The hustle needed to be an entrepreneur has always been in Travis Cox’s blood.
The Louisville native has fond memories of parking cars on Derby Saturday in front of his grandfather's house, who happened to live next to Churchill Downs. They would serve coffee in the morning, hotdogs and hamburgers later in the day and “all the drunk-people snacks that you needed.”
He was also the son of a Realtor, who had a natural gift for selling houses as his father did. At the age of 19, he obtained his real estate license, and a year later he had sold 35 homes, creating more money than most 20-year-olds have to handle.
A six-figure income led him down a path of taxes that he was unprepared to navigate. At one point, he took out a loan with an 18% interest rate just to pay off his taxes.
His frustration was exacerbated by an overall need for access to Realtor-specific reporting functionality on existing generalized book-keeping products in the market.
“We didn’t have access to our numbers, and we didn’t have access to reports that gave us more insights on our business,” Cox told me. “So that's what I really wanted to create ... is a system that gave me insights based on my own data, which was really hard to do in other softwares and systems.”
Starting from scratch
In January 2021, Cox sat down with a group of developers from Prospect, Kentucky-based Samiteon to begin constructing a tracking platform called GreenStats for Realtors to monitor production and transactions while making sure that the profit and loss statistics were “easily understandable.”
“When you're overwhelmed, it leads to little to no action,” Cox said. “But if it's all laid out for you, and you just have to log into your bank account and start tracking and mapping your expenses to certain categories that make sense to you, it might be easier to do.”
The data is entered manually by users, who are able to upload thousands of previous transactions to create reports about key performance indicators (KPIs) such as lead origins, top selling neighborhoods and how much money was spent on acquiring the lead.
“A Realtor has a very specific set of categories and subcategories that we really have to stick to, for lead generation for compensation and how we pay our employees all the way down to insurance and what it looks like to buy leads,” Cox said.
Cox currently oversees a team of eight agents and two staff members as part of the Keller Williams Louisville brokerage, where he has been with his father, Jamey, for four years after spending six other years at Keller Williams Louisville East. If all goes as planned, Cox’s team will sell 225 homes this year.
In addition, he recently launched GreenCheck Mortgage Solutions in October — a little more than a week before the GreenStats website and iOS version of his app launched on Oct. 7. An Android version of the app will be available in early February.
And the significance of green?
“It was almost depressing sometimes, when it was just colorless, without any emotion behind it. I wanted to feel good looking at my stats,” Cox said of other products in the market. “Green had to be in it, because it involved money — and because it made me feel good.”
Looking ahead
GreenStats runs on a subscription-based business model in which users pay $89.99 a month and $25 extra for each four additional users. At a recent date, Cox said that he had 54 users, which were a mix of teams of Realtors and single agents.
The company is currently pursuing an initial round of funding of $500,000 for the purpose of hiring two sales consultants and one marketing expert — as up until this point all of his marketing efforts have been through word of mouth. Cox said he currently has one unnamed investor who has a 5% stake with a contract to buy an additional 5% when a certain number of users is reached.
Cox said that within a year he hopes to have 400 main account users, equating to approximately 1,000 users.
“It’s going to evolve quite rapidly in the next year,” he said. “It’s going to be a tool that you're going to want to have if you’re in the real estate space.”
At one point in his early years, Cox was so frustrated with his tax conundrum that he had decided to get out of the industry in spite of his monetary success, and apply for a job as an assistant manager at a Starbucks. He was told he did not have enough relative experience, leading him to re-evaluate his career — and ultimately to drawing up what would become GreenStats.
“It’s cool because I don't let it affect me ... because it's a great thing, right? It’s led me down this huge path that I probably never would have gone on if I didn’t apply for that position,” he said. “So ultimately I go there to remind myself sometimes that that's where I could have been. Not that that's a bad thing, but that's different than what I'm doing now.”
