Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

Are you tired of dorm food and want to avoid the mad rush of finding a place to live off campus before next semester? There’s got to be an easier way for students to rent houses and apartments. It’s a problem that many entrepreneurs have tried to solve.  Today, I am talking to Dave Spooner of Innago. There are few incentives for landlords to digitize their rentals. Landlord demand for a listing platform is low, but there definitely is high demand for better tools to effectively manage and communicate with tenants.  You’ll Learn... [02:50] Tenant Management Software: Making landlords lives easier with online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, lease signing, and tenant screening.  [04:14] Understanding Innago: Flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive software for landlords and property managers.  [06:05] Learning Curve: Competitors’ software requires expertise and certification. [07:32] Who wants to waste time adopting ugly software?  [08:58 #1 Priority: Intuitiveness in software; speed is love language. [10:20] Different portals for different people to be more productive. [12:16] Find balance, and avoid too fast feature creep. [13:14] Possible future integration with Zapier and other third-party tools? [14:22] FAQs: Access permissions and pricing for landlords and tenants. [17:25] Innago offers unique and unmatched level of support. Tweetables Innago software is flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive. You shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. Choose features that matter, and get the biggest bang for your buck.  Big believers in early success begets future success.  Resources Innago Buildium AppFolio Propertyware Rent Manager.  Jason Fried of Basecamp Zapier 1099 Form Freshdesk HubSpot Intercom DGS 62: Property Management Accounting with Taylor Hou DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to another 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 unique challenges, daily variety, 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 here with Dave Spooner of Innago’s. Dave, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Dave: Hi Jason, thanks so much for having me. Jason: It's great to have you. Dave, we always like to get into our guest first, help us understand who Dave is, and how you kind of got into the space that you're in, and give us a little background. Dave: Yeah, absolutely, I'd be happy to, and thanks for the intro. I graduated from university in 2013. I kind of already had that entrepreneur spirit. Me and a couple other folks got together and we wanted to solve the problem of finding a place to live. We're not the first people to try to solve it, and I'm sure we won't be the last to try to solve it, but we want to make it easier for students to rent houses and apartments off campus. A lot of those markets are still mostly or fully offline, and there's usually a mad rush to try and find a place to live. We recognize those issues and we tried to solve them. As we were going about doing that, we kind of quickly realized that there's not a lot of incentives for landlords to digitize their portfolio. There's not a lot of incentives for landlords in student housing to really do a whole heck of a lot, but helps the students out because they're already going to fill other properties, which is really high occupancy in student housing.  We kind of pivoted, and listened to the market, and realized that there wasn't a huge demand on the landlord side for this listing platform, but there was a lot of demand for better tools to manage tenants, and better tools to manage and communicate with those tenants, and to manage their businesses. That's kind of how I got my foundation. I worked on that listing platform for a few years, learned a lot about the market, and then myself and the CTO of that company started and founded Innago in 2017, and we've been hard at work trying to make lives easier for landlords ever since. Jason: How do you make lives easier for landlords? Dave: Innago is tenant management software, and we call it tenant management software instead of property management software because we really believe that the focus should be on managing tenants, managing those relationships, and managing those personalities. Innago, of course, includes a lot of your classic property management tools like online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, online lease signing, tenant screening, etcetera. But at its heart, it's a communication platform. It's something that makes it easier to interact with and manage those tenants. We believe that having that, having that foundation enables landlords to become better landlords, and property managers become better property managers. Jason: I haven't heard of the software before, is this something that there's a good amount of property managers already using? Is this geared towards landlords, or is this geared towards property management businesses? Help me and the listeners understand Innago here. Dave: Yeah, absolutely. We work with both. We work with landlords as small as one unit, and landlords in the thousands of units. The software is really flexible, it’s effective, but it's also simple and intuitive for somebody who just owns some properties on the side, works a normal nine-to-five, and then manages at nights and on weekends, and for a landlord or property manager that's fully dedicated. We work with both property managers and landlords. We predominantly work in the residential space. We do a lot of student housing landlords, given my background, and my partner's background. We also have some commercial landlords as well. It's a really powerful, and flexible tool, and we work with all sorts of different clients. Jason: Cool, that's exciting. Help people understand, because a lot of the listeners in our audience probably already have a property management software, I mean, probably likely. They're probably already with Buildium, AppFolio, Propertyware, maybe Rent Manager. They're probably with one of these guys. But nobody's ever fully happy with their property management. Dave: Right, of course. Jason: So help those listening, how can they see where you fit into the market in relation to these? Dave: Well, yeah, it's funny you say that. I was actually listening to one of your earlier podcasts with Taylor, and he has the accounting services, the consulting accounting services, and one of the things that he mentioned, they work exclusively with AppFolio users, and kind of what they said is, “We only hire people that have worked at AppFolio, and we will only work with AppFolio at this stage because that's the only thing that we're comfortable with,” because it's this monolithic behemoth that you need expertise to even navigate, right? Jason: Right. Dave: That's definitely true for AppFolio, and it's true for a lot of the other software. There's a huge learning curve there. The first time we hire somebody on Innago, we always sit them down, and we jump on LinkedIn, and we do a little exercise, or research the companies. We're not looking for employees of those companies, or even their company page, we’re actually looking for employees at property management companies that their job title, their role is like the AppFolio expert on T, because you need certification to understand how to use it. That was kind of the initial kernel Innago came out of is, you shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. It should be like picking up Gmail for the first time, or picking up iPhone for the first time. It should be intuitive, and simple, and elegant, and powerful, and flexible to work with a lot of different users in a lot of ways. That's really our difference, in the way that we're approaching the market, putting a lot of time, and thought into the features, and the way that they interact, and the way that the user interacts with those features. We're really proud of the features that we do have. It is an ongoing product, and we're constantly adding more. I think for a lot of property managers, and landlords on the higher end, they're going to find at this stage that it might not be a perfect fit, but for those folks with small to mid size portfolios, it's got a lot of really great stuff that it will work well for them. Jason: Yeah, I'm in total agreement. When it comes to software, the number one challenge tends to be adoption, and ease of use is right there. If something is intuitive, that's the biggest challenge, and hurdle. Dave: Right. Jason: I don't even like them using software that's ugly. Dave: Right. Jason: I just can't bring myself to do it. Maybe it's the designer in me. I don't know, but if I'm going to be living in something, I don't want it to be ugly. That's why I use Apple products because they just… Dave: Right, absolutely. Clean design. Jason: I was around my mom just yesterday, and she had a computer and she was like, “I clicked on Chrome, and it's not loading, and nothing's happening coming up,” and I'm like, “I don't know, that's a PC. I've never had that problem on a Mac.” I just don't have that problem. I just think it's funny. I was like, “I don't know, good luck.” Dave: Yeah absolutely, and a lot of property managers and landlords—many are very tech savvy, there's also many that aren't so tech savvy. It's equally, if not more important, to have something that's not incredibly complex, and incredibly challenging, and opaque, and difficult to enter into. Jason: I'm incredibly tech savvy, and I probably could’ve figured out my mom's computer thing, but it probably would’ve wasted an hour or two of my time and I don't want to waste time figuring out my software at every step of the turn and teaching my team members how to figure out software at every step of the turn. Intuitiveness in software is my number one priority. A lot of people build their whole set up internally in their business, trying to find one piece of software that can do everything, and it's usually really awful at everything in a lot of instances, instead of finding the easiest, and best, and fastest tools. Speed is my love language, I think in business, and I want it to be fast, and want it to be simple, and intuitive. I love that that's kind of a foundational goal with your software, because I don't believe that any of the other property management software, that was their foundational goal, ease of use, and to be intuitive. If it was, they've gotten long far away from it. Dave: Right, yeah, I think you're right. Jason: Yeah, and some are much worse than others, and some of them, they can do everything. They're like the ultimate Swiss army knife. Like I've joked in the past, you're not going to see a handy man carrying around a multi tool to try and do all this hard jobs. Dave: Right. Jason: He's going to have a nice tool box with the best tools. The software’s more intuitive, the software is really easy for people to use, and now you're saying on all parties for like the owners, they want to maybe check reports, is there an owners portal? Dave: There is. Jason: Tenants that want to pay rent, and do their stuff, there's tenant portal. And then for the property manager, they can manage and see their portfolio pretty easily, and know what's available, and vacant. Does this have marketing stuff connected to it yet for listing, and the getting the properties out there in the marketplace? Dave: Yeah, great question. We do not currently have marketing. We plan to roll that out, but as you mentioned, I think one of the problems that's happened with other software packages, the feature creep went too fast. They wanted to get all the features that any landlord could ever ask for out as quickly as possible, and that has not been our approach. We have said let's do this methodically, let's think about ways to integrate this into the way that the rest of the software works. Let's make sure that it's easy to use. We are constantly adding features but we're not necessarily rolling out everything that everybody wants, all at the same time. Market syndication is what we call it. The marketing piece is definitely on its way, but it'll probably be another three or fours months before we have that out there. Jason: Yeah, feature creep is a real issue. I'm a big fan of Jason Fried. He's the CEO of Basecamp. I got to hang out with him on a Skype call for 90 minutes. He cut my staffing costs in half overnight, no doubt. I'm a big fan of him. By saying he cut my staffing costs in half, I should say he doubled our productivity. I didn't just fire everybody. We just became that much more productive because he helped me understand how we had so many interruptions, we had so many things that weren't intuitive, and he changed how we communicate as a company. He has a similar philosophy when he talks about creating their softwares. Basecamp doesn't do a whole lot compared to a lot of other software, it’s pretty limited in its feature set, but it's consistently always at the top of the tools and resources people mention for project management even though I really don't believe Basecamp is a project management tool, I believe it's a communication platform for internal communication, that's how we use it. Everyone's going to ask for features, you have to really be picky in choosing about what are the features that are really going to matter the most and get the biggest bang for your buck and really make a difference without it becoming overly crazy, too cumbersome, unintuitive, and difficult to do. There's always that balance of managing all of the features.  Do you see that you guys will be doing any sort of Zapier integration so that people can create zaps and start connecting and integrating with third party tools? No software has come out with this yet. Dave: Yeah. That’s a really good idea. That is not our road map but I love Zapier. We use it for all sorts of other things, whether it's connecting Wordpress to HubSpot or whatever. It’s a really cool platform. That’s an interesting thought. We hadn’t gotten that far. We might still… Jason: Add it to your list and be the first. I'm waiting to see who is the first property management software the adds Zapier integration because everyone's been asking for it. All these people want it connected to their automation. They want to connect it to their process street processes, or they want to connect it to whatever. I think this would be a really cool thing. Dave: We’ll let you know when we do. Jason: I keep throwing that out usually to property management software that I have on my show and I'm waiting to see who's the first to have Zapier integration. Some people call it [zey-pier], but I think [zey-pier] is weird because it creates [zaps], people, so it’s Zapier. You're not [zey-ping] your business.  What else should people know about this software? What are some of the most common questions that a property management business owner might ask that they're concerned about? Dave: Well, one you hit on was the sub users. Enabling not just the head property manager from accessing the platform, but also giving out who has access to which permissions, who has access to which features. Maybe it's Bob, you want him to handle these categories for these properties, or you want your property owners to log in and be able to handle it themselves. Jason: There's the ability for vendors to leverage and use the system as well? Dave: Not vendors, that would be like a maintenance person that you either have on staff or you have on retainer 1099 or whatever. We do not have a vendor portal at this time. That’s a big one and then the other really common question we get is of course the pricing because of the sector that we’re in, that's at the top of our base mind. Jason: Do you want to tell pricing now? If you're planning on changing, don’t. Tell them to go to your website. Dave: No, I'd be more than happy to jump into pricing. Now it’s pretty unique, we're 100% free to use for landlords. There’s no monthly fee, yearly fee, setup fee, there’s no contract. There's absolutely no cost. Everything that I've mentioned is included. Instead, when a tenant pays rent online, we charge them $2 for an ACH transaction. We charge them $2.75 for a credit or debit card, and that's it. Jason: Totally reasonable. I've been saying for at least over a year to people who have listened to some of my older podcast episodes that free property management software will come and there will be the day that somebody's going to offer it, just like people aren't paying for Gmail, people aren't paying for this sort of stuff and it's making money. It manifested, here it is. Dave: That’s right, we did it. It's 100% free for the landlord. Some landlords see the value in an online payment, they see it so highly to pay actually choose to incur a cost and we allow them to do that if they want to, but for most landlords 90% plus, they're not paying a dime to use Innago. Jason: Very cool, that's really interesting. This would be fantastic then for startup PM's, startup property managers. A question that my team would care about is for the rental listings, the vacant properties, do you have some way of listing the vacant properties in some web based fashion? If they're putting properties into their system, is there some sort of code that we can embed on a website to show their available rentals? Dave: Again, there's nothing on the marketing side just yet. Everything is cotntained within Innago but we certainly see the value in that. Jason: Maybe in the future then. What else should people know about Innago? Anything else you want to throw out there? Dave: Well, we offer particularly in our sector where you do have some of the lower cost platforms out there or some of the simpler platforms out there I suppose. Oftentimes, they don't offer any sort of support beyond a 48-hour email window. With Innago, we’re a little different, we offer full phone support. We also have embedded videos and help section to ease landlords along in the system as they get started and learn the platform. We’re really big believers in early success begets future success. We want to make sure that we’re hand holding for your first month, two months on the platform, and ensuring that you understand how to use it. You can use it effectively and can leverage it to improve your business. Once you do that, then you're off to the races and in really good shape. We offer a unique level of support that many others can't really match. Jason: What platform are you using for support? Dave: We use Freshdesk, and we use HubSpot, and we use Zapier to connect certain things to other things. Jason: Cool. We use intercom for anyone listening, because property managers need some sort of support desk too. Dave, this sounds really neat. How could somebody demo this if they're curious to check out your software and how should they get in touch? Dave: Yeah. They can go to innago.com and they can request access to a free account. We’ll get in touch with them shortly after just to make sure they're a good fit, that we're going to solve some problems for them. We don't want them to waste any time fooling around on a platform that is really not going to work for them. If they request access, we’ll shortly be in touch, and we'll get them into the platform, and they can start playing around with it. Jason: Where does the name Innago come from? I'm a branding guy, I'm always curious. Explain Innago. Dave: We like to think of it as a strong three-syllable word, that's about the extent of it. It's really kind of like Google or Yahoo, there's not a whole lot behind it. Jason: Okay. Maybe we’ll have to make up the story sometime together about it. Dave: Yeah. We’ve thought about it, but we'll take any suggestions. Jason: When did you guys launch this? How new is this software? Dave: We launched the company in January of 2017. We had the product out in the market, kind of like an alpha stage really in March of that year. We've been coming along ever since. As far as a product, we're a little over two years now. Jason: Awesome. How many companies are using this right now? Dave: We have thousands of landlords on the platform and it's growing every day. I would nail that hard number, but it probably changes by the minute. Jason: Yeah. It's probably pretty tempting and pretty easy if it's free. I would imagine you guys will have some success and you guys are making enough money you think to stay healthy just through the transactions? Dave: Yeah. As you know, there's a lot of landlords out there. The majority of them are still self managed or not using any kind of software. There's a lot of tenants that want to pay online. Only about 30% of the market currently pays rent online. That's a huge giant blue ocean that’s ready to be captured. Jason: Yeah. There's a lot of blue ocean that are self managing. If you really want to super attract property management business owners, if you can figure out a way to help connect these self managers so that they can get that professional managers to take over stuff, and partner, maybe create some partners, I think you’ve got a winning affiliate business going on right there that’s good for your company. Dave: Absolutely. Jason: I know there's lots of people listening that would like to get connected to those that are self managing and work with them. Dave, super cool to have you on the show. I wish you lots of success. It would be cool to have you come back maybe in the future after you've come out with even more features if you’ve got something really cool to share. I wish you guys a lot of success with the free software. I've been talking about this for a while. I think it's long overdue. This is really great. Dave: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jason. I really appreciate it, my pleasure being on the show. Jason: Yeah, thanks for coming on. You heard it everybody, free property management software that is intuitive. If they are really intuitive, they're going to have a lot of natural success and growth, and if they're free, they're going to have a lot of growth. If they can make the numbers work which sounds like it would be pretty easy with all the transactions that are going to be occurring, it could be a game changer.  I think other property management software, they're a little bit greedy, and there's too much of that feature creep. I think this will be a competitor. It’d be interesting to watch. Let’s keep our eyes tuned, our eyes peeled and stay tuned to see what they do. Anyway, this is Jason Hull of the DoorGrow Show. If you are wanting to know if your property management website is leaking money because every website is probably leaking money. If you want to see that it’s leaking money because you don't want it to be leaking deals and leads anymore and you want to make more money and cash from your business, test your website out by going to doorgrow.com/quiz and take our DoorGrow Score Quiz that’s going to grade your website on how effective it is at creating conversions. Some of the questions are tricky. There's a lot of people taking the test and then make a bunch of changes to their website, some of them are false positive, so be careful if you're going to do that. Do that quiz and then maybe talk to our team and we can help you improve your website piece because I really don't believe that anybody's better at creating websites that make money than DoorGrow for property managers. Alright, we'll talk to all of you guys soon. Until next time, to our mutual growth.  

If you enjoy unique challenges, daily variety, learning new things, finding opportunities, and experiencing freedom, then you would probably be successful in property management. Entrepreneurs would rather work 80 hours a week for themselves, than for someone else. You don’t have to do it all on your own. Be willing to take some risks, and connect with like-minded people. Let your entrepreneurial spirit fly! Today, I am talking to Bryan Jenkins and Jonathan Cook of AHI Properties. They share strategies that consistently grow their business and add doors in multiple markets.  You’ll Learn... [02:00] Keep on Growing: Corporate housing to single-family homes to property management. [05:25] Real Estate Market Crash: Created shift in income and dealing with investors, despite technology. [07:20] Love it, or Hate it: Learn something new every day in property management. [08:05] When’s the right time to grow and expand? Adding doors in multiple markets. [09:42] Sand Traps: Think outside the box to grow property management business. [11:15] Educate Clients with Market Knowledge: Direct investors into markets where they can make money and purchase more doors for AHI to manage. [12:03] Game Changer: Diversifying existing portfolio and dealing with accidental landlords who leave when it’s a good time to sell. [13:40] Recipe for Success: Gain momentum and referrals by building partnerships and relationships with sister companies, third-party providers, and contractors. [19:57] Four Ds to Revenue: Deals, Doors per deal, Duration, and Dollars. [24:30] Focus on Funnel: Multiple sources serve as supply line for incoming clients. [26:07] Strategies and Approaches: How to expand and operate in multiple markets. [27:13] False Scarcity: There’s plenty of opportunity to create business and follow up because 70% self-manage single-family residential properties.  [29:10] Remember Me? Make sure to have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy to keep track of clients and properties. [36:07] Bryan’s Biggest Piece of Advice: Keep an open mind, don’t be afraid, but focus on multiple funnels and opportunities to develop client relations. [38:03] Generational Change in Property Management Profession: Think about technology, bring awareness, and open people’s minds. Tweetables Let your entrepreneurial spirit fly. Recipe for Success: Gain momentum and referrals by building partnerships. Four Ds to Revenue: Deals, Doors per deal, Duration, and Dollars. Resources AHI Properties AHI Properties Email National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) MLS U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) IMN Five Star Conference Roofstock Deb Newell of Real-Time Leasing Matthew Whitaker of GKHouses DGS 75: Bridging the Gap Between Inside and Outside Sales with Jennifer Stoops of Park Avenue Properties 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. Gentlemen, welcome. I’ve got here hanging out with me Bryan Jenkins and Jonathan Cooks. Which ones which? Jonathan: I’m Jonathan. Bryan: And I’m Bryan.  Jason: Hi Jonathan. Hi Bryan. Jonathan, Bryan both of you have some experience in growing your property management business and I’d love to get into your background. Whoever wants to go first, share a little bit about your background, how you got into property management, into the space, and maybe a little bit about why somebody should listen to you today. Jonathan: Bryan is much more impressive. You go ahead, buddy. Jason: All right. Let’s go, Bryan. He threw you in.  Bryan: I’ve been a property manager now for 19 years and we started this firm ground-up but tied into a corporate housing company, where we do fully-furnished corporate housing for guests that are relocating. We operate that model in 12 different physical locations in 6 states, servicing 14 markets. With that, we had brick and mortar locations. I came online in 2000. We started buying residential single family homes to facilitate our corporate housing needs. From there, we actually acquired a property management company here in Birmingham, Alabama back in late 2003. Since that point, we’ve been growing. That’s the only acquisition we’ve really done through the years. We’ve first acquired that management company. We had 109 properties and that portfolio that we acquired. By that time, we purchased 52 of our own properties and eight classifications for corporate rentals and lease back. With that, we’ve grown over the years to five locations now and it worked in two states with our property management platform. We’re managing just shy of 1100 single family homes now.  I personally came from a military background, 9 years active service, got into real estate. My parents have always been entrepreneurs. I’m part of this operation and really got plugged in. Probably my big cook kick off and the expansion piece of it really took flight after I found NARPM back in 2011. I got plugged in there with the Atlanta chapter. I’m the past Atlanta chapter president. I’m currently the NARPM National Member Services Committee Chair and I just dropped my application for RVP. So, see how that one plays out, but a lot of experience. We’ve got a team. Including myself, we’ve got 23 property managers working on our operation and Jonathan is our business development. I’m going to segue that into him.  Jonathan: I got my real estate license in 2007. I was the youngest realtor in the state of Alabama when I got it. I was 21.  Bryan: Fun facts. Jonathan. Yeah. Fun facts. But my entire life I have been surrounded with real estate. My step dad owned a real estate company. He was in construction for a long time even before that. My mom’s best friend is a real estate agent in the area that has always owned properties, has her own rental company. After highschool, it just became my secondary job for the longest time of being her property manager. I don’t want to drive out to my 15 properties or how many she ended up having at that time. “I’ve got this property. I need you to run over there. Get rent. Get this. Make sure you maintain this. Paint these walls. That tenant’s out. That tenant’s in. Call the newspaper.” This is early 2000s. Before I even got my real estate license, I was still trying to do the maintenance piece of it. Then when I got my real estate license, I was doing real estate and had a... Bryan: Work field tech. Jonathan: Yeah, like a field tech. I had this halfway working knowledge of what property management was, I thought, supposed to be, but I was a realtor at that point. So, I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got an idea.” When the real estate market crashed in 2008–2009, there was not the source of income that I was used to. I started dealing with investors with the slight little piece of halfway working knowledge that I’ve built up with my family, like rentals, trying to figure out how the single family rental market works, and start cherry-picking areas because I had access to NLS and I could look up where properties were. At that time, there was no internet documentation. I couldn’t send documents online and have them signed. There was no electronic signatures at all.  Bryan: It was that long ago. Jonathan: It really was. I was having to drive offers on HUD homes from Birmingham where I’m at, in an hour-and-a-half away to the closest HUD office which is in Anniston, which is a whole another city in Alabama. It was an hour-and-a-half. I had to drive and had to have ink on page. “Here. This is an offer. Will you take it?” Then you end up, “Nah. Get out of here.”  Jason: So needless to say, things are a little bit more efficient now.  Bryan: A little bit.  Jonathan: My wife actually works for AHI for years before I did. I just started as the Business Development Manager in October of last year after my wife begging me for years. “Would you please go with AHI? You know what we do here.” I’m like, “Yes, it’s property management. I know how to do that.” Oh, I had no idea how to do that. Then I got here and like, “Oh.” I got plugged into NARPM. Started learning all the extra pieces, ins and outs that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know here at AHI. I learn on a daily basis from Bryan and from everyone out here in the office and it has just become, “I get it now.” There’s always going to be stuff that I’m not going to know. Bryan: That’s the challenge. That’s the beauty of property management. I always say, you love it or you hate it, there is no really gray area in between. As long as you’re learning something everyday and solving issues, that’s what keeps me coming back daily. It’s kind of us.  Jason: Like I said in the intro, the people that like this like the unique challenges, the daily variety, they like the opportunities, and ultimately if you’re an entrepreneur, you like freedom. And you’d rather be working 80 hours for yourself than 30 for somebody else.  Bryan: That’s right.  Jason: We’re crazy like that. Let’s get into how you guys have grown. You’ve mentioned there was an acquisition, there’s a couple of little things that you’ve done, but let’s get into how are you adding the bulk of the doors into your business. I guess the conversation topic at hand is supposed to be about multiple markets. How do you manage doing multiple locations and when do you feel it’s the right time to go into a second location for most managers that are listening?  Bryan: I’m going to say that, based on what I said earlier in our history, is we’re probably a little more unique than a company that’s trying to open a market from scratch in an outside area. Our growth strategy is actually to come alongside our corporate housing company, utilize the brick and mortar they already have. Then we just come in with client, we come in with systems, and hire local talent. With that, we’re ready to go operational, handling back office out of our main hub here in Birmingham. That allows us greater freedom and greater flexibility and movement with our client base.  Our most recent acquisition was Oklahoma City and we opened in December of 2017. We went out there basically with a client that took us out there with 24 properties to get us started. Hired a single property manager and now we’re managing 158 properties on the ground there. Some other clients have become along the way and have been clients we’re working with in multiple markets as well.  Jason: Let’s give some of the listeners some tips or some strategies here for growing their property management company. We’ve got two kinds of sand traps that people fall into. The first one’s maybe the solopreneur stuck at 50 or 60 units. What would you recommend to somebody that have 50 or 60 units if they’re wanting to add doors and build up a portfolio?  Bryan: Let your entrepreneurial spirit fly, first and foremost. I would say, be willing to take some risk. You have to be able to do that. What I see in property management is, I see people that are stuck in the box. What I mean by that is they’re happy signing accidental landlords on a daily basis and dealing with the one-off homeowner that by default is the landlord. Jonthan: They called you because they’ve seen your side.  Bryan: Right. Jonathan just talked to one earlier today and the expectations are totally off scale. They have no investment mindset whatsoever and they’ve got a strong emotional attachment to the property.  Jonathan: And in my opinion, if you start taking in those kinds of clients, it’s going to keep you at that rate because they’re going to require way more attention. They’re going to need hand holding for every little thing. They don’t have that entrepreneurial mindset.  Jason: If they’re only going to stay a year, that means every year, you have to get a new one to replace them. Plus another one if you want to grow and add something new. If you build your business on accidental landlords, it can be pretty difficult unless you’re magically able to convince them to switch to buy-and-hold. Jonthan: Generally, you’re not directing them into the markets that they can make money, which will in turn allow them to purchase more doors for you to manage. That’s one of the things I like to help our investors there is identify markets. I think that’s super important for any property manager no matter where you are. Knowing your markets, knowing them really, really well like the back of your hand, and being able to educate owners and investors from all over.  Bryan: Yeah, whether investors gain experience whatever. Jason, I would say that the big game changer for us was really about 3½ years ago, maybe even 4 years ago. Looking at the diversification of our existing portfolio and then realizing we had a heavy concentration of accidental landlords, and hearing the same information being repeated back to say, “You know what? A lot of the property managers I know, their managed inventory were shrinking and consistently shrinking year after year as the sales market started to gain momentum.” And that’s what happens to your accidental landlords to say they jump ship when it’s a good time to sell.  Jonathan: And get my money back out.  Bryan: That’s right. Some of those we did over the years, as long as we’ve been at it, we’ve had investors that have actually started off as accidental landlords and then they’ve converted to buy-and-hold and then they’ve had another property, and another property. They’ve educated themselves and they’ve become real estate investors.  In my opinion, they’ve done it the right way. They’re learning as they go the right way for them, I guess. They’re educating, taking a step, they’re not taking too much time to take the step because otherwise, you’d miss the opportunity. What we focused on was, we want to understand not only what is going on in our local market, but we want to get a broader national picture and see what markets are hot markets, why are they hot markets, what types of return on investment are investors realizing particularly after we looked at that focus on the time period after 2010. After bottoms have been hit and you’re starting to get some upward momentum again with property values and such.  We started attending outside events such as IMN or Five Star, started to align ourselves with some funds, some small REITs, and property owners that have portfolios that weren’t necessarily internalizing their management operations. They were small enough, they needed a professional partner to partnership with, to make their operations run as efficiently as possible, and focus on key metrics. That’s where we started focusing our education piece and then started signing those clients. Really, that’s been a wonderful piece.  From that, we’ve added another piece to our business which we have an internal insurance agency which we opened up last year that focuses on the investment product. They can insure in 50 states. If they’re buying property in one of our existing markets or even a couple of them, that’s the beauty of having multiple markets. They focus on investment in three- or four-year markets but then they’re buying elsewhere. The insurance piece will pick up their properties wherever they have them in the country. That’s been a really powerful piece for us and that has come online especially we opened it last year but we’re really been gaining momentum in the last six months with that piece.  Jason: This is a third party tool, or resource, or vendor that you guys have signed on with? Bryan: No. This is a sister company. It’s Birmingham Insurance Group and their carriers are third party. They use national carriers that are backed by Lloyds of London and a few others. Jonathan: It’s downstairs.  Bryan: Yeah, just downstairs in our office building. They are truly a sister company and my partner is a shared owner in that entity. It’s been a nice value add for us both ways. They’re referring people into us, we’re referring people out to them, handling the renter side of it. The big thing is the master policies with the insurance. That does make it nice and easy for investors, again, no matter where their stuff is, to add or take away property as they need to from online portal systems. It works pretty well.  My partner and spoke on a couple of podcast, investment network podcast and got invited out to the West Coast to speak to some folks and from there, that opened the door to three or four buyer networks, basically. They were focused on Alabama already and then Oklahoma City. Then aligning ourselves with turnkey providers and partnering with some local contractors to be able to facilitate that piece ourselves. That’s been the growth cycle. Back to that spread your entrepreneur wings, I think that somebody that really get stuck in a box and only want to do property management per se may handcuff themselves a little bit. I think you can’t be the master of all things, I understand that, but understanding what industry you’re in and how you can be most effective and partner with people. For example, I had a phone call with a real estate agent here locally that I’ve known for 15 years and all of the sudden, April 1, he just called me up today just to say, “Hey, April 1. I partnered with a rehabber, I partnered with a guy from a hedge fund, and we’ve got a couple of funds going. I’ve got some inventory to rehab and I hear you guys have some investor clients…” there’s partnerships all over the place.  At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to the relationship piece. Getting in front of people and just building those relationships. Maybe they’ll do it. The one sit down at the bar and have an hour a bit, maybe it’s the third one or the fourth one, just consistently following up. I found that a lot of these guys, if they’re shopping you and shopping your competition, what happens is they’re not really ready to pull the trigger that day. But if you stick with the follow-up, just stay in front of them, stay consistent, and know your metrics, then a lot of these guys will circle back to you and they’ll give you an opportunity. That’s been our recipe for success for the last three years. Jason: All right. You threw out a lot of things really quickly. I need a recap and I have notes here. For those that are watching, let’s cover some of these. First, you said, make sure you identify the good markets with the best investments. Get really familiar with your market even nationally taking a look at which markets are hot. Most managers are working in the market they’re in, but the advantage of looking nationally would be to understand maybe how their market fits in, play with the national scene to see if their market could be savvy to market investors outside of your geographic area. That sound about right? Jonathan: We’ve recently had a lot of out-of-state, out-of-market investors coming in because they’ve heard nationally in Birmingham. They come in and some of that information sometimes is going to be a little bit old but it’s taking them in and being willing to, and having the knowledge to help them understand the differences. Birmingham is big. How do we separate that into areas of, “Let me explain this area, then this area, then this area,” and then compare it to whatever markets that are used. Bryan: There are macro versus micro views. I think that gives you common ground to speak to the investor. If their coming out of the Indianapolis market, then all of a sudden they’re looking at Alabama. It gives you some common ground to start with.  Jason: That first one ultimately what’s really helpful is to have context to give them, these out of state investors, to see how your market fits in with the national scene. I think that is wise. Know your own markets, know the little neighborhoods in your market, but also see how you can fit into the macro view of the nation and beyond.  The second thing you mentioned is to shift away from accidental landlords, just recognizing that. I talk about this concept called the 4Ds to revenue. The first D is deals. The second D is the number of doors per deal. A lot of times people just lump those together and they think a door is a door. The third D is duration. That’s how long you can keep them on. There’s a massive difference between a one year accidental and the 10-year buy-and-hold. Ten times difference in revenue return. Then, the last D is dollars, making sure you get fees in place. A lot of people don’t focus on each of these things individually. They’re just like, “I just need to get doors on.” It’s just about the doors. There’s a such a big difference between those. So I think that’s wise to shift away from accidental landlords.  The third thing you’ve mentioned is identify partnership opportunities. There’s a lot of different ideas here for partnerships. You had mentioned partnering with an insurance product or an insurance company, bringing in a value add and partnering with them, getting on investment network podcast, then connecting to buyer’s networks, turnkey providers for partnerships. Then you’ve mentioned follow-up over and over and over again.  Bryan: That’s right. One other thing I’ll add to that would be your preferred vendor partnerships. One we allude to all the time is we work with Roofstock, which I don’t know if you had an opportunity to speak with those guys in the past. Jason: I haven’t. Bryan: Great product especially if you’re buying anywhere coast-to-coast but as roofstock.com—shameless plug there—be sure to check that out. Jonathan: It’s not for us.  Bryan: No, it’s not for us, but what they do is they come online, they certify their property management partner and the same thing with the wealth networks. Once they’ve certified you as a vendor and a partner in that capacity, then you’re a trusted resource. It makes the closing of the transaction that much easier.  Jonathan: One of the things that I really like about Roofstock is if you are able to direct your own internal investors, if you don’t have enough time to go through an actual buyer’s agency with an investor that does want to potentially grow more doors and you’re busy being a property manager, you don’t have time to walk down every single property with them, you can direct them to Roofstock and say, “Hey, grab your properties from Roofstock. Bring them to us.” That helps take that portion off of it, so they’re buying properties that you want to manage.  They’re buying properties that are already set-up. They’re already getting vetted out. They have an idea of what they’re going to get. They’re not coming to you with some uninformed number of “I saw a house and I have no information about it so maybe can we put [...] in there?” No, this house has [...]. This is how much I’m paying for. This is the ledger. This is what is already making for rent. This is what it should make for rent. Whatever.  Bryan: It allows you to control that potential client so you keep them inside your little circle if you will, to ensure that they’re going to be coming back to you. Just based on people we referred to them over the last couple of years, the relationships are really tight. They take really good care of them and they do come back. They asked the property managers to perform to certain levels and the properties, as we mentioned, they’re vetted out in advance. A lot of the due diligence piece done, we still always encourage our clients to do their own due diligence but a lot of that is done on the front end for them. It’s a nice value add.  Jason: That’s a great tip. Property managers listening should go get connected, if they can, to Roofstock so that they can have that vendor partnership. They can be listed as a preferred or recommended vendor. Are there other channels or how would somebody identify their channels that they should be looking at to become a certified partnership, or a preferred vendor as a property management company? Jonathan: Local REIT, REIs, and stuff like that. Any sort of investor networking. Most cities will have a local chapter and sometimes it’s going to be wholesalers. That’s fine. You need wholesalers if you are trying to bring in homeowners that are going to be growing their business and growing their doors which in turn is growing yours. You’re going to have to have some product to give them. It’s not bad to have a few wholesalers that you know and you know the product that they have and you can stir. Maybe you get an extra commission off of that, who knows, but you’re least adding to your own business by adding to theirs.  Bryan: I think my biggest tip in this arena right here would be, I view everything as a funnel. You’ve got to have multiple sources pouring into the funnel that’s going to push out to you on the end. I guess the tip to it all is develop the multiple networks and the multi approach to just having a supply line for incoming clients. We all know about the renter side; that’s pretty easy. What I think has been underdeveloped over the years in the property management arena has been the client-based side of it and trying to attract the clients back in instead of being strictly out of necessity, such as the case with an accidental landlord. There’s so many factors to focus on but ultimately, we are big on having probably no less than 10 different sources pouring into our funnel and then we give them points. So, there’s always a trickle effect and then you’re maintaining those relationships along the way.  In our operation, with five locations I’ve got five different property manager brokers that are actually running the operations. We actually have an education piece each month which we push out all of our brokers. We have a mastermind call group each month that we work through problematic areas within the individual operations corporately and then on the local market level. All these things help us stay consistent in our team approach.  You had Jen Stoops on recently, right? With Park Avenue? We love Jen. We did a show with Jen and Deb Newell after the Five Star event in Memphis, March, I think it was. We were talking about Jen’s approach with John in Park Avenue. He’s always been that hub approach. They have their back-end office piece and then they spoke out and she explained it to us. That’s been fascinating to me because we have brick and mortar in each location and a lot of it depends on what your state requires.  Again, there’s a couple of different strategies on how you do those operations and how you expand out and operate multiple markets, but both of them work and both companies are successful at it. Again, I just think don’t put all your eggs in one basket. My grandpa used to tell me that a long time ago and just growing up with entrepreneur parents I [...] that, exampled out to me on a daily basis. That’s probably the biggest approach. Don’t be fearful and don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Just be mindful of the relationships.  Jason: Yeah. I love this because I feel like the stuff that you’re doing is foundational to growth. This is what the property management industry needs right now. We’ve got 70% self-managing in single family residential. There’s plenty of opportunity. There isn’t scarcity in this industry, yet. Yet, there’s this false scarcity that’s been perpetuator-created. I think it’s just so refreshing that you didn’t mention, yet, it’s all about SEO, it’s all about doing pay-per-click ads, it’s all about social media marketing, it’s all about content marketing. You’re actually going out and tapping into that 70% and you’re creating business. You’re walking out the door, the business is there and you’re getting the business while everybody else is fighting over the coldest, crappiest, worst leads that fall off your table.  Bryan: I’m going out also to say everything you just addressed is important, too. I’ll let you be going on in the background but the resources have been beaten to death over the last several years.  Jonathan: We get those too. We get plenty of those and you have to call.  Bryan: That’s right. Jonathan: You have to. You have to still call them. Jason: And follow up, and follow up, and follow up. Jonathan: You have to. Bryan: The funniest thing and I know you can probably relate to this but we see it all the time. Any property management firm operator, or property manager just listening, they have seen it on multiple occasions. You’ll get there’s tire kickers that come to you, they’re checking out your services, your rates, your reputation and all these stuff. Then they’ll say, “Okay, I’ll call you when I’m ready.” You follow-up with them and then eventually they come back 12, 15 months later, “Okay, I’m ready to go. You remember my property?” We looked at thousands of properties since then.  Jonathan: “Remember, you saw it? You saw it.” Jason: Yeah.  Bryan: We do make it apprise, “Hey, save that information. There’s a good chance he comes back around.” That’s just experience of it all, but again, those are going to be your accidental landlords, your one off homeowners that—not being negative—aren’t really investors. They’re just investors by necessity only.  Jonathan: Or they just want to know what their property potentially can list for. Jason: That’s why it’s important to have a CRM and to keep track. I’ve talked to hundreds of property managers and it’s so funny because I always hear, “You remember me?” and sometimes—I’m honest—I’m like, “No, I don’t. But I have really good notes here from when we talked and I can refer to that,” and that’s enough.  Bryan: It is. We’ve seen you around at events and such, and everybody’s intertwined in our industry, at least to the NARPM scene and a couple of other organizations we belong to. At the end of the day, it is about the relationships. I always said, the thing I love about NARPM—not to turn into a NARPM commercial—I always felt like the analogy that I would beat my head against the door jamb every single day and it was quite painful. I got tired of learning from my own mistakes. The opportunity came up to learn from other people’s mistakes, so that made it much more appetizing. I enjoyed it.  Jason: Let other people bang their heads and you can watch. Jonathan: They already have. They’ve already banged their head on whatever problem you’re about to have. They’ve already done it. Here’s an answer for you already. It’s easy. Jason: We see that a lot inside of our Facebook community as well, the DoorGrow Club. It’s a resource, everybody’s super helpful, you can just ask a question, and you get at least several really solid answers. You don’t have to be alone as an entrepreneur. I think as entrepreneurs, there’s this myth that’s created in our minds that we’re alone. It does feel like that a lot of times because our teams are a little bit different than us. There are people that want to see the uncertainty or they’re crazy freedom people. Most of the people, I think, in the world are not entrepreneur personality type, so we feel like we’re aliens sometimes on a foreign planet. But if you can get around other people through organizations like NARPM or through the DoorGrow Club and connect with other people, you start to recognize that there’s nothing wrong with you and you’re normal.  Bryan: And you’re not alone.  Jason: And you’re not alone. There’s plenty of people willing to help. I think as entrepreneurs, we are contribution-focused people. We get momentum by helping other people. That’s why we do what we do. I think everyone’s always so surprised if they’ve been disconnected from other people like them, other entrepreneurs at how helpful entrepreneurs will be. They’re so helpful, so giving. I think really, a rising tide raises all ships. This industry really needs more collaboration. We’re not at the point where there’s any sort of real scarcity, or competition really is fierce. There’s so much business available and there’s lots of room for growth. I think the industry is going to start to see that here in the next several years.  Jonathan: I think before I came to AHI, one of the things that I learned on day one was before being at this company, I did have that mindset of, “I can’t, I don’t want to share any of this stuff, I got to do all this by myself.” Once I’ve been at AHI, one of our biggest competitors, we refer to them all the time. We refer people to them constantly because they might handle this better than we will in this instance. The competition is such friendly competition in this industry.  Bryan: Are you talking about Matthew? Jonathan: I am talking about Matthew. It’s so collaborative. We’re having him in an event in a month. Bryan: You know Matthew Whitaker, right? Matthew Whitaker with GK? GKHouses? Jason: Maybe. Jonathan: He’s got good notes on him.  Bryan: Anyway, Matthew’s a contrast to my vision and what we’ve done with growth. He’s been growing through acquisition.  Jason: Very different strategy.  Bryan: Yeah. Homevestors, franchise holder, and then converted, internalized to PM operations after 2007–2008 and then went to work. Basically, he’s growing from Birmingham to Nashville, Chattanooga, Little Rock, Arkansas, then Denver and Fort Collins, Colorado. He’s done it through acquisitions. He’s a sharp mind. He’s cutting-edge guy, but we got along famously and have been friends for years. We’re actually hosting a PM summit coming up in a month, in June.  First thing that we put on in the State of Alabama—NARPM doesn’t have a chapter in the entire State—we’re trying to do a kick-off event and get some property managers in, geographically from Huntsville all the way down Montgomery, and just have a nice panel discussion. I’ve got some professional managers coming over from the Atlanta chapter, Matthew and myself. It would be a great event and we’re looking forward to it. I think it’s going to lead to bigger and better things.  My big piece, I think you [...] upon it, is just make our industry better and raise the bar for crying out loud. If nothing else, what that does for operators that are raising their bars, those that refuse to do it, there’s such a difference between the two companies. It’s easy to select the [...] that’s doing it bigger, doing it better and more efficient, and giving more value back to our clients and customers. That’s our focus.  Jonathan: One of the things that I see with these smaller realtors that are doing property management individuals is we all know similar stuff. It will be those stories where it’s like, “Oh, I had this client that was doing this and I knew they shouldn’t have done it. We just let him and it was an issue.” Okay, well, that’s not education piece. Inform your client instead of just sitting there and holding it. That’s the thing that I see. They’re afraid to lose that business so they’re afraid to step on those toes to educate their clients.  Bryan: Yeah. I’ll make it a point to empower my team members. When you empower a property manager, you always see analogy of the guardrail system. Our procedures are guardrails and if they stay within the guardrails, they can have their own little flavor. That empowers them to make certain decisions and do things that are instantaneous and beneficial to everybody involved instead of having to go through red tape.  Jason: Yeah. Let’s wrap this up. If people want to connect with you, find a little bit more info, or they’re curious about what you’re doing for growth, how can they get in touch with you? Any final words to those who are struggling with growth right now who are looking to grow their property management business?  Bryan: My final thoughts going back and recapping this thing is just keep an open mind, don’t be afraid but focus on multiple funnels, if you will. Look at multiple opportunities for you to develop client relations. I think our strategy ended up originating from the need for self-preservation. Is not that we are in danger. We just saw that the market was going to change and has changed and will change again. We want to be better prepared for that and allow ourselves better diversity in what we’re doing.  If they want to reach us, we actually do a podcast ourselves. We have an email set up for that podcast@ahiproperties.com and that ties directly to both of us. We just love to answer any questions. I’m always open and available by email and phone. I’ll be happy to connect and just give my two cents worth. Again, I always like to give back to the industry. It has been good to me and I like to give back.  Jonathan: I second everything Bryan said. He’s got it.  Jason: All right. Perfect. Bryan, Jonathan, grateful to have both of you here on the DoorGrow Show. Appreciate what you guys are doing. Bryan: Thanks for having us.  Jonathan: It’s a pleasure.  Jason: It’s a good message for everybody to diversify your interest and how you’re bringing in business. It’s exactly what I coach clients to do, so I love that you’re reinforcing what I teach which is a welcome, refreshing unexpected thing. I appreciate you guys being here on the show.  Bryan: We appreciate you having us. We thank you very much. I just want to actually thank you for what you’re doing for the industry because I think it’s a wonderful thing.  Jonathan: Yes. It makes everything better.  Bryan: Yup.  Jason: Oh, thanks. Everyone says that and I’m going to ask you, what am I doing for the industry?  Bryan: Here’s the deal. I’m an old dog but you can teach me new tricks. There’s a generational change in the property management profession and I think as the level professionalism comes up, we see our younger generation of property managers coming in behind. I don’t want to say transitioning of the guard but it is a change of mindset from what was old. Think about the technology piece and the systems pieces that have kicked in, stuff that’s happened since 2012 is crazy. We were server-based.  Actually, what Jonathan was alluding to early on with the ink on paper scenarios. I think that’s the biggest piece. It’s bringing awareness and just opening people’s minds such as myself. The new line of thought process and focusing on efficiencies and systems and the benefits of what’s out there and available to us. I think that’s a huge help to entrepreneurs everywhere.  Jonathan: When you spread this message out to everyone through the internet and it becomes national and worldwide that people can get this information, when you’re going to partner with another property manager in a different area, at least we can start from a place where we can both springboard off of, we were able to send people to you and just, “Listen to this. That’s the information you need,” as opposed to us having to go, “We’re going to have to teach you all this stuff.” Bryan: It’s fun to do to educate, but it is an education piece for your in-bound clients. You’re using all of that to really set them up for success with the organization. The reason we got into our podcast, specifically, was the first one my partner and I were on was a guest on one of the investment wealth networks and we actually signed 52 houses off that one episode, of clients coming in from out-of-state. That prove the value of it and then the education piece. If you’re like me, if you travel, I listen to podcasts all the time and come outside my own little world. It just really open that up. People are listening on a more regular basis and it’s definitely an education piece. It’s on demand for you. That’s the beauty of it.  Jason: Great. It’s been great connecting with you guys. Love what you’re doing. Again, I appreciate you being here on the DoorGrow Show and I will let you guys go now.  Bryan: All right. Jonathan: Thank you so much.  Bryan: Thank you.  Jason: All right. You heard it from those two gentlemen. The strategy for growth, really, you need a diversified approach and there’s so much available potential business out there. I really feel like the industry has so much potential for growth. I think it’s a really exciting time for property management. There are tons and tons of people that are self managing, they’re frustrated and they’re not searching on Google according to Google Trends.  Anyway, reach out to us at DoorGrow. If you’re struggling with any of these challenges, you feel like, “Hey, I’m ready to be coached. I’m coachable. I’m open. I’m ready to grow my company. I’m ready to make some painful difficult changes in my business,” then, I might be able to help you. Reach out to DoorGrow. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and make sure you join our Facebook community so you don’t end up getting stuck on random questions. You can ask questions in there; doorgrowclub.com. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Today, I am talking to Gwenn Aspen of Anequim, which offers remote assistant, Rent Manager call center, and Rent Manager software consulting services. Also, Gwenn and her husband, Jeremy, own the Wistar Group, a property management company. You’ll Learn... [04:40] How helping a friend, helped property management companies hire employees. [05:20] Currently, 150 employees in Mexico work remotely for property management companies in the United States and Canada. [06:25] Connections and Relationships: Life is all about taking care of and looking out for those you know and love. [06:50] Internal References and Cultural Differences: Holding each other accountable results in low turnover/high retention. [08:20] Managers Managing Remotely: If you manage someone who works remotely, get to know them as a human being. [10:51] Webcam: Teams founded on trust and transparency should be seen and heard. [14:50] For better or worse, Anequim and Wistar Group are unique and original company names that could be patented to prevent being sued. [16:45] Finding a Good Fit: Anequim helps potential clients identify things that they don’t like to do and give them to someone who does. [20:51] Time vs. Energy: Avoid burnout by identifying what fills or drains your energy. [22:20] Onboarding Training: Includes four ways to not die in property management. [26:12] Vetting Team Members: Extensive process of selecting candidates for clients. [29:47] Working in Mexico: No background checks possible or databases available. [34:09] Progress, not Perfection: Help property managers move forward and feel confident in making a commitment. [38:21] Anequim Structure: Assistants, solution agents, and others handle 1,200 units. [42:36] Every business needs systems: Planning, process, documentation, and communication. Tweetables Power of the Webcam with Virtual Teams: Just be there, and be seen. Time and Attention: A manager’s most important resources; use them wisely. Word to the Wise: Keep your clothes on when training employees. Our job is to make sure people are happy with their candidates. Resources Anequim Gwenn Aspen on Facebook Gwenn Aspen’s Email Wistar Group DGS 76: Outsourcing Rules for Small, Medium and Large Companies with Todd Breen of VirtuallyinCredible First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently Zoom Myers–Briggs Type Indicator Fair Housing Act Americans with Disabilities Act Culture Index Traction by Gino Wickman SweetProcess Process Street Basecamp Help Scout Intercom Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? 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 the fabulous Gwenn Aspen of Anequim. Gwenn, welcome to the show. Gwenn: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Jason: I'm excited to have you. It's really fun hanging out with you in the green room and you were showing me your nerd glasses. Gwenn: That I carry around with me everywhere I go because there's always a need. They’re literally nerd glasses, you guys. They're from Hobby Lobby, I got them for an event I had to go to because we were revenge of the nerds and I bring them everywhere because that's how nerdy I really am. But we can have fun too, we can be fun nerds. Right, Jason? Jason: Yes. Maybe. It's probably possible. A lot of people think I wear all these weird, different glasses especially the orange ones. People notice I wear this orange glasses and they always come up to me and they think I'm trying to be so cool. Their like, "Why are you wearing this glasses? Are you trying to be Bono?" Which is funny because Bono wears them to block blue light, right? He's not wearing them just to be cool but he is cool. Way cooler than me. Then I go into this diatribe of why I wear them and how they block blue light and how it helps set my biorhythm patterns, helps me get good sleep, and then they’re just sorry they asked. Gwenn: Well, that's what’s in your nerd shows Jason. Jason: And then they realized they are nerd glasses, so they realize I'm a nerd. Gwenn: Yes, because they bring out your inner nerd when you wear them and people ask about them. Jason: Yeah. So, I got some less orange ones. This are my nerd glasses. This make me look a little bit smarter. Gwenn: I think they look good. I like them a lot. Jason: They're a little yellow to them but I don't have the tape. I have to get the tape and maybe add the tape at some point just to look more nerdy. Alright Gwenn, let's get into this. Give us a little bit background, so you run this company doing remote assistance from Mexico and you said they're not virtual assistance because they're not robots, right? Gwenn: Right. No. They're not. Jason: You manage Rent Manager, the property management back office. You manage Rent Manager's call center, so you have a call center for Rent Manager people. Gwenn: We do. Jason: Then you also have Wistar Group which is a property management company in Omaha, Nebraska. Gwenn: Yes. That's all true. My husband and I started Wistar Group back in 2006 so we've been doing this for a long time. In 2008, a friend of his called him from Mexico because he lived in Mexico before I knew him for five years doing something totally different, transportation and logistics. The friend called and she said, "You think the economy is bad in the United States? Well, you should come down to Mexico. Things are really bad down here and I lost my job. Is there any way I could work for you in some capacity from home?" Because it wasn't only about the economy, but it was pretty dangerous at that time and my husband is the most loyal person you'll ever meet, for better or worse. That's right when VoIP phones came out so we sent one down to her, we figured how to make it work and she started answering the calls for Wistar Group—at that time, it was called Certified Property Management. She's taking the calls and it works awesome. We love it. She loves it. It's great. Then we just started, as we grew, hiring all her friends for all the other jobs that we had. We just operated like that because it works for us for many years and then in 2016, our friends from Boutique Property Management in Denver, we were hanging out with them and they're like, "Hey, this Mexico thing is working out great for you guys. Can you hook us up with people from Mexico?" I was like, "Sure." Then I got them some employees from Mexico and they loved it. My husband and I were like, "Maybe we can help more property managers with this," and so it grown like wildfire since then and now we have almost 150 employees in Mexico working for property management companies across the U.S. and Canada. It's just a win-win for everyone and it's just so exciting and I love my job so much. Jason: Okay, great. This sounds very similar to [inaudible 00:05: 37] who we had in the show except they do the thing in the Philippines. It sounds like a very similar sort of etymology or story behind how you got into this and it really was filling your own need and starting by helping a friend and it grew into helping all these different property managers. That's the interesting thing I've heard from those that have Mexican staff is that they hire one and all of a sudden, all their family and friends start becoming team members too. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: That must be a culturally different thing, I think with Mexico versus the Philippines. I think they are both very family-oriented, but I think there's something about Mexico that they're like, "Hey, hire my brother." Or, "Hire this family member," and they're connecting people. Gwenn: Oh my gosh. Yeah, the connections that they have, don't we all love that? Isn't that what life is all about? Is connections and taking care of the people that you love, that you know. It's just yet another thing to love about all the people I know in Mexico, is just how much they care for one another and have each other's back and then also hold each other accountable. That's the other things are that we grow a lot through internal references from one employee to another. If someone has a problem and they were the one who referred them, man. They hear it from the other employee. I mean there are that many cultural differences, but that's been a fun one. It really ends up keeping the turnover really low because they are happy, our employees work from home, and they love it, that's a huge advantage. They have this great connection with each other and we have Christmas parties. We're going to have a summer picnic with everybody. It's added a lot of richness to my life, just getting to know the employees as well. Jason: I was going to bring that up. A while back, I read a book called First, Break All the Rules. I believed it's pulled up by the Gallup Organizations that does the pulling. They did a whole bunch of surveying companies trying to figure out what makes a really good team and what creates retention with the team. One of the number one indicators of retention whether somebody was going to stay in the company was whether they have a friend in the business or somebody they are connected to personally on the team. So, that makes a lot of sense. It increases retention, significantly. Gwenn: I would say that's our job. If we’re going to hire someone remotely, if we’re the managers of this person, it's imperative that you get to know them as a human being to get that retention and to get that buy-in and to get them on your same mission going in the same direction. I feel like I know you much better right now just because we are in a Zoom Conference and that doing what with cam... Jason: Now, we're totally homies because we are in Zoom. Gwenn: Yeah, now we’re homies and we have the nerd glasses together, I mean. Those little things add to the relationship so if you make a point, I only communicate with people from Mexico using webcam because we have this amazing connection then and we feel like we know each other better. If you use a webcam, I swear it makes all the difference and getting buy-in from a remote employee. Jason: I absolutely agree. I've done a lot of remote hiring in the past and there's a huge difference, but it got to a point where eventually, I have a policy in our company called the Webcam Policy and everyone is required to have a webcam to be on the team and to communicate and show up and turn on the camera when we do meetings because it ended up being, at one point I remember showing up having team meetings and there's 5-10 people without their webcams on and there's just me putting on the show. Gwenn: I love that. I don't have an official policy, but not that you said it, I'm adding it. But I also have another employee from a totally different industry, he did a lot in banking and he was told to never have his webcam on. It was such a cultural dissonance when he came on the team because we were like, "Put your camera on. I can't see you. I don't know what you're doing. I need to see you." It was hard for him. It's good if you're somebody who requires webcams and state it at the beginning because some people, it takes them a while to get used to it. Jason: Yeah. It is a part of my onboarding process that they have to review the webcam policy and read it. Do you want me to tell you some of it here? Gwenn: Yeah. I think it's so important because whether you do remote employees from Mexico, whether you have someone in the Midwest, you know a lot of people hire people from rural Nebraska to work for their company because it's a lot less expensive. Jason: Alright. I'm going to share an internal secret here. Gwenn: Understanding the power of a webcam is crucial for the relationship working in my opinion. Jason: Alright. Here's our webcam policy for those listening. We are a team founded on the values of trust and transparency. It is important in a virtual team to be able to see one another on our virtual meetings since we often can't meet directly in person. As a team, we don't care about your hair, makeup, clothes, etc.during internal meetings. Just be there. Not having a webcam during internal meetings can feel like talking with someone behind a reflective window. It causes humans to try to assume and guess too much because they lack nonverbal cues we have evolved to rely on. Why address this? And then in bullets: to promote an environment of trust and transparency, to improve the efficiency of company communications and shorten meetings by effectively communicating with the full spectrum of verbal facial expressions and nonverbal cues, to reduce multitasking, right? Because they [...], they're like, "Oh yeah. I'm listening." Gwenn: Right. Totally. Jason: To reduce the anxiety of those speaking on camera, and then having the expectation. It is expected that all team members will join OpenPotion, that's our corporation, virtual meetings on video in order to fully engage in team and one-on-one meetings, this promotes collaboration on multiple levels and it allows each individual to feel heard as they see and receive nonverbal cues from their peers. This also increases productivity and reduces anxiety as ideas are better understood when they're coupled with facial expressions, gestures, and other forms of nonverbal communication. When meeting with clients, we appreciate you doing your best to make yourself and your background presentable, but that is not required. We just want you fully present and visible. Then I have a quote and it says, "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said," Peter Drucker. Gwenn: Oh, I love it. I love it although I would push back on the not caring what you look like because I've had people show up, not very often, but I had a guy and he looked like he'd just been to the club, and just rolled out of bed, and I was like, "Man." Also, you have to know your audience. We have a screenshot and keystroke that we record of everyone that's working for us while they're working not when they're not. We had one guy who was at a webcam conference and he had his hat sideways and my assistant was like, "Is that okay?" If you live in California that might be okay, but if you're with an older team in Omaha and you have your cap on sideways, it just might not work. I was like, "No. They're in California. It's totally fine." She was like, "Oh, okay." You have got to know your audience, better know your audience. Jason: I think it all boils down to what the entrepreneur wants though too. Before the call, I'd ask you what your Myers-Briggs Type was and you're an ENTJ, so you've got that J in the end. Gwenn: So, I’m Judgy? That means I'm judgy, right? Jason: Yeah. You're judgy which means you're a planner. You want things done a certain way. This details matter to you. I'm a P so I'm all over the place. I'm a bit more open-minded and I love taking you Js and cracking you open a little bit to expose you to some things you weren't exposed to before. Gwenn: I need people like you in my life too because I can't be too in the box. It's so nice to have that fresh [...]. Jason: J from the box for sure. Ps have no box and Js look at us like we're crazy. Some of the Ps that are perceiving, that's what the P stands for, they will take in things from all different sources, all different ideas, and to most Js, that's being so open-minded, their brain is falling out. It's how Js kind of view us sometimes but we need each other. All these other different types. I definitely need Js on my team to run my email, handle my calendar, do all the planning stuff that is not fun for me. You do this virtual team thing, how does somebody start with you if they come to you and they're like, "Hey, Anequim." First, where did that name came from? What does this name mean? Gwenn: I'm going to give you the real answer. We used to be a certified property management and then [...] wanted to sue us because they were like, "We have a certified property manager distinction," or whatever. Jason: Designation. Gwenn: Designation. We were like, “Well, we wanted to rebrand anyway,” because we started from nothing and took any piece of garbage that had a roof on it and then as time went on we became more sophisticated, and wanted to take out nicer properties, but in the local market, we were the low end. We already were going to rebrand, but we didn't want to get sued or threatened of a lawsuit again, so we were like, "We have to have something that's totally unique." Well, it's very hard you guys. It's so hard to find something completely unique. My husband's a pilot for fun and so he loves this airplane called Anequim and it means mako shark in Portuguese, anyway that was like a word we could use that was unique. We got Anequim and then Wistar Group. Wistar is my middle name and they were unique enough that my best friend who is a patent attorney approved them. For better or worse we're Anequim and Wistar Group. Jason: There you go. Alright. Portuguese mako shark. Gwenn: It's also an airplane. Jason: Which has nothing to do with Mexico whatsoever. They don't even speak Spanish. Gwenn: But I'm not going to get sued for it, so you know. Jason: No, it's perfect. It's a unique and original name which is helpful in branding, right? Okay, cool. Now, how does somebody get started with you guys. Somebody comes to you and say, "Hey, I’ve got a problem." How do you know that you can help them? Because I'm sure there are clients that you don't take on and there are clients that aren’t a good fit. Gwenn: There are. In fact, there were two clients yesterday that called me and I was like, "You know what? I think you guys just need to wait for a minute." And that is my thing. We don't sell. We try to make a relationship because if I sell you and then it doesn't work for you, then it creates a lot of heartache and drama for me because I want the person in Mexico to be happy and I want the person in the United States to be happy. What happened yesterday was, this one guy was buying another company, and they already had two employees there, but he hadn't really worked with them yet. I was like, "Hmm." He was going to be managing 400 properties. I felt like his people count was good enough for 400 properties, so I said, "Just take on these two new people. Measure processes and procedures together, make sure it works, and then when you get a handle on them then call me." He was like, "Okay. That's a better idea. That's what I'm going to do." If you call me and it's not going to work for you, I might tell you to do a few things first. Then the other guy called me and I thought again that his head count was already too high. I thought you could make more efficiencies in his software because a lot of people only use 5% of the software that they have purchased. If you have five really expensive employees and 400 units, I kind of think you should work on being more efficient first with your software and then call me. Jason: Yeah, right. Gwenn: Unless, you’re going to transition things—but these were obviously, longer conversations, I'm giving you the shortened versions—so if someone calls me and they're like, "No. I need somebody. I'm working my butt off and I need some relief." Then we'll talk about a job description first because I need to find the right person for this role. I need to know what kind of tasks you want. For instance, if you want someone to be doing a lot of cold calling then that's going to be a different person than someone's who's going to be helping you associate the right invoices with the right property and the right owner, right? We have to make sure we have a good job description. Also, your training is going to be better, it’s going to be a smoother onboarding process if you are really clear about what your needs are. Now, a lot of people will call me and they are just overwhelmed and they'll just be like, "I need a personal assistant." A lot of the times I push back on the personal assistant and I say, "Why do you need a personal assistant?" And they'll be like, "I just hate taking the phone calls. " I say, "Okay. Well, let's find someone to take your phone calls." Really, if you want a personal assistant because you are overwhelmed, think about the things that you hate doing that don't bring you joy, that don't fill you up, and let's give those to someone who's a better fit for those roles, that loves doing those things. Usually, it starts with a conversation about what the pain point is and what people really need, who they already have in their team, and what software they are using. We come up with a plan that would actually help them get what they want. That's kind of my goal. It maybe me, it may not be me, but my goal because I come from the property management world is just to prevent burnout from whoever's calling me. Whatever that looks like. Jason: Yeah, so you're helping them a little bit “KonMari” their time, right? Gwenn: Yes. Jason: And you we're talking about that before. Gwenn: Oh my gosh. Well, I love that. Maybe I should use that, but you have so many things that you have to do. Some people are coaches and that's really important to them, their property managers, and their families. Your time and attention are two of your most important resources and everyone on your team needs you to be using those wisely if you’re the one steering the boat. Jason: Yeah. I'm a big fan or proponent of energy management over time management... Gwenn: Yes. Jason: ...and really identifying what energies you as an entrepreneur versus what drains you because we really afford doing the things that energizes us, we have an endless amount of energy. Like our life and our businesses fills us but if we are doing things that drain us, burnout sets in and it's inevitable, it becomes really difficult. I think it's really important for people to pay attention to their time and what really is giving them momentum. I tell property managers all the time, “Anything that's been sitting on your to-do list for more than a few weeks, you're probably not the person that should be doing it. Let's be honest.” Gwenn: Right. Absolutely. There are people like, you and I we are just talking about how our personalities are different. Find someone who you like working with. Who you enjoy spending time with because it isn't actually an employee essentially just living far away that compliments you and can do the things that you struggle doing. Our role is to help people do that and we also train them on the first day so I have very high anxiety. I take care of things that make me anxious. I always go over the four ways people can die in property management on the first day, carbon monoxide poisoning, natural gas explosion, fire, and a technician being mistaken as an intruder and getting shot, and the importance of asking permission to enter. Those are four things we go over, which is really funny because when we turn over the training to the client, my assistant will always be like, "So, what did you learn in training?" And they're like, "How not to die in property management." The clients are like, "What?" I mean, I told them that we were going to talk about that with the agents but people forget and they're caught off guard. Jason: Four ways to die. Gwenn: Four ways to die, but those are really, really important and it really does happen. And our industry, there's been a number of deaths that we're all aware of, and so it's really important whether you're going to hire someone remotely or not to really discuss what bad things can happen, and how to make sure they don't happen in on-boarding training. The other thing we cover is Fair Housing and American Disabilities Act. That really should be trained every year if that's not on people's schedules for training. Domestically, I don't do this with the remotes, but domestically at our property management company, the other one is sexual harassment prevention training. We have a 70-year-old sales guy and then we have a 21-year-old front office lady. When you have multi-generational employees especially what they think is appropriate is totally different. It's important to discuss that because people aren't trying to be jerks, and they're not trying to be bad people, and they're not trying to offend anyone, it's just that what was totally appropriate in 1950 to talk about in the workplace is different. Also, on the 21-year-old side. I mean, 21-year-old sometimes think everyone's their best friend and they’re hanging out at the bar and it's not true. Having that conversation at the beginning of a relationship with any employee is important. Jason: Okay. Fair Housing and Disabilities Act, sexual harassment training, and four ways to die in property management. Gwenn: Yeah. If you're going to be using webcam, here's another thing. I did have a client who thought that it's totally appropriate to train his new employee without any clothes on, so a word to the wise, keep your clothes on if you are going to be training somebody. People, sometimes just don't know, they just don't know. I'm sure it was hot, it was summer, maybe went out to the pool and came back. It was really not okay. It's another thing to keep in mind. Jason: Policies improve overtime. You know there's something interesting if my webcam policies say, "Don't be naked." It doesn't say that yet. We haven't had that come up yet, but if it does happen, we'll definitely have that in. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: I mean, I had no idea that's going to be an issue but... Jason: Right. You never know until it happens. I think that's how all of the property management contracts evolved over time. Like, "Oh, this one's a weird new situation. Let's avoid that in the future and write that into our contract." Gwenn: Right. Jason: Okay. Somebody comes to you, you start them with some of these things, how are you vetting these Mexican employees, these team members? What are some of the things you go through to ensure that you're getting a good match, you're finding somebody who's really a good fit for a position? Help those that are listening feel safer using Anequim to find them a team member. Gwenn: Sure. The first thing is that they have to fill out an application and upload a video of themselves speaking in English about their hobbies. You find out a lot about people when they think it's appropriate in a video to say about their hobbies and how good their English level is. It also demonstrates that they have some technological ability because they have to upload a video. Jason: Right. Gwenn: We get rid of a lot of applicants right there. If they make it through those two steps, then we have them take a personality test. We use the Culture Index, and the Culture Index indicates whether people have detail orientation or not. Generally speaking, unless I'm hiring for marketing position or outside sales or something, we are going to need detail orientation. We look for that. There are few personality types that we just don't hire at all and we also have a logic-emotional continuum. Anyone who's really low on logic also not pass to the next level. After that if the make it there then they do an initial interview and it's a pretty tough interview. Ensures they have the qualifications and the seriousness that we are looking for. Generally, the pool of candidates that we are looking for have worked previously for a large corporation. So, in the towns where we primarily source our candidates, they work for Nissan or GE or Hewlett-Packard or TATA Consulting, and there's some really big names where they've already one through a lot of the training that you wouldn't need to train a brand new person on. But they've already been through it so they know how to talk on the phone, they know how to deal with conflict in a professional manner, and they know how to write an email. We do benefit from all that corporate training many of our folks have already been through. Jason: Okay. Gwenn: If they make it through the interview then we are going to start calling their references and just make sure those show up well. After that, our clients, if they've made it through all the interviews, we’ve decided this person is worth this amount of money. We have a paying scale based on education level, work experience and we know what kind of job they would fit into then we match them with our clients we have who are looking. The clients get to look at three different candidates, and see if this is a cultural fit for them and if this is someone that's going to work on their team, and that they're going to feel comfortable with on a day to day basis. We always do the interviews in threes. Hopefully, we do our job well enough on the first three know exactly who we want, but if you want to do another round, our job is to make sure people are happy with their candidates. The one negative about working in Mexico—and this is going to be with a lot of the country that you would source from—background checks, it's not the same, there's no government database and even if there was it probably won't be accurate in the way that you and I would expect, so there's no background check policy or way to even do that if you wanted to. We rely a lot on internal references and those networks or people want to give us their best friend and then they internally hold them accountable as well. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: We haven't had any issues with it, but I would suggest with anyone working remotely, you manage your privileges and your software. Rent Manager allows me to obscure social security numbers, credit card numbers, and we have a policy that nobody working from home has access to those, and you have to be in the office if you are going to be taking credit cards or looking at social security numbers. If you have good tight privileges, you don't really have much to worry about by hiring someone remote, and it's just a good policy anyway. Jason: Yeah. Alright. That is kind of the match making process. Gwen: Mmm-hmm. Jason: Then once they pick a candidate, what's the transition like this on the onboarding sort of process and how far does Anequim gets involved? Because I know some property managers are not probably used to having a virtual team member, they are probably going to make some mistakes, they might just say, "Hey, this virtual stuff doesn't work. I don't get it." How do you ensure that the transition is going to be healthy? Gwenn: First of all, we try to get a good plan on before we even get to that place. We have documents on ideal first two weeks of training and talk to them about what that process looks like, talk to them about technology, what kind of phones do you use. We recommend that you listen to calls if you're going to have someone who's the face of your company, and you're not going to be able to overhear them when you walk in the office. Here's a form on monitoring calls and here's the portal so you can see their screenshot and their keystrokes. We try to do all of that before the commitment takes place. Talk about what that looks like, so that when the commitment like, "Yes. I want to move forward," happens they've seen in their minds, "I kind of have an idea what this looks like." We don't want for either the client or the agent to get to a place where it's the first day and they just look at each other in webcam and go, "Okay, what do I do now?" We try to avoid that situation as much as possible, which is why we’re not trying to hard sell anyone. We want someone to be committed to the process and feel somewhat confident. Obviously, you're going to be a little bit nervous if you've never done this before, but that's why we are here to hold your hand, and give you that documentation and talk you through it so that you feel more confident before it actually happens. But then, on the handover meeting you're going to get all of them setup on their computers. You're going to get them to know everybody on your office, taking the laptop around and you're going to say, "Tell us something that people don't know about you." Or, "What are you grateful for today?" You know, a little icebreaker and then you'll get into the tasks. The great thing about working with Mexico is that they're on your time zone. Do you have to be perfect? Do you have to have the perfect documentation? No. Because like any other employee that you hire, you can just say, "Okay. I'm going to show you how to do this." They know it should be written down but it's not, "But you're going to help me write it down because I never had time to do this before. Here's the software where were writing it down. Here's how you're going to get a screenshot using Snagit. I'm going to video record myself going through this process and then make it a pretty process for me and then when it's done and it's all pretty, then you're going to do it." That's possible. Some people are further along in their processes and procedures than others, but by no means you have to have things perfect to move forward to the remote assistance. Jason: Yeah. The Myers-Briggs people with Js a lot of times get really caught up to being perfect before they move forward. They're like, " I have to have every process documented before I could grow my business." Gwenn: No, that's not the real world. I would say progress not perfection, right? I mean, you have to move forward. I'm reading this great book called the Billionaire Coach or the Trillionaire Coach, I think is what’s it called. It's really good. It's on my audible right now. But the guy is like, "Okay. Once you have things down, you have to go, and you have to go fast." I think that sometimes the people who are really into perfection lose sight of go, go fast, so it's always that balancing act. If you're not good at processes and procedures then hire someone to help you do that and just show them on in a video and say, " Okay, for the next three hours you're going to write this down. Okay? Then I'll check in on you in three hours and see how you're doing." Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: That's totally okay. Jason: I like that. Progress over perfection, so what I teach clients is, "Done is better than perfect." It's very similar. Gwenn: It is. Jason: Done is better than perfect. Get it done, you can always redo it later. You can make it better the second time around but having something is better than not having it. The other thing that I'll throw out there, sometimes is that perfect businesses are out of business. So, don't try to make everything so perfect before you move forward. It's the businesses that fail, that make mistakes, that rapidly prototype, that try stuff out and see what doesn't work, they're the ones that move forward faster. Gwenn: And when you have that hard day where things really did fall apart then just go back to the values. Like, "Okay, it fell apart, but I'm suring it up as a value, as a person with values. So, what does that look like?" If you have your values strong and you’re connected to them then when you mess up, if you just go back to that, you'll be fine. Jason: Right. Gwenn: That's how I look at it at least. Jason: That's the foundation. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: A really strong why and set of values for the business. That's what creates culture in a company. Well, cool. What are some of the questions that property managers ask you that I haven't asked yet? Some of the frequently asked questions, concerns, considerations. Gwenn: The main thing is the role. People are just like, "Okay, everyone's doing VA and I know I should be doing it because I'm just supposed to be more profitable than I am right now, but where the heck do I get started?" Usually, when people ask that, I just tell them because we've been doing this since 2008, how our company is organized because I do feel like we do remote labor as high of a level as you could. You might structure it slightly differently but just to give people an idea because the thing is in people's minds and eyes, they remember virtual assistance. They think, "I need my processes to be perfect. This is someone who can only do route activities, can't think outside the box." All of that is not true. These people from Mexico, can be, if we hire for it, highly educated. We even have some professors on the team. We have some attorneys on the team. Highly-educated people who most certainly are capable of thinking outside the box. Guadalajara, where we source a lot of the people, it's the tech capital of Mexico. When I go to the Christmas Party in Guadalajara, people are speaking Spanish, English, French, Portuguese. It's like an international gathering, like any European city that you'll be at or anything like that. Here's how we're structured. We have 1200 units that we manage. We have three customer service people residing in Mexico who take all the front line calls. We actually call them Solutions Agent instead of Customer Service Agents because they're job is to provide solutions. They don't just read from a script, but they can also talk to tenants about their statement and what it means, what's this maintenance service issue, maintenance charge is for, and help people break a lease, give them information about breaking a lease, changing roommates, tell them if they could have a puppy or not. Actually solve problems that give solutions. They also take all the maintenances services issue and troubleshoot. The great thing is that you don't have a PhoneTree when you call into our office. You just get a person which is a really good customer service. Most property management that I call have a PhoneTree and then you still can't get a hold of everybody. Thinking about what the experiences of an owner calling your main line, and what that feels like, maybe important in many of the markets that people are in. Once someone takes their phone call, any elevated issues will go to the assistant property manager. Let's just take a simple thing, it's not even elevated but like a service issue. We’ll go from customer service agent, we'll take everything from the service issue then it goes to what we call the virgin list, the assistant property manager review that—and we have three of those, by the way, one for each property manager has an assistant who's a true assistant—and they look at all the service issues that come in and decide whether our internal maintenance team can handle it or if it needs to go into a vendor. If it needs to go to a vendor then they're in charge of putting a budget on it, and based on the contract, whatever the owner wants, and then signing it to a vendor and then following up on that. If it goes to our internal team, then another woman in Mexico who's the Maintenance Dispatcher decide whose list it goes on out of the 15 maintenance people that we have. Her job is to manage those guys' schedules and make sure they're busy. Make sure they have work and make sure that they're going to a place that makes sense. Then other people that we have is accounting. We have two people in accounting and collections. They don’t just do accounting but they're also are like, "Why is this maintenance guy going to store three times in a day?" He's like actually analyzing the invoices and saying, "This price doesn't make any sense." We have two people there. We have Applications Underwriter who does the applications in Mexico as well and a marketing person in Mexico. I feel like I'm forgetting somebody. I think that's it. Jason: Anything on the sales BDM side? Gwenn: No. My market, we get a lot of business just coming in the door so we don't have a BDM. We have some sales people that are on a commission basis but we don't have an official BDM role. We actually decided not to get one this year which is weird because sales always pay for itself, but when we look at the numbers in our market, it didn't make sense to get someone at that price point. Instead we’re buying a company in another market and growing that way, but that deal's not totally done yet. Jason: Right. Gwenn: Those are the people that we have in Mexico. Internally, we have a front office lady, a leasing agent, operations manager, a maintenance manager, and right now, we only have two property managers. And then my husband runs the company and puts his finger in everything. That's pretty lean for 1200 units, it's pretty a lean shop. Jason: Yeah, that's really lean. Then you have a pretty decent process documentation, I would imagine as well. Gwenn: We use SweetProcess, where we house our processes and procedures and we’re kind of obsessed with it. We use EOS so we’re using the traction book. We've been doing that for 2 ½ years now and love it. That's how we stay organized and set our goals and priorities and make sure that we don't get lost in the day to day task and know where we’re going on a daily basis. Jason: Yeah. I think every business, eventually, as they evolve, they need a planning system which you had mentioned EOS. Every business also needs a process system, some system for documenting process and leveraging these processes. We use Process Tree internally, which works out really well. Gwenn: And I like Process Tree, but it's more expensive than SweetProcess. It depends on what your needs are, but I would recommend looking at both and determining what's better for your organization. But yeah, I like both those systems a lot. Jason: Every business needs some sort of communication system in the business as well. As a team, we use Basecamp as our communication platform to communicate internally, and then you need a client supporting communication system. A lot of people are using Help Scout or Intercom, or one of these knowledge based support systems. There's probably other systems. I'm forgetting off the top of my head, but business really need all these different systems in place. Once you have these systems in place, it facilitates and enables your team to really do well and communicate and understand where the company is headed and get in alignment with your vision and your goals. It's a big deal. Gwenn: Yes. There's a lot to take on, but again, people don't have to be perfect. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: Because when you say that it's like, "Oh my god, that's so overwhelming." But it doesn't have to. Jason: One thing at a time. Yeah. Gwenn: One thing at a time, Yeah. Jason: Cool. Cool. Gwenn: That's why I like EOS though because it takes that overwhelming. The, "Oh my god we have 10 million things we have to do this year," and it forces you to say, "Okay. How much energy do we really have and what are the priorities out of my list of million things that I'm going to do in these three months?" It actually helps you get more of that done than you would if you just look at the long list. Jason: Yeah. It has an etymology that's very similar to a lot of business planning systems and most every business planning system has annual objectives, quarterly objectives, monthly, and these things break down and the idea is, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Gwenn: Right. Jason: It’s like these elephants, you break them down in a 90 day, 30 days, and then even weekly commitments as a team. But a lot of business don't have any sort of planning system in place, so they're hitting zero objectives because they really don't really have any, and there's no clarity around it. They’re just winging it and the entrepreneur's, they're crazy. Entrepreneurs come into the room and says changes every week, "Hey, guys. I got this great idea." And they lob a grenade in the middle of the room, pull the pin and lob this grenade and walk out. They're excited and pumped out and the team are like, "What are we going to do with this thing?" Having those systems in place can be really helpful especially if you have virtual team members because then it makes a lot of difference for everybody to be on the same page. Gwenn: People, historically, have thought like, "Oh, were going to do all these planning and then we'll tell them later what we planned." But I recommend having the virtual team members in on all of those meetings. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: Here's one tip that has really helped us. We have the three customer service agents. Every morning at 10 o'clock they meet with the Operations Manager and just say, "Oh, this person is out of the office today. They have a dentist appointment at 2:00 PM and it's whoever's birthday. Our swing thought for the day is people can hear you smile. In the call monitoring, I've noticed that there's not been so much smiling on there, so let's keep that in mind for today. Today's contest for online reviews, we’re still giving $50 certificates to anyone who gets an online review." Whatever you have going on and just touching base for 10 minutes a day makes all the difference for someone whose remote. When you have your weekly EOS meeting, include them and what you're talking about. If they feel included in the process and in your mission, people don't leave. We've had the same employees at Wistar Group for six, eight, I think, is it nine years. I think we have two employees who've been with us for nine years. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: That's the key to getting the virtual or the remote members totally immersed in your culture. Jason: Yeah. They need to be a part of it, ironically, right? Gwenn: Absolutely. Jason: Yeah. I'm a big proponent of making sure that your team members are involved in outcomes instead of being micromanaged. Give them outcomes and let them innovate and you'll be surprised with what they can come up with. It might not be the way you would do it, it might be better. A lot of times, as entrepreneurs, we think we have it all figured out. We need to tell our team members, "Here are the steps. Do this exactly this way." When it comes to goal setting, goals are outcomes. Assign an outcome to somebody, let them own it, and I think you'll be surprised at the results they can create. Getting your team all involved in it, some of those meetings have been really eye opening for me because I had my set of ideas. I thought this is how the whole world looks and then I went around and asked my team members, "Here's this outcome. What ideas you guys have that can do it?" My graphic designer has a totally different idea than I would have. My head of fulfillment has totally different ideas than I would have. They bring this perspective and all these ideas were really good. I'm like, "Yes. We should do that, maybe not that, that one's great." I think you don't want to be the emperor with no clothes running a company. That's how you do that, is by allowing your team members to have a voice and be involved in the process. Gwenn: I love that. Actually, we teach a version of that on the first day of training. Its form this article that you can get on the internet called Who's Got the Monkey. Jason: Okay. Gwen: It's the number one reprinted article from the Harvard Business Review of all time. I only came across it out of massive failure years ago. Where I took my team members out to lunch and I thought they would tell me how much they love their job and they were like, "No! We don't love it. You guys never listen to us." I was like, "What?" They're like, "Yeah. We don't even bring up ideas to you anymore because you are never going to listen to them anyway." I was like, "Oh my god. This is terrible." I found the article on the internet and we came and have a change management process. We asked our team members to own their ideas. The first steps are people come to meeting and say, "Hey, not all ideas are good ideas, but here's my idea." That allows people to save face and be vulnerable and say what they're afraid to say in the meeting. Then they have to bring everything to the meeting—the subsequent meetings—to move the idea forward... Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: ...so that the decision maker can just say yay or nay. Sometimes, there's a little homework on the decision maker’s part, but we try to make it as minimal as possible. I take it from sale, in sales people are always eternally optimistic and they think everything's going to close. My way of determining if it's going to actually close or not is, "Is your name on the prospect’s calendar for another meeting? If it's not, then your deal is dead." Just black and white. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: If it's not there, you can revive it, but you better get a meeting out there. Same thing with ideas, "If your name in this meeting is not on anyone else's calendar, your idea’s dead." Just know that because when people feel badly about their job, when they get vulnerable, they say it and their manager is like, "Oh, that's a great idea," and then they wait three months and nothing happens to it, that really hurts morale. Giving them the honest, "Hey, it’s not moving forward if there's not a meeting" Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: And having them own that helps give them agency over their idea. Jason: Yeah, I love it. Cool. Let's wrap this up, Gwenn. I think this has been really helpful. I think we talked about some really cool ideas. I think, hopefully, some listeners are a little bit more open to having some team members that are not sitting in their physical office. How can people get in touch with you if they are interested in learning more? Gwenn: Well, I'm on Facebook. If you want to send me a message at Gwenn W. Aspen, I'd love to meet you there. Additionally, we have a website anequim.net and you can fill out a form, we'll get right back to you there, or you can email me at gaspen@anequim.net. But we love to help people, and like I said, if you just want to bounce ideas off whether this is a good idea or not, we can talk about your specific situation. Jason: Awesome. Gwenn, thank you so much for coming into this show. Gwenn: Thank you, Jason. It's been so fun. I really appreciate you having me. Jason: Alright. We'll let you go now. Alright. Bye, Gwenn. Gwenn: Bye. Jason: So, there you have it. Check them out at anequim.net. For those that are listening for the first time or checking us out, we really appreciate you subscribing. If you’re listening on YouTube or watching on YouTube or listening on iTunes, we would appreciate—if you are on iTunes—you give us your feedback. We would love to hear your real and raw feedback. Again, give us a review on there. It will be really helpful especially if you liked the show. We would love that, that gets us excited. Then make sure you get inside our community which is doorgrowclub.com. This is a Facebook group where you get to hang out with other property management entrepreneurs, all the Door Grow Hackers, connect with us, and see future episodes. We livestream these episodes into that group so you won't miss a beat. Check us out there at doorgrowclub.com. If you are interested in growing your business then reach out to us doorgrow.com. We would love to help you and see if we can help you grow your business. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth.

In the United States, millions of residential properties are owned and rented out by individual landlords, not professional property managers. Why not protect yourself from painful experiences with tenants, have peace of mind, and leave it to the professionals? Today, I am talking to Dave Holt of SureVestor, which provides Scheer Landlord Protection. This insurance plan financially protects landlords and property managers from tenant-related risks. SureVestor is at the forefront of leading a trend that can significantly help grow the industry. You’ll Learn... [01:45] Passion for Property Management: Dave joined NARPM nearly 30 years ago and has gone through its entire chain of command. [02:51] Reasons why Scheer Landlord Protection was brought to America: Significant growth impact on property management industry in Australia Way to make, but not lose money Opportunity to turn self-managed landlords into professional property managers [05:22] Is the United States ready for similar level of growth? Whether companies grow exponentially, or at their own pace, insurance can help them get there. [07:06] Can't control what happens in people's lives; when bad things happen to good tenants, property managers experience frustration and stress. [08:05] Who’s to blame? Things happen that create a financial burden; Scheer Landlord Protection covers income loss for landlords and property managers. [09:32] Malicious Damage by Tenants: Insurance covers holes in walls, cabinets ripped off walls, sand poured down drains, etc. [09:47] Blanket of Coverage: Indirect and direct benefits create safety for all parties. [13:45] Property manager requirement helps insurance company mitigate risk. [16:33] Competition: Focusing on criteria of quantity over quality. Most property managers don’t have an insurance license; be compliant and legal to protect industry. [22:40] Tiered Pricing: Clients know the cost to be protected. [24:58] FAQs: How do I market this to my owners? How can I implement it? Follow SureVestor’s steps to success. Tweetables Scheer Landlord Protection: Grow exponentially, or at your own pace. When bad things happen to good tenants, property managers get stressed out. For most landlords, rental property is their most expensive investment. Scheer Landlord Protection: Covers malicious damage, eviction costs, and loss of rent. Resources SureVestor Dave Holt’s Email Dave Holt’s Phone Number: 612-465-0421 SureVestor’s Blog National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) California NARPM Terri Scheer Lloyd's of London The Iceberg Report U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 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. I have a guest today named Dave Holt. Dave is here talking with me about landlord protection insurance from SureVestor. Dave, welcome to the show. Dave: Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: I just got to see you at CALNARPM in your British soldier outfit that you had there. I want to connect with you a little bit here. Give us a little bit about background on how you got into this industry and into this space. Dave: Yeah, you bet. I've been in property management, that's really my industry. I've been in the business for over 30 years. I started managing for HUD back in the mid-80s, got introduced to property management in single-family homes, and started my fee management company in the late ‘80s. That's where I ran into a fledgling organization that was just starting out called NARPM. I got involved with NARPM early on. I actually started in 1990. I've been a member ever since and gone through the whole chain of command there. Property management is my passion. Throughout that whole process, I've met with thousands of property managers throughout the years. Like you, Jason, always looking to see how we can improve the industry and came across an opportunity. We're actually teaching over Australia. Both my partners, Kevin Knight and Todd Breen, had taught over there. We came across a product that was over Australia and had been there for 25 years. We're wondering, "Why isn't that here in the US?" Actually, long story short, joint ventured with the creator of the product from Australia, Terri Scheer, it still sells under her name over there, Terri Scheer insurance. She has since sold her business over there. Now, has joined forces with us to bring the product here to the US. Jason: Awesome. My understanding of that is that this product has significant impact on the growth of industry as a whole in Australia. Dave: Yeah, that's very true, that's one of the reasons why we wanted to bring it here, it's not just something, "Hey, here's something that we can make money doing," that really wasn't the crux of what we bought it here for, and you hit it on the head. What we look at in our industry here in the US, it's 15 times the size of Australia. When you look at the number of properties that are owned here by individual landlords, it's over 15 million single-family homes that are actually owned and rented out, a small fraction of those is handled professionally by us professional property managers. If we have an opportunity to bring a product here that can help drawing those self-managed landlords to us as professional property managers, that's what we're looking to do. Over in Australia, that actually happened. About 15%, increased in the business for professional property managers because the beauty of this product is that it's only available for landlords that are professionally managed and we did that intentionally, we did that over in Australia as well. Those self-managed landlords have to come to us as professionals in order to get this product. Hence, we're looking to be increasing the number of properties that are managed by us, professionals. Jason: Now, I have heard stats thrown around like the property management industry in Australia grew about 25% in a single decade. I don't know if that's accurate, but that sounds pretty incredible. I also have heard that they have about 80% of single-family residential is professionally managed. Dave: That's right. Jason: Here in the US, according to the [...] report, we're at about 30%. If the industry here could grow in a decade to maybe about 25%, that would mean that we would pretty much double in size. I don't think there are enough management companies in the US right now that can handle that level of growth. That would mean we either need to double the amount of companies that exist now—that's a lot—or each company would need to double in size. I think that would be incredibly painful for most business owners. Dave: Maybe, maybe not. Obviously, your DoorGrow hackers are looking to be growing that's why they're part of your endeavor. It's not that they have to grow exponentially, but they can grow at their own pace. Certainly, it's something that, if they can use the insurance to help them get there, that's what we're all about, and looking to help them do. Yes, we saw it happen over Australia, we don't see why we can't replicate that here. Jason: Let's break this down, and help people understand. Maybe we start from the point of, how do you sell this product, but let's first talk clearly of what is it. What is SureVestor? What is this insurance product? Then I would love to get into basically talking about what's in it for the homeowner? How do you sell this to them? We get into those two things, and then I think the light bulbs will start to go on, and they can start to see how this can be a facilitator of growth here in the US. Dave: You bet. It's probably better to start from my experience as a property manager. Obviously, we're all property managers. Really, the frustrations that we've experienced, as property managers over the years, is when bad things happen to our good tenants is really the situation. It's very stressful. We know that we do a professional job of screening our tenants and getting the best quality tenants for our landlords, but we can't control what happens in people's lives, whether it's a job loss, a divorce, a death in the family—things that can happen in someone's lives that create a situation of financial burden. Now, all of a sudden, if they're renting a property, they may be more inclined to skip or stay there, and not pay the rent, and now, we have to evict them as professionals. It's very painful. For a lot of us in the single-family space, those owners owned one property. If something bad happens to their tenants, and now all of a sudden they're out of three months of rent because of it, that's a lot of their income. A lot of them say, "You know what, this isn't for me." They decide to sell or worst, they blame us as the property manager because we're the ones who screen the tenants, and they say, "It's your fault that this happened. I'm going to somebody else." In either case, we've lost the business. If we had a product, which we do now, through SureVestor and sure landlord protection insurance, that covers the loss of rent for those type of things; a tenant skips, they have to be evicted, they are victims of violence—we've had that happen as well—or there's a death of a sole tenant, or murder, or suicide. I've experienced all of those over the 30 plus years of business. That rent then is not paid, and our landlord is out of money. Us, as property managers, most of us are charging our management fee based on the rents collected, and if that rent isn't collected, we're not getting paid either. This insurance covers all that. It covers it for the landlord. It covers it for the property managers as well. Then, there are some additional benefits. Malicious damage caused by the tenants, that's something that we've experienced as well. They punched holes in the walls, ripped cabinets off the walls, they pour sand on the drains, things that are malicious, there's coverage for that. There's coverage for theft and damage due to theft. There's the eviction fees and legal offense if the tenant brings it to trial. There's the covering of the sheriff cost if you have to get a writ and go through that whole process. We even have lockbox coverage for a digital lockbox. For property managers who are now doing self-showings, many times, they get some pushback from their landlord clients about doing that because of, "Well, what happens if." Now, there's some coverage for that as well and then, rekeying of the locks after those covered events happen. It's a way where we can, with the insurance, make that landlord whole and also make us whole as property managers. One other thing too, a lot of us as property managers are guaranteeing our tenants for some period of time. If something does happen to that tenant and they breach the lease, we will re-lease the property for nothing, for no charge, for our landlord. Now, when you have insurance that covers the loss of rent, the malicious damage, the eviction cost, and those types of things, you now have the security deposit available to cover your re-leasing fees among other things. Jason: There could be divorce, job loss, death of a family, violence, malicious damage, malicious damage theft. Then things like, eviction fees, legal fees, writ fees, lockbox coverage, rekeying after theft. It really creates this safety for all parties involved. Dave: Absolutely. When you think about it, for most of our landlord clients, their rental property is the most expensive investment they have. They get dwelling coverage because that's all they know. They get dwelling coverage to cover the catastrophe-type of damage, the fires, and things that can happen to the property. The things that happen more frequently are the things that we're covering—the loss of rent because a tenant skips, they maliciously damage the property and the other things that we went through. Why wouldn’t they get coverage to give them that peace of mind, so when those things happen to their tenant, now, they're protected as well? It gives them an overall blanket of coverage, that gives them that peace of mind so now, they can rent their property with confidence, and hopefully, stay with us as property managers longer because they don't have to have that fear of, "What if?" Because now they're going to have coverage for that. Hopefully, draw in more landlord clients that might have that fear. Some of them decide, they just want to sell to begin with because they go, "You know what? I can't afford a loss. I can't afford one of those situations that happen, and now I'm out of rent, and I've got a mortgage to pay." It's a way where we can keep new owners and a way where we can attract new owners as well to us. Jason: Yeah. Creating this blanket of coverage sounds really significant and important. If it's not there, then even having a rental property investment can be a risk. Maybe it's a risk that a lot of property owners are either ignoring or aren't aware of if they're actually involved in real estate investing. There's a lot of self-managing homeowners that are like, "Oh, it's easy. I just need a tenant." Famous last words. Then they start running into problems, but even for property management business owners, you don't want to be the fall guy or gal for those problems when they happen, you want your business to be healthy. Since this is so important, to have this blanket of coverage, as you call it, and it has such an impact in Australia, is this something that only property managers have access to, why don't people just go and get these policies directly and self-manage, how's this driving people towards property managers? Dave: We have purposely set it up where individual landlords have to go through a professional property manager to get this coverage. If a landlord goes on to our page and looks at the, "For landlords," it actually, guides them through the process and says, "Do you have a professional property manager?" If they don't, we actually find one for them. One of our property managers at SureVestor and we refer them to them and get them new business that way, as well. Jason: The requirement of them to have a property manager probably also helps the insurance company mitigate their own risk. Dave: You got it. Absolutely. Over in Australia, it's been around for 25 plus years. Now, it's open to individual landlords over there now because it's a more mature product. Starting out, our underwriters wanted to kind of mimic the initial process that Australia took, which was making it available only for landlords that were professionally managed, that's something that really resonated with us, not just because of the underwriting of it, but more so, to help bring in the self-managed landlords to us, as professionals, and help us grow our businesses. Jason: Alright. I'm going to give you an opportunity to throw stones at the competition a little bit. The competition is anything that people might perceive as something similar or reason not to use something like SureVestor. Are there competitors that just go direct or don't have that sort of stipulation that you have to use a property manager, and have some sort of insurance-like product? Dave: Yeah. I'm not aware of it. There are some startups that are happening now. Obviously, when something’s out in the cosmos, we're not the only ones thinking about it, there are certainly other companies out there that are starting, I know a couple of them. I'm not necessarily sure that they're going direct to the landlord or not, one might be, but that's just because my thinking would be, "They don't see the risk." But we know our business, and we’re property managers-first, and so we want to be helping our colleagues grow. One of the ways to do it is to make it only available for landlords that are professionally managed. We know that we do things professionally. A lot of self-managed landlords, they don't follow the same criteria. Some of them do, but a lot of them just do the, "You look good," the feel test. Say, "Oh, yeah. He seemed like a really nice person. Go ahead and rent my property." Then they find out it's not so safe after all. We decided not to do that. We wanted to have it available just for the landlords that are professionally managed. I can't comment on any competition that's doing it, why they do that, other than, they just want to try to get as many as they can, they're focused on the numbers. That's not our intent. Our intent first is to provide a great product to our property management colleagues that can help them retain landlord clients, and help them bring out new ones. Jason: Right. I would imagine that since you've got these different parties involved, you've got property manager, you've got renter, you've got homeowner, and then anybody else could get into the mix in any of the drama that ensues with all of these—this really reduces the risk for all parties. I imagine there's products out there that look similar on the surface, but somebody's getting the short end of the stick, I think that would be dangerous. Regardless of who that is, it's going to end up as a problem for everybody. It makes sense that you guys are doing it right, focusing on making sure that this, really is, the best option for everybody involved and that a professional manager is involved in this process. That's exactly right. We have vetted this thing over three-and-a-half years. It started from the foundation and make sure that we had everything in place to make sure that our industry is covered, and we're providing the best quality to our landlord clients. That takes a lot of work getting that together that's why we have the world-renowned, Terri Scheer, started this. This whole thing. I mean, every single company has mimicked what she's doing, if there are any copycats around because she was the first. We have Lloyd's of London as our underwriters. The first and the largest insuring entity syndicates in the world covering this type of thing. It gives us more security and backing for our landlord clients and our property managers. The thing that property managers, when they're looking out what other competition there is out there, they've got to be really careful when people are saying, "Hey, you can monetize this, you can make money as a new revenue stream," and so forth. Most property managers are not licensed in insurance. In insurance, similar to our property management industry, is very heavily regulated. If you're doing things that look and sound like insurance, for example, you have certain programs whether it's guarantees or other types of protection programs that you're making money off of, that can be construed as selling insurance. If you don't have a license that can be an issue. Everything that we're putting together is legal. The ways that we're making this available for landlord clients, and for property managers, and even starting to create processes where they can benefit better from it, that's what we're all about—to make sure we're protecting our industry. Jason: Yeah. This is a common thing. A lot of property managers, especially the more entrepreneurial ones, get really creative, and they're thinking, "Man, I got this great idea for this new gimmick or this new thing. I can sell this guarantee, this warranty, this protection." It's almost like insurance. It works almost like insurance. There are some significant red flags that they could be putting themselves into some serious legal liability. Dave: That's exactly right. Jason: They're basically, doing insurance without a license. You need to be careful. You guys help them do it the right way. Now, you had mentioned, they're doing it to generate revenue. Now with your service, property managers can make some money too, right, they're not just lowering risk? Dave: When we're saying making money, the benefits are more indirect than direct. For example, as I mentioned, when the rent isn't paid, the management isn't getting their management fee. When the insurance is covering the rent, now the rent is paid because of the insurance, the property manager collects their management fee. Yes, that's a direct benefit, that's income to them. Most of the property managers have some sort of guarantee for the tenants, as I mentioned. When something bad happens, and they have to re-lease the property, that's a lot of out of pocket for them. Now, when the insurance is covering that loss of rent, that deposit doesn't have to go those things which it typically, does. Now, you have that deposit available to pay the re-leasing fee that the tenant would otherwise owe you as a property manager. You're making money indirectly through that. Here's another idea, Jason, that a lot of property managers, including myself, we'd gone to tiered pricing. What tiered pricing is that you have different levels of pricing for your landlord clients. Usually, your first tier is leasing-only, your middle tier is your traditional management, so it's an a la carte, you're paying for whatever service you get, your management fees, your lease fees, your inspection, your evictions—all that stuff is an additional cost. Then you have your top tier and the top tier is an all-inclusive or mostly inclusive, type of tier. You can charge more for that tier. What property managers are doing is they're paying for the insurance in their top tier, and so it makes that top tier more valuable in the eyes of, obviously, of the landlord client. That landlord goes, "Well, I mean, I can pay this amount and know what all of my costs are. I can get the insurance to cover in the event of a bad thing happening to my tenant." That's a more predictable result for an investor. They know that cost, they know that they have the protection, and that gives them that peace of mind. That's a process that a lot of property managers are going to. In the top tier, even though you can't upcharge the insurance, you can charge higher to be including all of your charges, all of your fees, into one. Jason: Got it. They fold it into that. Makes sense. In that situation then it becomes an additional value add that allows them to sell their services at a higher price point. Dave: You bet. The insurance help do that and they make more money, you bet. Jason: There you go. Alright, awesome. Dave: Lastly, we are in the process of creating a way where we can legally compensate the property managers. It's something that they're not prepared at this point, to go through in detail, but I would welcome property managers to contact me. I'm more than happy to go through that process with them. Jason: Cool. Okay, great. What are some of the most common questions that you're getting from people that are maybe skeptical or concerned? What are some of the initial questions that property managers might ask about this? Dave: The first is, “How do I market this to my owners? What do I do?” Obviously, we got two parts of that: we have our current owners, and then we have new owners. What we have done is put together the steps to help them with their current owners, for one, and help them bring in new owners. As property managers ourselves, we know we're very busy. We have a hard time implementing things because we are very busy. We get sucked into the day-to-day grind of property management. It's probably what's happening right now. It's the last day of the month. Most property managers are out there doing their move out inspections, move-ins, and doing all that kind of stuff, they're busy. Trying to implement a new thing is always a challenge. We know that because we're property managers too. We've created those steps to help them do it. We've done it for them. We have all the email templates that they send to their current clients, for example. We have the schedule all laid out so that they can just send them out. We have what's called an opt-in, opt-out form. The beauty of that is it gives them a tool—a risk management tool—to use where they can send that out in the email. Just like here, "I'm opting in," and this is for the owner, their landlord client. "I'm opting into this coverage, and this is what I want." It's directing to the property manager, or it's saying, "No. I'm not interested at this time." Now, the property manager has a form. Six months later, when their tenant has to be evicted, and they've opted out with that coverage, if that landlord is coming to the property manager complaining about it, they can say, "We did our duty of care. We told you about this insurance. You opted out of it, don't blame me." We have that. We also have the disclosures and opt-ins that they use in their management agreement. Personally, even if my BDM, my Business Development Manager, who's talking to brand-new owners hasn't mentioned anything about the insurance, they see it in my management agreement. It's already laid out, and we have that addendum of it available for them and their management agreements. That's part of it. The next part is the whole part of bringing on and using it as a point of difference for their new clients. We have scripts that they can use to help in that initial conversation. Again, we have the information that they can use in their property management agreement both—if they're just doing regular pricing, and if they're doing tiered pricing—so we have both. Then we have the marketing information that they can embed, and put on their website with video clips and so forth. We've done all of that for them, so they don't have to recreate it. Our last step is on all implementation. We walk them through the steps of implementing it all. It's really quite simple. A lot of the marketing too, we have what we call a WDIFY, we-do-it-for-you process, and we can even help them do a lot of that marketing as well. Many of your DoorGrow hackers may recall Darren Hunter and Deniz Yusuf because they were at your event just last year. They have put together, since they know this insurance intimately, both of them being from Australia, they have helped put together a whole orientation for BDMs on how to be better at utilizing, not just the insurance, but utilizing tools to help draw new accounts to them. We have that on our site, on our blog site. It's a whole 45 minutes of them going through with their best practices and how to utilize the insurance as that point of difference to draw in new business for them. Jason: Cool. Dave: There are just a lot of tools that we have to make it simple for the property managers because again, we know it's challenging for them to get things implemented. Jason: The number one challenge in any new software, or any new system, or any new tool, is adoption. It sounds like you guys really helped lubricate that process, make it smooth, and make it easy. That's one of the biggest challenges, or complaints when people get into some new system or some new tool or service is, they just don't have the level of support that they need. That's one of the biggest challenges. It sounds like you guys really put a lot of energy and effort into making sure that they have what they need in order to succeed. I mean, the first challenge, making sure they've got the right vehicle, it sounds like—with the backing of Lloyd’s as an underwriter and everything—this is like the premier vehicle for this. Then the next question that a business owner would have is, "Well, can I do it? Is this possible?" It sounds like you've got the support, the tools, and the resources that they need. The last concern that people might have is what about external factors? What about the market? Could this go away? Could the government impact us? These sort of things. Are there any potential challenges there? It sounds like you guys have dealt with this stuff to make sure everything's compliant and legal. Dave: There's really no concern there. We just expect that to become more commonplace like it has been over in Australia. For those in your group that aren't familiar with Australia, we consider it almost advanced in property management. I say that because they are even more heavily regulated than we are, it just draws to making them more professional, and so they've got to do things to protect themselves and protect their owners. They're always thinking of new ways. Hence, why this insurance started 25 years ago or so. In a government, in a country that is very highly regulated, it's done nothing but expand. Over here, I don't see it going away. I see it expanding. I see it becoming more commonplace, especially as we're seeing after the global financial crisis, more and more, not just individual investors, but huge hedge funds coming in and buying real estate. Rental property, compared to homeownership, is increasing. As that continues to be the trend, more and more investors and landlords, in general, are going to want to protect themselves, and protect their investment because as I mentioned, it's the most expensive investment that a lot of them have, they want that peace of mind, they want more consistency, and predictability. When you have an insurance product like this, that they can get for as little as $1 a day, I mean, come on, it's a no brainer. We really think that this will become more commonplace. It's already in the insurance industry that's very highly regulated. The things that we go through as far as auditing and making sure that everything's done right is a continual process. We have vetted this to make sure that it is done right and protecting our landlords and protecting our property management colleagues. Jason: Love it. Most of the vendors that we handed out awards to for our DoorGrow Awards for 2018 were because they were the best in class, they were the leaders in a competitive space, that they'd gotten the most attention inside of our DoorGrow Club Facebook Group, they consistently were seen as a leader. We gave SureVestor an award, and it was for this reason because I do see this could be a game changer for the industry. We gave SureVestor, for 2018, the Game Changer Award, was what we called that award. I think, really, SureVestor's at the forefront leading a trend and a movement that I think is going to be happening here in the US, that I think can significantly help the industry, and help grow it, and help lower the risk of investors, and help bring people to the property management space. Property managers lower risk and SureVestor helps lower risk, I think combined, it really can give the property management a much better name here in the US, where people, having managed their biggest asset or investment ever—or whatever you want to call it—that they might ever be dealing with, and keep that risk low. Dave, great to have you on the show. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this. How can people get in touch with SureVestor? What's the next step for people that are listening or watching this later that are interested in finding it out more? Dave: You bet. Thank you. They can go to our website, real simple, surevestor.com. They can contact me as well, daveholt@surevestor.com or they can call me 612-465-0421. Happy to walk them through, happy to guide them through the process, and answer any questions they have. We're just looking to provide a great product to our industry. We really appreciate what you're doing as well, Jason. We think DoorGrow is really on the number. We're happy to support it anyway we can. Jason: Awesome. I appreciate it. Always fun for me to connect with other vendors and other people in the space that have a similar vision and mission for the industry, of helping it grow. Let's change it together. I appreciate you coming on, Dave. Thank you so much. I will let you go. Dave: Alright. Thanks again. Jason: That was surevestor.com. They don't pay me anything. I just think it's exciting. People probably wonder sometimes. Anyway, check them out. If you are not inside of our Facebook group, you're probably missing out on the best tools and the vendors. You're probably missing out on some great fee ideas. You're probably also not super connected to DoorGrow. We would love to help facilitate the growth in your business. I would love to be your coach. I would love to be your consultant to help you do what I've helped lots and lots of clients do which is, add easily, 100 extra doors to your business. If that sounds interesting to you, make sure you reach out to us at doorgrow.com and get inside our community, our Facebook group, community connected to this. Become a DoorGrow hacker. That is by going to doorgrowclub.com and you can join us there. 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.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, most of us have lived with roommates at some point. You probably split expenses and chores, including rent and taking out the trash. Today, I am talking to Tyler Hayes and Joáo Ritter of Roof, which helps roommates resolve problems to live peacefully together and landlords easily collect rent and connect with tenants. You’ll Learn... [01:48] How a college hobby project created a company: A group of friends who love to design and build things, like apps, got together to foster productive communities. [02:21] It’s good to have friends with different skill sets to make a product even better. [03:17] Roof: A company all about people who share and make a place feel like home and landlords who make space available to those tenants. [03:55] Property vs. Tenant Management: Does your landlord treat you like a human being or asset? Problem-solving by landlords improves relationships with their tenants. [04:45] Pairing up to build an app: Eager to work on meaningful, real-world projects and continue to invest in them. [06:00] What is Roof, and what does it do? Landlord: Gets paid, makes sure home operates as expected, and creates positive renting experience for tenants. Roommates: Share reminders, shopping items, expenses, and anything else they want to exchange while living together. [07:28] Target Audience: Landlords handling a small portfolio of college housing; who know all their tenants by name and care about communicating with them. [08:13] Landlords recognize that renting experiences and services they provide for tenants reflect back on them and their reputation. [08:39] Societal trend toward people moving in together for the sake of economic efficiency; people try to live together, share spaces, and live more cheaply. [09:26] Recipe for Disaster: Relying on one to communicate to entire household. [10:00] Roof app revolves around sharing space between people who all share responsibility for that space. [10:54] Common Challenges: Roof helps solve communication issues and responsibilities masked as reminders for people sharing space. [18:09] People love interacting and inspiring one another to take risks, make the move, offer encouragement and support - Roof’s team is part of conversation/common goal. [22:57] Plans to integrate with property management software that lacks Roof’s roommate functionality/communication platform? Too cost prohibitive for small investors. [27:53] Future Feature: How Roof decides which features to focus on or throw away. Tweetables Does your landlord treat you like a human being or asset? Roof revolves around sharing space between people who share responsibility for that space. There's always going to be bugs, tweaks, changes—that's just the nature of software. Resources Roof ($20 of transaction fees for free, use code: 3875 DoorGrow) Roof on Twitter Roof on Instagram Roof on Facebook Contact Roof AppFolio Buildium Propertyware Rent Manager Rentec Direct Property Meld Happy Inspector Latchel Myers & Briggs Personality Types Slack BiggerPockets PayLease 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’ve got two guests hanging out here with me. My guests are—see if I got the name right—Tyler Hayes and Joáo Ritter. How did I do? They are here from the company Roof, and one of you is the CEO. That’s you, Joáo, right? Joáo: That’s me, yup. Jason: You’re both software engineers. How did you guys get into this? How did you decide, “Hey, property management might be a space that we might want to connect with in some way, shape, or form.” Then let’s lead in how Roof came to be and what it is? Joáo: Sure. So, we started the company in college actually as a hobby project. I wanted to know how to build an app. I lived with a ton of roommates at the time, and we had a few things that we routinely split amongst ourselves: a few reminders of shopping, other expenses, rent, payments. I started to learn how to build an app by trying to automate some of these things. Part of my brain is naturally inclined to inputting names, and brands and business-fy things. Over time, we took this concept, I was working [...], and several friends wanted to put it on the App store, so we did. We started talking to my good friends who had different skill sets from myself, and we worked together to make the product even better. A couple of years then, super as a hobby project still, we had this app for roommates to solve roommate problems or roommate exchanges. We had a landlord, I remember at the time, Nathan, he really gave a damn about his tenants, about us. He's very much in tune with making sure we had a cozy place to live, the problems got solved, that he addressed us as human beings and not as assets, but his way of collecting rent was still pretty archaic, really easy to get logistics mixed up, and not communicate the way in which was authentic to him. We came to him. We were like, “Hey, look. We have this app for roommates that roommates are enjoying.” I think we really want to make this company all about home, about the people who share a home and make a place feel like home and operate well. That actually involves knowing that we're living in the house, but also the landlord to make the space available to tents. Funnily enough, we actually didn't come into the project with the intent of providing value directly to landlords. Our value prop was actually for roommates. I think that actually makes us a really interesting and appealing platform for landlords because their customers are roommates. By addressing the problem less, as a property management problem and more, as a tenant management problem, we really get to the core of the problem solving that you have to do as a landlord: from late payments to reminders to making sure service requests are addressed on time and that the communication is proper between everyone involved; that everyone who shares a home has the ability to stay in tune with the conversation with the landlord as the head of the [...] oftentimes and maybe [...]. That all led us to entertaining the idea of expanding to landlords. Then going all in, “Hey, look, if I'm going to build the platform of the future to make home exchange possible, we have to, not only solve roommate dynamics but also the landlord-tenant relationship.” Jason: Tyler, are you one of his roommates, then? Tyler: No. We never lived together. Although, we did both have roommates and we were both in college. Jason: Yeah. How did the two of you kind of pair up in the business here? Tyler: Well, at that time, I was in design school. We were in two different universities, pretty close to each other. At some point, we talked about this idea of building this app. Joao was really interested in figuring out how to build an app, [...] gets to practice in doing that is in trial-by-error, I guess. For me at the time, it was a similar sentiment because being in design school, I was really eager to work on something, some kind of real-world projects, work on something that's going to be meaningful, that I could follow, and continue to invest in. At the time, part of the motivation for starting the project was just like, “Hey, let's just make something.” We’re interested in learning some things and doing some things like, "Let's just make something." That was kind of it at first. Jason: Yeah, cool. Let’s let the audience know what is Roof. If you can give the back story. What the heck is it? What does it do? Joáo: [...] is an app for tenant management. It lets you collect rent payments and manage maintenance requests from your tenants, and communicate with your tenants. It's all about being on the same page with your tenants, you're getting paid and making sure your home operates as you expect, making sure your tenants have a great renting experience. It solves the core functionality the landlord needs when it comes to renting their home and growing their portfolio from there. For roommates, it helps you share your reminders, shopping items, expenses, and anything you may want to exchange throughout your living together. Jason: A lot of people listening, they might have AppFolio, or Buildium, or Propertyware, or Rent Manager or Rentec Direct, or one of this property management sort of back-office accounting solutions and some that might help with the maintenance request stuff. Some of them are okay, some of them a lot of our clients or people listening will use third party tools like Property Meld or Latchel. I'm really interested, and I haven't heard of anything for roommates, so that's pretty unique that you have something that helps facilitate roommates. Do you find that a lot of your target audience are running college housing or dealing with college housing situations? Tyler: Yeah, that's a really big segment of the people that we talk to, but it's not entirely. Generally, it's landlords with a bit of a smaller portfolio. The kind of people who probably know all the tenants by name, who would otherwise maybe be texting their tenants, having that kind of relationship with them. Basically, landlords who care about communication and especially landlords who care about actually just doing things that their tenants are going to appreciate. Because ultimately, for a lot of landlords, they recognize that the services that they can provide, the renting experience that they can provide for their tenants, is ultimately going to be reflected as their brand as a property manager, as a landlord. For landlords who want to invest in that, those are typically the ones that we see most invested in Roof. Joáo: Yeah, totally but let me double down on what you said. I think there's a lot to be said about the societal trend towards people moving in together, not for the sake of a family necessarily, but for the sake of economic efficiency. People are moving into urban areas, people are moving into college towns for school, and whatnot. Instead of living on the outskirts and pay cheaper, people try to live together and share spaces and live more cheaply. I bet a lot of landlords listening in here have rentals that they rent—not to single families—even though they may be single-family homes but actually to people who share a space as roommates, who may otherwise don't really have a relationship with one another apart from being roommates who may have found each other on craigslist or some service. What you'd probably run into as a landlord in those circumstances is you have to keep up a relationship with them. Normally, you have one head of the house, someone on the lease, or someone that you have their email, that you go to directly and expect them to convey the message to the rest of the house. That’s kind of a recipe for disaster when you talk about communication when you're trying to rely on one person to communicate an idea or a circumstance to a whole household. The core of our app revolves around sharing space and sharing space between people who all share the responsibility of the space. If you're a landlord who finds himself in this puzzle of trying to manage roommates, it makes it a lot easier to reach out in one spot, allow roommates to split payments as they will as long as you get the full rent ship at the month and then give them, as Tyler had said, a great experience meanwhile. There's a lot to be said about that. I think we have a lot to grow to accommodate larger portfolios which we fully intend to do. But for the time being, it's 100% focused on landlords who see the opportunity in creating a brand for themselves and experience for their tenants and solving problems through effective communication. Jason: What are some of the challenges that people sharing space will run into so that we can paint a picture of how this app solves these problems? What are some of the problems? Tyler: We could probably tape a whole podcast about that question. Jason: Cool. Let's paint a picture here. Tyler: At the core of it all is communication. The problem basically is, how can you communicate with each other things that each other needs to be responsible for, things that need to be done. Some of that can be abstracted into things like, if you're living together there's going to be expenses that are shared, there's going to be responsibilities that are shared, and purchases that are shared, items in their household that you might want to share responsibility for keeping in stock. Those things certainly tend to change a lot from household to household depending on just like what your house is like. In designing Roof, I think we tried to create some tools that were specific enough to target the main needs of people but still general enough to be applicable to as many different types of households as possible. The things that we've targeted are: one, just splitting expenses, so being able to keep track of who's paying for shared things whether it's groceries or split bills like monthly expenses like utilities or… Joao: Rent. Tyler: ...rent, yeah. Joao: That's kind of a holy grail of sharing space. Tyler: Right, the holy grail. We included a shopping list feature to keep things in stock that might be shared. Things like trash bags and groceries. In our household, we use it to track things like olive oil, things that we share for cooking, kitchen supplies, that kind of thing. Also, there is the responsibility aspect that I mentioned. Being able to sort of offer some kind of recognition for saying like, "Oh, Joao, took out the trash. Joao cleaned the dishes. Joao swept the hallway." Things like that, responsibilities that sort of affect everybody, that help everybody, that you want to offer some ability to track, but without getting too into the weeds of being like passive-aggressive like, "Come on. Do this." Joáo: Yeah, its responsibility kind of masked as reminders. So, “You have to take out the trash on Sundays.” You program your Roof app to schedule it between your roommates. So, one Sunday it'll be using, "Jason take out the trash." Then you know it’s your turn then next week time, “Tyler, take out the trash.” You can kind of all share the responsibility. Everyone has a roommate story. I think the roommate story, the core of them, stems from an imbalance of sharing. Maybe one person's accustomed to doing everything and has that sense of responsibility and autonomy but they feel as though people around them aren't keeping up or you're on the opposite end where you feel as there’s someone in your house just does everything without you having to say anything, and without you having the opportunity to be involved. All those are communication issues which I think is the backbone but still abstract. In order to make those tangible things like expenses, shopping, and reminders really kind of lay the foundation of the interactions. Rent payment is the thing you sign on the lease on together to be able to share, right, and we really see the opportunity there because no matter how many expenses you share throughout the month, usually they add up to less than your [...] in the month. You can imagine creating a more comfortable splitting environment where at the end of the month, I may buy a handful of groceries, and a new piece of furniture, but when it comes time to pay rents that just means I'll pay a little bit less and Tyler will pay a little bit more. You as landlord [...] full amount, we're even on our end, and all is well. That's kind of our way of operating. Jason: It's interesting because really, there are so many different personality types out there. I don't know if you've ever played around Myers Briggs, but in Myers Briggs, for example, you've got the ISFJ and the ESFJ personality types that are very much like givers, and they're always serving people, doing stuff for other people, but they don't want to ask. They’re just arguing, and they're expecting people to reciprocate. Joao: Totally. Jason: They're always let down because nobody gives as much as them. But their mindset is, "If I do this, people should just do it back, they should reciprocate." A lot of other personality types, they're focused on other things, they’re not focused on reality, they're focused on ideas or code or whatever you guys might have been focused on. There's this power play, and passive aggressiveness comes out, and challenges come out. It can get ugly. It's simply because somebody didn't communicate with somebody else. I can see how that would help. It probably could be used in families, let's be honest. Joáo: It's not dissimilar from Slack for workplaces. When you have a team that needs to collaborate or to get something done, you're going to have different personality types. Different people are more inclined to step in, and different people are more inclined to observe and take it in and then respond over time. But if you have the right organization of how you interact with one another, you have access to a whole group, you have access to individuals, you have access to services that come through and talk to you via this medium, you're able to actually keep clarity over the whole situation and manage those personalities. Roof, as a tool, is particularly useful for particular groups of people but it's really hard, as you mentioned, to solve the problem holistically. I think it's not terribly efficient to try to solve roommate ship. There exist roommates who already enjoy each other's company, and they aren't in this tug and pull battle. They just really could use a tool to basically make concrete their group and their place of interaction, and then through that means, you keep organized, but you're not necessarily leaning on the app to build your relationships. I don't know we're going to build any relationship that doesn't already exist, but we do have to step in and be a tool for people who are already managing themselves via a spreadsheet or via some other less efficient mechanism right. Jason: Yeah, cool. Yeah, I like it. What else should people listening, know about Roof? Joáo: I'm really proud of our team. I think that's why I love working on the project is I think we've managed to surround ourselves with incredible people. I think people who use Roof see that in the form of how they interact with us, and how we enjoy interacting with them, how we make ourselves available. Our whole team, from me all the way to people working on sales, it's a very small team. I don't state people as there’s just a bunch of us, a handful of us with pretty particular responsibilities. You have access to engineering, all the way to design, all the way to decision making, and we want your input. That's how we kind of operate internally with [...] one another. We consider the landlords who use us as investors. They're investing in us by putting their portfolio onto Roof, by extracting value that we have to offer, and by wanting our company as a means to build their own company, that's something I really care about. It sits tangent to the app itself, but I think it's actually a massive part of what you're getting with Roof is the team behind the project. Tyler: I actually just want to second that because I think it's something that, in my opinion, probably sets apart the company that we're building compared to some similar service in the same industry. I tend to be the member of our team who talks to the people who are using Roof the most. If you got an email from Roof, it's probably from me. It's something that we benefit from tremendously, getting to talk straight to people who are using Roof and not just from a feedback perspective like, "Hey, how is this feature working for you? What's something that you have in mind that could be working better?" It feels good to be able to hear the opinions of people have about how the app is working for them and any kind of conversation, really. What I found is that the types of landlords I think who want to invest in Roof tend to be the types of landlords who are very much interested in being a part and building something better than what already exists in the market right now. By nature of that, we're the type of people who are really eager to sort of get involved in the way that we want people to be involved which is, "Hey, like if you have an idea for something that we should be doing, tell us and reach out to us." We maintain a Slack channel with some of the more involved users that we're always trying to invite more people to. We maintain pretty regular e-mail communication with quite a few of our people who are using Roof. I think that benefits us as well as the people who use Roof a lot. Joáo: Jason, I know you know for sure how interconnected a lot of property management org, and financial freedom hustlers are. People love interacting and inspiring one another to take risks, to make the move, to encourage and to have the support, and I think we're an extension of that. We don't sit side by side to the landlords knowing the real estate investor is actually going out and paying attention to the market and purchases, etc., where we feel like we're very much part of that conversation. If you're expanding your portfolio, loop us in. We pay attention to so many blogs, from BiggerPockets to Instagram feeds of individuals who are, not only doing a hell of good work but also inspiring other people around them, in the same boat, maybe a little bit earlier on their careers to keep going. It's very similar, as a small business owner to work with small business owners towards this common goal. Jason: Very cool. Alright, I have feature requests, then, for you guys. I’m just kidding. Maybe these are on your road map, I don't know, but this is how my brain works. I'm going down all these channels. One huge opportunity, it sounds like for guys, is in the property management space. All these property management software tools, they lack this roommate functionality that you've created, this communication platform. Do you see the day that maybe you could somehow connect, or integrate with maybe Rent Manager, it could become sort of a strap on to AppFolio or Buildium or something like this to where if they have some college housing, they could set up the college housing people on this app and they could at least do the accounting. Because some property managers are using a third party tool just to collect rent payment like PayLease or something like that even though they have their own system. I think there might be a potential here for those that are doing college housing right now to use something like this, and they might have hundreds of doors. Joáo: Sure, yeah. Absolutely. I think the question is kind of multifold. I think there are several avenues, an opportunity that could be pursued there. The idea that Roof is a side-by-side tool to PayLease or AppFolio is interesting. You can set up your entire portfolio on Roof, and choose to collect payments directly on Roof or just mark settlements. If you want to actually put in your accounting on Roof, we don't yet have a full suite of graphs, charts, and really making your progressions known to you but not yet—that's another avenue. We could just go on accounting side-by-side through our communication core and really offer the value of other platforms. Or if you want to use the Roof side-by-side to it, you can just use Roof as a ledger, but actually, collect your payments through another software and just do all your communication on Roof. In which case, it's interesting to entertain the idea of proper integration between the two because I think in essence, we are competing and we are going after a different market. I think a lot of those tools, AppFolio in particular, is loaded with features that a lot of smaller rental operators don't need and it just overcomplicates the experience instead of ensuring it has a richer accounting feature. But oftentimes, too rich. It just gets in the way of the one report that we need, or the one piece of information that you actually come to over and over again. Jason: It’s too cost prohibitive for the smaller investor. Joáo: Too cost prohibitive. Absolutely. I'm unsure if a priority of ours would be to integrate. I think we would rather compete, to be honest, just because I think we see our market and our users as really valuing Roof as a strong competitor to those. I think it's a massive market. As you said, property management investors, property investors, come in all types, they all have different motivations. But I think the core of what you're getting at is, how can we extract the juicy features from our competitors and make them a part of the Roof in the most elegant way possible, and that's something that we're incredibly in tune with, "How our competitors' moving? What people are using?" Also, I don't think we're competitor-driven, I think we're customer-driven 100%. I'd rather spend my time talking to people who are using our app and appreciating the core of the features. We want to stay [...] with what we believe to be true about problem-solving and then say, "Yes, right. Cool. What kind of financial reports do you need? What kind of integration [...] do you need?" Then working those into the app in an elegant way. I think its value is to actually just build a feature and just throw it in another tab and just grow your tabs of different things you offer. Everything has to play with one another really well so that you actually create an experience that anyone can come into. From a person with one house and a couple of tenants to someone with 50 homes and hundreds of tenants and make the most of the platform. I'm more interested in that side of things—the post-integration bit. Jason: Right. Well, if you're open, in the future, I think there's a whole target audience that could use this that have lots of college housing clients. Rent Manager has an open API, Buildium has been doing integrations with Property Meld and Happy Inspector and others, and so I think there's a possibility there. AppFolio doesn't generally play nice with others. Usually, some people are finding workarounds, but they're still using third-party tools to do a lot of things. This is how my brain works are is, I would imagine one of the biggest challenges that roommates have is they lose a roommate. I don't know if this is some sort of future sort of idea, but I imagine this comes up a lot. They lose a roommate, they got to figure out how to pay rent, they need to find a roommate, and they want to make sure that they get the right fit. I don't know if this is something that you guys plan to tackle or this is a problem that Roof helps with it at all. Joáo: Yeah. I'll let Tyler explain, but I just want to say that, we sit and throw around ideas every single night. The most frustrating piece is just sitting on just like ledgers of great ideas. We're like, "We'll get to those. We have to do this thing that's in our face right now." Jason: How do you decide what comes first? How do you make the decision? Is it the noisiest customers or your biggest customers? As a software company, how do you decide which features to focus on, and which ones to throw away? Joao: It's a great question. It's the hardest part of the job, right, of making sure everyone's on the same page and has a shared belief of the direction we're going in. Oftentimes, I find that short-term goals can make the most sense when everyone sees with the opportunity that exists one, two, three years on the line. They still have to sit down and execute for three months at a time in particular feature set or particular go-to-market strategy or something like that, keeping these chunks of time open for discussion. Then, once everyone feels good that the product, that the users, marketing and the sales align, to basically, ink it all, sit down, get to work, knock it out and then go through your evaluation phase and then repeat the process. It seems like the most productive way to go about it. Obviously, I think as your cash flow increases, you're able to grow your company then you can kind of bring more heads, more brains out of the team and start to see if you can scale more horizontally. For the time being, I personally love working on a small team where we each kind of know each other intimately, know how we work and share [...]. It makes the decision making a little scarier because you have to pick a couple of things and do them, but you do them so well, I think. Whatever you choose to spend your time on, you just got to do the hell out of it and really believe that is the right way to go and then be truthful with yourself along the way if you need a correction. Tyler: Speaking to the scope of how user feedback, and what some of our customers are interested in, speaking of how that fits into the picture of what do we build next, there's certainly not any kind of rule for that. In fact, a lot of times, the two are sort of in odds with each other; the sort of things people would like to see us build versus the things we decide to build. Those are really tough decisions to make, especially when you have to make a decision and then respond to somebody in the email who's saying, "I love your app. I can't wait for you to build this." Then I got to come in and say, "Well, actually, it's going to be a couple of months before we can do that." A great example of that actually is right now, for the last couple of months, Joao and I have been invested in working on the new iOS and Android apps that we'll be shipping soon. Add the expense of otherwise, started addressing some urgent feature there's a couple of bugs that we'd love to be fixing in the current apps. Every single time something is brought to our attention where it's like, "Hey, this would be really helpful to have right now." We start to balance and say, "Okay. Well, do we take a couple of days away from this other project we're working on to do this thing that will help now? Or do we just buckle down and continue to invest time in something that's going to ultimately be an investment, and how well we'll be able to scale in the future?" The big reason that we're rebuilding the apps in the first place, from a tech perspective, the new stack that we'll be using to maintain those new apps will be a lot easier to maintain and so, adding a feature six months from now will take a lot of less effort than it would have taken now or a couple of months ago just because of how we're rebuilding things. The short answer is that it's really tough. Sometimes, one of the most frustrating things to deal with is having to tell people, "While you're suggesting is great, and I wish I can give you that. We've got to make a tough decision and focus on something else right now. Jason: I think every entrepreneur listening gets that. We all have situations in which we have our vision as an entrepreneur or as a business owner of what we want to do and accomplish, and then we have what our target audience is really screaming and begging for that we want to do. Every property manager probably has some sort of process they want to change or something they want to improve or something they're dealing with. I think that's the thing to realize is that the software that you're developing or the business that you're building, if you're a property manager that's listing, anything, it's always a living, breathing thing, it's never done. Just like, as human beings, we're never done. We're all still in the oven, so to speak. There's always going to be bugs, there's always going to be tweaks, there's always going to be changes—that's just the nature of software. You release new features, there's going to be little things, little nuances, and little things to change. Over time, you build something that just gets better and sharper. Then sometimes you have to completely rebuild something. You're like, "Okay. It'll be better to start over and do this really well now that we've learned so much than to keep building on a scaffolding that was not as strong." That's just how it works. I think our own main program, our seed program, we're on our third total revamp that we've done. I already have a whole list of old stuff I want to change, and add, and do—that's just how my brain works. Joáo: I think what's really important though is the fact that you've learned over time. It's not about always questioning, "Are you doing the right thing?" To me, it's all about knowing you are doing the right thing. If we make a choice to build something, "Let's build it. Let's ship it." There's going to be corners that need tying up in a good sense but, "Let's ship it. Let's learn from it. Let's move forward. Let's put weight on it and then let's see how far it can go until it stretches. Let's let it stretch." Let us not be afraid to let it stretch and feel comfortable like, "Hey, the work we did can hold that weight." But at the same time, we have to be evaluating, "Alright. Cool." If we then want to add more people or scale our transactions a hundredfold, "Will the stretch break?" At that point, you have to make a decision, "Yes. Let's go and do the remodel." I think the analogy for a lot of real estate investors is the remodel where maybe you have a house and you have a really janky kitchen. The whole house is beautiful, but something about the kitchen is off. People living in the house, they know that they would rather have a nicer kitchen that's going to take a long time. Meanwhile, you have a sink in the bathroom that's a little loose, and you have just a tweak off in the garden or something. The tenant will be like, "I get it. Yeah, you need to fix the kitchen. Spend time there. I'll deal with the sink and the little [...]." Jason: Meanwhile, I need a kitchen. Joáo: Yeah. A big thing for us is our Android app currently is running our web app on mobile, so it works. You can do everything you need, but the experience, the actual motion, the feel of it doesn't compare to what we built nearly iOS. We have a ton of people on Android who’s like, "Oh, I could use a new Roof experience in Android." Meanwhile, a lot of people already in iOS or on the web are kind of hoping at more sophisticated problems. But we’re like, “Look, by building a native Android app, we can also be able to offer this experience to a ton more people." Actually, [...] of doing that, we're now able to build for iPad, for desktop, new tablets, etc. It's exciting. Jason: Yeah, cool. I think it's exciting to hear what you guys are doing. I think you've done something really unique in the roommate space. It sounds like to kind of solve some problems. You've probably, solved a lot of passive-aggressive issues, and some [...] properties and created a lot more peace out there. It really sounds like this is software that creates a peaceful environment for all parties involved, including the landlords. To wrap this up, how can people find out more about Roof, and how can we get in touch? Joáo: Our website is roof.io. That provides an overview of the features that we offer, the different sides of it, you can read about how roommates use Roof, how landlords can use Roof. There's this little button that says 'Extra' which you click on, and we try to provide a lot of documentation to our accompany, it directs to the website also. You can go in there and find some more detailed information like FAQ and some guides for how to get started as a roommate or as a landlord or a renter. There's a lot of information on there. We also use Twitter to put out some updates as well as Instagram. We try to stay pretty up-to-date with that. There's also our Facebook page. We'll put some links to those wherever Jason thinks the best place to put some links. Reach out to us at team@roof.io—email address. Get directly in touch with us. We'll schedule a phone call with you, see what's up, see what's on your mind, see if Roof is a right fit for you. We're open to having a pretty open discussion. We've doubled a lot of users at this point, so we know kind of the ones that's really just a [...] value of what we offer them and those who are still in the edge of being the perfect fit for them. We'd be happy to kind of walk you through and making the right choice for you. Lastly, it cost $2 a transaction to use Roof. You can assume that yourself as a landlord or you can pass it on to your tenants, in which in case, it'd be free for you. If you do choose to assume, whenever your tenants come to pay, we give a little shout out for you in the app saying, "Your landlord is covering it for you. They're dope." But if you want $20 of transaction fees for free, use a code 3875 DoorGrow, it's a proprietary code just for the show, just for the audience here. You can get started, put some tenants there, try it out for a lease, you won't pay or tenants won't pay for about a year of that and see if it's right for you. Jason: The code one more time. Joáo: Code is 3875 DoorGrow. Jason: Okay, thanks for that. Those listening, property managers, that [...] college housing or deal with shared housing situations, I’d be be curious to get their feedback and see how it works for them. That’d be pretty cool. I appreciate you guys coming on the show. Have you guys thought of starting a shared housing property owners’ community? Like a Facebook group or something. It sounds like you’ve got this going in your Slack channel. Tyler: Speaking of Slack Channel, that would be another way to get in touch with us. Just scroll down to the bottom of the landlord’s page on the website, you can request to join there. Creating a community like that, it's not something that I think we have plans for. Jason: It's cool when you get them together, man. We’ve got our DoorGrow Club Facebook group, and you get these people together, and they start sharing ideas, helping each other, and the momentum is just awesome. I haven't heard of anything in the shared housing sort of space, this idea of having a property that is shared and this type of owners. College housing or whatever it might be, a cool little community out there, I guess. Anyway, check these guys out. Get into their Slack channel. Go to roof.io. I appreciate you guys coming on the show and excited to see what you guys do over the next few years here. Joáo: Thanks, Jason. Thank you for having us. It was a lot of fun. Jason: Alright. For those of you who are watching, make sure you get into our Facebook group, our community, which is doorgrowclub.com. You can get to that, it will redirect. If you are watching this on YouTube, make sure you like and subscribe so that you get these videos. We release the videos on YouTube before we release them to iTunes. If you're listening in iTunes, make sure you go to our YouTube channel, it's youtube.com/doorgrow, and click the red subscribe button there. Click the subscribe button and get subscribe and start getting notifications usually on your browser when we release or drop new videos. You can get this information and see some of these people instead of just listening. Until next time everybody. To our mutual growth. I hope you have a fantastic day and week. 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 own single-family properties, but rent them out? Are you tired of dealing with tenants? Incompetent contractors? Why do-it-yourself (DIY)? Why waste your time? About 70% of owners self-manage their properties. You can’t and shouldn’t do it all. Help is available. Today, I am talking to Dana Dunford of Hemlane, an all-in-one rental property management solution. After being encouraged by family and friends, Dana decided to do real estate investing on the side while working at Apple. She tried self-managing her properties, only to discover how difficult that can be - even tougher than calf dressing! You’ll Learn... [02:50] Moving from self-management to hybrid solution involving experts in real estate/property management to streamline and mitigate risks. [04:15] Property Management and Technology: Taking a different approach to build communities of agents, owners, and managers to work together. [07:50] Potential for property management industry: Buying real estate is easy; property management is much more difficult, but determines the success of your investment. [10:27] Property managers have to do everything and need to be Jack-or-Jill of all trades (maintenance, lawyer, therapist, sales, marketing, etc.). [10:56] Dana’s driven toward challenge; something new happens every day in property management and risk needs to be mitigated. [11:27] Subject matter experts should provide best practice, place, and process; there’s only so much technology and robots can do. [13:05] Entrepreneurs/Gluttons for Punishment: Highly adaptable and enjoy challenges. [14:56] Turnkey: When something goes wrong, property manager gets blamed. [15:47] Hemlane: Flexible and transparent property management platform that helps property managers solve problems. [19:55] Hemlane’s Ideal Prospect: Under 200 units and wants to grow portfolio/clientele. [22:36] Hemlane offers automation of administrative tasks and competitive advantage by building relationships and services over time. [27:10] Real estate investors find out about Hemlane on social media and blogs. [31:57] Are you trained and qualified, or just pretending to be a property manager? [35:15] FAQs from Property Managers: How can I communicate with owners? Will Hemlane take my clients? How do I know if I need help? [41:07] People aren’t buying property management; but safety, certainty, and trust. [48:40] What is a hemlane? House Differentiation: Hem is house in Swedish; lane is a path that divides you from others. Tweetables Property management is challenging; something new happens every day. Whether you love or hate them, industry isn’t ready for robots to show properties. Turnkey is a terrible word; if something goes wrong, the property manager is blamed. People aren’t buying property management. They want safety, certainty, and trust. Resources Hemlane Dana Dunford’s Email Dana Dunford on LinkedIn Hemlane on Software Advice Hemlane on Capterra Hemlane on GetApp Apple Nest The Iceberg Report Industrial Calf Dressing - California Rodeo Salinas Tim Ferriss Buildium AppFolio Zillow Russell Brunson’s Value Ladder 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 here with Dana Dunford of Hemlane. Dana, welcome to the show. Dana: Great. Thanks so much, Jason, for having me. Jason: I'm really excited to have you here. You have such a bright personality. I was really, I guess, curious with people. I was really biting my tongue, resisting just getting into figuring you out, and asking you questions. It was always a challenge for me. Now, I can do it. Let's get into this. Dana, why don't you share with everybody a little bit of background on you and who you are. Then, let's transition into getting into how Hemlane came to be. Dana: My background, by accident, I actually ended up at Silicon Valley. I'm just through studying here for university. My background was actually always been on technology and I've always been fascinated with that. I actually got into real estate and looking at real estate investing coming through two different people. One was my brother-in-law, who was investing in real estate and saying, "Dana, you need to get into investing as well. Do that on the side." I was working at Apple at that time doing new product introductions. Then, the second was actually who my co-founder is today, Frank, who has rental properties across the US. I haven't been on the property manager's side until we started self-managing. We ended up self-managing our properties remotely and trying to figure out how to make that work. Essentially, starting with self-management and then actually moved to a more hybrid model that worked out really well, where we were working with local managers and local real estate agents to help us with the management while we were still controlling the financials, the rent, and still be involved in it. So, a little bit of a hybrid solution which today I don't see actually in the market. It's either full service or do-it-yourself. I think do-it-yourself is really a horrible one to take because then every single person, all 43 million renter households, with 20 million people are looking for ways to essentially streamline and mitigate risks and all of that. Having property managers and experts in the industry really makes a ton of sense. That's what brought me to a more of a hybrid model. I left Apple then and went to business school at Harvard. After that, came back to Silicon Valley, was working at a company called Nest which is home technology, got me more excited about real estate technology. They were actually acquired by Google and I realized I want to actually start my own thing. Property management is one of those incredible industries where technology to date, there's a lot of players out there, a ton in the property management software space—quite frankly too many of them—but taking that model and saying how do we do it in a different approach, think about it differently, and really build communities of managers, communities of agents, communities of owners to work together because 70% of the owners, as you know, Jason—I think actually you were the first person I learned that from—self-manage, so how do you connect those 70% to get some sort of help? Right at the beginning, they're going to say, "I don't need help," but sure enough they call and they're like, "I had a nightmare of a tenant. I hate this. They're selling my portfolio," or, "I need some help." Really helping them and being there at the right time—a lot of times that right time for them—is getting involved with them even when they're self-managing. Jason: Yeah. I got the 70% stat from the Iceberg report which says, "On a single family residential, about 30% are professionally managed." I need to point out in your bio because this is the only bio I've ever seen. It says that you're an avid equestrian, paraglider, and skier. She is the first woman to win a calf-dressing championship belt buckle at the California rodeo. Are you kind of a cowgirl, then? Dana: Yeah, I did. I grew up in a farm in Salinas, California. We had horses, some cows and stuff in the backyard that really did teach me a lot of hard work. I did enter and I was the only woman. I don't why women don't enter these events. Salinas has the largest rodeo, the largest across the entire nation, largest prize pool of money, [...] and stuff they give you. I entered something called calf dressing. Actually, the huge advantage being a woman because you have to dress a cow in these Wrangler jeans. What's fantastic about it is you actually have to be able to get under the cow so you have to be small. These big burly farmer guys trying to do it and I came in with a team of two other guys. It's three people on a team and then me. I think there's a huge advantage to being small and just being able to dress it really quickly while they're holding down the cow. Anyway, we got a huge massive belt buckle, the same one that the pro bull riders win at the rodeo, which is pretty cool. Jason: This is so unrelated. This just fascinates me. You're actually putting pants on a calf, that's what's this is? Dana: Yes, that's the event. It has the same credibility as the pro bull riders that win the top belt buckle. You get the same belt buckle. It's like the best hack to getting a professional rodeo belt buckle. Jason: This is funny but it reminds me of listening to some of Tim Ferriss' stories where he just figured out how he could win some sort of a competition that was just random so that he could be a world champion. Very cool. You mentioned the property management industry and something about it got you excited which either says you're crazy or you see something maybe similar to me. What potential do you see the industry is having? In the US, I feel like it's underperforming in its potential. People just don't see it, awareness is low, perception is low. What's your perception of what the potential is for the property management industry as a whole? Dana: I think it's two things. It falls into two buckets of the potential. The first one really has to do with real estate investing in general. This happened to me when I was at Apple. Most people when you ask them, "How did you get into real estate investing?" it's usually, "Oh, someone told me. I have friend who is doing it and doing it successfully." All of these companies out there where they have these employees who have great savings and could be allocating money into real estate, they're literally going into stocks, bonds, and other things. It's sad. The biggest thing with property management was that's a biggest pain point. When I look at buying properties here in San Francisco, it didn't make sense. The numbers just didn't make sense for investment at that time. Maybe things changed. Some people want the appreciation gain that they'll invest in San Francisco, but it's really investing out of state. That’s the biggest thing is property management. I quite frankly think buying the property is the easy part of it. You put the numbers on spreadsheets, you're not emotional, you go and you purchase a property. There's not too much rocket science to that part. Where it really comes down to the success of your investment is in the property management. It's the most difficult part to be in and it's the one that you're stuck with for 20-25 years. Buying the property, it takes you maybe a year, depending on how long you're looking. Some people buy within their first month. The property management in actually being able to make sure you have that stable, steady, cash flow, is the most difficult part of it. There's no focus on it, I think, because it's the most difficult that people push it off. One of my biggest frustrations with property management is people thinking like, "Oh, maintenance is going to be so easy." That kind of stuff is really difficult to do. I always think of property managers as Jacks of all trades. They have to be good sales people. They have to be good at marketing. They have to be a lawyer because they have to know these lease contracts. They have to be a maintenance person because they have to know how to troubleshoot, push back on service professionals, and understand, "Am I getting screwed over or not?" They have to be a therapist because tenants get emotional because it's their home. One of the things I've always been driven towards this challenge, if something's not challenging and they get easy, I usually just leave the job. It's just boring. Then it’s just a nine-to-five. I think in property management it's not that. Something new happens every single day and you're constantly saying, "How do I take that and mitigate that risk?" That's really where I do think that there's just so much value to it. There's, quite frankly, not a lot of focus on it. That's where, Jason, this show's incredible because you actually bringing those people to talk about how do you mitigate that risk, how do you set it up for success, et cetera. I believe it has to be a subject matter expert that do it. There are certain things that technology can do to just say here's the best practice in place and process. Then, you also have to have the people component because you still have to talk to people. You still need someone physically there. The worst thing, I think, is when they talk about these robots showing the properties and stuff. Some people love it. I don't think the industry is there yet, go and show some of these properties. I don't think the industry is quite there for some of these stuff. That's just my own personal opinion from dealing with them, being hands on, showing properties, and doing all of these stuff. Inspections, move ins, move outs, maintenance coordination. It still needs that human component and it’s much better to say, “Here are the subject matter experts that do it,” versus every single person trying to do it. As you know, that happens with single family homes but still the majority doing the self-management themselves. Jason: Yes. I love what you said. Buying is easy, managing the property, hard. It's really simple. That's so true. When you get into real estate investing, they're hoping that they’ve got some turnkey magical easy thing, money is just going to be flowing in, and then they have to manage the property. That reality sets in. I think that's good pointing it out. Property management is the most difficult part. The other thing you pointed out is that property managers, these entrepreneurs are highly adaptable creatures. You call them Jacks of all trades or Jills of all trades. They're highly adaptable creatures as entrepreneurs. I think that's why I get excited about them because they're my type of people. What's interesting is some people maybe call entrepreneurs gluttons for punishment, but I think we love challenges. Just like I've said in the intro, we love unique challenges. I think that really we would be bored without challenges. We would [...] entrepreneurs. We want to be tested. We want to have some challenges to work on. I think the trick is finding the challenges we enjoy working on versus the ones that are kind of thrown into us that we don't want to be dealing with. There's a difference but I love that as well. I think the industry as a whole has a massive potential. You mentioned, the first one is real estate investing, that they need property management. What was the second thing? Dana: The second one, the challenges associated with it is just property management in general is such an afterthought of it. The first is real estate investing and thinking of it as stocks and bonds where you can purchase a property anywhere. But I tell people you shouldn't purchase in your backyard just so you can self manage it. You should be looking elsewhere. It's not like I say, "Okay, my neighbor rent this small little company and that's the only one I can do best in." When I'm looking at stocks, I'm like, “What stocks out there across the world should I invest in that's going to give me what I think is best return, diversification, and things like that?” It's the same with property management. The first is just that investing outside the area, but then the second is property management like you said. I think turnkey is actually a horrible word for that because when people say turnkey, it makes you think you don't have to do anything at all. It's going to be easy. The problem is that when something goes wrong, the property manager is first to get blamed. The first to get blamed. They actually don't even get credit because the word turnkey makes you think, "Oh, I'm going to get this casual." The turnkey companies put it like, "Hey, you're going to get this straight number, this is what you're going to get, and there aren't going to be any problems." What happens is you think you're going to be at the top of that and everything is going to go right. When something goes wrong, it's the property manager who gets blamed which we know there are women, tenants, out there, a bunch of different things. Those challenges and mitigating those are really that second component of it. Jason: Okay. Now, let's get into Hemlane a little bit here. Property management business owners have a lot of different pain points, challenges, and problems. There's a lot of pain points and challenges that owners, tenants, and everybody are dealing with. Businesses only exists, technically, to solve a problem. If a business exists that is not solving a problem, then it's just stealing money. Let's get into the problem that Hemlane helps solve. Tell us about the problem. I think this will help people transition into helping them understand Hemlane and what you guys do. Dana: Hemlane is a flexible and transparent property management platform. What I mean by platform is that we have software. Software, if you think of Buildium or AppFolio but for the smaller guy, not for 500+ units. It's got the software built into it where it automates things and sends reminders on what you need to do next, and it walks you through a risk-mitigated process. For example, people say, "Why don't you integrate PayPal? Why can't I pay with PayPal on Hemlane?" That's not a good process because tenants can dispute that. We're not going to flip that in there. Building the best practices in place, it's got the software. The second component of it is really saying that, “Hey, most of our clients are people who own rental properties and they don't locally.” What do they want help with? A lot of them are trying to self-manage or they're illegally using handymen to show the property and trying to haphazardly put together a process which we see a lot of the market doing especially the tail end of it. They usually do it with these B-class properties where it's not that they're having to deal with the Section 8 or much lower income, but they're saying, "Oh, I can probably manage this remotely myself." We actually come in and say, "No, if you want someone to show your property, they have to be licensed here, or managers we worked within that area, or real estate agents. They can show your property for you." That's why we call it a platform because we're not a brokerage. We're not trying to take clients from anyone. We're just looking to connect to them. There's basically two packages. Property managers and real estate agents use our software-only package because they don't really need us help connect them or do maintenance coordination. Owners will use the upgraded package, so owners of rental properties, and they'll say, "Hey, I still want to control my rent, have rent go to me but I want to pay someone a full leasing fee for them to do the leasing." Whatever it is, we don't get involved in that price negotiation. We just set them up with someone local who can provide those services for them. We have partnered with property managers and real estate agents across the nation based on where portfolios are or where the needs are. We're in all 50 states but our actual agents and managers are only in some of the major cities. We focus on certain cities. Then, what happens is when we have a real estate investor come to us, whether they purchased, they're in some group, whether they just come to us and find us online, we say, “Great. Here are the managers in the area, get on a call with them, and see what you want them to do. Whatever you want them to do, they'll just charge you for their services in the system.” It is in full service. Sometimes it does get to full service. Sometimes they just ask the manager to take over their account in our systems. It downgrades to the software-only package and then managers charges them a whole management fee. A lot of our owners are more in that category of, "Hey, we used to do it ourselves and we're looking for something else." They really fall into that do-it-yourself, that 70% category, and we're trying to push them into saying, "Hey, there are other things out there that are much more efficient than you trying to spend your time on doing your own property management." Jason: Let's make this super clear. For those that are listening, that have property management businesses, they're property management entrepreneurs, who's your ideal prospect when it comes to them? Help them self-identify if somebody that should be reaching out to Hemlane. Dana: Yeah. Great question. From that perspective, it's typically someone who has under 200 units, they're looking to grow their portfolio, and they're also open to doing a combination of multiple things for clients to expand their clientele. What I mean by expand their clientele is saying, “Hey, I'm going to offer a full service is one option and I'm going to offer some unbundled service as well, say, listing only, maintenance only, whatever it is.” When a customer comes to you, it's not saying, "I charged 10% on this. You don't want that, don't work with me." It's saying, "Hey, what do you want? What do you want me to do? Here's what I'll do. Here's what our contract says." Then, you can do everything yourself. They can jump on our platform. They don't even have to be using our software to actually get access to owners. They can create an agent manager profile for free. If we do connect them with people, we do have requirements and property management questions that we ask them to make sure that they're qualified, reference checks, things like that. Usually, it's for the smaller manager that doesn't have enough referrals yet, who's just starting out, saying, "How do I get an advantage in my market? I’m new, I'm a hustler, kind of crazy, in that sense of doing property management. I'm working around the clock, I know myself, but I'm just right now starting to grow my portfolio." In property management, there's only two ways to grow your portfolio. Starve yourself, do it slowly, and go door by door, or acquire brokerage. I have a tons of friends who just acquire property management brokerages. They just run on them, but they have capital. A lot of people don't have that capital. So, if you don’t and you're going door-to-door because your parents didn't hand down their property management business to you—doesn't happen a lot of the time—if you only have 10 doors and you're saying, "How do I get to 20?" working and partnering with companies like Hemlane makes a ton of sense to get you out there, your name out there, more referrals, et cetera. Jason: Love it. I know that we have quite a few that are under 200 doors who are listening. The fact that this could help them generate some more leads creates some more relationships and drum up some more businesses, I think is enticing. Let's focus just on the growth aspect. How does Hemlane help somebody, say they're stuck in that first sand trap, they've got 50 or 60 units under management, they're solopreneur, or maybe they just finally broken past and they wanted to get into that next level, which is that 200–400 door range I called the second sandtrap. How is Hemlane going to help them build up their book of business? Dana: There's two things. One is automation and stuff like that. Anything technology can do better that is administrative, we take off of you. Everything from a tenant just said that I’m interested in a showing and just reached out to you on Zillow, you shouldn't be manually responding to that. You should already have your calendar. You should already have your qualifications of what minimums they have, criteria to qualify. That showing calendar needs to be sent right out to them at that second. They can respond. If they don't, you can give them a personalized call. Everything from automation, so you're not focused on that and you're focused on sales and marketing of your property management business, which is the most important thing to grow at. That's number one. Number two is saying, why don't you give yourself a competitive advantage against everyone else by saying, "Hey, you know what? Everyone else has this 10% model." A lot of times these people who've been self-managing and they are saying, "Hey, I want a property manager," taking them from going to 0%–10% takes a while over time for them to do that, because they have to build trust in you, they've never worked with you. Starting them and saying, "Hey, let me just do your leasing for you. Let me just do your leasing. You can manage everything else on Hemlane." The next year, coming back and saying, "Hey, do you want me to take over this from you as well?" Letting them ease into it, it's like when you give a price. A lot of companies do 30 days free or you get those [...] and open door things. They're like, two-for-one. You try things at a low barrier to entry. Then, you're liking it, you're hooked, and you're connected to this person. Then you're like, "Hey, I trust this person. Now they can have more of my business." I think a lot of it is like, that doesn't happen today in the industry. The industry is just saying, "It's all or none." You're getting the same price quote from every property manager and you don't want to cut your prices. You don't want to say, "I'll give you everything at a lower price." You don't want a discount because then, there's quality problems there. Or when you say, "Hey, maybe I'll just takeover this little part from you." [...] with that and then, that's your biggest pain point. "Let me solve that. Now, let me solve your other ones." From that perspective, Hemlane can really help you set that up to provide your clients, new clients, and clients across the nation who may just be even looking in your area. With some sort of competitive advantage that you have, when you're trying to get new doors until you get more of them quickly, and then build those relationships and build that deal value on customer size, over time. Jason: Hemlane would also help expose this small business to investors in other markets and other areas? Dana: Yeah. They usually come to us. The investor will come to us and say, "Hey, I'm interested in this plus this." Usually, investors will come just across the nation and say, "Hey, I'm in Kansas City and I want to put my properties on Hemlane." We go, "Great! Sign-up and try us for free." Then we say, "What do you need?" They're like, "Oh, I need some advertising tools." "Great! We can provide that to you. Do you need someone to show your properties?" "No, I don't think I do." "Okay, when's your next turnover?" "In two months." "Great. We'll follow up then. Do you need someone to show you your property?" "Yeah. Actually my husband and I are going to Europe, things changed." "Great. Here's someone who can help with your leasing." From that perspective, it's capturing people at the right time because timing is everything. If you can just get your foot in the door, it makes a lot of sense. For us, because we're nationwide, we're a platform, people come in. Where our managers and agents are is where we focus on upselling them, connecting them with local professionals. Jason: Property management listings that maybe haven't heard of Hemlane, they were probably naturally inquiring or wondering how are these investors find out about Hemlane? Dana: There's a ton of places that they find out about us. The biggest ones that we actually find are actually in social media. Most of these real estate investors, I think, we have one of the best algorithms in place from this person we use from marketing. It is really social because a lot of them aren’t searching for property management software. They just don't search for that. They don't search for [...] software. A lot of it is on social. Whatever algorithms is being used is working for that. That's been huge for us. For example in the US, the top rated on Software Advice, if you look at their top products, you'll see us at the top for software solutions. They'll find us on Software Advice. They’ll find us on Capterra. They’ll find us on GetApp. The other thing is blogs and content. I write a ton of content on like, "Why is Venmo the worst way to collect rent?" "What do you need that's concrete in your lease?" A lot of times, when they're searching for something, they're not searching for a software or a manager. They're saying, "I have a problem and I need it fixed." They're searching that term. You can give them the solution in a blog post and say, "Here's some ways to get connected locally with folks in your area who do property management." A lot of times, I just set them up for a coffee. I just say, "Hey, so and so meet so and so for a coffee. I know you're self-managing, but it would be a great way for you guys just to connect locally in your city in case things change, in case your mind changes." That's a great way to start building those relationships without being too salesy. Those people come back to you and they do remember you, especially if you made that impression and you meet them for a quick coffee. Jason: You guys are pulling in traffic from Capterra, GetApp software sites, blogging all these. You got traffic coming in. For the property manager, what is the buy-in or what's the requirement for them to start working with you? Financially, what does this typically cost for them to get onboard? How much work does this take? What's your vetting process? How can those listing self-qualify to become part of the Hemlane network? Dana: Great question. In every area, we actually personally get on a call with you to understand you because if we're going to refer you out, we actually think of you more as a partner versus you created a profile. If we are going to refer you out, you actually do need to do some interviews with our team knowing who you are, asking questions, prequalifying. The minimum we've taken is someone who's done 10 doors. As long as you have 10 doors, even if they're your own doors or something like that and you're just starting your own property management, we need, as a prerequisite, that you have some experience [...] seen in property management because we're not [...] to that. Then, we ask you questions of what would you do in this situation, understanding how well do you really know property management in leasing and complex situations. We'll walk through those situations with you. The third and final thing is reference checks. We do some reference checks on you. There's two things in each area. The first is if you're using our software already, we obviously would refer people to you first before we refer it to someone who's not using our software because we don't take a cut. We don't believe in taking cuts of however how much you make so when you charge an owner for something, we don't take a cut of that. You get 100% of it. That's really important to us because we never want anyone to think, "Hey, we're working with this person because they give us 20% of their income." We don't care. That's yours. We make our money off of our software and our platform. The connections help make our software much more differentiated than others. We don't take a cut of anything that you made. That's really important to note. You build your own business, we build ours, we have the tools to help you with that. If you are using our software, we'll put you higher range assuming you fit our qualifications. Then, someone who's not using our software but just free on our program that just says, “Hey, I'm in this region.” In a lot of cities, we don't have anyone, any partner in that city. There's no one using our software that's good enough, that's qualified. Even if you're not using our software, we'll still refer you out just because we want to make sure those people are happy. That's the first things with it. What's even more important to ask to keep the business and keep traction going is asking reviews. When we refer owners out to you, we actually ask them for their opinions on you after working with you the first time. You might have done something really small for them by just saying, "Hey, let me do an annual inspection and drop by your property, you haven't been there," or we ask the owner, "How was it? What reports did they give you? This and that," because we want to make sure that you are trained and qualified. There's a ton of people out there pretending to be property managers who's like, "Gosh, if I have my property in their hands, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen." We found it's quality not quantity. It's the quality of the individuals we work with. In each city, we don't need 500 managers on our platform. "We have everyone on here." All we need is the top. The people who say they pick up their calls, they respond to emails, you don't need three weeks to respond to an owner, and they're fair with the owners. They set these owners up or the owners like, "Thank goodness I have this person on my team." They went in and did an annual inspection and saw leashes hanging and dog holes, but they're not supposed to have pets in the place. That takes us [...]. That's really where I do think the value comes in. It's really asking for reviews on that as well. You can even set it up if you use our maintenance coordination where you get reviews on how you did on maintenance coordination, how well your service professionals did. "I think, Dana's really big there," to understand how are people doing and performing because you can't do everything yourself. For us, it’s the same thing of how are our local agents performing. Sometimes we have to kick people off and say, “You know what? They're not exactly who we want our reputation to be surrounded with.” That's why it's just important if you don't have any leasing or management experience, you do need to go out and get some. We won't take someone who's a newbie and try to train them via meetings. Jason: This sounds like something ideal for probably most of our clients to get onboard with. If nothing else, you have that listing and be one of the boots-on-the-ground partners that you guys have in your database. Dana: Yeah. We would love for our team to interview you, have a call with you, and stuff like that. Like I said, it doesn't take too much time and adds free value. We don't ask you for marketing dollars. We have those inbound coming in already for our marketing. From that perspective, we'll just work directly with you and we won't take a cut. From our perspective, we’re not trying to make money off of you, we’re just trying to create a much more valuable community. Jason: We probably should have started the show saying, “If you’re a good property manager, Dana’s going to send you leads. She’s just going to send you some free business and you don’t have to pay for it,” and we probably could have just ended it right there and give in a link, and you probably would have gotten a few phone calls. Dana: That sounds good, yup. Jason: Okay, cool. What else should those listening know about Hemlane that we haven’t covered already? What are some of the most common questions that you’re feeling may be from the property management side? Dana: On the property management side, it’s really interesting. One of the things that we get most often image is with owners. When people come to us with owners of, “Hey, I’ve got too much going on, I can’t do it all, I’m stressed, I’m working around the clock, I can’t grow my doors, these owners are upset, blah, blah, blah…” One of the biggest things that I see is communication. When things go wrong, it’s usually because the owner wants to have communication and we see it on our side. When owners come to us, we say, “Why are you signing up for Hemlane?” Because I want some transparency in communication and for property managers to know that we have it in the solution wherein you can add your owners and decide what they get an access to. But you can also decide they get access to all of it but they don’t get notifications. Once the request is opened, they don’t get notifications on that but they just get a summary email once a week, once a month, depending on what you have set up. I think from the perspective of Hemlane, one of the things that we see as really valuable and the solution is having that communication. You’re not having to field 500 calls from owners everyday saying, “How many leads did I get today? How many showings did you do for my property this week?” All of that is in the system for your owner to just view and look at, and having that data and having that transparency to them it’s like, “Wow, you’re on top of what you’re doing,” and that makes them feel good. When they see an email it’s like, “We got 20 leads and 10 of them showed up for showings, and three of them completed an application,” and they go, “Okay, things are moving along.” So even if your day is back-to-back, you’re running around and you got some fire drill with plumbers, some tenants who wants to move out tomorrow, and all these other stuff going on, at least that technology is working for you. It’s one of the biggest things that we see that is really valuable on the software side. Other questions that we get from property managers is, “Well, what about if you’re going to take clients, and clients are just going to use you and not use me, and this and that?” We’ve never seen that happen. If you’re a good property manager which are the ones on our platform, that doesn’t happen. There are two types of owners. There is that 30% in the single family homes than Jason is talking about, who say, “I’m handing you the keys, I don’t want to hear about the property, take it and go with it,” and it changes based on different life events, especially when people have kids for some reason, that’s when they’re like, “Please take my properties now. I’ve got something worse than properties, I’ve got children. I’ve got something worse than properties, I can’t deal with them.” There’s these life events that happen that can signal, “Maybe I should check in with them and see if they want more full service.” For us, what we find is people really fall into different categories and they spiral into that. There are people who would say, “Take everything, I’m willing to pay for it, do everything for me, and send me my owner distribution.” There are other people in the system who want to be so hands on that quite frankly trying to do full service management with them is a nightmare. Jason, I love that you tell people to say “no” to clients. I think more property managers just need to do that, to fire clients, because they’re so hands on, they want to do everything. It’s double the work for you, then they get involved in things they shouldn’t, they mess up things, and it’s just way more for you. That’s another thing from Hemlane and what we offer and what people come to us for, what property managers ask us about is, “Hey, would you ever take our client?” we say, “No, we’re a platform.” People can use us but they sought just physically do the work and there’s still physical stuff to be done. The big question is, “Do they want you to do it, or do they want to do it themselves?” It’s based on life events and based on their personal preferences of whether they are going to do full service, whether they are going to do some hybrid, or whether they’re going to do everything themselves. I think that’s also another question that sometimes we get from managers and we just never seen that, we’ve never seen someone coming to us and say, “My property manager uses your software. Now we’d like to use it.” It’s not that, because that person doesn’t want to do it, right? Jason: Yeah. There’s a reason. Nobody generally wants to go from somebody’s taking care of something to I think I’d just be fun to start doing this on my own, when it comes to property management. Dana: Yeah, that’s true. The reverse definitely happens, and it happens in increments because they’re like, “I want someone to help me but I’m not quite sure, I don’t know if I trust this person, I’ve never worked with them.” So, it goes in increment. The only time they see someone who doesn’t work with their property manager, who isn’t someone on Hemlane but elsewhere is when something goes wrong or when they haven’t been communicated to, which honestly, if you have a really good process in place, you’re communicating with your owners everyday, you’re writing them mail, and they don’t have surprises, they shouldn’t have that. On our system, we have it set up wherein the property managers can just tell the owners on day two, “Here are your tenants who haven’t paid rent, we’re following up with them, but just as heads up, they haven’t paid rent, so we want to give you a forewarning,” so that when you call them on day six and tell them, “We’re serving a three-day notice,” they’re not saying, “Oh wait, now this is a surprise. I thought I was getting the money.” I think communication is really, really important there. Jason: Yes, you’re talking about this. A lot of times, property managers are just hoping for somebody to just get married to them like, “Let’s just get married, without the dating,” and I think people aren’t really buying property management. They don’t want just property management. What they really want is safety and certainty. That’s what they’re hoping to buy. People don’t buy property management, they’re buying trust in you as a property manager and asking somebody to turnover the keys and give you everything, for some, is just too big of a risk. I love the idea of they’re being some sort of stepping stone in leading into this safety and certainty. How much safety and certainty do they have initially? It’s pretty low and if they can just hand you a little bit or a piece of this, then it would be very easy to transition them. A major component of business is retention and upsell. If you can retain them and you can upsell to them, then you’re significantly increasing lifetime value and you have this funnel of people coming into this pipeline that you can build a relationship with over time and you can get them into something bigger. Russell Brunson, this crazy marketer that some are saying, got this concept that I’m sure he got from somewhere else called the Value Ladder. The idea of the Value Ladder is that you need these different price points that get marginally larger that you start people with, You don’t really want to start people with a really big, high-ticket item. You usually need to start with something small initially, which usually the very beginning is something free, like offering something of free value, or free content, or free information and then it incrementally builds. This gives property managers a little bit more of a Value Ladder to step people and seduce people or convince people into full management. Dana: Yeah exactly. I think you’re spot on there, Jason, in the sense of life events change where people upsells do happen. But you rarely see people say, “I’m going for full service with someone I trust” to “Now, I’m managing myself.” Once they have already committed, they’re done. The only time that happens is if you dropped the ball and what’s important for you is to have the software, have the communication, have the processes, have the team in place, build your team in order to do that. You’re right. A lot of times, I see it with property managers and I see they have a call and the owner says, “Hey, I’m looking for a property manager,” and they go, “Okay great. Well here’s all the services that we offer, we’re end-to-end, we charge one month’s rent for leasing, we charge 10% of [00:43.46] for monthly rent to do everything, and we’ll take the keys. When is the good time for me to meet you at the property to see at?” and the owner’s like, “Woah, woah, woah.” Instead, you should [...] the conversation about, “Great, thanks so much for reaching out to me. What can I help you with? What’s the one thing that you hate with your property management? Is it maintenance? Is it doing your showings? What’s the one thing that just drives you insane that you want to do?” That will change your game and differentiate you because they’re giving that same exact price quote, that same exact spiel from everyone, and it doesn’t differentiate you from that perspective. Jason: Going back to that analogy of marriage and dating, a lot of property managers are like, “Hey, you might need some help with your property?” is the equivalent of saying, “Yeah, I might be interested in, maybe, connecting with you.” “Great, I’ll be moving in tomorrow, like, we’re together.” Dana: Yup. All the way like, “Here’s my contract, sign it. It’s annual, there’s no free trial, and there’s a huge termination clause.” For an owner, it’s like, “I haven’t actually, physically worked with you.” It’s like hiring an employee. If you worked with someone in the past, you’re like, “Okay, I’m ready to go,” but if you haven’t worked with them, you’re like, “I need to do these interviews, I need to do these background checks, I need to do these,” and you’re like, “I’m not even quite sure if they’re going to work out.” There’s this much larger barrier. As much as you can, avoid and take down that barrier really will help your business. Also, it goes the other way. You’re dating now but sometimes you want to tell the client after doing just the leasing for them, “I’m so glad you’re taking over the management,” and then they reach back out to you to do the leasing next time and you’re like, “I would love to do the leasing for you but I’m completely booked,” because they were a freaking nightmare to deal with. I never want to deal with them again. Jason: “Please call our competitors down the street. They would love to help you, we’re a bit overwhelmed right now.” Dana: All of the competitors think. I think the dating goes both ways because one of the things, Jason, I love about your show what you’ve said time and time again is, a lot of these people who are really stressed in property management, it’s because they have 10% of their clients or 150% of the time they’ve spent of overworked, overwhelmed on these properties and you probably shouldn’t be doing those ones. So. I think the dating goes both ways. Jason: Yeah. I tell clients all the time that sales and deals and contracts happen at the speed of trust and it’s that simple. I love that with using Hemlane, based on what you’re saying, what this allows you to do is to start that relationship with trust. Once you build that, it becomes very easy to upsell or to get them into a more committed relationship with you of doing more stuff with you once you earned that. Once you earned that, if there’s anything that they’ll need, they’ll be happy to use you to do that and you then have more opportunities. That’s all property management entrepreneurs need is more opportunities to build trust and the more opportunities they have, the better. It sounds like Hemlane is another channel or possibility for them to do that, that they may not have considered before. Dana: Absolutely. Great way to market from that perspective. Jason: Dana, it’s been awesome having you here on the show. How can people get in touch with Hemlane? How can these property managers that are listening get started with you guys? How do they sign up? Dana: If you’re interested in our partnership program, we don’t do just regular sign ups through our partnership page. Instead of going there, you can just email me, dana@hemlane.com. I’ll send that out to our partnership team. Brad will give you a call, schedule, and find some time to go through things with you. That’s for the partnership. You can also go to www.hemlane.com and from there you can click the try us for free. You can watch our videos and see what we offer as well, features everything in there, so you can see that as well if you’re interested in using our services. If you just have some questions on property management in general and you’re in this rut or whatever and you think there is some way that potentially we can get you out of that, we’re really happy to hear about that, too, but the fastest thing to do is email me dana@hemlane.com because I’m always on my email. Jason: Cool. Maybe this is the last question so, what is a hemlane? Where does the name Hemlane come from? Dana: Great question. We wanted something that had an international feel to it. We wanted something that was easy to say, easy to pronounce. DoorGrow, really easy to say, really easy to pronounce, two syllables. We wanted something that didn’t have any branding behind it. When we looked international, we basically took multiple languages for the word ‘home,’ and we went through and looked at ‘home’ in multiple different languages. Hem is house in Swedish, and then Lane is a path that divides others from other people. When you think of a path, you’re always looking to get ahead of others and differentiate. So, we put how it’s differentiation from that perspective together. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t have rental in it, or something that didn’t really have its own branding around it. What was funny is when we started Hemlane, it sounded like a horrible pair of cut-off pants like hemline, and everyone I would go to is like, “Do you have a clothing company?” and I was like, “No, it’s not a clothing company. It’s like the opposite.” Now, when you look up, Hemlane it’s all Hemlane, it’s all property management, but before that, it was a lot of just really bad pictures of people’s cut-off pants, hemlines, and stuff like that beforehand. Jason: Good. I love branding, so I love hearing about how people come up with the name and I love that there’s this meaning behind this, so it’s interesting. Well Dana, it’s been a delight having you here on the show, always fun to hangout with like-minded business people and entrepreneurs. I love that you’re helping the industry, you’re helping growth. I think this is a great fit to have you here on the show and I’m excited to see what success you guys create. Dana: Great. Thank you so much, Jason, for having me on the show. I love your show and I love the content that you have. Jason: I appreciate that. Cool. We’ll let you go. It’s really great having Dana on, so if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to have doors, then maybe check out Hemlane, sounds like interesting channel for growth. If you’re struggling, you want to optimize your business, optimize your warm lead funnel, you’re tired of playing the game of SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing, paper lead services, it’s not working, you’re spending a lot of money, and you’re not getting the return on all that money, then you’re probably worse off than if you just not done the marketing in the first place. Those are the people that we would love to help. Reach out to us at DoorGrow and we might just blow your mind, and help you figure out how to target that 70% and grow your business. I had a really cool morning call this morning with Regis [...] one of our clients. I haven’t really connected much with him over the last year, but he dialed in our program, did what we said, and he had it over a hundred doors in just the last year, just by doing the stuff that I told him to do. All these success story were keep popping up and I probably should stay better connected but if you’re looking to add 100, 200 doors in the next year and you feel like growth, you’re losing more doors than you’re getting on right now due to the sell-off in the market, and you’re focused on cold lead advertising just trying to grow your business and it’s just not working, have a conversation with us at DoorGrow. We would love to help you out and our mission really is to transform this industry and help grow it. I believe this industry have massive potential to be as big as probably the entire real estate industry here in the US. There are a lot of rental properties and we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of growth. I’m excited to see what happens here in the future, so reach out. If you are watching us on Youtube, or you’re watching this, make sure to like and subscribe. I want to build up our Youtube channel and get our first 1000 subscribers. We’ve got, I think a few hundred there right now but I’d love to get to that thousand-dollar market subscribers and you will see these episodes first. You’ll be the first to be notified when we put these episodes out. We release them to Youtube as videos before they show up on iTunes. If you’re hearing this on iTunes, make sure to go to Youtube and subscribe to our Youtube channel to youtube.com/doorgrow. You load it from your phone right now. Do it and click subscribe. You’ll even start getting some notifications from Youtube in your browser occasionally when we pop up a new video and you’ll be excited and able to hear some of the latest and greatest material connected to property management industry and the growth. That is all for today, 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.

Do you use AppFolio? Word on the street is that it’s one of the most intuitive and easiest platforms to use, especially in the property management business. Today, I am talking to Nat Kunes. He’s the senior vice president of AppFolio, which is an all-in-one solution for property managers to grow their business and be more successful. You’ll Learn... [03:05] Shifts in technology solutions: AppFolio started as software as a service (SaaS), Web-based product and then added mobile ability to access anywhere. [04:29] Fourth Industrial Revolution: Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to property management problems. [05:18] AppFolio acquired Dynasty, which provides AI options for the real estate market. Digital employees lease properties, schedule maintenance, and perform other tasks. [08:16] Decision-making behind-the-scenes at AppFolio: Customer Input: Constant communication to identify core problems. Market Trends: Leasing, occupancy, and construction rates to fill units. Technology Shifts: Leverage leading-edge game changers to solve problems. [10:56] Integrations: Growing awareness of APIs to choose different vendors and tools to create custom connections. [12:51] AppFolio Property Manager PLUS Product: Geared toward larger property management firms. [13:30] Future Feature Request: Integration with Zapier to connect to more tools, save time, and increase productivity. [14:05] Employee Experiences: Meeting customer expectations and talent management by hiring and retaining great people is a challenge. [16:08] Recent survey conducted with John Burns Consulting found that factors inhibiting growth include retention and talent shortage. [17:57] Broader Benchmarking: What makes a good leasing agent? What makes a great maintenance technician? What is expected? [18:42] Switching software to grow business and move forward: Partner with progressive company focused on future. [20:43] Internally, AppFolio uses external tracking, HR, sales, and other software that offers insights and feedback to make better decisions. Tweetables Fourth Industrial Revolution: Applying AI to property management problems. Future AppFolio Features: Decisions based on input from customers, market trends, and technology shifts. The growing awareness of APIs integrations to choose tools to create custom connections. Resources AppFolio AppFolio Acquires Advanced Artificial Intelligence Technology Provider AppFolio Property Manager PLUS John Burns Real Estate Consulting Zapier 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, 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, finally, we’ve got AppFolio here on the DoorGrow Show. I’m hanging out with Nat Kunes. I said your name correctly, I think. Nat: Yup. Jason: Awesome. Nat, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you here. Nat: Thank you. So very excited to be here as well. Jason: Cool. Nat, you are the senior vice president of AppFolio. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us a little background on you and then let’s get into the topic at hand. Nat: Thanks for the introduction. I’ve been at AppFolio now for about 10 years, so pretty early on, in our company history, gotten to grow with the company as well. Our products are really geared around being that all-in-one solution for property managers. From everything that we wake up in the morning to do, it’s really to accomplish that one vision which is helping our property managers grow their businesses, be more successful, pretty much everything that sounds like you guys stand for as well. That’s why I’m really excited to be on the show with you. Jason: Great. Glad to have you here. I was telling you right before the show, most of our clients use AppFolio. Word on the street is that it’s one of the most intuitive platforms to use, easiest, that says a lot about software. I mean, the number one challenge with software is adoption; getting people to just use the thing. Let’s be honest, that’s the number one challenge with software is just getting people to use it and it being easy to use. Kudos on that. Nat, you’ve been with AppFolio for a decade now. That’s like a miniature lifetime. Tell us some of the changes you’ve seen while you’ve been there. I’m curious about that. Nat: Yeah. Really, we’ve seen some major shifts in technology solutions over that time period. One of the things people are really fortunate in our timing when we started the company, we started out as a web-based product, so Software As A Service from day one. By being web-based, we’re able to offer really complete solution that people could access from anywhere. When we started selling AppFolio in the early days, what we’d find was people were oftentimes using either Excel or QuickBooks or maybe some old solution that was on a CD or a server in our closet. Over time, what we saw was that technology shifting. We started web-based, quickly moved into mobile, knowing how important mobile was to our customers and their customers—the tenants, the residents of these different units, the property owners as well—and all that communication, it needs to happen. We drew a line in the sand and said, “Hey, anything that you do on your computer, you should be able to do on your mobile device.” That was kind of a different take when we first started down that path. Because originally, people were coming out with apps that would do just like one little maintenance thing here or one little big sync thing there and we said, “Really, everything needs to work on a mobile device.” That was kind of the first major shift just since we started AppFolio. The second major shift just happened in the last couple of years and you’re seeing us invest a lot in it. It’s really what we’re calling kind of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s tied to artificial intelligence. What we’re doing now is applying artificial intelligence technology to property management problems. Doing things like having opportunities to create digital employees that help people do things like lease up properties faster, handle maintenance issues in a much faster fashion. That’s kind of the new major shift that we’re seeing in the industry. Over the last decade, we’ve kind of lived through a couple of these transitions. Our goal is always to be leading the charge on behalf of our clients to make sure that they always have the most modern property management software is available to them to help them grow their business faster. Jason: We always hear this idea of AI. A lot of times when I’ve looked at different AI systems, it really, a lot of times, just looks like a really elaborate tree structure where they’ve just created a bunch of ‘if then’ statements and they call it AI. How is this actually coming into AppFolio? What are you guys doing to stay at the forefront and bring AI into your platform? Maybe give an example. Nat: A great example, you guys might have seen, we made an acquisition earlier this year of a company called Dynasty. What Dynasty does is artificial intelligence for the leasing process. When you give out a phone number for someone to inquire about an available unit, what it’ll do is it will start a conversational AI experience with the tenant via text messages. It will have full on conversations talking about availability of the unit, pricing of the unit, setting up a time to show the unit as well. You can imagine all the things behind the scenes that have to work for that to happen, it has to be able to have access to your leasing agents showing calendar, it has to interact with the prospective tenant, find times that work with them. It has to know full on availability of your units and then be able to book showings. Then follow-up with confirmations on these showings and then follow-up with, “How was your showing?” What we found is, using artificial intelligence, we’re able to close people for showings at a much higher rate in humans alone and it takes away all the mundane tasks, as you can imagine, of just the back and forth of calendaring and all that time that kind of goes into that and lets your leasing agent really focus on what they do best which is closing the unit, getting that prospect in there, booking it as fast as possible so that you can focus on showing the unit and doing that. That’s a great example. All of that’s done through conversational AI. If you talk to prospective residents, they really have no idea that they’re conversing with an AI device. They really believe that they’re talking with a human. That’s what makes it so effective in closing those showings, in getting those guys to actually show up on property. That’s a great example of it in action in. I think that you’ll see that manifest itself in many different areas of the property management business. Think of all any mundane tasks that doesn’t really require your best staff to do. Booking a showing is just a calendar activity of back and forth. Imagine that in other areas of your business where you can apply your resources to higher priority projects that let you grow your business. Jason: Maybe you could give listeners a little bit of insight behind the scenes there a t AppFolio since you’ve been there for so long. You’ve acquired Dynasty, you’re implementing this leasing conversational AI which sounds really cool, how do you guys go about deciding what is the next feature? How do you guys go about deciding internally? Maybe you could share a little bit what sort of the culture is. Because I think a lot of people see you as this big player in the market and I’d love to hear what goes on behind the scenes into the decision-making area. Nat: We use a few different inputs in terms of how we decide what to focus on. First and foremost, we look at our customers and we say, “Okay. What are our customers desires? What problems are they trying to solve in their business?” We have constant communication and feedback loops with our customers. Our customers are very diverse. We have customers with sometimes 50 doors, and we have customers with tens of thousands of doors. They could span a lot. We have customers that focus on single families exclusively, some do multi-family, some do commercial units—it kind of crosses the gamut there of community associations as well. We’re constantly gathering input from our customers trying to identify, “Really, what are the core problems they’re trying to solve?” And then we take that back and say, “Okay, how can we apply technology solutions to solve that?” That’s kind of one layer. The other layer we’re looking at is market trends. We’re trying to stay out in front of, “Okay, what’s leasing and occupancy rates look like this year? What does the macroeconomic market construction rates?” All that kind of stuff to try and stay ahead and say, “Okay. If it looks like, for instance, a lot of new construction is going to come out of the market, that’s going to flood a bunch of supply which means it’s going to be harder to fill those units.” Focusing on leasing experiences for our client thus can be critical for their success over the next couple of years. That’s kind of another layer. The third layer we’d look at is major technology shifts that we believe would be kind of game changers in the market and we need to get ahead of on behalf of our customers. Like I mentioned, AI is a big one. That is really the big shift in technology solutions, we’re calling kind of that Fourth Industrial Revolution. We believe that will change the trajectory of software and how businesses operate just as much as mobile and the web did previously. We’re getting ahead of that for our customers and focusing on areas within our product that can leverage that technology to solve our customers’ problems in their businesses is yeah, their main input. We take all those, amalgamate them up, and then that’s the focus of our teams. We have a lot of resources at our disposal to execute against that for our customers and deliver great products consistently to them. Jason: One of the trends we noticed inside our DoorGrow club group and one of the trends that we’ve seen a lot of people pushing and asking for, is there seems to be this heightened awareness of APIs, integrations and being able to pick and choose different vendors and different tools. I’m curious, is that anywhere on the roadmap for this? I know you guys are doing some really innovative things with the AI but as far as allowing AppFolio customers to create connections to other tools and third-party tools, is that on the horizon at all for AppFolio? Nat: Yeah. That’s a great question. What we take a look at when we look at APIs in general is, we really dive back to the problem that we’re trying to solve. We talk to our clients and say, “Okay, what’s the API being used for?” A good example of that in action is someone said, “I have this business intelligence database that I want to pipe my data out of and into, so I can do this custom queries or reports and it’s something for my investors or my owners that are unique to them and I want to do that.” Other examples that we’ve seen is, “Hey, I want to use a particular collections firm to do my tenant collections.” What we do is we tend to look at those on individual basis, say, “How can we provide the best experience for that particular use case?” Instead of a generic API structure that doesn’t really work really well with a lot of different vendors and you can wind up with broken integrations and different things that you’ll hear complaints often about, we tend to focus on particular vendors that we can partner up with. Right now, we actually have hundreds of integrations with different vendors behind-the-scenes. Some of them are out there and we talk very proudly about them and partner up with them. Others are enabling our customers behind-the-scenes as well. Late last year, we actually launched a new product that’s geared more towards larger property management firms called AppFolio Property Manager Plus. As part of that, one thing we heard from them is, “Hey, I need that data via an API to input in two things like my data warehouse and my business intelligence applications.” There is an actual API that comes with that product to do just that. On a case-by-case basis, we do look at those things. At this point, we’ve done that enough that we, like I said, hundreds of different integrations with different third parties. But that’s the approach that we take when we hear customers. We ask that, say, “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve and let’s figure out a way to solve it together.” Jason: I’m going to throw a feature request because I’ve been asked by every property management software that comes on for this, because I think it’d be a game changer, but Zapier integration. I don’t think there’s any major property management software that’s come up with Zapier integration which will allow them to connect to lots and lots of different tools and resources. I’m throwing it out there. Maybe you guys will do it in the future. We’ll see. I think the first software that will do that is going to get a lot of attention because it really opens up to a lot of tools and it’s one integration. Nat: Yeah. Jason: Alright, cool. Let’s talk about this idea of your employees’ experiences outside of just meeting customer expectations. You would this over and it’s just that many firms are still struggling to overcome the challenges with business growth and talent management. Let’s talk about that a little bit. Nat: What we hear when we talk to our clients is one, we’ll say, “What’s the biggest challenge in your business?” A lot of times, it doesn’t actually necessarily boil down to software or technology or things like that. It’s the people element of business. Hiring and retaining great people in the businesses is a struggle, it’s a challenge. There are definitely talent shortages in some key areas, amongst them, maintenance and some of the other areas of the business. What we’ve been able to find through our technology is two-fold. One is helping you do more with the team that you have. That’s a great way to solve talent shortages. As I mentioned that leasing situation, if I have five leasing agents then I can add 100 more doors and still have five leasing agents, that’s huge. You don’t have to continue to find new people. The counter to that is retaining those people. One thing we pride ourselves, as you mentioned earlier on, is our software being extremely easy to use. What benefit that gives our clients is a, the day-to-day work of the employees of the firm is much richer because it’s just easy. They’re not struggling with our software constantly day in and day out and complaining about that and causing them productivity loss. And then the other factor that comes into play there is when onboard a brand-new employee, you can train them so much faster. Because it’s so intuitive and easy to use, instead of handing them a big binder and saying, “Read this for two weeks and then maybe you could start using the software,” they can get in day one, start using, and be a productive, effective employee much faster. Those are the areas that we really focus on to try and help our clients with that talent piece of the equation. Jason: You’d sent this over and it says that you work with John Burns, a real estate consulting firm, and you discovered that four of the top five factors inhibiting growth were employee related. What were these five factors? Do you have that? Nat: One thing we should do is perhaps we could actually share out the report with you guys and include that at the end. Because it’s a lot to go through the whole things right now but a lot of them were retention of existing employee, key talent shortages. It’s the ones that I’ve already hit on, add it up to the five. But there’s a lot more nuance detail behind each of the five. I think it behoove you guys to read through that report because it is actually extremely valuable as companies look to grow their business to read through that, because there are some good strategies in there, how to counter that, and how to continue to grow despite those five headwinds that might be against the business. Jason: Yeah, we see that. I have the sand traps, at least that I’d call. We’ve got the solopreneur sand trap which is about 50-60 units and that’s where they’re trying to hire maybe their first team member and that’s a challenge to just offload anything or to get a team member on and retain them. The next sand trap is getting to that 200-400 door category. This is the team sand trap where they now have a team and they’re trying to figure out, “How do I keep good team members? How do I have A players instead of B players? How do I get people that aren’t just showing up for a paycheck, that want to go home at the end of the day and complain about me and the business and the job, and they live for the weekend?” I think that’s a big challenge. Property management is a tough business to be in. They deal with a lot of difficult things and so sometimes it is difficult to keep the team happy, positive, and motivated and not too stressed. Nat: And benchmarking as well. It’s like, “What makes a good leasing agent? What makes a great maintenance technician? What makes being able to see what’s normal, what should be expected of them in a day-to-day basis, to being able to look broader?” That’s another key area. It’s like, “How do I know if I have a great leasing agent? If they’re turning a unit in 15 days, is that good, is that bad, is that short, is that long?” Being able to have that benchmark to compare against industry normal and then also geographic normal—all that kind of stuff—is critical as well to, like you said, building a great team and making them productive and effective. Jason: Alright. Let’s take the listeners. Listeners are challenged with growth a lot of times. They’re dealing with team issues, they’re dealing with operational stuff, they’re usually pretty in bed with their software. If they’re with AppFolio, it’d be difficult to switch. If they’re with somebody else, it’d be difficult to switch. What ultimately do you think we should leave with the listeners as a takeaway from this for them to be able to grow their business and to move things forward? Nat: The things that I always give guidance on is just make sure you’re partnered up with a company that’s looking to the future. You want a future-proof your business. You want to make sure that you’re keeping that long-term view in mind when you choose software solutions. You may have some short-term pains, I’d say, it’s hard to find a software solution anywhere, in any business, in any market that sounds 100% of everything you want. But to make sure that you’re partnering up with a company that you feel is like-minded, that’s progressive, that’s constantly pushing forward towards new things. Like what I talked about AI, if you believe that AI is the future as well, then you want to partner up with a company that is investing in that space, that can provide solutions there. That kind of like-mindedness I think is one of the most important things that I say that can enable growth. We see a lot of our customers are able to grow their business because they invested in solid technology early on. That would be one thing that I would say as a key takeaway. I’d say that even at AppFolio, we offer software solutions from other companies and that’s what we look for when we buy software to help us run our businesses. “Who’s going to be with us in 10 years? Who’s going to be in it for the long haul?” Switching software every year is extremely painful and it can set your business back. You want to make sure that when you do that, that you’re really investing for the future. Jason: That brings up a really curious question. If you’re a software company, what software tools do you use internally? I’m sure listeners will be a little bit curious that. Nat: We use lots of different software. We use a lot of software to help us make better decisions as a business. We’ll use things within the product to serve up insights so we can see, “Oh, hey. People are spending X amount of time on this page.” Or, “People are clicking on this a lot. Why is that?” It helps us serve up insights that we can then talk to customers and say, “Hey, I notice when you’re looking at residence, you always click this one link. Is that because it’s not as easy to get there as it could be?” Helping us make the product easier to use. We use a lot of tracking tools like that to try to make better decisions within the product. We’ve use lots of product that’s on the market. We’ve used a few over the years that do that. We’ll have those types of things. We’ll have tools that help us gather feedback. We are constantly gathering feedback from our customers, actual verbatims, and they’ll see that borrow sometime and show up at the bottom of the screen that says, “Hey, would you recommend us to a friend or colleague? What do you think about AppFolio? Help us make it better.” Anytime we roll out new features, we have software that lets them click and provide direct feedback and say, “Hey, I would change this. I would change that.” We’ll iterate on that. Then we have obviously lots of backend software just like any company of decent size. We have companies to help us manage payroll, and HR, sales, all those kinds of things as well. But those are kind of generic company products as well. A lot of what we invest in is technology to make our products better and provide more value to our clients. Jason: Alright. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show here, Nat. This was interesting. How can people get in touch with AppFolio? What’s the easiest way? Nat: The best way is to contact your client services rep if you are a customer. They’ll always know exactly where to direct you to and help you get any help. If you’re looking at new features, functionality, you need training, whatever, we can help with that. For prospects or people that are interested in checking out our software, you can definitely go to appfolio.com, there’s a form right there, it gets routed right to one of our agents that can help you take a look at the software, take a deeper dive, learn more about the features, learn more about where we’re headed with it, a little bit about the AI stuff I talked about today, you can learn a lot through that as well. That would be the two main paths that I’d say if you’re a current customer versus someone who’s interested in checking out the software for the first time. Jason: Cool. Nat, thanks for coming on the show. Glad to have AppFolio represented here on the DoorGrow Show. I wish you guys success in helping the industry. Nat: Awesome. Thank you so much for having us. We’re happy to join anytime. Jason: Alright. Thanks, Nat. Cool. For those of you that are watching, make sure you check our AppFolio. If you don’t have a property management software, it’s definitely on my list of the top ones to check out for sure. Take a look and check out AppFolio at appfolio.com. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, you’re struggling, or maybe you just need a better website, or maybe you want a little bit of coaching, something related to growth, reach out to DoorGrow. Check us out at doorgrow.com, schedule with me or my team, and we will get you connected and help you move things forward. Make sure you join our community, connect to this podcast which is the DoorGrow Club. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com. If your website is more than two-three years old, it’s probably getting stale, it’s probably leaking money so go test it out, go to doorgrow.com/quiz, raid your website, check it out, and it’s going to give you a letter grade—like going back to elementary school, people. You’re going to get a grade on your website based on how effective it is at making you money and meeting your needs in terms of growing your business. Websites are not built to just please Google; they’re built to please people. If they please people, they make you a lot more money. Ultimately, that’s Google’s goal as well, to please people. That’s how they sell ads. Alright, everybody, check that out. Until next time, to our mutual growth. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time! Take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Building your property management business and team can be challenging. As a business owner and entrepreneur, you are wired to fix problems. So, get out of the way, and hire people who have different skill sets to solve them. Today, I am talking Melissa Prandi of PRANDI Property Management. Everybody in the National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) knows her name. She helped establish it and has been in the property management business for 37 years. You’ll Learn... [03:13] Brand new baby, brand new company, but no bank loan. [04:23] Beginning of NARPM and best practices for property management software. [05:25] Solopreneur Sandtrap: Can only handle 50-60 doors before getting stuck. [05:48] Team Sandtrap: Bottleneck of 200-400 doors when building a team, creating a culture, and systemizing processes become painful. [06:33] How to build a team: Different personalities and skill sets. [09:15] Success comes with your willingness to change. [12:15] Good at growing the company and letting people grow or go. [14:50] End-of-the-day (EOD) Report: Rate your day, workload, challenges. [15:50] Working from home: Nobody can touch you; a physical disconnect. [16:44] Modes of Communication: Basecamp, Voxer, and email. Analyze styles to know what tools to use. [21:10] Entrepreneur’s Ego: Nobody can do it as good as me. [24:57] It’s not always about business. Something’s going on. What can I do to help? [28:42] Face-time and morning connections to catch awesomeness and say thanks. [31:30] Making mistakes and ‘aha’ moments; what did you do/should have done? [34:15] Be a student and fan of what works, and be willing to fail. Never stop learning; speak and teach. Share your knowledge because people soak it up. [38:20] Keep yourself well to be a good leader. Health is #1 thing to impact productivity. [44:40] Reach out and lean on others who have been through the same things. Tweetables Success comes with your willingness to change. Be a student and fan of what works and be willing to fail. To grow your business, you have to build a community. You can’t do everything. Listening to chipmunks all day long telling you what needs to happen. Resources Melissa Prandi PRANDI Property Management NARPM Tony Robbins: DiSC Personality Test Basecamp Voxer Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen by Steve Sims EMDR Therapy 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 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, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. And today, I have a very special guest, Melissa Prandi. Melissa, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Melissa: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Jason: Melissa, you are practically synonymous with NARPM, you helped found NARPM, you have everybody in NARPM knows you, and you have been involved in property management for how many years now? Melissa: Thirty-seven years. March 27. Jason: Thirty-seven years which is almost my entire life, right? Melissa: You have to say that, yup. Jason: Which is amazing. You have tons of experience, you are this phenomenal character and charismatic person. Everybody’s been telling me I have to get Melissa on the show. I’m really excited for you to be here. Maybe the place to start would be to why don’t you share with everybody your story? How did you get started in property management all that time ago? What crazy idea popped in your head to make you decide that [...] Melissa: There’s a lot of crazy [...]. I have to say I started in my company March 27, 1982 as a receptionist. I came in, all of my friends have gone off to college, I said, “I’m not going to afford to go to college. I’m going to work three jobs.” So, I came in, that was one of my three jobs, I was a receptionist at a property management company. I worked there 5½ years. This is great because women love this part of the story. When I went out on maternity leave on a Wednesday at five o’clock, I went grocery shopping Thursday and Friday morning I went into labor. If you know where I live, I’m in Marin County just north of San Francisco and I had to cross the Golden Gate bridge. I got to the hospital at 10 minutes to eight in the morning, I [...] 10 minutes to nine in the morning, said, “Okay, give me my [...] I have things to do with backup,” went home the same day. Jason: What? Melissa: Yeah. I had this new baby boy, Matt, many people know Matt, and Monday morning the owners of my company called and said, “We’re going to sell this company. If you don’t buy it, you’re going to be out of the job.” I didn’t take too long. I said, “Oh, you know. Hmm, I have a new baby. Hmm,” and I’m going to have two new babies. Sure enough, I made arrangements. I went to my dad and said, “Dad, I want to buy this company.” He goes, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, I want to buy it.” He said, “All right,” and I said, “Well, I need a loan.” He goes, All right, I’ll give you $3000.” But the [...] you can’t do is go to a bank and get a loan, so I had to get very creative with this brand new baby and a brand new company. That was 37 years go. Jason: That was quite the adventure. When an entrepreneur personality type is given a challenge like this, you had a clear outcome, clear objective, you were going to get that company and you had all of this pressure. Entrepreneurs in those moments, like we, light up and something magical starts to happen, right? And it work out for you. Melissa: I guess so. [...] I’m still sitting here and [...] NARPM, still doing property management. Jason: Great. Maybe share a little backstory on how did NARPM come to be? How this this come about? Melissa: It’s an interesting story. I wasn’t one of the original 100 that were in the charter of NARPM. A handful of people got together and they were actually exchanging software challenges. [...] own a software company at the time which is no longer, and they started talking about their best practices. They all kicked in money to start NARPM. I’m 25 years in NARPM, so you can imagine that’s pretty much a part of my life. Jason: Quite a while. Our topic today is building your business and team. At your business, Brandi Property Management, I would imagine that you have a pretty awesome team after all this time. A lot of people this is a big challenge. I’ve talked about this on the show before but there’s these two sand traps I’ve noticed in property management. The first sand trap in growth is around 50 or 60 units. This is the solopreneur sand trap. That’s about as many doors as they can handle on their own and they get stuck. Sometimes, they back themselves into a financial corner, they don’t have enough revenue to hire their first person, they’re managing as much as they can handle, they’re losing doors as fast as they’re getting on, and they’re stuck. For those listening, if you’re stuck in that, talk to me. We can help you get past that. If you break past that 100 door barrier, I found that by default they end up in the next sand trap, which is the 200–400 door category. This is where it’s the team sand trap. This is where they’re not building a team, they’re trying to create culture, they’re trying to systemize processes, they’re trying to wrap their head around what they should be doing, and as they approach maybe 400–500 units it gets really painful because everybody’s asking them for everything and they start to realize they are the number one bottleneck in the entire business, that everything they got them there they have to give up. I’m excited to talk with you because you’ve dealt with this stuff and you’ve seen this. Maybe you could share your perspective of what does it really take to build a business and how does the team really play into that from your perspective. Melissa: You touched on little bit of my message is getting out of the way. I’m not the tech generation, the paperless generation. I still use paper. I still like to print and read. It doesn’t work in today’s market for everybody. I would say the number one thing as you grow is to get out of the way. Get out of the way and hire people that have different skill sets. In our company, we always do personality tests. Tony Robbins offers it for free. Jason: The DISC? Melissa: Yeah, the DISC test. It’s free on his website. We do that, find the personality styles. For example, in a bookkeeper, you want someone who is very good, very high, and procedural. You want to make sure you find that in any of your staff mates. In our chain we have a big diversity, age, and skills. You can’t remember everybody have personality when you want to be like me. I never met a stranger and I’m a visionary. I’m the person who’s up with the ideas, tell us the way I wanted results and then gets out of the way. Jason: I love it. I’m a big proponent of using the DISC as well. In fact, Tony Robbins recently switched his DISC assessment, if you’ve noticed, from the inner metrics, which I actually used to have a connection where I would get the full three-part inner metrics, which is even better than the Tony Robbins one which gives you the first two portions. But then, it started getting watered down and smaller. They just recently switched DISC providers and it changed, but I find it’s better than what it was even though it’s not as pretty. You can do that free DISC assessment. You’ve got people on you team that are high C’s, they love compliance, they are rigid, they’re probably not the best friendly communicators, you’ve got high I’s that are great communicators and really great maybe with people, maybe high S’s that are great with customer service, maybe DC’s which are like unicorns that are really great at operations, maybe high DI’s which are great at sales and closing. Understanding that gives you a lot of power in being able to understand people. Melissa: [...] when you get ready to hire, looking at that needs assessments. Looking that what diversity is in your team, but I want to go back to something you test on again because this is where [...] out, which is change. Success comes with your willingness to change. That’s what basically you’re talking about as you’re training your team and also speaking to the property managers, as you said, they reach out to you. They have to be willing to change and I’m willing to change. That’s why I take a lot of classes even after all these years. I get into classes and I think of these aha moments that’s like, “Oh, I used to do that.” I cannot just go back sometimes and do things I used to do, but I also wanted to say, “Oh, we can’t do that.” “Why not?” “Well, we tried that.” Don’t have this theory of ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it,’ because that [...] stuck. Jason: Right. Any of us who have been in business long enough, we’ve probably forgotten more than we’ve learned. There’s so much and it’s great to get those reminders. You have mentioned early on that they need to get out of the way. How does somebody consciously do that? A lot of times when we’re in the way, we can’t see it. It’s almost like telling somebody, “Look at the back of your head.” It’s how they feel. You’re saying, “Get out of the way,” and they’re like, “I don’t even know how I’m in the way. How do I do that?” How do you help [...] Melissa: I’m sitting upstairs in a private suite away from my entire staff. My son, Matt, and let me just tell you I started the way I got the business when Matt was born, right? My son used to say, “Mom, nobody grows up and wants to be a property manager. Matt just celebrated his 11th year in property management and he’s our [...] Business Development Manager. Jason: Over a decade. Melissa: Yeah. But he didn’t. He went to college. He didn’t think, “Well, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. Nor did I. I don’t [...] thought you’re going to be servicing property managers.” But Matt sits in my original office. Therefore there’s a different skill set and, guess what, I’m not in the way. I’m down there and there’s something like walking by the office to go fix it as it get me out of the way. Jason: You’ve physically have gotten yourself out of the way so you’re not hearing the auditory things that you would normally trigger a response and cause you to go into fix-it mode as an entrepreneur because we hear problems, we’re wired. We want to fix it. We also see a problem, we’re like, “I can make money solving that problem.” That’s how we think. Melissa: And I tell you, I still go down, I’ll sit there and they want to see. Remember, I’m the face of the company. I’m the visionary. So, I [...] in the morning, I start down there, good morning to everybody, “Good morning, Frank. Good morning, Christine.” I go through my good mornings, I say hello to everybody there, and that’s [...]. I find out if there’s anything they need, me but I [...] work for the first couple of hours at home. What difference does it make? It allows me to actually stay home. Let me tell you that my role, I was a property manager as I said when I started in the business. Got my license and my broker’s license, went to California State, got into real estate, and then I helped grow the company. And I’m very good at it. I really think if you want to grow your business, you have to be in community. You can’t be in community and be in the office operations and running everything. You can’t do everything. I have gone out of the way by not being physically in an office downstairs where everybody can come to me. Now, I have a really good team. Christine Goodin who has her RMP with NARPM and her MPM. That’s a Residential Property Manager. MPM is a Master Property Manager. She came to work for me 18 years ago and she didn’t even know what property management was. And she’s now the Vice-President of Operations. So, you hire right, you bring them to educational courses. Don’t stand in their way growing, either. That’s another really key factor. Don’t let them get stagnant. I say, “How do you keep somebody happy for 18 years? Give them new challenges.” You give them new roles. Let them grow right along with you. Jason: Yeah, if you find somebody that has a growth mindset. Not everybody wants to grow. There are certain personality types that love growth, they love learning. On DISC they would have a high theoretical score typically, for example, on the Tony Robbins DISC profile that we have mentioned. But if they love learning, they have a growth mindset, and that’s a priority in their life is personal development, then you got a feedback. You feed them that and you have a team member that, just like fine wine, accrues value over time. Melissa: [...] I want to go back, though, because it’s not without mistakes when you hire someone that doesn’t like the business. I think oftentimes with property managers and our groups and our friends come to me and they ask questions. I think some of the hardest thing we had was letting go. We hire someone that doesn’t fit in the team, doesn’t fit in our culture, and we hang on. I think [...] over the years. It took me a while to get there. But I can tell you that if you’re mostly have a 30-day, a 60-day, maybe a 90-day introductory period, if it’s not working in that first month, it doesn’t usually change. So, if I [...] in the States because I’m nice and I’m a fixer, then I hang on. [...] wait too long. Again, if you’re going through and adding to your team, you need to really make sure that you’re checking in. I want to give you a tip because I’m talking about that. I love to share. Jason: Yeah. Melissa: In the first 90 days of a new team member come in to work at Prandi Property Management, we do what’s called EOD, an end of the day report. They actually write down things they learned, the challenges they found that day, and just some sharing. At the end of that, they rate their day a one, a two, or a three—there could be 2.5—based on what they feel their workload, three being, “I can’t handle any more and I’m full.” I have a new employee coming on and she’s been with me, let’s say, 20 days, and she gave me a 1–1½, we’re not giving her enough work. If you’re going to bring somebody new onto your team, again I don’t have to check on them, I don’t have to call on her, I don’t have to sit with her, somebody else is handling all the training, but as the owner, the CEO, and the visionary, I need to know how I’m doing with the team’s giving her information and what she needs from me to make her the best Prandi team member. Jason: You mentioned a couple of things that I think are really important to point out. One, you mentioned that by not just having your office separate or segregated but also being able to work from home and working from home. I run a virtual team and a virtual company. Nobody can touch me and I’ve always had that advantage that there is a physical disconnect. I will probably go on saying that if my assistant could walk in every 10 minutes and say, “Hey, what should I be doing now?” I would go nuts, right? Having that, that’s another option for those that are listening, there is a trend with some people that they’re moving towards more virtual teams and digital offices and that can also create that disconnect. Melissa: I want to ask you a question so I can also [...] and teach the audience. How do you communicate best with the person since you are virtual, and we all love the virtual part of it, how are you best communicating with your team member that’s even your assistant? What’s the best way you all communicate? Jason: Our main modes of communication, we use Basecamp as a communication platform. What that allows us to do is to post messages, to think about things, to get clarity and put it, and then we allow team members to respond to those, rather than throwing it all out real-time in a meeting where everybody has to react, because I find the responses are big-time wasters and it’s not as helpful. We usually post memos or post a to-do and then people that are need to be looped in will be looped in and can comment on that. That keeps things really quiet and makes people think. It creates a very calm workplace. That’s our foundational mode of communication. For quicker communication, we use the app Voxer and that is a walkie-talkie app. I don’t like typing and texting all the time. It takes too long. I’m quick. I want to send a voice message so I hold down a button on the app and I say, “Hey, Adam. Can you check on this client? They have mentioned this and do this and blah-blah-blah.” And then he’ll take care of it. The cool thing about Voxer is if you’re really impatient as an entrepreneur, if you listen to the messages, if you’re in the chat with somebody, the messages are real time. But if you’re not, it works like voice messages, like voicemail. And you can play them at high speed so you can speed up if they’re already done talking and the recording’s there, then you can play it at high speed. So, I’m listening to chipmunks all day long, telling me what needs to happen. There’s a lot of communication even through Voxer or a situation like that that I just need the details, so I can just listen really quickly and we can consume information cognitively and auditory-wise much faster than we can speak it. We can usually do it at almost twice the pace very easily. Melissa: It brings another point of communication. A good team member and a good team lead [...]. People need to know you’re supporting them. That’s what I [...]. But I was thinking about it, we did a lot of team-building last year. We hired [...] consultants to come in, and one thing I’ve learned about myself was delivery of email. Don’t stand [...] similar. Send [...] information and what the fact is, what the need is, send it to me in a delivery form. If you have team members and that you’re on a call today and the podcast, I think it’s really important to know your style, what you want. They also said that I was sending the exact [...] that said, “Well, I send it after the company email and no one responds,” and they said, “Send me a few of those.” The guy came back and said, “You’re not asking for anything. You’re sending information but you’re not asking.” “Okay, I need this back but [...]” It’s not that we do a campaign to get you. This is where’s the call-to-action. [...] entrepreneur and you’re on the show today and you want to learn. Ask somebody from the outside to come in and analyze your style and your teams and they’ll help give you tools. I’ve done that. I’m always learning. Jason: One of the hacks that I learned when I worked at Hewlett-Packard is that we were told to have certain subject lines if we were sending emails. If we needed some sort of response, you always had to say, “ACTION REQ’D:” at the beginning of the subject line in all caps. So, we would do ACTION REQ’D: if there’s an action required, or FYI was for your information only, you don’t need to do anything on it. So, there was kind of this code with subject lines. Now, I’m beyond email. I don’t even look at my email. If anybody emails me, I’m not going to probably see it. My assistant handles all of that for me because I don’t like email. I don’t want to communicate through email. So, I set up a system in which somebody else can go with that and she just tells me the four or five emails I need to deal with and the other 100 or 200 I get a day are [...] somebody else. Melissa: She’s a very good communicator and she is very responsive. If she doesn’t get a response, she page me again, making sure and not [...] very positive way. She’s patient, when I’m really busy, I’ll be a couple of days [...] she’s right back checking in with me. You’ve got someone watching your back and helping you grow, I’m sure. Jason: Oh yeah. It’s a huge help and that’s the thing is with hiring, I think one of the big constraints of those with entrepreneurs is this myth that if I have somebody else do it, it won’t be done as well. It’s such an egotistical thing that people need to get over. This belief that nobody will be as good as me. As long as somebody believes that, it’s true. They make it true and they create a situation which they’ll never be able to offload things. But I can speak with total confidence that every single person on my team is better at what they do than myself. They’re all better at what they do. India, way better at email than me. I don’t want to deal with email. I’m short with emails, I don’t pay attention, I miss things. Email’s not my thing. Melissa: [...] going back to the strength of the team and knowing your strength as the owner/CEO of your company and knowing my strength. You put me in a room with 200 people, you put me in a room with 1000 people, I try to meet every one of them. I know that my strength in the world growing my business, is to be the face of the business, to be in the field. I was in a class this morning. I’ve been taking classes at the local university on hiring teams and developing teams. Yesterday, I took a great workshop at Dominican University from a [...] a little bit about,job descriptions, position statements, and what’s the end results. They really teach us to have things in place and what our expectation is. So I’m always taking courses to try and figure out how can I be better at things. I’m never going to be the techie person that knows how to set everything up. I hand it to my son. I don’t have to be, right? He’s 31 years old. I can hand it to Matt and say, “Matt, I don’t understand this. My phone is doing something. Here, can you just fix it?” I can hand it to Christine and she’s going to help me. So just not trying to waste time, I [...] come at me. And don’t forget, part of [...] today is also life balance. Being able to turn it off, take care of ourselves because we have a good team. Jason: I think the more that an entrepreneur focuses on self-care, the more they have to give to their team and the lower the pressure noises. One of things I’ve noticed with entrepreneurs is that when our pressure noise gets high—it can be high in property management or in any business, but we deal with a lot as business owners—all of the worst attributes you share about business owners come out. People could perceive us as controlling or angry or frustrated because we get into this preloaded state where we’re in a stress response. If you lower the pressure noise for an entrepreneur, our genius comes out. Our best attributes come out. The visionary comes out. We’re able to see the future. We’re able to make decisions about things. If an entrepreneur does not have the team that they are in love with right now, then they’re not the person yet that should be running it. That’s the sad truth. They haven’t become that person yet, that can have a team, that instead of them having feeling like they are trying to control, it’s instead a team that they’re able to just inspire. Whenever we fail to inspire, we always control and we get into that stressful place where we’re trying to manipulate and get our team to do stuff and we’re trying to force KPIs down their throat or trying to push them to do things because we feel like, “Why can’t me team just do what I need them to do?” We shift into a calm space of, “What does my team need from me in order to be as successful as possible so they can keep helping me the way that they’ve been helping me?” and that’s a much more comfortable place to be. It’s a calm, quiet workplace. Melissa: I actually have never been accused of… I don’t yell, I’m a very calm-natured person, I deal with and respect boundaries, so I’m very good about how would that person feel if they were in my seat, how are they want to be treated. I do that a lot. I know their personal. Something’s going on. You want to know if something’s going on, it’s not always about business. Those people that have lives [...] out the door. So, I’m really in-tune with that. I called someone in yesterday and said, “Look, I can tell something’s going on. You just not coming work with that bright smile. What can I do to help?” So, even though I’m not downstairs, still sense the energy and pay really good attention. I try to make sure they know that I really care and I do care. The other thing is really working with an outside business consultant. Don’t get stuck. Have somebody come in and help build your team by doing team building. We had a lot of fun doing team building last year at the end of the year in October. Last year in October, we went out and went off site, we prepared everything so we can all leave, and we had one person [...] kind of helped out while we work on all day. We worked on what I think the success in my company is very strongly if we’re not communicating with each other, and we’re not respecting, getting along, and taking our own blinders off from our busy property management day, then the outside world is getting that same message. So, if I’m not really happy doing my job as a property manager and I’m not having a good day because my team members not [...] and the other team members not doing something, that equals out to the public and that’s when one of those one-star reviews come in. You can ask the team to let them know they’re supportive with each other, give them the tools, working with that, and let them get to know each other and [...] each other, that goes out to customer service. Jason: There’s this great book by a gentleman. I believe his name is Steve Sims and the book’s called Bluefishing. He basically talks about how his whole goal with his team members or even with clients that he wants to work with is they have to pass the chug test. It’s like, “Would I want to have a beer with this person?” and it’s just a simple gut check to say, “Do I like this person? Do I enjoy being around this person? Does this person makes me feel safe? Do I feel comfortable?” because if anybody on your team doesn’t make you feel comfortable and you’re always worried about them or you’re concerned about them or there’s some sort of weird disconnect in rapport between the two of you, they’re adding to you pressure and noise. I think that it is important to like your team, to actually like them. Melissa: [...] company. Sometimes when there’s one person who’s not [...] team, they go and they grab other people. Jason: Oh yeah, they’re a cancer. Melissa: You have to be really careful with that. But I really [...] week after our last retreat work and that was they wanted. For somebody [...] it’s not the most positive [...], so we started a Positively Prandi board. We got that big board [...] coffee and our tea is, and people are [...], “Congratulations on your three-year anniversary.” We write riddles. [...] while the sun is shining now, how happy we are today. And that doesn’t cost money. It’s just a little more positivity and always share a five-star review. We always celebrate a good review, and if it’s not [...] we could get there. That’s another [...] about growing your business is really you have to work on your teams, inside the walls of your team before you can really start wanting to grow and double or triple in size. Jason: You have mentioned early on that you make sure you have this morning connection with your team. My team’s virtual and we’ve done the same thing. I felt like it’s absolutely critical that you get FaceTime with your entire team. Those that have virtual teams that are listening, or virtual team members, one of the things that we do at DoorGrow is we do a morning huddle. It’s 15 minutes, we set it at a weird hour so that people know that time matters. We set it at a weird time, like it’s not at a half-hour mark or hour mark and people have to show up for that. It’s 15 minutes, we just share stats openly in the company, here’s how much revenue we’ve made so far this month, here’s how many people on our Facebook group, all that different stats that matter, and then we do ‘caught being awesome,’ when we say, “Anybody catch anybody being awesome in the last day?” Sometimes it’s a little awkward if it’s a small huddle and not everybody showed up and people are like [...]. But I always comes up with somebody that we can point out or highlight somebody. Melissa: [...] for us at Prandi Property Management, I have a weekly team meeting. I get copies of the notes so I can look at what’s going on with the teams, and the at the very bottom it says, “Did you write a thank you note to them?” because still old-fashioned handwritten thank you notes go a long way. We have Prandi custom beautiful notes cards, it works in all industries, and who did you thank today? It’s similar to what you’re saying because a team, I like that. I want to go back and say that, “Who did you catch being awesome today?” That’s kind of we’re doing to Positively Prandi board, but in this case, acknowledging their credibility at the end of it, the weekly team meeting notes [...] really good [...] everybody’s formats is the same, so we’re looking at the same numbers, same things, and when it says, “Oh, that’s so nice,” they wrote the gardener a thank you note. They wrote the plumber a thank you note. They wrote [...] a thank you note for the inconvenience. We get a bunch of $5 Starbucks cards, we [...] and say, “Have a cup of coffee on us. Cheers to you.” Just saying thank you is really nice. Jason: I love it. In our huddle, at the very end we just go around and ask each person, “Are you stuck on anything? Really simple, is there anything you’re stuck on?” and there’s always somebody that’s stuck. When we didn’t used to do that and we would just have a weekly meeting or just throughout the day, it makes me wonder what were they doing when they were stuck all of these previous times because there’s always somebody stuck on something. “Oh yeah, this client had this question. I didn’t know how to deal with this, or this.” We can tackle those things really quickly and if it’s something that takes a lot of time, we’ll just say, “All right. Let’s schedule a meeting for that.” But we just tackle that in our huddle so everybody feels unstuck, which is also helpful. Melissa: It’s not just stuck. I myself have made mistakes in this business, that we have aha moments as well. I can say, “Well, is there anything you want to share that you have an aha moment that you might teach us how to do our job better?” [...] offers I do like I’ll start an example. I’ll say, “Matt, my son, now is the Business Development Manager, who is out there in the field. Sometimes we get three, four, five, six clients a day,” who knows how many are coming. They’re coming fast and furious because we’ve been there a long time. He’ll say, “Hey, can you take care of this duplex? The co-owner’s called in and they really wanted a response today, but I got so many things on my plate. Can you handle that?” which is okay because I know how to do it. Only, he gave it to me at 10 in the morning and I didn’t make that connection with that client until two in the afternoon and it was too late. He had already hired someone. I can use that as my team example as my aha moment. What I should have done the moment he gave it to me, I should have stopped, I should have looked at what is it important, not checking my Facebook, my email and everything else. I should have made that a priority. Because I didn’t, he signed up with another management company. I want to share that as the owner because what will happen next time is I’ll make it a priority. I try to [...] those aha moments and life lessons. What can we do, how can we have done it differently, and we had different results, because we can all [...]. Jason: We do a weekly team meeting. In our weekly team meeting, we share wins from the previous week, personal or business. That gives the team members opportunity each Monday to share, “What were your wins for last week?” so that we can point her out. As entrepreneurs, a lot of us are economically driven, so if we take a DISC profile and turn on all the insight, we’ll see that we have a pretty high economic score typically. The mistake we make is that we assume everybody else likes money as much as us. Look at that economic score in your team members, those that are listening, if the economic score is high, bonuses work great for them. If the economic score is low, they want recognition. Most of my team members, that’s all of my team members with the exception of people that are involved in sales, usually their economic score is low, which means they want recognition. So, creating opportunities in these meetings where they get to show what they’ve done the previous week, where they get to show that they’ve had wins and we look through our objectives for the week, and they get to say, “Yes, I got these all done,” this is an opportunity for them to feel recognized by the whole team. I find that that increases motivation and accountability, significantly. Melissa: And I think it’s interesting because you and I didn’t rehearse this and we didn’t talk about what was most important, but there’s a lot of similarities in what we’re doing as entrepreneurs, owners, and visionaries. I think that’s really important for the audience to hear that some of these things that we’re talking about are simple, and it can be done by anybody. Jason: What I’ve noticed in business and life is I’m just a student and a fan of what works. That’s just what I get excited about. And really, every system, all the different coaches and mentors I’ve worked with, they so many similarities because truth and/or reality is what works and everything gravitates towards that. You’ve been in business for 37 years. You’re going to have figured out a lot of things that don’t work. What that leaves less on the table is a lot of knowledge about what works. I think also I’m very willing to fail. I’ve had lots and lots of failures. I think DoorGrow’s been built on thousands of failures and that’s how we learned. I think that goes also to my team because I’ve had so many failures. I think also I’m very conscious of the fact that my team needs to be allowed to screw up and fail. They need to feel safe failing. If they don’t feel safe failing, then they’ll never be able to learn. Melissa: Or they could hide it. We don’t want them to hide it. Jason: Exactly. They become hiders. They start hiding stuff from you the first time they screw something up and they feel reprimanded or shamed or put down, they’re going to hide that from you forever. They’re going to hide everything in the future and then having team of hiders is absolutely catastrophic to the growth of the company. Melissa: That’s true. I think that always attending workshops and now we have things online, you talk about being able to teach people like you’re doing right now, that is great. I think just because you have 10 in the business or 20 years or in my case, you never stop learning. And I think it’s really important for people to use their resources. I love to read. People can share books. They can go on your website and your Facebook page, and share a good book, and share stuff they’re learning. I find that people soak it up. I love to speak and teach. I love to walk in a room and share my knowledge. There’s not one person I’ve ever said, “No, I absolutely will not share that with you.” I usually, “No problem. You want that form, let me send it to you.” You’re going to laugh, I taught a class in Palm Springs. I’m not paperless and I’m proud of it, because I’m not and people love it. They’re going to be people that still touch things like I do. Let’s give them [...] and eventually that does change. My son doesn’t print [...] anything, but I do. So, we have to have a diversity and we have to be able to give people the tools they need to be the best whatever the way it is in the year 2019 or the way we used to do it. When I first got in business, the screen was literally the size of a small [...]. We didn’t have cell phones. Technology is good. I think I’ve been able to travel, I’ve been able to leave my business. Now, I check my email but I schedule my time. I’m going to the beach because I’m sitting on a beach in Hawaii. I’ll check my information but I don’t check it like I do when I’m sitting on my desk working. Time management it important. I allow myself a lot of time because even last week, I was running hard. I was struggling early in the morning, facing the company, lots of meetings, going to Rotary, going to community events, starting the morning with my classes over at the university or whatever I’m doing, and I finish at nine o’clock at night. So, I just take it to Matt because I was going the State of the City Dinner with the Chamber of Commerce. By Thursday last week, I hit a wall and I was tired. So you have to find the balance. Everybody, not just the entrepreneur or owner, of how you’re doing with your whole life balance because you have to keep yourself well in order to be a good leader. Jason: Absolutely. My recently added for our C hackers, a health secrets training, simply because I found that health is the number one thing that impacts the productivity. An excuse that we get from entrepreneurs a lot was, “Oh, I just don’t have time.” They have almost doubled the amount of time if they’re taking care of themselves properly. Their brain is just that much more effective. Melissa: If you go to yoga for an hour, you’re not on your phone, you’re not on your email. Jason: You’re right. You’re disconnected. Melissa: You [...] can read the phone in your car. You just take your phone if you’re going out in an easy hike, if you’re going distance in that thing, but to be able to go and listen to music, too, on [...], people say sound and meditation. If you can do music meditation and it works really well. I just spent some time with a good friend in [...] and we had so much fun playing our playlist and singing the songs, and then how did we remember the words to this song? But your mind is doing so much. What music does is it kind of steals your heart and soul. If you ever are going through something, get yourself to music and let the music take you to a different [...] and property management. That happens a lot. I always tell my staff, “Get out from your desk, move or walk around the block, change your environment. Grab your iPhone, put on a song and walk around the block singing the words. It changes your whole intake of how you’re going to treat the next customer or the next co-worker. Jason: I love it. Let’s connect this to science and here is why that stuff is so effective. I’m a huge audiophile, I love music, I had a band in college, I bought [...] songs. I love music, but when you play instruments, when you play music—there’s videos on this—your entire brain lights up. Both sides of the brain are like fireworks when you’re playing an instrument or really engaged in music. When you connect your right and left hemispheres in your brain, when those sides of your brain are both firing, it significantly lower stress. In fact, I went and did EMDR therapy on the recommendation of my business coach, for a year. EMDR therapy is an eye movement therapy. The idea behind it is they use it to eliminate PTSD in soldiers and stuff like this. As entrepreneurs, my coach is saying, “You have some PTSD, Jason. Let’s be honest. You guys deal with a lot of stress. You’ve got some of this. Go get an EMDR therapy and talk about you assistant, they quit or talk about this, get this stuff taken cared of. What is cool is that EMDR therapy is based on the idea that there is bilateral stimulation, so stimulating both sides of the brain back and forth while tuned in to an idea that causes stress or PTSD or some sort of issue. I’m not making light, by the way, of those who have legit PTSD, but the stress that we have as entrepreneurs, it will tone that down and it kills that. It helps you see it with a fresh perspective and helps correct and eliminate that emotional stress response. Here’s what’s magical about walking. Walking is bilateral stimulation. Exercising increases the stress response in the body. It just does. That’s part of exercise. But walking oxygenates the body but does not increase the stress response. It actually lowers it because it’s causing bilateral stimulation. Left, right, your body keeps moving, and each step causes bilateral stimulation. So, if you have anxiety, if you have a stressful call or whatever, going for a walk until that goes down is really magical and amazing. So I go for a walk in the evenings if I had a stressful day. I start my day usually a lot of times with a walk, making sure that I walk around. It help digestion, it seriously helps cognitive function by getting your brain to lower its stress response. It’s like a serious hack and walking sounds so simple. Music more than any other thing can directly impact emotions. That’s why in movies, they’ll manipulate your emotions using the score of the movie because it makes you feel what’s going on. So, if you want to change your feeling, you can use music because different songs can help you lean into sorrow if you need to feel that sorrow, music can help you lean into positivity or shift out of... Melissa: Brings back memories. But [...], somebody having a bad day because in property management we done have all positive days. And sometimes, especially because where we are now in Northern California, we had a lot of rain. [...] when we were getting ready to set up, it’s not really our friend. Property management, rain, leaks, putting people up at hotels, you’ve got a lot coming at you and nobody wants to be displaced, especially if it’s the holiday season, we have bad weather and it rains then. So, I [...] “Okay, what have you done for a time out? What are you doing? Because you need to go have a time out. Just go.” We do fun Fridays, ice cream socials, aloha Fridays because we are actually [...] together in an office [...] downstairs, so we do see each other everyday. I may not but the staff works together [...] and works in an office. Having seen this which Christine’s been really good about it. Matt, last Friday [...] his dog is a new rescue. She’s adorable. Her name’s Mia and she’s a very [...]. She’s a very good dog and he said, “Hey, do you mind if I bring her out in the open? I don’t have any appointments.” People actually brought some really [...] good, fun Friday and made them feel really good by having a dog there. Who knew? Jason: Almost like one of those service animals. Melissa: Yeah. I was waiting for his to say, “Mom, I can bring the dog to work because this is a service animal.” I said it was okay. Jason: Yeah. I love the idea. Walk and talk is my own personal therapy. If I have something I need to talk through, I talk to somebody about it while I’m walking. I’ll just walk around. It’s magic. These are all really cool ideas. Melissa, it sounds like you have a phenomenal team. You’ve got a wealth of knowledge. For those that are listening, that maybe are struggling to achieve their growth, they’re really stuck in a rut, they’re having a difficult time maybe with their team, they’re just having trouble seeing over the weeds, so to speak, what sort of advice would you give them, maybe a first step to take, some step towards all the [...] Melissa: I would say don’t be afraid to [...]. Pick up the phone and call another property manager. Call you, check-in with you. People forget the touch of the voice, too, and someone knowing. Most people have been through the same thing. When you [...] the NARPM family or you or your users together share one thing that’s going on, it’s amazing when I see the post that goes on in your Facebook page and the solutions people are willing to offer. But sometimes picking up the phone and saying, “Look, I’m having a really hard time with this. I have a client doing it.” I’ll tell you to fire them. But if you have [...] a really hard time, then maybe you just need to [...] another professional. NARPM has over 5000 members. Don’t think you’re going to take the world on your own. If you’re going to grow, you have to be willing to change, to be willing to have a mentor, somebody you can lean on. You got to use the research that you’re offering as a national vendor and the research that you’re offering, we have to use those resources so that we can actually learn to grow because you’re going to give us tips from the outside of property management looking in at what we’re doing. You’re already doing that just sharing with me. So, if you’re willing to make the change and to reach out for growth ideas and ask how to implement because I’ve already done it. I’m willing to share. Why reinvent the wheel? Jason: I love it. You mentioned be willing to change, find mentors, reach out and get a mentor, reach out to other property managers. I think the crux of all these things, kind of energetically that you’re talking about here, underneath all of this, I think a property manager or anyone listening to the show, they need to recognize that the power being able to do these things come from vulnerability. It takes a certain amount of vulnerability as an entrepreneur to say, “I have a problem and I need support.” Whether you are reaching out to a mentor, it takes humility or vulnerability in order to be willing to go out and learn more like you’ve talked about. I think sometimes we want to put on this facade or we think we need to be the one that we’re always okay. I think it’s okay to not be okay. I think there’s power in that and I think there’s connection in that if we’re willing to be vulnerable, because I don’t have all good days. I have sent messages to my business coach or my mentors and saying, “Hey, I’m really struggling. This is hard for me dealing with this.” Sometimes, it’s all we need is just to be able to tell somebody that and acknowledge and be vulnerable, but I think when we’re vulnerable with others. Those that are inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group, I encourage you to be willing. Lots of people have been willing to share vulnerably like, “Hey, I’m dealing with the situation. I’m in over my head,” or, “I don’t know what to do with this,” or, “I’m stressed out and it’s been a really a rough day. What do you guys do or recommend?” or, “Could somebody talk to me on the phone today?” I think there are so many people that because the way we get momentum as entrepreneurs, the way we get fulfilled, is by giving it to others. Melissa: Helping others. That’s right. I was national president of NARPM. My team was sharing a vision and I’m still sharing a vision. Our visions can open up a lot of doors and windows for a lot [...]. Jason: There’s nothing that’s been more powerful for me when I’m having a rough time in business or as an entrepreneur or in life than to reach out and be able to help or support a client or help somebody else. I look for those opportunities when I’m stressed [...] somebody an opportunity to support you because you’re helping them by being vulnerable and allowing them to do that. Melissa: That works with our staff, our team members, to reach out and say, “Okay, I’m actually having a really hard time. I’m overwhelmed, I’m tired, I’m going to take [...] refill my bucket up. [...] keep that to your team. They’re only human, they understand. Jason: Absolutely. That’s the entire team’s job. My team’s job is to lower my pressure and noise. That is their whole purpose for having a job. But they can’t do that unless I’m honest. Melissa: Yeah and it’s working well. Jason: Yeah, it does. It works really well. The bigger my team gets, the bigger my company gets, the easier my life gets. I know that sounds backwards for a lot of people, especially those in the 200–400 doors sand trap because as they’re approaching the 400–500 units, their life gets crazy and hectic and it’s probably because they’ve built the team the wrong way. They built the system in which it’s transactional leadership and they’re throwing tasks at people. Everyone has to come to them for feedback instead of giving them objectives and trusting them. It’s something that takes work to shift out of. Melissa: It goes back to where we started [...]. The key to success [...] Jason: Full circle. Get out of the way. Sometimes we can’t see it. As entrepreneurs, I think no matter how evolved we are or how effective we are or how much coaching we’ve had, we always have our own blind spots and we always need that outside perspective. I need it all the time and your team can provide some of that if you ask them for honest feedback. I ask my team all the time like, “Hey, I’m thinking of sending this email out to all our clients,” and my writer, Adam, who’s very diplomatic, will say, “Let we reword that for you.” Melissa: That’s a good point. [...] I do that, too. If I’m about to send an email, or I end up firing a client or put them on a ‘this isn’t working,’ someone else on your team to say, “How does it sound as if you’re just receiving it?” That’s it. That’s a good point, too. Rely on that for that. Jason: This has been an awesome conversation. I’m sure we could talk for hours. It’s just really fun to connect with you. I appreciate you coming on the show. What takeaway do you want to leave people with and how can they get in touch with you if you like them to do that? Melissa: I would say to rely on the vendors yourself. You light up when we started the very beginning of our just getting ready for the podcast. When you started getting ready to do this, to share with your listeners, you light up. I think we need to rely on our resource with you and what you can bring to us property managers. I think that the other takeaway would be to be really in-tune with ourselves to know when we’ve had enough to take that break, and then to really take a hard look and maybe today or tomorrow, go down and really be grateful, and come within gratitude to thank the people we work with everyday. Together, I would say we can make a difference. So, keep that attitude and really respect for your team, the clients, the people you work around. Jason: Love it. How can people find out more about Melissa Prandi or get in touch? Melissa: My email probably is best. I am an emailer. It’s melissa@prandiprop.com. I’m great with [...] resources, I’ve written two books, and I love to share ideas. Let’s just keep going. Let’s keep growing and making our industry bigger, better, and more respected as we all become better at property management. Jason: Absolutely. I fully believe in the philosophy of the I mindset that the industry’s number one challenge right now is not your competition. It’s awareness. The industry’s second number one challenge is just perception of the industry as a whole. By helping your local competitors level up, you’re helping yourself. You’re helping the whole industry. Melissa: Raising the bar up to what one’s expecting the quality of what we’re providing out there, people on rental property. Jason: Absolutely and good property management can change the world. You guys get to have such a massive ripple effect. You’re impacting hundreds of thousands of tenants, homeowners and their families, and that ripple effect keeps going and that’s big. Melissa: I’ve seen how much that actually NARPM complement people, how much we give back into our community because we do that every year at charity. We’re giving back in more ways than just that. Jason: Absolutely. The ripple effect is big and I’m grateful that really awesome property managers like yourself allow me the opportunity to be part of that. That’s inspiring and exciting for me. All right, Melissa. It’s been great having you on the show and we’ll have to have you back soon. Melissa: Absolutely. See you in NAPA, the [...] NARPM conference [...]. Jason: We’ll see you in NAPA. All right. Melissa: See you soon. Thank you. Jason: Okay. Bye-bye. All right that was a phenomenal interview. Really fun to talk about that stuff, all things I’m very passionate about and Melissa is obviously very passionate about as well. If this episode was interesting or useful to you, please give us a feedback in iTunes if you’re listening there. We would love if you like and subscribe to our channel on YouTube. That would be awesome if you’re watching us there. If you’re seeing this on Facebook, then share it. We appreciate you. Make sure you get inside of our awesome community for property management entrepreneurs, which is the DoorGrow Club. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com. By joining, we’re going to give you some free takeaways including The Fee Bible, a list of good vendors you should be using, that are the best in the industry, that get the best feedback in our group, and we’re going to give you some other free gifts if you provide your email when you sign up for that group. Make sure you get inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group. At some point, you may want to reach out to our team and talk to us or myself about growing your business. If you’re feeling stagnant or stuck, or you feel like you could use some additional support, that’s where we do at DoorGrow. 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.

Delegating work, tracking progress, and managing issues often leads to frustration. So, businesses buy workflow software with all the bells and whistles; only to realize that it’s too cumbersome and confusing. Today, I am talking with Vinay Patankar of Process Street. After experiencing similar pain with software, he decided to create his own simple way to manage recurring workflows for teams. You’ll Learn... [02:40] Why isn't there software that can do these tasks while I sleep? [04:57] Philosophy behind process development and problem with most products - the people who built and designed them. [05:45] First-generation Software: The experience on paper is not necessarily the best experience on a computer. [06:15] Can my grandmother figure this out? Create easy and intuitive software that anyone can use without any kind of context or previous knowledge. [08:05] Process Street is not just a process documentation platform, but a superpower checklist for accountability. [11:17] Rules around Tasks: Customize checklist based on variables or conditions. [12:27] Create automations to do fast integrations with other systems. [15:50] Document processes to do it right, the first time; but not slow you down. [17:23] Process breaks down and people start doing it their way, but don’t document or update their processes. [19:50] Track Changes: Capturing every change made to a process on the backend. [21:22] Process Street gets processes done faster and more accurately. [24:20] Everything becomes better; creates momentum, saves time, improves efficiency. [25:35] Process Street’s Support Channels: General, sales, and engineering. [26:47] Catch-22: Struggling to manage team, keep things organized, maintain culture, document processes, and systemize business to grow and move forward. [28:24] Pre-made Process Templates: Tenant move in and move out, tenant screening, property inspection, and landlords. [29:09] What's your process? Share, copy, paste, and optimize processes. [30:25] Process Street down the road: Future features to include role-based assignments, task permissions, and mobile app. Tweetables User experience and ease should always be at the top of the list with software. Once you’ve got that checklist, you can superpower it. What's your process? Share, copy, paste, and optimize processes. Resources Process Street Microsoft SharePoint SAP Workflow Oracle Fusion Zapier Basecamp AppFolio Salesforce Typeform Gravity Forms Podio DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive 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 very special guest, super excited about, head of a really cool software platform, Vinay Patankar. Welcome to the show. He is here representing Process Street. Vinay: Thank you, Jason. I'm excited to be here. Hey, everyone. Jason: Vinay, give everybody a little bit of background. How did Process Street come about? Let's start with you. What's your background in all of these? Vinay: Sure. My background is I've done a few things. I'm from Australia originally. I kind of worked in tech, worked in finance, work as a recruiter, started a couple of companies, and ended up on running a company that was a marketing agency. We're doing lead generation for consumer finance. Basically, driving leads for credit cards for Citigroup, and insurance for Geico and things like that. We basically had a very repetitive process where we were launching new campaigns on different ad networks. I'm running a lot of different tests, so maybe we're watching 20 or 30 different tests every day. At this point in time, we're working a lot with the new ad networks where maybe they hadn't released their API yet or essentially there wasn't much automation possible. A lot of that was being done manually. I had a team in India that was helping managing one of those campaigns. I basically had a lot of issues tracking all of that–delegating work, tracking that it was done, making sure that it was done correctly, getting visibility over the progress of all these tasks, which meant that I was staying up until 6:00 o'clock in the morning sometimes kind of working with my team in India and I got really frustrated. I was like, "Why isn't there a software that can just do these for me while I sleep?" That was the original pain that I was feeling. I knew that there were workflow products in the enterprise. I'd work with tools like Microsoft SharePoint, SAP Workflow, [...], and these very multi-million-dollar expensive products. I knew that they existed, and I understood, "Oh, yeah." You define a workflow then it's in a very controlled set of tracks. People just kind of follow it and execute it. This is how a lot of the really big businesses that have to manage thousands or tens of thousands of people like manage their processes. I'm like, "Why isn't there a tool that does this that is as easy to use as Gmail." That was kind of the original spark. I just wanted it for my own team to use. We built it as an internal tool, initially, and got my own company on it. Then, started showing it to people and it was like, "It's so cool." We kind of eventually spun that as a product and that was the beginning. Essentially, just scratching my own itch. Jason: You still have the agency stuff? Vinay: No. That's long gone. Jason: Okay. Great. Originally, this was built to fill a real need in a real-world situation and a real-world scenario which a lot of times the challenge with software is that it's not. It's built on some theory or idea by some nerd. When it comes to practical reality, it's got too many clicks. It's not super user-friendly. It becomes really cumbersome and confusing, but it does everything. It's got all these features and bells and whistles. In developing this, what's the philosophy behind the process and how do you balance that? Vinay: For sure. Awesome question. The kind of thing that you just said is exactly the problem with most of the incumbent products in our space. The products I've mentioned before like SharePoint and SAP Workflow and this and that, that's the exact problem. They were designed by business process analysts, by Six Sigma specialists, that come from the process engineering department in IBM or something. I've gone to business school, I've done MBAs, have a very specialized understanding of how business processes were supposed to work, understand how design a flow diagrams, and essentially, took what they learned in the university and put it on a computer. It's like took what they've drawn in a piece of paper and put it on a computer. It's interesting. That's actually how a lot of first-generation software was built. It’s like, "Let's take this thing we do offline and let's put it on a computer." The experience that you get on the paper is not necessarily the best experience that you have on a computer. You actually see that in a lot of products. The first-generation products were designed that way. My approach to it was user centric or basically, user first. The idea was we're not selling to people who have degrees and business information systems. We're selling to people that run property management companies or people that run a local restaurant, some of them runs a hotel, some of them runs a HR team or sales team or something. It's not necessarily people that have their specialize process department or enterprise. Our approach was what is going to be the easiest piece of software that we can make that people who have no education, no understanding, don't know what the processes is, don't know what the workflow is, never done any of that before in their life, or ever read anything about it, that they're going to be able to intuitively understand, pickup, and just use without requiring any kind of context or previous knowledge. That's the approach that we've been taking which is really this, "Can my grandmother figure this out?" kind of approach. Jason: Yeah. I think when it comes to anything complicated maybe for an eight-year-old or for grandma to do it, then there's resistance no matter who is doing it. If you're a high-functioning, quick-thinking, entrepreneur or you have a team member that English is the second language and they're overseas, regardless, it lubricates the process to have that ease. User experience and ease should always be at the top of the list with software. It's my number one qualifier for looking software, "Will my team actually use it? Will it be easy for them? How quick they adapt it?" Because adaption for software is one of the biggest challenges getting a team to actually use it. Vinay: Absolutely, yeah. Jason: Maybe you could explain what Process Street is for those that are listening because it's not just a process documentation platform which is great and awesome. There are platforms that are just for process documentation that are out there. When some people use their Google Drive to document processes, they put them all in documents and they've got screenshots and just texts. It's beyond that. It's got this benefit of being a checklist where there's accountability, there's a record, and there's history of the people actually using the process. It also is this workflow tool that can be directly integrated with your external tools through Zapier, third party systems. It can capture data instead of just be something that somebody refers to and looks at. It really does a lot of things. How would you describe Process Street to those that are just not familiar with it? Vinay: Yeah. It's tricky. We're almost in a new category here. The easiest way I explain it to normal people that don't know anything about processes or workflow or stuff like that. It's that we’re a superpower checklist. You have a checklist. This is something that needs to get done. Some of that, we have a checklist we want to follow. In property management, you have a checklist for every time a tenant moves in or a tenant moves out. We have a checklist every time we sign up a new landlord. Essentially, these are all the things we have to do, and we want to make sure that we remember to do, or someone on our team remembers to do every time a tenant moves in, a tenant moves out. "Make sure you do a background check. Make sure you get the contract signed. Make sure they get the keys. Make sure that you inspect the property." And this and that, right? It sounds simple. It's a simple way of explaining it. But then once, you have that checklist and you can build a checklist really fast–as fast as you can, just typing out a list of stuff in excel, or doc, or whatever. But then once you’ve got that checklist, you can superpower it. This is where the superpower is coming. You can have each of those steps and you can say, "Make sure the tenants get their keys." Inside that, you can have instructions. You can have, "This is where the keys are located. The keys are numbered this way." Once you've given them the key, go into here, fill-up this form, and make sure you got the tenant to sign in this book that they've received the keys and take photo of the book or something. Again, in each of these tasks, I can add in instructions on how to do the tasks. As you've mentioned before, you can add in form fields to actually collect data along the way. If you have a step that's like, "Collect the tenant’s information." You can type in the field, what's the tenants name, what's their address, what's the address of the house, and things like that. You can catalogue all their information that kind of turns similar to submitting a form or filling up a spreadsheet where you get all of that data in a tabular form, you can use that in the future for automations as we talked about. You can control rules around the tasks. Now, I have a checklist inside each task. I have different steps. I can have content. I can have form fields inside those steps. Now, I can start to create rules around tasks. Now I can say that, if it's an apartment building, add these tasks for, "Have a building key." If it's a house, hide that task for, "give building key." I can customize this checklist based on variables or conditions that are happening in the scenario. For example, is it a house or is it an apartment? Is it in suburb A or suburb B? Maybe there's a different agent or something else that has to happen based on that scenario. I can add handoff. I can say, "Wait until John collects the keys and then assign Brandy to go and call the landlord or return the keys." I can handoff steps. I can say when somebody needs to do something kind of handoff. I can create automations and due dates. I can say, "This task is due two days after the keys are given." Or, "This task is due three days before the staging date." Or, "This task is due two days after the staging date." I can start to create all these automations and controls around how the tasks work when they're ordered, automating when they become due related to other various events, handing off between different people in the team and stuff like that. I can create lots of automations and other systems from that data as well. For example, if somebody sent you an email, that's like, "Oh, I'm interested in your property." You can have that trigger automatically run your checklist. Now, every time I add a tag on this email, it runs the checklist automatically and copies all the details of the email into this checklist so that when I’m running through it, I’d have it all day. If I change something in my CRM or in my rent management system, if a lease expiry comes up in rent manager, you can use that to trigger and automatically launch a checklist. You can then have data from your checklist pushing to other systems. If I know for example, the tenant’s name, I've collected their name and their email, and the house address, I can take that data and I can put it into hello sign and I can generate a contract that automatically gets sent out for signature to that client. Once the signature is signed, it can come back and notify [...] triggers is actually a new feature in Zapier they just released which is find and update checklist. But now you don’t even have to wait for that signature to come back and then pull back in the signed document, save it to the checklist, checkoff the task signed by the tenant and hand it off to somebody else in the team to do the next task. We start to do all sorts of fast integrations with other systems once you get all that set-up. Jason: Okay. I want to paint a picture for those listening. I use Process Street in my own business. I started using it because I'd seen a lot of property managers using it. A lot of property managers said, "Hey, this is really intuitive. It's very easy to use," so I started using it. What really pushed me over the edge is we used Basecamp internally as a communications system and platform which it is great at, but it really isn't good for repetitive processes. We have more process documentation scattered throughout several different Basecamp projects for different teams, indexed documents, we had some on Google Drive, and it just got really crazy. There wasn't a central repository to go to. Just changing that alone was a game changer for us. Having one place, "Oh, did you look in Process Street? It's in there. Everybody can go to that." What really pushed me over the edge though was I had spoken with a gentleman and I told you before this call, I remember his name, his name was Bob Abbott. Bob is a property manager. he was telling me how he runs his company. He's got his profit margin to 65% in his business by using Filipino labor and by using Process Street. He showed me how he uses it. We had some really cool conversations geeking out because we're both kind of nerdy. That's almost unheard of in the property management industry to create that sort of margin. It's very possible to do in property management because there's a lot of systemized things, there's a lot of repetitive things, and there's a lot of things where you need somebody manually to do stuff. You can give them the processes and the checklist to do it. One of the conversations we had which I think is an important balance to strike is, with my team, we want to document processes to the point where a beginner could do it the right way the first time. We also want to balance that with, we don't want it to slow them down once they know it. Just like driving a car. The very first time somebody drives a car, they're probably checking all their mirrors, adjusting their seat, and doing all this stuff. After they get used to that, they'll probably just hop in and drive. With us, with our team, we try to make our processes as few steps as possible, but as many as necessary to create that balance, so it doesn't get in the way when our experienced team members are trying to use it but to show record that they've done these tasks for this particular client or used this particular case or situation. What I've really noticed that’s brilliant is that just by having a process that’s actually used to do the process and your team is required to use the process to show record that they’ve done it, the process gets better overtime. What happens, I've noticed, in the business is I create a process document in the past, give it to a new team member, they would look at it and say, "Well, this is outdated." It always ends up being outdated because nobody's using it on a daily basis. Then, we have to fix it and adjust it, and then they learn how to use that. Once they get familiar with it, they never look at it anymore unless they forget something. What happens over time, the process breaks down. They'll start doing their own things. They start changing it. They figure out some innovations. They think innovations. Maybe it's worse, maybe it's better, but that isn't captured in the process. Then, if they quit or you lose them, our goal before they quit or leave, we've got them to update their processes because they weren't using it. There's this huge advantage, I've noticed, in just having the team use the actual process software that the processes in and going through each time. If there's a change that needs to be made, we can adjust it, they can adjust it, if I give them the permission to. We can improve it over time. Just the clarity in taking all of our processes in to where they're actually usable as a checklist is a huge step from having just the process you think is documented well enough to somebody actually being able to use it. It's a big leap and that leap has caused us to significantly change all of the processes that we brought over into it, so far. Vinay: That's awesome. What we find is that as you continue to iterate your processes over time, that's really when they become more valuable. I think that's normal for most systems. You can go look at the enterprise companies, their processes are some of their most valuable pieces of IP because they've been so refined over so many thousands of customers or years or whatever. They're now really, really valuable and they’re kind of like protected secrets for that organization. Some cool things you can do, for example, if you have 10 checklists running and you're onboarding 10 different landlords, or you’re moving in 10 different tenants, and you do want to make a change. One of your PMs comes back and says, "Hey, I noticed that this is incorrect," or "This needs to be clear if we do it this way." You could update the process and you can live pushout that update to all the 10 tenants. If you have 10 people in the field at the moment, even when we have no way of knowing, they can be in a car and by the time they get of their car, their house, and they open the process, it's got a new step in there. The steps change a little bit and now they'll just follow the adjusted step. You don’t need to run a training program, don't need to send out an email, it's just kind of like, "Oh, the process is updated. Let's do it." On the backend, it's actually not exposed right now but on the backend, we're actually tracking all these changes for you. Every time you're making a change to one of your processes, we're capturing those changes in the backends’ versions. We're working on dashboards that will let you see how the output of your process changes overtime as you iterate it. It's like, "Oh. It's taking us two weeks to onboard a landlord when we did version one of this. Now, it's a version 100. It's only taking us four days or something." You kind of see, as you continue to iterate your process over time, how they're improving or how they're affecting other metrics. That's pretty cool as well. One of the things we're really excited about, it's kind of a big part of the vision of the platform, is around what you said before where there are some processes where maybe you don't want to add extra work to somebody to their task. We definitely have a lot of processes like that. A good example is answering support tickets. We don't want somebody to run a checklist on every single support ticket that they're answering especially once they're in the roll after a while. They know how it works. But we do want them to do it for trainings. We want them to run that checklist for their reference or something as they're going through getting used to it. It's pretty important for us an our organization. We actually have everybody in the company do support when they come in. That's an example of what we just want people to run at the beginning. What we're really moving towards is we're trying to make our processes actually reduce the amount of time that it takes to get that process done. When you're using Process Street, it's actually less time to get that process done than if you were to not use the Process Street process. That's our ideal scenario. Not only is it faster for it to get done, but things got done more accurately; things got done in a higher detail way. A good example is we have a sales proposal processes where we send out a proposal for a price point for a set of users if we’re working on enterprise deal. For the rep, basically, what they have to do is they have to come in to their CRM, click a link in the CRM which launches a process, then they've got to fill in a few pieces of info. From that, it pools in a lot of information automatically from the client. All the client's details are filled out automatically. They don't have to do any of that. They've got to put a few things like how many users do they want, what's the price that we agreed upon, or do they want a one-year deal or a two-year deal, kind of things like that. They basically just punch in a few things in the process, really quickly, just takes 20 seconds. That then hands-off automatically to their manager who then looks at the proposal and approves it inside Process Street. Once that's approved, it creates a whole kind of proposal with all these multiple checkboxes and things that can get signed. It will probably take you 30 minutes to set up if you're going to go through the whole thing yourself. It goes back and it updates the CRM. It creates opportunities and changes the statuses, the confidence, it makes the proposal sent, and puts in links to the proposal, and updates all this information whether the proposal is sent out. That whole thing, for a rep to do that manually, to go customize a Word doc, [...], mapping all the fields, sent it out, go to the CRM, update all these different fields in the CRM, and follow up tasks and all this stuff, it takes them 30 minutes or an hour or something. With the Process Street process, they can do it in less than a minute. We're actually working on trying to build processes that actually significantly make you faster and more accurate to use the platform than without. Obviously, it can't happen for every kind of process. You can't completely automate going to a house and inspecting it. There’s a pretty manual aspect to that but for the ones that we can, that are very digital, we are trying to [...] as possible. Jason: Yeah. Sales people are notoriously known for not leaving good notes, not wanting to deal with software too much. Any burden you can take off their plate, software-wise, is a big win. You're saving money every single time. Vinay: For you though, as a business owner or as the team leader in sales, there's way more benefit than that. If you can shave off these minutes or hours off each of your reps like a week, it's just not a pure timesaving thing. They bill more so they would actually close more deals in that period of time. It creates more momentum for the whole team because the whole team bills more. The whole team saving time and building more which kind of creates this whole pause and momentum of like then you're able to hire better reps and you're more able to expand territories, this and that. Everything just becomes better. It's actually a pretty good lesson in most of your teams. If you can really get the operations piece tight; you can get your processes tight–your sales operations, your marketing operations, your support operations—it makes the whole team compounding much more efficient. It makes your whole organization much more attractive to other people because you don’t want to come in to a place that's a whole giant mess where they just going to have to be spending all their time copying and pasting stuff and dealing with spreadsheets. You'll be able to hire much more high-quality people. You'll be able to execute a much larger amounts of projects and whatnot. It’s just kind of all your infrastructures to sell it. Jason: Yeah. You've mentioned that you have everybody that come in and do support. Do you have your developers do support on a regular basis, so they have to live inside this tool and deal with support-related things? Vinay: Yeah. We have different support channels. We have general support, sales support, and engineering support. Engineering do kind of work in engineering support. It's generally more complicated problems versus how much does the product cost or things like that but they’re generally dealing with a more complicated [...], something with the API or something like that. Yeah, they’re in support as well. Jason: Interesting. Property managers that are listening, a lot of times, what ends up happening is there's two, I call them the first two sand traps. The first major sand trap of property manager falls into in the solopreneur stage, they get to maybe 50 or 60 units under management. They're doing it mostly on their own. They're struggling to figure things out. Then the first thing they think of doing is getting people like hiring people. People are so expensive. Having a tool like this could immediately allow them to outsource into offload and create some leverage in their business. Where it becomes even more necessary, I think for a tool like Process Street, is when you get into that 2-400 door category which is kind of the next sand trap that they fall into, this is where they’ve got a team now. They're struggling to manage this team, they're struggling to keep things organized, they're struggling to maintain some semblance of culture, and their big challenge right now is documentation. It's almost always a big challenge. They need to document their processes, they need to systemize the business, it’s this huge constraint that's limiting their ability to grow and move forward. By then, it becomes critical for them to get something like this in place where they've got a really good processes, really good documentation, and really good clarity as a team as what's actually being done. Vinay: Yeah, absolutely. It's a bit of a Catch-22 situation because you've got more work going on when you're in that next level of business because you got more customers and more doors. You kind of feel like you've got less time to work in your processes, but your processes are more important at that point of the company. I think the point in your CRM or whatever is probably a similarly stressful project to undertake but once it's done, you're very happy to do it. You might feel that you're underwater right now, but that's probably a good sign that you need to work on some of the processes. If you're that underwater because you won't be able to scale that way. The other thing that we have that helps a lot with data is we have tons of templates. We actually create pre-made process templates. We've got a whole bunch in property management. We've got some generic ones around it. Some of those mentioned, tenants move in and move out, tenant screening, property inspection, and landlords. We also have some ones that are like, "Oh, this is how you do it if your system is AppFolio," or something like that. It’s kind of like more generic ones and ones where you can kind of switch in and interacting with your different property management systems. That actually helps a lot if you do feel like you're really underwater, and you don't know where to start with your documentation, you don't have any time for this, "Come check out their offer." You come and check out all the different property management templates that we have and that's a really good starting point. Jason: Yeah. You can also share your process with other people. You can ask another property manager, "Hey, what's your process?" If they're using Process Street and they can share that with you, and you can immediately import it in your tool which is cool. It has a lot of really cool features. If you're on one of the higher plans, you can also do that context sensitive [..] statements. If a certain task is complete in a certain way, you can expose or hide certain other steps to make it faster or more hyper relevant to what needs to be done then. You can get as crazy with this as you want which I think is fascinating or you can be simple as just having a few steps with the couple screenshots and some texts. Immediately, I think, anybody could take whatever processes they currently have, bring it over, copy, and paste it in. Then, they can start optimizing it. I've even taken just checklist in a text document of steps, you can just paste that in and it spits it out as each separate step. It really is a rapid tool for getting processes built out. It's been a game changer for those that have implemented it especially those that just didn't have anything. It's a huge leap, huge step up. What's on the horizon for Process Street? What else do you think those that are managing property should know about Process Street? Vinay: A couple of things we have coming up is, one thing that I know a lot of our property management customers are excited about, we have hundreds and hundreds–I don't even know how many–of property management companies all the way from single person operators up to we have big teams in [...] and Keller Williams and stuff like that. We do work with a lot of property management companies. One of the ones that they're really excited about is a feature called role-based assignments. Right now, you can predefine on a checklist who needs to do what. You can say, "Either Bob in finance needs to do this collect payment task or the finance team needs to do this collect payment task." You can say, "The property management agent needs to do these four tasks at the beginning." But the way that it was right now is you could only indicate that this person has to do these four tasks. It gets a little bit tricky when you have a team of property managers. One property comes in, it needs to get assigned to Manager A. Another property comes in, it needs to get assigned to Manager B. Another one comes in gets assigned to property Manager C. You want to rotate your assignments, or you want to map who's the account manager on this and make sure that the correct account manager is assigned to that. We have now a feature called role assignments. At the beginning of the checklist, you kind of have a dropdown that says, "Who is the PM that is responsible for this account?" You can select that and that will automatically assign all the property management, PM-related tasks to that particular PM. You can maybe say like, "Who's their district manager? Who's their regional manager?" That will might assign some of the approval tasks to their particular manager for that PM that you selected. Instead of saying, "This task is always assigned to Bob." It's like, "This task is assigned to a property manager. I just don't know exactly which person on the team is going to be that. I'll assign it out later or I'll use the type of automation to assign that." For example, if I click this on Salesforce or I click this from one of my property management systems, I could look at who's the logged in user or who's the user that owns this account. I could automatically push in that email address into the process and automatically assign all those tasks to that particular person. Actually, a really cool one for this is, there's actually two cool features that just came out. Now, the features that came out is called task permissions. What task permissions do is it lets you control who can see specific tasks in the checklist. I have 10 tasks. I can say that, "Right now, anybody who comes into the checklist can see all the tasks in the checklist." I can say, "I want the property manager to see these five tasks. I want the manager to see these three tasks. I want the finance to see this one task." What's really cool is you can bring in the actual tenant or you can bring in the landlord as a guest into the system. It's like a free user that you can bring in. You can say, "I just want the landlord to see this one task at the top of these two tasks." It's like, "Fill in some form fields here, tell me your property, your address, and some information about when you want someone to come see you. Sign this contract here and then, done." Those two steps are exposed to the landlord. Then your team can come in afterwards, pick it up, and continue it out. "Let's do a background check on this person, a credit check, or whatever," and start doing internal steps. You now can break up the process and have external people, some internal people, an internal manager, all kind of working on the same process but not seeing all the information. It’s kind of being siloed into their own tasks and things that they need to see. That's pretty cool for bringing in landlords or tenants if you need them to upload documents or complete any complicated set of forms. It's really useful. You can @ mention them, have conversations with them. You can reject their uploads and say, "Do it again. Do it again." A lot of these gets done over hundreds of emails back and forth, and they always seem to get lost. It's really cool managing that. Another big project we're working is the mobile app. I think a lot of people will like that too. Jason: Yeah. Very cool. I think a lot of the systems that we have that feed into the Process Street were using some sort of a third-party form like Typeform or Gravity Forms and then, we're feeding in in that. You're saying it'll be possible or even easier to have tenants or clients to submit things through... Vinay: Yeah. They could do that whole form into a task inside the process and just expose one task or two tasks to those clients. You wouldn’t even use those external forms anymore. Jason: You want the client or the tenant to see, call the client up, and say these things because then it seems disingenuous. Vinay: Exactly. You could be doing an interview and you have notes on the interview and stuff like that. There's a lot of things where you want that wall of privacy. Someone can submit a leave application or an expense approval or something like that. You want to be able to have a conversation with HR or conversation with the manager just about the person who submitted it get seen. Jason: Yeah. I think in some way, if I create a process, if I put a video in there, I have checklist steps, there's so much clarity and transparency for my team to know how to get work done that they don’t have to come to me. Any question, as an entrepreneur, that we get asked once by our team is going to be asked again. Unless, it's documented somewhere. Every single one of those interruptions cost you at least 50 minutes a time. Every single one of those interruptions may take, each time you're training somebody or bringing somebody new, if that's not systemized, it can take you hours. The only way to really move forward with the business is to create a business that is somehow scalable. In order to do that, the foundation is having some SOPs in place; having some Standard Operating Procedures, having some process documentation. I think the brilliance of Process Street is adding that layer of accountability in mixing it in a checklist, having people move through a process, and being able to see who has done what for that transparency. Is there anything else that people listening should now about Process Street before we wrap this up? Vinay: Just that it's free to check out and that you should go sign up for free account at www.process.st. Jason: Alright. Cool. Check out Process Street. It's process.st. Vinay, thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show. Really great to have you here. Vinay: Absolutely. It's been great. Thanks for having me. Jason: Alright. Cool. For those of you that are listening, I do recommend you check Process Street. It is a really nice blend between ease and what's easy. I think it's a software that once you get into it, it's very intuitive, easy for people to figure it out, so don't be afraid. If you are a nerd, you really geek out on tech, and automation, I think it has plenty there to satisfy you. I think they’re coming out with some cool new things that will give Podio, another system, a run for their money. That'll get a little too complicated for most people. Check that out. If you're a DoorGrow Hacker and you've enjoyed the show, make sure to like and subscribe if you're watching in YouTube. Make sure on iTunes that you give us a real review. We're going to appreciate that. Everybody listening, if you are a property management business owner and wants to grow your business, make sure you get inside our DoorGrow Club by going to doorgrowclub.com and join our free Facebook group and our awesome community. Again, thanks to Vinay. Thanks to everybody that's been checking out this show and listening. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Searching here, searching there...How do investors find rental properties that align with their financial goals? Is there a way to provide them access to these assets? Today, I am talking with Dan Ganguly, president of HomeUnion and founder of INVESTimate. As an entrepreneur, he’s always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. So, if a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, a property manager needs a feed of investment properties to present to potential buyers. You’ll Learn... [04:05] Questions for Investors: What’s your budget? Risk preference? Age and stage in life? Do you need cash? [05:13] Two Brands Connected: HomeUnion’s where investors search for properties; INVESTimate’s where property managers and realtors work with investors. [06:30] Business Model Change: Internet-only to tool that increases engagement between property managers dealing with investors. [07:43] Where to Start: Build a relationship sooner than later in the sales cycle process. [09:00] Help property managers build better Websites as a front door for people. [13:53] What does the local property manager do? Signs up with service, pays monthly fee, and puts on private/white labels. [14:58] Realtor gets MLS feed for home buying; property manager gets MLS feed with intelligent filters and big data for investment buying. [15:15] Everybody knows their #1 prospect is their existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you. [16:12] Other Options: MLS, Zillow, and similar Websites focus on finding stuff (schools, pools, etc.) that get people into a neighborhood. [16:35] INVESTimate: Offers big data platform with 110 million properties, 20 years of transactions, 200,000 neighborhoods, and more than 9 million rentals. [19:30] Is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual. [20:15] INVESTimate: Investors get best of both worlds when making a transaction. [21:45] Different risk-reward gradients/categories help people make the right decision. [26:45] Feedback from Property Managers: How has this changed their business? [32:05] Bottom Line: Business owners make money, get a door, and much more. Tweetables It’s a fish net to grab fish, and then we nurture the fish until they buy. Your #1 prospect is an existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you. We can’t force them to buy, but give them a reason and product to buy. Bottom Line: Business owners make money and get a door. Resources HomeUnion INVESTimate MLS Zillow Realtor.com DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. And today, I have a very special guest. I’m hanging out here with Don Ganguly. Don is the CEO of Homeunion, is that correct? Don: Yeah. I’m the president of Homeunion and founder of Investimate. Jason: President and the founder of Investimate. Don, I want to welcome you to being here on the Door Grow Show. Don: I’m glad to be here. Jason: Don, you have an interesting background. You have a lot of experience in entrepreneurism, I think people would be really interested here some tidbits from you today, and some insights. I’m excited to get it into your business and service. But let’s start with you. Can you give us a little background on you and just some of your experience and what lead you to where you are now in business? Don: Sure. I’m sort of a vocationally reformed engineer. This is my third company. The last one we did was actually an outsourcing service company for mortgage banks and services. We were actually helping originators doing the big boom and people [...] were getting a loan. When everything fell apart we were helping the services service those loans and try to keep people in their houses. We touched I think over $75 billion of service. That company ended up getting sold to Oracle, to a banking software company. But it was the progenitor to this whole Homeunion and Investimate thing that we founded because we were able to see all these properties all over the country that had some pretty decent prices and a good rental price ratio. When we looked at that, we figured there are all these homes that made good investments and people that live in the coast don’t get access to these assets. We looked at that and said, “Is there a way that we could provide access to rental properties the way people buy stocks and bonds?” If you look at the way rental properties are bought, we base them a little how homes are bought. So people go to a listing site, they get a list of properties, they do some back and beyond below calculations, figure out the rent, go to the neighborhood, or pick up the neighborhood, call a realtor, and then bounce around and try to find the right property that they like. If you’re look at an analog to that and say, “Hey, if you go to a wealth advisor and say, ‘I’ve got this much money to invest, what should I buy?’” The wealth advisors are going to say, “Okay. I got some stocks, here’s the idea, and here’s the score, here’s Apple, here’s Facebook, which one of these do you think you want in your portfolio and let’s go through a list.” The question they ask you often is, “Hey, what’s your budget? What’s your risk preference? What’s your age and state in life? Do you need cash?” And then they put a portfolio together that’s got a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it all enlines to your financial goal. We took that playbook and we brought it to this Investimate product that we built which says, “We can ask investors the same type of questions about their real estate investments and then let the system go out and find the right assets and build them a portfolio or a set of assets that need those financial criteria.” The non trivial exercise because to do that, we actually had to calibrate everything from a risk and reward stand point. Right? How risky is this house? And what’s in that house type of thing. That’s how we came to this. As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. Often, the existing stakeholders don’t have the answers. You got to think of something a little bit different. That’s how we got into this business. Jason: Help us understand these two brands, how they’re connected first and what they are. Just the overview. Don: No, I’m happy to. Homeunion used to be a retail platform where investors can come in and basically search for properties and invest. The first incarnation of Homeunion, we were actually serving as overall asset managers for these properties and then farming out the actual work to property managers on the ground. And then last year we made the call, it was becoming too big a business for us. We’ve done over 200 other transactions and we didn’t want to be in property management. We ended up giving those properties out to the property managers that were managing it, productized it and provided it as a platform for property managers and realtors that are working with investors. The product itself has been tested for four and a half years, it’d done $200 million of transaction within 5% of forecast and a good use by investors to buy properties all around the country, highly exercised. What we just see is the business model from being an internet only model that brought consumers to my front door to a product that would then serve people like property managers who are actually dealing with investors day to day, giving them a tool to engage with their investors. That’s the connection between the two. The Homeunion brand is an internal user of the investment product. So any leads that come in there are fed to our property management partners in various locations because we are not in the business. When we engage with that investor and they want to buy a property, then that property is managed by one of our partners. Both of them actually feed into the advantage of the property management tool. Jason: Let’s take our typical listeners. We’ve got a property management business owner, they got a small business, maybe they’ve got 100-200 doors on their management. They’re wanting to grow their business, they’re trying to deal with team changes, and staffing, and operations, and trying to systemize things for the first time ever. And then we have these solutions available that they can use to support in bringing investors. Where would they start with your services? Don: Yes. If I look at businesses such as yours and others, you’re helping them grow doors. How do you grow doors? You grow doors by finding more investors and having investors buying more doors, right? The property manager either at the bottom of the food chain which is that when the investors already bought that property, then they put their hand up and compete with four other property managers and say, “I’m the best guy in this market and you should come and put your property with me.” Or they can be more proactive and go up the food channel and up that funnel and have a conversation with the investor when the investor starts looking for that property. Be early in the solutions process. What happened to them is if you’re at that point in the fulcrum then you are actually able to participate in the property management process more naturally rather than doing it after the fact. Jason: If you’re part of this process earlier in the sales cycle then they’re going to have this relationship with you that’s already set and you’re by default mostly going to get the management contract. Don: You got it. Because you've been partnering with them ahead of time. At the same token, let me just take the other side of the coin there, the good work that you’re doing and others are doing is that saying, “Okay, listen, you need to market your business in some fashion. You need to get traffic on your website. You need to put content up.” There are various stakeholders that are helping property managers build better websites, you have a business in that, and a better front door for people to come in. When those people come in, then what do you have for them? That’s where we come in. I’ll give you a simple analog. If you’re a realtor, what do you need? You need an idea speed to your local MLS. Otherwise you can’t show any property. When a company comes in and says, “Hey, I want to buy from you.” If you have a website that doesn’t show any properties or you don’t have an ability to send that buyer of homes to buy then you can’t participate. It’s a minimum stake for a realtor. Jason: [...] tool. Don: If I am an “investor realtor” and that sort of property management, if I’m catering to investors then I need an ability to serve up investment properties or properties that are more likely to be good investment. Or put another way, I need to give you an investment lens through which to look at these properties so that you can then engage in buying a rental property through my system. If I don’t have that then I’m back to the bottom of the food chain because I’m searching here, I’m searching there, I’m doing all of these. If a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, I think a property manager needs a feed of investment properties that it can present to its potential buyer, if the property manager wants to jump up the food chain. That’s what Investimate provides. If you’re a property manager in a particular market and we’re in 15 or 16 markets around the country, we have real time connections to the local lifting services, what we would do is we would white label Investimate for your website so it would say, “ABC Property Manager” with your logo and your color on the front. When you use Door Grow or another service to drive investors to your website, then they come in and they have a way to search for rental properties in your patch or around the country, if you allow them to. Because you still get a referral fee for that and engage with you in that fashion. That’s one part of it. The second part is if you look at the realtors and I go back to the home buying because everyone gets that business. If you go to the home buying end of the business, what happens? The realtors are all over that bill when it reels its head. When a home buyer says I want to buy, you have a short window in which to grab that person and about 20 realtors are all over it from leads, from various places. The name of the game and how quickly can I get that person. On the investment side, nobody wakes up and says, “I just have to buy rental property in the next 24 hours. Otherwise I’m going to have a hissy fit of some kind.” That doesn’t quite work that way. When people make that decision saying, “Hey, maybe I should be in real estate, I know a lot of wealth is built that way. I should be out of the stock market, or I’ve already bought two properties, I think it’s time for me to buy another one. I got some excess cash.” What they need is a steady dive of stuff that fits their preferences and in nurturing. It’s very different from the home buying. The investment platform actually comes with a set of campaign management and a set of investor support services. When you’re under Investimate, and you’re a customer of ABC Property Management. So you come in and say I’m Jason. You register you start using the site, we call you and say, “Jason, we’re investment support with ABC Property Management, we’re here to help you use the system and help you understand what’s in here.” You get acclimatized with the system, you understand what it is, we get an idea of your preferences and the system also captures your preferences. Now, you’ve told me you like sci-fi movies or romcom and I now keep sending you scifi and romcom till one day you watch that movie, because that’s how investors work. They drip feed them until they put their hand up and say, “That’s probably interesting.” Now I got to buy box. Once I get that buy box, then I call ABC Property Manager and say, “Hey, I’ve got Jason who’s got X amount to invest. He’s looking in Austin. This is sort of his buy box, this is the sort of the property he’s looking for. Please help him out and do the local due diligence.” We serve that lead up at that point. It’s the website, it’s a set of intelligence filter that connects to the local listing service, and it’s a whole analytics lens that allows them to search like they would search with stocks and bonds. I can get more into the data side of it, it’s much deeper than that. To answer your question what does that local property manager do? He signs up with the service, it’s a small monthly fee, and he private labels it, white labels it on his website, and he’s off to the races. The way we make money, really, most of it is from when there’s a successful transaction. What we ask for them is to load whatever lead customers they have into that proprietary database that always stays there on and then these people as they come in, it’s a fishnet to grab fish, and then we nurture those fish ‘til they buy. It’s a long term way to keep their brand in front of customers and leads and others. I’ll tell you something that a lot of the property managers are working with, not only loading customers, they’ll think, “Hey, here is a whole bunch of people we touched in the last five years. We didn’t do business with them but we touched them in some fashion. I want those registered to me.” And a lot of them wake up and are prospect of buying stuff. All because once you see the product then they’ll say, “Yeah. I’m interested and I will use this to buy something.” That’s what we bring to the tables. What a realtor gets from a strict MLS feed for home buying, a property manager gets an MLS feed with a bunch of intelligent filters and big data for investment buying. That’s what we’re doing. Jason: I love the idea. Everybody listening knows or should know that their number one prospect is your existing customer. They already know you, trust you, and like you. You’re already probably managing a property for them. They’re one of the most likely to do business with you again, and if you have opportunities, a property’s available and they’re already investors, it would be a very easier thing to get them into an additional property. They’re going to have a high level of trust with you. If you have this easy pull of properties that they could see and view and they’re getting dripped, and they’re getting notified, and they’re in your funnel and system here, then eventually something is going to grab them. They’re going to go, “Hey, this looks like a deal I could sink my teeth into. I’m going to go for this.” For the skeptics that are listening, you’ve got the property managers that also do real estate and they’ve already got the MLS and they’re like, “Wow, why don’t I just put the MLS on.” And they can just look for property, any property. Let’s really clarify the difference between just having the MLS and having the Investimate tool. Don: Great question. The MLS or Zillow or Realtor.com or any of these sites, are geared towards you looking for school pools, stuff that gets you into a neighborhood to live in. What we did is we created a big data platform where we have 110 million properties, we have the entire US Housing Stock, we have 20 years of transactions. We have 200,000 neighborhoods, we have an initiative here with University of California where we collect over 9 million rentals all over the internet so we could put that into our model, and we do a couple of different things with it. We process over $200 billion of properties to bill them out. What we do with it is first thing we’ve done is we calibrated neighborhoods from A to D as a neighborhood investment grading. Think of this as a bond grading so the D is not, we’re not in D neighborhood. C is not necessarily saying it’s a bad neighborhood, it just says it’s a neighborhood that’s a little bit more volatile, you get in with the lower quantum of money, it’s a high yield property, that neighborhood property isn’t going to give you as much growth. But you can pull me a portfolio depending on what else you’re trying to buy. An E neighborhood has a higher quantum of investment. It’s a more expensive neighborhood, view is not going to be that great, and you are going to see a lot more growth. The question is should I buy Apple stock at $800 and buy five units of Apple stocks or should I buy something that’s $50 and buy hundred units of it? Or should I do a little bit of both? We’ve given them a risk reward calibration so they can look at both of these things. Then we forecast, we have a model that estimates the rent. We have a rent valuation model, we have a cascade waterfall where we compare to [...] and a bunch of other things to say here’s a range of the rent. We then estimate the price and see if it’s above or below what we model the price to be at. Based on that we come up with a big range on their property. Then, we provide a con of rich neighborhood information on the renter. If you go to an investment, you’ll see how much money do the renters make, what’s the average income, how come they can afford the rent, where are the rents on this neighborhood, am I an outlier rent? Once my renter goes, “I’ll never be able to fulfill it because I’m the only guy in that neighborhood where my renter’s paying higher among everybody.” There’s a ton of good strategic data and there’s price trends and rent trends on that neighborhood. When investors go in, it’s a shame when you look at the stock. What’s my risk in this stock? What’s the previous growth has been? What’s my dividend play? What had done historically? What is it expected to do? What other research can I get around it? It’s that one place where all that information is encapsulated. The potential rental property buyers are doing what [...]. They’re going to go to Zillow, find new property, we’re doing a back of the napkin, going to a rental meter, finding the rent and then coming back, going to a realtor, looking at the neighborhood, they don’t like it, go to another one. We put all of that into one piece on the back of big data. Like in many model, is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual. You and I may be living next door to each other and you’ve done a lot of great things in your property. You may be a little bit different than mine. How do we do that? The property manager solved that last mile problems. The model, the data helps them create a buy box, instead of guard rails, instead of neighborhood, it’s a type of property. And then the property manager goes and then says, “Yes, the data is right on this one. The renter’s exactly what we said.” or “You know what, this property is gutted on the inside and it’s not going to work.” It’s a combination of that site, of the platform, and the local property manager at the point of purchase. Investimate, you get the best of both in terms of making a transaction. Now, why is the property manager the best partner? Because he or she has to manage that property afterwards. They’re not going to go in and say yeah, the rent’s going to be $2,000, no problem. The moment it closes, then they come back and say the rent’s $1,500, that’s the beginning of the end as far as their whole credibility goes. All that big data is underlying the investment lens of [...], just going in that a little bit more. When we look at the MLS, we pull the listing services every 30 minutes. It’s real time. We apply 50 to 60 different filters to pull stuff in. We exclude stuff. If they’re common, if we don’t like them, we exclude those things, exclude D neighborhood. There’s a set of filters that go in, then we [...] the rich data, then there’s a que where a set of eyeballs do a quality check. Then, it makes it into the platform. It’s a highly curated investment focused platform that’s available for the property manager to showcase to his or her client. Jason: Alright, that was a great explanation. Basically, what I’m hearing is this is like MLS. It includes all the MLS stuff but it’s better. It includes more tools, more resources geared specifically towards the investor, and they’re able to make decisions. This is maybe a random question but I’m really curious about these different gradients or different categorizations that you have of risk reward and how are people making this decision whether they want As or Ds? Don: It really depends on the risk profile, at the end of the day. If you go for a C property, when do you buy a Triple C bond? A Triple C bond is a high yield bond for sure, because it’s not an A bond. But when you buy Triple C bond, you also know that there could be defaults, there could be things that wreck your returns. You’re getting that high yield to compensate for the risk. When you buy a Triple A bond, it’s more deterministic. In a higher end neighborhood, you’ve got rents that are not quite as high to the ratio of the property price, but you’ve got renters that tend to be more stable, that have been there longer period of time, and their homes tend to appreciate. But it requires more money to get in. It all depends in the investor’s personal preferences, are they looking for money now, are they looking more to build a portfolio and after 15 years when it’s all paid off that’s [...]. Are they looking for growth where they wanna spin around and flip it in five years? That’s a whole different discussion, they you go after more growth properties. You need at least five years for real estate before you cover all your transaction costs, or three plus years. It just totally depends on the investment and their requirements. They might buy some properties for cash flow, they might buy some for growth, and they might buy some that’s in between. We hear investors say hey, I need cash flow, that’s my number one determinant. Other investors might say I don’t really need any money right now, but I wanna build up a portfolio that will grow and be safe. Others will say I need to cover my mortgage, and maybe make a little bit of money, then the balance in the middle, but I really need properties that are going to appreciate. I don’t really care about cash flow, but I don’t want to be out of pocket. Those decisions then drive the type of properties, neighborhoods, locations, cities they end up with. Jason: In your platform, curious, what do you see being the most popular for the investors that are typically using this with property managers in that categorization? Don: Where people buy, 40% is what I call the B neighborhoods, 40% are on the C neighborhoods which are the high yield neighborhoods, and 20% are the As. As are obviously more expensive, and your buy will shrink when you get to the A neighborhood. That’s roughly what I see. Jason: Got it. This would obviously work for non-property managers that are using it. Maybe their intention is just to use and look at this for their own stuff, or to look for flips, or turnkeys, or different types of deals than just some sort of long term management situation. Don: It would work for realtors, any realtors that’s dealing with investors, they are also using the platform. We’ve got a number of realtors that signed up. The realtor piece is a little bit different. I’d sell you a home and you’re not going to buy another home from me for the next 7 to 10 years typically, I’m not going to come every year and sell you a home. Once I sell you a home, if I’m smart, I know you could be a potential investor. I say hey, if you’re looking for rental properties now, here’s a site that gives you local and national rental properties, and I’ll help you out with it. For the realtor, it becomes a cross sell. For a property manager, it’s an upsell, it’s one more property or a new guy coming in. But for the realtor it’s a cross sell to a customer or lead that already spent the money getting that customer or the lead. Now you say what else can I get out of their wallet? And this product does that. In terms of flippers, we’re not really geared towards flippers. We’re not showing the big distressed assets out there that you can find and rehab. The big thing for the flippers are rehab numbers. How much do I have to put into this property to actually make money on it? I’m buying it $40,000 on the market, I put $20,000 in it so I’m already in $20,000. I can make another $20,000 because I can sell it at market. That requires on the ground running around and understanding what those rehab cost. They can use the system to identify stuff, I’m sure. But at the end of the day, I think these are people driving around neighborhoods or trying to find distressed assets that need that. There’s not an inordinate focus and people on that on that platform, just because our partners are not really chasing those types of deals. We need a partner on the ground for this, solving the last model. Any investor can come in and use it for sure. Jason: Property managers that are already working with you and using your system in doing this, what sort of changes or feedback or results have you been hearing from them? What are they noticing and how has this changed their business? Don: One thing a lot of them are noticing is that a lot of their customers or their leads are waking up and they are engaged in looking at properties. There’s two, three things they’re saying. One is they’re making offers and new properties, in some cases they’re selling properties to the system which helps the property manager get a listing. They get that listing, and if the investor is selling the property, they can get to keep the property management because it’s a rental property that they’re selling it as and they’re not kicking out the renter going to a homeowner. I think a lot of people like that because there’s no erosion or churn of their portfolio from that perspective. Jason: What’s happening is even though properties are selling, which would normally turned into a property management business, they’re able to retain the management contracts and keep the tenants in place. Don: That’s right. Jason: Love it. Don: For those investors that are willing to do that, there’s some that will want to sell in the open market for whatever reason. I think if we can increase the velocity of this, and as more and more people get connected to the investment network when you push something into that, it goes across, gets eyeballs everywhere. It may move a lot faster because the investment on the other end will want a rental property that’s already rented with a track record of history from that property manager, because the property manager will be able to give us what’s been happening in the last two or three years in performance on this property. That becomes a lot more attractive than to buy a new one and then do all this stuff to it. Jason: So this is a proven property, they’re able to see that it’s rent rolled effectively, and this extends the reach then of this ability far beyond what the local MLS would provide because investors would be out of state and beyond are able to see this opportunity. Don: And realtors are not that interested in selling rental properties to investors. The MLS and stuff like that, they get the least amount of attention from realtors. Putting it on this platform puts many more eyeballs. We get 120,000 users on the platform today. Remember, we’ve been at this for four years, four and a half years. As the assigning of these property managers, they’re going into this. The [...] account is increasing dramatically month over month. Out of that, not everyone’s a buyer today but big enough sample size there that people would look at it and say this is something I want to buy. And the more product you put in there, the better you are. Jason: Say they sign up, how easy is this to get connected into the website? Is it just some javascript code snippet that would be added to a page, or just some HTML like an iframe… Don: Good question. It’s not iframe, it’s a hyperlink linked with their subdomain that gets added to their website and we can put it right over… For example the DMI franchise is rolling this out to a lot of their franchisees. We spoke to their website company and made sure that the logos and the colors and all that was consistent in how they wanted the brand to look for all DMI franchises and put it out there so they have the same experience, it’s stuff like that. It’s not a massive task, it’s a quick task of getting it up and running. They don’t even need someone familiar with website development on their end to put it up. Jason: Fantastic. I would imagine besides that, they’re able to feed in maybe their list of clientele, or how do they get clients using or into this system? Don: They send a file of their clients and their leads, and we separate the two. That gets loaded and tagged to them in the CRM for good. Anytime they do anything, they’re forever tagged to them. We look at the clients one way, we look at the leads one way, and they get a mail from Jason at ABC Property Management saying hey, we just implemented this new tool, come check it out, here’s all that it’s got. A series of mails inviting them to come check out the tool, what’s in it, and then we engage with them as investor support for Jason’s property management company, help them utilize the tool. That’s all branded to Jason, it’s not branded to anything else, it’s all branded to Jason. The backend calls are made to investment support to help them use the system, that’s all Jason. Then, they start receiving some weekly properties that are hot in their particular market. If they put their hand up, we answer questions and take [...]. Jason: Great. The bottom line, everybody listening, that business owners are all thinking is this makes me money, right? They’re getting the real estate deals, they’re getting commissions on the real estate deals, anything else that I’m missing? Don: They get a door... Jason: And they get property management contracts. Don: Yup, and let’s say for example we have property managers in California. A California property manager’s customer wants to buy in Austin, so the Austin person then can get a referral from the California buyer because the California buyer is not finding something in the price range they want in California. One thing they always ask, our customers, is do you want to show only your market or do you want to show all markets? There’s pros and cons to it. If you only show your market, then that investor can only buy in your market and that’s all they get and you always get the door. The con is if they ever decide to buy somewhere else, they’re not going to buy through you because you didn’t show that. Or, you show all markets and then if they do decide to buy somewhere else, then you get a referral fee from that. By the same token, you get inbound traffic from someone else. That’s the idea of that. But we give people that option, because we can show one, or two, or all. Most people tend to keep it fully open, but when you have people that say I don’t want to show anything other than my city. We’re okay with that as well, it’s the business owner’s choice. Jason: So this has other potential benefits of really setting up a referral network, getting some deals. Don: Yup. We’ve had situations where property managers just got a door, because somebody is buying a property. Then the person says they need a property manager, so then we get the door. Sometimes, they get the whole thing. If an investor wants to buy in their market, then they become the buyer’s agent, obviously they give up a referral fee back into the system so others can get paid. They get the door and that commission. At the same token then, they refer someone, they get a fee from that person from the door and the commission; it works both ways. Jason: Alright. Don, this sounds fantastic. Is there any other common questions or things that you think people listening might be curious about related to this? And then how can they find out more? Don: I think one thing we had expectations on, this is a long term relationship with your investors. Let’s say you’ve got 400 doors and 150 investors, the investors get exposed to it. It’s not that okay. In 60 days, they all come in and say great, now that you’ve given me this, here are 10 properties that I’m going to buy. They will buy over time, but what’s important is they are now much more connected with your brand and you start seeing deals happening with these investors when they decide to buy. We can’t force them to buy, but we give them a reason to buy, and we give them a product to buy. That’s the one thing. The second thing is we do need the property management person trained on the system. We have a training program and all of that. When we transfer that investor in the right time, they need to be able to use the system to find the next property and the next one if this one doesn’t work out. Because ultimately, they’re the one fulfilling that. A property management company sometimes has not been in the sales process, they’ve always been at the other end of the food chain. They’ve got to think that if they want to climb the food chain, they do need some competence and strive to be able to go and get that property and close the property with the investor. Although we’re taking a lot of the analytical work in a way by systems giving them all of that. They get a very clear buy box, but they still need to fulfill that buy box. Jason: Let’s wrap this up, how would people find out more about your Investimate product, and how would they demo this and learn more about the business, and how do they get started? Don: They would go to investimateroi.com, in there is a little video that talks about the product, an explanation of what it does for property managers and realtors, and an ability to set up an appointment for a demo. The best thing to do is always look at a demo. If they go there and they schedule a time, just like we’re doing here, we’ll get them on an online webinar and we’ll take them through the product and explain what it does, and see if it’s a fit for the business. It’s simple enough, yeah. Jason: Fantastic. Don, this has been really interesting, really insightful. I think a lot of people’s wills returning as they listen to this. I think that you’ll probably be getting some demos of people checking it out. Don: Great, thank you. Jason: Thanks for being on the DoorGrow show. Don: Glad to be here. Jason: You can check that out at investimateroi.com. I appreciate Don being on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, then make sure you check us out at doorgrow.com. If you want to join the most awesome community of property management entrepreneurs on the planet, we are hanging out inside the DoorGrow Club. It is a free Facebook group, you can go to doorgrowclub.com, make sure you join the group. We will see you next time on the DoorGrow Show. Until then, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.