Recently, Jason and Sarah hosted a few momentum coaching calls where they taught DoorGrow Mastermind members ways to grow and scale their businesses. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull go over 3 strategies property managers can use to increase their close rate. You’ll Learn [01:53] Sales in a post-trust era [07:16] Objection-handling with a newer sales strategy [09:59] Proof bomb testimonials [13:55] One of the most effective selling tools Tweetables “A lot of you are trying to sell the way you learned maybe in real estate or the way that things happen in the past and you're probably finding it harder and harder as well.” “My agenda is to figure out simply, do they need what we have?” “If they can't find a consequence to not starting now, then they won't start now.” “People's trust levels are at an all-time low. And so in selling, I've had to really change things up.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: If you have any leads, deals, opportunities in the pipeline right now, and you would love to maybe double your close rate or double the deal count that you're getting out of your existing lead flow, I think these three elements combined would easily do that.  [00:00:14] 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. [00:00:31] 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. [00:00:50] 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, and Sarah Hull the owners of DoorGrow. [00:01:10] Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:13] So today we're going to talk a little bit, this is going to be a quick episode. We've got camera malfunctions. I don't know. I don't know what's going on, but I had a coaching call with clients recently, just the other day. We do these momentum coaching calls with some of our clients in the mastermind to get them back in momentum. [00:01:31] Like if they've maybe been disengaged a little for a little bit, or they've been focused on other things, or they're kind of unclear on what they should be doing next, we want to get them back in the state of momentum, which is where entrepreneurs want to be. And so, on that call, I was sharing with them some of the new stuff cause some of them have been a little bit unplugged and we're always adding new, innovative ideas. [00:01:53] So one of the things that I've noticed recently is that sales, we're kind of in this post trust era. I've noticed over the last three, four years, sales has become really difficult. It's become harder to sell using older sales tactics or typical sales tactics. And so I had to change up how it was selling. [00:02:14] And I did a lot of research, a lot of study. I took an empathy course and a communication thing, like seminar thing, and just a bunch of other stuff. And the old school sales, methodology just isn't working here in this post trust sort of era, like nobody believes anything anymore. The news, you can't really trust it. [00:02:37] We all know now the news is fake, right? Voting has been fake. Food's been fake, right? A lot of the medical stuff shoved on us, fake, right? Just saw something about the conspiracy theory or scam of like C sections being pushed on people, which is like ridiculous amounts, like everything's fake. [00:02:56] And so we don't know who or what we can trust. But we trust ourselves and so what I've noticed is people's trust levels are an all time low And so in selling I've had to really change things up and transparently sales was not going really well for us for a while, right? [00:03:13] Sarah: Yeah.  [00:03:13] Jason: Like we had a lot of clients that stayed in our program, but closing deals was hard.  [00:03:17] Sarah: Yeah, and we didn't focus on sales. [00:03:20] Jason: Yeah, it wasn't really a focus for us. At all. We focused a lot on the product. Yeah.  [00:03:24] Sarah: For like a year and a half maybe almost two years and then by the time we needed to focus on sales, it wasn't as easy to like, just flip a switch as we thought. We were like, "okay, we're ready now. Like, let's amp up sales." And they were like, "oh, that isn't happening the way we thought." [00:03:43] Like, we just thought, you know, like, just pick it right back up where you left off.  [00:03:47] Jason: Yeah. I thought, because I hadn't been doing sales for years. Like I had sales team members, people. So then I was like I'll go back to doing sales. And and the game has changed. Like, and a lot of you are trying to sell the way you learned maybe in real estate or the way that things happen in the past and you're probably finding it harder and harder as well. [00:04:08] I would imagine. So what I've noticed is that we need to shift to a different model. So I shifted to a more question based empathetic model of selling. And I went through and coached our clients on this and they're already starting to get some different results, which is awesome. My close rate using this different methodology has gone through the roof. [00:04:32] So what I've noticed, my close rate has gone through the roof, but what I've noticed is by just being super curious and not trying to sell something. [00:04:40] And I know that sounds wild, like I'm closing way more deals by not trying to sell. I'm just being curious and I'm just being helpful and I'm asking a lot of questions. If I'm on an hour call, I'm spending like almost the entire call just asking questions and letting them talk. If I ask questions in a strategic order, what I'm noticing is that if I ask the right questions, it helps them figure out what their problem is. It helps them figure out what their sort of ideal solution is. It helps them figure out what the consequence is if they don't change this, or if they continue doing what they're doing. [00:05:14] And then at the very end, like, I'll get into the pitch a little bit. But what I'm noticing is people don't know, we assume people know what their problem is. Like somebody comes to you for property management and you're like "they're already dealing with the problem. They're aware." They might be superficially, but they're not aware of the problem. They're not aware of how they feel about the problem. They're not aware fully about what the impact of that problem is. And they're not really even aware of what they want or what the ideal solution is to some degree. They become aware of all of this stuff when you ask them, like in that moment. [00:05:47] And so when I start asking clients these questions, they start, these potential clients, they start formulating this real time. I know NLP stuff. I can see their eyes moving around the right way. I know they're now creating this in their head. They're figuring it out. And if they don't know that they have a problem or where their pain is and what they want and what paradise looks like and the ideal outcomes and if they haven't formulate all this, it's really difficult to close the deal. It's really difficult to get them to move forward towards what they want. And I've also given up focusing on trying to you know, having any sort of agenda. My agenda is to figure out simply do they need what we have? I can see this, but they need to figure this out. So I need to ask questions to help them see that they might benefit from this or that they need something. And they, if they do identify that they need something different or they need help, then the next question I need to figure out is, do they want what we have? And that's it! i'm no longer trying to pitch and spending the majority of the call telling them how awesome our program is and all the cool stuff that we have. I go through and I just ask some questions and then at the very end My pitch is like I just picked three things because there's so much in our program. It was overwhelming people.  [00:07:02] I spent the whole call like "we have this call! We do this! We have this! And we have all this content in DoorGrow Academy and Telegram messenger access and blah blah blah," and like they were just like "oh, well, I need to think about it." And if you overwhelm them with features and benefits, you're going to get that objection every time. What I'm finding is with this new methodology of selling that I've been coaching clients on there's a very few objections. [00:07:22] There's not really anything to object to because you've gotten clear on what their problem is. They've gotten clear on what the problem is that you've gotten them clear on what the, you know the positive future outcome would look like and they're clear on that now, and so that creates this pain gap in between and then you're able to create urgency and one of my big challenges is I wasn't able to create urgency because I didn't get them clear on their problem or what they wanted and what that gap felt like and if the if that was really an issue And then I didn't ask some questions to help them get clear on why does this matter now? [00:07:58] Does this why would it matter to get this going now? Why not change it? Why not keep it the same and by asking that it helps them to identify also urgency and so then adding urgency was one of the big things I was missing because everybody would go through, listen to me pitch. And they'd be like, "this sounds amazing. It sounds like it's solved my problems. It sounds really great, but I'm onboarding a new assistant right now and I'll do it later." Or "I'm dealing with this challenge right now," or "I've got this problem in my business right now," or "it's summer and things really busy," right? And so there was no urgency. [00:08:30] And so if you're running into that with clients, the lack of urgency is caused by a lack of identifying this pain gap and then a lack of helping them identify what's going on. Why does it matter to do this now? Is there any consequence? And if they can't find a consequence to not starting now, then they won't start now. [00:08:47] They may never start. And so, my close rate is ridiculously high lately. And I'm not really doing anything other than asking questions to help them figure out what they want rather than trying to push my really cool ideas like, shove it, cram it down their throat, you know, like old style sales. [00:09:06] So I don't have to deal with objections. I don't have to use manipulative things like, "do you want the red one or the blue one?" And they're like, "I didn't even say I wanted one." You know, you don't have to use any of these old school. Pushy, icky sales tactics. And so what I'm also noticing is it doesn't create sales resistance or ick, this gross feeling in them that they feel like you're like disgusting or they feel awkward. [00:09:30] And a lot of you that have problems doing sales or you have problems with salespeople or you have problems feeling comfortable being a sales person or identifying with that, it's because of that gross feeling that you get when selling, when you're being pushy or manipulative instead of helpful. So I'm actually really enjoying doing sales because to me this feels more like what I love to do, which is coaching so that's one of the things I talked about with our coaching clients. Other thing I talked about with proof. [00:10:00] Sarah: The other thing that you're gonna do right now is take a break.  [00:10:03] Jason: Oh, we're going to take a break and then I'll tell you about proof bombs. One of our sponsors for this episode is Vendoroo. We're hearing great things and getting great feedback. So if you're tired of the constant stress and hassle of maintenance coordination, check out 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. vendoroo.ai/DoorGrow and experience maintenance done right. And go to that page, you get a special little perk or benefit. So, check out Vendoroo. We're hearing great feedback. And this is part of the AI revolution right now. If you're not doing stuff like this, you're getting left behind. [00:11:00] So, we're hearing some amazing things. True Submeter. Let me tell you about True Submeter. If you are a property owner or manager, check out True Submeter, the number one water Submetering company in the U. S. Say goodbye to water use abuse by your tenants, and hello to billing for exact water consumption. [00:11:21] With no unit minimum, enjoy smart, cost effective solutions designed to optimize your properties operations and save you money. Plus get an exclusive 10 percent discount with the code DoorGrow10. That's DoorGrow one zero. Visit True Submeter today for intelligent utility solutions and substantial savings. [00:11:43] That's truesubmeter. com. Okay. Proof bombs. The other cool thing I shared, it was an idea I learned from one of my mentors, which is Sharran Srivatsaa. Do you want to mention, tell them about Sharran?  [00:11:54] Sarah: Yeah. So, if you guys are in real estate there's a publicly traded real estate company. [00:12:02] Which is insane. Like it's on the stock market. Crazy. It's real. R E A L. Real. He's the CEO. Yeah. Of Real. They're A multi billion, billion with a B, yeah, multi billion dollar company. And they're growing really rapidly. They do some really cool stuff. Thanks to Sharran's leadership. Yeah. [00:12:26] Sharran's a really cool dude. His story's just so interesting. And he like, I mean, he literally came here with like 150 in his pocket and he got robbed on the street. So then he had zero dollars in his pocket and he's just so Well, wait such a cool dude. [00:12:41] Jason: I want to share this story. So he got robbed He had a certain amount of money and then he negotiated with the thief to allow him to just have enough money so he could like do a train ride or get on the train. So he negotiated with the thief, like, and he was able to  [00:12:56] Sarah: "...take all of my money." [00:12:57] Jason: Yeah. "Just leave me this much and you can have the rest." And they did that, like, he's negotiating. This just like, he's just a brilliant guy. And so he shared this idea with proof bombs and he was sharing how he had basically taught this to Alex Hormozi if you've heard of Alex Hormozi or followed his stuff, Sharran's kind of one of the mentors behind the content that Alex Hormozi shares. [00:13:20] And Alex Hormozi used this proof bomb concept in his book launch that went amazingly well. And proof bombs are basically this idea of showing a visual testimonial that you can just see without having to watch the video which uses like a photo and bullet points and some data as evidence and stuff like this. [00:13:39] So I trained my clients on how to create proof bombs, which we have in our pitch deck that I'll pull up sometimes or that we use because it helps get an idea across very quickly using images basically. And so, we shared the idea of proof bombs. And the other, the third idea I shared on these calls was I coached clients on an offer doc because the question came up, "well, what if I don't have a really effective website or I don't have a website yet? I need to wait until you guys help me with that before I can really sell effectively." And then I shared with them what's more effective, even if you have a website or what we call offer documents. If you have conversations with us, we will share one of our offer documents with you at some point, because this gives you everything you need to know or understand about our offer, our program, or what you might be interested in. So we have offer documents for just about everything in our DoorGrow all our different programs our different one day things events stuff like this we have offer documents. So I shared, I coached clients on how to build out these offer documents real effective. [00:14:44] And so those three elements alone will dramatically increase somebody's close rate, like significantly. So if you have any leads, deals, opportunities in the pipeline right now, and you would love to maybe double your close rate or double the deal count that you're getting out of your existing lead flow, these, I think these three elements combined would easily do that. [00:15:06] It'd be significant. Yeah. Very significant. My close rate is just through the roof right now. And if you want to experience some of the sales magic and not even feel like you're being sold to or sold on anything because nobody wants to be sold really, set up a call with our team and we'll help you grow. [00:15:24] We'll help you figure out if we can help you. So, that's basically what I've been up to lately. Is there anything else we should share?  [00:15:30] Sarah: I don't know if I told you this. On the scale call on Friday, Portia actually mentioned that they created offer docs and she's like, "these work so well." She's like, "these are so cool." [00:15:39] She's like, "this is such an awesome tool." So, you're not, you don't run that call, I run that call. So, I wanted to... yeah.  [00:15:47] We've got clients, super excited.  [00:15:49] Jason: We've got clients creating offer documents, proof bombs, and and using that new sales model and they're seeing results. So, just some of the latest stuff just to kind of open up the I don't know, the curtain a little bit and let you know what are some of the things that we're helping people at DoorGrow accomplish and do. Always innovating, always learning and getting new ideas. So that's the advantage of having coaches and mentors, which we have, and we recommend you have. So if you're interested in getting coach, it doesn't have to be us. Go get one. [00:16:23] If you are interested in it being us, then you can check us out at DoorGrow. com. And until next time, to our mutual growth.  [00:16:31] Sarah: Oh, and check out our Facebook group.  [00:16:33] Jason: DoorGrow club. com Join our free facebook community. And that's it until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone [00:16:41] 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!  [00:17:08] 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.

As business owners, we often mistakenly assume that micromanaging our teams will make them more effective and efficient. In today’s episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert, Jason Hull sits down with award-winning real estate coach and industry influencer, Jo Oliveri to discuss how implementing automated workflows can revolutionize your property management business. You’ll Learn [03:14] USA vs Australia for property management [07:03] Property management is stuck in the past [17:38] What is automation? [21:11] The importance of having good policy [31:24] Why your business needs a set of values [40:23] Implementing automated workflows and processes Tweetables “In some respects, we're struggling as an industry to change our mindset and have a fear of moving forward.” “When we use something manual, it's not logical. It becomes part of what a person feels like doing at that time.” “If you don't have your business founded on a very strong policy, then you're going to struggle when things go wrong.” “Out of policy becomes the promise that we can make, and we know that we can deliver on it.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jo: They say every leader is present even when they're not present. So you need to have that. And the only way to have it in property management is through your automated workflows that are built upon the logic that you created through your process.  [00:00:18] Jason: 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 than you are a DoorGrow property manager. [00:00:38] 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. [00:00:59] 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. I'm your host, founder and CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull. [00:01:18] Now let's get into the show. And my lovely guest today is Jo Oliveri. Welcome, Jo.  [00:01:25] Jo: Hello, Jason. How are you?  [00:01:28] Jason: Good. What time is it over there right now?  [00:01:30] Jo: I think it's about 7am in the morning. So we're a little ahead of you. It's Wednesday. We're in the future here.  [00:01:37] Jason: Yeah you're in the future. How's the future look? [00:01:39] Jo: The future in Brisbane is actually very bleak. It's a very wet day, which is unusual for Brisbane, but we need the rain so.  [00:01:46] Jason: Got it. Well, we're going to be chatting a little bit about about automation, about automating your team and processes a bit, but why don't you give people a little bit of background on yourself? [00:02:01] And how you kind of got into this.  [00:02:04] Jo: Yeah. Okay. Well, I've been around the industry in property management, I chose property management for 30 years, which seems like a long time when I say it, but I've been through the process of when they first introduced property management programs through to where we are today in technology. [00:02:22] And I've worked as a property manager right through to being the kind of like the creator of property management for one of the big international franchise groups until I was ready to launch my own business 15 years ago as a property management business coach and consultant and yeah, just feel blessed to be doing what I do every day because it's a great industry to be involved in.  [00:02:49] Jason: Awesome. So where do we start? [00:02:52] What do you think?  [00:02:53] Jo: Oh, well it's interesting when I say I started 30 years ago, I feel like we're still back in, you know, what we were doing 30 years ago, in some respects we're struggling as an industry to change our mindset and have a fear of moving forward. So it's quite interesting. [00:03:14] Jason: So. You've been back and forth between the United States and Australia involved in property management conferences, events. I've actually just for kicks been reading on my morning walks, the LPMA manuals or doc like books or whatever because I'm like, what do they got going on over there? And it seems like there are some notable differences. [00:03:35] It seems it's really interesting. I'm like, Oh, that's really weird. Why did they do stuff that way over there? So, but what have you noticed between the two countries, like what's kind of different in property management.  [00:03:46] Jo: It's an interesting question, because a lot of people think there is a big difference, but there's really not a lot of difference. [00:03:55] And I say that because I worked in the USA as vice president of a very large company over there in company management.  [00:04:03] Jason: Yeah. [00:04:04] Jo: And I really believe that in a lot of respects, the USA is way ahead of where we are here in Australia. But I think that probably the subtle difference is team structures. [00:04:18] We seem to focus more on property managers doing everything over here. And when I say here, I'm in Australia at the moment. Whereas in the U. S. they like to have like the breakaway roles, I call them. You know, someone focused on maintenance, someone focused on leasing. And yeah, a little bit more task orientated in the U. S.  [00:04:41] Jason: Got it. Okay. What I've noticed in my perception is that property management over there is almost always connected to a brokerage. That's the perception. Is that accurate? Or is it often that there are property management businesses that do not do real estate?  [00:05:00] Jo: Yes. I would say going back two decades, that was probably the case here. [00:05:05] But we are seeing a lot more entrepreneurial type business owners who start up as property management companies and as they grow, then what they're doing, they're losing management's to people selling. So as they grow, they're now adding in you know, like a sales service, which obviously makes sense. So yeah it has changed in the way they're doing it, but certainly when I started property management did belong to an brokerage. But you know, the, when I first started, I worked for a property management only company, which was very unusual back then.  [00:05:45] Jason: Yeah. I was particularly surprised by the growth strategies that I was reading the book. To me, it felt like they were a bit, I don't know, old school and I was like, man, why, but maybe there's just a lot more opportunity in the U S. One of the things that we have a big opportunity here is there's a lot of rental properties that are just not professionally managed. [00:06:07] Whereas it sounds like there's quite a high percentage are professionally managed in Australia.  [00:06:12] Jo: Yeah, I would say, you know, in Australia, we don't see the people who own big property portfolios, like personal property portfolios who become their own managers. So, you know, in the USA you see a lot of people who might own, you know, ten or more doors and they end up starting their own property management company, their own LLCs. [00:06:35] We don't see that In Australia you know, there's not a lot of people in Australia compared to the U. S. that have vast property, you know, holdings. We see more of the mom and dad or the mom and pop, as you would say over there, type investors in Australia that, you know, own one, maybe two properties. [00:06:57] So of course, most of those are managed through you know, a professional property management company.  [00:07:03] Jason: Got it. Yeah. Well, cool. Let's talk a little bit about the topic at hand. So we're going to talk about automated workflows in property management. And I did a webinar in the past talking about three levels of process documentation or of a process system in a property management business. [00:07:21] And my level one was just documentation. It was like google docs or something like that. Level two was checklist It was like Process St. or LeadSimple or some of these kind of tools and then level three was something like DoorGrow flow or Flussos which is It's basically the same thing. It's just Flussos, which is visual workflow. And we use that system and we've upgraded from checklist, which I've had a huge level, right? [00:07:54] First level is kind of like a Google, intranet back in the day when sites and then basically Google docs pretty much. And then and then we had some processes like in Basecamp and eventually we upgraded to Process St. And had that, and that was nice. I liked the software, but I had to do everything. [00:08:14] Like I had to always create the processes. Nobody else understood how the process were created, especially if they were complicated and now using visual workflow and using Flussos, it's been very intuitive. I don't have to create the processes. My team members all can figure it out and it's really like I jokingly say it's like Visio or flowchart software and something like Process St., like had a baby. [00:08:41] And so it really incorporates the best pieces of checklist and of documentation, but with visual workflow and it starts as a visual workflow, which is how everybody generally wants to create processes from the beginning. It's how we think process wise is like we create the boxes with the lines connecting things. [00:09:00] And so I found it to be very intuitive. So what have you noticed in companies in the U. S. and in Australia with their current process system and challenges that they're experiencing and then I'm curious about the contrast when they're switching to something like visual workflow.  [00:09:18] Jo: Yes. Yeah. And you know, there's a massive difference, but I think as a whole, the industry is still a little bit stuck in the old kind of like manual system. Whereas with automated workflow like DoorGrow Flow or Flussos, which, you know, is one in the same thing and it is the best system for property management, you create the logic in everything that we do. You know, when we use something manual, it's not logical. [00:09:46] It becomes part of what a person feels like doing at that time, or, you know, they might be focused on a task because someone is screaming the loudest to get something done. So, as a result, We're not working or focused working on the items within a task that we need to be working on at any given time. [00:10:08] So, you know, like the other thing with automated workflows is we see 24, 7, 365, all the tasks that we need to focus on exactly when we need to focus on. Whereas when you've got those paper checklists or even online checklists, we can move things around. You know, we can say, I don't feel like working on this at the moment. I'm going to go to this part of the flow. I'm going to look at that and your flow becomes illogical. Yes. So it's you know, it's interesting, the mindset that we're dealing with at the moment in the industry, because people like to do what they want to do. And they kind of like wanting to step past other steps because they don't like doing certain steps. [00:10:52] And a lot of the other workflow programs, you know, they allow people to bypass certain steps. And if you're doing that, it's not a proper workflow program. So, I think the industry is just struggling with understanding when they do a task, there is a lot of elements, a lot of actions and steps within every task. [00:11:15] And now we're seeing it. In front of us and people think, "I don't want to do that" or "I never do that," hence why we've had problems in the past  [00:11:24] Jason: Yeah, so steps get skipped, you know a lot of times in checklist systems or just project management type of systems where it's check boxes processes like the other challenges with those systems, it's always very linear it's like step one step two step three, but a lot of processes are more like: Step one, make a decision and based on the decision, go different ways and then maybe even split. So concurrently, one team is working on this and another person's working on this at the same time for efficiency is how we work in real life. [00:11:58] But in the linear checklist, we're waiting until somebody does the first steps and then it gets moves on to the next person. Or you have two people trying to attack the same checklist at the same time. So it just gets really messy. Using checklist and we would run into those issues, so then I had to create controls in my system so that my team would not skip steps. [00:12:18] So then they had to do things. And so then you have to create logic and then you have to make things show or hide based on whether it clicked. And like, there's all these, and so I had to get really nerdy to make things work really well in a checklist system. And it's still, once it got that complicated, if anything broke or was unclear, or somebody needed to alter the process. [00:12:39] I was the only person that could do it. I was the only person that understood what the process was supposed to be doing, because I built it. And if the process is old enough, I might even forget why I was doing things a certain way. So then I have to go back and kind of figure out, what was I trying to create? [00:12:57] Unless I actually created a visual map, or, you know, Visual flow chart in like Lucidchart or Visio or something and did that. And so I've loved being in Flussos. I love being able to even just create visual flows, and even if I'm not going to use them as a process, just creating the map. And i've mapped out my different growth engines for my business so I can pull it up and say, "this is how we get a customer. Here's what we do. Here's the steps. Here's one of our engines Here's another growth engine how we get customers" and so i've used it for other things as well because creating visual flows and everybody being able to see it and understand it creates a lot of clarity. And Sarah, my wife, she honestly believes technology is out to get her. [00:13:44] I don't know if there's anybody else listening to this podcast that like. She thinks technology is like trying to cause problems for her. It's confirmation bias, I'm sure. She's like, "see, look at this! The wifi is not working on my computer or this is not happening. And it's like being mean to me." [00:13:57] But she loves working inside of Flussos, like she loves being able to just drag and drop, move stuff around. She's our operator. She messes with all the processes, even though she's not generally fond of technology. That says a lot because the most difficult factor I've noticed when trying to implement or roll out new tools and things in our business or in any business with clients is adoption. Like it's really difficult to get people to adopt new tech unless it's really easy to use and really intuitive. And so that's one of the things i've really noticed is it's taken the burden off my shoulders. I create no processes. I don't do it! And I just tell my team members. They're like, "Hey, we noticed this. We need to change something". And I'm like, "cool, update the process." And they just do it. I don't have to be involved anymore, which is taking a big load off of my shoulders where I used to kind of think maybe I'm the smartest guy in the room and I'm the only guy that can do process, which is not the case. [00:14:54] I'm just nerdier than most of the people on my team, but having a tool where everybody else can create it makes it a lot easier and it's taken a big, big weight off my shoulders and it gives me that safety and certainty or security that I know because we have all of our processes in there, that if I lose somebody, we can put somebody in place right away, change the role of that person and they can start to use that process and just go through it and do it. And so it creates a lot of safety because we've had things like we've had team members like go on maternity leave. We have team members come back from maternity leave and then quit right away, you know and stuff like this and so it's nice to be able to have anybody on the team like be able to step in and just follow the flow and go through that and then while going through the flow they can see where they are In the process. [00:15:44] Jo: Yeah exactly. And, you know, like team members don't just leave, they could be away for the day. And if they're away for the day in property management, we've got timelines on everything and you create those timelines within Flussos or DoorGrow Flow. You put the timeline on when that particular action or step should be completed. [00:16:05] So, so what it means is it gives the business owner the opportunity to reassign that particular act or step to someone else, always completing the task within the given timeline and delivering on the promise that you made to your clients. There's no excuses of, "I'm sorry, Jo wasn't in this afternoon, so we didn't get it done." [00:16:28] You know? The company has a responsibility and an obligation to the clients to deliver on task as and when due, not on a person, on the company. So, yeah, you know, like when we look at checklists, I like to think of them as, you know, the old school signs and guardrails on the road, whereas our automation is like the magnificent satellite navigation that we have now. [00:16:54] It just guides you. It takes you there in the most you know, fastest, efficient way that you can get there. It gives you the opportunity as your business grows and you restructure roles that you can split those tasks and assign it to the relevant person. So there's no impact on growth as you scale up and grow the business. [00:17:17] It's just, it's the most logical thing for property management because what we do in property management is built on tasks. It's just task after task. So, you know, to me, it's the industry that, you know, really should have automated workflows. That's for sure.  [00:17:36] Jason: And by automation, there's a lot of buzzwords around this right now. [00:17:39] A lot of people think automation means that a robot's doing all the work. And so, but there's I think what we're talking about here is automating or making it so that your team members can follow the processes. And so the machine of the business becomes automated so that the team are more automated instead of doing it manually as you were talking about before. There's this myth kind of in the industry. There's maybe two myths. One I call the process myth. I've noticed this that a lot of businesses that are maybe You know 200 door +, they a lot of times fall prey to this myth that it doesn't matter what their team looks like, they can just go get the cheapest, most mediocre team members as long as they're dumb enough to follow a process, and I feel like that's not accurate like and so there's this process myth. [00:18:31] They think "I just need better processes," and a lot of times when i've dug into their businesses, I've also noticed though that companies that have amazing people and have really good teams, even if they have a lack of processes, there are processes in their heads and they care enough to make sure it's working And things work and the business works well, but i've yet to see businesses Is that are able to grow quickly, have a lot of success that overly micromanage and create endless amounts of processes and try to hire low dollar wage people to just do everything. [00:19:06] And the challenge there is that they still have to be the thinker and decision maker in a lot of instances. And so how do you look at processes versus humans making decisions? And so where's the decision making come in where you need somebody to think versus just follow a to do list and do tasks and be told what to do? [00:19:30] Jo: Yeah, well, to be able to make decisions, you have to have process because process is built on policy. So policy creates the protocol where you can make decisions. And there are things that come from left field every day in property management. And if you don't have a protocol that says "if this, then that," then people make decisions based on their own knowledge or. Perhaps fear of the situation that they're involved in and so potentially wrong decisions are made, delays are created, and so risk and mitigation is a result of that and liability. So if you don't have your business founded on a very strong policy, then you're going to struggle when things go wrong. [00:20:16] You'll struggle with growth because you start to become very reactive to everything that's going on. And when you've got policy, it provides that platform for being proactive in everything you do. There is, you know, deliberation and determination in every element of your business. And it removes that element of desperation that we see so many companies built upon. [00:20:42] You know, they feel losing a key member of staff. And I think if ever you've got that fear, then your business is not strong. You should never fear losing staff because the only constant in a business is the business owner. Everyone else will come and go. So if you fear losing any particular staff member, it means that you're not in control of your business. [00:21:05] Jason: It's job security for them, but it creates risk for you. Exactly. Exactly. Could you explain, you've spoken on this at one of our events and I thought it was really interesting, the difference between landlord tenant law and policy procedures process, like that sort of idea because I think a lot of property managers are like, "well, there's the law," but that's not always clear, right?  [00:21:30] Jo: The law is created, to me, by lawyers and therefore it's not black and white. It's gray So we have to interpret what the law says and there is some very strong guidelines in law as in, you know timelines for you know, issuing a breach or you know, notice to quit or anything like that. [00:21:51] So there is very strong timelines, but there's other things that we have to interpret legislation into our policy. And then when we've got policy, we can then create process and protocol should something happen. So an example of that is, you know, if we issue a pay or quit, and the owner is saying no, you know, like, "I don't want you to give that notice to my tenant. I want to give them a little bit of time to, you know, pay the rent." And then we're outside the guidelines of law. Then, you know, what have we got written into our policy should an owner say, "don't give my tenants you know, notice to pay or quit," or should an owner be saying, "no, I'm not going to do that maintenance on my property" when the tenancy agreement states that maintenance has to be done as does the management agreement. [00:22:44] So, you know, it's understanding all those things that do happen in property management or, you know, one that happens all the time is when managers do so much work on securing an applicant that should be approved for a property. A lot of work goes into that, showing the property, advertising the property, processing the application. And then we've got someone who is, you know, the star applicant and we can't get a hold of the owner. And what happens is property managers delay the process out of fear of making a decision because they can't get a hold of the owner, and then they lose that applicant. Now, you know, that's cost the company a lot of money and the owner has got extended periods of vacancy, whereas we should have a protocol in place that in the event that we can't contact the owner, we've had the discussion, you know, when the property is, knowing that it's going vacant to say, "if we can't contact you when we've got a an applicant that suits the criteria within that 24 hours, we will make a decision on your behalf because we know what you're looking for." But fear prevents people from making decisions. [00:24:02] And we shouldn't be like that. And the only reason why we're like that is because we don't have a strong policy. So, you know, don't build your business on legislation. You have to interpret that legislation into your policy and what you do to manage. That, you know, legislation.  [00:24:24] Jason: So it seems like there's kind of a process here, right? [00:24:27] So first people know and understand the legislation. They need to be clear on this and they need to be up and current on this. And then based on this legislation, they need to create rules internally for how we are going to go about doing business, how we're going to do things and we have these different policies in the business of how we're going to interpret the law or the legislation. Once we have these policies then we can start to create process around this so that we can follow our policies and achieve the good or desired outcomes that we're aiming for. Does this sound accurate?  [00:25:02] Jo: Absolutely spot on. Yes. Okay, exactly. Yes, right. [00:25:06] Jason: So what are some things that you notice, because you help a lot of business owners get their processes dialed in get some of these visual workflows mapped out, what's lacking a lot of times in their thinking about how to build a really good process? One of the things that really stood out to me in one of the previous calls as an example was setting expectations. Just setting expectations reduces a lot of extra unnecessary work, like, "Hey, tenant, we will let you know in a day that about this," instead of them following up multiple times asking you and then multiple phone calls and emails and stuff like this. And so just communicating clearly expectations of when you're going to communicate again seems like a really simple addition to a lot of processes that reduces a lot of extra unnecessary work and interruptions.  [00:25:55] Jo: Yeah. No, there again, you've got a business that will be proactive and not have that, you know, like, "Oh my goodness, what do we do now? This happened, the tenant won't talk to us," or "the tenants changed the locks at the property," or, you know, "we can't get a hold of the owner to get this decision." [00:26:12] So everything becomes reactive and the focus and the energy goes into whatever that situation is. And meanwhile, we've got other things that are cropping up in the business that are also going to just ignite. And then they'll take our attention. So, you know, we've got this constant hopping from one drama to another because we don't have the proper policy in place. [00:26:35] And when we say that, you know, like an automated workflow is logical. Well, logic is built on reality. You know, you can't have something that's logical if it's not created out of reality in the first place. And the reality becomes the policy that you create for your company. So I would say a lot of companies actually lack that foundation of policy. [00:27:00] It's all very much hearsay. When you talk to the teams, and I work with a lot of teams, and what I like to do is talk to each team member one on one and, you know, ask them, in the event of this, what do you do? How do you do this? And very rarely do I ever get the same response from, you know, the team, they're all based on their own experience, their own need to be valued. And the way people are valued is very personal. Whereas if you create your policy, then we create how people value what you do as well. So it's not all, you know, like, "I like this to make me feel good." You know, we do get the thank yous from the clients because we deliver on the promises we make because out of policy becomes the promise that we can make, and we know that we can deliver on it. And hence that's the expectation.  [00:28:00] Jason: So I've noticed one of the things I've noticed in some businesses, it sounds like there's kind of this issue of like, you ever played the telephone game? Where like you say something to somebody and they say it and then by the end they reveal what they think the person at the end that the beginning said and it's like totally off, right? And so it gets ridiculous because they're just passing it along and this hearsay as you mentioned, this is often how sort of the policies in a business kind of get passed around or passed on like somebody trains somebody else, somebody brings them in, they're asking questions. [00:28:33] "Hey, susie. What are we do in this?"  [00:28:35] "Oh, I just kind of do this," and so then we create this whole nebulous, cloudy, fuzzy, weird thing where everybody's kind of making decisions. And the reason why is "Susie told me, like when I first got hired because she was impatient and I was annoying her that to do it this way, and I've been doing it that way ever since, and that's what I've been telling everybody else that I've been talking to is how we do it." because it's not defined. So. That's interesting. So a lot of businesses they might have processes. I mean, almost every property management business probably has some process defined, if not, you are probably very new, but a lot of them are lacking policy being documented. [00:29:13] Jo: Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of them when they create the process, it's based upon, you know, what the team feel is right to, and you quite often hear property managers saying, "I never do that," or you know, "I do it this way and I've always done it that way, and I'll continue to do it that way because I feel comfortable." [00:29:31] Jason: "Manuel says this, but that seems mean or uncomfortable for me. So I've found a better way of doing it."  [00:29:39] Jo: Exactly. And "all my clients would never like it if I did that." Well, you know, when you hear that conversation, it's like, you've got a problem in your business because your business is not grounded in its policy. [00:29:52] So it's all made up as they go along. That's where we start to have that desperation. We don't have a finger on the pulse of that business. We don't know what's going on because your team is doing things the way they want to do it. And they're telling you what you want to hear. So you're hearing, "Oh, everything's great." [00:30:12] And then all of a sudden that team member is, you know, really struggling and with not coping and they leave, and we find an enormous amount of unfinished tasks of dissatisfied clients of liability sitting there.  [00:30:29] Jason: From my experience, every team member that I had that left that I thought I would just probably die if I lost them. [00:30:37] These are always the team members that you probably need to leave, I've realized. Because when they do, you think you can't lose them. It's because you don't know what they're doing. You don't have clarity on their processes. They're not documented, which creates job security for them, but it creates a lack of transparency and clarity for you. [00:30:55] And often they're doing things that are stupid or the wrong way or that don't make sense that you would change if you were aware of it. And so when I have a team member leave that I was unclear about what they were doing. We started digging into it. There's a lot of dissatisfaction, you know a lot of clients were frustrated a lot of situations where I didn't know it was being done that way, and so that's it becomes a, you know, kind of a blessing in disguise a really good opportunity to now define things and improve things. [00:31:24] So It sounds like maybe we've got the legal that impacts the policy, but it sounds like maybe also the business because different businesses have different set of values, right? So, for example, let's say one business, their maintenance value is to do things high quality as possible. Real high quality so that there's no repeat work. [00:31:48] And then another is like "our owners are cheap and we want to do things as cheap as possible." Duct tape is appropriate in plumbing. Something like this. And so there's a difference in value and maybe neither one is right or wrong. Right. There may be more repeat work, but it's cheaper and that's what the owners want or what and the values of the business owner and what they dictate. These are the values of the company. And so it sounds like maybe also going into the processes and maybe even into the policy is also there needs to be mixed in the principles or the values of the company, which should be defined.  [00:32:21] Jo: Oh, definitely. Yeah, definitely. It's about the principles and the personality of that company. [00:32:27] So what's the personality of your brand? How do you want people to see your brand when they talk about? So I always say, if you don't write your own story, people will make up your story about your brand. So you've got to write your story and tell your story about what your brand is all about. You know, is your brand, you know, filled with care and heart, or are they just, you know, a brand that's churn and burn? Just get them in. And, you know, we don't build on relationships. We get them in and, you know, do what we need to do. And it's a very interesting, a lot of that comes from one, the vision, the original vision of when that person created their business, and two, the marketplace that they're working in because you can't, you know, be a suave, sophisticated brand if you're in a marketplace where you're going through an area of the area is going through rejuvenation because what we find in those areas is a lot of the old homes that the, you know, the owners of those homes are developers. [00:33:30] And they don't want to spend money on those properties because they're just kind of like waiting until they've got the approval to knock the property down and rebuild, you know, high rise or something like that. So, you know, you've got to understand your market area and make sure that your brand aligns with your market and your message aligns with your brand. [00:33:51] And then to do that, you've got to make sure that what backs you up is your process because your process is in how you deliver on whatever that image is, that story is, that you created on your brand. Because this is where we start to see as the business grows, everyone has their own spin on your story and they it becomes their story not the brand story. So yeah, the chapters all start changing  [00:34:22] Jason: I've seen this in my own business. [00:34:24] I've seen this in our clients business and we refer to kind of that a lot of times as culture because what we've noticed is If culture is off in a business, then it seems like everything is worse. Everything gets worse. And it's, it means the business isn't really built effectively around the business owner. [00:34:41] So usually the business owner is miserable in their own business because they haven't created cultural clarity. They don't have their core values mapped out or they've got too many so they value everything and nothing all at the same time, kind of. And they don't have clarity on why they do what they do or why they're in the business. [00:35:01] And so getting clarity on the motive also when we create our processes one of my rules for creating processes for our team is It needs to state at the beginning of the process what the outcome is supposed to be, so there's clarity on exactly the best desired outcome and then why we're doing it like why is that important? So that they understand the reason because sometimes you may not achieve at the full outcome, but if as long as you're in alignment with our values or you understand why we're doing things a certain way, then you're less likely to screw it up or try to change it or be cute or be clever, right? [00:35:38] And so sometimes it you know, I really believe that transformational leadership is way more effective than transactional leadership and transactional is like "here's a task. Just do what I tell you to do. Be a robot, all of the orders" and you know, "don't think," and when we get into transformational leadership, it's more, "here's the outcome that we want. I don't care how you get there, well do it according to these values at least, but whatever steps you need to do to make sure this happens, this is the end desired goal. Here's a possible way of doing it, but get this outcome, right?" If the outcome is: we want to provide great customer service, that's going to look different in a variety of different situations. [00:36:20] But if you're like, "well, the policy is that we never give a refund for this, and we only, you know, blah, blah, blah, and tell you to go pound sand," then maybe it's not going to achieve great customer service. And so, you know, I had a support team for a while that they were getting stuff done. But their communication skills in the support tickets was like really terrible. [00:36:41] They were like, "this is done." And they like, that was their reply. And I was like wait a second. So like, we changed our why at the time, because it was to build websites or whatever back in the day. And I was like, "our why statement is to build incredibly effective relationships and websites." [00:37:00] And so the emphasis became on the relationships. And so then I was focusing on the team. So they started to, "Oh, I need to communicate in a different way." And they followed the same process to achieve closing a ticket out. But what was different is how they communicated it and whether they showed care and whether they showed, you know, had effective communication or kind communication, which is very different than just, I did this, it's done. [00:37:25] Jo: Definitely. And I agree with you. I think every task that we do and everything we do is a task in property management has to have its own objective and outcome. And then we also need to understand the clients that we serve, we need to understand their why and we become their how to their why because, you know, like they only engage us because they've got a certain goal that they want to achieve. [00:37:54] They don't know how to do that. So they call on us because we become their how and the how is then our objective and outcome for everything that we do. And it's consistent because then what we do is we break down that, you know, personality, who wants to be the hero in everything or the one who's the villain or the one who's, you know, got a split personality and they're a hero to some clients and a villain to others. [00:38:22] So, you know, that's where we start to have the schizophrenia within a brand. It's not the one personality. So, you know, like we do when we create a team is about different skills, different personality, but it all joins to actually deliver to the clients the way that we see our brand, the way that we've created our brand through the policy, the platform of policy. [00:38:47] And that's the reality of our brand, to then create the process and the protocol. And you know, you've got a good, solid brand. And I think the best example of this in the world is Disney. You know, Walt Disney he Died decades ago, but when you go into Disneyland, you feel him there. You look through the eyes of Walt Disney when you walk into Disneyland, when you watch a Disney movie, and that's what we need to do when we're creating our business. [00:39:20] We need to show what our vision is so all of our team can almost look through our eyes to see what it's going to be like. And you know, every leader, they say every leader is present even when they're not present. So you know, you need to have that. And the only way to have it in property management is through your automated workflows that are built upon, you know, the logic that you created through your process. [00:39:51] So, it's very interesting and people keep trying to shortcut it, or they think that, you know, they've hired the, you know, the next best thing since sliced bread and then they're disillusioned. They think, well, what happened to that person? And there's all the blame and justification. It's like business should not run on blame and justification. That's ignorance.  [00:40:14] Jason: That's terrible fuel for a business. Yeah, it is. So, well, I think Jo, this has been, I think very helpful. You do a lot of different things. Right. And you help people with process, you've got great systems, probably can help people with procedures, et cetera. So, how can people get in touch with you if they're needing some help with something? [00:40:39] Jo: Yes, definitely. And I would encourage, you know, everyone in the industry to invest in getting your policy and process done correctly, because once you've done it, then changing it as your business scales and grows is simple. It's just adjustments and alignments. along the way. So, you know, invest in it now. [00:41:01] And I'm more than happy, you know, we could even do group exercises, Jason. But probably the best way to contact me is I'm on social media you know, through the messenger and chats on social media or email. So, the email, it's a long one because my. My company is called E Revolution, which is Oliveri backwards. [00:41:26] So, yeah, so it's just Jo, which is simple Jo@ireviloution.Com. I R E V I L O U T I O N. Dot com. So it's super simple.  [00:41:41] Jason: All right, we'll throw that in the show notes, make sure people got it. All right Well, Jo, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you being here. And so how can people learn more that are interested about Flussos or this visual workflow tool. [00:41:58] Jo: Yeah, the easiest way there is jump on our website. [00:42:01] Sorry Flussos. com FLUSS OS dot com and Flussos is Italian for flow. So jump on there, book a demo and you'll most likely get my husband Stacey who will do the demo with you and you know, like go through the process of don't push back immediately. Yeah. Anyone who starts working on automated workflows, it's about adapting to a new mindset in the way that you do the do every day in property management. So, you know, be patient with yourself, be very deliberate and focused on going through a mindset. And I liken this to When we introduced, you know, property management platforms 30 years ago in the industry, and I was new then, so I adopted immediately, but I see all the people that have been in the industry failed to adapt, and they didn't hang around for long. [00:42:58] So we're going through that change that we did, but go in there, get help, don't do it alone. You know, it is difficult to create flows because you like engineering and architecture. So, is that a word? So yeah, go on to Flussos. com, book a demo let them know that you're, you know, with DoorGrow as well. Just say hi I'm with DoorGrow because we've got some special things for all the family at DoorGrow. So yeah. Yeah, you know, like, just do it. [00:43:27] Don't delay. Don't let fear get in the way. Don't let fear of your team not wanting it get in the way. You know, if you've got fear of your team pushing back,  [00:43:36] that's a problem. So yeah.  [00:43:38] Jason: Not sure what it sounds, but I can tell you, like, having gone through switching process software multiple times. [00:43:45] This one, we love. Like, we love being able to run processes on it. And once you figure it out, I really think it's super intuitive. At the basic level, it's drag and drop. It's really easy to use. And, yeah, there's a lot of complexity that can be added under the hood to really make things really well dialed in, but you'll get there.  [00:44:04] Stacey will help you. All right.  [00:44:06] Jo: He will.  [00:44:07] Jason: All right. Cool. Well, it's great to have you here on the show. Jo, thanks for being here on the DoorGrow show.  [00:44:13] Jo: My pleasure. Such a joy. Thanks, Jason. All right. Bye.  [00:44:17] Jason: Okay. So if you are a property management entrepreneur and you are struggling, you don't even know what the problem is, you're trying to grow your business, you're not even sure why, what is the problem? Maybe you think, "well, I just need more leads or I just need better processes or whatever it is that you believe." Get on a call with our team and we'll help you figure it out. And maybe you're not clear on what the problem is. [00:44:40] We'll help you figure it out. And maybe you're not even clear on what the solution is or where you're at currently and what your current situation is. You're like, "I know there's something off or it could be better, but I'm not even clear." We'll help you get some clarity on that and figure it out. And we're not going to try and sell you anything unless you need something. [00:44:57] And if you need something, then we're just going to try and figure out if you want it, you know, if we have something that could help you we're not we're not pushy salespeople. But we do love helping property managers. So check us out. You can go to doorgrow. com. A lot of people are like, what does DoorGrow do? [00:45:12] We grow and scale companies dramatically and quickly. And so if you would like to grow your business, you're tired of wasting time, trying to figure out what works, wasting time doing advertising, falling prey to a bunch of different marketers. And you want to figure out what is actually working to grow businesses? [00:45:29] We're helping people grow their businesses without spending money even on advertising. You're able to grow even faster by eliminating that stuff. And so we may be able to cut your ad budgets and increase the output and the ability to grow and add doors in your business. And so we do a lot of other stuff to consult property managers and helping them get things dialed in, reach out to us. [00:45:51] We would love to help you figure out how to grow your business. So you check us out at doorgrow. com. And if you are a frequent podcast follower or listener, we would appreciate it if you like subscribe and leave us some sort of review on whatever channels you're listening on. It helps us help more people and we appreciate it. [00:46:11] And that's it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everybody. [00:46:15] 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!  [00:46:42] 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.

In this engaging discussion, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull share their insights on the current economic climate and its impact on real estate. They explore the challenges of rising vacancies and lower rents while emphasizing the importance of empathy in tenant interactions. Jason and Sarah highlight that economic downturns often present unique opportunities for savvy investors. They encourage listeners to adopt a proactive mindset and innovative strategies to navigate the evolving landscape of property management.

Jason Hull and Sarah Hull, property management growth experts with over a decade of experience, dive into the transformative power of mindset in this discussion. They emphasize that a negative mindset can hinder growth and urge listeners to align personal fulfillment with business strategies. The conversation covers practical mindset shifts, the importance of embracing all emotions for growth, and breaking through limiting beliefs. Their insights provide a roadmap for revitalizing property management businesses by fostering a positive, growth-oriented mindset.

Mark DeHaan, a specialist from TenantCloud, dives into the evolution of property management software in this insightful discussion. He highlights how their platform simplifies operations for property managers, making payment collection and tenant screening a breeze. Mark discusses the challenge of financial management in the industry and shares how TenantCloud's integrations and user-friendly tools can streamline processes. The conversation also touches on the advantages of engaging with the DoorGrow community for further business growth.

As business owners, we often feel imposter syndrome or worry about our status. Have you ever wanted to elevate your image and be more relevant? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Michael Sartain, CEO of Men of Action Mentoring to talk about how to make high-status friends and attend VIP events. You’ll Learn [03:27] How to Utilize Networking [19:03] Becoming High-Status Using Social Media [26:54] How to be Relevant [38:58] Social Media is Fake [53:21] Authenticity vs Effective Content Tweetables “You need to be the person who always solves problems for other people and ask for nothing in return.” “You're building a brand. Status is status.” “A lot of our beliefs that we're holding on to that are holding us back.” “You make millions of dollars from solving other people's problems, not by doing what you love.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Michael: Your ability to grow is based on your perceived status, your perceived trustworthiness, your perceived know how. Not your actual know how.  [00:00:11] Jason: 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 a business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. [00:00:30] 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, 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. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. [00:01:10] Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:13] So I have an awesome guest today. I actually joined his program just for kicks. This is Michael Sartain. Michael, welcome to the DoorGrow show.  [00:01:22] Michael: Hey, what's going on, man? Hey, I gotta be honest with you. Two years ago, I didn't know what doors meant and then I started hanging out with Justin Waller and he's like, "yeah, man, I have 300 doors." [00:01:29] I was like, "bro, what are you talking about?" [00:01:31] And then he's like, now he's got 400 doors. And I was like, "oh, it's like all these different properties." And then my buddy Myron he's got 17 homes that he owns up in Connecticut. He told me about, and I didn't understand how this whole thing worked. And then the property management side of it, like "my company, we're like, we're buying properties because we want to use the depreciation. And we need someone to keep, you know, these places rented, blah, blah, blah." And then the property management, I don't know that much about it. So that's why I was really excited to come on here and check this out.  [00:01:57] Jason: Cool. Well, yeah. And I didn't know very much about like maintaining a presence. [00:02:03] Looking cool, like actually looking cool on social media instead of just trying to look cool. And and so I've learned some good things by being in your program. So let's get into a little bit of background about you for those that are like, who's this Michael guy? And maybe how you kind of got into entrepreneurism and I think that'd be relevant to anybody listening. [00:02:25] Michael: So I'm originally from East Dallas. I grew up on the good side of the tracks and went to high school on the bad side of the tracks. And graduated from my high school, barely like did anything. It was not a very good experience. And I got into UT Austin because I was in top 10 percent of my class. [00:02:39] Went there four years, studied astronomy and business and then got out of there. And then I ended up managing a nightclub for a while, for a couple of years because MCI Worldcom and Enron had gone out of business. So if you know, UT Austin, Enron was like a huge supply of jobs once you graduated you know, as a Longhorn. [00:02:56] Once they go out of business, none of us can find jobs. I ended up working at a strip club for like several years as a DJ. And this is the first point in my life where I'm like, "okay, there's something going on here. There's things that I've been taught growing up, but there's something different now." Of course, I want to preface this. [00:03:10] By no means am I saying that people who go to a strip club or people who work in a strip club are indicative of the median of society. They clearly aren't, clearly are not. What I am saying though is that you can see the extremes in society when you go to places like that and from those extremes, you can see overt reactions. [00:03:27] One of the things that I do in my course is I teach how people can network, get invited where the cool kids sit like that phenomenon of where the cool guys are and the not cool guys, the hot club versus the not club that the club people don't want to go to, or the party everyone's trying to get into. [00:03:42] What is it that causes that phenomenon of popularity and status? There has to be something that can explain it. And so what I've been trying to do for the last 15 years is use evolutionary studies in order to figure out a way in order to do that. And so a lot of times when you do that, you know, you can see subcommunication between a man and a woman and you don't really know what's going on. [00:04:02] They have the internal focus of what's going on, but when you see it in like a nightclub or a festival or someplace like that, you see very overt communication. And from that, you can learn a lot of cool stuff. It's like watching, you know, crows you know, pick at a carcass versus watching a giant white tiger go kill a gazelle. [00:04:18] Like that is overt examples of predation that you can see and be like, okay, this is how biology works. This is how natural selection works, et cetera. And I know for your audience, you're like, "where the fuck's he going with all this?" Yeah. The reason why, just to explain. I got fascinated. I did seven years in the military after 9 -11. [00:04:33] I joined and I flew a KC 135 as an instructor navigator. And then I was I did counterintelligence for about the last two years I was there. And then, so, in that time period, I learned how a very structured business could work and like how accountability works. Accountability and leadership, I learned very much during that time period. [00:04:49] But at that same time period, I was also going out a lot and I was like very interested to me in like, what is it that caused certain men to be phenomenally good with women and get a lot of people to show up to an event and then what caused other men to just not get it. And I always, I also noticed that there was a very small group of men that got it. [00:05:05] And then a very large group of men that didn't understand this concept whatsoever. So I became fascinated with that idea of 2011. I ended up retiring from the military and I ended up moving to Las Vegas and this is the first time when I started going out to some of these nightclubs and these venues here in Las Vegas. [00:05:19] And I meet a lot of real estate agents. I meet a lot of accountants. I meet plastic surgeons, doctors. And it was very clear to me like that some of them got it and some of them didn't get it. I threw a real estate event recently where we took a blue heron home. And then we had a charity event for animals. [00:05:33] And while we're there, I invited every single female influencer in the city to show up. Well, these, some of these girls were interested in getting into real estate, but I just want you to imagine it was just like a regular real estate event that you have, except you're doing it for animal rescue. [00:05:47] So now all these people who are in real estate, mortgage brokers, et cetera, property managers like yourself, they would show up to this beautiful three story house. It was catered. It was beautiful. And then every pretty girl in the city in Las Vegas who wasn't working that night showed up to this thing. [00:06:01] So now you're drinking champagne. There's three times as many girls as guys. Some of you guys are listening to this and you're like, "okay, now I understand. I'm starting to understand what he does." You're able to create these incredible environments and in doing so, just imagine, everyone... I try to teach networking through events. [00:06:17] That's basically how I try to teach networking through small events at your house or large events, you know, like a CES conference. I try to teach networking through those mechanisms. And then I try to show how evolution created humans throughout history. Dr. David Buss writes in his book the evolution of desire throughout history. [00:06:34] The men who have worked in groups and in tandem with one another always had access to more resources and always had access to more women. And so that's the reason why, you know, I teach these concepts. And so what happens is that blue Heron thing that we did, the guy who ran it, he's at the forefront and he goes, "I want to just thank you guys for coming out here and helping me, blah, blah, blah." [00:06:52] He had endeared so much goodwill with every mortgage broker, real estate agent. It was really crazy. All these other real estate agents wanted to train under him. People started sending him business. His business blew up. Another example I give, that's Jeremy Green's name. I have another example of my buddy, Mark Pearlberg, who's one of those also in my program. [00:07:09] Mark is an accountant. Mark started to see the way that I would use zoom calls and on the zoom calls, Mark would go on and show. How he understood accounting backwards and forwards better than everyone else who was listening, he showed himself to be a subject matter expert in the zoom calls. He was hosting in doing so, just imagine Jason, like, you know, I don't believe accounting is your specialty, but if you listen to accountant at first, it's interesting, but after like an hour and a half, you get to the realization, like, "this is interesting, but I don't want to do this." [00:07:37] And then at about the two hour mark, you're like, "This is interesting. I don't want to do this. How much do I have to pay you to do this?" And so because what we did and he started hosting a podcast and because he started hosting these zoom calls with other professionals, now he tells me, he's like, "I actually had to slow down the podcast because I can't handle all the business that I have. [00:07:55] There's not enough of me. In order for me to be able to do this." And he works from home. He just, an incredible lifestyle that he's created. So when we go back to what we're saying before, you know, I learned initially, "okay, what are the mechanisms that cause people to be cool or not cool, to be popular, not popular, to be low status or high status?" [00:08:13] I learned that when I was working in Austin, you know, nightclub, I learned that when I was in the U S military, like what good leadership and bad leadership was. And then I learned it in the last 13 years here living in Las Vegas. And I took all those lessons and I, from the last say, 25 years, and I put them into a course called the men of action course and try to concisely take this 25 years of knowledge and put it into one space so that everyone can learn how to do these kinds of things. [00:08:35] Now, here's where it might be confusing for some of your audience, the mechanisms that men use in order to show status with women in order to date them and the mechanisms that men and women use in order to pitch an idea or to sell a product are the same mechanisms. They are the same. This is difficult. A lot of people don't grasp this. if you guys ever want to see a great example of this, great book you should all read is Oren Klaff's book called pitch anything. Listen to some of the words he uses. Jason, you remember eliminate neediness. [00:09:06] Do you remember that? Eliminate neediness. Where does that come from? Where does that come from? It didn't come from self help. Eliminate neediness is a dating concept. Okay? Avoid beta behavior. Do you remember? Oren Klaff says this in his book. He goes, "avoid beta behavior." Where does that come from, Jason? [00:09:21] That is a dating concept. So where do these things come from? At the highest level Jordan Belfort, he calls it goal oriented communication. So goal oriented communication is, "will you go on a date with me?" Goal oriented communication is, "Ken, will you invest in my project?" Goal oriented communication is, "will you come work for me?" [00:09:36] Goal oriented communication. I'm doing this because this is like the apex of community of goal oriented communication. All these places meet at the apex, and that is the understanding of basically Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people, get people to talk about themselves. You can find common interests, figure out ways to break rapport, all these different things. [00:09:53] And like what I teach my clients, Jason, the number one thing I teach my clients when it comes to high stats networking is you need to be the person who always solves problems for other people and ask for nothing in return. A great example is, do you remember Harvey Keitel in the movie Pulp Fiction? [00:10:08] You remember he's the wolf? Do you remember Pulp Fiction? I haven't seen Pulp Fiction. Okay, so tonight you're going to watch Pulp Fiction. Every single other person watching this has watched Pulp Fiction. [00:10:17] Jason: I know, everybody else has watched it but me, so.  [00:10:19] Michael: There's a point, there's a point where they have to clean up a dead body and they have to call this guy named the wolf and he just, he fixes things. [00:10:25] He's a cleaner. The wolf shows up in his Acura NSX, it's Harvey Keitel and he just fixes things. He goes, "are you going to listen to me or do you want to go to jail?" And he does, he just fixes everything. That's what I become. I'm the guy who fixes things for other people. I have a bunch of friends. I help them find people for their sales team. Most of my friends have met their boyfriends or girlfriends through me. I help people find their employees. I'm the hub. I'm the hub of the social wheel. And that's what I teach you to do in my course. If you cannot replace your social circle, your girlfriend, or your job in 15 minutes, you don't have enough abundance and I need to teach you how to have more abundance. [00:10:56] And so how do you do that? There's just certain mechanisms that people who have an abundance mentality and understand networking have, and when they use those techniques, then they can have anything they want. They get into any door. So another example, Jason is like the guy who goes to the Tai Lopez conference or the Taylor Welch conference or goes to see Cole Gordon or goes to see Wes Watson or goes to see whoever. [00:11:17] The guy who is like, "Hey man, thank you for your time." The one who like goes and pays Patrick bed David for his counseling. And then there's the guy who Patrick Bet David who goes to see Patrick David for his counseling. And then Patrick David was like, "Hey man, can I come visit you and hang out? Come meet my wife. Let me take you out to dinner." Does that make sense? There's a mechanism you'll see, like with a lot of people have asked me this before. Why is it that, you know, other people are like paying to listen to Justin Waller speak, but like Justin Waller and I are like close friends? [00:11:42] Why is it that other people like buy Rollo's book, but Rollo is one of my best friends? Why is it like all these other people call me and I'm not trying to say this to brag, but the reason why I'm trying to say this is there's a status line that you get to where you're a customer, and then you're his friend. [00:11:56] How do you cross that status line? This is such a key for those of you who are like, trying to get into sales or trying to understand networking. It's just like, I'm paying this guy, like how much, like I'm paying Tony Robbins. I'm a customer. I'm customer. Now Tony's like sending me messages on my birthday. [00:12:09] What is that status line? Some people's like, "well, you just need to have more money." And I'm telling you that is not what the case is. That's definitely not what the case is.  [00:12:15] Jason: Who would want to connect with people that they're only connecting with you because of money? I mean, that'd be a really shitty reason to be connecting with somebody.  [00:12:22] Michael: In the beginning, you will. But after a while you learn, whenever I go up and talk to my favorite influencer, let's say I paid for his coaching program is my voice cracking or my eyes getting big is my vocal tonality changing because I see this person as high status. [00:12:38] Am I dressing too fancy to try to show off? Am I doing too much or am I just like just the normal dude? I am. Oren Klaff, one of my favorite YouTube content creators. I don't know if you are not Oren Klaff. I'm sorry, Orion Terriban. All right. His name is Psych Hacks. Well, I had him on my show a couple of days ago. [00:12:54] He kind of converges behavioral economics with evolutionary psychology. And he basically talks about the sexual marketplace as far as economics is concerned. Okay. Really great person. Have him on my show. Ask him a bunch of stuff during the show. One of the things I talk about is like, "Hey, Orion, I know that you do some sales stuff, some coaching stuff. If you want my help, I'll help you how to, you know, put out a low ticket offer, high ticket offer, how you can like buy back your time." he's like, "yeah, you know, I can't scale myself that much." I was like, "okay, so you're going to read buy back your time by Dan Martell." [00:13:21] And then I gave him a bunch of books, you know, that would probably help him. And then at the end, I was like, bro, anytime you want to call me and you ask me about any of this stuff, I'll help you. The guy who has the world, you guys look it up. The guy with the world record in the high jump on planet earth is a guy named Darius Clark. He went to Texas A& M. He's the leading scorer in slam ball. Have you ever seen slam ball, Jason? Remember the trampolines and the basketball, they go dunk on each other. Anyways, I bumped into Darius at a slam ball game. We started talking and I'm, and then Darius is like, "Hey man, I want to level up my social media." [00:13:50] And I'm like, "Darius, let me figure out ways that I can help you level up your social media." So it's like one guys are like a professional athlete. Another guy's an accountant. You might be saying like, "why is it you're able to do all these different things?" And the reason why is because these are evolutionary problems. [00:14:04] These are evolutionary challenges that all men we're looking for. There are three things that really differentiate men from women. Three massive things. There's more than three, but these are the three biggest ones. Jason here. Number one, this is the most obvious one. It's upper body strength. Men are about two standard deviations stronger than women as far as upper body strength, meaning the medium grip strength for a man it puts them in the top, you know, 98 percent and top 2 percent of women. Makes sense.  [00:14:27] Jason: Yeah. Which also throws off our balance is higher. Yeah.  [00:14:31] Michael: Correct. Also. Yeah. It also, there's a reason why some of the reasons why men live shorter lives is because they keep their weight up here around their waist. [00:14:37] Whereas women keep it below their hips. And that's really, it's further away from their heart. There's a couple other things according to that now that's the first thing. The second one is a variety of sexual partners. Men are again, two standard deviations. Yeah. Far more like meaning the median man is interested in more women than the other way around but puts them in the top 2%. [00:14:55] But the third one, and this was a really interesting one and I knew this one, but it was Tai Lopez I was at his house last Wednesday. And he was explaining this, do you know the main thing where women just do not care that much about at all? But men are obsessed with, you know what it is? It's in your title. [00:15:09] No, it's in your title.  [00:15:10] Jason: Let's see, friends, high status, what I don't know?  [00:15:13] Michael: Status. Women in general do not care as much about status as men do, meaning women don't kill each other over status as men have been doing for the last hundred thousand years. So in fact, Dr. Buss, women care about men having status. [00:15:26] Jason: Women care about men having status.  [00:15:28] Michael: Women care about the men that they're with having status, yes. Yeah, okay. Yes. I see. Meaning they care about status as an object to obtain, but not as a something for themselves. Or rather, if you've ever, if you've ever lived on a military base, it's one of the strangest things. [00:15:41] Whoever the base commander's wife is, she's like the leader of the wives. It's so weird. She did nothing. She didn't go to officer school. She didn't do shit, but because she's married to the 06, the base commander, whenever they have engagements, she is... it's so funny. Anybody who's been in the military, you know, this is true. [00:15:58] Whoever the base commander's wife is. She's all of a sudden like the leader of all the events, even though why? Because she's married to the base commander. That's the way it works. So men, women in general in gendered into themselves, don't care as much about status as men do men severely care about status far more than women do. [00:16:16] And so because of the, these concepts, that's why you'll see like with a lot of the stuff I'm saying when it comes to sales, this is for men and women, but when it comes to dating, women do not sit there and have to show their status in order to attract men. But the other way they do. Does that make sense? [00:16:29] Yeah. And that's why it's like an important differentiation to make. And that's one of the other things I teach in my course. Like when you also, when you're selling to men versus women, it's something that you need to understand. You don't necessarily need to sell to women based on status. Like how, "Hey Sherry, how'd you like those big shoulders to show off those muscles to get those guys?" No, they don't. It's that's a status thing shoulder to waist ratio is like a male strength machismo testosterone status thing that women just aren't as interested in, you know, so there's just interesting concepts like that. [00:16:59] This divergence innate differences between men and women and where do we find these differences? We find them in evolutionary studies.  [00:17:05] Jason: So I think it's really interesting what you talked about earlier. You mentioned like this gravitation towards basically what works, right. And we see this everywhere. [00:17:14] Like I've been in lots of different programs. I've worked with lots of different mentors, coaches, read lots of different books and I'm noticing more and more I evolve as a human being. I'm noticing more and more parallels between the best ideas. Like I just read a book on kids. It was like how to talk so kids will listen and how to listen so kids will talk. And it's probably one of the best communication books I've ever read. Like anybody could learn from reading this book because to some degree, we're all little kids in bigger. [00:17:44] Michael: Even without kids.  [00:17:45] Jason: And also I was like, this is brilliant, like self talk like psychology even in this book. [00:17:51] And I'm like, this could be applied to so many different things. And it talks about empathetic, like being empathetic in your communication. I'm like, this is brilliant. This will work so effectively for sales or for anything. And people think, "oh, it's for kids." Right. And so what works works. [00:18:05] And I read another book, something about relationships by David B. Wolfe. It was a really good book, and this was for grownups, but there were so many parallels between these things. And you had mentioned also with dating and you know, for example, sales really, there's so many parallels between going out and trying to get clients and trying to get dates. [00:18:27] Michael: The higher you go, they're not parallels. They're exactly the same. When you get to the top, they're exactly like what I'm saying is when you get to the top, meaning like Hugh Hefner, like when you're at the top and then you just see, it's just a total presentation and it's nothing but just showing status. [00:18:42] Oh, it's the same thing. It's the same. I bought a Tesla that like Playboy is a brand. Tesla is a brand. You start to see they're doing the same thing to your brain.  [00:18:51] Jason: So for the business owners, listening to this, who are not trying to be Hugh Hefner. Right. They're not, and maybe they're married like me and they're not like trying to get women, but they do want to increase their sales. [00:19:03] They do want to increase their status and they want to figure out how to attract more business. What are maybe some of the things that they could do to be more attractive to the real estate investors that they're trying to get as clients?  [00:19:18] Michael: Yeah, I will tell you the first thing is you need to be a way more cognizant of how you are perceived socially and for a lot of people, one of the things you have to understand is the more things become digital and the more your image can be spread across social media platforms, the less your actual merit of your business matters and the more the perception of your business matters. [00:19:40] Jason: Yeah. How do they get an accurate view of how they're perceived?  [00:19:46] Michael: You could ask other people. I mean, generally the market is going to tell you, right? What is the price of of a commodity? The market's going to end up telling you right. In a free market economy, but it's like when you make social media content, you need to make them the content to market your business in a sexy, fun way that catches people's attention, but it doesn't have to be extremely representative. And I know this is really hard for a lot of people to do because they're like, "no, I'm just going to be myself and make content that feels organic." And I'm just telling you that doesn't work. [00:20:14] I don't care what Gary Vanderchuck told you. That is not the way the world works. Everyone else is stunting. Everyone is using FaceApp and Facetune. All these other people are just showing images and pictures of the best parts of their life. I post on social media all the time. I did not post anything about me feeding my cats this morning. [00:20:30] Like, the people want to see the cool stuff. That's just generally the way it is. So, you're, the way you are perceived on social media again, that's what we, you know, Men of Action, our group, is when you're in a community that gives you accountability and feedback to let you know, hey man, this is not a good post or this is a good post. [00:20:45] When we are on Instagram specifically instagram trades, a currency and that currency is called status. That's all Instagram is. Facebook is not like that. By the way, you guys will notice for those of you do any kind of marketing, Facebook is going to work really well for your 38- 40 year old audience and older. [00:21:01] And Instagram is going to work for your audience below 38 to maybe 28 and then maybe to 25 and below 25, it's going to be TikTok. And you'll notice, depending on which audience you're trying to get to, that's where you're going to see the most prevalence on those different platforms. Also, you're also going to see the most politically progressive of those platforms will be TikTok and the most politically conservative all those platforms will be like Twitter or X. So you, these are kind of the things that you have to learn. What you need out there is a perception that people have of your business and you have it as an entrepreneur. So you need to be trustworthy. You need to seem like, you know, more than everyone else, like you're a subject matter expert and you need to seem extremely motivated. [00:21:40] And in doing so as well, when you show images of your business and you personally, you need to show relevancy, competency, access to scarce resources, and social proof. Those are the things that will help. So what I mean by social proof? Other people in the industry following you on Instagram is a great way to almost look like a testimonial or maybe they leave comments. [00:21:59] That's a great way to show social proof, relevancy. Are you trying to use banner ads from 25 years ago? Or you're like, "Well, I'm still using email blasts." Okay. If I'm talking to a guy in real estate and he's telling me about email blasts, I know he's not relevant anymore. If I'm sitting there talking to stuff, if that's all he's talking about, right? [00:22:17] If he's sitting there being like, you know, he doesn't use Instagram, but he's got an SEO guy. I'm like, okay, he's not relevant anymore. He doesn't know. He hasn't changed things. But when I talked to a guy and he's like, "yeah, what I did was I started a podcast and in my podcast, I do 20 minute interviews with different people using restream. And then I have a guy come through and make clips and then I have, and then the best clips I end up promoting those clips on Instagram or using meta. Facebook Ad manager, meta ad manager, and in doing so, then I make the best ones and I turn them into advertisements and I put a CTA at the end." I'm like, okay, that guy's relevant, that guy gets it. [00:22:49] Jason: Then we're relevant here at DoorGrow.  [00:22:51] Michael: What you're doing is extremely relevant.  [00:22:52] Jason: If they have an AOL email address, they're like, "what's your email?" [00:22:56] Michael: That's exactly, it's not relevant.  [00:22:57] "It's aol.Com." [00:22:58] "I have a Facebook, but I don't have an Instagram." You're just not relevant. Like I can tell you're not relevant. When people are like, "well, my audience isn't on Instagram." It's like, it doesn't matter if your audience is on Instagram, you're trying to grow your audience. And by the way, the market will tell you what it wants. And every day, I'm sorry for those of you who don't want to hear this. Every day, each one of these platforms becomes slightly less relevant. Okay? [00:23:19] TikTok is on its uprise right now. Instagram is becoming less relevant because of TikTok, Rumble, YouTube, and Facebook to a certain audience is also already completely irrelevant. You'll see women below a certain age do not have a Facebook, but they do have an Instagram. [00:23:32] So the answer is to have all of them. All of you should have, you should be making 30 to 90 second content, the up and down type of content. Not landscape of profile content. You should be making that and it should be going on Snapchat. It should be going on X. It should be going on YouTube. It should be YouTube shorts, TikToks, and Facebook and Instagram reels. [00:23:50] It should be going at all those different places. You can use HubSpot or some other platform in order to post that content. And the content doesn't just have to be clips that go viral from podcasts. You can do man on the street videos. And here's a big one. All of you can do this. You can do reaction videos. [00:24:04] All of you can do reaction videos. They're so easy to do. And by the way, you don't even have to like, you're just like, "Michael, I don't know how to use OBS and I don't know how to do a reaction video." All you have to do is sit like I'm sitting right now. I'm in my den. You know, obviously I put some soundproofing behind me, but I'm in my den, I got a big ol ring light in front of me, and somebody comes up to me and goes, "Michael, what do you think about the Trump assassination attempt?" [00:24:23] Or "Michael, what do you think about, you know, Kamala Harris or whatever?" And I'm like, and I just turn my camera like this, like I'm talking, "Man, I'll tell you what I'm thinking. I'm thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And you just say, and as soon as people watch the video and they're like, "This guy's about to tell me what he's thinking." [00:24:35] Then everyone will watch. And then some of you are listening right now and you're like, "I'm just a property manager. I don't want to talk about politics. Really go watch Ryan Pineda. Go watch Bradley, go watch Codie Sanchez, go watch Tom Bill. You go watch any of these guys who are crushing it in their fields. [00:24:51] They give their opinions on everything. Did you guys hear Alex Hormozi now talks about dating? What? Yeah. You're building a brand. Status is status. Like nobody cares. This is the other thing, Jason, a lot of your clients, and this is something I've talked to you about, and everyone in my program hears me talk about this ad nauseum. [00:25:08] Is the concept of like, I'm afraid that I'm going to post the wrong thing and nobody holds you accountable for anything you have to say, like, I was just looking at a video of Kamala Harris at a P Diddy party, walking around with Montel Jordan. No one seems to care that ever happened. No one cares about Joe Biden talking about, "I don't want to send my kids to school with the monkeys." [00:25:26] Nobody cares about it. No one cares. Like you said, like Donald Trump had sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant and they brought it up during the debates and no one cares. Literally one of the most popular movies of all time The wolf of wall street is a about a man who did 15 months in prison for securities fraud, punched his wife in the stomach, kidnapped his own kid, did quaaludes and slept with prostitutes, and then afterwards, he is one of the top sales trainers in the world today. But you guys think anyone cares. Caitlyn Jenner runs over someone, kills them, and then four months later is named woman of the year. But you're like, "Michael, I'm a property manager. What if I post the wrong thing?" Here's another thing, Jason, and this is a poor reflection on humanity, but it's absolutely true. [00:26:09] If you get popular enough, they will forgive you for anything. And if you don't believe me right before OJ died, I had a conversation with him and they had offered him millions of dollars to do a fantasy football podcast, and I was like, OJ, what about those people you stabbed 56 times? Nobody cares. So many of you are watching this right now and you're like, you have 400 followers on Instagram and you're like so worried about posting the wrong thing, bro. [00:26:32] You don't have 400 followers on Instagram. You have four followers on Instagram and one of them's your mom. No one cares what you're doing. Most of you on social media are irrelevant and because you're irrelevant on social media, in reality, you're invisible. Listening to this, when you ask me what the advice is, your job is to become visible. [00:26:49] Some of you will be offended by what I say and the rest of you will be successful. You've got to decide which one you want to be.  [00:26:54] Jason: So I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second here, right? A lot of property managers, they think "I'm going to go start posting about property management. And maybe I'll get some investors that want to like work with me." [00:27:06] And so they start posting property management with this false assumption that people really care about property management, right? And so the analogy I'll usually share with property managers is I'll say, "how many plumbers are you following on social media?" And they'll say, "none." [00:27:23] "Why?" I said, "they want your business. Why aren't you following them?" And so there's this false reality that these social media marketers will sell to property managers. They're like wasting their time. And some of them spend a lot of money and time with these social media companies, wasting time promoting their property management business on social media, when nobody gives a shit about property management, even their clients don't wake up in the morning and go, "man, I'm thinking about property management." [00:27:50] Jason, what should they be doing instead?  [00:27:52] Michael: Yes. Jason you saying that just got me. I want someone who's watching this to do this and then tag me in the video when you do it. Jason, as a property manager, do you ever have nightmare tenants?  [00:28:03] Jason: So to be clear for those listening...  [00:28:05] Michael: yeah,  [00:28:06] Jason: I'm not managing properties. I'm coaching property management business owners, but they would say, "yes," they have nightmare tenants. All the time.  [00:28:12] Michael: Do you ever have nightmare vendors? Like guys who come like when I say vendor, what I mean is the plumber, the carpenter, the guy who comes...  [00:28:18] Jason: Yes, they have problems with vendors constantly, they have nightmare owners. [00:28:21] They're managing properties.  [00:28:22] Michael: What about, well, I wouldn't do nightmare owners cause you're trying to get business. I wouldn't talk about nightmare owners. What I would talk about is. I would start off a clip just like this. "I had a nightmare tenant. This guy was destroying," and then it would just show pictures. [00:28:34] "This guy was destroying everything in the place. I swear. He didn't know how to, he couldn't aim and hit the toilet. He has just destroyed the place. And this is what I did to fix it. And here's three tips for you to deal with a nightmare tenant." Viral. Yeah. Viral. Not only are you viral. Everyone's coming to you. [00:28:52] It's like, "man, I don't want a nightmare tenant. I just bought this two bedroom, two bathroom. I don't want a nightmare tenant. I'm going to go do what he does."  [00:28:59] Jason: I don't want it to be a meth house eviction. Like, yeah.  [00:29:02] Michael: Yes. Yeah. You know what i'm saying? Like that's what I would do. I would go over like what are these and because what you're going to do is what are the biggest fears of the people who are hiring property owners, my nightmare tenant, my tenant who doesn't pay. Like those kind of things, and I would make content. What are the three steps that I did to do with the five tips that a lot of people's in this place don't do right? I would make content like that. And you could do opus there's these ai software apps that'll basically take the clip and then they'll just inject B roll that fits whatever the words you're saying. [00:29:33] You don't have to hardly do any work when you do it and then all of a sudden it's like, "it was a nightmare. This guy's made my place look like a roach house. Roach infested." And then it'll actually pull up an image like a whatever, a stock Shutterstock image of a roach infested home, whatever. [00:29:47] Jason: Now they're using ai. Even I'm seeing a lot of AI images Just flashing. Yeah. Yeah. Or, yeah. Correct.  [00:29:51] Michael: It could actually illustrate using artificial intelligence, illustrate the image for you. You could actually do that. So you don't have run into any copyright issues. Right. Or any permission issues. [00:30:00] There's just so many ways to do this. But what are you doing? You're showing relevancy and competency. You know how to use Instagram. You know how to create a clip using artificial intelligence. You have good audio. You have good lighting. You're showing relevancy. You're showing competency. You're showing high intelligence. [00:30:15] You're showing high social status. And then in the comments, you're like "LMAO." Like people are laughing my ass off. "This happened to me." "Oh my God, Jason, same shit." "100 percent true." And now I have social status. I have all these things. Why? Because I made some content that was engaging about something that is incredibly unsexy, which is property management. [00:30:35] That's how you do it. What are those ultimate fears that your prospective clients have? And I would just do nothing but make content about that. I have a friend of mine, FedEx fearless. His name's Bismarck. And this guy, he goes, "these are three reasons why you are ugly." And I'm like, "what?" [00:30:48] And like, he really goes after people. "This is the reason why your girlfriend is cheating on you right now." And everyone just, I'm like, "what?" And I don't want to watch, but I'm like, I need to watch this video.  [00:30:57] Jason: What's going on there? Yeah.  [00:30:59] Michael: It's so great. It's so great. " No, Michael, you need to be authentic with your social..." no, you don't. You don't need to be authentic. You need to capture people's attention. You need to be attractive. Your primary job is to be attractive on social media. Now what happens is now you got them with the hook, "Here are the top three things that I do to deal with this horrible tenant that I have" And then when they come in the hook now throughout there you give those three, explanations But you also throw in a little piece of advice that shows just a little humble brag that shows "In my 27 years of property management, this is the thing that I've learned." [00:31:30] Okay, little humble brag. And at the end, it goes, "if you want to learn more, comment, the word guide below," or if you're on YouTube, you'd be like, "go down into the description and click the link. And then blah, blah, blah." And it just ends up right down your sales funnel, maybe to a low ticket offer, maybe an ebook that you wrote something like that. [00:31:45] And the next thing, you've 10xed profits. You've 10x revenue. You're selling a course on property management while writing a book on property management, while having a podcast on property management, while being a property manager, all of it at the same time. And then you got to hire a new accountant because you got too many write offs. [00:31:59] Like you don't have enough time to pay your taxes. You got to get too much money. That's it. That's how this works. And that's about what I just explained to you. It's just the difference between getting it and not getting it, being relevant and not being relevant. And so a lot of people, what they're, they listen to me and they always make me out to be the bad guy because cause what I do is I tell people, no one cares about you. And no one likes to hear that. They like to think that the rest of the world cares about property managers. But like you said, no one's following plumbers. Right. But if I was a plumber, I would do the same thing, "man, I walked into this house and this toilet had exploded and just have an image of it." [00:32:30] And it'd be like, "okay, I need to hear what this is." "And then a monster crawled out of the toilet." I'm just kidding. And like, I would just, that's what I would do just to keep people's attention.  [00:32:37] Jason: So for those listening, can we qualify you a little bit related to social media, because you've got a good following? [00:32:43] You've got a sizable business because people listening if they don't know who you are, I want them to recognize you're very qualified to talk about this. Not so humble brag about yourself for a second.  [00:32:55] Michael: I have a men of action. We have 1600 clients that have gone through there. [00:32:58] 200 video testimonials if you go on the school server. And also we have a free community a free school server. What's about 43-4,500 guys in there. You're welcome to message. One of the things that I've told people is that if I join a group and they tell me not to talk to the other people in the group, I know this is a scam. [00:33:12] You'll notice sometimes with MLMs, you'll see that. I implore you to talk to anyone, any client that's ever gone through my program and they will tell you how incredibly satisfied they were. Also you, Jason, I'm sure you've seen my course is extremely comprehensive. It's about 65 hours long. That doesn't even include the live calls. [00:33:29] And then also there's a book, there's a required book list that you have to read in order to go through the course.  [00:33:33] Jason: I'll tell you right now, like an eight figure business for you.  [00:33:36] Michael: Just today, we've done eight figures in total, but as of this month, this is the first month we'll recross the mark. [00:33:42] It was what? 833 a month or something like that. We cross that this month. So that's about, yeah. So we're doing about a little bit under eight figures in revenue per year.  [00:33:50] Jason: This is more than any property managers probably listened to my show. So just for perspective. Okay. Yeah. Got it.  [00:33:57] Michael: Yeah. I mean, because coaching is scalable. [00:34:00] That's the reason why. And like the other thing I want you guys understand is a lot of people got into real estate because they were trying to find a scalable way of making income and they're using you to make their lives scalable. So if you guys read, buy back your time by Dan Martell, they're paying you to buy back their time as real estate owners. [00:34:15] That's what their job is. And essentially you're going to eventually do the same thing. You're going to pay someone to buy back your time from them. So the main difference, and I'm sure many of you entrepreneurs already know this, but. When you start off in the workforce, you are trading your time for money. [00:34:28] You're working at Chick fil A or McDonald's and you're being paying an hourly salary later on. You're trading your money for time. I pay one guy. He comes into my house. He turns on my computer, he turns on my camera, he turns on my lights, he sits me down, and then he just starts yelling at me to talk about certain subjects, and I have no idea, I'm just like, drinking coffee, and I'm like, what up, and he goes, "what do you think about this?" And I'm like, "oh man, let me tell you something, and then they record it," and then it's just a reaction video, and I do nothing. [00:34:53] I pay to get my time back. I have several editors that live in Romania and Nigeria and all these, because I don't want to edit videos anymore. I used to be a video editor and a videographer. I don't want to do it anymore. I pay one place to do the live editing for my podcast. I don't want to do that anymore. [00:35:07] I pay to get my time back. For those of you who are considering hiring a personal assistant, once again, highly recommend Dan Martell's book, Buy Back Your Time. In the book, he talks about taking your yearly salary and divided by 8, 000. And that's what you pay the guy hourly. Take your yearly salary, how much you make in a year, your yearly income divided by 8, 000. [00:35:24] That's it. They go over the reason why, but it ends up becoming like a 40 hour work week. You end up paying him one, you pay him half of what one hourly wage for years. So if your time is worth a thousand dollars an hour, you might pay him 500 an hour to get certain things done for your life. And one of my favorite sayings in that book is something done 80 percent right is 100 percent awesome. [00:35:43] And like, it was one of the hardest things to give up. The guy who does my timestamps, that was really hard. I love doing timestamps because timestamps were giving me clips and those clips would go viral and the virality would make me money, but I had to give that up. And eventually you're going to give up all these processes. [00:35:57] Another thing I'll explain for you guys who are entrepreneurs, one of the greatest tools you will ever find is an app called loom. Look up loom. What loom is allows you to make videos, but the video it's like, it's showing the screen on your phone or it's showing the screen on your computer while they're listening to your voice and you send it to your person. [00:36:12] So like, for instance, I do mass invites for certain events that I do. So I'll go on loom and I'll have a guy, maybe he speaks you know, Farsi or maybe this guy speaks like his English. Isn't that great? What I'll do is I'll go through my invite slowly and I'll do it like for 30 minutes, I'll just do invites and I'll show so he can see what it looks like. [00:36:28] And then I send it to him and then he looks at it and he has no questions. And my invites are done like that. Loom is one of the greatest way of passing along SOPs to people and then using them in order to buy back your time. So understanding all these concepts, it makes you more relevant, makes you more competent. [00:36:43] It gives you higher status. It gives you more access. And these are the things that you're looking for. In any walk of life, but especially in something like property management and you guys also understand as property managers Your job isn't sexy So what you have to do is you have to show the sexy parts of your job, right? [00:36:57] When I my favorite one are accountants and dentists. They're not my friend my friends who are dentists who know what they're doing, they show the fucking horror job teeth, You know car accident, messed up teeth, meth addict, whatever, and then they get the teeth back to 100%. And like me, as someone who doesn't care that much about dentistry, I'm just like staring like, "Oh my God, that was incredible." [00:37:17] Yeah. what you do is you figure out people's primary driver emotion and their biggest fear. And then from those things, from the primary driver emotion and their biggest fear and from those things then you make your content attacking those primary driver emotions and those biggest fears, okay. And when you do so it doesn't make any difference if you're an accountant It doesn't make any difference if you're a property manager doesn't make any difference what it is that you sell people will watch and they will be obsessed. [00:37:42] My brother, he watches videos of horseshoes. They basically, you know, they shave off the end of the horse's hoof and then they put the shoes on. He said it's like the most relaxing thing in the world to watch. And I wouldn't even think about that, but why is it? It's like something we don't even think about that much, but it's pretty amazing. [00:37:56] Like when you see, it's like very relaxing to watch stuff like that. You can do stuff like that.  [00:38:00] Jason: There's a guy that's viral for just, he finds distressed houses. And he just cleans up their lawn and the sidewalk. He's like, "Hey, could I mow your lawn? And it's like relaxing to watch the transformation." [00:38:12] Yeah.  [00:38:12] Michael: Another one that's great was if you guys watch the early Ryan Pineda stuff, what was he doing? He was flipping couches. He would find crappy couches, clean them up, and then he would sell them again. And he made a living from flipping couches. There's just all these different things. And like the concept of it sounds so boring, but I want to watch someone do it. [00:38:28] Right. It was the one where you'd buy those storage units and then you'd see whatever's in this. Oh, I forgot what that was. It was pawn shop, pawn stars or something where the people would buy storage units and open up in there. And there's like, sometimes there'd be nothing in the storage unit. Sometimes there'd be like a dead body in there or some crazy shit. [00:38:41] Like they find like a skull and like all of a sudden. Bag full of money. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, you guys know the producers were putting that bag of money in there, right? Like that wasn't real. That wasn't real.  [00:38:52] Jason: Reality TV isn't real either. You like to say social media isn't real and that's okay or something. [00:38:58] Michael: So rule number four in men of action is social media is fake and I'm okay with that because the money's real. And the world isn't fair. And I'm okay with that.  [00:39:05] Jason: Yeah.  [00:39:06] Michael: The world isn't fair and I'm okay with it. Rule number four in a, in social and of action is about acceptance. It's about accepting the world the way it is and never being a victim. [00:39:14] It's sure things are hard for you, but you're never a victim. You might be too short. English might not be your first language and you're having a hard time speaking it. You might be born poor. You might be born with some kind of ailment or disability that you feel like holds you back, but that's where you are. [00:39:27] You start from where you are. And then you create from there. Okay. You were saying something before about how you notice like all these books kind of converge in to the same place, three books that have nothing to do with each other, but it's the same concept. Ready? The power of now by Eckhart Tolle, the subtle art of not giving a fuck by Mark Manson and sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. [00:39:45] You're like, wait a second. It's all the same thing. It's all the same. It's all this. I get to choose how react. I get to tell myself stories that change my behavior. It's all three of these books that have nothing to do with each other end up being the same book, not exactly the same book, but similar books. [00:40:00] Because once you get to the highest levels of enlightenment, transcendence, goal oriented communication ends up being the same thing for everyone.  [00:40:07] Jason: There's a one of my favorite books is by Byron Katie called Loving What Is. And basically, she takes you through this process of just asking yourself these four sort of questions to challenge your current view of reality. [00:40:21] And it takes you out of this victim sort of view. It's very much like cognitive behavioral therapy, maybe, or something like this, right? Yes. Or CBT or something. But yeah, so asking this question, is this belief that I have actually true? And a lot of our beliefs that we're holding on to that are holding us back. [00:40:36] And like, if we're not getting results in life, it's because we currently have beliefs that are not working for us. And so, if you see people that things are working well for them, even though you think, like, somebody might be watching right now going, "Michael is completely full of shit. He's throwing out all these crazy stuff and he's, he worked at a strip club" and somebody's like, so against that or whatever. [00:40:56] They're like their own stumbling block and they're in their way and they won't pay attention to the truth or the things that you're sharing that are good because they're so stuck on everything in the universe having to look a certain way that they are not even open to receiving more, they're not willing to challenge their own thinking. [00:41:13] They're not going to progress. They're going to stay stuck.  [00:41:16] Michael: They identify more with their identity than they identify with success.  [00:41:20] Jason: Yeah. Good way of saying it. And I love how you talked about kind of these currencies. One of my mentors in the past was Alex Charfen. And he's from here in the Austin area as well. [00:41:30] And he was talking about time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. He calls the five currencies. And Hormozi went through Alex Charfen's like coaching with me. I met Layla and Alex in this. And one of the things that I then saw Alex talk about these currencies. But what I thought was interesting is Alex said the most significant of those five currencies in order to scale and grow your business is focus. [00:41:52] It's the most important to scale, grow a company. And then Dan Martell, I once saw him teach this framework that was, it was like about the power of one. He's like, "the most effective business is a business has one sales funnel, one product, one..." it was like all ones, like, And I see property managers, a lot of times they'll try and like start five different businesses. [00:42:14] They're like, I'm going to start a cleaning company, a maintenance company, like all these other things.because they're complimentary real estate brokerage. And then they wonder why none of them are growing because they lack focus. And so all these things kind of converge, making sure that we have focus. [00:42:28] You also mentioned Dan Martell, who I think is a brilliant entrepreneur, he generally was coaching like software companies, SAS companies to help them grow and scale, but his stuff's applicable to coaching businesses. I've noticed it's applicable to anything because the principles are valid. [00:42:44] And one of the things I've had my clients do to get them to that next level, to basically get their time back is to have them do a time study to where they become accountable for their time, which things are positive and which things are negative, like plus or minus, which things give them energy in life and which things take it away in their own business. [00:43:00] And I have them do this like usually once a quarter. And when I did my first time study, I realized I was doing like four hours of podcast production in a week. It all added up and I was like, holy shit. So then I just hired a company to do it. It was a no brainer to let that go because it was stupid at that point for me to hold on to that once I could see that challenge. [00:43:20] And you mentioned loom, awesome tool for like one of my favorite tools, like it, which is next level. It's like loom, but it's Wistia's video recorder. It lets you actually record the screen and yourself. And then after the recordings made. You can then have it mid recording. You can switch which parts are showing and have segues between the two. [00:43:42] And it's super fast. It's like super cool. But we use tools like that.  [00:43:46] Michael: Productivity. Yeah, definitely.  [00:43:47] Jason: Yeah. So, I love all these ideas for collapsing time. Michael has dropped several awesome tools, knowledge bombs, ideas for those that are listening and also how to leverage content social media wise. [00:43:59] So what you know, if we were to bring this full circle what would you say is the most important thing that maybe business owners or property managers could be doing to scale and grow their business?  [00:44:13] Michael: Right now? Again, one more time. It is: understand, your ability to grow is based on your perceived status, your perceived trustworthiness, your perceived know how. Not your actual know how. Like, I can tell you so many guys that I know that are real estate experts on YouTube. And then I have my friends of mine that are real estate agents. And they're like, "that guy doesn't know shit." And I'm like, "no, he's coaching the white belts." That's the why, the reason why he says the things that he says. [00:44:39] And they have a hard time dealing with it. So, understanding that concept. And then. You have to leave yourself. You have to subvert your own ego, go on places like TikTok or Instagram places you'd never think to go to, and then look at who's going viral, who's in your exact industry, and you're going to need to take pieces from what you see. [00:44:56] Like, what are the kinds of videos that do really well? And you're going to be able to find those very quickly. You can literally right now would go on Tik Tok and look up property management and you'll find a bunch of videos, like just pick the ones that go the most viral or a real estate, a podcast, and then pick the topics that go the most viral and just blatantly steal them, steal, blatantly steal everything. [00:45:19] You in the beginning, no creativity necessary, just steal. Okay, and you do that for a while and then you start to sort of get your footing And then you start to realize wait a second, I've been running ads and my ROAS per dollar my ads is x 1. 2 or 2. 0 or whatever but in organic my cost per lead is like nothing because my organic traffic, it costs me so much less to get a lead. [00:45:44] It's incredible. Then I go on someone else's podcast because my content is getting better and better. And then all of a sudden now, you know, Rich Summers and Ryan Pineda want me to come on their show to talk about, you know, maybe I'm on ice coffee hour or whatever, talking about real estate. [00:45:58] And then I get on bigger and bigger shows and now my cost per lead decreases even more because I just had this simple understanding that the way it works is my perceived status my perceived know how and my perceived trustworthiness to other people are the reasons why people will buy my product. Now you may already obviously everyone who's listened to this if you have any success in property management You already have your funnel is probably dealing with either word of mouth shaking hands, or it's dealing with some sort of paid advertisement, but I implore you try organic. Try to use organic and then organic meaning using Instagram posts or Facebook posts. [00:46:33] And then once you do that, try to take your best content and turn your best content in an advertisement and promote those, promote that content. That's something we've also been doing. And if you want examples on everything I just said, a great book, a great place to start is the 100 million offer series by Alex Hormozi. He goes over every single thing that I just talked about. It's absolutely fantastic. It's really great stuff. The difference is with my program, MOA, we're a little bit more bespoke for what it is exactly that you're doing. But we're mostly talk about networking. And then the other thing is, When you actually meet that person in person that you want to work with, do you come off as a fan boy? [00:47:06] Do you come off as too eager? Do you, does your body language show signs of neediness or signs of low status? Are these things that you can watch? And then how do you figure that out? You watch yourself on camera. Do you watch yourself on other people's podcasts? Because that's one of the things is like as social media grows and more people are exposed to more people, just remember like if you consider in the plasticine, you know, we live in hunter gatherer societies of 150 people and now we can legitimately have a hundred thousand friends on social media in that kind of situation because we're exposed to more people, we are more attuned to status, physical appearance, et cetera. And so now what happens is humans essentially become more shallow. [00:47:46] They become more attuned to other people's status and rightly or wrongly. Is it a negative commentary on humans? Yes, it probably is, but it's the world you live on. And if you want to get rich, you need to listen to what I'm saying. And if what I'm saying, offends you, get ready to stay poor. Like, I'm sorry. [00:48:01] If you guys are listening to this right now, and you're like, "No, social media is going to go away and we're going to go back to walking up to doors and do an email blast and buying banner ads." If that's what you think, go back to your AOL. com email and just keep believing that's the case. [00:48:16] It's all about the handshake. It's like, if that's what you believe, that's fine. But for the rest of you who are ready to understand that if you think things are bad, I got news for you. They're only going to get worse. Meaning people aren't going to put their phones down at dinner. People aren't going to take fewer photos. [00:48:30] People. I was reading something. It was like, like in one day, now more photos are taken in like an hour than were taken during the entire year of 1985 or something like that. It was like the amount of photographic and video data that's uploaded in one hour exceeds the total photographs taken in an entire year back in the 1980s. [00:48:49] Some absurd number like that. If you think things are going in one direction, things are getting faster. They're more virtual. They're more digital. Digital, they're going to be controlled by artificial intelligence and they're going to be more scalable. You need to get on that train. The train is leaving. [00:49:05] You need to get on the train. Now, if you don't want to get on the train, that's fine, but notice as the world passes you by and the rate at which it passes you by only increases every year. If you want to learn about that, read Ray Kurzweil series called the singularity is near, and you can see how he talks about the rate of change is increasing, and then the rate of change is also increasing. [00:49:24] Jason: Okay, so this is awesome stuff. So Michael one thing I want to point out for those that are listening. Because I think you've sold your Men of Action short a little bit. So I'm gonna, I want to say something about it because what I think is in, what people think is in there probably based on what you're saying is it's a bunch of social media stuff and it's like how to, maybe how to get women or something like this. [00:49:45] I think though you've created a program that are making men better men. Like you're covering topics in here like, Leadership and time management and like not just networking, which is to build status, but you're making them better people that people would want to network with that people would want to connect with and like I'm in the Austin group. [00:50:09] For men of action. Yeah.  [00:50:11] Michael: And that was one of the first groups.  [00:50:13] Jason: These are good guys. Like they're cool guys. We've hung out. And and I'm like one of the, I'm the older married guy, like in the group, hanging out with them, but it, they're all striving to like better themselves, not just to show that they look better maybe on social media, but they're also like working to be better people. [00:50:30] Yeah. And You know, I love the book extreme ownership, by the way. I like, I think just that principle alone would change every business's life. Every man's life every person's life. If they would just not be a victim and they would own their shit. Like it would be huge. It's like, should be required reading for business owners. [00:50:47] So if you're listening to this, go read that book. You're sharing and exposing them to a lot of these books. Like I've read a lot of the books on the reading list, not all of them. So I've got a ways to go, but. You're also exposing them to some of the best ideas for leveling themselves up as a human being. [00:51:04] Michael: Yes. So consider this concept, right? What was something that sounds super arrogant is the idea of taking pictures of yourself without a shirt on every day, and then posting a story on your Instagram at first, it seems like, well, how arrogant is that? But if it causes you, if it causes you to lose enough weight to where you're no longer, you know, a threat to get diabetes, or you lose enough weight to where your body fat index is low enough to where the opposite sex finds you attractive, or it caused you to lose enough weight that actually takes away strain on your heart. [00:51:32] That narcissistic, arrogant thing that you did saved your life and made you a better person.  [00:51:37] Jason: Yeah. You get to be around for your kids, right? Like that would be better, right? I'm doing 75 hard right now. I was 31 days into it. And then I forgot to take the picture. I forgot to take the picture. And so I just started over on like a weekend. [00:51:51] So it's now 107 days hard for me is what it's going to end up being. But but that's the thing. And every day you take the pic and you're doing the exercises and doing all this stuff, but it's more of a mental toughness challenge. And the fitness piece is tough, right? [00:52:05] Like you have to take care of yourself in order to keep up, but it's more of just being willing to invest in yourself and do hard things and to make hard decisions in order to get to that next level.  [00:52:15] Michael: It's exactly right. Yeah. And it's also it's work smarter, not harder. Like if you really had all the Intel, like for instance, if you're just flat broke, but you had Dan Fleischman's brain, Tai Lopez's brain, if you had Wes Watson's brain, if you had Justin Waller's brain, if you had Gregor Gallagher's brain, Brandon Carter's brain, if you, if I could just take their info and put it into your brain, you were completely broke. [00:52:38] You'd be a millionaire within 18 months. More than that, you'd be a decamillionaire in 18 months because these guys, there's two different things. There's money and then there's the mechanisms to make money. The second one is the one you want. The first one, people born into, with trust funds. [00:52:51] They have money. Money's great. I'm not telling you money's bad, but the mechanisms to make money. Not only does it give you more security, it's just a more fulfilling way of living life. And then the other part is making your friends rich. That's another great thing We haven't even got into that part But like networking with your friends to help them make more money is another great incredibly a fulfilling thing that you can do. Having people who work for you and then like making their lives more fulfilling and ensuring their security in life because you're able, like again, I, what do I do? [00:53:21] I'm doing a podcast right now. What am I doing? I'm doing this so that we can lower the cost per lead. Like essentially, I know that's, I'm saying the quiet part loud right now, but this is the truth and you're doing the same thing. What I'm trying to do is use organic traffic. To get leads to go down my funnel. [00:53:34] And when they do so, then they get to my sales team because they're taking in a warm lead, the likelihood of a conversion increases from like 1 percent to 6 percent to 9 percent based on how warm the lead is. Now the lead goes through and the cost per lead decreases because I'm doing this whole thing right now. So i'm doing this to help my sales team and make my sales team's life easier, and in doing so make it so that they have more security in their life with their family when you get to that point, that's the most fulfilling way to live your life. That's more important than being rich is being able to do something like that accomplishing goals with a team  [00:54:07] Jason: Yeah. And me having you on the podcast exposes me to new audiences, new people, and people that follow you are people that are like, "Oh, Michael's had all these really amazing guests on his show also. And Michael has a certain level of status that helps my status level as well." Right.  [00:54:22] Michael: Yeah.  [00:54:22] Jason: And a lot of people think, "Oh, that sounds, you know, maybe that's not authentic or it's disingenuous or whatever," but these are how we make connections. This is part of the networking game of life. And by connecting with other people, this is how we create relationships. This is how we create friends. This is how we identify people that we want to become more like, or how we want to, or people we want to be exposed and connected to, and by doing that, it helps us to grow as a human being, right? [00:54:52] The more people that I get to be around that are operating at a high level, the more it puts me in a state of wanting to be operating at a high level. And then this is also what you talked about is why I love coaching business owners. I love being able to coach and support entrepreneurs. [00:55:08] I learn as I do it. I get lots of ancillary benefits by doing it, but also it allows me a reason to feed my addiction to learning and to growth so that I can turn around and benefit them. And so it really creates this win, win scenario. And I'm sure that your involvement in men of action, I can, I get from your content that you. [00:55:29] Are legitimately invested in making these men better.  [00:55:33] Michael: Yeah. I did it for 14 years for free, so it's definitely not a money grab for me. The reason why we did six figures. The first month we opened was because I'd been coaching since 08 for no money. [00:55:42] There were a couple of self help organizations that would fly me out to do speeches. I was a stock option seller. I was a portfolio manager for a small fund out of Florida. And that's what I did for a living. And all the other stuff was just like every, what I figured out was every time I read a book, if there was a lesson in it, I wanted to teach someone as soon as possible. [00:55:57] So I'd make a video or I'd give a speech and it would help me codify these ideas. And then finally, once the the crash happened in 2020, the Corona crash, once that happened, I realized I need to turn this into a business. Like it's, and once I did, and once I started having more people, invest more time and resources into my program, their results got better. [00:56:16] Again, somebody taking my advice. They're not invested, so they don't really care. They'll listen for a second, but they won't really listen. People join my program and because they've invested resources. Into taking my program. Now, when I say you need to listen to this book at 1. 4 speed, move it up to 1. 7 so that you can get more out of it and then take notes on every one of these chapters. [00:56:34] Now they actually do it because they've invested in what I've asked them to do. And it's just been, it's just been so magnificent how different it is, but yeah, no money has never been the driver for this.  [00:56:43] Jason: Russell Brunson, I think it was, it says when people pay, they pay attention. And I noticed this, I used to give away this training. [00:56:51] I used to give away this training on sales that for clients I would just like throw it in with like doing a project for them or a website or whatever we were doing. And then I got a coaching client. He was like one of my first, I was having to pay two grand a month. [00:57:05] And I gave him this training. He was now paying. And he got results unlike anyone that had ever been given that course before because he paid attention to it. And that changed my perception forever about trying to benefit people by giving them free stuff. And I was just at that Taylor Welch event. I was about to say that. [00:57:25] Michael: So three weeks ago, you and I were at a Taylor Welch event and he said, I hate giving away stuff for free because free trains your audience to get something for nothing. So we took our free course and now we're charging $10 for it. It's just $10, but it's like, it's going to separate the wheat from the chaff. [00:57:39] Right. The sound from the noise.  [00:57:40] Jason: And I remember this, he was like, free. Free is stupid. And I was like, yeah, I'm being stupid.  [00:57:45] Michael: So we're changing. Yeah. And I'm creating a low ticket offer for a bunch of my stuff yet because of what I was saying. And I'm not going to charge a bunch, but like 3 we're going to do, I'm going to make an ebook and I'm charging $3 for it. [00:57:56] And then I'm going to make the first four steps of MOA. I'm going to charge $10 for it. That's all. The reason why I'm going to do it is because you need to invest internally. There's the investment. There's the actual money that transfers from one fund, you know, from one place to another, but then there's the actual and internal investment that you have. [00:58:11] Read, about like the Florence Nightingale effect, how like nurses fall in love with their patients as they continue to care for them. As you invest in an idea, you become more invested in the idea, additionally more invested. And so that's something that's a really important thing. [00:58:23] So people who pay attention. That's absolutely correct. Yeah. So yeah, man, that's been something that's been really helpful for me, but just kind of getting out of your own way and thinking that, you know, better, or just holding on to what you think is moral or authentic. Like you don't do things because they don't feel authentic. [00:58:38] And they don't feel organic and not recognizing that everyone you think is organic is they got their lights set up They're wearing makeup. They've got a fill light. They've got a director over here. They've got an editor They're using AI software, but you think to you it's organic, but it's not organic. [00:58:57] It really isn't the other thing I'm gonna tell you guys If you listen to huge content creators like Alex Hormozi or if you listen to like David Goggins, they will say things and the things will be viral because they said it. Like Alex Hormozi will say a thing and people quote him because he's Alex Hormozi. [00:59:11] None of you listening to this are at that spot. You need to say something that is actually transgressive. You're gonna need to say something that actually moves the needle or no one's gonna care. If you, and trust me, listen to Tony Robbins. If he makes a tweet... yeah, be bold. [00:59:24] Trust yourself. Go out and take action every day. If you fall down, just get back up like 400, 000 likes any one of you say some shit like that. Be bold. Take chances. Do what's best in your life. They're like, who are you? Fall down, get up. You will not get a single like on Twitter. No one will care because you're not famous enough to where the message is viral because you're famous. [00:59:45] No offense. Their message is useless. It doesn't help you at all. These messages are so vague. They do nothing for you, but you have to do something that is a bit more transgressive or no one's going to care. And I love Gary Vaynerchuk, I really do, but he gives this advice of like you just being authentic all the time and just always doing what you love. [01:00:03] And I'm just thinking about Wayne Huizenga, the guy who owns waste management. The guy made a billion dollars from cleaning up diapers and porta potties. Do you think Wayne Huizenga woke up every morning and be like, "you know what my dream is to clean up porta potties?" No. You make millions of dollars from solving other people's problems, not by doing what you love. [01:00:20] Sorry to break your spirit and sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Sorry to say the quiet part loud. Sorry if this comes off as offensive, it is the truth. And by the way, you want to know another example of that property management, you're not, none of you woke up this morning, like, "you know what? I just want that shitty drug addict fucking college burnout tenant who just makes my entire unit smell like a fucking hookah lounge, I can't wait to deal with that guy." None of you said that this morning. None of you did this was none of your dreams. But you did dream of being an entrepreneur.  [01:00:53] Jason: Yeah, nobody woke up as a kid and said, "mom, dad, you know what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a property manager."  [01:01:00] Michael: Yes. No one said that. And yet you're doing it. And many of you are really happy and it's putting food on your table and you're learning new ways to make money and it's becoming an adventure and you're becoming super relevant and super competent in this area. [01:01:13] And it was never your dream, but you're solving a problem and that's how you're going to get rich. Not by following your fucking passion.  [01:01:19] Have I sufficiently offended a happier audience? ?  [01:01:21] Jason: No, I don't think so.  [01:01:22] Michael: No. [01:01:23] Jason: No, I don't think so. I think my audience they know, like most property management companies suck. If I have a room full property managers, and I say, by show of hands, how many of you, all of your competitors suck? Everybody's hand goes up. I have a room of property managers, "but not yours," I usually joke at them.  [01:01:40] Michael: Do this one. How many of you guys think that the media fools people and manipulates people? [01:01:43] All of them will raise their hand. How many of you guys are manipulated by the media? And none of them raised their hand.  [01:01:48] Jason: I know. Dude, I love that.  [01:01:50] Michael: There's another friend of mine, I ask a group of women, "how many of you guys have dated a narcissist?" They all raised their hand and it was like, "well, 4 percent of the population are narcissists." [01:01:58] And then the other one I asked is like, "ladies, how many of you think that your friends are bigger sluts than you?" And all of them were raising their hands. I was like, "if your friends were here, they would say the same shit about you." [01:02:08] Yeah, it's really funny. It's this cognitive bias that individuals have.  [01:02:11] Jason: Yeah, so, I think, you know, property managers listening in the beginning, it's not fun. It's not a fun business. But if they get to the point where they recognize that they can create the business around themselves, instead of trying to build the business around the business. This is the big mistake most people make building any business in initially they build the business around the business. And they end up more and more miserable in it until they finally have a breakthrough in their business, in their journey of being an entrepreneur, that they figure out this is not what I had wanted from the beginning. [01:02:44] And I call it the four reasons for starting a business. They want fulfillment, they want freedom, they want contribution, and they want support. This is why we start businesses. They think it's to get money, but really they want these four things that a business and money could create for them if they do it the right way. [01:03:02] But we all tend to build businesses initially the wrong way. We have less freedom, less fulfillment, less of a sense that we're making a difference contribution and feeling like we're less supported, feeling more like, "why won't my team think for themselves?" Kind of a question. And we end up in a place that is usually the least profitable the business has ever been on a per like client basis and frustrated until we turn it around and we start to build the business around ourselves. And so property managers and every business owner need to be selfish enough that they recognize the business cannot be healthy. Their team cannot be healthy unless they build the business around them getting more of what they want out of the business. [01:03:43] And this is where they start to change how they build their team, how they build what they're doing. And they stopped trying to pretend to be this wrong person and then build a team around it. You cannot build your right team around the wrong person. And so property management can be a really shitty business to be in, or it can be a really systemizable process, residual income, cousin of real estate that they can spend their days just doing the few things they enjoy doing and offload everything else if they do it the right way. [01:04:15] Which is, you know, what we focus on with our clients. And I would assume that goes for anyone in any business. There's a way that you could show up in that business and just do the pieces that you love. Eventually, if you're willing to kind of like you were describing eat shit and do the hard things in the beginning to get there with that goal in mind. [01:04:33] Michael: I love it, man. Definitely. I mean, it's the hard part. It's like they've been sold this idea that they deserve success. It'll be something where you follow your passion and it's going to be fair. It's going to be fair because you're going to work hard and you're just going to make money just because you worked hard. [01:04:47] That's what they think it is. And then later on they start winding road. There's different parts where it's like, "this doesn't feel authentic." Guys, this is another thing really important. This is more self help advice than it is for specifically. If you aren't good at a thing and I'm elite at that thing, whatever it is. I'm a really good free throw shooter for instance I'm an elite level free throw shooter. It just happened to be some weird thing that I do every day when I work out. If I go and I were to teach you how to shoot free throws and and I teach you to keep your elbow in, I want your right foot slightly in front of your left foot. [01:05:16] I need you to drop your weight a little bit. Only finger only your fingers touch the ball. Your palm does not touch the ball comes over your index finger and your humerus is pointing towards there. The first time I get you to do it, it's going to feel like it's awkward. It's going to feel wrong. [01:05:30] It's going to feel inauthentic, but you've been doing, you've been doing the wrong thing authentically. I need you to do the right thing inauthentically. Whenever I give you a piece of advice that it leads to success and you don't have success, it will never feel authentic. Ever. Some of you watch this podcast, you've been getting advice and it doesn't feel authentic because it works. [01:05:52] That's why it doesn't feel authentic. You need to let go of this romantic notion of your authenticity. This is social media. All of it is fake. All of it is fake. If any of it is real or authentic, it's only real and authentic because I allowed you to see it. That's the only reason. Let go of your notion of authenticity and romantic beliefs. [01:06:16] Let go of it. It's imaginary. You want to be exciting and bombastic. You are going to have to be ostentatious because no one cares about you. No one is watching you. You don't mean anything to anyone other than your four closest friends and maybe your mom. No one cares. You are the tree falling in the forest and no one is there to hear it. [01:06:39] And so many of you are not, you, "I have 400 followers on Instagram," bro, you don't have 10 real followers on Instagram. You don't. Sorry, you don't. And that's the thing. You, if you understand how the Instagram algorithm works, if you have Instagram, it's going to show your content to four people. 1%. That's how it works. [01:06:55] Jason: So to be clear, What you're not saying is that people should be lying or unethical. No, no lying, no unethical.  [01:07:04] Michael: Don't even exaggerate. Don't even exaggerate. You ever seen the story about the blind people touching the elephant? One guy comes and touches the one blind person touches the trunk and said, "Oh, this thing is like a snake." [01:07:14] Another one touches the tail and was like, "Oh, this thing is almost like a willow tree or a tree branch." One of them touches the leg. And it's like, "Oh, this thing's like a tree." There's three blind people touching the elephant. They're all correct, but they do not adequately describe the elephant in total. [01:07:27] And my point is just take the parts of your life and just show the cool parts. You're just going to have to show the cool parts. Again, most of you when you look at your car, you have a cover over your, there's a fiberglass cover over the top of your engine. But you know, your engine might actually run more efficiently if you didn't have that thing in there, you'd be able to take in more air, right? [01:07:44] But why do you do that? Why is it? You do it because this is the part that you're trying to hide. The world is about hiding certain parts and showing more beautiful parts. There's a beautiful place in the woods, you're out there in a grove and there's trees and you show it in a photograph and you take pictures with your friends and you have a picnic and it's beautiful. [01:08:00] You don't show videos of cows taking a poop. You don't do that because even though both things are natural and both things happen, one of them is pretty and nice. Nobody is out there trying to like, let's say, Oh, what is it? What's an ugly animal? I'm trying to think of an no one's like, "let's save the aardvarks." [01:08:14] No one does that, but everyone's trying to save the cats. Notice that you notice we pick and choose what we find to be more appealing as homo sapiens. And so when you understand this concept and understand that this whole belief is fueled through evolution, then you're like, okay, let me pick and choose the concepts that my audience are going to find to be more digestible or more exciting to keep their attention. And as I do that, I'm going to grow as a content creator. And one of the weirdest things that is ever going to happen to you guys is as a content creator, you're only going to have 10, 000 people following you on Instagram and maybe a thousand subs on YouTube. [01:08:45] You're going to do that for a while. And the first time someone comes up to you and you can tell that they're actually visibly nervous to meet you because they've been watching all your stuff.  [01:08:52] Jason: Yeah.  [01:08:53] Michael: And that guy is going to convert and not only is he going to convert when he converts, he's gonna get more out of your content than anyone else because he's paying attention and that's the gift I give you It's just the ability to do that. [01:09:04] Jason: Yeah. I love it. It reminds me of, I saw a video on probably, I don't know, reels, Tik Tok but it was talking about how all these influencers go to the Bahamas. Bahamas look super beautiful or whatever, but they, nobody reveals that people are getting bitten by sand fleas and getting infections.  [01:09:20] Michael: Yeah, those, you know, those pigs on Exuma. [01:09:22] You know, those pigs, nobody shows that those pigs have like these horrible sunburns or like the pigs shouldn't even be out there or the fat or nobody even shows the part that everyone is just like like it's kind of abuse. It's kind of animal abuse. Nobody ever, they always just show the pigs up there swimming,  [01:09:35] Jason: living, cooking bacon. [01:09:37] Michael: Yeah. It's just crazy, bro. It's like, yeah, we never see that. Like guys, I want you to understand most of you. You live on a planet right now where half the population of this earth lives on less than $5 a day. There are people literally right now living in Managua living in a trash dump, like thousands of people that literally live in a trash dump. [01:09:53] Look it up right now before like you have no idea, not only how fortunate you are, but how fortunate you could be by using social media to scale your business and to scale your network. And so many people. In this world currently don't have that ability and no one on the planet had that ability before like 1992, right? [01:10:11] When we had a dial up internet. No one had that ability You are so unbelievably fortunate for the place that you live in life. You need to take advantage of it  [01:10:19] Jason: Michael, I appreciate you coming and hanging out with me here on the DoorGrow show. For those that are wanting to get, you know, maybe they're a guy, maybe they're interested in men of action or they want to follow you on social media and hear more of your passionate conversation where, how can they get in touch with you? [01:10:39] Michael: Go just go to Michael Sartain on Instagram. It's probably the easiest place to get ahold of me. If you guys are interested in the program specifically, you can go to moamentoring. com men of action, moamentoring. com or you can go to Skool you got no Skool. That's that new platform that Alex Hormozi just bought. [01:10:53] It's S K O O L. com forward slash men of action free. There's a hyphen in between each word. So it's men hyphen of hyphen action hyphen free. You guys can join our free Skool group there and it's got all kinds of information. It's got our calendar. It's got Instagram testimonials. It's got video testimonials. [01:11:08] It's got the book list and it's got the required podcast that we have for all of our clients that are on there. So if you guys want to go check that out, just go to skool.com/men-of-action- free.  [01:11:17] Jason: This has been awesome, Michael. I think you and I could have an ADHD conversation for like five hours straight and just go down a million rabbit holes, but I appreciate you coming and hanging out with me on the show. [01:11:28] Thanks so much.  [01:11:29] Michael: All right, man. Hey, good to talk to you. Talk to you soon, Jason. All right, we'll let you go.  [01:11:33] Jason: All right. So for those of you that. Are wanting to grow and scale your property management business. And you are wanting to figure out how to get to the next level. You've been stuck for a while. [01:11:43] Check us out at doorgrow. com. We would love to have a conversation, see if it might be a fit, see if we can help you get to the next level. And finally start getting the results that you're wanting in your business. And finally start feeling like you're making progress significantly, scaling your business and having success. [01:12:02] And until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [01:12:06] 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!  [01:12:32] 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.

If you are existing in your property management business but you aren’t enjoying it, you might be in property management hell. In today’s episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull explain how to escape property management hell. You’ll Learn [01:19] How do you know if you are in property management hell? [05:40] How to escape property management hell [07:33] How do you know if you are in property management hell? [10:32] What does an operator do in a property management business? Tweetables “So if you are existing, living in your business and you're not enjoying it and it's frustrating… then you might be in property management hell.” “There's definitely something to be said about working hard. There's definitely a time and a season for this.” “We have to get to the next level, and what got you to where you are now is not going to help you move forward.” “You can still be miserable and have an entire team.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: You will have more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, and more support in your business as it grows. [00:00:05] And this is the right way to do it. This will change your life. [00:00:09]  [00:00:10] Jason: 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. DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, and 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 and Sarah Hull, the founder and CEO and the COO of DoorGrow. [00:01:15] Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:18] Welcome everybody. So we were thinking about what to talk about today, and one of the things that I coached clients on this week in depth was this idea of how to escape property management hell. So let's talk about how to escape property management hell. So if you are existing, living in your business and you're not enjoying it and it's frustrating, you've got an entire team and you're wondering 'why won't they just think for themselves?' And you're stressed out and you're tired of dealing with all the escalated situations where your team couldn't handle it like tenants and owners, and you're still wearing a whole bunch of hats that you don't enjoy wearing, you're still doing a lot of stuff in the business that you really don't wake up in the morning and go, "man, I'm excited to do that thing today," then you might be in property management hell. This is not property management heaven. This is not the place you're supposed to stay. And so if you're not enjoying that we're going to talk about how to get out of that. And it's not that complicated of a process. We're not going to go into a ton of detail cause we don't have a ton of time. [00:02:20] Not as in depth as we would in coaching our clients, but we're going to give you the high level overview so you can understand that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. All right. So what do you notice with clients that they're doing and what's going on when they are in hell? What sort of frustrations and challenges are you hearing? [00:02:40] Sarah: Overwhelmed. They're overworked. They're crazy busy. Most of it is just busy work. [00:02:46] It needs to be done, but it's not high level things that a business owner would need to do. They're working lots and lots of hours. Sometimes it might be eight, 10, 12, 15 hours a day. Sometimes it's seven days a week. Usually it's at least six and then they do a little bit on the seventh day, but they don't really fully get time off and they're just responding to everything as it comes in and they're trying to handle everything and they're frustrated and they're just very stressed out.  [00:03:23] Jason: Yeah, I was talking with a past client who may end up, probably end up joining our mastermind program. I think we'd worked together four or five years ago, helped him with his website and some different stuff. And he's been using some of the stuff he learned and he was really excited to tell me how far he's come and he's like at 700 units and I think he was small when he came to me, I don't remember, maybe 50 or something, and so he's really excited about the progress he has. [00:03:50] Then he was telling me he's working 17 hour days, some days, like he's working these crazy hours and he's going through these cycles of growth and like working crazy hard and then stopping the growth so that he can focus on building up the business and operations and doing a lot of the onboarding of the properties and then he goes back into this cycle and he hasn't taken a legit vacation since he started the business. [00:04:17] And he goes on vacations, but he's on his phone the whole time. He's not totally available. And this is not a sustainable thing. Now he's just done it through sheer drive and will. To his credit, he's like, "nobody will outwork me." This is like a badge of honor for him. And he works incredibly hard and he's like, that's why he's had more success than any of his competitors is he's just willing to outwork all of them. [00:04:43] And there's definitely something to be said about working hard. There's definitely a time and a season for this. And if all of you or any of you are being lazy, work a little harder. Like do some hard work for a little while to get to that next level. But we want more fulfillment and more freedom. And I wasn't getting a sense from this gentleman that he was experiencing fulfillment and freedom. [00:05:03] To me, that sounds like hell. It's like a treadmill that you feel like you've created and you have to keep running on to keep the business going. And he's going to burn out. And you know, he even mentioned like it's affecting his health, it's affecting his body, you know, and it's probably impacting his relationships, you know? [00:05:21] And so a lot of guys get into this stage and I think women do it as well. Everybody does this in business where they get into this mode of growth and work and hustle. And that's how we get businesses going. We have to get to the next level, and what got you to where you are now is not going to help you moving forward. [00:05:38] You have to start to get out of the way. And so the way to escape this property management hell, this cycle of endless work and torment is we need to figure out what help do we need in the business? A lot of people go, "well, just offload stuff." Yeah, but how do you know what you actually should offload? [00:05:58] Because the big mistake people make is they go hire what they think the business needs and they keep helping the business. And this gentleman and many others I've talked to have an entire team and they're still stressing themselves out. You can still be miserable and have an entire team. Some of you listening are like, "yeah that's me. I've got an entire team and I'm miserable," right? So, how do we escape that? Here's how we figure out what you need. Because if we instead shift it to figuring out what you need, then this will be a game changer. So, the first thing we do is, we have our clients do a time study.  [00:06:30] We have a sponsor and our sponsor is Venderoo, which we're getting some great feedback on from clients. Tired of the constant stress and hassle of maintenance coordination. Meet Venderoo, 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 at Vendoroo, VENDOROO dot ai/doorgrow and experience maintenance done right. And I'll just add one of our clients had 80 work orders in his first day of turning Vendoroo, the AI thing on, he had 80 work orders closed out. Another client had 54 work orders closed out in their first day as well. [00:07:29] Like we're in this AI revolution. So I highly recommend you check these guys out. It's very cool.  [00:07:33] Okay, so back to what I was saying is here's the strategy. You do a time study. This time study will help you figure out what you're doing every 15 minutes and you're going to categorize your time based on whether it's tactical or strategic and you're going to figure out which things are your plus signs or your minus signs. [00:07:50] We have a whole process for this and a training on how to do this and you want to do this once a quarter. This will move the business forward more than most anything else that you could do. And it'll help you get out of the way. You do the time study, figure out plus and minus signs. Then you create a job description. [00:08:04] We call those R docs because each section starts with an R, ultimate Rdoc job description for yourself and your team members creates a ton of clarity. And so you get these Rdocs created, you create one for yourself, and then you highlight the things that you no longer want to be doing, or that are your tactical minus signs that are the things you're working in the business instead of on the business, which is strategic. And so then you take that and build out a new Rdoc for your ideal candidate and hire. And this needs to be a single personality type, not like, "Oh, I need somebody to do some sales stuff and some accounting stuff and some operations stuff." [00:08:41] No, those are weird people called entrepreneurs. Don't do that. Pick one realistic human being that's not entrepreneurial like a specialist. So that might be a really good executive assistant. And then you'll have a really good job description, move all the things on that job description that would be for that person. [00:08:58] And then you put that out to the marketplace. Now, if you want to do this correctly, DoorGrow hiring is the game changer. This is where you stop playing Russian roulette and you attract the right personality type for the role. So they will actually be good at it and the right cultural fit so that you will actually trust them. [00:09:15] It's not just about finding somebody willing to do the work or that has the skill, but you also need to find somebody that's intelligent enough to be able to learn and adapt to you and to be able to do this. And then if you start building your team this way, you will have a team built around the right person would because you're adjusting yourself every quarter, you're improving yourself every quarter, you're moving closer and closer to your plus signs and more of what energizes you, and then you're going to do this with all of your team members. You're going to have them do time studies and identify their strengths and what they enjoy doing, and your team will get better and better. And you will have more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, and more support in your business as it grows. [00:09:51] And this is the right way to do it. This will change your life. This is going to make you have a business that you actually enjoy being in that you're less and less involved in over time and that you're the only pieces you're still holding on to are the pieces you love. And so this is a business that is built to sell if you do want to exit because you're systematically exiting from the right pieces of the business. [00:10:15] And there's the right accountability. And then you need to get a really good operating system like DoorGrow OS, where you have a good planning system and you need to get a good operator to run this system and to run the business. And that will legitimately change your life. Having Sarah as an operator, changes my life. [00:10:31] Anything you'll add to this?  [00:10:32] Sarah: I think aside from the fact that people don't know what an operator is because everyone goes, "Oh yeah, I'm going to hire somebody for operations. And these are all the things they're going to do." They are not handling tactical work. [00:10:42] Your operator is not talking with tenants. Your operator is not talking with your clients. They are not involved in maintenance, rent collection, evictions, owner statements. They don't do any of those things. That is all front end, front line work. And your operator, no one will even know who your operator is because they don't talk to anybody in the business except for you and your team. [00:11:03] They're all back end. So they're very strategically involved in the business, which is very different. So they are responsible for the inner workings of your business and how things are progressing and moving forward. And are you guys running your strategic planning meetings? Are we on track for our weekly goals and our monthly goals, our quarterly goals, and most importantly, our big annual goal? Are we doing daily huddles? Are we attracting the right team members? Do we have the right team members? Do we have the right people in the right seats and the right roles in the business? If not, we need to make some adjustments. Do we have Rdocs and job descriptions for every single person? [00:11:47] Are they up to date? Are our processes documented? Are they up to date and are they actually being used? Or do we just have this library of processes that nobody ever looks at? And then we spent hours and hours wasting time because now nobody ever uses them or looks at them. Right? So hiring, firing, strategic planning, daily huddles, your team check ins... how are things going with your team? [00:12:11] If you don't know, and you're not regularly having these meetings, then you are missing out. Because your team will know things that you don't know, as soon as you get out of that role, and have somebody else fully in it. They're now going to know things that you don't know. So you have to rely on communication with your team to understand, "hey, is there some sort of cog that we don't know about now because I don't handle leasing anymore? But is there a big problem with leasing that we can probably shore up somewhere?" So, these are the things that your operator does. The operator and the CEO, they go together very well. They're like yin and yang. [00:12:51] One will balance the other out, but they work hand in hand, and your operator does all of the things back end in the business to make sure that the business is growing and running well, and that you have the right team. So, your operator, just so you know, has absolutely nothing to do with front end work. [00:13:09] They just kind of look over the people who do.  [00:13:12] Jason: They're not your property manager. They're not your maintenance coordinator. They're not your accountant.  [00:13:17] Sarah: No.  [00:13:18] Jason: They're not a lot of things. They're not your executive assistant. [00:13:21] Sarah: They don't do move ins. They don't do move outs. They don't talk to tenants ever. And they don't talk to clients.  [00:13:28] Jason: No. They will run your business and they will change your life, right? And this will free you up to be more of a visionary entrepreneur in your business, which is what the business needs. It needs somebody leading not working. Cool. Preach! Preach, Sarah. I'm like I'm going to let her cook. [00:13:44] She's going! [00:13:45] Sarah: I hear it because I hear it all the time, "Oh, I need an operator. Great. What are the things they're going to do?" [00:13:50] "Oh, they're going to handle my admin work. They're going to do my leasing." Not an operator. Right. Great, fantastic, that's the role that you need. [00:13:57] It's not an operator.  [00:13:58] Jason: Operator is not a worker. They're like, "I need a worker. I need a worker to do work." There's a little confusion there. Okay, cool. So, in short, operator is going to help with people, planning, and process in the business. We call those three systems that are key part of the super system. [00:14:15] So if this is of interest to any of you listening and you would like to get things flowing and working really well in your business and find these game changing people to build out your team so that you've got the right people to help you grow it, the right people to help you scale it, the right people to help you run it, then reach out to DoorGrow. [00:14:33] We would love to coach and support you and help you get your business to the next level. And that's it for today.  [00:14:40] Sarah: Oh, and if you're not yet in our facebook group, you should check that out!  [00:14:44] Jason: Oh, yeah DoorGrowclub.Com. Join our facebook group. All right until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:14:52] 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!  [00:15:18] 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.

When hiring a new team member in your property management business, one common mistake can cause you to lose out on potentially the best candidates. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss why having experience in property management is not a necessary qualification for the people you hire. You’ll Learn [01:11] The Myth of Needing Experience [04:19] More Important Than Experience: Culture Fit [13:59] You Need a Better Hiring System [19:17] What to do if You Struggle with Hiring Tweetables “If you don't even know what your culture is, how are you going to figure out if they match that?” “If they're not the right culture fit for sure you're overpaying or they're underperforming, either way, you're overpaying.” “Even if you hire based off of experience, you still have to train that person. That does not forego the training.” “If people are only loyal to a dollar, then yeah, you're at risk of losing those people pretty easily.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: If they're not the right culture fit for sure you're overpaying or they're underperforming or either way you're overpaying.  [00:00:06] 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. 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. [00:00:45] 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, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, and Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow. [00:01:06] Now let's get Into the show.  [00:01:08] All right. What are we talking about today, Sarah?  [00:01:11] Sarah: I wanted to talk about this thing that keeps coming up and I've seen it two times in the last week is hiring on experience.  [00:01:21] Jason: Oh. [00:01:22] Sarah: Everyone goes, "Oh yeah, I would love somebody who's experienced and they already know the industry and they already know my systems and they know how to do things. And that would be fantastic." [00:01:32] Jason: People listening are going to go, "well, yeah, of course you want people with experience. It would be dumb to have people with zero experience, right?"  [00:01:38] Sarah: Wrong!  [00:01:39] Jason: Okay. Okay. So let's explain this. What are you talking about? [00:01:43] Sarah: All right, so the first thing that I'm going to say, as soon as I say it, it'll click right? If we are lucky to hire someone who's already familiar with the industry, who's working in the industry. Maybe they understand some of your tools, your software, perhaps some of your processes. You're narrowing your candidate pool to such a tiny little minutiae of a candidate pool. How many people do you think there are that have experience in property management that are now in the job market?. Right? Like, "Oh, I'm only going to hire somebody if they have experience in property management, or I'm only going to hire somebody if they understand how to use Appfolio." All right. So we went from here to here, tiny little segment of the market. [00:02:33] The other thing I'll say about this is if you find someone who has experience in the property management industry, and perhaps even in your software and your processes. Why is it that they're looking for a job? If they were so great, would someone not have snatched them up already?  [00:02:49] Jason: What if they get them to come from another company? [00:02:52] Like they convinced them? [00:02:53] Sarah: Let's talk about that. I'm glad you brought that up. I'm so glad. It was like this morning, we were having a conversation and I had mentioned this to one of our clients who's currently trying to hire people based off of experience. So here's the other problem, and we've seen this a couple of times, businesses stealing other businesses' team members and employees. There's one case that I'm thinking of in particular that kind of getting a little nasty. The two competitors are trying to take what they can, clients, team members, whatever they can, market share. They're just trying to take anything that they can from the other one. And one of them snatched the operator, which is really. [00:03:33] Not a good person to lose in your business.  [00:03:36] Jason: Yeah. No.  [00:03:36] Sarah: Why was that able to happen though? She had experience, right? So the new company is like, "Oh, this is perfect. She understands property management. She's got experience. She knows how to do this." [00:03:46] Jason: I mean, most entrepreneurs would think it's just about money because entrepreneurs always look through the lens of money. So they'll think, "well, she probably just got a better offer."  [00:03:54] Sarah: And in this case, I bet she did.  [00:03:56] Jason: Okay.  [00:03:56] Sarah: And the problem that we're overlooking here is we're skipping the most important part, which is looking to see if they're a culture fit. [00:04:06] And then the second most important part is looking to see, are they the right personality fit for the role. And then and only then do we want to look at their skill set and experience and do they have the intelligence level to be able to learn that particular task.  [00:04:18] Jason: Right? This is one of our frameworks, the three fits, culture fit, skill fit, personality fit, and culture fit, most important. [00:04:26] So, yeah, I agree. If people are not the right culture fit, then by default, you're overpaying for your team members, period. Because either they're underperforming because they don't really believe in your business or buy in. So their secret goal really is just to get paid as much as possible and probably do as little work as possible would be their ideal, right? [00:04:48] And so that's if they're not a culture fit. If they're a culture fit, they buy into the vision, they believe in you, they're excited to work for you. They want to have an impact. They have a motive besides just getting paid. And so, yeah, they're not a culture fit, it's guaranteed you're overpaying for that team member. [00:05:03] Because either they're crappy or you're having to like compensate them a bunch of money in order to keep them on board at your business because they really don't enjoy being there. So then you end up overpaying in order to keep them. And if people are only loyal to a dollar, then yeah, you're at risk of losing those people pretty easily. [00:05:22] Sarah: Absolutely. And that is why this particular operator was able to be swayed. So if you've got people who are a culture fit, if you've got people who really believe in the company, in you as the business owner, in the vision and the mission, where you are wanting to go and what you are wanting to build, if people are truly bought in and on board with that, that makes all the difference in everything that they do. [00:05:52] So can you hire somebody with experience who understands how to use Buildium or Propertyware or your phone system, whatever it is, and your ticket system? Yeah. And they can come in and they can do the job and it would be a night and day difference If you had somebody who truly believed in your company and you had to just train them to do those things and then they were able to do that, they're going to outperform the person who only has the experience every day of the week. [00:06:22] Jason: Okay. So can you share an example? Because you, you mentioned some clients were having issues with this. So like, let's tie this in with maybe a story.  [00:06:31] Sarah: Yeah. So it was just last week I was talking with Andrew and he had recently hired a couple of team members. I think he hired a BDM and an admin and there was maybe someone for maintenance. [00:06:43] I don't remember who the third one was. So he had recently hired these people. Already he's looking to replace them because either they're not working out or they're moving on. So his BDM, she is a real estate agent as well. And she's like, "Oh, well, I'm just actually going to go focus on real estate. I don't think I'm going to do all of this." [00:07:02] And it's been under maybe two months, maybe three months. So not a very long time. And he had mentioned to me, "yeah, so I've got this one person in mind and their experience." And as soon as he said experience, I went, "uh oh, okay. He's hiring the wrong way. He's hiring completely the wrong way." [00:07:20] So I had asked him, I said, "all right, so just out of curiosity, when you're talking with people, when you're looking at resumes and your screening candidates, what are the things that you're looking at? Like, what do you look at first?" And he's like, "well, I look to see, do they have experience in the industry? [00:07:35] And specifically, do they already know how to use my tools?"  [00:07:37] Jason: Yeah. So that's first. Yeah. That's a big red flag. And a lot of people listening might not get that, but that's a red flag.  [00:07:43] Sarah: Huge.  [00:07:44] Jason: Okay.  [00:07:44] Sarah: So aside from the fact that, like I said, your Canada pool is so tiny. I mean, if there is a person I would love to meet you, who, when you were in, you know, kindergarten and elementary who said, "Oh! When I grew up, I want to be a property manager. When I grew up, I want to be a leasing agent for a property management company. I would love to do that. That's my dream job."  [00:08:06] Jason: Right?  [00:08:07] Sarah: Who? That doesn't happen. Right? So people kind of work their way into property management, but it's not the dream that you typically have when you're a child trying to choose your career path. [00:08:20] Jason: Yeah. And that's because the industry as a whole has an awareness problem. There's not a lot of people aware of property management and there's plenty of roles in property management that different personality types would enjoy doing or would thrive in. But people are not thinking of the industry. [00:08:36] And so, yeah, looking for people with experience, I think would be really limiting,  [00:08:40] Sarah: yes, very challenging. So you need to find somebody who has experience in the industry that already will be hard. And then, even if they have experience in the industry, then you're going to say, "Oh, and they need to have experience with my specific tools and software that I use." [00:08:57] That becomes harder.  [00:08:58] Jason: Right. [00:08:59] Sarah: So I had said to him, I said, "well, all right, I have experience as a leasing agent. Would you hire me?" Because I might know how to do leasing. I do. I do know how to do leasing, right? But I know how to do leasing my way because when I was running my company, I knew how I did leasing. [00:09:17] But that doesn't mean I know how to do leasing your way. So even if you hire based off of experience, you still have to train that person. That does not forego the training. And a lot of times I think this is what happens is people go, "Oh, I would love to make my life easier and hire somebody, and then maybe I don't have to spend a whole lot of time training them on a tool or a system or how we do things because they already know how to do it." Even if they know the tool, they still don't know your processes. They don't know your way of doing things. So you will still have to train them. Now, it is possible that the training is easier if you don't have to explain how to use the tool, if they already know how to do it. [00:10:04] use it and they're familiar with it. Yes, that part of training becomes easier. It does not mean though that training will not still be a one to three month process, experience or not.  [00:10:17] Jason: Right. So, yeah, so you're saying a lot of people will try and hire somebody based on experience because they're trying to avoid having to take the time to train somebody. [00:10:27] Sarah: You can hire me. I can come into your business. And I can screw it up just as well as somebody who doesn't know what they're doing can. Why? Because even if I know how to use that tool, I know how to do it the way that I did it. I don't know how to do it the way that you do it yet. [00:10:45] I don't know your processes. I only know how I did leasing, and how I did leasing might be very different than how you do leasing. I know how I did sales, but that might be very different from how you do sales. I know how I onboarded clients, but that might be very different. I might do your leasing and you would go, "Sarah, what the hell? Why did this happen?" [00:11:09] "Well, I don't know. That's just how I used to do it." So if you hire someone who has the experience and has the knowledge, you still have to train them.  [00:11:18] Jason: Yeah.  [00:11:18] Sarah: And training is the most important thing that you can do when hiring. If you hire anybody and you completely forget or just choose not to train them. [00:11:30] It is going to be a train wreck.  [00:11:32] Jason: I think a lot of times as entrepreneurs we're in the mode of like doing things quickly and we're impatient. And so we get lazy sometimes when it comes to onboarding team members. We're like, "yeah, just, here you go. We throw them to the wolves." [00:11:45] Sarah: Baptism by fire. Yeah, figure it out. [00:11:47] Jason: Yeah. And lazy onboarding is not, a great strategy, right? It's going to take work regardless of the person that you bring on. And there's advantages when they don't have the skill or the experience in that you can make sure that they're doing it the way that you value and the way that you like. [00:12:05] So there can be a benefit.  [00:12:07] I think for sure if they're not the right culture fit for sure you're overpaying or they're underperforming or either way you're overpaying. If they're not the right personality fit for that particular role you'll just constantly be frustrated and training them and trying to onboard them will just be a demoralizing experience for you because it's impossible. [00:12:26] Like you'll be trying so hard to get them up to speed. And I think this is where people have experienced this and they're like, "well, I just need to go find someone with experience." But the real problem is they're not the right personality to do the job well. If somebody is the right personality, they would naturally be good at it. [00:12:41] They would be inclined towards doing it. You wouldn't have to motivate them or inspire them to do it. They would want to because they love doing it. It's aligned with who they are. And otherwise there's always going to be some serious friction. Culture and personality are off, there's going to be lots of friction. [00:12:57] And then even related to skill fit, if they're not intelligent enough to do the job, because some jobs require a little bit more Intelligence, right? You know, like the best team members are usually the best at problem solving. That's an intelligence challenge. You can give them all the skill, like here's the processes, et cetera. [00:13:15] But if they can't problem solve because they're an idiot, like then it becomes a real problem because you have to then do all the thinking. You need intelligent people. And so that's part of the skill fit. So you need all three. What's interesting about this. And we've talked about the three fits before on the podcast is you can't create culture, personality, or skill and intelligence. [00:13:37] Like you can't really create those. You have to go find it. You have to find somebody that has all three and just finding somebody that has one of the three is not going to be a fit. They have to be all three, or they can't be in your business. Or they're just going to be screwing things up and there's going to be so much friction so much waste. You're going to be spending way too much money. You're going to be spending way too much time trying to onboard them and it's going to be a mess. [00:13:59] Sarah: I agree.  [00:13:59] Jason: Cool So, in seeing these clients and people dealing with hiring, how do we solve that? How do we solve  [00:14:05] Sarah: this?  [00:14:05] You have to take the hiring process and flip it backwards. So the first thing you have to do is you have to determine if they're a culture fit for your business. But in order for that to happen, you have to know what your culture is and it has to be defined, which is why, and this is where people fight me, is when they want to implement DoorGrow hiring, they're like, "I desperately need to hire somebody. I need somebody like, please help me with hiring." Right.  [00:14:29] "Send me your cultural documents." [00:14:32] " Oh, I don't have those." [00:14:33] Sarah: "Then I can't help you find a good hire. I can't do it because it's Russian roulette." So if you don't have your culture defined, meaning I need your company core values. I need a decision making guide. [00:14:47] I need a client centric mission statement. I need your personal why, and I need your business why. Without those things, I cannot help you find someone who's going to be great because I will never know, nor will you, are they a good culture fit? If you don't even know what your culture is, how are you going to figure out if they match that? [00:15:06] Jason: So what you're saying is people need a better system. They need a hiring system. And most don't really have a good system. I guess everybody has a hiring system, it's just usually a pretty crappy one. Building intentionally a really intelligently designed hiring system, which is what we do with DoorGrow hiring is a game changer for a business because hiring is one of the biggest challenges I've seen even in multimillion dollar companies with friends. And this is something we've gotten really well dialed in a DoorGrow, but this is a constant challenge for most businesses. And until they figure it out... I was talking with one of our clients yesterday ,and he added like 114 doors in like the last month or so. And so he's just like, his business is growing crazily. [00:15:49] And he's this amazing client because he does everything we tell him to do. He's got an operator. Now they're using DoorGrow OS, like they're crushing it. And I was talking with him and his big challenge right now is maintenance technicians. He had four, he lost two. So he's now trying to hire and In having a conversation with him, I had to shift his mindset that he's no longer right now, a property management company. [00:16:14] That's the business he thinks he's in. And because he thinks he's a property management company, he doesn't want to focus as much on the hiring piece. That's not the business that he's in, but I had to help him see right now, the business that he's in, is in order to scale, this is his biggest constraint is he's going to consistently need to be bringing in more maintenance techs into his business. [00:16:36] And so I said to him, I said, "your business for right now, until you get this solved, your business is not a property management company. Your business is a maintenance technician talent acquisition company. That's the business you're in." And until he accepts that he can't solve this problem. And so most businesses, this is a big constraint. [00:16:55] And for him right now, it's the constraint. And once he gets this solved, once he gets this dialed in. So that he becomes good at hiring and onboarding and getting up to speed with maintenance technicians. And he was planning on just trying to replace the two. In coaching, and we were talking about, you need to bring on probably four. [00:17:13] You need at least four in order to find one, maybe two that are going to be good and give them a working interview where you have them do some work to see if they can perform. And this means he needs an engine where he's consistently every month bringing in a good amount of maintenance technicians and has a system for doing this. [00:17:31] And so. Businesses need if you're wanting to scale and grow quickly, you have to have systems in place. And one of the key ones is a really solid hiring system that allows you to get culture, personality, and skill. And that's what we've developed with DoorGrow hiring and DoorGrow ATS, our applicant tracking system. [00:17:49] And we talked about optimizing the ATS just for those particular candidates because they don't want to go through a more lengthy application process like we do with some candidates, you know, these maintenance techs and then vetting them through our AI assessments and stuff like this afterwards to assess them for problem solving because that's his biggest challenge. [00:18:06] He says, "my best maintenance techs are the problem solvers." I'm like, "that's an intelligence problem." So we have to figure out a way without doing illegal things, you know, or that you're not supposed to do you have to figure out a way to assess or figure out that they're intelligent. [00:18:21] And one way would be a working interview. Another way would be, you know, the AI assessment tool that can assess cognitive ability, you know, stuff like this. And that would come after he does a culture interview with them first. He was looking for skill and that's the challenge. [00:18:35] So it was good. Super common. Everybody always goes, Oh, I need skill. I need experience.  [00:18:41] Yes, and you do want people that have some experience would be great, but having people that have the intelligence level to absorb information quickly and to learn and the problem solve is way better than having somebody that has a ton of experience, but is terrible at adapting and is dumb. [00:18:59] Any day of the week. And so they will get up to speed and supersede somebody with a decade of experience if they're slow and not able to learn anytime. So, all right. This is a good topic. Anything else we should say about this?  [00:19:14] Sarah: That's what I got.  [00:19:14] Jason: All right, cool. Hopefully this was helpful for those of you listening. [00:19:17] If you're struggling with hiring. A lot of you have made these mistakes, right? You've hired, you've had people churn out. You're like, "it's hard to find good people." These are the excuses we hear from people that have a crappy hiring system. "There's no good people out there. It's tough in my market. We can't find good people. Millennials don't want to work," you know, but whatever, right? "I just pay people, why won't they just do what I f*cking tell them to do?" You know, whatever it might be. So, that's just a sign that you have a bad hiring system or that you just have terrible culture or you have bad onboarding. [00:19:50] Sarah: Or no culture.  [00:19:51] Jason: No culture to find. No culture. Yeah. And so, we need to get these things cleaned up in your business or your business is constantly going to be a prison for you. It's going to be really hard until you get a really good team and you have really good culture in your business defined, business is hard. [00:20:07] And this is where I see a lot of people get stuck between two to 400 units where they have an entire team and they're the most frustrated and usually the least profitable per unit they've ever been because it's the team and they can't see it. They're like, "I have a good team." You have a team that are willing to take your money, but are they a great team? [00:20:25] Super easy way to know... if you have an entire team and you've got two to 400 units or more, and you have been unable to scale it past 600 doors for the last three to five years, you've been kind of stuck there and you are still wearing hats that you do not want to be wearing. [00:20:43] And you're sometimes asking, "why won't my team think for themselves?" You're the problem. This is the problem. You are showing up as the wrong person in the business and you have bad culture and a bad hiring system. And if you want to get that solved, reach out to us at DoorGrow. This is very simple to solve. [00:21:00] It's not too difficult. And we can probably get most of that mess cleaned up in like a single quarter, like 90 days. So reach out to us. We'd love to help you out. You can check us out at DoorGrow.com. And if you're wanting more, if you stumble across this, maybe on YouTube or somewhere else, make sure to like, and subscribe and join our free Facebook community DoorGrowclub.Com. You can get to it by going to DoorGrowclub.Com. And until next time to our mutual growth by everyone. [00:21:26] 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!  [00:21:52] 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.

I recently turned 47 years old. The last year has been full of challenges in the business and in my personal life, but things are starting to shift.  In today’s episode, property management growth expert Jason Hull discusses his personal and business growth recently and his hopes for the coming business year. You’ll Learn [01:17] Business Challenges and Revelations [08:35] Personal Challenges and Revelations [11:32] Learning Empathy [18:25] Don’t Give Up Tweetables “There's what people think they need and what they want, and there's what they actually need.” “A lot of you don't even realize you have a garbage product.” “Your business is one of the greatest personal development tools that you have.” “I think God may trick us into starting a business to make money and eventually, he uses it to turn us into better human beings.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] I think God may trick us into starting a business to make money and eventually, he uses it to turn us into better human beings. 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. [00:00:30] Jason: 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. [00:00:52] 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 and Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGroww, and now let's get into the show. [00:01:17] I just had on the 30th, and today is July 2nd this may come out at a later date, you might hear it a month later depending on which channel you listen to this on. So my birthday is June 30th. This is also the end of our planning year. [00:01:32] So we offset our planning by two quarters because it really sucks to try and hit your end of the year goals in December when everybody is kind of focused on holidays and family and to try and get them to put their attention on business, it isn't super effective. And I like that to be the middle of our planning year. [00:01:51] And we do our beginning of our year is July 1st. So not only is my birthday, it's also the end of our sort of a planning year for our business. And so I've had a lot of introspection. I mean, this has been a tough previous year for me in a lot of ways mostly on the personal side, you know, business has been a little tough as well to be transparent. And so the challenge in business is that we've developed this really amazing coaching program and I really enjoy doing that piece. So we've shied away from doing websites and focusing on other stuff, even though I still have a whole web development team and they just haven't had a whole lot of work to do. [00:02:30] But we've really put our focus into coaching and improving our programs and decreasing churn, which is a difficult challenge in a coaching business. And we've gotten it down, like half of our clients have been in our program for over a year, which is amazing because when I first even learned the word churn several years back our average retention rate was like five months, like it was super low. [00:02:52] And so we were kind of addicted to sales. And this is the advantage in a property management business is that you're not super addicted to the next big deal, right? You've got residual income. And so I learned when the pandemic hit, I learned I want more residuals coming in so that I'm not beholden to sales because sales stopped that month of May, I believe it was, there was no sales. [00:03:15] Every property manager, they were holding their breath. "Our tenant is going to pay rent? What's going to happen? is this scary?" And so they were like, "I'm not going to spend any money. I'm going to be careful here." So that was interesting and so we had to tighten our belt as a team. [00:03:27] We had to like, cut out expenses. We got a leaner and I think I let some people go on the team as well that were just, you know, maybe not as essential. And we had to tighten our belts to, to survive as a business because we were so focused on sales and we're at a good click. [00:03:46] Like we're a decent sized company. Like we make a good amount of money, but when you continue to have expenses every month and suddenly sales stops and that's the majority of our revenue, that's a bad thing. And those of you that have shifted from real estate sales and hunting and chasing to doing property management and building a residual income business model, you get it. [00:04:05] And I've seen so many of my clients have these great subscription sort of service, right? So I wanted to emulate that and we switched to doing it that way, and making sure we focused on residual income. So we built that up, we built it up really well. We've got a great coaching business. [00:04:20] We've got a great back end. We're really good at helping our clients grow and scale their companies. The weird and ironic thing though, that presented a challenge is that people don't want coaching, right? People don't like wake up in the morning, go, you know what? You know my business needs? I want to get a coach. [00:04:36] This is not generally people's first thought. There's what people think they need and what they want, and there's what they actually need. And so people would come to us and what they thought they needed was leads. I call it the leads myth. And what they thought they needed in order to get their business growing was maybe a better website or SEO or something like this. [00:04:57] And so they would come to us kind of thinking this is the stuff they needed. And then we could help them. Like reeducate them and help them see this is why you've been struggling to grow is because you believe these false beliefs And I would then point out like that like leads from the internet are not the best leads And there's better sources of getting business than just cold leads or cold lead advertising. And maybe having a website is nice, but you can grow a business without even having a website or without even having the top spot on google. And so we would get a lot of clients historically coming to us for a website and that was one major leak in their sales pipeline, but they had, you know, at least ,five major other leaks in their sales pipeline that needed to be shored up. [00:05:41] And they thought, "all I need to do is turn on the leads." So they would turn on the leads full blast, like turning on a hose. And there's all these leaks in the hose, right? One of them's a website. One of them was their pricing. One of them was branding. One of them was reputation. One of them was their sales pitch and their sales process. [00:05:58] One of them was what I call purpose, lack of culture in their team. So their whole product was just like garbage. A lot of you don't even realize you have a garbage product. It doesn't create trust and it has lots of leaks in the hose or in the pipeline. And you're just trying to shove more leads, like spend more money, time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. [00:06:17] And so it wasn't hard to take people that came to us for a website. "Hey, I need a website. I'm starting a business where I'm trying to figure this out, or we're struggling to grow and we think we need a new website. " And then convert them into giving them what they actually needed in order to grow and then help them crush it. [00:06:33] Yeah. But since shifting our focus towards coaching and changing our homepage, "let's focus on coaching." Because I just was so excited about coaching, it actually made it more difficult to get customers. So we spent a lot more money on advertising, doing a lot more marketing to attract people and to like reeducate the market, but that's a much more difficult challenge. [00:06:54] And so we've struggled to really grow our business. And we're at a good size. We're a good size. Like, you know, we're over a million in revenue, but DoorGrow easily the back end of our business, our systems it's better than $ 10 million companies that I've been around. [00:07:10] And we've got great systems. We've got great mechanisms. Our big challenge has just been client acquisition, ironically, right, and we're DoorGrow. And so we're going back to what has been working, which is focusing again on websites, especially in downturn markets like this, or where the real estate market isn't doing well, [00:07:29] lots of people start property management companies. So we did create a startup training for them. So they'd stopped like coming into the industry and screwing it up and making it worse. So we created the ultimate property management startup course material called DoorGrow Foundations. And this is a great tool, and we give it away for like really cheap. It's like 95 bucks flat fee. That's it. We created it just so we could send people somewhere that just couldn't afford to join our programs or do stuff with us, and they can pay extra to get a website and some other things we can give them as well. we're shifting our focus now back to what the market needs. And so I'll be putting out a survey. This is how I get the data and what are they actually wanting to learn? What training are they wanting? What do they want to be exposed to? And we're going to go back to focusing on websites and leads and, you know, those sort of gateway drugs that like bring people to you. [00:08:21] Right? And we'll see how that works. And I think It's historically worked really well for us. So I imagine we'll have our mastermind will get really nice and full and we'll have a ton of people in it. So I'm excited about that.  [00:08:35] The other thing over the last year on the personal side I've just been going through a lot of growth and, you know, when you're put into trials, tribulations, difficult situations, you're going to have a lot of growth. [00:08:45] And one of the challenges has been my relationship with my ex wife, which has affected the custody situation with my kids. [00:08:54] And they were dealing with a lot. It was just a really big mess. And it was a huge amount of stress on me. Huge amount of stress on our business. I don't think my clients realized it, you know, we take good care of our clients, but for me I wasn't able to put as much attention into moving DoorGrow forward, innovating and creating new stuff because I was inundated with dealing with custody situation, trying to get full control of the kids. [00:09:18] She took off to California for like four months and, you know, the kids were with me full time, which I wasn't used to. That you know, created some stress for Sarah and I. And you know, in the beginning when Sarah came into my life, you know, the kids were going through a lot of pain. [00:09:34] Because there was a messy divorce. There was a lot of problems in the relationship. It was just a mess. It was hard for the kids because, you know, I really tried to conceal all the challenges and stuff from them, but they didn't realize all what was going on. I have four kids and at least half of them still have no clue of all the stuff, the dark stuff that went on and the challenges that I dealt with. [00:09:55] But you know, they've had to go through a lot of stuff, and so they weren't very nice, like, to Sarah in the beginning. Any of you that have been a step parent, or in a step, sort of, role, you know, it's the hardest parenting role ever. Period. There's nothing harder. Can you discipline them? [00:10:10] Can you not? Like, there's not hardwired built in love. You know, it's a difficult thing, and they were hurting, and it was just ugly, right. And it was painful. They were really hard on her and they were disrespectful to me. [00:10:23] And so it just, you know, it created a difficult scenario. And so it just made things even more difficult coming into this sort of custody situation and trying to get everything handled. The good news, the light at the end of the tunnel is, you know, God always takes care of me and good things have happened. [00:10:39] She came back to Texas and now we can split time with the kids And she's wanting to get back, you know, and connect with them and get back in their life. And then that takes pressure off me. So I have the kids every other week and can focus on work and takes pressure off my marriage with Sarah and like, so that everything can work out better. So there's this light at the end of the tunnel. So things have shifted. In a way, I didn't even expect it would get this good. Like, and I got all this stuff legally handled the way I wanted.  [00:11:04] So there's a little bit of accountability in place now. And I'm really optimistic and hopeful for the future. And you know, for my ex wife, like she is a great mother, loving mother, and can be a really great, caring person. And so I think that's what the kids need. [00:11:21] That'd be really good for them. I can give them the tough dad love, the kids need mom's love too. So this is some of the stuff I've been dealing with. And you know, this has caused a lot of growth for me also in the last last several weeks. [00:11:32] Recently I went to this seminar put on by a group called SATVATOVE, S A T V A T O V E. A guy named David Wolfe he has a really great relationship book and I read the book and it it has some great content in it. It reminded me of this large group awareness training that I did in the past called the impact trainings out of Utah, which really has, you know, shifted my life. [00:11:53] It was really positive. I think it was born out of est or landmark or some of these sort of large group awareness trainings, but it was a little bit more on the spiritual side. I think, I don't know, but his is more on the emotional side of things. And I went to this seminar and you know, to learn empathy and it's been a really effective thing for my life. [00:12:12] Like it's really shifted how I communicate even with clients, with my family. I'm just able to connect with people more and my basic need, like in Tony Robbins, like five basic needs love and belonging or love and connection is like my primary, ironically because I don't generally have a lot of friends, I don't have a lot of relationships and you know, I've had a difficult time, you know, even communicating sometimes with my kids, and I just come across as very analytical, very logical in a lot of instances, I'm sure a lot of guys could resonate. [00:12:42] But I really connected with some of these tools to be able to empathize and to communicate and to reflect back emotion instead of just reflect back what they're saying to really have them be heard. And there's some real power in that. And in going through that, I also got reflected back to me from you know, I was partnered up with somebody at the event to do the exercises. [00:13:05] And the feedback I got from him was basically that in him hearing my story and some of the stuff I just shared with you all that he's like, "wow, you really care about your family. Like, you know, deeply and you try really hard to take care of everybody." And I just started crying because it wasn't what I was expecting but he was reflecting back the feeling and it really helped me connect with it because I didn't I wasn't seeing it. And I was like, "yeah, that's super true." [00:13:30] Like I just felt it and I broke down and then he said, "And you don't feel that you're worthy of it in return." And that just gutted me. I started crying like full on just... and I'm trying to keep it together. It's a seminar. There's a group of people. We're doing an exercise. [00:13:45] Everyone's talking in the room and here I am like, right. So I've really been thinking about that a lot the last several weeks is " What sort of self talk do I have? How am I making myself feel not worthy? Why am I allowing that to be in you know in my space internally? And what does that motivate or drive me to do?" And I realize that event like I'm always in group scenarios, even with clients or with anybody, I'm always wanting to showcase and give so much value. And a lot of it's born out of this insecurity that I'm not going to be loved or I'm not enough. [00:14:14] And I need to like show them, I need to show them I have some great ideas and there's some important things here. And it's been a real roadblock to me listening and hearing people in some instances, you know, a lot of clients value me giving them ideas, giving them feedback, sharing things with them. [00:14:30] So it works out okay in some business scenarios, but I've noticed since kind of letting go of that need for self importance in order to kind of be loved or for them to see me as valuable and just recognize I inherently have value and really putting my attention on them and connecting with them and reflecting their feelings and their emotion. [00:14:50] It's such a richer experience for me to get inside of other people's world and to connect with them. And that empathy has really allowed me to get more of what I actually was craving, which is more of that love and connection. Like I feel so connected to everybody now and I'm really enjoying this. Right. I mean, you can hear the excitement of my voice. [00:15:08] I'm really enjoying... it's made things deeper in my marriage with Sarah. It's made things deeper in my connection with my kids and helping them feel understood and heard and to allow them to feel. It's been with clients. I just feel like, you know, people don't care what you know, until they know that you care. [00:15:25] And they, I feel like clients can tell even more that I care. I've always cared, but I'm able to show it in a way that they get it, you know, a lot better. And so I'm really enjoying the results of you know, reflecting back this empathetic communication where I'm showcasing more warmth, empathy, and genuineness. [00:15:45] And then another part of his book and the seminar was about the difference between these three different types of communication, which are passive, aggressive, and then assertive. And really, there's passive, assertive, and aggressive, is probably how it really should be. Because passive is one extreme, aggressive is another extreme, assertive is the more true path. [00:16:06] And the difference in passive is it's indirect. There's some pain involved usually. There's some fears involved, there's not direct communication. And we're not really clear in our communication. And aggressive is hurtful and abrasive and doesn't really allow people the space to absorb or hear and comes across too strong, and so we don't get really what we want and we don't communicate effectively what we're trying to communicate. And assertive is you know a much more effective mode of communication. [00:16:33] So i'm focusing also on avoiding any sort of passive or aggressive communication I'm seeking to be more assertive in my communication and more direct and that also allows me to get more of what I want, you know, from my relationships and from the people I'm talking with in that. And especially if I'm coming from the space of care and I've showcased care. [00:16:52] So this is kind of my journey and I'm 47 years old as of June 30th. I'm just a couple of days into this 47 years old. And what's wild about that to me is I'm three years away from 50. And if you're watching me on video, I know you're thinking, this guy doesn't look like he's almost 50. I've heard that so much around my birthday. [00:17:13] Like I hear it every year. And so I don't know, good genes? Maybe it's my mom. I don't know. Maybe it's I'm an optimist eternally and I'm just trying to be positive all the time. I have no idea. But people are always like, "what doctor are you going to? What's your secret?" I don't know. I don't have a secret. But I've really been enjoying connecting with people emotionally, and so I'm grateful. My friend, Tim Francis, here in Austin set up the SATVATOVE event. He's been involved in it for a long time, and I just noticed how he would communicate, especially in difficult situations. [00:17:43] And he was just so masterful at handling difficult situations with grace and with diplomacy. And, I mean, to the point where I even said, "Tim, where the hell did you learn to talk like this? Like, where did you learn to talk like this?" Like, it's just, it's so impressive to me. And he was like, "Oh, SATVATOVE whatever," I'm like, "whatever that is." [00:18:02] Right. So eventually he put together a seminar here and said, "this is going to be awesome. Like, come do it." And I'm like, "okay I'm in." And it was amazing things. So I'm grateful to Tim, for my buddy, Tim for doing that. And yeah, we, it allowed us to connect even more and develop a better friendship at the event as well. [00:18:19] So I appreciate Tim. Appreciate you a lot. Yeah, so I just feel like my relationships have really been deepening. And so, if there's a message to take away from this is that I know that life can be tough. I know you're dealing with stuff and running your business, your business is one of the greatest personal development tools that you have. [00:18:39] It forces you to recognize some of your shortcomings because the marketplace will reveal it. And it forces you to make changes and you're always having to learn and to evolve. And so you start a business. I think God may trick us into starting a business to make money and eventually, he uses it to turn us into better human beings because he's clever like that. And so, you know, you can't in the long run build a sustainable business in which you are not focused on positive things. Like you have to benefit people in the marketplace. You have to take care of people. [00:19:11] You have to care about people. Otherwise, if there's a lack of care and a lack of empathy, which " show care" is one of our core values at DoorGrow, then people will recognize that people won't feel it. And I've had past clients that didn't feel care. [00:19:24] They didn't feel it. Like maybe I was too in my stuff or maybe I was you know, too focused on what I need to do or too stressed or whatever. And I'm sure that I've fallen short in some instances, but that's really why I have my business is I legitimately really enjoy being able to help move people's lives forward. [00:19:40] And there's nothing more rewarding than that. And that's why I just, I'm so tempted to just lean into the coaching and do the coaching, even though the marketplace wants something else. If I give the market what they're asking for. and help all of you in the way that you think you need initially, then I will get a lot more people that I can help in the way that you really need, which is a passion of mine. And yeah, lot of introspection lately. I also went through a really great book recently called inner work and it to the basic principle of it was that how your consciousness level or your focus or area of consciousness. Whether it's a low level, which is like focused on wounds and hurts from your past and stuff like this, or whether it's very positive and like love and acceptance or somewhere in between your level of consciousness dictates your entire view of the world. [00:20:27] And it. Makes the whole world seem different, but really it's just you. And so depending and a great example in the book, it was like, you know, related to like debt or loans. Some people's perception of that is like Dave Ramsey style, like it's always evil, it's horrible, whatever. And then there's people that are making millions of dollars because they know how to leverage debt and to get into real estate and to do things effectively, which is smarter than just using their own cash. [00:20:52] Right. And so. It's just a difference in your perspective and your belief about that. And so by changing your consciousness, it changes everything around you. And so I've really been focused on how can I be in a state of love, be in a state of happiness, be in a state of joy, regardless of what is going on externally and not allow the external to control me or to dictate? Who I am? And so that's been a really interesting perspective as well. And so yeah, i'm excited for this coming year because I think this is going to be a good year for DoorGrow I think it's going to be a good year for our clients. I think it's going to be a good year for my marriage. I think it's going to be good year for the kids. [00:21:31] I think there's going to be a lot of healing this year. And a lot of positive things moving forward. And so If you've had a tough year, maybe it's been a little tough, or you're in the middle of it right now. It's tough right now. Don't stay there. Like, don't stop. Don't quit. Don't give up. Keep going. You know, there's people counting on you. No one's coming to save you. There are people that if you open up your consciousness, if you change your perspective, there are people that can help you. I would be honored to help you. There's plenty of people out there that are willing to help and willing to serve, especially in property management. [00:22:04] Go into the DoorGrow club Facebook group, or join any property management, Facebook group. There's tons of people willing to help. You can get to our Facebook group by going to doorgrowclub. com. If for some reason you're listening to this podcast and you're not yet in there, go join the group. We reject 60 to 70 percent of the people that apply to join the group. [00:22:21] You got to be a business owner. You got to have a property management company or be starting one. If you're a property management entrepreneur, that group's for you. There's other groups that are just for property managers or employees or people in industry or vendors. Like, there's other groups you can go join. [00:22:35] But for those that are my people, you know, you're entrepreneurs, you're weird like me. You value fulfillment and freedom and contribution and support more than safety and certainty like the rest of the world it's more important to you, then you're an entrepreneur than you're my tribe and come hang out with us in the DoorGrowClub group. For those of you that you're like, "man, I haven't redone my website. He's talking about a website I haven't redone that or taken a fresh look at it in like five years. Your website is ugly, and your website sucks." It's pretty much guaranteed by about the five year mark, it's time trends have changed. It's like fashion. Like it's like wearing, you know, I don't know what's an outdated fashion. It's like wearing bell bottoms or something. I don't know what's out. Maybe that's back and cool, but it's like wearing something that's out of style. And people just look at your business, go, "Oh, they're kind of old. They're kind of outdated. Oh, look at this modern company. They look fresh." And then it's also about whether or not it's focused on conversions. Like, is it focused on helping people get their questions answered and and capturing leads so that you're getting, making money, not just looking pretty. And so if you want to test your website out to see if it's effective in making you money, regardless of how pretty it is, go to DoorGrow, go to a DoorGrow.com/quiz, and you can take our website quiz. And most websites, even brand new ones, usually get a low grade, like a D or an F. So take that quiz and see how good of a grade your website gets. And if it's low, recognize that's a big leak because everything drives towards your website typically, at least online, and people always check out your website when they're trying to get more info about you, even from offline. [00:24:16] And so that's a big leak. And if you have that leak, I can pretty much guarantee you have probably all the other major leaks that we see in businesses. You might have pricing similar to everybody else, 10 percent some sort of flat fee like 99 bucks, whatever you're priced like all the shittiest companies focused on the shittiest prospects on the internet. [00:24:37] And so that can be improved. We're able to help clients close more deals more easily at a higher price point using our three tier hybrid pricing model. That we've innovated and I got the original idea shout out to Scott Brady on hybrid. And then I put my own tweak on it based on pricing psychology that I knew. [00:24:54] And so, adding the three tiers, applying the Goldilocks principle, you know, some of these tactics and it's been really effective for our clients. Your branding might be off. You might be branded as a real estate company. You're like, why would that affect property management? Well, they're different target audiences and there's several other issues. [00:25:10] And so, take the website quiz, doorgrow.com/quiz, get your website grade, and then you'll be able to set up a call with us and then we can go through and showcase some of the other leaks you might not be seeing. And if we get all these leaks shored up, growth is a lot easier. Like we've had clients just by showing up, those leaks are adding doors. [00:25:30] And that's it. And they don't need to pay for leads anymore. They like cut off all their cold lead advertising. And then we do have like, six, seven major growth engines that can be installed in your business that are organic and that cost you nothing. And they actually take less time than cold leads would take to follow up on because you have to nurture them and it takes a lot of time to warm them up. [00:25:49] So we focus on warmer leads. and organic leads. And that's how we're able to help clients grow faster by eliminating the cold lead advertising. So we're cutting down their marketing budgets and then they're spending less money and they're spending less time and they're adding more doors. So we'll help you figure all this out. [00:26:05] Set up a call to talk with me or somebody on my team, and we'll help you figure this out. And you know, business can be tough. Business can be hard. One of the things that's made it a lot easier for me is I have mentors. I've got people I can reach out to. I just went to an event. It was awesome. [00:26:20] I went up to Charleston and met with some awesome entrepreneurs and people that are ahead of me. And I just, I love being able to deliver and bring that value back to my clients. And so I'm always investing. And so there's plenty of mentors ideas out there. Just keep learning. [00:26:35] Don't give up. Don't stop. Keep moving forward. And if I or my team could help you collapse time on your journey and entrepreneurism, just even a little bit, like if we could help you collapse time, even a little bit, you know, towards making more money, more revenue, having more impact, adding more doors, like anything we do will be very worth it. [00:26:55] That's basically it for today. I hope that all of you maybe found yourself a little bit in my story, in my journey, as me reflecting on my 47 years of life and where I'm at now. And you know, what the future is for DoorGrow. And I'll be honored to help you in your journey as you grow and scale your business. [00:27:12] And so reach out to us, you can check us out at doorgrow. com and that's it for today until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone [00:27:19] Jason: 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!  [00:27:46] 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.

At DoorGrow, we teach property management business owners to build referral engines to feed them new owners and doors. In today’s episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert sits down with Brandon Barnum, CEO of hoa.com to talk about how property managers can bring on new clients through Raving Referrals. You’ll Learn [03:21] The 3 Steps to Getting Referrals [09:52] Automate the Ask [13:43] Hyper-Local Social Farming [22:24] Become the Expert [30:41] Incentivizing Referrals Tweetables “Most people feel uncomfortable asking for referrals, so they don't get many referrals.” “The more you ask, the more you get, that's just how it works.” “By having that team of people that you're recommending, they'll recommend you back as well.” “Coaching is the breakfast of champions.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Brandon: Most people feel uncomfortable asking for referrals, so they don't get many referrals.  [00:00:04] Jason: 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. [00:00:26] 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. [00:00:48] 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 and Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGroww, and now let's get into the show. [00:01:13] What's up DoorGrow property managers. A quick disclaimer for this podcast episode. Unfortunately, the first few minutes were cut off by our streaming software. That means we will be jumping right into the meat of the episode, but quick intro for our guest today. Chatting with me in this episode is Brandon Barnum, CEO of HOA.com, the king of referrals, and he is here to talk with me about getting new clients through raving referrals. Enjoy the show. [00:01:42] I was young, I was in my twenties, and I had two daughters and I was like, "how am I going to take care of them or have time with them if I'm working a standard nine to five job?" Like there's no space for that. And so I was like, "I need something with more flexibility and freedom." And it's funny, you know, they say that this need or maybe pain is the mother of all invention. [00:02:03] I don't know. But yeah, so I had to figure something out. I can definitely resonate with that. And with daughters, it can be a little tough because I'm like trying to go through airports or take them places and I can't take them into the normal like my bathroom, but I don't want to go in to use the bathroom like without taking them, so I'm like, "do I take them in the men's bathroom with me so I can use the bathroom?" [00:02:23] Like things have gotten a little bit more easier nowadays, but it was difficult back then. So, Awesome.  [00:02:28] So you exited refer.com and would you still recommend that tool? Are you allowed to say? [00:02:35] Brandon: You know, it honestly, it has pivoted and the people, the company that bought us out completely shifted. [00:02:41] So we were a B2B platform to help people build their referral business. And the private equity firm that bought us really bought us for the database. So they've shifted. So it's no longer referral based. In fact, you can't even find refer.com anymore.  [00:02:55] Jason: That's wild. Okay.  [00:02:56] Brandon: Well, they bought it for the community. They bought it for 5 million members and 46 million people in the database. And so they chose a completely different path. They're about, I believe, to exit in their new venture. So. Wow. I wish I could say the tool exists, but it gave us the opportunity to build something similar here at HOA.com.  [00:03:17] Jason: Yeah. Well, okay. [00:03:19] So we're going to learn the magic trick to get current clients and vendors to refer like clockwork, right? That's the claim. So let's get into this. How does this work?  [00:03:30] Brandon: Well, there's a number of different ways that you can boost your business by referral. And one of the things that we teach is called the art of the ask, right? [00:03:38] Because one of the things that we know is most people feel uncomfortable asking for referrals, so they don't get many referrals. But there's an easy way, and it's three steps to ask for more referrals and get more referrals. And it's step one is setting the stage. Step two is listening for the referral triggers, and then step three is to A-S-K to G-E-T. [00:04:00] Okay, so let's unpack that a little bit, Jason. So, when you first have a new client that signs up for your service, what you want to do is at the end of that conversation, before you let them off the phone, off of Zoom, or in person, what you want to do is just say, "Hey, before I let you go. Can I ask you for a favor?" [00:04:18] Everyone's either going to say "yes," or "maybe tell me more." And then what you want to do is just say, "Hey, we're so committed to giving you a five star experience. And once we do, and you experience our service and we take care of everything for you, and it just runs like clockwork, would it be okay to ask you for referrals?" [00:04:38] Everybody's going to say yes, because you're not putting them on the spot right now. You're basically saying, "I'll do a great job for you and give you amazing service." Right? So that's step one is setting the stage. Now you're going to get some referrals right then because they're going to be like, "well, now that you mentioned it, I'm in this real estate investor group and I've got three other guys. We were just having this conversation about needing a new property management firm. So let me introduce you to Tom, Bobby and Susie." Right?" [00:05:04] Jason: Okay. So you ask the step one, you ask for a favor, you express that you're committed to five stars. So that's a nice pre frame, you know, experience, and then you're getting permission to hit them up for that later, basically.  [00:05:19] Brandon: At a later date, right? [00:05:20] And that's the key because you're not putting them on the spot now, everybody's totally comfortable. You're basically just saying, "I'm going to do a great job."  [00:05:27] Jason: Sure. Yeah, of course. "If you do a good job yeah. I'd be happy to do that for you."  [00:05:32] Brandon: So it's the easy "yes," and you'll pretty much get 100 percent buy in on that, right? [00:05:36] So that's setting the stage. Now you go into step two, you start serving them and you're listening for the referral triggers. And that's something like, "Oh, thank you so much. You guys did such a great job, right? I just, I love working with you guys." You're listening. For those expressions of appreciation, right? [00:05:55] And when you hear that, that means that somebody is in a peak referral state because they just recognize that you're doing a great job and they've expressed their appreciation for you. And that's when it's time to ask for referrals. And the way you do that is say, "I'm so glad to hear that. We love helping investors like you manage their properties and we're looking to take on a few more clients. So remember at the beginning we started working together, I told you we were going to deliver five star service. Well now that you know what our service is like, I'd love to see if there's any other investors you know that we can help."  [00:06:31] Jason: Yeah, this is really funny. It's like eerily odd to me because we use a very similar framework at DoorGrow for getting reviews from clients. And I like the idea though of the pre frame and setting the stage early on. So our formula for getting reviews is we like, identify peak happiness, which usually in property management is like when the tenant is placed. And then we reach out at peak happiness and then we first showcase the invisible. [00:07:00] So we highlight everything we've done for them. So, "Oh, we've got your tenant placed. We got the rent check collected. It should be hitting your bank account right about now." Like all this kind of stuff. Then asking, "how do you feel we've done?" Which is a loaded question because you've just pointed out all the good that they couldn't see. [00:07:15] And so, and then they're like, "Oh, you're great." So we're kind of intentionally making them say that, right? And so they're like, "Oh yeah, you guys have been amazing." "Oh, we love hearing that. Would you be willing to share that feedback online?" So brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. So very similar. I've never even thought about just applying it to referrals, so this is great. I love this.  [00:07:34] Brandon: And Jason also you can ask the question too, "how would you rate us on a scale of one to 10?" Oh yeah. "How good are we doing for you right now?" Yeah, right. And the net promoter score says if you get an eight, nine or 10, then it's time to ask, we always recommend if it's less than a 10, you want to ask, "well, what would make it a 10?" [00:07:52] Right? If it's a nine or an eight, "how can we get to a 10 for you? We're so committed to delivering exceptional service and excellence to you. What would get us there?" And if they say an eight or a nine, "I'm so glad to hear that. We love helping people like you manage your doors." Yeah. So there you go. [00:08:08] Jason: Very clever. I like that. Okay. So what was your step three? It was some sort of acronym?  [00:08:14] Brandon: Step three is A-S-K to G-E-T. Now that's how it was taught to me. It's ask to get, it's a little different way of remembering it. And like my kids know. A-S-K to G-E-T. I pounded it in their heads and they're not afraid to ask for what they want. [00:08:30] But it was taught to me by my mentor, Mark Victor Hansen. He wrote those chicken soup for the soul books, and that's the way he taught me the art of the ask years ago, 20 years ago.  [00:08:39] Yeah.  [00:08:40] Jason: Okay. Got it. Okay. So it's not an acronym. It's just spelling it out. So you can remember it. Cool. I'm like, "this is going to be something really clever!" [00:08:49] It's just like ask to get, yeah, it's so simple. We don't ask often enough. Right. Okay.  [00:08:54] Brandon: So the more you ask, the more you get, that's just how it works.  [00:08:57] Jason: Now, this is kind of a system that you can build into the business, right? Like that's what we teach referrals, like build this mechanism. And so we create this open loop, like "would you be willing to give us feedback online?" [00:09:09] "Yes. Oh, I'd be happy to do that. Awesome. We would really appreciate that. Let me send you a link to make this easier for you. And I know you're really busy, but would it be cool if I followed up in a week if I don't see something come through? Would that be okay?" And they're like, "yeah." So then they're in this endless loop where you continually follow up. [00:09:26] "Hey, you know, you had mentioned that you'd maybe take some time to do this and notice, hadn't seen anything come through. I know you're really busy. Would you be willing to give us feedback online?" And we just keep this and we work at like a sales process. Like it's a pipeline until we get them to either do it or give them an out and say, "you know what, if you don't want to do it, it's totally cool. We appreciate your business." "No, I'll do it." Takeaway. So anyway, there's got to be more to it than this. Is that, or is it just simple?  [00:09:51] Brandon: That's one of the strategies. So the next thing we want to do is we want to automate the ask, right? So first we talk about how to get more referrals just in your regular conversations, and we give people a framework to make it easy for them and comfortable for the clients. [00:10:06] Now let's take that same strategy and let's automate the ask. How do we do that? We integrate similar types of questions into our invoices, our email signature. If you're doing a newsletter, you can incorporate a section around that. I recommend that one of the things you consider doing is to incentivize people. [00:10:27] The best way to motivate is to compensate. Well, you don't necessarily have to pay out cash like in an affiliate program or what we call referral rewards, but you may choose to. At the very least, what you want to do is have some sort of way to incentivize and reward those that send you business. So maybe it is for every new client you refer us, we're going to give you one free months of service or three months of service, whatever's right for your business model. You got to understand your lifetime client value. You need to understand your customer acquisition costs. And Jason, I'm sure these are things that you're teaching your guys. So I don't think we have to dig deep into those, but it's really about creating the mechanism so that your system is doing the asking for you, right? [00:11:15] All of your automations have integrated referrals. If you're doing mailers and statements, you can simply put those requests as a footer, if you will, in your statements, and that way your system is constantly doing the asking and reminding people that you appreciate their referrals.  [00:11:33] Jason: So, what would be an example of what might be at the bottom of an invoice or at the bottom of an email? [00:11:38] Like, like something like, "we don't hate referrals, do you know anyone?" I'm joking, but what would you typically put?  [00:11:45] Brandon: Yeah. I mean, you can do something as simple as "we love referrals," right? "The greatest gift you can give us is to refer someone who cares." It's really about your personality and your brand, right? [00:11:56] So there's some standard language that you can use. "We love referrals. If you know anyone who is a fit for us, an investor looking for us to take over and provide five star service, we're here for them." And then again, if you're rewarding them, then you integrate your incentive into the ask.  [00:12:15] Jason: Okay. I love this. [00:12:17] Again with our reputation secrets for reviews we also teach like identify all the touch points that you have with your customer And figure out where you can add in some sort of link or direction to get reviews. So I'm starting to think maybe I should take a look at everything that I teach for reviews and figure out how do I turn this into referrals?  [00:12:37] Brandon: It sounds like it's the same, Jason. I mean, everything that you're teaching is right on point. Now, just add that referral request into what you're doing. Now you've got the ratings, reviews and the referrals. You've got two different ways to ask for similar things that are both going to add to more business. [00:12:53] Jason: Wow. Yeah, definitely. But the referral thing is a lot more direct, right? Let's get an actual lead. Let's get connected. And instead of, you know, looking good online and waiting for traffic flow in. It's definitely more direct. So I'm liking this. So, okay. Automate the ask. [00:13:08] I'm guessing you have more points.  [00:13:10] Brandon: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So many different things that you can do. One of the things that we teach is to become the expert, right? Become recognized as an expert. Now, many of your guys are probably already going to real estate investor groups. What are they teaching and training at real estate investor groups, right? [00:13:27] Yeah, part of the reason that you are where you are is because you are establishing your expert authority by having this call this group, right? You have elevated your status in the industry and that's what everybody that's listening should be doing too. We teach a concept called hyper local social farming, right? [00:13:47] If you think about the best realtors out there, they farm local communities. That's what they call it. They call it farming. And what that means is they're sending postcards to every homeowner in a specific neighborhood or HOA, and they do it regularly consistently because that consistency creates comfort and trust, right? So they become known as that top agent in that area. Well, we do that at HOA.com. It's part of our marketing platform that we've built, but we teach the strategy and I think it applies even to property managers, right? Number one, you can farm lists and I'm sure your guys are getting lists of non owner occupied properties and then doing direct mail and outreach. [00:14:34] to the investors, especially if you see that they have multiple properties that they own. Right? We have all that homeowner data at hoa.com. And so that's one of the things that we do too. But if you farm the communities and work specific areas, then what happens is you start to get the referrals from all the people that know each other in that area. [00:14:55] Or in that, that market, right? Because sometimes you're doing it down to the local area and other times you're working spheres of influence, if you will. Right. And so one of the other things that we teach is to teach others. When you establish that expert authority by teaching real estate investor groups, right? [00:15:15] Go partner with not only the real estate investor groups, but also the realtors in the area offer a course for investors into the specific real estate branch. We've just done this actually with raving referrals. So we created a raving referrals CE course, continuing education course for realtors. And now what we're doing is we're having different mortgage lenders, business coaches, and other professionals are becoming the certified trainer. And the beauty is, like I was just talking to the partner manager for REMAX yesterday. She manages all of North America. They've got about 80, 000 agents. Well, I thought we were primarily having an HOA conversation, which we were. [00:15:58] But when she found out that we had this CE course, her eyes and ears just lit up because their agents always need great content to grow their business. So somebody that is standing on stage and we help fill the audience, but somebody that's standing on stage delivering that content elevates their expert authority. [00:16:18] And now everybody wants to do business with them because they're seen as the expert they are.  [00:16:23] Jason: This is funny. So one of the strategies we give our clients, we have a course called the 411 on leasing that one of my clients I coached in the past kind of shared with us and we've kind of cleaned it up and we have our clients go and get this approved as a CE credit and here's this course on leasing that scares the shit out of real estate agents in handling leases because the number one source of complaints at any real estate office or any board of realtors, I mean, is usually property management related, not real estate related. And so they teach this class that basically scares the shit out of them and handling their own leases. And so then they just start referring the business to the teacher of class. So I love this idea. So they're teaching the CE course for realtors related to referrals.  [00:17:07] Brandon: Yeah. And what we teach is for the trainer, whoever it is, typically we focus on mortgage lenders and business coaches because they want to be in front of rooms full of realtors, but it works for a property manager too, right? You can become a trainer, go give a course. What we do is we partner with the title companies because as you know, the title companies exist to help realtors win more business, and they do that by providing training and tools, right? Technology to help them win. So we provide the title company with great content that is drawing their agents in and helping their realtors expand their business. [00:17:47] Because what we're doing is we're teaching the realtors how to formalize and activate their referral network. What we know about Realtors is they give a ton of referrals out and they don't get many back. And so if you want to win more business from Realtors, give more business to realtors, promote them, right? [00:18:06] And then the property management company, that's easy to do. It doesn't take much. You could have your list of five or 10 agents. They can specialize in different aspects of the industry. Maybe some are first time homers, some are luxury, some are Airbnb short term rentals, but by having that team of people that you're recommending, they'll recommend you back as well. [00:18:29] Jason: Yeah, that's great. I love it. All right, Brandon. I just want to milk all these ideas out of you. Like keep sharing because this is cool.  [00:18:37] Brandon: So next phase then is we've talked about activating the Realtors net network, right? How do we do that? We actually sit down with them. We teach something we call the referral partner blueprint. [00:18:49] And if you go to HOA. com slash blueprint, you can download this. It's a PDF document. But it basically walked you through all the different ways to create your referral team. You're what we call your trusted team. Now property managers have vendors that you use all of the time. And my question to you is you're referring business to those vendors. [00:19:11] Are those vendors referring you back?  [00:19:14] Jason: Yeah, it's a great strategy. We definitely have our clients focus on like vendors are great source of referrals. They know the bad landlords out there that they're doing jobs for. They know what it's like to deal with them and to not get paid. They would much rather have a property manager that they're dealing with. [00:19:29] That's good. Yeah, for sure.  [00:19:31] Brandon: Yeah. And they're in a perfect position. If they get hired by an investor to go work on a non owner occupied property, they're in a conversation, a dialogue anyway. And they can say, "by the way, have you ever considered hiring a professional property management company? So you don't have to come out here at 2 a. m. and, you know, address an emergency with one of your renters?" So being in partnership with them is key. We help the realtors formalize and activate their referral partnerships. Again, they give a ton out. They don't get many back at HOA. com. We've actually built a co marketing engine and it's all automated. [00:20:08] And so what happens is a realtor, after they come on board, they'll create their profile, and then they invite their trusted team. And on their profile, they get to feature the people that they know I can trust and recommend. So their mortgage lender, insurance agent, their painter, their plumber, their home inspector, property manager, their trusted team. [00:20:29] And what we do once those people join their network is the realtor also uploads their homeowner database. And then what we do is every month we send. An automated home safe report to the homeowners in their database from the agent or the pro to those homeowners and what it does is it gives the homeowner a monthly valuation report. [00:20:52] "Hey, your property has gone up by $4000. It's now worth $512, 000, right? Might be a good time to sell," and we include the estimated rental value of that property as well. The reason we're doing that is we want to help people find the resources that they need and they may see that, "wow, I could rent this house for $4, 000." [00:21:16] It might be time to make a move, right? So we want to stimulate that activity, but the home safe report, it goes out from the realtor featuring all of the vendors that they know, like, and trust and recommend, and the beauty is we do the same thing for everyone else. So the insurance agent is promoting the realtor to all of their clients. [00:21:38] The mortgage lender is promoting the realtor or the property manager. We help everybody work together as a team and automate the co marketing so that they're expanding the number of people that they get their message to. And everybody's recommending everyone else because a client for one can be a client for everyone. [00:21:58] Yeah. Nice.  [00:22:00] Jason: That is very strategic. I love it. So yeah, very clever. Cool. And I just got your guide. Like I put it in it's up on my screen. Super fast. And I'm looking at it here. Yeah, this follows a lot of the strategies that we leverage in getting our clients to get clients. [00:22:16] So this is really interesting, but I like the idea of the cross promotional campaigns and stuff like that. So. Very cool.  [00:22:23] Brandon: Yeah, you know, we started this company as the Homeowner Alliance and our original vision was to create like the BNI power team of professionals who serve homeowners, because there's nobody that's done that, right? [00:22:34] There is no referral network exclusively for pros who serve homeowners. So five years ago, we set out to create that. We actually started as the homeowneralliance. com. That was our URL and we were able to acquire hoa. com. Right. Home owner Alliance. We need to do shorter brand. But what we know is that people that are in this space do a ton of business together, but most of them don't have any systems about how to cross refer and cross marketing like BNI is great. [00:23:07] But once you leave the BNI meeting, then what?  [00:23:09] Jason: Yeah, I would say BNI is not that great. That's the feedback I've heard from so many people. Sorry, BNI. But the challenge is our property management clients will go there hoping to get a bunch of referrals. And what ends up happening is they have maybe one person there that could potentially be a client. [00:23:27] Maybe and they have maybe one person there that actually could connect them to something that's relevant or they might not and so they just they spend a lot of time investing in this with getting very little yield. There's better groups that you could either curate or be a part of or join, I think, that would yield a much bigger result, but that's my opinion. [00:23:45] Brandon: Yeah, and I agree, and I think it's industry specific, right? There are some industries that really thrive in BNI, and there's others that don't. Yeah. But the concept Is sound, right? The concept is let's build a trusted team of the people that we're cross referring my challenge with...  [00:24:02] Jason: your team, like the team that all like property managers are already connected to like property managers have accountants. [00:24:09] They're connected to lenders. They're connected to title companies. They're connected. They're connected to all sorts of vendors, like every housing related vendor there is, right? And they, and that's part of Building a property management business. You have to build a network and a team. [00:24:21] And so you might as well create that alliance strategically to facilitate that. So HOA. com on the surface, if people are assuming it's just related to association management would be probably a misnomer. That's probably not accurate, right? It sounds like you can help with facilitating some of this stuff happening that we're talking about. [00:24:43] Brandon: Yeah. We've really built a referral partner platform. That's what is at the core and what drives HOA. com. Again, we set out to create a platform to connect homeowners to professionals they can trust. Now we acquired the hoa. com domain after the fact, but that's our mission is to really connect homeowners in local communities with professionals they can trust. [00:25:06] And part of the way that we do that from an automation and a marketing perspective is we help people create their trusted teams, cross refer Cross market together. We automate that process. So it's easy, but we're creating community pages for every neighborhood in America, whether it's an HOA or not. [00:25:26] Jason: Yeah. And then we select top trusted pros that become the recommended property manager of that community the recommended realtor mortgage lender painter plumber And so we choose kind of like the bni concept. We're a community maker, but thank you.  [00:25:40] You're picking the kings of the champions for each, role in this community. [00:25:45] So okay, I love it. So, what's the process for a property manager to be one of those kings or queens of their local market in HOA. com. And how do you select them or how do they seduce you and get your attention?  [00:26:00] Brandon: They go to HOA. com up at the top, right? You're going to see a button that says, "become a pro." They're going to fill out that application. [00:26:07] We do background checks on people. We want to much like you said, before we jumped on the show, right? You don't allow everybody in, you only allow about 30 percent of people. If I heard you correctly. That want to be part of your Facebook group. Yeah, we take a similar approach, right? We're interested in quality over quantity and our reputation is at stake. [00:26:28] So we do background checks. We're going to check you out on social media. We're going to see what you're saying, who you are, make sure that our values are aligned. We don't just choose to do business with anyone and then we're going to make sure that you've got plenty of ratings and reviews that you got the experience and the expertise to take care of people. [00:26:46] So once that is complete and then you're approved, then you're on the platform and you basically create a profile. You invite your trusted team. You have the opportunity of claiming communities where you become the exclusive property manager for that HOA or master plan development. And that way you get remarketed to all those folks. [00:27:07] And then you have the opportunity to upload your homeowner database. So that every month they're getting a message and email from you with the value of their home. And then that home safe report has everything about their property in one location. Our goal is to be like Carfax for your home, but they're going to see all the square footage and you know, legal description, their mortgage information. [00:27:31] They're going to see a complete list of the sales transactions on that property. And then they're going to see a section, which is the trusted team, the recommended. providers, professionals that serve that community. And then they're also going to see local events. What's happening in your area. And ultimately, our goal is to create unity through community. [00:27:55] We want to connect people in the local neighborhoods so that they really get to know their neighbors and feel connected.  [00:28:02] Jason: I think that's super important nowadays because, you know, we've traded largely social networks for social media. And so we've lost the network. We've lost the connection in a lot of instances. [00:28:17] And. You know, it's been proven that the more time people spend on social media, the more disconnected, the more depressed they feel. And these really are psychological engines for stealing attention from us by leveraging dopamine and And it's extracting money from our wallets. And so either you use social media or it uses you. [00:28:38] And my daughter makes all of our social media posts, all my posts. Like I don't know where you really post anything, but she knows my voice. She knows how to write things the way that I would. And it's on my podcast. So she knows that. And so that allows me to use social media without using me as much, but I think everybody gets a little bit sucked in if they even have it on their phone. [00:28:58] Right. So, I love the idea of creating more connection and more community. So, for the random person listening to this that's not a property manager for some reason. Right. But they're just like, "man, I really am craving community." What could they do to be more connected to leveraging HOA. com?  [00:29:18] Brandon: Yeah. Well, so if they're a professional, they can sign up as a pro. [00:29:20] And one of the things that we do is we have a number of community impact events. Because part of the way that we bring people together is we give them a blueprint of how to host an event. You know, we do things like ice cream socials for the whole community, right? Or a watermelon eating contest. We do things like that, right? [00:29:39] Just fun stuff that bring people together and create a reason for families to come out and really build community within their HOA or neighborhood. So we provide all these guides to our pros, because again, some of the realtors, some of the property managers, they like to host events. And what's interesting is more often than not, when one of our pros approaches an HOA about doing a community impact event, the HOA gets behind it and they even promote it to all of the neighbors in their. [00:30:11] HOA because they don't typically have those types of events going on. Some do, but many don't. And so when, you know, a neighbor or a pro offers to do something for the neighborhood, they want to spread the word and get it out there. So what you're going to find is most HOAs will get behind it, especially if it's good for the community. [00:30:31] Jason: Sounds great. So yeah, maybe I should somehow get my HOA that I'm living in to do some of these things. All right. So Brandon, is there anything we missed in how to really get referrals going for maybe property managers or those listening.  [00:30:50] Brandon: Yeah, I think you've got to be intentional. You've got to have a plan what we recommend is that people start by doing a self assessment. [00:30:58] We have a referral score quiz. There are 10 Best practices when it comes to getting more referrals. And what we find is most often people have a couple of blind spots. There's a couple of things that they've never thought of before. And I'll give you one example. I had a mortgage company back in the early 2000s. [00:31:17] And I had this client come to me one day and he had referred me a client. And he calls me about two months later and he says, "Hey, I just want to know what happened with Mike Johnson." And I'm like, "Oh, great to hear from you. Amazing. We just helped Mike do his refinance two weeks ago and he closed on his transaction." [00:31:34] And then there was this awkward pause and he comes back and he says, "do you mind if I give you a little coaching?" And I said, "absolutely." You know, coaching is the breakfast of champions. And he says, "number one, it's a really good idea to thank people when they give you a referral," and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, how did I not? [00:31:54] How did I miss it? This guy was a VP for Intel. He had given me a number of referrals and I just hadn't even been aware to think about thanking the guy who was giving me this. Oh, I felt like just a capital L on my forehead. Right? The second thing he says is "it's also a really good idea to update people when they do give you a referral" and I'm like "doing! I'm an idiot!" Right? [00:32:21] And so what I did at that point, I had a mortgage company. I had 30 loan officers that were working for me. I printed up referral thank you cards. And they literally said, "thank you for referring." And there was a blank line and my people could write in the name of the client, quickly stick that in an envelope and send it out to the client to thank them for giving referrals, but if you're not thinking about it, then you're missing out. And that's one of the ways that you really build those relationships where people refer you on a regular basis because the trust goes up, especially if you update them on what happens, right? "Hey, thanks so much for referring Susie Smith." [00:32:59] She ended up becoming a client. We're now helping her with her properties and so grateful. And then you can either give them a gift. Starbucks card, movie card, whatever the case may be to reward them and give them that dopamine hit. So they want to do it again, right?  [00:33:16] Jason: Right, yeah, it's all about motivating them to do it again. [00:33:19] There's the idea you had mentioned before to incentivize, which is to throw money at them, right? But sometimes what really means even more to people is recognition. Like on disc assessments, for example, they have an economic score and most people's economic score is low. [00:33:33] Now this is B2B business owners. Economic score is generally high for most entrepreneurs and business owners and for salespeople. So realtors for sure. Generally everyone besides entrepreneurs and salespeople have a low economic score and which means they are recognition motivated. And so it's the gesture of doing something to show recognition. [00:33:54] Everybody likes recognition. Some people like money more, but if you do both, yes, then you're going to create a really solid incentive for these people.  [00:34:03] Brandon: How do you recommend that people recognize those that give them a referral? Do you have a system for that?  [00:34:08] Jason: I mean, I think the things that you mentioned are pretty solid, like a thank you card or something, but I think more. Depth is where magic happens. And so the deeper right so sending a card, that's nice, right? And that's a little deeper than an email, right? But the greatest depth would be "hey, let me take you out to lunch I really want you to know that I appreciate it," and looking them in the eye and expressing it would be the greatest step because there's more human connection and people like we mentioned before crave this nowadays and they will remember that forever. You know, I got chills just saying all that. [00:34:42] Brandon: Oh, I like it. Yeah. You know, one of the things we recommend too, is you give them a shout out on social media, right? I mean, you were just talking about the power of social media and here's why I love this strategy. When you recognize a referrer on social media, "Hey, I just wanted to give a shout out to Bob Williams, right? Bob recently referred over this client and we were able to help them with 10 of their clients. Properties. And we're so excited to be working with them. They're awesome people. So thanks again." Right. What are you doing there? Number one, you're feeding that, that dopamine hit right, of giving them that recognition. [00:35:18] You're doing it publicly by praising them. They're also going to tap into their relationships because birds of a feather flock together and that investor often will know others or that person will often know others who are investors as well. And you've also created social proof at the same time, right? [00:35:39] Somebody is trusting you enough to give you referrals. That social proof is good for you and for them. So if you can praise them on social media, if you do a newsletter, you can incorporate that. I started doing that back in 1997, right? [00:35:55] Where I did a week newsletter update on interest rates. I was in the mortgage business, but every week. I would include the people and thank the people that had referred me business. And what that did is it started to communicate and it was typically realtors, right? And what happened is other realtors would see that if they would be on my newsletter list and they're like, "Oh, Norma Reardon is sending business to Brandon. I've done business with her. She's high quality. If she trusts Brandon, I can too."  [00:36:25] Jason: Ooh, that is a clever, backwards evidence of social proof right there. That I love, that's clever. Yeah. Smart. Yeah. I like it. You've got a lot of ideas.  [00:36:36] Brandon: There's a few of them. You can pick up the book, Raving Referrals. Most of them are in this book. We haven't done one specifically for property managers. We need to think about that, Jason. We've got raving referrals for dentists, raving referrals for mortgage pros, and we're working on raving referrals for real estate agents right now.  [00:36:54] Jason: Hey, you want to coauthor a book? Let's get together and have that conversation... magic happen. So, yeah, and I think there's some cool stuff we could do together to do some referral magic. So, very cool. Well, before we wrap up anything else that you want to add, share, how can people get in touch with you? You know, anything you want to say about HOA. [00:37:14] com. This is your guy.  [00:37:16] Brandon: So best way to get in touch with me is at BrandonBarnum.Com. I'm sure you'll put that in the show notes on BrandonBarnum.Com. You can get the referral partner blueprint. So there's a link to download that. You can take the referral score quiz. That'll take you one to two minutes. [00:37:33] You'll rate yourself on the scale of one to 10 on the 10 best practices. And I guarantee. There's a couple of blind spots that are going to help you. The other thing you just mentioned, disc, this is a magic trick. This is called bank code, and this is a personality system that we teach. It helps you close more sales in less time and we did a research study to find out the impact of customizing your conversations and presentations for realtors on their listing conversions. And on average they increased their listing conversions by 123%. So more than doubled their closing ratio on listing conversions by understanding the personality style of the people that you're serving and selling and by customizing your conversation to the style that their brain makes buying decisions will help you close more sales in less time. [00:38:31] And you can take that bank code assessment. It's free. It'll take you 60 seconds and you can do that on brandonbarnum. com as well.  [00:38:39] Jason: Cool. All right. I will definitely check it out. All right, Brandon. Grateful to have you on the show. This was a pleasure. Appreciate it. And I think we'll definitely be connecting after the show. [00:38:50] So, all right. I love it. Thanks for having me, Jason. Appreciate it. Thanks for being here. So property managers, if you are a property management entrepreneur and you're struggling to add doors, you're adding plenty of doors, but you're struggling to figure out operations and you want to get your business to be what I call infinitely scalable, where you can continually add doors and stop stopping your momentum and break that hundred or thousand door barrier and hit your goals and achieve your dreams then reach out to us at DoorGrow We are helping people do this every day. This is what we do and we're confident that we can help you do it If you are positive and if you're active and willing to take action, we can help you get there. [00:39:27] So reach out to us at doorgrow. com and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:39:32] 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!  [00:39:59] 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. 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