About
A full service real estate consulting firm that offers insurance brokerage and property management services. They serve large commercial clients like East West Bank, Cathay Bank, and Hanmi Bank.
Company size
1-10
Industry
Services, Real estate
Headquarters
Los Angeles
Founded
2023
Missive use cases
Key features
Norm was drowning in emails. A former solopreneur turned founder of a growing real estate consulting firm (Wonoak), he went from watching YouTube during COVID to managing properties coast-to-coast and closing deals for billion-dollar banks. That’s when he realized, his inbox wasn’t built for scale.
Norm leads a tight-knit team of 5 (or 6 depends who’s counting) managing commercial and residential real estate across the U.S. Their business spans:
Their bread and butter? High-stakes deals and lots, and lots, of communication.
Norm’s workflow worked… until it didn’t.
He was using Superhuman. His partner was bringing in Slack, Notion, ClickUp… all the productivity hits. But real estate doesn’t run like a product roadmap. It’s reactive chaos. They needed something that could keep up.
As the business scaled, so did the volume of incoming communication—from vendors, landlords, clients, teammates, and contractors. One email could turn into 30. And Norm was still the center of it all.
Looking for: A platform that could keep pace
Enter the shortlist: Front vs. Missive.
Norm and his engineer-partner trialed both tools side-by-side. Their must-haves?
“Front was good. Missive just felt easier. We got set up same day. Everyone understood it. And I stopped being the help desk.”
With Missive, the team started rerouting communication away from Norm and into shared inboxes. Everyone gained visibility, context, and the ability to triage fast. Bonus: Missive’s draft collaboration let team members prep replies, and Norm could hit send when ready, no more back-and-forth or forwarding madness.
They now integrate:
Unexpected wins: The little things that added up
While the team’s still rolling out new processes and retraining clients to use shared emails and numbers, things are already smoother.
Norm’s big goal? Scale his business without becoming a bottleneck again. With Missive, he’s not just staying afloat, he’s building a team that works together, not through him.
When asked what sealed the deal?
“Honestly, Missive just made sense. The setup didn’t require a 40-page onboarding doc. And for a non-tech firm trying to scale fast, that’s everything.”
A conversation with
Norman Lee
·
Founder