Bonus Episode with George Wellmer

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgewellmer/
Email: george@tupelosmb.com
Website: https://www.tupelosmb.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwPsAoDk0SsmGqpR2Fjn73Q

Jason Cutter [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Business Broker Growth Show. This is essentially the after show. Business Broker Growth show After Dark. I don’t know what to call it.

George Wellmer [00:00:07]:
George.

Jason Cutter [00:00:07]:
I got George Wellmer from Tupelo, founder and creator of Tupelo CRM for business brokers. George and I just recorded. The first part was super fun. This is kind of like what happens afterwards. George, how was the first, first session? How was, how was all of that on the 1st?

George Wellmer [00:00:24]:
Man, you grilled me so hard I could barely get through it. Good. It’s good. It was fun. It was easy.

Jason Cutter [00:00:32]:
You’re such a pro. You’ve done a lot of content. And most people I talk to, they used to talking about what they. They talk about. They know it. And it was super easy. It was, it was fun. I know it’s going to be a lot of value.

Jason Cutter [00:00:44]:
I showed you my notes. I take a lot of notes. There’s a lot of nuggets that I got from and things that I just love learning. And here we are. So we’re part two. For anyone, if you didn’t catch part one, make sure, go find it. Listen to that. It will make a lot more sense.

Jason Cutter [00:00:58]:
There’s a ton of value. There’s also going to be links in the show notes for how to get in touch with George. Go check out the show notes. Check out part one. I don’t want to take up our time here. I want to just jump in the after show here to some questions. I have this list, I ask all the guests of the show in this kind of after segment and I want to get your take, especially for people tuning in. You’re a vendor, you sell a CRM and a platform to the business broker community.

Jason Cutter [00:01:26]:
So you’re not a part of it, but which I think is awesome because you can kind of give this unbiased lens versus like I’m a business broker, I’m amazing. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. You’re like, here’s what I really think is going to happen. So first question for you. What will brokers need to survive in 2030?

George Wellmer [00:01:44]:

2030. Okay. Well, they’ll need a CRM, that’s for sure. The thing is, is what we see happening in the industry is like the, the tools like Tuplo and other things out there are just really helping good brokers sell more and more listings. So like, we see the industry evolving to good brokers going from now selling like 10 listings or 15 listings a year to now like 50, 60 listings a year, no problem. There’s a Lot of things in the work with like AI agents and like, like AI that you can label on top of the CRM and the data to take advantage of it to just like make your lives a lot, lot easier. Like the whole thing, I know we talked about it like a lot in our show is like how can, and we think about this internally too is like how can Tupelo allow a broker to spend more time on critical aspects of their business? Right. And this is like a thing we talk about all the time.

George Wellmer [00:02:38]:
So like how can we get this business broker in front of more business owners? How can we get this business broker in front of like more LOI type deals? How can we get this business broker to spend less time vetting tire kicker buyers? Right. And we are working on building tools constantly to, to enable that. So in 2030 I think a broker is going to be spending 90 something percent of their time, maybe even more than that, maybe 95, 96% of their time just on those, those high critical value activities. And then Tupelo will fill that gap for them.

Jason Cutter [00:03:12]:
Yeah, which, and again I mentioned this in the first, first part. It’s not a paid product placement. This is sponsored podcast appearance by the fine people at Tupelo. And I agree with you said, I talked about it in the first segment as well where I think it’s, it’s really important because the systems are, the systems and tools are really going to be the thing that separate the people who are getting by, maybe doing some business and then the top performers. And it’s that case in any industry, in anything.

George Wellmer [00:03:38]:
Right.

Jason Cutter [00:03:38]:
Like top performing athletes, let’s say NFL players, they have amazing systems and processes and structure and support all these things in place that you know, people at the pickup game at the YMCA do not have.

George Wellmer [00:03:51]:
Right.

Jason Cutter [00:03:51]:
It’s like a totally different game and it just depends on what you want to play and where you want to be at. And I love that I think that’s so important. Now the second question I would normally ask people, George, is what’s the number one tech shift coming to M and A to business brokers? You can’t say CRMs because you already use that answer. So what do you think? Like you mentioned AI, obviously that’s the hot topic right now in 2025. So what do you see as far as like a tech shift in the industry for brokers?

George Wellmer [00:04:19]:
Yeah. So two things here. One is finding business owner contact information. So finding data like building lists. It’s a classic sales one on one is you want to target somebody or target an industry. First thing you’re going to do is you’re going to figure out who your ICP is, ideal customer profile, and then we’re going to build a list of these people. So for the business broker case, it’s business owners. And again, like the more granular you can get business owners and, you know, selling H Vac companies.

George Wellmer [00:04:47]:
And these H Vac companies only work on commercial service work. So now we know, like, I’m only going to target business owners who want to work on commercial business owners that are selling it, sorry, business owners that own H Vac companies that do commercial service work. So we have that like ideal customer profile and then we’re going to build a list of prospects. That’s like the first thing you always do in sales. Finding that data now is easier than it’s ever been. And going forward, it’s going to continue to get more and more easier. This is because, like, web scrapers are pretty good and business owners, their digital presence is more now than it’s ever been and that’s only going to continue. So finding out who they are is going to be easier.

George Wellmer [00:05:28]:
And then standing out to them is probably what’s going to actually be tougher for you. Because their inboxes are going to be. They’re already like being bombarded with emails right now. Cold calling. They’re already bombarded with cold calling. AI, cold callers are probably going to make this so much worse. So you’re going to have to figure out a way to stand out in their inbox and stand out in their voicemail and all this type of stuff. So getting the contact information will be easier, but standing out will be harder.

George Wellmer [00:05:53]:
The other thing we see that’s happening in the industry, and this is like early, early days, is these AI agents that will help a business broker with all these tasks that they don’t want to do, quite frankly. So you’ll have to find, you’ll have to close the deal to get them to sign a listing agreement. And then you’re going to have to close that deal with the buyer turn, negotiation, things like that, but everything in between. I think you’ll have technology do that for you.

Jason Cutter [00:06:19]:
Yeah, I agree.

George Wellmer [00:06:21]:
Right.

Jason Cutter [00:06:21]:
And then where, where, you know, is that helpful? Where is it valuable? I love what you said about, you know, the, the data, the emails, the cold calls, the. All those things it can do. Then what happens is it gets oversaturated, it gets noisy, and then it reverts to the relationships, the referrals, the content marketing, the authority online, things like that and you know, where is that blend and where is that kind of reversal kind of going to what you said in the first part of the show also for the first question, which is where the systems and processes leave a broker to do what they do best, their highest value task, which I think more and more is going to be the relational side and the content and the authority and that part because that has to be done by them.

George Wellmer [00:07:03]:
Right.

Jason Cutter [00:07:03]:
That’s all that’s left when we talk about the next one here. What is the, what’s like the biggest lesson that you learned from the year so far? Maybe it’s about your business, maybe it’s about brokerage, wherever you want to go with that.

George Wellmer [00:07:18]:
I think the biggest thing is like for us, customer service is like massive for us. We really try to provide the best customer service humanly possible out there right now. And like if, if I. There’s a lot of bad customer service out there, quite frankly. So like beating that is not too hard. The thing is, is like we as a company, we employ a lot of other services out there and we get to see like what customer service we like, how do they do it? And one of the like examples is that like hit home with me a long time ago was this wasn’t even for this business. It was another business that I had when I was doing valuations for business owners. I like had this website and I had to like, I never built a website before and I was like using YouTube to build it pretty much.

George Wellmer [00:08:07]:
And I had a question and I couldn’t figure out who did it. So I messaged their customer support and I put in my question and they filmed a video of them like answering my question. And it was my environment, my website building environment that they answered the question from. They didn’t do it. So they didn’t press like the save button. But they showed me how to do it and they sent it to me. And then I had this depository of all my questions that I asked because they would continue to do this. And this is like a, like that high level of customer service and like video where I could see what they were doing.

George Wellmer [00:08:37]:
This is something that we’ve implemented in like our practice. So when a business broker has a question, how do I manually send NDAs? We have a whole depository of videos that we can forward them so they can see how to do these activities. What’s been great is we use another service called Pylon and it allows us to read the support inquiry that comes through and then it uses AI to Draft a response with one of those videos in it so we can greatly reduce our turnaround time to get answers to these brokers that have, that have questions. So yeah, I think good customer support.

Jason Cutter [00:09:24]:
I think that’s great. It’s interesting how the world feels like customer support, customer service, it’s just getting worse and worse by the day. We all tolerate it. We feel like we don’t have a choice. It doesn’t take much, like you said, to stand out and to be exceptional. And then when you go way above it, then people are like, oh my God, this is amazing. I’m never going to leave. I know I use other platforms and I’ve helped companies pick platforms only on the service it could be A versus B.

Jason Cutter [00:09:51]:
B is not even as good as a product, but the service is so amazing that it doesn’t matter. Right. Like that makes up for it. So I think that’s a, I think that’s a huge lesson and I think that’s important for all businesses. I’m excited for the day when service goes back to mattering, like being important and being something that you know, they remember that the customers can vote with their dollars. So I think that’s great. What are you excited about doing? Normally would be the, for the year. Obviously we’re later, 20, 25, maybe it’s the end of this year with your business, next year with your business.

Jason Cutter [00:10:26]:
What are you excited about?

George Wellmer [00:10:28]:
Yeah, so we have a lot of like cool things that are coming to market. One of them is like we don’t see anyone really doing both of them. Actually. We don’t see anyone doing one is on like the buy side. So like for buyers who are interested in buying businesses, we’re like having a service that will be able to like make them a premium buyer through verified funds. Because like one of the major issues that business brokers face is they’ll get inundated with buyer inquiries. How do I know which of these buyer inquiries to focus on? They filled out a buyer profile, they signed an NDA, but there’s 200 of them. How do I know which one’s the best one to talk to? We’re verifying the buyer funds.

George Wellmer [00:11:10]:
So that’ll show up in the broker’s CRM. So they’ll know like if it’s a million dollar business that’s being for sale, this buyer has sufficient funds to actually execute on the transaction when in today’s world the broker has no idea that what the buyer wrote on the buyer profile is accurate, if they even filled it out at all. So they’ll have to spend hours calling the buyer, interview them and things like that when we’ll have something that’ll help brokers do that a lot quicker. The other thing, and this is more of 2026 is we have like Tupelo AI agents that are coming to help brokers with actual like sal of the business. So it’ll be able to do a lot of like the CRM activities for the brokers. It’ll be able to obviously like that buyers get listings up on the marketplace places and you know, help them out with all these tasks. So valuations, I mean we have a lot of the tools in there but now we’re launching AI agents to, to help them do that.

Jason Cutter [00:12:04]:
That’s awesome. Going back to what you talked about in the first episode with your growth taxes to, you know, automate whatever you can focus on the high, high, high dollar, high, high value tasks. I think that’s great. I love that verified funds, buyer kind of check process. I think that’s important. I’ve spent more time in real estate than I have in business brokerage, but always that mode bought a course or read a book or follows now an influencer online about how to buy businesses for $0 and they have no money and they’re just trying. It’s like hey, if as long as you make lots of offers and so how much of that is just clogging the system, taking brokers time versus like let’s just make sure. Are you, are you legit? Are you real? Because if you’re real, let’s talk if you’re not real, like I don’t want to spend my time on you, right?

George Wellmer [00:12:52]:
And a lot of this like the inspiration like the buyers are already doing in their like real estate lifestyle. Like you, you probably know this better than anyone but if you like go to apply for an apartment, like the first thing they’re going to ask you is do you have enough cash to pay for this apartment? If you’re going to buy a house, do you have enough money to buy the house? This is wild to me that this doesn’t happen in buying and selling businesses. Quite frankly, you don’t really know what the buyer has till the final day.

Jason Cutter [00:13:19]:
So yeah, it’s true, right? Like you want to buy a house. Like the first thing when you’re making an offer is the pre approval letter. Like you either have them, you’re either paying all cash or you’re getting a loan and the lender says you’re good for it and they’re good for It. So yeah, that is, it is wild. There’s so many things with business brokerage because it is kind of an official industry, but it’s also not. And it’s regulated differently and there’s not like a unified thing, like there is another industry. So that’s fascinating. I’m excited for that.

Jason Cutter [00:13:45]:
I think that’s a, that’s a huge thing and I love that last question. I normally ask this of business brokers. Obviously they come on the show, but I’ll ask you as well because obviously marketing and sales as part of any business, if you could wave a magic wand to have one, just one marketing strategy implemented automatically that you didn’t have to do ever again, what would you pick?

George Wellmer [00:14:09]:
I mean, if I look at results, I would like ChatGPT to answer. Tupelo is like the best CRM for business. Best place to buy businesses and to help buyers out. So like anything with SMB question, SMB, M&A questions, I want Chat GPD to spit out Tupelo as the answer.

Jason Cutter [00:14:27]:
That’s awesome. I, I don’t know how to make that work. I feel like that’s something you could do. But let’s, let’s just hope that happens and you know, it’s the go to answer and, and make Chat GPT bias.

George Wellmer [00:14:38]:
I love it.

Jason Cutter [00:14:39]:
I think that’s great. Well, George, I appreciate you being here on the after show, the time with this and the first episode again, for the audience listening, the links will be in the show notes. You can connect with George Wellmer Tupelo, you can find him on LinkedIn, find them on YouTube, you can go to tupelosmb.com email george tupelo SMB.com and if you want to get in touch with him, follow him for the content. All kinds of great stuff. As you can tell, he’s willing to share and talk about all these things in order to help the industry as a whole. George, thank you once again for everything that you’ve shared, for being on here and being such an awesome guest and having a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve taken lots of notes.

Jason Cutter [00:15:18]:
So, George, I appreciate it. Thanks for being on the show.

George Wellmer [00:15:21]:
My pleasure.

Jason Cutter [00:15:22]:
And for everyone listening, make sure to subscribe, make sure wherever you found this, share this, get the word out. Let’s help brokers in the industry as a whole with things like what George was talking about where we just elevated and really my goal is also to help separate the professionals and the people who are doing good work from the rest of them because bad business brokers can really wreak havoc. And so I love the kind of stuff that George is talking about and sharing this with everybody. So make sure you share this with us, everyone else that you know. And like I say every time, until next time, stop hoping for deals, start growing your pipeline.