Kristan Billing: Helping Realtors Find Balance Among The Chaos

Source: LinkedIn

In 2023, Kristan Billing founded a transaction coordination business in Canada called StradaCX, where she is the CEO.

After having spent some time in the real estate world, Kristan uncovered something that helped her shape her business into what it is today. She discovered that realtors are stressed and often sacrifice their well-being for the sake of professional success.

StradaCX was founded on this realization. Kristan now helps realtors live a more balanced and fulfilling life while still working efficiently in the real estate industry.

In this feature, we’ll discuss Kristan’s interesting background leading up to opening her own business and what advice she has for women in real estate.

Where It All Began

After completing high school, Kristan went to college and studied print journalism. Shortly after graduating, she became a crime reporter. In hindsight, she saw that this was the ideal background for her to be successful in real estate.

“It was the best training to become an inside sales agent (ISA). No one wants to talk to you as a crime reporter."

Kristan then left the world of journalism and embarked on a colorful career path that included installing shower heads on a door-to-door basis, becoming a yoga teacher, working in the service industry, and even in video stores. “I did a lot of different things,” she says. 

In each of these roles, Kristan learned something that would eventually help her build and mold StradaCX into what it is today.

Take her time as a yoga instructor, for example. At that point in her career, Kristan found out how important wellness and balance are. She has since applied what she learned in teaching yoga to what she now does in the real estate industry.

The Road to Real Estate

When Kristan started out as an ISA over six years ago, she admits she didn’t have much knowledge of the real estate industry. However, she was curious to see what the opportunity held for her.

She says the only reason she started working in real estate was because her husband suggested that she’d be a great agent. Turns out he was right!

It wasn’t long until she excelled in her role and began climbing the ladder. “I went from ISA to ISA and client care,” she says. “And then I went on to ISA and client care and marketing. And then I ended up being director of operations,” she explains. 

While attending to her duties as an ISA, she started realizing that she enjoyed making follow-up calls. “I really loved calling Betty in the database [for example] and asking about her tomatoes and her cat,” she explains. This was a lightbulb moment for her: client care is crucial to real estate.

On the operational side of the business where Kristan worked, the team was quite small, which she really liked. She said there wasn’t much structure within the business just yet, so she had free rein. 

This was when Kristan started building out the client care aspect of the business, successfully transforming it into a full client concierge program. 

“I see client care as being a client concierge. Which means anything that the client needs, we take care of it for them,” she explains. 

For example, if a client is moving to a new community and enjoys yoga, good client care would be sending them local yoga class schedules, explains Kristan.

“If we know they have a dog that is sick, then we’re going to send them a little note in the mail. That’s client care to me,” she says.

A Key Realization

While working at her previous firm, Kristan quickly realized that it wasn’t just client care that meant a lot to her in this context. 

“What I realized was missing in the transaction management world is this framing of real estate leverage that you can trust, that’s really high-quality.” 

Kristan says having this leverage—being able to hand over your transaction coordination tasks—is key to wellness in the real estate industry as it lessens workload and shifts some of your responsibilities over to someone you can trust.

She wanted to be a wellness provider—as she calls it—in the real estate space. 

The Start of StradaCX

It wasn’t long until Kristan had a big idea: launching her own transaction coordination business.

“I had built out this great client care program, and when I’d had conversations with other teams and agents, it really became clear that there was a need for what I was bringing to the table,” she recalls.  

StradaCX was founded on her insight that real estate professionals needed to elevate their client care. They also needed a way to lighten their load so that they could focus on their well-being outside of work.

This was the gap in the market that Kristan recognized, and so StradaCX was born.

Wellness in Real Estate

“Because I was a yoga teacher, I have a passion for wellness,” she says.

“I think when you look at Realtor wellness and stress and burnout, they need leverage that they can trust. I think that’s what we bring to the table: transaction management and client care that has a heart.” 

Kristan wants to see people thriving in the real estate industry, but not by sacrificing their personal well-being. 

“Every realtor I talk to, they check their phone 20 times while trying to watch a movie with their kids—they’re just so afraid to miss anything.” 

She explains that she’s found that realtors are scared to hand over the reins to other people. “This is why we have a personalized approach for agents we want to work with. We know how big of a deal it is to take on their transaction management,” Kristan explains.

She says she really wants realtors to see their businesses succeed, but not at the cost of their personal lives and well-being.

How StradaCX Is Different from the Rest

When looking at the transaction coordination aspect of real estate, there are two things that Kristan has picked up on: 

The first is that transaction coordination management exists, but on a small scale. “It’s the person at the front desk who does transaction management on the side,” Kristan explains. She says while there’s nothing wrong with this, it’s not scalable or sustainable. 

The second aspect she realized is that they don’t have the right systems to help them grow and succeed.

She says that with the right systems in place, “you get scalability and consistency.”

“We’re taking the value you would get from having a full-time operations team, and we’re taking all the systems that we have, and then we’re offering a really customized experience based on what the needs are for that realtor,” Kristan says.

“Not every real estate agent is the same, and their businesses aren’t the same, and they don’t work with the same people,” she explains. This is why personalizing her services is so important to Kristan.

This is what sets StradaCX apart from the rest. The team customizes the services they provide to the needs of each realtor. And this bouquet of services constantly changes based on the feedback they receive from every transaction. 

Learning from Her Biggest Mistake

Kristan says her biggest learning curve to navigate since becoming an entrepreneur was thinking that her own business was going to be an end-to-end service for realtors. But this didn’t make sense, she soon realized.

“When we first launched, our offer was so scattered. We were offering so many things,” Kristan recalls. She says this approach doesn’t serve anyone. 

What ended up happening, she explains, was that everyone was confused about what StradaCX does and what it offers. 

“The biggest learning there was to get really clear about what your value proposition is, how to communicate that, and know you’re not going to be for everybody—and that’s okay."

Kristan’s Advice for Female Entrepreneurs in Real Estate

Now that StradaCX is a fully-fledged transaction coordination solution, we asked Kristan what advice she has for women in real estate. Here’s what she said:

Get consistency on your side 

Based on the lessons she’s learned from initially not having consistency in place in her business, Kristan’s advice to entrepreneurs in real estate is to get clear on what you’re offering and stick to that. 

You’re not going to be able to be everything to everyone, Kristan explains. And there’s nothing wrong with not being a good fit for a client.

Her advice is to get “really good in one thing and do that one thing for a really long time. And just sell it over and over.” 

She says that when you’re doing this in a consistent way, you’re sure to see success.

Simplify your tech stack

Kristan explains that back when she started her business, there was this feeling that her team needed to have every system and tool available in their tech stack in order to succeed. 

She quickly realized that this wasn’t sustainable. Instead, she chose to whittle down her systems to what she really needed: Paperless Pipeline, Slack, and Follow Up Boss. “That has been working beautifully for us,” Kristan says. 

Listen to your potential clients

One aspect where Kristan feels she has really grown is learning to listen to clients on discovery calls—rather than doing most of the speaking.

She says that doing all the talking on the call was her way of trying to sell her services and landing the client. 

However, she has now started using these calls to actively listen and understand what the client needs and then tailoring her approach accordingly. 

“This is my biggest win,” she explains. “Now, when I get on a discovery call, I’m not talking that much anymore. Instead, I’m learning more about that person’s business. I’m asking them questions and building that relationship.” 

“Give yourself some grace”

“Don’t be in a rush” is Kristan’s fourth piece of advice. She explains that she initially had this feeling that she needed to do everything 100% of the time. “The reality is you can’t do that,” she says. “I’m only one person, there’s only so much I can do at a time, and it’s okay.”  

She says it’s important to respect the space that you’re in and not feel like everything has to get done right away.

“I really gave myself a hard time about being everything and operating on every level. I felt I should be working weekends and nights."

However, she says there are more important things in her life, like her son, that she needs to prioritize along with running her business.

Not missing those precious moments with family and friends is the cornerstone of StradaCX and a virtue Kristan lives by.

A Misconception about Entrepreneurship

We asked Kristan if she had any initial misconceptions about being an entrepreneur that she realized weren’t true.

“I thought I was going to feel guilty about being a mom and working,” she mentioned.

She says while it’s not easy to do both, she didn’t feel the guilt she expected she would. 

“I realized I want my son to see me work and enjoy what I do,” she explains. “I don’t want to be the kind of mom that feels so bad that I have to work all the time. I want him to see me succeed.” But this doesn’t mean it’s not hard juggling entrepreneurship with parenthood.

The Future of StradaCX

“I’m really excited about taking our service packages that we’ve built out and really scaling them now,” Kristan says. 

She says she’s had the chance to do a “slow and quiet launch,” and she’s now looking forward to taking what they’ve built and tested, and growing it.

The next few steps for StradaCX are to take on more brokers and expand to more locations.

“The idea of bringing on new brokerages and really customizing their action plans and automation—that really makes me excited,” she says. 

Making a Mark on the Real Estate Industry

There’s no denying that being an entrepreneur in the real estate world is challenging. Juggling a new business with having a small child and married life is undoubtedly a lot to handle. However, Kristan manages it all with grace and determination.