Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

What do you want to do with your life? Sit on the sidelines in a cubicle or travel the world? Take control of your life instead of watching it pass you by. Consider investing, start your own business, and enter the world of entrepreneurship. Today, I am talking to Reed Goossens, Lead Asset Manager/Chief Operations Officer of Wildhorn Capital, about investing in the United States. After spending two years abroad, having a great time, and meeting the girl of his dreams, Reed returned to Australia to sit in a cubicle as a civil structural engineer and wonder how he could get paid to travel. You’ll Learn... [03:17] Real Estate Investing: Rich Dad Poor Dad ignited Reed’s interest in being an entrepreneur. [03:45] Reed’s Journey: Leaving the safety of his cubicle in Australia to moving to America without a job for the love of his future wife.  [03:58] No job, no network, no problem: Took just six months for Reed to find a job in the United States and purchase his first investment property.  [04:29] Investing in the U.S. and 10,000 Miles to the American Dream: Reed went from reading Rich Dad Poor Dad to writing his own books on real estate investing.  [04:51] Structural Engineering: Prepared Reed for his future in America when it comes to construction. He’s built about half-a-billion dollars worth of infrastructure worldwide.  [06:21] Do you want financial freedom? How to get started in real estate investing.  [07:37] Benefits: Real estate investing creates cash flow, appreciation, and amortization.  [08:07] Rental properties aren’t turnkey, but property management is key to success.  [10:00] How to find a good property manager? Business culture with growth opportunity. [14:10] Ok Boomer: It’s not just about doing work whether you’re miserable or not. People want meaning and purpose.  [15:27] Invest in Yourself: Self-educate by reading books, listening to podcasts, joining local meetup groups, and expressing a willingness to learn.  Tweetables Structural Engineer: Scheduling, foundation and soil issues, you name it, throw it.  You make money when you buy, you lose it through bad property management. Culture: Critical and pivotal to foundation of business and why clients can trust them. Change and grow. People want meaning and purpose. Get out of your own way.  Resources Reed Goossens Email Reed Goossens Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you 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 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. Today’s guest, I’m hanging out with Reed Goossens of Wildhorn Capital. Reed, welcome to the show.  Reed: Good day, Jason. Thanks for having me on the show, mate. Jason: All right. You’ve got a really cool accent. Tell everybody where you’re from. Reed: From deep West Texas, mate, down below New Zealand and Australia. Jason: Very deep Texas. Got it. Reed: I’m originally from Australia. Grew up an Aussie, I went to school there, and moved to the United States back in 2012 when I moved here for two loves. One love was for my then girlfriend and now wife, and the other love was for the Big Apple. That’s really how it got me to the United States. Jason: All right. Those women man, they get us to move. They just do it. Awesome. We’re going to be talking about investing in the US but before we get into that, tell us a little about how you got into this and then lead us right into this topic. Reed: Sure. Let’s do it. My background is in structural engineering. I went to university for structural engineering, graduated in 2007, went abroad which means going overseas, and worked in the London 2012 Olympic games for about a year back in 2008. Then, I moved to the south of France, had an incredible life journey down there and that’s actually where I met my American wife or at the time, girlfriend. We fell in love and after galavanting around the south of France, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean. I worked for some Russian billionaires on some super yacht (it’s a whole story in itself). I found myself back in Australia in 2010 in a cubicle working as a civil structural engineer. The whole idea of I spent these two years abroad, having a great time, meeting the girl of my dreams, and I’m now sitting in this cubicle going, “Geez, what the hell?” I want someone to pay me to live this life of travel. Really, the thing that came up to me was investing, but I didn’t know what entrepreneurship was. I didn’t even really understand real estate investing. I picked up the book Rich Dad Poor Dad, and that’s back in 2009, a decade ago. That was the spark that got it all started. From there, I took the blinkers off a little bit. I definitely felt like a star athlete sitting on the sidelines, watching my life go by, and I really wanted to take control of that life. Over many years of self-education, I ended up moving to the United States. I quit my safe engineering job in Australia and moved in early 2012 to chase Erica, my wife. I moved here without a job. I didn’t have any network here and over a short period of time I was able to find a job. I think within six months of moving to the United States, I had my first property purchased, a triplex. The various [...] here in the United States for those people who are not aware are very, very low compared to Australia. The whole thing about Rich Dad Poor Dad says, “Get started by putting cash in your pocket and having assets.” That’s really where it got started. Jason: All right, and you’ve written some books. Reed: Yes I have. I’ve written two books, Investing in the US which is the podcast form, now in book form. I’ve written a second book with a couple of other Aussie entrepreneurs called The 10,000 miles to the American Dream. We’ve all moved out here and successfully invested in real estate, inside of real estate businesses, and now we’re sharing our story with the world. Jason: Structural engineering, how do you feel that prepared you for the stuff that you’re doing now. Reed: It hugely prepared me. I probably can walk into a room and run rings around most people in terms of when it comes to construction. As a project manager in a career, I had built about half a billion dollars worth of infrastructure, multi-family retail across the globe. Scheduling, understanding foundation issues, and soil issues, you name it, throw it at me, and we can go bat if you want to go bat. It also got me into a role that I worked for a developer in Long Beach for many years and learned the business side of the real estate game through them as well. Jason: Where are you located now? Reed: I’m in LA. I was in New York for a couple of years back in 2012–2013, then moved back out to sunny California because it was just too cold in New York. Jason: I get it. I’m just north of you. I’m in Los Angeles county, in Santa Clarita. Reed: Nice. We have to go meet up and go surfing some time because I love the beach. Jason: Yeah. The beach is cold, though. Reed: Let’s see, mate. Let’s see. Jason: Yeah. Reed, really cool to connect with you. Let’s get into this topic of investing in the US For those that are listening across the pond or those that are in the US, let’s make this relevant for both of them. Reed: Sure. Let’s do it. What do you want to know? I’m an open book. Jason: Where should we start? How does somebody start investing if they have no clue? You’ve been there at one point and if somebody has never done real estate investing, they haven’t invested themselves whether they’re here or not, how would they get started? Reed: Well, I think the whole idea is about what you want to achieve in your life. Do you want financial freedom? A lot of people get started in real estate investing to achieve some sort of financial freedom. Per my story in the beginning of the show, I felt stuck. I felt trapped in a cubicle. I wanted more to do with my life. The whole thing that drives me, Jason, is the fact that I have a fear of regret. If I wake up when I’m 65 years of age going, “Geez, I wish I’d given that a go,” I’ll have regrets. The whole thing that gets me driving, gets me up in the morning is going out and pushing my boundaries and being uncomfortable. The whole thing about real estate investing is you’ve got to ask yourself, “What do you want to do it for?” Is it to create financial freedom for your family? Is it to create a little bit of extra income? You love your job, but you just want to put your money to work and not sit in a bank? Whatever that might be, real estate investing is really big compared to the stock market investing. It’s one of the best investment vehicles in the world because it has all the benefits. There’s the four benefits as cash flow, there’s appreciation, there’s amortization, and it has appreciation of a long-term in terms of market appreciation. There are many benefits that you can have through investing in real estate compared to other stock investing or bond investing that make it a really quite a safe haven. It really goes back to, “What do you want to grow for your family or for yourself personally?” Once you answer that question, we can get off into the details of how you go do it. Jason: One of the challenges that you’ll see in the real estate industry is that a lot of people will make these claims. You see these gearers that are like, “Hey, just get into real estate investing. Buy this matching program and then it’s going to be easy.” And then they end up with these rental properties that are really difficult and they realize it’s not so turnkey. They’ve got tenants. They’ve got renters. Property management, maybe more than anything, is kind of the gateway to this because property management played a role in the properties that you tend to be involved in or the real estate investment that you do. Reed: Yeah, 100%. In property management, you make money when you buy, you lose it through bad property management. If you don’t have the right property managers on board, you can be royally screwed. We’ve experienced it. We have the daily grind of running a real estate investment firm at Wildhorn Capital, we have a constant struggle with trying to find good bums and seats to make sure that when they’re running our $40–$50 million assets, that they know what they’re doing, and they’re competent. You might be in certain markets which might not attract the right type of property managers. You really got to be really careful at how you select the people who sit at the helm of the ship of any property that you buy. We happen to buy large multi-families, so we have 200–300 units at any one property. There is a lot going on, a lot of moving pieces. Making sure that you have those right people in those positions, to make sure that they’re steering the ship in the right direction and you’re not going to lose money, and the deal’s going to continue to perform for the investors, is really important. My job within Wildhorn Capital is to make sure as a Lead Asset Manager, Chief Operations Officer, is really to make sure that those individual property managers, those individual sites are doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The original point, property management is the key to success. Jason: Love it. I get asked this question all the time when I go on other people’s podcast. They’re always asking me, “How do you find a good property manager? How do you identify them?” I want to put this on somebody else for a change. What do you look for when you’re looking for either a good property management company you’re going to partner with, in situations where you need that, or when you’re doing hiring to find a good property manager? Reed: Let’s answer the first question. To give some context, we have 1700 units across 8 assets in Austin, Texas. We have a third party property manager. I live in Los Angeles. My business partner lives in Austin, but we stood third party better. Probably, what a lot of people would do whether you start with a single family or you’re buying 150 units, you’re probably going to go out at the beginning to a third party. How do you identify those third parties? We just recently went through a transition. We had to fire our original property management company and it really boiled down to a couple of things. One was culture. Business culture is really, really important. If you’re going to be attracting someone to earn, sitting at an asset, $50,000–$60,000 a year, managing a $45 million asset, you better bloody have a good business culture. You need to have room for them to grow, and they want to grow into more than just being a property manager. Maybe they want to be regional. Maybe they want to get into the executive office. If you don’t have that growth opportunity, combined with somewhat a decent pay, and then also the training wheels (I’ll call it), the training services and programs within the company, within the organization, to help those people blossom, really, what we as owners employ these property managers for is to go out into the market and find the best “eggs on the shelf” and form those eggs into great, successful, property managers so our assets can be successful. We look for a couple of things. When we do interview asset managers, we look at how many properties are they currently managing. How many units do they have on the contract? How long are they doing this for? We go and get references from other owners. How have working with ABC property company been? Have you enjoyed their reporting systems? Have you enjoyed their business culture or are they really transparent with you? There’s a lot of things out there that you need to be aware of when you’re hiring and sitting down and “dating” a property manager because you need to go and understand all the rigmaroles that go on with asset managing it. I hope that answered your question. Jason: Yeah. I would agree. I think one of the first things when a property management company comes to me that’s struggling to grow and to figure out how to grow the business, that I will tackle with them is helping them get clarity on that cultural piece. It’s never the thing that they think they need but it’s so critical and pivotal to the foundation of their business. It’s why clients can or cannot trust them. Helping them get clear on their personal why and then helping them get clear on the why their business exists, and to feed that personal why. One of my goals is to create this golden thread all the way from them, the business owner, the property management company, their why, through to the business why, through to the person with the rental property wants. If I can help them create that connection with each potential client, sales happen really quickly. Deals happen very easily because there’s a golden thread of trust between what the person wants and what the business owner wants, the property manager wants. They can see that. It’s transparent. That’s so critical and we have to have culture. It has to exist in order for that to happen. If your team can sense that and can see that, then you’re able to attract A-players. B-players are not going to stay in a company without good culture. Especially millennials and Gen Z, they’re not going to work in a situation in which they’re just getting paid to do something that keeps them miserable. They want purpose. They want meaning. You’ll see a lot of dinosaurs in the industry get really frustrated because they’re saying in business… Then there’s this trend of the “OK Boomer.” But the Boomers are like, “Well, we pay you, so just do the work. Do the freaking work.” That’s not how people want to live nowadays. It’s not just about hunkering down and doing work whether you’re miserable or not. People want purpose. Reed: You bring up a good point. This comes not [...] also rent a business culture, but how you run the business with OK Boomers and a historical way of smacking someone over the back of the head if they’d done it wrong. They’re the old school dinosaur ways of the ways managers work. We’ve come a long way and as much as we—I’m a Millennial, I’m on the early end of it—get criticized for not working and all that sort of stuff. Look at my track record. I come from Australia. For most people, I don’t want to swear on this podcast but you know what I’m going to say. Millennials also have created a lot of changes and disruptions in the way that we approach things and change through our thinking around it. That is really important. If you’re not willing to change and grow, then you’re going to be stagnant and someone’s going to eat you. Jason: [...] Xennial which is kind of Gen X and kind of Millennial, and sort of bridges the gap. I remember dialing phones with the rotary dial. Reed: I was born in 1986, so I still remember that. I remember my first mobile phone in Australia was actually when I was 18 years of age. It was the Nokia 3310 and it’s funny. Jason: I had the Blackberry and I’ve had just about every version of iPhone that’s existed. Reed: Exactly. Jason: I think there’s a big shift in culture. I think that if business owners of larger property management companies, the most successful companies, they all have culture. They all bring up culture. I think a lot of smaller property managers hear them talk about it and go, “I don’t get it. That doesn’t make sense.” Then you’ll see a lot of property managers get to maybe about 200–400 door category and this is where if they don’t have culture, they get stuck. I taught the second sand trap in property management. It’s because they don’t have culture, they’re not able to maintain and retain good staff, and they don’t have a clear vision, clear purpose, clear values, a clear mission statement or whatever you want to call it. There’s a disconnect, and they’re wondering, “Why can’t I just find good managers?” One of my business coaches said this, “If you don’t have the business that you dream of, you’re not yet the person that can run it yet.” I think that a lot of times, we as business owners externalize everything. “Oh, it’s the Millennials. Oh, it’s my marketing. Oh, it’s my website.” Really, I found that if I could get the business owner to see that it’s them and make changes, everything else changes by default. Reed: I have a similar business coach. You have to be a key person of influence in your industry. Whatever industry that is, if it’s property management, if it’s being a real estate investor/entrepreneur. I’m trying to attract investors to me, so I’m putting all the content out there. I’m sitting on this podcast right now, talking about the ins and outs of building business culture. It’s easy as humans to blame something else. It’s someone else’s fault. It’s this one’s fault. But that’s why as humans, we can’t stop learning. If you stop learning, you stop growing. If you stop growing, you’re dead. It’s really about that embracing of change. Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore. If you don’t know something, go ahead and freaking learn it. If you don’t want to go do that, well then you’re dead in the water. That’s this whole mindset of changing the way in which we were historically taught to learn, grow, do business, manage people, expectations, and blah-blah-blah. We can get all into it, but it boils down to, you were right, you have to be a key person of influence in yourself. Your business is you. You are a business and you’ve got to start there. From that, people would want to feed off you, be around you, and then want to grow with you. If you don’t have that growth opportunity, you can’t attract better employees, better clients, and have better outputs for your company. I like this a lot. Jason: It certainly makes a lot of people uncomfortable, too. I get a lot of flack in it in this industry just for being a change bringer. Some people don’t like it. They don’t like that I’m not a property manager, I’m from outside, and I’m bringing change to this industry.  Reed: “You don’t grow, you don’t know.” Jason: Yeah, and for a while, I was kind of fearful of that fact. I thought, “Well, I’ll just stay in the background.” My business coach has consistently pushed me to get more and more uncomfortable as we were talking about earlier. Side question. You’ve got all this business in Austin which is so favorable and friendly to business because I’m legitimately looking to move to Austin. I’m seriously considering it. Why are you still in LA? Reed: Two things. The beach and my wife’s family are from here. Jason: Oh, yeah. Reed: But it’s insane. I set up my company to be a life by design company. It’s me and my business partner and I’ve got a couple of other small employees. I still outsource the general contracting. I still outsource the property management. As we grow, we have 17,000 units now but a 150 million under management with our investors. We want to keep it lean. I’m Australian. I just got back from a 2½ week vacation. It wasn’t really a vacation, I was working every day, but I went to the Rugby World Cup in Japan. I was in Australia. If I have Internet, I want to work and my business partner’s completely aligned with me. We’ve always joked that if we ever need to get HR within the house, we’re done growing. Part of the business of owning multi-family real estate is what can I control? The engineer within me wants to control everything. It’s the business systems, it’s the ecosystems that you create that can truly create true wealth, but like property management, do I want to go off and create a property management company? I know how much property management is a thankless job. I was literally sitting in my property management company’s head office in Austin the other day, beating him over the head about budgets in 2020. Literally beating him over the head. And having clashes with upper management, that they’re saying stuff in these meetings that should have been prepared, so I’ve just literally experienced it with, and that’s got nothing to do with property management. That has got to do with how you manage your people. Some people come into the meeting not prepared for budget review. I literally flew in from LA. What else are we going to do? The expectation is I’m sitting here ready to review budgets with you and you don’t know if these are baked yet. There are all these things that go on with any corporation, that you got to make sure you have your systems in place the hierarchy, and to your point before that, the old dinosaurs, there’s a couple of old dinosaurs in that organization that we have to get a bit of feathers ruffled, but you got at those honest conversations because I am the client and I do expect things to be presented in a certain way. And that’s regardless of the fact that there’s a property management company. Jason: Okay. What did you notice difference-wise between the Australian market? I would imagine you’re still connected to that. We get a lot of Aussies coming over here, where property management is very well-seasoned in Australia. We talk about a property manager as a household word, like a realtor is here, like people know what property management is over there is not as common here. Stats like 80% of single family residential rentals there are professionally managed by property managers. The US is nothing like that yet. What is your perception on the differences between the US market and the Australian market when it comes to real estate investing, rentals, and property management? Reed: I’m going to answer your first question first. This is because I’ve got a different lens on. Yes, you’re correct. My dad has an investment property and he has a property manager. When they say property manager, they’re really a real estate brokerage company that does sales for new homes. To keep the ecosystem going and the lights on when the market’s crap, they do single family rentals or vacation rentals, something like that. So that’s definitely well-baked. What isn’t well-baked? In Australia, we don’t have the per the construction way of financing set up in Australia. We don’t have large multi-family. I moved to the United States and I, as a 29-year old, bought a 150-unit complex. I would never have had the opportunity to do that in Australia because the way in which the financing is set up is that, it’s a condo market. Before it goes into construction, they need to pre-sell X amount of units before it goes under construction. We have all this condominium market. Within the condominiums, you might get ABC property manager to manage one of the units and you have someone completely different managing the other unit. Unlike here in the States where if I go to Texas, there’s a leasing center and I walk into the leasing center because one entity owns the entire thing. One thing really missing from the Australian market is in [...] the commercial property management game. I just mentioned the other day in the corporate office of my PM firm, is like, “Guys, there’s an opportunity to go to Australia and start this out as multi-family starts to have more traction.” I see this as the opposite, that in the commercial multi-family space, America has it dialed in. It’s a true business. I know universities offering degrees in property management now, whereas in Australia, because we don’t have that commercial multi-family space, you haven’t driven that professionalism that I’ve come to expect here. Again, I’m not in the single family world as much you plug in both here or in Australia, so I can’t comment as much on that, but just from the large multi-family commercial space, Australia is very mid-90s, like the Internet was in the mid-90s. No one really understood what it was, so that change. Does that answer your question? Jason: Yeah, very much. That’s very interesting. I love hearing about the contrast, because contrast gives us perspective here in the US. As far as investing in the US, what are some of the most common questions that people ask you when they hear about what you do, they’re curious, and they’re interested (maybe) getting into this? Reed: From a high level, it doesn’t break down what the United States is. I’m going to compare to other western countries, so Australia, Europe, and Canada to some extent. I’m just going to break it down to Australia because I’m from Australia. You guys have 300 million people who live in this country. You are the king of capitalism. You guys have this financing options up the wazoo. You’ve got thousands and thousands of financing options. With a large population, you have forced and you can inhabit north, south, east, west. You can pretty much inhabit the entire land mass. You force these what I call secondary markets. You have the New Yorks, the LAs, the San Franciscos, the Chicagos of the world, where people want destination cities. But then, because of the population and where jobs are being driven to, you have these secondary and tertiary markets. Through secondary and tertiary markets, you have more affordability. And that’s purely driven from a population point of view because you just got so many people. Compare that to Australia, we got the same land mass as America (excluding Alaska, we roughly got the same land mass), but we only have 25 or 26 million people. We have not even one-tenth of the population of what you guys have. America has this really weird, awesomeness of having so much population, so much affordability, it drives cash flow. But there’s also appreciation, it’s got a ton of pro-business, all these things and you compare it to other first world countries. We don’t have the cap rates that you guys have. You look at Charlotte, North Carolina or Austin. Historically was a seven- or eight-cap market. It’s now transition into these very low digit sort of four-fives. You compare that to Sydney, Brisbane, London, or Hong Kong where commercial real estate and real estate in general where cap rates have been like 1% and 2% because the supply and demand is forced to go that low. So, there’s these still pockets of growth in America where, because you can inhabit all these different parts of the country and through job growth, that you guys have these awesome opportunities for investing, and that’s where a lot of people have heard about it, where you’re cash flowing in the States. You got appreciation and all these great financing options. It’s also the US dollar, like where do I come? Where do I sign up? A lot of people hear about it internationally, and they come and want to invest here. That’s why I started investing in the US, and it was more of an idea of my journey, about how I’ve got started because when I first moved here, I had no idea what a credit score was. I had no idea what an LLC was. I had to learn all that stuff. Jason: All right. I think there’s an advantage of doing that. There’s an advantage in coming into an industry or into a market with no experience in it because your eyes are wide open. Nothing’s assumed, you have to learn everything from the ground up. That’s been my experience coming into the property management industry. There were so many things that I looked at and said why is everyone doing it that way? Why are people doing it like that? That doesn’t make sense to me. And why is pay rent the largest called action on their website when they want more owners and that’s the primary goal with this website? There’s this disconnect and I think that’s the advantage of coming in with this outside perspective. You coming into this, what do you think Americans are missing? That they just assume? That has given you this advantage? Because you’re doing obviously quite well. Reed: And thanks to America, I have been doing quite well. Let’s not get any wrong here like I haven’t made money in Australia. People ask me, “How do you make money in real estate?” I’ve never purchased anything in Australia. I got my fishing lines in the water out there, but until I actually go and do something, my whole portfolio is here in the United States. You are correct. Perspective is the difference between what gives me an advantage over someone else. A lot of the American ethos is being around, “I got to go to school, I get this huge debt, I can’t go traveling after university because I got this debt, and then I will get no job. Once I’m in a job, I can’t leave, I’ve got a 401(k).” All of a sudden, you’re 65 and like, “What the hell just happened?” As Australians, it’s in our DNA to go traveling. I didn’t come out of university with six figures of debt. It was absolutely more socialistic society back down in Australia, but that it allowed me to travel the world in open and give me that perspective so I can, when I move here, I can see an opportunity to go invest in America, I’m going to take those with two hands because I can see the opportunities compared to where I come from, how cash flow is so much more prevalent here. The barriers to entry into the United States market from a real estate investing perspective are so much lower than Australia. I can see a lot of people like that, a lot of international folks like that. The message I have for the American folks is realize what’s in your backyard. Don’t be ignorant. I’m telling you this for a reason. Perspective is good. Listen to what I’m saying. Go out and educate yourself on what is in your backyard, what is in the state across from you, or in an affordable market where you can start buying and investing. Ignorance isn’t an excuse anymore. I’ve said that earlier in the show. It’s really true that if you stop learning, you stop growing, and I think that’s what people get in there. Not just Americans. I’ve got Aussie mates back in my hometown, they’ve not left. They’re in that same blinkers on type of scenario. Not that that’s an issue, which is that if you want to understand the benefits of real estate investing, then get out of your own way sometimes and just start going out and educating yourself on what’s in your backyard. Jason: What would be a good place to start with getting education towards this? Reed: Well, sitting here right now talking about it, listening to your show. I still remember when I moved to the United States, I was going to real estate investment seminars made up in Aussie, and I remember being pitched to pay $10,000–$20,000 for a guru to help me teach everything. Then, when I got to the States, particularly in New York, the Big Apple, the firehose of information, it was all readily available at my fingertips. Websites, podcasts, books, meet-up events.  You don’t have to spend a lot of money, but at the end of the day, you do have to spend time. If you don’t want to spend the money investing in yourself or the time, then you’re never going to go anywhere. You got to understand that this is an investment in yourself. So, I would start by listening to podcasts. They’re free. Picking up a couple of books that can start educating you on whatever niche you want to get involved with, with real estate. Maybe just financial education and literacy that you need to be sharper on. Join a local meet-up group for real estate. I encourage everyone listening to the show, if you don’t have any experience, if you go to two meet-ups a month for the next six months, that’s 12 meet-ups. I bet your bottom dollar and I bet you $100 that they will know, or they would have created a circle around them, more knowledgeable than they were listening to the show today. It’s about getting out there, being willing to pick-up a book, being willing to say, “Hey, it’s okay that I don’t know what this is about, but I’m willing to learn.” I’m an example of that. I’m self-taught, I went to university with structural engineering, and now I run a multi-million dollar investment firm. You can change. The real advice is that we are in the digital age. It’s all at our fingertips. Go out, start investing yourself from an education perspective, and you will see change. Jason: Reed, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. How can people get more information from you as to what you’re up to or get plugged into whatever you’ve got going on? Reed: Simplest way, go to my website. It’s reedgoossens.com. I live in Los Angeles. If anyone wants to hit me up for a beer, coffee, or lunch, just shoot me an email at info@reedgoossens.com. You can check it out all there. Find the podcast, find the books, find the videos. It’s all there, so have fun. Jason: All right. Hey, thanks for coming on the show, and like Reed said, start getting involved in investing. Just start, right? There’s this power in just getting started. Set that intention, start going to some meet-up groups. You can check out meetup.com. You can check out Facebook groups, there are all kinds of resources available, and maybe you’ll find your passion the way Reed has. Reed, I appreciate you. Reed: Thank you so much for having me on the show, Jason. I really appreciate it. Jason: It’s been a pleasure. All right, so if you are a property management entrepreneur and you’re wanting doors, then reach out. We’ve got some cool programs that we’re adding to our lineup of what we’re doing. We’re really excited about something new that we’re launching, the DoorGrow Referral Amplifier that Jay Berube and I are doing, so make sure you check that out. He is an amazing entrepreneur, one of my clients that was able to close and acquire over 300 doors into this property management portfolio from ground zero in Florida in about two years. He did it largely through outbound, reach out to agents for referrals, and he systemized this. He’s now even got VAs helping do this for him. He runs his company remotely from another state now, and it’s still growing. So, reach out and check us out if you’re interested in this. By the time this airs on iTunes, it will probably already be filled. We’ve only got 20 seats, so if you’re watching this live, then get in. We’ve already sold about half the seats already, and we haven’t even announced it publicly. I’m just throwing it out there now. Get in before we close out the remaining 10 seats. Bye everyone.

Not tech-savvy? Afraid to use technology to meet elevated brand standards at scale? Are you willing to manage and centralize chaos by leveraging automation and mobile functionality for those maintaining and caring for your properties?  Today, I am talking to Tucker Cohen of Breezeway, which brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space. By combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management, Breezeway makes it easy for managers to deliver the best experience for guests, tenants, and owners.  You’ll Learn... [03:05] Problems Solved: Breezeway helps property management business owners when short- or long-term tenants move out to determine condition of property.  [05:15] Breezeway Bio: Created by FlipKey founder and acquired by TripAdvisor. Breezeway uses 75+ years of industry experience to build the future of property care. [07:00] Systemize business to be more effective and save time for brand standards and rising expectations in the market.  [10:23] Conferences and Companies: What does a conference need? Everything a business needs. Company growth and expansion doesn’t always make things easier. [14:45] What are brand standards and rising expectations? People and perceptions are extensions of your brand. Trust and transparency meet standards and expectations. [21:25] Dating Analogy: Am I the person that the person I want to attract into my life or into my business, would they be interested in me? Come down to their level or level up. [23:05] Running a Business: If something isn’t working, it's your fault. Take ownership, don’t blame your team that is following your lead.  [27:20] Expectations tend to rise, but sometimes expectations are artificially wrong, unrealistic, unmanageable, and express entitlement.  [29:22] Situational Sayings: If nothing changes, then nothing changes. If you want dramatically different results, dramatic changes are required.  [30:59] Status Quo Challenge: Some people aren't ready for change. Ultimately, everyone moves toward an operations tool, like Breezeway.  [36:00] Platform Integrations: Breezeway strives to be a connected system, but wants to work with Rent Manager and others. [38:35] Three-Legged Stool: Cleaning, inspection, and maintenance of property care and operations. Tweetables Everything looks shiny and pretty, but business is tough, being an entrepreneur is tough, and the inside of companies can be tough. The main thing must stay the main thing in the business. Keeping focus is power. Expectations tend to rise, but some expectations are unrealistic and unmanageable. The sooner you can automate, the better. As you scale, you have that process in place. Resources Breezeway Tucker Cohen’s Email Tucker Cohen on Twitter Tucker Cohen on LinkedIn FlipKey TripAdvisor Todd Breen Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink Rent Manager EZ Repair Hotline Property Meld Latchel DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you 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 their owners. 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. Today, I am hanging out here with Tucker Cohen. Tucker, welcome to the show. Tucker: Thanks a lot, Jason. That was fantastic. For some reason, I thought that was recorded. I didn’t know you did that a lot. Jason: I just say it each time. Sometimes, I screw it up even though I wrote it. Tucker: It’s perfect, you nailed it. Jason: I'm reading it. I think I haven't memorized, I probably do, but I read it because even I get nervous doing my own show sometimes. Tucker, we're going to get into Breezeway and our topic today is brand standards and rising expectations in the market. Give us a little bit of background before we get into the topic at hand. Tell us a little bit about what is Breezeway and maybe we can dig in more into that as we move through the topic. Tucker: Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad that we're able to reconnect since Orlando, probably like a month ago now. I’m super excited to be here. It's interesting. The topics are largely in line with what we're up to. I doubt that's much of a coincidence, but what Breezeway aims to do is allow property managers, like the ones you're talking about, the ones who aren't afraid to adopt technology, go out on a limb, and do something first, to meet those elevated brand standards at scale. The way we're doing that is through leveraging automation, through leveraging mobile functionality for folks in the field who are helping maintain and care for your properties. Without getting too much into it, I'd say that we're really in line with that brand standard piece you mentioned. Jason: Cool. I want to touch on this before we could move on, but what problems does Breezeway really solve? Property management business owners are struggling with what? They would be really interested in having a conversation with you. Tucker: I think there's a number of different ways to answer that with regards to the folks who I think are probably tuned in now. It's going to be more aligned along the lines of when someone moves out or when someone checks out of one of your properties, be it long-term or short-term, you don't necessarily know the condition that the property was in when they got there. With Breezeway, we have a system of record for every single detail down to the serial number of your appliance when someone checked in and every item into a certain room or a certain part of the house that often goes unnoticed or you have an owner coming in to check-in, I think it’s just managing the chaos would probably be the best way to describe what we're helping folks with. Jason: Now, my initial gut reaction hearing this is that sounds like a lot of work, of data entry and getting all these things, just to go around to each unit and feed all this stuff in. How do you deal with that objection that people are probably, I'm sure it's come up. That sounds like a lot of time. Tucker: Totally. With any of this type of stuff, you get what you put into it. If you're willing to go through the due diligence upfront, make sure that everything is set up right, and you have all your property information in the system, then it pays dividends down the line where you don't have to go digging through a Google Drive with hundreds of different files about your serial number on the microwave, that property number 150. That stuff is all there anyway. The only difference is that it's just buried somewhere, whether it's an email thread, a text chain with a cleaner, an inspector at your property, or a maintenance guy. You have most of this information anyway. What we're doing is we're centralizing everything in there under one hood. Jason: Got it. Now I'm going to read a little bit of that bio that we received when getting ready for the show because I think it makes you guys sound pretty credible and I want you guys to look really good. Breezeway brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space, combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management. We make it easy for managers to deliver the best experience of guests, tenants, and owners. We are serving a global customer base across a broad set of verticals, including short-term vacation managers, residential property managers, cleaning and maintenance providers, hospitality operators. This was created by the founder of FlipKey which was acquired by TripAdvisor. The Breezeway team is using 75-plus years of industry experience to build the future of property care. What you're working on is you are directly with the sales team. You're building the sales team inside that. This says, “Having skilled companies from series A to unicorn status in the past.” What does that mean? Explain that to me. Tucker: That's, of course, like privately-held software company jargon right there, but basically, what that means is a company that's pre-Series A, like us here at Breezeway, means we've raised a very small round of money. In the future, we may raise a Series A, which is more of an initial investment, proper venture capital raise, and then all the way up to unicorn status, which is commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as a billion-dollar valuation for the company. Jason: Okay. Let's get into the top of your hand. Brand standards and rising expectations in the market. This sounds like you guys are primed for growth. It sounds like you guys have a really cool technology in place that's going to do some stuff for property managers to help them systemize their business. I think you could answer my question better in saying that it's going to help them save time in the long run, right? It’s the bottom of the line. There's some time that it takes to get this stuff set up initially, but it's going to save you the hassle of all this time in the long run. Overall, it's not costing you time. Tucker: Yeah, you got it. Jason: There you go. Tucker: Most folks are already doing a lot of this stuff anyway. Jason: They're just doing it poorly. Tucker: Again, you said it, not me. Jason: Most things in most businesses. I get to see on the inside of hundreds of companies and everything's shiny on the outside. It could be shinier. We can help you with that, by the way, property managers. It could be shinier on the outside, but the challenges on the inside, that's like the whited sepulcher they talked about in the Bible like, “How's everything going?” “Oh, it's great,” but they're drowning. That's businesses on Instagram. Everything looks pretty and is great but really business is tough, being an entrepreneur is tough, and the inside of companies can be tough. A smart entrepreneur I’d spoken with today on a sales call said, “What's your internal organization like? How do you run your own business?” I just started telling him because us, entrepreneurs, we know what it's like to run a company. It feels like herding cats sometimes, it feels like chaos, wrapping some constraints around that and moving the business forward towards scaling towards growth takes work. You help manage some of the herding of the cats information-wise. Tucker: There you go. Absolutely. To that point, it's such an interesting timing. I actually just started listening to this other podcast called Under The Waterline. Have you heard of that one? Jason: No, but Under The Waterline? Like drowning? Tucker: It's pretty straightforward, but all about what you're saying. Everybody tells the story. When a company goes well, all you hear is the above the waterline, which is clean, beautiful, and nothing ever went wrong. I'm drawing a blank on the host. I only listened to a couple of episodes far, worth checking out. He digs and he interviews with entrepreneurs, and talks about “Tell me the honest take. What happened here? How did you do this? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it ugly?” really digging in on that under the waterline grit that it takes to successfully build a company like you're talking about. Jason: Yeah. I've made all kinds of mistakes. I jokingly tell people that DoorGrow has been built on thousands of failures, I mean really. I did a conference back in November and some of the listeners were probably at this conference. We had 150 attendees. This was our inaugural event. It was phenomenal. We had amazing food. We had great speakers. Here's the dirty secret about doing that conference. People were like, “Why aren't you doing it again this year?” I thought it'd be this great thing, our business is healthy, we're doing about $1 million in revenue, we've had 300% growth, then like, “Let's do a conference this year.” Tucker: Why not? Jason: The thing about starting a conference, property managers can compare this to—if they're in residential going into commercial, or deciding to start in a new market, deciding to do associations, or whatever it might be—some expansion and they think this will be easy. There’ll be just this other thing. This other thing was like starting a whole new company because what does a conference need? Everything a business needs: sales, marketing, branding positioning, lots and lots of organization, everything that a business needs. It was like starting another company. Guess how much growth we had the year that we were doing a conference? No growth. We had no growth for a year. We were healthy-ish but we weren't growing ironically. Our company is called DoorGrow, but it was because we were distracted because everything had to go towards this conference. Once you decide to do a conference, you're all in. You're on the hook with the hotel, you've got vendors, people sold tickets, there's no going back. There are lots of companies that have gone bankrupt just for doing a conference. I was like, “How was that possible? No.” We're [...] than that. Not me, no. That's every business owner starting company. “I'll be better than all those other property management businesses. They all suck but that won't be me.” I hear that all the time. “I'm starting a property management business because all the other companies in my market suck.” I hear that every week and they won't be that one. Tucker: What you're talking about, too, Jason is just like spending your time efficiently and effectively. If you are a small shop, you can't really afford to necessarily make mistakes like that with where you're allocating your time. In your case, it was a conference that did it. You did it, you pulled it off but someone who, like you're saying— Jason: Yeah, everybody loved it, everyone's like, “It was so great,” and I didn't love it. It was super stressful because I'm somewhat introverted. I'm an ambivert but that situation was incredibly uncomfortable for me because it was just so much pressure. But it went off well, everybody had great feedback but it cost me $2 million in opportunity cost easily. Tucker: No ROI there. Jason: I could do a conference that cost tons of money, broke even sort of thing. The conference probably cost $120,000 just to throw because we did everything great but the opportunity cost, the fact that my team were all focused on it, and everything else instead of on the main thing. I think as entrepreneurs, we need to remember in our business, the main thing is the main thing. If your business needs sales and revenue, then that's what you need to focus on, otherwise, you end up with a sales slump and then you're scrambling. The main thing has to stay the main thing in the business. That was a huge lesson that I got from that. I got to make sure the main thing always stays the main thing. Entrepreneurs, we’re always tempted by opportunity and there's always a distraction, there are always new options, opportunity, and distraction, whether it's expanding into a new market as a property manager or something. Keeping focused is power. Tell me what are brand standards? Rising expectations? Let's get into this. Tucker: I have a hot take on brand standards. I think it's a pretty lukewarm take, I think it's pretty straightforward, but it’s really like, “This is what your expectation is.” There's this sociological theory, which is that there are three versions of you. There's you as you see yourself, there's you as other people see you, and there's a version of you that you think other people see as you. It's your projection of what people's perception is. It's one thing from a personal standpoint, but from a business standpoint, you actually can control that in a lot of ways. That's what we're talking about with brand standards. You have expectations as an entrepreneur, as the CEO of your own company, you expect things to be done a certain way. How do you make sure that the people who you're trusting to impact your business, whether it's someone taking photos of your property for a posting, for listing, cleaning your property, or inspecting your property before someone checks in or moves in? Those people are extensions of your brand. You're effectively trusting them to meet those standards. A lot of times, you don't necessarily have insight into that but maybe that was a hot take. Jason: Yeah. I'll add to that. Branding is one of the main things that we have property management businesses with. I consider myself a branding expert. This is something that I dealt with in helping clean up the branding for hundreds of property management companies. We've helped some vendors even recently. We helped clean up Virtually Incredible’s branding. We helped clean up their new logo. It was designed by my team. I had some great conversation with Todd Breen on helping him focus on the main gateway that was feeding his business and recognize that other things were back-end products that came later in the sales cycle, instead of putting out the message that he did everything, which one feeds the business. I think property managers need to recognize that, too.  Property management is often the front-end gateway product even if they also do real estate. It works more effectively usually that way. I think they need to focus on that, but a lot of property management businesses in the branding are real estate companies, which scares off the people that want a specialist. They want a specialist that manage their biggest investment ever. I've helped double some property management businesses’ real estate revenue commissions by eliminating real estate from their branding, ironically, because once the property management side is healthy, it's what's feeding them the majority of the revenue that’s coming into that. It goes back again to focus. We can tie this back in, but it goes back again to focus that in order to deal with people's expectations and in order to manage the perception of your business, I think the key is that you need to align it towards what starts the process, not towards everything that you do. I'm dating now. Imagine that you're in the process of dating, you're going out, and you just vomit everything about yourself and what you do. You can't do that. You got to start with where's their interest level at. Start in that space first. “Oh, you're into music? Me too.” You have to start somewhere. There has to be a beginning. The same thing with our businesses, there has to be a beginning because you [...] what you're doing. You're trying to create a relationship and you can parallel this to dating, but you're not going to show up and try to make out with them on the front porch as soon as you meet them. That's what people try to do in sales a lot of times. They just vomit everything right on their lap, they're in a state of overwhelm, and they're like, “Okay, that's a bit much, buddy.” I think also with branding, transparency is so huge. You said something that I felt anxious just hearing you talk about the expectations with yourself, with others, and then what you think others are perceiving. That can be such a big head game that people get caught up in. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, how are people perceiving me? Am I okay? Do they like me? Am I being right for them? Am I doing this?” Ultimately, as we get older, we learn to just not give an F. You don't care as much because you become more confident, you love yourself, you like yourself. When your business is confident, when you're confident in your business, and you're confident your business can deliver, you come from a greater space in which you can be the prize that the client is trying to get instead of thinking that they're the prize. This is called prizing in sales. I think it happens when you’re transparent because transparency creates safety, it creates trust, you don't have to try and be something. The problem is, a lot of times, the brand is not in alignment with what's on the back end, what's on the inside. It's not in alignment with the business owner. Tucker: That brings up two great points. One is you say in your personal life, you grow up and you're just like, “Yeah, I don't really care. This is who I am, take it or leave it.” What we're talking about here, unfortunately, is a place where we don't have that luxury. We're talking about the rising expectations that are taking place across every element of property management and then the brand standards. Jason: Due to increases in technology. People have iPhones. If they have iPhones, they expect more. Tucker: It's one thing to say, “Yeah, this is who I am, take it or leave it,” but if it's your business, you say that, and you provide a bad experience, that's where I think branding really comes down to is the experience that your client ends up having when they engage with you, be it at the very beginning of your relationship or throughout the lion's share of it all the way to the end. Jason: Yeah. Let's go back to the dating analogy. If I'm overweight, I'm not getting my hair cut, I'm not brushing my teeth, and I just grow my beard down to my ankles, and I just say, “Screw everybody else, this is how I am. Take it or leave it.” That's cool, I will only attract people that are interested in that. That might not be what I'm interested in. Here's the thing. I love this question, “Am I the person—that the person I want to match with, or attract into my life, or into my business—they would be interested in? Am I at that level? If not, I even need to lower my expectations or I need to make some changes.” Tucker: Right, either come down to their level or you level up. That's it. Jason: Right. Either way, I need to get in touch with reality. I need to make some changes. A great question that I've had several coaches I've seen throw out or coaches I've worked with ask is, “Who do I have to become in order to be that person? Who do I have to become? What would it take? Who do you, as a property management business owner, have to become in order to have the type of business that you want?” Here's the thing. One of my coaches said, “If you don't have the business yet that you dream of, you're not yet the person that can run it yet. Tucker: That's meta. Jason: That's meta. Right, that's really simple. If you don't have the business that you dream of, you feel like it's not right, and you're frustrated with your team, you're not the person yet that can create that. But as entrepreneurs, it's so easy for us to externalize all of that. I get many people come to me and they want to focus on their website, they want to focus on lead gen, they want to blame their team. Everything is external. The ironic thing that I found is if I can get them to focus on themselves, get clarity on who they are, what really makes them feel alive and in momentum as entrepreneur, they get really clear on their purpose, then we align the brand, the business, everything around that, everything changes. The website's going to end up changing, their messaging is going to end up changing, their sales process changes. They fire some of their team members. Their team members change. Everything changes in a business once the business owner, the entrepreneur at the helm who is the sun at the center of the solar system changes. Everything has to change by default. But what's incredibly costly, time crazy, and painful is the folks trying to change everything externally without changing yourself which is really creating all that. Tucker: Do you know Jocko Willink, the ex-Navy SEAL? Jason: Yeah, he's written some good books. Tucker: He's got the book Extreme Ownership. That’s his whole thing, it’s extreme ownership. If something's not working out, it's your fault. You got to take some ownership, it’s not the team's fault. The team is following your lead. You're the leader. Jason: I'll share an example. I was talking with somebody and they were complaining about all these different people that had come into their life. They were complaining about this guy, that guy, and this. I said, “Hey, there's one common denominator among all of this. There's one commonality.” Because they were like, “I don't know [...]. All these people are so different.” I said, “There's one thing in common. You. That’s the one thing in common.” The most dangerous thing in the world—property managers know this if they've been in the business a while—one of the biggest red flags for property manager is if somebody comes to them and says with an existing manager or they just fired their last manager and they're complaining about their previous managers. “Oh, this company was terrible.” The dumb property manager would listen to all of that and they would say, “Oh, yeah, they're terrible. We'll be way better.” The correct property manager would say, “Okay, maybe it's this person so I better ask some really good questions before I take them on because I might be the next company that's on their [...] list that's getting attacked on online reviews and negative. I don't want to be that.” That's a red flag. Another red flag is if somebody's referring a client to you. We can't really help them. I teach my clients to do that, to refer the clients they don't like to somebody else. I'm sharing this transparently, everybody. If somebody's referring a client to you, it could mean that they're a terrible client. Sometimes, though, it may just mean that they’re not a fit. One man's junk is another man's treasure when it comes to property management. Some people can deal with that difficult investor and others can't. Some difficult investors can exchange the good ones just by setting a real strong fence and a boundary that some managers aren't capable of doing. That's all they wanted in the beginning, they just wanted safety. That's another advantage you can create. Tucker: The takeaway there, do your homework always. Larry David had a good episode on that. Don't get foisted. Jason: Foisted? I don’t know that term. Tucker: I'll send you a link. Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Jason: All right. I’ll avoid getting foisted after I launch this episode. Tucker: Tough referral. Jason: Perfect. Expectations do tend to rise but sometimes, expectations are artificially wrong. I saw a post from one of my buddies who's in the restaurant industry today. This girl wrote this note on a receipt saying, “I'm not giving you a tip because I'm only a few days away from my 21st birthday and you wouldn't allow me to have alcohol.” No tip for their whole party, from the whole party of food. This just shows the entitlement that exists in some people. That's ridiculous. Sometimes some people's expectations are unrealistic. I don't think it's too much for somebody to provide good service but to break the law for somebody so that they can have alcohol because, “Hey, my birthday is only a few days away,” come on. Tucker: That's an unrealistic expectation at its finest. Jason: As long as it's in the past. Yes. Some expectations are not manageable and it's not possible for us to raise to that level of their expectation because it's without foundation, it's a pie in the sky, it's a pipe dream, it's not realistic. Now I think the challenge with property managers is there's some things that they think, “This is a status quo, this is how we’ve done it. This is how it is. It's just hard this way.” They think everything else is pie in the sky or fluffy and not possible. They exclude themselves from making those changes. It’s like the guy that's like, “Oh, all girls are just difficult. I'm just going to sit on my couch and eat Cheetos all day. They only want a rich guy or they only want whatever. They just choose out.” In business is the same thing, we can just choose out. Tucker: An all-encompassing saying for every situation you can think of is if nothing changes, then nothing changes. Jason: Right. I've also heard it said if you want dramatically different results or if you want dramatic change, it requires dramatic change. Tucker: There you go, case in point. Then, of course, another bit of jargon of rising tide lifts all ships. That’s it. Jason: I think I touched on that one on this show before of rising tide can raise all ships if the tide is already high enough, but I think the challenge in property management is that the tide is all the way down in some areas. It's low. There are some property management businesses with holes in them like you wouldn't believe and they're sitting on gravel or sand. They're there.  A rising tide is going to sink some ships in this industry, no question, and they need to sink because it's going to help the entire industry. There are property owners businesses that should not be in business or they’re going to have them patch up some holes and make things work better. Tucker: I think to that point, Jason, it's really the ones who are going to sit back and say, “This is the way we've always done it or this is status quo,” because frankly, at the end of the day, the customer has all the power. They're the ones that can make or break your business with one bad review at the end of the day. [...] natural selection, I think. You’re right. Jason: Let's apply this to Breezeway. Breezeway, what are some of the challenges that you deal with in selling your services to property managers? Some of the things that you'll typically hear from them. Tucker: That's a really straightforward one, is that status quo like, “This is where we've always done it.” It's not that big of a headache for us now. We don't think we would use it that much, or what we talked about before, it might be too much work upfront. It's okay. Some people aren't ready for change but we stand by the fact that ultimately, everyone will move towards an operations tool like Breezeway, if not Breezeway. In most cases, when people say no, they come back. We believe that's going to continue to happen as this tide continues to rise and the expectations continue to rise. If you don't have high brand standards, you don't get to be a brand any more because (like you said) the ship sinks. If you can't meet the customers expectations, you're probably not going to have any customers for much longer, so the status quo. Like we said, this isn't stuff that people aren't doing already in a lot of cases. They're just running around and managing chaos in order to effectively do it. What Breezeway allows them to do is both automate as well as ensure that it's actually happening in a way that they hope it will, meeting those brand standards. Jason: You've got customers, right? Tucker: Yeah, we have some. Jason: Okay, good, me too. Can you share an example, a case study, or maybe even some typical situation that you've seen where they've gone from not doing it, struggling, not using Breezeway, to implementing your services, and what results they've been able to achieve? Tucker: Without naming any specific clients, another big piece of pushback that we receive is, “I don't know if my service providers will actually use this,” which is fair, generally considering the fact that service providers aren't tech-savvy, what have you. But one of our clients down south were able to effectively roll this out to their service network. Each one of those service providers now uses our app to download all of their checklists offline. Before, there was no good way for them to do that until they can download the apps all offline. They had pulled them and said, “Hey, would you want to go back to the old way?” which was email, paper and pen, checklist, they’re coming into the office, “Hey, here's your assignment for the day,” or emailing them out to some of the further ones, then they had to submit them all back manually with all the photos attached, and they're like, “Absolutely not. Of course, why would I ever want to go back to the old way?” A bit of an anecdotal story there about some of those challenges that we're seeing at the onset of conversations all being overcome and Breezeway being in a spot where they know no other way now. Jason: There are a lot of tools that a lot of property managers probably shouldn't even touch until they’re maybe about 50 to 100 units, they can't even entertain the idea. They don't have cash flow, they're not ready to use a service, they're a solopreneur maybe, at what stage do you feel like Breezeway can be implemented in a business? Where do they need to be, roughly, in terms of door count, size, who do you guys generally work with? Tucker: Good question. It is on a case-by-case basis to some extent because some entrepreneurs, like you're saying, have higher bandwidth for stress and they can deal with some of those chaotic nuances that go into managing a higher door count as opposed to someone like me who I like to ensure as much automation as possible so I don't let things slip through the cracks in the first place. The sooner I can automate, the better. Then as I scale, I have that process in place. Typical door count, from a short-term perspective, we’ll work with folks in the 50 to 100 range but all the way down to 5 doors too. Again, [...] pay. They like to just automate as much as possible. In the longer-term world, we're talking about the same, range only on the higher scale. So, 50 all the way up to 500 and 1000 doors. Jason: Okay. They can get started with you guys at any point. You guys don't have like 100-door minimum, 200-door minimum, or anything like this? Tucker: No. Jason: Okay. Tucker: We're not turning people away just yet, Jason. Jason: Okay. I do but I'm picky. I'm just kidding. Tucker, this is really cool, the future sounds like technology. Does Breezeway integrate with any platforms? There are so many different tools in property management, I think a lot of people listening to my show nowadays are like, “Oh, gosh, Jason just shared another stupid tool that I'm going to have to figure out how to plug into my business that I really want,” and they've got this to-do list of tools they want to add and implement. How difficult is it to get started with Breezeway and is there any concern about connection, integration, or any of this thing that is really significant? Tucker: I understand why people get concerned with this type of thing. Of course, whenever you're introducing new technology, there's always a concern, especially because folks (like you said) have been burned in the past like, “Oh, another one of these things I have to do.” But at Breezeway, we really aim to be a connected system. From a long-term standpoint, we're working with the folks of the likes of Rent Manager and other folks like them. Then short-term, all the 20-plus of the biggest PMS systems out there. But our goal by the end of this year and the coming year 2020, we're going to just be one of the most connected systems out there, whether it's your remote locks of the world all the way to your streamlines and your rent managers of the world as well. Jason: Got it. People listening might get confused and think, “Is Breezeway a complementary tool to maintenance coordination tools or is it a replacement for these type of tools, where we have, maybe EZ Repair Hotline, Property Meld, and Latchel, these services?” Tucker: Wow, that's a loaded question, Jason. I knew you’re going to come at me with that. Jason: It’s an obvious question. Tucker: It is an obvious question. Jason: I’m just asking what I know my clients are going to be like, “What is this? How does it fit in the overall mix?” Tucker: It's true. Listen, like I was saying before, we want to play nicely with anybody who's out there so we're not going to go ahead and say that we’re a direct competitor for these folks. The other thing is we do a handful of the same stuff. You'll be hard-pressed to be using one of them for maintenance, using Breezeway for cleaning and inspections, and not using us for maintenance. There's a three-legged stool with regards to where Breezeway plays in the operations world and our aim is to supplement the PMS regardless of which one it is, we want to integrate with them. Then if they're using something else for maintenance, that's fine too. Jason: Explain the three legs, what are they just for people that are a little bit lost. Tucker: Yeah, sorry. I'm a big analogy guy. Jason: Take the analogy into reality. Tucker: Here’s the reality, you have your cleaning, inspection, and your maintenance. Those are the three legs we believe of property care and operations. Jason: Got it. What other frequently asked questions do people have when they're approaching you for interest in Breezeway or just any other questions that we haven't covered? Tucker: I don't know, it runs the gamut. We're creating a new category to speak of, property operation which is really something that people haven't heard of. We're excited about it. The main question is probably what is property operations. It's just what I'm talking about. It's really thinking about not just managing a property but actually caring for it and taking into consideration preventative maintenance and safety measures. All that stuff rolled into one in a way that you can do it as hands-off as possible. Jason: Perfect. Okay. Tucker, I think we’ve talked about brand standards, we’ve talked about rising expectations in the industry, we've talked about Breezeway. How can people get in touch with Breezeway? How can they find out more if they want to get in touch and they're interested? Tucker: We are at www.breezeway.io. If you would like to check out our integrations page, it's very simple /integrations. If you would like to meet with me, you can send me an email, tucker@breezeway.io, @CorpoTuck on Twitter, on Linkedin, Tucker F. C. I know a lot of folks are on Facebook, I'm thinking about getting on there, but that's about it. Happy to fill any questions now, it looks like we're getting some coming in on the chat. Jason: We can touch on that. Is this available for homeowners or just landlords and property managers? Tucker: Yeah. Listen, right now, it is primarily for landlords and property managers, but we do see a world where a longer term this will be used by homeowners and the connected home Internet of Things world of the future that we see everything sliding towards. Jason: Someday, Breezeway may know whether my Roomba has done its job or not. Tucker: Exactly. Your Roomba would be automatically scheduled by Breezeway. Jason: All right. Tucker, it’s been great having you on. Everybody check out, it’s breezeway.io. I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show. Tucker: Yeah. Thanks so much, Jason. This is great. Glad we made it happen. Jason: All right, I'll let you go. All right, there you have it, check out breezeway.io. I'm always curious to hear your feedback on this so make sure you guys are inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group. This is our community for all those DoorGrow Hackers out there, property management, business owners, entrepreneurs. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com and that will take you to the Facebook group. Answer all the questions and we'll let you in if you're a property management entrepreneur. Get inside that group. As always, I'd love to hear feedback on what you think about different tools, different things that you're using, and ask questions to other people inside the Facebook group. We’ll give you some free gifts when you join that group, including a bible of fees that you can tack on your property management business. We have a list of really cool tools and vendors in there. You will get an email drip if you provided your email when you join the group. We will be giving you gifts to help you grow your property management business. Eventually, you'll be able to learn a little bit more about what we do at DoorGrow. Make sure you get inside that group if you're not in our community. There are amazing people in there, they're helpful, and they align with my vision of creating collaboration over competition. That's what this industry needs right now. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Do you need a place to rent? But you can’t complete or submit your application because you don’t have the required information and documentation for the property manager? This is a common and frustrating problem.  Today, I am talking to Stephen Arifin of The Closing Docs, which offers automated income verification in the property management industry. The Closing Docs is a modern way to help applicants prove their net income, which is the best indicator of their ability to pay rent. The Closing Docs provides property managers with income information needed to make a decision that can be defended. You’ll Learn... [01:48] Early Entrepreneurship Experience: Stephen started solving problems using technology to make money from the time he was in kindergarten through college. [02:50] First Job Out of School: Full-stack Web developer at Microsoft, where a small team taught Stephen the fundamentals of how to build a Web application from scratch. [03:08] Missing Entrepreneurial Spirit: Stephen leaves Microsoft to pursue broken industries in need of technological innovation to save time and money. [03:31] Mortgage Lenders: The Closing Docs was founded to fill in the gaps of loan application processes by automating income verification. [05:21] How it Works: The Closing Docs receives permission from applicant to prove their net income, the money that goes into their account to pay their rent. [07:00] The Closing Docs has developed integrations with property management software, including Buildium, AppFolio, On-Site, and Yardi. [12:18] Why switch to The Closing Docs and not follow the status quo? Information collected directly from banks is better and trustworthy for an approval recommendation. [13:38] Operational Cost Savings: People and software are expensive, so what can property managers/applicants expect to pay for The Closing Docs? $10 per screening.  Tweetables Broken Industries: Paper-and-pencil processes are ripe for technological innovation. Net income is the best indicator of applicant’s ability to pay rent.  The Closing Docs doesn’t ask or expect clients to change their software. The Closing Docs’s standardized information helps people close more deals faster. Resources The Closing Docs Automated Income Verification Process: How It Works Stephen Arifin's Email Microsoft AppFolio Propertyware Buildium Rent Manager On-Site Yardi The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you 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 their owners. We want to expand the industry, transform it, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception of it, expand the market, and help the best property managers 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 am hanging out with a special guest today. My guest is Stephen Arifin. He is with a company called The Closing Docs. Stephen, how are you today? Stephen: Good, Jason. How are you? Jason: I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for being here on the show. Stephen, before we get started, give us a little bit of background on you. Tell us a little bit about you, your entrepreneurial journey, your adventures here, and what led you to The Closing Docs.  Stephen: Sure. First thing, I'm a tech guy. I've always been around technology and computers growing up. My dad was a programmer and started his own banking software company. I was always around entrepreneurship and technology. Even at a young age, I would always try to solve problems with technology. For example, in kindergarten, all my classmates were really upset when the school installed the website blocker that prevented them from playing their online games. I created my own website and hosted all of my classmates favorite games so that they can play at school. Of course, I took the nominal donation, and made a little cash. I studied software engineering in college. I love building apps. I was in a fraternity and we were having some major issues collecting and organizing our finances. A buddy and I built a better invoicing system, launched the company into our fraternity, and help streamline their finances. That was probably my first real entrepreneurship experience. My first job out of school was at Microsoft, where I worked as a full stack web developer. It was a small team and taught me a solid fundamentals of how to build a web application from scratch. I consider myself really lucky to be in a team with so many talented engineers, but at Microsoft, I really missed my entrepreneurial drive.  While I was working there, I've began investigating broker industries. I started with industries that has many paper and pencil process, and were ripe for technological innovation. An obvious contender was the mortgage industry. I started finding gaps where technology can save time and money. After talking to a few dozen lenders, it was clear there was a breakdown in the [...] application process. Typically, their proof of income. Why were they taking screenshots of paystubs in W-2? In 2017 and even today, why are loan officers forced to review these data sources in so many different formats? It's cumbersome, it's time-consuming. It invites human error and judgment. Honestly, it's just downright painful. There had to be a better way.  Thus, The Closing Docs is born to provide automated income verification. I started in the lending industry. I really tried to help verify their applicant's income. But my lack of industry knowledge made it really difficult to sell. After speaking with folks in the real estate industry, I learned about similar problems in the property management space—a far less regulated industry and one that is even more disaggregated than the lending universe. At this time, it made sense for me to combine forces with someone familiar with the startup landscape, someone familiar with starting and operating businesses, and all their direct industry knowledge.  The Closing Docs other founder and my partner, Mark Fiebig, had started a handful of companies, successfully raised venture capital, and also happened to have deep real estate industry knowledge including owning a property management company himself. Together, along with my technical knowledge, we combined our assets and knowledge, and created what The Closing Docs is today. Jason: Cool. Explain what is The Closing Docs today. Stephen: We provide automated income verification. Essentially, a modern way to help applicants prove their net income. Here's how it works. With the applicants permission, we can obtain a years worth of deposit history directly from their banks, and share a report that illustrates an applicant's net income. Why are we reporting net income? It is the best indicator of an applicant's ability to pay rent going forward. The money going into the applicant bank account is the money that will be used to pay rent.  Our message to property managers is clear. We'll provide the info you need to make the decision you can defend instantly. So often, applicant provides incomplete information. Whatever info they do share, it comes from so many different formats from so many different sources. At the closing docs, we streamline the process significantly. Based on our client's usage data, we are seeing time spent from applicant screening fall by as much as 30%. That means that three hours screening timeline turns into two hours. We're saving our clients real money. If you do the math, that's one full-time employee for our property management firms seeing around 2000 property.  It's honestly fun for us to be on the phone with our customers and have them jumping for joy because they're super excited. We help them simplify and expedite their workloads. In essence, The Closing Docs is standardized information delivered right into your inbox or pushed directly into your property management software through our integration. We help people close more deals faster. Jason: All right. That sounded very pitchy but it sounds cool. Tell me which software does your software integrate with, that some of my listeners might be familiar with? A lot of them are using AppFolio, they're using Propertyware, they're using Rent Manager, they're using Buildium, some of these tools as a back office. Stephen: We've developed a number of integrations with Buildium, AppFolio, OnSite, Yardi. Those are many of the popular property management software systems out there. We're continuing to grow that list. We don't ask or expect our clients to change their software or stop using what they love or what they're used to.  We know that property managers pay multiple logins and switching between apps, so we made it as easy as possible for them to use our income screening. If they want, we also create an online rental application as well. Jason: So, they're going through this process of using your application (probably) instead of maybe what's built into their software. This is helping to gather all the documentation or documents (The Closing Docs) that they might need in order to verify their net income. What happens next in this process? How easy is it for them to use the software and figure out whether somebody is a viable candidate for this particular property? Stephen: There's two different entry points that property managers can use in our tools. One, if they are a firm with around 100 doors (usually), they can use our standalone web service. Essentially, they type in the applicant’s email and it sends the applicant an email to our site. The applicant authorizes their banks and they authorize us to pull all the information needed to aggregate metrics like net income—yearly net income, monthly net income.  We also count non-recurring deposits like bonuses, W-2 tax returns. Once that information comes in, the applicant gets the chance to review the information so that we remain FDR-compliant and they know the information that's being shared with their property manager, then they click a button. What we do is we print an income report. We deliver that directly to the property manager's email. That's the first way we do it. The second way is for bigger property management firms around 1000 doors, we actually integrate our income verification directly into our online rental application. We have an online rental app and it has different controls. All the information that the property management firm requires, we can require it to the applicant so they don’t skip it, and the income verification is built into the rental app. When the rental app is submitted, the property manager receives the rental application along with our income report. It's all in one combined package. That helps the back-and-forth issue that property managers so often get into, where the applicant doesn't submit all the necessary information and they have to go hound the applicant to, "Hey, can you submit this paystub? It's from two years ago." We save a lot of property managers time that way. Jason: I imagine, even one piece of back-and-forth is costing probably, sometimes even a day. Sometimes, 10, 15, or 20 minutes minimum. If there's pieces that are over and over again that are missing, they're working a one application, this adds up. You have 5 properties that are vacant that you are working on right now, 10 properties vacant that you are working on right now. Your staff are going to be really busy. It feels like it's such an essential, critical thing that just has to be done to move these things forward to get things rented, but what you're saying is a lot of it can be automated. Stephen: Right. When you’re trying to get more information about the applicant, that unit is in a limbo state. It's not really on the market. It's not really off the market. We're trying to prevent stuff like that. Jason: And the renter gets frustrated. Everyone's been in a situation where you have a key providing more information. They keep asking for more information. It just starts to get frustrating. I'm sure there's instances where they just decide to move on to something that's easier. Stephen: Right. One of the sites that want to [...] from starting this company, the property manager loves us, but their customers, their applicants, actually love us as well. They get approved faster, it's super easy, and they save a bunch of time. Really, everybody wins. Jason: Ultimately, that's why every business exist. It's to create some win-win, maybe win. You're solving a problem. You're shortening the [...] the time. What are some of the other benefits why should property managers pay attention to this instead of just doing what they've been doing and following the status quo?  Stephen: We receive our information directly from the banks. We support about 15,000 banks which is about 99.9% of all of the banks in the United States. We get trustworthy data. We get better data. Since the information is digitized, we're also able to produce and approve a recommendation. We use 2.5 times the net income to rent ratio. If the applicant makes 2.5 times more, then the units rank and we give them a thumbs up. If they don't, we give them a thumbs down. Property managers can make a decision really easily. Their applicants qualified. If it doesn't qualify, we'll give all the details of the transaction history and deposit history. They can drill down and see a little bit more detail where applicants [...]. Jason: All right. So, they’ll be able to have a little bit of information is to why they maybe didn't qualify, that sort of thing. I think another issue here that were a benefit to any piece of technology is that there's going to be an operational cost savings. If you have a staff member that's manually doing this, they're doing phone calls, they're texting, they're emailing saying, "Hey, we need this piece," they're trying to get stuff out of an email. They're trying to store documents in a certain way. They're asking people to send things, "Send me a picture of this," they will go into your bank, download these bank statements, and send them to us.  The challenge is, you're going to be paying somebody to spend the time to do this, somebody on your team. People are expensive. You're spending (for a decent team member) probably $15–$30 an hour. If you have hundreds of properties that you're dealing with, vacant properties, you're going to be spending hours and hours of money towards something that could easily be handled by technology. Help those listening understand, if you will, maybe a little bit about the cost of the software. Just get them a ballpark or help them understand if this is something even feasible for them to be doing in their business. Stephen: Our pricing is super simple, $10 per screening. There's no implementation cost. There's no sign-up cost. There's no minimum fees. It's just $10 per screening. The time that you save, especially when we have clients with a lot of doors and there's just a lot of applicants, especially during busy seasons like the summer season, applicants are just piling in by the truckload, each minute count. Each mental step that you actually even skip, it all adds up. It's really great. We have a lot of clients saying, "Man, we love your software."  Jason: This $10 application fee, they're probably passing on to the renters, I would imagine. Stephen: We support both the property manager or the applicant. We have clients that do both workloads. It's a business that's usually up to your [...]. Jason: Okay. They can do it either way. They can build it in as a part of their application process. Most property managers are going to have some other steps besides just income verification as part of their application process that they need to take into anyway. This would be one piece of that puzzle. This would be the income verification portion. Just to make screening even more solid. I would imagine that the financial aspect is probably one of the number one indicators as to whether they're going to be able to afford it and pay for it. They're going to be looking at things like credit. They're going to be looking at other things. Bottomline, if they don't have the funds available, it's okay. They're likelihood of making rent every month is going to be pretty slim. What are some of the frequently asked questions that some of the people may ask when they're looking at your software? When they're looking at your solution? What are some of the most common questions that property managers would probably be curious to hear about here on the DoorGrow Show? Stephen: Something with our income screening is that it requires the applicant's permission and the applicant's involvement. It's not like a hard inquiry on credit where you can just type in a social security number then they automatically pull credit without the applicant's involvement. We need the applicant to authorize their banks. That's how we remain FDR-compliant. Our data showed actually that we have around a 97% quiet rate which is honestly awesome. We do have some applicants in the older generation that is a little unfamiliar with technology. They get a little worried when authorizing the banks.  We're FDR-compliant, we have the same security protocols of banks, and we never see any of the sensitive credentials. But sometimes, applicants worry about that. Whenever we incorporate our income verification in an online rental app, we give the option to go the route that we've all come and known by uploading bank statements and pay stubs. We give that option. But like I said, 97% of the applicant go for the more streamlined option because it just saves so much time. Jason: Okay. So, if they get a conspiracy theorist grandpa, that's been living in a basement, he's freaking out, wearing his tinfoil hat, he's worried about giving his password through your software tool, he can still do things the old school way if the property manager's willing to tolerate it. Stephen: Right. If you think about it, they’re still uploading all the sensitive information. They're uploading their [...].  Jason: It's less secure. Let's be honest. Stephen: It's a perception. Jason: Yeah. If they're sending these stuff through email, that's even more ridiculous. Some emails open and passes through multiple servers. We understand that as nerds. That's okay. We need to help out our less technological brothers and sisters out there.  Stephen, it's exciting to hear about your tool. I hope people will check it out. How can people get in touch with you or with The Closing Docs and learn more? Stephen: Our website, theclosingdocs.com, has got a lot of great information. It also has a contact form. You can get in contact with our team. You can also email me at stephen@theclosingdocs.com. If you sign up at theclosingdocs.com on our site, you'll get three free screenings to try out our tool.  We're pretty confident that you'll be hooked by the first screening. It'll give you a chance to try out this new workflow. In the end, it is a new workflow. As a business, you need to adjust your business processes to accommodate for new tools that you incorporate in your business. Jason: All right, cool. Somebody was asking a question. They're asking, "How do you integrate with AppFolio since they don't have an API?"  Stephen: We use a Chrome extension, a browser extension. That allows people to create screenings directly from their browser no matter what website you're in. They're still using AppFolio, they're still using the tools that they love, but they can access our income screenings through our Chrome extension or a browser extension. Jason: It's a clever solution to that. If anybody has any other questions, reach out to stephen@theclosingdocs.com. I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show. Stephen: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for inviting me on the show. Jason: Yeah, you bet. Those of you that are watching, check out theclosingdocs.com. If you are watching us for the first time or maybe it's the 50th time, be sure to like and subscribe. Check us out on YouTube or leave us a comment on Facebook. I want to see people that are involved and see who's interested in the show. I love seeing that feedback. If you're on iTunes, do me a huge favor and leave us a review. I would appreciate it. We'd love some real feedback. Be sure to test out your website. You can do that at doorgrow.com/quiz. If you're doing any cold lead marketing, advertising, go to doorgrow.com/coldleads. Go through that calculator. I want to give you a gift and show you some leaks in your business that you may not be seeing right now. I would love to help you out, so reach out to us at DoorGrow. Until next time. To our mutual growth. Bye, everybody. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. 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. 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.

What do most skiers and snowboarders dream about? Owning mountain property. But most of them don’t have the necessary wealth or money to purchase a second home, especially in expensive real estate markets. Today, I am talking to Rob Stephens of Avalara MyLodgeTax. As a Denver resident and lifelong skier, Rob was fortunate enough to buy a three-bedroom condo in Vail about 20 years ago. But even then, it took Rob, his wife, and wife's brother-in-law to make the dream a reality.  You’ll Learn... [02:57] Short-term Rental Market Options:  Hire local property manager/real estate agent. Post property online via VRBO, Airbnb, Expedia, etc. Rent-by-Owner: Book guests, collect money, and provide on-site services. [03:48] Complex Tasks: Apply technology and manage challenges for property owners, managers, and operators. Know what taxes to charge, collect, file, and pay to agencies. [05:50] Lack of Awareness: Property owners trying to manage their short-term rentals have never dealt with these types of transactional taxes.  [06:20] It’s not rocket science, but multiple layers of government are involved. State and local tax rates and requirements are specific to rental property location and address. [07:10] Avalara MyLodgeTax: Online hosted, Cloud service similar to TurboTax but for short-term rentals with vacation, occupancy, resort, and other taxes.  [09:27] Penalties to Avoid: Long-term, multifamily operators getting into short-term rental space need to understand rules and risks involved.  [11:40] One less thing to worry about. Partnerships with property management companies is when Avalara handles everything occupancy tax related.  [13:02] Common Questions and Concerns: Shortcuts and consolidation for creating awareness and understanding the mechanics of administrative work. Tweetables Increasing scrutiny and regulation on the short-term rental space, makes for more paperwork and forms to be filed. Lack of Awareness: Property owners managing their short-term rentals have never dealt with some types of transactional taxes.  Short-term rentals involve multiple layers of government. State and local tax rates and requirements are specific to rental property address. Resources Avalara MyLodgeTax Vail, CO VRBO Airbnb Expedia TurboTax DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you 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 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. My guest today is Rob Stephens and his company is Avalara MyLodgeTax. Rob, before we get into talking about your business, I’d love to hear your background of how you're connected maybe to the real estate or property management industry. Maybe you could share with us just a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey just to qualify yourself to our listeners. Rob: Sure, happy to. Thanks for having me. I love the intro, good stuff. My story, I live in Denver, Colorado, lifelong skier like a lot of us, lifelong skiers here in Colorado. One of our aspirations is to have a mountain property. As a relatively young professional, this is about 20 years ago, was fortunate enough to be able to purchase a three-bedroom condo in Vail, Colorado with my wife's brother-in-law. The three of us went in together. At that point in time in my life, we wanted a second home in Vail, great skiing, be up in the mountains more, but part of that is when you make that financial investment—Vail is a very expensive real estate market—when we purchased it, we really needed income on that property to make the economics work. We certainly didn't have the wealth or money sitting around just to have a second home for our own personal use when we wanted it. We really needed to generate income. This was in the short-term rental market. Back in the day, this is the late 90s, you really hire a local property manager or real estate agent that would get you bookings. At the time, somebody told us about a little website called Vrbo, it was pretty new back then. We tossed it on what's now Vrbo. It was frankly really amazing to see the bookings and we were immediately connected to travelers really across the globe. Through this one subscription would cost us about $120 a year, we're able to keep our property pretty booked and you're talking $30,000, $40,000 a year in rent. Doing that, and I'm sure your audience will appreciate this, we were pretty clueless doing the rent-by-owner thing, there are all these other tasks to go along with it. You have to interact with guests, book guests, collect money, maybe have a rental agreement, you have to have on the site service, cleaning services. My background is I’m a CPA, accounting and finance background, worked for some of the big accounting firms. But even as a CPA at the time, we just stumbled across the requirement to collect, remit sales, and occupancy taxes. It was really through that experience, one being successfully doing this on the internet, managed my own property, and then coming across the complexity of managing these taxes even from my own little rental in Vail, we realized this is a powerful model. We think this online short-term rental, these sites have a lot of opportunities, but this tax is going to be a stumbling point. A few years down the road, we started a company to really solve that problem for people. Our model was to apply technology and manage all these complexities for our customers, which would be registering with the different agencies, knowing what taxes to charge, and then once you know what taxes to charge and collect taxes, then automating the monthly, quarterly filing and payment of those taxes to the different agencies. Just to be clear, this is like a hotel occupancy tax, the same taxes that hotels pay to apply to short-term rentals. That was our inspiration. We got started and we're able to form some partnerships originally with Vrbo and some of the other larger operators at the time, but the industry has certainly grown. Now you've got Airbnb, which I think really a ubiquitous household name, but the short-term rental industry, it's just everywhere now. We've been fortunate to be a little part of that on the back-end with our tax service, but about 4½ years ago, we sold our company to Avalara. Now we're part of the Avalara family, but our whole mandate in life, Jason, is to really support, whether that's an owner, property manager, or a large operator like Expedia or Airbnb, help all these taxes, apply technology to make all these taxes simple and keep that back-office function as simple as possible. Jason: Got it. In doing all of this, what are some of the complexities, some of the challenges that people are dealing with that have rental properties? Why is this a service that they might need? Rob: I think there's a lot of confusion in this arena. I think in the smaller segments of the market, if you think about property owners trying to manage this themselves, they've just never dealt with these types of transactional taxes before. If you mentioned tax to a property owner, they're thinking income tax. There's just a great lack of awareness and the complexity comes in. This isn't necessarily rocket science, but wherever you're renting, like for my property in Vail, I have to deal with the state of Colorado, the Colorado Department of Revenue for sales tax and then the town of Vail has their own local room tax or lodging tax, so that's very common. There are multiple layers of government involved, these are state and local taxes, and it's all specific to the rental property address. If you’re a manager and you have a portfolio, depending on how dispersed you are, each city, town, or county, and certainly, state, has their own tax rates and requirements. There are different forms and it can vary by city. That's the complexity. It's highly localized and each location has their own set of requirements. Jason: Now, your service can cover any city anywhere in the US? Rob: Yeah. We cover every location in the US. We don't do anything international yet, but that means we tell people the exact tax rate for all the properties they're managing or even if it's just one property, we register them. It's very common in this environment, you have to get a business license, short-term rental permit, or rental permits. There's increasing scrutiny and regulation on the short-term rental space so there are more paperwork and form. We manage and do all that on behalf of our customers. Then on the back-end, these taxes need to be collected on all short-term transactions. Your software platform automates the monthly filing and paying of the taxes. I sometimes compare it to TurboTax. It’s kind of an online hosted in the cloud service where you can log in, put in your data, and the technology does the heavy lifting and calculation of filing. We're similar, just a different type of taxes with these hotel taxes. Jason: Got it. What are some of the filings that have to occur that the typical homeowner would probably not be thinking about? Rob: Again, the typical homeowner (like I said) thinks of these taxes in the context of income taxes. I'll go back to my Vail property as an example. Every quarter, I have to file a Colorado sales tax return with the state. I have to file—this is where it gets confusing—a Vail special marketing district return which is also paid to the state even though it's a Vail tax. Then there's a Vail sales tax that's paid directly to the town of Vail. For my little example in Vail, I've got three different filings to two different agencies every quarter. That's pretty common. If you're in Florida, it's going to be a state sales tax filing and a county tourist tax filing. If you're in Texas, it's going to be a state hotel tax filing and then a city or county hotel tax filing based on your location. It’s multiple filings, it's always a sales tax or lodging tax, a very specific tax to providing accommodations. Jason: If somebody's listening that has a property like this and they're like I haven't really been paying too much attention, I probably don't need to, what penalties could be coming down the line that they're just not aware of? Rob: One of the things we're seeing is in the multifamily space. We're seeing a lot of operators that typically are in the residential long-term rental market, that are being pulled in at the short-term rental market because I think it's become so popular, it's become easy on these big platforms like Vrbo and Airbnb. The rent, the nightly or weekly rent can be very compelling, depending on your location of property relative to what you can do on a long-term lease. That's a huge trend we're seeing in the space is typical long-term or multifamily operators getting in the short-term space. One of the issues for those folks is that now they’re doing short-term rentals, the short-term nature of their rental is what triggers the requirement to deal with all these taxes. To your point, there's a risk there. Certainly, the very larger multifamily operators are very sensitive to it. They want to have all that covered before they engage in short-term rentals. For smaller operators, I think sometimes they'll get it going and then figure out as they're doing it, seeing if a short-term model is going to work for them. Again, there's increasing scrutiny on short-term rental operators, but the risk is that if you're audited or found not to be paying the tax, you can be assessed, not only back tax, which you would have typically just collected from your guest or renter—they're very accustomed to paying it—but then you've got penalties and interest on top of that. It's certainly something that can add up. We do see those cases and we do help people that are in that situation where they've got a back tax liability to figure that out. The penalties can be pretty significant. Tax, probably like everything in life, is better to do it proactively versus reactively. We certainly encourage our customers and people we interact with to try to get out in front of it, make sure you understand the rules, are registered, and collecting the taxes, so you don't have that liability jump up and bite you as you're trying to manage your business. Jason: For property managers that are listening to the show, they have investors as clients. Some of them may have short-term rentals. Do you typically work with property management companies and how might that work for those that listen? Rob: We work with hundreds and hundreds of property managers across the US in the short-term rental space. We actually do work, like I said, in the multifamily space. We're seeing a lot of those operators and we work with companies that often have largely been in the long-term rental space, they're getting in the short-term rental space. Our largest segment is still the rent-by-owner or the Airbnb host crowd but we certainly work with a lot of managers and we're a solution for them. Everything tax, occupancy-tax related, our model is to really handle that from soup-to-nuts, A-Z, like I said, registration rates. I think our property manager partners really value us as a way to take everything occupancy-tax related which includes licensing and registration, to hand that over to a trusted partner (which is us), and just make sure everything's done correctly, accurately, on time. It's just one less thing they have to deal with. Jason: Perfect. What are the typical questions that a property manager or a homeowner listening to this would be curious about knowing about your service? Rob: Good question. There are two different buckets. In the homeowner space, there's often generally just a lack of awareness of what they even need to do. It's more of a conversation about, “Oh yeah, if you are renting in Vail, here's what you need to do.” When owners understand that—and they often are very surprised about these requirements—they're often eager to outsource. Our service is $20 a month for that single user. Not to be cavalier, but we'd say it's a very affordable way, just to make sure you know the taxes are all getting paid on the right form, to the right agency, on the right date. For the rent-by-owner crowd or host, they're just generally not aware. For the manager, generally there is awareness. The first question a manager would ask us if they're new to the space would be “Hey, do I have to file this for each of the properties I'm managing in our portfolio? How does that work?” Generally, for managers, we can aggregate their portfolio onto one set of filings. We can really do it much more efficiently. There are some locations that require property level filings, but usually for managers, we can do things very efficiently, we can combine all their listings under one, what we call an umbrella account for the management company. Instead of filing 30, 50, or 100 returns for each property, we can file a couple for the management company that covers the 30, 50, or 100 properties they're managing in their portfolio. Managers often have a lot of questions around the mechanics of those type of administrative mechanics about how it works, how can we do it, and do they have to do it by property, by owner, or can we do things more efficiently? The good news is in the manager segment, there are shortcuts and consolidations we can do to make things easier. Jason: Right. Because usually, most of the properties are in similar geographic areas, you can bulk those together. Rob: Exactly. Most of our managers are obviously concentrated in one area. Sometimes they span across two, three, four cities, or a couple of counties, so there are maybe a handful of different jurisdictions or filings that need to be managed. We do work with some of the national operators like Evolve or TurnKey Vacation Rentals, we work with the Saunders and the Lyrics. A lot of their [...] comes out of that multifamily space. Certainly, the national operators have a much more complex set of tax requirements, so I think we can be a good partner. But you're right, most of these companies are localized within a certain area and they're dealing with a couple of tax agencies, not hundreds. Jason: Basically, you have streamlined tax compliance for property managers. You're going to be able to group some of these filings together so that they're not having to do as many, and then you're focused on things at even the local level, state level, and just making sure that they're compliant all throughout all these different tax situations. Anything else that those listening should know and how can they get in touch if they're interested in trying out your service? Rob: The one thing I had passed along, we sometimes see reticence on the multifamily or long-term operators. They certainly know what's going on in the short-term rental space and they certainly know maybe there are a few homes or some of their portfolios that would really work there, but they're often intimidated by these taxes. I'm talking about even multi-billion-dollar multifamily operators that we work with, they're very concerned about managing these taxes correctly for the liability. I think that's fair but I would encourage people if you want to get into it, experiment with it, or you think there's better revenue yield in the short-term space for some of your properties, I would encourage people to jump in. These large websites are very effective at generating your rent. Certainly, relative to the tax piece, we're applying technology to really just take that burden away from people and know that they can operate in this market, be fully taxed, and license-compliant. That's my advice. In terms of reaching us, we're a hosted service. We're on the cloud. We like to do things through technology. The best way to reach us and get information is through our website, which is mylodgetax.com. Once you're on the website, there's information about tax, our services. If you want to send us an email or give us a call, we do have phone numbers published there. We're happy to pick up the phone and walk through people's specific situation like what are the requirements for their city, how doesn't work, what would it cost to use our service. We feel those types of inquiries and happy to talk about it all day long. Jason: Perfect. All right. They can check out mylodgetax.com. I appreciate you coming on the show, Rob, and I wish you guys success. Rob: All right. Thanks so much, Jason. Jason: You bet. Bye-bye. All right, check out mylodgetax.com if you're concerned about the taxes, especially for your short-term rental properties, take a look at that. If you are a property management entrepreneur that’s wanting to grow your business, add doors, it might be time to take a look at your website. Test your website out. Go to doorgrow.com/quiz, test your website out, and see how effective it is at making money because it's not just about having a pretty website. It's about having a website that's effective at creating conversions, capturing business, and creating trust. If your website isn't, you could be potentially losing out on one, two, three, four deals every single month, maybe more. The typical deal for most property managers is probably worth about $6000 lifetime value. Say you can make $2000 a year per door and you can keep them on for maybe about three years on average, that's about $6000. If you're missing out on just a door a week or maybe about four doors a month, and if you're getting on about four doors a month, you're probably missing out on just about that many. That's about $24,000 in future ROI that you're missing out on every single month. Websites are not that expensive. Making the changes are not that expensive. That's a leak that's easily shored up. Check out the DoorGrow Score Quiz and you can then easily schedule a call with our team. Nobody builds more effective property management websites than DoorGrow. Other people are trying to manipulate and focus on search engine optimization and rankings. You don't even have to have the top spot or even show up on the first page of Google in order to have a business that's crushing it with growth. We can show you how, so reach out to the DoorGrow. That's it for today. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Before you accept a bunch of cash from applicants who drive up in a BMW to rent a property for a few years, check criminal background reports. Otherwise, you could end up with drug dealers with grow operations as tenants. You may be their next victim! Today, I am talking to Jason Waggoner of ACUTRAQ, which offers accurate and reliable criminal background reports. He knows what property owners/managers deal with when it comes to tenants and how ACUTRAQ makes a difference in communities.  You’ll Learn... [01:50] Who is Jason? Started out by fixing and customizing cars to selling vacuums.  [02:40] Buyer’s Remorse? Selling a vacuum to the right person led to ACUTRAQ job. [05:00] Federal vs. Multi-state Databases: Criminal reports are important, but don’t capture all crimes and court activity. [07:02] Federal vs. State Crimes: Federal reports include most heinous crimes.  [09:41] Don’t Ask, Don ‘t Tell? Avoid lawsuits and being liable for renting to criminals.  [13:45] Aliases: Know tenants by all their names via social trace for criminal history.  [15:41] Why use ACUTRAQ? What does it offer compared to others? ACUTRAQ specializes in where accurate information comes from and how it’s relayed to landlords.  Tweetables ACUTRAQ: We love what we do. We love making a difference in the community. Some state criminal background systems generate reports that have a lot of holes for criminals to crawl through. If landlords don’t do background checks, it doesn't take long to destroy rental properties. When you run a background check, know applicant’s past alias names...all of them. Resources ACUTRAQ ACUTRAQ’s Email ACUTRAQ’s Phone: 479- 439-9174 Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) FBI’s Most Wanted List DEA’s Most Wanted List 50 State Sex Offender Search Social Trace National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Multi-State Criminal Database iCORI System National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) AppFolio Rent Manager Buildium Propertyware DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason H: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.  DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. 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. My guest today is Jason Waggoner of ACUTRAQ. Jason, welcome. Jason W: Good afternoon, Jason. Jason H: I'm a little biased but I like your first name.  Jason W: It's a good one. We had some creativity going on in the 80s.  Jason H: Yeah. There's a lot of Jason, a lot of them. Let's get into this. First, I want to get in your background a little bit. How you got connected to the industry, how you got connected into doing ACUTRAQ. Give us a little bit of background for those listening on who is Jason. Jason W: Very fun story there. I started when I was 18, I actually went to school for autobody to learn how to work on cars, fix wreck cars, customize cars, [...] did that, got out of that, winning the sales. Years later, I was actually in between jobs at the moment and besides, this was in 2006. For 20–25 days, I sell vacuums while I was putting in resumes and different things. Thought nothing of it, got another job in inside sales. A month later, I went back to doing that. Two years later, Jeannie Baker, the owner of ACUTRAQ, calls me and ask me if I'm still doing sales and said that I had sold her a vacuum cleaner two years prior to this and wanted to go to lunch. We went to lunch, she had a great product, and believed in it. My father-in-law inherited a rental property. The things that he went through over the course of that first year, he ended up selling it and getting away from it. This was when I was young, 17–18-ish. After seeing him go through that and seeing what products she had that could have prevented it, it just made a home seem like a lot more. That was in 2008. I've been with her ever since and since then, the company has grown. We used to just be in a few states, now we're all in the lower 48 states with offices throughout the country and a staff of about 12 in Arkansas. Just good, consistent growth over the years. We love what we do, we love making a difference in the community. That's how I get hooked up in ACUTRAQ. It's not the normal story you hear from people.  Jason H: You sold her a vacuum? Jason W: Yeah. Jason H: You sold her a vacuum and she was so impressed at how you sold her the vacuum. She didn't have buyer's remorse. She wanted to have more of you, she wanted you to work for her. This is great. Jason W: She got up that morning and looked over the corner and thought, "I know who my salesman is."  Jason H: That vacuum was an anchor. Every time she saw that vacuum, she's like, "That guy sold me. I need somebody like that." It's interesting because as entrepreneurs, we're always looking for the person that's going to help us with the thing that we're weak at.  Jason W: Right. Jason H: You filled a gap for her.  Jason W: Definitely, yeah. She had done it for 10 years by herself at that point and had grown where she physically can't do it by herself anymore. A lot of planning, a lot of sleepless nights, we've been somewhat successful in growing this business and creating something that she started back in 1998 and just continuing to watch it grow.  Jason H: The topic at hand, the title of this episode is Everything You Need to Know About Federal Criminal Reports. Let's talk about what we need to know. Jason W: The federal criminal reports are important and a lot of people don't understand the difference between what most landlords run, meaning a multistate database and they sound similar. Multistate, federal, you think all the federal just covers all those different states. The reality of it is, the multistate database is what most landlords run. It has a lot of holes in it, it has States that don't even report to that database. For instance, New York, they report to the Department of Corrections but not their County data. Massachusetts has its own system called the iCORI system. There are holes in it but those are derived from state repositories from the Department of Corrections from different places like that. Let's say I get in trouble. I'm in Houston, Texas. If I get in trouble here, I go to Harris County, they book me in and if I get convicted, if I do prison time, I'm going to do it in a Texas state prison.  The difference with the federal criminal report is it's a different set of courts. Let's say I do that same crime. Let's just use drugs, for instance. Let's say, I do drugs and I traffic those drugs, now, I go to Louisiana, to Alabama, to Mississippi. I went across state lines. That's a federal charge now. I've messed up not only in my state but federally and that would be trialed in a different set of courts. Most landlords and even some employers do not get those federal court records because it's a smaller percentage. It's 8%–10% which is still a big chunk but the type of our crimes that are tried there are embezzlement, kidnapping, bank robbery, crimes against animals, child pornography, a lot of crimes. If a landlord knew that person had been convicted recently or maybe even in the past, it may change their decision on whether or not they would rent to that person. Most people don't know those records exist. The reality is, most landlords have probably placed somebody that had previously robbed a bank or an ATM, or somebody that had previously been convicted of kidnapping or embezzlement, things of that nature. A lot of computer crimes regarding identity, identity theft, things of that nature. The thing about the federal crimes that there may not be as many but they're all the crazy ones. They're all the ones that if that person had committed that type of crime, it would definitely change the decision. Jason H: They're the worst. Jason W: Right. That's the difference in those federal criminal reports. We offer them as an upsell to our clients for an extra $5. Whoever people are using, it would be wise to go back to their provider and say, "Hey, am I getting this federal criminal report? Can you show me that we're pulling that report?” because there are a lot of heinous crimes that can be committed under the federal level. Jason H: I just want to point this out because I thought this was really funny, that you're using an example of somebody committing crimes and you used yourself. You did this. You're like, "Let's say, I do this and I commit this crime." Most people do, "Let's say there's a guy named Fred." Jason W: Allegedly. Jason H: Allegedly. Here's what's funny. When I met you at the conference, you were this half criminal, half business suit costume like this thing. Sometimes, you even said you shaved half of your beard and you're like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or two-faced.  Jason W: Yes. At the Florida conference, the NARPM conference, the beard was just coming in. I couldn't quite get the half shaven down and make it look presentable. That piece, it really shed some light on what people come in looking like because we actually had applicants that showed up in BMW, with a briefcase full of money, and wanted to pay for the next two years in cash. Then, you look them up and they are known drug trafficker, they've been involved in grow operations and everything else, and you were going to be their next victim. Without running that report, you never see the criminal side of what they're bringing into that rental property because somebody's not going to buy a house and then trash it, do that stuff, dig down to the electric pole, and tunnel in all the things that it takes. They're going to do that to a rental property and then hit the road as soon as they have everything they need.  Jason H: Do you think some property managers would just rather keep their heads in the sand, kind of don't know, don't ask, don't tell? You think there's some that are like, "I'd rather just not do this extra work. I'd rather just not know. If that happens, I did something and they just didn't show up on that so I'm absolved." What would you say to those that they're thinking about listening to this, "I don't want to do extra work." Jason W: The thing about it is, let's say somebody moves in to that property and does something crazy, commits a crime. We've seen this before, it's the same way with our property managers. There's a lot of their stories that sound like sales pitches but they're really not. They're crazy stories that happened and they want to do whatever they can to help somebody avoid those again.  Let's say somebody does something heinous in a property. The first thing that the courts are going to do is go back to the person that leased that property and say, "Who put this person in there? What checks did you take to ensure the safety of the community around you?" Typically, they think that the homeowner has the deepest pockets. When something goes crazy, who's the first person they sue? The homeowner.  It may trickle down the line if there's a property management company involved, but the ones that are just out here doing it think maybe something is going on but like you said, they don't care enough to go to the motions. Whatever they do there is their business. It can be really scary, the things that we've seen. For the homeowner’s side, everything can be scary from the investment. You're looking at this company as an investment. So, if you get somebody that goes in and guts it down the studs, and puts all the stuff that they need in there to do, to set that house up for whatever they're setting it up for. Just to give you an idea, the things that go on, I'm actually in Kingwood, Texas which is the Northeast tip of Houston, Texas. Suburbs, everybody pretty much deems it a safe community. We let our kids play in the street. Last week, there was 79 arrest made from a sex trafficking operation. 79 people. How big that operation must be to arrest 79 people that are involved in?  Jason H: They just said, "Let's pick a really safe community. We're going to fly under the radar there probably." Those property managers aren't using ACUTRAQ so we're going to get away with this. Jason W: Right and even some of those. Those people are legit on paper and the career criminals know how to get by those background checks and we put everything in place in ours from identity alerts. We've tried to add a lot of things to try to catch these people when they're doing this. The reality of it is though, they're going to do it in rental property. If you get a property manager, I'm not even a property manager, in most cases, they're doing background checks. Let's say you get a home-based landlord, they just have six rental properties and the first one finds out that they don't do background checks or anything, as soon as one of their properties come open, "Hey, let me know if you have anything open. I've got somebody I know needs to rent a house, too, and I love recommending you." It just goes that line. Jason H: "I've got four other criminal friends that would love a place." Jason W: Yeah. "Landlord Johnny here does no background checks. It doesn't take long for those properties, the value and everything. Jason H: Let's drive this home to our target audience here. The property management business owners listening, they've got hundreds of rental properties. If somebody has figured out how to game their system, they don't really cover this check in this state. If we've done stuff in this state, we can fly under the radar. They're only running this light-level background. We get the pick of the litter. They got 20 properties available for lease, that just beat them up. Jason W: Yeah, it can happen. That's the thing. For instance, when you run that background check—this is for anybody that's in this world—you need to know the people or the person's past alias names. If somebody's been married three times, you need to actually run the married name and all three married names to get an accurate representation of that person's criminal history. If they changed their lives name, they change their date of birth, that's the only way criminal history is ran for a tenant’s screen is by name and date of birth. The career criminals, let’s say they say they know they have criminal history but it slides by, they automatically know that they either typo-ed something in it and it slid by, or they changed something on purpose and it got through. The next time they tell their people, "Make sure to change your data birth, your last names." If my last name's Waggoner, I may put it down on paper as Wagner. Even if they're looking at my license, if they're not matching it up right beside each other, it looks close enough that Jason Waggoner, Jason Wagner, it's all the same. That would cause a criminal hit to miss in most cases. The best thing to do is there's a search called a social trace and we put everything we have just because of how important it is but if somebody's not getting it, ask your provider about the social trace because it provides all the past alias names that that person has used with their social. If you signed up for a cell phone and utility, anything you had to put your social down, it's actually stored with that name used and the address used. That helps a lot in finding the alias names when people are trying to tell you they don't have any. This is the only name I've ever had. No, you've had two other ones and then, one nickname that you used as alias, too. Running those can make a difference. The career criminals, once they find the loophole, once they find the window or door opened, it's just like a house. They'll crawl through and they'll their other friends to come right behind them. Jason H: It's party time. Jason W: Yeah.  Jason H: Okay. There's a lot of different screening services out there. Help those listening. I'm sure a lot of them have something that maybe came with AppFolio or they got something with Rent Manager, something with Buildium, something with Propertyware. For those listening, why should they use ACUTRAQ? Help them understand what's the contrast between what they had typically and what you're going to do for them. Jason W: You bet. In Rent Manager, we're actually an affiliate of, some other software, too. Typically, the reason somebody will go outside of their software to use us for these reasons. The background check is a no way an afterthought. Not only that, if your applicants have trouble, they call us if they have a dispute. That's one of the big things. With tenant screening, it’s making sure your applicants have a way to dispute the information because you can have a Junior and a Senior. Senior's been arrested 10 times, been in prison his whole life. Junior didn't know him growing up. Jason H: Junior's a good kid. Jason W: Senior's criminal history still keeps showing up on Junior's report. Every time he gets an application for an apartment, he has to go through the whole process. "That was my dad. It's not my criminal history." Having a way to dispute that, it can mean them having housing or not having housing with those reports being accurate. If something like that does come up. Having that documented and being able to help him is one of the biggest things. The support side of things, that's what we do, is background checks, there's nothing else on our plate. The biggest reason is to have a third party, unbiased source outside of your company, outside of your software, all these people do are background checks and if something goes wrong, you could bet that we'll have your back and search through it, anything at all. That's the difference of having somebody that does that and having that as just an ancillary service.  Jason H: It's probably fair to say if their intuition is saying something's off about somebody but everything comes back clean, maybe they should put you to the test and see if you come up with something that [...]. Jason W: We love the [...]. The other thing too is not a lot of companies can staff and have people to make the phone calls to the landlords and employers. With our full premium report, you'll get an employment verification plus the current landlord and the prior landlord.  You'd be surprised that the different reports we get from one landlord that’s trying to get rid of them currently and the one from a year ago that lays it all out and lets you know what's coming. With those added, it really just helps give a better representation of how that applicant's going to act in that property and how they're going to pay rent and all that good stuff, everything to do with their character.  Jason H: We talked a little bit about why they should use ACUTRAQ and what makes it a little bit different. What are some of the typical questions a property manager might ask you about ACUTRAQ went during the sales process? You're the sales guy, I'm sure you dealt with some objections. What are some of the typical questions that you get for those that are listening? Jason W: We generally start with the application process. They want to know about that. Onboarding the applicants and how that process works. The biggest thing with the process is the application in our eyes because that's where it starts. That's the first thing that an applicant sees of your company, if you're a landlord, and whether they're doing it, the software's doing it, or a third party like ACUTRAQ. That's the first phase of the company. That needs to be a smooth process, the relationship, you get off on the right hand. The other thing is they typically want to see an itemized list of everything that's going to be on that background report. You think we're getting a criminal report. What does all that include? There are a number of different things that should be included on that and I hope most everybody listening is getting these with their provider, but of course, it's the 50 State Sex Offender search. It's the social trace that we talked about that has the alias names. The OFAC which is very important nowadays and that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control. They are the ones that have the terrorist database searches, the terrorist watchlist. Anything to do as far as that goes, that's where that information is going to come from and it's OFAC. A lot of people want to know about that one because everybody wants to make sure that we're not housing some terrorist cell in the middle of Houston or Atlanta Georgia, somewhere like that. The FBI most wanted list. That's another thing that's included that we forget to talk about a lot of time or the FBI most wanted list, the DEA most wanted list. Something a lot of people don't know is every major city has their own list for those. Along with the Top 10, every major city has their Top 10. Searching for those, understanding where the data comes from, and what you're getting like we were talking about name and date of birth only. So many people think it's tied to a social or driver's license number, or something like that, but in reality, it's not. The police officers and firemen are the only ones that have access to what we call the National Crime Information Center. Unfortunately, landlords don't have that luxury. Understanding where the information comes from, how important it is to make that decision can literally mean life and death from somebody on the block if you house a violent person in there, if you house a sex offender or something in that nature. That's a lot of the questions that we get. Spanish speaking, that's getting to be more and more prevalent, so we did add that a year-and-a-half ago. We do have bilingual staff. A lot of different things like that. What we specialize in is where the information comes from, how do we relay that back to the landlord in an accurate manner. Jason H: All right. So ACUTRAQ is your sole focus, is doing this screening, and you have these itemized lists, lots of different sources that you're going to be checking like OFAC. It goes well above and beyond what they're typically going to get. You integrate with some property manager software like Rent Manager.  Jason W: Yes. Jason H: I think I gave a light summary there, some of the pluses. This sounds like a really cool thing. How can people get in touch with ACUTRAQ? Jason W: acutraq.com. You can always reach us at info@acutraq.com, that goes to myself and the owners so we will reach back out to you directly. The website is the best way. If you want to call us, feel free to give us a call at (479) 439-9174. That would be the corporate office in Fayetteville, Arkansas and I'm out in the Houston, Texas office.  Jason H: You guys are making property management safer for the property managers that are the boots on the ground, you're making neighborhoods safer, and in general you're helping property management have a better reputation. I appreciate that. Jason W: That's our goal. Jason H: Awesome. Thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show.  Jason W: Thank you.  Jason H: All right. You guys check it out, ACUTRAQ. If you're a property management entrepreneur and you felt like your website might be a little bit leaky, you're just not seeing enough business come through, you think you need more lead, if you just had more leads, everything will be better, it's not leads. Leads are not your problem. You've got leaks in your sales pipeline. Leaks are at the very front end of the pipeline. If you've got leaks throughout it that are causing attrition and without even changing your lead sources, if you're shore up all those leaks, leaks of trust, you can have more business coming out. You're getting some business now. It's not hard to double it just by reducing the friction that's happening at every stage in your sales pipeline. Reach out to us at DoorGrow, that's what we specialize in. We also can clean up your property management website, that's what we specialize in. I don't believe that anybody does better property management websites than DoorGrow. Our focus in not on trying to manipulate Google and with search volume is relatively low and it always has been for property management. Our goal is to facilitate greater trust which helps you close more deals and that's really what your website is for. It's a trust indicator. People don't buy property management. What they really want to buy from you is safety and certainty. That's what they want to buy. You can create more of that through your website, through your branding, through your sales process, through your pricing strategy, through your reputation online. We'll help you get these things optimized so that your business can grow. Check the site site of doorgrow.com. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. 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. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Do you work because you want to or have to? Have you ever considered investing in land to generate enough passive income that exceeds your fixed expenses? Today, I am talking to Mark Podolsky of Frontier Equity Properties. Mark’s passion is investing in land, creating wealth efficiently, and helping others develop their inner geeky entrepreneurial spirit. He’s known as, “The Land Geek,” for buying and selling thousands of raw and undeveloped land deals. Also, he’s the author of Dirt Rich, a guide to building a passive income model in land investing. You’ll Learn... [02:40] Beat Friday Blues: How and why Mark became a land investor.  [05:40] Breaking Down Passive Income Model: No emotional attachment to land and distressed financially.  [07:26] Property Checklist: Due diligence to confirm ownership, back taxes, no title breaks, and no liens.  [08:25] Buy the property free and clear, and sell it in 30 days or less.  [08:40] Neighbors: Built-in best buyers to protect privacy, views, and expand holdings. [09:09] Other Options: Sites with specialized buyers and sellers of raw and undeveloped land (i.e., Craigslist, Facebook, Land Flip, Land Moto).  [10:00] No renters, rehabs, renovations, and rodents; exempt from erroneous real estate legislation.  [10:48] Price Point of Fixed Expenses: Typically, $10,000 a month in passive income.  [12:05] Operating Entity: Spend a few hours a day on land investing business, and automated software/virtual assistants do the rest.  [14:35] How to get started? Everything is hard in the beginning. Embrace the suck. [16:00] What Mark loves about land investing? No physical inventory, no competition, inefficient market, one-time sale, and passive income.  Tweetables Core Business Philosophy: Happy customers guaranteed. Raw land is the best passive income. There’s nothing not to love about land investing for passive income.  True Wealth: Work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want. Resources The Land Geek Dirt Rich by Mark Podolsky Frontier Equity Properties The Land Geek Podcast Warren Buffett’s Margin of Safety Land Moto Land Flip Dodd-Frank Financial Regulatory Reform Bill Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) S.A.F.E. Act FortuneBuilders Robert Kiyosaki Zig Ziglar GeekPay DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business, and life, and you’re open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. 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. Today, I am hanging out with Mark Podolsky. Mark, welcome to the show. I’m going to read your bio here because we want to qualify you and then we’ll let you brag a little bit because you got to do a little bit of starting out here. Today’s topic (for those who are just tuning in) is land investing for passive income. We’re going to learn how to use land investing to create a passive income stream. Mark J. Podolsky (AKA The Land Geek), is widely considered the country’s most trusted and foremost authority on buying and selling raw, undeveloped land within the United States for almost two decades. Mark has been actively investing in real estate and raw land and has completed over 5000 unique transactions. Mark’s company, Frontier Equity Properties, LLC, is an A+ rated Better Business Bureau real estate company. Mark has achieved this level of success largely due to his core business philosophy, happy customers guaranteed. Mark is the host of one of the top-rated podcasts in the Investing Category on iTunes, aptly titled The Best Passive Income Model and The Art of Passive Income. He is also the host of The Land Geek podcast: Work Smart. Earn More. Learn How. Mark, there you go. Give us a little bit of background on you and how you got into this land investing. Mark: Let’s rewind to 2000 and imagine me fighting traffic, 45 minutes in the car there and back, micromanaged, stressed out at an investment banking job, working with private equity groups specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Jason, it got so bad for me that I wouldn’t get the Sunday blues anticipating Monday coming around. I’d get the Friday blues anticipating the weekend going by really fast and heading back to work on Monday. My firm hired this guy and he’s telling me that as a side hustle, he’s going to tax deed auctions, he’s buying up raw land pennies on the dollar, he’s flipping them online, and he’s making a 300% return on his investment. Jason, I’m looking at companies all day long and a great company has 15% EBITDA margins or free cash flow. Great company. Average company is 10%. I’m looking at companies all day long, less than 10%. Of course, I’ll believe him. We go to New Mexico. I do exactly what he tells me to do. I’ve got $3000 saved up for car repairs so I can only buy $3000 worth of land. I buy 10 half-acre parcels, an average price of $300 each. I put them up all online and they all sell 30 days later from an average price of $1200 each. It worked. 300%. I took all that money, I went to another auction in Arizona (which is where I live) and again, it’s 2000. There’s no one in the room, there’s no competition, I’m buying up lots, I’m buying up acres for nothing. Over the next six months, I sold all that property and I made over $90,000 cash. I go to my wife, and she’s pregnant. I said, “Honey, I’m going to quit my job. I’m going to become a full-time land investor.” She says, “Absolutely not.” So I worked land investing part-time and it took 18 months for the land investing income to exceed the investment banking income and then, I quit. I’ve been doing it full-time ever since. Jason: It’s so easy, anybody can do it? Mark: Yeah, I wish. I wish it was so easy. It’s a simple model but anything worth doing in life is not easy. What I could do is I could walk you through the model and then, odds are you’ll just stop the podcast and quit doing what you’re doing and start land investing with me, but that’s okay. That happens a lot. You want me to walk you through it? Jason: Yeah. Mark: Jason, where do you live? Jason: I’m in Santa Clarita, California. Mark: Okay. Let’s imagine that you own 10 acres of land in Texas. I go to the county treasurer and I get a list of people that owe back taxes. Sure enough, there’s Jason Hull in Santa Clarita, California, $200 in back taxes on this 10-acre parcel. Jason, you’re advertising two things to me. Number one, you have no emotional attachment to that raw land. You’re in California. The property is located in Texas. Number two, you’re distressed financially in some way. Because when we don’t pay for things, we don’t value them in the same way. And you haven’t paid your property taxes. As a result, the county treasure keeps sending you notices saying that, “Jason, if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re eventually going to lose your 10 acres to a tax deed or tax lien investor. What I will do is I would look at the comparable sales on that 10-acre parcel. I’m going to take the lowest CUP and I’m going to divide by four. That’s going to get me what Warren Buffett calls a 300% margin of safety. I’m going to actually send you an offer of $2500 on that 10-acre parcel assuming that the lowest CUP is $10,000. I send you an offer for $2500. Now, you accept it because for you, $2500 is better than nothing and you haven’t gone out to look at the property. You just don’t care about it anymore. In reality, 3%-5% of people accept my “top dollar offer.” Now that you’ve accepted the offer, I’ve got to go through due diligence or in-depth research. Number one, I got to confirm you still own the property. Number two, I have to confirm the back taxes are only $200. Number three, I have to make sure there have been no breaks in the chain of title. Number four, I have to make sure there are no liens or encumbrances. I have this whole property checklist and it goes on and on and on. If it’s a property deal that’s worth less than $5000, I’ll actually close it directly with my team in the Philippines. We’re hooked up to an American title company. I pay $11 for due diligence. They’ll give me a whole property report. I’ll get the GIS maps, the plat maps, aerial maps. If it’s an area I don’t know, I’ll have somebody go out there, stamp on the property for me, take a video and shoot photos throughout the property checklist. What are the neighbors doing out there, what’s the road like, all these things. Everything checks out and now, I buy the property from you for $2500. You get $2300 of it, $200 goes to the treasurer, and now I have that property free and clear. I’m going to sell this property 30 days or less. The reason I’m going to do this is I have a built-in best buyer. Do you know who it is? Jason: No. Mark: The neighbors. I’m going to sell that to the neighbour saying, “Hey, here’s your opportunity. Protect your privacy, protect your views, expand your holdings, know your neighbour.” Oftentimes, the neighbors will buy it. If they pass, I’ll go to my buyers list. If my buyers list passes, I’ll go to a little website you might not have heard of called Craigslist (10th most traffic website in the United States). I’ll go to an even smaller one. It’s called Facebook buy-and-sell group and marketplace. And then, I’ll go to these platforms that specialize in buying and selling raw land, landmodo.com, landandfarm.com, landsofamerica.com, landflip.com. It goes on and on. Now, the way I’m going to sell it is I’m going to make it irresistible. I’m going to ask for a $2500 down payment. I get my money out on the down, within (let’s say) six months of that. I’m going to get a car payment, let’s say $449 a month, 9% interest over the next 84 months. Essentially, I’ve got a one-time sale, I have passive income of $449 a month, 9% interest over the next 84 months, no renters, no rehabs, no renovations, no rodents. And because I’m not dealing with a tenant, I’m exempt from Dodd-Frank, RESPA, and the SAFE act (this onerous real estate legislation). The game that we play is can we create enough of this land notes where our passive income exceeds our fixed expenses and then we’re working because we want to, not because we have to. The beautiful part about all of this is 90% of it is automated with software virtual assistants. It’s great. Jason: What is the price point of fixed expenses typically? Mark: For most people, after you earn about $10,000 a month in passive income (that’s $120,000 a year), you’re in pretty good shape. Now, we have some clients who are doctors and lawyers. I have a client. He’s been working with us for 10 months. He’s at $15,000 a month passive and he just went from 5 days a week at his law firm to 2 days a week and he’s spending the rest of his time with his dad who needs help working with him and the other two days doing what he wants to do. We have so many clients that once they hit that point, they retire their spouse. They quit their job. They do what they really want to do in life because the whole idea of this is that we can always make more money but we can’t get more time. For me, true wealth means you wake up and you don’t have to be anywhere. You work where you want, when you want, and with whom you want. That’s really the goal of doing all this. Jason: Love that. What else do people typically ask you about this? When you say it, it sounds really easy. It sounds like something that maybe anybody can do, but it’s like starting a part-time job if you start getting into this. Mark: It is. It is an operating entity. We ask our clients to spend about an hour or two a day doing this. That will move the needle because with our virtual assistants and our software, it’s pretty automated. We actually have automation software for marketing. We can automate our craigslist and our Facebook postings with a posting automator. The only two things that (as CEO of your land investing business) you, Jason, actually have to do, is county research because if you get that screwed up, that whole thing falls off the rails, so you have to pick a good county. From there, you’re going to make sure that you get your pricing right, so you might want to work with a VA, train them, and show them, “Hey, look. Here’s our lowest comps dividing by four. We need a response rate of 3%-5%. If it’s under 3%, our offer is too low. If it’s over 5%, let’s get nervous. Why are they selling us their property? We might have to renegotiate.” We have our metrics in there.  As far as the rest of the process, you can get virtual assistants to do our due diligence. You can get an intake manager that can actually talk to your sellers (because that’s a big time-suck as well). From there, you can close. We like to use Simplifile accountings, so that we can record our deeds online, so I don’t have to go and do a lot of whole paperwork that way. Once we own it, again, we have an inexpensive virtual assistant getting us through GIS, all the neighbors information, uploading that to our software, sending out our neighbor letters. There’s an API with lob.com, which does our mailings. On the backend of it, we use a software called GeekPay.io that is a set-it-and-forget-it system on collecting our money. We get our down payment via credit card and then we get our monthly payments via ACH. It does all the amortization. It does all the calculations. It charges fees but it does it through notifications. If that ACH bounces, it will charge the credit card on file. We went from an 8% default rate to a 4% default rate. I personally worked two hours a week in Frontier Properties, doing the kind of volume that we do. Jason: Sounds great. That’s pretty incredible. How hard is it for somebody to get started with this that’s new? Mark: It’s like anything in life. Everything is hard in the beginning. You know what’s really hard, Jason? Learning to read. We don’t remember it. We forgot how hard that was in the very beginning but you had a good teacher, they broke it down for you step-by-step, and you are with other people. It was just a thing, like everyone can do this and you’re just expected to do it. It’s the same kind of thing. What happens is we’re so ingrained after all these years of schooling that you have to achieve what you achieve, to go back and embrace beginner’s mind and embrace the suck. It’s hard. If you can do that, if you can be comfortable being uncomfortable and you have some grit, you can be successful in anything in life, whether it’s my land investing niche or growing your doors. It doesn’t matter. Nothing worth doing is easy. Jason: It sure is nothing worth doing is easy. The challenge is if somebody is going to choose into doing this, choose into doing property management, or choose into doing any business, they have to fall in love with this. They have to get excited about this. Help the listeners understand what do you love about doing this? Your clients that get involved in this, what do they love about it that’s different from other entrepreneurial ventures that they get into? Mark: The main reason that people like this model is number one, there’s no physical inventory. Number two, there’s little to no competition. If you go on HGTV or the DIY Network, you’re not going to ever see me on Flip This Land. The before pictures is raw land, the after pictures is raw land. It’s not going to be much fun to watch me in front of a computer. If you go to [...] meeting and there are 100 people in that room, 99 of them are house flippers, landlords, or wholesalers. You and I are the only land guys. Number three, you have an inefficient market. I’ve got a hedge fund manager that loves this business because he’s like, “Mark, there are very few inefficient markets left out there. Nobody knows the value of raw land.” Now, that can be very frustrating in the beginning, but it’s also very exciting once you get your arms around it.  No physical inventory, no competition, inefficient, and then you have the fact that it’s a one-time sale and then the passive income versus let’s say I flip a house. I make $20,000 on a flip. I have a new problem. What do I do with my $20,000? I can’t put it in the bank. It’s not going to earn anything. I have to keep redeploying that capital. Once we get to let’s say $10,000 a month of passive income, what our net worth? How long would it take you to have an investment of $120,000 a year at say 2% interest in the bank? That’s over $3 million you and I would have to save. How long, Jason, would it take for you to save $3 million? How long would it take anybody to save $3 million? Jason: I probably would never do it. Mark: Yeah. 12-36 months, you can have that kind of cash flow and then your bankers are really happy with you because your net worth is over $3 million. The fact that—I’m not proud of it—I can’t even screw in a light bulb. I tried to flip a house once. I am not interested in physical things so the subs come out there. I meet the subs. They don’t show up. Just the capital outlay, I started with $3000. My buddy, [...], started at $800. You’re not going to ever get knocked out of the game in this niche. The dollars are just too small. If you go into multifamily housing, you do one bad deal and you’re done for 10 years. You’re BK or you’re just a pariah in the investment community because you lost all your investors money. This is not like that at all. You have an easy entry point, you have no physical inventory, you have no competition. You have a one-time sale on passive income. You have an inefficient market. There’s nothing not to like about it. I think what’s interesting is if you go to a party and you tell people you’re a land investor, they’ll yawn. It’s not sexy. Definitely not sexy. Maybe you lie and say you’re in multifamily housing. Jason: I don’t know if that’s super sexy sometimes either, but yeah. Mark: I mean it depends who you’re talking to. Jason: How do people get started in this? It sounds interesting. My interest is piqued. I’m sure some people listening are interested. How do they get started with this because I’m sure there’s a fairly steep learning curve? There’s got to be a reason why everybody isn’t doing it. How saturated is this? Mark: It’s not saturated at all because again, it’s just not sexy. It’s not conventional. The marketing budgets of the people that are in the house flipping world like Robert Kiyosaki or FortuneBuilders, that’s really where people thought to. Land investing, you have a mental hurdle for people where they think, “Well, I’ve never bought land.” We all know everyone needs a place to live. Nobody needs raw land. You don’t wake up today and say, “Boy, I really got to own 10 acres today.” Jason: That land that nobody is using and nobody seems to want. That land. Mark: Right. It’s a marketing business. You have to interrupt somebody’s day, pique their interest, and make it irresistible. I’ll tell you, after over 5200 deals, I’ve never been stuck with a piece of land. You buy any asset, 25–30 cents on the dollar, there’s someone else on the other end of that deal. Whether it be a piece of land, a car, a trinket, it doesn’t matter. The market is the market. So to get started, I would say you’ve got to learn from somebody who’s done in. For example, let’s say you and I are going to go to Mount Everest together. We’re going to climb this big mountain. Jason: We’re not just going to wing it. Mark: Yeah. You’re going to someone who’s done it a million times and they can tell you the best routes quickly, efficiently, and safely to do it. That’s what you want to do. You can start with that. In fact, for the listeners, I would say that I have a $97 course that I’d love to offer them for free. If they just go to thelandgeek.com/launchkit, they can go ahead and get that course for free. Start there and then see if they like it or not. Jason: Their time investment is 1-2 hours a day? Mark: If that, yeah. It depends if they’re using tools or not. It also depends if they have a scarcity mentality or abundance mentality. A lot of people, when they start doing this, they think they can penny-pinch their way to wealth. They don’t want to use the tools that are out there.  Jason: “No, I’ll do it myself. I’ll watch 120 Youtube videos and figure out how to do it myself.” Mark: Yeah, and you can do that. But again, my whole philosophy is that I can always make more money. I can’t get more time. So, anything that’ll save you time, I’ll invest in. Jason: I say something very similar to my clients. That makes sense. Anything else anybody should know before we wrap this up and how can they get in touch with you? Mark: If you have that mindset that Zig Ziglar says, “If you'll do for the next 3–5 years what other people won't do, you’ll be able to do for the rest of your life what other people can’t do.” You’ve got to get your reps in and you have to embrace the suck. Again, nothing worth doing in life is easy. It might be a simple model, but it’s not easy. You have to take action at some point  Again, the best way to get a hold of me is thelandgeek.com. I’ve got an audio book. I’ve got a book on Amazon called Dirt Rich if you want to just read about it and hear my story as well. It got really good reviews. People seem to like it. It’s not because I’m such a good writer. It’s just that they like it. Jason: Nice. Perfect. Look for the book, Dirt Rich, or check out thelandgeek.com. Mark, this is interesting. I think it’s a new idea that people certainly haven’t heard of this before on the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you coming on and hanging out here with me. Mark: Jason, thank you so much. Again, I apologize if you’re just going to quit your business and go [...] with me. Jason: I love what I do so. Mark: See? There you go. You can do both. Jason: Both. All right. Maybe I’ll get a few people from this show that are wanting to do both. There you go. Mark, thanks again for coming on the show. We’ll let you go. Mark: Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: If you are a property management entrepreneur and you enjoy the show, be sure to like and subscribe. If you’re watching this on Youtube or on Facebook, be sure to share it if you would. We would appreciate that. If you’re in some property management groups, we’d love to see your comments. And if you’re on iTunes, give us a review. We would really love to get that feedback. We’re putting out this content for free. We would love a little reciprocity, people. That would be really sweet of you. I would appreciate it greatly. It helps us get the word out and make a difference in this industry.  If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business, add doors, you’re struggling, you’re feeling that there’s a scarcity in the industry, there’s no scarcity in property management right now. 70% are self-managing. There’s plenty of opportunity. Reach out, talk to us, and let us help you see how you can align your business towards more warm leads and stop spending so much time trying to go with cold leads, time keepers, and time wasters. The people that are at the very end of the sales cycle are the coldest, crappiest, most price-sensitive. Those are the people searching online. They’re the leftovers that fall off the word-of-mouth table. Come sit at the table with us. We’re DoorGrow. We’ll talk to you soon. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Bye everyone. Until next time, to our mutual growth.

Have you ever played the board game, Monopoly? Were you successful at buying properties, and charging people rent? Did you go from buying and selling the little green houses to bigger houses? Did you dream about becoming a successful real estate agent, making billions, winning the game, and retiring at an early age? You’re not alone.  Today, I am talking to Pat Hiban, a real estate agent who got better over time to have an illustrious career in the real estate sales business. Pat practiced what he preached and like most agents, bought houses and then rented them out. At 46 years old, Pat retired from selling homes for commissions to living off the income he made from the real estate that he purchased.  You’ll Learn... [02:45] Labeled as Learning-Disabled: How Pat overcame it, and didn’t let it bother him. [03:35] Go Getter: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Listen and copy others to sell houses.  [04:09] Done is better than perfect: Things don’t need to be perfect, but need to get done. Hire others to make them perfect and fix problems. [05:58] Building a Billion-Dollar Business: One sale at a time, one staff member at a time, one commission at a time. Get rich quick is a slow process and takes discipline. [07:54] What holds people back from growing their business? Themselves. There's someone else that has the same goals, but there's no difference between them. [11:00] What’s going to happen? You're going to quit affirming and focusing on your goals, or they’re going to come true.  [13:25] Unwilling to Give Up: Entrepreneurs tend to have tenacity and relentlessness.  [14:31] Are they not setting goals? Or, are they setting goals and failing? If they don't have any goals, they're never going to get anywhere.  [15:30] GoBundance: Find accountability partner for positive peer pressure to set goals, create affirmations for each goal, and make sure each goal and objective gets done. [19:42] Why people fail to succeed? They give up too soon and don’t establish proper mastermind.  Tweetables Stick with Superpower: Getting business, doing business, and making money. Done is better than perfect. To get rich quick is a slow process. Get rich slowly to succeed.  Your circumstances are a direct result of your goals and how often you review them. Resources Pat Hiban on Facebook Pat Hiban on Instagram GoBundance Tribe of Millionaires Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Robert Kiyosaki The Secret Movie Jim Rohn DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and the 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 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. And today's guest, I'm hanging out with Pat Hiban. Pat, welcome to the show. Pat: Good to be here, Jason. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be on DoorGrow.  Jason: Give everybody a little bit of background on you and how you got involved with real estate. Help them understand who Pat is. Pat: That's a big question as far as who Pat is. It's easier to say how I got involved in real estate. I went to college and I got a degree in sociology. I was going to be a probation officer and I couldn't get a job. What happened was I became an agent, a real estate agent, a poor one in the beginning. I sold 10 house in my first year, made $13,000. Over time, I got better, and better, and better, and I went on to an illustrious career in the real estate sales business. I did practice what I preach and like most agents, I bought houses along the way and then I rented them out.  I played monopoly a little bit, sold the little greenhouses, bought bigger hotels, shopping center, lots of apartments, things like that. Then, at 46 years old, I retired from selling real estate homes for commissions, and just live off of the income from the real estate that I purchased currently. Jason: One of the things in the bio that you've mentioned is you're labeled with a learning disability at the age of eight. Maybe you could share a little bit about that and how you overcame. Pat: Basically, I was learning-disabled. It was all a label. At that point, just like anything, I didn't let it bother me. When you're 8 years old, or even 10, or even 16, you're not conscious of any of that. You're really unconscious of it until later in life when your parents tell you about it.  I got a 2.3 GPA in college. I didn't really think of myself as being really smart. I really saw myself more as a go getter. Someone who would actually be able to do whatever somebody told me to do. My office managers would tell me, "Pat, this is what you need to do to sell a house or to get a listing," I would actually listen where 99 of 100 other agents wanted to try it their own way or reinvent the wheel. That's how I grew everything in my life. It's just by copying off other people. Jason: You've had a lot of success where a lot of other agents haven't been able to experience success or they eventually folded in and just gotten out because they just couldn't make it. What do you attribute to being different? Is it just that you would listen and learn? Or do you have a little bit more tenacity and bite than most people? Pat: One of my favorite quotes is, "Perfect is the enemy of done." I never really had to have things perfect, but I always had to have things done. I think that served me in that I would get them done. If they weren't perfect and there was a problem, I would hire other people to make them perfect for me so that I could stay in my superpower, which would be getting business, doing business, making money.  It was like what Robert Kiyosaki always says, "The B students works for the C students." That's true with me, I think. I'll be able to get it done. I'll be able to come up with the idea and implement a copy of it to somebody and implement it, then just hire other people along the way to make it perfect or better. Jason: I love that idea of, "Perfect is the enemy of done," which is funny because I say to my clients of a whole training video that talking about it and getting their websites launched. I say, "Done is better than perfect," because once it's done, it can make money. It can do its job. If you're waiting for perfect, it takes forever. Let's get into the topic on hand, which is building a billion dollar business. How do you build a billion dollar business? Pat: How do you build a billion dollar business? One bite at a time. That's like an elephant [...]. It's crazy. With me, it's just one sale at a time, one staff member at a time, one commission at a time. With regards to properties and property management, it's the same thing. One unit at a time, one door at a time. You're just building on that. That would be the answer to the question.  So many people today want to get rich quick. The truth to the matter is to get rich is a slow process. You got to know how to get rich slow. If you know how to do that, you're going to succeed. About a decade ago, there's a movie out called The Secret. The whole half of the movie was talking about what you need to do to become a millionaire is to sit there and basically just tell yourself, "I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire." There's a great quote by Jim Rohn. He says, "Affirmation without discipline is delusion." What Jim meant by affirmation without discipline is delusion is you can sit all day and be like, "I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire," but at the end of the day, if you don't earn a dollar and save a dollar, you're never going to have a million. It really should be, "I save $10 a day, I save $10 a day." Or, "I earn $20 a day and save half." Whatever it is, the point is, you need to add discipline.  Jason: For those listening, they're struggling in their business or they’re wanting to grow their business, what do they need to realize that it's maybe holding them back? Pat: Themselves. The answer is themselves. There's someone else in another state, another country, that has the same goals, and aspirations as them, that's so far ahead of them already this year. There's no difference between them. As a matter of fact, that person somewhere else may be disadvantaged compared to them in some way. Meaning, they don't have the money, or they don't have the skills, or they don't have the degree, or they aren’t the right race, or the right sex, whatever the case maybe. They may be disadvantaged in many ways, but I guarantee you that there's tons of amount there that are way ahead of you with the same goals as you and there's no difference between you two. Jason: Yeah. We could hold on to our story and excuses or we can get results. We're the one creating our own blindspots. If we're the ones that creating our own blindspots, we're the ones that's holding ourselves back, then how do we see that? Pat: What you have to understand is how psychology and how people are raised, and how most people are raised. I'll speak for America or North America. The average two-year old boy hears a negative statement from his or her parents or people older than him 16 times for every one positive statement. They might tell that little boy, "Don't touch that." "You're doing it wrong." "Wipe your face, you're messy," anything that's negative. None of that is positive.  By the time you're 18 years old, your subconscious mind is conditioned to believe that you can’t do stuff because you're doing all these things wrong. The only way to reverse that effect on your subconscious mind is to work on your subconscious mind. That's where you basically take goal-setting to whole another level where you actually set goals which everybody's listening to this probably has goals set. You reduce those goals to ridiculous.  I just talked about earlier, whatever it is you want to do, let's say you want to buy a house once a year or buy a house a month, that means you need to look at 20 everyday. You set your goal to that. Then, you create an affirmation around it for your subconscious mind that says, "I analyzed 20 deals a day." If you analyzed 20 deals a day, your mind believes that you're supposed to be analyzing 20 deals a day, and your mind believes that you're supposed to be buying one house a month, then it's going to happen. You can't help it. Either one of two things are going to happen. I guarantee it. Either you're going to quit, meaning you're going to quit affirming, you're going to quit reading your goals, you’re going to quit focusing on your goals. Or number two, it's going to come true. I believed that if you focus on that goal everyday, whatever it is, buying a house, and you focus on what you need to do to get into that goal everyday, it will happen. You will actualize it. I think that's how you overcome the subconscious mind of yours that’s not believing that you’re worthy, not believing that you ever will be a millionaire. I never really had much of a doubt that I would do well, that I will be rich. I was lucky and I was naive enough. A lot of people struggle with that. They don't have that naivety. The way to work around that is reprogramming your subconscious mind but not just in glorious goals. Not just in big goals, but in how you're going to actually act to get to that big goal. Jason: I like this idea. You're saying if you have a big goal, you have to break it down into the smallest action, the action that you're going to be taking on a daily, consistent basis. Then, you create an affirmation connected to this. That affirmation is just basically that you're completing this microcommitement, this action. Like, "I'm going to cold call this many owners to see if they're out of state. To see if I can get them on for business. I'm going to do whatever." It needs to be a daily, consistent, action. I'm going to go to this many real estate network. I'm going to commit to that. Breaking down into the smallest action, "I'm going to take this many agents out for lunch and have a conversation with them. Hopefully, we meet the referrals." They need to start setting some micro commitment and creating affirmations that they're saying regarding these to affirm that they're doing it. Then they need to live with integrity and take action towards those affirmations. Pat: Absolutely. Jason: Say, somebody's doing the affirmations. They're believing in themselves. They're taking these micro commitments. Then you said they're either going to quit or it's going to come true. There's this tenacity that I sense in you, this relentlessness, that I think a lot of entrepreneurs carry, that they're just unwilling to give up. If you're unwilling to give up, eventually, the universe just got to cave to you because you're relentless. Eventually, you're going to get it. Pat: And giving up is hard. You don't want to give up on the ultimate goal, but you’re going to have to change how you get there. Things are going to pop up on your way. You're going to have to go around them. Some people would say that would be quitting but it's not really quitting. You're just doing things in a different way all the time. Jason: Right, like course correcting. Pat: Course correcting, yeah. Jason: You've worked with quite a few different entrepreneurs and business owners. What advice would you give to those listening that you would typically give out for those that are wanting to move towards goals and they're struggling to figure stuff out on their own? What would you recommend to them? Pat: Are they not setting goals? Or are they setting goals and failing? Jason: That's a good point. What if they're not setting goals? What if they don't have any goals right now? Pat: Silly. Then they don't have any goals. They're never going to get anywhere. I have goals since day one. I can't imagine life without goals, even today. Most people don't have goals. That's why they're in a situation that they are. Your circumstances are a direct result of your goals and how many times you review your goals.  Jason: Got it. First off, they've got to set some goals, then they need to review these on a regular basis.  Pat: Daily. I would add something. Maybe have an accountability partner. One of the things we do at GoBundance, The Tribe of Millionaires is we have what we call peer partners which are people in the tribe that keep each other accountable. If they're goal is to call 20 out of state owners everyday, they text them, and say, "Did you call 20 today?" Then, we have GoBuds, which are about four to five GoBros that are in The Tribe of Millionaires that meet on a bi-weekly basis to talk about their goals, talk about where they're at, what they've done, and what they haven't done, that sort of thing, and it works. The point missing would be the accountability aspect. Not only set goals, not only create a subconscious affirmation for each goal big and each goal small, meaning the act-oriented goals, the discipline-oriented goals, but bring accountability around those discipline-oriented goals to make sure that they get done. Jason: Got it. They need to be accountable with somebody. If they're accountable to one, then the likelihood of them actually it is probably none. Pat: [...] works so well. Jason: It's probably because they have a coach, right? Pat: Yeah. They have to go in and step on a scale every week or every day. They have to write down and track what they put in their mouth. If you do that and someone's looking at it, it works. But if no one's looking at it, you're not looking at it, you're not stepping on the scale, and you're not writing down what you eat, chances are you're not going to lose weight.  Jason: Yeah. I worked out with a trainer for a solid year to get in shape. He had me fill out a spreadsheet. Every time I showed up (like once a week), he was pinching me with things to measure my body fat. There was no hiding. He was like, "I could tell you didn't eat right this week," or, "I could tell you're not getting enough sleep because you're retaining water." He’s just tell these stuff. He's done these with so many people. Same thing with working with any business coach that I've worked with. There's this level of accountability, that I'm checking in with them. I know I'm going to be talking into them and say they're going to ask me, "Did you keep your commitments? Did you do what you said you're going to do?"  I think there's that positive pressure. We're so good at applying negative pressure to ourselves. I think it's rare for us as entrepreneurs to apply pressure in a lateral or a positive way among our peers or among our people that their goal is to level us up. We firmly are really good at attracting people around us to tell us that we can't do things, that it's difficult, that maybe we should get a job. We've all heard these things as entrepreneurs. We really do need to have some sort of accountability. We need friends, we need partners, we need those that are in our corner. We need a coach, we need mentors. We need people that believe and can support us in our objectives. Pat: I agree. That's why we created GoBundance. That's why we do what we do and why there are over 220 members now, why our retention is extremely high. It's just because of that accountability piece. Your life just amplifies when you put it out there in front of other people. Jason: Got it. I love the idea of adding an accountability partner. It’s a simple buddy system.  Pat, I appreciate you coming here on the DoorGrow show. Is there any other advice you'd love to share related to how people can get out of their own way, start working towards building the legacy that they want, and building the finances that they want? Pat: I'm sure everybody here has heard of the classic book, Think and Grow Rich.  Jason: You said, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? Pat: Yeah. What Napoleon Hill did is he just went around rich people. He asked them, "How did you get rich? What are your habits?" There was a newspaper article that said Napoleon Hill had to break it down into two things. He actually asked for one thing, "Why people fail to succeed?" He said, "I don't have one but I have two." He said, "The first thing is they give up too soon." They're about to hit the gold and they stop digging. He said, "The second one is they fail to establish a proper mastermind." He was the one that came up with the mastermind concept. He had a mastermind with Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. These are all big name people. They would hang out, grilled marshmallows at a fire, and share secrets.  That's how we came to write our latest book which is Tribe of Billionaires. I want to give everybody on the show an opportunity to get a copy of this if I could. You can get a free copy by going to tribeofmillionaires.com and all you've got to do is pay the shipping. It's a story of a guy who loses touch with his father. For 20 years, he doesn't see his dad. Then, his dad dies and he has to settle the estate. He sees the pallbearers of his dad's coffin. They're six guys. They're all billionaires and multimillionaires.  He scratches his head because he's like, "I thought my dad was a deadbeat. How are his pallbearers billionaires?" Then, he's lucky enough that in order to get his estate, his dad wants him to spend a week with all these rich guys. What ensues are lessons that he learned. He journals about these lessons after spending or during his weeklong time with these six pallbearers. That was what Tribe of Millionaires was all about. You can get it on Amazon for $20. You're welcome to have it for $7 or free. All you're doing is paying $7 shipping. You just go to tribeofmillonaires.com. Jason: Perfect. All right, I appreciate that. Check out tribeofmillionaires.com. It sounds like a really good story that teaches some lessons regarding money, finances, and growing your business. I appreciate you sharing that, Pat. Any other words you want to share before we let you go? Pat: Nope. I'm easy to find. Luckily, my last name is not really popular. Just type in Pat Hiban. You can find me in multiple places. Follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere. Jason: Perfect. Pat, thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show.  Pat: My pleasure. Jason: There you have it. Check it out and get a free copy of the book. You said you can go to tribeofmillionaires.com.  If you're a property management entrepreneur that's wanting to grow your business, if you're looking to connect with other entrepreneurs, wanting some accountability from me as a coach, and some support, I recommend you reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you grow your business.  Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. 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. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

In property management, eliminate no-shows and days on the market. Don’t waste time on administrative work. Make it more profitable. The ultimate goal is to get the place rented.  Today, I am talking to Zee Bhimji and Asif Hussain of ShowingHero, which is property management software built by property managers because they understand the challenges you face daily—dealing with tenants, leasing, and maintenance. You’ll Learn... [04:15] What is ShowingHero? Automation of entire leasing process—from lead to lease.  [07:42] How is ShowingHero different? Customization, full access to improve efficiency. [08:40] Piecemeal Process and Missing Pieces: Some piecemeal solutions sometimes work, but they're not a one-stop solution. [10:40] Showing Process: Contact, communicate, pre-screen, and schedule time.  [14:45] People and Technology: Most expensive operational cost for a business is staff. Reduce expense through automation. [19:05] Customer Experience: Specific service level expected. Automation doesn’t take away personal touch. [21:15] Good property management companies provide consistency, follow laws, and do things in a timely manner. [23:10] Toilet Therapist: Focus on what’s important. Customer service is when it matters. [27:50] Pain Points: Look at problems from property manager’s perspective.  [33:20] Little Things Make a Big Difference: Listen and understand to keep a business moving toward benefiting customers. [36:50] Feature-centric Validation Process: Actionable data/insight to run your business the correct way.  Tweetables ShowingHero: From lead to lease, it helps get everything done. All you want to do is reduce the days in market and make it profitable. The most expensive thing in business is staff. It's the most expensive operational cost. It is people.  The less tactical work you have, the better. Leverage tools, software, and systems. Resources ShowingHero Tenant Turner Rently Knock Rentals ShowMojo Calendly DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives and you are interested in growing your business and life and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. 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 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. My guests today are Zee Bhimji and Asif Hussain. I got everyone's names right, right?  Zee: You really throw up my name though. Jason: Perfect. Let everybody know who you are and what your role is. I want to get into your background and how you got connected to the property management industry. We'll start with you, Zee. Zee: Yeah, absolutely. Zee Bhimji. I am the co-founder of ShowingHero. I have actually been in the industry for about 10 years now. I tell people this a lot of times. I couldn't spell property management where I started. I have a property management company also (Real Property Management) in the Chicagoland area. We've been around 10 years now. Like I said, I still couldn't spell property management when I started. I'm a finance and accounting major. It was a process. That's where ShowingHero came around, where we saw that there is a void in the market.I decided to work with my very good friend here, Asif. We decided to take down this very big challenge and a very fun project. Jason: Cool. Asif, why don't you tell everybody about yourself? Asif: Yeah. My background a little unique. I'm not a property manager, but I was a landlord and do-it-yourself landlord. I have managed a few properties and doors on my own. I was familiar with some of the issues and some of the pain points in the property management world—dealing with tenants, leasing, maintenance, the whole nine yards. My background is actually in marketing and finance. I worked for Discover Financial Services. I actually went ahead and got my Masters in Education in London. I went over to mentorship and educational leadership. Zee and I had actually met together. We were talking about some of the struggles. I actually just went up to Zee to figure out, "Hey. Either some of the struggles that I'm having with my landlords and with my tenants, what are some things that we could do?"  In exchanging ideas and learning from each other, this is where the idea of ShowingHero came from. There wasn't a solution in the market that was available to us, so that's where that spirit and that’s where it started, the beginning of our journey actually from. Jason: Got it. Gentlemen, why don't you explain to everyone what is ShowingHero?  Zee: ShowingHero is an automation of the entire leasing process. It's the easiest way to put it. What we would say is from lead to lease. One of the biggest challenges that I face as a property manager, we managed over a thousand doors, and it's a very good problem to have. Well it’s a problem and it's hard to do. We actually received an award from the Chicago Association of Realtors back in 2015 where we were the platinum leaders in the entire Chicago land market. It's definitely something we're very proud of. That's the time we started realizing we're facing a lot of problems and there are no solutions for them. There are piecemeal solutions. You guys have seen that. Jason, you've seen so many piecemeal solutions. I've seen that you are putting together a full solution because everyone has noticed piecemeal solutions are hard to do and customers don't prefer that.  As a property manager, one of the biggest things that I had was I don't want my employees to go to five different software to get their work done. That's where ShowingHero comes in. ShowingHero comes in and helps from the time a lead comes in to closing out the entire lease. What you want to do is you want to eliminate days in market. You want to make it more profitable. You want to avoid all the redundant stuff, all the administrative stuff. That's where ShowingHero comes in.  It will contact the lead. It'll scheduled the showing. It will use artificial intelligence or machine learning to contact people that are interested in the property, get them to schedule a showing as quickly as possible. This is something that's really cool. You can get a price drop on your property. Instead of having to go and communicate this to so many people, five minutes after you drop your price, you have people scheduled showings. That's incredible when it comes to automation coming in and doing their job. That's where ShowingHero comes in. It helps get everything done.  We come into self showings, which I would like us to talk about because that's something I'm very, very excited about. We do it differently and we do it more encompassing. Asif, I'm going to let you take the stage. Jason: Before you get into that, I wanted to touch on this. People are really looking for a result. They're not looking for pieces. When they're looking for pieces, they're hoping to magically put together a solution to get to a result. You really focus your tool on delivering front to end the result of automating the whole leasing process. You said from lead to lease. Most people listening to this have some solution in place. They may be using Tenant Turner. They're using Rently. I've seen Knock rentals on their ShowMojo. There's all these different tools out there. Maybe for the listeners, I'd love to hear about your processes, what you guys do, maybe how you stand out, or how you're different. Everybody listening is wondering how do you guys fit in the marketplace. Asif: I wanted to add one thing. One of the things that separates us from the market is that the idea of customizations and the full access on the platform. One of the things that Zee had mentioned is when you look at piecemeal solutions, you're looking at being able to solve something. People don't realize the amount of hours that are dedicated into doing that.  The example that Zee had mentioned in terms of price-reduced setting. You can manually go ahead and text or email, and say, "Hey look. That's a solution that works." People aren't realizing that for those smaller solutions that they're thinking that just works, they're not just being efficient. Not being efficient had the opportunity cost that you need to be able to understand that it's not necessarily in terms of dollars but its terms of hours. That adds up, which eventually does translate to dollars. Jason: This piecemeal idea you've mentioned a few times. Give us an example of a piecemeal process that you feel like has these gaps or is broken. Just so people are really clear on this. Asif: I've had clients that have said, "Look. I just use Calendly to schedule my showings. It works. I put out my show times there and I'll get notified." What they're not doing is, what does the reporting look like? Do you understand how many days your properties have been on the market? Are you getting the data that you need in terms of where the lead is coming from? What happens to the lead? Has a lead been able to provide you any feedback either if it's the assisted showing? Have they been able to provide you feedback on the agent or on the property? Are you able to see have they applied on? They clicked on the application link. What is the life cycle of that prospect? Are you able to understand those different points?  You could use Calendly. You might say, "Okay. I'm able to schedule," but you're missing out on those other solutions. You might say, "Hey, look. I'm using a lockbox and I'm allowing people to enter the property." But do you understand who's entering your property? When they've entered? If they've left the property? Are you able to follow-up on all of those different missing pieces? Sometimes these piecemeal solutions work. I had one client who said that they just text message (mass text message) to confirm a showing, which is great, but that does take an amount of time for someone to go get all those text messages, send that, see who replied, see who that person is. Those solutions work but they're not a one-stop solution. That's where ShowingHero tries to differentiate itself and say, "Look. We want you to be efficient and running on all gears." Jason: Cool. Explain the process of how the showing side work. Zee: One of the things to add to what Asif was saying and to clarify, we have piecemeal. The idea of piecemeal is just simply the fact that when a lead is interested in a property (we call our property management terms one, two, three, example stream), the first thing we're doing is we're saying, "Let's contact the lead." It's as simple as that. We just need to respond to them. Communicate, speak to them, pre-screen them, try to schedule time. Schedule time really takes three or four attempts. You're going back and forth. You're leaving voicemails, you're sending emails. From there, you're scheduling your time next week, Wednesday, 1:00 PM. Sounds good. Everything is great. From there, the next thing is a diligent agent or property manager is going to call in again and remind them about their showing the day before. Then, they're going to try and confirm the showing on the day about four hours prior. Jason: The goal behind that is to eliminate no-shows, to not waste time, to make sure that you're doing your best to get these people engaged so they show up, so you can get the property lease as quick as possible. The whole goal is just to get the place rented. Zee: Right. All you want to do is reduce the days in market and make it profitable. Yes, you can have ten agents for ten properties. You're not going to be profitable. That's what we had. We had four agents showing eighty properties. Yes, it worked for us. It made a lot of money but it was tough. I had a call center with three people full-time taking calls all the time. All they're doing is taking calls. That was 8:30-5:30. That's all I was making available and it wasn't enough. We're still getting a lot of calls, a lot of voicemails, a lot of emails outside of business hours. We were making it work. It was working. We pre-screen them on the phone, schedule a showing. We tried to be a little smart about it. We tried to be a little efficient about it. That's where ShowingHero comes in. ShowingHero takes 90% of all that administrative work. All you're doing is like going to your assistant and saying, "Hey. I want to show properties in the north side of town on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9:00-1:00. Can you please schedule a whole bunch of showings for me, but make sure that the people are pre-qualified? Then, make sure you follow-up with every single person to find out if they're going to show up on time. Remind them and confirm the showing." That's ShowingHero. ShowingHero is your personal assistant that is doing all those things but you don't have to remind them. Jason: Okay. The situation you're describing sounds like pretty normal. The problem situation, it sounds pretty normal. Most management companies, if they're smaller, the property managers are the one handling this. They're leveraging maybe one or two tools to try and systemize things. They've got one system that's putting the properties out to the market and feed allowing the system that's handling some of the showing stuff.  That sounds pretty normal. They're going to have a handful of people that are going out or maybe themselves. They're trying to do this. At your level of scale, you started to see gaps and the problem. It sounds like for smaller guys, something like ShowingHero could allow them some freedom from the leasing side of the business that they're tied up in.  Zee: Yeah. I want to put up the 100 emoji right now because that's what it is. It's all about having a bold solution. Jason: Okay. Let me point this out. My listeners have heard this multiple times. The most expensive thing in business is staff. It's the most expensive operational cost that we have. It is people. We're spending thousands, tens of thousands of dollars even on a team every month. If you can reduce that even slightly through some automation, through technology, through some process, through systems, through less communication needing to happen, then even eliminating phone calls being necessary between two people, or any step that is reduced adds up to a lot of cost savings. It scales once you get to 1000 doors like your size. It's pretty obvious. It's really obvious. it's difficult for people that are at a smaller door account to pay attention to all these little leaks that exist in their business. The challenge ends up being they just feel like they're spinning their wheels and they're not moving forward. They feel like they're just living paycheck-to-paycheck. They feel like the business isn't progressing. It's because they're not dedicating time towards strategic time in working on the business. They're focused on all the tactical things they need to do in the business. They have the business that they can do instead of the business that they should be doing, the business that they really want to have in which they're able to focus on strategic time, focus on planning on the future, on growth, on ideas. Instead they're handling leasing, maintenance, phone calls, their team, managing, trying to do accounting, and like all these kind of stuff.  The less tactical work they have on their plate, the better. If you can free up tactical work by leveraging a technology tool or system, you're going to dramatically reduce your cost. It doesn't matter if a tool is hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. Team members are thousands of dollars a month. That's where people miss the boat. I hear people so often they say, "Oh that software is so expensive." They're starting out and they're like, "I can't get the better property management accounting solution because it's hundreds of dollars a month." I'm like, "Are you kidding?" Your first team member is going to be thousands of dollars a month. Start with the solution you can live with forever because it's gonna be painful to switch. I wanted to point that out. Asif: Absolutely. What you were mentioning is key. People don't realize that payroll is expensive. It's one of the largest expense items out there. Doing it manually and not looking at a software solution because you think, "Oh. This upfront cost might be too much," you're not realizing how much you're spending in paying someone to do that manual because the work has to get done. It's not that you're not reaching out to these individuals. It's not that you're not following-up if somebody’s doing this and you're not realizing the cost. The other thing that's also important to think about is the prospect experience. Most prospects that we've looked at are scheduling during weeknights or weekends. Jason: Right. That's when they're not working. Asif: Exactly. How are you able to respond to them? I just read a stat somewhere that said when most prospects are looking at homes, they're not only looking at your listings. They're looking at multiple listings in that area. If they don't get a response within a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, and you don't get back to them, they're going to move on to the next one. They're not waiting for somebody in your office to respond back to them. That's what's ShowingHero does. With our tenant portal, we create a richer experience. The moment that somebody is interested in a property, they get information about the property that the property management company puts out. There's the picture, the details, what schools are nearby, what's the walk score. What are the important factors that allow me to make a decision about this property and then be able to have a response to instantly say, "Hey, this is when I can schedule a showing and that am I qualified?" The pre-screening also allows us to gather more information and that creates a richer experience on both ends. Making sure that the prospect feels that they're getting responded to and that allows them to hopefully sign that lease and sign on the dotted line quicker. Jason: You mentioned experience and you mentioned the service level that people expect. The customer experience is what I'm talking about. You get two camps of property managers. You get some that fear automation. They're like, "Oh. I can never use this AI tool or I can never use this automation because you're cutting out people." They pride themselves. It's like this badge of honor that they wear on their shirt sleeve that they're so personal. They do everything themselves. They think that that means they're providing a higher level of service. "Oh well, I'm going to deal with every tenant directly. I want to see them, know them, taste them, and smell them. I'm doing the best thing for my owners. I'm so connected." They wear this badge of honor. It's not scalable. There's this myth that that means it's better that they're able to provide better experience. Asif: It's not consistent. Automation doesn't take away the personal touch right. ShowingHero allows you to customize everything. I'm going to let Zee talk about how it helped his company grow with that because that was an issue that him and I discussed in detail and saying, "Are we taking away the human touch?"  Both of us thought that automation doesn't take it. It allows you to standardize and make that process simpler and more efficient. You're not going to know how your agent goes and respond to every message and email. You can't control that. You can create culture, obviously, and that takes time. But what about if I can be able to put that in an email or in a message or in my branding that then gets the same process goes out to every prospect every time? Jason: [...]. I know that every renter that's rented at least a handful of times or even maybe once has had a bad experience in renting. They've had difficulties with showings. They've had people not calling them back. They've had difficulties and maintenance. They've all had bad experiences.  When I moved to a new area and I asked around, it's pretty obvious when you ask people. They know which management companies are good and bad. They talk about them. I don't think people realize that the tenants are screening management companies as well. A lot of them will look for a good management company because they dealt directly with an owner that was terrible, wasn't attentive, was busy working, not available, wasn't following laws, wasn't on the up-and-up on things, or was shady. A good management company provide consistency. They follow the law. They do things in a timely fashion if they're healthy. They have good a good service experience. I know from my own experience, I appreciated not having to talk to a person in order to get things done that I wanted to do. I just wanted it done. I wanted it quick. I wanted to get in and see the property quickly. I wanted to get maintenance requests done quickly. I didn't need to talk to somebody, do all the niceties, and go through these. I just wanted stuff taken care of. Sometimes we may focus a little bit too much on customer experience when really the experience they want is just to get [...] done fast. That's it. Get it done and let me get on with my day. "I don't need a friend right now. I need my toilet fixed. I need to see this probably because I need to find a place." Zee: Jason, I especially agree with that because we have multiple things happening at the same time. One of the big items is if you can exaggerate something. Many people who wear this badge of honor are saying that we care about customer service. I fully agree. I don't call myself a property management company. ShowingHero doesn't call itself a tech company. We call ourselves a customer service company. It's where the customer service is required.  I'm not going to call you, Jason, and say, "Hey. I'm so sorry about your toilet not working. This is so upsetting. You want to talk about it?" No. That's not when you need a call. When you need a call is when you're frustrated. When the property owner is saying, "Hey, listen. I need to replace my sub-zero fridge. That's going to cost me $13,000. Can you guys give me a good option? Tell me something that's important." Not when it's $200, not when we need to schedule a showing. When you're trying to schedule a showing you want to automate that. Then you can focus on the things that really matter. Customer service is where when it matters. That's what ShowingHero is allowing you to do. Just like you had mentioned, you want to scale. One thing that I got lucky (and I say this very many times) is that I was fortunate. I was able to hear from people like you, Jason, who said, "Zee, don't work in your business, work on it." That made a really big difference because at that time I was a fresh graduate. I just got out of school and I said, "I'm going to start a business."  I did really well in school and I was like, "You know what? I'm gonna try and listen to people because I know nothing about property management." I didn't come in with any of my old ways of doing things. I was like, "I just need a try." From day one. I got to hear people like you, Jason, who said, "Listen, skill. Focus on growth. Don't focus on saving a few dollars by going and doing showings. One of the first things I did when nobody was doing it was I got epayments. I got esignatures for leasing. Many prospects would be confused and then they would call in. We would get reviews that, "Last time I signed a lease, I had to meet the person there, and we were there for three hours. This time it took 30 seconds." Now, esignatures are commonplace. Everyone is doing it.  But the guy who wears that badge that says, "Hey, listen. You know I want customer service. I want to sit there and explain the lease." No, that's not what you need. You need to be able to answer the questions that they have. Figure it out. Get the maintenance done in a timely manner. That's what's showing here does.  What we have done is also with cost. We've made it very customizable. One thing our clients do is they're saying that, “Hey. All the automation really helps us because then when we go to a showing we can focus and say, ‘Hey, which one?’ We have open houses. The prospect is going to go with it. We're going to get multiple prospects coined for one showing.” If you have six or seven people at the same time, you want to pick who is the correct person. That's where customer service comes in. I feel like that's where you should spend time. Jason: Going back to my earlier question (because everybody listening is wondering), how does this compare or how is it different than Tenant Turner, ShowMojo, or Rently? These are the three tools that have been in the marketplace for a while. A lot of people are using it. I've heard the most about those. What do you feel is different about ShowingHero? Asif: Zee, feel free to jump in. One of the things that I feel that we have, that is the most unique is building on our founders experience and those on our board. Zee, we also have Sean, who's also on the board, bring over almost two decades of property management experience.  Both of them have been very successful. Zee have been able to scale from where we were. I was in the beginning a few doors to 1000–1500 plus doors. I went in as part of the largest franchisee and has been able to establish himself. To be able to use that knowledge and expertise, we can all appreciate that that value is innumerable. Using his experience allows us to understand the pain points for scalability. That's one of the leverages. Because of his network, we've been able to look at different integrations. We've been able to look at different features that we've launched and to really figure out what's the next trend. Luckily (or unluckily) for him, we also do a lot of testing on his property management company. We're like," Hey. We have this view feature. Let's push it out to him." Jason: Zee's the guinea pig. Zee: Yeah. In this scenario, it's a happy guinea pig because these are things that many people will come up to us and say, "Hey, we need to do this. Is this something that you guys can do?" We're looking at it and we say, "That sounds amazing." We can vet a proposal much faster because I'm looking and I'm like, "That makes perfect sense. I've dealt with that." Property managers deal with that every day. We're not fixing things. It's not a novelty solution. When we look at a problem, we're looking at it from the property manager’s eyes. Many of our clients say that they appreciate the fact that we're a property management software that's built by property managers. We feel their pain. We understand their pain fully. I have been in the trenches (I'm still in the trenches). It makes a really big difference. One of the things that we have is the fact that we try to build a system that's customizable. We have vendor portals. We have very many features, Jason. A lot of our customers are ecstatic about the fact that we're feature-rich, but we're agile. We're an agile software which means that we can move quickly. One of the things that I thought was a major disadvantage for us is it's obviously an advantage also but we were the new shiny product out there. How can people trust it if they have no one else that has tried it. That's where we got a little lucky. We got a little fortunate because my network of people were like, "Zee, you know what? If you've built something, we're happy to see what it's about."  Sean Kingman said, "Hey. Let's try this," and that's how it caught on fire. We just started. We're a 2017-2018 product. We've only been around for a very short time. The reason why we're many times being added to conversations is because our customers see it as client success is very important to us and we know property management. That's a very big differentiator. When it comes to features, Asif could talk for like six hours. Jason, you might get a little bored. You might think some of these things are really cool but six hours, I don't think we have.  Jason: Maybe we'll get into a few features that Asif thinks are really cool. Before we do that, I just want to touch on what you said that there's fundamentally the intention from the ground up of what a company is involved in significantly changes all of the outcomes and the product that they create. If people start a product because they think, "Hey. We're really nerdy and we're really cool tech people. Let's make something really nerdy and see if we can make some money off these property managers." That's very different than having an intention from the ground-up saying, "Hey, we need to solve this problem for ourselves. Let's see if we can do this towards scaling the business."  Your focus from the ground-up was, “How can we focus on scaling this? How can we lower operational costs? How can we systemize things and reduce time? How can we speed up the process? How can we focus on the customer service aspect so that we're getting a high level of positivity throughout the experience for the customer?” That's a very different focus than I'm just focusing on being really tech-savvy and making something really nerdy and cool, and throwing a bunch of features at it. The whole goal to grow in scale is significant.  Just like in DoorGrow, our intention, our fundamental mission (like client-centric mission statement) is that we want to change and transform this industry, and have an impact. We get to do that through hundreds of clients that we have and create that ripple effect. I really do believe that good property management can change the world. You can have a significant impact on hundreds of thousands of families lives, home, money, property, and investments. This is fundamental to your owners and the tenants lives. That drives our mission and our vision, and we want to have a real impact with our clients. We've done things that, probably from a business standpoint, makes sense for us but it was towards our vision and our purpose. It's not always about the bottom line or about the dollar. I'm sure with you guys, you've made little changes and little differences between what you do. Maybe some of the others isn't on squeezing a dollar out of a person or just implementing some cool piece of technology. It's just like driving down the road. It's the little adjustments that you make to the steering wheel. You end up in a very different place. You stay on the road. But if the steering was just slightly off from the very beginning and you don't adjust it or if you're flying an airplane, you will end up in a very different place. You'll be off the road. You'll be in a different city if you're flying. It's the little things that end up making a big difference especially later on down the road. Vision and purpose is what keeps a business in alignment and keeps it moving towards benefiting the consumer and benefiting the target audience that you want to serve. You are your own target audience which is interesting. Asif: That really does help. I was just going to add. Zee and I both agree with you on this point. one of the most important things that I've learned in this journey is to listen. To listen and understand. Zee and I had a vision and said, "Okay, look. These are the problems that we're facing. Let's understand and how do we solve them." We've solved a solution and I said, "Look, I want to make sure that customer service is really important to me." Perhaps, it's a millennial thing. I want to get something, get it done fast, and I want to be treated well while doing it. For Zee, it was customizations that were really important. He said, "Look. I need this but I know that someone in my network has a different profile and might not want this. I want to customize this for myself." Even though we have both of those pillars to guide us, we listen to each of our clients to understand, "What is it that you need?" While we're driving to this destination in the car, for example, are we checking to make sure that we're headed towards that way? Are we checking our blind spots? Are we checking our biases to understand where that is? Then also, looking ahead 5-10 years, what are the integrations and technologies that we want to start implementing today to make sure that we collectively push property management to the next level?  Whether that's looking at virtual reality, whether that's looking at AI, looking at learning, looking at voice, what are these tools that we can start leveraging and using to help push property management to the next level while also understanding the realities of today? And then learning from the best practices. That's both from Zee and then from our clients. That's where that mixture has to happen and that's where that perfect blend is. Jason: You also said you have two camps when it comes to software creation. You have those that are more of the camp of, "We're going to create things the best way and everybody else needs to do it our way. Our way is the way they need to fit their business into our model or we're just not a fit for you." Then you've got, "We're going to allow this to be flexible for their business and listen to our consumers and we're going to make adjustments for this." I'm not saying either one is better than the other. They're just different. Somebody may create the ultimate solution and somebody may create something. It sounds like your focus is on customization. It's something that can be adapted to their business model. Can you explain some of the differences between some of your customers that might show up in your software, feature-wise? Zee: One of the things that I could be able to say is just like you said. We have this idea of saying that we have a product it's going to help you in many ways. But we want to customize it. People run their businesses differently. We're still going to provide best practices. We have our client success team. We have our senior consultants who are saying, "Here's how many of our customers are doing this but here are options." When we're doing customer check-ins our customers are like, "I'm thinking about doing something like this. How can you help me?" I'll give you an example of a feature that really differentiates us but it makes us proud. I'll tell you this that many times our customers are saying, "You're giving me a lot of good data." Once you have over 300 listings, 300 properties under your portfolio, you need data to run your business, so getting a lot of data. But sometimes it's not actionable data. You want to say, "Okay. Yes, cool. I'm getting a lot of showings. I'm getting a lot of leads."  What we've started doing is because our customer came up to us, we did a beta across around 30 different customers, and said, "Is this something that you guys care for?" We were looking at and we said this is something important and it's simply performance alerts. Something that comes in, gives you actionable data, and says, "Don't tell me how many showings I have. Tell me how many properties are not getting showings." "Instead of me going through 70 of my active listings, tell me what's actionable data." They tell me, "Here's where my problems are. This is a list of problems." You can ask that you receive this performance alerts on a weekly basis, on a daily basis, on a monthly basis. You're getting this information that says, "Here are all your listings that have less than X number of photos. Here are all your properties that have had less than five showings." This is such simple stuff and we looked at it and we're like, "This is a no-brainer but this helps a company."  Now, we get reviews. We get thank you emails. Asif was just showing me a thank you email yesterday. He was like, "This is a customer saying that this has made their life easy because the leasing manager in the office says, “Now I don't have to go in and look for the needle in the haystack. You guys are making the needle have a halo all around it."  Jason: Yeah. It's helping them see gaps. It's helping them see blind spots in these properties that they're leasing because the more properties you have, the more common those blind spots and leaks probably occur. "Oh, no. We didn't get enough photos on this one." "These small handful of properties are not renting very quickly over in this market." These challenges. It helps you make different business decisions. You may decide not to take on properties in a certain geographic area. They're just not leasing or whatever. Zee: Actionable insight is very important. It helps you run your business the correct way. When we're looking at something like the number of leads, yeah the number of leads are great. On average, our customers receive around 2700 leads on a monthly basis. It just might be something that you know and it's very common, but many small customers don't know this. They don't know how many leads they receive on it together because they contact the 15 leads they receive during the day. But how about the leads that came in on the weekends? How about the leads that came in via voicemail? Or missed calls? 2700 leads is a lot of leads. The problem is that even though you're getting 2700 leads, where's the actionable insight? How do I know which property is not getting the leads? I don't need to work on all the properties and getting a lot of leads. I want to know which property I should be focusing on. That's where ShowingHero comes in.  We have a tenant portal which makes a very big difference because like Asif and you were both talking about, you want a rich experience for the customer. We want to go get prospects to move through the lead pipeline faster and make it easy for them to do this. At the same time, you don't want to have too much work for your leasing staff, calling, making phone calls, asking. We have the prospect scheduling your showing, going and seeing the property within an hour of scheduling the showing, of submitting a lead on Zillow. That's how quick our turnaround can be. They can just go to the property, validate themselves, securely validate themselves. They're not sending a picture of themselves. They're going through a validation process. This is something that our customers find very important. They're like, "Listen. I don't want to just send pictures. I don't want to receive pictures. How do I know whose picture I received? How is that going to help me?" That's one more step. For us, what we're doing is we're going through the validation process. The prospect goes to see the property and once they're done with the showing we're going through more validation to go and say, "Did the person leave?" If everything is working, you're good. If the person doesn't confirm that they have left the property, we inform someone. The most important thing for a large company is to provide actionable data, actionable insight, so that people can move when they need to move. Otherwise, they can focus on other things. That's something that you know helps our clients and is our mantra for us.  Jason: Instead of people having to dig and react—they're always having to go to the data and find, they have to question, ask things, and figure it out, then they're gonna react to these things—your tool will say, “This needs to be dealt with. Somebody checked in this property. They never checked out somebody should go figure this out.” It's letting them know actionable things that they need to be doing instead of expecting the leasing manager to just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig. Asif: Right. There is data that you can pull and then there's data that's being pushed out. To be honest, we're continuously working on that. It's an ongoing journey for us in being able to understand which data is important, when should it be sent out, how much is too much data, and which one is the most valuable. As Zee mentioned, 2,700 leads means nothing unless you put it into context. How many properties? Where are these leads coming from? How many are qualified? How many are actually showing up to the property? How many are following through? What are my percentage over application over leads that came in? Is it coming from Zillow? Is it coming from voicemail? Is it coming through another third-party site? Data without context doesn't help. That's what Zee was trying to infer to is providing those actionable items in a context that's valuable to the end-user. Jason: Perfect. Maybe we should start wrapping this up. Are there any features and frequently asked questions that clients ask that you want to showcase here while we have you about ShowingHero? Asif: One of the things I do want to mention is that we have a special promotion going on where you can test out the software. I left to look at the marketing team a bit and there's like three or five active listings.  Probably, property management companies that are thinking, "I might not be able to do this," or "I'm not sure this is what it is." I understand that a switch or trying something new is difficult. I understand that there are a hundred questions that you have until we've made it where our first package is entirely free, where you get to test out the software, all of its features, and be able to see that power in being able to make sure that it's the right fit for you. That's one of the things that we pride ourselves and saying, "We're going to make sure that ShowingHero works for you. If not, we'll try to make sure that we can try to get it there and figure out a solution." There is always a solution to be had. Let's have that conversation to figure it out. That's one thing I wanted your listeners to know that there is a free understanding of that which is low risk for them. Also, keep in touch with ShowingHero. We're going to be launching some really, really, cool features and integrations, looking at some technology in the AI and the voice space, looking at more creative self solutions that are out there, and all of this should hopefully come to us by the end of this, or Q4, or early Q1 next year. We're continuously trying to grow and listen to the market, and hopefully, we'll be able to respond with some really great integrations. Jason: It sounds really cool. Someday we'll have to have you come back and [...] what some of these things are.  Zee: We have some cool announcements coming up. I'm gonna add one thing to what Asif was saying. A big thing our customers are saying, customers who have signed up with us around 90 days in, we try to get some feedback and say, "How are things going? What's going on?" One thing that we're hearing from a lot of our customers is that we wish we had pulled the trigger a little earlier and that's why Asif came up with this idea of saying, "Listen. Let's make it a little easier. Let's make it a no-brainer for them." If a customer is having a hard time making a decision because they don't know the value right away, let them try it. That's where our free tier is. We're 100% okay with, "Hey, come on in." I don't mean to brag, Jason, but I will tell you that as the new shiny product—I say this is pride, I'm going to put up the humble brags hashtag, but I will say this—one thing we're seeing is that when we're bringing these shiny objects out, setting a little bit of a trend in the industry where some of the other people you've mentioned are also adding those, we're really proud of the fact that competition is making the current product base. I have to put my property management hat on every once in a while and I have to say, "Just when a new product comes around, that means my other offerings become better because they need to compete." I'll give you a very, very simple example, very, very simple stuff. Our pricing model is being copied across many. I don't want to say copied, but I want to say that I feel that people are noticing that property managers respond to our pricing model. Maybe we should offer a similar pricing model. We have our property pages. We're showing extra data that may not be very easy to pull but we're pulling in the walk score, the bike score, the neighborhood score, neighborhood schools. This is all important information to prospects. Maybe it's not very easy to pull but we're doing it because we feel it's important.  Now, I have noticed that others are also trying to pull a little more information. Maybe not getting as much information as we provide, but it's cool and I like the fact that maybe we're making a little bit of an impact to the industry. Jason: Perfect. It is fun and it's nice to be able to see the impact. At DoorGrow, I feel like we get to have an impact. I get to have it through the podcast, I get to have it indirectly through my clients, and I can see the industry changing in ways that I didn't expect, but it was our goal. I didn't expect it to happen this soon. The momentum is building and it's really exciting to see your vision come to life. I'll take a tiny bit of credit to that and you can, too, so humble brag for both of us. Zee: Jason, I'll say this. One of your customers had come by us on in Nashville. They were just crazy about you. They're crazy about [...]. I just have to put this out there that you guys are providing information and help that is very beneficial. I would tell you guys, everyone listening is probably already a customer of yours, but when they're not, they should start talking to you very soon. Jason: I appreciate that a lot. We have thousands of listeners. I doubt that they're all customers. We have hundreds of customers but 1000. If you're listening, listen to Zee and come talk to me. Zee: Talk to Jason. Jason: I love it. Alright. I appreciate you plugging my business and coming on the show. Anyway, it sounds really cool you guys are doing. I resonate with your your ideology and your philosophy behind what you're doing. I'm excited to hear feedback from some of my customers and listeners on your tool. You people can check it out for free, which is bold of you guys. If somebody has something they can say to their leasing coordinator or to themselves, they can say, "Let's just try out one or two doors. Let’s try a handful of properties on this. Let's just see how it differs. Let's see how it works." That's where maybe you'll start to see some brilliance and maybe get really excited about working with ShowingHero. I look forward to hearing some feedback. Those of you who are you listening, make sure you're inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group, our community for the podcast. You get to by going to doorgrowclub.com. People post really real and raw feedback in there about different services and tools. I'd love to hear it. Cool. I appreciate you guys coming on the show. How can people get in touch with ShowingHero and try this out? Asif: We have a demo page that you can just request a demo out there and then I can share my information to you as well. They can get in touch with me directly in that way through our contact page. What I'm showing here, there's a couple of ways that you can get in touch with us. You can get through our chat box, emailing us, just checking out our website. There's a couple of mediums that you can look at. Jason: And the website is showinghero.com? Asif: Yup. Jason: All right, real simple. Everybody check out showinghero.com. Asif and Zee, I appreciate you guys coming on the DoorGrow Show and contributing to our property management community. Zee: Thank you for having us. Asif: Thanks for the chat, appreciate it. Jason: All right, we'll let you guys go.  There you go. Check out showinghero.com. If you guys are interested in growing your business, if you feel like you are doing it all on your own as an entrepreneur, you feel like you don't have support, you feel like nobody's in your corner, who's in your corner? Sometimes it's not even our spouse. Who's in your corner? Who do you feel is challenging you and helping you level up in what you're doing? If you feel like you want some support like that, you want to be part of something, you are aligned with our vision of changing and transforming this industry, then connect with DoorGrow. Reach out. We would love to help you see some of the blind spots that may exist in your sales pipeline. Our vision and purpose at DoorGrow, what we really do is we help align your business towards warm lead generation. We help align your business towards greater trust by shoring up the trust leaks that exist in your front end of your business, the sales pipeline. Because trust is what closes deals. Trust is what gets you contracts. People aren't looking to buy property management. What they buy is safety and certainty. What they're buying is trust. We can help you showcase trust throughout your sales pipeline and we can eliminate the leaks that scare them off, or that create a lack of trust, or create less trust than maybe one of your competitors, then we can facilitate you growing and adding more doors without even changing your lead sources a lot of times.  Reach out to us. We would love to see if we could help you out show you some of the leaks that may exist in your business. If you reach out, we'll send you access to a 1 hour and 45 minute training called DoorGrow Secrets that will help you see the gaps and the problems that exist in your business. You can to that by going to doorgrow.com/opt-in. That will take you to a page, it gives you a bunch of case studies, testimonials, and it will allow you to get access to that training. Maybe you'll be a client of ours if you get really excited about what we have to offer.  Hopefully we'll be talking soon. Until next time, everybody. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. 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. 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.

Entrepreneurs dream about starting their own business, but they can’t afford it. How can they reach their financial goals and objectives to fund and grow their business? Most of them borrow money from their friends, parents, and/or credit cards.  Today, I am talking to Bruce Mack of Platinum Trust Group. Bruce is an avid real estate investor and licensed financial advisor. He shares seven options to fund your business and take it to the next level. You’ll Learn... [03:54] Option 1: Revolving Lines of Credit Program is easy to qualify for with 700+ FICO score and more than one open lines of credit; no business plan, collateral needed.  [08:55] Option 2: Installment-based Lending Platform features 25 lenders offering $1,000 to $50,000 with lower FICO score, but provable income. [12:25] Option 3: Business Directed Retirement Account (BDRA) is rollable IRA or 401(k) where funds from previous employers are accessible for specific transactions.  [18:28] Option 4: Transactional Funding for A2B, B2C transactions, such as funds for wholesale flips. [20:07] Option 5: Platinum Trust Group/Division offers bulletproof asset protection and ability to save passive income money to repurpose.  [24:48] Option 6: Private and Hard Money Solutions with low annual percentage rates (APRs) and 1-2 points to cash out rental property income to deploy on new projects. [26:42] Option 7: Plug-and-Play Scenario is relationship-oriented opportunity to connect and network with partners and sponsors.  [29:17] Where to start? Typically, it takes about $75,000 to get your business started. [32:56] Funding Mindset: If you don’t want to go into debt to do anything, it may hold you back from growing your business and generating revenue.  [35:35] Constant Lawsuits: Property managers/management companies that aren’t real estate investors are in high-risk business. Tweetables Donuts to Dollars: Entrepreneurs start businesses thanks to friends, family, and credit cards. Plug-and-Play Option: You never know, who you know. Get your project going. You’re in the wrong business, if you don’t want to go into debt to grow your business and generate revenue. Protect your assets! Property managers/management companies that aren’t real estate investors face constant lawsuits. Resources Platinum Trust Group Platinum Financing Group FICO Fundbox IRA 401(k) Real Estate Investor Association (REIA) DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome to DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives and you are interested in growing your business and life and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and the 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. Today's guest, who I'm hanging out with, is Bruce Mack of Platinum Trust Group. Bruce, welcome to the show. Bruce: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it and you definitely are unbelievable at your opening. Jason: Thank you. It's built around all the challenges that we've heard in the industry and what our client-centric mission is as a company. I wanted to fold all that into our intro and I appreciate you giving us some positive feedback on it. Bruce, I'm really interested in getting into this. Today's topic is seven options to fund your business. This is a common challenge of people not being able to afford to do work with us, being able to afford to do the things they need to do to grow their business. This is a common challenge. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that are just trying to operate just paycheck to paycheck. In order to get ahead and grow the business, they need to find some funding, or get some money, or figure out how to make it work, or save something in order to make that work. Before we get into that, could you give everybody a bit of a background? Let's qualify you, help them understand how you got into what you're doing? Tell us, who is Bruce? Bruce: Well, in a couple of sentences or at least a short paragraph, I am an avid real estate investor, have been in a three-year period of time. I was able to buy rehab and flipped out over 160 properties. I've been involved with over $92 million worth of real estate transactions, SFR’s, as well as commercial. I'm a licensed financial advisor, prior owner and operator of a credit repair company that was also a licensed and bonded. I've been around the block. I love working with real estate investors. I speak to them all over the world, as well as nationally and have been at countless events helping folks just like the folks that are on this podcast, to be able to reach their financial goals and objectives, through getting them the rudimentary financing that they need so they can take their business to the next level. Jason: Okay, great. Let's get into the seven options. I guess we're starting with number one. Bruce: Okay, let's start with number one. One of our premiere programs that we use on a daily basis is what I call our revolving lines of credit program. Now, the nice thing is with this particular program, is that there are a lot of no's, but these are no’s that you want to hear, not no’s that you don't want to hear. Bruce: One of the no’s is that you don't have to have a business plan. Another no is that you don't have to have collateral pledged to be able to qualify for this, so if you don't have any collateral, i.e. properties, what have you, or other hard assets, there are no collateral pledges. Another no is that you don't have to have an income verification because it's a stated program. Without a business plan, without having a stated income, without having to go through a bunch of hoops, this makes it an easy qualify program. The key qualifiers are having a FICO score, ideally north of 700 or 700 when we put you through the program, and having more than one (ideally) open lines of credit with a credit card that would be at least $6000, $7000, $7500 worth of credit limit, and at the time that we put you through, you're ideally at 30% or lower on your utilization. Let's just say you have a $10,000 credit card. Let's say you have a $7000 balance currently, that would be at %70 utilization. What I'm saying is that we’d like to see that that $10,000 credit card has no more than %30 utilization or that you're not currently carrying more than a $30,000 balance. Now, if you are, because there's too much month, not enough money and therefore you have higher balances, we do have a solution. We do have another funding division that will likely take a look at those balances and work with you to actually pay them down for you, so that therefore your scores will skyrocket to where we need them to be, your utilization ratios will plummet to where we need them to be, so that we get the maximum results. The maximum results is our average client on a first round funding gets $75,000 worth of revolving lines of credit as much as $150,000 on a first round fund. When done properly and if we have a client that comes to us with longevity of accounts, no derogatory, so on and so forth, of course, that's going to get us all a better net result for the client on the back-end. Again these lines of credit are all at 0% APR for up to 21 months. Jason: Okay, but the cruz behind this is that they've got to have good credit in place in order to do this one. Bruce: Well, there's a couple of other if’s, and’s, and but’s, so let's talk about them briefly. Number one, because of that high utilization, we have taken people with scores as low as 620 and just by paying down those balances, they've shot their scores up within a several week period of time to well over 700 and then we can put them through. Today's present credit score may qualify you even if you're not knocking on the 700 door or higher, we need to do a consultation and see if the net effect of paying down those cards is going to get you to where we need you to be. Secondarily, we do have a secondary program, in as much as if the client can't qualify, but they have what we call a credit partner—maybe it's a partner in their business, maybe it's a relative, a friend—we can use a credit partner to get the same results, thus being able to put them through the program and that could be a win-win. There's a number of different ways we can literally skin the cat to get to the desired result, which is to get the client funded on that program. Jason: All right. You’re going to help them the pay down process, they can use a credit partner, there's a couple of options there. That's number one, the revolving lines of credit program. Bruce: Number two, one of our other core programs is we have 25 lenders. We have a platform for the 25 lenders and they are offering on the platform anywhere from $1000 to $50,000. We can stack those offers, so if you were to get two $50,000 offers, obviously you pony those up and parlay them into $100,000. Now, we can take more credit-challenged folks. We have gotten people some funding with FICO’s as low as 580. The key here is that there needs to be provable income, where the income on the revolving lines of credit is stated. These will need to be proved up through either showing the last couple of pay stubs and/or from their doing account validation by showing bank statements, 1099s, a year's tax return or what have you. Jason: Okay. Bruce: Very, very simple program, 12 questions asked and answered online, a soft pool with instantaneous pre-approvals and funding within usually a week or a week-and-a-half. This is a secondary program that can be used. We use it all the time and it's very, very effective. Jason: With these 25 lenders, these would be people like maybe Fundbox and some of the services out there. Would it be like those kinds of companies? Bruce: Could be, yes. We have our own lender pool that we work with. The nice thing is, there are a number of lenders that you can apply to on the net today, tomorrow, yesterday, what have you, but that's problematic. Every time you apply, you're going to be getting an inquiry. Every inquiry's going to be anywhere from two to several points and it starts to drag down your profile. Worse than that, other creditors that your applying with, see than you’ve been applying. The way we do it is when you access our platform with one soft inquiry, so it doesn't even show on your report, you're getting one or multiple preapprovals from multiple lenders at multiple options in terms of length anywhere from 12 months out to as long as 60 months or five years. This is an ideal way where you have no FICO hit, no negatives, only positives and you can get the pre approvals before you even press the accept button and go into what we call the final underwriting or the hard underwriting. Jason: Got it. Anything else to know about this second option? What would you call this second option? You're 25 lenders platform or? Bruce: Our 25 letters platform or our installment-based lending platform. Jason: Got it, installment-based. All right, so we’re on the number three now. Bruce: Number three. Let's talk about what we call our BDRA. Our BDRA stands for Business Directed Retirement Account. Now, many of the people that are on the podcast have a rollable IRA or 401(k). Maybe, they're even working and are aware that they have a roll-able IRA or 401(k) amount. Let's just say that you're currently working at an employer. You may have $100,000 there and your employers told you, “Well, you can't touch that, it's not rollable.” They’re may be half correct, because prior to coming to the existing employer, you worked at another employer. When you're at that other employer, guess what? You had a $50,000 IRA, which you’ve been rolled over to your present employer. Well, I'm here to tell you some really great news. You can do what's called a carve-out, so you can take those moneys and move them from your present employer, because those were moneys that came from a previous employer and you can automatically put them into what we call our BDRA. That BDRA is a wonderful opportunity for you to be able to access those funds to do what you want and what you want with them. Jason: That’s called what again? Bruce: Business Directed Retirement Account. Jason: Okay, got it. Bruce: Now, it's not a very, very different than a self-directed normal account. Some self-directed retirement accounts have the ability to give you checkbook capability, which is great. The BDRA coincidentally also does, but many of the self-directed accounts are accounts that once you moved on from your old employer, you've moved them into a self-directed environment so that you can tell your money what you want it to do. The problem with the traditional IRA or 401(k) in a self-directed environment (which many administrators that are out there and offer these types of accounts) is that you cannot use these but for very specific types of transactions. Let's just take a typical real estate transaction, a house costs $200,000, you have $100,000 in the self-directed retirement account. You need to come up with $100,000. Now, unfortunately, you cannot obligate a self-directed retirement account, a traditional type, not ours, but a traditional type and you cannot take on a recourse loan, because one of the exemptions is you cannot sign and obligate your IRA or your 401(k) to an external obligation. If you can't do that whole deal inside your IRA, you're pooched. You can't do the deal. Now, there is the possibility of taking on what's called a non recourse loan where you wouldn't sign. However, there are very few and far between. They never go more than 50% of LTV and they're usually a couple of points higher for all the right reasons. You’re only having a collateralized value of the loan. With a BDRA, I've got great news, you can take recourse loans on and it's not a violation of the BDRA precepts. Secondarily, when you have a normal IRA or 401(k), unfortunately, you're exempt from being able to do what we call inter familiar transactions because they're called a prohibited transaction. Meaning, father-sister, mother-brother, siblings what have you, you plain and simple are not allowed to invest with them because it's prohibited. That is not the case with the self-directed that we have in the BDRA environment. Third, you can put up to $53,000 of your annual salary into this tax deferred vehicle where you cannot with a traditional IRA or 401(k) that’s self-directed. Fourth, you can use the money for any business purpose. Now, you mentioned earlier that you've got coaching programs sometimes that are $10, $20, $30, $40, $50 whatever the amount is, it makes no difference, but the flexibility of the BDRA is a beautiful thing because BDRA funds can be used for any business purpose whatsoever. When you talk about a traditional IRA or 401(k), they're very finite, they're very linear, real estate being one of them, stocks and bonds being another, and there's a couple of others, and pretty much after that, you're out of luck. The flexibility that the BDRA brings to the table is phenomenal, and it is a great way to resource funds for enhancing your real estate business not only from the buying of the doors perspective, but from doing rehabs, for potentially using it for marketing money, to expand your net. There's many, many different ways that these moneys can be used that are all in conformity. Jason: Okay. Alright, BDRA is number three. Number four? Bruce: We have transactional funding. With our transactional funding, I'm sure a number of folks that are on this podcast are engaged with wholesale flips, where you're doing an A to B and B to C transaction. Well, we have transactional funding. We have $1 million on the sidelines at all time. You let us know, give us a couple of days notice. I mean, give us more notice than that, but within a couple of days, we can get the funds prepared, move them electronically to your escrow so that you can close and not have to be out of pocket if you're the wholesaler, and get the job done. The fee cost for that is the most reasonable that I've seen in the industry. The cost for funds is only 1.75% and a $495 transaction fee or our processing fee. Call it what you will. That’s another win-win strategy if you're a wholesaler, and you don't have the funds, and you're going to a traditional escrow. This is a perfect, perfect way to make everything come together so that you can get your property sold to that new buyer. Jason: Is that everything about transactional funding? Bruce: That's everything about transactional funding. Short and sweet. Jason: All right, let's look at number five. Bruce: Let's talk about number five. Now this is an esoteric way of getting funding, but saving the dollar obviously gives you $1 as I put it, redeploy or repurpose and I'm sure we all agree with that, and saving tens of thousands of dollars or more starts to become very, very interesting, let’s tell you how. On the other side of our business, we have our trust division. It's called platinum trust group. Platinum trust group is dedicated to bulletproof asset protection. I'll touch on that in a moment, but let me talk about the money aspect where you can redeploy. Real estate investors by the nature of who they are and what they're [...] are involved with two types in multiple streams of what we call passive income. The passive income that we're talking about would either be long or short term capital gains and/or lease and/or rental income. That is the sum and substance of what it's all about. One or the other. With our proprietary trust which we have 58 copyrights on, we've had the trust for over 20 years, we have over 31,000 clients on this program. As a real estate investor, when the properties are sold or the rents are collected, money goes into the corpus of the trust. However, the good news is, you can use the trust for any trust-related activities which would be anything other than what we call food, fun, or fashion. Now you're doing all your business out of the trust. Don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean you can't buy properties, you can't buy cars, that doesn't mean that you can't act in a fiduciary capacity as a trustee to do everything you would normally be doing on a daily basis. The good news is, that moneys, that long- and short-term capital gains which could be 20%, 30% depending, and/or the income from the lease and rental income, the fact that it goes into corpus and stays in the corpus, and that it’s deferred in perpetuity means you're not going to have the tax bill at the end of the year. Now, we have many investors who have tax bills in the $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 a year and are paying quarterlies that are enough to choke a horse. We're able to defer up to 97% of that annual tax liability, including the quarterlies, and deferred out in perpetuity, which means in 21 years, after the last of the beneficiary heir’s deceased, i.e., 100, 200, 300 years from now, we now have a vehicle that nobody in your family tree is going to have the tax consequence and certainly not you, and now we've got all of this additional liquidity that we can be using for investment purposes and is a huge win for our real estate investors. That's only one piece of the coin because the other side of that coin is the bulletproof asset protection, because you can never have a lien or judgment executed against you. It can't happen, let alone your properties because your properties are in the titanium vault of the trust. This is huge and this is a great, great income opportunity and/or savings opportunity for you. I think we're at number six or are we in number five? Jason: We’re at number six. Bruce: All right. Jason: That was number five. Basically. we will call that your trust division. Bruce: Okay, number six. We have a number of private money solutions and hard money solutions. Solutions that start as low as 4.9% on the APR and 1-2 points. Solutions for clients who have rental income properties and they want to do some cash out. We had even a blanket loan program which is available in 43 states. Again, if you've got properties, we have a solution for you to be able to access a ton of money that you are currently not able to access so that you can redeploy it on new projects. This could be huge for you by our hard end or private money funding. Should you have ground-up projects that you're looking to get underway, these are other ways that we can access funds for you depending upon what the project looks like. There's just so many different machinations without knowing more. We would really need to sit and talk, but not only can we get you the blanket loans, not only can we get you the cash out refis, we can do multifamily, we can do SFRs, ground-up projects. It just depends on what it is that you're looking for. Jason: Okay, great and that's number six. Bruce: That’s number six. Jason: Private and hard money lending solutions. Let's get into number seven. Bruce: Number seven is really a relationship-oriented proposition. Because I lecture on a nationwide basis and know so many people, I am constantly sourcing and/or resourcing and putting folks together. I speak. I meet sponsors. Sponsors are always looking for people to act as general partners for with other people who are newer and/or what I would call green peas and vice-versa. I have green peas that are looking for sponsors. Just by nature, the fact that I love to network, love to help people out, and if people are looking for a connection, I'll give you an example. Yesterday, I had a guy come to me in the Seattle area. He is looking to do a conversion. He’s got 93 apartments that he wants to build in one structure. He’s looking for general partners and money partners and he's got everything ready to go. He’s got the water. He’s got the utilities. He’s got all the zoning. He’s looking for money partners and he's also looking for some management help. Well, we have the perfect fit for him because we have people who are right up in the Seattle area because I've spoken recently up in the Seattle area to 800 people at one event. That’s an easy plug-and-play scenario. Oftentimes, you just never know. I don't know where you're calling in from on a nationwide basis because I know you have callers all over the place. I'm California-centric but I travel. I was just in Boston speaking to 1000 people. You never know who you know and tell me about the situation, and if there's a possibility that we can help, we certainly can try and plug to good ends into one another so that you can make a whole and get your project going, so you can take it to the next level. Jason: Perfect. Looking at all these different methods, let’s say I get a client that comes to me and they want to hire staff. They want us folks on marketing, maybe they want to do some coaching stuff with us, they need to get office space, these typical things to get their business going. Which channel would you push them towards first? What would be the best situation for them first? Bruce: Well, if the need is an average of, say, $75,000 roughly, somewhere between $50,000-$150,000. I’ll kind of use that $100,000 spread. invariably, our revolving line of credit program is the sweet spot and we utilize that at promoter events all the time for that $20,000, that $30,000, $40,000 to get them off the home plate, to get them the coaching program that they need to get them also the initial marketing moneys that they need so that they can really start to get traction and move forward in the marketplace. It's very easy and they don't need to have any collateral. Again, it's a state of program. If the person fits the parameters, it's by far and away, the easiest, fastest, most effective, and cost-effective solution. Jason: Now, what if they just wanted something smaller? They're just getting started, they're bootstrapping. Maybe they're looking for maybe $3000-$20,000, something in there. They just need to get some additional funds to get some things going in the business. Would the recommendation still be the same vehicle? Bruce: Depending. Let's just say today the need is $3000-$20,000. Let's just say they've got $100,000 locked up at the old employer that they used to work for, General Dynamics, let's just say. They're taking that money and they're turning it in the stock market, they're getting a horrible return, and they want to take control of it. I would move all of that to self-directed environment and then parse out where you've got total control over it. Then, I would parse out whatever that amount is that you need to deploy for whatever business purpose. If they only needed $3000, $7000, or $10,000 of that $100,000, they get immediately deployed because they have total discretionary use over the funds once it's in their dominion.  Likewise, another one of our programs might be for them to engage with the 25 lender platform. In a request, only request $3000 or only request $10,000, if that's what it is they're looking for. That could be another way to go. We really need to have a discussion. It's my best suggestion to the folks that are listening because sometimes during the course of discussion, we find a $3000, $7000, or $10,000, may not actually be the sum and substance of what you're looking for depending upon where you are, and where you want to go. Maybe it is. We will come up with based upon your credit what you bring to the table, what's going to be the most cost effective way to get you there. Jason: Let's address the mindset of funding. I'm sure there's people listening and they want to bootstrap everything. They're thinking, "I don't want to go into debt to do anything." What would you say to that? Maybe that mindset is holding them back from being able to grow their businesses quickly and generate more revenue as fast. Bruce: I don't mean to be pragmatic but I would say they might be thinking about being in the wrong business if they don't want to go into debt. I bought houses utilizing credit cards before. If you go to any REIA, anywhere in the United States—if you're not familiar with the term REIA, that's Real Estate Investors Association meeting—if you go to any Real Estate Investors Association meeting anywhere in the United States and you interview, take them out for coffee, talk to them after the meeting, what have you, you ask them how do they get the funds to buy some of their first properties, I can guarantee you, dollars to donuts, that they borrowed money from a friend, borrowed money from their parents, or borrowed money from their credit cards, to get their first property. Or a combination of all three coupled together to make it happen. They didn't have the money and their checking account. It was a little devoid or little depleted at that time.  Guys, this is truly a leverage play, and an arbitrage play, when you're borrowing money at X because you can make lie times X equally that new number which is the ability to compound on the amount of money that you're using to be able to get you that much bigger amount of money at the backend. I'm a firm believer in making the right decisions and not getting these moneys for a C shed or man cave. Forget it, you don't [...] it. If that's your ultimate goal, that's not leverage. That's just sheer stupidity, a waste of time, and a waste of money. If you're looking to get these moneys to be able to deploy them in an efficacious way and to utilize them to gain the leverage to be able to get a much bigger payday down the road when you exercise your exit strategy, let's go. Let's make it happen. We're here to help and get you to your financial goal. Jason: Plant some of these things. I know there's some property managers listening that are like, "I'm not a real estate investor." Some property managers that are running property management companies are not real estate investors. I think many of them are involved but they're thinking, "What about my business? Maybe I need funding for the business." I think the same principle applies. The idea that I want to point out is mindset-wise, I think a business is probably one of the most effective (if you do this well) investments you can invest in a period. Very few things give a return on an investment that a business can. I don't think even real estate, I think a lot of things cannot yield as high of a return as a business that is profitable, and highly effective. If the investment is moving the business towards those things, I would imagine that it's going to far outplay a 401(k) or any other sort of investment. They might be throwing them dollars towards in the long run. An effective business can yield a huge return especially once they sell it. Or it can just be an ATM machine feeding them once they systemize the business and they step out of being involved in it.  If you're going to that, I think it's wise to say, make sure it's going towards the right thing. It's going to yield the ROI you're looking to get.  Bruce: May I ask a brief question? Jason: Go ahead. Bruce: About your audience. I just heard or maybe I misheard, I heard you keying in on property management, and property management companies. Is there a broad segment of your listenership that are in that space? Jason: Yes. Most of the listeners listening are people that run property management companies. They manage properties for and on behalf of investors. Bruce: Okay. Let me just say this about that. I'm going to go back to, I think, it was number six. It might've been number five but it was right in there. We talked and drilled down a little bit about our proprietary trust. Guys, I'm going to say it just like it is, you are in an uber high risk business. Property managers and property management companies, they play it simple, they get sued. Facts are one in three Americans get sued. Two in three, 66% of all surgeons get sued. Property managers, I don't know what the numbers are, but everytime I talk to a property management company, they're constantly getting sued.  Just recently, we put on several property management companies who have gotten the trust. Their prime motivating reason was to have the trust be the owner of the property management company so that they would not have liens or judgments that could be affixed to the company. Guys, this is something you definitely want to explore further. It's very important for you because of the high risk nature of the business that you're in. Jason: Yeah. I agree. I have an asset protection attorney. I think it's a wise choice for everybody who has some asset protection struff going on with things in the trust and make sure the business is protected. Very cool. We've got several people that I've spoken to even recently. They're like, "I don't have the funds to work with, Jason, but I want to work with you. We're trying to get money." Or they're trying to get their business started. Or they know there's some things they need to do and they can't just afford to do it. How can they get in touch with you? How can they reach out? What's the best way to connect with you and what you've got going on? Bruce: If you're looking for funding, I'm going to give you a web address. That web address would be platinumfinancinggroup.com. There's a calendar on there. We will get you a complimentary consult. Please, we'll ask you, make sure that you've mentioned that you came from Jason. We always want to know where clients came from. Jason: Mention DoorGrow and the DoorGrow Show. Bruce: Please. Please, please, please. That'll get you the complimentary consultation now for financing. When Jason's got great programs which I've heard nothing but fabulous things about, that can be the genesis, give you the capital to be able to move your business forward, and get his programs. Secondarily, another way to access the programs, as I've said, from the savings from the tax deferral, from the trust program, and/or talking about the trust as well as an asset protection vehicle. Because if you get wiped out, you're done. You know that. This is one way to ensure that you're not going to get wiped out. I would go to platinumtrustgroup.com. We have another calendar there.  The difference between the two, other than the information that you're going to find and the calendars that you're going to find is that the calendar times that you're going to get blocked out for are quite different. If you go to platinumtrustgroup.com, we're going to block you out for an hour. We can talk about trust. Likewise, we can also talk about funding should you have an interest in both.  If you strictly go to platinumfinancinggroup.com, you'll be directed to a calendar for 15 minute blockout. Just be aware of that. When you make the choices to where's the best entry point to get in touch with us.  Jason: If they're really looking at everything and they want to get the full kit, the best place to probably to go the platinumtrustgroup.com. You can also help them with the financing side of things as well. Bruce: Absolutely. Jason: Perfect. Bruce, it's been fabulous having you on the show. Thanks for taking us through all the different options. I wasn't aware that there were so many different options for funding. I appreciate all the info that you're able to share with us today. Bruce: I certainly appreciate you're allowing me to come on your show. It's been a pleasure. I look forward to chatting with you guys. We'll get you taken care of. We'll get you the funding so that you can take your business to the next level and protected as well at the same time. Jason: Fantastic. One thing I just thought off. A lot of our listeners run property management companies. They're all connected to investors. Do you have a sort of program or a relationship that you can make with these entrepreneurs that are working and dealing with lots of investors trying to get them into multiple properties and new properties? Bruce: Absolutely. Not only that, we need to talk because we have an affiliate program. Give me a call, let's have that discussion. That's a whole other discussion and another income stream, potentially, for you. I'm glad you mentioned that, Jason. That was a great heads up. Jason: Perfect. Bruce, it's great to connect and I will let you go. Bruce: Thank you so much for the opportunity again. Have a great day, have a great weekend. Jason: If you're a property management entrepreneur, who wants to grow your business, who wants to add doors, you're looking, you're feeling a little bit stuck, you're dealing with some of the typical challenges, you're trying to do SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, and social media marketing, you're just not getting the ROI, you're not adding the doors you're wanting to. There might be something different. There might be some things that you're missing. You might have some leaks in your business that you can't see. Reach out to DoorGrow. We'll help you shore those leaks up. We'll help you get on a trajectory of growth. I will be honored to be able to coach you through that stuff. We can certainly help you redesign your website.  If you need to go and test your shiny new website or your old website, go to doorgrow.com/quiz. See if it's got some leaks there. You could be losing tens or hundreds of thousand dollars in future ROI every month depending on how many leads or deals you are missing out on because your website isn’t upgraded. I want you to have an A+. Talk to DoorGrow and let's see if we can help you get that taken care of. Until next time, everybody. To our mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. 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. 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.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sleep at night, knowing things are done right and no tasks are falling through the cracks? Unfortunately, many businesses don't have the tools, know-how, or means to document and scale their workflows.  Today, I am talking to Amit Kothari, co-founder and CEO of Tallyfy. Small- and medium-sized property management businesses use Tallyfy to easily scale operations and document their standard operating procedures (SOPs) to improve workflow and mapping processes. You’ll Learn... [03:29] Purpose of Tallyfy: Pain point that had to be fixed. Tool was built to help companies document, scale, and run processes.  [05:32] Process vs. Project: A process isn’t a process unless it repeats. A project is unique every time.  [05:50] Do you have processes? What are they? Document them in a structured form. [06:10] Collaboration for Continuous Improvement: Who looks at the processes? How are they updated? What needs to be done beyond creating a static document? [08:10] Forget Flowcharts: Too complicated and too big. Switch to simple checklists focusing on next step in the process for specific team members.  [15:38] What’s next for Tallyfy? Chat-based interactions and plug-in for Slack. [16:48] Property managers can sign up for a free 14-day trial. Tenant/landlord screening, onboarding, eviction, and maintenance workflow templates are available.  [18:05] Suggest Improvement/Idea: Tallyfy prompts and incentivizes documenting, reading, and making changes to improve processes. [23:54] One interruption can cost 18 minutes of money and productivity. Tweetables Tallyfy: Sleep at night, knowing things are done right and no tasks are falling through the cracks. Customer Experience: Awesome for everyone, including tenants and property managers. To reliably and scalably grow your company, you need processes, not projects. Functional is fine, but easy, fun, and engaging Tallyfy app makes workflow even better. Resources Tallyfy Process Street Slack DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you 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 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. My guest today, I'm hanging out here with Amit of Tallyfy. Amit, welcome to the show. Amit: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: Glad to have you. I'm going to share with the audience your intro here. Amit is the CEO of Tallyfy, a workflow software product that specializes in helping small- and medium-sized businesses scale their operations. Tallyfy enables anyone to document their process or SOP (standard operating procedures) and to launch/run it in a team of people while also being able to assign tasks to clients and people outside the company. Amit founded Tallyfy after decades of experience and mapping processes as flowcharts and noticed that while everyone makes flowcharts, nobody actually follows them while they are working. Very true. Tallyfy is being used by various property management companies to run operations like on-boarding and off-boarding tenants and also handling complex, repeatable real estate sales processes. This sounds really cool, I had not yet heard of this. Our topic today is scaling operations for property managers. Amit, tell us how you got started with this, give us some background on you. Amit: Yeah, sure. I'm British, first of all. I came to the US four or five years ago and I spent a while, basically, helping people improve workflows, mapping processes, things like that. It tended to be mid-sized companies, large companies. It turns out that many small companies don't really have the tools, or know-how, or the means to actually go and stop documenting and scaling all their workflows. That's where I noticed the opportunity that what if the rest of us who were not large companies actually had a simple tool that let us go in and just document a process, scale it, run it, and basically sleep at night so that we know things are done right, none of the tasks are falling through the cracks, and the client experience, ultimately, is completely awesome for your tenants, for your clients, whatever you want. It was just that vision that it doesn't have to suck that much. We founded Tallyfy five years ago and raised some funding from Silicon Valley so we went through a bunch of Silicon Valley accelerators, we're now based in St. Louis in Missouri and it's just growing crazy right now. It sounded like other people agreed with our vision that they want to document and scale their operations, too, so here we are. Now, we're still figuring things out but that's how we go here, that's a fairly simple story. There was a real pain, we had to fix it, so we built a product that fixed it. Jason: Got it. Take us through how this is different than some of the other tools that might be on the market, what people are using. Let's get into the problem that exists which was mentioned in your intro, that you create these complicated processes, or maybe have none, or maybe it's just a Word doc, or you've got a flowchart, but people look at it once, maybe a few times when they first on-boarded, then they think they know it, and then they ignore it. Amit: Let's start with the problem that's really the problem. The first problem is that you don't have any process whatsoever. That's not great. It's probably worse just sitting down for a minute and just saying, “What is it that I do? How do I do this thing? Does it vary a lot every time I do it?” because remember, a process isn’t a process unless it repeats, otherwise, it's just a project. A project is something that's just unique every time. To really grow your company reliably and scalably, what you need are processes, not projects. The first step is, do you have processes and what are they? The problem is if you haven’t written them down, we're a great tool to begin to just start writing them down in a structured form. If you have a process which is either a Word document or a flowchart, say you have one and it looks like that, the problem is, again, like you said, who looks at it? How do you update it if you keep improving it? There are things like collaboration and so on which you need to do beyond just having a static document because the document is always changing. For example, when I do a process, I might spot an idea like, “Hey, next time let's do it this way instead.” Now, if I don't remember that or put it down into my main process, when the next time comes around, it will be forgotten. There's this thing about documenting processes which is a problem, but there's also this problem around continuously improving and that's something that often people don’t do because once it's written, it just lies there like in a safe. It's like in a cabinet, it just sits there, dust gathers on top of it. and no one ever looks at it. Really, that's a wasted investment. We needed you to do both, but now, here's where the problem gets really, really big. That stuff is a problem, that's great. If you're a property entrepreneur and you're on your own, you could start that way, but imagine you hired an intern, you went into business with another property entrepreneur, or you have a team of people who do things for you. Now, the problem compounds about tenfold because whatever's in your head has to be in a place, otherwise, someone else is not going to be able to read your mind, especially if they’re new. It helps new employees see how you do things, which onboards them much faster. It makes sure that lots of people, as you hire more people and you grow or you partner with folks, they know how you do things successfully as well. The reason we don't like flowcharts is because they're just way too complicated. I've seen flowcharts that are so big that if you try to print them out, they would actually print on an A2 size paper. It's so big, it doesn't even fit on my screen right now. Jason: I've seen some print out there of a property management flowchart processes and they had multiple sheets of paper and they taped them together. Amit: I admire people who have the tenacity to document an amazing process like that. The trouble is are you really going to look at that seriously? If it doesn't fit on a picture frame, who's going to use it? Often, we found that just having like simple looking checklist-type things is a lot easier for people to follow. It works on phones because a lot of people are out there in the field. They're showing people houses or doing stuff like that, so it’s got to work on a phone or a tablet. A flowchart doesn't fit on a phone. It doesn't even fit on a piece of paper, so how is it going to fit on a phone? Devices that are small require checklist and things like that. We were the first app initially that launched this. A bunch of other people came out, but we initially create the idea of conditional branching, so if-this-then-that. In other words, if the tenant is this kind of tenant, then show this task, otherwise, show this other task. You can automate all your decisions. too, which means that there's no guesswork that people are doing. It's just like, “Hey, here's a question, we hit the answer for the question,” and the next question pops up just like magic. It handles that real-time workflow for people who are bigger teams like 3 people, 5 people, and even 50 people. In fact, the more people that turn up, the more useful the app becomes. Jason: Interesting. This is really popular right now in the property management industry, we've had Process Street on the show before, which sounds similar, there are some things that you guys have in common. What do you see is the difference between these two platforms or systems? Amit: It's left up to whoever's listening to judge the difference there. We don't know how they work, we don't really know that much about them, to be honest. One thing we did start the company believing in and having real experience in is improving workflows and mapping workflows. I spent a decade in London just mapping workflows. That was my actual job, mapping workflows and this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is a pain I actually had for 10 years. I think having real experience in the area is probably a really beneficial thing if you're trying to build a tool for that. If you try to build a tool for property entrepreneurs but you've never been a property entrepreneur or a landlord, it's going to be really difficult. That's one thing the whole team has right now in the space. Then, a real UX focus. I do think that functional is fine but an app that's like Slack—we love Slack because this is such an easy app to use and it's cool and it works—we love some of the UX pieces around making things easy and just making it fun. There are a lot of checklist apps, but they look really boring, so what things can we do that does make it engaging, fun to think about the design, the experience of somebody using the app. We’re thinking very hard about that and I'd like to think we're probably at the edge when it comes to really making that happen, making it an engaging experience, if you will. Jason: One of the biggest challenges with software is adoption, getting people to use it. Me personally, I'm a visual guy, so if the software is ugly and gross, I don't want to use it. It's a thing for me because I'm going to be living in that software and working with that software, I want it to be aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. It's a big crux of user interface and user experience design and that’s something I pay attention to. Amit: I'll give you one example of how it's different. We don't use checklists. In the actual user interface for Tallyfy, you won't see a checklist. You're probably wondering why like, “Does that make sense?” It does make sense because if you think about it, the first thing people see when they look at a checklist is a boring bunch of tasks that they're not going to think about, they're just going to mark them done even if they didn't do them. Seriously, I’m not kidding you, a lot of people just mark a task done even though they haven't done it. Jason: Yeah, it happens a lot. Then you have to build in these weird checks and balances to make them prove that they've completed it, put in their names or put in details so that step that you’re just created. Amit: Exactly. To answer your question what's different about our app, we've thought through these things because we've watched people do workflows for 10 years. One of the things we do is what we call a card. A card is a rectangular shaped thing and it invites collaboration. It's not just like, “Oh, I'll just mark stuff done,” but, “Maybe I have an idea to improve it. Maybe I need to chat to my friend, Jane, about something I don't understand about this task. Or maybe I have to collect some information of that task.” It encourages more engagement, we're seeing more engagement on our app with actually doing workflows. Honestly, if you want a checklist, you wouldn't need an app. You could just use any to-do app. It's only when you're in a team when you need to track between people where these kinds of apps become really useful. It's little touches like that which honestly needs a lot of experience to think about, things like that, those experiences that make us a little bit different from some of the others. It's just like we experience in the field of watching people do this and design thinking. That's what makes Tallyfy different. Jason: In Tallyfy, would you say that instead of seeing a checklist, they see what is the next step that they need to be focused on? Is that the focus design-wise? Amit: Yeah. We often found that people don't want to see anything but the one thing that they need to do right now. Jason: What do I need to do right now. Right, yeah, what's next? Amit: What do I need right now, yeah. Imagine if you saw a list of 55 tasks, wouldn’t that be scary? That’s just like, “Oh, my God, it’s so boring, I'm just going to mark everything done even though I haven't done it.” It's things like that that are so important that no one really thinks hard about them. They think that they can just roll out some app and like, “Oh, everyone's going to use it.” How did you know everyone did what they said they would do? These things with other things that helped solve it. There are some other things, too, which we're adding down the road which are seriously awesome, especially chat-based interactions which we’re adding with chat tool soon. So, instead of doing tasks, you're actually talking. You’re actually speaking to people on chat while also doing tasks at the same time. Actually, I might as well announce on your show today, we just got approved by Slack, which is like a chat application that a lot of people use. We just launched our plugin for Slack two days ago. It works beautifully with Slack, with a whole bunch of chat tools. You don't want to see a boring line of checkboxes, I don't think that's going to work out for anyone. We try to think. We're trying to move across the realm of possibility here and make it engaging, make it better for people, so that people actually love doing those workflows. Jason: Awesome. What else should property managers know about this app? Amit: It's free to sign up to. We have a bunch of templates which we can help you with, but we often find that most property managers already have processes or things that they already have written down. It's super easy to just move them across to Tallyfy. We could help you with that, too, but there is a bunch of sample workflows that we can also provide. Things like tenant screening, tenant onboarding, tenant eviction, maybe screening landlords, or onboarding new landlords, or even just apartment building maintenance checklists or just things like that. We have a bunch of samples we can help with, but the thing to really start doing is just go to tallyfy.com, hit the free sign up, it's free for 14 days, and then to reach out to us if you need help because maybe you’ll need help, maybe it's that simple. There's nothing to lose by just giving us a try and we're here to help you if you need it. Jason: Now you had mentioned that one of the things that's important is to update processes, as somebody moves through a process inside of Tallyfy, is there some prompt? How do you incentivize them, making changes to improve the process? Amit: Firstly, there’s collaboration. If who owns the process, say it's your manager that owns it, you can just notify them using @ replies saying, “Hey, here's an idea to improve it.” Now, we’re enhancing that around down the road. What we're doing is, as you're doing a process, even if you're not tracking it, you can hit a button that says “Suggest improvement,” (that's actually coming in a couple of months) a real simple button that just says, “I'm just reading this thing, I have an idea, here's the idea.” There's a proper thing that tracks the idea all the way through to the owner and that way, you can do continuous improvement because the person doing the process often has the best idea how to improve it as well. For them, it’s super simple. Also, I feel like people ignore this question but the reason people have Word documents now is because they don't want to literally launch a process every time, they just want to read documentation like, “This is how I do things.” Jason: Because it's fast. Amit: Because it's fast. You don't have to actually track every task, that's just boring. We're launching a plan. By the way, people listening to the show, if you want to trial this plan, we're happy to talk to you about it. We're launching a very cheap plan that's literally less than half the price of all the competitors on the market right now, that literally lets you document and read a process but also improve it. Take your Word document, which you might have already right now or your Google Doc. Now, think of all the features that you wished it had but it doesn't, like this improvement button, all sorts of other things which are not there right now. Package that in a simple thing that literally costs $5 a month per user. That's what we're launching soon, the ability to just document and read while also improving workflows at the same time. That's actually something no one has really seen so far because so far, all the apps out there make you start an actual process and make you mark every tasks done. Jason: Yeah, I’ve noticed there's a really fine balance that needs to be achieved between making every single, little, tiny step have to be done, documented, and check marked and allowing the process to be out of the way, allowing the employee or team member to just get work done. I don't go through a huge checklist every time I drive my car but I probably did the very first time I drove it. I was a little nervous, I want to make sure I was doing it right, but once you know how to drive a car, you want to get in, go, and you want to make sure things are right. But you want to get things done and you don't want to hinder your team members’ ability to get work done quickly by making the process overly cumbersome more than it needs to be. Amit: Yes, because you get that muscle memory, you get into the habit, and you already know how to do this stuff. The last thing you need is now to update some other place to say you've done it even though you know you've done it. I think no one's really addressing that, it's a real issue. We are launching this next month or so. We're very excited about that because it's also a lot cheaper, it's also a lot faster because you're not expecting people to literally go to their phones and go check, check, check, check, check. They're just reading stuff and as they read, if they need help, they can ask for help. Sometimes, you get stuck. In your example, you're going to start your car. But one day, your car doesn't start and you're like, “Oh, gee. I wonder why. I need help from my mechanic,” or something. It's at that point when you need actual help because you're stuck at that task right now or you have an idea to improve it. Either one of those things. But that's the only time you have to interact. When you need help or you have an idea to improve it. That's what's coming. That is transformational because it means that you as a property manager or your staff don't sit there getting bored, seeing a boring checklist of things they have to do every day because honestly, some of your people are actually really experienced. You don't need to offend them by making them check a box every time they do some tiny thing. Jason: Let’s connect it to money. A business owner also doesn't want to pay twice as much for a team member to do a bunch of tasks simply because they're slowing them down at half speed because they have to do something overly cumbersome. Amit: Right, isn't that completely insane? You buy an app to speed you up and it's actually slowing you down. Jason: Very possible. Amit: That could be possible and if you misuse some of these apps including ours, by the way. You could actually have that scenario. Jason: One of the biggest challenges I've noticed with slowing down team members in my own business in the past was interruptions. For example, we used Slack for a while but I found that Slack was causing so many interruptions with team members because everybody was messaging everybody constantly. The challenge also then becomes avoiding interruptions because one interruption, according to some, costs 18 minutes of productivity. If you have two team members interrupting each other, it's like 30 minutes of labor that is blowing out the door. If somebody's being interrupted once every 18 minutes, they almost feel they're spinning their wheels, so reducing interruptions is also important. Amit: Right, and the average professional services hourly rate, fully-loaded in the US is $44 an hour. So, you've literally just thrown, was it $20, you say 30 minutes every hour, something like that? Jason: If members interrupt each other every 18 minutes, yeah, that's almost about 30 minutes of work like you double that because [...] people, you're losing 18 minutes for each interruption. My business is built around eliminating interruptions. This is a focus that we have because the less interruptions, that means the team members need to be able to get the answers that quickly, we want to reduce them asking the same thing more than once, we want to make sure things are documented so that they don't have to keep coming back. If somebody has to say something and I have to tell them how to do it, I make sure they document it, I say, “Here's how to do it, document it, put that into our process.” Amit: Yeah. Let me tell you one thing about chat, and then Slack, for example, is a chat tool. Chat tells you what has happened, chat doesn't tell you what's going to happen or what should be happening next, chat just tells you what's going on right now, not what's going to happen next or what should be happening next. They're two completely different worlds. Tarryfy and processes, and Slack and chat, these are completely different things altogether. You could have the best of both worlds, we have an integration to Slack but we're doing it in a non-interrupted way the integration that I'm talking to you about. We're very conscious of that design experience because it is annoying, because everyone feels like checking their chat all day long like what messages they got and things like that. Jason: I’ve got 20 notifications, am I going to read all of them? Amit: Right, yeah. We don't use Slack to advertise Tallyfy, I want to put it that way. A lot of people build integrations, but they get those integrations to make people go back to their apps because they're like, “Oh, well just use Slack to make people come back to our app.” You just compounded the problem by interrupting someone every five minutes with some notification. We're definitely not going to do that. What we're doing with Slack is quite different and chat in general. I'm really excited about our future. A lot of it is shaping up right now. If any of these interests you, especially if you're looking to get your operations into one place as a property manager, just be in touch. We're really excited to speak to you folks right now. Jason: Very cool. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this with everybody. How can they get in touch with Tallyfy and learn more? Amit: Visit tallyfy.com. The best thing to do is just sign-up. There's a big sign-up button on the home page. Just feel free to check it out, you have nothing to lose, it's free of cost. Once you're in and you get the basic picture of how things work, feel free to reach out, that's when we’ll be most useful to you personally. I'm the CEO and the founder and most times, I often take calls. It’s not like I’m hiding in a corner. I take calls with customers directly. It’s a pretty flat company, we love what we do, and we like being honest with you. One thing you won't find about us is that we won't try and sell you. If we think this is not going to work for you, we'll just say it's not going to work for you. That’s the kind of fresh honesty many of these product vendors need to have. It's not just a case of pushing you a subscription plan to sell you stuff. It's got to work for you, it's got to deliver benefits, and that's what we’re interested in. Jason: I agree. We're very similar. I had a phone call today and it was a startup property manager. I just asked, “Do you want me to convince you you should do property management or not?.” I said, “I can go either way, I'll explain to you either one,” [...] an accurate picture and don't jump into something that you’ll regret later. I’ll wrap this up, I want to tell everybody I believe every business should have a [...]. This is one of the major systems that every business should have. They need a support system, they need an accounting system, they need several different systems. One of the systems they need is a process documentation system. You need some system to make sure the processes are also being done correctly. It's so simple. I recommend everybody check it out and I'm excited to hear feedback. Amit, I appreciate you coming on the show. I will let you go. Amit: Yeah, thanks for the time, Jason. Much appreciated. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrow Club. 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. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. 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