Episode 307 – Bondilyn Jolly, CMO – Elm Street Technology

  What if there’s a singular solution that automates the day-to-day activities for agents, brokers, and teams? That’s what Elm Street Technology can do for you. Bill Risser welcomes Bondilyn Jolly, the VP of Marketing at Elm Street Technology. Bondilyn talks with Bill about how Elm Street is hyper-focused on being the leader that demonstrates how to run a tech company the right way. Elm Street helps real estate organizations define who they are. When they know what they want to do, how they want to do it, and for whom, they’re better able to position themselves in the market. Listen to this episode to learn more! --- Bondilyn Jolly, CMO - Elm Street Technology I'm talking to Bondilyn Jolly. She's the Chief Marketing Officer of Elm Street Technology. They're doing some interesting things trying to help brokers, agents and teams streamline processes. We're going to talk about Bondilyn's childhood like we always do on this show. We're also going to talk about starting a company in the late-'90s based on email marketing. Bondilyn, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Bill. I was so glad that Molly introduced me to you when we traveled a lot and showed up at conventions and conferences and stuff. It was good to be back on the road. I'm hoping that that's not changing in Q1. We're off to a rocky start for sure. We have a few things on the calendar. Fingers crossed that we can continue down that path. You're in California. I grew up in San Diego. I know West Coast very well, but I also know that that's not where you grew up. I love the fact that I can talk to my guests and find out things about different parts of the country and you're in this, I'm going to call it the South Central area of New York in Binghamton. Is that your hometown? I'm from Binghamton, New York. I grew up close to the Pennsylvania border. My family used to spend a lot of time up on the St. Lawrence River, which is where the US and the Canadian borders meet. I used to spend all of my summers up there. As a kid, you probably had a cool childhood living in the country. Binghamton is not a big city, right? It isn't. It's most well-known for the University of Binghamton, IBM in Endicott was there, which is where my dad worked and that's why we were there. I grew up in a rural community where the road I lived on turned into a dirt road as you got a little past my house. I grew up playing out in the woods and making mud pies, climbing trees and skinning knees. That was my childhood. I did my undergrad in Ithaca, but I was very much inclined to head South and get away from that cold weather as soon as I could. I always say, "I may not have been born in the South, but I moved there." [bctt tweet="Streamline and automate your daily activities as much as possible. " username="billrisser"] The path that we're going to talk about is how you ended up in Louisiana. You mentioned Ithaca College. I did a little research on that school and saw that it's up on the Southern tip of one of the Finger Lakes. Finger Lakes, for the people who don't know, are these series of long skinny lakes that are a couple of hours north of Binghamton, or maybe a little closer than that. About an hour and a half outside of Binghamton. It's a stunning area. Cornell University is there as well. Ithaca houses fantastic universities that sit on opposite hills from each other. Talk about that experience. You're eighteen and moving out of the house for the first time, far enough away that it's difficult for the parents to do a drop-in. They could come up for all of my performances. I was a Music Major, studying Music Education and Performance. It was nice because if I had a concert or something like that, my parents would drive up to attend it. I could always go home on a weekend if I wanted to, but I had that sense of independence living in Ithaca as well. I did my undergrad in Music. A lot of people will ask me, "How did you go from music into running a software company?" It's interesting because whatever it is that side of the brain, that whole creative processes side lends itself to that business development side for me, they run in parallel. I'll ask you another question about that, but first, you can't say music. We need the details. What are the specifics? What was your instrument? I spent years as a classically trained pianist, but I majored in Percussion when I went to college. I was an orchestral percussionist. I specialized in the marimba, a large keyboard percussion instrument, and I studied at Ithaca with a gentleman named Gordon Stout, one of the premier marimbas in the world. I had the pleasure to spend four years studying with him. I was invited after that to do some Master's work in Austria and study Conducting. I had gotten heavily in the Conducting. Instead of studying Conducting, I chose to marry this cute guy named Ethan Jolly and to this day, I don't regret that choice. A marimba. Those who are reading can go check that out. Do you still have a piano at home? Is it something you still play? I have a beautiful music room in my house. I passed down the love of music to my daughter, who is a musical theater freak and a beautiful vocalist. She plays some piano and we have guitars and percussive instruments. You can come in and take over our music room any time, any of our guests. [caption id="attachment_4126" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Elm Street Technology: The creative side of the brain lends itself to the business development side.[/caption]   Marketing or running a company wasn't in your plans as you're graduating from Ithaca. What was your first job? My first job was as a music teacher. Ethan and I got married right out of college. We settled in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. I was an elementary school music teacher. It was a lot of fun, but after about a year and a half of doing that, my husband was transferred with his work to the New Orleans area. I ended up leaving in the middle of the school year and moving to New Orleans. At that time, I was like, "I can't necessarily go to a teaching job." I was doing substitute teaching. I started doing some sales and marketing consulting for a large athletic club down in the New Orleans area. This is back in the late-1990s. I developed their very first website for them. They were having some retention issues, trouble communicating with their membership because they had to rely on the membership to come into the club back then to find out what was going on. The internet was popping into existence. I taught myself HTML and built their very first website as a means to disseminate information to the public. Within six months of doing that, I had so much business in the New Orleans area that I started my company out of a spare bedroom in my house. The rest is history. You were helping people develop their sites. You're getting that entire background going? It's funny because I did not know HTML myself. I was strong in sales and marketing. It was a natural avenue for me. At the point that I started to need a developer, I hired this young guy. He was in college at Tulane in New Orleans. I hired him as a part-timer and he ended up becoming my CTO and to this day, he is my lead engineer at Elm Street, years later. He's one of my work husbands, as you say. He was with you when you founded that eMerge? My company was called New Millennium Designs and then it became NMD Inc, and eMerge was a software product that we developed, an email marketing automation platform. We developed that, but then we very quickly became known as eMerge, so we would do business as eMerge. By the time I sold out the company, it was that eMerge platform was what was being acquired was that piece of technology. I remember an email popping up somewhere in the early to mid-'90s, where it was being used actively. I was with the San Diego Padres at the time. Instead of having dumb terminals, we all got a PC for the first time. You were early in on the game there. Was it focused on the real estate area right from the beginning? [bctt tweet="Stay open to ideas and allow things to evolve organically. " username="billrisser"] It wasn't. We worked in law enforcement. We had an account that was a large government contractor. They will call watch systems to this day. We developed a software platform for them called the Offender Watch, which is the largest and most comprehensive sex offender management system in the United States. I had that software contract with them, but what happened was a lot of these law enforcement agencies across the United States were either federally or locally mandated to disseminate sex offender information to their constituency. We built the system. It was an email and a direct mail system that would automatically pull sex offender records. If there was a relocation or a new record, it would automatically...