We were lucky to catch up with Lauren Lockett recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lauren, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

Creating something from nothing is one of the toughest things we have ever done in life. Calling your business your “baby” is right on the nose. My husband (then boyfriend) had the idea for myRE360 a few years before we met. He could clearly see his vision, myRE360 – an online platform dedicated to real estate investors to Learn the Business, Build their Team, Find a Deal, and Manage their Project. This concept was to simplify the process to get started with real estate investing and to be the hub for everything real estate investing related. Simple, right?

We started working on it a few months after we met. He told me what he envisioned and the techie in me decided to mock it up. I had never done it before, but I started creating the wireframes for the website. I was bought and sold on the vision. Page by page I started to map out what this would look like in real life and to design the workflow. We met to review and he loved it. We continued to work to build it out and determine specific user types needs, features and functionalities required, the roadmap for what the platform would evolve into… we spent months planning and then started the search to find a development team to build it. We interviewed several developers and landed on a company that does the design, build, testing, and maintenance. They took what we created in the wireframes and actually designed what it would look like online. Once we had the designs agreed upon, we then mapped out the build out into different phases and went through rounds of build and testing before we had a finished product. It took months and months of development and testing, but we soft launched in 1 market.

To get the word out regarding our launch, we took to the streets. We sponsored events, we attended expos, and we talked to as many people as we could to tell them about our platform and how it can help them with real estate investing. We signed up people all the time and everyone was interested because the platform is free. For the next couple of years we continued that model – attending expos, sponsoring meetups, doing presentations to groups, all to get the word out and generate registrations.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I have always had a love for technology. I graduated college with a degree in computer science and went straight into technology consulting and project management. When we started working on myRE360 it was the perfect opportunity to modernize and innovate the real estate investing industry. To get started with real estate investing, the barriers can be very challenging. You pay a guru thousands of dollars to learn the business. You talk with dozens of people to receive referrals or google and search to find investor friendly contractors who understand the space and how you make money. You spend weeks/months trying to generate your own leads to find home sellers. You struggle understand the “flow” of the renovation and everything that needs to happen to make it successful. For those reasons, we created myRE360. Our goal is to simplify the process to get started with real estate investing and to make it accessible for anyone.

This company also went hand in hand with my husband’s other business Lockett-N-Homes and now LNH Capital. We consider these “sister” companies as the services offered can be utilized across the board as we plan to be the hub for real estate investors to provide the most resources to help them grow and scale their business. Lockett-N-Homes is primarily the real estate brokerage with offices in 3 states (Texas, California, and Florida). LNH Capital is a nationwide private/hard money lender that offers financing for new and experienced investors searching for bridge loans, fix and flip loans, new construction loans, and commercial loans. The primary product is the advanced draw fix and flip loan that includes the mortgage payments into the loan and provides advanced draws to investors versus working on reimbursement.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

Don’t stop until you find the right employees! The interviewing process can be grueling and tedious however, it is critical to continue to search until you find the right team member. We have lost business time and time again by having the wrong people in certain positions. We have learned to have frequent touch bases to monitor performance and if an individual is not performing and we aren’t able to course correct we have to let them go. It is a huge hit to our credibility as a small business when a team member is not performing. As a small business all you have is your reputation and so we protect it at all costs.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

In order to grow our brand presence and reputation we decided to put ourselves out in the marketplace as aggressively as possible. We attend dozens of expos and conferences a year to meet our desired customers and clients to engage and inform them about our products and services. It wasn’t limited to just our core market, but we went all over the country to create a brand and spread awareness.

We also took the route of creating a YouTube network dedicated to creating content focused on growing our reach to our target audience – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHK1PcXUXiIP-ip-iZi1SpA. We worked with a producer to create a fun/night-ish show called The Best Damn Real Estate Show and we also launched tech talk which was an opportunity to go in depth with different service providers to help educate real estate investors on the different trades and the best ways to engage with them.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.myRE360.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myre360/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/myRE360/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/myre360
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/myre360
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHK1PcXUXiIP-ip-iZi1SpA

Image Credits
My primary photo will not upload for some reason. I will email it over.