Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

On this week's podcast episode, we brought back a guest we've had on the #DoorGrowShow before, Joe Edgar from Tenant Cloud. Property management growth expert, Jason Hull sits down with Joe Edgar to talk about the many new features that have been added to Tenant Cloud to benefit property managers and what is next to come for the software. You'll Learn... [01:35] An Introduction to Tenant Cloud [06:44] The Different Systems PMs Need [14:11] Integrating Different Property Management Tools [17:36] Tenant Management and Roommates [27:43] Accessing and Transferring your Data [31:55] Are Completely Remote Showings the Future? Tweetables "Listings are important because of course, as soon as you have a rental, what do you need? You need a tenant. Nothing worse than vacant property." "So there's a relationship in all of those that you really have to harbor and that's where making sure you're connected to your tenants and you're connected to managing service for them is important because then they will reach out to you to buy one where if it's a bad experience, they won't." "You're busy doing all this work, but then actually going back and making sure you're making money at what you're doing is often the last thing they look at." "You have two choices in life... You can be reactive or you can be proactive. " Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Joe: Because that's one of the hard parts is you're busy doing all this work, but then actually going back and making sure you're making money at what you're doing is often the last thing they look at. They worry about because they're trying to provide to customers, their owners. Yeah. And the tenants, good quality customer support. And so that's where it's the hard challenge and making sure they're all connected in a nice, easy way. [00:00:20] Jason: All right, we are live. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management 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. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:25] All right, so my guest today is Joe Edgar. And Joe, it's been a while since we've had you on the show here, so. [00:01:33] Joe: Yeah, definitely has. Glad to be here. [00:01:35] Jason: So Joe started a company called Tenant Cloud. And today you're going to be talking about property management and real estate technology in 2023. So, Bring us up to date, man. [00:01:47] Joe: Yeah, it has been a while since we first launched, I think back in 2016 was a real focus on the DIY landlord and trying to support that general group. And as it really has grown into-- our biggest following is now really property managers focused in the single family rental space. So, that distinction has come down to really the difference in logistics. And so, as many know in property management, if you're managing multi-family, then you usually have somebody on site, but if you're managing single family rentals, there's just too many properties. And so Yeah. Ends up being a logistical nightmare. And so that's really where we end up fine tuning our solution is all around the logistics, managing those single family rentals and helping you grow your business. [00:02:30] Jason: Cool. So what have you been up to since then? I'm sure you've made some updates to Tenant Cloud. [00:02:36] Joe: Yeah, there have been a lot of updates especially since then. I think some of the best things that really help a property management company really get going is the fact that you can sign up for Tenant Cloud and in just a couple of minutes for free. There are some paid solutions, but just on the basis of free, you can set up your own company website. From your company website, you can have its own listing portal. So all of your listings that you're going to manage, it can have applications and so tenants can find you. They can apply for a rental. You can manage that application, you can send it back for more information. You can charge a management fee or not. Lots of customization inside of there. You could have multiple bank accounts. If you have different owners, you can, send an agreement to an owner have them sign it. They have their own portal so they can own their own reports. And then of course, the more traditional stuff on top of that, which is, just managing the property itself. Everything from maintenance to just general communication with your tenants. And so all those things kind of fit in there. I think the most fun thing that we have that really brings a lot of value worth mentioning is if you follow the industry, we're starting to see these silos and vertical step up. I think the biggest mover now is co-star who is looking to buy move.com, which is realtor.com. And so they're really trying to have that niche. And then Zillow of course, exists. And then you have Redfin who's putting together a lot of other sites. And those are all around listings. And so listings are important because of course, as soon as you have a rental, what do you need? You need a tenant. Nothing worse than vacant property. So, we built this thing. We have so many tenants that come to us. Our affiliate sites, College Pads, and Rentler, are all really bringing us lots and lots of leads. [00:04:25] So having all of these leads, we decided to go the extra mile. We said, what if we offered all of them the ability to basically say what it is they're looking for. And by telling us what they're looking for, we can then match them with all of the inventory of vacancies. And so we take users who are already, they came to us for the purpose of trying to find a home. And we have all these property managers who are trying to find tenants into their rentals. So we built this thing called premium leads, and really you could think of it as like Tinder for tenants. Okay. And so what happens is the tenant will put on what they're looking for. They're like, "I want Southwest Austin. I'm looking for, $2,500 a month, a two bedroom, one bath, a yard, a fence." Say the general things they're looking for. And the second you turn on premium leads as a landlord, it will take all of your properties, even if they're not listed, it'll have them already matched, but they won't see it. The tenant won't see it until you actually make it live by listing it. And immediately all of those show up for the property manager. So the second you turn on premium leads, you have potentially, like, I love turning it on because it's such a nice feeling to like list a property, immediately you have like 15 leads, you're like, "That's great," and you invite them to apply. So you just invite them to apply and that sends real invites to those tenants. So those tenants now got a personal invite from you and you can go through, the tenant goes through it. If they like the property, they can swipe left and ask more questions. They can fill out a rental application, maybe schedule a showing, anything like that. Or if they don't like it, they swipe left and they move on their way. [00:06:03] Jason: So they'll swipe right if they like it. Yep. And left if they don't, and then it's swipe left if they don't. Got it. [00:06:08] Joe: Yeah. So it's a very non-abrasive way to approach all of these different tenants looking for leads. And so it now is the largest lead generator inside of our solution. So we integrate with Zillow, we integrate with realtor.com, many of the Redfin solutions, but it now outperforms all of them. It produced about 60% of the leads on Tenant Cloud. Wow. So it's a really nice way to go and find and fill your tenants. So again, everything, it's really about bringing all of those things that you have to property management into one easy solution at a low cost, help you save time, grow your business. [00:06:44] Jason: So if somebody already is like knee deep in another property management software, can they still use the premium leads? [00:06:50] Joe: Oh yeah, for sure. It's easy. I mean, that's what's nice is it's segmented off. We have a lot of property managers who do multi-family and multi-family is a different beast. We have a lot who hack us and use us for like multi-family, but as I said, the single family rentals has a logistics problem and I can explain why we're so different in that space. Sure. But when you get into multi-family we know where the space and we know the industry. And so if you're in multi-family more traditionally after one of those larger property management solutions, and most of that is in part because multi-family is 95% owned by institutional investors. And institutional investors need data. These large rates. And so we're not designed for that big stuff. We're really out to help smaller property managers kind of, grow their business and not answer to large rates. So the way the data flows separates us pretty substantially. And so that's what would make a unique thing. So on the logistics problem you have, maybe you have one maintenance person, but a lot don't. And so the key feature is if you were a property manager, you already know, it's like how many property managers can manage how many units? You have the math and it's generally around a hundred units per person. [00:08:04] And you can get some that are starting to get more efficient. They're getting into like duplexes and triplexes where they get down to, maybe the 85 to one. But normally about a hundred. And a hundred's a good number because if you're also a broker, then you also know I'm managing these properties because I know about 5% of them will bring me additional business annually. Either my clients are selling or my clients are buying, or my tenants are looking to buy. Right. So there's a relationship in all of those that you really have to harbor and that's where making sure you're connected to your tenants and you're connected to managing service for them is important because then they will reach out to you to buy one where if it's a bad experience, they won't. [00:08:43] And so having a nice solution on their phone that they can easily sign a lease, they filled out their application, they can pay their rent, they can view everything that's in their power, is great. Then in addition, if anything happens, they can go to their phone. And there's four simple questions that breaks 1500 problems with a home down into four simple questions that are icon based. And so they select them and they can take a picture and a video and it goes direct to the property manager. And the property manager now has the choice because we can't say, not all tenants are accurate. Not all tenants know how to fix anything. And so, whatever they say the problem is, it could be something different. And so I've had this on my own experience where it's like, I find out the roof keeps leaking, but I'm like, you realize it hasn't rained in weeks. And you find out it's the air conditioner. It's like catching condensation. And so you know what they say the problem is and what it actually is is not always the case. And so it's nice. You get the maintenance request, you have a picture, you have a video, you have a small explanation if they wanted to add it to it. And if you have a service professional that you work with, you can send it to them or you can change the category. You can schedule it from there. [00:09:50] And once you assign it to them, they can now communicate directly with the tenant, but you are privy to all the messages. And now they can schedule this outside of it. Or you can plan for them, but they can schedule outside of you having to do it constantly. Now, that's one method. It can also be if you're in a property management office there's one here in Austin I just talked to. They have 50 rentals, so they're growing theirs. They're managing on behalf of about 10 owners. And so that's not big enough on their level to have a maintenance person on staff. And so they contract everything. And so what's nice is inside of theirs, they can actually use it inside the maintenance request. They can get a quote and that quote goes out to all service professionals in the local area that can then send in bids on behalf of that. And you can run it in two different flows. You can say, "okay, well I'll make the decision," depending on what you have with the owner. Or you can send the different quotes to the owner to pick one of them. [00:10:44] And so there's lots of different ways to manage that. But now once you connect them, you can then do the same thing. You're like, okay, I like your bid. You do it, I'll schedule you. You're in. And then you have privy. And then there's a way the tenant can say, well, it's not done exactly. And they say it is done. So you kind of do a lot before you actually have to go on site. I mean, when I was doing property management, the worst thing was most of the site visits are not what they said. And they're things like, "the lights are out," and it's because the light bulb is burned up. It's like, well, that's not, you just wasted a lot of time for me to drive across town. There's two hours of wasted time to do this. And so having those logistics are great. That's the heart of Tenant Cloud. But then on top of that, it's like, okay, well the logistic problem and getting on the phone and scheduling is tough. Then I got to account for all this. [00:11:30] And accounting is the next piece. So when the tenant goes in and enters that, we have those categories of which they're selecting by icon based for maintenance requests. They're matched with both revenue and expenditure and capital expenditure categories inside the accounting automatically. And then in addition, you can keep track of any assets. And by that I mean if you have a refrigerator or an oven, you can store all those in. So if a maintenance request comes, you can actually look up any piece of equipment like a fridge and it can tell you, show you all the maintenance requests it's had. It'll find correlations like things. You're replacing this motor every year so you can make those decisions on like, we probably should just get a new fridge. But then inside of that, all of those are matched with the IRS 1040 Schedule E categories. And so what is great is you as a property manager who is going to be doing your 1099s at the end of the year. Your contractors, if you were to bid it inside the system, you can pay them and they can invoice you. So if it's someone you don't know, then of course they'll create an invoice for you after the work. But it's someone you do know and they just, you're figuring out what the bill is on the side. You can message them on the side or directly in the ticket, and then you can pay them directly. What's nice is when it comes to accounting time, your owners have a very clean, simple 1040 Schedule E already done for them that has all their costs laid out, that you didn't have to go back and do anything extra, has all the receipts matched to it. Each one goes all the way down. And each property manager, as a refer to, are these "additional opportunities." There's lots of ways, depending on how you have a relationship with your owner to set up those additional opportunities. [00:13:06] For example, you could just charge like, I have a 10% fee on top of any cost for maintenance I do. And so that would be added into maintenance requests. So that's already being done. Or you could have it, we have a flat rate that we charge for tenants. I mean there's lots of ways to set it up for your property management company to make sure they're accounting for their revenue as well. Because that's one of the hard parts is you're busy doing all this work, but then actually going back and making sure you're making money at what you're doing is often the last thing they look at. They worry about because they're trying to provide to customers, their owners. Yeah. And the tenants, good quality customer support. And so that's where it's the hard challenge and making sure they're all connected in a nice, easy way. And everything kind of flows in a simple recurring way that is predictable and you know for sure how it's going to work is an important part of growing your business. And so then that passes through to the owners can fully see their reports. You have your reports for your 1099s and all of it happened behind the scenes without you really looking at it. So the heart of it is to be kind of a logistics and accountant, a back office person to help you, a small property management company kind of grow. [00:14:10] Jason: Cool. Cool. So the maintenance coordination piece, solving that logistics challenge, can that be used by companies that are also using another property management software already? [00:14:20] Joe: Yeah. Sorry, I kind of went on a-- I digress. That was your question before. You can kind of go on and use whatever piece you want. So we have lots of larger ones who are doing multi-family and they have found that they get all our leads at Tenant Cloud. So they still use their traditional property management software to answer to the beast above them for accounting. Yeah. But they get all their leads and manage all their rental applications through Tenant Cloud. And for their business, they get to keep the application fee. And so it's nice because they can set all that up and so they run everything there. So all the applications you can do a background check, you can do a full one, you can do a partial one. So there's lots of different variations you can do in there. And so it's nice for them because they manage everything on there. Once they actually do a lease, then they actually put them in their other property management software and do it on there. And then some are slowly kind of converting into Tenant Cloud as it does more for them. As they see, they're like, well, why don't we just move here? But in a lot of the wreaths they don't. But on slower ones, yeah, you can manage just leads. [00:15:15] We have a really nice CRM tool built in. And so because we give you a free website and then we distribute your listing to so many different places, we set you up on a unique text number. You don't know what it is, it doesn't matter to you, but what's great is it does matter to someone looking at your rental. And so to find your listing on any site, and then, if I have a rental application, that's an easy one. I'll fill out the application that goes through the system and you get a nice, clean application. You can request more information, whatever you want to do. But when it's just a lead, which is how most of them come in. They'll send you a message and they can do it via text straight from the listing. They hit a number, they send you a text, and you can respond to them via text, right in your Tenant Cloud account. And so that's where you can take all the different messengers, have it in one place, nice and simple track notes, maybe it's, maybe the one they're looking for is not available now and you want to use it for later, so you just tag it. [00:16:08] But yeah, there's different parts of Tenant Cloud that you can use for just different parts of your business, depending on what you're doing. [00:16:13] Jason: So what you're saying is on the tenant side, there's basically CRM for tenant leads and that you can manage that communication and you can do it through text message because the listings have that number on it. Exactly. And then on the maintenance coordination thing, which also sounded really cool that piece can be used standalone as well, is what you're saying? [00:16:31] Joe: Yep. Correct. Okay. Each one is really segmented Now if you use them altogether, of course, they just make life easier, but sure. But yeah, you really can use each little function separately. Now, if you wanted to come from another software, you can easily upload your data. So we have tools for that. And if you ever wanted to take Tenant Cloud data, this is one of the things, it has been our company's motto from the beginning, that we are not making business on holding your data randsom. And so you can easily take your data at any time you want and use it and flow it anywhere. And so some of those have been good. We have a QuickBooks integration, so that makes it seamless. But we have others who use some other unique accounting software, and so we've made that so you can just pull your data and put it in anything else that you want as well. So there's lots of reasons to have that, but that's an important thing before you use one, you're like, I want to know that I can get all my data out of it. because you're uploading images. Yeah, you're uploading tenant information. I mean, it ends up becoming your record retention for a lot of stuff that you're doing on a legal basis. And so it's important to have all that, but to also have access to where you can get rid of it on a digital form, but store it somewhere still. [00:17:36] Jason: So if we were to look at the Tenant Cloud ecosystem or, system as a whole, we've got, the tenant lead sort of CRM in communication for taking care of the vacancy situation. We've got the maintenance coordination piece, we've got the accounting piece you've mentioned. What other major? [00:17:53] Joe: So there's tenant management. Tenant management is just one where you want to have all your information about each tenant. It may flow from the application but then once you have it, you want to message them. And so you could have tenants all on one street and you need to message them and say, "Hey, street clean, street sweeping on this date. So you can message a part of them. Or you may have all your tenants at large, you have a policy change you're going to do, or you may have two cities and you say, okay, in this city this is changing. And so just helping manage all of those tenants and having a place to keep both private and information that you share with the tenant is really important. [00:18:29] So there are things like, for instance, if you enter an accounting or you send us something, it's nice to know that it's live. And it's also nice to know that they have seen it. And so when you have a message, you can see for sure that you see, as we all know a hard part, but a reality of property management is that you will end up in a court, every so often with a tenant. And so making sure you have an easy place to account for all your timing and what you did with a maintenance request. And all of your messages in regards to just your relationship in general in one place is really important. And so to be able to pull it out and show dates and to be able to show what was seen and what wasn't seen is really important. A nice, easy process to kind of print it out and, bring it to court. As you will know, it's a huge part. And unfortunately that's part of the business, but it is one that you really, if you're going to grow your business, it's an important part to have, early. So there's tenant management. [00:19:20] We have a whole calendar scheduling piece, and that's really important because it's the next piece that I'll talk about is as you grow your property management business, in the beginning it's usually just you. And that's fantastic because that is definitely where you're like, I need to grow this. And then you bring out, and sometimes it's a significant other. That's fantastic if you can pull that off. Right. And so there's two of you, right? And often they'll use the same logins, right? Because they're like, there's two of us. So we're talk, we see each other enough that we'll do stuff. But once you have that first real hire, it's a different business. Because now you really don't have the same, it's a professional relationship and you don't have that same thing where you're like, we do need to, like who's doing what. Yeah. And so even though I say it's this calendar function, we have a team feature. You can go in and add team members and you can change all the settings for each team member. [00:20:10] And so it could be like it, you can assign them specific properties and so they're only able to see stuff on properties. You could limit them from accounting, you could limit them from certain settings. And so there's lots of ways, depending on what the team member is. For instance, you could have accountant, you could have a property manager just doing marketing, and you could have someone who, does maintenance. So just depending on what it is. But what's great about your team function is now you have a way to communicate with them. So very easily in a chat you can press a hash sign and find any of your properties in a message, and it will pull that up and then have a link to it. And then at sign you can find any one of your team members. And from a message, you can make that a task. And so all of a sudden tasks are running for everybody. And as the master account, you can see all the tasks going through on the calendar, and then you can message, each other about different tenants or any type of messaging that goes on there. And so you'll find, and then the system itself will self-generate tasks for you. For example, ones you should, they're obvious, that is like, all right, I have a lease. I want to know two months in advance before this lease expires. [00:21:12] Tell me, cause I need to renew it. It could be, I talked to this tenant and they're going to schedule something, they send a message and from that message, they're going to pay rent two days late. But I get it. And so boom, you have a task, you're going to have those reminders come up. And so that's really that angle from trying to get the system knows a lot of the things that you automatically need to do. So they're already in there. For instance, every six months you need to check smoke detectors you need to do servicing before winter. There's cleanup. So all those things can be automatic inside of that calendar, but then really running inside the team function really brings it to work because now you mix that with your maintenance team or whether they're outside or not, but it's assigning them and it really becomes a magic. So we built this kanban board where you can manage a lot of those tasks, especially when you get more than a hundred properties and you're trying to grow your business. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about. You're just like, "ah, I forgot." So you have two choices in life. When it gets that big, you can be reactive. Or you can be proactive. So we have tried to build a system to help you be proactive. And that's, it's telling you before you think about it. So then you're like, "oh yeah, I totally forgot about it." I do need to schedule you that. You move it into the next kanban board, you assign it to this person, run it there. And so it's really a great way for a team to come together and trying to do property management. And so that's one of the features. There's quite a few features, but another one I'll mention that's worth noting, that makes us different than other solutions as well is when you go down to single family rentals, a lot don't know-- many in this area will know-- but universities are very unique in that universities have a higher density of smaller property managers managing around the university than non universities. And so if you get out away from the universities, you're into these big apartment developments and so they're slightly different. And you get into universities and there's quite a few property managers that just service around that area. [00:23:01] And so one of the struggles for the property managers is always how do they deal with roommates? And you have so many different ways to deal with a roommate. You could take one rental and I could rent out every room individually, or I could rent out the whole house and just say, okay, well I'm going to, I'll rent out the house to all of you, but each one of you are going to pay a specific amount. Or I can rent out the whole house, and I'm going to say, all right, I don't know. I don't care. You're all on the lease. However you pay, just get me the money. And so those are all very different structurally in how you set something up and it all the way down from receiving an application, vetting them, moving them in to sign a lease, and moving them out, holding deposits and the ongoing relationship. [00:23:42] They're all different. And so what's nice is we really have thought through a lot of those, and they're not just on roommates. So we're starting to see this happen now in older care centers. And so, assisted living of sorts, they are now doing a lot of roommate features. And so these are older care centers that are using us for property management software. However, they usually the tenants are self-sustaining, so they don't need a nurse. They're just living inside of a center. And so the same kind of features. And so a lot of this roommate functionality is taken off and then really during 2020, like, when Covid kind of happened, it wasn't as popular. It was a feature that we had built in and we we thought it was really aimed for the college universities as college pads, one of our partners. And so we had built that in, but really starting last year. And my own take is that real estate went so expensive that you're seeing a lot of roommates pop in. And so a lot of people are procrastinating moving into their own place. Rentals are taking off and people are moving in together. So now you see this over pouring. So the last report realtor.com did it. However it follows what Wall Street Journal did. That theirs was, there are 2 million households formed again last year, which means we are missing 6.5 million homes in the marketplace based on them. And if we are missing 6.5 million and things are so expensive, you are saying we have no choice that roommates are just over pouring into everyone's lives. So what they didn't think was is now a single family home, an apartment, everyone is now dealing with roommates and it's created software problems everywhere. [00:25:24] One that we have already solved and thought through. That's a great feature because how you rent them matters. It's, it changes the entire relationship from being a customer support frustration. Like if they're each paying a separate amount and you're doing rooms, but you're treating it as a solution where they're all in the same one, you'll just mess up all, for everyone. And so being able to manage those on so many different levels is really nice because you can have separate leases. One lease that they all sign and they all share their invoice, where as soon as one pays all the rest of them see it and they can figure out how to pay. Or you can just say each one of you're paying and then somebody's else is out and they're done. Or you going to move one in and move mountains, move the deposit. So it becomes such a problem that it's one to be noted. But now in today's industry, were roommate renting is just a commonplace, so that's a feature worth talking about. [00:26:11] Jason: Very cool. Yeah. Cool. All right, so we've got the maintenance coordination, the accounting, the CRM for tenant leads, tenant management and communication, you've got the calendar scheduling, which sounds like kind of team communication, and then you've got the Roommates functionality, so, [00:26:29] Joe: so we have a whole document. So anything you can manage all your, so we have both PDF and from scratch. So if you want to build an agreement yourself, you can drop in, easy pop in auto fills on the template, or you can just add a PDF and build the template. We also have them available for every state and county if they're divided. So lots of stuff to do E-signature and create your own lease agreements and manage kind of all that in-house as well. And then notices, So you can build a template notice, send it to a tenant when you know, rent's due or something like that. [00:26:58] Jason: Nice. Very cool. Yeah. Well, sounds like you guys have been busy so. [00:27:03] Joe: Very busy. Yeah, it's been fun. Yeah. [00:27:06] Jason: Very cool. Well, yeah, I can see how this would stand out from some of the property management software. Now you had mentioned that people can migrate from their existing software. So how difficult, because this is usually really painful for people, Yeah, to transition. I've seen people go from AppFolio to Buildium or AppFolio to Rent Manager or switching to Propertyware or Propertyware to AppFolio. Like, so how difficult or easy is it to switch from one of these to Tenant cloud and are there some that are easier than others? [00:27:42] Joe: No. So we've tried to make it as easy as possible. So what we do is we give you a template. So if you go into upload, you can find the upload and then you download a template Excel file. And basically you'll take whatever data you can get. That's the hardest part really isn't so much setting it up in Tenant Cloud. It's more other companies aren't so willing to just give you data. And that's the hardest part is that if you can get the data from them, we give you a template that's really easy added in and once it's in, you're done. Your tenants are set up, all their information is set up. The lease is set up. If you have late fees that are in there, they'll be set up. All of it will be done. Your property will be set up and you'll be live and it'll be working. But it's all, it's really more a problem of like, which software relationship are you trying to get out of? That's a hard one because for us, and we have many that call and like, " well I just want all this!!" And we're like, fortunately Buildium won't give us that data. We can't call them on behalf of you. Yeah. So the only thing we can do is like they can give it to us. Yeah, exactly. So that's the hardest part in getting in, helping people migrate. Is just being able to pull all the information. They spent so much time, putting in another software but on our end, it's really easy to kind of set it up. [00:28:52] And that's the heart of it is because everything is connected. It's helping you do each phase of your life. Because if you ask a property manager, like, what's the hardest part of your job? Well it really depends like one on the season, on the time of the month, and what stage of the property is in. Because if it's vacant, of course it's like, I need a rental, I need leads. I got to find this. But if it's, if they're all rented, well now you're like, oh, I got fridges breaking everywhere. So it just depends on the job. So the software's always set up to help you in all of those sanctions of your life. And so uploading it is really easy because it connects to all of them automatically and you're kind of done. But yeah, again, the hardest part is getting the information. So, yeah, I wish I could say that was really easy, but that's a part we don't usually get to touch. So. Cool. [00:29:35] Jason: Well, Tenant Cloud sounds pretty cool. I have not heard of too many people using it yet, and so I'm really interested in getting some feedback. That'll be really interesting to see. So it sounds like you guys have really been innovating in the space, so. [00:29:49] Joe: Yeah, we've been trying to keep it as affordable as possible and get it going. We now have over a hundred thousand active property managers and landlords. Using it and over a million tenants. So it's been fun, but you'll look at how big the market is and there's 15 million DIY landlords and something like 18,000 property managers. And, it's a small slice. [00:30:11] There are many out there still using, Excel or, a back of the notebook to keep track of stuff. So it is more about getting the word out there and let them know that there is a nice, easy solution to use. [00:30:21] Jason: Yeah. Very cool. So, now if they have a website, like say from us third party website or their own site or whatever are they able to get the rental listings? [00:30:31] Oh, I love that you said that. Yes. [00:30:32] An embed code to put into their site. [00:30:34] Joe: Yep. So if they just give us, they can tell us now, I will give you a quick hack so there's a quick hack, but then we can also help them do it. And so the quick hack is we give you a free site and if you have a listing link, so if you just relink that listing of yours and use Tenant Cloud, it'll automatically go there because it's the relink. Right? However we can help you customize it. So the free one we give you is going to be an extension of Tenant Cloud, right? Yeah, it's our free version. But if you want us to host it, we do have to be given the credentials, but we can host it and then you'll have an active live site, and then there are parts of it you can turn off or turn on. So you could use, if you've already built one, you say, I want to host this, but I still want the listings on my native site. We can do that for you. We have quite a few that do that. So, and the listing functions nice. It gives you a map, it'll show all your rentals. So you have a sub thing that you can click and, see a preview and then you go to the full listing. And then on there is really where the CRM powers because it says, 'do you have a question?' Or it'll be like, 'schedule a tour' or 'fill out an application.' And so each one of those, so if they schedule a tour or have a question that goes right to your CRM. And so that's where you can respond to them how whatever format they want to respond. If they give you email, you can do email. If it's text, you can do text. Or if they create an account, they can talk actually through the Tenant Cloud app. But then of course they've got an application, it forces them to put that behind some closed information just so they're not [00:31:55] Jason: I'm seeing some-- put it out-- Smart property managers switching from doing one-off showings for every vacancy constantly to doing open house dial. And is that possible using Tenant Cloud? [00:32:08] Joe: You can schedule them as open house, but what we don't have and that what we want to do, and this really came about from Covid, is we've been working with a company, so it's coming out here in the future, but it's not there. And that is to be able to do remote showings. So the remote showings are slightly different than open house. What it is soon you'll be able to have where you set up, it's a door lock, it gives a specific code to a phone, and then there are two cameras set up in it, wifi, and then so you have control of all the doors and you have a camera view. And so someone can go in and quickly get a text number that's going to be live for 10 minutes and you can literally watch them. And give them a short tour before they go out and you can secure the place back up and know whether any new windows were left open or any doors. And so you like, do those. So that's been more of the answer we've done just because it is, if you do the open house it there, there's a lot of things that require onsite. So it's like, how can we help property managers again, with the logistics problem. Yeah. And logistics problem's the hard one because you go, you list the property. And half the problem is like only 50% of the people show up showings and you drove a long way to get there and you're like, Ugh. And so yes, to get as many people at a specific time is great. And so you can kind of set that up with your calendar. That's easy. But the real heart of it is like, how can I show this and actually just be right here on my computer? So I could do five showings at the exact same time from my laptop. And that's really the heart of what we're trying to get to, is that you should be able to do that during business hours, know that it's locked up and know who it is that went into the rental. And so that's part of it. They have to get verified in order to get a code. And so they're using their phone as part of that process. There's a picture and an id check as well. And so they're verifying themselves, which just helps keep honest people honest when they're setting up and doing a rental. So you're kind of doing a bit of vetting as you set some different things up. So, so that's more of where we're trying to go, is trying to get more remote. [00:34:04] Jason: Cool. Cool stuff. So, well, I think everybody should go check it out. How can people get in touch with you or learn more about Tenant Cloud? [00:34:13] Joe: Yeah, I'm always easiest on Twitter, so, @Joe_Edgar_ , always accessible there. Tenant Cloud's the sites, t e n a n t c l o u d TenantCloud.com. And you can find us on all the social media. But yeah, definitely hope to check it out. It's, like I said, we have a base version that's free and then, other features that come on top of that. You can set up your bank account. Receive applications, list your property, move in a tenant, and collect rent online, and that's all free. [00:34:42] Jason: So, Cool. Very cool. Yeah, I think that was the first episode we did with you. You, we were talking about how I think software for property managers will be free someday. So. [00:34:51] Joe: Yes. I honestly think it's going to go that more and more features are coming to where it's like, the more of your business isn't there. Like some of the stuff I hope we get to, and I'll mention this just because more of the viewers are property managers, but if you remember that I talked about the maintenance request function and getting a bid. Well, I'm no stranger to property management. I own a couple of property management companies. And built the software off of that. And I know in our, one of them is fairly large, and so we have a maintenance crew, we have a turning crew, we have a painting crew. We now even have a a cabinet crew. We go through so many cabinets. We're like, we just need to build these ourselves. And so we have all these different crews and they're just doing us. But one of the biggest costs is the downtime. And so for them it's like each one of them is a side business. And so it's like we've been trying to like think of ways there, like how can we grow this? And I know I'm not alone. And so what we're hoping to get to is that all the property managers who use us are. They'll soon have a little flip that comes up that they can turn on to now get leads. And so they will be part of the ones like saying, Hey, we have a service that does carpet cleaning. And so inside of my normal property management, now I can actually go and service people outside of the properties I manage if I want to look to expand some of the businesses that I've now created. [00:36:10] And so, and it's unique because property management is different. Like if I go and if I say to a property manager, Hey I have a property I need to do a turn on. They know exactly what that means. And there's not just one contractor outside of property management that could do that. And so property managers are in a unique space where they're like, well, I know exactly what you need. I need to go do an inspection. I need to check the carpets, I need to check the walls. There's probably going to be some painting. I got to do a little plumbing. I may even have to do some hvac, I'm going to have to do a little landscaping. And all of that's tied into it and owning a property manager has built out some of the functions to be able to service that. It's not all the property management companies, but quite a few of them will do it as they grow, just because they're like, well, we're now in-house. We're doing enough of them. I've got one lawn mowing guy that's running or something. So, so it's a nice feature that we hope to really bring out to embrace our own customers, helping them now find and grow their business in other unique ways they never thought about. So. [00:37:05] Jason: Awesome. Very cool. Well, Joe, thanks for being on the show. Appreciate you being here. [00:37:10] Joe: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks. [00:37:11] Jason: All right, so check out tenantcloud.com. Sounds like it's really cool software. I'm really curious to get your feedback on how it compares to whatever else you've been using or what you're using for those that are doing research lately. So, let us know in our Facebook group. So join our free community that's available to property management entrepreneurs on Facebook. It is DoorGrow Club. The DoorGrow Club. You can get to that by going to DoorGrowclub.com and it will redirect you to our Facebook group. Answer the questions and join the group and we will give you some free gifts as well and that can benefit your property management business. And, check us out at DoorGrow.com. We are the world's leading property management coaching mastermind. We are helping grow and scale property management companies rapidly. We would love to help you grow and scale your business, figure out operations, make your day-to-day easier, and take some vacations, people. [00:38:05] Jason Hull: 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! [00:38:32] 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.

Are you aware of how much money you would need to protect and potentially replace all of the assets in the properties you manage? Join Jason as he chats with Aaron Lombardo from North Star Reserves about what a reserve study is, and how having one completed can benefit your property management business. You'll Learn... [01:21] Who is Aaron from North Star Reserves? [05:09] What is a Reserve Study? [16:30] What is the Difference Between a Reserve Study and an Inspection? [20:14] A New Concept: the "LIL Effect" [33:50] How to Stop Your Clients from Micromanaging You Tweetables "Property's easy to manage. People are tough to manage." "Retaining a client, you're continually selling them on why they should be with you. It involves trust." "One thing that property managers incur too much is blame." "Each property is a business and it needs to be able to be maintained." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Aaron: what the reserve study really does is creates kind of an internal bank of their own funds and we help them manage a threshold so they can have a zero base threshold where they're just managing just enough in contributions to maintain those assets over long term or they can increase that threshold so that there's a nest egg if you will, a buffer or padding [00:00:21] Jason Hull: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the # DoorGrowShow. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not bebecause 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. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:21] Aaron: I went in and got my undergrad, my bachelor's in psychology. So I majored in family and marriage therapy and kind of the end of that I realized I didn't want to be in psych. I love it. I love people, but I migrated very quickly into the construction industry. And I worked for the third largest builder in the country and managed multimillion dollar budgets as far as from the building side and construction. Was recruited by the largest builder in the state of Utah and spent quite a bit of time with them working through kind of their ranks, managing, again, oversight on millions of dollars in purchasing materials, actually building the structures from the ground up. That experience led me into the general manager position with them on their custom home division quietly running this custom home division. They were really a track builder and they had all sorts of, different styles, designs and levels of building from commercial to residential, and they had this quiet custom home division that was really exciting. It allowed me to really apply my psych trade into sales, dealing really with high-end buyers and executors buying properties and interacting with those properties as investments and so forth. [00:02:33] And ultimately that kind of landed quite a bit of interaction with building the actual communities themselves, HOAs, working with those HOAs. And then I had an opportunity to really jump ship and partner with a friend of mine in rental management. The short version is that he had a deal to buy a pump company fell out from underneath him after he'd literally moved across the country. And he kind of started by default just managing a rental property, a family's rental property. Anyway, long story short is he needed somebody to come along and help out with that, both on the HOA management and just generally the business. So, We ran this business, we expanded it over two states, Idaho and Utah. In the end, we separated. He took the rental management, I took HOA management. We both have grown those. I really enjoyed the HOA management side of it. It provided a lot of opportunities to interact with property managers as their competitors, but also with the boards. And so it was really by forced majeure that I had to take a deep dive into kind of the rental management, interacting again with real estate, which is where maybe my education wasn't, but my passion certainly was. And then I had an opportunity to buy this little mom and pop reserve study company out of Emmett, Idaho, and this was just a retiring couple that I had actually used their services several times in the rental and hoa management industry. And I just loved the idea of getting back into the budgets, but it afforded me the opportunity as well to get into the field doing site inspections for these properties while managing these budgets. [00:04:08] And so I did, we sold the HOA management company. We bought this little mom and pop. We've grown it to eight states, and then we consult in several others. We're in multiple markets within, kind of these states and subsets of these states, destination stops and so forth. And I'll tell you what a reserve study is here in just a second, which is why I'm here with you, I suppose, Jason, but we do, reserve studies and site inspections for golf courses and country clubs high rises. We do commercial properties and strip malls. We do a lot of homeowners associations that have clubhouses and buildings that they have to maintain in streets. We've done some really cool townships where we've done entire, small cities or small towns, airports And and then water treatment facilities. So we, we feel like we've got a real, broad gamut of these things. These properties of different sorts. Some are owned, by a governing body like an hoa, and some are owned by real estate investors or owners that are looking to track their costs. And that's where the reserve study comes in itself. [00:05:09] Jason: Got it. Cool. So tell us what is a reserve study? [00:05:14] Aaron: Right. The magic question. So a reserve study is really just a 30 year outlay of all income and expenses and using that contribution is what we call it, a contribution of that revenue to reserves or savings to maintain and repair all their physical assets over the course of 30 years. So it takes in a lot of aspects of that, right? You have the revenue that comes in and we call that the contribution. And it's just a piece of maybe the property's total revenue and then that contribution will fund the future maturation of all of those assets from the replacement of the roof to the maintenance of the plaster in the pool ceiling on the streets, et cetera, et cetera. And so it really takes, the full gamut. It includes inflation and the cost of inflation that compounds over time. It includes the useful life is what we call it in the industry for each individual item, right? Not everything wears the same and not everything wears the same in different. Locations. Our California clients have properties, in Spokane and in Spokane. It's just a harsher climate. And so their properties weather different, and if they don't take that into account and really understand the nuances of that it catches them off guard because of the weathering that occurs in a different, in different places. [00:06:29] Jason: Right. Just like cars in winter areas with the salted roads, the undercarriage gets rusted out. California no issue with that. So, That's right. At least not in SoCal. All right. So, cool. All right, I get that. So how do you go about doing these reserve studies and how does this relate to property management? I really haven't heard of any property managers doing this. I'm sure some do or should be. So tell us about that. [00:06:58] Aaron: Well, so the truth of it is there's not a lot of well, let me rephrase that, a lot of property managers do that if they're, if they have oversight in an HOA or some sort of governing body. We break our service down into two pieces. There's the actual physical creation of the reserve study, and then there's the consulting on how to use the reserve study, our other kind of group of clients, aside from just HOA property managers. Are, owners and business owners. So, typically when we're working with a property manager on a rental property or a multi-unit property, it's usually the owner or, sometimes it's the CFO or CEO that's looking at this property from a strictly, revenue generation standpoint. And they're looking at their total expense load and we build that expense load. So it comes in two parts. The first part is really just the physical creation of the reserve study that involves a site inspection. So we perform a physical site inspection where we comb through every piece of this property. Let's use a high-rise as an example. A high-rise might have everything from a generator tucked into the parking garage to, common area, boiler units that are serving all of the rental units above, and the roof and the windows, and all of the pieces. [00:08:07] In a typical high-rise, there might be 80 to a hundred components. That all have a varying degree of cost. Some of them need to be touched or maintained on an annual basis, and some of them you don't need to really worry about but every 30 or 40 years and those, long-term items usually have a significant cost that we're trying to help our owners avoid loans on. [00:08:29] Right. They can essentially, Jason, what the reserve study really does is creates kind of an internal bank of their own funds and we help them manage a threshold so they can have a zero base threshold where they're just managing just enough in contributions to maintain those assets over long term or they can increase that threshold so that there's a nest egg, if you will, a buffer or padding that allows, far more flexibility on how to use those funds for the improvement of those physical assets. [00:09:02] So the first part of that is just performing the site inspection, converting those physical assets into usable data, right? So we'll document every aspect of, the pool as an example, right down to the pool pumps. Pool pumps and pool plaster and the pool deck and the pool cover. I mean, there's a dozen components that maintain what we would, you and I would just call a pool, right? Yeah, there's a dozen components that would maintain that. We break those down, they all get a useful life. We convert that into data that has a useful life, a term for its expiration, and then a cost associated with that. In the process of that, we're contacting vendors, usually local vendors to that state or maybe that destination stop that town and city. So that we're finding out the local pricing and we plug that in commensurate to, their actual costs. And then we produce what we call a reserve study. [00:09:55] And it's a lengthy report. It'd be a hundred page report. Half of that is usually a very detailed page over page breakdown of every component, what we discovered, what our actual site inspection uncovered. And oftentimes we uncover problems that they don't, and sometimes that their management or their maintenance men don't see. Their maintenance men have a tendency to look at certain high visual items where we're in the process of discovering from a construction standpoint. What are the forthcoming or future problems that they might incur? A great but terrible example, and this has brought the whole industry kind of forefront. Everybody at this point has heard about the Florida condo that literally fell, and it was a horrible tragedy. You've heard of that? [00:10:38] Jason: I didn't hear that. [00:10:39] Aaron: You didn't hear about that? All right. [00:10:41] Jason: No. So when I was in Mexico and there was a hotel, or like a condo building next to one of the resorts we stayed at, and it won all these awards for design, but it like started sinking and collapsing. [00:10:52] Aaron: Oh yeah that's a different one. So, so this Florida compound really a preventable tragedy and a terrible tragedy. So this had a pool on an upper deck. So it was like a parking garage and imagined large concrete with rebar columns underneath upholding that pool and the structure above it. And over the course of probably decades, there was corrosion from the pool. Now pool chemicals are just brutal on everything that they touch right, even the concrete. And over time they noticed some corroding that had leaked into cracks and fissures in the concrete and had corroded, the rebar, which is kind of the structural integrity of the columns themselves. Long story short is they didn't have the funds or reserves, right. They didn't have the savings, just interchangeable word with reserves. They didn't have the reserves to fund repairs. And after decades of that type of corrosion, the columns gave way and the whole pool inside of the structure gave. And once the structure started to give, it was a cascading effect. And multiple stories of this condo complex fell and killed people, and it was just a horrible, preventable-- [00:12:05] Jason: wow. [00:12:06] Aaron: --Problem. Now that's about as dramatic as these circumstances get mind you. Right. Most of the time what we see is we see, gutters, for example, that are leaking off into the the wall and we know the cues and the primers that are kind of indicating that there's probably a leak behind the stucco itself. Right. Stucco's a permeable material. Yeah. But if it gets beyond the paper, behind the stucco, then you have wall issues and we see that. Pretty often where rain gutters are not skirting all of the snow, ice, and rain away from the building. So all of that's preventable If number one, there's funds to do it and if number two, there's eyes that can pick it up. So we help discover both of those. We help outline, highlight those potential problems and sometimes those problems in live. And then we help ensure that they have a plan of how and when those funds will occur in order to maintain and replace and repair all of those assets. [00:13:07] Ultimately the purpose of any property is to maintain and increase the value of that property, right? No investor wants to get in... [00:13:15] Jason: yeah. [00:13:15] Aaron: ...and not come out on the back end, however many years that might be, and not earn a profit at some level or another, either from the sale of the property or for the ongoing rental of the property. And that can only occur if you're maintaining the property in a condition that it can do so, in my opinion, in optimal condition. [00:13:33] Jason: So one of the things that comes to mind, so my wife and I like taking trips to Mexico and we've gone to some resorts in Mexico that have been around a long time, like decades. Yeah. And we didn't realize it because the rooms seemed new, the paint, but we saw maintenance people on this building. All day long, every day there were just people doing the grounds, doing painting, like everything. And it looked great. And then we just took a trip to Puerto Rico and we stayed at this modern kind of new sort of looking resort. I don't know how long it's been around, but it's already has rust coming down the white sides of the building from the top. They had some nets to capture, I don't know, maybe bird stuff or, I have no idea. Yeah. But they were torn and the room was mildewey and like, it just wasn't what it looked like in the pictures. It was just starting to show some wear and tear, and we were just kind of like, why don't they maintain it? Which was interesting. [00:14:27] Aaron: Well, and this is the second piece of what we do, the consulting piece of this because we have conversations like this all the time. 'Well, I've got this property that behaves very differently than this property. Right? And how do we appropriate these funds commensurate to the type of building?' It really is dependent on the purpose. Like people, not any property is really identical. They're not used the same way. They're not used the same frequency. Yeah. They're not in the same climate zone, et cetera, et cetera. And I think of a similar building that you just described in Montana. So we did recently did a site inspection on this architecturally really fascinating building. And they kind of jammed it into the corner of two main intersections. Okay. And the whole building architecturally is steel. It's intentionally rusting, and it's intentionally that way to keep the maintenance low. That steel on the outside will outlive all of us. And so the maintenance won't be going into the exterior of this building. It was designed for a very low maintenance exterior. Now, the interior finishes are different. The interior, it's got this high end deck and you've got this neat garden area and, you get into the inside, it's got this, really nice elevator and all of these things require a high level of maintenance in order to keep functionality optimal for that particular property. [00:15:42] We do some properties for investors that really intentionally just want to strip out and, for lack of a better term, it sounds bad the way I say it, but, we treat it a little bit differently. They want to strip out every dollar that they can because it's just not a high valued property to them, wherever it might be or however they might be using it. In which case we can put together a plan that. Creates basically what we call a baseline funding. It's a zero funding. It's just setting aside just enough to fund the needed maintenance to meet those financial goals. Again, being very intentional, right? I think most investors and executors fail when you have multiple properties and they start using funds from other properties to carry another or they're not intentional about the monies they're setting aside for maintenance. [00:16:29] Jason: So let me ask a question. So I recently bought a house. I'm here in it right now. Right? And it's over a decade old and we had a home inspection and most people connected to real estate are very familiar with a home inspection. How does a reserve study differ from a home inspection, maybe on like a single family residential property? [00:16:51] Aaron: Yeah, I'll be real candid with you, Jason. I think that the home inspection is very similar. Matter of fact, I have seen some really great home inspections where they will outline potential problems, right? That's the difference between maybe a typical inspector and a home inspector. An inspector might come in and they're going to say, 'okay, these are the things you need to do. These are the things that are really obvious.' A home inspector has a tendency like we do, to really get their hands dirty. They're looking for the little primers, the little cues that indicate that you have a leaking water heater, that the roof shingles are coming up on the ends and, stuff like that. And so I've been really impressed with some home inspections. The only real difference is taking that home inspection and converting it into datas, dollars, and timelines. So that's the difference. So when bought your home, you get a home inspection and it's left to you, buyer, to say, 'okay, well how do I feel about the fact that there's this, that and the other?' And you have to figure out a way to now negotiate that home inspection with your seller on what it means to you. What's the financial, consequence of that home inspection? We take it a pretty major step, but one step further where we say, 'okay, how long is that problem going to endure? When does it need to be replaced? And how much is it going to cost?' And then we build a report that actually puts numbers, dollars, and timelines to that. There's no more guesswork. The math now has a voice. [00:18:17] Jason: Got it. Got it. Okay, cool. Now I can see how this would be useful for rental properties, which are not just a home to live in, but they are a long-term investment and they're basically, each property is a business and it needs to be able to be maintained. It needs to run well, especially if their goal is to have it accrue in value over time, or for it to be making them a certain amount of money each month. Et cetera. So, okay. [00:18:47] Aaron: Now there's two pieces of that though, right? All right, so you've got, I mentioned in the beginning that you've got this kind of physical aspect the site inspection and then the data, and the vast majority, mind you, we don't shy away from data, but we also know how to read it. So when we produce a report, it's usually a lot to digest. And the second piece of that is, well, now what do we do with this data? How do I actually use this data and apply, and this kind of gets into the human element. So this is where it speaks to my psych degree, my salesmanship, if you will, which I just really love people. I think as much as we love properties and I do people, it's really what makes everything work. So now you've got to know, well, how do we take this data? And apply it to a property and in some cases apply it to manage the owner themselves. I'm not a hundred percent clear on your audience, for example. But if we just take a property manager that's managing to an investor, and I've been, in this circumstance, I've been that property manager managing to a CEO of a home builder that had multiple properties we were managing and they have certain expectations and sometimes those expectations are based on their feel, their gut feel. [00:19:59] And it was always better to manage that executor, that owner, that CEO with actual math, with the actual numbers where I can push back without it being a gut feel on my end. So I have what I call the LIL effect, like coin that myself, LIL, like little, the little effect. So one thing that property managers incur too much is blame. When there's stressors, when there's misunderstanding, when maybe the profitability is not there. Yeah. Property managers inadvertently end up being the scapegoat for owners that have left the management to the property, but shouldn't be leaving maybe the profitability to the property manager. Right? So we have what we call the LIL effect. So, and the LIL effect simply is the first L is listen more to your clients. You'd be shocked Jason. How often as a vendor... so I'm usually brought in as kind of a vendor to augment what the property manager might be doing for the owner. And you'd be surprised how many times the vendor or the owner may call and want some specific details that the property manager, doesn't know or is fine deferring to us because we do some consulting. [00:21:14] And then they open up about all sorts of problems and complaints and I'm constantly on the defence. I want to focus on the data and, not necessarily the complaints, but I'm a fly on the wall all the time. And one of the biggest complaints is that they're I think is that they're just not being heard enough. So property managers do a great job managing properties, but sometimes there's a pivot point that they miss with their owners, their clients, their executors. And so the first L is just listening more to the client. The 'I' that we have in the LIL effect is Intention, so being very intentional about building trust. I know a lot of property managers that are really good in the industry because they just, are honest and they just naturally build trust. But if they're not intentional, they leave so much of that trust on the table and they can build a lot of trust by being intentional. So the first L is for listening more to your clients. The 'I' is for intentionally building trust. In fact, an interesting story to go along with that. When I worked for a builder I was told at the very outset that there was an architect, very difficult to work with. We'll call him Brian. And Brian was impossible. [00:22:26] Brian did things his way and he was just difficult to work with. He was the head architect, so everything had to run through him, and if you couldn't get it through him, you couldn't get it done. And I had to get stuff done through him as a fairly new employee with this builder. And I determined right in the beginning that I would figure out a way to earn his trust. And I decided early on that I would just believe everything Brian told me. I would just take it at face value, trust, the fact that he knew what he was doing. Now everybody knew that he was emotionally driven, right? And a fascinating thing came out of this, Jason, I learned over the course of, less than a year, took some time, but I learned over the course o of that year that number one, I earned Brian's trust by hearing him out, asking questions strategically, and being very intentional about building that trust. The other thing that actually was quite fascinating to me is that I learned to really respect Brian. I gained a relationship with him and I could get things done through Brian that nobody else could, simply because I'd been intentional and at the time it was kind of accidental intention. Yeah. And it was a phenomenal relationship that he and I had. He was pretty rough around the edges, had his way, but I had, I could bend his ear, unlike most people could because I'd spent a significant amount of time building that trust. [00:23:48] Jason: That's interesting. I had a job working at HP and there were two of us on a team. We managed this software called Concentra, which was this workflow for all of their PDFs and documents for all their computers, printers, at everything to move through to make sure that there was some sort of quality. And it, it went through legal and it went through everything else. And so there were us two nerds and our boss was in, we were in Boise and our boss was in Texas. And I noticed he didn't trust us. He was always like trying to micromanage us and distrustful of us, and so I just started setting-- we used an instant message tool to communicate most of the time, so I just started changing my status. I'm like, how can I make him feel safer and trust me? So I had the intention. To build trust. And so, and the way I did that is I just communicated through my messenger status, showing what I was working on all the time, so he didn't have to ask me and say, 'Hey, did you guys doing stuff? Or what are you doing?' It just said, 'I'm working on this and I'm working on that'. And I would just update it throughout the day. He started to trust me and then he started to ask me about my coworker, what's he doing? Is he getting stuff done? I thought that was really funny. Yeah. Like acting like he'd-- this guy like didn't even know our names though. He like, eventually he just couldn't even remember our names, which is sad. [00:25:02] Aaron: But that level of transparency, solves all so many problems before they occur. [00:25:07] Jason: Yeah. So I like that. Yeah. Property managers need to listen more to their clients and they need to focus on the intention of building trust because really, I tell my clients sales and deals happen at the speed of trust. Yeah. In order to get clients, but keeping clients. Same thing, retaining a client, you're continually selling them on why they should be with you. It involves trust. Yeah. Trust goes, they go. [00:25:33] Aaron: It does. And it really is about being intentional, right? Because again, I know property managers who are quite good at it, but they're, there's a difference with being intentional. Yeah. Being strategic. [00:25:44] Jason: Yeah. because if their intention is just to do their job, that's not going to necessarily create trust. But if their intention is to create trust, then they're far more likely to do it. Yeah. This is interesting too becausewe have a tool we use with our clients so they can get more out of their day and we call it DoorGrow's Daily Planning. We have this daily planning exercise, and the goal is to map out, part of the daily planning exercise is to figure out what are all the appointments you have for the day, and then what intention do you have for each of those? Because we find just by having an intention and being clear on what your intention is with a particular outcome, you're far more likely to get the result ironically. So, if your intention is to go into a conversation and win, or create a win-win or to benefit them or whatever, you're far more likely if you're clear on that intention, then you just go into it and go, 'well, I have a meeting.' Right. Yeah. So, yeah. [00:26:36] Aaron: Well, I couldn't agree with you more. It's so we've got listen more to the clients, right? So to finish the LIL effect, intentionally build trust. And the last one, Is really one of the most undervalued, and that's, listen to your trades. And I'm not talking about just hearing them out, I'm talking about like understanding, understanding their perspective. You'd be shocked how many, so I talk to trades a lot. [00:27:00] Jason: Define trades. Are you talking about vendors that'll do work on property? [00:27:03] Aaron: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Your concrete guys, your maintenance guy. The, these are invaluable people that, sometimes I think property managers don't reach out to these trades. At the level they could because they see a guy that, you know, just for lack of a better term, just eats concrete for breakfast. He knows concrete. He loves concrete, he's really good at it, and they want him to solve a problem concrete related. But I can't tell you how many times I've talked to vendors, I'm usually gathering price and I can speak their language and I know all things construction from the ground up. So I can get into those conversations and as I do that, I've been shocked. At how many things they keep close to the chest because they've learned, and this goes back to kind of the psych days learned helplessness. They've learned that nobody really wants their opinion. They just want them to solve a problem. 'Solve this concrete problem, fix this tree,' whatever it might be. And so they have learned over the years to just keep those things close to the chest. But what they have close to the chest is often little golden nuggets of understanding of both property and profitability. They have ideas on how to turn a property more profitable in their little, bucket of trade, right? They're concrete or they're trees and, property managers are leaving some profits on the table, in my opinion, because they're not getting those vendors, not building the trust with those vendors to glean the little pieces and it goes back to, I forget the name of the book, 1% Better, where if you're gathering 1% better and you talk to 15 different, vendors and they all can provide you, you know even half a percent profitability better, suddenly you have a property that's 7% more profitable. That's incredible. [00:28:46] Jason: Yeah. That's interesting. The last place I was in, we were renting and it wasn't managed by a property manager and the owner took two weeks to replace water heater because he was just being super anal and trying to figure out the best one. Basically a problem property managers can solve for people. And one of the plumbers came out and. He like was badmouthing the owner saying that he was being cheap and then he like, but the level of detail this guy was because I was just curious in asking questions because that's just my nature. He was telling me like, 'these type of water heaters, they last this long, this other one's going to go out soon. And if we put in one like this, I recommend it be this capacity because it's going to last this much longer or do this' like the level of detail he knew about water heaters. Brands of water heaters and how much, putting the right one in and what it could save you in the long term and doing the long term. I was like really impressed. Yeah, so this rings very true to me. Everybody that is really an expert in their craft. And this guy ran his company, so we were lucky that he was the one that came out, I guess. The level of expertise that some of these vendors or trades, or not sure they call them tradies, yeah. That they have is really yeah, it, I can see how it could be a huge asset. [00:30:04] Aaron: Huge asset. So that's the LIL effect. They really are a huge asset. So you've got, listen more to your clients, the intentional of building trust, and listening to your trades and vendors and anyway, that LIL effect will produce positive consequences every day of the week. There's really no negative and it's kind of rare that you can apply a strategy and not have, some downside of it. But it's pretty easy to apply. Maybe a more listening and intentional ear. Yeah. Something that we're noticing, that kind of goes along with this, and I think everybody's probably feeling this at this point. I've been waiting for everybody to feel like the pinch of what's going on, right. So, one thing that we're trying to do here for our business is just constantly be on the pivot where, well, what are our clients feeling? Yeah. What are they experiencing? What are their hardships and challenges? What other problems can we solve? And we've been doing that since inception, but I've been waiting since kind of some of the overall damage from where it started with Covid. When is this downstream damage going to really start affecting just masses, right? And profitability and properties and so forth? And over the last four to six months we're seeing more of it. And on our end, we're ready for that pivot. And what that pivot looks like is when people are pinched financially and emotionally. And additionally, right now politically, when people feel pinched in corner like this, yeah they have a tendency to retreat into corners, right? It's the old adage, that we retreat into our shell. And as people do that, unfortunately trades and property managers, when they're feeling kind of this trifecta of pinch, they have a lack of control. This goes back to the psychology. They have a lack of control. So what do people do when they're losing control of one thing? They go and gain control of another, right? [00:31:51] Jason: Yeah. They start micromanaging other stuff. [00:31:54] Aaron: Yes. And asking all the wrong questions in that micromanagement, right? And so they start micromanaging, they start trying to regain control. And I see sometimes property managers pushing back because again, the client's asking the wrong group of questions, seeking for some semblance of balance of control. And as they push back, then they're usually again scapegoated into some failure, some misunderstanding, some reason that the client needs to retake or re grab control. Yeah. And when they're insecure and out of control, we often coach our clients to tell them, 'look, let them. Give them a moment. They don't want to drive the car. They don't really want to drive the car. Yeah. They want to know that they can drive the car.' Right. And so clients come, they feel uncomfortable, they want to regain control. And so we'll tell our property managers many times, ' let them sit in the driver's seat. It's like taking a teen, and you remember the old driving the cars, they had a brake pedal in the passenger seat where the instructor could sit and slam on the brakes and-- [00:33:04] Jason: Yeah. [00:33:04] Aaron: --Scare the teen right out of his gourd. I mean, that's how I learned to drive from a instructor. But it's kind of-- [00:33:10] Jason: sounds like a mean instructor. [00:33:12] It's sometimes though it's like that the property [00:33:14] Aaron: manager would be wise to step aside for a moment and let them get in. Actually a lot like you did with, telegraphing. Almost over transparency. This is what I'm doing, this is what I'm doing. Let them see how you're driving. Let them see every turn you're making. And eventually they get to a point where they're like, yeah, he's driving fine. I don't, they don't want to drive. And property managers hold that close to the chest. I can't let them get in. I can't let them, do X, Y, and Z because that's my job. That's my responsibility. And they guard that tenaciously and that actually leads to more distrust in the moment than trust. [00:33:48] Yeah, I actually [00:33:49] Jason: teach. And I've had a podcast episode on this subject before, but I actually teach clients that the one thing that people want to buy from a property manager is not property management. What they want to buy is safety and certainty. Yeah. They want to buy peace of mind. That's really what you're selling as a property manager. And so if you're not using LIL and that framework, And you're not going to get those positive consequences. And if you're not making them feel safe, you're actually going to have a higher operational cost in your business because you're going to have a whole bunch of owners that are micromanaging you because yes, if they don't feel safe, they're going to create safety. Yes. In the form of leading and micromanaging you. And if the only positive way to push back on that is to let them know that you know what you're doing to showcase the expertise and let them know that you are better at this than them. Yes. Based on proven history and results. Yes. [00:34:44] Aaron: I, that is such a great point, Jason. Matter of fact, that's really, really kind of the key, if they'll filter everything through what you just said, if they'll filter everything through this idea. Building that trust and managing that relationship that way and not the property. The property's easy to manage. People are tough to manage. True. And if you'll manage to those, like you said, those, those expectations with their end goal then you can manage the property kind of on, on the side. In fact, it's interesting. I would also say that anytime, That they see Anytime that, our clients see micromanagement from their clientele, that should be the first cue that they're on their way out. Yeah. You know that they're, they don't trust you, that they're not trusting and that eight, eight out of 10 times 80% of the time, I would say that when you have an owner or property manager or an executive body that's frustrated or micromanaging they don't know it yet sometimes, but they're already beginning the process of finding somebody who they feel that can do a better job and they never do. [00:35:50] They only find somebody to solve a problem for a minute. But the problem is really, like you said, trust, expectation, those relationships, because the property is not the challenge. [00:36:01] Jason: Yeah. I mean, there might be one counter to this. So one thing that's I think is really interesting is we'll have clients in our coaching program and sometimes they're just like grumpy and they complain about everything and they're frustrated, but they stay. And then sometimes they're really happy and they're getting great results and then they leave. And so what we've learned to pay attention to, In the realm of client success is that it's not even necessarily connected to whether or not they are happy or you're getting them great results or not. Which is really weird, but client retention is based on whether or not they still see a future with you or not. And that there's a future plan. And so as long as they have a future goal, a future roadmap, they might be miserable as they do all of it, but they'll still stick with you because they see a future that includes you, and so they'll stay with you, but it's very easy for them to start creating a new future the second they start not having a good experience with you, they start to imagine, man, it might be better with somebody else. Yeah. [00:37:00] Aaron: And with that, you can't discount the 80 20 rule either, right? There's a, there's the law of averages and statistically speaking, it's been proven, a thousand times that. 20% of your clientele is going to be 80% of your time expenditure. Right. [00:37:13] Jason: Which is why you should probably fire 20% of your clients. [00:37:17] Aaron: I knew you were going to say that. I set you up, Jason. I knew you were going to say that. I the truth is I've actually watched property managers do that very thing and they just end up with the different 20%. Right? Right. Yeah. So better, the better way to do it is if you're going to fire, because I don't think. I don't think the idea is lost. I think you got to look at profitability and Yeah. Which ones are really not making you money, right? And those are the ones to let go because you're going to end up with the same 20% of kind of high maintenance clientele. And if they're profitable, then maintain it. And if they're not, then call it and get to the 20% of higher profitability clients. Right. That's again, coming back to intention. [00:37:58] Jason: I would agree related, if you're focused just on the currency of cash, but if you're focused on the currency of like your peace of mind and time and other things, then it might not be worth it. [00:38:10] Aaron: Some. That's a great point. That's so true. [00:38:12] Jason: So it might not be worth it because it really, the goal of a business isn't just money. The goal of a business is to give us more freedom, more fulfillment as a business owner, more of a sense of contribution and more support. That's why we build a business, why we build a team. And so some owners are stealing that from people, and I think a lot of times it's easily solved by just setting really good boundaries, expectations. And like you were talking about communication. Yeah. And that most owners, when they're micromanaging like that, they just want to know you're actually holding the steering wheel. That's it. As soon as they recognize that, they're like, oh, okay, I'm fine. And so a lot of times it's just a matter of being stronger towards them. Like some of my clients, I teach them to say, 'No, Mr. Owner, we're not going to do that and here's why.' And then suddenly that owner disarms. But a lot of times if they say, okay, I'll do that for you, the owner then goes, 'oh, I now need to lead them through everything to get the results that I want.' [00:39:08] Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. So that's great. [00:39:12] Jason: Interesting stuff. All right, so, now a lot a lot of my clients are managing small multi-family units, single family residential, maybe some condos. There might be some association management. When does it make sense to reach out to North Star? [00:39:28] Aaron: When they want to use and empower the actual math is what I call it, when they want to use and empower the actual revenue versus expense load for decision making processes. Okay. It's really, there's a balance between the revenue and the expense load, and in almost all cases, the expense load is higher. So when I call it a balance, it's not like it's an equal balance. The expense load over time is higher when you factor in the revenue with profitability, et cetera. So how do we empower the math to make decisions based on the actual dollars and cents and not just aesthetics? [00:40:08] Jason: Okay, so let's take an example. Should they reach out to North Star if they have an owner that they can tell is not doing things mathematically effectively so that they can actually leverage your data in insight to say to this owner, you're being an idiot. You need to do it this way. Is that a good case example. [00:40:28] Aaron: It's a great example. In fact, in downtown Boise there's a highrise, I won't mention it. And very nice, very, kind of high end highrise. And the property manager called us, this is actually just a couple years ago, but I still play this one out because it changed everything. And they were ready to spend $50,000 just on a furniture rehab. And long story short is the furniture was already nice. I mean, high end from the lobby to the rooftop. And in the end we ran through reserve study, helped them see that a $50,000 was not only not in the budget, but a gross overspend. They still spent 15 grand, but that other 35 went to a future roof project that they were not only not prepared for, but didn't have properly funded. So the answer is yes, to I would say anytime that a property manager wants to help mitigate or remove the emotion from the pushback that they might get with their owners or executive body and using the math to make those financial decisions, that's an appropriate time to call North Star. Another great aspect of having a reserve study and having the proper financial is creating continuity. So once you start that decision making process, owners and property managers get really good at creating continuity for that decision making process, and that reduces the time expenditure on a property that reduces the discussion, meeting time, expenditure with their owners. And so we call it continuity. In fact, we have a continuity program, which is really a consulting program that we use the existing study to take them through a year long process of decision making and preparation where we are basically on retainer by the course of the year to interact and help create that continuity. Directly, it's actually always designed for the property manager. So that's create continuity for the property manager to use the financials to manage those long-term decisions. [00:42:20] Jason: So I imagine another use case would be they're about to take on a rough property and I get questions like this, should I take it on? Yeah. I mean, often the answer is no. But if the owner is amenable to like fixing it up, making the changes necessary, but a lot of times there's a lot of emotion in it for them. Yeah. And so if they can connect them to the math and to reality through something like working with North Star then, and they're willing to do this, then they could end up being a good client and it could be a good scenario. [00:42:51] Aaron: That's correct. And we resist all things boiler plate, right? We like to tailor it to the real circumstance. We do use some boiler plate numbers to help owners get to a basic understanding of profitability and whether or not to buy a property. More often than not, Jason the questions usually: I want to make an improvement on an existing property, and should I? What's the downstream cost and the downstream cost of maintaining that improvement? Yeah. Right. We want to resurface the streets and, or we want to we want to add in a bar to this, to this, mini restaurant or a bar area. And so you, we've got to look at, where the cost expenditure is and the long-term maintenance of that improvement. [00:43:33] Jason: I would imagine that property managers, if they've even done a few of these situations or scenarios with you, learn an immense amount of insight and knowledge just by through association with what you're doing. [00:43:48] Aaron: Yes. In fact, that's, I didn't start this business doing the consulting side of this. I started with just, reserve studies, right? We just produce a reserve study, we produce the math, and it's my nature to kind of help people through that. And I don't push back on people with meeting and the time expense of meeting. [00:44:05] I help them through it. But that has evolved over years into really a full consulting program because you're exactly right, property managers when they really know how to use it They need less of my expertise on the reserve study and more of my expertise on using the reserve study to manage again, people right, to manage expectations of people, to manage tough conversations with people. Property managers have more longevity in managing a property. I find when one, they have that trust, and two, they do have some profitability because you're right, it is about those people. But their investors want to see good financials. And when the property manager can focus on intentional trust while at the same time producing transparent and profitable financials, I mean, I don't know why anybody would want to leave a property manager that is performing at that level. [00:45:00] Jason: Yeah. So I think the next question somebody would have is, this has to be really expensive. Would it make sense? Like say I get an investor and he's got like, a hundred unit building, or I get a different investor and he's got a hundred single family units and I'm going to bring in this portfolio. Is this something that. Is financially going to make sense? Is there a way for this property manager to convince the owner to do this, and for the property manager to be able to afford to do this in a way that it's going to make them money? [00:45:32] Aaron: Yeah. In a very rare circumstance, has it not really and I'm just being very candid, in a very rare circumstance, has it not financially made sense. In fact, in 2019, and it just happened to be a good timing in late 2019, we created what we call a virtual site inspection for those properties were financially, they just don't maybe have the volume of assets to merit a 30 year full reserve study in the consulting. Yeah. And and so we do a virtual site inspection, which is a little bit more boiler plate, but we'll go on. As long as I have satellite images, I'll do a virtual site inspection from satellite imagery. I can usually get some really great street view images and I can build a reserve study without ever leaving the office. We have staff here and I've got one guy and that's all he does. He just looks at those virtual studies. He builds these virtual studies so we don't ever have to mobilize. We did that because that got the price, the mobilization costs down and therefore it got the price of the reserve study commensurate to producing well, just a profitable report, so it didn't make sense. Yeah, it's not cheap to to, again, to be candid with you, there's a lot that goes into it. Sure. On a high rise, we might have, 80 hours into a full study with the site inspection and all the data gathering. So it's generally not cheap. And so we do try to find balance in that. [00:46:49] Jason: Got it. Well, this is interesting. I think we've gotten a lot of info from you. I appreciate you being here on the show. [00:46:57] For those that are curious or interested in maybe doing their first, reserve study or in connecting with you, how can they get ahold of north Star Reserve? [00:47:10] Aaron: Well, for your customers and clients, Jason, I'd give my personal information out. So they can contact me directly at aaron@northstarreserves.com. [00:47:21] aaron@northstarreserves.com, all spelled out northstarreserves.com is our website. They can call our office at (208) 365-0977 and we'd be happy to help out, put a quote. I don't charge for any upfront consulting. We'll take anybody through their property, their needs just to make sense and vet out whether or not it even makes sense. And I I feel that's just ought to be industry standard, and help people make sure it makes sense in the first place. Right. [00:47:52] Jason: Awesome. Well then hopefully everybody reaches out. Right? I appreciate you. All right, awesome. Well, we appreciate you being on the show, Aaron. This was really insightful and yeah, I'm really, I'm going to be curious to see how this could help benefit some of our clients as well. So thanks for coming on. [00:48:09] Aaron: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate you, Jason. All right, so check out northstarreserves.com. Now, if you are a property management entrepreneur and you are wanting to grow your business, add doors, reach out to DoorGrow. We can help you do this if you're wanting to scale your operations, you just feel like you're banging your head against the wall. You're frustrated. You're trying to deal with all these different tools and software and trying to figure out what's the best way to scale my business. And to make a business that's infinitely scalable? You're going to need a lot of systems. And we've developed what we call the Super System. So you're going to need a people system for hiring and vetting candidates. You're going to need a system for operations in an operating system for planning that motivates your team instead of it's top down pushing your team all the time. We have DoorGrow OS. We have DoorGrow Hiring. You're going to need a system for documenting processes. We have DoorGrow Flow, which is a flow chart based software for mapping out processes and having your team run processes through. So if you're wanting to grow your property management and you're wanting to scale it, you're wanting to get a really good coaching for your operator or operations person. You're wanting to get really good coaching for your BDM or your salesperson to grow and scale and add doors. We are the best at this, so reach out to my team. We have a plethora of coaches and resources. [00:49:32] We've been doing this for over a decade. We love growing and scaling property management companies, and we know that we can help you. If you're willing to just do what we tell you to do, so reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you out. And if you want to test just something, test your website, go to DoorGrow.com/quiz test your property management website and see how effective it is. Usually this is enough to get people to wake up and go, 'Hey, I've got some leaks in my business people.' So most of you have leaky websites that you've gotten from people that are not DoorGrow, and your website is leaking you leads, deals, and money every single week. You could potentially be getting twice as many leads in deals if you're scoring an A on this DoorGrow Quiz. But most are scoring a D, C, or sometimes an F, right? So take this quiz, check it out, DoorGrow.com/quiz and grade your website. And that's it for today. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:50:30] Jason Hull: 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! [00:50:57] 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.

Has anyone ever told you that you need to implement more humor to grow and improve your property management business? Well today, property management growth experts, Jason and Sarah Hull are going to share why humor is an important tool when getting prospects to trust you and choose you over other management companies. You'll Learn… [01:26] Why we use humor to create trust [05:44] Mistakes happen… even in business [10:26] How humor and teasing can build rapport [13:45] How humor can be a sign of intelligence Tweetables "A lot of times, we take ourselves too seriously, and so we act too serious in our business, and when we're too serious, people are less likely to trust us." "You have to be willing to not always look perfect." "Even the best, smartest, fastest learning companies and people, they still make mistakes." "It's okay to make mistakes because it happens to everyone, and it's okay also to ask people for grace." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: Humor really is a sign of intelligence. The more intelligent somebody is, the more they can think on their feet and be witty and create jokes and add humor into the conversation. So I've always viewed humor as a sign of intelligence. [00:00:16] All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You realize that they're the ones that are crazy because they're not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trusts, gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:00:56] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform the property management industry. We want to change the industry. We want to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to eliminate the bs. We want to change the perception. We want to expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host. Property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder, and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. All right, so I sort of adlibbed that a little bit. I kind of messed up my intro a little bit. [00:01:26] All right, everybody. So I want to talk about humor. I want to talk about being funny, and a lot of times we take ourselves too serious, too seriously, and so we act too serious in our business and the when we're too serious, people are less likely to trust us. So you have to be willing to not always look perfect. Like I've made mistakes in business and some of the best ways I can close people and convince people to trust us is I get transparent and real and raw and share some of the challenges I've had in business. That allows people to open up and share as well, and it builds this bridge and this relationship of trust. And you've heard me say before, sales and deals happen at the speed of trust, right? And if they trust you and they know you, and they like you, they're going to work with you. So what I want to talk about is humor. [00:02:22] And so you may have noticed, if you're following us on YouTube, we've put out some funny videos. So, one of them is called Profit Martian and makes fun of the idea of maybe a property manager not having enough profitability in their business and you'll see Sarah, my wife and I, just being really silly around that and it's pretty funny. And then you may laugh, so I recommend you go search for Profit Martian. You can add DoorGrow and you should find it and have a good laugh. The other video we made recently is Not move in ready and you'll see me at the beginning yelling, "not move in ready!" Right? "This is not move ready." So check that out. Sarah and I made a humorous video showing a couple that decides to kind of manage the property themselves and all the stupid mistakes that we make. She's suggested I get a property manager and I was like, "ah, I don't need that. I can do it myself." Right? So check that out. That's funny as well. We actually just recorded our third video, which is going to be about all the reasons why you might not meet a property manager. [00:03:27] And it shows me doing some really uncomfortable things and challenging things and pretending that I like doing the property management stuff, acting as an owner that's doing it myself instead of using a property manager. And I think the working title is 13 Reasons Why You Might Not Need a Property Manager cause we had like 13 different instances. So you'll see me running from a dog when I'm supposed to be doing an inspection and, stuff like this. So, they get pretty ridiculous. What it does is we've already gotten feedback from some clients that signed up because they saw some of these videos because they say it shows our personality, which is true. And it shows that we are real humans, which is true. We're real humans. And it shows that we understand the industry. Like, you can't make funny memes and humor and stuff related to property management unless you kind of understand it, right? And so it showcases a level of expertise just in that we understand it well enough to make some jokes about it. [00:04:27] And so I recommend that you be sure or remember to add a little humor into your sales process. Add a little bit of humor into your interactions. Be willing to laugh and joke about yourself. Shows a lot of vulnerability and confidence to showcase that you don't always have to look perfect. If you're always trying to maintain this look of perfection cause you think that's going to make people feel safe. It actually does the opposite. There's no real secrets or hiding. People know if you're trying to create this perception that everything's amazing in your business when it's not. And so you can say, "look we're not always perfect. We don't get it right all the time, but we care and we will make sure that we make it right." That's the kind of conversation you need to have because then they're going to go, "I can trust a business like that more than the businesses "Well, we maintain a high level quality service and we blah, blah" and use a lot of business speak and try and look perfect all the time. They're going to go, "Hmm, I don't know this doesn't seem real to me. I don't know if we can really trust these people." Because it's not always about what you say. They can read body language. Some people are really intuitive. I think especially women, they're very intuitive about body language. They can pick up on things that you're not being honest on. [00:05:41] I don't know. Anything else you wanted to add to that? [00:05:44] Sarah: Oh now that I've been completely put on the spot, so I guess my take on that is I think just showing that you are human is really powerful. I think especially for me and other perfectionists out there, we want to present like this tidy, clean, perfect package, right? We're like, "oh, I do everything perfect, and I'm so wonderful all the time. And like, I never make mistakes. Some of it may be posturing for people, some of it may also just be like, you're afraid to fail. You're afraid to make a mistake. And I think, I had lived in this space for a very long time where I was scared to make a mistake because of the consequences. Right. [00:06:24] Here's a perfect example. If you misjudge a tenant, right? And now you put the wrong tenant in, because some people look really great on paper. Yeah. And everything seems wonderful and you've met with them and you can just kind of, judge to the best of your ability. Like, "Hey, I think they would be a great fit." And then you move them in and then it's like, It switches and you go, "oh, wow, I was way off on that and I clearly misjudged" and things like that. [00:06:52] Sometimes it's unavoidable but I think just being able to say, "Hey, like I've done this, and then what did I learn from it?" Because you're going to make mistakes no matter what. Like, none of us are perfect. Some of us are really good at trying to be perfect all of the time, but even the best, smartest, fastest learning companies and people, they still make mistakes. And I think the thing about that is that you need to just realize, first of all, that it's okay to make mistakes because it happens to everyone. And it's okay also to ask people for grace. And I think that if you do ask, especially with clients or tenants or whatever it is, like, "hey, just understand, we're not perfect all of the time. We will try to make it right because occasionally we do mess up like we are human and we are humans that rely on technology. And technology is not perfect either." Right? So like when you automate things and you're like, "oh, this was supposed to happen and it didn't happen because something in the process broke somewhere." Yeah. Like it happens. But just asking for grace, realizing that you will make mistakes and that it's okay, and then the biggest thing you can do honestly, is just what did you learn from that? So things are going to break, things are going to go wrong. Somebody on your team or yourself, or a process or a software or something at some point... it's not going to work the way that you intended and things break down and mistakes will happen. [00:08:25] And then when that happens, then all you can really do is like, you have to pivot. You have to be able to figure out what are you going to do to like, correct that as quickly and as neatly, I'd say as possible without a lot of blow back. But then what did you learn from the experience? Because if you don't learn anything from that and you don't say, "Hey, Maybe we can look at this in a different way. What can we do? Is there some sort of check and balance that we can put in place? Like how do we make sure that doesn't continue to happen, then it doesn't happen again? What did we learn from this experience? And if you don't do that, then the whole point I think is learning. And if you don't do that, then you're like you're missing out. [00:09:05] Jason: Okay. So related to making mistakes and showcasing humor I didn't mention this, but what do we have at the end of each of our videos? [00:09:15] Sarah: Oh, we have all the bloopers and I think the bloopers are so funny. I love them, but we, I mean, we all make mistakes, right? Yeah. Like, sometimes you forget, especially when you're like we've been recording these videos and. You forget your lines sometimes, or like, yeah, Jason in the last one, he's like, "oh, the camera has been rolling the whole time. I'm like, "UGH!" It's been just recording me, like moving things in the kitchen and like I'm standing there waiting for him to hit the record button. He's like, "oh, it's already recording." So I think if you can laugh at yourself, don't take yourself too seriously. And that for me has been huge because I am an INTJ. I am a perfectionist. I am the like, I need things to be the right way all the time and I don't have very much grace with myself and I don't have very much grace with other people. And that's something that I've been really working on I'd say over the last year or so is it can't always be perfect as much as I would love it to be, it's not realistic. It's not realistic to have a 100% success rate 100% of the time in 100% of the things that you do. [00:10:24] Jason: Yeah. It's good stuff. It's been proven that when you tease other people or joke with other people, It assumes rapport. Is that right? You can't like tease somebody that you don't have a good relationship with because they'll just not like you, and it seems really harsh, but, we can tease each other a bit, which we do. But it's an intimate form of communication and that's a form of joking. So you can add some humor into your conversations. Lightly, maybe teasing or something that potential client, "oh what You must really be a glutton for punishment, you know that you are doing all this property management stuff," you could say to them, and I know because I do a lot of it, or something like that. But you can make jokes and that assumes rapport and actually creates rapport with people. It creates the perception of that being willing to joke and play around. [00:11:13] Sarah: So, It's funny that you say that. I actually do that on my sales calls and I didn't even realize I did that until you just said it, so I'll do that, like when I'm talking with them and I'm, especially when they're self-managing or when they have somebody else managing, which is like 99% of the conversations we have, but yeah. Right. Like. I always ask like, "and how has that been going?" And it doesn't matter either if they already have a manager and they're looking for another one, it obviously isn't going well. If they're self-managing, it definitely isn't going well. Yeah, I don't really need a lot of information when they're self-managing. I already know they're in pain and I know they're probably not enjoying what they're doing. Very few people are like, I love all of this stuff. And that was the last video that we just did. But. I kind of will, as soon as they say something that really is like their pain point, right? [00:12:02] They're like, "oh yeah, like the, the tenants call me all the time, or, like, this tenant is late every single month. And like it's been going on too long and now they're behind three months and now I feel like I need to either get them to pay or evict them. And that's like painful for me. I don't want to be the bad guy or I don't know how to handle this legally. Like if I have to evict them, like I'm at that stage now and I have to evict them, but I don't know what I'm doing," and they don't say it exactly like that. But that's the, that's like the read between the lines message that you're getting. I'll kind of joke with them at that point. And they'll say, "oh yeah, sometimes like, tenants suck." And I just laugh and I'm like, "yeah, sometimes you're right. Sometimes tenants suck." And I know that is painful because we too have seen that and we too have dealt with that. And that's exactly why we have systems and processes in place. And sometimes it's not even that the tenant sucks, sometimes it's the tenant is amazing and then something changes in their life and now they suck. So, and that happens, right? It's called life. Like people lose their jobs, they lose their spouses relationships end. Hardships... they're just part of life. And sometimes that carries over into how they behave as a tenant. But I will, I'll kind of laugh like on the call and they'll say, "oh the building is completely vacant now because we had all these tenants in it and they didn't pay, so we got them all out." and I'm like, okay. So it's like all, it's all vacant. Yeah. And I'm like, "and I bet that's fun for you, right?" Like, and they're like, "oh yeah. It's like, it's horrible." But I didn't notice that I really did that until just now. [00:13:32] Jason: I think women do a lot of things intuitively. And I think there's a lot of things that people pick up when you do sales enough. Like you start to intuitively pick up things that work, especially once you're really comfortable doing it. So I think one of the things that I've noticed is that humor really is a sign of intelligence. The more intelligent somebody is, the more they can think on their feet and be witty and create jokes and add humor into the conversation. So I've always viewed humor as a sign of intelligence, and I've always viewed people having a sense of humor as a sign of, maybe intelligence or being more of a light in humanity. People that have no sense of humor, they're not willing to take jokes, they're not willing to joke. They're not super fun people to be around. And I think it shows us that when somebody knows the fine line of whether it's funny to somebody else or not, shows that you have that emotional quotient, you have that EQ intelligence and there's some emotional intelligence. And I think if you're able to be witty, it shows that iq, like you're able to piece ideas together and do something unexpected which is what humor's kind of based on. And people will see, okay, there's some intelligence behind this person. So, and I think that circles back to us making the videos, us being able to formulate an idea, know that we show that we know the industry. There's intelligence that goes into us putting together our scripts and what we're going to do in our videos and making it funny. And comedians I think are some of the most intelligent people out there. I love the observational humor. I love when they can see truth and things that don't make sense and it's ironic. So comedians really are able to showcase a high level of intelligence. They're able to piece things together and do things that people can't see coming. [00:15:16] And that's why punchlines are so funny. They're unexpected. Our brains get excited about that because it's different. It's unique and it's something we hadn't expected or heard of. And that's where humor becomes so funny to us and exciting because we didn't expect it. And it takes intelligence to be able to catch people off guard like that. So add a little bit of humor into your day and your day's just going to be a little bit more fun if you're laughing at some stuff and laughing with some people and laughing with people creates connection as well. Like if they laugh and you're laughing and like you, you can make jokes together. There's some bonding, I think that happens and really that creates more trust with clients. So, Anything else we should add? [00:15:56] Sarah: Yeah I don't know what you started out with, but I feel good about that. [00:16:00] Jason: Okay, cool. I'm glad you came and joined me. [00:16:03] Sarah: That was a mistake. Wasn't planning on being on the podcast. [00:16:07] Jason: She just walks into my office. Making noise. She could see I'm on the video. [00:16:10] Sarah: I couldn't see you were on the video. No. His desk is against the wall and I can hear him. And he does a lot of voice message, so I always just assume he's either on a call or some sort of voice message on telegram. [00:16:21] Jason: All right. If any of you are struggling with growing your business, you're having trouble figuring out how to scale your operations, you're having difficulty with your team. We have rolled out what we call the DoorGrow Super System. It's the system of systems we put together the ultimate sort of package of operational stuff, planning stuff process stuff, hiring stuff, and we brought in expert coaches to facilitate all of this as well, because you know it's not the Jason show at DoorGrow anymore. We've got experts like Sarah and Clint Collins and Phil Mazer and Roya Mattis and Stacy Pittman, and like we've got the Avengers team of coaches, so if you really want to take your business to the next level and you want to grow faster and be less frustrated with your team, be able to have more jokes and have more fun and stop wearing all the hats you don't really enjoy wearing because you're the one screwing up your own business if you're wearing the hats you don't enjoy wearing and start just getting those all offloaded, we're really good at that. [00:17:23] Like we can turn your business into something you love being in and you enjoy being in each day, and it will actually run better without you doing all that stuff. And so we can help you get to that next level, especially if you're 200 doors or higher. This is where all of this becomes really magical. And if you're below 200 doors and you're struggling to break even that a hundred door barrier, we can help you do that very easily. Adding doors is super easy. We can help you do it without spending any money on advertising. I know this sounds crazy, but we can actually help you grow faster without doing ads. And ads are expensive. And so if this is interesting to you and you're curious on our guerilla marketing strategies and how we can help you grow your business and get more leads, and get more doors and get better operations, reach out to DoorGrow and learn about our Mastermind. It's pretty awesome. And that's it. Check us out doorgrow.com and until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:18:21] Jason Hull: 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! [00:18:48] 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.

One of the most complicated parts to navigate when you own a property management company is the different types of insurance and risk management you have to know and have. Property management growth expert, Jason Hull brought on Calvin Roberts of Falcon Insurance to discuss everything you should know about insurance and risk management as a property manager. You'll Learn… [01:26] Introduction to Calvin and Falcon Insurance [05:46] Risk Management and Property Management [13:24] Holistic Risk Management Strategies [17:57] The Types of Insurance Coverage [25:25] Insurance Best Practices and Tips [29:56] Tenant Legal Liability Tweetables "It's the true risk management angle that I find to be sort of like chess. That's why I think it's interesting because one move counters another." "It's just making your rights known in the lease agreement that will hopefully alleviate the vast majority of instances like this before it could ever find its way to a courtroom." "If you don't feel like you're progressing or moving forward in your business, you just might not have a big enough goal. So set your stake a little bit bigger, a little bit higher." "I think cyber's a great idea for everyone. I carry cyber liability insurance on my own insurance policy for Falcon. It's fairly cheap, and it does add a lot of value." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] [00:00:00] Calvin: If you haven't gone through all of the building limits with your insurance broker over the last three years, and really over the last year, maybe two years, it's probably significantly underinsured. I read the statistic recently that over 75% of buildings-- commercial investment real estate-- are underinsured by 40% or more [00:00:25] Jason Hull: All right. Welcome Doorgrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management 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. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:26] So my guest today who I'm hanging out with is Calvin Roberts of Falcon Insurance Agency. [00:01:34] So Calvin, welcome to the show. [00:01:37] Calvin: Awesome. Thank you once again for having me today. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and super excited. [00:01:44] Jason Hull: Yeah, glad to have you. So, Calvin, give people a little bit of backstory on you. How did you get into insurance and how did you get into business in general and then we can chat more about insurance. [00:02:01] Calvin: So I started off in retail property and casualty insurance. Very young. I was 19 years old. I knew I wanted to take immediate action to, you know, more or less accomplish the goals I had set out on achieving. And I had some family members who had a very successful career for themself with insurance. They weren't on the retail, sales insurance agency side of it. They were more working for the company directly, but I saw the effectiveness of insurance as a growth vehicle for, you know, achieving good, stable personal income and overall just view that as a very, a very fulfilling field if you're one of the few people that find risk management genuinely fascinating. So I began an Allstate office in Mid, Michigan in 2016. I was there for about two years and quickly realized I needed to go independent. I didn't like being locked down for just one company. So in 2018, after I, you know, got my feet wet and did a couple years there. I branched off and worked at indie agency and I was at that office for about two years further, and also quickly realized I needed to own my book of business, my contractual relationship with my clients. That's where, you know, the real scalability and effectiveness and retail insurance as being a personal financial driver came into play. So I split off right as Covid was kicking off April, 2020. I figured if there's any time to bite the bullet, restart from zero and you know, take it from the ground up once more, april, 2020 was not the worst time to go out for it, you know. [00:03:53] So I, you know, split off then worked 1099. I had a friend that had started a insurance agency at their own couple months before and was like, "Hey, Cal, why don't you come work for me?" And I said, sure, but I am going to eventually leave to form my own agency. So I pre-negotiated contractual ownership of my clients. That was something that was very important to me and worked under him to more or less build the foundation for eventually splitting off and forming Falcon. You know, it's kind of a chicken-egg scenario with retail insurance where you want insurance companies on day one to work with you when you form an agency, but it's hard to get them to work with you unless you have some type of existing clients and premium volume that you can bring to the table on day one. [00:04:47] Yeah. So during that period I worked to, you know, set my pieces up and build a impressive enough book of business to where I could attract insurance companies on my own. And then last January I left my friend's agency and formed Falcon. We're a national boutique commercial insurance brokerage. We are very forward thinking, licensed nationally, and we don't ever really lose on price, but where we really sell on is having a unique, holistic risk management, value add strategy for our multi-family operators. We bring $0 best practices, you know, tips and tricks to the table that many of our competitors just don't take the time to share with the operator. And that's really how we differentiate ourself is taking a bold, big picture approach to managing risk for a multi-family operation. [00:05:46] Jason Hull: Okay. So what about you makes you interested in risk management? This is not something that most people wake up and go, "man, I want to learn about that today." Right? [00:05:55] Calvin: So I know, you know, every little kid growing up wakes up in the morning and thinks, "I want to be a insurance broker when I grow up." [00:06:03] Jason Hull: It's right up there with like firemen and working with animals like veterinarian. [00:06:08] Calvin: I am one of those few insurance geeks that finds it legitimately fascinating. You know, it's not very hard to write an insurance policy. Most people can probably do it for their home and auto, online, and realistically even most small businesses. Most people can probably put that together for themselves. It's the true risk management angle that I find to be sort of like chess. That's why I think it's interesting because one move counters another, and it's all about just proactively working a flank, whoever might be seeking to cause financial harm to your organization. So I'll give an example. Most insurance policies exclude care, custody, and control liability. So that's liability arising from your guardianship of property. So where that would come into play on a multi-family operation would be the vehicles kept in the parking lot of one of your buildings or complexes. [00:07:08] Let's say you have a resident, maybe they let their insurance policy lapse, you know, they forgot to pay it and it got canceled and maybe they had a brand new 2023 lease vehicle. You know, they pick up a new Ford truck. It gets stolen or maybe a tree branch falls on it. The bank is hounding them like, "Hey, why didn't you have insurance?" They're thinking to themselves, "I need to do something to get them made whole so I don't get sued" and you know, maybe, you know, "I have to get to work. How do I do that without a vehicle?" Type of thing. They're quite likely to attempt to sue the multi-family operator and or property management company due to this. So something that I recommend all of my clients implement into their tenant lease agreement is a stipulation that they are expressly not liable for care custody control of tenant vehicles parked on the premises. You know, it costs the operator nothing to add a one-paragraph section for their tenant lease agreement and the effectiveness of this, should it go to court, kind of varies on a state-by-state basis. [00:08:23] You know, depending on how the courts have interpreted this and your jurisdiction. But simply by having something like this in your tenant lease agreement, it talks a big game and it's pretty likely to, you know, hopefully dissuade 95% of people from even attempting to litigate. So it's that element of, I don't want to say bluffing, but just making your rights known in the lease agreement that will hopefully alleviate the vast majority of instances like this before it could ever find its way to a courtroom. Because you know the first thing that would happen. Should a loss like that occur is the resident would talk to their personal attorney and they're going to immediately ask for a copy of that tenant lease agreement. [00:09:14] Right. You know, they see a section like that and maybe they, you know, advise to maybe not attempt to litigate. They just aren't sure if that might play out in the courts favorably for them and say it's just not worth it. [00:09:29] Jason Hull: Yeah. 'An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure'. Right, exactly. So, I mean, they could get a really great lawyer, you know, to try and protect themselves. But you know, having a really good lease agreement in making sure that you have some of those things in place to protect you from potential issues surrounding insurance. Yeah. Sounds wise. So, yeah. Very cool. So, and you geek out on. This is fun for you. [00:09:56] Calvin: I think it's legitimately interesting to think about. I'm one of the few people that gets kicks out of it. [00:10:03] Jason Hull: Which is cool. I mean, if you are going to be handling this stuff for your clients, hopefully you do enjoy it. Right. Thank you for sharing kind of your journey. What's fascinating to me is that every single step that you had mentioned most insurance agents or people that kind of progress through that would probably drop off that first level. Maybe the second level. They just get stuck. They're comfortable. So what is it about you that drove you to, in such a short time period, like get to the point where you are innovating, making changes to starting your own business? [00:10:38] Calvin: Really a few things. I've always wanted to be in the agency principal. That's where it enables me to have the freedom to do the things I like to do. Yeah. You know, I don't just want to pick up access to five insurance companies and then try to write as much business as I'm able to that agrees with the appetite of those five insurance companies. I target segments, you know, industries that I find fun to work with, interesting to work on. [00:11:08] Overall fulfilling to be involved with, and I want to be as effective as possible constantly when going after and targeting those segments. So when you're working for someone else, I mean, they can have great access to insurance companies or it could be not as great and fairly lacking. More often than not, it is fairly lacking. I found most of the agencies I had been with previously, they had done, like you said, they got comfortable and kind of stopped trying to push the needle, so to speak. And, you know, that's fine. They were making, you know, excellent income for themselves and their family and it was working very well for them. But it just comes down to, I don't like to lose when I'm going after something. Yeah. So I might. Be humbled the first 1, 2, 5, 10 times I go after a new segment, but eventually I will start winning and I want to have access to the insurance companies. I know we'll win. I want to be active in the states where I would like to chase business, target accounts. Yeah, so it's about having the freedom on my end to accomplish my goal. [00:12:23] Jason Hull: So, I mean that plays into stuff I've talked about on the show previously. I mean, you're an entrepreneur at heart. Like now entrepreneurs, they want more freedom and they want more fulfillment and you know, than the average person when most people want safety and certainty, which is good for insurance agents, right? So you had an outcome that in your mind you were like, I want to be agency principal. Like you knew what you wanted. And so this is take note, everybody listen. Because most of you're business owners, if you don't feel like you're progressing or moving forward in your business, you just might not have a big enough goal. So set your stake a little bit bigger, a little bit higher. Like what do you really want? It probably isn't, probably not satisfied or comfortable with what you have, but maybe you're not clear the outcome that you want. So, so, now a lot of our listeners do residential and a lot of them, some have multi-family. Some have single-family properties they're managing. What did you want to come share with us today and chat about? [00:13:25] Calvin: So, I would love to talk about holistic risk management strategies. You know, things like my contractual risk transfer agreements that I think are advisable for all investment real estate operators, multi-family, and one the four family residential. Okay. Yeah. It doesn't cost anything besides maybe a consultation with your attorney, and it adds a lot of value that is not a recurring cost. It's a one time, you know, check to your attorney. Time and effort. So give an example. Let's say you're hiring a contractor, maybe an arborist to come trim the branches off of the tree on one of your properties. You'll want them to provide you a certificate of insurance that names your organization as additional insured. And you want that because if, let's say maybe when they're cutting down a tree branch and it falls and takes out the roof of a neighboring property, I mean, that's terribly plausible to happen. [00:14:28] You would rather that not be a claim on your insurance policy. You want that to fall on the arborist policy you know? We're in a what's called hard market, which basically means, for lack of a better word, it's a seller's market with an insurance currently. It's being driven by interest rate changes, inflation, and several other factors coming in to play. We don't want that claim to be tied to us that. You know, be passed off to the responsible party, the contractor that we hired. So by asking for that certificate, it makes it less of a challenge to get their insurance to respond should that type of loss occur. And on top of that, I like to see in the insurance requirement section of our, you know, contractor agreement for employing them on a 1099, that we have a primary non-contributory clause. We want a hold harmless agreement, and we would like a waiver of subrogation. We do that for a few reasons. We don't want to, you know, take the step of getting the contractor's insurance and having it name us as additional insured only for their insurance company to say, "oh, well, you know, we think that you are partially negligent somehow. You know, maybe you should have had the tree branch trimmed a year ago, or five years ago, and you let it grow too long." We don't want them to get into a more or less a battle with us and our insurance company on how much of the loss they're responsible for. We want them to take immediate responsibility and not attempt to, you know, wipe their hands of it, so to speak. [00:16:14] We also don't want the other insurance company to pay the claim, you know, settle the lawsuit only to attempt to come back and subrogate that loss from us, you know, the property owner or property management company. So that's where that waiver of subrogation would come into play. That would be where they attempt to be made whole by, you know, attempting to recover from a third party, so sue us, for lack of a better word. You know, maybe they might say, oh, well, you know, you were negligent because you had the duty to trim this tree branch when it got over, you know, 14 feet long, or just whatever argument they choose to try to put together. And then we're back at square one. We're being sued. [00:17:04] It's a claim. Our insurance policy we don't. So we ask for this as a requirement in our contractor employment agreement. It's fairly boiler plate. I mean, if you look at the insurance requirements on subcontractors coming from general contractors, you know, residential and commercial developers and builders, these requirements are usually found in what they're going to look for in their subcontractors, but I do commonly see it missing within property management companies. Despite property management companies being, you know, kind pseudo contracting type operations. It's kind of like that hybrid between like the clerical office job and the on the job site, you know, residential builder type role. [00:17:53] Jason Hull: Yeah, a lot of them kind of function as a general contractor to a bunch of contractors. So what what are the types of insurance coverage? Let's go to the basis, what are the types of insurance coverage typically required for a residential property management company? [00:18:08] Calvin: The residential property management company, you will want a general liability policy that would respond in the event that we cause bodily injury or property damage for which the company is liable. You want professional liability insurance. That's in case there is ever a professional boo boo, so to speak that comes up. I had a pretty nasty law scenario I won't get into too much detail on over the summer last year, which thankfully has not turned into a lawsuit. Let's kind of crossing my fingers and, you know, a little nervous for the insured on this one. I work with their third party property owners, but the property management company is not itself a client yet. But the story on this is that someone was, you know, injured, let's say in the apartment building via violent action from someone that may or may not have been a tenant. I'm not sure exactly on the circumstances. And the exterior facing door on this newer acquisition property had been purchased, you know, about four months before the loss event happened. That door had not been re-keyed by the property management company. So if a old tenant from five years ago still had their old key to get into the laundry room, they could, it was still the old locks. [00:19:29] The property manager was unaware that there was a door entering into the basement area that was accessible from the outside. So they just never thought to rekey it, you know, happens. There was a bad event in the property and if that were to ever make its way to court, the property management company would almost certainly get tied up into that. And to be honest it's kind of unclear if that might fall onto a professional liability or a general liability form. It's kind of gray because it's technically a bodily injury that occurred. It was bodily injury due to more of a lack of professional action than, you know-- it's not like they would hit someone with their car kind of thing. [00:20:13] So we would probably file claims on both policies and just kinda let the insurance companies fight it out on who's responsible to hear from there. So that would. A pretty good instance of where professional liability might come in into play. Okay. I also think that cyber liability insurance is a good idea. So cyber would come into play if, you know, let's say one of our accountants, you know, maybe we have two or three staff accountants on board. They download a file and maybe it has a virus and their computer gets hacked. And as a result, the personal banking information for 1500 residents that we have on file might have been stolen by a nefarious third party actor. We would become liable for what happens with that data, and that's where cyber would come into play. [00:21:04] Jason Hull: Yeah, there was a one of the major property management software that our clients use, one of our clients were telling us was hacked, So, yeah, so now they're having to deal with that mess. [00:21:14] Calvin: It happens a lot within the small business and the lower mid-market, you know, operation world. In recent years, I would say the biggest segment that really needs to put emphasis on protecting themselves is that middle market operation. Because if you're a nefarious third party actor, and maybe you're doing ransomware attacks where you hack into their system, lock down all of the data and say, send us $500,000 worth of Bitcoin to this address, or we're going to delete everything in three days. Yeah, I mean, it happens fairly often and they're not going to go after that real small operation. It'll be a operation. It's big enough to have financial resources where they can whip out a half mill if they need to keep their business alive more or less. But they're also not big enough to where, you know, they're that Fortune 1000 who has a, not only a risk management team, but they also have the, you know, cyber risk management team and the IT team, and they're able to much more effectively defend against that. So they target the businesses that are in between those two stages because they have the resources to pay out in a, you know, cyber extortion scenario. But they also do not yet have the resources to where they can adequately defend proactively against it. I think cyber's a great idea for everyone. I carry cyber liability insurance on my own insurance policy for Falcon. It's fairly cheap, and it does add a lot of value. [00:22:54] Jason Hull: Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Most small businesses are one bad password on their team, away from affecting all of their clients in having to e crow in front of all of them. And you also have no idea how the companies you're using and most property managers are using a lot of different software tools including the one that has all the accounting stuff going on, you know, their property management software, back office and they have a whole team of people that one person can screw it up for everybody. So yeah. So we've got general liability, professional liability, cyber liability. What else? [00:23:34] Calvin: You probably want worker's comp, you know, if it's just yourself, you can get away with not having it. But if you have any staff on board, even if they're a 1099 employment relationship, you will want the worker's compensation. And I say the 1099 rule, because that's a common question I get asked. You know, "I don't have any W2 employees. Do I need worker's comp?" The answer is yes, unless the third party, you know, 1099 employee that you're hiring provides you a certificate of workers' compensation insurance. If they do that and you do not have any other W2, then no, that is not a hard requirement. You can use your discretion on that. But if you are hiring, you know, even 1099, you need the worker's compensation insurance. It's fairly inexpensive, all things considered, and most states, because it does kind of vary by locality, it's a requirement and can create a whole host of hurt for not having it. It's one of those things where I am terrified, you know, maybe not doing something that the government loves, so to speak, and that's up there with things that ticks them off, you know? [00:24:54] Jason Hull: Yeah. So another one that I hear about in the industry a lot is errors and omissions. Can you touch on that one or explain that one? [00:25:02] Calvin: So the errors and emissions is that professional liability element. [00:25:06] Jason Hull: Okay. [00:25:07] Calvin: So they have kind of synonym names for that line of insurance. [00:25:12] Jason Hull: Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, perfect. Okay. because I hear like all the time they're saying, getting E and O you need E and O stuff like that. So that's kind of what they're calling professional liability. So how can property managers better protect their owners through these insurance products? [00:25:32] Calvin: Occasionally, the building owning entity itself may be tied up in a loss due to, you know, perhaps alleged property management negligence. So I'll give an example. Let's say, the property management company is assigned to hiring out snow and lawn maintenance services, you know, someone to come out and, you know, remove snow from the parking lot on a small apartment complex or a three-family rental property. And maybe they select a contractor who, they're nice and they're cheap, but they aren't super consistent or dependable. So sometimes when it snows, they just don't come by and snow and ice accumulates in the parking lot and perhaps a resident slips and falls on the way to their vehicle one day and they're seriously injured. It's one of those things where if the tenant sues, which they probably will, they're going to sue the property management company and they're going to sue the building company. [00:26:34] We would want, if we're going in the direction of, you know, looking out for our property owners and having that be kind of our unique selling proposition, we wouldn't want their insurance to respond because they hire us to take care of those things essentially. That was our boo boo one could say. That's where having our own general liability insurance would come into play, that coverage would trigger, and you know, it's kind of the inverse of how I usually see this play out, because it's generally the building owner's policy that would respond and then they would have the property management company as an additional insured. But I mean, if our branding and selling point is that we, you know, put a special emphasis on always doing right by the owner and just not allowing situations like that to occur, that's where we would want our insurance policy to respond primary. [00:27:31] Jason Hull: So, I would imagine with covid happening and all the stuff that's gone on recently in the increase in government control that's constantly happening, if somebody hasn't taken a look at their insurance, maybe in the last five years, what are some recent changes or things they should be paying attention to or they should be talking to somebody like you about? [00:27:54] Calvin: The first thing that I look for when reviewing a new policy for a new client, kind of getting eyes on the existing arrangement of coverage, just to make sure that everything is done correctly before I try to compete on price against that is to look at the building limit. If you haven't gone through all of the building limits with your insurance broker over the last three years, and really over the last year, maybe two years, it's probably significantly underinsured. I read the statistic recently that over 75% of buildings commercial investment real estate are underinsured by 40% or more, and the reason why that is not good isn't just that in a claim scenario that burns to the ground, we're only going to get a check for 60% of what it might cost to rebuild. because we're thinking, hey, the home's only worth 30% of what it might cost to rebuild. It's not a bad deal still. It's that the overwhelming majority of insurance policies, commercial property policies have what's called a co-insurance clause. And coinsurance is where the insurance company wants you to have sufficient skin in the game. So you can insure a property for 80% of what it might actually cost to rebuild. [00:29:14] So that million dollar to rebuild building, you can have a policy on it for 800,000 and that would be fine if you will like to carry 400,000. You know, maybe the market value of the property, that would not be acceptable and they would divide the amount of insurance that we have, 400,000 for this example, by the minimum amount of coverage that we should have had, 800,000. [00:29:39] That leaves us with a 0.5 gut insurance penalty multiplier. So on a $200,000 fire, they're going to subtract 50% and your deductible. So you get posed on that and are paying most of the loss out of pocket. [00:29:55] Jason Hull: So are there any other unique or unusual coverage options that are related specifically to residential property management? [00:30:06] Calvin: I've been putting a great deal of emphasis on the tenant legal liability product over the last two years. It started popping up pretty actively around three or four years ago. I mean, there are some operations that have been doing this for a decade. It became fairly popular around 2020- 21. And what the tenant legal liability insurance does is it provides a mechanism, one for monetizing the insurance vertical for the operator, and two, it enables the property owner to shield themselves from having small, you know, tenant negligence type losses pile up on their own insurance policy and therefore claims history. The most common cause of loss I see on residential investment real estate is you have a tenant come home one night. Maybe they just worked 11 hours and you know, tired after a long, busy day and they maybe get home, crack open a beer or two, start cooking something, throw a pizza in the oven. Going lay downs on the couch for 20 minutes. Well, that's cooking. Watch some tv, and then they fall asleep and it causes a $75,000 kitchen fire. It happens all the time. It's a high frequency, low to medium intensity type loss, or like we had in the upper Midwest over the holidays, maybe they are going out of town for the holiday. And they're thinking to themselves, I'm going to turn my heat off during that time. It'll save me $20 in electricity. Right? So they turn the heat off and they come back four or five days later and the walls have exploded. You know, the pipes have burst and $90,000 worth of damage has happened because about we don't want that type of loss to be associated with our property policy. [00:32:07] We're probably going to get nonrenewed, and it's going to negatively impact our pricing and cost for several years. It just is a bad scenario to be in. That's what destroys the loss experience for investment residential real estate is that high frequency, low to medium severity type tenant negligence cause of loss. So what you do is you write into your lease, the tenant must provide a certificate of acceptable third party renter's insurance. You know, State Farm, Allstate, Farmers, kind of whoever. And if they fail to do so, or if they let coverage lapse, you know, they stop paying for it, we as management reserve the right to place that coverage or a comparable coverage at their cost and for both of our benefit, more or less. And the reason why you do that is we want there to be that coverage in place. You know, I had just over the holidays, like probably five loss occurrences that would've otherwise gone on the property policy that were able to be pushed off onto this tenant legal liability master policy. So it kept their property policy clean. You know, we didn't have to file a claim against any of my insureds because of it. [00:33:27] Jason Hull: It's like having insurance to protect your insurance. [00:33:30] Calvin: Correct. It's unbelievable that property insurance has become this level of convoluted, but it's the game that we're playing and what we have in front of us. This is one of the most effective tools and toolbox. [00:33:44] Jason Hull: So it's about having layers of protection. [00:33:47] Calvin: Exactly. Got it. It doesn't cost us anything. We pass the cost off onto the tenant. And then what we do is we add maybe $3-7 per door per month on top of what we might pay to the insurance provider. So maybe we pay nine, we charge the tenant 16 and pocket that $7 spread as an administrative fee. [00:34:11] And that's a, but you might see this on P 12 s occasionally when you're underwriting a property on market or otherwise looking. Investment real estate is, you'll see insurance listed under the profit side of the equation. That's where this is coming into play. [00:34:28] Jason Hull: Okay. So it can be a profit center. [00:34:30] Calvin: Exactly. [00:34:31] Jason Hull: Got it. Okay. So, how often should a property management business owner be assessing their insurance? [00:34:41] Calvin: Once a year. I would think about it very actively as you come up to renewal and then, you know, depending on what best practice implementations we're hoping to, you know, add to what we're doing over that next year, it's good to think about the key points frequently, but we should put special emphasis on it once a year as you come up to renewal. You know, just kind of see. What, if any improvements might be recommendable and how the market has shifted over that last year, but you don't need to think about it every second of every day, but it is good to have it in the back of your head often because it kind of forces that extra level of diligence to being front and center. [00:35:32] Jason Hull: They just need somebody like you to think about it every day. [00:35:35] Calvin: Exactly. [00:35:36] Jason Hull: So I think a question that every business owner has is, "how do I balance the getting the best deal on insurance versus doing too much, get enough coverage, not spend an arm and a leg..." like, you know, in finding this balance and then trusting an insurance agent to do what's in my interest instead of just their interests? [00:35:58] Calvin: So I'm a big believer in transparency with my clients. So something that we always provide with every account, new and old, is a market report. So let's say I, you know, I go to 11 different insurance companies for a new property that you're looking at. I provide a breakdown of where each company is coming in at with their pricing, with comparable coverages between them. You know, we can't set the pricing on the retail side. We're just kind of at times the middlemen of bad news, so to speak. [00:36:32] Jason Hull: The messenger. [00:36:33] Calvin: Exactly. [00:36:34] Jason Hull: But don't kill the messenger. [00:36:35] Calvin: By having that market report, it demonstrates that we're bringing our due diligence to the table and not just going to one company and saying, here you go. Here's our price. This is what we can do. I think that's, just a low-effort, less ambitious approach. I mean, sure you can move a lot faster by hitting one company, but you can deliver the best results by going to every company that makes sense to approach. And letting them fight it out. Maybe company one is hotter than company two and a given zip code, but that competitiveness flip flops, depending on just the details of the case that you're working on. [00:37:21] So by approaching every insurance company where it makes sense to approach them, it's within their appetite, you let them fight it out and you see where the cards land. You know, sometimes the price comes in a lot lower than we were expecting to see. Other times, it's not within the range that we were hoping it would be, but by hitting every company possible and then showing your cards as to where they land, you know, that's really all we can do. And it demonstrates that we put, you know, our due diligence into marketing the account. [00:37:55] Jason Hull: Yeah. So you said that what a lot of insurance agents might do might be low effort or less ambitious. And so I think this is important to point out, this ties it back to the beginning, and this will be maybe good, you know, wrap up for us, but I think, you know, property management business owners listening to the show, my recommendation is you want to leverage and use vendors and use people as a support system in your business that are not low effort and less ambitious people that are running their businesses. There's a lot of accountants and insurance agents and people that really, they're basically like an employee with clients in their own mind. And then there's accountants like, you know, my Profit First Coach, an accountant and others that we leverage in our business. They think like entrepreneurs. They are always trained to improve themselves and improve their business, and they see things through a similar lens. So I can trust their advice and I can trust that they're wanting to that, that they know how an entrepreneur thinks and they're kind of eating their own dog food as an entrepreneur, and these are very different. Not all accountants are entrepreneurial, even though they have their own business. Not all insurance agents are entrepreneurial, even though they might have their own business. They're like just some State Farm agent that has their thing and they're set. [00:39:20] Right. So, so I think that's important to point out. I recommend that you find vendors and people to work with that see things through the lens of entrepreneurism because it's a very different lens. There's a very strong different focus that they prioritize fulfillment and freedom instead of just the safety and certainty. They understand that aspect. And in your line of work, you need to pay attention to safety and certainty, but you're somebody that I'm sure can understand the goal that these entrepreneurs have of having more freedom and more fulfillment. And to you, I would imagine safety and certainty and providing insurance is a way of helping them create more of that. [00:40:02] Calvin: Exactly. [00:40:03] Jason Hull: And that's different than a lot of insurance people. [00:40:07] Calvin: Yeah. I mean, I've definitely met some very ambitious colleagues within the field, but it's one of those things where it's not really that difficult in terms of chance of success or failure to make a very healthy living for yourself and for your family working in retail insurance, I mean, if you are in the gig for 10 years and you're writing even a modest amount of business, 2, 3, 4, $500,000 quite easily. So it, I see how that can more or less, I view it be as a trap because you become quite comfortable and stop trying to push the needle. [00:40:50] Yeah. [00:40:51] Jason Hull: Comfort kills sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, that's the case I think for all of us as business owners, we can get comfortable sometimes, and if we're not willing to get a little bit uncomfortable, if our goals don't sort of scare us a little bit, we don't have that ambition then we kind of lose life. I think feel like that's an important aspect for us to really find that fulfillment and enjoyment. Well, Calvin has been great having you here on the show. How can people get in touch with Falcon Insurance and get in touch with you? [00:41:23] Calvin: My email or phone or Facebook or LinkedIn, whichever is most convenient for you. I am extremely available and glued to the grind. Close to 95 hours every week. So you can email. Give us a call, shoot me a message on Facebook or LinkedIn. We'll rise to the challenge every time. [00:41:43] Cool. [00:41:43] Jason Hull: Share some of those things right now so the listeners can hear that. [00:41:47] Calvin: Awesome. My email is Calvin-- c-a-l-v-i-n @ falcon i n s agency.com and my direct line is 810-309-9475. You can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn under Calvin Roberts. [00:42:07] Jason Hull: Perfect. All right, thanks, Calvin. Appreciate you being on the show. [00:42:10] Calvin: No, thank you very much once again for having me. I appreciate that. [00:42:13] Jason Hull: All right, so if you are wanting to improve your property management business, and struggling with figuring out how to scale your team, your operations, your systems, here at DoorGrow DoorGrow, we are rolling out a lot of really cool new tools that are game changers for the industry. We've got DoorGrow CRM, which is going to be a disruptor, we've got DoorGrow flow, which is a process software, which is going to be a disruptor, and we've got DoorGrow OS, which is far and way better than things like EOS or Traction. Really awesome way to manage and run your team and the real rocket field of getting your team to think as decision-makers and as if they're business owners in the business to innovate and move the business forward. [00:43:03] And we have DoorGrow hiring. This is a game changer. This is one of the most costly mistakes business owners make in their business. Team members are the most expensive resource usually in a business. Hiring can be incredibly costly. It often takes you one, two, maybe three months to realize you made a bad choice, and then they may have cost you a lot of opportunity, cost, and money in the meantime. These are all systems that we're helping build. We call this the Super System, all of our different systems. It's like the Voltron of systems or THUNDERCATS of systems or Power Rangers when they combine. I don't know what age some of you are and when you grew up, but depending, this is like the ultimate combination of systems and it's all of these are free and included in our high-level mastermind in which you get to connect with game changers in the industry. People that are growth-minded and grow your business even faster. And we give you a lot of really good coaches and systems. We have some of the best in the industry we brought in as coaches that are supporting our clients. It really is a game-changer. Nobody else can touch us because we run on DoorGrow OS. We leverage our own systems and do these things, and we move rapidly as a company. [00:44:18] So DoorGrow is not the same company it was even 30 days ago, even 90 days ago, especially not a year ago, we have an amazing team and we would love to support you and help you scale your business and get you to that thousand doors or higher, whatever your goal is, and make your day-to-day in life easier and easier the more doors you add, which is the reverse of what we see most clients doing before they come to us. [00:44:45] If this is interesting, reach out to us at doorgrow.com. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. [00:44:52] 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! [00:45:19] 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 manage short-term rentals, you're probably well aware of how stressful the process of giving guests a key, code, etc. can be. In this episode, property management growth expert, Jason Hull talks with Bobby from Jervis, a company that allows property managers to automate code-sharing with smart locks and smart garage door openers and manage smart utilities remotely. You'll Learn… [01:45] Introduction to Bobby Varghese [06:50] Smart Locks, Code Sharing, and More: Intro to Jervis [13:55] The Financial Benefits of Automation [19:25] Where to Get Smart Locks and Products [22:10] Navigating Technological Issues [24:20] Jervis for Long-Term Rentals Too! Tweetables "Trying to do it all means that you can never do everything correctly." "What is your time worth?" "The biggest expense in the business really is almost all staff." "So we would love to help see you grow and we would love to help get the systems in people in place on your team so that you can handle that growth." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] I tell them, tell everyone, "you can do this yourself. You can open up the Schlage app, the August app, whichever brand app, right. And you can add the locks yourself." So the thing is, "what is your time worth?" Is what I always ask property managers. [00:00:14] All right. Welcome Doorgrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management, business owners and their businesses. [00:00:58] We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into this show. So today I am hanging out with Bobby Varghese. Bobby, welcome to the show. [00:01:27] Hey Jason. Thanks for having me. [00:01:28] Bobby has a company called Jervis Systems, which we're going to get into in just a minute, but Bobby, tell the audience and our listeners, how did you get into business entrepreneurism and eventually into Jervis systems? [00:01:45] Yeah, that's a good question, Jason. I have a short term rental in Ashburn, Virginia. A couple years ago, actually, we started in 2017. And I was doing a lot of automation for my own sanity's sake, right? Just, I didn't want to be at the property to check a guest in. And also I know how when I want to travel, I don't want to be confined to certain times. I don't want to have to meet somebody to go grab keys, things like that. So I was trying to like, replicate the same concepts for my guests. And so I had some brilliant programmers that were working with me at the time for my rent. And we applied a lot of the automation that we use with Jervis today initially for my rental, you know, that's kind of how it all started. So we were letting guests in automatically letting cleaning companies in automatically, deleting the codes automatically after the reservations were complete. This is in 2017. So back then, Jason, Jervis didn't exist. Right? So Jervis wasn't even an idea yet. And then what happened was property managers in Ashburn, you know, the surrounding city communities heard about us doing automation, right? So maybe guests that stayed with me told other property managers and they're like, Hey, can you do this for us too? Can you manage my property? And so I had a couple of property managers message me through Airbnb, through inquiries, and they were like, Hey, could you manage my property and take on full property management? And, you know, at the time I had a full-time job. I was teaching in the evenings at a local university. I didn't have the time or the bandwidth to just take on more and more of these properties, but the concept of like building this like a software as a service platform and then being able to offer that to property managers just sounded incredibly intriguing. [00:03:25] And it's something that we started the journey in 2019, and then it's just been learning and growing as we go. You know, lots of relationships over the years. Lots of vendors that we've connected with. You know, big brands like Schlake, August, Yale, Masterlock big companies like that, garage doors. And then over the last year we've gotten into like the thermostat world. So smart devices and not just access, getting to automate those. And then eventually we've got a roadmap this year and into next year of smart sensors and other places we want to get into as well. [00:04:01] Very cool. So, And give the audience a little bit of background on you personally, so I know who you are. [00:04:08] Sure, yeah. My name is Bobby Varghese, so I'm the founder of Jervis, as Jason said. I'm a US Air Force veteran. My background is as a security consultant. So, I did well, a little bit of everything. So networking, server administration and security, which really the military got me into. It was not something I ever thought I'd be interested in, and then it just kind of happened. And I found out I loved it, you know, and I got myself my graduate degree in it. I started, you know, getting certifications and eventually ended up teaching by chance at a local university here in security. And that's kind of my background. And I got into you know, just process improvement, just automation and things as we kept going on. And that's me as a person and how I got into all this. I live in the northern Virginia area right outside DC so, we've got a lot of customers locally in this area and the east coast and pretty much all over the states as well. [00:05:00] Great. Well, thanks for your service. I think that's awesome. And I mean, it's really cool that you come from a technological background, but not just in technology. Viewing everything through the lens, likely of is this secure? Are we doing things the right way? The access matters, you know. [00:05:17] It does. Yeah. Thanks appreciate you bringing that up, Jason, because that's actually a principle in everything we do in Jervis. We don't want to store your credentials, we don't want to know your credentials, right? So everything that we do with Jervis, when you as a property manager are connecting your devices with us. So we're going to take you to their login page, right? So that's where you're doing the authentication and the authorization to say, Hey, I want Jervis to be able to view my ABC you know, these devices, and then be able to manage them on my RPA half. And then that's when the grant access is granted. We're given like you know, a secure token basically that gives us access to it. And that's how we do all of the management. We make it a business. Philosophy on our team never to store credentials. So if, God forbid we ever get hacked, there's nothing to steal right with us. There's no credentials to be stolen, things like that. We do take security very seriously. [00:06:15] That's great. Yeah. I mean, even with us at DoorGrow we use a vault system with our merchant provider cause we don't want to store people's credit card information directly. [00:06:24] Yeah. [00:06:24] The liability's too high. [00:06:26] It is. It is. [00:06:27] So if, you know, God forbid, but if somebody hacked us, they wouldn't have people's credit card information. [00:06:32] Exactly. Yeah. That's smart. [00:06:33] Yeah. So, yeah, very cool. I like that. So, when AI takes over the world and they hack everything, then they might be sort of safe still. All right. So, that brings up an interesting question. AI is a huge buzz thing right now, so I'd love to touch on that maybe a little bit later in the show. But tell us a little bit about what Jervis does. I'm starting to get an idea just based on what you've told me so far, but tell us like, what does Jervis really do and how can it help property managers and it sounds like it's very much geared towards the short term rental market. [00:07:08] So we are geared towards property management, right? So, and that can be done in a couple of different spaces. So whether it's short-term rental management, long-term rental management we've got real estate agents using us, using like the master locks to instead of, you know, the old school like realtor access to be able to get into properties because those legacy systems are very expensive from what I've understood over the years. So, so we've got a lot of real estate agents that are trying to kind of modernize that world and using the master lock systems. So at a core Jervis, what we started with was access management. So smart locks and smart garage doors, right? So we've got, we support the MyQ based systems with LiftMaster and then we've got the Genie Aladdin and a couple brands like that. And then with the Smart Locks, we do the big players. And then there's a lot of other smart locks out there, like the Schlages, the August, the Yales, and then also a lot of other companies that are growing in popularity. And you know, there's. A lot of competitors in that space now as well, right? So what Jervis does is, or what our goal is to streamline your life from a property management perspective. And we'll use the short term rental world as an example, is as reservations come in, what a lot of property managers want is that the code gets to the guest, right? [00:08:29] So it gets stored to a lock for the duration of the reservation. Another caveat is that's important is it's got to be a unique code. So you're not using the same code over and over for multiple guests. [00:08:41] Yeah. [00:08:41] And then the code expires when the reservation is completed. Right. So even after the time completes and the guest knows the code, they cannot use that same code to get back into the property. Right? [00:08:53] Right. [00:08:54] And what Jervis will do is automate all of those steps we just talked about, and then when the code is done, we actually wait one day after the reservation is completed with the code being in a disabled state, and then we'll remove it entirely. And the reason we keep it one extra day, Jason, is that we found so many instances where reservations last minute, they need to be extended a couple extra hours, an extra day or two. Right. So immediately deleting it when the reservation is complete. We just found that's just causing-- [00:09:28] they're immediately locked out and they're all, "my suitcase is still in there!" [00:09:31] Exactly. Yeah. Or like, oh no, we need to extend for an extra day. And then you got to go through the entire process of adding the code all over again, which is not hugely inconvenient, right. But it's a lot easier and quicker to take an existing code and just modify like the time or the date, you know, versus like adding it entirely. [00:09:53] Yeah. Cool. So you had mentioned a lot of other like smart devices and stuff. So is there, does Jervis go beyond just the front door lock? [00:10:04] We do. Yeah. So besides access, so out outside of our original world of just smart locks and smart garages, we do smart thermostats right now with the Echobee, Nest, and the honeywell thermostat is coming really soon as well. And the problem that we're solving with that when it comes to property management is that you as a property manager, you can control the temperature as a guest is walking into the property. So we've got two modes with it. We call it guest mode and we call it a vacant mode. So guest mode is that as soon as the guest walks into the property, you can set your baseline that you as a property manager are comfortable with, right? So let's say you want it to be 70 degrees as a guest walks in, Jervis will take care of that set the temperature. The guests can adjust it during their stay, right? Bring it up, down, whatever they're comfortable with. When they're done, that's when vacant mode or when the guest is checking out, that's when vacant mode will kick in. And that means that, let's say in the wintertime, you don't want the heat blasting. Yeah, in the summertime you don't want the AC blasting, right? [00:11:14] So you can set it to a temperature where your pipes aren't going to freeze, right? It's that right temperature without increasing your heating expenses or electric bills. And right as the guest comes back into the property or your next guest comes in, Jervis will set the temperature back to guest mode as you're comfortable with it or what you set it for. So thermostats is something we support now. Later this year, our roadmap is to get into smart sensors. So carbon monoxide sensing, water leakage sensing and those noise sensing things like that. That's what we will get into this year. [00:11:51] Very cool. So there's water leaks or if there's, you know, some sort of issues going on at the property, they might get notified. [00:12:02] Exactly. And the goal is, Jason with Jervis, we don't aim to support every device that's out there, right? So every lock that's out there, you can see that we pick and choose the ones that are the most, most stable. Another feature that we look for is that it's ideally, it's wifi directly accessible, right? So that's very important. Other locks will work, right? There's a lot of older model locks that are using hubs and wifi, adaptors. We support selective ones after extensive testing because we found that having an extra piece in the middle can often be it's yet another piece that could go wrong, right? Yeah. So if that hub stops working, that wifi adapter stops working, you can't connect to your lock, right? So, it's, we pick and choose which devices are best to support, and then we are careful what other devices we get into. It's important that it solves like a property management problem, right? Because I still have my rental property in Ashburn and we do testing of all the capabilities that we implement, we do it all the testing at my property as well. [00:13:10] Yeah. [00:13:10] So eating my own dog food type of thing. And I want to make sure that we're not trying to do it all because I think that is... trying to do it all means that you can never do everything correctly. You may just get to a point where you're doing everything probably 50% or 60%. But yeah, that's kind of our philosophy as well. Right? Yeah, it's probably like the 80- 20 rule. The 80% of the stuff's probably covered by 20% of the things that you could do, right? [00:13:37] So, yep. Yep. [00:13:39] Very cool. So, What problems is this solving for property managers? So if a property manager's listening to this and they think, well, you know, it's not too big of a deal to maybe give out a code, do the walk and do this, help them justify switching to using Jervis. [00:13:55] Sure. [00:13:56] Yeah. That's a good point. And if a property manager has one or two properties, I tell them, tell everyone, "you can do this yourself. You can open up the Schlage app, the August app, whichever brand app, right. And you can add the locks yourself." So the thing is, "what is your time worth?" Is what I always ask property managers. It's like we charge $5 a month per active device. Right? So, I don't know what Starbucks charges nowadays, but it's the price of a cup of coffee. For a month is what we're charging roughly. Is that worth it for you from an automation perspective to be able to focus on other things? And so, that's, I think, the true benefit that service will give to property managers. And so I'll give you an example that applies to multiple properties, but one customer comes to mind for me because we talk about this several times over last year. And they had over a hundred properties, right? And so they had a dedicated person that their entire job was to add codes, remove codes, troubleshoot customer issues of like codes not working, and just putting in backup or giving out backup codes, putting in codes, things like that. [00:15:08] So it's one almost dedicated full-time employee or resource or consultant for x number of hours that you've assigned for this task, right? Once they set up Jervis, now to automate the process, they were able to move this person to do other tasks, right? They were doing more spot checking of codes or just issue handling, right? So automation is not perfect and again, I try to be transparent with our property managers when it comes to that. There's a lot of moving parts, right? The booking site has to send the property management system, the reservation or the updates. They got to send it to us. We got to talk to a lock vendor. So there's a lot of pieces that could go wrong or could be delayed, right. So issue handling, things like that it's always good to have a person that's available, especially as you scale to a hundred, couple hundred properties and things like that. [00:15:57] Yeah. [00:15:57] And so now that Jervis was doing the bulk of the work, they were able to. Reassign this person to be able to do other tasks that were, you know, more beneficial to the company, right? So doing marketing or customer service, answering emails, things like that. So Jervis was able to probably take on 80, 90% of the automation work or the code management work, and now this person's in more of in a backup spot checking role or a customer service role, and then they were able to take on additional tasks for the property manager. So they were very happy. Obviously it cut down their costs and they were able to maximize like their resources and kind of use their resources more wisely. [00:16:39] Yeah, I mean, the biggest expense in the business really is almost all staff, right? It's people and you know, let's say that team member's $20 an hour. Well, if they can offset that by just getting these devices, you know, in place. Yeah. It could save them some serious monthly expense, especially if they're not having to drive around and do stuff. [00:17:01] Exactly. [00:17:01] It would be pretty significant. So now you mentioned $5 a month per device. [00:17:06] How many devices typically does a property usually need? Before I answer that, Jason, let me just kind of back up a second there. With Jervis, we have no minimums, right? So there is no minimum number of doors that you have to come in with. We don't have a minimum threshold of the monthly amount. You could have technically one door. $5 a month and we'll still treat you at just same way as a customer that has a thousand doors. Right? So the goal with Jervis and all these automation is that you set it and forget it, right? And you shouldn't have to babysit it unless you run into problems, and then we'll work with you. But the, to answer your question, typically a home will have at least one door, right? It could be the front door that maybe the property manager puts the smart lock on. We've got property managers that go above and beyond that and maybe put it on the front door and also the garage door. Right. So that way, even though like, let's say the big garage doors, as you get past that, to actually get into the house, you have to get through smart lock as well, right? So then the way Jervis will work is that you can assign multiple locks to the same property. And if a reservation comes in for that property, Jervis will put the same code on both locks and schedule them exactly the same way. And we won't charge you separately or upcharge you for that capability. I've had a lot of property managers ask me, does that cost more? You know, or just give me, you know, they're surprised because they're expecting to be charged more for that kind of capabilities. But the average I've seen is if you just want smart lock access, one to two doors is kind of like the average. Some property managers are a lot more technology interested I guess. And they'll put the smart thermostat, smart sensors, you know, then you could start seeing three to four devices per property. [00:19:02] Yeah. I would imagine in some areas where the temperatures are somewhat extreme smart thermostat would sort of pay for itself. [00:19:10] Exactly. Yeah. [00:19:11] Your utility bills for the property easily, so that would make sense. So, all right. Very cool. So what other questions do property managers typically have when they're trying to figure out why should I use this or should I use this service? [00:19:26] Yeah, so one of the questions we typically will get is, do you have to purchase locks from us? I mean that's again a decision business philosophy we made years ago is we wanted to stay vendor agnostic, right? So we don't pitch one specific product. We decided not to make custom locks. A lot of vendors that are selling locks, they're reselling other brands, right? Or locks that are white label white labeling locks that are out there, right? We decided not to get into that world. We want to offer just a software as a service platform and be able to support as many devices as we sustainably can, reliably can. And that's a very important part of it. And so, yeah, so the question I get often is, do you have to purchase a lock from us? And the answer is no. We link on our website to where you can purchase the locks from, whether it's Amazon, who is one of our partners, but as far as like where we're linking, but you can get them at Home Depot, you can get them at Lowe's. Bill.com. They're very easily accessible locks and devices that are out there. [00:20:34] So you provide a list of, here are the ones we recommend, here's the best ones? [00:20:38] Exactly. And the ones we recommend are the ones that we carefully recommend because good products means less support issues, you know, for us, and that's one of the things that I have been very careful with from a team management perspective is we've got a good team and a lean team, and I want to make sure that we're not trying to support everything because that just means more headaches when the devices don't work as expected. [00:21:03] Right. And I would imagine with the door sensors or the door locks, and the biggest issue is just the batteries and things down, right? [00:21:11] It is. But sometimes some of the brands, you got to be careful, Jason, like, you know, there are a lot of vendors out there now. If you go to Amazon, just type in smart lock there's so many of them out there, right? So a lot of them are just companies that popped up overnight and. I always recommend to our property managers, even if you're paying slightly more. Stick with a brand that's been around for 20, 30 years. Right. So you know that they're going to be around if you need support, right? Or if the device fails on you, at least you can go, you know, claim your warranty and get a replacement, whatnot, right? So Schlage, August, Yale, Masterlock, these companies have been around decades, right? So those are always our top picks. There's a lot of other brands that are out there that we do support. Some of them are, you know, have been around like Igloo Homes has been around for a while. But we're just kind of careful of like trying not to support it all because it can cause other problems. [00:22:08] Got it. Cool. Anything else that property managers might be curious to know? [00:22:13] Yeah, there's a couple of other questions. I'm trying to think. Let's see what happens. If there's a power outage you kind of hit on this a little bit earlier. The locks are supported by batteries, right? So that means that if there is a power outage, your guests can still get in and out of the home. Right? It's not going to affect access to the property. When we get the reservations, we actually process them two weeks in advance, you know, type of thing. So that way it's not adding the code last minute on the day of the reservation. That's one of the things we do not do unless, you know, caveat being though, that if the reservation came in that day, obviously we're trying to put it on the lock that day, but normally if the reservation came in a week ago, two weeks ago. Well, we processed two weeks in advance typically. [00:22:59] Yeah. Very cool. So the codes are already in there. They're not active yet. Until its time it'll be activated. And so even if the power goes out or there's an issue or the wifi or internet has a problem, that code's already in there and they can get in and out during the time of their stay. [00:23:15] Exactly. Yep. So that's probably the number two question I get. And then third one I get often is our pricing and. We're transparent. As you can see from our website, we don't hide it from you, you don't have to talk to us first to see the pricing. We just keep it all published out there, $5 a month. We actually made a plan just for the property management system users, and it's $5 a month. I think, you know, your users will see that it's very competitive to the other players in the space. And again, I always tell our customers try the different players out, right? We all offer trials, right? So Jervis offers a one month free trial. Everyone offers a trial of some sort. So try everyone out, right? And see there's Remote Lock, there's Aperto, there's Links. Try everyone out. Try Jervis out and see what is the right fit for you, your organization for your needs. And then let us know if you've run into any issues or have any question. But those are the three questions I typically see, Jason. [00:24:18] Perfect. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this with us. So maybe you could touch on, just before we wrap on, how would this apply or be beneficial for long-term management companies and getting vendors in and out? You know, this sort of thing? [00:24:38] Yeah, the great question again. Yeah, so we do have a lot of property management companies, let's say with hundred, 200 properties or more, and that's where our mobile app especially comes in very handy, right? Let's say they have garage doors plus smart locks, and they're different brands, right? So they may be like MyQ garage doors, and then you got smart locks from varying different brands. And so what Jervis's mobile app will do for you is that you can, you know, let's say you have 10 different teammates, you can assign them access to the mobile app, and then they'll be able to switch between the properties just in a dropdown, select the property switch very easily. Then they'll see the devices that you assign to them. So then all they have to do is click a button, and the garage door opens, click a button, smart lock, the door opens, right? Or the lock opens. And then if you drive down the street to your next property, same thing. Just go to the dropdown, select the property, see the devices, click on what you need to open. And so that's where it really benefits the long-term rental users or the teams. We do have property management companies assigning or giving access to the app to their long-term tenant clients as well. So that way they don't have to give them access directly to Schlage. Right. Directly to MyQ. This keeps it like one level removed and then kind of transparent to them who the vendor is. It doesn't matter, right? Like the guest just sees the app, press the button and then they can just get into the property in and out. [00:26:15] Got it. So the tenant would use the Jervis App. Jervis systems, apps in order to get into, in and out of the property, they can use that. [00:26:23] Exactly. Yep. [00:26:24] They would just set up access for them. What about you've got this, you know, system for the short term for people to get in and out. What about for long term and short term? What about getting vendors in and out that are not your vendors? Like you need to send out a plumber. How are you creating access codes and do you have plans to integrate with some of this tech systems out there, like Property Meld or some of these sort of things where they're dispatching their vendors? [00:26:50] Yeah, so that's a good point. So down the road we will integrate with those companies, but by contractors I imagine You mean like handyman companies? [00:26:59] Yeah. [00:26:59] Or cleaning companies, things like that. So the access right now can be granted through our server systems dashboard. So you can assign temporary access, right? So just like you do with the cleaning company, instead of a reservation, when you're adding the user, you're going to be selecting a start date until a firm end date, right? Or it could be the same date, different hours, starting hour, ending hour. And so that's the way property managers can do it right now. But similar to how we integrate with all the property management companies that are out there, our goal is like, to connect with these companies like Property Meld, like things like that you said. And then be able to import in the support request, you know, for a specific property. And then assign a temporary code as we go. Just like that, just like we do with reservations for properties as well. [00:27:53] Yeah. Very cool. All right. Yeah, that sounds really cool. Well, Bobby, thanks for coming on the DoorGrowShow. Sounds like a really cool system. I think the price sounds really easy and fair, and so I'll be really curious to see what sort of response he yet from being on the show. And I hope people check you out. How can they find out more about Jervis? [00:28:14] Sure. Yeah. They can reach us on all the social medias. Were under Jervis.systems. And then the best way, honestly, is to contact us is go to our website and just use the Contact Us form. It'll go to directly to me and our support. So we'll get back to you on our questions or anything like that or answers to any questions. And then like we tell everybody is sign up for a trial. You got nothing to lose. We'll give you one free month to try it out. And if it doesn't work for you, we understand no hard feelings and but if you run into issues, let us know. [00:28:47] We'll be glad to work with you to fix it. [00:28:49] Very cool. All right, Bobby, thanks for being on the #DoorGrowShow. [00:28:54] Yeah. Thank you Jason. I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. All right, so if you are a property management business owner and you are looking to grow your business, you are tired of being stuck in the role, in the things that you're doing that you really don't want to be doing. You're wearing certain hats you don't want to be wearing. Reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you optimize your business. We would love to help you come up with strategies to grow and scale your business so you can easily be adding a hundred, 200, maybe even 300 doors a year without spending any money on paid advertising. So we would love to help see you grow and we would love to help get the systems in people in place on your team so that you can handle that growth. So if that is something you're interested in, you can reach out to us at DoorGrow.com and make sure to join our free community DoorGrowclub.com. It's our Facebook group. We have some free gifts for you with the fee Bible and some other cool things. We would love to give you some free stuff and have you join our community. If you are a property management business owner, we hope to see you. [00:30:00] 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! [00:30:26] 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.

We recently learned that most property managers have an awful profit margin in their businesses. If you struggle with profit in your PM business, you won't want to miss this. Join Jason and Sarah Hull from DoorGrow to learn about how to improve your business, team, and profit margin by making small improvements with BIG impact. You'll Learn… [01:18] Why do property managers have bad profits? [05:11] You need a better team [07:06] How do you know if someone is the right fit? [14:09] Deciding if YOU are in the right roles [18:10] Why you need a strategic planning system [22:57] How to fix your team Tweetables "If you have team members you don't feel safe giving up a chunk of your business to run for you, it's because they don't share your values. And if they don't share your values, you'll never trust them." "It doesn't matter how many doors you have or how few doors you have, you can have a really bad profit margin." "The average profit margin for companies in the 50th percentile is only 1%." "The easiest low-hanging fruit to increase profitability is to tackle the biggest expense in your business if you have a team… people." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] If you have team members you don't feel safe giving up a chunk of your business to run for you, it's because they don't share your values. And if they don't share your values, you'll never trust them. [00:00:09] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow! If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [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. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow here with Sarah, the COO of DoorGrow. And now let's get into the show. [00:01:16] So what are we chatting about today? [00:01:18] We are going to talk about profits. [00:01:21] Okay. I'm noticing this trend lately in talking with some clients, in talking with property managers, that some companies that are struggling with profitability-- which tends to happen when you have a team, usually in the 200-600 door range. Some are now maybe two to 400 range, which I call the second sand trap. A lot of times I'm noticing that they're trying to figure out profitability. They're like, " we don't have a good enough profit margin and-- Oh, we just did a cool video. [00:01:53] We did. [00:01:54] Called what? [00:01:55] Profit Martian. [00:01:56] Profit Martian [00:01:58] Little silly play on words. It's this silly video, make sure you go do a search on YouTube for Profit Martian. So you need to focus on your profit margin, right? And a lot of property managers have really bad profit margins. Like some of the gurus and mentors and coaches that you look up at out there, some of the people with tons of doors, their profit margin actually really sucks. It doesn't matter how many doors you have or how few doors you have, you can have a really bad profit margin. [00:02:26] Yeah. So actually, um, I was talking to somebody just maybe two days ago and he sent me some data from NARPM. So they do all of their little, you know, tests and data gathering and all of that good stuff. And this is from, I think, not 2022, but I think 2021. But there's like a whole breakdown. And if you're in the 50th percentile of property management companies, regardless of size, the average profit margin for companies in the 50th percentile is only 1%. Like one 1%, like one whole percent, which is... I almost threw up when I saw that document. Like, oh, whoa. I felt so gutted. And, I don't know, maybe I was just doing something different when I was running my company, but my profit margins were insane. They were insane. It can be-- [00:03:18] Define insane. Can you tell them? [00:03:20] I was well over 50% profit margin. [00:03:22] Yeah. [00:03:23] Like well over 50%. She's kind of efficient. I ran a tight ship. We did. But I almost couldn't believe the data, but I have to believe the data. It comes from NARPM right? So it's like, well, that's the data. So I don't know what's happening. And I think, I think we made the connection. [00:03:42] Yeah. And wait, can I brag by you for just a sec? So in-- [00:03:45] Yeah. [00:03:46] So she has, she was managing over 200 doors. [00:03:50] 260 [00:03:51] Okay. [00:03:51] Okay. It's a difference. [00:03:53] That's a lot. Some companies only have 60 and they're struggling. So 260 And these are C class properties? [00:04:02] Yeah. [00:04:03] Small multifamily. [00:04:04] And lots of single. Single and small multi. [00:04:07] Yeah. [00:04:08] Our like big multi was like 10 units, like a 10 unit building. [00:04:11] Okay. [00:04:11] We don't have in that area, big, big buildings. [00:04:14] And these are like not necessarily the easiest tenants normally. [00:04:18] No. [00:04:19] Now she did this with only one part-time person that was boots on the ground. [00:04:27] Mm-hmm. [00:04:28] And Sarah was so bored. She was so bored, she came to work in DoorGrow like she was like-- [00:04:35] Twice. [00:04:36] Yeah. [00:04:37] Yeah. So I came and then I left and then came back. [00:04:41] Yeah so I just want to point out like she's super efficient and she was able to do that. After looking inside of like, and talking to thousands of property management companies, like, I know that's exceptional. Like, I know that's rare and a lot of people are like, how's it possible? And some clients of ours, after Sarah's gotten on a coaching call with them, have cut their staffing costs in half, or fired half their staff. Like-- [00:05:01] Yeah. I've had a few of them today. [00:05:03] Yeah. [00:05:04] And then they thanked me for it. [00:05:05] Yeah. [00:05:06] Yeah. [00:05:06] Well, the team members probably didn't. [00:05:08] Well, not them, no. They weren't too happy. [00:05:11] So what we're noticing is a lot of times property managers are like, "we need more KPIs, we need more metrics, data. We need more data, numbers, we need more micromanaging and more process documentation because we're trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Like " how can I get a little bit more juice out of my team?" when they don't focus on the actual real problem. And the real problem is you have a shitty team. Like your team-- [00:05:38] The wrong team. [00:05:39] And maybe they're good people, maybe they have good values, but they probably do not match the three fits. Did I do an episode on the three fits previously? [00:05:49] Probably at some point. I think a lot of times what I see is-- and not just in property management, just in general, businesses-- they hire the wrong way. [00:05:57] Yeah. [00:05:58] So there are three different fits and they go cultural fit, then personality fit, then skill fit. [00:06:05] Mm-hmm. [00:06:05] And they should be in that order. Most of the times, what I see is the reverse. So they focus first on skill fit and then on personality fit and maybe culture. [00:06:19] So the Three Fits of DoorGrow... trademark. So the Three Fits to the Ultimate Hire, this is a framework that I came up with because I was just noticing in my own business this became really important. I was also noticing in other businesses of other million dollar plus business owners we hang out with and in lots of our clients. Like a lot of people were having difficulty with team members. This is common no matter how big the business is or how small it is, if they had a team. And it's because they don't have people that are the three fits. There's sort of a similar concept I noticed in the Traction book, but I didn't really like that model. I wanted to simplify this. So here's how I look at it, I look at it through these three lenses. First culture fit. Do they share your values? You can assess your team right now. Does everybody on your team share your values? If you're not clear on what your values are, though, the answer is probably no. They might have good values. That doesn't mean that your team members might have bad values, it just means they might be different. Like for example, you might value things being done very efficiently. Maybe that's a big deal to you and your clients value that, and you want to make sure things are done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. But maybe you have a person that's a vendor or a maintenance coordinator or in-house maintenance staff and they value things being done, quality, and they take a ton of time. Or it might be the reverse for a lot of you. It's just different competing values. And so if somebody doesn't have the same values as you, what's the big problem with that? [00:07:54] Well, the problem is they're going to make decisions differently than you make decisions. [00:07:59] And so you'll never trust them. You cannot trust them. So this is the thing, if you have team members you don't feel safe giving up a chunk of your business to to run for you, it's because they don't share your values. And if they don't share your values, you'll never trust them. That's the bottom line. Let's talk about personality fit. Culture fit is the most important, like Sarah said. Personality fit. This means they naturally love doing this job. They naturally love doing it, which means they don't have to be motivated. They don't wake up in the morning and think, "I can't wait to for the weekend. I hate this job." They like, they love doing what they get to do. And believe me when I tell you, you may think nobody loves property management. Nobody loves this... there is a person. There are people out there that love changing bed pans. There are people out there that love doing just about anything if you get the right personality fit for that role. Not everybody loves sales, but if somebody's the right personality fit, they love it. They love the push. They love the hunt. They love the chase. They love the challenge. They love talking to people. They have no resistance to doing cold calling. [00:09:04] Some people love that stuff. Some people hate it. Some people love accounting. Some people hate it. Some people love, you know, whatever it is. You can pick anything. And so personality fit means if they're good culture fit and a good personality, that means you just need the third, the last thing, which is skill. The skill fit means they have the training and the experience to do the job. So you can hire people that already have the skill, which is somebody that already knows how to do it well. They're what we would call a "who." They're looking for somebody who can do the job, or there's those that you can train and teach how, so that would be like hiring a "how". There's a really great book called Who Not How, which is a really great book, and in the beginning, early stages you have to hire "hows" and you're going to teach them, which means you have to be the "who" that knows everything. [00:09:56] And later on you're going to start to hire people that are beyond your level. Like I hire people beyond my level that are better at these things than me. I hire "whos". They're much better at these things. And so here's how this works. I usually have a Venn diagram, three circles that are overlapping. I've got culture, personality, skill, and if they have culture and personality, they can be trained-- is what shows up in the middle of those two. If they have culture and skill, but they're not the right personality fit for the role. They don't love it. But they believe in you. They love your company. They share your values, and they have the skill to do the job and the training. Here's the caveat, they'll never be great. They'll never be great at that role because they'll always have friction and resistance. Let's say you hire somebody to be a bdm, but they hate talking on the phone. They don't like reaching out to people and it's uncomfortable. You've trained them. They have the skill to do it. They believe in your values and believe in your business, and they share a belief in you. Like they like want to support you, but they're always going to have friction and they're going to avoid it. "Well I tried texting them twice," you know, and you're like, you have got to call them, right? So if they are personality fit and a skill fit, but not a culture fit, you'll never trust them. And so that's how these play out. If you have all three, they're the ultimate hire. Okay, so what I want you to understand is if you're focusing on profitability right now, KPIs, metrics, more micromanaging, it takes an infinite amount of processes and micromanaging to try and create the results you'll get from the three fits, and you'll never get close. It just won't happen. And so it doesn't make sense to go sign up with profit coaching companies and working on your NARPM accounting standard and all these metrics, when the easiest low-hanging fruit to increase profitability is to tackle the biggest expense in your business if you have a team. And what is that? What's the biggest expense? [00:11:47] The biggest expense on your team? Well, all the people. [00:11:49] Yeah. If you have a team, it's your team. People are-- [00:11:53] You have got to pay people. They like that. [00:11:55] People are expensive. They're way more expensive than software. They're expensive. And you need people in a property management business. It's a people based business, right? It's about relationships and communication and all this. And so the first thing we want to do is decrease the unnecessary work, which Sarah's really brilliant at. We decrease the unnecessary work. That alone can cut your staffing costs in half. [00:12:18] And redundancy. I've talked to like a lot of property managers where it's like, "who handles your leasing?" And they're like, "oh, Joe and Sally." Nope. have one, one person. Because if Joe and Sally does it, that means nobody's actually doing it. Because Joe will say, "oh, I thought it was Sally." Sally will say, "oh, I thought it was Joe." and he goes back and forth and that's how things fall through cracks. That's how things get missed. That's how mistakes happen. There's no true ownership... [00:12:43] Yeah. [00:12:43] ...of that thing. And if there's no ownership, you can like guarantee that it's not going to happen. [00:12:49] If it's not clear who owns the particular job or task or thing to be done, then nobody does, and then they'll be stepping on each other's toes so there'll be double work or it'll just get left undone. Or "I thought they were going to do it." It becomes a mess. Right? [00:13:01] Mm-hmm. [00:13:02] What else should we talk about about this? I think the thing is if you've seen our DoorGrow Code, and if you haven't seen that, I highly recommend you reach out to our team, get a copy of the DoorGrow Code. It shows the roadmap to go from basically zero to 1000 doors and how to do it as quick as possible. A lot of people focus on the profit system, which we have way later at like maybe the 600 door red belt stage, but they've skipped really dialing in their pipeline system. Maybe your sales CRM right now is still like a spreadsheet and you don't have your sales process defined. You don't have maybe a process system, so you don't have some sort of system like we're launching DoorGrow Flow, which is really cool. Vizio like flowchart software for mapping out your processes and for your team running the processes in the business consistently. But you don't have a really solid process system where the processes are clearly defined. But even if you have all the processes in the world, if you don't have a good people system in the business, which is the next thing that you need to have, this is your hiring system. This is how you vet your team. This is how you make sure everybody are the three fits. And I should point out the most important, who's the most important business that should be the three fits? [00:14:14] The CEO. [00:14:15] Yeah. [00:14:16] Yeah. So those of you listening, if you're the business owner, it's you. You should be making sure you are the right personality fit for the roles that you're in. And I guarantee if you're wearing every hat right now, or a lot of hats, you're not, you're not the personality fit. That's why you don't love doing some of those things. Those are the first things we've got to get off your plate. [00:14:33] Yeah. I talked with an owner yesterday and he's like, "oh, I do everything." I'm like, "all right, let's talk about what is everything? Tell me what you do" "I do this and this and this and this and this. So the list is like 20 things long. I'm like okay so out of those things, like what are the things you actually enjoy? "Like I love building systems." He's like, "I love it." He's like, "that's what I do." I'm like, "okay, cool. So what are you doing right now that you hate, that you like, if I could like just snap my fingers, you would never have to do again? What would be?" He's like, I hate doing sales, which is really-- [00:15:02] This was a business owner... bizarre [00:15:04] Really unique because a lot of times the business owner loves doing sales. That's the role they want to keep. They're like, "I love doing that. I love talking to people. I love networking. I love selling. I love promoting my business. I love that." He hated it. I'm like, "you're an operator and that's great." I'm like, that's cool. Like you're that operator personality type. The operator is not going to do sales. So if you're hiring somebody and you're like, "oh yeah, you're going to help me out with admin work and operations, and then they're also going to be like BDM and doing cold calls and..." no, they're not. No, those are two different personality types. [00:15:34] Yeah. [00:15:35] And they clash hard. They clash hard. So in that case, like he should not be doing sales because he hates it. So does he do it? Yes, because he has to. But does he like doing it? No, absolutely not. So if you don't like doing something and you're forcing yourself to do it, it means a few things. First of all, it means you're probably not going to be really super good at it because you're forcing yourself to do it. So you're just going to like, all right, how can I hurry up? How can I get through? Like you're not intentional with it. You're not. Because your heart isn't in it. You're like, I hate doing this. This is just something I have to do. Um, and then it also means that it will fall on his list of priorities really low, which means it will happen last. So he'll go, oh, these are all the things I could do instead of doing sales calls and he'll do 20 million other things instead of doing the sales calls. And the sales calls are the thing that actually are going to help grow the business. But since it's such a painful thing for him to do, it's going to come so low on his list of priorities that that will be the thing that either gets done last or gets skipped. So in that case, like take off that hat and hire it out. You need a bdm. [00:16:47] So one of the things that we recommend that you do is you need the process system. You need a people system. And so that's something we help our clients build out is a hiring system. We have DoorGrow ATS that stands for Applicant tracking system and software, and then we have an AI assessments partner that we partner with to assess you and your team and your potential new hires. [00:17:08] Mm-hmm. [00:17:08] Then we have things that we help you map out, like R Docs, which are the ultimate job descriptions, which will filter out and help also attract some people that are the right personality fit. And so we have this whole system for-- [00:17:21] the right culture fit. [00:17:22] Yeah. [00:17:22] Yeah. Your R doc will attract the right culture fit. [00:17:25] And so the hiring system we put in place reduces that risk because one bad hire is going to cost you probably about 10 grand minimum. You'll probably have a month for three months. You'll be paying them some sort of amount of money each month, and they will probably also cost you some business, especially if they're connected to the front end at. So it's going to be expensive. [00:17:45] Yeah. Plus your time to train them. [00:17:46] Yeah. [00:17:46] Or somebody else's, like on your team is training them so their time. [00:17:51] Yeah. So you're losing money. [00:17:52] Plus they missed opportunity from finding the right person. Yeah. [00:17:55] So bad hiring is super costly in the business. It eats your profits up like crazy. Bad team members or weak team members or team members that are not solidly the 3 fits. Eat your profits like crazy. [00:18:09] Yeah. [00:18:10] And then we have people that have somewhat mediocre teams or they're just not in the right seat on the bus, as a lot of people like to say. And then they don't have a planning system. And that's the next system we want to put in place a planning system. Once you have an operator and you have, you know, a team, a planning system, it really is the rocket fuel for your business and the planning system that we've built is better than EOS. It's better than Traction, all that kinda stuff out there, those are very top down. It needs to be bottom up to where your teams start to work and function like business owners thinking strategically in helping you grow these different arms and pieces of the business that you put them over on your executive team. And so DoorGrow OS allows that to happen. It's software that we've built and this allows you to come up with your annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals as a team to figure out how do we eat this elephant one bite at a time and break it down. And it creates ownership, it creates accountability. Everybody can see whether or not people are getting things done. There's green "yeses" and red "no's" at the end of the week on this software and everybody's accountable and can see it. A players, people that are the three fits, they love this, they love this accountability, they love being in the system. B players will quit. [00:19:30] Mm-hmm. [00:19:31] I've seen it multiple times. We implement something in a business, a planning system like this, and then team members quit. They're like, forget this. I don't want to be seen. I don't want to be accountable. I don't want them to know whether I'm getting stuff done or not. I just want to do my day-to-day tasks. This really is where you have team members that are now moving the business forward instead of you dragging them up the mountain towards the goal, which a lot of you feel like that. And if you're dragging your team members up the mountain, they're all sitting in the wagon and you're pulling them and you're trying to clear the path with the machete and go up the mountain towards the goal, you have the wrong team. If you get your team in the right alignment and you've got your values defined, you've got your process system, your people system, your planning system, your pipeline system, you've got all these, you will be infinitely more profitable. [00:20:15] I find that I get three times the output from team members if they are the three fits easily. And so what would that do? Imagine what that would do if you got three times the output from the existing team, how much more capacity you could have. How would that affect your business? Like it would be, it's pretty magical, I will tell you. So our clients grow pretty rapidly. And so focusing on those after we get all those systems in place, then at DoorGrow we'll focus with clients on the profit system. [00:20:43] Mm-hmm. [00:20:44] After all that, going to the profit system and KPIs and metrics and trying to squeeze team members and all this is kind of like you're trying to do body building and you are taking creatine. You're like, creatine's supposed to help my muscles. Yeah, it can help a little bit, but you need to eat food. You need to get sleep. You need to exercise, like you need to do the basics. So don't jump to the end and now start to squeeze more money out of your team and more profitability when you haven't solved all these earlier problems that need to be solved. [00:21:18] Don't put the cart before the horse. [00:21:20] Yeah, it really is putting a cart before the horse. [00:21:23] And everyone wants to, because they all want to focus on profitability and there are ways that you can focus on profitability. in your company early on, like door number one, you should be focused on profitability and there are things that you should be tracking in your business, but when you hire a team member and then you're like, oh, I'm just going to put in like 10 metrics that they have to do every day and I want end of day reports and I want weekly reports and I want this and I want that, I want this. It's just not going to be the same thing. Those are not going to be the things that actually help you be more profitable in the business, and that's what everybody thinks, but that's a really common mistake. The things that are actually going to help you be profitable in your business are things like looking at your P and L. Whoa. Crazy, right? And it's okay if you don't, right? Because this is what we do. This is how we learn. But you are not looking at your P and L every month making decisions based off of your P and L, then that's a missed opportunity. And then if you're not tracking your profit margin, if you're like, "I have no idea what my profit margin is, I don't know," then there's a missed opportunity. So those are the things that you could do even early on with or without team members. That will actually help you and you can make decisions accordingly and based off of that information, instead of saying, "all right, now I want to micromanage my team more and I want implement this and this and this and this, I need 12 tracking systems and I need all this data and all these metrics and all these spreadsheets," then what you're doing is you're just paying your team to do more work. [00:22:51] And that work isn't even moving the needle, which everyone thinks that moves the needle it doesn't move the needle. [00:22:57] So let's talk real quick about having the wrong team. Really, if you've been stuck at maybe the 200 to 400 door range for several years, you can't figure out how to get ahead, usually, the problem is you. Whether you want to admit it or not, you have the wrong team. You're micromanaging them. They come to you asking every question, and you can't trust them to think and make decisions the way that you would, and this is because you've built the wrong team and that's on you. And so there's a couple myths. One myth is the clone myth. I see this early on. They think, "well, if I could just find somebody else like me then I could clone myself. I just need that one person. They'll be just like me, and that's all I need. Entrepreneurs, I want you to understand it takes like 10 people to clone yourself. It takes like 10 people because you're so adaptable. You can do so many different things. And so it takes like 10 people to clone you. There's not just one. [00:23:52] And if you found somebody that actually was like you that could wear multiple hats and be highly adaptable and like was intelligent, you could learn all this stuff and do all of this, guess what? You're just training your next competitor. They're going to leave you because would you work for somebody? Probably not. You want freedom, you want fulfillment, you want the Four Reasons you are an entrepreneur. If you find somebody highly adaptable like that, they're going to learn what they can from you and they're going to go, "I can do this better myself. I can have more money, more time, more freedom, more fulfillment if I do this myself. I'm going to go do that." So if you find a good clone, they will be a clone, but they will also start doing what you're doing, and that-- I've seen that happen a lot. And they'll take some of your portfolio with them sometimes, regardless of what sort of legal stuff you think you've got protection on. I've seen that happen over and over again. [00:24:42] So the other thing is if you have the wrong team, this is something we can help you with at DoorGrow. We can help you figure out your team, assess, and we'll help you figure out which things are your strengths, which things do you most enjoy doing so we can build the right team around you. [00:24:56] Mm-hmm. [00:24:57] You can't build the right team around the wrong person, and so if you're showing up as the wrong person in the business, you're not doing things that you love, you're not focused on those things and then you're hiring team members based on what the business needs. This is the big failure I see why people get stuck at 200-400 doors is they built a team based on what they think the business needs instead of based on what you personally need as a business owner. We will help you figure that out. We have processes for this. We do time studies, we help you with R docs, all these things. We're going to get you clarity. We'll have you do our AI assessment as well. We'll get you clarity on what you should be doing and what you love doing, and then we will help you figure out very clearly what the next right hire is based on your time study instead of based on what you think the business needs because where the pain in the business is. [00:25:45] That's going to change your life because now your business gets easier and easier and better and better the bigger your team gets, you are focusing more and more on what you love the bigger the team gets and the more doors you have, the more revenue you have. And that means you're now building the right team and your business becomes more and more effective and more and more efficient as it gets bigger instead of more and more stressful. So we can help you get out of this. We can shift you from the wrong team and you showing up as the wrong person and wearing the wrong hats that you don't enjoy very quickly. It'd probably take us about a quarter to make significant movement on this. Even in the first month, you're going to get some serious insights and we'll make some shifts, but in a quarter, we can usually get you to a much healthier place where you feel like you have more fulfillment, more freedom, and we've restructured your team so that we can help you out. [00:26:34] We've done that. I just did that with the client recently and he thought, "Hey, I'm the operator." [00:26:39] Yeah. [00:26:39] "This is what I like. I like being the operator. I'm good at this. I'll do this." And then we assessed him because we built out his r doc for the operator. We assessed him in that role and he was like, "oh. I should not be doing this role." [00:26:51] He was not an operator. [00:26:53] : I actually don't like this and I don't function well in that capacity." So he realized that he should not be running the business in the operator capacity. [00:27:02] Mm-hmm. [00:27:03] Which means he needed to hire an operator. So that allowed him to focus on the things that he actually does like, which is the sales and the bdm, not surprisingly. So he's now in that role in the business and he was like, "Hey, I'm going to hire an operator, and he had someone on his team that he thought was going to be able to ascend into this operator position. He was going to start him out and then kind of ascend him and give him like a little bit more and a little bit more. We assessed this team member the same way, and it was very clear, "this is not going to be your operator." [00:27:35] Yeah. [00:27:36] "So if you put him in this position for right now, like it will be like, you know, a butt in the seat, but this is not your long-term guy. This is definitely not your forever guy. There's just going to be too much friction because he doesn't function in that capacity. He doesn't." And he said, "well I think I'm going to try it. We're, we're going to see how it goes." He tried it and very, very quickly he realized, "oh, this is not the right move. He's not going to be able to handle these things that operators handle." He could handle like a few pieces. So he's like, "I have to change, I have to change the role and I have to continue looking for the operator." and it was so funny because he was like "the AI assessment showed me very clearly, like, I am not the person for this. and he is not the right person for this." [00:28:24] Mm-hmm. [00:28:24] But he was able to make those decisions and have that, like, have that clarity in his business because of those assessments and because we built out the R docs and aside from doing that, he wouldn't have known and he just would've been the operator. That's what he thought he was supposed to do. [00:28:39] Yeah. So we have these R docs, we feed them into this AI tool. It helps us assess the different personality qualities and then we can adjust those levers based on what we think, whether it's accurate or not. And so it's very easy. Like we can sit down with a client like this client and look at this and go, what's the ideal operator? "Well, they would have this attribute, this attribute, this attribute." Cool. And then we have him take the assessment and it shows that's not him. It's pretty obvious. I mean, and then he looks at those, "well, what are my attributes? And then he can say, yeah, that's true about me. I can see that now." so it really provides some clarity. [00:29:12] I just want to say one more thing on that. So since we ran the business through that assessment we had his results. [00:29:18] Yeah. [00:29:19] And then we ran this other person that he thought was going to end up being the operator through that same assessment. And we had his results and we could see, first of all, that the business owner was not going to function as the operator. But it also staff ranks them so we could see the business owner out of two candidates. Right. We had the business owner and this other, the other team member. [00:29:36] Yeah. [00:29:36] The business owner scored the best, which still was not great. And then this person scored less than the business owner. [00:29:45] Yeah. [00:29:46] Which means that he definitely cannot do the role because he actually would do a worse job in the role than the business owner. And we already know that the business owner was not the right fit for role. [00:29:57] Yeah. [00:29:57] So it was like super clear. He's like, "oh, I see that now very clearly." [00:30:01] You want people that are better at these jobs, and that's the ideal. Everybody on my executive team are better at their job than I would be. I used to do every role in the business. I can do their jobs, but I don't love doing their jobs, which means I'm not going to be as great at their jobs, and I wouldn't put as much attention on it. Right? [00:30:23] Okay. So to sum this up, if right now you feel like you need more metrics, more KPIs, and more processes, and that's your gateway to profitability and freedom and everything else, you probably have the wrong team, and you need to get the right systems in place. You need a really good planning, communication, people, hiring, pipeline. All these systems in place that we have in our DoorGrow Super System to get your business in alignment. And then you're ready to start eating up other companies. You're ready to start buying and acquiring companies. You're ready to start, like you can see team members into this and hire. You can scale infinitely. Once you have these systems in place, you can scale. And that's our goal at DoorGrow is to create scalable businesses. And so if you want some help with scaling your business, getting out of, you know, the crappy day to day and the frustration, and you feel like your only way out of this business is to sell it someday, you can exit certain pieces of the business without exiting the business. [00:31:23] I've exited almost all the pieces... I've exited all the pieces that I really don't enjoy in my business. And I will continually be exiting pieces until maybe someday actually exit everything in the business and just an owner. Well, maybe eventually I die, or whatever, right? So you want to figure out which level of exit you want and you don't have to exit the frontline work or the stuff that you don't enjoy doing. This myth that you're the only person that can do it is bs. "Nobody else can do it better than me" is bs. This is what early entrepreneurs usually say that aren't well seasoned or haven't realized there's people out there that are smarter than you, better than you at most everything that you don't enjoy doing. [00:32:02] And you need to find those people. And we can, we can help you with that. We can help you get out of that situation and you're going to be way more profitable. You will have so much more profitability if we do that stuff first. And then after all that, we can focus on maybe some metrics and some KPIs, but most companies probably don't even need that granular sort of stuff once they have all this other stuff dealt with and taken care of. So, anything else you want to add? [00:32:29] I don't think so. I love doing this stuff. This is how my brain works, so like the clients that are like in our program and going through this stuff, I love it. I'll talk about it all day long. And I do think it's something that you can do that really will propel you. It's going to move you into that world that you really hoped that you would get right, because I doubt very much when you started a property management company, you were like, "man, I can't wait to talk to tenants every day. I can't wait to deal with maintenance. That's going to be so fun. Oh yes, dealing with tenants and evictions and like, all the nonsense that comes along with it, like, yeah! I can't wait for that. It's going to be so fun." It's like, probably not really your dream job. Like it sure as hell is not my dream job. I will tell you that. I've been offloading like more and more to my assistant and I'm like, "oh, this is so nice. I don't have to deal with a lot of the stuff that I used to have to deal with." [00:33:23] But I think a lot of times what business owners forget, or at least they don't realize it for some reason, is this is your business and you get to build it the way that you want to. So all of the, "I should do this" and "I have to do this," and "I'm the business owner, so this is my job." No, you create your job. You decide what your role is because you started the company. So all of the, "I have to do the accounting because I'm the owner." False. Like "I have to do the sales because I'm the owner." False. Like all of the things that you think that you need to do, do they have to be done? Yes. Does it have to be you? No. So you get to be the one who decides what seat do you sit in in the company, and I have clients that say, "I don't want any of the freaking seats at all." Awesome. Let's make that happen for you. [00:34:12] Yeah. I mean, if you wanted to be the receptionist, you could just be the receptionist, like it's your business. You can do whatever the hell you want. [00:34:18] You can do whatever you want. [00:34:19] Yeah. [00:34:19] If there's a thing in your business and you're like, I love this piece. Then keep that piece and let that be your role, and then hire out around that, like that piece. Don't give that piece away if that's the thing that you like. [00:34:34] One of my mentors said something to me that really hit me in the gut, and he said-- and I've shared this on the podcast before-- but he said, "Jason, if you don't yet have the business of your dreams, it's because you're not yet the person that can run it yet." and so that's our goal at DoorGrow with our clients, is we want to teach you to be the entrepreneur that can have the business of your dreams. You can have it. There's no reason why you can't have it. If anyone can do it, you can do it too, and we can help you get there. So That's it for today. So hopefully this was helpful. Until next time to our mutual growth, everybody, be sure to like, subscribe, follow us on all the different channels. We're on everything and we appreciate it. And leave us a good review somewhere. We would love that too. And check us out. Go to doorgrow.com and for those of you that want to be part of a free community, get some free stuff, and hang out with some other entrepreneurs and kind of be nurtured by us, and learn more about DoorGrow because you're not just ready to pull the trigger. Go to doorgrowclub.com. You can join our free Facebook group, and get in there. And if you're ready to have a conversation with my team and us map out a roadmap and a plan for you to get out of some of the suck that you don't want to be in, go to DoorGrow.com and book a call with our team. All right, bye everyone. [00:35:51] 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! [00:36:18] 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.

In this podcast episode, property management expert Jason Hull talks to Kal McDonough from True Submeter about how their product helps eliminate landlord-paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units. Kal explains how their product is different from competitors, how it works, and why property managers should consider using it to benefit both themselves and their clients. You'll Learn… [01:18] Introducing True Submeter [04:06] A Submeter that uses WIFI? [08:48] Tracking Usage in Multi-Family units [10:24] Warranties and Replacements [11:25] Early Warning Systems and Alerts Tweetables "True Submeter eliminates a middle ground and coordination with the tenant and the city." "We have finally developed a significant product that is used across the country to eliminate landlord paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units." "A lot of owners are paying for their tenants' water usage." "It also eliminates you having to kind of coordinate with the tenant, coordinate with the city. That's completely on us." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] A lot of owners are paying for their tenants' water usage. We have finally developed a significant product that is used across the country to eliminate landlord paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units. [00:00:17] Welcome Doorgrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management 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. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:18] My guest today is Kal McDonough. Did I say it right? [00:01:22] Yes, you did. Jason, I appreciate you having me here today. [00:01:25] Glad to have you. So Kal, you are with a company called what? What's the name of the company? [00:01:32] True Submeter. [00:01:33] True Submeter. Okay. So can you explain to us a little bit of background on yourself and how you got really excited about submeters? [00:01:43] Yeah, absolutely. I'm a recent grad from the University of Minnesota and we started this company, me and my partner, in 2016 because we got interested in real estate. Now being so young, we didn't know how to start investing with nothing. We didn't have the capital to do it. So we tried to figure out a product that real estate investors would like to have, that we could make that no one is really doing. And that's how we figured out a lot of people, a lot of owners are paying for their tenants' water usage. So we wanted to create a product to eliminate that, which is our True Submeter. It's a true submeter. We started this project in 2016 and we have finally developed a significant product that is used across the country to eliminate landlord paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units. [00:02:40] Okay. [00:02:42] Yeah, so basically we have two major products. We have our main line meter and our point of use meter. And the main line is our biggest seller, as you only need one per unit. These get attached to the plumbing to each, and it remotely tracks bills and shows live coverage of water usage for each month. So if someone were interested in purchasing our product, we set up an account for you. We send you our product, you install it, and from there on we take care of all the billing that is necessary for your tenants to receive the water bills, and then they will pay you, the landlord, and it's completely covered from there. [00:03:23] Got it. So people aren't using anything like this currently? Often? [00:03:30] So we have few competitors, however their products do not do the same thing as we do. Most of the time. If you would like to buy a submeter, you get the physical submeter and it has readings on it that you can physically take. Most people will need to hire someone to go read those. However, ours connect to wifi and automatically trans mit that to your account and to the tenants. So it eliminates a middle ground there. And it also eliminates you having to kind of coordinate with the tenant, coordinate with the city. That's completely on us. [00:04:06] Got it. How do you solve the wifi challenge, or whose wifi are these using? [00:04:12] Right, great question. So we set up our own routers and ship them with each order. These are specifically only to connect to our sub meters, so no one else can use these routers. There's special wifi, username and password that only our meters get connected to and we completely take care of the cellular payments and everything. So this has nothing to do with the landlord. You don't have to set up a new wireless connection. And it's great that we can troubleshoot it knowing that it's our own wifi. [00:04:42] Got it. Okay. So tell me, what are some of the big questions that people have about this and why should they do the extra work to get this set up and pay attention to this? Most property managers are probably thinking: how's this going to make me more money? How's this going to benefit my clients? Maybe you could go into that. [00:05:01] Yeah, absolutely. I can start off with a pretty simple example. Just saying if a landlord that owns a simple duplex is currently paying for their tenant's water bills because the property only gets one water bill. A lot of cities have a legal rule where you cannot split it down the middle because one tenant is using less. [00:05:20] Right. [00:05:20] You can't have them billed for more than what they're using. And that's one of the key reasons why our product is so great is if you're now recording the specific usage for each tenant, now you're able to bill them. A lot of people question is it worth the money? Is it worth the investment? A great thing about our product is for a lot of the people that we sell to, this is a one-time investment that now you're saving all of this monthly revenue that you don't have to pay for your tenant's water bill. I would like to get into that a little bit more as we do charge a monthly service fee, which is $5.90. Per unit. So say you have a duplex $5.90 per unit, that's $11.80 per month. However, we are able to bill this to the tenant. So this could be a one-time investment for a landlord owner or a property owner or property management company. And I think that's really what sets us apart of from any competitor that we have as well is we minimize our costs of the investment there. There is no one else that is able to accommodate the pricing of this for an original investment. Like I said, we have two main products, our mainline meters, which I touched on a little bit, and then we also have a point of use meter. Now the difference between these two products depends on the plumbing of the property. If plumbing is separated between units our mainline option is going to work fantastic for you because you only need one meter per unit. And these come at a flat price of $79 each. Now if plumbing is not separated and it flows through the entire property, we have our point of use option, which gets attached to every single point of use in the unit. [00:07:11] For example, a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, toilet washer, shower et cetera. Now, this is a little bit bigger of an investment being that you need more meters and it comes at the same price per meter, $79 each. But it does the same function. They do the exact same thing. We group these point of use meters together. They all still connect to the same wifi router and still bill monthly. Now this is another reason why we are kind of special in that we are the only people that have this point of use option. Otherwise it's completely mainline meters from our competitors. And that's really something special that we set ourselves apart from. Although we recommend if possible, our main line meter is just easier and more affordable. We can accommodate those interesting plumbing scenarios. [00:08:04] Got it. And so how difficult is it to attach the mainline meters or the point of use, meters? Is this something they need plumber to install or is this something they can typically do? [00:08:16] Yep. So we do not do installation as we're based out of Minnesota and we sell to across the country. A plumber is recommended. Although we do know a few of our customers have a maintenance team on hand if it's a property management company or whatnot. We send an installation guide that goes step by step. If someone wanted to save money and do it themselves, they would have the opportunity to do that, although we do recommend a plumber on site. [00:08:43] Right. That's probably a good idea for liability reasons. [00:08:47] Of course. [00:08:48] Alright, cool. So how do you justify this to people that have multi-unit properties and, they're low rent. How are you convincing, the property managers to do this and how are they convincing the owners to do this? Right, of course. Well, a great tool that we have, which is included on our website, is an ROI. This is a simple tool that you can plug in simple math equations and find out how much money you will be saving or how much return on the investment you will get from us. I think that's an easy way to, really show that we are worth it. And if that's not enough, then we just want to provide the simplicity of eliminating something like this for a property management company. What's nice for multi-home owners is that the account that we will set up for a personal owner, all of your properties in one are in one. It's easy to use. We, like I said before, we are very pleased with the simplicity of our website, our accounts, how they function. And along with that, I would like to offer my support and troubleshooting techniques to give any customers that we have an opportunity to connect with someone real instead of just looking up on our website and trying to find a solution. [00:10:01] So Kal, you mentioned your website several times. What's the website address? [00:10:05] It's simple. It's truesubmeter.com. [00:10:07] Okay. And there's no clever spelling with True. It's t r u e. [00:10:11] T r u e s u b m e t e r.com. [00:10:16] Got it. Great. Truesubmeter.com. Okay. What other questions might property managers be curious to know about this or concerns? [00:10:24] One question that we get quite a lot is, do we have a warranty? As our warranty is that if our meters break due to natural use, we'll replace 'em. We have a few to minimal to none replacements necessary in the time that we've been a company, which is quite impressive. We do know that some people have interesting tenants that will like to not cooperate in the ways that we would always like them to. And we offer a major discount based off of that if a meter happens to get tampered with broken due to outside circumstances. So that's one question that we get quite a bit. [00:11:02] And they can pass that along, to the tenant. They can fee the tenant for damaging. You agree? [00:11:08] Correct? Correct. We have had a couple of issues with some tenants that were not supposed to be there anymore. And we had to redo an entire project based off of that. And they weren't, they were not happy with that bill. But yes, we're very confident in our products which also I think sets us apart. And. . I'm trying to think of all-- [00:11:25] So curious, related to that, if a property is vacant, is there any sort of warning system that could be in integrated with this? Maybe in the future if somebody is flushing toilets or using the sink or something and no maintenance people and no tenants are in place like it's vacant? Absolutely. I mean, one of the key things to that is if the property is vacant and there is usage going. You will get a monthly bill saying there's usage. Obviously unless we know from the landlord that the property is vacant and there shouldn't be we're going to be assuming that it should be in usage. But otherwise-- another thing just to add on to that is our leak detection system where if we get weekly usage rates that show us if there's a abnormally large amount of usage at a property which will trigger us to contact the landlord and say, Hey, there's quite a bit of usage here. There could possibly be a leak. We know sometimes tenants do use this amount of water, but if not, this should get checked on. And then that's saving the landlord numerous amount of money as well. They don't have to pay the city for all the leaking. [00:12:34] Got it. Okay. Yeah. Very cool. All right. Did we miss anything? [00:12:40] Not off the top of my head. I think we kind of covered everything. Very cool. Leak detection. If it's vacant, you'll be alerted by the monthly bill. Like, Hey, what's going on here? You've got the main benefit. Why don't you sum up the main sort of benefit here and we'll wrap up. [00:12:56] Right. I mean, like we've stated a couple times here, the main benefit of our product is to eliminate landlord paid water utilities. I mean, that's the main goal of our company. It's a small investment to a large return. And I think that's why people should look into our company and partner with us going forward. [00:13:15] Cool. And this can be a profit center for property managers. [00:13:20] That is a good question. This cannot be a profit center for property managers. As there is strict rules with how much tenants get billed for usage and utilities we make sure that they are only getting billed for what the city bills them. And that is due to legal terms. [00:13:36] Got it. But they can charge a monthly fee for the use of this tool or service? [00:13:42] Correct. That is correct. [00:13:44] Okay. [00:13:44] And this monthly fee is from True Submeter ourselves. [00:13:49] Yeah. Can they mark that up? [00:13:51] We have had a few customers in the past mark this up to combat the investment, and that is allowed. However, we don't recommend it as tenants most likely would not like to pay higher bills for, probably for something that they might not have wanted in the first place. [00:14:09] Sure. Okay. But at least they don't have to pay the water bill for their neighbor. [00:14:15] Correct. Correct. [00:14:17] Okay. Very cool. All right, well Kal appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this. Everybody, check out truesubmeter.com. And thanks for being on the DoorGrowShow. [00:14:27] Jason, I appreciate you being-- letting me be on here. Thank you. [00:14:31] Awesome. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, you want to scale your operations, you're tired of being frustrated with your team, then reach out. We would love to see if we could help you grow and scale your business, get the right team in place. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and we hope to hear from you soon. [00:14:54] Bye everyone. [00:14:55] 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! [00:15:21] 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.

Do you use a pitch deck when you're selling to potential property management clients? If not, you might be missing out on more deals than you realize… Join property management growth expert Jason Hull as he dives into the reason why property management entrepreneurs should have a pitch deck/visual aid when selling to potential clients. You'll Learn… [01:53] Why use a visual aid? [06:49] What needs to be in a pitch deck? [08:32] Creating a visual roadmap for clients [11:52] 10 tips for creating a pitch deck [17:09] More tips for sales in property management Tweetables "Businesses can't grow unless you're working on them instead of just in them." "Now, in using visual aids, like in a pitch deck, having things that people can see, it will definitely help you increase your close rates" "You offer a really great service and you solve their problem, and if they don't understand that, they need to be educated on that." "Your product really is your business. It's not property management. Your product really is your team. It's your service. It's your philosophy. It's your values as a company." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] It doesn't matter if you're selling to somebody and they just forget everything instantly. And so if they can retain the information that you share and they learn, that education that you give them during the sales process increases the likelihood that they're going to work with you. [00:00:15] Welcome Doorgrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management 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. [00:01:12] Now let's get into the show. So at the time of this recording, we are in kind of the no man's land in between Christmas and New Year's. This time period I see a lot of entrepreneurs put their head down and they get a little bit bored and they start to focus on working on their business sometimes for the first time in a long time because there's a lot of business owners. A lot of y'all are working in your business constantly, and you're not working on your business, and businesses can't grow unless you're working on them instead of just in them, right? I call that strategic time instead of just daily tactical time doing the work. So today's topic that I wanted to talk about... I've been working with my sales team on helping to create better visual materials. So one thing that I've noticed is I've started using an app called Notability, and I draw a lot on my iPad with my Apple pencil and I've been doing a lot of drawings in educating, teaching clients, and I just notice that at the end of our group coaching calls and stuff, I have way less questions. There's much higher retention rate, people absorb the information better, and it's really helped me to understand the power in visuals. Not only that, but we've bought into several high ticket programs and masterminds, and I've noticed that some of the ones that we closed very easily with, they had a very nice pitch deck. [00:02:44] And so I wanted to share an idea with all of you that you should have a pitch deck for your property management business in selling. This is something that I coach clients on, and so I wanted to just touch on, kind of sell you on the idea of having a pitch deck. Now, I know, ironically, I do not have a pitch deck to show you right now to sell you on the idea of having a pitch deck. That would be really cool, right? But this is a podcast, so not everybody is going to see anything anyway. [00:03:17] But I'm going to go over some topics and if you saw my previous episode on ChatGBT, I actually had ChatGBT do some of the research for me. So AI helped me create this podcast episode. So one of the things that makes Pitch Decks really effective is there's this power in visual storytelling. Visuals help convey complex ideas really quickly. They help people get the idea and see it and absorb it a lot faster. Not only that, but it's engaging and it gives somebody something they can remember in association with it. So I think also with having something like that, you know, if it's designed even marginally well, it doesn't have to be amazing, but it helps build credibility and it shows a better first impression that you've thought through some of these concepts. So, I share frameworks, but I like to share them in a visual way so that people can absorb and learn these frameworks. We use these during our sales pitch, during the sales process. [00:04:19] Now, in using visual aids, like in a pitch deck, having things that people can see, it will definitely help you increase your close rates because if people are absorbing information faster and if people can see the information and they're visual learners and they're not just auditory learners, then they'll be able to absorb it a lot more quickly. And some people are kinesthetic learners. They have to kind of see and feel. And so visuals help them to kind of imagine how these things could work, especially if you're using sort of visual analogies or pictures that involve people touching, doing, acting right? For those kinesthetic learners out there. I mentioned that retention is a lot higher, so it doesn't matter if you're selling to somebody and they just forget everything instantly. And so if they can retain the information that you share and they learn that education that you give them during the sales process increases the likelihood that they're going to work with you because the only reason they would not work with you is because they aren't educated enough, right? Because you offer a really great service and you solve their problem. And if they don't understand that, they need to be educated on that. [00:05:30] So let's talk about the benefits of having a pitch deck, right? So, we talked about how it can visually help showcase the value proposition of your product or service. The pitch deck also can help the sales team if you have a sales team. This helps them to actually sell the way that you would want them to. It helps keep them on track during a presentation, and it helps them be more organized. It creates consistency because-- how many of you have created a sales script. Many of you probably don't have one, which really sucks, but how many of you created a sales script and then you listen to a call and your team don't follow it? And so the visuals kind of force them to go down a similar path to what you would want them to. And you can build the script into the pitch deck. If they're doing it digitally, they can be the notes on the slides. And so they have to talk about what they're showing visually, right? Pitch deck also can help establish and build credibility and it is kind of set you as a leader in your space because a lot of your competition probably don't have one. [00:06:31] I'll be honest, like most property managers' sales process is just hope somebody calles in and then just wing it and answer whatever questions they have, and hopefully, maybe they'll want to sign up, and that's like really ridiculous, right? It's not a very effective sales strategy. So we teach a lot more effective ways of building a sales process through multiple interactions, spread out over time, and using effective language, how to deal with objections and building the ultimate pitch using our golden bridge for phase selling and et cetera. So you want to build this out to be really effective. The pitch deck also can help your sales team anticipate and address the objections or questions from potential customers. So the pitch deck that I'm building out right now for my sales team has all of the most common objections and the ways to deal with those objections built into it. Now, they don't have to use every slide, like if they went through and used every slide that we have that I've put in the pitch deck and talked about them all and shared every framework, it'd probably be like a two hour conversation. It'd be really long. They don't need to. One of the early slides in the pitch deck is to triage and identify what their challenges are, and then later we have slides to deal with those challenges. You don't need to talk about anything else, right? You don't need to talk about stuff that you can solve for them that they're not dealing with if they're potential client, they care about the problems they have, right? And so that is another tool or another way that a pitch check can help is that it can help address objections or these questions and get them thinking about how you can help them solve this. Pitch deck can also help future pace people, so you can showcase a roadmap or a path that includes you in the future, and really this is why people work with you, is they imagine a different future than they've been experiencing in the present or in the past. [00:08:32] They imagine there's a different outcome or a different result in the future that includes you and it allows you to visually showcase here's the journey that you're going to go on. Which is why it's important to have maybe a roadmap or a journey. And if you haven't seen our roadmap for property managers, which is the DoorGrow Code, we've cracked the code on the process for growing and scaling your business from zero to a thousand plus doors in a relatively short period of time, and this roadmap it creates a lot of clarity for our clients and for our potential clients very quickly. They can see, oh, this is the problem I should be working on instead of this, and here's where I'm at and here's what I need to do to get to the next level. So they don't waste a lot of time doing the wrong stuff. Right? If you set up a call with our team, you'll definitely see that this is how we triage clients now. It's how we help them see the future of how we can help them. So the pitch deck also will help the, your sales team-- or yourself if you're selling-- persuade the potential customers because it'll highlight the key features, benefits of the product and service. You can showcase these. So if it's property management, you can showcase in your pitch deck through your slides, like the benefits of using a property manager over what other alternate vehicles they might have been thinking about doing, like doing it themselves or getting their realtor to do it, or whatever, right? [00:09:55] A pitch deck also can help your sales team close deals, by providing a clear call to action, and then outlining what happens after that, right? So you can have a clear call to action, which one of the biggest challenges I've noticed with sales teams is that they just don't ask. They don't go for the close. So you build that in and they will ask every time. And you need to ask for the close-- I teach my sales team-- you need to ask for the close, even if you know they won't do it yet , but because it brings out the objections. It allows those objections to come out or come to the foreground. It kind of shakes the gold out of the dirt, so to speak. It allows you to see the real objections in what you need to deal with, and if you don't ask, a lot of times you don't get to the objection, and she's like, "well, do you think you might do this?" "Yeah, maybe." "Cool, okay, well, you know, I'll follow up with you after you've taken a look at some things." "Okay." right. That's not very effective. But if you say, "Hey, is there anything that would prevent you from signing up or getting started with us today?" And, you know, "are you ready to do this?" They're going to say yes or no. They might say yes, right? And they might say, "well, no, I need to do this." Or you'll hear some typical objections like, "well, I need to talk to my spouse first, or I need, you know, I need to get the funds together," or whatever it might be. They're going to bring up some sort of objection. "Well, I'm working on this with the property first and I need to do this." Okay, cool. So now you know what the objection is, and you can say, "well, we can help you with that thing," or "We solve that problem, by the way," or "that's included" or "here's why you probably don't want to go down that path and do that. Instead, have us do this," right? So you can now solve that objection that's preventing them from signing up with you right now. [00:11:43] All right. So let's talk about some things to include in a good pitch deck. So this is what ChatGPT says. So here's some ideas, right? So it should have a clear and compelling value proposition. This should be the main focus of the pitch deck and should be communicated in a way that resonates with the audience, right? There needs to be value, right? How is this going to benefit me? Is what your prospect's thinking. Number two, a strong visual design. Use clean professional design elements to make the pitch deck visually appealing and easy to follow. You want it to be very visual, not text heavy. That's PowerPoint. Death by PowerPoint is you just include everything that you're going to say text-wise and then it's really annoying. It's almost insulting. You're like, "well, I'm going to read you what's on the screen right now." right? You don't want to do that. Use visuals that back up what you're going to say and have what you're going to say in the hidden notes on your desktop or on your screen, or in front of you, right? Where are we at? [00:12:43] Number three, detailed product or service information. So provide detailed information about the product or service being pitched, including key features and benefits. Now, if people get too caught up on the features and benefits, it's often because they don't trust you a lot of times. So just be aware of that. If they trust you, then the features and benefits can help move them towards the close. Number four, customer testimonials. So make sure you include quotes or video testimonials from satisfied customers to build credibility and trust. They need social proof. This is a risk for them to trust you, and so you need a showcase or have some stories, some success stories to share and showcase real people-- faces. They need to see faces of humans that say, "you should work with this property management company." Number five, a solid business model. Outline the company's business model and how the product or service fits into that model. So you think that your business, actual product, your product really is your business. It's not property management. [00:13:51] Your product really is your team. It's your service. It's your philosophy, it's your values as a company. And so I think it's important to showcase that. Number six, market analysis. You could provide data and research to demonstrate the size and potential of the target market. So I think this could be helpful in property management because one of the big challenges or objections people will have if you're trying to convert them maybe from an accidental investor to a long-term buy and hold for example or something. They might have concerns about external factors related to the real estate industry, the market as a whole. "Should I even keep this property?" And that could be very relevant to have some data about the market and why it's good to invest there and why it's good to hold onto the investment, et cetera. Number seven, marketing and sales strategy. Outline the marketing sales strategy for the product or service, including details on target audience, pricing, distribution channels. So you will be marketing these properties. And so they're going to want to see some of that stuff. Like, "here's how we're going to help you get this thing rented out. Here's how we're going to market. Here's our process. Here's how we're going to make a video of the property and how we're going to put it out there and how we're going to get you the best tenants" and stuff like this. [00:15:10] Number eight, team and leadership. So introduce the team and leadership behind the company highlighting the relevant expertise and experience. So I think that's very helpful to showcase that it's not just a one man show if you can, and to showcase that your team have knowledge and experience and to showcase your expertise. A lot of times you aren't talking enough about yourself and like, "here's why I'm an expert." So for example I would say, "I've spoken to thousands of property managers. I've helped hundreds. We have hundreds of clients. We have about 90 businesses in our Mastermind right now, paying us thousands of dollars a month, right?" so I want to showcase my expertise. Right. So you need to be willing to toot your own horn and showcase that you're an expert. Otherwise, why should they trust you? Right? They don't care how much you know or what you know until they know that you are an expert and are safe and they can trust you, right? [00:16:08] Then they'll start to listen to you. I usually recommend you qualify yourself early in your pitch deck and early in the conversation. Okay. What else? We've got number nine, financial projections. So providing financial projections, including revenue and profitability estimates to show the potential return on the investment for the product or service. So that can be a little bit dangerous, I think, legally. You need to be careful. You can't make certain promises, but I think with their rental property, you could show a performance. You could show some projections of the future of what they could be doing versus where they're at now, which creates a pain gap between the results you can get them and where they're currently sitting. You could showcase rent range reports and what their property should rent for. You could have comps, stuff like this. And then number 10, a clear call to action. So of course at the end, you should end with a clear call to action and outline the next steps, right? [00:17:09] So that is the idea of creating a pitch deck. Now I have a lot of psychology and science that I put into pitch decks. I don't have the time to go into all of that here on a podcast episode. We go deep. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can add into your pitch and into your pitch deck. As part of our rapid revamp program, I spend two weeks, two of our calls are spent just focusing on how to create the ultimate pitch, and then we have a whole training in DoorGrow Academy in Sales Secrets, how to build the ultimate sales pipeline and process. And then how sales language that you can use, which is based on neurolinguistic programming to psychologically shift people's attention towards the things they should be focused on to deal with objections, stuff like this. And then we get into my four phase Golden Bridge selling, which I think is the most authentic way to sell to create trust, which is about transparently sharing your real motivation besides just getting money from them and sharing, connecting it to their motivation and showcasing how your business is a vehicle for you to get what you want. So you can go back and listen to my episode on the Four Reasons for starting a Business. So it gets into that a bit and then connecting it. So if they understand your motive, the business motive, and it connects to their motive, everybody's in alignment and you know there's going to be a win-win win between all three entities here, right? So the business gives you what you want and helps give them what they want, and that's the golden bridge. [00:18:42] The business is the bridge between both of you getting and connecting with your desires, connecting to each other, right? And it's the most authentic, easiest way to create trust and to sell. And we get into the four phases of that in our selling process, and then we get into what I call the three dominoes that you need to knock over in order to have the ultimate pitch, which is during phase three is the pitch part. So, if you're curious about learning this, you want to increase your close rate, you want to close more deals, you want to get more clients, reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you out, and our clients are crushing it. We had our growth accelerator call today with our group coaching clients. One of our clients just added 37 doors in the last month. So kudos to that client. And he just broke the hundred door barrier. He knows how to get doors, doesn't have to spend any money on advertising. And he's like, "it's becoming painful." And that's exactly what we define at that stage in our DoorGrow Code. You break the hundred doors, and it's going to start to become painful because you now are a promoter and you know how to grow your business. Adding doors is not hard. So we solved that problem. So now he needs our super system. He needs to start building out the back end of the business operations, et cetera. [00:19:58] And if you're already beyond hundred doors, you're probably making some of the most typical mistakes. You're thinking, "I need more processes. I need to micromanage my team more, I need more KPIs." These are very typical thinking of entrepreneurs that are stuck and will never break 600 doors because they are focused on the wrong problem. It's not that you need to micromanage more. You need a better team that you don't have to micromanage. And so we can share all of that with you during our sales call. We have slides for this that I think you'll real will blow your mind. So reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you grow and scale your business. Reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. Book a call with our team and we're going to help you make a lot more money, but get more fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support in your business. [00:20:43] And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. [00:20:46] 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! [00:21:13] 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.

"Are you a property management business owner looking to stay ahead of the curve? Don't miss our latest episode where we revealed the top 10 ways AI is set to revolutionize the industry and how you can leverage it to improve your business. From automated customer service to predictive maintenance, we've got you covered. Tune in now to learn more."- This is a teaser written by AI for a podcast episode about AI… also written by AI. Phew! Join property management growth expert Jason Hull to learn more about AI like ChatGPT and how it could potentially impact the property management industry. You'll Learn… [01:52] This episode about AI was written by AI [02:43] 10 ways AI and chatbots could impact property management [04:53] How I used AI to write this episode [08:36] AI assessment for HIRING [11:27] 10 ways AI can help single-family residential PMs [14:47] The future and impact of AI Tweetables "Could AI take over the world and is it the most dangerous thing since nuclear weapons? The answer is probably yes." "Business owners that are able to leverage AI and leverage it early on will have a competitive advantage over those that are late adopters." "AI is a lot cheaper than people." "The future is getting crazy. So the creative stuff is going first. Eventually, maybe manual labor and some of the human, like real-time personal tasks will get taken." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] I asked, "What is a good intro to lead into the above list for introducing the topic on a podcast. So here's the intro: [00:00:07] "Hello and welcome to our latest episode where we'll be exploring the exciting world of artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the property management industry. With the rise of chatbots and other AI powered tools, it's clear that this technology is poised to have a major impact on how property managers do business. In today's episode, we'll be sharing our top 10 list of the ways that AI is set to revolutionize property management, from automated customer service to predictive maintenance and beyond. Whether you're a property management business owner or just interested in the future of the industry, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in." [00:00:46] It wrote this for me. It wrote this! [00:00:49] Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust, gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:01:28] 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. Now, let's get into the show. [00:01:51] So today's show is going to be very relevant to what's going on right now. So I don't know if you've seen what's going on right now, but what's going on right now is ChatGPT. You've probably heard of it if you're on social media. Everybody's going crazy. Why are they going crazy? And if you haven't heard about this, you should check this out. You can go to chat.openai.com. And what this is, is this is an AI tool. Like you're talking to a robot. You can type like you're chatting to a human and it will give you whatever information that you asked for back. It can write software. It can create stuff. It's pretty wild. And right now it's free. It's ridiculous. So I put in a prompt, I'm going to read this to you. I said, "can you give me the list of the top 10 ways AI like ChatGBT will impact property management in the future?" Within seconds, it spit this out: [00:02:43] "Here are 10 potential ways that AI and chatbots like GPT could impact property management in the future: [00:02:49] 1. Automated customer service. Chatbots can handle basic customer inquiries and requests, freeing up property managers to focus on more complex tasks. [00:02:59] 2. Tenant screening. AI can analyze tenant data to help property managers make informed decisions about who to rent to. [00:03:07] 3. Maintenance requests. Chatbots can handle maintenance requests from tenants, triaging and routing them to the appropriate team member." [00:03:16] This is cool stuff, right? Very cool stuff. So where was I at? [00:03:21] " 4. Lease management. AI can assist with tasks such as lease renewals and rent collections. Predictive maintenance is number five. Using machine learning, AI can analyze maintenance data to predict when equipment is likely to fail, allowing property managers to proactively address issues before they become problems." [00:03:43] There's companies already doing some of this, right? [00:03:45] "6. Energy management. AI can help optimize energy usage in buildings by predicting and adjusting energy demand in real time." [00:03:56] This is getting into maybe more commercial management or multi-family, right? [00:04:00] " 7. Marketing. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify potential tenants and tailor their marketing efforts to specific audience segments." I imagine the AI doesn't understand most of you want clients, so it also probably could be used for that-- not probably-- it could be, right? [00:04:19] "8. Space utilization. AI can help optimize the use of shared spaces within a building, such as conference rooms or common areas by analyzing usage data and making recommendations for scheduling and utilization. Tenant engagement is number eight (He meant #9) Chatbots can help facilitate communication between property managers and tenants, improving the overall tenant experience. [00:04:39] 10. risk assessment. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify and mitigate potential risks, such as detecting patterns of suspicious activity or identifying areas of a building that may be prone to accidents." [00:04:52] Now to get you interested, I asked it, "What would a good teaser for this-- if I used this list in a podcast episode to get property management business owners to listen? So here's the teaser: [00:05:03] "Are you a property management business owner looking to stay ahead of the curve? Don't miss our latest episode where we revealed the top 10 ways AI is set to revolutionize the industry and how you can leverage it to improve your business. From automated customer service to predictive maintenance, we've got you covered. Tune in now to learn more." [00:05:22] I didn't write that and I didn't just make it up A robot just made that up, right? Or ai. So, "What is a good intro? I then asked, "What is a good intro to lead into the above list for introducing the topic on a podcast. So here's the intro. Here's the intro that I could have said at the beginning of this, right? This is all happening in reverse here, but here's intro: [00:05:45] "Hello and welcome to our latest episode where we'll be exploring the exciting world of artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the property management industry. With the rise of chatbots and other AI powered tools, it's clear that this technology is poised to have a major impact on how property managers do business. In today's episode, we'll be sharing our top 10 list of the ways that AI is set to revolutionize property management, from automated customer service to predictive maintenance and beyond. Whether you're a property management business owner or just interested in the future of the industry, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in." [00:06:24] It wrote this for me. It wrote this. So I can put in here, "The first list you gave me seems geared a bit towards multi-family or commercial property management. Could you change it for those that primarily focus? on third party property management for owners of single family homes in the residential space? Note that they want to get more owners as clients." I'll put "more property owners as clients." Let's see what it comes back with here. So now I also asked-- while it's doing that-- it's actually typing it out. Like you see it typing out. It's pretty wild-- so then I asked, um, before I did just that, I asked, "could you also create a list of the top 10 ways AI can improve or benefit small business owners or service-based businesses?" [00:07:41] So the list has some similarities, like "1. Automated customer 2. Marketing. 3. Personalization." So AI can help personalize interactions with customers, improving the overall customer experience, which is cool. "4. Predictive analytics. AI can analyze data to help business owners make informed decisions about operations and strategies. 5. Process optimization. AI can help business owners to identify inefficiencies in their processes and suggest ways to streamline them. 6. Project management. AI can assist with tasks such as scheduling and task assignments, helping business owners stay organized and on track. 7. Risk assessment. Identifying potential risks, looking at suspicious patterns, et cetera. 8. Talent acquisition," so hiring. Now it says, "AI can assist with tasks such as resume screening and candidate matching, helping business owners find the best candidates for their open positions." [00:08:35] Now at DoorGrow, we've already, for our clients, partnered with an AI hiring assessment platform. And so what's really cool about this, we can take our ultimate job descriptions, which we call R Docs, which is a very strategic way of doing a job description that actually gets you the right culture fit, personality fit, and skill fit for a team member. We call it the three fits, and we can feed that into the AI tool and it will then change a whole bunch of levers on the screen and tell you like, these are the attributes you likely are looking for in a candidate. And then you can send out an assessment for this, and it will give you results and grade them based on the attributes that are selected, and you can even tweak the attributes. You're like, "Well, I actually want them to be more like this instead of this," so you can pick which attributes are most relevant. It's really cool and it's been really accurate. It's how I got my awesome assistant. We used the AI assessment to get hire other people on our team as well. And I also vetted all of my team members with this. And it grades them on a scale for the role between, you know, zero to a hundred. And anyone above 50 is a good potential candidate. Most of my team are like 70% or higher for the role, which shows they're a good culture fit, good skill fit, good personality fit for the role. We've had a very good hiring process. This has really collapsed time on all the other things we used to use like Wonder Lick and DISC and Myers Briggs and human design and like all these different things. [00:10:00] Some of them are the equivalent of looking at tea leaves, trying to figure out is this person going to be good or not, and trying to guess and predict the future. This has been really accurate, and the number one indicator according to the AI Assessment Company they said is intelligence, and it can assess people's intelligence through just chatting and completing the assessment, which is like, kind of like a chat. Pretty cool. So we're using that with clients and it's getting us great results. We've even used it on our clients, and some of our clients thought they were the operator personality type for their business and had to control the operations and based on putting them through the assessment in the operator role, they didn't do well, and it helps them see, "I'm not really the person that should be doing this thing." and then they were able to go and find somebody better, right? So, really cool. So talent acquisition for sure. We're already doing that at DoorGrow with our clients. [00:10:56] 9. it says, "upselling and cross-selling." AI can analyze customer data to help business owners identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. 10. voice and language recognition. AI can help business owners handle customer inquiries and requests through voice and language recognition technology, improving the overall customer experience. All right. So very cool stuff, right? So now I had put that question in previously it spit out the 10 things. So we'll go to that and we'll see what it's changed. [00:11:26] So we'll go through the 10 again just for kicks. " Certainly. Here are 10 potential ways AI could benefit small business owners, who specialized in third party property management for single family homes in the residential space." Oh, so combined both lists and made it very specific. So let's see how this is different from the first two lists that I gave you. [00:11:46] 1. automated customer service. AI can handle basic customer inquiries and requests, freeing up property managers to focus on other tasks." Awesome. "2. tenant screening. AI can analyze tenant data to help property managers make informed decisions about who to rent to. 3. Marketing. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify potential clients and tailor their marketing efforts to specific audience segments." Awesome. "4. lease management. AI can assist with tasks such as lease renewals and rent collections. 5. predictive maintenance. Using machine learning, AI can analyze maintenance data to predict when equipment is likely to fail, allowing property managers to proactively address issues before they become problems." Magic. Right? What's better than than retroactive maintenance, right? That's typical is proactive maintenance, right? [00:12:35] "6. Energy management. AI can help optimize energy usage in buildings and predicting and adjusting energy demand in real time." So that might be the case on maybe split units or multi-family units where they are sharing, you know, a boiler or, you know, some of these kind of things. "7. space utilization. AI can help optimize the use of shared spaces within a building, such as conference rooms." So they kept that in, I don't know that's relevant to homes. 8. Tenant engagement. Chatbots can help facilitate communication between property managers and tenants, improving the overall tenant experience." Cool. AI eventually could replace probably a lot of the tools for maintenance coordination and different things or become the new tool, and there are already AI appointment setting things. There's lots of AI stuff coming out. It's really, really a cool time. "9. Risk assessment." We talked about that one before. And then "10. property acquisition. AI can assist with task tasks such as property valuation and market analysis, helping property managers identify opportunities for expanding their portfolio." That's if they're an owner operator, but you can utilize maybe AI for assessing rent amounts or rent range reports or you know, these kind of things of figuring out what a property should rent for. [00:13:54] Really cool. So this whole episode, I didn't even have to think. I just went into chat AI and asked some questions and it gave me this, which is really, really interesting and really cool. So I highly recommend you check it out. It's going to revolutionize content creation. And one of the most interesting things I heard about ai, this is from the founder of I believe of ChatGBT and OpenAI, or one of the CEOs of an AI company-- but basically he said everybody thought AI when it comes, would take all the menial low level jobs, manual labor work, stuff like that. Robots would replace and then it would gradually and eventually maybe get-- but it'd be really difficult-- to get to the creative. What we're actually seeing, he says, is the exact opposite, the reverse. Ai... [00:14:46] I have a picture on my fireplace mantle right now of two lion's faces, and it was generated by ai. I used an AI app. I told it the colors I wanted for my living room and I said I wanted a lion and it made two faces and one looks kind of scared and one looks very bold. And I named the picture from fear to focus cuz that's kind of the two energies I saw. And I liked that. And it's really cool. So I had it printed, they shipped it out framed and everything and it's on my fireplace mantle. Really cool. And it was made by AI and it's art. It looks like a painting. You're seeing lots of people with the Lensa app right now. Go and create and have the ai-- you upload a bunch of pictures of your face from different angles, and then it will spit out art. Of paintings and pictures of you that are better than a lot of artists could ever generate. Some of them look really like, really like me, and there's a few that look not so like me. It's a little bit off, just a little bit off. It's like maybe they're related to me, you know? But it's really fascinating. [00:15:51] So AI is actually taking those top end creative jobs like article writing and blog posts. And here, my podcast episode and can generate that. There's even tools that can mimic your voice. You can upload your voice. There's a tool, we actually use this for our podcast editing, but there's a tool called Descript, and you can actually record a bunch of audio of your voice and feed in recordings, and the AI will learn your voice. And then you can literally just type words in and it will speak it out or play the audio as if you're saying it like naturally. They've used this to like mimic Joe Rogan and mimic Steve Jobs having a conversation and neither of them really did the conversation. So pretty wild. So you can generate scripts and things like that. You can use video AI people. So there's a company called Synthesia and you can actually just upload text in that you just had, maybe ChatGPT create over at chat.openai.com. And you can say, "create a script for somebody that talks about, you know, these things" and you upload the script in or any text in, and this video person will read it. [00:17:06] There's people creating deep fakes of different actors and different people that AI is generating and it could be anybody. So this, the future is getting crazy. So the creative stuff is going first. Eventually, maybe manual labor and some of the human, like real-time personal tasks will get taken, but it's actually going in the reverse order. So some of the creative stuff is actually being handled and taken off our plate first. Pretty wild times, right? So yeah. Could AI take over the world and is it the most dangerous thing since nuclear weapons? The answer is probably yes. Right? Elon Musk says it's the most dangerous thing for humanity, one of the most dangerous threats. And so I don't know. It'll be really interesting to see, but I do think business owners that are able to leverage AI and leverage it early on will have a competitive advantage over those that are late adopters and don't do it. And AI is a lot cheaper than people and there's a lot of really cool AI tools out there. [00:18:11] So, maybe as we uncover some of the coolest tools, we'll be sharing those with everybody. But I think it'd be really cool to start hearing from all of you, like, are you leveraging AI in your business? And if so, how? Let us know. I'd be really curious. So feel free to comment on our videos on YouTube when this goes up on YouTube or other channels where we post this. We would love to hear what your thoughts are about the future of ai. So, all right, so that's our episode for today and I hope you have some fun playing around with chat GBT. While they have it open and in beta and you can play around with it while they have their free research preview and you'll probably see that it's locked up sometimes because they have too much usage. It's really popular right now, but people are creating some really cool stuff with it. So anyway, until next time to our mutual growth. Make sure to check us out DoorGrow.com. And if you want to join our free online community in our Facebook group, go to DoorGrowclub.com, answer the questions, and join us and you'll get some free gifts. If you give us your email, we'll send you some free gifts like the Fee Bible and some other cool stuff, and you'll even be able to set up a call with our team and we can help you figure out how to grow. [00:19:25] And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. [00:19:28] 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! [00:19:56] 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.

Too many property management entrepreneurs fail to realize the potential for technology to increase the operating margin in their property management business. Property management growth expert Jason Hull invites Lindsay Liu to discuss how property management entrepreneurs can utilize technology to make their lives (and the lives of their tenants and owners) WAY easier by automating administrative tasks. You'll Learn… [01:39] Meet Linday Liu, the Technology and Real Estate Investing Expert [03:42] The Ultimate Software for Multi-Family and Governance [08:13] Diving into the Features of Super [17:19] The Biggest Challenge in Property Management: TIME [22:00] How is Super different from Other Software? Tweetables "When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging… time is your biggest premium." "And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things." "It's better to be extremely good at a small number of things than it is to be mediocre at a wide range of things." "The amount of care that needs to go into maintaining a healthy building is just inherently more complex when you have more stakeholders and parties in a multifamily set up." Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Lindsay: When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging, it really is time is your biggest premium, right? It is a very manual and people oriented set of tasks, right, that need to be done. And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things, right? And so where can we come in? We can come in and help them with all of the other type of administrative, repetitive work that is not as high value from a people perspective, but is definitely very high value from an operational perspective. [00:00:29] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to The DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:01:07] 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. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:31] All right, today my guest is Lindsay Liu. Lindsay, welcome to The DoorGrow Show. [00:01:37] Lindsay: Thanks so much for having me today. [00:01:39] Jason: So give us a little bit of background on yourself for those that don't know Lindsay, which is me as well. So tell us a little bit about you and then maybe how you sort of got connected to your business, and then we'll go into your business. [00:01:52] Lindsay: Great. Yeah, I can go back in time a bit. So professionally, I've been in the technology space for almost 15 years now. So building, launching digital products on behalf of and with companies. So I've done that for folks like Google, Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, the MBA. And then I've also been part of growing the businesses that I've been on that side of, right, really thinking about finding product market fit, creating value propositions that make sense through the lens of technology. And then more recently ventured into the startup world. So I was at a FinTech startup for a bit, actually launched a whole new stock exchange and a software platform around that. And then it finally felt like time to build my own thing out. And the reason that I got into the property management space is that kind of alongside that professional track of work. I'd also been investing in real estate and properties. So I have everything from short-term rentals-- so I've been kind of Airbnb, vacation homes-- to long-term leases and tenants to having done some flips over time. And the common thread with that for me was really just that when you are dealing with the maintenance, when you are dealing with an investment and you're really looking to make that place a home. And a home that's going to grow in value over time. There was just a lot left to be desired in the technology space. And so I thought, why not bring these two passions together? Right? My expertise in technology, alongside my passion in real estate, and start to solve some problems for the space. [00:03:24] Jason: Awesome. And being passionate about real estate is one thing, but also being super technologically savvy and into technology is a whole different thing. And so that's cool that you're able to merge these two things together and why don't you tell everybody what you came up with? [00:03:42] Lindsay: Yeah, so I'm the co-founder of Super. Super is a software platform really geared for property management and what we're building is for the multi-family residential space. [00:03:54] Jason: Okay. [00:03:54] Lindsay: So we're really looking to build tools that help with efficiency, productivity, streamlining communication, and transparency across all of the different players that exist in the ecosystem of maintaining a healthy building. So we have tools for property managers and their management teams. We have tools for sponsors and developers as well. And obviously for board members, owners, and residents of those buildings as well. [00:04:19] Jason: Got it. So what makes this particular to multifamily instead of other niches in property management? [00:04:27] Lindsay: Yeah, I think, you know, in my experience anyway, multifamily is a really unique situation, right? You have a group of people that are paying in for the shared maintenance and so things like repairing a roof, that decision becomes really difficult and more complicated when you're dealing with 50 or a hundred people that are part of making that decision and funding that. And so the governance and the amount of care that needs to go into maintaining a healthy building is just inherently more complex when you have more stakeholders and parties in a multifamily set up versus single family. And so we thought we would start with that pain point first. We definitely have big ambitions to continue to grow to support other types of real estate. But the multi-family space felt really like the place where we could solve some immediate pain points for folks. [00:05:13] Jason: Got it. So when you talk about governance, this manages a little bit of the association sort of situation as well. [00:05:20] Lindsay: Exactly. Yep. So homeowners associations, condos, co-ops, really thinking about the types of tools that are needed to help accelerate decision making and help gain alignment as. Okay, cool. Random questions then. Would this work for HOAs that are not multifamily? Absolutely. We have built the tool with that in mind, knowing that we would need to expand into that. In the case of, you know, for instance, homeowners associations, I think that the level of types of challenges really depends on that community and how healthy it is on its own, right? So the number of shared amenities that you might have, the amount that you're paying in for that shared maintenance and for your common charges. And so, you know, I think if it's just you're paying in for lawn maintenance, that's a different type of responsibility set than if you have, let's say a pool with you know, many common areas that need to be maintained for that homeowner's association as well. [00:06:17] Jason: Now, is this a tool that a property management company that already has some sort of property management software, they have rent manager or they have Resonant or you know, some sort, is this something that they would use in conjunction or is this replacing that? [00:06:33] Lindsay: I think we've really intentionally built the product to play very well and to play nice and be complimentary to whatever other suite. I think I deeply recognize that each management company already is going to have its own tech stack, right? Whether that's as simple as: we use email and we have a phone service and we use some out-of-the-box tools like, you know, maybe Slack or Trello or Basecamps, something like that. All the way to: we're using Yardi or we're using, you know, a number of other different types of software. I think our perspective on that is one of the challenges for management teams is how siloed a lot of these different solutions are, and the ability to really pull some of that data together and have that play nicely is pretty powerful on its own. [00:07:17] Jason: Yeah, I think integrations are going to be a big deal here in the future for property management. I feel like that's a space that's kind of lagged and there's a lot of companies that will integrate with vendors' property management software. But the challenge is trying to get the entire tech stack integrated can be a mess. [00:07:33] Lindsay: And I think that's exactly where I stand is from what we're trying to build the reason I've been pretty specific around that group that we're building for today, right? We're an early stage startup, is it's better to be extremely good at a small number of things than it is to be mediocre at a wide range of things as well. Right? So we really want to figure out what is the core that we're solving for? What are the biggest pain points that we should be building against, and be the experts in that. And then where we aren't, we want to make sure that we are playing nicely with the people that are the experts in that field. [00:08:03] Jason: I agree. So tell us what Super does. Tell us about it. Tell us about the features... [00:08:09] Lindsay: mm-hmm. [00:08:09] Jason: ...and how you can use it and what problems does this solve? [00:08:12] Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely. So at the core, I would say first thing is to really think about us from the lens of a productivity tool, right? So it's software that is supposed to help you save time, save money, and be more efficient. So from a property manager perspective, really this is about increasing your operational efficiency and therefore your operating margin, right? You'll be able to do more things in less time. And so to enable that, we built what we call like an operating core for sets of features and functionality that allow for that. So one of the main things that we're solving for right now is communication. And I think that is the piece that again, and again and again keeps coming up. When you talk to management teams and the residents it's a pain point on both sides, right? Where maybe a request is coming in and the resident is wondering "what happened with that? What is the status of it? Did it ever get done?" And then on the other end, the management team is saying, "I'm so busy getting the thing done. I just forgot to update you on that." Right? And so there's a lot of this unnecessary friction that is happening that we think is a great opportunity for technology to automate. [00:09:19] And the other thing that we're doing quite differently is we believe that consumers today are quite tired of having to download another app or to learn a whole new experience in order to use something. And what we've realized is we should remove all of that friction and just use the tools that people like to use today and that frankly do work for that baseline communication. So people like to email, and they like to text. So we've built our entire platform around enabling communication around email and text. And what happens is our system is going to parse all of that information and give the managers a really nice dashboard that says "We recognize who this person is, they emailed in, and we're going to make that task automatically for you." So we're really kind of short-cutting some of those steps between if someone emails you today, you have to go look it up. Right? Which property they're in, who they're with, their history, and then you have to go and create that ticket. We do all of that automatically. [00:10:11] Jason: Got it. So maybe to showcase this audibly, why don't you walk us through an example scenario involving all the parties and how it's facilitating the communication. [00:10:22] Lindsay: Sure. Let's take a really common one. Someone's got a leak, right? And they think it's the most urgent thing in the world, right? So what they would do if they are using Super, is the resident would either email or text the dedicated phone number that property has. So let's say, you know, I don't know, 1 23 HOA , right? Is going to email and say, "I have a leak in my unit." They don't even have to say, "I'm in unit one A or whatever." We recognize who that user is and we're automatically going to create the task in Super. For the resident, what's going to happen is because they emailed it in, we will automatically send them the confirmation, acknowledging receipt as well, and say, "Hey, we got this," and it will automatically be assigned to the property manager that is responsible for that. That property manager, right, will then get notified that they have a new task that's been assigned to them and they can go in and they can say, "okay, maybe I need to reassign this to the Super that's on staff, right, to go and take a look at this. Or maybe I need to bring in an external vendor, right? I maybe I need the plumbing company to come by and see if this is happening from something that we knew was happening with the toilet upstairs, above that unit," right? [00:11:29] So they can then bring in the appropriate parties and liaise with all of them within the platform. They can also update the resident within there. So they could just write back and kind of say, "Hey, we're on this. Don't worry, I'm going to send somebody out right now." And that resident's going to get an immediate paper trail of all of that communication. As soon as this issue is resolved, if the management team marks it as done, the resident's going to get feedback saying, this task has been marked as complete. So we're really closing those feedback loops, making sure that that communication, right, any of those gaps where we can automate with technology, we're using technology to do that. So it's just going to save you those minutes every single day on those repetitive types of emails and communication that have to be made so that you can just move on to doing something else with your day. [00:12:14] Jason: Okay, now what you described is like a really cool maintenance coordination tool. Right? So it's helping to coordinate maintenance. Does Super go beyond maintenance coordination, or is that-- [00:12:25] Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely, and this is where things start to get really exciting, right? So think about in that homeowner's association example, you have a board, they have to run regular board meetings. They have the annual owners meeting. We have templates that allow them to support that governance. So think about a task. There's a certain type of task, right? That is just about board meetings and owners meetings. And so what we'll do is we'll create that schedule for them. We'll set a preset agenda. They can update that at any time. They can add all of the board members to it. And then once those minutes are in there, they use that right to log the discussion that they had and next steps. That is saved, and you don't even have to go and create a separate minutes document. It's already there for you to go and look at over time. [00:13:07] For board members, we also have things like quick polling. So if you need to make a decision on something. I don't know about you, but the times that I've been on boards you're, you know, making a decision on an email thread that's already 70 emails deep, and by the time someone says, "Hey, can you all decide on this?" someone chimes in with something else, and suddenly you're talking better than a topic, and three weeks later, no decision has been made. So we're really trying to make everything very actionable and it's just, you know, it's the fact that if email is the most prevalent tool you're using, it's just not the right tool for creating actionable conversations, right? And so we're trying to build that tooling into a platform that is purpose-built for property management. We also have tools around, obviously all of your file management documentation and storage. That's I think, another challenge with email is you have turnover, you have, you know, for instance, board members that leave and all of that historical information today goes with them. [00:14:00] I'm still getting emails from boards that I was on years ago being like, "Hey, do you remember that vendor that we used for that thing? Do you happen to have that contract somewhere? You can look for it." That should never be something that happens with good governance of a building, right? So we centralize and store all of that information on behalf of the buildings. We help them keep their contact directories really nice and clean and updated. And then we have a whole finances component as well where we help them visualize these really simple real-time dashboards for what's going on with the association's health, how much are they taking in, how much are they spending every single month? You can kind of look at that throughout the year, dive into transactions, and then the next thing we'll be rolling out is the ability to accept and receive those monthly payments as well. [00:14:45] Jason: Okay. Very cool. All right, so the two, it sounds like so far, I don't know if there's anything else, but the two big components of this are maintenance, coordination, and then the HOA governance and board meetings and documentation, storage and dashboards. [00:15:02] Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, if I think about the things that I wish I had as a board member in my previous-- and I've been on the board of three condos at this point, so I'm just pulling from those personal experiences. I wish that I had a way-- what was that? [00:15:14] Jason: You're a brave person or a glutton for punishment. I don't know. There's a-- [00:15:18] Lindsay: I know [00:15:19] Jason: --individual that chooses be on a board of an association. [00:15:22] Lindsay: Well, you know, it's funny because the first time I joined, I remember a friend of mine being like, he was on the board of his co-op. He was like, "don't do it. Just don't do it. Like you're never going to have a life when you go home." And I was like, "I just feel like I'm really able to solve problems and I'm a really proactive person." then I got on and now I'm that person that tells people, I'm like, "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Like, good luck. Good luck to you," so when I think about the thing that I really wish that I had, right, it was that communication piece. I wanted more transparency and visibility into what the property manager was doing, the decisions that were being made, how things were going overall. I wanted that into our building's finances as well, right? How are we doing as far as our targets for what we wanted to be spending from an operating perspective versus how we are tracking? Do we need to think about doing things like raising the fees? Do we need to do things like leverage a special assessment, right? That type of planning. I really wish we had more visibility and transparency into that. Absolutely wish that we just had better governance around the documents, the history of the building, decisions that have been made previously, and tools to help us just operate in a healthier way as well. So we've really built around those cornerstones of what we think are the, kind of the building blocks, the foundation of what a healthy building. [00:16:36] Jason: Okay. Very cool. This sounds really great. So if people have a property management business and they're managing a large building, a multi-family building, and they're dealing with some of this drama, this would be a great tool for them to systematize things, bring the communication together, deal with some of the maintenance coordination, approvals communication transparency, and then also making sure that the meeting stuff is all held in one place. And I would imagine if property managers are implementing this, then this probably is a really great selling point for these property managers that are doing this work that they have this repository that's been built up with the association's help. [00:17:19] Lindsay: Absolutely. I think. When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging, and I'm sure you have a point of view on this as well it really is time is your biggest premium, right? It is a very manual and people oriented set of tasks, right, that need to be done. And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things, right? The kind of complex logic, the decisioning that needs to go into making sure that this group of people are happy and functioning. That's like totally something that you need a person to be able to manage. And so where can we come in? We can come in and help them with all of the other type of administrative, repetitive work that is not as high value from a people perspective, but is definitely very high value from an operational perspective, right? So where can we help streamline that? And I think that's a value proposition that resonates time and time again. If we say, I can save you minutes every single day on these 10 types of tasks, right? That ladders up to hours at the end of a week that you are saving and on top of that, your residents feel happier, you're going to have more stickiness and retention. These are things that will help the bottom line of a business. [00:18:29] Jason: Now, I imagine when it comes to associations utilizing a software like this, rather than the property manager, so the property manager would just build this into their fee structure, I would imagine it's part of their services. They can say, "we have this cool tool and system." and they have an advantage because otherwise the association board members, there's always going to be the negative person that's going to try and like say, "Hey, we don't want to spend all this money on this technology or this software. Somebody can do this and we can figure it out ourselves." And how do you deal with that? [00:19:03] Lindsay: Yeah. You know what's interesting is even though we don't specifically target the individual board members in HOAs, we get a lot of inbound from them. [00:19:12] Jason: Yeah. [00:19:12] Lindsay: People reaching out saying, "I really wish there was a better way. And so if anything, that gives me signal that the residents and the board members are looking for tools. They're looking for a better way to do things. And I think this is, when I think about technology in general and what's happening even in the enterprise space, we've been talking about this consumerization of IT, right? If I can get a Task Rabbit to come and fix a thing for me within 20 minutes and I can know every step of the way, and the payment's just settled, why can't I have that in every other aspect of my life? Why does that have to be so difficult when it comes to getting a plumbing repair done in my apartment? Right? That's the frame of reference that the resident is using is, well, I can get a card just to my door in five minutes with Uber. Like, why is this so difficult? I think more and more we're going to see that is the emerging expectation of residents. They're going to have these high expectations. They're going to expect things to just kind of feel like magic. And so the technology is a great differentiator, if anything, for these property management companies who say, "yeah we're with you on that, and we've already built that into our workflows." [00:20:16] Jason: Yeah. Got it. Cool. So I see on your website you have pricing for associations and for vendors, but really it sounds like you're just targeting people that are managing their own building. And that would be either they own the building and they are the property manager, they're an owner operator or people that are doing third party management. Is that accurate? [00:20:37] Lindsay: Yeah, that's right, and I think, you know, we're an interesting tool for those that are more on the self-managed side of things, right? So if you're kind of on that cusp of I need some help, we don't take in enough dues to be able to support hiring a property manager. The software is a great solution for that, right? Where it can come in, it can help you take care of, again, a lot of that administrative, operational stuff give you the peace of mind that we've got your back on the main things that you have to get done. And we'll be a fraction of the price of a management company. The audience that we're really focused on building and kind of finding mutual success with, I think is the property management companies though, because at the end of the day, they are the ones that are responsible for just, you know, some of the companies that we work with and talk to, you know, thousands of units and thousands of doors, right? Where that isn't something that we can help find just even greater scale of efficiency with them. And that's great for our business as well, right? To be dealing with one core customer that's highly motivated to pull this into their business and to find the results of it. [00:21:40] Jason: Yeah. So even you would rather deal with one company instead of death by committee. [00:21:46] Lindsay: Learning from the past. We're growing and evolving here. [00:21:49] Jason: Okay. Cool. Any other major questions that people might or usually ask about this software, about your technology that you want to make them aware of here on the podcast? [00:22:00] Lindsay: Sure. I think one thing that we hear quite a bit is: "how is this different from..." right? because there are other tools out there. I think one of the things that I would say is we're building for 2020 to 2023 even. Right? So we're really trying to bring best in class technology and engineering practices, thinking deeply about things like security, right? Like you've got information about where people live, about their roles in the building, about if they have kids and right all of their history here. That is really, really important actually, that you have a team that is thinking about the best practices for this modern age, where you've just got more and more kind of threats from a cybersecurity and digital perspective. So I would say that's kind of just one thing is just building best in class. Building from the ground up. And I think what we're also doing is we're really learning from all of those past experiences. We're learning from what has worked and we're also learning from what hasn't worked. We're trying to take a very user-centric approach there. And so even with our customers right now, I would say we are always co-creating. They have space to come and tell us what do they want in the roadmap? We feed that back to them. We kind of say, "here's the things we're thinking about," and we are shipping new things every single week. And that's like a really exciting time for us to be in where every single week there's something new to kind of go to a customer and say, "Hey, we now have this. We now have this." And it's a very rich and exciting roadmap ahead. So I think, you know, it's only going to get more exciting as we get into the next year and the beyond. [00:23:25] Jason: Very cool. So some people might look at the pricing that might go, "you know, I don't know if we can afford this." How do you help people justify the cost? [00:23:34] Lindsay: Yep. There's a few ways, right? So one of the key offerings that we have for New York City buildings specifically, and that's where I'm based and half of our team is based out here, is there's a lot of compliance work that needs to be done. So inspections, filings, just, you know, disclosures that need to be sent. And I just think there's a level of need to stay on top of that in New York City that is just even higher than other places. Even especially, you know, there's new laws rolling up for energy efficiency standards, right? New regulation that really adds a lot of extra layers of complexity. So one of the things that we have done is we've automated those compliance workflows. So we actually can look backwards sometimes, see when you last did a certain inspection and give you a reminder automatically for the next time it's due. So that value prop is really simple. The cost of an average violation, we're probably going to be less than that. So if we can save you that money and that time and that headache dealing with it then that's a really clear one. [00:24:29] For the property managers, I think it really does come down to we're saving you time. I talked to a boutique management company. This week and the owner operator was like, you know, "minimum wage is going up and with inflation and what's happening in the economy right now, I don't know that I can justify to my customers like they're not going to accept a rate increase, but my costs are going up, right?" I think that's a very real thing right now. And so for these teams to be able to operate with the quality of service they want to continue to maintain and to be able to do so in an environment economically where there's some constriction, there's a lot of sensitivity I think from the residents around price, right? Even on the rental side, just the cost of rent has skyrocketed. And there's just a lot of different factors there. If we can provide you with the way to be able to scale the number of customers that you can take on without having to increase headcount, that's a huge value add for your business. And so those are the types of conversations that I'm really excited to be having with management teams where there's a very clear value exchange of the ability for us to help them build their business and to be there alongside them for that. [00:25:35] Jason: Cool. So it's fair to say if somebody has a multi-unit building, they probably should talk to you guys. [00:25:42] Lindsay: Absolutely. You said it here, so thank you for that. [00:25:46] Jason: It sounds like you're doing some really innovative things, collapsing time, helping to systemize things. It sounds like it fills kind of a unique sort of gap in the marketplace between property management software and you know, what multi-unit buildings and associations over those buildings need and require. You know, the big challenge with associations though is the pet drama, like pets poop in places. Like that's the real stuff right there. That and packages, right? Those are-- [00:26:15] Lindsay: the packages... huge. Especially this time of year. That's something that I tell you, you know, I'm so glad we have such an amazing technology team. We want to figure something out there, because right now the only package scanning apps work. If you have full-time staff, right? If you have a porter there to actually scan the thing for you. So there's something interesting there that we're definitely trying to figure out. So maybe we can talk about that in the future. [00:26:36] Jason: That'll be a future episode. [00:26:38] Lindsay: Exactly. [00:26:39] Jason: You've got the pet poop and the packages. [00:26:42] Lindsay: I first heard about the doggy testing kits like years ago. it was a thing in one of the condos I was on the board of, I was like, whose pet is on the stairwell-- [00:26:52] a database of dog dna, pet DNA inside of your software [00:26:57] See? That feels like priority number one. We'll get on that. [00:27:02] Jason: That's funny. Cool. Well I appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for coming and sharing this technology with the DoorGrowShow audience. And I wish you success. [00:27:13] Lindsay: Thank you so much and thanks for having me on. Our website is hiresuper.com. H I R E S U P E R. [00:27:22] Jason: Perfect. Cool. Check out hiresuper.com if you have a multi-family building. All right, thank you, Lindsay. [00:27:29] Lindsay: Awesome. Thanks, Jason. [00:27:30] Jason: All right, so everybody go check out Hire Super. And we appreciate you listening to our show. Please like and subscribe if you're following us on some channels that'll allow you to do that. And please leave us some positive feedback and review. We'd appreciate it greatly. And check us out at DoorGrow. If you're wanting to grow your business, we highly recommend if you are in the single family residential space, check out our DoorGrow Code. Talk to our team and find out about the DoorGrow Code, which is the journey for an entrepreneur going from zero to a thousand plus doors. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. [00:28:05] Jason Hull: 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! [00:28:32] 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.