

DGS 310: Prioritizing Tasks, Reducing Communications, and Increasing Time in Property Management
How often do you say, “I don’t have time?” This is a common excuse we hear from property management business owners and their teams. The truth is, we all have the same amount of time.
In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss the myth of not having enough time and the true issue: having the wrong priorities.
You’ll Learn
[01:28] Time: The Biggest Excuse for Staying Stagnant
[06:02] You Don’t Make Money on Bad Clients
[10:20] Building Trust with Clients Without Overcommunicating
[19:35] Finding the Bottleneck in Your Business
Quotables“Don't optimize for the wrong things. You have to make sure you're optimizing for the right things.”
“We all have the same amount of time every day.”
“The issue is not time. The issue is priorities.”
Resources Transcript
Jason Hull (00:00)
most of you listening have some properties and some owners in your portfolio that are losing you money. Your operational cost on them is higher than
you being able to pull profit on them.
All right, we are Jason and Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we've brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of property management business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of businesses.
helping them add doors, improve pricing, increase profit, simplify operations, and build and replace teams. At DoorGrow, we believe that good property managers can change the world and 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. Now, let's get into the show. All right, so what are we chatting about today? Sarah? Time. Time. Time. Why are we chatting about time?
And this is where most people mess it up because it's so precious here's the little captain's face
It's precious. Okay, Captain for those listening is a little dog that we have. It's one of our dogs. Okay, so the reason we're talking about time is because time is one of the biggest excuses that we get. Are you working and growing your business? I just don't have time. Or have you been making the calls that you need to make to get your business growing? I don't have time. I'm so busy. I'm so overwhelmed. And so it's everybody is out of time.
Nobody has time. Nobody's so busy. There's a meme that it's old, but it's like classic. Ain't nobody got time for that. Ain't nobody got time for that? Yes, you do. So time, time is an issue. Why is time an issue? We all have the same amount of time every day. We get a whole new 24 hours the next day, every day. The issue isn't time. And we've talked about this, think, before, but the issue is not time. The issue is priorities. You're prioritizing the wrong things. And one of the things we've noticed
with clients. We just recently wrote for our clients a time optimization playbook for property managers. It's got some brilliant stuff in it. A lot of it from her brain, some of it from my brain, and it's really good. But one of things we've noticed, Elon Musk has these principles for how he goes and optimizes businesses. He's made businesses way more efficient. When he came into Twitter and rebranded it to X he cleaned house, thousands of
wasteful employees that were just bloat and not really contributing to code, not really updating it. One of his key principles is don't optimize for the wrong things. You have to make sure you're optimizing for the right things. And a lot of people are optimizing when they should have been cutting stuff out first. So they didn't ask the question, should we even be doing this thing at all? And most property managers we find are optimizing for the wrong thing.
They are optimizing for how do I take every phone call from every tenant and how do I take every phone call from every owner and how do I please everybody and do all this stuff that I have to do instead of what?
Instead of saying, should I even be talking to these people at all? Your owners don't really want to talk to you. They really would love if they could just trust you to do your job and do it well and not have to talk to you. Like that's really what owners want. When they feel anxious because they don't trust you because you aren't doing a good job or you've set incorrect boundaries or you haven't made them feel safe from the beginning or you onboarded them poorly, they now feel anxious. They want to talk to you all the time because why?
They now believe they need to manage the manager. They're trying to manage you. How ridiculous is that? They hire you to manage their property and then they manage you to manage the property. They just traded their job for another job instead of offloading it to you. so we need to optimize for the right things. And so we need to start questioning things. And so some of the things we'll have people do is we'll have them audit their time by doing a time study.
And ours is a little bit different. It focuses on identifying the five currencies of time, energy, focus, cash, and effort, which is a framework I got from one of my mentors, Alex Charfen. And so the idea of the time study showcases all of these. It shows all of these. Sarah's, used to say it didn't show cash, but Sarah was like, you should add cash. And so now it has the money piece in it too.
just said.
You're trading your time. Right. And this is thing I to my clients all the time. I say, if your time was worth, let's just call it a low amount like $50 an hour, you just traded $50 an hour for $13 an hour. It was not a good trade. Yeah. Of course it wasn't. Not a good trade at all. were you doing those things? Instead of using $50 an hour time to do $50 or $100 or $1,000 an hour work, you're using $50 an hour time.
to do $13 an hour work, you have to just look at the things that you're doing and place a dollar sign next to them and then kind of compare that with what your pay rate is and what you want your pay rate to be, not just what it currently is. So I just said, just put a dollar sign next to them. And we did. We updated it. So you might be thinking, how do I deal with all my tenants and all my clients? And maybe you should be asking
Should I even have all of these tenants, properties, and clients? After all, a lot of our clients, when they first come to us, are not making money on every property. They're losing money on some of the properties. They're losing money on some of the owners that they're dealing with. If you actually ran a P &L, a profit and loss statement on every individual owner, every individual unit that you manage, some of them in your business are losing you money. Would you manage for free? Would you do it for free?
People came to you, hey, could you do this? You won't make any money, but I'd like you to manage this anyway. I'll pay you nothing. You would probably say no to that, right? If they came to you and said, hey, I would like you to manage this and you will actually lose money, but it benefits me. Would you do it? You're like, Jason, that's stupid. But right now, most of you listening have some properties and some owners in your portfolio that are losing you money. Your operational cost on them is higher than
you being able to pull profit on them. And so it's the 80-20 principle. 20 % of your properties and 20 % of your owners probably cost you 80 % of your operational costs, right? They're eating it up. So one of the principles we share recently, we've been sharing at some of our Jumpstart sessions because we onboard clients in person. We have them come out to our Jumpstart sessions is this idea of, well, do you remember?
The Hamburglar. Do remember the Hamburglar? The sneaky, shady guy with the bands and over his like this little thing around his eyes and he's sneaking around stealing burgers, right? Well, there is a burglar sneaking around your business and you can't even see him. He's invisible. And he is the interruption burglar. He's just sneaking around stealing money and time throughout your business all day long.
the interruption burglar. One interruption costs between, depending on the studies, you look at 18 minutes to maybe up to 26 minutes of productivity and your team members and you are getting interrupted constantly throughout the day. And then they have to like reset their mind, get back into the flow, get back to what they were doing. But if they're just dealing with interruptions all day long, you are losing probably half the amount of labor that you should be getting.
This is why Sarah was able to run her business so efficiently when she was a property manager and why some of her clients have just as many doors as her, but they have a whole team. A huge team. Yeah. They have a whole bunch of people. Between me and my assistant. And they're not making much money. I didn't even have one full-time equivalent. And you were working maybe 20 hours a week. You had 60 to 90 % profit margin. And these were C-class difficult properties, right?
But Sarah optimizes. She optimizes for the right things. I hate wasting my time. Yeah, she values her time. biggest pet peeve out of everything in the world is wasting my time. So Sarah values her time. One thing Sarah did not give out, Sarah did not give out this magical check that all of you tend to give out to all of your clients and your tenants.
This is this big, giant, glowing golden check that says, steal all of my profits, call me anytime. And you give this to tenants, every tenant and owner, you give them this blank check to steal all of your profitability. I had a client come to me once with 600 units and he was making zero dollars in his business. How is that possible? That's exactly what I asked him. said, there's a previous podcast episode, you can check it out.
It's with Preston Brown. I think he was out in New Mexico and he had 250 units that probably they shouldn't been in his portfolio out of the 600. He fired them. It's almost half. Then he fired half of his staff. Now you think, oh, maybe his workload, his got kind of half. No, it went down dramatically like 80-20 rule. Like he had way more profitability available. He was making a lot of money then. He had a healthy business. So
It's not just about doors. It's about profit. It's about optimizing for the right things. There's no point going and getting more doors if your pricing is terrible, if your time is messy, if you don't have priorities set correctly. Okay, so what else do we run into with clients with time that we'd like to share here with the audience? I think the biggest thing that they tell themselves is just, I'm so busy.
Yeah.
piece of the business they're focused in, they always just say, my God, like I'm just so busy and I can never get everything done. That seems to be the thing that we hear again and again and again. I mean, we even had, he's a former client, but he had asked me several times. We were actually helping him implement his daily huddles after he hired a new team because he completed an acquisition. And he said, okay, what we're gonna track on the daily huddles.
He wanted a 98 or 97 % call answer rate. Optimizing for the wrong things. And I went, okay, I won't say his name, but I said, that's the worst idea I've ever heard. And he's like, no, it's really important that we answer the phone every time that it rings or almost every time that it rings. Because if we don't answer the phone, then people won't trust us because they can't get ahold of us. And then that shatters everything that I'm trying to do and everything that I'm trying to build.
And I think the big misconception is that those two things go hand in hand. For people to trust me, I must always be available. For people to trust me, I must be at their beck and call. For people to trust me, I must get back to them immediately. Okay, well some are freaking out right now. Some are going, I don't believe what Sarah's saying. Because the number one reason in most studies why people supposedly, why they leave property management companies is
a lack of communication or poor communication. Correct. But I think that's a red herring. You can over communicate, and we've had clients do this too. So you can over communicate. You can tell your clients every little single thing that you are doing in whichever method or manner you feel like is appropriate. So you can call them, you can text them, you can send them emails, you can have your system automatically send them notifications.
You can do whatever, but you can tell them, we did this today, and we did that today, and we did this many showings, and we got this many leads, and we're working on this many applications, and this 10 a call, and we did this, and this, this, this, this, this. Can we agree that that is excellent communication? Sure. Do you think that doing that though makes somebody more likely to trust you? I would argue that it doesn't. I would argue that it makes them
less likely to trust you. And the reason is because you're inviting them to babysit you. You're inviting them to be a watchdog. You're inviting them to question you and want to micromanage and monitor. And go, ⁓ what is Jason doing today? What did Jason do on my property today? How many of my tenants did Jason talk to you today?
⁓ What about how many showings did Jason do today and then if all of a sudden? Well, why wasn't there a showing at my property today Jason? I don't understand now. It seems like he's not doing anything, right? So you're you're training people the wrong way by over Communicating with them and you are teaching them to not trust you because they are inherently Question you
So I love this because the idea in these surveys and a lot of people at NARPM and people in property management have said, communication is key. We answer the phone, which is cool. Answer the phone. You still don't need to optimize for reducing the phone calls. How do we eliminate as many as possible? And so I think it's a red herring. I think it's a false idea that communication is the number one reason because there's something that comes before communication.
and that is you set bad expectations, you set poor boundaries, that leads to anxiety in the tenants and the owners, and then communication becomes this crazy thing that they need more of instead of being able to trust you. The lack of trust is the real problem. It's not communication. There's plenty of investors out there that have good property managers that do not want to talk to them ever.
I just had Dustin Heiner on a previous episode of our podcast. Very savvy investor. Every investor listening to this should probably listen to that guy, a really good friend of ours. He goes and finds a property manager first before he finds a property and he says, I will even pay them a little bit more if I have to because I don't want to ever have to talk to them. I don't want to have to deal with the property. I want to be able to trust them to do job so I can just live my life. He wants it to be passive. He's a good investor.
You're creating bad investors and you're making them anxious by not setting healthy boundaries and setting expectations and making sure that they can trust you. And so they trust you less and less over time because they're anxious. And then what happens? Then they have to and call more and more and they have to babysit more and more. And then they have to watch over your shoulder and then they want more reports and then they want more communication. then it's this constant. And then you have to hire more people. Now they need more.
And now that they've had more, now that they're more anxious and they trust you even less, now they want more of that. And you're just getting in this cycle that's eventually going to be the death of you and your team and perhaps your entire business. It gets worse because yeah, you have to build out this whole team of people you don't even need. You hire a bunch of extra people and these people are not, like if you're hiring that many people, you can't afford to pay them all super well. So you're not getting the most amazing people.
And these are the frontline people that are dealing with your tenants and owners. And then they're frustrated with them because they don't have all the answers and they don't sound confident and competent. And so then they want to talk to you. And so you're getting escalations constantly. And so now you're having to talk with them even more to calm down the anxiety because Susie at the front desk had no clue what they were talking about. And then all of a sudden you have this whole team that's not capable of running the business without you.
So now everything is still coming to you, but you're paying everybody to do things and it doesn't matter because they do things, they fail, people aren't satisfied and they still go, yeah, but I'm still putting out all the fires all day. You're right, you are. And that's because of how you are training people. And you know you have the wrong team if one of your key questions is, why won't my team just think for themselves? If you constantly are asking that question, why won't they just think for themselves? It's because you.
have bad leadership. You've set it up incorrectly and you have not created the right team. You've built the wrong team around the wrong person. You're showing up as the wrong person. You're over involved and you have not been able to create, but you created the wrong environment. And that started with picking, know, setting up the game incorrectly with tenants and owners and not setting good boundaries and not setting good expectations. And it doesn't even mean that you have bad clients. No. It doesn't mean you have bad clients. You're making them bad.
bad properties, doesn't even mean that you have bad tenants, it just means that you're training them to treat you that way. And you're allowing them to treat you that way. And then you're wondering why it's so hard to manage them and why everyone goes, Sarah, how is it possible that you ran 260 units and you were part time? I just don't understand how it's possible. And most people wouldn't understand how it's possible because they're making so many mistakes.
with their time and throughout their entire day, that almost the entire day, I would be willing to bet that about 80 % or more of the average property manager's day is bullshit. Yeah. Complete bullshit. So that's why when you're spending most of your day doing stupid things, yeah, no wonder why I can outwork you. And it's not even hard to do. It's just hard when you're trying to do everything.
And it's hard when you're not training your team, your clients, your tenants. They're all like puppies. You just, have to train all of them. If you want a dog that's going to go to the bathroom outside, you've got to train it. If you want an owner that's going to trust you and not question you and not consistently bother you and wonder what's happening on my property today, you've got to train them to do that.
And some of them may have come to you with those intentions. And then because of how your system is set up, you broke that. And now they're just used to, okay, well, they're gonna tell me every day or every once a week. Now I'm gonna get on a phone call once a week. Here's our weekly call. Here's my weekly email. Yeah. There's several other things related at a time. One that I'll...
related to what Sarah's talking about is if your goals are too low, like your goal right now is a shitty goal, like your goal is survival, or how do I just deal with all this time? That's an awful goal. That goal yields really terrible results. That's not a goal that's going to get you to think differently. It's not a goal that's going to get you to innovate or find a better path or to be able to grow and scale dramatically faster. That's a really low level goal. And so it doesn't raise the floor high enough. And so you're dealing with all this low level garbage in your business.
And that relates to priorities. Time is not, everybody has the same amount of time. It's not about time. It's about prioritization, as we mentioned at the beginning. And so you are intentionally filling your, uses a golf ball analogy. Do you want to share that? No. No. Okay. Well, I'll just, but basically you're filling up, you're filling up your day with all of the riff raff and the little stuff instead of prioritizing the main thing. And so I'll share this.
You need to figure out what your biggest bottleneck is. Anything other than that, there's only one bottleneck in your business. There's always one. It's one at a time. That's your biggest constraint is the bottleneck. And you have to always focus on what is the bottleneck that I need to be dealing with right now. I recently heard Alex Hermosy talk about this and there's lots of different leaks and lots of different constraints in the business, but
You need to figure out where is the biggest bottleneck. That's the priority. You need to prioritize the right things. Right now you're prioritizing the wrong things. Go back, find a previous episode where I talk about the six core functions of business. That will help reveal to you which of those six is the priority. And then you can figure out where's the bottleneck inside of that area of the business, that constraint. These are like six children you need to feed and take care of. And I guarantee you've got your fat healthy favorite. You keep shoving.
food down its throat, and then you've got the other kids that are starving, emaciated, sitting in the corner that you're neglecting. And that means you're not prioritizing the right thing in the business. You're being a bad steward over your own business. And so you've got to make intelligent decisions based on where's the constraint, where's the bottleneck. And that's how you should prioritize your time. And the rest has to fit elsewhere. And you need to set boundaries for your own time because you're not productive.
as often as you're working if you're working a ridiculous amount of hours. Some of your hours are probably a tenth as productive as some of your early morning hours where you're sharp and you're working on things effectively. And so it's not about more time. It's about prioritizing and it's about being more productive and more effective. Some say working smarter instead of harder. And so if you would like to do that, reach out to Sudorgo. We can help you with that.
little bit more about bottlenecks and speaking of bottlenecks, a lot of property managers they end up telling us that maintenance is probably I would say arguably the biggest bottleneck in their entire business because everyone seems to struggle with maintenance and unfortunately it is part of being property manager but it's definitely the most time-consuming yeah
What if you could cut that workload by up to 85 % and even some of our clients have gotten up to 95 % automation for their maintenance coordination? that's exactly what Vendoroo has achieved because they've leveraged cutting edge AI technology to handle nearly all of your maintenance tasks. That's right.
From initiating work orders and troubleshooting to coordinating with vendors and reporting, the AI doesn't just automate, it becomes your ideal employee. It learns your preferences and executes tasks flawlessly, never needing a day off and not quitting. This frees you up to focus on the critical tasks that really move the needle for your business, whether that's refining your operations, expanding your portfolio, or even just taking a well-deserved break because we all need one of those.
Over half the room at last year's DoorGrow Live conference signed up with Vendoroo right then and there. One year later, they're not just satisfied. They're raving about how Vendoroo has transformed their business. Don't let maintenance drag you down. Step up your property management game with Vendoroo. You can visit vendero.ai slash door grow. That's vendero.ai slash door grow today to make this the last maintenance hire that you're ever going to need. All right.
There's the word from the sponsor. Okay, so yeah, there's a lot of different time hacks that we could get into. You know, we help coach clients on this all the time. It's always this constant excuse, oh, I don't have time to work on growing my business. If your business isn't growing, it's dying. And if you're just burning yourself out on the hamster wheel, thinking you're making progress, but you're not, and there's no focus on growth, that's a really
stressful drain. That's a really terrible goal. That's a survival goal. We've got to get you dreaming bigger. We've got to get you seeing bigger. We've got to get you prioritizing better. We've got to get you eliminating a lot of stuff that you're prioritizing and that you're optimizing for that doesn't even need to exist. There's a lot of work in your business right now that doesn't even need to exist. It's just being created because of bad boundaries and bad set up.
If you'd like some help with this, reach out to us at DoorGrow. Anything else you want to add about time? I would say time is not something that you feel like you have a plethora of as a property manager. Then that tells me there are some shifts that you can make, relatively simple shifts that you can make in your business. I will admit I was bored as a property manager. Yeah. Running.
260 C-class properties, I was part-time. I was bored. That's why I'm here at DoorGrow That's how I convinced her. I was like, you got some time? Come help us optimize things Most property managers don't say that they're bored throughout the day and don't go, geez, what am I going to do for the next eight hours? I have no idea what to do. If you would like to figure out how you can run your business in only a few hours a week, that's definitely something I can help you with and it's super fun for me.
I like helping people optimize their time because I know that I can make you a lot more money. And that's exciting for me. I like making people more money. So if that's something that you're struggling with, and if you feel like, hey, I would really love to learn how I can be a part-time property manager, making a lot of money and not pulling my hair out, not hitting my life, then contact us. We can chat with you.
our sales team would be very happy to answer any questions that you might have. this is one of the biggest things that we can do for you here at DoorGrow is clean up your time and then you get to use that time to make more money, yeah. To make more money. Perfect. So if you feel stuck, stagnant, you want to take things to the next level, visit us at doorgrow.com. Also join our free Facebook community. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com.
We only let in business owners and property management companies. And if you want tips, tricks, ideas, and to learn about our offers, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com/subscribe And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us out until next time. Remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.