WGAN-TV Podcast | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo17710
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 WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN Forum Podcast  WGAN-TV Podcast | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) | Guests: Urbanimmersive President and CEO Ghislain Lemire, Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge and Urbanimmersive VP, Operations Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé | Episode: 163 | Thursday, 20 October 2022 | www.Urbanimmersive.com and www.Urbanimmersive.com/franchise | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN Forum Podcast WGAN-TV Podcast | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) | Guests: Urbanimmersive President and CEO Ghislain Lemire, Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge and Urbanimmersive VP, Operations Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé | Episode: 163 | Thursday, 20 October 2022 | www.Urbanimmersive.com and www.Urbanimmersive.com/franchise | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN-TV Podcast WGAN-TV Forum Podcast | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) | Guests: Urbanimmersive President and CEO Ghislain Lemire, Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge and Urbanimmersive VP, Operations Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé | Episode: 163 | Thursday, 20 October 2022 | www.Urbanimmersive.com and www.Urbanimmersive.com/franchise | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN-TV Podcast WGAN-TV eBook | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) | Guests: Urbanimmersive President and CEO Ghislain Lemire, Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge and Urbanimmersive VP, Operations Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé | Episode: 163 | Thursday, 20 October 2022 | www.Urbanimmersive.com and www.Urbanimmersive.com/franchise  WGAN-TV Training U  WGAN-TV Training U (Free Course) | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) | Guests: Urbanimmersive President and CEO Ghislain Lemire, Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge and Urbanimmersive VP, Operations Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé | Episode: 163 | Thursday, 20 October 2022 | www.Urbanimmersive.com and www.Urbanimmersive.com/franchise | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN-TV Podcast WGAN-TV | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) | Guests: Urbanimmersive President and CEO Ghislain Lemire, Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge and Urbanimmersive VP, Operations Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé | Episode: 163 | Thursday, 20 October 2022 | www.Urbanimmersive.com and www.Urbanimmersive.com/franchise | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN-TV Podcast  Urbanimmersive Franchise Network  Urbanimmersive Website Urbanimmersive 3D virtual tour example courtesy of Urbanimmersive WGAN-TV eBook | Part 3 of 3 | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) Hi All, [WGAN-TV eBook above ...] On WGAN-TV Live at 5 on Thursday, 20 October 2022, my guests are: 1. Urbanimmersive President and CEO Ghislain Lemire 2. Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge 3. Urbanimmersive VP, Operations Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé The topic: WGAN-TV | Part 3 of 3 | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo (Book, Schedule, Invoice and Deliver) For Part 3 of 3 (above), we will figure that you have already watched (see videos below): 1. Part 1 of 3 | WGAN-TV | Real Estate Pros: Intro to Urbanimmersive Real Estate Photography Services 2. Part 2 of 3 | WGAN-TV | 8 Reasons Real Estate Photographers Should Join the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network For the back-end demo of the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network back-end, I will ask our guests to assume that you have just joined the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network and you are ready for training on the back-end, including: 1. Booking 2. Scheduling 3. Invoicing 4. Delivering 5. And More! Questions that I should ask Ghislain Lemire and François-Hugues Liberge? Best, Dan Urbanimmersive Links 1. Urbanimmersive Website 2. Urbanimmersive Franchise Network (micro-website) 3. Urbanimmersive Facebook Page 4. Urbanimmersive YouTube Channel 5. Urbanimmersive LinkedIn Page 6. Urbanimmersive on Twitter 7. Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge Part 1 of 2 | WGAN-TV | Real Estate Pros: Intro to Urbanimmersive Real Estate Photography Services | Guest: Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge | Episode: 148 | Thursday, 9 June 2022 | Urbanimmersive website | WGAN-TV Podcast Part 2 of 2 | WGAN-TV | 8 Reasons Real Estate Photographers Should Join the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network | Guest: Urbanimmersive VP, Business Development and Partnerships François-Hugues Liberge | Episode: 160 | Thursday, 15 September 2022 | Urbanimmersive Franchise Network | WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN-TV Podcast --- Transcript (Video Above) [00:00:02] Dan Smigrod: -Hi all. I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum. Today is Thursday, October 20th, 2022 and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. We have an awesome show for you today: Urbanimmersive Franchise Network Back-End Demo Including Booking, Scheduling, Invoicing and Delivering Digital Assets. I think we have – I want to say, the whole company with us today to talk about this topic, but I know that's not true. We just have four of maybe 150 plus and you have an acquisition to talk about, so maybe it's 300 plus, but we do have a lot of guests on the show today. We have Ghislain, the President and CEO of Urbanimmersive; François-Hugues, the VP of Business Development and Partnerships; and Amélie, the VP of Operations. Thanks for being on the show today, super-appreciate it. Ghislain, just nine days ago you had some big news. What was that news? What does that mean for real estate photographers and more importantly for Urbanimmersive Franchise Network members? [00:01:17] Ghislain Lemire: -Yeah. It is important news for Urbanimmersive. We just announced that we acquired HomeVisit from CoreLogic. It's a huge acquisition for us because it's doubling the size of the company. We're super-pleased with this acquisition. We started meeting with the new employees this week, the vibe is good. A great, great team and so we look forward to working with them. Actually, today, this acquisition will bring Urbanimmersive close to $20 million top revenue per year; 250 employees of people surrounding the company, working with the company. But most of all that is going to add up also the value of HomeVisit within the groups, which is basically the print. You know that HomeVisit has a specialty in print and this is not something we were offering to our clients using our platform, so this is certainly something that will add a lot of value going forward for our franchisees and the photographers using our platform. [00:02:25] Dan Smigrod: -Awesome. Congratulations on the acquisition of HomeVisit, doubling the revenue overnight, almost doubling the number of employees, and as a result of the acquisition being able to offer yet additional services to Urbanimmersive clients; Urbanimmersive Franchise Network members. We've done two previous Urbanimmersive shows. So for the purpose of this WGAN-TV show we're going to assume that our viewers have watched previous WGAN-TV Live at 5 episodes. The first one being Part 1: Real Estate Photographer Pros - Intro to Urbanimmersive Real Estate Photography Services. Our Part 2: Eight Reasons Real Estate Photographers Should Join the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network. Those two shows you can simply Google WGAN-TV Live at 5 and Urbanimmersive, they'll pop up or go to the We Get Around Network Forum www.WGANForum.com - go into the search box. Just search for Urbanimmersive, and those shows will pop up. That way we will focus really on the back-end today of the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network. We're going to make a lot of assumptions that you really are perhaps right on the edge of your seat, you're deciding whether to move forward with Urbanimmersive Franchise Network. Before you do you really want to get maybe a little bit more deeper understanding of the ERP platform - the Enterprise Resource Platform - the back-end that controls the bookings, scheduling, invoicing, delivering and so much more. Where would you like to begin? Ghislain, do you want to talk at a higher level about the back-end and why it's significant? [00:04:15] Ghislain Lemire: -Yeah. The reason why I asked Amélie to come to the presentation is that it is a platform that we've been developing, commercializing for more than 10 years. Actually, we started that since the inception of Urbanimmersive back in 2007, so there's many features in it. Just to give you an idea, let's say, for example, HomeVisit, just the training sessions represent 160 hours of training to get and place this platform. Because it is much more than just the scheduling and invoicing platform. There's also the payroll in it. We cover accounting and stuff like that. The scope of the platform is very large. What I'm going to try to do today is to give you a quick overview in one hour of all the feature-sets that we have within this platform. Of course, like you said, Dan, we will not talk about TourBuzz (division of Urbanimmersive). We will not talk about 3D Tours; UiMeet3D, Floor Plans. We assume that people know that we do that. With that said, even though I'm also coding, actually, I'm a programmer within the platform. I'm just taking care of a specific section, which is what we call internally the CRM and the section that sends emails and everything. This is why I asked Amélie to come, so if I'm making a mistake she's going to punish me, but she can correct me because she is the specialist of the platform. Of course you know François. François is the Vice President, Urbanimmersive Franchise Network. He's nurturing our franchisee and also he's the Executive Vice President of Urbanimmersive. So he also knows everything about the Network, the franchise, and plans and so on and so forth. [00:06:15] Dan Smigrod: -Should we jump to Amélie and have her give us a deep-dive into the back-end of the platform, take a piece of it since we can't really cover it all in depth, but just to get a sense. Does that work for you Amélie? [00:06:30] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: -I can do that. I think it is like a PowerPoint presentation? [00:06:36] Ghislain Lemire: -Actually, I really wish you'll just correct me if I'm doing some mistakes or promising stuff that the platform is not doing, sometime I am dreaming about the features that the platform should be doing, but I will do the demo, Dan. [00:06:48] Dan Smigrod: -Okay. [00:06:49] Ghislain Lemire: -Very seldom that I do that. I might not be good, Dan. ;-) I just want to manage expectations here, so this is why I have two of the best of my team to do that. But I'm going to try to do a demo. So I'll do it. I'm going to share my screen, if you allow me. [00:07:10] Ghislain Lemire: Of course, Dan, I'm going to align the presentation in a way that I talk to franchisees, the potential photographers who would like to franchise with us. Because, for instance, the idea behind becoming a franchisee is that we take care of everything, and everything means that we start with a website. I'm going to share my screen. [00:07:41] Dan Smigrod: -You should be able to share your screen. [00:07:43] Ghislain Lemire: -You're seeing it now? [00:07:45] Dan Smigrod: -Yes. [00:07:46] Ghislain Lemire: -So from start, everything starts with a website. Most of the time photographers will use WordPress, some platform out there to create a website, and then the website gets stuck and nothing moves from there on. We're going to provide franchisees with a website. The templates look pretty much always the same. The reason that we always use the same template is that we find out that those are the templates that convert the most leads. If you look at Virtual Access, I'm taking Virtual Access Tours. This is a company that most photographers will know since they have been in business 15-20 years in New Jersey. They also cover New York. It's an acquisition of Urbanimmersive a year ago. I thought that the website was pretty much representative of what we are providing. But if you look at, let's say, for example, we do have another brand called EGP Techno, you're going to find out that the designs are mostly the same. You'll see the slight difference. I'm just going to bring it like this. There's a slight difference but the overall pretty much the same. [00:09:07] Francois-Hugues Liberge: -Those websites are the ones that'll be personalized for every franchisee. Ghislain said the template remains the same, but everything else will be personalized for the franchisees. [00:09:17] Ghislain Lemire: -This is the last one we did for Clique Mobile. These are four businesses owned by Urbanimmersive. It is personalized, customized with their colors and their brand and everything, but each website will come with the description of a Prime program. I'm going to talk a little bit further about that. The services offered by photographers, and we're also got to include a 3D Tour gallery, which will be automatically updated on a regular basis. Of course these are shoots from the photographer, so it's not just from Urbanimmersive Group. This is really from Virtual Access Tours. You can add the gallery and everything. We will also include the portfolio that we can manage on your side with the back-office. We're also going to include the contact FAQ, so if you could come back here. [00:10:20] Ghislain Lemire: There's two sections you can add. There's a frequently asked question and the News. For Virtual Access Tours they just selected one and they can maintain it. Again, even a photography business sometimes doesn't have time to curate content, so once you become a franchisee, you're going to get some content from Urbanimmersive to populate your FAQs and News. That is an option. You can decide to not have us manage your FAQs and News, and you can do it yourself, but if you want us to do it, then we're going to offer you the services to do it. Of course, you want to see the back-office. I'm just going to quickly show you that. You're going to have access to your back-office, a section called Blog FAQs. When you go there, you can even see the rest of the group, what they're using so you can be inspired by, let's say, iMOTO, for instance. You're going to see everything they put on their website. COVID has ended, so that's great. And if you go there, you see that this same fact actually is presented on EGP, Virtual Access Tours, and iMOTO. This is super-easy to add this on your page if you want to use the same content. We tried to create an environment where it's easy to add content to your website, or something that is news-worthy. In terms of Virtual Access Tours, they haven't added the news, but if you go on EGP Techno, they have a news section here, and I put it in English. They're just adding some news like this. It's presented differently than fact, but it's great also to have a news section. Then we'll also include a lead generation for the newsletter and stuff like that. Let's go back to my previous one here, which is New Jersey. Of course, the website will come with an ordering system. So it's totally integrated, you don't have to work to do it, it's coming with that, and it's going to be branded to your colors. If I click on it, you are going to jump into the ordering system. Of course, to get there, the agent will have to login, user password, and the credential. I already entered mine. Once you have your credential done, you're going to get this – what we call actually the agent panel or the client panel. If you want, that offers you many options, you can work your profile, you can add access to our products and everything, but those are the main functions that you want to use. So first of all... If you're not subscribing to our Prime program, you're going to be able to do it online, so your client can subscribe. Let me talk a little bit about the Prime subscription. Basically this is – and also if you want to comment, you can... [00:13:08] Dan Smigrod: Ghislain, we did cover with that Prime subscription in our previous WGAN-TV show. We're going to make the assumption that you saw the previous WGAN-TV shows, so that we can see as much of the back-end as possible. [00:13:17] Ghislain Lemire: That's perfect. We're going to save time there. You can see your appointments, my others, my invoice, and everything. This is the Prime panel. Before I'm creating an order, I wanted to bring your attention to this here. Our system enables your clients, if you want, this is an option you can offer to your clients. They enable the option of adding a line of credit. It's like a credit card. Instead of paying for every shoot, you can just put that on your bill, and at the end of the month, the system will send you a credit statement, and a balancing statement saying, you have done 10 shoots, you owe me $1,500, you can pay in full and stuff like that. This is exactly the same way a credit card works, and it's very useful for large clients. We do have a large photography agency that has clients providing $100,000 per year of business. It's hard for them to pay with credit cards all the time, so this is very useful. Let's jump into the ordering system, okay? Of course the ordering system will be different from one franchisee to the other. I mean, we tried to standardize it in a way that it makes sense, to bring into the group. So you have different services. For example you can see you have Virtual Access Tours, HDR photography with options, video only, aerial, drone Urbanimmersive 3D tour only, or virtual staging. Basically it means that when you are within those services here, those photographers, for example, aren't providing photography. You just want an aerial shoot. You're going to get the best price, the best photographer to do that from a Virtual Access Tours. Clicking here, I'm just going to open up all the options to start with. Let's say I would like to have 25 images. I can see the prices starting at $182. I'm clicking on it. The second option, you can see it's a step-by-step ordering system. The second option will present to your clients the options that you want to offer. So this is customizable and that's with Virtual Access Tours here, but it's still offering the drones. If you want to add drones there. You can order a URL property website, you can ask for a floor plan, you can ask for photography Add On, and you can see easily what you're selecting in terms of options, super-easy. Sometimes you do have some options that will require quantity. I don't see those here, but you're going to see a quantity option here that you can just add up. Come to shoot, that's great. Let's say that I'm clear with the option. I'm just going to continue. The third step would be basically where do you want to have a shot. Of course, right now the system, I just tagged my IP address and detected that I'm in Montreal. This is not where Virtual Access Tours is providing services. Usually if you order Virtual Access Tours, it is because you probably close in New York. This is the territory, this is the services, the zone of Virtual Access Tours. I'm just going to pick a random address here just to continue my shoot. There it is. Lucky address. Let's click on next. Now the system will start gathering all the information about the photographers. Their abilities, where they are, the shoots they have, and they're going to select the photographer to work with. For instance here I see that on Saturday there's availability. On Sunday there is not, and I can also see some icons presenting the weather forecast. Sometimes it helps to get an idea of, is it going to be a nice day for a shoot? Let's say I want to have Monday, I'm going to select Monday. And then the system will list the photographers available on Monday. We also recommend the one that fits the most criteria that you selected. So you can see recommendations here. We have two different notions about picking an hour. We have guaranteed hours and other hours to be confirmed. Basically the gap with our franchisee guarantees the hour, it's something that we want our franchisee to respect. If an agent is not guaranteed the hour, it's based on the algorithm optimizing the photographer's route. Basically, here you see Chris Hammill the guaranteed hours at 12:15 P.M. Basically what it means is that the system will get all the shots of this guy and the address of the shoot you want. The system calculates exactly the travel time, and the distance as well, to pick the best photographer to offer you a guaranteed hour. Of course, if your agent wants to work with Chris, but you want to have Chris at 3 P.M., you can select 3 P.M. like this. But it means that this time is not guaranteed. This time will not be guaranteed, meaning that it's possible that Chris might be maybe late 30 minutes, 40 minutes because you just picked a time that will not exactly optimize his route. Usually, when agents are picking a time to be confirmed, we leave the photographers the option of contacting the agents to just rearrange the route if there's anything – We don't leave that flexibility with guaranteed hour, you have to be there. If I'm selecting guaranteed hours here, the system will just reevaluate the traffic. Now everything is good, I will just confirm. Then I'm just completing the order. As you can see, because those are guaranteed hours, you have 15 minutes to complete your order. It's like when you order a ticket or you buy tickets for a flight. The reason is, that we don't want to add two agents ordering the same photographers at 9 A.M., then you know it won't be guaranteed anymore. So 15 minutes is enough, it takes only 2 minutes to complete the address. You have the resource person in place, the phone number. If you want to keep your client informed, you can ask to send an email, the email of the client, which language you use, optional additional information. You have a summary of your account of the order so far, and then you get to the payment system. You'll have different options to make your clients pay. You can ask for credit cards. So basically, I haven't got a credit card already saved in my account. So I'm going to have to add a new one. You can use a credit line. Your line of credit is deactivated. Basically, I don't have access to credit, but I could. Once I select the way I want to pay, I just confirm my order, and that's it. This is as simple as that. You set your service, the option, the address. You pick the date, you select your photographers, and the time, you complete your information and the payments. So that's the client panel. The rest of it is- [00:20:50] Dan Smigrod: Before we go on though, there was a moment where you referenced the traffic and the time. Are you looking forward to what the traffic typically is at 9 A.M. on that day? [00:21:07] Ghislain Lemire: Exactly. The system gathers a lot of information. Also, once you pick your photographers, then we will launch our algorithm, and we check it. Every Monday, let's see, at one o'clock there's an average time of traffic between those two addresses of this amount of time. [00:21:29] Ghislain Lemire: That is highly sophisticated. I'll tell you, Dan, that usually photographers using the system will increase the number of shoots they can get per day because the system is in real-time optimizing and you will see in the back-office, the back office. You will see how it optimizes the route of the photographer to make sure you have less time in your car and each of your routes, each of your appointments on your schedule is placed in the way that it's easy to drive and stuff like that. Let's see if I understand that. You live in New York, okay. Let's say you live in New Jersey and you have a shoot in New York. The system will know that at, let's say at four o'clock, there's traffic times and the traffic times will not make you able to go and shoot at five o'clock if you finish your shoot at 4:00 in New Jersey stuff like that. It avoids a lot of problems actually. [00:22:28] Dan Smigrod: But just for clarification, Urbanimmersive Franchise Network is doing a lookup on two things. One is the Google Calendar of the photographer to say, "Ah! That photographer is available at nine o'clock on Monday." Great. Then looking at traffic in order to calculate whether that photographer gets served up as the nearest photographer for the 10:30 or 11:00 A.M. job. So if someone goes to book an appointment at 11:00 A.M. if that photographer – let's say in this particular case, if they were extreme there in Newark, are they there in New York City, if the first job is at 09:00 A.M. was in Newark, there's no way they're going to make it shoot the job in Newark and make it into New York City at 11:30 A.M. so the platform actually does all the calculations in real-time so that a photographer is not offered for a particular time if it's literally not possible; based on their calendar and based on the traffic. [00:23:40] Ghislain Lemire: Exactly. I'll add up two things to that, Dan. The third thing that the software will look at is the time to do the service. Depending on the service, the number of images and the options, and whether you're a Prime client or not, the agent. You're going to have a 3D tour, floor plan and everything. You've gathered all this information and so this service will take, let's say, one hour 40 minutes. It's very precise. This is why you are seeing if the photographer is at 12:15 because we're not averaging on time. We're really good at 12:15. He's got to be there because he's going to finish this shoot, he's going to take one hour 35 minutes, and is going to drive 23 minutes. He's going to be at your house at 12:15. This is what we've been told by the client using it as a buffer, one of the best ordering systems right now on the market. [00:24:33] Dan Smigrod: Okay. Pause there for a second. [00:24:35] Ghislain Lemire: Yeah. [00:24:36] Dan Smigrod: That's a perfect world. Photographer shows up at 9:00 A.M. as he was supposed to. The agent is not ready. There's people still in the house. They're moving stuff around. There's people still sleeping in the beds. They haven't prepared the space. What happens to the rest of the day? The photographer says, "I'm sorry, but you didn't prepare, you didn't do what you were supposed to do." What happens? [00:25:03] Ghislain Lemire: That is the decision of the photographer, he can potentially just give us some buffer to his client. If you're late 15 minutes, I can understand and you know what I'm going to cut this, for instance, or it can re-booked the shoot because at one point – and the system will do two things. It will optionally, if you want to charge for a cancellation for your client will apply the cancellation. But, if you wanted to do the shoot and you're late for the other shoots, the system will start sending notifications to all the other shoots saying, "hey, you know what, I might be 15, 20 minutes late this afternoon." This is awesome. I'm telling you everything is very well prepared. But this is always the decision of the photographer. When you want to shoot or delay it – [00:25:55] Dan Smigrod: Is that something that we could look at the back-end, where those decisions are set by the owner of the photography agency? [00:26:04] Ghislain Lemire: This is, yeah, the configuration. There's multiple places where you can configure the system. The system is built to be flexible enough to adjust to the way you want to work, the decision you want to take. We don't want to force people to do this and that. The configuration part of the system is where the expertise of Urbanimmersive is. Amélie here, when she starts working on-boarding a client, the first thing we want to understand is how do you work and how do you want it to work? Do you want to charge your clients cancellation fees? That's the first thing. [00:26:41] Dan Smigrod: Let me ask the question differently. I guess I had assumed that I'm on-boarded as an Urbanimmersive Franchise Network member and it's up to me to go into the back-end and start doing stuff. Is that not the case? Is it more like, Amélie, you or a member of your team, is debriefing the photographer and then entering the appropriate instructions to the platform, to the ERP platform? [00:27:10] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: Yes, our integration team can definitely take some time with the franchisee to understand how they work. Then what we usually do is set up their account prior with what we've been told and what they're doing, and with some previous information that we are asking them. We provide a list. François provides a list of things that the franchisee needs to provide us, so we're able to create that account. Then after that, when the account is set up, we make sure with the franchisee that everything is set up properly and if they want to configure certain things differently that they're able to do it themselves also. [00:27:55] Dan Smigrod: It sounds like there's two things. First is maybe 90% of the on-boarding is really done on your behalf based on the debriefing, based on reviewing a checklist, based on the questions that Urbanimmersive Franchise Network on-boarding team asks. That said, you could probably do two things: is to go back and say, "hey, there's some things I need to change. Can you help me with that?" Or, literally sign in and make those changes yourself? Is that the case, there's those two different DIY and service options? [00:28:29] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: Exactly. Our goal, I think at Urbanimmersive is really to be there for the franchisee also, we don't want to sell anything and say, "hey, we're not here for you." This is where we are a part of the group or what a franchisee can feel part of the group is that we will support them and you will always be there to help them in the configuration and changing anything that they need on the platform. [00:28:58] Dan Smigrod: Awesome. Ghislain, then maybe we could take a look at the back-end a little bit to understand pricing bundles and ala carte. The first part you went in and you look, there's a real estate agent and said, "oh, I want to book these services." But as a photographer, perhaps, how do I see what my bundles look like? Maybe again, the operations team has helped me set up my bundles, but is there a place on the back-end where I get to – [00:29:29] Ghislain Lemire: We're going to get into "the juice" here. Let me start with the photographer panel because we have the admin panel where you can manage multiple photographers. We're going to see it. But the admin panel also includes so many features that I would like to finish with. Okay, the admin panel is super-simple. Imagine you have a business, you have five photographers working for you. [00:29:53] Dan Smigrod: You want to show us this? [00:29:54] Ghislain Lemire: Yeah, I'm going to share my screen right away. I'm going to pick who, Jeff Smith. Do you have an idea of who I should pick? No.That's going to work. This is a pretty simple dashboard. This is for a single photographer. Photographers who worked for you. They're going to see their orders that they need to fulfill. They're going to see their calendar. They can see the daily calendar. They're booking weekly. [00:30:27] Dan Smigrod: Excuse me. For clarification, are we looking at the photographer view or the photography agency owner view? [00:30:35] Ghislain Lemire: That is the photographer's view. This is the photographer panel. Yeah. But this is not the admin panel. You understand that there's a huge difference between the admin and photographer. This is the photographer who works for you. Maybe I'm going too fast but I know there's so many things to talk about. Basically you're going to shoot and click on the shoot and see the order. You can consume the order right away. But we're going to see the order of how it looks in the back office of the admin later. You have a feature here to send the images for photo editing. This is a pretty neat feature, actually, to send the images and maybe if you want, I can maybe take two-three minutes to show you this. Let's say that I'm taking this one here. Basically the way it's going to work is we're going to allow our photographers to... They can send the originally images, where you're going to see all the brackets using bracketed shots, bracketing here, I'm looking for those bracketing. [00:31:40] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: You can. [00:31:42] Ghislain Lemire: Which one has bracketing? [00:31:46] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: You see bracketing? [00:31:47] Dan Smigrod: I'm looking under type. It says bracketing. So I presume that's what you're looking for. [00:31:51] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: Did you save your original images? [00:31:53] Ghislain Lemire: Yeah. [00:31:54] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: Under you have five exposures. Under every image you have – [00:32:01] Ghislain Lemire: I have five exposures. Yeah. [00:32:04] Dan Smigrod: This is why I wanted to add Amélie. [00:32:08] Ghislain Lemire: It is showing the thumbnails of multiple exposures. This is not the final merged image. When you click on the thumbnails, we can see them like this. You can reorder your images and everything. Once it's done, you send it to the editing. It's as simple as that and it's going to be done. We have a team in France that'll do the photo editing. We also offer the possibility to work with well-known photo editing companies. It only depends on what the photographer wants to do. But this is part of our system to enable a totally integrated photo editing process. This is another example. I was looking for this. Basically the way it works, depending on the order and depending on what the client ordered. Y you're going to have different buckets. The first bucket is, you have to deliver 25 images; beauty shots. Those are the beauty shots. I want to see the original here. This is the three exposures. The first bucket will be this. The second bucket you're going to offload the images or drones. This is a client who took drones as an option. So you're going to have to add the media and the shoot of the drones. Technically speaking, you're going to have as many buckets to fill with content that you have options in your order. If you would have had a 3D tour and you would have had the bucket for the 3D tour, whatsoever, name it, twilight images; you would have had the bucket to fill. Once you have uploaded them, you send them to the photo editor; that's it. This is a totally integrated system and we charge the cost to franchisees. We charge a cost -- a deal for the entire Network -- plus 20 percent. Basically we can guarantee you that we have one of the best costs right now for photo editing. With one of our suppliers, we're giving them more than $1 million per year for photo editing. We're negotiating all the time for the group and you have the best price. These are the services you are offering. You can check marks of what you want to offer on that. Of course, the services listed here are the services provided by Virtual Access Tours and this is totally customizable. This is the service zone that you want to offer your services as a photographer. This is the photographer's panel. Are you following me, Dan? This is the zone where this photographer delivers services. These are available. Of course, this is connected to Google Calendar, but we're also offering a tool to just manage these. You still want to work on Saturday and Sunday and you want to spread your usual hours of work and you'd have your photo shoot payout. The photoshoot payout and just going to select a little bit more time here. Because basically how much you're going to be paying for every shoot. We like to say that our system to get paid is one of the most granular, one of the most precise systems on the market. For instance, here you can see the order or who you have worked for; because as a photographer – part of the Network of photographers, Urbanimmersive Franchisee, you can work on more than one brand. I'll show you the retribution [payments to photographer]. You can see the order, the shoot, the address, the distance you've done. You can see that the distance is pretty much similar. Because our ERP platform always tries to book as the minimum distance between two shoots. You're going to see the base you get for this shoot. What we pay for the images. You didn't do any videos to adjust the base, that 's coming from a comment that the photographers leaving the admin agree to the toll plus the travel fee. We like to say to our photographers that when they work for one of our brands, they get the best paycheck on the market because we're paying for every photo you're taking, every panoramic you're taking, a 3D scan. We are also paying for each mile you are doing for us. You can see here another example, I put a shoot, the base, the images and everything. Let's dig a little bit further down, if you allow me, I'll show you how we build what we call the retribution. Every time I'll take Virtual Access Tours again, getting the employees list and it will dedicate Chris here, get the employee list package. Basically, the way it works when you work for us, you're going to have for every shoot a base price. This is how much you're going to get for every shoot. For the mileage, you're going to have a base of $0.50 so whatever just getting in your car, you're going at $0.50 and you're going to have $0.50 per mile on top. You will see, oh my gosh, you're playing with cents. We're playing with cents on the number of shoots you're going to do, that's going to make a huge difference. The extra base retribution usually if you're doing a 3D tour for us, you're going to get another – Let's say I'm not going to enter it because I'm in a real database, but you can put a $10 base if you're doing a 3D tour. For instance, this photographer is probably more into aerial photography, so he's going to get $27 to just get gear out of his car. He has no studio and the travel fee. Then afterward we had the special visual content. How much do we pay per panorama? Basically, you know, $1.25 will be for a 3D tour for Urbanimmersive. If you do a Matterport tour, you can add up another $1. So basically, you're going to be paying – If you are doing a Matterport tour, you're going to be paid $1.25 plus $1. It's going to be a $2.25 pet scan so per minute it takes to do the scan, plus your base, of course. I should put the base here at $20. Remind me, Amélie, I need to just remove the base because it's saved in real-time. Then if you do a video, you're going to be paid $85. If you do aerial photos you will be paid $7 roughly, plus your base; measurement, twilight. You get all the pricing here for all the special visual content. Afterward, this is where it becomes super-interesting, you know, Dan, and I don't want to go back there, but you have seen Tourbuzz. We are using AI to recognize the images. We can automatically get the image tag and pay for it. Every image that AI can recognize, you can set up different pricing of how much you want to pay for it. I'm going to show you an example. I think there's an example here, a portrait, $25. But let's say that you want to take, for example, a swimming pool. You want to pay something like $5 for a swimming pool. If I detected that, you shot a swimming pool outside, and that might require that you change the lens. That might require that you're not shooting, you know with multi-bracketing, stuff like that that might require more work. You can pay more. So every picture you take will determine how much you will get in the base. All the bases together and all the images will be $29 here in that case. You can see how granular we can go. I don't know any other system right now that really pays for everything that photographers will do on site. On top of it, the mileage will be added on top of it. I wasn't on our time here. Sorry. What is my bucket here? This is how staffers and you can see that it's been paid for that and it has some right now running bill to be paid at the next payroll period. Again, the photographers can leave a note. He can also see the administrative note from the backup coming from the back-office. You can also have a set of reports for your taxes and everything at the end of the year. But I think this part here is definitely one of the most sophisticated payroll systems in the market. On top of it, this photographer can see that if you work for somebody else right now he worked for Virtual Access Tours. But let's say, jump to iMOTO or you worked for Agento, he can see all the list of packages he is going to get with them. Actually it's not having any package with the iMOTO, but let's go back to Virtual Access Tours. The photographer knows exactly how much is going to get paid. I'm going back to the photographer panel and you can see the last time an item has changed. Let's say that you negotiate a new pricing. You will see if your base is changing. When it changed. I required a bigger base for aerial photography. We changed it to 8 June. This is a very transparent system. Again, I don't want to be all over the map, Dan, but I want to show you something very interesting. When you are that granular, you can in real-time track your margin. This is coming from the back office system. I'm looking at all the orders coming in and I see exactly how much I paid the photographer. Every Urbanimmersive Franchisee has access to that. You can see how much the 3D tour cost. This is the cost of the 3D tour. I'm going back here at the beginning of the columns. This is the cost of the photographer. How much you sold it, the photo editing job, how much it costs, and the profits. I'm just going to show you some interesting things. [This client's project], you have an abnormal margin here; it is too high. Something is missing in terms of this shoot. By the way, this is normal here. This is the real profit. I know this. But the system will also warn you in real-time and can receive notifications when it's not normal. Potential negative margin. What happened here? I can tell you what happened. And we're splitting - I'm just going to put it in real-time. Invoice splitting because basically they have been two photographers on this job and they split the invoice into two agents. This is a normal negative margin should be 50. At least it is explained and you can see that in the comments. Then afterwards you have, again, too high margins, stuff like that. That's what we're tracking in real-time the cost of every shoot. This is a great shoot because we've done a 3D tour. We have $16. This is not Matterport, of course it is Urbanimmersive post-production that we charged to the franchisee. It costs $17 for the full edition. You sold it for $275, you made that profit. Is it awesome? [00:43:34] Dan Smigrod: - It is! It actually is awesome. This is really a random question based on one of the items that you were showing there, Ghislain. [00:43:50] Dan Smigrod: If a photographer is shooting Matterport 3D tours rather than an Urbanimmersive 3D tour, on the website where you were pushing out the portfolio examples, will you insert, instead of putting in the Urbanimmersive 3D tours for that particular client, they're doing Matterport so the gallery is Matterport tours? [00:44:18] Ghislain Lemire: - Actually, our brands that we own do very few Matterport tours. But, if you're an independent photographer and you want to use Matterport, Matterport is totally integrated within Tourbuzz property websites. Within your gallery, if you click on one of the examples in your gallery, you will see a Matterport 3D tour coming in. But like I said, I can't show you any examples because our brands are 99 percent of the time shooting our 3D tours. [00:44:48] Dan Smigrod: -I guess I thought of HomeVisit, for example. I was thinking that they were Matterport for 3D tours. I would imagine as part of the acquisition, congratulations, you're going to move all those people to Urbanimmersive tours, I would imagine. [00:45:05] Ghislain Lemire: - Maybe. [00:45:07] Dan Smigrod: - I will not probe too deeply there, but I could imagine that top-level, that's a strategy of acquisition and migration to Urbanimmersive solutions. [00:45:21] Ghislain Lemire: - But you know what, Dan, at the end of the day, we're not breaking arms. Pricing does. In a way that, for the photographers, with Urbanimmersive there is no monthly fee to use our 3D tours and they cost less. At the end of the day, you saw the margins. Photographers will demand money offering – It's coming from you, [Dan]. You said "good enough" 3D tours. There are so many good enough 3D tours out there. Urbanimmersive has great 3D tours, if you compare it with Matterport, Matterport is the top. But our 3D tours are more than good enough. [00:45:58] Dan Smigrod: - Yeah, I apologize for digressing here because – [00:46:03] Ghislain Lemire: - No I think you were talking in general. [00:46:04] Dan Smigrod: - Yeah, I think that's a great topic for another show and really offering "good enough" is a solution. Yes, I would say your Urbanimmersive 3D tours are actually great when you take a look at the MiuMeet 3D integration of live video chat within the tour, whatever that live experience is, which we've covered. But the short answer is, you are a real estate photography agency and all your image solutions do not perfectly align with the suite of Urbanimmersive Franchise Network solutions: perfectly fine. You can offer whatever solutions that you want. I presume that François is going to spend some time to probably help you understand how migrating your clients, migrating your business to the Urbanimmersive Franchise core business is going to save you time, save you energy, make you more money, and your clients are likely to be happier. [00:47:13] Francois-Hugues Liberge: - Exactly. Just like what Ghislain showed you, like the Matterport photographers and the margins and scheduling for franchisees that want to expand, usually that's their main concern, is how will I manage more photographers? I have a hard time managing myself. For them it's a pain when they have another photographer and somebody calls, "are you available on Tuesday at eight o'clock? Hold on. I'll call John to see if he's available." That way eliminates one big, big elephant for them is like scheduling is online. They can pay and show like Ghislain showed you it can personalize the pay for every photographer. If they have one that's almost a partner and they want that photographer to make more money, then they can personalize his or her pay and then if the other one has more or less experience it can get paid less. That's the good thing about it. It can be really personalized and reflect what kind of business they want to have and what they want. For customers also, that's a good thing. [00:48:16] Dan Smigrod: - That's awesome. I imagine Amélie in the operations side, that one-boarding side, well those pages that Ghislain took us through, are very granular – with lots of data entry – I imagine in the on-boarding process, there's some amounts that you recommend as a starting point and pre-populate and/or take the information from the photography agency in order to populate all those numbers so someone doesn't have to put them all in. [00:48:48] Ghislain Lemire: - We've taken care of everything. If you want a turnkey solution, we're going to put [wheels on your business] and we're going to give you a turnkey solution to start day 1 with everything. If you want to follow exactly our recipe, which we think is quite great because we're generating great gross margin. It's quite impressive what we can achieve with that business. If you want to achieve the same results, we are just going to cut and paste what we have somewhere else provided you take any discussion and then you can operate. If you want to customize it, then we will do that. [00:49:32] Dan Smigrod: - Again, digressing for a moment. But it sounds like a great business strategy for Urbanimmersive to acquire at least nine photography agencies. Have those nine agencies using the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network platform, the ERP platform, to be able to fine-tune from an operations standpoint, a marketing standpoint, and a pricing standpoint. Find out what best practices are and then literally offer that to the non – how would you call that? You have franchisees that are company-owned. But now to be able to offer best practices to franchisees that are not company-owned, but get the benefit from that knowledge base of those nine plus acquisitions. You showed us on the backend, scheduling, booking, paying the, the word retribution is a little bit foreign to me, but the payment schedule for photographers. Is there another piece of the backend that you'd like to show? Did you want it to show the admin section for the agency's side? [00:50:50] Ghislain Lemire: - Actually, I've shown maybe 10 percent of the platform. Are you ready to go a little bit deeper? [00:50:56] Dan Smigrod: - Yes. [00:50:57] Ghislain Lemire: - All right, let's go. I'm going to go and do what we call the admin panel. You see my screen? [00:51:05] Dan Smigrod: - Yes. [00:51:07] Ghislain Lemire: - I took EGP TechnoVirtuel. [00:51:16] Ghislain Lemire: We do have our own franchisee, but we do also have many photographers using our platform already. But I'm going to take EGP because I think it's a great example. It's a great size. They have 15 photographers, I think so it's a great mid-sized business. Just going to login as EGP to get into their dashboard, just going to close that to make sure that I have no collisions in terms of login. I'm going to log in as myself, just put my password. Now I'm ready to work. This is the admin system. Basically when you get to the admin, the first thing you will see is all the orders coming in. You can easily see the employee, the client, the services to be delivered, addresses. If there's an invoice, we're going to have a different section for the invoice, the status of the order. You can get private status if you want to customize your private status, the date of the order, appointment date, there's an endless link. If you want to get into the order, you take here and you're going to get directly to the order. I don't want to talk too long because an order is an order. By the end of the day, it's all the same from one platform to the other but you're going to have the client, you can have access to the profile of the client. If the client changes his mind and would like to add options, you can do it super-easily from here. You just add no options available, so that's what we get. - It's going to be hard to add options here. There's no one available for that. But you've got the photographers, the reservation date, appointment, that's known information, the invoice summary, and you have the status, check-in. You can add access to Tourbuzz. I took basically an in completed order. Let's say we're going to take this one here and it would probably be better. This is the summary of this order and I do have a Tourbuzz ... I don't have a Tourbuzz. I'm improvising here, but usually if you have a Tourbuzz property website, you're going to click on the bottom and you're going to get right away into the Tourbuzz. If you want to export the tour and the video, all the features are there and you can also add access here to the visual content required for this shoot. Here, it looks like it was a drone. This order is pretty dull. It's pretty straightforward. You have filters; if you want to filter, depending on the status that you have. You also have the calendar. The calendar basically, what this client is not synchronizing is a Google calendar. It should, but you can see all the appointments that require approval. This is an on-going appointment that is pulled up and required that you confirm it if you do want to confirm appointments because it's an option if you want appointments to get in your system right away without any confirmation, that's your stuff. But if you want to play with it, that's another thing. Now you can select a group of photographers. [If you are on a Google Calendar with all the photographers] it couldn't be hard to see a calendar like this and browse and look at all the photographers. Basically what we're doing is that we are creating groups and we can filter. Let's say that you want to have the South shore of Montreal and all of the photographers in that region. You click on this and you're going to see only the photographers in that region. You can do that and you can also even go and take particular photographers. I'm going to go into the main screen here again. One of the cool things about this on Thursday today. I want to make sure that every route and every photographer has the best routing in place. I'm going to click here, it's my mouse. Click on the map that I'm going to show me, that I'm taking, [this photographer], for example, that I'm going to show me her route. [These appointments are already 'route' optimized.] Basically it's already optimized. I'm going to look at some things that I can optimize. Here's an example here. The system has not been optimized. So nobody has reviewed that. But I can ask the system to rearrange their route and I save 3 minutes. That is wonderful. I saved 1 kilometer and I saved 3 minutes. That's an example. But sometimes the system will rearrange the route and save an hour in your day. Then if you want to approve this route, you send it to the photographer, but then just rearrange your route, do that path and everything. That's going to be awesome for you. [00:56:18] Dan Smigrod: - Excuse me. Pause there for a second. When we first looked at this from the real estate agents perspective, they had an option of a guaranteed time or an option of booking the photographer with a preferred time. Explain what we're looking at now, how it fits into what we looked at earlier. --- (Continues below ...) |
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| (Continued from above ...) --- [00:56:41] Ghislain Lemire: - That is such a great question because when we are reorganizing routes, we're taking this into account, there is some booking that you can't play with the hour, but there are some you can so the system will do okay. The one that you can rearrange, we're going to rearrange that and we got to keep the ones that you want to keep there. [00:57:06] Dan Smigrod: - Let me make it a little bit more granular and harder. So in that first example there was a guarantee of 09:00 A.M. I understand we're not going to touch that one when we do the optimization. But for the real estate agent that requested 3:30, and then all of a sudden you optimize the schedule and it's going to be 10:00 A.M. I understand that you'll send an email to say, good news. Your photographer is going to be there at 10:00 A.M., now the agent says, "I can't be there at ten. I was thinking this was going to be after lunch." Help me understand that challenge of optimizing photographers versus what are the client's expectations? [00:57:49] Ghislain Lemire: - You remember that when we were ordering online and then it's going to use my login. Let's just log out. Okay. I'm just going to go back to the ordering system. I'm going to log in as a client. Hopefully, it's going to work because I have multiple logins right now running on the computer. [00:58:10] Ghislain Lemire: Let's go. You do remember I'm not in Virtual Access Tours, but this is the same as them. I'm going to think this and that there's only a few options here, no option for me. I'm going to select this here. [00:58:33] Ghislain Lemire: On Saturday. [00:58:37] Ghislain Lemire: You do remember that you have the guaranteed hour? When you select another time, there's this label here – to be confirmed. You have until what time? I think you have a buffer. We are requiring the agency into the franchise agreement that you respect guaranteed times, so you cannot change the route in the morning. You have to do it the same day that the agent has a book for tomorrow, for instance. Let's say you've finished your day. Again, you want to make sure that tomorrow everything is optimized. You have until 8 o'clock- 9 o'clock. What is the time, Amélie? [00:59:13] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: - It's 5 o'clock at night. If an agent wants to book online. He will not be able to book for the next day since the route is supposed to be done at 5:00 at night. For the next morning. [00:59:30] Ghislain Lemire: - Yeah. That's important information. Your question was so good, Dan. You can see here, the guaranteed time is 10:15, which means that this photographer already has potentially a booking in the morning to get this time. I want to bring your attention here. If you want to get [this photographer] because she is super-good, you're going to have to pay a travel fee. It's not a big travel fee. But in her usual zone – so to get there, you're going to have to pay $3 more; sometimes it could be more. [01:00:05] Dan Smigrod: - Help me out there. I'm still confused about that optimization. Let's say after 5 o'clock today, I'm going to optimize for tomorrow. I hit that optimized button. The agent that had requested 3:15 in the afternoon is now scheduled at 11:00 A.M. I understand that I have now optimized the schedule for the photographer. I understand that you're automatically sending out an email to manage the expectation of the agent. Now what happens when the agent says, "sorry, I can't do it in the morning." [01:00:41] Ghislain Lemire: - I just want to add a variable here because I'll read them and it's complex. One other variable that we're adding up is that you can't put something that is P.M. in A.M. If you selected 3:00 P.M. The system will choose all the hours after lunch time until 5. [01:01:02] Dan Smigrod: Ah! So you won't be optimized into the morning. You'll just be optimized in the afternoon. That's clear. But let's stay with the fact that the agent still comes back and says, "sorry that time is not going to work." What happens? [01:01:15] Ghislain Lemire: - But next time take a guaranteed hour. Agents can find a workaround for this photographer, for this agent at this time. But this is why most real estate agents are using guaranteed hours because when you optimize the route, it's already optimized. If you look at this example here, EGP, when I'm trying to optimize the route, is just selecting another street to go with your car, but it's not a 2 minutes optimization there. [01:01:45] Dan Smigrod: - Yes. Just for clarification, when the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network scheduling module presents a time for guarantee. It already knows, perhaps, where the photographer would be coming from and where the photographer is going. It is taking into account traffic and how long it takes to shoot the particular job and any buffer time that's been added and it goes, "bingo." We can give you that guaranteed time because we know all those other variables. [01:02:18] Ghislain Lemire: - Exactly. Dan, this is why the route optimization that I was trying gives me two or three minutes difference because it has been automatically already optimized. [01:02:33] Dan Smigord: Then I'm confused about same-day booking. Is same day booking an option today or something that you'll be working on? [01:02:43] Ghislain Lemire: That is a good question, by the way. Amélie, how do you handle that? [01:02:48] Amelie Ste-Croix Dube: Same day booking? You mean if an agent wants to schedule for today? [01:02:56] Dan Smigord: Yes. [01:02:56] Amelie Ste-Croix Dube: We don't accept that, as of now. Right now, since we have to schedule the day prior, an agent cannot book for the same day. He has to book for the next day before five o'clock. [01:03:15] Dan Smigord: Assuming I've signed up for the customer service optional module, and I call the 800 number and I get the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network customer support person, probably operating transparently as the brand of whatever photographer that is, and I say, "Hey Amélie, I need some help for today, can you work me into the schedule?" Is that now an option? [01:03:42] Ghislain Lemire: It is an option, of course, the online ordering system is always considering optimizing routes and this is why the same day offer should be working. But, of course, if you call maybe the owner or maybe you can find a work around to find a photographer to really help the agent. The system works manually as well. You're not forced to use the online ordering system to serve your clients. [01:04:05] Dan Smigord: If you still have a client that likes to text you to say, "hey are you free at 2:00 P.M. today?" I could still enter that time into the ERP and make it work. [01:04:18] Ghislain Lemire: The strength of our Network is that if you don't have photographers, you just pick in the bottom and consult all the other brands to see if they have photographers that could subcontract your job. They can take the job you need. You have access to the pool of photographers within our organization as well so that is a great advantage because everybody works with the same system so you just ask for help and other photographers that are available will jump in. I just want to take a breath here then, available photographers, let's say you only have two shoots today and you want to work full-time but we have jobs for you. We take the photographers – and this is an idea that the Amélie has implemented this year, you're a photographer, you should know how to edit images. We add images to edit, to enhance. We're going to certify to you and during the afternoon if you want to do some post editing job, there's a job for you. The photographers who get into the Network – even if they're not owned by Urbanimmersive – if they're just independent franchisees, can find more jobs by being certified for our team to photo edit or also to do post-production for floor plans and stuff like that. It's a great advantage to be on the same system because then you have access to all the pool of jobs that can be offered from the group. I'm going to go back to the admin system. Of course, what you want to avoid is to have that kind of calendar where you see all the people, just one on top of the other. This is why we created this group system where you can really just select a photographer or the entire group. Otherwise, you're going to work per day like this and just close and open your schedule. This is about the calendar. The 26 here that you see, it's still 26 appointments that you need to confirm, those appointments are there. The editing task was basically – we saw it, so this is the same tool that the photographer has in his photographer panel – you remember, Dan? Before jumping into this big system everywhere in the photographer panel. This is the same thing, actually. This is where the photographer would be required to upload these 25 images, Immersive 3D Tours – this is in Quebec – and in French (other media). There's two buckets still to be fulfilled here, for that order. [01:06:54] Dan Smigord: Obviously, you're supporting French and English. Are there other languages on the Urbanimmersive platform today? [01:07:01] Ghislain Lemire: Right now, you see I can switch to French and I can switch to English, but we do have Spanish. It's not available right now, because you know that we have a brand in Mexico, Dan? The Spanish version is not the same path. It's not available in that version. [01:07:21] Dan Smigord: Forgive me. I had you digress here again. Before we finish up, is there another back-end module that you wanted to show? [01:07:32] Ghislain Lemire: Let's go quickly. I see that the time is running out. Let's go quickly. You have your client list. Of course, you can see all the details about the client. Let's say that, I'm going to take a client that has been invoiced, we're going to be sure that we are going to have some data about it. You can see all the invoices here. I'm going to display the invoice. If I want to have access to that particular client, actually I should just go from here and the model of that client. [01:08:07] Ghislain Lemire: There's something I want to talk about is the permission here. You see, the permission is full access and you're going to have read access only. Why would you have that? It's because we're a franchisor; so you cannot steal a client from somebody else. The client is yours or not. The client can decide to work with two brands, then you're going to have full access but this access will have to be alarmed by the client themselves. If you pass an order from your website, you're going to have full access to it right away, otherwise it is going to be read access only. The read access is more limited. You can't see all the comments like this detail in the comments and, of course, you won't be able to see the proactive reach. Basically a proactive reach is based on a campaign. You can see what you sent to the client in terms of email, so here he just received two emails. Here you received that flier and the news that we acquired HomeVisit. You can send, also, an email to that client, so you can use your templates. You can create templates like this. You can also trade, I'm going fast. If I'm going too fast, Dan, you stop me. You can also create a cell activity. You talk to your client, make phone calls, and visit customers. You can give some star because you can give points and everything, you can require an action. You see here action required, 38, so the 38 action requirement is coming from notes here. You can also see if the client is linked to other clients. I'm going to show you a great example. If you do have Georges Bardagi, is that the way we write it? If you do have clients that work in teams and you want to have some sort of a system where all the data is linked all together, this is a super-important feature because that's going to give you all the data of sales for the same group here. It's one client, but this is all the agents working for that group. So when you consult the sales, you want to make sure that you have all the information. This is a pretty interesting client though. So here from the sales tab you can see which sales rep is taking care of this client. From when, and the sales of the client and all the products the client is ordering since last year, he wasn't on our platform. By the way, Georges Bardagi was a strong user of Matterport: today it is all with the Urbanimmersive 3D Tours. Cool stuff also you can see which pages, this group of clients, all those clients, which pages they saw on your website. That could be interesting because right now I'm seeing Georges Bardagi, he is potentially trying to see all the single property websites on TourBuzz so all the solutions he can get. He went on the Georges Bardagi page, of course, [You can see all the pages that he visited.] [All the different pages that he - his team - visited.] Basically, you can see where your client is going on The View page and you have additional information that you can customize. Now, I'm going to just go into the recurring invoices. Our system will allow creating monthly invoices. Of course, everything that is a Prime subscription is monthly; so you can see all the packages you can sell. If you go into the packages like this, you will see the description of the package and stuff like that. I'm just going to go back here, the subscription, all clients subscribing to your packages and all the details. I'm going super-fast because I know we're running out of time, but this is a very sophisticated system for following your package. We're meeting all the requirements of the credit card, so let's say that before we have to renew a package, the client will receive an email notifying that his credit card will be picked and everything. We also have a special prices system. The special prices system has been recently reviewed. You can now apply a special list to a broker, to an agent, to MLS and stuff like that, otherwise you can go granular and I said those clients at these packages; special price. [01:12:28] Dan Smigord: Pause, if you will, because I think this is super-important and I just want to make sure that I understand this page correctly here, Ghislain. I have clients that have been with me for years. I want to grandfather their pricing in, but I got new pricing I want to apply to new clients. What I'm looking at lets us do exactly that. [01:12:48] Ghislain Lemire: Exactly. What you're going to like from that system is when the client would order let's say a Photo HDR 10, he's going to see $85 with a red mark on it; and say this is your pricing. It's not just like a discount or here is your discount, you want to remind your client that this is the real price. [01:13:10] Dan Smigord: New clients signing on today, this is what they're going to pay, but because you've been such a loyal, good client, this is what we're charging you on that, great. [01:13:20] Ghislain Lemire: You can create as many prices as you want and everything. You can add as many clients – with special pricing – as you like. [01:13:26] Dan Smigord: There was a tab on the line of credit and I didn't quite understand that, is that line of credit being extended by Urbanimmersive and that's financing – [01:13:35] Ghislain Lemire: No. Actually. -I mean, they are photographers, this is our credit. So yeah, I mean, if you want to see it like this, every photographer out there has clients that don't want to pay for every shoot with a credit card. I mean, you have a huge client that says, "You know what? Just send me a bill at the end of the month." How do you handle that? You're going to need a scheduling and accounting system to send the statement and everything. With Urbanimmersive, you don't need that. It's part of our system. We call it the line of credit, and you can see here all the lines of credit. I'm going to take Jean-Guy Ayotte, for instance, payment due by the way. Basically, the way it works, it is the same, same, same way a credit card works. Meaning that you're going to be able to allow a limit to this client to be spent per month. Right now he has $466 available. Current balance: I still have this money. Last payment received, and the line of credit, the day activated. We can also see the monthly statement that has been sent to the client. If you want to see how it looks, basically, it's sent electronically. We can resent it, you can download the PDF. You're going to see the PDF is looking pretty much like a credit card actually. [01:15:08] Dan Smigrod: -I think what I saw there was a payment by check, so it's possible the photography agency could accept the check and then mark it as paid. [01:15:19] Ghislain Lemire: -Absolutely. Checking everything. [01:15:24] Dan Smigrod: -Just for clarification, and I think I'm going to come off this page if you don't mind. If the photography agency wants to continue with certain, let's call it even legacy practices, let's call accepting paper checks perhaps legacy. They can certainly do that. If they want to try to migrate for every client paying with a credit card at the time of delivery, I imagine you have an option for that as well. So in order to get the digital assets delivered, you have to pay and then the assets get delivered. If the agency has been having a challenge of clients ordering, but not paying or taking a while to pay, you could implement the process easily and quickly with the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network, ERP platform, to require payment in order to have digital assets delivered. [01:16:23] Ghislain Lemire: -Exactly. Actually, the feature you talk, it's called, "ransom"... If you want [to implement the ransom feature] [01:16:32] Dan Smigrod: -ransom? [01:16:34] Ghislain Lemire: -Yeah, like a ransom, a real ransom. [01:16:36] Dan Smigrod: -Is that an internal term? I'm missing out on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles? [01:16:42] Ghislain Lemire: -Forgive me with my English, but ransom is like when somebody is wanted and the gift, if you forget the body of the person wanted, it's a ransom. Am I right? [01:16:54] Dan Smigrod: -Yeah. Okay. All right. You have to pay to get your digital assets. ;-) [01:17:00] Ghislain Lemire: -Yeah. Exactly. [01:17:01] Dan Smigrod: -Okay. Let me see if I can take it back to the top line and see if we can wrap things up. First, Amélie, I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm deciding whether I should go forward or not with Urbanimmersive Franchise Network. It seems like I may be overwhelmed with what I just saw. Can you console me so I shouldn't feel overwhelmed? [01:17:27] Amélie Ste-Croix Dubé: -Of course. So really our goal is to make sure that everyone is comfortable with the platform. This is why we are offering, also, depending on the company size, that much of a training, is it 40 hours, if you're under five or six employees, and if you're more, we get 160 hours of training. But this is where we want to take the franchisee hand-by-hand and make sure that he's comfortable with the platform and he's not alone. We're a team and we're all there for the franchisee and for the photographers as well, and for their clients. This is where our customer support team, also, is there to support their franchisee, their customer, and their photographers during this transition. [01:18:17] Dan Smigrod: -Great. François, I would imagine if someone is on the edge of the seat, you want to talk to them. I would imagine they should either: a) go to www.Urbanimmersive.com if they want to follow up, specifically, the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network, they should go to: b) www.Urbanimmersive.com/franchise c) If they happen to be email-centric and they just wanted to shoot the team an email: franchise@urbanimmersive.com [01:18:46] Dan Smigrod: What's the next step? [01:18:47] Ghislain Lemire: -Dan, Before talking about the next step, can I just talk about the email marketing system that we have worked with, and we finish like this. I want to thank you in 30 seconds. -Yes, in just a moment. I'll come back to you. -Okay. [01:19:04] Dan Smigrod: -Let me just finish up with François. So, François, I'm on the edge of my seat. I've watched all three WGAN-TV Live at 5 shows on Urbanimmersive and Urbanimmersive Franchise Network. I still would like to see more of the back-end, so do I set up an appointment with you, François? With a member of your team? [01:19:27] François-Hugues Liberge: -Exactly. They can set it up with me and I'll make sure that somebody from our team will be there to help them out and show them more of the back-end. [01:19:35] Dan Smigrod: -Whenever, it is that I need to put me over the goal line, you're happy to help. If it's back-end or to talk more about the pricing, or the terms, or to understand the services, I am using all these different vendors for photo editing, this one for single property websites, this one for floor plans, this one for, yet, other services. I think I got enough photographers and I got enough different services that it's driving me crazy, and I wanted to consolidate it with one company to provide all the solutions. Is that the kind of thing the photography agency can share with you what they're doing so that they can get a better – [01:20:20] François-Hugues Liberge: -Exactly. I'll be able to analyze what they're doing, how we can help them out, and synthesize everything, and say, if need be, I'll have people from our team helping out to explain all the details so we will be able to help them out. [01:20:36] Dan Smigrod: -Either go to: www.Urbanimmersive.com fill out the Contact Us form, or send an email directly to the Franchise team: franchise@urbanimmersive.com François, before I go to Ghislain, was there anything else to add? [01:20:50] François-Hugues Liberge: -No. Thanks again, Dan, for your collaboration and help. It's really appreciated. [01:20:57] Dan Smigrod: -You bet. Ghislain, what do you want to show and tell us? [01:21:00] Ghislain Lemire: -I mean you bring good points, Dan. I mean, photographers come to Urbanimmersive, and every photographer has different things they want to solve. More than often with marketing, "how can you help me with marketing?" We were seeing photographers spending a lot of time on email systems and so on and so forth. One of the great pieces we have in our system and ERP is fully integrated CRM. I'm just going to take 30 second and a minute to show you because basically there's a school at Urbanimmersive, how to use it because it's very powerful. Just let me show it very quickly, and afterwards, I think we're going to have completed most of the features. You'll see that in the dashboard, so we just jump on all of those services, you know 3D tour, TourBuzz and everything. I'm getting the marketing here where you have this option called campaigns so you can create campaigns, so I just opened up the campaign here. This is where the magic happens because, first of all, this is a real campaign we made. You can see all the emails sent and everything. You can see all the clicks that have been clicked, people that have unsubscribed and everything, the campaign has been sent. Of course, we're creating the templates for you. The cool stuff about it is that you can, if you want, select different groups. We can send it to your active clients, inactive clients, clients having negative buying trends, the client that just did his first order, so you want to follow up with them. We can reach clients that have a fixed number of orders. Let's say that, after 100 orders, I wanted to send you a big, special: the template, it will be "thank you for being a client, and here's a gift." Client that has stopped giving you orders for more than, let's say, 60 days. All clients that are Prime, that are not Prime, that subscribed to a different service, a monthly service. I'm just going to go. There are so many things. Clients that have visited a specific URL, so that can be a specific URL from your website or that we're providing or any other website of the group. Opened once, I don't know what it is. [01:23:21] Dan Smigrod: -Ghislain, I'm confused, when you're talking about these different groups, does Urbanimmersive Franchise Network write and pre-populate examples of e-blasts that go into each of the categories you're showing? [01:23:39] Ghislain Lemire: -Yeah. Absolutely. [01:23:39] Dan Smigrod: -That as I, as a photography agency can either say, "Oh, yeah. Like exactly what was written. Let's use it," or I can actually modify it before I send it out? [01:23:50] Ghislain Lemire: -Yeah, we're going to provide you this tool to create the HTML, but you can go into each of the text and change the content of it. You can use predefined marketing templates, we can send an article if you want. There's multiple group, there's so many group, and all those group, by the way, are all real-time and populated in the way – [01:24:10] Dan Smigrod: -These already exist, even though the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network is somewhat new, not that you don't have a ton of experience already because you have nine plus (internal, company owned) clients banging away at it, but in terms of making it public to non-company-owned stores, franchisees that are not owned by Urbanimmersive. These are already pre-populated email marketing ready to go? [01:24:36] Ghislain Lemire: Only for our franchisee not for the SaaS user. If you're not a franchisee, you don't have access to these pages. I'm going to go quickly here. You can send an email, but you can also create an activity and action required. You do have staff working for you, you can say that I want to assign this person and write the piece. I think this time whatsoever you can write an action required so that we send an email, I want you to make a follow-up. This is a pretty great feature. Also if you have like 1,000 people who read your email, you can create a campaign from that group; specifically that group. Or you can even say, "hey, those people engage deeply on my links. Let's click here and see who they are." You're going to see all your clients that click on the link and you can go in their file and you have full access. You can see that this client is your client. He has this email; that was the one that he saw. He clicks one; delivered. You can see how powerful this system – the camping system – it's definitely all totally automated. Sixty six subscribers. You want to talk to them. Actually, those are most of the time your clients and this, unsubscribe them, by the way. Of course, when you schedule a campaign, you can decide to use different frequencies. Every 30 minutes, hour, six hours, twice a day, once a day. Or you can also take a date and say, "I want to launch this campaign here at that hour, at the schedule." That's it. That's all. Yeah. [01:26:26] Dan Smigrod: If you don't mind, let me take it off screen share because that's a great amount of detail, but it begs at least two questions. For a photography agency that is presently using another email solution, let's say MailChimp for example. [01:26:46] Ghislain Lemire: HubSpot or whatever they're using. [01:26:48] Dan Smigrod: Yeah. They might go and go, "oh, I spend X number of thousands of dollars on email marketing." I'm going to guess, this is included at no additional charge as part of the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network membership? [01:27:04] Ghislain Lemire: 100%. [01:27:06] Dan Smigrod: It may be that if you look at all the different things that you're presently outsourcing: email marketing is probably pretty easy to go. "Oh, this is my annual bill." "Oh, I could migrate." And presumably you have maybe Amélie there that you have a operational procedures say, "oh yes, if you're using HubSpot or MailChimp or something, we can import all your data and begin from there so that you can close your MailChimp account, your HubSpot account, whatever it is, if that's what you want to do." That becomes: it's all consolidated within the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network, ERP platform. Check the box, just save some money or check the box just use that to help decide to pay for the Urbanimmersive Franchise Network membership. Yeah. [01:27:55] Ghislain Lemire: Yeah, if I can add – Virtual Access Tours was being $400 per month just to have MailChimp system to send emails. But he was sending emails maybe once per quarter. Normally we do not pay them for this type of system, but on top of it, we have a team that will remind them how you can have this campaign. You have this campaign. Then we activate the market, what we call the marketing automation. [01:28:20] Dan Smigrod: Is this something that Urbanimmersive Franchise Network offers two solutions? One is, here's the DIY. We'll give you all the tools. We've pre-written all the emails, but "oh, by the way, if you'd rather us take that away from you, we charge a fee for that, but we'll do that entire operation for you." [01:28:41] Ghislain Lemire: We prefer to make the entire operations by the way. [01:28:44] Dan Smigrod: Okay. So that's great. And I think in the example that you gave, that was a client that was spending $5,000 a year, barely using the MailChimp platform, was able to save that money and then presumably have Urbanimmersive Franchise Network do a better job. So this begs the question because it looks super-sophisticated. And sometimes things that are super-sophisticated can be super-intimidating. Or maybe it's too much of a solution for a real estate photography agency. So what is the sweet spot? Is that you've got two plus photographers? Then plus photographers? 50 plus photographers? I'm sure François wants to say, "anyone. We're happy to sign you up," but truly, Ghislain, where's the sweet spot for you on this? [01:29:45] Ghislain Lemire: Our smallest company that we acquired have four photographers and they fully integrated our system. The thing is that basically we're offering to support – this trend of a franchisee model – is that we're there to help, we're there to make sure that you're going to use it. It's not like, "here's the system and you're going to have to pay for everything and every call you are going to do at Urbanimmersive." That is the difference. The sweet spot, of course, is that we have single photographers using the platform, for instance, using a system. Is it too heavy? They don't have to use the payroll module. But again, the line of credit everybody wants to offer a line of credit. I mean, it's difficult to answer this question, but we have a variety of photographers using the system right now. [01:30:33] Dan Smigrod: François, do you want to hear from individual photographers? [01:30:39] François-Hugues Liberge: For sure because we can help them out; have access to a bigger platform that will help them out and they'll grow with that. I'm sure that will help them grow their business. [01:30:49] Dan Smigrod: Ghislain, do you want François spending his time talking to one person or do you want them talking to agencies – [01:30:55] Ghislain Lemire: There's definitely, I want François to sell the franchise to single photographers because they need it and we are going to support them big time. There's no doubt. This is why basically we know when we do acquisitions, we realize that it's harder for us to acquire small, small businesses. This is why we decided to go with the franchise. Because we're looking for acquisition for bigger businesses. [My dog is ready to GO!] [I will be back in five minutes!] [01:31:25] Dan Smigrod: I think that's our reminder that we should wrap it up. Ghislain, François, Amélie, thanks so much for being on the show today. [01:31:35] Ghislain Lemire: Thank you so much for having us Dan. [01:31:38] Dan Smigrod: We've been visiting with Ghislain, the President and CEO of Urbanimmersive, François, the Vice President of Business Development, Partnerships and Franchise. Also with Amélie, who is the VP of operations. They're all located in the greater Montreal, Quebec, Canada area. I'm Dan Smigrod Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum in Atlanta and you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. |
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