Episode 324 – Jeff Dinter, CEO – Gravy

  If you want to find answers and succeed in the real estate industry, particularly regarding home ownership, you have to be willing to research and talk to people. How can you close deals and get consumers to feel confident about their home purchases? Join your host Bill Risser as he dives deep into a conversation with Jeff Dinter about driving that entrepreneurial spirit in the real estate space. Jeff is the CEO of Gravy and a serial entrepreneur with a thing for product design who spends most of his career solving problems in the real estate tech and fintech spaces. In this episode, he shares his knowledge on how to work with agents and lenders to build great connections. He also discusses mistakes he has seen throughout his career and explains the new bridge he has created that hasn’t existed before. --- Jeff Dinter - CEO, Gravy We go into the heartland of the country, St. Louis, Missouri, and we are going to chat with Jeff Dinter. He is the CEO of Gravy. There are over 100 million renters in this country. What Gravy does is guide them down that path to home ownership. It’s very interesting. We are going to have a lot of fun with this conversation. Enough of this stuff. Let’s get it going. --- Jeff, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I was very excited to have you on. I get a lot of requests from podcast bookers, and generally, they are from motivational speakers or real estate investors who, somewhere in their life, were poor. I love it when I find people starting up companies doing things a little bit different. We are going to talk a lot about Gravy, your company, but I always like to start in the same place. You grew up in the Midwest, but it doesn’t get more Midwest than St. Louis, right? That’s right. It’s the spot in the middle of the Midwest. Do you still live there? Is your company there? Tell me why it’s so special for you. Why St. Louis? I was born and raised in St. Louis. I had a brief stint in Orlando, Florida, with my fiancée at that time but my wife now. For a few years, we ended up moving back, and it’s still here. Gravy is very remote-friendly, but our flag in the sand is here. We have got a handful. Our team is in St. Louis. It has always drawn me back for sure. There are probably two reasons that I’m still here. One, it’s family. I have got mine and my wife’s immediate family. They both live within ten minutes of our house. That was a plus and a big part of why we moved back from Orlando before we had a toddler. Now that we have a child, it’s free babysitting plus family time, so that’s an easy one. Two is the tech scene in St. Louis. It’s been growing more and more over the past decade or so. There are lots of great people, great minds thinking differently, and engineers. I love the environment here. I hear that a lot from a lot of different places around the country. I don’t know if it’s the time we are in, and with tech being so powerful. These little areas before were not considered Silicon Valley. You’ve got them all popping up all over the country. It’s a great point to your comment. It started on the coasts, and slowly but surely, the density came in and may not have the density of East or West Coast in St. Louis or Kansas City. The good news is that even if it’s smaller, the overall concept of thinking differently, getting folks that either want to build software or reimagine different things, the density, appetite to take risks and start businesses are there. It’s a cool combination of founders, but also people that make good early team members at startups are all here. I love it. My readers know I have this weird thing with sports. You can see it all around me. Can I assume Cardinals fan, or are you like some other people I know from St. Louis who got bushwhacked into being a Cubs fan somehow? I have got two answers for this. The first is I’m stereotypical from St. Louis, diehard Cardinals fan for life, not against the grain. Growing up, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t part of growing up that by default, if you were a Cardinals fan, you were not a Cubs fan. There’s truth to that. My mom’s family, so my extended family, is in Springfield, Illinois. They are in the Illinois state closer to the center, and that’s a mixed bag. Some Cardinals and Cubs fans. We had got some cool bickering that happened from when I was growing up, but at the end of the day, Cardinals fan for life. [bctt tweet="At the end of the day, businesses are about solving problems and finding big problems that a lot of people care about. There are new opportunities and problems to solve." username="billrisser"] You got Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Giants, but Cardinals and Cubs are right up there with them. I’m sure it’s been a lot more championships for the Cardinals and the Cubs in the last hundred years. You always got that. What’s cool is that even if it’s early in the season, mid-season, every series between the Cardinals and Cubs feels like post-season. That’s always fun. It’s great baseball. I don’t know how old you are. Have you forgiven the Rams? The short answer is yes. I grew up 100% going to some Rams games. I never got into football as much as being in a baseball town. Cardinals were a big Blues fan. I loved hockey. With the Rams, I have got no hardcore burn. If you ask the same question to my dad, I think he has a better answer because he’s got a little bit more thoughts around it. I love competitive sports in general, not knowing the outcome of an event and the suspense that goes with it. I love any sports event that goes to the last quarter, last period, or last minute. That’s what I love about it, so yes. I have forgiven the Rams. I still watch football. I’m a Chiefs fan, but I’m not rooting for the Rams anymore. That’s all I have got. You mentioned the Blues. I live in St. Petersburg. I’m right across the bay from Tampa. If you had to pick a team before this started, did you want to see the lining one another or were you rooting for the Avalanche to get one for many years? The Avalanche eliminated us. There’s the conference debate versus rooting for Patty Maroon is on Tampa. He’s a St. Louis boy. I have lots of friends who went to high school with him, I believe. I’m Tampa Bay here, for sure. I do think that Colorado is tough to beat right now. They didn’t plan so well. It could go either way, but Tampa has my vote for the series. Some work to do. It’s all about Vasilevskiy. If he can have a game like you had on Monday night, things will get better, and I will get out of this because a couple of people turned off their podcasts who don’t care about hockey. Let’s talk about you growing up. I’m going to assume you are pretty techie. I was going to know that’s the case that you were playing with computers and all about that. If you are fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school, what were you thinking about doing? I was a techie nerd growing up. My dad loves computers. I had the old-school HTML books lying around the house. I’m learning generally how to code. I was taking apart computers. With that said, I was created at the end of the day. Less technical, more creative. I liked computers. I ended up going the designer route and not the engineer route. I understand engineering, but I’m a designer at heart. When I was fifteen, I was dead set on being a rockstar at that time. I was listening to music. That was the other creative outlet. It’s playing music in high school bands. After high school, I played music for the next 5 or 6 years touring the country for the better half of the year of all United States and Canada. It was a huge part of me jumping into the world because being in an unsigned band is hard. It’s almost like starting a startup. Fifteen-year-old Jeff wanted to be a rock star. As you can tell, it didn’t pan out. Otherwise, we’d be talking about my greatest hits, but I have shifted to the tech world. Now I will take it. Now you open the door. What’s the instrument you played? [caption id="attachment_4339" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Home Ownership: We were ultimately a platform that helped property managers better engage with and retain their mobile-first renters, so the modern renter lives on their phone.[/caption]   I played guitar and sang. Lead or rhythm? Rhythm guitar, lead singer. If you were to compare yourself to a band that even an old guy like me would know, who would you compare yourself to? What was the genre you were in? We were pop-punkish. Blink-182 is probably the closest one because I grew up a pop-punk kid. I played guitar and wrote a lot of songs. I was the manager at the end of the day to where it was all business for me. I wish I had had more fun. It was all business. I’m trying to get the product out the door and have my business hat on before I knew it, but it was a great chapter in my life. I made a lot of lifelong friends and had great experiences. You were the guy herding the cats sometimes and in rock and roll. It’s got to be that way. I was a dad....