I do these little Zoom calls with folks to show them the site and by the end of it they’re asking me to sign up, which is the best. Those sales calls are the best, because you don’t even have to ask them to sign up. They’re like hey, I’m in, how do I sign up right now.” — Ken Robbins; CEO of MILLIE (GoMillie.com)
In 2014, the military officers working for The Chief of Staff of the Army knew when not to disturb Lieutenant Colonel Ken Robbins, speechwriter to the Department of the Army’s highest-ranking officer. Just a year later Colonel Robbins left the military, raised a very respectable $1.4 million dollars from angel investors, and began building what today is likely the largest veteran and military spouse real estate referral network in The United States and one of Forbes Top 25 veteran founded startups. In the wake of COVID, six years in the startup trenches, and double-digit growth, Ken Robbins looks back on building a company to serve the military and veteran community.
“We started off strictly as a referral network. The way real estate works is if you build a referral network and you get a license, a brokerage license, you can essentially take referral fees off the closed transactions. And that’s what we do. Real estate agents pay a percentage of their commission. So, we’re broker agnostic. But what makes us unique is all of them [MILLIE’s real estate network] are veterans or military spouses. We have what I think is now the largest veteran and military spouse referral network in the country. Why is that important? Because we can be hyper focused on something like VA loans.”
Every year ~17% of new home buyers are military veterans, and ~2% are active-duty service members, representing a sizeable chunk of the ~5.3 million existing homes sold every year. Access to this market is big business for some 1.3 million real estate agents and over one hundred thousand real estate brokerages serving the U.S. market.
“We now also do content for real estate agents, which is not anywhere near something we thought we would do. But the thing is when you’re starting a company you have to be open to what your customers want and that’s where I think the Army really benefits you. You learn how to be strategic. You can take calculated risks.”
Ken on 1st steps following their angel round:
“About six months into it, we were talking to one of our advisors. We started whiteboarding and that’s where the bigger idea took shape. The idea got sketched out, and then we spent about three or four months working with a marketing and branding company (1000Watt.net) that really understood the real estate space. We told them: Hey, this is what we’re trying to build. It’s unique. They helped us develop what became the name, the brand and the logo.”
Ken Robbins’ journey to entrepreneurship followed a distinguished twenty-year military career that included a deployment to Iraq at the height of the war in 2008 and a fellowship at The White House. But the career of a military officer is a team effort, and for Ken the key member of his team was his wife Heidi, today one of the top performing real estate agents in Northern Virginia whose strength carried the Robbins family through 12 homes in 20 years to their final active duty assignment in the Office of The Chief of Staff of The Army, and whose experience helped guide MILLIE to market fit as an interface between real estate agents and the military home buying community.
“As a speechwriter, you are one of the few people that have a license to sit in on any meeting in his [Chief of Staff Odierno’s] office. So, you get to witness that and then you get to watch with frustration when you see folks that you knew are not going to have a good meeting. You try to help them, and you try to warn them, and you try to go to them and coach them a little bit. Some weren’t open for coaching because they were senior officers and they thought they knew everything. You really started to learn which ones had a lot of emotional intelligence, because the ones that had high emotional intelligence, the two star or the three stars, were perfectly fine with the an 05 giving them advice. The ones that didn’t do well thought they already had the answers, like hey, look, I’m just trying to help. I know what’s on his [General Odierno’s] mind. And then you go in there and the meeting goes off the rails and you’re just sitting there thinking, I told you.”
By 2015, Ken Robbins was a senior military officer with strong tactical, operational, and strategic experience who had just spent a year inside the mind of one of the United States greatest military generals, and looking to take on some risk:
“I didn’t know for sure during my transition that I wanted to start MILLIE, so I was in the middle of the transition and I was kind of dual tracking. I was in some of my transition classes sketching out slides and kind of mapping out what I thought the company would look like. I didn’t want to play it too safe. What happens with a lot of officers when they get out, especially at my level, they settle, and look, there’s nothing wrong with that when you got a family, you got kids you’re going to send to school. Safety is important. I was fortunate enough that my wife was doing well. We could take some chances.”
With two co-founders including fellow senior military officer Jason Dempsey, a PhD author and Columbia professor, Ken set about building the company that would become MILLIE. Ken describes his mindset as he began his entrepreneurial journey:
“I don’t get sucked into the Cinderella stories of startups, that’s not the reality. Reality is that for most startups it takes 10 or 15 years before you have a hight level of success. I just wanted to build something that I could say was unique, and I was the foundation behind it. So that’s why I decided to jump and give it a shot.”
Ken describes why MILLIE is for-profit:
“Most folks in doing what we do, do it as a nonprofit. We felt that was part of the problem. We thought there was a marketplace that could be created, and that people were willing to pay for services. We’re starting to show that military families will pay for things if you offer them a service and they’re OK with that. We charge [real estate agents] $400 bucks a year to be a member. If it helps them close just one transaction it pays for itself four or five times over.”
Ken describes when he first felt that he had achieved what Marc Andreessen famously called ‘product/market fit’: being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
“You know it’s funny, you can just tell when a product is working, you can just feel the momentum building around it, you don’t even need to look at the hard data to know that something’s happening because you’re just ten times busier than it was a year ago.”
Ken describes how he allocated his initial $1.4 million angel round and discusses why MILLIE hasn’t raised another round yet:
“We used money to build content and our systems. Developing content is hard, and it’s really expensive. But I also knew that if we didn’t have great content, we weren’t going to have anything valuable. So, we spent a lot of time early on going after developing our content and hiring people to write that content.
Sometimes what happens is capital can actually make you a little lazy. You can kind of sit back a little bit and you’re not quite as hungry and you’re not quite as focused. It’s a little bit like Ranger School: Let’s go without meals for a while and see what we learn about ourselves. COVID really hit us hard this year. But as a result of it, it caused us to institute some really good reviews and to dive down our costs and figure out what we were doing that was good.”
Ken Robbins talks about his biggest mistake:
“So we have about a twelve hundred [real estate] agent network, and like a lot of folks I’m like, oh well I’m going to build my own [Customer Relationship Management] system to manage this. And we did. And that was OK. But it was really clunky. With most things, plenty of other people have already created the thing that you’re trying to create. And so, I found a company that could do it for us and we had it so that they only took a fee when we made money.
We wasted a lot of time and resources early on trying to do that. I wouldn’t have done that if I had to do it again. We struggled with technology a little bit because we didn’t really have a full-time person doing that and that was clearly something we needed. Surround yourself with different players, know what you’re good at, and more importantly know what you’re not good at. I’ve heard a lot of folks that say you should identify who your most likely acquirers are before you start your business, and then you should be building towards them. That’s not to say focus on exit at the beginning, because I think that’s a big mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make.
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Ken on one of his favorite founder stories:
“My favorite story is the CEO of MailChimp. MailChimp toiled for like 15 years and everybody thinks they were an overnight success, but they were killing themselves for 10 or 15 years building, and then all of a sudden everything lined up and the success came, and they were prepared for it. But the point is there are no shortcuts.””
Ken on the importance of big brands and creating trust:
“When you are a startup, and you want to work with big brands: Big brands rarely work with brand new companies. If you don’t have a reputation, they don’t know you, and they’re not lending their brand reputation to you period. So just now in the last year, conversations we’ve been having for the last two or three years have just started to come to fruition in terms of actual potential business deals and relationships. We did this partnership with Lowe’s last year. Lowe’s gave us some to give away MILLIE Scout jobs to military famlies and let us use their branding to promote the program. That’s a big deal for a company like Lowe’s to say to a small startup: We’ve seen what you do, and we trust that you’ll protect our brand and our reputation and that you’re not going to do anything to hurt that. You can’t do that until you have a reputation, until you’ve built relationships. Then you can go to other brands and say: Hey, we did something with Lowe’s and they trusted us, you can trust us with your brand. I think many startups need help from some of those bigger companies if they’re going to be successful.”
Ken on selling to military customers:
“I talk to a lot of companies that want to sell things to the military. They come to us asking how to do it, and it’s hilarious, talk about products in search of a market fit. I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with entrepreneurs and companies that have built a product that is not getting traction. Then they go: Hey, we have x, we think this would be great for military people. And I look at it and I go: Why didn’t anybody else buy that? Why do you think this is good for military people? The reality is, it’s not that good of a product and that was reason why nobody was buying it. So now they’re just out there with a product in search of a market. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t bring in a product and say: I think this is good for military folks. What, because you think they’re suckers? You didn’t design this product with them in mind. You were clearly designing it for somebody else and it just didn’t take and so that’s where I think we were different in that we were hyper focused on that market. We’re like, well, let’s build products that fit into our market, because we know our market really well.
People ask us: Why military veterans? That’s such a small percentage of the home buying market. I’m like: Well one, it’s 20% of the whole market and that’s a huge chunk. And two, because it’s what we know. Why not go after a market you know? It’s a niche that’s unique.”
Ken on leadership:
“I’m a collaborative leader, meaning I love to get input on things, and it doesn’t have to be my way, but I absolutely reserve the right to make any decision that I think is necessary. I’m the one that went to investors and said: Give me money to build so it’s my reputation on the line. I’m the one that’s took the biggest risk. That’s a hard thing for some folks that work in startups to understand. The founder is the one that’s got their butt on the line.”
Ken talks about the ideas that have influenced him most in his early-stage startup journey:
“Elon Musk said founders spend too much time on PowerPoint crunching numbers and excel spreadsheets and not enough time talking to their customers and for whatever reason that really resonated with me. So I called our COO up and I said I don’t know if we’re going to succeed with this platform, but we’re going to really make the member experience amazing. We started really focusing on customers and that’s when the good things started happening.”
Ken on what gets him out of bed in the morning:
“Every day I wake up and I think: let’s help a member, let’s answer a question. By doing that we are increasing our ROI because they’re hanging around longer.”
To join the MILLIE community or to partner with MILLIE and Ken Robbins in supporting military veterans through their PCS journey go to gomillie.com.