Emilio Espinosa, Sutton Group Quantum Inc.

Oakville, Ontario, Canada

Background

Twenty years in the Ontario market. Broker at Sutton Group Quantum Inc. Three licensed agents on the team. About 95% of business comes from referrals. Around $337K GCI for the team in 2025, with most of it generated by Emilio himself. Not paying for leads. Website on AgentFire. Database of roughly 1,180 contacts.

By his own description, he is a salesperson, not a tech person. He had Follow Up Boss but never set it up in a way that ran the team.

Before Kee Technology Solution

Follow up was manual and inconsistent. Referrals came in and got worked when Emilio had a free hour. Leads that were not ready in 90 days drifted. Some came back months later already working with another agent.

A few specifics that came up in our conversations with him before the build.

• First call response time was averaging 2 months

• About 4 manual contact attempts per lead

• 27% of leads responded

• No clear stages on his database

• No daily workflow for his agents

• No nurture running in the background

Emilio's framing, in his own words.

"It was horrendous. It was painful. A lot of missed opportunities."

"I would pray that you didn't forget about that lead."

"As much as I like to pretend that we had a robust system, we didn't."

The decision to invest

Emilio came to the first call already most of the way there. He had been doing the work to find the right partner.

"The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. A lot of the verbiage you get from the book Exactly What to Say. That's one of the books that whenever an agent is new to the business, I buy it for them as a gift. So there was alignment of ideology, or how we do business."

He also flagged a deeper reason. The pace was unsustainable.

"I've been doing this at a high tempo for 20 years. I don't think I can do another 20 years at this tempo. I want systems in place so that I can scale back my time, but then improve our touch points and our business so that my team members can make some more money."

Setup wrapped December 10, 2025. First implementation call was December 15.

What changed in the first week

A structured workflow replaced the open-ended scrolling. The cheat sheet gave the team a clear order of operations every day, and the action plans started running in the background.

"What I enjoyed from the CRM part of it, you guys gave us a cheat sheet, and then any questions that we had, you kind of handheld us. We also had access to the training. We have a system where we don't feel like, oh, we're missing that lead. All I got to do now is log in, see where all the leads are. Make sure the emails are closed, which again, we didn't have that before."

"It's allowed us to breathe."

Results after 5 months

Comparing pre-build (fall 2025 and earlier) to May 2026.

• First call response time,

  2 months to 2 days

• Manual contact attempts per lead,

  4 to 21

• Lead response rate,

  27% to 73%

These numbers are manual activity only. Automated emails, automated texts, batch emails, and newsletters are not counted.

Emilio's response when he saw the comparison.

"How much money did we lose? It's embarrassing honestly. When you look at those numbers, it's embarrassing. I wasn't running an efficient business."

"Now it's a breath of fresh air, knowing that we're touching on these clients, we're staying on top of them."

Scaling the team into the system

Emilio added a new agent shortly after the build went live. She was already a Follow Up Boss user, but in what Emilio called "the diaper stages" of using it. The first two to three weeks were the hardest, mostly because of old habits she had to unlearn.

"Just give it a shot. Just keep going. And now she loves it. She's like, oh my god, I don't even have to do this anymore. I can just go back and do the things I got to do."

He also leaned on his existing assistant differently. She moved from social media into a backbone role for the team, working from the same cheat sheet, watching the pipeline, tagging contacts, and keeping the agents accountable to the workflow.

"She's wanting to embrace that role and taken it upon herself to actually lead the team. She's basically a quarterback."

TCAssist running alongside

Emilio added TCAssist to the build. With no transaction coordinator on staff, the agents are running their own deals through it, with the assistant keeping them honest on the checklist.

"Rather than getting another system, which we were looking into, it's already there. As things need to be done, as soon as we move the client along the pipeline, we already know these are all the things that need to be done. So it's keeping us organized to making sure that nothing's getting lost in any of the cracks."

He flagged a side benefit. Google reviews are coming in cleaner because the request goes out when the pot is hot, not six months later.

"When it's right when the pot is hot, then people give you, oh, the team helped us with this, and they're more specific. People can resonate."

What he tells other brokers

We asked Emilio what he would say to a team lead debating whether to invest in their CRM during a slower market.

"If you're slow now, what the are you waiting for? We're talking about your business."

"Don't wait until you're busy to start implementing things. By that time, you're not going to do it. You don't have the time to educate yourself, because there's a learning curve."

"When you're slow, look at your business and see what you need to improve. Implement these things that we got to do now. And then when it gets busy, this thing is already moving. This machine is already turning."

What he wanted to be on record about

We asked him for one thing outside of CRM that has had outsized impact on his business. The answer was dialogue.

"Being able to communicate with somebody, whether it's another agent, whether it's a client, whether it's a lead, whether it's just a stranger on the street. Not just at their level, but to converse and actively listen to them. You can have the most robust systems, but if you're not able to communicate with them, then it doesn't matter. You're still just going to be a collection of numbers."

What this looked like from our side

Emilio is five months in. Most of the clients we publish case studies for are at least a year out from their build, because the compounding effect of a working CRM does not show up in the first 90 days. Emilio is an exception. The numbers moved fast because he and his team committed to the structure immediately. The work is not over. The next 12 months will show what this looks like as the market shifts and the new agent ramps up.

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