Zac Muir is the VP of Revenue at Sisu, an innovative operating system for real estate teams and brokerages. Zac brings an extensive background in software sales, marketing, and customer success—essentially, everything related to revenue generation. He joined Sisu in 2017 as a content marketer when the company was in its infancy stage. Zac leads the team in developing and executing sales initiatives and putting into place effective strategies to drive growth. He is also responsible for managing the revenue driving operations to ensure business objectives are achieved. In his role as a VP, Zac’s focus is on helping Sisu’s business excel by providing the industry’s only solution that streamlines and automates transactional operations, while at the same time providing an element of sales performance management, goal setting, and business intelligence.
In an interview with Aspioneer, Zac discussed his life’s journey, his goals, and how his career path has helped him become the outstanding leader he is today. Below are some of the highlights.
Zac and Sisu: Achieving greatness together
Zac Muir: “My name is Zac Muir, one of the very first hires and currently the VP of Revenue seat at Sisu, a SaaS platform for real estate teams and brokerages. We’ve been in business for just about seven years and are completely remote. So, our teams are spread out all over the country, with most employees (and our main headquarters) located in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Sisu has three unique selling propositions:
We empower great leaders to turn their business into a winnable game by capturing all the metrics that matter, overlaying them with goals, creating contests, and making it clear every single day whether they’re pacing or not toward their goals.
We enable operational leaders to streamline and automate processes through integrations and process-management features that eliminate redundant work and processes. The average Sisu client can eliminate 2–5 redundant systems or processes.
The most common complaint about the real estate process is a lack of communication. We use all the data already housed in our system to provide a home for every real estate transaction, where all parties (title, mortgage, insurance, and, of course, real estate) can collaborate—further eliminating redundant communication and rework.
Our most important source of business has always been referrals, which tells you about the service we provide and the value of our product in the market. We’ve always believed that behind every customer are 10 more who will sign up when we execute on our value proposition. We take that to heart as we serve each client. At the same time, we have a development team that’s relentless about innovation and refuses to slow down the pace of our product development.”
Connecting the dots
Zac Muir: “Great leadership means a firm understanding of reality—and that understanding cannot be achieved without truly understanding the numbers that dictate where your business is going. That’s where Sisu started, by pulling in all the metrics that matter for a successful real estate team, overlaying them with goals, and helping teams operate at a higher level of accountability.
We found with time that this data could be used for so many other purposes, which made our mission that much bigger. Today, Sisu paired with a good CRM are everything a real estate team needs to run their business. We connect all the other processes and systems to create a streamlined workflow, and we have many clients who operate with less headcount at 1000+ transactions than they did at around 200 transactions.”
Easing the pressure
Zac Muir: “There is tremendous pressure in the real estate industry on two fronts. First, the pressure on agents to lower commissions, and second, the pressure on brokerages to recruit and retain agents. While the average real estate agent does less than two deals each year, Sisu agents on the majority of our teams are averaging well over 10. We credit this to the value of teams in real estate, which is a model that provides a tremendous amount of support to agents through coaching, training, systems, processes, and direct operational support. This is the future of the industry, and we believe that only the agents who can operate at this level (because they are powered by teams with these resources) will be able to compete in a meaningful way. The rest of the agents will pick different careers or end up on a discounted commission model. We also believe that agents who can create a home base for their transactions, where it’s visible and transparent exactly what they are doing for the client (think Pizza Tracker for real estate), will have a much easier time winning clients and maintaining elevated commission rates for elevated services.”
A humble beginning
Zac Muir: “I’ve always loved to write. To me, writing is the art of turning complex ideas into words that teach. I interned with a software company in college and found that writing was where I was best able to add value. I loved it because every article I wrote was also an opportunity for me to learn and grow. After my first internship with a software company, I started writing freelance for all kinds of different tech companies through contracts I found on Upwork.com. This helped me grow my knowledge of the industry. One of my clients at the time was Sisu, and when they offered me to join as their first sales representative, I was all in. Since then, it’s been a journey of learning and taking on new challenges as they present themselves. I’m extremely grateful to my boss, Frank, who has always allowed me to take on bigger and more complex challenges, even when those challenges may have seemed above my experience level. My personal growth has always mirrored the difficulty of the challenges facing me, so I am grateful for the chance to tackle those problems.”
"The company’s legacy is also the people in those companies who excelled in part through our partnership and went on to start other companies that also excelled and created opportunities for more people."
It’s the same
Zac Muir: “I’m passionate about my life, period. For me, there isn’t a whole lot of division between my work life and my personal life. They are the same. My work life benefits my personal life, and my personal life benefits my work life. It’s all part of one vision and dream that I’m working to achieve together with my family, which is the most important thing to me. I’m extremely grateful for my wife and our first son, who is due in August. It’s easy for me to be passionate about work when I look at it holistically as a huge part of the life I want to create. Fun facts about me? I’d say the thing I’m the most talented at is wakeboarding, and I credit this picture (in part) to me landing the biggest partnership of my life, with my wife.”
The vision is to empower
Zac Muir: “Our clients and partners—who have achieved higher levels of success through our services—are part of the company’s legacy. I think it also goes much further than that. The company’s legacy is also the people in those companies who excelled in part through our partnership and went on to start other companies that also excelled and created opportunities for more people.
The same goes for the people inside this company, who were given the chance to learn and grow and will apply that moving forward. Just like I said earlier, we believe that behind every client we deliver a great experience for, there are 10 more that we’ll get connected to and also deliver for. I also believe that each successful career will create success and opportunities for many more people, and it’s easy to underestimate how powerful that is.
Our new client portal, which creates a home for every real estate transaction where the agent, buyer/seller, lender, title company, etc. can all interact with each other, is a much-needed experience in the industry and will come to be expected in the next 5 years. There are a lot of companies talking about doing this, but I’m excited that Sisu is delivering on it already. This is the future of the industry, hands down, and we are excited to be driving it.”
