How Mike Schumm Turned Hours of Spreadsheet Maintenance Into Proactive Profit Growth
The "Garbage In, Garbage Out" Trap
The hidden cost of elaborate spreadsheets
Mike Schumm has been coaching team leaders for years, and he kept seeing a persistent pattern. Teams would approach him with elaborate spreadsheets—formulas nested inside formulas, tabs linking to other tabs. While impressive at first glance, these systems were incredibly fragile.
The issue wasn't a lack of effort; people were tracking everything manually. However, every number depended on someone remembering to update it correctly. Miss a decimal point, and the entire P&L is off. Forget to log a lead, and you are making decisions based on incomplete data.
Mike noticed team leaders were spending hours each week just maintaining these sheets rather than analyzing data or coaching agents. "You cannot fix what you cannot measure accurately," Mike notes. If the measurement system is held together with duct tape and hope, you aren't measuring anything useful.
Pinpointing ROI Through "True" Conversion
That measurement problem is what pushed Mike toward MaverickRE. He needed a system that wouldn't collapse under the complexity of multi-source lead routing. Once he had reliable data, he discovered a "weird psychological thing" happening with agents.
Teams were rotating leads "fairly"—everyone gets the same mix of sources. However, the data revealed this was costing them money. Some agents crushed it with Zillow leads but couldn't convert Realtor.com leads, while others showed the exact opposite pattern.
With clean data, the math became simple: Route based on who actually converts. If an agent consistently converts a source at 8% while another hits 3%, splitting it evenly is bad business. As Mike puts it, "Feelings do not pay the bills."
The "Nudge" Tool
Once leads were matched to the right agents, Mike tackled the next inefficiency: "Call Volume." Most teams assume calling 200 leads yields double the results of calling 100. Mike disagrees.
Instead of pushing agents to work through massive lists of cold leads, Mike uses the Nudge tool to filter for leads showing actual transaction signals.
(Someone who has been searching listings everyday for three weeks is a better use of time than a cold lead from six months ago.)
Proactive Profitability
Mike has a personal rule now: he checks his MaverickRE dashboards before email, before social media, and before his morning coffee. This daily habit shifted him from "firefighting" to proactive management.
An agent's conversion rate drops? The system flags it. A lead source stops performing? It's obvious on the dashboard. Instead of discovering issues weeks later during a monthly review, Mike can intervene while there is still time to course-correct.
Crucially, the automation handles the role of "bad cop." When an agent drops the ball, the system surfaces it, allowing Mike to focus on coaching rather than playing detective.
Summary of Results
| Metric | Impact |
|---|---|
| Operational Efficiency | Shifted from hours of "spreadsheet maintenance" to high-value agent coaching. |
| Lead Routing | Eliminated "blind rotation," increasing ROI by matching agents to their strongest lead sources. |
| Management Costs | Reduced salary-spend on manual data entry and error-checking. |