Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

Everybody needs and deserves a place to live that is clean, maintained, and safe. Better yet, It makes perfect sense to get someone else to pay your mortgage by giving them a great space at a great rate and share some resources. Today, I am talking to Lisa Wise, co-founder of Nest DC, which manages residential units throughout Washington, DC. The company is committed to customer service, quality spaces, and excellent living experiences. You’ll Learn... [02:23] Nest continues to experience exceptional growth and measures success by revenue and number of jobs it’s created.  [02:34] Fun Spaces: Fixing an Adobe duplex where nothing’s square and everything’s made of dirt led Lisa to love her accidental landlord role in property management.  [04:09] Non-profit Dedication: Do what you can for the community, in terms of what you want to do professionally, due to ability to manage and maintain properties.  [05:04] Origin of Nest DC: Grow one property at a time, and focus on service forward to take care of tenants, spaces, and places.  [05:56] Property managers can make a meaningful impact by helping people and families preserve a better quality of life in their homes. [11:00] Bad Strategies for Building Relationships: Ignoring problems, letting things fall into disrepair, not paying expenses for repairing things—none of those are good..  [11:23] Property Manager Opportunities: Daily variety, unique challenges, freedom, and direct impact. [13:32] Cycle of Suck: Bad managers control costs and fail to maintain property; if people are unhappy with where they’re living, they’re less likely to be great tenants.  [19:20] Onboarding Process: Set expectations on maintenance costs and educate them on why they need to maintain the property at the highest level to take care of tenants.  [21:28] Ways to strategically grow through painful stages: Evaluate technology, be nimble, and cherish staff.  Tweetables Grow one property at a time, and focus on service forward to take care of tenants, spaces, and places. It’s truly an act of trust and intimacy to be invited to manage someone’s home and personal space.  Property managers can make a meaningful and powerful impact by helping people. If people are happy where they live, then they’re just better neighbors. Resources Nest DC AppFolio National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Shark Tank Upwork Fiverr 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. We’re here with Lisa Wise of Nest DC in Washington, DC. Lisa, welcome to the show. Lisa: Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you hear. Lisa, I’m going to read a little bit of your bio. It says that you’re the co-founder of two companies—both anchored in the real estate management company, both entirely unique in their contribution to the housing landscape. Nest DC was co-founded by Lisa Wise and Jim Pollack at the start of the “Great Recession” in 2009. Nest manages residential units throughout Washington, DC with a commitment to customer service and an emphasis on quality spaces and excellent living experiences. From 2011-2015, Nest DC was voted a top property management company in the Washington City Paper’s “Best of DC” issue. In August 2016, Nest placed in the Inc 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies. That is a reflection of an investment in the workplace. In 2013, Nest DC was named a “Small Business Gem” in Washingtonian Magazine’s “Top 50 Places to Work” issue. Year over year, Nest enjoys exceptional growth, measuring success not just in revenue, but in the number of good jobs that have been created since inception. I’ll stop there, but why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and how you go into property management? Lisa: I lived in Tucson, Arizona. I was going to graduate school there and had an 1893 Adobe duplex which was one of the coolest spaces I’ve ever lived in. I got a nice degree in Political Economy and enjoyed a long background doing political consulting basically, but I liked working with my hands and having an Adobe duplex is the best place in the world to get comfortable working with your hands because nothing’s square and everything’s made of dirt. There was no stem wall and it was actually pretty easy having […]. I liked the idea of being able to do a thing and then turn around and having adding proof to the space. I had worked on the plumbing to patching the roof to doing paint. I feel like I’ve painted, many, many, many square miles at this point. It was something that I think came really naturally to me and I enjoyed that process and working with my hands. I had grown up in an environment where working with your hands is definitely something that was what you did. The great thing about that duplex when I asked my landlord if I could buy it and he said yes was it was a duplex. I automatically became a landlord and I loved that. It made perfect sense to have someone else pay my mortgage. It made perfect sense to give someone a great space at a great rate and share some resources including a backyard, dog care, and all those kinds of things. I fell into being, I think what you might consider an accidental landlord, but really loved it. I have had an instinct that I would love it but I had always had this non-profit draw to do what I can for the community so there’s a little bit of tension and conflict there in terms of what I want to do professionally. If we fast forward many years, and we did bump up against that recession and I was in the non-profit environment, doing a lot of fundraising and felt like I wasn’t changing the world very quickly with my non-profit work. I was actually really ready to do a thing and get paid for it. At that point, I had a few more rentals that I had acquired over time and still really enjoyed that work. It was really originated as a side hustle. It was a great way of bringing in that extra revenue. I was good at managing and maintaining those spaces. I kept telling people, “You should start property management company. I think it’d be a really great business model.” Until one day I thought, “Maybe I should do that. It seems to be something I have an aptitude for, and interest, and enthusiasm, and a passion for.” Around 2009, we decided to launch Nest and the idea was just to grow one property at a time, very organic, focus on being very service forward and taking great care of tenants, spaces, and places. It worked, especially in DC where service doesn’t always tend to be stellar and where a lot of the management companies were high volume and not really building relationships one tenant at a time or one owner at a time. We came up with a really refreshing approach to the business. A really refreshing approach in terms of our relationship to community. The city was clearly ready for us. That’s the origin story of Nest DC. Jason: Love it. You’ve got sort of an activist built into you it sounds like. In property management, I wanted to touch on this, I think a lot of times we get so caught up on business, but I think property management can have a really big impact—on families, on people. Maybe you could touch on that a little bit because I get a sense that that’s something you’re passionate about. What impact you feel like you get to have or ripple effect you get to have as a property manager? Why is that interesting or inspiring to you? Lisa: That’s a great question. It’s truly an act of trust and intimacy to be invited to manage someone’s home and personal space. Doing it well is really an opportunity for us to create meaningful impact in people’s lives every single day. Everybody needs to live someplace. Everybody deserves a place to live that is clean, well-maintained, and safe and we get the chance to make that happen. We get the chance to be responsive and make people feel that their home base is that safe space for their family. It’s been pretty intriguing to feel that I can make more impact on people’s day-to-day lives in this business than I did in a lot of the healthcare and environmental work I did in my previous professional career. Because I do think that we give people a chance to have a better quality of life from them living in one of our spaces. We do get a chance to take good care of these properties. A lot of our properties are older and older as in historic. There is really a lot to be said for the fact that we’re stewards of these legacy places and historical buildings, we’re preserving them, and we’re making sure that the landscape of our city, which is architecturally really significant, is in good repair and well-maintained. That’s an important contribution we get to make as well. That’s part of our whole value-space philosophy for us to be around management, but at the core, we’re being invited to help people have better quality of life in their homes and that’s a pretty important role to play. Jason: You’ve really discovered something that I think was really significant. You said that you’re able to have a bigger impact by being a property manager than by the environmental work that you’ve done and other non-profit stuff that you’ve done. Lisa: Yeah. Jason: Just to explain that a little bit because I don’t think people realize the impact that they can have as property managers. I think we can paint a bigger picture for the industry of that inspirational aspect. I think we would attract better property managers into the industry. I think there would be a better perception of the industry out there. I think tenants would have a better experience. I think families’ lives would be better. People that are living in these different units underneath the property manager would have a better experience. The owners would be happier. I think the industry could use a little taste of this so explain that a little bit because you have experience with this. Paint a little bit of the contrast there? I think that’s fascinating for me. Lisa: When you’re in a non-profit environment, you’re sometimes very far removed from the outcome. If you’re working in healthcare policy or if you’re creating new systems for people to green their procurement supply chain, you’re very distant from the end user, you’re very distant from there being a positive outcome and this is in high contrast to that. We’re working with clients and we had a flash flood this week. We had probably 55, 60 affected buildings and units. We were able to pick up the phone every single time and help people walk through something that was very stressful for them. They’re worried about their things; they’re worried about mold, they’re worried about their safety, they’re not sure whether or not they’re going to experience damages. That comes down to protecting the actual space, helping tenants and residents navigate how to deal with a threat to their belongings and their own quality of life in that day, and then owners making that someone’s responsive in an emergency. That’s all about building relationships, being a trusted partner, and helping people make sure that, again, their quality of life is preserved and someone’s honoring that. It’s every single day when you get to see the person who is that end user, recipient, or benefactor of how we do our work differently. That’s not always a luxury that people get in their day-to-day work. In fact, I’d say it’s probably pretty rare unless you’re a provider. Let’s say you’re an ER doctor. Someone comes in and they’re hurt, or they’re scared, and you can help them. That’s a pretty powerful place to be. We’re in similar situations often when someone’s been—maybe they had a fire in their unit, maybe they have no hot water and they’ve got a baby—all these things that can impact the livability of a unit that isn’t just about inconvenience. It’s truly about making sure that people are safe and protected in their spaces and we want to solve those problems cheerfully. We want to take care of those people and want them to feel like we’re a good partner in making that that part of their life is taken care of. Ignoring problems, letting things fall into a state of disrepair, not caring about style, not caring about the building, avoiding paying for the actual expense of repairing things—none of those are good strategies to building solid relationships that help people feel that it’s a good partnership. We like to emphasize partnership as one of our key strategies for doing the work well and to success. Jason: Lisa, something that I think is probably really appealing to property managers, I mentioned in the intro some of the things that I’ve noticed clients mentioned to me that they resonate with. They love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, freedom that property management brings. I think there’s quite a few property managers or maybe most that really do love that direct impact that they get to have. As the company scale, they lose the ability as the business owner to maybe have that experience of having the direct impact, but they still get to have that ripple through their chains. How many doors does Nest manage or units does Nest manage presently? Lisa: We manage about 1000 doors. Jason: That’s a lot. Lisa: Yeah, it’s a lot and all in the district proper. We’re very focused on managing condos and buildings that will be like associations or single-family homes. We have a lot of townhouses. It’s probably a 70/30 split. Anything in the suburbs, it’s easy to get around the District of Columbia. We have a high-density portfolio and we really focus on an urban landscape for our work. That’s become our specialty. Jason: DC has some of the highest rent, probably in the nation, right? Lisa: Yes. Jason: Okay, we’re not going to talk about fees, but I would imagine if you charge anything, you probably do alright in DC as a property manager. Lisa: Honestly, it’s a good environment from that perspective but at the same time, all of our cost of living as a business… Jason: Is really high. Lisa: …so, I’m going to pay more in salaries. I’m going to pay more in occupancy. I’m going to pay more for insurance. Certainly, the cost of doing business is much higher in this environment. Jason: Got it. Why do you think it’s such a challenge in some of the inner cities or the larger city markets for there to be good property managers? Is it because the costs are high for the management companies or they’re just not charging enough? What’s your perception because it does seem like in some markets, there are some bad manager. It gets really difficult and it’s not that small-town feel, especially when you get into large multi-unit. What’s your take on that? Lisa: I think if you are trying to control costs and you’re unwilling to maintain the spaces at the highest possible standard and keep them in good repair and not wait until something is just broken, but you’re upgrading on a schedule or you’re making sure that these properties perform really well so that people are having a good experience in them. I understand that people don’t want to spend a lot of cash in making sure that these units are well-maintained, but not doing so means that you’re going to start renting spaces that are not comfortable, not attractive, not appealing. When people aren’t happy where they’re living, they’re a lot less likely to be great tenants. For us, if you have a great product, you’re going to attract great tenants. If you have people that you enjoy working with, you’re going to have a better reputation, better relationships, and better outcomes but you have to start with a great product. For us, we’re very choosy about managing spaces that we think meet particular standards for us. We’re not going to be the owner’s beard and make bad maintenance decisions and undercut the needs of the space because somebody wants to save money. If we have an owner that is insisting that we not keep that space in good repair, then that’s not a relationship that we’ll keep. That’s a boundary that we’ve set, and we set it early. Every time we’ve been stressed from a business perspective and we’ve got to increase doors because we need to grow faster and we’ve compromised on those values, it’s never […] out. It really works—great property attracts great tenants, when people are happy where they live, they make better neighbors, better neighbors equal better neighborhoods. It’s the same formula we’ve had from the very beginning. When we’ve strayed, we’ve definitely suffered from that. I hate when people manage crappy properties. They’re making excuses for why it’s crappy. They’re having to explain bad decisions. That’s a bad relationship float to get started on. Jason: I’ve talked quite a bit and people for me talk about the “cycle of suck” but I think this is an interesting ingredient that’s overlooked is as a property manager, in order to stay out of that “cycle of suck” of having bad properties, bad tenants, and bad reputation in the market, one of those ingredients is to have a philosophy of maintaining the properties at the highest level because that is going to dictate the types of tenants, that’s going to dictate the type of situations that you’re going to have to deal with. Something you mentioned that I think is really key is the importance of having a proactive strategy towards maintaining these properties rather than a reactive strategy towards maintaining these properties. I think there’s probably a little gradient scale. You should draw on a piece of paper, “Am I reactive or are we proactive?” I think most property managers could figure out where on this continuum they sit. If you’re off of middle towards reactive, they’re probably a company that’s dealing with pain and problems that are unnecessary, and it’s because they didn’t maintain that boundary like you’ve talked about with the client from the beginning, and they haven’t continued to maintain that when those problems arise with an existing client. Lisa: We’ve had owners who say, “I can’t believe I have to replace this hot water here. It’s been working perfectly for 25 years.” You’ve been rolling the dice and getting lucky but just because it’s now a rental and it worked fine for you doesn’t mean these things doesn’t have an actual lifespan. Sometimes there’s a tension between owners who just truly don’t see the value of maintaining things to the highest possible standard, but the cost of dealing with the flood is much higher than replacing the hot water heater in the first place. Sometimes you can’t explain to simple math and logic and people if they’re emotionally attached to the idea that you shouldn’t spend any money on it. We’re actually in the opposite position where, say, it’s a rental, take great care of it, it’ll take great care of you. Someone’s paying for your mortgage. You can capture depreciation. You’re probably saving some money, substantially, on taxes. You’re going to build an asset and make money basically on the interest rates of a mortgage and I think replacing a water heater is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. They look at it transactional instead of looking at the big picture which is too bad. I think it’s on the part of the property manager, we have to educate our owners on what it means to be engaged with that property and keep it in good repair. We give them estimated costs for maintenance over the course of the year and what they should expect. We have them sign off on that, being the expectation over the course of the relationship, that they will spend money on the properties. We make the counterpoint that properties that are in great shape and well-managed tend to keep tenants in them for longer periods of time which means that the turnover costs—the things that you don’t necessarily have to do annually like painting. If people hold over as tenants, you’re going to have to do it. If you’re having a high turnover, you’re going to have to pay a leasing fee. There’s a lot of advantage to having the nicest possible property and taking great care of it, but it can be hard to walk owners through that. If you’re a proxy for owners, and management company has not given the resources to adequately take care of the space, then they’re really truly not able to take good care of the tenant and then you’re stuck being the bad guy. I think a lot of property managers have been in that position. It’s hard to explain that to a tenant. They don’t care who owns the property. They just want it to operate really well. Jason: All of this really starts with your onboarding process with new perspective clients, it sounds like. You’re throwing little things out there that I think people are missing. You are taking people through an estimated maintenance cost and you’re giving it to them upfront, so they have an expectation to spend money to take care of these things. You’re talking about educating them. You have some sort of verbiage, process, or something. You’re taking them through to educate them on why they need to maintain this property at the highest level. You’re shifting their mindset away from trying to keep cost low and charge rent high and over the life of the property, make sure it’s a good investment. You’re also helping educate them on the importance of keeping in it long-term, and there’s probably other things that you guys do as a company to shift towards this. It sounds like you’ve really worked backwards from the idea of, “How can we have really great properties and how can we make sure that we have owners that will allow us to keep them really great?” I’m guessing based on your background, what really seems to drive this, what I’m hearing is that you really want to take care of the tenants. Lisa: Oh, absolutely. A happy tenant is going to take great care of that space. If they’re feeling well taken care of, then it’s truly in the best interest of the owner and property to do so. Again, people are happy where they live then they’re just better neighbors. That’s what we’re all about. We live next door to a lot of our properties. We’re around our tenants all the time. We’re part of this community. We want them to have a happy living experience. We want that to not be a stressful thing for them because life is stressful enough. When they have a maintenance request, we can respond to it and take care of them quickly and swiftly and they know that we were on top of it for them. Jason: Lisa, for those that are listening, they’re like, “Lisa’s got 1000 doors.” You’re like one of the whales in the industry. You’re one of the unicorns that’s made it magically to this place, that every property manager maybe dreams of, or they think would be incredibly painful to get to and doesn’t dream of. What things do you think you did early on that allowed you to grow through some of those really difficult, painful stages? There are painful stages in property management in terms of growth. How did you weather through those while other companies get so stuck? Lisa: I’d say technology, being nimble, and staffing are the three top things that we do. Being nimble is the first one. We stop all the time and evaluate our systems and strategies for how we do our work. We’re very open to the idea of changing the way we do things for the better. That is something that I think over time we all know that you’ll hit a certain number of doors and all of these systems that worked great for under 200 doors suddenly, it’s just the house of cards at 300. We had to get really deliberate about stopping and pausing long enough to study the work and reconfigure it so that it was working well for us. That led to us being really thoughtful about using technology really effectively. Our property management software, we kept using these workarounds for different tasks that had to be done. We weren’t pausing often enough to go back and see if the tool had changed enough to accommodate our needs where in fact, it had. We get a lot more focused on making sure that—AppFolio is the software that we use—that it was meeting our needs. We keep […] just in terms of how we relate to that company. We’re asking for the change that we wanted and needed. We started relying even more heavily on it. We started creating, really tried and true conventions around how we work with the software, the tools, and the processes. Lastly, and definitely not least and the most important thing we did, was really honor and cherish the staff that we have that comes in everyday to deliver on this promise—that we’re going to provide exceptional places for great people. The talent, the staff, and the commitment has been extraordinary to me and something I think I’m most proud of in the work. If you’re not taking good care of your team, then you cannot be an exceptional service-based company. Making sure to profit share, being as generous and thoughtful about benefits and any other extra that you can be, working as a team member, not taking people for granted, giving people a lot of time off and flexibility—basically, anything we can do to underscore a culture that makes this a great workplace will lead to better outcomes for management as well. It’s the staff, it’s hard work, and it’s technology, all of that is the secret sauce, but it has worked to get by in and get people to get very invested in the work that we’re doing. I think the tenure of our team really indicates that we’ve nailed that one. Jason: I think everybody knows they need really good staff. I think everybody goes, “Yes, we need really good technology.” I think you mentioning being nimble is not something you typically would hear. I think a lot of property managers are like, “What?” I love this idea. How do you actually go about being nimble? How do you maintain that? I think every company likes to believe or hope that they can stay young, stay fresh, and not get stuck in their ways, but it happens. Over time, they start, “This is how we do things,” and they […]. Do you have a process? Is this something you tactically sit down and do on a regular basis? How do you guys actually become nimble? Lisa: We actually spend a lot of time retreating and having conversations about our systems. We commit a lot of energy to those conversations. We’ll do a quarterly all-staff, all-day retreat. Often times, those retreats are about how can we streamline and be better at our work and we’ll break into different teams. We did a really fun thing that I actually picked up from someone that had presented in NARPM where we had people do a shark tank session. We had teams get together and proposed different ways of engaging with our clients that would accelerate the client experience. We implemented every single one of them. When you’re asking for everybody to contribute, to revisiting and focusing on how our systems can be more improved, from the plumber to the CEO, we have everybody participate in those all-day meetings and coming up with ideas for how we can be even better at what we do. They see that the fruits of that time. We did something with those ideas. I think everybody’s really motivated to make sure that we take that time away from our work to revisit how we’re doing it. To be honest, everybody will hate a certain aspect of their job, they’ll dislike something, or something will get tedious and I invite people everyday day, like, “Stop and steady it. Ask yourself, do you have to do that task? Can you do it differently? Can someone else do it? Is there a faster, better, smarter way of doing it?” If you’re inviting everybody to ask themselves whether they have to do something that they don’t like doing, that’s pretty motivating. Like, “I really hate doing this data entry or this workaround on managing the utilities or something.” I’m like, “Should we be doing utilities at all? Is this something that we have to be doing the same way?” I think everyone is being invited to find better ways of doing their job and enjoy their job more. That’s the investment. When that’s the incentive, then I think people are a lot more engaged in being nimble. Jason: I love it. We do that as a company as well and that’s built into our cadence of planning system that we do as a company. It’s amazing when you allow your team members to give you feedback, the ideas that they come up with. Because our perspective as CEO or entrepreneur as the head of the company, we have what we think we need from the top view but my graphic designer, she’s going to have a different perspective from what her standpoint, what we could do differently in our process when we get into that piece. I imagine it’s the same in property management businesses. There are so many moving parts, especially when you get into to your size and scale, everybody sees things from a different perspective, and they see things that bother them. They see things that could be improved. They have ideas to innovate and when you allow them the space. I think the magical thing that you’re doing is you’re allowing your entire company to shift at a tactical day-to-day operation for a short period of time into strategic planning. You’re allowing this step and strategic time in a business is the time that grows companies. Companies that only are doing tactical work, maintenance requests, leasing, tactical day-to-day, emails, phone calls, sales, whatever, if you’re only doing tactical work, the business can’t grow. It just doesn’t seem to grow. It’s the strategic work that helps you trim the tree so that it can grow. It’s the strategic work that help you plan and figure out what you can do next to innovate and create. You built that in as part of your process that you do every quarter. Lisa: Yeah. 100%. Jason: Okay, very cool. I love the idea of the idea of the shark tank sessions and you said you implemented every idea. Lisa: I did. It was really fun. People thought about infographics that we could use to describe what happens you become a tenant and who you’re interacting with. We were able to use different Upwork tools and Fiverr tools to get access to talent that before we had thought was out of reach and being really thoughtful about how we used different modern-day side hustle economies to capture talent, and skill sets that we don’t have inhouse so that we can some of these big dreams come true for our team. It’s been awesome. Jason: Okay, I love it. Is there anything else in the new paradigms in property management, or topic at hand, that you think we should bring up? Because that a really good one, maybe even one to end on. I love that idea. Lisa: I think you ask varied questions and I really appreciate your patience with my technology snafus. Jason: Okay. That’s alright. Everybody has technology snafus that has technology. It’s just part of what happens with technology, right? Lisa, really appreciate you for being in the show. Thank you for sharing those insights. I think there were some really practical takeaways for people watching that they could implement. Lisa: Awesome. Thank you, so much and great luck, with all of your work. Jason: Okay, thank you. All right. A little bit of delays and lags but that’s the internet. I’m at a remote location and doing things a bit differently. Hopefully, you guys can hear me okay today. I appreciate you guys tuning into the DoorGrow Show. If you could take a moment, if you’re listening to this later on iTunes, be sure to subscribe in iTunes to the podcast. You’ll get notified when episodes come out. You can listen to them while you’re driving around, get insights. Be sure to leave us a review on iTunes. We really appreciate that. As a team, that really makes a difference for us. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, we would love to have you inside of our Facebook group, the DoorGrow Club. You can join that. It is free. It’s for business owners of property management companies. Go to doorgrowclub.com. If you are wanting a more effective website, you are wanting to optimize the frontend of your business, dial in your pricing, dial in sales, dial in […] age of your business, that is what we are experts at DoorGrow. Please reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. All right, everybody until next time. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Are you a property manager or owner who wants to recoup financial losses when stuck with a bad tenant who stops paying rent or needs to be evicted? Lower your risk? Trust somebody else to manage your properties? Protect all parties involved?  Today, I am talking to John Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Steady Marketplace, a leading technology platform for property owners and managers. Steady’s subsidiaries offer financial products, including rent default insurance.  You’ll Learn... [02:00] Background of Big Financial Numbers: Starting with event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with billions in assets.  [06:37] Steady’s products protect property owners/managers from bad tenant outcomes.  [07:40] Rent Default Insurance: Protection against rental income loss due to tenant’s failure to pay.  [10:15] Rent Default Insurance is widely available and adopted around the world. About 70% are renters and 30% are owners. [12:38] Collaboration Over Competition: Don’t simply copy-and-paste products and policies; leads to lack of innovation. [13:55] Automate It All: Learn from online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and pricing. [15:05] Perfect Businesses are Out of Business: Entrepreneurs think they've got something perfect, only to realize they need to make it better.  [16:15] By the Book: Take regulatory issues seriously, and make sure to do it right. [17:00] Adoption is #1 challenge with any solution, software, or service.  [17:55] Competitive Advantage: Education, awareness, and understanding of product.  [20:53] FAQs: How does it work? Why does this exist? What’s the catch?  [21:55] Renter’s Insurance vs. Rent Default Insurance: What’s the difference? Tweetables Every entrepreneur should make a difference. Otherwise, they're just causing problems. When there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. Automate everything: Go slow to go fast. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Resources John Higgins’ Email Steady Marketplace Steady Marketplace FAQ John Higgins on LinkedIn SureVestor Rent Rescue National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) 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 John Higgins of Steady Marketplace. John, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. John: It's great to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: John, you've got a really big bio and you're really impressive. Do you want me to read all of it? John: You can read whatever you want to read. I'm not that impressive. I'll say you're more impressive hosting this show and with your following in the space. I'm just a guy trying to make a difference. Jason: I appreciate it. That's what every good entrepreneur is trying to do is make a difference, at least I hope. Otherwise, they're just causing problems.  I'll read a little bit here. It says you are the co-founder and CEO of Steady Technologies Inc., a leading technology platform for property owners and property managers. Steady, through subsidiaries, offers financial products that benefit property owners and managers. Their first product is rent default insurance, offered in partnership with the top US insurance carrier that is a Fortune 100 company, rated A+ by AM Best, and S&P.  Prior to co-founding Steady, Mr. Higgins founded Nobadeer Advisors which provided business development and capital market expertise to technology-enabled lending platforms across the variety of consumers and business, lending verticals, and backed by top venture capital firms globally.  Prior to Nobadeer, Mr. Higgins spent 2.5 years at Prosper Marketplace, Inc. where he helped build the institutional loan program growing it from $0 to over $5 billion over his tenure and help scale Prosper's monthly origination volumes over 4000% during his time at the firm.  Mr. Higgins also previously served as a director at Topwater Capital, now owned by Leucadia, where he made investments between $5-$100 million to hedge fund managers across a variety of strategies via structured managed accounts.  Prior to Topwater, Mr. Higgins spent five years working for event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with assets as large as $1.85 billion. There's a lot of big financial numbers here, John. A lot of big financial numbers. John: Want me to dive a bit deeper on it and summarize for you? Jason: Yeah. Let's dive into that and then tell us how you got into all of these. John: Sure. I can start from how I got into the hedge funds space which led me through here. I started and talk my way into an internship my junior college, totally unqualified, at the University of New Hampshire versus people that are top of their class from top business schools. Got a shot to join big hedge fund on my way up. I worked my tail off that summer and got a full time offer. I joined that firm full time after I graduated college. I was really lucky. I worked for the really brilliant entrepreneur there who would start this business with $500,000. Four years later, he grew it to almost $2 billion.  Then, left that company and went to Topwater where I was invested in hedge fund strategies via structured managed accounts, kind of cross the bench of the long, short, and distressed credit. That company was acquired by Leucadia which is now Jefferies Investment Bank; the two merged. Leucadia was at a big stake and Jefferies a long story anyway. As that transaction was transpiring, I was approached by the former management team across the marketplace who've I known from the hedge fund industry. They had great entrepreneurs that built and sold the company that served hedge funds called Merlin Securities. They're backed by Sequoia. Sold that business to Wells Fargo and decided they were going to take over Prosper.  They reached out and said, "We're looking for someone to help us build out this business as we take it over and turn it around." Really fortunate to work with tremendous entrepreneurs and the tremendous team there. During my time there, we went from about 50 employees up to about 600+ when I left. That was my first foray into more pure play technology.  We're a financial technology platform. We're offering unsecured personal loans online to end consumers. If you're thinking about going online, applying for a personal loan, no human interaction, [...] pricing, I can get you a loan in a matter of days as opposed to having to leave your house, go to a bank, et cetera, and fill up paper forms. After leaving Prosper, I was consulting for various lending platforms as you touched on in the intro. I got to work again with tremendous entrepreneurs across a bunch of different verticals. One of the people I've got to work with was doing some lending into the small landlord space. It's fix and flip lending and also rental lending. I started looking at the opportunities. I said, "This is really interesting. I know all of these products that helped multifamily owners protect them against bad tenant outcomes."  There's a lot of companies that pop up doing that, but no one's really going after single family. I started looking at the space and opportunity. As you and everyone else in the space realizes, it's actually bigger than the multifamily space. When you live in New York, everyone thinks rental properties are the big highrise. In fact, there's roughly more than 16 million single family rental units in the US, then another 8 million duplexes, triplex quads. All in all, you have about 20 million rental units in the US owned by individual investors that owned less than 10 units. These owners actually can't solve for this risk which is if the tenant goes bad. The smart owners are getting professional property managers or actually better at picking tenants at the established processes and procedures. They're getting bad tenants out. It can help manage those properties and have better outcomes. But still, when there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. In fact, my business partner and co-founder, Viken, had a property in New York City that he was renting. Person just skips town in the middle of the night. He was left with close to $20,000. It actually might have been north of $20,000 loss because the tenant just left the unit and didn't say anything. It took awhile to get it rerented. He had no coverage. If he had, it had no protection against that. If you had Steady or some of these other providers that are popping up, they could've indemnify themselves from that loss, and could've been made whole for a modest premium.  Long story short, there's a big need in the market to this type of product. What we're really excited about is working with all the property managers across the country to help ensure this is product underlying landlords and finding ways for everyone to win. Jason: Cool. Let's talk about the product specifically. Explain this to somebody that's never heard of this. They might even be an unseasoned property manager. Describe the problem that exists, that this solves for. John: Sure. When you look at it, if the tenant goes bad whether it's professionally managed or not—let’s suppose it’s some professionally managed properties; that's really who we're serving here in this podcast, and who we speak to—if their tenants goes bad, the owner's mad at them. They might've lose that door because guess what? They probably picked the tenant. They were entrusted by the landlord or the owner to find the tenant, to select the right tenant, and now the tenant's bad. So, the owner's mad, they might lose every relationship. The owner's also rental income. As a result, property managers also lost their property management fee income. Generally, they're charging based on the property management fee.  If you look globally, across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, this type of insurance product, rent default insurance, is widely available and widely adopted. The reason is that, if you look in other jurisdictions, primarily Europe, it's flipped from the US. It's about 70% renter 30% owner. As we know, post financial crisis, more and more US consumers are now choosing to rent instead of own. So, the property management space is going to be larger and the rental property market is getting larger.  As this is occuring, we think that more and more people will be in need of this insurance because we have a growing market. The insurance itself indemnifies and there's different flavors. We'll speak generally about rent default insurance and what's out there as opposed to Steady, specifically. What we want to do is educate the market on the availability of these types of products.  Rent default insurance, generally speaking, indemnifies the owner against losses as a result of the bad tenant outcome. It could be eviction, tenant skips, et cetera; different programs to different coverages. What this does is it allows the owner who can't self-insure due to the diversification to recoup losses if they are unfortunately stuck with the bad tenant that stops paying rent or needs to get evicted.  Different people had different approaches to it. Us at Steady, we've taken a lot of the learnings from the online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and try to deliver a great product that are at a reasonable price to the end market.  A lot of property managers are saying, "Hey, this is great. This is a huge concern that my underlying owners have. What happens if the tenant doesn't pay rent?" They see property management companies out there that have eviction protection plans or other plans. You've got the SureVestors, the Rent Rescues, and a bunch of other great companies out here, all serving for these types of risks and helping solve these pain points. The reason for that is this huge market is a huge concern. If you've got one property, say you own a home and you move for work across the country. You can't sell your home or whatever reason you have. You put it with the professional property manager. They're managing that, but you're relying on that cash flow for maintenance, upkeep, taxes, et cetera. In many cases, to pay the mortgage. If that tenant goes bad, all of a sudden, you're break even or your cash flowing property gone upside down and now you're coming out of pocket. You now have a liability that you have to come out of the pocket for every month. That's a big pain point, a big concern, and what these types of products do is solve for those types of risk, help landlords have peace of mind, and protect against bad tenant outcomes. Jason: You name dropped some of your own competitors, which is very generous of you. How does Steady standout or differ? How do you compare, standout, or differ in the space? John: We've taken a bit of a different approach on how we can structure our products and policy. A lot of other competitors, not just in space but in insurance generally, what they do is copy and paste what other products work on their markets or other products that other people have launched, and there's not a lot of innovation. As a result, we haven't seen a huge take rate for these types of product in the US.  What we found—you might feel differently—my business partner, Viken, grew up in Paris. What works in Europe doesn't necessarily work in the US. What works in Australia doesn't necessarily work for the US. What Viken and I did when we came together is we deconstructed how these programs work globally. We took a lot of the learning from online lending to build what we believe is a better program here in the US.  One differentiation is automation. Our entire process is fully automated. We just set an email prior to this event saying, "We are now in 20 states." We've got the ability to be in all 50 states. The reason we're not in all 50 states right now is because we want to automate everything. It is going slow to go fast. As we start to take it off here and ramp because the updates have been very strong, it's continuing to go stronger daily, everything will be automated. What that will result in is more efficient processes, procedures, and better pricing.  Jason: Explain what that means so everyone understands. You're saying that automation is a differentiator and that it's fully automated. What's automated? John: A property manager or a property owner can go online to the website, inquire about rent default insurance on their own, and complete the entire process in less than two minutes. There's no human interaction necessary and they could do everything themselves. Now, newer company, newer brand, we’re lucky to be aligned with the very strong brand in the insurance space, but nothing's perfect. As you know, as an entrepreneur, you think you've got something perfect and they realize you need to make it better. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Jason: The perfect businesses are out of business. John: Right. We continue to constantly push new development releases and streamlining things. What we believe is that, if you can make the process as easy as buying, say for instance, travel insurance when you're buying a flight and make it that easy, that will be a great outcome for us and for this market. The way which you can do that is through API integrations, the right product structures, the right creativity, the right business development strategies, et cetera.  If you look at our product, where our technology is our technology, our product is our product, the two weren't built separately. They're built together. They work very closely together and in tandem. Because of that, it allows us to deliver a great customer experience, a frictionless process, high scalability, and keep headcount well. Right now, our biggest expenses have been legal and engineering, as you can imagine. It's a technology company, but legal because we invest heavily in making sure that we do everything right and by the book. Also, that our partners do things right by the book. As you know, the property management space has some instances where people have more of a cavalier or cowboy type approach that works until it doesn't. For us, we have ambitions to be a very large company and we operate in a highly regulated space. It's non negotiable for us to run into issues on the regulatory front or have our partners run into those issues. We take that very seriously and focus on in making sure everything is done the right way. Jason: That makes sense. The number one challenge when it comes to any solution or software or third party service is adoption. It's how easy is it for them to adopt this and use. If adoption is a challenge, then it's not going to work. It's not going to grow. People are not going to use it or it's going to be confusing or frustrating.  I'm a big Apple fan. Apple made adoption very easy. My AirPods, I just hold them out, open them up, my phone just show them on the screen, and they connect. It was magic, it's easy, I didn’t have to fill around weird Bluetooth settings or hold down buttons. What you're saying makes a lot of sense.  You've mentioned that it's easy for the consumer or for the property manager. One challenge that I see a lot of firms run into is when you're servicing an audience that's servicing that same audience. You almost can become competitors with them. How do you negotiate that? How does the property manager still have a competitive advantage against them just working with you directly? John: I guess, education, awareness, and understanding. People [...] this in massive market. People don't even know about this product. One parallel I draw frequently is pet insurance. I’ve got a pet, I’ve got a dog who's five now. I have pet insurance that I pay $70 or $80 a month. They haven’t got a good plan because the vet at the time said, "Hey, you should consider pet insurance if there's ever an issue." To me, the asset there is the pet. A little bit different than a rental property, maybe not as emotional as a rental property would be. They said, "Maybe you should look at this." It's a similar thing as what you're seeing happening in the property management space. Property managers are the fiduciary, the trusted advisor to the asset and the asset owner, which is the landlord or the small rental property owner who's contracted the property manager for their services. If they can be introduced to this product, it's for their benefit.  We don't have a big direct push. We're not looking to go after single family rental landlords directly. Our entire business model is predicated on partnerships. Based on our analysis, there's roughly eight million rental units in the US managed professionally. We've love to see that grow larger. Those are also, for us, we believe the best risk. As I touched on earlier, we believe strongly that property managers are better at picking tenants, have an established processes and procedures in getting bad tenants out, and they can get units rented more quickly. Jason: Which lowers your risk as an insurance provider. John: Correct, which results in better outcomes from the underwriting perspective.  Jason: Okay, makes sense. Your interests are aligned directly with property managers. They're your focus.  John: Yes. They are our focus. We just did a giveaway today to property management conference for people that could enter. We view property managers as our partners. Again, the reason I mentioned some of our competitors earlier because the rising tide lifts all boats. We want to see everyone do well, we want to see landlords have access to the solution so they get better outcomes, and we want to see property managers to be able to benefit from this as well.  Jason: Yeah, I love it. I believe that too. I have said before, rising tide raises all ships, but sometimes the bar is so low in property management in some areas and in some markets, that I don't think every ship's going to rise. Some have too many holes and are going to sink, but that's okay. John: That's right. That's Darwinism. Jason: Right, survival of the fittest. What are some of the most frequently asked questions or concerns that property managers are asking you or have been asking in sales conversations? So that we can make sure we address them here on this show. John: A lot of things that a lot of property managers ask is simply how it work. We have an FAQ section on our website and we can share the link on it. "How does it work?" "Why does this exist?" "How can no one else is doing is?" As I catch on, this is the third time I'll mention SureVestor, Rent Rescue, and others. The awareness is growing and that's what the biggest challenge is for all of us in this space is awareness that these types of solutions are available. This isn't like rental insurance or pet insurance. Pet insurance, I guess, is now becoming widely adopted, but people don't know about it and don't understand it. Most of the reactions we got is, "Wow, this exists? This is great. How does it work?" "Wow, that's inexpensive. This makes a lot of sense." It all depends on the property address, the rent amount, and the pricing. Jason: For anyone that's confused, let's just explain the difference between renter's insurance and rent default insurance. John: Renter's insurance covers the renter's possessions and liability to the landlord, generally speaking. It's paid for by the renter and they're doing it, so if there's a fire in the unit, they're not covered from the landlord's policy. Their possessions are gone. The landlord gets the unit rebuild, the house rebuilt, but they don’t receive anything. Now with renter's insurance, then we get some coverage for that.  From the landlord's perspective, if the renter has renter's insurance, they have a guest over, they slip and fall, and break their leg, it protects the liability to the landlord for them getting sued from that slip and fall. That's renter's insurance. Rent default insurance, it depends on the program. Different people, different features. Generally speaking, it covers loss of rent due to tenant skips, eviction, and tenant nonpayment for whatever reason. Jason: Sometimes, we have to make sure things are at an 8 year old level so that everybody gets it.  John: I generally need things at an 8 year old level to understand.  Jason: Right. Most entrepreneurs do because we're just so damn impatient at paying attention to things sometimes.  All right. We talked about how it works, why is anyone doing this. Any other frequently asked questions that people are concerned about? John: "What's the catch?" generally. Insurance companies, for better or for worse, generally don't always have the best reputation for making it easy to make claims, et cetera. That's another thing. Some people want to see the policies and see things in that nature.  Again, the big thing is people just don't understand these types of products exists. That's why we're out there educating the market and letting people know that there are these types of coverages available and you can get the coverage to these types of risks.  Jason: Let's touch on the benefits for a property management business in having this in their repertoire of services and how this can help them sell and close more deals, give them the competitive advantage, maybe. John: What do you see is property managers are now looking at this and some are saying, "I'm just going to include it in all my plans," and say, "This makes a lot of sense.” Now, we've got a differentiator. All of my property management packages include three months of rent default insurance if the tenant goes bad. They're out there marketing and saying that it includes it. Others are saying, "This is interesting. How can we offer this and earn some B revenue?" The only way it works, as I touched on earlier with compliance, is you can't get paid for the sales, solicitation, negotiation of insurance, unless you're an insurance producer. You can do other things such as marketing fees, et cetera, but you can't make conditions on the sale, solicitation, negotiation, and insurance. That's why we spend so much to make sure that anything we do, anything our partners do in partnership with us, is fully vetted and above board. We make sure everyone stays on the right side of the rules. Jason: Do they become somewhat of an insurance agent? Or you're just laying that all together? John: No. They do not become insurance agents in any way, shape, or form unless they've got an insurance agent license. Then, they could be an insurance agent, obviously.  Jason: Okay. John, it's great to see an entrepreneur doing something that's impacting the industry. I believe these products are going to have massive ripple effect in the industry. They're going to create a lot more safety and certainty in the property management space. It's going to lower the risk. It's going to lower the pain threshold for landlords to trust somebody else to manage their properties. It's going to protect all the parties involved and that means it's going to help the industry grow. If Australians, somebody said their markets are any indicator, it seems like these types of products help these markets grow significantly in a relatively short period of time, over a decade. They've grown phenomenally. I heard stats like Australia's grown through 25% in a decade. Largely, they claimed that it was connected to that. I don't know if that's accurately or true, but if that were true and the industry—single family residential—were maybe about 30% are professionally managed, that almost be our industry doubling here in the US. I don't know that there's enough companies here in the US right now to handle that level of growth. That would mean we need to double the amount of companies or we need to double the size of every company that exists. Something in between that. John: Or let's double the size of every company that exists. That'll be a good outcome for everyone. Jason: Yeah. Regardless, I want to make sure that we've got the best. Let's raise the tide. I appreciate that you're seeking to raise the tide. I think collaboration over competition is what builds market, it's what builds the category. It's always important to build the category before you try to build the individual brand. That's Marketing 101, everybody.  Property management is in the same boat. Property management has very low awareness, in general, here in the US and right now, we've got a lot of people going around something in their chest, trying to fill their individual brand. We need to build the category first. There's a lesson for the industry to take away from what you've mentioned and what's going on in what you're doing, so I appreciate that. John: NARPM’s done a good job trying to get the industry moving in the right direction. People like you and a lot of others that are trying to educate and build awareness are very helpful as well. It's great to see everyone working together in some way, shape, or form. Jason: There's no scarcity in property management. There just really isn't. There's 70% in single family residential that are self-managing right now. That does not indicate scarcity. In certain channels of marketing, there is a lot of scarcity because everybody's doing the same stuff, there is scarcity. John, I appreciate you coming in the show. How can people get in touch with Steady and learn more about this? John: They can go to the website www.steadymarketplace.com or shoot me an email john@steadymarketplace.com. Jason: Perfect. John, I appreciate you coming on the show, I appreciate what you're doing, and I wish Steady success. John: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Check them out at steadymarketplace.com. If you are, for some reason, not getting the growth that you want, you're growth is good, but you want to pour a little gasoline on that fire, if you find that you're getting a lot of your business lately from word of mouth, and from the trust that you built in the marketplace, I would love to pour gasoline on that fire. That's what DoorGrow specializes in, optimizing your warmly funnel and optimizing your business for more organic growth, which is a lot less expensive than showing up tens of thousands of dollars a year towards pay per click, SEO, and everything that everybody is competing and already doing.  Like I said, I don't believe there's scarcity in the industry, but I believe there's false scarcity that's been created by marketers, and you can avoid that. For those who can't see, I'm wearing my "SEO won't save you" shirt. A lot of people are relying on SEO to save you. Don't get me wrong, SEO is great. If you have the top spot in Google, that's great to have search engine optimization. But there are things that are better than having the top spot in Google like being the most trusted company in your market. Our whole system is focused on building trust for your brand, for your business, and helping you to go after that blue ocean where there's all that business available; that 70%. I appreciate John being on the show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Freedom of time, money, relationships, and purpose is what we all want. Property managers, realtors, and investors help clients build wealth through real estate.  Today, I am talking to Steve Welty, owner of Good Life Property Management business and podcast. He enjoys meeting amazing people and indoctrinating listeners with his philosophies.  You’ll Learn... [03:23] Stop whining about solvable issues, such as online reviews to get warm leads.  [04:41] Steve surfs to success with Good Life Property Management.  [06:43] Podcast Passion Project: Do content for content's sake; add value to people's lives for opportunities and connections to come your way. [10:19] Don’t lose focus on why and what fires you up; limit time and effort spent on your business to achieve outcomes. [15:00] Purpose of Business: Not to make money; build a business that makes money.  [16:25] How to be happy: Create momentum for other people to gain momentum. If you wish to become great, learn to become the servant of many. [18:12] Zig when they Zag: Success outside outsource sandbox to reduce costs.  [18:55] Results-based Biz: Hire young, smart, motivated people and leave them alone.  [19:31] Big Issues, Big Success: More people can lead to more problems; paint a compelling vision to keep good people and let them do what they want to do.  [20:10] Move Out and Outwork Others: Create freedom of time and money by hiring CFO or profit first coach/accountant to offer advice, not control over finances.  [26:10] Value-add Revenue Sources: If you don't charge for it, you're doing it poorly.  [28:25] Opportunities in Other States/Markets: Pop-up shops to buy cash flow property.  [29:05] To Die List and Time Study: Procrastination problem property managers and owners experience.  [35:00] Barriers/Protections: Teach team and customers how to treat and reach you.  [37:35] Opinions vs. Observations: Co-creation/coaching is transformational and transactional superpower that changes lives.  [46:45] Give up control and allow people to fail, or you create an unsafe business.  [52:30] What Matters: Million ways to get to end results and outcomes.  [54:05] Hire and Fire: Center on core values; be reliable, positive, and go-giver (RPG). [57:10] Epiphany: Everything worthwhile lives on the other side of fear.  [1:03:05] Money is one side of it. Easiest decision to make is to be a different person.  Tweetables Do content for content's sake. Limit time in your business; achieve outcomes with least amount of effort. Add limitations or constraints to create a necessity for innovation. First key to greater time, money, and purpose is to create space for yourself. Resources Steve Welty’s Email Good Life Property Management Good Life Property Management Podcast Steve Welty on Spotify Steve Welty on Apple PM Grow Orange Tree Property Management GatherKudos National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Brad Larson Gary Vaynerchuk The 4-hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Todd Breen Making Money is Killing Your Business by Chuck Blakeman How I Built This with Guy Raz Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard  Voxer Jason Goldberg (Strategic Coach) Extreme Ownership Book E-Myth Book The Go-Giver  KingJasonHull’s Whimple on SoundCloud 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 little 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 change 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 really excited, we’re hanging out with Steve Welty. Steve, welcome to the DoorGrow show. Steve: What’s up Jason? Good to be here. Jason: Steve and I were reminiscing. I saw Steve at a broker owner conference, the very first one I went to several years ago and we were sitting at the same table and I guess I said hi to you and we were chatting it up. Steve: Yeah. It's funny, I remember that day very vividly and it's interesting because I have a very poor memory. You were the mysterious man behind me and you were dressed really nice. Jason: I don't dress nice anymore. I'm too lazy now. Steve: Yeah, you're just soaking it all, but we were talking before the show, was that really one of your first conferences? Jason: That was the first conference I'd gone to, yeah. My dad had just started property management business. He's got maybe about 200 doors now, but he had just started a property management business. He had been a hospital administrator for 30 years or something and he said, “I'm going to do what Bryan’s doing and start a property management business.” My brother has got maybe 1000 doors or something like that and he is out of Orange County. Not too far from you down San Diego. He thought, “Bryan’s doing it, maybe I could do this too.” He decided to become an entrepreneur. Caught the bug. It's been fun to watch that, but I was like, “Dad, let's go do this. I want to see what happens there. The only way I can go is if I'm with you, you're a broker owner.” I was his director of marketing and I was just the fly on the wall for Orange Tree Property Management, just checking out what goes on a broker owner. I just want to see what happened there. It was challenging for me though because the entire time I'm hearing people talk about problems, and challenges, and I'm just biting my tongue the whole time. I’m like, “I could solve that challenge. I can help with that.” I just had to sit there and be quiet. I've even got a text message from one of my clients that was sitting in the room and he said, “I'll bet this is just killing you right now,” I texted him back, “You have no idea.” It was just really funny to hear people whining about stuff that I think is solvable. Steve: What was something out of all those issues you're biting your tongue about that you can reflect on today. Jason: Now you’re interviewing me. Steve: I'm interested to hear that. Jason: I remember one of the things that really killed me was people were like, “How do you deal with your online reviews? How do you get more positive online reviews?” We have our system GatherKudos, and we have coaching material around that that we’d go through with clients to figure out how to identify peak happiness, leverage a lot of reciprocity, how to get more reviews, how to build a system in your business as part of your onboarding process with new tenants so you get more reviews. I think that's a better system to have than even most marketing systems, because that creates warm leads. I was just sitting there listening to them talk and some of the ideas were, “We're okay, we're good,” but I was like, “This is so solvable.” Steve: Reviews are still a big issue, six years later or whatever it is. Jason: Correct. Steve: People still can’t figure it out. It’s tough. I still try to figure it out on a daily basis. Jason. Yeah. Cool. Steve, you've got an awesome property management business. You've got your own podcast that you do. You've got a lot of stuff going on. Help my audience understand who you are and give us a little bit of background on Steve, your adventures in property management, and how you got into it. Steve: For sure. I graduated from San Diego State 2005 and stayed in construction for a little while. I was working with constructions in college, just bumming around, surfing, and doing whatever I was doing. Got my real estate license finally and did some deals 2006-2007. I hear a lot of stories like this, it’s like 2006-2007 sales, all of our sales, we should start a Facebook group for sales guys that flamed out, well I think it is, it’s probably called than NARPM of Facebook group. It seemed like everyone has that story. I made some nice checks in sales and I thought I was great, and then I became broke very fast. I was 26-27 and I was broke. I was applying for any job that I could get and I went to work for a French entrepreneur in Carlsbad as a personal assistant. He wanted someone to manage his property manager that had a real estate license because he didn't trust his property manager. Jason: Okay, so you were the spy that was going to monitor whether he was doing his job or not. Steve: Yeah, most managers hate it when the owner micromanages you. Imagine a realtor micromanaging you. I was like, “Yeah, I can do that,” I never managed anything in my life, but I figured it out and worked with him. He actually taught me some great business lessons looking back, but two years in, it was very stressful working for him. He was not the nicest guy, but he did teach me a lot and then I went out on my own with a business partner at the time. We decided, “Hey, let's start our own management company and just got it enough off the ground to allow me to quit my job, be on property management with my partner I think in 2008. We grew that until about 2012 and then we decided to part ways. I started Good Life in 2013 and then been doing Good Life ever since. I started the Good Life Property Management podcast which has nothing to do with clients, nothing to do with getting new customers. It was really a passion project and something I learned out of that was that I encourage people to do content for content's sake if their heart tells them to do that. A lot of times we try to figure out, “Well, how am I going to monetize that?” I remember when I asked Brad Larson, I think he was one of the first people to do a podcast that was a property manager. I was like, “What are you doing this for?” and he was like, “Oh, it's fun,” I was like, “It didn’t make any sense, you're wasting time.” When you add value, like Gary V—a lot of people have really put this in the forefront—when you add value to people's lives, opportunities come your way, connections come your way. I have so much fun doing the Good Life Property Management podcast and we serve the same community you serve which is property management entrepreneurs. I don't run ads. I have ran ads in the past, but I don't anymore. I don't necessarily get anything out of it other than just meeting cool people and getting to indoctrinate my listeners with my philosophies which are really along the same lines in a lot of ways as you, Jason. I really resonate with your manifesto in a lot of ways, so that's cool. That's it. I'm big into music. I do a lot of music. Steve Welty, I’m on Spotify and Apple, and that's my passion. I'm going more and more into that. Also, we have tried mastermind for property management entrepreneurs to max out their business and life. That's what's up for me. Jason: Cool stuff. I think we have a lot in common. Not only are we both California guys. A lot of people listening may not know this, but I had a band in college. I wrote all the music, I played guitar. I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur then. I didn't know that was in my blood, but I was the guy going door-to-door with a guitar and a clipboard pre selling CDs at girl’s dorms that I could fund to self-produce an album, and I was playing music. Steve: That’s [...]. Jason: I know, it was pretty crazy. The album is on SoundCloud if people are searching for it. Steve: Let’s check it out, what’s it called, how can we find it? Jason: My username on SoundCloud is my username everywhere, which is KingJasonHull, and the album is called Whimple, that was the name of my band. Steve: I love it. I think you told me that a while back, but I forgot, but I'm really fascinated with that because that was my story, too. I was a songwriter. That was hustle. I give you street credit like going dorm-to-dorm, playing for chicks, that's pretty cool. I thought I was going to be a rock star. That was my deal, but it's so funny looking back. I didn’t even practice. I just thought I have the natural talent and I used to drink a lot so I was probably delusional. I had this moment, this crossroads where I was like, “Okay, you're not going make it,” I'm not going to be okay being older and broke, so I'm going to go on a business route. I just gave up music completely, and then I was in a strategic coach workshop. I have given it up five or six years and I met this entrepreneur. I was telling him about my story. I was like, “I don't really play music anymore,” and he's like, “Oh, that sucks.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does suck.” Then he’s like, “Well, you have a guitar in your office don’t you?” and I was like, “No.” He’s like, “Well you’re the boss, aren’t you?” Jason: I can see it right behind you. Steve: Yeah, right now I do it. He’s like, “You’re the boss.” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Well, why don’t you try this, try just putting a guitar in your office. Just make a commitment to picking it up once a day even if it's for one second.” It really resonated with me because I had given up a part of myself that was really important because I think a lot of time as business owners, we just get so focused on like, “We got to make this company work,” and we’d lose focus of why and what fires us up on an internal level. I did that and that about two years ago, fast forward to today, I'm putting many hours a day into music, into song writing, into recording, into building my audience and it's helped my business so much because when you limit the amount of time that you're in your business, you can only do the things that you're really good at and so that's what I'm really passionate about, is figuring out how can I achieve an outcome with the least amount of effort possible. Jason: Yeah, because when we add limitation or constraint, it creates the byproduct of limitation or creating a constraint is it creates a necessity for innovation. If you have unlimited amounts of time, unlimited amounts of money, unlimited whatever, there's no innovation because it's so easy to be lazy. It's so easy to just let things unfold in a different way, but when we have some time constraints or we have some financial constraints, we have to get creative and that's where the genius starts to come out, that's where new ideas start to come out. I've noticed that even with team members, if I say “I need this done by this time,” they get creative or if I need this done under this budget, they get creative, then they start to innovate. If I say, “Yeah, do it whenever, take as much time as you want, spend as much money as you want,” there's no innovation. They're just going to go towards whatever seems easiest, which is the status quo. Steve: Yeah, you nailed it. I've been really interested in constraints. I had a son, my first child, he’s six months old, Myles, and I was encouraged by a friend of mine. He said “Take 30 days off, Steve,” he's like “It'll be the best thing you ever did for your business. Don't check in, don't do anything. Take 30 days off. Be with your son.” It was in December, so it was like the perfect time and so I did that, and man he was right. It really levelled up my business, my team got way better. They were already good, but just putting these things into place that force you to grow. That 30 days off was huge. Next year I'm planning a 60-day trip to another country that I’m really passionate about using that. I even got my operations manager. He doesn't work out of the office anymore. I moved out of my office a long time ago because when you're in the office, you are often the bottleneck for your company and everyone comes to you for the answers and the solutions. I really grabbed on to that concept and constantly looking for new ways to use constraints to my advantage. Jason: I love it. It's been awhile since I've told the client to do this, but a lot of clients will ask questions like, “How do I become a business owner instead of my own best employee?” I would tell them, “You just start doing it. You take a vacation.” If you schedule a week-long vacation, if you're not taking vacations, for those listening, you schedule week long vacation and you can't take off a week, you're going to have to figure out how to make everything not fall apart for that week. To go 30 days, that's incredible, 60 days is ridiculous, that's pretty awesome. At that point, you've arrived as owner of the company instead of being your own best employee. I noticed when I would take off time or vacation, I would be surprised by how my team would step up. I'd be surprised by the things leading up to that vacation, more would get done than would get done sometimes in months. There are so many little things that you need to get dialed in. “Oh my gosh, they’re going to be gone for a week. How are we going to live without Jason? We got to get this.” My team would say, “Hey Jason, I need this,” or, “I need to access to this,” or, “I need to know how to do this.” Suddenly everybody's rallying around this idea of taking some stuff off your plate because they need to be able to make sure things don't break and it creates the possibility for you to do that more or forever. Steve: Yeah, and I think its baby steps. I remember when I first read the four-hour work week. I thought Tim Ferriss was a god. I was like, that makes no sense. Jason: Did you almost move to Thailand? Steve: Close, but no, it was just really interesting. I guess from a personal level, having time was even more appealing than being a billionaire I guess to me personally. When I see people like Todd Breen and other people talk at NARPM that would talk about running your business from the beach or not is just very appealing to me. I wanted to grow a self-managing company and it was baby steps. There's this book called Making Money is Killing Your Business and they say it really why. It says the purpose of the business is not to make money, it's to build a business that makes money, like time and money equals wealth. Your business should throw off time and money. Now, if you want to then use that extra time to just pour more time in your business, doesn't mean you got to go live on a beach. You could do other adventures. For me, what's really worked and what I'm super blessed to have now is that it's created space in my life to actually start cultivating the other things that light me up, like music, other things. It gives you those options, but that's what I think in our industry especially in a lot of industries, we want to help people, help them anyway we can to experience that. Jason: They say, “What the world needs is people that are alive” I think as entrepreneurs that's where we feel. We want momentum. That's what we crave. The rest of the world, they're just trying to figure out how to be happy. “If I could just be happy then everything would be great.” It's whether they're happy or sad, depressed or excited, but for entrepreneurs, I feel like our two speeds are momentum or stuck, that's it. It’s momentum or overwhelm. We either feel like we're in complete overwhelm, we’re stuck, we can't move forward or we’re frustrated, or were on fire and alive. That's my version of happy or sad. I want to feel like I'm in momentum and I feel like as entrepreneurs, we get momentum when we give it away. When we create momentum for other people, whether it's our clients or the people in our family, the people around us, when we're creating momentum for other people, we get that sense of momentum, too. Steve: Yeah, and that's something I resonate with and I’ve heard you talk about it Jason. I love that message. I really think that the blue ocean is caring about people more than anyone else, like proactively putting the people in your life in the forefront, figuring out, “Who do I want to be a hero to?” and being a hero is usually used in a reactive way. Jason: Right, like there's a crisis or a problem, now you're going to be a hero. Steve: Right, as opposed to being a proactive hero like spending time and saying, “Okay, who are the most essential people or buckets or groups of people in my life and how can I serve them more deeply and impactfully today,” because the best quote of success I've ever heard is something like become a servant of many. If you wish to become great, learn to become the servant of many. I sometimes get a little jaded in certain groups because you constantly hear the feedbacks, the reduce the cost, the get it all out sourced. I use VAs, I look to reduce cost, I look to get fair fees, so I'm not knocking that, but everyone's playing in that sandbox. I'm very interested in seeing what is everyone else doing and how can I do the opposite because that's one of the ways to become successful that I've learned is that you go zig when they zag. That’s cliché. You can't do that when you're buried in tenant complaints and one-star reviews and a team you have to micromanage. I'm a big believer in hiring young, smart, motivated people and leaving them alone. We're a results-based company at Good Life. You can work from home, you could bring your dog, although actually our manager of our building said we can't anymore. I don't really care, with the exception of a couple like the front desk needs to be there in case someone walks in and things like that, but do your thing. There's a great podcast I heard yesterday on how I built this with Guy Raz where the owner of Patagonia wrote this book called “Let Them Go Surfing” and it's all about that. I think our biggest issues once we get to a certain size is people problems, and then we don't know why we can't keep good people, it’s because we don't paint it in a compelling vision. We micromanage. We don't let them do what they want to do. We try to fit corporate bureaucracies into the more entrepreneurial company that people want to be a part of these days. Would you rather follow just checklists and not have a future or would you rather be able to create your own future? Like I tell my team, “You can become anything with me. The sky's the limit wherever you want to go.” So, I think those are big parts of success. Jason: That's really what we're talking about today. The topic is freedom of time, money, and relationships through better business practices. What are some of the practices that you've implemented at Good Life that you feel like you've created more freedom of time and money? Steve: It starts with the business owner and probably a series of game changers. The first was moving out of my office. I had this epiphany and I was taught this by someone and I told the team, we had a meeting, I said, “I apologize. I've stood in the way of you guy’s future and I apologize for it. When I'm here, I'm the bottle neck. I'm stunting your growth. You can come to me for all the answers,” and the fact is as entrepreneurs if you serve 100 people and say, “Where do you do your best work?” nobody says at their office, who does the best work at their office? Why are we working out of our offices? It's just because that's how it's always been done. I kicked myself out. I don't have a desk at my office on purpose. I used to have the stereotypical nicest office in the corner with the best view, and then it freed up so much space, it helped my team grow. Once I created that space, now I work out of my home, and the first key to greater time, money, and purpose is to create space I believe, for yourself. I came from a place where three or four years ago, my dad always taught me outwork everyone else. I remember one time he came to visit me at a college and he asked me how much I was working, I said about 60 hours a week. He’s like, “60 hours? I work 60 hours, I'm retired. What the hell is wrong with you?” Jason: Step it up Steve. Steve: Yeah, and it's great. I love my dad. His work ethic was the reason I'm here today, because it got me to that. There are seasons of life. I knew there had to be a better way, so when I'd made that decision to move out of my office, I said, “Hey, you guys are going to have a bigger opportunity to move up now.” Some of the other things we did was hiring an operations manager. That was huge. That created space and that was something I look forward, and it took me probably eight or nine months to pull the trigger on that, but the operations manager was huge. Slowly but surely, I went from just being stressed out all the time, not having any space in my life. An over-scheduled entrepreneur has no time to transform. I said, “Alright, I'm going to create some space,” and then all the ideas and all the answers start bubbling to the surface because spiritually we all have all the answers inside of us, just we’re so distracted and so just going that we don't allow it. Jason: We’re preloaded, we're in fight or flight, we're up in our monkey brain, and all the great things, our greatest geniuses as an entrepreneur can't bubble up or can't come through when we're in that state. Steve: Exactly, and so that's time that just forced me to get more time because as an entrepreneur, you can make that decision. Jason: We’re buying time. Every person that we pay on our team, we’re buying time. That's what we're buying. I think the mistake we make as entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs I see, they go hire based on an org chart. They don't hire based on what they personally need in order to off load or get themselves out of the things that they don't really energetically enjoy. You getting an operations manager if you're a visionary entrepreneur is brilliant, because that's like the yin to the yang. It's the exact opposite personality type of the driven entrepreneur is to have somebody that is systems-minded, process-minded, and that can make sure everything's running. Generally, us entrepreneurs, we’re terrible managers. We think we're great at everything, but we're really terrible managers and usually the operations manager is much better at making sure everything runs smoothly. Steve: It's hard to take off or get more time initially if you don't have the money. The money component is important. I went on a Mastermind trip to Mexico a few years back with a handful of people and we looked at everyone's P&L and that was one of the biggest game changers for me was not only understanding my numbers. I think everyone needs a CFO at least part time or at least some outside eyes on the business is so important. Jason: I have a profit first coach and accountant. I'm not really a big fan of having a CFO in a business. Usually, my take on it is every story I've heard of embezzlement or of challenges it's always like the CFOs, and so they're also the crusher of all hopes and dreams. I don't want somebody making too big of decisions there personally, but I want to be coached, and I want to have input and I want to have insight from a third-party perspective, but I don't want them to have control over my stuff. Steve: Totally. I get that. I don't have a CFO, we use a profit coach. Jason: Yeah, similar thing. Steve: Right, but I found that I wasn't going to build a business I thought I was going to build because I'm a feel guy. Like I learn by doing. Does this feel right and I’ll make a decision, but I make decisions very quickly. I'm a high quick start, so I'll make 10 decisions, eight will be bad, two will be great but in the same time that someone else makes one decision. I sometimes can stay a step ahead, but I had to add some revenues and I wanted them to be value-added revenue sources where everyone was a win-win-win, so things like doing inspections better in charging for them. When you don't charge for something, you usually do them poorly. Every manager that doesn't charge for inspections, I guarantee 90% of you are behind on your inspections. Jason: Let's say that again. I like that concept. If you don't charge for it, you're probably doing it poorly. Steve: Right. I'm a believer in this. Just take inspections for example. You go survey people around NARPM or any property management group and everyone's behind on their inspections so they don't do them right. We send a letter to our clients. We said, “Hey, inspections are actually really important. This is when we identify how well the tenant is taking care of the place is when we get out in front of preventive maintenance and it needs to be done well, so we need to hire someone to do this full time and we want to invest in this X amount we charge. It’s going to probably save you three times at least that amount by getting out in front of some of this stuff,” so that was a win-win and our clients loved it. Maybe they didn't want to get charged initially, but once they saw the improved inspection, once they saw the improved communication and results, that was a big win. Then just some other ones that we added in. I think you got to keep the investor fees-friendly. The worst thing we can do as managers is fee our owners to death and they’d get out of the business. Ultimately, the freedom of time, money, relationships, and purpose is what we want, but it's a human need. It's what your clients want, too. So, we have a unique position as property managers, realtors, and investors ourselves in a lot of cases to help people build wealth through real estate. You're a manager and you make it easy, because if you don't make it easy, they burn out and they sell, but if they hold that house specially in San Diego for 30 years, that’s all you have to do and you've set your family up for life. They burn out, so we have a big position, a big part to play here. Jason: I love it, and I love that it’s like a mantra, having others build through real estate, and ultimately what property managers could be allowed towards doing. It’s not just managing a property. If your interests are in line with theirs, which that's their goal. Their goal is to build some wealth, otherwise, why would they be holding on to that property. Steve: Exactly. There's different ways to do that. Right now, we're looking at some other states to buy cash flow property and figure out how to have our owners follow us into some of these other markets. I think with technology these days, that's what all the venture people are doing, how to just pop up shops anywhere. That's something that's exciting to me right now because in San Diego it doesn't make sense to buy an $800,000 house that rents for $2800. We're sitting on some stuff when the market turns for San Diego, but yeah, there's different opportunities out there. Jason: Alright, cool. What should we talk about next? Steve: You know what I'm interested in? I actually thought of this today, and there's some things I've been thinking about doing that I procrastinate on. You know the saying… Jason: I think every business owner can say that. Steve: I know right? Jason: I call it the to-die list. We all have to do list of stuff. Just last week, I have my weekly commitments and I realized I was carrying all of these things over from week-to-week. I'm the guy that says to my clients, “If there's anything on your to do list for more than two weeks, you're not the person that should be doing it.” That's the problem. Yes, we all tend to do that as entrepreneurs. We tend to hold on to things instead of finding the right person to do them or giving it up somebody else. Steve: That’s so true. Jason: Talk about the to die list. Steve: Yeah, the to die list. I was thinking about this today. Two examples of things I have been procrastinating on. One, I don't want to answer email, anymore. I literally want to have email leave my life. I have gotten email down to just like 10 minutes a day at the end of the day, have an assistant, but literally that is still bugging me. I once got this really inspiring auto responder from this really smart cool guy, let’s see if I can find it. Jason: I don't deal with email anymore? Steve: He said, “Thank you for your message. Perhaps you are overwhelmed by email. In fact, last year I sent 43,742 emails, read and review countless more so in order to serve our stakeholders much more efficiently, I have asked my highly capable assistant that’s in New York to review, assign and reply all my email request moving forward,” and then it says some other stuff. That's something I want to do, but it's big and scary, and yeah, I know I'll probably have to respond to some emails, but I'm talking about eliminating it more. I'm like, “Why don’t I just try that? Why do I have to make this decision I procrastinate on forever? Why don't I just try that?” I think it comes back to we don't want to fail like that, we're always raised with, “There is no try, it's to do or die,” or whatever. You don't try, you either do it or you don't, but it's like, “Why can't I just try that? I have an assistant. Why don’t I run that for two or three weeks and see how it goes?” The other thing and I'm sure you've probably thought of this, Jason, is like Gary V, having maybe a semi full-time person doing vlogs, recording not just every few days, like every day. I'm just sitting on that and I'm like, “Well, why don't I just try it for like a freaking month?” I think there's so much possibility with that and I wanted to see what you thought because I'm like, “I don't have to commit to it.” There's so much stuff. Even hiring someone. I was thinking about hiring a GM or an operations manager for eight or nine months. What if I just said, “Hey, let's try it.” I mean this isn’t Canada or some other places where I don't think you can fire people. Try it, hire the person, and if it doesn't work out, let them go. Jason: Yeah. Let's go back to the email and then we can go the other thing. Here's how I identify stuff. I mentioned this on the previous episode, but I personally will do a time study probably about once a quarter and if I bring on a new team member that takes something off my plate, because how I identify what I need to get off my plate is by doing a time study. I have to be accountable. Where's my time actually going and which things are low dollar an hour work, which things are things that I don't enjoy. I actually write a plus or minus sign next to each thing that I'm doing, whether it energizes me or it drains me, and then identify the things that are tactical or strategic, things that are self-care versus family time. I have a whole system, I take clients through for doing time studies. When I do this, that helps me get clarity for what I need to get rid of. I gave up email a long time ago because I hated email. It was always a minus sign, it was always tactical, it was never like my hopes and dreams were coming true when I was writing an email. I don't even look at my email. So, if you've emailed me, I'm sorry, I don't look at it. My assistant will take care of the email. She reads it. If she has any questions, she sends me a message through a walkie talkie app, because I don't want to type to her. She'll send me a voice message through Voxer. We use Voxer and I use it with coaching clients, she will send me a Voxer voice message and say “Jason, what do you think, how should we respond to this email. They're asking this.” I say, “Just tell them this, this and this, but say it nicer than I just said.” Then she’ll take care of it, and she's asking me questions throughout the day. We also do daily huddles as a team and that's usually where she gets most of her questions in. I say, “Is anybody stuck on anything?” She's like, “Yeah, did you get my message about this?” “No, I wasn't paying attention.” “Okay, what do you need?” I answer it and she can respond to the email for me. She's gotten really good at understanding over time, she gets better and better at knowing my voice, knowing what I would say and she takes care of more and more and more. Every day she'll give me a short list, “Here are the emails I don't know what to do with. You need to take care of these,” and I begrudgingly will deal with them within a day or two. That's how it works. [...] then I’ll talk with them and move them forward, but outside of that, usually she hands it off to my team or has somebody else in the team deal with it. If it's support-related, I think most of my clients have learned that they're not getting a fast response by coming to me directly. They get their best response by emailing our support email address or system and so I think every property manager needs to do the same. Initially, when you're small you're the guy. They probably have your cell phone number. Tenants owners, everybody, and eventually you change your phone number and you create some barriers and protections, you have to educate and teach people how you want them to treat you, and you’re going to teach your customers what are the right channels and you have to teach your team what are the right channels. My days are pretty quiet. Steve: I love that. That's super inspiring. You fired me up even more and I love how you said it's tactical. It's very transactional-tactical. I want to be playing in the sandbox of transformational. I feel like I'm retired now because I do what I want and I'm blessed to say that. There's been a lot of hard work behind that, but I'm to the point to where I'm not going to do stuff that doesn't light me up and there's a small subset of tasks like creating content—podcast is one of them—that I could do all day and I have endless energy for. That's where I add the most value. So, the bigger the impact on people that I can have is going to be when I'm fired up and passionate and not dragging off of email, but I think we don't give ourselves permission to do that. You saying that, I'm all in now. I was 80% in, Jason, now I'm all in. I hope some listeners are all in to move forward. That's what I love about podcasts and other things with so much being shared these days. A lot of times we think things, or we know things internally, or we feel things a certain way, but we don't give ourselves permission to actually say that or feel that in public because sometimes we just need someone else to say it to give us the courage. I've noticed that happening so much lately that I finally got pissed, and I'm like, “You know what? I'm making a list of everything that I believe in whole-heartedly, that I think is a little off mainstream maybe.” That way I can have it in writing and I'm just going to start saying these things because I'm tired of being, “Oh yeah, and I felt that way, too,” but I never said anything. Jason: I mention this on the previous episode, too, that I've been really opinionated in the past and I've realized that I think I'm a little more humble now that I realized my way isn't always the exact right way for everyone, so I'm learning. I was just in Columbus for a week and one of the things that really hit me hard is that I've been really opinionated and I think it's important to put out things more as observations rather than gospel truth. Somebody may love email or somebody may hate doing podcast stuff. Everybody is different and I think everybody's perception is different, everybody's experiences as to what works or doesn't work in marketing could be different, their market might be different. There are so many variables involved, so I think moving forward, my content is a lot more observational because I've realized I was attracting clients or creating monsters in the industry that are hyper-opinionated and the hyper-opinionated people become like, “Oh my God, [...],” but the problem is they create a lot of negativity in the industry. They become the rampant [...] guys that are heartless, that want to crush all the hopes and dreams of every tenant on the planet. We need to be careful in any business or any industry in being too opinionated because what ends up happening is we end up attracting most opinionated people. Those are the people that turn on you. Those are the owners you don't want eventually. Those are the people that give you the negative reviews when one little thing goes wrong. I want open minded people, and these are the clients that I’ve loved the most, but I was attracting less of them per capita because of the message that was so in your face. “This is the [...], do this,” and I was just so strong willed that way and I realize now that that creates its own monster. I think it's important to share though, honestly, these little things that we have, that are weird about is or that are woo-woo that we feel like the rest of the world will judge. To say. “This is me, this is how I am, this is my experience,” and yeah I think you when we let our freak flag fly, so to speak, there are people that run with it. As long as we're not, “Hey, this is the gospel truth. This is the only way to do it,” we're not going to turn off so much so many of the people that don't resonate. They might go, “You know, Jason, that’s cool that you're into that weird stuff, but I'm more of a practical guy and I don’t resonate with that, but I like a lot of the stuff you say.” If I say, “This is the only way to do it,” I'm forcing them to make a choice to go all in and do everything my way or the highway. Steve: Your coach helped you nail that idea. I had that opposite issue. I think the issue for me was that I didn't want to ever come off as opinionated. I'm scared almost having an opinion because I'm like, “Do your thing, man,” so I’m always quick to anything I believe in. I'm quick to say, “Do what works for you. This is just my journey. Do what works for you.” I think like attracts like and that's a really cool observation that you started attracting all these opinionated people. The coaching thing, I love that you have coaches and you’re a coach yourself because the power of coaching has changed my life. Strategic coach, I work with Jason Goldberg. Every time I have a call with him, I transform. It's really crazy. If there's one thing I'm super high on right now, it's co-creation. Co-creation is the super power that nobody's talking about and I've experienced it in many ways. First through music. Although I normally do music on my own and I'll just write songs. When I get in the room with the right people, they don't even have to be a great musician, it's just that the energy. If we’re vibrating on the same frequency, things just come out so great. I played with this rapper the other day. Two of our new songs are two of my favorite songs I've recorded in the past year. Back when I had a casual mastermind that we used to do, helping each other co-create, kick this process back to you, now you kick it back to me and blah, blah, blah, everything just accelerated. So, I think outside eyes on the business, coaches, casual masterminds, paid masterminds, whatever it is, I think the more we're interacting with others and having a sounding board, the faster we're going to get to where we're going and the more transformative the experience will be. Jason: I agree. To touch on that, every single person you'll notice, everybody listening will know this is true. You can talk about it in terms of inner energy or spirituality or whatever, but every single person that you’re around brings out a different side of you. There are people that when I'm around them, I feel I'm freaking hilarious, I’m the funniest guy on the planet. They’re laughing at everything I say. It's awesome. Then there's people that I'm around that I feel I'm super mental, analytical, and logical. That's how they perceive me and that's what they bring out in me. And there are people that feel I'm this emotional sensitive person. My kids would probably say, “No, he’s Mr. Analytical.” There are different people that bring out a different side to us. This is also why I have a strong introverted side. I need space away from people to reconnect with who I am and to make I'm me. I feel when we're around other people, part of it is how they perceive and see us, brings that out in us, it allows us to be [...] energy and yes absolutely there's this connection and a certain combination of different people, or different energies, or different whatever that will create a different music. You've got the Beatles, for example. These four guys came together and they created all kinds of interesting sounds and music that had a really strong impact and all them wrote songs [...], but on their own, none of them really created as strong of a situation without the others. Just the energy between Paul McCartney and John Lennon was pretty magical. Steve: Totally, and country artists or country songwriters write typically with at least two but usually three or four people in the same room. I think there's parallels because I can speak from experience. I was constantly, with the exception of going to maybe two conferences a year, I was at the desk in my office, head down, genius with 1000 helpers, although I wasn't a genius that is just a saying I’ve heard by any stretch of the imagination. Jason: The emperor with no clothes. Steve: Right, the fool with too much control, and that’s the thing now. I'm in charge, but I'm not in control and that’s self-freeing. It's the people, my people that are awesome are in control and the cool thing now to get to the impact or the purpose part that is super firing me up these days is that I've gotten to a point now to where my job with Good Life is to take care of my team. It's to figure out how can I make their lives better. How can I figure out, what are their dangers, their opportunities, their strengths? Where do they want to be in three years? How can I cultivate that? How can I make it so all of them would run through a wall for me and take a bullet for me because if they would do that, they will treat my money like their money, my company like their company. The reason I started really researching how, I was like how does the military sail hundreds of 18-year-olds across the sea and set up forward military bases. It's just mind boggling, and I read Extreme Ownership. It’s a great book, some other books, but you talk about decentralized command. The top gives them the mission and then that leader gives them the mission and then the lieutenant, I’m butchering correct words. Jason: The hierarchy? Steve: Yeah, the hierarchy, but they are allowed to come up with the game plan and the battle plan. One of my jobs at Good Life is to make it okay to fail. To be okay to test things and screw things up and get beat up over it. Jason: Because if they're afraid to fail, guess what happens? They start hiding crap from you. Then there's all the secret stuff going on then there’s interoffice politics, there’s backbiting. People have to be allowed to fail and not feel they're going to have their head chopped off. Otherwise, you have a business that’s unsafe for you. I love the idea of you giving up control, I've given up control over my email. I don't even know what's getting sent out half the time, but I've created trust and I trust her. She's very cautious in how she does it. I've given up my schedule. I was in Vegas last week, the week before that I think it was in Columbus, a week before that I was I think in Phoenix. I don't choose anymore. My assistant, she's like, “Here’s a speaking opportunity. You're going to go speak here.” She sets up these podcast episodes, everything I've given up autonomy on my time, but I still blackout Mondays and Fridays so I can do some of the things I want and then I have my weekends, but you give up control. The higher you move up in your business, the less control you have and the more you give to the people around you. I just do what they tell me to do. I show up. My job is to support them. I love what you were saying that you've transitioned because I think as we start out as entrepreneurs and we get our first few team members. We’re always asking the question and frustrated why can't my team just do what I say. Then eventually we transition and we transform and evolve and realizing they are some of our best assets, they're supporting us, they're better at us in things that they do, they love their areas of expertise and now it's, how can I support them? How can I help them get ahead? How can I make it easier? How can I help them avoid burnout? You also threw out the words transformational and transactional, and I think those are two very different leadership styles that I think are important to point out. I think what you’ve just been describing is you're trying to create a team that is transformational. Transformational leadership is where you give them an outcome and say, “That's where I want to go,” and they say, “Great,. We'll figure it out, we'll help you get there.” Transactional leadership is, “We're going to go here and here's exactly how we’re going to do it and we’ll do it my way,” and then there's no buy-in, there’s no ownership, they don't get to fail because if they do what you tell them to do and it doesn't work, whose fault is it? It’s mine, but that means they can't win too. If they can't fail, they can never win, and you're never going to keep A players on your team that never get to win. This is why people get so frustrated by millennials, because they're dinosaur business owners, they're running their business like assholes, they're tyrants, they're trying to micromanage their team, tell everybody to do it, and it’s transactional. They're saying, “I'm giving you money, just do what I tell you to do. I paid you, do it.” Millennials don't stand for that. They value themselves more. They want something beyond just being told what to do and getting a paycheck. Believe me, I have team members on my team that would just be there to show up and [...] and get their check. They don't believe in you, they don’t believe in the company, they're hypers, and they go home and complain about you, and the job, and they live for the weekends. But if team members enjoy the work and they feel they have freedom and they have autonomy, you have their discretionary time. They're thinking about you after work. “How can we make this better?” They’re thinking about you on the weekends. They do extra stuff because they're in love with what they're doing. Steve: Totally. Now, you said that really well and I think what comes up for me as the EMyth, which was a very transformational book to use that word for me. Checklist, at certain points at Good Life, we are a results based company, but a lot of times I get pulled to these meetings it’s like this person is not… they checked the box and they didn't do it or they didn't check the box and they should have, you know I mean? What's the results? Is the days on market good? Where is his KPIs? Although they’re good, we have this back and forth. So, here's something that I want to stick my flag in the sand as something that's not conventional and goes away from my instinct which is let them figure it out. I don't care about the checklist. We're not all going to be McDonald's. Honestly, I'm not trying to scale my business across the whole country, if I was, I probably would have to make sure everybody checks that box, but I'm really interested in the small giants approach, where it's going deep with the smaller amount of people, still having a big business that makes a big impact. I say, “Hey, look at the results. Make it a results-based company because they can own it. They have more ownership in that regard.” Something else that comes to mind was, I remember I used to walk into the office when I used to go to the office every day and people would be on YouTube and I would freaking be so mad. They're watching some videos, I would stew about, I wouldn’t say anything right away. I would go in my office and fume. Then I remember I talked to a friend about it, someone I respect, a mentor. He's like, “Man, you got to let that go. If they get the results, who cares how many cat videos they're watching. You want a fun environment. If you go lay the hammer down on that, you're going to not have the team that you need to have to make your dreams come true.” Someone I respected telling me that was me letting go of a helium balloon. All this weight was just lifted and I was free. I didn't have to micromanage. Jason: I think it's interesting because sometimes usually the person or the team that gets really caught up on the checklist and everything being done a certain way, that's usually the operations person. They love that stuff, and it needs to be done this way, but I think that's our job as the visionaries to remind them it's the outcome that matters. It's the end result that matters. The end result is making sure we have a profitable business. The end result is to make sure that we're honoring our customers and we're treating people well. These sort of things, if we want to get to the outcome. How we get to that outcome, there's probably a million ways we can do it, and whether a certain box wasn't checked or certain thing didn't end up happening. Well, maybe that process is too cumbersome. Maybe it needs to be supplied, as long as getting a result. There’s always this balance. You can have a 30-point checklist that somebody has to complete, but if you can get it down to 10 steps and they can actually do it every time and it doesn't feel it’s in the way, then you're better off than the people that are operating without looking at a process document because most people don’t. They'll do it once and then just skip it. You need something that they can live with on an ongoing basis. I think that's really important to point out what you said is that it's the results, that results don't lie, it's the outcome that really matters. So, I think if you take a step back and say, “Well, what outcome are we going to achieve? Somebody's talking about checklist not being done well. What was the outcome we were trying to achieve? What's the outcome? Okay, did we achieve it? Who was responsible for it and how do we know whether it got done or not? Okay great, well then we're good, maybe we should change the process.” Steve: Exactly. Those are some things, but the exciting part is having freedom of time, money, relationships, the people you work with, the people you get to do business with, I know you talk a lot about firing the bad clients. That was an amazing experience, our profit went way up when we fired the wrong types of clients and getting really centered on our core values because then it's easy to hire and fire people and hire clients based on your core values. Ours are really simple. It’s RPG: be reliable, be positive, and be a go giver. It's based off that book, The Go Giver, and it's just simple. We used to have seven or eight, but then I couldn't even remember what they were and they felt weird, so we made it really simple. Now, my business development manager just goes down the list, like, “Are they reliable? Were they at the appointment on time? Did they send you the thing they said they were going to send you?” It just makes this compass of how to do business with the type of people that are going to make you successful. Jason: That's one of the things that coach clients through is to get clear on their three, maybe four core values because you can have a list to 10, you can have 20, but really your team aren’t going to remember all of those and you can usually boil it down to three core things. For us, ours are a little bit different. One of my core values is just transparency. That's originally why I call my company Open Potion and in just creating transparency I think in the industry has created some various significant shifts. I think also for [...] just how I operate. That's a value that is central to me and I want my team to espouse and really our companies are just extensions of us. It's my Iron Man suit that I get the strap on every day, that's my team and everything around me. It increases my capacity. It makes me feel a super human. I'm getting more done. I've got India handling my email and Adam handing fulfillment. I feel like I’m a superhuman. Steve: He’s awesome, by the way. Jason: Thank you. I think of other things I'm really big on is just eliminating constraints and looking for the big constraints that are preventing momentum, so that I can create momentum. It’s all about creating momentum for my clients and for myself. I think it's going to be different for everybody. With all the different things that we are inspired or that resonates with us and I think every business owner needs to get clear on really what their values are because you can't have it. There are only two types of team members. There are hiders we talked about that are hiding and they are living for the weekend and they show up for paycheck or there's believers. The only way you can have believers is if you have something for them to believe in. If you want believers on your team and you want clients that believe in you, you have to have values that you make transparent or clear to the marketplace or to your team so that they can they can buy in to them. It's amazing to see companies get to a large size without even having that in place. Once you get it in place, I imagine the shift is traumatic for the culture. Steve: And if there's one last thing I would leave the listeners with that’s going to be probably the most impactful thing for me in the last 24 months was, I had this epiphany that everything worthwhile lives on the other side of fear. I knew that instinctually and I've been told that before. You know how you can read a book, that's why they say re-read the books that you love because you read it four times and then you'll start to actually really get it. I knew that, but I didn't really get it and it hit me, it became crystal clear. I was like, “Okay, if I want my dreams to happen and be fulfilled and live a life that I want, I have to figure out what scares me and do that.” I have a two-part test. Does it scare me, part one. Part two, does my heart tell me to do it? If the answer to both of those is yes, you do it. I even made a wristband that says, “What scares you, do that.” I don't have it on me right now, I took it off. Just to remind me and it goes back to the try thing. All my biggest leaps came after I did something I wasn't prepared for and I was scared to do, like going to that mastermind. I couldn’t afford it, it was really expensive. Hiring my operations manager, hiring a marketing manager. I gave a talk recently at PM Grow that I thought I was going to be broke after I hired my marketing person because I didn't think I have the margin and we ended up having our best year ever. It comes back to the try thing. Figure out what scares you, do that, try it, whatever it is. I think that's where we make our biggest leaps and that's what sets people apart from living a life that they intended to having regrets, which is the number one regrets of the dying is that they didn't live a life true to themselves, instead they lived a life other people expected them to live. That's the thing that scares me more than anything in the world and so I’m passionate about sharing that message. Jason: Steve, it’s been awesome having you on the show. I'll second that. It really is that voice deep down that is that voice of truth, and also you can ask yourself deep down, “Do I really want to be doing this?” Deep down, “Should I be doing this thing?” Deep down, “Does this really resonates with me,” and if the answer isn't a, “Hell yes,” then there's a lack of congruency and I think that's where you're saying your heart is yes. I think [...] of something that isn't working is the death of something inside you. It means change, something has to die. You want to know what's really interesting? I've noticed a lot of this on [...]. The scariest thing to kill or to allow to die is the fantasy of something great. I’ll explain this, I've noticed this a lot lately with business owners. They have this fantasy of having a really healthy business, or having a business that is growing, or a business that they contribute, or they get to do great things, and that fantasy is so exciting to them and juicy to them that they don't want to take action on it, because to take action on it means they have to kill it. They have the brutally pull out the knife and slaughter their fantasy the second they start taking action towards it, because now reality sets in. Reality is never going to be at that level that the fantasy was, but it's better because it's real. I usually use the example of my friend in high school that wanted to be a rock star, which sounds like you. You had to eventually give up the fantasy of being a rock star or you have to choose into it fully. He had this fantasy of being a rock star and he would buy expensive guitars and amplifiers, and he wouldn't take guitar lessons. He won’t love the fantasy of having this fantasy of being a rock star and as long as he can buy cool guitars and keep imagining this future that would never happen, he was happy, but he didn't want to go sleep in his car and do gigs, tour round, work his butt off, and practice nine hours a day. He didn’t want to do any of that. That's reality. Reality means some work. Initially, if you're listening to this and you’re like, “This is great. Jason and Steve have these companies and making all this money, they've got their assistants. It must be so nice for them.” They're probably listening and going, “I don't get it. I'm not there.” You may have to be the person listening that you right now, it's time for you to double down. It's time for you to hustle. It's time for you to do stuff that scares you. It's time for you to get off of the fantasy of whatever you're hoping of doing or hoping of starting to really get out there and do the work, the hard work to make it happen and you listen to that voice, you get to that place. You get to that place eventually where you're now are able to focus on your team. You're able to be a coach and a mentor to people around you instead of the person trying to figure out how to get everybody to do everything. I think that transition really involves taking those scary leaps. I think every coach that I've hired was a leap. None of them were cheap. Every coach I've hired, every program or training I bought into, some of them I couldn't even afford at the time. They were risks, but I knew deep down it was a yes. I just knew it was a yes and it terrified me. I think for those that are really analytical and logical, they're like, “I don't get it Jason,” but for anybody else listening. If you have that voice deep down inside that is saying, “Hey, this is what's next for you. You've known it. You've been avoiding it and you're trying to figure out how to make it all feel safe, take the leap, and jump and do it. Worst case scenario, you're going to learn some powerful lessons.” I had lessons where I spent a lot of money and it didn't work out. A lot of money. I've probably lots of money making some bad choices, but I wouldn't trade those lessons and I've learned from them. Steve: Yeah, and money is just one side of it. Making a decision to be a different person, or to take more time off, or to go into a completely different field, that's probably the easiest one to do is scratch a check for something. Sometimes our way of being is probably what gets in the way of most of our issues because you can't solve the problem with the same mind that created it. Creating some space and getting clear always helps, getting clear on what you're trying to do and the life you're trying to live. At the end of the day, we’re the writer, director, producer of our own store and I love how you said, you kill off the fantasy because that's true. It's scary. I think that's why a lot of people don't delegate it or it takes so long to delegate because it's scary. If you give that up, what are you going to do? Then you actually might have to sit with yourself and figure out what's next and nobody wants to be alone with themselves. That's a scary place. It's through the work, it's through conquering those demons slowly over time that I've seen good results, so it's a process. Take it easy on yourself and do what's doable. I beat myself up a lot over the years and it's I think we're all pretty ambitious. Don't kill yourself. Life's too short. Just have fun with. Do what’s doable. Jason: Well, Steve, it’s been awesome having on the show. I'm sure we could jam over and over and over again about all kinds of cool things. I appreciate you being here. Fun having you and I think there's a lot of really good takeaways for people that are going to listen to this or relisten to this and thanks again for coming on. Steve: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jason. Jason: You're welcome. How can people get in touch with you or some of the stuff that you're doing? Steve: If you have any questions you can always email me steve@goodlifemgmt.com. Then check out the podcast, Good Life Property Management Podcast, we love that, and then Tribe Mastermind Podcast with me and Jordan Muela. Those are two podcasts that are we have a lot of fun with, that are around business, mindset, and all that good stuff. Jason: Cool. All right. Great. Thanks Steve. I appreciate you. Steve: Thanks so much for having me, Jason. Jason: All right. That was fun. If you are property management entrepreneur and you don't have a coach, I recommend that you find somebody. Find somebody, find the best that you feel you can afford at where you're at right now. Get some input from somebody else. Find a mentor, find another property manager in your state. If you need to, find somebody that you feel you can lean on as a resource. Nobody has to be alone in business and I think one of the biggest pitfalls that I had early on I think most entrepreneurs have is that we feel alone. We feel we're weird, we’re different. We are, we're different than a lot of the world, but there's plenty of people us out there and so make sure you have somebody that you can look up to, that you can lean on, that can give value to you and it's never just one person. Keep going. Keep doing this. Keep feeding into yourself. That's always an investment that's going to pay off. If we can help in any way with that, I would be honored. You can reach out to us at doorgrow.com and we would be glad to support you in the beginning of that journey towards your growth. As always, to our mutual growth. Until next time. Bye everybody.  

Property management is hard enough. As your business becomes successful, don’t always say “yes” or “no” to everything. Owners are coming to you to solve a problem. Step into potential opportunities without being pulled in multiple directions. Today, I am talking to Marc Cunningham, President of Grace Property Management, who identifies five characteristics that define successful property management companies.  You’ll Learn... [02:42] Entrepreneurial Footsteps: Marc grew up in real estate property management world working for his dad, who founded Grace Property Management in 1978.  [04:02] Doors in Denver: Grow slow and steady; from 110 to 1,000 doors.  [04:32] Mantra: Follow the opportunity. [07:15] However you define success, companies follow some of these five standards.  [07:56] #1. Filter and Qualify Owners: Don’t take every owner that comes along.  [20:04] #2. Know your numbers to know how well your business is doing.  [31:43] #3. Focus on profit, not door count. People are willing to pay for additional value. [37:20] #4. Have systems and processes in place, and follow them.  [43:50] #5. Recruit, develop, and retain talent.  [52:28] Marc’s Extra: #6. Hold weekly one-on-one meetings with each team member.  [53:15] DoorGrow Extra: #7. Invest consistently in your own development.  [56:27] DoorGrow Extra: #8. Get coaching to help grow your business.  Tweetables The more successful you get, the more opportunities come your way. Cycle of Suck: Taking on bad owners, you get bad properties, tenants, and reputation. You won’t regret firing difficult clients, despite emotional and operational costs. Track metrics regularly because numbers make a difference. Resources Grace Property Management Marc Cunningham's Email Business Health Check-up Form QuickBooks Steve Jobs FilterEasy PetScreening Process Street Basecamp Voxer Google Sheets AppFolio Help Scout Drift Intercom Traction LeadSimple DGS 25: Why Every Property Manager Should Implement Profit First DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DoorGrown 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 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. This guest that we have today is a fantastic gentleman named Marc Cunningham. Marc, you're not a stranger to most people probably listening to the show. Welcome to the show. Marc: Thank you for having me, Jason. Jason: I'm really excited to have you here. It's strange that you haven’t been on here yet. At the beginning of the show, I was like, “Have you been on here? You're like, “No.” I said, “It's long overdue.” Marc: I’ve just been waiting for the invitation. Jason: Okay, well I'm glad we finally got you invited. I’m glad you're here and today's topic is going to be the five characteristics of successful PM companies. Before we get into that, I want you to share a little bit of your background to qualify yourself to the audience, help them understand how you got into property management and what your connection is to these five characteristics of a successful company. Marc: Absolutely. Let me start by asking you a question. What were you doing in 1978 Jason? Jason: 1978? Marc: Yeah. Jason: I was probably pooping in a diaper and drinking breast milk. Marc: Okay. That image there. Jason: I was born in 1977. Marc: Okay, so you’re one. I wasn't much older than that, but in 1978 my dad decided that he was going to quit teaching—he was a middle school teacher—and he was going to follow his entrepreneurial real estate dream. We opened up a real estate property management company Grace Property Management 1978 in Denver. I was employee number one because I was pre child labor, so my dad would have me doing all the things that kids probably shouldn’t do. He would have me showing properties, mowing lawns, collecting rents, and filling out lease, just anything that needed to be done. I grew up in that world, so it really gave me a unique view into real estate, into property management, and just in the business because that's all I knew. That’s all we did. As I got older, I’d take my summers, I’d worked for him in the summers, and again just doing whatever needed done. If I get really lucky, if it gets too hot out, I’d work in the office. When it got over 110 degrees, the deal is I get to come into the office, otherwise I’m mowing lawns. I did that for many, many years. I went to Colorado State University, I studied finance and real estate there, and I was working in Cheyenne, Wyoming doing accounting work there. My dad called me one day and he said, “Hey, I need to hire a property manager, are you interested?” Well Cheyenne Wyoming, with all due respect, isn't the most fun place to live, so I jumped to that opportunity and that was about 20 years ago, 20 some odd years ago. I joined the firm permanently at that point in time. At that time, we were relatively small, I think we had 110–120 doors and we have grown slowly and steadily over the years. Today, we do both residential and commercial. We've got just under a thousand doors that we manage. We do real estate sales, we do property management, we’re investors ourselves—I own some stuff—we flip. Our mantra is follow the opportunity. If there's an opportunity to real estate, we want to look at that, whatever that is. So, that's how we've gotten to where we are today. Jason: I was just down in Vegas speaking to a group of property managers and they were bringing up like, “How do I avoid all this distraction and move the business forward?” What I said to them is opportunity is I've noticed is what kills entrepreneurs. How do you keep following the opportunity at all times but also keeping your focus narrow enough that you're actually moving forward. Marc: That's a great question. That's a really good question and that's hard. It is really hard because we found that the bigger we get, the more successful we get, the more opportunities that are out there. At this point, we're of the belief that you've got to say no to almost everything. I think it was Steve Jobs that said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people are the really successful people say no to just about everything.” Jason: Following the opportunity as a mantra doesn't mean saying yes to every opportunity. Marc: It does not mean saying yes to everything. You need to consider everything. What I don’t like is people say, “No, we don't do that.” For many, many years, for example, we didn't do real estate sales. “Hey, will you help me sell my house?” “No, we don’t do that. We only do property management.” We didn't consider. Well then, one day we thought, “Maybe we should consider it,” and as we considered it, we realized, this is a really good opportunity that we should capitalize on. Where when an owner says, “Gosh, I want to sell my house. Would you guys be interested in buying it?” “No, we don't do that.” Well, stop saying, “No, we don't do that.” At least think about it, consider it, and I think that's the way to step into some potential opportunities. But yes, you have to be cautious or else it will get you pulled to many directions. Jason: Relevant to that, how many of these units are now in your own portfolio, are yours or your company's? Marc: I don't have a real big portfolio. I'm a pretty conservative guy, so I'm a buy-it-pay-it-off kind of guy. I've got 10–12 rental properties in my portfolio. Jason: Let's get into these five characteristics that you feel define a successful company, and you're obviously a successful company. You've helped keep it successful, right? Second generation, so let's get in number one. Marc: Yeah. I don't pretend to be a guru. I can't stand the guys that stand there, beat their chest, and say, “Do it like me, I know what I’m doing.” This is just from our perspective. We worked with a lot of companies and I didn't get this, but I do a lot of PM coaching in business stuff on the side with PM companies helping them get better, basically. We know a lot of PM companies, we've worked a lot of PM companies and there seem to be some standards, some things companies that are successful, however you define success, are going to follow some of these aspects. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list by any means, but it's the way that we gauge ourselves. Jason: This will be cool because I probably come from a very different perspective. You're in the industry, you do this in Denver and I don't have any rental properties. I don't manage. I'm not a property manager. I have largely been this nerdy fly on the wall that's been able to see inside of hundreds of companies. My perspective might be a little bit different, but I'm sure there's some alignment. Let's get into number one. Marc: Number one is successful companies don't take every owner. They don't take every owner that comes along. So you agree with that one? Jason: Totally. If anyone's heard my show, they've heard me talk about the cycle of suck, which is it starts with filtering owners. Like if take in bad owners, you have bad properties. It doesn't matter how amazing they are. If you have bad properties, you have bad tenants. It doesn't matter how much tenant screening you do. If you have bad tenants, you have a bad reputation because you have bad owners and bad tenants. Nobody's happy and this is where I think the entire industry as a whole in aggregate sits right now. It has a bad reputation because they're taking on any owner. Marc: Yeah, I would agree. The concept is this. Any PM company knows that if a tenant, a prospective tenant walks in the door, an applicant comes in and says, “Hey, I want to rent your property,” every property manager is a little bit skeptical. They raise their eyebrow. They say, “Okay, well maybe. I’m going to qualify you.” We know industry-wide that whatever the number is, call it 25%-30%, depending on the market you're in, the 25%-30% of the applicants are not going to make good tenants. Everybody would agree upon that. Well, we really believe that probably that same percentage 25%, 30%, 35% of prospective owner-clients are not going to make good owner-clients. The challenge comes, how do we filter them? Because if it's an applicant to rent a property, we have them fill out a rental application. We go in deep. That's the hardest part of the business is qualifying those folks. So, how do you qualify an owner? That’s where the challenge lies. If you called our office today as a prospective owner-client and you are talking to our new account specialist or one of our PM's, they would have a dock in front of them, a piece of paper, and a lot of this is just basic questionnaires—what's your email address, what’s the property address, tell me about the property—but at the end of that questionnaire, they have four questions. Yes or no questions that they have to check the box on yes or no. They have to discern this information during the conversation with you because it helps us qualify these owners. For example, the first one says, “Is the owner financially stable?” If during this conversation you as my prospective owner say to me, “Hey Marc, if you can’t get this property rented next week, I can’t make my mortgage payment. I've got to get this thing ready quickly.” Well, you're not financially stable, right? That's going to be a no on that box, that's the first question. Jason: “So, are you current on all your house payments?” One of my clients said that was a favorite question they would ask. If they say no, it's instant disqualification. Marc: Absolutely. Then the second question we have to ask ourselves is, is the client emotionally stable? That can be a hard one to discern. I always tell people, “Don't ask them the question verbatim, okay?” It will get you in trouble. Jason: “Are you sane?” Yeah. Marc: Exactly, but we need to be able to discern that information from the conversation. Is this somebody who's going to be stable when things go bad because at some point in time it will. Jason: Right. Sometimes, people will reveal their emotional instability pretty quickly, right? Marc: Yes. I tell my PMs, “Look. Two quick keys. If they cry on the first conversation or if they own more than two cats, they are not emotionally stable. Run away from them.” Jason: Might be a little biased against cat owners. What’s cat owners like? Marc: I know. You just lost half of your audience because of my personal bias. Jason: No, they’re cool. Marc: I am as well. Then the third question we ask is, “Can I control the situation and the client? Are they willing to give me control?” Not in a puppet master, I'm going to be the mean guy, but they have to give me control. They have to be willing to do so. Then question number four is, are they realistic in expectations? Do they think that we should be able to get $2000 a month for property that's only going for $1000? Or do they think that we should call them before we ever spend a dime on maintenance? That's just not realistic. That’s not going to happen. If we can't check the yes box on all four of those, then my PM does not have permission to work with that client. Jason: I love the idea of figuring out if they're willing to relinquish control. That's such a big thing because they're coming to you to solve a problem. I've noticed with clients that they're not willing to be strong enough of a fence for people to push against to elicit trust enough for people to relinquish that control. I think a lot of people will push. They might look like bad owners, they're trying to test the fence, and it's like in dating how girls will crap test the guy. They just want to see if they can handle them or if they're willing to be strong enough. I think a lot of times property managers will try to be nice and maybe don't have enough bite or drive and they’re really looking for somebody they can feel safe with, so they test us. I think clients will test us and then they're willing to relinquish control at times. It’s just something I've noticed during the sales process because I deal with entrepreneurs. They’re driven people and I need the same thing. They need to be willing to relinquish a certain amount of control because I'm asking to do crazy stuff, like fire doors or change your business name. I love that idea, and then are they realistic in their expectations. If somebody says, “Hey, I want to add 500 doors in the next quarter,'' then that's probably not going to be realistic. I want to make sure they're in touch with a reality that I feel I can give them or lead them towards and it's the same with our property management clients. Marc: Yup, and if we set those filters on the front-end, that's just going to make things so much easier on bringing good clients on because our business is hard enough without having difficult owner-clients. I think there’s the second aspect of that is, “Well, gosh. That's great. I wish I would have heard that before I took on Mr. Crazy,” so, what do you do then? I think the other part of that—you alluded to this—is sometimes you do need to let those clients go, and sometimes that's the best thing, because we're talking about what successful companies do. Successful companies realize that, “Hey, if we made a mistake, we brought on a bad client, we need to let that client go, whatever that looks like.” Jason: There's always going to be those mistakes. We cannot always know and perceive every person coming in and know that they are emotionally stable, or that you can control them, or that they will be realistic, but when they start to reveal those colors, we have to be willing to let them go. I've made bad decisions in bringing people in as clients and I have had to let them go. Some of them were just really like verbally abusive to my team. You’d be really amazed at some of the types of people that that can somehow leak through even if you have pretty good qualifications at the beginning. I love what you're getting at here because really anybody that studies sales in any capacity knows that qualifying a prospect is at the outset. It's really mind boggling that people would not qualify their prospects in any regard. Marc: I’m curious. You said you had to let clients go. How have you overcome the internal thought of, “Ooh, but that's money. That's a big chunk.” When do you decide? How do you decide? Is that an internal struggle for you? Jason: Sometimes. There's always a negotiation and it's a balance. It's a balance between the money aspect and the cost with the team. Ultimately, my team I want to keep forever. I want to keep them long-term. If I keep that client on, I’m saying to my team, your feelings don't matter. I don't care about you. That sends a really painful message and I've noticed this in property management companies. People wonder why there's so much turnover with their staff and I think one key reason is because you're allowing your staff, you're forcing your staff to tolerate too much. There are some of these owners that should be let go, and I've said many times to clients, “The hallmark of a seasoned property manager is that they fired some clients.” Some businesses have hundreds of doors and they've never fired a client. I know if they've never fired a client, they have some bad things in their portfolio. There's some pain in there and that's a difficult place to work. They’re not willing to let go of painful situations and there's always going to be painful situations. Marc: Yeah, and I've never talk to a PM who did let a client go who regretted it. Jason: Never. Marc: It's hard, it's scary. We face that. I remember very vividly when we were small and we had 125 doors, maybe. We had a client and had like 12 properties. I remember the guy, could see the guys face. He wasn't a bad guy, but he was just difficult and it had to be his way. He would contact us all the time. He just drove us crazy. We finally decided we needed to let the guy go. Well that was like 10% of our portfolio. That was hard. We thought about it, we don’t know what to do, and even after we did it we thought, “Oh, is that the right decision or not?” But we quickly realized it's like a load that’s been lifted. When you get rid of those people that sucked that time and energy and life out of you, it is a positive thing. Jason: The operational costs, the emotional cost when all of that falls by the wayside. I've never had a client fire something. I had one person fire half their portfolios like one big property. I had one person do that and they were terrified, but they did it. Two things happen almost every time. One, they replace the income really quickly. It always, it creates some vacuum in the universe, I don't know what you want to call it, but they always seem to replace the income really quickly with better doors. That always seems to happen. They just need to trust that's going to happen. The other thing is, is they always say to me, “I can't believe I didn’t do it sooner,” like they wished they had done it sooner. They were so afraid of doing it and then once they do it, they realize it wasn't so bad and they wish they were like, “Why didn't I do this sooner?” Marc: If one of your clients is talking to you and you're saying, “Hey, you need to fire this owner,” how do you recommend they do that like? What should they say? Should they say, “You’re fired”? Jason: You’re interviewing me now. Marc: Yeah. Jason: There's a few ways you can let them go. There are some creative ways. One of the best is just raise the fees. If [...] make it worth, just make it more expensive. Say, “Hey this property is difficult. You're a bit more challenging person to deal with, to be honest. We are willing to keep doing it, but it's going to cost X.” So, you just raise the rate, and if they keep being annoying and you feel like it's still not worth it, you keep raising the rate until they self-select themselves out. That's one easy way. Another way is to just refer them to somebody else, and if you're going to refer you might as well get a nice referral fee out of it. Go to one of your buddies and one man's junk is another man's treasure. I mean they might know how to deal with this type of person. They might be a better personality fit for this type of person than you. Don't just instantly assume that because you can't tolerate them or their difficult for you, that everybody else will. Give them to somebody else and let somebody else have a shot. Marc: I like it. We will rarely fire an owner, but we will as you just suggested bump fees up and up until they decide to fire us. I’d much rather have them fire us and leave on their terms. Jason: Right, they’ll self-select out. Are we complete on number one? Marc: I think so. Number two is successful companies know their numbers. I see this so often with PM companies. We get really good at the logistical side of we know how to lease, we know how to talk to owners, know how to collect rents, but when it comes to the numbers, the financials, we just don't know what we’re doing often times. I really am a big believer in that concept that if you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business. You don't know how well your business is doing. One question I’ll often ask of coaching clients that I work with on that side of things is also, “Okay. Now, if you, Jason own a PM company, at what point in time do you close the books for your company? Let’s say the month of June ends, right? We’re here almost until the end of June. When June closes for you, how quickly will you have your June books closed so that you know how much money your company made in the month of June?” The answers always surprise me. They're all over the board. “Well, I'm currently 90 days behind. I’m trying to catch up,” or, “I'm not much further behind in that,” or, “I might get it towards the end of the following month.” Jason: Yeah, how can they make business decisions if they’re 90 days in the rear-view mirror? Imagine trying to drive a car like that. Marc: Like I said, I've been doing this for many, many years. While we were small. like anybody else, I was everything. I was the janitor, I was the accountant, and I was everything. My favorite day of the month was always the first. Not because we collect rents, but because on the first day of the month, I go online and print out our company bank statements for the last month. I get our paper checkbook out and I’d reconcile. I’d get our ending balance and I enter it all into QuickBooks. I can look at that piece of paper and say, “Hey, how much money did we make last month?” I love that. I would wake up early to do that. I'm weird, I know, but that's how you know how well you're doing, I wouldn’t wait until the second, the third, the fourth, the twentieth, that's crazy. You can do it on the first. So, I'm a big believer in as soon as possible, which in this day and age it can be pretty much immediate. You get your books balanced, you run some numbers, you see how your company is doing it, and you’ve tracked some metrics, some internal metrics for your company to know how you're doing. Jason: I think the challenge is when property managers are holding on to something that's not in their particular wheelhouse or area of genius, but if this isn't your thing, if you're not like Marc and you don't love doing this and this isn’t like what makes you thrilled and excited is to get in your bank statements and numbers, have somebody else get everything ready for you. I've got a profit-first coach and accountant. She meets with me and goes over everything with me. I get not only my perspective, but she says, “This is what it looks like to me, Jason,” so yeah, I think it's usually helpful to do a review every month and look at your numbers. Marc: Yup, and like you just said, most folks aren’t as weird as I am as it comes to that stuff, and that's fine. But you need to find someone weird like me. You need to find someone who can go get excited about running your numbers, make sure they do it, and then you review those and you track a couple key metrics. For example, some of the metrics that we always track, are door counts proportional to owner count? Because that’s a sign of a healthy business. So for example, if your company has 100 doors, if you’ve got 100 owners for those 100 doors, that is the sign of a very healthy business because it means that you don't have any one owner with too much control versus the guy the guy called me a couple of weeks ago and he wanted to know if I was interested in buying his business. I go, “Tell me a little bit about it.” I think he had like 75 doors, “I’ve got 75 doors, I’m here in Denver and interested in selling.” One of the first questions I always ask is how many owner-clients do you have? He had 75 doors and 4. I was like, “You know what? I don’t need to know anything else. I'm not interested.” Why? Because if we took those doors on, that's four owners. That’s a lot of control. Jason: If it’s two of them, then what are you getting? Marc: It's something that you can't control, but you need to track it, that's one of the things you want to track on a regular basis. Another metric we really like to track is the percentage of our overall income that we spend on employees. Because in our industry, that again can just be all over the map on companies. Do you have a number on that that you recommend to your folks on what that number should be? Jason: It varies so wildly especially by market, but I know an owner that has 65% profit margin in his business. Marc: Wow. Jason: I know it's ridiculous. Marc: It’s a good thing I’m sitting down. Jason: I know. He has a couple of hundred doors. It varies so wildly and it depends largely on the type of owners they're taking on, the type of property, because—I’m talking about this in the cycle of suck idea very often—if you take one bad owner or one bad door property, can have 10 times, maybe even 100 times the operational cost as a good door. So, that can vary so wildly. I've had a company come to me that had 500–600 units under management and wasn't making a dime. I said, “How is this possible?” They’re like, “Well, we're doing $3 million a month in real estate,” so there was a brokerage with a cancerous tumor on the side called property management. He had twice as much staff as he needed, no technology in place. Fast forward, he fired half his team, he fired about 200 doors, maybe 300 doors, and it's now a very profitable company. So, it's not all about doors and staffing is always going to be the highest cost. If you can replace even a fraction of that or create some leverage for your team using technology, outsourcing, whatever, those are some big wins financially. A lot of times everyone's looking at, I got to get more revenue in and they're not looking at their expenses. That's why I'm a big fan of the profit-first system which says, “You take out a portion for profit and then what's left over is your expenses.” Most people are like expenses. You’re just revenue minus expenses and then whatever's left over, there's nothing left over typically in that situation. Marc: Absolutely. We have that profit is almost like an expense item that we know we’re going to take out every month and put into a savings account. We've been doing that for a long, long time from that aspect. But yes, I agree 100% with that aspect of what you're saying there. The number that we coach folks around is you don't want to go over 50% of your total revenue to staffing costs regardless of your size. The bigger you get, the more that number's going to probably creep towards that, just because you get more overhead, you get more managers, and you have more red tape, so that's a natural part of that. But if you go over 50%, that's a red alert. Something's wrong from that standpoint, so that an important to track for every company. Jason: Yeah, as a company scale, they're able to create a bit more leverage, but yeah, I could see how when you're really small and you're doing everything, your employee costs are a bit less per door because assuming your free labor or maybe if you work for your dad. Or sometimes it’s a spouse. They’ll have their spouse as their business partner, and you'll see them get to maybe 70-80 units, they’re tapped out, and they can't afford to hire their first person. Nobody's getting paid. That makes sense. All right, I like it. Anything else on number two, knowing the numbers? Marc: The other things I would just add that's worth tracking that I often find companies don't track this well enough is how many doors they’re adding and how many doors they’re losing. It’s always a surprise to me is when you ask them that, they'll say, “Well, I can dig it up, but I don't know.” A lot of the software don't track that. If we’re old school, we’ve got the spreadsheet. Every time we lose a door, we go to our spreadsheet for the year, we put it in, and it's going to keep that auto tracking. Every time we sign a new one up, put those on the spreadsheet so we can pull that up and instantly see, “Okay. As of right now, we've lost X number of doors per year and we've added X number of doors.” So, track that. Don't make that something that you've got to go dig in your software and try to pull a report. That needs to be one of those metrics that you're tracking at least on a monthly basis. Jason: Yeah. It's a pretty difficult situation and it’s a common one where you’ll see somebody adding a door and losing a door just as often. They wonder why they're not getting growth. Sometimes, the problem aren’t getting enough [...], it’s obtaining doors. They could be the type of target audience that they're going after, it could be that they are lacking some awareness around how to retain these clients or whatever it might be, but yeah, that's an important thing I think to pay attention to. Marc: Yeah, and to track the percentage of doors lost. That's all over the map as well. If you can keep your losses on an annual basis in the single digits from a percentage standpoint, that's pretty good. If you can keep it 10% or below on doors that are leaving you every year, you're in the pretty rare group of PMs. Jason: I created something for property managers called our cold leads calculator. One of the things I noticed with a lot of companies—this is more relevant to what I do—a lot of property managers are not paying attention to the amount of money that they're spending on cold lead marketing—pay per click, SCO, APM leads—all these different places at social media marketing, content marketing, that they're paying to generate business. A bulk of where most people get their deals and leads from I find in the industry is often word-of-mouth, so they just group everything together. All their warm leads from word-of-mouth, referrals, other cold lead marketing, and they're not paying attention. When you look at the numbers alone of the cold lead marketing, which everyone can check it out by going to doorgrow.com/coldleads, they can take this little questionnaire and go through it, but it'll help you calculate your cost for cold lead marketing. It also calculates and factors in the time. Time is worth money and it calculates and ask what that time is worth, like what's your hourly wage or whoever is following up on these, how much time does it take to follow up on these, to create a real aggregate or at least close aggregate cost of what one cold lead is costing you. I’ve seen numbers. I just had one come through the other day. One cold lead was costing them $5000. I've seen $11,000, I've seen a $1700 per lead or per acquisition per deal and what I love to ask them when I get them on the phone, I say, “Hey, I saw you fill out this cold lead thing. How long does it take you to recoup $5000 on a contract?” and they’re like, “Well, that's probably three years of free management or two years whatever.” Then their perspective starts to shift and we have to uncouple that. The transparency in numbers helps you make decisions as a business owner. Marc: Yup, and then review them regularly. Don't just leave it your accounts. If you're a successful PM company, you're looking at those numbers because those numbers make a difference. Jason: All right. We’re on to number three. Marc: Number three is a good lead-in as you were just talking about there. Number three will be successful companies focus on profit, not door count. You've already talked about this. This comes up so often in our industry, what's the first question any PM ask another PM? How many doors do you have? What’s your door count? How many doors are you managing? That's the measuring stick and it’s the wrong measuring stick because I know companies that are smaller, they're very profitable, and I know companies that are very large that are not profitable at all. Door count is irrelevant. The profit is what matters. What that means is practically speaking, if you've got 50 doors, I would say, “Before you say I another 50—that's fine—but you know what? Let's maximize the profit of the existing group you have.” That doesn't mean just go out and nickel-and-dime everybody, but it means what other services can you provide? What other things can you put in place to make sure that you're maximizing that income and that’ll have a dual impact in that you're going to increase your income on that 50? Then when you pick up your next 50, now you've already got some structures in place to ensure that they are profitable as well. You've got to focus on the profits, on the revenue streams to be successful. Jason: Absolutely, I don't think there's ever been a property management company that I’ve seen that is not leaving some money on the table. There's always additional services that you can offer, even if it's something little like filter easier petscreening.com. There's always some additional value that you can offer and there's always a way that you can monetize that. People are willing to pay for additional value. Marc: On the flip side of that as well, I think we need to pay attention to those expenses because what the industry right now is more difficult than it has been a long time and folks that have not been in the industry for too long, they’ll recognize this because this is normal to them, but it's a tough industry. This is a tough market to be running a property management company. When things get tough, you've got to be tight on expenses, and it’s too easy not to get tough on expenses. That's one thing we encourage folks, is to go through that profit of loss, line by line, and if there are expense items on there that are not directly relational to income coming in, you have to figure out how to cut them. You have to get rid of those wasteful expenses. That is such a good exercise to sit down and start going through that stuff and say, “Well, gosh, I’ve just been paying for the subscription service every month and I don't even know what it does. I signed up for it two years ago. All right, let's get that cancelled.” Jason: Yeah, and you’re like, “Why am I still on this?” Marc: Exactly. This is beneficial as getting on a new door, is cutting those expenses. Jason: This is why I love having a profit-first coach, because this really is built into the system. Every month is like, “Hey, what about these services you said you're going to cancel and you said you don't need this anymore?” Yes, so I think it's helpful. If you’re not like accounting-minded, I highly recommend you go back and watch my episode with Mike Michalowicz, who is the author of Profit First and check out that episode. I think it was a fantastic episode. Really cool guy, came and spoke at our conference. It covers that system like cutting down expenses, putting profit first, making sure that expenses are fitting within your existing budget and you're still getting a profit. Yeah, makes sense. Marc: What I had to do, I realized that the biggest expense item, the biggest overhead we had was my ego. The thing is that, that I wanted for me, the big desk, the big office, the nice car, and that's something everyone needs to start there because if you drive, especially in the real estate sale side, you go to any real estate sales event and what is the parking lot filled with? A lot of very expensed leased vehicles. I'm not against nice vehicles, but that’s just a suck on the income side of things. Jason: I think there's always this ratio between the amount of money that you’re going to take out of the business, and the amount of money that you're going to leave in to fund towards the growth. If we take out too much too quickly, the business growth is stagnated. I've seen some really aggressive companies put almost all of their money. I’ve seen owners try not to even take a paycheck. They’re really minimizing their take out of the business so that they could fund the growth, because they're delaying gratification for the future. They’re funding and creating a business that is growing and they’re putting their funds and their money towards that.  Sometimes, you have to double down as a business owner and to be willing to take a short-term hit because you want a long-term growth goal. And we can put too much towards growth to where it feels shaky, it feels unsafe. We're not holding anything back. There's no padding there. It really is this balance of how much I’m going to put towards growth be aggressive, how safe am I going to play it, and how stable and slow am I going to be at doing this. There's a balance there. Marc: It is a balance, it’s an absolute balance because you need to leave some in, and you need to be pulling some out every month and putting it into that savings account so that you have opportunities. We’ve purchased several companies over the years and every one of those deals worked because we were able to in essence say, “We can write a check. We’ll write a check today. We’ll get this deal done.” Why? Because we have money put away. That savings account isn't just comforting, it's an opportunity fund for things when they come up in the future. Jason: I like it. All right, is that three? Marc: That's three. Jason: All right, number four. Marc: Number four is successful companies have systems and follow them. They have systems in place and they follow. In a word, system means different things to different people. Some people think, “Well, that's just so I need a good software. What’s the system?” I really believe that probably 75%-80% of what we do on a day-to-day basis in our industry can be systematized, meaning, simply documenting your process, documenting your routine, because it plays out in so many ways. We learned this early on when we were growing and first there were two of us. My dad and I, we both did it all and we hired a third person, and then we all three did it all. Then we hired a fourth person, and by the time we hired that fourth person, we realized that, we can't all do it all. This isn't scalable, we can't all do everything. It works great at two people, it works great at three people, but when we had that number person and Mr. Tenant calls and says, “Hey, I called in with a maintenance request last week and I haven’t heard from anybody.” And I say, “Well do you know who you talked to?” “No, I don't remember.” “Well hold on, let me see if I can figure it out.” “Hey dad, did they talk to you?” “Hey, Bill did they talk to you?” “Sue did they talk to you?” “No.” “Well they talked to one of us, right?” That’s very ineffective. You've got to start specializing in your processes. We realized at that point in time that if we're going to hire someone to be our leasing person, for example, we better have a documented process for them to follow. I mean specific detailed documented. Here's what time you get to the property before showing. You open the door, you turn on the lights. Here's where you stand when they come in. Here's how you greet them, here’s what you say, here’s what you don't say, here's how you process an application. If we do that into our entire business and we break the business down into the smallest components, it simplifies things like nothing else because we’re in a complex business. If you think of a continuum in your mind, a long line going on both directions. On one side of the continuum, you have the words consistency and simplicity. On the other side, the far extreme opposite, you've got the words variation and complexity. You have to ask yourself, where am I on that continuum? We're all different places, but we hopefully will always be moving forward towards consistency and simplicity. I don't think there's a better way of doing that than through documenting your process, your system and then following it, training on it, improving it, upgrading it. It's got to be written, it's got to be documented, and it is a process. Jason: That needs to be used. People document it, they’ll give it to the team member, the team member will look at it at the first few times they do it, and then they're done. I have Process Street on as a guest once. We used Process Street internally, but it forces them to actually use the process on going. It's a checklist that has to be verified and completed. Marc: Yes, checklists are huge. We couldn’t exist without the checklist. Its old school, but it works. We still have paper checklists on some things in our office here that people say, “That wouldn’t work.” I guess just too old school. I say, “Well , we’re pretty successful. It worked for a thousand doors; I can tell you that. Will it work beyond that? I don't know, but it works to get you to a thousand.” Jason: There you go. I've noticed in businesses, I think there’s, at a minimum, probably seven systems that every business eventually has to have in a business. One, they have to have an internal communication system. For me and my team, it’s virtual, so we're using things like Basecamp, Voxer, stuff like that. But there needs to be an internal communication system that isn't just, “Hey Steve, did you do this?” So, internal communication. There needs to be process documentation system. That could just be Google Sheets, Docs, and whatever, or it could be something more complicated or cooler like Process Street or whatever, but there needs to be a process documentation system. There needs to be a billing system, of course. Property managers use maybe AppFolio or Rentec Direct, Buildium, but there needs to be some billing, accounting system. Then there needs to be a support system. A lot of property managers are starting to gravitate towards setting up Help Scout, Intercom, Drift, or one of these, but internally we use Intercom. There needs to be a support system in the business so that you can track tickets and track things. Sometimes, you'll do that through your property management software a bit. I find one system most property management businesses are lacking or missing is a planning system. You're hearing people move towards traction in some of this which I think has some fundamental flaws to be blunt, but it's a great system. It’s better than no system and there's a lot of systems out there for planning, but there needs to be a planning system in the business. Another system that's necessary is a sales CRM. This is different than your existing customer database. This is for prospects. There needs to be a sales CRM in place. A lot of property managers use LeadSimple, for example. If there were one other system you can throw in there probably be a phone system. We need some way to manage this big influx of calls or outbound calls with team members being able to be reached. These are some of the systems that I've paid attention to, that businesses need. Most businesses will have maybe two or three. Marc: Yup, and we preach what we practice as well as preach to make on the systems for individual team members to make them position-specific. We have 20-some odd people our office and every role has a position-specific system manual, so our director of accounting has a director of accounting system manual. I'm the president of the organization. I have a president system manual. Why? Because I need to be replaceable. That's one of the benefits of it. That idea that now we become less dependent upon individuals and no individual can hold us hostage to be like, “They’ve got everything in their head. What are we going to do they leave? We can't lose them.” It's a terrible place to be. We don’t have to worry about that. You're going to lose everybody at some point in time. You’ll either lose them for a good reason or a bad reason, but they need to be replaceable. Now if you have a document, if you have documented their process, then they become replaceable. I'm replaceable. If I get hit by the truck today, it’s alright. Hopefully, the company will take a little hit, hopefully they’ll need me a little bit, but we got a system manual, somebody can step in that role, and already says, “Hey, this is what Marc does.” Just do it and you'll be successful. Jason: I like it. All right, so are we on to five? Marc: Number five, the last one, successful companies recruit and develop talent. We just talked about systems and the concept that systems can make your people replaceable to some extent and they should. However, at the end of the day, the team with the best players usually wins. If you can go out there and if you can figure out how to recruit the best talent and then retain them, that is going to do more for your company than almost anything else out there. If I'm going to brag about something about our company, I’ll brag about that. We get the best people around. We've gotten good at that. It makes it so much easier to do business. I don't work harder than my competitors, I'm not smarter than my competitors, I'm not technologically savvy more than my competitors, but what we do better than a lot of our competitors is we get really good people  Now that’s hard, and it’s hard to get really good people and that's why you got to recruit. It doesn't mean you put an ad on Craig's list and read a bunch of resumes of people that can't get jobs. I mean you go out and you find people that are really good at what they do and you got to get them, you have to recruit them. That's hard because successful people aren’t looking for jobs. They are already successful. If you want to be successful, you got to go out there. I’ll tell a story and I'll give that the short version. We had to hire a leasing person not too long ago. Wwe were hiring, meaning we were just reviewing resumes and I thought this is ridiculous. We can't find anybody good. I better do what I tell myself what I should be doing. I got my car one day and I drove around to a lot of the multi-family class A properties in Denver, and I walked in as a prospect. “Hey, I’m Marc, I’m here. I just want to see what you have available. I’m looking for a buddy of mine to rent a property.” And I was usually met with the, “Okay, well here's a piece of paper. Tell your buddy to give us a call.” I say, “Okay” and left. About the fourth place I came to, I came in and met a gal there behind the front and I said, “Hi, I’m Marc. I’m just looking for a place for a buddy of mine.” She said, “Well, me about your buddy. He’s looking for one bedroom. He’s tall dark and handsome, got a cat, probably crazy,” and she's like, “You know what? I know the perfect unit for your buddy. Do you have a couple minutes? I'd love to just have you tour this property.” “Yeah, sure. Okay.” She tours me through and she's pointing out the feature benefits to offer. She was sharp. Her name is Lindsay. I said, “Lindsay, you are really good at your job. She goes, “I love leasing. I just love it. I love helping people. I love real estate. I love what I do.” I said, “That's great. Coincidently, I happen to run a property management company and we're actually looking to hire a director of leasing for residential real estate. Have you thought about doing residential?” because she’s a multifamily. She was like, “Oh no. I could never leave. I'm not a job hopper. I'm really stable. Stability is a big deal for me once I get somewhere I like to stay.” Now I'm drooling. I got to have her. I said, “Well is there anything you don't like about your job Lindsay? Well we work weekends.” I said, “Oh. That’s too bad. We don’t work weekends.” I said, “Tell you what. Why don't you come into my office sometime? Here’s my card. I'd love to just sit down and have a conversation with you. Who knows? Maybe something comes out of it, maybe something don’t, but I’d love to just connect and see if there's something there for the future.” Well long story short, we got her. We got Lindsay. And we had to go after her, we had to get her because she didn't want to leave. She's been a rock star. She's been amazing. The things that she's helped our company to do, but we would not have found her if we were just hiring. We had to go recruit her, we had to go get her. That's what you have to do in every position in your company. You have to go find stuff. I'm not saying go steal people away from your competitors, but you have to find those people out there that are successful and get them. Once you get them, you have to retain them. You have to train them well, you got to pay them well, which is one of the reasons you need to have good profit because good people aren’t cheap, but that's what's going to lead to a long-term success, and unless you take a step back out of the day-to-day stuff at the end of the day. Jason: Yeah. I think it's important to point out what you're saying is not that people are easily replaceable, that you can pop somebody else in. You're not saying that at all, and I think every business owner knows that if you have a seasoned team member that you've invested in, that you've trained, that you've developed, there's nothing as good as that, like having somebody that's been with you for years. I have team members that has been on my team for maybe six years and he's a rock star. I have a competitive advantage over most companies in that our teams are virtual, so I can source the best talent from anywhere pretty much in the world. But yeah, this can be challenging for property managers that are looking for somebody locally, they're looking for somebody nearby, they’re looking for a particular set of skills may be. But ultimately, if you find somebody good, you want to make sure you retain them and that you keep them happy. You can compare it to a wine, you can compare it to anything, but over time they just get better. If they’re good they get better, if they're not good, they get worse. Marc: That's the other side of the coin. That's where just like we talked about earlier with owners. This is what we started this whole conversation with you get a bad owner, what do you do? You need to let them go. Well if you made a hiring mistake, you need to fix that and correct that as well and let that person go, because we're going to make hirings. We are very good at this, but we make a lot of hiring mistakes. We just do, it drives me crazy. But when we do that, we correct it quickly. We're going to move that person on very quickly when we make that mistake. Why? Because the longer they're sitting there, the longer the right person isn't there. You've got to make that correction when you made a hiring mistake. Jason: I think it's amazing when you bring in a new team member, it changes the entire team. It either changes the entire team for the better or for the worse, especially if that team member that you just brought on is taking off of your plate everything. It changes your role as CEO. It changes your role as an entrepreneur, and it affects everything from you. It's pretty significant and it's important to make sure that they’re the right fit. We we're all going to make hiring mistakes. You have to kiss a few frogs and you have to suck a little bit at hiring in order to find the good people. Marc: It's an art, and a skill set to hire someone in no way translates over to property management. It's not like, “I'm a good property manager. I’ll obviously be good at hiring.” No, there's no correlation there. It's completely different. The other unfortunate thing is, the smaller your company is, the more important it is to make that first good hire. Now we've got 20 people. If we make a bad hire, we got one in 20 then who's bad. They can fly under the radar a little bit, they're not going to stick to the company. If we've got two people and then we make a bad hire for number three, so we never got 33% of our workforce that's a low performer. The smaller you are, the more important it is that you take the time to get the right person in. A lot of it is just time. You've got to slow down the hiring process. These ideas of we had a phone conversation and we interviewed him, it's not enough? Are you kidding me? No, you want to do multiple interviews. Anybody can come across as a positive person on that first interview. You want to have multiple interviews with multiple people. You have to dig, dig, dig on that before you make that job offer. Jason: I think where I've made a lot of mistakes personally in the hiring process is I love to delegate and its delegating too quickly. Some people will micromanage, they’ll control too much, and I think some people will do the opposite. They'll bring somebody on and they won't give them all the training, all the tools, all the support they need to really be the rock star they could have been. I've made both of those mistakes to be transparent. I think onboarding is a really important process to make sure you’re meeting with your new hires on a regular basis daily initially, then backing it up to weekly and so on, so that every day like where are you stuck? What do you need? What are you confused about? Often, they're not going to just volunteer all that information to you. But when you're meeting with them daily, they're going to feel supported, they're going to feel like they're invested in the team. I think onboarding is a really big deal. That's where I made mistakes. Marc: We still do one-on-one meetings every single week with every one of our team members. It doesn't matter how long they've been. I'm a huge believer in that, I guess if you wanted number six, there is number six, right? Have one-on-ones every single week, sitting down with them, even if it’s for 5 or 10 minutes, touch base, see what issues are going. Those have been critical for our people in their success. Jason: We have a bonus, number six. Marc: You got a bonus, number six, because you’re so good. What did I leave out? I’m curious. You talk to a lot of PM companies. What do you think are characteristics of success may be that we didn’t hit on? Jason: I wasn’t even thinking this, I was so into yours. I think all these things are really fantastic. I think if I were to add a seventh here that I think is absolutely critical, so imagine you have an orchard, you’re at the top, and this is like a reservoir of hopefully money and or water or whatever you want to call it. There's outflow, you're paying your team, you're spending money, things like this, and investing your team. I think where most companies are flawed is there's no inflow at the top of the orchard. There's nothing above the entrepreneur feeding into them. I think this is why it's critical. I probably spent at least six figures annually just on coaches and mentors. I have three coaches right now affecting different areas of my business. I think it's that inflow that I'm able to get that allows me to consistently have value to offer to the marketplace and to benefit my clients. It comes out in ways that I don't even expect, like a client will ask me a question or be stuck on something mindset-wise or be challenged with something, and I'm like, “I had that issue and I worked that through with my coach,” or, “I have done that in that training that I had done,” or whatever it might be. I think as entrepreneurs, we need to invest in ourselves if we're expecting other people to invest in us. When you go to prospects or clients and you say, “Hey, invest in me, spend money with my company,” and you aren't willing to invest in yourself or in your company in a similar fashion, I think there's a little lack of integrity. Energetically, something's off. If there were a seventh, I would say that's a big one is make sure that you're investing consistently in your own development, not just your team so that you have something to give. I think that's the inflow. You don't want to be a dead sea, there needs to be in flow and there needs to be outflow and that's where there's life. That's where it’s a healthy business. Marc: For the person that would say, “Hey, that sounds great, but I'm working 70 hours a week. I don't have time to invest in me. I'm just give, give, give.” What would you say to them? Jason: I would say they’re ineffective, they’re inefficient because if we're doing, doing, doing we moved out of the mode of being affected. That means most of our time is tactical instead of strategic. Any business that lacks, the business owner lacks strategic time, the business isn’t growing. There's a direct relationship between the amount of strategic time, planning, looking towards the future, coming up with ideas, or getting trained or learning new things, versus their growth. If all their time is tactical, they're dealing with maintenance, fires, leases, managing their team, emails, phone calls, if all their time is tactical, their business can’t grow. It will stay basically where it is. I think what I do with clients is I start them with a time study and we create time. Everybody is spending time doing stuff that's unnecessary, or low dollar an hour work, or silly, and it's pretty simple to start getting clarity on that first and then that helps them see what they need next. My entire foundation, my company really has been built on time studies. That's where I think fundamentally there's a huge difference between how I would coach operationally a business to run versus something like traction or a rocket fuel or these other systems where they’re saying, “Here's the magic org chart and here's the roles that you have to have.” Ultimately, a business should be built around the entrepreneur and what they actually need. The only way to really see that is to know where your time is going. Marc: Good stuff. Jason: That's my two cents. Marc: I like it. Jason: All right, so that's number eight maybe. I don't know. Marc: It’s number eight. Jason: We’d better stop before we add anymore. Marc: We’d better. I know. You’re making me think of too many things. Jason: Marc, it was really awesome hanging out here with you. This is really fun. You're welcome back anytime. Before we go, how can people get in touch with you if they're curious about some stuff that you offer for property managers or they want to learn more about your business or whatever? Marc: The best way to reach me is through our website which is propertymanagementsystem.org and we got a handful things on there, a lot of video resource things. We've got our system manuals, we talked a little bit about that, our actual system manuals, we offer those. You can download samples of those and we got packages on those. We do ancillary business training, some coaching stuff from that aspect. One thing I'm pretty excited about, we're just putting in place, we actually just put in place and I'm happy to share with any of your folks if they're interested, they can drop me an email. We put a business health checkup form where you answer some questions and it spits out a number to let you do that business health checkup. If anybody is interested in that, drop me an email, go on the website, reach out to me from there, will be happy to send it to them. Jason: Cool. All right, Marc, thanks so much for coming on the DoorGrow Show and excited to see what you do in the future. Marc: Jason, thank you, it was fun. Jason: All right ,so if you are property management entrepreneur and you are struggling, you are feeling challenged in growth, be sure to connect with us over Door Grow. I would be honored to help you out. As I said during this call, I'm a firm believer in getting coached, getting coaches, and even if it's not me, somebody like Marc, there's lots of other [...] there that can coach you. Get somebody that can give you some value, help you grow your business, help you achieve your goals, and figure things out. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  

Do you want to build wealth through real estate investing and property management? Then, put in the work, trust the process, be open-minded, and get results that change your life. Today, I am talking to Robin Reed, CEO of Concept 360 Property Management and a licensed California real estate broker. She helps clients reposition assets to maximize their value by decreasing expenses and increasing income.  You’ll Learn... [04:29] Challenging Coworkers: Let them go, and try not to grow the company.  [05:07] Learn to appreciate employees who handle day-to-day tasks and tenants.  [05:45] Feast or Famine: Flip from brokerage income to property management.  [07:27] Completely Commit to Changes: Follow DoorGrow, and do whatever it takes.  [12:00] Then vs. Now: No Jerks Allowed policy to make everyone happy.  [17:05] Desperation and Disrespect: You get it, or you don’t.  [17:25] Value of Property Management: If working for peanuts...get what you pay for. [18:20] Walk Away: Not everything, everyone is a perfect market/product fit.  [22:00] Feeding Funnel: What do you do? What’s property management?  [25:50] Retention: What works? Sells? Results and relationships with real estate agents.  [26:05] Growing from 65 to 200 doors; adding 2-5 doors/properties each month.  [30:15] Second Sandtrap: New challenges ahead for processes, teams, trust, and more.  Tweetables I like working on the business, and not in the business. Feast or Famine: Rollercoaster of brokerage income. Be willing to change, take action, and make a difference. What sells, what people want to buy are results. Resources Concept 360 Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) LeadSimple GatherKudos DoorGrow Case Studies and Website Secrets 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 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's guest is Robin Reed of Concept 360 Property Management. Robin, welcome to the show. Robin: Thank you, Jason. Jason: It's really good to see you. Robin: You too. Jason: Robin has been a client. For long have you been a client? Robin: Coming up to two years. I think we’re right around two years. Jason: Maybe I should read a little bit of your bio because you’re really cool. It says, Robin Reed is a licensed California real estate broker and CEO of Concept 360 Property Management with a background in commercial real estate, finance, investment, and development. She's experienced in all real estate asset classes having secured over million in both debt and equity for her clients. She opened Concept 360 Property Management to share her true passion and combined experience as a broker and investor with her clients by helping them reposition their assets. They maximize their value by decreasing expenses and increasing income. A passionate real estate investor herself. She enjoys helping her clients build wealth through real estate investing. Robin is actively involved in several real estate trade organizations including NARPM, the National Association of Residential Property Managers, and is always aware of the pulls of the current real estate market. An Orange County native, she holds a BA degree in English and Comparative Literature from Chapman University. Robin, I actually saw you in person in Long Beach when I spoke at the NARPM chapter. It was awesome because you and your husband came up to me and gave me a big hug. I remember after that event you said some kind words to me. After that event, I was kind of high of the event, but afterwards in the parking lot, I started crying. Because as a coach and as a mentor to a lot of property management companies, I don't get to see clients in person very often because a lot are digital or remote. But occasionally, at a conference or something and somebody comes up to me and they say something in gratitude, that means a lot to me. Robin: Right. Jason: That was one of the moments I cherish. It was really nice being able to help you guys out. Why don't we start back at the beginning? Maybe a couple of years ago when you came to myself and to DoorGrow. What challenges were you dealing with then? What has been happening? Robin: We had let an employee go. The company was something that at the beginning when it first started in 2004, it was pretty big and had a lot of multi-family and things like that. Then the recession hit, a lot of people sold their buildings, some lost them, things like that. We weren't really focused on the property management company. It was just sort of this thing over in the other office that was self-sustaining and it was really something we weren't paying attention to and we were really focused on brokerage. We did a lot of brokerages, sold a lot of REOs for banks and we were really involved in that. I guess it was three years ago, that was right, it was about three years ago and we let an employee go and we looked and realized we were down from probably at the hay day close to 1800 doors, we are down to 65 doors. I said, "I don't even think we should keep this open. What's the point? It's a liability. I'm not into it. Let's just close it." So, we didn't, we kept it as a self-sustaining thing, but we didn't try to grow it. Then my remaining employee went to a maternity leave and I was doing her job for a couple of months which I learned that I hated doing her job. I'm glad I have employees. I like working on the business and not in the business. Luckily, we were at the point where we were able to have employees and I don't really have to deal with day to day of tenants and all that. I did her job for a couple of months and during that period I thought to myself, "This is a good business. This is a good business to be in. This is viable." I was so used to the rollercoaster of brokerage income, it's feast or famine. Jason: Yeah. Robin: And the property management company had always been in the background if between commissions or something like that. I thought, "why don't I flip it? Why don't I flip the script and focus on the property management company and then put the brokerage on the side?" My husband saw you speak somewhere on the internet, came across you and your videos and said, "You got to check this out." Historically, there's been a lot of "check this out", "we got to try this system" so I'm skeptic with systems and coaches, I always have been. I saw one video of yours and I said, "Yes, I'm in." Jason: That’s it. You have been super skeptic and one video was all you needed. Robin: One video and I said, "I'm in. Let's check him out." Jason: What did I do in that video? Robin: I don't know. I wish I knew which one it was. Jason: It's good. I got to do more of that video. Robin: That one, yeah. Jason: Yeah. Robin: We joined up with you and we were willing because we wanted the property management to grow. It’s like, I have this company already and we already have clients, it's something that I can grow from. I was committed and I said, "Whatever needs to happen." We went through all of the training. If I needed to change the name, we ended up changing the logo for you guys. I would have changed the name. I would have done anything. I said, "I'm completely committed to this system. I'm willing to do whatever it takes. Let's go." We did the website. I think before we even did the website or maybe in conjunction, I don't know how it works, but we did GatherKudos and that was huge. Jason: Yeah, [...] on the reviews. Robin: Yes, that was huge. That's been a huge help for us still. We have people that say, "Oh my god. I just saw your reviews." We started asking tenants and owners to review us. Sometimes you have to ask several times for people to review you. Dana, who works for me in the office, she's always trying. She's very good at getting people to review us. She's like a dog on a bone that she said, "You said you we're going to review us. Review us. Review us." So that's good. Jason: Yeah, good. You started going through a process. Robin: Yeah. Jason: The one thing I really loved about you guys as clients is I made mistakes in the past in attracting clients that are really opinionated because I was being very opinionated to the marketplace. Robin: Okay. Jason: But somehow you guys came through and were amazing clients. You guys were the type of clients that I really wanted because you were open to doing things differently. You were open to trying stuff. That's the type of person that I am. I'm very much like an open-minded person and so I'm getting better at putting out more of an open-minded message to attract those types of clients because we attract really well what we put out there. You guys came to me and you were willing to put in the work and you guys trusted the process. Those are the clients that get the biggest results and that's always really exciting to see a client get results, doing what you say that you asked them to do, I feel like when my clients come on, they are putting a lot of faith in us. Robin: Right. Jason: Whether you are a business owner or coaching client of mine and if they put that faith in you, that's a secret thing, I think, in business. I think that's why when your husband came to me—I don't even remember what he said off the top of my head—but he said something like, "You changed my life," or something like that. Robin: I think it was something like that because it's true. Jason: Yeah. I think as entrepreneurs—or at least the type of entrepreneurs I really like to work with—that's really the core of who we are. We want to make a difference. Some entrepreneurs, maybe you can call them entrepreneurs, they have business in which all they want to make money. Robin: Right. Jason: They are not really concerned about solving the problem, but real business exists to solve the problem. Property managers solve the real problem. Robin: Right. Jason: I think a lot of them are very much enjoy people who are contribution-focused. That really was great to watch you guys go through and trust that. You guys asked a lot of questions. Robin: Yeah. Jason: A lot of questions, good questions, then you guys took action. You guys did stuff. You did the things that I told you to do. Robin: Yeah. Jason: You did a lot of different things. You’ve gone from saying, "It's a liability. Let's just close it down," to saying, "Hey, maybe there's something here." To getting coaching, to going through a process, cleaning up your reputation, working on your website, working on your pricing model, working on your sales process, working on your prospecting methods. You've really gone through all of that and then we started getting on the operational things, figuring out your team a little bit, figuring how to get you in alignment with your business that wasn't so uncomfortable. Robin: Right. Jason: Because it was, it was uncomfortable for you at some times. Robin: Yes. It was. Jason: I think we've all been there. I remember some calls of you where you were like, "How do I get this one team member to do things the way that I want them to do?" Robin: Right. Jason: "I want things to be this way." Your perspective shifted really quickly after that. Robin: Oh, I did. Yeah. I've learned a lot. Jason: How do you feel like your business is now? How does it feel different now having gone through all that? Robin: We have no jerk's policy. You were talking about the kind of clients that you want to attract and it's the same. Life's too short. We've had some clients that are just not great and we let them go. That takes some faith in the system because it'd be easy for me to say, "I have a staff. They can deal with this person. I don't have to deal with him. I'm just going to keep them because of the income." But that's not really the culture that I want. I don't want unhappy employees to hate me because I keep bad clients on. We've attracted so many just really cool, nice people who get it. There's people that just don't. They don't get it. They don't see the value of property management. They maybe have self-managing for a long time and they don't see the value, but there are other people that do, and those are the people we want to work with. We've really streamlined our criteria about the kind of clientele we want, the kind of properties that we want to manage. We manage several HOAs. We don't manage them anymore. They had their separate challenges that weren't really working for our business model and so we let all of them go. That's income, but it's been replaced. It’s come back around. You were talking about relationships. You said to us, "Your property management company will be a place where you get referrals for your brokerage." I've got one in escrow right now that we’ve managed for a couple of years. Another one that we managed that were evicting a tenant and putting on the market. It is true that the property management company has been an interesting gateway to the brokerage business which has sort of become my side hustle, if you will, not my main thing. Jason: Yeah. It's a good side hustle. Robin: Yeah. Jason: One of the things that I point out to clients, and for those listening, I think it's very easy for us as business owners to fall into having the business that we can create or that we can have. Having the types of businesses that we can serve instead of having the business that we really want and the clients that we really want. Robin: Right. Jason: It's such a slight distinction and such an easy trap to fall into. It's similar to what I said outside of this is that, ultimately, I think what happens to clients is that we help them understand not just who they want to really work with, but who they don't want to work with. Then when they get that clarity and we then engineer the sales process and the reputation process, your pricing, and everything around who you really want then the message creates and attracts the right type of clients or tells the wrong type of clients, and so you are now attracting the right type of clients. I think a lot of property managers are hearing you and they just don't believe it. They’re hearing you say, "Our clients are great. We love them. They are easy. "And they’re like, "She's smoking something." They don’t get it because they’re feeling, "I know. I talk to people every day." And they’re like, "I hate this business sometimes. It's crazy. I'm struggling. We are dealing with people who are like we have to replace one door every time we get a door on." Really, it’s that they’re putting out the wrong type of energy, message, or perception or they’re focusing on the wrong type of audience and they don't see that it's possible. This sounds like a pipe dream to them. How would you explain that to somebody that's sitting where you were two or three years ago? Robin: It does sound like a pipe dream, doesn't it? It does sound a little bit scary to start trusting the process and that you will get new doors on if you let go of some. I'm a firm believer of that kind of energy anyway. You let go of some things and they are going to be replaced by something better anyway. I'm a firm believer in that kind of energy, but you might not be able to let go. Let's say you start doing the process and you start to GatherKudos and you start getting more clients. Then you'll be able to slowly maybe let go of the worst ones to replace it with better ones. You've got to trust the process. That's the thing and it's an empty card. I think a lot of times in this business, I've seen it in brokerage, and I'm sure it happens in every business, people get desperate and they accept treatment from clients they don't really want to accept, but they get desperate. We've had people call us and other people will do it for less. [...]. I mean, go ahead. I saw somebody on one of the DoorGrow threads say, "If you want peanuts, you're going to get monkeys or something." It was essentially like. Jason: If you’re working for peanuts, yeah. Robin: Right because that's what you pay for. Jason: [...] monkey if you’re working for peanuts. Robin: Right. There's a lot of people that would do it for less, go ahead. If that's your main thing, is somebody who would, "What the price is?” I mean, I was telling my husband, I said, "I've never gone in the hair salon and said, okay, how much?" It's more of what can you do and then how much. Don't you want to know what the product is? I have these people call me the other day and they had a litany of questions. I was being peppered with questions. I finally said, "It sounds like you guys have a lot of questions, maybe we can set up a meeting." They were just hammering me on pricing and I said, "Maybe we’re not a fit." It's okay to walk away, you are not going to fit with everyone. Jason: Probably the people that ask endless litany of questions, they're usually really looking for an excuse not to work with you... Robin: Right. Jason: ...especially if they know that your pricing is higher. They're looking, "There's got to be a reason I want to work with these guys, give me an excuse. Oh, you guys don't do that one little thing? Hahaha. I have my excuse. Now, I can avoid this leap that I was going to take working with a coach, working with this business, or whatever. I can avoid that and I can stay in my mediocrity. I can stay in my stuff. I can stay in my dysfunction." I mean, there might be people that call you up asking about your business and they really just want to self-manage. They're just looking for an excuse why is it too expensive or too bad of an idea, or why can't I not trust them so that I can hold onto this moldy peanuts and [...] a monkey and keep my hand in the monkey trap. They want to hold on to it. They don't want to let go and they are looking at you to give them a reason. I love when people play tug of war game with me. Robin: Right. Jason: My favorite thing in the tug of war game is to let go of the rope. Robin: Right, exactly. Jason: And watch them fall on their ass and then they are sitting there holding on going, "Why won’t you play with me? Why won’t you fight me on this?" "I don’t need to, I don’t need to play that game." Let’s get into the changes that you’ve made. Your business from where it is now in almost every way is different. Robin: Right. Jason: What changes did we go through? Did you mess with your branding? Robin: The logo. Jason: Okay. We did change something to do with branding. Then we go into the reputation stuff you mentioned. And you guys also have process now reaching out to people, and stuff like that. Or it’s gotten [...] for you? Robin: We used LeadSimple. I tried so many different things just to make our systems better as you bring on more doors, you have a quality problem of how do you manage everything. The system of bringing them on board and all of that. I’ve actually just been working, finessing our onboarding process. Our BDM wouldn’t get all of the necessary information. The BDM just wants the signature on the contract. Jason: Right. "Let’s get the deal, let’s close it." Robin: I realized, "You go get that signature, I’ll get the rest of the stuff." I’ll send them a welcome email with all the things that we need, and that has really worked out well for us. Jason: You’ve also revamped your pricing, right? You went through significant change there. You revamped your sales process, which you’re talking about right now. Robin: Right. Jason: Making significant changes there in optimizing that. How about the methods for feeding this funnel and prospecting methods? Robin: I’ll talk about a couple of things that have worked for us, and then something that haven’t worked for us because I’ve tried everything. Something that’s very, very simple is that when you have a business, whatever it is, you need people to know what you do. Especially in property management, my local area, there are people that sell products that can sell to a nationwide audience, that’s not what I do. I am managing properties in my local area. I think focusing on that type of local people that are local professionals that know what I do, and that can refer business to me. We do a lot of speaking engagements. We have Dan [...] presentation and then we have one that we’re doing right now that we’ve done a couple of times that is some before and afters because we do a lot with clients that have maybe inherited a property or bought something at a discount that needs to completely be rehabbed. We’ve worked through a lot of those. We’ve some before and afters and we talk about the clients getting more money in their pocket every month now because of turning the units. We got a client that inherited a property that his mother had owned and she had kept the rents the same for years. One bedroom was getting a month. It’s now getting . Jason: Wow. Robin: How can you argue with that? Jason: That’s what sells. What really sells, what people want to buy are results. Robin: Exactly. That’s why that presentation has been so successful, it’s black and white, it’s the numbers, it’s the before and after pictures, it’s the before and after rent rolls. It shows clients, when we manage their properties, and we have a lot of guys that work for us that can do the turns. We do a lot of it. We can discuss a lot of business. We have a lot of vendors that give us great deals. It’s been really beneficial for our clients. Doing this speaking engagement gets us out there and has people see what we do. That’s been very beneficial. I go to events, I’m really the only property management company there. There’s no other property management company that show up to these events that I go to. In general networking event, I don’t really seem to get much out of those. In our area, we have the realtor referral program on our website, we don’t get anything. I don’t know if it’s because the realtors in our area, they’re doing one-offs, kind of they’ve got one deal and that’s it, you never hear from them again or in LA County you make so make so much money on one deal that our little referral, they don’t care, they’re not interested. Jason: Not as enticing. Ultimately, having a relationship with real estate agents is what works... Robin: Right. Jason: ...and nurturing relationship long term. That’s really what works there. You mentioned before and after and how effective that is. Let’s paint a picture of your before and after for your business that helps me out. Let’s look at this. Before, when you came to me, you were 50, 60 units? Robin: I want to say it was 65 doors, 64 doors, right there. Jason: Okay. And then where you guys at now? Robin: Right around 200. Jason: Oh my gosh. So, 200 doors. How many doors were you adding when you were at the 65? What was the sort of the challenge then? What was the typical growth rate? Robin: Nothing. The growth rate was a negative. We were losing. We weren’t doing anything. The company was just in the other room on its own and we weren’t doing anything to try to grow it. Jason: No growth. That’s 65 doors and now, if you guys were at about 200 doors under management, what sort of the growth rate still like? How many doors you add in typically in a month on average? Robin: Typically, a month, 2-5. Jason: Okay. Steadily. If that’s the case then you must be retaining doors a lot longer. Robin: We always have. Our retention rate is really a lot longer I think than the stats I’ve heard in the industry. We’ve done well with that. Jason: Which [...] targeting better owners, or owners that are not just accidentals that are going to fold after a year. Robin: Right. I find the single family is what we like to target and the small multi-family. We do manage some properties, that’s why 2-5 a month, sometimes that’s not necessarily doors that’s properties, some of those properties might have 4 units. Jason: Oh, okay. Robin: We’ve taken on some larger multi-family. We actually started in multi-family. Jason: [...] a year typically on average adding a month maybe is what, maybe about 10? Robin: It may be. Depending. Sometimes it’s just five single family. It just depends on the month. A lot of times though because we’re doing so much prospecting, we have so many in the pipe that somebody I’ve been talking to for four months comes on, that kind of thing. That works well. Jason: That [...] nurture process. Robin: I just found that people that have the 25-unit buildings and things like that, they want you to run your business the way they want you to run it. I had a guy come and talk to us. We do all of our statements, there’s an owner portal, we email them, we don’t do a paper statement, and he wanted a bound paper statement every month, so his wife could read it. I said, "Too bad, we don’t do that." Jason: Could you imagine if you had 20 of those to do a month? Robin: Exactly. Jason: 50 of those to do a month? Robin: They seem to want special treatment so you really have to set your boundaries and know what you’re willing to accept. There’s always negotiation. It’s business. There’s always a bending. You might think, "Well, this is so worth it. You know what, I will lower my price on this or that, or I will do something out of the ordinary." But for the most part, you really have to stick to your guns and know what you’re willing to accept. That works for us. Jason: Works for me too. I love hearing about you and your husband’s successes. It’s really great to see you. I appreciate you coming on the show and hanging out with me. It’s great to hear that you guys are 200 doors and having growth. You guys are headed into what I call the second [...]. That’s the 200-400 doors and this is where now you’re dealing with processes and staff, and building a team. You’ve got some new challenges ahead. Maybe we’ll be talking soon. Robin: Okay, good. Jason: [...] challenges. It’s really great to see your success. Shameless plug, for those that are considering maybe working with me, doing the seed program, maybe they’re skeptical, or they’ve heard mixed reviews. What would you say to them about me, what’s your perception of me and DoorGrow? Robin: I can’t say enough positive things about you and DoorGrow. It has truly changed our business. If you have a property management company, if you’re starting a property management company, especially if you’re starting one, there’s not so much clean up that you’ll have to do. Do it right from the beginning. Jason is very genuine. He’s a good human being. That’s important. We trust you, we really care about you and you care about us, and we’ve had a two-year relationship with you and we know you’re there for us. We’ve seen the results. Not only that, for me, it was hard for me to trust the results, and trust that they were going to keep coming, and they have. You don’t just get a new DoorGrow website and have a seat and have everything come to you. That’s not how it works, but it’s all of these different pieces that starts to funnel business your way. Jason: I tell potential clients or even clients, it’s the last 10% of dialling in things that give you 90% of the results. Robin: That makes sense. Jason: It’s that last 10%. For example, they’ll do the website, but they don’t get faces on there, they don’t get the social proof. They’re missing just a couple little pieces. I have the whole website, that’s 90%. But they’re missing the little pieces that create that trust or ticket to the next level. How I built my business, and how I built the entire program is built around the idea of trusts. Trust is what sells and the fact that you came on board and trusted me, allowed me to help you create a business that creates trust. It sounds like you’re putting out a lot of trust for the industry and property management industry in your market which I think is awesome as well. You’re changing the perception of property management. There’s a lack of trust. For those that are listening, pay attention to this, people that are not signing up with you that you feel like should be, it’s not because they distrust you, it’s because you haven’t created enough trust for them to pick you over your competition. You just haven’t created enough trust. It’s not that they’re walking around just distrusting everybody. Maybe they are, maybe the property management industry has earned a bad reputation in some ways. But I think more than that, it’s that you haven’t created enough trust. It’s about creating that trust. Anyway, I honor you for your growth. You did all of these. You did it. I just pointed, and you and your husband deserves all the props for making this happen. Robin: Thank you. Jason: Really, you guys have done some phenomenal things. Like you said earlier, “I tried everything.” You have the tenacity. And I gave you ideas, but you tried things, you tried everything out. You did, you trusted the process but you experimented and that’s really what entrepreneurs do. That’s how business works. Robin: Yeah. We’re still tweaking. You mentioned the website. Jason: Always. Robin: I just took the website quiz again last week. I got a B. There’s a couple of things we need to tweak. Jason: I have a new training called Website Secrets that you got to watch. Robin: Right. Jason: And we’re getting to an A. Robin: Yeah, exactly! I know exactly what we need to do and it’s just getting with your team and making those tweaks. Jason: Make sure you watch the training because some of my questions in DoorGrow secrets or in the DoorGrow score quiz. Robin: I will. Jason: If anyone wants to grade their website, you can go to doorgrow.com/quiz and take a test to grade your website, how effective it is to creating trust and getting conversions, but some of the questions are backwards. You think you’re saying, “Yes, I’m going to get this, and I need to add this for my website.” It’s a trick, it’s like the reverse. I didn’t really explain which ones are right and which ones are wrong, I’m just asking do you have this and then it gives you a grade in the end. You’re on the inside. I’ve seen people go and implement a bunch of changes, thinking they could just go off the quiz and then it’s just [...] they can clear things up. Cool. Robin, really great to see you again. I’m excited to hear about your continuing success and what [...] big and brighter future with Concept 360 Property Management. Robin: Thank you. Thank you so much. Jason: Alright. I’ll let Robin go. Really great to connect with her. Always exciting to see and share in the winds with clients. Man, I would love to take all the credit, but my best clients, all the ones that are in my case studies that you guys can see back onto the doorgrow.com/case-studies, these are clients that they trusted the process, but they did the work. They did the work. This is a secret, there’s no company that you can just go hand them money and they’re going to give you contracts. We don’t do that. Marketing agencies can’t do that. The best they can give you, most agencies with cold leads, we’re going to help you build system so that your business grows more organically, that it’s easier that we put gasoline on the fire that works in the sense you which is word of mouth and we optimize your business towards that. If you are struggling to grow, if you are maybe what Robin was in the beginning saying, "It’s a liability, let’s just close it. I’m burnt out, I’m stressed out. I’m not getting any younger." I’ve heard these phrases from clients. Get on the phone with DoorGrow or start with our case studies, go to doorgrow.com/case-studies and just start there. If you go there, there is a free training—it really is the beginning of our program, I give it out for free. There is a link you can click on to watch free training about DoorGrow Secrets. It’s going to share with you concepts like the cycle of suck, the 4Ds to revenue, cold leads versus warm leads, the myth of SEO, so that you can be a more savvy educated person with marketing and growing your business. If you decide that we can help you out, I would love to do that. If you feel like you are a right fit, you are open-minded, you’re the right type of client, I would love and be honored to be able to work with you and coach you and help you grow your company. Again, thanks Robin for coming on the show. 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. This document has been edited with the instant web content composer. The online instant HTML converter make a great resource that will help you a lot in your work. Save this link or add it to your bookmarks.  

Toilets, tenants, and termites: Property management can be a tough business. Have you ever felt like giving up, only to find joy again?  Today, I am talking to Annemarie Sunde of Legacy Property Management. She paints a realistic and transparent turned pretty picture of property management.  You’ll Learn... [03:00] Discovering Development Areas: Annemarie never wanted to be a realtor, but now has a real estate license.  [04:04] Dealing with the Scum of the Earth? Given an opportunity to get into property management, only to learn most property managers and tenants lack integrity.  [04:50] Origins of Legacy Property Management: Treating others with respect that leads to legacy with tenants, owners, and co-workers.  [06:10] DoorGrow’s Time Study: Doing things that cause you stress and headaches. [06:30] Strategic and Futuristic Strengths: Started having fun thinking 20 years ahead about being on a beach and the business naturally growing.  [06:55] Cycle of Suck: Vicious circle of not-great properties, tenants, and owners. [08:40] Business Model and Breaking 100 Doors: Fewer but healthier and fun properties that pay bigger yield.  [09:45] Seeking Clarity: Biggest problem growing and scaling business is blaming everyone and everything else.  [10:47] Tactical vs. Strategic: Entrepreneurs are visionaries; why do the tactical crap?  [14:26] Accidental Perfect Landlords: Owners who take pride in their property. [15:16] Prospecting Channels/Methods: Lead gen from realtor referrals via classes, podcast, and online reputation.  [16:30] Some clients don’t listen, follow the protocols, or get results. Do what you’re told!  [17:48] Door Envy: It’s not about doors, but whether you love your business and life.  [19:25] How do you turn your phone off at night? Do Not Disturb. [20:35] Biggest Benefits of Seed Program: How to design a user-friendly Website, find clarity, ask for reviews, and create an online reputation.  [22:35] If you were to sell your business, what makes you valuable?  [25:07] Magical Mindshift: If you want people to invest in and spend money on you, be willing to do that for yourself.  [28:34] Memoirs of a Property Manager: What we go through managing owners. Tweetables Transparency of Property Management Industry: Toilets, tenants, and termites.  Cycle of Suck: Dealing with scummy owners and tenants sucking you dry.  Entrepreneurs assume everyone else is like them. Nobody’s like us. We’re weird. Resources Legacy Property Management Tom Rath's StrengthsFinder  DiSC DoorGrow Seed Program Yelp AppFolio National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) OpenPotion 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. Today, I’m hanging out with the fantastic Annemarie Sunde of Legacy Property Management. Annemarie, welcome to the show. Annemarie: Thanks. Jason: It’s been a while since we’ve chatted. Annemarie: I’m having Jason withdrawals. Jason: Yeah, you’ve mentioned that on the pre-show and I’m like, “You just show up. Show it to our weekly cult review, internally for our clients.” The topic for this episode is how I almost quit and then found joy in property management. Property management can be a tough business. It can be a tough industry. “Toilets, tenants, and termites,” as some of you say. As business owners, we’re often in this promotion-sales mode. We’re just telling everyone how great our business is all the time. We start to almost believe it superficially, but then on the inside, sometimes it’s just not really how it is and there’s this disconnect. I would love to just give people just a taste of some reality and some transparency because business is not always great. Sometimes it’s just really not great. I remember, way back, waking up when I was running my company as OpenPotion and realizing I hated my business. I didn’t like the clients that I was working with at the time. My team were out of alignment with my values. Everything was just off and I just want to stream Netflix today. That’s it. Let’s go back to one of those early conversations you and I had. Give people a little bit of background, you and your business. You can give the pretty picture first. Tell everybody about you. Let’s qualify you. Annemarie: I’m actually a degreed engineer by trade, worked 15 years in Oil and Gas in Denver. When I got married for the second time, I married a realtor, and I consulted to his business, actually growing his business. After a year of doing that, I said I never want to be a realtor. I never want a real estate license in my life, and now I have a real estate license. But I don’t do any of the buy-sell transactional selling, whatsoever. I’m not interested in that, I don’t have the patience for it, and you should know, I lack incredible patience. That’s part of my development that I’ve learned coaching with you. Let’s fast forward a little. Just got into the opportunity to get into property management was offered to me, and I have always done flips, I’ve always had rentals my entire life with my father. I’m like, “Well now, I can be the boss of a tenant. This sounds fun. I can do this.” I did when we started our own business, I worked for a couple of property management companies. I felt they lacked integrity, a lot of what you talk about in DoorGrow. They’re just scummy, dealing with scummy owners, scummy tenants.  Jason: I talk about that? Annemarie. Yeah, the Cycle of Suck. Jason: Oh, the Cycle of Suck. Yes. Annemarie: We had our own rentals and I was like, “You know, there’s got to be owners out there that actually want to be treated like something.” We created Legacy Property Management really to lead legacy with our tenants, with our owners, and with the people that we work with, that work for us. That’s where it was born. My husband stumbled across DoorGrow, and I was one of the first Seed Hackers 1.0. Jason: Jeff, right? Annemarie: Yes. I got into the Seed Hacker Program and then I got into coaching, but when I got into coaching with you, I was cooked. I hated my business. I was looking for anybody that wanted to offer me a good sum of money to buy my business. I did not want to be in it anymore. So, that’s where I was. Jason: I remember this conversation. You were describing your business, you’re like “I want out,” and what did you want? Annemarie: I wanted to be with my kids and I wanted to go sit on a beach. Jason: You’re right. I want to spend time with my kids. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to deal with all these headaches and stress, and I’ve seen this. I’ve seen this a lot. And it doesn’t the business or the industry, it’s not even about the business or the industry. What did you realize it was about? I’ll ask you. Annemarie: I was doing things that completely stressed me out. It started with a lot of the exercises you had us do on the coaching call, but one of the big things was the time study. The very first time I did a time study. I am not a tactical person, whatsoever. I am highly strategic. I’m the 50,000 foot. I actually did a Tom Rath StrenghtsFinders and I have strategic and futuristic in my strengths. I’m 20 years ahead of everybody, thinking about how I’m going to get myself onto a beach. When I learned that, your comment to me was, “When you’re doing the tactical crap in your business, this is when you are grumpy. This is when you can’t handle it. This is when you’re stressed. This is when your kids are driving you crazy. This is when your phone’s going in the toilet. All of those things.” The minute I took that out of my job description and I was doing strategy, I started having so much fun, and the business was naturally growing because I was having fun. Jason:We’ve thrown out a couple of terms that are insider terms here, right? So some people who are hearing this for the first time are like, “What are they talking about? They’re speaking some language only they know.” Let’s explain what the Cycle of Suck is. What is your perception of what the Cycle of Suck is? Annemarie: It’s this vicious circle of not a great property, not a great owner yields crappy tenants, and it just keeps going round and round and round. You can’t get out of the circle. Jason: The bad reputation and then you attract more bad owners, more bad properties. That’s where the whole industry sits in general, as a whole and aggregate in the industry has a negative reputation, and most businesses are taking on any owner. That’s something that the whole industry needs to shift. Annemarie: I did that. When I first met you guys, that’s where I was. You’re hungry, you’re starting a business, you just take in anything you can take, and you’re realizing that the low-end people are sucking you dry, costing me more money because I’m using attorneys. It just wasn’t a fun thing. So, I elevated our business model. We do know multi-family, for example. That’s our choice. We have fewer properties that pay a bigger yield so I’m sitting at about 110 doors, and I love it. Jason: Amazing. You broke 100. I love it. Annemarie: I did. Finally! Jason: Did you throw a party? You should’ve throw a party. Annemarie: We are going to throw a party. I think my senior property manager and I are going somewhere. Jason: You deserve to throw a party. That’s awesome. They’re healthier properties than where you were. Annemarie. Yes. They’re fun properties and we love representing them. Jason: I remember that first conversation. You just want to spend time with your kids. You wanted out of the business, and I remember what I said to you. I said, “You’re just doing it wrong. We can bring this business into alignment around you,” but at that time you were serving the business. You were a slave to the business instead of the business fulfilling you and your needs, specifically. [...] an alignment with you. Every business is different. What would work for you and fulfill you is different for me. We had a hard time even getting into this software, but I love the nerdy stuff. I would do technical stuff and I’d put that as part of my role in the business. You will hire someone up. Everybody’s team looks different. If we build the right team around us, but the only way we can do that is if we’re clear on ourselves and that’s the biggest problem people have with growing and scaling companies or teams because they have no clarity on themselves. So, they’re externalizing everything and blaming the business, they’re blaming their team, they’re blaming their clients, and the problem is them. Once you get clear on you and we have clarity on what really fulfills you and energizes you and drains you. You mentioned tactical versus strategic, right? Entrepreneurs, generally, we are strategic people. We’re the visionaries. That’s generally who all of us are as entrepreneurs. Some of us enjoy some of the tactical stuff. There are tactical things that I do enjoy, and you can hold onto those if you want to. But, in general, all the tactical things that we hold onto are the things that are holding us back. They’re holding an entire business back. The tactical things that drain us are the things that are keeping the entire company from growing and it makes us the biggest bottleneck in the company. Annemarie: I figured everybody was like me. Why would they want to do the tactical crap? I actually have people that work for me and they can’t even see beyond their nose, and they’re fine doing the tactical day in, day out, day stuff. I can’t stand it. Jason: That’s a big mistake we make as entrepreneurs. We assume everyone else are like us. Nobody’s like us. We’re weird. Raise the chair. My team members, they love doing the things that they love doing. I don’t love doing the things that they love doing. Annemarie: Me neither. Jason: That’s great. There’s seven billion people or whatever in the planet. There’s always people that love doing the stuff that you don’t love doing and that’s such an interesting mindset shift—to realize somebody would love doing this stuff. [...] that gift by giving it up, Annmarie: You even taught me how to screen somebody if I’m going to hire them. They go through this whole process now that we have, including a DISC profile to see because I am High D and I am the bull in the China shop. If I’m always going to have to massage your feelings because I just let it fly, then you’re probably not the person to work for me. Jason: You mentioned a few things that you did to go through this transition. As you shifted your business away from doing all the things that you felt like were draining you, that put you in a position where you wanted out, like you wanted to get rid of the business, what did you realize pretty quickly as you started to make these changes? You’ve already thrown out the word “fun” a few times, I’ve noticed. Annemarie: If I have a week where I am doing tactical things, I put my mind into, “Okay, this is a week,” and I warn my family, “This is what I got on my plate. I could be nasty this week because I’m not having fun this week.” That happens a lot when I’m bringing on a new person and I’m training them on having to do the day-to-day again. What I found to be the most exciting for me is I love to strategize on how we’re going to get properties. The way we get properties is hugely through realtor referrals because we don’t sell or buy any properties, so we’re a safeplace for them, and through my class that I teach. I’m teaching probably 2–3 a quarter now. I just did two and I have four properties from those two classes. It’s people that I want to work with. It’s owners that take pride or we call them the accidental landlords that they bought in this market. We had so many people going in and out of the state right now, it’s crazy. They don’t want to lose the foothold in the Denver market. They’re petrified someone’s going to trash their house. That’s the perfect landlord for me. We talk a lot about that to realtors that have owners that they just sold a house to and now that’s where they go back to. What do I do with my house? Jason: That was a significant piece. If you go back in your transition is getting clarity on what you really wanted. Annemarie: And what I enjoyed doing. Jason: Declare on your avatar in getting clear on what type of client you really were wanting to work with. I remember we had several conversations about that. Also, we talked quite a bit about different channels for prospecting and you found different methods that really worked for you. You were doing everything from podcasts. Annemarie: I still do the podcasts. That’s on Thursday this week, and it’s with the investor. I get more leads out of that. The three places I get my leads are realtor referrals probably coming from my classes, my podcast, and my online reputation which is what people should not even be asking if they do the Seed Hacker Program because that blew my business right out of the water. I just got another house this week from a Yelp review. Jason: So, those three channels, you didn’t really have a system or a process, you weren’t even really focused on those three channels before you had gone through the program. Annemarie: I had no idea what to do. Jason: Those were just three that worked for you. Somebody else could do three different things that might work for them. Help people understand. Some people are like, “I don’t know about Jason,” or they may be on the fence about working with me and they’re like, “I don’t know because I hear mixed reviews,” because I have clients that they don’t do stuff. They don’t listen to me. They don’t follow the protocols. They don’t get the results. You just did what I told you to do. You just did it. Annemarie: And sometimes, I have the tendency to compare myself to somebody else. We just talked about, I broke 100 doors. I’m now entering my fourth year of business and I hit 100 doors. So, four years and I hit 100 doors. I have to say that if you don’t know the Denver market, for the last two years, houses have been selling and there’s no inventory. I probably bumped into 100 several times, but I’ve lost 12–20 out of my portfolio from sales that owners decided to sell. That’s attrition in the business, but I got to say that I was constantly comparing myself. I’d passed two years and I can’t get to 100. Then I stopped focusing on it and I started focusing on getting rid of my crappy owners because those were crappy properties, and bringing on good owners that I wanted to work with and properties I wanted to. I marketed in those areas. Jason: I remember. I remember this conversation. I remember you were having door envy. You were like, “I haven’t broken that 100-door barrier. I want to break 100 doors,” like it was this thing. Do you remember what I said to you? Annemarie: Calm down. Jason: Yeah. Don’t worry about it. It’s not about doors. It’s about, do you love your business? Are you enjoying yourself? Are you getting the life that you want to have? Are you getting to spend time with your kids? Do you enjoy your team members? Do you like the people that you work with. This is your life. Don’t get me wrong, I like when people go after a goal, but once you let go of it having to look a certain way and you focused on aligning the business with you, it just started to happen naturally for you. Annemarie: What made me let go was setting critical numbers, another secret word in the secret club. I set critical numbers, and yes, one of my critical numbers was number of doors, but one of my top critical numbers was revenue coming in. What I found was, for the last two years, I’m making my critical revenue number despite being under 100 doors. That’s what proved to me, “Who cares?” I can still go on vacation and literally shut it off. I don’t know a lot of property managers. I have to tell you, the funniest post was one in the Facebook group when someone posted, “How do you turn off your phone at night?” After I laughed for literally 10 minutes, I went in on probably a paragraph of crap on, “First of all,” and then ended with, “and you should call Jason,” because seriously, on my phone that was the most liberating thing. I shut my phone off at 8:15 every night and it’s silent, just Do Not Disturb until 7:15 the next morning. I don’t care what’s happening. There are professionals out there that can help them, not me. Jason: All right. Great. No, I love this. Let’s go to the Seed Program, going through that portion which the coaching stuff that I took you through, we folded into our new version of the seed program, like majority of that stuff. So, it’s all one program now. Going through all of it, what do you feel were the biggest benefits and the biggest takeaways for you? Annemarie: I had a website because I used that folio. That folio gives you this website. It’s just learning what things to draw people. I had no clue and quite frankly I really didn’t want to, and I love that there’s a whole team of your people that will make a website change in literally three seconds of my time. There’s that component of really designing a website that’s user-friendly, and I tweak it all the time based on what I see other people’s websites. Why keep recreating the wheel? That was a big thing. Understanding what you wanted to focus on because when you get into property management, if you’re going to focus on multi-family like we do know multi-family, and from our owners, they love that we do know multi-family. That’s a different management than single-family luxury homes. That’s our niche. That’s where we focus. The other thing, I had no clue. I just thought we had to be SEO be the first, blah, blah, blah. I had no clue what online reputation was. The first I remember two or three clients that came on because, “Wow, you have a great Yelp review. You have five stars on whatever,” and I’m like, “Wow. This stuff works!” So, I learned that this was important and to go and ask for the review. That is part of our workflow process. If from a tenant, contractor, realtor that’s referred us, or owner, we ask for referrals endlessly online and it has really helped us. Jason: With that, we taught you how to build a process around that and how to leverage the law of reciprocity psychologically and all that. Annemarie: I just learned really quickly at a recent NARPM chapter lunch, they had a really great speaker on, “If you were to sell your business, what makes you valuable?” Outside of number of doors, income or profit, the third thing is, “How involved are you in your business?” Because that means that it’s not translatable. If they’re going to buy it, they’re going to have to buy you to keep it going and some people don’t want to do that. I looked at my husband because he always think I got to be involved and I’m like, “I told you. I could be this much money if I would just go somewhere.” So, now he’s on board because he heard that. I can easily go on vacation with my business. It’s much harder as a realtor to go on vacation, if you’ve got a buyer you got to be carting around. That’s how I look at it. I want to be able to come in and out of my business as I need to. That’s the part that I love. Jason: Shameless plug. For those that are on the fence, there’s like, “Maybe I show up at DoorGrow, maybe not.” What would you tell them? Annemarie: Don’t even think about it. Seriously. I realized that I was in the guinea pig stages of Seed Hacker, and I thought, “Oh, my gosh. How am I going to spend this money as a young company?” It’s paid for itself long ago, so it’s totally worth it. Jason, you have an amazing staff that people will email you, you don’t even know who these people are and they got it. I love it. It’s great. Obviously, I was at the DoorGrowLive last year and we thought it was fantastic. In terms of the resources that you have, with your coach and parlaying those or after listening to him speak, I looked at my husband and I’m like, “Guess what? I don’t have to pay that much because I paid Jason and he gives that to me!” I mean I learned so much. Jason: I invest a lot in the coaches. I just signed up with another coach. I’ve got three coaches right now. If I mentioned how much money I spend on coaching annually, they would lose it because it’s probably more than most property managers’ annual salary. It’s pretty ridiculous, but that’s how I have value to offer to others and that’s the one thing I would tell everybody listening. If you want people to invest in you, you want people to spend money with you, you have to be willing to do that to yourself. You have to be willing to invest in yourself and there’s a magical mindset shift that happened for me the second I decided to pay to invest in myself. Not just pay for a team member, not just pay for some marketing [...], when I paid to invest in myself and in my business, it changed my perception of my value and it changed how I sold. It changed my own confidence level in being able to pull in business. There’s an energetic shift that happens that when you invest in yourself, other people will invest in you, too. Annemarie: I’m sitting here thinking about, I definitely have an entrepreneurial spirit, this isn’t the first business I’ve run. One could come in and say, “Okay, I did a few rentals here and there.” Now, when I hear people say, “I’m going to get into property management,” I just think, “Oh, my gosh. The guy just did a nine minute video on the four new Colorado laws impacting landlords and property management,” and I sent it to my owners. I spent two months on Capitol Hill trying to fight these bills and it’s just crazy. People are going to get themselves in so much trouble. What I found is when I started coaching and going with DoorGrow is one could approach it, 10–20 properties, you could probably manage it. But when you start to get such a portfolio and you really don’t have processes, you really don’t know what you’re doing to be honest with you. I agree with you. Once you know where you’re really good at, and that’s why I said doing what you’re created to do and hiring people to do the other stuff. I still do listing appointments. I don’t do them all anymore. Remember you told me, “You need to give that up.” And I’m like, “You’re crazy. I’m the only one that could do a listing appointment.” Jason: I’m like, “Let go of your ego,” right? Annemarie: Right. It was like, “They can’t do it. They can’t do it. We can’t lose this,” and now, I don’t even want to go, but sometimes, I do. Sometimes it just keeps me in touch with this is what life is about and this is what they’re facing. I do them, but I have no problems handing that kind of stuff off. I like to be in teaching and doing the videos and doing the podcast. That’s my gig. That’s what I like. Jason: And you’re enjoying it. Annemarie: I am. I love that part. Jason: It’s such a transition. This is one of the things that’s amazing for me as a coach, that I get to see the contrast. I remember that conversation. I remember you wanting out and not liking it, and you’re a passionate person when you talk. I felt it. Now, you can feel this, too. You’re like, “love” and “fun.” These are adjectives that you’re associating with your business which most property managers are like, “She’s high on something right now. I don’t know what Jason gave her, but this sounds like crazy talk.” Annemarie: Having the right people, honestly, makes the job a lot more fun. My property manager’s been with me the longest. We literally wrote a coffee table book for our owners for Christmas. It’s Memoirs of a Property Manager. We can’t make this up. We were sitting in Starbucks, laughing to the point of how retarted are these people, and we manage them! She said, “We should put this in a book and give them to our owners just to remind them what we deal with.” So, we did and they are asking when’s the next volume coming. You got to have time for that. Jason: You don’t want to anymore. Annemarie: I tell them a lot of times, “If we can’t laugh about it, then certainly we will be in the fetal position crying about it.” Jason: Laughter is the stage before fear. Annemarie, it’s so good to catch up with you. I really appreciate you. I appreciate your husband, Jeff. It’s been phenomenal watching you guys progress and feeling all the love back from you guys. I really appreciate that. I just get to work with the most awesome clients. This is the type of things that I love doing. This is my jam. I enjoy it. It’s been great being able to work with you and I appreciate you coming and hanging out here on the DoorGrow Show with me. Annemarie: Yup. And I will say, if I have one piece of advice, if they do hire DoorGrow, the Seed Hacker, do what they say to do. It’s not take a pill and hope for the best. It’s you having to do the work. I was all in. If I was going to spend the money, I was all in. I was going to do what I was told to do and that’s my biggest advice. Don’t spend it if you’re not going to do it. Jason: Right. And to be honest, those are the only clients that get great results. It’s that last 10% of doing the stuff that I tell people to do, that not everybody really wants to do. It’s that last little dialing and that last little 10% that gets you 90% of the results. Annemarie: Yup. We appreciate you guys, for sure. Jason: All right, Annemarie. Thanks so much. I will let you go. Bye. Annemarie: Bye. Jason: That’s super rewarding for me as a coach. I don’t know that there’s anything more fulfilling than being able to see a client progress. It’s like watching my children succeed in anything. It doesn’t even matter what it is, it just feels good because you’re seeing this. It’s really awesome to have her come on the show. If you are property management entrepreneur, you feel like you need somebody in your corner. You want somebody that believes in you, somebody that can challenge you, somebody that can help you see something you can’t see because you’re in it, you’re too close to the fire, I need people to tell me the same stuff that I would tell myself to do because I’m too close to the fire in my own business. I would be honored to take on helping you in your business, being your coach, and helping you grow your company. Reach out to DoorGrow. We’re really picky about the clients that we take on because I want clients like Annemarie. I want clients that are going to do what I tell them to do. I want clients that going to trust the process. I want clients that are going to go all in. If you feel like you’re that type of person, then reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. That is it for today. Goodbye everybody and until next time to your and 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.

When property managers need a helping hand, where can they go to find the right handyman/maintenance contractor? Today, I am talking to Liz Koser of Keepe, an on-demand marketplace that fills the supply-and-demand gap between contractors and property managers. Liz is a real estate investor and landlord with 10 properties, 15 doors.  You’ll Learn... [01:40] Early Exposure to Property Management: Liz is following in her parents’ footsteps of real estate investing.  [01:54] Own vs. Rent: Liz’s first condo was her own home that turned into her first rental. Since then, she typically purchases 1–2 properties a year. [02:07] Diversify Property Portfolio: First year for Liz to explore out-of-state investing.  [03:32] A lot like Uber: Based on location and availability, contractors go through a background check before picking up jobs via Keepe’s mobile app. [04:00] Keepe Connecting through Techstars: Fast track program for startups to get feedback on product/market fit; network with others to quickly bring things to market. [04:39] Future Growth Goals: Keepe’s on the West Coast and making its way to Denver and beyond.  [06:25] Why choose to use Keepe? Allows property managers to feel safe expanding, growing their business, and extend the reach or capability to get jobs done. [08:55] Keepe Options as Seasons Change: When things heats up, it’s time to grow.  [10:07] Keepe’s Process: No monthly subscription fee, paid on-demand.  [11:08] Common Concerns and Questions: Keepe constantly collects data and feedback from customers and others to improve its network of contractors. [12:25] Building Relationships and Referrals: Bring over or block contractors to join the network.  Tweetables Diversify within the real estate investing realm. Pick up out-of-state properties, and continue down that path. When everything heats up, that’s the time to grow. Keepe makes property managers feel safe expanding, growing their business to get jobs done. Resources Liz Koser's Email Keepe Techstars Uber Lyft DoorGrow Secrets DoorGrow Newsletter 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. And today, I’m hanging out with the fantastic Liz Koser of Keepe. Liz, welcome to the show. Liz: Thanks for having me. Jason: Liz, give us a little bit of a background. Who is Liz? The bio that I have says you’re a Seattle real estate investor, landlord, you have 10 of your own properties, 15 doors, alongside with your husband, your parents actively invest in rental property, and you were exposed to this early on. Tell us a little more about you and how you got into property management or into the space. Liz: As you said, my parents were already investing in real estate and I have bought my first condo in 2009, which was my own home, and that eventually became my first rental. Then from 2012 to now, I steadily bought 1–2 properties a year. Last year, we didn’t get any, but this year we already have two and I think we’ll probably going to continue to add this year and continue to be aggressive about it. That’s where I’m at on the investing side. Also, I think I mentioned this in my bio, but this is the first year where I’ve explored investing out-of-state. I picked up my first out-of-state property and have every intention of continuing down that path. With the Seattle market, it’s high and it just makes sense also to diversify. I know people diversify within the stock market. I actually think it’s somewhat important to diversify within the real estate investing realm as well. Jason: Now, lead us towards Keepe. How did Keepe get started, what’s your role there, and give us a little background there. Liz: Keepe got started because there is a supply and demand gap between having handymen available and property managers’ need for finding handymen, especially in the markets that we’re in today. Keepe got started as a way to address that gap. We are an on-demand marketplace, matching contractors and property managers. It works a lot like Uber in that contractors pick up jobs on mobile app, based on location and availability. They go through a background check and so on. One of the Keepe founders does also own rental properties. I had known him previously and that is how I made the initial connection. Keepe went through Techstars in 2016. Jason: What is Techstars? Liz: Techstars is a startup incubator, which is a fast track program for startup companies to get feedback on product and market, the whole fit, top-end networking with lots of other entrepreneurs and investors to bring things to market more quickly. Jason: Okay, So, that means it rapidly was getting ready faster. Where’s Keepe at now in terms of growth and penetration? How new is Keepe for those that are listening? Liz: We’ve been in Seattle the longest, but actually Keepe is in the greater Seattle area, Portland, San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, Phoenix, Arizona, and then most recently Los Angeles and Orange County. Jason: You’ve hit a lot of the major markets here on the West Coast, right? Liz: Yup. Jason: What’s next, Denver? Liz: Yeah. I think Denver is a very good candidate and I’m actually from Colorado, so Denver would be a good fit for me personally in terms of running the sales side of Keepe. Also, I think Austin, Texas or the Dallas Fort Worth area, but definitely we’re here to grow nationally. With that, the first step is getting off the West Coast, right? Jason: Right. When you start shifting towards the east, it’s going to be Atlanta and Jacksonville. Those are big markets for us. They seem to attract a lot of businesses there. Certainly those. Liz: It’s interesting. We’ve actually received a few phone calls from the Atlanta area, property managers asking if we’re there yet. That’s a good sign we’re getting preemptive calls. Jason: All right. So the goal is expansion, you guys are growing, and eventually people will be listening to this because this episode will have been out for a while and you might already be in some of these new markets, right? Liz: Right. Jason: Explain to everybody why they should choose to use Keepe. I know a lot of property managers are like, “Well, we find our own people,” or, “I don’t trust this.” What are some of the typical things that you tell people to sell this to them? Liz: One, starting now, a lot of property managers who use Keepe kind of slow go. Let’s say they start to send us a handful of jobs and then over time, we end up gaining a larger portion of maintenance from our customers. I know people have their trusty handyman, but I would say a big need comes up when people say, “Oh, no. My handyman retired or moved away,” and this happens all the time. That is one area where if you’re counting on one or even two people, there’s a company in Arizona that said, “Oh, both our people retired at the same time.” It just doesn’t work in the long run. The other thing is when property managers are depending on those one or two handymen and they’re also a little bit geographically limited. Some of our customers maybe were in a certain Bay Area city, let’s say San Jose, and they’re weren’t willing to pick up clients in San Mateo because they didn’t have a contractor in San Mateo. Using Keepe now opens the door to look at branching out into other geographies as well. We’ve had customers that have been able to expand their footprint because they have Keepe in their back pocket and they know they can handle maintenance in other areas. Jason: So, having Keepe allows these property managers to feel safe expanding, growing their business, and allows them to extend the reach or capability as far as their challenges with getting jobs taken care of that they have. If the handyman retires, moves, all these kinds of stuff, then they’re typically in pain. This is one when they typically would reach out to Keepe? Is this what you’re finding? Liz: That is where they are like, “Oh, great. Now I get it.” We have a lot of property managers try us out before that point and we’ve had property managers that have said, “Oh, great. This helps me grow because I maybe had one on-staff handyman or two and I wasn’t sure about adding a third.” Sometimes, they realize that there’s busy seasons and so seasons, so, “How do I keep our team busy throughout the year?” Well, you might be able to keep one person busy throughout the year and utilize Keepe instead of adding a second person. There’s a lot of options here. Jason: That’s a little bit of flexibility to what they’ve got going on, which makes a lot of sense. Property management is a very seasonal sort of business. It really heats up in the summer and even if you look at Google Trends and look at search volume, you can see the year just spike through summer every single year in search volume for property management. That’s when everything heats up and that’s the time to grow if they’re needing to expand during those seasonal times without bringing on staff because bringing on somebody long-term is a commitment. Nobody wants to lay somebody off if things gets a little lame. It allows them a little safer adjusting. How does the process work with Keepe? How do they work with you? Liz: We have a pretty easy sign-up process and we actually don’t have a monthly subscription fee. We are paid on-demand. Keepe is both a platform and in the [...] contractors. All the payments flow through us. Invoicing comes from Keepe and we pay out the contractors. The sign-up process is pretty much getting set-up for billing terms. When property managers use us for a job, that’s when we make money. We actually don’t have a monthly subscription. Jason: Interesting. So, it’s only when you need it. Liz: Yeah, but our job is to earn a greater percentage of our customer’s business, which is good for our customers because that means that we are working to build a relationship in the long run. Jason: Fantastic. What are some of the common questions or concerns that people will bring up when they call you? We got people listening right now. They probably have these questions. What are the typical concerns that they have in handing something over to Keepe? Liz: We get questions about how do we find the contractors and what’s our process for getting contractors on board. Sometimes, people think that there’s somebody in the background dialing a list to find them a contractor. It’s just shifting the burden. We actually have a team that interviews contractors. We do criminal background checks and then from there, we are collecting ratings on the contractors, so tenants today are the ones that respond once a job is complete unless it’s a vacant unit and it’s a rental turn, then it would be the property manager. We’re constantly collecting this feedback and we have contractors that have been in our network for multiple years. We do remove contractors at times. So, it’s all about the feedback loop and continuously improving the network. Jason: Got it. Fantastic. Any other questions or concerns that they might have or that they bring up during the sales process? Liz: One question we get is if they don’t like a contractor, can they block them? Yes, we do allow property managers to block certain contractors. It’s come up more recently is, “If we end up going with Keepe, can our handyman join Keepe’s network?” Yes, we are happy to take those referrals from property managers. They are probably some of the best referrals we can get because if one property manager likes the contractor, then that’s a good sign going forward. Jason: It kind of like a timeshare. Liz: Yeah, a little bit. Jason: They’re like, “Can I share my contractor with some of the other people in your network, so I can keep them on?” Liz: Yeah, definitely. Once question we get is can they request their contractor. When you think about how Uber and Lyft operate, where they’re matching you with the driver near that location when they’re available, that is essentially how our network works. Although you could have a preference for someone, if that person is not available at that scheduled time, then it’s not going to be an exact matching. That’s one thing to keep in mind with a fluid marketplace is that it doesn’t work with the on-demand model to request a specific person necessarily. Jason: It’s optimized for efficiency. The trade-off in not getting to pick Steve is that you get the job done for faster and probably get a better review. Liz: Yup. Jason: This is very interesting, super helpful. I’m excited to see you guys expand into some more markets and grow. Anything else anybody should know about Keepe that we didn’t cover? Liz: I am always interested in hearing from people in other markets, too. Like I mentioned, we had a few calls from the Atlanta area. I do make note when people come to us and I’m like, “Oh, there’s already a lot of demand there.” So, even if we’re not in your city today, I would recommend reaching out because I do track that. It’s very telling of demand and helps us in the decision-making as we move forward into new markets. Jason: Liz, how can people get in touch with you to let you know they want you and your market or if they’re in one of the markets that you cover, how can they get in touch? Liz: They can reach me at liz@keepe.com. Jason: And they can check Keepe out at keepe.com, right? Liz: Yes. Jason: Perfect. All right. Liz, it’s great having you on the show. Excited to see Keepe grow and expand. It sounds like the service that helps feel that in-between gap between people’s in-house maintenance, people’s seasonal maintenance, some of these challenges that they’re dealing with. I look forward to seeing which markets you get into next. Liz: All right. Thank you for having me on the show, Jason. Jason: Yeah. Thanks for being here. So, check them out at keepe.com and see if it might fit. As always, I love getting feedback from you guys, so let me know what you think of these guys. And I appreciate Liz being here on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that is wanting to add doors, you’re trying to figure things out, you’re struggling, and things just don’t seem to be working, I would love to have a conversation with you. Reach out to our team. Go to doorgrow.com, give us a call, connect with us, schedule an appointment, and check us out. If you are a property management business that can handle adding 50 new doors at least, you want to add maybe 100 doors over the next year at least, then you can go to doorgrow.com/optin. Plug in your email address and that will get you access to some case studies. See if you can see other people that have done it. And they’ve done it without SEO, pay-per-click and content marketing, without social media marketing, without pay-per-lead. They were able to grow their businesses organically, healthily, with warm leads to take away last time, have a much higher close rate. You’ll also see that they’re all really happy, which is not super normal sometimes in this industry. It’s a tough industry. I want you to notice that. So, check out those case studies. On that case studies page, I have a link to free training called DoorGrow Secrets that really is the beginning of our training material that I give out for free. I’m going to share with you and add some concepts like The Cycle of Suck, The Four Ds to Revenue, Cold Leads Versus Warm Leads, The Myth of SEO, and some other cool stuff that’s going to help you see why growth has been challenging and what makes the most sense to help you grow your business. Hopefully, everybody checks that out, doorgrow.com/optin is where you go to that; one word. So, 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.

Why switch from a fun, high-flying job to a stressful one? Property management is the “Golden Ticket” to finding new properties and creating value to help others. Today, I am talking to Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management about putting profitability before adding more doors. If your company isn’t profitable, than you can’t create value for the community it serves. You’ll Learn... [02:00] Property Manager with Spare Time: Shawn serves as an instructor pilot for San Juan County Sheriff’s Office.  [02:40] NARPM professional member, chapter president, and residential management professional (RMP). [04:30] Passion for Property Management: Happiness comes not from avoiding problems, but finding fun challenges. [06:02] Innovative Incentive: Competing for staff resources increases salaries, compensation, and revenue to successfully facilitate growth and manage the company. [07:35] DiSC Personality Type: Motivated by money or recognition? [10:15] What makes a business profitable? Finding perfect customer/market fit via value-ads and associated fees.  [13:42] Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort without extra pay. [14:57] Cost Savings: Implement less labor-intensive work (paper checklists) and more technology (videos). [15:55] Tools and Software: Transition from a brick-n-mortar business to remote/virtual office using G Suite, Process Street, AppFolio, and RingCentral. [18:35] Current Client Base: Push out and justify new fee structure; talk them through it. [22:15] Sense of Scarcity: Feel safer and more comfortable raising fees and rates. [24:05] People are willing to pay for good service and experiences.  Tweetables Golden Ticket: Finding new properties, and creating value for others. Property management is never dull. Some people aren’t motivated by money, but freedom. Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort. Resources Independence Capital Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Darren Hunter G Suite Process Street AppFolio RingCentral TalkRoute DGS 7: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 1 DGS 8: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 2 DGS 9: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 3 DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DGS 82: Real Estate Revolution with Nat Kunes of AppFolio 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 change 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. And today, my guest is Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management. Shawn, welcome to the show. Shawn: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you. Shawn, we’re going to be getting into the topic today of profitability before more doors. When I mentioned that before the show, you’re like, “Yes, the cart before the horse.” Let’s get into that, but first, I want to give people a little bit of background on you. I’ve got your bio here and I’m going to read this and then maybe you can come and introduce yourself. Shawn grew up in Aztec, Nex Mexico. After completion of his Associate’s Degree from Glendale Community College, Shawn began flight school in Scottsdale, Arizona. Shawn’s career as a helicopter pilot provided opportunities to fly internationally into Mexico, off-shore into the gulf of Mexico, and as an EMS helicopter pilot. Shawn currently flies for the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office as an instructor pilot in his spare time. Shawn began his career in real estate in 2013 and has been investing in real estate since 2003. Shawn is currently a professional member of the National Association of Residential Property Managers and has earned his Residential Management Professional (RMP) designation. In 2017, he served as the NARPM Albuquerque Metro Chapter President and has been elected to serve at the 2020 Chapter President. Shawn enjoys golf, baseball, hunting, and fishing. He apparently is also connected with lots of really lengthy phrases and titles including his business name. Shawn, give us a little bit of a background. Who’s Shawn and how did you get into property management, so people can understand why should they listen to this guy say anything. Shawn: How did I get into property management? It’s kind of by default. My wife pulled me into it. She was a corporate paralegal for a large investment firm in California and in that process we moved, had kids, we moved to New Mexico, and she decided, “You know what? I think there is a need here.” There is definitely a need and we’ve started a management company. I was still flying helicopters at the time but she’s like, “You know what? I can’t do it alone. You’ve got to get out of the fun job and get into the stressful job.” So, I quit flying and here I am. Jason: And you regretted it ever since, right? Shawn: No, I actually really enjoy it. Jason: Good. Shawn: Your introduction to property management is spot on. I think there’s so much gold in it and it’s just really creating value for people. I really enjoy it. Really, it’s a nice “in” to investing in properties. I love investing in properties and this is like a golden ticket to find new properties. Jason: Property managers and everyone in the industry love to joke about how hard the industry is, but there is this passion for it that everyone seems to develop. I think happiness comes not through avoiding problems and challenges. It comes through finding challenges that are exciting to work on and property management is never dull. Shawn: Yeah, that’s a fact. Jason: Never dull, right? Shawn: No. Jason: Let’s get into this topic. Why is it important to have profitability before focusing on getting more doors? Shawn: For us, it was always a mission to be profitable right at the start. Back in the day, we’re just a management fee company. Because of that, we relented in the growth. We had to find ways to make money and compensate our employees appropriately. We live in a very blue collar town that is oil- and gas-driven and the salaries are very hard to compete with. We had to find ways to compensate them nice so that they weren’t pulled away from property management into oil and gas industry. Those are the things that were important to us. If you’re not a profitable company, you can’t create value for the community that you serve. You just can’t. You have to have money to be able to grow and expand and introduce new programs into your business. That was our mission right at the beginning. Jason: Because you’re competing with oil and gas for staff resources in your market, you’ve had to probably have a higher salary base than what would be typical for most management companies in most markets. Shawn: Yeah, they sell. Jason: In order to do that, you probably had to get a little bit innovative. Anytime we have a constraint as an entrepreneur, we have a challenge like that to overcome, we have to innovate. What were some of the steps you took to create a space that you could afford to have really good team members?  Shawn: One step was to create an incentivized comp plan. Our property managers are licensed real estate brokers, but we pay them off a percentage as the whole of the portfolio, not just a management fee. Anytime they bring in a late fee or an annual inspection that’s performed on the property, then they get a portion of that fee as well. That help us increase their annual revenue as well because it hurts when they lose a property and when we get a new property on, it actually helps them gain their salary as well. Jason: Okay. You’ve basically created the natural incentive for them to help facilitate growth and help successfully manage the company. And if the company does better, they do better.  Shawn: Exactly. Jason: I find that a lot of people, especially those that on a DISC profile that are not DI, they don’t have a high economic score. They’re not super motivated by additional money. As entrepreneurs, we tend to naturally think everyone’s like us; they love money. Those individuals that are not motivated by more money are more motivated by recognition. When you pick these team members and you have this comp plan, are you looking for people that also operate somewhat in a BDM role? Are they more of a sales-driven type of person? Are they a DI DISC personality type or more on the extroverted side? Shawn: No, we actually don’t want to mix those two―BDM and a portfolio management. You’re right. A lot of people are not motivated financially like entrepreneurs are, but what we found is giving unlimited vacation time, some perks to the business, having the ability to work from home or wherever they are. Everything that we do is electronic and digital anyway, so those perks. A lot of them are young parents and if they need to pick up their kid at school at three o’clock, who am I to say? As long as your job is done and you’re doing it effectively, then we don’t put constraints on that. I think that pools in that attraction to the job. Jason: I find those to be huge incentives, similar to running our virtual teams. Being able to work virtually and work from home, having flex time, being able to set your own schedule and as long as you’re getting work done, and being able to take vacations when you need to or want to, that’s huge. People want freedom. They want autonomy and that tends to attract the more entrepreneurial people we would like in our business. To what you’re saying, yeah it makes sense. The BDM portfolio thing would be segregated. But also that allows you, in your market, to have compensation that is on par with maybe what they might be getting in the oil and gas industry or at least competitive, right? Shawn: Absolutely. I would say that our salaries, once they have a full portfolio, they’re making as much, if not more, than what they would get comped in oil and gas industry which is good. That’s what we want. Jason: Right, and in oil and gas industry, they probably don’t have some of those other perks, I would imagine? Shawn: Oh, not at all. Jason: You’ve made your business intentionally competitive to maintain good people. Let’s get deeper into the profitability aspect. Since you’re paying more money for people, how do you make sure this is profitable? Shawn: We really evaluated the things that we did as a business beyond just the normal management stuff. What are the value-adds that we do every day? If they are a true value-add, can we add an associated value-add fee to it? We kind of looked at it that way. We went through Darren Hunter’s program and it was phenomenal. It definitely revolutionized the way we thought about our fee structure, but it also helped us think about and be cautious of those clients that are cost-conscious. If they are and all they care about is the cost of the service, then they may not be the right fit. It naturally brings in that right type of clientele when you have a fee structure beyond just a flat fee and everybody else is doing the same flat fee or whatever percentage fee. So, that was huge for us. As far as profitability goes, it varies in leasing season, but in our leasing season we’re about 44% profitability. Leasing fees and lease renewal fees, those things have to happen in the property management business. But to actually gain revenue from it is extremely important. I could look at our business structure and see that we have a leasing fee and we have a lease renewal fee, but my competitors lease homes in twice the amount of time that we do and they don’t push for lease renewals. So me as an investor, I’d be upset if they didn’t try to keep my tenants in a lease especially through the winter time. Such a cyclical business, we have seasons, and you don’t want it to go vacant in December. That little fee is nothing compared to having a vacant home in those times. Jason: What other fees did you guys start to identify and add going through this process? Shawn: We did a lease administration fee for our tenants. That was pretty big. The annual inspection fees—that’s a third party vendor that’s an actual inspector and he’ll come inspect the houses on an annual basis—there’s a little upcharge for that. A year-end statement fee. We found that our controller list just spinning a ton of time preparing for the year-end stuff and making sure everything was clear to send off to our clients’ accountants, so we incorporated a fee in that. Then a maintenance coordination fee. Our maintenance coordinators, we have one and we just hired a new one so we have two now, and they’re just super busy. Coordinating maintenance is a huge task and it’s such an important one here. We do have a small fee for that. There’s probably a bunch more. I’m not in the day-to-day as much anymore, so I’m kind of not thinking of the big ones. Obviously the bulk ones were leasing fee and lease renewal. Those are big and they’re often overlooked. Jason: One of the things you did then was you identified all the different situations in which it was taking extra time, extra energy, extra effort, you weren’t getting paid anything extra, and then just systematically saying, “Hey, can we add a fee to ensure that we’re getting compensated for this additional work?” to make sure that you business is profitable. Shawn: Sure. Jason: Okay. We’ve got somebody watching says, “Can you list the fees again?” I had down a leasing fee, a lease renewal fee, lease administration fee, annual inspection fee, year-end statement fee, and a maintenance coordination fee. Shawn: Those are the big ones. Kelly, reach out to me. I will give you the list. Jason: Slow down. Kelly you can rewatch this as many times. This is being recorded and it’s also on Facebook. Also for those watching this later, we have full transcription when this comes out on iTunes and you can check that out on our blog at doorgrow.com. Let’s get into other ways in which you’ve made this profitable. So, obviously increasing fees. You weren’t able to decrease cost with staff. This allowed you to increase cost with staff. Were there any cost savings things that you were able to implement? Shawn: Probably just technology and trying to not be super labor-intensive. I would say that doing things like move-in, move-out videos instead of running through an entire list on paper and whatnot. It takes a little bit less time than doing it on paper. Those types of things. It’s just efficiencies in the office. Then we set up our team literally to work from anywhere. If you’re on vacation, you want to check on a lease or whatever, it’s possible and super helpful. Those things help with driving cost down because you’re not focusing on the, “Hey, John. Are you back at the office? Can you reach me that file?” That’s just a waste of time. Jason: What are some of the things you’ve done to enable and facilitate this transition from being a brick-and-mortar business that operates on sneakernet, where everybody is walking into each other’s offices saying, “Hey, do you have this?” to being a virtual team that they can work from basically anywhere? Shawn: The big things are softwares that enable cloud access. Our general office is on G Suite. Everything operates through there and then our processes are through Process Street which is super helpful and can be accessed anywhere again. AppFolio for our software. They are super tech savvy as far as online stuff. I wish they’d open their API, that’s my shout out to them. Jason: Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot. Shawn: I imagine you have. And then RingCentral. We have a team in Mexico and I’ve got a team member in the Philippines, and they literally can call our office in Farmington, New Mexico. Then we have another Flagstaff office as well. It’s so easy because they can pick up their phone and it acts like they’re dialing from their desk. That was a key point we had to set up six years ago which was, back then, it wasn’t really heard of. Jason: Cool. I use all of those software or have in the past except AppFolio. Shawn: You don’t need that. Jason: We’ve had Process Steet on the show. Great interview. For those listening, I recommend you check it out. G Suite were a Google Apps reseller, so if people need help with that we can certainly help you get set up. We used RingCentral for several years. We eventually switched to Talkroute because we found that most of our team weren’t doing a lot of calling on our team and if they did, they had unlimited cell phone minutes. Talkroute just allows you to auto attendant and the call routing and the extensions but they can dial through the Talkroute app out of their phone and then it just uses their cell phone minutes. It’s free basically for outbound calls. It can also receive text messages. We switched to Talkroute and probably saved ourselves about $400 or $500 a month. Shawn: That’s big. I love it. Jason: What are some other things you focused on then to facilitate profitability? You’ve got the fees. You’re paying your team well so you can compete. You’ve got your leveraging technology. You’ve set up your team to be more virtual which is scary for a lot of property managers who’ve been doing things a certain way. Anything else? Shawn: What I would say is tap into your current client base. You probably have a ton of really loyal clients. Don’t forget to just really push out your new fee structure and justify those fees. Believe in what you’re charging to those current clients. When we switched over to a new fee structure, hardly anybody left. We had 12 clients leave on our first push. We found that those 12 clients were probably 12 good clients to leave. Jason: Out of how many clients? Shawn: We were at 614 at the time, 12 left. We had a second push and we did this in phases because you have to be really sensitive to homes that are vacant. You don’t want to increase fees on somebody that has a vacant home. That’s a stressful time already. We certainly don’t want to increase feels on a client that has not been in your portfolio for less than a year. They don’t really know and trust you yet. Then I haven’t built that loyalty for you. So don’t touch those yet. Once you segment those out and you found the client base that you really want to go after, then do it. Don’t just send out an email and hope that they sign into an agreement. You have got to follow-up. If you don’t follow-up, they’re just not going to believe in what you’re trying to do. So, make sure that you follow through with all of that. I’ve heard of people, “Hey, I increased my fees and I sent out this email. I got no response,” and I’m like, “Well, did you do anything else besides that? Because you got to call them. You got to pick up the phone and just talk them through.” It’s a scary thing. I just had a fee increase from one of the vendors that we use in our business and I was like, “What the heck?” My initial reaction was, “What the heck is going on?” Then, they talked me through and I was like, “You know what? It’s all good. We’re happy with you guys. We’re going to move forward. It’s all good.” I think that’s most people. Jason:Yeah, have a conversation. If you’re looking for the process that you went through or that Darren Hunter could have outlined—we’ve had him on the show before a few times—check out the episodes with Darren Hunter. Great content. He gave a lot away here in the show. You can check that out. I just saw him actually in Phoenix. So, 12 of out 614 that’s maybe 2%. Shawn: That was the first push. We did lose more the second round. There was probably a total number of 65. I can’t remember exactly that left, but our profitability went up. Jason: You lose 10% but you’re making more money, then not such a big deal, and usually those are the worst properties in your portfolio. What tends to happen then is you increase your revenue. You lose your profit. You lose a little bit of clientele, but you’re also losing the ones that take up the most amount of time, typically. Those particular doors probably have 10 times higher operational costs than a good door. By losing that pile in your portfolio, you’re gaining room to manage a lot more and you’re gaining a lot more leverage. Your profitability probably goes up even more because your operational costs go down significantly by cutting out the most challenging, most micromanagy, and most price sensitive owners that are the most challenging properties. Hopefully, people are a little bit sold to this idea, “Hey, maybe I can increase my fees,” because I do believe that property management businesses in general are not charging enough. They really deserve to be paid well for what they do. They provide a really valuable service and I feel there’s been this false scarcity that’s been created by marketers. Focus on SEO, pay-per-click and these sort of things where it feels like it’s difficult to grow. It feels scarce but they’re 70% self-managing in single family residential. There’s tons of blue ocean, there’s tons of opportunity, the scarcity is false. It really doesn’t exist. For those listening, if you feel like things are scarce, we should have a conversation because we can get you out of that mode of scarcity so that you feel safer and more comfortable raising your fees and rates. I believe that’s a false perception that doesn’t need to exist in the industry and it creates a problem for the entire industry—this sense of scarcity. It creates this competition that I don’t think really needs to be there. Really, the industry as a whole needs to be building each other up and helping each other out. You seen that being involved in NARPM. Shawn: Yeah, that’s right. NARPM’s big on that. Jason: Shawn, this has been really helpful. Any other other takeaways or things that you’ve explored your journey to make your business more profitable to grow your company? Shawn: I think most people get a little scared because of the competition and they’re worried about raising their fees. Let me just tell you that our competitors don’t charge anything besides a tenant, whatever, management fee. I almost said the fees. I don’t know if that was against the rules or something like that. Jason: I’m not a property manager so I guess you and I can talk about it. But someone else might hear it. We’re not colluding. Shawn: We are not colluding. Just don’t be fearful of that. I think that if you’re truly creating a value for your customer and clients that that is irrelevant, that people are willing to pay for good service and good experiences. When you raise your fees, it has a natural thing that happens that you get rid of the lower-end properties. The lower end properties cost you more money, they cost you more time, they cost you more stress, and they cost you more employees. They will burn out on the low-end properties. Once you bring on nicer properties and you keep to a standard, they are willing to pay the higher fees and get better service, and it naturally increases your profits. That’s a big win for us. Jason: Awesome. Well, Shawn it sounds like you’re doing great things in Farmington, New Mexico. Did you ever think that you would just end up in Farmington, New Mexico? Shawn: That’s the thing about New Mexico. It’s the land of entrapment, but it just brings you back. I’ve lived all over the country and it’s a good place to raise a family. Jason: Awesome. Shawn, I appreciate you coming onto the show. Thanks for being here. I appreciate your insight and I wish you continued success. Shawn: Thank you, Jason. I appreciate your time. Jason: If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference then maybe we should have a conversation. So, reach out. There is a lot of opportunity in the industry to grow a property management business right now. I think we’re on the cusp of a wave. I think the industry is going to blossom and grow. There’s a lot of big and good things happening when it comes to technology, when it comes to software, when it comes to awareness. We would love to be a part of facilitating that journey with you and I would love the opportunity to be your coach in your business. Reach out to DoorGrow, let’s start with a conversation, and I will give you a free training on some of the secrets and tips. I call it DoorGrow secrets on how you can avoid some of the most common pitfalls of preventing growth. Just reach out and say, “Hey, I want DoorGrow Secrets.” You might find it so interesting and get so excited, you’ll want to work with us. That’s my hope. So, we will talk with you all soon, to everyone’s 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.

How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? Leads. But it’s impossible for property managers to pursue the blue ocean of 70% self-managed landlords. There's no way to contact them. Until now.  Today, I am talking to Ben Atkin of DoorsUp, a lead generation service for property management entrepreneurs. You’ll Learn... [02:30] Ben’s Background: Grew up surrounded by real estate, property management, and software.  [03:09] 50-unit Student Housing Apartment Complex: Managing students is difficult; Ben moved on to something less stressful and more lucrative.  [03:40] Bootstrap to the Core: Partnered with Coldwell Banker Premier and started property management company from scratch. [04:10] Daily Pre-occupation: How do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management?  [04:41] Database: How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout? How do you contact them?  [05:03] DoorsUp Prototype: Every person in market who owns rental properties and their contact information to track interactions and engagement. [06:20] Secret Sauce: DoorsUp gets information and people ready to sign-up.  [07:37] Grow Doors: Use DoorsUp to pick an area to pursue to contact owners and acquire more properties to manage. [14:20] Future for DoorsUp: Going to NARPM to add service areas.  [16:27] FAQ: Does this have all the data that I can find myself? Data is concise, filtered, and updated regularly to make your marketing more efficient and cost-effective.  [21:14] Bogged Down and Overwhelmed: Grew too fast and doesn’t want to be a property manager!  [22:15] My Thesis: Property management has a serious marketing problem. People cannot find a sustainable way to grow doors.  Tweetables Bootstrap to the Core: Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero Website.  We have a lot of data. Mining and handling data is our expertise. We’re marketing strategy agnostic. Property management has a serious marketing problem. Resources Ben Atkin's Personal Email DoorsUp Ben Atkin on LinkedIn Google Street View Grant Cardone National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Business Network International (BNI) Cole Realty Resource SmartZip  REDX  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. Today, I'm hanging out with Ben Atkin from a new startup, it sounds like, called DoorsUp. Ben, welcome. Ben: Thanks, Jason. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I'm just going to go ahead and say this and geek out out of the way. I've watched literally every single one of your podcast and I can jive so much with that intro. It seems like it's changed a little bit in the last. Did I notice that? You changed that intro to include a couple more things recently? Jason: I have made some subtle changes, yes. Ben: Subtle changes, okay. I love that. I'm really excited to be on this show. I'm just stoked to be here. Jason: Let's get into your background. You've got this startup called DoorsUp, which in my understanding is a lead gen service for property management entrepreneurs, so they can get more owners which sounds very in alignment with what we do to optimize companies so they can handle those leads, so they can effectively, organically, create that business. Tell us how did you get into this space? Give us some background on Ben. Who the heck are you? Ben: Yeah. It's a long long road. I'm a second generation real estate person as well as second generation software developer and software person. My dad has a real estate company, was a real estate developer. The most inopportune time to be a real estate developer in 2006-2007. I grew up surrounded by real estates, surrounded by property management, and also surrounded by software. Anyway, I got my start in actually having experiences in property management in college. I was managing a 50-unit student housing apartment complex. If anybody is familiar with student housing, they know that that is just a difficult job to manage students. 50 units is about 250 leases in student housing. I was looking for something a little bit more lucrative and a little less stressful. I found an opportunity in my local market with a Coldwell Banker property management franchise or Coldwell Banker Premier, partnered with that franchise, and started with a property management company from scratch. Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero website—nothing; we just started from the ground. Jason: Bootstrap. Ben: Bootstrap. Yeah, absolute to the core. I have very little experience in property management at that time even though I did my best at pretending that I did. That was our major problem was how do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management? That was my preoccupation daily because I wasn't being paid. You talk about bootstrap, I was living on savings trying to grow a property management company. That was my challenge. That was my problem. I remember speaking to my broker at this franchise. I waited at his office for about an hour. I was brainstorming with him. I said, "How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout?" It's not like there's this big database of everybody who owns rental property and a way to contact them. That's really was the impetus for what we developed and what we started to pursue. I leveraged a little bit of my connection with my dad and my brothers who were software engineers, I have a software engineering background a little bit, and we built the prototype of DoorsUp, which is exactly that. It's a database of every person in your market virtually who owns rental properties. A way to get their phone number, mailing address, and a way to track their interactions with them as you pursue them to engage with the property management services. Jason: I love it. It sounds like this is almost the equivalent of somebody doing all the manual work to go and find an owner occupied list, then start trying to direct mail to them, and doing all this so manually which works, which can work great to help them grow their business. But it’s a long game. People will try it once and feel like, "I did a mailer, I didn't get anything." But then I hear people that have played this game and they’ll say, "I have clients walk in all the time." They're holding a postcard they did 10 years ago and saying, "Hey, I'm ready, so sign up." Explain how this works. Where are you getting the information? Let's start there. Ben: Sure. I'm going to mention that it's a little bit part of our secret sauce. I don't know if I consider ourselves a big data company. That's kind of a word that people on software throw around to make themselves sound cool, in my opinion. But we have a lot of data. Hundreds of sources, public sources, that's really our expertise is in managing and handling data to be able to target these types of people. Like what you mentioned, let me just make this quick point, mailing to absentee owners is, in some ways, inefficient. How many second home owners who aren't interested in property management are you mailing to? In a market like mine where it's a lot of retirees and it's almost a vacation area, that would be completely ineffective because you'd sent out a thousand mailers and 700 of those would go to people who really have no interest or their daughters' living in that home or whatever. I'm just going to make that point that what we're doing is quite a bit more targeted, and hopefully, should save on expenses, marketing wise and other things. Jason: Explain how somebody could utilize the system growth in their business. Ben: It's a web based application. The first thing that a user would see as they login is they would see a map and filters on the side. They can pick an area that they like to pursue in trying to acquire more properties to manage. Let's say, they've got a neighborhood that they really love, they draw a box on the map, and then they add a couple more filters. Maybe they want to manage only properties that are the 2000s and newer properties, so they don't have to deal with maintenance issues. They hit filter parcels. They'll just see a whole bunch of pins drop on the map, hundreds of pins of rental properties that are algorithms, are big data approach as identified as rental properties. Not just as absentees parcels, but as rental properties. It's really rigorous in deciding what we display as rentals. That's the first step. They filter, they find the rental properties, they can view the properties from the street with Google Street View through our application. It's very easy to see if the property's run down. They can actually look at it from the satellite imagery. They click on the owners name and they click the lookup button. Our system does a whole bunch of secret sauce magic in the background, gives you a phone number, and the accurate mailing address of the owner. As well as information about if they own other rentals. That type of information that they can then pursue that person and try to engage them into a conversation about their property management services. That's the simplest way to explain it. Jason: They sign up for your service, they markout their geographic area, they get some pintabs, they can street view the property, then your system will crawl the magical interweb, pull in phone numbers, email addresses, or mailing address. Then the next step for them would basically, probably be to do some sort of a direct mail campaign, cold calling. Ben: Yeah. We're agnostic to whatever marketing strategy they want to take. We provide the information, we provide the data. They can be as creative as they need to in order to pursue that market. Call, mail, we don't have email addresses, that would be something that they get them on the phone and ask for an email address. Then start them in their sales funnel. A great way to distribute their content, things that you've helped them create, or others who've helped them create, or even knocking on people's doors. That sounds ridiculous in my mind; it sounds ridiculously inefficient. But if you knew that someone had 10 rental properties and those rentals properties were exactly what you wanted to manage, you can see exactly where the homeowner or where the landlord lives or where the rental owner lives, it might be worth dropping off some fudge at the doorstep of their home. That sounds ridiculous, but that's actually something that one of our [...] has done in the past. It's very differentiating as opposed to just this search engine optimization, pay-per-click strategy. It's a little bit closer to a human connection. Jason: Oh, yeah. Realtors still knock doors. Realtors still do this. Property managers have probably really tried to avoid doing that. I've got a client who's in commercial property management. One of the ways he would get clients is he would go bring a candle to their place. "I'm old fashioned here, so here's this candle." He would give a gift, a little gift. The secret is, he'll buy these at the dollar store. This isn't like an expensive thing. But some people are showing up with, I don't know, a bottle of wine or something. It's a dollar of candle and it probably meant something, it felt like something warm to them. I think it's all about connection.  Obviously, if they were really aggressive, they’ve listened to Grant Cardone's 10X, they're like gunho. They wanted to create some business. They just need the opportunities. They go into the system. They may have done a multichannel approach. They're like, "This is my dream list right here. I'm going to call them. I'm going to send them some material. I'm going to nail them on a regular basis. I'm going to go knock on their door." They will get the business. Ben: Here's the thing, like I said, we're marketing strategy agnostic. People are already doing wonderful things to get more doors. They're doing great things. They're setting up landlords seminars, they've got great content, they're trying to push them to these distribution channels, but one of the things that we can provide is a way to reach more and more people. As part of your mailer, send out an invitation to your seminar. It fits really well into the things that people are already doing. If you've got a digital marketing strategy, get somebody on the phone, and say, "We would love to just send you an information in an email about what we do." Just enroll them in an email nurturing campaign that you've already developed, that you've already got going. It seems like organic traffic is a little bit harder to get in our industry for the smaller guys and for some of the companies that are just starting out. They've got to put a little bit of effort into it to start getting those doors, getting the traction that they've got. Jason: Yeah. If we've got roughly 70% that are self-managing in the industry, there's tons of blue ocean. This just helps you to see where the fish are. If you can see them, you can go hunt. It's time. Love the idea. I think this is such a nice match-up between DoorGrow and what you do. I'll be really curious to give feedback to some of our clients on some of the strategies that we teach them if they have these opportunities that they can go after. It's really going to be cool. Ben, what’s sort of the future for DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah, good question. Like you mentioned in the beginning, we're very recently coming out of stealth mode or development mode. We launched just short of a month and a half ago. We’re constrained geographically right now where we can service. Having just barely launched, we are currently servicing customers in Utah and Nevada. I live in Utah, I live right in between Las Vegas and South Lake City, which are two large markets that we wanted to initially, prove the concept of the product and establish a customer base. We are going to be in NARPM, at the NARPM convention conference in October in Arizona. Is that right? It's in Arizona. Jason: Yeah. My assistant schedules it all for me. I just do what she tells me to do. I'll be there. Ben: We'll be there and that's where we hope to add, geographically, another service area. We're going to be growing that way, kind of state by state as we go. That will be determined by the traction we're able to get in different states that we're able to start servicing. If we can grab a couple of customers in one state, that would be enticing enough for us to go through that state and start servicing that area. There's an advantage for our customers right now. They're alone in these sea of data. They're the only people using it. That's a huge competitive advantage right now for the people using it, to be some of the first ones that are using it. As much as we're just coming out of beta and the user interface is not as polished as it should be or could be, but there's a huge advantage for those that are early customers that are starting to use the system and see some results. Jason: What are some of the most common questions that people are asking you about this? I would imagine one question that comes to mind is, "Does this have all the data that I can go find myself?" Or is it missing that? Ben: Right, good question. Essentially, people ask that question. They have a little bit of misunderstanding about what we do. That was an instinct that you had right at the beginning of our conversation is, it's similar to what people are doing which is they're going out sourcing their own data, sending out mail, or sending out stuff like that. That's a very rudimentary version of what we do. The answer to that question is, I guess, the data is so concise, so aggressively filtered, that makes your marketing very efficient, and enables you to do certain things that you never would have time or money to do otherwise. Now, campaign is being an excellent example. The sales cycle for property management is so long. We're not selling toothbrushes. If you ask somebody, "Hey, you want to buy this toothbrush?" They can say, "Yes," and it's done; the sale is done and the service is done. Property management has such a long sales cycle where you get somebody on the phone and you say, "I would love to manage your units." And they say, "Well, it's got a 12-18 month lease on it. I'm not interested unless it's vacant. 12 months from now, call me." I'm being able to keep track on that and being able to keep track of how many times you've mailed to somebody is another really important part of that process. It's integrated into the system right now. People are able to track their leads, they're able to keep track of how many times they've mailed to somebody, keep notes on phone calls that they've had. The other aspect of that is that the data updates. I don't know if you've ever spoken to somebody who has actually tried to implement a long-term mail campaign, but the data, six months out, has changed. People buy properties, they sell property. How do they correlate whether they've mailed to somebody already? Whether they've called somebody already? How do they just track that change over time to be able to spend their time with one person long enough for them to close them given that property management has such a long sales cycle? That's part of the advantage of using a system like ours to do your prospecting and data sourcing. We keep it up to date. The data is updated monthly. The phone numbers, you click the lookup button and it does lookup immediately right then. Very, very fresh data which you're not going to be able to find yourself. Who has time for that anyway? You're going to be managing 200 properties and you're going to be spending time in a big Excel spreadsheet trying to correlate [...]. Absolutely not. I saw as a huge way to be much more effective and to really spend my money where it's going to make the most effect, given that I knew that people have multiple units, and they were units I wanted to manage. I can pursue the market that I want rather than shotgunning a mail campaign or something out in the world and seeing if I got anything I wanted. Jason: Tell us a little bit about some of the early adopters. What sort of experience have they had? Is there a case study or an example you can share with us? Ben: I'll start with myself. I was the first case study. If we go back to that origin story of DoorsUp, I asked my broker, "Where do I find these people?" He said, "I have no idea. No one has any idea." We developed this raw prototype of the system. I got this report. It's so embarrassing to even look at now, it’s this ugly Excel spreadsheet, but it was our prototype. It was the name, phone number, and address of every person in my market who owned rental property. How many rentals they owned, the value of their portfolio, and the addresses of all of their rentals. It was ridiculous to me. To me, it felt like magic. I got straight down and called through that list. After wasting three months getting four or five units, in two months, we were managing about 45 units. I was just bogged down. It was crazy. We grew too fast. I discovered that I didn't want to be a property manager, so I went into software. Jason: Yeah. A lot of people were like, "Why don't you do it, Jason?" I'm like, "Then I can't help everybody else do well." Then, I'll be competing with everybody. I don't think anybody wants that. You're no longer doing that, but you had a really rapid growth initially. I love creating that problem for clients, by the way. I love when they come to me and they're like, "Man, my biggest problem is adding doors and getting doors." Then I say, "Great. Let's get you to problem number two which is how you deal with the growth. Now, you've got doors coming in and you're in pain because you have so much growth." I love creating that problem. Well, anything else they should know about this? If not, how can they get in touch? How can they find out more about DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah. I guess, I'll end with this thought, this is kind of the thesis behind DoorsUp. This is why we got into this space and try to solve this problem. My thesis is, essentially, that property management has a serious marketing problem. I listen to your show a lot and I feel like I didn't steal that idea from you—I sure hope I didn't—but you've taught me a lot about that, but I experienced that myself. People cannot find a sustainable, reliable way, to grow their door count. Profitability aside, that's important. That's very, very important, but top line revenue growth is the thing that we are focusing on helping people to. We don't have, in our industry, any sort of enabling data or service or company like other industries do. For example, if somebody in property management really wanted to spend all day everyday prospecting, if they wanted to do Grant Cardone 10X, they want to not talk to seven new landlords a week, they want to talk to 75 new landlords a week. How would they do that? They would go to Rotary Club and hope that a landlord was there. They would go to BNI, Business Network International, and hope that a landlord is there. Or they'll take a realtor to lunch and pray that he'll give him a referral. How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? They just need these leads. Whereas in real estate sales, real estate sales and other industries, we've got Cole Realty Resource, we've got SmartZip, we've got the REDX. We've got all these prospecting tools. Property management industry just does not have that, which has made it impossible for property managers to pursue this blue ocean, 70% of self-managed landlords. There's no way for them to contact them. They have no visibility into that market. Just from a very macro perspective, that's what we're trying to provide the industry. To be able to turn the focus from just closing hand razors, people who go on Google and raise their hands and say, "We want your service," to be able to aggressively pursue that market instead of just waiting for leads to come to them. That's what we see. That's my thesis is that there's a problem in property management that they need this data and we can provide it. We're still proving and testing that thesis. But we're very excited to get out there and be able to offer that to people. We've seen some success. If people want to contact me, there are plenty of ways on our website. You can go ahead and email me. My personal email address is ben.r.atkin@gmail.com. That's probably the easiest way to reach out to me personally. Though, I'm also tuned in on the website if you chat with us. It'll be an actual person who answers that. If you're in Utah and Nevada, go online, signup for a free trial. We’d love to have you start using the system. We do a two-week, 30 lead, free trial. Other than that, just reach out to me. I'd love to chat about it, and jive about property management, and see if we can help this industry grow from the 30% penetration to 40% or 50% or 60%. I see there needs to be some sort of change in order to be able to do that. Jason: Cool. Ben, where are you based out of? Ben: I'm in St. George, Utah. Just an hour North of Las Vegas, Nevada. Jason: Got it. I know where it is. I was born in Utah. Alright. We'll connect, I think that I have a lot of clients are at the point where they're ready to be able to leverage their service like this. I think a lot of property managers are not. I think a lot of them really are just not ready to leverage something like this, unfortunately. If that's the case, reach out to DoorGrow. Then they'll see if you're ready. "You're ready. You have the bandwidth to do these kind of things and grow your business. Let's get you connected to DoorsUp." I look forward to watching what you guys do, seeing the progress, and growth of your company. Ben: Thanks, it's a pleasure. Jason: Thanks for coming in this show. Ben: Hopefully, we'll see you at NARPM. Anybody else, hopefully, we'll see in there. Thanks! Jason: Alright. Very cool. If you are a property management entrepreneur, and you are wanting to grow your business, and you want to grow without SEO, without pay-per-click, without content marketing, without social media marketing, without uncomfortable videos, without pay-per-lead services, and they're having phenomenal growth, they're easily adding in a year 100 doors to their business, they're adding $100,000 in revenue to their business annually and you want to do that, maybe you're one of these companies that, right now, is losing more doors than you're getting on right now because it's difficult to try to outpace the market when doors are selling off because the market's good with marketing then reach out to DoorGrow. Let's optimize your business, let's get you ready to use a service like this, and some other strategies, and tactics that we have, that can help you grow your business. Check us out at doorgrow.com. We would love to help you out. We want, like what I say in the intro, we want to impact this industry, and we're excited to find like-minded entrepreneurs like Ben and others that are helping to make this industry great. I think it has massive potential. I believe that property management industry can be as big as the real estate industry; I think it has the potential to really grow here in the US. Let's make that happen, everybody. Make sure, if you're a property management entrepreneur, you join our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. Get inside the community. Connect with us. This is a group for property management business owners. Get with your tribe. Connect with us, and we'll probably see you in person at some of these NARPM events because I'm hitting as many as I can lately. Hopefully, I'll be connecting with you guys in person and inside the DoorGrow Club. Thanks everybody for tuning in to DoorGrow Show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Have no fear, when it comes to social media. Share your opinions and what you know. Not everyone will like what you post, but that’s ok. Personal and professional Social media opportunities let you connect with others, build relationships, and post content to attract new business. Today, I am talking to Katie Lance, CEO and co-founder of Katie Lance Consulting. She helps real estate agents and brokers use social media to grow their businesses. Also, Katie is the author of #GetSocialSmart and founder of #GetSocialSmart Academy. She was named one of the most 100 influential people in real estate by Inman News and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post.  You’ll Learn... [02:40] Marketing Nerd: Katie didn't go to school for social media because there was no Facebook when she was in college.  [06:40] Social Media Challenge: Audience doesn’t care about property management.  [07:32] Don’t be Vanilla: Be engaging, interesting, unique, and authentic voice for what’s happening in your industry and market.  [10:08] Love vs. Hate: Share your opinions, and attract your tribe through polarity.  [12:20] People don’t buy what you do (property management), but why you do it.  [13:18] Warning: Don’t outsource all your social media, or you’ll lose your voice.  [15:59] Avoid anxiety and conquer fear of social media by creating a system or strategy.  [17:27] Day-in-the-Life of You: Done is better than perfect.  [22:05] Consistency and Batch Creating Content: The more you do it, the more comfortable you get.  [26:21] Repurposing Content: One piece can be posted on multiple platforms.  [27:15] Platform of Choice: Depends on your target audience.  [28:40] Future of Social Media: Instagram TV and video is where it’s at. [31:54] Personal and Professional Social Media Opportunities: Connect with others, build relationships, and post content to attract new business.  Tweetables Be you, instead of your business on social media. Done is better than perfect. Comment, Connect, and Create Content Don’t suffer from analysis paralysis. Resources Katie Lance Consulting Katie Lance on Instagram Katie Lance on Facebook #GetSocialSmart #GetSocialSmart Academy Inman News The Huffington Post Simon Sinek National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Instagram TV TikTok 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, and today's guest, I'm hanging out with Katie Lance from Katie Lance Consulting. Hi, Katie. Katie: Hi, Jason. Thanks for having me here today. Jason: I am glad to have you. Katie, we’re going to be so social today. Katie: That would be a lot of fun. Jason: [...] social media and we're on social media right now. We're doing it. Katie, help everybody understand your background. Can I read some of your bio? Katie: Sure, go ahead.  Jason: It’s really well written. Katie is the CEO and co-founder of Katie Lance Consulting. Katie is a nationally known keynote speaker at conferences and events. For the past 10 years, Katie has been working with real estate agents and brokers to help them get smarter about how to use social media to grow their business. Her specialty is in helping real estate agents and brokers achieve big results using social media without spending a ton of time. She is also the author of the best-selling book, #GetSocialSmart and the founder of #GetSocialSmart Academy. Katie has been named one of the most 100 influential people in real estate by Inman News and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two beautiful boys. Katie, welcome to the show. Tell us how did you get into social media? How did this come about for you?  Katie: I’ve always loved social media. I've always been a marketing nerd. I’ve always been one of those people to just really love marketing and didn't necessarily go to school for social media, and probably dating myself, but there was no Facebook when I was in college. I fell in love with social media and probably about 10 or 12 years ago. I got my first job in real estate. I was hired as a marketing director for a local real estate company and that was really when social media was starting to come to the forefront. I just remember having this epiphany and thinking this is so perfect for real estate. I had seen so many agents and brokers spending so much money on traditional marketing, which, a lot of it still works. I don't necessarily think social media replaces traditional marketing, if that's working for you, but it can be so expensive. And I thought, what a great opportunity.  That's really where I fell in love with it. I worked at that real estate company for a while, then I went to work for In The News for quite some time, ran their social media, and grew their social presence. Then about 2012 I decided, “You know? I'm going to go out on my own,” and got that entrepreneurial bug and haven't looked back since. It's been quite a journey.  Jason: What caused you to take that leap? It's a risky leap. To preface this, I didn't realize I was an entrepreneur. Even though I was the guy that started a band in college, created big events, going door-to-door pre-selling CDs so I could pay for an album at college girls dorms with a guitar and a clipboard, I didn’t realize I was an entrepreneur. I thought I needed a job, but what pushed me over the edge to jump into entrepreneurism was a divorce and needing to take care and wanting to have time with my kids. Out of necessity, I had to do it. What caused you to take the leap? That's a pretty big leap. People don’t just go, “I've got a job that’s going pretty well. I’m just going to throw it to the wind and go do something on my own.” Katie: I think there’s a couple of things. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. Any job I've ever had, I've always treated it as if it were my company. It was always very hard for me to just “work a 9–5 and turn the off button off.” I guess I always had that attitude for anywhere I've ever worked and I had a great job [...]. I've worked there for many years and for a lot of people, you get to a point in your career where you have that itchy feeling, like what's that next thing. Jason: Something more. Katie: Yeah, there's something more and quietly started to explore other options. It just became really clear to me that I don't necessarily want to work for anyone else. I want to work for myself and I want to be able to help not just one company but lots of different people, lots of different companies, lots of different organizations. And it was scary. It's a whole another ballgame. I'm happily married, we have mortgage, we have kids, so it's not necessarily the easiest leap. The hardest part was just making that decision. Then you make the decision and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there. I also had a really supportive husband, which makes a big difference, too. Jason: I was going to ask about that. If a spouse is not in support as an entrepreneur, there's a lot of friction, right? Katie: Yes.  Jason: And a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we tend to pair up with people that want safety and certainty. They're our balance and our opposite.   Katie: Yes. Actually, he ended up quitting his corporate job about 2½ years ago, so now we run our company side-by-side and it's been a great journey. Jason: So you converted him? Katie: I think I did, yes. Jason: [...] to a job, right? Katie: Yes.  Jason: Perfect, love it. Let's get into the topic at hand, which is how people can grow social media. I tend to be upfront and honest. A lot of my listeners have heard me say, probably at different times, that the challenge that property managers face with social media is that their target audience does not care about property management.  They don't care at all and when they ask me, “Should I spend a bunch of time and energy doing social media?” my general response is, “How much time are you spending time following and listening to plumbers? Plumbers want your business. They want your attention. Why aren't you subscribing to their newsletters and following them on social media?” and they're like, “Because I don't care about plumbing.” I’m like, “Your audience don't care about property management.” What should they be doing? I'm excited to get into this. Katie: I think social media is relevant for obviously a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs and whether you're in property management or you're a plumber or whatever business you're in, that is the default response. “Well, who really cares? Is this really interesting to a lot of people?” At the end of the day, one of the ways to get traction on social media is to be that unique voice, that authentic voice of what's happening in your industry, what's happening in the market. People tend to follow you and engage with you, not necessarily for just facts and information that you're spewing out there, but because they connect with who you are and your personality.  It's amazing about the management or real estate, and a lot of it's so done through word-of-mouth. A lot of it is still done through those connections that we make. That's what I think there's a lot of value in social media. It's funny you mentioned plumbers because there's actually a plumber who's killing it on YouTube, because of exactly what you said, because most people don't think like, “Oh, who's going to put out that type of content?” But his content is engaging, it's interesting, it's valuable, but it's also with his voice.  That's the thing that property management. You could talk about renting or whoever and all these different topics when it comes to property management. But you can insert your own opinion, your voice and not be afraid to just be really truly who you are. Some people won’t like it and that’s okay. Those aren’t your people. Jason: I’m going to rephrase what you just said and sum it up. It's more important on social media to be you than to be your business. Katie: Absolutely.  Jason: That's really what's going to attract and get people to resonate and connect with you as if you're willing to put it out there and be you, weirdness and all, and that's something. People follow me on social media, no. I'm putting out random stuff all the time about my life and who I am, and I figure that some people are just not gonna like me.  Katie: Yeah, and that’s okay. Jason: There are definitely people that don’t like me.  Katie: Sometimes, we try to want to be really professional and we don't offend anybody. I'm certainly not saying start offending people on social media. But there's that risk of becoming just really vanilla and really boring. If you think about as an end user, somebody uses Facebook or Instagram, what do you click like on? What do you comment on? What do you share? Typically, it's things that are funny, or poignant, or interesting, or they move you in some emotion, you get angry. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion. That's where I think in real estate and property management, really for any entrepreneur, that's where the magic is because most people are not putting up that type of content. If they are, they're not doing it on a consistent basis. That's a big thing that can make a huge difference. Jason: People should have an opinion and share their opinion on Facebook and let their freak flag fly, right?  Katie: Yes, and be comfortable with the fact when you do that, there’s going to be people that watch you and say, I don’t like that guy or girl. You have to be okay with that because with the opposite, which will happen, is that you will start to attract the people who go, “I really like that guy. He's doing a podcast? What other podcasts? I got to catch up on all of his podcast episodes.” That's what happens with video. When you start putting out especially episodic video or episodic podcast content, people start defining you. They’re like, “What else does she put out there?” and you search who attract your tribe. That's what can turn to business down the road. It just takes time just like anything else.  Jason: I’ve always thought this is very in align with what I think and feel, is that if you are not creating polarity, if there's no polarity, then you can’t be attractive. A magnet without polarity is not a magnet anymore. It's not attract anything. Nothing will be pulled towards it. Electricity without polarity doesn't exist anymore if you remove the polarity. There has to be polarity and that means you have to be willing to polarize someone there. I've probably been a little too polarizing in some instances; let's be honest. But I've noticed that when you are willing to just be you and polarize and put it out there, yes, you're going to have people that don't like you. You’re going to get flack for that, people are not going to attract you, but you now are attracting the right people. You’re attracting people that like you the way that you are. They like the way you communicate, they like the way that you coach, they like the way that you run your business, they like your philosophy.  Just like Simon Sinek said, “People don't buy what you do.” They don't buy what you do. They don’t buy property management, they don’t property management coaching/consulting from me, they don't buy what you do, they don't buy social media, whatever from you. They really buy why we do it. That's really what they're buying into is they believe in Katie, they believe in Jason, they believe in the property manager, they believe in you and they share values. What you do is really an afterthought compared to that. So, they need to create polarity. This is a great question everybody listening can ask is am I creating polarity? Have I offended anybody in the last month? And have I attracted anybody in the last month? Did anybody say, “Hell yes, I agree to that,” or, “That totally rubs me the wrong way,” but that's you, so thanks for sharing.  Katie: Absolutely. Jason: We don't want to be vanillas. What’s maybe the next thing that we should take away? Katie: Like I said, don't be vanilla. I've often said, “Lean into who you are and who you're not.” It goes hand in hand with that idea of not being vanilla. I also think a big part of your social media strategy is not outsourcing it completely. There's this feeling even still in 2019 of, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t have time to do this. It's one more thing. Who can I hire to do it?” It's a little bit of a slippery slope because I do think that there's value in hiring certain people. For example, we have a video editor on our team because my value is being on camera but I don't need to learn video editing, I really don't need it. For one or two, that's fine, but I don't have desire. Jason: That’s not your dream and goal in life is to edit videos and stare at videos on the screen for hours a day. Katie: Exactly, it’s not my dream. I’d rather put my eye out, honestly. Jason: Me neither. Katie: Similar with podcast. My value is in the content and the education I can bring, not necessarily in can I edit something. I think there's value in bringing at some point, maybe not in the beginning, people on who could help you with either editing, for example video or podcast editing, or copywriting if you enjoy writing, or something as a blogger or graphic designer, but to totally hand out who are personally is really risky and there's lots of businesses out there that are selling this idea. “You're too busy. Let us do it for you.” I would just caution anyone to be just be careful when you do that because you're handing off who you are. It's like having a dinner party with your 10 most important clients, and instead of you being there, you have your assistant run the whole thing. I just think it's a basic tip, but it's also something that is important to address because time is all we have. It's our most precious asset. I don't think you need to spend all day on social media. I'm in the business of social media and I'm certainly not on social media all day long, but it comes down to having a smart system, and making sure you're inserting yourself and your personality into what you do. I think that's really valuable.  Jason: This makes a lot of sense. I think there's so many parallels to this. There's so many situations in which we would not outsource. I wouldn't outsource to somebody to be the dad of my kids. I'm really single again after two decades, so I wouldn't outsource somebody else to use swiping on dating apps for me. They just don’t know what I’m into.  There's a lot of things we just should not outsource. And yet, being the face of our business, we will a lot of times as business owners, want to just outsource that, like some company can just come in and post a bunch of memes and garbage, and we're suddenly going to get business from it and then we wonder why it's not working. What about those business owners that are not charismatic, they don't have personality, they're better behind the scenes, they just feel really awkward putting anything out there. How do you deal with that? Some of the listeners avoid social media. Social is like an anxiety-inducing word to them.  Katie: For a lot of people who are anxious or feel a little overwhelmed with social media, I would imagine part of it is because you don't have a system for, and it feels like this thing that's out there, that you have to do, that you don't really know how to do it right, and everybody saying that you have to do it, but you don't really have a plan. It just becomes sort of the snowball. The thing is, anytime you're trying something new, especially with technology, it can feel ridiculously annoying. You feel like, “Oh, my God. What am I? How do I not know how to do this?” and it's just like anything else. We work with a lot of agents and brokers. I always say, “Imagine when you first got your real estate license. You took the test, you went through the courses, but you didn't really know what you're doing until you had your first client. And then you really learn. And then you learn again and again and again.” Part of it is just getting over and putting yourself out there. Sometimes we're so concerned with who am I, who cares what people think, I don't know, I don't like how I look or how I sound, I don't know how to do it, so I’m not going to do it. I always like to say, “Done is better than perfect.” Jason: Oh, my gosh. I [...] that, too. I love that. Katie: I’d love to say I made that up. I did not make that up. I’ve heard it somewhere and probably from you. Jason: Maybe not. I think I got it from my business coach. I’m sure he got it from somewhere, too. Katie: You just start today. So if you’re listening to this, start today. Go on Facebook and connect with three or four people at Facebook today. Don’t just like a bunch of stuff, but go on engage with a few people. Wish somebody a happy birthday. Start today. Then you can move on from there. Part of it is just getting a system together, getting a process together. One quick thing I'll mention real fast for anyone who's feeling a little bit overwhelmed, I would encourage you to think about all the things that you do on a day-to-day basis, all the questions you get asked, all the topics of conversation that come up. Get a notebook, get a pen, and just start brainstorming things that happen a day in the life of you. I would imagine you're going to come up with 10, 20, 30 different topics of things that you could potentially talk about, whether that's through video or on Facebook or whatever it might be. Just go to start. “Just do it,” like Nike says. Jason: I love the concept of done is better than perfect. I put that because a lot of times we're trying to get clients to launch their websites, we're trying to get them to take action and moving themselves forward on different things, and they just stay analyze really hard about something and they want it to be so perfect. I just iterate over and over again, done is better than perfect because once it's done, it can do its job in making money. You can go back and change it later, you can improve it later, but get something done because until you have something there, until you have the website up, or until you have this launch, or until you've done something, it's nothing to do anything for you. The other mantra that I'll share with everybody listening, if you're in that state of overwhelm, you’re feeling scared, whatever, just remember that that's how you start everything. One of my favorite mantras is, we all start at level suck. That's where you start in everything. You start at level suck. That is the level you started everything. My first YouTube video was two minutes long and had 30 uhms and and so's in it, and I had to edit them out. The video looked choppy and it was awful. It was so awful. I tried to get perfect lighting, I have my little mic clip thing, an uncomfortable shirt with a collar, and I was trying to be what I thought I needed to be in order to do a video and look good. I'd probably spent hours making a two-minute video. Here's the ironic thing for everybody listening. You think it has to be so perfect? I've made way more money by doing really crappy, shaky, jittery, selfie style videos, walking around outside, than any of those videos were I was uncomfortable behind a desk or in a shirt or whatever in front of a whiteboard.  Don't think it has to be perfect. People will crave reality nowadays because there's so much BS. They’re really craving reality. The other thing I point out to clients, is that they are talking to people all day, every day and it's really the same thing. You just look at a device and pretend you're talking to a person, you just say exactly what you would say and talk the same way. You don't have to think, “What am I going to do with my hands?” What do you do with your hands normally when you talk to people? “How’s my face supposed to like?” How does your face normally look? Just talk. You have the thing like you're talking to a person. So, just start noticing when you're talking to people and pretend they're a camera or a phone and just realize they're not that scary or awkward.  Katie: Absolutely. To your point, it doesn't have to be perfect. What a lot of people don't realize that maybe they forget is the lifetime of a post is pretty short. Let’s say you create a video, you put it on Facebook, that video will disappear in a couple hours. You put it on Twitter, tweet disappears in a matter of seconds. YouTube has a longer shelf life and certain content certainly has a longer shelf life. But generally speaking, we live in a world with so much noise, I often feel like I'm standing on the side of the freeway just watching cars fly by. If it's not your best performance, it doesn't have to be Oscar-worthy. As you said, just get it out there and especially with video, it's like a muscle. I will say the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. I don't know if I'm ever totally comfortable hearing myself and seeing myself, but what I am comfortable with are the results. That's what you have to think about. When you put yourself out there over the course of time consistently, that's when the magic happens. It's literally like a snowball and the consistency part is a huge part of it. Do you mind if I share a quick tip? Jason: Go ahead. Give us all the tips you want to. We want some free Katie Lance Consulting right now. Katie: Perfect. One of the things I always share with our GetSocialSmart Academy members is this idea of batch-creating your content. I love batch creating because for me, if I'm going to sit down, do my hair and makeup, and record one video, I might as well sit down and record four or five. We've been doing that the last couple years and that's made a huge difference. We'll set aside a couple hours once a month where I do the hair, get the camera set up, whatever. To be honest with you, the first 99 episodes were shot on my phone. So, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. This idea of getting into a system and batch-creating your content, that way you're done, you're locked and loaded. When we do that, then we're able to drip out those episodes once a week for the next month, but it gets you into that rhythm. When you're publishing at the same day and time every single week, people who start to follow you, as we talked about earlier, they start to notice that. It's just like your favorite TV show, you may not watch your favorite TV show Thursday night at 9:00 PM or Monday at 8:00 PM, but you know it's on and you set your DVR. It's the same thing with content. Once you start to put it out there regularly, if you can start doing it consistently, it can make a big difference.  Jason: Absolutely. That's one of the reasons I really like my assistant; made this show finally somewhat consistent. We're getting about two episodes done a week now. Consistency is huge because as soon as you disappear for a week or two, people are wondering if you're gone. You lose the engagement, you lose the momentum, so done is better than perfect, but consistency is better than anything, really, probably.  Katie: People wonder what's the best day. There's no best day. What day is good for you? Just pick a day. I remember when I first started sending out and email newsletters, it’s like, “Well, let's do it on a Saturday. I don't know. That sounds like a good day.” Seven years later, we're still sending our email newsletters out on Saturday, and people are like, “Oh, I love it. Get it every Saturday morning.” It's just consistency. So, pick a day. Jason: Love it. I love the idea of batching tasks, and you can apply that to so many different things. I just did a post on this on social media about this and I showed my pill case. I hate going and digging through all my supplement bottles every single meal, trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be taking. So, I got this pill case. It’s literally the size of a notebook. It's got every day of the week, four times a day, and I fill it once a week. If I travel I can take it with me. It's done, I can just take these supplements. That's how I'm able to be so sharp and so crazy all day long. No, I’m just kidding. Batching tasks reduces the decision-making that has to go into and the thought that has to go into it every day. You don't have to sit there, stress out, and “What should I talk about today? Oh, my gosh. I need to do a post. I haven't done it for a couple days,” and thinking about it. I love the idea of batch the tasks and we've got a pile of them waiting. Even with this podcast, we've got several episodes in the can. We're releasing them to iTunes and dripping them out because we want to have a little bit of padding. There's an advantage to having some things in the can, especially if you want to keep the consistency. What if you want to travel? I'm going to Austin this week to meet with my business coach. Next week, I'm going to Phoenix to talk to the NARPM Chapter in Phoenix. We’ll still be able to release some episodes while I'm gone.  Katie: That's awesome. What you're doing which is so smart is you're repurposing your content. We're streaming this live, it's getting shared on social media, but you're going to put it on YouTube, at some point, you're going to put it on iTunes. That's really where the magic can happen because instead of feeling like you have to post something every single day, why not invest in one great piece of content like this podcast you're creating.  That's what we try to do, too. It's one piece of great content, and then it can get sliced and diced a dozen different ways. You can turn it into an Instagram story or an Instagram post today and a post some two or three weeks, especially when you create content that's somewhat timeless. It's not just relevant on what's happening in the market, but it's going back to sharing things that are informative, that are really helping your audience, that have a voice, have an opinion, and that repurposing, there's a lot of magic in that. Jason: Let's talk about platform then. How do people pick? Because they're like, “Should I be on Instagram? Should I be doing LinkedIn? Should I be doing Facebook? Should I be on Twitter?” What's your recommendation when people are like, “What platform should I be on?” Katie: It depends on a couple things. Number one, where your audience is. Right now, typically, Facebook is still the number one platform for a lot of people in property management or real estate or even as an entrepreneur. But I also think that's changing as well. Instagram is growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of people have started to leave Facebook and go over to Instagram, even though Instagram is owned by Facebook, because Instagram is such an aspirational platform, lots of pretty pictures, there's not as many political posts and noise on Instagram right now. I think those are two big ones to watch.  I do think for LinkedIn, though, it's important to at least have your profile updated. Make sure that's up to date. LinkedIn is not as fun as Facebook or Instagram, but if you get googled or your company gets googled, typically, one of the first things that pops up is LinkedIn. Just making sure that's up to date, that's professional social network. Outside of LinkedIn, I do think Facebook and Instagram are two big platforms to connect with people, stay in touch with people, and then also to post relevant content and to repurpose some of the content you're creating. Jason: What do you think is coming new in social media? I'm sure you're always paying attention. What do you think coming up that's hot, that probably the teenagers are using that we’ll eventually be using? Katie: Good question. Snapchat was getting a lot of buzz a year or two ago, that a lot of folks in real estate were jumping on that. I think a lot of people realize it's still for the kids. Jason: I think the Instagram stories and Facebook stories killed it.  Katie: I agree. I think a big opportunity right now is definitely Instagram. Instagram is spending a lot of money and resources for people to stay on their platform. Especially Instagram TV right now is a big opportunity. That launched about a year or two ago. It’s doing so-so and then Instagram made some really big changes pretty recently to Instagram TV. When you're uploading a video to Instagram TV—if you don't know, you can upload a video up to 10 minutes—when you upload it to Instagram TV, you now share a one minute preview over to your newsfeed on Instagram, which shows up on your page, it shows up in your newsfeed, which is more likely that it shows up in the explore button. We found that for whatever reason, Instagram wants you to spend more time on Instagram TV. Our posts on Instagram TV are getting a much higher reach, likes, and engagement than just about any of our other posts. As of right now, as of the recording this podcast, that's definitely one to watch. It just reinforces a lot of what we're talking about with video. Jason: I will have to start doing those. When they started doing it, I was like, “This isn’t getting any attention,” but I have noticed, I have watched a few videos on Instagram, and I've hit that button that says, “Keep watching.” Katie: Yeah, it definitely keeps you engaged. We used to just beginning a couple of hundred views on our videos and now we’re consistently getting thousands of views on our videos. It's nothing really different that we've done other than just be consistent with putting up that content, sharing it over to our news feed. I think, ultimately, video is worth that. If you’re not creating original video content in your business, you’re missing a really big opportunity. Facebook even recently just came out over the last couple weeks and said, “Video has one of the highest rates in the Facebook newsfeed, original video content versus content that’s shared from somebody else.” If there was ever a time to get over, “How do I look?” or, “How do I sound?” or, “I have nothing to say,” now's the time to do it. Jason: Just do it. Nike. Katie: Just do it, yes. Jason: I'll just throw this out there because somebody is going to mention it later. If they have teenagers, I think TikTok right now is the thing. Katie: It is, yes. Jason: My teenager’s really into this TikTok thing. I don't know if that will somehow eventually translate to business, but let’s see where it gets. Katie: It might. It's fun to watch. It’s entertaining. Jason: It’s like the new Vine. It’s ridiculous. Katie: Exactly. Jason: Any other tips or takeaways we can squeeze out of Katie Lance before we let you go? Katie: If you are in real estate in any capacity or an entrepreneur, I really can't emphasize enough. There's two big opportunities with social. The personal side of it, being intentional, taking just 5 or 10 minutes a day to connect with people, wish people happy birthday, don’t just be a drive-by liker, actually be a person, connect. That relationship-building piece is so important. Then, that other piece is putting out new content, which is going to attract new business. I just would encourage anybody who's listening to really think about it. I love using techniques like time blocking where you're setting aside time, a couple of times a week, maybe it's just 15 minute blocks of time, or a couple times a month, to really get a system together. If you think about the areas of your business you’re most successful in, most likely there's some sort of system or process. Whether or not you're working with us or anybody else, that's my biggest tip. Get the system, get a process together, and don't wait. Don't suffer from analysis paralysis. Just do it. Jason: All right. Awesome. I love it. So, commenting and connecting, and then content and creation are things we need to build our social network, and we need to create social media. Two different things. Katie, if people are wanting to get a plan, get organized, figure this stuff out, be interesting, and learn social media, how can they get in touch with you? Katie: The best way is through our website, people can go to katielance.com. We have a free content grid that anyone can sign up for. It's a great planning guide. So, if you're listening to this going, “Okay, I’m stuck when it comes to putting a system together,” you can download that content grid for free right on our website. We have hundreds of free resources on our website, as well. Of course, I'm Katie Lance kon just about every social media platform. You can find me on Instagram or Facebook also. Jason: Awesome. Cool. And then anybody listening can also connect with me. I’m King Jason Hull on all social media. There we go, we were just very social, sharing ideas about social media. Katie, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for being here. Katie: Thank you so much for having me. Jason: Really cool. Check her out at katielance.com. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, as I said in the intro, be sure to reach out, connect with DoorGrow, we would love to help you figure out how to grow your business. If you feel stuck or frustrated, you feel like you're trying to do a bunch of marketing, pay per click, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and it's not working for some reason. You may have some blind spots. We can help you organize, sort out those blind spots, and get some clarity on the business, to help you focus on the growth side of your business. We would love to help you do that. If you want to see a big blind spot, you can start with a very public one, your website. Take our website quiz by going to doorgrow.com/quiz and grade your website. This will give you a letter grade for your website. Most websites fail going through this and this quiz will grade your website as to how effective it is at making your money, at creating conversions, at attracting leads. Go ahead and fill that out and then we'll be in touch with you.  Thanks everybody for tuning in to the DoorGrow Show. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.