Learn the difference between warm and cold leads in property management and how to attract more warm leads. Discover the problems with cold leads and the importance of building trust with potential clients. Hear a real-life example of a client's unsuccessful experience with pay-per-lead services.

Michael Sullivan, a property management entrepreneur with 275 doors, shares his experience starting and growing a property management business. Topics include getting started in the industry, growing a business, having support, and scaling to the next level.

Andrew Smallwood from Second Nature discusses the benefits of implementing a resident benefits package in property management to increase profit per door. Topics include customizing the package, protecting investors, pitfalls of DIYing, and increasing profitability. Stay focused on the main aspects of your business and leverage resident benefits packages to differentiate your property and enhance brand value.

Explore the challenges of getting real estate agent referrals in property management and alternative strategies. Learn about the importance of creating impactful introductions, going deeper to land more deals, and building confidence. Discover the limitations of asking for referrals and the significance of rebranding. Connect and engage with DoorGrow through their coaching program, website, and Facebook group for valuable information and community.

Property management entrepreneurs discuss topics like liberation from limiting beliefs, autonomy from bad clients, emancipation from inefficient processes, freedom of experimentation, independence through education and collaboration, allegiance to core values, and pursuit of holistic success.

Working with amazing, hard-working property management entrepreneurs is what makes being a coach worth it. Join property management growth expert Jason Hull in today’s episode as he interviews DoorGrow client Jeff Garner. Jeff went from 150 to 420 doors in 4 months! Learn how he did it. You’ll Learn [02:35] Why would anyone get into property management? [12:40] Fixing the foundation of a property management business [15:14] Importance of culture in a business [25:05] Why you need a coach [27:34] Navigating operational issues  Tweetables “No matter what market we're in, it's good. If we're going to the moon, management's great. If we're crashing, it's even better because people can't sell their properties and they go, ‘Oh shoot, we'll turn them into rentals.’” "Go where they won't go and do what they won't do. That's where the money's at," “It all starts with your mindset.” “Weekly commitments, and you'll start to see the momentum build big time when the team are all visible and can be seen and there's accountability and they get recognized because you have that system installed, performance sometimes goes up.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jeff: I have 420 doors and I have more peace of mind, more direction and I know where I'm going to be and where I'm going and how to get there.  [00:00:12] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not  [00:00:38] because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bss, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:08] And today's guest is Jeff Garner. Jeff, welcome.  [00:01:14] Jeff: Thanks man. Glad to be here.  [00:01:17] Jason: So Jeff, what's the name of your property management business?  [00:01:19] Jeff: Homes Stretch Property Management  [00:01:21] Jason: Homes Stretch. All right, cool. And why'd you pick that name?  [00:01:26] Jeff: I feel like real estate investing it's a long-term play. It builds wealth over the long haul. And for our home stretch of our life, whether you decide your home stretch starts at 40 because you retire early, or whether it's 60 or 70, if you are buying real estate, really it, you know, It's about letting the tenants pay down, you know, principal balance, pay down, depreciation, tax, write-offs, appreciation. Sure cash flow's nice every month, but you can make millions over, you know, 20 year period, 25 year period. And so I see the real value in real estate is being that, so we want to get our owners to the home stretch and, you know, that's kind of how we look at it. So we want to improve and maintain your property so that someday you can either sell or refi and it's in great shape and it's an easy process. Or you just want to keep it in cashflow forever. So our job's to give you freedom and peace of mind knowing that your properties are being taken care of better than you can or anyone else so.  [00:02:29] Jason: Nice. Love the brand. So Jeff. Why don't you give people a little bit of background on you. How did you start getting into real estate and what made you decide to do the crazy thing of starting a property management company? How did this all happen?  [00:02:43] Jeff: Yeah, it was the crazy thing because-- so I'll tell you a little bit about me. Real estate's the only business I've ever been in. I got my real estate license when I was 22. I was going to be a real estate agent. Found a niche working with investors because when you're 22, you know, growing up doesn't come overnight. And so when you're got all your, "oh shoot, I'm showing property today," and you have to crunch the beer cans and put them under your seat. because you just turned 21 a year before, you know, it can be a little awkward putting the 40 year old mom and dad and their kids in the car to go show them property. [00:03:18] Right. Which I did okay at. I did fine. But I found a niche in working with investors because you could sell them one house and most of the time they don't even want to get in your car. Half the time, once you get know what you're doing, you just give them a lockbox code and tell them to call you back and tell you what you think, and they give you a number and you write it and put it in. You could sell them 10 or 20 houses. So I developed a niche at that. I got really good at finding deals and I would send them to my guys. Shortly after that, I decided that I was on the wrong side of the table, you know, three or four years of that. I go to closing, I collect my $2,500 commission check, and he gets a check for $20,000 because he flipped it, right? And I just thought, wait a minute, I'm finding the deal. I'm calling him up, I'm telling him what number to put it in at and he's making all this money. What am I doing wrong? So I got into that side of the business, you know. So, 08 hit crashed. All of us really put me in a position to where I to make a decision on what I wanted to do because all my investors were gone. Right? [00:04:17] They were trying to stay alive. Yeah. You know, in 08 for the people that didn't go through it, was like If you worked in Walmart and all of a sudden the next morning you woke up and no one will shop at Walmart again. [00:04:31] Jason: Right?  [00:04:31] Jeff: Yeah. Never walks through the door.  [00:04:34] Jason: Yeah. So must have been scary.  [00:04:37] Jeff: Yeah. And so, I thought, "well, this investment thing's really what I want to do. So I'm going all in. It's time to restart. So that's what I'm going to go all in at." So I really looked at what happened and I realized that history, you know, tells the story and that everyone was riding this wave and had no idea it was a wave because no one does the research to, you know, see what the cycles are. I didn't know there was a cycle. I was young. Yeah. And so the common sense thought came, well, we were at a high. If I was a real investor and I was really good at what I did, I would've been taking vacations, waiting for this crash to happen, and then I'd go out and buy everything I could find and hold it. Yeah, so I did that. I bought 110 rentals over a three year period, all at, you know, probably 20% of what the market is today. And outsourced the management a couple times. Horrific. Cost me more money than you know, one, when I was at 110 properties, I had to take them back overnight because I realized that I had 16 vacants and they didn't even know about half of them. [00:05:42] Really? Yeah. It was horrible. They just they got overwhelmed and so I built a management company overnight to manage my own properties and had zero desire. It was the last thing on the absolute planet I wanted to deal with was tenants and toilets. I did not get into rentals to deal with tenants or maintenance. It didn't, yeah. So I put together a makeshift management company and decided I'd never take on another property of anyone else's. I'd only do my own, because I was going to do this, it was going to be for myself. There certainly wasn't going to make a hundred dollars a month on a property and do all this for somebody else. Right. That's, that was my thought on being real. And a few years went by '16, '17, realized that I'd gotten tons of equity and I had properties sitting there with 50, 60,000 in equity and I'm making 200 or 300 a month. And I thought, this math doesn't make sense anymore, right? So I sold off over a two or three year period, about 50 of them. But everyone apparently, everyone knew management is a tough gig and there's not a lot of good management companies out there. Why? Right? There was no DoorGrow then that I'm aware of at least. Right? So everyone in the management business just thought, "this looks like we can make some money, let's do this." [00:06:57] But they had no idea. The machine, it has to be to run well. Yeah. And so they said, "well, I'll buy that property. I'll even give you retail for it, but you have to keep the management." So to this day, I still manage all 110 of those properties, even though I only own 60 of them. Right. So to get the money I wanted, I had to keep the management. And then I just kind of started looking at it is in the last couple years when I realized that we could potentially be getting to another place. If you look at the charts and you look at history that we're you know, we're at a high now, will it last four years longer? Probably. So I had to kind of reevaluate what I wanted to do and I looked at all my businesses, flip business, wholesale, you know, my rental portfolios and my management company, I went, wait a minute, what am I doing? I'm focusing all this energy and chasing down deals and having all these, you know, taking all the risk on everything I buy and just grinding away constantly. For over 20 years now. And I got this management company, although it's not sexy, everyone tells me it's the worst thing in the world to do. Yeah. You know, I realize it was the one thing that was repeatable, scalable, and I could predict. And no matter what market we're in, it's good. If we're going to the moon, management's great. If we're crashing, it's even better because people can't sell their properties and they go, oh shoot, we'll turn them into rentals. I thought, "wait, what am I doing? I'm looking at this all wrong." I just started to look at it and so I started working on getting really good at it and filling all the holes on my own, right, with my own. And it's, you know, and I realized that with the right team in place and the right mindset, you know, which is we want to help landlords, right? I want to take 20 something years of resources and try to convert over this management company and give them to everyone else-- that it could be a great business. And then I realized, like I preach, because I did some coaching in the real estate space throughout the years "go where they won't go and do what they won't do. That's where the money's at," right? So if everyone's going after retail flips and a really nice b and b areas, then go look in the C areas because they're being neglected. If everyone's after all the C properties because the cash flows, so well then go up to your A or B areas and start doing flips because those are being neglected. Nice. Certain town everyone's afraid of? Good. Let them be all fighting in one place and you go there. And so I realized that was what was going on in the real estate market for the management business. So I decided that's what I wanted to focus my energies on. So I literally burned all the other boats, man. No marketing, no wholesaling, no flipping.  [00:09:40] Jason: Wow. You went all in on property management?  [00:09:42] Jeff: All in on property management, period. I got online, I did what I did 15 years before, after 08 happened, and I thought, "I'm going to redo myself. How do I do this?" And so I just got online and I started digging around and trying to teach myself things and I got coaches back then, and even though I knew 90% of what they were trying to teach me, because I got coaches in the flipping side, right? I knew you know, 80, 90% of what they were teaching me was that 10 or 20% where I knew would bring me all my money, right? So I did the same thing here and that's how I came to DoorGrow is I found you guys really were the only real system oriented, you know, nuts and bolts teach the how and not just the why. You know, a lot of people want to tell you why you do. Oh, well, you know why? They want to give you the why on, you know, but they don't want to give you the nuts and bolts of the how and tell you connect A to B to C to D and you'll get your results, right? And so, I found you guys, and I knew that's all I was missing to having success because the rest of the management companies all had bad raps. You couldn't talk to a landlord that really loved their management company. Yeah. So I knew I could fix, put those pieces together and really treat it like a business based off of giving people their freedom and peace of mind, knowing that their properties are being taken care of better than theirs. [00:11:10] If you can do that, anyone listening to this, if you can wrap your mind around being of service. No one else is doing that in the management business. Right? Yeah. You will dominate, it's like I used to say when I had lots of rehab crews going, if someone shows up and does what they say and has half of the talent that I need them to have, they could be rich. That's all they have to do. Just not be the best, but do what you say and show up so it's predictable and we can communicate well and get stuff done. So if you did that, and you can do that with a mindset of, "I want to be of service to the industry." Be the best. You'll dominate, end the story, but you have to wrap that around your mind, you know, and it'll come out in your calls. It'll come out in your conversations at the grocery store. It'll come out everywhere.  [00:12:00] Hell, I pulled 16 doors out of my gym in the first 30 days after joining DoorGrow because I just got the structure when we went through mindset and and some sales stuff of. Really taking what was in my mind and putting it in paper and going through the process of splitting the page into four spots and right. You know, going through everything. I got to dial it in and then boom, that was it. There's nothing else to talk about, but what I came up with there, you know, home stretch was the name of the business because it fits what I'm trying to do. I know what our mindset is, the culture for my company and you know, we started just plugging in systems and processes.  [00:12:40] Jason: So let's talk a little bit about it. because you said nuts and bolts, but to most property managers, they're like, "nuts and bolts means how do you like do maintenance and how do you plunger a toilet?" you know, like it's like the practical stuff where you know how to manage properties. Yeah. You know how to deal with tenants, you know how to like do all that. What challenge were you dealing with that brought you to DoorGrow and how did that help?  [00:13:04] Jeff: It's really hard to explain that. What I really had was is I had a business and it functioned and I did okay, but I did not feel at 150 properties, I did not feel I could bring on 10 more doors. I felt like it would all crumble and break because I had no idea what I was doing really. Right. I had nothing to model. I had just said I got maintenance, my maintenance was horrible. I had all these guys that that was one of the hardest parts to find. But I had all these just subcontractors and every once in a while we'd find someone to come on full time, but you'd have to trust them to be out there all day doing what they said they were doing. And I didn't know how to run that. I didn't know how to manage that. I didn't know how to systematize that where I knew what was going on at all times. And I didn't feel comfortable going any bigger because, I felt like I could see why other management companies had problems, and I don't think they want to suck, right? No, I don't think so. But they just don't want to say no to the money.  [00:14:06] "Hey, I got 20 doors." oh, we're going to do a great job for you. Let's bring it on. And they're already struggling with what they have. Yeah, right. Just think it's magically you're going to work, or, you know what? It'll give me more money in that way. More money will mean I can do more things. And no it doesn't. It creates more problems that cost more money. So I needed the systems, I needed the processes. Those are the nuts and bolts I'm talking about. Got it. Who to hire to do what and to, because that's it.  [00:14:34] Jason: I mean, so what's changed then? Like you had 150 doors, you came to DoorGrow and we started helping you change a lot of stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely. So, what things have you changed since joining DoorGrow? Yeah. What are some of the first things we start working on with you?  [00:14:51] Jeff: Okay, well, really it was just getting my mindset right was the biggest one because once my mindset was correct and I knew and I had our, what we were trying to do, where we could be of service, that opened my mind up to, " how do we do that then?" Right. So that's sort of answering questions for me, you know.  [00:15:14] Jason: So with mindset, what you're saying is I believe you're talking about all the culture stuff that we took you through stuff. Just the culture stuff and just kind of, I mean, that's the core foundation of the business. Like if we want to make this business built around you, we've got to figure that piece out, right? So we started with that and that probably had a significant ripple through everything.  [00:15:33] Jeff: Imagine like this, you have children, you all of a sudden you, "I'm going to be the best dad ever and I'm going to have kids." Next thing you know, you got two or three of them, they're under five. You have no, literally imagine your parents weren't good. I don't know. They didn't model worth a crap. Okay. Like, how do I do this? Like, I can feed them, I can put them to bed and I can keep them from killing themselves, but do I really know how to raise them to have commitment, how to be honest, how can I make a five year old a strong member of society at 28 years old, right? But if you have a culture and a mindset, you know, "I want my children to be like this. I want them to have this belief system," and how do we give them that belief system? Okay, "well, let me look into that. Okay. Well, if we go to this school, it'll give them these values and then I can back them up at home. And then with bedtime and, oh, I did a little research here. If I put them to bed at this time, get them up at this time. Oh wait, the sugars and dyes are bad. It makes them spastic and oh, well I'll take that out." And you start learning, right? But it all starts with your mindset. Right. And so my mindset changed and it started making me go down the rabbit holes that are all in DoorGrow of, "Okay. Leasing-- my leasing person that we're just winging it and working out of this software that we really were just doing all workarounds and spreadsheets because we really didn't know how to use it. Watch this. Watch these videos on leasing, watch these videos on placing tenants." And then I would watch them and then we would meet and put together a process and a system on how it's going to go instead of just winging every call we got. [00:17:17] So I started building it out position by position. I went and I found a new property manager that had the capacity to be a really good property manager and grow from some of the-- I'm still new inDoorGrow. I'm only six months in. Right? And honestly over the last month I've had a two months, I've had a really hard time getting into DoorGrow because I. [00:17:42] I'm up 420 in doors. Right.  [00:17:45] Jason: So, yeah. So, and let's get to that. That's interesting. But so the children, in your analogy here, this is your team you're talking about, and this is my team. Yeah. And you were in it for what, maybe a couple months and then you started replacing the entire team? [00:18:00] Jeff: The entire team is gone except for two people. And one of the two was almost gone. Because of just be all of a sudden having this parent mindset, I kind of coached him, or you know, raised him in a way in this little short period of time to where he's changed. Nice. And he is just, and the reality of it is, what I found out is he was so unhappy because of how screwed up systems were that everything rolled down to him that once I realized that I got to take things away, put them create and find out what was broken on his role. And he was a main construction manager that we created a different systems and now he's probably one of my strongest pieces. So everyone knew the whole team is new.  [00:18:50] Jason: So new team, you installed a good culture, you're then able to work with us on the hiring piece and getting good team members in place. Absolutely. You've leveled up some team members because you have culture and you know, like what you deserve and want as a business owner and what have the type of team and we want to build around you. Absolutely. Most business owners build teams around the business, and that's probably what you did before. [00:19:15] Jeff: Absolutely a pure necessity. And I, I didn't but hire people that fit the culture or what I was looking for. I just hired a warm body that seemed like they would work, and I thought, we'll just teach them what we need them to know. Yeah. And their mindset or what they did in their off time or their goals didn't mean they were their business. [00:19:36] Jason: Right. Yeah it's amazing. Some simple frameworks like just understanding the three fits to hiring. Yeah. Like culture fit, skill fit, personality fit can shift hiring significantly. So then you started working pretty quickly with one of our coaches on acquisitions. You went out and found a deal. And in four months you were at 420 units.  [00:19:59] Jeff: Yeah. Yep. 420. And I've got probably we're I'm just, we might be at four 40 or four 50 because we have 20 or 30 vacants that Okay. That are under, that are kind of on make ready that we took over that we haven't been able to fill yet because we have this construction backlog, not on our end, but on his backend. The guy that I bought the management from, which was part of the deal, and one of the reasons he sold was because he had done exactly what everyone else did. He got too big and wasn't saying no, and got backlogged and yeah, he was starting to provide really horrible service, so I went in, bought it from him at a really good price for me, but I think it was still a good price for him because if you're at a point to where you're going to, it's stressing you out, you can't get it all done. [00:20:46] It's affecting anything, all your other revenue streams and people are getting ready to start leaving you. Someone walks in "wait, you can take this off my hands and give me money? Okay. Where do I sign?" You know?  [00:20:59] Jason: So what are the things did you do with our team? Have we done a website for you?  [00:21:03] Jeff: You did a website. [00:21:05] Jason: What about your branding? Did you change your brand at all?  [00:21:08] Jeff: Yeah. Hell, hell yeah. I was starting point property management. I changed my brand. We rebranded a week before this acquisition, which I was like, I'm going to put this rebranding thing off because that's another, and then we sat down and I was talking to the team and I don't think they loved it, but they agreed that doing it before we transition all these new owners and tenants over was going to be the way to go because then we would have to change it all up in a couple months anyway when we rebranded and had them in a new website and portal and such so. [00:21:38] Jason: How about pricing? Did you change your pricing?  [00:21:41] Jeff: I'm on the hybrid pricing. Okay. The three plans. The three plans now, which is exactly from you guys. Which was another thing that really helped me because with changing the pricing and doing the hybrid plan and going through that training, and it was, once again, it was all the why's we're doing it. I got to design the plans that fit our culture and provide the service we wanted to provide. It gave me more confidence, honestly, in what we were doing, even though I was going to be charging more now. So yeah, we're on the three tier pricing, hybrid pricing.  [00:22:19] Jason: So you've changed your team, you changed your branding, you changed your website, you changed your pricing model. You've probably made some adjustments to your pitch. Do you do the Golden Bridge stuff?  [00:22:31] Jeff: I didn't have a pitch before. You didn't have a pitch? I didn't have a pitch. I'd just say, "Hey, we do management. Can we manage your properties?" And I just like, that's what I'm saying, when I didn't know, like I couldn't wrap my mind around, because I'd been flipping houses and wholesaling. I had that down to a science. I am a fricking ninja in that. Yeah. But the management side, it was just, "Hey, we manage properties." Yeah. This is what we charge if you want to come over. Cool. If not, I got to go. I got other calls with me, you know, and to have a pitch. So it was literally everything and the pitch made it. That's what I'm saying. I pulled 16 doors out of the gym. Yeah. Just "what are you doing now? Oh, I'm doing management and it's--" 'boop,' just going into my pitch casually, just real casual because we're at the gym. "Do you know anybody that manages any properties? Yeah, I do. I got this buddy. Cool. Could I talk to him? That was it.  [00:23:23] Jason: So I love clients like you, Jeff. because you implement, like you went through the rapid revamp and you did it rapid, like you got that stuff done. Yeah. Pretty quick. And then you start working on acquisition because you saw that opportunity with our acquisitions coach and you're like, "I'm going to do that." and you're just doing stuff and I think that's a testament to you. You know, this is part, I think when we work out more often at the gym, and I think our brains work better. I think that's science, like that's been proven. Like there's something released in our muscles. And you're a big dude. I got to get to your point. I'm trying to work out to catch up to you.  [00:23:59] Jeff: I'm going to be pitching you on coaching you in that area. [00:24:02] Jason: But I think I appreciate that you've been implementing this stuff rapidly and I asked you at DoorGrow Live, I was like, "where do you see yourself, you know, do you think you could get to a thousand doors?" And you were like, "yeah, probably a year and a half." Like it's nothing. Like it's nothing. And you're like, "well, maybe two years." And I was like, "do you know how ridiculous that sounds to most people?" Yeah. So, but I believe it. I believe it for you. I believe it's possible for you. And I believe any of our clients could do it if they just. Take action and implement. And in order to do that, they've got to trust us. And I appreciate you putting your faith in us and trusting us and just putting your head down and doing the work.  [00:24:41] So what would you say to other property managers that are maybe like the company that you bought or maybe like the way you were before if they've just been watching DoorGrow on the sidelines and they think they know what we're about and they think we're just marketers or something that like have a decent sales pitch, but they don't know if they can trust us? You're behind the paywall. What would you say to them?  [00:25:04] Jeff: Well, I mean, besides being behind the paywall and doing it and having experience with it, I know coaching and I know that space, and so I recognized DoorGrow immediately from watching your marketing and just digging in a little that you guys taught the business. It wasn't a marketing ploy to get people to sign up to you. Actually, it wasn't like I was just going to get a bunch of motivation, "go out there and do it!" right, right. Because I motivated it was, like I said, it was the whys and the hows and and the all the processes and systems. And so man, it's all there for you to just do it. You would just do it. You would literally just go, "okay, I'll start at one and work to 10." I had a management company already. If I had to redo it all when I got real life processes and systems, and then I saw that there was people in it that had a hundred doors, 500 doors, a thousand doors, and I'm like, "that's what I need." I need to be surrounded by people that are at a higher level of success and have been where I am and now are where I want to go. And so if you are watching and you have management already and you are struggling, and it sucks. Whether it's for you or your customers, or both?  I have 420 doors and I have more peace of mind, more direction and I know where I'm going to be and where I'm going and how to get there. And more time to myself if I wanted to take it. I don't take it because I still have big goals and so I'm working a lot. But then I did with 150 doors. That's awesome. I had more certainty with 3x almost than I did where I started. I got the team in place. I watched them problem solve all day long on the chat and working systems and the processes and everything happens the same over and over again.  [00:27:01] So it's really a business in a box, but you have to do it. You can't question yourself. You can't make excuses. You just have to do it. It'll be really easy if you just one foot in front of the other and take the steps. It's all there. And I had to stop because I can't wrap my mind around everything until I get to another place. Right. Yeah. Like I can only do so much and it's growing and working and so like, I've got to pause and then I'm going to dive back in and I don't know I'm still in DoorGrow obviously regularly.  [00:27:34] Jason: Well, let's do some co coaching live on air. Let's figure out what's your next step? Ready? Okay. Yeah. You open? Okay, cool. So you're at 420 units right now. Yeah. Yeah. You've finally got a good team, you've got good culture. Yeah. So the next level to get to, you know, to break past that next kind of major barrier, which maybe is 600 doors, you have to have a great team, but you got to get three major systems installed. Those three major systems are going to be, you have to really get a good process system installed. Not just process documentation, but a system to where they're running the processes each time. So we've got DoorGrow flow. You can use that, lead simple, process street, something, but you need a good process system. That's one piece. The other piece you need is you need a really good people system. So you've started to create the culture, you've started to install that system. Then we want to make sure-- and did you use DoorGrow hiring and do grow ATS and work with Sarah on some of that stuff?  [00:28:32] Jeff: I watched the coaching and implemented some of the things I learned just like I did with Clint. So yeah.  [00:28:38] Jason: So we want to make sure we have a solid system so that as you scale, you can get the right people and get those people quickly. So it sounds like you've done some work on that. And then we want to make sure you have a really good planning system. So once you have a team of people you trust to execute, your executive team, then we want to install a planning system. Now these three systems should not be run by you because as a visionary and an entrepreneur, it's not fun for you to do this. So the key person, the most important hire you will have on the team will be an operator. Somebody that runs the operations. Do you feel like you have that key person right now? [00:29:15] Jeff: I do, but she is one of the people I brought on the most valuable hire I've made after I came to DoorGrow. And it was to have that operator, but she's a CFO. Okay. And she's grown another insurance company to probably where we're at now from scratch, which, you know, I think I'm blowing her mind a little on where we want to go, how fast we're going. But yeah, my goal is to make her the operator. She's the CFO. And so you know management's an accounting business, really at the end of the day, and so we are doing so many changes to our software and our accounting to make sure that all those processes and automations are in place that she is buried every day, but she helps with the team. She helped on the hiring. And she's going to be the operator to try to shorten that. We're working her into that role because as she figures pieces out, we hand them off. So it frees her time up and she's not doing the 15- $20 an hour work because they're paying her more than that. Handing it off and it's freeing up her time and she's. Then we're putting in place some of that more operation stuff, so in process.  [00:30:23] Jason: Nice. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. So when she's ready, one of the things we'll want to do is start to get her to show up on the Friday coaching call, which is operations, and to do that super system breakout and work with her and you to get DoorGrow OS installed. Once you get DoorGrow OS installed, the planning system is that next level system. This is going to allow you to have your team start to function like a visionary, like the entrepreneur, they're going to start to innovate and move goals forward without you having to, you know, push them. And she will run that system. She'll run the meetings, and then you'll be able to set goals and break them down from quarterly to monthly to weekly commitments, and you'll start to see the momentum build big time when the team are all visible and can be seen and there's accountability and they get recognized because you have that system installed, performance sometimes goes up. When I first install a system like that, we grew 300% in a year. And so that is kind of the next level I think for you guys is when she's ready for that, we start to get DoorGrow OS installed and get that planning system and cadence. Because cadence in a business is the communication, cadence is the culture, cadence creates all of this, and it gets everyone rowing the boat in the same direction. So instead of you saying, "Hey, let's do this to everybody, watch this video at DoorGrow," et cetera. They will start to innovate and move outcomes forward because they're given goals and deadlines and then support instead of tasks. And that's where you'll start to see your team really perform. This is where you get like three times the output from your team members. This is where your operational costs drop significantly in relation to the number of people you have per door. And so that's what I see next level for you guys. And once you have that system installed, 600 doors is going to be a piece of cake. [00:32:17] Jeff: Yeah. The other thing too is that I know we need a sales funnel. The funnel right now is this mouth, that's it right now.  [00:32:27] Jason: We got to get you out of that. So what'll be next is either we get you, if you don't have this already, we get you an assistant, a setter, or a sales assistant. And that person will then help you double your capacity currently. because they'll be doing all of the follow up, getting you on calls to close and you can use tactics like the double barrel close and some of these things we talk about. That's maybe, that's like level one, baby step. Level two, we just get you out of doing that all together. We get you a full-time BDM. Just like James Wachob 's team installed Brad, he's been showing up to each of our Wednesday calls where we support the BDMs or the people working on growth and I think he's helped him add like 250, something like that. They've added 400 doors organically in less than a year. [00:33:18] Jeff: Is that Brian Bouler guy?  [00:33:20] Jason: Yeah, Brian Bouler's their operator. And he's, he actually just, yeah, he's a stud. He just became the director of the property management. So he's running all property management and he just hired an operator to replace himself from a Fortune 50 company. Right? So this is like once you have your operator fully functioning as an operator, you get her out of CFO role and you get her into being an operator, then we can start to install DoorGrow OS, get that team to the next level. And part of that plan, I think for your 90 days would be to start to focus on that sales side. If you're ready to ramp up lead gen and growth, then we get you maybe a setter initially, and then we get you a full-time BDM or you can jump straight to getting a BDM and we help you find somebody that can just crush it at sales. We identify the right personality type, they're great at this, and they will go out and just make it rain and create business for you.  [00:34:13] Jeff: I got the hiccups all of a sudden, so I'm like, this is going to look great in the podcast.  [00:34:17] Jason: You're just so excited about the future. Excited. Yeah. And you know, and that BDM could also, and then I think what you would do, if you want to focus on the growth side, if that's still fun for you, you just go out and find more acquisition deals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. You can even get your BDM to start hunting for acquisition deals as well and feed them to you, and then you do double barrel close that way. They're feeding you to close it. Right? So, anyway, I think that's going to be the next level for you and, you know, maybe what I would maybe have your CFO do is do a time study and maybe you do a time study if you haven't done one for a while, so that you can see where can you support her even more and more quickly to get things off of her plate. What are you doing? Which things do you love the most? Which things don't you? And start to take some things off of her plate and give them to other team members as quick as possible. So, and then you'll know like, this is what she spent her time doing over the last two weeks. You're like, cool, we, these are minus signs. These are things that are lower level dollar an hour work. Let's define these processes and we make that a goal and all that. When you have a cadence and a planning system, you can plug all that into your goals. Like one of your quarterly goals would be transition CFO to operator, for example. Yeah. So we could start to build out those systems even right now with her, we just need to get you and her on board with that. And then you'll see things start to go even faster because you're already working a plan. When we put the plan in a way that everyone else can see it and everyone can contribute, the whole business starts to go faster. Otherwise, it's you pushing her and her pushing everybody else, and it's very top down. When you create a bottom up system, you'll start to feel a lot of momentum. Okay. It's a weird feeling when you start to feel the team pulling you forward instead of you pushing them forward.  [00:36:10] Jeff: So, when you say that, what does that, what do you call that then? Like when you're saying bottom up, you know? When you, everything you just said, like, what is that? Like, what do I call that?  [00:36:21] Jason: So I call that the planning system or DoorGrow OS, the operating system. The operating. So we want to get this operating system installed so that there's this planning cadence and communication. So I'd start with by doing a six core functions assessment with your team brainstorming session. That'll be quarterly planning and it'll take like an hour and a half or two hours. First time you do this as a team.  [00:36:44] Jeff: That's all in os. That whole process is an OS. The step-by-step on that. That was my direction. I need OS, and I need Flow, and I'm like, oh, another thing I got to plan.  [00:36:53] Jason: Yeah that's DoorGrow OS. The planning system. What's cool about it and, if you do the math on this, right? Let's say you do in your annual planning, you spend maybe an hour, a half. Your quarterly planning, you do four times a year. You spend maybe an hour, a half, two hours, right? Each of your monthly planning meetings, which you have 12, that adds up to 12 hours, maybe an hour each, right? Then you're doing your weekly commitments meetings every week. Maybe you'll do about 50 of those a year. Maybe those take an hour, sometimes even just 30 minutes, depending on the size of your team and the aggressiveness of your goals. And the goal on a weekly basis is to hit 80% of your weekly commitments. That's a lot of goals getting achieved. This is outside of the tactical work, outside of the day-to-day work. This is innovating and moving the business forward towards your core functions and what the business needs most and what you need most. [00:37:49] If you stack and add all this up, maybe even add a culture meeting here or there, and you add your daily huddles with your teams that are like maybe 15, 20 minutes, all that combined adds up to, you can run the entire business on 300 hours a year, and it eliminates a massive amount of 'got a minute?'s, sneaker net communication, interruptions, and it makes the business far more efficient.  [00:38:14] Jeff: And that's all lined out in OS. Like I start OS, it's like everything step by step. I can do this. How?  [00:38:22] Jason: Yes. However, my disclaimer is, this is not stuff that you're going to want to do. This is stuff that your operator will probably enjoy doing. Okay, but not you. Okay. Like me, I hear a bunch of meetings. My initial gut reaction is like, "oh gosh, shoot me now." Right? Yeah. Like that sounds like a cumbersome and a waste of my time. It actually speeds you up and speeds up the business and gives you more time, but you don't want to run it. You need somebody else to run it because otherwise you end up as the emperor with no clothes because everybody's going to agree to you, say "whatever Jeff says," you need somebody else to run it. And you're last to speak in all these meetings. Yeah. Then you'll start to see the magic and the genius of your team. because some of them are more closely connected to some of the things that need to shift or move or be innovated or move forward than you are, right? Your maintenance coordinator can see what's going on in maintenance and they probably have ideas. And so this will allow them to start to, you know, bubble up some of these ideas and it'll allow them to innovate. When team members don't get deadlines and outcomes that they're given to achieve. And then they can see that there's need for improvement, instead of innovating, they go and try and spend more of your money. Yeah, exactly. And so the team gets more expensive. And then you, if you give them a blank check, they'll just spend like, "let's go buy this new thing and let's buy that. And that might do this," right? When you give your team a deadline and some constraints and an outcome, they will start to get creative and innovate, and you want your team members to start to think like that. That turns them into intrapreneurs. So getting this system installed, I think will be the big next level thing, and we can start getting that installed right away so Sarah can help you get that set up. And set up a call with you and your operator and you're already working on some goals. So let's just get those goals into a system where everyone can see and make sure you start to move the plan forward, create the plan, work the plan, and you'll start to see the team move forward way faster. [00:40:16] So I'm excited for you man.  [00:40:19] Jeff: Can you believe I got the hiccups? I get hiccups like once every 10 years. I get in the middle of the podcast. Yeah, I'm very excited about that because here's the truth is you're right, like you get to this place at, you know, 150 doors on my own right, that's capacity really no capacity would've been much higher. But doing it well, capacity was 150 doors. Now I'm at 400 something and we're going, well, yeah. I think I could add another a hundred doors before anything breaks, but I know we're there. We're 50 to a hundred doors away from having to do new stuff again. Yeah. I can feel it. And so that's exciting, but dreadful to think, to have to implement myself. [00:40:59] I think that's why I've kind of like, "let's just wait till we get everything we're doing dialed it perfectly before I get into that," but I need to just suck it up. I got to call with Sarah coming up the next couple days and I just need to tell her, okay, let's do OS, whatever. Tell me what to do next. Let's go. [00:41:14] Jason: Yeah. And really we're just going to start working on creating a plan. Then we'll put in the software and you'll start to see when you start having these weekly meetings with your team, you're going to start to see stuff move forward. Like our goal, we sometimes have like 40 things in a single week that we're working on as a team outside of our daily work, like 40 tasks that are assigned to different team members. [00:41:38] And my team members do not want to show up with a red 'no.' Yeah. And this increases their performance level, like you would not believe. They want green yeses when they show up on Monday for our weekly commitments meeting. And that means we are really likely to get all of our 30 day goals done, which means we're really likely to get all of our quarterly goals done because they're all connected. [00:41:59] Yeah. You'll start to see your business move forward really quickly. This is a next level thing. So I'm excited for you to get that installed. because first, you got to have an operator. because I've tried to do it on my own without an operator and I really, I get lazy because I just don't like it. Like, I don't like running the meetings. I'm like, "all right, anyone's stuck on anything? Let's move forward faster." And I just skip steps and I tell people, do things, but when the team starts to run this, your operator will start to run the business. The business will start to run itself. Things will start to move forward without you, and then instead of you feeling like you're the entrepreneur pulling your entire team up the hill in a wagon, which is what it feels like until you get a system like this, you're going to start to see them moving forward ahead of you, and you're going to be the one that is in the wagon and they're pulling you up the hill. You're just going to be there like giving some feedback, coaching them, supporting them, but you'll start to see the business move forward. I'm the biggest constraint on my team. Sarah and the team are using DoorGrow OS, and they're moving the whole business forward constantly. And they're like, "Jason, keep up. We need more from you." And so they're keeping me accountable now. I don't need to keep them accountable because I've got A players and I've got a system that brings that out in them. So that's the next level. Cool, man. Awesome. Well, hey, thanks for coming on the podcast and being vulnerable and sharing some of your struggles and your wins. [00:43:23] Really appreciate you as a client.  [00:43:25] Jeff: Yeah. Appreciate you too, man. It's been a huge life changer. So cool. Well, keep pushing me.  [00:43:32] Jason: Yeah, we'll keep going. We'll get you to that next level as well. So, thousand doors, here we come!  [00:43:37] Jeff: Here we come. All right.  [00:43:39] Jason: All right, thanks. See you. All right, so if you are a property management entrepreneur and you're wanting to get some coaching, you're tired of not having anyone in your corner, maybe nobody's believing in you, maybe not even your spouse is believing in you right now, and you need some hope, you want to have some results like Jeff, you're wanting to move your business forward. We would love to coach and help and support you. Join our mastermind. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. If you're looking like to get nurtured and warmed up a little bit more and you're not really sure about those DoorGrow people, then go to doorgrowclub.com. Join our free Facebook group. We give out better free stuff than most coaches in this industry give out that's paid, and you're going to get access to our master classes and some really cool stuff in there. Join that and you're going to see that we care and we want to see you succeed. And that will hopefully be a nice pathway into you becoming a client and working with DoorGrow and taking your business to that next level. And finally getting what you deserve, getting paid what you deserve, and having the business that you dream of having. [00:44:47] Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  [00:44:51] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:45:18] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

With the real estate market shifting, more and more real estate agents are going to be starting property management companies. Is this you? If you are starting a property management business, this episode is for you. Join property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull as they discuss the best way to build the foundation of your property management business in the current market. You’ll Learn [01:18] The Trends in the Market and What They Mean [07:10] Why You Should Start a Property Management Business [10:09] Building the Right Foundation [15:03] The Product Research Strategy [17:39] The Next Steps for Your Business Tweetables “The biggest challenge usually getting started is just taking action to actually get the business going.” “When you're in that dreamer or that fantasy stage, a lot of times we are very good at looking at all the upside, and we're very good at ignoring the difficulties or the downside.” “Property management, like I mentioned in the intro, is the ultimate gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.” “A lot of the people that are the least qualified to be doing it, they're going to be the ones that get hurt the most because they're not paying attention much to the market.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: the biggest challenge usually getting started is just taking action to actually get the business going, and they get caught up on wasting a lot of time on stuff that doesn't really matter when the only thing that really matters is getting your first client, right? That first door is the hardest.  [00:00:16] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, along with Sarah I'm the founder and CEO she is owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:17] Alright. So today's topic, we've been noticing there's some trends and some changes in the real estate industry, which is going to probably create some shifts. So what are we noticing?  [00:01:29] Sarah: Well, so some of you may have realized real estate isn't quite what it was a couple months, even a year ago, certainly not what it was two years ago. Things have a shifted a little bit in the market. There was a point where you can list a property, you would get, you know, multiple offers in one to two days, and it would sell for a whole lot over asking and it was very easy. It was simple because the market was just on fire. Things have changed just a little bit. They've slowed down. And we wanted to talk about what happens when the real estate market slows down.  [00:02:14] Jason: So, historically what I've noticed is anytime real estate kind of takes a nose dive or slows down or there's some sort of recession or something like this, I see a lot of real estate agents quit. There's a lot of real estate agents that don't renew their license. They leave, they quit, they give up. And a lot of these are the newer ones or the ones that came in thinking it'd be really easy when things were great and we had years of feast and now that there maybe is coming famine, they're out. And so we see a lot of that. I also see a lot of real estate agents decide to become property managers because they're struggling to get real estate deals. They're like, "what else could I do? I'm going to start a property management business because all of the other ones around me aren't that great." [00:03:00] And so historically DoorGrow, we get a lot of clients coming to us, looking for new websites and starting a business when the market takes a nosedive or there's a shift in real estate. So the other thing, I just saw a video that was pretty interesting data, and it was showing how there's been this huge spike in inventory in Airbnbs, but the revenue generated on average by Airbnbs has dipped in some markets to like 50% of the revenue generated per unit or per owner. And so the revenue's dipping significantly, but there's a lot of inventory of Airbnbs. What's going to happen is that bubble is going to burst, it's going to collapse because a lot of Airbnbs are going to sell. I talked to a property manager here locally in Austin, and he said he already saw the writing on the wall. And shout out to my buddy and friend, Brett Koster. He said that he already saw the writing on the wall. Oh, Koster, Koster. I said his name wrong. He did. All right. Koster Kingdom-- sorry-- on Instagram. I got you. All right. I think Koster sounds cool, but it's Koster, it's not "coaster." So yeah. Sorry Brett. [00:04:07] All right. So Brett said he already saw the writing on the wall and he went to his short-term rental clients and he said, Hey, let's convert these into long-term rentals. because this is what I see coming. So I think there's an opportunity for property managers out there. There's an opportunity for real estate agents to get into property management that brings a lot of unqualified people and people that are going to not be very great and make a lot of mistakes perhaps unless they have their own investments, they've been dealing with property management a little bit. We can help you do this correctly and we'll talk a little bit about our DoorGrow Foundations in a little bit, but those of you that are established property managers, there's going to be an opportunity for you to capitalize maybe on this bubble, this Airbnb bubble, and convert some of the short-term rentals or convince some of the short-term rentals to convert the long term. [00:04:57] Otherwise, they're probably going to sell an exit. For real estate agents, that's your opportunity is maybe to identify those Airbnbs that really need to just get sold so that they don't end up losing out. A lot of unqualified people came into the short-term rental situation as a result of the pandemic and everything else thinking, "Hey, there's a bunch of opportunity here now afterwards, and they are, you know, a lot of the people that are the least qualified to be doing it, they're going to be the ones that get hurt the most because they're not paying attention much to the market.  [00:05:30] Sarah: And there's a lot of like coaching things for like, "oh, here, I'll teach you how to like, run an Airbnb or like a short term rental business." and I think it's a really great idea. It is. I think what oftentimes happens is people significantly underestimate the amount of work that it takes. Significantly. Like Jason and I, we were just at Melanie's event last week and we were talking with someone who manages two short-term rental properties and she is already done. She's completely overwhelmed. She hates it. And that's only at two, two properties. And she's like, "everything is just urgent. They need it right now. You know, you can't wait, and sometimes people have very unreasonable expectations and thoughts as to what is an emergency and what needs to be done right now." so if you're in that short term Rental game. Our advice to her was, "you need a property manager," like, and one that does short-term rentals like on a consistent basis, not one that is just able to say, "Hey, I can do short-term." When you get into the short-term game, your short-term game and your long-term game are completely different. [00:06:39] They function like two very separate businesses, and we have a few clients that do both short term and long term, and they realize very quickly that they are not at all the same thing. They have to operate very differently just because of that quick turnover.  [00:06:57] Jason: Yeah, so I'm doing a webinar later today with a friend of mine that basically does some coaching stuff to the real estate industry to real estate agents. So I'm going to be talking to real estate agents about how they can double their real estate commissions by leveraging property management and there's an opportunity here. Real estate agents can either start their own property management business so that they can keep their investor clients or they can partner with a property manager locally, which could be you listening, and that could help them as well. [00:07:34] I've had several clients that if they make the property management arm of their business, when they also have brokerage, double their brokerage commissions simply by making sure property management is healthy, that they're acquiring new clients, that there's healthy flow, and that has fed them a lot more real estate deals. A lot of companies get their real estate deals from the tenants that are looking to get into buying a home from owners that are looking to buy or sell, they're getting real estate deals and commissions and property management, like I mentioned in the intro, is the ultimate gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. And so there's an opportunity there for those listening to either start your own property management business if you don't have that yet or to partner with a property manager, and there's ways they can help you generate revenue, get more deals if you have a good relationship. Especially those of my clients because they know how to help real estate agents get more real estate deals and make more money. [00:08:37] We teach them how to do this. So why don't we talk about to those that are looking to maybe get into property management or have been thinking about starting it up. Okay. Okay.  [00:08:48] Sarah: Okay. So if you're thinking about starting a property management business, I think it would be a very good time to do that because we aren't quite sure where the real estate market is going. Are we heading into a recession? Are we already in the recession? Is it going to continue to tank? We don't know. So I think it's a really great time to start a property management business. I actually started one years ago just kind of by mistake, and I learned some hard lessons along the way. So what we've done is we've created a course called DoorGrow Foundations for people who are starting, or who have recently started a property management company. So by like startups, we mean that you might already have a few clients, but you are just really not, you know, a big large company at this point. What we've done is we've kind of, mapped out.  [00:09:45] Jason: Or you have zero doors? Or like purely nothing.  [00:09:48] Sarah: Yeah. Started, I started by saying that, okay. [00:09:51] Jason: Just to clarify, a lot of the people that I talked to that have started their property management business, they started it because they were an investor. [00:09:57] They already had 10, sometimes even a hundred units that were their own. And then they decided to start doing it, third party, and then they were actually starting a business. So before that, they just considered themselves an investor. So why don't we tell them a little bit about our Foundations program  [00:10:12] then? [00:10:12] Sarah: Yeah. So what we've done in DoorGrow Foundations is we have created an entire course that you can go through that talks about all of the things that you're going to need to know when starting a property management business. We go into all of the mistakes that we see a lot of people make right around this point. [00:10:32] And I've leveraged my own experience as well to help people avoid making some really common mistakes. So some of the things that we've talked about are, you know, what do your bank accounts need to look like and what should your financials look like? And, you know, how do we prioritize, like how do we get started? What should my day look like? Like all of these types of things are usually questions that people have when they're starting up. And unfortunately, sometimes if you don't kind of set that up the right way in the beginning, then it comes around to kind of bite you later. So we've put all of this into a course and we've made this available because a lot of times we get people contacting us who don't yet have a property management business. [00:11:20] They're like, "Hey, I want to start this. I want to get into it." But they haven't actually done it yet and made that leap. So we thought, 'Hey, let's help people by leveraging what we know, what we've seen by talking hundreds of property managers and my own experience in starting a property management company, let's put all of that into a course that people can have access to, and that way it'll help you kind of get things off on the right foot.' [00:11:47] Jason: So in our DoorGrow code, a lot of. At the very earliest stage, we call those dreamers. These are people that have this dream of starting a business and we call them fantasy belts. You know, we have this belt system, so they're not even a white belt yet. When you're in that dreamer or that fantasy stage, a lot of times we are very good at looking at all the upside, and we're very good at ignoring the difficulties or the downside. And so there are a lot of potential pitfalls and mistakes that they make when getting started. and the biggest challenge usually getting started is just taking action to actually get the business going, and they get caught up on wasting a lot of time on stuff that doesn't really matter when the only thing that really matters is getting your first client, right? That first door is the hardest. And so our program is focused on helping you get that first third party door as quick as possible, getting the right things in place, that you need systems in place. And then we even have some upsells or upgrades in the program, so you can get a website and some of these other add-ons that you might want in starting your business. Let's talk about what the program costs.  [00:12:54] Sarah: Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about it. So the monthly investment for foundations is only $297 a month. And we price it this way because some people, it might take only a couple months to get through and some people might kind of hang out here for quite a while. So sometimes we see people really go through things like we have clients in our program. They go through things super quickly. They're rapid implementers. They get the knowledge that they need and then they just implement, move forward. And if that's you, then you can get through this really quickly. You might only be in there for a few months and at that point you might qualify for our mastermind if you need a little bit more time because. You maybe have another job or you've got, you know, other things that are requiring your attention. So you want to be able to do this so that you don't miss out on the opportunity, but you can't fully dedicate yourself to it, then that's okay too. It might take you a little bit longer, so it's only $297 a month. And that way as long as it takes you or as quickly as you get through it you still get all of that information and you can kind of work at your own pace.  [00:14:06] Jason: Cool. Let's talk about what you get with this program. So first you get access to the Foundation's training in DoorGrow Academy, which is going to help you make a lot of the right moves in getting this started. You also get a ticket to DoorGrow Live, which is easily worth the value of, you know, probably several months of paying for this program. But you get a ticket to DoorGrow Live, you get to attend in person, connect with other property managers, maybe make some connections, a friend or two, maybe find a mentor. And we've got some really great mastermind members in that, that are always coming to those events. You get access to DoorGrow CRM. So this is a tool that's going to help you to be able to keep track of potential deals and leads and to be able to move those forward more easily. And it has phone calling and texting and a lot of cool features. So DoorGrow CRM. [00:15:00] Sarah: Branding pages, automation, all that kind of good stuff.  [00:15:03] Jason: So you get access to that and then we have a growth strategy that we teach in this as well. That's perfect and ideal for startups that we call product research interviews so that you can go out and have a reason to talk to investors or people that can connect you to investors and how to leverage that and how to have the right conversation. We give you the scripts, everything so that you can use this tactic to get your first clients, which are the most difficult to get. And if you do these product research interviews and you do them correctly, you'll get some clients. And this is how we actually use this strategy to start our mastermind and several other programs that we've had at DoorGrow is this strategy of product research interviews, which gives you an excuse to talk to somebody. Sometimes I call this the Trojan horse to selling, but basically you're interviewing people and able to then convert them into clients.  [00:15:58] And that can be really effective for startups because it's also going to teach you, by doing these interviews, you're going to learn the language and the objections and the pain and the pleasure, all the stuff you need to understand in order to sell effectively to clients. So this is going to help you collapse time on selling to clients so that you will be able to sell as effectively, or maybe more so than some people that have been in the industry or at this game for a long time. There's some knowledge that we need to collapse time on, and this is one of the strategies that will help with that. We also have a upsell to where you can, if you want a logo and you want a website, you can pay a little extra to get access to our team to do those things for you. We're the world's leading property management, branding and design agency, we've rebranded more companies than anybody else. Period. Hundreds. And we can help you with making sure you don't make some significant mistakes on the brand, which can cost you a lot of money in the long run. And I think that's about it, right?  [00:16:59] Sarah: Oh, they do the masterclass too? They get access to the masterclass.  [00:17:02] Jason: Oh. We also have a masterclass that we do once a month where we do a cool training on something related to helping you grow and scale your property management business. Trainings in the past that we've done, you will have access to is we did a training on creating the ideal pitch deck, how to create a really good pitch deck to increase your close rate. We did a training on the three systems you need in order to make your business infinitely scalable so you can scale quickly. And any others? We've done some others. We just did your priorities. We did, yeah. We just did a training on increasing your profitability by changing the priorities in the business. Stuff like this.  [00:17:39] So, yeah. So the Foundation's program is a really great stepping stone to enable you to get the funds and get in gear so that you can join our Mastermind. Now, if you've already got the funds, maybe you've got a healthy brokerage, we would recommend you start with our lite version of the Mastermind, and that would be a much better program to be in because it includes the foundation stuff, but then you get coaching and we take things to the next level. You get our more advanced growth strategies, and we do a full rapid revamp on your business, which includes the branding, the website, all that stuff's included. Based on the price points for those things, those upsells being included, it makes it a no-brainer you should do the lite version of the Mastermind, because you'll probably save money that way. So you'll definitely save money that way. Yeah, we would recommend that.  [00:18:31] Program is a one year program or a 12 month commitment, and if you're 200 doors + maybe $20k revenue and plus, then you probably are at a point now where you know how to add doors. Your business probably has a team, you're probably ready for our super system level of the Mastermind and that would be the that next level that we would recommend for those of you that are 200 plus. At least a hundred doors, but maybe 20 K in revenue, plus maybe to be in that level. So depending on what you need and where you're at, we can help figure out what do you need most and how can we best help you? So, yeah. Cool. So if you're thinking about getting into property management, my usual joke is, If you're considering it is, do you want us to talk you into it or do you want us to talk you out of it? because we can do either one. So reach out to us and we can help you with that. Anything else that we should say?  [00:19:24] If you are interested in talking to us, you are struggling in your property management business. You are wanting to take things to the next level. You really haven't grown much or significantly over the last year. Let us inject a little bit of juice and rocket fuel into your business and get you to that next level. We're really good at that. Reach out to us at doorgrow.com and join our free Facebook community. We have some free gifts and we will help funnel you through to working with us as a client. If you need a little time to be nurtured, go to DoorGrowClub.com. We have a lot of great stuff, free content. You get access to some of our master classes and the goal is to convince you that we know what we're doing and to get you to the point where you're working with us as a client. And we'd love to see you in there. So, and that's it, right? And you'll get some free gifts for joining. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  [00:20:12] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:20:39] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Even though a vacancy can be painful for an investor, leasing doesn’t have to be the biggest hat a property manager has to wear. Join property management growth expert Jason Hull to talk about the topic of the property management Summer busy season with Tim and Larry from Tenant Turner.  You’ll Learn [02:55] When is the right time to automate? [07:52] Why being cheap leads to bad clients [14:34] Staying competitive in the slow season [18:04] The multifamily market oversupply [22:13] Lockboxes and self-showings Tweetables “The most important currency related to growth is not cash, it's focus.” “It's really stupid, in contrast, to hold onto the moldy peanuts in the monkey trap because you don't want to let go and not get your hand out because you just want to be cheap.” “I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses.” “Even if you only have, you know, one door, eight doors, 10 doors, any vacancy is painful.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, "well, I'm being cheap and I'm being frugal, and that's smart." It's not smart when it comes to business, and it's not smart when it comes to growth.  [00:00:17] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate, think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, along with Sarah Hull, the COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show, and our guests today are Tim Wallace and Larry Hancock of Tenant Turner. Welcome you two.  [00:01:27] Tim: Thanks for having us.  [00:01:28] Larry: Yeah, thanks for having us.  [00:01:29] Jason: So does everybody there have red hair now? Is this the thing? [00:01:32] Tim: We're slowly taking over the world.  [00:01:34] Larry: Like it's just-- gingers unite-- job application requirement. [00:01:37] Jason: That sounds like a really good t-shirt.  [00:01:40] Sarah: I like it. Yeah. "Are you willing to dye your hair?" [00:01:43] Jason: That'd be the strangest thing. Yeah. "It's part of the, it's part of the uniform." All right. Awesome. Well, it's good to have you both and you know, we really appreciate you being a sponsor for our DoorGrow events and doing some cool stuff with us. And Tim, you actually sold Sarah Tenant Turner previously. Oh, Larry did. Larry sold Sarah Tenant Turner. Yeah. You can't have the credit, Tim. Sorry. It's Larry. Larry did this. He closed the deal in Sarah's property management business that she's since sold, but they're still using Tenant Turner.  [00:02:17] Sarah: They do use tenant turner. [00:02:19] Jason: There you go. So awesome. So our topic today is scaling up your leasing process during the busy season, which is right now, right? It's summer, things heat up. And what's interesting, if you do go onto Google Trends, trends.google.com and look at the keyword "property management" and you backdate it for like a decade and you'll see these, it just spikes. It doesn't go up like it's not growing in search volume, but property management spikes every summer and goes down in the winter. And that's probably how leasing works as well in property management. So what, where should we start with scaling up your leasing process during the busy season? [00:02:59] Larry: So what's interesting is it's almost like a catch 22 for our customers. So for folks that aren't using any kind of automation, they're like, "I really need your services, but I'm just too darn busy to even consider it." I'm like, "ah! Why didn't you talk to us just a few months earlier?" And then you got the opposite side where some customers are like, "I'm not busy enough to consider your services." so we're always trying to, you know, have these conversation with these people why automation's beneficial for them. Whether they're in a stage where they're just, you know, drinking from a fire hydrant and they're just trying to just figure things out while they're in the busy leasing season. Or maybe you are using automation and it's just a matter of creating efficiencies. So that way you can continually grow your business. So, typically that's how we'll start our conversation is kind of where are you at right now? Are you kind of just struggling to stay afloat and you need to add some automation into your life, or do you have the automation and it's just creating those efficiencies in your business? [00:03:53] Jason: So how do you help people that say they're not busy enough justify leveraging and getting tenure turner?  [00:04:02] Larry: Yeah. So from there it's really. Trying to get them more in the head space of like, "I understand that for now. But let's figure out how we can create value here." So maybe I'm getting them in a place of, you know, let's build the building blocks. "We're not going to create your account just yet, but in a perfect world, when you are busy and need our services, let's kind of back out what the steps are to get there." Sometimes maybe their portfolio isn't large enough. So then that would be a time when I would recommend to someone like you, Jason, where it's like, "Hey, you need to be a part of a program where you can, you know, grow your portfolio because he's going to help you grow your portfolio and then you're going to need us because you're only one person." so I'll try to get them in that kind of head space. But it's really almost building their tech stack. So while we're an important piece to that whole thing there's other moving parts to the entire system. So that's usually how I start. It's really more playing a consolidative role. [00:04:55] So I'm trying to consult them, figure out where they're at in the process. And if they're not a good fit for us that day, that's okay. Maybe they will be. And then I'm going to set a reminder to reach out before they're busy losing season basically.  [00:05:07] Jason: So where is that kind of cutoff point to where they've achieved, you know, Tenant Turner readiness status? [00:05:17] Larry: So sometimes people will view it from like a portfolio size. I think it's really more about the entrepreneurial mindset. I met some people where they have just one door and they're like, "Hey Larry, I'm going to be a hundred units by the end of the year." I'm like, "that's awesome man. You know, it's great you're kind of trying to build this plane before you're trying to take off," where sometimes I talk to customers, they're like, "Hey, We're flying this plane. The wings are about to fall off. And I just don't know what to do." I'm like, "okay--" [00:05:42] Jason: I'm going to build it in the air. I'm working on it.  [00:05:45] Larry: I know. It's like, "all right, well I appreciate you, you know, diving ahead first, but you're probably really stressed out right now." So, typically in our world, our pricing model, month to month, no contracts. So one to 50 units you're fine. We're going to talk to you. We're not going to be like, "oh you're too small for us, man. Like, I just can't talk to you." We have a great culture in that way. We try to be that partner with them. But typically our general rule of thumb is if you expect to have any vacancy, whether it's one throughout the entire year, you should at least consider us. Even if it's only one month out of the entire year we'll still talk to you.  [00:06:16] Jason: Yeah.  [00:06:17] Sarah: Yeah. And I think something that people don't always realize is even if you're like, I don't need it right now, I'm not ready, I don't have enough. It's going to make it so much easier if you have systems in place already, so that you can scale so that when you scale, you're not now in massive amounts of pain. And even if you only have, you know, one door, eight doors, 10 doors, any vacancy is painful. Yeah, any vacancy is painful and it's going to help you massively, not only just in your time and your effort, but it will make your clients happier. Like when I implemented Tenant Turner, my vacancy rate like took a nosedive. Now, not that I had a high vacancy rate. But like just trying to like market and figure out where to put these things and answering all the messages and doing a gazillion showings for people that might not even qualify. You know, it was taking sometimes like weeks to fill a vacancy. And when I implemented that, it went down dramatically. So clients are much, much happier and you and your staff are going to be much, much happier because now it's a lot less work for you.  [00:07:28] Larry: Yeah and kind of building on that, Sarah, we kind of find our solution is almost like a an aspirin approach. So people are kind of taking that aspirin when they have a headache in the form of vacancy. And there is a time and place to pop the aspirin, but usually what's a lot better is kind of plan ahead of, "oh, I know I could have headaches during this time of the year, so I'm going to be a little bit more you know, I'm going to prepare, I'm going to be more proactive." where I see people have the right mindset in regards to software is usually what they'll do is they'll annualize the cost and then figure out how to generate enough ROI. So if I'm able to save. Five hours per week, you know, and I annual analyze the software in such a way I don't need to worry about it because I've looked at the 12 month period and I know I'm going to get my value that way. It's a little bit harder when you're trying to convince people when they're kind of penny pitching and it's like you're wasting all this time on that part and that time worrying about it, you just wasted where you could be attracting new owners. So the mindset really is kind of analyzing the software, but trying to build the ROI into that. [00:08:31] Sarah: I have to say like I was hesitant for a while because I was like, "well, this is easy and like I have this streamlined process" and really, I said this to you. I was like, "I just don't spend that much time." I had 200 and like some odd units, like 260 I think at my highest. And when I was talking with you, I was like, "you know, I just don't spend that much time doing it. So is there a benefit to it? Yes, but how much time am I really going to save? Because I feel like it's already something that is simple for me." And even though I had this streamlined and I had processes to find and I maybe was spending a couple hours a week doing, you know, messaging and email and confirmations and stuff like that. [00:09:14] I was still spending time doing it. When I implemented Tenant Turner, then I was like, "oh, I don't have anything to do." Like every once in a while I have to just pop in and you have to like manually approve somebody. And then once, like I updated my showing schedule once a week. So once a week I had to go in and update the showing schedule for the upcoming week, which took all of maybe four minutes. And other than that, I was just popping in and kind of like manually approving people. And I was spending, I went from maybe a few hours a week, which I still didn't think was a lot to minutes per week. And I was like, "oh wow. Okay. I see it now. I see it." But sometimes they think you have to experience it to see it. Because I was like, "I just don't know!" And I was really glad that I did it because it really like, it took so much. And sometimes when you make a change like that, then you realize how much work you are actually doing. Because we rationalize, we're like, "it's not that hard. It doesn't take me that long. Like I just send a couple emails," and then when you realize, "oh, I don't have to do any of that anymore." it was like mind blowing to me. I was like, "oh, like this literally takes me like 10 minutes a week and that's it." So all my leasing was done in 10 minutes.  [00:10:33] Jason: I think that's one of my favorite ways to justify an expense is you have to look at the opportunity cost because if you're just looking, you're like, "okay, well it costs me this much money and if I do it myself, then it's free. But your time is the most valuable resource you have in a business-- not free-- and the most important currency related to growth is not cash. It's focus. And if your focus is diluted as a business owner away from what can generate more revenue, then the opportunity cost is huge in two to three hours you could be closing deals that are worth tens of thousands of dollars over that year. So it's really stupid in contrast to like hold onto the moldy peanuts in the monkey trap because you don't want to let go and not get your hand out because you just want to be cheap. [00:11:22] And so I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, "well, I'm being cheap and I'm being frugal, and that's smart." It's not smart when it comes to business, and it's not smart when it comes to growth. You need to let go of those moldy peanuts. There's bananas in reach and the farmer's going to come along and chop off your head. And this is why most businesses fail. Most businesses fail in the-- or they get stuck-- first year or the first five years. A lot fail and property management is tough. And I see, I see a lot.  [00:11:55] Sarah: They get, they just get stuck and they're trapped. "I don't have more time. I can't do anything else. Like, I don't know what else I can do in making these little changes." Like I'm going to be honest with you, I like, I bought into the product and I still wasn't like, "ah, I think that's going to be amazing." I was like, "it'll help me." And it helped way more than I thought it was going to help me. I would say this is like 1. Was implementing a property management software and 2. Was implementing tenant Turner. Those are the two things that like made a massive shift in my business for me. [00:12:28] Jason: Nice.  [00:12:29] Sarah: And I almost wish I could have told myself like, "Hey, remember when you had 260 units and you were doing it all yourself? You should have been talking to Tenant Turner.  [00:12:37] Jason: There was some guy that had mentioned these things to you. [00:12:40] Sarah: I know! [00:12:40] Jason: He's pretty smart.  [00:12:41] Tim: I think even if you are in that cheap mindset, like at the end of the day, like vacancy is what's going to cost your owners the most money down the road too. Like one day on the market can cost them anywhere from what, 50 to $200 depending on what they're paying for their mortgage and everything. Like those costs add up and it's as property managers, it's your fiduciary duty to help them recoup that money. And if you're spending too much time on those types of things, even if you're focused on your business and spending time on that, you could still be losing that money by having those extra days on market without this type of system. [00:13:11] Sarah: Absolutely, and I think the conversation that I have with people over and over again is you need to figure out what this particular task is worth in dollars. So if this is like a $10 an hour task, a $20 an hour task, Is it something that you, as a business owner need to be doing? Is your time worth more than 10 or $20 an hour? And if the answer to that question is yes, then you need to not be the one who's doing this.  [00:13:35] Jason: Yeah. If a business owner, and a lot of business owners are the BDM, they are the business development manager. They are the person that's doing sales and generating revenue and growing the business. And if you do not as a business owner, have a full-time BDM. [00:13:49] You have somebody focused on this and it's on your shoulders, then you're a shitty part-time salesperson. You're maybe investing, I find one, maybe two hours a day. That's like 10 hours a week focusing on growing the business. And so everything else other than that should be offloaded that you can everything else. Give up the leasing stuff as much as you can, give up the maintenance stuff as much as you can, like you need to be focused on generating revenue until you can offload that piece and focus. Otherwise, you're not going to grow. And if any business owner is listening to this in property management, if you haven't grown significantly over the last year or two or three, it's because you are doing the wrong things as a business owner in the business. Plain and simple, there's no way around that. So we chatted about justifying it for those that are already, they have lots of doors and they're, you know, how do we deal with making things scalable during the busy season? And then things really for leasing tend to really cool down in the winter months. And so what are you typically seeing with clients that come to you that are maybe at a 200 plus doors or it's obvious that you can serve them. [00:15:02] Tim: I mean, even if you do have 200 doors sure, summertime's going to be the busiest, where generally speaking, you could have anywhere from what, five to 12% vacancy rates and whatnot with turnovers and whatnot. During the wintertime, there still might be one or two that hit every month. And what we're noticing with customers that size is that throughout the year we kind of keep things with that month to month rate really low for everyone. [00:15:24] It's based on portfolio size for us. And so most people are keeping that active because even one listing, like you're saying, if you're working on one listing, spending two or three hours on that one listing, even getting to go back and forth with the messages, the emails and everything like that could still be costing you more than what your monthly rate for subscription might be. So a lot of people do keep us going year round and have the lock boxes and things like that in service for vendors and stuff that might need to come and go for properties as well. So, there's lots of different little solutions that we provide there too that kind of help keep the business flowing smoothly, but generally speaking, we're there when they need us and any spot in the road where if it's crazy or if it's just a little bit, we try to keep the system smooth all year for them.  [00:16:10] Larry: I guess to add to that so typically when things are slow, usually people are saying, "I'm not getting enough leads." really what they mean is they're not getting enough leads from, you know, Zillow, Trulia, the big networks. And when they come to us and say, "Hey, what do I do? What can Tenant Turner provide?" That's usually when I tell them like, "you're really going to hunker down and how are you going to be different than your competition?" and that's also times when like, you know, "let's look at your website. You know, are you being an industry leader in your market?" So maybe they're not going to the Zillows, but when they search, or, you know, what is your web, your presence in your market? Automation's great and you definitely should automate, but then there's also times to be that personalized touch. So when things are slow, what aren't your competitors doing? If they're leaning really heavy where they can't talk to a person at all maybe you should go to what we call the 'take request model,' where we're automating things, we're pre-qualifying, and then we're setting, you know, a couple days and times. But before an appointment's approved, you get to talk to that lead. And really what you're doing, you're leveraging yourself. You introduce yourself, you say why you're great and you're market maybe some key differentiators. And then you schedule an appointment. And you do a couple things. What I like to say is you're doing what's called a vibes test just to make sure both of you are, you know, a good fit, rather to rent the property and that type of stuff. And also you're making sure they have a heartbeat. Making sure, you know, if you're using self-guided tours, it's another security layer to everything. Because at the end of the day, I'm a big fan of it's the, a book called Rework by the guys who created Basecamp. And the whole philosophy is that it's not that in a world where people saying, "I need more of this," whether it's "I need more leads" or "I need more tools," it's more utilizing the tools that you already have more efficiently. So when we look at things like lead flow, maybe it's not necessarily a top of the funnel problem, it's more of a bottom of the funnel conversion problem. And then when you use personalization to a lot of interesting ways, like I mentioned. [00:18:04] Jason: So one of the things that I think is happening a bit throughout the US and I've had some podcast guests touch on this, is that in some markets-- and I've heard some some property managers anecdotally share this with me as well-- they're having a difficulty getting tenants because the inventory as a result of the pandemic just went up, skyrocketed. A lot of people are like, "Hey, let's build, let's create a bunch of investments." Now there's a surplus of inventory and that creates a scarcity of tenants, and so they're having to get a little bit more aggressive. What strategies Have you guys seen, or you know, because you're connected to a lot of people that are doing leasing, how are they becoming more attractive to tenants than their competition? [00:18:48] Tim: You want to start or? So there's a lot of different things out there, like different solutions, whether it's providing something like a benefits package to your residents, things like that really making your listings stand out. If it's better photography, if it's better marketing in general for stuff. But generally speaking, we are kind of seeing that trend as well, where days on market are expanding a little bit. It's kind of a trend that's-- we were kind of in a goldlock zone for the last couple of years with rentals. Like it's been amazing and pre covid it wasn't ever really like that either. Like that we're kind of seeing the ebbs and flows of the market, and that's just natural in real estate. So, we're coming back to the time where people are like, kind of hunkering down and making sure that their properties are as good as they can be to really attract the best tenants for them. So while there might be a few extra days on market, there's a couple things you can do around there. Like Larry's saying, adding those personal touches in there. Setting up notifications so that as soon as someone gets to the property, you can still have that personal touch by making a phone call as soon as you can see they got into the property. Or if maybe some people are doing a few more in-person showings, if that's the case. Generally speaking, that's putting more time on the property as well, which, like we talked about, costs opportunity costs.  [00:20:00] If you got the team to do that, and that's kind of their role as a leasing agent or whatnot, great. They can have that personal touch and then go a little bit further with them. But if you're also focused on self showings having that additional personal touch, some additional marketing on the property or whatnot, I can kind of help draw that process out a little bit sooner. And really with our system, it. We really try to provide as much immediacy as possible. So when someone sees a listing on a site like Zillow, for instance they're clicking request information. We're sending them an email right away that they have the opportunity to come into Tenant Turner and click a link and schedule a tour right away. If they're calling into us, they're not going to a voicemail. They're going to be sitting there waiting three days for someone to respond to. I know that's a trend of the industry. A lot of people have massively filled inbox inboxes that they just can't handle. So tenant leads never hear back from anyone because they kind of pick and choose. We're responding to every single one of those leads as they come in and making sure that immediacy is really driving that engagement.  [00:20:59] So if we keep that engagement up for everyone the goal is that, generally speaking, that alone will really help drive. What's, I think there's a statistic out there? If you respond within five minutes, generally speaking, you're going to get 80% more acceptance in terms of a conversation. Yeah. There's that click or an actual phone call, things like that, like providing that immediacy is a massive, and it goes a long way for impressing tenant leads on the consumer side, but also in, in business. We all know B two B sales and even BDMs like calling their owners. As soon as you see a click on a website, you want to call them. So we want to keep that trend going on our side as well.  [00:21:33] Jason: Yeah, this is the TikTok generation man. They have attention spans of like two minutes, you know, it's like really short. So I love these ideas. So pushing owners to improve the property I think is a great strategy. Increasing your availability and your responsiveness and that immediacy, quick, beat, slow for sure in business. Increasing the ease Tenent Turner helps with. And then making sure that you are able to be super responsive within the first five minutes. So yeah. Love it. All right, cool. What else should we chat about related to scaling up your process during the busy season? Did we miss anything?  [00:22:12] Larry: We got it. I know typically the elephant in the room, so a lot of times, you know, self-guided tours is the golden child of, you know, why you should consider it and how it's helpful, whether it's busy or slow and this, that, and the other. But one of the things that we had is for people that aren't using it and it's like, "I would never consider that or I'm scared to use this or I can never get owner buy-in." And that's kind of always the elephant in the room. I know Tim, you have some very interesting data of, you know, while, you know, like anything in business there are inherent risks, but as business owners every day we are willing to kind of, you know, improve or, you know, try to tackle these risks. And there's usually a pot-- not all the time, but you know, a pot of gold can be waiting for you. So was there any data that you wanted to share, Tim?  [00:22:56] Jason: Before we get into that, let's kill that objection real quick. because I hear this all the time too. So I say, "Hey, maybe you should be using Tenant Turner or something like this," and they say, "well, I don't want to do lock boxes." And my response is, "you don't have to." like, there's a lot of benefits besides that piece. In fact, there's plenty of benefits besides that piece. And so maybe you can address that real quick and then we can talk about is that even really a valid concern or not? And are there markets that are better for lockbox versus others? Some are like, "I can never do that in my market. I'll have squatters all over the place." you know, they're concerned. So let's address that, that elephant in the room.  [00:23:34] Tim: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you guys know your properties best. You're going to know which areas might have a high potential for negativity happening. Whether it's someone coming in and stealing wires, the horror stories of people stealing appliances and stuff like that. At the end of the day, if someone wants to do something bad, A lockbox or a keyless lock isn't necessarily going to stop someone in that scenario, right? We all know areas where people aren't afraid to break a window and get in, steal a refrigerator. Like the fact that a property isn't known to be vacant is a big enough red flag alone that most people that want to do something nefarious will go ahead and do it. But at the same time on our side of things, if we can block as many of those instances as possible with our abilities to kind of keep track of known scammers and squatters and things like that. We've got some stuff built into our system, but really at the end of the day, if someone wants to do something bad, it's going to happen. But generally speaking, most people that are doing showings, that type of scenario, if you're, you know, your area, if you're doing your own kind of awareness inspections periodically and you're on top of the property yourself, we barely hear of any instances of negativity happening with those scenarios. Like self showings, we can come up with the horror stories, but at the end of the day, in our experience, they are really few and far between and we're not having major issues, at least more than what you would on average. See, with any property that's being marketed, it's vacant. Like that's, it's going to happen.  [00:24:56] Jason: And there's some serious advantages because, I would imagine the best defense, period, against all of those type of problems is just getting it leased out as quick as possible. Yep. It's decreasing vacancy, and so if a lockbox can help them get into it right away, get a showing right away, whatever, decreasing the vacancy time is probably your best, you know, defense.  [00:25:18] Sarah: Yeah. The other thing I'll add to this too, is if there are people who are kind of scoping out the property and they notice, hey, like every Tuesday at six o'clock people come and then that's it. They're not going to come at Tuesday at six o'clock. They're going to come at other times. Yeah. So if we do have a lockbox on it, and now we don't really know, like when people are going to come because they're coming whenever is like convenient for them. So it might be earlier in the morning or in the afternoon or late at night. We don't know for sure. There's not so much predictability in the schedule. So I think that's something that would help as well is if there's someone who's " Hey, that house over there is vacant. Let's like check that out." But they consistently see people in and out of it, that is a little bit of a deterrent as well, because you never know, like, "Hey, if I go over there because I want to steal that refrigerator, am I walking into someone who's already there? [00:26:14] Jason: Now you can not have a big old sign on the property out front that says, "Hey, this is vacant right now. Do you want to see this?" You know, but you can still market it online without like giving out the address until they're ready to do a showing probably.  [00:26:29] Larry: Yeah, so there's some kind of tips and tricks that we've found. So one thing is not advertising it as a self-guided tour. If you're going to use verbiage in the marketing description, use contactless showing. Because that could mean virtual tours, it could mean other things. But really for us, I like to describe ourselves as a closed loop system. because usually leads are only interacting with our platform if they find out through your website or through a syndication site. So it makes it much more harder to shop for homes because they really don't know, you know, but if they inquire, then that's when the automation will engage. Some interesting things, you know, kind of like Sarah said, one thing deterrent is they see activity, but you know, we find that a lead isn't going to put a government Id answer some questions and go through this process. Why would they do that when they could just go to the front door? You could go to YouTube and learn how to pick a lock and under five minutes, and then no one's going to know I'm on the radar. It's so much easier to do that. Especially in the age of TikTok. I'm sure there's a TikTok, within two minutes or less you'll learn how to pick a lock or pop open a lockbox or something like that too. [00:27:34] Sarah: Or break a window.  [00:27:35] Larry: Or break a window.  [00:27:37] Jason: Yeah, it's a little bit quicker probably. All right, cool. So, how can people get in touch with Tenant Turner and reach out to you guys?  [00:27:48] Larry: Yeah, so obviously if they want to learn a little bit about our services, tenantturner.com. My name's Larry, larry@tenantturner.com. Feel free to email me directly. I kind of deem myself as a software nerd so you know, any questions about whether you use this or not, that's fine. You know, I'm always happy to share tips and tricks of how to automate your process, so that's kind of how you learn some more.  [00:28:12] Tim: So Larry's on the sales side of things for tenant Turner. I'm on the marketing side too, so if you ever need any additional materials or data and statistics around the self showings, if you want to help market to your owners and whatnot, if you've already signed up with Tenant Turner, happy to kind of jump on that side of things. You can email me at tim@tenantturner.com. [00:28:26] Jason: Awesome. I'm sure that's a big part of it is really if they understand how to sell it to their clients, then that's probably the biggest hurdle. Is just being able to confidently say, here's why this is a good idea and how it's going to benefit you and to sell them on it. So, awesome. Well it's been great having you both here on the show. We appreciate Tenant Turner. We get great feedback on tenant Turner from our clients, so we've always felt very confident pushing our clients towards you as one part of their growth strategy and and I hope you guys have an awesome week.  [00:28:59] Larry: Thanks. You as well. We appreciate you guys and thanks for including us. [00:29:02] Jason: All right. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that is wanting to grow your business, reach out to Tenant Turner and make sure you reach out to DoorGrow. We are really good at helping our clients scale if you feel like you need more doors to be able to afford Tenant Turner or to be able to justify tenant Turner. We're really good at helping people do that. Anything else we should add? I don't think so. Let's tell them to join our Facebook group. Join our Facebook group.  [00:29:28] There you go. DoorGrow club.com. Join our Facebook group community. We have some free stuff in there. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  [00:29:37] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:30:04] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

The property management industry has been moving more and more towards automating tasks and processes in the last decade. Property management tools and software have improved drastically and continue to improve every year. In this episode, property management growth expert, Jason Hull sits down with Mo Hussein from Balanced Asset Solutions to talk about property management tools and systems. You'll Learn... [06:23] Why You DON’T Want Software that Does it All [10:27] Implementing a New Tool or System [20:40] The Cost of Hiring vs Implementing a New Software [28:04] The Most Effective Accountability System for Your Team Tweetables “Try to evaluate software from a very objective type of lens. At the end of the day, it is just a tool.” “You don't see an amazing handyman or you know, vendor or somebody that's going to do some work, show up with a, just a multi-tool. Like where's your toolbox?” “There's no such thing as one product that's going to do everything extremely well.” “The humbling experience every business owner needs to have is when they start to hire people that are better at the things they used to do that they've let go of.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: Initially when I was playing around with stuff in my own business, I was like, I need to find that multi-tool, and I think this is a mistake a lot of people make. I need to find this multi-tool that can do everything. That sounds like that would be the best thing, but it does it really badly, right? You don't see an amazing handyman or somebody that's going to do some work, show up with a, just a multi-tool. Like where's your toolbox?  [00:00:23] Welcome DoorGrow hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and in life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management, business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder, and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:24] So my guest today, I'm hanging out with Mo Hussein. Welcome Mo and what's the name of your business?  [00:01:30] Mohammed: Hey Jason. Pleasure to be here. It's called Balanced Asset Solutions.  [00:01:34] Jason: Balanced Asset Solutions. Awesome. So the topic Mo and I are going to be chatting about today is the Power of Innovative Software Solutions. But before we get into that, Mo, why don't you give everybody a little bit of background on yourself and how you've sort of connected yourself to property management?  [00:01:50] Mohammed: Yeah, great, great question. So we are a CPA accounting and technology advisory firm that specifically just focuses on real estate. So we work with property managers, asset managers, fund managers. In implementing software leveraging software to be able to streamline their business and enabling them to be able to scale. Prior to starting this practice about six years ago I've actually worked for AppFolio and well before they were public as well as Yardi Systems. And what I saw in the market was you know, the software is a tool at the end of the day, and there's a lot of complexity that comes with these programs. The accounting nuances, how to properly implement it, get your accounting to work right, your numbers to show up correctly. And a lot of customers would call in asking for accounting and operational kind of advice. And being a software vendor, we're there to make sure that the product is technically working right, versus giving advice in the accounting and operations world. And so we started this practice about six years ago and we offer, you know, CPA and accounting services around the accounting that bookkeeping using these products and also kind of maximizing the ability to kind of streamline your business and wrapping your business processes around these programs. [00:02:59] Jason: Cool. Awesome. So you worked for AppFolio, you worked for Yardi as well, correct? Correct. Okay. And in a tech capacity?  [00:03:09] Mohammed: In a tech capacity, yeah. In sales and account management? Correct.  [00:03:13] Jason: Okay. I come from a tech background as well, so. Great. I worked at HP and I worked at Verizon, and so we're both nerds. Talk nerdy to me, Mo! Let's go. So what are you noticing in the industry when it comes to software? And, you know, this is a challenge a lot of people are trying to figure out which one to pick when they're in the startup stage. And then what I also notice-- Some try to do it without it-- but what I also notice is that nobody ever seems totally happy with their software and they're always looking over the fence at their neighbor to try and figure out, what are you using? Is this better? And I get people switch more often than they probably should. And then they realize they're missing something else. So what do you work on with clients and what are you seeing?  [00:04:00] Mohammed: Yeah. You know, great question and you know about like what, 15, 20 years ago, when we think about property management software and the industry as a whole, there weren't that many players. You had Yardi, this is before AppFolio time, 15, 20 years ago. Yeah. You had some very legacy players that worked with larger commercial operators like an MRI or Skyline. A lot of these on-premise pieces of software have now been kind of gobbled up by larger players or have transformed to be, you know, software as a service or web-based programs. And now, you know, over time now the ability to be able to build new software, the barrier to entry is much lower. You know, modern technology frameworks like using like single page apps and stuff like that are very ubiquitous. And you're seeing a lot of new entrants and players that are coming into the market. You know, players like Red Vine. That you're hearing of now. And then also there's this whole you know, offshoot or like a entire vertical that's been created now called PropTech. And now you have technology that's specific for screening and, you know, maintenance management, facilities management, investment management, and you have all these little products that are coming out. And so, you know, one thing that we always you know, implore on our customers is, you know, try to evaluate software from a very objective type of lens. At the end of the day, it is just a tool. And the effectiveness of that tool is in how you use it. Right? If you're using a hammer, you know, not in a conducive way, then it's not going to be an effective tool, right? And so there's a lot of buzz in the market that you hear now, especially with AI and generative ai. There's a lot of different tools that are in the market, but you know, the fundamentals of what you're looking to make the software do or hopefully achieve with the software, being able to streamline your rent collections and tenant communication, your vendor communication, you know, we always tell our customers, Hey, put together a checklist of what exactly the objectives are that you're looking to accomplish with this piece of software. Try to tie that to some business outcome. And that's kind of the driver of why you're looking at or evaluating the software and then put together a grading rubric and then, you know, find the software that is effective for your business needs. Don't give too much credence and how it looks or the aesthetics or what you're hearing from other folks. Definitely what you're hearing in the market will help kind of guide the software programs they to take a look at, but you know, we tend to see this as well, a lot of clients are kind of jumping around between different products and are not happy with one product or another. And usually it's an issue associated with kind of the implementation and kind of the adoption and enablement that they're giving to their employees with the product. [00:06:22] Jason: So, going back to your tool analogy, I think my philosophy with software. Initially when I was playing around with stuff in my own business, I was like, I need to find that multi-tool, and I think this is a mistake a lot of people make. I need to find this multi-tool that can do everything. It's got the hammer, the screwdriver, the pliers, tweezers, knife, like everything in it. That sounds like that would be the best thing. I'll just find something, does everything, but it does it really badly, right? You don't see an amazing handyman or you know, vendor or somebody that's going to do some work, show up with a, just a multi-tool. Like where's your toolbox? "Oh, I've got this guy. This can do everything." Right? So my philosophy on software over time is definitely shifted to, I want my team members to have the best tools, and if those best tools can do some things really well, then I will find other tools to strap onto that or add into my toolbox. That also do their job really well, and I find I get a better result having the best tools, even if I'm spending more money, than having that multi-tool that can do a whole bunch of things. So what's your take on this? Are we in alignment or...?  [00:07:34] Mohammed: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. And I completely agree. There's no such thing as one product that's going to do everything extremely well, right? There's going to be some pitfalls in one area that you have to sacrifice for another area. And so, you know, usually when clients are going through these evaluation kind of cycles of looking at software, what we suggest is, "Hey, you know, use this as an opportunity to also do some introspection. Understand what your standard operating procedures are, how you run your business, what is your accounting cycle look like? Who's involved? How does that process propagate throughout the organization? Same thing with you know, the leasing, the accounting operations when it comes to maintenance and document what that process kind of looks like, and then use that as kind of a guiding post of the functionality you're looking from the program," you know, versus going into the evaluation and looking at a bunch of different pieces of software. And usually when, you know, when clients realize like, "Hey, you know, we didn't realize that this program had a limitation in this aspect," they didn't approach it from a manner of understanding kind of what their processes are and then kind of demoing the software or looking at the programs from that lens, if that makes sense. [00:08:40] Jason: Got it. So what size of companies and what companies typically are coming to you for help, and what do they need help with?  [00:08:49] Mohammed: Great question. So we have a pretty broad range of clients. We have small mom and pop and customers with, you know, 10 or 15 doors on the residential side. And then we have clients, large asset fund managers that are, you know, grappling with 80,000 plus doors across the world. And so, we don't only focus on residential, commercial, office, industrial, manufactured housing, self storage. The only vertical we don't touch is senior housing, mainly because of hipaa, kind of healthcare requirements there. Ok, cool. Some of the problems that they do have, one is change management. [00:09:21] Most of the clients we work with have, you know, CPAs in house, you know, they have staff implementing and properly adopting software is a herculean effort, especially as the organization grows larger and larger. You have your day-to-day responsibilities, challenges, organization, and cleanliness, you know, understanding kind of accounting and software. At the same time, you know, change management and project management and the orchestration of that is probably the biggest challenge that a lot of our clients have. And in general, we're all creatures of habit, right? So there's a significant opportunity that cost that comes with kind of managing and implementing a new solution and ushering a change, versus kind of focusing on growth and your portfolio and servicing your owners and your tenants. [00:10:04] Jason: Now a lot of business owners will get excited about some new tech or some new software, some new thing they're going to throw into the business, and they go and throw this at their team, and then they get friction and resistance and adoption. Anyone that's ever been around tech or software knows that trying to get a team to use tech adoption is the number one challenge. [00:10:25] You've already mentioned it twice, right? Adoption's a big challenge. So, What is the secret to adoption? And I find for me, there's a couple of factors, but I want to hear what you found really helps with the adoption happening and getting team buy-in and getting team members to actually use this stuff. [00:10:46] Mohammed: Yeah. Great question. I did a radio show a couple months ago and kind of the three things that we see that are needed in order to have kind of. Effective adoption and enablement with software and just in general, just changes. One is executive sponsorship and so we see a lot of owners of property management, asset management firms, you know, they understand that there is a need for some of your product or, you know, they're doing a lot of pen and paper using a lot of Excel spreadsheets. They want to use some piece of software. However, they'll relegate or delegate that to the team that would also be using it. And so, And this team not only has to go through and do their kind of day-to-day activities, but now they also have to go through the process of evaluating different pieces of software or different software products. And they're giving kind of an artificial budget and the executive or the sponsor is not as involved. Kind of the evaluation process and not giving much weight to, you know, how significant of a change this will be at the end of the day. You know, implementing a new piece of software is very business disruptive. And so, you know, your employees are the folks that are kind of doing this evaluation, feel like they're on, kind of on their own little island and kind of going through this entire change and evaluation on their own. That's one is the kind of executive sponsorship. And usually when that executive sponsorship exists and the, you know, the owner and the executives in the business are actually involved during the evaluation cycle this also gives confidence to, you know, the the employees and the folks in your organization that you are serious about this. [00:12:14] want to make sure that it is successful. I want to see it through. And it incentivizes, you know, extreme ownership. You know, folks want to do less manual work. We want to do less administrivia work, right? And so, and these software programs have that promise. So executive owner sponsorship extreme ownership. And then lastly, and probably most importantly is change management. And this is something that most organizations just struggle with in general. They're too focused and kind of, siloed into what they're trying to accomplish, that they're not looking at kind of the bigger picture and the impact that this change is impacting across the organization. And so that's why organizations and consultants like us kind of exist. And so executive sponsorship, extreme ownership and change management.  [00:12:58] Jason: Yeah, entrepreneurs like to walk into a room, pull the pin on a grenade that they picked up at a conference. Throw it into the middle of their team and say, "here's our new thing we're doing! or "go do this thing!" and the team are like, what the hell? Like, we've got plenty of work already to be working on. We're not excited about this. This does not look fun to us. This is terrifying. You know, how am I going to manage my current work? And and they don't want to really own it. They, and they don't want to mess up because they know if they go out there, start researching software and they're usually not given the right criteria. Right. Like, they're like, how do we weight the criteria? because they probably are going to be conservative and think just in terms of budget. Whereas the business owner's probably like, I want the best. And, you know, there isn't really a good decision making guide related to this and which weighted factors and how they should consider it. Right. And so, You know, if anyone's ever seen a decision making matrix where you list out all the criteria, right? Like what's the speed of implementation, how disruptive will this be? How intuitive is the UI or the user interface for the software you know, can we pick it up pretty easily? So, How much training is going to be required? What's the cost, right? How long is it going to take to implement, right? And then you can weight all the software and figure out, all right, what's going to look like, what looks like the best one, but which of these criteria is the most important? Which one's the second most important? So there's a cool app I like to, I've used in the past called Best Decision on the iPhone. [00:14:29] Okay. And you can put in all your criteria, you can put in your question, you can put in all your options, and it'll, you can put the weight on these and then it, you can go through and take it like a quiz and put in all your different options and each criteria. And then at the end it'll say, here's your best decision. So it's kind of cool. I don't know if it exists on Android, but I've used that in the past, but a lot of times people just don't have anything like that and nobody wants to manage the process of implementation. Right. Leaving that on the team shoulder generally doesn't work because they're going to just blame everyone else. There isn't extreme ownership. Right. Which is a great book by the way, right? And then the business owner. Is already delegated, so they're not really taking ownership. Yeah. I could see how that would be a huge mess. Yeah.  [00:15:14] Mohammed: Yeah. It's also you know, implementing a software is it has its own nuances and complexities that come with it, right? There's companies that just focus on that. And quite honestly, if you're a business owner, property manager, you know, implementing software is not a distinctive differentiator to you from your competition, and so you should be taking on responsibilities and delegating internally for the things that actually make material impact and differentiate your business versus, you know, the accounting or implementing some piece of software, which is something that you and your competition peers have to do anyway. [00:15:43] Jason: Yeah, I find that we have the best success. So DoorGrow has a suite of software as well in that PropTech category, I guess, and we find that the operator is the person that should be moving this forward and learning it and getting the team doing it. Not the business owner typically. Because the business owner likes the concept. They like the idea of the software, they like the vision of where we could get to and the results, but they don't want to do the work to implement it. They don't want to usually learn it fully. And the operator is usually more the personality type that geeks out on that stuff anyway, and would be happy to dig into it, learn it, get it dialed in. Get all the detail in the minutiae en entered into it. Especially when it comes to like process software. It's like we have this Visio like, or Lucidchart like flowchart software for building out workflows for process that you can build in forms and other stuff. But it's very visual and that makes it really intuitive and easy for teams to map out their processes and to know where they're at currently in a workflow if they're running a process. [00:16:51] We find that's a whole level beyond what we used to experience before we had DoorGrow flow in like Process Street. Or some people use Lead Simple, or they use some of these more checklist based tools. You know, and my operator actually is unique. She's my wife, but she's a little unique that she doesn't like technology, like she thinks it's trying to get her. She's fighting with her computer all the time. She's like, what is this? And she asked me to come in. I'm the nerd in the company. And I'm like, oh, it's like this. She's like, okay. But she's like, "see!" Like technology's out to get me, you know? And so, but she likes using DoorGrow flow. Because it's visual and she can map. I'm like, what are you doing? It was the weekend. This weekend. I'm like, what are you doing? She's like, oh, I'm mapping out a process. I'm like, really?  [00:17:36] Mohammed: Yeah, and this is a great example, Jason, that was already a process. You guys had documents, right? You're using the software to kind of map, you know, digitally the process that you've already kind of built. And so that's, and that's huge crux also with a lot of folks that are implementing these new products is that, you know, they don't have that process. They don't have SOPs, you know, they don't have controls within the organization and checks, especially when it comes to the accounting. And so they jump into this product and you know, They're, you know, they fail to have a process and that also tends to make the product just the enablement around it. Very finicky and, you know, there's a lack of adoption. And then, oh they find another shiny tool and product and that gets 'em excited.  [00:18:15] Jason: Right. I think one thing that also really affects adoption is the timeline in a lot of people's minds is a lot shorter than reality. And I think my general rule for implementing something new in a business, whether it's building out one of DoorGrow's, growth engines, and adding this into your business is it's going to take minimum 90 days. And usually it's the first 30 days to just start to install or build this engine or to like get the software just set up. Maybe it's going to take a second month to now start to do the major changes and tweaks in it, and then the third month, usually it's just the little tweaks that give you 90% of the results. Like it's that last 10% of getting something dialed in that gives you 90% of the results. And sometimes the mistake our clients will make, like if they're just implementing a growth strategy, for example, is they will do some of the work during the first 30 days. Not fully build that engine, and then they try and dump a little fuel into it and they're like, this thing is leaky as hell and it's not getting any results and it's not working, and they didn't do the work to get it dialed in. And this happens in your sales process. This happens in just about anything. It's that last 10% of dialing in the little tweaks and the little changes that finally gets you to getting 90% of the benefit and the results.  [00:19:40] Mohammed: Right. No, of course. And then there's also that notion of implementation fatigue, right? It's like the longer that kind of this implementation cycle kind of drags out kind of diminishing returns.  [00:19:51] Jason: Oh, totally true. They just burnt out on it. And the business owners getting fed up and it's just because they didn't probably have a decent plan, but they're like, they're giving up. And then you hear, like I hear a ton of clients say, Hey, we really like property meld like this cool tool that really has helped us dial in our maintenance and speed things up. And then I hear some say we tried it for like the first month and it was a nightmare and we quit. And I'm like, really? Because I hear amazing feedback most of the time. They're like, oh yeah, it was awful. I'm like, okay, so.  [00:20:25] Mohammed: Fail the plan or plan to fail. Right?  [00:20:27] Jason: Yeah. So interesting. So, well, what else would you like to chat about the power of innovative software solutions that we haven't covered yet?  [00:20:38] Mohammed: Yeah, so, you know, a lot of times when we're talking to clients or prospects that are implementing a new piece. One thing that I did want to kind of double click on is the the point that you mentioned about kind of the timeframe it takes to implement a new piece of software. It's also the toll and the investment, right? The time investment. You know, there's an opportunity cost between hiring experts to do something versus, you know, DIY or doing it yourself. And so I feel like there's also a chasm and kind of a gap between kind of ownership's understanding of just like, Hey, this new product is just data entry. I can use my VA or folks that I have in the Philippines, or you know, some of my other employees that just enter this data and then all of a sudden this product is going to be working well. Yeah. I'm curious when you're talking to clients and they're saying, Hey, you know, this piece of product didn't work well for us, do you usually kind of dig a little bit deeper? I'm usually try to ask a lot of follow up questions, quantify like where exactly things did not go right. [00:21:34] And and I tend to get a lot of answers of, you know what, I don't know. That's a good question. [00:21:37] Jason: So when things don't go well, it's usually excuses. They're like, well, we couldn't get vendors to use it, like if they're talking about Property Meld. But really like, did you tell them if they want to work with you, they have to use it? And did you sell them on the benefits of how it's going to collapse time for them? And they'll be able to just use their phone to do this and it'll make everything easier. Right. So I think one of the challenges is if you go into implementing a software, switching to a software, but you don't yet believe in it, then you're going to sabotage your results with it. And that means they're not fully sold on it. And I think when it comes to technology, First, the person that's the decision maker has to be sold on the technology. They have to believe in it if they're really going to move forward. Otherwise, they should not move forward with it. And then once they believe in it, they have to transfer that belief to their team. They have to convince the team to believe in it, because if they can't sell the team on doing it, but they're going to expect the team to implement it, it's going to be met with disastrous results. And I think that's our role as an entrepreneur. We have to continually be selling our team. On what we're doing, and then we can sell to potential clients on what our business is doing. But we have to always be selling our team. And the way that we do that internally, one of our software or one of our tech tools is a planning software called DoorGrow OS for Operations. One of the flaws or fundamental flaws I see in planning like with EOS or Traction or these sort of things is it's very top down. It's like I'm in charge and it over inflates the importance of the visionary in the accountability org chart. Like the visionary is like this amazing God who the only person who has all the ideas in the business. Which is really flawed thinking. If you have even a decent team, really flawed thinking, that means you're the emperor with no clothes. Everybody's like, yeah, you have the best ideas. Sure boss, you know, and you're missing out on a lot of good stuff. And then they, the below that person, they put the integrator and then below the integrator in the org chart, they put everyone else on the team, right? The rest of the executive team. This is so fundamentally flawed. I think it's ridiculous, but. It really inflates the importance of it inflates the ego of the visionary looking at this, well, yeah, I am pretty important. And then it over inflates the importance of the integrator, which really probably should be called an operator, but the integrator. And that's what the EOS company sells. [00:24:09] They sell integrators. These are their coaches that help with the implementation of this flawed system. And it over inflates the importance of this integrator so they can sell integrators, right? I believe that's a very top-down system, and I think it's super important to have a bottom up planning system with your team to where the team you're getting their ideas first on each of the major areas of dysfunction or constraint in the business, and then the visionary is the last to speak. [00:24:37] An operator is probably second to last to speak so that they don't mess everything up and temper it and become the emperor/empress with no clothes, where everybody's like, yeah what he said, I just want to keep my job and please this person. So what he or she said, right? So, so I think with I think it starts with having how you plan as a business and the planning and cadence is the communication system in the business. For effective communication and rolling out software or implementing new things, there needs to be a really solid plan, but the team need to be coming to these conclusions. The team needs to be saying, Hey, we could use a better software. And you can inject those ideas as a visionary, like, Hey, I did see this. There is a problem here. Let's brainstorm and the team come up with ideas.  [00:25:23] The visionary might say, Hey, you're missing another idea. There's this that could do this. And the team might be like, oh, okay. Right. We should get that Property Meld software or whatever, right? So you got to get the team's buy-in. And I think that happens through really good planning, right? And a lot of teams, that's one of the most fundamental systems I think a business should have, is a really good planning system where they have annual goals broken down into 90 day, you know, quarterly goals, broken down into their 30 day or monthly goals, broken down into weekly commitments. And this is strategic stuff to move the business forward. So they have a strategic plan, not just their daily tactical work. And the challenge, most businesses, everything's tactical, and then the boss comes and throws some strategic grenade into the middle of the room and says, Hey, start doing this thing. And the team didn't plan this together. They didn't buy in into this, they didn't see the problem together, and they didn't brainstorm together. And so there's no buy-in and it's very top-down. I think that's where the mistakes really start to happen, so.  [00:26:22] Mohammed: You hit the nail on the head there, Jason. It's it's funny you know, that even the way that software today is evaluated has changed also. Right? You know, traditionally, you know, a couple decades ago when you had a lot of on-premise type of software like Cap X, software investments versus, you know, SAAS subscriptions where you're actually paying a monthly maintenance fee, right? [00:26:41] Jason: You had to have a server and then you had to have a tech guy maintaining the server and there was some nerd that understood it and they had, like, you were like, you had to pay them whatever you had to pay them because this was, your whole business was running off this.  [00:26:52] Mohammed: Yeah. Right. Now you can just get something off the shelf and get it implemented very quickly. But one key thing that I do want to highlight of what you said is that, you know, you need to elevate the voices of the folks that are closest to the problem. So it has to be kind of that bottom up type of grassroots type of investment and type of focus. Because those are the folks that have the most to gain from being able to solve for those problems. And they'll feel, you know, when there are a lot of initiatives or objectives that kind of come from top down. Similar to what you were saying kind of about the eos, is that folks see it as kind of a task that are being delegated to do this work versus, you know, being incentivized and taking ownership of like, Hey, you know what, this is my domain. This is going to make my life easier in x, y, and Z way. And you know, and then I think the goals are very important.  [00:27:37] I'm sure you've heard of kind of smart goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time based. And putting that into, you know, weekly, 30 days, 90 days, and kind of, and going through that type of approach and kind of any type of endeavor or change or kind of trying to turn things around. Most of the clients that we speak with are just folks that we see that fail with when it comes to implementations. It's usually, you know, a lack of ownership and a lot of kind of top-down initiatives that are kind of broad, the organization and then, you know, kind of a lack of a, you know, sponsorship. [00:28:04] Jason: Also, you know, there's some entrepreneurs listening to this right now. I guarantee it. It might be you, whoever's listening that are thinking, this is total bs this can't work because the, you know, doing something that's bottom up. Because fundamentally, even before having a really good planning system for the team and communication system, if you could do this and have it be bottom up, they're like, it has to be top down because my team are idiots. Like, they don't believe in their team. And that's because there's a lot of bosses that have built the wrong team, and it's because they're showing up as the wrong person already in the business, which means they're wearing hats right now. If you're listening and you're wearing hats right now that you do not enjoy, several hats you don't enjoy, maybe you don't enjoy sales or maybe you don't enjoy accounting or whatever it is, or the team members that do are doing these things, you are all always talking with them about how to do it, which means your org chart really just has you in parentheses, next to every person in the org chart, right? So that means that you are the wrong person. You're showing up doing the wrong things in the business, and you've built a team around the wrong person. It's like having a fake puzzle piece. Instead of the right puzzle piece. It's you, and then you build puzzle pieces all around that. And so now you have the wrong team. And so you have the wrong team if you are constantly frustrated in your mind saying, why won't my team just think for themselves? The problem is you. It's because you as a business owner, Are holding onto too many things and not letting go. [00:29:37] And it's because you have built a team of people that you don't trust or you built a team of people that the business needed, but you didn't build the team that you needed in order to have more peace and more certainty and more freedom and fulfillment in your business. And so you built this monstrous business around the business and it's taken over like this armchair tyrant, this highchair tyrant. This highchair tyrant that's thrown food and saying, I want more. And you just keep giving it to the business and you should be in charge of this business. And that means that you should be setting really good culture. And that means you should be attracting team members and only hiring team members that believe what you believe in, share your views so that you can actually trust them. And so a lot of the reason why top-down systems are so necessary, even though they're bad ideas because they don't have a team they trust. So even going back before, like before technology, before planning, they need a team they actually trust, which means they need to be super clear on what their values are, their culture, and only hire based on that so that they can actually trust their team members. And if you hire good team members that you like culture-wise and they're the right personality fits for those roles when you weren't? They will be better at those things than you.  [00:30:53] That's the humbling thing I want every entrepreneur to eventually experience, because it's pretty powerful because we think we're pretty hot stuff in the beginning. We start to build a team, they come to us with all their questions. We're like, man, I know everything. It's so good to be king. And then the humbling experience every business owner needs to have is when they start to hire people that are better at the things they used to do that they've let go of. And they know like they're exceeding your ability to perform in those areas. Like I used to design logos. My logo designers are better at designing logos than me. Right. As an example, and then you can really start to trust that team and you can trust them. Like my operator's a better operator than me. [00:31:32] I was terrible at running the planning meetings. I just wanted to get them over with, I didn't want to do it right. And now she tells me," you're last to speak. Like don't talk." And I'm like, "okay." because she runs it, she's in charge and she makes it way better. And it's a lot faster than I would and more efficient than how I would do it. [00:31:50] Mohammed: Yeah, think that creating that crux of dependency is definitely going to stifle growth and scalability, right? And so, it's interesting that you mentioned, a lot of listeners or folks that are probably listening to this, and we hear this as well, is that they don't trust their teams. There's some introspection and it needs to be done there. If you've hired the right people for the right roles. You know, there's there's this notion, you know, Google's considered one of the most like, you know, effective organizations in the world and when, and they do a lot of research on on team dynamics and they have this notion of of psychological safety, which is basically how folks under understand like the own you know, ramifications of being able to take risk within an organization. And so you need to enable your folks and have the right folks in the right roles and be okay with people that have failed, but you want them to be bold. This is what helps kind of move the organization forward and helps you evolve as a business and scale and grow and you know, creating that dependency crux or creating yourself and creating that friction where you are a bottleneck and how things move and change within the organization. It creates not only a challenging environment to be able to like actually grow and evolve, but then it also erodes morality within your staff as well. And eventually you'll push out the high performers.  [00:33:01] Jason: Yeah, I think you know, A players love to be recognized and they love to be seen and B players love to hide and to not be noticed. Their secret goal is to make as much money as possible and do as little as possible. And A players, they don't just give you their time, they give you their discretionary time. Like they're thinking about you in the shower, they're thinking about your business and how to improve in their role when they're like on their walk, you know, on the weekend, right? Because they're believers and they want to win. And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs out there listening to this, they might be thinking, I need more KPIs. I need more micromanaging. I need more metrics. I need more profits, so I need to squeeze more blood from these team members. They're not giving enough, and that probably just means you have the wrong team. [00:33:51] It's surprising how little KPIs and metrics and accountability is needed when you have A players on your team and you just build in a simple accountability system like DoorGrow os, or some sort of planning system in which they are working towards objectives instead of just being given transactional leadership where it's a transaction. "Do this task and I'll pay you, right?" Transformational leadership is where you give them an outcome and a timeline, like a deadline and say, by the end of the month we want to achieve this goal towards our quarterly goal, which is in two months, you know, or whatever. You can have these things defined and what happens is these team members start to function like intrapreneurs. [00:34:31] They start to innovate, think, move things forward, and then implementing things like technology and software is just going to help them get towards these goals that they're working towards. It's not something preventing them from their day-to-day work. Instead, because if you don't, if they don't have strategic goals, they're just going to focus on the tactical work they have. And strategic growth in the business should be at priority over the daily tactical tasks. And if team members can see that and they have strategic goals, they're responsible for by the end of the month, they will focus on that and get their tactical work done. And the business then innovates and moves forward. And it's a really amazing, like beautiful thing to see happen. Well, this is a fun conversation. It sounds like there's a lot of people out there, I'm sure you've worked with quite a few that really could use some help understanding how to get their technology stuff dialed in, knowing what tools exist out there that can solve this you know, what can you help them with and how do people get in touch with you? [00:35:35] Mohammed: Yeah, good question. So we offer a pretty wide range of services, whether it's, you know, tax help, bookkeeping, accounting, implementing software, custom reporting, creating SOPs, and even just auditing business processes. And then if you ever do get audited by the boogeyman, they call Department of Real Estate. We also do Dre representations as well. You can reach us at www.balancedassetsolutions.com. You're welcome to also email me directly at mo@balancedassetsolutions.com. [00:36:05] Jason: Balanced asset solutions-- plural-- solutions.com. Yes. Okay, got it. All right. Cool. Mo, thanks for coming on the show. [00:36:14] Appreciate you being with us.  [00:36:15] Mohammed: Pleasure to be here. Thank you so much, Jason. Take care.  [00:36:18] Jason: All right, so check out Mo and his business if you need some support. Coming to this conversation, I didn't even know what he did, so this was really interesting for me. My team sets up these interviews and sounds like a really cool thing to get that support and technology implementation. If any of you've gone through it, you know, this is a painful process, so make sure you get some help. So, for those of you watching the show, if any of these things resonated that you're struggling with your team, you're struggling with getting, you know, more profitability in your business, make sure to reach out to DoorGrow. We can help you do those things in addition to helping you add doors, but more importantly we can help you make your business scalable. A lot of you aren't adding doors right now because you know how, but because. You know, if you add more doors, your life personally will get worse as a business owner. [00:37:10] And if that's the case, you do not yet have a scalable business. So you need a really good process system. You need a really good people system, and you need a really good planning system. And if you have those three things, you can, you're infinitely scalable. You can scale quickly, you can add any number of doors, and that freedom and that safety and that ability to just add doors and know that your business can handle the growth means you can now go even eat other companies, start to acquire businesses in the property management space, you can start buying up your neighbors. We want to help you do all of this stuff and scale. There's no reason why you can't be probably in the next two to five years, a thousand door business, crushing it and we can help you get there. We've got the roadmap, we've got the tools, we have some tech. [00:38:00] We can help you move forward on this. So reach out to DoorGrow. Check us out at doorgrow.com. And if you're wanting to get into an awesome free community, you waste a little bit of time on Facebook, you might as well be wasting that time in a way that's not wasting time. Like go to DoorGrowClub.com and you can get access to our free Facebook group. It's for property management, business owners, entrepreneurs. Get access to our free Facebook group by going to DoorGrowClub.com. We have some cool tools and free gifts that you get. As you join the group, make sure to answer the questions and if you plug in your email address in your phone, we will reach out to you and give you some free stuff that's going to help you grow and improve your business. And you will have a resource in which you can ask questions to other property management entrepreneurs get some really good ideas and it's an awesome community. And it's growing rapidly, right? It's growing rapidly. So make sure you get into the DoorGrow Club. Go to DoorGrowClub.com and that's it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  [00:39:01] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:39:28] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

DoorGrow recently partnered with Rocket Station VAs, a company that goes above and beyond finding the right virtual assistant for your property management business. Property management growth expert Jason Hull brings back Greg Brooks to talk about the new relationship between DoorGrow and Rocket Station and what’s next for hiring in the property management industry. You'll Learn... [01:45] Why an Operator is the Most Important Hire [05:02] Rocket Station’s Unique Process Mapping and Training [12:56] Why You Should Hire Virtual Assistants [15:11] Vetting and Filtering Hiring Candidates [21:25] The Kinds of Team Members PMs Need Tweetables “One of the big challenges that our clients have is they need operators. Like, this is the most important hire I think that any business will ever make.” “Most businesses don't even have a decent operator.” “A lot of the property managers out there, like if you wanted to map out your processes and systems and you were real operations-driven, you would've done it.” “If you're listening to this and you are still doing a bunch of stuff and wearing a bunch of hats and you already have a team, you have probably built the wrong team.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: The challenge with operators is in the us, they're expensive. These operators are usually probably minimum, like maybe 80 grand, and sometimes they want equity, you know, like they're not affordable to a lot of these property managers that hit that wall at maybe about 150, maybe 200 doors. And so we were like, how can we solve this challenge? And then it was like, well, maybe one of these companies could take VAs and we could find the cream of the crop and find those that could be operators. [00:00:29] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:01:06] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:28] So returning to the show, I'm hanging out here with Greg Brooks of Rocket Station. Welcome back Greg.  [00:01:35] Greg: Yeah. Thanks so much for having us. I'll just look and say the last invite to this was almost two months ago to the day, so we're becoming like a monthly regular. I like it. [00:01:43] Jason: Cool. We'll just keep it going. So, we've been chatting and one of the big challenges that our clients have is they need operators. Like, this is the most important hire I think that any business will ever make in their business is to get some sort of person that can help them really get the operations going because a visionary CEO does not like dealing with operations. They're bad at it, and they try to do it, and they're always telling themselves, I need more processes and I need to do more stuff, and, and they're just not doing it. And so what we wanted to do is we had this crazy idea, maybe there'd be a company that could do operators, but do it in an affordable way. And the challenge with operators is in the us, they're expensive. These are people that are beyond the level of what you would normally pay for just a va or even an executive assistant, even if you hired them in the US. These operators are usually probably minimum, like maybe 80 grand, and sometimes they want equity, you know, like they're not affordable to a lot of these property managers that hit that wall at maybe about 150, maybe 200 doors. Maybe they're in 300 to 400 doors, somewhere in there. But they need this operator and they don't have it, and they are in the least profitable stage of their business they will probably ever be in some instances. Because they've maxed out on staff, they've got all these team members, they built the team incorrectly, and so they have a lot of people that are costing a bunch of money. And so we were like, how can we solve this challenge? And then it was like, well, maybe one of these companies could take VAs and we could find the cream of the crop and find those that could be operators. So that's, that's kind of the conversation I think we started to have. Does that sound right? [00:03:31] Yeah, sounds, sounds accurate.  [00:03:33] So what, what did we come up with? I don't want to do all the talking so.  [00:03:37] Greg: You're good. No. So I think the part where we kind of bonded, if you will, between our companies is that that whole process implementation. A. Having someone that can kind of run point on that for you and streamline those processes systems, like that's a huge gap as you're trying to hire that operator, right? You got to find someone, find someone who's affordable and they got to come in and help with the process and systems. So it kind of blended perfectly with how we deliver our services. Because we have a whole team of professionals from the operational standpoint who, you know, help our clients, help our our property management clients go through that thought process and create those documents and create those processes and point out, Hey, why do you do it like this? Did you know your software can automate that? So it blended nicely in terms of that level of expertise. And then when you talk about the cream of the crop, I mean, Obviously, I'm very biased here, but I feel like our, our virtual assistants are the best in the business from the training and the experience and, yeah, really the comprehensive onboarding that we put them through to where DoorGrow members can help leverage our eight years of experience in this space to help with the systems, the processes, the refinement, and then we can put a rockstar VA in there who can jump right into the seat and really be that operator that they need at a much more affordable rate. So it just seemed like how you guys delivered and what you were teaching and the hires and kind of the steps that you, you know, teach to your students, regardless of what level they're at, really aligned with kind of our philosophy in terms of how to hire VAs and find great talent. And so I think we're going to knock it out of the park.  [00:05:02] Jason: Yeah, there's a lot of synergy there. And you kind of breezed over it, but I want listeners, I want people listening to really recognize this, what's really unique that I found about Rocket Station-- and we actually just gave you a client as a Guinea pig. And he just commented in my group coaching call today, he was like, " they've been awesome already so far." Like he's really appreciating the process. I think what's really innovative or unique about what you do is your team will come in and actually start to map out processes in a flowchart, like you'll start to help them map out their processes. This is something that's so painful for them to do on their own. I hear it all the time. Like, "oh, well, I need to work on my processes." Cool, but why are you doing it? And they really, if they were the guy or gal to do it, they would've done it by now. Yeah, there's a reason why they have not done that. And so when you come in and start to do this with them, that's a game changer for them. And so I love that you do that. Not only that, but we have DoorGrow flow that we launched recently, which is a visual flow chart based software, so similar to like Lucidchart or Vizio or some of these tools. And so, on our last call that you did with our team where we were like sharing with our team what we were going to be doing, we're like, oh yeah, that's some other synergy, right? [00:06:14] So, we are excited to start to get some of your VAs trained in to learn some of our systems, some of our software tools that we have for clients that I think are really new and innovative to the industry. There's, I don't know of any other visual flow chart software for processes in the industry like DoorGrow flow, and then your team members can help them to start to get these processes mapped out, documented, but even more so, we want to get this person supported in our program for those that are in our mastermind, in our super system and train this VA that is going to handle operations and be an operations assistant, help them figure out how to run the planning meetings, how to run the cadence for the team communication that meeting structure we call DoorGrow os how to handle some of the hiring pieces. And this allows a very affordable solution and it can all be done through Zoom calls, you know, as a team, which is how I run my company. [00:07:12] And I think that it'll be a game changer for the industry because, One, there aren't operators out there that are really well trained. There aren't operators out there that already know some of these systems and different property management systems. Most businesses don't even have a decent operator. And so, one, to get these systems installed and two, to have somebody to do it, that it actually, the right personality fit, culture fit, and skill fit for that role, I think will be a game changer. So now you have your own vetting process. I think we talked about that a little bit on the previous call. Maybe you can share just a little bit for those that weren't on that or didn't listen to that podcast interview, like, what's kind of your process? How does that unique, and then I'd love to share how we're going to add to that with DoorGrow, another layer to that.  [00:08:00] Greg: Yeah, definitely. And I know from our side, our team, when we announced this partnership, they were like literally salivating, right? They love the process. They see it as like a triple win. It's like you guys have very structured systems and very, you know, structured teaching, which is great because then when you take that and turn it into processes and act as that resource for the client it makes that synergy where we're, you know, we're speaking DoorGrow, right? And we can really be there you know, in line with their journey, regardless of if they're at, like I said, 20 doors, a hundred doors, 500 doors, wherever they're at. But then also like the software, like you said, our, I know our team has already started to mess around with flow and, and like they love it. So just being able to speak the same language. Every part of the journey is huge. And then, yeah, our vetting process it's basically six weeks of comprehensive screening. I know something that I think we talked about in the last podcast, or maybe it was in the conversation with some of your team members, we're big on, on kind of the three checkpoints, right? [00:08:52] You got to have the experience, you got to be tested and vetted and evaluated based on your knowledge, based on your tactical and practical skills within property management, and then you've also got to be the right culture fit, right? You got to have the right personality to, you know, want to be that operator. Because like you said, a lot of the property managers out there, like if you wanted to map out your processes and systems and you were real operations driven, you would've done it. Like most property managers are visionaries and they've got big plans, and the day-to-day operations just isn't what they enjoy, and it isn't what, you know, gets them up out of bed every morning. So what we've done prior to any operator or really any position, right? We staff kind of across the board-- is it's six weeks of comprehensive screening, evaluation and property management specific training. And part of what our team's really excited about, that we're literally building as we speak is more DoorGrow specialized training so that, you know, we've got eight years of experience in the property management industry working with operators that are 25 doors. [00:09:52] Two of our largest clients are over 40,000 doors. So like all the scale and the bottlenecks and the little learning points, like we've seen it, we've done it, we've staffed to it. But what we're excited about is to now really dive in to the DoorGrow platform, whether it's on the software side, whether it's on the process side, and really customize that training even further. So from day one that that VA gets into the seat, they're right there in the thick of it with the property manager to be able to really help and be that operator that assistant, that the business actually needs so they can start taking advantage and scaling quicker than their competitors. [00:10:25] Jason: So we didn't talk about this on the previous interview, but our team got to see this. One of the things that really resonated positively about Rocket Station is you guys really are contribution focused and you really have a positive impact with the talent that you have in the Philippines and you're impacting, you know, things there in the Philippines. Can you just touch on some of the stuff that you do with schools and some of that kind of stuff just real quick?  [00:10:49] Greg: Oh yeah, definitely. And cut me off. I get too long winded here. Usually we're talking business and talk and shop, and I don't get to brag on our people and what they do in country. It kind of comes down to how we even deliver the service to. There's a reason we go through the process mapping, right? Talent is everywhere. It's global. We now live in a global workforce. Most of the time, property managers aren't able to really leverage VAs the way we feel like they can. Mm-hmm. Simply cause like there's no process, there's no training, there's no onboarding, there's no ramp up, there's no screening process. So that same commitment to set a VA up for success in their business life. We do the same thing with kind of our-- we have a program called Rocket Station Cares, where we're very intentional about monthly doing events in local neighborhoods, in local communities, in the local islands. All of our people are in the Philippines, so a country of 7,000 islands where we give back. [00:11:35] So I know you guys, what we kind of showed you a little video that that we had done where we had gone to a a school of 2200 students and we had donated not only our time, we did a whole day you know, volunteer effort where we played games with the kids and we we sang songs, but we also donated computers, printers. We donated over 500 tables and chairs to their classrooms because this school was a state funded school that was only supposed to ever house 800 kids. But the need there in that specific area, The population was almost 1500 that were at this school. So we're very intentional. We're like you guys. You know, we're a little bit bigger. We're about 2200 people all across the Philippines, but we're fully virtual as well. So like being intentional and realizing like, yeah, all of our people, they want great opportunity. They want a professional atmosphere, they want to work for a great client just like anybody does in their business journey, professional lives, but also being like, Hey, There's a huge sense of community, a huge sense of camaraderie, and we're very intentional with getting out into the community and volunteering our time and giving back to their local neighborhoods, their, you know, their local areas. And like I said, the team does it monthly. We go over there, the US side of the business goes over there about four times a year, and we really try to make it a big spectacle. You know, donating money, donating resources, but more importantly, donating our time and getting out there to really give back. [00:12:56] Jason: So I imagine that's a bit of a challenge is that a lot of people go get VAs thinking, one, they're like, I don't know what the VA could do, but I think we need some help and I want some cheap labor. And then they sometimes treat those people as like second class members of their team and stuff like that. And so I'm sure you run into that, I'm sure. Like you get some clients and you're like, man, I don't know if they're really treating our people right. One of the things I'm really excited about, I hopefully, you know, rocket Station's excited about this too, is we coach and train all of our clients on creating good culture. Like it's wired into what we do because I think it's one of the greatest secrets to us being able to scale businesses. We can get three times the output in a business from staff if there's good culture. And so we get this stuff really well dialed in with them. And so I would imagine, like, I'm biased probably, but I would imagine that doorGrow will provide some of the best opportunities for, you know, for your VAs to work at through our clients because they're going to have good culture, they're going to have strong values and it will allow you to match people that share those similar values. So it'll be great culture fits. Culture is not something you can create in a person. It's hardwired, like it comes from their parents, their religion, their experiences, whatever. And so we need to figure out with our clients, we figure out what are their top three or four company core values? We map out a client-centric mission statement. We map out their personal why. We map out their business, why we want the business owner to have strong clarity so we can start to build the team around the business owner. Because we see a lot of businesses come to us and they've built a team around the business, and the business owner is doing all the wrong stuff, and you can't build the right team around the wrong person. And so these business owners that are holding onto and doing a lot of stuff, That they don't enjoy doing. They are the wrong person. And then they built a team around that wrong person. And so that's why they have the wrong team. If you're listening to this and you are still doing a bunch of stuff and wearing a bunch of hats and you already have a team, you have probably built the wrong team. And so, reach out to DoorGrow, we'll help you clean that up, and then we can get you connected to our collaborative situation here with Rocket Station.  [00:15:11] So you have this six week of you know, taking them through training, making sure you have a process to vet and find the right people. I'm sure figuring out people that their language level of ability in English and all these kind of things, what we want to bring to the table DoorGrow. We have DoorGrow hiring and we have a process for matching people culturally, personality, and skill wise to a particular role. And then we also have this AI assessments platform that we've partnered with so that we can vet candidates to see if they have the cognitive ability or the intelligence and the personality traits through this AI assessment to be a really great operator. And so there's less guessing, and so this will allow us to identify from the candidates that you send over, which ones will be the cream of the crop that will really do a great job as an operator. So we're super excited about this. And you have plenty of people that we could feed through, I would imagine, and find who's going to be this great fit for this particular business. And it'll be far more affordable than 80 grand a year.  [00:16:17] Greg: So yeah, and the DoorGrow students are almost getting double due diligence. Cause like I said, we're big on that three-point system in terms of how we evaluate, because most say most clients outside of DoorGrow, they don't really have, it's like, Hey, let's go grab a coffee and see if you're good and I'll read your resume. Awesome. Hired so they're getting the typical due diligence that we do already from a personality profiling experience from practical assessments. And then we're putting the candidates through the DoorGrow hiring platform as well to really niche it down. So, like I said, we definitely have tons of people ready to get going. But we're, we're excited to really see it. because I think when you compare what the AI does and the data you guys already collect through your vetting, mixing that with what Rocket Station has, it's going to be really special in terms of really getting the right, like I said, get the right butts in the right seats. I think we're really going to be able to do that at super high level. For your team for your, you know members that are really looking for that operator to help springboard the company to the next level.  [00:17:09] Jason: Yeah, and you know, transparently, Rocket Station was not the only VA company we re reached out to. We reached out to several in the industry and we've talked to some about this. And you know, there may be some additional ones that we do in the future, but nobody had something as comprehensive that we've seen so far as to how you onboard clients. And this makes us feel safe giving our clients over to you. And we've actually, like Sarah's, like I want to do a hire through Rocket Station, so she's our operator and so she's been going through it and she thinks it's a really cool process and she likes that you guys are mapping out processes and asking really good questions. And so there's a level of depth there rather than just, Hey, do you like this person? And do you like how they sound on this audio recording and like here, like you can pay right now and get them started to work for you. Yeah. As if they're just some tool that you can throw into your business.  [00:18:01] Greg: Exactly. Unfortunately, a lot of providers in the industry, they're just placements. It's just you need someone? I got someone. Here, figure it out, right? Mm-hmm. And I think that's where we bonded right when we did the podcast and we first kind of connected and started to have kind of exploratory conversations. It was just like, oh, it is more comprehensive from how you guys deliver your services to your clients. It kind of very well meshed with kind of how we just genuinely feel. It's about setting people up for success. Yeah. And there has to be more that goes into it than just here, here's someone, let us know how it goes. Call us if it doesn't work. You know, it's, it's someone's livelihood and we really take that serious and we know the team at DoorGrow does and with your culture so excited to really kind of build that, build that partnership and add to it.  [00:18:41] Jason: Yeah, we're really excited. So, so for those that are listening people can get VAs through this partnership with Rocket Station and DoorGrow, we will have some landing pages set up. We have our DoorGrow hiring process. If you want to hear more about DoorGrow hiring. Which can be used for, you know, VAs or can be used for getting team members locally and getting the right three fits for your business. Check us out. You can reach out to us at doorgrow.com. Those of our clients that are in the Mastermind, or if you're interested in joining our mastermind, if you're in our super system, you get access to this. It's part of just what we do. It's included and you get access to DoorGrow flow, our process software. You get access to DoorGrow crm, our sales CRM software that's next level. You get access to DoorGrow os the planning, cadence and operating system that your operator's going to help you run the business through. And what else? There's some other things, but with this, you're going to have an operator that has the tools and the training because we do a weekly call supporting operators and helping them get these systems installed, helping them get the business moving forward. And so as part of our mastermind, you'll have this ongoing support to move your business forward and get the operations really well dialed in. And if you have a really good people system, a really good process system, which is, you need something more than just process documentation. You need a system that they are able to use and leverage consistently, and that's better than just checklists. And then you have a planning system. These three systems will make your business infinitely scalable. You can add doors as fast as you want to. You can do acquisitions, you can you know, go crazy, you can get BDMs and like stack doors like crazy, and your business will not break and your life will actually get easier and better by adding more doors because you have more resources, more support, and you know how to get good people, and you have good processes, and you have good planning system to keep everybody rowing in the right direction and organized. Without those three systems, adding more doors for a lot of y'all will probably just make your life worse. And so we're really excited to have this partnership with Rocket Station to be able to take our mastermind clients to that next level. So, anything else we should say about this? Greg. [00:21:00] Greg: Oh, I hope everyone's as excited as we are. I know we matched today for the announcement as well, so we're really coordinated. I mean, DoorGrow is on the same page right now, so no, we're, we're excited. Like I said, anyone, I know you'll have landing pages and I'm sure you'll have links to make sure all your people get routed correctly, kind of into, into the pipeline so that we can kind of get them going and get them set up with operators. But no, we're excited and if anybody has any questions, I mean, feel free to reach out to us as well.  [00:21:25] Jason: I think the last thing, just to be clear, This is not just for operators though. So, why don't you just touch on briefly, like what are some of the other roles that some of the property management businesses are getting VAs for? Yeah, definitely. And operators is typically not, historically, I've haven't seen anybody doing that, so this, that might be a little bit innovative and new, but I'm sure there's, you know, getting a personal executive assistant for the ceo. Which I usually recommend is like the first hire most people should be doing, and I've seen people that have no assistant, that have a bunch of team members. So there's that. And what else?  [00:21:58] Greg: I would say depending on your size and your scale, like an assistant property manager, right? Someone who can kind of field the maintenance, coordinate with vendors, coordinate with your own guys, the billing, the paperwork. Yeah. The one that we've seen a lot of our clientele, regardless of size jumping into is the leasing kind of administrative assistant where, I mean, maybe you still are the person that gets out there and is showing the property, but like all the paperwork, the follow up, even just prepping the listing, I mean, those are two really big ones. Yeah. In terms of property management is, has just been incredible the last three years, seeing the evolution kind of through covid and being more virtual. So yeah, if anyone's out there, obviously the operator position is something very specific to the DoorGrow community that we're really excited about and we're going to have a nice, a nice through line to get you the best people quickly. But if you're just needing staff, whether it's say on the maintenance, whether it is an executive assistant to give you some more time back in your day, whether it's on the leasing side, listing management, social media management, reach out because that's the bread and butter of what almost 2200 of our VAs are staffed out to our clients doing each and every day. And even if you don't have the process piece fully knocked out your maintenance process, your billing process, Don't worry, like we are there for you. You're running a business, you're running a successful business. What we find is for most people, the processes get stuck in the six inches between our ears. So our team is incredible at flushing that out. We'll build it all for you and then hire a rockstar to, to jump into the seed and, and take on whatever role, whatever role you need.  [00:23:26] Jason: Cool. Awesome. Well, I'm excited Greg. Thanks for coming on the podcast again, hanging out with me here and for matching my clothing. I appreciate that. Oh, same page. And we'll be talking soon. So until next time, everybody to our mutual growth, go to DoorGrow.com. Check us out and be sure to check out Rocket Station. Bye everyone. [00:23:47] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:24:13] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. 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