Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

If you have made it to the 800-1200 door range as a property management entrepreneur, you have likely found strategies, essential connections, and executive team members that have helped your business grow and scale.  However, even at this stage, savvy entrepreneurs tend to find themselves dealing with problems. Join property management growth expert, Jason Hull, in the final addition to the DoorGrow Avatars Series as he details the common issues PM entrepreneurs face at 800-1200 doors. You’ll Learn… [01:19] Defining the Savvy Property Management Entrepreneur [03:46] How to Deal with Burnout and Building an Executive Team [05:00] Learning from Smaller Property Managers [07:49] Implementing the Ultimate Planning System [09:06] Transitioning to the Business of Your Dreams Tweetables “At the 800 to 1200 door range, these are savvy property management entrepreneurs. They are savvy at running a team. They're savvy in their business.” “As you come up through this DoorGrow scale that I've been talking about of these different stages in the life cycle, you gradually are being more connected to other savvy people and mentors.” “It's helpful for you to be around these smaller and more nimble property management businesses, because these businesses, they can implement stuff quickly.” “One of the best tips I can have is you need to get a really efficient operating system in place.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] This is better. This is going to allow your team to be involved in decision-making instead of you being so top down, trying to tell everybody what the goals are and what they should be doing right? Because that means you're dragging them up the mountain. They're like all sitting in a wagon and you're clearing the path ahead and trying to drag them up to the goal.  [00:00:17] We want to get the team pulling you in the wagon.  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. [00:00:55] 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.  [00:01:19] So today we're going to be continuing on that series of these different stages in the life cycle of being a property management entrepreneur. So this might be way beyond where you can even maybe imagine your business at right now, but we've gotten to the point where we're at now that 800 to 1200 door range. So at the 800 to 1200 door range, these are savvy property management entrepreneurs. They are savvy at running a team. They're savvy in their business, so they have probably by now had mentors, coaches... they've invested in themselves, and this is something that's very unique between them and maybe a solopreneur is they've really been investing in themselves in order to get to this level. It's not really possible to get to this level without some self investment and without having really good culture defined in their business. So they have a business that has culture. They have a cohesive team. They've been in the business for a while, like a long time, maybe more than a decade, maybe more than two decades. [00:02:24] At this stage, this might be a multi-generational family business, or maybe it was part of somebody else's business and it was purchased, right. But there's some depth in this business at this stage. They're rare at this stage. There's not a lot of businesses, especially in the single family, residential or small multi space that are at 800 to 1200 doors.  [00:02:45] Likely at this stage, if you're the entrepreneur or the business owner, you likely have little to no connection to the business in some ways. Like you just might not be super focused on it. If you are, I want to talk to you because I love those business owners. They're still engaged. They're still passionate about the business and they usually love the stuff that I teach even more than people at earlier stages because they are ready for it and they can value it. You know, a lot of the things that I learn and absorb and take in by investing in my own self in high level masterminds and coaches and books and everything that I do to learn, they love this stuff because they're ready for it.  [00:03:24] They know how useful it is, and I get the best feedback from the most high functioning people, and those are my favorite people to work with. But there's a lot at this stage, they've really checked out. Some have been completely burnt out on the business. They've put somebody else in to run it. Their whole goal has been, "how do I escape from this business, this vehicle that's uncomfortable?" So they put somebody else in place.  [00:03:46] So they have an executive team, they have hiring systems, they have a defined sales process, they have a BDM most likely. Somebody else is doing sales for them a lot of the time. Their website is usually I find outdated. They're only updating it maybe once every 10 years, maybe sometimes only once every five years, so their website's probably overdue for an upgrade. I've noticed they often have acquired multiple property management companies, at least maybe two usually, at least one or two including a significant competitor. So they've eaten somebody up, and they're possibly looking for the nearest exit to see if anybody else would be willing to do the same for them because they might be burnt out. [00:04:27] So, they have built this really great executive team in which each member of this team takes complete ownership over a piece of the business, so they have somebody in place that's handling all of the maintenance stuff. They have somebody in place that's handling the management stuff. They have somebody in place that's handling the internal operations for the business. They have somebody in place that's handling the financials and the accounting and the bookkeeping and the reporting and all that. So they have key people. That's an executive team, so that they don't have to wear every hat or do all of these things in the business.  [00:05:00] What else about them? Something that's really important at this stage: they're now paying attention to the smaller businesses that are in the industry. They go to NARPM events and different things like this because they want to see what the little guys are doing and what innovations other people have, because they want to maybe apply this, but they don't want to be the guinea pig. They want to see what all the little guinea pigs are doing and experimenting with and whether or not it was hurtful or helpful for their business. And so they benefit by being around other property management entrepreneurs that are not at their level. Now, they do probably have connections, network, mastermind people that they hang out with that are at their level. You know, they've got some connections there 'cause you don't get to this stage without some connections and some relationships. Solopreneurs are heavily isolated, and as you come up through this DoorGrow scale that I've been talking about of these different stages in the life cycle, you gradually are being more connected to other savvy people and mentors, peers, heroes that you want to be connected to, or that you look up to so that you can get good ideas, good feedback, and that are not the emperor with no clothes sitting on top of your little micro kingdom.  [00:06:18] You recognize there's people out there that are doing better than you are that can give you good feedback. So it's helpful for you to be around these smaller and more nimble property management businesses, because these businesses, they can implement stuff quickly. They can adopt new technology rapidly, way faster than you can, right? Because for you, you have a really large ship. It's difficult to maneuver this thing and to turn it and to make changes because you have a lot of doors, you have a lot of team members, and there's a bit of friction there generally. But the advantage you have is that even small optimizations, small tweaks, small improvements at various stages of your pipeline, to your pricing, to your website, to all the things that we could facilitate or help with at DoorGrow...  [00:07:03] Small tweaks and improvements, for you, give you a big result. It makes a big difference. It can have a significant financial impact. It's very easy for us to save you a little bit of money on staffing costs or increase efficiency a little bit or to make small movements that will easily pay for any of our services or program and help you justify it. So and paying for something like DoorGrow and services is really a drop in the bucket. You waste way more money, probably on bad team members or team members that aren't as efficient as they could be. Staffing costs are really high for you at this stage. And so we want to find some efficiencies and some ways to improve some stuff. That is those at the 800 to 1200 doors.  [00:07:49] So one of the best tips I can have is you need to get a really efficient operating system in place. We call that DoorGrow OS. It's the most effective strategic planning system that I believe exists. A lot of people are getting caught up on Traction and EOS, and this. This is better. This is going to allow your team to be involved in decision-making and your team bottom up to be creating the goals and the growth of the business instead of you being so top down, trying to tell everybody what the goals are and what they should be doing and being a dictator, right? Because that means you're dragging them up the mountain. They're like all sitting in a wagon and you're clearing the path ahead and trying to drag them up to the goal.  [00:08:30] We want to get the team pulling you in the wagon. You just are sitting in it with your map and your strategy and your pen, and you're figuring out where we need to go, and they're clearing the jungle path. They're laying out the road. They're making it easy and they're pulling you along. And when you have that really good executive team and you have a really good strategic vision and plan in place that your team runs and that your operator really leads and is in control of, you will see your business grow rapidly significantly because you'll be able to focus on what the business needs most right now, instead of everybody just doing their day-to-day work.  [00:09:06] So that's something that we can help you with DoorGrow, so, that's basically, I think, about it at that stage that I want to touch on today. These are really, usually, cool business owners. They're either really cool or they're really burnt out. So hopefully you're not the burnt out one. If you are, let's transition you into the business of your dreams, and if you feel like you're close to having the business of your dreams, you just need some tweaks, talk to us at DoorGrow. We'll help you out. So that's it for today until next time, to our mutual growth, make sure to go to doorgrow.com. Schedule a call with our team, and join our free Facebook group at doorgrowclub.com. Bye, everyone. [00:09:43] 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!  [00:10:10] 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. 

Once an entrepreneur reaches a certain level of doors in their property management business, they often seek to quit wearing so many hats and offload as much as they can. Unfortunately, even with 600-800 doors, PM entrepreneurs struggle to build an executive team, enjoy their day-to-day, and reach their business’s full potential. In this episode, Jason shares his insight on the unique challenges that property management business owners face in the 600-800 door range.  You’ll Learn… [01:16] The Next Property Management Entrepreneur Avatar [02:00] What Entrepreneurs Have in The 600-800 Door Range [03:20] A Common Mistake Entrepreneurs Make with Ads [05:59] Expanding and Starting New Businesses [07:00] Why PM Entrepreneurs Get Stuck at 600-800 Doors [08:55] How to Get Support and Get Unstuck Tweetables “It's really difficult to outpace the market attrition with marketing.” “If the main goal is the four reasons…If you do it the right way, this could be really a fun time in the business.” “Have an executive team, trust them to implement things, paint the picture of the vision, and focus on building the right culture and investing in coaching and mentoring and supporting your team members.” “We need a framework, a planning system, so that this is done effectively, that's led by the team, that's not top down and pushed and forced by you. This is where you really start to trust your team.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] We get into this temptation where we're like, "I can just throw money at things to solve a problem." Unfortunately, this usually becomes painful as the market shifts. And at this stage, you probably are losing more doors due to the owners selling than advertising can replace. [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're interested in growing your business and in 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. [00:00:55] 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.  [00:01:16] All right. So today we're going to continue on this series of going through these different stages of the property management entrepreneur life cycle. So really brief recap: we've touched on some of these different stages, like being a pure startup in the startup stage, solopreneurs, creating a little bit of leverage. Today we're going to talk about the 600 to 800 door category. So last time, we talked about the 400 to 600 door category. And so, there's kind of a category of property management business owners in the 600 to 800 doors. And at this stage, they are actively seeking to escape the day-to-day and to get others into key positions.  [00:02:00] So usually, universally, you have a BDM by about the stage. You're probably no longer doing all the sales yourself. You might, if you really love that and you're really good at that, you may hold onto that. But a lot of times they're getting a BDM. They're no longer focused on doing the sales. Either that, or you've made it probably your full-time focus like that's probably your full-time focus and you now have somebody else handling all the operations. So you've picked one of those sides: you've either shifted to doing all the operations and kind of running the business, and you have a BDM that's doing the sales, or you've shifted into being the salesperson, and you have an operator in your company. [00:02:39] But either way, you're likely totally out of the actual day-to-day, boots-on-the-ground-level work of operations or fulfillment in the property management business. So at this stage, you probably now believe in pulling in outside experts. You probably believe in using coaches and mentors. You probably believe in investing in yourself and in the business to move the business forward. I don't think you generally get to this stage unless you've kind of moved past that idea that "I'm going to do it all on my own, and I'm going to do it all myself" and "I have all the answers." Right? You've evolved beyond that. Because that would have held you back or held you small, you know, prior to this. [00:03:20] So, sometimes at this stage, what I see is that they're too focused, too heavily focused or in an unhealthy way, leveraged towards doing advertising. So they're spending a lot of money on ads in order to try and get leads, to grow their business, and they lose sight of opportunities related to maybe warm leads or referrals or prospecting or networking methods that could be effective because they've gravitated towards something they feel like they can just throw money at. Cause we get into this temptation where we're like, "I can just throw money at things to solve a problem." So you might be trying to solve the problem of the lead generation by paying for ads or advertising.  [00:04:04] Unfortunately, this usually becomes painful as the market shifts. And at this stage, you probably are losing more doors due to the owners selling than advertising can replace. This happens depending on how the market is going. You'll see property managers that are highly leveraged towards advertising and are spending a lot of their money and capital towards advertising in a bad market-- or I guess I should say a hot real estate market where investors are selling. They usually find that they're losing more doors than they can replace through advertising, because it's really difficult to outpace the market attrition with marketing. Right. And so, a lot of times at this stage, I notice property managers still have branding issues, but usually at this stage, they're a little less likely to make the changes they need to. So it's really difficult. They feel pretty cemented in their name, even if it's costing them money. So sometimes, I can get them to change or fix those things and it's always worth it if there's a leak there. But they're a little bit more rigid. [00:05:07] At this stage, they've broken through some major pain and major stress points in a business to get to this level that cause most property managers to just say, "I don't want to get too big." Most property managers feel pain in the 200 to 400 door stage, and it gets really painful as they're kind of getting just beyond that, unless they finally break down and undo and redo how they do just about everything and finally let go of control and let go of doing some things and build an effective team or an executive level team. And so at this stage, you're probably building an executive level team or have team members that you trust to kind of start to own pieces of the business a little bit. So you broken through those major things, but you've likely moved on to other opportunities and are distracted by other businesses. So this is really tempting. I see this a lot.  [00:05:59] Once you get this business somewhat healthy and you get it to this stage, a lot of these business owners decide "I'm going to go start another property management business in another city," or "I'm going to go start another business like locally," or "I'm going to do some other things." So the entrepreneurial bug of startup stage that's tempting: business gets a little bit boring for them. So then they go and kind of start to screw up their focus and their attention by focusing on other things. And so they go and start to start other businesses, do other things, and then the main business doesn't really probably reach its full potential. It struggles a little bit. They might have some key people in place and they might get a little bit disconnected from reality or from what the business needs. [00:06:43] So at this stage, this leveraged property management entrepreneur-- we'll call them leveraged because they have some leverage-- they have some key people. They're not having to wear every hat and do everything. They've probably got a pretty decent team by now. And very few entrepreneurs get to this level. Usually I see it, the 600 to 800 door level, the business owner starts to check out. Usually if they can get to this and they do it in a healthy way-- it's rare, but if I see them get to this stage and they do it in a healthy way, they will continue to grow and get to higher levels. But there's a lot of property managers that get stuck or stop at the 600 to 800 door level, because they're really burnt out on the business. They didn't really build it the right way. They didn't build the team the right way. And they are now trying to figure out: "how can I put somebody in place so I can get out of this business?" and so I see a lot of business owners during this stage kind of check out.  [00:07:38] By this point, they've been through so much pain and trial and tribulation and suffering and struggle that they're burnt out and they're done. So they get people in place. They get somebody to manage and run the business. They get an operator, they get a BDM, and then they're like, "The only thing I'm going to do is maybe show up the broker on our conferences and talk about how many doors I have." And you'll see some people that do that even at higher level door amounts. But if the main goal is the four reasons as I've talked about on previous episodes-- of having a business. This is the primary goal is to have more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, more support. If you do it the right way, this could be really a fun time in the business... if you do it the right way, but for a lot, at this point, they have the option or the opportunity to step out and get somebody else running the majority of everything for them, and just be an actual business owner, which might be tempting. [00:08:34] So they might then put this business up and exit it fully, put it up for sale and find a company that is willing to acquire them. But this is a difficult stage. It can be, but I think the hardest stage is probably that 200 to 400 doors. That's really tough. That's one of the most painful stages I see companies at. So that's about all I think I have to say about that. So if you are in this stage, you probably would like some support on the operational side of things. You might want to give your team members better coaching and better support, so we would bring you into our mastermind and we would support your operator and we would support your BDMs so that they can both become really exceptional in those roles, which helps the business grow a lot more quickly, and it would help you to be able to just focus on the visionary side of things in dreaming and coming up with new ideas. And it would help put your ideas into a framework that the team can help you to build. Because now you have the team that can help you build things. We need a framework, a planning system, so that this is done effectively, that's led by the team, that's not top down and pushed and forced by you.  [00:09:47] This is where you really start to trust your team. Have an executive team, trust them to implement things, paint the picture of the vision, and focus on building the right culture and investing in coaching and mentoring and supporting your team members. We can help you do that in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. So if that sounds interesting, reach out to us. You can go to doorgrow.com, or you can join our free Facebook group, which you can get to by going to doorgrowclub.com. So that's it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

At DoorGrow, we have some of the savviest property entrepreneurs on the planet in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. Brannon Potts is a property management business owner in North Texas, who joined DoorGrow with only 71 doors. In only 3 months, Brannon was able to grow his business to over 100 doors with 70 more on the way! Join property management growth expert, Jason Hull, as he interviews Brannon Potts, a DoorGrow client. Brannon shares his experience with DoorGrow and how he has seen it make a beneficial impact on his business. You’ll Learn… [01:12] Meet DoorGrow client Brannon Potts [04:42] Investing in Yourself and Your Business with Coaching [07:27] What Makes Jason and DoorGrow Different? [13:09] DoorGrow’s Two Key Ideas… [20:07] Finding Fulfillment by Growing and Scaling the Business [22:49] How Brannon used DoorGrow’s Script to Add Doors [27:08] How You can Grow and Scale Your Business  Tweetables “We have these moments as coaches where we feel like-- it's similar to as being a dad and seeing your kid get an award or do something.” “As you've been building your business, it could get uglier and more painful, but we always try to make sure that the client understands that's the wrong way to do it.” “Good, coaching or good marketing or good anything that you're going to pay for should give you an ROI, right? That means it's a good investment.” “A lot of people are thinking ‘I'd rather just spend money. I'd rather just spend money because it would save me time,’ That's a cost. That's not an investment.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: For those that are on the fence, thinking about DoorGrow maybe they've heard about DoorGrow, what would you say?  [00:00:05] Brannon: You might not like this, but I think it's so good, sometimes I wouldn't want to tell anybody cause it's so good for people.  [00:00:12] Jason: 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. [00:00:49] 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.  [00:01:12] And my guest today is one of my clients, Brannon Potts. Brannon, welcome to the show.  [00:01:19] Brannon: Thank you. Thank  [00:01:20] Jason: you.  [00:01:21] So it's good to have you. So Brannon, you're a client that I really enjoy working with. 1. Because you just do what I tell you to do, and it works and you're doing the right things. So I appreciate you as a client because that's always fun for me is to have clients that like, believe in what we're doing, and get it. And do it. You know, starting out, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about how you got into property management in the first place?  [00:01:47] Brannon: Sure. I think it was back-- late 2016. We were actually doing well in our sales business but had a friend give us some advice about getting into property management and you say it, even in the intro: at first, I didn't have just a great perception of property management, but I said, okay, I'm going to get into this business, learn it. I didn't know it very much. I didn't know it really much at all. And we began to grow. And over these years, we just, we grew a little bit and happened to see one of your ads and started investigating and just said, you know what? I want to join this coaching. And I did. I just said, "I really don't know very much about the property management business, and you have a background in coaching this. I'm just going to follow what he says, not question it, and just do it."  [00:02:46] And then I was going to hold your feet to the fire because you promised it and committed that if I did, you would refund my money, and I began to do that and I still have so much more to go because in your coaching, the depth of that coaching that you give, I think I'm only maybe touching on 10% of it right now. And I'm looking forward to actually many years to come of getting deeper and deeper in implementing all the things that you provide in coaching because I've been coached before. I've been actually a coach myself for the sales side. And what we've always been taught is when you teach people, typically only 10% implement what you're teaching. And I said, man, "I don't want to be that 90% that doesn't. I want to be the 10% that does. And let the chips fall where they may and begin doing exactly what you said, trying to follow it as closely as I could." [00:03:44] And what do you know? It happens. We grow, we have probably at this point, we're either from the initial investment of the coaching-- I bet you we're-- I'm trying to think-- three, four times, maybe five times now the dollars that we're generating from the coaching. So it was a great investment. [00:04:04] Jason: You mean on a monthly basis?  [00:04:06] On a monthly basis. [00:04:07] Yeah. So you've got way more residual income than what the program costs. So it's a no-brainer. And that's one of our initial goals with clients. Like we want to get them paid and make sure the program's double paid for within hopefully the first 30 to 60 days is the goal so that they can justify the expense and keep going. And then I guess you could say it's paying you now, to be part of the program.  [00:04:27] Brannon: It's-- I've made money off of this coaching and that's what everybody wants.  [00:04:32] Jason: That's what good, coaching or good marketing or good anything that you're going to pay for should give you an ROI, right? That means it's a good investment. So I'm glad that you're getting a good return on your investment. That's our goal. So you brought up something that I think it's interesting that you've worked with a lot of coaches. I've worked with a lot of coaches too. You know, I think one thing that's a little bit different from me than maybe other coaches in the industry, but there's a lot of coaches out there that don't have coaches. And they don't get coached themselves. And I think that's one of my competitive advantages, which is really simple is that I pay for really expensive coaching and masterminds and high ticket things to be involved in so that I can turn around and have value to give to my clients.  [00:05:16] Like I just came back from a mastermind, I pay a lot of money to be in it, and I shared an idea today with the group that you thought was pretty cool. We were talking about not focusing on referrals instead of referring to them, as in asking for– what did I say? I'll let you say it... [00:05:32] Brannon: an introduction. And that is an extra benefit is not just taking the wisdom you already have. You're still pouring into yourself so that you have something to pour out. [00:05:45] Cause I think a lot of people stop getting things poured into them and the great people, great leaders, and great entrepreneurs need something poured into them so that they can pour out to others. We need that relationship to continue. And that's what I appreciate of your coaching. It's your coaching, but you're still getting coached and I'm getting the benefit of your expense of coaching and you're handing extra value to us. [00:06:14] Jason: Yeah. I'm not even going to say how much I spend on coaching a year right now, but it's a lot, it's a lot. I'm in two really high-ticket masterminds, but for me, I love it because I get to hang out with the best. Like I'm talking business owners that are doing millions and millions of dollars. I was hanging out with people that are doing millions a month in business. Some are hitting a million a month or more. And these are the kind of people I get to hang out with. And I love to be able to learn. It's fun for me. And having a program in which I get to share that stuff. That's just even more fun for me. Cause I love to share what I'm learning. That's just fun for me. So...  [00:06:51] Brannon: As soon as you brought that up, I went out and shared that with my team, the ones that were here at the moment, and then I'm going to share that again on another meeting of not asking for the referral, but asking for the introduction. There's just many layers to that, of how good it is.  [00:07:09] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And we chatted about that on our group coaching call today. And for those that are not in our group, you're missing out. So Brannon what have you noticed since joining the program? I mean, You talked about some of the concerns you had coming in and some of the challenges you were dealing with, and you mentioned that you've made your money back, you've gotten some results. How does this compare or differ or relate to all the other coaching stuff that you've been involved in the past? [00:07:34] Brannon: Jason, I don't want you to get a big head, but it has been the best coaching I've had. And I talk about it all the time. I've been through several different coaches, both in the real estate side, and just some life coaches, and the value you bring is multiple layers and genuinely appreciate that, because that's what you teach us is bringing value to people and you do. And I would share this with anyone. This is not a sales pitch. This is true value. You bring on so many different layers and that's why I've shared in the past, and I've shared it even with my wife. I said, "I see myself. I've only scratched the surface of the value you've already brought. And I see this for many years to come that I plan to be a part of this. Cause it's not a cost, it's been an investment," and yes, we're talking about growing doors, but there's many other layers to the coaching of growing the business and how you do that from operations to people who you hire, what their duties are. This was exactly what I was looking for 'cause I did not have that knowledge. Though I've succeeded it at higher levels in a lot of ways in the real estate industry, these were the parts I didn't know. And I feel like I've still got so much more to learn. [00:09:01] Jason: I really appreciate that. That's-- that means a lot to me. I appreciate it. So for me, it's interesting to me because I've been in this business-- I founded it, and we had some tough times starting this business out and like me building a team I've gone through the entrepreneurial life cycle and journey that I coach clients on. And DoorGrow, our company has made so many changes, even in the last quarter. Like the slew of things that we get done that are on our list for quarterly planning is just amazing to me that we're able to accomplish. DoorGrow's not even the same company it was a year ago. Not even close. And some clients maybe worked with us in the past or knew about us in the past, or maybe we just did a website a long time ago. And DoorGrow is not even close to the same company. Some people are probably hearing you going "operations?" And like "this?" And like "coaching." And they're like, what? And it's funny because people, I think judge me and DoorGrow sometimes by who I was maybe five years ago or two years ago, or even a year ago. [00:10:06] And my personal development aggression, I guess you could say, or my drive and the level of the team members that I have and the drive of the team and how quickly we're able to make changes and implement is I mean, I'm obviously biased, but I think it's pretty amazing. So yeah. And I think people could give us a chance that haven't been with us for a while. Our new mastermind is just really awesome and I think people are really crushing it, which is really fun to see.  [00:10:32] Brannon: And the connections you make in that coaching group. There's several people that I've made connections with that will be valuable for the future and just collaborating or, "Hey, I'm having this struggle. How have you handled it?" There's just, there's so much value and I agree it's even in-- what is it? Five months now I've been in the program it's changed and added more layers to it. But that's because of your growth. You didn't stay stagnant. You're still growing yourself and have something to pour out. [00:11:07] Jason: I'd feel guilty if I took even the majority of the credit, like my operator, Sarah, also my fiance, she's moved the needle significantly in this business, Adam, over fulfillment, Ashlee who's over a client success-- like we've got some amazing people on my team and they're moving most of the objectives forward that we have each quarter, and it's been just awesome to see. And that's part of the DoorGrow OS planning system that we've got and that sort of thing. We've got 90 members in the mastermind, so I appreciate that you brought up community cause that's a big focus of ours moving forward this quarter is we're really trying to focus on improving the community aspect. A lot of people joined for the content in DoorGrow Academy and the material that we have and the ideas, and then the people win because of the coaching. But people generally in a program will stay because of the community and the connection and the benefits of having that comradery, 'cause you know, being an entrepreneur can be a lonely journey without being connected to others, so we're really focused on that, improving that, in fact, we've got about 90 members in the mastermind, 90 businesses. We probably have on average about two people per business. So we've got probably about somewhere close to 200 people in the program I think that are actively involved. [00:12:17] We haven't really grown honestly for the last, maybe two, three months, which is weird, but we've been filtering a lot of people out. We've been really trying to make sure people are active and engaged and shaking the tree, so to speak and some of the people that weren't really engaged or active in our outreach and stuff have dropped off while we've been adding people, but we've cleaned that up. So like the program's really clean. And so I'm really excited about the community aspect because most of the people now are all pretty much engaged. And in at least on one of the calls and doing their check-ins and moving forward. So I think even though the group is still about the same size it's been for a little while, it's a lot mightier, so we're really excited about that. And now that it's cleaned out, now we're going to be adding, I think a lot of people that are going to be staying in the program a lot longer and it'll be, even we're going to be growing for sure. Yeah. So Brannon, what do you feel like are some of the most significant things that you've got out of it so far? Because a lot of people, they hear you probably saying, "Hey, DoorGrow's great. Coaching's great." And you mentioned you're making more money. What are some of the key things that really have stood out to you that you're like, "Hey, like this is different or this is interesting," or that you've really valued? [00:13:29] Brannon: I think a couple of things. There are multiple layers, so I can talk about this for a while, but the key things initially were: how to lead generate that didn't cost money. And sometimes you hear that and you think, "oh, this is just a sales pitch." It was very genuine, and it was very good. And I implemented that. So the only cost was my time and following through with what the coaching did and that added the doors very quickly. The second was helping design a pricing plan and how to put that together. I implemented one of the plans, the hybrid plan that you discuss and implemented that and began to sell that. And through selling it, I've shared this in our mastermind, how I sell that. And I'm seeing how it resonates with owners and just those two things alone, those two changes that we made alone made money. Those are just the two things initially. And then you offer other things that we're beginning to tap into and  [00:14:40] there's so much there, the content, I can only absorb so much at the moment and I'm trying to fully implement those well, but that also gives me a path for several years to come things that I'll be able to dive deeper into different sections of what all you offer and implement those. So I see a path, but those two things alone were the big key movers, which you steer people to. Doing that lead generation first and then begin some pricing and other things. So those two are the big steps that made it an investment and made us money.  [00:15:17] Jason: Yeah, if any of my competitors are listening and they want to figure out how to steal some of the magic from DoorGrow, we focus on two main things with clients and you can probably feel this. I don't think you've heard me mention this Brannon, but one of our big goals within the first 30 to 60 days is we want to make sure clients have really strong clarity on what the future holds for them, like what direction to go in. So we have our clarity assessments we take you through, so you know clearly which path. We have three different paths we take people down depending on which thing is the biggest problem in the business right now. And we focus on pain first. So we get them clarity on what they want and where the pain is and then results. So we want to get them as quickly and as effortlessly as possible to the results. So we're giving you the scripts, the language, the outreach, like all the different things to do. And you mentioned lead gen without spending money, and I know a lot of people are thinking "I'd rather just spend money. I'd rather just spend money because it would save me time," is what they think. What would you say to that?  [00:16:18] Brannon: Yeah, boy, that's a cost. That's not an investment. This is a deeper level of long-term residual lead generation so that what you teach in the coaching pays dividends, not just now, but in the future, it continues to pay residual dividends and you haven't spent any money on it because the big thing in starting a property management company or starting any company is to generate revenue before expenses and it fit with the principles of that is, is generating that revenue before you have any hard costs, which help you get profitable better and faster, then you can have money to do other things to grow it even faster.  [00:17:04] Jason: Yeah there's several things we focus on with clients. We want to decrease the expenses in the business. So we talk about how a lot of property managers, we mentioned this on today's call, right? Like a lot of property managers... it's not about what they need to do more of, or add more of in the business. It's about some of the things they need to eliminate that they are doing. And then we get into, the lead gen piece. A lot of people mistakenly think that they can generate more leads by doing advertising or paid advertising, but that actually are colder leads that take more time. So we've actually decreased your time investment into lead generation and we've zeroed out the costs. [00:17:43] Brannon: And usually it's a better quality person--  [00:17:45] Jason: --and it's an absolutely better quality lead, right? The conversion rate's way higher because we're focusing on warmer lead generation. And the other thing that I think is a secret is that you're creating market share while other property managers are fighting over the small amount of existing market share that exists. They're all in the red water. It's ugly and bloody, and there's a lot of scarcity. And I'm guessing you don't really feel much scarcity in growing your property management business?  [00:18:11] Brannon: Not at all. It's doing so well, there's moments we have to just pause for a few minutes to absorb all the new clients coming on board so that we handle them, you know? It's not from lack of business coming in now from this lead gen source, it's making sure that we handle them effectively. And we talk about this in the coaching too, of how to handle the operations when all this business comes and how to handle it effectively and efficiently. [00:18:38] Jason: That's one of my favorite problems to do is make the growth become so uncomfortable and painful. And then we shift to solving that problem. Everybody wants that problem, but we want to create that problem for our clients that they're having so much growth that it's gotten uncomfortable and they have to start hiring and scaling their systems, so. And then yeah, pricing strategy. We talk about-- like you mentioned the hybrid pricing. Initially, I got the idea from Scott Brady. He's really sharp entrepreneur. And then we've put our own nuance and spin to it to make sure that people do it effectively. So it's psychologically really effective and that's been really really great for our clients that are starting to implement that. [00:19:16] So, yeah, you're right. There's a lot more in the program. I'm excited for you to get into some of the other stuff and get through it. Because I love seeing clients get all these different pieces dialed in because the speed at which the company moves forward is rapid. Now, a lot of people, a lot of property managers are already burnt out. They're already burnt out in their business. They're not enjoying it, which I would normally say, they're just doing it wrong, but that's, I think also one of the key things that we focus on at DoorGrow is not just building a business that just gets more crazy and more hectic and moves fast, that you enjoy less and less, which is typical. Most get to 200 to 400 doors and they're burnt out. They're micromanaging their team. They hate their day-to-day.  [00:19:56] Brannon: You talk about both growing with quantity, but also growing with quality and creating a quality of life too.  [00:20:05] Jason: Yeah, it's a big deal. So our primary focus is on, I call it the four reasons. I've done a previous podcast episode on that. For those listening, you can go back and listen to that. That's our primary goal is to move people towards the four reasons of more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, and more support. And as you've been building your business, it could get uglier and more painful, but we always try to make sure that the client understands that's the wrong way to do it. Like we can get you more support and make it more fun and you do less and less in the business.  [00:20:36] Brannon: I like to learn and listen as it scales, how to scale it, and you share this in the coaching, how to scale it properly so that you don't get burnout. So I'm aware of that and want to make sure that happens not just for me, but y'all also share how to do that for your team too. The positions and the different times to hire and how to do that effectively. So it's not just for the owner, but it's how to create quality for everyone.  [00:21:06] Jason: So you've seen some results in the program. What do you feel like your team's perspective of all this movement and change has been, and maybe even your spouse, like how is this kind of rippling out around you? Is this creating some pain and problems for people around you? Or how did they feel about all this?  [00:21:24] Brannon: Jason, you'll appreciate that I use a lot of your quotes at home. But, when you're hearing good things, you want to share it. So I would say we're growing and I think the team, I know the team is all on board and they're excited about the growth, but as any good growth, there is stretching and you have to go through that stretching process that makes you better, but you've provided several good things that help the team that I'm using to help them get through the stretching with the growth that we're having. And we'll take this problem of growth, as we all remember the great recession and we were begging to be busy. I keep mindful of that, of being grateful that we are and would not take the other side of that of not being busy. I keep that in mind and I encourage the team, and they're encouraged by the growth too. They're very excited. Even our sales team notices it and they're like, "man, maybe I should be on that side of the business." They get really excited about it.  [00:22:25] Jason: What's one thing you feel like you could share maybe with the audience, people that aren't in the program that might benefit them, that is maybe something you learned in the program or, maybe just a mindset shift or a takeaway or something that might be helpful to those that are listening? [00:22:41] Brannon: Boy. That's there's so many... [00:22:43] Jason: There are those that are struggling. What feedback or idea would you want to share with them?  [00:22:49] Brannon: I think, you know, looking for referrals from agents that are working in the multi-family or property industry that are selling investments that has helped us quite a bit, but what's been beneficial in the coaching is you've given a great template of a script of how to do it that is genuine, that really flows well and is right in line with building high trust with clients and with agents. That's been the number one benefit of the coaching is not just that idea, but then even giving a practical script that really works. We've been in coaching. We've all been in different programs where we'll see a script that is just not realistic because that person doesn't do it. Your script is genuinely realistic, and it works. I tested it. It worked. I went line by line, even had the script in front of me as I'm going through it, and it really flowed genuine and real and generated referrals that day. [00:23:58] Jason: That was actually one of those moments. We have these moments as coaches where we feel like-- it's similar to as being a dad and seeing your kid get an award or do something, but one of those moments for me was when you sent me your call recording, and you just followed the script. Because I get a lot of call recordings from clients and they don't follow the script. They either don't feel confident doing it that way, or they say it different or they think they're trying to be cute or clever. And then I'm coaching them like, "stop saying 'um' and stop saying 'kinda' and 'maybe' like show confidence." you just followed the script, and it went so beautifully, and that was just really rewarding to me to be able to hear that and go " yes! It worked." And hear that result like real-time is really cool.  [00:24:43] Brannon: I think I came into the coaching with the mindset and I thought of that 90-10 principle, and I said, "I'm going to be the 10%. Sink or swim, I'm going to be the 10% and I'm just going to follow it" and let it go where it went. But the beauty of it is, it went well. And it would for anyone that followed because we all know as we coach or teach, the ones that just say, "Hey, I'm going to be humble and I'm just going to do what you say, and let's see what happens." it generally works.  [00:25:16] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to tell clients like, "Hey, it's proven. If Brannon can do it, anybody else can do it too. Brannon's not any smarter or cooler than anybody else in our program, other than the fact that he does the work and he does what we tell them to do. And that makes you, I think, pretty smart and pretty cool. So I appreciate you, Brannon. So, um, Cool. I, appreciate you coming and taking some time out of your day to be here on the #DoorGrowShow and on the podcast. For those that are. On the fence, thinking about DoorGrow maybe they've heard about DoorGrow, a year ago or five years ago or in the past. What would you say to them now? You're on the other side of the paywall. You see what's going on in the community. What would you say?  [00:25:57] Brannon: Well, You might not like this, but I think it's so good, sometimes I wouldn't want to tell anybody 'cause it's so good for people.  [00:26:06] Jason: I've heard that. I've heard that quite a bit, which is really funny. Like "I want everyone to do it except my competition." [00:26:12] Brannon: That's it. [00:26:13] Jason: So which market are you in?  [00:26:16] Brannon: We're in north Texas.  [00:26:17] Jason: All right. So if you're in north Texas, Brannon says, do not do the DoorGrow thing. It's not going to work out for you probably, but everybody else should totally join this program. Does that sound accurate?  [00:26:30] Brannon: North Texas property managers and there's plenty of business for all of us. [00:26:35] Jason: There is. That's something, I think that we're really big on the program. You're not in the red water feeling scarcity fighting with other property managers. There's 70% are self-managing, there's tons of available potential business out there, and you've been able to tap into that tap and you're getting plenty from it and yeah, there's plenty of business out there. Very cool. Brannon appreciate you being a client. Appreciate you taking time out. And anything you wanna say before we wrap this up?  [00:27:03] Brannon: No, I think I've covered quite a bit myself.  [00:27:05] Jason: All right. Awesome. Thanks, Brannon. All right. So for those that have been listening to this and you're curious or interested in DoorGrow, you can reach out to us. And if you want to test the waters a little bit and get familiar with this, because this may be the first time you've heard about us for some reason, join our Facebook group, go to doorgrowclub.com. Videos like this get pushed into the group. I do live streams multiple times a week now. I'm sharing concepts and ideas. My goal and job is to prove to you that we have some value to offer to you. Once you get beyond the paywall, there's even more. And so join the DoorGrowClub. You can go to doorgrowclub.com to get to our Facebook group. The other thing that I would recommend is just go to doorgrow.com. [00:27:52] If you're curious and you want to set up a call and talk to my sales team, they will listen to you. I have great people on the team. They really care about our vision of helping property managers. And so if you're struggling with some issues, some challenges, bring it up to them and talk with them and they will help you see if there's a path in which we can help you deal with those challenges, whether it's you're just not enjoying your day to day, you're struggling with your team and with operations, you're struggling to figure out how to add doors and grow your business, you hate your website, you don't like your brand. Like we can help solve these problems for you and they'll help you see how we can do that. And they'll also give you access to our seven frameworks training so you can see seven different growth frameworks and really shift your mindset out of the idea that you need cold leads and you need to do advertising and you need to spend a bunch of money on marketing. [00:28:41] We'll shift you out of that and help you see why that mindset actually has been hurting your growth and will benefit you and get you moving forward. And that's it for today. So until next time, everybody to our mutual growth. Reach out to DoorGrow, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye, everyone. [00:28:55] 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!  [00:29:22] 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. [00:29:43] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life. 

If you are a property management entrepreneur in the 400-600 door range, you likely experience the same issues as others in this category: company culture, strategic planning, and more. In this episode, property management growth expert, Jason Hull continues the stages of the Property Management Entrepreneurial Journey series with the 400-600 door category.  You’ll Learn… [01:10] Recap of the Other Property Management Entrepreneur Types [03:29] Defining the 400-600 Door Range [04:52] Making Sure You Have Help in the Business [06:42] How to Build Your Team and Processes [08:23] Optimizing Your Business: Strategic Planning [10:09] Transitioning from Transactional to Transformational Leadership [11:20] Recap of the Other Property Management Entrepreneur Types Tweetables “So by the time you get to this 400 to 600 door stage, you are either in a massive amount of pain, it's really painful, or you finally solve some of those issues.” “So I'm hoping if you're at this stage, business is not crazy. It's not crazy at work, and things are good. And a good book recommendation is It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried.” “I believe most meetings are wasted time, but strategic planning, strategic meetings is one of the ways we really help scale and grow property management companies.” “If you don't have really clear strong culture, you probably don't have a really clear, good team.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] So by the time you get to this 400 to 600 door stage, you are either in a massive amount of pain, it's really painful, or you finally solve some of those issues. [00:00:10] All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, 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.  [00:00:46] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and the business owner. 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 the show.  [00:01:10] All right. So on previous episodes, we were doing this series of talking about all these different stages of property management entrepreneurs, and just to catch people up that have missed those, go back and watch those-- or listen. But what we talked about is we talked about pure startups, and then we talked about those that are kind of seekers and getting past that fantasy stage, and now they have a real business and seekers where they're kind of trying to figure stuff out, and these are all different door levels.  [00:01:36] And then we talked about the solo preneur property managers, and then we talked about those stuck property managers on one of the recordings. And then we talked about the transitioning property management entrepreneur, has broken the 100 door barrier, and they're leading into that next sand trap, which by default, they'll get to within a year or two, usually in the 200 to 400 door category. And we talked about that. I call it the standard property management entrepreneurs. So we talked about that group and category. And then during that last recording, I talked about the side biz, property management entrepreneur, cause some artificially break, the 100 door barrier and they really just have a side business. Real estate is maybe their main thing. And they artificially are stealing resources from that business. [00:02:19] All right. That brings you to the present and you're missing a lot of good info so that you can understand where you're at in this journey and which things you should have tackled at these various stages. We're going to talk a little bit today about. That next level. This is those that break past that 200 to 400 door sand trap. Sometimes I call it the second sand trap, maybe the third sand trap. First one is usually where just getting started. That's like the hardest hurdle for a lot. And so that could be the first, the real first sand trap once you've launched your business though is about 50, 60 doors, I see a lot. I call it the solopreneur sand trap.  [00:02:53] A lot of people get stuck there. They paint themselves into a corner. They end up trapped and that's really uncomfortable for them. So it's not like working. So the next sand trap is that 200 to 400 door stage. If you break the 100 door barrier in a healthy way within a year or two, you'll be there. And that 200 to 400 door stage I've talked about on the previous recording for the podcast. If you can break through that sand trap, and this is the team sand trap, and trying to figure out how to deal with the team, you're now going to be at this next level in the 400 to 600 door category. [00:03:29] Now, if you have achieved this level, you're at 400 to 600 doors, you may have done this through acquisition. Maybe you acquired another property management company. Maybe you got here just through grit and sheer will, and doing a lot of the sales yourself. At this stage, you probably have a pretty solid team because that 200 to 400 door stage is really painful trying to figure out your team. So now, you've got a good team. You probably like most of the people on it, and you probably aren't dealing with a ton of churn with the team. And probably at this stage, you've offloaded some of the growth oriented tasks. You may have a BDM at this stage most likely. If not, this is probably the next level for you. [00:04:15] So you might be a closer, and you want to focus on your area of genius and you have offloaded everything else. So you're still just the closer and you're closing a lot of deals, which is cool if you're good at that and you love that. If not, at this stage, I'm guessing by now you've already got some people helping you with the sales side, because you just probably wouldn't have gotten here, but if not, you need to get a BDM or at the very least a sales assistant. That you can maybe groom to be a BDM. But a sales assistant that you can offload at least the follow-up the appointment setting, stuff like that. So you need a setter basically while you act as closer.  [00:04:52] So you've probably gotten out of the day-to-day operations at 400 to 600 doors. If you're still heavily involved in day-to-day operations, I'd be surprised, at this level. I don't see that very often. However, even at this level, you still are likely your own best employee, right? You still have your hands in quite a few things. You probably have many of your processes to find 'cause usually at that 200 to 400 door stage, that's like becomes a heavy focus because it becomes so painful. You need to get these processes defined and you realize there's a lack of consistency and you realize the team aren't doing things the way that you would want, and it becomes painful. So by the time you get to this 400 to 600 door stage, you are either in a massive amount of pain, it's really painful, or you finally solve some of those issues. [00:05:40] So I'm hoping if you're at this stage, business is not crazy. It's not crazy at work, and things are good. And a good book recommendation is It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried. He's one of the founders, creators of Basecamp, CEO of Basecamp. Really, really great book. I got to hang out with Jason Fried years before he wrote that book. And he basically, during a 90 minute called taught me some of those principles and it was a game changer for my business in making the business more calm and more quiet and focusing on asynchronous communication, some other really cool ideas. So I highly recommend you check that out. One thing I'll disagree with Jason-- if you ever hear this is the idea of not having planning and not having meetings. I believe most meetings are wasted time, but strategic planning, strategic meetings is one of the ways we really help scale and grow property management companies. Game changer. And and that's using our system, DoorGrow OS, and I believe that that's more effective than EOS for those that are into rocket fuel and traction and all that kind of jazz.  [00:06:42] All right. Let's talk about this 400 to 600 door company and your team. So you probably have a good team. You like them. And if not, you might have one or two people you don't like, but you probably like most of your team. You probably, at this point have an operator in the business. You have somebody that's dealing with the operational side of things, because most of you are visionaries and visionary entrepreneurs probably need that in order to make it to this level. You probably have some systems and mechanisms in place. It's most likely that you do, you have probably some sort of maintenance process and system in place. You have a system for communication with clients that's working out really well. You have a task management system internally for the business, maybe Asana or Monday or some sort of tool that hands out tasks. We use Basecamp at DoorGrow for the little one-off tasks. And then we use Process Street for processes.  [00:07:38] So you may have something like AppFolio plus, which I heard good things about or Process Street or LeadSimple has a tool in their sales CRM for processes, checklists, that sort of thing. So you're going to have something for repeating processes that's connected to checking things off. Like it's a checklist, not just like an owner's manual that sits in the glove box of a car and no one looks at like standard operating procedures on a Google drive that nobody ever looks at. It's not going to be like that. Right. So you have some sort of process documentation checklist system as well. So that means you have a tactical task management system, you have a process system for repeatable processes, and you have some sort of communication system going with clients as well as probably several other systems. [00:08:23] So you've focused on building some systems out. Now at this stage, there's a lot of optimization. You need to optimize and figure out how to do that. And so you need to figure out what you need to do next. So you need to figure out what you need to do right now in order to control the future. You need to figure out: "how can I plan and create the future with my team?" So this is where you take your team and you need to shift them into strategic planning and build a strategic system and that would be DoorGrow OS is what I would recommend, of course. So, but you need to build a strategic system where you can get the entire team moving the business forward with you.  [00:09:05] So the 200 to 400 door primary focus is really creating culture. If you don't have really clear strong culture, you probably don't have a really clear, good team and you're not going to get to the 400 to 600 door level. So you probably have a healthier level of culture. If not, this is going to be a focus. You need to develop cohesive culture. It needs to be documented. You need to develop cohesive, strategic planning for the business, and you need to develop an internal communication system for the team that doesn't involve one to everyone communication constantly like Slack or some of these tools where you're communicating one to an entire group, and everyone thinks you need to read everything. It's about building asynchronous communication, so really you need an effective culture, effective hiring system, effective planning system for strategic planning, strategic stuff, not the tactical day-to-day stuff like I just talked about, and you need an internal communication system, which goes along with that planning and a correct cadence of meetings can reduce a lot of communication and interruptions in business. So, this is how to get to the next level.  [00:10:09] So, they have many of the processes defined and operations are running fairly smoothly in the business. Now you need to get all the team members helping you innovate in the business, not just getting stuff done that you tell them, which is transactional. Now you need to transfer and move towards transformational leadership. Transactional is I give you a task. You come back and say, you did it. I pay you a dollar, give you a task and you come back and do it, and that's the transaction. Transformational is I give you an outcome and a deadline, and then I support you in moving it forward, but you get to come up with how to get this done. And this is where you now start to have team members that think for themselves and innovate and move things forward. Instead of you having to micromanage everybody on your team, through processes and checklists. So if you're spending all your time trying to create tasks and trying to tell the team what to do and answer every question, you have a broken business that needs a strategic planning system, and that's going to free you up.  [00:11:11] But in order to do that, you need really good culture, really good team members, and now you can implement a really good planning system and you need a really good operations person or an operator if that stuff isn't fun for you. If you don't love spreadsheets and checklists and process documentation and calendars and all that kind of stuff, you're probably more of a visionary entrepreneur. You're more on the sales and marketing side of the spectrum. And you're going to enjoy that a lot more. So hopefully this is helpful for those of you. If you would like some help, if you're at this level-- I love working property managers at this level. A lot property managers at this level, some of them start to get really painful. And they, if they make it to the next level, they've checked out. I want to make this easy for you, help you implement a strategic planning system in your business. We focus on this in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. It's the "Scale" portion. Really awesome. I'd love to get you on a call with our team so we can figure out if we can help you grow your business and scale faster and get your team in better alignment. [00:12:05] And this alone can cut your staffing costs easily in half, sometimes by a third down to a third, by getting all these things really in healthy alignment and getting you in healthy alignment with your team. You're going to get way more output and that's the greatest expense in a business. So, if that's interesting to you check us out, join our Facebook group. If you're not yet ready to talk to us: doorgrowclub.com. You can go to doorgrowclub.com, join that, and we will love on you and hopefully eventually convince you to get on a call with us. Otherwise, reach out check us out at doorgrow.com and book a call. There's a little link at the top, and we'd love to talk with you and see if we can help you grow and scale your business until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth by everyone. [00:12:47] 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!  [00:13:14] 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. [00:13:35] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

A lot of property management entrepreneurs get stuck in this area between 200 and 400 doors. They’ve built the wrong team, and everything in the business feels like it’s out of alignment. These are the standard property management entrepreneurs. Property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder/CEO of DoorGrow, shares the next avatar in this series of episodes about the different types of property management entrepreneurs.  You’ll Learn… [01:15] The Next Avatar: The Standard Property Management Entrepreneur  [02:07] Have You Built the Wrong Team? How to Build the Right One [05:10] Defining Your Role in the Business [06:12] The Issues in the 200-400 Door Range [09:50] Defining Your Company’s Culture and Hiring [12:57] Inspiring vs. Controlling Your Team [14:29] The Side Business Property Management Entrepreneur Tweetables “You can't have a team that's your dream team, that's awesome, that makes you feel really well-supported if you are showing up incorrectly.” “There is nothing in the business that you have to be doing in the long run. There's nothing. You can offload any piece of the business.” “The only reason every team member should exist is because they are taking something off your plate.” “Tactical work just keeps businesses alive. Strategic is what really grows businesses.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] So they, at this stage, you probably also have all the same leaks in your business that the smaller companies do. You have leaks in your website, you have leaks in your branding, you have leaks in your reputation, you have leaks in your pricing, you have leaks and all these different areas of your business [00:00:13] 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 in 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. [00:00:52] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:15] So we are going to continue our series this week, talking about the different avatars that we target here at DoorGrow. And so we're going to talk about a group that maybe listening to my intro were thinking, "you know, I don't know about that. manifesto, Jason. I don't know about having more freedom and that property management makes me feel good." You might be feeling really stressed out and you might have a big team helping you do this. And by big, I mean maybe you have like five to 10 people even. So we're going to talk about what I call the standard property management entrepreneur. And this is the property management entrepreneur that has built a team, but it's the wrong team. And so this is usually in the 200 to 400 door category. This is where I see-- I sometimes call this the second sand trap or the third sand trap-- this is where a lot of property management business owners get stuck. And the reason they're stuck is because they've built the wrong role for themselves, and they built the wrong team around the wrong role. So they're showing up as the wrong person. And then they built a business and a team around that wrong person to support the business. And so everybody's out of alignment.  [00:02:25] You can't have a team that's your dream team, that's awesome, that makes you feel really well-supported if you are showing up incorrectly. And so usually, that's the problem is that the entrepreneur has these myths or these misconceptions or these beliefs that they're the business owner, so they should be doing X, Y, and Z. "I'm the business owner, so I have to be the one doing the sales and selling to people. "I'm the business owner, so I have to be the one doing accounting" or "I'm the business owner. I have to be running the meetings and handling the operations." Right. I just want to let you know, I'm letting you off the hook. I'm giving you permission, not that you need it from me, but you can give yourself permission. There is nothing in the business that you have to be doing in the long run. There's nothing. You can offload any piece of the business, and the ultimate goal of the business is to get those four reasons of fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. This is why we build a team. But you're probably, if you're at this stage, you're massively out of alignment with this. We talked about transitioning PM's and if you can break that a hundred door barrier, usually you're at this level within a year or two, you're in this 200 to 400 door area, and then you get stuck and it gets uncomfortable. [00:03:31] This is where a lot of people will fall prey to thinking they need to expand into a new market. Like we built it this big, maybe if we just pick another city nearby, we can start doing it there too. And that I call that premature expansion. It's a bad idea. Usually what ends up happening is they go into this new market and then their current market is starting to suffer and struggle. And then both are not doing well because you know, it starting two businesses are running two businesses and starting one while you're running another, usually means there's less focus. And focus is the most important currency related to growth. It's the most important. And so now, you're diluting your focus even more as an entrepreneur. [00:04:12] So, what we need to do is narrow your focus, even in your own business. The only reason every team member should exist is because they are taking something off your plate. But most business owners get to this point by building the team based on what the business needs. They're like "the business, we need more maintenance stuff, or we need more of this." instead of figuring out what does the business owner need? What do you need in order to move closer to the four reasons? Well, maybe you need an assistant, and you need to get rid of some of these things off your plate. Maybe you need a bookkeeping and accounting company because you don't really love doing the accounting and bookkeeping and you want it done well, and you need to offload that, right? So maybe you hate doing sales or that's uncomfortable, and lead-generation/ sales is really bad then probably in your business. And maybe you need to get a BDM or bring somebody in that's really good at that. Right? And so, If you focus on what does the business need most? And what does the entrepreneurial most? Then, you're going to bring in the right people. [00:05:10] Now, in order to do that, though, you have to be in proper alignment. You have to be doing the right things in the business. You have to know what your 'why' is, what your purpose is, what you really want out of the business. Of those four reasons, what does fulfillment and freedom and contribution and support look like for me? If I had the ultimate dream team, the ultimate business, how would I be spending my day so that you can move closer and closer to that. And then each team member you add should be helping you get closer to that. So you take everything that you do. You start shaving off and slicing off pieces to give to other people, and it should be the pieces you don't like doing. Not the pieces you don't have time to do. It should be the pieces you don't like to do and the pieces that are more tactical so that you can focus more on strategic leadership. Tactical work just keeps businesses alive. Strategic is what really grows businesses. There needs to be a general in the tent, leading the army. There needs to be a king, and the king needs to eat first, or their needs to be a queen and the queen needs to eat first. Otherwise, they'll have a starving kingdom. So let's talk about this standard property management entrepreneur at 200 to 400 doors. So this is the stage where they finally have a legit business they can live off of. It has the ability to spend money on marketing, so a lot of times they make the mistake of doing that. So they start trying out marketing channels and advertising channels and wasting a lot of money there. They're also wasting, probably too much money on their team because they don't really have team members that are giving three times the output that I'll see in healthy businesses and healthy teams that are in healthy alignment around a healthy business owner usually they'll have a third, right? They'll have a fraction of the output. The team members are frustrated. And so they're a business owner, they're likely doing still most of the sales at this stage. They have a team, but they struggle to build the team they truly want. They have consistent staffing challenges and turnover because team members really that are B players are the only ones they can attract because nobody wants to follow a starving king or starving queen. [00:07:10] They don't want to follow-- they're not inspired to have any other motivation other than to get money to follow a leader if that leader isn't really happy or enjoying their life, they're not going to be able to either. Because they're out of alignment with the four reasons. So they still feel like they're driving all the outcomes in the business as a visionary or as an entrepreneur at this stage, and they wish they could just get ahead and they're frustrated with their team. They have to answer every question, every approval. They don't have team members that can think and make decisions for themselves because this is how they've set up their business and set up the team. In the beginning, it's super tempting, right? You start bringing on people and they're asking you questions and you're like, "man, I'm so smart. It feels so good, but it wears thin pretty quick. And soon, you realize you have to drive every outcome. You have to hand out every task. You have to push everybody to do everything. And so it's not as effective.  [00:08:00] So at this stage, you probably also have all the same leaks in your business that the smaller companies do. You have leaks in your website, you have leaks in your branding, you have leaks in your reputation, you have leaks in your pricing, you have leaks and all these different areas of your business, but you're great at selling. You've probably gotten to the point where you can close deals. You're getting business on. You're getting out there, making it happen, or you found some sort of unique prospecting method that's working for you. And so you've achieved a certain level of success but, the delivery side feels frustrating because it's heavily connected to you. They often have outdated and ineffective websites. They've wasted a bunch of money on various lead sources and advertising methods. And they're usually ready to find something new that actually works, but they're gun shy and they don't believe it. Like they're scared to sign up with DoorGrow 'cause they're like, "I haven't had good experiences with this marketing firm or with this firm or with this lead gen idea or whatever." So they're cautious and they're tired of wasting money and they're wasting way too much money on their team and on resources because they just don't have the alignment they should. [00:09:12] They don't have team members that really have complete ownership of pieces of the business and are moving it forward and innovating in it. They're the only person that innovates as a visionary, and they go to conferences, come back, and have a ton of ideas they throw at their team, and it's like pulling the pin on a grenade and lobbing it into the middle of the room. And then they're freaking out. They're like, "I've already got all my day-to-day work. How are we gonna implement this cool thing you heard about at NARPM?" You know? How does that benefit me? "I'm already stressed out." Right? So you don't really have buy-in from your team. Your team are not sold on you. They don't believe in you. They're not sold on the vision of the company because you've never really made a clear and usually the big glaring problem they can't see, the blind spot at this level is you don't have culture defined. There's no culture. Really, they don't really know or care what your company core values are. They don't know or care what your why is. And your purpose is and how this business fulfills you and gives you freedom and fulfillment. They don't know or care what the customers really want. They just don't want to deal with any more garbage or complaints. Right. And so, you have some systems in place, probably at this level, this is where you start thinking, "I need to document more processes and I need more systems and I need to micromanage my team more because I need to systematize this, so what you really need at this stage is you just need to be able to get clarity on yourself. Then build the right team around you so that you have the right culture. [00:10:39] And in hiring, I talk about the three fits: you need a really good cultural fit. You need really personality fit for each role, make sure you have a good fit there. And then you need skill fit. You need to make sure that they can do the work and they have the right skill. So, usually at this stage, they have so many leaks in the business they can't see. You built a whole business around a whole bunch of blind spots. You can't see the problem with your branding or your website, your reputation, or your team members, or your own role in the business. And so I love working with these businesses because there's so much we can do, and they have the team and the capacity to move the needle very quickly. We can move things quickly and make a lot of changes and get them a lot of results really fast, and they have the money to spend to do this stuff and to invest in the business. Usually at this stage, they tend to be a bit more experimental. They're willing to try new ideas because they've dealt with a lot of frustrations and they already know what things are not working. [00:11:35] So they're open-minded to the message that I share at DoorGrow that: Hey, you could grow your business without all this other stuff. You don't need SEO or pay-per-click or content marketing or social media marketing or pay-per-lead services. Like you can grow and scale your business really rapidly adding a hundred, 200, maybe even 300 doors in a year like one of our clients did in last year without spending a dime on advertising. And I know that sounds crazy to people listening, but reach out to us and we'll share with you our seven frameworks training on how you can do that. So, anyway, this is a lot of businesses I see at NARPM in the NARPM organization. When I go to speak at local chapters, I see a lot of businesses in this 200 to 400 door range. They're stuck. They have a team that's sort of engaged that they kind of like, and they like some of their team members and some not so much and they're lacking culture. And so if this is the stage you're at, you may want to join our mastermind program and get into our scale program, which we were focused on first, so that we can figure out, assess you, assess your team, start to offload the right pieces and get the right support in place. [00:12:40] And make sure we get clarity on the company core values and client-centric mission statement and your personal 'why,' and so that we can start to build the business around you and create the right culture. Once you have the culture clear, you'll be able to see clearly whether or not your team members are buying into it or not. They're either going to have to be controlled by you, or they're going to be inspired by you. Inspired makes you a lot more money, and it's a lot more profitable, right? So the phrase that I like to repeat and say that I heard a long time ago is whenever we fail to inspire, we always by default control. Whenever we fail to inspire we always control. [00:13:18] And so make sure your team members are inspired. And if the only thing they're really inspired by is getting paid and making money off you, then they are probably people that you have to control. And they probably are what I call hiders. You either have believers. They're inspired. They believe in you, they believe in the business. [00:13:36] They believe in the vision and treating clients the way that you want to treat them. And they're excited, and they're engaged and they give you their discretionary time. They're thinking about how to be a better team member when they're in the shower and when they're at home, or you have hiders. Hiders complain about you. They live for the weekend. They really honestly would rather do as little as possible, hide, and get paid as much as possible. And that's kind of the standard American employee or standard employee maybe anywhere. So I want to shift you away from having just hiders in your business to having believers. And you'll get three times the output from believers than you will from hiders three times. Imagine how that would impact your profitability if you got three times the work ethic and output from really good team members. Right. It would be awesome. How would that affect your profitability? How would that lower your operational costs and increase your ability to have output? [00:14:29] All right. So that's all we'll chat about today about that. There's another category that tends to kind of be connected to this. It might be related to others. I'll touch on that really brief... and that's the side business property manager, and maybe that'll be a future call, but these are the ones that are often brokers of a successful real estate office. Property management's a side note. They're almost like accidental property managers. Just like in this industry, a lot of you talk about accidental investors; they're accidental property managers. They often have artificially broken past that hundred door barrier, not by fixing common problems they would have had to, but by leveraging their existing real estate revenue, and team to move past it without solving the problem. And so they're leaving a lot of money on the table. They have a lot of inefficiencies everywhere. They likely secretly hate and avoid the ugly, neglected property management arm of their business. But eventually, they start to wake up and go, Hey, this could be profitable somehow. And maybe sometimes when the real estate market shifts, they're like, "well, real estate is not doing so great. I want to hedge against this. I want my property management business finally healthy. So eventually, they wake up to the fact that it can be more profitable and they also usually need help to rebrand at least the property management side of that business, so it doesn't harm the real estate side and they can be segregated and stand healthy on their own two feet. [00:15:47] Often, these property management businesses just happen, like from natural growth from the real estate business. Like they just have investor clients. They're like, "could you manage our property?" And they're like, "okay, sure. And so they're not really even charging what they should be. It's really kind of just a service they're adding, trying to add value to keep their existing investor clients happy. But unfortunately, this growth and all the doors that they have is not effective. I had one client come to me that had 500 or 600 doors and they were making $0. They had zero profit. And this is very common with these side business property management companies, the side biz PM's. So they don't know what they don't know. They're not really focused on that business. It's kind of grown as this ugly weed and it's kind of taking over and eating resources and it's not really profitable. So it really is like a cancerous tumor on the side of a healthy real estate company. And they either should just cut that tumor off and kill it, or they need to get that thing separated, segregated, and healthy so it can stand on its own two feet, and not just be a leech of resources on your real estate company.  [00:16:54] So in order to do this, you have to shift property management, at least for a while to being the primary focus if you are the visionary. And a lot of times they want to just hand it off to somebody or give it to some operator person or some property manager or some director of property management, and they're not as big of a visionary, they're not as, you know, adaptable as the entrepreneur. And they would be able to move the needle so much faster if they just, at least for a quarter, maybe two quarters, maybe a year focused on that business and getting it really healthy. It could feed them for life. So that's all I'll say about that. So we covered standard property management entrepreneurs and the side business property manager entrepreneur, which sometimes can get up to that 200 to 400 door range as well. But they did it through kind of a back door or through a side door that wasn't as effective or efficient. And so they need to make all the changes that the early stages should have done or that others have done at earlier stages. So with that, we'll go ahead and end today. [00:17:54] Until next time to our mutual growth everybody. Check us out at doorgrow.com and I hope you have an awesome week. Bye, everyone. [00:18:02] 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!  [00:18:29] 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. [00:18:50] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

After pure startups and solopreneurs comes another type of property management entrepreneur with its own unique challenges: the transitioning property management entrepreneur. Property management growth expert Jason Hull shares his insight on the issues and problems that PM entrepreneurs face in the 100-200 door range. You’ll Learn… [01:20] The Next Avatar: the Transitioning PM Entrepreneur  [03:35] Learning to Trust Others and Building Your Team [07:41] Moving You Toward the Four Reasons for Starting a Business [09:13] Offloading the Tasks You Don’t Like  [09:41] Are You in This Stage? Keep Going!! Tweetables “If you add teammates and you're adding more expense to the business, you have to make sure you're doing it with the right people for the right things that the business needs most.” “There is nothing in the business that you have to do in the long run. If there's any piece you don't enjoy, you can get somebody else to do it.” “You can learn endlessly, but you need to be taking the right actions as quickly as possible.” “So if you're in that stage and it's uncomfortable right now, just keep going. Double down. You will graduate.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] So property management entrepreneurs, they don't stay at this level of this transitioning property management entrepreneur in the stage between zero to 200 doors. They don't stay there for very long. They either make it to the next level or they contract from struggle and attrition.  [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're interested in growing in your business and in 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.  [00:00:57] 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. [00:01:20] Now let's get into the show. So in today's episode, we're going to continue on this sort of train of thought or the series of talking about the different avatars that we target here at DoorGrow, and basically these different stages of progression in the entrepreneurial journey of property managers. So if you've missed some of the previous episodes in which we've talked about solo, preneurs, pure startups, those that are stuck, property managers transitioning is what we're talking about today. So go back and listen to previous episodes. We talked on previous episodes about pure startups and then graduating into that solopreneur stage of, you know, going from seeker to solopreneur. [00:02:04] And the next is transitioning. I call them transitioning property management entrepreneurs because they don't stay in the stage very long. So once you break that hundred door barrier, if you do it in a healthy way, you have basically graduated from that previous sort of sand trap, and you're going to graduate to the next sand trap. [00:02:27] And we'll talk about that on another call or another recording, that will be the kind of the standard property management entrepreneur, where they have a legit business at 200 to 400 doors. So you break the hundred door barrier usually within a year or two, if you do it in a healthy way, breaking that a hundred door barrier, within a year or two, you're going to be in that next sort of sand trap, typically, that next sort of challenge at 200 to 400 doors, and that's one of the most painful spots to be in. And we'll talk about that in a future episode. So let's talk a little bit about this transition. So say you break a hundred doors. You know now how to add doors. [00:03:08] Most likely you've done the work. You've did something that you can repeat. Finally, you're figuring out how to get past that first sand trap. You're figuring out how to grow and add doors. And so you've now graduated from being just at that solo preneurs sort of status. You've likely hired your first team member or two, and you're focused maybe a little bit on building processes and creating a little leverage for yourself. Maybe through assistance or other things. Going from seeker to that stage requires giving up control and trusting others, since that's really difficult for a lot of people. You probably also believe that you still are irreplaceable. You have this irreplaceable position and you probably still are lying a little bit to yourself, internally saying this sort of, kind of idea that "no one else can do what I do better than me. Nobody else could do it. It's like it's impossible. I'm so great. No one else could ever be as good as me."  [00:04:07] But you have now started to believe that at least there's other people out there that you can get and you probably are focused on some of the cheapest people. You could get, probably hiring VAs, maybe in Mexico or the Philippines. And you've started to like, let go of a little bit of that control because you're hitting a wall. Like you're hitting a limit in your capacity to focus and spend time on the business and you're maxing out. So you need some additional help and support. But if you could do it without them, you probably would 'cause you want to hold it all to yourself. Right? Because nobody's going to do it as well as you would do it because you're so great. At this stage, though, they're not good at hiring. They don't really understand how to hire. They don't understand how to build the right team. They have lots of failures when it comes to team and staffing and they sometimes wonder if they should just go back to doing it all back on their own. So you've probably thought that if you're at this stage, you've probably thought, "maybe I should just do this myself." [00:05:09] It felt easier. I hear this all the time: "if I have to tell them to do it, I might as well just do it myself." This is what this kind of category of person says, you know, "I might as well just do it myself, so it's a waste of my time." but they believe there might be this idea, they have the seed thought that there's this idea that they could have leveraged somehow. It just, they haven't experienced it fully yet. So they don't quite believe it. So property management entrepreneurs, they don't stay at this level of this transitioning property management entrepreneur in the stage between zero to 200 doors. They don't stay there for very long. They either make it to the next level or they contract from struggle and attrition. [00:05:52] Now, occasionally. You'll see somebody get to just, they might just break past that 200 door barrier and they figure out how to do it basically almost by themselves. They've got like maybe one assistant they've really gotten picky about their clients. They fired the bad stuff. They've got some processes kind of defined, and they figured out how they can almost stay a solopreneur with one boots on the ground part-time assistant and just have that. And you'll see people that have these businesses where they can do maybe 200 doors or so. It's rare to see them maybe break 300, but they'll be able to have a little portfolio like this and they'll be able to manage it. They're the one interacting almost entirely with most of the clients directly. They're still probably doing a lot of maintenance coordination stuff, but they've started to give up some pieces of the business to maybe one part-time or maybe full-time team member. And they really are pretty comfortable usually at that stage, some of them. Now, if you are like me, then you want to continue growing and you're going to get to that next level. [00:07:02] So usually they'd push through this. Once they've started into the transition, they want to fully complete that transition and they move into that next stage where they actually have a whole team. So really that transitioning property management entrepreneur at this stage, really your main goal right now is to learn how to hire, how to build a team, how to get the right people, but usually they never really learned that fully. And that's the challenge they deal with. As they build a team, they usually do it through a lot of trial and error, and then they have an okay team, but they build the wrong team-- the wrong team around themselves. And we'll talk about that in a future episode. [00:07:41] So what we do with clients early on, when they start to hire, before they hire, we have them do a time study. We figure out which things energize them and which things drain them, which things are tactical versus strategic. And then we have them offload and build out job descriptions and offload the things that are tactical and energetic drains, minus signs, so they can focus more on the strategic and the plus signs energetically. Right? So then we're getting on a team member that is taking the negatives off their plate that drain them that are not fun. So we can move them closer and closer with each new team member towards the four reasons, which is another episode we did previously. [00:08:21] The four reasons for having a business or the main goal to build a business in building a business is to have it be a vehicle for these four reasons, which is fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. And that means in order to have that, you have to have a team, and you have to have good team members. If you add teammates and you're adding more expense to the business, you have to make sure you're doing it with the right people, for the right things that the business needs most. And at the very early stages, it's really what you need most. If each team member you add is not moving you towards having greater fulfillment and greater freedom, greater contribution, and greater support. Then you are adding people incorrectly, or you're not adding the right people, or you're holding onto the wrong things. And a lot of times at the stage, you still probably believe you have to do certain things in the business. So if this is you right now, I'm letting you know there is nothing in the business that you have to do in the long run. [00:09:22] If there's any piece you don't enjoy, you can get somebody else to do it. And then will probably-- if you hire the right person-- they will be better at it than you, especially if it's something you don't enjoy and they do. They will be much better at that. And so if you do hiring right, you will build the ultimate team around you. [00:09:41] So that's kind of our topic for today is transitioning property managers. They're in this transitory sort of stage of 100 to 200 doors. I don't see very many people stay in that state for very long. It's usually maybe a year or two max, and then they're usually out of it. So if you're in that stage and it's uncomfortable right now, just keep going. Double down. You will graduate. And that graduation is building a team around you so that you are maybe in that 200 to 400 door category. And you've got maybe about five team members or more so that you can really start to hopefully graduate in fully into those four reasons. If you're like most you've done it wrong. And so we will talk about that on the next episode. [00:10:30] So until next time, everybody to our mutual growth, and if you are looking to add doors or you're looking to figure out hiring or scale operations, and you want to collapse time dramatically, the number one thing that you can do is invest in yourself and invest in knowledge. That's going to help you collapse time. If you are trying to do it all yourself and think you're the smartest person in the room. And you're trying to read books and watch videos and just learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, you can learn endlessly, but you need to be taking the right actions as quick as possible. And my goal would be as coach to help you collapse time on that. [00:11:08] So that's of interest to you. Reach out to DoorGrow we would love to help you out and support you. Our clients are getting phenomenal results really quickly, and it speeds up time dramatically and we've added some new trainings and some new material. We're constantly developing new stuff. So, and with that being said, we will talk to you in our next step. [00:11:27] So bye everyone.  [00:11:28] 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!  [00:11:55] 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. [00:12:16] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

I have noticed that property management entrepreneurs often try to do everything themselves. They think they can figure anything out on their own. This leads to frustration and wearing way too many hats as the business owner. Property management growth expert Jason Hull describes the next stage in the property management entrepreneur journey, the solopreneur. You’ll Learn… [02:02] The Property Management Solopreneur  [04:19] The Cycle of Suck and the Solopreneur Sandtrap [06:28] Fire Your Worst Doors! [08:15] $100 Earned Does not Justify $100 Spent [09:57] Don’t Undercharge [12:14] You Are Probably Limiting Your Own Business Growth [15:01] You Don’t Have to Do Everything Yourself Tweetables “It is absolutely possible to have the business of your dreams, to have the team of your dreams that supports you.” “If you have a crappy reputation and you're getting crappy reviews online guess what you attract more of? More crappy owners.” “You can't just go add another a hundred dollars expense because you're making another a hundred bucks.” “You can either be right, or you can win. You can either keep your excuses or you can start getting results, but you can't have both.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] 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 your 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. [00:00:42] 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.  [00:01:07] Alright, everybody. So I just got back from Mexico. My last episode was about the importance of taking a vacation and it was an awesome vacation, except for one thing. I got sick. I probably ate some food I shouldn't have, or maybe some seafood that wasn't cooked right. Or maybe I was at a bad restaurant. I don't know. Maybe-- I heard the ice sometimes, it's the ice, not what you're drinking, but it's the ice they put into it. Cause they didn't filter the ice. I don't know. So, anyway, I got sick and so I'm still feeling a little bit on the weather. I'm not feeling amazing or a hundred percent today, so you'll have to excuse me, because I am human. [00:01:47] So, but today we're getting back into talking about these different avatars that we target here at DoorGrow in property management. And so we're going to talk a little bit about today the solo preneur property management. Last time, if you missed that episode two episodes back, we talked about seekers and then a couple of episodes before that we talked about pure startups. [00:02:12] So if you miss those episodes, go back and listen to those, then there'll be very insightful for you to learn the entrepreneurial journey as he moved through various stages of property management. So today we're talking about solo preneur, property management entrepreneurs. And so these, I usually quickly categorize just based on door count. These are usually going to be people that are maybe you know, they're under a hundred doors. Usually they're stuck in the 50 to maybe 60, maybe 80 door range. A lot of times they'd been in business for two to five years. There is also a category of them that I call the stuck property management entrepreneurs. [00:02:48] And they've been in business anywhere from four to 20 years. And they're still in that five 50 to maybe a hundred door range. So let's, let's first get into kind of identifying these solopreneur property managers. The reason I call them solopreneurs is they're caught in what I call the solopreneur sandtrap. This means they've been in business usually short time, maybe three to five years before they even reach out for help. I get a lot of people at that stage that reach out for help. They don't do it in the first year, first, two years, sometimes even the third year until maybe towards the end of that. [00:03:24] Because lot of times, they think they can figure it out on their own. And they're trying. They're trying lots of different stuff. Usually they're right around 50, 60 doors, I find they might get up to maybe about 80 if they have a spouse or business partner or somebody that's kind of working for free, you know, in the business. You'll see sometimes they'll get up to maybe around 80, but that's usually about as many doors as they can handle on their own without additional team members. Or if they have a spouse or business partner. That's usually as many as they can handle dealing with, because they're caught in that cycle of suck. I've done episodes on several webinars and things over the years, I've talked about the Cycle of Suck in property management, which is you take on crappy owners, you then have crappy properties. And you take that on as well and then you have crappy tenants by default. Because they're difficult to deal with because the owner's being difficult, or the property's being difficult. And then you have a crappy reputation, and if you have a crappy reputation and you're getting crappy reviews online guess what you attract more of? More crappy owners, right. [00:04:32] So then you're caught in this property management hell, this cycle of suck So you want to escape that cycle of suck. Now, a lot of property managers or solopreneurs, they want to get on every client. They take on anybody and they move right into that cycle of suck, and they end up trapped. They're kind of-- they've painted themselves into a corner. They can't afford to hire anybody. They don't have enough money and they can't really manage any more doors. And they're usually losing about as many doors as they're getting on every year because they've taken on a lot of accidental investors, people that are only going to stick around for maybe a year, they have a lot of attrition have to replace a lot of those. I mean, often the solo preneurs that are in this stage, they often dream. They dream. Their goal is to break that hundred door barrier. And if you've already passed that a hundred door barrier, you are rare. There's not a lot that do that. There's vast majority that have a lot less than this. There's a lot that only have a handful of doors and they're dabblers, right? The seekers.  [00:05:33] And then you've got quite a few they're stuck at this first major sand trap. This solopreneur sandtrap. Often I find they're in a worse financial situation than the pure startups. The pure startups usually know that it's going to take a little money to get the business off the ground and they have some cash on hand, but these solo preneurs have tried everything, and they're investing so much into the business and they're getting such a little return or yield from that. And they have all these new expenses. They just can't seem to make it work, and they're in a lot of pain. And so they have a harder time, sometimes-- than pure startups-- in signing up with us or working with DoorGrow. I love helping all of these different groups. Solopreneurs... One of the main things that I will generally have them do to get them out of the cycle suck, is fire some bad doors. So they usually have built a portfolio up that is maxing them out in terms of time and resources. And I know property managers that by themselves have managed 200 doors and that's absolutely possible, but it's not possible if you're caught in the cycle of suck and you have bad doors and bad owners. [00:06:45] So you've got to get out of that. And so, right now, if you're caught in this sand trap and you know that your portfolio sucks, my recommendation is just fire your worst client. I guarantee if you do the math and you figure out your profit margin and you figure out the expenses that it costs you to manage that property based on profit margin, right? [00:07:06] So let's say you have a 50% profit margin, which would be amazing in most, any business, right. That would mean for every dollar of expense that you have. You need $2 to offset that in sales revenue or you collecting revenue, right? It's two to one ratio. My guess is your ratio is even worse. So it doesn't make sense for you to even keep on somebody that the expense for this owner or operating costs based on what your time is worth and effort, you are giving up a lot more than just that money. [00:07:41] And by letting go of them, it creates a lot more space. I would guarantee that these are not profitable for you to manage. The big mistake I see a lot of people in the solopreneur stage make is they don't really have a lot of financial savvy. And so you'll see people with this really unhealthy, unrealistic mindset where they'll say, "well, I'm making a hundred dollars off this door. So now that means I can now go spend a hundred dollars. That's not reality. If your profit margin were 50% that would mean you would need to make $200 in order to be able to justify a hundred dollar expense. So you can't just go add another a hundred dollars expense because you're making another a hundred bucks. [00:08:23] For most it's way worse than that in the beginning, it might be instead of a two to one ratio, it might be a 10 to one ratio, which means you need to make $10,000 in order to justify a thousand dollar expense or by cutting a thousand dollar expense, that's $10,000 in sales revenue. You don't have the pressure of generating. [00:08:43] You don't have to generate. So. They are usually in a worse financial situation. So right now, take a look at your portfolio. And if you have any owner or property, that's eating up a large portion of your time. It's not profitable. Let them go. If you dedicated that amount of time to grow your business or doing some strategies we teach at DoorGrow, you could easily offset that and create that space. And so you may also want to set a rule like maybe a three to one or five to one rule, in which you give yourself permission that if you can get on three good doors, you will fire that bad one. Or if you get on five good doors, you will fire your worst one until you get this portfolio cleaned up. A clean, healthy portfolio will make you money and be profitable and you'll have room to grow. If you don't have room to grow and you've backed yourself into a corner it's because you made some tactical errors in your business. [00:09:41] So the next thing is you want to take a look at. and I can give some examples. You know, I had one of my clients came here and his name was Sterling. He was at about 60 doors. He was charging too little. So this is another challenge I see is they think getting into the industry, they need to charge less. And I've talked about that on some previous episodes, but he was charging too little on average, maybe only charging, you know, a percentage of $500-$600 rent. So he was taking on worse properties, didn't have as much margin. And I helped him double the amount of profit in his business simply by increasing his pricing. And that also filtered out some of the worst properties. He actually pretty much doubled his gross revenue because his fees were so low, right? Like if you imagine somebody taking-- let's just throw out their number-- like 10% of 500 or $600 rent. That's only 50 or $60 a door. It's not enough. It's not enough. [00:10:40] It's certainly not enough with it doesn't give you enough space or room to grow the business or add team members. So, in six months, Sterling, after working with us and six months after we did some type of sales and did a website for him and some other stuff, he was at 300 doors and he was almost charging double. Right? So he was making a lot more money. We had a couple Will and Robin, and they built up a pretty sizeable property management business that they were focused on real estate and some other stuff. And they turned it over to a family member or somebody to run. And somehow all those doors whittled down all the way, to about 60 doors. So in about a year, we got them back up to 200 doors and they focused heavily on online reviews and some other strategies that were really effective building out a warm outreach program and some other stuff that we did with them, but they were able to build up the business really quickly and get out of that. [00:11:39] And they were stuck, partially caught in the cycle of suck. And one of the ways to mitigate that cycle suck is to focus on the reputation piece, which is that fourth step in the cycle of suck. So getting things cleaned up is a really big deal for this stage because you've probably built the wrong portfolio. Now, there are a category of property managers at this stage that have been in business longer, like four to 20 years, like a lot longer. And what that tells me is if they're still under a hundred doors and they've been doing this longer than four years or for a long time, and this wasn't just some side hustle, they were really trying to do this... it may have just been a side hustle, which is the case a lot of times, but the reality is usually these are people that are going to stay stuck probably forever. I don't even think I can help them in a lot of situations because they are ironically really smart and they're adaptive individuals, but they appear stupid others simply because they cannot see how they're limiting their own growth by trying to control everything. [00:12:45] So sometimes they are smarter than some of my other clients. And sometimes they just are too in their head. These are seekers basically that are stuck and stagnant. Their biggest challenge is their mindset that they can do it themselves. They just believe that it makes more sense to do it themselves and save money by doing it themselves, that it prevents them from being able to make more money and to grow. [00:13:11] So that's the biggest challenge is that mindset. Essentially, they focus on saving money over the speed of speeding up growth and spending money to make more money. They're cheap basically. And so they waste a lot of time and energy by seeking out stuff on YouTube and trying to read a bunch of books and trying to figure out how to do it all on their own, rather than getting expert help. They sometimes have a decent amount of ego. Sometimes, they're a bit more analytical logical, and they just feel that there's so much out there that they want to do and can do if they just had more time, "if I just had more time, I'd be able to solve all of these problems." And that is probably true, but it will take a decade to do what can be done in a year if you are really caught up in trying to do it all yourself. And if you really are that know-it-all that thinks, "I am smart enough and I can figure this out on my own. I don't need anyone else to help me do this." So unfortunately they can't see this potential. They look at the expense, the potential expense of getting new team members as insurmountable unjustifiable, because they already have this discomfort of this limited profit margin and their inability to get support and help and pay for experts really is what holds them hostage. They're now a slave to this business. So they end up trying to just do more and become more productive and get more done. [00:14:46] But everybody has a limited capacity, and they've hit their limit. And over time they build this business full of confirmation bias that relies more and more on them and reinforces the idea that no one else could possibly do what I can do. Right? They have this ego that no one else is good enough, and they view the world through this lens. So they might even try hiring a team member, and they're like, "they're so terrible." Or "they don't want to work" and they blame everybody else. And they're like, "only I can do this." And they have this ego that "I'm so amazing. I'm the guy or the gal and no one else can do what I can do." and so they make that true. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy because no savvy property manager would want to do things that way. And so they create this sort of prison for themselves, if you will. And in order to break out of that prison, it's a lot of work because they've built it up. They built up these walls. [00:15:44] Whether they're real or not, they built up these walls and this perception that it's insurmountable, it's difficult and they believe it. And so to destroy those walls, they fight for it. What I've noticed on calls with them is I will say, "well, you need to do this." And they're like, "well, I can't do that. I don't believe you, Jason. That doesn't mean." Or "does it make sense to do that?" Or " my owners would never go for that" or "that's how they are in my market. You don't know my market. And they always fight to keep their excuses of why they suck and why they can't grow. And it's impossible. It's really, I found it really impossible to try and squeeze a new idea into their head. And the only thing I could do is say, "look, we've got clients that were in a situation similar to you, but they're getting results. It is possible," but they are unwilling to believe it. And a lot of times, these property managers, they turn on me and they want to find flaws with me and believe that there's some sort of dirty secret about DoorGrow like we're not really in a state of integrity or we don't really do what we can do, or we're just in it to take money from people or whatever they want to believe. And they will try and find validation for this and they go hunting for it and they try and find, you know, every business that has success has a little tribe of haters, especially in coaching. [00:17:00] Right? And so they go find the other haters that all are bitter and upset that also didn't want to do the work or didn't want to make changes or thought they were smarter than me or anybody else. And weren't willing to do the work or make the changes. And they were fighting to keep their excuses. You know and I sometimes will say and I heard other coaches say, you can either be right, or you can win. You can either keep your excuses or you can start getting results, but you can't have both. You have to give something up and then if you're not willing to change your story, you're not going to be able to change your life. [00:17:37] If you're not willing to change the story about your clients or the market or all the excuses you have for why you're not winning and see something different, you will never have a different result. So if you are at this stage, you are a solopreneur property manager, you feel like you painted yourself into a corner, reach out. If you're humble enough and open-minded enough to reach out for help, we would be glad to help and support you. [00:18:02] We can help you figure out how to get to that next level. Hopefully you've gotten a few tips and ideas just from this call alone so that you can get to that next level and move forward. It is absolutely possible to have the business of your dreams, to have the team of your dreams that supports you and to find people that are better at each of the things you don't enjoy doing in your business. Is absolutely possible to find people that are better in each of those pieces that you aren't naturally inclined to do or don't love doing. It's possible to find people that will be better at it than you. They will surpass your ability in those things. I've seen it over and over and over again. My team are built as a team of people that are all better at things that they enjoy doing and love doing and that they are doing. They're all better at those things than I would be. Most entrepreneurs, we're highly adaptable. I used to do everything in the business. Right now, you might be doing everything in the business, but you don't love and enjoy everything. I have an episode. Previously, I talked about the four reasons. Go back and listen to that. [00:19:08] You are heavily out of alignment with the four reasons if you really want to hold on to everything and do everything and control everything. And there's a process to feeling safe, letting go of those things and finding people that are better at it than you and making the right hiring decisions at the right time. Otherwise you'll make a tactical mistake and you get crushed or your business fails because cashflow is king and you have to have cash in the business. So you don't want to hire the wrong person. You need to hire the right person with the right job to take off the minus signs or the things that energetically destroy your dream, and that's what you need most. [00:19:44] So I'm really good at helping business owners build the right business and the right team around them. Instead, what most do is building the business that they think that and building the team that they think the business needs instead. So, and they just build a stronger and bigger prison for themselves as they gravitate up into the 200 to 400 door range, for example. So that is solo preneur property managers and stuck property managers-- that early stage-- stuck in that early stage. So if you would like to escape that and you're, open-minded enough reach out to the DoorGrow. We'd be glad to help you. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and you can also join our Facebook group by going to doorgrowclub.com. [00:20:26] So doorgrow.com is our business, and doorgrowclub.com is our Facebook group, our community, for those that are enjoying this podcast, and we will be glad to start you on your journey of escaping being the solopreneur. And next time we get in one of these avatars, we're going to be talking about the transitioning property management entrepreneur that is moving speedily from a hundred doors-- they've broken that a hundred door barrier into the 200 to 400 door sand trap. Right. So we'll talk about that next. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. I hope to see you winning we'll talk soon. Bye everyone. [00:21:03] 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!  [00:21:30] 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. [00:21:51] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

If you want to scale your business, you have to let go of controlling everything. How? Plan a vacation. Vacations are ESSENTIAL in owning and running a business. Yes, really. Property management growth expert Jason Hull and DoorGrow Operator Sarah Hall explain why taking vacations is essential when running a property management business. You’ll Learn… [00:38] Where is Jason this Week?? [01:47] Why Should You Take a Vacation as a Property Manager? [02:53] Schedule Your Vacation in Advance [04:08] How to Prepare Your Team (p.s. You are Not as Important as You Think [06:21] Making Sure Your Business is Scalable Tweetables “Vacations are essential. You've got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you'll burn out.” “If you don't schedule time to make sure that you are healthy mentally and healthy physically and taking time to relax, the whole business will suffer.” “It forces your team to step up and level up because they can't lean on you anymore. So by taking vacations, it actually improves your team.” “I realized I'm not as important as I thought I was in my own business. Which is humbling.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Sarah: Vacations are essential. You've got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you'll burn out.  [00:00:05] Jason: All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers. So today's going to be a little bit of a different episode. I'm on vacation. And where are we?  [00:00:16] Sarah: Acapulco.  [00:00:17] Jason: Acapulco. So this is going to be a little different episode. I'm doing this from my phone. So hopefully this turns out. You're not going to-- I'm not going to read my manifesto, my normal intro. Just know that if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business and you do things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker, so. And, uh, you want to do things differently, alright? That's like the short version.  [00:00:38] All right. So, we're sitting here at the Banyan tree resort in Acapulco, which is like the number one resort. It's really nice. We are by the little pool near the bay here. This is the ocean. And, uh, what are we drinking? We've got the best mojitos that I've ever had. Which really sucks because once we leave here, I will forever feel like all other mojitos are not as good because these are the best ones I've ever had, so we'll have to come back to get a good Mojito I guess, so. They're really good.  [00:01:14] Anyway, what we want to talk about on today's episode is vacations, the importance of vacations. So one of the things I've noticed in dealing with and helping and talking to thousands of property managers is that there's a general lack of taking vacations. And this is one of the things that I coach clients on doing. So I'll let Sarah talk. So I'm here with my fiance, Sarah, who's also the operator at DoorGrow. She's amazing. She's already helped us save hundreds of thousands of dollars and figuring out things and really getting operations dialed in. So why do you think managers should commit to taking vacations? Like I'm in such a state of overwhelm, I'm completely part of the day-to-day operations. I don't have the support that I need. How am I going to take vacations?  [00:02:02] Sarah: So I'm also a property manager and vacations are essential. You've got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you'll burn out. It'll just keep going, your business. You're always going to have things to do. You're always going to have your endless to-do list and your things that need to get done and you would like to get done and things that you know is gonna happen to move your business forward. So that will never end, ever. So, if you don't schedule time for yourself, then your business will suffer. If you don't schedule time to make sure that you are healthy mentally and healthy physically and taking time to relax, the whole business will suffer.  So make sure you take some time for yourself. Plan family time. Plan vacations. Plan little trips. [00:02:53] Jason: To really make sure we drive this home. I want to point out that just scheduling a vacation. Schedule it out in advance. Give yourself plenty of time to prepare. If you haven't taken one in the last two or three years, do it right now. Sit down with your partner, your spouse, whoever, especially if they're involved in the business with you and say, "let's just schedule it." Because just by scheduling it and setting that intention, you have to figure out how to make it work. Set it out 90 days out. You can pretty much change everything significant related to this in the business in the next 90 days. Schedule a vacation schedule six months out if you feel like there's no possible way you could do this. But schedule the vacation and then do everything you need to do to get ready for it. If you have a team, even better. You can start meeting with your team and say, "Hey, look, I scheduled a vacation. It's in the next 90 days. It's on this date and we need to make sure we are ready for when I'm going to be gone because I'm going to be gone." [00:03:52] And I want you to be gone during your vacation. Like, "I'm not going to be available. You can't hand me escalations. I can't put out fires for you. I'm not going to be able to take care of problems. Like I'm going to be off grid. You'll need to figure out how to handle this." So if you have any team members at all, then you can do that. [00:04:08] If you need more time, get at least one one executive assistant, one team member, an operator in your business. And if you need help with that stuff, talk to me, talk to our team at DoorGrow. We can get you in a place where you're ready for that and figure out how to build out a really good hiring system. But if you set that intention, you can figure it out. You can figure out with your team, "what processes do we need for me to be gone for a week? What systems do we need to have in place for me to be gone for a week? Who needs to know how to do what in order for me to be gone for a week? [00:04:42] And so if you set that intention to do that, what I found was when I finally just started scheduling vacations, a couple of things happened. One, I realized I'm not as important as I thought I was in my own business. Which is humbling. Like my team actually stepped up and could handle stuff without me. And it forces your team to step up and level up because they can't lean on you anymore. So by taking vacations, it actually improves your team. The other thing I noticed was that leading up to the vacation, we got a shit ton of stuff done. Like we got a massive amount of things done: processes documented, things figured out, things changed. All this stuff that was on my plate, I had to start figuring out how to give this up in order to be prepared for it. So we had massive momentum and a massive amount of changes in the weeks leading up to the vacation Because stuff got real, and they knew I wouldn't be available, and everybody started to freak out a little bit including myself. So I started making a lot of changes. So this is an intentional way of forcing yourself to get out of the business, which is what you want. You want to have more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, more support. And in order to do that, you need to be able to lean on your team, and by forcing and setting an intention of a vacation, this will allow you to have a vacation. This will allow you to create distance from the business and be able to have a business that can run without you for at least a week. Very few things can really get completely destroyed or damaged in a week, right? You aren't going to lose clients in just one week.  [00:06:10] So set the intention, schedule a vacation, especially if you haven't done it in the last year or two. All right. My phone is saying we're on low power mode, so that means it's time to get back to vacation. So anything else we should add?  [00:06:21] Sarah: Yeah. We also want to make sure you and your business are in a position to scale. If everything is on your plate and you can't offload anything and you can't trust your team and you don't have any processes or any systems or anyone you can rely on you can't scale. You can only handle so much. Every person can only handle so much. So, if you want more out of life and you want more out of your business, and most of us do, you've got to be able to figure out what to do to get yourself out of the business. [00:06:52] Jason: Yeah, you're not as important as you think you are. Like, that's one of the humbling things us CEOs or entrepreneurs need to realize and learn. And the more you are out of the business and less you're involved in it, and the more you're able to lean on your team, the better the business actually does. And I've heard this repeatedly from multiple business owners and entrepreneurs I've helped over the years that the business and the team are happier and things are better because usually us as entrepreneurs, we're not really good managers. Most of us are visionaries and we're not good operators. So anyway, that's all we're going to do for today here for those that want some FOMO and you can see here what we're hanging out and dealing with here in Acapulco. And until next time to our mutual growth, everybody. Check us out at doorgrow.com. [00:07:35] We want to help support you and grow you in your business and help you have the business and the life of your dreams. And that's what we at Doorgrow all get a thrill of doing, to support our clients. And we want you to be able to experience more of this. All right, bye everybody. Until next time, to our mutual growth. [00:07:52] 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!  [00:08:19] 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. [00:08:40] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

After getting past the pure startup phase, property management entrepreneurs begin to face new challenges. Whether you have 1 door or 50 doors, you probably experience similar problems and fall victim to common mistakes. Property management growth expert Jason Hull explains the common pitfalls and challenges that “seekers” face in the property management industry. You’ll Learn… [01:12] Seekers: the Next Phase of Being a Property Management Entrepreneur [03:14] Falling Victim to Franchises [04:34] Learning the Ropes: Product Research Interviews [07:16] Getting that First 50 Doors [08:11] Becoming an Expert in Your Field [11:47] How to Collapse Time and Avoid Wasting Tens of Thousands of Dollars [12:32] Getting the Right Kind of Leads Tweetables “One of the big challenges: you don't know yet what you don't know at this stage.” “Get educated because the more educated you are, the more of authority you are” “If you are a decent human being, you will experience imposter syndrome. Every entrepreneur goes through this state.” “Remember, nobody wants to buy property management from you. What they really want to buy from you is peace of mind or safety and certainty.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Remember, nobody wants to buy property management from you. What they really want to buy from you is peace of mind 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 your business and your life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently than 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 businesses and the business owner. 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 am your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:12] So on a previous episode, we started talking about this journey that the entrepreneur or the property management entrepreneur business owner goes through. And we started with the pure startup. The zero door crowd. So today we're going to get into the next level. It's barely beyond that. It's like one door beyond that. Like they've actually started. And these, I call seekers. Why? Because they are seeking a lot. They're seeking a lot of knowledge. They don't know a lot. They're trying to figure out like what they need to do. They're trying to get over all sorts of challenges. So when you first start taking action, that's a big leap. It's difficult. So a lot of times these might be-- and if this is you, you're likely a realtor, maybe with a few rental investment properties of your own. Maybe you have a little bit of experience managing properties for yourself, or maybe a little bit for others. [00:02:14] These seekers are not yet even aware of how painful and tough it can be until they mature into kind of that next level we'll get into in a future episode. They are now wanting to start a property management business, and they are easy prey to making many common mistakes. They fall prey to a lot of potential pitfalls, such as selecting poor branding. Choosing poor branding that costs them a lot of leads, getting a website that doesn't convert and capture leads well, not pricing themselves effectively... like trying to be the cheapest in the market, no strategy for online review gathering and they start quickly earning a negative reputation just from their first few interactions taking on bad clients that costs them 10 times good ones. We talked about the cycle of suck on a previous episode. I recommend you review that if you're in this stage or any stage, really. And so that is a challenge. They're caught in the cycle of suck.  [00:03:14] A lot of times in this seeker stage, they fall prey to expensive franchises. And so, you know, you can check out DoorGrow, and just Google DoorGrow and "property management franchise alternative." and we have a whole page about the potential pitfalls of choosing into a property management franchise and all the limitations that that creates and why it may not be a good fit for almost anyone so. Paying for expensive and ineffective marketing channels, which franchises generally push you towards such as SEO, pay-per-click content marketing, social media marketing, pay per lead services, and you end up getting really poor results. So it's really costly, takes a lot more time, and you get way less results. A lot of times at this stage, they're seeking a broker. Uh, that's an issue with pure startups. A lot of times they're seeking a broker. They're working on getting their brokers license. They may be working underneath the broker instead of having their own brokers license, and they're just seeking a lot of tools and resources and ideas. And there's so many shiny objects, so many pieces of software, so many tools, and a lot of times they go down this rabbit hole of just playing around with all this stuff and not actually taking action and moving forward. [00:04:34] So. I've seen a lot of clients come to me that were kind of at this level and at this stage, and one of the big challenges: you don't know yet what you don't know at this stage. You haven't learned yet how difficult certain pieces of the business can be. So there's a lot of decisions that need to be made. So one of the things that I teach clients just to throw a bone out is an idea or strategy called product research interviews. And without giving away too much awesome stuff just on our free podcast-- but I want to always give value-- is product research interviews are going to be a great tool for the seeker and for the pure startups to get ideas and to learn what they need to do to please investors. It helps them learn what objections, what challenges. So do some product research interviews. If you are going to create something new, a new product or service. Such as starting a property management business and offering a suite of services for property management, my recommendation is you do some product research interviews because you may not really know. You know maybe what you need as an investor, but you're one limited avenue for information. And so my recommendation is that you talk to at least minimum 20 or 30 investors. And ask them about their concerns, why they haven't used a property manager in the past, if they have, what challenges have they had. [00:06:06] So you get connected to reality in terms of how the investor thinks, what their mindset is, what challenges they see, what their objections are. Once you've done this with about 20 or 30, you'll probably be almost as savvy as a lot of property managers that have been doing this for at least a handful of years, because they never did that, so they just waited until they had 20 or 30 solid opportunities. And then eventually they actually got wise enough to start asking really healthy questions to get feedback, which might've been, you know, a hundred people in after talking to a lot of investors. So I want to collapse time for you. Start doing some product research interviews. Real simple. Go out to some sort of real estate investor group. Start connecting and meeting people and just say, "Hey, I'm starting a property management business. It looks like you're doing some cool stuff in the industry or that you're an investor. I would love to take you out to lunch, pick your brain. I could really use some feedback on what I was looking at doing and offering to clients." And the secret that we talk about, even in more detail in our program is these are awesome leads. This is a really easy side door to get some leads for your business to get things started. [00:07:16] So getting that first 50 doors. A seeker, may be like one to 50 doors, right. And this stage you are just learning. You're just learning, like "how should I handle a lease?" And like, "how should I handle contracts?" And like, "how should I like get property management software in place?" And like, you're just focused on some really basic stuff to get the business healthy and going, and you might get caught up on stuff that you don't really need to spend a ton of time on yet. Like if it's just, you, you don't really need to be spending a ton of time documenting processes or worrying about VAs or, you know, some of this kind of stuff. That's probably once you have 50 doors, then it's time to start maybe focusing on "how can I offload a little bit?" "how can I start creating some leverage?" Maybe there's some software and some tools, and then we'll get into that on a subsequent podcast episode.  [00:08:11] So if you are a seeker and you are figuring this stuff out, I mentioned this for the pure startups, but a lot of seekers need to hear this too. Make sure you really learn the laws and the rules in landlord tenant law, and get really connected to the local real estate board and just really be aware of what you can and cannot do or should and should not do in your market. Get educated because the more educated you are, the more of authority you are and the more you're going to kill what every seeker feels, which is imposter syndrome. Seekers have stepped beyond the fantasy and they're in reality and reality is uncomfortable. And the pain you will experience, if you are a decent human being, you will experience imposter syndrome. Every entrepreneur goes through this state. You suck during this stage, you're going to experience a lot of pain and a lot of people avoid the suck. You have to just start sucking to get over it. You have to lean into the suck and you have to be willing to look stupid sometimes and ask dumb questions. [00:09:16] Cause you're not going to learn otherwise. And you need to be willing to experience that discomfort of imposter syndrome. And figure out how to overcome it, so you don't feel like a fake or phony or are worried whether or not they're going to know whether you know or don't know something. It's okay to admit that you're new. It's okay to admit that you might not know something, but that you will figure it out. You could easily say, "you know what? I don't actually-- I'm not totally clear on that, but that's a great question. Let me do a little bit more research and I will come back to you and let you know what I find out. You know, I have some connections with my lawyer. I have connections with my trade organization. I have connections with some of my investor clients. Let me ask around and find out a really solid answer for you on that." [00:10:06] You don't have to know everything immediately. They want to know that you can figure out problems and solve problems for them. And you don't have to be the expert on everything, but I want you to become the expert. Like become the expert that they can lean on and trust because that puts you in much higher category in their mind of trust. And they will want to do business with you if they feel safe with you. Remember, nobody wants to buy property management from you. What they really want to buy from you is peace of mind or safety and certainty, as I've talked about before. I talked about on a previous episode, the four reasons for entrepreneurs to start a business. The fifth reason for people in motivation of why they are involved in businesses or that you need to focus on a business. That fifth reason is safety and certainty. And so that's really what people want to buy from you. So make sure you know how to offer safety and certainty to them instead of just offering a bunch of products and services and things about managing their property that will maybe create safety and certainty. Help them become certain in you that you're going to create safety and certainty and they will care a lot less about all the details and features and benefits and trying to micromanage you and trying to ask way too many questions. That's usually a clue they're not feeling safe with you and they are uncomfortable and they don't feel like there's a high level of trust or safety and certainty. And remember, sales and deals happen at the speed of trust. So the faster you can create authentic, real trust, the faster you're going to get results, so. [00:11:47] If you are a seeker and you're struggling with some of this stuff and you're trying to figure it out and you don't want to make a ton of mistakes and you want to collapse time and you don't want to waste tens of thousands of dollars on marketing and signing contracts with marketing agencies, and you want to get some real solid wins, you want to grow your business without spending a dime on marketing and just investing time, but actually less time than it would take if you got leads through marketing-- which takes more time, by the way, than the warm lead strategies that we focus on at DoorGrow. If you want to spend less time and less money and get more doors more quickly, then reach out. One of my clients-- just had a call with him just the other day-- he's added 300 doors in the last year in working with us, about 300 doors.  [00:12:32] That would be impossible if you were focused on any lead gen channel or advertising channel, you know, if you were doing marketing or paying for SEO or pay-per-click or content marketing or social media marketing or any internet marketing, that would be impossible because those leads would have been colder. He wouldn't have had the time. He wouldn't have had the time to be closing that many deals and that many doors, but when deals come to you hot or warm and you're getting warm leads and referrals, and you've really optimized that sales pipeline for that, you built up really good partner programs and some of the stuff we talked about, this can go really, really fast because. The close rate on warm leads is super high. It's like 80, 90% typically. And the sales cycle time to close them is way shorter, so you're spending way less time selling. So if you want to get this business off the ground, build the right engine from the get-go. And then once it's built like this client, he's just injecting a little bit of fuel into this engine. He doesn't have to invest all the hours that he was putting in, and he was putting in like probably 20, 25 hours a week, I think, into this strategy. It is like a part-time job just to focus on sales and grow the business.  [00:13:45] But now, it just takes a little bit of fuel to keep that engine going now that he has really good connections, really good partners. He's built that. And there's some really easy, low hanging fruit that can get you a lot more doors than any of the really expensive cold lead marketing strategies. Some of them are so obvious, such a no brainer when I point it out to our new clients, they're just, they're just winning. It's just wins. We started doing in our mastermind, a new client call cause we had so many new clients that are in the early stage. And we started doing that on Tuesdays. And a lot of these are in this seeker category. [00:14:19] They've started the business, but they're in this difficult sort of stage and they have to build the engine. And the call that we just had, the first two calls we did on Tuesdays were just sharing strategies. Right? But this last call yesterday was just wins. It was just really awesome. It was lots of wins. Everyone's sharing wins and they just couldn't believe-- like they're batting a thousand. They're making calls and they're getting zero on some of the calls that they're doing. They're getting no one saying "no" in building up these referral relationships. And I know that sounds crazy and ridiculous, and you probably don't believe me, but join the program and then you'll be like, "oh yeah, that makes sense." and "that is so easy." And "I can't believe, I didn't think of doing that. I would never say no to that either." Right. So, anyway, if you're interested in growing your business, you are a seeker, check us out at doorgrow.com. Schedule a call with my team and let's get you into the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. [00:15:18] And our first goal with all of these seekers is to get them paid. We want to get them making double what the monthly cost of the mastermind is within the first 30 days, so that they're making enough money to justify the expense. Double the cost of the expense. They're making double that. So, and that's not too difficult to do. For most property managers, it's maybe like 10, maybe to 20 doors, depending on how much money they make per door, which later in our program, we will optimize and improve because everybody comes in with bad pricing. [00:15:50] So, all right. So that's it for today. For those of those seekers out there, keep seeking, and you will find right. This is what the Bible says anyway. So it keeps seeking, you'll find it. And hopefully in your hunt or in your seeking, you find DoorGrow. We would love to help you out. And until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:16:10] 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!  [00:16:37] 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. [00:16:58] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life. 

How many times have you considered going into short term rentals as a property manager? Short-term and vacation rentals are enticing, but they can also be an intimidating niche for newcomers.  Today’s guest is Alex Jarbo, short-term rental developer and manager and CEO of Sargon Investments.He is the host of the Youtube Channel called Alex Builds where he teaches the ins and outs of short-term development and management. You’ll Learn… [01:08] Starting out in the Short-Term Rental World [08:04] Useful Tools for Managing Short-Term Rentals [12:13] Virtual Guidebooks: Providing a Unique Experience to Guests [15:42] Dealing with Common Issues in Short-Term Rentals [18:32] Some Extra Tips from Pro Short-Term Rental Manager Alex [23:06] The Shifts in the Industry Since COVID [25:34] Where to go to Learn More! Tweetables “And anytime I talk to someone they're like, "I don't know where to start investing." I was like, just start in your backyard.” “It's easier to rent out these unique properties compared to, say, something like a normal condo or something.” “I like the property to be an experience in itself on top of the city that the people are visiting for the attraction.” “I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? Like, no. It's not. Invest and manage both.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Alex: I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? Like, no, it's not. Invest and manage both. [00:00:06] Jason: Alright, 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 your 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.  [00:00:44] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and the business owners. 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.  [00:01:08] And today's guest is Alex, Alex Jarbo. Am I saying your last name right?  [00:01:13] Alex: Yup. [00:01:14] Jason: I did? Okay. I didn't know if it was like a soft, "h" sounding 'j' or something. So Alex, welcome to the show. You have a company called Sargon investments. You do a lot of cool Airbnb stuff. So I'm really excited to have you on as a guest. I think the Airbnb market is of interest to a lot of my clients and a lot of property managers. It's heating up. There's more interest growing. So, maybe to get started: tell us a little bit about your background and how you kind of got into dealing with rental properties. [00:01:48] Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So I was originally, I served about four and a half years in the Marine Corps. And then I had gotten to a point where I just wanted to branch out and sort of do my own thing outside of the military. So, got out, and then the day I got out of the military, I actually moved down to where I live here in Asheville. Prior to that, I spent a couple months trying to figure out like where I wanted to move. I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan. And I wanted to get into short-term rentals. That was sort of the niche that I had chosen inside real estate. So when I moved here, got my real estate license, helped some people purchase and sell properties, but I saw a lot of people purchasing short term rentals that would just come to me. [00:02:26] So I decided to purchase my first one or at least start to purchase my first one. And I originally wanted to use my VA loan and purchase like a duplex or a triplex, live in one, and rent the other couple out on Airbnb. But what I realized really quickly was that like it was just very difficult, even back then in 2017 to find good, cash flowing short-term rentals that weren't completely out of my budget at the time. So after maybe like three months of looking and getting outbid a lot, I decided to build my first short-term rental. And on top of a building I decided to take over the, uh, management. So that's where I decided to both start a development company and start a management company. And that one property turned into two, two turned into four that we're developing, and now we're developing 10 and then working on like a boutique resort. [00:03:13] But yeah, that's the sort of the short of where I'm at now is just focusing on putting together these like boutique resort developments. And then we self manage in house. [00:03:24] Jason: Awesome. So a lot of property managers listening might think "I would like to be an investor and maybe get some of my own." I know some of my clients dabble a little bit just in their own investments. Even if they manage long-term rentals, they want to get more into AirBNB. So why don't we approach that topic first? Like getting into it, you do some things that are a little bit different than the typical Airbnb investor. And one of which being cabins. So I'm really curious about this idea of: why cabins? [00:03:59] Alex: So this is prior to COVID. My whole idea was like-- right now we invest in mountain communities, but every market has their own little area. And anytime I talk to someone they're like, "I don't know where to start investing." I was like, just start in your backyard. If you live in a Metro area, like a lot of areas, you're going to be renting out, like say condos, or you're going to be renting out apartments or something just cause you're in a busy metro city. I like to ask them like "where in your city or the market that you live in-- where do people like to take weekend vacations, maybe an hour to two away from you driving wise? [00:04:29] And that's sort of the market that I recommend people sort of go into. People are fine with driving say like 15- 20 minutes away from like a Metro city up to an hour in some cases. So like a good example of that is like people in New York, like New York city are going to travel maybe two hours. They're used to traveling two hours north to vacation, same thing with, say like in California on the west coast. People in San Diego are pretty used to going up to Big Bear Lake and taking that drive. Land prices are going to be cheaper.  [00:04:59] You can also host some like, not parties, but like bigger-- you can host more people in some of these larger cabins and you have more control on the design and that's sort of the thing we really focus on is focusing on developing unique cabins, whether it be a frames, really nice log cabins... we're, we're dabbling in like tree houses. It's just difficult to find like financing on those right now. The reason we gravitated towards cabins over something like purchasing a condo in a Metro city is we have more control over the design, which just plays into the marketing. It's easier to rent out these unique properties compared to say like something like a normal condo or something where it's a little bit more difficult to differentiate yourself to like the condo next door or something. [00:05:41] Jason: So it sounds like some of the key things you look at is proximity: like pick an area that's nearby. It needs to be something kind of where people take vacations and then novelty seems to be an aspect to this. Like cabins are a novel thing in the mountain area and making it somehow unique or different or stand out.  [00:05:59] Alex: Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, what I always like to say is: say, if you're not developing the property and you're coming into it, you want something unique about the property. I like the property to be an experience in itself on top of the city that the people are visiting for the attraction. So like, if you're looking at a market that has its attractions, but at the same time, it's like you sort of get rid of the seasonality part of it a little bit when the property itself is an experience in itself,  [00:06:24] Jason: Mmm, yeah, good point. The property kind of needs to be its own event or its own thing. Yeah. Cool. So let's shift gears and talk about property managers that might want to get into this game of targeting people. Like you have a portfolio or a small portfolio of investments that they can maybe get on as clients and what that might look like. And then maybe one of the things I think you're really good at is the technology. And so we could chat maybe a little bit about that.  [00:06:55] Alex: Yeah, for managers who are looking, before this, we were talking about like a lot of long-term managers are sort of starting to dabble in the short-term rental game. It sounds intimidating, but it's not as intimidating as it sounds. There's a lot of technology out there right now, plugins and then also CRMs that make the process pretty seamless. Depending on how many properties you have in the portfolio, you really don't need boots on the ground. It might in terms of like having a property manager in an area. Again, I would focus on one market at a time.  [00:07:25] But you can get away with a part-time maintenance person. The most important part is probably going to be your cleaning crew, and that's going to be up to you. There's pros and cons to either hiring your own, like managing the cleaning in-house or teaming up with a local cleaning crew in the area that can handle the cleaning stuff. Which again, the cleaning is definitely like-- I look at my cleaning crew as almost the manager of the properties themselves, because they're there at least twice a week or at least once a week, depending on what the booking looks like. So they see what needs to be replaced, what's damaged. If anything is damaged, they send me a picture directly, which I send directly to either Airbnb, VRBO, or wherever the property's listed.  [00:08:04] So the technology piece is going to be huge. And it, again, it's all dependent on how big you are. If you have 10 cabins, you can probably get away with, there are messaging plugins where it's like, I would say 80% of your messaging is automated. And then you can hire virtual assistants to sort of take over the other 20% of the messaging where it's like specific questions that are asked or say, if they're calling or something. [00:08:26] Jason: So the cleaning crew is almost your inspection crew. Like they're doing somewhat of an inspection as well, not just coming in and cleaning. So they're identifying issues, submitting things to your maintenance team or your system for maintenance. And then you need people that are managing that. And then you've got VAs that can help facilitate some of these things happening right? [00:08:48] Alex: Right. [00:08:49] Jason: What are some of the actual technological tools that you utilize that help you to systemize the business and make things simple for yourself?  [00:08:58] Alex: The first one is-- and I'll talk about maybe four or five tools here. The first one is going to be a tool and a company called StayFi. And I've talked about this tool so much now that I've recommended it to anyone looking to get into short-term rentals. StayFi is essentially a little disk that plugs in the back of the router. And what that does, is it email captures any guests that's using your internet. That 1. Protects you from if the guest is doing anything illegal on your internet, which might happen. But 2. It captures everyone's email in the cabin.  [00:09:29] So, you're essentially taking digital marketing principles and applying it to brick and mortar business, which is the short-term rental stuff. Which is a little difficult to do, but if you can master that part, you can essentially capture your customers. So StayFi. Imagine like you're walking into a Starbucks, you walk into an airport and you have to enter in your email address to be able to get access to the wifi. It's the same idea here, but it's geared towards short-term rentals.  [00:09:52] So from there we use MailChimp to push out marketing emails, but we push out maybe seasonal emails, like three or four emails a year just saying, "Hey," like "this season's coming up" or "Valentine's day is coming up. Would you like to book with us?" [00:10:04] Originally, when you're starting off, you can just put your Airbnb link directly in there. But as a manager who wants to build a bigger short-term rental business, you can use this to sort of take people off of Airbnb, VRBO where they book initially with the short-term rental sites, but then you can build a platform on the backend to sort of capture direct bookings where you're not paying both. The guest is not paying the processing fees. And then same thing with the host. You're saving money on that end where you're sort of-- you have more control over the guests, which is what we realized is very important.  [00:10:38] Jason: Yeah. So you're shifting from just traffic that's fed to you by Airbnb and you're taking that traffic so that it doesn't always have to come back through that and creating your own traffic. It's traffic you own now.  [00:10:50] And for those emails that you capture, do you have any, like, even anecdotal data or information on how many rebook at the same property? Is that common? [00:11:00] Alex: It is pretty common. I don't have exact numbers on that. But we do see a boost in booking say like a couple days after we've pushed the email out. Right now we're still working on building out the backend platform.  [00:11:13] We're just pushing them directly back through Airbnb right now. But like, companies like Airbnb and VRBO have metrics that show like, "Hey, this person has rebooked with you this many times." And then people who are looking to get into more of an advanced system, we use Streamline, or we're going to be using Streamline. vacation, rental software is top of the line where you can syndicate all the top short-term rental sites, and then it sort of syndicates all the messaging too that comes from the different sites. So you have one platform which I really recommend doing. Like, if someone is coming up to a manager and saying, "Hey, I want to take over your property. What can you do for me?" The first thing I recommend is always: are they just on one platform? If they're just on Airbnb, if they're just on VRBO, there's already room for growth there by just putting it on a couple other platforms or putting more eyes on your property. [00:12:00] Jason: Yeah. Very cool. So Streamline for syndication is one of the things. You mentioned MailChimp for getting emails out periodically do your list or some sort of newsletter. What other tools are you using to kind of simplify the business?  [00:12:13] Alex: Right now, a digital guidebook is very effective. We like to essentially plan-- I sort of stole this idea. My wife and I had a vacation in Taloon beach on a resort. And when we arrived, the resort had practically planned our trip for us, where it's like, "Hey, if you want to do a cave diving trip, this is this. If you want it, this is what your day would look like. If you wanted to go visit the pyramids, this is what your day is going to look like. If you just want a chill day and just want to go visit restaurants, this is what your day could look like."  [00:12:43] So we did the same thing there where we plan maybe three to four days. Like here we have like over a hundred breweries in the city, so we do like a brewery day. We do a hiking day. We do a waterfall chasing day, and it's like all that's in the digital guidebook where you could put links to different things in the digital guidebook. And it's just sent out. The link is sent out with the check-in instructions. Same thing with you can get with local restaurants or local providers and be like, "Hey, can you give me like a 10% discount, and then I'll put it in my digital guide book where the guests can use almost like a QR code where you can just generate a QR code. Yeah.  [00:13:15] Jason: So for the digital guidebook, is this just like a Google document or is this like..? [00:13:21] Alex: We use a company called Hostfully. And Hostfully is specifically a short-term rental, digital guidebook. [00:13:28] Jason: Host fully?  [00:13:30] Alex: Yeah, Hostfully. Host and then F U L L Y. Yeah.  [00:13:33] Jason: Okay. Great. [00:13:34] Alex: Pretty cheap too, man. It's like, I think it's like 15, $20 a month per property.  [00:13:38] Jason: Got it. And so what advantages does Hostfully give you over just throwing it in a Google document, for example?  [00:13:45] Alex: The templates are super easy to use. You can also track like how many people are actually looking at it. I mean, I would say the templates, and then also, Hostfully does have a backend system just like Streamline. So. Streamline I believe it's a minimum of 15 properties if you're just starting off. Hostfully I believe is like $25 a month per property. Where it's the same type of syndication CRM, where it pushes out to the other short-term rental sites. So you can sync those two together.  [00:14:11] Jason: Got it. Yeah. I had a software company on one of my previous episodes. They were showcasing TripAngle. Tripangle.com. And he was talking about how they like reduce all the fees, connected Airbnb and all this stuff. So. Pretty cool. It might be worth listeners checking out that and checking out tripangle.com. I think he had mentioned something about Streamline the last time I talked to this gentleman too. So, some connections. [00:14:37] Alex: Streamline's a company standard. It's been around before Airbnb. Before VRBO blew up too. People forget like short-term rentals is not a new idea. It's just the access Airbnb has made it so much easier and VRBO too. Short-term rentals have been around for a very long time where people have to pick up a phone and book So like, I mean, people aren't missing the boat on that. I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? [00:15:04] Like, no, it's not. Invest and manage both. It's continuing to grow, especially with COVID like people sort of stepped away from hotels a little bit, and they're more comfortable driving out a little further out where it's like, would you rather pay an extra $1500 to stay an actual house compared to a hotel? And same thing with like some of the larger properties that we manage. It's like we have families instead of booking, maybe two or three hotel rooms, they're just going to book one house and it almost comes out to be the same price.  [00:15:31] Jason: Nice. Yeah. For large groups it's hard to beat, you know, if you're doing a family reunion or something like that. It's pretty difficult. You're talking a whole bunch of hotel rooms or you get a 10 bedroom house. So, [00:15:42] Alex: One thing going back to the tools that just came to mind. This has helped us a lot when it comes to-- cause we are in a very strict short-term rental market in terms of like laws and zoning and everything. And one of the things that's helped us a lot. And this can help a lot of the managers who are looking to get into the space is using a company called NoiseAware and stacking that with a company called Party Squasher. And we mainly use NoiseAware compared to Party Squasher. You can combine the two but NoiseAware sort of, it hears-- it doesn't listen to everything. It doesn't listen into conversations, but it monitors the decibel level inside of the property.  [00:16:17] So if the guests are being way too loud or screaming since you get their phone number at booking, even if it's through Airbnb or VRBO, they get an immediate text message "Hey, you're being too loud. Could you please like quiet down?" Or something like that. Maybe a little bit more tactful than that. But that's been a very powerful tool for us and especially approaching the county. It's like the biggest thing neighbors think about is like, oh my God, when they think Airbnb they think like, oh my God, there's gonna be just parties next door all the time. So.  [00:16:44] Jason: Right. Destroy the neighborhood.  [00:16:46] Alex: Right.  [00:16:47] Jason: So, yeah, that's pretty interesting. So they get a text message. Do they reply to this and do you see their messages? Or like, what the hell? You know,  [00:16:55] Alex: But what we do, there's like a whole list of things. So Stayfi, what I mentioned earlier also allows you to see how many devices are connected to the wifi. So. [00:17:06] Jason: Right, so if there's like a thousand, you know there's some rager going on. [00:17:09] Alex: Granted, you might have your laptop. Like one guest will have a phone, a laptop, So two, three devices, maybe an iPad too, a tablet. But if like the property sleeps six people and there's 30 people attached to the wifi. [00:17:21] We also have like an outdoor facing camera just at the driveway too. So say if we do get a say, cause we can set it up to where we get the noise notification as well. So from there, we just look at our cameras and say, oh, okay. There's 50 cars in the parking lot, and this place sleeps six people. And then from there, we can either text "Hey, like you're not supposed to have..." or we can reach out to Airbnb directly. We've never really dealt with that issue, but the systems are in place just to make sure. [00:17:48] Jason: And it's largely probably the screening process at the outset that you have in place to prevent that. Right. So you mentioned NoiseAware you couple it sometimes with Party Squasher, is that what you said?  [00:17:59] Alex: I personally haven't used it, but some other guests have recommended it to me. I haven't-- I have almost no experience in that, but I've seen it a lot mentioned on different short term rental podcasts and some of the books that I've read too. [00:18:10] Jason: Okay. Cool.  [00:18:11] Alex: I Don't know what it does on the backend but...  [00:18:13] Jason: Yeah, I don't either. Okay, cool. But it probably prevents parties, which is probably a big concern, like, parties happening, the NoiseAware and the Party Squasher. All right. Cool. Any other tools or systems that you utilize in managing your rentals to make sure things go smoothly. [00:18:32] Alex: Going back to the cleaning crew just a good line of communication is very important. Making sure that you are choosing a cleaning crew or cleaning company that can grow with you. A lot of the time, you don't want to be teaching your cleaning crew how to clean short-term rentals because what I realized initially, and just with the labor shortage that's happening right now is a lot of people, like my cleaning crew stopped taking on new clients, not new properties, just new clients. [00:18:58] It's difficult to try to switch the mindset of approaching a cleaner that takes care of properties. Say for just cleaning people's properties like our property manager or our cleaning crew specifically deals in short-term rentals, a company that is used to turning a property two, three times a week if need be.  [00:19:17] Another thing I'd recommend is-- it might affect your bottom line a little bit, but it might outweigh the amount of time that you put on a specific property. Because of COVID, we stopped taking on one day bookings, which we were taking a lot of, one day bookings prior to COVID and that sort of just came out of my cleaning crew couldn't handle the work from the one day bookings, but what I realized is looking back, we've been doing that for four or five months since we stopped taking one day bookings, a lot of our problems, a lot of our questions, a lot of our bandwidth was taken up by one day guests. And I sorta understand it's like a lot of the times they were just coming in at like, say 8, 9, 10 PM. And they have to check in at 10:00 AM the next day. They don't really get to enjoy the property too much. You get those late night texts a lot too, from the one day guests compared to a guest staying 3, 4, 5, sometimes a week with you. [00:20:10] Sometimes those are the quietest guests where you don't hear anything from them. Maybe a couple of questions here and there. But what I saw was a lot of my issues, a lot of my people requesting refunds or whatever was coming from one day guests. So for people who are already in the short-term rental space, I'd play around to see. And what I also realized too, was like, sometimes that one day guest will book in the center of the week on the Wednesday, which blocks someone from booking that entire week. So if someone's in the short term rental space play around with seeing, maybe just do it with one property and see how the property is affected.  [00:20:42] You might get a better tenant in there which is what we saw a better tenant by booking two, three days minimum compared to a one day. And what I also saw with if you're booking on Airbnb or VRBO, is the algorithm sort of adjusts based off that request of only accepting two or three-day bookings. They'll try to play with your schedule to show it to people who are only trying to book three days and sort of, like for most of our properties are fully booked up with no one day gaps in the schedule right now, after we've switched over from not taking one day bookings. [00:21:16] Jason: Yeah, that's interesting. I would imagine that would be really effective. Plus if you're able to get two and three day bookings to fill it up for the most part, you probably rather than a bunch of one days, you're probably between a one day and a three day. For example, you probably have similar operational costs. [00:21:34] Alex: That's been huge. And that's sort of just came that we discovered that by accident. Also, one of my mentors had told me, like we were operating for the first year, we were operating at like a hundred percent occupancy and he's like, "your prices aren't high enough. You shouldn't be at a hundred percent occupancy." And that rings true for any type of real estate asset. It's like, if you're at a hundred percent occupancy or hundred percent booked... [00:21:53] Jason: yeah. You haven't hit the limit yet on what you could get. [00:21:55] Alex: Right.  [00:21:56] Jason: If you're at a hundred percent,  [00:21:57] Alex: If it's multi family, self storage, whatever. It's like, if you're at a hundred percent, you got to raise your prices. [00:22:01] Jason: Yeah what's the occupancy rate you go for now instead of aiming for a hundred percent.  [00:22:07] Alex: So we raised our rates by 30%, if we can stick to the 85%, which is, I mean, if you look at like companies that look at like what to price your property as like rdna.co is probably another good a good tool for the audience that sort of helps you price out what the short-term rental will rent for rdna.co they look at if a property is anything over 75% that's looked at, like you're in a higher percentile compared to anything below that. [00:22:35] This is getting on the development side when we develop our properties, we underwrite them as long-term rentals. Just in case, if the zoning ever changed in the city, that it's an extra fail safe, it's an exit. That's worst case scenarios. If we have to book it out, has a long-term rental. It can cover the debt service and the expenses. If we need it.  [00:22:54] Jason: Smart. Yeah. I know when COVID hit, the short-term rental game got pretty damaged in the short term, right? And there was a lot of people like trying to shift and shuffle and get their properties into the long-term space.  [00:23:06] Alex: What I saw too is I had talked to someone. I realized that this was different. We use the term vacation rental and short-term rental pretty interchangeably, but sometimes people look at that as differently. If you're looking at the definitions of what I'm about to explain right now, vacation rentals is what I'm in right now. Sometimes short-term rentals can be looked at like 30 day plus stays, but not over six months. During COVID a lot of people were renting out to traveling nurses and they're still doing that is they're renting out to traveling nurses. Say you're not in a market where you have all these properties. You might be close to a very large hospital. [00:23:40] If you're close to a large hospital, you can go. There are short-term rental sites that are specifically geared towards nurses. And that's a lot of hosts sort of pivoted towards that during, when they weren't allowed to do short-term rentals. But the 30 day plus stay is a gray area. Almost all cities and counties cannot regulate short-term rentals for 30 days plus which is interesting. A lot of people are making good money just on that route.  [00:24:06] Jason: Yeah. I've talked to some property managers. One property manager mentioned that they do a lot of that extended stay it's in the short term sort of space, but they get a lot of people from overseas that are coming over that need a place to stay in the interim or they're coming for some sort of work thing, you know, they might be maybe from India coming to work for a tech firm or some of these things, and they need an extended place to stay for a few months while they're doing some sort of training, you know, things like that. And so, yeah, that can be a very profitable business. They're getting a lot more money than the standard rate on a property.  [00:24:43] Alex: And you had mentioned COVID. It'll be interesting to-- I've seen different projections on like once international travel really starts to pick up again. Prices or occupancy might drop, but it's going to be interesting to see, every market's going to be different, how that plays out because a lot of people did start using. They picked up Airbnb and VRBO during COVID where it's like, instead of staying in a hotel, they decided to book through Airbnb and VRBO for the first time. So it'd be interesting to see if those people, if the occupancy and the rates sort of stay the same once, international travel picks back up. [00:25:16] Jason: Yeah, that will be interesting. Well, cool. This has been really insightful and I'm sure those that are kind of dabbling or just getting into the short-term rental game will have picked up some cool ideas and some cool tips. Anything else that you think they might be interested in or that we could point out to property managers? [00:25:34] Alex: Yeah. I talk a lot about this stuff on my YouTube channel too. Alex Builds it's a little logo of a blue tree house. If they want to sort of dive deeper into the management side of it and the tool side they can check that out. And then also my website, Sargoninvestments.com they can, if they can't find that YouTube channel, they could find it through there too. [00:25:51] Jason: Awesome. Cool, Alex, I appreciate you coming on the show and thanks for sharing so many of your knowledge and insights, and I wish you continued success in your short-term game.  [00:26:03] Alex: Perfect. Thanks, Jason. [00:26:04] Jason: You bet. All right. Cool. Check him out on YouTube. He's got a cool little YouTube channel you know, going over investments short-term rentals. He talks about some cool ideas. Lending loans like how to play the game of short-term rentals. So check him out on YouTube. And for those that are interested in growing their property management business, be sure to check us out at doorgrow.com we're here to support you and your growth. We're especially really good at helping you not just add a bunch of doors without spending a bunch of money on marketing. [00:26:34] And we are helping. We have short-term rental clients, you know, in our program. Long-term rental clients are our most common target audience that we're helping build out their portfolio. But we also are helping on the operational side to be able to streamline the business and to become the entrepreneur that can run and have a team that makes your life easier so that you have more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, which means you're making a difference and doing things you really feel good about, and more support. And so if you feel like you're kind of scarce on those things, I call those the four reasons and you're really frustrated and you're banging your head against the wall with your team, then reach out. We can support you and help you in that. [00:27:17] You might be a really good candidate for our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind which is really awesome. So anyway, check this out. And for those that are listening to this on iTunes or on YouTube, be sure to also join our free Facebook community, which you can get to by going to doorgrowclub.com and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:27:42] 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!  [00:28:09] 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. [00:28:30] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.