DGS 264: How a Mindset Shift can Impact Your Property Management Business

In over a decade of coaching and working with property management entrepreneurs, we have realized that the mindset stuff is often more impactful than the tactics and strategy.

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss some of their favorite mindset hacks for property management business owners.

[03:09] Having a Bad Mindset

[11:15] Hiring and the Process Myth

[13:28] Limiting Your Own Growth

[16:18] Shifting Your Mindset

[21:59] The Myth of Needing to be Happy

“If you really want to grow your business, you have to get off of this high horse of you being special.”

“Whatever you believe is going to be true.”

“You can either have excuses or you can have wins and results.”

“A lot of times we can't see the future. We know our current past and the past doesn't always equal the future.”

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[00:00:00] Jason: If you believe that you're special and nothing applies to you and nothing will work in your market, you're going to be right.

[00:00:07] But if I get the right client that has an open mind in your market, I can help them crush you. 

[00:00:13] Welcome DoorGrow property managers 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 in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager.

[00:00:33] DoorGrow 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.

[00:00:56] 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 and Sarah Hull.

[00:01:17] Now let's get into the show. All right. 

[00:01:20] So today we're going to be talking about mindset. This is this distinguishing, determining factor between clients having success or business owners having success and business owners that don't, even if you know all the tactics. And a lot of times people come to us for the tactics and they think, "Oh man, if I could just learn the right things to do, I'll suddenly have success."

[00:01:43] But in the end, when I asked clients, "what really made the difference? What did you really get from us, from DoorGrow?" The usual answer historically has been, "you've shifted how I think about things. You've shifted my mindset." And mindset is probably what's holding you back more than just tactics.

[00:02:00] Now, this is what we're going to talk about. Before we get. Into this, I want to share a sponsor that we have for this episode. Vendoroo really cool tech company. If you are tired of the constant stress and hassle of maintenance coordination, meet Vendoroo, your AI- driven, in house maintenance expert that handles work orders from start to finish, triaging, troubleshooting vendor selection and coordination. Built by property managers for property managers to provide cost effective and accountable maintenance operations where every dollar is accounted for and every task is handled with unmatched reliability. Vendoroo takes care of the details so you can focus on growth. Schedule a demo today by going to Vendoroo. ai So that's V E N D O R like vendor and then O O. Vendoroo.ai/ DoorGrow and experience maintenance done right. And we've got clients already getting great results with them. I think this is like the next awesome big thing. So go check them out. Okay. So let's talk about mindset and let's first, let's show some contrast, right? Sometimes we get some clients and they don't have good mindset. What do you notice with those clients? 

[00:03:13] Sarah: They always get stuck. They overthink everything. Everything just seems hard or harder than it has to be. A lot of times these are the clients that are like, "this isn't possible." It's like, "yeah, Sarah, I know that's how you ran your business, but like, I just can't do it that way. It's not possible in my market." So there's been a lot of I feel like it's justification. "Well, why isn't this possible for me? Like if Sarah can run her business that way, if like Jeff Garner can run his business that way, like if other people can run businesses the way that I would like to, but it just doesn't seem to be happening for me. There must be a reason, right?" So then there's a lot of justification. That's what I see. 

[00:03:55] Jason: Yeah. So they'll be like, "this won't work for me or this won't work in my market."

[00:03:59] Sarah: "My clients would never..." 

[00:04:01] Jason: "my clients would never go for that." Yeah. 

[00:04:03] Sarah: "They would never do it that well." 

[00:04:05] Jason: There's kind of this attitude of superiority that they just know more than everybody else. "There's no way, even though it's worked for countless others in a variety of different markets, there's no way it would work for me because I am so special and my market is so special." Let me tell you, you're not that special. Nobody's that special that things are not going to work for you that have been proven and time tested to work. That's the case. And so if you really want to grow your business, you have to get off of this high horse of you being special. "Well, I'm so special. My situation is so special. I'm so unique." And as long as people hold on to this myth that they're so special, that means nothing else applies to them. Nothing else can work for them. And so they stay stuck in their dysfunction and bottom line, the thing I think that's really important for people to look at when evaluating their current situation and whether their mindset might be off or not is just look at reality.

[00:05:05] Look at your results. Results do not lie. If you have not grown significantly over the last year, your results are shit. Your results suck. Bottom line. 

[00:05:16] Sarah: Did we trade places today? Are you the bad guy today? 

[00:05:19] Jason: Maybe. 

[00:05:20] Sarah: That means I have to play good guy? I can't play good cop. 

[00:05:22] Jason: We can both be bad cop today. 

[00:05:24] Sarah: I don't know how to play bad or good cop. I can only be bad cop. 

[00:05:26] Jason: We're both bad cops against bad mindset. I mean Here's the thing, like whatever you believe is going to be true. That's what I think. So if you believe it's tough, you're right. If you believe that you're special and nothing applies to you and nothing will work in your market, you're going to be right.

[00:05:46] But if I get the right client that has an open mind in your market, I can help them crush you. I can help them like totally destroy you. Like your business. They could acquire you. They could eat your business for lunch because they're willing to believe something different. And so take a look at your beliefs because your beliefs create your results.

[00:06:07] And if you don't like your results, your beliefs are garbage. Bottom line, and this is the tough love dad and me coming out. Like if you don't like your current results in life, you don't like the clients you're dealing with. You don't like the tenants you're dealing with. You don't like your business.

[00:06:23] You probably have a crappy belief system, which means you are not setting healthy boundaries. You're tolerating too much abuse. Maybe you've got some past trauma that led to this. I don't know, but you need to change your thinking and you need to change your story because your story creates your results and you cannot change your results dramatically and keep your old shitty story and your old excuses.

[00:06:45] You can either have excuses or you can have wins and results. You can't have both. You've got to change the story. And so really healthy mindset is a process where people are continually evaluating their own beliefs and their own story to, to just decide and ask the question, "is this serving me? Is this getting me what I want?" 

[00:07:08] "If not, then I can choose to change it. I can choose to believe differently about that situation that happened to me in the past. I can choose to believe differently about my market. I can choose to believe differently and find evidence to the contrary or figure out what works."

[00:07:22] And if you're trying to do it all on your own, it's kind of like trying to look at the back of your own head. This is the challenge is if you don't have good mindset, you need to go be around somebody that can install a healthier belief system into your brain. This is what we do at DoorGrow. In every training that we have, I'm not so secretly injecting new mindset into your brain because in order for you to take action on the things I need you to take action on, I've got to get you to understand it and believe something different or you won't do it. And I think this is one of my areas of genius, I think, historically, is I've been pretty good at persuading people to actually believe in themselves.

[00:08:02] I've been pretty good at persuading people to actually think a little bit differently about a subject so that I can get them to do crazy stuff, like completely overhaul their pricing with their existing clients. They're like, "no, it'll hurt them, they'll be upset," you know, "they'll all cancel," whatever. And then they're making more money, right?

[00:08:19] Or getting them to change their business name. "No, this is my baby. You called it ugly and said it needs plastic surgery." No, right? So their branding or whatever it is, we get them to think differently, which, gets them to take different actions. And you are the person creating your current results with your actions because of your current mindset.

[00:08:40] All right, that's my soapbox rant. This is a good place for me to share our next sponsor. And then we'll get into how to install healthy mindset 

[00:08:47] Sarah: and yell at you some more 

[00:08:49] Jason: Do it! Get good mindset. What's wrong with you people? All right, cool And we're going to talk about some healthy mindset things And maybe challenge some of the beliefs you have we'll do that and this won't take too long.

[00:08:59] Our next sponsor for this episode is True Submeter. This is some cool technology. Attention, multi family property owners and managers! Discover True Submeter, the number one water submetering company in the US. Say goodbye to water use abuse by your tenants and hello to billing for exact water consumption with no unit minimum, enjoy smart, cost effective solutions designed to optimize your property's operations and save you money. Plus get an exclusive 10 percent discount with the code doorgrow10. DoorGrow 1 0, use that code. Visit truesubmeter. com today for intelligent utility solutions and substantial savings. That's truesubmeter. com. So this is a cool tech actually for small plexes and yeah. 

[00:09:50] Sarah: I would have loved that on my multifamily because that was so irritating. You have to try to like increase the rent to offset the water cost, but how much is the water cost going to be? And then sometimes you price yourself out with the rent being too high and You can't track.

[00:10:04] You just can't. And then every once in a while, you get the tenant like I had, you know who you are, who just ran the sink for fun because she was pissed. Yeah, that was great. Oh, man. Oh, I hated her so much. Yeah, you, like, man, I wish I had that true submeter device on her, like a bill for that. 

[00:10:23] Yeah, she would just run the sink, she would turn on the water, she would walk away, it would flood the apartment downstairs and it would jerk up the water bill.

[00:10:30] Yeah oh, yeah, it was great market I was in guys. It was so fun. I miss it every day 

[00:10:35] Jason: Wow Okay. You good? 

[00:10:37] Sarah: I think so. All right. 

[00:10:38] Jason: Can we move on? Yeah. All right. We're going to talk about healthy mindset.

[00:10:42] Sarah: This is a great episode. You're cute. 

[00:10:44] Jason's yelling at people. I'm yelling at people. This is a good one. 

[00:10:47] Jason: Okay. Healthy mindset. I'll give you some examples. I actually, because I kept having clients say, like I would say, what was the best part of our program? Or, you know, things like this. And they would say mindset.

[00:10:58] And I was like, what? I don't even have anything about mindset I didn't think. It's just kind of what I do. It's built in, but I actually then created a training. I'm like, "I'm going to create a training that's legitimately mindset stuff." So I have a training called mindset secrets. So let me share some mindset ideas.

[00:11:15] One of the things that I've noticed in negative mindset is one really unhealthy mindset that would shift everything for property management business owners I see happen, especially between the stage of going from a hundred to 200 doors is this mindset that "I need to hire and build the team around the business" and it's so unconscious.

[00:11:37] It's just so wired. "Oh, like the business is getting stressful. I need to get a team member" and we just hire based on what the business needs instead of what we need. And so this is where I see business owners end up in two to 400 door range and they're more miserable than they've ever been and they stop focusing on growth and getting doors or they can't because adding more doors makes their life painful and they are more miserable in their business than they've ever been.

[00:12:03] I talk to people every week that are in this situation there and we've signed like how many businesses in the last two weeks did we sign up in our mastermind? Like seven. Yeah. Something like this. The majority of them are in our super system tier of our mastermind because they're dealing with this problem.

[00:12:21] This problem. And they're not happy. They don't have a rockstar team. They have sometimes an okay team, or they have a terrible team where they've really struggled with hiring. And they think they have a good team, but then they think, "well, we just need better processes." Let me tell you, if you think your biggest problem is you just need more processes so you can handle growth, you don't have a good team. Your team is not the team that you need. A good team can still perform amazingly without process documentation. They will figure it out. 

[00:12:52] I call this the process myth.

[00:12:53] This is really unhealthy mindset. You cannot out process bad team members. And you cannot build the right team around the wrong person. So if you are showing up in the business still wearing hats you don't enjoy wearing, still doing things you don't enjoy doing, you then are building the wrong team by default.

[00:13:09] If you still wear a bunch of different hats you don't enjoy wearing and you have an entire team, you have the wrong team. Period. This is bad mindset because you haven't been taking care of yourself. You haven't been building the business around you because you're probably not even clear on you and what you really want.

[00:13:24] And so that's caused this problem. So that's mindset. Another mindset issue. People come to me and I'm like, "what do you want?" They're like, "I want to grow, but maybe only to about 250 units or 300 units. I hear this all the time. It's like they, they have a cap." What would you say about that?

[00:13:39] You've heard me talk. 

[00:13:40] Sarah: So that's one of the things that I think it really holds people back. And if you're limiting yourself right out of the gate, then you're not, first of all, you're not living up to your full potential clearly. But in addition to that you're creating the glass ceiling. That we're all, like, pissed and fighting about.

[00:14:01] It's like, you know when you get a job and they're like, "Oh yeah, but this role, it maxes out at this salary. Like, you can't make any more. This is, like, the top. Okay? So, no matter how great of a job I do, I can't just make more?" Well, no. That's, like, you would have to get promoted, or move laterally to a different role, and that's how you would make more money. Oh, well, you're creating that for yourself now. You're putting a limitation on yourself and your business. And then what happens is it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And that's where you get stuck. And sometimes you can't even reach that because you know that it's the end. So sometimes you're like, "okay, I want to get to like 250, 250 would be like really good. Then you can't even get to 250 because your brain already knows it's done at 250. Especially if you're Power and Achievement. If you're Power and Achievement and you say, "Okay, 250 and then I'm going to stop." Your brain will literally never let you stop. Because you have to keep winning if you're Power and Achievement.

[00:15:03] And once you hit 250 and then you're done, then you're done winning. Your brain is going to go, Nope, not for me. Not doing that. I'll play in that game. 

[00:15:11] Jason: So what I've noticed is our brains were really good at kind of creating and predicting the future. I mean, if I asked you right now, imagine what you could be at in a year and what you could be doing.

[00:15:22] Like you can instantly come up with something. And so the problem is when I ask people what their goals are, instead of just thinking of the ultimate amazing possibility, they think of the pain. There's part of us that always focuses on, "well, I want this great outcome, but I also know there's going to be some pain involved.

[00:15:42] And so they have this false mindset that adding more doors is also going to be, which is, can be true, which is true for people that end up in the second stand trap. And so they're a little bit like magical and seeing the future. They can see their future that somewhere between two to 400 units, life's not going to be as good for them.

[00:16:01] And it's going to get hard. And so part of healthy mindset is being exposed to a different possibility. So here's a different possibility for everybody that thinks that would be the max level pain that they could tolerate would be maybe 250 units, 300 units or whatever. I want you to ask yourself this question.

[00:16:18] Do you think it could be possible that if you do it the right way, that the more doors you add. Every door you add, the more doors you add, the more money you could have and the better the team members you could get and the easier your business could get over time. Could you see a possibility in which a thousand doors, managing a thousand door business could be easier for you as a CEO than managing a hundred?

[00:16:44] I think most of us can see that's possible, but if you don't know how, then that's why you would maybe come to DoorGrow. Like, we would help you see that future. We would help paint how that's going to map out and how that's going to work so that it can become a reality. But a lot of times we can't see the future.

[00:16:59] We know our current past and the past doesn't always equal the future. It does if you don't get some sort of injection of something new, you don't bring something new into your space, some new ideas, a new mindset. And this is why it's very important to be around people that have health mindset. I think that's one of the best benefits of our mastermind is that it's full of people that are around Growers, full of people that are believers.

[00:17:22] It's full of people that are optimistic, that believe in potential and possibility. They're growth minded and not everybody out there growth minded. There's a lot of worn down, sad property management business owners and they won't admit it. You might be one of them. They won't admit it, but there's a lot of them and they would love to get out of the business.

[00:17:45] They just can't see a way out. I've had clients we just signed up that wanted out of their business. And as soon as they can paint a picture of how they can stay in the business and that selling it may not be the only way to escape the shittiness that they're experiencing, that they also could just change how they're running their business and do different types of exits.

[00:18:08] They can exit some of the frontline work. They don't have to sell the whole business. And that the business can be good because mindset wise, they are off, right? And I just show them the possibility. I show them evidence. I show them results from people that have done this. I share testimonies of people that had felt exactly how they did. 

[00:18:27] So I had, it was an interesting experience yesterday. I signed up a client in the morning that wanted to get rid of her business.

[00:18:35] She hated it. And the husband wanted to like keep it and she was miserable and I helped paint a picture of possibility of a different future that we could create. And I was excited to her, like emotionally, she was like, it got her. And she was like, "yeah, let's do this." Ironically, I had a call later that afternoon with Annemarie Sunde.

[00:18:55] If you go back and like, check out her podcast episode, this was a past client. She eventually sold her business. She did exit the business eventually, but when she first came to me, it was the same story. So I told her the story and she's like, "Oh my gosh, I have so much to say about that." But it was the same story.

[00:19:11] Annemarie came to me and was like, "I hate my business. I want to sell it. I want to get out of it. And after listening to her," I just said, "you're just doing it wrong." Like, let's just change what you're doing. And she was letting me know on this call yesterday, just catching me up on her life, like how grateful she was and and what she's up to now.

[00:19:29] And it's awesome to see that contrast. Because I've helped so many clients get out of that spot where they hate their business and they're miserable. There's no question. I know it's super possible that we can change how they show up in their business and we can change their mindset and things can be really good.

[00:19:47] And that gets me really excited. I'm excited for them because I know what's on the other side. They don't know it. They just have hope. And sometimes that's all people need to shift their mindset is an injection of hope. So come over to DoorGrow. We'll give you a little bit of hopium. We'll throw some hope in your face and get you to start to believe in some possibility that's, and that'll shift your mindset.

[00:20:07] So what other mindset things? 

[00:20:09] I

[00:20:09] Sarah: think the only other thing I would add to it is going back to your story and your excuses and everybody, this is what I'm realizing is everybody kind of is going through their own shit for most of us. It's not easy, right? Like, we don't just grow up having everything that we want and life just gives us the perfect scenario all the time and it's rainbows and butterflies and everything's just perfect all the time.

[00:20:40] It's just not reality for most people. We grow because of the things that we've been through. And I think that the best thing you can do is realize that first of all, you're not alone in it and second, it's what you do with it that really makes a difference. That's what counts. It's not the shitty thing that happened to you.

[00:21:02] It's what you do with that because you can have this horrible, awful thing happen to you. We all do and then go, "okay, that's the reason. That's the reason I don't feel love in my life. That's the reason I can't run a successful business. That's the reason I'll never make money. That's the reason I can't have a great relationship or great friendships. That's why I don't trust people. That's why I can't do this. That's why I can't do that." Or you can take that and say, "you know what? That's the reason I'm going to do it anyway. That's the reason that I am going to be successful. That's the reason that I am going to have trust in people, earned trust."

[00:21:41] Right. It's like it's what you do with it that makes the difference. 

[00:21:46] Jason: What you decide about it and what you decide about what it means, and you can decide, yeah, that it makes you a victim or you can decide that it taught you valuable lessons and empowered you. For sure. I love that. That's good mindset.

[00:21:57] People listen to her. I think one of my favorite things I've been thinking about lately is a lot of times people, mindset wise, a lot of times people think the goal is to be happy. And I think that's a really shitty goal. I, ironically, I know, people are like what's wrong with that? I think people mistakenly think the goal of life is just to be happy all the time.

[00:22:18] And so every moment they're not happy, they're not experiencing this one set of emotion that they think that there's something wrong with life. And I think a healthier mindset is that life should be full. You should experience a fullness. You should experience everything. Life is beautiful in its totality, if you are willing to experience everything. Can you imagine a life where you never felt lost? You never felt sorrow? There's beauty in all these things. I have a friend whose father just passed. And I was just thinking about that, you know, and she wrote about like what she's realizing, how she hasn't shown up for people that are grieving, didn't know how to, and she's like made a little list of the things that she thought would be beneficial to those, you know, in the future for people to know about those grieving and like what they would want. And it may be a bit different for everybody, but I think the point of life is to be able to experience everything. And that's where I think things get beautiful. There's some beauty in missing someone.

[00:23:20] There's some beauty in wanting something that you don't have. There's beauty in feeling sorrow. There's beauty in feeling loss. And if we're always trying to just manipulate things so that we can only experience one thing, we're going to be way less happy, I believe.

[00:23:34] And we're going to be way more focused on all the lack and the loss. And we're just unwilling to experience all these different emotions. Who's to say that a happy emotion is better than a sad emotion. They're just different emotions. And maybe we're supposed to be experiencing everything all the time and not trying to control it, just being willing to experience.

[00:23:55] And when we're willing to fully experience things, and we're actually in the present moment, instead of in the future, worrying about things or in the past, worrying about stuff that's happened. We're actually in this moment, we're far more likely to experience the good stuff, but we're experienced everything real time.

[00:24:10] So that's a mindset thing that I've been kind of chewing on me in noticing other people because I see people so caught up in their own misery that they're not experienced all happiness all the time. And there's so much beauty around them that they're missing out on in their relationships and their connections.

[00:24:25] This was just so focused on staring at the garbage. So that's my little mindset bit for today. So if you don't feel like you have the right mindset, you feel like things are unnecessarily hard. You don't feel like you're growing. Maybe you still are like, "man, Jason, I still really isn't in tactics."

[00:24:45] Cool. We can help you with that. Come check us out over at DoorGrow. Let's have a conversation and see if we might be able to help you out and figures your situation out and see if we can help you grow. Set up a call with us that won't hurt. It won't hurt anything like set up a call with us and we will help you figure out if this would be a good fit for you or not.

[00:25:03] And we only want people in our program that this is something that's really going to benefit them and it's going to be a good fit for you. So we're careful and I know you, you want to be careful. And so let's have a conversation, reach out to us. You check us out at doorgrow.Com and if you're wanting to join our free online community, our Facebook group.

[00:25:21] Called the DoorGrow club, which is just for property management entrepreneurs, your team members, just entrepreneurs, the business owners go to DoorGrow club. com and you can join through there. And that's it until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone

[00:25:38] 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! 

[00:26:05] 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 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 learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.