When Greg Clement was involved in real estate sales, he was, by his own admission, disorganized.
“We were a small business operating with papers and folders everywhere and lots of sticky notes,” he recalls. “Trying to keep track of all the moving parts of a real estate transaction was making us crazy. It was completely inefficient, and we wasted a lot of time trying to find stuff when we needed it.”
Clement realized that he needed a system, but discovered that the only effective way to manage things was to “cobble a bunch of different programs together and hope for the best,” he notes.
To salvage the situation, he developed a software system for small business management and hired a programmer to write it.
“It ended up being so helpful to us that we wanted to offer it to others in the real estate industry,” he explains.
He established
Realeflow in 2007 to offer the software, which he named OpenRoad.
“OpenRoad is web-based software that provides a comprehensive business management system for people in real estate,” Clement says. “It helps them attract new customers, manage those customers and ensure repeat purchases by those customers.”
The software program is available in both a standard and a professional version, which provides assistance in conducting marketing campaigns, creating legal forms, generating leads, and handling rehab projects.
“As a business management system, OpenRoad pulls everything together -- email, website, social media and video -- and has morphed into one-easy-to-use marketing automation platform,” Clement explains. ”It’s like putting your business on steroids, but without the nasty side effects.”
Realeflow, based in Parma Heights, has grown from just Clement and an assistant to 32 employees.
“As we’ve become proficient at Internet marketing, we’re offering webinars on what we’ve learned,” he says. The company offers on-line courses on “Facebook Domination” and “Smart Internet Marketing Solutions.”
Clement now wants to help businesses beyond the real estate field create order out of chaos.
“We’ll be branching out in 2012 and creating organizational software products for different industries, like restaurants, mortgage companies, small retail stores and construction,” he reports.
Source: Greg Clement, Realeflow
Writer: Lynne Meyer