Interview with CREOP’s founder John Gessford

Kindly give our readers an introduction to your business. Please include what your business is all about, in which city you are located and if you have offices in multiple locations/ cities.
- CREOP is an online marketing platform for commercial salespeople, brokers, syndicators, sellers, lenders, etc. Our members can upload property images and enter property information and our platform instantly generates a PDF offering memorandum, flyer, proposal, electronic flipbook, and property website with a “Deal Room”.

Kindly give us a brief description about yourself (it should include your brief educational or entrepreneurial background and list some of your major achievements).

I started my career at CBRE in the early nineties. Went through CBRE’s training program which is considered the gold standard in the commercial real estate industry. It was a wonderful experience and I learned so much. In 2003, I started a boutique commercial real estate brokerage company, Magellan Investments with a friend. In addition to commercial real estate, we sold securitized real estate (reg D offerings) which required us to get security licenses as the products were regulated by FINRA. This was a great experience as well until the Great Recession came (2008) which decimated the industry. It was around this time I created CREOP in addition to commercial real estate brokerage.

What inspired you to (start a new business venture) or (to make significant changes in an existing business)? How did the idea for your business come about?

During the Magellan Investments days, we hired a local developer to create a program that would allow our salespeople to create marketing packages and proposals. I noticed how our salespeople enjoyed using the program and thought how this program could be a business. When we closed Magellan Investments, I hired a team of developers (all in California) to build a new program from the ground up using what we built at Magellan Investments as a model but made it ten times more robust and comprehensive.

Know that you will work 3x harder being an entrepreneur compared to working for someone else. If you are passionate about what you’re doing, you won’t mind working 3x harder and you’ll find it gratifying. Keep a big picture perspective and don’t trip over the small stuff.

What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur?

Good communication skills. Work well with others. Be likeable, which starts with liking yourself.

How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?

We hired an amazing SEO company (Agency Jet) to optimize our SEO and we offer complimentary demos to potential subscribers.

Where did your organizations funding/capital come from and how did you go about getting it? How did you obtain investors for your venture?

The initial funding for CREOP came from my savings. In 2015, I brought in a working partner who infused cash into the business which was used for platform development. We have grown organically with no venture capital.

In 5-10 years, we will have new initiatives and offerings and use AI in areas I can’t even image today.

The quality of employees has been huge for us. Not only in customer service but on the development side. We have seen the spectrum with respect to developers and realized early on, having a super strong program development team is critical to success.

We rely heavily on feedback from our subscribers. If an idea doesn’t work, we’ll hear about it very quickly from our members and immediately abort. Thankfully, this is a very rare occurrence.

When a new subscriber completes their first offering memorandum and is blown away by the results, that experience motivates me to add more features and take the platform to the next level.

Some of my best ideas come from reading financial stock reports. I find their use of charts and graphs inspiring.

When a happy subscriber tells me how much they love the program, I feel a sense of success.

By making sure each and every customer has their questions answers and their needs met.

I really enjoy the creative side of the business. This involves designing interesting cover pages, adding charts and graphs to illustrate a point. It’s satisfying to hear feedback from subscribers.

What do you feel is the major difference between entrepreneurs and those who work for someone else?

Risk. Being an entrepreneur is risky compared to working for someone else. Entrepreneurs put their own money or investor’s money at risk. If the entrepreneur doesn’t perform as expected someone will get financially hurt. That level or risk is absent when working for someone else.