Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

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

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

Is there a way for property managers to reduce delinquent rent payments by more than 50 percent? How can residents positively or negatively impact their credit score by 20-70 points? Today, I am talking to President Dave Haldi and CEO Steve Jarvis of CredHub, which helps property managers report on every resident, including those considered a credit risk. It reports the positive and negative, incentivising tenants to make paying on time their top priority. You'll Learn... [01:47] CredHub: Name change, funding, continued growth, and creating transparency. [02:06] CredHub's Competition: Most companies only process and record positive payments, not negative payments on individual's credit score. [02:28] Bolt-on Technology: CredHub connects and bolts onto rental software systems to validate positive and negative payments via rent roll system. [02:52] How it works: Provides property managers access to an individual's credit score information reported to credit bureaus and pass-through revenue opportunity. [03:27] RentCredit Plus includes identity theft resolution services and rental payment reporting to credit bureaus for $3.50 each month. [04:20] Customer Support: Resolution Services as Customer Support: If there is a credit issue, CredHub takes on responsibility to work with credit bureaus. [05:35] Doing Good Things: CredHub helps people get back their financial health and credit for payments. [06:42] Recapitalization: Report all data at scale to achieve goal of growing CredHub. [07:58] Lease vs. Mortgage: What's the difference? Educate managers and residents. [09:13] Audit Proof: Information given to credit bureaus via CreditHub must be correct. [11:25] Collections: CredHub has credentials to create trade line for property managers. [11:54] Implementation Process: After CredHub has signed agreement, implementation takes about six weeks. Tweetables Increase credit score by 20–70 points; make paying rent on time a top priority. CredHub: Bolt-on, backend, rent roll, data pole cleansing and reporting at scale. CredHub: Gets property managers out of credit business, and puts them in property management business. CredHub reports the positive and negative, incentivizing tenants to pay on time. Resources CredHub CredHub's YouTube Channel Yardi RealPage Rent Manager ResMan TransUnion Equifax Rogers Payment Fair Credit Reporting Act DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Dave: ...opportunity for property managers to help reduce their delinquency because we figured out a way to report the negative or late payments. The program can then help increase an individual's credit score 20–70 points on a positive perspective but it will also impact their score negatively and help reduce delinquency by over 50% encouraging an individual to pay on time and making rent their priority to pay. It started four years ago, validated the idea, worked with some property management companies locally. We changed the name to CredHub a little about a year ago, got funded, we've had continued growth, and built an automated technology with a dashboard to create transparency of what we had learned from the marketplace. That's what created CredHub and that's where we are today. Jason: Perfect. There's other companies in the space they that do this. Is that correct? Dave: There are a few companies but we're a bolt-on technology. Most of the companies that we have come across are payment processors and they may process payments only allowing to record positive payments on an individual's credit score. Our technology connects and bolts on to the back-end of rental software systems—Yardi, RealPage, Rent Manager, ResMan, et cetera. Therefore, we validate the payment that has been made because it comes out of the back-end of the rent roll system allowing us to report positive and negative. It also gives the property manager, on-site resident manager transparency to see what information was reported to the credit bureaus once it's been uploaded and helps affect the individual's credit score. So, we're different. We also create a pass-through revenue opportunity for the property manager to make some additional revenue for their bottom line through our program. Jason: Okay, explain how that works. Dave: So, we have RentCredit Plus, which also includes an identity theft resolution services because identity theft is such an issue today, especially in larger properties with mail rooms, et cetera. With that, we charge $3.50 for this program that is identity theft resolution services as well as reporting the rental payments to the credit bureaus, both positive and negative, on a monthly basis. It would be our best results or best practices or we make this program mandatory for all residents. We charge $3.50 per person on the lease including the co-signer and most of our clients charge $7. So, they make a 50% increase of what we charge for the product and for the services that we provide. In addition to that, we also provide the resolution services, making sure that if they do have a credit issue, we take on all the responsibility to work with the credit bureaus to make sure if something was reported incorrectly, we will fix it. So, we provide that customer support from a third party's perspective, not eliminating the burden to the on-site resident manager and getting them out of the credit business because they're in the property management business. Jason: Got it, okay. So, Steve, what's your role at CredHub then? Steve: Yeah. So, I came in to the company about a year ago when we recapitalized the company as Dave said and renamed it to CredHub and that recapitalization was really meant to build this platform so that we could do this back-end, rent roll, data pole cleansing and reporting at scale. My career was always in automation and travel. I worked for the likes of Expedia and built alaskaair.com for Alaska Airlines and had retired from travel, and was looking for an interesting new project that really had an element of doing good things for people that needed it which, I believe, we're doing it at CredHub. The folks that are now going to be able to get credit for their Rogers payment or are young folks that are credit-invisible or folks that need to get back in financial health back on their feet. It feels really good to be working in this market. I'm CEO, so primarily looking at business development and strategy finance. The goal here is to really do this at scale nationally. You mentioned what makes us different and David had mentioned that the element of negative reporting of late and skipped payments and its impact on getting residents to pay on time for property managers. No one's really done that at scale. Like Dave has said, others in the market that are doing reporting are doing almost entirely positive reporting which it's pretty easy. The hard part is this is what we do is getting all of the data reported and doing it at scale. I came in with the recapitalization, with an element to really growing this thing nationally and doing it in a big way. Jason: Perfect. So, what questions do property managers typically want to know about CredHub? Steve: Well, one of the things, for me, especially coming into the property management space having been to trade shows, travel, and technology, the core of what we do is really, really easy to understand, which is really compelling. When we talk to property managers, it's pretty easy to get what we do in 90 seconds. Like really, wow, you can report positive and negative to credit bureaus, reduce my delinquency, I can add a revenue stream, and my residents will like it because I'm helping them. There aren't a lot of questions there. We do get some questions as we roll through closing clients on the legal side. We'll get a legal department and a property management company worrying about disputes from their residents but it's a fairly easy question to answer because the residents have a financial obligation. They have a contract called a lease. It's not that different than a mortgage. Property management companies who aren't being paid by the residents have every right to report that to the credit bureaus. There's an education process that I think we need to go through on that side of the sales process with property managers. Oftentimes, we'll get questions on whether this is optional. Property management company may want to have this be an opt-in for their residents. That's not how we work. We report the entire file to the entire resident population to the credit bureaus which is what they want. Our program really only works for property managers if everybody's being reported including those that are credit risk. Dave, do you have any other? Dave: Yeah. I think a couple of analogies would be and it really creates this carrot with the stick, encouraging people to pay on time and because they require everybody, all of the residents to be reported the messaging is consistent for everyone. It also has helped us because of our platform being so audit-proof because the information that needs to go to the credit bureaus has to be right. We found that we've really helped clean up the data that we're pulling out of the system because it has to be correct. We provide an error submission report and that report can go back so it's something that maybe the on-site resident manager or assistant manager can help clean up as they're going through their lease renewals or new residency. We found errors or mistakes when maybe a check has come in, it got incorrectly posted. Because ours is third party, it helps to create checks and balances and the system is audit-proof. It provided an additional layer but easy for people to log into and make the changes. And we support them seven days a week, 24/7 if they have an issue. I think the other questions that may come up is, "Well, how does this work?" One of the things for a property management firm who works with us, we create a trade line at the credit bureaus. We have credentials and privileges with TransUnion and Equifax so we credential them and create a trade line with the bureaus. Therefore, if we are working with somebody and we pick a date that we report on the 10th of the month, rent is late at 30 days because we pay rent in advance. If an individual is delinquent or pays late after the 10th or they don't pay, Fair Credit Reporting Act says, "It can't be turned to collections until 90 days." If we report on the 10th, we're going to be 50 days ahead when that person can go to collections affecting their credit score, encouraging them to pay the property manager in full and not having to lose that income that could be the cost of going through collections. That's a piece that becomes critical in what we do and a lot of questions get surrounded about that but we have all the credentials to create the trade line necessary for the property manager. Jason: How difficult is this for a property management business owner to implement? Maybe you could talk a little bit about the process. Dave: The process is we meet with them, we work with them on the pricing, and figure out when it would work for them to implement. Once we have a signed agreement, we try to implement it within six weeks if that works for them. Once we've got credentials with the bureaus, then our data team connects with somebody in their office. It usually takes an hour, but once we pull the data to get it out of the system, then we go through some testing on our end making sure that the data is correct. Once we've confirmed that, we give them four weeks or a month. Let's just say, we signed a contract in August. We would give them the month of September, lay out a timeline that we work with them to educate their on-site resident managers, create a lease addendum because we know that our best practices if they sign, if they put the addendum in the lease, it gets explained to them helping that education of why it's important to pay your rent on time. Then, they sign the leases with the addendum. We have a template, but we can make changes to the addendum depending on how they want to implement it. And then we would begin reporting on the 10th of the following month or on a mutually-agreed date they want to pull it. In some states like Washington, with just changing the 3-day evict or 14-day evict, we used to report some property management firms on the 15th but because of that change, they have asked us to report on the 5th. So, we can change the pull date and the report date helping encourage the protection of the property management company for these individuals who are playing the system or gaming the system and not paying their rent on time. Jason: Okay. Cool. It sounds pretty simple, sounds like a really good idea, really good service. Now, can landlords listen to this, besides property managers, also implement this, or homeowner? Dave: Yes. We work with any property type or size. If they don't have a rent roll system, we just create a spreadsheet for them, collect the necessary information, and then they can upload the spreadsheet themselves through our portal. We have a variety of ways we can connect and help very managed. Jason: Very cool. All right. The CredHub sounds like a brilliant idea. It reports the positive, it also reports the negative, incentivizing the tenants to make sure they're paying on time. It gives them the benefit of building some credits so there's a carrot and a stick connected to this. You also have identity theft resolution they can be tied to this that can be a profit center. Ultimately, how much does this cost the homeowner or property manager? Or do they just make money doing this? Steve: Pass-through revenue model, they make money doing this. We bolt onto their existing system, we help them do the lease addendum with the residents and they actually make money. We like to think of it as a win-win-win. It's good for the residents, it's great for the property manager, and obviously, we're in business for profit as well. Jason: Win, win, win. All right. Anything else that anybody should know? How can they get in touch with CredHub if somebody's listening to this and they wanted to get started, they wanted to check you guys out? How can they connect? Steve: credhub.com would be the best place to go. We have a YouTube channel that has some really simple videos on it, you can link to those from the CredHub website. In fact, our animated "what we do" video is in the hero image right on the homepage. We have a Contact Us section and a there's a form there that property managers can sign up with the number of units they have and we'll follow-up. That's probably the best way to do it is just to come visit us at credhub.com. Jason: Perfect. Sounds like a no-brainer, it makes sense. I think what you guys are doing is going to help out a lot of people which I resonate with and I appreciate you guys coming out on the DoorGrow Show. Dave: Thanks for having us. Jason: All right, we'll let you guys go. So, checkout CredHub at credhub.com. For those that are new to watching or listening to the DoorGrow Show, be sure to like and subscribe. Leave us a review somewhere that would really make a difference and check us out at doorgrow.com. If you're wanting to grow your property management business, or you're in need of a new website, or you're just wanting to make sure that your business is growing as effectively as it could, reach out. We'd love to talk to you. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Is pre-screening tenant leads the most time-consuming part of your business? What you need is an online system that advertises, generates and pre-screens leads, automates showings, and turns leads into applications at a reasonable price. Today, I am talking to Cliff Hayden of ShowMeTheRental, a time-saving tool for automating and screening rental leads. ShowMeTheRental handles the B.S. part of management between prospective tenants and property managers/owners. You'll Learn... [03:05] From Lineman to Realtor: Longest suspension in AT&T history to do real estate. [04:00] Poor Priorities: Money was goal. Financial success wrecked family/homelife. [05:15] ShowMeTheRental: System put in place to automate lead screening for tenants. [06:12] Fulfilling Family Priorities: Money is a tool, now; not a goal. [07:25] Happy vs. Frustrated Customers: Set expectations of what you expect from them and what they expect from you via questions that filter qualified leads. [11:25] Where is ShowMeTheRental advertised? All major Websites, including Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and HotPads. [15:18] See something you like? Try ShowMeTheRental today to save time and money. Tweetables Working all the time costs you family and friends. Money is a tool, not the goal. You can buy time, but you can't get your time back. Resources Cliff Hayden's Email Cliff Hayden's Phone: 502-641-8781 ShowMeTheRental Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki CASHFLOW Game Kentuckiana Real Estate Investors Association (KREIA) Section 8 Housing Buildium Zillow HotPads Google Trends 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 and expand your rent roll, 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. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to grow property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, expand the market, and help the best property managers win. So, if you enjoy this episode, do me a favor. Open up iTunes, find the DoorGrowShow, subscribe, and then give us a real review. Thank you for helping us with that vision. I'm your host, property management growth hacker, Jason Hull, the founder of OpenPotion, GatherKudos, ThunderLocal, and of course DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. My guest today is, Cliff Hayden. Cliff is from a tool called... what's your tool called, Cliff? Cliff: showmetherental.com Jason: ShowMeTheRental. All right Cliff, let's get into your background. Tell us a little bit about how you got into this so people get familiar with you a little bit. Cliff: I got into ShowMeTheRental to save my marriage, actually, and my family life. I worked at AT&T, my real job, when I first started this business. I was an outside plant technician, which is a fancy word for a line man. [...] bucket trucks and put up telephone lines everywhere. I always wanted something more, so,I got into real estate. You've heard of Robert Kiyosaki? Rich Dad, Poor Dad. My brother-in-law was in, and my sister came back from Iraq. They brought home a game called CASHFLOW. I can remember sitting at the dining room table playing CASHFLOW. I didn't understand that you can buy assets and buy rental houses, and people will pay you and you can make money off of it. That's how green I was when I first started. I knew absolutely nothing. From playing that game, I actually signed up for a mentorship through Robert Kiyosaki. They helped me buy my first duplex. End up being a horrible deal, it was bad, but it all worked out because in that whole process of getting a loan on it and learning what I was doing, I found our local real estate club called Cria. I started going to local meetings and I met a mentor, a guy named Mike Butler. He took me under his wing, showed me the road to real estate, and made sure I didn't fall on my face. He was a big part of my success. From there, I worked a full time job and started buying rentals on the side. Long story short, I just started making enough money to quit my job. Now, cool story that I like to tell is, I do hold the longest suspension in AT&T history. I come from a lower middle class family. I didn't want to quit my job and do real estate full-time. It was a very high paying job for us and a very good job for my family. I just didn't want to up and quit, so got suspended on purpose. As a lineman, you have to have a CDL license, and they random drug test you. They did pop me a random drug test. I decided I wouldn't take it, which is an automatic fail. Then they suspended me. I took that suspension and turned it into four-and-a-half months. In the meantime, in the first month of my suspension, I made my whole salary at AT&T doing real estate full-time. I kind of drag it out and then I decided to quit my job and do real estate full-time, which was awesome, because I was my own boss. I had a lot of fun in the beginning, but my priorities were all mixed up. When I first started, my priority was money was the goal. The problems that I had was all I focused on was money, buying houses, and doing everything I could to get money because I thought that was going to make me happy. What it did is, I became financially successful, but my home life was a wreck. I'm happily married with five children. I would work all day, come home, and continue to work. I couldn't turn it off and it's causing a lot of problems at home. The biggest problems at home is, when I would come home and eat dinner, I would get text messages, phone calls, emails, because at any given time we would have three or four empty rental houses. All these leads would start coming in and my wife would just get, I call it superman vision. She had that look on me where she could shoot lasers out of her eyes. She would. It caused a lot of friction at home and a lot of problems. I decided there's got to be a system I could start putting in place to make this more fun, to make this job smoother, and to get my life back, because I was just working all the time. I didn't see my family, I didn't see my friends, I didn't have anymore friends because I was doing nothing but working all the time. I went out and started putting systems together. One of the systems I wanted was lead screening for tenants because it was our biggest headache. When we get empty houses in our town, nothing to get a hundred phone calls and emails a day. There's no possible way to keep up with those without a system in place. When I tried to find a system, I couldn't find anything I like or anything with a good price point that I like. That's where we created ShowMeTheRental. What we did with ShowMeTheRental is we took all the problems we were having, created a system for it, and then automated it. What ShowMeTheRental does is, it's an online system that advertises, generates leads, prescreens those leads, automates the showings, and turns those leads into applications. We do all these automatically, with a few clicks of a button, and at a price point that I think is incredible. For $49, you can put it in our system and it's on there until it's rented. That's how I got into real estate. Over the last six or seven years, I started changing my priorities to live a more abundant life. Now, money is a tool and not the goal. That's the biggest change I've had over the last several years. Now, I don't miss any field trips. We switched our whole business around and put systems in place so I can be mobile. That's our new goal now. With the technology that's out there now, and the systems in place, if you just take the time to do it, it's not very hard to do. Now, with all our kids, we travel every summer. This year we went to Colorado for a month, then stopped to St. Louis from Branson, Missouri, and we just get back from Pigeon Forge. We have systems in place now to run our company, so we can be mobile and I can do what's important, which is making sure my kids are good, happy, and productive citizens. That's my quick story. Jason: Tell us more about ShowMeTheRental. It sounds like a lot of your clients are individual investors. A lot of investors can use this. They can put in their one property when they need to make sure it gets rented. It deals with all these tenant leads, help systemize the process so they're not overwhelmed in it, and filters out some of the riff-raff and time wasting. Cliff: Correct. Jason: Maybe you could explain the process of once somebody gets into your system, they sign up. Take us through what's going to happen. Cliff: I'll tell you our situation. Our situation was, when we would have leads coming in, we would always find ourselves asking the same questions over and over, which were, "Are you on Section 8? Will you sign a three-year lease? How much money is in your bank account? How long have you been on your job?" Simple questions we wanted answered to qualify, to go see our houses, or to rent our houses. What we did is, we generated a list of around 40 questions that we use and that we think other property managers like you all would use to kind of this thing about big funnel. Take a big funnel people and just get them down to that. Take that 100 or 200, get it down to that 15 or 20 really qualified leads that get access to view your house, so you're not wasting your time. More importantly, what we learned is tenants get pretty upset going to look at houses they're not qualified to go see. They fall in love with the house, only to find out they don't qualify income-wise. "You don't take Section 8. They don't want to sign a three-year lease." We set it up for them also, so they'll have a system where they know that if they don't lie on their question and tell the truth, they'll have a great opportunity to get this house. It could be theirs. We mesh that together so everybody can be happy. Jason: So really, it reverses the issue. A lot of times, what happens is tenants apply for a bunch of properties, renters will apply for a bunch of properties, and hope that they'll get one. They aren't taking a look at the income requirements. None of these things were filtered when you're looking at Zillow rentals or wherever they're looking to find a property. They're just going, "Oh, I like this one. This looks great." They're not really aware of what they would qualify for. They're getting frustrated. They're wasting a lot of time. Really, it doesn't take a whole lot for somebody to get frustrated. You see, you go look at a couple of properties that you like, and find out you don't qualify. You'll start to get pretty upset and annoyed, I'm sure as a renter. It would be really challenging. Cliff: Yes, and there are customers. I call them customers. Just like any business, you want your customers to be happy. You don't want to start them off on the wrong foot. I want to set the expectations upfront about our policies and procedures, so we go into what we expect from them and what they expect from us. It just streamed on that system so much better than what we did before. This way, we're not wasting our time and we're collecting all their information. We can go into that. It's hard to go over on a podcast, but we can. For guests who want to check out showmetherental.com, it shows you we collect all the lead information and we actually have a cross-reference database, that if they don't qualify for my property but you're in our system, they qualify for your property, Jason, it will send them over to you. We have a system where, when properties pop in our system that they qualify for, it will automatically send it to them. I know based on their profile they filled out and the prescreening questions they answered, that they're qualified to go see that house. I think that's important and the tenants really like it, because you said it best, it's just such a headache to go to 20 houses and know you're only qualified to rent two of them. I think a lot of people miss that because I think we need to take care of our customers because they're our business. If we don't take care of them, we don't really have a business. If we can get those good customers in there, spread that word of mouth, and get them to know about us, it makes our lives a lot easier. Jason: What are some of the common questions that a homeowner, or an investor, or maybe even a property manager usually ask you about ShowMeTheRental? Cliff: I don't know the common questions. The biggest one we get is what websites do we advertise on? We do all the major websites. Zillow, which is always number one, Facebook Marketplace, we just syndicated with Zumper, Trulia, HotPads, Rent Leads, all the major websites. We advertise on every major website. How this system works is, when you put in on the website through our system, it goes into our system. Instead of them contacting you, they're going to contact our system. They can contact us via phone, via email, and via phone number. Each specific city has their own phone number and how will they contact us. Usually, 90% is through email. When they go in Zillow and to your property, when they look at it, they'll inquire about it and then we will send them, through ShowMeTheRental, a link to your prescreening questions. From there, they'll answer those questions and if they answer those questions correctly, we will then send them showing instructions based on your preference. We have five different ways to show the property. Once they looked at the property, we will send them a link for an online application. We provide one, but we recommend if you have your own, you can just put your own application link in our system and it will send them to your application. We use a software company called Buildium. I want everything in Buildium, so I'll have all the stuff already entered. From there, we have our screening service. We screen, we don't offer the service we have in our in-house. We then screen the tenant, get all the information we need from them, and we take it from there. Jason: Okay. You're not just helping prescreening, but you're also fielding the phone calls. You really are this barrier between the prospective tenants and the homeowner property manager. Cliff: To me, we're the BS part. We help fix the problem, the BS part of management which is prescreening and leads. I think that is the most cumbersome, time consuming part of our business. Jason: Yeah. It's a huge time waste. Cliff: Yes, A huge time waste. Jason: It just cost a business money. It doesn't make an investor or property manager money. In general, it's the garbage of phone calls. "How many square feet are on this property that I'm looking at right now?" where it says the square feet on the property. You know, these kind of calls. You guys will handle the phone calls? Cliff: The system does, correct. Jason: Or emails, or all that kind of stuff? Cliff: Everything, yes. It's all automated. Jason: Okay, cool. You do it on a per property basis. What bout a property manager that has a lot of properties, or an investor that has a lot of properties? Cliff: What do you consider a lot? To me, a lot is a couple of hundred. If you have multiple properties, we'll work out discount prices for you. I guess there's no grey area. There is no setup fee, but if you have multiple properties on there, multiple times we'll work out deals with you. Most of the time it's people like me, who have 30 something properties. We have pretty nice properties. We sold off all our pain in the ass houses. We might have, out of those properties, every year we have two, maybe three turnovers. I like it. This is more built towards smaller amount of pop we do. Of course, we do take on all the bigger ones, but it's more of, you got two or three rentals a year. If you do have multiple ones, then we'll work with you on prices and make sure everybody is happy. My big goal is to get people their time back. I know it changed my life when I started living life more and stopped worrying about all the money all the time and just started being home and being present with my family, with my kids, and being more involved. That's our big goal, is just to help. You can't get your time back. That's what I tell everybody. Jason: Right. You can buy time thought. Cliff: You can. Jason: The residents experience going through this, what's their experience? Cliff: What they'll do when they log on to the site, their view is a map of whatever city they're in, it will show different properties. What we try to do, when we market, when they go in, they got to sign up with their phone number, email, and name. Then, we're going to try to get them a profile filled out before they even go into a house. We're going to get a profile filled out of all the questions we have and then we're going to match it up the properties. If they don't go that route and say, they find it on Zillow like I said earlier, then from there, they'll just get on Zillow, find a house, inquire about, and they'll answer the prescreening questions from there. If they qualify, they get to see the house. If they don't, it just tells them they're not qualified to go see the house. Jason: Got it. So just kind of kills it there. Cliff: It kills it there so you don't have to talk to them. You seem like a nice guy like I am. I don't know how many times you've been on the phone and you have to tell them, talk to them for 15 or 20 minutes and they go on for 15 or 20 minutes, and you don't want to hang up because you want to be nice. It's just a headache. It takes care of that headache. Managers had that conversation, I know all of them have. All those conversations are gone, which is a big blessing. Jason: One phone call is probably 10-15 minutes, because you have a nice intro on the call, you have to be cordial, they're going to have some questions, you want to answer those questions, and then you need to figure out how to end and get off this call in a nice fashion. Yeah, it eats up a huge chunk of time. Cliff: Yeah, huge chunk. Jason: If it's a nice property, it's in a nice area, and it's priced appropriately, you're going to get a lot of these phone calls. It can be pretty cumbersome and overwhelming if you're trying to just enjoy your day, have a day job, or do something. Besides, I have this part time business of managing a property. Cliff: Yes, correct. Jason: This one property. If you have multiple, it becomes even more crazy real quickly. This is something that maybe property managers could use. I mean really, it's a piecemeal service. It's like "Hey, I need it for this property, maybe not for this one." They can use it as needed, maybe something supplemental to the other stuff they have going on, like through Buildium or [...]. Cliff: Correct. Definitely. Jason: Ok cool. Cliff, is there anything else people should know about ShowMeTheRental before I let you go? If not, tell us how everybody can get in touch with you and find out more. Cliff: The only thing I ask is just give it a try. Check it out. Hopefully, you'll like it. It's been a huge game changer for us. Like I said earlier, when I come home from work, I'm actually home now, I'm not working all the time, I'm not answering phone calls. I just say, give it a try to see if you'll like it. I think you will. As far as contacting me, you can reach me anytime. My email is cliff@showmetherental.com and you call me if you have any questions, if I can help you. I do answer my phone only between 12:00 and 1:00, and 4:00 and 5:00. If you call outside of that, I'll try to call you back the next day. You can reach me at (502) 641-8781. Jason: Perfect. Cliff, I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show, it's great to have you, and everybody, check out showmetherental.com Cliff: Jason, I appreciate your help. Thank you, sir. Thanks for the opportunity. Jason: Alright, cool. I appreciate Cliff coming on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business, one thing you may want to take a look at, that I will mention a little bit is take a look at your website. If your website has been around for 2-3 years or longer, that's the typical lifespan of a website or a design. It maybe starting to look stale, which creates a perception about your business. Once it's get about 5 years old, it starts to get a little bit painful. It's a little bit embarrassing. It looks probably outdated. The reality is, most of our competitors, when it comes to website design, a lot of their designs were designed 2-3 years ago. The challenge is, you're getting websites, sometimes out of the box, that's already design-wise, behind and outdated. So make sure to go and test out your website by going to doorgrow.com/quiz. You go to doorgrow.com/quiz, test your property management website, take the quiz. It will help you see how effective it is at creating leads, generating business, capturing and creating trust, and capturing and converting people that are visiting on the site. It's really all about trust, instead of just trying to manipulate Google and get to the top of Google. I'll just point out that the reality that search volume for property management according to Google Trends—you can go to trends.google.com and put in property management, back date it, filter it for the US, back date it to 2004 to the present—is low. It's small. You can compare it to any other term and see this. It really hasn't grown since 2004. In fact, it slightly peaked in 2011, around July, the summer, when property management search volume peaks each summer, but it's been on a steady decline since 2011. There's less people searching. Not only that, but competition has gone through the roof since 2011. Competition has been increasing. Everybody's pushing everyone to do. This was the game everybody's playing. It's trying to manipulate SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Pay-per click, and Google Ads. The reality is, search volume has been on a decline. It's going down, while competition is going up. It created this false scarcity in the industry. I'd love for you to escape that. There's no scarcity in property management, 70% are self-managing their own properties right now. There's tons of blue ocean. They have problems, they have stress, but they're not looking on Google, in general. If you can identify them, capture them, you have a website that creates and builds trust, and your sales processes optimize for trust, you are going to be the company that they work with. We want to help you optimize trust in your business, clean up, and short all the leaks in your sales pipeline. Reach out to DoorGrow. We can help you with the website and we can help you with your sales process, your pricing strategy, all the things that affects your ability to close deals. We can help you clean all that up and make your business far more effective at capturing business and going after that blue ocean where 70% are self-managing. Check us out at doorgrow.com. So, until next time everybody to our mutual growth. Bye everybody. You've 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.

Whether you're flying a plane or dealing with property management, manual processes based on your own way of interpreting a task doesn't always represent your brand. Today, I am talking to Jo-Anne Oliveri, founder and managing director of ireviloution. Jo is a leading authority on property management and author of Find Your Property Manager Now. In this episode, she describes how to streamline business operations. You'll Learn... [05:00] Find your passion, and change your life. [07:05] Crusade for Courage: Understand property management and real estate from investors' point of view to pursue your dreams. [08:15] Build business using deliberate methods, not desperate measures. [10:35] Singing and Standing in Line: Businesses built on foundation of consistent processes and systems decrease frustration and anxiety. [17:55] Scalability and Serviceability Platform: Streamline business operations by identifying tasks, each with its own timeline and priority plus corresponding tasks. [21:28] Brand Culture, Business Vision: Brand relationship is greater than individuals. [22:18] Selecting Process Software: Depends on your business, but needs to work for your budget, growth plans, and how you want to build your business. [28:37] Streamlining System Components: Processes, resources, and training. [33:51] Vision for Success: Every business needs to start with a plan. [34:24] Default vs. Design: Desperate to make changes due to shiny object syndrome. [35:20] Task Tracker: Require and verify accountability, responsibility, and transparency via consistency, compliance, and completion. [40:03] Which is worse: Losing a client or team member? [44:25] Step-by-Step Process: How to get started streamlining business operations. Tweetables How can you run a business when no one is doing a job the same way? Career by Design: Empower owners with courage to take control of their businesses. Passionate about crusade of creating positive change in property management. Businesses built on processes create a foundation, not frustration. Resources ireviloution Jo-Anne Oliveri on LinkedIn Jo-Anne Oliveri's Email Jo-Anne Oliveri's Phone: 917-969-4066 Jo-Anne Oliveri on Facebook Find Your Property Manager Now: Hire the Right Agent and Make More Money Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! by Tony Robbins Rent Manager Buildium AppFolio Process Street DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar 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 lovely Jo Oliveri from the ireviloution. Jo: Hi there. Jason: Hi, welcome. Jo: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you. We're going to get into your background first, but before we do that, I'm going to read your bio here for the audience, for the listeners, so they have a little bit of understanding. The topic we're going to be talking about is streamlining business operations, is that right? Jo: Correct. Jason: Okay. I'm sure everybody here, everyone listening—clients, friends, property managers—they all could use a little bit of streamlining in the business operations. That's something close to you and to my heart as well. Let me tell me people a little bit about you here. Do you go by Jo or Jo-Anne? Jo: Jo. Jason: Okay. Jo is the Founder and Managing Director of ireviloution and PM Leadership Summit Vice-President, First Team Property Management with over 20 years of real estate experience. I don't know what the CIPS or TRC are. What are those? Jo: CIPS is a National Association of Realtors designations. It's Certified International Property Specialist. The TRC is Transnational Referral Certification, the very handy ones we have specially in property management we're dealing with people from all around the world. Jason: Okay. Jo is a leading authority on all things property management and an inspiring force within the industry. As Founder and Managing Director of ireviloution and the Property Management Leadership Summit and Vice-President of First Team Property Management based in the USA, she's an international real estate identity who has trained over 500 agencies, thousands of agency owners, and property managers worldwide. She is seen as a leading authority in all things property management and regularly speaks at the industry's top Australian and North American conferences. She's also author of the real estate books, Find Your Property Manager Now: Hire the Right Agent and Make More Money. As well, she was selected as an Industry Thought Leader of the Year finalist for 2015, 2016, and 2017 Real Estate Business Awards, and is an Industry Influencer for the Elite Agent 2017 Awards. Jo is a big deal. Jo, welcome to the show again. Tell me, how did you get into this property management stuff? For those who are watching, I'm hanging out in my son's room. It was the only quiet place today. I've got pug posters behind me for those that can't see. How cool is this kid here? Jo: All the room. Jason: Yeah. He likes pugs. Jo, tell everybody, how did you get into this? Jo: Actually, I came from a business background. We had a family business in grocery stores and convenience stores. We were involved in the 80s down turning businesses. We had very high interest rates, we were paying for our business loan and our home loan, and we lost everything, we have bankrupted. What I discovered is the business I was working in was my husband's passion, it was not my passion. I wanted to find something I was passionate about. I'm a mom, I had three small children, and I read this book by Anthony Robbins called Awaken The Giant Within. It's an excellent book, it changed my life. I did all of the exercises and at the end of that, it was steering me towards real estate. I was a tenant at the time because we've lost our property and property management is where I landed. What was really interesting is because I came from a business background, I ended up getting a job with a company in Perth, Western Australia where I originally come from. I thought, "This is an awesome business." There were three other property managers and I was asking them, "What do I do?" They're all telling me different things. I thought, "How do you run a business like this where no one is doing the same job the same way?" They were talking to clients differently, giving different advice. It set me on a path of understanding the business of property management because I saw that there are enormous opportunities to grow a business through property management rather than grow a business through sales. Hence, I started off on a journey of career by design and I thought, "One day, I want to be able to empower business owners with the courage to take control of their business." Have a business that represents their vision, their brand, and their personality, but for me to do that, I had to understand everything, not just property management but the business of real estate. Hence, my journey started and I've worked in all areas of real estate with large franchise groups and small boutique agencies, wealth companies to understand how the investor feels. I've purposely invested in real estate myself to understand what it's like from an investor's point of view. It's all brought me to this point here today. Like you, I'm passionate, I'm on a crusade to empower positive change in the property management industry by infusing business leaders with the courage to pursue their dream. Jason: Love it. It's very similar to my why or our business why which is the transform property management businesses and their owners. Let's get in to this. Streamlining business operations. Maybe we should start with why this is important. Jo: Well, this is very important because if you don't streamline business operations, you become what I call, a business built on desperate measures instead of deliberate methods. Everything becomes by default, every decision is by default, recruiting new staff is by default, service promises is by default. You start to become another "me too" property management company where we all start to look the same. You lose sight of your vision and your why. You start to offer property management services in the beginning. When I was learning everything I could about what's so good about property management business operations and what goes wrong, I started to see that streamlining systems was a major cause of why things go wrong in property management. That actually made me go on a search and discovery tour of other industries. They had systems and processes and it actually brought me here, to where I'm living right now in Orange County, California. In 2007, I went to the Disney Institute to learn how Disney creates all their processes and streamlines everything that they do and discover why people will spend. If you're like me and had to travel from Australia to go to Disneyland, you can spend a few tens of thousands of dollars going there taking your family, all the privilege of standing in a line to get on a ride for up to two hours. I discovered people don't complain. They actually stand in these lines and they whistle and they talk to each other. Yet people call a property management company and if they're not responded to within a matter of minutes they become very frustrated. My discovery was it's because they don't know the process either. If a company is built on processes then you know everyone who work within the guidelines of those processes including the clients that you're dealing with. That becomes a very, very strong foundation in creating success in any property management business. It's just critical. If you look at the other businesses or other industries like Starbucks, it's all built on processes, it's all built on how do we create maximum efficiency right down to measuring how long does it take for the barista to get the scoop of coffee beans out of the sack and put them into the machine that makes the coffee. If we move the coffee bag 2 inches closer, that's going to save over a period of time, 100 hours every month. It also reduces the loss of coffee beans spillage. I started to understand the concept of time efficiency through processes and streamlining with systems and related it all back to how do we do it in property management. Jason: I love it. I love the idea. I mean, essentially what you're saying is that processes just like the example you give with lines of Disney which I don't want to stand in those, by the way, but it disarms people by them knowing that there's process and I think it creates some safety for them. They really have two choices at that point is to choose into the process that exists or not. But if a process isn't there then what naturally ends up happening is people try to implement or push their own agenda or their own process onto the property manager. "Hey I need this done by here. I need this done at this time. I need them to show up now or this time." They'll try to push their agenda and process onto the property manager because there isn't a clear one for them to see. Jo: Exactly. Hence, the business starts to become a very reactive thing. You will hear the shock horror stories where a property manager says, "We just lost an owner. They terminated their management with us." We thought they're really happy because we never hear from them. You never hear from them and you never had that contact with them. They're thinking like, "What are they doing? Where's the value that I pay?" So, whatever you do it's got to be consistent across every client. Again, I'll relate this back to Disney where the people who run the rides, I mean a lot of them are just young kids, they're college kids, and they don't start to get reactive when they can see that the line is two, three, four hours long on Independence Day for the Incredibles ride last year. Everyone stood in a hot sun for four hours. Their Disney cast, as they call them, they just did their job and kept smiling, just pushing the people through and offering alternatives with single rider and things like that. We can learn a lot from Disney. Jason: I like the idea of what you were saying about just making sure that the process is visible. Something I noticed that you spark the memory. In the past, I had jobs working in IT. When you work in IT at a company, it doesn't matter how good of a job you do. You still are the lowest person on the totem pole when it comes to there being an emergency. If there's a problem with the server, something goes down in the middle of the night you're on call, it doesn't matter if you're like one of the top executives in the business or you paint really well. If you do everything perfect, nobody would notice and never going to say, "Why do I even pay you?" If there's a problem, they notice and then, they would say, "Why do we even pay you?" I'm a little bit smart, just a little bit. What I realize is if I was just noisy about what I was doing, my bosses or my superiors would now see that I was doing stuff. I'm like, "Hey, I just upgraded this. Hey, I just took care of this. Hey, there hasn't been any problems with this because I did this." I just started being noisy about the things that I was doing. I worked at HP for a while as well and I had a boss in Texas while I was in Boise. It was the same thing. He was like, "What are you guys doing? Are you doing this?" He would ask each person on my team, "Is the other one doing their job?" I just started updating my instant messenger status with what I was working on just so he could see, to reduce that anxiety that he had that we weren't doing anything. Then, he started thinking, "I was the only one on the team doing stuff." So, I think maybe there's the little secret and what you'd mentioned that the property managers need to be a little bit more visible in what they're doing to maintain these properties in letting people know that, "Hey, we did something here," and keeping the owners informed so that they go, "Okay. That's why I pay you." Jo: Exactly. It's like evidence defeats doubt and you got to share the value to the clients and remind them, "Hey, over the past year, we've managed to increase your rent by 10% and it's 5% above the average in the area. This means [...] your asset value has increased this much. Now, we're here to help you to maximize returns and optimize growth. This is what we've done so far with you. What are your goals for the future? Perhaps you might consider buying another property because you've built equity in this property and you've built income in this property." It's about planting the seeds of thought in your clients mind and always having that connection. Property management can be as frustrating for the rental property owners as it is for property managers but it need not be. It all comes down to your systems. When you've got systems, it then articulates your value and worth, and your service promise as well to the clients. Jason: We're talking about streamlining business operations, we're talking about implementing systems, making sure there's processes. How would you how would you define streamlining business operations? What really is it? It sounds like a nebulous, all-encompassing sort of thing, I think. Jo: It truly is. You're quite correct. A lot of people don't understand how do I streamline my processes. I've got different systems for this and different systems for that. We do a lot of I'm diagnostic reporting on business operations to see where things might be falling through the cracks or things are not working together. The thing with property management is we have a multitude of things going on at any given time. Every task that we do has its own timeline and has its own priority. For every task that we do, it has a plethora of tasks involved within that one task and it could have several team members involved in that one task as well. For instance, if we're bringing on a new management, then there is a lot of admin work involved in that. When we bring on a new management, that then moves on to leasing that property, finding a tenant for that property, and it's not always the same person involved. What you need is a business that's built on a platform of scalability and a business that's built on a platform of serviceability so that we can always service the client, scale our business growth. To do that means that we need to make sure we're streamlining systems. Streamlining systems in property management is about identifying every task that we do in property management and almost seeing your business like it's a series of all these cogs that all work together. Those cogs need [...] or turn in perfect sync so that we're just moving on to the next task, next team member that needs to be done. There is nothing that creates what they call "the bushfire is starting" because something has fallen through the cracks or something as you know stopped another process from being completed. Creating systems, to me, is something that needs to be engineered. You can't look at one system and say, "We're going to do this for onboarding new management." We're going to use this other system for looking after the property once we've got it occupied and things like that. All of those systems all have to work as one. The only way to do this is to engineer, to architectural design how your systems work together so that as your business grows and you bring in new team members or new roles, you can seamlessly move one task to a new role and know that it's not going to fall through the cracks, or know that you don't have a team member who says," I got this relationship with the client. I'll just do it all and whilst they're focusing on that, other things are falling through the cracks. Like a good point there is, whenever you've got team members who say, "I've got a relationship with the client." You've got a problem because the relationship is with your brand. Your team represent your brand and your vision. If you've infused your team with your brand culture, personality, promise and standards, then all the team are representing exactly what your vision is for your business. Jason: I love that. The brand relationship is greater than the people, individual person relationship that should be in the company and everybody should have that mindset on your team. You mentioned a lot about platform, systems, scalability. I know a lot of property managers out there are a little bit more nerdy than the average real estate person. They're listening to this and they're thinking, "What system should I be using? What is the ultimate software for doing all these processes and systemized in my business." Do you have a favorite? Jo: In my role, I do get to look at a lot of different software. I do due diligence. I think my best answer to that is it depends on your business. And it truly does. When you look at software, it's got to work for you. It's got to work for, (1) your budget, (2) your growth plans, and (3) how you got to build your business and what you want that software to represent about your business. Currently, the company that I'm working for here in California is using rent manager and that's been very good. For us, we've got over 30 branches spread out from South LA to San Diego. That's a huge area that we cover and our home office is in the middle, it's somewhere in the middle, in Orange County. Through that, we've been able to customize that software so it suits our scalability and the way we service our clients and our agents. We've got over 3000 agents in first team, so we want to make sure that we have a way of measuring the referrals that our agents come in and keeping them connected to that client. Rent manager works for this company. If there's other great ones like [...]. It's very, very good. That started out small- to medium-businesses and I think it fits really well in that marketplace, but I know that they've been doing a lot of work on how can they build a platform that is useful for bigger businesses as well . And then, of course, there's appFolio and there's a lot of popular ones out there. I encourage people, when they're choosing software, choose software based on a due diligence that they do in accordance with what they're looking for in the software. The other thing to remember with software is it's not your system. Your software is the platform if you like that you store all your data and generate your reports. Your system is your manual operations. A great analogy are pilots because pilots have these massive computer systems that fly the planes, but pilots have to go through a manual process of check-listing that everything is working, that three people agree that everything is working before that plane will take off. There is a manual process to flying a plane and property management is the same. It's these manual processes where a lot of companies are going wrong because everyone is doing it their own way, that they interpret a task, and it doesn't represent the brand. Jason: Right. This is a problem with processes. For those listening, I'm a big fan of the software process tree. It allows you to have a process system that is outside of whatever accounting or back office you're using free property management company and you can really dial in. For those listening, check out the previous episode that I did with Process Street. I think you'd be really interested in hearing that. I think the challenge with most process systems or systems out there where they have some process documentation in the business is that once a team member has read the process document and they've done it a couple times, they think they know it. It's in their head. They're not going to go back and check it. They're not checking against the process if the process gets documented, gets updated, or the process gets changed, or that person makes changes to the process, they're probably not updating that. There's always this gap between what the process is and what's documented, if it even is at all. Think about all of us that drive cars. We don't check the manual for the car or read the DMV booklet on how to drive the car, all the rules of driving every time we get into the car. The first time, we probably checked every mirror and made sure everything was okay, but now we just drive it it's like an extension of our body. That's how team members feel. They may simplify things, they make short-cut, they may cut things out, they may forget about things, they maybe weren't onboarded properly, they weren't trained properly. I'm a big fan of having a process that they have to use each time where they have to check something off. There's some manual input that says I did this and I followed these steps. Jo: Exactly. I totally agree. I was at a conference where one of the doctors from one of the busiest hospitals in Australia—he works in the emergency section—said, regardless of the level of emergency, they still have to follow a checklist where everything is ticked off. That's where we're going wrong in property management is because property managers keep it in their head and they make a slight change to a process which has sometimes devastating results to the overall business. My own company, ireviloution, we've designed those manual processes which are architecturally designed, but every manual process you have, you've got to have a way of measuring so you've also got your management leadership that locks into that, so that we know that we're being efficient and compliant, consistent and complete everything that we're doing. To me, when you have a system, there's three different components when it comes to streamlining. One is your processes. You've identified what all the processes are for every task that we do in property management that then we'd lock in and we can measure the efficiency, effectiveness, profitability, performance, productivity, everything shows that process. Then, what locks into that is your resources. Jason: This is number two? Jo: Yes. P plus R resources is that resources have to be designed. If there is a tweak in those resources, which we find a lot of property managers say, "But I want to put this step in," that step might be somewhere else in the process. By tweaking it, it can actually break something down. The third step which is really, really critical is T, P plus R plus T, equals training. Your training is a vital importance and what we discovered in property management is to become a property manager, we're really learning theory—the theory of property management. If you look at doctors to go through university and college for seven years learning how to be a doctor, it's still all theory. Once they've graduated they've got to go into the learning hospitals to learn the practice of being a doctor, the practice of what happens when a patient does present themselves with an emergency or with some kind of condition. It's ongoing training for them. The training that we have in property management needs to be something where if you're putting your team through training, it's got to be consistent as well. If they're going off to all these different training courses, then they're not learning the process and the resource. So, there's a breakdown. All three elements of the P plus R plus T are critical in streamlining business operations. Jason: Alright. I'm gonna recap this. So, you're saying everyone gets that they need processes and it's helpful to make sure that the processes are very well-defined and people know how long it's going to take. Explained resources because I think that's a little bit less clear. What is a resource? Jo: Resources are your paper documents. When we put information into software, there's still a way that we gather that information or the data that is then put into the software to make sure that we've got all the information we need. I call it your intel and your insight into everything that we do. The resources are just like what I mentioned before with the emergency doctors or the pilots where their resources are checklist. Then, your resources are also the way that the business owner can measure productivity, performance. it's how they measure, monitor, and manage what's going on. So, resources are things like one checklist to the different forms that you use for some legal forms and some just best practice forms like getting a tenant to sign a disclaimer that they know that they're not allowed to disconnect smoke detectors for instance. We know that we didn't just tell them, we actually got them to sign a form and they understand the consequences in different forms. Your productivity trackers are manual forms so we can measure productivity against what's going into your software. So, that's all your resources. The resources that we've developed, we've got over 500 resources there and that's the enormity of the resources that you need to manage your property management business depending on the size, of course, and team structure. The training speaks for itself. Jason: Yeah. You need to make sure that they're actually leveraging these things and they understand. I like what you said. There needs to be consistency because a lot of people just want to send the team off to these property management conferences and they come back with a whole different set of ideas, "Well, this company's doing this." I had one client that didn't even talk to me but came back and said, "I decided to change my whole structure from departmental to another structure." He was changing his entire company and then everything fell apart. I was like, "How did you know that that was right for you?" He's like, "Well, all the cool people are doing it," was basically the answer. All the cool people were changing their whole business and I said, "Your business was working and now, it's not." Jo: Yeah. You hear that a lot and that's why I think that they haven't got a plan to start off with. Every business has to be built upon a plan. It's not a financial plan, it's an operational business plan. So, what they've done is they've created their vision for success and they've mapped it out. It's like creating the way that you're going to get from LA to Brisbane in Australia. You've got a plan, you've got a timeline, you've got a budget, you've got all of that. But you know, a lot of them become very reactionary, their business becomes default instead of design, and that's where they start to be desperate. It's like, "Oh, this is not working. Let's change something else." They lose the deliberation around their business because they don't have a plan in the first place. A killer of business growth is when you keep changing what you're doing because someone else is doing it. Jason: Shiny object syndrome. Jo: Exactly. That's right. That's a term we use a lot because business owners are like, "Oh, if that's happening over there, let's try that." That's why we all become clones of each other. When you talk to consumers, the people that we serve, they all see us as the same. So, very important. Jason: Okay. So, you have processes resources training and I think anytime there's a process, somebody needs to be responsible for it, there needs to be clear accountability, there needs to be process documentation and there needs to be a clear definition of done, like how this does this need to be done? How can we verify that it's done? There needs to be accountability. There needs to be some transparency there as well like some scoreboard or some way to know that they've won, or completed, or finished, and there needs to be that accountability or responsibility. If we have all these things in place, then is that everything that they need? Jo: Yes and no because the other thing is that the business leader or if they appoint someone to manage that business, they got to keep their finger on the pulse because accountability is just king when it comes to property management. One of the problems I have in property management is they're not profitable. They've got property managers who keep saying, "I'm so busy, I can't get this done. I need someone else." And because they don't have the data and the statistics about how long it takes to do a job because they're not using processes and resources, then they start to react to that team member saying, "I can't do this anymore. I'm too busy, I'm stressed out, I'm going to leave." I know you can't leave because if you leave I'm going to lose all my clients. Well, comes back to there's no point in having processes and resources if you don't have accountability. That's what I was mentioning before, you've got to be able to manage it so you've got to have the ability to say, "We know exactly what's going on with the business. We know when we've got peaks and when there's pressure on the team because of those peaks. We also know when we need to bring in new resources in terms of new team and what that role will be and what we're prepared to pay and offer that new team member." For every task that we do, the objective is to be consistent, to be compliant and to complete within the timeline and priority of that task and then to be able to measure how many tasks a property manager is doing daily, weekly, monthly. The only way you do that is with the business resources. We've got something that we call a task tracker so we can measure many things with that. One thing is the number of tasks our property manager is doing weekly, monthly. The other thing is every number tells a story. You can see that if we've done this then this should generate a job new tasks over here. What's that done? Do the numbers all add up? Are we doing that? We start to then create that historical data about our business so that we know we've got peak times, we've got risk associated with this time of the year with our business. The business leader has what we call finger on the pulse. They can make those decisions, added deliberation not desperation. Jason: I think one of the things that's really helpful in tracking just about anything that you care about in the business, whatever it might be, the one thing that's super helpful is just it gives you context. Even just having two data points like we did this much this last month and we did this much this month, you can tell if it's gone up or down and that allows you to understand where you keep your finger on the pulse, as you say, or to have an idea of whether these things are improving or getting worse, or whether business is changing. Property management certainly ebbs and flows during certain times of the year. It helps you to see, "Okay, these are the trends that we see during the summer when kids are getting out of school and these are the trends that we're seeing through the winter months when things have cooled down." It gives them some context and that allows them to plan and prepare for the future and understand, "All right. We're ahead of where we were last year or we're behind. We should be concerned like we can make changes, let's make adjustments." It allows you to feel safer as an entrepreneur, it lowers your pressure and noise it makes you less reactive. I'm sure there's other benefits to come from that. Jo: Exactly. Well, it takes away what we said at the start up is that they fear losing a client more than they feel losing a team member because they've got control of their business. If their team member is not performing then, they know how to manage them to perform better. Sometimes, team members do have a use by date and it might be good to let them go but let them go with respect and honor rather than like, "Oh my gosh. I'm losing them in a one lose business." We should never, ever have that fear about our business. Our business is about us, it's about our vision. Jason: Right. So, team members may have an expiration date. Jo: I think some of them do. Jason: Fair enough, probably true. So, wouldn't be great if they just had that stamp on their forehead when they came to us at the beginning? Then we would know.We can keep their replacements ready, we'd get everything documented really clearly but that's the nice thing about having things documented. My assistant that I just had just recently took another job, but we had everything documented I wasn't freaking out like in the past I might have been freaking out. Losing a team member that was critical to operations would be really a big deal but we've got things documented. There's this safety that comes with having things documented and if it's documented well enough, that's the question you ask yourself, those listening, "Do you feel like if any certain member of your team left that you have you have their knowledge documented so that the next person could step into that without having to be trained by them directly?" If you don't, then that's where business owners have a lot of fear. They have a lot of fear in that, "Oh no, if I lost this person, it would be so detrimental." Here's the thing I've noticed anytime somebody said, "Oh, it would be the worst thing ever if I lost this one team or if I lost Susy or whoever this person might be in my whole business. It would be terrible, it would be the worst thing ever." That's like the best person for them to lose. I notice every time it's because they don't understand what that person is doing, that person is usually doing a lot of things that maybe are redundant or unnecessary or not done the way you have them done. When they do leave, you have to step in, you have to figure these things out. You realize, "Why were they doing it that way?" Because we didn't have that transparency into what was really going on. We weren't able to manage it, we weren't able to help improve it and it wasn't very effective in a lot of situations. I had one assistant that I had for like three years and I thought, "Oh, if I lost her it would be the worst thing ever." Really, when I lost that person, it was one of the best things that happened to our business. We changed so many things, I realize a lot of things could be done more efficiently and it's never as bad as our brains make it out to be. Jo: You're absolutely right. Property managers love to be loved, but we need to change that thinking because we want people to love the brand and respect the team that represent the branch. Out of respect comes love. Property managers need to let go and know that clients will respect them if they're delivering on the service promises and results. They'll feel good about themselves. I think every owner needs to work their business as if when a team member leaves, this is what happens. Everything that we've got in our business is all built upon generic names. It's not a person's name. It's not a person's phone number. Everything is associated with a role, so I move the team around within the roles and to the client, it's seamless. It's still first team servicing them. Jason: Right. It's maintenance, it's not Fred. Jo: Exactly. The team has that personality. They're friendly, they want to help the clients. Jason: Yeah, love it. Cool. So, we've talked about the who, the what, the why. So, how do people get started with streamlining their business operations? Maybe we could just dig into the actual process of getting their processes and their resources and their training all dialed in. Jo: Yeah. That's a really good question, Jason. The thing is when you're implementing processes, there's a whole process around them as well. What you want to do is you want to get everyone engaged in it. You need to get your team engaged, you need to get your clients engaged so they understand what's going on as well. You need to create a step-by-step process of, at this step, we're going to implement this new process and we'll introduce that to the clients because there might be new policy around that as well. Articulate and communicate that to the clients. They get to buy in with what we're doing and they've got the opportunity to voice any concerns or misunderstandings. The best thing is, know that when you are implementing new processes, then you have to muddy the waters for a bit. You're going to find all these things that start rising to the surface moving up like, "What's going on here? I've got team that are unhappy. I'm losing team." Normally, that will happen because you haven't started with the process. So, muddy the waters and have a look at what you need to do first. It could be restructuring the team to start off with. It could be redefining, and reassigning, and realigning roles, but whatever the step is, you need to look at it like a building lego blocks, one by one by one. This one means that this is going to happen. Once that happens, then this next step is going to happen. My best advice is don't do it all at once, have a plan of implementation, a plan of communication as well, and a plan of education. It really is a step-by-step process. Jason: Yeah, I think when we're leading a team, when we're leading a company, our job really is to inspire everybody to be excited about what we're going to be doing rather than control them. I like to say, whenever we failed to inspire, we always control by default. If you can inspire your team and get them excited, "Hey, we're going to be doing this. Here's why, here's how this will benefit you, here's how this will benefit the business. Everything will be better off," and you can get them on board and get them in alignment, then they will help you do it. But if you are trying to control them and force them and say, "Hey, we're going to be doing this," you're going to churn some people. You're going to lose some people Especially if you're making changes and they're used to doing things being done a certain way, that shakes them up and makes them feel insecure, makes them feel uncomfortable. You start documenting their processes and, "Why we didn't document these before?" They're going to thinking, "Is my job okay? Why are you having me to document this now? I'm doing a good job, aren't I?" We need to really be careful and inspire our team members to take care of these things and help us. I think, as entrepreneurs, we also try to shoulder everything on our own a lot of times. Our team members are the ones that are doing these processes. A lot of times they know it better than us and that they should be the ones helping us do it. We have the insight to be able to look at those ones they're documented and help them figure out, "Hey, maybe we can improve this. We can make this better. Let's see if we can make this easier for you and make this faster for you. Or what would help you move this forward quicker?" Jo: Exactly. One of the things I learned at Disney is Disney has a wonderful way like everyone who works at Disney wants to be there. If Disney makes changes, they have a lovely way of making sure that the cast are all on board and involved. The way that they do that is they have this program where they all sit around, it's like brainstorming to a degree but everyone has a say and they build on what they're saying. It's never like that's not going to work, it's like yes and they build on that idea. They bring it around to something that is a way that the business leader can drive their business in a way that they want to. The team all have that understanding. When we go in and we work with businesses, we talk about infusing the team not just like, "This is what we're doing." It's like if you actually infuse them with the vision and how it's all going to be for everyone, then they will have that encouragement and that willingness to like, "I want to be a part of this." And that's what you want for the team. And your clients, too. Jason: Yeah. Ultimately, we have two types of people in our team. We either have believers or we have hiders. The hiders are just there to get a paycheck, probably do as little as possible and complain about us on the weekends. The believers, we get their discretionary time. They're thinking about us after hours, they're thinking about their job, they want to be better, they want to improve and they're looking for solutions. It's a very different mindset. But they can't be a believer unless they have something to believe in and you're relating that to them. So, we have to give them the chance to be able to believe in us. Jo: Yeah. It's so true. You're talking before when we mentioned about the use by date. Sometimes, we can have insight into that as well because when we bring on our new recruits and then we do our monthly 1on1s with them or however often you do it, that's a way to gain insight into what they're thinking what they're short and long-term dreams are. You will know that at some point, your company might not be able to offer them the future that they're seeking. You don't have the next role for them in their career. That's okay because while they've been with your company, they've helped you to grow your company and you're still in control of your company if you've got all of the systems and processes, that person will go off still having respect for your company and you have respect for them. That's the way I would love it to be in the industry if we all understand it's okay to say bye-bye to team for the right reasons. Jason: Right. Any relationship can be ended amicably. Jo: Absolutely. Jason: Any relationship. I mean life's all about relationships and relationships can be ended poorly and very negatively and it can cause a lot of drama or they can be ended amicably. We should always look for that route first. That's the best Jo, is there anything else that our listeners should hear or should know about streamlining business operations before we wrap this up? Jo: I think, Jason, we just encourage them to not go it alone because creating a process and then the resources around it, it does take a lot of work. It's like engineering mindset and I see a lot of property management business owners make the mistake of letting their property managers do it. They say, "You bring in the systems and you create the systems." They can't do that. They're employing that person to look after their clients and bring in new clients. Whilst they're doing something that they're not entirely skilled to do, then it's impacting the business and quite often there is no goal and you'll say, "Well, where are the systems they created?" I say invest in systems, invest in people that really know what they're doing when it comes to designing systems because all system should be customized to [...] their business is well. When you implement, do it in stages, do it in a process so everyone feels good about the changes that have been made. Jason: Jo, how can people get in touch with you if they're wanting some help on their systems and on some of the things we talked about? Jo: Well, thank you. They can email and I'll spell this out because I've got a very confusing business name, but as I was explaining to Jason before, my business name, ireviloution, is my surname backwards, Oliveri. I always said I'd create a revolution in the industry, so it kind of went together. So, my email is jo@ireviloution.com or you can call my cell here in the US. I'm living in California so Pacific time and it's (917) 969-4066 or even look me up on Facebook or LinkedIn. Jason: Perfect. Alright, cool. Well, Jo, it's been fun connecting with you. I think we share a lot of alignment and I look forward to seeing what you do in the future. Jo: Definitely, as I do look forward to watching you. I love what you're doing. Jason: Thank you, I appreciate it. All right, we'll let you go. Jo: Thanks, Jason. Bye. Jason: If you are property management entrepreneur that wants to have doors and make a difference as we talked about in the intro, please reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help and see if we can help you grow your company and be sure to check out Jo, really cool stuff that she was talking about today. I hope you got a lot of value from this episode and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Do you want to grow your single-family portfolio, but not sure how? Don't think you're smart enough to be successful in real estate? Invest in yourself, get an education, and hire a coach. Today, I am talking to Mark Dolfini, founder of Landlord Coach and author of three real estate books. Mark shares how he ventured into real estate, property management, and landlord coach. He follows the VIP Paradigm: Vision, Infrastructure, and Process. You'll Learn... [04:40] Real Estate Education: You can learn, if you want to; even if you're not smart. [07:21] Hospitality Industry: How to treat people, customers, and residents like guests. [10:37] Set up sustainable business by shifting to VIP Paradigm. [14:35] Landlord Coach's favorite catch phrases focus on valuing your time and money. [19:30] Better Business Owner: It's not about the number of doors, but what you're trying to accomplish in revenue and lifestyle. [26:40] Cycle of Suck and 4 Ds to Revenue (doors, deals, duration, and dollars). [29:10] Being time wealthy is more of a decision than a destination. [31:37] Bad communication is a symptom of the problem, not the problem. The problem is a bad infrastructure and/or process. [36:35] Product to Produce: Consistency; sloppiness is your only competition. [37:35] Negative Feedback Loop: If you put something in place, make sure it gets done. [39:04] Company's Compass: Define/develop core values to make business decisions. [41:55] Being your own boss is great, but get a coach to take you where you want to go. [44:10] Difference between mentor and coach: Invest in yourself by paying a coach to hold you accountable. Tweetables Real Estate Education: It's about the want to; not the intelligence. Don't do it all. Learn to fire yourself! There is no amount of money that will make time irrelevant. If you don't place a value on your free time, someone else will. Resources Mark Dolfini on Facebook Landlord Coach The Time-Wealthy Investor 2.0 Marriott 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 Mark Dolfini of Landlord Coach. Mark, welcome to the show. Mark: Hey, it's great to be here. That's a heck of an intro. Jason: It's our manifesto, I call it. Mark: I love it. That speaks directly to my heart when we're talking about people who want to grow their single family portfolios. That gets me fired up. Jason: So Mark, I want to introduce you. I'm really excited to have you on the show. We're talking before show a little bit and we have a lot of alignment. We both believe in coaching, we both believe in having coaches. It says Mark Dolfini is a veteran of the US marines—thank you for your service—and the author of three real estate books. He was first published in 2017, second book released in early 2018, and his third book, The Time-Wealthy Investor 2.0, came out in March of 2019. He received a Bachelor of Science in Accounting at Purdue University, worked for Marriott International before venturing out full time into the world of real estate investing. He's a managing broker for property management company based out of Lafayette, the founder of Landlord Coach, sits on numerous boards, including the Better Business Bureau of Central Indiana, the National Federation of Independent Business, and is a training director for the Central Indiana BNI Franchise and Networking Organization. He spends his free time pistol shooting and kayaking, and lives in Lafayette where he and his wife, Jennifer, are raising their two sons, Leland and Logan. All right, so we got through your bio. Mark, let's start out with you and I want to hear about your background. How did you get into the space of real estate, property management, landlord coach, all of this. How did this all come about? Give us a little backstory. Mark: Sure. Well, I'd love to say it was a straight line trajectory, but you know there's your plan and God's plan, right? That doesn't and usually don't always match up. Jason: [...] and then there's reality. Mark: Exactly. Jason: [...] winds. Always. Mark: Right. I'd always wanted to do something entrepreneurial. I didn't know exactly what that was. I mean, this is back me being seven or eight years old, I started with a vegetable stand, the vegetable that I grew in Upstate New York and sold them at a vegetable stand that I built out of out of wood. So I always started back from there. My first go at real estate was when I was actually in the marine corps still and I bought 40 acres of property that was in Northern Arizona. I paid a couple of hundred bucks an acre for it and that was really it. It was just a desert in the middle of nowhere that no one seemed to want, but I knew at $200 an acre was a pretty good deal. I ended up buying it for capital appreciation at that point in time. But having a piece of land that doesn't generate income doesn't generate revenue. I learned pretty quickly is not the way to wealth. Getting someone else to pay for it was really what I wanted to do. I was getting near the end of my time in the marine corps. Had a great time, it was good for me in a lot of ways. It was tough, but I'm glad I did it. I also knew I needed to get an education. So, I got out. Now, let me just frame this because I went to school in Upstate New York and graduated 352nd out of 354. Let that sink in, everybody. I was at the bottom of the class. Jason: Right [...] the class by any means. Mark: Right. Not even close. The reason I'm saying that is because people who are out there think that they have to have this high-level of intelligence and high-level of intellect to make this business work. If you know anything and you're doing real estate, it's about the want to, it's not about the intelligence. Let me just put that to bed right away. Now, that doesn't give you an excuse to not go out and say, "Well, I need to learn things and therefore it's just too hard." There are lots of things are difficult. Walking when you were two years old was probably difficult. Or 18 months when learning how to talk was difficult at one point. It's the same thing. You can learn this if you have the right intention. Anyway, getting out of the marine corps and getting into college was a little tricky because with my "stellar" high school career. I had to figure out how to how to do that. I hadn't sat for an SAT. I had to learn in high school all that stuff. When I got out of the marine corps, I actually got accepted to Purdue. I got a high-enough score on my SAT. While I was at Purdue, I started buying some rental real estate. By the time I got out of Purdue, I had about a dozen rental units altogether, which is roughly half a million dollars for the real estate. That really how I got started and that's really where my real estate education really got started. Jason: Right, so you cut your teeth on in the real world with your own real estate deals dealing with tenants, toilets, and termites, I'm sure. Fast forward to now. Help us understand. We're going to be talking about the VIP paradigm: vision, infrastructure, and process the acronym. Let's get into it. Mark: Sure. Before I get into that, it's important to know that the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey might say. As I was getting out of college and I was buying more rental units, there's lots of property managers out there who are also investors, so now I'm speaking to them as well. As I was growing this side of the portfolio, I was working as an accountant—I have a degree in accounting—for the Marriott. Wonderful, wonderful company. I learned an awful lot from the hospitality industry in terms of how to treat people, how to treat customers, and really treat my residents like I would be treating hotel guests. There's a lot to learn out there from the hospitality industry in terms of what they do right. It's just a different approach. It's almost like the paradigm shift that happened with the banks maybe about 20 years ago. It used to be you run into the bank almost when you were in trouble. Now, you walk into a bank and everyone greets you, throws bottles of water at you, says hello and they give you this. That wasn't always the way. The old school guys may remember that. Now, it's a different paradigm because now they're welcoming customers. They want you to come into the bank. They want you to have that transaction at their location. I would love to see that shift continue into the property management side because now it almost seems like the residents are the enemy rather than they're the ones who pay the bills. As I continue to evolve and I loved what I learned from the hospitality industry, eventually I got to a point where I was able to get out and start to do that full-time just managing my own portfolio. Unfortunately, I got very, very overleveraged, not only in money but in time. What was happening is every time a task would come on, rather than looking for someone to hand that task to, I just took it on and kept it. There's lots of property managers out there that are doing this. They're not valuing their time highly enough. What ends up happening is they end up taking on this job, they don't factor in opportunity cost where they're going to take every job that's out there and they're going to do it. Even though they may be worth realistically $20–$50 an hour, they're still doing $10 an hour jobs. In essence, every time they're doing a $10 an hour job, they're costing their business $40 an hour or $30 an hour and they don't look at in that paradigm. Learning to fire yourself is one of the biggest things and I'm sure we can get in that little bit later, but really where my transition in the property management occurred was almost out of necessity. That seems to happen for a lot of people and certainly I was no exception. Going into 2009, I had about $6 million worth of real estate in my own portfolio. I was working 16–17 hours a day just trying to keep all the balls in the air. When the economy fell apart, that's when things really, really got bad for me. Of course I started working 20 and 22 hour days and kept catching naps wherever I could. I was doing it all and I was doing it all very, very poorly. Finally, where the camel's back broke was I got sick and I almost died in the hospital from double pneumonia. From all that, is really where I really got very intentional about setting up a business that was sustainable and I started delivering to my cash flow by doing some property management for other people. I got my broker's license, started doing some property management on the side, and that's really where I also got very, very intentional about how I want my business to look, the infrastructure that I needed it, and also the processes that needed to run on that infrastructure. That's the vision infrastructure process paradigm that you're alluding to earlier is you're getting a vision where I wanted to go, setting up the proper infrastructure for it, and then putting the processes in place on top of that. Jason: I want to point this out because this is a milestone that I'm wondering if every entrepreneur eventually go through it. It's like a crisis of health where we finally realize that we are not invincible, that it's not sustainable to just do the hustle and grind that's trumped up, and it made to look beautiful and exciting to just work, endless work weeks and crazy amounts of hours. Looking back, I had my own crisis like this. I remember I was literally at the end of a sales call laying on the floor because I had slipped a disk in my back or something because I wasn't eating. I was just working, I thought I had to work harder and harder, I was just do-do-do, and then I couldn't work for two weeks. I was laying on the floor and it was ridiculous. That gets really expensive trying to recover from that. 5That was when I had this shift and this epiphany came to me that our health and self-care is the foundation for my ability to provide, to do everything in the business, and you need to have a business that serves your needs and be sustainable instead of becoming this robot slave that is going to wear your body out on the business. Mark: Right To that point, you have to understand that we work so we can live, not the other way around. There's so many people who are out there living to work and property managers, you get that one or two critical pieces, or one or two critical people that are doing 80%–90% of the work, and then you get everybody else who just shows up and cares or doesn't care, whatever. I know it's a typical 80/20 rule where you get 20% of people doing 80% of the work. In property management, it's more like 1% doing 99% of the work. Then you got those critical pieces and you cannot build a sustainable business on that. Lots of property managers are very small. They're under 500 units and they're one- or two-man shops. In the property management company that I have, definitely is a weird hybrid between management company, maintenance company, but it works and it works really, really well. We can get into that later, but I agree with you. You have to almost get to that crisis. You either get to that crisis and you make a decision or you just have enough for you to just walk away. In either one, I don't think is good. A lot of people get to that point because they don't value their free time. That's fundamentally it. They're just not buying their time. Rob: Yup. Time is worth more than money to me now. If people approached it from that standpoint at the beginning, that's why you hire somebody. You're buying time. That's why you build the business. You're buying time. Every dollar I spend should be hopefully moving towards buying me some additional time or collapsing time. That's why I get coaches. It collapses time. I'm buying time. I love what you're saying. A lot of times, we start out building the business we can have instead of the business that we want, and they're two very different things. One you're serving and the other one serves us. Mark: That's exactly right. There are two catch phrases I use all the time. One of those is, "There is no amount of money that will make time irrelevant." When you get your head around that, then all of a sudden you say, "Okay." The other phrase I use quite often, especially when I'm signing-off on a live event or something like that is, "Not only is there no amount of money that will make time irrelevant, but if you don't place a value on your free time, someone else will." Usually the amount of value that they're going to place on your free time is far less than what you're worth, and they know it. That's why they're calling you with that, right? Jason: Yeah. The, "You got a minute?" and, "Hey, can I just take you out to lunch?" these kind of things. Mark: Absolutely right. That's exactly right. Jason: You need to value your time. I don't know how you tell people to value your time, but I usually say, "Take your gross revenue of the company if you're the entrepreneur and divide that by 20-, 80-, or a 40-hour work week. That's a pretty good estimate of what you should, at least, value your time as a dollar if you were looking at it on a dollar per hour basis." Mark: Yeah, and if you did it on a 40-hour work week, you'd be surprised that most property managers I know are working way more than that. When you come back into it just from that simple math, that's a perfect calculation. In fact, that's exactly how I would tell people how to put just a rough number on your time. Or even people that are doing property management on the side. There's lots of property managers are also estate brokers. They all have to be brokers, but they're also doing real estate transactions on the side where they're showing properties and they're selling properties. That's all revenue and that's where you need to determine your opportunity cost. I would say all of your revenue that's coming in, divide that by coming up with an hourly rate in terms of a 40-hour work week or even a 50-hour work week, to be fair. If you're coming up with the $50–$60 an hour rate and you're doing a $12 an hour work, you've got to replace yourself from doing that task as soon as you possibly can. I have a driver that I hire when I go to Indianapolis. I go to Indianapolis a couple of times a week and people are like, "Oh, you're mister big time," and I'm like, "No, it's not about that. It's not about because I feel super important. It's because I get three hours of windshield time that literally is purposeless. I might listen on audio book. I still like to drive, but it's not about that. It's so I can get that time back." So when I'm done at the end of the day, I'm not completely wiped out and spent. I don't have to spend an extra three hours at the office that I should be spending with my wife, even if just sitting on the couch with her. Or just sitting at home being with her, or being around my kids, or just being home, where I want to be. There's lots of people who don't understand that and I'm like, "Okay, I pay this guy maybe $50, $75, $100 to drive me there and back. That's easily worth it because my time is several hundred dollars an hour. Someone wants to call me and coach with me, I'm like, "Yeah, that's what I'm going to charge you," so why would it cost myself that money driving? Sometimes, I still do because I want the solitude and I want to listen to an audio book and just enjoy it. Sometimes, I just want road time. But lots of times, if it's purposeless, I really want to try to eliminate those bottlenecks as quickly as I possibly can, so I can stay focused on what I'm really trying to accomplish. Jason: Yeah. It's funny. You'll see entrepreneurs, they say they have $1 million business. Their time is probably worth about $480 an hour by that calculation, say $500 bucks an hour, and they're still doing stuff like sometimes you'll see them doing their yard. If they love doing those things, great, but sometimes we'll be so focused on one area that we lose sight. For example, there was a time period where I hired a house manager and a nanny because all the fake dad stuff was being done. [...] care about laundry. They don't care who makes the mills. They want time. So if I can offload those thing to somebody and I'm not paying them $500 an hour to offload those things, then I can spend time. Ultimately, were buying time and that's a critical piece to growing and scaling business. Mark: Yes. That's 100% vision. A lot of times, especially whether I'm working with an individual investor or I'm working with a property manager, door count is really where a lot of people say that and I stop them. I know. For example, I got the moniker, Landlord Coach, but my goal is to make people not landlords. If I was going to be a property management coach, my goal would not to make them better property managers. My goal for them is to be better business owners. Even though a lot of times they say, "Oh, all I want," if it's an investor, "are 100 units," or if it's a property manager, "I want 1000 doors." I'm like, "Okay, so 999 wouldn't do it?" and they go, "Well, yeah maybe." "Okay 997 wouldn't do it?" I'll go down this until they finally get that, "Well, okay Mark, what's your point?" I said, "Look, it's not the number of doors. It's really about..." Jason: It's not an ego number, not an ego goal. Mark: Right. It's not about that at all. It's about what you are trying to accomplish in terms of your revenue goals. It's really about that. If this is about ego, I respect that, but that's not toward your vision. A lot of times they say, "Okay, well let's get towards a vision that's really actually purposeful and usually after I beat him up a little bit and I go, "Okay, 997. How about 995?" After they go, "Okay, what's your point?" A lot of times I would say, "Okay, so in other words, you're saying to me that you need to get to a revenue or you need to get to 1000 doors at, say, $1000 apiece. That's what you need, but you couldn't get there with 500 doors at $2000 apiece? Obviously the math is the same and a lot less work," and they go, "Well, yeah. Okay." "So, is it really about door count? Because I can get you 1000 doors. There are not going to be anything in the world that you or anybody else going to want to manage, but you really want 1000 doors?" Jason: [...] ridiculously low, that you can get a lot of doors really quickly. Mark: And that's what a friend of mine did. He's in the area of the state that I wouldn't go to for love or money, and it's terrible. I feel bad for him because I see him, watching him get into a leaky lifeboat in shark-infested waters, and I'm just like, "Oh, my God." And he's a good dude. He grew overnight from zero to, I don't even know he's pumping maybe 150–200 now, but they're units that I wouldn't take for any amount. I literally go, "Well, the rent amount isn't enough to cover my management fees," because they still wouldn't be enough. Jason: Ultimately, people really need to ask themselves the question, "What do you really want? What do I really want out of the business?" If it's an ego goal, great, but maybe what you really want is usually some lifestyle or maybe you want to have some amount of time, you want to spend time with your kids. What do you really want? And maybe you can create that and have that without having 1000 doors or without it having to look a certain way that you may have thought. [...] really matter? Why [...] matter? Mark: Right. It's really not about door count as much as people want to focus on that now to a certain degree. It depends on your business structure. Again, investors are a little bit different than property managers. In my case, we do a lot of our own maintenance. We have an in-house maintenance department. A significant amount of revenues come in from that. Having more doors enables us to have more opportunities to maintenance. So in that particular case, it does really matter, but we still want to manage higher-end properties. We don't do a lot of low-end stuff anymore just because of the amount of banging your head against around. It just increases exponentially when you get a certain lower market. It's just not a market that we want to court anymore. We got out of that probably maybe six years ago and never looked back. The level of drama that has decreased in my life has just been exponential. Not saying that's bad. There's other people who want to court that market and do well in that market. That's certainly fine if that's a strategy that's working for you. I'm not telling you about to change it. But for me, I would really invite you to really focus on not even so much as a revenue goal, because then the revenue goal, it's funny because people go, "Well, yeah. I would like to have $50,000 a month coming in free cash flow, Mike." And then, I go back to my normal argument and go, "Well, okay. So you want $50,000 a month coming in. $49,990 won't do it?" So, you have to tie it to a life output goal. That's why I say to them, "What is this even about? What are you trying to accomplish?" When they say, "Well, okay. What I'm really trying to do," and usually it's after they start to fight back some tears, "honestly I just want to spend more time with my kids." "Okay, does more time mean?" "Honestly, I would love to be able to homeschool them." "Awesome. Now we're getting to a vision that really frigging matters. Not some nebulous 1000 doors, or $50,000 a month, or whatever it is. That's what you want and we can tie a number to that. We can tie a revenue number to that." Or, "I want to move my aging mother into a house that's just close by." "Okay, what's it going to take to buy your mom a house? Do you even need to buy it? Can you rent one? The next 10 years, your mom's 80 now. Is she going to live another 10 years or you can budget 10 years worth of rent payments for that sort of thing?" Whatever that is, you can actually get a quantifiable life output goal that's tied to that and that's really what vision really needs to be. It needs to come from the limbic system of our brain. The problem with the limbic system is it doesn't have a capacity for language. It can't explain why you love your wife. It can't explain why you love your grandmother. We come up with platitudes like, "Well, she bakes me cookies," but that's a thing. You just say, "I don't know. It's just the way she makes me feel," and you get teary-eyed. That's the limbic system activating your brain and that's how when you get to that point of your vision and you start to think that way, feel that when you get the goose bumps on your on your arms, that's when you're close. And that's when you know you're starting to get to a vision that really, really matters. Jason: I like it. I like it a lot. You touched on a couple things. Some of the concepts that I share is the cycle suck. It's like if you take on bad owners, you'll have bad tenants or bad properties. If you have bad properties, you get bad tenants. If you get bad tenants, then you all have a bad reputation, and then you'll attract more bad owners. By taking up on the crappy properties, you end up caught in property management hell, the cycle of suck. Another concept that resonates with what you're talking about that I the shares the four Ds to revenue. It's not just about doors. The four Ds, the first one could be doors, but the next one is how many deals. Deals is usually what I share first. You get number of deals you get in, how many doors per deal? It's not just about the doors. One deal being worth one door, that's the ratio, then you don't have as much leverage. It's not as easy, but if on average your deals have two doors, you double your revenue. It's these four numbers that multiply. Then, you've got duration. How long can you keep the door on? A 1-year accidental investor versus a 10-year buy and hold, in your property management business there's 10 times difference. That's pretty significant. Then, there's dollars. It's just what your fee structure is like. Are your fees good? It's not just about doors. There's all these other variables that can create that. I love shifting it towards the life goal because the life goal is what really matters. I would imagine you found this with coaching clients. Sometimes the life goal and all the stuff they had trumped up in their mind, or built up, or that they felt they needed in order to have the life that they want, sometimes you can just jump right to life goal. You can just create that like, "I want to spend an extra hour with my kids." "Okay, block out an extra hour," and they're like, "Oh, I didn't think I could do that." Sometimes it's really that simple. We can just jump right to the life goal and the business will still be there and it will still function. Mark: Yup, that is true. One of the things I talk about in The Time-Wealthy Investor 2.0 is really about making that decision. A buddy of mine who's got multiple units is just nauseatingly wealthy in terms of real estate. He's a great guy and said to me, "You know? I read your book the other day." He's a guy who doesn't read and he's such a snarky friend. His name is Randy and he says, "I would never admit this to your face, but I feel I have to," he goes, "I really got a lot out of that book." I was like, "Okay. What's the punchline?" He's like, "No, there's really no punchline. I feel I am time-wealthy," he goes, "and funny, I could probably retire based on the life output that I want to define right now." He's like, "Really, time-wealth is really more of a decision that it is a destination." I was like, "Yeah, it really is because right now I have all the time-weath that I want. I work about maybe two hours a week. Sometimes I'm working more, like right now, I'm pitching in more in the office just because we're down a person," but it gets me re-engage in the business and it makes me go, "Hey guys, why are we doing it this way?" and then they go, "Oh, because this this and this." I'm like, "Okay, cool," and I let them define the process. If they're the ones that normally work the process, my job is really to come in, look and see what maybe needs tinkering with, maybe new or adjusting, giving them coaching, that's the sort of thing. Working 2 hours a week, sometimes 4–5 hours a month in the property management business, but I have all this time-wealth to do other things like coaching, writing books, and things that I really, really enjoy. It really is just a decision. When you hire good people, you bring them in, you set up a solid infrastructure for your business, set up solid processes, and you let them run it. Stay the hell out of the way. When I'm coaching property managers, that's where I see a lot of problems. They don't have an established vision for themselves, they don't have proper infrastructure, they're trying to run on really lean infrastructure or none at all, so the process has to pick it up. What I'm talking about infrastructure, say property management software, or website, or things like that, when you have a weak infrastructure, it has to be picked up by a stronger process, which means people. A person has to pick up that extra process. Let's just go from the really sublime to ridiculous level. Say you don't have property management software. You're running everything on Excel spreadsheets. That's the extreme, but there are property managers out there doing that, so that means they have to have a lot of people managing that poor infrastructure. Here's the thing. Here's the one thing I hear all the time is that, "Oh, my property manager doesn't communicate. They don't communicate with me. They don't tell me." When you have bad communication, that is a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Let me say that again. When you have bad communication, that's a symptom of the problem, not the problem. The problem is you have bad infrastructure, you have bad process. That's where communication issues are going to show up. Let's just use a very obscure example. We've all been to a restaurant where you had bad service. You're sitting down and you can see that that waiter has nine tables and that waiter has one table. You're trying to communicate to someone to take your order. You can see the problem because you're sitting on the outside. You can see the problem, but you're going, "Well, that waiter's got nine tables, that one's got one. Why isn't the manager stepping in?" Bad process. "Why does that person have nine tables?" That's bad infrastructure. That never should have happened that way. That's just one very obscure example. Let me use another quick example here real fast. Have you ever walked up to a McDonald's at a truck stop, where there's basically four cashiers ready to take your order. You walk up, you look left and right, and everybody's standing back away from the registers. the customers. You're trying to figure out who's next in line. You're like, "Can I go? Are you next?" Because there's no infrastructure, the customers have to decide who's next in line. What's a simple piece of infrastructure that you could put in place to manage that? Well, a simple queue, a simple rope line. That's a piece of infrastructure that you could put in place that would manage the customer flow. Then, you don't have to worry about that. Another example would be a bad process. Let's pretend you go back to the same McDonald's. This time it's really busy and the customers are four and five deep at each line at each of the four registers. This time what ends up happening is you get a manager that opens the fifth register and says, "I can help the next person." Then, you get somebody who goes from the bend of one line and then jumps in front of everybody else. Now you just base and created a brawl. It's this mad rush towards this fifth line. That's a process problem. What should have happened is, "Hey, I'm the assistant manager. I'm going to have you open that line over there but I'm going to direct some people over there. I'm going to go out to the crowd and direct some people over there first before you say anything." Then you can manage the process. That's process. That's a broken process when they do it the other way. That's why I'm saying infrastructure and process shows up in bad communication all the time. This means they're not communicating work orders when they come in. They're not communicating when a resident doesn't pay rent. Owners need to know that. They need to know if they're expecting the revenue to come in on a certain month and they don't get communicated that. "Oh, by the way, the resident never paid rent," and, "Oh, yeah. By the way, we're going to go ahead and evict them." They need to know these things and when you don't have an infrastructure or a process in place to let them know that, that's when communication falls. That's when the bad communication issue show up. Jason: Yeah, it's interesting. It's really tempting for entrepreneurs to start blaming their team. This is like early entrepreneurs that they're transitioning away from being a solopreneur, that having a team, they usually build the team around them as if they're just the solopreneur still, and they try to micromanage them. They're always complaining about the communication. They're always complaining about people not doing things, "Why can't they just do what I tell them?" and that sort of thing. I like what you're saying is they have bad infrastructure and bad process. Things are not defined, there isn't clarity, and that leads to challenges in communication. [...] built into the process. They can be part of the process. [...] you need the right tools to facilitate communication. I run a virtual company. If we didn't have the tools that facilitate communication, there wouldn't be any. We're in different states, some of us different countries. Mark: That's exactly right and they need to think about their business, about the product that they produce. I used somewhat as a nebulous example, but the product that they need to produce should be consistency. That's the product that they need to be shooting for. When consistency is your product, the only competitor you're going to have a sloppiness. When consistency is your product, sloppiness is your only competition. That's the thing that is really hard for me to convey to lots of managers because we've got all sorts of products. We sell properties. We buy properties. We do all these different things. I don't care what you're doing. I don't care if you're making razor blades. You need to have a consistent product and I will not allow us to do anything in the business unless we can do it consistently. If they come to me and say, "Hey, you know what we should do? We should send out birthday cards to all of our residents." "Okay, great. How are you going to do that consistently? And you need to tell me. Who's going to manage it? Who's going to do it? What's the negative feedback loop if that doesn't happen?" Let me talk about negative feedback loop for second. You put something in place, it's like I send you an email expecting you to do something. What's the negative feedback loop I'm going to put in place if that doesn't happen? I'm not talking a negative feedback loop like someone complains, which is often what happens if something doesn't get done. You go, "Oh, man. I don't know. I sent that email off two weeks ago. I forgot about it. I just assume that they would do it." What's the negative feedback that you're going to put in place to make sure it actually gets done? Are you going to list that [...]? Are you going to put a task? Are you're going to put something in some task management software? What's the negative feedback loop that you're going to have to make sure that stuff gets done? That's all part of process. Let me just boil this down into an example because I keep saying vision, infrastructure, and process. Think of vision as your map. Infrastructure would be the train tracks, and then the process should be the train that runs on those tracks that all stays in alignment with your vision for the future. Now, for property managers, they're saying, "Well, why would my employees care about my vision?" They're not going to care about your vision. They're only going to work so hard, but they're not going to work that hard to put a boat in your driveway, or a pool in your backyard. This is an extra step to goes in with property managers is once you have that vision for your future, then you go into developing core values for your business. The core values are just the things that you value. You may value justice, You may value efficiency, you may value lots of different things that are core to you, but now you get to identify what those things are and that becomes your compass for all decisions that you're making. Once you have those core values defined, if you're making improvement, you say, "Okay, is this in line with my core values?" If I'm going to make a hiring decision or a firing decision, are they acting in line with my core values? When I do my employee evaluations, I'm going to say, "Hey, when you did this, this was really in alignment with our core values and I really like what you did," or, "Hey, when you did this, I was really upset because it wasn't in line with our core values. I'm [...] say you. I'm just upset that your behavior because this isn't in alignment with our core values." One of the things I'll coach them through, some are three, four, five, no more than six. A lot of people sometimes want to get, "Oh, we value all the stuff," but usually it's something that's inherent to them as an individual and they value these things. They value justice, they value equity, they value fairness, and they can value profitability. There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean you're a bad person because we all need profits to grow, get better, and be a better company. Once you get those core values defined, then it's easier to put infrastructure and process improvements in place. The infrastructure of the things I'm talking about there are websites, software, even the desks and chairs in your office. The process pieces are really about how you operate. It's the rules of how much you operate, it's your SRP, it's your FAQs. Those things that really helped define how things are done in your office based on it that infrastructure that you have in place. Jason: A lot of alignment between what you're doing and what I do with clients as well. I mean, 3–4 core values for their business, you're helping them figure out their purpose, their why as a business owner. These things sound like woo woo and fluff to a lot of people until they implement them. Then, they're usually pretty astounded because, like I tell my clients, "You're the sun at the center of the solar system. If you don't like what's going on inside the solar system, you change the sun, everything changes." Usually as business owners, we try to externalize everything and tackle everything farthest away from ourselves. If we work on ourselves. everything changes by default. Mark: That's so good. I love that. That is so true. Jason: So, we talked about vision, we talked about the infrastructure, we talked about the process. Is there anything else that you want to touch on while we're hanging out here? Mark: Yeah. I see a lot of people out there that are just working themselves. They've created a job for themselves and they're not ever trying to transition themselves out. They think that there's no end in sight. Jason: They've succumbed. They [...] to their fate. Mark: Yeah. I'm not saying I'm the coach for everybody and you would probably say the same thing, that you're not the coach for everybody, but for God's sake, get a coach. Get somebody that can help you get to where you want to go so much faster. Yeah, it's great being your own boss because you didn't want to be held accountable to anybody. But now you're not accountable to anybody, know your life sucks. It didn't turn out the way you want it. If you're living the dream, your life is great, and you have everything that you want, that's great. I don't know that I can help you get much better, but get somebody to help you. We talked earlier about each of us having coaches. I spend a lot of money each month on coaches to help me in areas where I have blind spots and just to challenge me, just to say, "Hey, Mark. You said you were going to do XYZ by a certain period of time. That's not done, so now what?" They already know how they're going to hold me accountable and I pay a fair sum to these people, so it hurts when I show up. I know I'm going to be ready when the bell rings. It's not about paying them the money just for the sake of paying them the money so that they can call and yell at me. They are a softer touch, but the thing is, I want to make sure that I'm being held accountable because we don't have anybody that's holding us accountable. That's the danger of being an entrepreneur. I would really encourage people to look at that. It doesn't necessarily need to be real estate-focused although it probably would make more sense. I have one that helps me in sales. I have one that helps me in marketing. I have one that helps me as a national speaker. I go and I speak at a lot of different places, so I have one that help coach me in that. And of course different masterminds of things like. I would really, highly encourage people that if they are looking or just flirting with the idea, get somebody. I am going to say this. The difference between a coach and a mentor, I would say a mentor is probably someone that you're not paying, probably a friend. They are not going to hold you accountable to the level that you need. I say that this is someone you need to pay, it needs to hurt a little bit, and you need to have some skin in the game. You really need to be committed and you really need to be paying somebody to do that. Like I said, it doesn't need to be me, it doesn't need to be you. I'm just saying it's someone they knew paying someone. Jason: Yeah. There's some magic I've noticed, just psychologically, that happens in shifts inside of my clients or that shifts inside of myself when I am paying a coach and I'm investing in myself. It just shifts psychologically how we value ourselves and energetically it allows us to convince others to invest in us as well. It's a hard sell to go out even as a property management business owner and if you're doing the sales in your company, you're the BDM and say, "Hey, you should spend money with us. You should invest. You should have us manage your rental property," but I don't even invest in myself. I don't care enough about myself or my business to invest in that. I'm just trying to make money, then you're going to ask others to invest in you. Psychologically, when you invest in yourself, I've noticed revenue goes up for me, lifestyle shifts. There's something that happens energetically and psychologically when you are subconsciously investing in yourself. It shifts things. I love what you're saying, everybody really deserves to have a coach, they deserve to be working with consultants, they deserve to have people above them. If you're at the top of the org chart, there's a problem. There's a problem because everybody below in the org chart is hopefully being fed, getting some input, growing, and evolving, but if you're at the top of the org chart and there's nobody above you, it's a scary place to be. [...] The Emperor With No Clothes, unless you get some input, unless you get somebody that you can place above you in that org chart like a coach, or mentor, or something that will feed you. Mark: I look at it exactly the way you're looking at it except I flip your chart upside down. I look at those people as the direct supports for everybody above them because they're carrying the weight of everybody above them. If you get somebody that's not doing what they're supposed to be doing—they're coming in late, they're wiggling around at the top, and you're trying the keep the org chart balanced—it's tough. Maybe it's so far up that you can't see what's going on up there, but you have a coach that can stand back and go, "Yeah, that guy's playing Galaga on his computer and you don't even see it," because you don't want to see it or you just can't see it. That's where it gets tricky and a lot of times, you get too close to the problem and you can't see it. It's like you sitting back watching the waiter who's got nine tables. You can see the problem instantly. Jason: [...] you can't sometimes. They're too close to the fire, they're dealing with what they're dealing with right at that moment, that's us as entrepreneurs all the time. I can't tell you how many times I've had a coach, I've sat down with coach or talk to one of my coaches and said, "Hey, here's what I'm dealing with," and they point, they say something to me, and I feel really stupid, then I say back to them, "That's exactly what I would've told one of my clients." We're just too close to the fire. We don't have somebody outside of ourselves because we are the one that created the problem. We're at the helm. We are the problem. We are the biggest bottleneck in our company. We are the one holding everything back. We're the one preventing growth. Us trying to solve the problem on our own is like trying to look at the back of our own head. Mark: Yeah. It's like trying to put sunscreen on your own back and that's the thing. If you don't see yourself as part of the problem, you cannot see yourself as part of the solution. A lot of times when it's educating them to say, "Look, your company has a very real culture problem. That one is not respectful, that one is treating customers anyway that they want. As a result, they're treating each other very poorly and blah-blah-blah." That's because when you got ill-defined core values, you're going to run into that. You're going to run into culture problems. There's a client that I really didn't feel like I could help him as much as I wanted to, but he had a real culture problem is at his office. He didn't really see it until he started letting some people go that were really some of the major problems. He had a live event that we don't work together anymore, but I'd love to get him back on just to say, "Hey, how are you doing? How did things evolve for you in terms of getting those core values more well-defined?" and really start holding people accountable to them. One of the things that I do is we have an 8:07 meeting every day. The reason it's 8:07 is people are rarely late to a meeting that's got an oddball time to it. They always get there early. There's not much I don't do without purpose, but every meeting, we pick one of our five core values and we review it. They're hearing these core values every single day. That way at their 90-day evaluation, guess what they get to roll over again? Guess what they're hearing again? Our core values. They're getting graded against those core values. It's not just a shock like, "Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah. I never heard that core value before." These are things that need to be repeated over and over. Jason: Yeah. I think we run our businesses probably somewhat similar [...]. Everything gravitates towards truth. We do our daily huddle at 8:45 every morning. I always have appointments starting at 9:00, so it has to be short and that allows our team to see each other because we're virtual, but yeah, it's an oddball time which does work, to make sure people show up. Mark: Absolutely. Jason: Cool. Mark, it's really great to connect with you, to get [...]. How can people get in touch with you? Now, I want to point out like we were talking before the show, your area of genius, what you really can help probably our listeners with, is on the delivery, the fulfillment side, building out this portion of their business where they may be struggling, especially those that are graduating maybe from solopreneur to trying to build a team. That's where they're getting the systems and processes. They're not the guy doing every single thing or the gal doing every single thing anymore and that's a painful transition. How can people get in touch with the Mark and Landlord Coach? Mark: My website's landlordcoach.com. I'm on Facebook @mylandlordcoach. You can find me easily. You can see the moniker in the back. I think where you and I differ is that I helped create capacity in the world. I helped create white space on our calendar. What they do with that white space is up to them. If they want to use that white space to grow their company from 300 doors to 800 doors, that's fine. I don't help them with the growth side. I just help them create capacity on their calendar, help create white space, so they can do whatever they want. Now, some people go, "Yeah. I'm happy with the white space and I'm making enough money now and I've gotten time on my calendar. I'm cool. I got everything I want." Some people get to that point in their like, "No, we're ready to grow." I'm not the growth guy. It's not what I do. I'm not from that piece of it. I [...] turn it over to someone you and say, "Now that you got this increased capacity, that's the person that's going to help you take your business from 1000 doors to 2000 or whatever." That that's not what I do. What I do is I help them create capacity on the calendar. To that aspect I just want to make sure I delineate myself there because I do work with a lot of individual investors. I also work with property managers and just helping them get their life back. That's one of the biggest things that I do. Jason: Love it. Mark, I appreciate you being on the show. Thanks for being here. Mark: This has been great. Thanks so much and my best wishes to all your listeners. Jason: Thank you. All right, we'll let Mark go. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to like and subscribe on whichever channel we're on. We're on YouTube, we are no iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to our email newsletter. If you are property management entrepreneur that's wanting to grow your business, add doors, and increase your revenue, then please reach out to us over at DoorGrow. We'd be happy to have a conversation and see if you are a good fit for what we might be able to do for you. Of course, check out Mark and his business over at Landlord Coach. That's it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth, everyone. Bye. 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 can you reduce the number of times you show a property? Virtual tours. It's time to weed out unnecessary in-person showings with time wasters and tire kickers. Today, I am talking to James Barrett of Tenant Turner, a leading property management tool and resource that lets property managers manage tenant leads, schedule showings, and automate the leasing process. You'll Learn... [02:59] Goal of Virtual Tours: Educate potential tenants before choosing to visit property. [03:27] Customer-Centric Concept: Virtual tours evolved from quality images to videos. [04:20] ROI: Reduced costs for video camera equipment make virtual tours possible. [07:40] Lack of competition makes virtual tours core to growth and promotion. [08:28] Direct correlation between virtual tours, time on market, vacancy, and showings. [08:53] Quality over Quantity: Maximize exposure to increase good-fit tenant leads. [13:37] Virtual tours take time and money. Are they worth it? Promoted? Required? [16:29] Record moves, maintenance, and inspections for marketing and leasing metrics. [21:08] Options and Recommendations: Zillow's 3D Home, zInspector, and Ricoh; or outsource and offload to PlanOmatic, VirtuallyinCredible, and HomeJab. Tweetables Listings with virtual tours increase interest by 250% and generate 49% more leads. One-third of Tenant Turner's customers do virtual tours; 11% of its listings include them. Do virtual tours. If you do, you'll be different, reduce vacancy, and make more money. About 45% of millennial renters seek virtual tour technology before making a decision. Resources Tenant Turner James Barrett's Email Matterport Zillow zInspector Apartments.com VirtuallyinCredible Ricoh National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) PlanOmatic HomeJab DGS 45: Automate Tenant Lead Management with James Barrett and Calvin Davis of Tenant Turner DGS 78: Automating Property Showings with Michael Sanz of Neesh Property 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's guest is my buddy James Barrett. James, how are you? James: Doing well, sir. Good to be back on the show. Jason: James and I were just in Nashville, at the Southern States Conference. We got to hang out afterwards and we went dancing. We went out on the town and it was crazy, wasn't it? James: It was a great time. Jason: It was a great time. James: Dance floors everywhere. Jason: The musicians and the talent. Yeah, it was crazy. It was a lot of fun. James: That's what I tell people about Nashville all the time, the worst musician in Nashville is better than every musician everywhere else, it seems like. Jason: I'm doing open mic night tomorrow night and everyone in Nashville's better than me, that's for sure. I'm taking the risk, I'm getting on stage. James: That's right, go out there. You can get a lot of practice behind the mic doing this podcast so it'll… Jason: I don't know if that's the same as singing with the guitar, but yeah. James: We'll see. Jason: We'll see. James, you've been on the show before, welcome back. I'm glad to have you here. In case anybody who's listening doesn't know James and they can't see his shirt because they're listening, he is part of a company called Tenant Turner, which consistently has been one of the top performing companies for vendors. In our Facebook group, we get a lot of positive feedback from clients on Tenant Turner. I'm glad to have you back on the show. Today, we're going to be talking about virtual tour technologies, what is that? James: For those of you who might be questioning, "Why is James from a scheduling software, where they do lock boxes and in person showing, why is he talking about virtual tours?" With virtual tours, the real goal is how can you reduce the number of showings that are happening because people are being educated before physically having to go to the property. Jason, as you alluded to with how highly we're rated within the Facebook group and what not, we are a very customer centric, customer driven organization. It is something that's come up, particularly more recently, is just the concept of virtual tours. Seeing the evolution of quality images, which was kind of the norm 5-10 years ago. Making sure you have quality, high definition images on your listings, to then moving more to a model of video tours, which is a form of virtual tours but really just the gateway of virtual tours where you're taking a video walking through the home. Now, more and more, we see customers who are adopting these 3D virtual tours like those that are provided by like Matterport. It's becoming very important within the industry because people are investing in this amount of time and effort into these virtual tours and they need to make sure they're seeing an ROI on that. Jason: Are they always seeing an ROI or is that a problem? James: It's been a problem largely because of the investment has always been so high, because one of the big companies that really got into the real estate market was Matterport, one that's very highly rated, but their cameras are $4000. Every property management company in the world might want to do a virtual tour, but at that price point, it's limited. What we've seen more recently is there's now lower cost 360 cameras that are used by not only Matterport, but companies like zInspector which are used by a lot of property managers for inspection software. Really, I think one of the big tipping points is Zillow, who recently came out with their own app that allows you to take a 360 virtual tours utilizing just an iPhone. You're starting to see that barrier to entry drop down pretty significantly but it's still early on in its adoption phases here. Jason: We've had some really great episodes for those listening, if they look at like that so we do with Michael Sanz. He talked a lot about how he's leveraged some of these cheaper cameras and took to offload and to reduce the number of showing significantly. Let's dig in, so how does this apply to Tenant Turner? James: One of the things we have is we have a nice, unique data set that tells us how many people are starting to adopt these types of virtual tours and put them in their listings. We started to see a nice little increase of such tours to date. Right now, it's only about 11% of our active listings, but just a couple years ago, sub 1%, sub 2%. It was really just in its infancy. We started to see faster adoption of virtual tours and one of the things that's also really interesting is 11% of our active rentals have virtual tours associated with them, but now a full third of our customers had at least one virtual tour. Companies in general are starting to adopt more and more of the virtual tours and basically building it to their process. Jason: Let's point this out, people that are using Tenant Turner are probably the more tech savvy, maybe more forthcoming property manager, I mean they're a little more forward thinking, is what I mean. They're early adopters and using your technology. You may have 11% and maybe 33% or whatever a third or have at least one but I would imagine outside Tenant Turner, the number has got to be way lower. This is still a huge differentiating factor for a management company that say, "Hey, we do these tours." It's probably really rare that people are going to bump into any competitors that are doing this yet. Even the people that are savvy enough to be using a scheduling software and showing software like Tenant Turner, only 11% of the properties it's really being used for. James: Yeah, and I think where there's a huge opportunity within the property management space, is now that some of these barriers have been brought down, making it core to your growth model being able to promote the fact that you do this. You actually have an artifact that is created that you can then share with the property owner, that's part of the whole thing, it's part of the inspection process. It's part of your now marketing material where you can say, "Look at these beautiful virtual tours that we're providing," that really nobody else in your market may be doing. Jason: Yeah and I'm sure there's a direct correlation between virtual tours, and time on the market, and vacancy, and not having to do showings and all of this. James: It's really interesting, there's a lot of similarities between Tenant Turner and our goals and what virtual tours do. With Tenant Turner, we want to make the process as streamlined as possible. On one hand we're generating more leads because we want to make sure we maximize our customer's exposure, but on the other hand, we want to eliminate anyone who's not a good fit. On the one side, we're a 24/7 service that can respond to the leads instantly, but on the other side, we have a pre qualification scoring tool that weeds out people who aren't a good fit. These virtual tours are kind of the same thing but for the other side of the market. With virtual tours, because you have a virtual tour on your listing, statistically it's going to get more page views. It's going to get more clicks. Apartments.com, they actually did a nice little study on this and it's something that they've started offering through their website is highlighting listings that have virtual tours. There's a 250% increase in time on page for a listing that has a virtual tour versus one that does not Jason: Okay, you said 250%? James: 250%, yep. You got to think too, a lot of these listing sites, they're very vanilla, you can go to Zillow or HotPads or apartments.com and it's pretty cookie cutter in a lot of ways. If you are able to provide a virtual tour and it gets pushed out to those different sites and they can put a little tag or icon next to it, it can go a long way into generating more clicks. Similar to Tenant Turner, they're trying to increase leads with virtual tours and we see more time on page. They've also seen a 49% increase in the number of leads. That's one of the goals of virtual tours is how can we get more leads into the top end of the funnel. At the same time, just like Tenant Turner, how we like to weed out people who aren't a good fit, the virtual tours are helping prospective tenants weed themselves out if they think that the place is a good fit for them. Jason: Right. Yeah, makes sense. James: More leads on one hand but at the same time better fit leads, so that way when it does get time for a showing, you'll ultimately have fewer showings at a particular property but it will be more people who are qualified… Jason: More relevant. James:…exactly, exactly. It's a quality over quantity type solution. Jason: Yeah, I mean relevancy is the crux of everything. It doesn't matter how great the property is or how many tenants you have going through it, if the showings aren't relevant or they're not interested. It allows them to filter it out. They can see the kitchen and say, "No, that's too small," or they can see the backyard, "That's not what I was hoping for." They just get a better feel for what it would like to be in it without having actually go and do it. If there is a virtual tour and somebody scheduled to showing they're probably fairly legit interested. They're probably seriously considering putting an application in on this place. They're probably ready to move. Whereas, instead of getting a whole host of tire kickers and time wasters. James: That's right. What we're seeing, the big thing right now in our industry is the movement to support self access viewings and whatnot. Within Tenant Turner, only a third of our properties are enabled for self access, because if you have an occupied property, if the owner won't allow self access to the particular property, if the price point's too low, you're still going to show and if the price points too high, you're still going to show it. This is a huge tool to help weed out unnecessary in-person showings. If you have your showing agent, like you said, driving around town interacting with all these different tire kickers who would've weeded themselves out of the process if they actually saw what it looked like from the curb, if they actually had an opportunity to see the size of the backyard and wouldn't fit their two or three dogs. If they saw the layout of it and they know they want an open floor plan, but then as soon as they walk in they see it's not an open floor plan, they're going to walk right back out. It is a huge opportunity to generate more leads because you've got people who are going to be more engaged with your listing, but then also allow them to self identify that it's really not a good fit for them based upon what they're seeing in the virtual tour. Jason: Yeah, I mean it's really difficult when you're just looking at a bunch of photos where you're just seeing an angle from one corner of a room, and that's all you see of each room. It's really hard to get perspective as a renter and you have no idea how these rooms kind of fit together, how that works and what the flow of the place would be like, so all that makes sense. How is Tenant Turner allowing people to get the virtual showings into the listings? James: Yeah, it was kind of a surprising thing that we saw come through our enhancements requests and whatnot, it was just really people—they're spending a lot of money. Whether they own their own Matterport camera or they're putting a lot of time into it and these virtual tours can take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to record. Some people like to go in at Matterport and do video editing or maybe they pay a service like VirtuallyinCredible to do virtual tour, where they stitch together the images for you and stuff like that. They're either putting in a lot of time or putting in a lot of money or effort or both. One of the downsides with a lot of these listing sites,and even with Tenant Turner for awhile was that you couldn't really put links in the description that were clickable that enabled that to be highlighted element. They came through in our enhancement request, just making sure that those things are being promoted appropriately that got Tenant Turner now their own section where people can watch tours. It highlights the fact that that particular listing has a tour versus the ones that do not. The links are in the descriptions, hyperlinks and clickable, which then engages a new window for them to be able to watch the tours before they go through and schedule a showing. Some of our customers, they even have custom questions built into the Tenant Turner Questionnaire that asks if they have viewed the tour. Jason: I was going to say, can they require in order to schedule a showing or even to do a self access, can you require them to confirm that they have seen the virtual tour so no time's wasted? James: Yeah and that's a huge thing. We've seen that in past questions that customers created. It was really like, "Have you driven through the neighborhood?" was kind of the beginning part of it, because they didn't want to meet somebody at a home that the person has no idea what the neighborhood is like, if it's going to be a good fit for them, have they driven by and seen the outside. Now we're starting to see more people do that with the virtual tours and say, "Have you watched the virtual tour?" If not, draw attention to it before they schedule an appointment, because if they're not satisfied with the virtual tour, they're not going to be satisfied with an in-person tour once they get to the property. Jason; Right. Very clever. What are some other ways that people are leveraging these or making sure that it's all tied together? You're at the forefront of seeing how people are reaching this stuff. I think that's a clever hack to require the virtual tour in some way or fashion. Are there any other things like that that you're noticing people are doing to facilitate this? James: Yes. I think one thing that's really interesting and really smart is particularly the cost of these cameras is dropping and there are more options for property managers than there's ever been before. As you're doing your move outs and some of the homes obviously, they're going to need some maintenance as you turn them over, and maybe a new coat of paint, a new carpet, whatever, but as you do your next move-in inspection, if you have a 360 camera for using the Zillow 3D Home app, if you're using your own iPhone in order to record your pictures and whatnot, use that next move-in inspection as an opportunity to not only record what the status of the home is before the new tenant moves in, but then use that as an opportunity for your marketing material too. A lot of these tools like Matterport for example if you use one of their cameras, it'll take all the pictures panoramic pictures for you, and then you can even take out specific 2D images and use those for your marketing materials too. Basically, if you have the right equipment and your budget allows for it, put the camera on the tripod, put it inside each room, it'll take stance of the entire room, it'll create a 3D floor plan, it'll create a dollhouse view of the home, and it will create all the individual images that you would need for your listings and for your inspection. Take that as an opportunity to combine the maintenance and loop-in element with the marketing elements so that you can have that 3D tour for that home in the future. Jason: Right. Then when your tenant puts a notice, you can start marketing the property right away, you can put it out there, you can put out the tour and everything else before, and you may be able to get the place rented before it's even vacant. James: Absolutely. That's another big benefit that some property managers are realizing with high quality virtual tours is that they can get the properties rented, sight unseen. If the virtual tour is good enough whether the person lives in town or not, if the property's occupied and they want to put it out there in the market, there's a higher likelihood that they'll have the home rented sight unseen with a high quality virtual tour. I think that's the goal. With Tenant Turner, we're trying to manage the leads and schedule the appointments to get people into the home, but ultimately what we're trying to do is streamline the leasing process. If we can help minimize the number of showings to help minimize the amount of back and forth that goes on with these virtual tours, maybe even prevent somebody from going to a property altogether, it's a win-win. Jason: The property managers that are not doing this stuff, if they're tracking their metrics, and they're tracking their average time to get things rented out, their time on market, some of these variables, and then they start using maybe Tenant Turner to start using maybe self access, maybe start using virtual 360 cameras and tours, and all this, they probably will see a dramatic difference. To be able to say in a sales presentation to a prospective owner, "Hey, this is where we were before, like all the companies out there, and here's where we're at now, and what we've noticed," it's such a huge differentiator in selling point. Even a month of vacancy, even a couple weeks of vacancy can be pretty expensive. In some markets, that could be thousands of dollars depending on the property. James: Yeah. It's just another kind of tool in the tool belt. I think a big thing is some of the concepts from virtual tours and I think something like Matterport too, just because the cost has been so high, you can get into doing virtual tours relatively easier now because of the Zillow's 3D home app, you can do it now just with the quality of phones being able to take your own panoramic pictures. I know a lot of people out there, they're using tools like zInspector already for their home inspections, but they also offer a virtual tour tool. There's a lot more out there now than there's ever been before and I think the property managers who are willing to take that leap into putting a little bit of extra effort into it, and putting a little bit of extra time in it, they're going to be the ones to receive the biggest returns by reducing their vacancy, reducing their rent loss to vacancy, but then also like you said, being able to inject those core metrics back into their value prop to their customers. Jason: Between you and me, because it's just you and me right now, just us, if you're hanging out with one of your buddies that runs a property management company and they're like, "Hey, what should I use? What camera should I get? I've got your system Tenant Turner." What would your go to recommendation be right now? James: I think the Zillow thing is really intriguing because it's free, but for all of us in the industry, Zillow, they're kind of a… Jason: It makes everyone scared. We're all afraid of Zillow. James: Exactly. Jason: We're all watching Zillow, but we're all a little bit afraid. James: With Zillow, I mean they own and control your data because you're recording it in their app, you're uploading it to their servers, and I know a lot of people in this industry, they're thinking at the back of their mind, "It's just a matter of time before I've uploaded this to their servers for free and then they're going to take me out of the process completely because now they have my virtual tour." I would say, the Zillow one is appealing because of the cost, it costs nothing to do it, but I do think for property managers who are a bit more sophisticated and a bit more in the know in the industry, and maybe have some fears of Zillow and for good reason, there's a couple of hundred dollar camera, a RICOH camera which is a reputable brand. It works with zInspector, it works with Matterport, you can use it with either one of those products and probably a couple of others, and that's a great place to be able to create these beautiful 360 panoramic vantage points of the rental property. This is what we saw in the data that we looked at, a third of our customers are doing virtual tours, but only 11% of our listings have virtual tours. The higher end properties or maybe some of your smaller multifamily that you can reuse the layout or use a virtual tour across multiple units, that's where you're also going to get the most bang for your buck. I think as time goes on, maybe we're not quite there yet where this is going to be a ubiquitous part of everybody's process, you can use it as an upsell to an owner, you can use it as something particular for those higher end listings. You tell somebody and say, "Hey, you have a top tier property, you have a beautiful space, and I want to be the property manager for you, and this is how I'm going to do it." That's part of a way you can help win that management agreement. I don't think it has to be something that's used all the time by every property out there. I think that's a good way to overcome it. If you don't have a camera and you want to test the waters, the RICOH cameras, and there are a couple of them out there, but they're more like $400 versus the Matterport's $4000. It's a good way to test it out and see if it's a good fit for your organization. To your point earlier is it going to positively impact your key metrics, are you going to see a reduction in your days vacant, are you going to see a reduction of your time on market, are you going to see an increase in either maybe an additional fee or more management contracts because you offer this, and nobody else in your market does. Jason: Say you've got a $20 an hour employee that's helping do some of this stuff, whatever. If it's a $400 camera and if it saves you 20 hours ever at $20 an hour, you've broken even on the camera. I would imagine, what is that, 20 showings maybe, or trips out to a place, or whatever. I think it's a no brainer. You could probably justify the $4000 camera if you needed two guys or gals, but $400 is pretty easy to start with. James: Exactly. We have seen with some of the bigger groups, particularly property managers who are tied into larger real estate offices that primarily focus on sales, they tend to have access to the Matterport cameras because these Matterport cameras have taken off more on the for sale side. That's another thing. Whether it's within the NARPM world or within your just local real estate group, you may have a friend that has one. Whether or not they let you borrow their $4000 camera... Jason: Rent it. James: Rent it, that's an option. There are services too, depending upon what you think your choke point is, but there's tools out there or services out there. PlanOmatic is one, Zillow also offers their own network of professional photographers that have access to the 3D tour technology. PlanOmatic is in partnership with Matterport. HomeJab is another new one that has 50 offices nationwide. If your issue is getting somebody to go to the property, take pictures and do the editing, PlanOmatic, HomeJab, those tools are in place. Those services are offered. Jason: You can offload it. James: Exactly. Think about what's the most appropriate part of the process to potentially outsource. VirtuallyinCredible, they do a good job in creating virtual tours that can then be promoted through your various listings, and websites, and whatnot. If you have an editing, if that's where your constraint is, you don't feel like you have the time or talent to do it, there's another place where you can offload and outsource that component to it. You should be doing it, and if you do it, you will differentiate yourself to make more money and reduce your days vacant, so it makes sense to do it, but if you have hesitancies around buying a camera, then borrow one, or use one of these services, or go the Zillow route. If you can overcome that hurdle and your concern is really around editing, and formatting, and getting it to the appropriate level, you can use another one of those services like VirtuallyinCredible who can piece it all together for you, but any stage of the game where you think you have hesitancy or you're resistant to taking it on, there are opportunities to buy equipment or utilize an existing service who's an expert in it. Jason: Perfect. I think you've sold people on the idea of virtual tour technologies. Anything else that that they should know about this that you're seeing from your 30-foot view with all the different property management companies that you're helping them with the leasing side? James: Yeah. I would say one thing to add is that some people might be listening to this saying, "We don't really need to do that, the technology is not there yet," at least be thinking about this, whether you look at strategic components every quarter, or every year, or whatever, because one of the big statistics that came out of some of the research done by apartments.com and Zillow is, about 45% of millennial renters are really leaning into virtual tours before they make a decision. If you don't think the stats are compelling, if you don't want to try it, just know that the largest group of renters that continues to expand within the markets that we serve, they are looking for this type of technology. Again, it's something that you can use to help sell to your owners, but as you look at quality tenants, this is something that those folks are going to be looking for, and they'll look past your listings eventually if this is not going to be there. Be ready. Jason: I would wager to say there might be a correlation between the most tech savvy of renters and the safest ones to be placing into properties. It might help you attract better tenants. Maybe. James: Yeah, I agree. Jason: Psychologically, it seems sound to me, but who knows. James, it was really cool to have you here again. I don't know when the next conference is but we'll have to go dancing again. James: That's right. Jason: With all our homies. To be clear, it's not just Jason and I dancing. Jason: No, we're not dancing together. James: Good times. Jason: You're married, but I'm single again, so I can pick up… James: I could be your wingman. Jason: You'll be my wingman, I could use a wingman. James: I got you covered. Jason: Alright, well hey, it's really good to see you again. James, it's really good to see you again. I love what you guys are doing at Tenant Turner. I appreciate you coming on the show and how could people get in touch with Tenant Turner? James: Yeah, if you guys ever need any help with your showings, software, lock boxes, or locks, or ever just a resource to chat with as you can tell, we're really into the data, we're really into the industry, and we want to be of service to folks. You can reach me at james@tenantturner.com. Definitely come to our website. We've got a live chat feature. Anytime you want to speak with somebody, we have folks standing by all US based who would love to hear from you. Come on through. Jason: I saw your Instagram. I'm going to let you get another quick plug here. You have some new lock boxes that you guys are doing now? James: That's right, yes. One of the big and exciting things that we've been rolling out, we've been doing it in a slow launch and actually Calvin, he owns his own property management company, Keyrenter Richmond. He was one of our guinea pig customers. We put new lock boxes on his property. They're SentriLock lock boxes, SentriLock's a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors. It is an extremely high quality lock box with the six year warranty. For anybody who has had a desire to experiment with self access but maybe was hesitant because of the lock boxes, what we have now is top tier and will last you a good long time and help prevent you from having to go to those properties showings yourself. Jason: Perfect, awesome. Alright, cool. Well James, thanks again for coming on and I will let you go. James: Cool, thank you, Jason, it was a pleasure. Jason: Alright, so great to see him again and have him on the show. Check out Tenant Turner at tenantturner.com and if you are [...] business feel free to reach out. Test your website at doorgrow.com/quiz. Test your website out. See if it's effective, and if not, you maybe want to talk with us and that might help you realize there's that leak, but you probably have several other leaks that we can help you with in your sales pipeline. Our goal is to show up trust, show up those leaks because trust is the speed in which you're able to get clients on close deals and grow your company. That's what we specialize in is helping maximize trust and organic growth and we're on lead generation at DoorGrow. With that I will let everybody have an awesome day, let everybody go and until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Property management businesses always want and need products and services to be profitable and grow doors. That's why many of them choose the user-friendly residential rental property management software for single-family properties called, Propertyware. Today, I am talking to Inaas Arabi, Vice President (VP) of Single Family Rental and General Manager (GM) of Propertyware. He understands the importance of developing new and innovative ways to help property managers attain profitability and growth. You'll Learn... [04:37] Past and Present Perception of Propertyware: Before becoming GM, Inaas was a customer because of ability to customize system based on business models. [06:38] Who uses Propertyware? Typically, larger companies wanting to scale and grow. [07:45] Room to Grow: Never buy a solution for where your business is today; always buy a solution for where you want it to be. [09:50] Directions for Growth: Add units by differentiating services via customization and special offers. Increase revenue per door by offering add-on products and services. Reduce expenses via automation for manual and repetitive tasks. [20:33] Propertyware stands behind its platform; serves as business advisor, not only technology provider, to solve pain points. [23:54] Facilitating Future Integrations: Freedom to connect with third-party tools, vendors, and services. [27:40] API Connections and Challenges: Propertyware provides two-way data exchange that's maintained in one system. [34:50] Status of Property Management Industry: Advocate, educate, and train others on legislation and awareness to protect tenants and landlords. [45:38] Should you switch software? Break up dysfunctional system to experience freedom by having good data, building relationships, and improving processes. Tweetables Never buy software for where you're at today; always buy software for where you want to be. Pick property management software that you can live with for the long-term to grow. Automate mundane tasks performed by property managers via software. Kiss of death is double entry and manual input. Resources Inaas Arabi on LinkedIn Propertyware HubSpot Zapier Tenant Turner Property Meld Renter, Inc. Rent Manager ShowMojo Rently Rentec AppFolio Buildium 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, I'm hanging out with, Inaas Arabi. Inaas: Yes. Jason: Did I say it right? Inaas: Yes, you sure did. Thank you. Jason: All right. Inaas, I'm excited to have you on the show. We have not yet had Propertyware on the show and Inaas is from Propertyware. Inaas: Yes I am. Jason: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the space of property manager first and then let's get into maybe Propertyware a bit and talk about growth. Inaas: Awesome. I do want to first of all say that I'm a door hacker as well, so thank you for having me on, I'm excited. I came in mostly from the operational background. I started a company from scratch, operated and built it a little bit to over 1700 doors and then I sold it to a national player, then I went to work for the second largest owner and operator in the single family industry, American Homes for Rent. I worked for them for a while. I was their Midwest regional director of ops. We've done a lot of great things there. We took the company public. I left that and went to work for a company called the Altisource, which deals with banks and REITs and does a very similar thing to third party property management or property managers but on a different scale mostly for the banks and the financial industry. Operated a very large portfolio over 35 states and after that I got recruited by RealPage to be able to become the single family vice-president for them as well as general manager for Propertyware. Now, the reason why I think Propertyware would be a great choice for somebody like me and for a lot of operators is because you're able to take somebody like me with my experience and put him into the seats where we can make decisions that would actually help the property managers with their day-to-day lives. That's the difference that we're trying to go after compared to some of the other systems, is that we really want to build things that would be usable and would make an impact for people's businesses. I know we are going to talk about growth here in a little bit, but that is really the approach that we're going with Propertyware since I came in. We are building enhancements that allows people to grow in multiple different ways. They grow by adding units, which is what you talked about as far as being a door hacker. Number two, you grow by increasing your revenue by making more money per door. Then number three, you also went to grow financially by reducing expenses while keeping everything the same, so that would allow you to be able to have a much better financials or higher NOI's for your property, since you're an owner or operator. That's really the goal. That's the approach that we're taking upon with Propertyware since I've started to them. I started Propertyware late January of this year. Jason: Okay. This is kind of new for you, the Propertyware thing. Inaas: Yes, it is. I mean, you can say it's new. I've been there since January so depending on how you take a look at it. Jason: You're halfway through… Inaas: Yeah, you're right. I'm definitely halfway through a year, yes, but I'm not new… Jason: You're 0.5 years at Propertyware right now. Inaas: Yes, it is. Jason: I mean that's two quarters. That's enough time to… Inaas: Make a change, yes. Jason: Make some changes. So, what was your perception of Propertyware before you came in versus now? Inaas: I was a customer of Propertyware when I was working with Altisource. We ran a set of very complicated and very large portfolio, a little over 10,000 units over 35 states, and we did it through Propertyware. One thing that I always appreciated about Propertyware was the ability to customize and the ability to be able to build unique or redo the system around your uniqueness as a business model. Now, I think that also causes people to be more afraid of the technology because there is not a very easy systematic streamlined way of doing things on Propertyware. You have multiple ways of doing things. It's built as such to be able to allow people the ability to customize based on the business model. Having that I've been working for Propertyware, before I found it to be a very interesting point as a customer, it was very good for me, but when I moved in to being in the seat of making changes, I didn't realize that this is an intentional thing that we're doing where we are able to keep the business and keep the platform customizable by the business model. Now, I would also say that that will make some people be very hesitant into looking into Propertyware because they're afraid of how customizable the system could be. That could also take you into a lot of what I would call rabbit holes, meaning, if you've got 20 ways to be able to do something, sometimes you give way too many options for some people that would allow you to take out the simplicity aspect of it or the easiness aspect of it. Overall, really what I appreciate the most as customization, if I want to have to sum it up down to one thing. Jason: The perception that I've always had about Propertyware is I've noticed that a lot of the larger companies, the companies that really are folks on scale, that they tend to use Propertyware. Propertyware seems to be very scalable. It seems much more of an enterprise solution than a lot of the other property management software out there. That's kind of the perception that I've noticed. I have lots of clients that have used Propertyware. I noticed usually the guys with thousands of doors are using Propertyware. Inaas: We do have people from different levels of where they're at. Now, to your point, sometimes it's very difficult and I struggle with this myself as well, it's really very difficult to be able to equate the number of units for your business to how complicated of a process you're running. We come across some people that they maybe only running 200 units, but they have some of the most complex processes that I've seen and the opposite is very true. It's really more about how customizable are you ready to look in to be able to build for your business. The one thing that I would always say, you never buy software for where you at today, you should always be buying software to where you want to be. It's almost like when you're talking to trainers that they always say, "You don't want to be the guy or the person who's playing today. You really want to be playing to what you want yourself to look like after you win or at the winning table," and that's really where it comes in to be. If you're thinking you want to grow and you want to have a system that grows with you, scales with you, that allows you to be able to do different things in many different ways, Propertyware certainly will be it. Now, I would also say, you do have to be willing to take on this opportunity to be able to build things that will be customizable for you, so you can get the best advantage. Jason: This is the feedback that I've noticed about Propertyware. What he says is absolutely true. If you're going to pick a property management software solution or any solution for your business, you want to pick a solution that is going to give you room to grow into for whatever size you imagine because it's not easy to switch property management software. Anybody that's done it that switched from one to the other because they thought the grass would be greener on the other side, usually regrets it and it's not been so comfortable. I agree, pick a software that you feel like you can live with in the long term. Inaas: What you're saying is absolutely true. It's really about jumping from one system to the next is not an easy task. I do recognize that you do have to put in a lot of effort into that, but you do need to find something that would scale with you for the long term, not for where you are today. That's the beauty about finding that system and being able to grow with it as you go. We've seen a lot of great companies have grown with us over the years and have done wonderful things as far as that goes. Jason:: Let's get into growth. The topic is growth via Propertyware. How does Propertyware help somebody grow or what are we chatting about here? Inaas: Like I said, the approach for us since I've got into Propertyware is the fact that we're building enhancements that would allow people to grow in all of those three directions. I'm going to give you specific examples because I know you like that. Number one. Growth, in my opinion, is adding units. How do you add units? You help PMCs differentiate their services and do things where they can go out there and put themselves in front of the right people that they're looking for their services. As an example, I know you guys offer wonderful websites offering, which is great. One way that we can help is we do provide our clients what we call a listing widget that they can plug in anywhere on the website. This way, you as a website provider don't have to build it for them. It defeats all the information directly from the Propertyware property management software. All of the vacancies, the rent price, the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, pictures and all that are all within that listing widget. Then we make it so customizable to the point where people are able to do some awesome things with it. An awesome thing would be, for example, you can add on banners at their specific workflow. For example, you can put in a banner that says, "Only make that banner available over the weekend to make a weekend offer," so you can say, "Come take a look at my house that I have for rent and you're going to get $100 off if you look at it between Friday and Sunday," or "If you look at it between the 1st and the 15th." You can do things like, "We're looking for awesome owners like yourselves. Click on this link to be able to see our offering." You could do things like the workflow, like once a property has an approved applicant for it, then you would automatically take it off the listing so this way you don't have to do anything with that manually. You could also do it where you can add a lot of information in the description for that property and one thing I teach people to do and I'm sure you'd like that, Jason, is the fact that for every listing that you put in out there for rent at the bottom of the description for that listing, you should take a couple of lines and you should type in information about your services with the link to the website that will take people on to a full offering of those services. Because we know when people go out to look for properties, rental properties on the market, majority of them will be renters, but some are not necessarily renters. Some of them might be owners that they're looking to comp out their property to figure out what the other properties in the area are renting for or they might be asset managers that [...] ability to put yourself in front of those guys while they're searching for properties. It's very unique. It doesn't cost you any extra. It's part of the listing widget that allows you to plug and play and do it as you go. This is one example of an enhancement that does help for the unit growth. There is plenty more, I don't think I have enough time to be able to share all of them because I want to talk about other items that are important. The second element we talked about, which is adding revenue or increasing your revenue, making it where instead of making $1000 per door, you go up to $1500 per door, you go up to $2000, $3000, whatever you feel like it's the right level that you want to go to. How do we do that? We do that by offering ancillary products that could make sense for the property managers but they're also integrated within the system so this way, they don't have to do anything offsite the system. The beauty about that is you get the beauty of getting something that is offered, make some money on it without adding too much expenses on your end from an HR or an employee perspective. Some examples with that would be asset protection or our renter's insurance. I know some other software do offer that. The reason why I mentioned it is because between Propertyware and some of the other systems is the fact that we really want to make sure that it's fully integrated within our system. The tenant will have a very seamless experience when they're selecting the process or selecting the product and they were going through it, and then also the PMC will have a very seamless experience. Last but not the least, if there is an owner involved, that owner will also have a very seamless experience. As an example of the asset protection, it's a checkbox and then you can select whether it's paid for by the owner or paid for by the tenant. You can put in whatever extra fee that you would want to add on as a PMC as your profit margin, and then you can apply either to a tenant ledger or to an owner ledger depending on who's paying for it, and you do all of that very seamlessly with a couple of clicks. If you do enough of those, you start seeing a little bit of an increase of revenue in per door that you're having. Some of the other products that were also migrating or integrating within our system would be things like utility management which is I think we're one of the only system that I know of that offer something like that. Utility management in single family has not been a revenue center for a long time, but I think that is changing with all of the legalities where it's forcing either the owner or the property management company to keep a lot of utilities in their names so you don't have any off and on for all the tenants when they leave or when you have a new tenant moving in. If you are a PMC and you're going to have to manage that for the owner, we believe you do it with ease, but you should charge a fee to be able to do that and you can apply for that again either on the tenant ledger or on the owner ledger—depending on who's paying for it—and you make a little bit of money on it. That's the examples of how do we help increase revenue for our PMCs. The last type of growth that I want to talk about which is very near and dear to my heart is the profit growth by reducing your expenses. In my opinion, you reduce your expenses by doing automation. Now automation, certainly I'm not suggesting that you exchange relationships or conversations with owners and tenants with technology, but what you do, if you take a look at a lot of repetitive elements that we do every day in property management, you should automate those or you should look into making them systematic, so this way you're not spending a lot of time doing what [...] specific example here. Since I came in to Propertyware, we sat down and we looked at all the processes that our PMCs go through. From renewals, to leasing, to signing of a lease, to maintenance, to all of the big processes. Our goal was to be able to build or educate our PMCs on the best automated way to be able to do a process from A-Z, for the best results, for the cheapest cost as far as HR, and for the highest profit margin. I can tell you, we've gotten rave reviews from our clients when they've seen what we've put together. We have what we call road shows which is more of events that we put out in some certain cities in the United States and we invite our clients and prospects to come out to see us and see what we have going and what we're working on. We share with them for example the renewal process that we build together for them. Now, the beauty about why this is important, why I talk about it, we actually talk about both sides of the spectrum here. We talk about the setup, how you can setup Propertyware for full automation, as well as the actual process of how you run it from a systematic perspective and from an operational perspective. By the time you leave, if you have been a little bit hesitant about how do I work Propertyware to my advantage, you already know how you set it up, and you already know how to work the process itself. We've had customers where they came back and they reported that their renewal rate was at 60%-70%, now they are close to 80%. As a matter of fact, I was talking to a client a little bit earlier today and they quoted 79.83% renewal rate from, I think it was close to 71% or 72%. That's a huge movement. Now, why that's important for PMCs, that's a differentiator for you as well as a service. When you go talk to owners and you say, "I am able to get 80% of people to renew, that speaks volumes to the owners and allows them to see the benefit of working with you compared to working with somebody else who does not have a high renewal rate. Did I explain it to you well as far as all the different types of growth and how we calculate what kind of enhancements we use for each one of them? Jason: Yeah, absolutely. All of these things make sense and I love the idea that you're taking a look at the challenges that the property managers are facing internally when it comes to their operations to facilitate that with the software, to make that faster, to make that more simple versus all the manual stuff. Property managers do a lot of manual stuff. Inaas: They sure do. Jason: The more that you can pull into that software, the better. A lot of people a lot of times, they're turning to lots of different systems to try and systemize their business outside of their accounting solution and that can get cumbersome at times. Inaas: Yeah and the renewal process that we put together for full automation, we've got a little over 20 contact steps, where if you're doing this manually, you would need about 20, a little bit over 20 steps to be able to go through the entire process. We're talking steps from talking to the tenants and making sure that they want to renew, then again talking to the owner is making sure you agree on pricing, making sure you come back and you talk to the tenant and you send them a lease and you follow up on the lease and you do all of that back and forth. We changed that down to the point where we're able to do the entire thing with about six or seven touches. Six to seven touches in my opinion compared to over 20, does saves you so much time and so much effort that allows you to really concentrate on building the relationship instead of losing the time doing mundane task that you should be automating. In my opinion, that's how you grow, you grow by taking all of those mundane tasks, automate them, take those out of your way, and then concentrate on building the relationship, whether it's with the owners or with tenants themselves. Jason: Yeah, makes sense. All right, cool. Is there anything else that you want people to know about Propertyware while I've got you here? Inaas: Absolutely. There is a lot of things that I want to people to know about Propertyware but few things come to mind right off the bat. One, that we do stand behind all of our clients and we do appreciate the relationships that we have with them. Also, if you can imagine, we're taking a different approach by becoming more of our business advisors to our PMCs, not just a technology provider. A lot of times, you come across a lot of great technologies, but if you don't know how to take that technology and apply it into your day-to-day operations, that technology really failed because it's not really allowing you to get what you'd want out of it. Think about text messaging when it came out, for example. If people didn't try it, didn't perfected it, didn't figure out what to do with it, we wouldn't have had such a great success with it today. The same effort would be with our platform. We wanted to educate people. We want to make a business partnership with them, to be able to tell him how to do it, what do they do with it, and how they can use it to be able to get best results from all the aspects that we talked about. That's one. Number two, I also want them to know that we are property managers, building stuff for property managers. We're not technologists, we're just building things in a vacuum, and really building it from the perspective of we know where their pain points are, we've been through it, whether it's myself or somebody on my staff, we know what your folks, the people that's hearing us today are going through and because of that, my goal is to be able to build things to solve those issues for them, to solve those pain points. Now, sometimes we have to take them in steps, but at the end of the day we are solving those pain points. For example, we rolled out our text messaging feature earlier this year and for fairness sake it was what I would call the basic features of being able to communicate back and forth via text messaging. In order for us to take that to the next level, we're also working on enhancements now that would allow us to do the multi-level, the multimedia, as well as the group texting, and things like categorize station for all of the text. This way, our PMCs could take a text and apply it toward somebody specific, whether it's an owner or tenant. They can also do group texting. They can also do multimedia, so they can send a picture, send a file, and do all of that all within one centralized communication command, if you call it that, within the system, so it's not anywhere off the system. Then, last but not least, I think we've talked very greatly about growth, but what I really want people to know, your listeners, is that if you're looking for a scalable system that has a lot of potential for you, that would allow you to be able to do a lot of customization for your business based on your business needs, then you should look into Propertyware and you should evaluate it as an opportunity as an option for you. Now, it may fit then that's fantastic, it may not and that's okay, but at the end of the day you should really evaluate it to figure out if it's a good fit for you or not. Jason: You're talking about what you guys are doing internally. One of the big questions I know a lot of my clients have, a lot of listeners have that's really hot on the tip of the tongue of most property managers nowadays is integrations. That's freedom to connect with third party tools, vendors, different services. Maybe you can touch on an API, what you guys have maybe going on there, and how you guys are kind of facilitating integrations with third parties. Inaas: Yeah. That's such a fantastic point, I'm so glad that you actually brought that up. Propertyware's current approach is that we are offering a two-way data exchange [...] an API that allows people to be able to connect to their property management software. They can connect almost anything and everything that they would like to do. In my view, we want to provide people the opportunities to make a choice or pick the right option that fits for their business model. There is a lot of great things that we offer. If it fits your business model, if it fits your needs fantastic, use it. If you have something else that you'd like to use, connect it to property management software so you don't have to double entry anything. To me, the kiss of death is double entry and the kiss of death is any manual input that you put into either your staff or yourself, because somebody's going to make a mistake with that manual entry and somebody's going to cause you havoc later, even if it's not happening today. That's as far as the API. Now, I know on other webcast, Jason, you did ask about things like I think the place was, remind me again, was HubSpot or something like that, where you're able to connect Propertyware to everything else that it's out there as far as softwares… Jason: That was Zapier. Inaas: …yes, Zapier, thank you. I appreciate that. We actually looked into that and we're talking to them now about getting our platform on their site to be able to have full integrations with everything that they've done. You could do this yourself today, meaning if you have access to the API, you can take API, you can plug it into whatever other software that you'd want to plug it into, whether it's CRM, whether it's an inspection product, whether it's a [...] product, typically anything and everything that has got API, you can connect it to do. Jason: If you're nerdy enough or you pay enough money to get somebody nerdy enough to do it. Inaas: True. I mean, you do have to have a developer to be able to take a look at it. This is not something that's geared toward a property manager to be doing it themselves, that's for sure. Jason: That's why there's Zapier. The Zapier is very cool because it allows a somewhat normal person—you have to be a little bit nerdy, let's be honest—to do it without having to know code. You can create connections between tools and systems, so if you guys are working on that, I'll be really excited to hear when you guys have that ready. Inaas: Yeah, absolutely. You're definitely correct, it does need a little bit of development resources to be able to do the API, that's for sure, but remember though, Jason, once you do it once, you've got it, meaning you don't have… Jason: You don't have to do it over again. Inaas: Exactly. You don't have to go do connection every day, meaning if you've got five products that you're working on plus your property management software, you connect them all at once and you're done. You may have to do maintenance every once in awhile like if something is changed on your property management software or if you change your business model, if you do different things, you make maintenance changes, but it's not as big of a change once you've done it once. It's really more of an initial step and once you go through that initial step, you're good to go. However, I would also say, we're also one of the very few systems that offer two-way data exchange. Some other systems would offer data out and they call that API, but that's really not an API. An API should be a two-way data exchange, where you can take data out of your system and you can put data back into your system. If you can't do that, you can't really call it API but that's again [...] view at this point. I have seen some of our customers do some awesome things with the API connections. Those API's might have where they take information out of Propertyware, they go do something else with it and then go back and feed it back into Propertyware to be able to have one system through which is Propertyware for them. At the end of the day, you would want to connect everything you're working on with your property management software, so you're not having to enter anything manually. Jason: One of the challenges with API's is that you've got two pieces a software there communicating and if either one of them makes changes it can break that connection like something happens, that's what's I think is really important for the different vendors and property management software to create relationships where somebody's maintaining this. For example, if Tenant Turner was working with Propertyware or if Property Meld was working the Propertyware, if one of these vendors a lot of people are really enjoying, if they're helping to maintain that connection, then the business owner doesn't have to keep that working or make sure that it's working. Inaas: It's also fair and I'm again [...] and we have a list of companies that we're actually working with to be able to have direct integrations with, you've mentioned Property Meld for example, that's one of our success stories with the API. We have a full integration with them, they'll tell you the same thing as well. The beauty about that is somebody could do the maintenance within Property Meld and then they can make the payment out of their Propertyware system with ease without any complications. It also allows you to do back and forth between the two systems, so if you have a work order that came in from a tenant, you can feed into Property Meld and vice versa as well. Having that we have the API, that's what allowed us to be able to do that. There is a list of companies that we're going through to be able to do direct integration with. I think RentersInc is one of the people here, they're putting in chats. We've been working with them on a direct integration of the API. I think they're almost there, they're about 95% there to it. To me, it's all about providing opportunities for our PMCs to be able to take advantage of what the technology could do for them. That's what we're embarking upon. That's what we are going to do. And if you stay tuned, you're going to get a lot of great news about us connected with a lot of different vendors that does different things for our PMCs. The idea is, again to your point, we maintain the connection, so the PMC doesn't have to. If they wanted to go elsewhere like for example somebody wants to go to a different maintenance provider Property Meld is not what they want to use, they can still use the API to be able to make the exact same connection the Property Meld is made with Propertyware, if they have an access to the API. Jason: Yeah, makes sense. I love the idea of direct integrations. I love the idea of having an open API. I love the idea of you helping them to systemize your business internally, leveraging your software. These are all powerful tools for them. One of the main things you have mentioned at the beginning, is to lower expenses and all of these things is going to lower the level of communication, which lessens the amount of time in man-hours and manual stuff that has to happen. That's the biggest expense in property management is staff, it's people, it's those resources and that allows them greater leverage so that they can get more done without having to throw money at bodies constantly in order to get everything done. Property management is not a cheap business to run for a lot of people, so margins matter quite a bit. Inaas: It was quite interesting to me once I came on to work for Propertyware because I went out and talked to a lot of clients and again I'm an operator, so I understand what people are going through and I remember when I ran my own company, it was really more throwing bodies at it all the time. The difference though in today's world that is very different than when I ran my own company, is today you have options for technologies that could fulfill those tasks that people were doing for you before. Back when I ran my own company, those options were not even available. For example, if you recall back in the day when we were doing inspections on pen and paper or via pen and paper, everybody would take a piece of paper and a list of items or questions and you just fill amount while you're going through the property doing inspection. Today, you do most of your inspections via mobile technology on mobile devices and with mobile templates. The beauty about that is that saved you the ability or the need to have someone that is actually sitting down and writing down information on a piece of paper and they're transcribing them back into your property management software. If you have the integration correctly, you go from mobile inspection tool to the inspection report directly into your property management. We're working on something that we're just actually going to roll out here tomorrow, which is enhancements for our evaluation module. It allows people to be able to do multiple inspections and then match them column by column for every time you've done inspection. Think of when you go out and you do a move in inspection, you do a midyear inspection, you do a move out inspection, and then you're seeing all of those inspections in front of you matched line item by line item, so you know what the kitchen looked like when you did the move-in, you know what the kitchen looks like when you did a midyear inspection and you absolutely you know what the kitchen looks like when somebody moved out If you can show some damages that the tenant have caused that home, there is never a question anymore about who caused it because you have such an access to data and information that is beyond anyone's ability to be able to dispute it in court. Again, that's the beauty about the technology and the use of technology in today's market compared to what was before. Jason: Yeah. Technology certainly is changing quite a bit. I think here in the US, we're in the forefront of what's happening technologically in property management, even if we are maybe behind other countries in terms of how well-developed or how familiar people are with property management. It's exciting to see what you guys are doing. Before we wrap this up is there anything else anybody should know about Propertyware and how can they get in touch with you guys? Inaas: I appreciate that. What I would like to do though is I do want to talk a little bit about the industry in general because I want to take this platform as a way for us to be able to educate and train. I do believe that our industry and to your point earlier some other countries have this property management business defined a little bit better and it's a little bit more integrated within day in and day out lives of people, so it's looked at a very different. Jason: There's probably two things, maybe just more legislation surrounding it and maybe just more awareness in those markets. Inaas: Awareness is really a good word. Thank you. The reason why I mentioned that is I truly believe that our industry has been under attack this year and is probably going to be continuing on ongoing under attack from almost everywhere. Whether it states that they're changing the rules, whether it's businesses that they're changing the rules, whether it's somebody else is changing the rules. The problem with it is I think we're so defragmented to the point that we lost the ability to stand up for ourselves as an industry. [...] I can give you of states changing the rules on the fly and make it miserable for our PMCs to be able to operate. Not to single them out, but I'm going to make an example of the State of New York. They just rolled out a brand new law about that the tenant protection law, that's what they call it. The effect of those things that they put into the… Jason: Protecting the tenants from the big bad evil landlord. Inaas: Yes, exactly. Part of it, for example, you can't charge more than $20 for application fee. You can't even call it an application fee, you have to call it something else. If the customer or if the tenant brings you a copy of an old credit report, you typically have to accept it and not charge him anything if you're going to go screen them through your ways. You can imagine the complexity that this is putting on our PMCs in the State of New York and they're not the only state. I know some other states and they're changing things, changing rules. The reason why I say all of this is I do have an ask for all of us as property managers and the ask is, let's really get together. Let's support the organizations that support us. I don't want to make this a pitch for any specific organizations that are very well known in our industry, that are usually a couple, two or three, but let's support them to be able to have a voice, so they can stand on our behalf against some of these things that are happening to our industry. Let's really truly do a good job making sure that we're providing the utmost best customer experience, the best customer service that we can provide, because that is the only savior for us to where the public is going to realize that we have value and what we do has value and they're going to continue on working with us and our business is going to continue to grow. That's as far as the industry. I really wanted to make sure that I put that plug in there. You asked me about Propertyware, I think we've talked… Jason: To touch on that I want to agree with you on that. Property management is really in its infancy I think here in the US in terms of awareness and perception. Every property management business owner is either an advocate for the industry or they're hurting the industry. We all need to be advocates for the industry and we also need to educate. We need to educate because I think if a lot of these laws wouldn't exist or they would be very different if property managers had input, because they know what works in the real world. They know what needs to happen. They do want to protect the interests of the tenant and the owner. When things get skewed, when the pendulum swings all the way away from the owner's interests or the landlord's interest just towards what serves the needs and interests of the tenants, eventually it's not really going to end up serving the needs of the tenants. It creates some sort of imbalance that is going to hurt tenants in the long run. That's generally just always going to be true when something isn't right, or isn't fair, or isn't just. Inaas: I totally agree 100% and I think you hit the nail on its head with the education. I do also feel that we should educate everybody that we come across with. Whether it's our tenants, whether it's our owners, whether it's somebody else that we're dealing with our vendors. One thing that I was very advocate for when I ran either of my company or other companies, is the fact that you have to have an onboarding experience for everybody you're dealing with. An onboarding experience with your tenant, an onboarding experience with your owner, an onboarding experience for your vendor. And guess what? Also an onboarding experience for the HOAs that you're dealing with, an onboarding experience for the politicians that are responsible for your area as well because if you don't educate all of those people on what we and how we do it well, there is also not going to be something you're going to like. To your point, Jason, I think if the property managers were involved in some of these laws that they were written, I'm sure they would have been written differently. It's not because we don't want to protect the public. We actually have the utmost respect for the public, but we know what works, and we know what works well. If the idea is to make sure that a tenant has the opportunity to not being overly charged for a particular application fee or something like that, you could have written that in as a rule but a little bit differently than just making it where it's mandated, it's one fee, and you're minimizing the ability for somebody to be able to do the right screening for their tenant and putting the right people in place. Jason: Even in contracts and everything else, we need a little bit of educated language to explain the why behind things. Inaas: Yes, absolutely, 100%. Jason: It's like that spoonful of sugar that Mary Poppins says makes the medicine go down. There needs to be a little bit of education added to some of the stuff rather than just throwing out, "This is how we're going to do it," and you have to just take it. Inaas: Agreed. Now, you did ask me about property. I do want to say a couple things here. It is a system that I'd like people to take a look into as an opportunity for them to understand what the system could do for them, what are we doing as far as these processes, these automations, the opportunities for the two-way API for them to be able to connect their system to everything else that they're working on. We understand that people have to have options and we're supporting that and we're going to go with it. I just want people to take a look at what we've got to offer and if it's fitting to what they need and what their business model is, fantastic. We can work together. If it's not, it's no big deal. We will continue on staying part of the same industry and we'll support each other, but I do feel that people are missing quite a lot by not checking out what the opportunities look like and what the options are with Propertyware. As far as connecting with us what I would recommend, if people go on to our website Propertyware.com, we've just finalized a new experience for what I'm going to call here the free trial where you can go in, login, take a look at a little bit of the system, figure out what's going on. You're certainly not going to be able to do every single thing in the system. I'm not going to allow you to be able to take a payment in the system or put a tenant in there and kind of have them pay you through it, but the beauty of that is at least, it gives you an insider look of what we have available to you. I would also invite you to have a conversation with our sales staff to really truly understand what we have to offer and then go through a demo. If it works, great. If it doesn't, no big deal. Jason: I want to point this out because I'm an advocate for the industry. I'm not a property manager. I want to see the industry shift towards more openness, more freedom. I love what you're saying. We've had other property management software on the past and the general message of one of the big players out there who I won't mention by name was just, we're going to just create everything internally. We're going to just try and give our customers everything that they need rather than giving them what they really are asking for. The general feedback I hear from everybody is they want freedom. They want freaking freedom to be able to make choices, to make the best choices for the business, to choose the best tools and vendors. They want freedom. As entrepreneurs, that's why we are doing what we are doing. We don't give up the 9-5 job so that we can work even more hours a lot of times initially and have a lot more stress and a lot more pain just because we're crazy. We do it because we want more freedom. We want to be choosing what we're doing. What you're saying I think is in alignment with entrepreneurs. It's in alignment with entrepreneurs that are running these property management businesses. They want the freedom to be able to choose the vendors, choose the third party tools that they're going to be using, and they want that stuff to work with their property management software. I appreciate that that is a focus of what Propertyware is doing. I wanted to point that out because I think it's important to highlight those in the industry that are doing that. I see you guys doing it. I see Rent Manager doing that, the open API thing. One thing I've also always appreciated about Propertyware since we started doing websites at DoorGrow back in the day, the very first website I did were websites for Propertyware clients and customers. I've always had that really good integration for the widget. In the first, I have a JavaScript widget, it would populate the data, it wasn't just a cheesy iframe thing that we were putting into the page, and that's always been nice. It's always been nice to have that reduced double data entry. People are putting in their properties into their websites and then doing that just back in the day. We've come a long way since then, every everybody has. Now they're using tools like maybe Tenant Turner, ShowMojo, or Rently, and some of these sorts of integrations. I've always appreciated those aspects of Propertyware. Question. Most people have a property management software. I would imagine most people listening to this show are not just startups that are like, "Which software should I pick?" Say they're using AppFolio, they're using Buildium, they're using Rent Manager, they're using Rentec Direct, they're using something already. What would you say as far as switching? We mentioned already. It's painful usually to switch. How do you help facilitate this if you're going to get customers on? They're going to have to make the switch. Right now, they're probably not even listening because they're like, "There's no way I can switch. I'm married and I'm married for eternity." I'm going to give you an opportunity to help them break up that marriage if it's dysfunctional. Inaas: I am so appreciative of you bringing this on as well. I do want to go back though. Freedom, I love that. I'm actually going to use it because you are correct in making sure that you highlight the fact that it's all about freedom. Yes, we do have offerings. Yes, we do have products, but at the same token, I am personally a believer. In Propertyware, we're believing that we have to provide options for people. You pick whatever makes sense for you as a property management company, if you have a different vendor that is offering something that is more unique to your business model and you like to use that versus using something that we have, great. Go for it. Now as far as the implementation—obviously you can use the API two-way data exchange to be able to connect them so you don't have to double entry anything—the implementation is such an important piece. When you talk to technologist and you talk to them about implementation, they just don't realize the amount of hassles that a PMC will have to go through when they're jumping from one system to another system. To them, it's more of a 1+1=2. Once I came in to Propertyware, the first thing that I have to tackle was our implementation. What we did with it is a couple of folds. One, we broke it down to where we provide now tools for ability to be able to have clean data that gets into your system. Having clean data is half the battle for your implementation because if you have a good, clean data coming into your system, it makes your life so much easier to be able to operate. What we found, a lot of PMCs may not have realized some of the, I'm going to use the word "garbage" that they may have had in their systems. When we go through our checks, we come back to our PMCs and we say, "You told us you managed 200, 300, 1000 doors but when we're looking at your data here, we're seeing 1033, so what's going on with those additional 33 units? Are they truly for rent? Are they truly something you don't use? What's going on with them?" and they're coming back saying, "You know what? You're right. Those are people that we lost two years ago and the person who was working on the system never deactivated the units." Having good data is half the battle. Second is the partnership between the PMCs as well as a good implementation team that allows them to go through the experience one step at a time. What that means, when they're coming in to us to be able to work with Propertyware, they're going to be assigned a particular team with one project manager who is driving the entire implementation from A-Z. They have calls, they have specific asks, there is a specific journey that they're going through step-by-step. Data is usually number one issue that we all come across. Number two would be all your accounting setups. Number three would be all you process setups. Number four would be more of your training and your customization. Number five kind of bringing it all together with KPIs, reports, and dashboards. Now, after you've done all of this implementation, then you're also going to get the training team to come in and do full training with you for all these processes. That training is part of the implementation. It's not something specific that you got to pay for. It also allows you to be able to customize to what your business model needs. Let's say you have a specific way of doing move-ins, that trainer is going to learn that from you before they come out to train you and your staff. When they come out to train you and your staff, they're training you on the system to the best business model, to the best business process that you told him you want to do for that move-in. They're not going to tell you, "Propertyware does it this way," they're going to say, "This is how you told me you want to do move-ins and this is how you could do the same thing in Propertyware for the best of all the results, whether it's for you or for us." Last but not the least, what I would also mention is the fact that we provide our PMCs timelines for their integration. We point it out. We basically say you have, I think the timeline is about 90 days for you to be able to be integrated. You're not paying for the systems during those 90 days until you fully integrated. Once you are fully integrated, then you start paying for it. That allows us to both be on the same footing saying, "We're going to work with you to be able to get you implemented because you're not paying us, so we're not making any money. At the same token, it's in our best interest to help you through this process so we can get you to that finalized implementation piece so you can start using your system." Now, what we've seen is a huge reduction in the days of implementation for Propertyware in particular. We've also seen a very high number of what I would say happy customers that they came on our new plan for implementation. We've also seen a lot less issues with data when data comes in through the system and we're finding a lot of ahas from our clients similar to what I described to you saying, "Hey, I didn't know that I had 1033 units. I thought I was only managing 1000 so now I got to deal with those 33 units," or, "I didn't know that I could do move-ins this way or move-outs that way, or do a process of secure deposit, and refunds this way to be able to make it easier for me and more streamlined." It's less touches, less communications, less points of friction between the teams, and then obviously what gives you the best results at the end of the day. We've seen very good results from our new approach with the implementation. Jason: People are a little frustrated with their existing property management software. It sounds like you guys have made a lot of changes, as well as the API stuff you've been talking about, direct integrations. It's probably worth to them to take a new fresh look at Propertyware. Inaas: Absolutely, yes. If you looked at it before, I do invite you to take a look at it again. I promise you, we've made a lot of changes. And we are continually making changes. We do this every day. When I say changes, it's really more of enhancements that really makes sense for all of what we talked about. You've mentioned the listing, how easy it is. One thing we just rolled out recently is the watermarking for photos in listing widget. It's a small thing but it's an awesome thing to have. Jason: It protects the photos. Inaas: It protects the photos. Especially if you're in areas where you're hit a lot by scams. When I went operating, I'm not singling them out but just a case of the matter. Florida was one of those states that had a lot of scams. By watermarking your photos at ease without a lot of work, it helps you to be able to protect them and making sure that no one is going to steal those photos to be able to scam you or your owners out of the property. Again, we're making enhancements that make sense and we're making enhancements that is allowing people to grow. Either by adding units, increasing their revenue, and/or reducing their expenses, and increasing their profits. Jason: Cool. Inaas, I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing some ideas about Propertyware, letting us know where everything's at with it. Again, people can get in touch by going to propertyware.com and check you guys out. Inaas: I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Jason. I'm really glad that I got a chance to be on the webcast with you. Thank you very much. You guys do a fine job. Please continue on these webcasts. Please continue educating our PMCs and just know that we're going to be supporting you all the way. If there is anything we can do for you and your listeners to be able to support them in their businesses, and in their endeavors, please reach out to us. We'd love to be your business partners. Jason: Awesome. Yeah, I would love to. That would be great. It would be cool. Maybe we'll do something to your audience at some point. That will be fun. Inaas: Absolutely. We welcome that. Jason: All right, cool. I love sharing the message that we share. I'll let you go Inaas. Thanks again for being on the show. Inaas: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Jason: As everybody knows, I love sharing the message that I think property management, there is a bigger vision for property managers than just getting mired in toilets, tenants, and termites. I do believe good property management can change the world. There is a massive ripple effect. There are thousands and thousands of families that can be affected by good management. There's a lot of situations in which families should be underneath good management instead of a crappy landlord situation. I do believe good property management can have a massive ripple effect that can change the world and hopefully that all of you get a little bit inspired or excited about that. You are having an impact. You get to make a difference. I am honored that through you my listeners, through our clients that we get to work with, that we're able to get that message out, and that we're able to have some small impact in the industry and have a ripple effect. I appreciate Inaas pointing that out. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, then please reach out. We'd love to have you and maybe work with you, and see if you'd be a good fit for the type of client that we're looking to work with, and make a difference in this industry. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Usually, paying attention to your body, mind, and health is the last thing you do when it comes to your business. It's time to focus on yourself first! Today, I am talking to Tony LeBlanc, second-generation property manager and author of The Doorpreneur: Property Management Beyond the Rent Roll. Tony shares the keys to debunking the rent roll paradox when chasing doors to grow. You'll Learn... [03:00] Software Engineer Stint: Tech geek at heart that brings love of technology into property management space. [04:30] What is rent roll paradox? Property management companies that constantly rely on getting new doors to grow their business. [05:42] Chasing doors creates havoc and stress due to inefficiencies. [08:45] Expanding Territories/Locations: The bigger and more geographically dispersed a business gets, the more opportunities arise that aren't taken advantage of. [10:56] Would you want two doors making the same amount, or one door making same amount as two? One door, if the goal is revenue/profit, it's not just about adding doors. [12:30] Premature Expansion: Go-to once a company reaches a certain size; anything premature is generally not a good thing. [14:13] Entrepreneur's Journey: Everyone hits stagnation or desire for more. They get distracted by opportunity. [15:11] Opportunities vs. Expansion: Think it through, be disciplined, and follow good habits before making the jump and knowing where you're going. [17:40] Cycle of Suck: Bad owners, properties, reputation, and false scarcity. [18:15] Property management is changing. It's future is a foundation full of opportunities. [21:50] Dinosaur Dictators vs. Millennials Seeking Meaning and Purpose: Good property management can change the world. [22:45] Tony's Aha Moment: We matter and play an important role in thousands of people's day-to-day life. [28:30] Target on Back: How to deal with being overwhelmed as a property manager. [32:14] When we create and have constraints, when we're limited in our time and attention, we innovate. Tweetables Growth doesn't happen by accident. Personal growth is gateway to business growth. Chasing Doors: Is all you care about being introduced to new people, close deals, and get more doors? Property management's growth is defined by doors that it turns down, not doors it gets. Focus is power. Cut something out in your life to achieve something. Resources The Doorpreneur by Tony LeBlanc Ground Floor Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Cycle of Suck DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube 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 are those that love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. My guest today is Tony LeBlanc from Canada. Welcome Tony, how are you doing? Tony: Hey man, I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: I'm really excited to have you on the show. You've been on before a long time ago and I was telling you in the green room before the show, but I think we resonate with a lot of similar values. I think we're both growth-minded people. I read your Doorpreneur book, which everybody should take a look at. And I think we have a similar mindset that growth doesn't happen by accident and personal growth is the gateway to business growth. I think we probably would both agree. Tony: Absolutely. Jason: I posted about this just the other day. I think it's the last thing that everybody wants to pay attention to in their business, is themselves. They'll focus on everything external. "I need more leads. I need this. I need this." Ironically, if I could change the person or get them clear on themselves, then all of those things end up changing by default, everything. Website marketing, everything into changing by default if you focus on yourself first. Tony give people a little bit of background. Maybe those that had heard you before, bring them up-to-date. Tell us a little bit about who Tony is. Tony: Sure, thanks Jason. I said my name's Tony LeBlanc from eastern Canada. Born and raised out here. I am a second generation property manager. It wasn't my first career of choice. I actually got into it as my second career. My first career was a 15-year stint as a software engineer with IBM which provided me an amazing experience visiting the world and working with a lot of great people in that domain. I'm a tech geek at heart. I love technology and I don't think that'll ever go away. It's been interesting to bring that into the property management world, because as everybody knows, technology in the property management space is still not, in my opinion, where it should be. I still think we're 5-10 years behind some of the stuff that we should have out there available to us. I still find it very difficult to run my business with the standard property management software that they have out there. After I left IBM, I started my management company which had been running out for about 10 years, called Ground Floor Property Management. We have been very well-received in our community. We now have three locations and I am now an author. I've basically taken everything that I've learnt from IBM, from life, and from the last 10 years of growing my property management company as well as the spin offs that we've created over the years, and that's where I am today, introducing the doorpreneur way. Jason: Perfect. The title of the show is the Keys to Debunking the Rent Roll Paradox. What is the rent roll paradox? Tony: The rent roll paradox is the fact that most, if not all property management companies out there, are constantly relying on getting new doors to grow their business. I believe there's a different way. I believe there is a much better way than doing that. And I say that from experience. For the first five years of running Ground Floor, my property management company, I was nothing but a door chaser. I just wanted to grow, grow, grow, grow. That's all I cared about. I just wanted to be introduced to new people, close deals, and get more doors. We got to the point to where we reached almost 2000 doors in five years. That's across three locations. It was fast, it was intense, and it was incredibly painful. Incredibly painful. Now that I've gotten into the second five-year phase of the management journey, I've learned a lot looking back, and I realized that as I was going through that growth phase, I'm just adding more doors, and more doors, and more doors. I was causing a lot of havoc and stress on myself and my staff, but I was leaving an incredible amount of money on the table because of inefficiencies. If anybody's growing a property management company, when you're getting doors pouring in—we do multi-rise mostly, not just single family—it's a lot of work. We've onboarded 50, 60, 124 unit buildings, and it consumes you for a period of time. If you don't give the proper amount of space in between those growth, it becomes rough, but you don't want to take your foot off the gas if you're like me. Jason: Yeah, so let's touch on this real quick. I tell people this all the time. If somebody calls me and they say, "I am thinking of starting a property management business," I say, "Do you want me to talk you into it or out of it?" because I get to see inside hundreds of companies. They usually laugh, but they usually stay into it. The thing is, this property management is easily death by a thousand cuts. Tony: Absolutely. Jason: If you have one little problem with one door and then you have a thousand doors, you have thousands of those problems over and over again. That's why it's so critical to shore up some of these leaks early on, because if you're having problems now and you feel like it's stressful now, just adding more doors is throwing gasoline on whatever fire you have. If that fire is a bad fire, then it's just going to explode. It's going to be worse. Customer service goes down. You have more complaints and it compounds. Usually, they have to make significant changes just to go from 50-60 units under management to break past that first sand trap—I call 50-60 door the solopreneur sand trap—to break 100 doors. Just to do that, they have to change everything. Ironically, I'll real estate companies that are doing property management on the side, break past that barrier artificially without making the necessary changes. They don't get technology in place, they don't get systems in place, and it will pass it. One of my case studies was a client that had 600 units under management, single family, and was making $0 in this business. I said, "How are you doing that?" he's like, "I've $3 million a month in real estate every month or whatever. I'm doing real estate." Property management can be death by a thousand cuts. You have this pain, but you have growth and I'm sure a lot of people are like, "I would love that problem. I would love the problem to deal with, to figure out how to get 2000 doors and quit crying," so tell us a little bit about your experience after that. Tony: One of the big things was expanding into different territories. Our headquarters, which is my main office, we're doing extremely well. We then split off to another city within an hour-and-a-half away, and that ended up going well. The third location came in and that started off really well, but then about a year later, we started looking at all three locations individually, and we started seeing a lot of gaps, and a lot of issues that we're struggling with. We made a conscious effort to obviously fix a lot of those things and it made us really pull the curtain back and look at the overall business as it sat. The bigger we got and the more geographically dispersed that we became, we started seeing a lot of opportunities that we were just not taking advantage of. When I started the management company 10 years ago, I had maintenance as part of the division. That's the way my mother did it and that's the way I wanted to do it. I always wanted to have my own maintenance guys on my payroll so that I can control that and we still do that to this day. What really became evident as we're studying and looking at our rent rolls across all three locations, was the amount of money that was being spent outside in terms of different trades, different services that were required on all these properties. To be quite honest with you, I was getting tired of chasing doors. It wasn't as enticing anymore. Don't get me wrong, we still grow, we still love getting new doors, but something had changed in me. Then we were really started looking at what can we do beyond just getting more doors and that's really when the whole doorpreneur philosophy was born. Our first pivot into a new business that serviced our portfolios was landscaping [...] and that's where everything grew from there. Jason: Here's an obvious question. Would you rather have two doors that are making the same amount or one door that's making the same amount as two? Tony: Definitely one. Absolutely. Jason: Absolutely. If the goal is revenue, the goal is profit, and it's not just about adding doors. Everyone focuses on that one multiplier, it is doors. Everyone's trying to get a deal and it's like one deal per door. What if you can get multiple doors per deal? What if you can get multiple years per door? What about duration? There's all these other factors they're not paying attention to. There are some property managers out there that are replacing every door every year. They're usually about 50-60 units, they're getting on an accidental investor that leaves every year, they have to replace every damn door every year, and they're like, "We're adding doors, why aren't we growing?" It seems so obvious. Tony: The major shift for us has been quality over quantity. I say no to more doors today than I ever have in my 10-year career running this company. It's really all about where can we take this? Where can we take that door and what can it do in the long term? Jason: Yeah. I think a property management company's growth will always be defined by the doors that they're willing to turn down, not the doors they're able to get on for sure. I think another thing going back to your rent roll paradox, you talked about expanding into locations. I think that's a go-to once a company hits a certain size, they're like, "We did it here, let's go here." They just had me speak on this at the Ironman conference on a panel and I call that, premature expansion. Anything premature is generally not a good thing. A lot of people think, "Well, we did this here, we're hitting a cap in our door account, so instead of expanding our revenue opportunities with those doors, or here, or figuring out other ways to hit different parts of the market here, let's just go find a new market. We'll do it all over again," they don't realize it's worse than being twice as hard in starting a new location. Tony: 100%. The stories that I can tell you about the two locations that we can open. It all comes back to a fundamental need of chasing doors. It's like that's all you're able to see. We got this tunnel vision. It's like, "Okay, I've grown here and I think I'm as big as I can get. Where else can I go and chase more doors?" It's fulfilling for the first little while. It's fun, it's exciting, but there's an emptiness to it in the end. I think I'm a little bit different than maybe probably a lot of traditional type property managers. I knew when I started Ground Floor that it was going to be something much bigger than just a property management company. I had that vision 10-15 years ago and just running after doors, it lasted for 3-4 years and then I was like, "Okay, what's next? Is this it? What else can I do in here?" That's when a lot of other things started coming along. Jason: I think that's common for every entrepreneur in the entrepreneurial journey. If they really are an entrepreneurial-minded person, they're going to hit this stagnation or this desire for more. The desire to do more. Sometimes that goes south and they do it in negative or dysfunctional ways. I started out just doing websites. Then I go like, "Hey, I could make residual income if I'm doing the hosting for these websites. I could do this. They also need the service." I think as entrepreneurs, we also get distracted by opportunity. We see it everywhere and it keeps us sometimes from even achieving the goal we're working on right now. How do you find that balance between seeing all the opportunity and expanding into new areas, but making sure that you're actually getting stuff done? Tony: I'll be honest with you. The first couple of years, I was so focused. I had my head down so bad in terms of just getting the doors and growing my local office, that it was so busy and it was all so fast that I didn't have time to look at anything else. It's when I get a little bit of breathing room that I started looking at the different locations. I don't necessarily regret it, but I probably would have thought about it a little bit longer before I need the jump. If I look at myself now, it really comes down to being disciplined and a lot of good habits. Like I said, I say no to more business today than I ever have. I am 100% focused. Property management is my life. If it's not in property management or in my sphere, I'm not interested. I don't have time for it, I don't make time for it, and I'm very blunt with that. I have an extremely tough schedule that I follow. I do a lot of stuff for myself personally, and then that translates over to the business side. I know where I'm going. It's kind of fun to where you'll have other guys or people that'll come in and say, "I got these cool opportunities, I got this, I got this," I'm like, "Cool, good for you. I hope it works." Me? I'm not interested. I got my path and I know what I'm doing. Jason: Yeah. I did hit up for opportunities all the time. Different property management there's like, "Hey, we could do this cool thing together." I'm like, "No, we can't." Focus is power like with anything. You could be a flood light or you could be a laser and actually cut something out in your life and achieve something. All right. Can we touch on your book a little bit? I read through it. I think there's some interesting ideas in there. I don't know where we should start, but you've got this book, you call it The Doorpreneur: Property Management Beyond the Rent Roll. It's a quick read. I think it's a good read. You share a little bit of your journey and some of the things you've gone through. I think we've done some similar things. I'm going to quote a part of it. It says, "We are the problem and we are the solution." You were talking about how property management had a bad rep because we're allowing it to. I think that's the case. Everyone who's heard of me, if they listen to my show at all, talk about the cycle of suck. If you haven't, just google "Property Management Cycle of Suck" and you'll find an old video I did on it. I think that the industry as a whole is that's where they are. It's caught in the cycle of suck. It has a bad reputation because everyone's taking on bad owners, and they're taking on bad properties, and they're not being picky, and they feel all the scarcity. Everybody's trying to do the same stuff that's not working which creates false scarcity in the industry and there's no scarcity in property management. You said that you believe the industry's time has come. What do you see for this industry? You say it's on the brink of change. I feel that, too. I feel like there's a shift going on right now. I'm hoping that DoorGrow is helping to push that forward. What do you see for the future of property management? Tony: Just over the last few years, I would say probably in the last 4-5 years, I will say that you've had a part in this in terms of, you're starting to see a lot more people get together and talk about property management, and not just NARPM. I know that's a big organization in the States, but in order for an industry to really take over, I believe it's got to go beyond just the regulation of the groups that are that are like that. It's exciting to see a lot of that happening, whether if it's groups online or different organizations, all sorts of cool stuff. But I'm also seeing that the opportunities that are becoming present in all these different places are becoming much more attractive to different people. It's like you're seeing the density being built in a lot of different cities—the rise of renting out in this whole generation of millennials—in terms of it being a renter's nation. That is providing a good foundation for a lot of required property managers to come out here and start managing these properties. The tools are getting better. They're not amazing yet, and I'm speaking in terms of technology. Those things are getting better over time. But more and more, I'm seeing the property management is getting away from the old school that started in the business 30, 40, 50 years ago, and you're seeing a new breed of property management come into the picture, which is they're a lot more professional, they're running real businesses, it's not just a side gig from a realtor, or it's not just this big owner that owns a big portfolio and he decided to manage a few places on the side so he can make a few bucks and pay for him running his own stuff. They're seeing legitimate people, business people coming into the space and making a run at it, and that's what we need. We need professionals coming in and we need professionally-run businesses. More than ever today, I'm seeing and talking to a lot of people that are running greater businesses and it's exciting, because I think the opportunity is huge. But it's also at the same time somewhat limited because I know I've done this long enough. I've been around it my entire life. This business is tough. It is not for everybody. We're going to have the turnover that's going to come through and hopefully the good will stick and make the business better for everybody. Better first impression of the business, better for us working in the industry, being able to grow together, and making it all better together. Jason: Yeah. I think that the way to change the industry is obviously to have healthy businesses. Healthy business owners in this industry, leading the way, and they have to be profitable. I think also there's a huge opportunity right now in that, millennials are the workforce largely. I think a lot of people, they've gotten a bad rep. A lot of people think they're lazy, they're unmotivated, and I find that to be patently false. I think millennials are our new generation of workers that don't want to do menial work. They don't want to do something without meaning. I think this is a huge opportunity for business owners that are not acting like dinosaurs saying, "I'm paying you to do something so just freaking do it." Those are the dinosaur dictators that think, "Well, I give them money. Why don't they just do everything amazingly?" Millennials want purpose and I think there's an opportunity now for business owners that believe they have a purpose, that there's a greater vision for what they do. You touched on that in your book. I talked quite a bit about that as well. People have heard me say, "I believe good property management can change the world. It can have a significant impact. We're affecting families. We're affecting lives." I could have that impact through my clients, which is what gets me excited about showing up helping property management business owners lead the way and do good work. They can't do that if they're struggling. Tony: Yeah. The biggest aha moment I've had in my career with Ground Floor, my management company, was four years ago. We had an offsite meeting with all my staff. We're about 50 people with all 3-4 different companies. I was looking at the rent roll, I showed it to everybody on the big screen, and I'm like, "We've got 2000 apartments," roughly it was right around there, that we're almost full all the time, "and if I take an average, we'll probably have around 3000-3500 people that live in properties that we take care of. Guys, we matter. You cannot not look at that and how important of a role we play in day-to-day life for close to 4000 people." I'm like, "That's pretty special." Like I explained in the book, we're a part of all sorts of experiences for these people. We've seen deaths, we've seen births, we've seen marriages, we've seen plenty of divorces, we've seen it all. It happens underneath our roofs. Again, I grew up in the business, I've seen it all from a personal standpoint, and now I've seen it all from running a business. There are no ifs or ands about it. It's a special business. Jason: All of those different situations require some activity or involvement with the property manager. I mean, even if it's just maintaining the property and doing some maintenance, it's affecting these families lives, and it's affecting these sometimes challenging moments that they're going through. Those interactions can be positive, helpful interactions, or it can deepen their words, they can cause more pain, and the ripple effect property managers have is huge. Property management is death by a thousand cuts. It also can be a ripple effect of a thousand possible positive interactions on a regular basis. I know property management can be tough. I hear about it all the time. I know how difficult it can be to run a business. I know that. Every entrepreneur knows that. It doesn't get easier the bigger you get, often. It can sometimes get more challenging. But it makes it worth it when you have somebody that comes to you and says, "Hey, you made my life better," or, "You had an impact," and those little moments we don't always hear about them, but when they do come through, they do. That's why we do what we do. Tony: Yeah. I think a lot of property managers will be able to agree with me, that there's an old saying that the phone never rings with good news in our business. If someone's calling, it's usually something bad on the other line. It's either a complaint, or an issue, or something. It's almost like you have to come into the office each day knowing that you may not get a million praises from the outside, and that's why the office environment is sacred for you and your staff, for the people running the business. I just hired a new girl a few weeks ago and I'm very honest and transparent during our interview. I was like, "You're new to this industry and you are going to struggle. It's going to be really tough. It's going to test you emotionally. It's going to test your ability to deal with a million things going on at the same time, it's going to test you in every way possible." I asked her the other day, she's going on her third week and she's like, "I knew it was going to be tough, but I didn't think there would be so much that I had to learn," but the office environment is such a way that we're very much a team, we help each other out, we have each other's backs. If there's a difficult situation, other people step in. You really have to have that environment because it can really help the overall business. If not, it can get in get a little lonely. Jason: Yeah. The turnover in property management businesses regarding staff can be pretty high. I think one way to mitigate that is what you're talking about, it's creating a really positive culture, a safe place within the business, a place in which your team members are allowed to make mistakes, they're allowed to screw up, and they're allowed to figure things out. Otherwise, they start hiding stuff. Tony: And start costing you money. Bad mistake. Jason: I think it's important to realize, a lot of times in any business, the people that are really attacking or really causing you grief, are hurt people. They're hurting on the inside. It's not even really usually about you. We were talking about before the show how I've been really attacked lately in some forums and some groups. I have several people messaging me privately and lots of people that message me like, "Hey Jason, you don't deserve this, you've done a lot for us," and it's ironic because in property management, we deal with this. Everybody gets these negative reviews. They feel unjust and unfair, they didn't give the deposit back which rightly so probably, you're being attacked, and these people have nothing better to do than just try to destroy your business. That's just part of being in business, I think. In general, you're always going to have haters. The bigger you get, the bigger the target is on your back. You just have more people that you're dealing with. I definitely got a target. You dealing with 4000 maybe potential constituents connected to your business that you're impacting, all the owners, all the renters, everything, you have a big target, Tony, on your back. Tony: Yeah. It's overwhelming in the best of days. That's probably one of the, I would say, either the first or the second biggest problem overall arching in this industry is how do you deal with the overwhelm of dealing with so many different things. If we were to count all the different balls that we're juggling in the area at any given time as an owner even as a property manager, it's a lot. That's why I've gone to the depths that I did with the book in terms of putting the importance on lifestyle, in terms of installing good habits, in terms of being healthy, working out, just simple things because if you're going to go in this industry and you're going to make a run at it, you got to be firing on all cylinders. A big part of that is your body, your relationships at home, your relationships with your kids. You got to go into the office with a clear mindset. If not, it's going to be rough. I've walked in the holes in my office on many days after either having an argument with one of my kids or having an argument with my queen and that's like, "I can't do anything in here. I have zero patience and I just want everybody to stay away from me." That's not a way to run a business. Jason: That's how I would feel if I'm hungry. That's how I would feel if I didn't get enough sleep the night before. We tend to start externalizing these challenges. That's why even people coming to my program they're like, "Well, I wanted to grow my business, why are you having me focus on some of the silly stuff like drinking water?" I get picked on about some of those things but I know the impact that it's had on my own life to get the basics in place and have that foundation so that you can tackle the world. We have one vehicle in which we approach everything in life and that's our body. Tony: Yeah, absolutely. Jason: Our current ability distinct cognitively, to function, to be able to deal with stress, be able to see objectively, to be able to handle all the stuff that gets thrown out as a business, to be able to see alternatives and ideas, all of it has to do with our brain and being able to function on all four cylinders or however many you might have. Tony: Absolutely. I'm a true believer. I've always been an athletic guy. 2019, I've taken it up a notch and done some other things. Jason: I've noticed. Tony: Yeah. It's funny because 8½ months getting ready for an Ironman, I made more money in that eight months than I probably did in the last two years by just condensing the amount of time that I had and the focus that was required to do it, and to pull it off. I still look back at it and like, "How did I do that?" and I'm still digesting it all because it's still fairly new, but it's taught me so many lessons that I'm going to be able to take forth with the new stuff that I'm doing. The very first video that I made to get ready for my Ironman training and it was January or February, it's like I'm doing this because I need to become somebody different in order to launch this book, to write this book, to finish this book, and to grow beyond the book. It was amazing. It was a journey like I can't explain Jason: I'll point out one thing that's very obvious to me because I've seen it in you, I've seen it in a hundreds of entrepreneurs. When we create constraints, when we have constraints, when we're limited in our time or limited in our attention, we innovate. That's when our brain starts to really fire and we get really, really creative. It's the same thing with our team members. If you give them unlimited time to do something and unlimited resources and money to do something, they're going to do it in the most costly, time-sucky way possible. But when you create constraints and having a goal of doing something big like an Ironman, where you're going to put your body to some massive stress, you have to be prepared for that, and you know what it's actually going to take, then it gets really difficult and it creates constraint. I'll point out to everybody. I've seen this in lots and lots of businesses and I've seen in my own life when we have constraints. You don't notice, you come up with ideas when money get scarce. When you have a team member leave, all of a sudden, you're changing things that they've been doing a status quo forever. A lot of these challenges that we perceive as challenges really are opportunities for us to innovate and to grow and to change. I'm not sure if Tony will make it back here, but I'm sure Tony would love for you guys to reach out. Tony, I'm going to plug you. He's got his book, Doorpreneur, and I recommend you check that out. You can go to doorpreneur.com You can preorder it now. Make sure you get his book. Check it out. I think there's some really great value. It's a quick read, it's only 125 pages, and I think you'll really enjoy it. He's got some previews of the first four chapters on his site doorpreneur.com and it looks like you'll be able to get it on Amazon and in some other places. We'll go ahead and wrap this up. So if you are property management entrepreneur, and you are wanting to add doors, and you are wanting to get your business in alignment, and you are wanting to create that space for yourself, you feel like you're the hamster on the treadmill, then reach out. You can check us out at doorgrow.com.

From surfing waves to making waves by fixing exploding toilets for tenants—how an entrepreneur and creative technologist leveraged design to streamline simple solutions. Today, I am talking to Mark Rojas, CEO and founder of the Proper app that streamlines the building repairs process. Mark has spent his career creating positive user experiences and adding value by solving problems related to efficiency and human connectivity. You'll Learn... [04:40] Definition of Design: Viewing how something works in the real world and creating a corresponding experience to make your life easier and more enjoyable. [05:34] Proper app idea originated with possibility of becoming an accidental landllord. [07:13] Maintenance is the bain of their existence. There's got to be a better way to fix building repairs process and problems. [09:30] Maintenance is more than one issue. It involves many problems for many people. [10:10] Lack of Communication: Leverage "chat room" to create efficient and effective dialogue between contractors, property managers, and tenants. [13:07] What makes Proper different? Visibility and shared platform for centralized communication between all participating people and places. [14:50] Building Repairs Process: Submit image, describe problem, create work order, send notifications, add contractors, diagnosis issue, complete fix, submit/pay invoice. [19:50] Property Management Platforms: Proper's integration and import/export plans for increased visibility for systematic way to save time and money while simplifying lives. [22:42] Common Questions and Concerns: Is Proper app intuitive? Is training provided? [28:15] Future Feature: Email integration and aggregation to avoid duplicate data. Tweetables Every elegant solution involves some element of intelligent design. Design isn't all about pixels. It's applied via various mediums by viewing how something works in the real world. Maintenance is the bain of a property manager's existence. First Step with Proper App: A picture is worth a 1,000 words, so describe the problem succinctly. Resources Proper Mark Rojas on LinkedIn Venice Art Crawl Buildium AppFolio Propertyware Intercom Help Scout GatherKudos 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's guest, I'm hanging out with Mark Rojas. Mark, welcome to the show. Mark: Hey, it's good to see you again. Jason: Mark is coming to us from a company called Proper Chat, correct? Mark: That's correct. Jason: Mark, I'll read a little bit of your bio. It says you are the CEO and founder and it says, "While you might not think of hiring a designer to fix an exploding toilet, Mark Rojas still might be the man for the job. From starting his own surfboard manufacturing company at 16 to founding multiple tech companies focused on creating positive user experiences, Mark has spent his career working to add value by solving problems of efficiency, and human connectivity. An entrepreneur and creative technologist from Queens, Mark is the founder and CEO of Proper, an app designed to streamline the building repairs process. He first began befriending property managers while producing the Venice Art Crawl, a passion project that transformed vacant properties into temporary art showrooms (aka fun, free open houses). Shortly thereafter while subletting his apartment in 2017, Mark was blessed with the invigorating experience of needing to manage repairs for a bathroom explosion involving multiple tenants." Why don't you take us from there? Mark: That's a good intro. Jason: I'll let you tell the rest of the story. How did you get into this from surfboards? Mark: Surfboards was a little I went to when I was 16 years old, but that did throw me into design and ultimately product design. Right after college, my career quickly became into web development, app development, and working with a lot of startups here in the Bay Area, which is where we're based out of, to leverage design to solve water problems. It came with the advent of mobile, really becoming this fast-growing platform, where your everyday user now is expecting this very seamless experience that is solving various problems we're on. That transitioned from building a product, starting a company, and then continuing to wanting to build products for others. I think one of those things that continues to be a passion of mine is finding a problem and leveraging design to simplify, streamline it, and make everyone's life better. Jason: I love it. That's entrepreneurism in a nutshell. We see a problem and we're crazy enough to think we can solve that problem. We can make money solving that problem and create a win-win. You love that you say that you focus on doing it through design because really, every elegant solution involves some sort of intelligent design, whether it's a system, whether it's something visual. People think design, they think it's like graphic design or something creative. Mark: Yeah. I don't think of design as just pixels. There's various mediums through which one can apply design. It's really viewing how something works in the real world and seeing how can you create a corresponding experience that can streamline it, that can make it simpler, that can make it more delightful, more efficient, and really give you a lot of your life back, whether that's time or even just joy. Jason: What problem then did you really see that you're like, "I'm going to create Proper"? Let's try to build this problem up. Mark: I've seen a lot of different thoughts to my life in being a tenant, but it really became a problem for me when I almost became an accidental landlord. I was traveling for an extended period of time, I have known my landlord for a while, and she was happy to actually let me sublet it. It's like, "It's okay. Go off, I trust you, and when you come back, it's all good." But there's still a level of responsibility that was pressed upon me. As I rented out my apartment, I quickly realized that I have become a landlord. So, two days into it, the subtenant called me to let me know that there was a major problem. I was like, "What? What's going on?" It turned out that the pipe above our ceiling under our neighbor's bathroom had burst. To say the least, it's quite a mess. This set up a flurry of emails, phone calls, text messages between the tenant and myself, the property owner, neighbors, contractors, plumbers, et cetera, and it was happening over phone calls, emails, text messages, WhatsApp calls, FaceTime calls. At some point, I was like, "Wow, this is rather ridiculous," and my design mind immediately started thinking... Jason: Broken. This is flawed. There's got to be a better way than this. Mark: Yeah. My wheels are just spinning and spinning and spinning, and I started designing it in my brain. Then, one day I just whipped it out of my computer, I just mocked it up, and I was like, "I'm going to build this." I started building it and I think one thing that's true then and now, and even more true now, is we spend a lot of time talking to our users and our customers, and really dissecting their problems or processes. I immediately started doing calls with property managers that I already knew. As you saw in my bio, I knew a lot of property managers. When I started the Venice Art Crawl, which is a crowd-sourced art event, we have 40 different art shows going on at the same time in Venice beach. The way I did it was I found vacant spaces, [...] the property managers and basically said, "I know I can bring high net worth individuals to these empty spaces and we can treat it almost as an open house." That worked not only well—I was creating value for them—they all basically love me. When I started working on this idea, they were happy to talk to me for hours at a time. What I found is that maintenance is almost the bane of their existence. Jason: Oh yeah. We did a survey inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group—property managers listening, you should be in there if you have a property management business—and we asked—just an informal poll in the Facebook group—"What's your number one challenge in your business?" There were two or three items at the top of the list that were connected to maintenance. It was sourcing vendors, it was maintenance coordination. Maintenance is the biggest headache or challenge in property management. Mark: Yeah. It's very painful to the point that I actually thought that I was becoming a therapist. Sometimes, they would talk to me for three hours at a time just talking about it, and I was like, "Wow, this is a very real problem." I was able to take those learnings and turned it into a product that corresponded with it. What started off was really just a project. I didn't think, "Oh, I'm going to become a billionaire off of this. This is my next big thing." This is more, I was traveling, I wanted to start building a product, and I wanted it to not be something that I built in bane, but rather, to possibly solve someone's problem. Initially, it was my problem, and when I talked to property managers, they actually laughed at me because I was building an app already and only dealing with a monthly maintenance issue, while they're dealing with hundreds a month, if not more. Jason: Right. You're building an app for one maintenance issue. Mark: Yeah, so talking to them totally validated that this is something worth pursuing. Then, I just went deeper. I kept talking to them. I started talking to the contractors, the tenants, and I realized that this is a problem on all sides of the equation and set out to start building a solution that could solve a lot of the issues with it. I think a lot of my history in design has been focused on communication, really making it richer and removing barriers. Essentially, a lot of friction and a lot of time wasted happens when poor communication happens. That's why it's proper.chat and leveraging chat as a platform to remove a lot of the bottlenecks that happen, like playing Whac-A-Mole between an email for this contractor, phone call for that tenant, and really starting to centralize everything where we could remove those bottlenecks and with the oversight of the property manager, the contractor and the tenant can speak with each other. Anything from scheduling, updates, "Hey, I got to go to Home Depot and get this part. I'll be back tomorrow." In the world today, the tenant would know. Three days could pass and that creates frustration and friction for the tenant because they don't know what's going on, and that means another phone call to the property manager. Jason: Right. Communication in a business, for any business, causes a challenge; internal communication. For a while, as I was growing from solopreneur to building a team, I have freelancers. I thought this was so great because I only have to pay them when there's work. "Here's the job, do this work." But the challenge with that is the communication level was just not strong enough. I didn't realize that until I started getting full-time employees. The communication level is dramatically different when you have somebody that's dedicated because you're reducing the number of people that you need. That person is giving more of their time. Two people that are doing 10 hours a week versus 1 person that's doing 20 hours a week, I would take the one person any day of the week, especially if those two have to communicate. The communication back-and-forth wastes so much time, and there's always a percentage of loss when there's any sort of communication. If there's communication between two parties, there are gaps. There just always is. It could be a misread and body language. It could be somebody doesn't understand something. Somebody's a poor communicator. There's some sort of flaw. The more you can reduce that, the less friction there is. One of my recent hires was one of these unicorns that can do web development and design. The communication level is way shorter. He can get things done in such a short time. Normally, I want a specialist, but he's able to create something so much quicker because he's not having the communicate and negotiate between another party that doesn't understand what they do. A developer and a designer are two different universes, right? Mark: Absolutely, yeah. Jason: [...] crazy guys setting you both. So, I get it. Explain how this helps reduce the communication and why is this better than the other stuff that's out there, what other people have been doing? What's unique about Proper that you're noticing? Mark: A lot of it comes down to visibility and a shared placed for everyone involved with the maintenance, to communicate with each other. Where we really differentiate is that we started on mobile. We're a mobile-first solution. We do have a desktop and a web experience for the property manager. In terms of being able to report, what we notice from a lot of property managers, whether they have Yardi, AppFolio, you're still getting these maintenance requests from many different places. You're getting from phone calls, emails, text messages. What we set out to build and we're building right now is one place I can centralize all that. Not only centralize it but make it a more useful format. When someone writes you a three-paragraph email, a lot of it is frustration. Jason: Right. There's all this emotion and they want you to understand their pain. They're like, "I got to relate this. I got to paint this picture." Mark: Exactly, and part of it is because they've waited too long to write this email. This frustration has built up and they want to write this email. With our application, which is native, you as a tenant are able to create a work order very quickly, and it's very visual. An image is worth a thousand words and it really is in this area. Often, these emails don't even include images, so a tenant is able to quickly snap a photo, almost like Snapchat or Instagram. You don't train anyone. There's literally billions of users on these apps who know how to use this and they're able to create a work order in under 30 seconds. The format is not to write paragraphs and paragraphs. It's to be succinct, 140–200 characters max and you choose a category. This gets fired off to the property manager, you get a notification on your phone or on your desktop, and then from there you have your contractors that you can add this this conversation. The idea is that it turns into a group chat at this point, with the property manager still being involved. Instead of trying to get back and forth between scheduling, instead of the contractor having to ask questions to the property manager to then go ask the tenant to further diagnose what's broken, the contractor's able to immediately see what's broken because there's always going to be a picture. We pretty much make that almost mandatory for the tenants. What we've seen from contractors is that they're able to save time and cost by more quickly able to diagnose where the problem is, what tools to bring, what materials to bring. Everything just happens there. The property manager is still part of the process, but they don't need to insert themselves. When they insert themselves now, it really takes up a lot of their time. Not only because they have to go back and forth, but often they're fielding phone calls, they're fielding emails, and then this really, really adds up. Jason: I love that it's prompting them to take a picture. Mark: Yeah. The first step is to create a work order, take a picture. That's the first thing. Jason: And a picture's worth a thousand words. They're not going to have to write a thousand words in order to get it across. You can see it and you go, "Okay, you can fluff it up or make it more dramatic, but I can see it. Here it is." Or they might do the opposite. They might say, "Hey, there's a problem with the faucet and it's flooding the whole bathroom." So, you can see it. They send you a picture. In a lot of apps, a picture's an afterthought. They have to do some serious extra work in order to get a photo into something or to do it. I've had maintenance companies ask me, "Could you email me a photo?" or, "Can you take a picture so we know what to look for or what type of fixture we need?" whatever. It slows down the communication significantly. Mark: Totally and I think there are these added benefits that currently property managers don't have the bandwidth to do. Because of the contractors there, they can easily provide updates themselves like, "Hey, I have this question." "Hey I have to come back." Right now, that has to go to the property manager, the property manager then has to tell the tenant, and then often this doesn't happen. So, you have this built-in benefits of transparency that you have with the tenant that really builds trust, but also stops them from calling you, which once again takes up a lot of your time. The very nice thing is that at the end, the contractor is able to close up the job by providing proof that they've done it. So, they have to take pictures of it. Then, you have these records of the conversations that you have with everyone, the images at the beginning of the job, the images at the end, and it just creates a ton of transparency and documentation that you can have, that's very easily searchable, filterable later on. One thing we're starting to work on is really reporting. You can start to really understand the volume of workers that you're getting, the stages that they're at, the amount of time it took to complete it, and really how much time it's taking up for you. Jason: It makes a lot of sense. If you can cut out one phone call, you're probably saving your team, at a minimum, 15–18 minutes of productivity, simply because one interruption in a team member's day, typically they say, cost about 18 minutes of productivity. Even [...] take 18 minutes, they got to rebuild the house of cards they were working on or go back to whatever project they're trying to figure out. So, if you can cut down the phone calls significantly, even if you don't have that large of a portfolio, it's almost like getting a new team member on your team. It's that significant. People are really expensive in property management businesses. It's the highest cost in the PM business. I know what property managers listening to this are going to be thinking. They're going to be thinking, "Well, that sounds great, but another piece of technology. How is it going to work with my Buildium, or my AppFolio, or my Propertyware? I got these, they've got maintenance requests built into them. How will this work?" Mark: In terms of the different platforms, there are ones that permit direct integrations and we're starting to work with building some of those. Then, we're also building a way for you to be able to easily export, search, and import this data at the end. I think the difference really is that the maintenance offerings that they have don't create the same level of visibility and don't save you the amount of time. Even if their integration is not there, the amount of time that we're currently saving you and that we're going to continue to increase, really starts to outweigh some of the cons of doing that. That's the way we're moving through with all these things. Jason: Can you tell us who you're working to start integrating with yet? Mark: We have a couple of partners, mostly in the Los Angeles area. One has about 1000 units, another 2000 units, and we're working with both of them. They're both on different platforms and seeing what's going to be the most efficient way. It's not just integration of the maintenance, but also I think what's really important here is their accounting. We're really looking at accounting and how we can start to streamline with that because there is one of the things that we've seen with the contractors is a lot of them don't have a systematic way of not just keeping track of their work orders or invoices, but even just generating invoices, so it takes up a lot of their time. On the property management side, you're getting all these different types of invoices coming in, totally different formats, and then you're manually doing double data entry into all these different systems. It's kind of a pain because it's like, "Why is it formatted this way?" You have this hurdle that you're dealing with all these messed-up invoices. One thing that we're seeing is there's the ease of use of our invoice. A lot of the maintenance techs and workers are actually enjoying using it and starting to use it as a way to create a uniform way of generating invoices for their property managers. What we want to do is actually make that very easy to export so you can import so that you can import it into your accounting system. Jason: Cool. What are the big questions that people ask about this? What are their frequently asked questions, concerns? What are the big questions that they're asking so that we cover all the bases here? Mark: There's quite a few, but I think there's this very chat-focused, very simple, clean design. There isn't a lot of other platforms that we've seen in the space yet. They're starting to show up, but really there's very few. I think a lot of people are like, "Hey, do you provide training? How much is training going to cost?" Jason: You're like, "Do you know how to use instant message?" Mark: No. We don't want to be sending that at all. We really care about our users, so we offer like, "We'll train you," and then the funny thing here is that we do a demo and not for a minute we train them. Jason: And by the way that demo was the training. Mark: Yeah. If you know how to use iMessage or any of those things, it's very intuitive. That's really the core principle of the company is designing something that is not only beautiful, but it's extremely easy to use because we don't think that we should be paying and send somebody out to train you or that you need to hire some expert to use the software. Jason: All right. I'm going to go to the devil's advocate on the other side here. It's so easy, it's just chat, it's so simple, why don't I just sign-up with Intercom or Help Scout and get a chat tool and take tickets? What's different between those solutions and something like Proper? Mark: Proper is really geared towards maintenance. Even just the terminology, the flow, the understanding of the whole workflow of maintenance getting done, is what is unique to us. You could theoretically use text messaging to do. The reality is you can start to use that, but then very quickly it breaks down and it becomes cumbersome. For example, Intercom. There's no mobile app. There's no way to really add photos into what's going on. There's no way to categorize it into the type of problem that might be related to maintenance. For us, we provide all those things but then, you're also able to search, filter, and zoom in on a property and be like, "Okay, these are all the work orders. This is how we spent maintenance on this property." As we move forward and we start to integrate with other systems, that's something that Intercom would probably not do. Jason: They're going to put this chat tool probably on their website, so people coming there if they have maintenance requests, do they hide it like, "Go here for maintenance and then the chat is there"? Or is it [...] and if so, the maintenance coordination is one side, but they also have lead gen that they're trying to do. They have sales. They're trying to target owners and capture people with their live chat tools. How do you usually recommend they segregate that or can Proper help up with that other challenge as well? Mark: Good question. The way the application is working right now is that the live chatting or website, if you're using something like Intercom, that is something that we're not providing right now. Essentially, what happens is that property managers will announce that they're using Proper to their network, share the app, then they're able to install it, and then start reporting through there. It comes into our web app and mobile app. As a property manager, you can use the app from anywhere, but you could also use it at your desktop. From there, is where to start to field everything. Jason: So, Proper works more like an internal tool. When you onboard your new tenants, you can say, "Hey, get this. This is how you can communicate with us." It's probably not just functioning as the live chat tool that's capturing leads on the front-end of your business, but you could always take that tool and put links into it or pre-written messages to say, "Oh, it's a maintenance request. Go here." [...] Intercom a button that they click, that I'm here for maintenance and it takes them to Proper to take care of that. Mark: Yeah and one of the really interesting things is that we're starting to build email integrations, so the initial one that we built is that if you receive an email that's coming in from a tenant and it's maintenance-related, we build the Chrome extension where very easily just sends it to Proper and then it turns it into actual work orders. You're not actually trying to do double data entry there. The next step of that is making it so that your tenants and contractors don't have to join Proper. They can submit things via email, but then you have one place where it's starting to aggregate everything, whether it's submitted directly to Proper or through another channel like email. That's one of the really exciting features for these next two months that we're working on should be out. Jason: So, that will be similar to Intercom, which you can have a certain email address like maintenance@businessname.com and have that forward those emails into Proper? Mark: Yeah, it all vacuums it right up and then as it comes in, you're able to categorize it and make it something that is not mixed with thousands of other's emails but rather centralized and easy to find just like any of the other maintenance tickets. Jason: It sounds like it would make sense for them to have some sort of support solution and still use Proper for the maintenance portion for the back-end, and internally with tenants. Very cool. What other questions then do people tend to ask? Mark: One of the big ones is really that email integration that I just mentioned. That's essentially what we've been doing is tons of user research and starting to find what are the biggest problems. Using that is like having it bubble up to the top and turning it into features that are usable to them. Jason: One of the challenges in maintenance is the communication between vendor and owner is getting paid, payouts. What if the vendor starts messaging and they're like, "Hey, property manager, when do I get paid? Here's my invoice," and the tenants are seeing this stuff. How do you deal with that? Mark: I'm glad you asked that because that's literally the feature we're rolling out right now. We're waiting for the upstart to approve and by the way, we're on iOS, Android, and web. The next thing I told you, we make it really easy for your maintenance staff or techs to create invoices and generate them. We're actually about to roll out payments where they're able to get to pay through ACH and really it's cut out a lot of time for the contractors to generate those invoices or even for the property managers to [...] and all these things which I still see very frequently happening. Jason: In the app, the contractor maybe see something a little different and they can submit invoice or something like this? Mark: Yeah. Basically, when the contractor closes up the job, they provide proof that they did it and they're prompted to create an invoice. Jason: And one proof would be another photo, something along these lines? Mark: Yeah. You're able to add multiple photos as the contractor. This then generates an invoice that the property manager receives. This is a separate view where the tenant is not part of it. They're not anything around cost, they're not seeing this. The property manager is actually able to pay via ACH directly to the contractor through the app. There's no need to go elsewhere and try to cut a check, having anyone pick it up, or mail it, or anything like that. Jason: So again, it's reducing a lot of the friction and communication challenges between the property manager or maintenance coordinator and the vendors. Mark: Yeah. That's one thing that we've seen on both sides of the equation. A lot of property managers are still spending a lot of time just doing payments. On the contractor side, they are spending a lot of time generating invoices. They have a good support, so at the end of the week, they're tying up all the work that they did. They don't even necessarily have the good system to keep track of all the jobs that they did. So, they're often once again spending this admin time where they're not actually getting paid to do that. What happens now is that with the invoicing feature, although it's simple and very intuitive, it actually reduces the amount of time that they're doing this stuff, they're able to get paid faster, and they're able to spend a lot less time worrying about the stuff and actually getting more work done, which means your maintenance is getting done faster, which means your tenants are happier, which means you're happier as a property manager because you're hearing less from them. It's really an interesting problem because you have these three different groups of people and you're trying to design the simplest solution that takes into account their unique set of problems. Jason: If you imagine, what would be the ideal situation so that all three parties could communicate the most efficiently? You would just have all three of them sitting in a room face-to-face talking like, "Hey, you'll do this. I'll do this." "Okay, I'll pay you then. I'll do this." "Okay, team. Ready? Great." Everybody's there, it would be fast, but that's not reality, right? Mark: Yeah. Jason: You're trying to run a business and so is the vendor. The tenant should hopefully has a job and making some money to pay rent. There's all this stuff going on, we can't just all hang out, but Proper really creates a room that they can all hang out in and communicate. Mark: It's great that you actually put it that way because that's very much how I think about solving this problem. When you're in person with sometime, it is the richest form of communication. If it's a group of people, then the bottlenecks or the walls that exist, that is created through distance, creates all these inefficiencies. Essentially, that is actually how we think. That is what we want to be able to create these rooms and make this very efficient, yet rich way to communicate with each other, to eliminate a lot of these barriers that are currently costing a lot of time, which includes money, and often just frustration. One thing that I didn't mention here is that I spent a whole year working out of a property manager's office. You can call it extreme customer development and I really understood a lot of their operations and just so much of their time is spent on communication, but because they don't have good tools for it, it just generates a lot of frustration on each side of it. Assuming that it's hard to measure, the quality of life when you're constantly doing frustration just really goes down. Jason: Yeah. Plus there's a lot of turn-over. Among the property managers that are working for a property management business owner, it's very difficult. Mark: What's true of us as a company is to improve that quality of life because we know how gruesome the job can be, how hard it can be, how taxing it can be. If you use our app, it's very colorful. We kind of joke around in the copy and we try to make it not just extremely efficient but fun. We want to make it [...] inject a little bit of fun into it. I don't think that I see that very much in the space yet, which is one of the things I'm very excited about is that I want to bring that to the space. Jason: Some of the things I've seen in some apps lately that people have been doing to gamify things, which is really funny, that once you complete something or you finish something, you get confetti and balloon noises and stuff like this, like this is a little celebration. So, I'm just going to throw this is a feature request that after a maintenance is completed and somebody marks complete to get […] and they get this little celebration thing. It gives them that dopamine boost to get things done and they feel good about it. Mark: Oh yeah. That's actually something that now that we're starting to mature as a company and we're getting ahead with the feature set and the road map, that's something that we actually can bring into it. So, given my part of design background, I also know a lot of animators and illustrators. As you can see, we have a lot of illustrations. We very much want to use those opportunities. When you've succeeded at doing something, really just letting you know. Jason: Even rewarding a tenant for using the system. Instead of calling you, like they submit a ticket and you're like, "You've done it! Good job!" All these little things just create positivity and they add a positive feel to the property management company. The tenants are usually pretty upset if there's a maintenance request. The vendors are having to deal with that, the property manager. Anywhere you can add a little bit of fun and gamification into an app, I think is [...] world a little bit more fun. Mark: Yeah. There's no reason you can't have fun doing this job. I want to save you time, but like in this, get you to crack a smile a couple of times a day. It's not just about saving time but it's about being able to continue to do that job and be happy doing it. Jason: All right, cool. Mark, I really enjoy having you on the show. One thing that might be cool, it would be after a maintenance request is submitted, if we did an integration with GatherKudos, real super easy, super simple. [...] whether they're happy or sad. Mark: I'm totally happy to talk about that. Jason: All right. That would be cool. It's really great to have you on. How can people get in touch with Proper? How can do a demo? How can they find out more? Mark: We actually created a unique link for the show, so if you go to proper.chat/doorgrow, you can definitely learn a little bit about our products and then very easily set-up a demo with us. Again the tool is super easy to use, so we are happy to set-up a demo with you. It shouldn't take more than five minutes. Once you start seeing the product it becomes very quickly evident how this can start saving you time and also maybe make you smile. Jason: Awesome. All right, everybody check that out. I appreciate you setting up that link. That's awesome. Go to proper.chat/doorgrow and check it out. You get a little special perk for being a DoorGrow Show listener. Mark, really grateful for you coming on the show. I love hearing about new technology. I think this sounds really innovative and I think it solves a problem. I think that it will really be beneficial and I'm really excited to see what you guys do in this space and start hearing some feedback from my clients on what they think. Mark: Yeah. Thanks for giving me time and always a pleasure to talk. I look forward to checking in again soon. Jason: Cool. Yeah, we'll be talking again soon. All right, I'll let Mark out. If you are a property management entrepreneur and you're looking to add doors, you've been struggling, you're wondering why does it feel like there's scarcity in an industry and 70% are self-managing. There's no scarcity in property management right now. There just isn't, but they're not looking on Google. You're going to have some trouble if your whole goal is you have people find you through Google. There are ways to go out and create business and we're focusing on that. So, stay tuned with DoorGrow, keep an eye on us, and if you're wanting to grow your business, if you want to short some of the leaks in your sales pipeline, you want to dial in trust engine, have generate more warm leads and warm business, it's easier to close and have less conversations about price, price sensitivity, and comparison to other companies, that's what we do. Reach out and talk to DoorGrow. We'll be happy to help you add doors to your business, figure out how you can optimize your business for growth and creating trust. Again, I'm Jason Hull with DoorGrow here on the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you tuning in. Please like and subscribe on whichever channel your hearing this on, whether it's YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, whatever. Stay plugged in and make sure you get inside our DoorGrow Club Facebook group where we are putting out discontent. We have an awesome community of DoorGrow hackers like you. So, check it out doorgrowclub.com. That's all for today, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.