Do you like dealing with people or properties? Most real estate investors and property managers leave dealing with numbers to their accountants. Today, I am talking to Kyle Redding, Head of Growth and Sales for Proper. The property management tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to provide accounting and bookkeeping services. As a former CPA, Kyle has extensive knowledge of accounting, bookkeeping, and customer experience.  You’ll Learn... [05:12] Purpose of Proper: Partner with property management companies to set up accounting automation for back office. [06:10] Proper Position: Works with, doesn’t replace other property management tools. [10:00] Sophistication Fog: Property managers who need additional software and staff to optimize accounting automation. [12:15] Proper Process: Property managers handle invoices via dedicated email inbox, training, and automated processing. [17:45] Reminders: Rent is due! Rent is late! Proper’s frequency of property management invoices and statements. [21:10] Proper Competition: Hire bookkeepers/accountants with qualifications, education, and experience to alleviate single point-of-failure. [29:55] Proper Pricing: Affordable and sliding-fee scale based on price per unit. Tweetables Proper manages the books, you manage the properties. Proper’s Primary Focus: Accounting automation for more scalability and less stress. Proper’s accounting team is not your run-of-the-mill bookkeepers. Leverage Growth: Partner with Proper to take property management to the next level. Resources Kyle Redding’s Email Proper Ernst & Young QuickFee Buildium AppFolio Rent Manager Propertyware Yardi QuickBooks DGS 101: Take Confusion Out of Property Management with the Proper App  DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today’s guest is Kyle Redding of Proper. We’re going to be learning about what Proper is now. I think we’ve had you guys on the show before and it’s different. Kyle, welcome to the Door Grow Show, glad to have you. Let’s get into your background and maybe you could share with people your entrepreneurial journey, I think you have a cool story and I think it’d be fun to get into first. Kyle: Yeah, thanks, Jason. This is exciting, thanks for having us. Up at baseball in college really all I wanted to do fell into accounting. That sounds a little crazy, but Accounting 101 was in all those classes that I took and got 100% in. Don’t ask me how, but it just happened. While playing baseball I was like, “Okay, I think I can do this.” You travel a bit, you miss a bunch of classes but still, somehow worked it out. That revolved into an internship with Ernst & Young and then ultimately, a full-time job. I started up at EY in Orange County, California for about five years or so in the real estate group. A lot of my clients were public REITs or real estate developers. I ultimately then transferred out to Australia where I work at EY. Again with some real estate clients and some other industries. Ultimately, I got out of the public accounting game and was attracted to start-up life. I found this little start-up in Australia that was looking for an accountant that could sell, and I thought I’d give this a crack. We are a little finance online payment company in the professional services, all of our clients were accounting firms and law firms. We got really deep into the accounting industry and the CPA world and how they run their business. We grew that business and brought it to the US about four years ago. I took that company public in July last year. While that happened, I’ve always stayed in touch with one of my best friends, Matt, who is our COO and head of finance at Proper and Mark, an old college roommate from USC. We used to make surfboards and Matt and I worked at Ernst & Young together. At that time, Proper was really trying to solve a lot of different challenges for a property managing company, mainly on the maintenance side, which I think he comes and talks about before. Mark, our COO, was just religious about user research and first principles, light up thinking, breaking down problems, and finding the best solution for those problems; which is how we ended up coming back to Matt and I’s core background from the CPA world and real estate and addressing that [...] maintenance side of things, which is a nice to have and people want that to be better. The real true problem that we found was on the accounting side. A lot of property managers don’t necessarily get into this business because they like doing the accounting, or they do not do the accounting because (like you said) different from the real estate sales. It allows them to grab a hold of these owners and these properties, and develop other business opportunities but at the end of the month, the key deliverable that they all have is a financial package on that owner’s investment. That’s where we are today, helping a lot of property management companies solve that challenge and get better and focus on growth as opposed to running a call center and operations. Jason: Cool, so let’s get into how would you describe Proper now to those that are listening? What does Proper do? Kyle: Yep, sure. We partner with company management companies to help automate their back-office essentially, from everything, from AR to AP, to bank [...], to owner reporting. We use very high caliber accountants who have all got an accounting degree from big universities, that work in a big board accounting firm, that works at a Fortune 500 accounting firm. We power our team with machine learning, automation, and artificial intelligence to help make their job easier and allow our clients, the property managers, to scale a lot faster without having to worry about hiring more staff for training those people or maybe delaying, bringing on more portfolio because they need to do those things before they can get to that next step. We focus on accounting automation. Jason: Help me understand then how that works. Most property management entrepreneurs and business owners that are listening to the show right now are probably thinking, “Well, I’ve already got AppFolio, I’ve already got Rent Manager, I’ve already got Buildium. I’ve got a property management back office or accounting solution.” Is Proper something that you guys are positioning yourself to replace these tools or is this something where work in conjunction? How does this work? Kyle: Good question. We work alongside all of those tools. We’ve got a big mix, we don’t just work in AppFolio, we don’t just work in Propertyware. We’ve got clients that use Buildium, use Yardi, AppFolio, Propertyware, Rent Manager, you name it. We’ve even got clients who start out with QuickBooks and then as we help them grow, we transition into something more appropriate like a property management software. Right now, we’re not looking to replace any of those tools. We help optimize them for our clients. We help them set up a foundation to better utilize those and then manage those as well. A big part of what we do is helping them set up the appropriate level of internal controls. Are they set up for growth? Is that foundation there to really pile on top of? When we take on a new client, a lot of times it’s retooling the way they’ve set up AppFolio, Buildium, or Propertyware. It’s helping them get their [...] matrices set up. It’s all of those things to create efficiency, get them out of the weeds of the mundane repetitive low-level tasks that are [...] time set from their day, put that on to our plate, and get them back out to the field, so they can grow their business. Jason: It’s not just accounting because you’re helping with some of the operational aspects as well. Kyle: Correct. What we found is depending on a property manager and the company and the way they’re staffed, there’s a lot of leaving in and out of that accounting process. There’s a property manager who might spend 10%–15% of their day doing some accounting function that they probably shouldn’t be doing. The other side of that is you might be the owner or the broker-owner going, “I wish my PMs are out there losing these vacant apartments I’ve got, but they’re stuck doing this paperwork because there’s no one else to do it,” or it’s part of a process that they set up that hasn’t been revisited or fine-tuned. So, we help alleviate all those little bits of pieces there, then create more capacity for them to focus on what they want to focus on. Jason: Is this difficult to get going, get set up, and is there a certain level that a property management business owner has to be at before it would make sense to work with you guys? Kyle: Let me tackle that second question first which is do we have a minimum or a certain size. The short answer is no. We’ve got clients who have as little as six units. We’ve got clients who start with us at say 30 units and grow to 50–60 within three months. I’d probably say where it starts to make the most sense where they can move away from that one part-time admin or office staff handling some of these admin related tasks or accounting related tasks. Generally, to make it to that 30–40 unit mark and they’re starting to gain some momentum and get a little serious is where we can usually help them get to that next level. Where we see a clear difference is with somebody’s property managers who we call in the sophistication fog. They’ve half thought on their AppFolio or Yardi to do some things for them, but they still have some low-level staff that may or may not have an accounting background. They’re essentially taking off things on the checklist on a daily basis to help get that job done but there really isn’t an optimization to that process yet, it hasn’t really been optimized. We can come in and create efficiencies for them and help them, ultimately, have them repurpose those people to maybe a more interesting role or a more revenue-generating role, and then start to use some automation and fine-tune their property management software to do more for them. Jason: When it comes to automation and the technology side, do you guys have a homegrown software that’s running and doing the stuff? Are you using a certain software platform that you work within? Kyle: We continue to optimize and build other tools mainly around AP. Our goal is to attack one of these functions at a time. We found by measuring our accountants’ time that on average it takes about 5 minutes and 59 seconds to process an invoice. We built a proprietary tool that allows us to take that 5 minutes and 59 seconds down to (say) 30 seconds. From a scaling perspective, that property manager then takes on another 200 units. There isn’t the fear of being able to handle that, and we don’t need to staff another five people on their account to get that work done. We can continue getting through that work at a very high accuracy rate by training our model over and over with the different touches and windows that we see. Jason: How are the property managers feeding stuff into the system as if they’re feeding it into Proper? Kyle: Just like maybe a more specific property manager we may have set up where, let’s say 70%–80% of their invoices from their [...] vendors are coming in by email. They might have a dedicated inbox, [email protected] or [email protected]. If they don’t already have something like that set-up, then we’ll help create something like that. We’ll work with their vendors and their team to start training those invoices to come through to that inbox, at which point we can then adjust them and start processing them through our automation tools. Jason: What are some of the big questions that you’ve been getting? Everybody’s using their property management software, they probably have their systems and processes going to where they’re afraid to even mess with it a little bit, they feel comfortable. Then hearing you say, “Hey, we can help you make things faster. We can make it better, we can help you utilize things better, we work alongside,” and they’re probably thinking, “This is going to be really expensive, I don’t know if this makes sense. I’m going to have to do something different or something new.” What are some of the concerns and how are you addressing those? Maybe you can address them here so people listening, they’re popping up in their head. Kyle: Sure. I’ll probably revisit one of the questions you asked earlier which I didn’t address, which was what does it look like to get started or to start working with us? What does that process [...]? Our onboarding process, usually depending on the size of the PM, say, between two and four weeks to where we’ve fully taken over the accounting work off of their plate. When we start working with a new client we’ll basically do a deep dive walkthrough through every single one of their processes that they have. We’ll then document that process, so if they do continue to grow or they want these policies, procedures, and manuals for their own internal use, they’ll have those and we can use those to hire additional staff as they continue to grow. That’s probably a big first step, is understanding what they do, how they do it, what is being done, who’s doing what, et cetera. During that onboarding process, if we see a glaring opportunity for an improvement or an optimization, we’ll help them execute it right there on the spot. In the first instance, we’re going to match what they do so there’s the least amount of distraction to their day. Then over time, the next 30-60 days, we’ll tweak that some more and optimize it a little bit further to where they’ve got a smooth running engine behind [...] essentially. That’s a big question for a lot of prospects of clients that we take on is how do we get started, how does this work? That’s a very high level. Jason: Let me recap that. Some of these direct out with accounting, they’re frustrated with some of their internal processes connected to these, their day-to-day, and in 2–4 weeks you feel like Proper can significantly lighten their load and allow them to breathe. Kyle: Yeah. For example, just in the last month, 80% of our clients had increased their unit count on a month-to-month basis. Obviously, there are ebbs and flows, they might lose an owner (which drops the units), but generally speaking, once Proper gets in there, we alleviate and free up. We have one client, we freed up 35 hours a month of their time. This is a seasoned property manager who’s just, at the end of the day having to review work, or they were using another accounting partner. Jason: Then roughly how many doors did they have that they were freeing up that much time? Kyle: About 200, let’s say. Not a massive one but a decent-sized property managing company. Working with Proper, we generally saved in terms of card cost of headcount, up to 30% of their accounting staff wages over time. Maybe not on day one because if we’re not going to replace a team, that comes in phases, but over time, we generally see about a 30% cost reduction. We can fix this cost for them as opposed to them running a call center. They want to be making more money so let us fix this cost for you. Keep the quality at a very high level so that financial output and what you’re delivering to your owners. We also see a significant reduction in the number of questions or queries that our clients get from owners every single month because now our accountants are coming in and doing things may be the way they should’ve been done before or at a slightly better cadence or faster cadence which helps them keep their relationships. Jason: What are you seeing in all the property management businesses that you’re working with? How often are they sending out statements? Rent is sometimes trickling in. Rent [...] coming [...] a month. Sometimes it’s late, rent is really late. In these situations, what are you seeing as a frequency for invoices going out? Kyle: Definitely ranges depending on who it is that we’re taking on board but ultimately during that onboarding and stabilization period, generally it’s within 60 days or so. We have them all recording on the 10th of the following month and that’s a pretty standard cadence across the industry, but we make sure it’s consistent. There isn’t that, “We’d like to get it done by the 10th. Sometimes it’s the 15th or sometimes it’s the 20th.” We try and help standardize that across all of their owners. That might even come down to giving them some advice around, “Hey, you don’t have this clause in your owner agreement negotiated property, let’s help you fix that real quick.” That way you have some consistency. There are fewer exemptions and less, “Oh, this one requires that and this one requires that.” Again, building for scale, they can make those tweaks and continue to pile on top of what they’ve already built. Jason: One of the questions that pop up in my head hearing about this and owners giving some of their subs, they’re concerned about checks and balances. How am I going to make sure everything between my management software reconciles with my trust accounts, banking accounts, and everything is going in and out? How do I make sure everything is legit and stable? If I’m going to hand it off to somebody, I want to feel safe that these checks and balances are in place otherwise I’m going to have to check everything. Isn’t that true? Kyle: Yeah. A big way that we approach that is through those onboarding walkthroughs. When we do a deep dive into each process, whether it’s collecting rent or AP, or with the owner recording if there are only [...] there, we go into extreme detail, we document and create a manual for that process. Then there is a consistent agreed way of doing it, whether we try to make recommendations to improve it, or we say, “Hey, you guys have got some great process here.” We just formalize it in that way there’s a clear line of, “This is how it’s going to work.” Then we use tools to keep people accountable. Set reminders for (say) someone on the PM side, they haven’t approved an invoice for us yet, we need to garnish their approval. We use tools that allow us to keep those people accountable, so we can keep them [...]. Jason: Short callers and text messages? Kyle: We communicate daily pretty much with all of our clients from Google Hangouts, workflow collaboration tools, things like that, so there’s clear visibility. Jason: What are some of the other frequently asked questions that people give you when they’re going through the sales prospects sort of process with you? Kyle: What are our qualifications, what makes us qualified to do this sort of thing. As I said, Matt and I—Matt is our head of operations—we’re both CPAs with extensive real estate experience at Ernst & Young. All of our accounting team—I think I mentioned this before—got an accounting degree from college, they’ve worked at a Fortune 500 company, or [...] accounting firms. Our staff is not your run-of-the-mill bookkeepers. They’re highly trained, they’ve got extensive experience, we require our team to do at least 10 hours of CP in real estate accounting every year, that generally gives them some confidence. Then we’ve got some clients out of their really sticky situation with back books and unreconciled accounts for a long period of time and if we can come in and clean that up in a very short amount of time. We have one client who had nine months of unreconciled accounts, and we helped clean that up in about 3½ weeks. When we can show our clients that we can do this for them and help them get to a part where they can sell all their managing company and their portfolio, that speaks volumes for the rest of the people that we talk to. Jason: Let’s throw stones at some of the competition. Kyle: Sure. Jason: One of the main competitors is going to be the property management that’s like, “I’m just going to go higher because the alternative will be I’m going to go higher than somebody. She’ll help me with my bookkeeping or my accounting, or data entry with checks and invoices and all this kind of stuff.” They bring in somebody, they’re probably one of the lowest-paying members of their team, and they’re trying to teach them how they do it and it gets really messy. I don’t know if you want to say anything else, maybe I already threw stones at it. Kyle: No, that’s good. It’s definitely a challenge that we come across, where they’re weighing up, “Do we do this in-house or do we bring on a partner like you guys?” What we often see or hear from people who maybe have gone down that road and then maybe come back to someone like Proper is that it's a single point of failure. It’s one person who’s a real accountant. They go on vacation, things get missed or they get tired if they’re growing quickly, and they’re not organized. All of those things are risks that a team like Proper doesn’t let happen because we have more than one person while working on your portfolio. We could do that and your pricing is still fixed. That’s one of the ways that we help alleviate those sorts of risks from that setup but that might be the right set up for some people. Jason: Yeah, I’m sure every property manager that’s brought anybody else in to touch anything financial in their business has noticed some really ugly mistakes that they’re having to clean up. They’re having to reissue their statements, they’re having to undo or apologize for a notice to quit or something that went out to the tenant that shouldn’t have. Let’s compare this now to just going and getting an accountant, like somebody maybe, “I’m going to go hire a local accountant. They know my area, they’ll get to know my business. Steve down the street, this guy, CPA.” Let’s throw stones at that now. Kyle: The biggest downside to that scenario is that they’re often doing things in arrears. The accountant isn’t there, the CPA isn’t there every day to do and process invoices or reconcile the bank account. They usually come in the first week of the next month to catch up on everything. The client isn’t super organized, they’re going to have to be digging through things, distracting their clients, asking them questions about stuff that happened three or four weeks ago. Which can be a big challenge. You might be able to navigate through that and create some processes, but that can be burdensome. Even more at a time sucks especially if people on the go are not doing things the way they should be along the way. With our team, we’re reconciling bank accounts on a daily basis as transactions go through. We’re processing invoices instantaneously as they come through. There are benefits of us essentially being an extension of your team, just maybe not sitting in your office, but having the same people every day in and out doing that work for you as you go. The other thing about the traditional CPA firm is they’d rather do the higher margin advisory work, tax consulting. It’s expensive for them to do the low-level bookkeeping. They’ll do it for a relationship, but they don’t necessarily like doing it. We actually get a lot of referrals from CPA firms who have clients who need property accounting done at an affordable price. Jason: You go get an accountant, they’re looking at things after the fact, they’re pointing out things you need to clean up, they’re disrupting your day. You’re having to communicate with them, you’re trying to find the problem they’re pointing out rather than these things being taken care of on a day-to-day basis. If you guys fix something that’s messed up within a day or even two, it’s dealt with. Thirty days later, some stuff to undo your mess. Kyle: Correct. Jason: What are some other alternatives to going without Proper? I guess doing it themselves. Kyle: Yeah, doing it themselves but again you’re constantly fighting that growth battle. How do I get to the next stage, whether it’s right? We all look for leverage to put us into that next zone. We get a lot of clients coming to us who want to grow. They get to the point of, “I can’t do anymore. I need a partner to get to the next stage.” We get people who’ve been burned by other accounting partners who maybe just don’t have the same quality control so now they’re looking for a new partner that isn’t going to mess things up that they don’t have to keep an eye on. I think because we focus exclusively on property managing companies, we’re not doing restaurants, we’re not doing eCommerce businesses. We’re 100% real estate accounting. That gives a bit of confidence in partnering with someone like us. Jason: Got it. If you’re working with some sort of accounting bookkeeping firm, you’re having to force the system, and you’re having to explain to them what you do and that rent’s going to come in, and certain amounts are going to be taken out, and all of those kinds of mess, and they just don’t get it. You’re having to use every time, like change the account rep that’s working with you this company has turned over. That can be a mess, you can guess it. Any other frequently asked questions that people come in to look at your firm would maybe want to hear on this podcast? Kyle: How quickly we can get started with people or whether we can help them retool their software stack. Another one we get quite a bit and gotten quite a bit recently is “Can you handle our overflow accounting?” As in they might already have a full accounting team with that capacity that they’re hungry to grow, and they want to buy four portfolios in the next quarter 400–500 units each. “Can we engage you guys to help do the mapping and the chart of accounts to our chart of accounts and the monthly accounting into a ready to transition them from whatever software they are on now to ours?” We handle a bit of our work as well or even maybe some ad hoc research of which one would outgrow this solution, what else should we look to do. We can scope in that sort of work and continue to partner with them on their growth. Jason: Okay, pricing. If we can really give any numbers here but if you can help people understand how do you price this out, how affordable this is, how does this work? Kyle: Great question. Our pricing scale is part of our client’s scale. As in the price per unit drops, the number of units continues to rise. We might start out someone with $12.99 per unit, we might have 100 units. Then if they get up to 2000 plus, we could get as low as $6.99 per unit. We calculate on a monthly basis and as the unit count fluctuates we adjust the pricing, so it’s a fixed note cost for them each month based on their unit count. If we don’t have to work on 100 units that they lost last month then cool, their fees are going to reflect that. So, between $12.99 a unit and $6.99 per unit per month for a full suite service. Jason: Got it. Well no matter how you work the numbers, doing that here at my screen, it’s going to be a lot cheaper than even a part-time employee generally would be. That’s handling the stuff, that’s a single weak link in the chain, that can be a bottleneck, that might get sick, go on vacation, or whatever, or yourself holding the entire company back because maybe this is not your area of genius or your life’s purpose to handle all this stuff. Kyle: Yup, exactly. We don’t necessarily provide à la carte services or our different functions of the accounting process other than accounts payable. We know that AP typically takes up about 60% of the time across the entire accounting function. We can get scale on AP pretty quickly especially with automation. If we’ve got someone who’s looking to maybe test us out, try before they buy sort of thing, we might take on just AP for them or maybe 60% of their workload at an appropriate price point for them to handle just AP, then move that into taking on the rest of their accounting services. Otherwise, we get people who just say, “We need this, let’s get started right now.” We’ll work with their team, get up to speed in a very short period of time, and then take everything off their plate. Jason: It’s just crazy to imagine that some of the property managers are going to listen to this. You’re dealing with some of the stuff, you’re running into headaches, you’re frustrated, this could be dealt with based on what Kyle’s saying here in like a month. It could be literally off your plate and your life could be infinitely easier. Kyle: That’s very true. We do start taking stuff off their plate in the first week or two but that first 2–4 weeks we like to really just make sure we’ve got a good understanding of what’s going on so that mistakes don’t happen, so that by week 4, we’re fully optimizing, we’re ready to roll. Jason: Cool. Well, I’ve gotten too deep with you and some of the members of your team and I know you guys are sharp. This sounds even better than what I thought we were going to be talking about today, so it sounds pretty exciting. I’m sure you’ll get some people reaching out that are running into some difficulties [...] off the top of my head that has been complaining about some of the stuff so it should be interesting to see the attraction you get on this episode. Kyle: The main thing, Jason, that we wanted to do is really give our clients their time back and give them the confidence and reliance on this financial that every month they got to deliver to their owners without having to worry, want it to be consistent, and want it to be high quality. We want them to not have to fear about getting right or spending time checking things. We want to be their partner in growth. We look for clients who want to grow and are like-minded with us to really help transform their business. Jason: I think those types of clients are my type of clients. These are the people that are focused on growth, so awesome. This is the Door Grow Show so hopefully, the people listening are that type of people. How do people get in touch with Proper? How do they get started? What’s the next step for those who might be listening that might be interested? Kyle: My email is [email protected]. You can check out our site proper.ai. Shoot us a note. We’d love to do a free consultation for you, show you a little bit about how we work. We’re happy to be in touch with any of our customers as well if you want to reference check us. Please reach out, and we’d love to work with anyone who’s interested. Jason: Awesome. Kyle, thanks for being on the DoorGrow Show. Kyle: Thanks for having us, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge in getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Are you a property manager who loves or hates creating systems by leveraging technology? Do you enjoy or dislike doing inspections, dealing with tenant issues, and handling renewals? Have you considered putting processes and people in place to automate your business? Today, I am talking to Paul Kankowski, a real estate investor with more than 200 doors. Paul increased systems to build a better property management business. He describes how he created computer-based processes for his employees to do everything his way, the same way, the right way. You’ll Learn... [03:10] One-man Show: Learn how to get the job done right and then do what you want. [04:41] Paul prefers to create processes and systems to solve problems. [05:29] No Secret Sauce: NARPM speaker/expert on automated processes/systems.  [07:29] Paradise is Possible: People make more money, if they have good systems. [08:39] Fines: Do I charge? Do I not charge? Decision made by process, not employee.  [09:25] Everything that doesn't have a process, Paul deals with until he creates one. [10:52] Manuals and How To Videos: From simple checklists to 195+ steps to follow.  [13:37] First Process: Tackle the one that's losing you the most money. [16:40] Make or Break and Placing Blame: Mistakes are made by processes or people.  [25:40] People as Process: Property management will never be completely automated. [29:30] Retention vs. Growth: Give good customer service and don't let doors leave.  [36:20] Stay in Your Space: Identify what energizes or drains you, then offload them.  Tweetables Mistakes are made when processes are broken or employees skip steps. Be involved in your systems. Know how they're running for your business to run right. Processes are not a secret sauce that everyone has to have a different one.  Why people like systems: They make more money, if they have a good system. Resources PM Systems Conference (Aug. 10-13, 2020, in Las Vegas) AppFolio Asana Process Street Podio Wolfgang Croskey Mark Cunningham Landlord Source Property Meld DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar  DGS 76: Outsourcing Rules for Small, Medium and Large Companies with Todd Breen of VirtuallyinCredible DGS 69: HireSmart Virtual Assistants with Anne Lackey DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today I am hanging out with Paul Kankowski. Welcome to the show, Paul. I'm excited to have you on. I told you in the green room that I was really excited to have you because this is a topic I think everybody would be interested in. Everybody loves this idea of creating systems in the property management business, figuring out how to leverage technology. Before we get into this topic, qualify yourself. Tell everybody about you. You’ve done some really cool things in the property management space connected to this. Introduce yourself. Pau: Hi, my name is Paul Kankowski. I'm out here in Temecula, California, this is Southern California. I have over 200 doors right now. We're not huge, but we have increased our systems in order to make ourselves better. I actually started in education. I was a school principal and a math teacher for 18 years, and I was a real estate investor. I've been a real estate investor for over 20 years. I bought a lot of properties and when the crash happened, I became a flipper. I bought a lot of rental properties and people were doing a really crappy job in my area. Now I actually know a lot of property managers in my area, but back then I didn't. At the time, I just didn't have anyone that could do the job right, so I started taking some NARPM classes and I started using that to manage my own properties. I only cared about managing my own properties and family for the first two or three years, and then I went into that to turn it into a business. Since I've turned into a business, now, I don't want to manage everyday things. I don't want to be doing inspections. I don't want to be doing all the stuff that you have to do as a one-person show. We have eight employees and I've created processes and systems so that they do everything that is done by computer and everything in the same way, I can work on higher-level things, more networking, and doing stuff that is more enjoyable in the industry. Jason: More enjoyable for you, right? Because some entrepreneurs hate that stuff. Paul: Yes. More enjoyable, in the sense, that I don't like doing inspections. I don't do them anymore. I don't like dealing with some tenant issues. I don't like dealing with renewals, but I like everything being done my way. I like it being done well. I like it to be done the same type every way. Before (as you know) I have to get my hands on everything to make sure things are being done, so we are giving the best customer service. Now, we have systems in place, so I know that things are being done the way we state it and ought to just hope that my employees are doing it the right way. Jason: Right. What's cool about Paul, for those watching, is Paul's built this business around himself and what he wants to spend his time doing, versus what most business owners think they should or have to do. You get to do things you enjoy doing on a daily basis, which really is different for every single entrepreneur. Paul: Yeah, it's great. I like doing the processes and systems are working on them, but I can't. I was a math teacher for 12 years, so systems and stuff are like math problems. If you have a problem, how are you going to solve it and how do you solve them the same way each time? It also (I think) a great way for people to hire people that can do it for them, to get it done right, but you have to be involved in your systems. I don't care if you don't like the math portion of it. It's just very important that you know how they're running so that your business will run right. Jason: Right. You can't just stick your head in the sand and throw it at somebody and expect that it's going to be done well. Paul: I agree. Jason: Let's take a step back. Everybody listening to this, I want to point this out, too. You’ve run some conferences related to automation and technology. You've got some things going related to that, you didn't mention that. You're an expert at this. You’ve spoken at NARPM, the Broker-Owner, I think, related to this, or the national conference or something like that. Paul: I spoke at the national conference in San Diego. It was something similar to this. I have had four conferences on systems and I have a systems conference. My next one's in August, that will be our 5th one. This has been really good. It's a small conference, they only allow 50 property managers to go do it. It's a workshop, not a conference, I always like to say, because it's not a bunch of speakers speaking. It's a lot of time you getting down and dirty, actually doing the processes, having fun with property managers, and really getting in conversations. “How is your move out? What's your move out different?” Sitting there and discussing with other people what they're doing and then creating the process on people that have already paved the path to do good process. I find that when you sit there and you work with five or six other people, you learn where your inefficiencies are, what's great about someone else's processes that you can copy. Processes are not this secret sauce that everyone has to have a different one. You can take a good process and you can adapt it to your business. That's what our workshops are about. It's a really great time. They usually sell out in about three to four weeks. I usually have a long waiting list afterward, just because we do keep it small. I don't want to get so big where people can't actually sit and have a conversation with each other. Jason: I like the idea. Let's talk about your business. Let's paint a picture of what's possible or what you see other business owners do that had been in these conferences, some of the people that are plugged in, they've got technology, they're leveraging it. I want to paint a picture of paradise or a possibility for those that are listening because I think a lot of people listening are going, “It sounds so complicated. It's probably not possible. I'm sure what I'm doing is nearly just as good.” What are you noticing in your own business? Maybe in terms of margins, systemization, and staff? Paul: This is the biggest thing and this is why people like systems. You'll make more money if you have a good system. I'll look at HOA. HOA was an issue a year ago. We tackled; we were not doing as good of a job. We were handling every HOA issue as its own individual thing. We weren't getting emails to owners. We were dealing with the HOAs, but we weren't letting the owners know, “Hey, we're dealing with it every week.” I lost a big owner because they thought we weren't dealing with the HOA issue, even though we were, but I lost it because of perception. The perception was they were getting email weekly, so we create a process where the owners get updated every week on the condition of the HOA when the things are going to be resolved. The other things that would make more money, first off, we have owners that are happy. Second, the fines that we’re giving to tenants, they were happening 100% of the time. When it’s not in a set process, a lot of times I'm like, “I'm not going to charge that because it wasn't that big a deal. He left the trash can out.” Well no, it is a big deal and it's a $25 charge. You're going to get a charge no matter what now because it's in the steps. The employee who's doing it doesn't have to make that decision, “Do I charge? Do I not charge? Is this one of those things?” That's a step that might have been missed. We've noticed our revenue—when we have processes—doing really well, it goes up dramatically. I would say HOA fines, we might have a couple of $100 in HOA fines the year before and now, it's thousands of dollars. That's a huge difference because we were not being consistent on the fine. That's a huge thing about the process. The other thing is everything that doesn't have a process, I have to deal with. Here's one that we have not created yet, owners leaving us, and we have to exit them. That’s the next process we’re making in the next two months. Right now, when an owner leaves, I have to do all the work because I don't have a process. I'm afraid that my employees might do it their way. They might make a mistake. They might not take them out of the property mill. I'm going to be paying $2 a month for that door that’s not even active because it's not been deactivated or up fully own and that it's $1.50 a month. All these little things that you think, “It's only $2, only $1.50.” You have 20 doors that you're being charged $2 a month, that’s $40. Over a year, you're looking at $480. You have to have good processes so you don't skip minor steps. You say, “Well, I don’t skip.” If it's not written down, you make mistakes. You might not make mistakes but your employees are going to. They're not bleeding the business day-to-day that they're not going to sleep thinking about the business like you are as the property owner. If you write it down and you have every detail there, not only you're going to make more money, you're also not going to lose money from having money just shot through. Jason: Okay. You were just talking about a process that you haven't yet created, that you're working on right now. When you get into this process of creating a new process, how involved are these? Are these like insane, and they have lots of different steps? You're thinking of every nuance and every detail or are a lot of your processes simple? Paul: When I started, they were really simple. When I started, I was Asana, it was a checklist. It was a checklist and everything was the same and it was fine. It was better than nothing, but it wasn't good. Now, my utilities processes are 195 steps. Jason: Your utilities process. Paul: Are 195 steps. When someone does utility, it's about eight steps for them to finish it because one of the things is every utility is listed and so you put SDG&E, or you put Edison, a different step is going to come up for every single utility. It asks you questions and then Neil, my person has to go through 195 steps, they go through nine steps. They go through SDG&E, then it tells them the phone number to call, who they have to talk to. Sometimes, one of our processes for a little water company we deal with it says, “Talk to Susan,” because Susan's the one in the office that they have to talk to in order to pay this bill because this is [...] water district, and they're just kind of backward, I believe that's the one. It says every detail. There are videos there. If I get a new person on, they can watch a video and the video shows them step-by-step how we do, how we put the invoice in AppFolio, how we do everything. It's a training tool for my new employees. I just had a new employee last week. The first thing we tell them is, “You need to go through Process Street. You need to watch these processes and you need to go through this 20 times,” and then I want you to try it, without me even instructing you and see if you know how to do the process. I'm going to watch you do it. If you know how to do it, then I created a good process. If you watch these videos and go through it 20 times and you still don't have a clue how to do your job, then my process isn't good enough at this stage I'm at right now. You can be as small as just wanting a checklist and having people skip steps, which is fine, but there's more chance for mistakes to being so detailed that it's a training manual for every person that comes on. Jason: I love it. For those listening, you're currently using Process Street. We had Process Street founder, CEO on the show before. It was a great episode. Make sure you go back and listen to that episode where we're talking about Process Street. We use it internally here at DoorGrow. I think it's a great software. Now, if somebody is looking to get started with this, or they're showing up at your conference for the first time, they're one of these 50 people, they've got the deer in the headlights, eyeballs going on, and they're like looking around, they're feeling really inseminated, what is the first process that usually people should tackle? Paul: The one that's losing you the most money. The one that's a hemorrhage point. It’s usually either moving, leasing, those are usually two of the big ones, move out. It's funny, right now, we've changed our compass around a little bit. I'm doing a pre-session on the first day, so we're doing it for four hours, where I'm going to work with a small group (10 people), and we're going to break down your process and build it together for the first four hours. You're right, I have people at all stages of my conference now, I have people that have been to every single one of mine. This August, it will be their 5th time going and I have people that's their first time going. We want to give the difference between those that are first-timers and those that have been to four of them. When I started this systems conference two years ago, it was two years ago last September, I started it because I thought my processes sucked. I hired a speaker to come and speak to us, and he was pretty expensive. This is how this conference has started. I put on Facebook, “Anybody wants to share on the speaker cost, we’ll just meet in Vegas.” We had 10-12 companies there and it just started because 12 of us got together, we split the cost of the speaker, and we went together and hung out. We had such a great time, we found that it was so great just talking with other property managers, that we kind of tweaked it a little bit, and then we’re like, “Okay, we are kind of the speakers because we are in the industry. We know what each other needs.” Now it's all about helping each other. If you go to this, you're going to the four hours (in the beginning where you're going to get that), and then just go and sit with other property managers, see what they're doing, write little notes, and get your checklist. Start as basic as you can. I have one guy that will only use Google. Everything is Google sheets, but he has his steps written down and it works for him. Other people are Asana, other people Process Street. Other people like Wolfgang Croskey, have Podio everything automated. All his emails are sent automatically. Everybody that goes, they're using different software, they're using different things, but their whole goal is to help each other and to make it so that your process will be good. Jason: Yeah. I would imagine one of the best things about being there, talking with other people, seeing and hearing how they do things, you're just going to get ideas, and there's a lot of ways to implement that idea. A process is software-agnostic in general. It's a process. You need certain steps to be done, it can be done by humans, it could be done by technology like Podio, it could be done by whatever, but it needs to be done. You need to know what the vision is so that you can create it. Sometimes, this just comes from getting ideas from other people. “Oh my gosh, that’s a great idea,” and you're doing that in your business. “We should do that too,” and then, “How can we do that with the tools and resources that we're currently using?” Paul: Jason, I would say, to start a good process, the first thing you do is you get every employee that's working on a process on the table. You get a big white sheet of paper and you write down, “What are you doing?” This is our creation of the process. Our process is to get them right. It’ll take about two months. It sounds like a long time, but it's really not because of the process we do to get our processes. We start out by getting all the people involved in the process, and we write down, “What steps are you doing? What do you do?” We don't skip anything. After we get all of the steps down, I send it to someone in my office named David who will sit there and put it into a Process Street with all the bells and whistles, all the changes, and when this is going to happen. We sit there, and we go through it, and I try to break it. I go through every single step and I see where it ran into a problem. That's the very first month. I only work for an hour here and an hour there. I work on for an hour and say, “Hey, this is tweaked,” and “Are we clear?” He fixes that. I look at it and say, “Okay, this is good.” After that, we give it to the person who’s actually going to be doing the job. Their job for the first month is to try to find where the process doesn't work and to either, doing the process to be like, “Oh my gosh, we forgot to put the charge into the tenant,” or whatever it is. If they find something wrong with the process, then I'm going to praise them beyond belief because they broke my process. Breaking my process is a good thing. Throughout the entire year or whenever we have a process, whenever a problem occurs in my company—an HOA gets missed, and we have some major issues with some HOA—we look through the process, and we say, Was it a mistake by the employee, or the mistake by the process?” If it’s a mistake by the process, we fix the process right then, right there and get it right again. If the mistake is by the employee, we show them, “Look here are the steps, what happened? Why did you skip it?” “Oh, I'm sorry. I just skipped this step,” now they know that it was them. It's really easy. In the past when you just have, “ Hey, here's what you do with an employee, you're always blaming the employee,” a lot of times, it is not the employee’s fault, it's your process. Jason: Yeah, that makes sense. A broken process ensures you're going to have a bad employee a lot of times. Paul: I agree. Jason: I'm going to recap, this is what I wrote down. It takes about two months. You're going to first document it, sit down as a team, then you're going to build it, then you're going to break it, then you're going to fix it, then you're going to test it. It sounds like over time, you're going to optimize it based on what feedback you're getting from your team, and what feedback you're getting from clients, tenants, owners, and problems that are coming out. Paul: Exactly and that process is never done because the second something goes wrong in our company, you look at what the process is. If you have a move-in and the move-in is a disaster, it's either the employee or process, and you have to check and find out. It's so easy when you have a good process, to find out where the breakdown occurred. Jason: I think this is an interesting thing to point out because I get a lot of people that come to me, and they're like, “I need the perfect magic owner's manual. Where can I buy that?” or “I need this,” and I tell them, “Every single property management business is so unique, so different. How you want things done is going to be different and no business is ever perfect,” it's never just done. I think a lot of property managers think, “Well, I just need this one thing that I could just strap onto my business and it'll finally be perfect, it’ll finally be done, and I won't have to ever mess with it again.” I think that's just not reality. You’ve got things really well dialed in and you're still working on stuff. Paul: I bought multiple different companies through NARPM that I'm glad I bought them because I did look at them. I can tell you right now, there are some things I bought that I never looked at, we never really did, and it says, “Blank your property manager company name,” it is very, very detailed and stuff like that, but until you sit down, if you buy something, it gives you a basis to start working on your thing, don't think, “Oh, I spent $1000 on this. Now, I can just implement it in my company,” you have a framework. By the time you're done rewriting that, it's going to be 50%-60% different (I think) than what you bought. It's still going to help you. It's still going to help you pay Mark Cunningham, or any of these people, or Landlord Source for something that they have, is going to help you in getting your brain thinking about what you need to do for that role or position, but how Mark Cunningham or Landlord Source do their business is not the same way. I don't do my business the same way as anyone and I get a lot of their information. I look at them and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, it’s really cool how they did that,” but then we might have a different law in California, a different ruling, a different way of doing what we have to. You can't assume that what someone else do you can just implement in your company on day one. Jason: Yeah. For a lot of us, it's easier to create something. Especially, for starting from scratch. If you're a startup, or you're a new property manager, you never documented your processes, sometimes it's helpful to have some resources to look at. It might not even be that great. Sometimes the bad processes with the bad ideas are even better because you can look at that and the contrast from what you know you're doing and what you're reading about, you're like, “Okay, we don't want to do anything like this, and I want to make sure that we avoid these things.” I like the idea that you intensely try to break your processes. Paul: Yeah. The other thing I want to add is, I think automation is amazing, but this is my fear of automation. I will automate a lot of my processes, and they’ll be better automated than it is something that we're going to work on. But any bad process that’s automated, you're not going to see that's a bad process. If you have an email that’s automated going out and says, “Dear tenant’s last name.” Putting the tenant’s last name because you're not actually having any human do it at the beginning, then you're going to be automating that for 70-80 emails that are going to be sending “Dear tenant’s last name.” I think you need to do a process for a while by hand. You need to have an actual human being doing the process, checking the boxes, and making sure it's right, so they could find things that are wrong. When you get a process really good, then your next step is to automate, because yes, it's great to save time and have an email every week go out that tells them about their HOA violation or tells them about the moving processes. I still look at emails every once in a while and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, we forgot to change the wording from this move-in email to this move-in email saying the second week.” If it's automated, it’s going to be automated. Something automated bad is going to be badly automated forever. All I'm saying is that a lot of people want to go from no process to everything being automated, and them not being involved. I don't think that's possible. Wolfgang Croskey, he’s automated, and he does an amazing job, but I don't think he went from not having a process to everything running on its own, and him not involved in it. Jason: No. There was a coaching plan for a good while and I know he didn't start at Podio. I think he was using Process Street and even before that, he was working on stuff. I love the idea. You got to do it manually. A lot of property managers are already doing a lot of things manually. They're doing it that way first. They now need to document it, then they need to figure out, how can we start to systemize this? How can we create consistency? How can we automate this? How can we make sure it's being done the same way every single time and there are checks and balances? That's one of the reasons I like Process Street because you can build a process and that’s one step, and you just paste it in a Word document if you have to. Really, really low level and maybe that's the best you've got. Eventually, you can break it into some multiple steps. Then you can get it into something crazy like you're 100 plus step thing that's got context-sensitive options based on what you pick, and it's going to give you different tasks to do depending on what options you're selecting, and you can get really crazy (if that makes sense). The cool thing about having a process though is you can continually improve it. It can get better over time. That means that you're lowering operational costs, you're lowering drag, you're improving your team member’s ability to accomplish things and win, and get things done. Now, what do you think about the challenge of people as a process? What I mean is, everybody has team members that they need in order to think. If somebody is making decisions, they're planning, they're coming up with ideas. Then you have team members that really are operating like a computer. Their job is just to follow the process. How do you balance this in your own company and determine, is this just anybody on the planet that could just follow this checklist, or they need some customer service skills, and they need to be able to communicate? How do you balance the discrepancy that people have that are fearful of processes because they're like, “I want my clients to be taken care of really well.” Paul: You still have to think. You still have to go through it. You still look and see what's going on. How many of us property owners, managers, et cetera, spend nights thinking about everything we have to do the next day? You write steps down on a sheet of paper before you go to bed and then you try to get it out of your mind so the next day you don't forget it. You're not doing that because you don't want to care about your business or you don’t what I think about it, you're doing it because you don't want to be staying up at 1:00 in the morning, sitting there and trying to think what you need to do. Everything we do in life, if something tells us how to do it, then we can start thinking about things that are higher level. You can take your employees. If you could take a lease renewal process and you can make it so that every single time it's done correctly, it's done right, no one wants to think about it, then there's no stress on these renewals. Now, when something does come up that’s stressful, people that are higher level can think about the things that are higher level. You have a maintenance issue where someone falls off the roof and you're getting sued. You're not going to process for that. Now, instead of you thinking about lease renewals and wasting your time on something that can be automated, something that can be just automatic, you can spend your time on high-level items, and you're going to have employees that need to spend their time with high-level items, so you could spend your time on other high-level items. Probably the management will never be completely automated. There are companies that say, “Oh, we could just automate everything,” no, you can automate a lot of stuff so you can spend your time on the 10% of the stuff that really, really matters, that’s really stressful, and that can't be automated. Jason: We talked about this on the show I think probably several times with different companies, but ultimately, the goal (in my opinion) when it comes to technology, when it comes automation, when it comes to systems, is to take off the plate of yourself and your team members, the stuff that's really redundant, the stuff that could be systemized so that you can focus more on depth. I think that's where property managers are going to be able to compete with the big conglomerates, the big companies that are super tech-based, is that it's going to be about relationships. Property management is a high touch relationship type of business. If process and systems allow you to create a more personal touch, to go deeper, to spend more time communicating more intimately with more depth with tenants, residents, owners, then I think you're creating a business that is going to have significant value, and it's going to have longevity because it’s built on relationships. Ultimately, it's people that are giving you the money. As people, we tend to like humanity, and we tend to like people. Paul: If you're spending, as a business owner, 20 hours a month on something that can be automated or something that can be done by someone at a less level, you have to think of your time as value. When I had 30 doors, I did everything. When I had 50 doors, I was still doing everything. You have to figure out where you value your time. I have five remote employees and I have two employees in my office. People are like, “Oh my gosh, that's a ridiculous amount of employees you have for the number of doors you have.” We’re profitable, and we’re profitable because we're in California, we price ourselves well. It's the customer service level we give our competition. Some of them are missing the mark. They are not giving that customer service, so we are giving it. Someone is not going to leave because of some deep discount or just giving really bad customer service where retention is so huge. I'm seeing so many property managers talk about retention being better than growth because if you are losing 20% or 30% of your doors, all your time and ability is going to just stay even. People are spending $500–$1000 a door to get a new lead, but there are others that walk out the door. My thing is to give really good customer service and don't let those doors leave you. They are going to leave you because they are selling, but don't let them leave you because you are not doing the job right. Jason: I find that with clients. A lot of times, the issue with retention. I agree, retention is a significant thing. The issue with retention is often created during the sales and onboarding so if you can really systemize, automate, and build a really solid process during the sales and onboarding, you've got a really solid sales and onboarding process that really develops a strong relationship, that would carry you for years with some clients. Paul: I agree. Jason: And the trust level is higher even if the communication (later on) is really low. If you created them in the beginning, they are going to trust you and it's going to be a lot stronger. If that's not done effectively during onboarding and sales and isn't created well, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear. They are going to be questioning everything that you do. You might end up a lot more operational costs related to that, and they are probably not going to stay with you as well. Paul: I agree. We have one person whose new onboarding is their main priority. It's making sure that new owners have a good experience and are treated well, and the onboarding experience is great. Never lose a customer. I think one of the podcasts I heard about that, I read the book. It was a great book. It's about customer service and taking it to the next level.  The thing is people will spend so much money on different things and then don’t answer the phone. If you can have your people working on the process, working on other things, then you answer your phone, you are not going to let that lead that. You just play when it clicks, $30, $20 get away. Processes are huge for your business to me, they are the number one building block.  I don't think everyone on all the boards is always, "How can I grow? How can I grow? How can I grow?" I think growth is important, but if you grow and all of a sudden, you add 100 doors in one year and it was just you, you don't have a process and everything is in your head, then you are going to lose all those doors because you are not going to be able to give. When you had 30 doors, and you go from 30 to 130 and you’re at the customer service, you gave those 30 people. You are not going to be able to give 130 because all of a sudden, then you are hiring someone. They are going to be like, "Well, how do I do it?"  "Well, you just got to listen to my head." No one can read your head. So, even if you are a single person that's by themself, if you want to give a task away, then start working on the process for it as soon you have to give that away. If you are at 50, 60, 70 doors, I would tell those people it's more important for you to start working your processes right now unless you plan just staying at 50 or 60 and never want to grow.  Jason: This is one of the greatest secrets that I coach entrepreneurs when they come into our program. One of the very first things to start them with is helping them get clarity on where they can get leverage the quickest first. It's usually different for everybody. There are some similarities but the way to identify that is usually done through getting clear on where you are actually going. I have them do a time study, then I have them identify which things are energizing them and which things are draining them, then which things are strategic versus tactical. The strategic stuff grows your business, tactical stuff just keeps it going. Most of the process would work by its tactical work. The strategic work is what you are talking about doing in creating a new process. You are like, "We are going to work for this new process for the next two months when we get this dialed-in." That's what grows companies.  If you get to stay in your area of genius, the things you really enjoy doing as a business owner, and you've identified what does are because you are clear on which things are causing you grief and energizing you versus draining you, then you know exactly what to offload. You know what to give to your assistant and different people. We've had different great companies here talking about [...], hire smart VAs, great assistants. We've had companies talking about virtual team members and whatnot. Those are great episodes if you want to listen to those on the DoorGrow Show. We touched a lot on those different ideas. Ultimately, one takeaway you want everybody to get is that everybody can have the property management business that they enjoy, that they love having, and if we built around you and what your unique strengths are, maybe you love the accounting side, maybe you love doing the phone calls, the customer service, connection with people. Maybe you’re a people person, maybe you geek out on systems and process, but you can do whatever you want to do in your business if that's your intention. I think we get stuck sometimes having the business that we think that we need to do like the job that we need to do in the business instead of the business that we want. Paul: I would agree with that 100%. Last year, we grew 80 doors so that's probably the average of what our average. We are averaging between 5 and 10 doors a month. We haven't really started spending money on marketing because I really wanted to first get everything correct and right. One of my property management friends (who is my mastermind guru) calls me once a month and asks me, "Hey, Paul. Did you talk to a tenant this month?" and I'm not allowed to talk to tenants because it was taking time away that I could be doing other high-level things and I need to trust my team to deal with my tenants.  Now, if it gets to a certain level and I have to talk to a tenant, then that's a different call, but I have to make sure that I am actually thinking about when I talk to a tenant. When a tenant calls because they are pissed-off about the fact that we paid the utility bill and make every charge, I have to trust my team’s going to handle it, my team's going to do it, and that I am not going to get involved in it because I find when I get involved in it, then I might do something that wasn't like the process we agreed upon as a team. I even had to, as an owner, that's $25. You are talking for 10 minutes, not worth my time for $25.  I have to be out of it because I will be like, “Yeah, just waive the $25. I don't want to talk to them anymore.” It's really important that no matter who you are, that you follow what you tell your team to follow. A lot of times, you can do it yourself, you made your own decision, but once you make a decision on how you are going to run your process or what your rules are, you have to stick to it company-wide.  I laugh because it's usually us, as the owner, are the worst culprits of not following what we are going to do. The employees do it because a lot of times my employees’ bonuses are based on serving certain goals so if I don't accept anything, they are like, "Man, you are hitting on my bonus. Don't be messing with my goals."  That's something I've learned is just find what you like. Find what you are good at and get a group of property managers around you that can be like a mastermind group that can keep you focused because you need other owners to tell you, "Stop doing that," because your employees won't always tell you exactly what you need to do, what you need to hear.  The other thing is when systems aren't working right. Now, there's a system in there where my employees can say, "Well, you didn't follow the system here." Every person is accountable for checking off what they have to do in the system. When I don't check it off at the end of the week, an email goes out to every person who missed any steps of the system. I have an employee that's checking that. My name is on there. I miss a part of my system and it will list. I never want to be there with three or four items that I missed because that would look really bad. That's another thing, the accountability, I'm not doing the accountability part. I have an employee on Saturday that answers the phones and her job on Saturday if it’s not very busy, is to go through every single process in [...] and write down who hasn't met their deadlines for that process. Jason: Yeah, accountability. Paul: It works really well. None of us wants to see our name on that list, so everybody is getting their stuff done and it's not because I'm going to yell at them, it's because we don't want to be mass emailed to the whole team that you didn't do your job. Jason: It creates a lot of pressure which is a positive thing. That means you don't have to come down on them all the time. There's this lateral pressure, this internal peer pressure in which most employees and team members are recognition-based. That's how they are most motivated rather than financially, so they want to be seen as doing a good job, and they want to be recognized. That's the opposite. There's that pressure, so they want to make sure they avoid that. Paul: Exactly. Jason: It makes sense.  Paul: And we also do our bonuses based on not being recognized. Even my bonuses. Everything is based on getting your job done. What I saw in the past, we didn't have someone that was going through it weekly. We had some process where they’d be open three or four weeks and not being completed yet. Now, it's very rare for the process. It will definitely not be there if you are listed on that one week. If you are listed in the second week for the same one, then you are going to have a conversation with me, then you’re going to me. Our processes are never missed for more than 5–7days, which is huge.  The only thing that I'm still trying to figure out is maintenance because I use Property Meld and I'm still trying to figure out how I can make sure my maintenance team doesn’t get missed. Property Meld does good ways of doing that. That's something I'm currently working on is how on a weekly basis, we can check to make sure none of that's missed.  Everything that you do, you got to find using the software systems that will work to check on the system.  Jason: All right. Paul, I think it has been really fascinating. I think everybody listening got a lot of value out of this. I loved your tips about where to start. Anything else that you throw out there and want to say to anybody before we wrap this up about creating systems in the business? Paul: I just tell them the dates. Our website is pmsystemsconference.com and the dates of our conference will be August 10th through 13th. It's in Las Vegas and it will be in Rio. It is not up yet, we should have it up next week or two. We are still working on it. We just got the rooms and booked everything yesterday. We just booked for August, but it's a really good time. Last time in January, we went ziplining on one of the nights. We also try new fun stuff because if you are working all day, you also want to have fun. There was a time we went bowling one night which is a great time to get together with a small number of property managers and get to know them. I enjoyed it.  People always ask me how long I am going to do it, I'm going to do it until I stop getting fun. When it becomes a job, then I'll stop doing that workshop, but now I go there and it's like seeing a bunch of old friends.  Jason: Cool, love it. All right, Paul, thanks for coming to the DoorGrow show. I appreciate you. Paul: Thank you so much, Jason. You have a wonderful day.  Jason: All right, so check out his website. Check that out. Thanks everybody for tuning in. If you have a moment, make sure to like and subscribe. If you are watching this on YouTube, be sure to like and subscribe. If you are listening to this on a podcast on iTunes, then please leave us a review. We would love it. That would be great. If you are a property management entrepreneur, you are struggling, you are frustrated, you are not sure what you need to do in order to grow, there's a lot of different ways you can approach growth depending on what challenges you are dealing with now. We have solutions for various things here at DoorGrow that we can help you with, please reach out. You can check us out at doorgrow.com, and we will talk to you soon, everybody. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Why is your business remarkable? What are you doing differently that gives you a competitive advantage? Why should customers trust you over someone else? These are foundational elements that every entrepreneur should consider.  Today, I am talking to John Ray, formerly of Inspect & Cloud and now part of the DoorGrow team. John is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert who helps property management entrepreneurs grow revenue and attract new customers. You’ll Learn... [01:27] Internet Marketing: Seeking clarity, relevance, and truth through so much noise. [01:57] Seed Program: Training purpose of DoorGrowSecrets, not SEO. [03:38] Keywords and Rankings: Transparency and truth, not tricks, deliver value. [05:29] Can authority and expertise be effectively and successfully outsourced? [07:35] Deliverables and Outcomes: Steps in purpose-driven SEO content process. [10:00] Who are we in-service to? Don’t write directly to a search engine.  [11:25] Micromanagement Culture: Solopreneur businesses get stuck at 200-400 doors. [14:20] SEO’s Place in Property Management: Communicate authority in community to make conversions. [18:00] Does SEO make sense, right now? Do the right things at the right time.  Tweetables The higher the level of trust, the lower the level of price sensitivity. The worst thing that you can do for SEO is write directly to Google. SEO has a place in property management, as a way to communicate authority and make conversions. Do you need SEO to grow and be great? Resources DGS 27: Inspect & Cloud: Inspection Software For Property Managers  Inspect & Cloud DoorGrow Seed Program DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. I've got a very special guest today. He's been on the show before, Jon Ray. John, welcome. Jon: Hey, thanks for having me. Jason: Yeah. I think we're getting to a point now in terms of internet marketing and the internet where there's so much noise. People are looking for clarity, they're looking for things to be succinct. They're not looking for paragraphs and paragraphs of keyword targeted content. They're looking for relevancy. They're looking for the truth. That's a great way to stand out. Going back before, you talked about a business having a higher purpose. This is one of the things we focus on expressly in the seed program. We have a training called Purpose Secrets. I think it is the most important training in the program but it's not what people come to us for. They don't say, "Hey, I really like this." Once they get into it or want this, that's one of the most impactful things they can do—have a clear set of values, have a clear set of purpose behind what they do, and be able to relate that. It creates trust. That's ultimately what the website's job is to do, to create trust. Trust is what closes deals. Not tricking people. We also have city keyword landing pages and neighborhood keyword landing pages that will help the client I'm with input into the site to capture those longer tail keywords instead of just trying to focus on the main one market big, giant keyword. These are all things that we've thought about in our program to build out into, to prime the pond and get them started with all of these. It all helps with SEO but the program was never designed just for SEO. It's designed to create trust. It's designed to please people. The side effect is that some of our clients get rankings on some of these pages. Ultimately, for me, the most important thing was always if somebody lands on the page–whether it's through them doing prospecting, or going to real estate meetup group, or they handout a card, word of mouth, or whatever that is. If somebody goes to that page, it sells people on trusting them, and them being trustworthy rather than trying to manipulate Google and trick them into showing people the page. Jon: Right. There's a level of transparency, honesty, and alignment with truth that comes to actually delivering value versus just writing articles to hack the system. That means that in the customer's mind, maybe you're cutting corners on other things. To a certain extent, especially if someone knows the techniques that you're using and knows that you're just trying to manipulate the system, it leaves a bad taste in their mouth.  One of the things that you can do to deliver real value and to understand both what your customer wants and what Google is looking for, what the search engine's are looking for, is type in the keyword phrase that you want to rank for. Then search the web the way that your prospects are searching the web. Open all 10 of those websites and actually read the content on all 10 of those websites. Then take all that content in your mind, or have whoever's writing your content look at those 10 posts. For instance, for the neighborhood-specific pages that I was talking about, let's say you want to rank for property management Far West to Austin. You would write an article. First, you would type in "property management Far West, Austin '' into Google. You would see what Google thinks the experts and authority in that particular keyword phrase look like. You read all of the pages on page one of Google, you take notes at the type of things that are in those posts.  Then, you approach your article and you say, "How can I summarize everything that I felt was valuable in these articles?" Then, you go above and beyond to deliver value. If you can effectively do that for every single keyword, then Google will start to see you as the authority but it takes more time. It means that you just can't outsource this to somebody in another country. You have to have somebody who actually understands that neighborhood, who actually understands what’s valuable to property owners in that neighborhood, and who knows how to properly amalgamate all of that content that your competition is putting out, then rewrite it in a way that provides even more value while still answering all the same questions. Jason: I love it.  Jon: The foundational elements are always asking yourself why is my business remarkable? What are we doing that's different? What are our competitive advantages? Why should people trust me over the other 10 people on page one of Google? Most of the time, when you click through the top 10 results for any search term, the website is not aligned with any kind of value structure. They don't really have a competitive advantage statement that they're clearly communicating. That leaves a huge advantage for anyone who is purpose-driven, is showing up in the community in an interesting way to differentiate, and to be able to charge more money.  The interesting thing about aligning yourself with integrity is that when you're aligned with integrity, people will pay more money for your services. Jason: The higher the level of trust, the lower the level of price sensitivity. It's been proven. As a property manager, if you're listening to this, if you're constantly butting up against people that are price sensitive, you have a trust problem or you're targeting the wrong audience. You're targeting the worst list price—the most price sensitive people which are probably the people that you're getting through cold leads that don't trust you. You get a word of mouth, high trust, referral, they're way less price sensitive. Jon: It's such a vague statement to say, “Yeah, you need to be purpose-driven." Maybe we could talk a little bit about what that looks like in practicality, and some steps maybe someone could take without giving away all the Purpose Secrets in the DoorGrow seed program. I do think that it's important for somebody to be able to unpack that word "purpose" and understand what does that actually mean. Jason: Some of the deliverables and outcomes that our clients end up with—they may not make sense to people just listening to this call—they end up with a personal why statement which is where they're getting really clear on why they're doing what they're doing. That's a really difficult thing for people to figure out.  I have some really cool processes that I take people through. I came to that conclusion for myself. Then we figure out what the purpose is for their business so that they have a very succinct mission statement that people can actually remember which means it's not some b*llsh*t piece of document that is like huge paragraphs of stuff that nobody ever looks at and never uses. Nobody on the team, if you ask them, "What's our mission statement?" Nobody will be able to say it. We want something real that is memorable.  Then, we get into creating a client-centric mission where you're getting really clear on your target audience—who you want. You don't want every client. If you're in the space right now where you’re trying to take on anybody, and anybody you talk to you think you need to try and get them on, you're in a very uncomfortable, probably negative, space running your business right now. You probably have operational costs that are far higher than they should be because you're taking on people that you probably shouldn't be taking on. That's another thing. We get them really clear on who they want to serve and how they want to serve them. This keeps the business focused, aligned. As they're doing planning, they can challenge it against this measuring stick, so to speak. Whether they're still in alignment with their values. Jon: I want to pause you real quick there. You're moving quickly through this. I really want to focus on something that you said. Whether you're running a PPC campaign or pay per click campaign, whether you're doing SEO or whether you're just trying to determine how to make your business remarkable, which is then going to add fuel to whatever fire you're trying to soak.  The one question that I think is important to answer is who are we in service to? That is going to help align all of your content. You don't own a right to a search engine. The worst thing that you can do for a SEO is write directly to Google. Google doesn't care about your business, Google isn't your customer. What you want to do, and this could be a tangible exercise that somebody could take away from this podcast, is at the top of a sheet of paper, write, "Who are we in service to?" Then answer that question as many times as you can. Now, hang that over your computer or give it to the person who is creating your content. You should write all of your SEO articles, or any article or marketing or advertising campaign that you should write should be written as a love letter to the people that you wrote—that you put on that list. If you will do that and just make that small shift in perspective where all your content is targeted towards the people you're in service to, your campaigns will convert better. Jason: Yeah, I like it.  Some of the other things we get into than finding the values of the company, everything to create the right culture. One of the challenges I see—and I guess we're gravitating out of SEO here—is that property managers, businesses, tend to fall apart when they get to about 200-400 doors. This is a really painful category for property management business owners because they are operating still as a solopreneur, mindset-wise. They now have a team usually that they built around them without culture, without clarity and purpose, and without clarity and vision.  That means they haven't attracted the leaders that support them and make their lives easier. They basically got a pile of people that they need to micromanage and tell what to do. They're trying to force trust through the veins of their company. It's a painful place to be in. It gets more and more challenging. As they approach 400-500 units, most property management business owners are massively stressed out. That's silly because if you build a team the right way, your life and your day to day should get easier and easier with every person that you add. You're just doing it wrong. When we talk about the seed program being the ultimate foundation, it not only is a foundation to be able to eventually do SEO type work properly. It's a foundation for culture for their business so that they don't get stuck in that second sandtrap of 200-400 doors. They're unable to grow because they built the wrong team and they don't have culture. They're held back and they can't expand. Jon: Yeah. I'll bring that back to SEO. What you're talking about is being able to build a little space between the business and the visionary. The visionary entrepreneur should be able to focus on developing thought leadership and authority in the community with a powerful team full of integrity that can take any assignments that are put in there. At some point, some of that thought leadership and authority has to be extracted so that the team has it for use.  One exercise that you can do as a delegation management tool so that you're not having to optimize your website yourself is find somebody in your office who can help you compile the most important questions that your prospects—those people that you’re in service to—have. Just informally have someone in your office interview you as the authority and thought leader, ask you those questions, and record it. This video does not have to go online because I know a lot of people are afraid of video, they're afraid of putting themselves out there. This audio is just going to be internal unless you want it to be a public piece.  The value of this is that now, this person in your office has a recorded response of how you would guide a prospect or someone you're in service to through a particular question. They can transcribe that and use that as the foundational basis for creating a really compelling piece of content. I think that SEO definitely has a place in the property management industry. It's definitely a way to communicate your thought leadership and your expertise and to show up in your local community with authority which will then allow you to convert at a much higher level whether you're doing PPC, SEO, or just bringing in organic leads because you're remarkable. The exercises, I guess, that I would send somebody home with is one, any keyword that you want to rank for, any keyword phrase that you want to rank for, go and type it into Google right now. Open the 10 pages that are on page one of Google. See what kind of content Google thinks is valuable around that searchphrase. Then think about how you can essentially summarize all of the key points that Google thinks that are important in your own words, adding your own level of expertise, and authority. Then go above and beyond delivering even more value. That's a really good way to think about creating content. Two, at the top of the sheet of a paper, write, "Who am I inservice to?" Make a list of all the people that you want to be in service to. All of your content should be written as a love letter to those people because if you're speaking to them and just pick one on the list and write it as a personal letter to that one person, it's really difficult to write content to a group of people. But if you can identify customer avatars, someone on that list of people that you want to be in service to, act like you're writing a letter to them. Your content will be digested so much better. It will resonate at a more emotional level. Then three, think about some of the longer tail keywords. Instead of thinking that the only thing you need to be writing content for is this top level city name, then property management. Instead, think about some of the longertail things, the neighborhoods that you can rank for, the value that you can deliver on a page by talking about some of the landmarks, businesses, problems that you know are happening in that neighborhood, and how you're going to show up as the authority in that neighborhood.  If you can do those three things, that alone will put you lightyears ahead of where most people are creating their SEO from. If you are working with an SEO professional, make sure that before they start doing the competitive analysis on what the other people who are ranking on page one are doing. If one of your competitors has 65,000 inbound links and really, really, solid content, it's going to be very difficult to knock them out of the number one spot no matter how much money you spend on content creation. Before you even start paying someone to write articles, they need to do a competitive analysis to see if it even makes sense for you to invest in SEO. There are some local markets that somebody over the last three years may have spent $40,000 on content creation. That likely means that you're going to have to make a similar investment in order to rank number one. That $40,000 might be better spent somewhere else and provide more value if you invest it into making your business remarkable. Jason: Love it. To go back to the original question, am I anti-SEO? I'm not. We built our business on SEO. We have good rankings for different things. We get customers all the time that find us on Google. I'm a fan of people doing what works. I feel like everybody should do the right things at the right time in their business, not doing the wrong things prematurely with hopes of an outcome that is not achievable.  If you are at a place where you think SEO might make sense, I encourage you to reach out to our team, have a conversation with Jon, that is something we can help you with. If you feel like you want to grow and your main goal is to add doors, we’ll have a conversation with you on DoorGrow, and figure out what's going to make the most sense for you where your business is at right now. Jon: Yeah. I've had a lot of calls with property managers over the last two months about whether SEO is right for them. Almost all of them, I talked them out of SEO because it wasn't the highest priority thing that they needed to focus on. It wasn't going to deliver enough return on investment. What I can promise is that if you book time with me and have a conversation with me, I'll be very transparent. I will be very honest. I will give you a clear indication of what kind of investment you're going to have to make and how quickly you're going to have to make that investment to make any dent in your search ranking. You will have all the information you need to decide if that's an investment that's worthwhile or if that money's better spent somewhere else. Jason: I think that's something we have a lot of clarity at DoorGrow. We know what types of clients we want to work with. We know who we want to serve, who we want to help. We know our avatar. We know what types of clients would not be a good fit for various programs. We make clients qualify. Our main seed program, we make people apply to be part of it. We're even talking about stepping up the requirements for that application to filter out even more people.  I think that's the secret in having clients you love working with that get great results, that build a good reputation in the market regardless of what business you have. You are really clear on who you want to serve and you’re picky about who you take on. Reach out and have a conversation. If you're somebody that's listening to this and you're like, "I really want to grow." Or, "I think I need SEO." Or, "Somebody's saying I need it." Or, "I didn't ever think I needed it." Maybe you do. Reach out and have a conversation with us. Is there anything else you think, Jon, before we go? Jon: Yeah. I'll just say one final thing. Tagging on to what you just said, what I see in 15+ years of entrepreneurial consulting is that the entrepreneurs who are successful are the ones who are showing up in a big way in their business and actively seeking out how they can be remarkable. Almost always, when people historically call me for PPC or SEO, it's because they're not in integrity with themselves. They want to be able to set it and forget it. They want to be able to pay for something that's going to grow their business without actually having to show up. It is a way for them to opt out of doing the real work that is required to be great.  What I'm interested in is working with people who want to be great and are willing to show up in that way. Jason: Amen. On that note, Jon, I'm so glad to have you as part of the team. I'm really grateful that you're part of DoorGrow. It's super cool that we're both now in Austin and able to get together. I really appreciate you being on the team and the energy that you bring to it. You just fit our culture so nicely. I just want to throw that out there publicly. For anybody that's listening, if you have comments about SEO, if you think we said something that was off, you're confused, you have questions, feel free to challenge us. Feel free to ask us questions. Throw these out inside of our Facebook community, it's a free group. We're very careful about who we let in. You'll have to apply to get in. You can go to the doorgrowclub.com to check out the DoorGrow Club and get into this group.  We only let property management business owners or entrepreneurs or those that are seriously considering starting a property management business into this group which keeps it clean, which keeps it very un-noisy. It's got really high quality people. We got over 2000 property management entrepreneurs in there. It's a fantastic group and resource. If you ever get stuck, you don't have to be stuck. There's lots of people who are willing to support you and help you in that group. On that note, until next time. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. Jon: Bye. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

How can you utilize the Internet with your blog and website content to attract prospects and grow your property management business?  Today, I am talking to John Ray, formerly of Inspect & Cloud. John decided to join the DoorGrow team to help entrepreneurs align with a higher purpose through transparency to grow revenue and attract new customers. You’ll Learn... [02:45] Bromance: Similar passion, vision, and success for property management. [08:50] Anti-SEO? Merging of minds and skill sets to increase customer base. [11:16] What is property management? Lack of name recognition and understanding. [12:15] Lead Gen: What clients want vs. what they actually need from marketers. [15:13] Digital Marketing: Ancillary to foundational basics of a business. [15:35] Purpose of Seed Program: Clients not quite ready for digital marketing solutions. [18:17] SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Getting the cart before the horse. [18:24] What makes marketing work? Storytelling. Do or say something interesting. [19:07] Hook, Line, and Resonance: Shifting away from SEO the right way.  [21:48] Blue Ocean Concept: Opportunities for professional property management. [27:35] FAQs: How do you respond? Are you a property management expert/authority? [30:02] Quality vs. Quantity: Add value, not noise. Google’s goal is to please people. Tweetables Every marketer sells what’s easy. Digital Marketing: Ancillary to foundational basics of a business. Forget cold calls; trust is what closes deals. SEO and PPC: Putting the cart before the horse.  Resources DGS 27: Inspect & Cloud: Inspection Software For Property Managers  Inspect & Cloud DoorGrow Seed Program DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. I've got a very special guest today. He's been on the show before. Jon Ray. Jon, welcome. Jon: Hey, thanks for having me. We're finally doing a DoorGrow Jon Ray-Jason podcast again. I'm really excited to share some of the things that we're going to talk about on how to best utilize the internet, content on your blog, in your website, and some of the things that you can really do to dial in the way that you're attracting prospects on your website using SEO. Also, just to talk about how fun it has been working for DoorGrow and joining the team. Jason: All right. Let's take a step back. I had you on the podcast, and we hit it off right away. We were joking before, we're having fun afterwards. We have little conversations here and there. We talk about random crazy stuff. Then, for a little while, we started meeting just as entrepreneurial friends hanging out like on Fridays or something. We were just setting a time to chat.  You've joined the team here at DoorGrow, but you came to me and reached out at one point. I was thinking about something at the back of my head. I was thinking, "Man, it'd be so cool if Jon and I work together. It'll be so awesome to have him on the team." Then you reached out. Why don't you tell your side? Jon: Yeah. Part of my purpose is helping entrepreneurs figure out how to align themselves with higher purpose and use transparency in their business as a way to grow their revenue and attract more customers. My why and my purpose was really aligned with your why and your purpose. To connect some of the dots of my history, I've been an entrepreneurial consultant in the digital marketing space for over 15 years now. I went and worked for Google for a few years. I was helping run their global field marketing team.  A business partner friend of mine started a SaaS product in the property management space called Inspect & Cloud, which is a digital inspection tool that helps you determine how much security deposit to give back and make sure that your maintenance team and your property owners have clear communication with you. That was birth out of this marriage. In my early 20s, I was a realtor and property manager. I was one of the people who had to go out and file eviction on people. This was over 15 years ago. When I had to go and file eviction on somebody, that meant that I have to drive up to the storage unit. I had to go through hundreds of file cabinets and files and hope that we had an inventory movement condition form, that we still had a copy of their lease, that wasn't just stained in coffee and doughnut crumbs. Sometimes I meant moving like six or seven file cabinets out-of-the-way, so I can get to the one that actually had the information I needed, so that I can go and file eviction on somebody who had been in the property for three or four years. We just didn't have good access to those records.  When I left the real estate space to go work for Google, I still was in contact with a lot of these people. One of these people is Gilbert Quinones who was my business partner in Inspect & Cloud. He's still successfully running Inspect & Cloud (inspectandcloud.com, if you want to check that out). The idea with Inspect & Cloud was we've got to solve the frustration of milling this status of a property and being able to effectively get that information when we need it. I married everything that I have learned at Google, doing digital marketing with the experience that I've had in the property management world. Those things joined together to become Inspect & Cloud.  We were very successful in growing that. I met a lot of property managers and really got inside the head of trajectory that property management was going. There were so many opportunities for property managers to dominate their local market because nobody was doing anything that I felt was remarkable. When I decided to walk away as an active owner-operator in Inspect & Cloud, to explore some personal things that I was interested—mostly coaching at a more philosophical and spiritual level. Really aligning businesses with purpose is what I wanted.  I was looking for methods that would pair traditional marketing and digital marketing with some kind of unique purpose that made a business remarkable. Ever since we've done our interview, it was so obvious to me that you were super passionate about what you're doing. You're seeing a lot of success with your seed program, growing people's businesses, and helping them align with purpose, given so much overlapping our wheelhouses, and in the way we wanted to consult with businesses.  I'm a builder. I'm somebody who can build businesses, run a team, handle operations, implement marketing, and jump on sales calls. I do my best work when I'm aligned with a visionary and with somebody who's helping create the intellectual property that then I could go and distribute. I kept seeing what you were doing, tuning into your podcast in the background. We started meeting on Zoom. It just seems like our two historical paths were meeting at this point that was better suited with us working together because I think we compliment each other really well. Without going into more about this bromance, I thought that the most effective way that you and I could continue to deliver value to property managers and conscious entrepreneurs was for us to partner and capitalize on each other's strengths. We could really grow DoorGrow to a whole new level. I think we're doing that. It's been really fun to talk to a lot of seed hackers, to be on the sales calls, to go through the seed program myself, and really have a whole understanding for the first time.  I was always somebody out here looking in and being, "Well, how much more value could this program really have?" Then I got to actually go through it. I was like, "Oh, this is so much more aligned than I ever even thought." I think that has helped me in my genius zone since I've been working with you because I'm able to draw all of these other experiences that I've had working with entrepreneurs over the last 15 years and channel it through the lens of what you've created in the seed program. A big part of that was me bringing some of my skill set in, which as I was working for Google and in this past 15 years of digital marketing consulting, I've become an expert on Search Engine Optimization, and building really solid content campaigns that drive revenue, increase attention, and increase your customer base.  I think that for property managers, SEO's is an interesting strategy that they can implement. I think that a lot of people think that you're anti-SEO. I thought that would be interesting for us to have a conversation and talk about each of our perspectives—why I'm really bullish on SEO and why you're (at least publicly) seemed to be more bearish on SEO. Maybe we can come to a merging of the minds on that. Jason: Yeah, we'll chat about that. I'm not really a builder. I help other people build their companies, but it's through my innovation that I [...]. I'm an innovator. I love sitting down, being the mad professor. I didn't want to be the guy who's been doing videos or in the foreground. I have business coaches who were like, "Jason, if you're not going to do it, nobody's going to do it. You got to do it." They pushed me into that space and I've gotten a lot more comfortable on that. Even still, it's really nice to have somebody coming on the team that I trust to understand the vision behind what I want to do, and allow me the space to innovate and create new stuff. Now that I have you on the team, I'm really excited about the new stuff that DoorGrow's going to be doing to solve property management problems here in the future. I've got some cool ideas and now I can start to focus on those, work on those, and we get along really well. We just have so much fun together. A lot of people do think I'm anti-SEO. In the past, I love throwing stones at different things that I think are causing challenges in the industry. Because we were focused on SEO—we did pay-per-click management, and we're focused on the search engines in the beginning—the challenge was, this is an industry (I saw) that has very little name recognition. It's an industry that has very little understanding in public opinion as to what property management is or what a property manager does. Random people that have rental properties just weren't looking for property management. It's what seemed to be the situation. The challenge was we just had clients that would play that game, and they found the trap of some of the marketing agencies. Every marketer sells what's easy. It's very easy if people still come to us. It's very easy if somebody comes to us and says, "Hey, I want SEO, I want pay-per-click, I want content marketing, I want social media marketing." This is what everybody says you're supposed to be doing online. "I want pay-per-leads."  These are the things people were looking for. Sometimes the confusion people have about DoorGrow is like, "What do you guys do if it's not those things?" That's all people know what to do, is what marketers are telling them. Why? Because that's what marketers sell. They're selling it. They're not doing it because they're evil. They're doing it because that's what customers are asking them for. Maybe they're in some ways smarter than me. This is what the client is saying, "I want." Even though my perception is, "It's not working. It's not working for a lot of these companies."  The challenge I saw is that if the companies weren't at least 200–400 doors, it didn't even make sense to be running ad campaigns, getting all these cold leads, and trying to take the time to do it. Really, there should be part-time sales people that only have 10–15 hours a week to focus on leads. If they're getting these leads that are colder, they weren't even answering their phones. The lead's only good for maybe 5–10 minutes a lot of times. Then the close rate or conversion rate dropped significantly. The challenge was when we're running ad campaigns and doing these things for clients, they weren't capitalizing on the leads. And because they didn't have the bandwidth, they weren't answering the phone calls. Usually, companies have to be about 200–400 doors minimum, they needed a full-time BDM, they needed that just to do pay-per-click on the SEO side. If they're in a big city market and it's super competitive, maybe there's more search volume, even still property management's very little search line. No matter how big the market is, there are very few people looking. It felt dishonest or disingenuous to sell it to clients just because we can make money. All the time I started realizing, it's not effective. I started because I've talked to thousands of property managers. We literally have hundreds of clients right now that are active. I get to see inside their business. They come and ask me for help, and they ask me for coaching. I would occasionally run into a client doing something unique. They come to me and say, "Oh, yeah. We've been in business for three years. We're at 300 doors." "That's amazing. How did you do that?" Every now and then I would notice an exception. I will pay attention to these things. I will get super curious and I'll ask questions. Over time, I suddenly noticed things that were working, and it wasn't the digital marketing stuff that they were doing. Now, that doesn't mean that if you don't do the foundational basics, that it wouldn't make sense to then shift and start doing more. The analogy I would typically use with clients once I understood this, I would say, it's just like in bodybuilding. You can go get creatine, glutamine, supplements, protein powders and whatever, but if you're not getting sleep and you're not eating food, even though you're working out, you're not going to get great results because those things are ancillary.  That's how I view a lot of digital marketing. It's ancillary to the foundational basics that are involved in a business. The sales pipeline and word-of-mouth is significantly impacted by your brand, your website, your reputation, your sales process, all these things that we focus on in seed programs. That's why I built the seed program to shore up these leaks. The ironic thing is I originally built the seed program because clients weren't ready for the digital marketing stuff that I wanted to sell. They weren't ready. I was like, "Let's get them ready. I'll create a program that once they do it, they'll be ready for all this digital marketing stuff. They'll want to do cold lead advertising and marketing with us. Then we'll make more money." If there weren't enough companies that can capitalize on it and if they're going to try doing it and fail and quit, I'm going to create a program that gets them ready to have this stuff. So, I built out my first iteration called the SeedPackage of the seed program. I created this and clients get these amazing results. The crazy side effect of it was when they went through, and we shored up all these trust leaks that existed in their sales pipeline because trust is what closes deals, they didn't need or want cold leads anymore. It didn't do what I wanted to do. It didn't get us more marketing clients to actually prevent them from meeting it at all. Even though they were the ones that most likely to be able to use it now. But they didn't need it because they're getting so many warm leads and warm leads the closer is so much higher.  Then I started putting up this message like, "SEO won't save you." A lot of people view SEO as savior. They thought, "If I could just get the top spot on Google, all my hopes and dreams for my property management business would come true." It's just like playing the lottery or gambling. If I just get that one jackpot, I'll have everything that I need financially. It really is. It's like the SEO lottery. They would play the lottery and I kept getting stories of losers coming to me from other property management marketing companies. They were sad, they were upset, they've done a one-year contract of doing uncomfortable videos, doing SEO, doing content marketing stuff, and they didn't have doors to show for it. They were really, really frustrated. They didn't trust me. There was a distrust in all marketing in general because they've been burned. I think a lot of property managers have been burned because it's very easy for people to sell what people don't need if they're asking for it. I felt like it was unethical. Jon: Yeah. It's definitely a space where there's a spectrum of charlatans and all the way to people who are in integrity and really good at SEO. I think everything that you're saying is right in many ways. SEO and pay-per-click is getting the cart before the horse.  From a fundamental level, what makes marketing work is really great storytelling. You have to be doing and saying something that is interesting or remarkable for any amplification of that message to convert. What people think they need to do is just hire somebody to write four articles a month, and eventually they're going to be on page one of Google. That's the lie of digital marketing and SEO.  I'm going to give some really practical tips and advice for any property manager that wants to start doing an effective in-house SEO campaign. I promise that before the end of this podcast, we'll give you some action items that you can walk away, so that you can start shifting away SEO in the right way. What happens is when you first start, especially if you're in new business or never done any type of optimization on your website, you're likely showing up on page 8, 9, or 10, or not even being indexed by Google. The way that people search the web is they type in "property management Austin Texas."  Then they open the first 10 links on page one of Google in 10 different tabs. Then they quickly scan each of those pages looking for something that feels like resonance to them. They're looking for some kind of a hook that says, "That's the person I want to work with."  If you haven't effectively created that hook for your business, then no SEO is going to convert for you even if you're in page 1 because the page 10 spot is going to convert better than the page 1 spot if the page 10 spot has a better story and is creating more interesting trust indicators on the website. What that comes down to is making sure that you have a really solid reputation in your local community—that has a lot to do in online reviews—then making sure you're showing up as a thought leader and an authority in your local space. That means that you actually have to be an authority or bring an authority onto your team. You have to learn how to effectively communicate that authority.  SEO can be a really good delivery mechanism for thought leadership and authority but only if you already have those things and are showing up in your community as that. One of the things that I always resonated with the way that you approach digital marketing and SEO—it's the things I always have reached in my own consulting practice—is that you have to learn how to tell an effective brand story before you spend any money on any type of amplification of that.  Jason: You're right. SEO and [...] Google's [...]. It's really hard to dethrone somebody that's been there for 10–20 years. It can be really expensive, it can be really time costly, and a lot of these property managers starting out, that maybe not the game they should play. You're right. There are companies with the top spot in Google right now, due to the way the market is right now, they’re losing more doors than they're getting on due to the sell off.  It's really difficult to outpace the market when the market shifts with marketing. Yet, there's this huge blue ocean of potential property management clients that are not aware of property management yet, of real estate investors, people that run rental properties. We see only in the single family residential only maybe 30% are professionally managed versus Australia which is 80%. There are all these opportunities, yet people are fighting over the scraps that fall off my client's table. They're not focused on the word-of-mouth. They're not focused on networking. They're not focused on community marketing, going out, connecting with that blue ocean, establishing rapports, building trust, and being an authority. They're focused on, "I'm just going to pay a company to just shotgun for leads and hope I get something," then you're getting the coldest, most price-sensitive worst stuff, that are what’s leftover at the end of the sell cycle, after word-of-mouth capture the good stuff. Jon: Yeah. When you talk about the blue ocean, I want to unpack that a little bit. I think that's an important concept because when you're paying for leads or when you're trying to SEO your website to be able to compete for search terms, you're only competing for a very small sliver of the overall pie that is available. Only maybe 10%–15%, depending on your local market of property owners that are open to finding a manager, are actively searching at any given moment. That means that 85%–90% of the potential market place isn't actively searching. You wouldn't be able to track those people through PPC or SEO anyway.  I think there's a misconception that if you rank on page one of Google that you're going to have access to all of the available leads out there. Actually, the larger slice of the pie that's available in the property management industry, and really in any industry is the 85%-90% of people who would be open to some kind of service or some kind of value add, but they don't have enough pain to be actively searching for it. However, if someone they trust said, "Hey. You know, this person works with people like you or businesses like you. They're showing up in the community in a really interesting way right now. Maybe you should talk to them," that's a much easier handoff to somebody to make. That's why having a really strong community-driven purpose is an interesting foundational element to create that will then benefit you when you start to do an active SEO campaign or pay-per-click campaign.  If you don't have that powerful story that is going to create a resonance and the competitive advantage over the other 10 people that are in the 9 of their tabs that somebody has opened in their Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, then no amount of investment in the pay-per-click or SEO is going to be able to convert at a ratio that will make it valuable for you. That's why at DoorGrow and the advice I've always given when people come to me for SEO advice is, what's your story? How are you aligned with your community? How are you aligned with some purpose above and beyond just making money?  That comes back to good business planning. In the property management space and in a lot of service-based industries, people start as a solopreneur. They're not always thinking about the big picture. "Where is this business going up in the next 5–10 years?" They're just kind of nickel-and-diming trying to make enough where they can pay for their families' expenses. That puts them in the weeds and fires of the business, which doesn't allow them to show up as a visionary or even develop their authority in the community. They have no real competitive advantage. Because they're operating in the place of solopreneur scarcity, they're not closing at a conversion ratio that would warrant spending money on advertising or SEO. One of the things that SEO can be really good at doing is helping you create that community authority. You have to look at what you are actually an expert at. What a lot of people do, they hire somebody in another country, or they hire somebody who's just a generic content creator, who's good at writing but knows nothing about the property management industry. What does that person do? They pull up property management on Wikipedia. They rewrite some of those articles so that you have the right keyword density in your article. Ultimately, it's a big nothing burger because when somebody comes to that page, it creates no emotional resonance. Yeah, maybe you captured the click-through from Google, but they're going to immediately click back. That actually hurts your ranking. You always want to make sure that the SEO post that you are writing is providing genuine value to the person who lands on the page. Google will actually penalize you if you have content that ranks on page 1 of Google and somebody clicks through it, then it's not the answer to the question or it doesn't hold them on the page for longer than 90 seconds, if they click back, you're going to be penalized for that. The thing to think about as a property manager, when you're meeting with prospects, what are the most frequently asked questions that you get? How do you answer those questions in person? Sometimes I'll have people record the way that they answer certain objections or questions, and then transcribe those. That could be a good basis for a solid SEO article that starts to give the prospect value and sets you apart as an expert and an authority. Another really good piece of content is neighborhood-specific content. Everybody's focused on these macro keywords. If I'm in Austin, Texas, then the keyword that every property manager in Austin, Texas thinks that they want is "property management Austin." All the articles are targeted towards that macro keyword phrase. There's actually all kinds of what we call long tail phrases which would be like neighborhood phrases. In Austin, there's a neighborhood called Brentwood. You could write a post all about why Brentwood is an interesting place to live as a tenant, but as a property owner, how you serve the Brentwood community. That is going to be an easier term for you to rank for. You're going to be able to provide some actual expertise about how you manage properties in that specific neighborhood. You're going to be able to reference landmarks, grocery stores, and local venues that makes the property owner feel like you know what their property needs because you're familiar with the neighborhood. What that does is "property management Brentwood Austin '' is an easier keyword to rank for. It gives you SEO juice that then points up to the main keyword phrase that you want—that macro phrase of "property management Austin." You build out 50 neighborhood pages and those all start ranking well, you're going to rank for this macro phrase. But most people do it in reverse order. All their articles are these boring regurgitations of Wikipedia trying to rank for a macro term. They're providing no value. They're not ranking for any long tail keywords. Ultimately, their SEO investment nets them nothing because they're not tuned into how competitive the marketplace is. Jason: And it's just that noise instead of value. It's not having real value. One of the things I always said to clients for over a decade, my philosophy when it comes to Google is, "Google's goal is to please people. That's how it's able to sell ads." If your goal is to please people and help people, you're always in alignment with that. Now, what most people do is their goal is not to please people. It's to manipulate the search engine and the robots. If that's your goal, eventually, you're going to be penalized for that. That's going to be viewed as black hat. You might find the hack, somebody who has the hack that they're doing, where they're doing SEO on videos, and they've got 20 different company accounts. They're making them all, liking comments on each other's stuff. Google's smart. It's going to figure out that you've got a game going on. I had one property management company out in Atlanta. He had paid these guys in India to do backlinks. Any backlink was considered relevant. A backlink, for those listening, is a link to your website. So they would go out, scour the web, and find any website they could, directory they could, and they would put links to his website in Atlanta. Then Google realized people were playing that game, trying to manipulate the search engines again.  What they did is they started adding a quality score. They started gauging websites that are not reputable or not relevant and which ones are. Then they release an update. His site wasn't just down-ranked. It was removed from Google rankings all together because he had so many shady, [...] backlinks. Google said, "This site must be bad. It's dangerous to people." They pulled it down. It was like a sandbox. Jon: Yeah. One of the things on any consulting call that I have was somebody about SEO, very often that comes up. "What if I invest all this money in SEO and then Google decides to remove my site from search?" They're only going to do that if you're working against their terms of service and if you're not providing real value. Ultimately, like you said, they want Google to be the search engine that immediately takes you to the content that is most relevant to you. Their algorithm is always shifting to determine what the most valuable content is. That's why everything, even as they're moving to artificial intelligence, everything more and more, is being catered towards who is the thought leader and who's the authority in this local market place around this topic. The way that you identify yourself as that person is by having a stellar reputation with a lot of five star reviews, and then making sure that every single article that you write is providing value where if you were your customer, and you read that article, would you actually read it? Or would you immediately be like, "This is an SEO article"? That's a dead ringer. If you go to a website and the first word is bolded out, there's all these links linking to other pages, it's all keywords that are linked, and you're not actually answering the question that is in the user's head, then you're going to be devalued in the eyes of Google because if that person bounces off your website which means they clicked on Google to your website, they didn't see what they wanted, so then they clicked back to Google to go to a different website, that ultimately is not going to serve you.  You can spend a ton of money on SEO, and if it's not the right content, it can actually hurt your business and hurt your website. It's better to add one really high quality piece of content a month than it is to add 30 super low value pieces of content that don't help the user in some way. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

What is cost segregation, and how does it work? If you're knowledgeable of the tax code and understand what you’re able to do, you will put money in your pocket.  Today, I am talking to Kim Lochridge, Executive Vice-President at Engineered Tax Services. The company started with about six employees and has grown to 130 to do 150-200 cost segregation studies a month. Kim loves talking about taxes. She’s here to help make sense of it all!  You’ll Learn... [03:10] Investment Depreciation Concept: What you get when you have an investment property. It's a tax deduction. [05:15] Depreciation is everything and anything, including buildings, carpet, walls, paint, countertops, and cabinets that depreciate over 27.5 years (unrealistic). [07:17] Cost Segregation Metamorphosis: IRS allows building professional/engineer that understands property and tax laws to segment each component of a building.  [10:30] Does Kim use cost segregation? No matter how big or small, she doesn’t do a deal without cost seg. [11:53] Cost Segregation Studies: How long are you going to own the property? What are you going to be doing with the property?  [12:03] Justify Numbers: Don’t do a cost seg study unless it makes sense financially to pay less in taxes for more money to reinvest. [15:10] Audit Defense: Engineered Tax Services covers questions from IRS about cost seg performed by internal engineers. [16:00] Tax Strategy: Know how to use it and when to use it. Too many people don't understand taxes and let their professionals handle it.  [16:21] Motto: We do believe that everyone should pay tax, but there's nothing in the code that says you have to leave a tip. [16:55] When and when not to do cost seg? Ask questions. If something doesn't make sense, make it make sense.  [21:35] Bonus Depreciation: Too good to be true? Or, leaving money on the table by not doing cost seg? Probaby 80-90% of real estate agents are missing out.  [29:30] Depreciating Bonus Depreciation: Do it now before it decreases from 100% to 20% in 2026. Tweetables Engineered Tax Services’s Motto: Everyone should pay tax, but there's nothing in the code that says you have to leave a tip. Depreciation: What you get when you have an investment property. It's a tax deduction. Don't do a deal without cost seg. It doesn't matter how big or how small. Bonus Depreciation: It’s a big deal, not a scam, to spark the economy.  Resources Kim Lochridge’s Email Engineered Tax Services Schedule E W-2 Form 1099 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) Opportunity Zones DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guest today is Kim Lochridge. Kim, welcome to the show. Kim: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Kim is here with Engineered Tax Services. We're going to be chatting a little bit today about cost segregation and how it works. Those of you that don't really geek out on accounting, that's okay because I pay people to help me with that stuff. I don't either, so I'm going to ask all the questions. We're going to figure this out and make sure it'll all make sense. Kim, give us a little bit of background on you, and how you got started with Engineered Tax Services. Kim: Thank you for the internal question. I've been with Engineered Tax Services. I'm the Executive Vice-President, and I've been with them for about 10 years. I started out as an associate. I was on the board of a manufacturing company, and they were looking into some energy-efficient tax credits. It was just a brand new program that came out and tax rules. I found this company because they were doing that early on. That was really my beginning and how I met them. I just thought I came on board.  We've been growing the company since we started about five or six employees. Now we have about 130 across the country. We're doing about 150-200 studies a month across the country. It's pretty impressive. Jason: All right. We will get into what those studies are in just a minute. Let's get into the subject at hand. Maybe we start in the preshow, in the Green Room, we were chatting for just a little bit. It was like, "When is this stuff?" "Maybe I should explain it a little bit to you, Jason." You did which is very gracious of you. Why don't we start with the concept of depreciation on an investment? Just to make sure those that are not yet investors, or they're just new in the space, and they're starting to deal with real estate investors, understand this concept. Kim: Okay. Depreciation is something that you get when you have an investment property. It's a tax deduction, essentially. On top of the mortgage interest or any of that expenditures that you spend on that property, you also get depreciation.  Depreciation is calculated depending on the type of property that you have. If it's a single family home or some type of residence like a multifamily and then in capacity, you're required to depreciate that property over 27½ years. If it's any other type of property like an office, retail, or anything commercial, that is 39 years. For today, I think almost everybody in the audience is more of a single family-owned, we’ll target more at 27½. Just know that that's interchangeable with 39 if it's commercial. Essentially, if you have (say) a $300,000 single family home, you're going to be able to depreciate according to the IRS. You're going to divide that by 27½ and you end up getting $10,909 every year, that you can help use that to offset the income that you made on that property and then not pay tax on it. Sometimes, if it's a smaller home, that might cover it, that and any expenses, and you won't have to pay any tax on the income (which is nice). But sometimes, if your cash flow's pretty good, once you're high right now, mortgage rates are low, you might've owned it for a while, then this could be something that could help you. If you have that, your income is more than the depreciation, then you're going to want to make sure to do something else. This is where cost segregation comes in. Also, if you end up having multiple properties, and one is cash flowing much more than another, then you can basically take that cash flow, and you can do from one to another if it's in the excess. We'll go over some of those details a little bit more. Essentially, the depreciation is just that. You have depreciation. You're required to depreciate a building if it's on a Schedule E or if it's a rental income. If it’s a second home, you're not going to depreciate it. It has to be a Schedule E or some sort of an income revenue-generating project. Jason: The idea with depreciation is that everything in the property is going to depreciate at the same way? Kim: Yeah, everything. It contains the whole building, whatever you bought. That means carpet, walls, paint, countertops, cabinets, anything that you bought in that purchase is going to be depreciated over 27½ years. Jason: [...] lasts about 27½ years, right? Kim: That's what the IRS says.  Jason: Okay, that's not reality. How do we solve this problem there? Kim: Yeah, it's not reality. For decades since the 40s, cost segregation as a whole, what we're going to talk about today, has been around since the 40s when it began in court cases. That's because property owners went and argued the fact that, "This is what I'm doing. This isn't really fair because assets that I'm depreciating over 27½ years or 39 years are not going to last that long. I'm replacing them, in some cases, multiple times over the course of ownership. I want different rules. I want to be able to depreciate those separately." It made it very difficult for a CPA to say how much is the carpet or how much is the building when you just bought up a building. You didn't put it in. You don't have receipts. You don't know how much the roof, the HVAC, the water heater and all that were. They can't break it down. The CPA doesn't have the ability to do that. The IRS came back and over years of morphing cost segregation, they said, "We're going to give you the ability to do cost segregation, which means you have to have a building professional or an engineer, somebody who understands property and tax laws to come into the building, and segment (hence, the segregation) out each of the component of your building." As a result of segmenting those out, you can depreciate them in different time zones, or different buckets. For instance—these are just some examples, depending on the purpose on some of those components—carpeting is always going to land in a five-year bucket. You're going to be able to depreciate all of your carpet in five years, not 27½.  Things like all of your landscaping, your driveways, curbing, gutter, landscape bushes, trees, all of Rockwell expenses, all of that stuff, gets to be depreciated over 15 years. That's more realistic. Things are going to be overgrown. You're going to have to rip things out. You're going to have to replace fences, all those types of things. They'll give you that bucket as well.  The law also says that you can break down certain components like mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, as long as it's for specific purpose for the building, and not necessarily for the building itself. It has to be for the business.  It gets pretty complicated and these rules have morphed since the 40s. There have been massive amounts of court cases that give us these rules today. As an example, something traditional out of today, if you have that same $300,000 single family home, percentage-wise, we're going to be able to take (conservatively) about 40% of the cost of that building or $120,000, and we're going to be able to shift that into faster class lives for you. You won't have to depreciate all of it over 27½ years, but we can break it out.  Essentially with that, that would be $180,000 gets depreciated over 27½ years, and about $120,000 gets split up between five and 15 years. Those are the good rules of thumb numbers to use. Following so far? Jason: I'm with you. Kim: I have to tell you, I love tax. I know it's really geeky, but it's okay. I can help you through it. Jason: That's why people hire you. You're weird. Kim: I get excited about it. Just to kind of give you an idea, I'm also a real estate investor myself. I have my day job, but I'm also an investor. I have invested in about 800 doors in multifamily in Texas. We have cannabis warehouses, we have a mobile home park, just my husband and I. We manage them all ourselves (which is pretty incredible) plus a full-time job. Jason: Do you use this? Do you use cost segregation? Kim: Of course. I don't do a deal without cost seg. It doesn't matter how big or how small. Jason: That's the cool phrase for it, it's cost seg. Kim: Yes, short for cost segregation. Jason: Guys, get yourselves some cost seg. Pretty dope. Explain how your company helps with this. Obviously, accountants can do these. The property manager isn't doing this. The investor doesn't know when they will buy this property. How do we solve this problem? Kim: Engineered Tax Services, this is our specialty. This is one of the main service lines that we offer as cost segregation. This is where I was saying that we do about 150-200 studies per month across the country, whether it's a single family residence all the way up to something like the AI Building in Chicago—big, high-rise, office buildings. We do cost segregations. We're very good at it. It's cost effective. Most CPAs, if it's not over $2,000,000 then it's going to be too expensive. We have single family home rates. We have different levels of studies that we can do according to how long you are going to own the property, what you are going to be doing with the property and those types of things. Maybe we should go in and talk about some numbers, Jason, just to tell everybody (the listeners and the viewers) what it would mean for them. Jason: Yeah. I don't know if this is where you're headed but if you're saying that a lot of people say, "Oh, that's for the big properties. That's too expensive to do for my clients on this single family home or my investment property." Help them justify the cost of doing this study. Nobody would ever do it with you ever unless it made sense financially. Kim: I haven't since a project that isn't at minimum like a 50-to-1 return. It's going to be better than any improvement you can do in the house, any tenant change over, addition, or whatever you're going to do, your returns on this are going to be [...]. Jason: By doing this, by getting the cost seg study, working with you guys, and with their accountant to make this all happen, what has this allowed the investor then to do that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise? Kim: They're going to be able to depreciate more in the first years rather than just the $10,900 on the $300,000 property that we talked about.  Jason: Which means they're just reducing their tax liability? Paying less taxes? Which maybe means they have more money to reinvest? Kim: Exactly. I want to preface this with the fact that there's a lot of investors that this is passive income for them. If you don't know whether your income from your investment property is passive or active, you want to talk to your CPA because sometimes this gets locked up. We're only talking about if you're a non-real estate professional, how to offset the income from the property so you're not going to have to pay tax on that. This isn't a loophole. This is nothing that is illegal. This has been around for decades. This isn't something that I’m going to get in trouble if I do this. This is simply just a different method of accounting and it requires a professional to come in. Just like an inspector or an appraiser would come in to tell you more specific about a building that you're building. This is basically more of a professional coming in to explain more of the accounting side of it. Jason: Okay. What do you call these experts that come out to the property to do a cost seg? Kim: They're engineers. Jason: Engineers? Kim: Yeah. Engineers come out. They're either structural professionals or mechanical engineers that understand building mechanics. They understand how to break down different components in the building. They're our own employees across the country. They come out to do those studies to document everything.  Just keep in mind that the IRS says that if you have the building professional onsite, then that is required by the IRS. A CPA can do some sort of cost seg if they're knowledgeable about it, but many of them aren't going to be able to tell you how much the [...] costs. If they do, they're just going to do it from a square foot allocation. It's not going to be able to stand up in the event of an audit.  We offer audit defense, so if the IRS does come back and question this, we're going to cover all of that for you. We're going to defend that for you. Our reports are going to be solid. We're going to be here and that's what this covers. We're going to stay behind the product. Jason: Okay. What else should people know about cost segregation or about your company that they may ask? Kim: I think we need to talk about tax strategy because I think this is really important for people to understand. So many people (and I think in my opinion, too many people) don't understand taxes, and they let their professional handle it. That’s exactly what you said in the very beginning, Jason. Jason: Yeah, that's what I do. Kim: Yeah. We have a motto at Engineered Tax Services. The motto is we do believe that everyone should pay tax, but there's nothing in the code that says you have to leave a tip. Jason: I love it. Kim: If you're knowledgeable of that tax code and you understand what you are able to do, you will literally put money in your pocket. That's what this strategy does. That's what these studies do for you. You have to know how to use it and when to use it. That's what I can help with. We help with realizing when is the good time to do cost seg and when it may not be a good time. When it would not be a good time to do a cost seg study is if you just flip. You're going to buy and you're going to renovate it. You're going to get rid of it. You will probably not want to accelerate depreciation. It's just not smart because you're essentially taking more depreciation upfront because you're going to hold on to those assets like the carpet, and you’re depreciating it over five years. You're not going to get all that money and keep it if you sell the building. Jason: Right. You don't want to pay for the future owner of the place’s carpet. Kim: Right. Unless you're doing substantial rehab—that's a different story—and if you're actually going to depreciate the property on a flip, you usually don't depreciate it because you're never placing it in service, if that makes sense. You're never really putting in service because it's all going to be under renovation. You're not going to depreciate it. This does not include flippers, but it does include people who are renting their property. If you have this passive income, let's just take our $300,000 example from the beginning, you're giving the $10,900 in the depreciation every year. If your cash flow is bigger than that, more than that, and you're still paying some tax on that income, you might have to figure that out because you might have a job in your W-2, and you're not really sure what part of this is what you owed in tax because of the house and the income, and what's on your W2.  It's really important for you to see where this is coming from. "How much of my paying tax is from my rental property?" Ask those questions to your CPA, or we can work with you on that. We're looking at tax returns and can help you there. That's the first thing. Just ask some questions. If it doesn't make sense, let's make it make sense. Let's make sure that the common sense is there. At least, you trigger certain things in the brain. When you get into that and you start realizing that you are paying tax on the income, that $10,000 isn't enough, then you're going to want to do some sort of cost segregation, so you can accelerate the depreciation faster especially if you're going to do renovations. Many times we buy property, and then we're doing renovations, either immediately or very soon after or even just repairs and maintenance, and we have to capitalize that in many cases. Now, you're actually depreciating two assets. Let's say you bought a building that had a roof, then the roof gets replaced in five years, now you can't write off the roof. You have to capitalize it which means you have to depreciate it. You don't just get an expense for the cost of the roof. You have to capitalize it and depreciate it. Now you have two roofs. You're depreciating one in the purchase and you're depreciating one you just bought. That's where we really want to come back from that and say, "I don't want to depreciate two roofs. When I sell this property, I'm going to get killed in the accumulated depreciation on both of those assets. I only have one in the building. Why am I depreciating two?" If you do a cost seg study on the original purchase, then you replace the roof, not only do you have to capitalize the new roof, but you can write off the remaining depreciation of the old roof. Traditionally, CPAs can't do that because they don't know how to value the roof if you don't have a cost segregation study.  Not only are we going to help you with your depreciation, but you're now going to have a very detailed fixed asset report that's going to outline every single aspect, every component of that building, and it's going to have a number attached to it. Every light switch plate cover on the wall, every baseboard, every layer of the roof, HVACs, and hot water heater. Now, you have this really great report that every time you do any improvement, it has to be capitalized. You're going to write off the remaining depreciation of the old.  Let's think about this for a minute. Let's say you buy a property. You have it for three years and the hot water heater goes out. It's a significant dollar amount, you have to replace it. You can now take that hot water heater if it's not expensable. You capitalize it and write off the old hot water heater. If you have it in a straight-line depreciation, that water is being depreciated over 27½ years. That means you're going to have 24½ years left of depreciation on the old one. Now, you're depreciating two of them. Why not get that money right now and help cover the cost of the new water heater? That's the beauty of cost segregation. Jason: Nice. You mentioned real estate agents. Are they not allowed to do cost segregation on their properties if they're an agent? Kim: No. It actually gets better for them. If you're a real estate professional, this is a whole different conversation. Jason: A lot of our listeners, they're property management business owners, but they're also brokers, real estate agents, and are licensed, most of them. Kim: Yeah. That's where we really want to get into. This is part of the tax strategy that I was talking about. If you are a real estate professional in any capacity, whether you're self-proclaimed real estate professional and you're managing your own property, or if you're actually a real estate professional, an agent, or a manager. If you are paying tax, if you are a W-2 employee or if it's a 1099, if you're paying tax, and you're a real estate professional, you have had some misinformation. This industry right now, we have a real estate president, like him or hate him, it doesn't matter. He's a real estate president. He walked in and just literally handed the real estate industry a gift with a big red bow. It's called bonus depreciation. Remember what when we said the $300,000, you'd have over 27½ years. You'd have $10,900. Then if we did a cost segregation, we would be able to accelerate the depreciation. That would be a lot better, actually. Now, with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2018, President Trump passed the bill for bonus depreciation. Let me go back a little bit in history. Bonus depreciation has been around since 2006. It was 50% bonus depreciation (and I'll cover what that 50% of what in a minute) on new construction or renovations. You're essentially able to really expense a lot of stuff to a certain point—at least half of it—for a long time from 2006 until through 2017.  In 2018, President Trump passed this Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Not only increasing the bonus depreciation to 100% from 50%, they also expanded it to allow purchases not just new construction. What this means is that, say you're a real estate professional. Let's say you're making $200,000 a year. Maybe it's tons more, but let's just call it that. Let's say you're making $200,000 a year, and at that level you're probably paying 33% tax rate or something like that. Maybe a little bit less. Let's call it 35% just to be generous. Each year you're paying about $70,000 in income taxes. If you are a real estate professional and you go buy a property, let's just say you go buy this $300,000 house, and you're going to start renting it out. We have the cash flow, we have the income from that which is also a factor, but let's just talk about the tax for a minute. When and if you do buy a $300,000 property and you're a real estate professional, then you do a cost seg study on that building. Essentially, we're going to be able to write off about 40% of it. That's $120,000. Normally, if you're not a real estate professional, that's locked up in your passive income and it cannot offset your W-2 wages. It has to just stick with the income from the property or other properties that you owned.  If it goes in your Schedule E, if you own 10 properties, then that $120,000 will house all the other properties. But it is still stuck on the passive side because it's passive income. When you're a real estate professional, it's an active income. This is active depreciation, which also covers all of your regular W-2 or 1099 income when you're in the real estate industry. Remember when I said that the $120,000 will be shifted over five or 15 years. We have to prorate that all out over these buckets. What's really cool about bonus depreciation, that means 100%, not 50% anymore on purchases, but 100% of your purchase price that is allocated to a class life less than 20 years. You heard me talk about the 5-year buckets and the 15-year buckets. Anything in a cost seg study that you reclassify that's less than 20 years which would be about 40% of this building, you're going to take as a writeoff in year one. Now you get this $120,000 in the year that you purchase it. You can go buy a property on December 31st and it closes before the end of the year. You can offset your taxes by the amount of your results of cost seg study. In this case, $120,000 that you get to offset, all of your $200,000. You've made $200,000, you're going to depreciate $120,000. Now you're only paying tax on $80,000. But if you buy two houses, you basically just wrote it off, and you can pocket that $70,000 that you would've paid in taxes. Let's just run the numbers real quick. If you have $300,000 and you're saying you're going to put 30% down, that's $90,000. Let's just say the $120,000 times the tax rate of 33%, so $40,000. Basically, what the $120,000 would equate to is about $40,000 in cash. Instead of coming up with your down payment of 30%, if you have to come up with 30%, you've got to come up with the $90,000 down payment to buy that $300,000 house. But you're going to get $40,000 back in your pocket. Immediately. As soon you file your tax return. You get to write that off. Buy two properties and you just write off your entire tax liability for the year. Jason: Okay. This sounds almost too good to be true. Help me understand. How many agents do you think are doing this type of stuff, that they're not doing cost seg, and they're just leaving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. Kim: Probaby 80%-90%. Jason: This is a pretty big problem. Kim: That’s why I’m on the show because I want to raise awareness. I will tell you personally, I'm an executive, my husband's an executive, we have high incomes, and when they came out with this bill, the first thing that I told my husband was, "We have to go and buy some properties." I am a real estate professional by trade because of what I do anyway, so I'm a professional. We are under contract to buy a mobile home park. We're closing on December 31st. We have good income and I bought it, but I actually am going to have about $400,000-$500,000 write-off this year for my taxes. Jason: Nice. Is there anything else that people need to know about this? That was a really good point. Any other major things that we should be aware of? Kim: Yeah. Bonus depreciation goes through 2026.  Jason: Okay, then what happens? Kim: Then it starts to phase out starting in 2023. It goes from 100% to 80%. Then 2024, it goes down to 60%. Then 2025, it goes to 40%. Then in 2026, there's only a 20% bonus depreciation. It doesn't mean cost seg is not beneficial. It's still beneficial to do that just like it would've been without bonus depreciation, but there's a greater incentive to do it now. This is all brand new tax rules that just came out in 2018. If you're saying to yourself, "Hey, why haven't I heard of this? This has got to be a scam." It's not. This is a big deal. It's huge for President Trump [...]. Jason: It's a big deal. Was this done to basically spark the economy? Is that why they're throwing this out there? Such a big [...], so to speak, then they're depreciating their bonus depreciation over time? They're going to be taking it down, but is that the mindset of why was it put out there? Kim: Yeah. I'm in the tax community for the real estate roundtable in Washington, DC. When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was being formulated, we had long discussions about how to deal with depreciation and what to do. Everyone was worried about the real estate being in the 7th or 8th inning as far as the cycle goes. “Hey, we’re a little bit worried about this. How can I continue to be sustainable at this rate?” The big talk of this Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on President Trump's docket was solely to raise the GDP and just really get the economy going a little bit better. What they did to incentivize that is to offer this bonus depreciation. This was part of that incentive to buy property, exchange property. They also, in this package, were part of the opportunity zone, which I know a lot about. If you don't know about that, we can do a whole another show on that, about purchasing property in an opportunity zone, and having essentially no tax liability on that after you held it for 10 years (as long as you do some improvements). That's a whole another show that we can do. All of these are part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It's very powerful, and in my opinion, I think we probably, at that time, went from a 7th or 8th inning in real estate back down to a 5th or 6th inning. That's where it really continued to boost and postpone any kind of real estate downturn.  Jason: Who is aware of this and is capitalizing on this? Obviously, your company and your clients. Who's been taking advantage of this? Kim: We do a really good job educating CPAs across the country. We try. There are a lot of CPAs out there. We cannot touch them all. We've got 120 people and there's literally hundreds and thousands of CPAs. We do the best we can. We love CPAs. We want to educate them. We want to connect with them. If you are not doing this and you want to do this, it would be great for us to work together. I really want to talk to your CPA because he has more of use out there that I want to make sure he’s or she's aware and give him or her resources to be able to let other people know that we do this. We do this very economically. I work with a lot of property management companies, investors, and funds. I work with a lot of family offices. I work with a lot of individuals. The word is now starting to get out there. There's a lot more individuals that are starting. We do a lot of shows like this to bring what really the wealthy has done for a long time down into mainstream. That's really what we've been doing. Jason: Random seg question, if property managers came to you, and they've got lots of investors, is there some sort of service that they could work with on you that they can add as a new revenue stream to push their investors towards you? Kim: Yeah. Absolutely have them call us. We can do some sort of [...] share or something like that, or just the finder's fee or something like that. Property managers, historically, have been difficult. Property managers do the property management. They usually don't get involved in the taxes. It's hard for them to have those discussions because a lot of times with the owners they'll say, "Hey, you should really do cost seg," they're going to go, "Oh, it's taxes. My CPA handles that." Now you're dealing with two different layers. Just like you said in the beginning, "If it has anything to do with taxes, I'll let my CPA do it." Those people have that mentality like, "Oh. I'm sure my CPA's already doing this if it's that big." I'm telling you, please listen to me, most CPAs are not doing this. I'm telling you that right now. Most of them aren't. Be proactive. Take your own taxes and your knowledge into your own hands and ask the appropriate question.  I will leave you with a kind of case study of a project I've been working on right now. This is incredible. I literally have a client that I was referred to from a CPA. The CPA brought me the client—a very good CPA client of mine. He owns tons of property all over the country. His family owns property and I've done all their cost seg for about five or six years. We finished the project. I was in my closing call with them, explaining those studies in the last report and everything. He says to me, "I'm part owner in this mobile home park. I think we should probably do this. Do you think it will be worth it?" I said, "Absolutely. Mobile home parks are killer. They're amazing." They do way better than single family homes or multifamily with that matter.  They said, "Yes. It's absolutely worth it. Get me the depreciation schedule, and we'll go over it." He put his partner on the phone with me, and we talked about it. Then, they finally sent me the depreciation schedule. The mobile home park was put on their depreciation schedule as land, $3.5 million as land. I looked at that and I almost gasped, that I called, and I was like, "That's not good. You're not depreciating this at all. Land is not depreciable. It looks like you just bought a raw piece of land." He goes, "Well, that's just all there is. We don't own any of the parks." I go, "Yeah. But you own the pads, the electrical post, you own a laundry facility and there's a house there, there's fencing and there are all kinds of stuff. They are land improvements. That's all 15 year depreciation. You have to pull out the land first then depreciate what's left." He goes, "Oh, man." Long story short, we get on the phone with the CPA. They're like, "Why didn’t you depreciate this? Why is it all on land?" He's like, "Oh, well. I didn't know." The CPAs don't know this stuff. Make sure that you're asking questions. If you have even just the inkling, reach out to me. I try to be very responsive to my emails, text messages, and whatnot. Email me. It's [email protected]. Shoot me an email. Give me some synopsis on what's going on. Send me your depreciation schedule and I'll be able to tell you real quick if we can do something or not.  Most CPAs are not doing this because we don't have the resources. They don't even know. How was a CPA to know how much the electrical post we're going to depreciate? How was he supposed to know how much the pads are? They don't. You have to have a professional to go out there. Appraisers can't do it because they're going to tell you what's in there and what's the total value is. They're not going to break it down. Inspectors are going to tell you what's wrong. Nobody's going to tell you what the cost of every component is in that building. That's where the power comes. Jason: Awesome. This is really interesting to me. I appreciate you coming on the show, Kim. You gave out your email address, which we will have in the show notes as well, and on the website. How else can they get in touch with your company? Kim: Our website is engineeredtaxservices.com. I'm also on the back page with our team. Just pick my profile and shoot me an email from there as well. I'm happy to help you. I have an assistant that can handle all the influx of emails that might come. We'll be able to work through them all. I'd love to hear it from you and please just reach out, so we can at least talk about tax. Jason: Perfect. Kim, thanks for coming out and hanging out with me here on the DoorGrow Show. Kim: Anytime. Jason: All right. We'll let you go. Bye. Kim: Okay. I’ll talk to you soon. Bye, Jason. Jason: All right. There you have it. Really interesting topic. I didn't know about that. It's really fascinating. I'm sure it might be new to a lot of you. If that was helpful, make sure to reach out to them. If you are watching this on YouTube, make sure to subscribe, and catch these videos as they come out. If you are paying attention to us on iTunes and listening, make sure to subscribe on iTunes. If you can give us a little review, like this video, whatever you can do to help us about, it means a lot.  We're putting out a lot of free content. We would love it if you would reciprocate just a little bit and help us out. It helps us get the message out. It helps us get greater awareness and help more property managers change this industry. I'm Jason Hull of DoorGrow. This is right towards the end of the year. This may come out in 2020 on iTunes and other places. To everybody, happy holidays. I hope you have a fantastic 2020. If you're looking to grow your business, you're wanting a vision for 2020, you want 20/20 vision, you have a plan, and you want to do something different, reach out to DoorGrow. I'll say this real quick, if you didn’t get the results you wanted in 2019 or the result you wanted in 2018 or in 2017, you know exactly where you're going to be at the end of 2020. You're going to be at the same level of results you had every year so far. That's your default future. If you want to have a creative future that's dramatically different, then I would love and be honored to help you create that. We've helped hundreds of companies do that. Those that listened to me, followed, do what I tell them to do, and show up to our coaching calls, they get those results. They get it. I would love that to be you. That's it. Bye, everyone. Until next time, to our mutual growth. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

What do you want to do with your life? Sit on the sidelines in a cubicle or travel the world? Take control of your life instead of watching it pass you by. Consider investing, start your own business, and enter the world of entrepreneurship. Today, I am talking to Reed Goossens, Lead Asset Manager/Chief Operations Officer of Wildhorn Capital, about investing in the United States. After spending two years abroad, having a great time, and meeting the girl of his dreams, Reed returned to Australia to sit in a cubicle as a civil structural engineer and wonder how he could get paid to travel. You’ll Learn... [03:17] Real Estate Investing: Rich Dad Poor Dad ignited Reed’s interest in being an entrepreneur. [03:45] Reed’s Journey: Leaving the safety of his cubicle in Australia to moving to America without a job for the love of his future wife.  [03:58] No job, no network, no problem: Took just six months for Reed to find a job in the United States and purchase his first investment property.  [04:29] Investing in the U.S. and 10,000 Miles to the American Dream: Reed went from reading Rich Dad Poor Dad to writing his own books on real estate investing.  [04:51] Structural Engineering: Prepared Reed for his future in America when it comes to construction. He’s built about half-a-billion dollars worth of infrastructure worldwide.  [06:21] Do you want financial freedom? How to get started in real estate investing.  [07:37] Benefits: Real estate investing creates cash flow, appreciation, and amortization.  [08:07] Rental properties aren’t turnkey, but property management is key to success.  [10:00] How to find a good property manager? Business culture with growth opportunity. [14:10] Ok Boomer: It’s not just about doing work whether you’re miserable or not. People want meaning and purpose.  [15:27] Invest in Yourself: Self-educate by reading books, listening to podcasts, joining local meetup groups, and expressing a willingness to learn.  Tweetables Structural Engineer: Scheduling, foundation and soil issues, you name it, throw it.  You make money when you buy, you lose it through bad property management. Culture: Critical and pivotal to foundation of business and why clients can trust them. Change and grow. People want meaning and purpose. Get out of your own way.  Resources Reed Goossens Email Reed Goossens Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today’s guest, I’m hanging out with Reed Goossens of Wildhorn Capital. Reed, welcome to the show.  Reed: Good day, Jason. Thanks for having me on the show, mate. Jason: All right. You’ve got a really cool accent. Tell everybody where you’re from. Reed: From deep West Texas, mate, down below New Zealand and Australia. Jason: Very deep Texas. Got it. Reed: I’m originally from Australia. Grew up an Aussie, I went to school there, and moved to the United States back in 2012 when I moved here for two loves. One love was for my then girlfriend and now wife, and the other love was for the Big Apple. That’s really how it got me to the United States. Jason: All right. Those women man, they get us to move. They just do it. Awesome. We’re going to be talking about investing in the US but before we get into that, tell us a little about how you got into this and then lead us right into this topic. Reed: Sure. Let’s do it. My background is in structural engineering. I went to university for structural engineering, graduated in 2007, went abroad which means going overseas, and worked in the London 2012 Olympic games for about a year back in 2008. Then, I moved to the south of France, had an incredible life journey down there and that’s actually where I met my American wife or at the time, girlfriend. We fell in love and after galavanting around the south of France, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean. I worked for some Russian billionaires on some super yacht (it’s a whole story in itself). I found myself back in Australia in 2010 in a cubicle working as a civil structural engineer. The whole idea of I spent these two years abroad, having a great time, meeting the girl of my dreams, and I’m now sitting in this cubicle going, “Geez, what the hell?” I want someone to pay me to live this life of travel. Really, the thing that came up to me was investing, but I didn’t know what entrepreneurship was. I didn’t even really understand real estate investing. I picked up the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, and that’s back in 2009, a decade ago. That was the spark that got it all started. From there, I took the blinkers off a little bit. I definitely felt like a star athlete sitting on the sidelines, watching my life go by, and I really wanted to take control of that life. Over many years of self-education, I ended up moving to the United States. I quit my safe engineering job in Australia and moved in early 2012 to chase Erica, my wife. I moved here without a job. I didn’t have any network here and over a short period of time I was able to find a job. I think within six months of moving to the United States, I had my first property purchased, a triplex. The various [...] here in the United States for those people who are not aware are very, very low compared to Australia. The whole thing about Rich Dad Poor Dad says, “Get started by putting cash in your pocket and having assets.” That’s really where it got started. Jason: All right, and you’ve written some books. Reed: Yes I have. I’ve written two books, Investing in the US which is the podcast form, now in book form. I’ve written a second book with a couple of other Aussie entrepreneurs called The 10,000 miles to the American Dream. We’ve all moved out here and successfully invested in real estate, inside of real estate businesses, and now we’re sharing our story with the world. Jason: Structural engineering, how do you feel that prepared you for the stuff that you’re doing now. Reed: It hugely prepared me. I probably can walk into a room and run rings around most people in terms of when it comes to construction. As a project manager in a career, I had built about half a billion dollars worth of infrastructure, multi-family retail across the globe. Scheduling, understanding foundation issues, and soil issues, you name it, throw it at me, and we can go bat if you want to go bat. It also got me into a role that I worked for a developer in Long Beach for many years and learned the business side of the real estate game through them as well. Jason: Where are you located now? Reed: I’m in LA. I was in New York for a couple of years back in 2012–2013, then moved back out to sunny California because it was just too cold in New York. Jason: I get it. I’m just north of you. I’m in Los Angeles county, in Santa Clarita. Reed: Nice. We have to go meet up and go surfing some time because I love the beach. Jason: Yeah. The beach is cold, though. Reed: Let’s see, mate. Let’s see. Jason: Yeah. Reed, really cool to connect with you. Let’s get into this topic of investing in the US For those that are listening across the pond or those that are in the US, let’s make this relevant for both of them. Reed: Sure. Let’s do it. What do you want to know? I’m an open book. Jason: Where should we start? How does somebody start investing if they have no clue? You’ve been there at one point and if somebody has never done real estate investing, they haven’t invested themselves whether they’re here or not, how would they get started? Reed: Well, I think the whole idea is about what you want to achieve in your life. Do you want financial freedom? A lot of people get started in real estate investing to achieve some sort of financial freedom. Per my story in the beginning of the show, I felt stuck. I felt trapped in a cubicle. I wanted more to do with my life. The whole thing that drives me, Jason, is the fact that I have a fear of regret. If I wake up when I’m 65 years of age going, “Geez, I wish I’d given that a go,” I’ll have regrets. The whole thing that gets me driving, gets me up in the morning is going out and pushing my boundaries and being uncomfortable. The whole thing about real estate investing is you’ve got to ask yourself, “What do you want to do it for?” Is it to create financial freedom for your family? Is it to create a little bit of extra income? You love your job, but you just want to put your money to work and not sit in a bank? Whatever that might be, real estate investing is really big compared to the stock market investing. It’s one of the best investment vehicles in the world because it has all the benefits. There’s the four benefits as cash flow, there’s appreciation, there’s amortization, and it has appreciation of a long-term in terms of market appreciation. There are many benefits that you can have through investing in real estate compared to other stock investing or bond investing that make it a really quite a safe haven. It really goes back to, “What do you want to grow for your family or for yourself personally?” Once you answer that question, we can get off into the details of how you go do it. Jason: One of the challenges that you’ll see in the real estate industry is that a lot of people will make these claims. You see these gearers that are like, “Hey, just get into real estate investing. Buy this matching program and then it’s going to be easy.” And then they end up with these rental properties that are really difficult and they realize it’s not so turnkey. They’ve got tenants. They’ve got renters. Property management, maybe more than anything, is kind of the gateway to this because property management played a role in the properties that you tend to be involved in or the real estate investment that you do. Reed: Yeah, 100%. In property management, you make money when you buy, you lose it through bad property management. If you don’t have the right property managers on board, you can be royally screwed. We’ve experienced it. We have the daily grind of running a real estate investment firm at Wildhorn Capital, we have a constant struggle with trying to find good bums and seats to make sure that when they’re running our $40–$50 million assets, that they know what they’re doing, and they’re competent. You might be in certain markets which might not attract the right type of property managers. You really got to be really careful at how you select the people who sit at the helm of the ship of any property that you buy. We happen to buy large multi-families, so we have 200–300 units at any one property. There is a lot going on, a lot of moving pieces. Making sure that you have those right people in those positions, to make sure that they’re steering the ship in the right direction and you’re not going to lose money, and the deal’s going to continue to perform for the investors, is really important. My job within Wildhorn Capital is to make sure as a Lead Asset Manager, Chief Operations Officer, is really to make sure that those individual property managers, those individual sites are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The original point, property management is the key to success. Jason: Love it. I get asked this question all the time when I go on other people’s podcast. They’re always asking me, “How do you find a good property manager? How do you identify them?” I want to put this on somebody else for a change. What do you look for when you’re looking for either a good property management company you’re going to partner with, in situations where you need that, or when you’re doing hiring to find a good property manager? Reed: Let’s answer the first question. To give some context, we have 1700 units across 8 assets in Austin, Texas. We have a third party property manager. I live in Los Angeles. My business partner lives in Austin, but we stood third party better. Probably, what a lot of people would do whether you start with a single family or you’re buying 150 units, you’re probably going to go out at the beginning to a third party. How do you identify those third parties? We just recently went through a transition. We had to fire our original property management company and it really boiled down to a couple of things. One was culture. Business culture is really, really important. If you’re going to be attracting someone to earn, sitting at an asset, $50,000–$60,000 a year, managing a $45 million asset, you better bloody have a good business culture. You need to have room for them to grow, and they want to grow into more than just being a property manager. Maybe they want to be regional. Maybe they want to get into the executive office. If you don’t have that growth opportunity, combined with somewhat a decent pay, and then also the training wheels (I’ll call it), the training services and programs within the company, within the organization, to help those people blossom, really, what we as owners employ these property managers for is to go out into the market and find the best “eggs on the shelf” and form those eggs into great, successful, property managers so our assets can be successful. We look for a couple of things. When we do interview asset managers, we look at how many properties are they currently managing. How many units do they have on the contract? How long are they doing this for? We go and get references from other owners. How have working with ABC property company been? Have you enjoyed their reporting systems? Have you enjoyed their business culture or are they really transparent with you? There’s a lot of things out there that you need to be aware of when you’re hiring and sitting down and “dating” a property manager because you need to go and understand all the rigmaroles that go on with asset managing it. I hope that answered your question. Jason: Yeah. I would agree. I think one of the first things when a property management company comes to me that’s struggling to grow and to figure out how to grow the business, that I will tackle with them is helping them get clarity on that cultural piece. It’s never the thing that they think they need but it’s so critical and pivotal to the foundation of their business. It’s why clients can or cannot trust them. Helping them get clear on their personal why and then helping them get clear on the why their business exists, and to feed that personal why. One of my goals is to create this golden thread all the way from them, the business owner, the property management company, their why, through to the business why, through to the person with the rental property wants. If I can help them create that connection with each potential client, sales happen really quickly. Deals happen very easily because there’s a golden thread of trust between what the person wants and what the business owner wants, the property manager wants. They can see that. It’s transparent. That’s so critical and we have to have culture. It has to exist in order for that to happen. If your team can sense that and can see that, then you’re able to attract A-players. B-players are not going to stay in a company without good culture. Especially millennials and Gen Z, they’re not going to work in a situation in which they’re just getting paid to do something that keeps them miserable. They want purpose. They want meaning. You’ll see a lot of dinosaurs in the industry get really frustrated because they’re saying in business… Then there’s this trend of the “OK Boomer.” But the Boomers are like, “Well, we pay you, so just do the work. Do the freaking work.” That’s not how people want to live nowadays. It’s not just about hunkering down and doing work whether you’re miserable or not. People want purpose. Reed: You bring up a good point. This comes not [...] also rent a business culture, but how you run the business with OK Boomers and a historical way of smacking someone over the back of the head if they’d done it wrong. They’re the old school dinosaur ways of the ways managers work. We’ve come a long way and as much as we—I’m a Millennial, I’m on the early end of it—get criticized for not working and all that sort of stuff. Look at my track record. I come from Australia. For most people, I don’t want to swear on this podcast but you know what I’m going to say. Millennials also have created a lot of changes and disruptions in the way that we approach things and change through our thinking around it. That is really important. If you’re not willing to change and grow, then you’re going to be stagnant and someone’s going to eat you. Jason: [...] Xennial which is kind of Gen X and kind of Millennial, and sort of bridges the gap. I remember dialing phones with the rotary dial. Reed: I was born in 1986, so I still remember that. I remember my first mobile phone in Australia was actually when I was 18 years of age. It was the Nokia 3310 and it’s funny. Jason: I had the Blackberry and I’ve had just about every version of iPhone that’s existed. Reed: Exactly. Jason: I think there’s a big shift in culture. I think that if business owners of larger property management companies, the most successful companies, they all have culture. They all bring up culture. I think a lot of smaller property managers hear them talk about it and go, “I don’t get it. That doesn’t make sense.” Then you’ll see a lot of property managers get to maybe about 200–400 door category and this is where if they don’t have culture, they get stuck. I taught the second sand trap in property management. It’s because they don’t have culture, they’re not able to maintain and retain good staff, and they don’t have a clear vision, clear purpose, clear values, a clear mission statement or whatever you want to call it. There’s a disconnect, and they’re wondering, “Why can’t I just find good managers?” One of my business coaches said this, “If you don’t have the business that you dream of, you’re not yet the person that can run it yet.” I think that a lot of times, we as business owners externalize everything. “Oh, it’s the Millennials. Oh, it’s my marketing. Oh, it’s my website.” Really, I found that if I could get the business owner to see that it’s them and make changes, everything else changes by default. Reed: I have a similar business coach. You have to be a key person of influence in your industry. Whatever industry that is, if it’s property management, if it’s being a real estate investor/entrepreneur. I’m trying to attract investors to me, so I’m putting all the content out there. I’m sitting on this podcast right now, talking about the ins and outs of building business culture. It’s easy as humans to blame something else. It’s someone else’s fault. It’s this one’s fault. But that’s why as humans, we can’t stop learning. If you stop learning, you stop growing. If you stop growing, you’re dead. It’s really about that embracing of change. Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore. If you don’t know something, go ahead and freaking learn it. If you don’t want to go do that, well then you’re dead in the water. That’s this whole mindset of changing the way in which we were historically taught to learn, grow, do business, manage people, expectations, and blah-blah-blah. We can get all into it, but it boils down to, you were right, you have to be a key person of influence in yourself. Your business is you. You are a business and you’ve got to start there. From that, people would want to feed off you, be around you, and then want to grow with you. If you don’t have that growth opportunity, you can’t attract better employees, better clients, and have better outputs for your company. I like this a lot. Jason: It certainly makes a lot of people uncomfortable, too. I get a lot of flack in it in this industry just for being a change bringer. Some people don’t like it. They don’t like that I’m not a property manager, I’m from outside, and I’m bringing change to this industry.  Reed: “You don’t grow, you don’t know.” Jason: Yeah, and for a while, I was kind of fearful of that fact. I thought, “Well, I’ll just stay in the background.” My business coach has consistently pushed me to get more and more uncomfortable as we were talking about earlier. Side question. You’ve got all this business in Austin which is so favorable and friendly to business because I’m legitimately looking to move to Austin. I’m seriously considering it. Why are you still in LA? Reed: Two things. The beach and my wife’s family are from here. Jason: Oh, yeah. Reed: But it’s insane. I set up my company to be a life by design company. It’s me and my business partner and I’ve got a couple of other small employees. I still outsource the general contracting. I still outsource the property management. As we grow, we have 17,000 units now but a 150 million under management with our investors. We want to keep it lean. I’m Australian. I just got back from a 2½ week vacation. It wasn’t really a vacation, I was working every day, but I went to the Rugby World Cup in Japan. I was in Australia. If I have Internet, I want to work and my business partner’s completely aligned with me. We’ve always joked that if we ever need to get HR within the house, we’re done growing. Part of the business of owning multi-family real estate is what can I control? The engineer within me wants to control everything. It’s the business systems, it’s the ecosystems that you create that can truly create true wealth, but like property management, do I want to go off and create a property management company? I know how much property management is a thankless job. I was literally sitting in my property management company’s head office in Austin the other day, beating him over the head about budgets in 2020. Literally beating him over the head. And having clashes with upper management, that they’re saying stuff in these meetings that should have been prepared, so I’ve just literally experienced it with, and that’s got nothing to do with property management. That has got to do with how you manage your people. Some people come into the meeting not prepared for budget review. I literally flew in from LA. What else are we going to do? The expectation is I’m sitting here ready to review budgets with you and you don’t know if these are baked yet. There are all these things that go on with any corporation, that you got to make sure you have your systems in place the hierarchy, and to your point before that, the old dinosaurs, there’s a couple of old dinosaurs in that organization that we have to get a bit of feathers ruffled, but you got at those honest conversations because I am the client and I do expect things to be presented in a certain way. And that’s regardless of the fact that there’s a property management company. Jason: Okay. What did you notice difference-wise between the Australian market? I would imagine you’re still connected to that. We get a lot of Aussies coming over here, where property management is very well-seasoned in Australia. We talk about a property manager as a household word, like a realtor is here, like people know what property management is over there is not as common here. Stats like 80% of single family residential rentals there are professionally managed by property managers. The US is nothing like that yet. What is your perception on the differences between the US market and the Australian market when it comes to real estate investing, rentals, and property management? Reed: I’m going to answer your first question first. This is because I’ve got a different lens on. Yes, you’re correct. My dad has an investment property and he has a property manager. When they say property manager, they’re really a real estate brokerage company that does sales for new homes. To keep the ecosystem going and the lights on when the market’s crap, they do single family rentals or vacation rentals, something like that. So that’s definitely well-baked. What isn’t well-baked? In Australia, we don’t have the per the construction way of financing set up in Australia. We don’t have large multi-family. I moved to the United States and I, as a 29-year old, bought a 150-unit complex. I would never have had the opportunity to do that in Australia because the way in which the financing is set up is that, it’s a condo market. Before it goes into construction, they need to pre-sell X amount of units before it goes under construction. We have all this condominium market. Within the condominiums, you might get ABC property manager to manage one of the units and you have someone completely different managing the other unit. Unlike here in the States where if I go to Texas, there’s a leasing center and I walk into the leasing center because one entity owns the entire thing. One thing really missing from the Australian market is in [...] the commercial property management game. I just mentioned the other day in the corporate office of my PM firm, is like, “Guys, there’s an opportunity to go to Australia and start this out as multi-family starts to have more traction.” I see this as the opposite, that in the commercial multi-family space, America has it dialed in. It’s a true business. I know universities offering degrees in property management now, whereas in Australia, because we don’t have that commercial multi-family space, you haven’t driven that professionalism that I’ve come to expect here. Again, I’m not in the single family world as much you plug in both here or in Australia, so I can’t comment as much on that, but just from the large multi-family commercial space, Australia is very mid-90s, like the Internet was in the mid-90s. No one really understood what it was, so that change. Does that answer your question? Jason: Yeah, very much. That’s very interesting. I love hearing about the contrast, because contrast gives us perspective here in the US. As far as investing in the US, what are some of the most common questions that people ask you when they hear about what you do, they’re curious, and they’re interested (maybe) getting into this? Reed: From a high level, it doesn’t break down what the United States is. I’m going to compare to other western countries, so Australia, Europe, and Canada to some extent. I’m just going to break it down to Australia because I’m from Australia. You guys have 300 million people who live in this country. You are the king of capitalism. You guys have this financing options up the wazoo. You’ve got thousands and thousands of financing options. With a large population, you have forced and you can inhabit north, south, east, west. You can pretty much inhabit the entire land mass. You force these what I call secondary markets. You have the New Yorks, the LAs, the San Franciscos, the Chicagos of the world, where people want destination cities. But then, because of the population and where jobs are being driven to, you have these secondary and tertiary markets. Through secondary and tertiary markets, you have more affordability. And that’s purely driven from a population point of view because you just got so many people. Compare that to Australia, we got the same land mass as America (excluding Alaska, we roughly got the same land mass), but we only have 25 or 26 million people. We have not even one-tenth of the population of what you guys have. America has this really weird, awesomeness of having so much population, so much affordability, it drives cash flow. But there’s also appreciation, it’s got a ton of pro-business, all these things and you compare it to other first world countries. We don’t have the cap rates that you guys have. You look at Charlotte, North Carolina or Austin. Historically was a seven- or eight-cap market. It’s now transition into these very low digit sort of four-fives. You compare that to Sydney, Brisbane, London, or Hong Kong where commercial real estate and real estate in general where cap rates have been like 1% and 2% because the supply and demand is forced to go that low. So, there’s these still pockets of growth in America where, because you can inhabit all these different parts of the country and through job growth, that you guys have these awesome opportunities for investing, and that’s where a lot of people have heard about it, where you’re cash flowing in the States. You got appreciation and all these great financing options. It’s also the US dollar, like where do I come? Where do I sign up? A lot of people hear about it internationally, and they come and want to invest here. That’s why I started investing in the US, and it was more of an idea of my journey, about how I’ve got started because when I first moved here, I had no idea what a credit score was. I had no idea what an LLC was. I had to learn all that stuff. Jason: All right. I think there’s an advantage of doing that. There’s an advantage in coming into an industry or into a market with no experience in it because your eyes are wide open. Nothing’s assumed, you have to learn everything from the ground up. That’s been my experience coming into the property management industry. There were so many things that I looked at and said why is everyone doing it that way? Why are people doing it like that? That doesn’t make sense to me. And why is pay rent the largest called action on their website when they want more owners and that’s the primary goal with this website? There’s this disconnect and I think that’s the advantage of coming in with this outside perspective. You coming into this, what do you think Americans are missing? That they just assume? That has given you this advantage? Because you’re doing obviously quite well. Reed: And thanks to America, I have been doing quite well. Let’s not get any wrong here like I haven’t made money in Australia. People ask me, “How do you make money in real estate?” I’ve never purchased anything in Australia. I got my fishing lines in the water out there, but until I actually go and do something, my whole portfolio is here in the United States. You are correct. Perspective is the difference between what gives me an advantage over someone else. A lot of the American ethos is being around, “I got to go to school, I get this huge debt, I can’t go traveling after university because I got this debt, and then I will get no job. Once I’m in a job, I can’t leave, I’ve got a 401(k).” All of a sudden, you’re 65 and like, “What the hell just happened?” As Australians, it’s in our DNA to go traveling. I didn’t come out of university with six figures of debt. It was absolutely more socialistic society back down in Australia, but that it allowed me to travel the world in open and give me that perspective so I can, when I move here, I can see an opportunity to go invest in America, I’m going to take those with two hands because I can see the opportunities compared to where I come from, how cash flow is so much more prevalent here. The barriers to entry into the United States market from a real estate investing perspective are so much lower than Australia. I can see a lot of people like that, a lot of international folks like that. The message I have for the American folks is realize what’s in your backyard. Don’t be ignorant. I’m telling you this for a reason. Perspective is good. Listen to what I’m saying. Go out and educate yourself on what is in your backyard, what is in the state across from you, or in an affordable market where you can start buying and investing. Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore. I’ve said that earlier in the show. It’s really true that if you stop learning, you stop growing, and I think that’s what people get in there. Not just Americans. I’ve got Aussie mates back in my hometown, they’ve not left. They’re in that same blinkers on type of scenario. Not that that’s an issue, which is that if you want to understand the benefits of real estate investing, then get out of your own way sometimes and just start going out and educating yourself on what’s in your backyard. Jason: What would be a good place to start with getting education towards this? Reed: Well, sitting here right now talking about it, listening to your show. I still remember when I moved to the United States, I was going to real estate investment seminars made up in Aussie, and I remember being pitched to pay $10,000–$20,000 for a guru to help me teach everything. Then, when I got to the States, particularly in New York, the Big Apple, the firehose of information, it was all readily available at my fingertips. Websites, podcasts, books, meet-up events.  You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but at the end of the day, you do have to spend time. If you don’t want to spend the money investing in yourself or the time, then you’re never going to go anywhere. You got to understand that this is an investment in yourself. So, I would start by listening to podcasts. They’re free. Picking up a couple of books that can start educating you on whatever niche you want to get involved with, with real estate. Maybe just financial education and literacy that you need to be sharper on. Join a local meet-up group for real estate. I encourage everyone listening to the show, if you don’t have any experience, if you go to two meet-ups a month for the next six months, that’s 12 meet-ups. I bet your bottom dollar and I bet you $100 that they will know, or they would have created a circle around them, more knowledgeable than they were listening to the show today. It’s about getting out there, being willing to pick-up a book, being willing to say, “Hey, it’s okay that I don’t know what this is about, but I’m willing to learn.” I’m an example of that. I’m self-taught, I went to university with structural engineering, and now I run a multi-million dollar investment firm. You can change. The real advice is that we are in the digital age. It’s all at our fingertips. Go out, start investing yourself from an education perspective, and you will see change. Jason: Reed, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. How can people get more information from you as to what you’re up to or get plugged into whatever you’ve got going on? Reed: Simplest way, go to my website. It’s reedgoossens.com. I live in Los Angeles. If anyone wants to hit me up for a beer, coffee, or lunch, just shoot me an email at [email protected]. You can check it out all there. Find the podcast, find the books, find the videos. It’s all there, so have fun. Jason: All right. Hey, thanks for coming on the show, and like Reed said, start getting involved in investing. Just start, right? There’s this power in just getting started. Set that intention, start going to some meet-up groups. You can check out meetup.com. You can check out Facebook groups, there are all kinds of resources available, and maybe you’ll find your passion the way Reed has. Reed, I appreciate you. Reed: Thank you so much for having me on the show, Jason. I really appreciate it. Jason: It’s been a pleasure. All right, so if you are a property management entrepreneur and you’re wanting doors, then reach out. We’ve got some cool programs that we’re adding to our lineup of what we’re doing. We’re really excited about something new that we’re launching, the DoorGrow Referral Amplifier that Jay Berube and I are doing, so make sure you check that out. He is an amazing entrepreneur, one of my clients that was able to close and acquire over 300 doors into this property management portfolio from ground zero in Florida in about two years. He did it largely through outbound, reach out to agents for referrals, and he systemized this. He’s now even got VAs helping do this for him. He runs his company remotely from another state now, and it’s still growing. So, reach out and check us out if you’re interested in this. By the time this airs on iTunes, it will probably already be filled. We’ve only got 20 seats, so if you’re watching this live, then get in. We’ve already sold about half the seats already, and we haven’t even announced it publicly. I’m just throwing it out there now. Get in before we close out the remaining 10 seats. Bye everyone.

Not tech-savvy? Afraid to use technology to meet elevated brand standards at scale? Are you willing to manage and centralize chaos by leveraging automation and mobile functionality for those maintaining and caring for your properties?  Today, I am talking to Tucker Cohen of Breezeway, which brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space. By combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management, Breezeway makes it easy for managers to deliver the best experience for guests, tenants, and owners.  You’ll Learn... [03:05] Problems Solved: Breezeway helps property management business owners when short- or long-term tenants move out to determine condition of property.  [05:15] Breezeway Bio: Created by FlipKey founder and acquired by TripAdvisor. Breezeway uses 75+ years of industry experience to build the future of property care. [07:00] Systemize business to be more effective and save time for brand standards and rising expectations in the market.  [10:23] Conferences and Companies: What does a conference need? Everything a business needs. Company growth and expansion doesn’t always make things easier. [14:45] What are brand standards and rising expectations? People and perceptions are extensions of your brand. Trust and transparency meet standards and expectations. [21:25] Dating Analogy: Am I the person that the person I want to attract into my life or into my business, would they be interested in me? Come down to their level or level up. [23:05] Running a Business: If something isn’t working, it's your fault. Take ownership, don’t blame your team that is following your lead.  [27:20] Expectations tend to rise, but sometimes expectations are artificially wrong, unrealistic, unmanageable, and express entitlement.  [29:22] Situational Sayings: If nothing changes, then nothing changes. If you want dramatically different results, dramatic changes are required.  [30:59] Status Quo Challenge: Some people aren't ready for change. Ultimately, everyone moves toward an operations tool, like Breezeway.  [36:00] Platform Integrations: Breezeway strives to be a connected system, but wants to work with Rent Manager and others. [38:35] Three-Legged Stool: Cleaning, inspection, and maintenance of property care and operations. Tweetables Everything looks shiny and pretty, but business is tough, being an entrepreneur is tough, and the inside of companies can be tough. The main thing must stay the main thing in the business. Keeping focus is power. Expectations tend to rise, but some expectations are unrealistic and unmanageable. The sooner you can automate, the better. As you scale, you have that process in place. Resources Breezeway Tucker Cohen’s Email Tucker Cohen on Twitter Tucker Cohen on LinkedIn FlipKey TripAdvisor Todd Breen Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink Rent Manager EZ Repair Hotline Property Meld Latchel DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I am hanging out here with Tucker Cohen. Tucker, welcome to the show. Tucker: Thanks a lot, Jason. That was fantastic. For some reason, I thought that was recorded. I didn’t know you did that a lot. Jason: I just say it each time. Sometimes, I screw it up even though I wrote it. Tucker: It’s perfect, you nailed it. Jason: I'm reading it. I think I haven't memorized, I probably do, but I read it because even I get nervous doing my own show sometimes. Tucker, we're going to get into Breezeway and our topic today is brand standards and rising expectations in the market. Give us a little bit of background before we get into the topic at hand. Tell us a little bit about what is Breezeway and maybe we can dig in more into that as we move through the topic. Tucker: Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad that we're able to reconnect since Orlando, probably like a month ago now. I’m super excited to be here. It's interesting. The topics are largely in line with what we're up to. I doubt that's much of a coincidence, but what Breezeway aims to do is allow property managers, like the ones you're talking about, the ones who aren't afraid to adopt technology, go out on a limb, and do something first, to meet those elevated brand standards at scale. The way we're doing that is through leveraging automation, through leveraging mobile functionality for folks in the field who are helping maintain and care for your properties. Without getting too much into it, I'd say that we're really in line with that brand standard piece you mentioned. Jason: Cool. I want to touch on this before we could move on, but what problems does Breezeway really solve? Property management business owners are struggling with what? They would be really interested in having a conversation with you. Tucker: I think there's a number of different ways to answer that with regards to the folks who I think are probably tuned in now. It's going to be more aligned along the lines of when someone moves out or when someone checks out of one of your properties, be it long-term or short-term, you don't necessarily know the condition that the property was in when they got there. With Breezeway, we have a system of record for every single detail down to the serial number of your appliance when someone checked in and every item into a certain room or a certain part of the house that often goes unnoticed or you have an owner coming in to check-in, I think it’s just managing the chaos would probably be the best way to describe what we're helping folks with. Jason: Now, my initial gut reaction hearing this is that sounds like a lot of work, of data entry and getting all these things, just to go around to each unit and feed all this stuff in. How do you deal with that objection that people are probably, I'm sure it's come up. That sounds like a lot of time. Tucker: Totally. With any of this type of stuff, you get what you put into it. If you're willing to go through the due diligence upfront, make sure that everything is set up right, and you have all your property information in the system, then it pays dividends down the line where you don't have to go digging through a Google Drive with hundreds of different files about your serial number on the microwave, that property number 150. That stuff is all there anyway. The only difference is that it's just buried somewhere, whether it's an email thread, a text chain with a cleaner, an inspector at your property, or a maintenance guy. You have most of this information anyway. What we're doing is we're centralizing everything in there under one hood. Jason: Got it. Now I'm going to read a little bit of that bio that we received when getting ready for the show because I think it makes you guys sound pretty credible and I want you guys to look really good. Breezeway brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space, combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management. We make it easy for managers to deliver the best experience of guests, tenants, and owners. We are serving a global customer base across a broad set of verticals, including short-term vacation managers, residential property managers, cleaning and maintenance providers, hospitality operators. This was created by the founder of FlipKey which was acquired by TripAdvisor. The Breezeway team is using 75-plus years of industry experience to build the future of property care. What you're working on is you are directly with the sales team. You're building the sales team inside that. This says, “Having skilled companies from series A to unicorn status in the past.” What does that mean? Explain that to me. Tucker: That's, of course, like privately-held software company jargon right there, but basically, what that means is a company that's pre-Series A, like us here at Breezeway, means we've raised a very small round of money. In the future, we may raise a Series A, which is more of an initial investment, proper venture capital raise, and then all the way up to unicorn status, which is commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as a billion-dollar valuation for the company. Jason: Okay. Let's get into the top of your hand. Brand standards and rising expectations in the market. This sounds like you guys are primed for growth. It sounds like you guys have a really cool technology in place that's going to do some stuff for property managers to help them systemize their business. I think you could answer my question better in saying that it's going to help them save time in the long run, right? It’s the bottom of the line. There's some time that it takes to get this stuff set up initially, but it's going to save you the hassle of all this time in the long run. Overall, it's not costing you time. Tucker: Yeah, you got it. Jason: There you go. Tucker: Most folks are already doing a lot of this stuff anyway. Jason: They're just doing it poorly. Tucker: Again, you said it, not me. Jason: Most things in most businesses. I get to see on the inside of hundreds of companies and everything's shiny on the outside. It could be shinier. We can help you with that, by the way, property managers. It could be shinier on the outside, but the challenges on the inside, that's like the whited sepulcher they talked about in the Bible like, “How's everything going?” “Oh, it's great,” but they're drowning. That's businesses on Instagram. Everything looks pretty and is great but really business is tough, being an entrepreneur is tough, and the inside of companies can be tough. A smart entrepreneur I’d spoken with today on a sales call said, “What's your internal organization like? How do you run your own business?” I just started telling him because us, entrepreneurs, we know what it's like to run a company. It feels like herding cats sometimes, it feels like chaos, wrapping some constraints around that and moving the business forward towards scaling towards growth takes work. You help manage some of the herding of the cats information-wise. Tucker: There you go. Absolutely. To that point, it's such an interesting timing. I actually just started listening to this other podcast called Under The Waterline. Have you heard of that one? Jason: No, but Under The Waterline? Like drowning? Tucker: It's pretty straightforward, but all about what you're saying. Everybody tells the story. When a company goes well, all you hear is the above the waterline, which is clean, beautiful, and nothing ever went wrong. I'm drawing a blank on the host. I only listened to a couple of episodes far, worth checking out. He digs and he interviews with entrepreneurs, and talks about “Tell me the honest take. What happened here? How did you do this? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it ugly?” really digging in on that under the waterline grit that it takes to successfully build a company like you're talking about. Jason: Yeah. I've made all kinds of mistakes. I jokingly tell people that DoorGrow has been built on thousands of failures, I mean really. I did a conference back in November and some of the listeners were probably at this conference. We had 150 attendees. This was our inaugural event. It was phenomenal. We had amazing food. We had great speakers. Here's the dirty secret about doing that conference. People were like, “Why aren't you doing it again this year?” I thought it'd be this great thing, our business is healthy, we're doing about $1 million in revenue, we've had 300% growth, then like, “Let's do a conference this year.” Tucker: Why not? Jason: The thing about starting a conference, property managers can compare this to—if they're in residential going into commercial, or deciding to start in a new market, deciding to do associations, or whatever it might be—some expansion and they think this will be easy. There’ll be just this other thing. This other thing was like starting a whole new company because what does a conference need? Everything a business needs: sales, marketing, branding positioning, lots and lots of organization, everything that a business needs. It was like starting another company. Guess how much growth we had the year that we were doing a conference? No growth. We had no growth for a year. We were healthy-ish but we weren't growing ironically. Our company is called DoorGrow, but it was because we were distracted because everything had to go towards this conference. Once you decide to do a conference, you're all in. You're on the hook with the hotel, you've got vendors, people sold tickets, there's no going back. There are lots of companies that have gone bankrupt just for doing a conference. I was like, “How was that possible? No.” We're [...] than that. Not me, no. That's every business owner starting company. “I'll be better than all those other property management businesses. They all suck but that won't be me.” I hear that all the time. “I'm starting a property management business because all the other companies in my market suck.” I hear that every week and they won't be that one. Tucker: What you're talking about, too, Jason is just like spending your time efficiently and effectively. If you are a small shop, you can't really afford to necessarily make mistakes like that with where you're allocating your time. In your case, it was a conference that did it. You did it, you pulled it off but someone who, like you're saying— Jason: Yeah, everybody loved it, everyone's like, “It was so great,” and I didn't love it. It was super stressful because I'm somewhat introverted. I'm an ambivert but that situation was incredibly uncomfortable for me because it was just so much pressure. But it went off well, everybody had great feedback but it cost me $2 million in opportunity cost easily. Tucker: No ROI there. Jason: I could do a conference that cost tons of money, broke even sort of thing. The conference probably cost $120,000 just to throw because we did everything great but the opportunity cost, the fact that my team were all focused on it, and everything else instead of on the main thing. I think as entrepreneurs, we need to remember in our business, the main thing is the main thing. If your business needs sales and revenue, then that's what you need to focus on, otherwise, you end up with a sales slump and then you're scrambling. The main thing has to stay the main thing in the business. That was a huge lesson that I got from that. I got to make sure the main thing always stays the main thing. Entrepreneurs, we’re always tempted by opportunity and there's always a distraction, there are always new options, opportunity, and distraction, whether it's expanding into a new market as a property manager or something. Keeping focused is power. Tell me what are brand standards? Rising expectations? Let's get into this. Tucker: I have a hot take on brand standards. I think it's a pretty lukewarm take, I think it's pretty straightforward, but it’s really like, “This is what your expectation is.” There's this sociological theory, which is that there are three versions of you. There's you as you see yourself, there's you as other people see you, and there's a version of you that you think other people see as you. It's your projection of what people's perception is. It's one thing from a personal standpoint, but from a business standpoint, you actually can control that in a lot of ways. That's what we're talking about with brand standards. You have expectations as an entrepreneur, as the CEO of your own company, you expect things to be done a certain way. How do you make sure that the people who you're trusting to impact your business, whether it's someone taking photos of your property for a posting, for listing, cleaning your property, or inspecting your property before someone checks in or moves in? Those people are extensions of your brand. You're effectively trusting them to meet those standards. A lot of times, you don't necessarily have insight into that but maybe that was a hot take. Jason: Yeah. I'll add to that. Branding is one of the main things that we have property management businesses with. I consider myself a branding expert. This is something that I dealt with in helping clean up the branding for hundreds of property management companies. We've helped some vendors even recently. We helped clean up Virtually Incredible’s branding. We helped clean up their new logo. It was designed by my team. I had some great conversation with Todd Breen on helping him focus on the main gateway that was feeding his business and recognize that other things were back-end products that came later in the sales cycle, instead of putting out the message that he did everything, which one feeds the business. I think property managers need to recognize that, too.  Property management is often the front-end gateway product even if they also do real estate. It works more effectively usually that way. I think they need to focus on that, but a lot of property management businesses in the branding are real estate companies, which scares off the people that want a specialist. They want a specialist that manage their biggest investment ever. I've helped double some property management businesses’ real estate revenue commissions by eliminating real estate from their branding, ironically, because once the property management side is healthy, it's what's feeding them the majority of the revenue that’s coming into that. It goes back again to focus. We can tie this back in, but it goes back again to focus that in order to deal with people's expectations and in order to manage the perception of your business, I think the key is that you need to align it towards what starts the process, not towards everything that you do. I'm dating now. Imagine that you're in the process of dating, you're going out, and you just vomit everything about yourself and what you do. You can't do that. You got to start with where's their interest level at. Start in that space first. “Oh, you're into music? Me too.” You have to start somewhere. There has to be a beginning. The same thing with our businesses, there has to be a beginning because you [...] what you're doing. You're trying to create a relationship and you can parallel this to dating, but you're not going to show up and try to make out with them on the front porch as soon as you meet them. That's what people try to do in sales a lot of times. They just vomit everything right on their lap, they're in a state of overwhelm, and they're like, “Okay, that's a bit much, buddy.” I think also with branding, transparency is so huge. You said something that I felt anxious just hearing you talk about the expectations with yourself, with others, and then what you think others are perceiving. That can be such a big head game that people get caught up in. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, how are people perceiving me? Am I okay? Do they like me? Am I being right for them? Am I doing this?” Ultimately, as we get older, we learn to just not give an F. You don't care as much because you become more confident, you love yourself, you like yourself. When your business is confident, when you're confident in your business, and you're confident your business can deliver, you come from a greater space in which you can be the prize that the client is trying to get instead of thinking that they're the prize. This is called prizing in sales. I think it happens when you’re transparent because transparency creates safety, it creates trust, you don't have to try and be something. The problem is, a lot of times, the brand is not in alignment with what's on the back end, what's on the inside. It's not in alignment with the business owner. Tucker: That brings up two great points. One is you say in your personal life, you grow up and you're just like, “Yeah, I don't really care. This is who I am, take it or leave it.” What we're talking about here, unfortunately, is a place where we don't have that luxury. We're talking about the rising expectations that are taking place across every element of property management and then the brand standards. Jason: Due to increases in technology. People have iPhones. If they have iPhones, they expect more. Tucker: It's one thing to say, “Yeah, this is who I am, take it or leave it,” but if it's your business, you say that, and you provide a bad experience, that's where I think branding really comes down to is the experience that your client ends up having when they engage with you, be it at the very beginning of your relationship or throughout the lion's share of it all the way to the end. Jason: Yeah. Let's go back to the dating analogy. If I'm overweight, I'm not getting my hair cut, I'm not brushing my teeth, and I just grow my beard down to my ankles, and I just say, “Screw everybody else, this is how I am. Take it or leave it.” That's cool, I will only attract people that are interested in that. That might not be what I'm interested in. Here's the thing. I love this question, “Am I the person—that the person I want to match with, or attract into my life, or into my business—they would be interested in? Am I at that level? If not, I even need to lower my expectations or I need to make some changes.” Tucker: Right, either come down to their level or you level up. That's it. Jason: Right. Either way, I need to get in touch with reality. I need to make some changes. A great question that I've had several coaches I've seen throw out or coaches I've worked with ask is, “Who do I have to become in order to be that person? Who do I have to become? What would it take? Who do you, as a property management business owner, have to become in order to have the type of business that you want?” Here's the thing. One of my coaches said, “If you don't have the business yet that you dream of, you're not yet the person that can run it yet. Tucker: That's meta. Jason: That's meta. Right, that's really simple. If you don't have the business that you dream of, you feel like it's not right, and you're frustrated with your team, you're not the person yet that can create that. But as entrepreneurs, it's so easy for us to externalize all of that. I get many people come to me and they want to focus on their website, they want to focus on lead gen, they want to blame their team. Everything is external. The ironic thing that I found is if I can get them to focus on themselves, get clarity on who they are, what really makes them feel alive and in momentum as entrepreneur, they get really clear on their purpose, then we align the brand, the business, everything around that, everything changes. The website's going to end up changing, their messaging is going to end up changing, their sales process changes. They fire some of their team members. Their team members change. Everything changes in a business once the business owner, the entrepreneur at the helm who is the sun at the center of the solar system changes. Everything has to change by default. But what's incredibly costly, time crazy, and painful is the folks trying to change everything externally without changing yourself which is really creating all that. Tucker: Do you know Jocko Willink, the ex-Navy SEAL? Jason: Yeah, he's written some good books. Tucker: He's got the book Extreme Ownership. That’s his whole thing, it’s extreme ownership. If something's not working out, it's your fault. You got to take some ownership, it’s not the team's fault. The team is following your lead. You're the leader. Jason: I'll share an example. I was talking with somebody and they were complaining about all these different people that had come into their life. They were complaining about this guy, that guy, and this. I said, “Hey, there's one common denominator among all of this. There's one commonality.” Because they were like, “I don't know [...]. All these people are so different.” I said, “There's one thing in common. You. That’s the one thing in common.” The most dangerous thing in the world—property managers know this if they've been in the business a while—one of the biggest red flags for property manager is if somebody comes to them and says with an existing manager or they just fired their last manager and they're complaining about their previous managers. “Oh, this company was terrible.” The dumb property manager would listen to all of that and they would say, “Oh, yeah, they're terrible. We'll be way better.” The correct property manager would say, “Okay, maybe it's this person so I better ask some really good questions before I take them on because I might be the next company that's on their [...] list that's getting attacked on online reviews and negative. I don't want to be that.” That's a red flag. Another red flag is if somebody's referring a client to you. We can't really help them. I teach my clients to do that, to refer the clients they don't like to somebody else. I'm sharing this transparently, everybody. If somebody's referring a client to you, it could mean that they're a terrible client. Sometimes, though, it may just mean that they’re not a fit. One man's junk is another man's treasure when it comes to property management. Some people can deal with that difficult investor and others can't. Some difficult investors can exchange the good ones just by setting a real strong fence and a boundary that some managers aren't capable of doing. That's all they wanted in the beginning, they just wanted safety. That's another advantage you can create. Tucker: The takeaway there, do your homework always. Larry David had a good episode on that. Don't get foisted. Jason: Foisted? I don’t know that term. Tucker: I'll send you a link. Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Jason: All right. I’ll avoid getting foisted after I launch this episode. Tucker: Tough referral. Jason: Perfect. Expectations do tend to rise but sometimes, expectations are artificially wrong. I saw a post from one of my buddies who's in the restaurant industry today. This girl wrote this note on a receipt saying, “I'm not giving you a tip because I'm only a few days away from my 21st birthday and you wouldn't allow me to have alcohol.” No tip for their whole party, from the whole party of food. This just shows the entitlement that exists in some people. That's ridiculous. Sometimes some people's expectations are unrealistic. I don't think it's too much for somebody to provide good service but to break the law for somebody so that they can have alcohol because, “Hey, my birthday is only a few days away,” come on. Tucker: That's an unrealistic expectation at its finest. Jason: As long as it's in the past. Yes. Some expectations are not manageable and it's not possible for us to raise to that level of their expectation because it's without foundation, it's a pie in the sky, it's a pipe dream, it's not realistic. Now I think the challenge with property managers is there's some things that they think, “This is a status quo, this is how we’ve done it. This is how it is. It's just hard this way.” They think everything else is pie in the sky or fluffy and not possible. They exclude themselves from making those changes. It’s like the guy that's like, “Oh, all girls are just difficult. I'm just going to sit on my couch and eat Cheetos all day. They only want a rich guy or they only want whatever. They just choose out.” In business is the same thing, we can just choose out. Tucker: An all-encompassing saying for every situation you can think of is if nothing changes, then nothing changes. Jason: Right. I've also heard it said if you want dramatically different results or if you want dramatic change, it requires dramatic change. Tucker: There you go, case in point. Then, of course, another bit of jargon of rising tide lifts all ships. That’s it. Jason: I think I touched on that one on this show before of rising tide can raise all ships if the tide is already high enough, but I think the challenge in property management is that the tide is all the way down in some areas. It's low. There are some property management businesses with holes in them like you wouldn't believe and they're sitting on gravel or sand. They're there.  A rising tide is going to sink some ships in this industry, no question, and they need to sink because it's going to help the entire industry. There are property owners businesses that should not be in business or they’re going to have them patch up some holes and make things work better. Tucker: I think to that point, Jason, it's really the ones who are going to sit back and say, “This is the way we've always done it or this is status quo,” because frankly, at the end of the day, the customer has all the power. They're the ones that can make or break your business with one bad review at the end of the day. [...] natural selection, I think. You’re right. Jason: Let's apply this to Breezeway. Breezeway, what are some of the challenges that you deal with in selling your services to property managers? Some of the things that you'll typically hear from them. Tucker: That's a really straightforward one, is that status quo like, “This is where we've always done it.” It's not that big of a headache for us now. We don't think we would use it that much, or what we talked about before, it might be too much work upfront. It's okay. Some people aren't ready for change but we stand by the fact that ultimately, everyone will move towards an operations tool like Breezeway, if not Breezeway. In most cases, when people say no, they come back. We believe that's going to continue to happen as this tide continues to rise and the expectations continue to rise. If you don't have high brand standards, you don't get to be a brand any more because (like you said) the ship sinks. If you can't meet the customers expectations, you're probably not going to have any customers for much longer, so the status quo. Like we said, this isn't stuff that people aren't doing already in a lot of cases. They're just running around and managing chaos in order to effectively do it. What Breezeway allows them to do is both automate as well as ensure that it's actually happening in a way that they hope it will, meeting those brand standards. Jason: You've got customers, right? Tucker: Yeah, we have some. Jason: Okay, good, me too. Can you share an example, a case study, or maybe even some typical situation that you've seen where they've gone from not doing it, struggling, not using Breezeway, to implementing your services, and what results they've been able to achieve? Tucker: Without naming any specific clients, another big piece of pushback that we receive is, “I don't know if my service providers will actually use this,” which is fair, generally considering the fact that service providers aren't tech-savvy, what have you. But one of our clients down south were able to effectively roll this out to their service network. Each one of those service providers now uses our app to download all of their checklists offline. Before, there was no good way for them to do that until they can download the apps all offline. They had pulled them and said, “Hey, would you want to go back to the old way?” which was email, paper and pen, checklist, they’re coming into the office, “Hey, here's your assignment for the day,” or emailing them out to some of the further ones, then they had to submit them all back manually with all the photos attached, and they're like, “Absolutely not. Of course, why would I ever want to go back to the old way?” A bit of an anecdotal story there about some of those challenges that we're seeing at the onset of conversations all being overcome and Breezeway being in a spot where they know no other way now. Jason: There are a lot of tools that a lot of property managers probably shouldn't even touch until they’re maybe about 50 to 100 units, they can't even entertain the idea. They don't have cash flow, they're not ready to use a service, they're a solopreneur maybe, at what stage do you feel like Breezeway can be implemented in a business? Where do they need to be, roughly, in terms of door count, size, who do you guys generally work with? Tucker: Good question. It is on a case-by-case basis to some extent because some entrepreneurs, like you're saying, have higher bandwidth for stress and they can deal with some of those chaotic nuances that go into managing a higher door count as opposed to someone like me who I like to ensure as much automation as possible so I don't let things slip through the cracks in the first place. The sooner I can automate, the better. Then as I scale, I have that process in place. Typical door count, from a short-term perspective, we’ll work with folks in the 50 to 100 range but all the way down to 5 doors too. Again, [...] pay. They like to just automate as much as possible. In the longer-term world, we're talking about the same, range only on the higher scale. So, 50 all the way up to 500 and 1000 doors. Jason: Okay. They can get started with you guys at any point. You guys don't have like 100-door minimum, 200-door minimum, or anything like this? Tucker: No. Jason: Okay. Tucker: We're not turning people away just yet, Jason. Jason: Okay. I do but I'm picky. I'm just kidding. Tucker, this is really cool, the future sounds like technology. Does Breezeway integrate with any platforms? There are so many different tools in property management, I think a lot of people listening to my show nowadays are like, “Oh, gosh, Jason just shared another stupid tool that I'm going to have to figure out how to plug into my business that I really want,” and they've got this to-do list of tools they want to add and implement. How difficult is it to get started with Breezeway and is there any concern about connection, integration, or any of this thing that is really significant? Tucker: I understand why people get concerned with this type of thing. Of course, whenever you're introducing new technology, there's always a concern, especially because folks (like you said) have been burned in the past like, “Oh, another one of these things I have to do.” But at Breezeway, we really aim to be a connected system. From a long-term standpoint, we're working with the folks of the likes of Rent Manager and other folks like them. Then short-term, all the 20-plus of the biggest PMS systems out there. But our goal by the end of this year and the coming year 2020, we're going to just be one of the most connected systems out there, whether it's your remote locks of the world all the way to your streamlines and your rent managers of the world as well. Jason: Got it. People listening might get confused and think, “Is Breezeway a complementary tool to maintenance coordination tools or is it a replacement for these type of tools, where we have, maybe EZ Repair Hotline, Property Meld, and Latchel, these services?” Tucker: Wow, that's a loaded question, Jason. I knew you’re going to come at me with that. Jason: It’s an obvious question. Tucker: It is an obvious question. Jason: I’m just asking what I know my clients are going to be like, “What is this? How does it fit in the overall mix?” Tucker: It's true. Listen, like I was saying before, we want to play nicely with anybody who's out there so we're not going to go ahead and say that we’re a direct competitor for these folks. The other thing is we do a handful of the same stuff. You'll be hard-pressed to be using one of them for maintenance, using Breezeway for cleaning and inspections, and not using us for maintenance. There's a three-legged stool with regards to where Breezeway plays in the operations world and our aim is to supplement the PMS regardless of which one it is, we want to integrate with them. Then if they're using something else for maintenance, that's fine too. Jason: Explain the three legs, what are they just for people that are a little bit lost. Tucker: Yeah, sorry. I'm a big analogy guy. Jason: Take the analogy into reality. Tucker: Here’s the reality, you have your cleaning, inspection, and your maintenance. Those are the three legs we believe of property care and operations. Jason: Got it. What other frequently asked questions do people have when they're approaching you for interest in Breezeway or just any other questions that we haven't covered? Tucker: I don't know, it runs the gamut. We're creating a new category to speak of, property operation which is really something that people haven't heard of. We're excited about it. The main question is probably what is property operations. It's just what I'm talking about. It's really thinking about not just managing a property but actually caring for it and taking into consideration preventative maintenance and safety measures. All that stuff rolled into one in a way that you can do it as hands-off as possible. Jason: Perfect. Okay. Tucker, I think we’ve talked about brand standards, we’ve talked about rising expectations in the industry, we've talked about Breezeway. How can people get in touch with Breezeway? How can they find out more if they want to get in touch and they're interested? Tucker: We are at www.breezeway.io. If you would like to check out our integrations page, it's very simple /integrations. If you would like to meet with me, you can send me an email, [email protected], @CorpoTuck on Twitter, on Linkedin, Tucker F. C. I know a lot of folks are on Facebook, I'm thinking about getting on there, but that's about it. Happy to fill any questions now, it looks like we're getting some coming in on the chat. Jason: We can touch on that. Is this available for homeowners or just landlords and property managers? Tucker: Yeah. Listen, right now, it is primarily for landlords and property managers, but we do see a world where a longer term this will be used by homeowners and the connected home Internet of Things world of the future that we see everything sliding towards. Jason: Someday, Breezeway may know whether my Roomba has done its job or not. Tucker: Exactly. Your Roomba would be automatically scheduled by Breezeway. Jason: All right. Tucker, it’s been great having you on. Everybody check out, it’s breezeway.io. I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show. Tucker: Yeah. Thanks so much, Jason. This is great. Glad we made it happen. Jason: All right, I'll let you go. All right, there you have it, check out breezeway.io. I'm always curious to hear your feedback on this so make sure you guys are inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group. This is our community for all those DoorGrow Hackers out there, property management, business owners, entrepreneurs. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com and that will take you to the Facebook group. Answer all the questions and we'll let you in if you're a property management entrepreneur. Get inside that group. As always, I'd love to hear feedback on what you think about different tools, different things that you're using, and ask questions to other people inside the Facebook group. We’ll give you some free gifts when you join that group, including a bible of fees that you can tack on your property management business. We have a list of really cool tools and vendors in there. You will get an email drip if you provided your email when you join the group. We will be giving you gifts to help you grow your property management business. Eventually, you'll be able to learn a little bit more about what we do at DoorGrow. Make sure you get inside that group if you're not in our community. There are amazing people in there, they're helpful, and they align with my vision of creating collaboration over competition. That's what this industry needs right now. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Do you need a place to rent? But you can’t complete or submit your application because you don’t have the required information and documentation for the property manager? This is a common and frustrating problem.  Today, I am talking to Stephen Arifin of The Closing Docs, which offers automated income verification in the property management industry. The Closing Docs is a modern way to help applicants prove their net income, which is the best indicator of their ability to pay rent. The Closing Docs provides property managers with income information needed to make a decision that can be defended. You’ll Learn... [01:48] Early Entrepreneurship Experience: Stephen started solving problems using technology to make money from the time he was in kindergarten through college. [02:50] First Job Out of School: Full-stack Web developer at Microsoft, where a small team taught Stephen the fundamentals of how to build a Web application from scratch. [03:08] Missing Entrepreneurial Spirit: Stephen leaves Microsoft to pursue broken industries in need of technological innovation to save time and money. [03:31] Mortgage Lenders: The Closing Docs was founded to fill in the gaps of loan application processes by automating income verification. [05:21] How it Works: The Closing Docs receives permission from applicant to prove their net income, the money that goes into their account to pay their rent. [07:00] The Closing Docs has developed integrations with property management software, including Buildium, AppFolio, On-Site, and Yardi. [12:18] Why switch to The Closing Docs and not follow the status quo? Information collected directly from banks is better and trustworthy for an approval recommendation. [13:38] Operational Cost Savings: People and software are expensive, so what can property managers/applicants expect to pay for The Closing Docs? $10 per screening.  Tweetables Broken Industries: Paper-and-pencil processes are ripe for technological innovation. Net income is the best indicator of applicant’s ability to pay rent.  The Closing Docs doesn’t ask or expect clients to change their software. The Closing Docs’s standardized information helps people close more deals faster. Resources The Closing Docs Automated Income Verification Process: How It Works Stephen Arifin's Email Microsoft AppFolio Propertyware Buildium Rent Manager On-Site Yardi The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to expand the industry, transform it, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception of it, expand the market, and help the best property managers win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. I am hanging out with a special guest today. My guest is Stephen Arifin. He is with a company called The Closing Docs. Stephen, how are you today? Stephen: Good, Jason. How are you? Jason: I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for being here on the show. Stephen, before we get started, give us a little bit of background on you. Tell us a little bit about you, your entrepreneurial journey, your adventures here, and what led you to The Closing Docs.  Stephen: Sure. First thing, I'm a tech guy. I've always been around technology and computers growing up. My dad was a programmer and started his own banking software company. I was always around entrepreneurship and technology. Even at a young age, I would always try to solve problems with technology. For example, in kindergarten, all my classmates were really upset when the school installed the website blocker that prevented them from playing their online games. I created my own website and hosted all of my classmates favorite games so that they can play at school. Of course, I took the nominal donation, and made a little cash. I studied software engineering in college. I love building apps. I was in a fraternity and we were having some major issues collecting and organizing our finances. A buddy and I built a better invoicing system, launched the company into our fraternity, and help streamline their finances. That was probably my first real entrepreneurship experience. My first job out of school was at Microsoft, where I worked as a full stack web developer. It was a small team and taught me a solid fundamentals of how to build a web application from scratch. I consider myself really lucky to be in a team with so many talented engineers, but at Microsoft, I really missed my entrepreneurial drive.  While I was working there, I've began investigating broker industries. I started with industries that has many paper and pencil process, and were ripe for technological innovation. An obvious contender was the mortgage industry. I started finding gaps where technology can save time and money. After talking to a few dozen lenders, it was clear there was a breakdown in the [...] application process. Typically, their proof of income. Why were they taking screenshots of paystubs in W-2? In 2017 and even today, why are loan officers forced to review these data sources in so many different formats? It's cumbersome, it's time-consuming. It invites human error and judgment. Honestly, it's just downright painful. There had to be a better way.  Thus, The Closing Docs is born to provide automated income verification. I started in the lending industry. I really tried to help verify their applicant's income. But my lack of industry knowledge made it really difficult to sell. After speaking with folks in the real estate industry, I learned about similar problems in the property management space—a far less regulated industry and one that is even more disaggregated than the lending universe. At this time, it made sense for me to combine forces with someone familiar with the startup landscape, someone familiar with starting and operating businesses, and all their direct industry knowledge.  The Closing Docs other founder and my partner, Mark Fiebig, had started a handful of companies, successfully raised venture capital, and also happened to have deep real estate industry knowledge including owning a property management company himself. Together, along with my technical knowledge, we combined our assets and knowledge, and created what The Closing Docs is today. Jason: Cool. Explain what is The Closing Docs today. Stephen: We provide automated income verification. Essentially, a modern way to help applicants prove their net income. Here's how it works. With the applicants permission, we can obtain a years worth of deposit history directly from their banks, and share a report that illustrates an applicant's net income. Why are we reporting net income? It is the best indicator of an applicant's ability to pay rent going forward. The money going into the applicant bank account is the money that will be used to pay rent.  Our message to property managers is clear. We'll provide the info you need to make the decision you can defend instantly. So often, applicant provides incomplete information. Whatever info they do share, it comes from so many different formats from so many different sources. At the closing docs, we streamline the process significantly. Based on our client's usage data, we are seeing time spent from applicant screening fall by as much as 30%. That means that three hours screening timeline turns into two hours. We're saving our clients real money. If you do the math, that's one full-time employee for our property management firms seeing around 2000 property.  It's honestly fun for us to be on the phone with our customers and have them jumping for joy because they're super excited. We help them simplify and expedite their workloads. In essence, The Closing Docs is standardized information delivered right into your inbox or pushed directly into your property management software through our integration. We help people close more deals faster. Jason: All right. That sounded very pitchy but it sounds cool. Tell me which software does your software integrate with, that some of my listeners might be familiar with? A lot of them are using AppFolio, they're using Propertyware, they're using Rent Manager, they're using Buildium, some of these tools as a back office. Stephen: We've developed a number of integrations with Buildium, AppFolio, OnSite, Yardi. Those are many of the popular property management software systems out there. We're continuing to grow that list. We don't ask or expect our clients to change their software or stop using what they love or what they're used to.  We know that property managers pay multiple logins and switching between apps, so we made it as easy as possible for them to use our income screening. If they want, we also create an online rental application as well. Jason: So, they're going through this process of using your application (probably) instead of maybe what's built into their software. This is helping to gather all the documentation or documents (The Closing Docs) that they might need in order to verify their net income. What happens next in this process? How easy is it for them to use the software and figure out whether somebody is a viable candidate for this particular property? Stephen: There's two different entry points that property managers can use in our tools. One, if they are a firm with around 100 doors (usually), they can use our standalone web service. Essentially, they type in the applicant’s email and it sends the applicant an email to our site. The applicant authorizes their banks and they authorize us to pull all the information needed to aggregate metrics like net income—yearly net income, monthly net income.  We also count non-recurring deposits like bonuses, W-2 tax returns. Once that information comes in, the applicant gets the chance to review the information so that we remain FDR-compliant and they know the information that's being shared with their property manager, then they click a button. What we do is we print an income report. We deliver that directly to the property manager's email. That's the first way we do it. The second way is for bigger property management firms around 1000 doors, we actually integrate our income verification directly into our online rental application. We have an online rental app and it has different controls. All the information that the property management firm requires, we can require it to the applicant so they don’t skip it, and the income verification is built into the rental app. When the rental app is submitted, the property manager receives the rental application along with our income report. It's all in one combined package. That helps the back-and-forth issue that property managers so often get into, where the applicant doesn't submit all the necessary information and they have to go hound the applicant to, "Hey, can you submit this paystub? It's from two years ago." We save a lot of property managers time that way. Jason: I imagine, even one piece of back-and-forth is costing probably, sometimes even a day. Sometimes, 10, 15, or 20 minutes minimum. If there's pieces that are over and over again that are missing, they're working a one application, this adds up. You have 5 properties that are vacant that you are working on right now, 10 properties vacant that you are working on right now. Your staff are going to be really busy. It feels like it's such an essential, critical thing that just has to be done to move these things forward to get things rented, but what you're saying is a lot of it can be automated. Stephen: Right. When you’re trying to get more information about the applicant, that unit is in a limbo state. It's not really on the market. It's not really off the market. We're trying to prevent stuff like that. Jason: And the renter gets frustrated. Everyone's been in a situation where you have a key providing more information. They keep asking for more information. It just starts to get frustrating. I'm sure there's instances where they just decide to move on to something that's easier. Stephen: Right. One of the sites that want to [...] from starting this company, the property manager loves us, but their customers, their applicants, actually love us as well. They get approved faster, it's super easy, and they save a bunch of time. Really, everybody wins. Jason: Ultimately, that's why every business exist. It's to create some win-win, maybe win. You're solving a problem. You're shortening the [...] the time. What are some of the other benefits why should property managers pay attention to this instead of just doing what they've been doing and following the status quo?  Stephen: We receive our information directly from the banks. We support about 15,000 banks which is about 99.9% of all of the banks in the United States. We get trustworthy data. We get better data. Since the information is digitized, we're also able to produce and approve a recommendation. We use 2.5 times the net income to rent ratio. If the applicant makes 2.5 times more, then the units rank and we give them a thumbs up. If they don't, we give them a thumbs down. Property managers can make a decision really easily. Their applicants qualified. If it doesn't qualify, we'll give all the details of the transaction history and deposit history. They can drill down and see a little bit more detail where applicants [...]. Jason: All right. So, they’ll be able to have a little bit of information is to why they maybe didn't qualify, that sort of thing. I think another issue here that were a benefit to any piece of technology is that there's going to be an operational cost savings. If you have a staff member that's manually doing this, they're doing phone calls, they're texting, they're emailing saying, "Hey, we need this piece," they're trying to get stuff out of an email. They're trying to store documents in a certain way. They're asking people to send things, "Send me a picture of this," they will go into your bank, download these bank statements, and send them to us.  The challenge is, you're going to be paying somebody to spend the time to do this, somebody on your team. People are expensive. You're spending (for a decent team member) probably $15–$30 an hour. If you have hundreds of properties that you're dealing with, vacant properties, you're going to be spending hours and hours of money towards something that could easily be handled by technology. Help those listening understand, if you will, maybe a little bit about the cost of the software. Just get them a ballpark or help them understand if this is something even feasible for them to be doing in their business. Stephen: Our pricing is super simple, $10 per screening. There's no implementation cost. There's no sign-up cost. There's no minimum fees. It's just $10 per screening. The time that you save, especially when we have clients with a lot of doors and there's just a lot of applicants, especially during busy seasons like the summer season, applicants are just piling in by the truckload, each minute count. Each mental step that you actually even skip, it all adds up. It's really great. We have a lot of clients saying, "Man, we love your software."  Jason: This $10 application fee, they're probably passing on to the renters, I would imagine. Stephen: We support both the property manager or the applicant. We have clients that do both workloads. It's a business that's usually up to your [...]. Jason: Okay. They can do it either way. They can build it in as a part of their application process. Most property managers are going to have some other steps besides just income verification as part of their application process that they need to take into anyway. This would be one piece of that puzzle. This would be the income verification portion. Just to make screening even more solid. I would imagine that the financial aspect is probably one of the number one indicators as to whether they're going to be able to afford it and pay for it. They're going to be looking at things like credit. They're going to be looking at other things. Bottomline, if they don't have the funds available, it's okay. They're likelihood of making rent every month is going to be pretty slim. What are some of the frequently asked questions that some of the people may ask when they're looking at your software? When they're looking at your solution? What are some of the most common questions that property managers would probably be curious to hear about here on the DoorGrow Show? Stephen: Something with our income screening is that it requires the applicant's permission and the applicant's involvement. It's not like a hard inquiry on credit where you can just type in a social security number then they automatically pull credit without the applicant's involvement. We need the applicant to authorize their banks. That's how we remain FDR-compliant. Our data showed actually that we have around a 97% quiet rate which is honestly awesome. We do have some applicants in the older generation that is a little unfamiliar with technology. They get a little worried when authorizing the banks.  We're FDR-compliant, we have the same security protocols of banks, and we never see any of the sensitive credentials. But sometimes, applicants worry about that. Whenever we incorporate our income verification in an online rental app, we give the option to go the route that we've all come and known by uploading bank statements and pay stubs. We give that option. But like I said, 97% of the applicant go for the more streamlined option because it just saves so much time. Jason: Okay. So, if they get a conspiracy theorist grandpa, that's been living in a basement, he's freaking out, wearing his tinfoil hat, he's worried about giving his password through your software tool, he can still do things the old school way if the property manager's willing to tolerate it. Stephen: Right. If you think about it, they’re still uploading all the sensitive information. They're uploading their [...].  Jason: It's less secure. Let's be honest. Stephen: It's a perception. Jason: Yeah. If they're sending these stuff through email, that's even more ridiculous. Some emails open and passes through multiple servers. We understand that as nerds. That's okay. We need to help out our less technological brothers and sisters out there.  Stephen, it's exciting to hear about your tool. I hope people will check it out. How can people get in touch with you or with The Closing Docs and learn more? Stephen: Our website, theclosingdocs.com, has got a lot of great information. It also has a contact form. You can get in contact with our team. You can also email me at [email protected]. If you sign up at theclosingdocs.com on our site, you'll get three free screenings to try out our tool.  We're pretty confident that you'll be hooked by the first screening. It'll give you a chance to try out this new workflow. In the end, it is a new workflow. As a business, you need to adjust your business processes to accommodate for new tools that you incorporate in your business. Jason: All right, cool. Somebody was asking a question. They're asking, "How do you integrate with AppFolio since they don't have an API?"  Stephen: We use a Chrome extension, a browser extension. That allows people to create screenings directly from their browser no matter what website you're in. They're still using AppFolio, they're still using the tools that they love, but they can access our income screenings through our Chrome extension or a browser extension. Jason: It's a clever solution to that. If anybody has any other questions, reach out to [email protected]. I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show. Stephen: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for inviting me on the show. Jason: Yeah, you bet. Those of you that are watching, check out theclosingdocs.com. If you are watching us for the first time or maybe it's the 50th time, be sure to like and subscribe. Check us out on YouTube or leave us a comment on Facebook. I want to see people that are involved and see who's interested in the show. I love seeing that feedback. If you're on iTunes, do me a huge favor and leave us a review. I would appreciate it. We'd love some real feedback. Be sure to test out your website. You can do that at doorgrow.com/quiz. If you're doing any cold lead marketing, advertising, go to doorgrow.com/coldleads. Go through that calculator. I want to give you a gift and show you some leaks in your business that you may not be seeing right now. I would love to help you out, so reach out to us at DoorGrow. Until next time. To our mutual growth. Bye, everybody. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

What do most skiers and snowboarders dream about? Owning mountain property. But most of them don’t have the necessary wealth or money to purchase a second home, especially in expensive real estate markets. Today, I am talking to Rob Stephens of Avalara MyLodgeTax. As a Denver resident and lifelong skier, Rob was fortunate enough to buy a three-bedroom condo in Vail about 20 years ago. But even then, it took Rob, his wife, and wife's brother-in-law to make the dream a reality.  You’ll Learn... [02:57] Short-term Rental Market Options:  Hire local property manager/real estate agent. Post property online via VRBO, Airbnb, Expedia, etc. Rent-by-Owner: Book guests, collect money, and provide on-site services. [03:48] Complex Tasks: Apply technology and manage challenges for property owners, managers, and operators. Know what taxes to charge, collect, file, and pay to agencies. [05:50] Lack of Awareness: Property owners trying to manage their short-term rentals have never dealt with these types of transactional taxes.  [06:20] It’s not rocket science, but multiple layers of government are involved. State and local tax rates and requirements are specific to rental property location and address. [07:10] Avalara MyLodgeTax: Online hosted, Cloud service similar to TurboTax but for short-term rentals with vacation, occupancy, resort, and other taxes.  [09:27] Penalties to Avoid: Long-term, multifamily operators getting into short-term rental space need to understand rules and risks involved.  [11:40] One less thing to worry about. Partnerships with property management companies is when Avalara handles everything occupancy tax related.  [13:02] Common Questions and Concerns: Shortcuts and consolidation for creating awareness and understanding the mechanics of administrative work. Tweetables Increasing scrutiny and regulation on the short-term rental space, makes for more paperwork and forms to be filed. Lack of Awareness: Property owners managing their short-term rentals have never dealt with some types of transactional taxes.  Short-term rentals involve multiple layers of government. State and local tax rates and requirements are specific to rental property address. Resources Avalara MyLodgeTax Vail, CO VRBO Airbnb Expedia TurboTax DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guest today is Rob Stephens and his company is Avalara MyLodgeTax. Rob, before we get into talking about your business, I’d love to hear your background of how you're connected maybe to the real estate or property management industry. Maybe you could share with us just a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey just to qualify yourself to our listeners. Rob: Sure, happy to. Thanks for having me. I love the intro, good stuff. My story, I live in Denver, Colorado, lifelong skier like a lot of us, lifelong skiers here in Colorado. One of our aspirations is to have a mountain property. As a relatively young professional, this is about 20 years ago, was fortunate enough to be able to purchase a three-bedroom condo in Vail, Colorado with my wife's brother-in-law. The three of us went in together. At that point in time in my life, we wanted a second home in Vail, great skiing, be up in the mountains more, but part of that is when you make that financial investment—Vail is a very expensive real estate market—when we purchased it, we really needed income on that property to make the economics work. We certainly didn't have the wealth or money sitting around just to have a second home for our own personal use when we wanted it. We really needed to generate income. This was in the short-term rental market. Back in the day, this is the late 90s, you really hire a local property manager or real estate agent that would get you bookings. At the time, somebody told us about a little website called Vrbo, it was pretty new back then. We tossed it on what's now Vrbo. It was frankly really amazing to see the bookings and we were immediately connected to travelers really across the globe. Through this one subscription would cost us about $120 a year, we're able to keep our property pretty booked and you're talking $30,000, $40,000 a year in rent. Doing that, and I'm sure your audience will appreciate this, we were pretty clueless doing the rent-by-owner thing, there are all these other tasks to go along with it. You have to interact with guests, book guests, collect money, maybe have a rental agreement, you have to have on the site service, cleaning services. My background is I’m a CPA, accounting and finance background, worked for some of the big accounting firms. But even as a CPA at the time, we just stumbled across the requirement to collect, remit sales, and occupancy taxes. It was really through that experience, one being successfully doing this on the internet, managed my own property, and then coming across the complexity of managing these taxes even from my own little rental in Vail, we realized this is a powerful model. We think this online short-term rental, these sites have a lot of opportunities, but this tax is going to be a stumbling point. A few years down the road, we started a company to really solve that problem for people. Our model was to apply technology and manage all these complexities for our customers, which would be registering with the different agencies, knowing what taxes to charge, and then once you know what taxes to charge and collect taxes, then automating the monthly, quarterly filing and payment of those taxes to the different agencies. Just to be clear, this is like a hotel occupancy tax, the same taxes that hotels pay to apply to short-term rentals. That was our inspiration. We got started and we're able to form some partnerships originally with Vrbo and some of the other larger operators at the time, but the industry has certainly grown. Now you've got Airbnb, which I think really a ubiquitous household name, but the short-term rental industry, it's just everywhere now. We've been fortunate to be a little part of that on the back-end with our tax service, but about 4½ years ago, we sold our company to Avalara. Now we're part of the Avalara family, but our whole mandate in life, Jason, is to really support, whether that's an owner, property manager, or a large operator like Expedia or Airbnb, help all these taxes, apply technology to make all these taxes simple and keep that back-office function as simple as possible. Jason: Got it. In doing all of this, what are some of the complexities, some of the challenges that people are dealing with that have rental properties? Why is this a service that they might need? Rob: I think there's a lot of confusion in this arena. I think in the smaller segments of the market, if you think about property owners trying to manage this themselves, they've just never dealt with these types of transactional taxes before. If you mentioned tax to a property owner, they're thinking income tax. There's just a great lack of awareness and the complexity comes in. This isn't necessarily rocket science, but wherever you're renting, like for my property in Vail, I have to deal with the state of Colorado, the Colorado Department of Revenue for sales tax and then the town of Vail has their own local room tax or lodging tax, so that's very common. There are multiple layers of government involved, these are state and local taxes, and it's all specific to the rental property address. If you’re a manager and you have a portfolio, depending on how dispersed you are, each city, town, or county, and certainly, state, has their own tax rates and requirements. There are different forms and it can vary by city. That's the complexity. It's highly localized and each location has their own set of requirements. Jason: Now, your service can cover any city anywhere in the US? Rob: Yeah. We cover every location in the US. We don't do anything international yet, but that means we tell people the exact tax rate for all the properties they're managing or even if it's just one property, we register them. It's very common in this environment, you have to get a business license, short-term rental permit, or rental permits. There's increasing scrutiny and regulation on the short-term rental space so there are more paperwork and form. We manage and do all that on behalf of our customers. Then on the back-end, these taxes need to be collected on all short-term transactions. Your software platform automates the monthly filing and paying of the taxes. I sometimes compare it to TurboTax. It’s kind of an online hosted in the cloud service where you can log in, put in your data, and the technology does the heavy lifting and calculation of filing. We're similar, just a different type of taxes with these hotel taxes. Jason: Got it. What are some of the filings that have to occur that the typical homeowner would probably not be thinking about? Rob: Again, the typical homeowner (like I said) thinks of these taxes in the context of income taxes. I'll go back to my Vail property as an example. Every quarter, I have to file a Colorado sales tax return with the state. I have to file—this is where it gets confusing—a Vail special marketing district return which is also paid to the state even though it's a Vail tax. Then there's a Vail sales tax that's paid directly to the town of Vail. For my little example in Vail, I've got three different filings to two different agencies every quarter. That's pretty common. If you're in Florida, it's going to be a state sales tax filing and a county tourist tax filing. If you're in Texas, it's going to be a state hotel tax filing and then a city or county hotel tax filing based on your location. It’s multiple filings, it's always a sales tax or lodging tax, a very specific tax to providing accommodations. Jason: If somebody's listening that has a property like this and they're like I haven't really been paying too much attention, I probably don't need to, what penalties could be coming down the line that they're just not aware of? Rob: One of the things we're seeing is in the multifamily space. We're seeing a lot of operators that typically are in the residential long-term rental market, that are being pulled in at the short-term rental market because I think it's become so popular, it's become easy on these big platforms like Vrbo and Airbnb. The rent, the nightly or weekly rent can be very compelling, depending on your location of property relative to what you can do on a long-term lease. That's a huge trend we're seeing in the space is typical long-term or multifamily operators getting in the short-term space. One of the issues for those folks is that now they’re doing short-term rentals, the short-term nature of their rental is what triggers the requirement to deal with all these taxes. To your point, there's a risk there. Certainly, the very larger multifamily operators are very sensitive to it. They want to have all that covered before they engage in short-term rentals. For smaller operators, I think sometimes they'll get it going and then figure out as they're doing it, seeing if a short-term model is going to work for them. Again, there's increasing scrutiny on short-term rental operators, but the risk is that if you're audited or found not to be paying the tax, you can be assessed, not only back tax, which you would have typically just collected from your guest or renter—they're very accustomed to paying it—but then you've got penalties and interest on top of that. It's certainly something that can add up. We do see those cases and we do help people that are in that situation where they've got a back tax liability to figure that out. The penalties can be pretty significant. Tax, probably like everything in life, is better to do it proactively versus reactively. We certainly encourage our customers and people we interact with to try to get out in front of it, make sure you understand the rules, are registered, and collecting the taxes, so you don't have that liability jump up and bite you as you're trying to manage your business. Jason: For property managers that are listening to the show, they have investors as clients. Some of them may have short-term rentals. Do you typically work with property management companies and how might that work for those that listen? Rob: We work with hundreds and hundreds of property managers across the US in the short-term rental space. We actually do work, like I said, in the multifamily space. We're seeing a lot of those operators and we work with companies that often have largely been in the long-term rental space, they're getting in the short-term rental space. Our largest segment is still the rent-by-owner or the Airbnb host crowd but we certainly work with a lot of managers and we're a solution for them. Everything tax, occupancy-tax related, our model is to really handle that from soup-to-nuts, A-Z, like I said, registration rates. I think our property manager partners really value us as a way to take everything occupancy-tax related which includes licensing and registration, to hand that over to a trusted partner (which is us), and just make sure everything's done correctly, accurately, on time. It's just one less thing they have to deal with. Jason: Perfect. What are the typical questions that a property manager or a homeowner listening to this would be curious about knowing about your service? Rob: Good question. There are two different buckets. In the homeowner space, there's often generally just a lack of awareness of what they even need to do. It's more of a conversation about, “Oh yeah, if you are renting in Vail, here's what you need to do.” When owners understand that—and they often are very surprised about these requirements—they're often eager to outsource. Our service is $20 a month for that single user. Not to be cavalier, but we'd say it's a very affordable way, just to make sure you know the taxes are all getting paid on the right form, to the right agency, on the right date. For the rent-by-owner crowd or host, they're just generally not aware. For the manager, generally there is awareness. The first question a manager would ask us if they're new to the space would be “Hey, do I have to file this for each of the properties I'm managing in our portfolio? How does that work?” Generally, for managers, we can aggregate their portfolio onto one set of filings. We can really do it much more efficiently. There are some locations that require property level filings, but usually for managers, we can do things very efficiently, we can combine all their listings under one, what we call an umbrella account for the management company. Instead of filing 30, 50, or 100 returns for each property, we can file a couple for the management company that covers the 30, 50, or 100 properties they're managing in their portfolio. Managers often have a lot of questions around the mechanics of those type of administrative mechanics about how it works, how can we do it, and do they have to do it by property, by owner, or can we do things more efficiently? The good news is in the manager segment, there are shortcuts and consolidations we can do to make things easier. Jason: Right. Because usually, most of the properties are in similar geographic areas, you can bulk those together. Rob: Exactly. Most of our managers are obviously concentrated in one area. Sometimes they span across two, three, four cities, or a couple of counties, so there are maybe a handful of different jurisdictions or filings that need to be managed. We do work with some of the national operators like Evolve or TurnKey Vacation Rentals, we work with the Saunders and the Lyrics. A lot of their [...] comes out of that multifamily space. Certainly, the national operators have a much more complex set of tax requirements, so I think we can be a good partner. But you're right, most of these companies are localized within a certain area and they're dealing with a couple of tax agencies, not hundreds. Jason: Basically, you have streamlined tax compliance for property managers. You're going to be able to group some of these filings together so that they're not having to do as many, and then you're focused on things at even the local level, state level, and just making sure that they're compliant all throughout all these different tax situations. Anything else that those listening should know and how can they get in touch if they're interested in trying out your service? Rob: The one thing I had passed along, we sometimes see reticence on the multifamily or long-term operators. They certainly know what's going on in the short-term rental space and they certainly know maybe there are a few homes or some of their portfolios that would really work there, but they're often intimidated by these taxes. I'm talking about even multi-billion-dollar multifamily operators that we work with, they're very concerned about managing these taxes correctly for the liability. I think that's fair but I would encourage people if you want to get into it, experiment with it, or you think there's better revenue yield in the short-term space for some of your properties, I would encourage people to jump in. These large websites are very effective at generating your rent. Certainly, relative to the tax piece, we're applying technology to really just take that burden away from people and know that they can operate in this market, be fully taxed, and license-compliant. That's my advice. In terms of reaching us, we're a hosted service. We're on the cloud. We like to do things through technology. The best way to reach us and get information is through our website, which is mylodgetax.com. Once you're on the website, there's information about tax, our services. If you want to send us an email or give us a call, we do have phone numbers published there. We're happy to pick up the phone and walk through people's specific situation like what are the requirements for their city, how doesn't work, what would it cost to use our service. We feel those types of inquiries and happy to talk about it all day long. Jason: Perfect. All right. They can check out mylodgetax.com. I appreciate you coming on the show, Rob, and I wish you guys success. Rob: All right. Thanks so much, Jason. Jason: You bet. Bye-bye. All right, check out mylodgetax.com if you're concerned about the taxes, especially for your short-term rental properties, take a look at that. If you are a property management entrepreneur that’s wanting to grow your business, add doors, it might be time to take a look at your website. Test your website out. Go to doorgrow.com/quiz, test your website out, and see how effective it is at making money because it's not just about having a pretty website. It's about having a website that's effective at creating conversions, capturing business, and creating trust. If your website isn't, you could be potentially losing out on one, two, three, four deals every single month, maybe more. The typical deal for most property managers is probably worth about $6000 lifetime value. Say you can make $2000 a year per door and you can keep them on for maybe about three years on average, that's about $6000. If you're missing out on just a door a week or maybe about four doors a month, and if you're getting on about four doors a month, you're probably missing out on just about that many. That's about $24,000 in future ROI that you're missing out on every single month. Websites are not that expensive. Making the changes are not that expensive. That's a leak that's easily shored up. Check out the DoorGrow Score Quiz and you can then easily schedule a call with our team. Nobody builds more effective property management websites than DoorGrow. Other people are trying to manipulate and focus on search engine optimization and rankings. You don't even have to have the top spot or even show up on the first page of Google in order to have a business that's crushing it with growth. We can show you how, so reach out to the DoorGrow. That's it for today. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Before you accept a bunch of cash from applicants who drive up in a BMW to rent a property for a few years, check criminal background reports. Otherwise, you could end up with drug dealers with grow operations as tenants. You may be their next victim! Today, I am talking to Jason Waggoner of ACUTRAQ, which offers accurate and reliable criminal background reports. He knows what property owners/managers deal with when it comes to tenants and how ACUTRAQ makes a difference in communities.  You’ll Learn... [01:50] Who is Jason? Started out by fixing and customizing cars to selling vacuums.  [02:40] Buyer’s Remorse? Selling a vacuum to the right person led to ACUTRAQ job. [05:00] Federal vs. Multi-state Databases: Criminal reports are important, but don’t capture all crimes and court activity. [07:02] Federal vs. State Crimes: Federal reports include most heinous crimes.  [09:41] Don’t Ask, Don ‘t Tell? Avoid lawsuits and being liable for renting to criminals.  [13:45] Aliases: Know tenants by all their names via social trace for criminal history.  [15:41] Why use ACUTRAQ? What does it offer compared to others? ACUTRAQ specializes in where accurate information comes from and how it’s relayed to landlords.  Tweetables ACUTRAQ: We love what we do. We love making a difference in the community. Some state criminal background systems generate reports that have a lot of holes for criminals to crawl through. If landlords don’t do background checks, it doesn't take long to destroy rental properties. When you run a background check, know applicant’s past alias names...all of them. Resources ACUTRAQ ACUTRAQ’s Email ACUTRAQ’s Phone: 479- 439-9174 Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) FBI’s Most Wanted List DEA’s Most Wanted List 50 State Sex Offender Search Social Trace National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Multi-State Criminal Database iCORI System National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) AppFolio Rent Manager Buildium Propertyware DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason H: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.  DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. My guest today is Jason Waggoner of ACUTRAQ. Jason, welcome. Jason W: Good afternoon, Jason. Jason H: I'm a little biased but I like your first name.  Jason W: It's a good one. We had some creativity going on in the 80s.  Jason H: Yeah. There's a lot of Jason, a lot of them. Let's get into this. First, I want to get in your background a little bit. How you got connected to the industry, how you got connected into doing ACUTRAQ. Give us a little bit of background for those listening on who is Jason. Jason W: Very fun story there. I started when I was 18, I actually went to school for autobody to learn how to work on cars, fix wreck cars, customize cars, [...] did that, got out of that, winning the sales. Years later, I was actually in between jobs at the moment and besides, this was in 2006. For 20–25 days, I sell vacuums while I was putting in resumes and different things. Thought nothing of it, got another job in inside sales. A month later, I went back to doing that. Two years later, Jeannie Baker, the owner of ACUTRAQ, calls me and ask me if I'm still doing sales and said that I had sold her a vacuum cleaner two years prior to this and wanted to go to lunch. We went to lunch, she had a great product, and believed in it. My father-in-law inherited a rental property. The things that he went through over the course of that first year, he ended up selling it and getting away from it. This was when I was young, 17–18-ish. After seeing him go through that and seeing what products she had that could have prevented it, it just made a home seem like a lot more. That was in 2008. I've been with her ever since and since then, the company has grown. We used to just be in a few states, now we're all in the lower 48 states with offices throughout the country and a staff of about 12 in Arkansas. Just good, consistent growth over the years. We love what we do, we love making a difference in the community. That's how I get hooked up in ACUTRAQ. It's not the normal story you hear from people.  Jason H: You sold her a vacuum? Jason W: Yeah. Jason H: You sold her a vacuum and she was so impressed at how you sold her the vacuum. She didn't have buyer's remorse. She wanted to have more of you, she wanted you to work for her. This is great. Jason W: She got up that morning and looked over the corner and thought, "I know who my salesman is."  Jason H: That vacuum was an anchor. Every time she saw that vacuum, she's like, "That guy sold me. I need somebody like that." It's interesting because as entrepreneurs, we're always looking for the person that's going to help us with the thing that we're weak at.  Jason W: Right. Jason H: You filled a gap for her.  Jason W: Definitely, yeah. She had done it for 10 years by herself at that point and had grown where she physically can't do it by herself anymore. A lot of planning, a lot of sleepless nights, we've been somewhat successful in growing this business and creating something that she started back in 1998 and just continuing to watch it grow.  Jason H: The topic at hand, the title of this episode is Everything You Need to Know About Federal Criminal Reports. Let's talk about what we need to know. Jason W: The federal criminal reports are important and a lot of people don't understand the difference between what most landlords run, meaning a multistate database and they sound similar. Multistate, federal, you think all the federal just covers all those different states. The reality of it is, the multistate database is what most landlords run. It has a lot of holes in it, it has States that don't even report to that database. For instance, New York, they report to the Department of Corrections but not their County data. Massachusetts has its own system called the iCORI system. There are holes in it but those are derived from state repositories from the Department of Corrections from different places like that. Let's say I get in trouble. I'm in Houston, Texas. If I get in trouble here, I go to Harris County, they book me in and if I get convicted, if I do prison time, I'm going to do it in a Texas state prison.  The difference with the federal criminal report is it's a different set of courts. Let's say I do that same crime. Let's just use drugs, for instance. Let's say, I do drugs and I traffic those drugs, now, I go to Louisiana, to Alabama, to Mississippi. I went across state lines. That's a federal charge now. I've messed up not only in my state but federally and that would be trialed in a different set of courts. Most landlords and even some employers do not get those federal court records because it's a smaller percentage. It's 8%–10% which is still a big chunk but the type of our crimes that are tried there are embezzlement, kidnapping, bank robbery, crimes against animals, child pornography, a lot of crimes. If a landlord knew that person had been convicted recently or maybe even in the past, it may change their decision on whether or not they would rent to that person. Most people don't know those records exist. The reality is, most landlords have probably placed somebody that had previously robbed a bank or an ATM, or somebody that had previously been convicted of kidnapping or embezzlement, things of that nature. A lot of computer crimes regarding identity, identity theft, things of that nature. The thing about the federal crimes that there may not be as many but they're all the crazy ones. They're all the ones that if that person had committed that type of crime, it would definitely change the decision. Jason H: They're the worst. Jason W: Right. That's the difference in those federal criminal reports. We offer them as an upsell to our clients for an extra $5. Whoever people are using, it would be wise to go back to their provider and say, "Hey, am I getting this federal criminal report? Can you show me that we're pulling that report?” because there are a lot of heinous crimes that can be committed under the federal level. Jason H: I just want to point this out because I thought this was really funny, that you're using an example of somebody committing crimes and you used yourself. You did this. You're like, "Let's say, I do this and I commit this crime." Most people do, "Let's say there's a guy named Fred." Jason W: Allegedly. Jason H: Allegedly. Here's what's funny. When I met you at the conference, you were this half criminal, half business suit costume like this thing. Sometimes, you even said you shaved half of your beard and you're like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or two-faced.  Jason W: Yes. At the Florida conference, the NARPM conference, the beard was just coming in. I couldn't quite get the half shaven down and make it look presentable. That piece, it really shed some light on what people come in looking like because we actually had applicants that showed up in BMW, with a briefcase full of money, and wanted to pay for the next two years in cash. Then, you look them up and they are known drug trafficker, they've been involved in grow operations and everything else, and you were going to be their next victim. Without running that report, you never see the criminal side of what they're bringing into that rental property because somebody's not going to buy a house and then trash it, do that stuff, dig down to the electric pole, and tunnel in all the things that it takes. They're going to do that to a rental property and then hit the road as soon as they have everything they need.  Jason H: Do you think some property managers would just rather keep their heads in the sand, kind of don't know, don't ask, don't tell? You think there's some that are like, "I'd rather just not do this extra work. I'd rather just not know. If that happens, I did something and they just didn't show up on that so I'm absolved." What would you say to those that they're thinking about listening to this, "I don't want to do extra work." Jason W: The thing about it is, let's say somebody moves in to that property and does something crazy, commits a crime. We've seen this before, it's the same way with our property managers. There's a lot of their stories that sound like sales pitches but they're really not. They're crazy stories that happened and they want to do whatever they can to help somebody avoid those again.  Let's say somebody does something heinous in a property. The first thing that the courts are going to do is go back to the person that leased that property and say, "Who put this person in there? What checks did you take to ensure the safety of the community around you?" Typically, they think that the homeowner has the deepest pockets. When something goes crazy, who's the first person they sue? The homeowner.  It may trickle down the line if there's a property management company involved, but the ones that are just out here doing it think maybe something is going on but like you said, they don't care enough to go to the motions. Whatever they do there is their business. It can be really scary, the things that we've seen. For the homeowner’s side, everything can be scary from the investment. You're looking at this company as an investment. So, if you get somebody that goes in and guts it down the studs, and puts all the stuff that they need in there to do, to set that house up for whatever they're setting it up for. Just to give you an idea, the things that go on, I'm actually in Kingwood, Texas which is the Northeast tip of Houston, Texas. Suburbs, everybody pretty much deems it a safe community. We let our kids play in the street. Last week, there was 79 arrest made from a sex trafficking operation. 79 people. How big that operation must be to arrest 79 people that are involved in?  Jason H: They just said, "Let's pick a really safe community. We're going to fly under the radar there probably." Those property managers aren't using ACUTRAQ so we're going to get away with this. Jason W: Right and even some of those. Those people are legit on paper and the career criminals know how to get by those background checks and we put everything in place in ours from identity alerts. We've tried to add a lot of things to try to catch these people when they're doing this. The reality of it is though, they're going to do it in rental property. If you get a property manager, I'm not even a property manager, in most cases, they're doing background checks. Let's say you get a home-based landlord, they just have six rental properties and the first one finds out that they don't do background checks or anything, as soon as one of their properties come open, "Hey, let me know if you have anything open. I've got somebody I know needs to rent a house, too, and I love recommending you." It just goes that line. Jason H: "I've got four other criminal friends that would love a place." Jason W: Yeah. "Landlord Johnny here does no background checks. It doesn't take long for those properties, the value and everything. Jason H: Let's drive this home to our target audience here. The property management business owners listening, they've got hundreds of rental properties. If somebody has figured out how to game their system, they don't really cover this check in this state. If we've done stuff in this state, we can fly under the radar. They're only running this light-level background. We get the pick of the litter. They got 20 properties available for lease, that just beat them up. Jason W: Yeah, it can happen. That's the thing. For instance, when you run that background check—this is for anybody that's in this world—you need to know the people or the person's past alias names. If somebody's been married three times, you need to actually run the married name and all three married names to get an accurate representation of that person's criminal history. If they changed their lives name, they change their date of birth, that's the only way criminal history is ran for a tenant’s screen is by name and date of birth. The career criminals, let’s say they say they know they have criminal history but it slides by, they automatically know that they either typo-ed something in it and it slid by, or they changed something on purpose and it got through. The next time they tell their people, "Make sure to change your data birth, your last names." If my last name's Waggoner, I may put it down on paper as Wagner. Even if they're looking at my license, if they're not matching it up right beside each other, it looks close enough that Jason Waggoner, Jason Wagner, it's all the same. That would cause a criminal hit to miss in most cases. The best thing to do is there's a search called a social trace and we put everything we have just because of how important it is but if somebody's not getting it, ask your provider about the social trace because it provides all the past alias names that that person has used with their social. If you signed up for a cell phone and utility, anything you had to put your social down, it's actually stored with that name used and the address used. That helps a lot in finding the alias names when people are trying to tell you they don't have any. This is the only name I've ever had. No, you've had two other ones and then, one nickname that you used as alias, too. Running those can make a difference. The career criminals, once they find the loophole, once they find the window or door opened, it's just like a house. They'll crawl through and they'll their other friends to come right behind them. Jason H: It's party time. Jason W: Yeah.  Jason H: Okay. There's a lot of different screening services out there. Help those listening. I'm sure a lot of them have something that maybe came with AppFolio or they got something with Rent Manager, something with Buildium, something with Propertyware. For those listening, why should they use ACUTRAQ? Help them understand what's the contrast between what they had typically and what you're going to do for them. Jason W: You bet. In Rent Manager, we're actually an affiliate of, some other software, too. Typically, the reason somebody will go outside of their software to use us for these reasons. The background check is a no way an afterthought. Not only that, if your applicants have trouble, they call us if they have a dispute. That's one of the big things. With tenant screening, it’s making sure your applicants have a way to dispute the information because you can have a Junior and a Senior. Senior's been arrested 10 times, been in prison his whole life. Junior didn't know him growing up. Jason H: Junior's a good kid. Jason W: Senior's criminal history still keeps showing up on Junior's report. Every time he gets an application for an apartment, he has to go through the whole process. "That was my dad. It's not my criminal history." Having a way to dispute that, it can mean them having housing or not having housing with those reports being accurate. If something like that does come up. Having that documented and being able to help him is one of the biggest things. The support side of things, that's what we do, is background checks, there's nothing else on our plate. The biggest reason is to have a third party, unbiased source outside of your company, outside of your software, all these people do are background checks and if something goes wrong, you could bet that we'll have your back and search through it, anything at all. That's the difference of having somebody that does that and having that as just an ancillary service.  Jason H: It's probably fair to say if their intuition is saying something's off about somebody but everything comes back clean, maybe they should put you to the test and see if you come up with something that [...]. Jason W: We love the [...]. The other thing too is not a lot of companies can staff and have people to make the phone calls to the landlords and employers. With our full premium report, you'll get an employment verification plus the current landlord and the prior landlord.  You'd be surprised that the different reports we get from one landlord that’s trying to get rid of them currently and the one from a year ago that lays it all out and lets you know what's coming. With those added, it really just helps give a better representation of how that applicant's going to act in that property and how they're going to pay rent and all that good stuff, everything to do with their character.  Jason H: We talked a little bit about why they should use ACUTRAQ and what makes it a little bit different. What are some of the typical questions a property manager might ask you about ACUTRAQ went during the sales process? You're the sales guy, I'm sure you dealt with some objections. What are some of the typical questions that you get for those that are listening? Jason W: We generally start with the application process. They want to know about that. Onboarding the applicants and how that process works. The biggest thing with the process is the application in our eyes because that's where it starts. That's the first thing that an applicant sees of your company, if you're a landlord, and whether they're doing it, the software's doing it, or a third party like ACUTRAQ. That's the first phase of the company. That needs to be a smooth process, the relationship, you get off on the right hand. The other thing is they typically want to see an itemized list of everything that's going to be on that background report. You think we're getting a criminal report. What does all that include? There are a number of different things that should be included on that and I hope most everybody listening is getting these with their provider, but of course, it's the 50 State Sex Offender search. It's the social trace that we talked about that has the alias names. The OFAC which is very important nowadays and that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control. They are the ones that have the terrorist database searches, the terrorist watchlist. Anything to do as far as that goes, that's where that information is going to come from and it's OFAC. A lot of people want to know about that one because everybody wants to make sure that we're not housing some terrorist cell in the middle of Houston or Atlanta Georgia, somewhere like that. The FBI most wanted list. That's another thing that's included that we forget to talk about a lot of time or the FBI most wanted list, the DEA most wanted list. Something a lot of people don't know is every major city has their own list for those. Along with the Top 10, every major city has their Top 10. Searching for those, understanding where the data comes from, and what you're getting like we were talking about name and date of birth only. So many people think it's tied to a social or driver's license number, or something like that, but in reality, it's not. The police officers and firemen are the only ones that have access to what we call the National Crime Information Center. Unfortunately, landlords don't have that luxury. Understanding where the information comes from, how important it is to make that decision can literally mean life and death from somebody on the block if you house a violent person in there, if you house a sex offender or something in that nature. That's a lot of the questions that we get. Spanish speaking, that's getting to be more and more prevalent, so we did add that a year-and-a-half ago. We do have bilingual staff. A lot of different things like that. What we specialize in is where the information comes from, how do we relay that back to the landlord in an accurate manner. Jason H: All right. So ACUTRAQ is your sole focus, is doing this screening, and you have these itemized lists, lots of different sources that you're going to be checking like OFAC. It goes well above and beyond what they're typically going to get. You integrate with some property manager software like Rent Manager.  Jason W: Yes. Jason H: I think I gave a light summary there, some of the pluses. This sounds like a really cool thing. How can people get in touch with ACUTRAQ? Jason W: acutraq.com. You can always reach us at [email protected], that goes to myself and the owners so we will reach back out to you directly. The website is the best way. If you want to call us, feel free to give us a call at (479) 439-9174. That would be the corporate office in Fayetteville, Arkansas and I'm out in the Houston, Texas office.  Jason H: You guys are making property management safer for the property managers that are the boots on the ground, you're making neighborhoods safer, and in general you're helping property management have a better reputation. I appreciate that. Jason W: That's our goal. Jason H: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show.  Jason W: Thank you.  Jason H: All right. You guys check it out, ACUTRAQ. If you're a property management entrepreneur and you felt like your website might be a little bit leaky, you're just not seeing enough business come through, you think you need more lead, if you just had more leads, everything will be better, it's not leads. Leads are not your problem. You've got leaks in your sales pipeline. Leaks are at the very front end of the pipeline. If you've got leaks throughout it that are causing attrition and without even changing your lead sources, if you're shore up all those leaks, leaks of trust, you can have more business coming out. You're getting some business now. It's not hard to double it just by reducing the friction that's happening at every stage in your sales pipeline. Reach out to us at DoorGrow, that's what we specialize in. We also can clean up your property management website, that's what we specialize in. I don't believe that anybody does better property management websites than DoorGrow. Our focus in not on trying to manipulate Google and with search volume is relatively low and it always has been for property management. Our goal is to facilitate greater trust which helps you close more deals and that's really what your website is for. It's a trust indicator. People don't buy property management. What they really want to buy from you is safety and certainty. That's what they want to buy. You can create more of that through your website, through your branding, through your sales process, through your pricing strategy, through your reputation online. We'll help you get these things optimized so that your business can grow. Check the site site of doorgrow.com. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Do you work because you want to or have to? Have you ever considered investing in land to generate enough passive income that exceeds your fixed expenses? Today, I am talking to Mark Podolsky of Frontier Equity Properties. Mark’s passion is investing in land, creating wealth efficiently, and helping others develop their inner geeky entrepreneurial spirit. He’s known as, “The Land Geek,” for buying and selling thousands of raw and undeveloped land deals. Also, he’s the author of Dirt Rich, a guide to building a passive income model in land investing. You’ll Learn... [02:40] Beat Friday Blues: How and why Mark became a land investor.  [05:40] Breaking Down Passive Income Model: No emotional attachment to land and distressed financially.  [07:26] Property Checklist: Due diligence to confirm ownership, back taxes, no title breaks, and no liens.  [08:25] Buy the property free and clear, and sell it in 30 days or less.  [08:40] Neighbors: Built-in best buyers to protect privacy, views, and expand holdings. [09:09] Other Options: Sites with specialized buyers and sellers of raw and undeveloped land (i.e., Craigslist, Facebook, Land Flip, Land Moto).  [10:00] No renters, rehabs, renovations, and rodents; exempt from erroneous real estate legislation.  [10:48] Price Point of Fixed Expenses: Typically, $10,000 a month in passive income.  [12:05] Operating Entity: Spend a few hours a day on land investing business, and automated software/virtual assistants do the rest.  [14:35] How to get started? Everything is hard in the beginning. Embrace the suck. [16:00] What Mark loves about land investing? No physical inventory, no competition, inefficient market, one-time sale, and passive income.  Tweetables Core Business Philosophy: Happy customers guaranteed. Raw land is the best passive income. There’s nothing not to love about land investing for passive income.  True Wealth: Work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want. Resources The Land Geek Dirt Rich by Mark Podolsky Frontier Equity Properties The Land Geek Podcast Warren Buffett’s Margin of Safety Land Moto Land Flip Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform Bill Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) S.A.F.E. Act FortuneBuilders Robert Kiyosaki Zig Ziglar GeekPay DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business, and life, and you’re open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I am hanging out with Mark Podolsky. Mark, welcome to the show. I’m going to read your bio here because we want to qualify you and then we’ll let you brag a little bit because you got to do a little bit of starting out here. Today’s topic (for those who are just tuning in) is land investing for passive income. We’re going to learn how to use land investing to create a passive income stream. Mark J. Podolsky (AKA The Land Geek), is widely considered the country’s most trusted and foremost authority on buying and selling raw, undeveloped land within the United States for almost two decades. Mark has been actively investing in real estate and raw land and has completed over 5000 unique transactions. Mark’s company, Frontier Equity Properties, LLC, is an A+ rated Better Business Bureau real estate company. Mark has achieved this level of success largely due to his core business philosophy, happy customers guaranteed. Mark is the host of one of the top-rated podcasts in the Investing Category on iTunes, aptly titled The Best Passive Income Model and The Art of Passive Income. He is also the host of The Land Geek podcast: Work Smart. Earn More. Learn How. Mark, there you go. Give us a little bit of background on you and how you got into this land investing. Mark: Let’s rewind to 2000 and imagine me fighting traffic, 45 minutes in the car there and back, micromanaged, stressed out at an investment banking job, working with private equity groups specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Jason, it got so bad for me that I wouldn’t get the Sunday blues anticipating Monday coming around. I’d get the Friday blues anticipating the weekend going by really fast and heading back to work on Monday. My firm hired this guy and he’s telling me that as a side hustle, he’s going to tax deed auctions, he’s buying up raw land pennies on the dollar, he’s flipping them online, and he’s making a 300% return on his investment. Jason, I’m looking at companies all day long and a great company has 15% EBITDA margins or free cash flow. Great company. Average company is 10%. I’m looking at companies all day long, less than 10%. Of course, I’ll believe him. We go to New Mexico. I do exactly what he tells me to do. I’ve got $3000 saved up for car repairs so I can only buy $3000 worth of land. I buy 10 half-acre parcels, an average price of $300 each. I put them up all online and they all sell 30 days later from an average price of $1200 each. It worked. 300%. I took all that money, I went to another auction in Arizona (which is where I live) and again, it’s 2000. There’s no one in the room, there’s no competition, I’m buying up lots, I’m buying up acres for nothing. Over the next six months, I sold all that property and I made over $90,000 cash. I go to my wife, and she’s pregnant. I said, “Honey, I’m going to quit my job. I’m going to become a full-time land investor.” She says, “Absolutely not.” So I worked land investing part-time and it took 18 months for the land investing income to exceed the investment banking income and then, I quit. I’ve been doing it full-time ever since. Jason: It’s so easy, anybody can do it? Mark: Yeah, I wish. I wish it was so easy. It’s a simple model but anything worth doing in life is not easy. What I could do is I could walk you through the model and then, odds are you’ll just stop the podcast and quit doing what you’re doing and start land investing with me, but that’s okay. That happens a lot. You want me to walk you through it? Jason: Yeah. Mark: Jason, where do you live? Jason: I’m in Santa Clarita, California. Mark: Okay. Let’s imagine that you own 10 acres of land in Texas. I go to the county treasurer and I get a list of people that owe back taxes. Sure enough, there’s Jason Hull in Santa Clarita, California, $200 in back taxes on this 10-acre parcel. Jason, you’re advertising two things to me. Number one, you have no emotional attachment to that raw land. You’re in California. The property is located in Texas. Number two, you’re distressed financially in some way. Because when we don’t pay for things, we don’t value them in the same way. And you haven’t paid your property taxes. As a result, the county treasure keeps sending you notices saying that, “Jason, if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re eventually going to lose your 10 acres to a tax deed or tax lien investor. What I will do is I would look at the comparable sales on that 10-acre parcel. I’m going to take the lowest CUP and I’m going to divide by four. That’s going to get me what Warren Buffett calls a 300% margin of safety. I’m going to actually send you an offer of $2500 on that 10-acre parcel assuming that the lowest CUP is $10,000. I send you an offer for $2500. Now, you accept it because for you, $2500 is better than nothing and you haven’t gone out to look at the property. You just don’t care about it anymore. In reality, 3%-5% of people accept my “top dollar offer.” Now that you’ve accepted the offer, I’ve got to go through due diligence or in-depth research. Number one, I got to confirm you still own the property. Number two, I have to confirm the back taxes are only $200. Number three, I have to make sure there have been no breaks in the chain of title. Number four, I have to make sure there are no liens or encumbrances. I have this whole property checklist and it goes on and on and on. If it’s a property deal that’s worth less than $5000, I’ll actually close it directly with my team in the Philippines. We’re hooked up to an American title company. I pay $11 for due diligence. They’ll give me a whole property report. I’ll get the GIS maps, the plat maps, aerial maps. If it’s an area I don’t know, I’ll have somebody go out there, stamp on the property for me, take a video and shoot photos throughout the property checklist. What are the neighbors doing out there, what’s the road like, all these things. Everything checks out and now, I buy the property from you for $2500. You get $2300 of it, $200 goes to the treasurer, and now I have that property free and clear. I’m going to sell this property 30 days or less. The reason I’m going to do this is I have a built-in best buyer. Do you know who it is? Jason: No. Mark: The neighbors. I’m going to sell that to the neighbour saying, “Hey, here’s your opportunity. Protect your privacy, protect your views, expand your holdings, know your neighbour.” Oftentimes, the neighbors will buy it. If they pass, I’ll go to my buyers list. If my buyers list passes, I’ll go to a little website you might not have heard of called Craigslist (10th most traffic website in the United States). I’ll go to an even smaller one. It’s called Facebook buy-and-sell group and marketplace. And then, I’ll go to these platforms that specialize in buying and selling raw land, landmodo.com, landandfarm.com, landsofamerica.com, landflip.com. It goes on and on. Now, the way I’m going to sell it is I’m going to make it irresistible. I’m going to ask for a $2500 down payment. I get my money out on the down, within (let’s say) six months of that. I’m going to get a car payment, let’s say $449 a month, 9% interest over the next 84 months. Essentially, I’ve got a one-time sale, I have passive income of $449 a month, 9% interest over the next 84 months, no renters, no rehabs, no renovations, no rodents. And because I’m not dealing with a tenant, I’m exempt from Dodd-Frank, RESPA, and the SAFE act (this onerous real estate legislation). The game that we play is can we create enough of this land notes where our passive income exceeds our fixed expenses and then we’re working because we want to, not because we have to. The beautiful part about all of this is 90% of it is automated with software virtual assistants. It’s great. Jason: What is the price point of fixed expenses typically? Mark: For most people, after you earn about $10,000 a month in passive income (that’s $120,000 a year), you’re in pretty good shape. Now, we have some clients who are doctors and lawyers. I have a client. He’s been working with us for 10 months. He’s at $15,000 a month passive and he just went from 5 days a week at his law firm to 2 days a week and he’s spending the rest of his time with his dad who needs help working with him and the other two days doing what he wants to do. We have so many clients that once they hit that point, they retire their spouse. They quit their job. They do what they really want to do in life because the whole idea of this is that we can always make more money but we can’t get more time. For me, true wealth means you wake up and you don’t have to be anywhere. You work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want. That’s really the goal of doing all this. Jason: Love that. What else do people typically ask you about this? When you say it, it sounds really easy. It sounds like something that maybe anybody can do, but it’s like starting a part-time job if you start getting into this. Mark: It is. It is an operating entity. We ask our clients to spend about an hour or two a day doing this. That will move the needle because with our virtual assistants and our software, it’s pretty automated. We actually have automation software for marketing. We can automate our craigslist and our Facebook postings with a posting automator. The only two things that (as CEO of your land investing business) you, Jason, actually have to do, is county research because if you get that screwed up, that whole thing falls off the rails, so you have to pick a good county. From there, you’re going to make sure that you get your pricing right, so you might want to work with a VA, train them, and show them, “Hey, look. Here’s our lowest comps dividing by four. We need a response rate of 3%-5%. If it’s under 3%, our offer is too low. If it’s over 5%, let’s get nervous. Why are they selling us their property? We might have to renegotiate.” We have our metrics in there.  As far as the rest of the process, you can get virtual assistants to do our due diligence. You can get an intake manager that can actually talk to your sellers (because that’s a big time-suck as well). From there, you can close. We like to use Simplifile accountings, so that we can record our deeds online, so I don’t have to go and do a lot of whole paperwork that way. Once we own it, again, we have an inexpensive virtual assistant getting us through GIS, all the neighbors information, uploading that to our software, sending out our neighbor letters. There’s an API with lob.com, which does our mailings. On the backend of it, we use a software called GeekPay.io that is a set-it-and-forget-it system on collecting our money. We get our down payment via credit card and then we get our monthly payments via ACH. It does all the amortization. It does all the calculations. It charges fees but it does it through notifications. If that ACH bounces, it will charge the credit card on file. We went from an 8% default rate to a 4% default rate. I personally worked two hours a week in Frontier Properties, doing the kind of volume that we do. Jason: Sounds great. That’s pretty incredible. How hard is it for somebody to get started with this that’s new? Mark: It’s like anything in life. Everything is hard in the beginning. You know what’s really hard, Jason? Learning to read. We don’t remember it. We forgot how hard that was in the very beginning but you had a good teacher, they broke it down for you step-by-step, and you are with other people. It was just a thing, like everyone can do this and you’re just expected to do it. It’s the same kind of thing. What happens is we’re so ingrained after all these years of schooling that you have to achieve what you achieve, to go back and embrace beginner’s mind and embrace the suck. It’s hard. If you can do that, if you can be comfortable being uncomfortable and you have some grit, you can be successful in anything in life, whether it’s my land investing niche or growing your doors. It doesn’t matter. Nothing worth doing is easy. Jason: It sure is nothing worth doing is easy. The challenge is if somebody is going to choose into doing this, choose into doing property management, or choose into doing any business, they have to fall in love with this. They have to get excited about this. Help the listeners understand what do you love about doing this? Your clients that get involved in this, what do they love about it that’s different from other entrepreneurial ventures that they get into? Mark: The main reason that people like this model is number one, there’s no physical inventory. Number two, there’s little to no competition. If you go on HGTV or the DIY Network, you’re not going to ever see me on Flip This Land. The before pictures is raw land, the after pictures is raw land. It’s not going to be much fun to watch me in front of a computer. If you go to [...] meeting and there are 100 people in that room, 99 of them are house flippers, landlords, or wholesalers. You and I are the only land guys. Number three, you have an inefficient market. I’ve got a hedge fund manager that loves this business because he’s like, “Mark, there are very few inefficient markets left out there. Nobody knows the value of raw land.” Now, that can be very frustrating in the beginning, but it’s also very exciting once you get your arms around it.  No physical inventory, no competition, inefficient, and then you have the fact that it’s a one-time sale and then the passive income versus let’s say I flip a house. I make $20,000 on a flip. I have a new problem. What do I do with my $20,000? I can’t put it in the bank. It’s not going to earn anything. I have to keep redeploying that capital. Once we get to let’s say $10,000 a month of passive income, what our net worth? How long would it take you to have an investment of $120,000 a year at say 2% interest in the bank? That’s over $3 million you and I would have to save. How long, Jason, would it take for you to save $3 million? How long would it take anybody to save $3 million? Jason: I probably would never do it. Mark: Yeah. 12-36 months, you can have that kind of cash flow and then your bankers are really happy with you because your net worth is over $3 million. The fact that—I’m not proud of it—I can’t even screw in a light bulb. I tried to flip a house once. I am not interested in physical things so the subs come out there. I meet the subs. They don’t show up. Just the capital outlay, I started with $3000. My buddy, [...], started at $800. You’re not going to ever get knocked out of the game in this niche. The dollars are just too small. If you go into multifamily housing, you do one bad deal and you’re done for 10 years. You’re BK or you’re just a pariah in the investment community because you lost all your investors money. This is not like that at all. You have an easy entry point, you have no physical inventory, you have no competition. You have a one-time sale on passive income. You have an inefficient market. There’s nothing not to like about it. I think what’s interesting is if you go to a party and you tell people you’re a land investor, they’ll yawn. It’s not sexy. Definitely not sexy. Maybe you lie and say you’re in multifamily housing. Jason: I don’t know if that’s super sexy sometimes either, but yeah. Mark: I mean it depends who you’re talking to. Jason: How do people get started in this? It sounds interesting. My interest is piqued. I’m sure some people listening are interested. How do they get started with this because I’m sure there’s a fairly steep learning curve? There’s got to be a reason why everybody isn’t doing it. How saturated is this? Mark: It’s not saturated at all because again, it’s just not sexy. It’s not conventional. The marketing budgets of the people that are in the house flipping world like Robert Kiyosaki or FortuneBuilders, that’s really where people thought to. Land investing, you have a mental hurdle for people where they think, “Well, I’ve never bought land.” We all know everyone needs a place to live. Nobody needs raw land. You don’t wake up today and say, “Boy, I really got to own 10 acres today.” Jason: That land that nobody is using and nobody seems to want. That land. Mark: Right. It’s a marketing business. You have to interrupt somebody’s day, pique their interest, and make it irresistible. I’ll tell you, after over 5200 deals, I’ve never been stuck with a piece of land. You buy any asset, 25–30 cents on the dollar, there’s someone else on the other end of that deal. Whether it be a piece of land, a car, a trinket, it doesn’t matter. The market is the market. So to get started, I would say you’ve got to learn from somebody who’s done in. For example, let’s say you and I are going to go to Mount Everest together. We’re going to climb this big mountain. Jason: We’re not just going to wing it. Mark: Yeah. You’re going to someone who’s done it a million times and they can tell you the best routes quickly, efficiently, and safely to do it. That’s what you want to do. You can start with that. In fact, for the listeners, I would say that I have a $97 course that I’d love to offer them for free. If they just go to thelandgeek.com/launchkit, they can go ahead and get that course for free. Start there and then see if they like it or not. Jason: Their time investment is 1-2 hours a day? Mark: If that, yeah. It depends if they’re using tools or not. It also depends if they have a scarcity mentality or abundance mentality. A lot of people, when they start doing this, they think they can penny-pinch their way to wealth. They don’t want to use the tools that are out there.  Jason: “No, I’ll do it myself. I’ll watch 120 Youtube videos and figure out how to do it myself.” Mark: Yeah, and you can do that. But again, my whole philosophy is that I can always make more money. I can’t get more time. So, anything that’ll save you time, I’ll invest in. Jason: I say something very similar to my clients. That makes sense. Anything else anybody should know before we wrap this up and how can they get in touch with you? Mark: If you have that mindset that Zig Ziglar says, “If you'll do for the next 3–5 years what other people won't do, you’ll be able to do for the rest of your life what other people can’t do.” You’ve got to get your reps in and you have to embrace the suck. Again, nothing worth doing in life is easy. It might be a simple model, but it’s not easy. You have to take action at some point  Again, the best way to get a hold of me is thelandgeek.com. I’ve got an audio book. I’ve got a book on Amazon called Dirt Rich if you want to just read about it and hear my story as well. It got really good reviews. People seem to like it. It’s not because I’m such a good writer. It’s just that they like it. Jason: Nice. Perfect. Look for the book, Dirt Rich, or check out thelandgeek.com. Mark, this is interesting. I think it’s a new idea that people certainly haven’t heard of this before on the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you coming on and hanging out here with me. Mark: Jason, thank you so much. Again, I apologize if you’re just going to quit your business and go [...] with me. Jason: I love what I do so. Mark: See? There you go. You can do both. Jason: Both. All right. Maybe I’ll get a few people from this show that are wanting to do both. There you go. Mark, thanks again for coming on the show. We’ll let you go. Mark: Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: If you are a property management entrepreneur and you enjoy the show, be sure to like and subscribe. If you’re watching this on Youtube or on Facebook, be sure to share it if you would. We would appreciate that. If you’re in some property management groups, we’d love to see your comments. And if you’re on iTunes, give us a review. We would really love to get that feedback. We’re putting out this content for free. We would love a little reciprocity, people. That would be really sweet of you. I would appreciate it greatly. It helps us get the word out and make a difference in this industry.  If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business, add doors, you’re struggling, you’re feeling that there’s a scarcity in the industry, there’s no scarcity in property management right now. 70% are self-managing. There’s plenty of opportunity. Reach out, talk to us, and let us help you see how you can align your business towards more warm leads and stop spending so much time trying to go with cold leads, time keepers, and time wasters. The people that are at the very end of the sales cycle are the coldest, crappiest, most price-sensitive. Those are the people searching online. They’re the leftovers that fall off the word-of-mouth table. Come sit at the table with us. We’re DoorGrow. We’ll talk to you soon. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Bye everyone. Until next time, to our mutual growth.

Have you ever played the board game, Monopoly? Were you successful at buying properties, and charging people rent? Did you go from buying and selling the little green houses to bigger houses? Did you dream about becoming a successful real estate agent, making billions, winning the game, and retiring at an early age? You’re not alone.  Today, I am talking to Pat Hiban, a real estate agent who got better over time to have an illustrious career in the real estate sales business. Pat practiced what he preached and like most agents, bought houses and then rented them out. At 46 years old, Pat retired from selling homes for commissions to living off the income he made from the real estate that he purchased.  You’ll Learn... [02:45] Labeled as Learning-Disabled: How Pat overcame it, and didn’t let it bother him. [03:35] Go Getter: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Listen and copy others to sell houses.  [04:09] Done is better than perfect: Things don’t need to be perfect, but need to get done. Hire others to make them perfect and fix problems. [05:58] Building a Billion-Dollar Business: One sale at a time, one staff member at a time, one commission at a time. Get rich quick is a slow process and takes discipline. [07:54] What holds people back from growing their business? Themselves. There's someone else that has the same goals, but there's no difference between them. [11:00] What’s going to happen? You're going to quit affirming and focusing on your goals, or they’re going to come true.  [13:25] Unwilling to Give Up: Entrepreneurs tend to have tenacity and relentlessness.  [14:31] Are they not setting goals? Or, are they setting goals and failing? If they don't have any goals, they're never going to get anywhere.  [15:30] GoBundance: Find accountability partner for positive peer pressure to set goals, create affirmations for each goal, and make sure each goal and objective gets done. [19:42] Why people fail to succeed? They give up too soon and don’t establish proper mastermind.  Tweetables Stick with Superpower: Getting business, doing business, and making money. Done is better than perfect. To get rich quick is a slow process. Get rich slowly to succeed.  Your circumstances are a direct result of your goals and how often you review them. Resources Pat Hiban on Facebook Pat Hiban on Instagram GoBundance Tribe of Millionaires Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Robert Kiyosaki The Secret Movie Jim Rohn DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and the residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. And today's guest, I'm hanging out with Pat Hiban. Pat, welcome to the show. Pat: Good to be here, Jason. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be on DoorGrow.  Jason: Give everybody a little bit of background on you and how you got involved with real estate. Help them understand who Pat is. Pat: That's a big question as far as who Pat is. It's easier to say how I got involved in real estate. I went to college and I got a degree in sociology. I was going to be a probation officer and I couldn't get a job. What happened was I became an agent, a real estate agent, a poor one in the beginning. I sold 10 house in my first year, made $13,000. Over time, I got better, and better, and better, and I went on to an illustrious career in the real estate sales business. I did practice what I preach and like most agents, I bought houses along the way and then I rented them out.  I played monopoly a little bit, sold the little greenhouses, bought bigger hotels, shopping center, lots of apartments, things like that. Then, at 46 years old, I retired from selling real estate homes for commissions, and just live off of the income from the real estate that I purchased currently. Jason: One of the things in the bio that you've mentioned is you're labeled with a learning disability at the age of eight. Maybe you could share a little bit about that and how you overcame. Pat: Basically, I was learning-disabled. It was all a label. At that point, just like anything, I didn't let it bother me. When you're 8 years old, or even 10, or even 16, you're not conscious of any of that. You're really unconscious of it until later in life when your parents tell you about it.  I got a 2.3 GPA in college. I didn't really think of myself as being really smart. I really saw myself more as a go getter. Someone who would actually be able to do whatever somebody told me to do. My office managers would tell me, "Pat, this is what you need to do to sell a house or to get a listing," I would actually listen where 99 of 100 other agents wanted to try it their own way or reinvent the wheel. That's how I grew everything in my life. It's just by copying off other people. Jason: You've had a lot of success where a lot of other agents haven't been able to experience success or they eventually folded in and just gotten out because they just couldn't make it. What do you attribute to being different? Is it just that you would listen and learn? Or do you have a little bit more tenacity and bite than most people? Pat: One of my favorite quotes is, "Perfect is the enemy of done." I never really had to have things perfect, but I always had to have things done. I think that served me in that I would get them done. If they weren't perfect and there was a problem, I would hire other people to make them perfect for me so that I could stay in my superpower, which would be getting business, doing business, making money.  It was like what Robert Kiyosaki always says, "The B students works for the C students." That's true with me, I think. I'll be able to get it done. I'll be able to come up with the idea and implement a copy of it to somebody and implement it, then just hire other people along the way to make it perfect or better. Jason: I love that idea of, "Perfect is the enemy of done," which is funny because I say to my clients of a whole training video that talking about it and getting their websites launched. I say, "Done is better than perfect," because once it's done, it can make money. It can do its job. If you're waiting for perfect, it takes forever. Let's get into the topic on hand, which is building a billion dollar business. How do you build a billion dollar business? Pat: How do you build a billion dollar business? One bite at a time. That's like an elephant [...]. It's crazy. With me, it's just one sale at a time, one staff member at a time, one commission at a time. With regards to properties and property management, it's the same thing. One unit at a time, one door at a time. You're just building on that. That would be the answer to the question.  So many people today want to get rich quick. The truth to the matter is to get rich is a slow process. You got to know how to get rich slow. If you know how to do that, you're going to succeed. About a decade ago, there's a movie out called The Secret. The whole half of the movie was talking about what you need to do to become a millionaire is to sit there and basically just tell yourself, "I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire." There's a great quote by Jim Rohn. He says, "Affirmation without discipline is delusion." What Jim meant by affirmation without discipline is delusion is you can sit all day and be like, "I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire," but at the end of the day, if you don't earn a dollar and save a dollar, you're never going to have a million. It really should be, "I save $10 a day, I save $10 a day." Or, "I earn $20 a day and save half." Whatever it is, the point is, you need to add discipline.  Jason: For those listening, they're struggling in their business or they’re wanting to grow their business, what do they need to realize that it's maybe holding them back? Pat: Themselves. The answer is themselves. There's someone else in another state, another country, that has the same goals, and aspirations as them, that's so far ahead of them already this year. There's no difference between them. As a matter of fact, that person somewhere else may be disadvantaged compared to them in some way. Meaning, they don't have the money, or they don't have the skills, or they don't have the degree, or they aren’t the right race, or the right sex, whatever the case maybe. They may be disadvantaged in many ways, but I guarantee you that there's tons of amount there that are way ahead of you with the same goals as you and there's no difference between you two. Jason: Yeah. We could hold on to our story and excuses or we can get results. We're the one creating our own blindspots. If we're the ones that creating our own blindspots, we're the ones that's holding ourselves back, then how do we see that? Pat: What you have to understand is how psychology and how people are raised, and how most people are raised. I'll speak for America or North America. The average two-year old boy hears a negative statement from his or her parents or people older than him 16 times for every one positive statement. They might tell that little boy, "Don't touch that." "You're doing it wrong." "Wipe your face, you're messy," anything that's negative. None of that is positive.  By the time you're 18 years old, your subconscious mind is conditioned to believe that you can’t do stuff because you're doing all these things wrong. The only way to reverse that effect on your subconscious mind is to work on your subconscious mind. That's where you basically take goal-setting to whole another level where you actually set goals which everybody's listening to this probably has goals set. You reduce those goals to ridiculous.  I just talked about earlier, whatever it is you want to do, let's say you want to buy a house once a year or buy a house a month, that means you need to look at 20 everyday. You set your goal to that. Then, you create an affirmation around it for your subconscious mind that says, "I analyzed 20 deals a day." If you analyzed 20 deals a day, your mind believes that you're supposed to be analyzing 20 deals a day, and your mind believes that you're supposed to be buying one house a month, then it's going to happen. You can't help it. Either one of two things are going to happen. I guarantee it. Either you're going to quit, meaning you're going to quit affirming, you're going to quit reading your goals, you’re going to quit focusing on your goals. Or number two, it's going to come true. I believed that if you focus on that goal everyday, whatever it is, buying a house, and you focus on what you need to do to get into that goal everyday, it will happen. You will actualize it. I think that's how you overcome the subconscious mind of yours that’s not believing that you’re worthy, not believing that you ever will be a millionaire. I never really had much of a doubt that I would do well, that I will be rich. I was lucky and I was naive enough. A lot of people struggle with that. They don't have that naivety. The way to work around that is reprogramming your subconscious mind but not just in glorious goals. Not just in big goals, but in how you're going to actually act to get to that big goal. Jason: I like this idea. You're saying if you have a big goal, you have to break it down into the smallest action, the action that you're going to be taking on a daily, consistent basis. Then, you create an affirmation connected to this. That affirmation is just basically that you're completing this microcommitement, this action. Like, "I'm going to cold call this many owners to see if they're out of state. To see if I can get them on for business. I'm going to do whatever." It needs to be a daily, consistent, action. I'm going to go to this many real estate network. I'm going to commit to that. Breaking down into the smallest action, "I'm going to take this many agents out for lunch and have a conversation with them. Hopefully, we meet the referrals." They need to start setting some micro commitment and creating affirmations that they're saying regarding these to affirm that they're doing it. Then they need to live with integrity and take action towards those affirmations. Pat: Absolutely. Jason: Say, somebody's doing the affirmations. They're believing in themselves. They're taking these micro commitments. Then you said they're either going to quit or it's going to come true. There's this tenacity that I sense in you, this relentlessness, that I think a lot of entrepreneurs carry, that they're just unwilling to give up. If you're unwilling to give up, eventually, the universe just got to cave to you because you're relentless. Eventually, you're going to get it. Pat: And giving up is hard. You don't want to give up on the ultimate goal, but you’re going to have to change how you get there. Things are going to pop up on your way. You're going to have to go around them. Some people would say that would be quitting but it's not really quitting. You're just doing things in a different way all the time. Jason: Right, like course correcting. Pat: Course correcting, yeah. Jason: You've worked with quite a few different entrepreneurs and business owners. What advice would you give to those listening that you would typically give out for those that are wanting to move towards goals and they're struggling to figure stuff out on their own? What would you recommend to them? Pat: Are they not setting goals? Or are they setting goals and failing? Jason: That's a good point. What if they're not setting goals? What if they don't have any goals right now? Pat: Silly. Then they don't have any goals. They're never going to get anywhere. I have goals since day one. I can't imagine life without goals, even today. Most people don't have goals. That's why they're in a situation that they are. Your circumstances are a direct result of your goals and how many times you review your goals.  Jason: Got it. First off, they've got to set some goals, then they need to review these on a regular basis.  Pat: Daily. I would add something. Maybe have an accountability partner. One of the things we do at GoBundance, The Tribe of Millionaires is we have what we call peer partners which are people in the tribe that keep each other accountable. If they're goal is to call 20 out of state owners everyday, they text them, and say, "Did you call 20 today?" Then, we have GoBuds, which are about four to five GoBros that are in The Tribe of Millionaires that meet on a bi-weekly basis to talk about their goals, talk about where they're at, what they've done, and what they haven't done, that sort of thing, and it works. The point missing would be the accountability aspect. Not only set goals, not only create a subconscious affirmation for each goal big and each goal small, meaning the act-oriented goals, the discipline-oriented goals, but bring accountability around those discipline-oriented goals to make sure that they get done. Jason: Got it. They need to be accountable with somebody. If they're accountable to one, then the likelihood of them actually it is probably none. Pat: [...] works so well. Jason: It's probably because they have a coach, right? Pat: Yeah. They have to go in and step on a scale every week or every day. They have to write down and track what they put in their mouth. If you do that and someone's looking at it, it works. But if no one's looking at it, you're not looking at it, you're not stepping on the scale, and you're not writing down what you eat, chances are you're not going to lose weight.  Jason: Yeah. I worked out with a trainer for a solid year to get in shape. He had me fill out a spreadsheet. Every time I showed up (like once a week), he was pinching me with things to measure my body fat. There was no hiding. He was like, "I could tell you didn't eat right this week," or, "I could tell you're not getting enough sleep because you're retaining water." He’s just tell these stuff. He's done these with so many people. Same thing with working with any business coach that I've worked with. There's this level of accountability, that I'm checking in with them. I know I'm going to be talking into them and say they're going to ask me, "Did you keep your commitments? Did you do what you said you're going to do?"  I think there's that positive pressure. We're so good at applying negative pressure to ourselves. I think it's rare for us as entrepreneurs to apply pressure in a lateral or a positive way among our peers or among our people that their goal is to level us up. We firmly are really good at attracting people around us to tell us that we can't do things, that it's difficult, that maybe we should get a job. We've all heard these things as entrepreneurs. We really do need to have some sort of accountability. We need friends, we need partners, we need those that are in our corner. We need a coach, we need mentors. We need people that believe and can support us in our objectives. Pat: I agree. That's why we created GoBundance. That's why we do what we do and why there are over 220 members now, why our retention is extremely high. It's just because of that accountability piece. Your life just amplifies when you put it out there in front of other people. Jason: Got it. I love the idea of adding an accountability partner. It’s a simple buddy system.  Pat, I appreciate you coming here on the DoorGrow show. Is there any other advice you'd love to share related to how people can get out of their own way, start working towards building the legacy that they want, and building the finances that they want? Pat: I'm sure everybody here has heard of the classic book, Think and Grow Rich.  Jason: You said, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? Pat: Yeah. What Napoleon Hill did is he just went around rich people. He asked them, "How did you get rich? What are your habits?" There was a newspaper article that said Napoleon Hill had to break it down into two things. He actually asked for one thing, "Why people fail to succeed?" He said, "I don't have one but I have two." He said, "The first thing is they give up too soon." They're about to hit the gold and they stop digging. He said, "The second one is they fail to establish a proper mastermind." He was the one that came up with the mastermind concept. He had a mastermind with Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. These are all big name people. They would hang out, grilled marshmallows at a fire, and share secrets.  That's how we came to write our latest book which is Tribe of Billionaires. I want to give everybody on the show an opportunity to get a copy of this if I could. You can get a free copy by going to tribeofmillionaires.com and all you've got to do is pay the shipping. It's a story of a guy who loses touch with his father. For 20 years, he doesn't see his dad. Then, his dad dies and he has to settle the estate. He sees the pallbearers of his dad's coffin. They're six guys. They're all billionaires and multimillionaires.  He scratches his head because he's like, "I thought my dad was a deadbeat. How are his pallbearers billionaires?" Then, he's lucky enough that in order to get his estate, his dad wants him to spend a week with all these rich guys. What ensues are lessons that he learned. He journals about these lessons after spending or during his weeklong time with these six pallbearers. That was what Tribe of Millionaires was all about. You can get it on Amazon for $20. You're welcome to have it for $7 or free. All you're doing is paying $7 shipping. You just go to tribeofmillonaires.com. Jason: Perfect. All right, I appreciate that. Check out tribeofmillionaires.com. It sounds like a really good story that teaches some lessons regarding money, finances, and growing your business. I appreciate you sharing that, Pat. Any other words you want to share before we let you go? Pat: Nope. I'm easy to find. Luckily, my last name is not really popular. Just type in Pat Hiban. You can find me in multiple places. Follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere. Jason: Perfect. Pat, thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show.  Pat: My pleasure. Jason: There you have it. Check it out and get a free copy of the book. You said you can go to tribeofmillionaires.com.  If you're a property management entrepreneur that's wanting to grow your business, if you're looking to connect with other entrepreneurs, wanting some accountability from me as a coach, and some support, I recommend you reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you grow your business.  Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

In property management, eliminate no-shows and days on the market. Don’t waste time on administrative work. Make it more profitable. The ultimate goal is to get the place rented.  Today, I am talking to Zee Bhimji and Asif Hussain of ShowingHero, which is property management software built by property managers because they understand the challenges you face daily—dealing with tenants, leasing, and maintenance. You’ll Learn... [04:15] What is ShowingHero? Automation of entire leasing process—from lead to lease.  [07:42] How is ShowingHero different? Customization, full access to improve efficiency. [08:40] Piecemeal Process and Missing Pieces: Some piecemeal solutions sometimes work, but they're not a one-stop solution. [10:40] Showing Process: Contact, communicate, pre-screen, and schedule time.  [14:45] People and Technology: Most expensive operational cost for a business is staff. Reduce expense through automation. [19:05] Customer Experience: Specific service level expected. Automation doesn’t take away personal touch. [21:15] Good property management companies provide consistency, follow laws, and do things in a timely manner. [23:10] Toilet Therapist: Focus on what’s important. Customer service is when it matters. [27:50] Pain Points: Look at problems from property manager’s perspective.  [33:20] Little Things Make a Big Difference: Listen and understand to keep a business moving toward benefiting customers. [36:50] Feature-centric Validation Process: Actionable data/insight to run your business the correct way.  Tweetables ShowingHero: From lead to lease, it helps get everything done. All you want to do is reduce the days in market and make it profitable. The most expensive thing in business is staff. It's the most expensive operational cost. It is people.  The less tactical work you have, the better. Leverage tools, software, and systems. Resources ShowingHero Tenant Turner Rently Knock Rentals ShowMojo Calendly DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives and you are interested in growing your business and life and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. My guests today are Zee Bhimji and Asif Hussain. I got everyone's names right, right?  Zee: You really throw up my name though. Jason: Perfect. Let everybody know who you are and what your role is. I want to get into your background and how you got connected to the property management industry. We'll start with you, Zee. Zee: Yeah, absolutely. Zee Bhimji. I am the co-founder of ShowingHero. I have actually been in the industry for about 10 years now. I tell people this a lot of times. I couldn't spell property management where I started. I have a property management company also (Real Property Management) in the Chicagoland area. We've been around 10 years now. Like I said, I still couldn't spell property management when I started. I'm a finance and accounting major. It was a process. That's where ShowingHero came around, where we saw that there is a void in the market.I decided to work with my very good friend here, Asif. We decided to take down this very big challenge and a very fun project. Jason: Cool. Asif, why don't you tell everybody about yourself? Asif: Yeah. My background a little unique. I'm not a property manager, but I was a landlord and do-it-yourself landlord. I have managed a few properties and doors on my own. I was familiar with some of the issues and some of the pain points in the property management world—dealing with tenants, leasing, maintenance, the whole nine yards. My background is actually in marketing and finance. I worked for Discover Financial Services. I actually went ahead and got my Masters in Education in London. I went over to mentorship and educational leadership. Zee and I had actually met together. We were talking about some of the struggles. I actually just went up to Zee to figure out, "Hey. Either some of the struggles that I'm having with my landlords and with my tenants, what are some things that we could do?"  In exchanging ideas and learning from each other, this is where the idea of ShowingHero came from. There wasn't a solution in the market that was available to us, so that's where that spirit and that’s where it started, the beginning of our journey actually from. Jason: Got it. Gentlemen, why don't you explain to everyone what is ShowingHero?  Zee: ShowingHero is an automation of the entire leasing process. It's the easiest way to put it. What we would say is from lead to lease. One of the biggest challenges that I face as a property manager, we managed over a thousand doors, and it's a very good problem to have. Well it’s a problem and it's hard to do. We actually received an award from the Chicago Association of Realtors back in 2015 where we were the platinum leaders in the entire Chicago land market. It's definitely something we're very proud of. That's the time we started realizing we're facing a lot of problems and there are no solutions for them. There are piecemeal solutions. You guys have seen that. Jason, you've seen so many piecemeal solutions. I've seen that you are putting together a full solution because everyone has noticed piecemeal solutions are hard to do and customers don't prefer that.  As a property manager, one of the biggest things that I had was I don't want my employees to go to five different software to get their work done. That's where ShowingHero comes in. ShowingHero comes in and helps from the time a lead comes in to closing out the entire lease. What you want to do is you want to eliminate days in market. You want to make it more profitable. You want to avoid all the redundant stuff, all the administrative stuff. That's where ShowingHero comes in.  It will contact the lead. It'll scheduled the showing. It will use artificial intelligence or machine learning to contact people that are interested in the property, get them to schedule a showing as quickly as possible. This is something that's really cool. You can get a price drop on your property. Instead of having to go and communicate this to so many people, five minutes after you drop your price, you have people scheduled showings. That's incredible when it comes to automation coming in and doing their job. That's where ShowingHero comes in. It helps get everything done.  We come into self showings, which I would like us to talk about because that's something I'm very, very excited about. We do it differently and we do it more encompassing. Asif, I'm going to let you take the stage. Jason: Before you get into that, I wanted to touch on this. People are really looking for a result. They're not looking for pieces. When they're looking for pieces, they're hoping to magically put together a solution to get to a result. You really focus your tool on delivering front to end the result of automating the whole leasing process. You said from lead to lease. Most people listening to this have some solution in place. They may be using Tenant Turner. They're using Rently. I've seen Knock rentals on their ShowMojo. There's all these different tools out there. Maybe for the listeners, I'd love to hear about your processes, what you guys do, maybe how you stand out, or how you're different. Everybody listening is wondering how do you guys fit in the marketplace. Asif: I wanted to add one thing. One of the things that separates us from the market is that the idea of customizations and the full access on the platform. One of the things that Zee had mentioned is when you look at piecemeal solutions, you're looking at being able to solve something. People don't realize the amount of hours that are dedicated into doing that.  The example that Zee had mentioned in terms of price-reduced setting. You can manually go ahead and text or email, and say, "Hey look. That's a solution that works." People aren't realizing that for those smaller solutions that they're thinking that just works, they're not just being efficient. Not being efficient had the opportunity cost that you need to be able to understand that it's not necessarily in terms of dollars but its terms of hours. That adds up, which eventually does translate to dollars. Jason: This piecemeal idea you've mentioned a few times. Give us an example of a piecemeal process that you feel like has these gaps or is broken. Just so people are really clear on this. Asif: I've had clients that have said, "Look. I just use Calendly to schedule my showings. It works. I put out my show times there and I'll get notified." What they're not doing is, what does the reporting look like? Do you understand how many days your properties have been on the market? Are you getting the data that you need in terms of where the lead is coming from? What happens to the lead? Has a lead been able to provide you any feedback either if it's the assisted showing? Have they been able to provide you feedback on the agent or on the property? Are you able to see have they applied on? They clicked on the application link. What is the life cycle of that prospect? Are you able to understand those different points?  You could use Calendly. You might say, "Okay. I'm able to schedule," but you're missing out on those other solutions. You might say, "Hey, look. I'm using a lockbox and I'm allowing people to enter the property." But do you understand who's entering your property? When they've entered? If they've left the property? Are you able to follow-up on all of those different missing pieces? Sometimes these piecemeal solutions work. I had one client who said that they just text message (mass text message) to confirm a showing, which is great, but that does take an amount of time for someone to go get all those text messages, send that, see who replied, see who that person is. Those solutions work but they're not a one-stop solution. That's where ShowingHero tries to differentiate itself and say, "Look. We want you to be efficient and running on all gears." Jason: Cool. Explain the process of how the showing side work. Zee: One of the things to add to what Asif was saying and to clarify, we have piecemeal. The idea of piecemeal is just simply the fact that when a lead is interested in a property (we call our property management terms one, two, three, example stream), the first thing we're doing is we're saying, "Let's contact the lead." It's as simple as that. We just need to respond to them. Communicate, speak to them, pre-screen them, try to schedule time. Schedule time really takes three or four attempts. You're going back and forth. You're leaving voicemails, you're sending emails. From there, you're scheduling your time next week, Wednesday, 1:00 PM. Sounds good. Everything is great. From there, the next thing is a diligent agent or property manager is going to call in again and remind them about their showing the day before. Then, they're going to try and confirm the showing on the day about four hours prior. Jason: The goal behind that is to eliminate no-shows, to not waste time, to make sure that you're doing your best to get these people engaged so they show up, so you can get the property lease as quick as possible. The whole goal is just to get the place rented. Zee: Right. All you want to do is reduce the days in market and make it profitable. Yes, you can have ten agents for ten properties. You're not going to be profitable. That's what we had. We had four agents showing eighty properties. Yes, it worked for us. It made a lot of money but it was tough. I had a call center with three people full-time taking calls all the time. All they're doing is taking calls. That was 8:30-5:30. That's all I was making available and it wasn't enough. We're still getting a lot of calls, a lot of voicemails, a lot of emails outside of business hours. We were making it work. It was working. We pre-screen them on the phone, schedule a showing. We tried to be a little smart about it. We tried to be a little efficient about it. That's where ShowingHero comes in. ShowingHero takes 90% of all that administrative work. All you're doing is like going to your assistant and saying, "Hey. I want to show properties in the north side of town on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9:00-1:00. Can you please schedule a whole bunch of showings for me, but make sure that the people are pre-qualified? Then, make sure you follow-up with every single person to find out if they're going to show up on time. Remind them and confirm the showing." That's ShowingHero. ShowingHero is your personal assistant that is doing all those things but you don't have to remind them. Jason: Okay. The situation you're describing sounds like pretty normal. The problem situation, it sounds pretty normal. Most management companies, if they're smaller, the property managers are the one handling this. They're leveraging maybe one or two tools to try and systemize things. They've got one system that's putting the properties out to the market and feed allowing the system that's handling some of the showing stuff.  That sounds pretty normal. They're going to have a handful of people that are going out or maybe themselves. They're trying to do this. At your level of scale, you started to see gaps and the problem. It sounds like for smaller guys, something like ShowingHero could allow them some freedom from the leasing side of the business that they're tied up in.  Zee: Yeah. I want to put up the 100 emoji right now because that's what it is. It's all about having a bold solution. Jason: Okay. Let me point this out. My listeners have heard this multiple times. The most expensive thing in business is staff. It's the most expensive operational cost that we have. It is people. We're spending thousands, tens of thousands of dollars even on a team every month. If you can reduce that even slightly through some automation, through technology, through some process, through systems, through less communication needing to happen, then even eliminating phone calls being necessary between two people, or any step that is reduced adds up to a lot of cost savings. It scales once you get to 1000 doors like your size. It's pretty obvious. It's really obvious. it's difficult for people that are at a smaller door account to pay attention to all these little leaks that exist in their business. The challenge ends up being they just feel like they're spinning their wheels and they're not moving forward. They feel like they're just living paycheck-to-paycheck. They feel like the business isn't progressing. It's because they're not dedicating time towards strategic time in working on the business. They're focused on all the tactical things they need to do in the business. They have the business that they can do instead of the business that they should be doing, the business that they really want to have in which they're able to focus on strategic time, focus on planning on the future, on growth, on ideas. Instead they're handling leasing, maintenance, phone calls, their team, managing, trying to do accounting, and like all these kind of stuff.  The less tactical work they have on their plate, the better. If you can free up tactical work by leveraging a technology tool or system, you're going to dramatically reduce your cost. It doesn't matter if a tool is hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. Team members are thousands of dollars a month. That's where people miss the boat. I hear people so often they say, "Oh that software is so expensive." They're starting out and they're like, "I can't get the better property management accounting solution because it's hundreds of dollars a month." I'm like, "Are you kidding?" Your first team member is going to be thousands of dollars a month. Start with the solution you can live with forever because it's gonna be painful to switch. I wanted to point that out. Asif: Absolutely. What you were mentioning is key. People don't realize that payroll is expensive. It's one of the largest expense items out there. Doing it manually and not looking at a software solution because you think, "Oh. This upfront cost might be too much," you're not realizing how much you're spending in paying someone to do that manual because the work has to get done. It's not that you're not reaching out to these individuals. It's not that you're not following-up if somebody’s doing this and you're not realizing the cost. The other thing that's also important to think about is the prospect experience. Most prospects that we've looked at are scheduling during weeknights or weekends. Jason: Right. That's when they're not working. Asif: Exactly. How are you able to respond to them? I just read a stat somewhere that said when most prospects are looking at homes, they're not only looking at your listings. They're looking at multiple listings in that area. If they don't get a response within a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, and you don't get back to them, they're going to move on to the next one. They're not waiting for somebody in your office to respond back to them. That's what's ShowingHero does. With our tenant portal, we create a richer experience. The moment that somebody is interested in a property, they get information about the property that the property management company puts out. There's the picture, the details, what schools are nearby, what's the walk score. What are the important factors that allow me to make a decision about this property and then be able to have a response to instantly say, "Hey, this is when I can schedule a showing and that am I qualified?" The pre-screening also allows us to gather more information and that creates a richer experience on both ends. Making sure that the prospect feels that they're getting responded to and that allows them to hopefully sign that lease and sign on the dotted line quicker. Jason: You mentioned experience and you mentioned the service level that people expect. The customer experience is what I'm talking about. You get two camps of property managers. You get some that fear automation. They're like, "Oh. I can never use this AI tool or I can never use this automation because you're cutting out people." They pride themselves. It's like this badge of honor that they wear on their shirt sleeve that they're so personal. They do everything themselves. They think that that means they're providing a higher level of service. "Oh well, I'm going to deal with every tenant directly. I want to see them, know them, taste them, and smell them. I'm doing the best thing for my owners. I'm so connected." They wear this badge of honor. It's not scalable. There's this myth that that means it's better that they're able to provide better experience. Asif: It's not consistent. Automation doesn't take away the personal touch right. ShowingHero allows you to customize everything. I'm going to let Zee talk about how it helped his company grow with that because that was an issue that him and I discussed in detail and saying, "Are we taking away the human touch?"  Both of us thought that automation doesn't take it. It allows you to standardize and make that process simpler and more efficient. You're not going to know how your agent goes and respond to every message and email. You can't control that. You can create culture, obviously, and that takes time. But what about if I can be able to put that in an email or in a message or in my branding that then gets the same process goes out to every prospect every time? Jason: [...]. I know that every renter that's rented at least a handful of times or even maybe once has had a bad experience in renting. They've had difficulties with showings. They've had people not calling them back. They've had difficulties and maintenance. They've all had bad experiences.  When I moved to a new area and I asked around, it's pretty obvious when you ask people. They know which management companies are good and bad. They talk about them. I don't think people realize that the tenants are screening management companies as well. A lot of them will look for a good management company because they dealt directly with an owner that was terrible, wasn't attentive, was busy working, not available, wasn't following laws, wasn't on the up-and-up on things, or was shady. A good management company provide consistency. They follow the law. They do things in a timely fashion if they're healthy. They have good a good service experience. I know from my own experience, I appreciated not having to talk to a person in order to get things done that I wanted to do. I just wanted it done. I wanted it quick. I wanted to get in and see the property quickly. I wanted to get maintenance requests done quickly. I didn't need to talk to somebody, do all the niceties, and go through these. I just wanted stuff taken care of. Sometimes we may focus a little bit too much on customer experience when really the experience they want is just to get [...] done fast. That's it. Get it done and let me get on with my day. "I don't need a friend right now. I need my toilet fixed. I need to see this probably because I need to find a place." Zee: Jason, I especially agree with that because we have multiple things happening at the same time. One of the big items is if you can exaggerate something. Many people who wear this badge of honor are saying that we care about customer service. I fully agree. I don't call myself a property management company. ShowingHero doesn't call itself a tech company. We call ourselves a customer service company. It's where the customer service is required.  I'm not going to call you, Jason, and say, "Hey. I'm so sorry about your toilet not working. This is so upsetting. You want to talk about it?" No. That's not when you need a call. When you need a call is when you're frustrated. When the property owner is saying, "Hey, listen. I need to replace my sub-zero fridge. That's going to cost me $13,000. Can you guys give me a good option? Tell me something that's important." Not when it's $200, not when we need to schedule a showing. When you're trying to schedule a showing you want to automate that. Then you can focus on the things that really matter. Customer service is where when it matters. That's what ShowingHero is allowing you to do. Just like you had mentioned, you want to scale. One thing that I got lucky (and I say this very many times) is that I was fortunate. I was able to hear from people like you, Jason, who said, "Zee, don't work in your business, work on it." That made a really big difference because at that time I was a fresh graduate. I just got out of school and I said, "I'm going to start a business."  I did really well in school and I was like, "You know what? I'm gonna try and listen to people because I know nothing about property management." I didn't come in with any of my old ways of doing things. I was like, "I just need a try." From day one. I got to hear people like you, Jason, who said, "Listen, skill. Focus on growth. Don't focus on saving a few dollars by going and doing showings. One of the first things I did when nobody was doing it was I got epayments. I got esignatures for leasing. Many prospects would be confused and then they would call in. We would get reviews that, "Last time I signed a lease, I had to meet the person there, and we were there for three hours. This time it took 30 seconds." Now, esignatures are commonplace. Everyone is doing it.  But the guy who wears that badge that says, "Hey, listen. You know I want customer service. I want to sit there and explain the lease." No, that's not what you need. You need to be able to answer the questions that they have. Figure it out. Get the maintenance done in a timely manner. That's what's showing here does.  What we have done is also with cost. We've made it very customizable. One thing our clients do is they're saying that, “Hey. All the automation really helps us because then when we go to a showing we can focus and say, ‘Hey, which one?’ We have open houses. The prospect is going to go with it. We're going to get multiple prospects coined for one showing.” If you have six or seven people at the same time, you want to pick who is the correct person. That's where customer service comes in. I feel like that's where you should spend time. Jason: Going back to my earlier question (because everybody listening is wondering), how does this compare or how is it different than Tenant Turner, ShowMojo, or Rently? These are the three tools that have been in the marketplace for a while. A lot of people are using it. I've heard the most about those. What do you feel is different about ShowingHero? Asif: Zee, feel free to jump in. One of the things that I feel that we have, that is the most unique is building on our founders experience and those on our board. Zee, we also have Sean, who's also on the board, bring over almost two decades of property management experience.  Both of them have been very successful. Zee have been able to scale from where we were. I was in the beginning a few doors to 1000–1500 plus doors. I went in as part of the largest franchisee and has been able to establish himself. To be able to use that knowledge and expertise, we can all appreciate that that value is innumerable. Using his experience allows us to understand the pain points for scalability. That's one of the leverages. Because of his network, we've been able to look at different integrations. We've been able to look at different features that we've launched and to really figure out what's the next trend. Luckily (or unluckily) for him, we also do a lot of testing on his property management company. We're like," Hey. We have this view feature. Let's push it out to him." Jason: Zee's the guinea pig. Zee: Yeah. In this scenario, it's a happy guinea pig because these are things that many people will come up to us and say, "Hey, we need to do this. Is this something that you guys can do?" We're looking at it and we say, "That sounds amazing." We can vet a proposal much faster because I'm looking and I'm like, "That makes perfect sense. I've dealt with that." Property managers deal with that every day. We're not fixing things. It's not a novelty solution. When we look at a problem, we're looking at it from the property manager’s eyes. Many of our clients say that they appreciate the fact that we're a property management software that's built by property managers. We feel their pain. We understand their pain fully. I have been in the trenches (I'm still in the trenches). It makes a really big difference. One of the things that we have is the fact that we try to build a system that's customizable. We have vendor portals. We have very many features, Jason. A lot of our customers are ecstatic about the fact that we're feature-rich, but we're agile. We're an agile software which means that we can move quickly. One of the things that I thought was a major disadvantage for us is it's obviously an advantage also but we were the new shiny product out there. How can people trust it if they have no one else that has tried it. That's where we got a little lucky. We got a little fortunate because my network of people were like, "Zee, you know what? If you've built something, we're happy to see what it's about."  Sean Kingman said, "Hey. Let's try this," and that's how it caught on fire. We just started. We're a 2017-2018 product. We've only been around for a very short time. The reason why we're many times being added to conversations is because our customers see it as client success is very important to us and we know property management. That's a very big differentiator. When it comes to features, Asif could talk for like six hours. Jason, you might get a little bored. You might think some of these things are really cool but six hours, I don't think we have.  Jason: Maybe we'll get into a few features that Asif thinks are really cool. Before we do that, I just want to touch on what you said that there's fundamentally the intention from the ground up of what a company is involved in significantly changes all of the outcomes and the product that they create. If people start a product because they think, "Hey. We're really nerdy and we're really cool tech people. Let's make something really nerdy and see if we can make some money off these property managers." That's very different than having an intention from the ground-up saying, "Hey, we need to solve this problem for ourselves. Let's see if we can do this towards scaling the business."  Your focus from the ground-up was, “How can we focus on scaling this? How can we lower operational costs? How can we systemize things and reduce time? How can we speed up the process? How can we focus on the customer service aspect so that we're getting a high level of positivity throughout the experience for the customer?” That's a very different focus than I'm just focusing on being really tech-savvy and making something really nerdy and cool, and throwing a bunch of features at it. The whole goal to grow in scale is significant.  Just like in DoorGrow, our intention, our fundamental mission (like client-centric mission statement) is that we want to change and transform this industry, and have an impact. We get to do that through hundreds of clients that we have and create that ripple effect. I really do believe that good property management can change the world. You can have a significant impact on hundreds of thousands of families lives, home, money, property, and investments. This is fundamental to your owners and the tenants lives. That drives our mission and our vision, and we want to have a real impact with our clients. We've done things that, probably from a business standpoint, makes sense for us but it was towards our vision and our purpose. It's not always about the bottom line or about the dollar. I'm sure with you guys, you've made little changes and little differences between what you do. Maybe some of the others isn't on squeezing a dollar out of a person or just implementing some cool piece of technology. It's just like driving down the road. It's the little adjustments that you make to the steering wheel. You end up in a very different place. You stay on the road. But if the steering was just slightly off from the very beginning and you don't adjust it or if you're flying an airplane, you will end up in a very different place. You'll be off the road. You'll be in a different city if you're flying. It's the little things that end up making a big difference especially later on down the road. Vision and purpose is what keeps a business in alignment and keeps it moving towards benefiting the consumer and benefiting the target audience that you want to serve. You are your own target audience which is interesting. Asif: That really does help. I was just going to add. Zee and I both agree with you on this point. one of the most important things that I've learned in this journey is to listen. To listen and understand. Zee and I had a vision and said, "Okay, look. These are the problems that we're facing. Let's understand and how do we solve them." We've solved a solution and I said, "Look, I want to make sure that customer service is really important to me." Perhaps, it's a millennial thing. I want to get something, get it done fast, and I want to be treated well while doing it. For Zee, it was customizations that were really important. He said, "Look. I need this but I know that someone in my network has a different profile and might not want this. I want to customize this for myself." Even though we have both of those pillars to guide us, we listen to each of our clients to understand, "What is it that you need?" While we're driving to this destination in the car, for example, are we checking to make sure that we're headed towards that way? Are we checking our blind spots? Are we checking our biases to understand where that is? Then also, looking ahead 5-10 years, what are the integrations and technologies that we want to start implementing today to make sure that we collectively push property management to the next level?  Whether that's looking at virtual reality, whether that's looking at AI, looking at learning, looking at voice, what are these tools that we can start leveraging and using to help push property management to the next level while also understanding the realities of today? And then learning from the best practices. That's both from Zee and then from our clients. That's where that mixture has to happen and that's where that perfect blend is. Jason: You also said you have two camps when it comes to software creation. You have those that are more of the camp of, "We're going to create things the best way and everybody else needs to do it our way. Our way is the way they need to fit their business into our model or we're just not a fit for you." Then you've got, "We're going to allow this to be flexible for their business and listen to our consumers and we're going to make adjustments for this." I'm not saying either one is better than the other. They're just different. Somebody may create the ultimate solution and somebody may create something. It sounds like your focus is on customization. It's something that can be adapted to their business model. Can you explain some of the differences between some of your customers that might show up in your software, feature-wise? Zee: One of the things that I could be able to say is just like you said. We have this idea of saying that we have a product it's going to help you in many ways. But we want to customize it. People run their businesses differently. We're still going to provide best practices. We have our client success team. We have our senior consultants who are saying, "Here's how many of our customers are doing this but here are options." When we're doing customer check-ins our customers are like, "I'm thinking about doing something like this. How can you help me?" I'll give you an example of a feature that really differentiates us but it makes us proud. I'll tell you this that many times our customers are saying, "You're giving me a lot of good data." Once you have over 300 listings, 300 properties under your portfolio, you need data to run your business, so getting a lot of data. But sometimes it's not actionable data. You want to say, "Okay. Yes, cool. I'm getting a lot of showings. I'm getting a lot of leads."  What we've started doing is because our customer came up to us, we did a beta across around 30 different customers, and said, "Is this something that you guys care for?" We were looking at and we said this is something important and it's simply performance alerts. Something that comes in, gives you actionable data, and says, "Don't tell me how many showings I have. Tell me how many properties are not getting showings." "Instead of me going through 70 of my active listings, tell me what's actionable data." They tell me, "Here's where my problems are. This is a list of problems." You can ask that you receive this performance alerts on a weekly basis, on a daily basis, on a monthly basis. You're getting this information that says, "Here are all your listings that have less than X number of photos. Here are all your properties that have had less than five showings." This is such simple stuff and we looked at it and we're like, "This is a no-brainer but this helps a company."  Now, we get reviews. We get thank you emails. Asif was just showing me a thank you email yesterday. He was like, "This is a customer saying that this has made their life easy because the leasing manager in the office says, “Now I don't have to go in and look for the needle in the haystack. You guys are making the needle have a halo all around it."  Jason: Yeah. It's helping them see gaps. It's helping them see blind spots in these properties that they're leasing because the more properties you have, the more common those blind spots and leaks probably occur. "Oh, no. We didn't get enough photos on this one." "These small handful of properties are not renting very quickly over in this market." These challenges. It helps you make different business decisions. You may decide not to take on properties in a certain geographic area. They're just not leasing or whatever. Zee: Actionable insight is very important. It helps you run your business the correct way. When we're looking at something like the number of leads, yeah the number of leads are great. On average, our customers receive around 2700 leads on a monthly basis. It just might be something that you know and it's very common, but many small customers don't know this. They don't know how many leads they receive on it together because they contact the 15 leads they receive during the day. But how about the leads that came in on the weekends? How about the leads that came in via voicemail? Or missed calls? 2700 leads is a lot of leads. The problem is that even though you're getting 2700 leads, where's the actionable insight? How do I know which property is not getting the leads? I don't need to work on all the properties and getting a lot of leads. I want to know which property I should be focusing on. That's where ShowingHero comes in.  We have a tenant portal which makes a very big difference because like Asif and you were both talking about, you want a rich experience for the customer. We want to go get prospects to move through the lead pipeline faster and make it easy for them to do this. At the same time, you don't want to have too much work for your leasing staff, calling, making phone calls, asking. We have the prospect scheduling your showing, going and seeing the property within an hour of scheduling the showing, of submitting a lead on Zillow. That's how quick our turnaround can be. They can just go to the property, validate themselves, securely validate themselves. They're not sending a picture of themselves. They're going through a validation process. This is something that our customers find very important. They're like, "Listen. I don't want to just send pictures. I don't want to receive pictures. How do I know whose picture I received? How is that going to help me?" That's one more step. For us, what we're doing is we're going through the validation process. The prospect goes to see the property and once they're done with the showing we're going through more validation to go and say, "Did the person leave?" If everything is working, you're good. If the person doesn't confirm that they have left the property, we inform someone. The most important thing for a large company is to provide actionable data, actionable insight, so that people can move when they need to move. Otherwise, they can focus on other things. That's something that you know helps our clients and is our mantra for us.  Jason: Instead of people having to dig and react—they're always having to go to the data and find, they have to question, ask things, and figure it out, then they're gonna react to these things—your tool will say, “This needs to be dealt with. Somebody checked in this property. They never checked out somebody should go figure this out.” It's letting them know actionable things that they need to be doing instead of expecting the leasing manager to just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. Asif: Right. There is data that you can pull and then there's data that's being pushed out. To be honest, we're continuously working on that. It's an ongoing journey for us in being able to understand which data is important, when should it be sent out, how much is too much data, and which one is the most valuable. As Zee mentioned, 2,700 leads means nothing unless you put it into context. How many properties? Where are these leads coming from? How many are qualified? How many are actually showing up to the property? How many are following through? What are my percentage over application over leads that came in? Is it coming from Zillow? Is it coming from voicemail? Is it coming through another third-party site? Data without context doesn't help. That's what Zee was trying to infer to is providing those actionable items in a context that's valuable to the end-user. Jason: Perfect. Maybe we should start wrapping this up. Are there any features and frequently asked questions that clients ask that you want to showcase here while we have you about ShowingHero? Asif: One of the things I do want to mention is that we have a special promotion going on where you can test out the software. I left to look at the marketing team a bit and there's like three or five active listings.  Probably, property management companies that are thinking, "I might not be able to do this," or "I'm not sure this is what it is." I understand that a switch or trying something new is difficult. I understand that there are a hundred questions that you have until we've made it where our first package is entirely free, where you get to test out the software, all of its features, and be able to see that power in being able to make sure that it's the right fit for you. That's one of the things that we pride ourselves and saying, "We're going to make sure that ShowingHero works for you. If not, we'll try to make sure that we can try to get it there and figure out a solution." There is always a solution to be had. Let's have that conversation to figure it out. That's one thing I wanted your listeners to know that there is a free understanding of that which is low risk for them. Also, keep in touch with ShowingHero. We're going to be launching some really, really, cool features and integrations, looking at some technology in the AI and the voice space, looking at more creative self solutions that are out there, and all of this should hopefully come to us by the end of this, or Q4, or early Q1 next year. We're continuously trying to grow and listen to the market, and hopefully, we'll be able to respond with some really great integrations. Jason: It sounds really cool. Someday we'll have to have you come back and [...] what some of these things are.  Zee: We have some cool announcements coming up. I'm gonna add one thing to what Asif was saying. A big thing our customers are saying, customers who have signed up with us around 90 days in, we try to get some feedback and say, "How are things going? What's going on?" One thing that we're hearing from a lot of our customers is that we wish we had pulled the trigger a little earlier and that's why Asif came up with this idea of saying, "Listen. Let's make it a little easier. Let's make it a no-brainer for them." If a customer is having a hard time making a decision because they don't know the value right away, let them try it. That's where our free tier is. We're 100% okay with, "Hey, come on in." I don't mean to brag, Jason, but I will tell you that as the new shiny product—I say this is pride, I'm going to put up the humble brags hashtag, but I will say this—one thing we're seeing is that when we're bringing these shiny objects out, setting a little bit of a trend in the industry where some of the other people you've mentioned are also adding those, we're really proud of the fact that competition is making the current product base. I have to put my property management hat on every once in a while and I have to say, "Just when a new product comes around, that means my other offerings become better because they need to compete." I'll give you a very, very simple example, very, very simple stuff. Our pricing model is being copied across many. I don't want to say copied, but I want to say that I feel that people are noticing that property managers respond to our pricing model. Maybe we should offer a similar pricing model. We have our property pages. We're showing extra data that may not be very easy to pull but we're pulling in the walk score, the bike score, the neighborhood score, neighborhood schools. This is all important information to prospects. Maybe it's not very easy to pull but we're doing it because we feel it's important.  Now, I have noticed that others are also trying to pull a little more information. Maybe not getting as much information as we provide, but it's cool and I like the fact that maybe we're making a little bit of an impact to the industry. Jason: Perfect. It is fun and it's nice to be able to see the impact. At DoorGrow, I feel like we get to have an impact. I get to have it through the podcast, I get to have it indirectly through my clients, and I can see the industry changing in ways that I didn't expect, but it was our goal. I didn't expect it to happen this soon. The momentum is building and it's really exciting to see your vision come to life. I'll take a tiny bit of credit to that and you can, too, so humble brag for both of us. Zee: Jason, I'll say this. One of your customers had come by us on in Nashville. They were just crazy about you. They're crazy about [...]. I just have to put this out there that you guys are providing information and help that is very beneficial. I would tell you guys, everyone listening is probably already a customer of yours, but when they're not, they should start talking to you very soon. Jason: I appreciate that a lot. We have thousands of listeners. I doubt that they're all customers. We have hundreds of customers but 1000. If you're listening, listen to Zee and come talk to me. Zee: Talk to Jason. Jason: I love it. Alright. I appreciate you plugging my business and coming on the show. Anyway, it sounds really cool you guys are doing. I resonate with your your ideology and your philosophy behind what you're doing. I'm excited to hear feedback from some of my customers and listeners on your tool. You people can check it out for free, which is bold of you guys. If somebody has something they can say to their leasing coordinator or to themselves, they can say, "Let's just try out one or two doors. Let’s try a handful of properties on this. Let's just see how it differs. Let's see how it works." That's where maybe you'll start to see some brilliance and maybe get really excited about working with ShowingHero. I look forward to hearing some feedback. Those of you who are you listening, make sure you're inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group, our community for the podcast. You get to by going to doorgrowclub.com. People post really real and raw feedback in there about different services and tools. I'd love to hear it. Cool. I appreciate you guys coming on the show. How can people get in touch with ShowingHero and try this out? Asif: We have a demo page that you can just request a demo out there and then I can share my information to you as well. They can get in touch with me directly in that way through our contact page. What I'm showing here, there's a couple of ways that you can get in touch with us. You can get through our chat box, emailing us, just checking out our website. There's a couple of mediums that you can look at. Jason: And the website is showinghero.com? Asif: Yup. Jason: All right, real simple. Everybody check out showinghero.com. Asif and Zee, I appreciate you guys coming on the DoorGrow Show and contributing to our property management community. Zee: Thank you for having us. Asif: Thanks for the chat, appreciate it. Jason: All right, we'll let you guys go.  There you go. Check out showinghero.com. If you guys are interested in growing your business, if you feel like you are doing it all on your own as an entrepreneur, you feel like you don't have support, you feel like nobody's in your corner, who's in your corner? Sometimes it's not even our spouse. Who's in your corner? Who do you feel is challenging you and helping you level up in what you're doing? If you feel like you want some support like that, you want to be part of something, you are aligned with our vision of changing and transforming this industry, then connect with DoorGrow. Reach out. We would love to help you see some of the blind spots that may exist in your sales pipeline. Our vision and purpose at DoorGrow, what we really do is we help align your business towards warm lead generation. We help align your business towards greater trust by shoring up the trust leaks that exist in your front end of your business, the sales pipeline. Because trust is what closes deals. Trust is what gets you contracts. People aren't looking to buy property management. What they buy is safety and certainty. What they're buying is trust. We can help you showcase trust throughout your sales pipeline and we can eliminate the leaks that scare them off, or that create a lack of trust, or create less trust than maybe one of your competitors, then we can facilitate you growing and adding more doors without even changing your lead sources a lot of times.  Reach out to us. We would love to see if we could help you out show you some of the leaks that may exist in your business. If you reach out, we'll send you access to a 1 hour and 45 minute training called DoorGrow Secrets that will help you see the gaps and the problems that exist in your business. You can to that by going to doorgrow.com/opt-in. That will take you to a page, it gives you a bunch of case studies, testimonials, and it will allow you to get access to that training. Maybe you'll be a client of ours if you get really excited about what we have to offer.  Hopefully we'll be talking soon. Until next time, everybody. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Entrepreneurs dream about starting their own business, but they can’t afford it. How can they reach their financial goals and objectives to fund and grow their business? Most of them borrow money from their friends, parents, and/or credit cards.  Today, I am talking to Bruce Mack of Platinum Trust Group. Bruce is an avid real estate investor and licensed financial advisor. He shares seven options to fund your business and take it to the next level. You’ll Learn... [03:54] Option 1: Revolving Lines of Credit Program is easy to qualify for with 700+ FICO score and more than one open lines of credit; no business plan, collateral needed.  [08:55] Option 2: Installment-based Lending Platform features 25 lenders offering $1,000 to $50,000 with lower FICO score, but provable income. [12:25] Option 3: Business Directed Retirement Account (BDRA) is rollable IRA or 401(k) where funds from previous employers are accessible for specific transactions.  [18:28] Option 4: Transactional Funding for A2B, B2C transactions, such as funds for wholesale flips. [20:07] Option 5: Platinum Trust Group/Division offers bulletproof asset protection and ability to save passive income money to repurpose.  [24:48] Option 6: Private and Hard Money Solutions with low annual percentage rates (APRs) and 1-2 points to cash out rental property income to deploy on new projects. [26:42] Option 7: Plug-and-Play Scenario is relationship-oriented opportunity to connect and network with partners and sponsors.  [29:17] Where to start? Typically, it takes about $75,000 to get your business started. [32:56] Funding Mindset: If you don’t want to go into debt to do anything, it may hold you back from growing your business and generating revenue.  [35:35] Constant Lawsuits: Property managers/management companies that aren’t real estate investors are in high-risk business. Tweetables Donuts to Dollars: Entrepreneurs start businesses thanks to friends, family, and credit cards. Plug-and-Play Option: You never know, who you know. Get your project going. You’re in the wrong business, if you don’t want to go into debt to grow your business and generate revenue. Protect your assets! Property managers/management companies that aren’t real estate investors face constant lawsuits. Resources Platinum Trust Group Platinum Financing Group FICO Fundbox IRA 401(k) Real Estate Investor Association (REIA) DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome to DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives and you are interested in growing your business and life and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and the residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today's guest, who I'm hanging out with, is Bruce Mack of Platinum Trust Group. Bruce, welcome to the show. Bruce: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it and you definitely are unbelievable at your opening. Jason: Thank you. It's built around all the challenges that we've heard in the industry and what our client-centric mission is as a company. I wanted to fold all that into our intro and I appreciate you giving us some positive feedback on it. Bruce, I'm really interested in getting into this. Today's topic is seven options to fund your business. This is a common challenge of people not being able to afford to do work with us, being able to afford to do the things they need to do to grow their business. This is a common challenge. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that are just trying to operate just paycheck to paycheck. In order to get ahead and grow the business, they need to find some funding, or get some money, or figure out how to make it work, or save something in order to make that work. Before we get into that, could you give everybody a bit of a background? Let's qualify you, help them understand how you got into what you're doing? Tell us, who is Bruce? Bruce: Well, in a couple of sentences or at least a short paragraph, I am an avid real estate investor, have been in a three-year period of time. I was able to buy rehab and flipped out over 160 properties. I've been involved with over $92 million worth of real estate transactions, SFR’s, as well as commercial. I'm a licensed financial advisor, prior owner and operator of a credit repair company that was also a licensed and bonded. I've been around the block. I love working with real estate investors. I speak to them all over the world, as well as nationally and have been at countless events helping folks just like the folks that are on this podcast, to be able to reach their financial goals and objectives, through getting them the rudimentary financing that they need so they can take their business to the next level. Jason: Okay, great. Let's get into the seven options. I guess we're starting with number one. Bruce: Okay, let's start with number one. One of our premiere programs that we use on a daily basis is what I call our revolving lines of credit program. Now, the nice thing is with this particular program, is that there are a lot of no's, but these are no’s that you want to hear, not no’s that you don't want to hear. Bruce: One of the no’s is that you don't have to have a business plan. Another no is that you don't have to have collateral pledged to be able to qualify for this, so if you don't have any collateral, i.e. properties, what have you, or other hard assets, there are no collateral pledges. Another no is that you don't have to have an income verification because it's a stated program. Without a business plan, without having a stated income, without having to go through a bunch of hoops, this makes it an easy qualify program. The key qualifiers are having a FICO score, ideally north of 700 or 700 when we put you through the program, and having more than one (ideally) open lines of credit with a credit card that would be at least $6000, $7000, $7500 worth of credit limit, and at the time that we put you through, you're ideally at 30% or lower on your utilization. Let's just say you have a $10,000 credit card. Let's say you have a $7000 balance currently, that would be at %70 utilization. What I'm saying is that we’d like to see that that $10,000 credit card has no more than %30 utilization or that you're not currently carrying more than a $30,000 balance. Now, if you are, because there's too much month, not enough money and therefore you have higher balances, we do have a solution. We do have another funding division that will likely take a look at those balances and work with you to actually pay them down for you, so that therefore your scores will skyrocket to where we need them to be, your utilization ratios will plummet to where we need them to be, so that we get the maximum results. The maximum results is our average client on a first round funding gets $75,000 worth of revolving lines of credit as much as $150,000 on a first round fund. When done properly and if we have a client that comes to us with longevity of accounts, no derogatory, so on and so forth, of course, that's going to get us all a better net result for the client on the back-end. Again these lines of credit are all at 0% APR for up to 21 months. Jason: Okay, but the cruz behind this is that they've got to have good credit in place in order to do this one. Bruce: Well, there's a couple of other if’s, and’s, and but’s, so let's talk about them briefly. Number one, because of that high utilization, we have taken people with scores as low as 620 and just by paying down those balances, they've shot their scores up within a several week period of time to well over 700 and then we can put them through. Today's present credit score may qualify you even if you're not knocking on the 700 door or higher, we need to do a consultation and see if the net effect of paying down those cards is going to get you to where we need you to be. Secondarily, we do have a secondary program, in as much as if the client can't qualify, but they have what we call a credit partner—maybe it's a partner in their business, maybe it's a relative, a friend—we can use a credit partner to get the same results, thus being able to put them through the program and that could be a win-win. There's a number of different ways we can literally skin the cat to get to the desired result, which is to get the client funded on that program. Jason: All right. You’re going to help them the pay down process, they can use a credit partner, there's a couple of options there. That's number one, the revolving lines of credit program. Bruce: Number two, one of our other core programs is we have 25 lenders. We have a platform for the 25 lenders and they are offering on the platform anywhere from $1000 to $50,000. We can stack those offers, so if you were to get two $50,000 offers, obviously you pony those up and parlay them into $100,000. Now, we can take more credit-challenged folks. We have gotten people some funding with FICO’s as low as 580. The key here is that there needs to be provable income, where the income on the revolving lines of credit is stated. These will need to be proved up through either showing the last couple of pay stubs and/or from their doing account validation by showing bank statements, 1099s, a year's tax return or what have you. Jason: Okay. Bruce: Very, very simple program, 12 questions asked and answered online, a soft pool with instantaneous pre-approvals and funding within usually a week or a week-and-a-half. This is a secondary program that can be used. We use it all the time and it's very, very effective. Jason: With these 25 lenders, these would be people like maybe Fundbox and some of the services out there. Would it be like those kinds of companies? Bruce: Could be, yes. We have our own lender pool that we work with. The nice thing is, there are a number of lenders that you can apply to on the net today, tomorrow, yesterday, what have you, but that's problematic. Every time you apply, you're going to be getting an inquiry. Every inquiry's going to be anywhere from two to several points and it starts to drag down your profile. Worse than that, other creditors that your applying with, see than you’ve been applying. The way we do it is when you access our platform with one soft inquiry, so it doesn't even show on your report, you're getting one or multiple preapprovals from multiple lenders at multiple options in terms of length anywhere from 12 months out to as long as 60 months or five years. This is an ideal way where you have no FICO hit, no negatives, only positives and you can get the pre approvals before you even press the accept button and go into what we call the final underwriting or the hard underwriting. Jason: Got it. Anything else to know about this second option? What would you call this second option? You're 25 lenders platform or? Bruce: Our 25 letters platform or our installment-based lending platform. Jason: Got it, installment-based. All right, so we’re on the number three now. Bruce: Number three. Let's talk about what we call our BDRA. Our BDRA stands for Business Directed Retirement Account. Now, many of the people that are on the podcast have a rollable IRA or 401(k). Maybe, they're even working and are aware that they have a roll-able IRA or 401(k) amount. Let's just say that you're currently working at an employer. You may have $100,000 there and your employers told you, “Well, you can't touch that, it's not rollable.” They’re may be half correct, because prior to coming to the existing employer, you worked at another employer. When you're at that other employer, guess what? You had a $50,000 IRA, which you’ve been rolled over to your present employer. Well, I'm here to tell you some really great news. You can do what's called a carve-out, so you can take those moneys and move them from your present employer, because those were moneys that came from a previous employer and you can automatically put them into what we call our BDRA. That BDRA is a wonderful opportunity for you to be able to access those funds to do what you want and what you want with them. Jason: That’s called what again? Bruce: Business Directed Retirement Account. Jason: Okay, got it. Bruce: Now, it's not a very, very different than a self-directed normal account. Some self-directed retirement accounts have the ability to give you checkbook capability, which is great. The BDRA coincidentally also does, but many of the self-directed accounts are accounts that once you moved on from your old employer, you've moved them into a self-directed environment so that you can tell your money what you want it to do. The problem with the traditional IRA or 401(k) in a self-directed environment (which many administrators that are out there and offer these types of accounts) is that you cannot use these but for very specific types of transactions. Let's just take a typical real estate transaction, a house costs $200,000, you have $100,000 in the self-directed retirement account. You need to come up with $100,000. Now, unfortunately, you cannot obligate a self-directed retirement account, a traditional type, not ours, but a traditional type and you cannot take on a recourse loan, because one of the exemptions is you cannot sign and obligate your IRA or your 401(k) to an external obligation. If you can't do that whole deal inside your IRA, you're pooched. You can't do the deal. Now, there is the possibility of taking on what's called a non recourse loan where you wouldn't sign. However, there are very few and far between. They never go more than 50% of LTV and they're usually a couple of points higher for all the right reasons. You’re only having a collateralized value of the loan. With a BDRA, I've got great news, you can take recourse loans on and it's not a violation of the BDRA precepts. Secondarily, when you have a normal IRA or 401(k), unfortunately, you're exempt from being able to do what we call inter familiar transactions because they're called a prohibited transaction. Meaning, father-sister, mother-brother, siblings what have you, you plain and simple are not allowed to invest with them because it's prohibited. That is not the case with the self-directed that we have in the BDRA environment. Third, you can put up to $53,000 of your annual salary into this tax deferred vehicle where you cannot with a traditional IRA or 401(k) that’s self-directed. Fourth, you can use the money for any business purpose. Now, you mentioned earlier that you've got coaching programs sometimes that are $10, $20, $30, $40, $50 whatever the amount is, it makes no difference, but the flexibility of the BDRA is a beautiful thing because BDRA funds can be used for any business purpose whatsoever. When you talk about a traditional IRA or 401(k), they're very finite, they're very linear, real estate being one of them, stocks and bonds being another, and there's a couple of others, and pretty much after that, you're out of luck. The flexibility that the BDRA brings to the table is phenomenal, and it is a great way to resource funds for enhancing your real estate business not only from the buying of the doors perspective, but from doing rehabs, for potentially using it for marketing money, to expand your net. There's many, many different ways that these moneys can be used that are all in conformity. Jason: Okay. Alright, BDRA is number three. Number four? Bruce: We have transactional funding. With our transactional funding, I'm sure a number of folks that are on this podcast are engaged with wholesale flips, where you're doing an A to B and B to C transaction. Well, we have transactional funding. We have $1 million on the sidelines at all time. You let us know, give us a couple of days notice. I mean, give us more notice than that, but within a couple of days, we can get the funds prepared, move them electronically to your escrow so that you can close and not have to be out of pocket if you're the wholesaler, and get the job done. The fee cost for that is the most reasonable that I've seen in the industry. The cost for funds is only 1.75% and a $495 transaction fee or our processing fee. Call it what you will. That’s another win-win strategy if you're a wholesaler, and you don't have the funds, and you're going to a traditional escrow. This is a perfect, perfect way to make everything come together so that you can get your property sold to that new buyer. Jason: Is that everything about transactional funding? Bruce: That's everything about transactional funding. Short and sweet. Jason: All right, let's look at number five. Bruce: Let's talk about number five. Now this is an esoteric way of getting funding, but saving the dollar obviously gives you $1 as I put it, redeploy or repurpose and I'm sure we all agree with that, and saving tens of thousands of dollars or more starts to become very, very interesting, let’s tell you how. On the other side of our business, we have our trust division. It's called platinum trust group. Platinum trust group is dedicated to bulletproof asset protection. I'll touch on that in a moment, but let me talk about the money aspect where you can redeploy. Real estate investors by the nature of who they are and what they're [...] are involved with two types in multiple streams of what we call passive income. The passive income that we're talking about would either be long or short term capital gains and/or lease and/or rental income. That is the sum and substance of what it's all about. One or the other. With our proprietary trust which we have 58 copyrights on, we've had the trust for over 20 years, we have over 31,000 clients on this program. As a real estate investor, when the properties are sold or the rents are collected, money goes into the corpus of the trust. However, the good news is, you can use the trust for any trust-related activities which would be anything other than what we call food, fun, or fashion. Now you're doing all your business out of the trust. Don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean you can't buy properties, you can't buy cars, that doesn't mean that you can't act in a fiduciary capacity as a trustee to do everything you would normally be doing on a daily basis. The good news is, that moneys, that long- and short-term capital gains which could be 20%, 30% depending, and/or the income from the lease and rental income, the fact that it goes into corpus and stays in the corpus, and that it’s deferred in perpetuity means you're not going to have the tax bill at the end of the year. Now, we have many investors who have tax bills in the $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 a year and are paying quarterlies that are enough to choke a horse. We're able to defer up to 97% of that annual tax liability, including the quarterlies, and deferred out in perpetuity, which means in 21 years, after the last of the beneficiary heir’s deceased, i.e., 100, 200, 300 years from now, we now have a vehicle that nobody in your family tree is going to have the tax consequence and certainly not you, and now we've got all of this additional liquidity that we can be using for investment purposes and is a huge win for our real estate investors. That's only one piece of the coin because the other side of that coin is the bulletproof asset protection, because you can never have a lien or judgment executed against you. It can't happen, let alone your properties because your properties are in the titanium vault of the trust. This is huge and this is a great, great income opportunity and/or savings opportunity for you. I think we're at number six or are we in number five? Jason: We’re at number six. Bruce: All right. Jason: That was number five. Basically. we will call that your trust division. Bruce: Okay, number six. We have a number of private money solutions and hard money solutions. Solutions that start as low as 4.9% on the APR and 1-2 points. Solutions for clients who have rental income properties and they want to do some cash out. We had even a blanket loan program which is available in 43 states. Again, if you've got properties, we have a solution for you to be able to access a ton of money that you are currently not able to access so that you can redeploy it on new projects. This could be huge for you by our hard end or private money funding. Should you have ground-up projects that you're looking to get underway, these are other ways that we can access funds for you depending upon what the project looks like. There's just so many different machinations without knowing more. We would really need to sit and talk, but not only can we get you the blanket loans, not only can we get you the cash out refis, we can do multifamily, we can do SFRs, ground-up projects. It just depends on what it is that you're looking for. Jason: Okay, great and that's number six. Bruce: That’s number six. Jason: Private and hard money lending solutions. Let's get into number seven. Bruce: Number seven is really a relationship-oriented proposition. Because I lecture on a nationwide basis and know so many people, I am constantly sourcing and/or resourcing and putting folks together. I speak. I meet sponsors. Sponsors are always looking for people to act as general partners for with other people who are newer and/or what I would call green peas and vice-versa. I have green peas that are looking for sponsors. Just by nature, the fact that I love to network, love to help people out, and if people are looking for a connection, I'll give you an example. Yesterday, I had a guy come to me in the Seattle area. He is looking to do a conversion. He’s got 93 apartments that he wants to build in one structure. He’s looking for general partners and money partners and he's got everything ready to go. He’s got the water. He’s got the utilities. He’s got all the zoning. He’s looking for money partners and he's also looking for some management help. Well, we have the perfect fit for him because we have people who are right up in the Seattle area because I've spoken recently up in the Seattle area to 800 people at one event. That’s an easy plug-and-play scenario. Oftentimes, you just never know. I don't know where you're calling in from on a nationwide basis because I know you have callers all over the place. I'm California-centric but I travel. I was just in Boston speaking to 1000 people. You never know who you know and tell me about the situation, and if there's a possibility that we can help, we certainly can try and plug to good ends into one another so that you can make a whole and get your project going, so you can take it to the next level. Jason: Perfect. Looking at all these different methods, let’s say I get a client that comes to me and they want to hire staff. They want us folks on marketing, maybe they want to do some coaching stuff with us, they need to get office space, these typical things to get their business going. Which channel would you push them towards first? What would be the best situation for them first? Bruce: Well, if the need is an average of, say, $75,000 roughly, somewhere between $50,000-$150,000. I’ll kind of use that $100,000 spread. invariably, our revolving line of credit program is the sweet spot and we utilize that at promoter events all the time for that $20,000, that $30,000, $40,000 to get them off the home plate, to get them the coaching program that they need to get them also the initial marketing moneys that they need so that they can really start to get traction and move forward in the marketplace. It's very easy and they don't need to have any collateral. Again, it's a state of program. If the person fits the parameters, it's by far and away, the easiest, fastest, most effective, and cost-effective solution. Jason: Now, what if they just wanted something smaller? They're just getting started, they're bootstrapping. Maybe they're looking for maybe $3000-$20,000, something in there. They just need to get some additional funds to get some things going in the business. Would the recommendation still be the same vehicle? Bruce: Depending. Let's just say today the need is $3000-$20,000. Let's just say they've got $100,000 locked up at the old employer that they used to work for, General Dynamics, let's just say. They're taking that money and they're turning it in the stock market, they're getting a horrible return, and they want to take control of it. I would move all of that to self-directed environment and then parse out where you've got total control over it. Then, I would parse out whatever that amount is that you need to deploy for whatever business purpose. If they only needed $3000, $7000, or $10,000 of that $100,000, they get immediately deployed because they have total discretionary use over the funds once it's in their dominion.  Likewise, another one of our programs might be for them to engage with the 25 lender platform. In a request, only request $3000 or only request $10,000, if that's what it is they're looking for. That could be another way to go. We really need to have a discussion. It's my best suggestion to the folks that are listening because sometimes during the course of discussion, we find a $3000, $7000, or $10,000, may not actually be the sum and substance of what you're looking for depending upon where you are, and where you want to go. Maybe it is. We will come up with based upon your credit what you bring to the table, what's going to be the most cost effective way to get you there. Jason: Let's address the mindset of funding. I'm sure there's people listening and they want to bootstrap everything. They're thinking, "I don't want to go into debt to do anything." What would you say to that? Maybe that mindset is holding them back from being able to grow their businesses quickly and generate more revenue as fast. Bruce: I don't mean to be pragmatic but I would say they might be thinking about being in the wrong business if they don't want to go into debt. I bought houses utilizing credit cards before. If you go to any REIA, anywhere in the United States—if you're not familiar with the term REIA, that's Real Estate Investors Association meeting—if you go to any Real Estate Investors Association meeting anywhere in the United States and you interview, take them out for coffee, talk to them after the meeting, what have you, you ask them how do they get the funds to buy some of their first properties, I can guarantee you, dollars to donuts, that they borrowed money from a friend, borrowed money from their parents, or borrowed money from their credit cards, to get their first property. Or a combination of all three coupled together to make it happen. They didn't have the money and their checking account. It was a little devoid or little depleted at that time.  Guys, this is truly a leverage play, and an arbitrage play, when you're borrowing money at X because you can make lie times X equally that new number which is the ability to compound on the amount of money that you're using to be able to get you that much bigger amount of money at the backend. I'm a firm believer in making the right decisions and not getting these moneys for a C shed or man cave. Forget it, you don't [...] it. If that's your ultimate goal, that's not leverage. That's just sheer stupidity, a waste of time, and a waste of money. If you're looking to get these moneys to be able to deploy them in an efficacious way and to utilize them to gain the leverage to be able to get a much bigger payday down the road when you exercise your exit strategy, let's go. Let's make it happen. We're here to help and get you to your financial goal. Jason: Plant some of these things. I know there's some property managers listening that are like, "I'm not a real estate investor." Some property managers that are running property management companies are not real estate investors. I think many of them are involved but they're thinking, "What about my business? Maybe I need funding for the business." I think the same principle applies. The idea that I want to point out is mindset-wise, I think a business is probably one of the most effective (if you do this well) investments you can invest in a period. Very few things give a return on an investment that a business can. I don't think even real estate, I think a lot of things cannot yield as high of a return as a business that is profitable, and highly effective. If the investment is moving the business towards those things, I would imagine that it's going to far outplay a 401(k) or any other sort of investment. They might be throwing them dollars towards in the long run. An effective business can yield a huge return especially once they sell it. Or it can just be an ATM machine feeding them once they systemize the business and they step out of being involved in it.  If you're going to that, I think it's wise to say, make sure it's going towards the right thing. It's going to yield the ROI you're looking to get.  Bruce: May I ask a brief question? Jason: Go ahead. Bruce: About your audience. I just heard or maybe I misheard, I heard you keying in on property management, and property management companies. Is there a broad segment of your listenership that are in that space? Jason: Yes. Most of the listeners listening are people that run property management companies. They manage properties for and on behalf of investors. Bruce: Okay. Let me just say this about that. I'm going to go back to, I think, it was number six. It might've been number five but it was right in there. We talked and drilled down a little bit about our proprietary trust. Guys, I'm going to say it just like it is, you are in an uber high risk business. Property managers and property management companies, they play it simple, they get sued. Facts are one in three Americans get sued. Two in three, 66% of all surgeons get sued. Property managers, I don't know what the numbers are, but everytime I talk to a property management company, they're constantly getting sued.  Just recently, we put on several property management companies who have gotten the trust. Their prime motivating reason was to have the trust be the owner of the property management company so that they would not have liens or judgments that could be affixed to the company. Guys, this is something you definitely want to explore further. It's very important for you because of the high risk nature of the business that you're in. Jason: Yeah. I agree. I have an asset protection attorney. I think it's a wise choice for everybody who has some asset protection struff going on with things in the trust and make sure the business is protected. Very cool. We've got several people that I've spoken to even recently. They're like, "I don't have the funds to work with, Jason, but I want to work with you. We're trying to get money." Or they're trying to get their business started. Or they know there's some things they need to do and they can't just afford to do it. How can they get in touch with you? How can they reach out? What's the best way to connect with you and what you've got going on? Bruce: If you're looking for funding, I'm going to give you a web address. That web address would be platinumfinancinggroup.com. There's a calendar on there. We will get you a complimentary consult. Please, we'll ask you, make sure that you've mentioned that you came from Jason. We always want to know where clients came from. Jason: Mention DoorGrow and the DoorGrow Show. Bruce: Please. Please, please, please. That'll get you the complimentary consultation now for financing. When Jason's got great programs which I've heard nothing but fabulous things about, that can be the genesis, give you the capital to be able to move your business forward, and get his programs. Secondarily, another way to access the programs, as I've said, from the savings from the tax deferral, from the trust program, and/or talking about the trust as well as an asset protection vehicle. Because if you get wiped out, you're done. You know that. This is one way to ensure that you're not going to get wiped out. I would go to platinumtrustgroup.com. We have another calendar there.  The difference between the two, other than the information that you're going to find and the calendars that you're going to find is that the calendar times that you're going to get blocked out for are quite different. If you go to platinumtrustgroup.com, we're going to block you out for an hour. We can talk about trust. Likewise, we can also talk about funding should you have an interest in both.  If you strictly go to platinumfinancinggroup.com, you'll be directed to a calendar for 15 minute blockout. Just be aware of that. When you make the choices to where's the best entry point to get in touch with us.  Jason: If they're really looking at everything and they want to get the full kit, the best place to probably to go the platinumtrustgroup.com. You can also help them with the financing side of things as well. Bruce: Absolutely. Jason: Perfect. Bruce, it's been fabulous having you on the show. Thanks for taking us through all the different options. I wasn't aware that there were so many different options for funding. I appreciate all the info that you're able to share with us today. Bruce: I certainly appreciate you're allowing me to come on your show. It's been a pleasure. I look forward to chatting with you guys. We'll get you taken care of. We'll get you the funding so that you can take your business to the next level and protected as well at the same time. Jason: Fantastic. One thing I just thought off. A lot of our listeners run property management companies. They're all connected to investors. Do you have a sort of program or a relationship that you can make with these entrepreneurs that are working and dealing with lots of investors trying to get them into multiple properties and new properties? Bruce: Absolutely. Not only that, we need to talk because we have an affiliate program. Give me a call, let's have that discussion. That's a whole other discussion and another income stream, potentially, for you. I'm glad you mentioned that, Jason. That was a great heads up. Jason: Perfect. Bruce, it's great to connect and I will let you go. Bruce: Thank you so much for the opportunity again. Have a great day, have a great weekend. Jason: If you're a property management entrepreneur, who wants to grow your business, who wants to add doors, you're looking, you're feeling a little bit stuck, you're dealing with some of the typical challenges, you're trying to do SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, and social media marketing, you're just not getting the ROI, you're not adding the doors you're wanting to. There might be something different. There might be some things that you're missing. You might have some leaks in your business that you can't see. Reach out to DoorGrow. We'll help you shore those leaks up. We'll help you get on a trajectory of growth. I will be honored to be able to coach you through that stuff. We can certainly help you redesign your website.  If you need to go and test your shiny new website or your old website, go to doorgrow.com/quiz. See if it's got some leaks there. You could be losing tens or hundreds of thousand dollars in future ROI every month depending on how many leads or deals you are missing out on because your website isn’t upgraded. I want you to have an A+. Talk to DoorGrow and let's see if we can help you get that taken care of. Until next time, everybody. To our mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sleep at night, knowing things are done right and no tasks are falling through the cracks? Unfortunately, many businesses don't have the tools, know-how, or means to document and scale their workflows.  Today, I am talking to Amit Kothari, co-founder and CEO of Tallyfy. Small- and medium-sized property management businesses use Tallyfy to easily scale operations and document their standard operating procedures (SOPs) to improve workflow and mapping processes. You’ll Learn... [03:29] Purpose of Tallyfy: Pain point that had to be fixed. Tool was built to help companies document, scale, and run processes.  [05:32] Process vs. Project: A process isn’t a process unless it repeats. A project is unique every time.  [05:50] Do you have processes? What are they? Document them in a structured form. [06:10] Collaboration for Continuous Improvement: Who looks at the processes? How are they updated? What needs to be done beyond creating a static document? [08:10] Forget Flowcharts: Too complicated and too big. Switch to simple checklists focusing on next step in the process for specific team members.  [15:38] What’s next for Tallyfy? Chat-based interactions and plug-in for Slack. [16:48] Property managers can sign up for a free 14-day trial. Tenant/landlord screening, onboarding, eviction, and maintenance workflow templates are available.  [18:05] Suggest Improvement/Idea: Tallyfy prompts and incentivizes documenting, reading, and making changes to improve processes. [23:54] One interruption can cost 18 minutes of money and productivity. Tweetables Tallyfy: Sleep at night, knowing things are done right and no tasks are falling through the cracks. Customer Experience: Awesome for everyone, including tenants and property managers. To reliably and scalably grow your company, you need processes, not projects. Functional is fine, but easy, fun, and engaging Tallyfy app makes workflow even better. Resources Tallyfy Process Street Slack DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guest today, I'm hanging out here with Amit of Tallyfy. Amit, welcome to the show. Amit: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: Glad to have you. I'm going to share with the audience your intro here. Amit is the CEO of Tallyfy, a workflow software product that specializes in helping small- and medium-sized businesses scale their operations. Tallyfy enables anyone to document their process or SOP (standard operating procedures) and to launch/run it in a team of people while also being able to assign tasks to clients and people outside the company. Amit founded Tallyfy after decades of experience and mapping processes as flowcharts and noticed that while everyone makes flowcharts, nobody actually follows them while they are working. Very true. Tallyfy is being used by various property management companies to run operations like on-boarding and off-boarding tenants and also handling complex, repeatable real estate sales processes. This sounds really cool, I had not yet heard of this. Our topic today is scaling operations for property managers. Amit, tell us how you got started with this, give us some background on you. Amit: Yeah, sure. I'm British, first of all. I came to the US four or five years ago and I spent a while, basically, helping people improve workflows, mapping processes, things like that. It tended to be mid-sized companies, large companies. It turns out that many small companies don't really have the tools, or know-how, or the means to actually go and stop documenting and scaling all their workflows. That's where I noticed the opportunity that what if the rest of us who were not large companies actually had a simple tool that let us go in and just document a process, scale it, run it, and basically sleep at night so that we know things are done right, none of the tasks are falling through the cracks, and the client experience, ultimately, is completely awesome for your tenants, for your clients, whatever you want. It was just that vision that it doesn't have to suck that much. We founded Tallyfy five years ago and raised some funding from Silicon Valley so we went through a bunch of Silicon Valley accelerators, we're now based in St. Louis in Missouri and it's just growing crazy right now. It sounded like other people agreed with our vision that they want to document and scale their operations, too, so here we are. Now, we're still figuring things out but that's how we go here, that's a fairly simple story. There was a real pain, we had to fix it, so we built a product that fixed it. Jason: Got it. Take us through how this is different than some of the other tools that might be on the market, what people are using. Let's get into the problem that exists which was mentioned in your intro, that you create these complicated processes, or maybe have none, or maybe it's just a Word doc, or you've got a flowchart, but people look at it once, maybe a few times when they first on-boarded, then they think they know it, and then they ignore it. Amit: Let's start with the problem that's really the problem. The first problem is that you don't have any process whatsoever. That's not great. It's probably worse just sitting down for a minute and just saying, “What is it that I do? How do I do this thing? Does it vary a lot every time I do it?” because remember, a process isn’t a process unless it repeats, otherwise, it's just a project. A project is something that's just unique every time. To really grow your company reliably and scalably, what you need are processes, not projects. The first step is, do you have processes and what are they? The problem is if you haven’t written them down, we're a great tool to begin to just start writing them down in a structured form. If you have a process which is either a Word document or a flowchart, say you have one and it looks like that, the problem is, again, like you said, who looks at it? How do you update it if you keep improving it? There are things like collaboration and so on which you need to do beyond just having a static document because the document is always changing. For example, when I do a process, I might spot an idea like, “Hey, next time let's do it this way instead.” Now, if I don't remember that or put it down into my main process, when the next time comes around, it will be forgotten. There's this thing about documenting processes which is a problem, but there's also this problem around continuously improving and that's something that often people don’t do because once it's written, it just lies there like in a safe. It's like in a cabinet, it just sits there, dust gathers on top of it. and no one ever looks at it. Really, that's a wasted investment. We needed you to do both, but now, here's where the problem gets really, really big. That stuff is a problem, that's great. If you're a property entrepreneur and you're on your own, you could start that way, but imagine you hired an intern, you went into business with another property entrepreneur, or you have a team of people who do things for you. Now, the problem compounds about tenfold because whatever's in your head has to be in a place, otherwise, someone else is not going to be able to read your mind, especially if they’re new. It helps new employees see how you do things, which onboards them much faster. It makes sure that lots of people, as you hire more people and you grow or you partner with folks, they know how you do things successfully as well. The reason we don't like flowcharts is because they're just way too complicated. I've seen flowcharts that are so big that if you try to print them out, they would actually print on an A2 size paper. It's so big, it doesn't even fit on my screen right now. Jason: I've seen some print out there of a property management flowchart processes and they had multiple sheets of paper and they taped them together. Amit: I admire people who have the tenacity to document an amazing process like that. The trouble is are you really going to look at that seriously? If it doesn't fit on a picture frame, who's going to use it? Often, we found that just having like simple looking checklist-type things is a lot easier for people to follow. It works on phones because a lot of people are out there in the field. They're showing people houses or doing stuff like that, so it’s got to work on a phone or a tablet. A flowchart doesn't fit on a phone. It doesn't even fit on a piece of paper, so how is it going to fit on a phone? Devices that are small require checklist and things like that. We were the first app initially that launched this. A bunch of other people came out, but we initially create the idea of conditional branching, so if-this-then-that. In other words, if the tenant is this kind of tenant, then show this task, otherwise, show this other task. You can automate all your decisions. too, which means that there's no guesswork that people are doing. It's just like, “Hey, here's a question, we hit the answer for the question,” and the next question pops up just like magic. It handles that real-time workflow for people who are bigger teams like 3 people, 5 people, and even 50 people. In fact, the more people that turn up, the more useful the app becomes. Jason: Interesting. This is really popular right now in the property management industry, we've had Process Street on the show before, which sounds similar, there are some things that you guys have in common. What do you see is the difference between these two platforms or systems? Amit: It's left up to whoever's listening to judge the difference there. We don't know how they work, we don't really know that much about them, to be honest. One thing we did start the company believing in and having real experience in is improving workflows and mapping workflows. I spent a decade in London just mapping workflows. That was my actual job, mapping workflows and this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is a pain I actually had for 10 years. I think having real experience in the area is probably a really beneficial thing if you're trying to build a tool for that. If you try to build a tool for property entrepreneurs but you've never been a property entrepreneur or a landlord, it's going to be really difficult. That's one thing the whole team has right now in the space. Then, a real UX focus. I do think that functional is fine but an app that's like Slack—we love Slack because this is such an easy app to use and it's cool and it works—we love some of the UX pieces around making things easy and just making it fun. There are a lot of checklist apps, but they look really boring, so what things can we do that does make it engaging, fun to think about the design, the experience of somebody using the app. We’re thinking very hard about that and I'd like to think we're probably at the edge when it comes to really making that happen, making it an engaging experience, if you will. Jason: One of the biggest challenges with software is adoption, getting people to use it. Me personally, I'm a visual guy, so if the software is ugly and gross, I don't want to use it. It's a thing for me because I'm going to be living in that software and working with that software, I want it to be aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. It's a big crux of user interface and user experience design and that’s something I pay attention to. Amit: I'll give you one example of how it's different. We don't use checklists. In the actual user interface for Tallyfy, you won't see a checklist. You're probably wondering why like, “Does that make sense?” It does make sense because if you think about it, the first thing people see when they look at a checklist is a boring bunch of tasks that they're not going to think about, they're just going to mark them done even if they didn't do them. Seriously, I’m not kidding you, a lot of people just mark a task done even though they haven't done it. Jason: Yeah, it happens a lot. Then you have to build in these weird checks and balances to make them prove that they've completed it, put in their names or put in details so that step that you’re just created. Amit: Exactly. To answer your question what's different about our app, we've thought through these things because we've watched people do workflows for 10 years. One of the things we do is what we call a card. A card is a rectangular shaped thing and it invites collaboration. It's not just like, “Oh, I'll just mark stuff done,” but, “Maybe I have an idea to improve it. Maybe I need to chat to my friend, Jane, about something I don't understand about this task. Or maybe I have to collect some information of that task.” It encourages more engagement, we're seeing more engagement on our app with actually doing workflows. Honestly, if you want a checklist, you wouldn't need an app. You could just use any to-do app. It's only when you're in a team when you need to track between people where these kinds of apps become really useful. It's little touches like that which honestly needs a lot of experience to think about, things like that, those experiences that make us a little bit different from some of the others. It's just like we experience in the field of watching people do this and design thinking. That's what makes Tallyfy different. Jason: In Tallyfy, would you say that instead of seeing a checklist, they see what is the next step that they need to be focused on? Is that the focus design-wise? Amit: Yeah. We often found that people don't want to see anything but the one thing that they need to do right now. Jason: What do I need to do right now. Right, yeah, what's next? Amit: What do I need right now, yeah. Imagine if you saw a list of 55 tasks, wouldn’t that be scary? That’s just like, “Oh, my God, it’s so boring, I'm just going to mark everything done even though I haven't done it.” It's things like that that are so important that no one really thinks hard about them. They think that they can just roll out some app and like, “Oh, everyone's going to use it.” How did you know everyone did what they said they would do? These things with other things that helped solve it. There are some other things, too, which we're adding down the road which are seriously awesome, especially chat-based interactions which we’re adding with chat tool soon. So, instead of doing tasks, you're actually talking. You’re actually speaking to people on chat while also doing tasks at the same time. Actually, I might as well announce on your show today, we just got approved by Slack, which is like a chat application that a lot of people use. We just launched our plugin for Slack two days ago. It works beautifully with Slack, with a whole bunch of chat tools. You don't want to see a boring line of checkboxes, I don't think that's going to work out for anyone. We try to think. We're trying to move across the realm of possibility here and make it engaging, make it better for people, so that people actually love doing those workflows. Jason: Awesome. What else should property managers know about this app? Amit: It's free to sign up to. We have a bunch of templates which we can help you with, but we often find that most property managers already have processes or things that they already have written down. It's super easy to just move them across to Tallyfy. We could help you with that, too, but there is a bunch of sample workflows that we can also provide. Things like tenant screening, tenant onboarding, tenant eviction, maybe screening landlords, or onboarding new landlords, or even just apartment building maintenance checklists or just things like that. We have a bunch of samples we can help with, but the thing to really start doing is just go to tallyfy.com, hit the free sign up, it's free for 14 days, and then to reach out to us if you need help because maybe you’ll need help, maybe it's that simple. There's nothing to lose by just giving us a try and we're here to help you if you need it. Jason: Now you had mentioned that one of the things that's important is to update processes, as somebody moves through a process inside of Tallyfy, is there some prompt? How do you incentivize them, making changes to improve the process? Amit: Firstly, there’s collaboration. If who owns the process, say it's your manager that owns it, you can just notify them using @ replies saying, “Hey, here's an idea to improve it.” Now, we’re enhancing that around down the road. What we're doing is, as you're doing a process, even if you're not tracking it, you can hit a button that says “Suggest improvement,” (that's actually coming in a couple of months) a real simple button that just says, “I'm just reading this thing, I have an idea, here's the idea.” There's a proper thing that tracks the idea all the way through to the owner and that way, you can do continuous improvement because the person doing the process often has the best idea how to improve it as well. For them, it’s super simple. Also, I feel like people ignore this question but the reason people have Word documents now is because they don't want to literally launch a process every time, they just want to read documentation like, “This is how I do things.” Jason: Because it's fast. Amit: Because it's fast. You don't have to actually track every task, that's just boring. We're launching a plan. By the way, people listening to the show, if you want to trial this plan, we're happy to talk to you about it. We're launching a very cheap plan that's literally less than half the price of all the competitors on the market right now, that literally lets you document and read a process but also improve it. Take your Word document, which you might have already right now or your Google Doc. Now, think of all the features that you wished it had but it doesn't, like this improvement button, all sorts of other things which are not there right now. Package that in a simple thing that literally costs $5 a month per user. That's what we're launching soon, the ability to just document and read while also improving workflows at the same time. That's actually something no one has really seen so far because so far, all the apps out there make you start an actual process and make you mark every tasks done. Jason: Yeah, I’ve noticed there's a really fine balance that needs to be achieved between making every single, little, tiny step have to be done, documented, and check marked and allowing the process to be out of the way, allowing the employee or team member to just get work done. I don't go through a huge checklist every time I drive my car but I probably did the very first time I drove it. I was a little nervous, I want to make sure I was doing it right, but once you know how to drive a car, you want to get in, go, and you want to make sure things are right. But you want to get things done and you don't want to hinder your team members’ ability to get work done quickly by making the process overly cumbersome more than it needs to be. Amit: Yes, because you get that muscle memory, you get into the habit, and you already know how to do this stuff. The last thing you need is now to update some other place to say you've done it even though you know you've done it. I think no one's really addressing that, it's a real issue. We are launching this next month or so. We're very excited about that because it's also a lot cheaper, it's also a lot faster because you're not expecting people to literally go to their phones and go check, check, check, check, check. They're just reading stuff and as they read, if they need help, they can ask for help. Sometimes, you get stuck. In your example, you're going to start your car. But one day, your car doesn't start and you're like, “Oh, gee. I wonder why. I need help from my mechanic,” or something. It's at that point when you need actual help because you're stuck at that task right now or you have an idea to improve it. Either one of those things. But that's the only time you have to interact. When you need help or you have an idea to improve it. That's what's coming. That is transformational because it means that you as a property manager or your staff don't sit there getting bored, seeing a boring checklist of things they have to do every day because honestly, some of your people are actually really experienced. You don't need to offend them by making them check a box every time they do some tiny thing. Jason: Let’s connect it to money. A business owner also doesn't want to pay twice as much for a team member to do a bunch of tasks simply because they're slowing them down at half speed because they have to do something overly cumbersome. Amit: Right, isn't that completely insane? You buy an app to speed you up and it's actually slowing you down. Jason: Very possible. Amit: That could be possible and if you misuse some of these apps including ours, by the way. You could actually have that scenario. Jason: One of the biggest challenges I've noticed with slowing down team members in my own business in the past was interruptions. For example, we used Slack for a while but I found that Slack was causing so many interruptions with team members because everybody was messaging everybody constantly. The challenge also then becomes avoiding interruptions because one interruption, according to some, costs 18 minutes of productivity. If you have two team members interrupting each other, it's like 30 minutes of labor that is blowing out the door. If somebody's being interrupted once every 18 minutes, they almost feel they're spinning their wheels, so reducing interruptions is also important. Amit: Right, and the average professional services hourly rate, fully-loaded in the US is $44 an hour. So, you've literally just thrown, was it $20, you say 30 minutes every hour, something like that? Jason: If members interrupt each other every 18 minutes, yeah, that's almost about 30 minutes of work like you double that because [...] people, you're losing 18 minutes for each interruption. My business is built around eliminating interruptions. This is a focus that we have because the less interruptions, that means the team members need to be able to get the answers that quickly, we want to reduce them asking the same thing more than once, we want to make sure things are documented so that they don't have to keep coming back. If somebody has to say something and I have to tell them how to do it, I make sure they document it, I say, “Here's how to do it, document it, put that into our process.” Amit: Yeah. Let me tell you one thing about chat, and then Slack, for example, is a chat tool. Chat tells you what has happened, chat doesn't tell you what's going to happen or what should be happening next, chat just tells you what's going on right now, not what's going to happen next or what should be happening next. They're two completely different worlds. Tarryfy and processes, and Slack and chat, these are completely different things altogether. You could have the best of both worlds, we have an integration to Slack but we're doing it in a non-interrupted way the integration that I'm talking to you about. We're very conscious of that design experience because it is annoying, because everyone feels like checking their chat all day long like what messages they got and things like that. Jason: I’ve got 20 notifications, am I going to read all of them? Amit: Right, yeah. We don't use Slack to advertise Tallyfy, I want to put it that way. A lot of people build integrations, but they get those integrations to make people go back to their apps because they're like, “Oh, well just use Slack to make people come back to our app.” You just compounded the problem by interrupting someone every five minutes with some notification. We're definitely not going to do that. What we're doing with Slack is quite different and chat in general. I'm really excited about our future. A lot of it is shaping up right now. If any of these interests you, especially if you're looking to get your operations into one place as a property manager, just be in touch. We're really excited to speak to you folks right now. Jason: Very cool. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this with everybody. How can they get in touch with Tallyfy and learn more? Amit: Visit tallyfy.com. The best thing to do is just sign-up. There's a big sign-up button on the home page. Just feel free to check it out, you have nothing to lose, it's free of cost. Once you're in and you get the basic picture of how things work, feel free to reach out, that's when we’ll be most useful to you personally. I'm the CEO and the founder and most times, I often take calls. It’s not like I’m hiding in a corner. I take calls with customers directly. It’s a pretty flat company, we love what we do, and we like being honest with you. One thing you won't find about us is that we won't try and sell you. If we think this is not going to work for you, we'll just say it's not going to work for you. That’s the kind of fresh honesty many of these product vendors need to have. It's not just a case of pushing you a subscription plan to sell you stuff. It's got to work for you, it's got to deliver benefits, and that's what we’re interested in. Jason: I agree. We're very similar. I had a phone call today and it was a startup property manager. I just asked, “Do you want me to convince you you should do property management or not?.” I said, “I can go either way, I'll explain to you either one,” [...] an accurate picture and don't jump into something that you’ll regret later. I’ll wrap this up, I want to tell everybody I believe every business should have a [...]. This is one of the major systems that every business should have. They need a support system, they need an accounting system, they need several different systems. One of the systems they need is a process documentation system. You need some system to make sure the processes are also being done correctly. It's so simple. I recommend everybody check it out and I'm excited to hear feedback. Amit, I appreciate you coming on the show. I will let you go. Amit: Yeah, thanks for the time, Jason. Much appreciated. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Is there a way for property managers to reduce delinquent rent payments by more than 50 percent? How can residents positively or negatively impact their credit score by 20-70 points?  Today, I am talking to President Dave Haldi and CEO Steve Jarvis of CredHub, which helps property managers report on every resident, including those considered a credit risk. It reports the positive and negative, incentivising tenants to make paying on time their top priority.  You’ll Learn... [01:47] CredHub: Name change, funding, continued growth, and creating transparency. [02:06] CredHub’s Competition: Most companies only process and record positive payments, not negative payments on individual's credit score. [02:28] Bolt-on Technology: CredHub connects and bolts onto rental software systems to validate positive and negative payments via rent roll system. [02:52] How it works: Provides property managers access to an individual's credit score information reported to credit bureaus and pass-through revenue opportunity. [03:27] RentCredit Plus includes identity theft resolution services and rental payment reporting to credit bureaus for $3.50 each month. [04:20] Customer Support: Resolution Services as Customer Support: If there is a credit issue, CredHub takes on responsibility to work with credit bureaus.  [05:35] Doing Good Things: CredHub helps people get back their financial health and credit for payments.  [06:42] Recapitalization: Report all data at scale to achieve goal of growing CredHub. [07:58] Lease vs. Mortgage: What’s the difference? Educate managers and residents. [09:13] Audit Proof: Information given to credit bureaus via CreditHub must be correct. [11:25] Collections: CredHub has credentials to create trade line for property managers. [11:54] Implementation Process: After CredHub has signed agreement, implementation takes about six weeks. Tweetables Increase credit score by 20–70 points; make paying rent on time a top priority.  CredHub: Bolt-on, backend, rent roll, data pole cleansing and reporting at scale.  CredHub: Gets property managers out of credit business, and puts them in property management business. CredHub reports the positive and negative, incentivizing tenants to pay on time. Resources CredHub CredHub’s YouTube Channel Yardi RealPage Rent Manager ResMan  TransUnion  Equifax Rogers Payment Fair Credit Reporting Act DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Dave: ...opportunity for property managers to help reduce their delinquency because we figured out a way to report the negative or late payments. The program can then help increase an individual's credit score 20–70 points on a positive perspective but it will also impact their score negatively and help reduce delinquency by over 50% encouraging an individual to pay on time and making rent their priority to pay. It started four years ago, validated the idea, worked with some property management companies locally. We changed the name to CredHub a little about a year ago, got funded, we've had continued growth, and built an automated technology with a dashboard to create transparency of what we had learned from the marketplace. That's what created CredHub and that's where we are today. Jason: Perfect. There's other companies in the space they that do this. Is that correct? Dave: There are a few companies but we're a bolt-on technology. Most of the companies that we have come across are payment processors and they may process payments only allowing to record positive payments on an individual's credit score. Our technology connects and bolts on to the back-end of rental software systems—Yardi, RealPage, Rent Manager, ResMan, et cetera. Therefore, we validate the payment that has been made because it comes out of the back-end of the rent roll system allowing us to report positive and negative. It also gives the property manager, on-site resident manager transparency to see what information was reported to the credit bureaus once it's been uploaded and helps affect the individual's credit score. So, we're different. We also create a pass-through revenue opportunity for the property manager to make some additional revenue for their bottom line through our program. Jason: Okay, explain how that works. Dave: So, we have RentCredit Plus, which also includes an identity theft resolution services because identity theft is such an issue today, especially in larger properties with mail rooms, et cetera. With that, we charge $3.50 for this program that is identity theft resolution services as well as reporting the rental payments to the credit bureaus, both positive and negative, on a monthly basis. It would be our best results or best practices or we make this program mandatory for all residents. We charge $3.50 per person on the lease including the co-signer and most of our clients charge $7. So, they make a 50% increase of what we charge for the product and for the services that we provide.  In addition to that, we also provide the resolution services, making sure that if they do have a credit issue, we take on all the responsibility to work with the credit bureaus to make sure if something was reported incorrectly, we will fix it. So, we provide that customer support from a third party's perspective, not eliminating the burden to the on-site resident manager and getting them out of the credit business because they're in the property management business. Jason: Got it, okay. So, Steve, what's your role at CredHub then? Steve: Yeah. So, I came in to the company about a year ago when we recapitalized the company as Dave said and renamed it to CredHub and that recapitalization was really meant to build this platform so that we could do this back-end, rent roll, data pole cleansing and reporting at scale. My career was always in automation and travel. I worked for the likes of Expedia and built alaskaair.com for Alaska Airlines and had retired from travel, and was looking for an interesting new project that really had an element of doing good things for people that needed it which, I believe, we're doing it at CredHub. The folks that are now going to be able to get credit for their Rogers payment or are young folks that are credit-invisible or folks that need to get back in financial health back on their feet. It feels really good to be working in this market. I'm CEO, so primarily looking at business development and strategy finance. The goal here is to really do this at scale nationally. You mentioned what makes us different and David had mentioned that the element of negative reporting of late and skipped payments and its impact on getting residents to pay on time for property managers. No one's really done that at scale. Like Dave has said, others in the market that are doing reporting are doing almost entirely positive reporting which it's pretty easy. The hard part is this is what we do is getting all of the data reported and doing it at scale. I came in with the recapitalization, with an element to really growing this thing nationally and doing it in a big way. Jason: Perfect. So, what questions do property managers typically want to know about CredHub? Steve: Well, one of the things, for me, especially coming into the property management space having been to trade shows, travel, and technology, the core of what we do is really, really easy to understand, which is really compelling. When we talk to property managers, it's pretty easy to get what we do in 90 seconds. Like really, wow, you can report positive and negative to credit bureaus, reduce my delinquency, I can add a revenue stream, and my residents will like it because I'm helping them. There aren't a lot of questions there. We do get some questions as we roll through closing clients on the legal side. We'll get a legal department and a property management company worrying about disputes from their residents but it's a fairly easy question to answer because the residents have a financial obligation. They have a contract called a lease. It's not that different than a mortgage. Property management companies who aren't being paid by the residents have every right to report that to the credit bureaus. There's an education process that I think we need to go through on that side of the sales process with property managers. Oftentimes, we'll get questions on whether this is optional. Property management company may want to have this be an opt-in for their residents. That's not how we work. We report the entire file to the entire resident population to the credit bureaus which is what they want. Our program really only works for property managers if everybody's being reported including those that are credit risk. Dave, do you have any other? Dave: Yeah. I think a couple of analogies would be and it really creates this carrot with the stick, encouraging people to pay on time and because they require everybody, all of the residents to be reported the messaging is consistent for everyone. It also has helped us because of our platform being so audit-proof because the information that needs to go to the credit bureaus has to be right. We found that we've really helped clean up the data that we're pulling out of the system because it has to be correct. We provide an error submission report and that report can go back so it's something that maybe the on-site resident manager or assistant manager can help clean up as they're going through their lease renewals or new residency. We found errors or mistakes when maybe a check has come in, it got incorrectly posted. Because ours is third party, it helps to create checks and balances and the system is audit-proof. It provided an additional layer but easy for people to log into and make the changes. And we support them seven days a week, 24/7 if they have an issue. I think the other questions that may come up is, "Well, how does this work?" One of the things for a property management firm who works with us, we create a trade line at the credit bureaus. We have credentials and privileges with TransUnion and Equifax so we credential them and create a trade line with the bureaus. Therefore, if we are working with somebody and we pick a date that we report on the 10th of the month, rent is late at 30 days because we pay rent in advance. If an individual is delinquent or pays late after the 10th or they don't pay, Fair Credit Reporting Act says, "It can't be turned to collections until 90 days." If we report on the 10th, we're going to be 50 days ahead when that person can go to collections affecting their credit score, encouraging them to pay the property manager in full and not having to lose that income that could be the cost of going through collections. That's a piece that becomes critical in what we do and a lot of questions get surrounded about that but we have all the credentials to create the trade line necessary for the property manager. Jason: How difficult is this for a property management business owner to implement? Maybe you could talk a little bit about the process. Dave: The process is we meet with them, we work with them on the pricing, and figure out when it would work for them to implement. Once we have a signed agreement, we try to implement it within six weeks if that works for them.  Once we've got credentials with the bureaus, then our data team connects with somebody in their office. It usually takes an hour, but once we pull the data to get it out of the system, then we go through some testing on our end making sure that the data is correct. Once we've confirmed that, we give them four weeks or a month. Let's just say, we signed a contract in August. We would give them the month of September, lay out a timeline that we work with them to educate their on-site resident managers, create a lease addendum because we know that our best practices if they sign, if they put the addendum in the lease, it gets explained to them helping that education of why it's important to pay your rent on time. Then, they sign the leases with the addendum. We have a template, but we can make changes to the addendum depending on how they want to implement it. And then we would begin reporting on the 10th of the following month or on a mutually-agreed date they want to pull it. In some states like Washington, with just changing the 3-day evict or 14-day evict, we used to report some property management firms on the 15th but because of that change, they have asked us to report on the 5th. So, we can change the pull date and the report date helping encourage the protection of the property management company for these individuals who are playing the system or gaming the system and not paying their rent on time. Jason: Okay. Cool. It sounds pretty simple, sounds like a really good idea, really good service. Now, can landlords listen to this, besides property managers, also implement this, or homeowner? Dave: Yes. We work with any property type or size. If they don't have a rent roll system, we just create a spreadsheet for them, collect the necessary information, and then they can upload the spreadsheet themselves through our portal. We have a variety of ways we can connect and help very managed. Jason: Very cool. All right. The CredHub sounds like a brilliant idea. It reports the positive, it also reports the negative, incentivizing the tenants to make sure they're paying on time. It gives them the benefit of building some credits so there's a carrot and a stick connected to this. You also have identity theft resolution they can be tied to this that can be a profit center. Ultimately, how much does this cost the homeowner or property manager? Or do they just make money doing this?  Steve: Pass-through revenue model, they make money doing this. We bolt onto their existing system, we help them do the lease addendum with the residents and they actually make money. We like to think of it as a win-win-win. It's good for the residents, it’s great for the property manager, and obviously, we're in business for profit as well. Jason: Win, win, win. All right. Anything else that anybody should know? How can they get in touch with CredHub if somebody's listening to this and they wanted to get started, they wanted to check you guys out? How can they connect? Steve: credhub.com would be the best place to go. We have a YouTube channel that has some really simple videos on it, you can link to those from the CredHub website. In fact, our animated “what we do” video is in the hero image right on the homepage. We have a Contact Us section and a there's a form there that property managers can sign up with the number of units they have and we'll follow-up. That's probably the best way to do it is just to come visit us at credhub.com. Jason: Perfect. Sounds like a no-brainer, it makes sense. I think what you guys are doing is going to help out a lot of people which I resonate with and I appreciate you guys coming out on the DoorGrow Show. Dave: Thanks for having us. Jason: All right, we'll let you guys go. So, checkout CredHub at credhub.com. For those that are new to watching or listening to the DoorGrow Show, be sure to like and subscribe. Leave us a review somewhere that would really make a difference and check us out at doorgrow.com. If you're wanting to grow your property management business, or you're in need of a new website, or you're just wanting to make sure that your business is growing as effectively as it could, reach out. We'd love to talk to you. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Is pre-screening tenant leads the most time-consuming part of your business? What you need is an online system that advertises, generates and pre-screens leads, automates showings, and turns leads into applications at a reasonable price.  Today, I am talking to Cliff Hayden of ShowMeTheRental, a time-saving tool for automating and screening rental leads. ShowMeTheRental handles the B.S. part of management between prospective tenants and property managers/owners.  You’ll Learn... [03:05] From Lineman to Realtor: Longest suspension in AT&T history to do real estate. [04:00] Poor Priorities: Money was goal. Financial success wrecked family/homelife. [05:15] ShowMeTheRental: System put in place to automate lead screening for tenants. [06:12] Fulfilling Family Priorities: Money is a tool, now; not a goal.  [07:25] Happy vs. Frustrated Customers: Set expectations of what you expect from them and what they expect from you via questions that filter qualified leads. [11:25] Where is ShowMeTheRental advertised? All major Websites, including Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and HotPads. [15:18] See something you like? Try ShowMeTheRental today to save time and money. Tweetables Working all the time costs you family and friends. Money is a tool, not the goal. You can buy time, but you can’t get your time back.  Resources Cliff Hayden’s Email Cliff Hayden’s Phone: 502-641-8781 ShowMeTheRental  Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki CASHFLOW Game Kentuckiana Real Estate Investors Association (KREIA) Section 8 Housing Buildium Zillow HotPads Google Trends DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and expand your rent roll, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to grow property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market, and help the best property managers win. So, if you enjoy this episode, do me a favor. Open up iTunes, find the DoorGrowShow, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision. I’m your host, property management growth hacker, Jason Hull, the founder of OpenPotion, GatherKudos, ThunderLocal, and of course DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guest today is, Cliff Hayden. Cliff is from a tool called... what's your tool called, Cliff? Cliff: showmetherental.com Jason: ShowMeTheRental. All right Cliff, let's get into your background. Tell us a little bit about how you got into this so people get familiar with you a little bit. Cliff: I got into ShowMeTheRental to save my marriage, actually, and my family life. I worked at AT&T, my real job, when I first started this business. I was an outside plant technician, which is a fancy word for a line man. [...] bucket trucks and put up telephone lines everywhere. I always wanted something more, so,I got into real estate. You've heard of Robert Kiyosaki? Rich Dad, Poor Dad. My brother-in-law was in, and my sister came back from Iraq. They brought home a game called CASHFLOW. I can remember sitting at the dining room table playing CASHFLOW. I didn't understand that you can buy assets and buy rental houses, and people will pay you and you can make money off of it. That's how green I was when I first started. I knew absolutely nothing. From playing that game, I actually signed up for a mentorship through Robert Kiyosaki. They helped me buy my first duplex. End up being a horrible deal, it was bad, but it all worked out because in that whole process of getting a loan on it and learning what I was doing, I found our local real estate club called Cria. I started going to local meetings and I met a mentor, a guy named Mike Butler. He took me under his wing, showed me the road to real estate, and made sure I didn't fall on my face. He was a big part of my success. From there, I worked a full time job and started buying rentals on the side. Long story short, I just started making enough money to quit my job. Now, cool story that I like to tell is, I do hold the longest suspension in AT&T history. I come from a lower middle class family. I didn't want to quit my job and do real estate full-time. It was a very high paying job for us and a very good job for my family. I just didn't want to up and quit, so got suspended on purpose. As a lineman, you have to have a CDL license, and they random drug test you. They did pop me a random drug test. I decided I wouldn't take it, which is an automatic fail. Then they suspended me. I took that suspension and turned it into four-and-a-half months. In the meantime, in the first month of my suspension, I made my whole salary at AT&T doing real estate full-time. I kind of drag it out and then I decided to quit my job and do real estate full-time, which was awesome, because I was my own boss. I had a lot of fun in the beginning, but my priorities were all mixed up. When I first started, my priority was money was the goal. The problems that I had was all I focused on was money, buying houses, and doing everything I could to get money because I thought that was going to make me happy. What it did is, I became financially successful, but my home life was a wreck. I'm happily married with five children. I would work all day, come home, and continue to work. I couldn't turn it off and it's causing a lot of problems at home. The biggest problems at home is, when I would come home and eat dinner, I would get text messages, phone calls, emails, because at any given time we would have three or four empty rental houses. All these leads would start coming in and my wife would just get, I call it superman vision. She had that look on me where she could shoot lasers out of her eyes. She would. It caused a lot of friction at home and a lot of problems. I decided there’s got to be a system I could start putting in place to make this more fun, to make this job smoother, and to get my life back, because I was just working all the time. I didn't see my family, I didn't see my friends, I didn't have anymore friends because I was doing nothing but working all the time. I went out and started putting systems together. One of the systems I wanted was lead screening for tenants because it was our biggest headache. When we get empty houses in our town, nothing to get a hundred phone calls and emails a day. There's no possible way to keep up with those without a system in place. When I tried to find a system, I couldn't find anything I like or anything with a good price point that I like. That's where we created ShowMeTheRental.  What we did with ShowMeTheRental is we took all the problems we were having, created a system for it, and then automated it. What ShowMeTheRental does is, it's an online system that advertises, generates leads, prescreens those leads, automates the showings, and turns those leads into applications. We do all these automatically, with a few clicks of a button, and at a price point that I think is incredible. For $49, you can put it in our system and it's on there until it's rented. That's how I got into real estate. Over the last six or seven years, I started changing my priorities to live a more abundant life. Now, money is a tool and not the goal. That's the biggest change I've had over the last several years. Now, I don’t miss any field trips. We switched our whole business around and put systems in place so I can be mobile. That's our new goal now. With the technology that's out there now, and the systems in place, if you just take the time to do it, it's not very hard to do. Now, with all our kids, we travel every summer. This year we went to Colorado for a month, then stopped to St. Louis from Branson, Missouri, and we just get back from Pigeon Forge. We have systems in place now to run our company, so we can be mobile and I can do what's important, which is making sure my kids are good, happy, and productive citizens. That's my quick story. Jason: Tell us more about ShowMeTheRental. It sounds like a lot of your clients are individual investors. A lot of investors can use this. They can put in their one property when they need to make sure it gets rented. It deals with all these tenant leads, help systemize the process so they're not overwhelmed in it, and filters out some of the riff-raff and time wasting. Cliff: Correct. Jason: Maybe you could explain the process of once somebody gets into your system, they sign up. Take us through what's going to happen. Cliff: I'll tell you our situation. Our situation was, when we would have leads coming in, we would always find ourselves asking the same questions over and over, which were, “Are you on Section 8? Will you sign a three-year lease? How much money is in your bank account? How long have you been on your job?” Simple questions we wanted answered to qualify, to go see our houses, or to rent our houses. What we did is, we generated a list of around 40 questions that we use and that we think other property managers like you all would use to kind of this thing about big funnel. Take a big funnel people and just get them down to that. Take that 100 or 200, get it down to that 15 or 20 really qualified leads that get access to view your house, so you're not wasting your time. More importantly, what we learned is tenants get pretty upset going to look at houses they're not qualified to go see. They fall in love with the house, only to find out they don't qualify income-wise. “You don't take Section 8. They don't want to sign a three-year lease.” We set it up for them also, so they'll have a system where they know that if they don't lie on their question and tell the truth, they’ll have a great opportunity to get this house. It could be theirs. We mesh that together so everybody can be happy. Jason: So really, it reverses the issue. A lot of times, what happens is tenants apply for a bunch of properties, renters will apply for a bunch of properties, and hope that they'll get one. They aren't taking a look at the income requirements. None of these things were filtered when you're looking at Zillow rentals or wherever they're looking to find a property. They're just going, “Oh, I like this one. This looks great.” They're not really aware of what they would qualify for. They're getting frustrated. They're wasting a lot of time. Really, it doesn't take a whole lot for somebody to get frustrated. You see, you go look at a couple of properties that you like, and find out you don't qualify. You'll start to get pretty upset and annoyed, I'm sure as a renter. It would be really challenging. Cliff: Yes, and there are customers. I call them customers. Just like any business, you want your customers to be happy. You don't want to start them off on the wrong foot. I want to set the expectations upfront about our policies and procedures, so we go into what we expect from them and what they expect from us. It just streamed on that system so much better than what we did before. This way, we're not wasting our time and we're collecting all their information. We can go into that. It's hard to go over on a podcast, but we can. For guests who want to check out showmetherental.com, it shows you we collect all the lead information and we actually have a cross-reference database, that if they don't qualify for my property but you're in our system, they qualify for your property, Jason, it will send them over to you. We have a system where, when properties pop in our system that they qualify for, it will automatically send it to them. I know based on their profile they filled out and the prescreening questions they answered, that they're qualified to go see that house. I think that's important and the tenants really like it, because you said it best, it's just such a headache to go to 20 houses and know you're only qualified to rent two of them. I think a lot of people miss that because I think we need to take care of our customers because they're our business. If we don't take care of them, we don't really have a business. If we can get those good customers in there, spread that word of mouth, and get them to know about us, it makes our lives a lot easier. Jason: What are some of the common questions that a homeowner, or an investor, or maybe even a property manager usually ask you about ShowMeTheRental? Cliff: I don't know the common questions. The biggest one we get is what websites do we advertise on? We do all the major websites. Zillow, which is always number one, Facebook Marketplace, we just syndicated with Zumper, Trulia, HotPads, Rent Leads, all the major websites. We advertise on every major website. How this system works is, when you put in on the website through our system, it goes into our system. Instead of them contacting you, they're going to contact our system. They can contact us via phone, via email, and via phone number. Each specific city has their own phone number and how will they contact us. Usually, 90% is through email. When they go in Zillow and to your property, when they look at it, they'll inquire about it and then we will send them, through ShowMeTheRental, a link to your prescreening questions. From there, they'll answer those questions and if they answer those questions correctly, we will then send them showing instructions based on your preference. We have five different ways to show the property. Once they looked at the property, we will send them a link for an online application. We provide one, but we recommend if you have your own, you can just put your own application link in our system and it will send them to your application. We use a software company called Buildium. I want everything in Buildium, so I'll have all the stuff already entered. From there, we have our screening service. We screen, we don't offer the service we have in our in-house. We then screen the tenant, get all the information we need from them, and we take it from there. Jason: Okay. You're not just helping prescreening, but you're also fielding the phone calls. You really are this barrier between the prospective tenants and the homeowner property manager. Cliff: To me, we're the BS part. We help fix the problem, the BS part of management which is prescreening and leads. I think that is the most cumbersome, time consuming part of our business. Jason: Yeah. It's a huge time waste. Cliff: Yes, A huge time waste. Jason: It just cost a business money. It doesn't make an investor or property manager money. In general, it’s the garbage of phone calls. “How many square feet are on this property that I'm looking at right now?” where it says the square feet on the property. You know, these kind of calls. You guys will handle the phone calls? Cliff: The system does, correct. Jason: Or emails, or all that kind of stuff? Cliff: Everything, yes. It's all automated.  Jason: Okay, cool. You do it on a per property basis. What bout a property manager that has a lot of properties, or an investor that has a lot of properties? Cliff: What do you consider a lot? To me, a lot is a couple of hundred. If you have multiple properties, we’ll work out discount prices for you. I guess there's no grey area. There is no setup fee, but if you have multiple properties on there, multiple times we’ll work out deals with you. Most of the time it's people like me, who have 30 something properties. We have pretty nice properties. We sold off all our pain in the ass houses. We might have, out of those properties, every year we have two, maybe three turnovers. I like it. This is more built towards smaller amount of pop we do. Of course, we do take on all the bigger ones, but it's more of, you got two or three rentals a year. If you do have multiple ones, then we'll work with you on prices and make sure everybody is happy. My big goal is to get people their time back. I know it changed my life when I started living life more and stopped worrying about all the money all the time and just started being home and being present with my family, with my kids, and being more involved. That's our big goal, is just to help. You can't get your time back. That's what I tell everybody. Jason: Right. You can buy time thought. Cliff: You can. Jason: The residents experience going through this, what's their experience? Cliff: What they'll do when they log on to the site, their view is a map of whatever city they're in, it will show different properties. What we try to do, when we market, when they go in, they got to sign up with their phone number, email, and name. Then, we're going to try to get them a profile filled out before they even go into a house. We're going to get a profile filled out of all the questions we have and then we're going to match it up the properties. If they don't go that route and say, they find it on Zillow like I said earlier, then from there, they'll just get on Zillow, find a house, inquire about, and they'll answer the prescreening questions from there. If they qualify, they get to see the house. If they don't, it just tells them they're not qualified to go see the house. Jason: Got it. So just kind of kills it there.  Cliff: It kills it there so you don’t have to talk to them. You seem like a nice guy like I am. I don't know how many times you've been on the phone and you have to tell them, talk to them for 15 or 20 minutes and they go on for 15 or 20 minutes, and you don't want to hang up because you want to be nice. It’s just a headache. It takes care of that headache. Managers had that conversation, I know all of them have. All those conversations are gone, which is a big blessing. Jason: One phone call is probably 10-15 minutes, because you have a nice intro on the call, you have to be cordial, they're going to have some questions, you want to answer those questions, and then you need to figure out how to end and get off this call in a nice fashion. Yeah, it eats up a huge chunk of time. Cliff: Yeah, huge chunk. Jason: If it's a nice property, it's in a nice area, and it's priced appropriately, you're going to get a lot of these phone calls. It can be pretty cumbersome and overwhelming if you're trying to just enjoy your day, have a day job, or do something. Besides, I have this part time business of managing a property. Cliff: Yes, correct. Jason: This one property. If you have multiple, it becomes even more crazy real quickly. This is something that maybe property managers could use. I mean really, it’s a piecemeal service. It's like “Hey, I need it for this property, maybe not for this one.” They can use it as needed, maybe something supplemental to the other stuff they have going on, like through Buildium or [...]. Cliff: Correct. Definitely. Jason: Ok cool. Cliff, is there anything else people should know about ShowMeTheRental before I let you go? If not, tell us how everybody can get in touch with you and find out more. Cliff: The only thing I ask is just give it a try. Check it out. Hopefully, you’ll like it. It's been a huge game changer for us. Like I said earlier, when I come home from work, I'm actually home now, I'm not working all the time, I'm not answering phone calls. I just say, give it a try to see if you'll like it. I think you will. As far as contacting me, you can reach me anytime. My email is [email protected] and you call me if you have any questions, if I can help you. I do answer my phone only between 12:00 and 1:00, and 4:00 and 5:00. If you call outside of that, I’ll try to call you back the next day. You can reach me at (502) 641-8781. Jason: Perfect. Cliff, I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show, it's great to have you, and everybody, check out showmetherental.com Cliff: Jason, I appreciate your help. Thank you, sir. Thanks for the opportunity. Jason: Alright, cool. I appreciate Cliff coming on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business, one thing you may want to take a look at, that I will mention a little bit is take a look at your website. If your website has been around for 2-3 years or longer, that's the typical lifespan of a website or a design. It maybe starting to look stale, which creates a perception about your business. Once it's get about 5 years old, it starts to get a little bit painful. It's a little bit embarrassing. It looks probably outdated.  The reality is, most of our competitors, when it comes to website design, a lot of their designs were designed 2-3 years ago. The challenge is, you're getting websites, sometimes out of the box, that's already design-wise, behind and outdated. So make sure to go and test out your website by going to doorgrow.com/quiz. You go to doorgrow.com/quiz, test your property management website, take the quiz. It will help you see how effective it is at creating leads, generating business, capturing and creating trust, and capturing and converting people that are visiting on the site. It's really all about trust, instead of just trying to manipulate Google and get to the top of Google. I'll just point out that the reality that search volume for property management according to Google Trends—you can go to trends.google.com and put in property management, back date it, filter it for the US, back date it to 2004 to the present—is low. It's small. You can compare it to any other term and see this. It really hasn't grown since 2004. In fact, it slightly peaked in 2011, around July, the summer, when property management search volume peaks each summer, but it's been on a steady decline since 2011. There's less people searching. Not only that, but competition has gone through the roof since 2011. Competition has been increasing. Everybody’s pushing everyone to do. This was the game everybody’s playing. It's trying to manipulate SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Pay-per click, and Google Ads. The reality is, search volume has been on a decline. It's going down, while competition is going up. It created this false scarcity in the industry. I'd love for you to escape that. There's no scarcity in property management, 70% are self-managing their own properties right now. There’s tons of blue ocean. They have problems, they have stress, but they're not looking on Google, in general. If you can identify them, capture them, you have a website that creates and builds trust, and your sales processes optimize for trust, you are going to be the company that they work with.  We want to help you optimize trust in your business, clean up, and short all the leaks in your sales pipeline. Reach out to DoorGrow. We can help you with the website and we can help you with your sales process, your pricing strategy, all the things that affects your ability to close deals. We can help you clean all that up and make your business far more effective at capturing business and going after that blue ocean where 70% are self-managing. Check us out at doorgrow.com. So, until next time everybody to our mutual growth. Bye everybody.  You've just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Whether you’re flying a plane or dealing with property management, manual processes based on your own way of interpreting a task doesn’t always represent your brand. Today, I am talking to Jo-Anne Oliveri, founder and managing director of ireviloution. Jo is a leading authority on property management and author of Find Your Property Manager Now. In this episode, she describes how to streamline business operations.  You’ll Learn... [05:00] Find your passion, and change your life. [07:05] Crusade for Courage: Understand property management and real estate from investors’ point of view to pursue your dreams. [08:15] Build business using deliberate methods, not desperate measures. [10:35] Singing and Standing in Line: Businesses built on foundation of consistent processes and systems decrease frustration and anxiety. [17:55] Scalability and Serviceability Platform: Streamline business operations by identifying tasks, each with its own timeline and priority plus corresponding tasks. [21:28] Brand Culture, Business Vision: Brand relationship is greater than individuals. [22:18] Selecting Process Software: Depends on your business, but needs to work for your budget, growth plans, and how you want to build your business. [28:37] Streamlining System Components: Processes, resources, and training. [33:51] Vision for Success: Every business needs to start with a plan. [34:24] Default vs. Design: Desperate to make changes due to shiny object syndrome. [35:20] Task Tracker: Require and verify accountability, responsibility, and transparency via consistency, compliance, and completion. [40:03] Which is worse: Losing a client or team member?  [44:25] Step-by-Step Process: How to get started streamlining business operations. Tweetables How can you run a business when no one is doing a job the same way? Career by Design: Empower owners with courage to take control of their businesses. Passionate about crusade of creating positive change in property management. Businesses built on processes create a foundation, not frustration.  Resources ireviloution Jo-Anne Oliveri on LinkedIn Jo-Anne Oliveri’s Email Jo-Anne Oliveri’s Phone: 917-969-4066 Jo-Anne Oliveri on Facebook Find Your Property Manager Now: Hire the Right Agent and Make More Money Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! by Tony Robbins Rent Manager Buildium AppFolio Process Street DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I'm hanging out with lovely Jo Oliveri from the ireviloution.  Jo: Hi there. Jason: Hi, welcome. Jo: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you. We're going to get into your background first, but before we do that, I'm going to read your bio here for the audience, for the listeners, so they have a little bit of understanding. The topic we're going to be talking about is streamlining business operations, is that right? Jo: Correct. Jason: Okay. I'm sure everybody here, everyone listening—clients, friends, property managers—they all could use a little bit of streamlining in the business operations. That's something close to you and to my heart as well. Let me tell me people a little bit about you here. Do you go by Jo or Jo-Anne? Jo: Jo. Jason: Okay. Jo is the Founder and Managing Director of ireviloution and PM Leadership Summit Vice-President, First Team Property Management with over 20 years of real estate experience. I don't know what the CIPS or TRC are. What are those? Jo: CIPS is a National Association of Realtors designations. It’s Certified International Property Specialist. The TRC is Transnational Referral Certification, the very handy ones we have specially in property management we're dealing with people from all around the world. Jason: Okay. Jo is a leading authority on all things property management and an inspiring force within the industry. As Founder and Managing Director of ireviloution and the Property Management Leadership Summit and Vice-President of First Team Property Management based in the USA, she's an international real estate identity who has trained over 500 agencies, thousands of agency owners, and property managers worldwide. She is seen as a leading authority in all things property management and regularly speaks at the industry's top Australian and North American conferences. She's also author of the real estate books, Find Your Property Manager Now: Hire the Right Agent and Make More Money. As well, she was selected as an Industry Thought Leader of the Year finalist for 2015, 2016, and 2017 Real Estate Business Awards, and is an Industry Influencer for the Elite Agent 2017 Awards. Jo is a big deal. Jo, welcome to the show again. Tell me, how did you get into this property management stuff? For those who are watching, I'm hanging out in my son's room. It was the only quiet place today. I've got pug posters behind me for those that can't see. How cool is this kid here? Jo: All the room. Jason: Yeah. He likes pugs. Jo, tell everybody, how did you get into this? Jo: Actually, I came from a business background. We had a family business in grocery stores and convenience stores. We were involved in the 80s down turning businesses. We had very high interest rates, we were paying for our business loan and our home loan, and we lost everything, we have bankrupted. What I discovered is the business I was working in was my husband's passion, it was not my passion. I wanted to find something I was passionate about.  I'm a mom, I had three small children, and I read this book by Anthony Robbins called Awaken The Giant Within. It's an excellent book, it changed my life. I did all of the exercises and at the end of that, it was steering me towards real estate. I was a tenant at the time because we've lost our property and property management is where I landed. What was really interesting is because I came from a business background, I ended up getting a job with a company in Perth, Western Australia where I originally come from. I thought, "This is an awesome business." There were three other property managers and I was asking them, "What do I do?" They're all telling me different things. I thought, "How do you run a business like this where no one is doing the same job the same way?" They were talking to clients differently, giving different advice. It set me on a path of understanding the business of property management because I saw that there are enormous opportunities to grow a business through property management rather than grow a business through sales. Hence, I started off on a journey of career by design and I thought, "One day, I want to be able to empower business owners with the courage to take control of their business." Have a business that represents their vision, their brand, and their personality, but for me to do that, I had to understand everything, not just property management but the business of real estate.  Hence, my journey started and I've worked in all areas of real estate with large franchise groups and small boutique agencies, wealth companies to understand how the investor feels. I've purposely invested in real estate myself to understand what it's like from an investor's point of view. It's all brought me to this point here today. Like you, I'm passionate, I'm on a crusade to empower positive change in the property management industry by infusing business leaders with the courage to pursue their dream. Jason: Love it. It's very similar to my why or our business why which is the transform property management businesses and their owners. Let's get in to this. Streamlining business operations. Maybe we should start with why this is important. Jo: Well, this is very important because if you don't streamline business operations, you become what I call, a business built on desperate measures instead of deliberate methods. Everything becomes by default, every decision is by default, recruiting new staff is by default, service promises is by default. You start to become another “me too” property management company where we all start to look the same. You lose sight of your vision and your why. You start to offer property management services in the beginning.  When I was learning everything I could about what’s so good about property management business operations and what goes wrong, I started to see that streamlining systems was a major cause of why things go wrong in property management. That actually made me go on a search and discovery tour of other industries. They had systems and processes and it actually brought me here, to where I'm living right now in Orange County, California. In 2007, I went to the Disney Institute to learn how Disney creates all their processes and streamlines everything that they do and discover why people will spend. If you're like me and had to travel from Australia to go to Disneyland, you can spend a few tens of thousands of dollars going there taking your family, all the privilege of standing in a line to get on a ride for up to two hours. I discovered people don't complain. They actually stand in these lines and they whistle and they talk to each other. Yet people call a property management company and if they're not responded to within a matter of minutes they become very frustrated. My discovery was it's because they don't know the process either. If a company is built on processes then you know everyone who work within the guidelines of those processes including the clients that you're dealing with. That becomes a very, very strong foundation in creating success in any property management business. It’s just critical. If you look at the other businesses or other industries like Starbucks, it’s all built on processes, it's all built on how do we create maximum efficiency right down to measuring how long does it take for the barista to get the scoop of coffee beans out of the sack and put them into the machine that makes the coffee. If we move the coffee bag 2 inches closer, that's going to save over a period of time, 100 hours every month. It also reduces the loss of coffee beans spillage.  I started to understand the concept of time efficiency through processes and streamlining with systems and related it all back to how do we do it in property management. Jason: I love it. I love the idea. I mean, essentially what you're saying is that processes just like the example you give with lines of Disney which I don't want to stand in those, by the way, but it disarms people by them knowing that there's process and I think it creates some safety for them.  They really have two choices at that point is to choose into the process that exists or not. But if a process isn't there then what naturally ends up happening is people try to implement or push their own agenda or their own process onto the property manager. "Hey I need this done by here. I need this done at this time. I need them to show up now or this time." They'll try to push their agenda and process onto the property manager because there isn't a clear one for them to see. Jo: Exactly. Hence, the business starts to become a very reactive thing. You will hear the shock horror stories where a property manager says, "We just lost an owner. They terminated their management with us." We thought they're really happy because we never hear from them. You never hear from them and you never had that contact with them. They're thinking like, "What are they doing? Where's the value that I pay?" So, whatever you do it's got to be consistent across every client. Again, I'll relate this back to Disney where the people who run the rides, I mean a lot of them are just young kids, they're college kids, and they don't start to get reactive when they can see that the line is two, three, four hours long on Independence Day for the Incredibles ride last year. Everyone stood in a hot sun for four hours. Their Disney cast, as they call them, they just did their job and kept smiling, just pushing the people through and offering alternatives with single rider and things like that. We can learn a lot from Disney. Jason: I like the idea of what you were saying about just making sure that the process is visible. Something I noticed that you spark the memory. In the past, I had jobs working in IT. When you work in IT at a company, it doesn't matter how good of a job you do. You still are the lowest person on the totem pole when it comes to there being an emergency. If there's a problem with the server, something goes down in the middle of the night you're on call, it doesn't matter if you're like one of the top executives in the business or you paint really well. If you do everything perfect, nobody would notice and never going to say, "Why do I even pay you?" If there's a problem, they notice and then, they would say, "Why do we even pay you?" I'm a little bit smart, just a little bit. What I realize is if I was just noisy about what I was doing, my bosses or my superiors would now see that I was doing stuff. I'm like, "Hey, I just upgraded this. Hey, I just took care of this. Hey, there hasn't been any problems with this because I did this." I just started being noisy about the things that I was doing. I worked at HP for a while as well and I had a boss in Texas while I was in Boise. It was the same thing. He was like, "What are you guys doing? Are you doing this?" He would ask each person on my team, "Is the other one doing their job?" I just started updating my instant messenger status with what I was working on just so he could see, to reduce that anxiety that he had that we weren't doing anything. Then, he started thinking, "I was the only one on the team doing stuff." So, I think maybe there's the little secret and what you'd mentioned that the property managers need to be a little bit more visible in what they're doing to maintain these properties in letting people know that, "Hey, we did something here," and keeping the owners informed so that they go, "Okay. That's why I pay you." Jo: Exactly. It's like evidence defeats doubt and you got to share the value to the clients and remind them, "Hey, over the past year, we've managed to increase your rent by 10% and it's 5% above the average in the area. This means [...] your asset value has increased this much. Now, we're here to help you to maximize returns and optimize growth. This is what we've done so far with you. What are your goals for the future? Perhaps you might consider buying another property because you've built equity in this property and you've built income in this property." It's about planting the seeds of thought in your clients mind and always having that connection. Property management can be as frustrating for the rental property owners as it is for property managers but it need not be. It all comes down to your systems. When you've got systems, it then articulates your value and worth, and your service promise as well to the clients. Jason: We're talking about streamlining business operations, we're talking about implementing systems, making sure there's processes. How would you how would you define streamlining business operations? What really is it? It sounds like a nebulous, all-encompassing sort of thing, I think. Jo: It truly is. You're quite correct. A lot of people don't understand how do I streamline my processes. I've got different systems for this and different systems for that. We do a lot of I'm diagnostic reporting on business operations to see where things might be falling through the cracks or things are not working together. The thing with property management is we have a multitude of things going on at any given time. Every task that we do has its own timeline and has its own priority. For every task that we do, it has a plethora of tasks involved within that one task and it could have several team members involved in that one task as well. For instance, if we’re bringing on a new management, then there is a lot of admin work involved in that. When we bring on a new management, that then moves on to leasing that property, finding a tenant for that property, and it's not always the same person involved. What you need is a business that's built on a platform of scalability and a business that's built on a platform of serviceability so that we can always service the client, scale our business growth. To do that means that we need to make sure we're streamlining systems. Streamlining systems in property management is about identifying every task that we do in property management and almost seeing your business like it's a series of all these cogs that all work together. Those cogs need [...] or turn in perfect sync so that we're just moving on to the next task, next team member that needs to be done. There is nothing that creates what they call “the bushfire is starting” because something has fallen through the cracks or something as you know stopped another process from being completed. Creating systems, to me, is something that needs to be engineered. You can't look at one system and say, "We're going to do this for onboarding new management." We're going to use this other system for looking after the property once we've got it occupied and things like that. All of those systems all have to work as one. The only way to do this is to engineer, to architectural design how your systems work together so that as your business grows and you bring in new team members or new roles, you can seamlessly move one task to a new role and know that it's not going to fall through the cracks, or know that you don't have a team member who says," I got this relationship with the client. I'll just do it all and whilst they're focusing on that, other things are falling through the cracks. Like a good point there is, whenever you've got team members who say, "I've got a relationship with the client." You've got a problem because the relationship is with your brand. Your team represent your brand and your vision. If you've infused your team with your brand culture, personality, promise and standards, then all the team are representing exactly what your vision is for your business. Jason: I love that. The brand relationship is greater than the people, individual person relationship that should be in the company and everybody should have that mindset on your team. You mentioned a lot about platform, systems, scalability. I know a lot of property managers out there are a little bit more nerdy than the average real estate person. They're listening to this and they're thinking, “What system should I be using? What is the ultimate software for doing all these processes and systemized in my business.” Do you have a favorite? Jo: In my role, I do get to look at a lot of different software. I do due diligence. I think my best answer to that is it depends on your business. And it truly does. When you look at software, it's got to work for you. It's got to work for, (1) your budget, (2) your growth plans, and (3) how you got to build your business and what you want that software to represent about your business. Currently, the company that I'm working for here in California is using rent manager and that's been very good. For us, we've got over 30 branches spread out from South LA to San Diego. That's a huge area that we cover and our home office is in the middle, it's somewhere in the middle, in Orange County. Through that, we've been able to customize that software so it suits our scalability and the way we service our clients and our agents. We've got over 3000 agents in first team, so we want to make sure that we have a way of measuring the referrals that our agents come in and keeping them connected to that client. Rent manager works for this company. If there's other great ones like [...]. It's very, very good. That started out small- to medium-businesses and I think it fits really well in that marketplace, but I know that they've been doing a lot of work on how can they build a platform that is useful for bigger businesses as well . And then, of course, there's appFolio and there's a lot of popular ones out there. I encourage people, when they're choosing software, choose software based on a due diligence that they do in accordance with what they're looking for in the software. The other thing to remember with software is it's not your system. Your software is the platform if you like that you store all your data and generate your reports. Your system is your manual operations. A great analogy are pilots because pilots have these massive computer systems that fly the planes, but pilots have to go through a manual process of check-listing that everything is working, that three people agree that everything is working before that plane will take off. There is a manual process to flying a plane and property management is the same. It's these manual processes where a lot of companies are going wrong because everyone is doing it their own way, that they interpret a task, and it doesn't represent the brand. Jason: Right. This is a problem with processes. For those listening, I'm a big fan of the software process tree. It allows you to have a process system that is outside of whatever accounting or back office you're using free property management company and you can really dial in. For those listening, check out the previous episode that I did with Process Street. I think you'd be really interested in hearing that. I think the challenge with most process systems or systems out there where they have some process documentation in the business is that once a team member has read the process document and they've done it a couple times, they think they know it. It's in their head. They're not going to go back and check it. They're not checking against the process if the process gets documented, gets updated, or the process gets changed, or that person makes changes to the process, they're probably not updating that. There's always this gap between what the process is and what's documented, if it even is at all. Think about all of us that drive cars. We don't check the manual for the car or read the DMV booklet on how to drive the car, all the rules of driving every time we get into the car. The first time, we probably checked every mirror and made sure everything was okay, but now we just drive it it's like an extension of our body. That's how team members feel. They may simplify things, they make short-cut, they may cut things out, they may forget about things, they maybe weren't onboarded properly, they weren't trained properly. I'm a big fan of having a process that they have to use each time where they have to check something off. There's some manual input that says I did this and I followed these steps. Jo: Exactly. I totally agree. I was at a conference where one of the doctors from one of the busiest hospitals in Australia—he works in the emergency section—said, regardless of the level of emergency, they still have to follow a checklist where everything is ticked off. That's where we're going wrong in property management is because property managers keep it in their head and they make a slight change to a process which has sometimes devastating results to the overall business. My own company, ireviloution, we've designed those manual processes which are architecturally designed, but every manual process you have, you've got to have a way of measuring so you've also got your management leadership that locks into that, so that we know that we're being efficient and compliant, consistent and complete everything that we're doing. To me, when you have a system, there's three different components when it comes to streamlining. One is your processes. You've identified what all the processes are for every task that we do in property management that then we'd lock in and we can measure the efficiency, effectiveness, profitability, performance, productivity, everything shows that process. Then, what locks into that is your resources. Jason: This is number two? Jo: Yes. P plus R resources is that resources have to be designed. If there is a tweak in those resources, which we find a lot of property managers say, “But I want to put this step in,” that step might be somewhere else in the process. By tweaking it, it can actually break something down.  The third step which is really, really critical is T, P plus R plus T, equals training. Your training is a vital importance and what we discovered in property management is to become a property manager, we're really learning theory—the theory of property management. If you look at doctors to go through university and college for seven years learning how to be a doctor, it's still all theory. Once they've graduated they've got to go into the learning hospitals to learn the practice of being a doctor, the practice of what happens when a patient does present themselves with an emergency or with some kind of condition. It's ongoing training for them. The training that we have in property management needs to be something where if you're putting your team through training, it's got to be consistent as well. If they're going off to all these different training courses, then they're not learning the process and the resource. So, there's a breakdown. All three elements of the P plus R plus T are critical in streamlining business operations. Jason: Alright. I'm gonna recap this. So, you're saying everyone gets that they need processes and it's helpful to make sure that the processes are very well-defined and people know how long it's going to take. Explained resources because I think that's a little bit less clear. What is a resource? Jo: Resources are your paper documents. When we put information into software, there's still a way that we gather that information or the data that is then put into the software to make sure that we've got all the information we need. I call it your intel and your insight into everything that we do. The resources are just like what I mentioned before with the emergency doctors or the pilots where their resources are checklist. Then, your resources are also the way that the business owner can measure productivity, performance. it's how they measure, monitor, and manage what's going on. So, resources are things like one checklist to the different forms that you use for some legal forms and some just best practice forms like getting a tenant to sign a disclaimer that they know that they're not allowed to disconnect smoke detectors for instance. We know that we didn't just tell them, we actually got them to sign a form and they understand the consequences in different forms. Your productivity trackers are manual forms so we can measure productivity against what's going into your software. So, that's all your resources. The resources that we've developed, we've got over 500 resources there and that's the enormity of the resources that you need to manage your property management business depending on the size, of course, and team structure. The training speaks for itself. Jason: Yeah. You need to make sure that they're actually leveraging these things and they understand. I like what you said. There needs to be consistency because a lot of people just want to send the team off to these property management conferences and they come back with a whole different set of ideas, "Well, this company's doing this." I had one client that didn't even talk to me but came back and said, "I decided to change my whole structure from departmental to another structure." He was changing his entire company and then everything fell apart. I was like, "How did you know that that was right for you?" He's like, "Well, all the cool people are doing it,” was basically the answer. All the cool people were changing their whole business and I said, "Your business was working and now, it's not." Jo: Yeah. You hear that a lot and that's why I think that they haven't got a plan to start off with. Every business has to be built upon a plan. It's not a financial plan, it's an operational business plan. So, what they've done is they've created their vision for success and they've mapped it out. It's like creating the way that you're going to get from LA to Brisbane in Australia. You've got a plan, you've got a timeline, you've got a budget, you've got all of that. But you know, a lot of them become very reactionary, their business becomes default instead of design, and that's where they start to be desperate. It's like, "Oh, this is not working. Let's change something else." They lose the deliberation around their business because they don't have a plan in the first place. A killer of business growth is when you keep changing what you're doing because someone else is doing it. Jason: Shiny object syndrome. Jo: Exactly. That's right. That's a term we use a lot because business owners are like, "Oh, if that's happening over there, let's try that." That's why we all become clones of each other. When you talk to consumers, the people that we serve, they all see us as the same. So, very important.  Jason: Okay. So, you have processes resources training and I think anytime there's a process, somebody needs to be responsible for it, there needs to be clear accountability, there needs to be process documentation and there needs to be a clear definition of done, like how this does this need to be done? How can we verify that it's done? There needs to be accountability. There needs to be some transparency there as well like some scoreboard or some way to know that they've won, or completed, or finished, and there needs to be that accountability or responsibility. If we have all these things in place, then is that everything that they need? Jo: Yes and no because the other thing is that the business leader or if they appoint someone to manage that business, they got to keep their finger on the pulse because accountability is just king when it comes to property management. One of the problems I have in property management is they're not profitable. They've got property managers who keep saying, "I'm so busy, I can't get this done. I need someone else." And because they don't have the data and the statistics about how long it takes to do a job because they're not using processes and resources, then they start to react to that team member saying, "I can't do this anymore. I'm too busy, I'm stressed out, I'm going to leave." I know you can't leave because if you leave I'm going to lose all my clients. Well, comes back to there's no point in having processes and resources if you don't have accountability. That's what I was mentioning before, you've got to be able to manage it so you've got to have the ability to say, "We know exactly what's going on with the business. We know when we've got peaks and when there's pressure on the team because of those peaks. We also know when we need to bring in new resources in terms of new team and what that role will be and what we're prepared to pay and offer that new team member." For every task that we do, the objective is to be consistent, to be compliant and to complete within the timeline and priority of that task and then to be able to measure how many tasks a property manager is doing daily, weekly, monthly. The only way you do that is with the business resources. We've got something that we call a task tracker so we can measure many things with that. One thing is the number of tasks our property manager is doing weekly, monthly. The other thing is every number tells a story. You can see that if we've done this then this should generate a job new tasks over here. What's that done? Do the numbers all add up? Are we doing that? We start to then create that historical data about our business so that we know we've got peak times, we've got risk associated with this time of the year with our business. The business leader has what we call finger on the pulse. They can make those decisions, added deliberation not desperation. Jason: I think one of the things that's really helpful in tracking just about anything that you care about in the business, whatever it might be, the one thing that's super helpful is just it gives you context. Even just having two data points like we did this much this last month and we did this much this month, you can tell if it's gone up or down and that allows you to understand where you keep your finger on the pulse, as you say, or to have an idea of whether these things are improving or getting worse, or whether business is changing. Property management certainly ebbs and flows during certain times of the year. It helps you to see, "Okay, these are the trends that we see during the summer when kids are getting out of school and these are the trends that we're seeing through the winter months when things have cooled down." It gives them some context and that allows them to plan and prepare for the future and understand, "All right. We're ahead of where we were last year or we're behind. We should be concerned like we can make changes, let's make adjustments." It allows you to feel safer as an entrepreneur, it lowers your pressure and noise it makes you less reactive. I'm sure there's other benefits to come from that. Jo: Exactly. Well, it takes away what we said at the start up is that they fear losing a client more than they feel losing a team member because they've got control of their business. If their team member is not performing then, they know how to manage them to perform better. Sometimes, team members do have a use by date and it might be good to let them go but let them go with respect and honor rather than like, "Oh my gosh. I'm losing them in a one lose business." We should never, ever have that fear about our business. Our business is about us, it's about our vision. Jason: Right. So, team members may have an expiration date. Jo: I think some of them do. Jason: Fair enough, probably true. So, wouldn't be great if they just had that stamp on their forehead when they came to us at the beginning? Then we would know.We can keep their replacements ready, we'd get everything documented really clearly but that's the nice thing about having things documented. My assistant that I just had just recently took another job, but we had everything documented I wasn't freaking out like in the past I might have been freaking out. Losing a team member that was critical to operations would be really a big deal but we've got things documented. There's this safety that comes with having things documented and if it's documented well enough, that's the question you ask yourself, those listening, "Do you feel like if any certain member of your team left that you have you have their knowledge documented so that the next person could step into that without having to be trained by them directly?" If you don't, then that's where business owners have a lot of fear. They have a lot of fear in that, "Oh no, if I lost this person, it would be so detrimental." Here's the thing I've noticed anytime somebody said, "Oh, it would be the worst thing ever if I lost this one team or if I lost Susy or whoever this person might be in my whole business. It would be terrible, it would be the worst thing ever." That's like the best person for them to lose. I notice every time it's because they don't understand what that person is doing, that person is usually doing a lot of things that maybe are redundant or unnecessary or not done the way you have them done. When they do leave, you have to step in, you have to figure these things out. You realize, "Why were they doing it that way?" Because we didn't have that transparency into what was really going on. We weren't able to manage it, we weren't able to help improve it and it wasn't very effective in a lot of situations. I had one assistant that I had for like three years and I thought, "Oh, if I lost her it would be the worst thing ever." Really, when I lost that person, it was one of the best things that happened to our business. We changed so many things, I realize a lot of things could be done more efficiently and it's never as bad as our brains make it out to be. Jo: You're absolutely right. Property managers love to be loved, but we need to change that thinking because we want people to love the brand and respect the team that represent the branch. Out of respect comes love. Property managers need to let go and know that clients will respect them if they're delivering on the service promises and results. They'll feel good about themselves. I think every owner needs to work their business as if when a team member leaves, this is what happens. Everything that we've got in our business is all built upon generic names. It's not a person's name. It's not a person's phone number. Everything is associated with a role, so I move the team around within the roles and to the client, it's seamless. It's still first team servicing them. Jason: Right. It's maintenance, it's not Fred. Jo: Exactly. The team has that personality. They're friendly, they want to help the clients. Jason: Yeah, love it. Cool. So, we've talked about the who, the what, the why. So, how do people get started with streamlining their business operations? Maybe we could just dig into the actual process of getting their processes and their resources and their training all dialed in. Jo: Yeah. That's a really good question, Jason. The thing is when you're implementing processes, there's a whole process around them as well. What you want to do is you want to get everyone engaged in it. You need to get your team engaged, you need to get your clients engaged so they understand what's going on as well. You need to create a step-by-step process of, at this step, we're going to implement this new process and we'll introduce that to the clients because there might be new policy around that as well. Articulate and communicate that to the clients. They get to buy in with what we're doing and they've got the opportunity to voice any concerns or misunderstandings. The best thing is, know that when you are implementing new processes, then you have to muddy the waters for a bit. You're going to find all these things that start rising to the surface moving up like, "What's going on here? I've got team that are unhappy. I'm losing team." Normally, that will happen because you haven't started with the process. So, muddy the waters and have a look at what you need to do first. It could be restructuring the team to start off with. It could be redefining, and reassigning, and realigning roles, but whatever the step is, you need to look at it like a building lego blocks, one by one by one. This one means that this is going to happen. Once that happens, then this next step is going to happen. My best advice is don't do it all at once, have a plan of implementation, a plan of communication as well, and a plan of education. It really is a step-by-step process. Jason: Yeah, I think when we're leading a team, when we're leading a company, our job really is to inspire everybody to be excited about what we're going to be doing rather than control them. I like to say, whenever we failed to inspire, we always control by default. If you can inspire your team and get them excited, "Hey, we're going to be doing this. Here's why, here's how this will benefit you, here's how this will benefit the business. Everything will be better off," and you can get them on board and get them in alignment, then they will help you do it. But if you are trying to control them and force them and say, "Hey, we're going to be doing this," you're going to churn some people. You're going to lose some people Especially if you're making changes and they're used to doing things being done a certain way, that shakes them up and makes them feel insecure, makes them feel uncomfortable. You start documenting their processes and, “Why we didn't document these before?” They're going to thinking, “Is my job okay? Why are you having me to document this now? I'm doing a good job, aren't I?” We need to really be careful and inspire our team members to take care of these things and help us. I think, as entrepreneurs, we also try to shoulder everything on our own a lot of times. Our team members are the ones that are doing these processes. A lot of times they know it better than us and that they should be the ones helping us do it. We have the insight to be able to look at those ones they're documented and help them figure out, "Hey, maybe we can improve this. We can make this better. Let's see if we can make this easier for you and make this faster for you. Or what would help you move this forward quicker?" Jo: Exactly. One of the things I learned at Disney is Disney has a wonderful way like everyone who works at Disney wants to be there. If Disney makes changes, they have a lovely way of making sure that the cast are all on board and involved. The way that they do that is they have this program where they all sit around, it's like brainstorming to a degree but everyone has a say and they build on what they're saying. It's never like that's not going to work, it's like yes and they build on that idea. They bring it around to something that is a way that the business leader can drive their business in a way that they want to. The team all have that understanding. When we go in and we work with businesses, we talk about infusing the team not just like, "This is what we're doing." It's like if you actually infuse them with the vision and how it's all going to be for everyone, then they will have that encouragement and that willingness to like, "I want to be a part of this." And that's what you want for the team. And your clients, too. Jason: Yeah. Ultimately, we have two types of people in our team. We either have believers or we have hiders. The hiders are just there to get a paycheck, probably do as little as possible and complain about us on the weekends. The believers, we get their discretionary time. They're thinking about us after hours, they're thinking about their job, they want to be better, they want to improve and they're looking for solutions. It's a very different mindset. But they can't be a believer unless they have something to believe in and you're relating that to them. So, we have to give them the chance to be able to believe in us. Jo: Yeah. It's so true. You're talking before when we mentioned about the use by date. Sometimes, we can have insight into that as well because when we bring on our new recruits and then we do our monthly 1on1s with them or however often you do it, that's a way to gain insight into what they're thinking what they're short and long-term dreams are. You will know that at some point, your company might not be able to offer them the future that they're seeking. You don't have the next role for them in their career. That's okay because while they've been with your company, they've helped you to grow your company and you're still in control of your company if you've got all of the systems and processes, that person will go off still having respect for your company and you have respect for them. That's the way I would love it to be in the industry if we all understand it's okay to say bye-bye to team for the right reasons. Jason: Right. Any relationship can be ended amicably. Jo: Absolutely. Jason: Any relationship. I mean life's all about relationships and relationships can be ended poorly and very negatively and it can cause a lot of drama or they can be ended amicably. We should always look for that route first. That's the best Jo, is there anything else that our listeners should hear or should know about streamlining business operations before we wrap this up? Jo: I think, Jason, we just encourage them to not go it alone because creating a process and then the resources around it, it does take a lot of work. It's like engineering mindset and I see a lot of property management business owners make the mistake of letting their property managers do it. They say, "You bring in the systems and you create the systems." They can't do that. They're employing that person to look after their clients and bring in new clients. Whilst they're doing something that they're not entirely skilled to do, then it's impacting the business and quite often there is no goal and you'll say, "Well, where are the systems they created?" I say invest in systems, invest in people that really know what they're doing when it comes to designing systems because all system should be customized to [...] their business is well. When you implement, do it in stages, do it in a process so everyone feels good about the changes that have been made. Jason: Jo, how can people get in touch with you if they're wanting some help on their systems and on some of the things we talked about? Jo: Well, thank you. They can email and I'll spell this out because I've got a very confusing business name, but as I was explaining to Jason before, my business name, ireviloution, is my surname backwards, Oliveri. I always said I'd create a revolution in the industry, so it kind of went together. So, my email is [email protected] or you can call my cell here in the US. I'm living in California so Pacific time and it's (917) 969-4066 or even look me up on Facebook or LinkedIn. Jason: Perfect. Alright, cool. Well, Jo, it's been fun connecting with you. I think we share a lot of alignment and I look forward to seeing what you do in the future. Jo: Definitely, as I do look forward to watching you. I love what you're doing.  Jason: Thank you, I appreciate it. All right, we'll let you go. Jo: Thanks, Jason. Bye. Jason: If you are property management entrepreneur that wants to have doors and make a difference as we talked about in the intro, please reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help and see if we can help you grow your company and be sure to check out Jo, really cool stuff that she was talking about today. I hope you got a lot of value from this episode and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Do you want to grow your single-family portfolio, but not sure how? Don’t think you’re smart enough to be successful in real estate? Invest in yourself, get an education, and hire a coach. Today, I am talking to Mark Dolfini, founder of Landlord Coach and author of three real estate books. Mark shares how he ventured into real estate, property management, and landlord coach. He follows the VIP Paradigm: Vision, Infrastructure, and Process.  You’ll Learn... [04:40] Real Estate Education: You can learn, if you want to; even if you’re not smart. [07:21] Hospitality Industry: How to treat people, customers, and residents like guests. [10:37] Set up sustainable business by shifting to VIP Paradigm. [14:35] Landlord Coach’s favorite catch phrases focus on valuing your time and money.  [19:30] Better Business Owner: It’s not about the number of doors, but what you’re trying to accomplish in revenue and lifestyle. [26:40] Cycle of Suck and 4 Ds to Revenue (doors, deals, duration, and dollars). [29:10] Being time wealthy is more of a decision than a destination. [31:37] Bad communication is a symptom of the problem, not the problem. The problem is a bad infrastructure and/or process.  [36:35] Product to Produce: Consistency; sloppiness is your only competition. [37:35] Negative Feedback Loop: If you put something in place, make sure it gets done. [39:04] Company’s Compass: Define/develop core values to make business decisions. [41:55] Being your own boss is great, but get a coach to take you where you want to go. [44:10] Difference between mentor and coach: Invest in yourself by paying a coach to hold you accountable. Tweetables Real Estate Education: It’s about the want to; not the intelligence. Don’t do it all. Learn to fire yourself! There is no amount of money that will make time irrelevant.  If you don’t place a value on your free time, someone else will.  Resources Mark Dolfini on Facebook Landlord Coach The Time-Wealthy Investor 2.0 Marriott DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today I’m hanging out with Mark Dolfini of Landlord Coach. Mark, welcome to the show. Mark: Hey, it’s great to be here. That’s a heck of an intro. Jason: It’s our manifesto, I call it. Mark: I love it. That speaks directly to my heart when we’re talking about people who want to grow their single family portfolios. That gets me fired up. Jason: So Mark, I want to introduce you. I’m really excited to have you on the show. We’re talking before show a little bit and we have a lot of alignment. We both believe in coaching, we both believe in having coaches. It says Mark Dolfini is a veteran of the US marines—thank you for your service—and the author of three real estate books. He was first published in 2017, second book released in early 2018, and his third book, The Time-Wealthy Investor 2.0, came out in March of 2019. He received a Bachelor of Science in Accounting at Purdue University, worked for Marriott International before venturing out full time into the world of real estate investing. He’s a managing broker for property management company based out of Lafayette, the founder of Landlord Coach, sits on numerous boards, including the Better Business Bureau of Central Indiana, the National Federation of Independent Business, and is a training director for the Central Indiana BNI Franchise and Networking Organization. He spends his free time pistol shooting and kayaking, and lives in Lafayette where he and his wife, Jennifer, are raising their two sons, Leland and Logan. All right, so we got through your bio. Mark, let’s start out with you and I want to hear about your background. How did you get into the space of real estate, property management, landlord coach, all of this. How did this all come about? Give us a little backstory. Mark: Sure. Well, I’d love to say it was a straight line trajectory, but you know there’s your plan and God’s plan, right? That doesn’t and usually don’t always match up. Jason: [...] and then there’s reality. Mark: Exactly. Jason: [...] winds. Always. Mark: Right. I’d always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I didn’t know exactly what that was. I mean, this is back me being seven or eight years old, I started with a vegetable stand, the vegetable that I grew in Upstate New York and sold them at a vegetable stand that I built out of out of wood. So I always started back from there. My first go at real estate was when I was actually in the marine corps still and I bought 40 acres of property that was in Northern Arizona. I paid a couple of hundred bucks an acre for it and that was really it. It was just a desert in the middle of nowhere that no one seemed to want, but I knew at $200 an acre was a pretty good deal. I ended up buying it for capital appreciation at that point in time. But having a piece of land that doesn’t generate income doesn’t generate revenue. I learned pretty quickly is not the way to wealth. Getting someone else to pay for it was really what I wanted to do. I was getting near the end of my time in the marine corps. Had a great time, it was good for me in a lot of ways. It was tough, but I’m glad I did it. I also knew I needed to get an education. So, I got out. Now, let me just frame this because I went to school in Upstate New York and graduated 352nd out of 354. Let that sink in, everybody. I was at the bottom of the class. Jason: Right [...] the class by any means. Mark: Right. Not even close. The reason I’m saying that is because people who are out there think that they have to have this high-level of intelligence and high-level of intellect to make this business work. If you know anything and you’re doing real estate, it’s about the want to, it’s not about the intelligence. Let me just put that to bed right away. Now, that doesn’t give you an excuse to not go out and say, “Well, I need to learn things and therefore it’s just too hard.” There are lots of things are difficult. Walking when you were two years old was probably difficult. Or 18 months when learning how to talk was difficult at one point. It’s the same thing. You can learn this if you have the right intention. Anyway, getting out of the marine corps and getting into college was a little tricky because with my “stellar” high school career. I had to figure out how to how to do that. I hadn’t sat for an SAT. I had to learn in high school all that stuff. When I got out of the marine corps, I actually got accepted to Purdue. I got a high-enough score on my SAT. While I was at Purdue, I started buying some rental real estate. By the time I got out of Purdue, I had about a dozen rental units altogether, which is roughly half a million dollars for the real estate. That really how I got started and that’s really where my real estate education really got started. Jason: Right, so you cut your teeth on in the real world with your own real estate deals dealing with tenants, toilets, and termites, I’m sure. Fast forward to now. Help us understand. We’re going to be talking about the VIP paradigm: vision, infrastructure, and process the acronym. Let’s get into it. Mark: Sure. Before I get into that, it’s important to know that the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey might say. As I was getting out of college and I was buying more rental units, there’s lots of property managers out there who are also investors, so now I’m speaking to them as well. As I was growing this side of the portfolio, I was working as an accountant—I have a degree in accounting—for the Marriott. Wonderful, wonderful company. I learned an awful lot from the hospitality industry in terms of how to treat people, how to treat customers, and really treat my residents like I would be treating hotel guests. There’s a lot to learn out there from the hospitality industry in terms of what they do right. It’s just a different approach. It’s almost like the paradigm shift that happened with the banks maybe about 20 years ago. It used to be you run into the bank almost when you were in trouble. Now, you walk into a bank and everyone greets you, throws bottles of water at you, says hello and they give you this. That wasn’t always the way. The old school guys may remember that. Now, it’s a different paradigm because now they’re welcoming customers. They want you to come into the bank. They want you to have that transaction at their location. I would love to see that shift continue into the property management side because now it almost seems like the residents are the enemy rather than they’re the ones who pay the bills. As I continue to evolve and I loved what I learned from the hospitality industry, eventually I got to a point where I was able to get out and start to do that full-time just managing my own portfolio. Unfortunately, I got very, very overleveraged, not only in money but in time. What was happening is every time a task would come on, rather than looking for someone to hand that task to, I just took it on and kept it. There’s lots of property managers out there that are doing this. They’re not valuing their time highly enough. What ends up happening is they end up taking on this job, they don’t factor in opportunity cost where they’re going to take every job that’s out there and they’re going to do it. Even though they may be worth realistically $20–$50 an hour, they’re still doing $10 an hour jobs. In essence, every time they’re doing a $10 an hour job, they’re costing their business $40 an hour or $30 an hour and they don’t look at in that paradigm. Learning to fire yourself is one of the biggest things and I’m sure we can get in that little bit later, but really where my transition in the property management occurred was almost out of necessity. That seems to happen for a lot of people and certainly I was no exception. Going into 2009, I had about $6 million worth of real estate in my own portfolio. I was working 16–17 hours a day just trying to keep all the balls in the air. When the economy fell apart, that’s when things really, really got bad for me. Of course I started working 20 and 22 hour days and kept catching naps wherever I could. I was doing it all and I was doing it all very, very poorly. Finally, where the camel’s back broke was I got sick and I almost died in the hospital from double pneumonia. From all that, is really where I really got very intentional about setting up a business that was sustainable and I started delivering to my cash flow by doing some property management for other people. I got my broker’s license, started doing some property management on the side, and that’s really where I also got very, very intentional about how I want my business to look, the infrastructure that I needed it, and also the processes that needed to run on that infrastructure. That’s the vision infrastructure process paradigm that you’re alluding to earlier is you’re getting a vision where I wanted to go, setting up the proper infrastructure for it, and then putting the processes in place on top of that. Jason: I want to point this out because this is a milestone that I’m wondering if every entrepreneur eventually go through it. It’s like a crisis of health where we finally realize that we are not invincible, that it’s not sustainable to just do the hustle and grind that’s trumped up, and it made to look beautiful and exciting to just work, endless work weeks and crazy amounts of hours. Looking back, I had my own crisis like this. I remember I was literally at the end of a sales call laying on the floor because I had slipped a disk in my back or something because I wasn’t eating. I was just working, I thought I had to work harder and harder, I was just do-do-do, and then I couldn’t work for two weeks. I was laying on the floor and it was ridiculous. That gets really expensive trying to recover from that. 5That was when I had this shift and this epiphany came to me that our health and self-care is the foundation for my ability to provide, to do everything in the business, and you need to have a business that serves your needs and be sustainable instead of becoming this robot slave that is going to wear your body out on the business. Mark: Right To that point, you have to understand that we work so we can live, not the other way around. There’s so many people who are out there living to work and property managers, you get that one or two critical pieces, or one or two critical people that are doing 80%–90% of the work, and then you get everybody else who just shows up and cares or doesn’t care, whatever. I know it’s a typical 80/20 rule where you get 20% of people doing 80% of the work. In property management, it’s more like 1% doing 99% of the work. Then you got those critical pieces and you cannot build a sustainable business on that. Lots of property managers are very small. They’re under 500 units and they’re one- or two-man shops. In the property management company that I have, definitely is a weird hybrid between management company, maintenance company, but it works and it works really, really well. We can get into that later, but I agree with you. You have to almost get to that crisis. You either get to that crisis and you make a decision or you just have enough for you to just walk away. In either one, I don’t think is good. A lot of people get to that point because they don’t value their free time. That’s fundamentally it. They’re just not buying their time. Rob: Yup. Time is worth more than money to me now. If people approached it from that standpoint at the beginning, that’s why you hire somebody. You’re buying time. That’s why you build the business. You’re buying time. Every dollar I spend should be hopefully moving towards buying me some additional time or collapsing time. That’s why I get coaches. It collapses time. I’m buying time. I love what you’re saying. A lot of times, we start out building the business we can have instead of the business that we want, and they’re two very different things. One you’re serving and the other one serves us. Mark: That’s exactly right. There are two catch phrases I use all the time. One of those is, “There is no amount of money that will make time irrelevant.” When you get your head around that, then all of a sudden you say, “Okay.” The other phrase I use quite often, especially when I’m signing-off on a live event or something like that is, “Not only is there no amount of money that will make time irrelevant, but if you don’t place a value on your free time, someone else will.” Usually the amount of value that they’re going to place on your free time is far less than what you're worth, and they know it. That’s why they’re calling you with that, right? Jason: Yeah. The, “You got a minute?” and, “Hey, can I just take you out to lunch?” these kind of things. Mark: Absolutely right. That’s exactly right. Jason: You need to value your time. I don’t know how you tell people to value your time, but I usually say, “Take your gross revenue of the company if you’re the entrepreneur and divide that by 20-, 80-, or a 40-hour work week. That’s a pretty good estimate of what you should, at least, value your time as a dollar if you were looking at it on a dollar per hour basis.” Mark: Yeah, and if you did it on a 40-hour work week, you’d be surprised that most property managers I know are working way more than that. When you come back into it just from that simple math, that’s a perfect calculation. In fact, that’s exactly how I would tell people how to put just a rough number on your time. Or even people that are doing property management on the side. There’s lots of property managers are also estate brokers. They all have to be brokers, but they’re also doing real estate transactions on the side where they’re showing properties and they’re selling properties. That’s all revenue and that’s where you need to determine your opportunity cost. I would say all of your revenue that’s coming in, divide that by coming up with an hourly rate in terms of a 40-hour work week or even a 50-hour work week, to be fair. If you’re coming up with the $50–$60 an hour rate and you’re doing a $12 an hour work, you’ve got to replace yourself from doing that task as soon as you possibly can. I have a driver that I hire when I go to Indianapolis. I go to Indianapolis a couple of times a week and people are like, “Oh, you’re mister big time,” and I’m like, “No, it’s not about that. It’s not about because I feel super important. It’s because I get three hours of windshield time that literally is purposeless. I might listen on audio book. I still like to drive, but it’s not about that. It’s so I can get that time back.” So when I’m done at the end of the day, I’m not completely wiped out and spent. I don’t have to spend an extra three hours at the office that I should be spending with my wife, even if just sitting on the couch with her. Or just sitting at home being with her, or being around my kids, or just being home, where I want to be. There’s lots of people who don’t understand that and I’m like, “Okay, I pay this guy maybe $50, $75, $100 to drive me there and back. That’s easily worth it because my time is several hundred dollars an hour. Someone wants to call me and coach with me, I’m like, “Yeah, that's what I’m going to charge you,” so why would it cost myself that money driving? Sometimes, I still do because I want the solitude and I want to listen to an audio book and just enjoy it. Sometimes, I just want road time. But lots of times, if it’s purposeless, I really want to try to eliminate those bottlenecks as quickly as I possibly can, so I can stay focused on what I’m really trying to accomplish. Jason: Yeah. It’s funny. You’ll see entrepreneurs, they say they have $1 million business. Their time is probably worth about $480 an hour by that calculation, say $500 bucks an hour, and they’re still doing stuff like sometimes you’ll see them doing their yard. If they love doing those things, great, but sometimes we’ll be so focused on one area that we lose sight. For example, there was a time period where I hired a house manager and a nanny because all the fake dad stuff was being done. [...] care about laundry. They don’t care who makes the mills. They want time. So if I can offload those thing to somebody and I’m not paying them $500 an hour to offload those things, then I can spend time. Ultimately, were buying time and that’s a critical piece to growing and scaling business. Mark: Yes. That’s 100% vision. A lot of times, especially whether I’m working with an individual investor or I’m working with a property manager, door count is really where a lot of people say that and I stop them. I know. For example, I got the moniker, Landlord Coach, but my goal is to make people not landlords. If I was going to be a property management coach, my goal would not to make them better property managers. My goal for them is to be better business owners. Even though a lot of times they say, “Oh, all I want,” if it’s an investor, “are 100 units,” or if it’s a property manager, “I want 1000 doors.” I’m like, “Okay, so 999 wouldn’t do it?” and they go, “Well, yeah maybe.” “Okay 997 wouldn’t do it?” I’ll go down this until they finally get that, “Well, okay Mark, what’s your point?” I said, “Look, it’s not the number of doors. It’s really about...” Jason: It’s not an ego number, not an ego goal. Mark: Right. It’s not about that at all. It’s about what you are trying to accomplish in terms of your revenue goals. It’s really about that. If this is about ego, I respect that, but that’s not toward your vision. A lot of times they say, “Okay, well let’s get towards a vision that’s really actually purposeful and usually after I beat him up a little bit and I go, “Okay, 997. How about 995?” After they go, “Okay, what’s your point?” A lot of times I would say, “Okay, so in other words, you’re saying to me that you need to get to a revenue or you need to get to 1000 doors at, say, $1000 apiece. That’s what you need, but you couldn’t get there with 500 doors at $2000 apiece? Obviously the math is the same and a lot less work,” and they go, “Well, yeah. Okay.” “So, is it really about door count? Because I can get you 1000 doors. There are not going to be anything in the world that you or anybody else going to want to manage, but you really want 1000 doors?” Jason: [...] ridiculously low, that you can get a lot of doors really quickly. Mark: And that’s what a friend of mine did. He’s in the area of the state that I wouldn’t go to for love or money, and it’s terrible. I feel bad for him because I see him, watching him get into a leaky lifeboat in shark-infested waters, and I’m just like, “Oh, my God.” And he’s a good dude. He grew overnight from zero to, I don’t even know he’s pumping maybe 150–200 now, but they’re units that I wouldn’t take for any amount. I literally go, “Well, the rent amount isn’t enough to cover my management fees,” because they still wouldn’t be enough. Jason: Ultimately, people really need to ask themselves the question, “What do you really want? What do I really want out of the business?” If it’s an ego goal, great, but maybe what you really want is usually some lifestyle or maybe you want to have some amount of time, you want to spend time with your kids. What do you really want? And maybe you can create that and have that without having 1000 doors or without it having to look a certain way that you may have thought. [...] really matter? Why [...] matter? Mark: Right. It’s really not about door count as much as people want to focus on that now to a certain degree. It depends on your business structure. Again, investors are a little bit different than property managers. In my case, we do a lot of our own maintenance. We have an in-house maintenance department. A significant amount of revenues come in from that. Having more doors enables us to have more opportunities to maintenance. So in that particular case, it does really matter, but we still want to manage higher-end properties. We don’t do a lot of low-end stuff anymore just because of the amount of banging your head against around. It just increases exponentially when you get a certain lower market. It’s just not a market that we want to court anymore. We got out of that probably maybe six years ago and never looked back. The level of drama that has decreased in my life has just been exponential. Not saying that’s bad. There’s other people who want to court that market and do well in that market. That’s certainly fine if that’s a strategy that’s working for you. I’m not telling you about to change it. But for me, I would really invite you to really focus on not even so much as a revenue goal, because then the revenue goal, it’s funny because people go, “Well, yeah. I would like to have $50,000 a month coming in free cash flow, Mike.” And then, I go back to my normal argument and go, “Well, okay. So you want $50,000 a month coming in. $49,990 won’t do it?” So, you have to tie it to a life output goal. That’s why I say to them, “What is this even about? What are you trying to accomplish?” When they say, “Well, okay. What I’m really trying to do,” and usually it’s after they start to fight back some tears, “honestly I just want to spend more time with my kids.” “Okay, does more time mean?” “Honestly, I would love to be able to homeschool them.” “Awesome. Now we’re getting to a vision that really frigging matters. Not some nebulous 1000 doors, or $50,000 a month, or whatever it is. That’s what you want and we can tie a number to that. We can tie a revenue number to that.” Or, “I want to move my aging mother into a house that’s just close by.” “Okay, what’s it going to take to buy your mom a house? Do you even need to buy it? Can you rent one? The next 10 years, your mom’s 80 now. Is she going to live another 10 years or you can budget 10 years worth of rent payments for that sort of thing?” Whatever that is, you can actually get a quantifiable life output goal that’s tied to that and that’s really what vision really needs to be. It needs to come from the limbic system of our brain. The problem with the limbic system is it doesn’t have a capacity for language. It can’t explain why you love your wife. It can’t explain why you love your grandmother. We come up with platitudes like, “Well, she bakes me cookies,” but that’s a thing. You just say, “I don’t know. It’s just the way she makes me feel,” and you get teary-eyed. That’s the limbic system activating your brain and that’s how when you get to that point of your vision and you start to think that way, feel that when you get the goose bumps on your on your arms, that’s when you’re close. And that’s when you know you’re starting to get to a vision that really, really matters. Jason: I like it. I like it a lot. You touched on a couple things. Some of the concepts that I share is the cycle suck. It’s like if you take on bad owners, you’ll have bad tenants or bad properties. If you have bad properties, you get bad tenants. If you get bad tenants, then you all have a bad reputation, and then you’ll attract more bad owners. By taking up on the crappy properties, you end up caught in property management hell, the cycle of suck. Another concept that resonates with what you’re talking about that I the shares the four Ds to revenue. It’s not just about doors. The four Ds, the first one could be doors, but the next one is how many deals. Deals is usually what I share first. You get number of deals you get in, how many doors per deal? It’s not just about the doors. One deal being worth one door, that’s the ratio, then you don’t have as much leverage. It’s not as easy, but if on average your deals have two doors, you double your revenue. It’s these four numbers that multiply. Then, you’ve got duration. How long can you keep the door on? A 1-year accidental investor versus a 10-year buy and hold, in your property management business there’s 10 times difference. That’s pretty significant. Then, there’s dollars. It’s just what your fee structure is like. Are your fees good? It’s not just about doors. There’s all these other variables that can create that. I love shifting it towards the life goal because the life goal is what really matters. I would imagine you found this with coaching clients. Sometimes the life goal and all the stuff they had trumped up in their mind, or built up, or that they felt they needed in order to have the life that they want, sometimes you can just jump right to life goal. You can just create that like, “I want to spend an extra hour with my kids.” “Okay, block out an extra hour,” and they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t think I could do that.” Sometimes it’s really that simple. We can just jump right to the life goal and the business will still be there and it will still function. Mark: Yup, that is true. One of the things I talk about in The Time-Wealthy Investor 2.0 is really about making that decision. A buddy of mine who’s got multiple units is just nauseatingly wealthy in terms of real estate. He’s a great guy and said to me, “You know? I read your book the other day.” He’s a guy who doesn’t read and he’s such a snarky friend. His name is Randy and he says, “I would never admit this to your face, but I feel I have to,” he goes, “I really got a lot out of that book.” I was like, “Okay. What’s the punchline?” He’s like, “No, there’s really no punchline. I feel I am time-wealthy,” he goes, “and funny, I could probably retire based on the life output that I want to define right now.” He’s like, “Really, time-wealth is really more of a decision that it is a destination.” I was like, “Yeah, it really is because right now I have all the time-weath that I want. I work about maybe two hours a week. Sometimes I’m working more, like right now, I’m pitching in more in the office just because we’re down a person,” but it gets me re-engage in the business and it makes me go, “Hey guys, why are we doing it this way?” and then they go, “Oh, because this this and this.” I’m like, “Okay, cool,” and I let them define the process. If they’re the ones that normally work the process, my job is really to come in, look and see what maybe needs tinkering with, maybe new or adjusting, giving them coaching, that’s the sort of thing. Working 2 hours a week, sometimes 4–5 hours a month in the property management business, but I have all this time-wealth to do other things like coaching, writing books, and things that I really, really enjoy. It really is just a decision. When you hire good people, you bring them in, you set up a solid infrastructure for your business, set up solid processes, and you let them run it. Stay the hell out of the way. When I’m coaching property managers, that’s where I see a lot of problems. They don’t have an established vision for themselves, they don’t have proper infrastructure, they’re trying to run on really lean infrastructure or none at all, so the process has to pick it up. What I’m talking about infrastructure, say property management software, or website, or things like that, when you have a weak infrastructure, it has to be picked up by a stronger process, which means people. A person has to pick up that extra process. Let’s just go from the really sublime to ridiculous level. Say you don’t have property management software. You’re running everything on Excel spreadsheets. That’s the extreme, but there are property managers out there doing that, so that means they have to have a lot of people managing that poor infrastructure. Here’s the thing. Here’s the one thing I hear all the time is that, “Oh, my property manager doesn’t communicate. They don’t communicate with me. They don’t tell me.” When you have bad communication, that is a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Let me say that again. When you have bad communication, that’s a symptom of the problem, not the problem. The problem is you have bad infrastructure, you have bad process. That’s where communication issues are going to show up. Let’s just use a very obscure example. We’ve all been to a restaurant where you had bad service. You’re sitting down and you can see that that waiter has nine tables and that waiter has one table. You’re trying to communicate to someone to take your order. You can see the problem because you’re sitting on the outside. You can see the problem, but you’re going, “Well, that waiter’s got nine tables, that one’s got one. Why isn’t the manager stepping in?” Bad process. “Why does that person have nine tables?” That’s bad infrastructure. That never should have happened that way. That’s just one very obscure example. Let me use another quick example here real fast. Have you ever walked up to a McDonald’s at a truck stop, where there’s basically four cashiers ready to take your order. You walk up, you look left and right, and everybody’s standing back away from the registers. the customers. You’re trying to figure out who’s next in line. You’re like, “Can I go? Are you next?” Because there’s no infrastructure, the customers have to decide who’s next in line. What’s a simple piece of infrastructure that you could put in place to manage that? Well, a simple queue, a simple rope line. That’s a piece of infrastructure that you could put in place that would manage the customer flow. Then, you don’t have to worry about that. Another example would be a bad process. Let’s pretend you go back to the same McDonald’s. This time it’s really busy and the customers are four and five deep at each line at each of the four registers. This time what ends up happening is you get a manager that opens the fifth register and says, “I can help the next person.” Then, you get somebody who goes from the bend of one line and then jumps in front of everybody else. Now you just base and created a brawl. It’s this mad rush towards this fifth line. That’s a process problem. What should have happened is, “Hey, I’m the assistant manager. I’m going to have you open that line over there but I’m going to direct some people over there. I’m going to go out to the crowd and direct some people over there first before you say anything.” Then you can manage the process. That’s process. That’s a broken process when they do it the other way. That’s why I’m saying infrastructure and process shows up in bad communication all the time. This means they’re not communicating work orders when they come in. They’re not communicating when a resident doesn’t pay rent. Owners need to know that. They need to know if they’re expecting the revenue to come in on a certain month and they don’t get communicated that. “Oh, by the way, the resident never paid rent,” and, “Oh, yeah. By the way, we’re going to go ahead and evict them.” They need to know these things and when you don’t have an infrastructure or a process in place to let them know that, that’s when communication falls. That’s when the bad communication issue show up. Jason: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s really tempting for entrepreneurs to start blaming their team. This is like early entrepreneurs that they’re transitioning away from being a solopreneur, that having a team, they usually build the team around them as if they’re just the solopreneur still, and they try to micromanage them. They’re always complaining about the communication. They’re always complaining about people not doing things, “Why can’t they just do what I tell them?” and that sort of thing. I like what you’re saying is they have bad infrastructure and bad process. Things are not defined, there isn’t clarity, and that leads to challenges in communication. [...] built into the process. They can be part of the process. [...] you need the right tools to facilitate communication. I run a virtual company. If we didn’t have the tools that facilitate communication, there wouldn’t be any. We’re in different states, some of us different countries. Mark: That’s exactly right and they need to think about their business, about the product that they produce. I used somewhat as a nebulous example, but the product that they need to produce should be consistency. That’s the product that they need to be shooting for. When consistency is your product, the only competitor you’re going to have a sloppiness. When consistency is your product, sloppiness is your only competition. That’s the thing that is really hard for me to convey to lots of managers because we’ve got all sorts of products. We sell properties. We buy properties. We do all these different things. I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t care if you’re making razor blades. You need to have a consistent product and I will not allow us to do anything in the business unless we can do it consistently. If they come to me and say, “Hey, you know what we should do? We should send out birthday cards to all of our residents.” “Okay, great. How are you going to do that consistently? And you need to tell me. Who’s going to manage it? Who’s going to do it? What’s the negative feedback loop if that doesn’t happen?” Let me talk about negative feedback loop for second. You put something in place, it’s like I send you an email expecting you to do something. What’s the negative feedback loop I’m going to put in place if that doesn’t happen? I’m not talking a negative feedback loop like someone complains, which is often what happens if something doesn’t get done. You go, “Oh, man. I don’t know. I sent that email off two weeks ago. I forgot about it. I just assume that they would do it.” What’s the negative feedback that you’re going to put in place to make sure it actually gets done? Are you going to list that [...]? Are you going to put a task? Are you’re going to put something in some task management software? What’s the negative feedback loop that you’re going to have to make sure that stuff gets done? That’s all part of process. Let me just boil this down into an example because I keep saying vision, infrastructure, and process. Think of vision as your map. Infrastructure would be the train tracks, and then the process should be the train that runs on those tracks that all stays in alignment with your vision for the future. Now, for property managers, they’re saying, “Well, why would my employees care about my vision?” They’re not going to care about your vision. They’re only going to work so hard, but they’re not going to work that hard to put a boat in your driveway, or a pool in your backyard. This is an extra step to goes in with property managers is once you have that vision for your future, then you go into developing core values for your business. The core values are just the things that you value. You may value justice, You may value efficiency, you may value lots of different things that are core to you, but now you get to identify what those things are and that becomes your compass for all decisions that you’re making. Once you have those core values defined, if you’re making improvement, you say, “Okay, is this in line with my core values?” If I’m going to make a hiring decision or a firing decision, are they acting in line with my core values? When I do my employee evaluations, I’m going to say, “Hey, when you did this, this was really in alignment with our core values and I really like what you did,” or, “Hey, when you did this, I was really upset because it wasn’t in line with our core values. I’m [...] say you. I’m just upset that your behavior because this isn’t in alignment with our core values.” One of the things I’ll coach them through, some are three, four, five, no more than six. A lot of people sometimes want to get, “Oh, we value all the stuff,” but usually it’s something that’s inherent to them as an individual and they value these things. They value justice, they value equity, they value fairness, and they can value profitability. There’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person because we all need profits to grow, get better, and be a better company. Once you get those core values defined, then it’s easier to put infrastructure and process improvements in place. The infrastructure of the things I’m talking about there are websites, software, even the desks and chairs in your office. The process pieces are really about how you operate. It’s the rules of how much you operate, it’s your SRP, it’s your FAQs. Those things that really helped define how things are done in your office based on it that infrastructure that you have in place. Jason: A lot of alignment between what you’re doing and what I do with clients as well. I mean, 3–4 core values for their business, you’re helping them figure out their purpose, their why as a business owner. These things sound like woo woo and fluff to a lot of people until they implement them. Then, they’re usually pretty astounded because, like I tell my clients, “You’re the sun at the center of the solar system. If you don’t like what’s going on inside the solar system, you change the sun, everything changes.” Usually as business owners, we try to externalize everything and tackle everything farthest away from ourselves. If we work on ourselves. everything changes by default. Mark: That’s so good. I love that. That is so true. Jason: So, we talked about vision, we talked about the infrastructure, we talked about the process. Is there anything else that you want to touch on while we’re hanging out here? Mark: Yeah. I see a lot of people out there that are just working themselves. They’ve created a job for themselves and they’re not ever trying to transition themselves out. They think that there’s no end in sight. Jason: They’ve succumbed. They [...] to their fate. Mark: Yeah. I’m not saying I’m the coach for everybody and you would probably say the same thing, that you’re not the coach for everybody, but for God’s sake, get a coach. Get somebody that can help you get to where you want to go so much faster. Yeah, it’s great being your own boss because you didn’t want to be held accountable to anybody. But now you’re not accountable to anybody, know your life sucks. It didn’t turn out the way you want it. If you’re living the dream, your life is great, and you have everything that you want, that’s great. I don’t know that I can help you get much better, but get somebody to help you. We talked earlier about each of us having coaches. I spend a lot of money each month on coaches to help me in areas where I have blind spots and just to challenge me, just to say, “Hey, Mark. You said you were going to do XYZ by a certain period of time. That’s not done, so now what?” They already know how they’re going to hold me accountable and I pay a fair sum to these people, so it hurts when I show up. I know I’m going to be ready when the bell rings. It’s not about paying them the money just for the sake of paying them the money so that they can call and yell at me. They are a softer touch, but the thing is, I want to make sure that I’m being held accountable because we don’t have anybody that’s holding us accountable. That’s the danger of being an entrepreneur. I would really encourage people to look at that. It doesn’t necessarily need to be real estate-focused although it probably would make more sense. I have one that helps me in sales. I have one that helps me in marketing. I have one that helps me as a national speaker. I go and I speak at a lot of different places, so I have one that help coach me in that. And of course different masterminds of things like. I would really, highly encourage people that if they are looking or just flirting with the idea, get somebody. I am going to say this. The difference between a coach and a mentor, I would say a mentor is probably someone that you’re not paying, probably a friend. They are not going to hold you accountable to the level that you need. I say that this is someone you need to pay, it needs to hurt a little bit, and you need to have some skin in the game. You really need to be committed and you really need to be paying somebody to do that. Like I said, it doesn’t need to be me, it doesn’t need to be you. I’m just saying it’s someone they knew paying someone. Jason: Yeah. There’s some magic I’ve noticed, just psychologically, that happens in shifts inside of my clients or that shifts inside of myself when I am paying a coach and I’m investing in myself. It just shifts psychologically how we value ourselves and energetically it allows us to convince others to invest in us as well. It’s a hard sell to go out even as a property management business owner and if you’re doing the sales in your company, you’re the BDM and say, “Hey, you should spend money with us. You should invest. You should have us manage your rental property,” but I don’t even invest in myself. I don’t care enough about myself or my business to invest in that. I’m just trying to make money, then you’re going to ask others to invest in you. Psychologically, when you invest in yourself, I’ve noticed revenue goes up for me, lifestyle shifts. There’s something that happens energetically and psychologically when you are subconsciously investing in yourself. It shifts things. I love what you’re saying, everybody really deserves to have a coach, they deserve to be working with consultants, they deserve to have people above them. If you’re at the top of the org chart, there’s a problem. There’s a problem because everybody below in the org chart is hopefully being fed, getting some input, growing, and evolving, but if you’re at the top of the org chart and there’s nobody above you, it’s a scary place to be. [...] The Emperor With No Clothes, unless you get some input, unless you get somebody that you can place above you in that org chart like a coach, or mentor, or something that will feed you. Mark: I look at it exactly the way you’re looking at it except I flip your chart upside down. I look at those people as the direct supports for everybody above them because they’re carrying the weight of everybody above them. If you get somebody that’s not doing what they’re supposed to be doing—they’re coming in late, they’re wiggling around at the top, and you’re trying the keep the org chart balanced—it’s tough. Maybe it’s so far up that you can’t see what’s going on up there, but you have a coach that can stand back and go, “Yeah, that guy’s playing Galaga on his computer and you don’t even see it,” because you don’t want to see it or you just can’t see it. That’s where it gets tricky and a lot of times, you get too close to the problem and you can’t see it. It’s like you sitting back watching the waiter who’s got nine tables. You can see the problem instantly. Jason: [...] you can’t sometimes. They’re too close to the fire, they’re dealing with what they’re dealing with right at that moment, that’s us as entrepreneurs all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a coach, I’ve sat down with coach or talk to one of my coaches and said, “Hey, here’s what I’m dealing with,” and they point, they say something to me, and I feel really stupid, then I say back to them, “That’s exactly what I would’ve told one of my clients.” We’re just too close to the fire. We don’t have somebody outside of ourselves because we are the one that created the problem. We’re at the helm. We are the problem. We are the biggest bottleneck in our company. We are the one holding everything back. We’re the one preventing growth. Us trying to solve the problem on our own is like trying to look at the back of our own head. Mark: Yeah. It’s like trying to put sunscreen on your own back and that’s the thing. If you don’t see yourself as part of the problem, you cannot see yourself as part of the solution. A lot of times when it’s educating them to say, “Look, your company has a very real culture problem. That one is not respectful, that one is treating customers anyway that they want. As a result, they’re treating each other very poorly and blah-blah-blah.” That’s because when you got ill-defined core values, you’re going to run into that. You’re going to run into culture problems. There’s a client that I really didn’t feel like I could help him as much as I wanted to, but he had a real culture problem is at his office. He didn’t really see it until he started letting some people go that were really some of the major problems. He had a live event that we don’t work together anymore, but I’d love to get him back on just to say, “Hey, how are you doing? How did things evolve for you in terms of getting those core values more well-defined?” and really start holding people accountable to them. One of the things that I do is we have an 8:07 meeting every day. The reason it’s 8:07 is people are rarely late to a meeting that’s got an oddball time to it. They always get there early. There’s not much I don’t do without purpose, but every meeting, we pick one of our five core values and we review it. They’re hearing these core values every single day. That way at their 90-day evaluation, guess what they get to roll over again? Guess what they’re hearing again? Our core values. They’re getting graded against those core values. It’s not just a shock like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. I never heard that core value before.” These are things that need to be repeated over and over. Jason: Yeah. I think we run our businesses probably somewhat similar [...]. Everything gravitates towards truth. We do our daily huddle at 8:45 every morning. I always have appointments starting at 9:00, so it has to be short and that allows our team to see each other because we’re virtual, but yeah, it’s an oddball time which does work, to make sure people show up. Mark: Absolutely. Jason: Cool. Mark, it’s really great to connect with you, to get [...]. How can people get in touch with you? Now, I want to point out like we were talking before the show, your area of genius, what you really can help probably our listeners with, is on the delivery, the fulfillment side, building out this portion of their business where they may be struggling, especially those that are graduating maybe from solopreneur to trying to build a team. That’s where they’re getting the systems and processes. They’re not the guy doing every single thing or the gal doing every single thing anymore and that’s a painful transition. How can people get in touch with the Mark and Landlord Coach? Mark: My website’s landlordcoach.com. I’m on Facebook @mylandlordcoach. You can find me easily. You can see the moniker in the back. I think where you and I differ is that I helped create capacity in the world. I helped create white space on our calendar. What they do with that white space is up to them. If they want to use that white space to grow their company from 300 doors to 800 doors, that’s fine. I don’t help them with the growth side. I just help them create capacity on their calendar, help create white space, so they can do whatever they want. Now, some people go, “Yeah. I’m happy with the white space and I’m making enough money now and I’ve gotten time on my calendar. I’m cool. I got everything I want.” Some people get to that point in their like, “No, we’re ready to grow.” I’m not the growth guy. It’s not what I do. I’m not from that piece of it. I [...] turn it over to someone you and say, “Now that you got this increased capacity, that’s the person that’s going to help you take your business from 1000 doors to 2000 or whatever.” That that’s not what I do. What I do is I help them create capacity on the calendar. To that aspect I just want to make sure I delineate myself there because I do work with a lot of individual investors. I also work with property managers and just helping them get their life back. That’s one of the biggest things that I do. Jason: Love it. Mark, I appreciate you being on the show. Thanks for being here. Mark: This has been great. Thanks so much and my best wishes to all your listeners. Jason: Thank you. All right, we’ll let Mark go. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to like and subscribe on whichever channel we’re on. We’re on YouTube, we are no iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to our email newsletter. If you are property management entrepreneur that’s wanting to grow your business, add doors, and increase your revenue, then please reach out to us over at DoorGrow. We’d be happy to have a conversation and see if you are a good fit for what we might be able to do for you. Of course, check out Mark and his business over at Landlord Coach. That’s it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth, everyone. Bye. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. 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How can you reduce the number of times you show a property? Virtual tours. It’s time to weed out unnecessary in-person showings with time wasters and tire kickers.  Today, I am talking to James Barrett of Tenant Turner, a leading property management tool and resource that lets property managers manage tenant leads, schedule showings, and automate the leasing process.  You’ll Learn... [02:59] Goal of Virtual Tours: Educate potential tenants before choosing to visit property. [03:27] Customer-Centric Concept: Virtual tours evolved from quality images to videos. [04:20] ROI: Reduced costs for video camera equipment make virtual tours possible. [07:40] Lack of competition makes virtual tours core to growth and promotion.  [08:28] Direct correlation between virtual tours, time on market, vacancy, and showings. [08:53] Quality over Quantity: Maximize exposure to increase good-fit tenant leads. [13:37] Virtual tours take time and money. Are they worth it? Promoted? Required? [16:29] Record moves, maintenance, and inspections for marketing and leasing metrics. [21:08] Options and Recommendations: Zillow’s 3D Home, zInspector, and Ricoh; or outsource and offload to PlanOmatic, VirtuallyinCredible, and HomeJab. Tweetables Listings with virtual tours increase interest by 250% and generate 49% more leads. One-third of Tenant Turner’s customers do virtual tours; 11% of its listings include them. Do virtual tours. If you do, you’ll be different, reduce vacancy, and make more money. About 45% of millennial renters seek virtual tour technology before making a decision. Resources Tenant Turner James Barrett’s Email Matterport Zillow zInspector Apartments.com VirtuallyinCredible Ricoh National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) PlanOmatic HomeJab DGS 45: Automate Tenant Lead Management with James Barrett and Calvin Davis of Tenant Turner DGS 78: Automating Property Showings with Michael Sanz of Neesh Property DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.  At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today's guest is my buddy James Barrett. James, how are you? James: Doing well, sir. Good to be back on the show. Jason: James and I were just in Nashville, at the Southern States Conference. We got to hang out afterwards and we went dancing. We went out on the town and it was crazy, wasn't it? James: It was a great time. Jason: It was a great time. James: Dance floors everywhere. Jason: The musicians and the talent. Yeah, it was crazy. It was a lot of fun. James: That’s what I tell people about Nashville all the time, the worst musician in Nashville is better than every musician everywhere else, it seems like. Jason: I'm doing open mic night tomorrow night and everyone in Nashville’s better than me, that's for sure. I'm taking the risk, I'm getting on stage. James: That’s right, go out there. You can get a lot of practice behind the mic doing this podcast so it'll… Jason: I don't know if that's the same as singing with the guitar, but yeah. James: We'll see. Jason: We'll see. James, you've been on the show before, welcome back. I'm glad to have you here. In case anybody who’s listening doesn't know James and they can't see his shirt because they're listening, he is part of a company called Tenant Turner, which consistently has been one of the top performing companies for vendors. In our Facebook group, we get a lot of positive feedback from clients on Tenant Turner. I'm glad to have you back on the show. Today, we’re going to be talking about virtual tour technologies, what is that? James: For those of you who might be questioning, “Why is James from a scheduling software, where they do lock boxes and in person showing, why is he talking about virtual tours?” With virtual tours, the real goal is how can you reduce the number of showings that are happening because people are being educated before physically having to go to the property. Jason, as you alluded to with how highly we’re rated within the Facebook group and what not, we are a very customer centric, customer driven organization.  It is something that's come up, particularly more recently, is just the concept of virtual tours. Seeing the evolution of quality images, which was kind of the norm 5-10 years ago. Making sure you have quality, high definition images on your listings, to then moving more to a model of video tours, which is a form of virtual tours but really just the gateway of virtual tours where you're taking a video walking through the home. Now, more and more, we see customers who are adopting these 3D virtual tours like those that are provided by like Matterport. It's becoming very important within the industry because people are investing in this amount of time and effort into these virtual tours and they need to make sure they're seeing an ROI on that. Jason: Are they always seeing an ROI or is that a problem? James: It's been a problem largely because of the investment has always been so high, because one of the big companies that really got into the real estate market was Matterport, one that's very highly rated, but their cameras are $4000. Every property management company in the world might want to do a virtual tour, but at that price point, it's limited.  What we’ve seen more recently is there's now lower cost 360 cameras that are used by not only Matterport, but companies like zInspector which are used by a lot of property managers for inspection software. Really, I think one of the big tipping points is Zillow, who recently came out with their own app that allows you to take a 360 virtual tours utilizing just an iPhone. You're starting to see that barrier to entry drop down pretty significantly but it's still early on in its adoption phases here. Jason: We've had some really great episodes for those listening, if they look at like that so we do with Michael Sanz. He talked a lot about how he's leveraged some of these cheaper cameras and took to offload and to reduce the number of showing significantly. Let's dig in, so how does this apply to Tenant Turner? James: One of the things we have is we have a nice, unique data set that tells us how many people are starting to adopt these types of virtual tours and put them in their listings. We started to see a nice little increase of such tours to date. Right now, it's only about 11% of our active listings, but just a couple years ago, sub 1%, sub 2%. It was really just in its infancy. We started to see faster adoption of virtual tours and one of the things that's also really interesting is 11% of our active rentals have virtual tours associated with them, but now a full third of our customers had at least one virtual tour. Companies in general are starting to adopt more and more of the virtual tours and basically building it to their process. Jason: Let's point this out, people that are using Tenant Turner are probably the more tech savvy, maybe more forthcoming property manager, I mean they're a little more forward thinking, is what I mean. They're early adopters and using your technology. You may have 11% and maybe 33% or whatever a third or have at least one but I would imagine outside Tenant Turner, the number has got to be way lower.  This is still a huge differentiating factor for a management company that say, “Hey, we do these tours.” It's probably really rare that people are going to bump into any competitors that are doing this yet. Even the people that are savvy enough to be using a scheduling software and showing software like Tenant Turner, only 11% of the properties it’s really being used for. James: Yeah, and I think where there's a huge opportunity within the property management space, is now that some of these barriers have been brought down, making it core to your growth model being able to promote the fact that you do this. You actually have an artifact that is created that you can then share with the property owner, that's part of the whole thing, it's part of the inspection process. It's part of your now marketing material where you can say, “Look at these beautiful virtual tours that we're providing,” that really nobody else in your market may be doing. Jason: Yeah and I'm sure there's a direct correlation between virtual tours, and time on the market, and vacancy, and not having to do showings and all of this. James: It's really interesting, there's a lot of similarities between Tenant Turner and our goals and what virtual tours do. With Tenant Turner, we want to make the process as streamlined as possible. On one hand we're generating more leads because we want to make sure we maximize our customer’s exposure, but on the other hand, we want to eliminate anyone who's not a good fit. On the one side, we’re a 24/7 service that can respond to the leads instantly, but on the other side, we have a pre qualification scoring tool that weeds out people who aren’t a good fit. These virtual tours are kind of the same thing but for the other side of the market. With virtual tours, because you have a virtual tour on your listing, statistically it's going to get more page views. It's going to get more clicks.  Apartments.com, they actually did a nice little study on this and it's something that they've started offering through their website is highlighting listings that have virtual tours. There's a 250% increase in time on page for a listing that has a virtual tour versus one that does not Jason: Okay, you said 250%? James: 250%, yep. You got to think too, a lot of these listing sites, they're very vanilla, you can go to Zillow or HotPads or apartments.com and it's pretty cookie cutter in a lot of ways. If you are able to provide a virtual tour and it gets pushed out to those different sites and they can put a little tag or icon next to it, it can go a long way into generating more clicks. Similar to Tenant Turner, they're trying to increase leads with virtual tours and we see more time on page. They’ve also seen a 49% increase in the number of leads. That's one of the goals of virtual tours is how can we get more leads into the top end of the funnel. At the same time, just like Tenant Turner, how we like to weed out people who aren’t a good fit, the virtual tours are helping prospective tenants weed themselves out if they think that the place is a good fit for them. Jason: Right. Yeah, makes sense. James: More leads on one hand but at the same time better fit leads, so that way when it does get time for a showing, you'll ultimately have fewer showings at a particular property but it will be more people who are qualified… Jason: More relevant. James:…exactly, exactly. It's a quality over quantity type solution. Jason: Yeah, I mean relevancy is the crux of everything. It doesn't matter how great the property is or how many tenants you have going through it, if the showings aren't relevant or they're not interested. It allows them to filter it out. They can see the kitchen and say, “No, that's too small,” or they can see the backyard, “That's not what I was hoping for.” They just get a better feel for what it would like to be in it without having actually go and do it. If there is a virtual tour and somebody scheduled to showing they're probably fairly legit interested. They’re probably seriously considering putting an application in on this place. They're probably ready to move. Whereas, instead of getting a whole host of tire kickers and time wasters. James: That's right. What we’re seeing, the big thing right now in our industry is the movement to support self access viewings and whatnot. Within Tenant Turner, only a third of our properties are enabled for self access, because if you have an occupied property, if the owner won’t allow self access to the particular property, if the price point’s too low, you're still going to show and if the price points too high, you're still going to show it. This is a huge tool to help weed out unnecessary in-person showings. If you have your showing agent, like you said, driving around town interacting with all these different tire kickers who would’ve weeded themselves out of the process if they actually saw what it looked like from the curb, if they actually had an opportunity to see the size of the backyard and wouldn’t fit their two or three dogs. If they saw the layout of it and they know they want an open floor plan, but then as soon as they walk in they see it's not an open floor plan, they're going to walk right back out. It is a huge opportunity to generate more leads because you've got people who are going to be more engaged with your listing, but then also allow them to self identify that it's really not a good fit for them based upon what they're seeing in the virtual tour. Jason: Yeah, I mean it's really difficult when you're just looking at a bunch of photos where you’re just seeing an angle from one corner of a room, and that's all you see of each room. It's really hard to get perspective as a renter and you have no idea how these rooms kind of fit together, how that works and what the flow of the place would be like, so all that makes sense. How is Tenant Turner allowing people to get the virtual showings into the listings? James: Yeah, it was kind of a surprising thing that we saw come through our enhancements requests and whatnot, it was just really people—they're spending a lot of money. Whether they own their own Matterport camera or they're putting a lot of time into it and these virtual tours can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to record. Some people like to go in at Matterport and do video editing or maybe they pay a service like VirtuallyinCredible to do virtual tour, where they stitch together the images for you and stuff like that. They're either putting in a lot of time or putting in a lot of money or effort or both.  One of the downsides with a lot of these listing sites,and even with Tenant Turner for awhile was that you couldn't really put links in the description that were clickable that enabled that to be highlighted element. They came through in our enhancement request, just making sure that those things are being promoted appropriately that got Tenant Turner now their own section where people can watch tours. It highlights the fact that that particular listing has a tour versus the ones that do not. The links are in the descriptions, hyperlinks and clickable, which then engages a new window for them to be able to watch the tours before they go through and schedule a showing. Some of our customers, they even have custom questions built into the Tenant Turner Questionnaire that asks if they have viewed the tour. Jason: I was going to say, can they require in order to schedule a showing or even to do a self access, can you require them to confirm that they have seen the virtual tour so no time’s wasted? James: Yeah and that's a huge thing. We've seen that in past questions that customers created. It was really like, “Have you driven through the neighborhood?” was kind of the beginning part of it, because they didn’t want to meet somebody at a home that the person has no idea what the neighborhood is like, if it’s going to be a good fit for them, have they driven by and seen the outside. Now we’re starting to see more people do that with the virtual tours and say, “Have you watched the virtual tour?” If not, draw attention to it before they schedule an appointment, because if they're not satisfied with the virtual tour, they're not going to be satisfied with an in-person tour once they get to the property. Jason; Right. Very clever. What are some other ways that people are leveraging these or making sure that it's all tied together? You're at the forefront of seeing how people are reaching this stuff. I think that's a clever hack to require the virtual tour in some way or fashion. Are there any other things like that that you're noticing people are doing to facilitate this? James: Yes. I think one thing that's really interesting and really smart is particularly the cost of these cameras is dropping and there are more options for property managers than there's ever been before. As you're doing your move outs and some of the homes obviously, they're going to need some maintenance as you turn them over, and maybe a new coat of paint, a new carpet, whatever, but as you do your next move-in inspection, if you have a 360 camera for using the Zillow 3D Home app, if you're using your own iPhone in order to record your pictures and whatnot, use that next move-in inspection as an opportunity to not only record what the status of the home is before the new tenant moves in, but then use that as an opportunity for your marketing material too. A lot of these tools like Matterport for example if you use one of their cameras, it'll take all the pictures panoramic pictures for you, and then you can even take out specific 2D images and use those for your marketing materials too. Basically, if you have the right equipment and your budget allows for it, put the camera on the tripod, put it inside each room, it'll take stance of the entire room, it’ll create a 3D floor plan, it'll create a dollhouse view of the home, and it will create all the individual images that you would need for your listings and for your inspection. Take that as an opportunity to combine the maintenance and loop-in element with the marketing elements so that you can have that 3D tour for that home in the future. Jason: Right. Then when your tenant puts a notice, you can start marketing the property right away, you can put it out there, you can put out the tour and everything else before, and you may be able to get the place rented before it's even vacant. James: Absolutely. That's another big benefit that some property managers are realizing with high quality virtual tours is that they can get the properties rented, sight unseen. If the virtual tour is good enough whether the person lives in town or not, if the property’s occupied and they want to put it out there in the market, there's a higher likelihood that they'll have the home rented sight unseen with a high quality virtual tour. I think that's the goal.  With Tenant Turner, we're trying to manage the leads and schedule the appointments to get people into the home, but ultimately what we're trying to do is streamline the leasing process. If we can help minimize the number of showings to help minimize the amount of back and forth that goes on with these virtual tours, maybe even prevent somebody from going to a property altogether, it's a win-win. Jason: The property managers that are not doing this stuff, if they're tracking their metrics, and they're tracking their average time to get things rented out, their time on market, some of these variables, and then they start using maybe Tenant Turner to start using maybe self access, maybe start using virtual 360 cameras and tours, and all this, they probably will see a dramatic difference. To be able to say in a sales presentation to a prospective owner, “Hey, this is where we were before, like all the companies out there, and here's where we're at now, and what we've noticed,” it's such a huge differentiator in selling point. Even a month of vacancy, even a couple weeks of vacancy can be pretty expensive. In some markets, that could be thousands of dollars depending on the property. James: Yeah. It’s just another kind of tool in the tool belt. I think a big thing is some of the concepts from virtual tours and I think something like Matterport too, just because the cost has been so high, you can get into doing virtual tours relatively easier now because of the Zillow’s 3D home app, you can do it now just with the quality of phones being able to take your own panoramic pictures. I know a lot of people out there, they're using tools like zInspector already for their home inspections, but they also offer a virtual tour tool. There's a lot more out there now than there's ever been before and I think the property managers who are willing to take that leap into putting a little bit of extra effort into it, and putting a little bit of extra time in it, they're going to be the ones to receive the biggest returns by reducing their vacancy, reducing their rent loss to vacancy, but then also like you said, being able to inject those core metrics back into their value prop to their customers. Jason: Between you and me, because it's just you and me right now, just us, if you're hanging out with one of your buddies that runs a property management company and they're like, “Hey, what should I use? What camera should I get? I've got your system Tenant Turner.” What would your go to recommendation be right now? James: I think the Zillow thing is really intriguing because it's free, but for all of us in the industry, Zillow, they're kind of a… Jason: It makes everyone scared. We’re all afraid of Zillow. James: Exactly. Jason: We’re all watching Zillow, but we’re all a little bit afraid. James: With Zillow, I mean they own and control your data because you're recording it in their app, you're uploading it to their servers, and I know a lot of people in this industry, they're thinking at the back of their mind, “It's just a matter of time before I've uploaded this to their servers for free and then they're going to take me out of the process completely because now they have my virtual tour.”  I would say, the Zillow one is appealing because of the cost, it costs nothing to do it, but I do think for property managers who are a bit more sophisticated and a bit more in the know in the industry, and maybe have some fears of Zillow and for good reason, there's a couple of hundred dollar camera, a RICOH camera which is a reputable brand. It works with zInspector, it works with Matterport, you can use it with either one of those products and probably a couple of others, and that's a great place to be able to create these beautiful 360 panoramic vantage points of the rental property.  This is what we saw in the data that we looked at, a third of our customers are doing virtual tours, but only 11% of our listings have virtual tours. The higher end properties or maybe some of your smaller multifamily that you can reuse the layout or use a virtual tour across multiple units, that's where you're also going to get the most bang for your buck. I think as time goes on, maybe we're not quite there yet where this is going to be a ubiquitous part of everybody's process, you can use it as an upsell to an owner, you can use it as something particular for those higher end listings. You tell somebody and say, “Hey, you have a top tier property, you have a beautiful space, and I want to be the property manager for you, and this is how I'm going to do it.” That's part of a way you can help win that management agreement. I don't think it has to be something that's used all the time by every property out there. I think that's a good way to overcome it. If you don't have a camera and you want to test the waters, the RICOH cameras, and there are a couple of them out there, but they're more like $400 versus the Matterport’s $4000. It's a good way to test it out and see if it's a good fit for your organization. To your point earlier is it going to positively impact your key metrics, are you going to see a reduction in your days vacant, are you going to see a reduction of your time on market, are you going to see an increase in either maybe an additional fee or more management contracts because you offer this, and nobody else in your market does. Jason: Say you've got a $20 an hour employee that's helping do some of this stuff, whatever. If it's a $400 camera and if it saves you 20 hours ever at $20 an hour, you’ve broken even on the camera. I would imagine, what is that, 20 showings maybe, or trips out to a place, or whatever. I think it's a no brainer. You could probably justify the $4000 camera if you needed two guys or gals, but $400 is pretty easy to start with. James: Exactly. We have seen with some of the bigger groups, particularly property managers who are tied into larger real estate offices that primarily focus on sales, they tend to have access to the Matterport cameras because these Matterport cameras have taken off more on the for sale side. That's another thing. Whether it's within the NARPM world or within your just local real estate group, you may have a friend that has one. Whether or not they let you borrow their $4000 camera... Jason: Rent it. James: Rent it, that's an option. There are services too, depending upon what you think your choke point is, but there's tools out there or services out there. PlanOmatic is one, Zillow also offers their own network of professional photographers that have access to the 3D tour technology. PlanOmatic is in partnership with Matterport. HomeJab is another new one that has 50 offices nationwide. If your issue is getting somebody to go to the property, take pictures and do the editing, PlanOmatic, HomeJab, those tools are in place. Those services are offered. Jason: You can offload it. James: Exactly. Think about what's the most appropriate part of the process to potentially outsource. VirtuallyinCredible, they do a good job in creating virtual tours that can then be promoted through your various listings, and websites, and whatnot. If you have an editing, if that's where your constraint is, you don't feel like you have the time or talent to do it, there's another place where you can offload and outsource that component to it. You should be doing it, and if you do it, you will differentiate yourself to make more money and reduce your days vacant, so it makes sense to do it, but if you have hesitancies around buying a camera, then borrow one, or use one of these services, or go the Zillow route. If you can overcome that hurdle and your concern is really around editing, and formatting, and getting it to the appropriate level, you can use another one of those services like VirtuallyinCredible who can piece it all together for you, but any stage of the game where you think you have hesitancy or you're resistant to taking it on, there are opportunities to buy equipment or utilize an existing service who’s an expert in it. Jason: Perfect. I think you’ve sold people on the idea of virtual tour technologies. Anything else that that they should know about this that you're seeing from your 30-foot view with all the different property management companies that you're helping them with the leasing side? James: Yeah. I would say one thing to add is that some people might be listening to this saying, “We don't really need to do that, the technology is not there yet,” at least be thinking about this, whether you look at strategic components every quarter, or every year, or whatever, because one of the big statistics that came out of some of the research done by apartments.com and Zillow is, about 45% of millennial renters are really leaning into virtual tours before they make a decision. If you don't think the stats are compelling, if you don't want to try it, just know that the largest group of renters that continues to expand within the markets that we serve, they are looking for this type of technology. Again, it's something that you can use to help sell to your owners, but as you look at quality tenants, this is something that those folks are going to be looking for, and they'll look past your listings eventually if this is not going to be there. Be ready. Jason: I would wager to say there might be a correlation between the most tech savvy of renters and the safest ones to be placing into properties. It might help you attract better tenants. Maybe. James: Yeah, I agree. Jason: Psychologically, it seems sound to me, but who knows. James, it was really cool to have you here again. I don't know when the next conference is but we'll have to go dancing again. James: That's right. Jason: With all our homies. To be clear, it’s not just Jason and I dancing. Jason: No, we’re not dancing together. James: Good times. Jason: You're married, but I'm single again, so I can pick up… James: I could be your wingman. Jason: You’ll be my wingman, I could use a wingman. James: I got you covered. Jason: Alright, well hey, it's really good to see you again. James, it’s really good to see you again. I love what you guys are doing at Tenant Turner. I appreciate you coming on the show and how could people get in touch with Tenant Turner? James: Yeah, if you guys ever need any help with your showings, software, lock boxes, or locks, or ever just a resource to chat with as you can tell, we're really into the data, we’re really into the industry, and we want to be of service to folks. You can reach me at [email protected]. Definitely come to our website. We’ve got a live chat feature. Anytime you want to speak with somebody, we have folks standing by all US based who would love to hear from you. Come on through. Jason: I saw your Instagram. I'm going to let you get another quick plug here. You have some new lock boxes that you guys are doing now? James: That's right, yes. One of the big and exciting things that we've been rolling out, we've been doing it in a slow launch and actually Calvin, he owns his own property management company, Keyrenter Richmond. He was one of our guinea pig customers. We put new lock boxes on his property. They're SentriLock lock boxes, SentriLock’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors. It is an extremely high quality lock box with the six year warranty. For anybody who has had a desire to experiment with self access but maybe was hesitant because of the lock boxes, what we have now is top tier and will last you a good long time and help prevent you from having to go to those properties showings yourself. Jason: Perfect, awesome. Alright, cool. Well James, thanks again for coming on and I will let you go. James: Cool, thank you, Jason, it was a pleasure. Jason: Alright, so great to see him again and have him on the show. Check out Tenant Turner at tenantturner.com and if you are [...] business feel free to reach out. Test your website at doorgrow.com/quiz. Test your website out. See if it's effective, and if not, you maybe want to talk with us and that might help you realize there's that leak, but you probably have several other leaks that we can help you with in your sales pipeline. Our goal is to show up trust, show up those leaks because trust is the speed in which you're able to get clients on close deals and grow your company. That's what we specialize in is helping maximize trust and organic growth and we’re on lead generation at DoorGrow. With that I will let everybody have an awesome day, let everybody go and until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Property management businesses always want and need products and services to be profitable and grow doors. That’s why many of them choose the user-friendly residential rental property management software for single-family properties called, Propertyware. Today, I am talking to Inaas Arabi, Vice President (VP) of Single Family Rental and General Manager (GM) of Propertyware. He understands the importance of developing new and innovative ways to help property managers attain profitability and growth. You’ll Learn... [04:37] Past and Present Perception of Propertyware: Before becoming GM, Inaas was a customer because of ability to customize system based on business models. [06:38] Who uses Propertyware? Typically, larger companies wanting to scale and grow. [07:45] Room to Grow: Never buy a solution for where your business is today; always buy a solution for where you want it to be. [09:50] Directions for Growth:  Add units by differentiating services via customization and special offers. Increase revenue per door by offering add-on products and services.  Reduce expenses via automation for manual and repetitive tasks.  [20:33] Propertyware stands behind its platform; serves as business advisor, not only technology provider, to solve pain points. [23:54] Facilitating Future Integrations: Freedom to connect with third-party tools, vendors, and services. [27:40] API Connections and Challenges: Propertyware provides two-way data exchange that’s maintained in one system. [34:50] Status of Property Management Industry: Advocate, educate, and train others on legislation and awareness to protect tenants and landlords. [45:38] Should you switch software? Break up dysfunctional system to experience freedom by having good data, building relationships, and improving processes. Tweetables Never buy software for where you’re at today; always buy software for where you want to be. Pick property management software that you can live with for the long-term to grow. Automate mundane tasks performed by property managers via software. Kiss of death is double entry and manual input. Resources Inaas Arabi on LinkedIn Propertyware HubSpot Zapier Tenant Turner Property Meld Renter, Inc. Rent Manager ShowMojo Rently Rentec AppFolio Buildium DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today's guest, I'm hanging out with, Inaas Arabi. Inaas: Yes. Jason: Did I say it right? Inaas: Yes, you sure did. Thank you. Jason: All right. Inaas, I'm excited to have you on the show. We have not yet had Propertyware on the show and Inaas is from Propertyware. Inaas: Yes I am. Jason: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the space of property manager first and then let's get into maybe Propertyware a bit and talk about growth. Inaas: Awesome. I do want to first of all say that I'm a door hacker as well, so thank you for having me on, I'm excited. I came in mostly from the operational background. I started a company from scratch, operated and built it a little bit to over 1700 doors and then I sold it to a national player, then I went to work for the second largest owner and operator in the single family industry, American Homes for Rent. I worked for them for a while. I was their Midwest regional director of ops. We've done a lot of great things there. We took the company public. I left that and went to work for a company called the Altisource, which deals with banks and REITs and does a very similar thing to third party property management or property managers but on a different scale mostly for the banks and the financial industry. Operated a very large portfolio over 35 states and after that I got recruited by RealPage to be able to become the single family vice-president for them as well as general manager for Propertyware. Now, the reason why I think Propertyware would be a great choice for somebody like me and for a lot of operators is because you're able to take somebody like me with my experience and put him into the seats where we can make decisions that would actually help the property managers with their day-to-day lives. That's the difference that we're trying to go after compared to some of the other systems, is that we really want to build things that would be usable and would make an impact for people's businesses. I know we are going to talk about growth here in a little bit, but that is really the approach that we're going with Propertyware since I came in. We are building enhancements that allows people to grow in multiple different ways. They grow by adding units, which is what you talked about as far as being a door hacker. Number two, you grow by increasing your revenue by making more money per door. Then number three, you also went to grow financially by reducing expenses while keeping everything the same, so that would allow you to be able to have a much better financials or higher NOI’s for your property, since you're an owner or operator. That's really the goal. That's the approach that we're taking upon with Propertyware since I've started to them. I started Propertyware late January of this year. Jason: Okay. This is kind of new for you, the Propertyware thing. Inaas: Yes, it is. I mean, you can say it's new. I've been there since January so depending on how you take a look at it. Jason: You're halfway through… Inaas: Yeah, you're right. I'm definitely halfway through a year, yes, but I'm not new… Jason: You're 0.5 years at Propertyware right now. Inaas: Yes, it is. Jason: I mean that's two quarters. That's enough time to… Inaas: Make a change, yes. Jason: Make some changes. So, what was your perception of Propertyware before you came in versus now? Inaas: I was a customer of Propertyware when I was working with Altisource. We ran a set of very complicated and very large portfolio, a little over 10,000 units over 35 states, and we did it through Propertyware. One thing that I always appreciated about Propertyware was the ability to customize and the ability to be able to build unique or redo the system around your uniqueness as a business model. Now, I think that also causes people to be more afraid of the technology because there is not a very easy systematic streamlined way of doing things on Propertyware. You have multiple ways of doing things. It's built as such to be able to allow people the ability to customize based on the business model. Having that I've been working for Propertyware, before I found it to be a very interesting point as a customer, it was very good for me, but when I moved in to being in the seat of making changes, I didn't realize that this is an intentional thing that we're doing where we are able to keep the business and keep the platform customizable by the business model. Now, I would also say that that will make some people be very hesitant into looking into Propertyware because they're afraid of how customizable the system could be. That could also take you into a lot of what I would call rabbit holes, meaning, if you've got 20 ways to be able to do something, sometimes you give way too many options for some people that would allow you to take out the simplicity aspect of it or the easiness aspect of it. Overall, really what I appreciate the most as customization, if I want to have to sum it up down to one thing. Jason: The perception that I've always had about Propertyware is I've noticed that a lot of the larger companies, the companies that really are folks on scale, that they tend to use Propertyware. Propertyware seems to be very scalable. It seems much more of an enterprise solution than a lot of the other property management software out there. That's kind of the perception that I've noticed. I have lots of clients that have used Propertyware. I noticed usually the guys with thousands of doors are using Propertyware. Inaas: We do have people from different levels of where they're at. Now, to your point, sometimes it's very difficult and I struggle with this myself as well, it's really very difficult to be able to equate the number of units for your business to how complicated of a process you’re running. We come across some people that they maybe only running 200 units, but they have some of the most complex processes that I've seen and the opposite is very true. It's really more about how customizable are you ready to look in to be able to build for your business. The one thing that I would always say, you never buy software for where you at today, you should always be buying software to where you want to be. It's almost like when you're talking to trainers that they always say, “You don't want to be the guy or the person who's playing today. You really want to be playing to what you want yourself to look like after you win or at the winning table,” and that's really where it comes in to be. If you're thinking you want to grow and you want to have a system that grows with you, scales with you, that allows you to be able to do different things in many different ways, Propertyware certainly will be it. Now, I would also say, you do have to be willing to take on this opportunity to be able to build things that will be customizable for you, so you can get the best advantage. Jason: This is the feedback that I've noticed about Propertyware. What he says is absolutely true. If you're going to pick a property management software solution or any solution for your business, you want to pick a solution that is going to give you room to grow into for whatever size you imagine because it's not easy to switch property management software. Anybody that's done it that switched from one to the other because they thought the grass would be greener on the other side, usually regrets it and it's not been so comfortable. I agree, pick a software that you feel like you can live with in the long term. Inaas: What you're saying is absolutely true. It’s really about jumping from one system to the next is not an easy task. I do recognize that you do have to put in a lot of effort into that, but you do need to find something that would scale with you for the long term, not for where you are today. That's the beauty about finding that system and being able to grow with it as you go. We've seen a lot of great companies have grown with us over the years and have done wonderful things as far as that goes. Jason:: Let's get into growth. The topic is growth via Propertyware. How does Propertyware help somebody grow or what are we chatting about here? Inaas: Like I said, the approach for us since I've got into Propertyware is the fact that we're building enhancements that would allow people to grow in all of those three directions. I'm going to give you specific examples because I know you like that. Number one. Growth, in my opinion, is adding units. How do you add units? You help PMCs differentiate their services and do things where they can go out there and put themselves in front of the right people that they're looking for their services. As an example, I know you guys offer wonderful websites offering, which is great. One way that we can help is we do provide our clients what we call a listing widget that they can plug in anywhere on the website. This way, you as a website provider don't have to build it for them. It defeats all the information directly from the Propertyware property management software. All of the vacancies, the rent price, the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, pictures and all that are all within that listing widget. Then we make it so customizable to the point where people are able to do some awesome things with it. An awesome thing would be, for example, you can add on banners at their specific workflow. For example, you can put in a banner that says, “Only make that banner available over the weekend to make a weekend offer,” so you can say, “Come take a look at my house that I have for rent and you're going to get $100 off if you look at it between Friday and Sunday,” or “If you look at it between the 1st and the 15th.” You can do things like, “We're looking for awesome owners like yourselves. Click on this link to be able to see our offering.” You could do things like the workflow, like once a property has an approved applicant for it, then you would automatically take it off the listing so this way you don't have to do anything with that manually. You could also do it where you can add a lot of information in the description for that property and one thing I teach people to do and I'm sure you’d like that, Jason, is the fact that for every listing that you put in out there for rent at the bottom of the description for that listing, you should take a couple of lines and you should type in information about your services with the link to the website that will take people on to a full offering of those services. Because we know when people go out to look for properties, rental properties on the market, majority of them will be renters, but some are not necessarily renters. Some of them might be owners that they're looking to comp out their property to figure out what the other properties in the area are renting for or they might be asset managers that [...] ability to put yourself in front of those guys while they're searching for properties. It's very unique. It doesn't cost you any extra. It's part of the listing widget that allows you to plug and play and do it as you go. This is one example of an enhancement that does help for the unit growth. There is plenty more, I don't think I have enough time to be able to share all of them because I want to talk about other items that are important. The second element we talked about, which is adding revenue or increasing your revenue, making it where instead of making $1000 per door, you go up to $1500 per door, you go up to $2000, $3000, whatever you feel like it's the right level that you want to go to. How do we do that? We do that by offering ancillary products that could make sense for the property managers but they're also integrated within the system so this way, they don't have to do anything offsite the system. The beauty about that is you get the beauty of getting something that is offered, make some money on it without adding too much expenses on your end from an HR or an employee perspective. Some examples with that would be asset protection or our renter's insurance. I know some other software do offer that. The reason why I mentioned it is because between Propertyware and some of the other systems is the fact that we really want to make sure that it’s fully integrated within our system. The tenant will have a very seamless experience when they're selecting the process or selecting the product and they were going through it, and then also the PMC will have a very seamless experience. Last but not the least, if there is an owner involved, that owner will also have a very seamless experience. As an example of the asset protection, it's a checkbox and then you can select whether it's paid for by the owner or paid for by the tenant. You can put in whatever extra fee that you would want to add on as a PMC as your profit margin, and then you can apply either to a tenant ledger or to an owner ledger depending on who's paying for it, and you do all of that very seamlessly with a couple of clicks. If you do enough of those, you start seeing a little bit of an increase of revenue in per door that you're having. Some of the other products that were also migrating or integrating within our system would be things like utility management which is I think we're one of the only system that I know of that offer something like that. Utility management in single family has not been a revenue center for a long time, but I think that is changing with all of the legalities where it's forcing either the owner or the property management company to keep a lot of utilities in their names so you don't have any off and on for all the tenants when they leave or when you have a new tenant moving in. If you are a PMC and you're going to have to manage that for the owner, we believe you do it with ease, but you should charge a fee to be able to do that and you can apply for that again either on the tenant ledger or on the owner ledger—depending on who's paying for it—and you make a little bit of money on it. That's the examples of how do we help increase revenue for our PMCs. The last type of growth that I want to talk about which is very near and dear to my heart is the profit growth by reducing your expenses. In my opinion, you reduce your expenses by doing automation. Now automation, certainly I'm not suggesting that you exchange relationships or conversations with owners and tenants with technology, but what you do, if you take a look at a lot of repetitive elements that we do every day in property management, you should automate those or you should look into making them systematic, so this way you're not spending a lot of time doing what [...] specific example here. Since I came in to Propertyware, we sat down and we looked at all the processes that our PMCs go through. From renewals, to leasing, to signing of a lease, to maintenance, to all of the big processes. Our goal was to be able to build or educate our PMCs on the best automated way to be able to do a process from A-Z, for the best results, for the cheapest cost as far as HR, and for the highest profit margin. I can tell you, we've gotten rave reviews from our clients when they've seen what we've put together. We have what we call road shows which is more of events that we put out in some certain cities in the United States and we invite our clients and prospects to come out to see us and see what we have going and what we're working on. We share with them for example the renewal process that we build together for them. Now, the beauty about why this is important, why I talk about it, we actually talk about both sides of the spectrum here. We talk about the setup, how you can setup Propertyware for full automation, as well as the actual process of how you run it from a systematic perspective and from an operational perspective. By the time you leave, if you have been a little bit hesitant about how do I work Propertyware to my advantage, you already know how you set it up, and you already know how to work the process itself. We've had customers where they came back and they reported that their renewal rate was at 60%-70%, now they are close to 80%. As a matter of fact, I was talking to a client a little bit earlier today and they quoted 79.83% renewal rate from, I think it was close to 71% or 72%. That's a huge movement. Now, why that's important for PMCs, that's a differentiator for you as well as a service. When you go talk to owners and you say, “I am able to get 80% of people to renew, that speaks volumes to the owners and allows them to see the benefit of working with you compared to working with somebody else who does not have a high renewal rate. Did I explain it to you well as far as all the different types of growth and how we calculate what kind of enhancements we use for each one of them? Jason: Yeah, absolutely. All of these things make sense and I love the idea that you're taking a look at the challenges that the property managers are facing internally when it comes to their operations to facilitate that with the software, to make that faster, to make that more simple versus all the manual stuff. Property managers do a lot of manual stuff. Inaas: They sure do. Jason: The more that you can pull into that software, the better. A lot of people a lot of times, they're turning to lots of different systems to try and systemize their business outside of their accounting solution and that can get cumbersome at times. Inaas: Yeah and the renewal process that we put together for full automation, we've got a little over 20 contact steps, where if you're doing this manually, you would need about 20, a little bit over 20 steps to be able to go through the entire process. We're talking steps from talking to the tenants and making sure that they want to renew, then again talking to the owner is making sure you agree on pricing, making sure you come back and you talk to the tenant and you send them a lease and you follow up on the lease and you do all of that back and forth. We changed that down to the point where we're able to do the entire thing with about six or seven touches. Six to seven touches in my opinion compared to over 20, does saves you so much time and so much effort that allows you to really concentrate on building the relationship instead of losing the time doing mundane task that you should be automating. In my opinion, that's how you grow, you grow by taking all of those mundane tasks, automate them, take those out of your way, and then concentrate on building the relationship, whether it's with the owners or with tenants themselves. Jason: Yeah, makes sense. All right, cool. Is there anything else that you want people to know about Propertyware while I've got you here? Inaas: Absolutely. There is a lot of things that I want to people to know about Propertyware but few things come to mind right off the bat. One, that we do stand behind all of our clients and we do appreciate the relationships that we have with them. Also, if you can imagine, we're taking a different approach by becoming more of our business advisors to our PMCs, not just a technology provider. A lot of times, you come across a lot of great technologies, but if you don't know how to take that technology and apply it into your day-to-day operations, that technology really failed because it's not really allowing you to get what you’d want out of it. Think about text messaging when it came out, for example. If people didn't try it, didn’t perfected it, didn’t figure out what to do with it, we wouldn't have had such a great success with it today. The same effort would be with our platform. We wanted to educate people. We want to make a business partnership with them, to be able to tell him how to do it, what do they do with it, and how they can use it to be able to get best results from all the aspects that we talked about. That's one. Number two, I also want them to know that we are property managers, building stuff for property managers. We’re not technologists, we're just building things in a vacuum, and really building it from the perspective of we know where their pain points are, we've been through it, whether it's myself or somebody on my staff, we know what your folks, the people that’s hearing us today are going through and because of that, my goal is to be able to build things to solve those issues for them, to solve those pain points. Now, sometimes we have to take them in steps, but at the end of the day we are solving those pain points. For example, we rolled out our text messaging feature earlier this year and for fairness sake it was what I would call the basic features of being able to communicate back and forth via text messaging. In order for us to take that to the next level, we're also working on enhancements now that would allow us to do the multi-level, the multimedia, as well as the group texting, and things like categorize station for all of the text. This way, our PMCs could take a text and apply it toward somebody specific, whether it's an owner or tenant. They can also do group texting. They can also do multimedia, so they can send a picture, send a file, and do all of that all within one centralized communication command, if you call it that, within the system, so it's not anywhere off the system. Then, last but not least, I think we’ve talked very greatly about growth, but what I really want people to know, your listeners, is that if you're looking for a scalable system that has a lot of potential for you, that would allow you to be able to do a lot of customization for your business based on your business needs, then you should look into Propertyware and you should evaluate it as an opportunity as an option for you. Now, it may fit then that's fantastic, it may not and that's okay, but at the end of the day you should really evaluate it to figure out if it's a good fit for you or not. Jason: You're talking about what you guys are doing internally. One of the big questions I know a lot of my clients have, a lot of listeners have that's really hot on the tip of the tongue of most property managers nowadays is integrations. That’s freedom to connect with third party tools, vendors, different services. Maybe you can touch on an API, what you guys have maybe going on there, and how you guys are kind of facilitating integrations with third parties. Inaas: Yeah. That's such a fantastic point, I'm so glad that you actually brought that up. Propertyware’s current approach is that we are offering a two-way data exchange [...] an API that allows people to be able to connect to their property management software. They can connect almost anything and everything that they would like to do. In my view, we want to provide people the opportunities to make a choice or pick the right option that fits for their business model. There is a lot of great things that we offer. If it fits your business model, if it fits your needs fantastic, use it. If you have something else that you'd like to use, connect it to property management software so you don't have to double entry anything. To me, the kiss of death is double entry and the kiss of death is any manual input that you put into either your staff or yourself, because somebody's going to make a mistake with that manual entry and somebody's going to cause you havoc later, even if it's not happening today. That's as far as the API. Now, I know on other webcast, Jason, you did ask about things like I think the place was, remind me again, was HubSpot or something like that, where you're able to connect Propertyware to everything else that it's out there as far as softwares… Jason: That was Zapier. Inaas: …yes, Zapier, thank you. I appreciate that. We actually looked into that and we're talking to them now about getting our platform on their site to be able to have full integrations with everything that they've done. You could do this yourself today, meaning if you have access to the API, you can take API, you can plug it into whatever other software that you'd want to plug it into, whether it’s CRM, whether it's an inspection product, whether it's a [...] product, typically anything and everything that has got API, you can connect it to do. Jason: If you're nerdy enough or you pay enough money to get somebody nerdy enough to do it. Inaas: True. I mean, you do have to have a developer to be able to take a look at it. This is not something that's geared toward a property manager to be doing it themselves, that's for sure. Jason: That’s why there's Zapier. The Zapier is very cool because it allows a somewhat normal person—you have to be a little bit nerdy, let's be honest—to do it without having to know code. You can create connections between tools and systems, so if you guys are working on that, I'll be really excited to hear when you guys have that ready. Inaas: Yeah, absolutely. You're definitely correct, it does need a little bit of development resources to be able to do the API, that's for sure, but remember though, Jason, once you do it once, you've got it, meaning you don’t have… Jason: You don’t have to do it over again. Inaas: Exactly. You don't have to go do connection every day, meaning if you've got five products that you're working on plus your property management software, you connect them all at once and you're done. You may have to do maintenance every once in awhile like if something is changed on your property management software or if you change your business model, if you do different things, you make maintenance changes, but it's not as big of a change once you've done it once. It's really more of an initial step and once you go through that initial step, you're good to go. However, I would also say, we're also one of the very few systems that offer two-way data exchange. Some other systems would offer data out and they call that API, but that's really not an API. An API should be a two-way data exchange, where you can take data out of your system and you can put data back into your system. If you can't do that, you can't really call it API but that's again [...] view at this point. I have seen some of our customers do some awesome things with the API connections. Those API's might have where they take information out of Propertyware, they go do something else with it and then go back and feed it back into Propertyware to be able to have one system through which is Propertyware for them. At the end of the day, you would want to connect everything you're working on with your property management software, so you're not having to enter anything manually. Jason: One of the challenges with API's is that you've got two pieces a software there communicating and if either one of them makes changes it can break that connection like something happens, that's what's I think is really important for the different vendors and property management software to create relationships where somebody's maintaining this. For example, if Tenant Turner was working with Propertyware or if Property Meld was working the Propertyware, if one of these vendors a lot of people are really enjoying, if they're helping to maintain that connection, then the business owner doesn't have to keep that working or make sure that it’s working. Inaas: It’s also fair and I'm again [...] and we have a list of companies that we’re actually working with to be able to have direct integrations with, you've mentioned Property Meld for example, that's one of our success stories with the API. We have a full integration with them, they'll tell you the same thing as well. The beauty about that is somebody could do the maintenance within Property Meld and then they can make the payment out of their Propertyware system with ease without any complications. It also allows you to do back and forth between the two systems, so if you have a work order that came in from a tenant, you can feed into Property Meld and vice versa as well. Having that we have the API, that's what allowed us to be able to do that. There is a list of companies that we're going through to be able to do direct integration with. I think RentersInc is one of the people here, they're putting in chats. We've been working with them on a direct integration of the API. I think they're almost there, they're about 95% there to it. To me, it's all about providing opportunities for our PMCs to be able to take advantage of what the technology could do for them. That's what we're embarking upon. That's what we are going to do. And if you stay tuned, you’re going to get a lot of great news about us connected with a lot of different vendors that does different things for our PMCs. The idea is, again to your point, we maintain the connection, so the PMC doesn't have to. If they wanted to go elsewhere like for example somebody wants to go to a different maintenance provider Property Meld is not what they want to use, they can still use the API to be able to make the exact same connection the Property Meld is made with Propertyware, if they have an access to the API. Jason: Yeah, makes sense. I love the idea of direct integrations. I love the idea of having an open API. I love the idea of you helping them to systemize your business internally, leveraging your software. These are all powerful tools for them. One of the main things you have mentioned at the beginning, is to lower expenses and all of these things is going to lower the level of communication, which lessens the amount of time in man-hours and manual stuff that has to happen. That's the biggest expense in property management is staff, it's people, it's those resources and that allows them greater leverage so that they can get more done without having to throw money at bodies constantly in order to get everything done. Property management is not a cheap business to run for a lot of people, so margins matter quite a bit. Inaas: It was quite interesting to me once I came on to work for Propertyware because I went out and talked to a lot of clients and again I'm an operator, so I understand what people are going through and I remember when I ran my own company, it was really more throwing bodies at it all the time. The difference though in today's world that is very different than when I ran my own company, is today you have options for technologies that could fulfill those tasks that people were doing for you before. Back when I ran my own company, those options were not even available. For example, if you recall back in the day when we were doing inspections on pen and paper or via pen and paper, everybody would take a piece of paper and a list of items or questions and you just fill amount while you're going through the property doing inspection. Today, you do most of your inspections via mobile technology on mobile devices and with mobile templates. The beauty about that is that saved you the ability or the need to have someone that is actually sitting down and writing down information on a piece of paper and they're transcribing them back into your property management software. If you have the integration correctly, you go from mobile inspection tool to the inspection report directly into your property management. We're working on something that we're just actually going to roll out here tomorrow, which is enhancements for our evaluation module. It allows people to be able to do multiple inspections and then match them column by column for every time you've done inspection. Think of when you go out and you do a move in inspection, you do a midyear inspection, you do a move out inspection, and then you're seeing all of those inspections in front of you matched line item by line item, so you know what the kitchen looked like when you did the move-in, you know what the kitchen looks like when you did a midyear inspection and you absolutely you know what the kitchen looks like when somebody moved out If you can show some damages that the tenant have caused that home, there is never a question anymore about who caused it because you have such an access to data and information that is beyond anyone's ability to be able to dispute it in court. Again, that's the beauty about the technology and the use of technology in today's market compared to what was before. Jason: Yeah. Technology certainly is changing quite a bit. I think here in the US, we’re in the forefront of what's happening technologically in property management, even if we are maybe behind other countries in terms of how well-developed or how familiar people are with property management. It's exciting to see what you guys are doing. Before we wrap this up is there anything else anybody should know about Propertyware and how can they get in touch with you guys? Inaas: I appreciate that. What I would like to do though is I do want to talk a little bit about the industry in general because I want to take this platform as a way for us to be able to educate and train. I do believe that our industry and to your point earlier some other countries have this property management business defined a little bit better and it's a little bit more integrated within day in and day out lives of people, so it's looked at a very different. Jason: There's probably two things, maybe just more legislation surrounding it and maybe just more awareness in those markets. Inaas: Awareness is really a good word. Thank you. The reason why I mentioned that is I truly believe that our industry has been under attack this year and is probably going to be continuing on ongoing under attack from almost everywhere. Whether it states that they're changing the rules, whether it's businesses that they're changing the rules, whether it's somebody else is changing the rules. The problem with it is I think we're so defragmented to the point that we lost the ability to stand up for ourselves as an industry. [...] I can give you of states changing the rules on the fly and make it miserable for our PMCs to be able to operate. Not to single them out, but I'm going to make an example of the State of New York. They just rolled out a brand new law about that the tenant protection law, that's what they call it. The effect of those things that they put into the… Jason: Protecting the tenants from the big bad evil landlord. Inaas: Yes, exactly. Part of it, for example, you can't charge more than $20 for application fee. You can't even call it an application fee, you have to call it something else. If the customer or if the tenant brings you a copy of an old credit report, you typically have to accept it and not charge him anything if you're going to go screen them through your ways. You can imagine the complexity that this is putting on our PMCs in the State of New York and they're not the only state. I know some other states and they're changing things, changing rules. The reason why I say all of this is I do have an ask for all of us as property managers and the ask is, let's really get together. Let's support the organizations that support us. I don’t want to make this a pitch for any specific organizations that are very well known in our industry, that are usually a couple, two or three, but let's support them to be able to have a voice, so they can stand on our behalf against some of these things that are happening to our industry. Let's really truly do a good job making sure that we're providing the utmost best customer experience, the best customer service that we can provide, because that is the only savior for us to where the public is going to realize that we have value and what we do has value and they're going to continue on working with us and our business is going to continue to grow. That's as far as the industry. I really wanted to make sure that I put that plug in there. You asked me about Propertyware, I think we've talked… Jason: To touch on that I want to agree with you on that. Property management is really in its infancy I think here in the US in terms of awareness and perception. Every property management business owner is either an advocate for the industry or they're hurting the industry. We all need to be advocates for the industry and we also need to educate. We need to educate because I think if a lot of these laws wouldn’t exist or they would be very different if property managers had input, because they know what works in the real world. They know what needs to happen. They do want to protect the interests of the tenant and the owner. When things get skewed, when the pendulum swings all the way away from the owner’s interests or the landlord’s interest just towards what serves the needs and interests of the tenants, eventually it's not really going to end up serving the needs of the tenants. It creates some sort of imbalance that is going to hurt tenants in the long run. That's generally just always going to be true when something isn't right, or isn't fair, or isn’t just. Inaas: I totally agree 100% and I think you hit the nail on its head with the education. I do also feel that we should educate everybody that we come across with. Whether it's our tenants, whether it's our owners, whether it's somebody else that we're dealing with our vendors. One thing that I was very advocate for when I ran either of my company or other companies, is the fact that you have to have an onboarding experience for everybody you’re dealing with. An onboarding experience with your tenant, an onboarding experience with your owner, an onboarding experience for your vendor. And guess what? Also an onboarding experience for the HOAs that you're dealing with, an onboarding experience for the politicians that are responsible for your area as well because if you don't educate all of those people on what we and how we do it well, there is also not going to be something you're going to like. To your point, Jason, I think if the property managers were involved in some of these laws that they were written, I'm sure they would have been written differently. It's not because we don't want to protect the public. We actually have the utmost respect for the public, but we know what works, and we know what works well. If the idea is to make sure that a tenant has the opportunity to not being overly charged for a particular application fee or something like that, you could have written that in as a rule but a little bit differently than just making it where it’s mandated, it's one fee, and you're minimizing the ability for somebody to be able to do the right screening for their tenant and putting the right people in place. Jason: Even in contracts and everything else, we need a little bit of educated language to explain the why behind things. Inaas: Yes, absolutely, 100%. Jason: It’s like that spoonful of sugar that Mary Poppins says makes the medicine go down. There needs to be a little bit of education added to some of the stuff rather than just throwing out, “This is how we're going to do it,” and you have to just take it. Inaas: Agreed. Now, you did ask me about property. I do want to say a couple things here. It is a system that I'd like people to take a look into as an opportunity for them to understand what the system could do for them, what are we doing as far as these processes, these automations, the opportunities for the two-way API for them to be able to connect their system to everything else that they're working on. We understand that people have to have options and we're supporting that and we’re going to go with it. I just want people to take a look at what we've got to offer and if it's fitting to what they need and what their business model is, fantastic. We can work together. If it's not, it's no big deal. We will continue on staying part of the same industry and we’ll support each other, but I do feel that people are missing quite a lot by not checking out what the opportunities look like and what the options are with Propertyware. As far as connecting with us what I would recommend, if people go on to our website Propertyware.com, we've just finalized a new experience for what I'm going to call here the free trial where you can go in, login, take a look at a little bit of the system, figure out what's going on. You're certainly not going to be able to do every single thing in the system. I'm not going to allow you to be able to take a payment in the system or put a tenant in there and kind of have them pay you through it, but the beauty of that is at least, it gives you an insider look of what we have available to you. I would also invite you to have a conversation with our sales staff to really truly understand what we have to offer and then go through a demo. If it works, great. If it doesn't, no big deal. Jason: I want to point this out because I'm an advocate for the industry. I'm not a property manager. I want to see the industry shift towards more openness, more freedom. I love what you're saying. We've had other property management software on the past and the general message of one of the big players out there who I won't mention by name was just, we're going to just create everything internally. We're going to just try and give our customers everything that they need rather than giving them what they really are asking for. The general feedback I hear from everybody is they want freedom. They want freaking freedom to be able to make choices, to make the best choices for the business, to choose the best tools and vendors. They want freedom. As entrepreneurs, that's why we are doing what we are doing. We don't give up the 9-5 job so that we can work even more hours a lot of times initially and have a lot more stress and a lot more pain just because we're crazy. We do it because we want more freedom. We want to be choosing what we're doing. What you're saying I think is in alignment with entrepreneurs. It’s in alignment with entrepreneurs that are running these property management businesses. They want the freedom to be able to choose the vendors, choose the third party tools that they're going to be using, and they want that stuff to work with their property management software. I appreciate that that is a focus of what Propertyware is doing. I wanted to point that out because I think it's important to highlight those in the industry that are doing that. I see you guys doing it. I see Rent Manager doing that, the open API thing. One thing I've also always appreciated about Propertyware since we started doing websites at DoorGrow back in the day, the very first website I did were websites for Propertyware clients and customers. I've always had that really good integration for the widget. In the first, I have a JavaScript widget, it would populate the data, it wasn't just a cheesy iframe thing that we were putting into the page, and that's always been nice. It's always been nice to have that reduced double data entry. People are putting in their properties into their websites and then doing that just back in the day. We've come a long way since then, every everybody has. Now they're using tools like maybe Tenant Turner, ShowMojo, or Rently, and some of these sorts of integrations. I've always appreciated those aspects of Propertyware. Question. Most people have a property management software. I would imagine most people listening to this show are not just startups that are like, “Which software should I pick?” Say they're using AppFolio, they're using Buildium, they're using Rent Manager, they're using Rentec Direct, they're using something already. What would you say as far as switching? We mentioned already. It’s painful usually to switch. How do you help facilitate this if you're going to get customers on? They're going to have to make the switch. Right now, they're probably not even listening because they're like, “There's no way I can switch. I'm married and I'm married for eternity.” I'm going to give you an opportunity to help them break up that marriage if it's dysfunctional. Inaas: I am so appreciative of you bringing this on as well. I do want to go back though. Freedom, I love that. I'm actually going to use it because you are correct in making sure that you highlight the fact that it's all about freedom. Yes, we do have offerings. Yes, we do have products, but at the same token, I am personally a believer. In Propertyware, we're believing that we have to provide options for people. You pick whatever makes sense for you as a property management company, if you have a different vendor that is offering something that is more unique to your business model and you like to use that versus using something that we have, great. Go for it. Now as far as the implementation—obviously you can use the API two-way data exchange to be able to connect them so you don't have to double entry anything—the implementation is such an important piece. When you talk to technologist and you talk to them about implementation, they just don't realize the amount of hassles that a PMC will have to go through when they're jumping from one system to another system. To them, it's more of a 1+1=2. Once I came in to Propertyware, the first thing that I have to tackle was our implementation. What we did with it is a couple of folds. One, we broke it down to where we provide now tools for ability to be able to have clean data that gets into your system. Having clean data is half the battle for your implementation because if you have a good, clean data coming into your system, it makes your life so much easier to be able to operate. What we found, a lot of PMCs may not have realized some of the, I'm going to use the word “garbage” that they may have had in their systems. When we go through our checks, we come back to our PMCs and we say, “You told us you managed 200, 300, 1000 doors but when we're looking at your data here, we're seeing 1033, so what's going on with those additional 33 units? Are they truly for rent? Are they truly something you don't use? What's going on with them?” and they're coming back saying, “You know what? You're right. Those are people that we lost two years ago and the person who was working on the system never deactivated the units.” Having good data is half the battle. Second is the partnership between the PMCs as well as a good implementation team that allows them to go through the experience one step at a time. What that means, when they're coming in to us to be able to work with Propertyware, they're going to be assigned a particular team with one project manager who is driving the entire implementation from A-Z. They have calls, they have specific asks, there is a specific journey that they're going through step-by-step. Data is usually number one issue that we all come across. Number two would be all your accounting setups. Number three would be all you process setups. Number four would be more of your training and your customization. Number five kind of bringing it all together with KPIs, reports, and dashboards. Now, after you've done all of this implementation, then you're also going to get the training team to come in and do full training with you for all these processes. That training is part of the implementation. It's not something specific that you got to pay for. It also allows you to be able to customize to what your business model needs. Let's say you have a specific way of doing move-ins, that trainer is going to learn that from you before they come out to train you and your staff. When they come out to train you and your staff, they're training you on the system to the best business model, to the best business process that you told him you want to do for that move-in. They're not going to tell you, “Propertyware does it this way,” they're going to say, “This is how you told me you want to do move-ins and this is how you could do the same thing in Propertyware for the best of all the results, whether it's for you or for us.” Last but not the least, what I would also mention is the fact that we provide our PMCs timelines for their integration. We point it out. We basically say you have, I think the timeline is about 90 days for you to be able to be integrated. You’re not paying for the systems during those 90 days until you fully integrated. Once you are fully integrated, then you start paying for it. That allows us to both be on the same footing saying, “We're going to work with you to be able to get you implemented because you're not paying us, so we're not making any money. At the same token, it's in our best interest to help you through this process so we can get you to that finalized implementation piece so you can start using your system.” Now, what we've seen is a huge reduction in the days of implementation for Propertyware in particular. We've also seen a very high number of what I would say happy customers that they came on our new plan for implementation. We’ve also seen a lot less issues with data when data comes in through the system and we're finding a lot of ahas from our clients similar to what I described to you saying, “Hey, I didn’t know that I had 1033 units. I thought I was only managing 1000 so now I got to deal with those 33 units,” or, “I didn't know that I could do move-ins this way or move-outs that way, or do a process of secure deposit, and refunds this way to be able to make it easier for me and more streamlined.” It's less touches, less communications, less points of friction between the teams, and then obviously what gives you the best results at the end of the day. We've seen very good results from our new approach with the implementation. Jason: People are a little frustrated with their existing property management software. It sounds like you guys have made a lot of changes, as well as the API stuff you’ve been talking about, direct integrations. It's probably worth to them to take a new fresh look at Propertyware. Inaas: Absolutely, yes. If you looked at it before, I do invite you to take a look at it again. I promise you, we've made a lot of changes. And we are continually making changes. We do this every day. When I say changes, it's really more of enhancements that really makes sense for all of what we talked about. You've mentioned the listing, how easy it is. One thing we just rolled out recently is the watermarking for photos in listing widget. It's a small thing but it's an awesome thing to have. Jason: It protects the photos. Inaas: It protects the photos. Especially if you're in areas where you're hit a lot by scams. When I went operating, I'm not singling them out but just a case of the matter. Florida was one of those states that had a lot of scams. By watermarking your photos at ease without a lot of work, it helps you to be able to protect them and making sure that no one is going to steal those photos to be able to scam you or your owners out of the property. Again, we're making enhancements that make sense and we're making enhancements that is allowing people to grow. Either by adding units, increasing their revenue, and/or reducing their expenses, and increasing their profits. Jason: Cool. Inaas, I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing some ideas about Propertyware, letting us know where everything's at with it. Again, people can get in touch by going to propertyware.com and check you guys out. Inaas: I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Jason. I'm really glad that I got a chance to be on the webcast with you. Thank you very much. You guys do a fine job. Please continue on these webcasts. Please continue educating our PMCs and just know that we're going to be supporting you all the way. If there is anything we can do for you and your listeners to be able to support them in their businesses, and in their endeavors, please reach out to us. We’d love to be your business partners. Jason: Awesome. Yeah, I would love to. That would be great. It would be cool. Maybe we'll do something to your audience at some point. That will be fun. Inaas: Absolutely. We welcome that. Jason: All right, cool. I love sharing the message that we share. I'll let you go Inaas. Thanks again for being on the show. Inaas: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Jason: As everybody knows, I love sharing the message that I think property management, there is a bigger vision for property managers than just getting mired in toilets, tenants, and termites. I do believe good property management can change the world. There is a massive ripple effect. There are thousands and thousands of families that can be affected by good management. There's a lot of situations in which families should be underneath good management instead of a crappy landlord situation. I do believe good property management can have a massive ripple effect that can change the world and hopefully that all of you get a little bit inspired or excited about that. You are having an impact. You get to make a difference. I am honored that through you my listeners, through our clients that we get to work with, that we’re able to get that message out, and that we’re able to have some small impact in the industry and have a ripple effect. I appreciate Inaas pointing that out. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, then please reach out. We’d love to have you and maybe work with you, and see if you’d be a good fit for the type of client that we're looking to work with, and make a difference in this industry. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Usually, paying attention to your body, mind, and health is the last thing you do when it comes to your business. It’s time to focus on yourself first! Today, I am talking to Tony LeBlanc, second-generation property manager and author of The Doorpreneur: Property Management Beyond the Rent Roll. Tony shares the keys to debunking the rent roll paradox when chasing doors to grow.  You’ll Learn... [03:00] Software Engineer Stint: Tech geek at heart that brings love of technology into property management space. [04:30] What is rent roll paradox? Property management companies that constantly rely on getting new doors to grow their business.  [05:42] Chasing doors creates havoc and stress due to inefficiencies. [08:45] Expanding Territories/Locations: The bigger and more geographically dispersed a business gets, the more opportunities arise that aren’t taken advantage of.  [10:56] Would you want two doors making the same amount, or one door making same amount as two? One door, if the goal is revenue/profit, it's not just about adding doors.  [12:30] Premature Expansion: Go-to once a company reaches a certain size; anything premature is generally not a good thing. [14:13] Entrepreneur’s Journey: Everyone hits stagnation or desire for more. They get distracted by opportunity.  [15:11] Opportunities vs. Expansion: Think it through, be disciplined, and follow good habits before making the jump and knowing where you’re going. [17:40] Cycle of Suck: Bad owners, properties, reputation, and false scarcity. [18:15] Property management is changing. It’s future is a foundation full of opportunities. [21:50] Dinosaur Dictators vs. Millennials Seeking Meaning and Purpose: Good property management can change the world.  [22:45] Tony’s Aha Moment: We matter and play an important role in thousands of people’s day-to-day life. [28:30] Target on Back: How to deal with being overwhelmed as a property manager. [32:14] When we create and have constraints, when we're limited in our time and attention, we innovate. Tweetables Growth doesn't happen by accident. Personal growth is gateway to business growth. Chasing Doors: Is all you care about being introduced to new people, close deals, and get more doors? Property management’s growth is defined by doors that it turns down, not doors it gets. Focus is power. Cut something out in your life to achieve something. Resources The Doorpreneur by Tony LeBlanc Ground Floor Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Cycle of Suck DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers are those that love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guest today is Tony LeBlanc from Canada. Welcome Tony, how are you doing? Tony: Hey man, I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: I'm really excited to have you on the show. You've been on before a long time ago and I was telling you in the green room before the show, but I think we resonate with a lot of similar values. I think we're both growth-minded people. I read your Doorpreneur book, which everybody should take a look at. And I think we have a similar mindset that growth doesn't happen by accident and personal growth is the gateway to business growth. I think we probably would both agree. Tony: Absolutely. Jason: I posted about this just the other day. I think it's the last thing that everybody wants to pay attention to in their business, is themselves. They’ll focus on everything external. “I need more leads. I need this. I need this.” Ironically, if I could change the person or get them clear on themselves, then all of those things end up changing by default, everything. Website marketing, everything into changing by default if you focus on yourself first. Tony give people a little bit of background. Maybe those that had heard you before, bring them up-to-date. Tell us a little bit about who Tony is. Tony: Sure, thanks Jason. I said my name's Tony LeBlanc from eastern Canada. Born and raised out here. I am a second generation property manager. It wasn't my first career of choice. I actually got into it as my second career. My first career was a 15-year stint as a software engineer with IBM which provided me an amazing experience visiting the world and working with a lot of great people in that domain. I'm a tech geek at heart. I love technology and I don't think that'll ever go away. It’s been interesting to bring that into the property management world, because as everybody knows, technology in the property management space is still not, in my opinion, where it should be. I still think we’re 5-10 years behind some of the stuff that we should have out there available to us. I still find it very difficult to run my business with the standard property management software that they have out there. After I left IBM, I started my management company which had been running out for about 10 years, called Ground Floor Property Management. We have been very well-received in our community. We now have three locations and I am now an author. I've basically taken everything that I've learnt from IBM, from life, and from the last 10 years of growing my property management company as well as the spin offs that we've created over the years, and that's where I am today, introducing the doorpreneur way. Jason: Perfect. The title of the show is the Keys to Debunking the Rent Roll Paradox. What is the rent roll paradox? Tony: The rent roll paradox is the fact that most, if not all property management companies out there, are constantly relying on getting new doors to grow their business. I believe there's a different way. I believe there is a much better way than doing that. And I say that from experience. For the first five years of running Ground Floor, my property management company, I was nothing but a door chaser. I just wanted to grow, grow, grow, grow. That's all I cared about. I just wanted to be introduced to new people, close deals, and get more doors. We got to the point to where we reached almost 2000 doors in five years. That’s across three locations. It was fast, it was intense, and it was incredibly painful. Incredibly painful. Now that I've gotten into the second five-year phase of the management journey, I've learned a lot looking back, and I realized that as I was going through that growth phase, I'm just adding more doors, and more doors, and more doors. I was causing a lot of havoc and stress on myself and my staff, but I was leaving an incredible amount of money on the table because of inefficiencies. If anybody's growing a property management company, when you're getting doors pouring in—we do multi-rise mostly, not just single family—it's a lot of work. We've onboarded 50, 60, 124 unit buildings, and it consumes you for a period of time. If you don't give the proper amount of space in between those growth, it becomes rough, but you don't want to take your foot off the gas if you're like me. Jason: Yeah, so let's touch on this real quick. I tell people this all the time. If somebody calls me and they say, “I am thinking of starting a property management business,” I say, “Do you want me to talk you into it or out of it?” because I get to see inside hundreds of companies. They usually laugh, but they usually stay into it. The thing is, this property management is easily death by a thousand cuts. Tony: Absolutely. Jason: If you have one little problem with one door and then you have a thousand doors, you have thousands of those problems over and over again. That's why it's so critical to shore up some of these leaks early on, because if you're having problems now and you feel like it's stressful now, just adding more doors is throwing gasoline on whatever fire you have. If that fire is a bad fire, then it's just going to explode. It’s going to be worse. Customer service goes down. You have more complaints and it compounds. Usually, they have to make significant changes just to go from 50-60 units under management to break past that first sand trap—I call 50-60 door the solopreneur sand trap—to break 100 doors. Just to do that, they have to change everything. Ironically, I’ll real estate companies that are doing property management on the side, break past that barrier artificially without making the necessary changes. They don't get technology in place, they don’t get systems in place, and it will pass it. One of my case studies was a client that had 600 units under management, single family, and was making $0 in this business. I said, “How are you doing that?” he’s like, “I've $3 million a month in real estate every month or whatever. I'm doing real estate.” Property management can be death by a thousand cuts. You have this pain, but you have growth and I'm sure a lot of people are like, “I would love that problem. I would love the problem to deal with, to figure out how to get 2000 doors and quit crying,” so tell us a little bit about your experience after that. Tony: One of the big things was expanding into different territories. Our headquarters, which is my main office, we’re doing extremely well. We then split off to another city within an hour-and-a-half away, and that ended up going well. The third location came in and that started off really well, but then about a year later, we started looking at all three locations individually, and we started seeing a lot of gaps, and a lot of issues that we're struggling with. We made a conscious effort to obviously fix a lot of those things and it made us really pull the curtain back and look at the overall business as it sat. The bigger we got and the more geographically dispersed that we became, we started seeing a lot of opportunities that we were just not taking advantage of. When I started the management company 10 years ago, I had maintenance as part of the division. That's the way my mother did it and that's the way I wanted to do it. I always wanted to have my own maintenance guys on my payroll so that I can control that and we still do that to this day. What really became evident as we're studying and looking at our rent rolls across all three locations, was the amount of money that was being spent outside in terms of different trades, different services that were required on all these properties. To be quite honest with you, I was getting tired of chasing doors. It wasn't as enticing anymore. Don't get me wrong, we still grow, we still love getting new doors, but something had changed in me. Then we were really started looking at what can we do beyond just getting more doors and that's really when the whole doorpreneur philosophy was born. Our first pivot into a new business that serviced our portfolios was landscaping [...] and that's where everything grew from there. Jason: Here's an obvious question. Would you rather have two doors that are making the same amount or one door that's making the same amount as two? Tony: Definitely one. Absolutely. Jason: Absolutely. If the goal is revenue, the goal is profit, and it's not just about adding doors. Everyone focuses on that one multiplier, it is doors. Everyone's trying to get a deal and it's like one deal per door. What if you can get multiple doors per deal? What if you can get multiple years per door? What about duration? There's all these other factors they’re not paying attention to. There are some property managers out there that are replacing every door every year. They're usually about 50-60 units, they're getting on an accidental investor that leaves every year, they have to replace every damn door every year, and they're like, “We’re adding doors, why aren’t we growing?” It seems so obvious. Tony: The major shift for us has been quality over quantity. I say no to more doors today than I ever have in my 10-year career running this company. It's really all about where can we take this? Where can we take that door and what can it do in the long term? Jason: Yeah. I think a property management company’s growth will always be defined by the doors that they're willing to turn down, not the doors they're able to get on for sure. I think another thing going back to your rent roll paradox, you talked about expanding into locations. I think that's a go-to once a company hits a certain size, they're like, “We did it here, let's go here.” They just had me speak on this at the Ironman conference on a panel and I call that, premature expansion. Anything premature is generally not a good thing. A lot of people think, “Well, we did this here, we're hitting a cap in our door account, so instead of expanding our revenue opportunities with those doors, or here, or figuring out other ways to hit different parts of the market here, let's just go find a new market. We’ll do it all over again,” they don't realize it's worse than being twice as hard in starting a new location. Tony: 100%. The stories that I can tell you about the two locations that we can open. It all comes back to a fundamental need of chasing doors. It’s like that's all you're able to see. We got this tunnel vision. It's like, “Okay, I've grown here and I think I'm as big as I can get. Where else can I go and chase more doors?” It's fulfilling for the first little while. It's fun, it’s exciting, but there's an emptiness to it in the end. I think I'm a little bit different than maybe probably a lot of traditional type property managers. I knew when I started Ground Floor that it was going to be something much bigger than just a property management company. I had that vision 10-15 years ago and just running after doors, it lasted for 3-4 years and then I was like, “Okay, what's next? Is this it? What else can I do in here?” That's when a lot of other things started coming along. Jason: I think that's common for every entrepreneur in the entrepreneurial journey. If they really are an entrepreneurial-minded person, they're going to hit this stagnation or this desire for more. The desire to do more. Sometimes that goes south and they do it in negative or dysfunctional ways. I started out just doing websites. Then I go like, “Hey, I could make residual income if I'm doing the hosting for these websites. I could do this. They also need the service.” I think as entrepreneurs, we also get distracted by opportunity. We see it everywhere and it keeps us sometimes from even achieving the goal we're working on right now. How do you find that balance between seeing all the opportunity and expanding into new areas, but making sure that you're actually getting stuff done? Tony: I'll be honest with you. The first couple of years, I was so focused. I had my head down so bad in terms of just getting the doors and growing my local office, that it was so busy and it was all so fast that I didn't have time to look at anything else. It's when I get a little bit of breathing room that I started looking at the different locations. I don't necessarily regret it, but I probably would have thought about it a little bit longer before I need the jump. If I look at myself now, it really comes down to being disciplined and a lot of good habits. Like I said, I say no to more business today than I ever have. I am 100% focused. Property management is my life. If it's not in property management or in my sphere, I'm not interested. I don't have time for it, I don't make time for it, and I'm very blunt with that. I have an extremely tough schedule that I follow. I do a lot of stuff for myself personally, and then that translates over to the business side. I know where I'm going. It's kind of fun to where you'll have other guys or people that'll come in and say, “I got these cool opportunities, I got this, I got this,” I'm like, “Cool, good for you. I hope it works.” Me? I'm not interested. I got my path and I know what I'm doing. Jason: Yeah. I did hit up for opportunities all the time. Different property management there's like, “Hey, we could do this cool thing together.” I’m like, “No, we can't.” Focus is power like with anything. You could be a flood light or you could be a laser and actually cut something out in your life and achieve something. All right. Can we touch on your book a little bit? I read through it. I think there's some interesting ideas in there. I don't know where we should start, but you've got this book, you call it The Doorpreneur: Property Management Beyond the Rent Roll. It's a quick read. I think it's a good read. You share a little bit of your journey and some of the things you've gone through. I think we've done some similar things. I'm going to quote a part of it. It says, “We are the problem and we are the solution.” You were talking about how property management had a bad rep because we're allowing it to. I think that's the case. Everyone who’s heard of me, if they listen to my show at all, talk about the cycle of suck. If you haven't, just google “Property Management Cycle of Suck” and you'll find an old video I did on it. I think that the industry as a whole is that's where they are. It's caught in the cycle of suck. It has a bad reputation because everyone's taking on bad owners, and they're taking on bad properties, and they're not being picky, and they feel all the scarcity. Everybody's trying to do the same stuff that's not working which creates false scarcity in the industry and there's no scarcity in property management. You said that you believe the industry's time has come. What do you see for this industry? You say it's on the brink of change. I feel that, too. I feel like there's a shift going on right now. I'm hoping that DoorGrow is helping to push that forward. What do you see for the future of property management? Tony: Just over the last few years, I would say probably in the last 4-5 years, I will say that you’ve had a part in this in terms of, you're starting to see a lot more people get together and talk about property management, and not just NARPM. I know that’s a big organization in the States, but in order for an industry to really take over, I believe it's got to go beyond just the regulation of the groups that are that are like that. It's exciting to see a lot of that happening, whether if it's groups online or different organizations, all sorts of cool stuff. But I'm also seeing that the opportunities that are becoming present in all these different places are becoming much more attractive to different people. It's like you're seeing the density being built in a lot of different cities—the rise of renting out in this whole generation of millennials—in terms of it being a renter's nation. That is providing a good foundation for a lot of required property managers to come out here and start managing these properties. The tools are getting better. They're not amazing yet, and I'm speaking in terms of technology. Those things are getting better over time. But more and more, I'm seeing the property management is getting away from the old school that started in the business 30, 40, 50 years ago, and you're seeing a new breed of property management come into the picture, which is they’re a lot more professional, they're running real businesses, it's not just a side gig from a realtor, or it's not just this big owner that owns a big portfolio and he decided to manage a few places on the side so he can make a few bucks and pay for him running his own stuff. They're seeing legitimate people, business people coming into the space and making a run at it, and that's what we need. We need professionals coming in and we need professionally-run businesses. More than ever today, I'm seeing and talking to a lot of people that are running greater businesses and it's exciting, because I think the opportunity is huge. But it's also at the same time somewhat limited because I know I've done this long enough. I've been around it my entire life. This business is tough. It is not for everybody. We're going to have the turnover that's going to come through and hopefully the good will stick and make the business better for everybody. Better first impression of the business, better for us working in the industry, being able to grow together, and making it all better together. Jason: Yeah. I think that the way to change the industry is obviously to have healthy businesses. Healthy business owners in this industry, leading the way, and they have to be profitable. I think also there's a huge opportunity right now in that, millennials are the workforce largely. I think a lot of people, they’ve gotten a bad rep. A lot of people think they're lazy, they’re unmotivated, and I find that to be patently false. I think millennials are our new generation of workers that don't want to do menial work. They don't want to do something without meaning. I think this is a huge opportunity for business owners that are not acting like dinosaurs saying, “I'm paying you to do something so just freaking do it.” Those are the dinosaur dictators that think, “Well, I give them money. Why don't they just do everything amazingly?” Millennials want purpose and I think there's an opportunity now for business owners that believe they have a purpose, that there's a greater vision for what they do. You touched on that in your book. I talked quite a bit about that as well. People have heard me say, “I believe good property management can change the world. It can have a significant impact. We’re affecting families. We’re affecting lives.” I could have that impact through my clients, which is what gets me excited about showing up helping property management business owners lead the way and do good work. They can't do that if they're struggling. Tony: Yeah. The biggest aha moment I've had in my career with Ground Floor, my management company, was four years ago. We had an offsite meeting with all my staff. We’re about 50 people with all 3-4 different companies. I was looking at the rent roll, I showed it to everybody on the big screen, and I'm like, “We've got 2000 apartments,” roughly it was right around there, that we're almost full all the time, “and if I take an average, we’ll probably have around 3000-3500 people that live in properties that we take care of. Guys, we matter. You cannot not look at that and how important of a role we play in day-to-day life for close to 4000 people.” I'm like, “That's pretty special.” Like I explained in the book, we’re a part of all sorts of experiences for these people. We've seen deaths, we've seen births, we've seen marriages, we've seen plenty of divorces, we've seen it all. It happens underneath our roofs. Again, I grew up in the business, I've seen it all from a personal standpoint, and now I've seen it all from running a business. There are no ifs or ands about it. It's a special business. Jason: All of those different situations require some activity or involvement with the property manager. I mean, even if it's just maintaining the property and doing some maintenance, it's affecting these families lives, and it's affecting these sometimes challenging moments that they're going through. Those interactions can be positive, helpful interactions, or it can deepen their words, they can cause more pain, and the ripple effect property managers have is huge. Property management is death by a thousand cuts. It also can be a ripple effect of a thousand possible positive interactions on a regular basis. I know property management can be tough. I hear about it all the time. I know how difficult it can be to run a business. I know that. Every entrepreneur knows that. It doesn't get easier the bigger you get, often. It can sometimes get more challenging. But it makes it worth it when you have somebody that comes to you and says, “Hey, you made my life better,” or, “You had an impact,” and those little moments we don't always hear about them, but when they do come through, they do. That’s why we do what we do. Tony: Yeah. I think a lot of property managers will be able to agree with me, that there's an old saying that the phone never rings with good news in our business. If someone’s calling, it's usually something bad on the other line. It’s either a complaint, or an issue, or something. It’s almost like you have to come into the office each day knowing that you may not get a million praises from the outside, and that's why the office environment is sacred for you and your staff, for the people running the business. I just hired a new girl a few weeks ago and I'm very honest and transparent during our interview. I was like, “You're new to this industry and you are going to struggle. It’s going to be really tough. It’s going to test you emotionally. It’s going to test your ability to deal with a million things going on at the same time, it's going to test you in every way possible.” I asked her the other day, she’s going on her third week and she's like, “I knew it was going to be tough, but I didn't think there would be so much that I had to learn,” but the office environment is such a way that we're very much a team, we help each other out, we have each other's backs. If there's a difficult situation, other people step in. You really have to have that environment because it can really help the overall business. If not, it can get in get a little lonely. Jason: Yeah. The turnover in property management businesses regarding staff can be pretty high. I think one way to mitigate that is what you're talking about, it's creating a really positive culture, a safe place within the business, a place in which your team members are allowed to make mistakes, they're allowed to screw up, and they're allowed to figure things out. Otherwise, they start hiding stuff. Tony: And start costing you money. Bad mistake. Jason: I think it's important to realize, a lot of times in any business, the people that are really attacking or really causing you grief, are hurt people. They're hurting on the inside. It's not even really usually about you. We were talking about before the show how I've been really attacked lately in some forums and some groups. I have several people messaging me privately and lots of people that message me like, “Hey Jason, you don’t deserve this, you’ve done a lot for us,” and it's ironic because in property management, we deal with this. Everybody gets these negative reviews. They feel unjust and unfair, they didn’t give the deposit back which rightly so probably, you're being attacked, and these people have nothing better to do than just try to destroy your business. That's just part of being in business, I think. In general, you're always going to have haters. The bigger you get, the bigger the target is on your back. You just have more people that you're dealing with. I definitely got a target. You dealing with 4000 maybe potential constituents connected to your business that you're impacting, all the owners, all the renters, everything, you have a big target, Tony, on your back. Tony: Yeah. It's overwhelming in the best of days. That’s probably one of the, I would say, either the first or the second biggest problem overall arching in this industry is how do you deal with the overwhelm of dealing with so many different things. If we were to count all the different balls that we’re juggling in the area at any given time as an owner even as a property manager, it's a lot. That's why I've gone to the depths that I did with the book in terms of putting the importance on lifestyle, in terms of installing good habits, in terms of being healthy, working out, just simple things because if you're going to go in this industry and you're going to make a run at it, you got to be firing on all cylinders. A big part of that is your body, your relationships at home, your relationships with your kids. You got to go into the office with a clear mindset. If not, it's going to be rough. I've walked in the holes in my office on many days after either having an argument with one of my kids or having an argument with my queen and that's like, “I can't do anything in here. I have zero patience and I just want everybody to stay away from me.” That's not a way to run a business. Jason: That's how I would feel if I'm hungry. That's how I would feel if I didn't get enough sleep the night before. We tend to start externalizing these challenges. That's why even people coming to my program they're like, “Well, I wanted to grow my business, why are you having me focus on some of the silly stuff like drinking water?” I get picked on about some of those things but I know the impact that it's had on my own life to get the basics in place and have that foundation so that you can tackle the world. We have one vehicle in which we approach everything in life and that's our body. Tony: Yeah, absolutely. Jason: Our current ability distinct cognitively, to function, to be able to deal with stress, be able to see objectively, to be able to handle all the stuff that gets thrown out as a business, to be able to see alternatives and ideas, all of it has to do with our brain and being able to function on all four cylinders or however many you might have. Tony: Absolutely. I'm a true believer. I've always been an athletic guy. 2019, I've taken it up a notch and done some other things. Jason: I've noticed. Tony: Yeah. It's funny because 8½ months getting ready for an Ironman, I made more money in that eight months than I probably did in the last two years by just condensing the amount of time that I had and the focus that was required to do it, and to pull it off. I still look back at it and like, “How did I do that?” and I'm still digesting it all because it’s still fairly new, but it's taught me so many lessons that I'm going to be able to take forth with the new stuff that I'm doing. The very first video that I made to get ready for my Ironman training and it was January or February, it's like I'm doing this because I need to become somebody different in order to launch this book, to write this book, to finish this book, and to grow beyond the book. It was amazing. It was a journey like I can't explain Jason: I’ll point out one thing that's very obvious to me because I've seen it in you, I've seen it in a hundreds of entrepreneurs. When we create constraints, when we have constraints, when we're limited in our time or limited in our attention, we innovate. That's when our brain starts to really fire and we get really, really creative. It's the same thing with our team members. If you give them unlimited time to do something and unlimited resources and money to do something, they're going to do it in the most costly, time-sucky way possible. But when you create constraints and having a goal of doing something big like an Ironman, where you're going to put your body to some massive stress, you have to be prepared for that, and you know what it's actually going to take, then it gets really difficult and it creates constraint. I'll point out to everybody. I've seen this in lots and lots of businesses and I've seen in my own life when we have constraints. You don’t notice, you come up with ideas when money get scarce. When you have a team member leave, all of a sudden, you're changing things that they've been doing a status quo forever. A lot of these challenges that we perceive as challenges really are opportunities for us to innovate and to grow and to change. I'm not sure if Tony will make it back here, but I'm sure Tony would love for you guys to reach out. Tony, I'm going to plug you. He's got his book, Doorpreneur, and I recommend you check that out. You can go to doorpreneur.com You can preorder it now. Make sure you get his book. Check it out. I think there's some really great value. It's a quick read, it’s only 125 pages, and I think you'll really enjoy it. He's got some previews of the first four chapters on his site doorpreneur.com and it looks like you'll be able to get it on Amazon and in some other places. We'll go ahead and wrap this up. So if you are property management entrepreneur, and you are wanting to add doors, and you are wanting to get your business in alignment, and you are wanting to create that space for yourself, you feel like you're the hamster on the treadmill, then reach out. You can check us out at doorgrow.com.

From surfing waves to making waves by fixing exploding toilets for tenants—how an entrepreneur and creative technologist leveraged design to streamline simple solutions.  Today, I am talking to Mark Rojas, CEO and founder of the Proper app that streamlines the building repairs process. Mark has spent his career creating positive user experiences and adding value by solving problems related to efficiency and human connectivity.  You’ll Learn... [04:40] Definition of Design: Viewing how something works in the real world and creating a corresponding experience to make your life easier and more enjoyable. [05:34] Proper app idea originated with possibility of becoming an accidental landllord. [07:13] Maintenance is the bain of their existence. There’s got to be a better way to fix building repairs process and problems. [09:30] Maintenance is more than one issue. It involves many problems for many people.  [10:10] Lack of Communication: Leverage “chat room” to create efficient and effective dialogue between contractors, property managers, and tenants. [13:07] What makes Proper different? Visibility and shared platform for centralized communication between all participating people and places.  [14:50] Building Repairs Process: Submit image, describe problem, create work order, send notifications, add contractors, diagnosis issue, complete fix, submit/pay invoice. [19:50] Property Management Platforms: Proper’s integration and import/export plans for increased visibility for systematic way to save time and money while simplifying lives.  [22:42] Common Questions and Concerns: Is Proper app intuitive? Is training provided? [28:15] Future Feature: Email integration and aggregation to avoid duplicate data.  Tweetables Every elegant solution involves some element of intelligent design. Design isn’t all about pixels. It’s applied via various mediums by viewing how something works in the real world. Maintenance is the bain of a property manager’s existence.  First Step with Proper App: A picture is worth a 1,000 words, so describe the problem succinctly. Resources Proper Mark Rojas on LinkedIn Venice Art Crawl Buildium AppFolio Propertyware Intercom Help Scout GatherKudos DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today’s guest, I’m hanging out with Mark Rojas. Mark, welcome to the show. Mark: Hey, it’s good to see you again. Jason: Mark is coming to us from a company called Proper Chat, correct? Mark: That’s correct. Jason: Mark, I’ll read a little bit of your bio. It says you are the CEO and founder and it says, “While you might not think of hiring a designer to fix an exploding toilet, Mark Rojas still might be the man for the job. From starting his own surfboard manufacturing company at 16 to founding multiple tech companies focused on creating positive user experiences, Mark has spent his career working to add value by solving problems of efficiency, and human connectivity. An entrepreneur and creative technologist from Queens, Mark is the founder and CEO of Proper, an app designed to streamline the building repairs process. He first began befriending property managers while producing the Venice Art Crawl, a passion project that transformed vacant properties into temporary art showrooms (aka fun, free open houses). Shortly thereafter while subletting his apartment in 2017, Mark was blessed with the invigorating experience of needing to manage repairs for a bathroom explosion involving multiple tenants.” Why don’t you take us from there? Mark: That’s a good intro. Jason: I’ll let you tell the rest of the story. How did you get into this from surfboards? Mark: Surfboards was a little I went to when I was 16 years old, but that did throw me into design and ultimately product design. Right after college, my career quickly became into web development, app development, and working with a lot of startups here in the Bay Area, which is where we’re based out of, to leverage design to solve water problems. It came with the advent of mobile, really becoming this fast-growing platform, where your everyday user now is expecting this very seamless experience that is solving various problems we’re on. That transitioned from building a product, starting a company, and then continuing to wanting to build products for others. I think one of those things that continues to be a passion of mine is finding a problem and leveraging design to simplify, streamline it, and make everyone’s life better. Jason: I love it. That’s entrepreneurism in a nutshell. We see a problem and we’re crazy enough to think we can solve that problem. We can make money solving that problem and create a win-win. You love that you say that you focus on doing it through design because really, every elegant solution involves some sort of intelligent design, whether it’s a system, whether it’s something visual. People think design, they think it’s like graphic design or something creative. Mark: Yeah. I don’t think of design as just pixels. There’s various mediums through which one can apply design. It’s really viewing how something works in the real world and seeing how can you create a corresponding experience that can streamline it, that can make it simpler, that can make it more delightful, more efficient, and really give you a lot of your life back, whether that’s time or even just joy. Jason: What problem then did you really see that you’re like, “I’m going to create Proper”? Let’s try to build this problem up. Mark: I’ve seen a lot of different thoughts to my life in being a tenant, but it really became a problem for me when I almost became an accidental landlord. I was traveling for an extended period of time, I have known my landlord for a while, and she was happy to actually let me sublet it. It’s like, “It’s okay. Go off, I trust you, and when you come back, it’s all good.” But there’s still a level of responsibility that was pressed upon me. As I rented out my apartment, I quickly realized that I have become a landlord. So, two days into it, the subtenant called me to let me know that there was a major problem. I was like, “What? What’s going on?” It turned out that the pipe above our ceiling under our neighbor’s bathroom had burst. To say the least, it’s quite a mess. This set up a flurry of emails, phone calls, text messages between the tenant and myself, the property owner, neighbors, contractors, plumbers, et cetera, and it was happening over phone calls, emails, text messages, WhatsApp calls, FaceTime calls. At some point, I was like, “Wow, this is rather ridiculous,” and my design mind immediately started thinking... Jason: Broken. This is flawed. There’s got to be a better way than this. Mark: Yeah. My wheels are just spinning and spinning and spinning, and I started designing it in my brain. Then, one day I just whipped it out of my computer, I just mocked it up, and I was like, “I’m going to build this.” I started building it and I think one thing that’s true then and now, and even more true now, is we spend a lot of time talking to our users and our customers, and really dissecting their problems or processes. I immediately started doing calls with property managers that I already knew. As you saw in my bio, I knew a lot of property managers. When I started the Venice Art Crawl, which is a crowd-sourced art event, we have 40 different art shows going on at the same time in Venice beach. The way I did it was I found vacant spaces, [...] the property managers and basically said, “I know I can bring high net worth individuals to these empty spaces and we can treat it almost as an open house.” That worked not only well—I was creating value for them—they all basically love me. When I started working on this idea, they were happy to talk to me for hours at a time. What I found is that maintenance is almost the bane of their existence. Jason: Oh yeah. We did a survey inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group—property managers listening, you should be in there if you have a property management business—and we asked—just an informal poll in the Facebook group—“What’s your number one challenge in your business?” There were two or three items at the top of the list that were connected to maintenance. It was sourcing vendors, it was maintenance coordination. Maintenance is the biggest headache or challenge in property management. Mark: Yeah. It’s very painful to the point that I actually thought that I was becoming a therapist. Sometimes, they would talk to me for three hours at a time just talking about it, and I was like, “Wow, this is a very real problem.” I was able to take those learnings and turned it into a product that corresponded with it. What started off was really just a project. I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m going to become a billionaire off of this. This is my next big thing.” This is more, I was traveling, I wanted to start building a product, and I wanted it to not be something that I built in bane, but rather, to possibly solve someone’s problem. Initially, it was my problem, and when I talked to property managers, they actually laughed at me because I was building an app already and only dealing with a monthly maintenance issue, while they’re dealing with hundreds a month, if not more. Jason: Right. You’re building an app for one maintenance issue. Mark: Yeah, so talking to them totally validated that this is something worth pursuing. Then, I just went deeper. I kept talking to them. I started talking to the contractors, the tenants, and I realized that this is a problem on all sides of the equation and set out to start building a solution that could solve a lot of the issues with it. I think a lot of my history in design has been focused on communication, really making it richer and removing barriers. Essentially, a lot of friction and a lot of time wasted happens when poor communication happens. That’s why it’s proper.chat and leveraging chat as a platform to remove a lot of the bottlenecks that happen, like playing Whac-A-Mole between an email for this contractor, phone call for that tenant, and really starting to centralize everything where we could remove those bottlenecks and with the oversight of the property manager, the contractor and the tenant can speak with each other. Anything from scheduling, updates, “Hey, I got to go to Home Depot and get this part. I’ll be back tomorrow.” In the world today, the tenant would know. Three days could pass and that creates frustration and friction for the tenant because they don’t know what’s going on, and that means another phone call to the property manager. Jason: Right. Communication in a business, for any business, causes a challenge; internal communication. For a while, as I was growing from solopreneur to building a team, I have freelancers. I thought this was so great because I only have to pay them when there’s work. “Here’s the job, do this work.” But the challenge with that is the communication level was just not strong enough. I didn’t realize that until I started getting full-time employees. The communication level is dramatically different when you have somebody that’s dedicated because you’re reducing the number of people that you need. That person is giving more of their time. Two people that are doing 10 hours a week versus 1 person that’s doing 20 hours a week, I would take the one person any day of the week, especially if those two have to communicate. The communication back-and-forth wastes so much time, and there’s always a percentage of loss when there’s any sort of communication. If there’s communication between two parties, there are gaps. There just always is. It could be a misread and body language. It could be somebody doesn’t understand something. Somebody’s a poor communicator. There’s some sort of flaw. The more you can reduce that, the less friction there is. One of my recent hires was one of these unicorns that can do web development and design. The communication level is way shorter. He can get things done in such a short time. Normally, I want a specialist, but he’s able to create something so much quicker because he’s not having the communicate and negotiate between another party that doesn’t understand what they do. A developer and a designer are two different universes, right? Mark: Absolutely, yeah. Jason: [...] crazy guys setting you both. So, I get it. Explain how this helps reduce the communication and why is this better than the other stuff that’s out there, what other people have been doing? What’s unique about Proper that you’re noticing? Mark: A lot of it comes down to visibility and a shared placed for everyone involved with the maintenance, to communicate with each other. Where we really differentiate is that we started on mobile. We’re a mobile-first solution. We do have a desktop and a web experience for the property manager. In terms of being able to report, what we notice from a lot of property managers, whether they have Yardi, AppFolio, you’re still getting these maintenance requests from many different places. You’re getting from phone calls, emails, text messages. What we set out to build and we’re building right now is one place I can centralize all that. Not only centralize it but make it a more useful format. When someone writes you a three-paragraph email, a lot of it is frustration. Jason: Right. There’s all this emotion and they want you to understand their pain. They’re like, “I got to relate this. I got to paint this picture.” Mark: Exactly, and part of it is because they’ve waited too long to write this email. This frustration has built up and they want to write this email. With our application, which is native, you as a tenant are able to create a work order very quickly, and it’s very visual. An image is worth a thousand words and it really is in this area. Often, these emails don’t even include images, so a tenant is able to quickly snap a photo, almost like Snapchat or Instagram. You don’t train anyone. There’s literally billions of users on these apps who know how to use this and they’re able to create a work order in under 30 seconds. The format is not to write paragraphs and paragraphs. It’s to be succinct, 140–200 characters max and you choose a category. This gets fired off to the property manager, you get a notification on your phone or on your desktop, and then from there you have your contractors that you can add this this conversation. The idea is that it turns into a group chat at this point, with the property manager still being involved. Instead of trying to get back and forth between scheduling, instead of the contractor having to ask questions to the property manager to then go ask the tenant to further diagnose what’s broken, the contractor’s able to immediately see what’s broken because there’s always going to be a picture. We pretty much make that almost mandatory for the tenants. What we’ve seen from contractors is that they’re able to save time and cost by more quickly able to diagnose where the problem is, what tools to bring, what materials to bring. Everything just happens there. The property manager is still part of the process, but they don’t need to insert themselves. When they insert themselves now, it really takes up a lot of their time. Not only because they have to go back and forth, but often they’re fielding phone calls, they’re fielding emails, and then this really, really adds up. Jason: I love that it’s prompting them to take a picture. Mark: Yeah. The first step is to create a work order, take a picture. That’s the first thing. Jason: And a picture’s worth a thousand words. They’re not going to have to write a thousand words in order to get it across. You can see it and you go, “Okay, you can fluff it up or make it more dramatic, but I can see it. Here it is.” Or they might do the opposite. They might say, “Hey, there’s a problem with the faucet and it’s flooding the whole bathroom.” So, you can see it. They send you a picture. In a lot of apps, a picture’s an afterthought. They have to do some serious extra work in order to get a photo into something or to do it. I’ve had maintenance companies ask me, “Could you email me a photo?” or, “Can you take a picture so we know what to look for or what type of fixture we need?” whatever. It slows down the communication significantly. Mark: Totally and I think there are these added benefits that currently property managers don’t have the bandwidth to do. Because of the contractors there, they can easily provide updates themselves like, “Hey, I have this question.” “Hey I have to come back.” Right now, that has to go to the property manager, the property manager then has to tell the tenant, and then often this doesn’t happen. So, you have this built-in benefits of transparency that you have with the tenant that really builds trust, but also stops them from calling you, which once again takes up a lot of your time. The very nice thing is that at the end, the contractor is able to close up the job by providing proof that they’ve done it. So, they have to take pictures of it. Then, you have these records of the conversations that you have with everyone, the images at the beginning of the job, the images at the end, and it just creates a ton of transparency and documentation that you can have, that’s very easily searchable, filterable later on. One thing we’re starting to work on is really reporting. You can start to really understand the volume of workers that you’re getting, the stages that they’re at, the amount of time it took to complete it, and really how much time it’s taking up for you. Jason: It makes a lot of sense. If you can cut out one phone call, you’re probably saving your team, at a minimum, 15–18 minutes of productivity, simply because one interruption in a team member’s day, typically they say, cost about 18 minutes of productivity. Even [...] take 18 minutes, they got to rebuild the house of cards they were working on or go back to whatever project they’re trying to figure out. So, if you can cut down the phone calls significantly, even if you don’t have that large of a portfolio, it’s almost like getting a new team member on your team. It’s that significant. People are really expensive in property management businesses. It’s the highest cost in the PM business. I know what property managers listening to this are going to be thinking. They’re going to be thinking, “Well, that sounds great, but another piece of technology. How is it going to work with my Buildium, or my AppFolio, or my Propertyware? I got these, they’ve got maintenance requests built into them. How will this work?” Mark: In terms of the different platforms, there are ones that permit direct integrations and we’re starting to work with building some of those. Then, we’re also building a way for you to be able to easily export, search, and import this data at the end. I think the difference really is that the maintenance offerings that they have don’t create the same level of visibility and don’t save you the amount of time. Even if their integration is not there, the amount of time that we’re currently saving you and that we’re going to continue to increase, really starts to outweigh some of the cons of doing that. That’s the way we’re moving through with all these things. Jason: Can you tell us who you’re working to start integrating with yet? Mark: We have a couple of partners, mostly in the Los Angeles area. One has about 1000 units, another 2000 units, and we’re working with both of them. They’re both on different platforms and seeing what’s going to be the most efficient way. It’s not just integration of the maintenance, but also I think what’s really important here is their accounting. We’re really looking at accounting and how we can start to streamline with that because there is one of the things that we’ve seen with the contractors is a lot of them don’t have a systematic way of not just keeping track of their work orders or invoices, but even just generating invoices, so it takes up a lot of their time. On the property management side, you’re getting all these different types of invoices coming in, totally different formats, and then you’re manually doing double data entry into all these different systems. It’s kind of a pain because it’s like, “Why is it formatted this way?” You have this hurdle that you’re dealing with all these messed-up invoices. One thing that we’re seeing is there’s the ease of use of our invoice. A lot of the maintenance techs and workers are actually enjoying using it and starting to use it as a way to create a uniform way of generating invoices for their property managers. What we want to do is actually make that very easy to export so you can import so that you can import it into your accounting system. Jason: Cool. What are the big questions that people ask about this? What are their frequently asked questions, concerns? What are the big questions that they’re asking so that we cover all the bases here? Mark: There’s quite a few, but I think there’s this very chat-focused, very simple, clean design. There isn’t a lot of other platforms that we’ve seen in the space yet. They’re starting to show up, but really there’s very few. I think a lot of people are like, “Hey, do you provide training? How much is training going to cost?” Jason: You’re like, “Do you know how to use instant message?” Mark: No. We don’t want to be sending that at all. We really care about our users, so we offer like, “We’ll train you,” and then the funny thing here is that we do a demo and not for a minute we train them. Jason: And by the way that demo was the training. Mark: Yeah. If you know how to use iMessage or any of those things, it’s very intuitive. That’s really the core principle of the company is designing something that is not only beautiful, but it’s extremely easy to use because we don’t think that we should be paying and send somebody out to train you or that you need to hire some expert to use the software. Jason: All right. I’m going to go to the devil’s advocate on the other side here. It’s so easy, it’s just chat, it’s so simple, why don’t I just sign-up with Intercom or Help Scout and get a chat tool and take tickets? What’s different between those solutions and something like Proper? Mark: Proper is really geared towards maintenance. Even just the terminology, the flow, the understanding of the whole workflow of maintenance getting done, is what is unique to us. You could theoretically use text messaging to do. The reality is you can start to use that, but then very quickly it breaks down and it becomes cumbersome. For example, Intercom. There’s no mobile app. There’s no way to really add photos into what’s going on. There’s no way to categorize it into the type of problem that might be related to maintenance. For us, we provide all those things but then, you’re also able to search, filter, and zoom in on a property and be like, “Okay, these are all the work orders. This is how we spent maintenance on this property.” As we move forward and we start to integrate with other systems, that’s something that Intercom would probably not do. Jason: They’re going to put this chat tool probably on their website, so people coming there if they have maintenance requests, do they hide it like, “Go here for maintenance and then the chat is there”? Or is it [...] and if so, the maintenance coordination is one side, but they also have lead gen that they’re trying to do. They have sales. They’re trying to target owners and capture people with their live chat tools. How do you usually recommend they segregate that or can Proper help up with that other challenge as well? Mark: Good question. The way the application is working right now is that the live chatting or website, if you’re using something like Intercom, that is something that we’re not providing right now. Essentially, what happens is that property managers will announce that they’re using Proper to their network, share the app, then they’re able to install it, and then start reporting through there. It comes into our web app and mobile app. As a property manager, you can use the app from anywhere, but you could also use it at your desktop. From there, is where to start to field everything. Jason: So, Proper works more like an internal tool. When you onboard your new tenants, you can say, “Hey, get this. This is how you can communicate with us.” It’s probably not just functioning as the live chat tool that’s capturing leads on the front-end of your business, but you could always take that tool and put links into it or pre-written messages to say, “Oh, it’s a maintenance request. Go here.” [...] Intercom a button that they click, that I’m here for maintenance and it takes them to Proper to take care of that. Mark: Yeah and one of the really interesting things is that we’re starting to build email integrations, so the initial one that we built is that if you receive an email that’s coming in from a tenant and it’s maintenance-related, we build the Chrome extension where very easily just sends it to Proper and then it turns it into actual work orders. You’re not actually trying to do double data entry there. The next step of that is making it so that your tenants and contractors don’t have to join Proper. They can submit things via email, but then you have one place where it’s starting to aggregate everything, whether it’s submitted directly to Proper or through another channel like email. That’s one of the really exciting features for these next two months that we’re working on should be out. Jason: So, that will be similar to Intercom, which you can have a certain email address like [email protected] and have that forward those emails into Proper? Mark: Yeah, it all vacuums it right up and then as it comes in, you’re able to categorize it and make it something that is not mixed with thousands of other’s emails but rather centralized and easy to find just like any of the other maintenance tickets. Jason: It sounds like it would make sense for them to have some sort of support solution and still use Proper for the maintenance portion for the back-end, and internally with tenants. Very cool. What other questions then do people tend to ask? Mark: One of the big ones is really that email integration that I just mentioned. That’s essentially what we’ve been doing is tons of user research and starting to find what are the biggest problems. Using that is like having it bubble up to the top and turning it into features that are usable to them. Jason: One of the challenges in maintenance is the communication between vendor and owner is getting paid, payouts. What if the vendor starts messaging and they’re like, “Hey, property manager, when do I get paid? Here’s my invoice,” and the tenants are seeing this stuff. How do you deal with that? Mark: I’m glad you asked that because that’s literally the feature we’re rolling out right now. We’re waiting for the upstart to approve and by the way, we’re on iOS, Android, and web. The next thing I told you, we make it really easy for your maintenance staff or techs to create invoices and generate them. We’re actually about to roll out payments where they’re able to get to pay through ACH and really it’s cut out a lot of time for the contractors to generate those invoices or even for the property managers to [...] and all these things which I still see very frequently happening. Jason: In the app, the contractor maybe see something a little different and they can submit invoice or something like this? Mark: Yeah. Basically, when the contractor closes up the job, they provide proof that they did it and they’re prompted to create an invoice. Jason: And one proof would be another photo, something along these lines? Mark: Yeah. You’re able to add multiple photos as the contractor. This then generates an invoice that the property manager receives. This is a separate view where the tenant is not part of it. They’re not anything around cost, they’re not seeing this. The property manager is actually able to pay via ACH directly to the contractor through the app. There’s no need to go elsewhere and try to cut a check, having anyone pick it up, or mail it, or anything like that. Jason: So again, it’s reducing a lot of the friction and communication challenges between the property manager or maintenance coordinator and the vendors. Mark: Yeah. That’s one thing that we’ve seen on both sides of the equation. A lot of property managers are still spending a lot of time just doing payments. On the contractor side, they are spending a lot of time generating invoices. They have a good support, so at the end of the week, they’re tying up all the work that they did. They don’t even necessarily have the good system to keep track of all the jobs that they did. So, they’re often once again spending this admin time where they’re not actually getting paid to do that. What happens now is that with the invoicing feature, although it’s simple and very intuitive, it actually reduces the amount of time that they’re doing this stuff, they’re able to get paid faster, and they’re able to spend a lot less time worrying about the stuff and actually getting more work done, which means your maintenance is getting done faster, which means your tenants are happier, which means you’re happier as a property manager because you’re hearing less from them. It’s really an interesting problem because you have these three different groups of people and you’re trying to design the simplest solution that takes into account their unique set of problems. Jason: If you imagine, what would be the ideal situation so that all three parties could communicate the most efficiently? You would just have all three of them sitting in a room face-to-face talking like, “Hey, you’ll do this. I’ll do this.” “Okay, I’ll pay you then. I’ll do this.” “Okay, team. Ready? Great.” Everybody’s there, it would be fast, but that’s not reality, right? Mark: Yeah. Jason: You’re trying to run a business and so is the vendor. The tenant should hopefully has a job and making some money to pay rent. There’s all this stuff going on, we can’t just all hang out, but Proper really creates a room that they can all hang out in and communicate. Mark: It’s great that you actually put it that way because that’s very much how I think about solving this problem. When you’re in person with sometime, it is the richest form of communication. If it’s a group of people, then the bottlenecks or the walls that exist, that is created through distance, creates all these inefficiencies. Essentially, that is actually how we think. That is what we want to be able to create these rooms and make this very efficient, yet rich way to communicate with each other, to eliminate a lot of these barriers that are currently costing a lot of time, which includes money, and often just frustration. One thing that I didn’t mention here is that I spent a whole year working out of a property manager’s office. You can call it extreme customer development and I really understood a lot of their operations and just so much of their time is spent on communication, but because they don’t have good tools for it, it just generates a lot of frustration on each side of it. Assuming that it’s hard to measure, the quality of life when you’re constantly doing frustration just really goes down. Jason: Yeah. Plus there’s a lot of turn-over. Among the property managers that are working for a property management business owner, it’s very difficult. Mark: What’s true of us as a company is to improve that quality of life because we know how gruesome the job can be, how hard it can be, how taxing it can be. If you use our app, it’s very colorful. We kind of joke around in the copy and we try to make it not just extremely efficient but fun. We want to make it [...] inject a little bit of fun into it. I don’t think that I see that very much in the space yet, which is one of the things I’m very excited about is that I want to bring that to the space. Jason: Some of the things I’ve seen in some apps lately that people have been doing to gamify things, which is really funny, that once you complete something or you finish something, you get confetti and balloon noises and stuff like this, like this is a little celebration. So, I’m just going to throw this is a feature request that after a maintenance is completed and somebody marks complete to get […] and they get this little celebration thing. It gives them that dopamine boost to get things done and they feel good about it. Mark: Oh yeah. That’s actually something that now that we’re starting to mature as a company and we’re getting ahead with the feature set and the road map, that’s something that we actually can bring into it. So, given my part of design background, I also know a lot of animators and illustrators. As you can see, we have a lot of illustrations. We very much want to use those opportunities. When you’ve succeeded at doing something, really just letting you know. Jason: Even rewarding a tenant for using the system. Instead of calling you, like they submit a ticket and you’re like, “You’ve done it! Good job!” All these little things just create positivity and they add a positive feel to the property management company. The tenants are usually pretty upset if there’s a maintenance request. The vendors are having to deal with that, the property manager. Anywhere you can add a little bit of fun and gamification into an app, I think is [...] world a little bit more fun. Mark: Yeah. There’s no reason you can’t have fun doing this job. I want to save you time, but like in this, get you to crack a smile a couple of times a day. It’s not just about saving time but it’s about being able to continue to do that job and be happy doing it. Jason: All right, cool. Mark, I really enjoy having you on the show. One thing that might be cool, it would be after a maintenance request is submitted, if we did an integration with GatherKudos, real super easy, super simple. [...] whether they’re happy or sad. Mark: I’m totally happy to talk about that. Jason: All right. That would be cool. It’s really great to have you on. How can people get in touch with Proper? How can do a demo? How can they find out more? Mark: We actually created a unique link for the show, so if you go to proper.chat/doorgrow, you can definitely learn a little bit about our products and then very easily set-up a demo with us. Again the tool is super easy to use, so we are happy to set-up a demo with you. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes. Once you start seeing the product it becomes very quickly evident how this can start saving you time and also maybe make you smile. Jason: Awesome. All right, everybody check that out. I appreciate you setting up that link. That’s awesome. Go to proper.chat/doorgrow and check it out. You get a little special perk for being a DoorGrow Show listener. Mark, really grateful for you coming on the show. I love hearing about new technology. I think this sounds really innovative and I think it solves a problem. I think that it will really be beneficial and I’m really excited to see what you guys do in this space and start hearing some feedback from my clients on what they think. Mark: Yeah. Thanks for giving me time and always a pleasure to talk. I look forward to checking in again soon. Jason: Cool. Yeah, we’ll be talking again soon. All right, I’ll let Mark out. If you are a property management entrepreneur and you’re looking to add doors, you’ve been struggling, you’re wondering why does it feel like there’s scarcity in an industry and 70% are self-managing. There’s no scarcity in property management right now. There just isn’t, but they’re not looking on Google. You’re going to have some trouble if your whole goal is you have people find you through Google. There are ways to go out and create business and we’re focusing on that. So, stay tuned with DoorGrow, keep an eye on us, and if you’re wanting to grow your business, if you want to short some of the leaks in your sales pipeline, you want to dial in trust engine, have generate more warm leads and warm business, it’s easier to close and have less conversations about price, price sensitivity, and comparison to other companies, that’s what we do. Reach out and talk to DoorGrow. We’ll be happy to help you add doors to your business, figure out how you can optimize your business for growth and creating trust. Again, I’m Jason Hull with DoorGrow here on the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you tuning in. Please like and subscribe on whichever channel your hearing this on, whether it’s YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, whatever. Stay plugged in and make sure you get inside our DoorGrow Club Facebook group where we are putting out discontent. We have an awesome community of DoorGrow hackers like you. So, check it out doorgrowclub.com. That’s all for today, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

To celebrate the 100th episode of the DoorGrowShow, I’m doing something a bit different. Instead of me interviewing someone, I’m the one being asked the questions.  Today, I am featuring my appearance as a guest on the Cashflow Diary (CFD) podcast hosted by J. Massey. We discuss my journey into property management and how to optimize a business through organic growth to achieve success. You’ll Learn... [05:00] Today’s entrepreneurs are like yesterday’s superheroes. They save lives. [06:01] Who is Jason Hull? Someone who has never managed a property, but helps others grow and scale their property management business. [06:48] Being an entrepreneur is in his DNA: Grew up with an entrepreneurial mother, who taught him to make more money and beat the competition. [08:16] Failed Marriage and “Disney” Dad: Jason needed a job that offered freedom and autonomy to spend time with his kids and create clients. [10:13] Website Design, Marketing,and Branding: How to win when competing with Goliaths and make it to the top of Google. [11:53] Financial Decisions: Entrepreneurs like to make money, not lose it. [15:25] Conventional to Comfortable Confidence: Do what works for you, not others, to lower pressure noise.  [20:15] Curiosity: See what others don’t and causes businesses to lose leads and deals. [21:55] Still struggling with imposter syndrome? Hire a business coach who believes in you to rebuild confidence and effective communication to make a difference. [28:55] Why choose property management and deal with tenants, toilets, and termites? [32:53] Why choose Jason and DoorGrow? He helps create positive awareness and address negative perception surrounding property management. [40:00] Cold vs. Warm Leads: Prospecting pipeline plugs leaks to grow business and get people to know, like, and trust you. [44:56] How do good property owners find good property managers? Avoid sandtraps of solopreneurs with few doors; add doors to build a property portfolio. [49:10] Short-term Rental Success: Get a property manager to solve revenue issues. [52:32] Precipice of Decision: Believe in yourself, make it happen, and decide to be different by listening to your truest voice.  Tweetables Today’s entrepreneurs and yesterday’s superheroes save lives and make the world a better place. Entrepreneurism: Insatiable desire to learn and explore opportunities. Entrepreneurs: Allow yourself to do what you need to do to lower the pressure noise. Entrepreneurs create positive, uncomfortable change wherever they go. Resources CFD 542 – Jason Hull On How Property Management Can Change The World Jason Hull on Facebook Steve Jobs 6 Non-QWERTY Keyboard Layouts Alex Charfen (Business Coach) Momentum Podcast DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: This is a special episode because this is our 100th episode. What I wanted to do was share something different. I've been on a lot of other people's podcasts recently and this was one that I really enjoyed, this was with J. Massey of the Cash Flow Diary podcast. He was a really great interviewer, I really enjoyed being on the show. He asked a lot of questions and it really dug into me. I'm not used to somebody really digging into hearing about me as much. I'm usually the one digging in and hearing about other people. I thought my listeners would enjoy this podcast so I asked J. Massey if we could have permission to put this on our podcast and he was glad to let us do so. You get to hear this interview of me being on this episode of the Cash Flow Diary with J. Massey. Enjoy the show. Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. J: All right, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the Cash Flow Diary podcast. I'm your host, J. Massey. I'm glad that you are here today because we are going to talk about something that I know, and my guest knows, is one of the most, if not the most, critical piece for your success, not only in business but specifically, the real estate world. I know that many of us were out there. We're trying to grow our cash flow. We're trying to make things happen. Build a bigger, better business, and you're doing it and you're succeeding, and that's great. Also at the same time, many of you are like, “Man, if I could just figure out how to take what I'm doing in business and do it in real estate too, that would be great.” Some of you are like, “Man, I just want to grow that real estate portfolio and make it a little bit bigger and better, but I'm still having some challenges in these specific areas because I can't find any good help. I can't make anybody do what I think is common sense. There's just not enough common best practices out there. How on earth, J, can I find that particular property manager?” Or maybe you are that property manager and you're going, “You know what? How on earth can I find that owner that actually knows what's up and won't drive me nuts?” I believe we have solutions for you today. I have with me today none other than CEO, Jason Hull of DoorGrow, doorgrow.com. Some of you may actually know him from his podcast, the DoorGrow Show. What's going to be interesting today is that Jason wasn't always a property manager. We're going to get to find out the story, the journey, and most importantly, learn the lessons around entrepreneurship along the way that have allowed us the world to be able to know and love Jason the way that he is. Here's what we're going to do, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to pay attention, we're going to make sure that, yes, I know you're walking the dog and doing the dishes, but you're going to hit that mark, you're going to bookmark those spots so that you can come back and listen to the gems that he's going to drop. Most importantly right now though, let's just welcome Jason Hull. Jason, how are you doing? Jason: Wow, that's a great intro. I really appreciate that. J: Thank you. I'm glad that you were here. I'm also excited because we're going to be talking about something that I'm passionate about. Real estate's really important, but more importantly, it's the people and the teams that you hire that tend to make things go well, and sometimes, not go so well. I'm looking forward to that, but before I get down there, I have to ask you the same question I didn't ask everybody else the first time that they're here, are you ready? Jason: Do it. J: All right. I tend to look at today's entrepreneurs a lot like yesterday's superheroes—Batman, Robin, Hulk, Wonder Woman, you get the idea—because I think entrepreneurs and superheroes have a ton of things in common. For example, as an entrepreneur, occasionally, I can envision myself using our products and services, flying around town, and saving customers one sale at a time. Also, like a superhero, an entrepreneur has a beginning. If you think about Spider-Man, for example, there was a time where he's just a kid going to school, doing his own thing, taking some photos, and then one day gets bit by a spider, discovers he's got a superhuman ability, and now he has to choose, “Will I use my newfound talents for good or for evil?” My question to you is as follows. Before DoorGrow, before your podcast, before your degree in marketing, your website design, before being a property manager, before everything we know you for today, what we want to know is who is Jason Hull? Jason: That's a deep question. Let's sum up a whole person really quickly here. J: No pressure. Jason: Yeah, no pressure. First thing, let me just correct something real quick, I had never managed property in my life, yet I somehow am attracting property management entrepreneurs from all over the US and beyond, asking for help in growing and scaling their businesses. I'm more of a nerd that used to be secretly in the background, helping them and had to push myself out into the limelight to make a difference in an industry that I could see there was an obvious change needed to be made. But my background growing up, I grew up with an entrepreneur mother. She is this amazing, loving, charismatic woman that is a real estate agent. She's just had hustle in her since she was a little kid. She's told me stories of she saw the other boys mowing lawns and she was doing babysitting when she was young, she was like, “They're making way more money than me.” She went around and she figured, “I could undercut them by a dollar, go door-to-door, and steal their business, and start offering to mow lawn.” She started mowing lawns to make more money. She just had that bite in her to accomplish and do things. I didn't see myself as an entrepreneur, I didn't really know what an entrepreneur was, yet, I think it was just in my DNA. I was the guy in college that decided, “Hey, I want a band so I'm going to start one. I'm going to write all the music.” I was a guy going door-to-door, pre-selling CDs at girls’ dorms with a guitar in hand and a clipboard for an album that didn't exist so that I could pay for the recording time so I could fund an album, but I wasn't an entrepreneur. J: Yeah. No, that’s not entrepreneurial at all. Jason: I was thinking I needed to go get a job. I was like, “I'm going to finish college and I got to then find a job.” What thrust me into entrepreneurism is I had gotten married really young and the marriage fell apart. I had two kids and I needed to be able to have time that I could spend with them. I didn't want to just be Disney-dad. I had to create a situation in which I had freedom and autonomy. The other factor that played into it is my employer at the time got hit by the whole financial mess back in 2006–2007, I guess, and could no longer pay me. I was just doing nerdy stuff for them at the time. Then I realized, they were now a client. I started reaching out and creating clients. One of the earliest people I had helped was my brother who was just getting started in the property management business. He had just bought a property management franchise, he was fresh out of college with his business partner, they had no doors under management, and they had this terrible website they got from corporate. He was like, “Can you just help me figure this out because you're smart? What do I need to do?” I'm like, “Add some phases to it. That'll increase conversion rates. Let's do this and that.” He's like, “Can you just do it for me? Can you please just build me a site?” I'm like, “Sure, but you're going to pay for it.” He's like, “Okay, no problem.” I built him a website and then suddenly, all of his fellow franchisees—this franchise had maybe 200–300 franchisees in it—and I started attracting these people that had thousands of doors. They wanted what he had. They're like, “Hey, what he has is better. I want that.” Really quickly, here's me, a freelancer, web designer, starting to do websites for people with thousands of doors. Some of these are probably million-dollar-plus businesses. They had really great backlinks, so I was at the top of Google pretty quickly and started getting clients around the US within a short time. I was competing against Goliaths, just me. There we go, now then I'm an entrepreneur. I think I just have an insatiable desire to learn, I just always have, and entrepreneurship allows me to really explore and it's really exciting. J: Got it. Now I see how I got confused about the difference between understanding what it is you do versus being a property manager. It's more you help property managers, is what it sounds like, become better versions of themselves with their marketing and advertising. Am I close? Jason: Yeah. Over the years, I've shifted more into coaching and consulting, but we still do websites, we clean up branding. What I tell property management entrepreneurs in short when they come and ask me what I do, I’d say, “I'm not going to teach you how to do property management. I'm hoping you already know that and you're good at it. I’m going to teach you how to win, that's it.” Basically, what we do in short is we rehab property management companies so that they cash flow effectively, so that they have revenue, they have growth. We optimize their business more for organic. We're cleaning up their branding. Probably 60% or 70% of my clients that come to me, I change their business name, which is ridiculous if you consider how painful, challenging, or scary it is for somebody to do that, but I'm really good at helping them see the principles that impact their decisions about what's going to make money or cost them money. Then it becomes just a financial decision. One thing I know about entrepreneurs is that they usually like to make money. J: Yes, definitely, but what I like about what you've shared with us here is to some degree, you're in what I would call the reluctant entrepreneur category because you weren't even considering like, “I'm not one of those. That's not what I do,” and then over time, you start displaying these traits. Now I'm curious, did your mom ever suggest that, “Hey, son, you might be…” and you have this conversation with her like, “No, no, no, I just need to go get a job?” was that ever a thing? Jason: I don't know if I was reluctant. It just wasn't something that anyone had ever explained to me. I don't even know if I really was clear on what technically an entrepreneur was. I think I'd always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I had a paper out as a kid, my mom would have us fold flyers to canvass neighborhoods for real estate as little kids. She would pay us a penny per fold, if we folded a piece of paper twice, we get two cents. I would fold hundreds and then she would have us go around either on roller skates, scooters, or whatever, go around neighborhoods and just canvas and put those out. She'd keep an eye on us, walk around a bit with us, and we would just canvas neighborhoods. I think I was just raised with it and no one had ever put a label on it. J: Oh, man, this is great. I'm sure some people right now are listening like, “A penny a fold? That's nothing.” I'm sure that happens in somebody's head, but the principle was clearly laid down for you in such a way that you're like, “I'll do it. Okay, let's go,” and you didn't care, and spending time with mom is always awesome. But at the same time, this desire gets left behind and you just keep finding ways to create opportunity. That's what I hear when you talk is you just find ways to create opportunity relative to something that you're currently enjoying. I am curious though did you ever actually get the concert CD album sold? How'd that work out? Jason: I did. We did create the album, we created the CD, I wrote all the music for it, I sang every song on it, and yeah, we got it recorded. It's a pretty decent little album for being self-produced. I was very into the Beatles at the time. J: Okay, yes. There's something else that you're also mentioning, the thing that thrust you, I would say is the correct word, into considering something in entrepreneurship in a more realistic fashion was the combination of kids and your employer not being able to employ you, but most importantly, I hear of a deep-seated value. You’re just like, “You know what? Working for someone else can be fine, but I have two kids now and I value spending more time with them, so I'm going to become or do whatever it takes to make sure that I can do that.” I'm curious to know where that comes from. Jason: I think at the core of people that are really entrepreneurial, they know deep down that they're unemployable. Let's be honest. I worked at HP, I worked at Verizon, I was in call centers, I did a lot of nerdy jobs, I was a nerd, and tech support, stuff like that. In every situation I was in, I think something about me is I create positive uncomfortable change everywhere I go. It's just how I'm wired. I cannot be somewhere and leave things as the status quo. I don't do anything normally. If you could see the keyboard sitting on my desk right now, it's not even in QWERTY order, I pop all the keys off and rearrange them when I get a new computer and keyboard. J: I want a picture now that you said that, but okay. Jason: Yes, somebody can just Google if they want to see a different keyboard layout. J: Dvorak? Jason: Dvorak, yeah. J: Yeah, that's the only other thing. I was like, “What else could it be?” The only other thing I was thinking was Dvorak. But okay, that makes sense. Jason: Yeah, because I'm the guy that my brain just says, “Why is everybody doing it this way? Is this the best way? If it's not, I don't care.” Conventional standards mean very little to me. There's a lot of quirky things about me, and I think entrepreneurs are quirky. You look at Steve Jobs or you look at different entrepreneurs, they have weird habits. Like Steve Jobs, I wear the same clothes every day. I have black t-shirts, I have black pants, I have a whole closet full of black pants and black t-shirts. I just want it simple. I don't want to have to make decisions about that. I wear black hoodies, and I put on a conference, I've been around lots of people in business suits, that's what I wear because I don't care. I just want to be comfortable and that's what I wear. I think ultimately, as entrepreneurs, we need to allow ourselves to do what we need to do to lower the pressure noise instead of trying to play everybody else's game. For example, with the keyboard, I realized my wrists were hurting. I was typing a lot. I was getting my degree online at the time, I was also working, and I was typing a lot. I was like, “This seems stupid, this is really dumb. Why are my wrists hurting?” I did what I like to do, which is nerd out, and do some research in Google and I realized, “Oh, Dvorak has 50% less movement, it would cut my movement in half.” The home row on the left hand is all the most commonly-used vowels and the home row on the right hand is all the most commonly used consonants, so there's more back and forth between the two hands. QWERTY’s history was that it was designed and developed to slow down typist. The keys used to be in alphabetical order and they wanted to screw them up because they were typing too fast and the typewriters couldn't handle the speed. I'm like, “Okay, why am I doing this?” It took me, maybe about a month to get used to typing in a different format. My wrist issues went away and I was a lot more comfortable. J: I like you a lot, I like this. It’s like, “Hey, this doesn't work for me. We're going to figure out what does.” I now have this question. What was that transition moment? There's usually a moment at which, like I said earlier, the superhero recognizes. “I have something special here, and now I get to choose what I'm going to do with it.” You clearly had that moment, but that moment is often, we'll call it rocky, not as smooth, or there's usually some strong emotions around it in some way, shape, or form, or some pivotal conversation. What was it like when you realize, “My employer can't pay me. I guess they'll become a client,” and then you go, “Huh, maybe what I need to do is develop a surface around this whole thing and do my own thing?” What was that like? Jason: I think really for me, it's been a longer journey than just right in the beginning. A lot of people see me is a really confident guy, but I really have a strong introverted side. I wasn't that confident guy. In school, I did a lot of performing, I did music, stuff like that, but I still had a strong introverted side. I think that confidence level, part of it happened early on working with entrepreneurs and just recognizing that they couldn't see things I could see. I was like, “You can't see that this is a problem, that you’re branded as a real estate company and it's causing you to lose probably 50% of the deals and leads you should be because you're a property management business, but on the tenants as real estate. There were just things they didn't see that seems so obvious to me. The other thing is I'm really curious. With each client I would work with, just to do a website, I would probably spend on average about six hours doing a planning and discovery process over, maybe a period of a week or two with them. Multiple sessions, getting clear on their target audience, their avatar, what needs to be included in the website, what their avatar’s pain is, what they want. It became really clear to me that most of the websites were focused on tenants, yet they're not hunting for tenants, they don't have problems getting tenants, they want more owners to manage properties for. It just seemed obvious to me that everything was off on the websites that existed at the time. I think I just grew in confidence that I could help people, but I still stayed heavily in the background. I was also in a rough marriage, my second marriage. I was in a marriage in which I didn't really have belief. I didn't have somebody that believed in me and that didn't help the confidence thing going. Eventually, I signed up with a business coach. I went through several different coaches. Some I was a bad fit for, honestly, I just wasn't ready for them. Some, they were a bad fit. Some maybe were really great marketers and terrible coaches. I eventually got a really great business coach that I've been working with for a couple of years now. I remember going down to meet with him in Austin. He has a fantastic podcast, by the way, called The Momentum Podcast. His name is Alex Charfen; a really brilliant guy. I went down and met with him and some other entrepreneurs down in Austin. My business was struggling, we're maybe about $300,000 in revenue annually at the time. I felt like an ant in the room. I was around entrepreneurs that had multi-million dollar companies, I felt completely unworthy, my confidence just wasn't really strong, and yet when he would open up for dialogue, I would end up captivating everyone else in the room, and that was weird for me that I was able to communicate in a way that all of them wanted to know more and they were really fascinated about what I was talking about. I had learned a lot, I just didn't have the confidence yet to put it out there. I hadn't said, “Hey, I'm going to change this entire industry. I'm the one to do it.” I was like, “Somebody else should do it. Somebody that's been a property manager. Maybe somebody that runs a big, huge property management franchise should be the one.” My business coach was like, “Who else could do it? You're the one that you care about it, you're the one who can see what needs to change, and they’re everybody else’s competition. Why would they help everybody?” I'm like, ‘That's a good point,” but I had wicked impostor syndrome. I think that's a challenge for entrepreneurs that we have to kill is that impostor syndrome in which we don't feel like we're enough, or we're good enough, or that we qualify, or we’re worthy. We sometimes think we need to find that external validation to say that we're okay. I think that came just in working with clients. I grew in confidence in situations in which I was able to finally place myself around other entrepreneurs because one of the most damaging things we do as entrepreneurs is that we spend too much time around non-preneurs. J: Yeah, I believe you. Jason: It's painful and it's difficult because we see opportunity everywhere. We see how we can change and impact the world. We want to make a difference, we want to contribute, and the rest of the world looks at us like we're crazy, we're making them uncomfortable. “Why can't you leave good enough alone?” They hear the struggles we go through as an entrepreneur and they say, “Why don't you just get a job?” They look at us like we're crazy and then we look at them like, “Why don't I just slit my wrists now? How can you just sit there and tolerate, complaining about your boss and your job, and living for the weekend? Don't you want something bigger?” We don't understand them, but I think if we’re around non-preneurs too much, it wears us down. It breaks us a little bit. It's really hard and I hadn't really yet been around entrepreneurs. I think as entrepreneurs are starting out in our early development when we're in the early stages of being an entrepreneur, one of the biggest things that hold us back is being lonely. That's it. We're just not around other people like us to say, “You're normal. You, as an entrepreneur, are awesome, amazing, and you can change the world. You don't have to live by everybody else's rules.” J: Agreed. There's something that you said that I often have thought about myself. I know that there are people who are listening have had that same thought at least once. You mentioned that yes, we desire to make a difference, we want to see change, and we're not happy with the, ‘That's just not the way you do it, it should be this way.” That's just how we roll, and yet we're the ones who can see the problem. Like your business coach is saying, why aren't we the ones who can resolve it? But more importantly or said a different way, does that come across to you when you can see an issue? Does it come across to you—I know it does for me—as a responsibility like, “Okay, it’s me, obviously. I'm the one who sees it, this is my thing. So, let me go solve this problem”? That's how it feels to me when I notice opportunity or something that's just not right that could be better. Jason: Yeah. I think there are two sides to this. I think one, opportunity. On the negative side, I think opportunity also can kill us as entrepreneurs because we do see it everywhere. It can be incredibly distracting. There's that opportunist in all of us, and if we focus on too many opportunities, we don't really get to make any headway in anyone. That's a temptation and a challenge entrepreneurs deal with early on is struggle to focus and to niche down. On the positive side, we see that the world can be better. We can see it. We are the change-makers. We are the people throughout history, throughout time eternal probably, that were the ones that would move society forward. We would make everyone uncomfortable, we would change something, and we would move people towards a higher and better ideal. J: Now, let me ask you this question. You could have chosen any industry to serve. Why property managers? I've spent so much time as the one owning the property. This may sound funny to you, but I never considered that property managers had a problem finding owners. That never occurred to me because it just never occurred to me that they had that as a business problem. Obviously, it's there because you're saying it, but as an entrepreneur, you could choose to serve anybody. You could have taken this skill to any industry, so to speak, because believe me, they're not the only one with a problem. Why property management? Jason: That's a really good point. I don't think there was a time in my life as a child that I woke up and said, “I want to help property management business owners when I grow up. I want to get into this industry that's focused on toilets, tenants, and termites, that sounds exciting to me.” J: It's right after firemen, I understand. Jason: Yeah, I'll either be a superhero or I will be a property management coach. J: Yeah, absolutely, totally right. Jason: No, that's a great question. I think I resisted it, to be honest, in the beginning. It came to me like I just started attracting them, I tried to just help every type of business though, still, I didn't niche out. It took me a while. I started my corporation, my company back in 2008, but DoorGrow as a brand was maybe only four or five years ago. It took me a little while to, I guess, choose into that niche fully. I think it was imposter syndrome like, “I've never done this so I feel like I'm not the person to do it.” For a lot of people, it's not the sexiest industry. Here's how you fall in love with property management.If you're an entrepreneur that's a little bit nerdy, property management is like the systemizable, more tech-savvy version of the real estate industry. It's residual income instead of the hunt and the chase for the next deal as a realtor. It's a business that can be optimized over time. It's a business that can follow the theory of constraints and you can make processes around. All of that appealed to me. What I really fell in love with was not property management. It's the people that are property managers. Do you want to talk about resilient, innovative entrepreneurs? Property management entrepreneurs. You cannot imagine the level of challenges, difficulty, and negotiating. I don't think there's any industry like it because in terms of customer interaction, it's rated third behind retail and hospitality; it's heavily a people business. In retail and hospitality, you're not negotiating really difficult situations not unlike a lawyer between two opposed parties as the middle person, but in property management that's what you end up doing. These are really some of the sharpest people. They're just amazing entrepreneurs to be around and honestly, I just chose into doing it because I wanted to be around people that are like me. Entrepreneurs. I love my clients. I love being able to spend time with them. I do not feel weird and I really enjoy that. I have a nerdy background and a lot of the clients that are attracted to me, they like figuring out processes, systems, technology, and that sort of thing. There's just a strong resonance in the type of entrepreneur that is in that industry. J: For the person that's listening right now that happens to be a property manager or maybe it's an owner who's currently doing his own property management in some way, shape, or form, what would you say are the top three things you tend to assist a new client with from day one? How do they know, how can they recognize, “Oh, I need Jason”? What is it that you end up doing over there at DoorGrow for them typically in that first appointment or the first solutions you guys come to the table with? Jason: Let's go back to the question you asked me earlier about the surprising problem that exists in property management. J: Yeah, that is still a thing in my head like, “Wow, I didn't know they had problems finding me? I didn't know that.” Jason: Yeah, every business exists to solve a problem. If a business is not solving a problem, they're stealing money. The problem that exists in the property management industry that I could see, property management has two major challenges. The biggest challenge first is awareness, there are a lot of people that have property. In the US, in single-family residential rental properties, only about 30% are professionally managed, 70% are self managing. The first biggest hurdle is awareness, there's just a lot of people that are not aware of what a property management company would do for them. The average Joe on the street if you said, “Hey, I'm a property manager,” they would say, “Great, I guess you manage a property.” They don't really know what that means. There's a strong lack of awareness to the point where property management really is relatively, in the US, in its infancy. Let's contrast that with Australia. In Australia, 80% of single-family residential rentals are professionally managed. There are reasons for that. There's steeper legislation there, it's more consumer-focused and a lot of that, but the word on the street is that it grew 25% in a decade, it grew massively. But in the US, property management still is this ugly cousin of real estate, it has this negative perception, especially among real estate. The other challenge is property management is the number one source of property management-related issues like fair housing challenges, mismanagement of trust funds, or leases, all this stuff, property management is the number one source of complaints at most any board of real estate. Not real estate, property management is. So, everything property management. This is why it's perpetuated heavily among the real estate industry. Realtors say, “Oh, property management. That's gross. Don't touch that. How could you do that?” The second hurdle that takes the next big portion of potential market share away is perception. Property management has a very negative perception among investors, among people that are aware of it. There's a negative perception that takes away the next big chunk of potential market share. After perception takes a hit, those that are aware and they think they have a decent enough perception to think, “At least, I have to have one or I need one,” or maybe they are okay—there are some good ones—then word-of-mouth captures what's leftover. Word-of-mouth captures the best clients that property management might get. After word-of-mouth, the scraps that fall off my client’s table, that fall off the word-of-mouth table, the coldest, crappiest, worst leads that are the most price-sensitive, that view all property managers as the same and is a commodity, that are the worst owners and properties to build a portfolio on, in which you're going to have probably an operational cost in your property management company of 10 times higher than that of having healthy good doors and owners, those are the people searching on Google. That's what's leftover. Most property management business owners are trying to build their business on the back of Google. I'm wearing a t-shirt right now, you can't see, but it says, “SEO won't save you.” It has a hand reaching up out of the water, trying to grab a life preserver, a black t-shirt with white lettering. This is a message I put out to the industry that they don't need to be playing the SEO lottery because, really, search volume in the property management industry has actually been on a steady decline. According to Google Trends in the US, it's been a steady decline since July of 2011. It's been going down, yet every marketer targeting the industry, every service provider, every web design company, they're shoving and pushing the concept that SEO is going to save them. They just need the top spot on Google. They're playing into this myth, so all these property managers are spending marketing dollars, their hard-earned money, they’re trying to run Google Ads, everything to be at the top of Google, and they're not getting an ROI. They're not getting a return on that investment. It's an incredibly expensive game that has many potential points of failure. You have to be a property management business, usually, at about 200 to 400 doors, with a business development manager. You have to be making sure that all of your phone calls are answered and you're following up on every lead within the first 10 minutes to really play that marketing game. I found most property management business owners were not at that level. I wanted to create them, get them to that level. Originally, I was the guy doing that stuff, I was a marketing company, I was a guy helping with those type of things, and I realized really quickly that it wasn't working. They weren't even answering their phones. Why would I send them a lead that's only good for maybe about 10 minutes—that's how long an internet lead’s probably good for, maybe 15—and then 80% drop off in conversion rates if they're not going to answer their phones? I just pivoted this company and I was thinking, “What would I do if I were going to start a property management business? What are all the most common problems that I can see even in the largest companies? Where are the biggest leaks in their sales pipeline?” Just like the theory of constraints, I just went from the beginning of the sales pipeline, which is that awareness. It's branding. Branding was costing some of them half the amount of deals and leads they could or should be getting. Some companies do real estate and property management. By eliminating real estate from the branding, I helped double their real estate commissions, ironically, because property management is a great front-end product. Real estate is a better back-end product. People don't wake up in the morning and say, “I want to find a realtor today. That sounds exciting to me.” No. They want property, they want to find buyers, they try to for sale by owner, but eventually, they list with an agent. The property management, if you have a constant influx of owners, investors that may get into additional properties, constant influx of renters and tenants, you have buyers and sellers. You have bodies constantly flowing into the business and this is the dream of a real estate company. We just started addressing these big leaks from branding, reputation, which is word-of-mouth, their website wasn't built around conversions and targeting the audience, their sales process, pricing strategy played into this heavily, they were not priced effectively, they were taking too many deals at too low of a price point. Psychologically, for example, there are three types of buyers. Most of them just had one fee, serving one type of buyer, and there was no price anchoring. I just started to see all these different leaks that we could shore up through the pipeline so that we could optimize their business for organic growth. Then the big secret is at the front end of this. Once we get all of these leaks dialed in, their sales process, they have follow-up, all these things are in place, what spigot should we turn on through this pipeline? They could go back and do cold-lead marketing, but cold leads are terrible. Conversion rates are low even if they're a bad A. I don't know what the rating is on your podcast so I'll be careful. If they're a bad A in sales, they’ll only get maybe about 30% conversion rate or close rate, but most people, say 1 out of 10 cold leads, they'll convert. The hidden killer with cold leads in any industry or business—the secret the marketers don't want to tell you—is they can't give you contracts. Marketers cannot give you contracts. You can't hand dollars to a marketer and they will hand you written signed contracts or clients. What they can hand you at best, usually, the furthest they can push it along is usually a really cold lead. That's it. That's typically what they can give you is they give you a cold lead and this cold lead then has to be nurtured. You have to warm it up. You have to get them to know you, trust you, and like you.  Cold leads convert really poorly, usually, you'll get maybe 1 out of 10. The hidden killer though with cold leads is time. This is the hidden killer with cold leads that small business owners don't realize. Time on a cold lead is at least twice as much time as a warm lead or maybe three times as much. I found clients when I would ask them, “How much time do you spend warming these people up, calling them, meeting them at the property?” They say in total, in my sale-cycle time, three to six hours to close the deal. “How long does it take you a warm lead?” I was getting answers like 15 minutes, maybe an hour, it was like half, at least, half the amount of time. These small business owners, if you give them 10 leads in a week and it's going to take them 2 to 3 hours to do all the follow-up necessary and they're going to get maybe 1 or 2 deals out of it, that's a full-time job. They don't have the time, as small business owners, to do that if they're also the main person doing the selling. They just didn't have the bandwidth to do it. It wasn't even possible for me to give cold leads to clients and have them win that game. They didn't have the time. They really work part-time crappy salespeople that had maybe about 10 hours a week to focus on that piece. I had to create a system that will allow them more warm leads. Instead of the front-end of this pipeline, what I teach clients to do is to go to prospecting. There's 70% self-managing. There's so much blue ocean in property management and yet everyone's fighting over the coldest, crappiest, worst leads that fall off the word-of-mouth table, that are searching on Google in the bloody red water. It's created this false sense of scarcity that's so strong in the industry that everybody feels like the industry is scarce, yet there’s 70% self-managing and none of them are really happy doing it. J: I have been doing real estate for over a decade and I have never even considered this concept from the property manager’s perspective in this way. I've always considered them partners. I've never wanted the lowest guy, they’re such a critical piece. Some of the things that you said, I was like, “Why would somebody bargain-basement shop for a property manager? That's just silly, you don't understand, you can't do that. That's not going to work long term,” but I've never thought about the fact that they would have trouble finding the quality owners. Just hearing you describe their world, it's like, “Oh, wow, yeah. I can see why that would be a challenge.” I'm curious, though, when a property manager is out there and trying to make it work—I'm just going to throw it out there—how can the good owners let the good property managers know that, “Hey, yeah, I would love to have you”? Jason: I think the biggest challenge I usually hear is that there aren't any good property managers. How do you find one that's good? Those owners feel completely unsafe. The industry has a really bad reputation as a whole. One of the concepts I teach—all these principles apply to really any industry, in any industry—branding has an impact, reputation has impact, pricing strategy has an impact. There's nothing I'm doing for this industry that is only related to this industry. I think the challenge the industry has, though, is it just has a lot less awareness, but I think that also means there's a lot more opportunity. There's a huge opportunity in property management. If we were to grow even remotely close to how Australia's grown in a decade, that would mean the industry in the US would double. I think property management could be as big as the real estate industry here in the US. There's much potential. I don't think it's been tapped. I think property management in the US has artificially been kept small and it is really a business category that's in its infancy. If you look at business categories that are relatively new in the US, you've got marijuana, vaping, and stuff like this, maybe Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, there's these fledgling industries. Property management's been around a long time, but it's still in its infancy. There's a huge potential there to grow. There are a lot of bad owners. That's true, too. The accidental investors didn't really want to have a rental property, but they needed it, and they just want to get rid of it after a year. If a property manager builds their portfolio on those type of doors, which some do, they have to replace every single client every single year. J: Yeah, that's an untenable situation that would go with that. Jason: Yeah. You'll find property managers fall into this first sand trap of 50 units or so. One question you can ask them is, “How many doors do you have under management?” If they're in the 50 or 60 door category, then I call that the first sand trap. That's one of my key avatars that I want to help is to get them out of that first sand trap. I call that the solopreneur sand trap where they're doing everything in the business, they've taken on too many clients at too low of a price point. And this applies to any industry. As a small business owner, you take on too many clients at too low of a price point, you back yourself into a financial corner, and you take on the worst clients because you're needy, and your operational costs with bad clients are 10 times higher than that of having good clients, easily. One bad property or a bad owner that tries to micromanage you is easily 10 times the operational cost, time and attention, and stress as one good door or one good owner, easily. If you build a portfolio of that, you're stuck. You're backed into a financial corner, you can't afford to hire anybody, and you're losing as many doors as you’re getting on in a year. You're stuck. Sometimes, I have to tell them to do really painful stuff like fire customers in order to create space. J: Yeah, that makes 100% sense. For those that have listened to this far and want to find out more about what you've got going on, what's going to be the best way for them to track you down? Jason: I love connecting with other entrepreneurs and a really easy way for them to connect with me, I'm on every social channel—probably—that exists, because I'm nerdy, as @KingJasonHull. They can connect with me as @KingJasonHull on any social channel, especially Facebook. Then if they're in real estate and they're really considering getting into property management, they've managed rental properties, they feel like they know how to do it, but they want to grow that side of the business and maybe feed their real estate side, or they’re a property management entrepreneur that's been struggling at doors and they want to make a difference and grow, then they can just reach out to us at doorgrow.com. J: Okay, I've got a question I just got to ask now. I wasn't going to do this, but I got to ask. My entire world when it comes to real estate, is all around the whole world of short-term rentals. It's what we do, it's what we teach, it's how our students have achieved success. One of the interesting things is that when we're interfacing with individuals, we often get the question, “Why don't I just get a property manager?” I'm like, “You don't understand. What we are talking about is completely different than what a property manager would typically do.” I'm just curious if the whole idea of short-term rentals or things of that nature, because being able to add that, if property managers took that on, they'd be able to solve some of their revenue issues for sure. Is that something you're seeing happening and in any way with your clients? Jason: Yeah, I think there is a trend of short-term rentals coming into the space. If long-term rental property management is in its infancy, I think that's even younger. There are property managers, especially in more resort-like areas where vacation rentals are more popular, I think all of them have some, they get into that, especially the larger management companies, just by nature of having a larger business and lots of different investors, they're going to have some short-term rentals. Short-term rentals make a lot of sense for them. It's a lot of turnovers, it's a lot more work, but it also can be a lot more payout for them. There is a trend shifting towards that. J: Yeah. I just asked because, in order to do it effectively, there's just specialization that's required. That's why we just stepped up and started doing it because we can’t find the property manager that could do a good a job as we have learned to do and now teach others to do. It’s just like, “You know what? We'll just do it ourselves.” That's what's happening, but at the same time, in the back of my head, I'm like, “Man, they're missing an opportunity. If they would just understand some of these things that we're doing, I think it would work well.” I was just curious, it's been in the back of my head, I'm like, “I wonder, considering you're helping them put their services together.” Jason: Yeah, J, be careful because that is the story that almost all of my clients tell me. You may end up in this industry. That's what they all tell me. They all come to me and they’re like, “I started this business X number of years ago and it was because we were investors and we couldn't find a property manager that was good enough to do things the way that we needed it done, so we started one. They're all bad and we're good,” I hear that almost every day. J: Oh, man, I love it. Okay, as we wind down, I've got a final question for you because I'm really curious to hear your answer. Here's what I know. I know that individuals started the call on one spot, and now, as we’re ending, they're in a different spot. They're at what I like to call the precipice of decision. It's where they go, “You know what? That's it. I can do this. I can make this happen.” Maybe they are a property manager and, “Yeah, I should call Jason. That's exactly what I need to do. I need to track him down, figure this out.” They're drawing that proverbial line in the sand, they're saying that's it, and now they're going to be different. Now, Jason, you know like I know that when we make those types of decisions, we often have a companion, and it's a companion that comes in the form of a voice that says things like, “You? Now, you know good and well last time you tried anything, it didn't really work out. What on earth are you thinking about? Oh, my gosh, no one's going to buy anything from you. You're not going to be able to get any clients, whatsoever, so why don't you just go back to your job?” For some people, they're related to that voice. My question to you is as follows. Let's pretend that this time it's going to be different. This time they're going to do exactly what you suggest and they're going to do so in the next 24 to 48 hours. What would you suggest that they do? Jason: If somebody has a voice, especially if it's an external voice, saying, “You don't have what it takes. You can't do this. You need to play it safe,” they need to find another voice. The truest voice that we all have is the voice deep down. That's never the voice that we have deep down. When somebody says, “Oh, deep down I knew it would be like this,” or, “Deep down I knew I should have done this,” or, “Deep down, I just knew it was the right move.” The voice deep down—you can call that the voice of God, you can call that your intuition, you can call it your gut—is the truest voice and that's the only voice we really should be listening to. Let me close an open loop I left open earlier. I mentioned how I was down in Austin, I'd met with my business coach for the first time down there, I was around all the other entrepreneurs, I felt like an ant in the room, but I was sharing ideas, they were resonating with it. My business coach asked me to describe what I did and he said, “Oh, that'll never work.” Then, I explained to how much money I was making and what I was doing, so he understood it, he looked at me and he said, “Jason, you have a $20 million company and you don't even know it.” Do you want to know what I started doing? I started crying. I had had little validation, I had much resistance from spouse, I just had no support around me in terms of being connected to entrepreneurs, I started crying in front of a room of other entrepreneurs. I needed that in that moment, badly. Fast forward. In a year, I had 300% growth. We were a million-dollar company in about a year. I was crying and it was like a cathartic thing that somebody could see what I felt deep down and they believed in me. I don't know if there's anything more powerful than that to be seen for who you really are and I think that is the love or energy that we all need as entrepreneurs in order to grow. We need that belief. J: 100%. I definitely appreciate the journey that you have been on. I thank you for taking the time to distill your knowledge down in such a way that you could then share it, become the person that's capable of sharing it, and influencing an industry that's very close to my own heart. At the end of the day, it's where it's been at for us for quite some time, it's where we're going to stay, but the more that you enable property managers to do what they do and find the customers that they need, the better I think it all gets for everyone. Just let me be the first to say thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge, wisdom, and insight here with us today at the Cash Flow Diary. Jason: J, it's been an absolute pleasure. In line with what you just said, I really do believe deep down that good property management can change the world. The impact that they can have in that industry is massive. They're affecting homes, families, on the tenant and the owner’s side. They're affecting people's cash flow. They're affecting their finances. They're affecting real estate investors that got into the real estate investing with the myth that it could be turnkey. The impact is massive and I think that's what gets me excited about the industry. We're contribution-focused banks as entrepreneurs, we want to have an impact. I appreciate you allowing me to share that message and to be here on your show. J: All right, ladies and gentlemen, you know what time it is? It's time for you to move at the speed of instruction. What does that mean? That means get over to doorgrow.com. That means go listen to his podcast. That also means connect with him. He said he wants to talk to you, it's very simple, ladies and gentlemen. One of the things that I hope you learn from today's episode is when you see a need, it's probably your responsibility to go fill it and just figure it out along the way. You don't need to understand everything at the beginning, but over time, you can get there. But most importantly as you heard and I heard, you want to follow that path, follow that voice that is telling you there's greatness inside. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been fun talking to you today. I look forward to talking to you soon. Until next time. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Property managers may not know about or haven’t tried maintenance coordination. But they are quickly discovering its value in making their jobs easier, manageable, and understandable.  Today, I am talking to Andy Shinn of EZ Repair Hotline about implementing an Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Traction, and process improvement.  You’ll Learn... [02:40] Maintenance Coordination: Define world-class process to run for property managers to address issues and inconsistency with performance. [03:49] Growing and gaining Traction to create a structured operating model and take business to the next level.  [04:32] Systems that every business needs: Operating, planning, support, and phone. [06:00] EOS predicts and creates future through annual planning for quarterly goals broken down into monthly and weekly commitments.  [08:38] Constraints around Crazy: Don’t get distracted; you can’t do everything; force yourself to limit your focus to inspire, not control your team. [13:18] Fundamental Flaws:Take things that work well for you with Traction and EOS; leave out the other stuff.  [16:28] Accountability Chart: Visionary, integrator, leader, doer, and other roles and responsibilities depend on strengths and weaknesses. Overlap occurs until roles are filled by others. [22:43] EZ Repair Hotline establishes values: What are we doing now? What are we aspiring toward?  [25:28] Do they share my values? If the answer is “no,” they have to go. They’re team members hurting your business, momentum, and results. [26:18] Two Different Businesses: Do you want a business that you can have vs. a business that you want and love?  [30:08] Change people's mindset to move beyond minimum standards by motivating those who want to step up and make things happen.  [37:42] Process Piece: One of the six components of Traction by documenting processes to improve them and help others reach goals. [40:03] Planning System Solves Internal Problems: One of three things must be missing—accountability, transparency, or clarity on outcomes. [43:19] Property Managers: A structure helps you avoid working 80 hours a week; figure out how to handle work without having to be available all the time. Tweetables Every business needs an operating system. EOS: What are you going to do with your business in the next 90 days? EOS makes things doable, not overwhelming when growing a business. When businesses predict and create the future through planning, that’s magic! Resources EZ Repair Hotline DGS 15: EZ Repair Hotline with Andy Shinn Traction by Gino Wickman Wake Up Warrior 90 Day Year Rockefeller Habits EMyth Clockwork Checklist Manifesto Profit First DiSC DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: All right, and we are live. Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today’s guest, I am hanging out with Andy. Andy, welcome to the show. This is Andy Shinn of EZ Repair Hotline. Andy, you’ve been on the show before. Welcome back. Andy: Great. Thanks for having me back. It’s good to be here. Jason: [...] and you’ve made a lot of changes since then and grown. I would imagine quite a bit. I’ve seen you at several conferences that we’ve both been vendors at. Tell us what’s been going on with EZ Repair Hotline. Andy: Last time we talked we were pretty much brand new. We were maybe a couple years in, but we really hadn’t had much momentum, and we were just getting started in the industry. We’ve grown a lot over the last couple of years. We’ve learned a lot in terms of process. I hope to talk to you about some of that today and some of what we’re doing. It’s been an exciting couple of years. I think this is an industry, maintenance coordination, that’s just taking off in the property management space. A lot of property managers don’t even maybe know this is available or some haven’t tried it yet. It’s definitely a wide open industry and we’re excited to work with a lot of property management companies who I think are seeing value with what we do. Jason: Great. Well, let’s get into it. Where should we start? Today’s topic is implementing EOS, Traction, and process improvement at EZ Repair Hotline. Let’s get into it. Where do we start? Andy: I guess, maybe just a little bit of history. Over the last year, we have really been working on defining a process and what our product needs to look like. Before that year, we were very customizable. As a property manager, you come in and you’d inform the process as much as we did and I think that was causing us issues, inconsistency in performance. About a year ago, we said, “We got to define a process that’s best in class, that’s world-class, that we can run for the property manager. They’re not just buying us like a virtual assistant, they’re buying our whole process. They’re getting that whole package of what we do.” That was really important for us over the last year and we’ve made some strides in that direction. Not exactly to the end of where we want to be, but we’re moving in that direction. Anyway, about January or so, I’d heard about Traction probably on the DoorGrow site. A lot of property managers are implementing Traction. I decided to read it but I did an audio book which I do sometimes. I read about a business book a week. Usually, I read them but for whatever reason I did this on audio. It just didn’t catch with me, so I just went on and I kept doing my thing but then I was hearing more and more about Traction. I decided to go to Barnes & Noble and pick up the physical book and see if that made a difference, and it did. It’s a kind of book you need to sit down, open up with a notepad, and really use it almost like a workbook. I knew a few chapters into it that it was going to be that was going to be really exciting for EZ Repair because it creates a really structured operating model which is what we needed. There’s a lot of different books that’ll help you do that but I think Traction for a small–medium-sized business is the perfect way to do it. Certainly is the perfect fit for us. We’re only a couple months into that Traction piece, coming off, like I said, where we started a year ago, but Traction’s taking us to that next level. It’s really exciting. Jason: Cool. I believe every business needs an operating system. There’s different systems that every business needs. Initially, the entrepreneur is every system when you’re first starting out, but there needs to be a planning system which is what we’re talking about. There needs to be a support system for most business. If you have customers that needs to be supported, there needs to be a support system in place. There needs to be a phone system for most business so there’s phone communication. I think there’s five or six, maybe seven different systems that every business needs and one of the key systems is a planning system. In most business planning systems I’ve studied, the Traction and EOS stuff, scaling up—I’ve worked with Allen Scharfen who’s a brilliant operations mind—there’s a lot of different planning systems out there. One common thread that seems to be through all of them is annual planning, having quarterly goals, being broken down into quarterly and then having goals broken down into 30 days, and then maybe even something broken down into weekly commitments that the team are working on. We don’t use EOS. In our business, I use a different system but it’s similar to what you might find in other systems, which I think all good business planning systems incorporate at least those basic elements. Andy: It does and you mentioned taking the goals, like the quarterly goals. What EOS really tries to do is take your business into 90-day chunks. You’re really running a 90-day cycle of, “What am I going to do with the business in the next 90 days?” You’re setting longer term goals like, “Here’s what’s out here that I need to be able to hit. Here’s my stretch goal, my 5- or 10-year goal of what this company’s really going to be like.” Then, what it does is it takes it down to just 90-day blocks where you’re setting targets that the enterprise owns but then individuals on the leadership team own. Here’s what I own for the next 90-days, what they call rocks. At the end of that 90 days, you’ve taken your business that next step and now, you plan out your next 90 days. It really helps businesses put things in a very doable context because it can get overwhelming, as an entrepreneur, when you’ve got a lot of stuff going on, especially in a growing business—this industry is really growing—and to be able to say, “Here’s what’s going to happen in the next 90 days. Here’s what we have to do in the next 90 days. Here’s the goal for the next 90 days.” That’s a very easy way to take the business forward, rather than thinking, “Where are we going to be three years from now,” and trying to plan off of that. That’s fully difficult. EOS for our business has been fantastic and in just about 90 days in, in taking the business into those 90-day chunks. I have a feeling, for property managers, they’d see the same kind of value. When I was a property manager, I would have seen a lot of value in this. Like you mentioned, there’s other systems, too, but being able to select a system like this is really important for companies to be successful. Jason: I think most businesses have no planning system. They’re just winging it. The entrepreneur’s winging it. When you do implement a really sub-planning system, then what happens is you become able to predict the future. You’re creating the future in the present and eventually, it’s happening and that’s magic. That’s magic for businesses to be able to predict and create the future. Most entrepreneurs come up with these big goals, big dreams, and these endless to-do lists. If you look back at all those things—we’ve all been there as entrepreneurs—very few of them ever end up coming to fruition, very few end up getting done. We always bite off more than we can chew. We overestimate our ability to get things done. We get distracted because we take on too many different goals and too many different things. What I’ve noticed in having a planning system in the business is it forces me to limit the things I focus on. I’ve been doing this for several years, not just 90 days. I’ve been doing this for years and it forces me to limit the pressure that I put on my team as well because a lot of time, as entrepreneurs, we get really pumped up and excited, right? We go to an event, conference, something. We come back to our team and we’re like, “We’re going to do all this stuff. I just got all these great ideas.” And then we get super excited, we throw out some big goal where we heard some coach or somebody say, “Write a number down that you want to make. Add a zero to it. Add another zero. Go big.” You hear these old phrases like, “It’s better to aim for the stars and miss than a pile of manure and hit.” Entrepreneurs love that. They’re like, “Yes, the stars.” We get so pumped up and excited, then we walked out of the room and we think, “Man, my team must be pumped up.” What they see is a grenade sitting in the middle of the floor with the pin pulled. That’s their perception. They’re like, “What are we going to do with this? How are we going to that? My life’s already hard. Doesn’t he know how hard I’m already working?” They look at us like we’re kind of crazy. I think the biggest thing I’ve noticed with planning is that it allows us to get buy in from our team because ultimately, I can’t do it all on my own. I just don’t have that capacity. You don’t as well. You cannot do everything in your business. You cannot answer every phone call at EZ Repair Hotline personally. We really rely on our team and if we don’t get their buy-in, if there isn’t adoption into any system, or into any goal, or any outcome that we have, then we end up trying to control people. Controlling as an entrepreneur is not a very comfortable place for us to be, to be controlling our team instead of inspiring them. Andy: That’s a great point, though, because entrepreneurs have different personalities. It is a different mindset. Most people, they want more structure. You and I are probably really comfortable just working without structure and getting things done. Jason: I can totally live in chaos. I can totally do it because to me, it’s giving me new ideas, I have to adapt, I’m exploring. That’s fun and exciting for me. I’ve had team members quit because of that, because it makes them feel really uncomfortable and unsafe because most people [...] crazy, you have to be smart, maybe a C on the DISC profile. They want stability, they want things to be okay, they want a job where everything stays similar each day. I would probably get really bored in a situation like that. It wraps some constraints around my crazy. An upside of constraints is that it forces innovation. It allows my team also to innovate because they have an outcome. I don’t care how they get there, as long as they live within our value system, but I don’t care what specific actions they take to do it or to get there and they can create, innovate, and come up with ideas that I never would have thought of. Andy: That’s exactly right. You’re training structure for your team so they know what to do, what to expect, and what the goals are. Goals that they can imagine because I can imagine a five-year goal but my typical employee is not imagining a five-year goal. They want to know, “What are we doing this year? What are we doing the next three months?” It gives them something very tangible to hold on to. “What do we need to accomplish in these next three months?” At the same time, the whole operating system relies on employees and leadership at all levels to be able to bring ideas to the table, bring process improvements to the table, and to do things to try and achieve those goals. How are we going to get there? Well, we’re not going to get there by just running the show. We’re going to get there because we’ve set these 90-day targets, what specific activities do we need to do or what do we need to change to get to these targets? It creates structure but at the same time, almost counterintuitively, it does create that innovation from employees thinking about, “How do we hit these targets?” I think it’s very effective. I think the cool thing, too, about Traction that I like, it creates what they call a visionary role. That allows for somebody like me to still have a place in the operating model. I’m not just trying to fit into this operating model and be more structured. It allows a place for the entrepreneur to be that visionary, to be that person who’s got the ideas, and maybe he’s got the crazy goals but it tells you, “Here’s how you operate within that model as that person.” That’s been a personal help for me as well. Jason: I’ve been really outspoken online. I don’t know if you’ve seen some of my posts but I’ve been really outspoken online somewhat against Traction and EOS. I do see the value and important pieces of it but I also think there’s a couple of fundamental flaws. Everybody I’ve talked to that does EOS, they don’t do everything. I think that’s the benefit of taking a system is you can take the things that really work well for you and leave out the other stuff. Ultimately, if we’re really honest, EOS was built as a system to create a really nice business for the people that created EOS. You have to go hire integrators from them, you need the integrator, and the integrator is the magical, golden key to the whole puzzle. They take on this glorified role that replaces a COO or operations manager. They take on the executive assistant role which is a critical role for an entrepreneur. They squeeze all of that as this layer in between in their accountability chart, which is an org chart, between the visionary, which is the entrepreneur, and the entire team. Which in reality would be probably the most dangerous thing to ever do with your company, ever, to give somebody that much power and control because they don’t even need you anymore. They can just chop that top piece off and the whole org chart works fine without you. What that means, they can charge whatever they freaking want. They’ll come back to you after a year, after they know and run everything in the business, and everybody’s loyal to them and say, “I want $500,000 a year. I want a percentage of the company.” What are you going to do? Replace them? I think, ultimately, the best way to foundationally build every business is around the entrepreneur because we’re not all the quintessential or perfect visionary. I’ve noticed in property management, there’s different roles. I’ve noticed there are some property management business owners, some entrepreneurs are more accountants. They’re more accounting-minded, they’re more on the financial side, they’re more doing things by the book. You got some that are more relationship-oriented. They’re more about people, relationships, they love. Some are more sales-oriented. Some may be should keep and retain some of the property manager type of role. Some may be should be the sales or BDM person in the business. That might be the last thing they give up. Some may be the operations person and doing systems and coordinating things. Ultimately, the great thing about having a business is instead of building it to somebody else’s system, we can build it around ourselves and make ourselves feel like Ironman with our supersuit. We can have the business that makes us feel amazing, supported, and fulfilled that we love doing everyday. Ultimately, that’s the one fundamental, foundational piece that I would change in that system to build around it. I think everything would extend out from that. Andy: That makes total sense. I’ll tell you how we’re doing for the accountability chart. Jason: Yeah, I wonder how you’re using it. Andy: First of all, we’re self-implementing so there’s nobody else in the picture but it’s working out well for us. Maybe this is probably just advantageous to us. It just so happens to be that I’m in this business with Michael, my stepson. He is the perfect integrator. He’s the perfect operations. Jason: He’s an operations guy. Andy: Exactly, that’s what he does. I’ve done those things but I’m not as good at that as he is. I’m more of the visionary. We’ve taken ourselves and each of us has taken that role. So, I’m the visionary, he’s the integrator. There’s still a lot of overlap so it’s maybe not as clean as what it would look like at the end of that accountability chart. It’s not like there’s one person reporting to the visionary. That’s the only contact the visionary has as you might look at it visually. Jason: This isn’t as it perfectly claims. Andy: No, exactly. We’re growing and in our current size, I’m actually filling a couple of the boxes that would be on the next level down like some of the financial and the CFO type roles. I’m filling that as well. I’m filling a couple of the boxes. That’s how we’re using the accountability charts, to make sure that somebody’s in each of those boxes. Even if that’s Michael or me overlapping. As part of the process, we also added a couple of folks to our leadership team. We had one operations lead. We brought that up to three to give them very specific responsibilities within the organization. When you look at our accountability chart, you will see that visionary and integrator but it’s not quite what you described. It’s a lot different. Then next level down, we’ve got our operations leads and then you’ve got me on a couple of the boxes at that next level down, filling those roles until we’re large enough to fill those roles with other folks. That’s how we’re using that chart. I think the risk that you brought out are very real but I think for us, and maybe it is a little unique with me and Michael being in a partnership in the business, those roles actually worked out really well for us. Jason: Yeah. I think every visionary entrepreneur does need an operationally-minded person. They’re just the yin to the yang. They’re the opposite that we need to wrap some constraints and some managerial prowess towards what we as visionaries would not be good at. We need that person and that role in the business, so it makes a lot of sense. I think ultimately, another key takeaway for the listeners is that it is important to have an org chart. There’s a lot of people saying, “Do away with org charts,” or they’re saying that no org chart that has to exist and you need to build towards it. I don’t believe there’s an ideal org chart or an ideal situation but I do believe that it is important to have clear levels of responsibility to understand who reports to who. You can’t serve two masters. You can’t have somebody reporting to two people, everybody will be confused as to who their supervisor is and who they report to, and have a company that runs well. It just doesn’t tend to happen in reality. Even if you don’t create it, it starts to exist organically. People have people they trust as an authority, people that they go to, and to make it actually clear and say, “This is how it is,” makes everyone feel more at ease, makes it a lot more comfortable, and then attaching to that, their roles. What is their job description? I think that’s where it gets really specific is everytime we add a new team member, our role changes if they are doing anything that impacts us in any way. Most of our initial hires impact us directly. Any executive team members, any assistants, they’re taking something off our plate. Our job description changes, so we need to update that. Their job description changes everytime we bring on somebody else that works with them on that team. Businesses are a fluid thing. Everytime you hire somebody, and if you’re growing and scaling, these are always happening. That top level team is going to be in flux, initially, until that’s somewhat stable. Then the lower levels are going to have that flux and that change, all those variations, and their job descriptions need to be updated and tight. Over time, what I’ve noticed also is every single team member, as the company grows in scales, starts to do less, not more if it’s being done well. Because as the company scales and grows, my job description gets narrower. Like my head of fulfillment, his job description gets narrower. He used to be doing all the content, content gathering, client communication, and everything. His job gets narrower and narrower as we slice pieces off and give them to new people so that he has leverage. That’s how that pyramid grows and scales, is everyone slicing pieces off and doing less and less, but they get better at it and they’re able to focus more on what they really enjoy if you’re doing it right. Then, they’re even better at it and more excited. Over time, they get better and improve. A lot of people think you just pop somebody into a role if you got the processes documented. But I think there’s something to be said about long-term employees and keeping people as long as you possibly can. I don’t think you can beat that in a business. Andy: Absolutely. I’ll tell you though, as you’re growing, what you just said is exactly why you want to have an operating system in place as you’re growing. It’s because you do have those changing roles. If you don’t have that built, you said something like it’s going to happen anyway, it is. It’s going to happen by itself but it’s not going to happen the way you want it to and that’s true. If the processes is through the job roles, is through the culture in your organization, all of that stuff is happening. The only question is, are you directing it? We’ve really been trying to direct it over the years and finally, with Traction, we’ve found a way that we’ve said, “This really organizes what we’re trying to do and it’s been very helpful.” I’ll talk a little bit about our values, if I can, which is one piece of Traction that we had a head start on. We were already working on our values. We had set up an initial set of values a few years ago when we started the company. They were just me and Michael, put them together. They were just about having fun in the workplace. That sort of thing. I’d say they were lightweight values. They didn’t have a lot of meaning behind them and since we just put them together. The employees that had come on since didn’t have any stake in them, so to speak. Last year, last December, we brought in a team of three employees and we had them work as a committee to put together our values as an organization. We wanted them to focus on two things: (1) What are we doing now? Because we felt like we had a pretty healthy culture, and (2) What are we aspiring towards? What are we aspiring our culture to look like? Those three went out and talked to all of our existing employees. Over the course of several months, ended up putting together our values which fit in perfectly, timing-wise, with Traction because we had that in place at the same time we’re implementing Traction. That’s so important for any company to do. Even if you're a small company, put together those values because now we’re able to look at how we deal with customers, how we interact with employees, how we do our job, how we set up processes. We can look at all of those and the context of our values. Is this consistent with what we’re trying to be as an organization, with the culture we’re trying to put together? So, that’s been really helpful. That’s a part of Traction we were sure to working on. You can do it without doing Traction, but it’s a big part of what Traction brings to the table as well. So, very important. Jason: Touching on values, I think it’s important to have values in the business because without those, you can’t even have team members that believe what you believe, which I think is the most foundational thing in building a team. If you don’t have believers, then you have people that are just there to get paid. If they’re just there to get paid, they’re going to be B players. They’re not going to care about quality the way that you do. They’re not going to care about the results. They just care about getting the paycheck. I think it’s a very dangerous thing to not really ensure that you have values set and that your team members are aware of what those are. I think it’s very easy once you get clarity on your own values as a company. This is one of the exercises I take clients through when we take them on, is to get clear on their values. But if you don’t have clarity in your values, then it’s impossible to have a company that displays them. It just won’t happen. Once you get that clarity, it’s very easy to look at every single team member and just ask a very simple question, “Do they share my values?” It becomes really obvious, it’s a yes or no, you know. If you know these team members at all, you know. Do they value integrity? Do they value being on time or whatever it may be that you care about as an entrepreneur? And if the answer is a no, they have to go because they’re hurting your business, they’re hurting your momentum, and they’re hurting your results in the business. I know when I got clear of some of my values as an organization, what my purpose was as a human being and my purpose for my businesses, over a very short period of time, I think I fired half of my team. I just let them go. I let go of contractors. I brought in new people and the entire temperature of the company leveled up because I think what we do as entrepreneurs is we often trade the business we really deep down want for the business we can have. We have this business. We take on the properties we can, anything we can. We go out to far areas and manage properties too far where we can. We take on team members that can fill a role instead of what we really want. We’re doing the business that can be used instead of the business that we should or the business that we deserve. That’s a huge difference. Having a business that you can have versus a business that you really love are two completely different businesses. Most businesses, especially when they get into the 200–400 door category, a lot of them at that stage had built a team, a system, and everything around them, I’ve noticed that is still with the old mindset that they had as a solopreneur and it’s painful. This is probably the most painful stage I’ve seen for entrepreneurs in the property management industry, is that 200–400 door category. Fifty–sixty door category can be quite painful, too, but they’re usually solopreneurs at that point, so the pain isn’t as widespread. Andy: That’s right. The thing about this too, Jason, whether you’re talking about Traction, E Myth, Clockwork, or other books that’ll talk to you about, how do you pull yourself out of the business all the time? Because when you’re an entrepreneur and you’re growing, if you don’t have a structure for how that growth is going to happen and what’s your business model needs to look like, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. You’re going to be working 90 hours a week and you’re going to be on-call 24/7. You’re going to be answering the phones all the time. That’s just part of what a lot of entrepreneurs do as they grow. If you get a system like Traction, I think that helps you pull yourself away, be the real leader of the company and not the doer of everything within the company. I think Traction’s a good way to do that. For me, I’ve been able to create this role that I think is comfortable for me, that’s not overwhelming, that it’s something that I can do, it’s the kinds of things I like to do, and at the same time, Michael’s got something he likes to do in our operations leads. They’re in roles, they’re very comfortable, and they like to do that. I think you take that all the way down your organization and if you structure that, you give everybody a piece that they’re good at, that they can do, they have the ability to do, and that they want to do, that’s going to make them very effective. That’s a lot about what Traction and other operating systems are really about. The other thing, though, I wanted to touch on something you said a little bit about we can set minimum standards for people who work for us. A lot of people get into that mindset of, “Oh, well you’ve got to hit this minimum. If you’re not hitting it, you’re in trouble. You got to hit this minimum.” No matter what happens is people hit that minimum. But what you don’t understand is that you’re losing an extraordinary amount of discretionary effort that you could have had from that employee if they were on board with your values, if they understood the goals. They were buying to those goals, and they wanted to reach them. Now, their performance isn’t the minimum. Their performance is up here. They're not even worried about managing the minimum because everybody's onboard with their culture, everybody's onboard with their goals. Nobody's around here. It's just a matter of how much discretionary effort they're providing.  I worked in call centers for a large organization before I became a property manager, before I started EZ Repair. Call centers are the worst at this because it's about setting up these metrics around handle times or compliance. Jason: [...] tickets, check time between how long it takes to write notes, everything. Andy: When you took your break, you're supposed to take a 7-14 but you took a 7-17, so you're only 98% compliant. All this stuff, all you're doing is managing somebody that hit a minimum standard. That's what you're going to get.  When I came into some centers, we were able to change their whole mindset, saying, "Yeah. We've got to measure on the outside of those things, but what we really need to do is to motivate our team towards a common goal." We were able to improve service levels immediately at a very large contact center, immediately. That contact center, people thought it was understaffed, that we weren’t answering the phone quick enough, going and almost immediately just by setting targets, getting away from this minimum standards, changing people's mindset, and getting people to step up. People will give you discretionary effort if they're buying the way you're doing it. They're onboard with it.  As a small business owner, I think a lot of us missed that. We do get into the, "Okay, we've got to hit these standards," or, "It's busy. We're not getting everything done. We've got to up our standard to how many X number of widgets we're going to make or whatever our performance metrics is," and that's fine. You have to have goals and standards.  What we really need to do is to motivate people who want to step up, add a little work, and be a part of your company because they buy into your company. They decided to get up on Monday and go to work because they like what they're doing. They like what they're trying to accomplish. That's a big part of this. Traction help us do this. I think there's a lot of other ways you can implement those types of things. Traction gives you a way to show each employee on a 90-day basis, something that is very relatable to everybody, "Here's what we're trying to accomplish over 90 days. Can you help us do that?" To a person, our teams told me in small meetings with everybody on our teams, “Yeah, we can do that. We will do that. We'll step up if we have to. We'll do that and we'll make that happen.”  I think you'd be surprised how people will respond to you when you can bring them a real visual, structured, account of what we're trying to do with the company, and get it out of the framework that we're talking about earlier where it's in my head, that I know what I want my company to do, and I got this pie in the sky. Jason: Which [...] everyday. Andy: Exactly. It didn't help anybody because it does seem a little scattered, it does change sometimes, and nobody can really related to these ideas I've got in my head about where business is going. Traction brings it to a level where everybody in the organization can understand the buy-in and get excited about it.  They can also put the pieces together. They can see in our five year goal, "Okay. This is what we need to do in this next 90 day chunk. If we do this and we keep doing our 90 day chunk, we're going to hit that five year target." Even though it seems like it's way out there, we're going to hit that, and we're going to hit it 90 days at a time. If I were looking at Traction and say, "What's the biggest single thing we've got out of this?" there's a lot of things in there. It's the ability to chunk that business in 90 days, and have a very good and very solid structure. Jason: Yeah, and really any business planning system, that is one of the most basic things. I've done Wake Up Warrior, there's a 90 day year which is a system out there that's scaling up, the Rockefeller Habits, that system. There's EOS, Traction. All of these things. My [...], internally we call DoorGrow OS. It's our Operating System. I've taken what I feel like is the best of all the systems out there. It may, in the future—I don't want to be the vaporware guy—be the system that we share with property managers. I do have an intention to help create the ultimate system out there, but I think what you're saying is very valid. I don't know if you know this, you and I have a little bit of a similar background. I don't have the scale that you had at AAA, but I was the head. I did all the hiring, I was the lead supervisor and head of a call center for the largest private broadband internet service provider in California. Then, I left there as a big fish in a small pond to work at Verizon in their Business and Tech Support Center for DSL and was the low guy on the totem pole, but I got paid a lot more when I went there.  I've been in the call center environment. I've been the supervisor doing the hiring. I've taken the supervisor calls as well. I've done all the low level work. The funny thing I noticed is when you have a system and you geared it towards those metrics, people figure out how to game the system. I figured out how to manipulate the system because it was all about speed in getting things done faster. I used a piece of software that could do macros that would prepopulate tickets. I noticed we're only getting about three types of tickets. We had to fill up this horrible piece of software in Verizon that was detailing everything that we did, what we said, and how to be done. They really made four types of problems so I created this macroscript thing. It would just prepopulate the tickets. I have my tickets done and I was back on a call right away. I got really good at closing out tickets legitimately, so that we were helping people.  I then started sharing with other people that were struggling. If you're not making your metrics, you get nervous. They're afraid that you're going to get axed. Here's the funny thing. Supervisors don't like [...] people messing with the system or doing things differently, especially if it wasn't their idea. I had supervisors that wanted to challenge that or felt threatened by the fact that I optimized and make things better.  As entrepreneurs, this is what we do. We're always looking for ways to support our team or looking for ways to improve speed, improve accuracy, help them be better. If we give our team members that ability to feel entrepreneurial which is where instead of micromanaging them, we give them our values, we give them our outcomes. We give them outcomes to work towards and we let them see what they could do. I've been really amazed when we've gone into planning sessions with my team. I say, "Here's the things that I want, what [...] you have to help us get there." My graphic designer has a completely different view and perspective from her angle of the business than I have from my top down. My head of fulfillment and the content person has a completely different view and perspective from that side than I do from the top down. Their ideas are great. I'm always amazed. We have all these brainstormed ideas. I'm like, "Yes. I didn't even think of that."  I think we also as entrepreneurs, we become the emperor with no clothes if we don't have a planning system because they're all just saying, "Yes," and they're just getting their paychecks, they're just doing what they're told. They're not innovating, they're not feeling alive, and they're not really enjoying being part of that organization. You're the boss that everyone is complaining about. On the weekend, they just leave for the weekend. What you said earlier about discretionary time, I want team members that even on the weekends, they're thinking about how they could be better. They're thinking about the job. They're excited about what they're doing. They're studying and learning new stuff because they're excited about what they get to do in the business and they feel passionate about being able to be part of something bigger. They like that feeling and camaraderie of being on a team, and having a culture. It's a very different thing. Andy: I’ll tell you a quick story along those lines. We're doing a lot of the process piece. One of the six components of Traction, one of those is process. We've been spending a lot of time on that. I mentioned a year ago, we want to really formalize our process where it’s consistent the same way every time for every company. You can customize things like that. Your [...] criteria can be customized, but you couldn't customize when we follow up with the tenant after repair. We're not going to do the same for everybody. There's things in our process where we don't do the same. When we started Traction, we're also used to email then The Checklist Manifesto was a great book, as well. We talked about how we are going to document our processes in a way that our team has all the support that they need for the process. We did that. We put some really cool documentation for our seven key processes all in checklist style but visual checklist. You don't have to fill anything up. Any team member, even new team members can immediately walk into a process and these steps to do for that, for example. When we roll that out, almost immediately, one of the team members who does most of the work on one of our frontend processes—part of the dispatch processes—that was able to come in and say, "Look, I’ve been doing this process. It's working fine. If we did this, we've been quicker. We can get to these work-overs dispatch even quicker." We made these small changes. Because we had a checklist listed down, he can even see what's the next stage in the process and what are they doing. He was able to put that altogether and say, "Here's the fix. Here's something that we can improve." We implemented it the same day. It definitely drives people to be more engaged in the operations. They're not just there to do your ABC work that you asked them to do. They're vying into the goals they were trying to accomplish. They're vying into the process you're rolling out. They're trying to be a part of that.  We've seen a lot of that. A lot of folks at the very frontline and in this particular case. This is an employee that has only been enlisted for a couple of months. People feeling really comfortable to be able to help us towards these goals. Now that they understand what we're trying to do and that really put an understandable 90-day blocks. Here’s what we’re trying to do and everybody's going to be more likely to be onboard, jump up, and say, "Hey, let's do this differently because that’s going to improve our operation." Jason: Yeah. If you look at any problem internally in a business, there's one of three things that must be missing. Either there isn't a clear outcome, which a planning system help solve, there isn't accountability, it wasn't clear who was supposed to be doing it or who was responsible for the outcome, and there isn't transparency. Nobody can see who's doing what or see that people are or are not getting things done. Nobody has clarity on where the business is at financially or how it’s working. I think having a planning system, having regular meetings, it creates this culture that allows accountability, allows transparency, allows responsibility, allows to be a clear drive towards outcomes.  Most businesses have no clear outcome. They're not working towards a clear outcome. They're just managing day to day fires and they're just shooting in the dark. That's how most small businesses operate. It financially looks that way in their business, too. There is a consistency in the financial side as well. Also, it's a financial system which is a part of planning. I'll just throw that out there which I'm a big fan of Profit First.  Andy: First of all, big plug to Profit First. Big plug to Profit First. It changed my business two years ago. Absolutely a big fan of Profit First and in Clockwork thesis. He’s written several great books for profit entrepreneurs.  For me, you were talking about how most small business owners don't do these things. I was in that same boat. Even though I come from a very structured environment from AAA, when I was a property manager, that's all I [...] property management company. I joked but it's not really a joke. I didn't make any money in my property management company until I sold it. That was the company I ran. When we started EZ Repair, we sort of forgot to do this a little differently. We started getting into the systems and reading different books about structuring, about how to have an operating model, how to profitability. It wasn't really until, like I said, two years ago, we were at Profit First. That just transformed our finances completely. It's was amazing. And then here, I feel like Traction for us is going to be the next turning point, but a couple of years from now, I'll be talking about how we found Traction a couple of years ago. I think it's an evolution of a small business. You learn different things as you go. But for any small business owner, even if you're just starting up, whether it's Traction or another system, you need to have an operating system in place. This would've been so much easier for us a couple of years ago if we did implement it, but that’s okay. We’re implementing it now and it's never too early. I don't care how small you are. Maybe you don't have employees yet but you plan on growing. Get it in place.  Jason: Yeah. For those listening, what do you want them to take away from this? Andy: Hopefully, some learnings from me. What I just said from my own property management experience when I was a property manager. Hopefully, you can make some money before you decide to sell your [...] business. Hopefully, you can make money along the way. There's a lot of property managers who are. The ones who are have that structure. They have that operating system. They have that financial plan in place.  What I'm advocating for is to do that as a property manager. Implement, whether it's Traction or another operating system. Implement it. Definitely read Profit First. It will change your life, absolutely. Do that going forward. Even if you're small, even if you don't think you're there yet, even if you think, "Well, I'm just a one person show," or whatever, one or two person show, it doesn't matter. The structure is going to help you so much and it’s going to keep you from working those 80 hours a week.  I know there are PMs out there working 80 hours weeks because that was what I was doing when I was a PM. You don't need to. Even if you're not ready to hire right now, these operating systems are going to help you structure in a way that you won't be working 80 hour weeks anymore. They'll figure out how to handle the work without actually having to just be available all the time.  Hopefully, you'll determine too that there's some self-showing work that you can do, maybe some maintenance work coordination, work duty. You can do some other things. You can outsource, but you're definitely even without doing any of that, just by structuring your work and system like Traction, you're going to find your job becomes easier or manageable, and you're going to understand exactly what you need to be doing in the business everyday. Jason: One thing I want everybody to take away from this, too, is that this is rare in businesses in the US or everywhere, really. This is rare that a business will implement a planning system, implement profit first, have these pieces in place. I think every listener should feel a lot safer with using a company if they hear that they have these pieces in place. Andy, props to you for getting these pieces in place over EZ Repair Hotline. I'm sure those listening will feel a lot safer with using these services if they haven't considered these before. It creates more consistency in the outcomes of the business. It creates more reliability. Really, that's what people are vying from all of us—safety and uncertainty. That's what they want. They want results. It's far easier to deliver results when you have a predictable system to create that magic and to create a future.  Andy, I appreciate you coming on the show. How can they check you out? Andy: Thanks for having me. Our website is probably the best way to start to take a look at us. It's ezrepairhotlinellc.com. They can see all our products and the easy way to set up a meeting with me or just to send us a note in the contact form. I'd love to have people follow up with us. Jason: Perfect. I appreciate you, Andy, coming on the show. Hopefully, you have an awesome rest of your day. Andy: Thanks, Jason. That was great. I appreciate it. Jason: You can check them out. It is ezrepairhotlinellc.com, so check them out. If you are a property management entrepreneur, you're feeling stressed out, you’re feeling overwhelmed, you're not getting the results that you want, you don't feel like you have consistency, you feel like things are crazy, you feel like you're on a financial rollercoaster, you may just need to start with getting clarity on yourself. This is where I start clients out when we start working with them, when we start coaching and consulting property management business. We start them with figuring themselves out first. Andy is the center of the solar system. I'm the center of my business. If you change and help them get clarity on what they love doing, on what they should be doing, or where their time is being drained, or where their energy is being drained, we align the business around the entrepreneur.  Every business will be very different from each other. Every business will be unique. It will support you, you will feel alive, and you will feel the momentum which is what we crave as entrepreneurs. The rest of the world wants to be happy or sad. They're focused on that. We want momentum. We want to feel alive. If we don't have that, we feel unconstrained, we feel overwhelmed, we feel frustrated, we feel stressed, we feel stuck. That's hell for us as entrepreneurs. If you're stuck in a little bit of hell, maybe reach out, and we'll see if we can get you unstuck. I'm Jason Hull, from DoorGrow. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Make sure you join our Facebook community, our Facebook group. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com. If you feel like your property management website is a little bit outdated, it's older than 2-3 years, maybe it's 5 years old or older, it might be time to test that website, see how much money is really leaking and costing you. You can go to doorgrow.com/quiz and take our website quiz. Most websites that go through it get an F grade in terms of conversion which means you are losing deals and money right now. It's probably costing you tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually, in lost deals and lost business. So, check that out. Again, I'm Jason Hull with the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to check us out on iTunes or on YouTube. Like and subscribe. Where it's possible, leave us a testimonial or review. We'll really appreciate that. That is it. I am out. Bye, everyone. To our mutual growth. Until next time.  

Everybody needs and deserves a place to live that is clean, maintained, and safe. Better yet, It makes perfect sense to get someone else to pay your mortgage by giving them a great space at a great rate and share some resources. Today, I am talking to Lisa Wise, co-founder of Nest DC, which manages residential units throughout Washington, DC. The company is committed to customer service, quality spaces, and excellent living experiences. You’ll Learn... [02:23] Nest continues to experience exceptional growth and measures success by revenue and number of jobs it’s created.  [02:34] Fun Spaces: Fixing an Adobe duplex where nothing’s square and everything’s made of dirt led Lisa to love her accidental landlord role in property management.  [04:09] Non-profit Dedication: Do what you can for the community, in terms of what you want to do professionally, due to ability to manage and maintain properties.  [05:04] Origin of Nest DC: Grow one property at a time, and focus on service forward to take care of tenants, spaces, and places.  [05:56] Property managers can make a meaningful impact by helping people and families preserve a better quality of life in their homes. [11:00] Bad Strategies for Building Relationships: Ignoring problems, letting things fall into disrepair, not paying expenses for repairing things—none of those are good..  [11:23] Property Manager Opportunities: Daily variety, unique challenges, freedom, and direct impact. [13:32] Cycle of Suck: Bad managers control costs and fail to maintain property; if people are unhappy with where they’re living, they’re less likely to be great tenants.  [19:20] Onboarding Process: Set expectations on maintenance costs and educate them on why they need to maintain the property at the highest level to take care of tenants.  [21:28] Ways to strategically grow through painful stages: Evaluate technology, be nimble, and cherish staff.  Tweetables Grow one property at a time, and focus on service forward to take care of tenants, spaces, and places. It’s truly an act of trust and intimacy to be invited to manage someone’s home and personal space.  Property managers can make a meaningful and powerful impact by helping people. If people are happy where they live, then they’re just better neighbors. Resources Nest DC AppFolio National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Shark Tank Upwork Fiverr DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you’re open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. We’re here with Lisa Wise of Nest DC in Washington, DC. Lisa, welcome to the show. Lisa: Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you hear. Lisa, I’m going to read a little bit of your bio. It says that you’re the co-founder of two companies—both anchored in the real estate management company, both entirely unique in their contribution to the housing landscape. Nest DC was co-founded by Lisa Wise and Jim Pollack at the start of the “Great Recession” in 2009. Nest manages residential units throughout Washington, DC with a commitment to customer service and an emphasis on quality spaces and excellent living experiences. From 2011-2015, Nest DC was voted a top property management company in the Washington City Paper’s “Best of DC” issue. In August 2016, Nest placed in the Inc 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies. That is a reflection of an investment in the workplace. In 2013, Nest DC was named a “Small Business Gem” in Washingtonian Magazine’s “Top 50 Places to Work” issue. Year over year, Nest enjoys exceptional growth, measuring success not just in revenue, but in the number of good jobs that have been created since inception. I’ll stop there, but why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you go into property management? Lisa: I lived in Tucson, Arizona. I was going to graduate school there and had an 1893 Adobe duplex which was one of the coolest spaces I’ve ever lived in. I got a nice degree in Political Economy and enjoyed a long background doing political consulting basically, but I liked working with my hands and having an Adobe duplex is the best place in the world to get comfortable working with your hands because nothing’s square and everything’s made of dirt. There was no stem wall and it was actually pretty easy having […]. I liked the idea of being able to do a thing and then turn around and having adding proof to the space. I had worked on the plumbing to patching the roof to doing paint. I feel like I’ve painted, many, many, many square miles at this point. It was something that I think came really naturally to me and I enjoyed that process and working with my hands. I had grown up in an environment where working with your hands is definitely something that was what you did. The great thing about that duplex when I asked my landlord if I could buy it and he said yes was it was a duplex. I automatically became a landlord and I loved that. It made perfect sense to have someone else pay my mortgage. It made perfect sense to give someone a great space at a great rate and share some resources including a backyard, dog care, and all those kinds of things. I fell into being, I think what you might consider an accidental landlord, but really loved it. I have had an instinct that I would love it but I had always had this non-profit draw to do what I can for the community so there’s a little bit of tension and conflict there in terms of what I want to do professionally. If we fast forward many years, and we did bump up against that recession and I was in the non-profit environment, doing a lot of fundraising and felt like I wasn’t changing the world very quickly with my non-profit work. I was actually really ready to do a thing and get paid for it. At that point, I had a few more rentals that I had acquired over time and still really enjoyed that work. It was really originated as a side hustle. It was a great way of bringing in that extra revenue. I was good at managing and maintaining those spaces. I kept telling people, “You should start property management company. I think it’d be a really great business model.” Until one day I thought, “Maybe I should do that. It seems to be something I have an aptitude for, and interest, and enthusiasm, and a passion for.” Around 2009, we decided to launch Nest and the idea was just to grow one property at a time, very organic, focus on being very service forward and taking great care of tenants, spaces, and places. It worked, especially in DC where service doesn’t always tend to be stellar and where a lot of the management companies were high volume and not really building relationships one tenant at a time or one owner at a time. We came up with a really refreshing approach to the business. A really refreshing approach in terms of our relationship to community. The city was clearly ready for us. That’s the origin story of Nest DC. Jason: Love it. You’ve got sort of an activist built into you it sounds like. In property management, I wanted to touch on this, I think a lot of times we get so caught up on business, but I think property management can have a really big impact—on families, on people. Maybe you could touch on that a little bit because I get a sense that that’s something you’re passionate about. What impact you feel like you get to have or ripple effect you get to have as a property manager? Why is that interesting or inspiring to you? Lisa: That’s a great question. It’s truly an act of trust and intimacy to be invited to manage someone’s home and personal space. Doing it well is really an opportunity for us to create meaningful impact in people’s lives every single day. Everybody needs to live someplace. Everybody deserves a place to live that is clean, well-maintained, and safe and we get the chance to make that happen. We get the chance to be responsive and make people feel that their home base is that safe space for their family. It’s been pretty intriguing to feel that I can make more impact on people’s day-to-day lives in this business than I did in a lot of the healthcare and environmental work I did in my previous professional career. Because I do think that we give people a chance to have a better quality of life from them living in one of our spaces. We do get a chance to take good care of these properties. A lot of our properties are older and older as in historic. There is really a lot to be said for the fact that we’re stewards of these legacy places and historical buildings, we’re preserving them, and we’re making sure that the landscape of our city, which is architecturally really significant, is in good repair and well-maintained. That’s an important contribution we get to make as well. That’s part of our whole value-space philosophy for us to be around management, but at the core, we’re being invited to help people have better quality of life in their homes and that’s a pretty important role to play. Jason: You’ve really discovered something that I think was really significant. You said that you’re able to have a bigger impact by being a property manager than by the environmental work that you’ve done and other non-profit stuff that you’ve done. Lisa: Yeah. Jason: Just to explain that a little bit because I don’t think people realize the impact that they can have as property managers. I think we can paint a bigger picture for the industry of that inspirational aspect. I think we would attract better property managers into the industry. I think there would be a better perception of the industry out there. I think tenants would have a better experience. I think families’ lives would be better. People that are living in these different units underneath the property manager would have a better experience. The owners would be happier. I think the industry could use a little taste of this so explain that a little bit because you have experience with this. Paint a little bit of the contrast there? I think that’s fascinating for me. Lisa: When you’re in a non-profit environment, you’re sometimes very far removed from the outcome. If you’re working in healthcare policy or if you’re creating new systems for people to green their procurement supply chain, you’re very distant from the end user, you’re very distant from there being a positive outcome and this is in high contrast to that. We’re working with clients and we had a flash flood this week. We had probably 55, 60 affected buildings and units. We were able to pick up the phone every single time and help people walk through something that was very stressful for them. They’re worried about their things; they’re worried about mold, they’re worried about their safety, they’re not sure whether or not they’re going to experience damages. That comes down to protecting the actual space, helping tenants and residents navigate how to deal with a threat to their belongings and their own quality of life in that day, and then owners making that someone’s responsive in an emergency. That’s all about building relationships, being a trusted partner, and helping people make sure that, again, their quality of life is preserved and someone’s honoring that. It’s every single day when you get to see the person who is that end user, recipient, or benefactor of how we do our work differently. That’s not always a luxury that people get in their day-to-day work. In fact, I’d say it’s probably pretty rare unless you’re a provider. Let’s say you’re an ER doctor. Someone comes in and they’re hurt, or they’re scared, and you can help them. That’s a pretty powerful place to be. We’re in similar situations often when someone’s been—maybe they had a fire in their unit, maybe they have no hot water and they’ve got a baby—all these things that can impact the livability of a unit that isn’t just about inconvenience. It’s truly about making sure that people are safe and protected in their spaces and we want to solve those problems cheerfully. We want to take care of those people and want them to feel like we’re a good partner in making that that part of their life is taken care of. Ignoring problems, letting things fall into a state of disrepair, not caring about style, not caring about the building, avoiding paying for the actual expense of repairing things—none of those are good strategies to building solid relationships that help people feel that it’s a good partnership. We like to emphasize partnership as one of our key strategies for doing the work well and to success. Jason: Lisa, something that I think is probably really appealing to property managers, I mentioned in the intro some of the things that I’ve noticed clients mentioned to me that they resonate with. They love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, freedom that property management brings. I think there’s quite a few property managers or maybe most that really do love that direct impact that they get to have. As the company scale, they lose the ability as the business owner to maybe have that experience of having the direct impact, but they still get to have that ripple through their chains. How many doors does Nest manage or units does Nest manage presently? Lisa: We manage about 1000 doors. Jason: That’s a lot. Lisa: Yeah, it’s a lot and all in the district proper. We’re very focused on managing condos and buildings that will be like associations or single-family homes. We have a lot of townhouses. It’s probably a 70/30 split. Anything in the suburbs, it’s easy to get around the District of Columbia. We have a high-density portfolio and we really focus on an urban landscape for our work. That’s become our specialty. Jason: DC has some of the highest rent, probably in the nation, right? Lisa: Yes. Jason: Okay, we’re not going to talk about fees, but I would imagine if you charge anything, you probably do alright in DC as a property manager. Lisa: Honestly, it’s a good environment from that perspective but at the same time, all of our cost of living as a business… Jason: Is really high. Lisa: …so, I’m going to pay more in salaries. I’m going to pay more in occupancy. I’m going to pay more for insurance. Certainly, the cost of doing business is much higher in this environment. Jason: Got it. Why do you think it’s such a challenge in some of the inner cities or the larger city markets for there to be good property managers? Is it because the costs are high for the management companies or they’re just not charging enough? What’s your perception because it does seem like in some markets, there are some bad manager. It gets really difficult and it’s not that small-town feel, especially when you get into large multi-unit. What’s your take on that? Lisa: I think if you are trying to control costs and you’re unwilling to maintain the spaces at the highest possible standard and keep them in good repair and not wait until something is just broken, but you’re upgrading on a schedule or you’re making sure that these properties perform really well so that people are having a good experience in them. I understand that people don’t want to spend a lot of cash in making sure that these units are well-maintained, but not doing so means that you’re going to start renting spaces that are not comfortable, not attractive, not appealing. When people aren’t happy where they’re living, they’re a lot less likely to be great tenants. For us, if you have a great product, you’re going to attract great tenants. If you have people that you enjoy working with, you’re going to have a better reputation, better relationships, and better outcomes but you have to start with a great product. For us, we’re very choosy about managing spaces that we think meet particular standards for us. We’re not going to be the owner’s beard and make bad maintenance decisions and undercut the needs of the space because somebody wants to save money. If we have an owner that is insisting that we not keep that space in good repair, then that’s not a relationship that we’ll keep. That’s a boundary that we’ve set, and we set it early. Every time we’ve been stressed from a business perspective and we’ve got to increase doors because we need to grow faster and we’ve compromised on those values, it’s never […] out. It really works—great property attracts great tenants, when people are happy where they live, they make better neighbors, better neighbors equal better neighborhoods. It’s the same formula we’ve had from the very beginning. When we’ve strayed, we’ve definitely suffered from that. I hate when people manage crappy properties. They’re making excuses for why it’s crappy. They’re having to explain bad decisions. That’s a bad relationship float to get started on. Jason: I’ve talked quite a bit and people for me talk about the “cycle of suck” but I think this is an interesting ingredient that’s overlooked is as a property manager, in order to stay out of that “cycle of suck” of having bad properties, bad tenants, and bad reputation in the market, one of those ingredients is to have a philosophy of maintaining the properties at the highest level because that is going to dictate the types of tenants, that’s going to dictate the type of situations that you’re going to have to deal with. Something you mentioned that I think is really key is the importance of having a proactive strategy towards maintaining these properties rather than a reactive strategy towards maintaining these properties. I think there’s probably a little gradient scale. You should draw on a piece of paper, “Am I reactive or are we proactive?” I think most property managers could figure out where on this continuum they sit. If you’re off of middle towards reactive, they’re probably a company that’s dealing with pain and problems that are unnecessary, and it’s because they didn’t maintain that boundary like you’ve talked about with the client from the beginning, and they haven’t continued to maintain that when those problems arise with an existing client. Lisa: We’ve had owners who say, “I can’t believe I have to replace this hot water here. It’s been working perfectly for 25 years.” You’ve been rolling the dice and getting lucky but just because it’s now a rental and it worked fine for you doesn’t mean these things doesn’t have an actual lifespan. Sometimes there’s a tension between owners who just truly don’t see the value of maintaining things to the highest possible standard, but the cost of dealing with the flood is much higher than replacing the hot water heater in the first place. Sometimes you can’t explain to simple math and logic and people if they’re emotionally attached to the idea that you shouldn’t spend any money on it. We’re actually in the opposite position where, say, it’s a rental, take great care of it, it’ll take great care of you. Someone’s paying for your mortgage. You can capture depreciation. You’re probably saving some money, substantially, on taxes. You’re going to build an asset and make money basically on the interest rates of a mortgage and I think replacing a water heater is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. They look at it transactional instead of looking at the big picture which is too bad. I think it’s on the part of the property manager, we have to educate our owners on what it means to be engaged with that property and keep it in good repair. We give them estimated costs for maintenance over the course of the year and what they should expect. We have them sign off on that, being the expectation over the course of the relationship, that they will spend money on the properties. We make the counterpoint that properties that are in great shape and well-managed tend to keep tenants in them for longer periods of time which means that the turnover costs—the things that you don’t necessarily have to do annually like painting. If people hold over as tenants, you’re going to have to do it. If you’re having a high turnover, you’re going to have to pay a leasing fee. There’s a lot of advantage to having the nicest possible property and taking great care of it, but it can be hard to walk owners through that. If you’re a proxy for owners, and management company has not given the resources to adequately take care of the space, then they’re really truly not able to take good care of the tenant and then you’re stuck being the bad guy. I think a lot of property managers have been in that position. It’s hard to explain that to a tenant. They don’t care who owns the property. They just want it to operate really well. Jason: All of this really starts with your onboarding process with new perspective clients, it sounds like. You’re throwing little things out there that I think people are missing. You are taking people through an estimated maintenance cost and you’re giving it to them upfront, so they have an expectation to spend money to take care of these things. You’re talking about educating them. You have some sort of verbiage, process, or something. You’re taking them through to educate them on why they need to maintain this property at the highest level. You’re shifting their mindset away from trying to keep cost low and charge rent high and over the life of the property, make sure it’s a good investment. You’re also helping educate them on the importance of keeping in it long-term, and there’s probably other things that you guys do as a company to shift towards this. It sounds like you’ve really worked backwards from the idea of, “How can we have really great properties and how can we make sure that we have owners that will allow us to keep them really great?” I’m guessing based on your background, what really seems to drive this, what I’m hearing is that you really want to take care of the tenants. Lisa: Oh, absolutely. A happy tenant is going to take great care of that space. If they’re feeling well taken care of, then it’s truly in the best interest of the owner and property to do so. Again, people are happy where they live then they’re just better neighbors. That’s what we’re all about. We live next door to a lot of our properties. We’re around our tenants all the time. We’re part of this community. We want them to have a happy living experience. We want that to not be a stressful thing for them because life is stressful enough. When they have a maintenance request, we can respond to it and take care of them quickly and swiftly and they know that we were on top of it for them. Jason: Lisa, for those that are listening, they’re like, “Lisa’s got 1000 doors.” You’re like one of the whales in the industry. You’re one of the unicorns that’s made it magically to this place, that every property manager maybe dreams of, or they think would be incredibly painful to get to and doesn’t dream of. What things do you think you did early on that allowed you to grow through some of those really difficult, painful stages? There are painful stages in property management in terms of growth. How did you weather through those while other companies get so stuck? Lisa: I’d say technology, being nimble, and staffing are the three top things that we do. Being nimble is the first one. We stop all the time and evaluate our systems and strategies for how we do our work. We’re very open to the idea of changing the way we do things for the better. That is something that I think over time we all know that you’ll hit a certain number of doors and all of these systems that worked great for under 200 doors suddenly, it’s just the house of cards at 300. We had to get really deliberate about stopping and pausing long enough to study the work and reconfigure it so that it was working well for us. That led to us being really thoughtful about using technology really effectively. Our property management software, we kept using these workarounds for different tasks that had to be done. We weren’t pausing often enough to go back and see if the tool had changed enough to accommodate our needs where in fact, it had. We get a lot more focused on making sure that—AppFolio is the software that we use—that it was meeting our needs. We keep […] just in terms of how we relate to that company. We’re asking for the change that we wanted and needed. We started relying even more heavily on it. We started creating, really tried and true conventions around how we work with the software, the tools, and the processes. Lastly, and definitely not least and the most important thing we did, was really honor and cherish the staff that we have that comes in everyday to deliver on this promise—that we’re going to provide exceptional places for great people. The talent, the staff, and the commitment has been extraordinary to me and something I think I’m most proud of in the work. If you’re not taking good care of your team, then you cannot be an exceptional service-based company. Making sure to profit share, being as generous and thoughtful about benefits and any other extra that you can be, working as a team member, not taking people for granted, giving people a lot of time off and flexibility—basically, anything we can do to underscore a culture that makes this a great workplace will lead to better outcomes for management as well. It’s the staff, it’s hard work, and it’s technology, all of that is the secret sauce, but it has worked to get by in and get people to get very invested in the work that we’re doing. I think the tenure of our team really indicates that we’ve nailed that one. Jason: I think everybody knows they need really good staff. I think everybody goes, “Yes, we need really good technology.” I think you mentioning being nimble is not something you typically would hear. I think a lot of property managers are like, “What?” I love this idea. How do you actually go about being nimble? How do you maintain that? I think every company likes to believe or hope that they can stay young, stay fresh, and not get stuck in their ways, but it happens. Over time, they start, “This is how we do things,” and they […]. Do you have a process? Is this something you tactically sit down and do on a regular basis? How do you guys actually become nimble? Lisa: We actually spend a lot of time retreating and having conversations about our systems. We commit a lot of energy to those conversations. We’ll do a quarterly all-staff, all-day retreat. Often times, those retreats are about how can we streamline and be better at our work and we’ll break into different teams. We did a really fun thing that I actually picked up from someone that had presented in NARPM where we had people do a shark tank session. We had teams get together and proposed different ways of engaging with our clients that would accelerate the client experience. We implemented every single one of them. When you’re asking for everybody to contribute, to revisiting and focusing on how our systems can be more improved, from the plumber to the CEO, we have everybody participate in those all-day meetings and coming up with ideas for how we can be even better at what we do. They see that the fruits of that time. We did something with those ideas. I think everybody’s really motivated to make sure that we take that time away from our work to revisit how we’re doing it. To be honest, everybody will hate a certain aspect of their job, they’ll dislike something, or something will get tedious and I invite people everyday day, like, “Stop and steady it. Ask yourself, do you have to do that task? Can you do it differently? Can someone else do it? Is there a faster, better, smarter way of doing it?” If you’re inviting everybody to ask themselves whether they have to do something that they don’t like doing, that’s pretty motivating. Like, “I really hate doing this data entry or this workaround on managing the utilities or something.” I’m like, “Should we be doing utilities at all? Is this something that we have to be doing the same way?” I think everyone is being invited to find better ways of doing their job and enjoy their job more. That’s the investment. When that’s the incentive, then I think people are a lot more engaged in being nimble. Jason: I love it. We do that as a company as well and that’s built into our cadence of planning system that we do as a company. It’s amazing when you allow your team members to give you feedback, the ideas that they come up with. Because our perspective as CEO or entrepreneur as the head of the company, we have what we think we need from the top view but my graphic designer, she’s going to have a different perspective from what her standpoint, what we could do differently in our process when we get into that piece. I imagine it’s the same in property management businesses. There are so many moving parts, especially when you get into to your size and scale, everybody sees things from a different perspective, and they see things that bother them. They see things that could be improved. They have ideas to innovate and when you allow them the space. I think the magical thing that you’re doing is you’re allowing your entire company to shift at a tactical day-to-day operation for a short period of time into strategic planning. You’re allowing this step and strategic time in a business is the time that grows companies. Companies that only are doing tactical work, maintenance requests, leasing, tactical day-to-day, emails, phone calls, sales, whatever, if you’re only doing tactical work, the business can’t grow. It just doesn’t seem to grow. It’s the strategic work that helps you trim the tree so that it can grow. It’s the strategic work that help you plan and figure out what you can do next to innovate and create. You built that in as part of your process that you do every quarter. Lisa: Yeah. 100%. Jason: Okay, very cool. I love the idea of the idea of the shark tank sessions and you said you implemented every idea. Lisa: I did. It was really fun. People thought about infographics that we could use to describe what happens you become a tenant and who you’re interacting with. We were able to use different Upwork tools and Fiverr tools to get access to talent that before we had thought was out of reach and being really thoughtful about how we used different modern-day side hustle economies to capture talent, and skill sets that we don’t have inhouse so that we can some of these big dreams come true for our team. It’s been awesome. Jason: Okay, I love it. Is there anything else in the new paradigms in property management, or topic at hand, that you think we should bring up? Because that a really good one, maybe even one to end on. I love that idea. Lisa: I think you ask varied questions and I really appreciate your patience with my technology snafus. Jason: Okay. That’s alright. Everybody has technology snafus that has technology. It’s just part of what happens with technology, right? Lisa, really appreciate you for being in the show. Thank you for sharing those insights. I think there were some really practical takeaways for people watching that they could implement. Lisa: Awesome. Thank you, so much and great luck, with all of your work. Jason: Okay, thank you. All right. A little bit of delays and lags but that’s the internet. I’m at a remote location and doing things a bit differently. Hopefully, you guys can hear me okay today. I appreciate you guys tuning into the DoorGrow Show. If you could take a moment, if you’re listening to this later on iTunes, be sure to subscribe in iTunes to the podcast. You’ll get notified when episodes come out. You can listen to them while you’re driving around, get insights. Be sure to leave us a review on iTunes. We really appreciate that. As a team, that really makes a difference for us. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, we would love to have you inside of our Facebook group, the DoorGrow Club. You can join that. It is free. It’s for business owners of property management companies. Go to doorgrowclub.com. If you are wanting a more effective website, you are wanting to optimize the frontend of your business, dial in your pricing, dial in sales, dial in […] age of your business, that is what we are experts at DoorGrow. Please reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. All right, everybody until next time. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Are you a property manager or owner who wants to recoup financial losses when stuck with a bad tenant who stops paying rent or needs to be evicted? Lower your risk? Trust somebody else to manage your properties? Protect all parties involved?  Today, I am talking to John Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Steady Marketplace, a leading technology platform for property owners and managers. Steady’s subsidiaries offer financial products, including rent default insurance.  You’ll Learn... [02:00] Background of Big Financial Numbers: Starting with event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with billions in assets.  [06:37] Steady’s products protect property owners/managers from bad tenant outcomes.  [07:40] Rent Default Insurance: Protection against rental income loss due to tenant’s failure to pay.  [10:15] Rent Default Insurance is widely available and adopted around the world. About 70% are renters and 30% are owners. [12:38] Collaboration Over Competition: Don’t simply copy-and-paste products and policies; leads to lack of innovation. [13:55] Automate It All: Learn from online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and pricing. [15:05] Perfect Businesses are Out of Business: Entrepreneurs think they've got something perfect, only to realize they need to make it better.  [16:15] By the Book: Take regulatory issues seriously, and make sure to do it right. [17:00] Adoption is #1 challenge with any solution, software, or service.  [17:55] Competitive Advantage: Education, awareness, and understanding of product.  [20:53] FAQs: How does it work? Why does this exist? What’s the catch?  [21:55] Renter’s Insurance vs. Rent Default Insurance: What’s the difference? Tweetables Every entrepreneur should make a difference. Otherwise, they're just causing problems. When there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. Automate everything: Go slow to go fast. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Resources John Higgins’ Email Steady Marketplace Steady Marketplace FAQ John Higgins on LinkedIn SureVestor Rent Rescue National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners, we want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today, I am hanging out with John Higgins of Steady Marketplace. John, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. John: It's great to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: John, you've got a really big bio and you're really impressive. Do you want me to read all of it? John: You can read whatever you want to read. I'm not that impressive. I'll say you're more impressive hosting this show and with your following in the space. I'm just a guy trying to make a difference. Jason: I appreciate it. That's what every good entrepreneur is trying to do is make a difference, at least I hope. Otherwise, they're just causing problems.  I'll read a little bit here. It says you are the co-founder and CEO of Steady Technologies Inc., a leading technology platform for property owners and property managers. Steady, through subsidiaries, offers financial products that benefit property owners and managers. Their first product is rent default insurance, offered in partnership with the top US insurance carrier that is a Fortune 100 company, rated A+ by AM Best, and S&P.  Prior to co-founding Steady, Mr. Higgins founded Nobadeer Advisors which provided business development and capital market expertise to technology-enabled lending platforms across the variety of consumers and business, lending verticals, and backed by top venture capital firms globally.  Prior to Nobadeer, Mr. Higgins spent 2.5 years at Prosper Marketplace, Inc. where he helped build the institutional loan program growing it from $0 to over $5 billion over his tenure and help scale Prosper's monthly origination volumes over 4000% during his time at the firm.  Mr. Higgins also previously served as a director at Topwater Capital, now owned by Leucadia, where he made investments between $5-$100 million to hedge fund managers across a variety of strategies via structured managed accounts.  Prior to Topwater, Mr. Higgins spent five years working for event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with assets as large as $1.85 billion. There's a lot of big financial numbers here, John. A lot of big financial numbers. John: Want me to dive a bit deeper on it and summarize for you? Jason: Yeah. Let's dive into that and then tell us how you got into all of these. John: Sure. I can start from how I got into the hedge funds space which led me through here. I started and talk my way into an internship my junior college, totally unqualified, at the University of New Hampshire versus people that are top of their class from top business schools. Got a shot to join big hedge fund on my way up. I worked my tail off that summer and got a full time offer. I joined that firm full time after I graduated college. I was really lucky. I worked for the really brilliant entrepreneur there who would start this business with $500,000. Four years later, he grew it to almost $2 billion.  Then, left that company and went to Topwater where I was invested in hedge fund strategies via structured managed accounts, kind of cross the bench of the long, short, and distressed credit. That company was acquired by Leucadia which is now Jefferies Investment Bank; the two merged. Leucadia was at a big stake and Jefferies a long story anyway. As that transaction was transpiring, I was approached by the former management team across the marketplace who've I known from the hedge fund industry. They had great entrepreneurs that built and sold the company that served hedge funds called Merlin Securities. They're backed by Sequoia. Sold that business to Wells Fargo and decided they were going to take over Prosper.  They reached out and said, "We're looking for someone to help us build out this business as we take it over and turn it around." Really fortunate to work with tremendous entrepreneurs and the tremendous team there. During my time there, we went from about 50 employees up to about 600+ when I left. That was my first foray into more pure play technology.  We're a financial technology platform. We're offering unsecured personal loans online to end consumers. If you're thinking about going online, applying for a personal loan, no human interaction, [...] pricing, I can get you a loan in a matter of days as opposed to having to leave your house, go to a bank, et cetera, and fill up paper forms. After leaving Prosper, I was consulting for various lending platforms as you touched on in the intro. I got to work again with tremendous entrepreneurs across a bunch of different verticals. One of the people I've got to work with was doing some lending into the small landlord space. It's fix and flip lending and also rental lending. I started looking at the opportunities. I said, "This is really interesting. I know all of these products that helped multifamily owners protect them against bad tenant outcomes."  There's a lot of companies that pop up doing that, but no one's really going after single family. I started looking at the space and opportunity. As you and everyone else in the space realizes, it's actually bigger than the multifamily space. When you live in New York, everyone thinks rental properties are the big highrise. In fact, there's roughly more than 16 million single family rental units in the US, then another 8 million duplexes, triplex quads. All in all, you have about 20 million rental units in the US owned by individual investors that owned less than 10 units. These owners actually can't solve for this risk which is if the tenant goes bad. The smart owners are getting professional property managers or actually better at picking tenants at the established processes and procedures. They're getting bad tenants out. It can help manage those properties and have better outcomes. But still, when there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. In fact, my business partner and co-founder, Viken, had a property in New York City that he was renting. Person just skips town in the middle of the night. He was left with close to $20,000. It actually might have been north of $20,000 loss because the tenant just left the unit and didn't say anything. It took awhile to get it rerented. He had no coverage. If he had, it had no protection against that. If you had Steady or some of these other providers that are popping up, they could've indemnify themselves from that loss, and could've been made whole for a modest premium.  Long story short, there's a big need in the market to this type of product. What we're really excited about is working with all the property managers across the country to help ensure this is product underlying landlords and finding ways for everyone to win. Jason: Cool. Let's talk about the product specifically. Explain this to somebody that's never heard of this. They might even be an unseasoned property manager. Describe the problem that exists, that this solves for. John: Sure. When you look at it, if the tenant goes bad whether it's professionally managed or not—let’s suppose it’s some professionally managed properties; that's really who we're serving here in this podcast, and who we speak to—if their tenants goes bad, the owner's mad at them. They might've lose that door because guess what? They probably picked the tenant. They were entrusted by the landlord or the owner to find the tenant, to select the right tenant, and now the tenant's bad. So, the owner's mad, they might lose every relationship. The owner's also rental income. As a result, property managers also lost their property management fee income. Generally, they're charging based on the property management fee.  If you look globally, across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, this type of insurance product, rent default insurance, is widely available and widely adopted. The reason is that, if you look in other jurisdictions, primarily Europe, it's flipped from the US. It's about 70% renter 30% owner. As we know, post financial crisis, more and more US consumers are now choosing to rent instead of own. So, the property management space is going to be larger and the rental property market is getting larger.  As this is occuring, we think that more and more people will be in need of this insurance because we have a growing market. The insurance itself indemnifies and there's different flavors. We'll speak generally about rent default insurance and what's out there as opposed to Steady, specifically. What we want to do is educate the market on the availability of these types of products.  Rent default insurance, generally speaking, indemnifies the owner against losses as a result of the bad tenant outcome. It could be eviction, tenant skips, et cetera; different programs to different coverages. What this does is it allows the owner who can't self-insure due to the diversification to recoup losses if they are unfortunately stuck with the bad tenant that stops paying rent or needs to get evicted.  Different people had different approaches to it. Us at Steady, we've taken a lot of the learnings from the online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and try to deliver a great product that are at a reasonable price to the end market.  A lot of property managers are saying, "Hey, this is great. This is a huge concern that my underlying owners have. What happens if the tenant doesn't pay rent?" They see property management companies out there that have eviction protection plans or other plans. You've got the SureVestors, the Rent Rescues, and a bunch of other great companies out here, all serving for these types of risks and helping solve these pain points. The reason for that is this huge market is a huge concern. If you've got one property, say you own a home and you move for work across the country. You can't sell your home or whatever reason you have. You put it with the professional property manager. They're managing that, but you're relying on that cash flow for maintenance, upkeep, taxes, et cetera. In many cases, to pay the mortgage. If that tenant goes bad, all of a sudden, you're break even or your cash flowing property gone upside down and now you're coming out of pocket. You now have a liability that you have to come out of the pocket for every month. That's a big pain point, a big concern, and what these types of products do is solve for those types of risk, help landlords have peace of mind, and protect against bad tenant outcomes. Jason: You name dropped some of your own competitors, which is very generous of you. How does Steady standout or differ? How do you compare, standout, or differ in the space? John: We've taken a bit of a different approach on how we can structure our products and policy. A lot of other competitors, not just in space but in insurance generally, what they do is copy and paste what other products work on their markets or other products that other people have launched, and there's not a lot of innovation. As a result, we haven't seen a huge take rate for these types of product in the US.  What we found—you might feel differently—my business partner, Viken, grew up in Paris. What works in Europe doesn't necessarily work in the US. What works in Australia doesn't necessarily work for the US. What Viken and I did when we came together is we deconstructed how these programs work globally. We took a lot of the learning from online lending to build what we believe is a better program here in the US.  One differentiation is automation. Our entire process is fully automated. We just set an email prior to this event saying, "We are now in 20 states." We've got the ability to be in all 50 states. The reason we're not in all 50 states right now is because we want to automate everything. It is going slow to go fast. As we start to take it off here and ramp because the updates have been very strong, it's continuing to go stronger daily, everything will be automated. What that will result in is more efficient processes, procedures, and better pricing.  Jason: Explain what that means so everyone understands. You're saying that automation is a differentiator and that it's fully automated. What's automated? John: A property manager or a property owner can go online to the website, inquire about rent default insurance on their own, and complete the entire process in less than two minutes. There's no human interaction necessary and they could do everything themselves. Now, newer company, newer brand, we’re lucky to be aligned with the very strong brand in the insurance space, but nothing's perfect. As you know, as an entrepreneur, you think you've got something perfect and they realize you need to make it better. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Jason: The perfect businesses are out of business. John: Right. We continue to constantly push new development releases and streamlining things. What we believe is that, if you can make the process as easy as buying, say for instance, travel insurance when you're buying a flight and make it that easy, that will be a great outcome for us and for this market. The way which you can do that is through API integrations, the right product structures, the right creativity, the right business development strategies, et cetera.  If you look at our product, where our technology is our technology, our product is our product, the two weren't built separately. They're built together. They work very closely together and in tandem. Because of that, it allows us to deliver a great customer experience, a frictionless process, high scalability, and keep headcount well. Right now, our biggest expenses have been legal and engineering, as you can imagine. It's a technology company, but legal because we invest heavily in making sure that we do everything right and by the book. Also, that our partners do things right by the book. As you know, the property management space has some instances where people have more of a cavalier or cowboy type approach that works until it doesn't. For us, we have ambitions to be a very large company and we operate in a highly regulated space. It's non negotiable for us to run into issues on the regulatory front or have our partners run into those issues. We take that very seriously and focus on in making sure everything is done the right way. Jason: That makes sense. The number one challenge when it comes to any solution or software or third party service is adoption. It's how easy is it for them to adopt this and use. If adoption is a challenge, then it's not going to work. It's not going to grow. People are not going to use it or it's going to be confusing or frustrating.  I'm a big Apple fan. Apple made adoption very easy. My AirPods, I just hold them out, open them up, my phone just show them on the screen, and they connect. It was magic, it's easy, I didn’t have to fill around weird Bluetooth settings or hold down buttons. What you're saying makes a lot of sense.  You've mentioned that it's easy for the consumer or for the property manager. One challenge that I see a lot of firms run into is when you're servicing an audience that's servicing that same audience. You almost can become competitors with them. How do you negotiate that? How does the property manager still have a competitive advantage against them just working with you directly? John: I guess, education, awareness, and understanding. People [...] this in massive market. People don't even know about this product. One parallel I draw frequently is pet insurance. I’ve got a pet, I’ve got a dog who's five now. I have pet insurance that I pay $70 or $80 a month. They haven’t got a good plan because the vet at the time said, "Hey, you should consider pet insurance if there's ever an issue." To me, the asset there is the pet. A little bit different than a rental property, maybe not as emotional as a rental property would be. They said, "Maybe you should look at this." It's a similar thing as what you're seeing happening in the property management space. Property managers are the fiduciary, the trusted advisor to the asset and the asset owner, which is the landlord or the small rental property owner who's contracted the property manager for their services. If they can be introduced to this product, it's for their benefit.  We don't have a big direct push. We're not looking to go after single family rental landlords directly. Our entire business model is predicated on partnerships. Based on our analysis, there's roughly eight million rental units in the US managed professionally. We've love to see that grow larger. Those are also, for us, we believe the best risk. As I touched on earlier, we believe strongly that property managers are better at picking tenants, have an established processes and procedures in getting bad tenants out, and they can get units rented more quickly. Jason: Which lowers your risk as an insurance provider. John: Correct, which results in better outcomes from the underwriting perspective.  Jason: Okay, makes sense. Your interests are aligned directly with property managers. They're your focus.  John: Yes. They are our focus. We just did a giveaway today to property management conference for people that could enter. We view property managers as our partners. Again, the reason I mentioned some of our competitors earlier because the rising tide lifts all boats. We want to see everyone do well, we want to see landlords have access to the solution so they get better outcomes, and we want to see property managers to be able to benefit from this as well.  Jason: Yeah, I love it. I believe that too. I have said before, rising tide raises all ships, but sometimes the bar is so low in property management in some areas and in some markets, that I don't think every ship's going to rise. Some have too many holes and are going to sink, but that's okay. John: That's right. That's Darwinism. Jason: Right, survival of the fittest. What are some of the most frequently asked questions or concerns that property managers are asking you or have been asking in sales conversations? So that we can make sure we address them here on this show. John: A lot of things that a lot of property managers ask is simply how it work. We have an FAQ section on our website and we can share the link on it. "How does it work?" "Why does this exist?" "How can no one else is doing is?" As I catch on, this is the third time I'll mention SureVestor, Rent Rescue, and others. The awareness is growing and that's what the biggest challenge is for all of us in this space is awareness that these types of solutions are available. This isn't like rental insurance or pet insurance. Pet insurance, I guess, is now becoming widely adopted, but people don't know about it and don't understand it. Most of the reactions we got is, "Wow, this exists? This is great. How does it work?" "Wow, that's inexpensive. This makes a lot of sense." It all depends on the property address, the rent amount, and the pricing. Jason: For anyone that's confused, let's just explain the difference between renter's insurance and rent default insurance. John: Renter's insurance covers the renter's possessions and liability to the landlord, generally speaking. It's paid for by the renter and they're doing it, so if there's a fire in the unit, they're not covered from the landlord's policy. Their possessions are gone. The landlord gets the unit rebuild, the house rebuilt, but they don’t receive anything. Now with renter's insurance, then we get some coverage for that.  From the landlord's perspective, if the renter has renter's insurance, they have a guest over, they slip and fall, and break their leg, it protects the liability to the landlord for them getting sued from that slip and fall. That's renter's insurance. Rent default insurance, it depends on the program. Different people, different features. Generally speaking, it covers loss of rent due to tenant skips, eviction, and tenant nonpayment for whatever reason. Jason: Sometimes, we have to make sure things are at an 8 year old level so that everybody gets it.  John: I generally need things at an 8 year old level to understand.  Jason: Right. Most entrepreneurs do because we're just so damn impatient at paying attention to things sometimes.  All right. We talked about how it works, why is anyone doing this. Any other frequently asked questions that people are concerned about? John: "What's the catch?" generally. Insurance companies, for better or for worse, generally don't always have the best reputation for making it easy to make claims, et cetera. That's another thing. Some people want to see the policies and see things in that nature.  Again, the big thing is people just don't understand these types of products exists. That's why we're out there educating the market and letting people know that there are these types of coverages available and you can get the coverage to these types of risks.  Jason: Let's touch on the benefits for a property management business in having this in their repertoire of services and how this can help them sell and close more deals, give them the competitive advantage, maybe. John: What do you see is property managers are now looking at this and some are saying, "I'm just going to include it in all my plans," and say, "This makes a lot of sense.” Now, we've got a differentiator. All of my property management packages include three months of rent default insurance if the tenant goes bad. They're out there marketing and saying that it includes it. Others are saying, "This is interesting. How can we offer this and earn some B revenue?" The only way it works, as I touched on earlier with compliance, is you can't get paid for the sales, solicitation, negotiation of insurance, unless you're an insurance producer. You can do other things such as marketing fees, et cetera, but you can't make conditions on the sale, solicitation, negotiation, and insurance. That's why we spend so much to make sure that anything we do, anything our partners do in partnership with us, is fully vetted and above board. We make sure everyone stays on the right side of the rules. Jason: Do they become somewhat of an insurance agent? Or you're just laying that all together? John: No. They do not become insurance agents in any way, shape, or form unless they've got an insurance agent license. Then, they could be an insurance agent, obviously.  Jason: Okay. John, it's great to see an entrepreneur doing something that's impacting the industry. I believe these products are going to have massive ripple effect in the industry. They're going to create a lot more safety and certainty in the property management space. It's going to lower the risk. It's going to lower the pain threshold for landlords to trust somebody else to manage their properties. It's going to protect all the parties involved and that means it's going to help the industry grow. If Australians, somebody said their markets are any indicator, it seems like these types of products help these markets grow significantly in a relatively short period of time, over a decade. They've grown phenomenally. I heard stats like Australia's grown through 25% in a decade. Largely, they claimed that it was connected to that. I don't know if that's accurately or true, but if that were true and the industry—single family residential—were maybe about 30% are professionally managed, that almost be our industry doubling here in the US. I don't know that there's enough companies here in the US right now to handle that level of growth. That would mean we need to double the amount of companies or we need to double the size of every company that exists. Something in between that. John: Or let's double the size of every company that exists. That'll be a good outcome for everyone. Jason: Yeah. Regardless, I want to make sure that we've got the best. Let's raise the tide. I appreciate that you're seeking to raise the tide. I think collaboration over competition is what builds market, it's what builds the category. It's always important to build the category before you try to build the individual brand. That's Marketing 101, everybody.  Property management is in the same boat. Property management has very low awareness, in general, here in the US and right now, we've got a lot of people going around something in their chest, trying to fill their individual brand. We need to build the category first. There's a lesson for the industry to take away from what you've mentioned and what's going on in what you're doing, so I appreciate that. John: NARPM’s done a good job trying to get the industry moving in the right direction. People like you and a lot of others that are trying to educate and build awareness are very helpful as well. It's great to see everyone working together in some way, shape, or form. Jason: There's no scarcity in property management. There just really isn't. There's 70% in single family residential that are self-managing right now. That does not indicate scarcity. In certain channels of marketing, there is a lot of scarcity because everybody's doing the same stuff, there is scarcity. John, I appreciate you coming in the show. How can people get in touch with Steady and learn more about this? John: They can go to the website www.steadymarketplace.com or shoot me an email [email protected]. Jason: Perfect. John, I appreciate you coming on the show, I appreciate what you're doing, and I wish Steady success. John: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Check them out at steadymarketplace.com. If you are, for some reason, not getting the growth that you want, you're growth is good, but you want to pour a little gasoline on that fire, if you find that you're getting a lot of your business lately from word of mouth, and from the trust that you built in the marketplace, I would love to pour gasoline on that fire. That's what DoorGrow specializes in, optimizing your warmly funnel and optimizing your business for more organic growth, which is a lot less expensive than showing up tens of thousands of dollars a year towards pay per click, SEO, and everything that everybody is competing and already doing.  Like I said, I don't believe there's scarcity in the industry, but I believe there's false scarcity that's been created by marketers, and you can avoid that. For those who can't see, I'm wearing my "SEO won't save you" shirt. A lot of people are relying on SEO to save you. Don't get me wrong, SEO is great. If you have the top spot in Google, that's great to have search engine optimization. But there are things that are better than having the top spot in Google like being the most trusted company in your market. Our whole system is focused on building trust for your brand, for your business, and helping you to go after that blue ocean where there's all that business available; that 70%. I appreciate John being on the show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Freedom of time, money, relationships, and purpose is what we all want. Property managers, realtors, and investors help clients build wealth through real estate.  Today, I am talking to Steve Welty, owner of Good Life Property Management business and podcast. He enjoys meeting amazing people and indoctrinating listeners with his philosophies.  You’ll Learn... [03:23] Stop whining about solvable issues, such as online reviews to get warm leads.  [04:41] Steve surfs to success with Good Life Property Management.  [06:43] Podcast Passion Project: Do content for content's sake; add value to people's lives for opportunities and connections to come your way. [10:19] Don’t lose focus on why and what fires you up; limit time and effort spent on your business to achieve outcomes. [15:00] Purpose of Business: Not to make money; build a business that makes money.  [16:25] How to be happy: Create momentum for other people to gain momentum. If you wish to become great, learn to become the servant of many. [18:12] Zig when they Zag: Success outside outsource sandbox to reduce costs.  [18:55] Results-based Biz: Hire young, smart, motivated people and leave them alone.  [19:31] Big Issues, Big Success: More people can lead to more problems; paint a compelling vision to keep good people and let them do what they want to do.  [20:10] Move Out and Outwork Others: Create freedom of time and money by hiring CFO or profit first coach/accountant to offer advice, not control over finances.  [26:10] Value-add Revenue Sources: If you don't charge for it, you're doing it poorly.  [28:25] Opportunities in Other States/Markets: Pop-up shops to buy cash flow property.  [29:05] To Die List and Time Study: Procrastination problem property managers and owners experience.  [35:00] Barriers/Protections: Teach team and customers how to treat and reach you.  [37:35] Opinions vs. Observations: Co-creation/coaching is transformational and transactional superpower that changes lives.  [46:45] Give up control and allow people to fail, or you create an unsafe business.  [52:30] What Matters: Million ways to get to end results and outcomes.  [54:05] Hire and Fire: Center on core values; be reliable, positive, and go-giver (RPG). [57:10] Epiphany: Everything worthwhile lives on the other side of fear.  [1:03:05] Money is one side of it. Easiest decision to make is to be a different person.  Tweetables Do content for content's sake. Limit time in your business; achieve outcomes with least amount of effort. Add limitations or constraints to create a necessity for innovation. First key to greater time, money, and purpose is to create space for yourself. Resources Steve Welty’s Email Good Life Property Management Good Life Property Management Podcast Steve Welty on Spotify Steve Welty on Apple PM Grow Orange Tree Property Management GatherKudos National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Brad Larson Gary Vaynerchuk The 4-hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Todd Breen Making Money is Killing Your Business by Chuck Blakeman How I Built This with Guy Raz Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard  Voxer Jason Goldberg (Strategic Coach) Extreme Ownership Book E-Myth Book The Go-Giver  KingJasonHull’s Whimple on SoundCloud DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a little bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners, we want to change the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull. The founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today's guest, I’m really excited, we’re hanging out with Steve Welty. Steve, welcome to the DoorGrow show. Steve: What’s up Jason? Good to be here. Jason: Steve and I were reminiscing. I saw Steve at a broker owner conference, the very first one I went to several years ago and we were sitting at the same table and I guess I said hi to you and we were chatting it up. Steve: Yeah. It's funny, I remember that day very vividly and it's interesting because I have a very poor memory. You were the mysterious man behind me and you were dressed really nice. Jason: I don't dress nice anymore. I'm too lazy now. Steve: Yeah, you're just soaking it all, but we were talking before the show, was that really one of your first conferences? Jason: That was the first conference I'd gone to, yeah. My dad had just started property management business. He's got maybe about 200 doors now, but he had just started a property management business. He had been a hospital administrator for 30 years or something and he said, “I'm going to do what Bryan’s doing and start a property management business.” My brother has got maybe 1000 doors or something like that and he is out of Orange County. Not too far from you down San Diego. He thought, “Bryan’s doing it, maybe I could do this too.” He decided to become an entrepreneur. Caught the bug. It's been fun to watch that, but I was like, “Dad, let's go do this. I want to see what happens there. The only way I can go is if I'm with you, you're a broker owner.” I was his director of marketing and I was just the fly on the wall for Orange Tree Property Management, just checking out what goes on a broker owner. I just want to see what happened there. It was challenging for me though because the entire time I'm hearing people talk about problems, and challenges, and I'm just biting my tongue the whole time. I’m like, “I could solve that challenge. I can help with that.” I just had to sit there and be quiet. I've even got a text message from one of my clients that was sitting in the room and he said, “I'll bet this is just killing you right now,” I texted him back, “You have no idea.” It was just really funny to hear people whining about stuff that I think is solvable. Steve: What was something out of all those issues you're biting your tongue about that you can reflect on today. Jason: Now you’re interviewing me. Steve: I'm interested to hear that. Jason: I remember one of the things that really killed me was people were like, “How do you deal with your online reviews? How do you get more positive online reviews?” We have our system GatherKudos, and we have coaching material around that that we’d go through with clients to figure out how to identify peak happiness, leverage a lot of reciprocity, how to get more reviews, how to build a system in your business as part of your onboarding process with new tenants so you get more reviews. I think that's a better system to have than even most marketing systems, because that creates warm leads. I was just sitting there listening to them talk and some of the ideas were, “We're okay, we're good,” but I was like, “This is so solvable.” Steve: Reviews are still a big issue, six years later or whatever it is. Jason: Correct. Steve: People still can’t figure it out. It’s tough. I still try to figure it out on a daily basis. Jason. Yeah. Cool. Steve, you've got an awesome property management business. You've got your own podcast that you do. You've got a lot of stuff going on. Help my audience understand who you are and give us a little bit of background on Steve, your adventures in property management, and how you got into it. Steve: For sure. I graduated from San Diego State 2005 and stayed in construction for a little while. I was working with constructions in college, just bumming around, surfing, and doing whatever I was doing. Got my real estate license finally and did some deals 2006-2007. I hear a lot of stories like this, it’s like 2006-2007 sales, all of our sales, we should start a Facebook group for sales guys that flamed out, well I think it is, it’s probably called than NARPM of Facebook group. It seemed like everyone has that story. I made some nice checks in sales and I thought I was great, and then I became broke very fast. I was 26-27 and I was broke. I was applying for any job that I could get and I went to work for a French entrepreneur in Carlsbad as a personal assistant. He wanted someone to manage his property manager that had a real estate license because he didn't trust his property manager. Jason: Okay, so you were the spy that was going to monitor whether he was doing his job or not. Steve: Yeah, most managers hate it when the owner micromanages you. Imagine a realtor micromanaging you. I was like, “Yeah, I can do that,” I never managed anything in my life, but I figured it out and worked with him. He actually taught me some great business lessons looking back, but two years in, it was very stressful working for him. He was not the nicest guy, but he did teach me a lot and then I went out on my own with a business partner at the time. We decided, “Hey, let's start our own management company and just got it enough off the ground to allow me to quit my job, be on property management with my partner I think in 2008. We grew that until about 2012 and then we decided to part ways. I started Good Life in 2013 and then been doing Good Life ever since. I started the Good Life Property Management podcast which has nothing to do with clients, nothing to do with getting new customers. It was really a passion project and something I learned out of that was that I encourage people to do content for content's sake if their heart tells them to do that. A lot of times we try to figure out, “Well, how am I going to monetize that?” I remember when I asked Brad Larson, I think he was one of the first people to do a podcast that was a property manager. I was like, “What are you doing this for?” and he was like, “Oh, it's fun,” I was like, “It didn’t make any sense, you're wasting time.” When you add value, like Gary V—a lot of people have really put this in the forefront—when you add value to people's lives, opportunities come your way, connections come your way. I have so much fun doing the Good Life Property Management podcast and we serve the same community you serve which is property management entrepreneurs. I don't run ads. I have ran ads in the past, but I don't anymore. I don't necessarily get anything out of it other than just meeting cool people and getting to indoctrinate my listeners with my philosophies which are really along the same lines in a lot of ways as you, Jason. I really resonate with your manifesto in a lot of ways, so that's cool. That's it. I'm big into music. I do a lot of music. Steve Welty, I’m on Spotify and Apple, and that's my passion. I'm going more and more into that. Also, we have tried mastermind for property management entrepreneurs to max out their business and life. That's what's up for me. Jason: Cool stuff. I think we have a lot in common. Not only are we both California guys. A lot of people listening may not know this, but I had a band in college. I wrote all the music, I played guitar. I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur then. I didn't know that was in my blood, but I was the guy going door-to-door with a guitar and a clipboard pre selling CDs at girl’s dorms that I could fund to self-produce an album, and I was playing music. Steve: That’s [...]. Jason: I know, it was pretty crazy. The album is on SoundCloud if people are searching for it. Steve: Let’s check it out, what’s it called, how can we find it? Jason: My username on SoundCloud is my username everywhere, which is KingJasonHull, and the album is called Whimple, that was the name of my band. Steve: I love it. I think you told me that a while back, but I forgot, but I'm really fascinated with that because that was my story, too. I was a songwriter. That was hustle. I give you street credit like going dorm-to-dorm, playing for chicks, that's pretty cool. I thought I was going to be a rock star. That was my deal, but it's so funny looking back. I didn’t even practice. I just thought I have the natural talent and I used to drink a lot so I was probably delusional. I had this moment, this crossroads where I was like, “Okay, you're not going make it,” I'm not going to be okay being older and broke, so I'm going to go on a business route. I just gave up music completely, and then I was in a strategic coach workshop. I have given it up five or six years and I met this entrepreneur. I was telling him about my story. I was like, “I don't really play music anymore,” and he's like, “Oh, that sucks.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does suck.” Then he’s like, “Well, you have a guitar in your office don’t you?” and I was like, “No.” He’s like, “Well you’re the boss, aren’t you?” Jason: I can see it right behind you. Steve: Yeah, right now I do it. He’s like, “You’re the boss.” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Well, why don’t you try this, try just putting a guitar in your office. Just make a commitment to picking it up once a day even if it's for one second.” It really resonated with me because I had given up a part of myself that was really important because I think a lot of time as business owners, we just get so focused on like, “We got to make this company work,” and we’d lose focus of why and what fires us up on an internal level. I did that and that about two years ago, fast forward to today, I'm putting many hours a day into music, into song writing, into recording, into building my audience and it's helped my business so much because when you limit the amount of time that you're in your business, you can only do the things that you're really good at and so that's what I'm really passionate about, is figuring out how can I achieve an outcome with the least amount of effort possible. Jason: Yeah, because when we add limitation or constraint, it creates the byproduct of limitation or creating a constraint is it creates a necessity for innovation. If you have unlimited amounts of time, unlimited amounts of money, unlimited whatever, there's no innovation because it's so easy to be lazy. It's so easy to just let things unfold in a different way, but when we have some time constraints or we have some financial constraints, we have to get creative and that's where the genius starts to come out, that's where new ideas start to come out. I've noticed that even with team members, if I say “I need this done by this time,” they get creative or if I need this done under this budget, they get creative, then they start to innovate. If I say, “Yeah, do it whenever, take as much time as you want, spend as much money as you want,” there's no innovation. They're just going to go towards whatever seems easiest, which is the status quo. Steve: Yeah, you nailed it. I've been really interested in constraints. I had a son, my first child, he’s six months old, Myles, and I was encouraged by a friend of mine. He said “Take 30 days off, Steve,” he's like “It'll be the best thing you ever did for your business. Don't check in, don't do anything. Take 30 days off. Be with your son.” It was in December, so it was like the perfect time and so I did that, and man he was right. It really levelled up my business, my team got way better. They were already good, but just putting these things into place that force you to grow. That 30 days off was huge. Next year I'm planning a 60-day trip to another country that I’m really passionate about using that. I even got my operations manager. He doesn't work out of the office anymore. I moved out of my office a long time ago because when you're in the office, you are often the bottleneck for your company and everyone comes to you for the answers and the solutions. I really grabbed on to that concept and constantly looking for new ways to use constraints to my advantage. Jason: I love it. It's been awhile since I've told the client to do this, but a lot of clients will ask questions like, “How do I become a business owner instead of my own best employee?” I would tell them, “You just start doing it. You take a vacation.” If you schedule a week-long vacation, if you're not taking vacations, for those listening, you schedule week long vacation and you can't take off a week, you're going to have to figure out how to make everything not fall apart for that week. To go 30 days, that's incredible, 60 days is ridiculous, that's pretty awesome. At that point, you've arrived as owner of the company instead of being your own best employee. I noticed when I would take off time or vacation, I would be surprised by how my team would step up. I'd be surprised by the things leading up to that vacation, more would get done than would get done sometimes in months. There are so many little things that you need to get dialed in. “Oh my gosh, they’re going to be gone for a week. How are we going to live without Jason? We got to get this.” My team would say, “Hey Jason, I need this,” or, “I need to access to this,” or, “I need to know how to do this.” Suddenly everybody's rallying around this idea of taking some stuff off your plate because they need to be able to make sure things don't break and it creates the possibility for you to do that more or forever. Steve: Yeah, and I think its baby steps. I remember when I first read the four-hour work week. I thought Tim Ferriss was a god. I was like, that makes no sense. Jason: Did you almost move to Thailand? Steve: Close, but no, it was just really interesting. I guess from a personal level, having time was even more appealing than being a billionaire I guess to me personally. When I see people like Todd Breen and other people talk at NARPM that would talk about running your business from the beach or not is just very appealing to me. I wanted to grow a self-managing company and it was baby steps. There's this book called Making Money is Killing Your Business and they say it really why. It says the purpose of the business is not to make money, it's to build a business that makes money, like time and money equals wealth. Your business should throw off time and money. Now, if you want to then use that extra time to just pour more time in your business, doesn't mean you got to go live on a beach. You could do other adventures. For me, what's really worked and what I'm super blessed to have now is that it's created space in my life to actually start cultivating the other things that light me up, like music, other things. It gives you those options, but that's what I think in our industry especially in a lot of industries, we want to help people, help them anyway we can to experience that. Jason: They say, “What the world needs is people that are alive” I think as entrepreneurs that's where we feel. We want momentum. That's what we crave. The rest of the world, they're just trying to figure out how to be happy. “If I could just be happy then everything would be great.” It's whether they're happy or sad, depressed or excited, but for entrepreneurs, I feel like our two speeds are momentum or stuck, that's it. It’s momentum or overwhelm. We either feel like we're in complete overwhelm, we’re stuck, we can't move forward or we’re frustrated, or were on fire and alive. That's my version of happy or sad. I want to feel like I'm in momentum and I feel like as entrepreneurs, we get momentum when we give it away. When we create momentum for other people, whether it's our clients or the people in our family, the people around us, when we're creating momentum for other people, we get that sense of momentum, too. Steve: Yeah, and that's something I resonate with and I’ve heard you talk about it Jason. I love that message. I really think that the blue ocean is caring about people more than anyone else, like proactively putting the people in your life in the forefront, figuring out, “Who do I want to be a hero to?” and being a hero is usually used in a reactive way. Jason: Right, like there's a crisis or a problem, now you're going to be a hero. Steve: Right, as opposed to being a proactive hero like spending time and saying, “Okay, who are the most essential people or buckets or groups of people in my life and how can I serve them more deeply and impactfully today,” because the best quote of success I've ever heard is something like become a servant of many. If you wish to become great, learn to become the servant of many. I sometimes get a little jaded in certain groups because you constantly hear the feedbacks, the reduce the cost, the get it all out sourced. I use VAs, I look to reduce cost, I look to get fair fees, so I'm not knocking that, but everyone's playing in that sandbox. I'm very interested in seeing what is everyone else doing and how can I do the opposite because that's one of the ways to become successful that I've learned is that you go zig when they zag. That’s cliché. You can't do that when you're buried in tenant complaints and one-star reviews and a team you have to micromanage. I'm a big believer in hiring young, smart, motivated people and leaving them alone. We're a results-based company at Good Life. You can work from home, you could bring your dog, although actually our manager of our building said we can't anymore. I don't really care, with the exception of a couple like the front desk needs to be there in case someone walks in and things like that, but do your thing. There's a great podcast I heard yesterday on how I built this with Guy Raz where the owner of Patagonia wrote this book called “Let Them Go Surfing” and it's all about that. I think our biggest issues once we get to a certain size is people problems, and then we don't know why we can't keep good people, it’s because we don't paint it in a compelling vision. We micromanage. We don't let them do what they want to do. We try to fit corporate bureaucracies into the more entrepreneurial company that people want to be a part of these days. Would you rather follow just checklists and not have a future or would you rather be able to create your own future? Like I tell my team, “You can become anything with me. The sky's the limit wherever you want to go.” So, I think those are big parts of success. Jason: That's really what we're talking about today. The topic is freedom of time, money, and relationships through better business practices. What are some of the practices that you've implemented at Good Life that you feel like you've created more freedom of time and money? Steve: It starts with the business owner and probably a series of game changers. The first was moving out of my office. I had this epiphany and I was taught this by someone and I told the team, we had a meeting, I said, “I apologize. I've stood in the way of you guy’s future and I apologize for it. When I'm here, I'm the bottle neck. I'm stunting your growth. You can come to me for all the answers,” and the fact is as entrepreneurs if you serve 100 people and say, “Where do you do your best work?” nobody says at their office, who does the best work at their office? Why are we working out of our offices? It's just because that's how it's always been done. I kicked myself out. I don't have a desk at my office on purpose. I used to have the stereotypical nicest office in the corner with the best view, and then it freed up so much space, it helped my team grow. Once I created that space, now I work out of my home, and the first key to greater time, money, and purpose is to create space I believe, for yourself. I came from a place where three or four years ago, my dad always taught me outwork everyone else. I remember one time he came to visit me at a college and he asked me how much I was working, I said about 60 hours a week. He’s like, “60 hours? I work 60 hours, I'm retired. What the hell is wrong with you?” Jason: Step it up Steve. Steve: Yeah, and it's great. I love my dad. His work ethic was the reason I'm here today, because it got me to that. There are seasons of life. I knew there had to be a better way, so when I'd made that decision to move out of my office, I said, “Hey, you guys are going to have a bigger opportunity to move up now.” Some of the other things we did was hiring an operations manager. That was huge. That created space and that was something I look forward, and it took me probably eight or nine months to pull the trigger on that, but the operations manager was huge. Slowly but surely, I went from just being stressed out all the time, not having any space in my life. An over-scheduled entrepreneur has no time to transform. I said, “Alright, I'm going to create some space,” and then all the ideas and all the answers start bubbling to the surface because spiritually we all have all the answers inside of us, just we’re so distracted and so just going that we don't allow it. Jason: We’re preloaded, we're in fight or flight, we're up in our monkey brain, and all the great things, our greatest geniuses as an entrepreneur can't bubble up or can't come through when we're in that state. Steve: Exactly, and so that's time that just forced me to get more time because as an entrepreneur, you can make that decision. Jason: We’re buying time. Every person that we pay on our team, we’re buying time. That's what we're buying. I think the mistake we make as entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs I see, they go hire based on an org chart. They don't hire based on what they personally need in order to off load or get themselves out of the things that they don't really energetically enjoy. You getting an operations manager if you're a visionary entrepreneur is brilliant, because that's like the yin to the yang. It's the exact opposite personality type of the driven entrepreneur is to have somebody that is systems-minded, process-minded, and that can make sure everything's running. Generally, us entrepreneurs, we’re terrible managers. We think we're great at everything, but we're really terrible managers and usually the operations manager is much better at making sure everything runs smoothly. Steve: It's hard to take off or get more time initially if you don't have the money. The money component is important. I went on a Mastermind trip to Mexico a few years back with a handful of people and we looked at everyone's P&L and that was one of the biggest game changers for me was not only understanding my numbers. I think everyone needs a CFO at least part time or at least some outside eyes on the business is so important. Jason: I have a profit first coach and accountant. I'm not really a big fan of having a CFO in a business. Usually, my take on it is every story I've heard of embezzlement or of challenges it's always like the CFOs, and so they're also the crusher of all hopes and dreams. I don't want somebody making too big of decisions there personally, but I want to be coached, and I want to have input and I want to have insight from a third-party perspective, but I don't want them to have control over my stuff. Steve: Totally. I get that. I don't have a CFO, we use a profit coach. Jason: Yeah, similar thing. Steve: Right, but I found that I wasn't going to build a business I thought I was going to build because I'm a feel guy. Like I learn by doing. Does this feel right and I’ll make a decision, but I make decisions very quickly. I'm a high quick start, so I'll make 10 decisions, eight will be bad, two will be great but in the same time that someone else makes one decision. I sometimes can stay a step ahead, but I had to add some revenues and I wanted them to be value-added revenue sources where everyone was a win-win-win, so things like doing inspections better in charging for them. When you don't charge for something, you usually do them poorly. Every manager that doesn't charge for inspections, I guarantee 90% of you are behind on your inspections. Jason: Let's say that again. I like that concept. If you don't charge for it, you're probably doing it poorly. Steve: Right. I'm a believer in this. Just take inspections for example. You go survey people around NARPM or any property management group and everyone's behind on their inspections so they don't do them right. We send a letter to our clients. We said, “Hey, inspections are actually really important. This is when we identify how well the tenant is taking care of the place is when we get out in front of preventive maintenance and it needs to be done well, so we need to hire someone to do this full time and we want to invest in this X amount we charge. It’s going to probably save you three times at least that amount by getting out in front of some of this stuff,” so that was a win-win and our clients loved it. Maybe they didn't want to get charged initially, but once they saw the improved inspection, once they saw the improved communication and results, that was a big win. Then just some other ones that we added in. I think you got to keep the investor fees-friendly. The worst thing we can do as managers is fee our owners to death and they’d get out of the business. Ultimately, the freedom of time, money, relationships, and purpose is what we want, but it's a human need. It's what your clients want, too. So, we have a unique position as property managers, realtors, and investors ourselves in a lot of cases to help people build wealth through real estate. You're a manager and you make it easy, because if you don't make it easy, they burn out and they sell, but if they hold that house specially in San Diego for 30 years, that’s all you have to do and you've set your family up for life. They burn out, so we have a big position, a big part to play here. Jason: I love it, and I love that it’s like a mantra, having others build through real estate, and ultimately what property managers could be allowed towards doing. It’s not just managing a property. If your interests are in line with theirs, which that's their goal. Their goal is to build some wealth, otherwise, why would they be holding on to that property. Steve: Exactly. There's different ways to do that. Right now, we're looking at some other states to buy cash flow property and figure out how to have our owners follow us into some of these other markets. I think with technology these days, that's what all the venture people are doing, how to just pop up shops anywhere. That's something that's exciting to me right now because in San Diego it doesn't make sense to buy an $800,000 house that rents for $2800. We're sitting on some stuff when the market turns for San Diego, but yeah, there's different opportunities out there. Jason: Alright, cool. What should we talk about next? Steve: You know what I'm interested in? I actually thought of this today, and there's some things I've been thinking about doing that I procrastinate on. You know the saying… Jason: I think every business owner can say that. Steve: I know right? Jason: I call it the to-die list. We all have to do list of stuff. Just last week, I have my weekly commitments and I realized I was carrying all of these things over from week-to-week. I'm the guy that says to my clients, “If there's anything on your to do list for more than two weeks, you're not the person that should be doing it.” That's the problem. Yes, we all tend to do that as entrepreneurs. We tend to hold on to things instead of finding the right person to do them or giving it up somebody else. Steve: That’s so true. Jason: Talk about the to die list. Steve: Yeah, the to die list. I was thinking about this today. Two examples of things I have been procrastinating on. One, I don't want to answer email, anymore. I literally want to have email leave my life. I have gotten email down to just like 10 minutes a day at the end of the day, have an assistant, but literally that is still bugging me. I once got this really inspiring auto responder from this really smart cool guy, let’s see if I can find it. Jason: I don't deal with email anymore? Steve: He said, “Thank you for your message. Perhaps you are overwhelmed by email. In fact, last year I sent 43,742 emails, read and review countless more so in order to serve our stakeholders much more efficiently, I have asked my highly capable assistant that’s in New York to review, assign and reply all my email request moving forward,” and then it says some other stuff. That's something I want to do, but it's big and scary, and yeah, I know I'll probably have to respond to some emails, but I'm talking about eliminating it more. I'm like, “Why don’t I just try that? Why do I have to make this decision I procrastinate on forever? Why don't I just try that?” I think it comes back to we don't want to fail like that, we're always raised with, “There is no try, it's to do or die,” or whatever. You don't try, you either do it or you don't, but it's like, “Why can't I just try that? I have an assistant. Why don’t I run that for two or three weeks and see how it goes?” The other thing and I'm sure you've probably thought of this, Jason, is like Gary V, having maybe a semi full-time person doing vlogs, recording not just every few days, like every day. I'm just sitting on that and I'm like, “Well, why don't I just try it for like a freaking month?” I think there's so much possibility with that and I wanted to see what you thought because I'm like, “I don't have to commit to it.” There's so much stuff. Even hiring someone. I was thinking about hiring a GM or an operations manager for eight or nine months. What if I just said, “Hey, let's try it.” I mean this isn’t Canada or some other places where I don't think you can fire people. Try it, hire the person, and if it doesn't work out, let them go. Jason: Yeah. Let's go back to the email and then we can go the other thing. Here's how I identify stuff. I mentioned this on the previous episode, but I personally will do a time study probably about once a quarter and if I bring on a new team member that takes something off my plate, because how I identify what I need to get off my plate is by doing a time study. I have to be accountable. Where's my time actually going and which things are low dollar an hour work, which things are things that I don't enjoy. I actually write a plus or minus sign next to each thing that I'm doing, whether it energizes me or it drains me, and then identify the things that are tactical or strategic, things that are self-care versus family time. I have a whole system, I take clients through for doing time studies. When I do this, that helps me get clarity for what I need to get rid of. I gave up email a long time ago because I hated email. It was always a minus sign, it was always tactical, it was never like my hopes and dreams were coming true when I was writing an email. I don't even look at my email. So, if you've emailed me, I'm sorry, I don't look at it. My assistant will take care of the email. She reads it. If she has any questions, she sends me a message through a walkie talkie app, because I don't want to type to her. She'll send me a voice message through Voxer. We use Voxer and I use it with coaching clients, she will send me a Voxer voice message and say “Jason, what do you think, how should we respond to this email. They're asking this.” I say, “Just tell them this, this and this, but say it nicer than I just said.” Then she’ll take care of it, and she's asking me questions throughout the day. We also do daily huddles as a team and that's usually where she gets most of her questions in. I say, “Is anybody stuck on anything?” She's like, “Yeah, did you get my message about this?” “No, I wasn't paying attention.” “Okay, what do you need?” I answer it and she can respond to the email for me. She's gotten really good at understanding over time, she gets better and better at knowing my voice, knowing what I would say and she takes care of more and more and more. Every day she'll give me a short list, “Here are the emails I don't know what to do with. You need to take care of these,” and I begrudgingly will deal with them within a day or two. That's how it works. [...] then I’ll talk with them and move them forward, but outside of that, usually she hands it off to my team or has somebody else in the team deal with it. If it's support-related, I think most of my clients have learned that they're not getting a fast response by coming to me directly. They get their best response by emailing our support email address or system and so I think every property manager needs to do the same. Initially, when you're small you're the guy. They probably have your cell phone number. Tenants owners, everybody, and eventually you change your phone number and you create some barriers and protections, you have to educate and teach people how you want them to treat you, and you’re going to teach your customers what are the right channels and you have to teach your team what are the right channels. My days are pretty quiet. Steve: I love that. That's super inspiring. You fired me up even more and I love how you said it's tactical. It's very transactional-tactical. I want to be playing in the sandbox of transformational. I feel like I'm retired now because I do what I want and I'm blessed to say that. There's been a lot of hard work behind that, but I'm to the point to where I'm not going to do stuff that doesn't light me up and there's a small subset of tasks like creating content—podcast is one of them—that I could do all day and I have endless energy for. That's where I add the most value. So, the bigger the impact on people that I can have is going to be when I'm fired up and passionate and not dragging off of email, but I think we don't give ourselves permission to do that. You saying that, I'm all in now. I was 80% in, Jason, now I'm all in. I hope some listeners are all in to move forward. That's what I love about podcasts and other things with so much being shared these days. A lot of times we think things, or we know things internally, or we feel things a certain way, but we don't give ourselves permission to actually say that or feel that in public because sometimes we just need someone else to say it to give us the courage. I've noticed that happening so much lately that I finally got pissed, and I'm like, “You know what? I'm making a list of everything that I believe in whole-heartedly, that I think is a little off mainstream maybe.” That way I can have it in writing and I'm just going to start saying these things because I'm tired of being, “Oh yeah, and I felt that way, too,” but I never said anything. Jason: I mention this on the previous episode, too, that I've been really opinionated in the past and I've realized that I think I'm a little more humble now that I realized my way isn't always the exact right way for everyone, so I'm learning. I was just in Columbus for a week and one of the things that really hit me hard is that I've been really opinionated and I think it's important to put out things more as observations rather than gospel truth. Somebody may love email or somebody may hate doing podcast stuff. Everybody is different and I think everybody's perception is different, everybody's experiences as to what works or doesn't work in marketing could be different, their market might be different. There are so many variables involved, so I think moving forward, my content is a lot more observational because I've realized I was attracting clients or creating monsters in the industry that are hyper-opinionated and the hyper-opinionated people become like, “Oh my God, [...],” but the problem is they create a lot of negativity in the industry. They become the rampant [...] guys that are heartless, that want to crush all the hopes and dreams of every tenant on the planet. We need to be careful in any business or any industry in being too opinionated because what ends up happening is we end up attracting most opinionated people. Those are the people that turn on you. Those are the owners you don't want eventually. Those are the people that give you the negative reviews when one little thing goes wrong. I want open minded people, and these are the clients that I’ve loved the most, but I was attracting less of them per capita because of the message that was so in your face. “This is the [...], do this,” and I was just so strong willed that way and I realize now that that creates its own monster. I think it's important to share though, honestly, these little things that we have, that are weird about is or that are woo-woo that we feel like the rest of the world will judge. To say. “This is me, this is how I am, this is my experience,” and yeah I think you when we let our freak flag fly, so to speak, there are people that run with it. As long as we're not, “Hey, this is the gospel truth. This is the only way to do it,” we're not going to turn off so much so many of the people that don't resonate. They might go, “You know, Jason, that’s cool that you're into that weird stuff, but I'm more of a practical guy and I don’t resonate with that, but I like a lot of the stuff you say.” If I say, “This is the only way to do it,” I'm forcing them to make a choice to go all in and do everything my way or the highway. Steve: Your coach helped you nail that idea. I had that opposite issue. I think the issue for me was that I didn't want to ever come off as opinionated. I'm scared almost having an opinion because I'm like, “Do your thing, man,” so I’m always quick to anything I believe in. I'm quick to say, “Do what works for you. This is just my journey. Do what works for you.” I think like attracts like and that's a really cool observation that you started attracting all these opinionated people. The coaching thing, I love that you have coaches and you’re a coach yourself because the power of coaching has changed my life. Strategic coach, I work with Jason Goldberg. Every time I have a call with him, I transform. It's really crazy. If there's one thing I'm super high on right now, it's co-creation. Co-creation is the super power that nobody's talking about and I've experienced it in many ways. First through music. Although I normally do music on my own and I'll just write songs. When I get in the room with the right people, they don't even have to be a great musician, it's just that the energy. If we’re vibrating on the same frequency, things just come out so great. I played with this rapper the other day. Two of our new songs are two of my favorite songs I've recorded in the past year. Back when I had a casual mastermind that we used to do, helping each other co-create, kick this process back to you, now you kick it back to me and blah, blah, blah, everything just accelerated. So, I think outside eyes on the business, coaches, casual masterminds, paid masterminds, whatever it is, I think the more we're interacting with others and having a sounding board, the faster we're going to get to where we're going and the more transformative the experience will be. Jason: I agree. To touch on that, every single person you'll notice, everybody listening will know this is true. You can talk about it in terms of inner energy or spirituality or whatever, but every single person that you’re around brings out a different side of you. There are people that when I'm around them, I feel I'm freaking hilarious, I’m the funniest guy on the planet. They’re laughing at everything I say. It's awesome. Then there's people that I'm around that I feel I'm super mental, analytical, and logical. That's how they perceive me and that's what they bring out in me. And there are people that feel I'm this emotional sensitive person. My kids would probably say, “No, he’s Mr. Analytical.” There are different people that bring out a different side to us. This is also why I have a strong introverted side. I need space away from people to reconnect with who I am and to make I'm me. I feel when we're around other people, part of it is how they perceive and see us, brings that out in us, it allows us to be [...] energy and yes absolutely there's this connection and a certain combination of different people, or different energies, or different whatever that will create a different music. You've got the Beatles, for example. These four guys came together and they created all kinds of interesting sounds and music that had a really strong impact and all them wrote songs [...], but on their own, none of them really created as strong of a situation without the others. Just the energy between Paul McCartney and John Lennon was pretty magical. Steve: Totally, and country artists or country songwriters write typically with at least two but usually three or four people in the same room. I think there's parallels because I can speak from experience. I was constantly, with the exception of going to maybe two conferences a year, I was at the desk in my office, head down, genius with 1000 helpers, although I wasn't a genius that is just a saying I’ve heard by any stretch of the imagination. Jason: The emperor with no clothes. Steve: Right, the fool with too much control, and that’s the thing now. I'm in charge, but I'm not in control and that’s self-freeing. It's the people, my people that are awesome are in control and the cool thing now to get to the impact or the purpose part that is super firing me up these days is that I've gotten to a point now to where my job with Good Life is to take care of my team. It's to figure out how can I make their lives better. How can I figure out, what are their dangers, their opportunities, their strengths? Where do they want to be in three years? How can I cultivate that? How can I make it so all of them would run through a wall for me and take a bullet for me because if they would do that, they will treat my money like their money, my company like their company. The reason I started really researching how, I was like how does the military sail hundreds of 18-year-olds across the sea and set up forward military bases. It's just mind boggling, and I read Extreme Ownership. It’s a great book, some other books, but you talk about decentralized command. The top gives them the mission and then that leader gives them the mission and then the lieutenant, I’m butchering correct words. Jason: The hierarchy? Steve: Yeah, the hierarchy, but they are allowed to come up with the game plan and the battle plan. One of my jobs at Good Life is to make it okay to fail. To be okay to test things and screw things up and get beat up over it. Jason: Because if they're afraid to fail, guess what happens? They start hiding crap from you. Then there's all the secret stuff going on then there’s interoffice politics, there’s backbiting. People have to be allowed to fail and not feel they're going to have their head chopped off. Otherwise, you have a business that’s unsafe for you. I love the idea of you giving up control, I've given up control over my email. I don't even know what's getting sent out half the time, but I've created trust and I trust her. She's very cautious in how she does it. I've given up my schedule. I was in Vegas last week, the week before that I think it was in Columbus, a week before that I was I think in Phoenix. I don't choose anymore. My assistant, she's like, “Here’s a speaking opportunity. You're going to go speak here.” She sets up these podcast episodes, everything I've given up autonomy on my time, but I still blackout Mondays and Fridays so I can do some of the things I want and then I have my weekends, but you give up control. The higher you move up in your business, the less control you have and the more you give to the people around you. I just do what they tell me to do. I show up. My job is to support them. I love what you were saying that you've transitioned because I think as we start out as entrepreneurs and we get our first few team members. We’re always asking the question and frustrated why can't my team just do what I say. Then eventually we transition and we transform and evolve and realizing they are some of our best assets, they're supporting us, they're better at us in things that they do, they love their areas of expertise and now it's, how can I support them? How can I help them get ahead? How can I make it easier? How can I help them avoid burnout? You also threw out the words transformational and transactional, and I think those are two very different leadership styles that I think are important to point out. I think what you’ve just been describing is you're trying to create a team that is transformational. Transformational leadership is where you give them an outcome and say, “That's where I want to go,” and they say, “Great,. We'll figure it out, we'll help you get there.” Transactional leadership is, “We're going to go here and here's exactly how we’re going to do it and we’ll do it my way,” and then there's no buy-in, there’s no ownership, they don't get to fail because if they do what you tell them to do and it doesn't work, whose fault is it? It’s mine, but that means they can't win too. If they can't fail, they can never win, and you're never going to keep A players on your team that never get to win. This is why people get so frustrated by millennials, because they're dinosaur business owners, they're running their business like assholes, they're tyrants, they're trying to micromanage their team, tell everybody to do it, and it’s transactional. They're saying, “I'm giving you money, just do what I tell you to do. I paid you, do it.” Millennials don't stand for that. They value themselves more. They want something beyond just being told what to do and getting a paycheck. Believe me, I have team members on my team that would just be there to show up and [...] and get their check. They don't believe in you, they don’t believe in the company, they're hypers, and they go home and complain about you, and the job, and they live for the weekends. But if team members enjoy the work and they feel they have freedom and they have autonomy, you have their discretionary time. They're thinking about you after work. “How can we make this better?” They’re thinking about you on the weekends. They do extra stuff because they're in love with what they're doing. Steve: Totally. Now, you said that really well and I think what comes up for me as the EMyth, which was a very transformational book to use that word for me. Checklist, at certain points at Good Life, we are a results based company, but a lot of times I get pulled to these meetings it’s like this person is not… they checked the box and they didn't do it or they didn't check the box and they should have, you know I mean? What's the results? Is the days on market good? Where is his KPIs? Although they’re good, we have this back and forth. So, here's something that I want to stick my flag in the sand as something that's not conventional and goes away from my instinct which is let them figure it out. I don't care about the checklist. We're not all going to be McDonald's. Honestly, I'm not trying to scale my business across the whole country, if I was, I probably would have to make sure everybody checks that box, but I'm really interested in the small giants approach, where it's going deep with the smaller amount of people, still having a big business that makes a big impact. I say, “Hey, look at the results. Make it a results-based company because they can own it. They have more ownership in that regard.” Something else that comes to mind was, I remember I used to walk into the office when I used to go to the office every day and people would be on YouTube and I would freaking be so mad. They're watching some videos, I would stew about, I wouldn’t say anything right away. I would go in my office and fume. Then I remember I talked to a friend about it, someone I respect, a mentor. He's like, “Man, you got to let that go. If they get the results, who cares how many cat videos they're watching. You want a fun environment. If you go lay the hammer down on that, you're going to not have the team that you need to have to make your dreams come true.” Someone I respected telling me that was me letting go of a helium balloon. All this weight was just lifted and I was free. I didn't have to micromanage. Jason: I think it's interesting because sometimes usually the person or the team that gets really caught up on the checklist and everything being done a certain way, that's usually the operations person. They love that stuff, and it needs to be done this way, but I think that's our job as the visionaries to remind them it's the outcome that matters. It's the end result that matters. The end result is making sure we have a profitable business. The end result is to make sure that we're honoring our customers and we're treating people well. These sort of things, if we want to get to the outcome. How we get to that outcome, there's probably a million ways we can do it, and whether a certain box wasn't checked or certain thing didn't end up happening. Well, maybe that process is too cumbersome. Maybe it needs to be supplied, as long as getting a result. There’s always this balance. You can have a 30-point checklist that somebody has to complete, but if you can get it down to 10 steps and they can actually do it every time and it doesn't feel it’s in the way, then you're better off than the people that are operating without looking at a process document because most people don’t. They'll do it once and then just skip it. You need something that they can live with on an ongoing basis. I think that's really important to point out what you said is that it's the results, that results don't lie, it's the outcome that really matters. So, I think if you take a step back and say, “Well, what outcome are we going to achieve? Somebody's talking about checklist not being done well. What was the outcome we were trying to achieve? What's the outcome? Okay, did we achieve it? Who was responsible for it and how do we know whether it got done or not? Okay great, well then we're good, maybe we should change the process.” Steve: Exactly. Those are some things, but the exciting part is having freedom of time, money, relationships, the people you work with, the people you get to do business with, I know you talk a lot about firing the bad clients. That was an amazing experience, our profit went way up when we fired the wrong types of clients and getting really centered on our core values because then it's easy to hire and fire people and hire clients based on your core values. Ours are really simple. It’s RPG: be reliable, be positive, and be a go giver. It's based off that book, The Go Giver, and it's just simple. We used to have seven or eight, but then I couldn't even remember what they were and they felt weird, so we made it really simple. Now, my business development manager just goes down the list, like, “Are they reliable? Were they at the appointment on time? Did they send you the thing they said they were going to send you?” It just makes this compass of how to do business with the type of people that are going to make you successful. Jason: That's one of the things that coach clients through is to get clear on their three, maybe four core values because you can have a list to 10, you can have 20, but really your team aren’t going to remember all of those and you can usually boil it down to three core things. For us, ours are a little bit different. One of my core values is just transparency. That's originally why I call my company Open Potion and in just creating transparency I think in the industry has created some various significant shifts. I think also for [...] just how I operate. That's a value that is central to me and I want my team to espouse and really our companies are just extensions of us. It's my Iron Man suit that I get the strap on every day, that's my team and everything around me. It increases my capacity. It makes me feel a super human. I'm getting more done. I've got India handling my email and Adam handing fulfillment. I feel like I’m a superhuman. Steve: He’s awesome, by the way. Jason: Thank you. I think of other things I'm really big on is just eliminating constraints and looking for the big constraints that are preventing momentum, so that I can create momentum. It’s all about creating momentum for my clients and for myself. I think it's going to be different for everybody. With all the different things that we are inspired or that resonates with us and I think every business owner needs to get clear on really what their values are because you can't have it. There are only two types of team members. There are hiders we talked about that are hiding and they are living for the weekend and they show up for paycheck or there's believers. The only way you can have believers is if you have something for them to believe in. If you want believers on your team and you want clients that believe in you, you have to have values that you make transparent or clear to the marketplace or to your team so that they can they can buy in to them. It's amazing to see companies get to a large size without even having that in place. Once you get it in place, I imagine the shift is traumatic for the culture. Steve: And if there's one last thing I would leave the listeners with that’s going to be probably the most impactful thing for me in the last 24 months was, I had this epiphany that everything worthwhile lives on the other side of fear. I knew that instinctually and I've been told that before. You know how you can read a book, that's why they say re-read the books that you love because you read it four times and then you'll start to actually really get it. I knew that, but I didn't really get it and it hit me, it became crystal clear. I was like, “Okay, if I want my dreams to happen and be fulfilled and live a life that I want, I have to figure out what scares me and do that.” I have a two-part test. Does it scare me, part one. Part two, does my heart tell me to do it? If the answer to both of those is yes, you do it. I even made a wristband that says, “What scares you, do that.” I don't have it on me right now, I took it off. Just to remind me and it goes back to the try thing. All my biggest leaps came after I did something I wasn't prepared for and I was scared to do, like going to that mastermind. I couldn’t afford it, it was really expensive. Hiring my operations manager, hiring a marketing manager. I gave a talk recently at PM Grow that I thought I was going to be broke after I hired my marketing person because I didn't think I have the margin and we ended up having our best year ever. It comes back to the try thing. Figure out what scares you, do that, try it, whatever it is. I think that's where we make our biggest leaps and that's what sets people apart from living a life that they intended to having regrets, which is the number one regrets of the dying is that they didn't live a life true to themselves, instead they lived a life other people expected them to live. That's the thing that scares me more than anything in the world and so I’m passionate about sharing that message. Jason: Steve, it’s been awesome having you on the show. I'll second that. It really is that voice deep down that is that voice of truth, and also you can ask yourself deep down, “Do I really want to be doing this?” Deep down, “Should I be doing this thing?” Deep down, “Does this really resonates with me,” and if the answer isn't a, “Hell yes,” then there's a lack of congruency and I think that's where you're saying your heart is yes. I think [...] of something that isn't working is the death of something inside you. It means change, something has to die. You want to know what's really interesting? I've noticed a lot of this on [...]. The scariest thing to kill or to allow to die is the fantasy of something great. I’ll explain this, I've noticed this a lot lately with business owners. They have this fantasy of having a really healthy business, or having a business that is growing, or a business that they contribute, or they get to do great things, and that fantasy is so exciting to them and juicy to them that they don't want to take action on it, because to take action on it means they have to kill it. They have the brutally pull out the knife and slaughter their fantasy the second they start taking action towards it, because now reality sets in. Reality is never going to be at that level that the fantasy was, but it's better because it's real. I usually use the example of my friend in high school that wanted to be a rock star, which sounds like you. You had to eventually give up the fantasy of being a rock star or you have to choose into it fully. He had this fantasy of being a rock star and he would buy expensive guitars and amplifiers, and he wouldn't take guitar lessons. He won’t love the fantasy of having this fantasy of being a rock star and as long as he can buy cool guitars and keep imagining this future that would never happen, he was happy, but he didn't want to go sleep in his car and do gigs, tour round, work his butt off, and practice nine hours a day. He didn’t want to do any of that. That's reality. Reality means some work. Initially, if you're listening to this and you’re like, “This is great. Jason and Steve have these companies and making all this money, they've got their assistants. It must be so nice for them.” They're probably listening and going, “I don't get it. I'm not there.” You may have to be the person listening that you right now, it's time for you to double down. It's time for you to hustle. It's time for you to do stuff that scares you. It's time for you to get off of the fantasy of whatever you're hoping of doing or hoping of starting to really get out there and do the work, the hard work to make it happen and you listen to that voice, you get to that place. You get to that place eventually where you're now are able to focus on your team. You're able to be a coach and a mentor to people around you instead of the person trying to figure out how to get everybody to do everything. I think that transition really involves taking those scary leaps. I think every coach that I've hired was a leap. None of them were cheap. Every coach I've hired, every program or training I bought into, some of them I couldn't even afford at the time. They were risks, but I knew deep down it was a yes. I just knew it was a yes and it terrified me. I think for those that are really analytical and logical, they're like, “I don't get it Jason,” but for anybody else listening. If you have that voice deep down inside that is saying, “Hey, this is what's next for you. You've known it. You've been avoiding it and you're trying to figure out how to make it all feel safe, take the leap, and jump and do it. Worst case scenario, you're going to learn some powerful lessons.” I had lessons where I spent a lot of money and it didn't work out. A lot of money. I've probably lots of money making some bad choices, but I wouldn't trade those lessons and I've learned from them. Steve: Yeah, and money is just one side of it. Making a decision to be a different person, or to take more time off, or to go into a completely different field, that's probably the easiest one to do is scratch a check for something. Sometimes our way of being is probably what gets in the way of most of our issues because you can't solve the problem with the same mind that created it. Creating some space and getting clear always helps, getting clear on what you're trying to do and the life you're trying to live. At the end of the day, we’re the writer, director, producer of our own store and I love how you said, you kill off the fantasy because that's true. It's scary. I think that's why a lot of people don't delegate it or it takes so long to delegate because it's scary. If you give that up, what are you going to do? Then you actually might have to sit with yourself and figure out what's next and nobody wants to be alone with themselves. That's a scary place. It's through the work, it's through conquering those demons slowly over time that I've seen good results, so it's a process. Take it easy on yourself and do what's doable. I beat myself up a lot over the years and it's I think we're all pretty ambitious. Don't kill yourself. Life's too short. Just have fun with. Do what’s doable. Jason: Well, Steve, it’s been awesome having on the show. I'm sure we could jam over and over and over again about all kinds of cool things. I appreciate you being here. Fun having you and I think there's a lot of really good takeaways for people that are going to listen to this or relisten to this and thanks again for coming on. Steve: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: You're welcome. How can people get in touch with you or some of the stuff that you're doing? Steve: If you have any questions you can always email me [email protected]. Then check out the podcast, Good Life Property Management Podcast, we love that, and then Tribe Mastermind Podcast with me and Jordan Muela. Those are two podcasts that are we have a lot of fun with, that are around business, mindset, and all that good stuff. Jason: Cool. All right. Great. Thanks Steve. I appreciate you. Steve: Thanks so much for having me, Jason. Jason: All right. That was fun. If you are property management entrepreneur and you don't have a coach, I recommend that you find somebody. Find somebody, find the best that you feel you can afford at where you're at right now. Get some input from somebody else. Find a mentor, find another property manager in your state. If you need to, find somebody that you feel you can lean on as a resource. Nobody has to be alone in business and I think one of the biggest pitfalls that I had early on I think most entrepreneurs have is that we feel alone. We feel we're weird, we’re different. We are, we're different than a lot of the world, but there's plenty of people us out there and so make sure you have somebody that you can look up to, that you can lean on, that can give value to you and it's never just one person. Keep going. Keep doing this. Keep feeding into yourself. That's always an investment that's going to pay off. If we can help in any way with that, I would be honored. You can reach out to us at doorgrow.com and we would be glad to support you in the beginning of that journey towards your growth. As always, to our mutual growth. Until next time. Bye everybody.  

Property management is hard enough. As your business becomes successful, don’t always say “yes” or “no” to everything. Owners are coming to you to solve a problem. Step into potential opportunities without being pulled in multiple directions. Today, I am talking to Marc Cunningham, President of Grace Property Management, who identifies five characteristics that define successful property management companies.  You’ll Learn... [02:42] Entrepreneurial Footsteps: Marc grew up in real estate property management world working for his dad, who founded Grace Property Management in 1978.  [04:02] Doors in Denver: Grow slow and steady; from 110 to 1,000 doors.  [04:32] Mantra: Follow the opportunity. [07:15] However you define success, companies follow some of these five standards.  [07:56] #1. Filter and Qualify Owners: Don’t take every owner that comes along.  [20:04] #2. Know your numbers to know how well your business is doing.  [31:43] #3. Focus on profit, not door count. People are willing to pay for additional value. [37:20] #4. Have systems and processes in place, and follow them.  [43:50] #5. Recruit, develop, and retain talent.  [52:28] Marc’s Extra: #6. Hold weekly one-on-one meetings with each team member.  [53:15] DoorGrow Extra: #7. Invest consistently in your own development.  [56:27] DoorGrow Extra: #8. Get coaching to help grow your business.  Tweetables The more successful you get, the more opportunities come your way. Cycle of Suck: Taking on bad owners, you get bad properties, tenants, and reputation. You won’t regret firing difficult clients, despite emotional and operational costs. Track metrics regularly because numbers make a difference. Resources Grace Property Management Marc Cunningham's Email Business Health Check-up Form QuickBooks Steve Jobs FilterEasy PetScreening Process Street Basecamp Voxer Google Sheets AppFolio Help Scout Drift Intercom Traction LeadSimple DGS 25: Why Every Property Manager Should Implement Profit First DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DoorGrown Cold Leads Calculator DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. This guest that we have today is a fantastic gentleman named Marc Cunningham. Marc, you're not a stranger to most people probably listening to the show. Welcome to the show. Marc: Thank you for having me, Jason. Jason: I'm really excited to have you here. It's strange that you haven’t been on here yet. At the beginning of the show, I was like, “Have you been on here? You're like, “No.” I said, “It's long overdue.” Marc: I’ve just been waiting for the invitation. Jason: Okay, well I'm glad we finally got you invited. I’m glad you're here and today's topic is going to be the five characteristics of successful PM companies. Before we get into that, I want you to share a little bit of your background to qualify yourself to the audience, help them understand how you got into property management and what your connection is to these five characteristics of a successful company. Marc: Absolutely. Let me start by asking you a question. What were you doing in 1978 Jason? Jason: 1978? Marc: Yeah. Jason: I was probably pooping in a diaper and drinking breast milk. Marc: Okay. That image there. Jason: I was born in 1977. Marc: Okay, so you’re one. I wasn't much older than that, but in 1978 my dad decided that he was going to quit teaching—he was a middle school teacher—and he was going to follow his entrepreneurial real estate dream. We opened up a real estate property management company Grace Property Management 1978 in Denver. I was employee number one because I was pre child labor, so my dad would have me doing all the things that kids probably shouldn’t do. He would have me showing properties, mowing lawns, collecting rents, and filling out lease, just anything that needed to be done. I grew up in that world, so it really gave me a unique view into real estate, into property management, and just in the business because that's all I knew. That’s all we did. As I got older, I’d take my summers, I’d worked for him in the summers, and again just doing whatever needed done. If I get really lucky, if it gets too hot out, I’d work in the office. When it got over 110 degrees, the deal is I get to come into the office, otherwise I’m mowing lawns. I did that for many, many years. I went to Colorado State University, I studied finance and real estate there, and I was working in Cheyenne, Wyoming doing accounting work there. My dad called me one day and he said, “Hey, I need to hire a property manager, are you interested?” Well Cheyenne Wyoming, with all due respect, isn't the most fun place to live, so I jumped to that opportunity and that was about 20 years ago, 20 some odd years ago. I joined the firm permanently at that point in time. At that time, we were relatively small, I think we had 110–120 doors and we have grown slowly and steadily over the years. Today, we do both residential and commercial. We've got just under a thousand doors that we manage. We do real estate sales, we do property management, we’re investors ourselves—I own some stuff—we flip. Our mantra is follow the opportunity. If there's an opportunity to real estate, we want to look at that, whatever that is. So, that's how we've gotten to where we are today. Jason: I was just down in Vegas speaking to a group of property managers and they were bringing up like, “How do I avoid all this distraction and move the business forward?” What I said to them is opportunity is I've noticed is what kills entrepreneurs. How do you keep following the opportunity at all times but also keeping your focus narrow enough that you're actually moving forward. Marc: That's a great question. That's a really good question and that's hard. It is really hard because we found that the bigger we get, the more successful we get, the more opportunities that are out there. At this point, we're of the belief that you've got to say no to almost everything. I think it was Steve Jobs that said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people are the really successful people say no to just about everything.” Jason: Following the opportunity as a mantra doesn't mean saying yes to every opportunity. Marc: It does not mean saying yes to everything. You need to consider everything. What I don’t like is people say, “No, we don't do that.” For many, many years, for example, we didn't do real estate sales. “Hey, will you help me sell my house?” “No, we don’t do that. We only do property management.” We didn't consider. Well then, one day we thought, “Maybe we should consider it,” and as we considered it, we realized, this is a really good opportunity that we should capitalize on. Where when an owner says, “Gosh, I want to sell my house. Would you guys be interested in buying it?” “No, we don't do that.” Well, stop saying, “No, we don't do that.” At least think about it, consider it, and I think that's the way to step into some potential opportunities. But yes, you have to be cautious or else it will get you pulled to many directions. Jason: Relevant to that, how many of these units are now in your own portfolio, are yours or your company's? Marc: I don't have a real big portfolio. I'm a pretty conservative guy, so I'm a buy-it-pay-it-off kind of guy. I've got 10–12 rental properties in my portfolio. Jason: Let's get into these five characteristics that you feel define a successful company, and you're obviously a successful company. You've helped keep it successful, right? Second generation, so let's get in number one. Marc: Yeah. I don't pretend to be a guru. I can't stand the guys that stand there, beat their chest, and say, “Do it like me, I know what I’m doing.” This is just from our perspective. We worked with a lot of companies and I didn't get this, but I do a lot of PM coaching in business stuff on the side with PM companies helping them get better, basically. We know a lot of PM companies, we've worked a lot of PM companies and there seem to be some standards, some things companies that are successful, however you define success, are going to follow some of these aspects. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list by any means, but it's the way that we gauge ourselves. Jason: This will be cool because I probably come from a very different perspective. You're in the industry, you do this in Denver and I don't have any rental properties. I don't manage. I'm not a property manager. I have largely been this nerdy fly on the wall that's been able to see inside of hundreds of companies. My perspective might be a little bit different, but I'm sure there's some alignment. Let's get into number one. Marc: Number one is successful companies don't take every owner. They don't take every owner that comes along. So you agree with that one? Jason: Totally. If anyone's heard my show, they've heard me talk about the cycle of suck, which is it starts with filtering owners. Like if take in bad owners, you have bad properties. It doesn't matter how amazing they are. If you have bad properties, you have bad tenants. It doesn't matter how much tenant screening you do. If you have bad tenants, you have a bad reputation because you have bad owners and bad tenants. Nobody's happy and this is where I think the entire industry as a whole in aggregate sits right now. It has a bad reputation because they're taking on any owner. Marc: Yeah, I would agree. The concept is this. Any PM company knows that if a tenant, a prospective tenant walks in the door, an applicant comes in and says, “Hey, I want to rent your property,” every property manager is a little bit skeptical. They raise their eyebrow. They say, “Okay, well maybe. I’m going to qualify you.” We know industry-wide that whatever the number is, call it 25%-30%, depending on the market you're in, the 25%-30% of the applicants are not going to make good tenants. Everybody would agree upon that. Well, we really believe that probably that same percentage 25%, 30%, 35% of prospective owner-clients are not going to make good owner-clients. The challenge comes, how do we filter them? Because if it's an applicant to rent a property, we have them fill out a rental application. We go in deep. That's the hardest part of the business is qualifying those folks. So, how do you qualify an owner? That’s where the challenge lies. If you called our office today as a prospective owner-client and you are talking to our new account specialist or one of our PM's, they would have a dock in front of them, a piece of paper, and a lot of this is just basic questionnaires—what's your email address, what’s the property address, tell me about the property—but at the end of that questionnaire, they have four questions. Yes or no questions that they have to check the box on yes or no. They have to discern this information during the conversation with you because it helps us qualify these owners. For example, the first one says, “Is the owner financially stable?” If during this conversation you as my prospective owner say to me, “Hey Marc, if you can’t get this property rented next week, I can’t make my mortgage payment. I've got to get this thing ready quickly.” Well, you're not financially stable, right? That's going to be a no on that box, that's the first question. Jason: “So, are you current on all your house payments?” One of my clients said that was a favorite question they would ask. If they say no, it's instant disqualification. Marc: Absolutely. Then the second question we have to ask ourselves is, is the client emotionally stable? That can be a hard one to discern. I always tell people, “Don't ask them the question verbatim, okay?” It will get you in trouble. Jason: “Are you sane?” Yeah. Marc: Exactly, but we need to be able to discern that information from the conversation. Is this somebody who's going to be stable when things go bad because at some point in time it will. Jason: Right. Sometimes, people will reveal their emotional instability pretty quickly, right? Marc: Yes. I tell my PMs, “Look. Two quick keys. If they cry on the first conversation or if they own more than two cats, they are not emotionally stable. Run away from them.” Jason: Might be a little biased against cat owners. What’s cat owners like? Marc: I know. You just lost half of your audience because of my personal bias. Jason: No, they’re cool. Marc: I am as well. Then the third question we ask is, “Can I control the situation and the client? Are they willing to give me control?” Not in a puppet master, I'm going to be the mean guy, but they have to give me control. They have to be willing to do so. Then question number four is, are they realistic in expectations? Do they think that we should be able to get $2000 a month for property that's only going for $1000? Or do they think that we should call them before we ever spend a dime on maintenance? That's just not realistic. That’s not going to happen. If we can't check the yes box on all four of those, then my PM does not have permission to work with that client. Jason: I love the idea of figuring out if they're willing to relinquish control. That's such a big thing because they're coming to you to solve a problem. I've noticed with clients that they're not willing to be strong enough of a fence for people to push against to elicit trust enough for people to relinquish that control. I think a lot of people will push. They might look like bad owners, they're trying to test the fence, and it's like in dating how girls will crap test the guy. They just want to see if they can handle them or if they're willing to be strong enough. I think a lot of times property managers will try to be nice and maybe don't have enough bite or drive and they’re really looking for somebody they can feel safe with, so they test us. I think clients will test us and then they're willing to relinquish control at times. It’s just something I've noticed during the sales process because I deal with entrepreneurs. They’re driven people and I need the same thing. They need to be willing to relinquish a certain amount of control because I'm asking to do crazy stuff, like fire doors or change your business name. I love that idea, and then are they realistic in their expectations. If somebody says, “Hey, I want to add 500 doors in the next quarter,'' then that's probably not going to be realistic. I want to make sure they're in touch with a reality that I feel I can give them or lead them towards and it's the same with our property management clients. Marc: Yup, and if we set those filters on the front-end, that's just going to make things so much easier on bringing good clients on because our business is hard enough without having difficult owner-clients. I think there’s the second aspect of that is, “Well, gosh. That's great. I wish I would have heard that before I took on Mr. Crazy,” so, what do you do then? I think the other part of that—you alluded to this—is sometimes you do need to let those clients go, and sometimes that's the best thing, because we're talking about what successful companies do. Successful companies realize that, “Hey, if we made a mistake, we brought on a bad client, we need to let that client go, whatever that looks like.” Jason: There's always going to be those mistakes. We cannot always know and perceive every person coming in and know that they are emotionally stable, or that you can control them, or that they will be realistic, but when they start to reveal those colors, we have to be willing to let them go. I've made bad decisions in bringing people in as clients and I have had to let them go. Some of them were just really like verbally abusive to my team. You’d be really amazed at some of the types of people that that can somehow leak through even if you have pretty good qualifications at the beginning. I love what you're getting at here because really anybody that studies sales in any capacity knows that qualifying a prospect is at the outset. It's really mind boggling that people would not qualify their prospects in any regard. Marc: I’m curious. You said you had to let clients go. How have you overcome the internal thought of, “Ooh, but that's money. That's a big chunk.” When do you decide? How do you decide? Is that an internal struggle for you? Jason: Sometimes. There's always a negotiation and it's a balance. It's a balance between the money aspect and the cost with the team. Ultimately, my team I want to keep forever. I want to keep them long-term. If I keep that client on, I’m saying to my team, your feelings don't matter. I don't care about you. That sends a really painful message and I've noticed this in property management companies. People wonder why there's so much turnover with their staff and I think one key reason is because you're allowing your staff, you're forcing your staff to tolerate too much. There are some of these owners that should be let go, and I've said many times to clients, “The hallmark of a seasoned property manager is that they fired some clients.” Some businesses have hundreds of doors and they've never fired a client. I know if they've never fired a client, they have some bad things in their portfolio. There's some pain in there and that's a difficult place to work. They’re not willing to let go of painful situations and there's always going to be painful situations. Marc: Yeah, and I've never talk to a PM who did let a client go who regretted it. Jason: Never. Marc: It's hard, it's scary. We face that. I remember very vividly when we were small and we had 125 doors, maybe. We had a client and had like 12 properties. I remember the guy, could see the guys face. He wasn't a bad guy, but he was just difficult and it had to be his way. He would contact us all the time. He just drove us crazy. We finally decided we needed to let the guy go. Well that was like 10% of our portfolio. That was hard. We thought about it, we don’t know what to do, and even after we did it we thought, “Oh, is that the right decision or not?” But we quickly realized it's like a load that’s been lifted. When you get rid of those people that sucked that time and energy and life out of you, it is a positive thing. Jason: The operational costs, the emotional cost when all of that falls by the wayside. I've never had a client fire something. I had one person fire half their portfolios like one big property. I had one person do that and they were terrified, but they did it. Two things happen almost every time. One, they replace the income really quickly. It always, it creates some vacuum in the universe, I don't know what you want to call it, but they always seem to replace the income really quickly with better doors. That always seems to happen. They just need to trust that's going to happen. The other thing is, is they always say to me, “I can't believe I didn’t do it sooner,” like they wished they had done it sooner. They were so afraid of doing it and then once they do it, they realize it wasn't so bad and they wish they were like, “Why didn't I do this sooner?” Marc: If one of your clients is talking to you and you're saying, “Hey, you need to fire this owner,” how do you recommend they do that like? What should they say? Should they say, “You’re fired”? Jason: You’re interviewing me now. Marc: Yeah. Jason: There's a few ways you can let them go. There are some creative ways. One of the best is just raise the fees. If [...] make it worth, just make it more expensive. Say, “Hey this property is difficult. You're a bit more challenging person to deal with, to be honest. We are willing to keep doing it, but it's going to cost X.” So, you just raise the rate, and if they keep being annoying and you feel like it's still not worth it, you keep raising the rate until they self-select themselves out. That's one easy way. Another way is to just refer them to somebody else, and if you're going to refer you might as well get a nice referral fee out of it. Go to one of your buddies and one man's junk is another man's treasure. I mean they might know how to deal with this type of person. They might be a better personality fit for this type of person than you. Don't just instantly assume that because you can't tolerate them or their difficult for you, that everybody else will. Give them to somebody else and let somebody else have a shot. Marc: I like it. We will rarely fire an owner, but we will as you just suggested bump fees up and up until they decide to fire us. I’d much rather have them fire us and leave on their terms. Jason: Right, they’ll self-select out. Are we complete on number one? Marc: I think so. Number two is successful companies know their numbers. I see this so often with PM companies. We get really good at the logistical side of we know how to lease, we know how to talk to owners, know how to collect rents, but when it comes to the numbers, the financials, we just don't know what we’re doing often times. I really am a big believer in that concept that if you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business. You don't know how well your business is doing. One question I’ll often ask of coaching clients that I work with on that side of things is also, “Okay. Now, if you, Jason own a PM company, at what point in time do you close the books for your company? Let’s say the month of June ends, right? We’re here almost until the end of June. When June closes for you, how quickly will you have your June books closed so that you know how much money your company made in the month of June?” The answers always surprise me. They're all over the board. “Well, I'm currently 90 days behind. I’m trying to catch up,” or, “I'm not much further behind in that,” or, “I might get it towards the end of the following month.” Jason: Yeah, how can they make business decisions if they’re 90 days in the rear-view mirror? Imagine trying to drive a car like that. Marc: Like I said, I've been doing this for many, many years. While we were small. like anybody else, I was everything. I was the janitor, I was the accountant, and I was everything. My favorite day of the month was always the first. Not because we collect rents, but because on the first day of the month, I go online and print out our company bank statements for the last month. I get our paper checkbook out and I’d reconcile. I’d get our ending balance and I enter it all into QuickBooks. I can look at that piece of paper and say, “Hey, how much money did we make last month?” I love that. I would wake up early to do that. I'm weird, I know, but that's how you know how well you're doing, I wouldn’t wait until the second, the third, the fourth, the twentieth, that's crazy. You can do it on the first. So, I'm a big believer in as soon as possible, which in this day and age it can be pretty much immediate. You get your books balanced, you run some numbers, you see how your company is doing it, and you’ve tracked some metrics, some internal metrics for your company to know how you're doing. Jason: I think the challenge is when property managers are holding on to something that's not in their particular wheelhouse or area of genius, but if this isn't your thing, if you're not like Marc and you don't love doing this and this isn’t like what makes you thrilled and excited is to get in your bank statements and numbers, have somebody else get everything ready for you. I've got a profit-first coach and accountant. She meets with me and goes over everything with me. I get not only my perspective, but she says, “This is what it looks like to me, Jason,” so yeah, I think it's usually helpful to do a review every month and look at your numbers. Marc: Yup, and like you just said, most folks aren’t as weird as I am as it comes to that stuff, and that's fine. But you need to find someone weird like me. You need to find someone who can go get excited about running your numbers, make sure they do it, and then you review those and you track a couple key metrics. For example, some of the metrics that we always track, are door counts proportional to owner count? Because that’s a sign of a healthy business. So for example, if your company has 100 doors, if you’ve got 100 owners for those 100 doors, that is the sign of a very healthy business because it means that you don't have any one owner with too much control versus the guy the guy called me a couple of weeks ago and he wanted to know if I was interested in buying his business. I go, “Tell me a little bit about it.” I think he had like 75 doors, “I’ve got 75 doors, I’m here in Denver and interested in selling.” One of the first questions I always ask is how many owner-clients do you have? He had 75 doors and 4. I was like, “You know what? I don’t need to know anything else. I'm not interested.” Why? Because if we took those doors on, that's four owners. That’s a lot of control. Jason: If it’s two of them, then what are you getting? Marc: It's something that you can't control, but you need to track it, that's one of the things you want to track on a regular basis. Another metric we really like to track is the percentage of our overall income that we spend on employees. Because in our industry, that again can just be all over the map on companies. Do you have a number on that that you recommend to your folks on what that number should be? Jason: It varies so wildly especially by market, but I know an owner that has 65% profit margin in his business. Marc: Wow. Jason: I know it's ridiculous. Marc: It’s a good thing I’m sitting down. Jason: I know. He has a couple of hundred doors. It varies so wildly and it depends largely on the type of owners they're taking on, the type of property, because—I’m talking about this in the cycle of suck idea very often—if you take one bad owner or one bad door property, can have 10 times, maybe even 100 times the operational cost as a good door. So, that can vary so wildly. I've had a company come to me that had 500–600 units under management and wasn't making a dime. I said, “How is this possible?” They’re like, “Well, we're doing $3 million a month in real estate,” so there was a brokerage with a cancerous tumor on the side called property management. He had twice as much staff as he needed, no technology in place. Fast forward, he fired half his team, he fired about 200 doors, maybe 300 doors, and it's now a very profitable company. So, it's not all about doors and staffing is always going to be the highest cost. If you can replace even a fraction of that or create some leverage for your team using technology, outsourcing, whatever, those are some big wins financially. A lot of times everyone's looking at, I got to get more revenue in and they're not looking at their expenses. That's why I'm a big fan of the profit-first system which says, “You take out a portion for profit and then what's left over is your expenses.” Most people are like expenses. You’re just revenue minus expenses and then whatever's left over, there's nothing left over typically in that situation. Marc: Absolutely. We have that profit is almost like an expense item that we know we’re going to take out every month and put into a savings account. We've been doing that for a long, long time from that aspect. But yes, I agree 100% with that aspect of what you're saying there. The number that we coach folks around is you don't want to go over 50% of your total revenue to staffing costs regardless of your size. The bigger you get, the more that number's going to probably creep towards that, just because you get more overhead, you get more managers, and you have more red tape, so that's a natural part of that. But if you go over 50%, that's a red alert. Something's wrong from that standpoint, so that an important to track for every company. Jason: Yeah, as a company scale, they're able to create a bit more leverage, but yeah, I could see how when you're really small and you're doing everything, your employee costs are a bit less per door because assuming your free labor or maybe if you work for your dad. Or sometimes it’s a spouse. They’ll have their spouse as their business partner, and you'll see them get to maybe 70-80 units, they’re tapped out, and they can't afford to hire their first person. Nobody's getting paid. That makes sense. All right, I like it. Anything else on number two, knowing the numbers? Marc: The other things I would just add that's worth tracking that I often find companies don't track this well enough is how many doors they’re adding and how many doors they’re losing. It’s always a surprise to me is when you ask them that, they'll say, “Well, I can dig it up, but I don't know.” A lot of the software don't track that. If we’re old school, we’ve got the spreadsheet. Every time we lose a door, we go to our spreadsheet for the year, we put it in, and it's going to keep that auto tracking. Every time we sign a new one up, put those on the spreadsheet so we can pull that up and instantly see, “Okay. As of right now, we've lost X number of doors per year and we've added X number of doors.” So, track that. Don't make that something that you've got to go dig in your software and try to pull a report. That needs to be one of those metrics that you're tracking at least on a monthly basis. Jason: Yeah. It's a pretty difficult situation and it’s a common one where you’ll see somebody adding a door and losing a door just as often. They wonder why they're not getting growth. Sometimes, the problem aren’t getting enough [...], it’s obtaining doors. They could be the type of target audience that they're going after, it could be that they are lacking some awareness around how to retain these clients or whatever it might be, but yeah, that's an important thing I think to pay attention to. Marc: Yeah, and to track the percentage of doors lost. That's all over the map as well. If you can keep your losses on an annual basis in the single digits from a percentage standpoint, that's pretty good. If you can keep it 10% or below on doors that are leaving you every year, you're in the pretty rare group of PMs. Jason: I created something for property managers called our cold leads calculator. One of the things I noticed with a lot of companies—this is more relevant to what I do—a lot of property managers are not paying attention to the amount of money that they're spending on cold lead marketing—pay per click, SCO, APM leads—all these different places at social media marketing, content marketing, that they're paying to generate business. A bulk of where most people get their deals and leads from I find in the industry is often word-of-mouth, so they just group everything together. All their warm leads from word-of-mouth, referrals, other cold lead marketing, and they're not paying attention. When you look at the numbers alone of the cold lead marketing, which everyone can check it out by going to doorgrow.com/coldleads, they can take this little questionnaire and go through it, but it'll help you calculate your cost for cold lead marketing. It also calculates and factors in the time. Time is worth money and it calculates and ask what that time is worth, like what's your hourly wage or whoever is following up on these, how much time does it take to follow up on these, to create a real aggregate or at least close aggregate cost of what one cold lead is costing you. I’ve seen numbers. I just had one come through the other day. One cold lead was costing them $5000. I've seen $11,000, I've seen a $1700 per lead or per acquisition per deal and what I love to ask them when I get them on the phone, I say, “Hey, I saw you fill out this cold lead thing. How long does it take you to recoup $5000 on a contract?” and they’re like, “Well, that's probably three years of free management or two years whatever.” Then their perspective starts to shift and we have to uncouple that. The transparency in numbers helps you make decisions as a business owner. Marc: Yup, and then review them regularly. Don't just leave it your accounts. If you're a successful PM company, you're looking at those numbers because those numbers make a difference. Jason: All right. We’re on to number three. Marc: Number three is a good lead-in as you were just talking about there. Number three will be successful companies focus on profit, not door count. You've already talked about this. This comes up so often in our industry, what's the first question any PM ask another PM? How many doors do you have? What’s your door count? How many doors are you managing? That's the measuring stick and it’s the wrong measuring stick because I know companies that are smaller, they're very profitable, and I know companies that are very large that are not profitable at all. Door count is irrelevant. The profit is what matters. What that means is practically speaking, if you've got 50 doors, I would say, “Before you say I another 50—that's fine—but you know what? Let's maximize the profit of the existing group you have.” That doesn't mean just go out and nickel-and-dime everybody, but it means what other services can you provide? What other things can you put in place to make sure that you're maximizing that income and that’ll have a dual impact in that you're going to increase your income on that 50? Then when you pick up your next 50, now you've already got some structures in place to ensure that they are profitable as well. You've got to focus on the profits, on the revenue streams to be successful. Jason: Absolutely, I don't think there's ever been a property management company that I’ve seen that is not leaving some money on the table. There's always additional services that you can offer, even if it's something little like filter easier petscreening.com. There's always some additional value that you can offer and there's always a way that you can monetize that. People are willing to pay for additional value. Marc: On the flip side of that as well, I think we need to pay attention to those expenses because what the industry right now is more difficult than it has been a long time and folks that have not been in the industry for too long, they’ll recognize this because this is normal to them, but it's a tough industry. This is a tough market to be running a property management company. When things get tough, you've got to be tight on expenses, and it’s too easy not to get tough on expenses. That's one thing we encourage folks, is to go through that profit of loss, line by line, and if there are expense items on there that are not directly relational to income coming in, you have to figure out how to cut them. You have to get rid of those wasteful expenses. That is such a good exercise to sit down and start going through that stuff and say, “Well, gosh, I’ve just been paying for the subscription service every month and I don't even know what it does. I signed up for it two years ago. All right, let's get that cancelled.” Jason: Yeah, and you’re like, “Why am I still on this?” Marc: Exactly. This is beneficial as getting on a new door, is cutting those expenses. Jason: This is why I love having a profit-first coach, because this really is built into the system. Every month is like, “Hey, what about these services you said you're going to cancel and you said you don't need this anymore?” Yes, so I think it's helpful. If you’re not like accounting-minded, I highly recommend you go back and watch my episode with Mike Michalowicz, who is the author of Profit First and check out that episode. I think it was a fantastic episode. Really cool guy, came and spoke at our conference. It covers that system like cutting down expenses, putting profit first, making sure that expenses are fitting within your existing budget and you're still getting a profit. Yeah, makes sense. Marc: What I had to do, I realized that the biggest expense item, the biggest overhead we had was my ego. The thing is that, that I wanted for me, the big desk, the big office, the nice car, and that's something everyone needs to start there because if you drive, especially in the real estate sale side, you go to any real estate sales event and what is the parking lot filled with? A lot of very expensed leased vehicles. I'm not against nice vehicles, but that’s just a suck on the income side of things. Jason: I think there's always this ratio between the amount of money that you’re going to take out of the business, and the amount of money that you're going to leave in to fund towards the growth. If we take out too much too quickly, the business growth is stagnated. I've seen some really aggressive companies put almost all of their money. I’ve seen owners try not to even take a paycheck. They’re really minimizing their take out of the business so that they could fund the growth, because they're delaying gratification for the future. They’re funding and creating a business that is growing and they’re putting their funds and their money towards that.  Sometimes, you have to double down as a business owner and to be willing to take a short-term hit because you want a long-term growth goal. And we can put too much towards growth to where it feels shaky, it feels unsafe. We're not holding anything back. There's no padding there. It really is this balance of how much I’m going to put towards growth be aggressive, how safe am I going to play it, and how stable and slow am I going to be at doing this. There's a balance there. Marc: It is a balance, it’s an absolute balance because you need to leave some in, and you need to be pulling some out every month and putting it into that savings account so that you have opportunities. We’ve purchased several companies over the years and every one of those deals worked because we were able to in essence say, “We can write a check. We’ll write a check today. We’ll get this deal done.” Why? Because we have money put away. That savings account isn't just comforting, it's an opportunity fund for things when they come up in the future. Jason: I like it. All right, is that three? Marc: That's three. Jason: All right, number four. Marc: Number four is successful companies have systems and follow them. They have systems in place and they follow. In a word, system means different things to different people. Some people think, “Well, that's just so I need a good software. What’s the system?” I really believe that probably 75%-80% of what we do on a day-to-day basis in our industry can be systematized, meaning, simply documenting your process, documenting your routine, because it plays out in so many ways. We learned this early on when we were growing and first there were two of us. My dad and I, we both did it all and we hired a third person, and then we all three did it all. Then we hired a fourth person, and by the time we hired that fourth person, we realized that, we can't all do it all. This isn't scalable, we can't all do everything. It works great at two people, it works great at three people, but when we had that number person and Mr. Tenant calls and says, “Hey, I called in with a maintenance request last week and I haven’t heard from anybody.” And I say, “Well do you know who you talked to?” “No, I don't remember.” “Well hold on, let me see if I can figure it out.” “Hey dad, did they talk to you?” “Hey, Bill did they talk to you?” “Sue did they talk to you?” “No.” “Well they talked to one of us, right?” That’s very ineffective. You've got to start specializing in your processes. We realized at that point in time that if we're going to hire someone to be our leasing person, for example, we better have a documented process for them to follow. I mean specific detailed documented. Here's what time you get to the property before showing. You open the door, you turn on the lights. Here's where you stand when they come in. Here's how you greet them, here’s what you say, here’s what you don't say, here's how you process an application. If we do that into our entire business and we break the business down into the smallest components, it simplifies things like nothing else because we’re in a complex business. If you think of a continuum in your mind, a long line going on both directions. On one side of the continuum, you have the words consistency and simplicity. On the other side, the far extreme opposite, you've got the words variation and complexity. You have to ask yourself, where am I on that continuum? We're all different places, but we hopefully will always be moving forward towards consistency and simplicity. I don't think there's a better way of doing that than through documenting your process, your system and then following it, training on it, improving it, upgrading it. It's got to be written, it's got to be documented, and it is a process. Jason: That needs to be used. People document it, they’ll give it to the team member, the team member will look at it at the first few times they do it, and then they're done. I have Process Street on as a guest once. We used Process Street internally, but it forces them to actually use the process on going. It's a checklist that has to be verified and completed. Marc: Yes, checklists are huge. We couldn’t exist without the checklist. Its old school, but it works. We still have paper checklists on some things in our office here that people say, “That wouldn’t work.” I guess just too old school. I say, “Well , we’re pretty successful. It worked for a thousand doors; I can tell you that. Will it work beyond that? I don't know, but it works to get you to a thousand.” Jason: There you go. I've noticed in businesses, I think there’s, at a minimum, probably seven systems that every business eventually has to have in a business. One, they have to have an internal communication system. For me and my team, it’s virtual, so we're using things like Basecamp, Voxer, stuff like that. But there needs to be an internal communication system that isn't just, “Hey Steve, did you do this?” So, internal communication. There needs to be process documentation system. That could just be Google Sheets, Docs, and whatever, or it could be something more complicated or cooler like Process Street or whatever, but there needs to be a process documentation system. There needs to be a billing system, of course. Property managers use maybe AppFolio or Rentec Direct, Buildium, but there needs to be some billing, accounting system. Then there needs to be a support system. A lot of property managers are starting to gravitate towards setting up Help Scout, Intercom, Drift, or one of these, but internally we use Intercom. There needs to be a support system in the business so that you can track tickets and track things. Sometimes, you'll do that through your property management software a bit. I find one system most property management businesses are lacking or missing is a planning system. You're hearing people move towards traction in some of this which I think has some fundamental flaws to be blunt, but it's a great system. It’s better than no system and there's a lot of systems out there for planning, but there needs to be a planning system in the business. Another system that's necessary is a sales CRM. This is different than your existing customer database. This is for prospects. There needs to be a sales CRM in place. A lot of property managers use LeadSimple, for example. If there were one other system you can throw in there probably be a phone system. We need some way to manage this big influx of calls or outbound calls with team members being able to be reached. These are some of the systems that I've paid attention to, that businesses need. Most businesses will have maybe two or three. Marc: Yup, and we preach what we practice as well as preach to make on the systems for individual team members to make them position-specific. We have 20-some odd people our office and every role has a position-specific system manual, so our director of accounting has a director of accounting system manual. I'm the president of the organization. I have a president system manual. Why? Because I need to be replaceable. That's one of the benefits of it. That idea that now we become less dependent upon individuals and no individual can hold us hostage to be like, “They’ve got everything in their head. What are we going to do they leave? We can't lose them.” It's a terrible place to be. We don’t have to worry about that. You're going to lose everybody at some point in time. You’ll either lose them for a good reason or a bad reason, but they need to be replaceable. Now if you have a document, if you have documented their process, then they become replaceable. I'm replaceable. If I get hit by the truck today, it’s alright. Hopefully, the company will take a little hit, hopefully they’ll need me a little bit, but we got a system manual, somebody can step in that role, and already says, “Hey, this is what Marc does.” Just do it and you'll be successful. Jason: I like it. All right, so are we on to five? Marc: Number five, the last one, successful companies recruit and develop talent. We just talked about systems and the concept that systems can make your people replaceable to some extent and they should. However, at the end of the day, the team with the best players usually wins. If you can go out there and if you can figure out how to recruit the best talent and then retain them, that is going to do more for your company than almost anything else out there. If I'm going to brag about something about our company, I’ll brag about that. We get the best people around. We've gotten good at that. It makes it so much easier to do business. I don't work harder than my competitors, I'm not smarter than my competitors, I'm not technologically savvy more than my competitors, but what we do better than a lot of our competitors is we get really good people  Now that’s hard, and it’s hard to get really good people and that's why you got to recruit. It doesn't mean you put an ad on Craig's list and read a bunch of resumes of people that can't get jobs. I mean you go out and you find people that are really good at what they do and you got to get them, you have to recruit them. That's hard because successful people aren’t looking for jobs. They are already successful. If you want to be successful, you got to go out there. I’ll tell a story and I'll give that the short version. We had to hire a leasing person not too long ago. Wwe were hiring, meaning we were just reviewing resumes and I thought this is ridiculous. We can't find anybody good. I better do what I tell myself what I should be doing. I got my car one day and I drove around to a lot of the multi-family class A properties in Denver, and I walked in as a prospect. “Hey, I’m Marc, I’m here. I just want to see what you have available. I’m looking for a buddy of mine to rent a property.” And I was usually met with the, “Okay, well here's a piece of paper. Tell your buddy to give us a call.” I say, “Okay” and left. About the fourth place I came to, I came in and met a gal there behind the front and I said, “Hi, I’m Marc. I’m just looking for a place for a buddy of mine.” She said, “Well, me about your buddy. He’s looking for one bedroom. He’s tall dark and handsome, got a cat, probably crazy,” and she's like, “You know what? I know the perfect unit for your buddy. Do you have a couple minutes? I'd love to just have you tour this property.” “Yeah, sure. Okay.” She tours me through and she's pointing out the feature benefits to offer. She was sharp. Her name is Lindsay. I said, “Lindsay, you are really good at your job. She goes, “I love leasing. I just love it. I love helping people. I love real estate. I love what I do.” I said, “That's great. Coincidently, I happen to run a property management company and we're actually looking to hire a director of leasing for residential real estate. Have you thought about doing residential?” because she’s a multifamily. She was like, “Oh no. I could never leave. I'm not a job hopper. I'm really stable. Stability is a big deal for me once I get somewhere I like to stay.” Now I'm drooling. I got to have her. I said, “Well is there anything you don't like about your job Lindsay? Well we work weekends.” I said, “Oh. That’s too bad. We don’t work weekends.” I said, “Tell you what. Why don't you come into my office sometime? Here’s my card. I'd love to just sit down and have a conversation with you. Who knows? Maybe something comes out of it, maybe something don’t, but I’d love to just connect and see if there's something there for the future.” Well long story short, we got her. We got Lindsay. And we had to go after her, we had to get her because she didn't want to leave. She's been a rock star. She's been amazing. The things that she's helped our company to do, but we would not have found her if we were just hiring. We had to go recruit her, we had to go get her. That's what you have to do in every position in your company. You have to go find stuff. I'm not saying go steal people away from your competitors, but you have to find those people out there that are successful and get them. Once you get them, you have to retain them. You have to train them well, you got to pay them well, which is one of the reasons you need to have good profit because good people aren’t cheap, but that's what's going to lead to a long-term success, and unless you take a step back out of the day-to-day stuff at the end of the day. Jason: Yeah. I think it's important to point out what you're saying is not that people are easily replaceable, that you can pop somebody else in. You're not saying that at all, and I think every business owner knows that if you have a seasoned team member that you've invested in, that you've trained, that you've developed, there's nothing as good as that, like having somebody that's been with you for years. I have team members that has been on my team for maybe six years and he's a rock star. I have a competitive advantage over most companies in that our teams are virtual, so I can source the best talent from anywhere pretty much in the world. But yeah, this can be challenging for property managers that are looking for somebody locally, they're looking for somebody nearby, they’re looking for a particular set of skills may be. But ultimately, if you find somebody good, you want to make sure you retain them and that you keep them happy. You can compare it to a wine, you can compare it to anything, but over time they just get better. If they’re good they get better, if they're not good, they get worse. Marc: That's the other side of the coin. That's where just like we talked about earlier with owners. This is what we started this whole conversation with you get a bad owner, what do you do? You need to let them go. Well if you made a hiring mistake, you need to fix that and correct that as well and let that person go, because we're going to make hirings. We are very good at this, but we make a lot of hiring mistakes. We just do, it drives me crazy. But when we do that, we correct it quickly. We're going to move that person on very quickly when we make that mistake. Why? Because the longer they're sitting there, the longer the right person isn't there. You've got to make that correction when you made a hiring mistake. Jason: I think it's amazing when you bring in a new team member, it changes the entire team. It either changes the entire team for the better or for the worse, especially if that team member that you just brought on is taking off of your plate everything. It changes your role as CEO. It changes your role as an entrepreneur, and it affects everything from you. It's pretty significant and it's important to make sure that they’re the right fit. We we're all going to make hiring mistakes. You have to kiss a few frogs and you have to suck a little bit at hiring in order to find the good people. Marc: It's an art, and a skill set to hire someone in no way translates over to property management. It's not like, “I'm a good property manager. I’ll obviously be good at hiring.” No, there's no correlation there. It's completely different. The other unfortunate thing is, the smaller your company is, the more important it is to make that first good hire. Now we've got 20 people. If we make a bad hire, we got one in 20 then who's bad. They can fly under the radar a little bit, they're not going to stick to the company. If we've got two people and then we make a bad hire for number three, so we never got 33% of our workforce that's a low performer. The smaller you are, the more important it is that you take the time to get the right person in. A lot of it is just time. You've got to slow down the hiring process. These ideas of we had a phone conversation and we interviewed him, it's not enough? Are you kidding me? No, you want to do multiple interviews. Anybody can come across as a positive person on that first interview. You want to have multiple interviews with multiple people. You have to dig, dig, dig on that before you make that job offer. Jason: I think where I've made a lot of mistakes personally in the hiring process is I love to delegate and its delegating too quickly. Some people will micromanage, they’ll control too much, and I think some people will do the opposite. They'll bring somebody on and they won't give them all the training, all the tools, all the support they need to really be the rock star they could have been. I've made both of those mistakes to be transparent. I think onboarding is a really important process to make sure you’re meeting with your new hires on a regular basis daily initially, then backing it up to weekly and so on, so that every day like where are you stuck? What do you need? What are you confused about? Often, they're not going to just volunteer all that information to you. But when you're meeting with them daily, they're going to feel supported, they're going to feel like they're invested in the team. I think onboarding is a really big deal. That's where I made mistakes. Marc: We still do one-on-one meetings every single week with every one of our team members. It doesn't matter how long they've been. I'm a huge believer in that, I guess if you wanted number six, there is number six, right? Have one-on-ones every single week, sitting down with them, even if it’s for 5 or 10 minutes, touch base, see what issues are going. Those have been critical for our people in their success. Jason: We have a bonus, number six. Marc: You got a bonus, number six, because you’re so good. What did I leave out? I’m curious. You talk to a lot of PM companies. What do you think are characteristics of success may be that we didn’t hit on? Jason: I wasn’t even thinking this, I was so into yours. I think all these things are really fantastic. I think if I were to add a seventh here that I think is absolutely critical, so imagine you have an orchard, you’re at the top, and this is like a reservoir of hopefully money and or water or whatever you want to call it. There's outflow, you're paying your team, you're spending money, things like this, and investing your team. I think where most companies are flawed is there's no inflow at the top of the orchard. There's nothing above the entrepreneur feeding into them. I think this is why it's critical. I probably spent at least six figures annually just on coaches and mentors. I have three coaches right now affecting different areas of my business. I think it's that inflow that I'm able to get that allows me to consistently have value to offer to the marketplace and to benefit my clients. It comes out in ways that I don't even expect, like a client will ask me a question or be stuck on something mindset-wise or be challenged with something, and I'm like, “I had that issue and I worked that through with my coach,” or, “I have done that in that training that I had done,” or whatever it might be. I think as entrepreneurs, we need to invest in ourselves if we're expecting other people to invest in us. When you go to prospects or clients and you say, “Hey, invest in me, spend money with my company,” and you aren't willing to invest in yourself or in your company in a similar fashion, I think there's a little lack of integrity. Energetically, something's off. If there were a seventh, I would say that's a big one is make sure that you're investing consistently in your own development, not just your team so that you have something to give. I think that's the inflow. You don't want to be a dead sea, there needs to be in flow and there needs to be outflow and that's where there's life. That's where it’s a healthy business. Marc: For the person that would say, “Hey, that sounds great, but I'm working 70 hours a week. I don't have time to invest in me. I'm just give, give, give.” What would you say to them? Jason: I would say they’re ineffective, they’re inefficient because if we're doing, doing, doing we moved out of the mode of being affected. That means most of our time is tactical instead of strategic. Any business that lacks, the business owner lacks strategic time, the business isn’t growing. There's a direct relationship between the amount of strategic time, planning, looking towards the future, coming up with ideas, or getting trained or learning new things, versus their growth. If all their time is tactical, they're dealing with maintenance, fires, leases, managing their team, emails, phone calls, if all their time is tactical, their business can’t grow. It will stay basically where it is. I think what I do with clients is I start them with a time study and we create time. Everybody is spending time doing stuff that's unnecessary, or low dollar an hour work, or silly, and it's pretty simple to start getting clarity on that first and then that helps them see what they need next. My entire foundation, my company really has been built on time studies. That's where I think fundamentally there's a huge difference between how I would coach operationally a business to run versus something like traction or a rocket fuel or these other systems where they’re saying, “Here's the magic org chart and here's the roles that you have to have.” Ultimately, a business should be built around the entrepreneur and what they actually need. The only way to really see that is to know where your time is going. Marc: Good stuff. Jason: That's my two cents. Marc: I like it. Jason: All right, so that's number eight maybe. I don't know. Marc: It’s number eight. Jason: We’d better stop before we add anymore. Marc: We’d better. I know. You’re making me think of too many things. Jason: Marc, it was really awesome hanging out here with you. This is really fun. You're welcome back anytime. Before we go, how can people get in touch with you if they're curious about some stuff that you offer for property managers or they want to learn more about your business or whatever? Marc: The best way to reach me is through our website which is propertymanagementsystem.org and we got a handful things on there, a lot of video resource things. We've got our system manuals, we talked a little bit about that, our actual system manuals, we offer those. You can download samples of those and we got packages on those. We do ancillary business training, some coaching stuff from that aspect. One thing I'm pretty excited about, we're just putting in place, we actually just put in place and I'm happy to share with any of your folks if they're interested, they can drop me an email. We put a business health checkup form where you answer some questions and it spits out a number to let you do that business health checkup. If anybody is interested in that, drop me an email, go on the website, reach out to me from there, will be happy to send it to them. Jason: Cool. All right, Marc, thanks so much for coming on the DoorGrow Show and excited to see what you do in the future. Marc: Jason, thank you, it was fun. Jason: All right ,so if you are property management entrepreneur and you are struggling, you are feeling challenged in growth, be sure to connect with us over Door Grow. I would be honored to help you out. As I said during this call, I'm a firm believer in getting coached, getting coaches, and even if it's not me, somebody like Marc, there's lots of other [...] there that can coach you. Get somebody that can give you some value, help you grow your business, help you achieve your goals, and figure things out. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  

Do you want to build wealth through real estate investing and property management? Then, put in the work, trust the process, be open-minded, and get results that change your life. Today, I am talking to Robin Reed, CEO of Concept 360 Property Management and a licensed California real estate broker. She helps clients reposition assets to maximize their value by decreasing expenses and increasing income.  You’ll Learn... [04:29] Challenging Coworkers: Let them go, and try not to grow the company.  [05:07] Learn to appreciate employees who handle day-to-day tasks and tenants.  [05:45] Feast or Famine: Flip from brokerage income to property management.  [07:27] Completely Commit to Changes: Follow DoorGrow, and do whatever it takes.  [12:00] Then vs. Now: No Jerks Allowed policy to make everyone happy.  [17:05] Desperation and Disrespect: You get it, or you don’t.  [17:25] Value of Property Management: If working for peanuts...get what you pay for. [18:20] Walk Away: Not everything, everyone is a perfect market/product fit.  [22:00] Feeding Funnel: What do you do? What’s property management?  [25:50] Retention: What works? Sells? Results and relationships with real estate agents.  [26:05] Growing from 65 to 200 doors; adding 2-5 doors/properties each month.  [30:15] Second Sandtrap: New challenges ahead for processes, teams, trust, and more.  Tweetables I like working on the business, and not in the business. Feast or Famine: Rollercoaster of brokerage income. Be willing to change, take action, and make a difference. What sells, what people want to buy are results. Resources Concept 360 Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) LeadSimple GatherKudos DoorGrow Case Studies and Website Secrets DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today's guest is Robin Reed of Concept 360 Property Management. Robin, welcome to the show. Robin: Thank you, Jason. Jason: It's really good to see you. Robin: You too. Jason: Robin has been a client. For long have you been a client? Robin: Coming up to two years. I think we’re right around two years. Jason: Maybe I should read a little bit of your bio because you’re really cool. It says, Robin Reed is a licensed California real estate broker and CEO of Concept 360 Property Management with a background in commercial real estate, finance, investment, and development. She's experienced in all real estate asset classes having secured over million in both debt and equity for her clients. She opened Concept 360 Property Management to share her true passion and combined experience as a broker and investor with her clients by helping them reposition their assets. They maximize their value by decreasing expenses and increasing income. A passionate real estate investor herself. She enjoys helping her clients build wealth through real estate investing. Robin is actively involved in several real estate trade organizations including NARPM, the National Association of Residential Property Managers, and is always aware of the pulls of the current real estate market. An Orange County native, she holds a BA degree in English and Comparative Literature from Chapman University. Robin, I actually saw you in person in Long Beach when I spoke at the NARPM chapter. It was awesome because you and your husband came up to me and gave me a big hug. I remember after that event you said some kind words to me. After that event, I was kind of high of the event, but afterwards in the parking lot, I started crying. Because as a coach and as a mentor to a lot of property management companies, I don't get to see clients in person very often because a lot are digital or remote. But occasionally, at a conference or something and somebody comes up to me and they say something in gratitude, that means a lot to me. Robin: Right. Jason: That was one of the moments I cherish. It was really nice being able to help you guys out. Why don't we start back at the beginning? Maybe a couple of years ago when you came to myself and to DoorGrow. What challenges were you dealing with then? What has been happening? Robin: We had let an employee go. The company was something that at the beginning when it first started in 2004, it was pretty big and had a lot of multi-family and things like that. Then the recession hit, a lot of people sold their buildings, some lost them, things like that. We weren't really focused on the property management company. It was just sort of this thing over in the other office that was self-sustaining and it was really something we weren't paying attention to and we were really focused on brokerage. We did a lot of brokerages, sold a lot of REOs for banks and we were really involved in that. I guess it was three years ago, that was right, it was about three years ago and we let an employee go and we looked and realized we were down from probably at the hay day close to 1800 doors, we are down to 65 doors. I said, "I don't even think we should keep this open. What's the point? It's a liability. I'm not into it. Let's just close it." So, we didn't, we kept it as a self-sustaining thing, but we didn't try to grow it. Then my remaining employee went to a maternity leave and I was doing her job for a couple of months which I learned that I hated doing her job. I'm glad I have employees. I like working on the business and not in the business. Luckily, we were at the point where we were able to have employees and I don't really have to deal with day to day of tenants and all that. I did her job for a couple of months and during that period I thought to myself, "This is a good business. This is a good business to be in. This is viable." I was so used to the rollercoaster of brokerage income, it's feast or famine. Jason: Yeah. Robin: And the property management company had always been in the background if between commissions or something like that. I thought, "why don't I flip it? Why don't I flip the script and focus on the property management company and then put the brokerage on the side?" My husband saw you speak somewhere on the internet, came across you and your videos and said, "You got to check this out." Historically, there's been a lot of "check this out", "we got to try this system" so I'm skeptic with systems and coaches, I always have been. I saw one video of yours and I said, "Yes, I'm in." Jason: That’s it. You have been super skeptic and one video was all you needed. Robin: One video and I said, "I'm in. Let's check him out." Jason: What did I do in that video? Robin: I don't know. I wish I knew which one it was. Jason: It's good. I got to do more of that video. Robin: That one, yeah. Jason: Yeah. Robin: We joined up with you and we were willing because we wanted the property management to grow. It’s like, I have this company already and we already have clients, it's something that I can grow from. I was committed and I said, "Whatever needs to happen." We went through all of the training. If I needed to change the name, we ended up changing the logo for you guys. I would have changed the name. I would have done anything. I said, "I'm completely committed to this system. I'm willing to do whatever it takes. Let's go." We did the website. I think before we even did the website or maybe in conjunction, I don't know how it works, but we did GatherKudos and that was huge. Jason: Yeah, [...] on the reviews. Robin: Yes, that was huge. That's been a huge help for us still. We have people that say, "Oh my god. I just saw your reviews." We started asking tenants and owners to review us. Sometimes you have to ask several times for people to review you. Dana, who works for me in the office, she's always trying. She's very good at getting people to review us. She's like a dog on a bone that she said, "You said you we're going to review us. Review us. Review us." So that's good. Jason: Yeah, good. You started going through a process. Robin: Yeah. Jason: The one thing I really loved about you guys as clients is I made mistakes in the past in attracting clients that are really opinionated because I was being very opinionated to the marketplace. Robin: Okay. Jason: But somehow you guys came through and were amazing clients. You guys were the type of clients that I really wanted because you were open to doing things differently. You were open to trying stuff. That's the type of person that I am. I'm very much like an open-minded person and so I'm getting better at putting out more of an open-minded message to attract those types of clients because we attract really well what we put out there. You guys came to me and you were willing to put in the work and you guys trusted the process. Those are the clients that get the biggest results and that's always really exciting to see a client get results, doing what you say that you asked them to do, I feel like when my clients come on, they are putting a lot of faith in us. Robin: Right. Jason: Whether you are a business owner or coaching client of mine and if they put that faith in you, that's a secret thing, I think, in business. I think that's why when your husband came to me—I don't even remember what he said off the top of my head—but he said something like, "You changed my life," or something like that. Robin: I think it was something like that because it's true. Jason: Yeah. I think as entrepreneurs—or at least the type of entrepreneurs I really like to work with—that's really the core of who we are. We want to make a difference. Some entrepreneurs, maybe you can call them entrepreneurs, they have business in which all they want to make money. Robin: Right. Jason: They are not really concerned about solving the problem, but real business exists to solve the problem. Property managers solve the real problem. Robin: Right. Jason: I think a lot of them are very much enjoy people who are contribution-focused. That really was great to watch you guys go through and trust that. You guys asked a lot of questions. Robin: Yeah. Jason: A lot of questions, good questions, then you guys took action. You guys did stuff. You did the things that I told you to do. Robin: Yeah. Jason: You did a lot of different things. You’ve gone from saying, "It's a liability. Let's just close it down," to saying, "Hey, maybe there's something here." To getting coaching, to going through a process, cleaning up your reputation, working on your website, working on your pricing model, working on your sales process, working on your prospecting methods. You've really gone through all of that and then we started getting on the operational things, figuring out your team a little bit, figuring how to get you in alignment with your business that wasn't so uncomfortable. Robin: Right. Jason: Because it was, it was uncomfortable for you at some times. Robin: Yes. It was. Jason: I think we've all been there. I remember some calls of you where you were like, "How do I get this one team member to do things the way that I want them to do?" Robin: Right. Jason: "I want things to be this way." Your perspective shifted really quickly after that. Robin: Oh, I did. Yeah. I've learned a lot. Jason: How do you feel like your business is now? How does it feel different now having gone through all that? Robin: We have no jerk's policy. You were talking about the kind of clients that you want to attract and it's the same. Life's too short. We've had some clients that are just not great and we let them go. That takes some faith in the system because it'd be easy for me to say, "I have a staff. They can deal with this person. I don't have to deal with him. I'm just going to keep them because of the income." But that's not really the culture that I want. I don't want unhappy employees to hate me because I keep bad clients on. We've attracted so many just really cool, nice people who get it. There's people that just don't. They don't get it. They don't see the value of property management. They maybe have self-managing for a long time and they don't see the value, but there are other people that do, and those are the people we want to work with. We've really streamlined our criteria about the kind of clientele we want, the kind of properties that we want to manage. We manage several HOAs. We don't manage them anymore. They had their separate challenges that weren't really working for our business model and so we let all of them go. That's income, but it's been replaced. It’s come back around. You were talking about relationships. You said to us, "Your property management company will be a place where you get referrals for your brokerage." I've got one in escrow right now that we’ve managed for a couple of years. Another one that we managed that were evicting a tenant and putting on the market. It is true that the property management company has been an interesting gateway to the brokerage business which has sort of become my side hustle, if you will, not my main thing. Jason: Yeah. It's a good side hustle. Robin: Yeah. Jason: One of the things that I point out to clients, and for those listening, I think it's very easy for us as business owners to fall into having the business that we can create or that we can have. Having the types of businesses that we can serve instead of having the business that we really want and the clients that we really want. Robin: Right. Jason: It's such a slight distinction and such an easy trap to fall into. It's similar to what I said outside of this is that, ultimately, I think what happens to clients is that we help them understand not just who they want to really work with, but who they don't want to work with. Then when they get that clarity and we then engineer the sales process and the reputation process, your pricing, and everything around who you really want then the message creates and attracts the right type of clients or tells the wrong type of clients, and so you are now attracting the right type of clients. I think a lot of property managers are hearing you and they just don't believe it. They’re hearing you say, "Our clients are great. We love them. They are easy. "And they’re like, "She's smoking something." They don’t get it because they’re feeling, "I know. I talk to people every day." And they’re like, "I hate this business sometimes. It's crazy. I'm struggling. We are dealing with people who are like we have to replace one door every time we get a door on." Really, it’s that they’re putting out the wrong type of energy, message, or perception or they’re focusing on the wrong type of audience and they don't see that it's possible. This sounds like a pipe dream to them. How would you explain that to somebody that's sitting where you were two or three years ago? Robin: It does sound like a pipe dream, doesn't it? It does sound a little bit scary to start trusting the process and that you will get new doors on if you let go of some. I'm a firm believer of that kind of energy anyway. You let go of some things and they are going to be replaced by something better anyway. I'm a firm believer in that kind of energy, but you might not be able to let go. Let's say you start doing the process and you start to GatherKudos and you start getting more clients. Then you'll be able to slowly maybe let go of the worst ones to replace it with better ones. You've got to trust the process. That's the thing and it's an empty card. I think a lot of times in this business, I've seen it in brokerage, and I'm sure it happens in every business, people get desperate and they accept treatment from clients they don't really want to accept, but they get desperate. We've had people call us and other people will do it for less. [...]. I mean, go ahead. I saw somebody on one of the DoorGrow threads say, "If you want peanuts, you're going to get monkeys or something." It was essentially like. Jason: If you’re working for peanuts, yeah. Robin: Right because that's what you pay for. Jason: [...] monkey if you’re working for peanuts. Robin: Right. There's a lot of people that would do it for less, go ahead. If that's your main thing, is somebody who would, "What the price is?” I mean, I was telling my husband, I said, "I've never gone in the hair salon and said, okay, how much?" It's more of what can you do and then how much. Don't you want to know what the product is? I have these people call me the other day and they had a litany of questions. I was being peppered with questions. I finally said, "It sounds like you guys have a lot of questions, maybe we can set up a meeting." They were just hammering me on pricing and I said, "Maybe we’re not a fit." It's okay to walk away, you are not going to fit with everyone. Jason: Probably the people that ask endless litany of questions, they're usually really looking for an excuse not to work with you... Robin: Right. Jason: ...especially if they know that your pricing is higher. They're looking, "There's got to be a reason I want to work with these guys, give me an excuse. Oh, you guys don't do that one little thing? Hahaha. I have my excuse. Now, I can avoid this leap that I was going to take working with a coach, working with this business, or whatever. I can avoid that and I can stay in my mediocrity. I can stay in my stuff. I can stay in my dysfunction." I mean, there might be people that call you up asking about your business and they really just want to self-manage. They're just looking for an excuse why is it too expensive or too bad of an idea, or why can't I not trust them so that I can hold onto this moldy peanuts and [...] a monkey and keep my hand in the monkey trap. They want to hold on to it. They don't want to let go and they are looking at you to give them a reason. I love when people play tug of war game with me. Robin: Right. Jason: My favorite thing in the tug of war game is to let go of the rope. Robin: Right, exactly. Jason: And watch them fall on their ass and then they are sitting there holding on going, "Why won’t you play with me? Why won’t you fight me on this?" "I don’t need to, I don’t need to play that game." Let’s get into the changes that you’ve made. Your business from where it is now in almost every way is different. Robin: Right. Jason: What changes did we go through? Did you mess with your branding? Robin: The logo. Jason: Okay. We did change something to do with branding. Then we go into the reputation stuff you mentioned. And you guys also have process now reaching out to people, and stuff like that. Or it’s gotten [...] for you? Robin: We used LeadSimple. I tried so many different things just to make our systems better as you bring on more doors, you have a quality problem of how do you manage everything. The system of bringing them on board and all of that. I’ve actually just been working, finessing our onboarding process. Our BDM wouldn’t get all of the necessary information. The BDM just wants the signature on the contract. Jason: Right. "Let’s get the deal, let’s close it." Robin: I realized, "You go get that signature, I’ll get the rest of the stuff." I’ll send them a welcome email with all the things that we need, and that has really worked out well for us. Jason: You’ve also revamped your pricing, right? You went through significant change there. You revamped your sales process, which you’re talking about right now. Robin: Right. Jason: Making significant changes there in optimizing that. How about the methods for feeding this funnel and prospecting methods? Robin: I’ll talk about a couple of things that have worked for us, and then something that haven’t worked for us because I’ve tried everything. Something that’s very, very simple is that when you have a business, whatever it is, you need people to know what you do. Especially in property management, my local area, there are people that sell products that can sell to a nationwide audience, that’s not what I do. I am managing properties in my local area. I think focusing on that type of local people that are local professionals that know what I do, and that can refer business to me. We do a lot of speaking engagements. We have Dan [...] presentation and then we have one that we’re doing right now that we’ve done a couple of times that is some before and afters because we do a lot with clients that have maybe inherited a property or bought something at a discount that needs to completely be rehabbed. We’ve worked through a lot of those. We’ve some before and afters and we talk about the clients getting more money in their pocket every month now because of turning the units. We got a client that inherited a property that his mother had owned and she had kept the rents the same for years. One bedroom was getting a month. It’s now getting . Jason: Wow. Robin: How can you argue with that? Jason: That’s what sells. What really sells, what people want to buy are results. Robin: Exactly. That’s why that presentation has been so successful, it’s black and white, it’s the numbers, it’s the before and after pictures, it’s the before and after rent rolls. It shows clients, when we manage their properties, and we have a lot of guys that work for us that can do the turns. We do a lot of it. We can discuss a lot of business. We have a lot of vendors that give us great deals. It’s been really beneficial for our clients. Doing this speaking engagement gets us out there and has people see what we do. That’s been very beneficial. I go to events, I’m really the only property management company there. There’s no other property management company that show up to these events that I go to. In general networking event, I don’t really seem to get much out of those. In our area, we have the realtor referral program on our website, we don’t get anything. I don’t know if it’s because the realtors in our area, they’re doing one-offs, kind of they’ve got one deal and that’s it, you never hear from them again or in LA County you make so make so much money on one deal that our little referral, they don’t care, they’re not interested. Jason: Not as enticing. Ultimately, having a relationship with real estate agents is what works... Robin: Right. Jason: ...and nurturing relationship long term. That’s really what works there. You mentioned before and after and how effective that is. Let’s paint a picture of your before and after for your business that helps me out. Let’s look at this. Before, when you came to me, you were 50, 60 units? Robin: I want to say it was 65 doors, 64 doors, right there. Jason: Okay. And then where you guys at now? Robin: Right around 200. Jason: Oh my gosh. So, 200 doors. How many doors were you adding when you were at the 65? What was the sort of the challenge then? What was the typical growth rate? Robin: Nothing. The growth rate was a negative. We were losing. We weren’t doing anything. The company was just in the other room on its own and we weren’t doing anything to try to grow it. Jason: No growth. That’s 65 doors and now, if you guys were at about 200 doors under management, what sort of the growth rate still like? How many doors you add in typically in a month on average? Robin: Typically, a month, 2-5. Jason: Okay. Steadily. If that’s the case then you must be retaining doors a lot longer. Robin: We always have. Our retention rate is really a lot longer I think than the stats I’ve heard in the industry. We’ve done well with that. Jason: Which [...] targeting better owners, or owners that are not just accidentals that are going to fold after a year. Robin: Right. I find the single family is what we like to target and the small multi-family. We do manage some properties, that’s why 2-5 a month, sometimes that’s not necessarily doors that’s properties, some of those properties might have 4 units. Jason: Oh, okay. Robin: We’ve taken on some larger multi-family. We actually started in multi-family. Jason: [...] a year typically on average adding a month maybe is what, maybe about 10? Robin: It may be. Depending. Sometimes it’s just five single family. It just depends on the month. A lot of times though because we’re doing so much prospecting, we have so many in the pipe that somebody I’ve been talking to for four months comes on, that kind of thing. That works well. Jason: That [...] nurture process. Robin: I just found that people that have the 25-unit buildings and things like that, they want you to run your business the way they want you to run it. I had a guy come and talk to us. We do all of our statements, there’s an owner portal, we email them, we don’t do a paper statement, and he wanted a bound paper statement every month, so his wife could read it. I said, "Too bad, we don’t do that." Jason: Could you imagine if you had 20 of those to do a month? Robin: Exactly. Jason: 50 of those to do a month? Robin: They seem to want special treatment so you really have to set your boundaries and know what you’re willing to accept. There’s always negotiation. It’s business. There’s always a bending. You might think, "Well, this is so worth it. You know what, I will lower my price on this or that, or I will do something out of the ordinary." But for the most part, you really have to stick to your guns and know what you’re willing to accept. That works for us. Jason: Works for me too. I love hearing about you and your husband’s successes. It’s really great to see you. I appreciate you coming on the show and hanging out with me. It’s great to hear that you guys are 200 doors and having growth. You guys are headed into what I call the second [...]. That’s the 200-400 doors and this is where now you’re dealing with processes and staff, and building a team. You’ve got some new challenges ahead. Maybe we’ll be talking soon. Robin: Okay, good. Jason: [...] challenges. It’s really great to see your success. Shameless plug, for those that are considering maybe working with me, doing the seed program, maybe they’re skeptical, or they’ve heard mixed reviews. What would you say to them about me, what’s your perception of me and DoorGrow? Robin: I can’t say enough positive things about you and DoorGrow. It has truly changed our business. If you have a property management company, if you’re starting a property management company, especially if you’re starting one, there’s not so much clean up that you’ll have to do. Do it right from the beginning. Jason is very genuine. He’s a good human being. That’s important. We trust you, we really care about you and you care about us, and we’ve had a two-year relationship with you and we know you’re there for us. We’ve seen the results. Not only that, for me, it was hard for me to trust the results, and trust that they were going to keep coming, and they have. You don’t just get a new DoorGrow website and have a seat and have everything come to you. That’s not how it works, but it’s all of these different pieces that starts to funnel business your way. Jason: I tell potential clients or even clients, it’s the last 10% of dialling in things that give you 90% of the results. Robin: That makes sense. Jason: It’s that last 10%. For example, they’ll do the website, but they don’t get faces on there, they don’t get the social proof. They’re missing just a couple little pieces. I have the whole website, that’s 90%. But they’re missing the little pieces that create that trust or ticket to the next level. How I built my business, and how I built the entire program is built around the idea of trusts. Trust is what sells and the fact that you came on board and trusted me, allowed me to help you create a business that creates trust. It sounds like you’re putting out a lot of trust for the industry and property management industry in your market which I think is awesome as well. You’re changing the perception of property management. There’s a lack of trust. For those that are listening, pay attention to this, people that are not signing up with you that you feel like should be, it’s not because they distrust you, it’s because you haven’t created enough trust for them to pick you over your competition. You just haven’t created enough trust. It’s not that they’re walking around just distrusting everybody. Maybe they are, maybe the property management industry has earned a bad reputation in some ways. But I think more than that, it’s that you haven’t created enough trust. It’s about creating that trust. Anyway, I honor you for your growth. You did all of these. You did it. I just pointed, and you and your husband deserves all the props for making this happen. Robin: Thank you. Jason: Really, you guys have done some phenomenal things. Like you said earlier, “I tried everything.” You have the tenacity. And I gave you ideas, but you tried things, you tried everything out. You did, you trusted the process but you experimented and that’s really what entrepreneurs do. That’s how business works. Robin: Yeah. We’re still tweaking. You mentioned the website. Jason: Always. Robin: I just took the website quiz again last week. I got a B. There’s a couple of things we need to tweak. Jason: I have a new training called Website Secrets that you got to watch. Robin: Right. Jason: And we’re getting to an A. Robin: Yeah, exactly! I know exactly what we need to do and it’s just getting with your team and making those tweaks. Jason: Make sure you watch the training because some of my questions in DoorGrow secrets or in the DoorGrow score quiz. Robin: I will. Jason: If anyone wants to grade their website, you can go to doorgrow.com/quiz and take a test to grade your website, how effective it is to creating trust and getting conversions, but some of the questions are backwards. You think you’re saying, “Yes, I’m going to get this, and I need to add this for my website.” It’s a trick, it’s like the reverse. I didn’t really explain which ones are right and which ones are wrong, I’m just asking do you have this and then it gives you a grade in the end. You’re on the inside. I’ve seen people go and implement a bunch of changes, thinking they could just go off the quiz and then it’s just [...] they can clear things up. Cool. Robin, really great to see you again. I’m excited to hear about your continuing success and what [...] big and brighter future with Concept 360 Property Management. Robin: Thank you. Thank you so much. Jason: Alright. I’ll let Robin go. Really great to connect with her. Always exciting to see and share in the winds with clients. Man, I would love to take all the credit, but my best clients, all the ones that are in my case studies that you guys can see back onto the doorgrow.com/case-studies, these are clients that they trusted the process, but they did the work. They did the work. This is a secret, there’s no company that you can just go hand them money and they’re going to give you contracts. We don’t do that. Marketing agencies can’t do that. The best they can give you, most agencies with cold leads, we’re going to help you build system so that your business grows more organically, that it’s easier that we put gasoline on the fire that works in the sense you which is word of mouth and we optimize your business towards that. If you are struggling to grow, if you are maybe what Robin was in the beginning saying, "It’s a liability, let’s just close it. I’m burnt out, I’m stressed out. I’m not getting any younger." I’ve heard these phrases from clients. Get on the phone with DoorGrow or start with our case studies, go to doorgrow.com/case-studies and just start there. If you go there, there is a free training—it really is the beginning of our program, I give it out for free. There is a link you can click on to watch free training about DoorGrow Secrets. It’s going to share with you concepts like the cycle of suck, the 4Ds to revenue, cold leads versus warm leads, the myth of SEO, so that you can be a more savvy educated person with marketing and growing your business. If you decide that we can help you out, I would love to do that. If you feel like you are a right fit, you are open-minded, you’re the right type of client, I would love and be honored to be able to work with you and coach you and help you grow your company. Again, thanks Robin for coming on the show. Until next time, everybody to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life. This document has been edited with the instant web content composer. The online instant HTML converter make a great resource that will help you a lot in your work. Save this link or add it to your bookmarks.  

Toilets, tenants, and termites: Property management can be a tough business. Have you ever felt like giving up, only to find joy again?  Today, I am talking to Annemarie Sunde of Legacy Property Management. She paints a realistic and transparent turned pretty picture of property management.  You’ll Learn... [03:00] Discovering Development Areas: Annemarie never wanted to be a realtor, but now has a real estate license.  [04:04] Dealing with the Scum of the Earth? Given an opportunity to get into property management, only to learn most property managers and tenants lack integrity.  [04:50] Origins of Legacy Property Management: Treating others with respect that leads to legacy with tenants, owners, and co-workers.  [06:10] DoorGrow’s Time Study: Doing things that cause you stress and headaches. [06:30] Strategic and Futuristic Strengths: Started having fun thinking 20 years ahead about being on a beach and the business naturally growing.  [06:55] Cycle of Suck: Vicious circle of not-great properties, tenants, and owners. [08:40] Business Model and Breaking 100 Doors: Fewer but healthier and fun properties that pay bigger yield.  [09:45] Seeking Clarity: Biggest problem growing and scaling business is blaming everyone and everything else.  [10:47] Tactical vs. Strategic: Entrepreneurs are visionaries; why do the tactical crap?  [14:26] Accidental Perfect Landlords: Owners who take pride in their property. [15:16] Prospecting Channels/Methods: Lead gen from realtor referrals via classes, podcast, and online reputation.  [16:30] Some clients don’t listen, follow the protocols, or get results. Do what you’re told!  [17:48] Door Envy: It’s not about doors, but whether you love your business and life.  [19:25] How do you turn your phone off at night? Do Not Disturb. [20:35] Biggest Benefits of Seed Program: How to design a user-friendly Website, find clarity, ask for reviews, and create an online reputation.  [22:35] If you were to sell your business, what makes you valuable?  [25:07] Magical Mindshift: If you want people to invest in and spend money on you, be willing to do that for yourself.  [28:34] Memoirs of a Property Manager: What we go through managing owners. Tweetables Transparency of Property Management Industry: Toilets, tenants, and termites.  Cycle of Suck: Dealing with scummy owners and tenants sucking you dry.  Entrepreneurs assume everyone else is like them. Nobody’s like us. We’re weird. Resources Legacy Property Management Tom Rath's StrengthsFinder  DiSC DoorGrow Seed Program Yelp AppFolio National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) OpenPotion DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I’m hanging out with the fantastic Annemarie Sunde of Legacy Property Management. Annemarie, welcome to the show. Annemarie: Thanks. Jason: It’s been a while since we’ve chatted. Annemarie: I’m having Jason withdrawals. Jason: Yeah, you’ve mentioned that on the pre-show and I’m like, “You just show up. Show it to our weekly cult review, internally for our clients.” The topic for this episode is how I almost quit and then found joy in property management. Property management can be a tough business. It can be a tough industry. “Toilets, tenants, and termites,” as some of you say. As business owners, we’re often in this promotion-sales mode. We’re just telling everyone how great our business is all the time. We start to almost believe it superficially, but then on the inside, sometimes it’s just not really how it is and there’s this disconnect. I would love to just give people just a taste of some reality and some transparency because business is not always great. Sometimes it’s just really not great. I remember, way back, waking up when I was running my company as OpenPotion and realizing I hated my business. I didn’t like the clients that I was working with at the time. My team were out of alignment with my values. Everything was just off and I just want to stream Netflix today. That’s it. Let’s go back to one of those early conversations you and I had. Give people a little bit of background, you and your business. You can give the pretty picture first. Tell everybody about you. Let’s qualify you. Annemarie: I’m actually a degreed engineer by trade, worked 15 years in Oil and Gas in Denver. When I got married for the second time, I married a realtor, and I consulted to his business, actually growing his business. After a year of doing that, I said I never want to be a realtor. I never want a real estate license in my life, and now I have a real estate license. But I don’t do any of the buy-sell transactional selling, whatsoever. I’m not interested in that, I don’t have the patience for it, and you should know, I lack incredible patience. That’s part of my development that I’ve learned coaching with you. Let’s fast forward a little. Just got into the opportunity to get into property management was offered to me, and I have always done flips, I’ve always had rentals my entire life with my father. I’m like, “Well now, I can be the boss of a tenant. This sounds fun. I can do this.” I did when we started our own business, I worked for a couple of property management companies. I felt they lacked integrity, a lot of what you talk about in DoorGrow. They’re just scummy, dealing with scummy owners, scummy tenants.  Jason: I talk about that? Annemarie. Yeah, the Cycle of Suck. Jason: Oh, the Cycle of Suck. Yes. Annemarie: We had our own rentals and I was like, “You know, there’s got to be owners out there that actually want to be treated like something.” We created Legacy Property Management really to lead legacy with our tenants, with our owners, and with the people that we work with, that work for us. That’s where it was born. My husband stumbled across DoorGrow, and I was one of the first Seed Hackers 1.0. Jason: Jeff, right? Annemarie: Yes. I got into the Seed Hacker Program and then I got into coaching, but when I got into coaching with you, I was cooked. I hated my business. I was looking for anybody that wanted to offer me a good sum of money to buy my business. I did not want to be in it anymore. So, that’s where I was. Jason: I remember this conversation. You were describing your business, you’re like “I want out,” and what did you want? Annemarie: I wanted to be with my kids and I wanted to go sit on a beach. Jason: You’re right. I want to spend time with my kids. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to deal with all these headaches and stress, and I’ve seen this. I’ve seen this a lot. And it doesn’t the business or the industry, it’s not even about the business or the industry. What did you realize it was about? I’ll ask you. Annemarie: I was doing things that completely stressed me out. It started with a lot of the exercises you had us do on the coaching call, but one of the big things was the time study. The very first time I did a time study. I am not a tactical person, whatsoever. I am highly strategic. I’m the 50,000 foot. I actually did a Tom Rath StrenghtsFinders and I have strategic and futuristic in my strengths. I’m 20 years ahead of everybody, thinking about how I’m going to get myself onto a beach. When I learned that, your comment to me was, “When you’re doing the tactical crap in your business, this is when you are grumpy. This is when you can’t handle it. This is when you’re stressed. This is when your kids are driving you crazy. This is when your phone’s going in the toilet. All of those things.” The minute I took that out of my job description and I was doing strategy, I started having so much fun, and the business was naturally growing because I was having fun. Jason:We’ve thrown out a couple of terms that are insider terms here, right? So some people who are hearing this for the first time are like, “What are they talking about? They’re speaking some language only they know.” Let’s explain what the Cycle of Suck is. What is your perception of what the Cycle of Suck is? Annemarie: It’s this vicious circle of not a great property, not a great owner yields crappy tenants, and it just keeps going round and round and round. You can’t get out of the circle. Jason: The bad reputation and then you attract more bad owners, more bad properties. That’s where the whole industry sits in general, as a whole and aggregate in the industry has a negative reputation, and most businesses are taking on any owner. That’s something that the whole industry needs to shift. Annemarie: I did that. When I first met you guys, that’s where I was. You’re hungry, you’re starting a business, you just take in anything you can take, and you’re realizing that the low-end people are sucking you dry, costing me more money because I’m using attorneys. It just wasn’t a fun thing. So, I elevated our business model. We do know multi-family, for example. That’s our choice. We have fewer properties that pay a bigger yield so I’m sitting at about 110 doors, and I love it. Jason: Amazing. You broke 100. I love it. Annemarie: I did. Finally! Jason: Did you throw a party? You should’ve throw a party. Annemarie: We are going to throw a party. I think my senior property manager and I are going somewhere. Jason: You deserve to throw a party. That’s awesome. They’re healthier properties than where you were. Annemarie. Yes. They’re fun properties and we love representing them. Jason: I remember that first conversation. You just want to spend time with your kids. You wanted out of the business, and I remember what I said to you. I said, “You’re just doing it wrong. We can bring this business into alignment around you,” but at that time you were serving the business. You were a slave to the business instead of the business fulfilling you and your needs, specifically. [...] an alignment with you. Every business is different. What would work for you and fulfill you is different for me. We had a hard time even getting into this software, but I love the nerdy stuff. I would do technical stuff and I’d put that as part of my role in the business. You will hire someone up. Everybody’s team looks different. If we build the right team around us, but the only way we can do that is if we’re clear on ourselves and that’s the biggest problem people have with growing and scaling companies or teams because they have no clarity on themselves. So, they’re externalizing everything and blaming the business, they’re blaming their team, they’re blaming their clients, and the problem is them. Once you get clear on you and we have clarity on what really fulfills you and energizes you and drains you. You mentioned tactical versus strategic, right? Entrepreneurs, generally, we are strategic people. We’re the visionaries. That’s generally who all of us are as entrepreneurs. Some of us enjoy some of the tactical stuff. There are tactical things that I do enjoy, and you can hold onto those if you want to. But, in general, all the tactical things that we hold onto are the things that are holding us back. They’re holding an entire business back. The tactical things that drain us are the things that are keeping the entire company from growing and it makes us the biggest bottleneck in the company. Annemarie: I figured everybody was like me. Why would they want to do the tactical crap? I actually have people that work for me and they can’t even see beyond their nose, and they’re fine doing the tactical day in, day out, day stuff. I can’t stand it. Jason: That’s a big mistake we make as entrepreneurs. We assume everyone else are like us. Nobody’s like us. We’re weird. Raise the chair. My team members, they love doing the things that they love doing. I don’t love doing the things that they love doing. Annemarie: Me neither. Jason: That’s great. There’s seven billion people or whatever in the planet. There’s always people that love doing the stuff that you don’t love doing and that’s such an interesting mindset shift—to realize somebody would love doing this stuff. [...] that gift by giving it up, Annmarie: You even taught me how to screen somebody if I’m going to hire them. They go through this whole process now that we have, including a DISC profile to see because I am High D and I am the bull in the China shop. If I’m always going to have to massage your feelings because I just let it fly, then you’re probably not the person to work for me. Jason: You mentioned a few things that you did to go through this transition. As you shifted your business away from doing all the things that you felt like were draining you, that put you in a position where you wanted out, like you wanted to get rid of the business, what did you realize pretty quickly as you started to make these changes? You’ve already thrown out the word “fun” a few times, I’ve noticed. Annemarie: If I have a week where I am doing tactical things, I put my mind into, “Okay, this is a week,” and I warn my family, “This is what I got on my plate. I could be nasty this week because I’m not having fun this week.” That happens a lot when I’m bringing on a new person and I’m training them on having to do the day-to-day again. What I found to be the most exciting for me is I love to strategize on how we’re going to get properties. The way we get properties is hugely through realtor referrals because we don’t sell or buy any properties, so we’re a safeplace for them, and through my class that I teach. I’m teaching probably 2–3 a quarter now. I just did two and I have four properties from those two classes. It’s people that I want to work with. It’s owners that take pride or we call them the accidental landlords that they bought in this market. We had so many people going in and out of the state right now, it’s crazy. They don’t want to lose the foothold in the Denver market. They’re petrified someone’s going to trash their house. That’s the perfect landlord for me. We talk a lot about that to realtors that have owners that they just sold a house to and now that’s where they go back to. What do I do with my house? Jason: That was a significant piece. If you go back in your transition is getting clarity on what you really wanted. Annemarie: And what I enjoyed doing. Jason: Declare on your avatar in getting clear on what type of client you really were wanting to work with. I remember we had several conversations about that. Also, we talked quite a bit about different channels for prospecting and you found different methods that really worked for you. You were doing everything from podcasts. Annemarie: I still do the podcasts. That’s on Thursday this week, and it’s with the investor. I get more leads out of that. The three places I get my leads are realtor referrals probably coming from my classes, my podcast, and my online reputation which is what people should not even be asking if they do the Seed Hacker Program because that blew my business right out of the water. I just got another house this week from a Yelp review. Jason: So, those three channels, you didn’t really have a system or a process, you weren’t even really focused on those three channels before you had gone through the program. Annemarie: I had no idea what to do. Jason: Those were just three that worked for you. Somebody else could do three different things that might work for them. Help people understand. Some people are like, “I don’t know about Jason,” or they may be on the fence about working with me and they’re like, “I don’t know because I hear mixed reviews,” because I have clients that they don’t do stuff. They don’t listen to me. They don’t follow the protocols. They don’t get the results. You just did what I told you to do. You just did it. Annemarie: And sometimes, I have the tendency to compare myself to somebody else. We just talked about, I broke 100 doors. I’m now entering my fourth year of business and I hit 100 doors. So, four years and I hit 100 doors. I have to say that if you don’t know the Denver market, for the last two years, houses have been selling and there’s no inventory. I probably bumped into 100 several times, but I’ve lost 12–20 out of my portfolio from sales that owners decided to sell. That’s attrition in the business, but I got to say that I was constantly comparing myself. I’d passed two years and I can’t get to 100. Then I stopped focusing on it and I started focusing on getting rid of my crappy owners because those were crappy properties, and bringing on good owners that I wanted to work with and properties I wanted to. I marketed in those areas. Jason: I remember. I remember this conversation. I remember you were having door envy. You were like, “I haven’t broken that 100-door barrier. I want to break 100 doors,” like it was this thing. Do you remember what I said to you? Annemarie: Calm down. Jason: Yeah. Don’t worry about it. It’s not about doors. It’s about, do you love your business? Are you enjoying yourself? Are you getting the life that you want to have? Are you getting to spend time with your kids? Do you enjoy your team members? Do you like the people that you work with. This is your life. Don’t get me wrong, I like when people go after a goal, but once you let go of it having to look a certain way and you focused on aligning the business with you, it just started to happen naturally for you. Annemarie: What made me let go was setting critical numbers, another secret word in the secret club. I set critical numbers, and yes, one of my critical numbers was number of doors, but one of my top critical numbers was revenue coming in. What I found was, for the last two years, I’m making my critical revenue number despite being under 100 doors. That’s what proved to me, “Who cares?” I can still go on vacation and literally shut it off. I don’t know a lot of property managers. I have to tell you, the funniest post was one in the Facebook group when someone posted, “How do you turn off your phone at night?” After I laughed for literally 10 minutes, I went in on probably a paragraph of crap on, “First of all,” and then ended with, “and you should call Jason,” because seriously, on my phone that was the most liberating thing. I shut my phone off at 8:15 every night and it’s silent, just Do Not Disturb until 7:15 the next morning. I don’t care what’s happening. There are professionals out there that can help them, not me. Jason: All right. Great. No, I love this. Let’s go to the Seed Program, going through that portion which the coaching stuff that I took you through, we folded into our new version of the seed program, like majority of that stuff. So, it’s all one program now. Going through all of it, what do you feel were the biggest benefits and the biggest takeaways for you? Annemarie: I had a website because I used that folio. That folio gives you this website. It’s just learning what things to draw people. I had no clue and quite frankly I really didn’t want to, and I love that there’s a whole team of your people that will make a website change in literally three seconds of my time. There’s that component of really designing a website that’s user-friendly, and I tweak it all the time based on what I see other people’s websites. Why keep recreating the wheel? That was a big thing. Understanding what you wanted to focus on because when you get into property management, if you’re going to focus on multi-family like we do know multi-family, and from our owners, they love that we do know multi-family. That’s a different management than single-family luxury homes. That’s our niche. That’s where we focus. The other thing, I had no clue. I just thought we had to be SEO be the first, blah, blah, blah. I had no clue what online reputation was. The first I remember two or three clients that came on because, “Wow, you have a great Yelp review. You have five stars on whatever,” and I’m like, “Wow. This stuff works!” So, I learned that this was important and to go and ask for the review. That is part of our workflow process. If from a tenant, contractor, realtor that’s referred us, or owner, we ask for referrals endlessly online and it has really helped us. Jason: With that, we taught you how to build a process around that and how to leverage the law of reciprocity psychologically and all that. Annemarie: I just learned really quickly at a recent NARPM chapter lunch, they had a really great speaker on, “If you were to sell your business, what makes you valuable?” Outside of number of doors, income or profit, the third thing is, “How involved are you in your business?” Because that means that it’s not translatable. If they’re going to buy it, they’re going to have to buy you to keep it going and some people don’t want to do that. I looked at my husband because he always think I got to be involved and I’m like, “I told you. I could be this much money if I would just go somewhere.” So, now he’s on board because he heard that. I can easily go on vacation with my business. It’s much harder as a realtor to go on vacation, if you’ve got a buyer you got to be carting around. That’s how I look at it. I want to be able to come in and out of my business as I need to. That’s the part that I love. Jason: Shameless plug. For those that are on the fence, there’s like, “Maybe I show up at DoorGrow, maybe not.” What would you tell them? Annemarie: Don’t even think about it. Seriously. I realized that I was in the guinea pig stages of Seed Hacker, and I thought, “Oh, my gosh. How am I going to spend this money as a young company?” It’s paid for itself long ago, so it’s totally worth it. Jason, you have an amazing staff that people will email you, you don’t even know who these people are and they got it. I love it. It’s great. Obviously, I was at the DoorGrowLive last year and we thought it was fantastic. In terms of the resources that you have, with your coach and parlaying those or after listening to him speak, I looked at my husband and I’m like, “Guess what? I don’t have to pay that much because I paid Jason and he gives that to me!” I mean I learned so much. Jason: I invest a lot in the coaches. I just signed up with another coach. I’ve got three coaches right now. If I mentioned how much money I spend on coaching annually, they would lose it because it’s probably more than most property managers’ annual salary. It’s pretty ridiculous, but that’s how I have value to offer to others and that’s the one thing I would tell everybody listening. If you want people to invest in you, you want people to spend money with you, you have to be willing to do that to yourself. You have to be willing to invest in yourself and there’s a magical mindset shift that happened for me the second I decided to pay to invest in myself. Not just pay for a team member, not just pay for some marketing [...], when I paid to invest in myself and in my business, it changed my perception of my value and it changed how I sold. It changed my own confidence level in being able to pull in business. There’s an energetic shift that happens that when you invest in yourself, other people will invest in you, too. Annemarie: I’m sitting here thinking about, I definitely have an entrepreneurial spirit, this isn’t the first business I’ve run. One could come in and say, “Okay, I did a few rentals here and there.” Now, when I hear people say, “I’m going to get into property management,” I just think, “Oh, my gosh. The guy just did a nine minute video on the four new Colorado laws impacting landlords and property management,” and I sent it to my owners. I spent two months on Capitol Hill trying to fight these bills and it’s just crazy. People are going to get themselves in so much trouble. What I found is when I started coaching and going with DoorGrow is one could approach it, 10–20 properties, you could probably manage it. But when you start to get such a portfolio and you really don’t have processes, you really don’t know what you’re doing to be honest with you. I agree with you. Once you know where you’re really good at, and that’s why I said doing what you’re created to do and hiring people to do the other stuff. I still do listing appointments. I don’t do them all anymore. Remember you told me, “You need to give that up.” And I’m like, “You’re crazy. I’m the only one that could do a listing appointment.” Jason: I’m like, “Let go of your ego,” right? Annemarie: Right. It was like, “They can’t do it. They can’t do it. We can’t lose this,” and now, I don’t even want to go, but sometimes, I do. Sometimes it just keeps me in touch with this is what life is about and this is what they’re facing. I do them, but I have no problems handing that kind of stuff off. I like to be in teaching and doing the videos and doing the podcast. That’s my gig. That’s what I like. Jason: And you’re enjoying it. Annemarie: I am. I love that part. Jason: It’s such a transition. This is one of the things that’s amazing for me as a coach, that I get to see the contrast. I remember that conversation. I remember you wanting out and not liking it, and you’re a passionate person when you talk. I felt it. Now, you can feel this, too. You’re like, “love” and “fun.” These are adjectives that you’re associating with your business which most property managers are like, “She’s high on something right now. I don’t know what Jason gave her, but this sounds like crazy talk.” Annemarie: Having the right people, honestly, makes the job a lot more fun. My property manager’s been with me the longest. We literally wrote a coffee table book for our owners for Christmas. It’s Memoirs of a Property Manager. We can’t make this up. We were sitting in Starbucks, laughing to the point of how retarted are these people, and we manage them! She said, “We should put this in a book and give them to our owners just to remind them what we deal with.” So, we did and they are asking when’s the next volume coming. You got to have time for that. Jason: You don’t want to anymore. Annemarie: I tell them a lot of times, “If we can’t laugh about it, then certainly we will be in the fetal position crying about it.” Jason: Laughter is the stage before fear. Annemarie, it’s so good to catch up with you. I really appreciate you. I appreciate your husband, Jeff. It’s been phenomenal watching you guys progress and feeling all the love back from you guys. I really appreciate that. I just get to work with the most awesome clients. This is the type of things that I love doing. This is my jam. I enjoy it. It’s been great being able to work with you and I appreciate you coming and hanging out here on the DoorGrow Show with me. Annemarie: Yup. And I will say, if I have one piece of advice, if they do hire DoorGrow, the Seed Hacker, do what they say to do. It’s not take a pill and hope for the best. It’s you having to do the work. I was all in. If I was going to spend the money, I was all in. I was going to do what I was told to do and that’s my biggest advice. Don’t spend it if you’re not going to do it. Jason: Right. And to be honest, those are the only clients that get great results. It’s that last 10% of doing the stuff that I tell people to do, that not everybody really wants to do. It’s that last little dialing and that last little 10% that gets you 90% of the results. Annemarie: Yup. We appreciate you guys, for sure. Jason: All right, Annemarie. Thanks so much. I will let you go. Bye. Annemarie: Bye. Jason: That’s super rewarding for me as a coach. I don’t know that there’s anything more fulfilling than being able to see a client progress. It’s like watching my children succeed in anything. It doesn’t even matter what it is, it just feels good because you’re seeing this. It’s really awesome to have her come on the show. If you are property management entrepreneur, you feel like you need somebody in your corner. You want somebody that believes in you, somebody that can challenge you, somebody that can help you see something you can’t see because you’re in it, you’re too close to the fire, I need people to tell me the same stuff that I would tell myself to do because I’m too close to the fire in my own business. I would be honored to take on helping you in your business, being your coach, and helping you grow your company. Reach out to DoorGrow. We’re really picky about the clients that we take on because I want clients like Annemarie. I want clients that are going to do what I tell them to do. I want clients that going to trust the process. I want clients that are going to go all in. If you feel like you’re that type of person, then reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. That is it for today. Goodbye everybody and until next time to your and our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

When property managers need a helping hand, where can they go to find the right handyman/maintenance contractor? Today, I am talking to Liz Koser of Keepe, an on-demand marketplace that fills the supply-and-demand gap between contractors and property managers. Liz is a real estate investor and landlord with 10 properties, 15 doors.  You’ll Learn... [01:40] Early Exposure to Property Management: Liz is following in her parents’ footsteps of real estate investing.  [01:54] Own vs. Rent: Liz’s first condo was her own home that turned into her first rental. Since then, she typically purchases 1–2 properties a year. [02:07] Diversify Property Portfolio: First year for Liz to explore out-of-state investing.  [03:32] A lot like Uber: Based on location and availability, contractors go through a background check before picking up jobs via Keepe’s mobile app. [04:00] Keepe Connecting through Techstars: Fast track program for startups to get feedback on product/market fit; network with others to quickly bring things to market. [04:39] Future Growth Goals: Keepe’s on the West Coast and making its way to Denver and beyond.  [06:25] Why choose to use Keepe? Allows property managers to feel safe expanding, growing their business, and extend the reach or capability to get jobs done. [08:55] Keepe Options as Seasons Change: When things heats up, it’s time to grow.  [10:07] Keepe’s Process: No monthly subscription fee, paid on-demand.  [11:08] Common Concerns and Questions: Keepe constantly collects data and feedback from customers and others to improve its network of contractors. [12:25] Building Relationships and Referrals: Bring over or block contractors to join the network.  Tweetables Diversify within the real estate investing realm. Pick up out-of-state properties, and continue down that path. When everything heats up, that’s the time to grow. Keepe makes property managers feel safe expanding, growing their business to get jobs done. Resources Liz Koser's Email Keepe Techstars Uber Lyft DoorGrow Secrets DoorGrow Newsletter DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. And today, I’m hanging out with the fantastic Liz Koser of Keepe. Liz, welcome to the show. Liz: Thanks for having me. Jason: Liz, give us a little bit of a background. Who is Liz? The bio that I have says you’re a Seattle real estate investor, landlord, you have 10 of your own properties, 15 doors, alongside with your husband, your parents actively invest in rental property, and you were exposed to this early on. Tell us a little more about you and how you got into property management or into the space. Liz: As you said, my parents were already investing in real estate and I have bought my first condo in 2009, which was my own home, and that eventually became my first rental. Then from 2012 to now, I steadily bought 1–2 properties a year. Last year, we didn’t get any, but this year we already have two and I think we’ll probably going to continue to add this year and continue to be aggressive about it. That’s where I’m at on the investing side. Also, I think I mentioned this in my bio, but this is the first year where I’ve explored investing out-of-state. I picked up my first out-of-state property and have every intention of continuing down that path. With the Seattle market, it’s high and it just makes sense also to diversify. I know people diversify within the stock market. I actually think it’s somewhat important to diversify within the real estate investing realm as well. Jason: Now, lead us towards Keepe. How did Keepe get started, what’s your role there, and give us a little background there. Liz: Keepe got started because there is a supply and demand gap between having handymen available and property managers’ need for finding handymen, especially in the markets that we’re in today. Keepe got started as a way to address that gap. We are an on-demand marketplace, matching contractors and property managers. It works a lot like Uber in that contractors pick up jobs on mobile app, based on location and availability. They go through a background check and so on. One of the Keepe founders does also own rental properties. I had known him previously and that is how I made the initial connection. Keepe went through Techstars in 2016. Jason: What is Techstars? Liz: Techstars is a startup incubator, which is a fast track program for startup companies to get feedback on product and market, the whole fit, top-end networking with lots of other entrepreneurs and investors to bring things to market more quickly. Jason: Okay, So, that means it rapidly was getting ready faster. Where’s Keepe at now in terms of growth and penetration? How new is Keepe for those that are listening? Liz: We’ve been in Seattle the longest, but actually Keepe is in the greater Seattle area, Portland, San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Phoenix, Arizona, and then most recently Los Angeles and Orange County. Jason: You’ve hit a lot of the major markets here on the West Coast, right? Liz: Yup. Jason: What’s next, Denver? Liz: Yeah. I think Denver is a very good candidate and I’m actually from Colorado, so Denver would be a good fit for me personally in terms of running the sales side of Keepe. Also, I think Austin, Texas or the Dallas Fort Worth area, but definitely we’re here to grow nationally. With that, the first step is getting off the West Coast, right? Jason: Right. When you start shifting towards the east, it’s going to be Atlanta and Jacksonville. Those are big markets for us. They seem to attract a lot of businesses there. Certainly those. Liz: It’s interesting. We’ve actually received a few phone calls from the Atlanta area, property managers asking if we’re there yet. That’s a good sign we’re getting preemptive calls. Jason: All right. So the goal is expansion, you guys are growing, and eventually people will be listening to this because this episode will have been out for a while and you might already be in some of these new markets, right? Liz: Right. Jason: Explain to everybody why they should choose to use Keepe. I know a lot of property managers are like, “Well, we find our own people,” or, “I don’t trust this.” What are some of the typical things that you tell people to sell this to them? Liz: One, starting now, a lot of property managers who use Keepe kind of slow go. Let’s say they start to send us a handful of jobs and then over time, we end up gaining a larger portion of maintenance from our customers. I know people have their trusty handyman, but I would say a big need comes up when people say, “Oh, no. My handyman retired or moved away,” and this happens all the time. That is one area where if you’re counting on one or even two people, there’s a company in Arizona that said, “Oh, both our people retired at the same time.” It just doesn’t work in the long run. The other thing is when property managers are depending on those one or two handymen and they’re also a little bit geographically limited. Some of our customers maybe were in a certain Bay Area city, let’s say San Jose, and they’re weren’t willing to pick up clients in San Mateo because they didn’t have a contractor in San Mateo. Using Keepe now opens the door to look at branching out into other geographies as well. We’ve had customers that have been able to expand their footprint because they have Keepe in their back pocket and they know they can handle maintenance in other areas. Jason: So, having Keepe allows these property managers to feel safe expanding, growing their business, and allows them to extend the reach or capability as far as their challenges with getting jobs taken care of that they have. If the handyman retires, moves, all these kinds of stuff, then they’re typically in pain. This is one when they typically would reach out to Keepe? Is this what you’re finding? Liz: That is where they are like, “Oh, great. Now I get it.” We have a lot of property managers try us out before that point and we’ve had property managers that have said, “Oh, great. This helps me grow because I maybe had one on-staff handyman or two and I wasn’t sure about adding a third.” Sometimes, they realize that there’s busy seasons and so seasons, so, “How do I keep our team busy throughout the year?” Well, you might be able to keep one person busy throughout the year and utilize Keepe instead of adding a second person. There’s a lot of options here. Jason: That’s a little bit of flexibility to what they’ve got going on, which makes a lot of sense. Property management is a very seasonal sort of business. It really heats up in the summer and even if you look at Google Trends and look at search volume, you can see the year just spike through summer every single year in search volume for property management. That’s when everything heats up and that’s the time to grow if they’re needing to expand during those seasonal times without bringing on staff because bringing on somebody long-term is a commitment. Nobody wants to lay somebody off if things gets a little lame. It allows them a little safer adjusting. How does the process work with Keepe? How do they work with you? Liz: We have a pretty easy sign-up process and we actually don’t have a monthly subscription fee. We are paid on-demand. Keepe is both a platform and in the [...] contractors. All the payments flow through us. Invoicing comes from Keepe and we pay out the contractors. The sign-up process is pretty much getting set-up for billing terms. When property managers use us for a job, that’s when we make money. We actually don’t have a monthly subscription. Jason: Interesting. So, it’s only when you need it. Liz: Yeah, but our job is to earn a greater percentage of our customer’s business, which is good for our customers because that means that we are working to build a relationship in the long run. Jason: Fantastic. What are some of the common questions or concerns that people will bring up when they call you? We got people listening right now. They probably have these questions. What are the typical concerns that they have in handing something over to Keepe? Liz: We get questions about how do we find the contractors and what’s our process for getting contractors on board. Sometimes, people think that there’s somebody in the background dialing a list to find them a contractor. It’s just shifting the burden. We actually have a team that interviews contractors. We do criminal background checks and then from there, we are collecting ratings on the contractors, so tenants today are the ones that respond once a job is complete unless it’s a vacant unit and it’s a rental turn, then it would be the property manager. We’re constantly collecting this feedback and we have contractors that have been in our network for multiple years. We do remove contractors at times. So, it’s all about the feedback loop and continuously improving the network. Jason: Got it. Fantastic. Any other questions or concerns that they might have or that they bring up during the sales process? Liz: One question we get is if they don’t like a contractor, can they block them? Yes, we do allow property managers to block certain contractors. It’s come up more recently is, “If we end up going with Keepe, can our handyman join Keepe’s network?” Yes, we are happy to take those referrals from property managers. They are probably some of the best referrals we can get because if one property manager likes the contractor, then that’s a good sign going forward. Jason: It kind of like a timeshare. Liz: Yeah, a little bit. Jason: They’re like, “Can I share my contractor with some of the other people in your network, so I can keep them on?” Liz: Yeah, definitely. Once question we get is can they request their contractor. When you think about how Uber and Lyft operate, where they’re matching you with the driver near that location when they’re available, that is essentially how our network works. Although you could have a preference for someone, if that person is not available at that scheduled time, then it’s not going to be an exact matching. That’s one thing to keep in mind with a fluid marketplace is that it doesn’t work with the on-demand model to request a specific person necessarily. Jason: It’s optimized for efficiency. The trade-off in not getting to pick Steve is that you get the job done for faster and probably get a better review. Liz: Yup. Jason: This is very interesting, super helpful. I’m excited to see you guys expand into some more markets and grow. Anything else anybody should know about Keepe that we didn’t cover? Liz: I am always interested in hearing from people in other markets, too. Like I mentioned, we had a few calls from the Atlanta area. I do make note when people come to us and I’m like, “Oh, there’s already a lot of demand there.” So, even if we’re not in your city today, I would recommend reaching out because I do track that. It’s very telling of demand and helps us in the decision-making as we move forward into new markets. Jason: Liz, how can people get in touch with you to let you know they want you and your market or if they’re in one of the markets that you cover, how can they get in touch? Liz: They can reach me at [email protected]. Jason: And they can check Keepe out at keepe.com, right? Liz: Yes. Jason: Perfect. All right. Liz, it’s great having you on the show. Excited to see Keepe grow and expand. It sounds like the service that helps feel that in-between gap between people’s in-house maintenance, people’s seasonal maintenance, some of these challenges that they’re dealing with. I look forward to seeing which markets you get into next. Liz: All right. Thank you for having me on the show, Jason. Jason: Yeah. Thanks for being here. So, check them out at keepe.com and see if it might fit. As always, I love getting feedback from you guys, so let me know what you think of these guys. And I appreciate Liz being here on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that is wanting to add doors, you’re trying to figure things out, you’re struggling, and things just don’t seem to be working, I would love to have a conversation with you. Reach out to our team. Go to doorgrow.com, give us a call, connect with us, schedule an appointment, and check us out. If you are a property management business that can handle adding 50 new doors at least, you want to add maybe 100 doors over the next year at least, then you can go to doorgrow.com/optin. Plug in your email address and that will get you access to some case studies. See if you can see other people that have done it. And they’ve done it without SEO, pay-per-click and content marketing, without social media marketing, without pay-per-lead. They were able to grow their businesses organically, healthily, with warm leads to take away last time, have a much higher close rate. You’ll also see that they’re all really happy, which is not super normal sometimes in this industry. It’s a tough industry. I want you to notice that. So, check out those case studies. On that case studies page, I have a link to free training called DoorGrow Secrets that really is the beginning of our training material that I give out for free. I’m going to share with you and add some concepts like The Cycle of Suck, The Four Ds to Revenue, Cold Leads Versus Warm Leads, The Myth of SEO, and some other cool stuff that’s going to help you see why growth has been challenging and what makes the most sense to help you grow your business. Hopefully, everybody checks that out, doorgrow.com/optin is where you go to that; one word. So, until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Why switch from a fun, high-flying job to a stressful one? Property management is the “Golden Ticket” to finding new properties and creating value to help others. Today, I am talking to Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management about putting profitability before adding more doors. If your company isn’t profitable, than you can’t create value for the community it serves. You’ll Learn... [02:00] Property Manager with Spare Time: Shawn serves as an instructor pilot for San Juan County Sheriff’s Office.  [02:40] NARPM professional member, chapter president, and residential management professional (RMP). [04:30] Passion for Property Management: Happiness comes not from avoiding problems, but finding fun challenges. [06:02] Innovative Incentive: Competing for staff resources increases salaries, compensation, and revenue to successfully facilitate growth and manage the company. [07:35] DiSC Personality Type: Motivated by money or recognition? [10:15] What makes a business profitable? Finding perfect customer/market fit via value-ads and associated fees.  [13:42] Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort without extra pay. [14:57] Cost Savings: Implement less labor-intensive work (paper checklists) and more technology (videos). [15:55] Tools and Software: Transition from a brick-n-mortar business to remote/virtual office using G Suite, Process Street, AppFolio, and RingCentral. [18:35] Current Client Base: Push out and justify new fee structure; talk them through it. [22:15] Sense of Scarcity: Feel safer and more comfortable raising fees and rates. [24:05] People are willing to pay for good service and experiences.  Tweetables Golden Ticket: Finding new properties, and creating value for others. Property management is never dull. Some people aren’t motivated by money, but freedom. Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort. Resources Independence Capital Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Darren Hunter G Suite Process Street AppFolio RingCentral TalkRoute DGS 7: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 1 DGS 8: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 2 DGS 9: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 3 DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DGS 82: Real Estate Revolution with Nat Kunes of AppFolio DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to change the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. And today, my guest is Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management. Shawn, welcome to the show. Shawn: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you. Shawn, we’re going to be getting into the topic today of profitability before more doors. When I mentioned that before the show, you’re like, “Yes, the cart before the horse.” Let’s get into that, but first, I want to give people a little bit of background on you. I’ve got your bio here and I’m going to read this and then maybe you can come and introduce yourself. Shawn grew up in Aztec, Nex Mexico. After completion of his Associate’s Degree from Glendale Community College, Shawn began flight school in Scottsdale, Arizona. Shawn’s career as a helicopter pilot provided opportunities to fly internationally into Mexico, off-shore into the gulf of Mexico, and as an EMS helicopter pilot. Shawn currently flies for the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office as an instructor pilot in his spare time. Shawn began his career in real estate in 2013 and has been investing in real estate since 2003. Shawn is currently a professional member of the National Association of Residential Property Managers and has earned his Residential Management Professional (RMP) designation. In 2017, he served as the NARPM Albuquerque Metro Chapter President and has been elected to serve at the 2020 Chapter President. Shawn enjoys golf, baseball, hunting, and fishing. He apparently is also connected with lots of really lengthy phrases and titles including his business name. Shawn, give us a little bit of a background. Who’s Shawn and how did you get into property management, so people can understand why should they listen to this guy say anything. Shawn: How did I get into property management? It’s kind of by default. My wife pulled me into it. She was a corporate paralegal for a large investment firm in California and in that process we moved, had kids, we moved to New Mexico, and she decided, “You know what? I think there is a need here.” There is definitely a need and we’ve started a management company. I was still flying helicopters at the time but she’s like, “You know what? I can’t do it alone. You’ve got to get out of the fun job and get into the stressful job.” So, I quit flying and here I am. Jason: And you regretted it ever since, right? Shawn: No, I actually really enjoy it. Jason: Good. Shawn: Your introduction to property management is spot on. I think there’s so much gold in it and it’s just really creating value for people. I really enjoy it. Really, it’s a nice “in” to investing in properties. I love investing in properties and this is like a golden ticket to find new properties. Jason: Property managers and everyone in the industry love to joke about how hard the industry is, but there is this passion for it that everyone seems to develop. I think happiness comes not through avoiding problems and challenges. It comes through finding challenges that are exciting to work on and property management is never dull. Shawn: Yeah, that’s a fact. Jason: Never dull, right? Shawn: No. Jason: Let’s get into this topic. Why is it important to have profitability before focusing on getting more doors? Shawn: For us, it was always a mission to be profitable right at the start. Back in the day, we’re just a management fee company. Because of that, we relented in the growth. We had to find ways to make money and compensate our employees appropriately. We live in a very blue collar town that is oil- and gas-driven and the salaries are very hard to compete with. We had to find ways to compensate them nice so that they weren’t pulled away from property management into oil and gas industry. Those are the things that were important to us. If you’re not a profitable company, you can’t create value for the community that you serve. You just can’t. You have to have money to be able to grow and expand and introduce new programs into your business. That was our mission right at the beginning. Jason: Because you’re competing with oil and gas for staff resources in your market, you’ve had to probably have a higher salary base than what would be typical for most management companies in most markets. Shawn: Yeah, they sell. Jason: In order to do that, you probably had to get a little bit innovative. Anytime we have a constraint as an entrepreneur, we have a challenge like that to overcome, we have to innovate. What were some of the steps you took to create a space that you could afford to have really good team members?  Shawn: One step was to create an incentivized comp plan. Our property managers are licensed real estate brokers, but we pay them off a percentage as the whole of the portfolio, not just a management fee. Anytime they bring in a late fee or an annual inspection that’s performed on the property, then they get a portion of that fee as well. That help us increase their annual revenue as well because it hurts when they lose a property and when we get a new property on, it actually helps them gain their salary as well. Jason: Okay. You’ve basically created the natural incentive for them to help facilitate growth and help successfully manage the company. And if the company does better, they do better.  Shawn: Exactly. Jason: I find that a lot of people, especially those that on a DISC profile that are not DI, they don’t have a high economic score. They’re not super motivated by additional money. As entrepreneurs, we tend to naturally think everyone’s like us; they love money. Those individuals that are not motivated by more money are more motivated by recognition. When you pick these team members and you have this comp plan, are you looking for people that also operate somewhat in a BDM role? Are they more of a sales-driven type of person? Are they a DI DISC personality type or more on the extroverted side? Shawn: No, we actually don’t want to mix those two―BDM and a portfolio management. You’re right. A lot of people are not motivated financially like entrepreneurs are, but what we found is giving unlimited vacation time, some perks to the business, having the ability to work from home or wherever they are. Everything that we do is electronic and digital anyway, so those perks. A lot of them are young parents and if they need to pick up their kid at school at three o’clock, who am I to say? As long as your job is done and you’re doing it effectively, then we don’t put constraints on that. I think that pools in that attraction to the job. Jason: I find those to be huge incentives, similar to running our virtual teams. Being able to work virtually and work from home, having flex time, being able to set your own schedule and as long as you’re getting work done, and being able to take vacations when you need to or want to, that’s huge. People want freedom. They want autonomy and that tends to attract the more entrepreneurial people we would like in our business. To what you’re saying, yeah it makes sense. The BDM portfolio thing would be segregated. But also that allows you, in your market, to have compensation that is on par with maybe what they might be getting in the oil and gas industry or at least competitive, right? Shawn: Absolutely. I would say that our salaries, once they have a full portfolio, they’re making as much, if not more, than what they would get comped in oil and gas industry which is good. That’s what we want. Jason: Right, and in oil and gas industry, they probably don’t have some of those other perks, I would imagine? Shawn: Oh, not at all. Jason: You’ve made your business intentionally competitive to maintain good people. Let’s get deeper into the profitability aspect. Since you’re paying more money for people, how do you make sure this is profitable? Shawn: We really evaluated the things that we did as a business beyond just the normal management stuff. What are the value-adds that we do every day? If they are a true value-add, can we add an associated value-add fee to it? We kind of looked at it that way. We went through Darren Hunter’s program and it was phenomenal. It definitely revolutionized the way we thought about our fee structure, but it also helped us think about and be cautious of those clients that are cost-conscious. If they are and all they care about is the cost of the service, then they may not be the right fit. It naturally brings in that right type of clientele when you have a fee structure beyond just a flat fee and everybody else is doing the same flat fee or whatever percentage fee. So, that was huge for us. As far as profitability goes, it varies in leasing season, but in our leasing season we’re about 44% profitability. Leasing fees and lease renewal fees, those things have to happen in the property management business. But to actually gain revenue from it is extremely important. I could look at our business structure and see that we have a leasing fee and we have a lease renewal fee, but my competitors lease homes in twice the amount of time that we do and they don’t push for lease renewals. So me as an investor, I’d be upset if they didn’t try to keep my tenants in a lease especially through the winter time. Such a cyclical business, we have seasons, and you don’t want it to go vacant in December. That little fee is nothing compared to having a vacant home in those times. Jason: What other fees did you guys start to identify and add going through this process? Shawn: We did a lease administration fee for our tenants. That was pretty big. The annual inspection fees—that’s a third party vendor that’s an actual inspector and he’ll come inspect the houses on an annual basis—there’s a little upcharge for that. A year-end statement fee. We found that our controller list just spinning a ton of time preparing for the year-end stuff and making sure everything was clear to send off to our clients’ accountants, so we incorporated a fee in that. Then a maintenance coordination fee. Our maintenance coordinators, we have one and we just hired a new one so we have two now, and they’re just super busy. Coordinating maintenance is a huge task and it’s such an important one here. We do have a small fee for that. There’s probably a bunch more. I’m not in the day-to-day as much anymore, so I’m kind of not thinking of the big ones. Obviously the bulk ones were leasing fee and lease renewal. Those are big and they’re often overlooked. Jason: One of the things you did then was you identified all the different situations in which it was taking extra time, extra energy, extra effort, you weren’t getting paid anything extra, and then just systematically saying, “Hey, can we add a fee to ensure that we’re getting compensated for this additional work?” to make sure that you business is profitable. Shawn: Sure. Jason: Okay. We’ve got somebody watching says, “Can you list the fees again?” I had down a leasing fee, a lease renewal fee, lease administration fee, annual inspection fee, year-end statement fee, and a maintenance coordination fee. Shawn: Those are the big ones. Kelly, reach out to me. I will give you the list. Jason: Slow down. Kelly you can rewatch this as many times. This is being recorded and it’s also on Facebook. Also for those watching this later, we have full transcription when this comes out on iTunes and you can check that out on our blog at doorgrow.com. Let’s get into other ways in which you’ve made this profitable. So, obviously increasing fees. You weren’t able to decrease cost with staff. This allowed you to increase cost with staff. Were there any cost savings things that you were able to implement? Shawn: Probably just technology and trying to not be super labor-intensive. I would say that doing things like move-in, move-out videos instead of running through an entire list on paper and whatnot. It takes a little bit less time than doing it on paper. Those types of things. It’s just efficiencies in the office. Then we set up our team literally to work from anywhere. If you’re on vacation, you want to check on a lease or whatever, it’s possible and super helpful. Those things help with driving cost down because you’re not focusing on the, “Hey, John. Are you back at the office? Can you reach me that file?” That’s just a waste of time. Jason: What are some of the things you’ve done to enable and facilitate this transition from being a brick-and-mortar business that operates on sneakernet, where everybody is walking into each other’s offices saying, “Hey, do you have this?” to being a virtual team that they can work from basically anywhere? Shawn: The big things are softwares that enable cloud access. Our general office is on G Suite. Everything operates through there and then our processes are through Process Street which is super helpful and can be accessed anywhere again. AppFolio for our software. They are super tech savvy as far as online stuff. I wish they’d open their API, that’s my shout out to them. Jason: Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot. Shawn: I imagine you have. And then RingCentral. We have a team in Mexico and I’ve got a team member in the Philippines, and they literally can call our office in Farmington, New Mexico. Then we have another Flagstaff office as well. It’s so easy because they can pick up their phone and it acts like they’re dialing from their desk. That was a key point we had to set up six years ago which was, back then, it wasn’t really heard of. Jason: Cool. I use all of those software or have in the past except AppFolio. Shawn: You don’t need that. Jason: We’ve had Process Steet on the show. Great interview. For those listening, I recommend you check it out. G Suite were a Google Apps reseller, so if people need help with that we can certainly help you get set up. We used RingCentral for several years. We eventually switched to Talkroute because we found that most of our team weren’t doing a lot of calling on our team and if they did, they had unlimited cell phone minutes. Talkroute just allows you to auto attendant and the call routing and the extensions but they can dial through the Talkroute app out of their phone and then it just uses their cell phone minutes. It’s free basically for outbound calls. It can also receive text messages. We switched to Talkroute and probably saved ourselves about $400 or $500 a month. Shawn: That’s big. I love it. Jason: What are some other things you focused on then to facilitate profitability? You’ve got the fees. You’re paying your team well so you can compete. You’ve got your leveraging technology. You’ve set up your team to be more virtual which is scary for a lot of property managers who’ve been doing things a certain way. Anything else? Shawn: What I would say is tap into your current client base. You probably have a ton of really loyal clients. Don’t forget to just really push out your new fee structure and justify those fees. Believe in what you’re charging to those current clients. When we switched over to a new fee structure, hardly anybody left. We had 12 clients leave on our first push. We found that those 12 clients were probably 12 good clients to leave. Jason: Out of how many clients? Shawn: We were at 614 at the time, 12 left. We had a second push and we did this in phases because you have to be really sensitive to homes that are vacant. You don’t want to increase fees on somebody that has a vacant home. That’s a stressful time already. We certainly don’t want to increase feels on a client that has not been in your portfolio for less than a year. They don’t really know and trust you yet. Then I haven’t built that loyalty for you. So don’t touch those yet. Once you segment those out and you found the client base that you really want to go after, then do it. Don’t just send out an email and hope that they sign into an agreement. You have got to follow-up. If you don’t follow-up, they’re just not going to believe in what you’re trying to do. So, make sure that you follow through with all of that. I’ve heard of people, “Hey, I increased my fees and I sent out this email. I got no response,” and I’m like, “Well, did you do anything else besides that? Because you got to call them. You got to pick up the phone and just talk them through.” It’s a scary thing. I just had a fee increase from one of the vendors that we use in our business and I was like, “What the heck?” My initial reaction was, “What the heck is going on?” Then, they talked me through and I was like, “You know what? It’s all good. We’re happy with you guys. We’re going to move forward. It’s all good.” I think that’s most people. Jason:Yeah, have a conversation. If you’re looking for the process that you went through or that Darren Hunter could have outlined—we’ve had him on the show before a few times—check out the episodes with Darren Hunter. Great content. He gave a lot away here in the show. You can check that out. I just saw him actually in Phoenix. So, 12 of out 614 that’s maybe 2%. Shawn: That was the first push. We did lose more the second round. There was probably a total number of 65. I can’t remember exactly that left, but our profitability went up. Jason: You lose 10% but you’re making more money, then not such a big deal, and usually those are the worst properties in your portfolio. What tends to happen then is you increase your revenue. You lose your profit. You lose a little bit of clientele, but you’re also losing the ones that take up the most amount of time, typically. Those particular doors probably have 10 times higher operational costs than a good door. By losing that pile in your portfolio, you’re gaining room to manage a lot more and you’re gaining a lot more leverage. Your profitability probably goes up even more because your operational costs go down significantly by cutting out the most challenging, most micromanagy, and most price sensitive owners that are the most challenging properties. Hopefully, people are a little bit sold to this idea, “Hey, maybe I can increase my fees,” because I do believe that property management businesses in general are not charging enough. They really deserve to be paid well for what they do. They provide a really valuable service and I feel there’s been this false scarcity that’s been created by marketers. Focus on SEO, pay-per-click and these sort of things where it feels like it’s difficult to grow. It feels scarce but they’re 70% self-managing in single family residential. There’s tons of blue ocean, there’s tons of opportunity, the scarcity is false. It really doesn’t exist. For those listening, if you feel like things are scarce, we should have a conversation because we can get you out of that mode of scarcity so that you feel safer and more comfortable raising your fees and rates. I believe that’s a false perception that doesn’t need to exist in the industry and it creates a problem for the entire industry—this sense of scarcity. It creates this competition that I don’t think really needs to be there. Really, the industry as a whole needs to be building each other up and helping each other out. You seen that being involved in NARPM. Shawn: Yeah, that’s right. NARPM’s big on that. Jason: Shawn, this has been really helpful. Any other other takeaways or things that you’ve explored your journey to make your business more profitable to grow your company? Shawn: I think most people get a little scared because of the competition and they’re worried about raising their fees. Let me just tell you that our competitors don’t charge anything besides a tenant, whatever, management fee. I almost said the fees. I don’t know if that was against the rules or something like that. Jason: I’m not a property manager so I guess you and I can talk about it. But someone else might hear it. We’re not colluding. Shawn: We are not colluding. Just don’t be fearful of that. I think that if you’re truly creating a value for your customer and clients that that is irrelevant, that people are willing to pay for good service and good experiences. When you raise your fees, it has a natural thing that happens that you get rid of the lower-end properties. The lower end properties cost you more money, they cost you more time, they cost you more stress, and they cost you more employees. They will burn out on the low-end properties. Once you bring on nicer properties and you keep to a standard, they are willing to pay the higher fees and get better service, and it naturally increases your profits. That’s a big win for us. Jason: Awesome. Well, Shawn it sounds like you’re doing great things in Farmington, New Mexico. Did you ever think that you would just end up in Farmington, New Mexico? Shawn: That’s the thing about New Mexico. It’s the land of entrapment, but it just brings you back. I’ve lived all over the country and it’s a good place to raise a family. Jason: Awesome. Shawn, I appreciate you coming onto the show. Thanks for being here. I appreciate your insight and I wish you continued success. Shawn: Thank you, Jason. I appreciate your time. Jason: If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference then maybe we should have a conversation. So, reach out. There is a lot of opportunity in the industry to grow a property management business right now. I think we’re on the cusp of a wave. I think the industry is going to blossom and grow. There’s a lot of big and good things happening when it comes to technology, when it comes to software, when it comes to awareness. We would love to be a part of facilitating that journey with you and I would love the opportunity to be your coach in your business. Reach out to DoorGrow, let’s start with a conversation, and I will give you a free training on some of the secrets and tips. I call it DoorGrow secrets on how you can avoid some of the most common pitfalls of preventing growth. Just reach out and say, “Hey, I want DoorGrow Secrets.” You might find it so interesting and get so excited, you’ll want to work with us. That’s my hope. So, we will talk with you all soon, to everyone’s mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? Leads. But it’s impossible for property managers to pursue the blue ocean of 70% self-managed landlords. There's no way to contact them. Until now.  Today, I am talking to Ben Atkin of DoorsUp, a lead generation service for property management entrepreneurs. You’ll Learn... [02:30] Ben’s Background: Grew up surrounded by real estate, property management, and software.  [03:09] 50-unit Student Housing Apartment Complex: Managing students is difficult; Ben moved on to something less stressful and more lucrative.  [03:40] Bootstrap to the Core: Partnered with Coldwell Banker Premier and started property management company from scratch. [04:10] Daily Pre-occupation: How do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management?  [04:41] Database: How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout? How do you contact them?  [05:03] DoorsUp Prototype: Every person in market who owns rental properties and their contact information to track interactions and engagement. [06:20] Secret Sauce: DoorsUp gets information and people ready to sign-up.  [07:37] Grow Doors: Use DoorsUp to pick an area to pursue to contact owners and acquire more properties to manage. [14:20] Future for DoorsUp: Going to NARPM to add service areas.  [16:27] FAQ: Does this have all the data that I can find myself? Data is concise, filtered, and updated regularly to make your marketing more efficient and cost-effective.  [21:14] Bogged Down and Overwhelmed: Grew too fast and doesn’t want to be a property manager!  [22:15] My Thesis: Property management has a serious marketing problem. People cannot find a sustainable way to grow doors.  Tweetables Bootstrap to the Core: Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero Website.  We have a lot of data. Mining and handling data is our expertise. We’re marketing strategy agnostic. Property management has a serious marketing problem. Resources Ben Atkin's Personal Email DoorsUp Ben Atkin on LinkedIn Google Street View Grant Cardone National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Business Network International (BNI) Cole Realty Resource SmartZip  REDX  DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I'm hanging out with Ben Atkin from a new startup, it sounds like, called DoorsUp. Ben, welcome. Ben: Thanks, Jason. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I'm just going to go ahead and say this and geek out out of the way. I've watched literally every single one of your podcast and I can jive so much with that intro. It seems like it's changed a little bit in the last. Did I notice that? You changed that intro to include a couple more things recently? Jason: I have made some subtle changes, yes. Ben: Subtle changes, okay. I love that. I'm really excited to be on this show. I'm just stoked to be here. Jason: Let's get into your background. You've got this startup called DoorsUp, which in my understanding is a lead gen service for property management entrepreneurs, so they can get more owners which sounds very in alignment with what we do to optimize companies so they can handle those leads, so they can effectively, organically, create that business. Tell us how did you get into this space? Give us some background on Ben. Who the heck are you? Ben: Yeah. It's a long long road. I'm a second generation real estate person as well as second generation software developer and software person. My dad has a real estate company, was a real estate developer. The most inopportune time to be a real estate developer in 2006-2007. I grew up surrounded by real estates, surrounded by property management, and also surrounded by software. Anyway, I got my start in actually having experiences in property management in college. I was managing a 50-unit student housing apartment complex. If anybody is familiar with student housing, they know that that is just a difficult job to manage students. 50 units is about 250 leases in student housing. I was looking for something a little bit more lucrative and a little less stressful. I found an opportunity in my local market with a Coldwell Banker property management franchise or Coldwell Banker Premier, partnered with that franchise, and started with a property management company from scratch. Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero website—nothing; we just started from the ground. Jason: Bootstrap. Ben: Bootstrap. Yeah, absolute to the core. I have very little experience in property management at that time even though I did my best at pretending that I did. That was our major problem was how do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management? That was my preoccupation daily because I wasn't being paid. You talk about bootstrap, I was living on savings trying to grow a property management company. That was my challenge. That was my problem. I remember speaking to my broker at this franchise. I waited at his office for about an hour. I was brainstorming with him. I said, "How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout?" It's not like there's this big database of everybody who owns rental property and a way to contact them. That's really was the impetus for what we developed and what we started to pursue. I leveraged a little bit of my connection with my dad and my brothers who were software engineers, I have a software engineering background a little bit, and we built the prototype of DoorsUp, which is exactly that. It's a database of every person in your market virtually who owns rental properties. A way to get their phone number, mailing address, and a way to track their interactions with them as you pursue them to engage with the property management services. Jason: I love it. It sounds like this is almost the equivalent of somebody doing all the manual work to go and find an owner occupied list, then start trying to direct mail to them, and doing all this so manually which works, which can work great to help them grow their business. But it’s a long game. People will try it once and feel like, "I did a mailer, I didn't get anything." But then I hear people that have played this game and they’ll say, "I have clients walk in all the time." They're holding a postcard they did 10 years ago and saying, "Hey, I'm ready, so sign up." Explain how this works. Where are you getting the information? Let's start there. Ben: Sure. I'm going to mention that it's a little bit part of our secret sauce. I don't know if I consider ourselves a big data company. That's kind of a word that people on software throw around to make themselves sound cool, in my opinion. But we have a lot of data. Hundreds of sources, public sources, that's really our expertise is in managing and handling data to be able to target these types of people. Like what you mentioned, let me just make this quick point, mailing to absentee owners is, in some ways, inefficient. How many second home owners who aren't interested in property management are you mailing to? In a market like mine where it's a lot of retirees and it's almost a vacation area, that would be completely ineffective because you'd sent out a thousand mailers and 700 of those would go to people who really have no interest or their daughters' living in that home or whatever. I'm just going to make that point that what we're doing is quite a bit more targeted, and hopefully, should save on expenses, marketing wise and other things. Jason: Explain how somebody could utilize the system growth in their business. Ben: It's a web based application. The first thing that a user would see as they login is they would see a map and filters on the side. They can pick an area that they like to pursue in trying to acquire more properties to manage. Let's say, they've got a neighborhood that they really love, they draw a box on the map, and then they add a couple more filters. Maybe they want to manage only properties that are the 2000s and newer properties, so they don't have to deal with maintenance issues. They hit filter parcels. They'll just see a whole bunch of pins drop on the map, hundreds of pins of rental properties that are algorithms, are big data approach as identified as rental properties. Not just as absentees parcels, but as rental properties. It's really rigorous in deciding what we display as rentals. That's the first step. They filter, they find the rental properties, they can view the properties from the street with Google Street View through our application. It's very easy to see if the property's run down. They can actually look at it from the satellite imagery. They click on the owners name and they click the lookup button. Our system does a whole bunch of secret sauce magic in the background, gives you a phone number, and the accurate mailing address of the owner. As well as information about if they own other rentals. That type of information that they can then pursue that person and try to engage them into a conversation about their property management services. That's the simplest way to explain it. Jason: They sign up for your service, they markout their geographic area, they get some pintabs, they can street view the property, then your system will crawl the magical interweb, pull in phone numbers, email addresses, or mailing address. Then the next step for them would basically, probably be to do some sort of a direct mail campaign, cold calling. Ben: Yeah. We're agnostic to whatever marketing strategy they want to take. We provide the information, we provide the data. They can be as creative as they need to in order to pursue that market. Call, mail, we don't have email addresses, that would be something that they get them on the phone and ask for an email address. Then start them in their sales funnel. A great way to distribute their content, things that you've helped them create, or others who've helped them create, or even knocking on people's doors. That sounds ridiculous in my mind; it sounds ridiculously inefficient. But if you knew that someone had 10 rental properties and those rentals properties were exactly what you wanted to manage, you can see exactly where the homeowner or where the landlord lives or where the rental owner lives, it might be worth dropping off some fudge at the doorstep of their home. That sounds ridiculous, but that's actually something that one of our [...] has done in the past. It's very differentiating as opposed to just this search engine optimization, pay-per-click strategy. It's a little bit closer to a human connection. Jason: Oh, yeah. Realtors still knock doors. Realtors still do this. Property managers have probably really tried to avoid doing that. I've got a client who's in commercial property management. One of the ways he would get clients is he would go bring a candle to their place. "I'm old fashioned here, so here's this candle." He would give a gift, a little gift. The secret is, he'll buy these at the dollar store. This isn't like an expensive thing. But some people are showing up with, I don't know, a bottle of wine or something. It's a dollar of candle and it probably meant something, it felt like something warm to them. I think it's all about connection.  Obviously, if they were really aggressive, they’ve listened to Grant Cardone's 10X, they're like gunho. They wanted to create some business. They just need the opportunities. They go into the system. They may have done a multichannel approach. They're like, "This is my dream list right here. I'm going to call them. I'm going to send them some material. I'm going to nail them on a regular basis. I'm going to go knock on their door." They will get the business. Ben: Here's the thing, like I said, we're marketing strategy agnostic. People are already doing wonderful things to get more doors. They're doing great things. They're setting up landlords seminars, they've got great content, they're trying to push them to these distribution channels, but one of the things that we can provide is a way to reach more and more people. As part of your mailer, send out an invitation to your seminar. It fits really well into the things that people are already doing. If you've got a digital marketing strategy, get somebody on the phone, and say, "We would love to just send you an information in an email about what we do." Just enroll them in an email nurturing campaign that you've already developed, that you've already got going. It seems like organic traffic is a little bit harder to get in our industry for the smaller guys and for some of the companies that are just starting out. They've got to put a little bit of effort into it to start getting those doors, getting the traction that they've got. Jason: Yeah. If we've got roughly 70% that are self-managing in the industry, there's tons of blue ocean. This just helps you to see where the fish are. If you can see them, you can go hunt. It's time. Love the idea. I think this is such a nice match-up between DoorGrow and what you do. I'll be really curious to give feedback to some of our clients on some of the strategies that we teach them if they have these opportunities that they can go after. It's really going to be cool. Ben, what’s sort of the future for DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah, good question. Like you mentioned in the beginning, we're very recently coming out of stealth mode or development mode. We launched just short of a month and a half ago. We’re constrained geographically right now where we can service. Having just barely launched, we are currently servicing customers in Utah and Nevada. I live in Utah, I live right in between Las Vegas and South Lake City, which are two large markets that we wanted to initially, prove the concept of the product and establish a customer base. We are going to be in NARPM, at the NARPM convention conference in October in Arizona. Is that right? It's in Arizona. Jason: Yeah. My assistant schedules it all for me. I just do what she tells me to do. I'll be there. Ben: We'll be there and that's where we hope to add, geographically, another service area. We're going to be growing that way, kind of state by state as we go. That will be determined by the traction we're able to get in different states that we're able to start servicing. If we can grab a couple of customers in one state, that would be enticing enough for us to go through that state and start servicing that area. There's an advantage for our customers right now. They're alone in these sea of data. They're the only people using it. That's a huge competitive advantage right now for the people using it, to be some of the first ones that are using it. As much as we're just coming out of beta and the user interface is not as polished as it should be or could be, but there's a huge advantage for those that are early customers that are starting to use the system and see some results. Jason: What are some of the most common questions that people are asking you about this? I would imagine one question that comes to mind is, "Does this have all the data that I can go find myself?" Or is it missing that? Ben: Right, good question. Essentially, people ask that question. They have a little bit of misunderstanding about what we do. That was an instinct that you had right at the beginning of our conversation is, it's similar to what people are doing which is they're going out sourcing their own data, sending out mail, or sending out stuff like that. That's a very rudimentary version of what we do. The answer to that question is, I guess, the data is so concise, so aggressively filtered, that makes your marketing very efficient, and enables you to do certain things that you never would have time or money to do otherwise. Now, campaign is being an excellent example. The sales cycle for property management is so long. We're not selling toothbrushes. If you ask somebody, "Hey, you want to buy this toothbrush?" They can say, "Yes," and it's done; the sale is done and the service is done. Property management has such a long sales cycle where you get somebody on the phone and you say, "I would love to manage your units." And they say, "Well, it's got a 12-18 month lease on it. I'm not interested unless it's vacant. 12 months from now, call me." I'm being able to keep track on that and being able to keep track of how many times you've mailed to somebody is another really important part of that process. It's integrated into the system right now. People are able to track their leads, they're able to keep track of how many times they've mailed to somebody, keep notes on phone calls that they've had. The other aspect of that is that the data updates. I don't know if you've ever spoken to somebody who has actually tried to implement a long-term mail campaign, but the data, six months out, has changed. People buy properties, they sell property. How do they correlate whether they've mailed to somebody already? Whether they've called somebody already? How do they just track that change over time to be able to spend their time with one person long enough for them to close them given that property management has such a long sales cycle? That's part of the advantage of using a system like ours to do your prospecting and data sourcing. We keep it up to date. The data is updated monthly. The phone numbers, you click the lookup button and it does lookup immediately right then. Very, very fresh data which you're not going to be able to find yourself. Who has time for that anyway? You're going to be managing 200 properties and you're going to be spending time in a big Excel spreadsheet trying to correlate [...]. Absolutely not. I saw as a huge way to be much more effective and to really spend my money where it's going to make the most effect, given that I knew that people have multiple units, and they were units I wanted to manage. I can pursue the market that I want rather than shotgunning a mail campaign or something out in the world and seeing if I got anything I wanted. Jason: Tell us a little bit about some of the early adopters. What sort of experience have they had? Is there a case study or an example you can share with us? Ben: I'll start with myself. I was the first case study. If we go back to that origin story of DoorsUp, I asked my broker, "Where do I find these people?" He said, "I have no idea. No one has any idea." We developed this raw prototype of the system. I got this report. It's so embarrassing to even look at now, it’s this ugly Excel spreadsheet, but it was our prototype. It was the name, phone number, and address of every person in my market who owned rental property. How many rentals they owned, the value of their portfolio, and the addresses of all of their rentals. It was ridiculous to me. To me, it felt like magic. I got straight down and called through that list. After wasting three months getting four or five units, in two months, we were managing about 45 units. I was just bogged down. It was crazy. We grew too fast. I discovered that I didn't want to be a property manager, so I went into software. Jason: Yeah. A lot of people were like, "Why don't you do it, Jason?" I'm like, "Then I can't help everybody else do well." Then, I'll be competing with everybody. I don't think anybody wants that. You're no longer doing that, but you had a really rapid growth initially. I love creating that problem for clients, by the way. I love when they come to me and they're like, "Man, my biggest problem is adding doors and getting doors." Then I say, "Great. Let's get you to problem number two which is how you deal with the growth. Now, you've got doors coming in and you're in pain because you have so much growth." I love creating that problem. Well, anything else they should know about this? If not, how can they get in touch? How can they find out more about DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah. I guess, I'll end with this thought, this is kind of the thesis behind DoorsUp. This is why we got into this space and try to solve this problem. My thesis is, essentially, that property management has a serious marketing problem. I listen to your show a lot and I feel like I didn't steal that idea from you—I sure hope I didn't—but you've taught me a lot about that, but I experienced that myself. People cannot find a sustainable, reliable way, to grow their door count. Profitability aside, that's important. That's very, very important, but top line revenue growth is the thing that we are focusing on helping people to. We don't have, in our industry, any sort of enabling data or service or company like other industries do. For example, if somebody in property management really wanted to spend all day everyday prospecting, if they wanted to do Grant Cardone 10X, they want to not talk to seven new landlords a week, they want to talk to 75 new landlords a week. How would they do that? They would go to Rotary Club and hope that a landlord was there. They would go to BNI, Business Network International, and hope that a landlord is there. Or they'll take a realtor to lunch and pray that he'll give him a referral. How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? They just need these leads. Whereas in real estate sales, real estate sales and other industries, we've got Cole Realty Resource, we've got SmartZip, we've got the REDX. We've got all these prospecting tools. Property management industry just does not have that, which has made it impossible for property managers to pursue this blue ocean, 70% of self-managed landlords. There's no way for them to contact them. They have no visibility into that market. Just from a very macro perspective, that's what we're trying to provide the industry. To be able to turn the focus from just closing hand razors, people who go on Google and raise their hands and say, "We want your service," to be able to aggressively pursue that market instead of just waiting for leads to come to them. That's what we see. That's my thesis is that there's a problem in property management that they need this data and we can provide it. We're still proving and testing that thesis. But we're very excited to get out there and be able to offer that to people. We've seen some success. If people want to contact me, there are plenty of ways on our website. You can go ahead and email me. My personal email address is [email protected]. That's probably the easiest way to reach out to me personally. Though, I'm also tuned in on the website if you chat with us. It'll be an actual person who answers that. If you're in Utah and Nevada, go online, signup for a free trial. We’d love to have you start using the system. We do a two-week, 30 lead, free trial. Other than that, just reach out to me. I'd love to chat about it, and jive about property management, and see if we can help this industry grow from the 30% penetration to 40% or 50% or 60%. I see there needs to be some sort of change in order to be able to do that. Jason: Cool. Ben, where are you based out of? Ben: I'm in St. George, Utah. Just an hour North of Las Vegas, Nevada. Jason: Got it. I know where it is. I was born in Utah. Alright. We'll connect, I think that I have a lot of clients are at the point where they're ready to be able to leverage their service like this. I think a lot of property managers are not. I think a lot of them really are just not ready to leverage something like this, unfortunately. If that's the case, reach out to DoorGrow. Then they'll see if you're ready. "You're ready. You have the bandwidth to do these kind of things and grow your business. Let's get you connected to DoorsUp." I look forward to watching what you guys do, seeing the progress, and growth of your company. Ben: Thanks, it's a pleasure. Jason: Thanks for coming in this show. Ben: Hopefully, we'll see you at NARPM. Anybody else, hopefully, we'll see in there. Thanks! Jason: Alright. Very cool. If you are a property management entrepreneur, and you are wanting to grow your business, and you want to grow without SEO, without pay-per-click, without content marketing, without social media marketing, without uncomfortable videos, without pay-per-lead services, and they're having phenomenal growth, they're easily adding in a year 100 doors to their business, they're adding $100,000 in revenue to their business annually and you want to do that, maybe you're one of these companies that, right now, is losing more doors than you're getting on right now because it's difficult to try to outpace the market when doors are selling off because the market's good with marketing then reach out to DoorGrow. Let's optimize your business, let's get you ready to use a service like this, and some other strategies, and tactics that we have, that can help you grow your business. Check us out at doorgrow.com. We would love to help you out. We want, like what I say in the intro, we want to impact this industry, and we're excited to find like-minded entrepreneurs like Ben and others that are helping to make this industry great. I think it has massive potential. I believe that property management industry can be as big as the real estate industry; I think it has the potential to really grow here in the US. Let's make that happen, everybody. Make sure, if you're a property management entrepreneur, you join our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. Get inside the community. Connect with us. This is a group for property management business owners. Get with your tribe. Connect with us, and we'll probably see you in person at some of these NARPM events because I'm hitting as many as I can lately. Hopefully, I'll be connecting with you guys in person and inside the DoorGrow Club. Thanks everybody for tuning in to DoorGrow Show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Have no fear, when it comes to social media. Share your opinions and what you know. Not everyone will like what you post, but that’s ok. Personal and professional Social media opportunities let you connect with others, build relationships, and post content to attract new business. Today, I am talking to Katie Lance, CEO and co-founder of Katie Lance Consulting. She helps real estate agents and brokers use social media to grow their businesses. Also, Katie is the author of #GetSocialSmart and founder of #GetSocialSmart Academy. She was named one of the most 100 influential people in real estate by Inman News and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post.  You’ll Learn... [02:40] Marketing Nerd: Katie didn't go to school for social media because there was no Facebook when she was in college.  [06:40] Social Media Challenge: Audience doesn’t care about property management.  [07:32] Don’t be Vanilla: Be engaging, interesting, unique, and authentic voice for what’s happening in your industry and market.  [10:08] Love vs. Hate: Share your opinions, and attract your tribe through polarity.  [12:20] People don’t buy what you do (property management), but why you do it.  [13:18] Warning: Don’t outsource all your social media, or you’ll lose your voice.  [15:59] Avoid anxiety and conquer fear of social media by creating a system or strategy.  [17:27] Day-in-the-Life of You: Done is better than perfect.  [22:05] Consistency and Batch Creating Content: The more you do it, the more comfortable you get.  [26:21] Repurposing Content: One piece can be posted on multiple platforms.  [27:15] Platform of Choice: Depends on your target audience.  [28:40] Future of Social Media: Instagram TV and video is where it’s at. [31:54] Personal and Professional Social Media Opportunities: Connect with others, build relationships, and post content to attract new business.  Tweetables Be you, instead of your business on social media. Done is better than perfect. Comment, Connect, and Create Content Don’t suffer from analysis paralysis. Resources Katie Lance Consulting Katie Lance on Instagram Katie Lance on Facebook #GetSocialSmart #GetSocialSmart Academy Inman News The Huffington Post Simon Sinek National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Instagram TV TikTok DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show, and today's guest, I'm hanging out with Katie Lance from Katie Lance Consulting. Hi, Katie. Katie: Hi, Jason. Thanks for having me here today. Jason: I am glad to have you. Katie, we’re going to be so social today. Katie: That would be a lot of fun. Jason: [...] social media and we're on social media right now. We're doing it. Katie, help everybody understand your background. Can I read some of your bio? Katie: Sure, go ahead.  Jason: It’s really well written. Katie is the CEO and co-founder of Katie Lance Consulting. Katie is a nationally known keynote speaker at conferences and events. For the past 10 years, Katie has been working with real estate agents and brokers to help them get smarter about how to use social media to grow their business. Her specialty is in helping real estate agents and brokers achieve big results using social media without spending a ton of time. She is also the author of the best-selling book, #GetSocialSmart and the founder of #GetSocialSmart Academy. Katie has been named one of the most 100 influential people in real estate by Inman News and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two beautiful boys. Katie, welcome to the show. Tell us how did you get into social media? How did this come about for you?  Katie: I’ve always loved social media. I've always been a marketing nerd. I’ve always been one of those people to just really love marketing and didn't necessarily go to school for social media, and probably dating myself, but there was no Facebook when I was in college. I fell in love with social media and probably about 10 or 12 years ago. I got my first job in real estate. I was hired as a marketing director for a local real estate company and that was really when social media was starting to come to the forefront. I just remember having this epiphany and thinking this is so perfect for real estate. I had seen so many agents and brokers spending so much money on traditional marketing, which, a lot of it still works. I don't necessarily think social media replaces traditional marketing, if that's working for you, but it can be so expensive. And I thought, what a great opportunity.  That's really where I fell in love with it. I worked at that real estate company for a while, then I went to work for In The News for quite some time, ran their social media, and grew their social presence. Then about 2012 I decided, “You know? I'm going to go out on my own,” and got that entrepreneurial bug and haven't looked back since. It's been quite a journey.  Jason: What caused you to take that leap? It's a risky leap. To preface this, I didn't realize I was an entrepreneur. Even though I was the guy that started a band in college, created big events, going door-to-door pre-selling CDs so I could pay for an album at college girls dorms with a guitar and a clipboard, I didn’t realize I was an entrepreneur. I thought I needed a job, but what pushed me over the edge to jump into entrepreneurism was a divorce and needing to take care and wanting to have time with my kids. Out of necessity, I had to do it. What caused you to take the leap? That's a pretty big leap. People don’t just go, “I've got a job that’s going pretty well. I’m just going to throw it to the wind and go do something on my own.” Katie: I think there’s a couple of things. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. Any job I've ever had, I've always treated it as if it were my company. It was always very hard for me to just “work a 9–5 and turn the off button off.” I guess I always had that attitude for anywhere I've ever worked and I had a great job [...]. I've worked there for many years and for a lot of people, you get to a point in your career where you have that itchy feeling, like what's that next thing. Jason: Something more. Katie: Yeah, there's something more and quietly started to explore other options. It just became really clear to me that I don't necessarily want to work for anyone else. I want to work for myself and I want to be able to help not just one company but lots of different people, lots of different companies, lots of different organizations. And it was scary. It's a whole another ballgame. I'm happily married, we have mortgage, we have kids, so it's not necessarily the easiest leap. The hardest part was just making that decision. Then you make the decision and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there. I also had a really supportive husband, which makes a big difference, too. Jason: I was going to ask about that. If a spouse is not in support as an entrepreneur, there's a lot of friction, right? Katie: Yes.  Jason: And a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we tend to pair up with people that want safety and certainty. They're our balance and our opposite.   Katie: Yes. Actually, he ended up quitting his corporate job about 2½ years ago, so now we run our company side-by-side and it's been a great journey. Jason: So you converted him? Katie: I think I did, yes. Jason: [...] to a job, right? Katie: Yes.  Jason: Perfect, love it. Let's get into the topic at hand, which is how people can grow social media. I tend to be upfront and honest. A lot of my listeners have heard me say, probably at different times, that the challenge that property managers face with social media is that their target audience does not care about property management.  They don't care at all and when they ask me, “Should I spend a bunch of time and energy doing social media?” my general response is, “How much time are you spending time following and listening to plumbers? Plumbers want your business. They want your attention. Why aren't you subscribing to their newsletters and following them on social media?” and they're like, “Because I don't care about plumbing.” I’m like, “Your audience don't care about property management.” What should they be doing? I'm excited to get into this. Katie: I think social media is relevant for obviously a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs and whether you're in property management or you're a plumber or whatever business you're in, that is the default response. “Well, who really cares? Is this really interesting to a lot of people?” At the end of the day, one of the ways to get traction on social media is to be that unique voice, that authentic voice of what's happening in your industry, what's happening in the market. People tend to follow you and engage with you, not necessarily for just facts and information that you're spewing out there, but because they connect with who you are and your personality.  It's amazing about the management or real estate, and a lot of it's so done through word-of-mouth. A lot of it is still done through those connections that we make. That's what I think there's a lot of value in social media. It's funny you mentioned plumbers because there's actually a plumber who's killing it on YouTube, because of exactly what you said, because most people don't think like, “Oh, who's going to put out that type of content?” But his content is engaging, it's interesting, it's valuable, but it's also with his voice.  That's the thing that property management. You could talk about renting or whoever and all these different topics when it comes to property management. But you can insert your own opinion, your voice and not be afraid to just be really truly who you are. Some people won’t like it and that’s okay. Those aren’t your people. Jason: I’m going to rephrase what you just said and sum it up. It's more important on social media to be you than to be your business. Katie: Absolutely.  Jason: That's really what's going to attract and get people to resonate and connect with you as if you're willing to put it out there and be you, weirdness and all, and that's something. People follow me on social media, no. I'm putting out random stuff all the time about my life and who I am, and I figure that some people are just not gonna like me.  Katie: Yeah, and that’s okay. Jason: There are definitely people that don’t like me.  Katie: Sometimes, we try to want to be really professional and we don't offend anybody. I'm certainly not saying start offending people on social media. But there's that risk of becoming just really vanilla and really boring. If you think about as an end user, somebody uses Facebook or Instagram, what do you click like on? What do you comment on? What do you share? Typically, it's things that are funny, or poignant, or interesting, or they move you in some emotion, you get angry. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion. That's where I think in real estate and property management, really for any entrepreneur, that's where the magic is because most people are not putting up that type of content. If they are, they're not doing it on a consistent basis. That's a big thing that can make a huge difference. Jason: People should have an opinion and share their opinion on Facebook and let their freak flag fly, right?  Katie: Yes, and be comfortable with the fact when you do that, there’s going to be people that watch you and say, I don’t like that guy or girl. You have to be okay with that because with the opposite, which will happen, is that you will start to attract the people who go, “I really like that guy. He's doing a podcast? What other podcasts? I got to catch up on all of his podcast episodes.” That's what happens with video. When you start putting out especially episodic video or episodic podcast content, people start defining you. They’re like, “What else does she put out there?” and you search who attract your tribe. That's what can turn to business down the road. It just takes time just like anything else.  Jason: I’ve always thought this is very in align with what I think and feel, is that if you are not creating polarity, if there's no polarity, then you can’t be attractive. A magnet without polarity is not a magnet anymore. It's not attract anything. Nothing will be pulled towards it. Electricity without polarity doesn't exist anymore if you remove the polarity. There has to be polarity and that means you have to be willing to polarize someone there. I've probably been a little too polarizing in some instances; let's be honest. But I've noticed that when you are willing to just be you and polarize and put it out there, yes, you're going to have people that don't like you. You’re going to get flack for that, people are not going to attract you, but you now are attracting the right people. You’re attracting people that like you the way that you are. They like the way you communicate, they like the way that you coach, they like the way that you run your business, they like your philosophy.  Just like Simon Sinek said, “People don't buy what you do.” They don't buy what you do. They don’t buy property management, they don’t property management coaching/consulting from me, they don't buy what you do, they don't buy social media, whatever from you. They really buy why we do it. That's really what they're buying into is they believe in Katie, they believe in Jason, they believe in the property manager, they believe in you and they share values. What you do is really an afterthought compared to that. So, they need to create polarity. This is a great question everybody listening can ask is am I creating polarity? Have I offended anybody in the last month? And have I attracted anybody in the last month? Did anybody say, “Hell yes, I agree to that,” or, “That totally rubs me the wrong way,” but that's you, so thanks for sharing.  Katie: Absolutely. Jason: We don't want to be vanillas. What’s maybe the next thing that we should take away? Katie: Like I said, don't be vanilla. I've often said, “Lean into who you are and who you're not.” It goes hand in hand with that idea of not being vanilla. I also think a big part of your social media strategy is not outsourcing it completely. There's this feeling even still in 2019 of, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t have time to do this. It's one more thing. Who can I hire to do it?” It's a little bit of a slippery slope because I do think that there's value in hiring certain people. For example, we have a video editor on our team because my value is being on camera but I don't need to learn video editing, I really don't need it. For one or two, that's fine, but I don't have desire. Jason: That’s not your dream and goal in life is to edit videos and stare at videos on the screen for hours a day. Katie: Exactly, it’s not my dream. I’d rather put my eye out, honestly. Jason: Me neither. Katie: Similar with podcast. My value is in the content and the education I can bring, not necessarily in can I edit something. I think there's value in bringing at some point, maybe not in the beginning, people on who could help you with either editing, for example video or podcast editing, or copywriting if you enjoy writing, or something as a blogger or graphic designer, but to totally hand out who are personally is really risky and there's lots of businesses out there that are selling this idea. “You're too busy. Let us do it for you.” I would just caution anyone to be just be careful when you do that because you're handing off who you are. It's like having a dinner party with your 10 most important clients, and instead of you being there, you have your assistant run the whole thing. I just think it's a basic tip, but it's also something that is important to address because time is all we have. It's our most precious asset. I don't think you need to spend all day on social media. I'm in the business of social media and I'm certainly not on social media all day long, but it comes down to having a smart system, and making sure you're inserting yourself and your personality into what you do. I think that's really valuable.  Jason: This makes a lot of sense. I think there's so many parallels to this. There's so many situations in which we would not outsource. I wouldn't outsource to somebody to be the dad of my kids. I'm really single again after two decades, so I wouldn't outsource somebody else to use swiping on dating apps for me. They just don’t know what I’m into.  There's a lot of things we just should not outsource. And yet, being the face of our business, we will a lot of times as business owners, want to just outsource that, like some company can just come in and post a bunch of memes and garbage, and we're suddenly going to get business from it and then we wonder why it's not working. What about those business owners that are not charismatic, they don't have personality, they're better behind the scenes, they just feel really awkward putting anything out there. How do you deal with that? Some of the listeners avoid social media. Social is like an anxiety-inducing word to them.  Katie: For a lot of people who are anxious or feel a little overwhelmed with social media, I would imagine part of it is because you don't have a system for, and it feels like this thing that's out there, that you have to do, that you don't really know how to do it right, and everybody saying that you have to do it, but you don't really have a plan. It just becomes sort of the snowball. The thing is, anytime you're trying something new, especially with technology, it can feel ridiculously annoying. You feel like, “Oh, my God. What am I? How do I not know how to do this?” and it's just like anything else. We work with a lot of agents and brokers. I always say, “Imagine when you first got your real estate license. You took the test, you went through the courses, but you didn't really know what you're doing until you had your first client. And then you really learn. And then you learn again and again and again.” Part of it is just getting over and putting yourself out there. Sometimes we're so concerned with who am I, who cares what people think, I don't know, I don't like how I look or how I sound, I don't know how to do it, so I’m not going to do it. I always like to say, “Done is better than perfect.” Jason: Oh, my gosh. I [...] that, too. I love that. Katie: I’d love to say I made that up. I did not make that up. I’ve heard it somewhere and probably from you. Jason: Maybe not. I think I got it from my business coach. I’m sure he got it from somewhere, too. Katie: You just start today. So if you’re listening to this, start today. Go on Facebook and connect with three or four people at Facebook today. Don’t just like a bunch of stuff, but go on engage with a few people. Wish somebody a happy birthday. Start today. Then you can move on from there. Part of it is just getting a system together, getting a process together. One quick thing I'll mention real fast for anyone who's feeling a little bit overwhelmed, I would encourage you to think about all the things that you do on a day-to-day basis, all the questions you get asked, all the topics of conversation that come up. Get a notebook, get a pen, and just start brainstorming things that happen a day in the life of you. I would imagine you're going to come up with 10, 20, 30 different topics of things that you could potentially talk about, whether that's through video or on Facebook or whatever it might be. Just go to start. “Just do it,” like Nike says. Jason: I love the concept of done is better than perfect. I put that because a lot of times we're trying to get clients to launch their websites, we're trying to get them to take action and moving themselves forward on different things, and they just stay analyze really hard about something and they want it to be so perfect. I just iterate over and over again, done is better than perfect because once it's done, it can do its job in making money. You can go back and change it later, you can improve it later, but get something done because until you have something there, until you have the website up, or until you have this launch, or until you've done something, it's nothing to do anything for you. The other mantra that I'll share with everybody listening, if you're in that state of overwhelm, you’re feeling scared, whatever, just remember that that's how you start everything. One of my favorite mantras is, we all start at level suck. That's where you start in everything. You start at level suck. That is the level you started everything. My first YouTube video was two minutes long and had 30 uhms and and so's in it, and I had to edit them out. The video looked choppy and it was awful. It was so awful. I tried to get perfect lighting, I have my little mic clip thing, an uncomfortable shirt with a collar, and I was trying to be what I thought I needed to be in order to do a video and look good. I'd probably spent hours making a two-minute video. Here's the ironic thing for everybody listening. You think it has to be so perfect? I've made way more money by doing really crappy, shaky, jittery, selfie style videos, walking around outside, than any of those videos were I was uncomfortable behind a desk or in a shirt or whatever in front of a whiteboard.  Don't think it has to be perfect. People will crave reality nowadays because there's so much BS. They’re really craving reality. The other thing I point out to clients, is that they are talking to people all day, every day and it's really the same thing. You just look at a device and pretend you're talking to a person, you just say exactly what you would say and talk the same way. You don't have to think, “What am I going to do with my hands?” What do you do with your hands normally when you talk to people? “How’s my face supposed to like?” How does your face normally look? Just talk. You have the thing like you're talking to a person. So, just start noticing when you're talking to people and pretend they're a camera or a phone and just realize they're not that scary or awkward.  Katie: Absolutely. To your point, it doesn't have to be perfect. What a lot of people don't realize that maybe they forget is the lifetime of a post is pretty short. Let’s say you create a video, you put it on Facebook, that video will disappear in a couple hours. You put it on Twitter, tweet disappears in a matter of seconds. YouTube has a longer shelf life and certain content certainly has a longer shelf life. But generally speaking, we live in a world with so much noise, I often feel like I'm standing on the side of the freeway just watching cars fly by. If it's not your best performance, it doesn't have to be Oscar-worthy. As you said, just get it out there and especially with video, it's like a muscle. I will say the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. I don't know if I'm ever totally comfortable hearing myself and seeing myself, but what I am comfortable with are the results. That's what you have to think about. When you put yourself out there over the course of time consistently, that's when the magic happens. It's literally like a snowball and the consistency part is a huge part of it. Do you mind if I share a quick tip? Jason: Go ahead. Give us all the tips you want to. We want some free Katie Lance Consulting right now. Katie: Perfect. One of the things I always share with our GetSocialSmart Academy members is this idea of batch-creating your content. I love batch creating because for me, if I'm going to sit down, do my hair and makeup, and record one video, I might as well sit down and record four or five. We've been doing that the last couple years and that's made a huge difference. We'll set aside a couple hours once a month where I do the hair, get the camera set up, whatever. To be honest with you, the first 99 episodes were shot on my phone. So, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. This idea of getting into a system and batch-creating your content, that way you're done, you're locked and loaded. When we do that, then we're able to drip out those episodes once a week for the next month, but it gets you into that rhythm. When you're publishing at the same day and time every single week, people who start to follow you, as we talked about earlier, they start to notice that. It's just like your favorite TV show, you may not watch your favorite TV show Thursday night at 9:00 PM or Monday at 8:00 PM, but you know it's on and you set your DVR. It's the same thing with content. Once you start to put it out there regularly, if you can start doing it consistently, it can make a big difference.  Jason: Absolutely. That's one of the reasons I really like my assistant; made this show finally somewhat consistent. We're getting about two episodes done a week now. Consistency is huge because as soon as you disappear for a week or two, people are wondering if you're gone. You lose the engagement, you lose the momentum, so done is better than perfect, but consistency is better than anything, really, probably.  Katie: People wonder what's the best day. There's no best day. What day is good for you? Just pick a day. I remember when I first started sending out and email newsletters, it’s like, “Well, let's do it on a Saturday. I don't know. That sounds like a good day.” Seven years later, we're still sending our email newsletters out on Saturday, and people are like, “Oh, I love it. Get it every Saturday morning.” It's just consistency. So, pick a day. Jason: Love it. I love the idea of batching tasks, and you can apply that to so many different things. I just did a post on this on social media about this and I showed my pill case. I hate going and digging through all my supplement bottles every single meal, trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be taking. So, I got this pill case. It’s literally the size of a notebook. It's got every day of the week, four times a day, and I fill it once a week. If I travel I can take it with me. It's done, I can just take these supplements. That's how I'm able to be so sharp and so crazy all day long. No, I’m just kidding. Batching tasks reduces the decision-making that has to go into and the thought that has to go into it every day. You don't have to sit there, stress out, and “What should I talk about today? Oh, my gosh. I need to do a post. I haven't done it for a couple days,” and thinking about it. I love the idea of batch the tasks and we've got a pile of them waiting. Even with this podcast, we've got several episodes in the can. We're releasing them to iTunes and dripping them out because we want to have a little bit of padding. There's an advantage to having some things in the can, especially if you want to keep the consistency. What if you want to travel? I'm going to Austin this week to meet with my business coach. Next week, I'm going to Phoenix to talk to the NARPM Chapter in Phoenix. We’ll still be able to release some episodes while I'm gone.  Katie: That's awesome. What you're doing which is so smart is you're repurposing your content. We're streaming this live, it's getting shared on social media, but you're going to put it on YouTube, at some point, you're going to put it on iTunes. That's really where the magic can happen because instead of feeling like you have to post something every single day, why not invest in one great piece of content like this podcast you're creating.  That's what we try to do, too. It's one piece of great content, and then it can get sliced and diced a dozen different ways. You can turn it into an Instagram story or an Instagram post today and a post some two or three weeks, especially when you create content that's somewhat timeless. It's not just relevant on what's happening in the market, but it's going back to sharing things that are informative, that are really helping your audience, that have a voice, have an opinion, and that repurposing, there's a lot of magic in that. Jason: Let's talk about platform then. How do people pick? Because they're like, “Should I be on Instagram? Should I be doing LinkedIn? Should I be doing Facebook? Should I be on Twitter?” What's your recommendation when people are like, “What platform should I be on?” Katie: It depends on a couple things. Number one, where your audience is. Right now, typically, Facebook is still the number one platform for a lot of people in property management or real estate or even as an entrepreneur. But I also think that's changing as well. Instagram is growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of people have started to leave Facebook and go over to Instagram, even though Instagram is owned by Facebook, because Instagram is such an aspirational platform, lots of pretty pictures, there's not as many political posts and noise on Instagram right now. I think those are two big ones to watch.  I do think for LinkedIn, though, it's important to at least have your profile updated. Make sure that's up to date. LinkedIn is not as fun as Facebook or Instagram, but if you get googled or your company gets googled, typically, one of the first things that pops up is LinkedIn. Just making sure that's up to date, that's professional social network. Outside of LinkedIn, I do think Facebook and Instagram are two big platforms to connect with people, stay in touch with people, and then also to post relevant content and to repurpose some of the content you're creating. Jason: What do you think is coming new in social media? I'm sure you're always paying attention. What do you think coming up that's hot, that probably the teenagers are using that we’ll eventually be using? Katie: Good question. Snapchat was getting a lot of buzz a year or two ago, that a lot of folks in real estate were jumping on that. I think a lot of people realize it's still for the kids. Jason: I think the Instagram stories and Facebook stories killed it.  Katie: I agree. I think a big opportunity right now is definitely Instagram. Instagram is spending a lot of money and resources for people to stay on their platform. Especially Instagram TV right now is a big opportunity. That launched about a year or two ago. It’s doing so-so and then Instagram made some really big changes pretty recently to Instagram TV. When you're uploading a video to Instagram TV—if you don't know, you can upload a video up to 10 minutes—when you upload it to Instagram TV, you now share a one minute preview over to your newsfeed on Instagram, which shows up on your page, it shows up in your newsfeed, which is more likely that it shows up in the explore button. We found that for whatever reason, Instagram wants you to spend more time on Instagram TV. Our posts on Instagram TV are getting a much higher reach, likes, and engagement than just about any of our other posts. As of right now, as of the recording this podcast, that's definitely one to watch. It just reinforces a lot of what we're talking about with video. Jason: I will have to start doing those. When they started doing it, I was like, “This isn’t getting any attention,” but I have noticed, I have watched a few videos on Instagram, and I've hit that button that says, “Keep watching.” Katie: Yeah, it definitely keeps you engaged. We used to just beginning a couple of hundred views on our videos and now we’re consistently getting thousands of views on our videos. It's nothing really different that we've done other than just be consistent with putting up that content, sharing it over to our news feed. I think, ultimately, video is worth that. If you’re not creating original video content in your business, you’re missing a really big opportunity. Facebook even recently just came out over the last couple weeks and said, “Video has one of the highest rates in the Facebook newsfeed, original video content versus content that’s shared from somebody else.” If there was ever a time to get over, “How do I look?” or, “How do I sound?” or, “I have nothing to say,” now's the time to do it. Jason: Just do it. Nike. Katie: Just do it, yes. Jason: I'll just throw this out there because somebody is going to mention it later. If they have teenagers, I think TikTok right now is the thing. Katie: It is, yes. Jason: My teenager’s really into this TikTok thing. I don't know if that will somehow eventually translate to business, but let’s see where it gets. Katie: It might. It's fun to watch. It’s entertaining. Jason: It’s like the new Vine. It’s ridiculous. Katie: Exactly. Jason: Any other tips or takeaways we can squeeze out of Katie Lance before we let you go? Katie: If you are in real estate in any capacity or an entrepreneur, I really can't emphasize enough. There's two big opportunities with social. The personal side of it, being intentional, taking just 5 or 10 minutes a day to connect with people, wish people happy birthday, don’t just be a drive-by liker, actually be a person, connect. That relationship-building piece is so important. Then, that other piece is putting out new content, which is going to attract new business. I just would encourage anybody who's listening to really think about it. I love using techniques like time blocking where you're setting aside time, a couple of times a week, maybe it's just 15 minute blocks of time, or a couple times a month, to really get a system together. If you think about the areas of your business you’re most successful in, most likely there's some sort of system or process. Whether or not you're working with us or anybody else, that's my biggest tip. Get the system, get a process together, and don't wait. Don't suffer from analysis paralysis. Just do it. Jason: All right. Awesome. I love it. So, commenting and connecting, and then content and creation are things we need to build our social network, and we need to create social media. Two different things. Katie, if people are wanting to get a plan, get organized, figure this stuff out, be interesting, and learn social media, how can they get in touch with you? Katie: The best way is through our website, people can go to katielance.com. We have a free content grid that anyone can sign up for. It's a great planning guide. So, if you're listening to this going, “Okay, I’m stuck when it comes to putting a system together,” you can download that content grid for free right on our website. We have hundreds of free resources on our website, as well. Of course, I'm Katie Lance kon just about every social media platform. You can find me on Instagram or Facebook also. Jason: Awesome. Cool. And then anybody listening can also connect with me. I’m King Jason Hull on all social media. There we go, we were just very social, sharing ideas about social media. Katie, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for being here. Katie: Thank you so much for having me. Jason: Really cool. Check her out at katielance.com. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, as I said in the intro, be sure to reach out, connect with DoorGrow, we would love to help you figure out how to grow your business. If you feel stuck or frustrated, you feel like you're trying to do a bunch of marketing, pay per click, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and it's not working for some reason. You may have some blind spots. We can help you organize, sort out those blind spots, and get some clarity on the business, to help you focus on the growth side of your business. We would love to help you do that. If you want to see a big blind spot, you can start with a very public one, your website. Take our website quiz by going to doorgrow.com/quiz and grade your website. This will give you a letter grade for your website. Most websites fail going through this and this quiz will grade your website as to how effective it is at making your money, at creating conversions, at attracting leads. Go ahead and fill that out and then we'll be in touch with you.  Thanks everybody for tuning in to the DoorGrow Show. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Are you tired of dorm food and want to avoid the mad rush of finding a place to live off campus before next semester? There’s got to be an easier way for students to rent houses and apartments. It’s a problem that many entrepreneurs have tried to solve.  Today, I am talking to Dave Spooner of Innago. There are few incentives for landlords to digitize their rentals. Landlord demand for a listing platform is low, but there definitely is high demand for better tools to effectively manage and communicate with tenants.  You’ll Learn... [02:50] Tenant Management Software: Making landlords lives easier with online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, lease signing, and tenant screening.  [04:14] Understanding Innago: Flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive software for landlords and property managers.  [06:05] Learning Curve: Competitors’ software requires expertise and certification. [07:32] Who wants to waste time adopting ugly software?  [08:58 #1 Priority: Intuitiveness in software; speed is love language. [10:20] Different portals for different people to be more productive. [12:16] Find balance, and avoid too fast feature creep. [13:14] Possible future integration with Zapier and other third-party tools? [14:22] FAQs: Access permissions and pricing for landlords and tenants. [17:25] Innago offers unique and unmatched level of support. Tweetables Innago software is flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive. You shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. Choose features that matter, and get the biggest bang for your buck.  Big believers in early success begets future success.  Resources Innago Buildium AppFolio Propertyware Rent Manager.  Jason Fried of Basecamp Zapier 1099 Form Freshdesk HubSpot Intercom DGS 62: Property Management Accounting with Taylor Hou DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to another DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the unique challenges, daily variety, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses, and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.  Today's guest, I'm hanging out here with Dave Spooner of Innago’s. Dave, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Dave: Hi Jason, thanks so much for having me. Jason: It's great to have you. Dave, we always like to get into our guest first, help us understand who Dave is, and how you kind of got into the space that you're in, and give us a little background. Dave: Yeah, absolutely, I'd be happy to, and thanks for the intro. I graduated from university in 2013. I kind of already had that entrepreneur spirit. Me and a couple other folks got together and we wanted to solve the problem of finding a place to live. We're not the first people to try to solve it, and I'm sure we won't be the last to try to solve it, but we want to make it easier for students to rent houses and apartments off campus. A lot of those markets are still mostly or fully offline, and there's usually a mad rush to try and find a place to live. We recognize those issues and we tried to solve them. As we were going about doing that, we kind of quickly realized that there's not a lot of incentives for landlords to digitize their portfolio. There's not a lot of incentives for landlords in student housing to really do a whole heck of a lot, but helps the students out because they're already going to fill other properties, which is really high occupancy in student housing.  We kind of pivoted, and listened to the market, and realized that there wasn't a huge demand on the landlord side for this listing platform, but there was a lot of demand for better tools to manage tenants, and better tools to manage and communicate with those tenants, and to manage their businesses. That's kind of how I got my foundation. I worked on that listing platform for a few years, learned a lot about the market, and then myself and the CTO of that company started and founded Innago in 2017, and we've been hard at work trying to make lives easier for landlords ever since. Jason: How do you make lives easier for landlords? Dave: Innago is tenant management software, and we call it tenant management software instead of property management software because we really believe that the focus should be on managing tenants, managing those relationships, and managing those personalities. Innago, of course, includes a lot of your classic property management tools like online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, online lease signing, tenant screening, etcetera. But at its heart, it's a communication platform. It's something that makes it easier to interact with and manage those tenants. We believe that having that, having that foundation enables landlords to become better landlords, and property managers become better property managers. Jason: I haven't heard of the software before, is this something that there's a good amount of property managers already using? Is this geared towards landlords, or is this geared towards property management businesses? Help me and the listeners understand Innago here. Dave: Yeah, absolutely. We work with both. We work with landlords as small as one unit, and landlords in the thousands of units. The software is really flexible, it’s effective, but it's also simple and intuitive for somebody who just owns some properties on the side, works a normal nine-to-five, and then manages at nights and on weekends, and for a landlord or property manager that's fully dedicated. We work with both property managers and landlords. We predominantly work in the residential space. We do a lot of student housing landlords, given my background, and my partner's background. We also have some commercial landlords as well. It's a really powerful, and flexible tool, and we work with all sorts of different clients. Jason: Cool, that's exciting. Help people understand, because a lot of the listeners in our audience probably already have a property management software, I mean, probably likely. They're probably already with Buildium, AppFolio, Propertyware, maybe Rent Manager. They're probably with one of these guys. But nobody's ever fully happy with their property management. Dave: Right, of course. Jason: So help those listening, how can they see where you fit into the market in relation to these? Dave: Well, yeah, it's funny you say that. I was actually listening to one of your earlier podcasts with Taylor, and he has the accounting services, the consulting accounting services, and one of the things that he mentioned, they work exclusively with AppFolio users, and kind of what they said is, “We only hire people that have worked at AppFolio, and we will only work with AppFolio at this stage because that's the only thing that we're comfortable with,” because it's this monolithic behemoth that you need expertise to even navigate, right? Jason: Right. Dave: That's definitely true for AppFolio, and it's true for a lot of the other software. There's a huge learning curve there. The first time we hire somebody on Innago, we always sit them down, and we jump on LinkedIn, and we do a little exercise, or research the companies. We're not looking for employees of those companies, or even their company page, we’re actually looking for employees at property management companies that their job title, their role is like the AppFolio expert on T, because you need certification to understand how to use it. That was kind of the initial kernel Innago came out of is, you shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. It should be like picking up Gmail for the first time, or picking up iPhone for the first time. It should be intuitive, and simple, and elegant, and powerful, and flexible to work with a lot of different users in a lot of ways. That's really our difference, in the way that we're approaching the market, putting a lot of time, and thought into the features, and the way that they interact, and the way that the user interacts with those features. We're really proud of the features that we do have. It is an ongoing product, and we're constantly adding more. I think for a lot of property managers, and landlords on the higher end, they're going to find at this stage that it might not be a perfect fit, but for those folks with small to mid size portfolios, it's got a lot of really great stuff that it will work well for them. Jason: Yeah, I'm in total agreement. When it comes to software, the number one challenge tends to be adoption, and ease of use is right there. If something is intuitive, that's the biggest challenge, and hurdle. Dave: Right. Jason: I don't even like them using software that's ugly. Dave: Right. Jason: I just can't bring myself to do it. Maybe it's the designer in me. I don't know, but if I'm going to be living in something, I don't want it to be ugly. That's why I use Apple products because they just… Dave: Right, absolutely. Clean design. Jason: I was around my mom just yesterday, and she had a computer and she was like, “I clicked on Chrome, and it's not loading, and nothing's happening coming up,” and I'm like, “I don't know, that's a PC. I've never had that problem on a Mac.” I just don't have that problem. I just think it's funny. I was like, “I don't know, good luck.” Dave: Yeah absolutely, and a lot of property managers and landlords—many are very tech savvy, there's also many that aren't so tech savvy. It's equally, if not more important, to have something that's not incredibly complex, and incredibly challenging, and opaque, and difficult to enter into. Jason: I'm incredibly tech savvy, and I probably could’ve figured out my mom's computer thing, but it probably would’ve wasted an hour or two of my time and I don't want to waste time figuring out my software at every step of the turn and teaching my team members how to figure out software at every step of the turn. Intuitiveness in software is my number one priority. A lot of people build their whole set up internally in their business, trying to find one piece of software that can do everything, and it's usually really awful at everything in a lot of instances, instead of finding the easiest, and best, and fastest tools. Speed is my love language, I think in business, and I want it to be fast, and want it to be simple, and intuitive. I love that that's kind of a foundational goal with your software, because I don't believe that any of the other property management software, that was their foundational goal, ease of use, and to be intuitive. If it was, they've gotten long far away from it. Dave: Right, yeah, I think you're right. Jason: Yeah, and some are much worse than others, and some of them, they can do everything. They're like the ultimate Swiss army knife. Like I've joked in the past, you're not going to see a handy man carrying around a multi tool to try and do all this hard jobs. Dave: Right. Jason: He's going to have a nice tool box with the best tools. The software’s more intuitive, the software is really easy for people to use, and now you're saying on all parties for like the owners, they want to maybe check reports, is there an owners portal? Dave: There is. Jason: Tenants that want to pay rent, and do their stuff, there's tenant portal. And then for the property manager, they can manage and see their portfolio pretty easily, and know what's available, and vacant. Does this have marketing stuff connected to it yet for listing, and the getting the properties out there in the marketplace? Dave: Yeah, great question. We do not currently have marketing. We plan to roll that out, but as you mentioned, I think one of the problems that's happened with other software packages, the feature creep went too fast. They wanted to get all the features that any landlord could ever ask for out as quickly as possible, and that has not been our approach. We have said let's do this methodically, let's think about ways to integrate this into the way that the rest of the software works. Let's make sure that it's easy to use. We are constantly adding features but we're not necessarily rolling out everything that everybody wants, all at the same time. Market syndication is what we call it. The marketing piece is definitely on its way, but it'll probably be another three or fours months before we have that out there. Jason: Yeah, feature creep is a real issue. I'm a big fan of Jason Fried. He's the CEO of Basecamp. I got to hang out with him on a Skype call for 90 minutes. He cut my staffing costs in half overnight, no doubt. I'm a big fan of him. By saying he cut my staffing costs in half, I should say he doubled our productivity. I didn't just fire everybody. We just became that much more productive because he helped me understand how we had so many interruptions, we had so many things that weren't intuitive, and he changed how we communicate as a company. He has a similar philosophy when he talks about creating their softwares. Basecamp doesn't do a whole lot compared to a lot of other software, it’s pretty limited in its feature set, but it's consistently always at the top of the tools and resources people mention for project management even though I really don't believe Basecamp is a project management tool, I believe it's a communication platform for internal communication, that's how we use it. Everyone's going to ask for features, you have to really be picky in choosing about what are the features that are really going to matter the most and get the biggest bang for your buck and really make a difference without it becoming overly crazy, too cumbersome, unintuitive, and difficult to do. There's always that balance of managing all of the features.  Do you see that you guys will be doing any sort of Zapier integration so that people can create zaps and start connecting and integrating with third party tools? No software has come out with this yet. Dave: Yeah. That’s a really good idea. That is not our road map but I love Zapier. We use it for all sorts of other things, whether it's connecting Wordpress to HubSpot or whatever. It’s a really cool platform. That’s an interesting thought. We hadn’t gotten that far. We might still… Jason: Add it to your list and be the first. I'm waiting to see who is the first property management software the adds Zapier integration because everyone's been asking for it. All these people want it connected to their automation. They want to connect it to their process street processes, or they want to connect it to whatever. I think this would be a really cool thing. Dave: We’ll let you know when we do. Jason: I keep throwing that out usually to property management software that I have on my show and I'm waiting to see who's the first to have Zapier integration. Some people call it [zey-pier], but I think [zey-pier] is weird because it creates [zaps], people, so it’s Zapier. You're not [zey-ping] your business.  What else should people know about this software? What are some of the most common questions that a property management business owner might ask that they're concerned about? Dave: Well, one you hit on was the sub users. Enabling not just the head property manager from accessing the platform, but also giving out who has access to which permissions, who has access to which features. Maybe it's Bob, you want him to handle these categories for these properties, or you want your property owners to log in and be able to handle it themselves. Jason: There's the ability for vendors to leverage and use the system as well? Dave: Not vendors, that would be like a maintenance person that you either have on staff or you have on retainer 1099 or whatever. We do not have a vendor portal at this time. That’s a big one and then the other really common question we get is of course the pricing because of the sector that we’re in, that's at the top of our base mind. Jason: Do you want to tell pricing now? If you're planning on changing, don’t. Tell them to go to your website. Dave: No, I'd be more than happy to jump into pricing. Now it’s pretty unique, we're 100% free to use for landlords. There’s no monthly fee, yearly fee, setup fee, there’s no contract. There's absolutely no cost. Everything that I've mentioned is included. Instead, when a tenant pays rent online, we charge them $2 for an ACH transaction. We charge them $2.75 for a credit or debit card, and that's it. Jason: Totally reasonable. I've been saying for at least over a year to people who have listened to some of my older podcast episodes that free property management software will come and there will be the day that somebody's going to offer it, just like people aren't paying for Gmail, people aren't paying for this sort of stuff and it's making money. It manifested, here it is. Dave: That’s right, we did it. It's 100% free for the landlord. Some landlords see the value in an online payment, they see it so highly to pay actually choose to incur a cost and we allow them to do that if they want to, but for most landlords 90% plus, they're not paying a dime to use Innago. Jason: Very cool, that's really interesting. This would be fantastic then for startup PM's, startup property managers. A question that my team would care about is for the rental listings, the vacant properties, do you have some way of listing the vacant properties in some web based fashion? If they're putting properties into their system, is there some sort of code that we can embed on a website to show their available rentals? Dave: Again, there's nothing on the marketing side just yet. Everything is cotntained within Innago but we certainly see the value in that. Jason: Maybe in the future then. What else should people know about Innago? Anything else you want to throw out there? Dave: Well, we offer particularly in our sector where you do have some of the lower cost platforms out there or some of the simpler platforms out there I suppose. Oftentimes, they don't offer any sort of support beyond a 48-hour email window. With Innago, we’re a little different, we offer full phone support. We also have embedded videos and help section to ease landlords along in the system as they get started and learn the platform. We’re really big believers in early success begets future success. We want to make sure that we’re hand holding for your first month, two months on the platform, and ensuring that you understand how to use it. You can use it effectively and can leverage it to improve your business. Once you do that, then you're off to the races and in really good shape. We offer a unique level of support that many others can't really match. Jason: What platform are you using for support? Dave: We use Freshdesk, and we use HubSpot, and we use Zapier to connect certain things to other things. Jason: Cool. We use intercom for anyone listening, because property managers need some sort of support desk too. Dave, this sounds really neat. How could somebody demo this if they're curious to check out your software and how should they get in touch? Dave: Yeah. They can go to innago.com and they can request access to a free account. We’ll get in touch with them shortly after just to make sure they're a good fit, that we're going to solve some problems for them. We don't want them to waste any time fooling around on a platform that is really not going to work for them. If they request access, we’ll shortly be in touch, and we'll get them into the platform, and they can start playing around with it. Jason: Where does the name Innago come from? I'm a branding guy, I'm always curious. Explain Innago. Dave: We like to think of it as a strong three-syllable word, that's about the extent of it. It's really kind of like Google or Yahoo, there's not a whole lot behind it. Jason: Okay. Maybe we’ll have to make up the story sometime together about it. Dave: Yeah. We’ve thought about it, but we'll take any suggestions. Jason: When did you guys launch this? How new is this software? Dave: We launched the company in January of 2017. We had the product out in the market, kind of like an alpha stage really in March of that year. We've been coming along ever since. As far as a product, we're a little over two years now. Jason: Awesome. How many companies are using this right now? Dave: We have thousands of landlords on the platform and it's growing every day. I would nail that hard number, but it probably changes by the minute. Jason: Yeah. It's probably pretty tempting and pretty easy if it's free. I would imagine you guys will have some success and you guys are making enough money you think to stay healthy just through the transactions? Dave: Yeah. As you know, there's a lot of landlords out there. The majority of them are still self managed or not using any kind of software. There's a lot of tenants that want to pay online. Only about 30% of the market currently pays rent online. That's a huge giant blue ocean that’s ready to be captured. Jason: Yeah. There's a lot of blue ocean that are self managing. If you really want to super attract property management business owners, if you can figure out a way to help connect these self managers so that they can get that professional managers to take over stuff, and partner, maybe create some partners, I think you’ve got a winning affiliate business going on right there that’s good for your company. Dave: Absolutely. Jason: I know there's lots of people listening that would like to get connected to those that are self managing and work with them. Dave, super cool to have you on the show. I wish you lots of success. It would be cool to have you come back maybe in the future after you've come out with even more features if you’ve got something really cool to share. I wish you guys a lot of success with the free software. I've been talking about this for a while. I think it's long overdue. This is really great. Dave: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jason. I really appreciate it, my pleasure being on the show. Jason: Yeah, thanks for coming on. You heard it everybody, free property management software that is intuitive. If they are really intuitive, they're going to have a lot of natural success and growth, and if they're free, they're going to have a lot of growth. If they can make the numbers work which sounds like it would be pretty easy with all the transactions that are going to be occurring, it could be a game changer.  I think other property management software, they're a little bit greedy, and there's too much of that feature creep. I think this will be a competitor. It’d be interesting to watch. Let’s keep our eyes tuned, our eyes peeled and stay tuned to see what they do. Anyway, this is Jason Hull of the DoorGrow Show. If you are wanting to know if your property management website is leaking money because every website is probably leaking money. If you want to see that it’s leaking money because you don't want it to be leaking deals and leads anymore and you want to make more money and cash from your business, test your website out by going to doorgrow.com/quiz and take our DoorGrow Score Quiz that’s going to grade your website on how effective it is at creating conversions. Some of the questions are tricky. There's a lot of people taking the test and then make a bunch of changes to their website, some of them are false positive, so be careful if you're going to do that. Do that quiz and then maybe talk to our team and we can help you improve your website piece because I really don't believe that anybody's better at creating websites that make money than DoorGrow for property managers. Alright, we'll talk to all of you guys soon. Until next time, to our mutual growth.  

If you enjoy unique challenges, daily variety, learning new things, finding opportunities, and experiencing freedom, then you would probably be successful in property management. Entrepreneurs would rather work 80 hours a week for themselves, than for someone else. You don’t have to do it all on your own. Be willing to take some risks, and connect with like-minded people. Let your entrepreneurial spirit fly! Today, I am talking to Bryan Jenkins and Jonathan Cook of AHI Properties. They share strategies that consistently grow their business and add doors in multiple markets.  You’ll Learn... [02:00] Keep on Growing: Corporate housing to single-family homes to property management. [05:25] Real Estate Market Crash: Created shift in income and dealing with investors, despite technology. [07:20] Love it, or Hate it: Learn something new every day in property management. [08:05] When’s the right time to grow and expand? Adding doors in multiple markets. [09:42] Sand Traps: Think outside the box to grow property management business. [11:15] Educate Clients with Market Knowledge: Direct investors into markets where they can make money and purchase more doors for AHI to manage. [12:03] Game Changer: Diversifying existing portfolio and dealing with accidental landlords who leave when it’s a good time to sell. [13:40] Recipe for Success: Gain momentum and referrals by building partnerships and relationships with sister companies, third-party providers, and contractors. [19:57] Four Ds to Revenue: Deals, Doors per deal, Duration, and Dollars. [24:30] Focus on Funnel: Multiple sources serve as supply line for incoming clients. [26:07] Strategies and Approaches: How to expand and operate in multiple markets. [27:13] False Scarcity: There’s plenty of opportunity to create business and follow up because 70% self-manage single-family residential properties.  [29:10] Remember Me? Make sure to have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy to keep track of clients and properties. [36:07] Bryan’s Biggest Piece of Advice: Keep an open mind, don’t be afraid, but focus on multiple funnels and opportunities to develop client relations. [38:03] Generational Change in Property Management Profession: Think about technology, bring awareness, and open people’s minds. Tweetables Let your entrepreneurial spirit fly. Recipe for Success: Gain momentum and referrals by building partnerships. Four Ds to Revenue: Deals, Doors per deal, Duration, and Dollars. Resources AHI Properties AHI Properties Email National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) MLS U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) IMN Five Star Conference Roofstock Deb Newell of Real-Time Leasing Matthew Whitaker of GKHouses DGS 75: Bridging the Gap Between Inside and Outside Sales with Jennifer Stoops of Park Avenue Properties DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz   Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Gentlemen, welcome. I’ve got here hanging out with me Bryan Jenkins and Jonathan Cooks. Which ones which? Jonathan: I’m Jonathan. Bryan: And I’m Bryan.  Jason: Hi Jonathan. Hi Bryan. Jonathan, Bryan both of you have some experience in growing your property management business and I’d love to get into your background. Whoever wants to go first, share a little bit about your background, how you got into property management, into the space, and maybe a little bit about why somebody should listen to you today. Jonathan: Bryan is much more impressive. You go ahead, buddy. Jason: All right. Let’s go, Bryan. He threw you in.  Bryan: I’ve been a property manager now for 19 years and we started this firm ground-up but tied into a corporate housing company, where we do fully-furnished corporate housing for guests that are relocating. We operate that model in 12 different physical locations in 6 states, servicing 14 markets. With that, we had brick and mortar locations. I came online in 2000. We started buying residential single family homes to facilitate our corporate housing needs. From there, we actually acquired a property management company here in Birmingham, Alabama back in late 2003. Since that point, we’ve been growing. That’s the only acquisition we’ve really done through the years. We’ve first acquired that management company. We had 109 properties and that portfolio that we acquired. By that time, we purchased 52 of our own properties and eight classifications for corporate rentals and lease back. With that, we’ve grown over the years to five locations now and it worked in two states with our property management platform. We’re managing just shy of 1100 single family homes now.  I personally came from a military background, 9 years active service, got into real estate. My parents have always been entrepreneurs. I’m part of this operation and really got plugged in. Probably my big cook kick off and the expansion piece of it really took flight after I found NARPM back in 2011. I got plugged in there with the Atlanta chapter. I’m the past Atlanta chapter president. I’m currently the NARPM National Member Services Committee Chair and I just dropped my application for RVP. So, see how that one plays out, but a lot of experience. We’ve got a team. Including myself, we’ve got 23 property managers working on our operation and Jonathan is our business development. I’m going to segue that into him.  Jonathan: I got my real estate license in 2007. I was the youngest realtor in the state of Alabama when I got it. I was 21.  Bryan: Fun facts. Jonathan. Yeah. Fun facts. But my entire life I have been surrounded with real estate. My step dad owned a real estate company. He was in construction for a long time even before that. My mom’s best friend is a real estate agent in the area that has always owned properties, has her own rental company. After highschool, it just became my secondary job for the longest time of being her property manager. I don’t want to drive out to my 15 properties or how many she ended up having at that time. “I’ve got this property. I need you to run over there. Get rent. Get this. Make sure you maintain this. Paint these walls. That tenant’s out. That tenant’s in. Call the newspaper.” This is early 2000s. Before I even got my real estate license, I was still trying to do the maintenance piece of it. Then when I got my real estate license, I was doing real estate and had a... Bryan: Work field tech. Jonathan: Yeah, like a field tech. I had this halfway working knowledge of what property management was, I thought, supposed to be, but I was a realtor at that point. So, I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got an idea.” When the real estate market crashed in 2008–2009, there was not the source of income that I was used to. I started dealing with investors with the slight little piece of halfway working knowledge that I’ve built up with my family, like rentals, trying to figure out how the single family rental market works, and start cherry-picking areas because I had access to NLS and I could look up where properties were. At that time, there was no internet documentation. I couldn’t send documents online and have them signed. There was no electronic signatures at all.  Bryan: It was that long ago. Jonathan: It really was. I was having to drive offers on HUD homes from Birmingham where I’m at, in an hour-and-a-half away to the closest HUD office which is in Anniston, which is a whole another city in Alabama. It was an hour-and-a-half. I had to drive and had to have ink on page. “Here. This is an offer. Will you take it?” Then you end up, “Nah. Get out of here.”  Jason: So needless to say, things are a little bit more efficient now.  Bryan: A little bit.  Jonathan: My wife actually works for AHI for years before I did. I just started as the Business Development Manager in October of last year after my wife begging me for years. “Would you please go with AHI? You know what we do here.” I’m like, “Yes, it’s property management. I know how to do that.” Oh, I had no idea how to do that. Then I got here and like, “Oh.” I got plugged into NARPM. Started learning all the extra pieces, ins and outs that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know here at AHI. I learn on a daily basis from Bryan and from everyone out here in the office and it has just become, “I get it now.” There’s always going to be stuff that I’m not going to know. Bryan: That’s the challenge. That’s the beauty of property management. I always say, you love it or you hate it, there is no really gray area in between. As long as you’re learning something everyday and solving issues, that’s what keeps me coming back daily. It’s kind of us.  Jason: Like I said in the intro, the people that like this like the unique challenges, the daily variety, they like the opportunities, and ultimately if you’re an entrepreneur, you like freedom. And you’d rather be working 80 hours for yourself than 30 for somebody else.  Bryan: That’s right.  Jason: We’re crazy like that. Let’s get into how you guys have grown. You’ve mentioned there was an acquisition, there’s a couple of little things that you’ve done, but let’s get into how are you adding the bulk of the doors into your business. I guess the conversation topic at hand is supposed to be about multiple markets. How do you manage doing multiple locations and when do you feel it’s the right time to go into a second location for most managers that are listening?  Bryan: I’m going to say that, based on what I said earlier in our history, is we’re probably a little more unique than a company that’s trying to open a market from scratch in an outside area. Our growth strategy is actually to come alongside our corporate housing company, utilize the brick and mortar they already have. Then we just come in with client, we come in with systems, and hire local talent. With that, we’re ready to go operational, handling back office out of our main hub here in Birmingham. That allows us greater freedom and greater flexibility and movement with our client base.  Our most recent acquisition was Oklahoma City and we opened in December of 2017. We went out there basically with a client that took us out there with 24 properties to get us started. Hired a single property manager and now we’re managing 158 properties on the ground there. Some other clients have become along the way and have been clients we’re working with in multiple markets as well.  Jason: Let’s give some of the listeners some tips or some strategies here for growing their property management company. We’ve got two kinds of sand traps that people fall into. The first one’s maybe the solopreneur stuck at 50 or 60 units. What would you recommend to somebody that have 50 or 60 units if they’re wanting to add doors and build up a portfolio?  Bryan: Let your entrepreneurial spirit fly, first and foremost. I would say, be willing to take some risk. You have to be able to do that. What I see in property management is, I see people that are stuck in the box. What I mean by that is they’re happy signing accidental landlords on a daily basis and dealing with the one-off homeowner that by default is the landlord. Jonthan: They called you because they’ve seen your side.  Bryan: Right. Jonathan just talked to one earlier today and the expectations are totally off scale. They have no investment mindset whatsoever and they’ve got a strong emotional attachment to the property.  Jonathan: And in my opinion, if you start taking in those kinds of clients, it’s going to keep you at that rate because they’re going to require way more attention. They’re going to need hand holding for every little thing. They don’t have that entrepreneurial mindset.  Jason: If they’re only going to stay a year, that means every year, you have to get a new one to replace them. Plus another one if you want to grow and add something new. If you build your business on accidental landlords, it can be pretty difficult unless you’re magically able to convince them to switch to buy-and-hold. Jonthan: Generally, you’re not directing them into the markets that they can make money, which will in turn allow them to purchase more doors for you to manage. That’s one of the things I like to help our investors there is identify markets. I think that’s super important for any property manager no matter where you are. Knowing your markets, knowing them really, really well like the back of your hand, and being able to educate owners and investors from all over.  Bryan: Yeah, whether investors gain experience whatever. Jason, I would say that the big game changer for us was really about 3½ years ago, maybe even 4 years ago. Looking at the diversification of our existing portfolio and then realizing we had a heavy concentration of accidental landlords, and hearing the same information being repeated back to say, “You know what? A lot of the property managers I know, their managed inventory were shrinking and consistently shrinking year after year as the sales market started to gain momentum.” And that’s what happens to your accidental landlords to say they jump ship when it’s a good time to sell.  Jonathan: And get my money back out.  Bryan: That’s right. Some of those we did over the years, as long as we’ve been at it, we’ve had investors that have actually started off as accidental landlords and then they’ve converted to buy-and-hold and then they’ve had another property, and another property. They’ve educated themselves and they’ve become real estate investors.  In my opinion, they’ve done it the right way. They’re learning as they go the right way for them, I guess. They’re educating, taking a step, they’re not taking too much time to take the step because otherwise, you’d miss the opportunity. What we focused on was, we want to understand not only what is going on in our local market, but we want to get a broader national picture and see what markets are hot markets, why are they hot markets, what types of return on investment are investors realizing particularly after we looked at that focus on the time period after 2010. After bottoms have been hit and you’re starting to get some upward momentum again with property values and such.  We started attending outside events such as IMN or Five Star, started to align ourselves with some funds, some small REITs, and property owners that have portfolios that weren’t necessarily internalizing their management operations. They were small enough, they needed a professional partner to partnership with, to make their operations run as efficiently as possible, and focus on key metrics. That’s where we started focusing our education piece and then started signing those clients. Really, that’s been a wonderful piece.  From that, we’ve added another piece to our business which we have an internal insurance agency which we opened up last year that focuses on the investment product. They can insure in 50 states. If they’re buying property in one of our existing markets or even a couple of them, that’s the beauty of having multiple markets. They focus on investment in three- or four-year markets but then they’re buying elsewhere. The insurance piece will pick up their properties wherever they have them in the country. That’s been a really powerful piece for us and that has come online especially we opened it last year but we’re really been gaining momentum in the last six months with that piece.  Jason: This is a third party tool, or resource, or vendor that you guys have signed on with? Bryan: No. This is a sister company. It’s Birmingham Insurance Group and their carriers are third party. They use national carriers that are backed by Lloyds of London and a few others. Jonathan: It’s downstairs.  Bryan: Yeah, just downstairs in our office building. They are truly a sister company and my partner is a shared owner in that entity. It’s been a nice value add for us both ways. They’re referring people into us, we’re referring people out to them, handling the renter side of it. The big thing is the master policies with the insurance. That does make it nice and easy for investors, again, no matter where their stuff is, to add or take away property as they need to from online portal systems. It works pretty well.  My partner and spoke on a couple of podcast, investment network podcast and got invited out to the West Coast to speak to some folks and from there, that opened the door to three or four buyer networks, basically. They were focused on Alabama already and then Oklahoma City. Then aligning ourselves with turnkey providers and partnering with some local contractors to be able to facilitate that piece ourselves. That’s been the growth cycle. Back to that spread your entrepreneur wings, I think that somebody that really get stuck in a box and only want to do property management per se may handcuff themselves a little bit. I think you can’t be the master of all things, I understand that, but understanding what industry you’re in and how you can be most effective and partner with people. For example, I had a phone call with a real estate agent here locally that I’ve known for 15 years and all of the sudden, April 1, he just called me up today just to say, “Hey, April 1. I partnered with a rehabber, I partnered with a guy from a hedge fund, and we’ve got a couple of funds going. I’ve got some inventory to rehab and I hear you guys have some investor clients…” there’s partnerships all over the place.  At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to the relationship piece. Getting in front of people and just building those relationships. Maybe they’ll do it. The one sit down at the bar and have an hour a bit, maybe it’s the third one or the fourth one, just consistently following up. I found that a lot of these guys, if they’re shopping you and shopping your competition, what happens is they’re not really ready to pull the trigger that day. But if you stick with the follow-up, just stay in front of them, stay consistent, and know your metrics, then a lot of these guys will circle back to you and they’ll give you an opportunity. That’s been our recipe for success for the last three years. Jason: All right. You threw out a lot of things really quickly. I need a recap and I have notes here. For those that are watching, let’s cover some of these. First, you said, make sure you identify the good markets with the best investments. Get really familiar with your market even nationally taking a look at which markets are hot. Most managers are working in the market they’re in, but the advantage of looking nationally would be to understand maybe how their market fits in, play with the national scene to see if their market could be savvy to market investors outside of your geographic area. That sound about right? Jonathan: We’ve recently had a lot of out-of-state, out-of-market investors coming in because they’ve heard nationally in Birmingham. They come in and some of that information sometimes is going to be a little bit old but it’s taking them in and being willing to, and having the knowledge to help them understand the differences. Birmingham is big. How do we separate that into areas of, “Let me explain this area, then this area, then this area,” and then compare it to whatever markets that are used. Bryan: There are macro versus micro views. I think that gives you common ground to speak to the investor. If their coming out of the Indianapolis market, then all of a sudden they’re looking at Alabama. It gives you some common ground to start with.  Jason: That first one ultimately what’s really helpful is to have context to give them, these out of state investors, to see how your market fits in with the national scene. I think that is wise. Know your own markets, know the little neighborhoods in your market, but also see how you can fit into the macro view of the nation and beyond.  The second thing you mentioned is to shift away from accidental landlords, just recognizing that. I talk about this concept called the 4Ds to revenue. The first D is deals. The second D is the number of doors per deal. A lot of times people just lump those together and they think a door is a door. The third D is duration. That’s how long you can keep them on. There’s a massive difference between a one year accidental and the 10-year buy-and-hold. Ten times difference in revenue return. Then, the last D is dollars, making sure you get fees in place. A lot of people don’t focus on each of these things individually. They’re just like, “I just need to get doors on.” It’s just about the doors. There’s a such a big difference between those. So I think that’s wise to shift away from accidental landlords.  The third thing you’ve mentioned is identify partnership opportunities. There’s a lot of different ideas here for partnerships. You had mentioned partnering with an insurance product or an insurance company, bringing in a value add and partnering with them, getting on investment network podcast, then connecting to buyer’s networks, turnkey providers for partnerships. Then you’ve mentioned follow-up over and over and over again.  Bryan: That’s right. One other thing I’ll add to that would be your preferred vendor partnerships. One we allude to all the time is we work with Roofstock, which I don’t know if you had an opportunity to speak with those guys in the past. Jason: I haven’t. Bryan: Great product especially if you’re buying anywhere coast-to-coast but as roofstock.com—shameless plug there—be sure to check that out. Jonathan: It’s not for us.  Bryan: No, it’s not for us, but what they do is they come online, they certify their property management partner and the same thing with the wealth networks. Once they’ve certified you as a vendor and a partner in that capacity, then you’re a trusted resource. It makes the closing of the transaction that much easier.  Jonathan: One of the things that I really like about Roofstock is if you are able to direct your own internal investors, if you don’t have enough time to go through an actual buyer’s agency with an investor that does want to potentially grow more doors and you’re busy being a property manager, you don’t have time to walk down every single property with them, you can direct them to Roofstock and say, “Hey, grab your properties from Roofstock. Bring them to us.” That helps take that portion off of it, so they’re buying properties that you want to manage.  They’re buying properties that are already set-up. They’re already getting vetted out. They have an idea of what they’re going to get. They’re not coming to you with some uninformed number of “I saw a house and I have no information about it so maybe can we put [...] in there?” No, this house has [...]. This is how much I’m paying for. This is the ledger. This is what is already making for rent. This is what it should make for rent. Whatever.  Bryan: It allows you to control that potential client so you keep them inside your little circle if you will, to ensure that they’re going to be coming back to you. Just based on people we referred to them over the last couple of years, the relationships are really tight. They take really good care of them and they do come back. They asked the property managers to perform to certain levels and the properties, as we mentioned, they’re vetted out in advance. A lot of the due diligence piece done, we still always encourage our clients to do their own due diligence but a lot of that is done on the front end for them. It’s a nice value add.  Jason: That’s a great tip. Property managers listening should go get connected, if they can, to Roofstock so that they can have that vendor partnership. They can be listed as a preferred or recommended vendor. Are there other channels or how would somebody identify their channels that they should be looking at to become a certified partnership, or a preferred vendor as a property management company? Jonathan: Local REIT, REIs, and stuff like that. Any sort of investor networking. Most cities will have a local chapter and sometimes it’s going to be wholesalers. That’s fine. You need wholesalers if you are trying to bring in homeowners that are going to be growing their business and growing their doors which in turn is growing yours. You’re going to have to have some product to give them. It’s not bad to have a few wholesalers that you know and you know the product that they have and you can stir. Maybe you get an extra commission off of that, who knows, but you’re least adding to your own business by adding to theirs.  Bryan: I think my biggest tip in this arena right here would be, I view everything as a funnel. You’ve got to have multiple sources pouring into the funnel that’s going to push out to you on the end. I guess the tip to it all is develop the multiple networks and the multi approach to just having a supply line for incoming clients. We all know about the renter side; that’s pretty easy. What I think has been underdeveloped over the years in the property management arena has been the client-based side of it and trying to attract the clients back in instead of being strictly out of necessity, such as the case with an accidental landlord. There’s so many factors to focus on but ultimately, we are big on having probably no less than 10 different sources pouring into our funnel and then we give them points. So, there’s always a trickle effect and then you’re maintaining those relationships along the way.  In our operation, with five locations I’ve got five different property manager brokers that are actually running the operations. We actually have an education piece each month which we push out all of our brokers. We have a mastermind call group each month that we work through problematic areas within the individual operations corporately and then on the local market level. All these things help us stay consistent in our team approach.  You had Jen Stoops on recently, right? With Park Avenue? We love Jen. We did a show with Jen and Deb Newell after the Five Star event in Memphis, March, I think it was. We were talking about Jen’s approach with John in Park Avenue. He’s always been that hub approach. They have their back-end office piece and then they spoke out and she explained it to us. That’s been fascinating to me because we have brick and mortar in each location and a lot of it depends on what your state requires.  Again, there’s a couple of different strategies on how you do those operations and how you expand out and operate multiple markets, but both of them work and both companies are successful at it. Again, I just think don’t put all your eggs in one basket. My grandpa used to tell me that a long time ago and just growing up with entrepreneur parents I [...] that, exampled out to me on a daily basis. That’s probably the biggest approach. Don’t be fearful and don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Just be mindful of the relationships.  Jason: Yeah. I love this because I feel like the stuff that you’re doing is foundational to growth. This is what the property management industry needs right now. We’ve got 70% self-managing in single family residential. There’s plenty of opportunity. There isn’t scarcity in this industry, yet. Yet, there’s this false scarcity that’s been perpetuator-created. I think it’s just so refreshing that you didn’t mention, yet, it’s all about SEO, it’s all about doing pay-per-click ads, it’s all about social media marketing, it’s all about content marketing. You’re actually going out and tapping into that 70% and you’re creating business. You’re walking out the door, the business is there and you’re getting the business while everybody else is fighting over the coldest, crappiest, worst leads that fall off your table.  Bryan: I’m going out also to say everything you just addressed is important, too. I’ll let you be going on in the background but the resources have been beaten to death over the last several years.  Jonathan: We get those too. We get plenty of those and you have to call.  Bryan: That’s right. Jonathan: You have to. You have to still call them. Jason: And follow up, and follow up, and follow up. Jonathan: You have to. Bryan: The funniest thing and I know you can probably relate to this but we see it all the time. Any property management firm operator, or property manager just listening, they have seen it on multiple occasions. You’ll get there’s tire kickers that come to you, they’re checking out your services, your rates, your reputation and all these stuff. Then they’ll say, “Okay, I’ll call you when I’m ready.” You follow-up with them and then eventually they come back 12, 15 months later, “Okay, I’m ready to go. You remember my property?” We looked at thousands of properties since then.  Jonathan: “Remember, you saw it? You saw it.” Jason: Yeah.  Bryan: We do make it apprise, “Hey, save that information. There’s a good chance he comes back around.” That’s just experience of it all, but again, those are going to be your accidental landlords, your one off homeowners that—not being negative—aren’t really investors. They’re just investors by necessity only.  Jonathan: Or they just want to know what their property potentially can list for. Jason: That’s why it’s important to have a CRM and to keep track. I’ve talked to hundreds of property managers and it’s so funny because I always hear, “You remember me?” and sometimes—I’m honest—I’m like, “No, I don’t. But I have really good notes here from when we talked and I can refer to that,” and that’s enough.  Bryan: It is. We’ve seen you around at events and such, and everybody’s intertwined in our industry, at least to the NARPM scene and a couple of other organizations we belong to. At the end of the day, it is about the relationships. I always said, the thing I love about NARPM—not to turn into a NARPM commercial—I always felt like the analogy that I would beat my head against the door jamb every single day and it was quite painful. I got tired of learning from my own mistakes. The opportunity came up to learn from other people’s mistakes, so that made it much more appetizing. I enjoyed it.  Jason: Let other people bang their heads and you can watch. Jonathan: They already have. They’ve already banged their head on whatever problem you’re about to have. They’ve already done it. Here’s an answer for you already. It’s easy. Jason: We see that a lot inside of our Facebook community as well, the DoorGrow Club. It’s a resource, everybody’s super helpful, you can just ask a question, and you get at least several really solid answers. You don’t have to be alone as an entrepreneur. I think as entrepreneurs, there’s this myth that’s created in our minds that we’re alone. It does feel like that a lot of times because our teams are a little bit different than us. There are people that want to see the uncertainty or they’re crazy freedom people. Most of the people, I think, in the world are not entrepreneur personality type, so we feel like we’re aliens sometimes on a foreign planet. But if you can get around other people through organizations like NARPM or through the DoorGrow Club and connect with other people, you start to recognize that there’s nothing wrong with you and you’re normal.  Bryan: And you’re not alone.  Jason: And you’re not alone. There’s plenty of people willing to help. I think as entrepreneurs, we are contribution-focused people. We get momentum by helping other people. That’s why we do what we do. I think everyone’s always so surprised if they’ve been disconnected from other people like them, other entrepreneurs at how helpful entrepreneurs will be. They’re so helpful, so giving. I think really, a rising tide raises all ships. This industry really needs more collaboration. We’re not at the point where there’s any sort of real scarcity, or competition really is fierce. There’s so much business available and there’s lots of room for growth. I think the industry is going to start to see that here in the next several years.  Jonathan: I think before I came to AHI, one of the things that I learned on day one was before being at this company, I did have that mindset of, “I can’t, I don’t want to share any of this stuff, I got to do all this by myself.” Once I’ve been at AHI, one of our biggest competitors, we refer to them all the time. We refer people to them constantly because they might handle this better than we will in this instance. The competition is such friendly competition in this industry.  Bryan: Are you talking about Matthew? Jonathan: I am talking about Matthew. It’s so collaborative. We’re having him in an event in a month. Bryan: You know Matthew Whitaker, right? Matthew Whitaker with GK? GKHouses? Jason: Maybe. Jonathan: He’s got good notes on him.  Bryan: Anyway, Matthew’s a contrast to my vision and what we’ve done with growth. He’s been growing through acquisition.  Jason: Very different strategy.  Bryan: Yeah. Homevestors, franchise holder, and then converted, internalized to PM operations after 2007–2008 and then went to work. Basically, he’s growing from Birmingham to Nashville, Chattanooga, Little Rock, Arkansas, then Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado. He’s done it through acquisitions. He’s a sharp mind. He’s cutting-edge guy, but we got along famously and have been friends for years. We’re actually hosting a PM summit coming up in a month, in June.  First thing that we put on in the State of Alabama—NARPM doesn’t have a chapter in the entire State—we’re trying to do a kick-off event and get some property managers in, geographically from Huntsville all the way down Montgomery, and just have a nice panel discussion. I’ve got some professional managers coming over from the Atlanta chapter, Matthew and myself. It would be a great event and we’re looking forward to it. I think it’s going to lead to bigger and better things.  My big piece, I think you [...] upon it, is just make our industry better and raise the bar for crying out loud. If nothing else, what that does for operators that are raising their bars, those that refuse to do it, there’s such a difference between the two companies. It’s easy to select the [...] that’s doing it bigger, doing it better and more efficient, and giving more value back to our clients and customers. That’s our focus.  Jonathan: One of the things that I see with these smaller realtors that are doing property management individuals is we all know similar stuff. It will be those stories where it’s like, “Oh, I had this client that was doing this and I knew they shouldn’t have done it. We just let him and it was an issue.” Okay, well, that’s not education piece. Inform your client instead of just sitting there and holding it. That’s the thing that I see. They’re afraid to lose that business so they’re afraid to step on those toes to educate their clients.  Bryan: Yeah. I’ll make it a point to empower my team members. When you empower a property manager, you always see analogy of the guardrail system. Our procedures are guardrails and if they stay within the guardrails, they can have their own little flavor. That empowers them to make certain decisions and do things that are instantaneous and beneficial to everybody involved instead of having to go through red tape.  Jason: Yeah. Let’s wrap this up. If people want to connect with you, find a little bit more info, or they’re curious about what you’re doing for growth, how can they get in touch with you? Any final words to those who are struggling with growth right now who are looking to grow their property management business?  Bryan: My final thoughts going back and recapping this thing is just keep an open mind, don’t be afraid but focus on multiple funnels, if you will. Look at multiple opportunities for you to develop client relations. I think our strategy ended up originating from the need for self-preservation. Is not that we are in danger. We just saw that the market was going to change and has changed and will change again. We want to be better prepared for that and allow ourselves better diversity in what we’re doing.  If they want to reach us, we actually do a podcast ourselves. We have an email set up for that [email protected] and that ties directly to both of us. We just love to answer any questions. I’m always open and available by email and phone. I’ll be happy to connect and just give my two cents worth. Again, I always like to give back to the industry. It has been good to me and I like to give back.  Jonathan: I second everything Bryan said. He’s got it.  Jason: All right. Perfect. Bryan, Jonathan, grateful to have both of you here on the DoorGrow Show. Appreciate what you guys are doing. Bryan: Thanks for having us.  Jonathan: It’s a pleasure.  Jason: It’s a good message for everybody to diversify your interest and how you’re bringing in business. It’s exactly what I coach clients to do, so I love that you’re reinforcing what I teach which is a welcome, refreshing unexpected thing. I appreciate you guys being here on the show.  Bryan: We appreciate you having us. We thank you very much. I just want to actually thank you for what you’re doing for the industry because I think it’s a wonderful thing.  Jonathan: Yes. It makes everything better.  Bryan: Yup.  Jason: Oh, thanks. Everyone says that and I’m going to ask you, what am I doing for the industry?  Bryan: Here’s the deal. I’m an old dog but you can teach me new tricks. There’s a generational change in the property management profession and I think as the level professionalism comes up, we see our younger generation of property managers coming in behind. I don’t want to say transitioning of the guard but it is a change of mindset from what was old. Think about the technology piece and the systems pieces that have kicked in, stuff that’s happened since 2012 is crazy. We were server-based.  Actually, what Jonathan was alluding to early on with the ink on paper scenarios. I think that’s the biggest piece. It’s bringing awareness and just opening people’s minds such as myself. The new line of thought process and focusing on efficiencies and systems and the benefits of what’s out there and available to us. I think that’s a huge help to entrepreneurs everywhere.  Jonathan: When you spread this message out to everyone through the internet and it becomes national and worldwide that people can get this information, when you’re going to partner with another property manager in a different area, at least we can start from a place where we can both springboard off of, we were able to send people to you and just, “Listen to this. That’s the information you need,” as opposed to us having to go, “We’re going to have to teach you all this stuff.” Bryan: It’s fun to do to educate, but it is an education piece for your in-bound clients. You’re using all of that to really set them up for success with the organization. The reason we got into our podcast, specifically, was the first one my partner and I were on was a guest on one of the investment wealth networks and we actually signed 52 houses off that one episode, of clients coming in from out-of-state. That prove the value of it and then the education piece. If you’re like me, if you travel, I listen to podcasts all the time and come outside my own little world. It just really open that up. People are listening on a more regular basis and it’s definitely an education piece. It’s on demand for you. That’s the beauty of it.  Jason: Great. It’s been great connecting with you guys. Love what you’re doing. Again, I appreciate you being here on the DoorGrow Show and I will let you guys go now.  Bryan: All right. Jonathan: Thank you so much.  Bryan: Thank you.  Jason: All right. You heard it from those two gentlemen. The strategy for growth, really, you need a diversified approach and there’s so much available potential business out there. I really feel like the industry has so much potential for growth. I think it’s a really exciting time for property management. There are tons and tons of people that are self managing, they’re frustrated and they’re not searching on Google according to Google Trends.  Anyway, reach out to us at DoorGrow. If you’re struggling with any of these challenges, you feel like, “Hey, I’m ready to be coached. I’m coachable. I’m open. I’m ready to grow my company. I’m ready to make some painful difficult changes in my business,” then, I might be able to help you. Reach out to DoorGrow. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and make sure you join our Facebook community so you don’t end up getting stuck on random questions. You can ask questions in there; doorgrowclub.com. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Today, I am talking to Gwenn Aspen of Anequim, which offers remote assistant, Rent Manager call center, and Rent Manager software consulting services. Also, Gwenn and her husband, Jeremy, own the Wistar Group, a property management company. You’ll Learn... [04:40] How helping a friend, helped property management companies hire employees. [05:20] Currently, 150 employees in Mexico work remotely for property management companies in the United States and Canada. [06:25] Connections and Relationships: Life is all about taking care of and looking out for those you know and love. [06:50] Internal References and Cultural Differences: Holding each other accountable results in low turnover/high retention. [08:20] Managers Managing Remotely: If you manage someone who works remotely, get to know them as a human being. [10:51] Webcam: Teams founded on trust and transparency should be seen and heard. [14:50] For better or worse, Anequim and Wistar Group are unique and original company names that could be patented to prevent being sued. [16:45] Finding a Good Fit: Anequim helps potential clients identify things that they don’t like to do and give them to someone who does. [20:51] Time vs. Energy: Avoid burnout by identifying what fills or drains your energy. [22:20] Onboarding Training: Includes four ways to not die in property management. [26:12] Vetting Team Members: Extensive process of selecting candidates for clients. [29:47] Working in Mexico: No background checks possible or databases available. [34:09] Progress, not Perfection: Help property managers move forward and feel confident in making a commitment. [38:21] Anequim Structure: Assistants, solution agents, and others handle 1,200 units. [42:36] Every business needs systems: Planning, process, documentation, and communication. Tweetables Power of the Webcam with Virtual Teams: Just be there, and be seen. Time and Attention: A manager’s most important resources; use them wisely. Word to the Wise: Keep your clothes on when training employees. Our job is to make sure people are happy with their candidates. Resources Anequim Gwenn Aspen on Facebook Gwenn Aspen’s Email Wistar Group DGS 76: Outsourcing Rules for Small, Medium and Large Companies with Todd Breen of VirtuallyinCredible First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently Zoom Myers–Briggs Type Indicator Fair Housing Act Americans with Disabilities Act Culture Index Traction by Gino Wickman SweetProcess Process Street Basecamp Help Scout Intercom Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today's guest, I'm hanging out with the fabulous Gwenn Aspen of Anequim. Gwenn, welcome to the show. Gwenn: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Jason: I'm excited to have you. It's really fun hanging out with you in the green room and you were showing me your nerd glasses. Gwenn: That I carry around with me everywhere I go because there's always a need. They’re literally nerd glasses, you guys. They're from Hobby Lobby, I got them for an event I had to go to because we were revenge of the nerds and I bring them everywhere because that's how nerdy I really am. But we can have fun too, we can be fun nerds. Right, Jason? Jason: Yes. Maybe. It's probably possible. A lot of people think I wear all these weird, different glasses especially the orange ones. People notice I wear this orange glasses and they always come up to me and they think I'm trying to be so cool. Their like, "Why are you wearing this glasses? Are you trying to be Bono?" Which is funny because Bono wears them to block blue light, right? He's not wearing them just to be cool but he is cool. Way cooler than me. Then I go into this diatribe of why I wear them and how they block blue light and how it helps set my biorhythm patterns, helps me get good sleep, and then they’re just sorry they asked. Gwenn: Well, that's what’s in your nerd shows Jason. Jason: And then they realized they are nerd glasses, so they realize I'm a nerd. Gwenn: Yes, because they bring out your inner nerd when you wear them and people ask about them. Jason: Yeah. So, I got some less orange ones. This are my nerd glasses. This make me look a little bit smarter. Gwenn: I think they look good. I like them a lot. Jason: They're a little yellow to them but I don't have the tape. I have to get the tape and maybe add the tape at some point just to look more nerdy. Alright Gwenn, let's get into this. Give us a little bit background, so you run this company doing remote assistance from Mexico and you said they're not virtual assistance because they're not robots, right? Gwenn: Right. No. They're not. Jason: You manage Rent Manager, the property management back office. You manage Rent Manager's call center, so you have a call center for Rent Manager people. Gwenn: We do. Jason: Then you also have Wistar Group which is a property management company in Omaha, Nebraska. Gwenn: Yes. That's all true. My husband and I started Wistar Group back in 2006 so we've been doing this for a long time. In 2008, a friend of his called him from Mexico because he lived in Mexico before I knew him for five years doing something totally different, transportation and logistics. The friend called and she said, "You think the economy is bad in the United States? Well, you should come down to Mexico. Things are really bad down here and I lost my job. Is there any way I could work for you in some capacity from home?" Because it wasn't only about the economy, but it was pretty dangerous at that time and my husband is the most loyal person you'll ever meet, for better or worse. That's right when VoIP phones came out so we sent one down to her, we figured how to make it work and she started answering the calls for Wistar Group—at that time, it was called Certified Property Management. She's taking the calls and it works awesome. We love it. She loves it. It's great. Then we just started, as we grew, hiring all her friends for all the other jobs that we had. We just operated like that because it works for us for many years and then in 2016, our friends from Boutique Property Management in Denver, we were hanging out with them and they're like, "Hey, this Mexico thing is working out great for you guys. Can you hook us up with people from Mexico?" I was like, "Sure." Then I got them some employees from Mexico and they loved it. My husband and I were like, "Maybe we can help more property managers with this," and so it grown like wildfire since then and now we have almost 150 employees in Mexico working for property management companies across the U.S. and Canada. It's just a win-win for everyone and it's just so exciting and I love my job so much. Jason: Okay, great. This sounds very similar to [inaudible 00:05: 37] who we had in the show except they do the thing in the Philippines. It sounds like a very similar sort of etymology or story behind how you got into this and it really was filling your own need and starting by helping a friend and it grew into helping all these different property managers. That's the interesting thing I've heard from those that have Mexican staff is that they hire one and all of a sudden, all their family and friends start becoming team members too. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: That must be a culturally different thing, I think with Mexico versus the Philippines. I think they are both very family-oriented, but I think there's something about Mexico that they're like, "Hey, hire my brother." Or, "Hire this family member," and they're connecting people. Gwenn: Oh my gosh. Yeah, the connections that they have, don't we all love that? Isn't that what life is all about? Is connections and taking care of the people that you love, that you know. It's just yet another thing to love about all the people I know in Mexico, is just how much they care for one another and have each other's back and then also hold each other accountable. That's the other things are that we grow a lot through internal references from one employee to another. If someone has a problem and they were the one who referred them, man. They hear it from the other employee. I mean there are that many cultural differences, but that's been a fun one. It really ends up keeping the turnover really low because they are happy, our employees work from home, and they love it, that's a huge advantage. They have this great connection with each other and we have Christmas parties. We're going to have a summer picnic with everybody. It's added a lot of richness to my life, just getting to know the employees as well. Jason: I was going to bring that up. A while back, I read a book called First, Break All the Rules. I believed it's pulled up by the Gallup Organizations that does the pulling. They did a whole bunch of surveying companies trying to figure out what makes a really good team and what creates retention with the team. One of the number one indicators of retention whether somebody was going to stay in the company was whether they have a friend in the business or somebody they are connected to personally on the team. So, that makes a lot of sense. It increases retention, significantly. Gwenn: I would say that's our job. If we’re going to hire someone remotely, if we’re the managers of this person, it's imperative that you get to know them as a human being to get that retention and to get that buy-in and to get them on your same mission going in the same direction. I feel like I know you much better right now just because we are in a Zoom Conference and that doing what with cam... Jason: Now, we're totally homies because we are in Zoom. Gwenn: Yeah, now we’re homies and we have the nerd glasses together, I mean. Those little things add to the relationship so if you make a point, I only communicate with people from Mexico using webcam because we have this amazing connection then and we feel like we know each other better. If you use a webcam, I swear it makes all the difference and getting buy-in from a remote employee. Jason: I absolutely agree. I've done a lot of remote hiring in the past and there's a huge difference, but it got to a point where eventually, I have a policy in our company called the Webcam Policy and everyone is required to have a webcam to be on the team and to communicate and show up and turn on the camera when we do meetings because it ended up being, at one point I remember showing up having team meetings and there's 5-10 people without their webcams on and there's just me putting on the show. Gwenn: I love that. I don't have an official policy, but not that you said it, I'm adding it. But I also have another employee from a totally different industry, he did a lot in banking and he was told to never have his webcam on. It was such a cultural dissonance when he came on the team because we were like, "Put your camera on. I can't see you. I don't know what you're doing. I need to see you." It was hard for him. It's good if you're somebody who requires webcams and state it at the beginning because some people, it takes them a while to get used to it. Jason: Yeah. It is a part of my onboarding process that they have to review the webcam policy and read it. Do you want me to tell you some of it here? Gwenn: Yeah. I think it's so important because whether you do remote employees from Mexico, whether you have someone in the Midwest, you know a lot of people hire people from rural Nebraska to work for their company because it's a lot less expensive. Jason: Alright. I'm going to share an internal secret here. Gwenn: Understanding the power of a webcam is crucial for the relationship working in my opinion. Jason: Alright. Here's our webcam policy for those listening. We are a team founded on the values of trust and transparency. It is important in a virtual team to be able to see one another on our virtual meetings since we often can't meet directly in person. As a team, we don't care about your hair, makeup, clothes, etc.during internal meetings. Just be there. Not having a webcam during internal meetings can feel like talking with someone behind a reflective window. It causes humans to try to assume and guess too much because they lack nonverbal cues we have evolved to rely on. Why address this? And then in bullets: to promote an environment of trust and transparency, to improve the efficiency of company communications and shorten meetings by effectively communicating with the full spectrum of verbal facial expressions and nonverbal cues, to reduce multitasking, right? Because they [...], they're like, "Oh yeah. I'm listening." Gwenn: Right. Totally. Jason: To reduce the anxiety of those speaking on camera, and then having the expectation. It is expected that all team members will join OpenPotion, that's our corporation, virtual meetings on video in order to fully engage in team and one-on-one meetings, this promotes collaboration on multiple levels and it allows each individual to feel heard as they see and receive nonverbal cues from their peers. This also increases productivity and reduces anxiety as ideas are better understood when they're coupled with facial expressions, gestures, and other forms of nonverbal communication. When meeting with clients, we appreciate you doing your best to make yourself and your background presentable, but that is not required. We just want you fully present and visible. Then I have a quote and it says, "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said," Peter Drucker. Gwenn: Oh, I love it. I love it although I would push back on the not caring what you look like because I've had people show up, not very often, but I had a guy and he looked like he'd just been to the club, and just rolled out of bed, and I was like, "Man." Also, you have to know your audience. We have a screenshot and keystroke that we record of everyone that's working for us while they're working not when they're not. We had one guy who was at a webcam conference and he had his hat sideways and my assistant was like, "Is that okay?" If you live in California that might be okay, but if you're with an older team in Omaha and you have your cap on sideways, it just might not work. I was like, "No. They're in California. It's totally fine." She was like, "Oh, okay." You have got to know your audience, better know your audience. Jason: I think it all boils down to what the entrepreneur wants though too. Before the call, I'd ask you what your Myers-Briggs Type was and you're an ENTJ, so you've got that J in the end. Gwenn: So, I’m Judgy? That means I'm judgy, right? Jason: Yeah. You're judgy which means you're a planner. You want things done a certain way. This details matter to you. I'm a P so I'm all over the place. I'm a bit more open-minded and I love taking you Js and cracking you open a little bit to expose you to some things you weren't exposed to before. Gwenn: I need people like you in my life too because I can't be too in the box. It's so nice to have that fresh [...]. Jason: J from the box for sure. Ps have no box and Js look at us like we're crazy. Some of the Ps that are perceiving, that's what the P stands for, they will take in things from all different sources, all different ideas, and to most Js, that's being so open-minded, their brain is falling out. It's how Js kind of view us sometimes but we need each other. All these other different types. I definitely need Js on my team to run my email, handle my calendar, do all the planning stuff that is not fun for me. You do this virtual team thing, how does somebody start with you if they come to you and they're like, "Hey, Anequim." First, where did that name came from? What does this name mean? Gwenn: I'm going to give you the real answer. We used to be a certified property management and then [...] wanted to sue us because they were like, "We have a certified property manager distinction," or whatever. Jason: Designation. Gwenn: Designation. We were like, “Well, we wanted to rebrand anyway,” because we started from nothing and took any piece of garbage that had a roof on it and then as time went on we became more sophisticated, and wanted to take out nicer properties, but in the local market, we were the low end. We already were going to rebrand, but we didn't want to get sued or threatened of a lawsuit again, so we were like, "We have to have something that's totally unique." Well, it's very hard you guys. It's so hard to find something completely unique. My husband's a pilot for fun and so he loves this airplane called Anequim and it means mako shark in Portuguese, anyway that was like a word we could use that was unique. We got Anequim and then Wistar Group. Wistar is my middle name and they were unique enough that my best friend who is a patent attorney approved them. For better or worse we're Anequim and Wistar Group. Jason: There you go. Alright. Portuguese mako shark. Gwenn: It's also an airplane. Jason: Which has nothing to do with Mexico whatsoever. They don't even speak Spanish. Gwenn: But I'm not going to get sued for it, so you know. Jason: No, it's perfect. It's a unique and original name which is helpful in branding, right? Okay, cool. Now, how does somebody get started with you guys. Somebody comes to you and say, "Hey, I’ve got a problem." How do you know that you can help them? Because I'm sure there are clients that you don't take on and there are clients that aren’t a good fit. Gwenn: There are. In fact, there were two clients yesterday that called me and I was like, "You know what? I think you guys just need to wait for a minute." And that is my thing. We don't sell. We try to make a relationship because if I sell you and then it doesn't work for you, then it creates a lot of heartache and drama for me because I want the person in Mexico to be happy and I want the person in the United States to be happy. What happened yesterday was, this one guy was buying another company, and they already had two employees there, but he hadn't really worked with them yet. I was like, "Hmm." He was going to be managing 400 properties. I felt like his people count was good enough for 400 properties, so I said, "Just take on these two new people. Measure processes and procedures together, make sure it works, and then when you get a handle on them then call me." He was like, "Okay. That's a better idea. That's what I'm going to do." If you call me and it's not going to work for you, I might tell you to do a few things first. Then the other guy called me and I thought again that his head count was already too high. I thought you could make more efficiencies in his software because a lot of people only use 5% of the software that they have purchased. If you have five really expensive employees and 400 units, I kind of think you should work on being more efficient first with your software and then call me. Jason: Yeah, right. Gwenn: Unless, you’re going to transition things—but these were obviously, longer conversations, I'm giving you the shortened versions—so if someone calls me and they're like, "No. I need somebody. I'm working my butt off and I need some relief." Then we'll talk about a job description first because I need to find the right person for this role. I need to know what kind of tasks you want. For instance, if you want someone to be doing a lot of cold calling then that's going to be a different person than someone's who's going to be helping you associate the right invoices with the right property and the right owner, right? We have to make sure we have a good job description. Also, your training is going to be better, it’s going to be a smoother onboarding process if you are really clear about what your needs are. Now, a lot of people will call me and they are just overwhelmed and they'll just be like, "I need a personal assistant." A lot of the times I push back on the personal assistant and I say, "Why do you need a personal assistant?" And they'll be like, "I just hate taking the phone calls. " I say, "Okay. Well, let's find someone to take your phone calls." Really, if you want a personal assistant because you are overwhelmed, think about the things that you hate doing that don't bring you joy, that don't fill you up, and let's give those to someone who's a better fit for those roles, that loves doing those things. Usually, it starts with a conversation about what the pain point is and what people really need, who they already have in their team, and what software they are using. We come up with a plan that would actually help them get what they want. That's kind of my goal. It maybe me, it may not be me, but my goal because I come from the property management world is just to prevent burnout from whoever's calling me. Whatever that looks like. Jason: Yeah, so you're helping them a little bit “KonMari” their time, right? Gwenn: Yes. Jason: And you we're talking about that before. Gwenn: Oh my gosh. Well, I love that. Maybe I should use that, but you have so many things that you have to do. Some people are coaches and that's really important to them, their property managers, and their families. Your time and attention are two of your most important resources and everyone on your team needs you to be using those wisely if you’re the one steering the boat. Jason: Yeah. I'm a big fan or proponent of energy management over time management... Gwenn: Yes. Jason: ...and really identifying what energies you as an entrepreneur versus what drains you because we really afford doing the things that energizes us, we have an endless amount of energy. Like our life and our businesses fills us but if we are doing things that drain us, burnout sets in and it's inevitable, it becomes really difficult. I think it's really important for people to pay attention to their time and what really is giving them momentum. I tell property managers all the time, “Anything that's been sitting on your to-do list for more than a few weeks, you're probably not the person that should be doing it. Let's be honest.” Gwenn: Right. Absolutely. There are people like, you and I we are just talking about how our personalities are different. Find someone who you like working with. Who you enjoy spending time with because it isn't actually an employee essentially just living far away that compliments you and can do the things that you struggle doing. Our role is to help people do that and we also train them on the first day so I have very high anxiety. I take care of things that make me anxious. I always go over the four ways people can die in property management on the first day, carbon monoxide poisoning, natural gas explosion, fire, and a technician being mistaken as an intruder and getting shot, and the importance of asking permission to enter. Those are four things we go over, which is really funny because when we turn over the training to the client, my assistant will always be like, "So, what did you learn in training?" And they're like, "How not to die in property management." The clients are like, "What?" I mean, I told them that we were going to talk about that with the agents but people forget and they're caught off guard. Jason: Four ways to die. Gwenn: Four ways to die, but those are really, really important and it really does happen. And our industry, there's been a number of deaths that we're all aware of, and so it's really important whether you're going to hire someone remotely or not to really discuss what bad things can happen, and how to make sure they don't happen in on-boarding training. The other thing we cover is Fair Housing and American Disabilities Act. That really should be trained every year if that's not on people's schedules for training. Domestically, I don't do this with the remotes, but domestically at our property management company, the other one is sexual harassment prevention training. We have a 70-year-old sales guy and then we have a 21-year-old front office lady. When you have multi-generational employees especially what they think is appropriate is totally different. It's important to discuss that because people aren't trying to be jerks, and they're not trying to be bad people, and they're not trying to offend anyone, it's just that what was totally appropriate in 1950 to talk about in the workplace is different. Also, on the 21-year-old side. I mean, 21-year-old sometimes think everyone's their best friend and they’re hanging out at the bar and it's not true. Having that conversation at the beginning of a relationship with any employee is important. Jason: Okay. Fair Housing and Disabilities Act, sexual harassment training, and four ways to die in property management. Gwenn: Yeah. If you're going to be using webcam, here's another thing. I did have a client who thought that it's totally appropriate to train his new employee without any clothes on, so a word to the wise, keep your clothes on if you are going to be training somebody. People, sometimes just don't know, they just don't know. I'm sure it was hot, it was summer, maybe went out to the pool and came back. It was really not okay. It's another thing to keep in mind. Jason: Policies improve overtime. You know there's something interesting if my webcam policies say, "Don't be naked." It doesn't say that yet. We haven't had that come up yet, but if it does happen, we'll definitely have that in. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: I mean, I had no idea that's going to be an issue but... Jason: Right. You never know until it happens. I think that's how all of the property management contracts evolved over time. Like, "Oh, this one's a weird new situation. Let's avoid that in the future and write that into our contract." Gwenn: Right. Jason: Okay. Somebody comes to you, you start them with some of these things, how are you vetting these Mexican employees, these team members? What are some of the things you go through to ensure that you're getting a good match, you're finding somebody who's really a good fit for a position? Help those that are listening feel safer using Anequim to find them a team member. Gwenn: Sure. The first thing is that they have to fill out an application and upload a video of themselves speaking in English about their hobbies. You find out a lot about people when they think it's appropriate in a video to say about their hobbies and how good their English level is. It also demonstrates that they have some technological ability because they have to upload a video. Jason: Right. Gwenn: We get rid of a lot of applicants right there. If they make it through those two steps, then we have them take a personality test. We use the Culture Index, and the Culture Index indicates whether people have detail orientation or not. Generally speaking, unless I'm hiring for marketing position or outside sales or something, we are going to need detail orientation. We look for that. There are few personality types that we just don't hire at all and we also have a logic-emotional continuum. Anyone who's really low on logic also not pass to the next level. After that if the make it there then they do an initial interview and it's a pretty tough interview. Ensures they have the qualifications and the seriousness that we are looking for. Generally, the pool of candidates that we are looking for have worked previously for a large corporation. So, in the towns where we primarily source our candidates, they work for Nissan or GE or Hewlett-Packard or TATA Consulting, and there's some really big names where they've already one through a lot of the training that you wouldn't need to train a brand new person on. But they've already been through it so they know how to talk on the phone, they know how to deal with conflict in a professional manner, and they know how to write an email. We do benefit from all that corporate training many of our folks have already been through. Jason: Okay. Gwenn: If they make it through the interview then we are going to start calling their references and just make sure those show up well. After that, our clients, if they've made it through all the interviews, we’ve decided this person is worth this amount of money. We have a paying scale based on education level, work experience and we know what kind of job they would fit into then we match them with our clients we have who are looking. The clients get to look at three different candidates, and see if this is a cultural fit for them and if this is someone that's going to work on their team, and that they're going to feel comfortable with on a day to day basis. We always do the interviews in threes. Hopefully, we do our job well enough on the first three know exactly who we want, but if you want to do another round, our job is to make sure people are happy with their candidates. The one negative about working in Mexico—and this is going to be with a lot of the country that you would source from—background checks, it's not the same, there's no government database and even if there was it probably won't be accurate in the way that you and I would expect, so there's no background check policy or way to even do that if you wanted to. We rely a lot on internal references and those networks or people want to give us their best friend and then they internally hold them accountable as well. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: We haven't had any issues with it, but I would suggest with anyone working remotely, you manage your privileges and your software. Rent Manager allows me to obscure social security numbers, credit card numbers, and we have a policy that nobody working from home has access to those, and you have to be in the office if you are going to be taking credit cards or looking at social security numbers. If you have good tight privileges, you don't really have much to worry about by hiring someone remote, and it's just a good policy anyway. Jason: Yeah. Alright. That is kind of the match making process. Gwen: Mmm-hmm. Jason: Then once they pick a candidate, what's the transition like this on the onboarding sort of process and how far does Anequim gets involved? Because I know some property managers are not probably used to having a virtual team member, they are probably going to make some mistakes, they might just say, "Hey, this virtual stuff doesn't work. I don't get it." How do you ensure that the transition is going to be healthy? Gwenn: First of all, we try to get a good plan on before we even get to that place. We have documents on ideal first two weeks of training and talk to them about what that process looks like, talk to them about technology, what kind of phones do you use. We recommend that you listen to calls if you're going to have someone who's the face of your company, and you're not going to be able to overhear them when you walk in the office. Here's a form on monitoring calls and here's the portal so you can see their screenshot and their keystrokes. We try to do all of that before the commitment takes place. Talk about what that looks like, so that when the commitment like, "Yes. I want to move forward," happens they've seen in their minds, "I kind of have an idea what this looks like." We don't want for either the client or the agent to get to a place where it's the first day and they just look at each other in webcam and go, "Okay, what do I do now?" We try to avoid that situation as much as possible, which is why we’re not trying to hard sell anyone. We want someone to be committed to the process and feel somewhat confident. Obviously, you're going to be a little bit nervous if you've never done this before, but that's why we are here to hold your hand, and give you that documentation and talk you through it so that you feel more confident before it actually happens. But then, on the handover meeting you're going to get all of them setup on their computers. You're going to get them to know everybody on your office, taking the laptop around and you're going to say, "Tell us something that people don't know about you." Or, "What are you grateful for today?" You know, a little icebreaker and then you'll get into the tasks. The great thing about working with Mexico is that they're on your time zone. Do you have to be perfect? Do you have to have the perfect documentation? No. Because like any other employee that you hire, you can just say, "Okay. I'm going to show you how to do this." They know it should be written down but it's not, "But you're going to help me write it down because I never had time to do this before. Here's the software where were writing it down. Here's how you're going to get a screenshot using Snagit. I'm going to video record myself going through this process and then make it a pretty process for me and then when it's done and it's all pretty, then you're going to do it." That's possible. Some people are further along in their processes and procedures than others, but by no means you have to have things perfect to move forward to the remote assistance. Jason: Yeah. The Myers-Briggs people with Js a lot of times get really caught up to being perfect before they move forward. They're like, " I have to have every process documented before I could grow my business." Gwenn: No, that's not the real world. I would say progress not perfection, right? I mean, you have to move forward. I'm reading this great book called the Billionaire Coach or the Trillionaire Coach, I think is what’s it called. It's really good. It's on my audible right now. But the guy is like, "Okay. Once you have things down, you have to go, and you have to go fast." I think that sometimes the people who are really into perfection lose sight of go, go fast, so it's always that balancing act. If you're not good at processes and procedures then hire someone to help you do that and just show them on in a video and say, " Okay, for the next three hours you're going to write this down. Okay? Then I'll check in on you in three hours and see how you're doing." Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: That's totally okay. Jason: I like that. Progress over perfection, so what I teach clients is, "Done is better than perfect." It's very similar. Gwenn: It is. Jason: Done is better than perfect. Get it done, you can always redo it later. You can make it better the second time around but having something is better than not having it. The other thing that I'll throw out there, sometimes is that perfect businesses are out of business. So, don't try to make everything so perfect before you move forward. It's the businesses that fail, that make mistakes, that rapidly prototype, that try stuff out and see what doesn't work, they're the ones that move forward faster. Gwenn: And when you have that hard day where things really did fall apart then just go back to the values. Like, "Okay, it fell apart, but I'm suring it up as a value, as a person with values. So, what does that look like?" If you have your values strong and you’re connected to them then when you mess up, if you just go back to that, you'll be fine. Jason: Right. Gwenn: That's how I look at it at least. Jason: That's the foundation. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: A really strong why and set of values for the business. That's what creates culture in a company. Well, cool. What are some of the questions that property managers ask you that I haven't asked yet? Some of the frequently asked questions, concerns, considerations. Gwenn: The main thing is the role. People are just like, "Okay, everyone's doing VA and I know I should be doing it because I'm just supposed to be more profitable than I am right now, but where the heck do I get started?" Usually, when people ask that, I just tell them because we've been doing this since 2008, how our company is organized because I do feel like we do remote labor as high of a level as you could. You might structure it slightly differently but just to give people an idea because the thing is in people's minds and eyes, they remember virtual assistance. They think, "I need my processes to be perfect. This is someone who can only do route activities, can't think outside the box." All of that is not true. These people from Mexico, can be, if we hire for it, highly educated. We even have some professors on the team. We have some attorneys on the team. Highly-educated people who most certainly are capable of thinking outside the box. Guadalajara, where we source a lot of the people, it's the tech capital of Mexico. When I go to the Christmas Party in Guadalajara, people are speaking Spanish, English, French, Portuguese. It's like an international gathering, like any European city that you'll be at or anything like that. Here's how we're structured. We have 1200 units that we manage. We have three customer service people residing in Mexico who take all the front line calls. We actually call them Solutions Agent instead of Customer Service Agents because they're job is to provide solutions. They don't just read from a script, but they can also talk to tenants about their statement and what it means, what's this maintenance service issue, maintenance charge is for, and help people break a lease, give them information about breaking a lease, changing roommates, tell them if they could have a puppy or not. Actually solve problems that give solutions. They also take all the maintenances services issue and troubleshoot. The great thing is that you don't have a PhoneTree when you call into our office. You just get a person which is a really good customer service. Most property management that I call have a PhoneTree and then you still can't get a hold of everybody. Thinking about what the experiences of an owner calling your main line, and what that feels like, maybe important in many of the markets that people are in. Once someone takes their phone call, any elevated issues will go to the assistant property manager. Let's just take a simple thing, it's not even elevated but like a service issue. We’ll go from customer service agent, we'll take everything from the service issue then it goes to what we call the virgin list, the assistant property manager review that—and we have three of those, by the way, one for each property manager has an assistant who's a true assistant—and they look at all the service issues that come in and decide whether our internal maintenance team can handle it or if it needs to go into a vendor. If it needs to go to a vendor then they're in charge of putting a budget on it, and based on the contract, whatever the owner wants, and then signing it to a vendor and then following up on that. If it goes to our internal team, then another woman in Mexico who's the Maintenance Dispatcher decide whose list it goes on out of the 15 maintenance people that we have. Her job is to manage those guys' schedules and make sure they're busy. Make sure they have work and make sure that they're going to a place that makes sense. Then other people that we have is accounting. We have two people in accounting and collections. They don’t just do accounting but they're also are like, "Why is this maintenance guy going to store three times in a day?" He's like actually analyzing the invoices and saying, "This price doesn't make any sense." We have two people there. We have Applications Underwriter who does the applications in Mexico as well and a marketing person in Mexico. I feel like I'm forgetting somebody. I think that's it. Jason: Anything on the sales BDM side? Gwenn: No. My market, we get a lot of business just coming in the door so we don't have a BDM. We have some sales people that are on a commission basis but we don't have an official BDM role. We actually decided not to get one this year which is weird because sales always pay for itself, but when we look at the numbers in our market, it didn't make sense to get someone at that price point. Instead we’re buying a company in another market and growing that way, but that deal's not totally done yet. Jason: Right. Gwenn: Those are the people that we have in Mexico. Internally, we have a front office lady, a leasing agent, operations manager, a maintenance manager, and right now, we only have two property managers. And then my husband runs the company and puts his finger in everything. That's pretty lean for 1200 units, it's pretty a lean shop. Jason: Yeah, that's really lean. Then you have a pretty decent process documentation, I would imagine as well. Gwenn: We use SweetProcess, where we house our processes and procedures and we’re kind of obsessed with it. We use EOS so we’re using the traction book. We've been doing that for 2 ½ years now and love it. That's how we stay organized and set our goals and priorities and make sure that we don't get lost in the day to day task and know where we’re going on a daily basis. Jason: Yeah. I think every business, eventually, as they evolve, they need a planning system which you had mentioned EOS. Every business also needs a process system, some system for documenting process and leveraging these processes. We use Process Tree internally, which works out really well. Gwenn: And I like Process Tree, but it's more expensive than SweetProcess. It depends on what your needs are, but I would recommend looking at both and determining what's better for your organization. But yeah, I like both those systems a lot. Jason: Every business needs some sort of communication system in the business as well. As a team, we use Basecamp as our communication platform to communicate internally, and then you need a client supporting communication system. A lot of people are using Help Scout or Intercom, or one of these knowledge based support systems. There's probably other systems. I'm forgetting off the top of my head, but business really need all these different systems in place. Once you have these systems in place, it facilitates and enables your team to really do well and communicate and understand where the company is headed and get in alignment with your vision and your goals. It's a big deal. Gwenn: Yes. There's a lot to take on, but again, people don't have to be perfect. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: Because when you say that it's like, "Oh my god, that's so overwhelming." But it doesn't have to. Jason: One thing at a time. Yeah. Gwenn: One thing at a time, Yeah. Jason: Cool. Cool. Gwenn: That's why I like EOS though because it takes that overwhelming. The, "Oh my god we have 10 million things we have to do this year," and it forces you to say, "Okay. How much energy do we really have and what are the priorities out of my list of million things that I'm going to do in these three months?" It actually helps you get more of that done than you would if you just look at the long list. Jason: Yeah. It has an etymology that's very similar to a lot of business planning systems and most every business planning system has annual objectives, quarterly objectives, monthly, and these things break down and the idea is, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Gwenn: Right. Jason: It’s like these elephants, you break them down in a 90 day, 30 days, and then even weekly commitments as a team. But a lot of business don't have any sort of planning system in place, so they're hitting zero objectives because they really don't really have any, and there's no clarity around it. They’re just winging it and the entrepreneur's, they're crazy. Entrepreneurs come into the room and says changes every week, "Hey, guys. I got this great idea." And they lob a grenade in the middle of the room, pull the pin and lob this grenade and walk out. They're excited and pumped out and the team are like, "What are we going to do with this thing?" Having those systems in place can be really helpful especially if you have virtual team members because then it makes a lot of difference for everybody to be on the same page. Gwenn: People, historically, have thought like, "Oh, were going to do all these planning and then we'll tell them later what we planned." But I recommend having the virtual team members in on all of those meetings. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: Here's one tip that has really helped us. We have the three customer service agents. Every morning at 10 o'clock they meet with the Operations Manager and just say, "Oh, this person is out of the office today. They have a dentist appointment at 2:00 PM and it's whoever's birthday. Our swing thought for the day is people can hear you smile. In the call monitoring, I've noticed that there's not been so much smiling on there, so let's keep that in mind for today. Today's contest for online reviews, we’re still giving $50 certificates to anyone who gets an online review." Whatever you have going on and just touching base for 10 minutes a day makes all the difference for someone whose remote. When you have your weekly EOS meeting, include them and what you're talking about. If they feel included in the process and in your mission, people don't leave. We've had the same employees at Wistar Group for six, eight, I think, is it nine years. I think we have two employees who've been with us for nine years. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: That's the key to getting the virtual or the remote members totally immersed in your culture. Jason: Yeah. They need to be a part of it, ironically, right? Gwenn: Absolutely. Jason: Yeah. I'm a big proponent of making sure that your team members are involved in outcomes instead of being micromanaged. Give them outcomes and let them innovate and you'll be surprised with what they can come up with. It might not be the way you would do it, it might be better. A lot of times, as entrepreneurs, we think we have it all figured out. We need to tell our team members, "Here are the steps. Do this exactly this way." When it comes to goal setting, goals are outcomes. Assign an outcome to somebody, let them own it, and I think you'll be surprised at the results they can create. Getting your team all involved in it, some of those meetings have been really eye opening for me because I had my set of ideas. I thought this is how the whole world looks and then I went around and asked my team members, "Here's this outcome. What ideas you guys have that can do it?" My graphic designer has a totally different idea than I would have. My head of fulfillment has totally different ideas than I would have. They bring this perspective and all these ideas were really good. I'm like, "Yes. We should do that, maybe not that, that one's great." I think you don't want to be the emperor with no clothes running a company. That's how you do that, is by allowing your team members to have a voice and be involved in the process. Gwenn: I love that. Actually, we teach a version of that on the first day of training. Its form this article that you can get on the internet called Who's Got the Monkey. Jason: Okay. Gwen: It's the number one reprinted article from the Harvard Business Review of all time. I only came across it out of massive failure years ago. Where I took my team members out to lunch and I thought they would tell me how much they love their job and they were like, "No! We don't love it. You guys never listen to us." I was like, "What?" They're like, "Yeah. We don't even bring up ideas to you anymore because you are never going to listen to them anyway." I was like, "Oh my god. This is terrible." I found the article on the internet and we came and have a change management process. We asked our team members to own their ideas. The first steps are people come to meeting and say, "Hey, not all ideas are good ideas, but here's my idea." That allows people to save face and be vulnerable and say what they're afraid to say in the meeting. Then they have to bring everything to the meeting—the subsequent meetings—to move the idea forward... Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: ...so that the decision maker can just say yay or nay. Sometimes, there's a little homework on the decision maker’s part, but we try to make it as minimal as possible. I take it from sale, in sales people are always eternally optimistic and they think everything's going to close. My way of determining if it's going to actually close or not is, "Is your name on the prospect’s calendar for another meeting? If it's not, then your deal is dead." Just black and white. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: If it's not there, you can revive it, but you better get a meeting out there. Same thing with ideas, "If your name in this meeting is not on anyone else's calendar, your idea’s dead." Just know that because when people feel badly about their job, when they get vulnerable, they say it and their manager is like, "Oh, that's a great idea," and then they wait three months and nothing happens to it, that really hurts morale. Giving them the honest, "Hey, it’s not moving forward if there's not a meeting" Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: And having them own that helps give them agency over their idea. Jason: Yeah, I love it. Cool. Let's wrap this up, Gwenn. I think this has been really helpful. I think we talked about some really cool ideas. I think, hopefully, some listeners are a little bit more open to having some team members that are not sitting in their physical office. How can people get in touch with you if they are interested in learning more? Gwenn: Well, I'm on Facebook. If you want to send me a message at Gwenn W. Aspen, I'd love to meet you there. Additionally, we have a website anequim.net and you can fill out a form, we'll get right back to you there, or you can email me at [email protected]. But we love to help people, and like I said, if you just want to bounce ideas off whether this is a good idea or not, we can talk about your specific situation. Jason: Awesome. Gwenn, thank you so much for coming into this show. Gwenn: Thank you, Jason. It's been so fun. I really appreciate you having me. Jason: Alright. We'll let you go now. Alright. Bye, Gwenn. Gwenn: Bye. Jason: So, there you have it. Check them out at anequim.net. For those that are listening for the first time or checking us out, we really appreciate you subscribing. If you’re listening on YouTube or watching on YouTube or listening on iTunes, we would appreciate—if you are on iTunes—you give us your feedback. We would love to hear your real and raw feedback. Again, give us a review on there. It will be really helpful especially if you liked the show. We would love that, that gets us excited. Then make sure you get inside our community which is doorgrowclub.com. This is a Facebook group where you get to hang out with other property management entrepreneurs, all the Door Grow Hackers, connect with us, and see future episodes. We livestream these episodes into that group so you won't miss a beat. Check us out there at doorgrowclub.com. If you are interested in growing your business then reach out to us doorgrow.com. We would love to help you and see if we can help you grow your business. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth.

In the United States, millions of residential properties are owned and rented out by individual landlords, not professional property managers. Why not protect yourself from painful experiences with tenants, have peace of mind, and leave it to the professionals? Today, I am talking to Dave Holt of SureVestor, which provides Scheer Landlord Protection. This insurance plan financially protects landlords and property managers from tenant-related risks. SureVestor is at the forefront of leading a trend that can significantly help grow the industry. You’ll Learn... [01:45] Passion for Property Management: Dave joined NARPM nearly 30 years ago and has gone through its entire chain of command. [02:51] Reasons why Scheer Landlord Protection was brought to America: Significant growth impact on property management industry in Australia Way to make, but not lose money Opportunity to turn self-managed landlords into professional property managers [05:22] Is the United States ready for similar level of growth? Whether companies grow exponentially, or at their own pace, insurance can help them get there. [07:06] Can't control what happens in people's lives; when bad things happen to good tenants, property managers experience frustration and stress. [08:05] Who’s to blame? Things happen that create a financial burden; Scheer Landlord Protection covers income loss for landlords and property managers. [09:32] Malicious Damage by Tenants: Insurance covers holes in walls, cabinets ripped off walls, sand poured down drains, etc. [09:47] Blanket of Coverage: Indirect and direct benefits create safety for all parties. [13:45] Property manager requirement helps insurance company mitigate risk. [16:33] Competition: Focusing on criteria of quantity over quality. Most property managers don’t have an insurance license; be compliant and legal to protect industry. [22:40] Tiered Pricing: Clients know the cost to be protected. [24:58] FAQs: How do I market this to my owners? How can I implement it? Follow SureVestor’s steps to success. Tweetables Scheer Landlord Protection: Grow exponentially, or at your own pace. When bad things happen to good tenants, property managers get stressed out. For most landlords, rental property is their most expensive investment. Scheer Landlord Protection: Covers malicious damage, eviction costs, and loss of rent. Resources SureVestor Dave Holt’s Email Dave Holt’s Phone Number: 612-465-0421 SureVestor’s Blog National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) California NARPM Terri Scheer Lloyd's of London The Iceberg Report U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz   Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. I have a guest today named Dave Holt. Dave is here talking with me about landlord protection insurance from SureVestor. Dave, welcome to the show. Dave: Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: I just got to see you at CALNARPM in your British soldier outfit that you had there. I want to connect with you a little bit here. Give us a little bit about background on how you got into this industry and into this space. Dave: Yeah, you bet. I've been in property management, that's really my industry. I've been in the business for over 30 years. I started managing for HUD back in the mid-80s, got introduced to property management in single-family homes, and started my fee management company in the late ‘80s. That's where I ran into a fledgling organization that was just starting out called NARPM. I got involved with NARPM early on. I actually started in 1990. I've been a member ever since and gone through the whole chain of command there. Property management is my passion. Throughout that whole process, I've met with thousands of property managers throughout the years. Like you, Jason, always looking to see how we can improve the industry and came across an opportunity. We're actually teaching over Australia. Both my partners, Kevin Knight and Todd Breen, had taught over there. We came across a product that was over Australia and had been there for 25 years. We're wondering, "Why isn't that here in the US?" Actually, long story short, joint ventured with the creator of the product from Australia, Terri Scheer, it still sells under her name over there, Terri Scheer insurance. She has since sold her business over there. Now, has joined forces with us to bring the product here to the US. Jason: Awesome. My understanding of that is that this product has significant impact on the growth of industry as a whole in Australia. Dave: Yeah, that's very true, that's one of the reasons why we wanted to bring it here, it's not just something, "Hey, here's something that we can make money doing," that really wasn't the crux of what we bought it here for, and you hit it on the head. What we look at in our industry here in the US, it's 15 times the size of Australia. When you look at the number of properties that are owned here by individual landlords, it's over 15 million single-family homes that are actually owned and rented out, a small fraction of those is handled professionally by us professional property managers. If we have an opportunity to bring a product here that can help drawing those self-managed landlords to us as professional property managers, that's what we're looking to do. Over in Australia, that actually happened. About 15%, increased in the business for professional property managers because the beauty of this product is that it's only available for landlords that are professionally managed and we did that intentionally, we did that over in Australia as well. Those self-managed landlords have to come to us as professionals in order to get this product. Hence, we're looking to be increasing the number of properties that are managed by us, professionals. Jason: Now, I have heard stats thrown around like the property management industry in Australia grew about 25% in a single decade. I don't know if that's accurate, but that sounds pretty incredible. I also have heard that they have about 80% of single-family residential is professionally managed. Dave: That's right. Jason: Here in the US, according to the [...] report, we're at about 30%. If the industry here could grow in a decade to maybe about 25%, that would mean that we would pretty much double in size. I don't think there are enough management companies in the US right now that can handle that level of growth. That would mean we either need to double the amount of companies that exist now—that's a lot—or each company would need to double in size. I think that would be incredibly painful for most business owners. Dave: Maybe, maybe not. Obviously, your DoorGrow hackers are looking to be growing that's why they're part of your endeavor. It's not that they have to grow exponentially, but they can grow at their own pace. Certainly, it's something that, if they can use the insurance to help them get there, that's what we're all about, and looking to help them do. Yes, we saw it happen over Australia, we don't see why we can't replicate that here. Jason: Let's break this down, and help people understand. Maybe we start from the point of, how do you sell this product, but let's first talk clearly of what is it. What is SureVestor? What is this insurance product? Then I would love to get into basically talking about what's in it for the homeowner? How do you sell this to them? We get into those two things, and then I think the light bulbs will start to go on, and they can start to see how this can be a facilitator of growth here in the US. Dave: You bet. It's probably better to start from my experience as a property manager. Obviously, we're all property managers. Really, the frustrations that we've experienced, as property managers over the years, is when bad things happen to our good tenants is really the situation. It's very stressful. We know that we do a professional job of screening our tenants and getting the best quality tenants for our landlords, but we can't control what happens in people's lives, whether it's a job loss, a divorce, a death in the family—things that can happen in someone's lives that create a situation of financial burden. Now, all of a sudden, if they're renting a property, they may be more inclined to skip or stay there, and not pay the rent, and now, we have to evict them as professionals. It's very painful. For a lot of us in the single-family space, those owners owned one property. If something bad happens to their tenants, and now all of a sudden they're out of three months of rent because of it, that's a lot of their income. A lot of them say, "You know what, this isn't for me." They decide to sell or worst, they blame us as the property manager because we're the ones who screen the tenants, and they say, "It's your fault that this happened. I'm going to somebody else." In either case, we've lost the business. If we had a product, which we do now, through SureVestor and sure landlord protection insurance, that covers the loss of rent for those type of things; a tenant skips, they have to be evicted, they are victims of violence—we've had that happen as well—or there's a death of a sole tenant, or murder, or suicide. I've experienced all of those over the 30 plus years of business. That rent then is not paid, and our landlord is out of money. Us, as property managers, most of us are charging our management fee based on the rents collected, and if that rent isn't collected, we're not getting paid either. This insurance covers all that. It covers it for the landlord. It covers it for the property managers as well. Then, there are some additional benefits. Malicious damage caused by the tenants, that's something that we've experienced as well. They punched holes in the walls, ripped cabinets off the walls, they pour sand on the drains, things that are malicious, there's coverage for that. There's coverage for theft and damage due to theft. There's the eviction fees and legal offense if the tenant brings it to trial. There's the covering of the sheriff cost if you have to get a writ and go through that whole process. We even have lockbox coverage for a digital lockbox. For property managers who are now doing self-showings, many times, they get some pushback from their landlord clients about doing that because of, "Well, what happens if." Now, there's some coverage for that as well and then, rekeying of the locks after those covered events happen. It's a way where we can, with the insurance, make that landlord whole and also make us whole as property managers. One other thing too, a lot of us as property managers are guaranteeing our tenants for some period of time. If something does happen to that tenant and they breach the lease, we will re-lease the property for nothing, for no charge, for our landlord. Now, when you have insurance that covers the loss of rent, the malicious damage, the eviction cost, and those types of things, you now have the security deposit available to cover your re-leasing fees among other things. Jason: There could be divorce, job loss, death of a family, violence, malicious damage, malicious damage theft. Then things like, eviction fees, legal fees, writ fees, lockbox coverage, rekeying after theft. It really creates this safety for all parties involved. Dave: Absolutely. When you think about it, for most of our landlord clients, their rental property is the most expensive investment they have. They get dwelling coverage because that's all they know. They get dwelling coverage to cover the catastrophe-type of damage, the fires, and things that can happen to the property. The things that happen more frequently are the things that we're covering—the loss of rent because a tenant skips, they maliciously damage the property and the other things that we went through. Why wouldn’t they get coverage to give them that peace of mind, so when those things happen to their tenant, now, they're protected as well? It gives them an overall blanket of coverage, that gives them that peace of mind so now, they can rent their property with confidence, and hopefully, stay with us as property managers longer because they don't have to have that fear of, "What if?" Because now they're going to have coverage for that. Hopefully, draw in more landlord clients that might have that fear. Some of them decide, they just want to sell to begin with because they go, "You know what? I can't afford a loss. I can't afford one of those situations that happen, and now I'm out of rent, and I've got a mortgage to pay." It's a way where we can keep new owners and a way where we can attract new owners as well to us. Jason: Yeah. Creating this blanket of coverage sounds really significant and important. If it's not there, then even having a rental property investment can be a risk. Maybe it's a risk that a lot of property owners are either ignoring or aren't aware of if they're actually involved in real estate investing. There's a lot of self-managing homeowners that are like, "Oh, it's easy. I just need a tenant." Famous last words. Then they start running into problems, but even for property management business owners, you don't want to be the fall guy or gal for those problems when they happen, you want your business to be healthy. Since this is so important, to have this blanket of coverage, as you call it, and it has such an impact in Australia, is this something that only property managers have access to, why don't people just go and get these policies directly and self-manage, how's this driving people towards property managers? Dave: We have purposely set it up where individual landlords have to go through a professional property manager to get this coverage. If a landlord goes on to our page and looks at the, "For landlords," it actually, guides them through the process and says, "Do you have a professional property manager?" If they don't, we actually find one for them. One of our property managers at SureVestor and we refer them to them and get them new business that way, as well. Jason: The requirement of them to have a property manager probably also helps the insurance company mitigate their own risk. Dave: You got it. Absolutely. Over in Australia, it's been around for 25 plus years. Now, it's open to individual landlords over there now because it's a more mature product. Starting out, our underwriters wanted to kind of mimic the initial process that Australia took, which was making it available only for landlords that were professionally managed, that's something that really resonated with us, not just because of the underwriting of it, but more so, to help bring in the self-managed landlords to us, as professionals, and help us grow our businesses. Jason: Alright. I'm going to give you an opportunity to throw stones at the competition a little bit. The competition is anything that people might perceive as something similar or reason not to use something like SureVestor. Are there competitors that just go direct or don't have that sort of stipulation that you have to use a property manager, and have some sort of insurance-like product? Dave: Yeah. I'm not aware of it. There are some startups that are happening now. Obviously, when something’s out in the cosmos, we're not the only ones thinking about it, there are certainly other companies out there that are starting, I know a couple of them. I'm not necessarily sure that they're going direct to the landlord or not, one might be, but that's just because my thinking would be, "They don't see the risk." But we know our business, and we’re property managers-first, and so we want to be helping our colleagues grow. One of the ways to do it is to make it only available for landlords that are professionally managed. We know that we do things professionally. A lot of self-managed landlords, they don't follow the same criteria. Some of them do, but a lot of them just do the, "You look good," the feel test. Say, "Oh, yeah. He seemed like a really nice person. Go ahead and rent my property." Then they find out it's not so safe after all. We decided not to do that. We wanted to have it available just for the landlords that are professionally managed. I can't comment on any competition that's doing it, why they do that, other than, they just want to try to get as many as they can, they're focused on the numbers. That's not our intent. Our intent first is to provide a great product to our property management colleagues that can help them retain landlord clients, and help them bring out new ones. Jason: Right. I would imagine that since you've got these different parties involved, you've got property manager, you've got renter, you've got homeowner, and then anybody else could get into the mix in any of the drama that ensues with all of these—this really reduces the risk for all parties. I imagine there's products out there that look similar on the surface, but somebody's getting the short end of the stick, I think that would be dangerous. Regardless of who that is, it's going to end up as a problem for everybody. It makes sense that you guys are doing it right, focusing on making sure that this, really is, the best option for everybody involved and that a professional manager is involved in this process. That's exactly right. We have vetted this thing over three-and-a-half years. It started from the foundation and make sure that we had everything in place to make sure that our industry is covered, and we're providing the best quality to our landlord clients. That takes a lot of work getting that together that's why we have the world-renowned, Terri Scheer, started this. This whole thing. I mean, every single company has mimicked what she's doing, if there are any copycats around because she was the first. We have Lloyd's of London as our underwriters. The first and the largest insuring entity syndicates in the world covering this type of thing. It gives us more security and backing for our landlord clients and our property managers. The thing that property managers, when they're looking out what other competition there is out there, they've got to be really careful when people are saying, "Hey, you can monetize this, you can make money as a new revenue stream," and so forth. Most property managers are not licensed in insurance. In insurance, similar to our property management industry, is very heavily regulated. If you're doing things that look and sound like insurance, for example, you have certain programs whether it's guarantees or other types of protection programs that you're making money off of, that can be construed as selling insurance. If you don't have a license that can be an issue. Everything that we're putting together is legal. The ways that we're making this available for landlord clients, and for property managers, and even starting to create processes where they can benefit better from it, that's what we're all about—to make sure we're protecting our industry. Jason: Yeah. This is a common thing. A lot of property managers, especially the more entrepreneurial ones, get really creative, and they're thinking, "Man, I got this great idea for this new gimmick or this new thing. I can sell this guarantee, this warranty, this protection." It's almost like insurance. It works almost like insurance. There are some significant red flags that they could be putting themselves into some serious legal liability. Dave: That's exactly right. Jason: They're basically, doing insurance without a license. You need to be careful. You guys help them do it the right way. Now, you had mentioned, they're doing it to generate revenue. Now with your service, property managers can make some money too, right, they're not just lowering risk? Dave: When we're saying making money, the benefits are more indirect than direct. For example, as I mentioned, when the rent isn't paid, the management isn't getting their management fee. When the insurance is covering the rent, now the rent is paid because of the insurance, the property manager collects their management fee. Yes, that's a direct benefit, that's income to them. Most of the property managers have some sort of guarantee for the tenants, as I mentioned. When something bad happens, and they have to re-lease the property, that's a lot of out of pocket for them. Now, when the insurance is covering that loss of rent, that deposit doesn't have to go those things which it typically, does. Now, you have that deposit available to pay the re-leasing fee that the tenant would otherwise owe you as a property manager. You're making money indirectly through that. Here's another idea, Jason, that a lot of property managers, including myself, we'd gone to tiered pricing. What tiered pricing is that you have different levels of pricing for your landlord clients. Usually, your first tier is leasing-only, your middle tier is your traditional management, so it's an a la carte, you're paying for whatever service you get, your management fees, your lease fees, your inspection, your evictions—all that stuff is an additional cost. Then you have your top tier and the top tier is an all-inclusive or mostly inclusive, type of tier. You can charge more for that tier. What property managers are doing is they're paying for the insurance in their top tier, and so it makes that top tier more valuable in the eyes of, obviously, of the landlord client. That landlord goes, "Well, I mean, I can pay this amount and know what all of my costs are. I can get the insurance to cover in the event of a bad thing happening to my tenant." That's a more predictable result for an investor. They know that cost, they know that they have the protection, and that gives them that peace of mind. That's a process that a lot of property managers are going to. In the top tier, even though you can't upcharge the insurance, you can charge higher to be including all of your charges, all of your fees, into one. Jason: Got it. They fold it into that. Makes sense. In that situation then it becomes an additional value add that allows them to sell their services at a higher price point. Dave: You bet. The insurance help do that and they make more money, you bet. Jason: There you go. Alright, awesome. Dave: Lastly, we are in the process of creating a way where we can legally compensate the property managers. It's something that they're not prepared at this point, to go through in detail, but I would welcome property managers to contact me. I'm more than happy to go through that process with them. Jason: Cool. Okay, great. What are some of the most common questions that you're getting from people that are maybe skeptical or concerned? What are some of the initial questions that property managers might ask about this? Dave: The first is, “How do I market this to my owners? What do I do?” Obviously, we got two parts of that: we have our current owners, and then we have new owners. What we have done is put together the steps to help them with their current owners, for one, and help them bring in new owners. As property managers ourselves, we know we're very busy. We have a hard time implementing things because we are very busy. We get sucked into the day-to-day grind of property management. It's probably what's happening right now. It's the last day of the month. Most property managers are out there doing their move out inspections, move-ins, and doing all that kind of stuff, they're busy. Trying to implement a new thing is always a challenge. We know that because we're property managers too. We've created those steps to help them do it. We've done it for them. We have all the email templates that they send to their current clients, for example. We have the schedule all laid out so that they can just send them out. We have what's called an opt-in, opt-out form. The beauty of that is it gives them a tool—a risk management tool—to use where they can send that out in the email. Just like here, "I'm opting in," and this is for the owner, their landlord client. "I'm opting into this coverage, and this is what I want." It's directing to the property manager, or it's saying, "No. I'm not interested at this time." Now, the property manager has a form. Six months later, when their tenant has to be evicted, and they've opted out with that coverage, if that landlord is coming to the property manager complaining about it, they can say, "We did our duty of care. We told you about this insurance. You opted out of it, don't blame me." We have that. We also have the disclosures and opt-ins that they use in their management agreement. Personally, even if my BDM, my Business Development Manager, who's talking to brand-new owners hasn't mentioned anything about the insurance, they see it in my management agreement. It's already laid out, and we have that addendum of it available for them and their management agreements. That's part of it. The next part is the whole part of bringing on and using it as a point of difference for their new clients. We have scripts that they can use to help in that initial conversation. Again, we have the information that they can use in their property management agreement both—if they're just doing regular pricing, and if they're doing tiered pricing—so we have both. Then we have the marketing information that they can embed, and put on their website with video clips and so forth. We've done all of that for them, so they don't have to recreate it. Our last step is on all implementation. We walk them through the steps of implementing it all. It's really quite simple. A lot of the marketing too, we have what we call a WDIFY, we-do-it-for-you process, and we can even help them do a lot of that marketing as well. Many of your DoorGrow hackers may recall Darren Hunter and Deniz Yusuf because they were at your event just last year. They have put together, since they know this insurance intimately, both of them being from Australia, they have helped put together a whole orientation for BDMs on how to be better at utilizing, not just the insurance, but utilizing tools to help draw new accounts to them. We have that on our site, on our blog site. It's a whole 45 minutes of them going through with their best practices and how to utilize the insurance as that point of difference to draw in new business for them. Jason: Cool. Dave: There are just a lot of tools that we have to make it simple for the property managers because again, we know it's challenging for them to get things implemented. Jason: The number one challenge in any new software, or any new system, or any new tool, is adoption. It sounds like you guys really helped lubricate that process, make it smooth, and make it easy. That's one of the biggest challenges, or complaints when people get into some new system or some new tool or service is, they just don't have the level of support that they need. That's one of the biggest challenges. It sounds like you guys really put a lot of energy and effort into making sure that they have what they need in order to succeed. I mean, the first challenge, making sure they've got the right vehicle, it sounds like—with the backing of Lloyd’s as an underwriter and everything—this is like the premier vehicle for this. Then the next question that a business owner would have is, "Well, can I do it? Is this possible?" It sounds like you've got the support, the tools, and the resources that they need. The last concern that people might have is what about external factors? What about the market? Could this go away? Could the government impact us? These sort of things. Are there any potential challenges there? It sounds like you guys have dealt with this stuff to make sure everything's compliant and legal. Dave: There's really no concern there. We just expect that to become more commonplace like it has been over in Australia. For those in your group that aren't familiar with Australia, we consider it almost advanced in property management. I say that because they are even more heavily regulated than we are, it just draws to making them more professional, and so they've got to do things to protect themselves and protect their owners. They're always thinking of new ways. Hence, why this insurance started 25 years ago or so. In a government, in a country that is very highly regulated, it's done nothing but expand. Over here, I don't see it going away. I see it expanding. I see it becoming more commonplace, especially as we're seeing after the global financial crisis, more and more, not just individual investors, but huge hedge funds coming in and buying real estate. Rental property, compared to homeownership, is increasing. As that continues to be the trend, more and more investors and landlords, in general, are going to want to protect themselves, and protect their investment because as I mentioned, it's the most expensive investment that a lot of them have, they want that peace of mind, they want more consistency, and predictability. When you have an insurance product like this, that they can get for as little as $1 a day, I mean, come on, it's a no brainer. We really think that this will become more commonplace. It's already in the insurance industry that's very highly regulated. The things that we go through as far as auditing and making sure that everything's done right is a continual process. We have vetted this to make sure that it is done right and protecting our landlords and protecting our property management colleagues. Jason: Love it. Most of the vendors that we handed out awards to for our DoorGrow Awards for 2018 were because they were the best in class, they were the leaders in a competitive space, that they'd gotten the most attention inside of our DoorGrow Club Facebook Group, they consistently were seen as a leader. We gave SureVestor an award, and it was for this reason because I do see this could be a game changer for the industry. We gave SureVestor, for 2018, the Game Changer Award, was what we called that award. I think, really, SureVestor's at the forefront leading a trend and a movement that I think is going to be happening here in the US, that I think can significantly help the industry, and help grow it, and help lower the risk of investors, and help bring people to the property management space. Property managers lower risk and SureVestor helps lower risk, I think combined, it really can give the property management a much better name here in the US, where people, having managed their biggest asset or investment ever—or whatever you want to call it—that they might ever be dealing with, and keep that risk low. Dave, great to have you on the show. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this. How can people get in touch with SureVestor? What's the next step for people that are listening or watching this later that are interested in finding it out more? Dave: You bet. Thank you. They can go to our website, real simple, surevestor.com. They can contact me as well, [email protected] or they can call me 612-465-0421. Happy to walk them through, happy to guide them through the process, and answer any questions they have. We're just looking to provide a great product to our industry. We really appreciate what you're doing as well, Jason. We think DoorGrow is really on the number. We're happy to support it anyway we can. Jason: Awesome. I appreciate it. Always fun for me to connect with other vendors and other people in the space that have a similar vision and mission for the industry, of helping it grow. Let's change it together. I appreciate you coming on, Dave. Thank you so much. I will let you go. Dave: Alright. Thanks again. Jason: That was surevestor.com. They don't pay me anything. I just think it's exciting. People probably wonder sometimes. Anyway, check them out. If you are not inside of our Facebook group, you're probably missing out on the best tools and the vendors. You're probably missing out on some great fee ideas. You're probably also not super connected to DoorGrow. We would love to help facilitate the growth in your business. I would love to be your coach. I would love to be your consultant to help you do what I've helped lots and lots of clients do which is, add easily, 100 extra doors to your business. If that sounds interesting to you, make sure you reach out to us at doorgrow.com and get inside our community, our Facebook group, community connected to this. Become a DoorGrow hacker. That is by going to doorgrowclub.com and you can join us there. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn, and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, most of us have lived with roommates at some point. You probably split expenses and chores, including rent and taking out the trash. Today, I am talking to Tyler Hayes and Joáo Ritter of Roof, which helps roommates resolve problems to live peacefully together and landlords easily collect rent and connect with tenants. You’ll Learn... [01:48] How a college hobby project created a company: A group of friends who love to design and build things, like apps, got together to foster productive communities. [02:21] It’s good to have friends with different skill sets to make a product even better. [03:17] Roof: A company all about people who share and make a place feel like home and landlords who make space available to those tenants. [03:55] Property vs. Tenant Management: Does your landlord treat you like a human being or asset? Problem-solving by landlords improves relationships with their tenants. [04:45] Pairing up to build an app: Eager to work on meaningful, real-world projects and continue to invest in them. [06:00] What is Roof, and what does it do? Landlord: Gets paid, makes sure home operates as expected, and creates positive renting experience for tenants. Roommates: Share reminders, shopping items, expenses, and anything else they want to exchange while living together. [07:28] Target Audience: Landlords handling a small portfolio of college housing; who know all their tenants by name and care about communicating with them. [08:13] Landlords recognize that renting experiences and services they provide for tenants reflect back on them and their reputation. [08:39] Societal trend toward people moving in together for the sake of economic efficiency; people try to live together, share spaces, and live more cheaply. [09:26] Recipe for Disaster: Relying on one to communicate to entire household. [10:00] Roof app revolves around sharing space between people who all share responsibility for that space. [10:54] Common Challenges: Roof helps solve communication issues and responsibilities masked as reminders for people sharing space. [18:09] People love interacting and inspiring one another to take risks, make the move, offer encouragement and support - Roof’s team is part of conversation/common goal. [22:57] Plans to integrate with property management software that lacks Roof’s roommate functionality/communication platform? Too cost prohibitive for small investors. [27:53] Future Feature: How Roof decides which features to focus on or throw away. Tweetables Does your landlord treat you like a human being or asset? Roof revolves around sharing space between people who share responsibility for that space. There's always going to be bugs, tweaks, changes—that's just the nature of software. Resources Roof ($20 of transaction fees for free, use code: 3875 DoorGrow) Roof on Twitter Roof on Instagram Roof on Facebook Contact Roof AppFolio Buildium Propertyware Rent Manager Rentec Direct Property Meld Happy Inspector Latchel Myers & Briggs Personality Types Slack BiggerPockets PayLease DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think, you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I’ve got two guests hanging out here with me. My guests are—see if I got the name right—Tyler Hayes and Joáo Ritter. How did I do? They are here from the company Roof, and one of you is the CEO. That’s you, Joáo, right? Joáo: That’s me, yup. Jason: You’re both software engineers. How did you guys get into this? How did you decide, “Hey, property management might be a space that we might want to connect with in some way, shape, or form.” Then let’s lead in how Roof came to be and what it is? Joáo: Sure. So, we started the company in college actually as a hobby project. I wanted to know how to build an app. I lived with a ton of roommates at the time, and we had a few things that we routinely split amongst ourselves: a few reminders of shopping, other expenses, rent, payments. I started to learn how to build an app by trying to automate some of these things. Part of my brain is naturally inclined to inputting names, and brands and business-fy things. Over time, we took this concept, I was working [...], and several friends wanted to put it on the App store, so we did. We started talking to my good friends who had different skill sets from myself, and we worked together to make the product even better. A couple of years then, super as a hobby project still, we had this app for roommates to solve roommate problems or roommate exchanges. We had a landlord, I remember at the time, Nathan, he really gave a damn about his tenants, about us. He's very much in tune with making sure we had a cozy place to live, the problems got solved, that he addressed us as human beings and not as assets, but his way of collecting rent was still pretty archaic, really easy to get logistics mixed up, and not communicate the way in which was authentic to him. We came to him. We were like, “Hey, look. We have this app for roommates that roommates are enjoying.” I think we really want to make this company all about home, about the people who share a home and make a place feel like home and operate well. That actually involves knowing that we're living in the house, but also the landlord to make the space available to tents. Funnily enough, we actually didn't come into the project with the intent of providing value directly to landlords. Our value prop was actually for roommates. I think that actually makes us a really interesting and appealing platform for landlords because their customers are roommates. By addressing the problem less, as a property management problem and more, as a tenant management problem, we really get to the core of the problem solving that you have to do as a landlord: from late payments to reminders to making sure service requests are addressed on time and that the communication is proper between everyone involved; that everyone who shares a home has the ability to stay in tune with the conversation with the landlord as the head of the [...] oftentimes and maybe [...]. That all led us to entertaining the idea of expanding to landlords. Then going all in, “Hey, look, if I'm going to build the platform of the future to make home exchange possible, we have to, not only solve roommate dynamics but also the landlord-tenant relationship.” Jason: Tyler, are you one of his roommates, then? Tyler: No. We never lived together. Although, we did both have roommates and we were both in college. Jason: Yeah. How did the two of you kind of pair up in the business here? Tyler: Well, at that time, I was in design school. We were in two different universities, pretty close to each other. At some point, we talked about this idea of building this app. Joao was really interested in figuring out how to build an app, [...] gets to practice in doing that is in trial-by-error, I guess. For me at the time, it was a similar sentiment because being in design school, I was really eager to work on something, some kind of real-world projects, work on something that's going to be meaningful, that I could follow, and continue to invest in. At the time, part of the motivation for starting the project was just like, “Hey, let's just make something.” We’re interested in learning some things and doing some things like, "Let's just make something." That was kind of it at first. Jason: Yeah, cool. Let’s let the audience know what is Roof. If you can give the back story. What the heck is it? What does it do? Joáo: [...] is an app for tenant management. It lets you collect rent payments and manage maintenance requests from your tenants, and communicate with your tenants. It's all about being on the same page with your tenants, you're getting paid and making sure your home operates as you expect, making sure your tenants have a great renting experience. It solves the core functionality the landlord needs when it comes to renting their home and growing their portfolio from there. For roommates, it helps you share your reminders, shopping items, expenses, and anything you may want to exchange throughout your living together. Jason: A lot of people listening, they might have AppFolio, or Buildium, or Propertyware, or Rent Manager or Rentec Direct, or one of this property management sort of back-office accounting solutions and some that might help with the maintenance request stuff. Some of them are okay, some of them a lot of our clients or people listening will use third party tools like Property Meld or Latchel. I'm really interested, and I haven't heard of anything for roommates, so that's pretty unique that you have something that helps facilitate roommates. Do you find that a lot of your target audience are running college housing or dealing with college housing situations? Tyler: Yeah, that's a really big segment of the people that we talk to, but it's not entirely. Generally, it's landlords with a bit of a smaller portfolio. The kind of people who probably know all the tenants by name, who would otherwise maybe be texting their tenants, having that kind of relationship with them. Basically, landlords who care about communication and especially landlords who care about actually just doing things that their tenants are going to appreciate. Because ultimately, for a lot of landlords, they recognize that the services that they can provide, the renting experience that they can provide for their tenants, is ultimately going to be reflected as their brand as a property manager, as a landlord. For landlords who want to invest in that, those are typically the ones that we see most invested in Roof. Joáo: Yeah, totally but let me double down on what you said. I think there's a lot to be said about the societal trend towards people moving in together, not for the sake of a family necessarily, but for the sake of economic efficiency. People are moving into urban areas, people are moving into college towns for school, and whatnot. Instead of living on the outskirts and pay cheaper, people try to live together and share spaces and live more cheaply. I bet a lot of landlords listening in here have rentals that they rent—not to single families—even though they may be single-family homes but actually to people who share a space as roommates, who may otherwise don't really have a relationship with one another apart from being roommates who may have found each other on craigslist or some service. What you'd probably run into as a landlord in those circumstances is you have to keep up a relationship with them. Normally, you have one head of the house, someone on the lease, or someone that you have their email, that you go to directly and expect them to convey the message to the rest of the house. That’s kind of a recipe for disaster when you talk about communication when you're trying to rely on one person to communicate an idea or a circumstance to a whole household. The core of our app revolves around sharing space and sharing space between people who all share the responsibility of the space. If you're a landlord who finds himself in this puzzle of trying to manage roommates, it makes it a lot easier to reach out in one spot, allow roommates to split payments as they will as long as you get the full rent ship at the month and then give them, as Tyler had said, a great experience meanwhile. There's a lot to be said about that. I think we have a lot to grow to accommodate larger portfolios which we fully intend to do. But for the time being, it's 100% focused on landlords who see the opportunity in creating a brand for themselves and experience for their tenants and solving problems through effective communication. Jason: What are some of the challenges that people sharing space will run into so that we can paint a picture of how this app solves these problems? What are some of the problems? Tyler: We could probably tape a whole podcast about that question. Jason: Cool. Let's paint a picture here. Tyler: At the core of it all is communication. The problem basically is, how can you communicate with each other things that each other needs to be responsible for, things that need to be done. Some of that can be abstracted into things like, if you're living together there's going to be expenses that are shared, there's going to be responsibilities that are shared, and purchases that are shared, items in their household that you might want to share responsibility for keeping in stock. Those things certainly tend to change a lot from household to household depending on just like what your house is like. In designing Roof, I think we tried to create some tools that were specific enough to target the main needs of people but still general enough to be applicable to as many different types of households as possible. The things that we've targeted are: one, just splitting expenses, so being able to keep track of who's paying for shared things whether it's groceries or split bills like monthly expenses like utilities or… Joao: Rent. Tyler: ...rent, yeah. Joao: That's kind of a holy grail of sharing space. Tyler: Right, the holy grail. We included a shopping list feature to keep things in stock that might be shared. Things like trash bags and groceries. In our household, we use it to track things like olive oil, things that we share for cooking, kitchen supplies, that kind of thing. Also, there is the responsibility aspect that I mentioned. Being able to sort of offer some kind of recognition for saying like, "Oh, Joao, took out the trash. Joao cleaned the dishes. Joao swept the hallway." Things like that, responsibilities that sort of affect everybody, that help everybody, that you want to offer some ability to track, but without getting too into the weeds of being like passive-aggressive like, "Come on. Do this." Joáo: Yeah, its responsibility kind of masked as reminders. So, “You have to take out the trash on Sundays.” You program your Roof app to schedule it between your roommates. So, one Sunday it'll be using, "Jason take out the trash." Then you know it’s your turn then next week time, “Tyler, take out the trash.” You can kind of all share the responsibility. Everyone has a roommate story. I think the roommate story, the core of them, stems from an imbalance of sharing. Maybe one person's accustomed to doing everything and has that sense of responsibility and autonomy but they feel as though people around them aren't keeping up or you're on the opposite end where you feel as there’s someone in your house just does everything without you having to say anything, and without you having the opportunity to be involved. All those are communication issues which I think is the backbone but still abstract. In order to make those tangible things like expenses, shopping, and reminders really kind of lay the foundation of the interactions. Rent payment is the thing you sign on the lease on together to be able to share, right, and we really see the opportunity there because no matter how many expenses you share throughout the month, usually they add up to less than your [...] in the month. You can imagine creating a more comfortable splitting environment where at the end of the month, I may buy a handful of groceries, and a new piece of furniture, but when it comes time to pay rents that just means I'll pay a little bit less and Tyler will pay a little bit more. You as landlord [...] full amount, we're even on our end, and all is well. That's kind of our way of operating. Jason: It's interesting because really, there are so many different personality types out there. I don't know if you've ever played around Myers Briggs, but in Myers Briggs, for example, you've got the ISFJ and the ESFJ personality types that are very much like givers, and they're always serving people, doing stuff for other people, but they don't want to ask. They’re just arguing, and they're expecting people to reciprocate. Joao: Totally. Jason: They're always let down because nobody gives as much as them. But their mindset is, "If I do this, people should just do it back, they should reciprocate." A lot of other personality types, they're focused on other things, they’re not focused on reality, they're focused on ideas or code or whatever you guys might have been focused on. There's this power play, and passive aggressiveness comes out, and challenges come out. It can get ugly. It's simply because somebody didn't communicate with somebody else. I can see how that would help. It probably could be used in families, let's be honest. Joáo: It's not dissimilar from Slack for workplaces. When you have a team that needs to collaborate or to get something done, you're going to have different personality types. Different people are more inclined to step in, and different people are more inclined to observe and take it in and then respond over time. But if you have the right organization of how you interact with one another, you have access to a whole group, you have access to individuals, you have access to services that come through and talk to you via this medium, you're able to actually keep clarity over the whole situation and manage those personalities. Roof, as a tool, is particularly useful for particular groups of people but it's really hard, as you mentioned, to solve the problem holistically. I think it's not terribly efficient to try to solve roommate ship. There exist roommates who already enjoy each other's company, and they aren't in this tug and pull battle. They just really could use a tool to basically make concrete their group and their place of interaction, and then through that means, you keep organized, but you're not necessarily leaning on the app to build your relationships. I don't know we're going to build any relationship that doesn't already exist, but we do have to step in and be a tool for people who are already managing themselves via a spreadsheet or via some other less efficient mechanism right. Jason: Yeah, cool. Yeah, I like it. What else should people listening, know about Roof? Joáo: I'm really proud of our team. I think that's why I love working on the project is I think we've managed to surround ourselves with incredible people. I think people who use Roof see that in the form of how they interact with us, and how we enjoy interacting with them, how we make ourselves available. Our whole team, from me all the way to people working on sales, it's a very small team. I don't state people as there’s just a bunch of us, a handful of us with pretty particular responsibilities. You have access to engineering, all the way to design, all the way to decision making, and we want your input. That's how we kind of operate internally with [...] one another. We consider the landlords who use us as investors. They're investing in us by putting their portfolio onto Roof, by extracting value that we have to offer, and by wanting our company as a means to build their own company, that's something I really care about. It sits tangent to the app itself, but I think it's actually a massive part of what you're getting with Roof is the team behind the project. Tyler: I actually just want to second that because I think it's something that, in my opinion, probably sets apart the company that we're building compared to some similar service in the same industry. I tend to be the member of our team who talks to the people who are using Roof the most. If you got an email from Roof, it's probably from me. It's something that we benefit from tremendously, getting to talk straight to people who are using Roof and not just from a feedback perspective like, "Hey, how is this feature working for you? What's something that you have in mind that could be working better?" It feels good to be able to hear the opinions of people have about how the app is working for them and any kind of conversation, really. What I found is that the types of landlords I think who want to invest in Roof tend to be the types of landlords who are very much interested in being a part and building something better than what already exists in the market right now. By nature of that, we're the type of people who are really eager to sort of get involved in the way that we want people to be involved which is, "Hey, like if you have an idea for something that we should be doing, tell us and reach out to us." We maintain a Slack channel with some of the more involved users that we're always trying to invite more people to. We maintain pretty regular e-mail communication with quite a few of our people who are using Roof. I think that benefits us as well as the people who use Roof a lot. Joáo: Jason, I know you know for sure how interconnected a lot of property management org, and financial freedom hustlers are. People love interacting and inspiring one another to take risks, to make the move, to encourage and to have the support, and I think we're an extension of that. We don't sit side by side to the landlords knowing the real estate investor is actually going out and paying attention to the market and purchases, etc., where we feel like we're very much part of that conversation. If you're expanding your portfolio, loop us in. We pay attention to so many blogs, from BiggerPockets to Instagram feeds of individuals who are, not only doing a hell of good work but also inspiring other people around them, in the same boat, maybe a little bit earlier on their careers to keep going. It's very similar, as a small business owner to work with small business owners towards this common goal. Jason: Very cool. Alright, I have feature requests, then, for you guys. I’m just kidding. Maybe these are on your road map, I don't know, but this is how my brain works. I'm going down all these channels. One huge opportunity, it sounds like for guys, is in the property management space. All these property management software tools, they lack this roommate functionality that you've created, this communication platform. Do you see the day that maybe you could somehow connect, or integrate with maybe Rent Manager, it could become sort of a strap on to AppFolio or Buildium or something like this to where if they have some college housing, they could set up the college housing people on this app and they could at least do the accounting. Because some property managers are using a third party tool just to collect rent payment like PayLease or something like that even though they have their own system. I think there might be a potential here for those that are doing college housing right now to use something like this, and they might have hundreds of doors. Joáo: Sure, yeah. Absolutely. I think the question is kind of multifold. I think there are several avenues, an opportunity that could be pursued there. The idea that Roof is a side-by-side tool to PayLease or AppFolio is interesting. You can set up your entire portfolio on Roof, and choose to collect payments directly on Roof or just mark settlements. If you want to actually put in your accounting on Roof, we don't yet have a full suite of graphs, charts, and really making your progressions known to you but not yet—that's another avenue. We could just go on accounting side-by-side through our communication core and really offer the value of other platforms. Or if you want to use the Roof side-by-side to it, you can just use Roof as a ledger, but actually, collect your payments through another software and just do all your communication on Roof. In which case, it's interesting to entertain the idea of proper integration between the two because I think in essence, we are competing and we are going after a different market. I think a lot of those tools, AppFolio in particular, is loaded with features that a lot of smaller rental operators don't need and it just overcomplicates the experience instead of ensuring it has a richer accounting feature. But oftentimes, too rich. It just gets in the way of the one report that we need, or the one piece of information that you actually come to over and over again. Jason: It’s too cost prohibitive for the smaller investor. Joáo: Too cost prohibitive. Absolutely. I'm unsure if a priority of ours would be to integrate. I think we would rather compete, to be honest, just because I think we see our market and our users as really valuing Roof as a strong competitor to those. I think it's a massive market. As you said, property management investors, property investors, come in all types, they all have different motivations. But I think the core of what you're getting at is, how can we extract the juicy features from our competitors and make them a part of the Roof in the most elegant way possible, and that's something that we're incredibly in tune with, "How our competitors' moving? What people are using?" Also, I don't think we're competitor-driven, I think we're customer-driven 100%. I'd rather spend my time talking to people who are using our app and appreciating the core of the features. We want to stay [...] with what we believe to be true about problem-solving and then say, "Yes, right. Cool. What kind of financial reports do you need? What kind of integration [...] do you need?" Then working those into the app in an elegant way. I think its value is to actually just build a feature and just throw it in another tab and just grow your tabs of different things you offer. Everything has to play with one another really well so that you actually create an experience that anyone can come into. From a person with one house and a couple of tenants to someone with 50 homes and hundreds of tenants and make the most of the platform. I'm more interested in that side of things—the post-integration bit. Jason: Right. Well, if you're open, in the future, I think there's a whole target audience that could use this that have lots of college housing clients. Rent Manager has an open API, Buildium has been doing integrations with Property Meld and Happy Inspector and others, and so I think there's a possibility there. AppFolio doesn't generally play nice with others. Usually, some people are finding workarounds, but they're still using third-party tools to do a lot of things. This is how my brain works are is, I would imagine one of the biggest challenges that roommates have is they lose a roommate. I don't know if this is some sort of future sort of idea, but I imagine this comes up a lot. They lose a roommate, they got to figure out how to pay rent, they need to find a roommate, and they want to make sure that they get the right fit. I don't know if this is something that you guys plan to tackle or this is a problem that Roof helps with it at all. Joáo: Yeah. I'll let Tyler explain, but I just want to say that, we sit and throw around ideas every single night. The most frustrating piece is just sitting on just like ledgers of great ideas. We're like, "We'll get to those. We have to do this thing that's in our face right now." Jason: How do you decide what comes first? How do you make the decision? Is it the noisiest customers or your biggest customers? As a software company, how do you decide which features to focus on, and which ones to throw away? Joao: It's a great question. It's the hardest part of the job, right, of making sure everyone's on the same page and has a shared belief of the direction we're going in. Oftentimes, I find that short-term goals can make the most sense when everyone sees with the opportunity that exists one, two, three years on the line. They still have to sit down and execute for three months at a time in particular feature set or particular go-to-market strategy or something like that, keeping these chunks of time open for discussion. Then, once everyone feels good that the product, that the users, marketing and the sales align, to basically, ink it all, sit down, get to work, knock it out and then go through your evaluation phase and then repeat the process. It seems like the most productive way to go about it. Obviously, I think as your cash flow increases, you're able to grow your company then you can kind of bring more heads, more brains out of the team and start to see if you can scale more horizontally. For the time being, I personally love working on a small team where we each kind of know each other intimately, know how we work and share [...]. It makes the decision making a little scarier because you have to pick a couple of things and do them, but you do them so well, I think. Whatever you choose to spend your time on, you just got to do the hell out of it and really believe that is the right way to go and then be truthful with yourself along the way if you need a correction. Tyler: Speaking to the scope of how user feedback, and what some of our customers are interested in, speaking of how that fits into the picture of what do we build next, there's certainly not any kind of rule for that. In fact, a lot of times, the two are sort of in odds with each other; the sort of things people would like to see us build versus the things we decide to build. Those are really tough decisions to make, especially when you have to make a decision and then respond to somebody in the email who's saying, "I love your app. I can't wait for you to build this." Then I got to come in and say, "Well, actually, it's going to be a couple of months before we can do that." A great example of that actually is right now, for the last couple of months, Joao and I have been invested in working on the new iOS and Android apps that we'll be shipping soon. Add the expense of otherwise, started addressing some urgent feature there's a couple of bugs that we'd love to be fixing in the current apps. Every single time something is brought to our attention where it's like, "Hey, this would be really helpful to have right now." We start to balance and say, "Okay. Well, do we take a couple of days away from this other project we're working on to do this thing that will help now? Or do we just buckle down and continue to invest time in something that's going to ultimately be an investment, and how well we'll be able to scale in the future?" The big reason that we're rebuilding the apps in the first place, from a tech perspective, the new stack that we'll be using to maintain those new apps will be a lot easier to maintain and so, adding a feature six months from now will take a lot of less effort than it would have taken now or a couple of months ago just because of how we're rebuilding things. The short answer is that it's really tough. Sometimes, one of the most frustrating things to deal with is having to tell people, "While you're suggesting is great, and I wish I can give you that. We've got to make a tough decision and focus on something else right now. Jason: I think every entrepreneur listening gets that. We all have situations in which we have our vision as an entrepreneur or as a business owner of what we want to do and accomplish, and then we have what our target audience is really screaming and begging for that we want to do. Every property manager probably has some sort of process they want to change or something they want to improve or something they're dealing with. I think that's the thing to realize is that the software that you're developing or the business that you're building, if you're a property manager that's listing, anything, it's always a living, breathing thing, it's never done. Just like, as human beings, we're never done. We're all still in the oven, so to speak. There's always going to be bugs, there's always going to be tweaks, there's always going to be changes—that's just the nature of software. You release new features, there's going to be little things, little nuances, and little things to change. Over time, you build something that just gets better and sharper. Then sometimes you have to completely rebuild something. You're like, "Okay. It'll be better to start over and do this really well now that we've learned so much than to keep building on a scaffolding that was not as strong." That's just how it works. I think our own main program, our seed program, we're on our third total revamp that we've done. I already have a whole list of old stuff I want to change, and add, and do—that's just how my brain works. Joáo: I think what's really important though is the fact that you've learned over time. It's not about always questioning, "Are you doing the right thing?" To me, it's all about knowing you are doing the right thing. If we make a choice to build something, "Let's build it. Let's ship it." There's going to be corners that need tying up in a good sense but, "Let's ship it. Let's learn from it. Let's move forward. Let's put weight on it and then let's see how far it can go until it stretches. Let's let it stretch." Let us not be afraid to let it stretch and feel comfortable like, "Hey, the work we did can hold that weight." But at the same time, we have to be evaluating, "Alright. Cool." If we then want to add more people or scale our transactions a hundredfold, "Will the stretch break?" At that point, you have to make a decision, "Yes. Let's go and do the remodel." I think the analogy for a lot of real estate investors is the remodel where maybe you have a house and you have a really janky kitchen. The whole house is beautiful, but something about the kitchen is off. People living in the house, they know that they would rather have a nicer kitchen that's going to take a long time. Meanwhile, you have a sink in the bathroom that's a little loose, and you have just a tweak off in the garden or something. The tenant will be like, "I get it. Yeah, you need to fix the kitchen. Spend time there. I'll deal with the sink and the little [...]." Jason: Meanwhile, I need a kitchen. Joáo: Yeah. A big thing for us is our Android app currently is running our web app on mobile, so it works. You can do everything you need, but the experience, the actual motion, the feel of it doesn't compare to what we built nearly iOS. We have a ton of people on Android who’s like, "Oh, I could use a new Roof experience in Android." Meanwhile, a lot of people already in iOS or on the web are kind of hoping at more sophisticated problems. But we’re like, “Look, by building a native Android app, we can also be able to offer this experience to a ton more people." Actually, [...] of doing that, we're now able to build for iPad, for desktop, new tablets, etc. It's exciting. Jason: Yeah, cool. I think it's exciting to hear what you guys are doing. I think you've done something really unique in the roommate space. It sounds like to kind of solve some problems. You've probably, solved a lot of passive-aggressive issues, and some [...] properties and created a lot more peace out there. It really sounds like this is software that creates a peaceful environment for all parties involved, including the landlords. To wrap this up, how can people find out more about Roof, and how can we get in touch? Joáo: Our website is roof.io. That provides an overview of the features that we offer, the different sides of it, you can read about how roommates use Roof, how landlords can use Roof. There's this little button that says 'Extra' which you click on, and we try to provide a lot of documentation to our accompany, it directs to the website also. You can go in there and find some more detailed information like FAQ and some guides for how to get started as a roommate or as a landlord or a renter. There's a lot of information on there. We also use Twitter to put out some updates as well as Instagram. We try to stay pretty up-to-date with that. There's also our Facebook page. We'll put some links to those wherever Jason thinks the best place to put some links. Reach out to us at [email protected]—email address. Get directly in touch with us. We'll schedule a phone call with you, see what's up, see what's on your mind, see if Roof is a right fit for you. We're open to having a pretty open discussion. We've doubled a lot of users at this point, so we know kind of the ones that's really just a [...] value of what we offer them and those who are still in the edge of being the perfect fit for them. We'd be happy to kind of walk you through and making the right choice for you. Lastly, it cost $2 a transaction to use Roof. You can assume that yourself as a landlord or you can pass it on to your tenants, in which in case, it'd be free for you. If you do choose to assume, whenever your tenants come to pay, we give a little shout out for you in the app saying, "Your landlord is covering it for you. They're dope." But if you want $20 of transaction fees for free, use a code 3875 DoorGrow, it's a proprietary code just for the show, just for the audience here. You can get started, put some tenants there, try it out for a lease, you won't pay or tenants won't pay for about a year of that and see if it's right for you. Jason: The code one more time. Joáo: Code is 3875 DoorGrow. Jason: Okay, thanks for that. Those listening, property managers, that [...] college housing or deal with shared housing situations, I’d be be curious to get their feedback and see how it works for them. That’d be pretty cool. I appreciate you guys coming on the show. Have you guys thought of starting a shared housing property owners’ community? Like a Facebook group or something. It sounds like you’ve got this going in your Slack channel. Tyler: Speaking of Slack Channel, that would be another way to get in touch with us. Just scroll down to the bottom of the landlord’s page on the website, you can request to join there. Creating a community like that, it's not something that I think we have plans for. Jason: It's cool when you get them together, man. We’ve got our DoorGrow Club Facebook group, and you get these people together, and they start sharing ideas, helping each other, and the momentum is just awesome. I haven't heard of anything in the shared housing sort of space, this idea of having a property that is shared and this type of owners. College housing or whatever it might be, a cool little community out there, I guess. Anyway, check these guys out. Get into their Slack channel. Go to roof.io. I appreciate you guys coming on the show and excited to see what you guys do over the next few years here. Joáo: Thanks, Jason. Thank you for having us. It was a lot of fun. Jason: Alright. For those of you who are watching, make sure you get into our Facebook group, our community, which is doorgrowclub.com. You can get to that, it will redirect. If you are watching this on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe so that you get these videos. We release the videos on YouTube before we release them to iTunes. If you're listening in iTunes, make sure you go to our YouTube channel, it's youtube.com/doorgrow, and click the red subscribe button there. Click the subscribe button and get subscribe and start getting notifications usually on your browser when we release or drop new videos. You can get this information and see some of these people instead of just listening. Until next time everybody. To our mutual growth. I hope you have a fantastic day and week. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Do you own single-family properties, but rent them out? Are you tired of dealing with tenants? Incompetent contractors? Why do-it-yourself (DIY)? Why waste your time? About 70% of owners self-manage their properties. You can’t and shouldn’t do it all. Help is available. Today, I am talking to Dana Dunford of Hemlane, an all-in-one rental property management solution. After being encouraged by family and friends, Dana decided to do real estate investing on the side while working at Apple. She tried self-managing her properties, only to discover how difficult that can be - even tougher than calf dressing! You’ll Learn... [02:50] Moving from self-management to hybrid solution involving experts in real estate/property management to streamline and mitigate risks. [04:15] Property Management and Technology: Taking a different approach to build communities of agents, owners, and managers to work together. [07:50] Potential for property management industry: Buying real estate is easy; property management is much more difficult, but determines the success of your investment. [10:27] Property managers have to do everything and need to be Jack-or-Jill of all trades (maintenance, lawyer, therapist, sales, marketing, etc.). [10:56] Dana’s driven toward challenge; something new happens every day in property management and risk needs to be mitigated. [11:27] Subject matter experts should provide best practice, place, and process; there’s only so much technology and robots can do. [13:05] Entrepreneurs/Gluttons for Punishment: Highly adaptable and enjoy challenges. [14:56] Turnkey: When something goes wrong, property manager gets blamed. [15:47] Hemlane: Flexible and transparent property management platform that helps property managers solve problems. [19:55] Hemlane’s Ideal Prospect: Under 200 units and wants to grow portfolio/clientele. [22:36] Hemlane offers automation of administrative tasks and competitive advantage by building relationships and services over time. [27:10] Real estate investors find out about Hemlane on social media and blogs. [31:57] Are you trained and qualified, or just pretending to be a property manager? [35:15] FAQs from Property Managers: How can I communicate with owners? Will Hemlane take my clients? How do I know if I need help? [41:07] People aren’t buying property management; but safety, certainty, and trust. [48:40] What is a hemlane? House Differentiation: Hem is house in Swedish; lane is a path that divides you from others. Tweetables Property management is challenging; something new happens every day. Whether you love or hate them, industry isn’t ready for robots to show properties. Turnkey is a terrible word; if something goes wrong, the property manager is blamed. People aren’t buying property management. They want safety, certainty, and trust. Resources Hemlane Dana Dunford’s Email Dana Dunford on LinkedIn Hemlane on Software Advice Hemlane on Capterra Hemlane on GetApp Apple Nest The Iceberg Report Industrial Calf Dressing - California Rodeo Salinas Tim Ferriss Buildium AppFolio Zillow Russell Brunson’s Value Ladder DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today's guest, I'm hanging out here with Dana Dunford of Hemlane. Dana, welcome to the show. Dana: Great. Thanks so much, Jason, for having me. Jason: I'm really excited to have you here. You have such a bright personality. I was really, I guess, curious with people. I was really biting my tongue, resisting just getting into figuring you out, and asking you questions. It was always a challenge for me. Now, I can do it. Let's get into this. Dana, why don't you share with everybody a little bit of background on you and who you are. Then, let's transition into getting into how Hemlane came to be. Dana: My background, by accident, I actually ended up at Silicon Valley. I'm just through studying here for university. My background was actually always been on technology and I've always been fascinated with that. I actually got into real estate and looking at real estate investing coming through two different people. One was my brother-in-law, who was investing in real estate and saying, "Dana, you need to get into investing as well. Do that on the side." I was working at Apple at that time doing new product introductions. Then, the second was actually who my co-founder is today, Frank, who has rental properties across the US. I haven't been on the property manager's side until we started self-managing. We ended up self-managing our properties remotely and trying to figure out how to make that work. Essentially, starting with self-management and then actually moved to a more hybrid model that worked out really well, where we were working with local managers and local real estate agents to help us with the management while we were still controlling the financials, the rent, and still be involved in it. So, a little bit of a hybrid solution which today I don't see actually in the market. It's either full service or do-it-yourself. I think do-it-yourself is really a horrible one to take because then every single person, all 43 million renter households, with 20 million people are looking for ways to essentially streamline and mitigate risks and all of that. Having property managers and experts in the industry really makes a ton of sense. That's what brought me to a more of a hybrid model. I left Apple then and went to business school at Harvard. After that, came back to Silicon Valley, was working at a company called Nest which is home technology, got me more excited about real estate technology. They were actually acquired by Google and I realized I want to actually start my own thing. Property management is one of those incredible industries where technology to date, there's a lot of players out there, a ton in the property management software space—quite frankly too many of them—but taking that model and saying how do we do it in a different approach, think about it differently, and really build communities of managers, communities of agents, communities of owners to work together because 70% of the owners, as you know, Jason—I think actually you were the first person I learned that from—self-manage, so how do you connect those 70% to get some sort of help? Right at the beginning, they're going to say, "I don't need help," but sure enough they call and they're like, "I had a nightmare of a tenant. I hate this. They're selling my portfolio," or, "I need some help." Really helping them and being there at the right time—a lot of times that right time for them—is getting involved with them even when they're self-managing. Jason: Yeah. I got the 70% stat from the Iceberg report which says, "On a single family residential, about 30% are professionally managed." I need to point out in your bio because this is the only bio I've ever seen. It says that you're an avid equestrian, paraglider, and skier. She is the first woman to win a calf-dressing championship belt buckle at the California rodeo. Are you kind of a cowgirl, then? Dana: Yeah, I did. I grew up in a farm in Salinas, California. We had horses, some cows and stuff in the backyard that really did teach me a lot of hard work. I did enter and I was the only woman. I don't why women don't enter these events. Salinas has the largest rodeo, the largest across the entire nation, largest prize pool of money, [...] and stuff they give you. I entered something called calf dressing. Actually, the huge advantage being a woman because you have to dress a cow in these Wrangler jeans. What's fantastic about it is you actually have to be able to get under the cow so you have to be small. These big burly farmer guys trying to do it and I came in with a team of two other guys. It's three people on a team and then me. I think there's a huge advantage to being small and just being able to dress it really quickly while they're holding down the cow. Anyway, we got a huge massive belt buckle, the same one that the pro bull riders win at the rodeo, which is pretty cool. Jason: This is so unrelated. This just fascinates me. You're actually putting pants on a calf, that's what's this is? Dana: Yes, that's the event. It has the same credibility as the pro bull riders that win the top belt buckle. You get the same belt buckle. It's like the best hack to getting a professional rodeo belt buckle. Jason: This is funny but it reminds me of listening to some of Tim Ferriss' stories where he just figured out how he could win some sort of a competition that was just random so that he could be a world champion. Very cool. You mentioned the property management industry and something about it got you excited which either says you're crazy or you see something maybe similar to me. What potential do you see the industry is having? In the US, I feel like it's underperforming in its potential. People just don't see it, awareness is low, perception is low. What's your perception of what the potential is for the property management industry as a whole? Dana: I think it's two things. It falls into two buckets of the potential. The first one really has to do with real estate investing in general. This happened to me when I was at Apple. Most people when you ask them, "How did you get into real estate investing?" it's usually, "Oh, someone told me. I have friend who is doing it and doing it successfully." All of these companies out there where they have these employees who have great savings and could be allocating money into real estate, they're literally going into stocks, bonds, and other things. It's sad. The biggest thing with property management was that's a biggest pain point. When I look at buying properties here in San Francisco, it didn't make sense. The numbers just didn't make sense for investment at that time. Maybe things changed. Some people want the appreciation gain that they'll invest in San Francisco, but it's really investing out of state. That’s the biggest thing is property management. I quite frankly think buying the property is the easy part of it. You put the numbers on spreadsheets, you're not emotional, you go and you purchase a property. There's not too much rocket science to that part. Where it really comes down to the success of your investment is in the property management. It's the most difficult part to be in and it's the one that you're stuck with for 20-25 years. Buying the property, it takes you maybe a year, depending on how long you're looking. Some people buy within their first month. The property management in actually being able to make sure you have that stable, steady, cash flow, is the most difficult part of it. There's no focus on it, I think, because it's the most difficult that people push it off. One of my biggest frustrations with property management is people thinking like, "Oh, maintenance is going to be so easy." That kind of stuff is really difficult to do. I always think of property managers as Jacks of all trades. They have to be good sales people. They have to be good at marketing. They have to be a lawyer because they have to know these lease contracts. They have to be a maintenance person because they have to know how to troubleshoot, push back on service professionals, and understand, "Am I getting screwed over or not?" They have to be a therapist because tenants get emotional because it's their home. One of the things I've always been driven towards this challenge, if something's not challenging and they get easy, I usually just leave the job. It's just boring. Then it’s just a nine-to-five. I think in property management it's not that. Something new happens every single day and you're constantly saying, "How do I take that and mitigate that risk?" That's really where I do think that there's just so much value to it. There's, quite frankly, not a lot of focus on it. That's where, Jason, this show's incredible because you actually bringing those people to talk about how do you mitigate that risk, how do you set it up for success, et cetera. I believe it has to be a subject matter expert that do it. There are certain things that technology can do to just say here's the best practice in place and process. Then, you also have to have the people component because you still have to talk to people. You still need someone physically there. The worst thing, I think, is when they talk about these robots showing the properties and stuff. Some people love it. I don't think the industry is there yet, go and show some of these properties. I don't think the industry is quite there for some of these stuff. That's just my own personal opinion from dealing with them, being hands on, showing properties, and doing all of these stuff. Inspections, move ins, move outs, maintenance coordination. It still needs that human component and it’s much better to say, “Here are the subject matter experts that do it,” versus every single person trying to do it. As you know, that happens with single family homes but still the majority doing the self-management themselves. Jason: Yes. I love what you said. Buying is easy, managing the property, hard. It's really simple. That's so true. When you get into real estate investing, they're hoping that they’ve got some turnkey magical easy thing, money is just going to be flowing in, and then they have to manage the property. That reality sets in. I think that's good pointing it out. Property management is the most difficult part. The other thing you pointed out is that property managers, these entrepreneurs are highly adaptable creatures. You call them Jacks of all trades or Jills of all trades. They're highly adaptable creatures as entrepreneurs. I think that's why I get excited about them because they're my type of people. What's interesting is some people maybe call entrepreneurs gluttons for punishment, but I think we love challenges. Just like I've said in the intro, we love unique challenges. I think that really we would be bored without challenges. We would [...] entrepreneurs. We want to be tested. We want to have some challenges to work on. I think the trick is finding the challenges we enjoy working on versus the ones that are kind of thrown into us that we don't want to be dealing with. There's a difference but I love that as well. I think the industry as a whole has a massive potential. You mentioned, the first one is real estate investing, that they need property management. What was the second thing? Dana: The second one, the challenges associated with it is just property management in general is such an afterthought of it. The first is real estate investing and thinking of it as stocks and bonds where you can purchase a property anywhere. But I tell people you shouldn't purchase in your backyard just so you can self manage it. You should be looking elsewhere. It's not like I say, "Okay, my neighbor rent this small little company and that's the only one I can do best in." When I'm looking at stocks, I'm like, “What stocks out there across the world should I invest in that's going to give me what I think is best return, diversification, and things like that?” It's the same with property management. The first is just that investing outside the area, but then the second is property management like you said. I think turnkey is actually a horrible word for that because when people say turnkey, it makes you think you don't have to do anything at all. It's going to be easy. The problem is that when something goes wrong, the property manager is first to get blamed. The first to get blamed. They actually don't even get credit because the word turnkey makes you think, "Oh, I'm going to get this casual." The turnkey companies put it like, "Hey, you're going to get this straight number, this is what you're going to get, and there aren't going to be any problems." What happens is you think you're going to be at the top of that and everything is going to go right. When something goes wrong, it's the property manager who gets blamed which we know there are women, tenants, out there, a bunch of different things. Those challenges and mitigating those are really that second component of it. Jason: Okay. Now, let's get into Hemlane a little bit here. Property management business owners have a lot of different pain points, challenges, and problems. There's a lot of pain points and challenges that owners, tenants, and everybody are dealing with. Businesses only exists, technically, to solve a problem. If a business exists that is not solving a problem, then it's just stealing money. Let's get into the problem that Hemlane helps solve. Tell us about the problem. I think this will help people transition into helping them understand Hemlane and what you guys do. Dana: Hemlane is a flexible and transparent property management platform. What I mean by platform is that we have software. Software, if you think of Buildium or AppFolio but for the smaller guy, not for 500+ units. It's got the software built into it where it automates things and sends reminders on what you need to do next, and it walks you through a risk-mitigated process. For example, people say, "Why don't you integrate PayPal? Why can't I pay with PayPal on Hemlane?" That's not a good process because tenants can dispute that. We're not going to flip that in there. Building the best practices in place, it's got the software. The second component of it is really saying that, “Hey, most of our clients are people who own rental properties and they don't locally.” What do they want help with? A lot of them are trying to self-manage or they're illegally using handymen to show the property and trying to haphazardly put together a process which we see a lot of the market doing especially the tail end of it. They usually do it with these B-class properties where it's not that they're having to deal with the Section 8 or much lower income, but they're saying, "Oh, I can probably manage this remotely myself." We actually come in and say, "No, if you want someone to show your property, they have to be licensed here, or managers we worked within that area, or real estate agents. They can show your property for you." That's why we call it a platform because we're not a brokerage. We're not trying to take clients from anyone. We're just looking to connect to them. There's basically two packages. Property managers and real estate agents use our software-only package because they don't really need us help connect them or do maintenance coordination. Owners will use the upgraded package, so owners of rental properties, and they'll say, "Hey, I still want to control my rent, have rent go to me but I want to pay someone a full leasing fee for them to do the leasing." Whatever it is, we don't get involved in that price negotiation. We just set them up with someone local who can provide those services for them. We have partnered with property managers and real estate agents across the nation based on where portfolios are or where the needs are. We're in all 50 states but our actual agents and managers are only in some of the major cities. We focus on certain cities. Then, what happens is when we have a real estate investor come to us, whether they purchased, they're in some group, whether they just come to us and find us online, we say, “Great. Here are the managers in the area, get on a call with them, and see what you want them to do. Whatever you want them to do, they'll just charge you for their services in the system.” It is in full service. Sometimes it does get to full service. Sometimes they just ask the manager to take over their account in our systems. It downgrades to the software-only package and then managers charges them a whole management fee. A lot of our owners are more in that category of, "Hey, we used to do it ourselves and we're looking for something else." They really fall into that do-it-yourself, that 70% category, and we're trying to push them into saying, "Hey, there are other things out there that are much more efficient than you trying to spend your time on doing your own property management." Jason: Let's make this super clear. For those that are listening, that have property management businesses, they're property management entrepreneurs, who's your ideal prospect when it comes to them? Help them self-identify if somebody that should be reaching out to Hemlane. Dana: Yeah. Great question. From that perspective, it's typically someone who has under 200 units, they're looking to grow their portfolio, and they're also open to doing a combination of multiple things for clients to expand their clientele. What I mean by expand their clientele is saying, “Hey, I'm going to offer a full service is one option and I'm going to offer some unbundled service as well, say, listing only, maintenance only, whatever it is.” When a customer comes to you, it's not saying, "I charged 10% on this. You don't want that, don't work with me." It's saying, "Hey, what do you want? What do you want me to do? Here's what I'll do. Here's what our contract says." Then, you can do everything yourself. They can jump on our platform. They don't even have to be using our software to actually get access to owners. They can create an agent manager profile for free. If we do connect them with people, we do have requirements and property management questions that we ask them to make sure that they're qualified, reference checks, things like that. Usually, it's for the smaller manager that doesn't have enough referrals yet, who's just starting out, saying, "How do I get an advantage in my market? I’m new, I'm a hustler, kind of crazy, in that sense of doing property management. I'm working around the clock, I know myself, but I'm just right now starting to grow my portfolio." In property management, there's only two ways to grow your portfolio. Starve yourself, do it slowly, and go door by door, or acquire brokerage. I have a tons of friends who just acquire property management brokerages. They just run on them, but they have capital. A lot of people don't have that capital. So, if you don’t and you're going door-to-door because your parents didn't hand down their property management business to you—doesn't happen a lot of the time—if you only have 10 doors and you're saying, "How do I get to 20?" working and partnering with companies like Hemlane makes a ton of sense to get you out there, your name out there, more referrals, et cetera. Jason: Love it. I know that we have quite a few that are under 200 doors who are listening. The fact that this could help them generate some more leads creates some more relationships and drum up some more businesses, I think is enticing. Let's focus just on the growth aspect. How does Hemlane help somebody, say they're stuck in that first sand trap, they've got 50 or 60 units under management, they're solopreneur, or maybe they just finally broken past and they wanted to get into that next level, which is that 200–400 door range I called the second sandtrap. How is Hemlane going to help them build up their book of business? Dana: There's two things. One is automation and stuff like that. Anything technology can do better that is administrative, we take off of you. Everything from a tenant just said that I’m interested in a showing and just reached out to you on Zillow, you shouldn't be manually responding to that. You should already have your calendar. You should already have your qualifications of what minimums they have, criteria to qualify. That showing calendar needs to be sent right out to them at that second. They can respond. If they don't, you can give them a personalized call. Everything from automation, so you're not focused on that and you're focused on sales and marketing of your property management business, which is the most important thing to grow at. That's number one. Number two is saying, why don't you give yourself a competitive advantage against everyone else by saying, "Hey, you know what? Everyone else has this 10% model." A lot of times these people who've been self-managing and they are saying, "Hey, I want a property manager," taking them from going to 0%–10% takes a while over time for them to do that, because they have to build trust in you, they've never worked with you. Starting them and saying, "Hey, let me just do your leasing for you. Let me just do your leasing. You can manage everything else on Hemlane." The next year, coming back and saying, "Hey, do you want me to take over this from you as well?" Letting them ease into it, it's like when you give a price. A lot of companies do 30 days free or you get those [...] and open door things. They're like, two-for-one. You try things at a low barrier to entry. Then, you're liking it, you're hooked, and you're connected to this person. Then you're like, "Hey, I trust this person. Now they can have more of my business." I think a lot of it is like, that doesn't happen today in the industry. The industry is just saying, "It's all or none." You're getting the same price quote from every property manager and you don't want to cut your prices. You don't want to say, "I'll give you everything at a lower price." You don't want a discount because then, there's quality problems there. Or when you say, "Hey, maybe I'll just takeover this little part from you." [...] with that and then, that's your biggest pain point. "Let me solve that. Now, let me solve your other ones." From that perspective, Hemlane can really help you set that up to provide your clients, new clients, and clients across the nation who may just be even looking in your area. With some sort of competitive advantage that you have, when you're trying to get new doors until you get more of them quickly, and then build those relationships and build that deal value on customer size, over time. Jason: Hemlane would also help expose this small business to investors in other markets and other areas? Dana: Yeah. They usually come to us. The investor will come to us and say, "Hey, I'm interested in this plus this." Usually, investors will come just across the nation and say, "Hey, I'm in Kansas City and I want to put my properties on Hemlane." We go, "Great! Sign-up and try us for free." Then we say, "What do you need?" They're like, "Oh, I need some advertising tools." "Great! We can provide that to you. Do you need someone to show your properties?" "No, I don't think I do." "Okay, when's your next turnover?" "In two months." "Great. We'll follow up then. Do you need someone to show you your property?" "Yeah. Actually my husband and I are going to Europe, things changed." "Great. Here's someone who can help with your leasing." From that perspective, it's capturing people at the right time because timing is everything. If you can just get your foot in the door, it makes a lot of sense. For us, because we're nationwide, we're a platform, people come in. Where our managers and agents are is where we focus on upselling them, connecting them with local professionals. Jason: Property management listings that maybe haven't heard of Hemlane, they were probably naturally inquiring or wondering how are these investors find out about Hemlane? Dana: There's a ton of places that they find out about us. The biggest ones that we actually find are actually in social media. Most of these real estate investors, I think, we have one of the best algorithms in place from this person we use from marketing. It is really social because a lot of them aren’t searching for property management software. They just don't search for that. They don't search for [...] software. A lot of it is on social. Whatever algorithms is being used is working for that. That's been huge for us. For example in the US, the top rated on Software Advice, if you look at their top products, you'll see us at the top for software solutions. They'll find us on Software Advice. They’ll find us on Capterra. They’ll find us on GetApp. The other thing is blogs and content. I write a ton of content on like, "Why is Venmo the worst way to collect rent?" "What do you need that's concrete in your lease?" A lot of times, when they're searching for something, they're not searching for a software or a manager. They're saying, "I have a problem and I need it fixed." They're searching that term. You can give them the solution in a blog post and say, "Here's some ways to get connected locally with folks in your area who do property management." A lot of times, I just set them up for a coffee. I just say, "Hey, so and so meet so and so for a coffee. I know you're self-managing, but it would be a great way for you guys just to connect locally in your city in case things change, in case your mind changes." That's a great way to start building those relationships without being too salesy. Those people come back to you and they do remember you, especially if you made that impression and you meet them for a quick coffee. Jason: You guys are pulling in traffic from Capterra, GetApp software sites, blogging all these. You got traffic coming in. For the property manager, what is the buy-in or what's the requirement for them to start working with you? Financially, what does this typically cost for them to get onboard? How much work does this take? What's your vetting process? How can those listing self-qualify to become part of the Hemlane network? Dana: Great question. In every area, we actually personally get on a call with you to understand you because if we're going to refer you out, we actually think of you more as a partner versus you created a profile. If we are going to refer you out, you actually do need to do some interviews with our team knowing who you are, asking questions, prequalifying. The minimum we've taken is someone who's done 10 doors. As long as you have 10 doors, even if they're your own doors or something like that and you're just starting your own property management, we need, as a prerequisite, that you have some experience [...] seen in property management because we're not [...] to that. Then, we ask you questions of what would you do in this situation, understanding how well do you really know property management in leasing and complex situations. We'll walk through those situations with you. The third and final thing is reference checks. We do some reference checks on you. There's two things in each area. The first is if you're using our software already, we obviously would refer people to you first before we refer it to someone who's not using our software because we don't take a cut. We don't believe in taking cuts of however how much you make so when you charge an owner for something, we don't take a cut of that. You get 100% of it. That's really important to us because we never want anyone to think, "Hey, we're working with this person because they give us 20% of their income." We don't care. That's yours. We make our money off of our software and our platform. The connections help make our software much more differentiated than others. We don't take a cut of anything that you made. That's really important to note. You build your own business, we build ours, we have the tools to help you with that. If you are using our software, we'll put you higher range assuming you fit our qualifications. Then, someone who's not using our software but just free on our program that just says, “Hey, I'm in this region.” In a lot of cities, we don't have anyone, any partner in that city. There's no one using our software that's good enough, that's qualified. Even if you're not using our software, we'll still refer you out just because we want to make sure those people are happy. That's the first things with it. What's even more important to ask to keep the business and keep traction going is asking reviews. When we refer owners out to you, we actually ask them for their opinions on you after working with you the first time. You might have done something really small for them by just saying, "Hey, let me do an annual inspection and drop by your property, you haven't been there," or we ask the owner, "How was it? What reports did they give you? This and that," because we want to make sure that you are trained and qualified. There's a ton of people out there pretending to be property managers who's like, "Gosh, if I have my property in their hands, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen." We found it's quality not quantity. It's the quality of the individuals we work with. In each city, we don't need 500 managers on our platform. "We have everyone on here." All we need is the top. The people who say they pick up their calls, they respond to emails, you don't need three weeks to respond to an owner, and they're fair with the owners. They set these owners up or the owners like, "Thank goodness I have this person on my team." They went in and did an annual inspection and saw leashes hanging and dog holes, but they're not supposed to have pets in the place. That takes us [...]. That's really where I do think the value comes in. It's really asking for reviews on that as well. You can even set it up if you use our maintenance coordination where you get reviews on how you did on maintenance coordination, how well your service professionals did. "I think, Dana's really big there," to understand how are people doing and performing because you can't do everything yourself. For us, it’s the same thing of how are our local agents performing. Sometimes we have to kick people off and say, “You know what? They're not exactly who we want our reputation to be surrounded with.” That's why it's just important if you don't have any leasing or management experience, you do need to go out and get some. We won't take someone who's a newbie and try to train them via meetings. Jason: This sounds like something ideal for probably most of our clients to get onboard with. If nothing else, you have that listing and be one of the boots-on-the-ground partners that you guys have in your database. Dana: Yeah. We would love for our team to interview you, have a call with you, and stuff like that. Like I said, it doesn't take too much time and adds free value. We don't ask you for marketing dollars. We have those inbound coming in already for our marketing. From that perspective, we'll just work directly with you and we won't take a cut. From our perspective, we’re not trying to make money off of you, we’re just trying to create a much more valuable community. Jason: We probably should have started the show saying, “If you’re a good property manager, Dana’s going to send you leads. She’s just going to send you some free business and you don’t have to pay for it,” and we probably could have just ended it right there and give in a link, and you probably would have gotten a few phone calls. Dana: That sounds good, yup. Jason: Okay, cool. What else should those listening know about Hemlane that we haven’t covered already? What are some of the most common questions that you’re feeling may be from the property management side? Dana: On the property management side, it’s really interesting. One of the things that we get most often image is with owners. When people come to us with owners of, “Hey, I’ve got too much going on, I can’t do it all, I’m stressed, I’m working around the clock, I can’t grow my doors, these owners are upset, blah, blah, blah…” One of the biggest things that I see is communication. When things go wrong, it’s usually because the owner wants to have communication and we see it on our side. When owners come to us, we say, “Why are you signing up for Hemlane?” Because I want some transparency in communication and for property managers to know that we have it in the solution wherein you can add your owners and decide what they get an access to. But you can also decide they get access to all of it but they don’t get notifications. Once the request is opened, they don’t get notifications on that but they just get a summary email once a week, once a month, depending on what you have set up. I think from the perspective of Hemlane, one of the things that we see as really valuable and the solution is having that communication. You’re not having to field 500 calls from owners everyday saying, “How many leads did I get today? How many showings did you do for my property this week?” All of that is in the system for your owner to just view and look at, and having that data and having that transparency to them it’s like, “Wow, you’re on top of what you’re doing,” and that makes them feel good. When they see an email it’s like, “We got 20 leads and 10 of them showed up for showings, and three of them completed an application,” and they go, “Okay, things are moving along.” So even if your day is back-to-back, you’re running around and you got some fire drill with plumbers, some tenants who wants to move out tomorrow, and all these other stuff going on, at least that technology is working for you. It’s one of the biggest things that we see that is really valuable on the software side. Other questions that we get from property managers is, “Well, what about if you’re going to take clients, and clients are just going to use you and not use me, and this and that?” We’ve never seen that happen. If you’re a good property manager which are the ones on our platform, that doesn’t happen. There are two types of owners. There is that 30% in the single family homes than Jason is talking about, who say, “I’m handing you the keys, I don’t want to hear about the property, take it and go with it,” and it changes based on different life events, especially when people have kids for some reason, that’s when they’re like, “Please take my properties now. I’ve got something worse than properties, I’ve got children. I’ve got something worse than properties, I can’t deal with them.” There’s these life events that happen that can signal, “Maybe I should check in with them and see if they want more full service.” For us, what we find is people really fall into different categories and they spiral into that. There are people who would say, “Take everything, I’m willing to pay for it, do everything for me, and send me my owner distribution.” There are other people in the system who want to be so hands on that quite frankly trying to do full service management with them is a nightmare. Jason, I love that you tell people to say “no” to clients. I think more property managers just need to do that, to fire clients, because they’re so hands on, they want to do everything. It’s double the work for you, then they get involved in things they shouldn’t, they mess up things, and it’s just way more for you. That’s another thing from Hemlane and what we offer and what people come to us for, what property managers ask us about is, “Hey, would you ever take our client?” we say, “No, we’re a platform.” People can use us but they sought just physically do the work and there’s still physical stuff to be done. The big question is, “Do they want you to do it, or do they want to do it themselves?” It’s based on life events and based on their personal preferences of whether they are going to do full service, whether they are going to do some hybrid, or whether they’re going to do everything themselves. I think that’s also another question that sometimes we get from managers and we just never seen that, we’ve never seen someone coming to us and say, “My property manager uses your software. Now we’d like to use it.” It’s not that, because that person doesn’t want to do it, right? Jason: Yeah. There’s a reason. Nobody generally wants to go from somebody’s taking care of something to I think I’d just be fun to start doing this on my own, when it comes to property management. Dana: Yeah, that’s true. The reverse definitely happens, and it happens in increments because they’re like, “I want someone to help me but I’m not quite sure, I don’t know if I trust this person, I’ve never worked with them.” So, it goes in increment. The only time they see someone who doesn’t work with their property manager, who isn’t someone on Hemlane but elsewhere is when something goes wrong or when they haven’t been communicated to, which honestly, if you have a really good process in place, you’re communicating with your owners everyday, you’re writing them mail, and they don’t have surprises, they shouldn’t have that. On our system, we have it set up wherein the property managers can just tell the owners on day two, “Here are your tenants who haven’t paid rent, we’re following up with them, but just as heads up, they haven’t paid rent, so we want to give you a forewarning,” so that when you call them on day six and tell them, “We’re serving a three-day notice,” they’re not saying, “Oh wait, now this is a surprise. I thought I was getting the money.” I think communication is really, really important there. Jason: Yes, you’re talking about this. A lot of times, property managers are just hoping for somebody to just get married to them like, “Let’s just get married, without the dating,” and I think people aren’t really buying property management. They don’t want just property management. What they really want is safety and certainty. That’s what they’re hoping to buy. People don’t buy property management, they’re buying trust in you as a property manager and asking somebody to turnover the keys and give you everything, for some, is just too big of a risk. I love the idea of they’re being some sort of stepping stone in leading into this safety and certainty. How much safety and certainty do they have initially? It’s pretty low and if they can just hand you a little bit or a piece of this, then it would be very easy to transition them. A major component of business is retention and upsell. If you can retain them and you can upsell to them, then you’re significantly increasing lifetime value and you have this funnel of people coming into this pipeline that you can build a relationship with over time and you can get them into something bigger. Russell Brunson, this crazy marketer that some are saying, got this concept that I’m sure he got from somewhere else called the Value Ladder. The idea of the Value Ladder is that you need these different price points that get marginally larger that you start people with, You don’t really want to start people with a really big, high-ticket item. You usually need to start with something small initially, which usually the very beginning is something free, like offering something of free value, or free content, or free information and then it incrementally builds. This gives property managers a little bit more of a Value Ladder to step people and seduce people or convince people into full management. Dana: Yeah exactly. I think you’re spot on there, Jason, in the sense of life events change where people upsells do happen. But you rarely see people say, “I’m going for full service with someone I trust” to “Now, I’m managing myself.” Once they have already committed, they’re done. The only time that happens is if you dropped the ball and what’s important for you is to have the software, have the communication, have the processes, have the team in place, build your team in order to do that. You’re right. A lot of times, I see it with property managers and I see they have a call and the owner says, “Hey, I’m looking for a property manager,” and they go, “Okay great. Well here’s all the services that we offer, we’re end-to-end, we charge one month’s rent for leasing, we charge 10% of [00:43.46] for monthly rent to do everything, and we’ll take the keys. When is the good time for me to meet you at the property to see at?” and the owner’s like, “Woah, woah, woah.” Instead, you should [...] the conversation about, “Great, thanks so much for reaching out to me. What can I help you with? What’s the one thing that you hate with your property management? Is it maintenance? Is it doing your showings? What’s the one thing that just drives you insane that you want to do?” That will change your game and differentiate you because they’re giving that same exact price quote, that same exact spiel from everyone, and it doesn’t differentiate you from that perspective. Jason: Going back to that analogy of marriage and dating, a lot of property managers are like, “Hey, you might need some help with your property?” is the equivalent of saying, “Yeah, I might be interested in, maybe, connecting with you.” “Great, I’ll be moving in tomorrow, like, we’re together.” Dana: Yup. All the way like, “Here’s my contract, sign it. It’s annual, there’s no free trial, and there’s a huge termination clause.” For an owner, it’s like, “I haven’t actually, physically worked with you.” It’s like hiring an employee. If you worked with someone in the past, you’re like, “Okay, I’m ready to go,” but if you haven’t worked with them, you’re like, “I need to do these interviews, I need to do these background checks, I need to do these,” and you’re like, “I’m not even quite sure if they’re going to work out.” There’s this much larger barrier. As much as you can, avoid and take down that barrier really will help your business. Also, it goes the other way. You’re dating now but sometimes you want to tell the client after doing just the leasing for them, “I’m so glad you’re taking over the management,” and then they reach back out to you to do the leasing next time and you’re like, “I would love to do the leasing for you but I’m completely booked,” because they were a freaking nightmare to deal with. I never want to deal with them again. Jason: “Please call our competitors down the street. They would love to help you, we’re a bit overwhelmed right now.” Dana: All of the competitors think. I think the dating goes both ways because one of the things, Jason, I love about your show what you’ve said time and time again is, a lot of these people who are really stressed in property management, it’s because they have 10% of their clients or 150% of the time they’ve spent of overworked, overwhelmed on these properties and you probably shouldn’t be doing those ones. So. I think the dating goes both ways. Jason: Yeah. I tell clients all the time that sales and deals and contracts happen at the speed of trust and it’s that simple. I love that with using Hemlane, based on what you’re saying, what this allows you to do is to start that relationship with trust. Once you build that, it becomes very easy to upsell or to get them into a more committed relationship with you of doing more stuff with you once you earned that. Once you earned that, if there’s anything that they’ll need, they’ll be happy to use you to do that and you then have more opportunities. That’s all property management entrepreneurs need is more opportunities to build trust and the more opportunities they have, the better. It sounds like Hemlane is another channel or possibility for them to do that, that they may not have considered before. Dana: Absolutely. Great way to market from that perspective. Jason: Dana, it’s been awesome having you here on the show. How can people get in touch with Hemlane? How can these property managers that are listening get started with you guys? How do they sign up? Dana: If you’re interested in our partnership program, we don’t do just regular sign ups through our partnership page. Instead of going there, you can just email me, [email protected]. I’ll send that out to our partnership team. Brad will give you a call, schedule, and find some time to go through things with you. That’s for the partnership. You can also go to www.hemlane.com and from there you can click the try us for free. You can watch our videos and see what we offer as well, features everything in there, so you can see that as well if you’re interested in using our services. If you just have some questions on property management in general and you’re in this rut or whatever and you think there is some way that potentially we can get you out of that, we’re really happy to hear about that, too, but the fastest thing to do is email me [email protected] because I’m always on my email. Jason: Cool. Maybe this is the last question so, what is a hemlane? Where does the name Hemlane come from? Dana: Great question. We wanted something that had an international feel to it. We wanted something that was easy to say, easy to pronounce. DoorGrow, really easy to say, really easy to pronounce, two syllables. We wanted something that didn’t have any branding behind it. When we looked international, we basically took multiple languages for the word ‘home,’ and we went through and looked at ‘home’ in multiple different languages. Hem is house in Swedish, and then Lane is a path that divides others from other people. When you think of a path, you’re always looking to get ahead of others and differentiate. So, we put how it’s differentiation from that perspective together. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t have rental in it, or something that didn’t really have its own branding around it. What was funny is when we started Hemlane, it sounded like a horrible pair of cut-off pants like hemline, and everyone I would go to is like, “Do you have a clothing company?” and I was like, “No, it’s not a clothing company. It’s like the opposite.” Now, when you look up, Hemlane it’s all Hemlane, it’s all property management, but before that, it was a lot of just really bad pictures of people’s cut-off pants, hemlines, and stuff like that beforehand. Jason: Good. I love branding, so I love hearing about how people come up with the name and I love that there’s this meaning behind this, so it’s interesting. Well Dana, it’s been a delight having you here on the show, always fun to hangout with like-minded business people and entrepreneurs. I love that you’re helping the industry, you’re helping growth. I think this is a great fit to have you here on the show and I’m excited to see what success you guys create. Dana: Great. Thank you so much, Jason, for having me on the show. I love your show and I love the content that you have. Jason: I appreciate that. Cool. We’ll let you go. It’s really great having Dana on, so if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to have doors, then maybe check out Hemlane, sounds like interesting channel for growth. If you’re struggling, you want to optimize your business, optimize your warm lead funnel, you’re tired of playing the game of SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing, paper lead services, it’s not working, you’re spending a lot of money, and you’re not getting the return on all that money, then you’re probably worse off than if you just not done the marketing in the first place. Those are the people that we would love to help. Reach out to us at DoorGrow and we might just blow your mind, and help you figure out how to target that 70% and grow your business. I had a really cool morning call this morning with Regis [...] one of our clients. I haven’t really connected much with him over the last year, but he dialed in our program, did what we said, and he had it over a hundred doors in just the last year, just by doing the stuff that I told him to do. All these success story were keep popping up and I probably should stay better connected but if you’re looking to add 100, 200 doors in the next year and you feel like growth, you’re losing more doors than you’re getting on right now due to the sell-off in the market, and you’re focused on cold lead advertising just trying to grow your business and it’s just not working, have a conversation with us at DoorGrow. We would love to help you out and our mission really is to transform this industry and help grow it. I believe this industry have massive potential to be as big as probably the entire real estate industry here in the US. There are a lot of rental properties and we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of growth. I’m excited to see what happens here in the future, so reach out. If you are watching us on Youtube, or you’re watching this, make sure to like and subscribe. I want to build up our Youtube channel and get our first 1000 subscribers. We’ve got, I think a few hundred there right now but I’d love to get to that thousand-dollar market subscribers and you will see these episodes first. You’ll be the first to be notified when we put these episodes out. We release them to Youtube as videos before they show up on iTunes. If you’re hearing this on iTunes, make sure to go to Youtube and subscribe to our Youtube channel to youtube.com/doorgrow. You load it from your phone right now. Do it and click subscribe. You’ll even start getting some notifications from Youtube in your browser occasionally when we pop up a new video and you’ll be excited and able to hear some of the latest and greatest material connected to property management industry and the growth. That is all for today, until next time everybody to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Do you use AppFolio? Word on the street is that it’s one of the most intuitive and easiest platforms to use, especially in the property management business. Today, I am talking to Nat Kunes. He’s the senior vice president of AppFolio, which is an all-in-one solution for property managers to grow their business and be more successful. You’ll Learn... [03:05] Shifts in technology solutions: AppFolio started as software as a service (SaaS), Web-based product and then added mobile ability to access anywhere. [04:29] Fourth Industrial Revolution: Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to property management problems. [05:18] AppFolio acquired Dynasty, which provides AI options for the real estate market. Digital employees lease properties, schedule maintenance, and perform other tasks. [08:16] Decision-making behind-the-scenes at AppFolio: Customer Input: Constant communication to identify core problems. Market Trends: Leasing, occupancy, and construction rates to fill units. Technology Shifts: Leverage leading-edge game changers to solve problems. [10:56] Integrations: Growing awareness of APIs to choose different vendors and tools to create custom connections. [12:51] AppFolio Property Manager PLUS Product: Geared toward larger property management firms. [13:30] Future Feature Request: Integration with Zapier to connect to more tools, save time, and increase productivity. [14:05] Employee Experiences: Meeting customer expectations and talent management by hiring and retaining great people is a challenge. [16:08] Recent survey conducted with John Burns Consulting found that factors inhibiting growth include retention and talent shortage. [17:57] Broader Benchmarking: What makes a good leasing agent? What makes a great maintenance technician? What is expected? [18:42] Switching software to grow business and move forward: Partner with progressive company focused on future. [20:43] Internally, AppFolio uses external tracking, HR, sales, and other software that offers insights and feedback to make better decisions. Tweetables Fourth Industrial Revolution: Applying AI to property management problems. Future AppFolio Features: Decisions based on input from customers, market trends, and technology shifts. The growing awareness of APIs integrations to choose tools to create custom connections. Resources AppFolio AppFolio Acquires Advanced Artificial Intelligence Technology Provider AppFolio Property Manager PLUS John Burns Real Estate Consulting Zapier DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guest today, finally, we’ve got AppFolio here on the DoorGrow Show. I’m hanging out with Nat Kunes. I said your name correctly, I think. Nat: Yup. Jason: Awesome. Nat, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you here. Nat: Thank you. So very excited to be here as well. Jason: Cool. Nat, you are the senior vice president of AppFolio. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us a little background on you and then let’s get into the topic at hand. Nat: Thanks for the introduction. I’ve been at AppFolio now for about 10 years, so pretty early on, in our company history, gotten to grow with the company as well. Our products are really geared around being that all-in-one solution for property managers. From everything that we wake up in the morning to do, it’s really to accomplish that one vision which is helping our property managers grow their businesses, be more successful, pretty much everything that sounds like you guys stand for as well. That’s why I’m really excited to be on the show with you. Jason: Great. Glad to have you here. I was telling you right before the show, most of our clients use AppFolio. Word on the street is that it’s one of the most intuitive platforms to use, easiest, that says a lot about software. I mean, the number one challenge with software is adoption; getting people to just use the thing. Let’s be honest, that’s the number one challenge with software is just getting people to use it and it being easy to use. Kudos on that. Nat, you’ve been with AppFolio for a decade now. That’s like a miniature lifetime. Tell us some of the changes you’ve seen while you’ve been there. I’m curious about that. Nat: Yeah. Really, we’ve seen some major shifts in technology solutions over that time period. One of the things people are really fortunate in our timing when we started the company, we started out as a web-based product, so Software As A Service from day one. By being web-based, we’re able to offer really complete solution that people could access from anywhere. When we started selling AppFolio in the early days, what we’d find was people were oftentimes using either Excel or QuickBooks or maybe some old solution that was on a CD or a server in our closet. Over time, what we saw was that technology shifting. We started web-based, quickly moved into mobile, knowing how important mobile was to our customers and their customers—the tenants, the residents of these different units, the property owners as well—and all that communication, it needs to happen. We drew a line in the sand and said, “Hey, anything that you do on your computer, you should be able to do on your mobile device.” That was kind of a different take when we first started down that path. Because originally, people were coming out with apps that would do just like one little maintenance thing here or one little big sync thing there and we said, “Really, everything needs to work on a mobile device.” That was kind of the first major shift just since we started AppFolio. The second major shift just happened in the last couple of years and you’re seeing us invest a lot in it. It’s really what we’re calling kind of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s tied to artificial intelligence. What we’re doing now is applying artificial intelligence technology to property management problems. Doing things like having opportunities to create digital employees that help people do things like lease up properties faster, handle maintenance issues in a much faster fashion. That’s kind of the new major shift that we’re seeing in the industry. Over the last decade, we’ve kind of lived through a couple of these transitions. Our goal is always to be leading the charge on behalf of our clients to make sure that they always have the most modern property management software is available to them to help them grow their business faster. Jason: We always hear this idea of AI. A lot of times when I’ve looked at different AI systems, it really, a lot of times, just looks like a really elaborate tree structure where they’ve just created a bunch of ‘if then’ statements and they call it AI. How is this actually coming into AppFolio? What are you guys doing to stay at the forefront and bring AI into your platform? Maybe give an example. Nat: A great example, you guys might have seen, we made an acquisition earlier this year of a company called Dynasty. What Dynasty does is artificial intelligence for the leasing process. When you give out a phone number for someone to inquire about an available unit, what it’ll do is it will start a conversational AI experience with the tenant via text messages. It will have full on conversations talking about availability of the unit, pricing of the unit, setting up a time to show the unit as well. You can imagine all the things behind the scenes that have to work for that to happen, it has to be able to have access to your leasing agents showing calendar, it has to interact with the prospective tenant, find times that work with them. It has to know full on availability of your units and then be able to book showings. Then follow-up with confirmations on these showings and then follow-up with, “How was your showing?” What we found is, using artificial intelligence, we’re able to close people for showings at a much higher rate in humans alone and it takes away all the mundane tasks, as you can imagine, of just the back and forth of calendaring and all that time that kind of goes into that and lets your leasing agent really focus on what they do best which is closing the unit, getting that prospect in there, booking it as fast as possible so that you can focus on showing the unit and doing that. That’s a great example. All of that’s done through conversational AI. If you talk to prospective residents, they really have no idea that they’re conversing with an AI device. They really believe that they’re talking with a human. That’s what makes it so effective in closing those showings, in getting those guys to actually show up on property. That’s a great example of it in action in. I think that you’ll see that manifest itself in many different areas of the property management business. Think of all any mundane tasks that doesn’t really require your best staff to do. Booking a showing is just a calendar activity of back and forth. Imagine that in other areas of your business where you can apply your resources to higher priority projects that let you grow your business. Jason: Maybe you could give listeners a little bit of insight behind the scenes there a t AppFolio since you’ve been there for so long. You’ve acquired Dynasty, you’re implementing this leasing conversational AI which sounds really cool, how do you guys go about deciding what is the next feature? How do you guys go about deciding internally? Maybe you could share a little bit what sort of the culture is. Because I think a lot of people see you as this big player in the market and I’d love to hear what goes on behind the scenes into the decision-making area. Nat: We use a few different inputs in terms of how we decide what to focus on. First and foremost, we look at our customers and we say, “Okay. What are our customers desires? What problems are they trying to solve in their business?” We have constant communication and feedback loops with our customers. Our customers are very diverse. We have customers with sometimes 50 doors, and we have customers with tens of thousands of doors. They could span a lot. We have customers that focus on single families exclusively, some do multi-family, some do commercial units—it kind of crosses the gamut there of community associations as well. We’re constantly gathering input from our customers trying to identify, “Really, what are the core problems they’re trying to solve?” And then we take that back and say, “Okay, how can we apply technology solutions to solve that?” That’s kind of one layer. The other layer we’re looking at is market trends. We’re trying to stay out in front of, “Okay, what’s leasing and occupancy rates look like this year? What does the macroeconomic market construction rates?” All that kind of stuff to try and stay ahead and say, “Okay. If it looks like, for instance, a lot of new construction is going to come out of the market, that’s going to flood a bunch of supply which means it’s going to be harder to fill those units.” Focusing on leasing experiences for our client thus can be critical for their success over the next couple of years. That’s kind of another layer. The third layer we’d look at is major technology shifts that we believe would be kind of game changers in the market and we need to get ahead of on behalf of our customers. Like I mentioned, AI is a big one. That is really the big shift in technology solutions, we’re calling kind of that Fourth Industrial Revolution. We believe that will change the trajectory of software and how businesses operate just as much as mobile and the web did previously. We’re getting ahead of that for our customers and focusing on areas within our product that can leverage that technology to solve our customers’ problems in their businesses is yeah, their main input. We take all those, amalgamate them up, and then that’s the focus of our teams. We have a lot of resources at our disposal to execute against that for our customers and deliver great products consistently to them. Jason: One of the trends we noticed inside our DoorGrow club group and one of the trends that we’ve seen a lot of people pushing and asking for, is there seems to be this heightened awareness of APIs, integrations and being able to pick and choose different vendors and different tools. I’m curious, is that anywhere on the roadmap for this? I know you guys are doing some really innovative things with the AI but as far as allowing AppFolio customers to create connections to other tools and third-party tools, is that on the horizon at all for AppFolio? Nat: Yeah. That’s a great question. What we take a look at when we look at APIs in general is, we really dive back to the problem that we’re trying to solve. We talk to our clients and say, “Okay, what’s the API being used for?” A good example of that in action is someone said, “I have this business intelligence database that I want to pipe my data out of and into, so I can do this custom queries or reports and it’s something for my investors or my owners that are unique to them and I want to do that.” Other examples that we’ve seen is, “Hey, I want to use a particular collections firm to do my tenant collections.” What we do is we tend to look at those on individual basis, say, “How can we provide the best experience for that particular use case?” Instead of a generic API structure that doesn’t really work really well with a lot of different vendors and you can wind up with broken integrations and different things that you’ll hear complaints often about, we tend to focus on particular vendors that we can partner up with. Right now, we actually have hundreds of integrations with different vendors behind-the-scenes. Some of them are out there and we talk very proudly about them and partner up with them. Others are enabling our customers behind-the-scenes as well. Late last year, we actually launched a new product that’s geared more towards larger property management firms called AppFolio Property Manager Plus. As part of that, one thing we heard from them is, “Hey, I need that data via an API to input in two things like my data warehouse and my business intelligence applications.” There is an actual API that comes with that product to do just that. On a case-by-case basis, we do look at those things. At this point, we’ve done that enough that we, like I said, hundreds of different integrations with different third parties. But that’s the approach that we take when we hear customers. We ask that, say, “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve and let’s figure out a way to solve it together.” Jason: I’m going to throw a feature request because I’ve been asked by every property management software that comes on for this, because I think it’d be a game changer, but Zapier integration. I don’t think there’s any major property management software that’s come up with Zapier integration which will allow them to connect to lots and lots of different tools and resources. I’m throwing it out there. Maybe you guys will do it in the future. We’ll see. I think the first software that will do that is going to get a lot of attention because it really opens up to a lot of tools and it’s one integration. Nat: Yeah. Jason: Alright, cool. Let’s talk about this idea of your employees’ experiences outside of just meeting customer expectations. You would this over and it’s just that many firms are still struggling to overcome the challenges with business growth and talent management. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Nat: What we hear when we talk to our clients is one, we’ll say, “What’s the biggest challenge in your business?” A lot of times, it doesn’t actually necessarily boil down to software or technology or things like that. It’s the people element of business. Hiring and retaining great people in the businesses is a struggle, it’s a challenge. There are definitely talent shortages in some key areas, amongst them, maintenance and some of the other areas of the business. What we’ve been able to find through our technology is two-fold. One is helping you do more with the team that you have. That’s a great way to solve talent shortages. As I mentioned that leasing situation, if I have five leasing agents then I can add 100 more doors and still have five leasing agents, that’s huge. You don’t have to continue to find new people. The counter to that is retaining those people. One thing we pride ourselves, as you mentioned earlier on, is our software being extremely easy to use. What benefit that gives our clients is a, the day-to-day work of the employees of the firm is much richer because it’s just easy. They’re not struggling with our software constantly day in and day out and complaining about that and causing them productivity loss. And then the other factor that comes into play there is when onboard a brand-new employee, you can train them so much faster. Because it’s so intuitive and easy to use, instead of handing them a big binder and saying, “Read this for two weeks and then maybe you could start using the software,” they can get in day one, start using, and be a productive, effective employee much faster. Those are the areas that we really focus on to try and help our clients with that talent piece of the equation. Jason: You’d sent this over and it says that you work with John Burns, a real estate consulting firm, and you discovered that four of the top five factors inhibiting growth were employee related. What were these five factors? Do you have that? Nat: One thing we should do is perhaps we could actually share out the report with you guys and include that at the end. Because it’s a lot to go through the whole things right now but a lot of them were retention of existing employee, key talent shortages. It’s the ones that I’ve already hit on, add it up to the five. But there’s a lot more nuance detail behind each of the five. I think it behoove you guys to read through that report because it is actually extremely valuable as companies look to grow their business to read through that, because there are some good strategies in there, how to counter that, and how to continue to grow despite those five headwinds that might be against the business. Jason: Yeah, we see that. I have the sand traps, at least that I’d call. We’ve got the solopreneur sand trap which is about 50-60 units and that’s where they’re trying to hire maybe their first team member and that’s a challenge to just offload anything or to get a team member on and retain them. The next sand trap is getting to that 200-400 door category. This is the team sand trap where they now have a team and they’re trying to figure out, “How do I keep good team members? How do I have A players instead of B players? How do I get people that aren’t just showing up for a paycheck, that want to go home at the end of the day and complain about me and the business and the job, and they live for the weekend?” I think that’s a big challenge. Property management is a tough business to be in. They deal with a lot of difficult things and so sometimes it is difficult to keep the team happy, positive, and motivated and not too stressed. Nat: And benchmarking as well. It’s like, “What makes a good leasing agent? What makes a great maintenance technician? What makes being able to see what’s normal, what should be expected of them in a day-to-day basis, to being able to look broader?” That’s another key area. It’s like, “How do I know if I have a great leasing agent? If they’re turning a unit in 15 days, is that good, is that bad, is that short, is that long?” Being able to have that benchmark to compare against industry normal and then also geographic normal—all that kind of stuff—is critical as well to, like you said, building a great team and making them productive and effective. Jason: Alright. Let’s take the listeners. Listeners are challenged with growth a lot of times. They’re dealing with team issues, they’re dealing with operational stuff, they’re usually pretty in bed with their software. If they’re with AppFolio, it’d be difficult to switch. If they’re with somebody else, it’d be difficult to switch. What ultimately do you think we should leave with the listeners as a takeaway from this for them to be able to grow their business and to move things forward? Nat: The things that I always give guidance on is just make sure you’re partnered up with a company that’s looking to the future. You want a future-proof your business. You want to make sure that you’re keeping that long-term view in mind when you choose software solutions. You may have some short-term pains, I’d say, it’s hard to find a software solution anywhere, in any business, in any market that sounds 100% of everything you want. But to make sure that you’re partnering up with a company that you feel is like-minded, that’s progressive, that’s constantly pushing forward towards new things. Like what I talked about AI, if you believe that AI is the future as well, then you want to partner up with a company that is investing in that space, that can provide solutions there. That kind of like-mindedness I think is one of the most important things that I say that can enable growth. We see a lot of our customers are able to grow their business because they invested in solid technology early on. That would be one thing that I would say as a key takeaway. I’d say that even at AppFolio, we offer software solutions from other companies and that’s what we look for when we buy software to help us run our businesses. “Who’s going to be with us in 10 years? Who’s going to be in it for the long haul?” Switching software every year is extremely painful and it can set your business back. You want to make sure that when you do that, that you’re really investing for the future. Jason: That brings up a really curious question. If you’re a software company, what software tools do you use internally? I’m sure listeners will be a little bit curious that. Nat: We use lots of different software. We use a lot of software to help us make better decisions as a business. We’ll use things within the product to serve up insights so we can see, “Oh, hey. People are spending X amount of time on this page.” Or, “People are clicking on this a lot. Why is that?” It helps us serve up insights that we can then talk to customers and say, “Hey, I notice when you’re looking at residence, you always click this one link. Is that because it’s not as easy to get there as it could be?” Helping us make the product easier to use. We use a lot of tracking tools like that to try to make better decisions within the product. We’ve use lots of product that’s on the market. We’ve used a few over the years that do that. We’ll have those types of things. We’ll have tools that help us gather feedback. We are constantly gathering feedback from our customers, actual verbatims, and they’ll see that borrow sometime and show up at the bottom of the screen that says, “Hey, would you recommend us to a friend or colleague? What do you think about AppFolio? Help us make it better.” Anytime we roll out new features, we have software that lets them click and provide direct feedback and say, “Hey, I would change this. I would change that.” We’ll iterate on that. Then we have obviously lots of backend software just like any company of decent size. We have companies to help us manage payroll, and HR, sales, all those kinds of things as well. But those are kind of generic company products as well. A lot of what we invest in is technology to make our products better and provide more value to our clients. Jason: Alright. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show here, Nat. This was interesting. How can people get in touch with AppFolio? What’s the easiest way? Nat: The best way is to contact your client services rep if you are a customer. They’ll always know exactly where to direct you to and help you get any help. If you’re looking at new features, functionality, you need training, whatever, we can help with that. For prospects or people that are interested in checking out our software, you can definitely go to appfolio.com, there’s a form right there, it gets routed right to one of our agents that can help you take a look at the software, take a deeper dive, learn more about the features, learn more about where we’re headed with it, a little bit about the AI stuff I talked about today, you can learn a lot through that as well. That would be the two main paths that I’d say if you’re a current customer versus someone who’s interested in checking out the software for the first time. Jason: Cool. Nat, thanks for coming on the show. Glad to have AppFolio represented here on the DoorGrow Show. I wish you guys success in helping the industry. Nat: Awesome. Thank you so much for having us. We’re happy to join anytime. Jason: Alright. Thanks, Nat. Cool. For those of you that are watching, make sure you check our AppFolio. If you don’t have a property management software, it’s definitely on my list of the top ones to check out for sure. Take a look and check out AppFolio at appfolio.com. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, you’re struggling, or maybe you just need a better website, or maybe you want a little bit of coaching, something related to growth, reach out to DoorGrow. Check us out at doorgrow.com, schedule with me or my team, and we will get you connected and help you move things forward. Make sure you join our community, connect to this podcast which is the DoorGrow Club. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com. If your website is more than two-three years old, it’s probably getting stale, it’s probably leaking money so go test it out, go to doorgrow.com/quiz, raid your website, check it out, and it’s going to give you a letter grade—like going back to elementary school, people. You’re going to get a grade on your website based on how effective it is at making you money and meeting your needs in terms of growing your business. Websites are not built to just please Google; they’re built to please people. If they please people, they make you a lot more money. Ultimately, that’s Google’s goal as well, to please people. That’s how they sell ads. Alright, everybody, check that out. Until next time, to our mutual growth. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time! Take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Building your property management business and team can be challenging. As a business owner and entrepreneur, you are wired to fix problems. So, get out of the way, and hire people who have different skill sets to solve them. Today, I am talking Melissa Prandi of PRANDI Property Management. Everybody in the National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) knows her name. She helped establish it and has been in the property management business for 37 years. You’ll Learn... [03:13] Brand new baby, brand new company, but no bank loan. [04:23] Beginning of NARPM and best practices for property management software. [05:25] Solopreneur Sandtrap: Can only handle 50-60 doors before getting stuck. [05:48] Team Sandtrap: Bottleneck of 200-400 doors when building a team, creating a culture, and systemizing processes become painful. [06:33] How to build a team: Different personalities and skill sets. [09:15] Success comes with your willingness to change. [12:15] Good at growing the company and letting people grow or go. [14:50] End-of-the-day (EOD) Report: Rate your day, workload, challenges. [15:50] Working from home: Nobody can touch you; a physical disconnect. [16:44] Modes of Communication: Basecamp, Voxer, and email. Analyze styles to know what tools to use. [21:10] Entrepreneur’s Ego: Nobody can do it as good as me. [24:57] It’s not always about business. Something’s going on. What can I do to help? [28:42] Face-time and morning connections to catch awesomeness and say thanks. [31:30] Making mistakes and ‘aha’ moments; what did you do/should have done? [34:15] Be a student and fan of what works, and be willing to fail. Never stop learning; speak and teach. Share your knowledge because people soak it up. [38:20] Keep yourself well to be a good leader. Health is #1 thing to impact productivity. [44:40] Reach out and lean on others who have been through the same things. Tweetables Success comes with your willingness to change. Be a student and fan of what works and be willing to fail. To grow your business, you have to build a community. You can’t do everything. Listening to chipmunks all day long telling you what needs to happen. Resources Melissa Prandi PRANDI Property Management NARPM Tony Robbins: DiSC Personality Test Basecamp Voxer Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen by Steve Sims EMDR Therapy DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. And today, I have a very special guest, Melissa Prandi. Melissa, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Melissa: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Jason: Melissa, you are practically synonymous with NARPM, you helped found NARPM, you have everybody in NARPM knows you, and you have been involved in property management for how many years now? Melissa: Thirty-seven years. March 27. Jason: Thirty-seven years which is almost my entire life, right? Melissa: You have to say that, yup. Jason: Which is amazing. You have tons of experience, you are this phenomenal character and charismatic person. Everybody’s been telling me I have to get Melissa on the show. I’m really excited for you to be here. Maybe the place to start would be to why don’t you share with everybody your story? How did you get started in property management all that time ago? What crazy idea popped in your head to make you decide that [...] Melissa: There’s a lot of crazy [...]. I have to say I started in my company March 27, 1982 as a receptionist. I came in, all of my friends have gone off to college, I said, “I’m not going to afford to go to college. I’m going to work three jobs.” So, I came in, that was one of my three jobs, I was a receptionist at a property management company. I worked there 5½ years. This is great because women love this part of the story. When I went out on maternity leave on a Wednesday at five o’clock, I went grocery shopping Thursday and Friday morning I went into labor. If you know where I live, I’m in Marin County just north of San Francisco and I had to cross the Golden Gate bridge. I got to the hospital at 10 minutes to eight in the morning, I [...] 10 minutes to nine in the morning, said, “Okay, give me my [...] I have things to do with backup,” went home the same day. Jason: What? Melissa: Yeah. I had this new baby boy, Matt, many people know Matt, and Monday morning the owners of my company called and said, “We’re going to sell this company. If you don’t buy it, you’re going to be out of the job.” I didn’t take too long. I said, “Oh, you know. Hmm, I have a new baby. Hmm,” and I’m going to have two new babies. Sure enough, I made arrangements. I went to my dad and said, “Dad, I want to buy this company.” He goes, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, I want to buy it.” He said, “All right,” and I said, “Well, I need a loan.” He goes, All right, I’ll give you $3000.” But the [...] you can’t do is go to a bank and get a loan, so I had to get very creative with this brand new baby and a brand new company. That was 37 years go. Jason: That was quite the adventure. When an entrepreneur personality type is given a challenge like this, you had a clear outcome, clear objective, you were going to get that company and you had all of this pressure. Entrepreneurs in those moments, like we, light up and something magical starts to happen, right? And it work out for you. Melissa: I guess so. [...] I’m still sitting here and [...] NARPM, still doing property management. Jason: Great. Maybe share a little backstory on how did NARPM come to be? How this this come about? Melissa: It’s an interesting story. I wasn’t one of the original 100 that were in the charter of NARPM. A handful of people got together and they were actually exchanging software challenges. [...] own a software company at the time which is no longer, and they started talking about their best practices. They all kicked in money to start NARPM. I’m 25 years in NARPM, so you can imagine that’s pretty much a part of my life. Jason: Quite a while. Our topic today is building your business and team. At your business, Brandi Property Management, I would imagine that you have a pretty awesome team after all this time. A lot of people this is a big challenge. I’ve talked about this on the show before but there’s these two sand traps I’ve noticed in property management. The first sand trap in growth is around 50 or 60 units. This is the solopreneur sand trap. That’s about as many doors as they can handle on their own and they get stuck. Sometimes, they back themselves into a financial corner, they don’t have enough revenue to hire their first person, they’re managing as much as they can handle, they’re losing doors as fast as they’re getting on, and they’re stuck. For those listening, if you’re stuck in that, talk to me. We can help you get past that. If you break past that 100 door barrier, I found that by default they end up in the next sand trap, which is the 200–400 door category. This is where it’s the team sand trap. This is where they’re not building a team, they’re trying to create culture, they’re trying to systemize processes, they’re trying to wrap their head around what they should be doing, and as they approach maybe 400–500 units it gets really painful because everybody’s asking them for everything and they start to realize they are the number one bottleneck in the entire business, that everything they got them there they have to give up. I’m excited to talk with you because you’ve dealt with this stuff and you’ve seen this. Maybe you could share your perspective of what does it really take to build a business and how does the team really play into that from your perspective. Melissa: You touched on little bit of my message is getting out of the way. I’m not the tech generation, the paperless generation. I still use paper. I still like to print and read. It doesn’t work in today’s market for everybody. I would say the number one thing as you grow is to get out of the way. Get out of the way and hire people that have different skill sets. In our company, we always do personality tests. Tony Robbins offers it for free. Jason: The DISC? Melissa: Yeah, the DISC test. It’s free on his website. We do that, find the personality styles. For example, in a bookkeeper, you want someone who is very good, very high, and procedural. You want to make sure you find that in any of your staff mates. In our chain we have a big diversity, age, and skills. You can’t remember everybody have personality when you want to be like me. I never met a stranger and I’m a visionary. I’m the person who’s up with the ideas, tell us the way I wanted results and then gets out of the way. Jason: I love it. I’m a big proponent of using the DISC as well. In fact, Tony Robbins recently switched his DISC assessment, if you’ve noticed, from the inner metrics, which I actually used to have a connection where I would get the full three-part inner metrics, which is even better than the Tony Robbins one which gives you the first two portions. But then, it started getting watered down and smaller. They just recently switched DISC providers and it changed, but I find it’s better than what it was even though it’s not as pretty. You can do that free DISC assessment. You’ve got people on you team that are high C’s, they love compliance, they are rigid, they’re probably not the best friendly communicators, you’ve got high I’s that are great communicators and really great maybe with people, maybe high S’s that are great with customer service, maybe DC’s which are like unicorns that are really great at operations, maybe high DI’s which are great at sales and closing. Understanding that gives you a lot of power in being able to understand people. Melissa: [...] when you get ready to hire, looking at that needs assessments. Looking that what diversity is in your team, but I want to go back to something you test on again because this is where [...] out, which is change. Success comes with your willingness to change. That’s what basically you’re talking about as you’re training your team and also speaking to the property managers, as you said, they reach out to you. They have to be willing to change and I’m willing to change. That’s why I take a lot of classes even after all these years. I get into classes and I think of these aha moments that’s like, “Oh, I used to do that.” I cannot just go back sometimes and do things I used to do, but I also wanted to say, “Oh, we can’t do that.” “Why not?” “Well, we tried that.” Don’t have this theory of ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it,’ because that [...] stuck. Jason: Right. Any of us who have been in business long enough, we’ve probably forgotten more than we’ve learned. There’s so much and it’s great to get those reminders. You have mentioned early on that they need to get out of the way. How does somebody consciously do that? A lot of times when we’re in the way, we can’t see it. It’s almost like telling somebody, “Look at the back of your head.” It’s how they feel. You’re saying, “Get out of the way,” and they’re like, “I don’t even know how I’m in the way. How do I do that?” How do you help [...] Melissa: I’m sitting upstairs in a private suite away from my entire staff. My son, Matt, and let me just tell you I started the way I got the business when Matt was born, right? My son used to say, “Mom, nobody grows up and wants to be a property manager. Matt just celebrated his 11th year in property management and he’s our [...] Business Development Manager. Jason: Over a decade. Melissa: Yeah. But he didn’t. He went to college. He didn’t think, “Well, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. Nor did I. I don’t [...] thought you’re going to be servicing property managers.” But Matt sits in my original office. Therefore there’s a different skill set and, guess what, I’m not in the way. I’m down there and there’s something like walking by the office to go fix it as it get me out of the way. Jason: You’ve physically have gotten yourself out of the way so you’re not hearing the auditory things that you would normally trigger a response and cause you to go into fix-it mode as an entrepreneur because we hear problems, we’re wired. We want to fix it. We also see a problem, we’re like, “I can make money solving that problem.” That’s how we think. Melissa: And I tell you, I still go down, I’ll sit there and they want to see. Remember, I’m the face of the company. I’m the visionary. So, I [...] in the morning, I start down there, good morning to everybody, “Good morning, Frank. Good morning, Christine.” I go through my good mornings, I say hello to everybody there, and that’s [...]. I find out if there’s anything they need, me but I [...] work for the first couple of hours at home. What difference does it make? It allows me to actually stay home. Let me tell you that my role, I was a property manager as I said when I started in the business. Got my license and my broker’s license, went to California State, got into real estate, and then I helped grow the company. And I’m very good at it. I really think if you want to grow your business, you have to be in community. You can’t be in community and be in the office operations and running everything. You can’t do everything. I have gone out of the way by not being physically in an office downstairs where everybody can come to me. Now, I have a really good team. Christine Goodin who has her RMP with NARPM and her MPM. That’s a Residential Property Manager. MPM is a Master Property Manager. She came to work for me 18 years ago and she didn’t even know what property management was. And she’s now the Vice-President of Operations. So, you hire right, you bring them to educational courses. Don’t stand in their way growing, either. That’s another really key factor. Don’t let them get stagnant. I say, “How do you keep somebody happy for 18 years? Give them new challenges.” You give them new roles. Let them grow right along with you. Jason: Yeah, if you find somebody that has a growth mindset. Not everybody wants to grow. There are certain personality types that love growth, they love learning. On DISC they would have a high theoretical score typically, for example, on the Tony Robbins DISC profile that we have mentioned. But if they love learning, they have a growth mindset, and that’s a priority in their life is personal development, then you got a feedback. You feed them that and you have a team member that, just like fine wine, accrues value over time. Melissa: [...] I want to go back, though, because it’s not without mistakes when you hire someone that doesn’t like the business. I think oftentimes with property managers and our groups and our friends come to me and they ask questions. I think some of the hardest thing we had was letting go. We hire someone that doesn’t fit in the team, doesn’t fit in our culture, and we hang on. I think [...] over the years. It took me a while to get there. But I can tell you that if you’re mostly have a 30-day, a 60-day, maybe a 90-day introductory period, if it’s not working in that first month, it doesn’t usually change. So, if I [...] in the States because I’m nice and I’m a fixer, then I hang on. [...] wait too long. Again, if you’re going through and adding to your team, you need to really make sure that you’re checking in. I want to give you a tip because I’m talking about that. I love to share. Jason: Yeah. Melissa: In the first 90 days of a new team member come in to work at Prandi Property Management, we do what’s called EOD, an end of the day report. They actually write down things they learned, the challenges they found that day, and just some sharing. At the end of that, they rate their day a one, a two, or a three—there could be 2.5—based on what they feel their workload, three being, “I can’t handle any more and I’m full.” I have a new employee coming on and she’s been with me, let’s say, 20 days, and she gave me a 1–1½, we’re not giving her enough work. If you’re going to bring somebody new onto your team, again I don’t have to check on them, I don’t have to call on her, I don’t have to sit with her, somebody else is handling all the training, but as the owner, the CEO, and the visionary, I need to know how I’m doing with the team’s giving her information and what she needs from me to make her the best Prandi team member. Jason: You mentioned a couple of things that I think are really important to point out. One, you mentioned that by not just having your office separate or segregated but also being able to work from home and working from home. I run a virtual team and a virtual company. Nobody can touch me and I’ve always had that advantage that there is a physical disconnect. I will probably go on saying that if my assistant could walk in every 10 minutes and say, “Hey, what should I be doing now?” I would go nuts, right? Having that, that’s another option for those that are listening, there is a trend with some people that they’re moving towards more virtual teams and digital offices and that can also create that disconnect. Melissa: I want to ask you a question so I can also [...] and teach the audience. How do you communicate best with the person since you are virtual, and we all love the virtual part of it, how are you best communicating with your team member that’s even your assistant? What’s the best way you all communicate? Jason: Our main modes of communication, we use Basecamp as a communication platform. What that allows us to do is to post messages, to think about things, to get clarity and put it, and then we allow team members to respond to those, rather than throwing it all out real-time in a meeting where everybody has to react, because I find the responses are big-time wasters and it’s not as helpful. We usually post memos or post a to-do and then people that are need to be looped in will be looped in and can comment on that. That keeps things really quiet and makes people think. It creates a very calm workplace. That’s our foundational mode of communication. For quicker communication, we use the app Voxer and that is a walkie-talkie app. I don’t like typing and texting all the time. It takes too long. I’m quick. I want to send a voice message so I hold down a button on the app and I say, “Hey, Adam. Can you check on this client? They have mentioned this and do this and blah-blah-blah.” And then he’ll take care of it. The cool thing about Voxer is if you’re really impatient as an entrepreneur, if you listen to the messages, if you’re in the chat with somebody, the messages are real time. But if you’re not, it works like voice messages, like voicemail. And you can play them at high speed so you can speed up if they’re already done talking and the recording’s there, then you can play it at high speed. So, I’m listening to chipmunks all day long, telling me what needs to happen. There’s a lot of communication even through Voxer or a situation like that that I just need the details, so I can just listen really quickly and we can consume information cognitively and auditory-wise much faster than we can speak it. We can usually do it at almost twice the pace very easily. Melissa: It brings another point of communication. A good team member and a good team lead [...]. People need to know you’re supporting them. That’s what I [...]. But I was thinking about it, we did a lot of team-building last year. We hired [...] consultants to come in, and one thing I’ve learned about myself was delivery of email. Don’t stand [...] similar. Send [...] information and what the fact is, what the need is, send it to me in a delivery form. If you have team members and that you’re on a call today and the podcast, I think it’s really important to know your style, what you want. They also said that I was sending the exact [...] that said, “Well, I send it after the company email and no one responds,” and they said, “Send me a few of those.” The guy came back and said, “You’re not asking for anything. You’re sending information but you’re not asking.” “Okay, I need this back but [...]” It’s not that we do a campaign to get you. This is where’s the call-to-action. [...] entrepreneur and you’re on the show today and you want to learn. Ask somebody from the outside to come in and analyze your style and your teams and they’ll help give you tools. I’ve done that. I’m always learning. Jason: One of the hacks that I learned when I worked at Hewlett-Packard is that we were told to have certain subject lines if we were sending emails. If we needed some sort of response, you always had to say, “ACTION REQ’D:” at the beginning of the subject line in all caps. So, we would do ACTION REQ’D: if there’s an action required, or FYI was for your information only, you don’t need to do anything on it. So, there was kind of this code with subject lines. Now, I’m beyond email. I don’t even look at my email. If anybody emails me, I’m not going to probably see it. My assistant handles all of that for me because I don’t like email. I don’t want to communicate through email. So, I set up a system in which somebody else can go with that and she just tells me the four or five emails I need to deal with and the other 100 or 200 I get a day are [...] somebody else. Melissa: She’s a very good communicator and she is very responsive. If she doesn’t get a response, she page me again, making sure and not [...] very positive way. She’s patient, when I’m really busy, I’ll be a couple of days [...] she’s right back checking in with me. You’ve got someone watching your back and helping you grow, I’m sure. Jason: Oh yeah. It’s a huge help and that’s the thing is with hiring, I think one of the big constraints of those with entrepreneurs is this myth that if I have somebody else do it, it won’t be done as well. It’s such an egotistical thing that people need to get over. This belief that nobody will be as good as me. As long as somebody believes that, it’s true. They make it true and they create a situation which they’ll never be able to offload things. But I can speak with total confidence that every single person on my team is better at what they do than myself. They’re all better at what they do. India, way better at email than me. I don’t want to deal with email. I’m short with emails, I don’t pay attention, I miss things. Email’s not my thing. Melissa: [...] going back to the strength of the team and knowing your strength as the owner/CEO of your company and knowing my strength. You put me in a room with 200 people, you put me in a room with 1000 people, I try to meet every one of them. I know that my strength in the world growing my business, is to be the face of the business, to be in the field. I was in a class this morning. I’ve been taking classes at the local university on hiring teams and developing teams. Yesterday, I took a great workshop at Dominican University from a [...] a little bit about,job descriptions, position statements, and what’s the end results. They really teach us to have things in place and what our expectation is. So I’m always taking courses to try and figure out how can I be better at things. I’m never going to be the techie person that knows how to set everything up. I hand it to my son. I don’t have to be, right? He’s 31 years old. I can hand it to Matt and say, “Matt, I don’t understand this. My phone is doing something. Here, can you just fix it?” I can hand it to Christine and she’s going to help me. So just not trying to waste time, I [...] come at me. And don’t forget, part of [...] today is also life balance. Being able to turn it off, take care of ourselves because we have a good team. Jason: I think the more that an entrepreneur focuses on self-care, the more they have to give to their team and the lower the pressure noises. One of things I’ve noticed with entrepreneurs is that when our pressure noise gets high—it can be high in property management or in any business, but we deal with a lot as business owners—all of the worst attributes you share about business owners come out. People could perceive us as controlling or angry or frustrated because we get into this preloaded state where we’re in a stress response. If you lower the pressure noise for an entrepreneur, our genius comes out. Our best attributes come out. The visionary comes out. We’re able to see the future. We’re able to make decisions about things. If an entrepreneur does not have the team that they are in love with right now, then they’re not the person yet that should be running it. That’s the sad truth. They haven’t become that person yet, that can have a team, that instead of them having feeling like they are trying to control, it’s instead a team that they’re able to just inspire. Whenever we fail to inspire, we always control and we get into that stressful place where we’re trying to manipulate and get our team to do stuff and we’re trying to force KPIs down their throat or trying to push them to do things because we feel like, “Why can’t me team just do what I need them to do?” We shift into a calm space of, “What does my team need from me in order to be as successful as possible so they can keep helping me the way that they’ve been helping me?” and that’s a much more comfortable place to be. It’s a calm, quiet workplace. Melissa: I actually have never been accused of… I don’t yell, I’m a very calm-natured person, I deal with and respect boundaries, so I’m very good about how would that person feel if they were in my seat, how are they want to be treated. I do that a lot. I know their personal. Something’s going on. You want to know if something’s going on, it’s not always about business. Those people that have lives [...] out the door. So, I’m really in-tune with that. I called someone in yesterday and said, “Look, I can tell something’s going on. You just not coming work with that bright smile. What can I do to help?” So, even though I’m not downstairs, still sense the energy and pay really good attention. I try to make sure they know that I really care and I do care. The other thing is really working with an outside business consultant. Don’t get stuck. Have somebody come in and help build your team by doing team building. We had a lot of fun doing team building last year at the end of the year in October. Last year in October, we went out and went off site, we prepared everything so we can all leave, and we had one person [...] kind of helped out while we work on all day. We worked on what I think the success in my company is very strongly if we’re not communicating with each other, and we’re not respecting, getting along, and taking our own blinders off from our busy property management day, then the outside world is getting that same message. So, if I’m not really happy doing my job as a property manager and I’m not having a good day because my team members not [...] and the other team members not doing something, that equals out to the public and that’s when one of those one-star reviews come in. You can ask the team to let them know they’re supportive with each other, give them the tools, working with that, and let them get to know each other and [...] each other, that goes out to customer service. Jason: There’s this great book by a gentleman. I believe his name is Steve Sims and the book’s called Bluefishing. He basically talks about how his whole goal with his team members or even with clients that he wants to work with is they have to pass the chug test. It’s like, “Would I want to have a beer with this person?” and it’s just a simple gut check to say, “Do I like this person? Do I enjoy being around this person? Does this person makes me feel safe? Do I feel comfortable?” because if anybody on your team doesn’t make you feel comfortable and you’re always worried about them or you’re concerned about them or there’s some sort of weird disconnect in rapport between the two of you, they’re adding to you pressure and noise. I think that it is important to like your team, to actually like them. Melissa: [...] company. Sometimes when there’s one person who’s not [...] team, they go and they grab other people. Jason: Oh yeah, they’re a cancer. Melissa: You have to be really careful with that. But I really [...] week after our last retreat work and that was they wanted. For somebody [...] it’s not the most positive [...], so we started a Positively Prandi board. We got that big board [...] coffee and our tea is, and people are [...], “Congratulations on your three-year anniversary.” We write riddles. [...] while the sun is shining now, how happy we are today. And that doesn’t cost money. It’s just a little more positivity and always share a five-star review. We always celebrate a good review, and if it’s not [...] we could get there. That’s another [...] about growing your business is really you have to work on your teams, inside the walls of your team before you can really start wanting to grow and double or triple in size. Jason: You have mentioned early on that you make sure you have this morning connection with your team. My team’s virtual and we’ve done the same thing. I felt like it’s absolutely critical that you get FaceTime with your entire team. Those that have virtual teams that are listening, or virtual team members, one of the things that we do at DoorGrow is we do a morning huddle. It’s 15 minutes, we set it at a weird hour so that people know that time matters. We set it at a weird time, like it’s not at a half-hour mark or hour mark and people have to show up for that. It’s 15 minutes, we just share stats openly in the company, here’s how much revenue we’ve made so far this month, here’s how many people on our Facebook group, all that different stats that matter, and then we do ‘caught being awesome,’ when we say, “Anybody catch anybody being awesome in the last day?” Sometimes it’s a little awkward if it’s a small huddle and not everybody showed up and people are like [...]. But I always comes up with somebody that we can point out or highlight somebody. Melissa: [...] for us at Prandi Property Management, I have a weekly team meeting. I get copies of the notes so I can look at what’s going on with the teams, and the at the very bottom it says, “Did you write a thank you note to them?” because still old-fashioned handwritten thank you notes go a long way. We have Prandi custom beautiful notes cards, it works in all industries, and who did you thank today? It’s similar to what you’re saying because a team, I like that. I want to go back and say that, “Who did you catch being awesome today?” That’s kind of we’re doing to Positively Prandi board, but in this case, acknowledging their credibility at the end of it, the weekly team meeting notes [...] really good [...] everybody’s formats is the same, so we’re looking at the same numbers, same things, and when it says, “Oh, that’s so nice,” they wrote the gardener a thank you note. They wrote the plumber a thank you note. They wrote [...] a thank you note for the inconvenience. We get a bunch of $5 Starbucks cards, we [...] and say, “Have a cup of coffee on us. Cheers to you.” Just saying thank you is really nice. Jason: I love it. In our huddle, at the very end we just go around and ask each person, “Are you stuck on anything? Really simple, is there anything you’re stuck on?” and there’s always somebody that’s stuck. When we didn’t used to do that and we would just have a weekly meeting or just throughout the day, it makes me wonder what were they doing when they were stuck all of these previous times because there’s always somebody stuck on something. “Oh yeah, this client had this question. I didn’t know how to deal with this, or this.” We can tackle those things really quickly and if it’s something that takes a lot of time, we’ll just say, “All right. Let’s schedule a meeting for that.” But we just tackle that in our huddle so everybody feels unstuck, which is also helpful. Melissa: It’s not just stuck. I myself have made mistakes in this business, that we have aha moments as well. I can say, “Well, is there anything you want to share that you have an aha moment that you might teach us how to do our job better?” [...] offers I do like I’ll start an example. I’ll say, “Matt, my son, now is the Business Development Manager, who is out there in the field. Sometimes we get three, four, five, six clients a day,” who knows how many are coming. They’re coming fast and furious because we’ve been there a long time. He’ll say, “Hey, can you take care of this duplex? The co-owner’s called in and they really wanted a response today, but I got so many things on my plate. Can you handle that?” which is okay because I know how to do it. Only, he gave it to me at 10 in the morning and I didn’t make that connection with that client until two in the afternoon and it was too late. He had already hired someone. I can use that as my team example as my aha moment. What I should have done the moment he gave it to me, I should have stopped, I should have looked at what is it important, not checking my Facebook, my email and everything else. I should have made that a priority. Because I didn’t, he signed up with another management company. I want to share that as the owner because what will happen next time is I’ll make it a priority. I try to [...] those aha moments and life lessons. What can we do, how can we have done it differently, and we had different results, because we can all [...]. Jason: We do a weekly team meeting. In our weekly team meeting, we share wins from the previous week, personal or business. That gives the team members opportunity each Monday to share, “What were your wins for last week?” so that we can point her out. As entrepreneurs, a lot of us are economically driven, so if we take a DISC profile and turn on all the insight, we’ll see that we have a pretty high economic score typically. The mistake we make is that we assume everybody else likes money as much as us. Look at that economic score in your team members, those that are listening, if the economic score is high, bonuses work great for them. If the economic score is low, they want recognition. Most of my team members, that’s all of my team members with the exception of people that are involved in sales, usually their economic score is low, which means they want recognition. So, creating opportunities in these meetings where they get to show what they’ve done the previous week, where they get to show that they’ve had wins and we look through our objectives for the week, and they get to say, “Yes, I got these all done,” this is an opportunity for them to feel recognized by the whole team. I find that that increases motivation and accountability, significantly. Melissa: And I think it’s interesting because you and I didn’t rehearse this and we didn’t talk about what was most important, but there’s a lot of similarities in what we’re doing as entrepreneurs, owners, and visionaries. I think that’s really important for the audience to hear that some of these things that we’re talking about are simple, and it can be done by anybody. Jason: What I’ve noticed in business and life is I’m just a student and a fan of what works. That’s just what I get excited about. And really, every system, all the different coaches and mentors I’ve worked with, they so many similarities because truth and/or reality is what works and everything gravitates towards that. You’ve been in business for 37 years. You’re going to have figured out a lot of things that don’t work. What that leaves less on the table is a lot of knowledge about what works. I think also I’m very willing to fail. I’ve had lots and lots of failures. I think DoorGrow’s been built on thousands of failures and that’s how we learned. I think that goes also to my team because I’ve had so many failures. I think also I’m very conscious of the fact that my team needs to be allowed to screw up and fail. They need to feel safe failing. If they don’t feel safe failing, then they’ll never be able to learn. Melissa: Or they could hide it. We don’t want them to hide it. Jason: Exactly. They become hiders. They start hiding stuff from you the first time they screw something up and they feel reprimanded or shamed or put down, they’re going to hide that from you forever. They’re going to hide everything in the future and then having team of hiders is absolutely catastrophic to the growth of the company. Melissa: That’s true. I think that always attending workshops and now we have things online, you talk about being able to teach people like you’re doing right now, that is great. I think just because you have 10 in the business or 20 years or in my case, you never stop learning. And I think it’s really important for people to use their resources. I love to read. People can share books. They can go on your website and your Facebook page, and share a good book, and share stuff they’re learning. I find that people soak it up. I love to speak and teach. I love to walk in a room and share my knowledge. There’s not one person I’ve ever said, “No, I absolutely will not share that with you.” I usually, “No problem. You want that form, let me send it to you.” You’re going to laugh, I taught a class in Palm Springs. I’m not paperless and I’m proud of it, because I’m not and people love it. They’re going to be people that still touch things like I do. Let’s give them [...] and eventually that does change. My son doesn’t print [...] anything, but I do. So, we have to have a diversity and we have to be able to give people the tools they need to be the best whatever the way it is in the year 2019 or the way we used to do it. When I first got in business, the screen was literally the size of a small [...]. We didn’t have cell phones. Technology is good. I think I’ve been able to travel, I’ve been able to leave my business. Now, I check my email but I schedule my time. I’m going to the beach because I’m sitting on a beach in Hawaii. I’ll check my information but I don’t check it like I do when I’m sitting on my desk working. Time management it important. I allow myself a lot of time because even last week, I was running hard. I was struggling early in the morning, facing the company, lots of meetings, going to Rotary, going to community events, starting the morning with my classes over at the university or whatever I’m doing, and I finish at nine o’clock at night. So, I just take it to Matt because I was going the State of the City Dinner with the Chamber of Commerce. By Thursday last week, I hit a wall and I was tired. So you have to find the balance. Everybody, not just the entrepreneur or owner, of how you’re doing with your whole life balance because you have to keep yourself well in order to be a good leader. Jason: Absolutely. My recently added for our C hackers, a health secrets training, simply because I found that health is the number one thing that impacts the productivity. An excuse that we get from entrepreneurs a lot was, “Oh, I just don’t have time.” They have almost doubled the amount of time if they’re taking care of themselves properly. Their brain is just that much more effective. Melissa: If you go to yoga for an hour, you’re not on your phone, you’re not on your email. Jason: You’re right. You’re disconnected. Melissa: You [...] can read the phone in your car. You just take your phone if you’re going out in an easy hike, if you’re going distance in that thing, but to be able to go and listen to music, too, on [...], people say sound and meditation. If you can do music meditation and it works really well. I just spent some time with a good friend in [...] and we had so much fun playing our playlist and singing the songs, and then how did we remember the words to this song? But your mind is doing so much. What music does is it kind of steals your heart and soul. If you ever are going through something, get yourself to music and let the music take you to a different [...] and property management. That happens a lot. I always tell my staff, “Get out from your desk, move or walk around the block, change your environment. Grab your iPhone, put on a song and walk around the block singing the words. It changes your whole intake of how you’re going to treat the next customer or the next co-worker. Jason: I love it. Let’s connect this to science and here is why that stuff is so effective. I’m a huge audiophile, I love music, I had a band in college, I bought [...] songs. I love music, but when you play instruments, when you play music—there’s videos on this—your entire brain lights up. Both sides of the brain are like fireworks when you’re playing an instrument or really engaged in music. When you connect your right and left hemispheres in your brain, when those sides of your brain are both firing, it significantly lower stress. In fact, I went and did EMDR therapy on the recommendation of my business coach, for a year. EMDR therapy is an eye movement therapy. The idea behind it is they use it to eliminate PTSD in soldiers and stuff like this. As entrepreneurs, my coach is saying, “You have some PTSD, Jason. Let’s be honest. You guys deal with a lot of stress. You’ve got some of this. Go get an EMDR therapy and talk about you assistant, they quit or talk about this, get this stuff taken cared of. What is cool is that EMDR therapy is based on the idea that there is bilateral stimulation, so stimulating both sides of the brain back and forth while tuned in to an idea that causes stress or PTSD or some sort of issue. I’m not making light, by the way, of those who have legit PTSD, but the stress that we have as entrepreneurs, it will tone that down and it kills that. It helps you see it with a fresh perspective and helps correct and eliminate that emotional stress response. Here’s what’s magical about walking. Walking is bilateral stimulation. Exercising increases the stress response in the body. It just does. That’s part of exercise. But walking oxygenates the body but does not increase the stress response. It actually lowers it because it’s causing bilateral stimulation. Left, right, your body keeps moving, and each step causes bilateral stimulation. So, if you have anxiety, if you have a stressful call or whatever, going for a walk until that goes down is really magical and amazing. So I go for a walk in the evenings if I had a stressful day. I start my day usually a lot of times with a walk, making sure that I walk around. It help digestion, it seriously helps cognitive function by getting your brain to lower its stress response. It’s like a serious hack and walking sounds so simple. Music more than any other thing can directly impact emotions. That’s why in movies, they’ll manipulate your emotions using the score of the movie because it makes you feel what’s going on. So, if you want to change your feeling, you can use music because different songs can help you lean into sorrow if you need to feel that sorrow, music can help you lean into positivity or shift out of... Melissa: Brings back memories. But [...], somebody having a bad day because in property management we done have all positive days. And sometimes, especially because where we are now in Northern California, we had a lot of rain. [...] when we were getting ready to set up, it’s not really our friend. Property management, rain, leaks, putting people up at hotels, you’ve got a lot coming at you and nobody wants to be displaced, especially if it’s the holiday season, we have bad weather and it rains then. So, I [...] “Okay, what have you done for a time out? What are you doing? Because you need to go have a time out. Just go.” We do fun Fridays, ice cream socials, aloha Fridays because we are actually [...] together in an office [...] downstairs, so we do see each other everyday. I may not but the staff works together [...] and works in an office. Having seen this which Christine’s been really good about it. Matt, last Friday [...] his dog is a new rescue. She’s adorable. Her name’s Mia and she’s a very [...]. She’s a very good dog and he said, “Hey, do you mind if I bring her out in the open? I don’t have any appointments.” People actually brought some really [...] good, fun Friday and made them feel really good by having a dog there. Who knew? Jason: Almost like one of those service animals. Melissa: Yeah. I was waiting for his to say, “Mom, I can bring the dog to work because this is a service animal.” I said it was okay. Jason: Yeah. I love the idea. Walk and talk is my own personal therapy. If I have something I need to talk through, I talk to somebody about it while I’m walking. I’ll just walk around. It’s magic. These are all really cool ideas. Melissa, it sounds like you have a phenomenal team. You’ve got a wealth of knowledge. For those that are listening, that maybe are struggling to achieve their growth, they’re really stuck in a rut, they’re having a difficult time maybe with their team, they’re just having trouble seeing over the weeds, so to speak, what sort of advice would you give them, maybe a first step to take, some step towards all the [...] Melissa: I would say don’t be afraid to [...]. Pick up the phone and call another property manager. Call you, check-in with you. People forget the touch of the voice, too, and someone knowing. Most people have been through the same thing. When you [...] the NARPM family or you or your users together share one thing that’s going on, it’s amazing when I see the post that goes on in your Facebook page and the solutions people are willing to offer. But sometimes picking up the phone and saying, “Look, I’m having a really hard time with this. I have a client doing it.” I’ll tell you to fire them. But if you have [...] a really hard time, then maybe you just need to [...] another professional. NARPM has over 5000 members. Don’t think you’re going to take the world on your own. If you’re going to grow, you have to be willing to change, to be willing to have a mentor, somebody you can lean on. You got to use the research that you’re offering as a national vendor and the research that you’re offering, we have to use those resources so that we can actually learn to grow because you’re going to give us tips from the outside of property management looking in at what we’re doing. You’re already doing that just sharing with me. So, if you’re willing to make the change and to reach out for growth ideas and ask how to implement because I’ve already done it. I’m willing to share. Why reinvent the wheel? Jason: I love it. You mentioned be willing to change, find mentors, reach out and get a mentor, reach out to other property managers. I think the crux of all these things, kind of energetically that you’re talking about here, underneath all of this, I think a property manager or anyone listening to the show, they need to recognize that the power being able to do these things come from vulnerability. It takes a certain amount of vulnerability as an entrepreneur to say, “I have a problem and I need support.” Whether you are reaching out to a mentor, it takes humility or vulnerability in order to be willing to go out and learn more like you’ve talked about. I think sometimes we want to put on this facade or we think we need to be the one that we’re always okay. I think it’s okay to not be okay. I think there’s power in that and I think there’s connection in that if we’re willing to be vulnerable, because I don’t have all good days. I have sent messages to my business coach or my mentors and saying, “Hey, I’m really struggling. This is hard for me dealing with this.” Sometimes, it’s all we need is just to be able to tell somebody that and acknowledge and be vulnerable, but I think when we’re vulnerable with others. Those that are inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group, I encourage you to be willing. Lots of people have been willing to share vulnerably like, “Hey, I’m dealing with the situation. I’m in over my head,” or, “I don’t know what to do with this,” or, “I’m stressed out and it’s been a really a rough day. What do you guys do or recommend?” or, “Could somebody talk to me on the phone today?” I think there are so many people that because the way we get momentum as entrepreneurs, the way we get fulfilled, is by giving it to others. Melissa: Helping others. That’s right. I was national president of NARPM. My team was sharing a vision and I’m still sharing a vision. Our visions can open up a lot of doors and windows for a lot [...]. Jason: There’s nothing that’s been more powerful for me when I’m having a rough time in business or as an entrepreneur or in life than to reach out and be able to help or support a client or help somebody else. I look for those opportunities when I’m stressed [...] somebody an opportunity to support you because you’re helping them by being vulnerable and allowing them to do that. Melissa: That works with our staff, our team members, to reach out and say, “Okay, I’m actually having a really hard time. I’m overwhelmed, I’m tired, I’m going to take [...] refill my bucket up. [...] keep that to your team. They’re only human, they understand. Jason: Absolutely. That’s the entire team’s job. My team’s job is to lower my pressure and noise. That is their whole purpose for having a job. But they can’t do that unless I’m honest. Melissa: Yeah and it’s working well. Jason: Yeah, it does. It works really well. The bigger my team gets, the bigger my company gets, the easier my life gets. I know that sounds backwards for a lot of people, especially those in the 200–400 doors sand trap because as they’re approaching the 400–500 units, their life gets crazy and hectic and it’s probably because they’ve built the team the wrong way. They built the system in which it’s transactional leadership and they’re throwing tasks at people. Everyone has to come to them for feedback instead of giving them objectives and trusting them. It’s something that takes work to shift out of. Melissa: It goes back to where we started [...]. The key to success [...] Jason: Full circle. Get out of the way. Sometimes we can’t see it. As entrepreneurs, I think no matter how evolved we are or how effective we are or how much coaching we’ve had, we always have our own blind spots and we always need that outside perspective. I need it all the time and your team can provide some of that if you ask them for honest feedback. I ask my team all the time like, “Hey, I’m thinking of sending this email out to all our clients,” and my writer, Adam, who’s very diplomatic, will say, “Let we reword that for you.” Melissa: That’s a good point. [...] I do that, too. If I’m about to send an email, or I end up firing a client or put them on a ‘this isn’t working,’ someone else on your team to say, “How does it sound as if you’re just receiving it?” That’s it. That’s a good point, too. Rely on that for that. Jason: This has been an awesome conversation. I’m sure we could talk for hours. It’s just really fun to connect with you. I appreciate you coming on the show. What takeaway do you want to leave people with and how can they get in touch with you if you like them to do that? Melissa: I would say to rely on the vendors yourself. You light up when we started the very beginning of our just getting ready for the podcast. When you started getting ready to do this, to share with your listeners, you light up. I think we need to rely on our resource with you and what you can bring to us property managers. I think that the other takeaway would be to be really in-tune with ourselves to know when we’ve had enough to take that break, and then to really take a hard look and maybe today or tomorrow, go down and really be grateful, and come within gratitude to thank the people we work with everyday. Together, I would say we can make a difference. So, keep that attitude and really respect for your team, the clients, the people you work around. Jason: Love it. How can people find out more about Melissa Prandi or get in touch? Melissa: My email probably is best. I am an emailer. It’s [email protected]. I’m great with [...] resources, I’ve written two books, and I love to share ideas. Let’s just keep going. Let’s keep growing and making our industry bigger, better, and more respected as we all become better at property management. Jason: Absolutely. I fully believe in the philosophy of the I mindset that the industry’s number one challenge right now is not your competition. It’s awareness. The industry’s second number one challenge is just perception of the industry as a whole. By helping your local competitors level up, you’re helping yourself. You’re helping the whole industry. Melissa: Raising the bar up to what one’s expecting the quality of what we’re providing out there, people on rental property. Jason: Absolutely and good property management can change the world. You guys get to have such a massive ripple effect. You’re impacting hundreds of thousands of tenants, homeowners and their families, and that ripple effect keeps going and that’s big. Melissa: I’ve seen how much that actually NARPM complement people, how much we give back into our community because we do that every year at charity. We’re giving back in more ways than just that. Jason: Absolutely. The ripple effect is big and I’m grateful that really awesome property managers like yourself allow me the opportunity to be part of that. That’s inspiring and exciting for me. All right, Melissa. It’s been great having you on the show and we’ll have to have you back soon. Melissa: Absolutely. See you in NAPA, the [...] NARPM conference [...]. Jason: We’ll see you in NAPA. All right. Melissa: See you soon. Thank you. Jason: Okay. Bye-bye. All right that was a phenomenal interview. Really fun to talk about that stuff, all things I’m very passionate about and Melissa is obviously very passionate about as well. If this episode was interesting or useful to you, please give us a feedback in iTunes if you’re listening there. We would love if you like and subscribe to our channel on YouTube. That would be awesome if you’re watching us there. If you’re seeing this on Facebook, then share it. We appreciate you. Make sure you get inside of our awesome community for property management entrepreneurs, which is the DoorGrow Club. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com. By joining, we’re going to give you some free takeaways including The Fee Bible, a list of good vendors you should be using, that are the best in the industry, that get the best feedback in our group, and we’re going to give you some other free gifts if you provide your email when you sign up for that group. Make sure you get inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group. At some point, you may want to reach out to our team and talk to us or myself about growing your business. If you’re feeling stagnant or stuck, or you feel like you could use some additional support, that’s where we do at DoorGrow. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Delegating work, tracking progress, and managing issues often leads to frustration. So, businesses buy workflow software with all the bells and whistles; only to realize that it’s too cumbersome and confusing. Today, I am talking with Vinay Patankar of Process Street. After experiencing similar pain with software, he decided to create his own simple way to manage recurring workflows for teams. You’ll Learn... [02:40] Why isn't there software that can do these tasks while I sleep? [04:57] Philosophy behind process development and problem with most products - the people who built and designed them. [05:45] First-generation Software: The experience on paper is not necessarily the best experience on a computer. [06:15] Can my grandmother figure this out? Create easy and intuitive software that anyone can use without any kind of context or previous knowledge. [08:05] Process Street is not just a process documentation platform, but a superpower checklist for accountability. [11:17] Rules around Tasks: Customize checklist based on variables or conditions. [12:27] Create automations to do fast integrations with other systems. [15:50] Document processes to do it right, the first time; but not slow you down. [17:23] Process breaks down and people start doing it their way, but don’t document or update their processes. [19:50] Track Changes: Capturing every change made to a process on the backend. [21:22] Process Street gets processes done faster and more accurately. [24:20] Everything becomes better; creates momentum, saves time, improves efficiency. [25:35] Process Street’s Support Channels: General, sales, and engineering. [26:47] Catch-22: Struggling to manage team, keep things organized, maintain culture, document processes, and systemize business to grow and move forward. [28:24] Pre-made Process Templates: Tenant move in and move out, tenant screening, property inspection, and landlords. [29:09] What's your process? Share, copy, paste, and optimize processes. [30:25] Process Street down the road: Future features to include role-based assignments, task permissions, and mobile app. Tweetables User experience and ease should always be at the top of the list with software. Once you’ve got that checklist, you can superpower it. What's your process? Share, copy, paste, and optimize processes. Resources Process Street Microsoft SharePoint SAP Workflow Oracle Fusion Zapier Basecamp AppFolio Salesforce Typeform Gravity Forms Podio DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today's very special guest, super excited about, head of a really cool software platform, Vinay Patankar. Welcome to the show. He is here representing Process Street. Vinay: Thank you, Jason. I'm excited to be here. Hey, everyone. Jason: Vinay, give everybody a little bit of background. How did Process Street come about? Let's start with you. What's your background in all of these? Vinay: Sure. My background is I've done a few things. I'm from Australia originally. I kind of worked in tech, worked in finance, work as a recruiter, started a couple of companies, and ended up on running a company that was a marketing agency. We're doing lead generation for consumer finance. Basically, driving leads for credit cards for Citigroup, and insurance for Geico and things like that. We basically had a very repetitive process where we were launching new campaigns on different ad networks. I'm running a lot of different tests, so maybe we're watching 20 or 30 different tests every day. At this point in time, we're working a lot with the new ad networks where maybe they hadn't released their API yet or essentially there wasn't much automation possible. A lot of that was being done manually. I had a team in India that was helping managing one of those campaigns. I basically had a lot of issues tracking all of that–delegating work, tracking that it was done, making sure that it was done correctly, getting visibility over the progress of all these tasks, which meant that I was staying up until 6:00 o'clock in the morning sometimes kind of working with my team in India and I got really frustrated. I was like, "Why isn't there a software that can just do these for me while I sleep?" That was the original pain that I was feeling. I knew that there were workflow products in the enterprise. I'd work with tools like Microsoft SharePoint, SAP Workflow, [...], and these very multi-million-dollar expensive products. I knew that they existed, and I understood, "Oh, yeah." You define a workflow then it's in a very controlled set of tracks. People just kind of follow it and execute it. This is how a lot of the really big businesses that have to manage thousands or tens of thousands of people like manage their processes. I'm like, "Why isn't there a tool that does this that is as easy to use as Gmail." That was kind of the original spark. I just wanted it for my own team to use. We built it as an internal tool, initially, and got my own company on it. Then, started showing it to people and it was like, "It's so cool." We kind of eventually spun that as a product and that was the beginning. Essentially, just scratching my own itch. Jason: You still have the agency stuff? Vinay: No. That's long gone. Jason: Okay. Great. Originally, this was built to fill a real need in a real-world situation and a real-world scenario which a lot of times the challenge with software is that it's not. It's built on some theory or idea by some nerd. When it comes to practical reality, it's got too many clicks. It's not super user-friendly. It becomes really cumbersome and confusing, but it does everything. It's got all these features and bells and whistles. In developing this, what's the philosophy behind the process and how do you balance that? Vinay: For sure. Awesome question. The kind of thing that you just said is exactly the problem with most of the incumbent products in our space. The products I've mentioned before like SharePoint and SAP Workflow and this and that, that's the exact problem. They were designed by business process analysts, by Six Sigma specialists, that come from the process engineering department in IBM or something. I've gone to business school, I've done MBAs, have a very specialized understanding of how business processes were supposed to work, understand how design a flow diagrams, and essentially, took what they learned in the university and put it on a computer. It's like took what they've drawn in a piece of paper and put it on a computer. It's interesting. That's actually how a lot of first-generation software was built. It’s like, "Let's take this thing we do offline and let's put it on a computer." The experience that you get on the paper is not necessarily the best experience that you have on a computer. You actually see that in a lot of products. The first-generation products were designed that way. My approach to it was user centric or basically, user first. The idea was we're not selling to people who have degrees and business information systems. We're selling to people that run property management companies or people that run a local restaurant, some of them runs a hotel, some of them runs a HR team or sales team or something. It's not necessarily people that have their specialize process department or enterprise. Our approach was what is going to be the easiest piece of software that we can make that people who have no education, no understanding, don't know what the processes is, don't know what the workflow is, never done any of that before in their life, or ever read anything about it, that they're going to be able to intuitively understand, pickup, and just use without requiring any kind of context or previous knowledge. That's the approach that we've been taking which is really this, "Can my grandmother figure this out?" kind of approach. Jason: Yeah. I think when it comes to anything complicated maybe for an eight-year-old or for grandma to do it, then there's resistance no matter who is doing it. If you're a high-functioning, quick-thinking, entrepreneur or you have a team member that English is the second language and they're overseas, regardless, it lubricates the process to have that ease. User experience and ease should always be at the top of the list with software. It's my number one qualifier for looking software, "Will my team actually use it? Will it be easy for them? How quick they adapt it?" Because adaption for software is one of the biggest challenges getting a team to actually use it. Vinay: Absolutely, yeah. Jason: Maybe you could explain what Process Street is for those that are listening because it's not just a process documentation platform which is great and awesome. There are platforms that are just for process documentation that are out there. When some people use their Google Drive to document processes, they put them all in documents and they've got screenshots and just texts. It's beyond that. It's got this benefit of being a checklist where there's accountability, there's a record, and there's history of the people actually using the process. It also is this workflow tool that can be directly integrated with your external tools through Zapier, third party systems. It can capture data instead of just be something that somebody refers to and looks at. It really does a lot of things. How would you describe Process Street to those that are just not familiar with it? Vinay: Yeah. It's tricky. We're almost in a new category here. The easiest way I explain it to normal people that don't know anything about processes or workflow or stuff like that. It's that we’re a superpower checklist. You have a checklist. This is something that needs to get done. Some of that, we have a checklist we want to follow. In property management, you have a checklist for every time a tenant moves in or a tenant moves out. We have a checklist every time we sign up a new landlord. Essentially, these are all the things we have to do, and we want to make sure that we remember to do, or someone on our team remembers to do every time a tenant moves in, a tenant moves out. "Make sure you do a background check. Make sure you get the contract signed. Make sure they get the keys. Make sure that you inspect the property." And this and that, right? It sounds simple. It's a simple way of explaining it. But then once, you have that checklist and you can build a checklist really fast–as fast as you can, just typing out a list of stuff in excel, or doc, or whatever. But then once you’ve got that checklist, you can superpower it. This is where the superpower is coming. You can have each of those steps and you can say, "Make sure the tenants get their keys." Inside that, you can have instructions. You can have, "This is where the keys are located. The keys are numbered this way." Once you've given them the key, go into here, fill-up this form, and make sure you got the tenant to sign in this book that they've received the keys and take photo of the book or something. Again, in each of these tasks, I can add in instructions on how to do the tasks. As you've mentioned before, you can add in form fields to actually collect data along the way. If you have a step that's like, "Collect the tenant’s information." You can type in the field, what's the tenants name, what's their address, what's the address of the house, and things like that. You can catalogue all their information that kind of turns similar to submitting a form or filling up a spreadsheet where you get all of that data in a tabular form, you can use that in the future for automations as we talked about. You can control rules around the tasks. Now, I have a checklist inside each task. I have different steps. I can have content. I can have form fields inside those steps. Now, I can start to create rules around tasks. Now I can say that, if it's an apartment building, add these tasks for, "Have a building key." If it's a house, hide that task for, "give building key." I can customize this checklist based on variables or conditions that are happening in the scenario. For example, is it a house or is it an apartment? Is it in suburb A or suburb B? Maybe there's a different agent or something else that has to happen based on that scenario. I can add handoff. I can say, "Wait until John collects the keys and then assign Brandy to go and call the landlord or return the keys." I can handoff steps. I can say when somebody needs to do something kind of handoff. I can create automations and due dates. I can say, "This task is due two days after the keys are given." Or, "This task is due three days before the staging date." Or, "This task is due two days after the staging date." I can start to create all these automations and controls around how the tasks work when they're ordered, automating when they become due related to other various events, handing off between different people in the team and stuff like that. I can create lots of automations and other systems from that data as well. For example, if somebody sent you an email, that's like, "Oh, I'm interested in your property." You can have that trigger automatically run your checklist. Now, every time I add a tag on this email, it runs the checklist automatically and copies all the details of the email into this checklist so that when I’m running through it, I’d have it all day. If I change something in my CRM or in my rent management system, if a lease expiry comes up in rent manager, you can use that to trigger and automatically launch a checklist. You can then have data from your checklist pushing to other systems. If I know for example, the tenant’s name, I've collected their name and their email, and the house address, I can take that data and I can put it into hello sign and I can generate a contract that automatically gets sent out for signature to that client. Once the signature is signed, it can come back and notify [...] triggers is actually a new feature in Zapier they just released which is find and update checklist. But now you don’t even have to wait for that signature to come back and then pull back in the signed document, save it to the checklist, checkoff the task signed by the tenant and hand it off to somebody else in the team to do the next task. We start to do all sorts of fast integrations with other systems once you get all that set-up. Jason: Okay. I want to paint a picture for those listening. I use Process Street in my own business. I started using it because I'd seen a lot of property managers using it. A lot of property managers said, "Hey, this is really intuitive. It's very easy to use," so I started using it. What really pushed me over the edge is we used Basecamp internally as a communications system and platform which it is great at, but it really isn't good for repetitive processes. We have more process documentation scattered throughout several different Basecamp projects for different teams, indexed documents, we had some on Google Drive, and it just got really crazy. There wasn't a central repository to go to. Just changing that alone was a game changer for us. Having one place, "Oh, did you look in Process Street? It's in there. Everybody can go to that." What really pushed me over the edge though was I had spoken with a gentleman and I told you before this call, I remember his name, his name was Bob Abbott. Bob is a property manager. he was telling me how he runs his company. He's got his profit margin to 65% in his business by using Filipino labor and by using Process Street. He showed me how he uses it. We had some really cool conversations geeking out because we're both kind of nerdy. That's almost unheard of in the property management industry to create that sort of margin. It's very possible to do in property management because there's a lot of systemized things, there's a lot of repetitive things, and there's a lot of things where you need somebody manually to do stuff. You can give them the processes and the checklist to do it. One of the conversations we had which I think is an important balance to strike is, with my team, we want to document processes to the point where a beginner could do it the right way the first time. We also want to balance that with, we don't want it to slow them down once they know it. Just like driving a car. The very first time somebody drives a car, they're probably checking all their mirrors, adjusting their seat, and doing all this stuff. After they get used to that, they'll probably just hop in and drive. With us, with our team, we try to make our processes as few steps as possible, but as many as necessary to create that balance, so it doesn't get in the way when our experienced team members are trying to use it but to show record that they've done these tasks for this particular client or used this particular case or situation. What I've really noticed that’s brilliant is that just by having a process that’s actually used to do the process and your team is required to use the process to show record that they’ve done it, the process gets better overtime. What happens, I've noticed, in the business is I create a process document in the past, give it to a new team member, they would look at it and say, "Well, this is outdated." It always ends up being outdated because nobody's using it on a daily basis. Then, we have to fix it and adjust it, and then they learn how to use that. Once they get familiar with it, they never look at it anymore unless they forget something. What happens over time, the process breaks down. They'll start doing their own things. They start changing it. They figure out some innovations. They think innovations. Maybe it's worse, maybe it's better, but that isn't captured in the process. Then, if they quit or you lose them, our goal before they quit or leave, we've got them to update their processes because they weren't using it. There's this huge advantage, I've noticed, in just having the team use the actual process software that the processes in and going through each time. If there's a change that needs to be made, we can adjust it, they can adjust it, if I give them the permission to. We can improve it over time. Just the clarity in taking all of our processes in to where they're actually usable as a checklist is a huge step from having just the process you think is documented well enough to somebody actually being able to use it. It's a big leap and that leap has caused us to significantly change all of the processes that we brought over into it, so far. Vinay: That's awesome. What we find is that as you continue to iterate your processes over time, that's really when they become more valuable. I think that's normal for most systems. You can go look at the enterprise companies, their processes are some of their most valuable pieces of IP because they've been so refined over so many thousands of customers or years or whatever. They're now really, really valuable and they’re kind of like protected secrets for that organization. Some cool things you can do, for example, if you have 10 checklists running and you're onboarding 10 different landlords, or you’re moving in 10 different tenants, and you do want to make a change. One of your PMs comes back and says, "Hey, I noticed that this is incorrect," or "This needs to be clear if we do it this way." You could update the process and you can live pushout that update to all the 10 tenants. If you have 10 people in the field at the moment, even when we have no way of knowing, they can be in a car and by the time they get of their car, their house, and they open the process, it's got a new step in there. The steps change a little bit and now they'll just follow the adjusted step. You don’t need to run a training program, don't need to send out an email, it's just kind of like, "Oh, the process is updated. Let's do it." On the backend, it's actually not exposed right now but on the backend, we're actually tracking all these changes for you. Every time you're making a change to one of your processes, we're capturing those changes in the backends’ versions. We're working on dashboards that will let you see how the output of your process changes overtime as you iterate it. It's like, "Oh. It's taking us two weeks to onboard a landlord when we did version one of this. Now, it's a version 100. It's only taking us four days or something." You kind of see, as you continue to iterate your process over time, how they're improving or how they're affecting other metrics. That's pretty cool as well. One of the things we're really excited about, it's kind of a big part of the vision of the platform, is around what you said before where there are some processes where maybe you don't want to add extra work to somebody to their task. We definitely have a lot of processes like that. A good example is answering support tickets. We don't want somebody to run a checklist on every single support ticket that they're answering especially once they're in the roll after a while. They know how it works. But we do want them to do it for trainings. We want them to run that checklist for their reference or something as they're going through getting used to it. It's pretty important for us an our organization. We actually have everybody in the company do support when they come in. That's an example of what we just want people to run at the beginning. What we're really moving towards is we're trying to make our processes actually reduce the amount of time that it takes to get that process done. When you're using Process Street, it's actually less time to get that process done than if you were to not use the Process Street process. That's our ideal scenario. Not only is it faster for it to get done, but things got done more accurately; things got done in a higher detail way. A good example is we have a sales proposal processes where we send out a proposal for a price point for a set of users if we’re working on enterprise deal. For the rep, basically, what they have to do is they have to come in to their CRM, click a link in the CRM which launches a process, then they've got to fill in a few pieces of info. From that, it pools in a lot of information automatically from the client. All the client's details are filled out automatically. They don't have to do any of that. They've got to put a few things like how many users do they want, what's the price that we agreed upon, or do they want a one-year deal or a two-year deal, kind of things like that. They basically just punch in a few things in the process, really quickly, just takes 20 seconds. That then hands-off automatically to their manager who then looks at the proposal and approves it inside Process Street. Once that's approved, it creates a whole kind of proposal with all these multiple checkboxes and things that can get signed. It will probably take you 30 minutes to set up if you're going to go through the whole thing yourself. It goes back and it updates the CRM. It creates opportunities and changes the statuses, the confidence, it makes the proposal sent, and puts in links to the proposal, and updates all this information whether the proposal is sent out. That whole thing, for a rep to do that manually, to go customize a Word doc, [...], mapping all the fields, sent it out, go to the CRM, update all these different fields in the CRM, and follow up tasks and all this stuff, it takes them 30 minutes or an hour or something. With the Process Street process, they can do it in less than a minute. We're actually working on trying to build processes that actually significantly make you faster and more accurate to use the platform than without. Obviously, it can't happen for every kind of process. You can't completely automate going to a house and inspecting it. There’s a pretty manual aspect to that but for the ones that we can, that are very digital, we are trying to [...] as possible. Jason: Yeah. Sales people are notoriously known for not leaving good notes, not wanting to deal with software too much. Any burden you can take off their plate, software-wise, is a big win. You're saving money every single time. Vinay: For you though, as a business owner or as the team leader in sales, there's way more benefit than that. If you can shave off these minutes or hours off each of your reps like a week, it's just not a pure timesaving thing. They bill more so they would actually close more deals in that period of time. It creates more momentum for the whole team because the whole team bills more. The whole team saving time and building more which kind of creates this whole pause and momentum of like then you're able to hire better reps and you're more able to expand territories, this and that. Everything just becomes better. It's actually a pretty good lesson in most of your teams. If you can really get the operations piece tight; you can get your processes tight–your sales operations, your marketing operations, your support operations—it makes the whole team compounding much more efficient. It makes your whole organization much more attractive to other people because you don’t want to come in to a place that's a whole giant mess where they just going to have to be spending all their time copying and pasting stuff and dealing with spreadsheets. You'll be able to hire much more high-quality people. You'll be able to execute a much larger amounts of projects and whatnot. It’s just kind of all your infrastructures to sell it. Jason: Yeah. You've mentioned that you have everybody that come in and do support. Do you have your developers do support on a regular basis, so they have to live inside this tool and deal with support-related things? Vinay: Yeah. We have different support channels. We have general support, sales support, and engineering support. Engineering do kind of work in engineering support. It's generally more complicated problems versus how much does the product cost or things like that but they’re generally dealing with a more complicated [...], something with the API or something like that. Yeah, they’re in support as well. Jason: Interesting. Property managers that are listening, a lot of times, what ends up happening is there's two, I call them the first two sand traps. The first major sand trap of property manager falls into in the solopreneur stage, they get to maybe 50 or 60 units under management. They're doing it mostly on their own. They're struggling to figure things out. Then the first thing they think of doing is getting people like hiring people. People are so expensive. Having a tool like this could immediately allow them to outsource into offload and create some leverage in their business. Where it becomes even more necessary, I think for a tool like Process Street, is when you get into that 2-400 door category which is kind of the next sand trap that they fall into, this is where they’ve got a team now. They're struggling to manage this team, they're struggling to keep things organized, they're struggling to maintain some semblance of culture, and their big challenge right now is documentation. It's almost always a big challenge. They need to document their processes, they need to systemize the business, it’s this huge constraint that's limiting their ability to grow and move forward. By then, it becomes critical for them to get something like this in place where they've got a really good processes, really good documentation, and really good clarity as a team as what's actually being done. Vinay: Yeah, absolutely. It's a bit of a Catch-22 situation because you've got more work going on when you're in that next level of business because you got more customers and more doors. You kind of feel like you've got less time to work in your processes, but your processes are more important at that point of the company. I think the point in your CRM or whatever is probably a similarly stressful project to undertake but once it's done, you're very happy to do it. You might feel that you're underwater right now, but that's probably a good sign that you need to work on some of the processes. If you're that underwater because you won't be able to scale that way. The other thing that we have that helps a lot with data is we have tons of templates. We actually create pre-made process templates. We've got a whole bunch in property management. We've got some generic ones around it. Some of those mentioned, tenants move in and move out, tenant screening, property inspection, and landlords. We also have some ones that are like, "Oh, this is how you do it if your system is AppFolio," or something like that. It’s kind of like more generic ones and ones where you can kind of switch in and interacting with your different property management systems. That actually helps a lot if you do feel like you're really underwater, and you don't know where to start with your documentation, you don't have any time for this, "Come check out their offer." You come and check out all the different property management templates that we have and that's a really good starting point. Jason: Yeah. You can also share your process with other people. You can ask another property manager, "Hey, what's your process?" If they're using Process Street and they can share that with you, and you can immediately import it in your tool which is cool. It has a lot of really cool features. If you're on one of the higher plans, you can also do that context sensitive [..] statements. If a certain task is complete in a certain way, you can expose or hide certain other steps to make it faster or more hyper relevant to what needs to be done then. You can get as crazy with this as you want which I think is fascinating or you can be simple as just having a few steps with the couple screenshots and some texts. Immediately, I think, anybody could take whatever processes they currently have, bring it over, copy, and paste it in. Then, they can start optimizing it. I've even taken just checklist in a text document of steps, you can just paste that in and it spits it out as each separate step. It really is a rapid tool for getting processes built out. It's been a game changer for those that have implemented it especially those that just didn't have anything. It's a huge leap, huge step up. What's on the horizon for Process Street? What else do you think those that are managing property should know about Process Street? Vinay: A couple of things we have coming up is, one thing that I know a lot of our property management customers are excited about, we have hundreds and hundreds–I don't even know how many–of property management companies all the way from single person operators up to we have big teams in [...] and Keller Williams and stuff like that. We do work with a lot of property management companies. One of the ones that they're really excited about is a feature called role-based assignments. Right now, you can predefine on a checklist who needs to do what. You can say, "Either Bob in finance needs to do this collect payment task or the finance team needs to do this collect payment task." You can say, "The property management agent needs to do these four tasks at the beginning." But the way that it was right now is you could only indicate that this person has to do these four tasks. It gets a little bit tricky when you have a team of property managers. One property comes in, it needs to get assigned to Manager A. Another property comes in, it needs to get assigned to Manager B. Another one comes in gets assigned to property Manager C. You want to rotate your assignments, or you want to map who's the account manager on this and make sure that the correct account manager is assigned to that. We have now a feature called role assignments. At the beginning of the checklist, you kind of have a dropdown that says, "Who is the PM that is responsible for this account?" You can select that and that will automatically assign all the property management, PM-related tasks to that particular PM. You can maybe say like, "Who's their district manager? Who's their regional manager?" That will might assign some of the approval tasks to their particular manager for that PM that you selected. Instead of saying, "This task is always assigned to Bob." It's like, "This task is assigned to a property manager. I just don't know exactly which person on the team is going to be that. I'll assign it out later or I'll use the type of automation to assign that." For example, if I click this on Salesforce or I click this from one of my property management systems, I could look at who's the logged in user or who's the user that owns this account. I could automatically push in that email address into the process and automatically assign all those tasks to that particular person. Actually, a really cool one for this is, there's actually two cool features that just came out. Now, the features that came out is called task permissions. What task permissions do is it lets you control who can see specific tasks in the checklist. I have 10 tasks. I can say that, "Right now, anybody who comes into the checklist can see all the tasks in the checklist." I can say, "I want the property manager to see these five tasks. I want the manager to see these three tasks. I want the finance to see this one task." What's really cool is you can bring in the actual tenant or you can bring in the landlord as a guest into the system. It's like a free user that you can bring in. You can say, "I just want the landlord to see this one task at the top of these two tasks." It's like, "Fill in some form fields here, tell me your property, your address, and some information about when you want someone to come see you. Sign this contract here and then, done." Those two steps are exposed to the landlord. Then your team can come in afterwards, pick it up, and continue it out. "Let's do a background check on this person, a credit check, or whatever," and start doing internal steps. You now can break up the process and have external people, some internal people, an internal manager, all kind of working on the same process but not seeing all the information. It’s kind of being siloed into their own tasks and things that they need to see. That's pretty cool for bringing in landlords or tenants if you need them to upload documents or complete any complicated set of forms. It's really useful. You can @ mention them, have conversations with them. You can reject their uploads and say, "Do it again. Do it again." A lot of these gets done over hundreds of emails back and forth, and they always seem to get lost. It's really cool managing that. Another big project we're working is the mobile app. I think a lot of people will like that too. Jason: Yeah. Very cool. I think a lot of the systems that we have that feed into the Process Street were using some sort of a third-party form like Typeform or Gravity Forms and then, we're feeding in in that. You're saying it'll be possible or even easier to have tenants or clients to submit things through... Vinay: Yeah. They could do that whole form into a task inside the process and just expose one task or two tasks to those clients. You wouldn’t even use those external forms anymore. Jason: You want the client or the tenant to see, call the client up, and say these things because then it seems disingenuous. Vinay: Exactly. You could be doing an interview and you have notes on the interview and stuff like that. There's a lot of things where you want that wall of privacy. Someone can submit a leave application or an expense approval or something like that. You want to be able to have a conversation with HR or conversation with the manager just about the person who submitted it get seen. Jason: Yeah. I think in some way, if I create a process, if I put a video in there, I have checklist steps, there's so much clarity and transparency for my team to know how to get work done that they don’t have to come to me. Any question, as an entrepreneur, that we get asked once by our team is going to be asked again. Unless, it's documented somewhere. Every single one of those interruptions cost you at least 50 minutes a time. Every single one of those interruptions may take, each time you're training somebody or bringing somebody new, if that's not systemized, it can take you hours. The only way to really move forward with the business is to create a business that is somehow scalable. In order to do that, the foundation is having some SOPs in place; having some Standard Operating Procedures, having some process documentation. I think the brilliance of Process Street is adding that layer of accountability in mixing it in a checklist, having people move through a process, and being able to see who has done what for that transparency. Is there anything else that people listening should now about Process Street before we wrap this up? Vinay: Just that it's free to check out and that you should go sign up for free account at www.process.st. Jason: Alright. Cool. Check out Process Street. It's process.st. Vinay, thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show. Really great to have you here. Vinay: Absolutely. It's been great. Thanks for having me. Jason: Alright. Cool. For those of you that are listening, I do recommend you check Process Street. It is a really nice blend between ease and what's easy. I think it's a software that once you get into it, it's very intuitive, easy for people to figure it out, so don't be afraid. If you are a nerd, you really geek out on tech, and automation, I think it has plenty there to satisfy you. I think they’re coming out with some cool new things that will give Podio, another system, a run for their money. That'll get a little too complicated for most people. Check that out. If you're a DoorGrow Hacker and you've enjoyed the show, make sure to like and subscribe if you're watching in YouTube. Make sure on iTunes that you give us a real review. We're going to appreciate that. Everybody listening, if you are a property management business owner and wants to grow your business, make sure you get inside our DoorGrow Club by going to doorgrowclub.com and join our free Facebook group and our awesome community. Again, thanks to Vinay. Thanks to everybody that's been checking out this show and listening. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Searching here, searching there...How do investors find rental properties that align with their financial goals? Is there a way to provide them access to these assets? Today, I am talking with Dan Ganguly, president of HomeUnion and founder of INVESTimate. As an entrepreneur, he’s always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. So, if a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, a property manager needs a feed of investment properties to present to potential buyers. You’ll Learn... [04:05] Questions for Investors: What’s your budget? Risk preference? Age and stage in life? Do you need cash? [05:13] Two Brands Connected: HomeUnion’s where investors search for properties; INVESTimate’s where property managers and realtors work with investors. [06:30] Business Model Change: Internet-only to tool that increases engagement between property managers dealing with investors. [07:43] Where to Start: Build a relationship sooner than later in the sales cycle process. [09:00] Help property managers build better Websites as a front door for people. [13:53] What does the local property manager do? Signs up with service, pays monthly fee, and puts on private/white labels. [14:58] Realtor gets MLS feed for home buying; property manager gets MLS feed with intelligent filters and big data for investment buying. [15:15] Everybody knows their #1 prospect is their existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you. [16:12] Other Options: MLS, Zillow, and similar Websites focus on finding stuff (schools, pools, etc.) that get people into a neighborhood. [16:35] INVESTimate: Offers big data platform with 110 million properties, 20 years of transactions, 200,000 neighborhoods, and more than 9 million rentals. [19:30] Is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual. [20:15] INVESTimate: Investors get best of both worlds when making a transaction. [21:45] Different risk-reward gradients/categories help people make the right decision. [26:45] Feedback from Property Managers: How has this changed their business? [32:05] Bottom Line: Business owners make money, get a door, and much more. Tweetables It’s a fish net to grab fish, and then we nurture the fish until they buy. Your #1 prospect is an existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you. We can’t force them to buy, but give them a reason and product to buy. Bottom Line: Business owners make money and get a door. Resources HomeUnion INVESTimate MLS Zillow Realtor.com DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. And today, I have a very special guest. I’m hanging out here with Don Ganguly. Don is the CEO of Homeunion, is that correct? Don: Yeah. I’m the president of Homeunion and founder of Investimate. Jason: President and the founder of Investimate. Don, I want to welcome you to being here on the Door Grow Show. Don: I’m glad to be here. Jason: Don, you have an interesting background. You have a lot of experience in entrepreneurism, I think people would be really interested here some tidbits from you today, and some insights. I’m excited to get it into your business and service. But let’s start with you. Can you give us a little background on you and just some of your experience and what lead you to where you are now in business? Don: Sure. I’m sort of a vocationally reformed engineer. This is my third company. The last one we did was actually an outsourcing service company for mortgage banks and services. We were actually helping originators doing the big boom and people [...] were getting a loan. When everything fell apart we were helping the services service those loans and try to keep people in their houses. We touched I think over $75 billion of service. That company ended up getting sold to Oracle, to a banking software company. But it was the progenitor to this whole Homeunion and Investimate thing that we founded because we were able to see all these properties all over the country that had some pretty decent prices and a good rental price ratio. When we looked at that, we figured there are all these homes that made good investments and people that live in the coast don’t get access to these assets. We looked at that and said, “Is there a way that we could provide access to rental properties the way people buy stocks and bonds?” If you look at the way rental properties are bought, we base them a little how homes are bought. So people go to a listing site, they get a list of properties, they do some back and beyond below calculations, figure out the rent, go to the neighborhood, or pick up the neighborhood, call a realtor, and then bounce around and try to find the right property that they like. If you’re look at an analog to that and say, “Hey, if you go to a wealth advisor and say, ‘I’ve got this much money to invest, what should I buy?’” The wealth advisors are going to say, “Okay. I got some stocks, here’s the idea, and here’s the score, here’s Apple, here’s Facebook, which one of these do you think you want in your portfolio and let’s go through a list.” The question they ask you often is, “Hey, what’s your budget? What’s your risk preference? What’s your age and state in life? Do you need cash?” And then they put a portfolio together that’s got a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it all enlines to your financial goal. We took that playbook and we brought it to this Investimate product that we built which says, “We can ask investors the same type of questions about their real estate investments and then let the system go out and find the right assets and build them a portfolio or a set of assets that need those financial criteria.” The non trivial exercise because to do that, we actually had to calibrate everything from a risk and reward stand point. Right? How risky is this house? And what’s in that house type of thing. That’s how we came to this. As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. Often, the existing stakeholders don’t have the answers. You got to think of something a little bit different. That’s how we got into this business. Jason: Help us understand these two brands, how they’re connected first and what they are. Just the overview. Don: No, I’m happy to. Homeunion used to be a retail platform where investors can come in and basically search for properties and invest. The first incarnation of Homeunion, we were actually serving as overall asset managers for these properties and then farming out the actual work to property managers on the ground. And then last year we made the call, it was becoming too big a business for us. We’ve done over 200 other transactions and we didn’t want to be in property management. We ended up giving those properties out to the property managers that were managing it, productized it and provided it as a platform for property managers and realtors that are working with investors. The product itself has been tested for four and a half years, it’d done $200 million of transaction within 5% of forecast and a good use by investors to buy properties all around the country, highly exercised. What we just see is the business model from being an internet only model that brought consumers to my front door to a product that would then serve people like property managers who are actually dealing with investors day to day, giving them a tool to engage with their investors. That’s the connection between the two. The Homeunion brand is an internal user of the investment product. So any leads that come in there are fed to our property management partners in various locations because we are not in the business. When we engage with that investor and they want to buy a property, then that property is managed by one of our partners. Both of them actually feed into the advantage of the property management tool. Jason: Let’s take our typical listeners. We’ve got a property management business owner, they got a small business, maybe they’ve got 100-200 doors on their management. They’re wanting to grow their business, they’re trying to deal with team changes, and staffing, and operations, and trying to systemize things for the first time ever. And then we have these solutions available that they can use to support in bringing investors. Where would they start with your services? Don: Yes. If I look at businesses such as yours and others, you’re helping them grow doors. How do you grow doors? You grow doors by finding more investors and having investors buying more doors, right? The property manager either at the bottom of the food chain which is that when the investors already bought that property, then they put their hand up and compete with four other property managers and say, “I’m the best guy in this market and you should come and put your property with me.” Or they can be more proactive and go up the food channel and up that funnel and have a conversation with the investor when the investor starts looking for that property. Be early in the solutions process. What happened to them is if you’re at that point in the fulcrum then you are actually able to participate in the property management process more naturally rather than doing it after the fact. Jason: If you’re part of this process earlier in the sales cycle then they’re going to have this relationship with you that’s already set and you’re by default mostly going to get the management contract. Don: You got it. Because you've been partnering with them ahead of time. At the same token, let me just take the other side of the coin there, the good work that you’re doing and others are doing is that saying, “Okay, listen, you need to market your business in some fashion. You need to get traffic on your website. You need to put content up.” There are various stakeholders that are helping property managers build better websites, you have a business in that, and a better front door for people to come in. When those people come in, then what do you have for them? That’s where we come in. I’ll give you a simple analog. If you’re a realtor, what do you need? You need an idea speed to your local MLS. Otherwise you can’t show any property. When a company comes in and says, “Hey, I want to buy from you.” If you have a website that doesn’t show any properties or you don’t have an ability to send that buyer of homes to buy then you can’t participate. It’s a minimum stake for a realtor. Jason: [...] tool. Don: If I am an “investor realtor” and that sort of property management, if I’m catering to investors then I need an ability to serve up investment properties or properties that are more likely to be good investment. Or put another way, I need to give you an investment lens through which to look at these properties so that you can then engage in buying a rental property through my system. If I don’t have that then I’m back to the bottom of the food chain because I’m searching here, I’m searching there, I’m doing all of these. If a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, I think a property manager needs a feed of investment properties that it can present to its potential buyer, if the property manager wants to jump up the food chain. That’s what Investimate provides. If you’re a property manager in a particular market and we’re in 15 or 16 markets around the country, we have real time connections to the local lifting services, what we would do is we would white label Investimate for your website so it would say, “ABC Property Manager” with your logo and your color on the front. When you use Door Grow or another service to drive investors to your website, then they come in and they have a way to search for rental properties in your patch or around the country, if you allow them to. Because you still get a referral fee for that and engage with you in that fashion. That’s one part of it. The second part is if you look at the realtors and I go back to the home buying because everyone gets that business. If you go to the home buying end of the business, what happens? The realtors are all over that bill when it reels its head. When a home buyer says I want to buy, you have a short window in which to grab that person and about 20 realtors are all over it from leads, from various places. The name of the game and how quickly can I get that person. On the investment side, nobody wakes up and says, “I just have to buy rental property in the next 24 hours. Otherwise I’m going to have a hissy fit of some kind.” That doesn’t quite work that way. When people make that decision saying, “Hey, maybe I should be in real estate, I know a lot of wealth is built that way. I should be out of the stock market, or I’ve already bought two properties, I think it’s time for me to buy another one. I got some excess cash.” What they need is a steady dive of stuff that fits their preferences and in nurturing. It’s very different from the home buying. The investment platform actually comes with a set of campaign management and a set of investor support services. When you’re under Investimate, and you’re a customer of ABC Property Management. So you come in and say I’m Jason. You register you start using the site, we call you and say, “Jason, we’re investment support with ABC Property Management, we’re here to help you use the system and help you understand what’s in here.” You get acclimatized with the system, you understand what it is, we get an idea of your preferences and the system also captures your preferences. Now, you’ve told me you like sci-fi movies or romcom and I now keep sending you scifi and romcom till one day you watch that movie, because that’s how investors work. They drip feed them until they put their hand up and say, “That’s probably interesting.” Now I got to buy box. Once I get that buy box, then I call ABC Property Manager and say, “Hey, I’ve got Jason who’s got X amount to invest. He’s looking in Austin. This is sort of his buy box, this is the sort of the property he’s looking for. Please help him out and do the local due diligence.” We serve that lead up at that point. It’s the website, it’s a set of intelligence filter that connects to the local listing service, and it’s a whole analytics lens that allows them to search like they would search with stocks and bonds. I can get more into the data side of it, it’s much deeper than that. To answer your question what does that local property manager do? He signs up with the service, it’s a small monthly fee, and he private labels it, white labels it on his website, and he’s off to the races. The way we make money, really, most of it is from when there’s a successful transaction. What we ask for them is to load whatever lead customers they have into that proprietary database that always stays there on and then these people as they come in, it’s a fishnet to grab fish, and then we nurture those fish ‘til they buy. It’s a long term way to keep their brand in front of customers and leads and others. I’ll tell you something that a lot of the property managers are working with, not only loading customers, they’ll think, “Hey, here is a whole bunch of people we touched in the last five years. We didn’t do business with them but we touched them in some fashion. I want those registered to me.” And a lot of them wake up and are prospect of buying stuff. All because once you see the product then they’ll say, “Yeah. I’m interested and I will use this to buy something.” That’s what we bring to the tables. What a realtor gets from a strict MLS feed for home buying, a property manager gets an MLS feed with a bunch of intelligent filters and big data for investment buying. That’s what we’re doing. Jason: I love the idea. Everybody listening knows or should know that their number one prospect is your existing customer. They already know you, trust you, and like you. You’re already probably managing a property for them. They’re one of the most likely to do business with you again, and if you have opportunities, a property’s available and they’re already investors, it would be a very easier thing to get them into an additional property. They’re going to have a high level of trust with you. If you have this easy pull of properties that they could see and view and they’re getting dripped, and they’re getting notified, and they’re in your funnel and system here, then eventually something is going to grab them. They’re going to go, “Hey, this looks like a deal I could sink my teeth into. I’m going to go for this.” For the skeptics that are listening, you’ve got the property managers that also do real estate and they’ve already got the MLS and they’re like, “Wow, why don’t I just put the MLS on.” And they can just look for property, any property. Let’s really clarify the difference between just having the MLS and having the Investimate tool. Don: Great question. The MLS or Zillow or Realtor.com or any of these sites, are geared towards you looking for school pools, stuff that gets you into a neighborhood to live in. What we did is we created a big data platform where we have 110 million properties, we have the entire US Housing Stock, we have 20 years of transactions. We have 200,000 neighborhoods, we have an initiative here with University of California where we collect over 9 million rentals all over the internet so we could put that into our model, and we do a couple of different things with it. We process over $200 billion of properties to bill them out. What we do with it is first thing we’ve done is we calibrated neighborhoods from A to D as a neighborhood investment grading. Think of this as a bond grading so the D is not, we’re not in D neighborhood. C is not necessarily saying it’s a bad neighborhood, it just says it’s a neighborhood that’s a little bit more volatile, you get in with the lower quantum of money, it’s a high yield property, that neighborhood property isn’t going to give you as much growth. But you can pull me a portfolio depending on what else you’re trying to buy. An E neighborhood has a higher quantum of investment. It’s a more expensive neighborhood, view is not going to be that great, and you are going to see a lot more growth. The question is should I buy Apple stock at $800 and buy five units of Apple stocks or should I buy something that’s $50 and buy hundred units of it? Or should I do a little bit of both? We’ve given them a risk reward calibration so they can look at both of these things. Then we forecast, we have a model that estimates the rent. We have a rent valuation model, we have a cascade waterfall where we compare to [...] and a bunch of other things to say here’s a range of the rent. We then estimate the price and see if it’s above or below what we model the price to be at. Based on that we come up with a big range on their property. Then, we provide a con of rich neighborhood information on the renter. If you go to an investment, you’ll see how much money do the renters make, what’s the average income, how come they can afford the rent, where are the rents on this neighborhood, am I an outlier rent? Once my renter goes, “I’ll never be able to fulfill it because I’m the only guy in that neighborhood where my renter’s paying higher among everybody.” There’s a ton of good strategic data and there’s price trends and rent trends on that neighborhood. When investors go in, it’s a shame when you look at the stock. What’s my risk in this stock? What’s the previous growth has been? What’s my dividend play? What had done historically? What is it expected to do? What other research can I get around it? It’s that one place where all that information is encapsulated. The potential rental property buyers are doing what [...]. They’re going to go to Zillow, find new property, we’re doing a back of the napkin, going to a rental meter, finding the rent and then coming back, going to a realtor, looking at the neighborhood, they don’t like it, go to another one. We put all of that into one piece on the back of big data. Like in many model, is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual. You and I may be living next door to each other and you’ve done a lot of great things in your property. You may be a little bit different than mine. How do we do that? The property manager solved that last mile problems. The model, the data helps them create a buy box, instead of guard rails, instead of neighborhood, it’s a type of property. And then the property manager goes and then says, “Yes, the data is right on this one. The renter’s exactly what we said.” or “You know what, this property is gutted on the inside and it’s not going to work.” It’s a combination of that site, of the platform, and the local property manager at the point of purchase. Investimate, you get the best of both in terms of making a transaction. Now, why is the property manager the best partner? Because he or she has to manage that property afterwards. They’re not going to go in and say yeah, the rent’s going to be $2,000, no problem. The moment it closes, then they come back and say the rent’s $1,500, that’s the beginning of the end as far as their whole credibility goes. All that big data is underlying the investment lens of [...], just going in that a little bit more. When we look at the MLS, we pull the listing services every 30 minutes. It’s real time. We apply 50 to 60 different filters to pull stuff in. We exclude stuff. If they’re common, if we don’t like them, we exclude those things, exclude D neighborhood. There’s a set of filters that go in, then we [...] the rich data, then there’s a que where a set of eyeballs do a quality check. Then, it makes it into the platform. It’s a highly curated investment focused platform that’s available for the property manager to showcase to his or her client. Jason: Alright, that was a great explanation. Basically, what I’m hearing is this is like MLS. It includes all the MLS stuff but it’s better. It includes more tools, more resources geared specifically towards the investor, and they’re able to make decisions. This is maybe a random question but I’m really curious about these different gradients or different categorizations that you have of risk reward and how are people making this decision whether they want As or Ds? Don: It really depends on the risk profile, at the end of the day. If you go for a C property, when do you buy a Triple C bond? A Triple C bond is a high yield bond for sure, because it’s not an A bond. But when you buy Triple C bond, you also know that there could be defaults, there could be things that wreck your returns. You’re getting that high yield to compensate for the risk. When you buy a Triple A bond, it’s more deterministic. In a higher end neighborhood, you’ve got rents that are not quite as high to the ratio of the property price, but you’ve got renters that tend to be more stable, that have been there longer period of time, and their homes tend to appreciate. But it requires more money to get in. It all depends in the investor’s personal preferences, are they looking for money now, are they looking more to build a portfolio and after 15 years when it’s all paid off that’s [...]. Are they looking for growth where they wanna spin around and flip it in five years? That’s a whole different discussion, they you go after more growth properties. You need at least five years for real estate before you cover all your transaction costs, or three plus years. It just totally depends on the investment and their requirements. They might buy some properties for cash flow, they might buy some for growth, and they might buy some that’s in between. We hear investors say hey, I need cash flow, that’s my number one determinant. Other investors might say I don’t really need any money right now, but I wanna build up a portfolio that will grow and be safe. Others will say I need to cover my mortgage, and maybe make a little bit of money, then the balance in the middle, but I really need properties that are going to appreciate. I don’t really care about cash flow, but I don’t want to be out of pocket. Those decisions then drive the type of properties, neighborhoods, locations, cities they end up with. Jason: In your platform, curious, what do you see being the most popular for the investors that are typically using this with property managers in that categorization? Don: Where people buy, 40% is what I call the B neighborhoods, 40% are on the C neighborhoods which are the high yield neighborhoods, and 20% are the As. As are obviously more expensive, and your buy will shrink when you get to the A neighborhood. That’s roughly what I see. Jason: Got it. This would obviously work for non-property managers that are using it. Maybe their intention is just to use and look at this for their own stuff, or to look for flips, or turnkeys, or different types of deals than just some sort of long term management situation. Don: It would work for realtors, any realtors that’s dealing with investors, they are also using the platform. We’ve got a number of realtors that signed up. The realtor piece is a little bit different. I’d sell you a home and you’re not going to buy another home from me for the next 7 to 10 years typically, I’m not going to come every year and sell you a home. Once I sell you a home, if I’m smart, I know you could be a potential investor. I say hey, if you’re looking for rental properties now, here’s a site that gives you local and national rental properties, and I’ll help you out with it. For the realtor, it becomes a cross sell. For a property manager, it’s an upsell, it’s one more property or a new guy coming in. But for the realtor it’s a cross sell to a customer or lead that already spent the money getting that customer or the lead. Now you say what else can I get out of their wallet? And this product does that. In terms of flippers, we’re not really geared towards flippers. We’re not showing the big distressed assets out there that you can find and rehab. The big thing for the flippers are rehab numbers. How much do I have to put into this property to actually make money on it? I’m buying it $40,000 on the market, I put $20,000 in it so I’m already in $20,000. I can make another $20,000 because I can sell it at market. That requires on the ground running around and understanding what those rehab cost. They can use the system to identify stuff, I’m sure. But at the end of the day, I think these are people driving around neighborhoods or trying to find distressed assets that need that. There’s not an inordinate focus and people on that on that platform, just because our partners are not really chasing those types of deals. We need a partner on the ground for this, solving the last model. Any investor can come in and use it for sure. Jason: Property managers that are already working with you and using your system in doing this, what sort of changes or feedback or results have you been hearing from them? What are they noticing and how has this changed their business? Don: One thing a lot of them are noticing is that a lot of their customers or their leads are waking up and they are engaged in looking at properties. There’s two, three things they’re saying. One is they’re making offers and new properties, in some cases they’re selling properties to the system which helps the property manager get a listing. They get that listing, and if the investor is selling the property, they can get to keep the property management because it’s a rental property that they’re selling it as and they’re not kicking out the renter going to a homeowner. I think a lot of people like that because there’s no erosion or churn of their portfolio from that perspective. Jason: What’s happening is even though properties are selling, which would normally turned into a property management business, they’re able to retain the management contracts and keep the tenants in place. Don: That’s right. Jason: Love it. Don: For those investors that are willing to do that, there’s some that will want to sell in the open market for whatever reason. I think if we can increase the velocity of this, and as more and more people get connected to the investment network when you push something into that, it goes across, gets eyeballs everywhere. It may move a lot faster because the investment on the other end will want a rental property that’s already rented with a track record of history from that property manager, because the property manager will be able to give us what’s been happening in the last two or three years in performance on this property. That becomes a lot more attractive than to buy a new one and then do all this stuff to it. Jason: So this is a proven property, they’re able to see that it’s rent rolled effectively, and this extends the reach then of this ability far beyond what the local MLS would provide because investors would be out of state and beyond are able to see this opportunity. Don: And realtors are not that interested in selling rental properties to investors. The MLS and stuff like that, they get the least amount of attention from realtors. Putting it on this platform puts many more eyeballs. We get 120,000 users on the platform today. Remember, we’ve been at this for four years, four and a half years. As the assigning of these property managers, they’re going into this. The [...] account is increasing dramatically month over month. Out of that, not everyone’s a buyer today but big enough sample size there that people would look at it and say this is something I want to buy. And the more product you put in there, the better you are. Jason: Say they sign up, how easy is this to get connected into the website? Is it just some javascript code snippet that would be added to a page, or just some HTML like an iframe… Don: Good question. It’s not iframe, it’s a hyperlink linked with their subdomain that gets added to their website and we can put it right over… For example the DMI franchise is rolling this out to a lot of their franchisees. We spoke to their website company and made sure that the logos and the colors and all that was consistent in how they wanted the brand to look for all DMI franchises and put it out there so they have the same experience, it’s stuff like that. It’s not a massive task, it’s a quick task of getting it up and running. They don’t even need someone familiar with website development on their end to put it up. Jason: Fantastic. I would imagine besides that, they’re able to feed in maybe their list of clientele, or how do they get clients using or into this system? Don: They send a file of their clients and their leads, and we separate the two. That gets loaded and tagged to them in the CRM for good. Anytime they do anything, they’re forever tagged to them. We look at the clients one way, we look at the leads one way, and they get a mail from Jason at ABC Property Management saying hey, we just implemented this new tool, come check it out, here’s all that it’s got. A series of mails inviting them to come check out the tool, what’s in it, and then we engage with them as investor support for Jason’s property management company, help them utilize the tool. That’s all branded to Jason, it’s not branded to anything else, it’s all branded to Jason. The backend calls are made to investment support to help them use the system, that’s all Jason. Then, they start receiving some weekly properties that are hot in their particular market. If they put their hand up, we answer questions and take [...]. Jason: Great. The bottom line, everybody listening, that business owners are all thinking is this makes me money, right? They’re getting the real estate deals, they’re getting commissions on the real estate deals, anything else that I’m missing? Don: They get a door... Jason: And they get property management contracts. Don: Yup, and let’s say for example we have property managers in California. A California property manager’s customer wants to buy in Austin, so the Austin person then can get a referral from the California buyer because the California buyer is not finding something in the price range they want in California. One thing they always ask, our customers, is do you want to show only your market or do you want to show all markets? There’s pros and cons to it. If you only show your market, then that investor can only buy in your market and that’s all they get and you always get the door. The con is if they ever decide to buy somewhere else, they’re not going to buy through you because you didn’t show that. Or, you show all markets and then if they do decide to buy somewhere else, then you get a referral fee from that. By the same token, you get inbound traffic from someone else. That’s the idea of that. But we give people that option, because we can show one, or two, or all. Most people tend to keep it fully open, but when you have people that say I don’t want to show anything other than my city. We’re okay with that as well, it’s the business owner’s choice. Jason: So this has other potential benefits of really setting up a referral network, getting some deals. Don: Yup. We’ve had situations where property managers just got a door, because somebody is buying a property. Then the person says they need a property manager, so then we get the door. Sometimes, they get the whole thing. If an investor wants to buy in their market, then they become the buyer’s agent, obviously they give up a referral fee back into the system so others can get paid. They get the door and that commission. At the same token then, they refer someone, they get a fee from that person from the door and the commission; it works both ways. Jason: Alright. Don, this sounds fantastic. Is there any other common questions or things that you think people listening might be curious about related to this? And then how can they find out more? Don: I think one thing we had expectations on, this is a long term relationship with your investors. Let’s say you’ve got 400 doors and 150 investors, the investors get exposed to it. It’s not that okay. In 60 days, they all come in and say great, now that you’ve given me this, here are 10 properties that I’m going to buy. They will buy over time, but what’s important is they are now much more connected with your brand and you start seeing deals happening with these investors when they decide to buy. We can’t force them to buy, but we give them a reason to buy, and we give them a product to buy. That’s the one thing. The second thing is we do need the property management person trained on the system. We have a training program and all of that. When we transfer that investor in the right time, they need to be able to use the system to find the next property and the next one if this one doesn’t work out. Because ultimately, they’re the one fulfilling that. A property management company sometimes has not been in the sales process, they’ve always been at the other end of the food chain. They’ve got to think that if they want to climb the food chain, they do need some competence and strive to be able to go and get that property and close the property with the investor. Although we’re taking a lot of the analytical work in a way by systems giving them all of that. They get a very clear buy box, but they still need to fulfill that buy box. Jason: Let’s wrap this up, how would people find out more about your Investimate product, and how would they demo this and learn more about the business, and how do they get started? Don: They would go to investimateroi.com, in there is a little video that talks about the product, an explanation of what it does for property managers and realtors, and an ability to set up an appointment for a demo. The best thing to do is always look at a demo. If they go there and they schedule a time, just like we’re doing here, we’ll get them on an online webinar and we’ll take them through the product and explain what it does, and see if it’s a fit for the business. It’s simple enough, yeah. Jason: Fantastic. Don, this has been really interesting, really insightful. I think a lot of people’s wills returning as they listen to this. I think that you’ll probably be getting some demos of people checking it out. Don: Great, thank you. Jason: Thanks for being on the DoorGrow show. Don: Glad to be here. Jason: You can check that out at investimateroi.com. I appreciate Don being on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, then make sure you check us out at doorgrow.com. If you want to join the most awesome community of property management entrepreneurs on the planet, we are hanging out inside the DoorGrow Club. It is a free Facebook group, you can go to doorgrowclub.com, make sure you join the group. We will see you next time on the DoorGrow Show. Until then, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Are you sure your kitchen table or big-screen TV will fit? If you’re interested in renting or buying a specific property, there’s a few steps to take before actually visiting it. Watch a virtual tour video and get pre-qualified. Today, I am talking with Michael Sanz of Neesh Property, which started in 2009 and has more than 650 doors. We discuss the benefits of automating property showings, including the opportunity to spend more time with people and to travel. Who wouldn’t want to operate a property management business from beaches around the world? You’ll Learn... [02:25] Purpose of Neesh Property: Holistic real estate that helps people buy, sell, rent, and arrange financing. [03:20] Same Startup Suffering: Michael struggled to start a business, grow new doors, and retain customers. [03:37] Identify and Prevent Problems: Michael controls and protects his business and simplifies his life through systemization and automation. [05:45] Workforce Reduction: Michael went from 18 to 1½ staff members and replaced them with property management software to save money. [07:58] Eliminate Office Space: Doesn’t affect how you do business. [09:43] Competitive Advantage: Neesh Property closes deals and acquires new business by leasing properties quickly. [10:30] Retain Relationships: Be client-focused, not location-focused when managing properties. [12:40] Learn from Mistakes: Try and implement new things, which may or may not work completely; pivot when necessary. [14:29] What’s the problem? Any problem, big or small, should be documented and automated to disappear. [16:10] Build Knowledge Base: Take time to make “how-to, what to do...” videos, recordings, and other visuals to help people understand processes/procedures. [21:05] Leverage People as Process: Create core team of people who are thinkers and decision-makers. [27:38] Virtual Tour Stats: Neesh Property gets over 85% of its real estate booked based on the virtual platform and averages 1.8 showings per property. [31:05] Good Tenants Gone Bad: Rather than giving best to the bad, give it to the best of everyone; mesh type of tenant to property. [50:55] Common Beginner Pitfall: You don’t need to be cheaper than everybody else to get started and compete; change your value proposition. Tweetables Save Money: Replace staff members with property management software. Be client-focused, not location-focused. Meaningful Connections/Conversations: The rest just falls into place; it’s all systems. Automation offers the opportunity to simplify your life and spend more time with people. Resources Neesh Property Michael Sanz on Facebook Ricoh 360 Camera Matterport: 3D Camera and Virtual Tour Platform Vieweet Skype Zoom Housecraft GatherKudos Oculus Rift DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. I am welcoming all the way from across the pond or even further maybe, Michael Sanz of Neesh Property Management. Michael, welcome to the show. Michael: Thank you very much for having me. Jason: I’m excited to have you. You’re a really cool guy. I got to connect with you in the past in person, which was great to meet you in person, and you’ve done some really cool things. But before we get into some of that, and today’s topic for those listening, is automating property showings. We’re going to be talking about that. But before we get into that, why don’t you give people a little bit of background on you and let everyone know why I think you’re so awesome. Michael: Thanks for the introduction and thanks for having me at the conference in Missouri last year. It was amazing. Perfect. As Jason said, I’m Michael Sanz. I am from Australia, from Melbourne, and I have a company called Neesh Property Residential that has been going since 2009, has over 650 doors. I started how everybody else started out in real estate and started from zero, or how much people started, started from zero doors. I had a new relationship started at the time. Add the pressure and the stress of a new relationship coming into a new business, setting all that up. I started from the study nook in an apartment that I had. I had left a previous business. It was quite a successful business. Left the partnership at the time and I started Neesh Property. What was Neesh Property to me? It was a holistic real estate that help people buy property, sell property, rent property, and arrange the finance. It’s holistic all under one roof. I had suffered the same problems everybody else has suffered from starting a business, trying to grow new doors, I guess retain business when people sell their properties or go to other agencies. I spent a lot of time methodically going through all the pros and cons of a property management business and I really started to systemize it, automate it, and not let the business control me from an early point, but how I could control my real estate business and what protections I could put in place to make sure that I could do some hyper growth, retain the customers that I had, and simplify life. A lot of people that know me would have say that I will operate Neesh Property from many beaches around the world. I would close down the company every Christmas time for two months. In real estate, people say, “That’s unheard of. What about maintenance? What about all the problems?” But I identified all these problems and I’ve been out of able to do a lot of travel, and I’ve spend a lot of family time while automating the business. Jason, as you’re talking about today, automating how I show properties and really break down that process meant that I could be in Missouri and show people property before I went on stage, after I went on stage, and successfully lease property without really having to do anything at all. Jason: This is wild. I think everybody listening goes, “Michael’s some sort of crazy, weird robot. This is some magical impossible thing. Nobody else can do this.” You’re maybe some sort of savant or guru. But you started your business and from the beginning had this intention of systemizing things and keeping things off your plate to keep that space, and some people, their intentions and focus is very different. They build a business that’s very difficult to manage and to run. Paint a picture. You’ve got 650 doors right now, I think you’ve said, right? Michael: I just sold a bulk of that and I’ve got Neesh Property. I’ve automated even more with a new portfolio, but that’s for a whole other conversation. Jason: Help people understand your business logistically. How many team members do you have? I think this is where it really showcases how different your business is than most companies that are at a similar size. Michael: Sure. At a point with the business, we had about 18 staff members. We had acquired another smaller business, and we acquired their team, and we had an office. A lot of which goes against the grain having office to me. But when I acquired another business, I took the office and it had a receptionist, it had a business development person, it had an account, they had all these people there. I couldn’t see, with total respect to their role, I couldn’t see the purpose of it, so I knocked them down from 18 down to 1½ staff members. One full-time property manager and one part-time who did routines and edit some showings as required. Jason: Wait. So, you went from 18, bring on another company, and then you whittled that down to 1½ team members. Michael: Yeah, correct. I couldn’t see the massive need to have all these people doing accounts when a lot of the property management software already did all the reconciliation. I was just having a bum on a seat to press a button to reconcile. I couldn’t see the purpose of having a receptionist when there are people there who could answer the phone, so we put in a good IVR, a good voicemail system, and we educated. We identified that a lot of the calls that were coming in were from tenants either trying to report maintenance or [...] it was. Then we put in automated responses there, too, and if there’s any business call, “Press one if you’re a landlord, press two if it’s new business,” and then it would come through to my cell where I could answer and respond to it quite fast. Identifying the flow of calls, the type of calls that are coming through the office meant I no longer had to have a receptionist there. In Australia, the wages are quite high. We’d be paying someone $50,000–$60,000 to sit at a front desk, to greet people if they came in. We have also identified that as property change, people will less and less likely to come to an office. Tenants wouldn’t necessarily walk into the office and let’s say they did walk into the office, we would be there to greet them but no one was really walking in. Owners rarely walk into an office anymore because they could call you, they could video call you. We ended up getting rid of the office. We have spent from a big 250 square meter office place to a two-bedroom apartment, and guess what? It didn’t affect how we did business, didn’t affect us picking up new business, didn’t affect us losing any business, and the world still spins. It’s not chaos. For us identifying all these headaches we’re able to see what mattered. If the team couldn’t adapt to technology changes, video, virtual reality, automated IVR systems, and things like that, then there wasn’t really a place in the business for them, respectfully. I actually have one property manager leave to go with a company where they still did paper condition reports because that’s how she wanted to do them. Jason: Right. You’re welcome to it. That’s so funny. Okay, so this will make a lot of sense and I think you and I have both significant, nerdy, technological side to us. This stuff sounds obvious to me and maybe obvious to you, some people listening maybe not so obvious. If they have all these questions, “How would I do this? I would I do that?” It’s scary. But if you make that your intention and your goal, you’ll figure it out just like you figured out whatever you’re doing now. One of your big competitive advantages now in closing deals and in acquiring new business is your ability to lease properties so rapidly. Paint this picture of how rapidly and how different your leasing process is, just to prime the pump here. Michael: To put it into another perspective—I know we touched on it previously—we were full suburbs. We manage properties in over 84 suburbs and we also have properties in two other states, which was Sydney and New South Wales in WA. WA is a four-hour plane ride and Sydney is 1½-hour plane ride from us. Now, we weren’t insane, crazy totally. We only manage properties of the clients that we actually had on our book and we did that so that we could retain the relationship with them and we would appoint other local agents to help with open inspections or routine inspections, or things like that. And because I’m a frequent traveler, when I was in the area, I would pop in, say good day to the tenants, and just touch face that way, so the owners knew that they are getting full kind of service. In Victoria, it is very much managed by our office and again, we are client-focused and not location-focused, which was one of our main selling points and is quite attractive to landlords that we had. Because we also offered mortgage brokering, we really didn’t do too many sales, we were mainly property management and then we offered mortgage brokering we saw the value in that. If it was [...] other agents that could help us do the menial tasks. It wasn’t a headache for us, we didn’t stress about it, but we covered a lot of space. You can imagine when properties come up for rent. It’s cyclical because people [...] properties around at Christmas time, they go home to their families and their friends. We would have sometimes 10%–15% of the book would start to come up for rent and you can imagine the franticness of trying to get out all the inspections, deal with tenants, vacates, and all those headaches that came with it. Now, it’s probably 11 where I started [...] this. This wouldn’t be a problem with the spread of properties. As I sat down, I started writing down all the problems that I could have. Petrol, time on the road, who am I going to have, how many staff members I need to to do this if I’m going to have potential growth? How do I automate this? That was the biggest thing. How do I automate this? What if it’s Christmas time and I want to go away on holiday? What am I going to do? The selfishness in me also came out because I still wanted to live and being an owner-operator. What would you do? I identified with myself that if I made mistakes, that was okay because being a business owner, if we don’t try and implement the things we’re looking, that ain’t worth. But it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work in its entirety. It might mean that you just need to pivot a little bit and change what you’ve been doing to give another go. I had to automate the whole thing and I started the journey. Jason: I’m hearing a process here and I think you’ve mentioned this twice now. For those listening, you may have caught on this but it sounds like you have this mental process that you go through probably constantly where you list out potential problems, and then you sit down and figure out what are the solutions, and then you have this intention throughout that whole process of, “How can I have vacations? How can I make sure that I don’t have to always be doing it?” Which is a very different mindset than most ppl have. They’re just figuring out, “How to do I keep the business running? How do I make sure that we don’t drop the ball?” And you’re like, “No. How can I,” as you put it, “take Christmas and not have to work? How can I go on holiday and not have to do this, and it would still work?” That’s a different problem to solve. As entrepreneurs, we’re great at solving problems. But if we don’t give ourselves the right problem to work on, our subconscious isn’t going to work on it, our brains are not going to work on it, we’re not going to find those solutions. We stop prematurely at something superficial and that’s a whole level of depth to go beyond just making sure things work, it’s making sure things work without you. Maybe just describe that. What do you actually do? Do you just pull out a piece of paper and you write all the problems? Michael: A big point when I had staff in the office is that if anyone reported any type of problem, big or small, it had to be written down. If an owner said, for example, “I can’t reach you on your mobile phone.” Or, “I don’t understand the statement,” just general questions. If someone doesn’t understand the statement, what we did was we recorded what the landlord income statement meant. “This is your name, this is the date and everything.” We do a video. We do a screenshare/screengrab video and in that was a link. If anyone asks anything about statement, it was there for them. It was in one of our FAQs. People could see it. All of a sudden, we didn’t get all these calls. We worked out any problem in the business. Someone turned out in our office at 7:00 in the morning and said, “Why aren’t you open?” We address those things, we have better signage on the front door, and then all of a sudden, all these problems that a business would have were just disappearing and it was automated. By using video, by using written text, by having window displays, just simple things, the business became automated. So much so that religiously we close before Christmas and we open up towards the end of January, so that everyone gets time off to spend time with their family. Jason: And everyone being your 1½ team members. Michael: When I had a lot of team members, they were loving it big time. If people want to go on holiday, they can go on holiday because the business can run. Jason: All right, so this is really cool. Basically, what you’re talking about is you built a knowledge base of frequently asked questions and leveraged video screen shares, recordings, showing them how to do things so they visually could see, hear, and understand what needed to happen. As they would go through these and have these questions, or you send them a link to this frequently asked questions or in your knowledge base, or you send them this video, they would watch this video. The magic of video is they would feel like you’re right there, walking them through it, tell them, they’d hear you, see you, they feel like you’re taking care of them, and you’re not even there. You did it one time and now, it can be used for 650 different people or however many clients ;that you have. They can go through it multiple times instead of just once because they may not remember. But they’ll remember, “Oh, there’s this thing I can go to to get it.” Michael: Correct. A lot of the agents who I would speak to is on video. I don’t have to speak to video where it takes time, I don’t have enough time. A lot of the videos early on that I did [...] showing or like a routine inspection or open for inspection. I would just have the camera on a tripod and while I was waiting for people to come, I would do a video. “I’m at this property here. Look at this one,” or, “This is a leaking tap. This is how we address it. This is what we do.” Just small videos and I just built up content. I had the tenants any problems, what to do if it’s raining. What to do if your hot water service breaks. What to do if your dog runs out to your next door neighbor. Just simple things I turned into a video so I didn’t have to answer again and again. Again, this is like I’ve touched on before when people could call up and they address the problem or an issue or concern, we try to turn that into a video so that it was answered once, solved 100 times. Jason: The trick is that if you’re going to have to answer ever, once, take note of it, then put it on your to-do list to make a video so you don’t ever have to answer that again. Michael: Yeah. I think as business owners we need to give ourselves the emotional permission today to take the time, even if takes us half an hour to do it, so we bank up future time. That task is going to take us a 30-minute phone call or whatever it is, we spend 30 minutes recording it now, and you’re going to have that conversation a hundred times, you just saved yourself 50 future hours and you could be doing other things. Jason: Absolutely. We have done the same thing with clients who go through our program. I used to coach them all directly, but shifting it into video content allowed me to make sure that I said the same thing and got the best information to each client, and it allowed them to watch it more than once. My memory is not so amazing that I could remember every single thing I’ve said to every single clients about every single topic and not miss something. But I could put it into content. If I get a bunch of questions, I can add more content. I think some people would say, “Jason,” or, “Michael, you guys are really lazy.” I think there’s brilliance in that. I wouldn’t call it laziness; I would call it, we don’t like doing stupid stuff over and over. I mean, really simply, and that’s really frustrating to have to do redundant work. But some people, they love that. They would just do the same thing everyday. They love doing that. That’s not me. I would guess that that’s not really you, either. You like being able to have freedom and not have to answer the same questions over and over and over again. Michael: That’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it? Doing the same thing over and over again, getting the same result. I can’t understand doing the same thing over and over. I guess as business owners, we also get caught up in the really small things, and those small things we think become really important but they’re not. I’ve got some VAs that do the really menial, small tasks that I don’t even have to think about. Things that our software doesn’t do that a VA would do. Get out of that mindset that you have to do these really small things because it’s not important and when we identified that owners and tenants just want to get that problem resolved. If it needs to get escalated, then yeah of course, take it on. But the small things, they don’t really care who answers, it’s fine. As long as it’s clear, their problem is solved, they can walk away happy, then they’re good. Don’t stress. Jason: So, part of this automation, you’re leveraging technology, you’re leveraging video, you’re leveraging a database or knowledge base of frequently asked questions but also, you are leveraging people as process. You’re bringing people almost in a position of almost operating software in some instances. And then you have a core team of people that actually are thinkers and decision-makers that’s really small based on what you said. Let’s get into then the topic at hand, which is automating property showing. How can those listening start to move towards automating property showings and what are the benefits you’ve seen by doing that? Let’s get them excited about the why they should do this first. Michael: As a business owner, having staff members and having multiple properties that would come out open for inspection and also understanding that tenants are really demanding, they want to see the property, they would call you up and say, “Is it open now? Is somebody there now? Can I go now?” And then having a staff member get in the car, drive half an hour listening to music, speaking to their family and friends, doing whatever they want to do in the car, get to the property, wait for the tenant to turn up, show them the property, have them say, “Oh, yeah. It’s nice. The walls really look like they did in the photos.” Whatever it is, or they love it and again they’ll buy for it. “Can you wait for my friend to turn up? My partner’s on their way.” All these headaches. They do the inspection and then they spend another half an hour driving back or getting lunch on the way, or however long it is. One time, okay, but if you replicate that, you’ve got 8, or 10, or 15 properties for rent at that time, that’s a headache for any company because of all these inefficiencies on the road. I identified, “Okay. Well, what do we do?” My wife was working for a ticketing and event company based in San Diego. She was running it from Australia, it’s the operations. We’re in San Diego one time, I had this massive 3D 360 camera. I was going through all the theaters and from every seat there would be a 360 [...] so that people, when they go to buy a ticket, they could see their exact view of how they’re going to see the stage. I was like, “Hang on. Why can’t I do this in real estate? What’s stopping me from doing [...]? This is so simple.” The camera was huge. It was massive at the time. Even three months later, I couldn’t find an actual camera to do it. What I was doing was going to the room and taking 100 shots everywhere and then stitching it together. For one image it was taking way too long. At Christmas time, I was in London, closed the business down, before virtual reality [...]. It can be done. I was walking up the high street in London and I just thought, “I need to find something simple, cheap, to get the job done, and save me more time.” I just went on the phone, I looked at my phone, and I found a local supplier that had the Ricoh 360 camera. It has just been released. I went out and picked it up, and from that point in time, everything I did for real estate, for property had a 360 video. And went then into step two, and I made sure that all the rental properties had a normal video, just with a smartphone or SLR. From that moment on, when I brought the 360 camera, I really hit all our properties hard. Before I go with 360 virtual reality and video, a lot of people that I speak to, they go out and buy the camera, they’ll do one tour which generally happens after the tenant has vacated and they’ve already had marketing for 4–6 weeks, they’ll do the tour and they’ll say, “You know what? Michael, I tried that. It’s not for me. Didn’t help me get a tenant. It was no good.” That’s the biggest feedback I had. That’s cool. That’s fine. But for me, I want to persevere. I made sure that every single property we came up for rent, had a 360 virtual tour. Also in the start, it didn’t help with every single property because I had marketed without photos for four weeks prior, and I was able to find tenants thereabouts, most often than not. With the 360 virtual tours, it was the next time that it came up for rent. A tenant would give me notice to vacate. The day they gave me notice to vacate, the virtual tour went up on all the real estate platforms that are out there. We have the video and we have our photos which are okay. They’re good, they’re okay. But from day one, people could start to see the property without me having to worry about booking an open for inspection and the condition of the property is all boxed up, or the whole family’s home or whatever excuse the tenant was, people could start to see the property. That started to change things. Just to reiterate, if you’re starting off, you have a property that’s coming up for rent, the tenant’s moving out, you can do the 360 tour afterwards. You may not get the hyper result that you’re expecting. Don’t stress. Replicate it on every single property you’ve got and you will start to see massive change from the next time it’s for rent and every time after that. Don’t stress. Give it time. People fail because they give up straight away. Jason: And then each new door that you’re getting on, you’re going to do the virtual tour at the beginning so you’ll have that moving forward. Michael: Correct. I got to the point where if a tenant gave notice to vacate, I went in there, and I do the 360 tour with all the furniture in there as it was. I didn’t put that on publicly but I was able to show people with the tenant’s permission, just give them a link, and remove the link after they see it afterwards. I wouldn’t get it publicly on the real estate platforms but I would have the tour and I would give it to people. That changed everything, too. Tenants were okay with that because you can edit the 360 images to blur out photos in the wall and things like that. That was pretty good. I also just did on the iPhone walk-through videos that I could also comment on. I would take just photos, too. We had over 85% of our real estate booked on virtual platform. Can you imagine, Jason, having 85% of your business, that people can view the property without you having to worry about putting a lot box on, be physically attending the property, and having the issue of staff or even yourself going to have to show that property multiple times? To touch on that, we were averaging at 1.8 showings per property and I’ve got to cancel one showing per property on average. Jason: No kidding. Michael: Huge time savings. If you were to quantify that and you’re breaking out 15 properties a month, let’s say, that’s like $150,000 saving in a year, of time and profit based on our letting fees. Our letting fees are small than American letting fees. It’d be significantly higher in America but for us, it’s about $150,000 just the base saving in 15 properties a month. Jason: Oh, yeah. So, the cost savings compared to the cost of getting the digital cameras and maybe the little bit of work and labor that would take to get these virtual tours done and everything, it was an obvious no brainer, financially. Michael: Obviously, yeah. For me at the start, I would have spent a couple of thousand dollars, maybe more, trying to really solve it. I have a lot of cameras now, a lot of VR, a lot of 360 cameras, and I’m still using the same one that I bought years ago which was the Ricoh. But I’m trying to find the next camera that gives me more depth immersion like the Matterport but something that fits in my pocket. So, for me to do it, if it does not fit in my pocket, I’m not going to take it with me. The Ricoh fits in the pocket. I think it’s $170 or something like that on Amazon. A tripod is $30 or $40 on Amazon. To host 22 platforms of the year is $20. The platform that I use is Vieweet It’s one of the cheapest one out there. It’s robust, it’s simple, it’s no frills. If you’re an agency, you’re just starting out, and you’re looking for cheap ways to do 360 automated showings, $130 for the camera, $30 for the tripod, $20 a year to list 20 showings that you can put up and take down. A lot of people don’t have more than 20 properties available all at once. Jason: It's called Vieweet? Michael: Yes. If you're in $200-$250 US, you can be up and running today to do these things. But just remember, you may not get that sprinkled dust straight away. It’s something where you build that new catalog that does work. Results have been quite fast because I kept at it and you will, I can’t say, you'll get the same if not similar results that I was getting because what it all sold for us—that’s just kind of the odd part of things, Jason. Our property to more people around the world in different that [...] the property. Rather than having to rely on people to come into a lock box or view the property physically, they may not have been the best quality tenant. Rather than giving the best to the bad bunch, we’re able to give it to the best of everyone. Anyone who wants to see it within the markets to high-end income, at least they could go to relocation consultants that were actually being paid by people to come into the country to show them properties. We were showing it to the people before they go to relocation agencies in the end. If they will apply, they would inquire, “Hi, Michael. I'm actually relocating from America or Europe. I'll be there next month, try to arrange a viewing.” I’ll send in the link. They view the property. They don’t need to worry about looking at 10 properties when they get here. We can do the process, we can get them out of Skype or Zoom. At the end of the day, good tenants can go bad. Make sure you get landlord insurance if you can get that. We were so efficient with what we did and that’s probably for another conversation, but we got rent arrears to 0%. Not only will we have to get the best tenants in the marketplace, we get the best tenants that could afford to pay rent and not have any arrears and it solved a massive problem for us too. We are probably at about I think 3½ of rent arrears sometimes because people, they’re just lazy. By changing the type of tenants that we had, also made all the knock on effects that we had so that our arrears is 0% vacancy because we’re able to work credibly with our leases to make sure that longer leases we had better type of tenants. We’re also able to mesh the type of tenants to the property. For example, if we have an application that was someone 50 years plus as opposed to 18-25 year olds. An 18-25 year old would be more transient and they wouldn’t stay on the property for a long period of time, maybe 12 months. But someone who’s older is typically settling down, they don’t want to be moving around everywhere. We have a bit of a tenant selection too. Jason: I realized it might be a little different in Australia than here though. Michael: Well, what we did inside the office, we can verbalize it to the people that apply. Jason: Got it. Michael: No one from Australia is watching this, yeah? No tenants that I had. Jason: Right. This all makes a lot of sense. You have 0% vacancy rate. You’re renting out some of these places before they're even vacant because you're marketing them from the second there's a notice. You're getting people out of state or out of country that are able to look at it. I think it’s brilliant that you've got partnerships you've created in alignment with relocation agencies and relocation agents. I think that's sharp. All of this sounds really fascinating and this is something that anybody can do. Michael: Anyone can do it. Even like staff members. You’ve got people who work for bosses, there's no reason why [...] to help automate your showing. If a virtual tour or a video, or someone contact you at 10:00 o’clock at night and you're this type of person that picks up the phone at 10:00 o’clock and tries to make a time, you can send them link that’ll pre-qualify them. The good thing about UVR, it shows you the room, the whole room. They can be looking at the whole kitchen. They can be looking at the whole bathroom for so many times you go online and you just see a corner of the bathroom which shows the tiles, the toilet, the shower, and the bath. It eradicates all of that, it’s gone. I think I showed you too, when we got to the actual property, the other headache was, I'm not sure if my table would fit, or the fridge might fit in the cavity so then we included an incorporated AR, so the augmented reality which was just another boat. With the AR, you can record the screen, so you can be at the property while it’s taken and actually do a video recording of, “This is where your catch goes. This is where the fridge goes, and the TV goes,” and put the furniture down. Then you can send that video to people too when they inquire about, “Will it fit a king sofa bed, or what size is the fridge cavity?” Because people are visual, mostly. Jason: How are you doing that? How are you putting in beds, virtual beds and things like this into a video? Michael: The app that I use is a free app. I love this stuff. It isn’t going to cost anyone here. Housecraft. Now that’s free augmented reality application. Jason: Housecraft, it sounds like witchcraft, it’s like magic. Housecraft, okay. Michael: It is magic. Again, I have all these tools because they're objection handlers. I don't need to over complicate things because then it just starts making problems. These are free things that anyone can be using. Anyone can do anything that I've been doing. None of it is hard. It’s just I have a better use of my time. Jason: Yeah. You’re using Housecraft, you're using Vieweet, you’ve got your Ricoh camera, are there any other technological tools that help you automate the showing thing? Michael: Basically, how it would work for us was a tenant will give notice to vacate or we would have a brand new property come on. We would have the tour or take the tour. We would put that as a link on a description. A lot of the feedback I had from people around the world was, our property software, our showing software doesn't allow us to put a hyperlink in there. We just put it in the ads, we put it in the ad there too. We had every second photo for us was, “Did you know this property is in virtual reality? Make sure you click on the link in the description.” When people are looking on their smart device, because most people are probably looking ad property searches from their mobiles, it’s important that we could grab their attention with a nice bit of photo, grab their attention saying, “Hey, we've got a virtual tour, or a video, make sure you look at it and prequalify.” Rather than coming to the property and saying it’s for them. If someone did call and inquire the questions was, “Great. Have you seen the virtual tour?” If it was no, it’s like, “Okay, here’s the virtual tour,” and they all had to see it. We would not go to a property unless the person had seen the virtual tour. Jason: Right. Virtual tour first and then if you've watched that and it's still a go, then we will show you the property. Michael: Correct. When we did that, when we went to the property, we knew that it was really just a case of them checking if there's a smell, just their general feel, their juju. It was basically they’re going to apply for the property. Typically, if I went to the property, there's a 93% chance they got the property, and it was 96% that they would apply or they’d rent the property. Jason: Because the virtual tours have filtered out so much. Michael: Prequalified. Jason: Now, in the photos where you doing stuff like box brownie and like this kind of stuff or are we just getting photos? Michael: We change it to make sure that the header photo, the main photo in this sort of style—we’d have a blue sky, green grass—it was just a nice attractive image so that people would click on that, like a clickbait basically. It'll look nice, they click on it, and then the next image was the virtual tour. They knew that there was a virtual tour there and then there are the other photos. They were the only photos that were relevant like the way you actually see the room. If you couldn’t see the room or it was cut off, we wouldn’t show it, because the virtual tour was going to show the property in its entirety. This just meant that I would not put 20 photos up of a half-baked house when I can put three photos up, a virtual tour video, and a walkthrough video—far greater impact. That’s why we’re leasing properties four times faster than our competitors, and we were getting more than double the amount of views on all our properties according to realestate.com.au which is a massive property platform in Australia. What we were doing was, no major cost difference to competitors, but we were getting twice the people looking at our property, and four times faster with being leased. Jason: Michael, this sounds really incredible. Having all these stuff in place, it sounds really low cost, and it sounds like it actually saves you a ton of time, and a ton of money to get these things implemented. Now, what I love to do is connect this to how is this helping you grow your business. Obviously, it’s reducing cost, it's reducing staff, but this sounds like a huge competitive advantage selling point when you're pitching to new owners to say, “We have zero vacancy rate. We’re managing hundreds of properties…” which is unheard of in our industry, “…and we can we can get this thing taken care of and lease it out really rapidly. I've got the cameras on me, I'm ready to go. Let’s do this.” Michael: Correct. There’s a lot of white noise and noise generally in property management. When you're going to a listing presentation, it runs based on the same topics. “We collect rent. We have low vacancy. We are fantastic. We have good systems.” You can basically walk into a presentation and know verbatim what people are going to saying. If somebody inquired about renting out a property, they will get an email from me with our reviews, true statements, and things that we do differently. When I would go to the appraisal, I wouldn't actually bring anything other than a set of virtual reality goggles. For me, I didn’t go in with a booklet. Everyone kind of expects you to walk in with a booklet and pamphlet like all your competitors do. But me, it’s straight away, “Let's work on that trust that rapport with the owner.” I would walk into the presentation, I put the virtual goggles down the table which is a gimmick, they're a gimmick, and then I put them on the table and then I say, “Mr. and Mrs. Landlord, so tell me, what do you love about your property? What are the tenants going to love about the property? What would you do differently to the property that tenants might also think that they wouldn’t want changed?” I get them speaking about it. None of it is about my fees, none of it is about my service, none of it is about anything else about me, it’s just about them. Then it gets to the point where, “I can totally see why people fall in love in this property and it's so important that we show people what this property actually offers. Here are a couple of ways that we can do that.” Bear in mind, by the time they've already got to ask and called us, they've gone and seen our Google reviews. They've seen our social profile. They’ve already assessed us when they make the phone call. Jason: Sure. Michael: It’s so important that you’ve got some social proof and some history there. If you're just starting out as an agent, get reviews, get some social proof because you really are fantastic. As people, we’re fantastic, and there's so many great attributes. If you're starting fresh, you don't have to look fresh. Jason, you're helping build websites. You can make someone who's just starting out look as a major player in the marketplace. Jason: Absolutely. I tell potential clients, there's no reason why a company with zero doors or even five doors has to look any different than a company with a 1000 doors. They can have just as good a branding, just as good of a website, and we can help them with the reputation stuff. We have our service gatherkudos.com for those listening that you can check out, which helps you facilitate or lubricate I guess if you will, that process of getting more reviews from clients. Michael: There's no reason why you can’t. “I don’t have clients to get reviews.” “I'm sure you've done business with people before and they can leave you reviews.” That’s all you need, just that momentum. From the time that we’re meeting with them, they know a little bit about us. I'm not concerned about any other services because they all know that we collect rent, and we find tenants, and we manage maintenance, and we do all that stuff. It's going to the owners that we will love their property, and really focus on the things that they love also, and identify the weaknesses of the property too because it’s important for us at the start the owners to acknowledge their property may have some shortcomings. They wouldn’t have to have that awkward conversation later. The prospective tenants said that, “I like the pink wall in the kitchen.” We get the owners to draw out what they think is needed in the start, and then it sets the time. Then I bring out the virtual goggles, and I say, “This is one way that people are really going to immerse themselves in your property from their own lounge room. We also had virtual goggles and Oculus Rift in our office, so when people came in and they want to get a rental list, we stop giving out paper and we would say, “What are you after? A three-bedroom, two-bedroom?” And give them the goggles, and show them a property. We have far greater success than coming in, picking up some paper in the office, leaving, throwing it in the bin later on for one property they might be interested in. We cut down on paper too, Jason. That was a pretty good experience. We went paperless. For new owners, they could say that we were focused on serving the customer, rather than they burdened with admin and just a slow death in a real estate office. We could show them some of the other tours we've done. We were doing drone work too Jason, where we would showcase the aerial view of the property in proximity to shops because that was another question that people would say, “Probably looks great, but what's it near?” In Australia, with Google maps, sometimes, they hadn't caught up, so the area would look like just massive farmland, but actually, they’ve built up a state with shopping malls, and freeways going through it. We take aerial shot, and show it from what it was near. With owners, I think, I was at 140 doors and 141 appraisals. Jason: You show up for these initial contacts at the property, or these appraisals, or whatever you're doing, and you would pull out virtual reality goggles, and set your camera there, and start describing what you do. Michael: Correct. Now, fast forward a few more years, we didn’t have to go to the property anymore, because I had the virtual tours online, and people can see them, and it would tie on my websites, so people could see that too, and they got to the point where people would make an inquiry, and I will send them a video message. They're already seeing all the proof statements, and a video message to start the initial conversation. I didn't have to meet all these owners, I try to meet all the owners. Sometimes I make time for if they're interstate, they were overseas, whatever the reason. I found other ways to get inside the living room without being in their living room. You have the virtual tours, and then you get the video text messages, and a lot of people will say, “I’m too scared to do a video text message. What if I say the wrong thing?” I say, “It's easy, don’t send it. Just do it again.” Jason: Right, re-record it. Michael: If you're doing a video, you can edit it. If it’s not live, edit. If it’s live, I’d say laugh. So what? Make a mistake, we’re human. I will make the same mistake speaking with you, as I would do on a video. Recapping on it, our process was, every property had to have a virtual tour. When I had the staff, they weren't happy going out and taking a virtual tour, because it would take them between 15 minutes to 30 minutes, maybe depending on how many rooms there were. It's a very fast process to take photos and then you just copy them on to the Vieweet platform, and you put the hyperlinks, the hotspots, and the tour is done. The tour might take you 45 minutes to do. For me, that's no problem at all, if it’s a big one. If it’s small one bedroom place, might take you five minutes to stitch it together. It just depends. The more you do it, the faster you become. Every property had the virtual tour, had the video, had some updated photos. It just meant that as a tenant, trying to select for the property, all the problems were answered. As an owner, we're now looking at other agents online who’s going to rent out their property, they can take the methodical process of photo, virtual tour, application form. That’s very simple process. We then are going to back it up with proof statements, like the rent is zero vacancy. All those other things that were important, because if you guys are doing an appraisal and start just reeling off everything you do, you're the same as everyone else, but if you can show proof statements, then it's 97% there. Jason: Love it. You can easily send a video introducing yourself, and you can send them link to a page of video testimonials from clients. If you can give them all the social proof, and you say, “Look at how we market the properties.” Send them the link to your rental listings. “Here's an example. Here's a property similar to yours maybe.” Suddenly, they can imagine all of it, they can see it, and it becomes real to them. This becomes this huge competitive advantage in this huge differentiator between you, and other property management companies, and then it's allowing you to close more deals. I would imagine it facilitates word-of-mouth, because people are going to talk about you because they're probably impressed. I would be impressive if somebody showed up with goggles, and camera, and show me tours, and sent me a video text message. I'd be like, “These guys are on top of things, and they're tech savvy, and they're going to take care of me out of the gate.” Michael: I guess one of the great things is, I won't mention the exact pricing, but we were full fee. We weren’t competing with, “But that agent is offering a cheaper fee,” anymore. We’re full fee, we’re doing full leasing fee for management estate. In Australia, we can't charge as many fees as you can in America. I wish we could, but we were full fees. I was maximizing every potential fee that I could, so routine inspection fees, higher statement fees. We were full fees, we don’t have to compete with someone. I remember when I started, Jason, and I’m trying to get traction, I sent out a thousand flyers to people and offered a low management fee to people for three months. I got one person out of the thousand that I sent out, that was great, because there were multiple referring client. But starting out, thinking that I have to charge something low, so that I can get in front of more people was one of the biggest crazy thoughts that I had at the very start. Jason: It's one of the most common beginner pitfalls is, “I need to be cheaper than everybody else to get started and to compete.” Michael: Yeah. If I just realized back over 10 years ago that my value proposition had to change. Jason: Yeah. Michael: “Not with my fees but with my value proposition. How do I not complicate it? Now, I no longer have any other office. I work from a home office. I've restructured because I don’t want to have physical staff. I've got VAs that do all the menial tasks. All the properties that we have are on the virtual platform. I've got no properties arranged at the moment. No rent arrears. Last year, I was abroad seven months of the year. I was in Turkey for two months, Indonesia for two months, in and out of America, or like interstate. I traveled a lot. This year, maybe four months of the year. If I get a new business, I will have someone go and do the virtual tool for me. I’ll train a simple person who doesn't want to do anything else if I'm not around. I enjoy going to the properties and checking them out. I'm a bit of a property nerd, I like checking them out, seeing how we can add value and connecting. The most important thing for me as an agency was to make sure that we have meaningful conversations, getting rid of all the clutter and all the noise. Instead, we will focus on the good happy goals, the meaningful connections, making sure that we can add value to our customers and our clients. That was our end result, to have that meaningful connection. The rest just all falls into place, it’s all systems. Jason: You didn't go into it thinking, “I just want to automate everything to the nines.” Your core end goal was, “We want to have meaningful connections,” and then, “I want to have freedom as I'm doing this,” to just focus on that. Michael: Yeah. Automating it just allows the opportunity to spend more time with people. Jason: I love it. Michael: It wasn't to make it so easy that I could travel a lot. It just meant that I need to get better connections. I pick up properties from going overseas. So many Americans travel. I've been in Europe and picked up a new management system [...] abroad. It gives me that flexibility. Also, you get to actually get new systems. People do things differently, so go out and see how other people are doing things to make their businesses better and how can you implement it in your business. It’s so important. Jason: Yeah. I think I heard a quote the other day that was, “Travel is the language of peace.” The amount of tolerance, and learning, and growth that happens just from being in different environments and different cultures, I remember taking a trip to Israel and it just was so different than what I was used to in the US. Even the checkpoints where kids were holding machine guns. It was just all so different and it was just really eye opening. I've been in Mexico, very different. You’ve been exposed to so many different cultures. You get to really fill your soul with having this variety in life. I think that's part of why a lot of people are in property management. They love that unique variety. There's all these different unique challenges that come with it. There’s all these unique opportunities to meet unique people. You really got to focus on the even best and highest portions of that by being able to treat that freedom. Michael: Don't be scared of doing anything. Don’t be scared of making mistakes. Trial it. If it’s not 360 for someone, if it’s not video for someone. Go ahead and trial things and see how it can give you that freedom, but also to be able to engage with people, family, and friends. Imagine if you live in a suburb and you've got a sports club, a church, a local pub, or whatever you’ve got, all these meeting places but you never get to go there because you're so busy trying to do the admin. You're a local real estate agent and you're not even able to local. Flip that upside down. Imagine if you're a local real estate agent doing local things because you have all these other things automated and being done for you while you're networking, and meeting, and engaging with people in your area. Imagine for a second how different that looks. Jason: Yeah, I love it. I think, Michael, everybody listening has probably by now hopefully felt a little bit inspired that there's this possibility that you've painted for them that is probably for a lot of property manager still outside the current world view. I think that's exciting. I appreciate you coming on the show. How can people get in touch with you and what sort of take away would you want to leave them with? Michael: Well, if you’ve got any questions about anything we've spoken about today, just hit me up on Facebook and send me a message and I'll respond that way. It’s probably the easiest way rather than giving you a cell number or an email, just go to Facebook, we can connect there. I'm on messenger, it’s the simplest way. Again, I guess the constant message that we've been discussing today is try it; don’t give up, try new things that may automate your business and give you more time tomorrow even though you’re spending more time today to get it done. Jason: Perfect. This is an episode I will hope that people will listen to more than once. Michael, I appreciate you coming on the show. Michael: You're welcome. Jason: I think you gave a lot of value. I'm grateful to you. Thanks for being here and sharing so many ideas. Michael: Thank you. Jason: Alright, cool. That was really fun for me as a nerd to have Michael on. Message him through Facebook. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, as I said in the intro, then you should be a part of our community. You would love it in there. Make sure you join the DoorGrow Club. You can get into that by going to doorgrowclub.com. Our Facebook group, there's really cool people in there like Michael, and there's just some phenomenal helpful property managers. People that buy into this vision that good property management can change the world. That what the industry needs here, especially in the US is collaboration over competition. These are people that are willing to collaborate, willing to help, willing to support you. Make sure you get inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group and check it out. If you join that group, if you apply and join that group, it's free, but you have to apply. We will give you some free gifts including a fee bible and some other really cool takeaways and gifts over the next few days after we welcome you to the group, just to welcome you aboard, part of our Facebook group. Check that out at doorgrowclub.com. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everybody.  

The American dream no longer represents home ownership. Whether you’re looking to rent or buy, everyone wants the same thing: A place they call, “home.” Not a house, but a home. There is a difference. Today, I am talking with Chris Litster, CEO of Buildium, which helps property managers handle properties, leases, tenants, and units. Chris shares how property management firms should focus on customer service, relationships, and reputation. You’ll Learn... [06:53] Service Oriented, Relationship Focused: Avoid treating residents, owners, or vendors adversarially, if you want to be a successful property management firm. [07:43] Millennial and Baby Boomer generations view home ownership as a burden. When things change, personally or professionally, they want to be able to move. [09:25] One reason to rent is to avoid dealing with and doing maintenance. Time is better spent focusing on other priorities. [11:19] Multiple generations want technology from property management companies to automate payments, submit maintenance request, and perform other tasks. [12:04] People demand a strong relationship with their property management “firm.” Their moving away from using the term, “Landlord,” because of the baggage it brings. [12:25] Property managers should make their language more friendly and appealing. [15:50] Property management firms should shift their mindset to be service-oriented and understanding to have stronger relationships and less resident turnover. [17:40] Property managers have a massive network and influence with owners, tenants, potential residents, and others. They can cause a ripple effect and change the world. [19:50] Every property manager says they’re the only good ones. All others are terrible. A mindset of scarcity has been falsely created in the industry. [20:50] Low levels of awareness and perception impact a business’s ability to grow. The industry needs collaboration over competition. [22:41] Buildium believes, knows, and has evidence that service orientation and relationships matter. [25:38] Core principle and goal of technology is to take care of customers and solve their problems efficiently. [28:53] Strategic vs. Tactical Timing: Expanding and growing a business takes time and effort. Automating processes gives you time to think strategically. [30:57] SEO Lottery Addiction: Spending revenue on SEO won’t generate ROI. [37:21] Ladder of Autonomy: Companies that understand their business, customers, message, and differentiator are at the top level and benefit everyone involved. [38:43] Fundamental Funnel Basics: Brand, pricing, reputation, Website, sales process. Tweetables American dream no longer represents home ownership. Landlord Stereotype: Evil person who collects your rent, but doesn’t take care of things. Low levels of awareness and perception impact a business’s ability to grow. The industry needs collaboration over competition. Resources Chris Litster’s Email Address Buildium All Property Management - a Buildium Company Constant Contact MailChimp DGS 3: Buildium’s 2015 State of Property Management Report – Part 1 DGS 3: Buildium’s 2015 State of Property Management Report – Part 2 National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) The Iceberg Report Google Ads DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason: All right, we are live. Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I have a special guest. I am here hanging out with Chris Litster, the CEO of Buildium. Chris, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Chris: Hey, Jason. How are you? Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I’m just flabbergasted by that opening. The energy, I could already feel it. It’s going to be a great hour. Jason: Yeah. I put quite a bit of thought into that little intro. Chris: It’s great. It’s fantastic. Jason: Yeah. We’re pretty passionate about this and we want to champion a cause here. Chris, I’m really excited to have you on. I love to get a little bit of background on you and how you got connected to Buildium. Give us a little history here. Chris: Sure. I’ve been with Buildium now for just over a little bit of 2½ years. I have been in the SMB or the small- and medium-sized business market space for probably 15–20 years. I’ve been in tech for a lot longer than that. I was with IBM for a while, a couple of other tech companies, then I landed at Constant Contact in 2006. It was an email marketing firm for small businesses like MailChimp and a couple of other players in that space. I was with Constant Contact for 10 years, started with them, they’re pretty small, and that when we grew them and scaled with a great team at Constant Contact. Ultimately, ended up selling them three years ago, selling Constant Contact. Took a year off to reacquaint myself with my wife and three boys. During that 10 years they have the short end of the stick as we’re building Constant Contact. During that time off, I had the opportunity, through different acquaintances and such, to meet the former CEO and one of the founders of Buildium, Michael Monteiro, who I know that you had on this show. Michael, at that point, was interested in just talking with folks who had scaled companies before. Buildium was on the verge of that inflection point of really scaling and revenue growth was starting to really accelerate. Michael and the team at that time over the past 12 years or so, had grown Buildium to where it was. Now, because of our great product, great team, and great customers, we are ready to go to the next level. We started talking and it took three times of meeting each other. Finally, it was either he or maybe it was I who had said, “Hey, wait a minute. Do you want me here and did you say, ‘Hey, would you want to join us?’” I wasn’t really ready to jump back into the space yet but there’s so many great things going on here at Buildium that I decided to. The fact that Buildium again was focused of small and medium business was something that really attracted me because this is where I get my passion from the small business folk. The fact that it was then focused on one vertical instead of hundreds, that being property management on the residential side, I jumped in. I joined a couple of years ago as the Chief Customer Officer and for that, I was responsible for sales, marketing, partners, support, and success. I did that for the next year, year-and-a-half or so. Around that time, Michael and I started talking about Michael looking to transition out of the CEO role. He’s been the CEO since founding—that was 12 years or so—and we started talking. Last July, we went through the transition. I have now been the CEO since last July and I’m loving every minute of it. Jason: Cool and what’s he up to now? Chris: Michael and Dimitris, our other founder, are both advisers here at Buildium. Dimitris has a couple of things going on but he’s here a couple of days a week helping us out with some of the larger initiatives that we have going on. Michael’s here a couple of days a week advising me, the rest of the exec team. They’re both active board members for Buildium. It’s just great having them both here because it just adds to that continuity, builds on the history. I can turn to him and say, “Hey, this customer that’s been around for 10 years. How did we get them and what were the things that they were looking to do 10 years ago?” so that when I go and meet them, I know the history that they’ve had with Buildium and how we’ve helped them grow. Jason: Great. The topic that we had discussed or that we had down is homes, not houses. Let’s get into that. What do you mean by homes, not houses? Chris: Great question. I’m sure, as many people know, Buildium is in the residential space, as far as helping property managers with our platform to manage their properties, manage their leases, tenants, and units. Also on the accounting side. We have 16,000 customers, we’re managing on the platform about 1.8 million units, and through that, we have the ability to not only talk and speak with our customers in the residence, but also because of our partnership with NARPM and a few other things, we do a ton of research. We have most certainly seen over the past couple of years, this trend where the idea of the importance of relationships between the property management firm and their residents has really taken on a new and different light where relationships have become so important. As part of that, the realization that regardless of if you rent or if you buy a home, everyone is looking for the same thing. Even when you are a renter, you are actually looking for a place that you can call home. The idea of referring to this as a rental property or a rental unit, in the minds of the resident, they’re really looking to understand and get that feeling of, “Hey, I’m going to call this home.” Why are they doing that? Because frankly, there’s many trends that are going on, both at, let’s say, the millennial segment as well as in the upper segments of the baby boomers, where this idea of the American Dream where it used to represent home ownership no longer really stands for that. It’s the whole idea of that, ‘I just want to find a home.’ By calling it a home and not a house, what we’re trying to do is bring that idea of belonging and bring that idea of where can I put my roots down. Just for the fact that I didn’t sign a mortgage and I have a rental agreement, doesn’t mean that my aspirations are different somehow. Because of that, property management firms should really take that idea really as far down the road as they can and understand that they have to be service-oriented. They have to be relationship-focused. This idea sometimes of looking at residents or your owners or your vendors in somewhat of an adversarial way, is no longer something that you can do if you really want to be a successful 21st century property management firm. Jason: That makes a lot of sense. I think part of the challenge is that nowadays, millennials and the younger generation, a lot of them see home ownership as a burden. They see it as a tether in a lot of situations. We live in a day and age in which people can work from coffee shops, they can have freedom, they can travel, and jobs change. It’s no longer the day and age where people will stay in the same career sometimes for just 20 years. When things are changing, they want to be able to move. I think also, one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed renting was I didn’t have to do the maintenance stuff. I do want to have to deal with that. I either have to hire a house manager to manage the property for me or have a property manager that helps manage those things for me. I don’t want to have to deal with that. My time is far better spent on my business, with my family, those kind of things, and that’s not just a priority for me. I don’t have any sort of kick out of doing that stuff. Chris: Exactly and that’s not only. So, 100% on the millennial side. The idea that even though they may only be a resident for a year or two years, again, they still want to have that strong feeling of being able to call this their home. The same thing, for different reasons, is on the baby boomer generation. Here we now have this generation who are quickly becoming empty nesters left, right, and center, and they now have really no more great use for the large house that they have in the suburbs. They have all this space, again to your point, they no longer want to have to clean in every week and they no longer want to maintain this beautiful house. So, what they’re doing is actually selling their houses. We’re seeing a big trend of, for example, there’s a brand new neighborhood here in Boston that has just grown over the past decade or so called the Seaport. Many empty nesters are moving into the Seaport and renting. Actually, they’re renting it with some of the leases are almost renting at will, a three-month lease, a half year lease, for the same reasons that you talked about. They want to now travel. They want to have that flexibility that, should they want to pick up and explore another part of the country or another country altogether, they don’t want to be burdened, like you said, tethered down by the fact that they’re carrying this mortgage. That is changing on the top end as well. The interesting thing that binds these two segments together, these two parts of our industry together, is they’re both asking for technology. They’re both asking for technology with their property management companies for automation of payments, understanding, “Hey, if I have burst pipe, I don’t want to have to call but rather perhaps tell Alexa that there’s a burst pipe or you log into the portal to put in there maintenance request. Even though many people look at millennials and baby boomers as quite different—in many cases they are—there’s a huge intersection in the property management space that both of these segments share. The largest one that we’re seeing, there’s two. One, again is around technology and the other one is demanding a really strong relationship with their property management firm and actually moving away from even using the word ‘landlord’ because there’s just so much baggage in that word. But saying, “My property management company,” or, “My property manager,” it really works to strike in the relationship that they’re looking to have. Jason: Let’s talk a little bit about the language then because I think that does matter. I think you’re right. The word ‘landlord’ is always been displayed or the archetype of the landlord is this sort of evil person that you have to pay rent to and that doesn’t take care of things. This is what you’ll see in shows. They’re often this great antagonist in virtually any show. Because we’re talking about homes, not houses, what sort of language should a property manager be using? How should we be rephrasing this to make things a bit more tenant-friendly and shifting towards being more appealing towards residents? Chris: That’s it. That last word you just used. We strain and really speak with our property management customers about the idea of resident versus tenant. There’s just a deeper meaning around resident as opposed to lacking emotion the word tenant. As the title of what we’re talking about here today, wherever you have that opportunity, use the word home as opposed to unit. Unit is so devoid of any emotion. Even if it’s a rental apartment or even if it’s a multifamily property, when you’re talking with the residents, talk it in a sense of their home. And the idea of partnership. We talked about looking for a deeper relationship amongst all of the different constituents that our property management company works with. Instead of looking at it as us and them, you talk about the partnerships. The partnership that you have together with your vendors, the maintenance vendor or your service partners. The partnership that you have with your owner. So really, getting away from, again, that adversarial type of thing and being deliberate about using this language and taking the time to check yourself as a property management firm, to make sure that you’re using that language that holds your constituents or your partners in, as opposed to setting up that wall between you and your resident, you and your vendor, or you and your owner. Jason: Got it. I’ve heard some property managers joke that calling your clients your owners has this psychological negative impact. If you call somebody your owner, they own you. You’re like a slave to them. Chris: Yeah. You reminded me of another one. Definitely that idea of client versus owner, tenant versus resident, service partners instead of, “This is my landscaper or roofer.” Jason: I like the idea of service partners instead of just vendors. The latter sounds pretty cold. All right, we’ve addressed several target audiences here that are connected to property management. Tenants instead of our residents, owners instead of our clients, vendors instead of service partners. Are there any other groups we’re missing here? Chris: No. I think, yes, it’s language but if you look at the property management firm itself, there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen. It’s that idea of being service-oriented and being understanding that if you get that service-orientation, you’re going to have stronger relationships and you’re going to then hopefully have residents who stay in your properties longer, so then not having to deal with your turnover expense, the constant ins and outs, and just building those bonds. Ultimately, again, building the language with that mind shift. We have customers that are just living into this idea. Not only are they growing, they start to get a reputation for this. We know in our space, word of mouth is so important that they’re seeing people coming to them and saying, “Hey, I’ve heard that you really are doing something different and you really are looking to help with the service perspective. And on top of that, you’re using some cool technology that helps build on the relationships.” This idea of technology taking out the human factor is not what we’re talking about. Being a technology vendor, some people are somewhat surprised to hear that. We look at technology being the enabler, to help firms become more efficient so that they then have the time to be able to focus on building these relationships, making sure they’re service-oriented, and making sure frankly that they’re differentiating themselves from everybody else in the pack. Jason: I think that’s a really important distinction. Going back to what you’re talking about, you’re talking about with residents, with clients, service partners, you’re talking about just in general being a more respectful company honoring other people, caring about other people. I really believe that property managers have a massive network. They have a massive ripple effect between all the owners, all the tenants, all the different people that they connect with, even potential residents, they are able to have quite a big influence. It can be a bunch of little micro interactions that are negative, and it can be lots of micro interactions that are positive. That little shift, even in language and little things. This is what gets me excited about our company, DoorGrow, and impact that we get to have through our clients. But I really believe that good property management can change the world. Chris: I completely believe that. I’m with you 100%. That’s so great. Jason: So, good property management can change the world. Bad property management [...] industry and it can have a massive ripple effect either way. Chris: Well, think about this. To you’re point, driving and if you’re commuting somewhere, we know that property management firms love to have the banners, love to have the advertising, “This building is managed by so-and-so.” If they have a bad reputation, people that are two, three, or four degrees away from that actual company, there’s a good change that they know of that reputation. So, even though I’m not directly involved in XYZ property management firm, when I drive into Boston every morning, I know of folks, those that aren’t even our customers, I know the reputation that they have. I think that’s a good example of that ripple effect. They’re always out there. You can’t miss those banners. There’s just this constant on of this advertising for these property management firms, that if they don’t have that great reputation to back it up, like you said, it can impact them pretty directly. Jason: I think it’s even bigger than that and I want everyone listening to realize this. A lot of property managers I talk to, they say, “Well, we started our company because there weren’t any good companies in our market,” or they tell me, “We’re the only good ones. All the other ones are terrible.” But everyone says that. What’s interesting is I think some people have this mindset of scarcity that I think has been falsely created in this industry. In single family residential, according to Iceberg Group, we’ve got about 70% that are self-managing. There’s tons of blue ocean, tons of available potential market share, and yet everybody’s been fighting over the coldest, worst, most difficult leads. I think the thing to realize is that there really isn’t scarcity right now in the US. There really is not and the thing that I really want listeners to pay attention to is that the companies that have bad reputations in your market are hurting your ability to grow your company because of that. The awareness level is low and the perception level is low. Those two things are impacting your ability to grow. I think what the industry needs right now is collaboration over competition. Collaboration allows you to feel safe helping your competitors. A rising tide raises all ships is sort of true but it sinks some because the tide is low in the industry as a whole. Some of those ships are not seaworthy and they’ll sink. But I think if you can lift up the ones that are seaworthy, there’s going to be a lot more business to go around. The ones that are at the top promoting the industry are going to be the ones that win. Anytime there’s a new business category in the US, the person that builds the category instead of their own individual brand is the winner. Google built the category of internet search. Now we google everything. Whether you’re on any other search engine, “I’m going to google it.” Kleenex built the category of disposable paper facial tissue. Everyone was using handkerchiefs before that. So now, Kleenex is synonymous with any tissue. “Give me Kleenex.” Property management has been held back, I believe, and has a huge opportunity to grow. It’s been around for decades but the problem is the awareness level is on par with brand new industries. I don’t even know of any other new industries that exist in the US that are as young in reputation, perception, and that sort of infancy other than maybe marijuana, vaping and these kind of things. Property management can be as big, I think, as the real estate industry. It has that potential. We barely scratched the surface. Chris: I completely agree. It’s funny that you used the all the boats rising because we talk about that all the time here at Buildium. We talk about the idea that this industry is ripe for so many things as far as growth and a little bit of disruption, as far as technology adoption, and it’s all for the idea of introducing the true human element into the industry. Further, this idea that everyone who really buys into that is then going to rise up because as you said, I think there’s enough pie for everybody. It’s really interesting when we’re at either some of our meetups or we’re at NARPM, there is a real camaraderie around those folks. You can almost tell those folks that have really been successful around this idea of understanding, it’s the strength of relationships that count. Why? They’re not threatened by the other property management firms because they know that their relationships are solid, that their residents, their clients, their service partners are going to stay with them, because they know the reason that they’re going to stay with them. They don’t mind talking with other PMCs because they know that they’re solid in their business. What really working here to try to bring that element, obviously in addition to the technology. But there is a change that needs to happen and frankly, it’s not just a, “Hey, we think you should change.” What we’re saying is, “We 100% believe, know, and have evidence that people who take this idea of service orientation, this idea of relationships matter, and using technology to get to those, we know it works.” Again, 16,000 customers and we have so many of them that are successful, who have bought into that entire idea. What do they have? They have happy long-term residents, they have happy clients, and they have happy service partners that aren’t going to go anywhere else because they know they’re in it together. That’s what we’re looking to really continue to help and help the entire industry here, which is really exciting. To your point, there’s an opportunity here that not too many industries have. We have seen research that says that the property management industry is the third highest industry in interaction with constituents, let’s say, because they have to deal with residents, they have to deal with their clients. That idea of total interaction and ongoing interaction with people, it’s the third highest. What are the other two? Hospitality and retail. That’s pretty good company that they’re in and hospitality and retail understand that relationships matter. Now, it’s time for the third person or the third set in this industry to realize that. Jason: That’s really an interesting little factoid right there. Let’s go back to what you mentioned earlier. You’re talking about tech enables you to spend more time on relationships. I think there is this mythical creature that everybody’s chasing after that looks like this robot that will run their business for them. They can cut out relationships and they can have this business that runs itself. It could be super easy. I think when we chase that mythical creature, we end up chasing a pipe dream. It becomes really difficult and we alienate ourselves from our customer base. I think that’s an important thing to point out what you’ve mentioned earlier. I love technology. I’m a total nerd, I love it, I love automation, I love geeking out on this stuff. But the whole goal of all of it, everyone needs to remember the core principle that it’s about your customer. It’s all about giving your customer more depth. I think instead of trying to hit more people, more superficially, more quickly, we need to figure out how to go more deep, more personal, and connect more with more people. If that becomes the focus, then we can leverage technology and automation to take care of the mundane, while we focus on the relationships and getting us personal and as deep as possible. I’ve noticed that a general rule I give to my team, that if any is a sticky or difficult communication, or situation, or somebody’s not happy, we want to go as personal as possible. The most personal would be in person. Second most would be a video call like this. Third would be maybe a phone call. But it needs to be as personal as possible because it just calms the situation down, it makes things easier, and really that’s what people want. People want to be taken cared of. A business only exist if it’s serving somebody and if it’s solving their problems and their pains. That’s only the reason a business exist. You cut yourself off from the customer, you’re really killing your ability to have a business. Chris: Right. Do you want to come and do our copywriting? You’re hitting on every single thing that are just so fundamental to what we believe here at Buildium. The idea of using technology for technology’s sake is a non-starter. The idea of using technology, as you talked about, to serve something and what we truly believe, after talking with our customers and understanding the industry, that using technology leads to the greater efficiency that offers you the ability to then spend your time where you can and where you should from an important business perspective. There are two things. The efficiency brings your ability to spend time with, again, your various partners or clients and your residents. So really, get to know them, to really understand them, to really interact with them because now you don’t have to be chasing them for, let’s say, the rent payment because that’s automated. You don’t have to be chasing them for understanding their tasks, their needs from a maintenance perspective because that’s automated. Rather, what you need to talk with them about is, “Hey, am I meeting your expectations to help you build this home, this idea of a home?” “Hey, am I meeting your expectations as my client?” “Hey, how can we think of growing this business together?” That’s the second part. The second part is how do I look to grow my business? If your goal as a property management firm is to continue to expand, that takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of effort. You really need to understand what type of properties you’re really good at, what types of residents you really want to have, what type of clients you really want to get in business with. That’s not something you can just do haphazardly. You have to work at it. You have to plan at it. If you’re not focused on, as you said, those things that can be repeated and processes that can be automated, that gives you the time to really think of you business strategically to continue to help grow. You are, in a directed fashion, going after and driving how you want to grow your business, so you’re growing your business and your business isn’t growing in spite of you or growing at you. You’re taking control of it and you’re working in a methodical way now to grow your business and become more efficient. Jason: You mentioned something that stood out to me, talking about strategic timing. This is one of the first things we have clients do when they come aboard with us, is we have them do a time study to get really clear on how much strategic time they’re spending in the business and how much tactical time. Usually, their strategic and tactical ratio is almost 99% tactical. It’s like everything is completely tactical. You’re just doing work in the business. You’re handling emails. You’re doing phone calls. You’re dealing with your calendar. You’re just working. Business can’t grow if there isn’t strategic time. Strategic time is the time you spend to focus on growth. If that doesn’t exist, you won’t be growing. I think another thing that’s important to point out is you talked about how customer service and relationships really matters. One thing to point out that I think a lot of property managers listening, I talked to hundreds of property management business owners that they want to do good customer service. They want to be the good company. I don’t think of of them wake up in the morning and say, “I want to be terrible to tenants, I want to be terrible to my owners, and fight terrible customer service.” I think one of the big things holding them back is that the entire industry is addicted to the SEO lottery. The SEO lottery is a losing game for the majority but you get a few noisy winners that hit the jackpot. They tell everybody how they built their business and grew things, they get the top spot in Google, and everybody chases after this myth or this thing like they’re playing the slot machine in Vegas. It’s harmed the entire industry because if the company is spending their hard-earned revenue on SEO, pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, content marketing, social media marketing, and they’re not getting an ROI, then the first thing to go is customer service. They’re worst off than if they have just not spent the money in the first place because they didn’t get an ROI. So, then the first thing to go is that customer service. They’re not growing. There isn’t growth. There isn’t going to be customer service. So, if anybody’s listening, shameless plug, talk to DoorGrow. We help people get out of that problem and then you can move. I find that when people solve that problem, the next thing they want to focus on is everything else. They want to focus on systems and processes, building a team, creating culture, focusing on the customer, and then they get in to making a difference. But when you’re starving, you’re not too focused on anybody else. I think there’s a Chinese proverb that says, “Your own toothache is more important to you than a million people dying on the other side of the world,” or something like that. Chris: I have not heard of that one. That’s pretty interesting. Jason: I may have adapted it, but... Chris: I agree with you. I agree, let’s say 99%, and the reason being is because we’re also, as part of the growth aspect of what we offer and what the industry likes is that we do have the whole property management side of our business. However, I’m going to caveat with that, there is a massive impact of relationship and reputation in that side of the business as well. Why? Because you have prospective clients going to that side and going that that marketplace, and ultimately being exposed to local property management firms because they’re interested in having a third party manage their properties for a myriad reasons as to why they no longer want to self-manage. There is a reputation and relationship aspect that plays into that exposure as well, because again, it goes back to the banners on the side of the building ad that I’ve talked about. When you are exposed to potentially these three, four, whatever other property management firms, if you have a good reputation, I will contend that that owner probably has heard about you. If you have a bad reputation, they’ve probably have heard about you as well and they immediately are going to discount you. If you have a good reputation and they see that, “Okay, this property management firm has said, ‘Yes, I’m open to looking to get more greater properties under management,’” they’re going to turn to that, one that they have a little inkling as far as, “Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that this is a good firm.” I agree with you about the vast majority of what we’ve just talked about. However, reputation and relationships even matter in that space, too. What goes of value, of all the channels, it’s not binary. It’s not the idea of, “Oh, I can just,” to your point, “focus on this execution aspect and not stuff over here,” because this stuff over here is also going to matter in whatever marketing channel or marketing activity you use. Jason: Absolutely. If somebody shores up all the major league should exist in the sales pipeline all the way from awareness to closing a contract, then it makes sense absolutely to do different advertising methods, all probably management. But if you have a massive leak where you have this horrible reputation online, or your website doesn’t create trust or convert or answer their core questions, or your pricing is off in your market, or your branding is off like they think you’re a real estate company or something generic with properties or they’re confused, there’s a lot of potential pitfalls. If you have all those pitfalls, you can turn the spigot on full-blast and it’s not going to work very well. If you have those things tight, you can squeeze blood from a stone and you can use allpropertymanagement.com, you can do SEO services and focus on that, maybe get more business. But you need to make sure that you end up foundation of it, like you said, is word of mouth and reputation. That’s going to trump everything. It’s like a clamp on the pipeline. You could have everything else in alignment but if you have really bad reputation, they’re going to check you out. Even if your website’s amazing, even if your advertising and copywriting are on point, they’re going to go check you out because they want to feel safe. If you’re a one-star company, they’re going to feel a little bit nervous talking to you, and then you’re going to have to figure out how to spin it. Like, “Oh, the tenants just hate us but the owners love us or something like that. Chris: This is something from a small business perspective that it’s not only property management but it’s everywhere. It’s that idea and I think what you’re saying is shoring up your business model before you pour a ton of gas on the top of what we call a funnel. I can’t tell you the number of not only property management firms but owners from all different types of SMBs. When you start to talk with them and they want to do that top of funnel stuff, they want to do all of that because sometimes that’s more attractive. It leaves a more sexy type of activities about growing your business. Then when you go, “Okay. Well, are you going to be able to keep that? Are you going to be able to get a response to that lead within a matter of minutes? Are you going to be able to service that prospect all the way through? And then are you going to be able to keep that prospect if they become a customer for a long time because you’re all service?” That’s when you start to see the whole, “No, I can’t do that. No, I can’t follow-up. I really don’t understand that. I don’t really have good service levels.” It’s very hard for folks to say, “Wow, that would be a waste of money, actually, to really expand my top of funnel work until I get,” like you just said, “everything shored up.” When that happens, you know it. For us here, we talk about the ladder of autonomy. It’s kind of a 50s phrase but companies that are just existing or at the bottom of the ladder. Customers have this level of autonomy because they have all their you-know-what together, they understand their business, they understand their customers, they understand their message, they understand the differentiator, they’re working on a completely different level than other folks in their industry, notably on the property management side. Our whole goal is to get everybody up to that top level on the ladder so everyone, again, we think will benefit from it, the ripples, the network effect that you talked about is going to be there. Who’s going to benefit as well? Residents, clients, and service partners. Jason: Yeah and that’s why at DoorGrow we shifted our focus just to help optimize that whole funnel so it makes sense. Once you have that dialed in, everything is more effective. [...] is more effective, Google Ads is more effective, everything becomes more effective when you take care of those things. I usually use the analogy, it’s like trying to do bodybuilding and you’re not eating food and sleeping but you take some really great supplements. Supplements are not going to cut it, but supplements can really help you get to the next level, probably, if you take care of the foundational basics. Dialing your brand, your pricing, your reputation, your website, your sales process, all these things that are in the funnel, these are the basics. These are [...] any business, like you said. Chris: It’s [...], Jason. I love that that’s your philosophy. It’s so important. And also, everyone here at Buildium is going to be psyched that I said the word funnel a number of times because I talk about [...] company. Jason: I love the idea of a funnel. It’s a great metaphor as well. Is there anything else we should discuss here on this idea of homes, not houses? If not, let’s let you plug something. Chris: I think we covered it. Again, the idea of more and more over the years, we think it’s going to become almost a requirement. Those folks that are grabbing on to it today, competition is there, things are hotter than ever, and it is not nice to have anymore. Other industries have been disrupted through this very same idea and now, we see evidence, we talk with our customers, we talk with general folks that aren’t even our customers in the industry, and we really see this big wave coming. Luckily, it’s also a cool time because the technology is there to enable the way to become more efficient through those processes that you talked about that are more on the just everyday ongoing type of things. Technology is there now to really allow this to happen. It is an exciting time. It’s an exciting time to be a vendor, it’s an exciting time to be a service provider in this space as you guys are, to see where it really goes. Just the whole property management industry is pretty hot right now and I just like to be a part of it. It’s really exciting. Jason: Chris, it’s been great having you on the show. I feel like we had a lot of synergy. I really like you. You strike me as a visionary entrepreneur, a decade building up Constant Contact, all this kind of stuff. Not every company is lead by a visionary. I always feel safer with a company that is led by a visionary entrepreneur. That’s why I use T-Mobile, that’s why I have Apple products. I feel like there’s always been these visionaries at the helm of these companies. One thing I want to point out, to plug Buildium or make them look maybe even better, is we’ve been talking all about being focused on the customer, being focused on your customer, serving your customer. We’ve been talking about that for property management companies, but I’m getting the sense that this is how you and your company view dealing with your own constituents, your own customers, that you want to serve their needs, make a difference for them, and not just squeeze dollar out of them. Chris: 100%. Jason: And to that point, some companies are focused primarily, first and foremost, as to serve investors. There’s a different focus there instead of serving their constituents. I think there’s been a lot of talk about this and a lot of pain by people in some other property management software and it’s really difficult to switch. So, maybe you can touch on that difference a little bit with Buildium and maybe you can tell us how does somebody switch this? Somebody listening might be like, “Hey, maybe I like this guy Chris. I’d rather have him at the helm where I’m tethering my whole business to.” Chris: Yeah. I hope there’s a lot of people that have that reaction. It is a core, foundational reality that we love here at Buildium. It’s something that Michael and Dimitris started years ago. It’s something that I 100% believe in. I think that’s why Michael and I hit it off so well so quickly. It’s actually the core essence of every single Buildium and there’s more than 200 of us now that believes in. We do not believe that we’re going to be a 100-year company who changes the face of property management if that’s not at our core and it is. There’s a reason why we believe that customer success and customer support is not a function in a company but it’s everybody. There’s also a reason to believe that we’ll stay on the phone with customers for however long they need it. Again, property management on the accounting side is pretty involved. We’re not talking about accountants. We will stay on the phone and we will ride out the basic T account and say, “Here’s your debit, where’s the credit?” and we will walk them through that. Why? Because it leads to that relationship and then it leads to that idea that our customers are going to stay with us longer, they’re not going to think about jumping even if there’s a cheaper price or less expensive offering, and they’re going to tell their friends. Word of mouth in this space is so important as it is for our customers. It’s so important for us. This is not corporate baloney that we’re talking about. It is something that we talk at every single company meeting, we talk about every single functional meeting. We have people listening to our phone calls all the time. We have people out in the field, employees are out in the field meeting with customers. You got to fly to California? Go fly to California. It’s going to pay off with the lifetime relationship that we end up with our customers. How can people switch and if they are interested in getting to know me? [email protected]. Just email me. We have our standard customer success or support line. It’s on buildium.com. I have literally dozens, hundreds even, customers that I know personally, that the rest of my executive team, leadership team, and all of the Buildians. We know these customers. Just because we’re 16,000 strong doesn’t mean that you’re just a number. We will be here for anything that you need. We just had customers up here the other day. We have a brand new office, which is great because we grew out of our other one and we spent the whole day with these customers just answering whatever questions in doing whatever we tend to do. It is a core element of what makes Buildium, Buildium and to your point, we 100% believe it. It sets us apart from the pack. It creates space between us and other folks. Frankly, we’re only going to build on it and we’re all going to make it better so that space is just going to get bigger and bigger. Again, thank you for the visionary aspect. I think also, other folks are focused on just the technology, all product. We have a very good to great product that already throws a ton of value at our customers, that is only continuing to get better. We’re investing heavily in it but we’re also investing heavily in the relationship side. It is something that we have the ability to continue to grow and make even stronger. It’s not something that’s going to go away as we continue to expand. I’ll also say, we have investors, too, and those investors couldn’t be more supportive of our vision, our mission, and the alignment we have around the idea that is the customer’s first always. It makes my job easier from a board perspective because they’re actually pushing me probably even more to make sure we don’t lose that, which is fantastic. I will always be. A hundred years from now, I won’t be here but I know the idea of customer’s first and always at Buildium will be. Jason: Love it. Chris, really excited to connect, get to know you a little bit better, and hear a little more about Buildium. Chris: Thank you so much. Jason: And I appreciate you coming on the show. Where can people find Buildium? Chris: buildium.com and they can find me at [email protected]. Jason: Perfect. All right. Chris, thanks so much for coming out. Chris: Jason, I want to have you come out to Boston and see our nice new offices and spend some time with us. Jason: Yeah, you’ll have to have me come out. I’ll check it out. Chris: Love it. Jason: We’ll hang out. Chris: Yeah. It will be great. Jason: We’ll talk shop. All right. Cool, Chris. Thanks for coming on. Chris: Thanks. I’ll talk to you. Jason: All right, great. It’s great having Chris on. So, if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, and you want to make a difference, and some of the things in the show hit a pain point for you, then make sure to reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to connect with you. We also have a really clear vision that we want to transform this industry and make a difference. It’s not just hype for us. That’s what gets me fired up and excited. The clients that are closest to me know that. That’s why I do what I do. It’s super rewarding and fun for me to hang out with other entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed doing this conversation with Chris. Make sure to check us out at DoorGrow. If you are not in our Facebook group and you want to be a part of a community where the tide is raising all the ships, make sure you get into the DoorGrow Club. Go to doorgrowclub.com. It’s a Facebook group. It will redirect into Facebook. doorgrowclub.com and it is free but it’s only for property management entrepreneurs. If you’re an entrepreneur in this space, you’re a business owner, you have a company, or you’re looking to start one, make sure you join our group and start getting [...] in. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  

Managing people when you are not a people manager keeps most property management businesses within 0-200 doors. They can’t scale beyond that without hiring a significant number of people. How can you shift to outsourcing to scale, save money, and improve business operations? Today, I am talking with Todd Breen of VirtuallyinCredible, which helps answer property management leasing calls every day through its experienced call center. Also, VirtuallyinCredible can hire virtual assistants (VAs) and customer service representatives (CSRs) with or without phone skills for you and your property management business. You’ll Learn... [03:15] Outsourcing: Follow rules to get it right, and select best solution to avoid failure. [04:03] Outsource companies often find and hire virtual assistants (VAs) and other team members from foreign countries causing frustration instead of support . [06:00] Small businesses need an entrepreneur, people manager, and task-oriented employees. [07:43] People Manager Traits: They care for their staff and have strong coaching, communication, and development skills. [08:50] Avoid pitfall of a property management entrepreneur who manages a team, but shouldn’t; they’re nice people, but they’re not making money or sales for the business. [12:30] Grow your management company by adding more doors and a people manager. [13:35] Entrepreneurs are sales-oriented, driven, and willing to do things others aren’t; they start controlling everyone and everything, so they need “inspired staff.” [16:25] Systems can make or break businesses; is your business systemized; and has it established and documented processes, policies, and systems? [20:14] HR should find, hire, and train employees; supervision is quality assurance. [21:38] Three Outsource Options: Hire your own VA directly; hire a VA reseller/recruiter; or select turnkey solution to hire VA for you. [27:54] Ask for and get good reviews by offering good service. [38:30] Don’t underestimate or overestimate software; technology is another tool. besides outsourcing that creates leverage, and lowers operational and staffing costs. Tweetables Property management businesses can’t scale, stay stale without hiring lots of people. Shift to outsourcing to scale, save money, and improve business operations. Outsourcing: Get it right by following rules and avoid failure by selecting a solution Lifeblood of Real Estate Business: Answer phone, get listing, rent/sell new listing Resources Todd Breen’s Email VirtuallyinCredible HireSmartVAs GatherKudos SuperTenders Property Meld EZ Repair Hotline DGS 39: Property Management Outsourcing with Todd Breen DGS 43: How Virtually Incredible Can Help a Property Management Business Grow with Todd Breen DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive The online Windows XP simulator runs in a web browser and its operation imitates the operating system. You can use it to prank someone. Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, and expand your rent roll, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market, and help the best property managers win. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, open up iTunes, find the DoorGrowShow, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision. I’m your host, property management growth hacker Jason Hull, the founder of OpenPotion, GatherKudos, ThunderLocal, and of course, DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today’s guest, I have with me, the wise, experienced, property management guru, Todd Breen. Todd, welcome to the show. Todd: Thanks, Jason. It’s awesome to be here. Jason: Todd, you are talking to us live right now from Manila, right? Todd: That’s correct. I spend a few months a year here working with our team and been enjoying my time here, and getting a lot of work done. It’s an honor to be on your show all the away from around the world. Jason: It’s a tropical island though, right? Todd: It is. It’s actually the cooler season right now, so it’s similar to where I live in Florida. It’s just a nice weather. Jason: Maybe there’s a little bit of fun in it while you’re there too. Todd: Yeah. I played golf today while you guys were sleeping. Jason: Yes, nice. Cool. Todd, today, we are going to be talking about outsourcing roles for small, medium, and large companies—perhaps there’s some differences there—and connected to Virtually inCredible. Tell everybody, what is your thinking behind outsourcing in general. This is a topic that used to be taboo. It used to be a bad word. “Uh-oh, they’re outsourcing. You’re not using people in the US, you’re like some sort of evil entrepreneur.” I think the temperature shifted. Todd: It has. I first started outsourcing eight years ago in 2010. Back in those days, I got a lot of raised eyebrows and funny looks. Now, when people hear that we’re outsourcing to the scale that we are, a lot of people are like, “Wow! That’s awesome! How can I save some money and improve my business operations in the process?” It’s really matured nicely. The topic today is about how to get it right if you’re going to try and outsource, whether you’re a small, medium, or large business. I’m really excited to share what I’ve learned in eight years of helping small, medium, and large businesses outsource. I’ve seen what’s worked and what hasn’t. In this, I’m just going to lay it out for you and say, “Hey, if you’ve tried and failed in the past, I can probably pinpoint how that happened.” We’ll do it in a very simple grid that I’ve made for you guys. If you’re a first timer and you want to get it done right the first time, we’re going to explain the rules for you and have what it takes to do it right and to pick the right outsourcing solution. Jason: Anyone that’s listening to this show knows we’ve had a few different companies that help with like either VAs or outsourcing or finding assistants for things, and I’ve revealed multiple times, I’ve had my fair share of failures. I’ve had team members in India, Bolivia, Philippines. Right now, the bulk of my team are in the US because I’ve had so many struggles dealing with a lot of that. But we’re now just now ourselves getting back into hiring and sourcing some talent in the Philippines to add greater support for my team and my staff. Our team has helped your team with some branding work and designing new logos, so check out Virtually inCredible’s new shiny logo. I’m really liking it. We also helped out HireSmart VAs and have cleaned up their branding. It’s been awesome getting familiar with people that are making a difference in the space of property management. You’re also making a difference in the lives of people in the Philippines. Todd: I grew up in the real estate business. My dad was a very busy real estate broker, very successful, and he was working days, nights, and weekends, and he was always answering the phone. Because he couldn’t afford not to answer the phone because the lifeblood of any real estate business is answer the phone, get a listing, answer the phone, rent or sell new listing. I have a real passion now with my four kids to give them a better quality of life as third generation property management company. They just look at me and say, “Dad, how did you do it before you could outsource your leasing lines or before you could have your own private virtual assistant that was full time helping you?” And I said, ‘Yeah, it was a lot of hard work and now, it’s a lot of smart work.” Let me get into what the rules are so that the viewers will have an idea what it takes to get the right solution for you no matter what stage of business you’re in. Is it alright with you if I share my screen? Jason: Yeah, you can share your screen. Just make sure you’re talking through it because some people would just be hearing this. Todd: I’m sharing my screen, I’m going here, I’m hitting play, and tell me if you can see my slides. Jason: Yup, I see them. Todd: If you’re a small business, you’re all three of what a business needs. Because a business needs an entrepreneur that actually is the driving force behind the business, a people manager and task a score of people or employees that actually perform the tasks needed to get the job done in the business. Me, I’m an entrepreneur, always have been my whole life, and I struggled building my management company with one thing and that was managing my staff. I was pretty good at managing owners and tenants, but you don’t work everyday, all day, eight hours a day with your homeowner and your tenant. You get intermittent relationships with them. You have to actually build a relationship with your team. Whether it’s inhouse, whether it’s onshore, whether it’s offshore, if you can’t manage people, then my aha moment was, “I needed a people manager.” On this screen, I'm listing the things that a people manager needs. They’re good at caring for their staff. Me, as an entrepreneur, that’s not in my DNA. I’m not going to trouble you with my troubles and I appreciate it if won’t trouble me with yours. Entrepreneurs are not the warm fuzzy people managers. People managers are good at coaching, communicating, development, they take an interest in the development of the staff. I’ve got a graphic on the screen, there’s things that a people manager does. Number one, they know me. Number two, they focus on me and help me to focus. Number three, they care about me as a person. When all three of those things happen, they inspire me to do my best. There’s a long list of things that people managers do, but that inspiration in getting into the minds and hearts of the team and building a team is what a people manager does. Jason: Just to back that up, what I’ll say is, I see this a lot. That’s what I get to do all day long is—I’ve talked to hundreds of different property management entrepreneurs, especially when they get into that 2-400 door range—they end up in this pitfall where they now have a team and the trap because they’re trying to manage this team, and they have this to-do list that’s ever growing and endlessly long, and everything on their to-do list have been sitting there for more than two weeks. It’s probably there because they’re not the person that should be doing it. They’re in a situation which they are not natural managers. It’s just not who they are. Todd: Right. Jason: They end up in a difficult situation in which they’re not managing well, the team’s not performing well, and then they’re blaming the team. Todd: They’re really in the wrong role. An entrepreneur is very rarely a people manager. If we meet an entrepreneur who’s an awesome people manager, you’re looking at the one in a thousand entrepreneurs, or one in a hundred. It’s rare to see somebody who’s a gifted entrepreneur, and a wonderful people manager. Jason: Virtually, if they are really good people managers, they’re not so great at the entrepreneurship, the sales side of the business is struggling, they’re really nice to people, but they’re not making money. Todd: On the screen, I’ve got a picture of my wife and I right now. My wife is the consummate, ultimate people manager. She’s tremendous in managing people. We have a team of well over 150 here in the Philippines. They all think of her as the mother goose or mother hen, but they love and respect her, and they all do for her above and beyond because they’re inspired by her. It’s awesome for me to see that because I don’t have that skill set and it’s wonderful, it defines our company. Let me explain to you why that’s so important. If you are a small business, you’re the entrepreneur, and you hire your first staff member—maybe it’s a property manager, maybe it’s a secretary, or a receptionist, maybe it’s an inspector, or a work person/handyman—as soon as you start managing people and you’re not a people manager, that’s what keeps most property management businesses in the 0-200 doors. Because you can’t scale beyond 200 doors without hiring a significant number of people. Whether you hire them yourself, or you outsource them, it’s up to you, but you need people to blow past 200 doors. The companies, they get from 150-200 doors and grow up to 500 doors, they have to develop a people manager and get reliable people that work for them. There’s ways that you can get a people manager. You can hire one directly. By the way, if you were 500 or more doors, the companies that are 800-1000, 2000 doors, let me tell you something, they have a people manager on staff. Jason: Sometimes multiple. Todd: That people manager is the reason why they’ve hit that level and it’s the missing ingredient. Everyone says how do I grow my management company. I say, We’ll, there’s two ways to grow your management company. One is add more doors but at some point, you’re going to need to add a people manager.” You can actually rent a people manager or you can hire one depending on how you outsource. That’s one of the keys to today’s lessons is, “Hey, if I’m 100 doors and all I really want to do is get to 200 because the cash flow just looks so amazing then I want to go to 300. How do I best do it?” There’s some real super rules that I’m going to walk you through on how to do that. I’ve switched screens here now, for those who are listening. If you don’t have a people manager, you’ll have staff turnover, more than you want staff turnover. You’ll notice that it’s easier to get bad reviews than it is to get good reviews because you don’t have inspired staff on your team. You’re going to hit a slower growth process because normally what happens is, the entrepreneurs grows the business to the first 100, 200 doors and then, unless the entrepreneur replaces him or herself and stays working in BDM or business development and growth, then they’re going to slow down on their growth. They won’t know what to do to kickstart the growth because they’re so busy putting out fires because they’re not a people manager. Their lifestyle will suffer and they’ll say, “I’m not having any fun.” Jason: You’re referring to inspired staff. I heard this phrase several years ago that’s always stuck with me that I believe it’s true, that I love sharing with people connected to this and it’s, “Whenever we fail to inspire, we always control. Whenever we fail to inspire, we always control.” What ends up happening is, as entrepreneurs, because we’re generally really driven, risk-oriented somewhat and we’re willing to do things that other people aren’t willing to do—and sometimes we’re more sales-oriented and driven—by default if we’re not able to get people to do things, we start just controlling. The opposite is to make them inspired and they just do it. You’ll end up with these business owners that are trying to micromanage, push their team, control them, force goals on them, and they aren’t inspired to do any of it. These are the team members that are B players, that’s the only ones that will stick around in a situation like that, and they are the ones that are complaining about you, the boss, and they go home and live for the weekend. They’re just hoping to get a paycheck. That creates a company culture of hiders, they’re hiding. Todd: They’re hiding even when they’re at work. They might hide behind their voicemail. What’s the solution? We pointed out that if you are a small business and you want to go to large, at some stage you’re going to need a people manager. You can actually hire a local people manager which might cost you $50,000 or $80,000—depending on where you are—or you can hire a virtual people manager for some of the tasks at your business. By doing that, you’re now a well-rounded business. You have the entrepreneur, you have the virtual and local employees, and you have a virtual people manager. We’re going to ask you guys to rate your business. How do you rate for systems? If you’re listening to this right now, “Am I systemized, yes or no?” And if you answer is, “Yeah, I’ve got a system for everything.” If I hire somebody, I sit in my desk, and they can open a training manual, and they can open policies and procedures manual and all of the answers are there. If the answer is that you’ve got your policies, procedures, and systems setup, then you’re halfway there to being able to onboard people. A lot of people, small business owners, and entrepreneurs, they do the trial by fire. They’ll hire somebody, sit him at the desk and say, “Figure it out,” and if the person survives, then they walk through the fire, and if not, they burn up, burn out, or they leave, or they get fired. And that’s all due to a lack of systems, policies, and procedures. Now, what I’ve seen is that in the 0-150 doors, unless you have a franchise that they’re giving you every system that you could imagine, and even some that you don’t need, and then you tailor them to your local market, unless you’re one of those people who has bought or created your own systems, policies, and procedures, then from 0-150, you’re winging it. You’re figuring it out yourself and it’s all in your head. If you’re listening to this you’ll say, “Yeah, that’s me.” Then what’s going to happen whether you hire a local staff or a virtual staff and it’s all in your head? Jason: For those listening, they can break it down even further because in a business there’s not just like one system. A lot of people think, I just need a process system for processes. Every business needs some sort of sales system in their business. They need a communication system as a team in order to communicate effectively. They need a planning system in their business—which a lot of businesses don’t really have—for setting goals and milestones and allowing people to know what outcomes that are being worked towards. They need an accounting system, and they need a process system, if I didn’t already say that, for documenting, capturing all the process. Whether it’s a manual or something like Process Tree. And they need a support system for managing all the customer requests and everything else. They might be a 10 on 1 of these and a 1 on another. It really takes all of these different systems. And then you need processes for all the documented. Todd: What happens is in those 0-150, most entrepreneurs still haven’t even started with these systems. From the 150-500, they slowly come to realize that, “These systems are going to make me or break me.” By the way, we’ve outsourced for large businesses that are over 500 and they still have horrible systems, horrible policies, horrible procedures, and believe it or not, really interesting staff and that’s the nice way to put it. Jason: That’s probably the norm which is sad. Occasionally, you’ll see the conversed side where you’ll see somebody that is super systems-oriented entrepreneur. They’re basically an operator trying to function as the CEO. They will focus so much on process, and operations, and systems and they have no revenue. Todd: It went off work and they’re not growing. If you’re good at systems, give yourself a pat on the back with your policies and procedures. The next we’re going to talk about is your HR. If you;re going to grow your business and scale it and have quality and lifestyle, you have to have HR that can find good people. Then you have to get those people trained, and training does not mean you sit up the desk and figure it out, it means, before we put people to work on their tasks, nobody goes to work with less than one week of training. That’s 40 hours of specific human training. It’s a live trainer, training somebody with what’s our business, what’s out vision, mission, values, and then how do you do the actual tasks that you’ve been hired to do. Supervision is quality assurance and etc. If you have all of those things, probably, you’re closer to 500 and more doors. If you’re missing any of those things, you’re probably in that 0-400 doors. You can say, “I’m good at some, but man, I got major holes and others.” That really impacts how you should outsource. I’ve got a graph up on the screen. The graph talks about if I am rough on my systems or rough on my HR, in other words, if I didn’t rate myself high on that last five minutes of conversation, how should I outsource. The answer is, you have three choices: You can hire your own virtual assistant direct by going to the destination country, for instance, the Philippines, wherever, and you can run your ad and try and hire somebody. Not recommended for anybody of any size that’s rough on their systems or rough on their HR for obvious reasons. Jason: Yeah. You’re setting them up for failure. Todd: Yeah. I see people say, “I don’t need a reseller or a turn-key. I’ll just do it myself.” I’m like, “How are you doing with your systems and you HR with you onshore operations because that’s going to directly impact or give you an insight into how your offshore is going to be?” And then they look at me and say, “Yeah, not so good.” I’m like, “Well, running out of the country isn’t going to make it better.” The first option is to hire your own virtual staff direct. The second is hire a VA reseller which is either a recruiter or somebody who will actually stick around after they recruit for you. And then the third option is, “Hey, I just want a turnkey solution that will take care of it for me. In other words, I want staff but I’m paying you to also provide me good systems and processes and good HR because I don’t have that yet. In fact, I don’t think I’m going to have it anytime soon because I’m busy in that 0-150 doors just getting volume and growing my business.” If I can figure out a way to affordably get good systems and HR brought into me by outsourcing, that sounds like a dream job to me. This tells you that turnkey is your number one solution. If you can go to somebody that offers turnkey outsourcing and just give them some process or system or some of the workflow from your business, and then it’s called set it and forget it, and just manage the results, you’ll be thrilled. If you hire a reseller, you may or may or be thrilled based on how well systemized those systems are for the work that you give. “Have you got a system, or policy, and procedure for the specific work that you’re giving?” And/or, “How good are you at managing onshore staff and how well do you think you could manage some offshore staff?” Jason: Right. Todd: Let me go to the next screen which is a hiring guide; if you have good systems already in place and you have a people manager. In my case my wife, in your case, if you have somebody who’s a good people manager, wow, what should I do? The answer is, the world is your oyster. You can do turnkey from 0-150 and that allows you to just focus on growing your business. And then when you start hiring locally, from 150-600 doors, it means that it’s one last thing to worry about. Now, 600 and more doors, you’d be looking at a big bill from a turnkey operator and you’d be saying, “Look, I can do this myself. I should take this over inhouse with either my own DA resellers,” where I pay a recruiter to hire me an offshore staff, or by going to the destination country yourself to hire which can all be done virtually or you can actually take some trips depending on how far away you go. But good systems, good HR, and a people manager is important before you start hiring individual offshore staff that are going to report to you and work for you directly. Does that make sense? Jason: Absolutely. I think people really need to realize that they need to figure out what’s the best fit and works for them. One of the biggest mistakes I see people really early on is their default thought is, “I need to go hire somebody like me right here in the US.” That’s the first employee. They’re like, “I need to go get another me and duplicate myself,” and they’re doing 20 different things; they’re wearing 20 different hats. They go to try to hire and they’re not ready for that. They can’t even bring on somebody, they really should with technology and just start with outsourcing solutions like Virtually inCredible because you’re bringing to the table a lot of the stuff they aren’t even aware of that they might need yet. Todd: One of the things that I outsource at my management company, for those who are listening who aren’t aware, I had a property management company since 1985. I used to absolutely hate the answering my leasing calls because I knew if I didn’t answer them during the day then I had no return calls. I knew if I didn’t answer them in the evening or on the weekend then I wasn’t going to fill my vacancies and I’d have to return more messages. My phone was glued to my ear. I decided to outsource my leasing calls and so many other managers heard about and said, “Will you take my calls too?” It’s such a systemized process with us that it’s not like you could just hire somebody if you’re 120 doors. You can’t hire somebody for what you pay us because you’re going to pay more for your outsourced people, and they’ll only answer 40 hours a week, and we’re answering 80 plus hours a week. There’s a stage which it makes sense to take it over yourself, but there’s a stage where you just say, “Get rid of this and let me focus on other stuff.” When we talk about capacity in online reviews, this is the DoorGrow Show and Jason, I’m one of your customers for the review, what’s the software you have? Jason: GatherKudos. Todd: GatherKudos, thank you. I think we’ve had it for several years. We’ve had good reviews in my management company and that’s because we offer good service, and we ask for the reviews. Seasonal workload variations can actually impact your reviews. Let me explain to you why. I’m going to show you what the variations look like. This is what your work orders look like. This is from Super Tenders. Hundreds of thousands of doors went into this. In January until May, you don’t have near the work orders that you do in June, July, August, September and then it’s slower a little bit again in the fall. You’ve literally got double the work orders between April and July. April is half of what July is. How do you staff for that in your business? Jason: Yeah. The question is, “Are you going to just double staff and then fire half your staff every season?” Todd: What happens is, if you look at when you get your bad reviews from tenants who are tired of work orders taking forever to get done, you’re getting those reviews typically, not April, you get them in June, July, August, September. That’s when the majority of bad reviews come in. It’s no secret, if you’re not staffed for the increase in volume, you’re going to have a problem. At my management company, we use Property Meld to technology, really accelerates the communication process and then we use EZ Repair Hotline. Now I can outsource. I’m pretty good at it, but I hire somebody else to do my work order outsourcing because they’re pretty good at it. I haven’t chosen to do that in the Philippines yet and it’s got a US-based team. What do they call about eating your own dog food or drinking your own Kool-Aid? I outsource to other people at my management company because it makes sense for me to do it and I’m under 300 doors. I’m not at that stage where it makes sense for me to take it over. The same goes for our leasing call volumes. This is data courtesy of Virtual inCredible. This is our call volumes across the entire United States on a monthly basis, and you can see, December’s the slowest month of the year. Thank goodness, right? Going into the holidays. November, December are great, but literally there’s double the volume between December and June. June is going to crush you and people say, “Man, I can’t answer my calls or my properties take longer to rent.” It’s because you’re not really staffed to handle it right. This is called a heat map. For those of you who are listening, it’s a counter Monday through Sunday, and it shows the darker hours of the day are when we have higher call volumes and the lighter colors are lower call volumes. Throughout the course of the week, on an 80-hours of answering your calls, days, evening, and weekends, there’s a tremendous call volume variation between Monday all day. By the way, there is a reason why Mondays are Mondays. Your phone’s going to ring with your highest call volume on your leasing calls on Monday. Jason: Compared from the weekend because we aren’t generally doing it over the weekend. Todd: Or they didn’t get you on the weekend. It could that too. Wednesday is a calm day. How do you staff for that? When you’re at 120 doors. When it’s just all hands on deck at all times when you’re at that volume. It makes sense to just say, “Hey, take my calls. When I grow to a certain stage, I’ll take them back.” That’s where people are able to make a tremendous good decision for their business because if you’re under capacity, under staffed, you’re going to get bad reviews. Jason: Yeah. Todd: If you have sufficient capacity at all times throughout the season of workload variations, you can get good reviews if you ask for them. If you have too much capacity, too many staff, you’ll get good reviews but your profit will suffer. Managing that becomes a full time job when you go past 500 or 600 doors, you’ll start to do that yourself but under that, it just makes sense to outsource some of these stuff. It will save you a tremendous amount of time and money, it’ll make getting good reviews easier, it’ll make your staff happier to get rid of some of your high seasonal workload that varies a lot, and just outsource it until you’re big enough to take it back inhouse. Jason: And if you’re built out to the point where you can handle the amount of seasonal growth and seasonal increase, then what happens during those lean times, you end up with team members that are sitting at unused capacity. Nobody likes being in a position, or a job in which they feel like they’re meaningless, or there’s lack of purpose except really bad team members that you wouldn’t want. Todd: They’ll never tell you that they’re not busy. Jason: Yes. They will never say, “Oh, I have so much extra time right now. I’m probably not relevant during these few months. I probably shouldn’t be here.” It makes a lot of sense. Todd: If you’re a small company and growing, this is the last part, I don’t have slides for this, maybe I’ll stop sharing my screen. Jason: I’ll point out, connected to that, it’s not a great investment to have a team member that’s sitting in the garage half the time not being used. Imagine you live in a big city, and you’re taking the subway all the time, and you have this expensive car that you’re maintaining constantly but you’re not using. Financially, it becomes incredibly costly to have a team that is under utilized especially if they’re US-based staff, they’re really expensive, and you’re not just able to use them. You’re [inaudible 00:34:56] the money whether you’re using them or not. They’re not making any money. Todd: Can you imagine what it’s like being me? We’ve got hundreds of staff and our volume is following that curve. We figure out how to do it. There’s something I wanted to share. This is on a personal note from a guy who’s grown a management company through a few cycles. If you’re in that 150 or less, I want you to ask yourself, “Is it easy to get leads to grow my business?” If it is, great, if it’s not, check out DoorGrow, check out some great ways to get improve your leads. Second is, “Am I too busy to grow my business being an operator instead of being an owner?” An owner knows how to grow a business and knows how to keep the capacity to grow the business open because that’s what it takes. You know, 60% or 70% of calls to a business are your leasing calls. When you’re sitting there answering somebody who says, “How much is that house with the red door?” You’re considering the brain damage that’s giving you. Meanwhile, your phone’s ringing on line two and it’s an owner who has a nice listing and you didn’t get to that call. If you’re struggling to grow your business and you have leads, but you’re not growing your business, man, clear your plate, get rid of some of your work, and grow your business. You can always take it back. And then work on reducing your labor costs. If you’re in the stage in your business where, “Oh I don’t get enough leads or I don’t want to grow my business.” Well then fine tune your business, that’s great. But as long as you can grow and you want to grow, clear your plate and move forward on growth which is your highest dollar. People are valuing management companies at between $2000 and $4000 per door. Each new listing that you can sign up is going to increase your net worth, your asset value of your company by $2000 or $3000. If you can get five new listings in a month, and that’s worth $3000 a listing, we’re talking $10,000-$15,000, that’s what you’re increasing your net worth. You grow up that rate in a year and you’re $150,000 and $200,000 in your net worth. It’s all because you’re focused on growth and clearing the decks to make it possible. That’s what it takes to grow your business. Then as you bring in the new volume of work, decide carefully, “Should I insource or outsource? Do I have a people manager or don’t I? What’s the best way that’s going to keep the machine moving forward?” That’s what I tell people because if they fail that outsourcing, I usually say, “Well, who’s the people manager?” And when the entrepreneur says, “I am.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” Jason: It didn’t work for me. You just did it wrong. Todd: Did you learn something, Jason? Relative to your world and your lives that you’ve been living with our outsourcing? Jason: Absolutely. All of these makes so much sense. Over the last decade, I’ve had plenty of failures in outsourcing things or I’m trying to do things. I think if I were to add one thing to this is one thing that has really helped me is to not underestimate or overestimate technology. Because technology, like you mentioned, like Property Meld for example, technology is another tool besides outsourcing that creates leverage, and lowers operational costs, and lower staffing cost. A lot of people will try to go cheap on software. I believe that when it comes to software, you want the best tools, the best softwares. I have spent a lot of money on software tools and I buy the best. I don’t buy the Swiss Army knife that can do everything crapily or terribly, but I buy the best in each category to make sure we have the best systems for process, or the best communications system in our business. That allows my team to get more done, and be more efficient, and more effective. Whether you’re going to outsource directly or you’re going to outsource to companies, make sure that you have the best tools available software-wise because even if software costs you hundreds of dollars a month, people are always going to be more. If you can give them the tools that they need to do the job well, you’re collapsing your cost and making them far more efficient, and it always pays off. Todd: Very true. Listen, if anyone has any questions about this, I’ll just briefly tell you how we can help you at our company. We do answer your leasing calls, we also have a tenant screening department. That scales too because you get your number of applications in the summer, is a heck a lot more than it is in the winter. We do that. Those are full termkey systems, where you’re actually putting a department into place and you don’t need a local department to do either of those tasks. In addition to that, we also have a brand new service where we’ll hire an individual VA for you with or without phone skills. You can get an admin VA or you can get a CSR, a customer service rep that can answer calls for you, and they’re all screened by our company and trained in property management. I used to be a trainer for the Property Management Academy. We put all of our people through all of that training now before they show up at your job. You get screening and training though our VA. If you like some more information, just send an email to [email protected]. Be happy to help you out however I can. Jason: Awesome. For those listening, when we put on our conference, DoorGrow Live, we gave Virtually inCredible an award because they have consistently been one of the best in class or the best in their category for what they do inside the DoorGrow Club and inside the feedback that we hear from clients. It’s not just my recommendation, it’s a recommendation of a lot of people, and you provide a really good experience for people. You are making a difference in the industry. Todd: Yeah, thanks. We’re having a ball and appreciate all you’re doing to help people grow with creative ways that aren’t obvious. I’ve been through some of your education, it’s really high quality. Thank you for what you do. Jason: Appreciate it. Todd, thanks so much for coming on the show, and appreciate you sharing all these insights. I think there’s some solid takeaways that people listening this show. I think some rising like start with technology, then start with outsourcing to a solution like Virtually inCredible, and then maybe once you start getting some things dialed in, you might want to start bringing the staff in-house eventually, but you may not. It’s going well. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Todd: That’s right. Jason: Todd, thanks again. Todd: Alright, guys. Take care. Jason: Alright, it’s great having Todd on the show. Again, to make sure to check out the previous episodes in which we talked specifically about leasing lines and the challenges with those with Todd. You can just search for Todd Breen and DoorGrowShow, one word. If you are listening to this on iTunes, be sure to give us your feedback in iTunes, they helps us out, also makes us aware of how you feel about the show. We love getting your feedback on these different shows, and make sure you are inside our Facebook community where you can hang out with cool people like Todd and other really savvy entrepreneurs. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com and this is a community unlike any other. It’s a special community of property management business owners that believe in this vision and message that collaboration is more significant and important than competition in what this industry needs right now. If you love the idea of collaboration and helping level up the entire industry, we’re just going to help every property management business owner succeed and grow this business and industry and get more market share then that’s the place for you, that’s your home. Join us in the DoorGrow Club. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff: SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time. Take what you’ve learned and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.