I could just tell you my experience and what, what I did and why I did it. And maybe you relate to that. Maybe you take it back to your business. Maybe it's a light bulb moment for you. Maybe it's not. But at the end of the day, everything works. There's guys that call rush it with listing presentations, right?  Okay, which is what I've been, what I preached about in the beginning. That is fine with me. You know why? Cause there's people that make millions off of strictly buyer heavy businesses. And you know what turn those buyers turn into, right? It gets you to the same place. It just takes longer. So think about this. You have a buyer heavy business. What happens? Those buyers buy properties. Now what are they? Property owners, which is who I want to talk to first, but you do get there, right? But you represent all these buyers. And if you have your foundation in place with the weekly email, they remember how that process and experience went when they bought. They're gonna more than likely list with you when they decide to list in the next two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 years.  I just want to go ahead and get to the listing the property, helping them buy something else today versus driving them around in the beginning. I'll add another buyer, another agent to all that stuff and I'll catch them five years from now when they list and want to buy something else. But anyway, what, you know, what I say isn't the gospel or the Bible, it's just how I do it. You know, and maybe you guys are late, maybe you don't, maybe there's just a little piece of something I do that you can take and really transform your business. And that's what I hope for today. Well, I love that finding your voice is not copying someone else's. It's figuring out your voice and finding out how do I say what what he's saying in my way because that whatever that way is is going to be the most understandable to the people we're talking to. So I love it. I love I love the fact that you said research go Google. I mean, that's how I got started. I didn't know how to be an agent. So I just I watched a lot of people be agents until I figured out what's my way. Is that so is that gold bar thing yours or I was just curious. One's my partner. Got it. Okay. I it's a beautiful platform. I was looking into it a few months ago. Love it. What want one and I are partners on that and we're doing gold bar live in New York on Times Square where they do the Heisman Trophy presentation. We got Ryan Sirhan, Josh Altman, Tal Alexander, like all the big boys. So we're doing an event February 29th. So it's going to be really really cool. So yeah, we're just we just want to blow that gold bar name up. That's our that's our baby. You know, that's our coaching program and I did free coaching for seven years seven. If you can imagine seven years a lot of people are you know mad when they don't sell a property in three months and you know, I've been coaching agents for seven years for free. So anyway, it's we got all boats rolling in the right direction now with that and everything else that we're doing. I'm basically on tour. I go every week somewhere in the country to speak. Where are you guys at?  We're in Denver. Oh, everybody's in Denver. Don't have anything in Denver right this second. But I'm sure I will at some point. So if I come up that way, you guys need to come out and see me. I'd love to see all you guys and shake your hands and all that good stuff. Any other questions? Any other questions from any of the agents we hadn't heard from? Yeah, I got one last question. How would you or what would you recommend putting out there as like a good lead magnet for social media to maybe I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I would just do organic content and maybe run some ads to owners through like red X ad builder or something. But you got to realize, you know, having a lead magnet on social media is more of a buyer driven activity and you can do homebuoyation. You can do seller type stuff on there. But again, Andrew, think about this. Let me just ask you what what is the purpose of that action? Right? Let's just break it down. What's the purpose of creating a lead magnet on social media? What's the goal for you with that? Capture emails. Just just strictly capture emails and get them into your email database. Yeah, because I'm making a lot of organic content now and I've got a good following on the short form stuff and I'm trying to figure out how to capture those emails. Okay, well, that that could be good for me. I'm thinking every legion activity comes back to creating a list of people for me to call. I guess creating something automatic that just like throws people into my weekly email could be good. But there again, I'm not am I capturing their phone number to and calling them? I guess you could.  Let's really tweak this thing out.  Right. And I need to go from person to person to person to person. It's got to be about volume. You know, we spend a lot of time with like three or four buyers or three or four sellers or something and we give them all this quality and we kind of ignore the fact that we need quantity of clients now if we want a big business. And like we can go get it. We're just, again, this is our perception holding us back, thinking that we need to spend all this time on these people. No, you don't.  You can spend 10, 20% of the time and go spread that time out across three or four other people at the same time. You got it. Okay. I don't know, man. Um, all that stuff's just, uh, um, kind of like, if I get something off of like some kind of thing like what you're talking about, it's just kind of like a bonus. You know what I mean? I tell you, I tell you what I like and that is when somebody follows me, I deal them right then and try to get into a conversation, really connect with them and get their email that way. Okay. Now that, now that, now that's quality there because you had a conversation, they gave it to you.  You could automate it. Um, what are you doing though? I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't deal them when they follow me. I literally get like five, 600 followers a day. Um, and if I did automatic messages, like there was no way I'd be able to keep up with all the DMs, I literally can barely keep up just from people just DMing. So I'm a little different animal for you. Yes, I think I would put an automated thing in there, but you got to be careful because I like to see something on their profile and then say something about it. You know, like, you know, hey, thanks for the follow.  You know, I'm also a local real estate agent. You know, nice to meet you. Maybe we can do some business. See if they answer. Get in some back and forth. See what you connect with. See if they're looking to buy a house or know somebody looks by house or whatever. You know, if they're a landscaper, they know a lot of property owners. You know, and like, so just be careful with the automation stuff that kind of takes away from the personable touch. Yeah, anybody else? One last question. You talked a lot about expires. If you were starting over as an agent again and you were just working for sell by owners, what would your, you know, 30 second high level strategy be for working?  Really connect with them because everybody's trying to get that listing. Let them know you don't care about the listing. You just want to help them and then follow up every Monday, call them say, Hey, how was your weekend? Did you guys have any showings? And you just do it every Monday until they throw the towel in. They're going to throw the towel in, right? 87% of percent of owners throw the towel in. So it's about connecting the deepest deeper than the rest of the agents and then following up until they throw the towel in. You know, it's all you can do and you can't take anything at face value. If they say, I want to pay a buyer agent 1%, you got to buy her. Just say great. What kind of come see it? Get in front of them, talk to them, work with them because when they switch from a for sale by owner trying to save money to, okay, we've got to give this to an agent. The commission goes up. It's not going to be 1% anymore. It's going to be regular deal. Yeah, pretty simple, right? Call them, go over there, make the connection, follow up every Monday. How was your weekend? Did you have any showings? You know, how to go and kind of give them a little advice here and there. You know, give them some value. Anybody else? It's like rapid fire. We're in the rapid fire section of this call. Beautiful. Cool guys. Well, good to meet you. Keep crushing it. Let me know what I could do to help. Shoot me a DM on Instagram. If you do need anything, I do answer them all and go to zero to diamond.com. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Ricky for coming on. I'm going to shoot out all those links you sent us to the team here. So yeah, really appreciate it. Thank you, Alex for getting them on here and really some really good gold today to help us have a successful year. So let's do it. Thank you guys. Appreciate it, Ricky. So much. Thank you guys.


Thanks everyone for joining my presentation about running Home Assistant on Fedora IoT. With that, let's get started. Who am I? My name is Dan Schedmark. I'm a software developer working at SUSE. I'm also a member of the Open SUSE community and of course of the Fedora community. So I'm in the i3 special interest group. I was involved in building up the i3 spin. I'm a long-time package maintainer in Fedora. So I'm, for instance, I'm the maintainer of i3.  Sorry, I'm also, I used to be in Fesco for the Fedora 34 release cycle and I do a bunch of stuff here and there. So my passions also include besides testing, documentation, community building, also development tools, which is what I do at my day job, where I build tools for other developers. And since recently, home automation, this thing that can eat up your time and your money and fill your home with smart devices that turn out to be less smart unless you make them smart. Anyway, if after this presentation, you're still not sick of me, you can stalk me on social media. There's a few links below, including my website, my GitHub account, Twitter, and Mastodon. So let's take a look. What are we going to do today? So first, I want to present you Home Assistant a little bit. What is this thing even if you've never heard of that? Then how we can run this on Fedora IoT, and we'll tweak this setup a little bit and by then we'll probably already run out of time. So you'll have to take a look at the rest in the slides because I'd also like to answer your questions. So what is Home Assistant? If you haven't heard about it, Home Assistant is a free and open source home automation system. So you can run this on your own machine and it's essentially a replacement of your Google Home, or Apple HomeKit, or your Alexa, sorry I don't have any of these devices, but there's essentially everyone nowadays as one of these smart home gateways where you just whip up your cell phone and say, Alexa, turn on the lights and then this goes to somewhere to AWS and they process your voice and then it goes back and turns on your lights. And Home Assistant is essentially an open source implementation of all of this magic. The cool thing about Home Assistant is it integrates with nearly every smart home system out there. So with Alexa you can control the stuff that's certified for Alexa and the rest might work and probably won't. With Google, with the Google stuff, it's for the Google stuff with Apple HomeKit, it's what's Apple HomeKit certified and some standard stuff also works with that. Home Assistant tries to work with everything. Unfortunately some integrations are spotty, but if you have some smart home device or if you have a ton of them from a ton different vendors then Home Assistant could really help you out because it can talk to all of them and you're not tied certainly to a certain ecosystem. It has a very slick and very simple UI. It's easy to use. So really it doesn't require you to be an expert in programming and fiddling with config files. To be frankly honest, I've used Home Assistant mostly from the GUI because it just works and I don't have to look up any stuff and I can configure most of it via that. So that's really convenient.  You can create templates where you pre-define certain workflows where you can for instance say, I take an input of some kind of switch or some kind of twiddly knob which allows you to set a certain percentage and you can turn on the lights or change the color of the lights. You can set up scenes. So imagine something like you have a scene for your evening where you turn off most of the lights, tone down the light and play some nice music and then you have the morning scene where you turn up all the lights to max and play some heavy metal so that you actually get awake and you turn on the coffee machine to create a really strong cup of coffee. If you have a smart coffee machine, you can do all of that in Home Assistant. Believe me, you can. And another very cool thing is you have a mobile app. So I'm pretty certain this will not be too visible, but this is the mobile app and I can now turn on my... I can now turn on the lights in my bathroom. Unfortunately, I can't show you that because I'm not at home and I don't have a security cam but so you can all do all this via your cell phone or track where your cell phone is which is pretty neat. So let me just switch the tab. No, this Home Assistant instance. So here you can, for instance, see a Home Assistant instance where you can see all the members which are connected to it and you can see where they're moving around. So let's get back. Okay. So let's put on my salesperson hat on which is, well, I don't have one but let's give it a try. So why should you use it? You want something that's cloud free. Cloud free only works if you really, if you have some, if your smart home devices don't require a cloud themselves. So for instance, if you buy stuff from IKEA, it's really that works without a cloud. You can self host all of this stuff. You don't have to, but you can if this is something you're passionate about. It runs on your machine and by that I mean not only that you own the machine but it runs on literally anything that you have. So if you have an old, I think it might even run on a Pi 2 probably. So it runs without any issues on the Pi 4 and also on the Pi 3 on a low power laptop. Really, it runs on anything that you have. It's not that, it doesn't require so many resources. You can automate literally everything. So the stupidest idea that you have, the silliest automation, you can implement it. Do you want to play some music if you enter on the second Thursday of the month and it's raining and it's night and the light level in your kitchen is below a certain level. You want to play a certain music on your Bluetooth speaker. You can do that in Home Assistant. Should you? Well, that's something that you have to answer. And also since recently it has support for energy tracking. So if you have, for instance, if you have a solar power grid you can track that, you can track your energy consumption and all kinds of stuff. So this is all very convenient if you have your own home. So, where can you run Home Assistant? For testing you can just run it on your PC. So they have virtual machines. They have containers. You can all do that. You don't need a PC for that. But long-term Home Assistant really works very well if you run it all the time and running your main machine all the time is maybe a little wasteful given energy prices going through the roof recently and that ain't going to get better in the future. So maybe get something low power.  Maybe you have a home server that's running anyway. Maybe you have an old laptop. Laptops really don't consume that much power if you if you remove if you turn off the screen so that's an option. Yeah and do you really need a Pi for that? Especially a Pi 4 which is unobtainium since the beginning of this year and you don't want to spend the rest of your days on rpilocator.com waiting for someone to sell you one no, you can use a Pi 3 you can use something else. I'm going to show you how to do another Pi 4 but you don't have to, you can use more or less anything else. And with that, let's go to Fedora IoT. So Fedora IoT is an edition of Fedora which is powered by RPMOS3 which is this fancy new thing that allows you to have a little base OS and I'm probably going to I'm not really good at selling you all of this but this is a really it's a very slim system it's very hard to break it's very lightweight by itself it supports provisioning via ignition if this is something you've ever heard of if not you can just ignore it and zzzree sorry this is a really cool system we'll see it in a minute and it's really built for deploying containerized applications it's meant for IoT devices so something like this you can put it on ARM on x86 and if you're curious more about that just go to the Fedora home page there's a link there so what are you going to need as hardware? So first you're going to need a PC this one if it's running Fedora that's really big plus because that's going to make a whole ton of things easier then you need an SD card so I got I am prepared you need obviously an SD card reader and then you need a Pi I have one it's behind there I can't unfortunately show it to you because the network cable is too short sorry it's just lying on the floor you'll have to believe me and it's actually a Pi 400 but more or less the same thing so let's get started first thing that we need to do we go to getFedora.org and we grab the Fedora IoT image so let's do that and I did the thing that I shouldn't have done so news app we grab if you are going to deploy this port grab this image just go to download and we also want to verify the image so I already downloaded it so I'm not going to click it just now and we also want to get the checksum, get the appropriate one this is this one so I just save it and it's those are already on my system so if we take a look at this one in my download folder I have them here and here those are the files so then we need to install GnuPG and the RM image installer I already have them so you can just do that then we need to get the Fedora GnuPG key that's done via this command so we're just verifying that we really got the correct image and as you can see I already entered the stuff so what you do here is you verify that the checksum has been correctly signed which is the case then we can take a look at the checksum and verify that the signature is actually correct because so far we've only verified that this checksum file is correctly signed which doesn't tell us that the correct is actually the checksum of the correct file but if we run the we'll see that this thing and this thing are same so we're fine so we can proceed then we need to find out what is the name of our SD card you can use multiple tools for that so I think the simplest one is UDiskCTL so we just UDiskCTL status is going to tell us what are all connected devices on this machine like storage devices you can see I have three and then you just have to find out okay which one is the SD card simplest thing is you just unplug it and hopefully one of them disappeared you see yeah this one disappeared and that's the SD card double check this if you overwrite your hard drive your system is toast and then you just flash the image with the ARM image installer and let me just tell you quickly what this does so the first flag minus minus image there you just you just pass it the image that you want to flash that's the one that we downloaded then you set the target since I have a pi4 I'm going to type in here rpi4 if you have a pi3 type in rpi3 if you have another ARM board pick a different one then media here you type in the path to the device that you have that you've identified so here mine is called MMCBLK0 so I would type in here instead of this XXX MMCBLK0 as I said double check this otherwise you might total nuke your system resize resize FS just means that the image will get resized to the full SD card in most cases you want to do that unless you want to have another partition there and then the add key option is very nice it will add your SSH key already into the image so you can just SSH into that you don't have to type in passwords or do any other kind of jazz so I can just show you how this looks in my case so I have the image downloaded in my downloads folder so it's there and here is my SSH key this is the device as I said def MMCBLK now I could just overwrite this but since I already prepared the stuff I'm not going to do that because it's going to take something like 5 to 10 minutes and we don't have that much time so let's just assume we overwrite those I took the SD card went to the Pi plugged it in booted it up which already happened and it's currently up so now we can play around with Zzre and that's very simple we just go to provision.fedoraproject.org I'm going to switch the tab increase the size a little bit and you then want to log in I already did that and then go to the claim on devices tab and then you probably should see a device in here unfortunately I already started it up previously at some point this device so it's no longer showing up there but it's this one you'll have to believe me it would appear here under claim on devices you can press on claim and then you can then you can provision it here the nice thing is you can go into SSH key management in Zzre and you can add your SSH keys don't worry these are public keys so you can have them they are not secret you can add additional keys here and they will get copied to your Fedora IoT device which is very convenient because immediately you get access to it so let's get back to the presentation so here we are you go to you claim the unknown device you can also sorry I forgot to show you this part here you can set up you can set a provisioning request so let's just quickly cancel this one you will go to submit provisioning request and you want to go with Fedora IoT stable schedule it and that will also copy your SSH keys so now you need to find out the IP of your home of your home assistant instance there's multiple ways how to do that you can for instance do an nmap of your network like this and wait a bit and then you'll find out which I already did that the IP of my Pi is this one so I'm just gonna log in and I'm there so I get greeted so this is a this is a fresh installation of Fedora IoT and so now we want to run home assistant and that's actually so first thing that we have to do we have to create a folder for the config I simply decided to put it into home containers that folder already now exists and then we just run it via portman so the full command is here so you create a config path then you share it with the container you also share at the local time so it knows what time zone it is you have to run it as privileged and with this option as well because otherwise it will not discover certain stuff it will not contain a name and this is it and then you press then you press enter in my case I already did this previously so can show you it's currently running yeah and that's it you have home assistant running sorry that's kind of unimpressive I guess so let's take a look what is this thing actually doing so home assistant will by default run on port 1 8 1 2 3 so let's go there and you'll find out ooh unable to connect yes because your firewall is still on so first thing firewall cmd you want to add this port like this wait for firewall cmd to allow it and then you'll get greeted with the home assistant onboarding I'm not going to show this to you now because then we'll never get finished with anything and there's much better tutorials than what I could do here um so let's take a look at tweaking the setup a little bit and the first thing that I'd really recommend is run home assistant by a systemd um then you can also set up hdps and maybe zigby um so how to run it by a systemd um so why do you want to do that the thing is I have now started um started um home assistant just via this podman um let's pull up the command via this so this started podman now if I reboot the pie it will not restart so home assistant will be off and that sucks because if your power goes out if uh if your kid or your friend unplugged the pie because they didn't know what it did then home assistant will be off um so that's uh that that's kind of bad and you can remedy this via systemd and for that podman has a very convenient feature that's called podman generate systemd and if we just plot that in so let's just let's just show you what this does uh sorry you need to give it a container name like this and this is unfortunately takes a little bit because podman on the pie is pretty slow unfortunately but bear with me you will get a unit file and the cool thing is this you can just plop somewhere so as you see this is just a systemd unit file so we can just take this you can see a whole bunch of stuff about like how to start home assistant um how to stop it yada yada yada so we can just plot this into xc systemd system system yes and then give it a name home assistant dot service then let's do a systemctl demon reload then we need to stop the currently running container this is going to take a second and then we just enable home yeah we already done so and then systemctl enable now home assistant boom and now home assistant will get restarted every time which is pretty nice in my opinion what you can also do is container auto updates so the thing is containers are like packages you have to update them you can't do it automatically um and there's a convenient feature from podman as well if you add the label this one i o dot containers dot auto update equals registry which how would you do that so essentially you would go into the file that we just created and you would add it like this label i o I forgot the name already I'm sorry I'm terrible at this um like this now exit out of the eye correctly yes spot the emex user uh demon reload uh restart home assistant and the thing is so this this flag will tell podman I run the auto update command pull in a fresh version of this and you can do this manually by just issuing podman auto update yeah we have to wait for home assistant to get up or if you don't want to run home auto update yourself you can also enable the podman auto update timer um there's a great article in the fedora magazine about this and you might want uh and you might want to be careful with this if you always pull in the latest image because they could have breaking changes so be careful with that um okay so with that let me just this still didn't come up wow unfortunately home assistant takes a while to um to start and stop on the pie but we can maybe try to run podman auto update in another let's see what will happen ah cool yeah you can see it already it already saw our home assistant instance did it update no because we started it literally at least I started an hour ago so no updates yet okay um I have a bit more content but since I since I'm already out of time I would just jump into the questions part and if you're so let me just say the slides they will be on up on gitlab so if you're interested in that you can you can find links for how to get in touch with the iot project with home assistant and also with wire guard if you want to set up some bpn um here's also some additional links about the home assistant itself how to run it properly with ignition and butane more stuff about zzre and zincati in case you want to automate rpm of os3 auto updates and my slides will be up on gitlab and with that I'd I'd love to answer your questions if you have any so let me just jump quickly into the qa tab um and Dennis is asking if I have any recommendations for setting up something like her proxy in front of with let's encrypt for securing access um so I can tell you how I do it um my home assistant instance is uh this one and unfortunately I'm afraid this is going to be too tiny to read but that's actually secured by HTTPS and what I do for this is the following I have my personal home page is not running a h a proxy I have a traffic instance that requests a let's encrypt a wildcard certificate so I'm my home page is dancer mac dot name and I just request by let's encrypt a wildcard certificate for anything dot dancer mac dot name um and then I just uh grab this certificate and include it in uh and uh just let me go back a few slides uh sorry this one so essentially I grab these certificates from from traffic I copy them onto the pie so this this traffic instance is running on the note uh I grab the certificate I copy them as podman secrets into uh into the pie um I pass them as flags to the container and then I run them via um and then I configure home assistant to do tls itself so I don't have any proxy in front of that my home assistant instance is also not reachable from the internet it's just reachable internally via via guard but um so not something like h a proxy but I hope this helps a bit and I see Matthew Miller says that he uses nginx with let's encrypt so that's probably uh would be maybe comparable and if you're interested in that I on my I have on my to-do list to document my setup properly so maybe I'll write I hope I'll write a blog post about that at some point uh so there's a question if it's possible to use ipv6 um I think it should I don't see a reason why it shouldn't I haven't tried but the thing is you can always set up something like tail scale or wire guard to go to connect directly to a home assistant instance um and then you don't have to care then you just have to then you just have to get access via via wire guard and that one supports ipv6 I'm relatively certain of that yes so there's a request to get my the URL to my slides I'll give you a link to the GitLab repository uh it's currently empty I'll upload them I just need I just need clearance that I can upload a certain image in there and then you'll get them okay and uh with that see no more questions so I would like to thank you ah Matthew Miller has won well then please shoot uh so Matthew is asking whether we should package up Home Assistant for Fedora Linux to be honest um to be honest we could package it but Home Assistant upstream has been um they have been very they have been say outright hostile but they are not very um they are not happy about distributions packaging up Home Assistant so there has been a huge discussion about this on GitHub in one of their GitHub issues and they explicitly don't want distributions to package them um so and given how much stuff there is in Home Assistant I am not exactly sure whether us repackaging it is really adding any value um I to be frankly honest don't see currently how how us repackaging it would add a whole ton of value if we start creating a Fedora IoT based image with Home Assistant in it then yes but unless we do something like that um I don't see how we would how this would really help but yeah so I see yeah Matthew is proposing that we can get them to switch to UBI or OpenSucelib base or something like the SLEEBCI would also be an option but yeah certainly we just have to convince them but you know most projects don't really care what their base always is so maybe just send a pull request it will work okay so I've exhausted my time and took even more time from you so I'd like to thank you for your attention I'm you can reach me on Matrix you can reach me on Discord so if you have any questions feel free to ping me thanks very much for your attention and hope to see you around


And for our next presentation, it's by Giancarlo Coro, talking to AI Open Science and Blue Growth, Culture, Habitats, Ecological, Niche Modelling and Fish Identification. Hello everyone, I'm Giancarlo Coro, researcher at CNR Italy. I'm a physicist and I'm currently involved in a number of new projects. My research topics range from computational biology to NLP, using artificial intelligence and open science methodologies. This presentation will explain the support that artificial intelligence and the open science paradigm can give to the new long-term strategy for the sustainable growth of the marine and maritime sectors. That is Blue Growth. So first, let me clarify what this command link meant for big data. That is a fundamental concept in modern AI applications. Big data are data streams characterized by a large volume, a high generation velocity, a large variety, unreliable content and heterogeneous descriptions. These data require unconventional computer science systems to be properly managed and to extract valuable information from them. Some examples in marine science are vessel-transmitted data, climatic parameters and species observations. In the last decade, new science paradigms are born to manage big data while supporting large computations and collaborative experimentation. These paradigms include open science, e-science and science 2.0, whose definitions are rapidly converging towards the same definition because overall, they guarantee the three hours of science that is reproducibility, repeatability and reusability of data and processes and the transparency of the scientific methodology. Aside from this concept, AI has applications on big data in several branches of science. An AI system is any system that executes tasks that can be perceived as intelligent. It can either emulate what happens inside that biological system or simulate its input and output. AI is by definition multidisciplinary and requires collaboration between experts. The infrastructures are platforms that manage both AI and open science requirements in the context of big data processing. They have been largely supported by the EU Commission in the last decades. E-infrastructures are networks of hardware and software resources that support collaborative and data-intensive science. They also support the creation of virtual research environments that foster data sharing and collaborative experimentation while guaranteeing the transparency and repeatability of the workflows. One example of E-infrastructure is D4Science, a CNR platform that hosts virtual research environments for many application domains, ranging from taxonomic studies to geothermal analysis and cultural heritage, all dealing with AI and big data management. All this technology is supporting the blue growth strategy through the generation of new knowledge from big data, the reusability of data methodologies across domains, the transparency of the workflows because it is possible to verify and repeat experiments and the overall guarantee of longevity to data and processes. In the next slides, I will rapidly show questions that have been answered through AI methodologies based on collaborative infrastructures that use open science approaches. The first question is, why a species is in a certain place? This question has been answered through ecological niche models that have combined multiple AI models with big data of environmental parameters and species observations to produce uniform distributions of habitat suitability scores. In the slide, you can find a link to access the habitat distributions of over 60,000 marine species hosted on the D4Science infrastructure. By combining ecological niche models with cluster analysis, we can discover patterns of habitat change due to climate change. And answer to the question, how does climate change affect species habitat change? If we add the environmental parameter and the AI model forecasting, we can predict future expansions of invasive species. In this slide, for example, you can see the prediction of the invasion of the Mediterranean Sea by the silver chick, the Toadfish, which was analyzed through an ensemble of seven AI models that worked on future forecasts of the environmental parameters under different greenhouse gases emission scenarios. So worries open science. It is behind the scenes because every step of an experiment has a link associated that allows to exactly repeat one experimental step or modify the parameters and re-execute that step. Additionally, all links correspond to web services described under a representation standard, which allows for fast reapplication to new data. Other experiments worth mentioning include the 3D reconstruction of underwater environments to study, for example, coral biomass change in time, based on the photos uploaded by a group of scuba divers or the use of AI collaborative platforms to build systems that will later run on board of edge computing systems. The case reported in this slide is the Utmos device developed in collaboration with FAO that uses an array of cameras to record videos of large fishes passing in front of one of the cameras. This system uses a combination of AI and visual computing approaches that were first collaboratively developed and tested on an infrastructure and were later deployed on an unbated underwater device. In conclusion, blue growth is benefiting from AI and AI itself is gaining more and more importance in the cheese and making processes. When combined with open science, AI can announce knowledge discovery and process big data with a transparent approach. Transparency is indeed crucial to communicate with the cheese and makers. So this concludes my presentation. Sorry for this technical issues. I try to be fast and then if you have questions. Thank you, Jean-Paul. I think you did exceptionally well considering you weren't planning for that. So thank you very much. Thank you, Jean-Paul. Thank you. I might turn over to Matt because I know Matt has worked with you and there's actually so many areas which you've worked across, but one of those was in trying to get cameras to collect over long periods. But only select the imagery that was needed and that allowed you to somehow make decisions within the camera rather than when you've got home and had run out of battery. So maybe Matt's got a question to lead with. Thank you. I can do Kim, but I mean, it's a bit vain for me to ask a question about my own work. I think something that you spoke to me about, Jean-Paul, I mean, the work on UDMOS is available for everyone to read, but I think something that's really important that you spoke to me about a couple of months ago is the idea about how old algorithms are in AI and how we need to work on more specific algorithms to tackle issues such as identification of fish. I don't know if you remember that conversation. I hope so. I found what you said very interesting about the age of some of the technology and the maths that we're using currently. I found that extremely interesting. I don't think that was necessarily a question, but Jean-Paul, I think Matt was asking you to repeat some of the stories about the understanding of how far back this kind of thinking goes to developing algorithms, which today are in the news. But, you know, five years ago, you mentioned the word algorithm. No one knew what you were talking about or very few people knew. And Matt was saying you had conversations and you've done some reading about the age of the mathematics which have built these types of systems. Maybe you could share some of those stories. Yes. Well, it's a complex question to answer because, yes, we are now at the edge of technology for some applications like the one of unbeaten remote devices because originally we wanted to produce and to make a scalable solution and also in terms of costs because, yes, it is always possible to throw a big computer underwater. But then you have to care about batteries, the number of devices that you want to buy or to propose and also the computational capacity of the device that you are working on. So we are currently at the edge of this type of technology. And so, well, from one month to the other, everything can change. Also, the kind of models that are currently produced in the AI research is not really parallel to hardware and also costs, requests. So I don't know if I was clear with this explanation on the issues but there are not only AI problems but the fact that if you want to really downscale to practical difficulties and also to low costs, you have to find other ways. And one way is to open up the black box of the AI models and to modify something inside and this can be done by taking inspiration from what happens in some biological systems. So in doing this scaling now, let me say that we are going backwards in some way from AI to cybernetics where you had to emulate in some parts of the biological system to find efficient solutions in ways to solve the problems. And to do this, it is absolutely crucial to work within multi-competence, let's say, multidisciplinary context so to have collaborative tools that support conversation between a biologist and a physicist and mathematician and other people that may come with solutions from also even unexpected domains. So I hope this straight explanation of mine was clear for you. Exactly what I was referring to, Jean-Paul, I think that this sort of scenario and I didn't realize we were doing it, kind of unpicks AI back to cybernetics, doesn't it, like you said. And I think sometimes to try and break beyond outside the box, like you're saying, you need to be reflective and multidisciplinary and to produce something that is capable of doing something cutting edge and that sort of collaboration and collaborative thinking and assist that process, doesn't it, which really echoes what the objectives of the whole forum are about, really, bringing people together and trying to help everybody and everything. Yes, these are not problems that one group of people having the same expertise can solve or one person can solve.