Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

As a property management business owner, how many leads do you throw away? These are leads that are outside of your service area or properties that are short-term rentals when you only manage long-term rentals. Every property manager turns away potential clients and leads. Imagine if you could work with the local property managers in or outside of your area and feed each other business. Property management growth expert Jason Hull gets into strategies for connecting with other property managers and creating a referral system that is a win-win for both parties involved. You’ll Learn… [01:09] Referral Partnerships Between Property Managers [02:04] Creating Strategic, Win-Win Relationships [04:21] Most Property Management Companies Suck [6:24] A Tip from One of Our DoorGrow Mastermind Clients [7:39] Assume the Close!  [8:35] Get FREE access to the Seven Frameworks Training Tweetables “Just one strategic relationship in a neighboring city could be feeding you some doors every single month, and you could be feeding them some doors, every single month.” “I really do believe a rising tide raises all ships and it will allow you to be more connected, more aware.” “Plant those seeds that will maybe come to fruition that will lead maybe to acquisition, maybe lead to referrals, but create some relationships and get connected with other property managers in your market.” “There are a lot of people that property management is a side hustle for them. It's not their bread and butter. It's not their mainstay. It's not what they really want to be doing with their life.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: Just one strategic relationship in a neighboring city could be feeding you some doors every single month, and you could be feeding them some doors, every single month.    [00:00:08] 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 life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.   [00:00:29] 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.   [00:00:47] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their 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.    [00:01:09] All right. So today we're going to be talking a little bit about local referral property management partners. So, what do I mean by that? So one of the things that I've noticed in property management is there is some very low hanging fruit and a lot of property managers are overly competitive and they look at all the other property managers in their local market as these competitors that they need to somehow beat or avoid.   [00:01:35] And a lot of property managers have this general lack of collaboration. And I really believe that the industry needs collaboration over competition. I really believe in this principle of collaboration over competition. So in taking a look at this one thing that I would recommend that you do is you start getting familiar with all the other property managers in your local market, especially those that you're not directly competing with that are right outside of your local market.   [00:02:04] Now, connect with these property managers and get familiar with them because. You know how often you're getting phone calls from people with properties that you just cannot manage. They might be too far outside of your service or coverage area. They might be different types of niches of property management that you do not service like commercial or associations or storage units or whatever, right.   [00:02:27] There may be other companies in your local market or just outside of your local market that you might be able to refer business out to, and you know how often you get contacted for things that you can't handle. So what do you do with that? You just tell them no, and you basically, essentially take that potential lead and you throw it in the garbage can, right?   [00:02:45] There's a lot that tends to go into these garbage cans in business. And so those things that are in the garbage can could be useful to other people. Well, think about all these other people, you could be connected to that they have their own garbage can full of stuff that they could have handed to you.   [00:03:02] Just one strategic relationship in a neighboring city could be feeding you some doors every single month, and you could be feeding them some doors, every single month.    [00:03:11] "Hey, do you manage in this area?"    [00:03:12] "Actually, no, but I know this gal, Susie, who's really great at that. She's just outside of our market and covers that area." Right?   [00:03:20] So you can then be referring business back and forth. This is obvious. It's low hanging fruit, but there's so many property managers, especially newer property managers that do not do this. So think about how often you're receiving stuff that you can't use or do anything with, you could give to other people.   [00:03:37] Well, other people have that, that they could give to you. So get connected to these other property managers. Call them up and start reaching out and creating these relationships. So you can join the local NARPM chapters. You can start a local group of property managers, but I really do believe a rising tide raises all ships and it will allow you to be more connected, more aware.   [00:04:00] And even if you view your competition as an enemy, for some reason, you know, the old adage, which is. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. So stay close to them and be aware of what they're doing anyway if you're that type of person, that's that competitive. So get connected to them because, you know, having these local referral partners, some of my clients are getting doors, you know, on a monthly basis, just from people that they're connected to and sending it. Now, here's where this gets even more awesome.    [00:04:30] So if you're connected with these other people that are doing property management, you're going to identify some people that do property management that don't like it. I know that's crazy. And I know you're really surprised at hearing that there might be people out there that don't enjoy property management.    [00:04:46] But There are. There are some people that do not enjoy property management. Most property managers out there suck. This is the reality. Most property management businesses suck. And that means most of the business owners probably are not happy. And most of the property management businesses aren't doing a great job.   [00:05:04] There are a lot of people that property management is a side hustle for them. It's not their bread and butter. It's not their mainstay. It's not what they really want to be doing with their life. They would rather be doing more real estate deals, or they would rather be doing something else, but they feel like they need to do it in order just to keep their existing clients happy or to maintain something or whatever.   [00:05:26] You can create a win-win with these people. And you can call up these companies or these people that are doing property management, and you can suggest if you create a relationship with them, you can plant that seed, thought that, "Hey, we would be willing to acquire or offer you X number of dollars per unit, and we would take over these portfolio, we would do a really great job doing it. And you won't have to deal with this anymore."   [00:05:48] And ask them, "do you love this? Or would you rather do more real estate?"    [00:05:52] And if they're honest with you, they would probably say, "I would love to just really do more real estate deals if I didn't have to do this, but I don't want to lose the real estate deals."   [00:05:58] "What if you could keep the real estate deals, keep the clients, but give up the property management, not have to do that. And any time you gave us property management we'd give you some sort of referral kickback or something, and I could help you turn them into maybe even more real estate deals?"   [00:06:12] So This is stuff that we talk about a bit more in our Referral Secrets training, but I wanted to share this idea with everybody: connect with other property managers. Plant those seeds that will maybe come to fruition that will lead maybe to acquisition, maybe lead to referrals, but create some relationships and get connected with other property managers in your market.   [00:06:34] So I don't know if there's a whole lot more I need to say about that. I think this is a pretty simple idea, pretty simple concept, but get connected with other property managers. If you want to be connected with some of the best property managers that are crushing it all over the U.S. we have over 80 businesses that are in our mastermind that are crushing it, sharing wins, getting on our calls, doing great stuff, adding lots of doors, they're sharing all kinds of tips.   [00:07:01] Just to give an example, what's a good tip that somebody shared today? One of the tips that was shared on the call today is they would call up other potential referral partners, and they would just say, "Hey, we just want to be an asset on your team for you to refer out to people. You know, you have a team of vendors that you probably refer out to people. We want to be on that team."   [00:07:23] I thought that was a pretty smart little idea. I shared a tip one of my clients on cold calls was asking if people would be interested in getting on a call with him so he could explain his program or his product or service or whatever. And I shared the tip of, don't ask for the call.   [00:07:39] Don't ask if they'd be interested. Assume they'd be interested. Sell them on being interested, and then assume that they're going to want to be on a call with you and then just give them times. So for example, instead of saying, "Hey, would you be interested in getting on a call where we can talk about..." like sounds really not confident, right?   [00:07:56] Saying, "Hey, I've got this really cool thing. I love to set up a time with you. When would be a good time? How's Thursday at two? Would that work for you? Right. Just assume they would want to and give them a time. So then they can say, "Yeah, that would work" or "No, that doesn't work for me."   [00:08:12] "Cool. How about this time?"    [00:08:13] That's going to be far more effective in closing people on things. Right? So anyway, there's lots of really cool tips. If you're interested in being part of something like this, join the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. Reach out to us at DoorGrow.Com.    [00:08:27] We do not let everybody into this program. We have some qualifications. We have our three commitments that are required in order to be part of this program.    [00:08:35] If you would like to get free access to Seven Frameworks training in which I share seven frameworks, plus some additional ones that can be game changers for how to think about your business and how to become a better entrepreneur, and I share my top three strategies on how to grow a property management business and an overview of our program. This is basically our big sales pitch. If you want access to the Seven Frameworks training, reach out to us, we'd be happy to give you access to this for free, explain everything transparently... pricing for the program, everything's in that.   [00:09:06] And then you can apply and get on a call with our team. So just reach out to us at DoorGrow. We'd be happy to help you do that. You can find us at doorgrow.com, and that's all I have to share for today. So I hope that's helpful. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.   [00:09:24] 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! 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.   [00:10:12] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

As a property management entrepreneur, your cell phone number is sacred information. Not everyone should have access to it. How can you implement and utilize phone systems in your business? Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the importance of protecting your personal cell phone number and using systems like Talkroute to make and receive business calls instead. You'll Learn... [01:16] The Challenge of Dealing with Phones in the Business [04:54] The Frustrating Issue with Many Phone Systems: Latency [09:02] Why we Like to Use Talkroute here at DoorGrow [10:59] Why Should You Protect Your Cell Phone Number? [15:07] Comparing Other Examples of Phone Systems You Can Utilize Tweetables “One of the first things property managers learn really quick in starting their businesses: you don't want everybody to have your cell phone number..” “As a business owner, in order to leverage a team and have this dream of only having the four reasons, you need to have leverage.” “One of the ways to have leverage is you can't be reachable by everybody by phone immediately, you need to have protection and support.” “I recommend that you utilize those tools, protect and insulate yourself and get a really good phone system.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: So one of the first things property managers learn really quick in starting their businesses: you don't want everybody to have your cell phone number. So if every tenant and every owner has your cell phone number, your business-- you're going to be the biggest bottleneck in your business, and it's going to be a nightmare. [00:00:13] 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're open to doing things a bit differently-- then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.  [00:00:31] 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 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.  [00:01:16] Okay. So. This question came up on my Wednesday coaching call today with the group, with the mastermind group. And, um, it was right at the end, but this is such a common question. And this isn't even a growth-related question. Our Wednesday call's a growth call. We usually focus on adding doors. [00:01:34] We had some great wins and things shared, but at the end, one of our clients is like, “Hey, I got a question. I don't know if I should wait until Friday to ask this during your Scale call, where it's operations, even though I'm focused on growth, I've got a problem that I need to deal with. And I said, “what is it about?” [00:01:50] And it was about phones. So we're going to talk about phones today because this comes up-- I'm just surprised how often this comes up and it comes up. It's a common challenge is how do you deal with phones? Why phones are expensive. How do we do phones with our team? What phone system should we use? So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I've used in the past, what we use currently– what I recommend to property managers that could make sense. [00:02:17] So let's talk about phones. Okay. So the challenge is most people nowadays are using-- they don't have just a standard phone. They have a phone system, they have a cell phone and they might have some standard phones in their office, like normal office phone system. but all of these things can get really expensive. [00:02:39] So we used at DoorGrow-- OpenPotion-- we used RingCentral for a while. So we had this voiceover IP phone system, the challenge with systems like most phone systems nowadays, even if their voiceover IP used to be, Hey, get a voiceover IP and it could be super cheap. Right? But it's not nowadays. [00:03:01] Nowadays, it's like, you have to have a device and they sell you these devices. So you got to buy a phone, you have to have multiple phones for each desk and each person and each line. And each person usually is like $30 or sometimes $40 a seat. And so if you have a team, like, of five, you could be shelling out like $40 a person for each line then, you know, that adds up. [00:03:26] So let's say you've got a team of five-- $40. You spend 200 bucks just on your phone system. Well, in our business, we were spending. Anywhere from two to $300 a month, something like this a month on phones. And it was really costly. And we were using RingCentral, which is a popular one. It works really well. [00:03:45] It gives you tons of features, which is really nice, but we didn't-- we didn't need-- we had so many team members that needed to make phone calls, but not-- they weren't on the phone like 24 hours a day. They didn't need unlimited calling. They were making calls all the time. And what was really ridiculous is we all had cell phones. [00:04:02] We had unlimited calling on our cell phones. We all have plans where we had unlimited cell phone plans. So it's just-- it felt really weird that we have unlimited cell phones that we already have, but we just didn't want everybody to have our cell phone numbers. Cause that would have been a mess, right? [00:04:17] Having a business where everybody has their cell phone number. So one of the first things property managers learn really quick in starting their businesses: you don't want everybody to have your cell phone number. So if every tenant and every owner has your cell phone number, your business-- you're going to be the biggest bottleneck in your business, and it's going to be a nightmare. [00:04:33] So you need to get rid of that phone number, right? You need some sort of solution. So you could port that number into a phone system like RingCentral. And then if anybody calls that number, they're going into your phone system and then you can leverage your team and whatnot, right. That's one option, but here's what we switched to. [00:04:54] So we were using RingCentral and we switched to a system called TalkRoute, which you can get to by going to TalkRoute R-O-U-T-E .com. The reason I like TalkRoute is: I tested a lot of different phone systems. One of the biggest challenges with modern phone systems or voice over IP or VoIP or digitally based phone systems is latency. [00:05:18] Latency means like a lag, delay. If you've ever been on a bad phone system or bad VoIP system and experienced delay, it feels like you say, “hi,” and then two seconds later, they hear it. And so then what ends up happening because of that latency, that lag of even a second, it causes you both to speak over each other. [00:05:39] So let's say we're having a conversation. Somebody who's like, “Hey, how's it going?”And they're like, then you, if you don't hear them respond for like two seconds or a second, you're like, that's uncomfortable. It's weird. That awkwardness that's because of there's lag, there's latency, and then they're going to start talking and you might not realize they start talking. [00:05:57] So you start talking and then you're going to end up talking over each other all the time. You'll think there's a gap and you'll start talking, but they won't realize that you didn't say anything. And so they'll continue talking and then you're talking over them and then you end up stepping on each other's toes, and it's a really awkward way to have a conversation. [00:06:13] And so what I did when I was looking at phone systems is in testing them, I would do a trial, do a demo, do a test, and I would set up the phone system. So I could call my cell phone with that system or call the system with my cell phone and, and talk. And I would say,”hi,” and I listened to other one, I say, “hi” and listen to the other one. [00:06:32] And I wanted to see how quick or how long it took for me to hear what I just said. How quick was it? If it's like:”Hi.” “Hi.” “Hey.” You know, that's pretty fast. That's low latency. You can have a conversation, and it's routing through the magical internet or wires or whatever, and they're getting it quick enough that you can have a conversation and it's not going to cause that delay of stepping on each other's toes. [00:06:57] Now, very few phone systems passed what I call that delay or lag test. So that's the first thing I would recommend when you're looking at a phone system is do a test and see what the lag is. See what the delay time is. Now, sometimes their servers and your internet are gonna play a factor to this. So sometimes some phone systems were better just simply because you have better internet, you have a better router, some of these ping times or latencies or lags or whatever it could be caused simply because you have a crappy device running your internet in your office or at your home. [00:07:34] And so you need to have a really good device that can handle a lot of connections and a really good internet connection. So sometimes it's just about getting a better router and not just using your internet modem, that's like providing the service. A lot of times, internet providers nowadays will give you a modem that has a router built into it, and it's doing everything. [00:07:54] It's your wifi, it's a router. And it's your modem connecting you to the service for internet. And usually it's crappy. It's like, they're doing the cheapest thing. They can get all put together and it's a Jack of all trades and a master of none.  [00:08:11] And usually most homes nowadays, or offices have multiple Apple watches and iPhones and iPads and phones and, like, cameras and all sorts of things utilizing this network with the internet of things everything's connected and it's just a lot, my house has a ton of stuff. Even light bulbs are hooked on the wifi. So I can talk to my phone and tell things to turn on and off. Right. So. There's so many devices connected, usually routers, struggle to handle all the device connections and to deal with that. [00:08:46] So it's usually just the chipset on the router is not strong enough to handle all of these devices talking at the same time and communicating, even if they're not using very much internet bandwidth. And sometimes that's a bottleneck. So first make sure you have a really good internet connection.  [00:09:02] Now, TalkRoute. Why I liked TalkRoute-- TalkRoute is a phone system, you pay one flat fee for their entire service. And then instead of them giving you a bunch of devices, they give you an app that you can install on your phone and you can make calls through your cell phone using your cell phone minutes.  [00:09:24] So if your outbound calls, cell phone calls are good and you like how they sound and they work fine, which everybody's cell phone calls generally work really well, those are great networks. That's what you're going to be using. You're just going to be making a cell phone call and there's no latency at all. Inbound calls will route through the TalkRoute system then to your cell phone, and you can choose to accept that call... if you have them route to you, right? So you can have an auto attendant. You can have unlimited extensions, you can assign extensions to every cell phone in your office, or every person in your office.  [00:09:55] Some real estate offices, for example, will use TalkRoute. And I think they give you unlimited extensions, something like this. So you can assign an extension for every available property with, and put a little Voicemail voice message on there saying, Hey, this property is really great. You should walk around in it, blah, blah, blah. Right? So you can put record messages and then you can put these extension numbers on every single property. You can just put a number up on the yard sign or on the brochure or whatever, and people will call this number, dial this extension to hear a message about this property. [00:10:28] So you can build it out really awesome. You can port your numbers in, so if you have a cell phone that too many people have port that number in once it's ported and that number is in that system, now nobody can reach you. They can reach the system, go get yourself a better cell phone number that nobody knows, and only, only give it out to sacred, well, trusted people. Treat this number like it's sacred. Only give it out to family, maybe really good friends. Nobody else. You need to protect and insulate yourself and protect yourself from giving out your phone number to everybody.  [00:10:59] As a business owner, in order to leverage a team, and have a team, and to offload and have this dream of only having the four reasons as I've talked about on a previous episode of fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support, where you get to do the things you want to enjoy and not do everything in the business you need to have leverage. And one of the ways to have leverage is you can't be reachable by everybody by phone immediately, you need to have protection and support. [00:11:28] You need to protect yourself. How do you protect yourself? when it comes to phone calls, you have to set up barriers so that people can't just reach you directly. It's cool. They should be able to reach somebody directly. That's fine. Or at very least an auto attendant and it can route to people. They should not immediately all be able-- nobody should be able to just reach you directly if you want this business to scale and business to grow. [00:11:52] So, TalkRoute has an app on your phone. You can choose a number to dial it also can-- you can get text messages at this number. You can choose which of the phone numbers you have linked to TalkRoute you want to show up on the caller ID for your outbound calling, and that's the only number they're gonna see. You initiate a phone call, it calls in via your cell phone to TalkRoute and then dials that number, initiates the call. TalkRoute knows that it's you, that you're going to be calling that number, so it just makes it all happen magically and they don't see your cell phone number, your personal cell phone number. They only see on their caller ID that they're getting a call from XYZ property management or whatever the caller ID thing that you have set up for that number. They just see that number. [00:12:35] Your main business number, or you could even assign a phone number to each of your team members, or just assign an extension and have that outbound number always be the same number. And they call in and they can hear an auto-attendant, ”push 'one' for sales, 'two' for support,” et cetera. Right. So I recommend you check out TalkRoute. [00:12:52] When I did testing, we've had no problems with latency. All of my team used that for phone calls, except for our sales side of the business and myself. We use our sales CRM, which has calling built into it. I use a CRM called Close, which is really expensive on a per seat basis. But for most of my team, we use TalkRoute and that's how we can get business and send business text messages. We can do phone calls through that. We have extensions. We have auto attendants. We have multiple 800 numbers for different businesses.  [00:13:28] So, all of that. Feeds into one system and it's very easy to manage through TalkRoute's web app. You just go to talkroute.com, I log in and then I can just customize everything. I can make sure everybody has their voicemails and voice messages recorded. And I have the tree structure mapped out and it's easy to record. It's really well thought out and it works really well, and the audio quality is fantastic. So highly recommend that you get TalkRoute.  [00:13:57] So TalkRoute... I think we spend-- I have a lot of phone numbers and a lot of things going on on that now for all the stuff that we have going on underneath all my OpenPotion companies and including DoorGrow-- I think our bill is like still under a hundred bucks a month. Like it's a fraction. And I think initially we were spending like maybe 70, 80 bucks, like it was really cheap. So we were saving you know, probably two, maybe even 300 bucks. [00:14:26] I don't know. We're saving hundreds of dollars over our previous phone set up because we had a large team and everybody had to have extensions and they were charging us 30 or 40 bucks per person. And now it's a fraction of the cost. So, and most of you operate and live off your cell phones. Anyway, you just want to protect that cell phone number, and then you can make those outbound calls, but not give out your cell phone number. And you can still receive and send text messages through the TalkRoute app, if necessary. Some of you have sales CRMs that will shield and mask your phone numbers as well, maybe like lead simple. So I recommend that you utilize those tools, protect and insulate yourself and get a really good phone system. [00:15:07] Now, there are other phones, voice-over IP systems out there. Some require more work on your end. Some are going to give you a lot more hand-holding and have really good reviews for taking care of people. There's Nextiva, which I always found had really aggressive sales tactics, but they had really high ratings. [00:15:27] There's, um, Jive, which has really great ratings for a long time. And maybe still is number one because their customer service level is top-notch. It would really hold your hand. I didn't find they had really aggressive, annoying salespeople. And so I really liked them and they would walk people through it. [00:15:45] And then there's RingCentral, which gives you a lot of features and benefits. they're, they're affordable, but still it's a lot more expensive than something like TalkRoute. And so TalkRoute is the winner for us because we're a virtual company. And I think any companies where you have a lot of team members on the go, everybody has cell phones, they're on the move. TalkRoute would be a great system for most property management businesses. So that is my recommendation. So nobody has to ask me about phone systems anymore. I can say, watch my episode on phone systems and protecting your cell phone number as a property manager. That is this episode.  [00:16:21] So, anyway, if you're struggling to grow your business, you are wanting to implement best practices. [00:16:27] You're wanting to set up a business that's scalable. You want to be adding doors quickly and easily. Instead of losing doors right now, due to the sell-off that's happening, our clients are adding doors. Clients are showing up on Wednesday calls and they’re– our growth call and they're celebrating, sharing their wins. [00:16:43] And a lot of them are only investing a part-time level of hours a week towards growth. That's it, like, my bare minimum requirement if you want to join this program is you have to be willing to block out at least 10 hours to grow your business. That's basically two hours a day. It'll take you less time doing the strategies I give you than it would take to follow up if I gave you a bunch of leads. If I gave you a bunch of leads, that would be terrible because it takes a lot of time. These are cold. You'd have to nurture them and you'll spend far more than just 10 hours a week. If I even gave you 10 leads, a follow-up in time to nurture and you probably only get one deal a week. [00:17:21] My clients are adding multiple doors very quickly. And the bare minimum that I tell them is just do two hours a day. It's 10 hours a week using the strategies that give you to grow. And it's really effective. yeah. So anyway, reach out. If you're interested in growing and scaling your business, if you're a larger company, I love working with those. [00:17:42] If you are in the two to 400 door range, what I call the “second sand trap.” You're trapped. You're stuck. You feel like you're the biggest bottleneck in the business. You wish just everybody would just be smart enough to do everything on your team and you're frustrated. You are the problem. I know that's the sad news. [00:17:58] So let me help you figure out how you can become the entrepreneur that has the business of your dreams and the team of your dreams so that you can trust them. You probably have a cultural mismatch. You probably have, maybe people that know how to do a job and follow a task, but you don't trust them. You don't trust them because you don't have the right cultural foundation in your business. You don't have believers. You don't have people that you can trust to do things the way that you would do them, which is why you haven't given them more or handed things off to them or relegated or delegated or given up your decision-making in certain areas of the business. And you're holding onto it too tightly. [00:18:33] I will teach you how you can offload those pieces, let go of those things and trust people to run your business-- pieces of your business for you, especially the areas that they would be better at than you. Because you don't really enjoy those pieces. And then we can get you closer and closer in alignment towards those four reasons so you really love your business. So  [00:18:51] if you're dealing with that, we can also help you with that in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. And so reach out, chat with us. I'd love to help you grow your business. And we're making some big changes right now. DoorGrow is just really exciting and we're going to be, we're improving our programs that we're constantly improving, but we're making some big changes to them. [00:19:13] And clients are getting even faster momentum. And if you'd love to be part of that, you want to have a coach in your corner, you want to feel like you're not all on your own, you want to feel like it's not just you against the world and trying to get your business going, and you feel stuck. If you want some support, reach out, we'd be happy to help you. This is what we do. We love helping our clients succeed and win here at DoorGrow. So reach out and you can find us at doorgrow.com or reach out to us on any social media. Just search for DoorGrow. You'll find us. Anyway, that's it for today. So make sure you get a really good phone system in place to insulate and protect yourself and present a very presentable professional image. [00:19:53] And until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. [00:19:57] 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! 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 at 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.

Take a look at your portfolio, investors, who you're targeting, and methods used to find out how they line up with the 4 Ds to revenue in property management—deals, doors, duration, and dollars. The 4 Ds is a framework/concept that helps you figure out how to grow your business and improve it. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the 4 doors (or numbers) that equal the gross revenue of your company when multiplied by each other. You’ll Learn... [02:19] Why the 4 Ds are so important in your property management business.  [02:43] 4 Ds to Revenue: What are they? [02:47] Deals: How many deals are you getting on? [03:15] Doors per deal: How many investors are you getting that have 2 or more doors? [04:20] Duration: How long can you keep them as a client? Connects to lifetime value. [05:45] Dollars: Money is needed to generate revenue. Revamp pricing structure/model. [08:00] Identify Ideal Prospects: What would their situation look like regarding the 4 Ds? Tweetables “We need some money in this equation. Otherwise, it's not going to equal revenue.” “You want to make sure you're getting paid really well.” “Price sensitivity is created artificially by my clients. They don't realize they're creating it and how.” “Colder leads are going to have a much higher price sensitivity than warmer leads.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, help others impact lives, and you are 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. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and 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. I had a hard time coming up with what to talk about today. We just had Christmas and New Year's is coming up. We're sort of in this time period where I think for a lot of business owners, we tend to start focusing on our business because we've got a little bit of downtime, a little bit of free time, and some quiet moments maybe. Then we're also spending a lot of time focused on family and spending time with family. One of the things I wanted to talk about today is what I call the Four Ds to Revenue in Property Management. I also sometimes call this the Four Doors to Revenue and sometimes visually, we'll showcase four doors when I'm explaining this, or coaching clients on this, or teaching this. The Four Ds to Revenue is really four numbers that when multiplied by each other, equal the gross revenue of your company. Just to drive this home with multiplication, each number is so important that if any one of these four numbers—metrics-wise—in your business is zero, you make $0. That's how important they are. If you move any one of these numbers, if they're a one, for example, and you move it to a two and you double it, you double your revenue. That's how important multiplication can be in generating revenue in your business. Let's go through these Four Ds to Revenue. The first D is Deals. In looking at the revenue of your company and trying to grow your business, you want to get on clients that are bringing to the table multiple deals or deals on the regular, and you need to calculate how many deals we're getting on roughly right now. That would be some sort of number. You're getting on a certain number of deals. The next number, the next D would be Doors per deal. The reason I separate this is a lot of clients, especially in single-family residential property management, equate these things to the same thing. They're like I get on a deal, it's a door. Now that second D, to separate that out is important. That second deal of doors means doors per deal. If you move the needle on this just from like a one to a two, you double your revenue. For example, this could mean that you're getting on more investors that have two or more doors on average. Maybe your average moves from a one to a two, or maybe to a four. That can be a significant multiplier in your business. If you're getting on clients that are bringing on lots of deals or doing lots of real estate deals, they have multiple doors, and maybe each of their doors or each of their deals has multiple doors, then these numbers tend to add up quickly. The third D is Duration. This is how long can you keep them as a client. This connects heavily to lifetime value. There is a 10 times difference, for example, between an accidental investor that's only going to stick with you for a year and a 10-year buy and hold. There's a 10 times difference. If somebody is going to keep their deals and the rental properties in place for a decade, that's massive. Where I see a lot of property managers really struggling in terms of growth is that they have so much attrition that they have to replace almost every door that they get on every year, or at least half. If half of your portfolio are accidental investors, for example, or one-year shorter term that they're not going to stick with you, then you're going to have trouble growing your business because you have to replace all of those doors every year. I've seen clients have is a majority of their portfolio when they came to us, were these accidental investors that couldn't just sell the property and they decided to rent it out just for a year until they could get it sold. Or they might have half their portfolio as this, but even still, usually the number of doors they're adding every year equates the number of doors they're losing every year and, so they end up not growing. The last D is Dollars. We need some money in this equation, otherwise, it's not going to equal revenue. The last D is dollars and what's important to note there is you want to make sure you're getting paid really well. One of the things I do with every client that comes through our program at some point or another, usually is to revamp their entire pricing structure and their pricing model. Most property managers only have one major fee that they charge, it's one sort of percentage, something typically like 10% or something like that in lower-end markets. In higher-end markets, it might be maybe 6%, or something along these lines, 7%, 8%, whatever. Or they'll have a flat fee like $99 or $79 in really low rent areas where it's really tight. They'll just have one major fee though. They might also have a lease-up fee for when getting the property rented out. That's pretty typical as well, but that's about it. If that is the case for your business and you only have one option that clients can choose from when signing up, then you're leaving a lot of money on the table. There are probably a lot of other leaks in relation to pricing as well and then there are a lot of psychological hacks to decrease price sensitivity. If you've ever been frustrated and dealt with a potential prospect that came to you and pushed back on the price—I'm sure this has happened to you—or they ask for a discount, a lot of times that price sensitivity is created artificially by my clients. They don't realize they're creating it and how. A lot of times it's created artificially by their acquisition source, so how they're getting these leads. Colder leads are going to have a much higher price sensitivity than warmer leads. If you want to reduce the number of people that are asking for discounts, or eliminate your temptation to fold on your pricing, cave on your pricing, and give in order to get business, my clients don't have to do that. You need to be more effective with your pricing. Dollars is really significant as well. If we take all four of these things together—this is a secret, this is one of the secrets in property management that I teach—if you work this backward, this will help you identify your ideal prospects. It takes just as much work to get on crappy clients, maybe more, than it does to get on good clients. If you want to sit down and figure out what's my ideal client, look at these Four Ds. What would their situation look like in relation to these? Well, ideal client, right? If they're helping you maximize deals, that means they're probably bringing multiple deals to the table, they're doing real estate deals on the regular, they are an investor, they want to do more deals in the future. Doors, they probably have multiple doors, maybe each deal they do has multiple doors, multiple doors per deal. The doors metric is high. Duration. They are in it for the long game. They want to invest. They want to grow a portfolio, so their duration is lengthy or high. That's a high metric. Then dollars. That means they're willing to spend money with you to make sure things are taken care of. They're not the cheapos that exist out there. They're not so price-sensitive. They want a better experience and maybe they're more of a premium type of buyer. These would be your ideal prospects. This is one of the tools I go over with clients to help them recognize who are your ideal customers. What would they look like? Then we can work backward and figure out how do we connect with these people? What resources do they currently have? Who would be good referral partners that connect us to these people? That might already get some wheels turning. Take a look at your portfolio, take a look at your investors, and take a look at who you're targeting and the methods you're using to target new clientele and get new business on, and see how it lines up with the Four Ds to Revenue—deals, doors, duration, and dollars. These are the four doors that you need to open to make the magic happen in order to grow your business and identify and attract really great clientele. If you have any questions about this, feel free to comment or hit us up inside our Facebook group at doorgrowclub.com or reach out to us by going to doorgrow.com. We'd be happy to help you grow your business and maybe sit down with your team, as you're planning out things here at the end of the year. It's almost New Year’s here as I'm recording this. I just want to let everybody know I really am grateful for our clients and grateful this holiday season for those that spend their money with us, that have allowed us to help them increase the amount of money that they're making. It's really exciting for me to show up each week on the group coaching calls that we do as a mastermind group and see clients winning and sharing their success, talking about the doors they're adding, talking about how they're closing more deals at a higher price point, talk about how they're no longer offering discounts and how they're establishing themselves as an authority and as an expert and that these clients are willing to spend and pay more money. I love this. This is so rewarding for me. I really enjoy getting into what I do and I'm really honored and grateful that I get to do this. Those of my clients who are listening, I really appreciate you and I'm grateful for you. Anyway, for everybody else, I appreciate you listening to this show as well and I hope that the Four Ds to Revenue is a helpful framework or concept to help you figure out how to grow your business and improve it. And that's it for today. Happy New Year, everybody. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everybody.

What can property managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners say or do when leaving a voicemail to ultimately get somebody to return their call?  Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about doing and saying less to add more doors. Property managers need to work at finding opportunities and setting effective boundaries to get referrals and grow results. You’ll Learn... [01:46] Onboarding: Revamping roadmap help clients add more doors. [02:06] No Distractions: Stay focused and do the most important actions to add doors. [02:41] Check-ins: Clients are still getting amazing results by setting more boundaries. [03:03] Deciding Factor: Outbound referral partner program is a competitive advantage. [05:29] Promotions/Opportunities: Follow criteria, attend trainings, show up, rebrand. [06:11] Nextdoor: Pay attention to hub as a review channel and lead generation source. [07:08] Sales Assistant/BDM Role: Hire person who will speed up the amount of deals. [09:13] Existing Customers: Now—in real time—is the right time to target your clientele. [09:35] Vanity Metrics: Make numbers as big as possible to highlight benefits/results. [11:21] Voicemail: How to leave ultimate message to get somebody to return your call. [13:09] Most Effective Messages: Leave only name/number and be emotionally honest. Tweetables “Doing less is more.” “There is a link that you can publicly access through the web, where somebody can go to leave your review on Nextdoor, then yes, we can put that link into GatherKudos.” “Anything that's been sitting on your to do list for too long is an indicator that you're not the person that should be doing that thing.” “Sometimes, a little bit of mystery is more enticing and more attractive.” Resources Sign up for Talkroute DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive GatherKudos Nextdoor Transcript 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, you are 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, the daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their 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. I was on my coaching call today. It was a great call. I love these calls. It ran longer than the normal call because I give a little bit of leeway of about a half hour after our coaching group call to just make sure that I'm taking care of clients, anybody else that wants to check in, anyone that's stuck or has questions as we go through. We have a pretty good group on our Wednesday call. I love hearing clients that are doing the work, doing stuff. We're starting to revamp our onboarding. We just revamped our Grow program, our roadmap for how we help clients add more doors to make it even more effective. One of the things I'm noticing from that is doing less is more. We're actually taking things out of that program so that property managers will stay more focused. These entrepreneurs will stay more focused on doing the most important actions that they need to do in order to add doors. Removing any rabbit holes or tangents out of the program that might distract them or get them focused on the wrong things, which is very tempting for business owners. We've made it even more effective and I'm really excited about it. I went over the changes with everybody. That being said, clients—even with the old roadmap—are still getting amazing results, and we had some great check-ins today. Clients that are setting more effective boundaries, with potential clients being willing to walk away, they're actually attracting more business because of that. Clients that are focusing on our referral programs so they're creating more referrals, and how other real estate agents that also did property management, were not able to get the deals. One of our clients said that they were one of four or five companies that a potential client was vetting. He told this client like, hey, basically set some boundaries and told them, I'm not going to do things your way and if you're interested in doing things our way, then we're here for you and you can work with us. Surprisingly, they chose him and I want to ask, what was then the deciding factor why they chose you out of four or five different companies? He said the one big competitive advantage that he had is that he had this outbound referral partner program with the agent, and this person's agent was kind of the deciding factor. People trust the real estate agent. These investors trust the real estate agent. They're not going to want to connect to you or talk well or make a relationship happen between themselves, their client, and a property manager that also does real estate because it doesn't feel safe. My client also does real estate, but we've recently rebranded his company as a property management company, new logo, new website. This new perception allows people like this real estate agent that wants to protect her relationship with a client allowed her to feel safe, and allowed him to be the one that the client and the real estate agent both felt safe with, and he was selected. So because of that and because of setting boundaries. Another cool thing is this client got an opportunity. Because he is no longer branded as a real estate company, which is one of the key things we do with a lot of clients is help rebrand and get them so they don't look like a real estate company so they can get more referrals, he with his new brand and his new website, a friend of his who runs the entire real estate association in the greater metro area that he covers, said that you are going to be our preferred partner for his business. He's going to be their preferred partner. He's going to announce this at this black tie event at a real estate event. He's going to promote him, allow him to have a table there, and he's going to push this property management company of my clients as they go to that everybody, every real estate broker agent should be using for referring out to for property management. That is a massive opportunity and that opportunity wouldn't have been available unless he had built out a really effective partner program based on the criteria that I teach in our referral secrets training, and been showing up to the calls, and gone through our C program process of rebranding. Awesome, awesome wins for that client. John, you know who you are, when you listen to this, kudos to you and all that you've done. I appreciate you. That's super awesome. Another thing that came up during today's coaching call, there were other clients sharing wins, which was awesome, but one little tidbit that was really interesting is one of our clients pointed out that he's getting some decent results from next door. I wanted to point this out to listeners of podcasts. You may want to start paying attention to next door as a review channel and as a lead generation source. He just goes on next door monitors and every now and then, he sees people on next door, the social network, posting in the neighborhoods and communities that he's active on saying, does anybody know of a property manager? Does anybody have a property manager? He then is responsive to those in that's getting him some business. We then talked about adding next door to his review funnel, which is gatherkudos.com, which is a service we provide, and whether or not that was possible. Basically, the answer was if there is a link that you can publicly access through the web, where somebody can go to leave your review next door, then yes, we can put that link into GatherKudos. Another client just hired somebody to step into almost a BDM role, but first, initially, as a sales assistant. This gal was very outgoing, showed up on the call, and charismatic. My client that I'm working with is not that personality type, so this is going to be a really awesome game for her. I told them to just get a sales assistant in place. This is going to speed up the amount of deals and opportunities. Maybe eventually, this client will graduate this new sales assistant to a full-fledged BDM role, which would be fantastic. I think they would be able to add a lot more doors because the client I'm working with is more of an operations and operator personality–type, more of an introvert. The comfort level of this team member that she brought on, came on the call and she was just introducing herself, and chatting, and most people are quiet and waiting until it's their turn. She was really comfortable checking in and communicating, and she'll be great in this sales assistant/BDM role, which is exciting. It goes back to what I've said several times in the past. If you're not the person that should be doing or anything that's been sitting on your to-do list for too long, is an indicator that you're not the person that should be doing that thing. If you're avoiding it, there's too much friction. If you have so many questions about it and you're not just taking action on something, you might not be the person that should do it. A lot of business owners think I have to do this, I've got to learn this. I've got to figure out how to do this, even though it's really uncomfortable. As a business owner, you don't really have to be the one that does the things you really don't enjoy doing, at least not in the long run. So those were some wins. The other cool thing we talked about on today's call was about targeting your existing clients. It's the holiday season right now. It's Christmas. I don't know when this will actually be released as an episode, but for those that are watching the live recordings or the live calls that I'm doing—I'm doing this in real time—now is a great time to target your existing clientele. There's always some low-hanging fruit. There's definitely some gold inside your portfolio of people that would be willing to get into an additional investment, or additional properties, or maybe have some referrals they can offer you, know some friends that are investors that they're retired. You could reach out to them and point out all of the vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are where you take numbers and you make them as big as possible by coupling them all together. For example, you can reach out to an owner and say, hey, owner, I wanted to check in with you, just let you know how things are going. Over the last year, we've collected X number of dollars in rent for payouts to you. We have done X number of maintenance requests. We've been doing all these vanity metrics, these big metrics. We've done this many in aggregate over the years of you being with us. This is how much rent we've collected. This is how much we paid out to you. This is how many maintenance requests we've dealt with that you didn't have to. It helps the invisible to become visible, so they can see what you've been doing for them, to see that there's been a benefit and there's a result, and you're highlighting this and pointing it out. That's a great time to then say, hey, would you be willing to give us a review and ask for feedback? How do you think we've been doing as you pointed out? Then they'd be likely to give you a review if you ask, you might be able to get a referral, you might be able to ask, hey, what are your long term goals? Are you wanting to get into another investment? Cool, let's get you connected to a real estate agent and get this going. If you're a real estate agent, then cool, you have another deal (maybe) in the works. Capture that low-hanging fruit, reach out to people, and show a little care. You have an excuse. Hey, it's the end of the year. I wanted to assess things and where they're at. Or it's Merry Christmas or whatever you want to do. These are some awesome opportunities that we were chatting about on our call today. Now, the point of today's call. One question that I keep getting asked—I want to put this out on the podcast; this is that the point of today's episode—is voicemails. I get asked this a lot. My clients are making calls to potential clients, potential referral partners doing outreach. One of the things they get is they get voicemails a lot of times. How do you deal with voicemail? What am I supposed to do with a voicemail? What's the most effective thing? What should I say? I don't know if what I'm saying is right. When I'm working, a lot of times we tend to overthink it. Here's my response on how to leave the ultimate voicemail that's going to do the primary goal and get somebody to call you back. This is not what you might expect. Let's talk about what could be effective. You could call up and say, hey, this is so and so, and I'm interested in managing property or I'm interested in creating a referral relationship with you. If you're going to go that really obvious direct route, then you might want to mention a story or a result really quickly. For example, in my business, we would reach out. We did some calling and we said, hey, we helped one of our clients in the last year to add 200 doors. If that's something you might want as a result, give me a call back, I'd love to chat about that with you and see if we might be able to help you do something similar. Mention some sort of result that they might be interested in, depending on the target of who you're going after. If it's an investor, mention something you've done for an investor that's pretty impressive, that they might be interested in. If you want to offload this property and no longer be dealing with maintenance and stuff through the holidays, give us a call back. Give me a call back, this is my number. That's obvious and can be effective. Now, here's what I find to be the most effective way to get people to call you back. You just don't tell them anything except your name and your phone number. I know. It's really simple. Here's how that might sound and then I'll tell you how to make this even more effective. Hey, this is Jason. Hi, Fred. Give me a call back at blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and you hang up. They're not going to know what it's about. They're going to be a little curious to give you a call back. Leaving voicemails is frustrating and you're just trying to sound so nice. So here's my plus one on this. Here's how to really maximize getting a return call on a voicemail. Be very emotionally honest. Voicemails are frustrating for you. This is how I would leave voicemails, and I found I would get a high rate of callback. First thing you do is you sigh. You get the beep, and it's annoying, and you hate it, and you leave a bit, you let out a big sigh of frustration. Or even a groan or a moan. I know. This is what this might sound like. We leave a message at the beep. Beep. Hey, Fred. This is Jason. Give me a call back. My number is da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Click. They're going to listen to this and be like, oh, my gosh, obviously this person's a little frustrated. What's going on? Who is this? I don't even know what this is regarding. They're going to call up and they're like, hi, yeah, is Jason there? We got your voicemail. Oh, hey, Fred, man, thanks for giving me a call back, man. I hate voicemails. You don't have to say that, but then you can start a conversation. Yeah, I was reaching out to see if we could build a referral program. I've got this really cool program going, blah-blah-blah or whatever you're trying to do with this person, and then you go into it. Now you have a real person you can communicate with and you've got them on the phone. So there has to be a little bit of mystery. Sometimes, a little bit of mystery is more enticing and more attractive. Rather than giving them all the details, please leave me a message with the nature of your call, and the best times to reach you at, and blah-blah-blah. Sometimes, less is far more effective. You're getting them to play your game instead of playing the game they are telling you to leave. Do it their way in the voicemail. Sometimes that works really, really well. Sometimes it doesn't. I've left voicemails and I'm like, hey, Fred, I'm trying to reach you. I've had a hard time getting a hold of you. Here's my number. Please give me a call back. Maybe I've called him three or four times. I can't reach this person. Sometimes I might even say, hey, I don't know if you're still alive. We've talked in the past. I'm having trouble reaching you. Hopefully, you're doing okay. I know you're busy, but give me a call back as soon as you get this. These are honest voicemails. They say honesty is the best policy. I think when it comes to reaching out to clients and connecting with people, being really real and really honest sometimes inspires or creates a lot more curiosity, a lot more engagement, and helps you stand out from all the people that are all shiny, fluffy, and always trying to be so nice and smiley when they're making a phone call. When you're not being nice, which is a pleasing trait, when you're not trying to please people, you're often shifting into a state of power and they see you in a position of power. Like, oh, my gosh, this is the person I need to talk to. Anyway, that is my real simple hack for leaving a really effective voicemail. Again, I had mentioned you can mention some results, you can mention a benefit of why, you could talk about something they might be able to give you back or that you might be able to give them, something you might be able to give them. If they call you, I'll help you with this or could do this or this. Potentially, a good thing could happen. You could pre-frame them. Hey, give me a call back. Another effective strategy would be to say, give me a call back, I think you're really going to be excited about something I have to share with you. Just give me a call back, here's my number. Try those out, try those strategies out. Let us know how it goes. You can comment inside the DoorGrow Club. Go to doorgrowclub.com, which is our Facebook group. If you're running into some issues or you're having some success with this, I'd love to hear about it from you guys. When I say guys, that's guys and gals, all y'all. Just say it like a Texan. I appreciate everybody hanging out with me and listening to the show. Until next time to our mutual growth. I hope everybody, if you're watching this live, has a Merry Christmas, which is just coming up in a few days, and I hope you have a Happy New Year. If you want to kick off your business this coming year, and you want to get out of that rut you've been in for the last two, three years, you want this next year not to look like last year, that's your default future. Your default future is this coming year is going to be similar, so the results you got in the last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. You know what your future looks like. You can pretty well guess. If you want to create a different future with me, and with my team, and with DoorGrow, and have success like the clients I'm seeing on my coaching calls, and the clients that I'm working with, the 80+ businesses that we have in our mastermind, I want to help support you. I would be honored to be your trusted coach, mentor, advisor to help you scale and grow this thing. I love doing this. It's a lot of fun for me to reach out. We would love to help you. Hopefully we're talking soon and you're my next great success story. Maybe I'm talking about you here on this podcast soon. All right. Until next time, everyone, to our mutual growth. Bye, everybody.

What unscalable things are you doing, but none of your competitors are doing, to scale your property management business? Do the unscalable things because that’s the strategy that scales companies. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about doing the unscalable to help your business grow. If you want to scale your business, do the unscalable things that nobody else is willing to do but what the customers want. You’ll Learn... [02:25] Secret to Scale: Grow your business by doing the unscalable things. [03:00] Real World Examples: Blanketing adverstising strategies, such as PPC, SEO. [04:06] Top Strategies: Do unscalable things to grow and add doors via referrals. [06:25] What is unscalable? Personal one-on-one interactions to make more money. [06:50] Referral Results: Online reviews grow your business, reputation, retention rates. [08:25] Opposite Direction: Build relationships and scale systems to get revenue results. [13:15] Unscalable Things: What’s the least scalable thing you can do to add doors? Tweetables “The problem is that everybody is looking for the scalable solution.” “It’s all about creating more depth and connection on a one-on-one individual basis with potential referral partners.” “If you do warm, personal outreach, you’re going to create a lot more reviews.” “Do the unscalable things, and that’s what scales companies.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive GatherKudos BirdEye Mailchimp Calendly Grant Cardone Transcript 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, you are 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. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. For today's topic, what I wanted to talk with you about is doing the unscalable. A lot of times in businesses, everybody's looking for what's the scalable option, which means what's the shortcut? What's the hack? What's the fast way to do this so we can just do as little work as possible? How can we just hit a whole bunch of people? Here's how that tends to look. We do that in our advertising, we do that in marketing a lot of times. A lot of people are trying to figure out, how can they create some sort of shortcut? Let's direct mail everybody. Let's see if we can just blanket text message everybody. Let's set up automation. A lot of people come to me and they're like, what's the secret? How are you helping your clients add 100, 200, or more doors in a year? How are they growing right now because our company is down about 200 doors over previous years because all the owners are selling because the market's hot right now? They want to get out of these properties and cash out of their investment. But the problem is that everybody's looking for a scalable solution, and here's the secret. If you want to scale your business, do the unscalable things that nobody is doing. If you want to stand out in the marketplace, do what nobody else is willing to do that the customers really want. If you want to scale your business in sales and improve sales, do the unscalable things that nobody else is willing to do. Instead of automation, go in the complete opposite direction. How can we have more depth and connection? Let's throw out some practical, real-world examples of this. One example that I refer to a lot is a lot of people will try to grow their business through these blanketing strategies of advertising. They want to blanket the world and just spray and pray. So they'll use strategies like let's focus on pay per click, content marketing, or SEO. Why? Because these are the things they can throw money at and have somebody else maybe do for them, they hope. The challenge is when you try and create a system where you think you're going to have a lot of leverage, hey, we'll just throw money at this problem, the challenge is, usually, you get more work in exchange. For example, those are all cold leads. Cold leads take a lot more time to deal with. They take more nurture, they take more follow up time, there's less trust involved. If there's less trust involved and there's more follow-up time involved, then it's actually going to take more work. It's going to take more time. Advertising is expensive, so it costs more money. One of the things that our clients do, our top strategies for growing and adding doors is to do the unscalable things. For example, something that usually people try to do to grow the business is they go and get referrals from other people, from real estate agents, for example. They try and just say, hey, if you ever run into somebody that needs property management, refer them to me. Here's the problem. The best prospects, the people that actually might need property management, most of them are not looking for property management. They're not going to go up to a real estate agent and say, hey, I need a property manager. That just doesn't happen. Usually, by the time they do think they need a property manager, they're in a world of hurt, they’re in a crappy situation, something you won't even want to take on. Then you're getting the garbage, so then they're connecting you to the garbage that exists in the marketplace and the biggest problems. The best clients are people that don't even yet know they need property management, capturing them way earlier in the sales cycle before they become price-sensitive, and you're the first person they've heard of or talked to related to property management. Maybe that's a better idea. You're closer, it's going to be a lot higher. There's a lot more trust in that relationship, and that's going to be more effective than doing cold leads and spending time prospecting directly to potential investors, for example, where the close rate is typically really low like maybe 1 out of 10 or worse. Why not create an outbound prospecting program towards real estate agents? This is one of the things that we share in our program of how to make that really effective and how to create the right incentives so that people are actually referring business to you. Without going into too much detail, it's all about creating more depth and connection on a one-on-one individual basis with potential referral partners. Other people are like, hey, I'm going to go present to a whole real estate morning office meeting, high leverage, lots of people, and you're going to talk to all these people in pitch, and then guess what happens? They're all looking at their phones, nobody thinks about you, and you never get a referral. But hey, you got to talk to a lot of people. It sounds very scalable, high leverage. We want to focus on what is unscalable. That would be the personal one-on-one interactions with each of those agents. That would be the goal. I would love to meet with each of you individually, let's set up a time, and connect with them and create a deep, personal, and more intimate relationship and connection, that's where you make more money because it's the thing people are not willing to do. Let's talk about online reviews, for example, a great strategy for growing your business. A lot of people will just use something like tools like our GatherKudos tool, they'll use something like Birdeye, or some sort of system where their goal is like, hey, we'll just send out emails, text messages, or whatever. What I teach in our program, in our Training Reputation Secrets is if you do warm personal outreach, you're going to create a lot more reviews. It's not scalable, but you get a much bigger result. Is it worth the time investment? Is it worth the additional staff and resources you might need to implement that strategy? Absolutely. And you will crush your competition. There's a lot of other stuff that I talk about in Referral Secrets of how to make that really effective, how you can set it up so it increases retention rates with your clients, et cetera. The general principle in each of our most effective growth strategies is to do the unscalable things, and that's what scales companies. If you want to grow your business right now, take a look at what are you trying to do right now that is a scalable version, a scalable solution? Like you're trying to hit a lot of people through some sort of email newsletter where you got a list of thousands of people. Or are you trying to just go and throw out an advertisement on Facebook or Google ads where you're trying to just hit tons and tons of people and get lots of eyeballs? What if you went in the complete opposite direction and you did something that was the most personal, the most intimate, the most connecting way of reaching out and creating relationships with people in order to achieve the same result? What if you went the complete opposite direction and then you started to build and scale your systems related to doing more of that? Which means hiring more people instead of more technology and automation. I have a friend, one of my mentors. He has a business that does a lot in revenue—really, really big company. I believe they do like $100 million a year in their business. It's ridiculous. He has really savvy skills, is a really great marketer, great with technology, and yet, he could automate his whole sales process. He can't have a funnel, have videos, and all this stuff, yet he has a really large sales team. Why? Because that's what's most effective to get to that level of revenue. He has a large sales team of setters and a large sales team of closers because it's the most effective. It's more effective than having a funnel, a video webinar, and trying to automate all this stuff. And you'll hear lots of people saying you're just one funnel away, you just need this marketing piece, if you just do a newsletter, or just do social media. These are all scalable solutions. They're scalable. You can get people in place, you can hit a lot of people really quickly. Scalable solutions can be effective. Some of them can be effective. But in general, if your business isn't growing, I'm guessing you're already doing some of these "scalable things", but you're not doing the unscalable things. What are the unscalable things that none of your competitors are doing? Are they doing warm personal outreach with every new tenant and every new owner to get a review? Are you doing warm personal outreach with every real estate agent, lender, handyman, attorney, lawyer, anyone that helps investors in your market to create a referral relationship and partnership with them? Probably not. That's not scalable. We don't want to do that. Let's go do advertising. And yet the companies that are doing advertising right now, they're usually spending about $300–-$5000 a month, and they're probably down about 200 doors over previous years. If you have between 600–1000 doors, my guess is you've lost maybe about 200 over the last year because you're not doing the unscalable actions that are more intimate. So focus on greater depth and greater connection. That's really what property management is. It's a business of connection, depth, and relationships. People are trying to turn it into a business of automation, technology, and tools. I do like technology, don't get me wrong. I do recommend that you use and create leverage where you can technologically, however, if you want the biggest result when it comes to getting referrals, with getting reviews, with getting on more deals, the more personal approach and the more depth is going to be the most effective strategy, and nobody else is doing it. This allows you to create market share while everybody else is fighting over this red bloody water where everybody's trying to spray and pray and hope they're going to get some sort of return on their advertising dollars. Stop falling prey to marketers that are just selling advertising. What I teach is to do the right actions and you will spend less time than you would dealing with cold leads, and it costs you $0. I had a client today on our coaching call, a really cool guy, Michael Sullivan. He was talking about how he added eight properties in the last 24 hours. His phone is ringing, he said, constantly. And I said, how are you doing? He's just doing the strategy that I told him to do and doing this outbound method. I said, how many thousands of dollars in marketing have you spent to get on all these doors that you're adding right now? He looked really confused because it was a loaded question. But he looked really confused and he was like, I don't understand what you're saying. And I said, you've spent $0 in advertising, correct? And he said, oh, yeah, $0. How many of you are spending $0 and you've added eight properties just in the last 24 hours and your business is growing really fast? Another client showed up, he had added 13 doors. Another client showed up and said he added eight doors on that call. This is a weekly call, weekly check-in. How many doors have you added this week? If you're not adding doors as quickly as you want to, and you don't trust me enough to come into my program and let us help you, that's cool, but start just focusing on what's the least scalable thing I could do. It's probably that thing you're avoiding. Maybe it's too personal, maybe it's uncomfortable, go do that thing. What you'll find is your business will start to grow really rapidly. Anyway, if I can help you go faster, focus on the unscalable things in business. The reason I want to talk about this today is it keeps coming up for me. I get questions all the time. Even a client today is like, how do I leverage this list I have of 4000 emails. I've got this other list of this. Again, what I taught him was to figure out what's the least scalable thing you could do. What everybody else would do is do a newsletter. He says, I'm doing a newsletter. How often? Every week. Cool, are you using a system to do that? Yes, MailChimp. Okay, cool. In MailChimp, what are your stats on the open rate? 10%. That's email, right? It's scalable, but it's really [...] results, 10% open rate? That means 90% are not even opening the email. The challenge there is I said, cool, what if you took all of those email addresses of different either investors or real estate agents on your list and you send out a personal email to each individual one? You did like maybe 50 a day or whatever your email system, but you do it from your personal email account, not from an email system, and just reached out to them and said, hey, how are things going with your rental properties? Hey, do you need anything from me today? Or hey, would you be interested in getting a call to find out how I could get you some more real estate commission because I have this cool new program? These kinds of things, like if it was to a potential referral partner. Give them a Calendly link or something to schedule with you and that sort of thing. That's the kind of conversation. How can you take this thing you're trying to do that's not really working, but it's very scalable and do the unscalable thing? Even if it's a little bit of that, you're going to get a much bigger return on that time investment, and you don't have to spend a whole bunch of time drafting up a big newsletter. Just do a little bit of outreach with a really short one-sentence email and you may start getting some real responses and initiate some conversations. It keeps going back to this. My own mentors, every method that I tend to hear or see that works, it's always going back to what's the least scalable thing. It's not, how can I do this with less people? It's, how can I do this with more? You can sometimes double your close rate like I talked about on a previous podcast episode, just by getting a setter involved. That's adding more people. Having a setter and a closer increases the conversion rates and increases the close rates, even though it's more people and you're spending more money on staff. But a lot of people are looking for a way, how can I decrease the need to talk to people or how can I systemize this or how can I automate it or leverage technology? I hope this was a helpful conversation. Do the unscalable things. The unscalable things are where you show care. It's where you invest in people. It's where you're human. It's where you love people. This is where you build relationships. I think it was Grant Cardone, he said, "The difference between a contract and a contact is the R, and that's relationships." Focus on making relationships and you're going to get a lot more contracts. This is what most business owners and businesses are unwilling to do. If you do it, you're going to have results that other businesses are unable to achieve. That's my message for today. I hope this is helpful for those of you. If you want a little bit more help, if you want some accountability, if you want some new ideas, if you want to inject some life into your business, reach out to DoorGrow. We'd be glad to help you. This is my passion. This is what I love to do. I love coaching and supporting clients and helping them grow their companies. My goal is to turn you into the entrepreneur that can have the business of your dreams. If you don't have the business of your dreams right now, one of my mentors would say, you're not yet the person that can run it yet. So let's turn you into that person. Reach out to us, check us out at doorgrow.com, or join our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. We'll get you to our community and that's it. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Business owners and entrepreneurs make mistakes and take risks that other people are unwilling to do. However, they learn from them because nobody’s perfect! Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about one of the biggest mistakes he made in his business. He calls it his $2 million mistake, although it was probably even bigger. You’ll Learn... [01:37] Validation: Everyone makes mistakes, even entrepreneurs are human. [02:20] Growing Company: Be super cautious and picky when selecting clients. [03:23] Start Small, Not Big: Conference idea requires everything a business requires. [06:54] Lesson Learned: Big deal turned out to be a $2-million or more mistake. [08:27] Results: Clients got the best results, but a lot of team members left business. [09:08] Change to Grow: Focus on clients, not sales, marketing, website, or branding. [11:00] Dilemma: What should I do? Something new? Expand? Go after shiny objects? [11:30] Premature Problems: Why expand business into new niches, markets, or areas? [12:29] Hand Holding: Some people are not willing to put in the effort or do the work. [15:16] 3 Commitments: 1 hour for strategy, 2 hours to implement tactics, and show up. [17:45] Coaching Calls: Clients access calendar to work through problems, challenges. Tweetables “I recommend you to be very picky about the clients that you take on.” “We weren't able to focus on the main thing, which is our customer and which is our product.” “I have fired clients. I have just refunded clients. We've let clients go. Some just quit.” “The lessons end up always being worth the risk. So, take a risk, invest in yourself, invest in your business.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript 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, you are 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. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and business owners. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. For today's show, I wanted to talk with all of you about what's been going on at DoorGrow. Over the years, I've made some big mistakes in business like most business owners, this is part of how we learn. We take risks that other people are unwilling to take. One of the biggest mistakes that I made in my business was, I sometimes call my $2 million mistake, but it was probably even bigger of a mistake. A lot of people probably would not tell you their mistakes in business. But one thing that I think is super validating as an entrepreneur is to hear about some of my mentors’ challenges and some of the mistakes that others that I have worked with that they have made, it makes me feel safe. It makes me feel like they're human, I'm human. It helps entrepreneurs also to see that you're not supposed to be perfect all the time. It's not always going to be great or perfect in business. One of the big mistakes that I made is I had really great growth in my business. Things were going really well. We were bringing out a lot of clients. We had some clients getting great results. We had some clients not getting great results. Usually, in most coaching programs, what I've learned is that about 20% will be bad clients. They're not going to do it, they're not going to take action, they're not going to get results. No matter how hard you try or how good you do, that's generally going to be the case if you're a growing company. If you're not a growing company, then you can be super cautious, super picky, and that sort of thing. But we are in high paced growth. One challenging factor is we had some clients that were a bad fit, and over time, we were always trying to filter, be more careful, raise our pricing, and be pickier about the clients that we take on, which is what I recommend to all of you. I recommend you to be very picky about the clients that you take on. But we had great growth. I started working with the coach. We had 300% growth in a year. We were really moving. Things were going really fast. Things were really good. There was a lot of momentum. I built out a really awesome team, it felt really exciting, and then I had this great idea that I thought would be a great idea. I had always had this dream of doing a conference. So I came up with this idea to do this big conference. I didn't want it to be small. I was looking at all the other conferences that were going on. I saw what they did and this has to be next level. It's got to be as good as this. Even my coach at the time was like, hey, do something small, just start small. I'm like, no way, I'm going big, I'm going to make this awesome. We're going to have the best food, Paleo food, and gluten-free options. Even the food was going to be really nice. We're going to do this really ritzy venue. We did it at this really nice hotel. This conference cost us well over six figures. It was, I think, $150,000 or something like that all in we spent on this conference. That's not that bad if you're a business that's doing about a million in revenue, I guess that's okay as long as you make revenue from it, if you're just doing simple math. Anybody that's done a significant event knows how challenging these are to put together. But here's the caveat to this or the challenge is we had 300% growth in the year. Then the year we decided to do a conference, we then had to shift all of our attention towards this conference. The thing that you don't realize when you launch a conference or you get on the hook for a conference is you have to get this venue and you're on the hook with the venue, which means you owe them money. You have a contract with them. If you don't sell enough tickets and you don't sell enough people getting there, you're not going to get enough people into rooms, you're responsible for a certain group rate and amount of people, and there's this big expense. The other thing is they usually want that money upfront, a lot of it or in big chunks, and then there's this whole racket hotel. They are a monopoly on food. They don't allow outside food vendors or outside food to be brought in. You have to pay thousands. I think we spent like $8000 or $9000 just for coffee—it's crazy—for two days, I think it was, three days. It just gets really crazy, and then they do things like some of these venues will charge by the plate. Say it's like $50, $60, $80 a plate, but what they do is they go around. They pick up the plates, and then people go and get another plate to get another item or another food and they're charging you per plate. There are just little things that are a little bit shady in how that industry can work sometimes. I was completely blind to a lot of this stuff. I was really nervous about putting it together, but here's the real problem. Launching a conference like this required sales. It required marketing, it required organization. It requires everything that a business requires. It's like starting a business. We have this business that's doing really well. We're moving really fast. It's going really rapid, 300% growth in the year, hitting about a million in revenue. We hit a million in revenue and things were moving really fast. We probably could have continued that trajectory. Things were really good. We had a really good team in place and everything and then decided to do this conference. That year, we had no growth. We stayed flat at about a million in revenue because we did the conference. So that's why I call it my $2 million mistake because we easily could generate probably $2 million more in revenue just that year. But we also stayed flat the year after and the year after as a result. As a result, things got really crazy because we did this crazy conference, it took a massive amount of work. All of our time and attention had to shift towards that as a team, sales, marketing, everything because we were on the hook to make this work. The conference went well and we had some great speakers. I got great feedback, but to me, it was massively stressful. I wasn't really able to enjoy it. I have kind of an introverted side to me. It wasn't quite the dream that I thought it would be, but I'm glad that I did it as a learning experience. It was $2 million tuition for this learning opportunity. Maybe, if I really did some math, maybe it was a $10 million mistake, hindsight being 2020. Not only that, but by shifting our focus towards this conference and so much attention having to be placed on it, we weren't able to focus on the main thing, which is our customer and which is our product. So I had to shift out of some of the coaching stuff that I was doing. We tried to go more towards just getting people to move through the program and follow the material. We had people that weren't getting as good of results. Really, that's the piece that I enjoy the most, the one-on-one personal depth and interactions and coaching clients. Those are always the clients that get the best results. We realized that. Now, we lost a lot of team members as a result. It took a while for us to get back in momentum. I was working with a coach at the time. I got a lot of personal growth through that time period, so it was a good time period. It caused me to wake up to a lot of things in my life that were really challenging or frustrating. I ended up ending my marriage of 13 years also. This is in the last several years and becoming single again after like two decades. There was just a lot, a lot of change, a lot of growth. Now we're getting back into a nice growth mode in the business and I've got some really good team members building up our team back up. My focus is really just on clients. I'm not even doing sales anymore. I'm not having to do the marketing stuff. I'm not doing any of the website stuff, branding stuff. I really just get to focus on coaching clients, which is really what I enjoy. It's the fun part for me. So I built this awesome team. What's interesting is due to these painful situations, the COVID, and all these things which were causing cash crunches or constraints, it forced us to tighten the business up. My team is smaller than it's ever been. We're more effective than we've ever been, and our product offering is better than it's ever been. We're able to deliver more value than we've ever been able to deliver at a much lower price point. Overall, these things made us, these difficult situations, these problems, and these challenges like a conference and team members quitting and leaving as a result of, then financial challenges in the business, and divorce. These kinds of things are the refiner’s fire that improves us as human beings if we allow it, and improves our businesses if we allow it. Now, I'm not saying you're going to go jump into problems. I'm not saying that that's a good idea either. But I am grateful for the lessons and I'm grateful to have learned those things that I've learned. I wouldn't give up those lessons in hindsight. It enables me to have conversations with clients. This is a common entrepreneurial dilemma. Should I do this new thing? Should I expand into this thing? Should I do this cool, new idea? Should I go after the shiny object? I have this really powerful story that I get to share with clients and say, look, let me tell you about my $2 million mistake, why the main thing always needs to stay being the main thing, why focus equals power in your business, and why your attention shouldn't be diluted. Some of the concepts that I teach and some of the ideas like premature expansion, a lot of property managers prematurely want to expand their business into new niches, new markets, or new areas. They do that prematurely, they're not really ready to do that, and they just dilute their focus, which dilutes their potency and their ability to grow and scale, for example. There's a lot of lessons that came out of this. Personally, business-wise, that came as a result of that. There were clients that went through our processes and came on board as clients during some of these challenging time periods. We had some that got phenomenal results. We had some great success stories, clients that just did what we told them to do, but not every client is like that. Not every client will just watch all your videos, show up to every call, invest all the time that you tell them to do, and do the work. Most need a lot more hand-holding, I've realized. We weren't able to really hold people's hands very effectively during that. So there were people that sort of fell through the cracks, and I felt bad about that. Some became very vocal about me and my business online. But the most vocal people, ironically, that are negative about DoorGrow and about me are people that have never worked with me in a lot of instances. They love hearing that the decision they made to never work with me is so validated by the few [...] clients that really don't like us, that didn't get a good result, or didn't put in the effort and didn't do the work. As a property manager, you're going to have these situations too. You're going to have an owner that you shouldn't have taken on. You didn't realize it. Maybe you had pretty good qualifications and you qualified them during the sales process, but they still made their way into your business. Unbeknownst to you, maybe they're wolves in sheep's clothing or whatever, but you realized it and you fired them. I have fired clients. I have just refunded clients. We've let clients go. Some just quit. That is a situation that comes up, and so we've gotten much better over the years at qualifying clients. We have an application people fill out just to work with us to make sure that we can help them. We're looking for certain qualities and we make them jump through some serious hoops. We give out. We give away a two-hour training currently called The Seven Frameworks for Growth or DoorGrow Secrets that we give out of free material teaching a lot of my frameworks and the secrets that I love to share with clients. I just give that away because I know if the right people will go through this and they'll see value in it, and the wrong people will go through this and they won't find it valuable. So they sell filters, or they just won't even invest the time to do that because it's kind of a prerequisite. If they're not willing to watch all that and do that, they're not going to really watch all the material, take action, and do the things that we tell them to do in the program either because they're lazy, so they're not going to get the result. There have been zero clients that I've had that have actually done what I've told them to do that have not won and gotten results and benefited from the program. The one quality or one characteristic that I have to have in a client if they're going to get a result is that they're willing to do the work and take action. So now, in our program, just to become a client, not only do they have to watch a two-hour training, they have to fill out an application. We also have a requirement I call the three commitments. This is something that I would recommend that you implement in your own business. But we have this framework we call the three commitments. The three things they have to commit to in order for us to guarantee that they're going to get results, and we offer a guarantee. If you are willing to spend one hour being a business owner of your business, this is the first commitment. One hour of strategic time means you actually operate like a business owner. Not doing all the tactical stuff, which a team member or an employee could do—emailing, calling, or whatever. Strategic stuff: planning, scheming, watching the material that we have in DoorGrow Academy. This needs to be done early in the morning before work, before you start your day, before kids, before pets, and before your day runs away from you. You need some quiet time for strategic time, the best time, after you've had a good night's rest and your brain is full of all the brain decision-making chemicals that it needs to think strategic time. Give you the best time. The king or queen needs it first. Otherwise, you'll always have a starving kingdom, I like to say. The second commitment that's required is to be willing to dedicate at least two hours each workday, five days a week towards implementing tactically the strategies and tactics that I give you. Doing the work, making the calls, outreach, dialing in operations, or whatever is the big challenge that we're solving or working on. Really, that just means, for people that want to grow that are on the growth path, because we have three different paths in our program, that means that just being a part-time salesperson for 10 hours a week. I mean, that's really a [...] salesperson. That's it. Just at least do that. Ten hours minimum a week. Track your time, be accountable, check in on our weekly check-in, and let us know how many hours you've done and at least do 10. That's it. Third commitment is to show up to the weekly coaching call. I find that clients that don't show up to the call don't have any pressure, they're not accountable. I can't coach them. I can't check in with them on how they're doing. I can't redirect them away from some of the things they might be thinking, doing, or that are holding them back. I can't really coach them if they're not reachable by me. Those are the three commitments. Now we give them even more support than that. We have a Telegram group. I give all my clients access to my calendar to schedule one-on-one calls. This is all I do now is coach. They can schedule one-on-one calls with me. We work through problems, challenges, objections, things they're dealing with, or whatever, to make sure that they're in momentum and moving forward. How does that apply to your business? Could you have maybe three commitments and could you also keep your focus as I talked about on your main thing a little bit more? These are just some things that I wanted to share just in my struggles as a business owner and in my journey in developing my business. If you are one of those clients that struggled in the past, you worked with us, you didn't get a great result, I'm perfectly willing to coach you for free. We'll do a 30-day trial between the two of us. If you're willing to commit to taking action, I'll coach you for free. We'll get you a result, and then at the end of that 30 days, we'll both have a conversation and it will be, yes, I want to do your program and I'll pay for your mastermind. I've been getting great results and I've been keeping the three commitments. Or if you're not keeping those three commitments, then we'll part ways and I'll kick you out, but you'll probably choose that. You'll realize, hey, this isn't for me, I'm not really going to do this stuff. We've got clients that are adding hundreds of doors to this program, and they're not spending any money on advertising. They're not having to deal with cold [...] leads, they're able to charge more money, the potential clients are less price-sensitive because we're capturing them earlier in the sales cycle. So I'm going to teach you how to do the unscalable things that actually scale your business. It's all about more depth, more personal connection, and creating more relationships, and we'll scale your business. Most property management companies are losing doors right now. They're down. Mostly, the larger ones are down about 200 doors. A significant chunk of their portfolio is selling because the markets are high, investors are getting the itch, and they want to get out, sell, and make some money. They're cashing out. Our clients are growing and they're adding doors. They're net positive. They're making money and building up residual income. They're not even spending money on advertising. That's my client. That's pretty powerful and it's true. It's working really well. I'm going to teach you how to do unscalable things. SEO, Google ads, all that kind of stuff, that's scalable. It's something you can hand money and whatever. I'm going to teach you how to do the unscalable things that actually are really working in the marketplace right now to help you grow your business, so you can capture more businesses that are less price-sensitive, that are captured earlier in the sales cycle, and your close rate is infinitely higher with those warmer leads, and it is with cold leads through those other strategies. We'll give you that free training that you can watch—our Seven Frameworks training. Just reach out, we're happy to give that to you and get you hopefully on as a client in our process. I don't know if there's anything else I should say about my $2 million mistake. All of us as entrepreneurs are going to have experiences and challenges that we make a bad decision or business. Maybe you've never had one, but that probably means you're playing a game that's too small or you’re being too cautious. The lessons end up always being worth the risk. So take a risk, invest in yourself, invest in your business, reach out if we can help you, and keep your business focused on your main thing, which is your property management business. Grow that thing and keep the focus tight. It's so tempting as an entrepreneur to be distracted and to go towards other things. Let's start a roofing company. Let's start a pool cleaning company. Let's start a carpet cleaning company. Let's start a maintenance company. There may be a place for these and maybe it will help you add some revenue. But in a lot of instances, adding more to the business ends up actually taking away from the main thing. So you have to get to the place where you've got a solid team that you can trust to make sure everything's running smoothly before you start to add additional pieces and start additional companies. Anyway, that's it. I've had this on my agenda for a while to share my $2 million mistake. I just had other topics that were a lot more exciting for me to share, but I wanted to share this. If you have any questions, if you are a client that went through some of that stuff with us and you felt like you didn't get results, reach out to me. I want to make sure that we take care of you. If you're bitter and upset and you're not open to that, then that's cool. Don't reach out. I know there's always some of those out there. The more successful we are, the more we attract. We build up a little group of haters because we've worked with thousands of clients, and I've talked to thousands of property managers. We've got hundreds of clients right now. We've got 80 businesses in our mastermind right now, which is just crazy to me. It's really awesome. People are getting great results. Today's call was a really good call since I'm just kind of riffing and chatting here. I love hearing our clients get results. Yeah, it was a good call today. Anyway, each week we start by sharing wins on our Grow call. Anyway, that's all I have today to share. Feel free to hit me up on social media if you want to check in with me. My username is @kingjasonhull. Happy to have a conversation because this is all I do. I love coaching my clients. I really enjoy helping people grow and win in their businesses. If you want to know if I'm the real deal, set up a call with me. Let's chat. I will say I'll point out that I'm in every property management group and every real estate group probably that exists on Facebook. There's a property management group that has a kind of a culture of negativity towards me and they don't like me, which is cool. It's not my group. I chime in every now and then to try and be helpful. I'll admit, as a business owner, it hurts, just like it probably hurts you when you see an owner bad mouth your business or whatever. But when I see a past client maybe that really I didn't even know or they didn't really talk to me, they didn't show up to the calls, they didn't really work with me, they didn't really take action, they just signed up with us and hope the website would magically do the work for them for some reason, something like that, yeah, it hurts. It hurts to see people complain. Especially, it's frustrating to see people that have never worked with me tell other people to work with businesses. I saw one guy mention like, somebody said, hey, should I work with DoorGrow? One of my past clients was like, yeah, we had a good experience, but he knows the culture there and was afraid of really saying too much like talking to them directly. Then there were a bunch of people that were negative. One guy was like, hey, you, don't use them, use this other company. So I reached out to this guy directly and I said, hey, what was your experience with that other company? I'm always looking for ways to benefit my clients and they're like, oh, I've never worked with them, but the people seemed cool there. I was like, okay, so you've never worked with me. You've never worked with this other company either, but you're telling people not to work with me and to work with this other company. To me, that is a massive lack of integrity. I'm not going to recommend somebody go do something or work with something unless they've done that themselves or gotten a lot of feedback from other clients or people that have done this so that I can share that, but that's just me. Anyway, that made me sad. That's part of the challenge we have to deal with as business owners. You're going to have some haters and you just do what you can. That sort of inspired this episode. I hope this was helpful. I hope hearing my situation was helpful. I hope you stay focused on the main thing and you win in business and life. If I can support you in any way, reach out. Anyway, until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

What is the secret code to powerful communication? Be real, get raw, and stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to get results. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about how to deal with uncomfortable conversations In property management. You’ll Learn... [02:10] Qualifying Questions: Do you feel uncomfortable and taken advantage of? [03:05] Communication Code: Practice the four Rs - real, raw, relevant, and results. [04:57] Step 1 - Real: Be honest. Tell the truth. Just don’t lie. [06:02] Step 2 - Raw: Be vulnerable, which is powerful and not a weakness. [07:35] Step 3 - Relevant: What matters to others, not what matters to you. [08:49] Step 4 - Results: Know your and your communication targets’ wants and needs. [12:41] Built-in Liar: Your brain tries to protect you from pain and problems. Tweetables “You have to tell the truth. Be honest.” “There’s power in being vulnerable.” “Stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to results.” “What is your desired outcome?” “We all have a built-in liar and that’s our brain. It’s always trying to help us avoid pain.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive OpenPotion Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown Calendly Transcript 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, you are 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. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and 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. Today's topic, friends, we're going to be talking about a code of communication. During my weekly coaching call with clients today, a client got vulnerable and asked, how do you deal with an uncomfortable conversation? The situation was this particular client of mine has a potential client that keeps calling him up and asking how they should do things. He really wants this person's doors. He really wants to get them on as a client. He's being nice. But now they're starting to say, hey, I really need a concrete vendor to do this and I need somebody. He's being helpful and he's giving out some info. I know a lot of you listening are like, do not give out your vendors. I'm freaking out, but he doesn't want to give out anymore and he feels like he's being taken advantage of. Now I asked some qualifying questions. I said, how do you feel about this to get clarity on that? I'm guessing by bringing this up, did you feel taken advantage of? Do you feel like it's uncomfortable? His question was, how do I have this uncomfortable conversation, or how do I move them forward towards maybe becoming a client? It was kind of the question. My feedback to my client is that you need to get really honest. When we get really vulnerable and honest, it allows other people to see that we're human beings, it allows us to have much more effective communications. As I said, rather than tell you exactly what to say, let me share with you the principles because this is generally how I like to work. Because how he says it might be unique to him, but I said what you need to do is practice a code. I learned this years ago from a coach named Setema Gali Jr. He was part of a coaching program that I was part of. He was my coach. I believe he's the first person that explained this to me. I've heard lots of coaches share this idea. I'm not sure where it originally got its start, but the idea is this code of communication called real, raw, relevant, and results. This is also connected to Wake Up Warrior and Garrett J. White. That's who Setema was working for at the time. Setema, just let me tell you about this guy, a 300-pound Polynesian. He played for the New England Patriots. He has a Super Bowl ring, I believe, won a Super Bowl. He is a really big guy and a really powerful speaker. I really enjoyed working with him. This concept I'm going to share with you is this code of communication that will improve your communication in your relationships personally. It'll improve communication between you and your potential clients. It helps you with challenging situations, challenging communication. This is the mode of how you should always approach communication. In general, this is a code for life. It's four R’s, four R words: real, raw, relevant, and results. Let me explain this code of communication and we'll go through each of these four items. When you're communicating with somebody, the challenge is you need to be honest, and this particular client of mine had not yet been really honest with this potential client that he was speaking with about how he was feeling and what he was experiencing. The very first thing is you have to tell the truth, be honest. That's a factual truth. This is the mental logical side of things. What you say should be factual, it should be truthful in your communication with somebody. That's step one. Just don't lie. If you're saying, oh, it's okay and it's not okay, you're lying. The very first thing is to honestly communicate, and that's just telling the truth. The first is real, be real. Be real with people. Just be real with people. Tell the truth. Now the second is closely related. But not only is there logical, honest communication. There needs to be emotionally honest communication. This is where a lot of people fail in their communication. It's not fully honest because you're not really sharing how you feel about things. Logically, what you're saying may be true, but we're being dishonest if we're not honestly expressing how we feel about something emotionally. The second R is raw. So be real, get raw. Most people don't want to get raw. This is what we call being vulnerable. There's power in being vulnerable. There are books written on this subject like Brene Brown, I believe, is her name. The Power of Vulnerability was a big TED Talk, YouTube videos, and whatever. Getting vulnerable is a source of power. A lot of people see it as a weakness. But the most powerful person is the person who has the confidence to get the most raw with people and to be the most emotionally honest. It allows other people to feel safe being honest with you as well because it's at a deeper level. The real thing is that they felt taken advantage of. That's factual, but expressing how that makes them feel would deepen that conversation like, hey, I feel uncomfortable. We've had lots of conversations, facts. I've helped given you some freebies and given you some access to some vendors that I use, facts. I'm feeling though, that I'm being taken advantage of. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I run a business. I care about my clients. I want to take care of them. But then when I have somebody that is not paying me, asking for this information, and I'm helping them out, it makes me feel like whatever you feel. That's getting raw and expressing the honest emotional side of things. The next is to stay relevant. Be real, get raw, stay relevant. Keeping things relevant is important. It's easy to start whining and sharing all your feelings about whatever's going on in your life, but they don't care about that. Whatever the conversation you're having—whether it's kids, spouse, potential clients, existing clients, tenants, whatever—it should be relevant to them. If they don't care and it's irrelevant to them, they're not going to pay attention to it anyway. You're wasting your breath, you're wasting your time, and you're probably gossiping or emotionally manipulating. It's not relevant, so make sure it's relevant. The communication should be relevant to what the real situation is. It should be relevant to the feelings and thoughts that you're having around that thing that you're currently talking about, not other stuff. It's one thing to just get really real and honest and go up to some random person or even a potential client and say, oh, yeah, how are things going? And you start blabbing your whole life story and problems to them. They don't care about that, it's not relevant. So make sure your communication is relevant. Now the next is results. It's real, raw, relevant, and results. So be real, get raw, stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to results. If you are committed to results, that means you need to know what your communication targets, wants, and desires. You need to know what you want. You have to have that clarity. Otherwise, it's not going to be relevant. What you want are results. So if it's relevant, it's going to be focused ruthlessly on getting towards the result. What's the outcome? What is your desired outcome? This is why on my Calendly link, it always asks the question, for appointment scheduling with me, what is your desired outcome? What's the outcome you're hoping for during this conversation? Maybe I can move towards that. What is your desired outcome? If you're going into a conversation that's going to be uncomfortable, you need to be clear on what is true, what factually happened, what do you know for sure, how do you feel about that? You need to have that clarity of how you feel. You need to know what's relevant to them, what's relevant to the conversation, and what's relevant to you. You need to know what you want. What results or outcomes are you hoping for? To honestly express, in this instance, this example, it would be very honest, real, and raw to express. Let's say this potential client was named Suzie. We're talking to this potential client. Hey, Suzie, I've helped you with this, I've done this, and I'm starting to honestly feel like I'm being taken advantage of in this relationship. I want to be honest with you, my goal and being helpful in talking to you, all these multiple times we've had calls is because I want to get your business. I want to get you on as a client. So I need to know, that's what I want, is that going to happen? Is that a reality? Do you see that you potentially will become a client, or are you just taking advantage of the fact that you know that I know some of the things you might need? If so, then maybe we need to have a different conversation. But are you interested in becoming a client or working with me for property management or letting me take over your units? This is expressing what you want and that you might be able to express what Suzie wants. You can say, Suzie, what is it that you are wanting? My understanding is you want this property to be taken care of. You probably don't really want or enjoy dealing with finding contractors and dealing with these challenging and difficult situations. I would love to take that off your plate. I want to do that for you. That would be much more effective communication and it'd be far more honest because the reality of the situation is this communication leading up to this point, this client of mine had not yet been honest with Suzie or whatever their name is. Had not yet been fully honest with them and hadn’t lived according to this code of communication. Everything gets better and easier if you're willing to live. It's uncomfortable sometimes to have this communication, but it's less uncomfortable, I believe, than dealing with feeling taken advantage of, feeling misaligned internally, feeling frustrated, feeling annoyed by people. Honestly, express. There's a really good book I'm listening to right now. I really love this book so far. It's called Radical Honesty. This guy is really refreshing to listen to. I appreciate it. It really made me take a look. I've always prided myself on being a very honest, open person. That's always how I've wanted to run my business. One of the core facets is transparency that we subscribe to in our core values. That's why I created my original business, it was called OpenPotion. We all have a built-in liar and that's our brain. It's always trying to help us avoid pain. So if our brain is saying, well, it'll be an uncomfortable conversation that our brain lies and comes up with stories around this. Maybe they know or maybe I shouldn't bring this up. Maybe that'd be uncomfortable if I brought this up or set it this way. Maybe I need to be nicer, more diplomatic. That's our brain lying. We have this built-in liar that is always there in the background creating stories and filtering our perspective and our view from past pain and past history trying to protect us from future pain and creating more problems in our life. We have to confront that, and we have to deal with that and get even more honest. This is something that I remind myself of and that I hope is helpful to you is to be real, get raw, stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to results. If you focus on this mode of communication with family members, potential clients, or anybody that you care to communicate with, you're going to have a much better result. You're more likely to get the results out of this that you want because you're communicating honestly. You're going to create more safety. You're going to create more trust, sales, and deals happen at the speed of trust. Relationships, the foundation is trust. This is going to help you build more relationships and improve your close rate. I hope this has been helpful to those listening. That is all I have to share today. If you would like to have an objective perspective in your business because you're too close to the fire as all of us business owners are and you want a mentor, coach, or somebody that can help you move your business forward, I would be honored and happy to help you grow your business. We have clients getting fantastic results in our Mastermind program. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and set up a call with us to learn more about our DoorGrow and Scale mastermind, how we are helping grow and scale companies. That is what I will leave you with today. I hope this has been helpful to those listening. If it has, please give us some positive feedback on the various channels in which you may be listening to this, whether it's YouTube, iTunes, or wherever, we appreciate that. It helps us get the message out to others and benefit more people in the industry, which is our mission at DoorGrow. That's it. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Do you need a business development manager (BDM) to double the close rate and double the amount of deals and business you get in the property management space? Maybe you can’t afford or find a BDM. Maybe you like doing it yourself or want to double the amount of deals faster. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about how to get help closing deals for your property management business and selling people on using you for property management. You’ll Learn... [03:22] Simple Secret: Get a sales assistant to help with follow-up to close more deals. [04:10] What would an assistant do? Schedule appointments and make calls. [05:00] Sales Assistant Requirements: Must love making phone calls. Must enjoy talking to people. Must enjoy connecting with people. Must be somewhat driven. [06:12] Onboard and Train: What are they going to do for you? Help you qualify people. [06:24] Qualifying Questions/Criteria: Where’s the property? What’s the address? [08:26] Preframe: Creates future emotional state, positive sales call/pitch experience. [10:25] CRM Follow-up: An assistant can take notes, make calls, and enter updates. [11:03] CRM Requirements: Needs to sort and track deals, opportunities, leads, sales. [11:55] LeadSimple: Initial follow-up for texts, emails, campaigns, workflows, and drips. [12:54] Process Street: Facilitates tenant and owner onboarding processes, checklists. [13:10] Calendly: Scheduling tool handles calendars, appointment settings, scheduling. [14:28] Zoom: Face-to-face sales is far more effective and video sales calls create trust. [15:37] Prospecting: Give good sales assistant scripts to start functioning in a BDM role. [16:34] Double-Barrel Close: Someone who does both sides of deals - finds and closes. Tweetables “It’s nurturing these leads and opportunities to get them warm enough, to where they trust you, know you, and like you enough that you can get the deal closed.” “Having somebody that can help to nurture these along, follow-up, and get appointments scheduled can be really powerful and effective.” “Nobody wants to buy low value, so having an assistant can establish you as high value.” “This can eliminate the biggest time-suck in sales, which is all of the follow-up they can do. All of that follow-up for you.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive DiSC LeadSimple Process Street Calendly Zoom Alex Hormozi Transcript 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 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 doing it because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today’s topic came up on my group coaching call today. We were talking a little bit about sales, and I don’t mean real estate sales. When I talk about sales, I’m talking about closing deals for your property management business, selling people on using you for property management, just to eliminate any confusion. My topic today is going to be how can you double your property management close rate without a BDM. A lot of people think, gosh I would need a BDM or I need a business development manager. I need somebody that’s out there hustling and acquiring business. I’m going to assume you’re doing the sales in the business or you already have a BDM or you have somebody, but you want to speed things up. You want to go a little bit faster. You want to double the close rate, double the amount of deals and business you’re getting. I’m going to share with you a secret today, really simple. A lot of clients come to me and they’re like, gosh. I just need somebody doing sales all the time, but I can’t afford a BDM or I can’t find one. Now, there is sort of this waystation in-between, getting a full-time BDM, offloading it completely off of your plate, and doing it yourself. If you’re doing it yourself, you’re probably doing it part-time. You’re maybe dedicating two hours a day, maybe less. But you should at least be doing two hours, five days a week, which means 10 hours a week. Somebody is doing sales or focused on that side of the business. It’s the lifeblood of the business. That means, you’re at least a [...] part-time salesperson for at least 10 hours a week in your business. You’ve got at least that going on. Now, if you have that, this waystation in-between, really simple, you can’t afford a BDM, maybe you can’t find one, maybe you like doing it, you just want to go a little bit faster, and you want to double the amount of deals. One of the things I did when I got overwhelmed in my own business, back when I was doing all the sales, is I got an assistant. And they were like, what do you need? Well, I could use some help with the sales follow-up. Getting a sales assistant is this secret, this little waystation in-between, that can help you double your close rate. It can help you double the amount of deals that you’re getting on. The most challenging thing in sales a lot of times time-wise is just follow-up. It’s nurturing these leads and opportunities to get them warm enough, to where they trust you, know you, and like you enough that you can get the deal closed. Having somebody that can help to nurture these along, follow-up, and get appointments scheduled can be really powerful and effective. What would you have this person do? A good sales assistant, really, is just an appointment setter. They’re calling these people up saying, hey, this is Jason Hull’s assistant. He just wanted to get back together. When would be a good time? Do you have some time on Wednesday at two o’clock, or would Thursday maybe at three o’clock be better? What works for you? That would be really effective. Me, getting a sales assistant or an assistant that was facilitating this at the time back when I needed it really badly, helped me double the amount of business that I was able to acquire. My revenue doubled, my gross revenue in the business. So this could be very effective. The thing you’re going to have is a really good sales assistant. Let’s talk about the requirements. They need to be somebody that really loves making phone calls. This is a challenge nowadays because a lot of millennials and younger do not like talking on the phone. They don’t like talking to people. There’s a lot. They opt for text messaging, they rather send an email, so they’re always trying to shift away from having a conversation, as if that’s uncomfortable. You have to find somebody that actually enjoys talking to people. On a DiSC profile, they’re going to show up as probably a high I, they’re going to have a lot of conversational skills, they’re going to like to talk or feel comfortable talking about themselves and with other people. They enjoy connecting with people. They probably also need a certain amount of D in the DiSC profile, which means they’re somewhat driven. This is the stereotypical sales profile as a DI. Now, they can have other attributes. They might have some S for stabilizing, which means they want to take care of people. They don’t have to be an aggressive, natural salesperson. They just need to be somebody who’s comfortable making phone calls. If you find this person, now you need to onboard and train them. You want to make sure that this person, what are they going to do for you? They’re going to help you. One, they’re going to help you a little bit with qualifying people. They can ask qualifying questions. Hey, I’d love to get you on a call with Jason. In order to do that, he’s really careful about his time. I’ve got a couple of qualifying questions just to make sure you’re going to be a good fit. Does that sound fair? Then you say, yeah sure. Then you have some qualifying questions that they can ask. For example, if it’s for property management instead of my business model, you would say maybe, are you current on all your house payments? Where is the property located? What’s the address? What are your long-term goals? Okay, cool. I really appreciate you giving me all this info. I think this will be a really good fit. Give them some criteria so they can help with the prequalification question. What that does is it places you—who is going to be the closer—in a position of being kind of the sexy girl or guy at the bar. You’re the one that gets to make a choice. Instead of them being the prize, it shifts. It’s them realizing that hey, this person that I’m going to talk to—which is the business owner—is the prize. They don’t work with everybody. They’re careful about who they take on, which suggests they’re high value. Nobody wants to buy low value, so having an assistant establish you as high value. Not only that, but assistants get a pass when it comes to follow-up because they’re not the salesperson. Just by them being able to reach out and say, hey, this is Jason’s assistant. He wanted me to reach out, it sets me on sort of a level of value that’s higher because I’m an assistant. It will make you look even more valuable. Back when I got my first assistant helping with sales, that was almost my only team member. It was just me and I had an assistant, and I was doing pretty much everything. But people perceived me differently and they treated me differently when I would get on the phone with them. The other thing that your sales assistant can do is to preframe. Preframing or some might call this future pacing, but is really effective, like you having a better sales call or sales pitch experience. Preframe might look like this. Hi, this is Suzy, calling to get an appointment scheduled for Jason. I’m his assistant over at DoorGrow. He was really wanting to meet with you again to chat about X, Y, and Z. I think you’re really going to love talking to Jason. That’s a little preframe. Now, if you schedule a time, when’s a good time? Thursday at 2:00 PM or would 3:00 PM be better? He has some time then. Which would work for you? Oh, not that? Okay, how about Friday? Giving them time is going to be more effective. Once you book a time, cool. You schedule that time, then you can use a preframe. They’re going to say something like, Fred, you’re really going to love talking to Jason. It’s going to be an awesome experience for you. Bring your questions if you have some problems with your rental property, or in my case, your property management business. I think you’ll really love what you’re going to hear during that call. That’s a preframe. It creates this future emotional state, they’re imagining this while you’re saying it, and they’re far more likely to experience that one when they talk to you. Make sure that they’re educated and trained in this art of preframing the call. Some sort of positive experience or outcome. They might even let them know future pacing. Yeah, he’s going to get on a call, he’ll talk with you about this and about this, and he’ll talk all about our pricing, how things work, and what we’ll do for you. I think you’ll really be excited to hear what he has to say and how we’re different from other companies. That’s a really powerful, effective thing to do as a preframe. Now, they also can handle all of the follow-up in your CRM. But keep your CRM tight. Make sure all the deals have good notes, follow-up with people, making text and email as you if you want them to do that. Or they can reach out and say, hey, this is the assistant, and they can follow-up. They can feed all this data into the CRM. They can keep notes. If somebody says they’re not interested, they can update that so you don’t waste time. This can eliminate the biggest time-suck in sales, which is all of the follow-up they can do. All of that follow-up for you. Let’s talk about some requirements to really make this work. What do you need? You already have somebody else helping you do sales, assuming you’re doing this all by yourself. At the very basic level, you’re going to need a CRM. You need some sort of sales CRM to keep track of the deals, opportunities, leads, and sales. Each of you can keep notes so that you’re not stepping on each other’s toes. You can see what communication has occurred, and you need to use it. You need to put in your notes from your calls and conversations. You need to mark this deal or opportunity at a certain stage. They know what the next stage is that they need to help move this towards, so that they can call and get an appointment scheduled, to move it to that next level. You want to be able to use this with your assistant and yourself. You need separate logins for this so that you could see who did what. The most common recommendation in the industry is LeadSimple. You can check that out at leadsimple.com. They really should be giving me some sort of affiliate, commission, or something. I’ve sent so much business over to them, but I don’t get paid. But anyway, check out leadsimple.com. And tell them they should send me a kickback. I’m just kidding. Check out LeadSimple. I get really positive feedback. It’s a cool CRM. It can initiate a phone call once a lead comes in to you, which makes it look like you followed it up right away, like you’re just on top of things. Leads are only good for maybe the first 10–15 minutes, and then conversion rates can drop dramatically, maybe even 80% on a lead. It helps you with that initial follow-up, and then you can build out text message, email, nurturing, campaigns, workflows, and drips. LeadSimple also has kind of a process street, sort of clone that can facilitate some of the onboarding tenant and owner onboarding processes and checklists that you want to build in your business. So you’re going to need a sales CRM. Another tool that I would recommend is that you have some sort of scheduling link. This makes it a lot easier to handle calendars, appointment settings, and scheduling, so get something like Calendly. I really like Calendly. You can check it out at calendly.com. They do have a free version, I believe, but you want to get Calendly set up. You can have some different appointment times. You can have separate links for these. I have a 15-minute, 30-minute, and 1-hour appointment link. My assistant knows initial things will be 15 minutes, maybe a lengthier call after that will be 30 or an hour, depending. They know at various stages in the sales pipeline to skip the scheduled, what kind of timeframe. You can also assign follow-up tasks in your CRM to your assistant instead of to yourself as a reminder. And it can be for the same day to (say) get them booked for a 30-minute call, or follow-up and see if they’re ready to schedule another call with me for an hour or whatever. You can book that in using a follow-up task you can assign VA your CRM. So get the Calendly link. The other thing that I would recommend is face-to-face sales is far more effective. I would rather be on a call face-to-face on Zoom, so I would get a Zoom account set up. I believe Calendly has free Zoom integration during COVID. They set this up. I don’t know if it’s still available. You may have to have a paid account in order to connect Calendly to Zoom. Get Zoom. I believe there is a free version of that as well. I have a paid version because I like to be able to record calls to the cloud using Zoom, for coaching, and stuff that I do for later. You can integrate Calendly and Zoom, so they can book a call. They’ll get the Zoom call details and they can show up. People are pretty used to face-to-face. It allows you to read and see their body language. It allows them to see yours. It creates trust and relationships a lot easier by using video, so recommend you try to have video calls, if at all, possible. That could be part of the preframe and the expectation set by your sales assistant. If you want to be able to leverage your sales assistant, somebody has to be dedicating some time through prospecting and growing the business at least 10 hours a week. A really good sales assistant, if they’re not just doing inbound and follow-up, they might be able to do some outbound. If they are a bit more driven and they’re comfortable kind of interrupting people and doing the prospecting side, you could also give them some scripts and have them start to function in a BDM role, and they can graduate to that. You can come up with a commission structure and you can give them half of the commission. You can give them half commission if they initiate or find somebody and then you close them. Later, you can graduate them to a full commission if they do both sides of the deal. Finding them and they close them. This allows you to use a strategy that I learned from one of my mentors, Alex Hormozi, which he called the double barrel close, where you have a setter and a closer, and it can be really effective. Anyway, that is my tip for today. Get yourself a sales assistant. Even if you want a BDM or you’re hiring somebody as a BDM, it’s a great way for them to start to learn your sales process, to start with the follow-up, to just help you go a little bit faster initially. And eventually they can graduate to being a full-fledged BDM. So, starting them as a sales assistant. That can be very affordable, even somebody just stepping in part-time to assist for an hour or two a day can do a lot of follow-up and probably double the amount of deals (at least) you’re getting right now. If you need some help learning how to prospect effectively, you want us to help onboard or help you figure out your sales process, you want to help your BDM or sales assistant figure out how to prospect and help you grow your business, reach out to us. This is the stuff that we do in the DoorGrow & Scale Mastermind. I’m your host, Jason Hull. I hope this has been helpful. And reach out to us if there’s anything that we can do for you. Let us know in doorgrowclub.com, which is our Facebook group. If you’ve gotten yourself a sales assistant and be curious, leave in the comments. As always on our iTunes, please leave us a review if these podcast episodes are effective for you. We would really appreciate it. That’s it. Until next time, to our mutual growth. And I’m out. Bye, everyone.

What is the most important currency when assessing whether or not we’re doing the right things or making really good decisions in the business? Time, energy, focus, cash, or effort? It’s not money, but time that is limited and scarce. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the five currencies for property management entrepreneurs. It is a concept that he was taught by his mentor, Alex Charfen. You’ll Learn... [01:50] Five Currencies: Time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. [02:58] #1 Currency: Time - most important commodity. [04:44] #2 Currency: Energy - some things give us energy and others drain us. [06:19] #3 Currency: Focus/attention - whatever you focus on tends to grow. [08:10] #4 Currency: Cash/money - Buy back more of your time and other currencies. [08:41] Four Reasons: Fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. [09:15] Six Core Functions of business. Which function is your weakest? [09:48] #5 Currency: Effort - put in more than anyone else; your results are assured. [11:20] Currencies: Assess and evaluate yourself related to the five currencies. Tweetables “We trade money in order to get back some of our own time.” “Do less and less of the things that drain you and do more of things that give you energy. You only have so much energy in a day.” Focused Equals Power: “The more focus you have, the more power you’ll have, which means you can go faster.” “If we have enough cash, we can buy other people’s time and get more of our time back.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Alex Charfen 10X by Grant Cardone Transcript 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 life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My topic today is we’re going to chat about the five currencies. This is a concept that I was taught by one of my mentors, Alex Charvin. He would probably explain it differently and he has a great podcast, by the way, for entrepreneurs. It’s (I think) really validating for us as entrepreneurs. I really look up to Alex. He’s a mentor that really helped me take my life and business to another level, which is a goal I aspire to do with all my clients. This is something that I was taught by Alex. These currencies—write them down; these are one through five—I like them in this order. This is just how I’ve always set them and how I like them. This is probably not his order but time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. Let’s get into each of these. Let me just give you an overview. We have five different currencies that we can invest into our personal life and into our business. When assessing whether or not we’re doing the right things or making really good decisions in the business, we want to take a look at it. If I’m investing, you should be getting a return if it’s a good investment. But a lot of business owners are not making a very good decision, they are not investing correctly or well, so they’re not getting a return. If you’re not making enough money in your business, you’re not having enough growth, you’re probably not doing the right things in investing these currencies correctly. Let’s go through each of these. Time. Time, in my opinion, is the most important commodity, is the most important currency, hands down. Why? None of us know when we’re going to die but we’re all going to die. Time is a scarce, limited resource. It’s the most important, your personal time. Now, what’s cool is you can buy the time of others. This is why we have team members, pay employees, pay people to do certain services for us and stuff like that. We trade money in order to get back some of our own time. That is the most important commodity. When we’re young, we do crazy stuff. We work at a job, trading our time, giving up our life, chunks of our life for money. We don’t realize how valuable it is. Eventually, hopefully you’ve realized or starting to realize right now that money is not the most important currency. It’s time. You’ll realize that as you recognize that it’s the one that’s truly limited and scarce. Related to time, you want to take a look at where’s my time going? Is it towards the things that feed me more life, or make me feel joy, or are the things that I really find fun or enjoyable? This goes back to my podcast episode about the four reasons. Make sure you check that out if you haven’t listened to that. I want to make sure that if you’re investing your time, it’s towards those things; you getting more and more of those. When it comes to time, this is why I have clients do things like time studies, and we have a very strategic way of looking at your time so you can assess that. The next is energy. We all have things to give us energy and things that drain us. Me coaching clients energizes me. It’s fun. I woke up like 3:00 in the morning, I was super tired and just before this I got off a coaching call, and I feel bit pumped up. It just gives me life. I enjoy being able to teach. I enjoy being able to share cool stuff. I learn. That’s my why, is to inspire others to love true principles. I love being able to learn cool stuff, share with other people, and see them get it. That’s just so fulfilling for me. It gives me energy. But there are things that drain my energy. I also run a web design agency designing logos and building websites that’s not super energizing for me. It used to be kind of fun for me, but I really did it to make money. That was a job when I was a solopreneur. All of you are doing and wearing hats that you don’t want to wear and doing things you don’t want to do. Over time, moving towards the four reasons, I want you to do less and less of the things that drain you and do more of things that give you energy. You only have so much energy in a day. That’s a currency you can protect, you can work to be healthy, you can do some self care, you can protect yourself enough load things, but you want to pay attention to your energy levels and the things that are energizing you or the things that are draining you. Next is focus or attention. Whatever you focus on tends to grow. Those that are into the law of attraction stuff, recognize this, but wherever they say energy flows where attention goes. If you want more of your energy to go towards more positive things, you need to place more attention on those things. Focus is also one of the greatest secrets in business. So many business owners get diluted in their focus and their attention, and they wonder why they can’t go as fast. A good analogy is to look at light. You can have a flashlight. It’s helpful. It’s more helpful than maybe a candle in some instances, or maybe something’s really dim like a fire. And you can move it around. A flashlight’s really cool. But if you really want to have something really powerful, and you focus that light, you then end up having a laser. A laser can cut through things. It can do really cool stuff.  It can cut machinery, it can do some really powerful stuff. It can do dangerous stuff. Focused equals power. This is a principle in the universe. The more focus you have, the more power you’ll have, which means you can go faster. In the property management business, for example, if you are diluted in your focus—you’re doing lots of different types of management while you’re small—you’re not going to be able to grow as effectively in any of them. It’s like trying to run multiple races at a time. You’re scattered, you’re diluted. A lot of entrepreneurs lose focus and get distracted by opportunity. You want to make sure that you can determine, where’s my focus going and is it giving me more of the things that I want? More all of the other currencies maybe or more towards the four reasons? Currency number four is cash. Cash also, like all of these, is a limited resource. But if we invest our currencies correctly, we can get more of it and we can turn that cash into more of these other currencies if we’re investing correctly. If we have enough cash, we can buy other people’s time and get more of our time back, and then we can do more of the things that energize us. A lot of business owners, as I said on a previous podcast when I talked about the four reasons, make more and more money and they have less and less of the four reasons. Just to recap, just real quick, fulfillment, freedom, contribution, support. These are the things we want to get from our business. We want to make sure focus is tight. A lot of business owners, the reason you’re not growing right now is because you are focused on the things that the business is already doing well and you’re not putting the majority of your focus as a leader and as a business owner on the things the business is struggling with currently. So go back and listen to my episode about the six core functions of business. That’s where you can determine where should our focus be as a company right now. Which function is our weakest. Cash. It’s also important to recognize cash. You’ll need cash flow. You need some space and some padding there that’s going to give you a lot more ability to focus and have attention. Cash can affect all of these other functions. The next is effort. This is the last one, number five, effort. We only have so much physical energy, physical strength that we can do. After that we can put into something. But if you’re willing to put in more effort than anyone else is willing to put in, your results are assured. A great book on this is Grant Cardone’s book, 10X. I like the audio book because you get to hear him talk about it and share these principles. The basic principle is if you do 10 times the effort—it’s very focused on the effort attribute—you put 10 times the effort towards something, you’re going to get the result. And it’s 10 times more than what you’d typically think you’ll need, and the results are assured. There’s no way you’re not going to hit that goal. Now, all of these five currencies will show up on a time study, except cash, really. Time study will reveal to you where your time, your energy, your focus, and your efforts are going currently, so that you can figure out how to reinvest it. It’s a cheat code to having greater productivity. But my goal for you is not to become just more productive. I don’t need you to do more stuff if you want your company to grow. You don’t really have to do more. In fact, the ultimate goal is for you to do less things but spend more time and attention doing the things that you really enjoy doing, that give you energy. Take a look at yourself through the lens of these five currencies—time, energy, focus, cash, and effort—and figure out where is this going. If you want to work with me as a coach, go through my proprietary time study process, to identify your plus and minus signs energetically, figure out how to reinvest and eliminate the interruptions in your business that are stealing money, focus, time, and effort, and improving that. This is something that I coach clients and doing once a quarter. So reach out and let’s connect. We’d be glad to help you. This (I believe) is the greatest secret to offloading, figuring out how you can get out of being the biggest bottleneck in your own business, is just starting with assessing your time and seeing where these currencies are going. Take a look at your currencies, assess yourself, evaluate yourself related to these currencies, and figure out how am I doing in each of these? Give yourself a rating. Am I deficient? Where am I weak? Am I weak on cash? Am I weak on time? Am I weak on energy? Am I weak on focus or attention? Am I weak on effort? And then start to dedicate a little bit more of those currencies towards what’s weak so that you can improve that. If you’re weak on time, maybe you’ve got good cash. So invest some of that cash towards time. Maybe you’re weak on effort. You’re like, I’ve kind of floating and coasting right now, and I really would like some more of these other currencies. Cool, invest more time and put in some more effort towards it. More attention and focus, that if you want more cash, certainly a way to do that is invest more of those. All right. That's what I'm going to say about the five currencies. If anybody has questions about these, feel free to hit us up in our Facebook group, doorgrowclub.com which is our free community. Make sure to apply. We don’t let everybody in. Once you’re inside, you can ask questions related to these things. Or send me a message on Facebook or through any other social media platform. I might see it. I try to monitor them all. We’d be happy to help you move your business forward. So take a look at your currencies. That’s it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. I hope everybody has an awesome week and success. Bye, everyone.

Most property management businesses suck because they have miserable business owners, but it's not because of the industry. There are unhappy business owners in any business, in any industry, or in any business category. What would you do differently now that you run a property management business? Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about 13 common mistakes made and tips on how to avoid them when starting a property management business. These are things that you should know or wish you had known. Some are really practical and some are a bit more high-level recommendations. You’ll Learn... [02:23] Out of Alignment: You’re in the wrong role, doing wrong things in the business. [04:00] Mistake #1: Not using or choosing cheapest property management software. [05:49] Mistake #2: Don't give out your real direct cell phone number to tenants, owners. [07:03] Mistake #3: Learn how to win the online reviews game before starting to play it. [08:17] Mistake #4: Do not be the cheapest in your market. Price yourself at the top. [09:51] Mistake #5: Your business name should always end with property management. [10:50] Mistake #6: Save time and money - grow a business without paid advertising. [12:39] Mistake #7: Cycle of Suck - don't take on shady clients or properties. [13:57] Mistake #8: Do not hire until you’re clear on what matters - culture, values. [16:36] Mistake #9: Everybody has a fantasy when starting a business. Kill the fantasy. [19:20] Mistake #10: Make property management the focus, especially in startup stage. [21:24] Mistake #11: Protect your time; offload emergency/after-hours calls, eventually. [22:27] Mistake #12: Distraction of Opportunity - reduce variations and focus on niche. [24:48] Mistake #13: Don’t be a know-it-all; collapse time by getting a coach, mentor. Tweetables “Choose property management software that you can live with forever.” “You need to insulate, protect yourself, and not be reachable all the time by cell phone.” “It's better to be the most expensive than the cheapest, in my opinion.” “There's one thing that without it you don't have a business—clients.” “When you start to value yourself and value your time, other people will start to value you and value your time.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Rent Manager Talkroute Burner Abodia Latchel EZ Repair Hotline Property Meld OpenPotion The Myers and Briggs Foundation Telegram Messenger National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Transcript All right, we are live. 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, you are 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. 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. Okay. Today, what we are going to be talking about—this was prompted by a question that I saw posted on Facebook. Somebody asked a question like, what do you wish you could do differently now that you run a property management business? If you could go back in time, what would you do differently? There were lots of jokes, hahaha, from people saying I would start a pizza company or pizza place, or I'd do something else like I wouldn't do it. It is a common joke. There's pain underneath those statements because there are a lot of property management businesses that a) suck, and that b) because they have miserable business owners. They're not happy. I just want to point out that I don't believe it's because of the industry. There are miserable business owners in any business, in any industry, or in any business category. I think the challenge is that the business owners that are not happy out there, which there's a lot in a lot of industries, there's a lot in the property management industry. But the ones that are not happy are the ones that are not in alignment with the four reasons, which I talked about in an earlier episode. Go back and check that out. If you're out of alignment with that, the real issue is that you are doing the wrong things in the business. You are in the wrong role. So that's the challenge. I want to talk about 13 tips that you should know if you're a startup property manager. These are probably 13 things you wish you had known or should know if you're starting a property management business. Some of these are really practical and some of these are a little bit more high level, mindset, or whatever. I just made a list of the 13 most common mistakes that I see people make starting property management companies. I've made a pretty decent living in helping property managers either start up their businesses or most of the time, helping clean up the mistakes they made during the startup process. It's a lot of what I do at DoorGrow. So I've talked to thousands of property managers. I've gotten to see inside a lot of businesses. I get to hear what actually goes on behind the scenes—the pain, the sorrow, the sadness, and the joy when we get things figured out and dialed in. So let's get into these. These are in no particular order or priority. These are just how they came into my head. One of the biggest mistakes that I see, number one, is choosing property management software based on what's cheapest. That's a mistake. A lot of times, property managers either don't use the software in the beginning or choose something cheap or less expensive. My recommendation is to choose property management software that you can live with forever. The reason being, if you can choose software that you can live with forever, that software is going to save you a lot more money in the long run. You're going to end up spending a lot of money on staffing costs instead. So if you go cheap on software in the beginning because you're like, hey, this is a lower price, those costs get translated and pushed on to staff. Don't pick it based on what's cheapest and the same, get the most expensive software but get the software that can do the most, that's going to give you the most leverage. I typically like to recommend Rent Manager simply because I hear the most positive feedback on it. It's not an investor-backed company where their primary goal, if they're honest, is to please their financial backers. That's not their goal, some software out there. It's not owned by some bigger conglomerate or company, as far as I know. They have one of the best property management conferences I've heard in the industry. But clients seem to just really love Rent Manager. They love that software. I've seen it used by really large enterprises that have thousands of doors in multiple markets. I've seen it used by startups. It seems to work for a variety of different types of management. It has an open API. It connects and integrates with everything is what that means, generally. So that would be my recommendation. Don't push the cost on the staff because staff are far more expensive. All right. Number two, don't give out your direct real cell phone number to tenants and owners. It's so easy to do early on. Real estate agents are absolute horrors with their cell phone numbers, that happens all the time. Every guy or gal in real estate just gives it out to everybody, puts it on park benches, puts it up on yard signs. For property management, that's a whole different game. You need to insulate, protect yourself, and not be reachable all the time by cell phone. So you need to get some other service or you might get something like Talkroute, which works great with cell phones, low latency, voice over IP system that allows you to use your cell phones. It works really well and it's low cost. You can build out a phone tree, protect yourself, and route it to different services that you bring on later. You can even go and just get some sort of phone app in the App store to get a second phone number that can allow you to do text messaging, phone calls. I've heard of some people using an app called Burner and some of these. Have a different phone number than your real cell phone number and just save that for those that you really want to be able to reach you—family, friends, not clients and customers. Number three, learn how to win the online reviews game before you start to play it and are losing, which is the default. If you're a restaurant in the restaurant industry, this is critical. You start up a business, you're hoping that it's going to make money, you put on some investment into it, you start getting some bad reviews initially because you make some mistakes, and suddenly, it just compounds, piles on, you just get more and more bad reviews, and you're not getting good reviews. The business could die. Now in property management, the default also is that you're going to get bad reviews from tenants and owners. They're going to be frustrated, tenants especially, if they don't get their deposit back or whatever. You need to know how to play this game. In DoorGrow Academy, we have a training called Reputation Secrets and then teach clients how to win at this game, but you need to have a strategy for this before the reviews just start to happen. Because the default is you will lose and that is a significant impact. A lot of people mistakenly assume they'll just get good reviews if they just do good service, and that is not the case. That's not how the review game works. So before you start to play that game, you need to know how to win that game, and it's not a hard game to win. Number four, one of the biggest mistakes I see, my really big tip here is do not price yourself as the cheapest. Do not be the cheapest in your market. Do not price yourself at the low end of the market or at the bottom. There's already a race to the bottom. This is a fast track to building a business. It's not sustainable, that's painful, that's uncomfortable. It helps you attract more and more of the bottom of the barrel, the worst clients, and residents. That's not the type of business that you want to get caught up in. Price yourself at the top of the market. It's better to be the most expensive than the cheapest, in my opinion. There's a lot more nuance to that and pricing psychology and strategy that we get into in our Mastermind program that I love to coach clients on because I have not yet had a property manager come to me that had really effective pricing. It's always something we can optimize, improve, and then they can close more deals at a higher price point more easily. That price sensitivity, that sense of scarcity that they're getting pushed back on, that price sensitivity and pain that they're dealing with with owners, there are lots of ways to mitigate that, remove it, or capture better prospects that are not like that, like the cheapos of the world. That's the default. That's what most property managers do. They try to be the cheapest or they try to charge what everybody else is charging in their market. They're all making similar mistakes. Number five, make sure your business name ends with property management. It's one of the most common mistakes. Almost every startup seems to have real estate or realty in the name, or they choose something generic so they can do it from multiple industries like properties. They might even put rentals, which is weird. So real simple, when it comes to branding, we've helped rebrand hundreds of companies—redoing their names, redoing their logos, hundreds. We are the world's leading property management branding and design agency. Nobody's done more rebrands than us in the property management space. The most common mistake that we see is just not ending your name with property management. Just end your name with property management and be a property management company. Be a master of one trade instead of a jack of all trades and a master of none. All right, number six. Learn to create a business without paid advertising and you'll never struggle with growth, and you will save a [...] ton of time and money. Cold lead advertising takes a lot of money. It wastes a lot of time because you have to nurture these leads. There are far better strategies for growth. What do I mean by cold leads? I'm talking about SEO, pay-per-click like Google ads, content marketing, social media marketing, and pay-per-lead services. You do not have to do these things in order to grow your business. In fact, there are faster and better ways. I'm not saying don't do those. All of those can be effective if you do the right things, but they can be costly, and that's not where you should start spending your time and energy. The number one way that almost every business owner I've talked to ever in property management, I asked, where have you gotten the majority of the doors you have now? It's always word of mouth. So figure out how to play that game, figure out a way to create it. to intentionally make it, and to be outbound about it instead of just inbound, which means waiting for stuff to just come to you. So we have an outbound partner prospecting program that we teach in DoorGrow Academy and in Referral Secrets in our Mastermind program. This has helped some of our clients to have hundreds of doors in a year's time without spending any money on advertising. It just takes time, but it takes less time than it would be if they were just being spoon-fed a bunch of cold leads. It takes less time and they get more doors. It's a no-brainer. The next item, number seven, don't take on shady clients or properties. I've talked over and over again about what I call the cycle of suck. Take on a shitty owner, you have a shitty property, you have a shitty tenant, you're going to get a shitty reputation in the marketplace. This is the cycle of suck. Escape the cycle of suck, filter at each stage, and the most important is be careful about the types of owners that you take on. This is the most important thing because this starts the entire cycle. Be careful about the properties that you take on. Of course, screen the tenants—you all do that, and have a strategy in place. We've already talked about reviews. Have a strategy in place to get more good reviews and to mitigate, filter, or prevent negative reviews. If you are able to do this, you will have significantly lower operational costs than most property management companies, which means you'll be more profitable and you'll be able to invest more into growth, into your team, and into scaling your operations. So don't take on shitty clients and properties. Really simple. In the beginning, a lot of people think they need to take on everybody. This is one of the most common mistakes and they do it at too low of a price point. They're needy, needy is creepy, and it prevents you from getting on a better business. All right, the next item. The next tip for startup or starting a property management business is do not hire until you are clear on your culture, which means your values, what matters to you, and you've created that in a tangible way, which means it's written, it's documented, and you are clear on what you should be doing in the business. Meaning, you are clear on the things that bring you those four reasons. You know what gives you more fulfillment, more freedom, and more contribution so that you can get more support. You need to understand yourself. Because if you don't understand yourself, you're going to do the wrong things as a business owner. You're going to wear every hat in the beginning. The hats you need to get rid of are the ones that are minus signs for you. They are not energetic plus signs. They do not give you life and energy. You need to strategically focus on that. I talked about time studies and things like that in our program, ways of figuring out which things energize you versus draining you. I talked about the five currencies of time, energy, effort, focus, and cash. Figuring out what is going to give me the most fulfillment and freedom. What's going to bring me more joy? You need to understand what that role is that you're going to be moving towards. You don't have to do anything in the business in the long run. You could offload everything, but there are certain things that are going to bring you joy and fulfillment and that's why we have businesses. That's one of the main reasons. So you need to figure out what is that for you so that you can build the right team around the right person. If you're showing up as the wrong person, you start to build a team, and you don't have the culture, and you only have yourself clear, you're going to build the wrong team. You're going to be frustrated with them, and you're going to be like most of the 200–400 door companies that the business owner is in a state of constant burnout and frustration. Just frustrated that they cannot get their team members to think and make decisions because they've set up their business the wrong way, they are annoyed, and they are micromanaging everybody even though they don't want to admit it. So make sure you get clear on that. That's something that we help clients with. Clients give me feedback. They dial this stuff in that that was the most important training and material they went through in our Mastermind program, which is what I call Purpose Secrets and getting that clarity. It helps them build their dream team so they can have their dream business. If you don't have the business of your dreams, as one of my coaches and mentors would say, then you are not yet the person that can run it yet. That means you just don't have clarity on yourself. All right, the next thing is number nine. Tip, starting a business. When we start a business, we all have a fantasy. It is so sexy, it is so seductive that we're willing to take a risk against the advice sometimes of family and friends, and we start a business. We spend money, we spend massive amounts of time and energy to do this, to go towards this fantasy. Everybody has a fantasy when they start up a business. You have to be willing to kill the fantasy. So this tip is to kill the fantasy early. You know that you're delaying this death of the fantasy. What I mean by killing the fantasy is if you want a reality, if you want a real business that actually pays you, because fantasies are sexy, nice, and they make you feel good, but they don't pay you. They don't actually give you a real-life result. The fantasy just makes your brain feel good and gives you some chemicals. But if you want to have a real business, you have to get a reality business, you have to kill the fantasy if you want that. You have to let it die. So kill it early. What I mean by this is some business owners delay this. They mentally masturbate as one of my mentors or coaches would say. They don't take the right action and they spend a lot of time doing all the action that's safe. I'm going to work on my branding, my business card, my logo, or my website for 100 hours. They're doing all this stuff, and they're not getting clients and they're not getting paid. You don't need any of that stuff. The only thing that you need in order to have a property management business. There's one thing that without it you don't have a business—clients. That's the one thing and you can just get clients. I've seen people have hundreds of doors without a website, without a good brand name, without a logo. Certainly, these things can help improve things and make things go faster. But you don't need t-shirts printed, you don't need a cool brick and mortar building. You just need some tenacity, some work ethic, and to take the right action. That's the first thing I start clients on if they're in a startup stage or they want to grow their business, we start them down to what I call the Grow Program First. It lets you add doors. Then we can clean up branding, website, and your sales pipeline, and then it'll go faster. But there's no point having something that's going to help you go faster if you're not even moving yet. Let's get you moving and making some money first. Kill the fantasy early, do the uncomfortable hard stuff first. If it's uncomfortable, if you're avoiding it, if you don't want to do it, it's probably a sign that that's where you should go. Lean into the pain early in the business and the business will be less painful forever. All right. What is next? Number 10, make property management the focus. At least during the startup stage. I've seen so many that have it as a side hustle. It's a side hustle for years where they sometimes come into my program, it's a side hustle, and they don't even choose to focus on it. Then after about three or four months, they realize they finally get honest and connect to reality, they're not going to do the work. Because they don't really want to invest in that business or focus on it, and then they just give up, quit, stop the business, or just leave it where it is, and they don't make it a focus or priority. So if you want just to succeed and go fast, give it a real chance of success. If you have a baby that's born, you need to take really good care of that baby, at least for the first little while, first few years. Because otherwise, that baby is not going to be able to feed itself, change itself, take care of itself. That's your business. Your business is this baby. You need to take care of it in the beginning. Eventually, you can build a team, you can build systems, you can offload things, you can focus on other passions or other businesses if you want to, but it needs to be a focus if you want this to work. One of the biggest challenges I see is they don't make it a focus and they artificially keep feeding into this business from the resources, revenue, and staff in their existing healthy business. So then you end up with this cancerous tumor on the side of a healthy real estate company, for example, that's a property management business, and it's not profitable. I had one client that had 600 doors when he first came to me and was making $0 in his business. That's painful. Too many expenses, too much staff, too many resources, and a cycle of suck. All these things were going on, lack of technology, et cetera because a healthy company would have had to make significant changes at about 100 doors or so or earlier just to break the 100 door barrier. They were able to artificially skip past that in terms of door count because they had another business they could siphon resources from. Make sure your business can stand on its own two feet and make it the focus. Number 11, protect your time and offload as early as possible emergency or after-hours maintenance calls. You need to value yourself and protect yourself. You could get a service like Abodia, Latchel, or EZ Repair Hotline I've heard good things about. You could sign up, eventually, once you get maybe 50–100 doors. It might make sense to get a service like Property Meld and they work really nicely, I guess with EZ Repair Hotline under their full-service plan. I've heard great things about Property Meld service over and over again from clients. But as soon as possible, offload emergency or after our mains maintenance calls. You're the business owner and protect yourself, protect your time, and protect your time with your family. When you start to value yourself and value your time, other people will start to value you and value your time. That means they’ll want to pay you, they’ll want to give you money because you're valuable. You have something to offer them. Don't be low value. All right, so the next thing is the number 12 tip when starting a property management business. One of the biggest problems I see with entrepreneurs is this distraction of opportunity. We see opportunities everywhere as entrepreneurs. So my big tip is to reduce variations as soon as possible. Variation, what do I mean by that? I mean shift your focus towards simplicity and doing as little as possible, like one thing, one main business. You will go faster. Reducing variation means having less types of management that you offer. Don't try to do commercial, residential, multifamily, trailer parks, and storage units. Pick a niche and really focus on it, reduce variation. Don't have custom contracts that you're trying to negotiate every time. Get a lawyer, get your contract tight, determine this is what it's going to be, and improve it over time. Don't fold on it. They're looking for an expert that they can trust. Be that expert that they can trust. Don't fold. Don't cave in. Reduce variation in the business. The more variation you have, the more side hustles you have, the more random things that you're trying to do, the more service you think might be a good idea that you're trying to incorporate, if you do those at the wrong time, it just creates speed bumps. It slows you down, so try to reduce variation. My business, we basically have one product, one service, one sales pipeline. Our growth has skyrocketed as a result. In the beginning, I had this company called OpenPotion. It was OpenPotion Website Design and Business Solutions. I was like, I'm going to set up computer networks, set up businesses' phones. I could do their websites, I can help with logos. I was going to do everything because I thought I could do all this stuff. Overtime, we've done less and less and less and made ourselves more and more focused. Even focusing on a niche in becoming DoorGrow so that we can become more effective and reduce the amount of variation in the business. It allows us to go deeper, help our clients even more, and reduces the complexity so that we can service more clients more quickly and provide better service. Number 13, do not be a know-it-all and collapse time by getting a coach. Now I know you're like Jason, you're a coach, come on. This is biased. Transparency time here. I was that guy. I tried to do everything myself in the beginning. I tried to watch the YouTube videos and read every book. I thought, I'm so smart, I can figure anything out. I am smart enough to probably eventually figure everything out, but it takes a decade to go that route when you could collapse time in a year if you worked with somebody that already has invested a decade into this. I started this business in 2008. I've been helping property managers since then. It's over a decade. I've also been able to incorporate knowledge, wisdom, and ideas from hundreds of clients, thousands of property managers that I've talked to, and being able to pull in the best ideas. I'm really good at piecing together various pieces, ideas, and creating new things. It's just kind of my area of genius. As an ENTP, if you're familiar with Myers Briggs, I'm always looking for truth and looking for what works. That's kind of my skill set, but the trap in that is I always thought I could figure it out. But when I got coaches, I started actually go fast. Nothing helps you collapse more time than getting mentors or coaches that know what they're doing. They can help you move forward a lot faster. When I started getting coaches and mentors, and I'm very careful about who I choose as mentors or coaches nowadays because I'm at a level to where a bad coach or a bad mentor could do a lot of damage. One of the things I look at is, do I want to be more like that person? Do they have a lifestyle that I would like to have more of in my life? Do I feel like they're a good person? Do they have values? That's important to me. Do they have knowledge that they can share? Are they sharp? Get a coach, get resources around you, get mentors. It's going to help you collapse time far faster. This takes humility. It's hard for us as business owners, especially early on because we think we know a lot. Over the years, a lot of pain, failures, and mistakes helps us learn we really have no clue. We're all just winging it. There's a lot of people that are far beyond where I'm at that I could learn from. Don't be a know-it-all. Get a coach and collapse time. If you feel like I might be able to be that coach and might be able to help you grow and scale your business, we have over 80 businesses in our Mastermind, which means over a hundred people in our Mastermind program that we are coaching, mentoring, and helping move their business forward. You'll get access to me with one-on-ones. You'll get access to me through video, voice, text message through Telegram messenger. We do two weekly calls each week, and we have a repository of training material I built out in doorgrowacademy.com that you get access to as well. Then you get the support and help from my team. We included a website in the program and branding. All this is just part of this mastermind experience. My goal is to keep clients forever so that I'm adding value. It's very easy for me to help a client offset the cost of this program by double, so that this program feels like it's now paying you. Very easy, no brainer. So if you're interested in the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind, reach out to us, reach out to us, reach out to my team, check us out at doorgrow.com. Join our Facebook group at doorgrowclub.com. We would love to talk with you and see if you might be a good fit for our culture, for our program, and for the types of clients we want to help and service. There's nothing I enjoy more really in my business than helping coach the clients. It's super fun. It's Wednesday. I got to do one of those calls today. It's super rewarding being able to hear all the wins, people adding doors, hear the questions, and be able to support these people in growing their businesses. I'd be honored to be able to support you. It's my passion. It's what I love doing. With that, those are the 13 tips for those that aren't in the startup stage. If I were to add a bonus one here, I would say, get around other people doing what you want to be doing. Join NARPM, get around other property managers, get to know your local competition. It's a friendly space. Create some relationships and be connected. Don't be an island in your business. Our mastermind can be a support or channel for that as well, but make sure you're connected to people. I'll leave it at that and until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.