Your Marketing Dude

Mike Cuevas has scripted, edited, and distributed over 2,000 videos for small business owners across the country. He builds full‐service video marketing systems — handling message strategy, editing, ads — so business owners don’t need large teams to grow.His mission is to help people amplify their voice with authenticity and consistency, turning video marketing from overwhelming to manageable.

Your Marketing Dude is a business podcast hosted by Mike Cuevas, with 264 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Mike Cuevas hosts Your Marketing Dude, a business show with 264 episodes published.

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  Your Marketing Dude

  Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents | Get Found in AI Search

  Aug 8, 202658 min

  The Bottom Line How does a Google Business Profile help real estate agents get found in AI search? According to Bobby Kerr, serial entrepreneur and local market authority expert with nearly $500 million in revenue generated across real estate and related industries, your Google Business Profile is no longer just a local SEO tool. It is the primary data source that ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini pull from when someone asks for a local business recommendation. Research from Whitespark confirms the AI citation threshold sits at 150 or more reviews. Below that number AI platforms rarely name you. GBP signals now account for 32% of all controllable local ranking factors. And ChatGPT has become the third most popular source for local business recommendations behind only Google and Facebook. Your profile is not an afterthought. It is the foundation. Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents | Get Found in AI Search A buyer opens their phone on a Saturday morning. They are thinking about selling their house and they want to know who the best real estate agent in their area is. They do not Google it. They open ChatGPT and just ask. The agent who shows up in that answer is not necessarily the one with the best website or the most Instagram followers. It is the one whose Google Business Profile gave the AI enough confidence to make a recommendation. That is the shift that most agents have not caught up to yet. I sat down with Bobby Kerr this week on Your Marketing Dude to talk about why your Google Business Profile has quietly become the most important piece of your online presence. Bobby has generated nearly $500 million in revenue across real estate, lending, home inspection, and insurance. He has been COO of a top-producing RE/MAX team, VP of Business Development at Summit Lending, co-founded Diamond Heritage Inspections and a Goosehead Insurance franchise. And if that is not enough, he is also the lead performer of Bob Jovi, the world’s premier Bon Jovi tribute band. When someone with that much ground-level experience in this industry tells you that your Google Business Profile matters more right now than it ever has, you should probably listen. Your Google Profile Is What AI Reads First Here is the thing most agents do not know. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend a real estate agent in their city, those platforms are not crawling your website. They are not reading your social media. They are primarily pulling from your Google Business Profile. The research backs this up hard. GBP signals now account for 32% of all controllable local ranking factors, more than review signals, on-page SEO, and link signals combined. And the AI citation threshold, the minimum you need to even be considered for a named recommendation by ChatGPT or Perplexity, sits at 150 or more Google reviews. Below 150 reviews, AI platforms rarely surface you as a recommendation at all. ChatGPT is now the third most popular source for local business recommendations behind only Google and Facebook. And AI algorithms are 30 times more selective than Google search, which means ranking on Google does not guarantee you show up in AI recommendations. The businesses that do show up are the ones whose profiles are complete, consistent, and actively maintained. The Free Marketing Asset Most Agents Ignore Bobby makes a point early in our conversation that I want you to sit with. Your Google Business Profile is free. Completely free. And most agents either set it up once and never touch it again or never fully set it up at all. Meanwhile that profile is often the first impression a potential client gets of your business. Not your website. Not your social media. Your Google profile. Because when someone searches for a real estate agent in your city, Google shows three results in the map pack before any website listings appear. If you are not in those three spots, a huge chunk of potential clients never even know you exist. Bobby calls it your digital storefront. I call it the thing most agents are leaving wide open for their competitors to walk through. Reviews Are No Longer Just Social Proof This is where the conversation gets really interesting and where most agents are thinking about reviews the wrong way. Reviews are not just there to make new clients feel comfortable calling you. In 2026 they are a ranking signal, a trust signal, and an AI training signal. AI platforms read your reviews and extract themes from them. An agent with 200 reviews that mention specific neighborhoods, specific types of transactions, and specific outcomes is an agent that AI platforms can confidently describe and recommend. An agent with 12 reviews that all say great agent highly recommend is essentially invisible to AI. The math is not complicated. 150 reviews is the floor to get named in AI recommendations. Getting there requires making asking for reviews a systematic part of how you do business, not something you remember to do every few months. Bobby walks through the right way to build review velocity, which is consistent monthly volume rather than seasonal spikes. A competitor gaining 10 fresh reviews a month will outrank an agent sitting at 200 stale reviews from three years ago. Recency matters because AI pulls fresh data. Consistency Is the Trust Signal AI Cannot Ignore Here is a concept that Bobby covers that most people miss entirely. AI platforms build what is called entity validation before they recommend a business. What that means in plain English is that before ChatGPT or Perplexity names you as a recommendation, they need to see your business information show up consistently across multiple sources. Your name, address, and phone number need to match on your Google profile, your website, your Facebook page, your LinkedIn, your real estate portals, and every directory that lists you. If the information conflicts across platforms, AI models cannot confidently recommend you because they cannot verify who The post Google Business Profile for Real Estate Agents | Get Found in AI Search appeared first on Your Marketing Dude .

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  Your Marketing Dude

  Tax Deductions for Real Estate Agents | S Corp Tax Write Offs That Save You Thousands

  Aug 1, 202630 min

  The Bottom LineWhat tax deductions can real estate agents actually take? According to Leland Gross, CFP and enrolled IRS agent and founder of PeaceLink Financial Planning and Accounting, most agents are overpaying by thousands every year not because they’re doing something wrong but because nobody ever showed them what they’re allowed to do. The S corp structure alone can save you 15.3% in self employment tax on your profit above your salary. The QBI deduction gives you 20% off your taxable business income and you don’t have to spend a single dollar to get it. Your home office, mileage, cell phone, and marketing expenses are all deductible. Pull up your 1040 right now and look for the QBI line. If it’s blank or less than 20% of your profit you’re working with the wrong CPA. Tax Deductions for Real Estate Agents: S Corp Tax Write Offs That Save You Thousands April hits and the number shows up on the screen and your stomach drops. You made good money last year. Really good money. And somehow you still owe the IRS more than you thought was possible. You pay it. You move on. And then you do the exact same thing next year. Here’s the thing. That’s not bad luck. That’s a system problem. I incorporated my business six months into my real estate career back in 2002. Got some advice from a guy we used to call Shady Jay and I never looked back. I have never once experienced what most agents go through in April because I set up the structure right from the beginning. Most agents never do that. And it costs them tens of thousands of dollars a year. This week I sat down with Leland Gross, CFP and enrolled agent of the IRS, founder of PeaceLink Financial Planning and Accounting in Virginia Beach. Leland works specifically with real estate professionals across the country and he gets genuinely nerdy about this stuff in the best possible way. Here is what he told me. You Are a Business Owner Whether You Think So or Not This is where most agents go wrong before they even get to the tax conversation. You are a 1099 contractor. The IRS considers you self-employed. That means you are a business owner whether you have ever thought of yourself that way or not. And if you don’t treat your situation like a business owner, you are going to miss out on every advantage the tax code was designed to give you. Leland put it plainly. He had just walked out of a meeting before we recorded where someone was overpaying by $40,000 in taxes purely because they hadn’t set up their business properly. Forty thousand dollars. Just sitting there on the table every single year. The IRS code, and I know this sounds crazy, is actually written to reward you for being self-employed. You can legally avoid taxes. You cannot evade them. Avoiding is legal. The IRS literally built the code to give business owners advantages because self-employed people generate more income and that’s good for the economy. But you have to know the game to play it. Why the S Corp Structure Changes Everything When you are just a straight 1099 filing a Schedule C, everything you earn as profit gets hit with federal tax, state tax if your state has it, and self-employment tax at 15.3%. That last one is the killer. It goes toward Medicare and Social Security and you pay both halves because you are both the employer and the employee. When you incorporate as an S corp, something changes. You split your income into two buckets. Your salary and your profit. You pay yourself a reasonable salary for the work you do and you pay self-employment tax on that amount. The rest of your income comes out as profit distributions and that profit is NOT subject to self-employment tax. Leland walked me through the math. Say you earn $100,000. You set your salary at $40,000. You pay self-employment tax on the $40,000. The other $60,000 comes to you as profit with no self-employment tax. That is 15.3% on $60,000 that you just kept in your pocket. That is $9,180 a year. Just from the structure. The salary has to be reasonable. You cannot pay yourself $5,000 a year and claim you made $200,000 in profit. But reasonable in real estate is often lower than agents think and your CPA can help you find that number. The QBI Deduction: The One You Should Check Right Now Pull up your 1040. The front page. Go to around line 13. It might move slightly by tax year but look for something that says QBI. That stands for Qualified Business Income deduction. And Leland calls it his favorite deduction because it is the only one in the tax code you do not have to spend a single dollar to receive. You get it purely because you are a business owner. Here is how it works. It is 20% of your business profit as a straight deduction. If you made $200,000 in commissions and had $100,000 in deductions so you were getting taxed on $100,000 of profit, your QBI deduction should be $20,000. That comes right off the top after everything else. If that line on your 1040 is blank, you are working with the wrong CPA. If that number is less than 20% of your profit, that means there was no proactive tax planning happening. It is very easy to get to the full 20% with the right structure in place. The fact that it is not there means someone was not doing their job. The Real Estate Agent Tax Write Offs That Actually Work Once you are set up properly, the deductions are where the money really starts to add up. Here is what Leland covers with every real estate client. The obvious ones: MLS fees, licensing costs, marketing expenses, accounting fees, professional development. Every dollar you spend running your The post Tax Deductions for Real Estate Agents | S Corp Tax Write Offs That Save You Thousands appeared first on Your Marketing Dude .

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  Your Marketing Dude

  Real Estate Agent Burnout? Hustle Isn’t The Problem, Alignment Is

  Jul 18, 2026—

  Real Estate Agent Burnout? Hustle Isn’t The Problem, Alignment Is The Bottom Line Why do real estate agents burn out? According to Deborah Stellingwerff, a leadership coach, former award-winning REALTOR and bestselling author, it starts with something most agents never think to work on: leading themselves. Before you can build a team, lead clients through major decisions, or grow a business that runs without consuming your life, you have to get clear on your own values, your definition of success, and the daily habits that either move you toward the business you want or quietly pull you away from it. Agents who skip that inner work tend to build businesses that look successful on the outside and feel hollow on the inside. The ones who do it tend to build something they actually want to keep. You already know this feeling even if you have never said it out loud. The calendar is full. The phone keeps going. You are closing deals. From the outside the business looks fine. And you are completely running on empty. You took the weekend off and came back just as tired. You tried a new morning routine. You pushed through. And the exhaustion is still sitting right there waiting for you. That is not a hustle problem. That is an alignment problem. Real estate agent burnout almost never comes from working too hard. It almost always comes from working hard in a direction that was never quite right for you in the first place. The clients who drain you instead of energize you. The hours that leave nothing for the rest of your life. The version of success you are chasing that somebody else defined. Deborah Stellingwerff has been inside this problem from two directions. She built a successful real estate career, became an award winning agent, and then stepped back and asked herself an honest question: is this actually what I want? The answer changed everything. She has spent the years since helping other agents ask the same question before they hit the wall she did. That is what this episode is really about. Who Is Deborah Stellingwerff? Deborah Stellingwerff spent years building a successful real estate career and became an award-winning REALTOR before she made a pivot into coaching. What she kept noticing in the agents around her, and eventually in herself, was that the ones struggling were not lacking drive or hustle. They were lacking structure. Not systems structure, though that matters too. The kind of inner structure that comes from knowing what you actually want, what you will and will not accept, and who you are trying to become. Today she works as a business and leadership coach, speaker, and bestselling author helping real estate professionals and service-based entrepreneurs build profitable businesses without losing themselves in the process. She also runs the Aligned and Prosperous Real Estate CEO Quiz if you want to see where you actually stand. Burnout Is Not a Hustle Problem Here is the reframe Deborah makes early in the conversation that changes how you look at everything that follows. Most real estate agents who burn out are not lazy. They are the opposite. They work constantly, follow up on every lead, stay available, and say yes to almost everything because they care about doing the job well. And they still hit the wall. Which means hustle is not the variable. Alignment is. When the work you do every day matches what you actually value, the hours feel different. The clients feel different. Even the hard parts feel manageable because they are in service of something that genuinely matters to you. When there is a gap between what you are doing and what you actually want, every hour costs more than it should. Not because you are tired. Because you are spending energy on something that was never quite yours. That gap is where burnout lives. And no productivity system, morning routine, or motivational content will close it. You have to go back to the source and get honest about what you actually want. What Self Leadership Actually Means Deborah is careful not to make this sound like a meditation retreat or a personality quiz. Self leadership is practical. It shows up in the choices you make before anyone else is watching. It is the decision to end your workday at a specific time and actually do it, even when there is more to do. It is the willingness to have a hard conversation with a client instead of avoiding it and letting the situation fester. It is the ability to sit with uncertainty instead of filling every quiet moment with more activity so you do not have to think. Deborah talks about confidence in a way that cuts against most of what agents hear about it. Confidence is not something you accumulate enough of before you take action. It is something that gets built through the actions you take while you are still uncertain. Every time you do the hard thing, every time you hold the boundary, every time you have the conversation you were dreading, confidence grows. Not the other way around. Your Clients Feel Your Energy Whether You Want Them To or Not This is a point Deborah makes that most business coaches skip over entirely. Leadership in a client-facing business is not just about what you say and what you do. It is about the state you are in when you show up. Think about the last time you were in a listing appointment when something in your life was genuinely off. When you were exhausted or anxious or preoccupied with a deal that was falling apart somewhere else. The client in front of you felt it even if you did your best to mask it. They may not have been able to name it, but they felt it. And it shaped how they experienced you. Contrast that with a version of yourself who is settled, clear, and genuinely present. Same market The post Real Estate Agent Burnout? Hustle Isn’t The Problem, Alignment Is appeared first on Your Marketing Dude .

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  Real Estate Listing Appointment Tips | The Seller Conversations Nobody Teaches You

  Jul 11, 202649 min

  The Bottom LineWhat are the best real estate listing appointment tips for handling difficult seller conversations? According to Debbie De Grote, one of North America’s most recognized real estate coaches with over 100,000 private coaching calls in her career, the answer starts before the problem does. Agents who set expectations immediately after taking the listing, discuss likely showing activity and possible price adjustments before they become issues, and communicate proactively every week no matter what, rarely end up in the desperate conversation. When it does get hard, empathy comes before data, collaborative language positions you as a partner instead of an adversary, and giving sellers options instead of opinions keeps them in control and you out of the blame seat. Real Estate Listing Appointment Tips: The Seller Conversations Nobody Teaches You Picture this. It is week four of a listing. The house has had six showings and zero offers. Your seller calls you on a Tuesday morning and the first thing out of their mouth is not hello. They want to know what you have been doing. They want to know why nobody is making an offer. And somewhere under all of that, they want someone to blame. Guess whose number they called. This is the moment most agents completely fall apart. They get defensive. They start explaining. They quote market statistics while the seller gets angrier. They leave the call feeling beat up and unsure whether they still have the listing. Debbie De Grote has coached agents through this exact moment more times than almost anyone alive. She started in real estate at eighteen, closed over 3,000 transactions in her selling career, became the first agent ever inducted into the Century 21 Hall of Fame, and has spent the last 25 years as one of the most sought after coaches in the industry. She has been on over 100,000 private coaching calls. In this episode she walks through exactly what to say, what not to say, and how to completely change the dynamic of the hardest conversations in real estate. The Best Defense Is a Good Offense Here is Debbie’s most important point and she makes it early. The agents who handle difficult seller conversations best are not the ones with the best scripts for when things go wrong. They are the ones who had the right conversations before anything went wrong. Think about the difference between two scenarios. In the first one, an agent takes a listing, puts it on the market, and calls the seller only when there is news. Weeks go by. The seller has been watching the days on market tick up. They have been telling their friends the house is listed. And now they want answers nobody gave them ahead of time. In the second scenario, the agent sits down after the listing is signed and says something like: here is what the first few weeks are going to look like, here is how many showings are typical for a home priced like this, here is what I am going to be doing each week, and here is the conversation we are probably going to have in about three weeks if we are not seeing the activity we want. The second agent does not get ambushed. They get a call from a seller who already knows what to expect. Proactive communication is not just a nice gesture. It is the foundation of the whole thing. The First Two to Three Weeks Are the Whole Game Debbie is emphatic about this and the data backs her up. The first fourteen to twenty one days of a listing are when it gets the most attention, the freshest eyes, the most motivated buyers. After that, days on market starts telling a story to every buyer who sees it. Not a good story. Buyers start wondering what is wrong with it. They start lowballing. Some just skip it entirely. The longer a home sits, the harder it becomes to sell it at the original price, and often the harder it becomes to sell it at all. This is why Debbie says the pricing conversation and the expectation conversation have to happen before the listing goes live, not after three weeks of disappointing results. The window for getting it right is much smaller than most sellers realize, and most agents never tell them that. Let the Data Do the Talking One of the biggest mistakes agents make in a price reduction conversation is making it personal. They say things like I think we need to lower the price or in my opinion the market is telling us something. And the seller immediately has someone to disagree with. You. Debbie teaches agents to take themselves out of it. Show the seller what comparable homes sold for. Show them what is sitting on the market right now and for how long. Let them see the pattern themselves. When the data makes the case, the agent becomes the guide instead of the bad news. The script she recommends sounds something like this: Let me show you what is happening out there right now and then we can talk about what it means for us. Notice the word us. Not you. Not your house. Us. Use We, Us, and Our This sounds almost too simple to mention but Debbie says it changes everything. Language that positions the agent as a partner changes the emotional temperature of the conversation. When you say your home is overpriced it sounds like an accusation. When you say based on what we are seeing in our market, let me walk you through our options, it sounds like two people solving a problem together. The seller is not being told what to do. They are being invited into a decision. Sellers in difficult conversations are often scared. They have a lot riding on this. The house might represent their retirement, or their kids college fund, or the ability to move closer to family. When they feel like they The post Real Estate Listing Appointment Tips | The Seller Conversations Nobody Teaches You appeared first on Your Marketing Dude .

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  Stop Working In Your Business & Start Leading It

  Jul 5, 202644 min

  The Bottom Line: How do founders stop getting stuck in the day-to-day of their business? According to business coach Lynea Carver and Mike Cuevas of Your Marketing Dude, the answer starts with recognizing that burnout is a systems problem, not a willpower problem. Entrepreneurs who cannot get out of the weeds are usually missing three things: clarity on who their ideal client actually is, documented systems that let the business run without depending on the owner for everything, and the willingness to delegate and actually trust people to own responsibilities. A business that consumes your life is not a successful business. The goal is to build something that generates sustainable growth while supporting the life you actually want to live. Most entrepreneurs start their business because they want more freedom. A few years in, most of them are working longer hours than they ever did for someone else. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a systems problem. And it’s exactly what business coach Lynea Carver has spent her career helping founders fix. This week she joined me on Your Marketing Dude to talk about what it actually looks like to get out of the weeds, build a business that doesn’t depend on you for everything, and stop mistaking being busy for being productive. Who Is Lynea Carver? Lynea Carver is a growth-focused business coach and former real estate leader who helps founders build profitable businesses without burning out or sacrificing their personal lives. She came to this work the hard way. Burnout, financial setbacks, relationships under strain. She watched her entrepreneur father struggle with overwork her whole childhood and then found herself making the same mistakes. The experience gave her a perspective on business sustainability that most coaches don’t have. Being Busy Isn’t the Same as Being Productive Lynea opens with something that should land hard for most entrepreneurs. Being busy all the time and actually moving your business forward are two completely different things, and most founders have confused them for years. The work that feels urgent, the fires, the client calls, the inbox, the day-to-day logistics, is almost never the work that actually grows the business. The work that grows the business is strategy, hiring, systems, relationships, and decisions about where the company is going. Most founders never have time for any of that because they’re too deep in the operational work that should belong to someone else. You Cannot Scale If You Do Everything Yourself This is the trap almost every founder falls into at some point. They built the business by doing everything themselves. So they keep doing everything themselves, because that’s what worked in the beginning. The problem is that the skills that get a business to a hundred thousand dollars are not the skills that get it to a million. The founder who does everything is the ceiling. The leader who delegates effectively is not. Lynea talks about the transition from operator to CEO as one of the most difficult and most important shifts a founder can make. It requires letting go of the belief that nobody else can do it as well as you can, which is both partially true and completely irrelevant to whether the business grows. Clarity on Your Ideal Client Changes Everything One of the most practical points Lynea makes is about ideal clients. Most entrepreneurs say yes to almost everyone, especially in the early years. The problem is that the wrong clients don’t just take your time. They take your energy, create more complexity than they’re worth, and crowd out the clients you actually want to be working with. Getting clear on who your ideal client actually is, the ones who energize rather than drain you, who pay on time, who refer others, who are genuinely a good fit for what you do best, changes the economics of the entire business. You work less and produce better results because you’re operating in your zone rather than constantly adapting to clients who were never really the right fit. Learning to Say No Is a Business Skill Every yes you say to something that’s not quite right comes at the expense of something that is. Lynea is direct about this. Saying no is not a failure to find opportunity. It’s a decision to protect your capacity for the things that actually matter. Most founders never learn this until they’ve burned out once or twice. The entrepreneurs who figure it out earlier tend to build cleaner, more profitable, more sustainable businesses, because they’re not constantly managing the downstream consequences of yeses they never should have said. Systems Create Freedom This is one of the most underrated ideas in business building. A system is just a documented, repeatable process for doing something. When a process is documented, it can be delegated. When it can be delegated, it no longer depends on the founder to execute it. Lynea talks about this as the mechanism of freedom. Not passive income or some future exit. The ability to step away from your business for a week, a month, or longer, and have it continue to run is a function of how systematized it is. Founders who have been operating from their heads for years are often the least free people they know, because everything stops when they stop. Delegation Requires Actually Letting Go Most founders who try to delegate don’t actually delegate. They hand over a task and then hover over it, correct it constantly, and take it back the first time something goes wrong. That’s not delegation. That’s creating extra work for yourself while also discouraging the person you hired. Lynea talks about what real delegation looks like. You hire the right person, you train them on the outcome you want, you give them the authority to own the result, and then you get out of the way. The first few attempts will probably be imperfect. That’s part of the process. The alternative is staying stuck in the same ceiling forever. Burnout Is a The post Stop Working In Your Business & Start Leading It appeared first on Your Marketing Dude .

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