Enhancing Productivity through Time Studies and Team Efficiency in Property Management

We all catch ourselves saying, “I just don’t have enough time,” especially as a property management business owner. 

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull talk about the excuse of not having enough time and using time more effectively in property management.

You’ll Learn

[01:25] The excuse of not having enough time

[05:29] You can buy more time

[10:08] Energy management vs. time management

[13:23] Doing a time study

[16:04] Don’t fight your natural energy level

Tweetables

“It's not actually true to say we don't have time. What we're really saying is, ‘This is not a priority for me right now.’”

“Time is a currency you can buy.”

“You should not be trading your time for money. If you own a business.”

“It's really about energy management, not time management when you're an entrepreneur.”

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

TalkRoute Referral Link

Transcript

[00:00:00] Jason: It's really about energy management, not time management when you're an entrepreneur. It's about managing that currency of energy. And what I find is we have endless amounts of energy if we're doing the things that we love, that we enjoy doing. 

[00:00:15] Welcome DoorGrowers, to the DoorGrowShow. 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 in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrower. DoorGrower property managers 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 business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. We're your hosts, property management growth experts, Jason Hull and Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGrow.

[00:01:09] Now let's get into the show. All right. So the topic we discussed last night about talking about on the podcast today is time. 

[00:01:20] Time excuse. "I don't have enough time."

[00:01:23] We hear this a lot. Every day. "I don't have time. I don't have time. I don't have enough time to do this." So we're talking about the time excuse and You know sometimes... we've got this amazing mastermind. Sometimes clients want to cancel. And we have a really low churn rate. We keep clients, so we're usually surprised when somebody wants to cancel. And when we find out and ask why, we got this from one of our mentors, but we now ask the question, "is this a time thing or a money thing?" Which has proven to be really effective because a lot of times it's just a time thing and time is easily solvable.

[00:01:59] If it's a money thing, then that's easily solvable too. That's easily solvable too. Just a different route. That's all. So let's talk about time. I've got two clients right now actually that it was a time thing and they're still staying in the program and it's very easy to keep people in the program if it's just a time thing because they're always like, "Oh, we love the program. I just, I don't have time to do all this stuff right now." So what do we say about time? 

[00:02:21] Sarah: So this is, I think the thing that I hear the most from property managers. Period. Just, especially in this business is, "Oh my God, I just don't have time for anything. Like I feel like I'm spending my whole day working," and we'll come across clients who are working anywhere from eight to 16 hours a day and that's normal for them.

[00:02:45] Jason: Yeah. So it's our job to get them out of that. Yeah. 

[00:02:49] Sarah: If you're working eight to 16 hours a day, I'm talking to you. 

[00:02:53] Jason: So we have a training that we did once called the priorities training, and it was all about time really. But the reason we called it the priorities training is because saying, "I don't have time," is a very victim sort of phrase.

[00:03:05] It's not actually true. You can't legitimately go to any other human being on the planet and say, "I don't have time" when we all are allotted the same number of hours in a day. We've all been given the same amount of currency each day. What's different though, it's not actually true to say we don't have time.

[00:03:23] What we're really saying is "this is not a priority for me right now." Or our priorities are just off. So it's really more about priorities. The more honest answer is "I am not making time for this right now because I'm prioritizing something else." And so if you're the type of person that goes around saying, "I don't have time. I don't have time for this," then you are using victim language. This is not effective language if you want to actually be in control of your life. You recognize that you are the creator of your universe, your life, your world. Like you have choice, right? And to walk around saying, "I don't have time" is like putting on the blinders and saying, "the world just takes control of everything I have to do. I have no control of my life," right? You're not a slave. You're not a servant to somebody else. You have control and autonomy over your time. And so you're just making choices. And so the more honest answer would be not to say, "I don't have time," would be to say, "I'm choosing something else right now," right?

[00:04:25] Be honest about that. If what you're spending, what you think you should be spending your time on is not really your priority, then maybe you're not really being honest with yourself. Maybe your priority is something else. Maybe your priority right now is family. Maybe your priority right now is another business.

[00:04:39] We run into this with clients sometimes, their priority is their brokerage. And they're doing real estate deals. It's not the property management side. 

[00:04:45] Sarah: And in the property management side, sometimes their focus is the property management side, but they're prioritizing all the wrong things.

[00:04:53] Yeah. They're prioritizing all the little things that the day to day tactical work that has to be done. It has to be done by somebody, but it doesn't probably have to be done by you, right? 

[00:05:05] Jason: So what I find is even the two clients that I'm coaching right now helping them get out of this time sort of constraint, they both have assistants, they have team members.

[00:05:14] They have an assistant? Yeah, they have assistants. And so what's really funny is that when we say we don't have time and then we are paying other people for their time so that we can have more time, then we're missing something. We're not doing something effective. 

[00:05:29] Sarah: Time is a currency you can buy. Yeah. So to say, "Oh I don't have enough time." You have the same amount of time that everybody else has. Some people are just more effective with their time than others, which is why they're able to do so much or do so much so quickly or be so successful. However, with time, that's the beauty of it is you can literally purchase more time.

[00:05:50] You can purchase time of another human being. Yeah. To help move your business forward. 

[00:05:54] Jason: So one of the concepts that I got from one of my mentors in the past, Alex Charfen, he shared this concept called the five currencies and the five currencies that you have to invest in your own life and in your business are time, energy, focus, cash, and effort.

[00:06:11] Now, I believe the most important of those, the scarcest resource of all those is time. We're all going to die. Time is the most significant currency. Time is the most significant currency. It's the most limited. We can do a lot of things to try and have more time and live life a little longer.

[00:06:31] But time is a limited currency. The other ones. We can maximize, but we can't generally do a whole lot to maximize time. We can do a lot to shorten it. So we buy time, right? What's crazy to me though, is that when people start working, they don't have a lot, right? When people start into the workforce, the one thing they can sell though is pieces of their life.

[00:06:54] They can sell time. So it's pretty wild that I can go out into the marketplace. And I can buy people's time. Like they will pay, like I can give them money and they will give me chunks of their life. They're like, "here you go." As a business owner, we want to get out of the trap of being paid for our time.

[00:07:12] We don't want to be paid an hourly wage or being taking care of like hourly. We want to get out of the time trap. 

[00:07:20] Sarah: You should not be trading your time for money. If you own a business. 

[00:07:24] Jason: Smart business owners are buying people's time with money and not giving their time for money. And so we want to shift that as a business owner and property management is a great business model for that. You can create a lot of leverage. You can build up a lot of doors in your portfolio, and it's not about time. It's not about, Oh I have this many hours. It's all me, right? You can systematize the business. You can get other people to do things for you.

[00:07:45] And so we want to. I want to make sure that we make time something enjoyable. And so we've talked about the four reasons before, but we want to make sure you have more fulfillment in the time that you're spending, that you have more freedom, more a sense of autonomy, more a sense of contribution and more support from your team, right?

[00:08:06] The four reasons. And then there's a fifth reason of safety and certainty. So we want to get more and more of those as the business progresses and as we grow in the business and as we grow in entrepreneurship. But a lot of business owners end up with less and less time, less and less fulfillment, less and less freedom, less and less of a sense of like of contribution.

[00:08:27] And they then burn themselves out even as they build a team. So we want to make sure that we don't do. But what are some of the time excuses or time challenges and then maybe we can talk about how we deal with those briefly and how to get 

[00:08:41] Sarah: out of it. I think what's probably. Because there's a gazillion excuses you can come up with, right?

[00:08:47] Leases take forever or tenants always call me or what, whatever it is. And every in, in every business, there's always going to be an infinite number of things that can just eat up all of your time. That's how it works in every business. This is how it works. What we need to do though, is really figure out what are the things that I actually enjoy doing and how can I do more of those things?

[00:09:08] And then the things that I really hate doing, how can I do less of those things? So how would the time that I have, and if I'm willing to invest, because every minute that you put into your business is an investment. So if you're willing to invest eight hours a day in your business, and if you're working for someone else, it just means you're investing eight hours a day into their business, right?

[00:09:31] So you might as well invest in your own. So if you're investing eight hours a day into your business, what can I do in those eight hours a day to really make a difference? And what? In those eight hours a day, can I do that's going to make me happy? Because if you're spending eight hours a day and you hate every minute of it and you're going, "oh my god Is it five o'clock yet? Like I can't wait for this to be over. Is it the weekend yet? Because I can't wait for that to be done," Then you're probably doing the wrong things in your business, and you need to be able to purchase somebody else's time to offload those things that somebody else would actually enjoy doing 

[00:10:08] Jason: So it's really about energy management, not time management when you're an entrepreneur.

[00:10:13] It's about managing that currency of energy. And what I find is we have endless amounts of energy if we're doing the things that we love, that we enjoy doing. It like gives us energy. Those are our plus signs energetically. 

[00:10:26] Sarah: If you're charging our batteries at a party and they just go. The party is done and they're still gabbing away and they're like handing out, whatever and they're like, "oh, let me get your number Oh, let me hook up with you and let me like get-" It's like "guys, wrap up." But there's like that one person who's still going and it's like you have to kick him You're like I don't care where you go. Just don't go here anymore. Go take this elsewhere That's because they really enjoy that. They're like in their element. They're like, "I love talking to people. I love connecting with people. I love networking. I love this. They can do it all day long." Me, I can't do that because I'm much more of an introvert.

[00:11:04] So the things that you really enjoy truly will energize you. And you'll find them fun and you want to do them instead of just constantly checking the clock. "What time is it now? How long? Oh, geez. How many more calls do I have to do? Oh, I have to do two hours of calls a day. Ah, crap. All right. Like maybe I can dial real slow." 

[00:11:20] Jason: Yeah. And so I think one of the mistakes we make early in the early stages and entrepreneurs, we assume that we need to find people like ourselves. Or we just do because we like ourselves to some degree. But we want to find people that their plus signs are our minus signs, right?

[00:11:37] That's where they're a match for us, right? So there are a lot of things that Sarah enjoys that I do not enjoy. He would not. And there's definitely things that are the reverse. right? And you want to find and build a team of people that basically are happy and enjoy your minus signs and are not like you.

[00:11:58] Instead of making the assumption, "this sucks, and now I got to find somebody to give this sucky thing to, because I hate maintenance coordination. And now I got to find somebody else that's going to hate it." When you make those assumptions, then you sometimes attract people that are like you and that hate it. But you need to find people that's their plus sign. So we can keep everybody in your team in their plus signs. And if you're not in your plus signs, your team members definitely aren't. It's just really rare that you'll have a business owner that's absolutely miserable, they are holding onto all these hats and things they don't enjoy wearing... so we got to make sure that we move the things off our plate onto people's plates that enjoy it, but you cannot build the right team for you around the wrong person.

[00:12:38] You have to be showing up as the right person. You have to constantly be moving towards your plus signs. So how do we get you out of all the minus signs and focus on the plus signs? So these two clients, I've got them doing a two week time study right now. And this is the foundation.

[00:12:51] This is the foundation of getting clarity on what things do I enjoy and don't I enjoy because sometimes as entrepreneurs, we just tolerate a lot. It becomes white noise. We just do what we feel like we're supposed to do. " I'm the boss. I have to do sales or I'm the boss. I have to do the accounting" and there's really nothing you have to be doing in the business.

[00:13:09] Sarah: And just because you can do it doesn't mean you enjoy doing it. So can you fill all the roles in your business? Yeah. Because at some point it was just you. So of course you can do it, but it doesn't mean that you like doing it. 

[00:13:23] Jason: So they're doing their time studies and they got to do it for two weeks because the first week they learn a lot of things.

[00:13:27] Like we found three major problems in my coaching call with one of the clients that's been doing his time study already for a week, three major time problems. Like one was he was spending an hour to do something after three o'clock. It was taking him an hour to do something that takes him 10 minutes to do in the morning, right?

[00:13:44] So we talked about. His time and how he's becoming less effective at the end of the day because his brain chemicals aren't properly functioning. And then it related to sleep. And so then we were like, "okay, we've got to figure out some hacks for sleep. How do we get the circadian rhythm?" Because he believed his rhythm was messed up because of like working nights previously for a long time. So he had this belief that he was on a schedule. I'm like, "okay we can get your body on a different schedule and affect the circadian rhythm by using light, sunlight in the morning and stuff like this" and some other hacks. So we got into that and that he had two other major issues and he wasn't leveraging his assistant properly. He wasn't doing daily planning. And these are super easy things to install to create a lot more productivity and a lot more space and to actually leverage the team members that this particular client has.

[00:14:34] And so the second week of his time study is going to look very different than the first week. Now, the other mistake we make when it comes to time is our team members will say, "I don't have any more time. So when your team members say that, what I find is it's also still a lie, right? And so usually, I'll have my team members do a time study to prove it.

[00:14:53] And usually the first time study that a team member does, they magically have 30 percent more time available. Almost always. So it usually takes about two or three time studies before they legitimately need an assistant or some support or you need to hire or get some help or advice, get some software or whatever.

[00:15:11] But after you do a time study, a lot of clarity comes out. You're like, "why are you spending four hours doing this?" " This happens and it does this." And you're like, "cool, let's solve that problem." So you'll be able to use your creativity and your innovative mind as to solve problems time wise for your team members.

[00:15:27] And this allows you to get a lot more yield from your existing team, rather than just assuming because they're busy that they are productive and they are doing everything that you need them to do and that you need to go hire more people because then you artificially are building out a much more expensive team than you actually need.

[00:15:47] It's not based on proof or reality and the evidence or proof that you need an assistant and what you should have your assistant do. And that eventually that. Assistant or team member needs their own assistant is all should be based on time studies should be based on looking at time 

[00:16:04] Sarah: You brought up something you touched on it really quickly that I've taught on this on the scale call I think a few times is figuring out what your energy levels are like and don't try to fight your body like literally every body is different.

[00:16:19] So some people they're morning people like this one. Some people are not like me. So if you feel really energized in the morning, then utilize that time. And use that time when you feel fresh, when you feel energized, when you feel like, "Hey, I'm like, good to go," use that time to do the most, either the most difficult thing or the thing that's going to take the most amount of brain power.

[00:16:46] Or if you're doing something like sales and you feel like you're in your element, do it then. And if you're more like me where I'm more effective in the afternoon, then. Shift those things to the afternoon. But a lot of times people, they go, "Oh, I have to do this. And it's like sales secrets will say that the morning is the best time to do this, so I must do this in the morning." If you're trying to fight with your own body and your own rhythm and how you're feeling, if you're trying to do sales calls and you have low energy and you feel like "I just, I don't want to do this. I feel like I'm either not ready for the day or I'm done for the day."

[00:17:24] You're probably doing it at the wrong time. So the tasks that are going to take a lot of brain power. Don't try to force yourself to do them when you have really low energy levels because it will take a lot longer and you're probably going to make a lot of mistakes, whereas otherwise you can just fly through it.

[00:17:41] Maybe you know that at least like the back of your hand, it's no problem. But if your energy levels are low or if you're feeling off, then you have to maybe double or triple check some things. 

[00:17:51] Jason: You bring up a really good point. These two clients that I'm coaching, we talked about daily planning.

[00:17:57] So daily planning is a great way to get more juice from your day and set the intention, but daily planning. I'd like to do the daily planning in the morning because that's when I'm freshest, I have the best ideas. I can think through things. But for some they probably should be doing it in the evening because like they can't go to bed without unloading their brain.

[00:18:18] I can just shut down. I just go to sleep. I don't worry about a thing. I can just go to bed. I'm like, it's bedtime. But for a lot of my clients, a lot of other people, maybe you listening, you might not be able to do that. So you might be like, "man, I just keep thinking about all the stuff." And until you get that stuff out of your head and it's on paper where it's safe.

[00:18:36] They say the Chinese proverb is the palest ink is stronger than the best memory. When we get it out of our head, it reduces our anxiety and we no longer have to worry that we're going to lose that thing. So I use the notes app on my phone. I put notes all over the place. I just get things out of my head.

[00:18:52] So daily planning is a great process to unload everything out of your head. So that you can go to bed and get some good rest. And so for one of the clients, that was what I advised. Do your daily planning in the evenings so that you can go to sleep, get good sleep and wake up in the morning and you already have a plan and you're ready to attack the day.

[00:19:10] And then you will know how to leverage your assistant. You'll know how to leverage your team members because you made a plan. And the next step in getting a big to do list is to give it to your team members. So if you have two, three team members, like this client did, then they can give these to their team members, anything that they can so it's not sitting on their plate, eating up headspace and stressing them out, and taking up their day and so then they're able to give up some of that time chunk to somebody else to eat. So cool All right. Anything else we should say about time or this time? Excuse and how to kill these time excuses so that they should be focused on? 

[00:19:46] One of the things I ask the clients I'm like, "cool if we create this space if we you are able to give more to your assistants and you free up your time and you've got more time... what are you going to use that time for? How are you going to allocate that? What are you going to do that's going to make the business more money or move you forward or make your life better?" And so I think that's the other thing is we need to have a plan for what are we going to do with our time because we have no incentive to create more space or create more bandwidth or create more time if it's just going to mean we're going to be more miserable, right? So we need to figure out what are we going to use this extra time for? It's just like making money. You need a goal. Like "I'm going to go buy this nice car if I make more money." So it's going to motivate me. You need some sort of motivation. What am I going to do with this extra time? If you enjoy doing sales or growing the business or business development, that might be a really great place to invest that time because then it's going to make you more money and which you can use to buy more freedom. Maybe it's to get a BDM because you don't like doing sales, something like that.

[00:20:43] Sarah: So once you free up your time, then you have offloaded a lot of the things you hate, you have some extra time, and now you can decide "what do I actually want to do with that time?" Because if you don't wake up in the morning and go, "what do I want to do with my day today?" Then you may have a time problem.

[00:21:00] Jason: All right. So for those of you listening, if you're like, "man, I'm really been in this time trap. Like I've been stuck doing the same default future for the last two or three years. Every January comes around, I'm like, 'I've got big goals.'" And you still are miserable, you're still wearing all the same hats, you haven't really made progress in adding doors. Then it's time to admit you may need some good advice. You may need some extra ideas. You may need some knowledge outside of yourself. And the slowest way to grow your business is to do it all by yourself. It's time to reach out and get some help and we can help you collapse time significantly and that's what it's all about.

[00:21:42] That's what coaching is all about is collapsing time, helping you find ways to just shorten the time of learning, the time of making mistakes to learn, the time of figuring things out, like what actually works, what gets results, what helps you outdoors quickly, how do we lower costs? So we want to help you figure that out.

[00:22:00] So reach out to us at DoorGrow and go to DoorGrow.com. Until next time, everybody to our mutual growth, bye everyone.

[00:22:07] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. 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! 

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