If you manage short-term rentals, you’re probably well aware of how stressful the process of giving guests a key, code, etc. can be.  In this episode, property management growth expert, Jason Hull talks with Bobby from Jervis, a company that allows property managers to automate code-sharing with smart locks and smart garage door openers and manage smart utilities remotely. You’ll Learn… [01:45] Introduction to Bobby Varghese [06:50] Smart Locks, Code Sharing, and More: Intro to Jervis [13:55] The Financial Benefits of Automation [19:25] Where to Get Smart Locks and Products [22:10] Navigating Technological Issues [24:20] Jervis for Long-Term Rentals Too! Tweetables “Trying to do it all means that you can never do everything correctly.” “What is your time worth?” “The biggest expense in the business really is almost all staff.” “So we would love to help see you grow and we would love to help get the systems in people in place on your team so that you can handle that growth.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] I tell them, tell everyone, "you can do this yourself. You can open up the Schlage app, the August app, whichever brand app, right. And you can add the locks yourself." So the thing is, "what is your time worth?" Is what I always ask property managers. [00:00:14] All right. Welcome Doorgrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing 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. [00:00:58] We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into this show. So today I am hanging out with Bobby Varghese. Bobby, welcome to the show. [00:01:27] Hey Jason. Thanks for having me. [00:01:28] Bobby has a company called Jervis Systems, which we're going to get into in just a minute, but Bobby, tell the audience and our listeners, how did you get into business entrepreneurism and eventually into Jervis systems? [00:01:45] Yeah, that's a good question, Jason. I have a short term rental in Ashburn, Virginia. A couple years ago, actually, we started in 2017. And I was doing a lot of automation for my own sanity's sake, right? Just, I didn't want to be at the property to check a guest in. And also I know how when I want to travel, I don't want to be confined to certain times. I don't want to have to meet somebody to go grab keys, things like that. So I was trying to like, replicate the same concepts for my guests. And so I had some brilliant programmers that were working with me at the time for my rent. And we applied a lot of the automation that we use with Jervis today initially for my rental, you know, that's kind of how it all started. So we were letting guests in automatically letting cleaning companies in automatically, deleting the codes automatically after the reservations were complete. This is in 2017. So back then, Jason, Jervis didn't exist. Right? So Jervis wasn't even an idea yet. And then what happened was property managers in Ashburn, you know, the surrounding city communities heard about us doing automation, right? So maybe guests that stayed with me told other property managers and they're like, Hey, can you do this for us too? Can you manage my property? And so I had a couple of property managers message me through Airbnb, through inquiries, and they were like, Hey, could you manage my property and take on full property management? And, you know, at the time I had a full-time job. I was teaching in the evenings at a local university. I didn't have the time or the bandwidth to just take on more and more of these properties, but the concept of like building this like a software as a service platform and then being able to offer that to property managers just sounded incredibly intriguing. [00:03:25] And it's something that we started the journey in 2019, and then it's just been learning and growing as we go. You know, lots of relationships over the years. Lots of vendors that we've connected with. You know, big brands like Schlake, August, Yale, Masterlock big companies like that, garage doors. And then over the last year we've gotten into like the thermostat world. So smart devices and not just access, getting to automate those. And then eventually we've got a roadmap this year and into next year of smart sensors and other places we want to get into as well. [00:04:01] Very cool. So, And give the audience a little bit of background on you personally, so I know who you are. [00:04:08] Sure, yeah. My name is Bobby Varghese, so I'm the founder of Jervis, as Jason said. I'm a US Air Force veteran. My background is as a security consultant. So, I did well, a little bit of everything. So networking, server administration and security, which really the military got me into. It was not something I ever thought I'd be interested in, and then it just kind of happened. And I found out I loved it, you know, and I got myself my graduate degree in it. I started, you know, getting certifications and eventually ended up teaching by chance at a local university here in security. And that's kind of my background. And I got into you know, just process improvement, just automation and things as we kept going on. And that's me as a person and how I got into all this. I live in the northern Virginia area right outside DC so, we've got a lot of customers locally in this area and the east coast and pretty much all over the states as well. [00:05:00] Great. Well, thanks for your service. I think that's awesome. And I mean, it's really cool that you come from a technological background, but not just in technology. Viewing everything through the lens, likely of is this secure? Are we doing things the right way? The access matters, you know. [00:05:17] It does. Yeah. Thanks appreciate you bringing that up, Jason, because that's actually a principle in everything we do in Jervis. We don't want to store your credentials, we don't want to know your credentials, right? So everything that we do with Jervis, when you as a property manager are connecting your devices with us. So we're going to take you to their login page, right? So that's where you're doing the authentication and the authorization to say, Hey, I want Jervis to be able to view my ABC you know, these devices, and then be able to manage them on my RPA half. And then that's when the grant access is granted. We're given like you know, a secure token basically that gives us access to it. And that's how we do all of the management. We make it a business. Philosophy on our team never to store credentials. So if, God forbid we ever get hacked, there's nothing to steal right with us. There's no credentials to be stolen, things like that. We do take security very seriously. [00:06:15] That's great. Yeah. I mean, even with us at DoorGrow we use a vault system with our merchant provider cause we don't want to store people's credit card information directly. [00:06:24] Yeah. [00:06:24] The liability's too high. [00:06:26] It is. It is. [00:06:27] So if, you know, God forbid, but if somebody hacked us, they wouldn't have people's credit card information. [00:06:32] Exactly. Yeah. That's smart. [00:06:33] Yeah. So, yeah, very cool. I like that. So, when AI takes over the world and they hack everything, then they might be sort of safe still. All right. So, that brings up an interesting question. AI is a huge buzz thing right now, so I'd love to touch on that maybe a little bit later in the show. But tell us a little bit about what Jervis does. I'm starting to get an idea just based on what you've told me so far, but tell us like, what does Jervis really do and how can it help property managers and it sounds like it's very much geared towards the short term rental market. [00:07:08] So we are geared towards property management, right? So, and that can be done in a couple of different spaces. So whether it's short-term rental management, long-term rental management we've got real estate agents using us, using like the master locks to instead of, you know, the old school like realtor access to be able to get into properties because those legacy systems are very expensive from what I've understood over the years. So, so we've got a lot of real estate agents that are trying to kind of modernize that world and using the master lock systems. So at a core Jervis, what we started with was access management. So smart locks and smart garage doors, right? So we've got, we support the MyQ based systems with LiftMaster and then we've got the Genie Aladdin and a couple brands like that. And then with the Smart Locks, we do the big players. And then there's a lot of other smart locks out there, like the Schlages, the August, the Yales, and then also a lot of other companies that are growing in popularity. And you know, there's. A lot of competitors in that space now as well, right? So what Jervis does is, or what our goal is to streamline your life from a property management perspective. And we'll use the short term rental world as an example, is as reservations come in, what a lot of property managers want is that the code gets to the guest, right? [00:08:29] So it gets stored to a lock for the duration of the reservation. Another caveat is that's important is it's got to be a unique code. So you're not using the same code over and over for multiple guests. [00:08:41] Yeah. [00:08:41] And then the code expires when the reservation is completed. Right. So even after the time completes and the guest knows the code, they cannot use that same code to get back into the property. Right? [00:08:53] Right. [00:08:54] And what Jervis will do is automate all of those steps we just talked about, and then when the code is done, we actually wait one day after the reservation is completed with the code being in a disabled state, and then we'll remove it entirely. And the reason we keep it one extra day, Jason, is that we found so many instances where reservations last minute, they need to be extended a couple extra hours, an extra day or two. Right. So immediately deleting it when the reservation is complete. We just found that's just causing-- [00:09:28] they're immediately locked out and they're all, "my suitcase is still in there!" [00:09:31] Exactly. Yeah. Or like, oh no, we need to extend for an extra day. And then you got to go through the entire process of adding the code all over again, which is not hugely inconvenient, right. But it's a lot easier and quicker to take an existing code and just modify like the time or the date, you know, versus like adding it entirely. [00:09:53] Yeah. Cool. So you had mentioned a lot of other like smart devices and stuff. So is there, does Jervis go beyond just the front door lock? [00:10:04] We do. Yeah. So besides access, so out outside of our original world of just smart locks and smart garages, we do smart thermostats right now with the Echobee, Nest, and the honeywell thermostat is coming really soon as well. And the problem that we're solving with that when it comes to property management is that you as a property manager, you can control the temperature as a guest is walking into the property. So we've got two modes with it. We call it guest mode and we call it a vacant mode. So guest mode is that as soon as the guest walks into the property, you can set your baseline that you as a property manager are comfortable with, right? So let's say you want it to be 70 degrees as a guest walks in, Jervis will take care of that set the temperature. The guests can adjust it during their stay, right? Bring it up, down, whatever they're comfortable with. When they're done, that's when vacant mode or when the guest is checking out, that's when vacant mode will kick in. And that means that, let's say in the wintertime, you don't want the heat blasting. Yeah, in the summertime you don't want the AC blasting, right? [00:11:14] So you can set it to a temperature where your pipes aren't going to freeze, right? It's that right temperature without increasing your heating expenses or electric bills. And right as the guest comes back into the property or your next guest comes in, Jervis will set the temperature back to guest mode as you're comfortable with it or what you set it for. So thermostats is something we support now. Later this year, our roadmap is to get into smart sensors. So carbon monoxide sensing, water leakage sensing and those noise sensing things like that. That's what we will get into this year. [00:11:51] Very cool. So there's water leaks or if there's, you know, some sort of issues going on at the property, they might get notified. [00:12:02] Exactly. And the goal is, Jason with Jervis, we don't aim to support every device that's out there, right? So every lock that's out there, you can see that we pick and choose the ones that are the most, most stable. Another feature that we look for is that it's ideally, it's wifi directly accessible, right? So that's very important. Other locks will work, right? There's a lot of older model locks that are using hubs and wifi, adaptors. We support selective ones after extensive testing because we found that having an extra piece in the middle can often be it's yet another piece that could go wrong, right? Yeah. So if that hub stops working, that wifi adapter stops working, you can't connect to your lock, right? So, it's, we pick and choose which devices are best to support, and then we are careful what other devices we get into. It's important that it solves like a property management problem, right? Because I still have my rental property in Ashburn and we do testing of all the capabilities that we implement, we do it all the testing at my property as well. [00:13:10] Yeah. [00:13:10] So eating my own dog food type of thing. And I want to make sure that we're not trying to do it all because I think that is... trying to do it all means that you can never do everything correctly. You may just get to a point where you're doing everything probably 50% or 60%. But yeah, that's kind of our philosophy as well. Right? Yeah, it's probably like the 80- 20 rule. The 80% of the stuff's probably covered by 20% of the things that you could do, right? [00:13:37] So, yep. Yep. [00:13:39] Very cool. So, What problems is this solving for property managers? So if a property manager's listening to this and they think, well, you know, it's not too big of a deal to maybe give out a code, do the walk and do this, help them justify switching to using Jervis. [00:13:55] Sure. [00:13:56] Yeah. That's a good point. And if a property manager has one or two properties, I tell them, tell everyone, "you can do this yourself. You can open up the Schlage app, the August app, whichever brand app, right. And you can add the locks yourself." So the thing is, "what is your time worth?" Is what I always ask property managers. It's like we charge $5 a month per active device. Right? So, I don't know what Starbucks charges nowadays, but it's the price of a cup of coffee. For a month is what we're charging roughly. Is that worth it for you from an automation perspective to be able to focus on other things? And so, that's, I think, the true benefit that service will give to property managers. And so I'll give you an example that applies to multiple properties, but one customer comes to mind for me because we talk about this several times over last year. And they had over a hundred properties, right? And so they had a dedicated person that their entire job was to add codes, remove codes, troubleshoot customer issues of like codes not working, and just putting in backup or giving out backup codes, putting in codes, things like that. [00:15:08] So it's one almost dedicated full-time employee or resource or consultant for x number of hours that you've assigned for this task, right? Once they set up Jervis, now to automate the process, they were able to move this person to do other tasks, right? They were doing more spot checking of codes or just issue handling, right? So automation is not perfect and again, I try to be transparent with our property managers when it comes to that. There's a lot of moving parts, right? The booking site has to send the property management system, the reservation or the updates. They got to send it to us. We got to talk to a lock vendor. So there's a lot of pieces that could go wrong or could be delayed, right. So issue handling, things like that it's always good to have a person that's available, especially as you scale to a hundred, couple hundred properties and things like that. [00:15:57] Yeah. [00:15:57] And so now that Jervis was doing the bulk of the work, they were able to. Reassign this person to be able to do other tasks that were, you know, more beneficial to the company, right? So doing marketing or customer service, answering emails, things like that. So Jervis was able to probably take on 80, 90% of the automation work or the code management work, and now this person's in more of in a backup spot checking role or a customer service role, and then they were able to take on additional tasks for the property manager. So they were very happy. Obviously it cut down their costs and they were able to maximize like their resources and kind of use their resources more wisely. [00:16:39] Yeah, I mean, the biggest expense in the business really is almost all staff, right? It's people and you know, let's say that team member's $20 an hour. Well, if they can offset that by just getting these devices, you know, in place. Yeah. It could save them some serious monthly expense, especially if they're not having to drive around and do stuff. [00:17:01] Exactly. [00:17:01] It would be pretty significant. So now you mentioned $5 a month per device. [00:17:06] How many devices typically does a property usually need? Before I answer that, Jason, let me just kind of back up a second there. With Jervis, we have no minimums, right? So there is no minimum number of doors that you have to come in with. We don't have a minimum threshold of the monthly amount. You could have technically one door. $5 a month and we'll still treat you at just same way as a customer that has a thousand doors. Right? So the goal with Jervis and all these automation is that you set it and forget it, right? And you shouldn't have to babysit it unless you run into problems, and then we'll work with you. But the, to answer your question, typically a home will have at least one door, right? It could be the front door that maybe the property manager puts the smart lock on. We've got property managers that go above and beyond that and maybe put it on the front door and also the garage door. Right. So that way, even though like, let's say the big garage doors, as you get past that, to actually get into the house, you have to get through smart lock as well, right? So then the way Jervis will work is that you can assign multiple locks to the same property. And if a reservation comes in for that property, Jervis will put the same code on both locks and schedule them exactly the same way. And we won't charge you separately or upcharge you for that capability. I've had a lot of property managers ask me, does that cost more? You know, or just give me, you know, they're surprised because they're expecting to be charged more for that kind of capabilities. But the average I've seen is if you just want smart lock access, one to two doors is kind of like the average. Some property managers are a lot more technology interested I guess. And they'll put the smart thermostat, smart sensors, you know, then you could start seeing three to four devices per property. [00:19:02] Yeah. I would imagine in some areas where the temperatures are somewhat extreme smart thermostat would sort of pay for itself. [00:19:10] Exactly. Yeah. [00:19:11] Your utility bills for the property easily, so that would make sense. So, all right. Very cool. So what other questions do property managers typically have when they're trying to figure out why should I use this or should I use this service? [00:19:26] Yeah, so one of the questions we typically will get is, do you have to purchase locks from us? I mean that's again a decision business philosophy we made years ago is we wanted to stay vendor agnostic, right? So we don't pitch one specific product. We decided not to make custom locks. A lot of vendors that are selling locks, they're reselling other brands, right? Or locks that are white label white labeling locks that are out there, right? We decided not to get into that world. We want to offer just a software as a service platform and be able to support as many devices as we sustainably can, reliably can. And that's a very important part of it. And so, yeah, so the question I get often is, do you have to purchase a lock from us? And the answer is no. We link on our website to where you can purchase the locks from, whether it's Amazon, who is one of our partners, but as far as like where we're linking, but you can get them at Home Depot, you can get them at Lowe's. Bill.com. They're very easily accessible locks and devices that are out there. [00:20:34] So you provide a list of, here are the ones we recommend, here's the best ones? [00:20:38] Exactly. And the ones we recommend are the ones that we carefully recommend because good products means less support issues, you know, for us, and that's one of the things that I have been very careful with from a team management perspective is we've got a good team and a lean team, and I want to make sure that we're not trying to support everything because that just means more headaches when the devices don't work as expected. [00:21:03] Right. And I would imagine with the door sensors or the door locks, and the biggest issue is just the batteries and things down, right? [00:21:11] It is. But sometimes some of the brands, you got to be careful, Jason, like, you know, there are a lot of vendors out there now. If you go to Amazon, just type in smart lock there's so many of them out there, right? So a lot of them are just companies that popped up overnight and. I always recommend to our property managers, even if you're paying slightly more. Stick with a brand that's been around for 20, 30 years. Right. So you know that they're going to be around if you need support, right? Or if the device fails on you, at least you can go, you know, claim your warranty and get a replacement, whatnot, right? So Schlage, August, Yale, Masterlock, these companies have been around decades, right? So those are always our top picks. There's a lot of other brands that are out there that we do support. Some of them are, you know, have been around like Igloo Homes has been around for a while. But we're just kind of careful of like trying not to support it all because it can cause other problems. [00:22:08] Got it. Cool. Anything else that property managers might be curious to know? [00:22:13] Yeah, there's a couple of other questions. I'm trying to think. Let's see what happens. If there's a power outage you kind of hit on this a little bit earlier. The locks are supported by batteries, right? So that means that if there is a power outage, your guests can still get in and out of the home. Right? It's not going to affect access to the property. When we get the reservations, we actually process them two weeks in advance, you know, type of thing. So that way it's not adding the code last minute on the day of the reservation. That's one of the things we do not do unless, you know, caveat being though, that if the reservation came in that day, obviously we're trying to put it on the lock that day, but normally if the reservation came in a week ago, two weeks ago. Well, we processed two weeks in advance typically. [00:22:59] Yeah. Very cool. So the codes are already in there. They're not active yet. Until its time it'll be activated. And so even if the power goes out or there's an issue or the wifi or internet has a problem, that code's already in there and they can get in and out during the time of their stay. [00:23:15] Exactly. Yep. So that's probably the number two question I get. And then third one I get often is our pricing and. We're transparent. As you can see from our website, we don't hide it from you, you don't have to talk to us first to see the pricing. We just keep it all published out there, $5 a month. We actually made a plan just for the property management system users, and it's $5 a month. I think, you know, your users will see that it's very competitive to the other players in the space. And again, I always tell our customers try the different players out, right? We all offer trials, right? So Jervis offers a one month free trial. Everyone offers a trial of some sort. So try everyone out, right? And see there's Remote Lock, there's Aperto, there's Links. Try everyone out. Try Jervis out and see what is the right fit for you, your organization for your needs. And then let us know if you've run into any issues or have any question. But those are the three questions I typically see, Jason. [00:24:18] Perfect. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this with us. So maybe you could touch on, just before we wrap on, how would this apply or be beneficial for long-term management companies and getting vendors in and out? You know, this sort of thing? [00:24:38] Yeah, the great question again. Yeah, so we do have a lot of property management companies, let's say with hundred, 200 properties or more, and that's where our mobile app especially comes in very handy, right? Let's say they have garage doors plus smart locks, and they're different brands, right? So they may be like MyQ garage doors, and then you got smart locks from varying different brands. And so what Jervis's mobile app will do for you is that you can, you know, let's say you have 10 different teammates, you can assign them access to the mobile app, and then they'll be able to switch between the properties just in a dropdown, select the property switch very easily. Then they'll see the devices that you assign to them. So then all they have to do is click a button, and the garage door opens, click a button, smart lock, the door opens, right? Or the lock opens. And then if you drive down the street to your next property, same thing. Just go to the dropdown, select the property, see the devices, click on what you need to open. And so that's where it really benefits the long-term rental users or the teams. We do have property management companies assigning or giving access to the app to their long-term tenant clients as well. So that way they don't have to give them access directly to Schlage. Right. Directly to MyQ. This keeps it like one level removed and then kind of transparent to them who the vendor is. It doesn't matter, right? Like the guest just sees the app, press the button and then they can just get into the property in and out. [00:26:15] Got it. So the tenant would use the Jervis App. Jervis systems, apps in order to get into, in and out of the property, they can use that. [00:26:23] Exactly. Yep. [00:26:24] They would just set up access for them. What about you've got this, you know, system for the short term for people to get in and out. What about for long term and short term? What about getting vendors in and out that are not your vendors? Like you need to send out a plumber. How are you creating access codes and do you have plans to integrate with some of this tech systems out there, like Property Meld or some of these sort of things where they're dispatching their vendors? [00:26:50] Yeah, so that's a good point. So down the road we will integrate with those companies, but by contractors I imagine You mean like handyman companies? [00:26:59] Yeah. [00:26:59] Or cleaning companies, things like that. So the access right now can be granted through our server systems dashboard. So you can assign temporary access, right? So just like you do with the cleaning company, instead of a reservation, when you're adding the user, you're going to be selecting a start date until a firm end date, right? Or it could be the same date, different hours, starting hour, ending hour. And so that's the way property managers can do it right now. But similar to how we integrate with all the property management companies that are out there, our goal is like, to connect with these companies like Property Meld, like things like that you said. And then be able to import in the support request, you know, for a specific property. And then assign a temporary code as we go. Just like that, just like we do with reservations for properties as well. [00:27:53] Yeah. Very cool. All right. Yeah, that sounds really cool. Well, Bobby, thanks for coming on the DoorGrowShow. Sounds like a really cool system. I think the price sounds really easy and fair, and so I'll be really curious to see what sort of response he yet from being on the show. And I hope people check you out. How can they find out more about Jervis? [00:28:14] Sure. Yeah. They can reach us on all the social medias. Were under Jervis.systems. And then the best way, honestly, is to contact us is go to our website and just use the Contact Us form. It'll go to directly to me and our support. So we'll get back to you on our questions or anything like that or answers to any questions. And then like we tell everybody is sign up for a trial. You got nothing to lose. We'll give you one free month to try it out. And if it doesn't work for you, we understand no hard feelings and but if you run into issues, let us know. [00:28:47] We'll be glad to work with you to fix it. [00:28:49] Very cool. All right, Bobby, thanks for being on the #DoorGrowShow. [00:28:54] Yeah. Thank you Jason. I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me. All right, so if you are a property management business owner and you are looking to grow your business, you are tired of being stuck in the role, in the things that you're doing that you really don't want to be doing. You're wearing certain hats you don't want to be wearing. Reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you optimize your business. We would love to help you come up with strategies to grow and scale your business so you can easily be adding a hundred, 200, maybe even 300 doors a year without spending any money on paid advertising. So we would love to help see you grow and we would love to help get the systems in people in place on your team so that you can handle that growth. So if that is something you're interested in, you can reach out to us at DoorGrow.com and make sure to join our free community DoorGrowclub.com. It's our Facebook group. We have some free gifts for you with the fee Bible and some other cool things. We would love to give you some free stuff and have you join our community. If you are a property management business owner, we hope to see you. [00:30:00] 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! [00:30:26] 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.  

We recently learned that most property managers have an awful profit margin in their businesses. If you struggle with profit in your PM business, you won’t want to miss this. Join Jason and Sarah Hull from DoorGrow to learn about how to improve your business, team, and profit margin by making small improvements with BIG impact. You’ll Learn… [01:18] Why do property managers have bad profits? [05:11] You need a better team [07:06] How do you know if someone is the right fit? [14:09] Deciding if YOU are in the right roles [18:10] Why you need a strategic planning system [22:57] How to fix your team Tweetables “If you have team members you don't feel safe giving up a chunk of your business to run for you, it's because they don't share your values. And if they don't share your values, you'll never trust them.” “It doesn't matter how many doors you have or how few doors you have, you can have a really bad profit margin.” “The average profit margin for companies in the 50th percentile is only 1%.” “The easiest low-hanging fruit to increase profitability is to tackle the biggest expense in your business if you have a team… people.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] If you have team members you don't feel safe giving up a chunk of your business to run for you, it's because they don't share your values. And if they don't share your values, you'll never trust them.  [00:00:09] 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. [00:00:48] 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 here with Sarah, the COO of DoorGrow. And now let's get into the show.  [00:01:16] So what are we chatting about today?  [00:01:18] We are going to talk about profits.  [00:01:21] Okay. I'm noticing this trend lately in talking with some clients, in talking with property managers, that some companies that are struggling with profitability-- which tends to happen when you have a team, usually in the 200-600 door range. Some are now maybe two to 400 range, which I call the second sand trap. A lot of times I'm noticing that they're trying to figure out profitability. They're like, " we don't have a good enough profit margin and-- Oh, we just did a cool video.  [00:01:53] We did.  [00:01:54] Called what?  [00:01:55] Profit Martian.  [00:01:56] Profit Martian [00:01:58] Little silly play on words. It's this silly video, make sure you go do a search on YouTube for Profit Martian. So you need to focus on your profit margin, right? And a lot of property managers have really bad profit margins. Like some of the gurus and mentors and coaches that you look up at out there, some of the people with tons of doors, their profit margin actually really sucks. It doesn't matter how many doors you have or how few doors you have, you can have a really bad profit margin.  [00:02:26] Yeah. So actually, um, I was talking to somebody just maybe two days ago and he sent me some data from NARPM. So they do all of their little, you know, tests and data gathering and all of that good stuff. And this is from, I think, not 2022, but I think 2021. But there's like a whole breakdown. And if you're in the 50th percentile of property management companies, regardless of size, the average profit margin for companies in the 50th percentile is only 1%. Like one 1%, like one whole percent, which is... I almost threw up when I saw that document. Like, oh, whoa. I felt so gutted. And, I don't know, maybe I was just doing something different when I was running my company, but my profit margins were insane. They were insane. It can be-- [00:03:18] Define insane. Can you tell them?  [00:03:20] I was well over 50% profit margin.  [00:03:22] Yeah.  [00:03:23] Like well over 50%. She's kind of efficient. I ran a tight ship. We did. But I almost couldn't believe the data, but I have to believe the data. It comes from NARPM right? So it's like, well, that's the data. So I don't know what's happening. And I think, I think we made the connection.  [00:03:42] Yeah. And wait, can I brag by you for just a sec? So in--  [00:03:45] Yeah.  [00:03:46] So she has, she was managing over 200 doors.  [00:03:50] 260  [00:03:51] Okay.  [00:03:51] Okay. It's a difference.  [00:03:53] That's a lot. Some companies only have 60 and they're struggling. So 260 And these are C class properties?  [00:04:02] Yeah. [00:04:03] Small multifamily. [00:04:04] And lots of single. Single and small multi.  [00:04:07] Yeah.  [00:04:08] Our like big multi was like 10 units, like a 10 unit building.  [00:04:11] Okay.  [00:04:11] We don't have in that area, big, big buildings. [00:04:14] And these are like not necessarily the easiest tenants normally.  [00:04:18] No.  [00:04:19] Now she did this with only one part-time person that was boots on the ground.  [00:04:27] Mm-hmm.  [00:04:28] And Sarah was so bored. She was so bored, she came to work in DoorGrow like she was like--  [00:04:35] Twice.  [00:04:36] Yeah.  [00:04:37] Yeah. So I came and then I left and then came back. [00:04:41] Yeah so I just want to point out like she's super efficient and she was able to do that. After looking inside of like, and talking to thousands of property management companies, like, I know that's exceptional. Like, I know that's rare and a lot of people are like, how's it possible? And some clients of ours, after Sarah's gotten on a coaching call with them, have cut their staffing costs in half, or fired half their staff. Like-- [00:05:01] Yeah. I've had a few of them today.  [00:05:03] Yeah.  [00:05:04] And then they thanked me for it.  [00:05:05] Yeah.  [00:05:06] Yeah.  [00:05:06] Well, the team members probably didn't. [00:05:08] Well, not them, no. They weren't too happy. [00:05:11] So what we're noticing is a lot of times property managers are like, "we need more KPIs, we need more metrics, data. We need more data, numbers, we need more micromanaging and more process documentation because we're trying to squeeze blood from a stone. Like " how can I get a little bit more juice out of my team?" when they don't focus on the actual real problem. And the real problem is you have a shitty team. Like your team-- [00:05:38] The wrong team.  [00:05:39] And maybe they're good people, maybe they have good values, but they probably do not match the three fits. Did I do an episode on the three fits previously?  [00:05:49] Probably at some point. I think a lot of times what I see is-- and not just in property management, just in general, businesses-- they hire the wrong way.  [00:05:57] Yeah.  [00:05:58] So there are three different fits and they go cultural fit, then personality fit, then skill fit.  [00:06:05] Mm-hmm.  [00:06:05] And they should be in that order. Most of the times, what I see is the reverse. So they focus first on skill fit and then on personality fit and maybe culture.  [00:06:19] So the Three Fits of DoorGrow... trademark. So the Three Fits to the Ultimate Hire, this is a framework that I came up with because I was just noticing in my own business this became really important. I was also noticing in other businesses of other million dollar plus business owners we hang out with and in lots of our clients. Like a lot of people were having difficulty with team members. This is common no matter how big the business is or how small it is, if they had a team. And it's because they don't have people that are the three fits. There's sort of a similar concept I noticed in the Traction book, but I didn't really like that model. I wanted to simplify this. So here's how I look at it, I look at it through these three lenses. First culture fit. Do they share your values? You can assess your team right now. Does everybody on your team share your values? If you're not clear on what your values are, though, the answer is probably no. They might have good values. That doesn't mean that your team members might have bad values, it just means they might be different. Like for example, you might value things being done very efficiently. Maybe that's a big deal to you and your clients value that, and you want to make sure things are done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. But maybe you have a person that's a vendor or a maintenance coordinator or in-house maintenance staff and they value things being done, quality, and they take a ton of time. Or it might be the reverse for a lot of you. It's just different competing values. And so if somebody doesn't have the same values as you, what's the big problem with that?  [00:07:54] Well, the problem is they're going to make decisions differently than you make decisions.  [00:07:59] And so you'll never trust them. You cannot trust them. So this is the thing, if you have team members you don't feel safe giving up a chunk of your business to to run for you, it's because they don't share your values. And if they don't share your values, you'll never trust them. That's the bottom line. Let's talk about personality fit. Culture fit is the most important, like Sarah said. Personality fit. This means they naturally love doing this job. They naturally love doing it, which means they don't have to be motivated. They don't wake up in the morning and think, "I can't wait to for the weekend. I hate this job." They like, they love doing what they get to do. And believe me when I tell you, you may think nobody loves property management. Nobody loves this... there is a person. There are people out there that love changing bed pans. There are people out there that love doing just about anything if you get the right personality fit for that role. Not everybody loves sales, but if somebody's the right personality fit, they love it. They love the push. They love the hunt. They love the chase. They love the challenge. They love talking to people. They have no resistance to doing cold calling.  [00:09:04] Some people love that stuff. Some people hate it. Some people love accounting. Some people hate it. Some people love, you know, whatever it is. You can pick anything. And so personality fit means if they're good culture fit and a good personality, that means you just need the third, the last thing, which is skill. The skill fit means they have the training and the experience to do the job. So you can hire people that already have the skill, which is somebody that already knows how to do it well. They're what we would call a "who." They're looking for somebody who can do the job, or there's those that you can train and teach how, so that would be like hiring a "how". There's a really great book called Who Not How, which is a really great book, and in the beginning, early stages you have to hire "hows" and you're going to teach them, which means you have to be the "who" that knows everything. [00:09:56] And later on you're going to start to hire people that are beyond your level. Like I hire people beyond my level that are better at these things than me. I hire "whos". They're much better at these things. And so here's how this works. I usually have a Venn diagram, three circles that are overlapping. I've got culture, personality, skill, and if they have culture and personality, they can be trained-- is what shows up in the middle of those two. If they have culture and skill, but they're not the right personality fit for the role. They don't love it. But they believe in you. They love your company. They share your values, and they have the skill to do the job and the training. Here's the caveat, they'll never be great. They'll never be great at that role because they'll always have friction and resistance. Let's say you hire somebody to be a bdm, but they hate talking on the phone. They don't like reaching out to people and it's uncomfortable. You've trained them. They have the skill to do it. They believe in your values and believe in your business, and they share a belief in you. Like they like want to support you, but they're always going to have friction and they're going to avoid it. "Well I tried texting them twice," you know, and you're like, you have got to call them, right? So if they are personality fit and a skill fit, but not a culture fit, you'll never trust them. And so that's how these play out. If you have all three, they're the ultimate hire. Okay, so what I want you to understand is if you're focusing on profitability right now, KPIs, metrics, more micromanaging, it takes an infinite amount of processes and micromanaging to try and create the results you'll get from the three fits, and you'll never get close. It just won't happen. And so it doesn't make sense to go sign up with profit coaching companies and working on your NARPM accounting standard and all these metrics, when the easiest low-hanging fruit to increase profitability is to tackle the biggest expense in your business if you have a team. And what is that? What's the biggest expense?  [00:11:47] The biggest expense on your team? Well, all the people.  [00:11:49] Yeah. If you have a team, it's your team. People are-- [00:11:53] You have got to pay people. They like that.  [00:11:55] People are expensive. They're way more expensive than software. They're expensive. And you need people in a property management business. It's a people based business, right? It's about relationships and communication and all this. And so the first thing we want to do is decrease the unnecessary work, which Sarah's really brilliant at. We decrease the unnecessary work. That alone can cut your staffing costs in half.  [00:12:18] And redundancy. I've talked to like a lot of property managers where it's like, "who handles your leasing?" And they're like, "oh, Joe and Sally." Nope. have one, one person. Because if Joe and Sally does it, that means nobody's actually doing it. Because Joe will say, "oh, I thought it was Sally." Sally will say, "oh, I thought it was Joe." and he goes back and forth and that's how things fall through cracks. That's how things get missed. That's how mistakes happen. There's no true ownership... [00:12:43] Yeah.  [00:12:43] ...of that thing. And if there's no ownership, you can like guarantee that it's not going to happen.  [00:12:49] If it's not clear who owns the particular job or task or thing to be done, then nobody does, and then they'll be stepping on each other's toes so there'll be double work or it'll just get left undone. Or "I thought they were going to do it." It becomes a mess. Right?  [00:13:01] Mm-hmm.  [00:13:02] What else should we talk about about this? I think the thing is if you've seen our DoorGrow Code, and if you haven't seen that, I highly recommend you reach out to our team, get a copy of the DoorGrow Code. It shows the roadmap to go from basically zero to 1000 doors and how to do it as quick as possible. A lot of people focus on the profit system, which we have way later at like maybe the 600 door red belt stage, but they've skipped really dialing in their pipeline system. Maybe your sales CRM right now is still like a spreadsheet and you don't have your sales process defined. You don't have maybe a process system, so you don't have some sort of system like we're launching DoorGrow Flow, which is really cool. Vizio like flowchart software for mapping out your processes and for your team running the processes in the business consistently. But you don't have a really solid process system where the processes are clearly defined. But even if you have all the processes in the world, if you don't have a good people system in the business, which is the next thing that you need to have, this is your hiring system. This is how you vet your team. This is how you make sure everybody are the three fits. And I should point out the most important, who's the most important business that should be the three fits? [00:14:14] The CEO.  [00:14:15] Yeah.  [00:14:16] Yeah. So those of you listening, if you're the business owner, it's you. You should be making sure you are the right personality fit for the roles that you're in. And I guarantee if you're wearing every hat right now, or a lot of hats, you're not, you're not the personality fit. That's why you don't love doing some of those things. Those are the first things we've got to get off your plate. [00:14:33] Yeah. I talked with an owner yesterday and he's like, "oh, I do everything." I'm like, "all right, let's talk about what is everything? Tell me what you do" "I do this and this and this and this and this. So the list is like 20 things long. I'm like okay so out of those things, like what are the things you actually enjoy? "Like I love building systems." He's like, "I love it." He's like, "that's what I do." I'm like, "okay, cool. So what are you doing right now that you hate, that you like, if I could like just snap my fingers, you would never have to do again? What would be?" He's like, I hate doing sales, which is really-- [00:15:02] This was a business owner... bizarre  [00:15:04] Really unique because a lot of times the business owner loves doing sales. That's the role they want to keep. They're like, "I love doing that. I love talking to people. I love networking. I love selling. I love promoting my business. I love that." He hated it. I'm like, "you're an operator and that's great." I'm like, that's cool. Like you're that operator personality type. The operator is not going to do sales. So if you're hiring somebody and you're like, "oh yeah, you're going to help me out with admin work and operations, and then they're also going to be like BDM and doing cold calls and..." no, they're not. No, those are two different personality types.  [00:15:34] Yeah.  [00:15:35] And they clash hard. They clash hard. So in that case, like he should not be doing sales because he hates it. So does he do it? Yes, because he has to. But does he like doing it? No, absolutely not. So if you don't like doing something and you're forcing yourself to do it, it means a few things. First of all, it means you're probably not going to be really super good at it because you're forcing yourself to do it. So you're just going to like, all right, how can I hurry up? How can I get through? Like you're not intentional with it. You're not. Because your heart isn't in it. You're like, I hate doing this. This is just something I have to do. Um, and then it also means that it will fall on his list of priorities really low, which means it will happen last. So he'll go, oh, these are all the things I could do instead of doing sales calls and he'll do 20 million other things instead of doing the sales calls. And the sales calls are the thing that actually are going to help grow the business. But since it's such a painful thing for him to do, it's going to come so low on his list of priorities that that will be the thing that either gets done last or gets skipped. So in that case, like take off that hat and hire it out. You need a bdm.  [00:16:47] So one of the things that we recommend that you do is you need the process system. You need a people system. And so that's something we help our clients build out is a hiring system. We have DoorGrow ATS that stands for Applicant tracking system and software, and then we have an AI assessments partner that we partner with to assess you and your team and your potential new hires. [00:17:08] Mm-hmm.  [00:17:08] Then we have things that we help you map out, like R Docs, which are the ultimate job descriptions, which will filter out and help also attract some people that are the right personality fit. And so we have this whole system for-- [00:17:21] the right culture fit.  [00:17:22] Yeah.  [00:17:22] Yeah. Your R doc will attract the right culture fit. [00:17:25] And so the hiring system we put in place reduces that risk because one bad hire is going to cost you probably about 10 grand minimum. You'll probably have a month for three months. You'll be paying them some sort of amount of money each month, and they will probably also cost you some business, especially if they're connected to the front end at. So it's going to be expensive.  [00:17:45] Yeah. Plus your time to train them.  [00:17:46] Yeah.  [00:17:46] Or somebody else's, like on your team is training them so their time. [00:17:51] Yeah. So you're losing money.  [00:17:52] Plus they missed opportunity from finding the right person. Yeah.  [00:17:55] So bad hiring is super costly in the business. It eats your profits up like crazy. Bad team members or weak team members or team members that are not solidly the 3 fits. Eat your profits like crazy.  [00:18:09] Yeah.  [00:18:10] And then we have people that have somewhat mediocre teams or they're just not in the right seat on the bus, as a lot of people like to say. And then they don't have a planning system. And that's the next system we want to put in place a planning system. Once you have an operator and you have, you know, a team, a planning system, it really is the rocket fuel for your business and the planning system that we've built is better than EOS. It's better than Traction, all that kinda stuff out there, those are very top down. It needs to be bottom up to where your teams start to work and function like business owners thinking strategically in helping you grow these different arms and pieces of the business that you put them over on your executive team. And so DoorGrow OS allows that to happen. It's software that we've built and this allows you to come up with your annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals as a team to figure out how do we eat this elephant one bite at a time and break it down. And it creates ownership, it creates accountability. Everybody can see whether or not people are getting things done. There's green "yeses" and red "no's" at the end of the week on this software and everybody's accountable and can see it. A players, people that are the three fits, they love this, they love this accountability, they love being in the system. B players will quit.  [00:19:30] Mm-hmm. [00:19:31] I've seen it multiple times. We implement something in a business, a planning system like this, and then team members quit. They're like, forget this. I don't want to be seen. I don't want to be accountable. I don't want them to know whether I'm getting stuff done or not. I just want to do my day-to-day tasks. This really is where you have team members that are now moving the business forward instead of you dragging them up the mountain towards the goal, which a lot of you feel like that. And if you're dragging your team members up the mountain, they're all sitting in the wagon and you're pulling them and you're trying to clear the path with the machete and go up the mountain towards the goal, you have the wrong team. If you get your team in the right alignment and you've got your values defined, you've got your process system, your people system, your planning system, your pipeline system, you've got all these, you will be infinitely more profitable.  [00:20:15] I find that I get three times the output from team members if they are the three fits easily. And so what would that do? Imagine what that would do if you got three times the output from the existing team, how much more capacity you could have. How would that affect your business? Like it would be, it's pretty magical, I will tell you. So our clients grow pretty rapidly. And so focusing on those after we get all those systems in place, then at DoorGrow we'll focus with clients on the profit system.  [00:20:43] Mm-hmm. [00:20:44] After all that, going to the profit system and KPIs and metrics and trying to squeeze team members and all this is kind of like you're trying to do body building and you are taking creatine. You're like, creatine's supposed to help my muscles. Yeah, it can help a little bit, but you need to eat food. You need to get sleep. You need to exercise, like you need to do the basics. So don't jump to the end and now start to squeeze more money out of your team and more profitability when you haven't solved all these earlier problems that need to be solved. [00:21:18] Don't put the cart before the horse.  [00:21:20] Yeah, it really is putting a cart before the horse. [00:21:23] And everyone wants to, because they all want to focus on profitability and there are ways that you can focus on profitability. in your company early on, like door number one, you should be focused on profitability and there are things that you should be tracking in your business, but when you hire a team member and then you're like, oh, I'm just going to put in like 10 metrics that they have to do every day and I want end of day reports and I want weekly reports and I want this and I want that, I want this. It's just not going to be the same thing. Those are not going to be the things that actually help you be more profitable in the business, and that's what everybody thinks, but that's a really common mistake. The things that are actually going to help you be profitable in your business are things like looking at your P and L. Whoa. Crazy, right? And it's okay if you don't, right? Because this is what we do. This is how we learn. But you are not looking at your P and L every month making decisions based off of your P and L, then that's a missed opportunity. And then if you're not tracking your profit margin, if you're like, "I have no idea what my profit margin is, I don't know," then there's a missed opportunity. So those are the things that you could do even early on with or without team members. That will actually help you and you can make decisions accordingly and based off of that information, instead of saying, "all right, now I want to micromanage my team more and I want implement this and this and this and this, I need 12 tracking systems and I need all this data and all these metrics and all these spreadsheets," then what you're doing is you're just paying your team to do more work. [00:22:51] And that work isn't even moving the needle, which everyone thinks that moves the needle it doesn't move the needle.  [00:22:57] So let's talk real quick about having the wrong team. Really, if you've been stuck at maybe the 200 to 400 door range for several years, you can't figure out how to get ahead, usually, the problem is you. Whether you want to admit it or not, you have the wrong team. You're micromanaging them. They come to you asking every question, and you can't trust them to think and make decisions the way that you would, and this is because you've built the wrong team and that's on you. And so there's a couple myths. One myth is the clone myth. I see this early on. They think, "well, if I could just find somebody else like me then I could clone myself. I just need that one person. They'll be just like me, and that's all I need. Entrepreneurs, I want you to understand it takes like 10 people to clone yourself. It takes like 10 people because you're so adaptable. You can do so many different things. And so it takes like 10 people to clone you. There's not just one. [00:23:52] And if you found somebody that actually was like you that could wear multiple hats and be highly adaptable and like was intelligent, you could learn all this stuff and do all of this, guess what? You're just training your next competitor. They're going to leave you because would you work for somebody? Probably not. You want freedom, you want fulfillment, you want the Four Reasons you are an entrepreneur. If you find somebody highly adaptable like that, they're going to learn what they can from you and they're going to go, "I can do this better myself. I can have more money, more time, more freedom, more fulfillment if I do this myself. I'm going to go do that." So if you find a good clone, they will be a clone, but they will also start doing what you're doing, and that-- I've seen that happen a lot. And they'll take some of your portfolio with them sometimes, regardless of what sort of legal stuff you think you've got protection on. I've seen that happen over and over again.  [00:24:42] So the other thing is if you have the wrong team, this is something we can help you with at DoorGrow. We can help you figure out your team, assess, and we'll help you figure out which things are your strengths, which things do you most enjoy doing so we can build the right team around you. [00:24:56] Mm-hmm. [00:24:57] You can't build the right team around the wrong person, and so if you're showing up as the wrong person in the business, you're not doing things that you love, you're not focused on those things and then you're hiring team members based on what the business needs. This is the big failure I see why people get stuck at 200-400 doors is they built a team based on what they think the business needs instead of based on what you personally need as a business owner. We will help you figure that out. We have processes for this. We do time studies, we help you with R docs, all these things. We're going to get you clarity. We'll have you do our AI assessment as well. We'll get you clarity on what you should be doing and what you love doing, and then we will help you figure out very clearly what the next right hire is based on your time study instead of based on what you think the business needs because where the pain in the business is. [00:25:45] That's going to change your life because now your business gets easier and easier and better and better the bigger your team gets, you are focusing more and more on what you love the bigger the team gets and the more doors you have, the more revenue you have. And that means you're now building the right team and your business becomes more and more effective and more and more efficient as it gets bigger instead of more and more stressful. So we can help you get out of this. We can shift you from the wrong team and you showing up as the wrong person and wearing the wrong hats that you don't enjoy very quickly. It'd probably take us about a quarter to make significant movement on this. Even in the first month, you're going to get some serious insights and we'll make some shifts, but in a quarter, we can usually get you to a much healthier place where you feel like you have more fulfillment, more freedom, and we've restructured your team so that we can help you out. [00:26:34] We've done that. I just did that with the client recently and he thought, "Hey, I'm the operator." [00:26:39] Yeah.  [00:26:39] "This is what I like. I like being the operator. I'm good at this. I'll do this." And then we assessed him because we built out his r doc for the operator. We assessed him in that role and he was like, "oh. I should not be doing this role." [00:26:51] He was not an operator. [00:26:53] : I actually don't like this and I don't function well in that capacity." So he realized that he should not be running the business in the operator capacity. [00:27:02] Mm-hmm. [00:27:03] Which means he needed to hire an operator. So that allowed him to focus on the things that he actually does like, which is the sales and the bdm, not surprisingly. So he's now in that role in the business and he was like, "Hey, I'm going to hire an operator, and he had someone on his team that he thought was going to be able to ascend into this operator position. He was going to start him out and then kind of ascend him and give him like a little bit more and a little bit more. We assessed this team member the same way, and it was very clear, "this is not going to be your operator." [00:27:35] Yeah.  [00:27:36] "So if you put him in this position for right now, like it will be like, you know, a butt in the seat, but this is not your long-term guy. This is definitely not your forever guy. There's just going to be too much friction because he doesn't function in that capacity. He doesn't." And he said, "well I think I'm going to try it. We're, we're going to see how it goes." He tried it and very, very quickly he realized, "oh, this is not the right move. He's not going to be able to handle these things that operators handle." He could handle like a few pieces. So he's like, "I have to change, I have to change the role and I have to continue looking for the operator." and it was so funny because he was like "the AI assessment showed me very clearly, like, I am not the person for this. and he is not the right person for this." [00:28:24] Mm-hmm. [00:28:24] But he was able to make those decisions and have that, like, have that clarity in his business because of those assessments and because we built out the R docs and aside from doing that, he wouldn't have known and he just would've been the operator. That's what he thought he was supposed to do.  [00:28:39] Yeah. So we have these R docs, we feed them into this AI tool. It helps us assess the different personality qualities and then we can adjust those levers based on what we think, whether it's accurate or not. And so it's very easy. Like we can sit down with a client like this client and look at this and go, what's the ideal operator? "Well, they would have this attribute, this attribute, this attribute." Cool. And then we have him take the assessment and it shows that's not him. It's pretty obvious. I mean, and then he looks at those, "well, what are my attributes? And then he can say, yeah, that's true about me. I can see that now." so it really provides some clarity.  [00:29:12] I just want to say one more thing on that. So since we ran the business through that assessment we had his results.  [00:29:18] Yeah.  [00:29:19] And then we ran this other person that he thought was going to end up being the operator through that same assessment. And we had his results and we could see, first of all, that the business owner was not going to function as the operator. But it also staff ranks them so we could see the business owner out of two candidates. Right. We had the business owner and this other, the other team member.  [00:29:36] Yeah.  [00:29:36] The business owner scored the best, which still was not great. And then this person scored less than the business owner.  [00:29:45] Yeah. [00:29:46] Which means that he definitely cannot do the role because he actually would do a worse job in the role than the business owner. And we already know that the business owner was not the right fit for role.  [00:29:57] Yeah.  [00:29:57] So it was like super clear. He's like, "oh, I see that now very clearly." [00:30:01] You want people that are better at these jobs, and that's the ideal. Everybody on my executive team are better at their job than I would be. I used to do every role in the business. I can do their jobs, but I don't love doing their jobs, which means I'm not going to be as great at their jobs, and I wouldn't put as much attention on it. Right? [00:30:23] Okay. So to sum this up, if right now you feel like you need more metrics, more KPIs, and more processes, and that's your gateway to profitability and freedom and everything else, you probably have the wrong team, and you need to get the right systems in place. You need a really good planning, communication, people, hiring, pipeline. All these systems in place that we have in our DoorGrow Super System to get your business in alignment. And then you're ready to start eating up other companies. You're ready to start buying and acquiring companies. You're ready to start, like you can see team members into this and hire. You can scale infinitely. Once you have these systems in place, you can scale. And that's our goal at DoorGrow is to create scalable businesses. And so if you want some help with scaling your business, getting out of, you know, the crappy day to day and the frustration, and you feel like your only way out of this business is to sell it someday, you can exit certain pieces of the business without exiting the business. [00:31:23] I've exited almost all the pieces... I've exited all the pieces that I really don't enjoy in my business. And I will continually be exiting pieces until maybe someday actually exit everything in the business and just an owner. Well, maybe eventually I die, or whatever, right? So you want to figure out which level of exit you want and you don't have to exit the frontline work or the stuff that you don't enjoy doing. This myth that you're the only person that can do it is bs. "Nobody else can do it better than me" is bs. This is what early entrepreneurs usually say that aren't well seasoned or haven't realized there's people out there that are smarter than you, better than you at most everything that you don't enjoy doing. [00:32:02] And you need to find those people. And we can, we can help you with that. We can help you get out of that situation and you're going to be way more profitable. You will have so much more profitability if we do that stuff first. And then after all that, we can focus on maybe some metrics and some KPIs, but most companies probably don't even need that granular sort of stuff once they have all this other stuff dealt with and taken care of. So, anything else you want to add?  [00:32:29] I don't think so. I love doing this stuff. This is how my brain works, so like the clients that are like in our program and going through this stuff, I love it. I'll talk about it all day long. And I do think it's something that you can do that really will propel you. It's going to move you into that world that you really hoped that you would get right, because I doubt very much when you started a property management company, you were like, "man, I can't wait to talk to tenants every day. I can't wait to deal with maintenance. That's going to be so fun. Oh yes, dealing with tenants and evictions and like, all the nonsense that comes along with it, like, yeah! I can't wait for that. It's going to be so fun." It's like, probably not really your dream job. Like it sure as hell is not my dream job. I will tell you that. I've been offloading like more and more to my assistant and I'm like, "oh, this is so nice. I don't have to deal with a lot of the stuff that I used to have to deal with."  [00:33:23] But I think a lot of times what business owners forget, or at least they don't realize it for some reason, is this is your business and you get to build it the way that you want to. So all of the, "I should do this" and "I have to do this," and "I'm the business owner, so this is my job." No, you create your job. You decide what your role is because you started the company. So all of the, "I have to do the accounting because I'm the owner." False. Like "I have to do the sales because I'm the owner." False. Like all of the things that you think that you need to do, do they have to be done? Yes. Does it have to be you? No. So you get to be the one who decides what seat do you sit in in the company, and I have clients that say, "I don't want any of the freaking seats at all." Awesome. Let's make that happen for you. [00:34:12] Yeah. I mean, if you wanted to be the receptionist, you could just be the receptionist, like it's your business. You can do whatever the hell you want.  [00:34:18] You can do whatever you want.  [00:34:19] Yeah.  [00:34:19] If there's a thing in your business and you're like, I love this piece. Then keep that piece and let that be your role, and then hire out around that, like that piece. Don't give that piece away if that's the thing that you like.  [00:34:34] One of my mentors said something to me that really hit me in the gut, and he said-- and I've shared this on the podcast before-- but he said, "Jason, if you don't yet have the business of your dreams, it's because you're not yet the person that can run it yet." and so that's our goal at DoorGrow with our clients, is we want to teach you to be the entrepreneur that can have the business of your dreams. You can have it. There's no reason why you can't have it. If anyone can do it, you can do it too, and we can help you get there. So That's it for today. So hopefully this was helpful. Until next time to our mutual growth, everybody, be sure to like, subscribe, follow us on all the different channels. We're on everything and we appreciate it. And leave us a good review somewhere. We would love that too. And check us out. Go to doorgrow.com and for those of you that want to be part of a free community, get some free stuff, and hang out with some other entrepreneurs and kind of be nurtured by us, and learn more about DoorGrow because you're not just ready to pull the trigger. Go to doorgrowclub.com. You can join our free Facebook group, and get in there. And if you're ready to have a conversation with my team and us map out a roadmap and a plan for you to get out of some of the suck that you don't want to be in, go to DoorGrow.com and book a call with our team. All right, bye everyone. [00:35:51] 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! [00:36:18] 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.

In this podcast episode, property management expert Jason Hull talks to Kal McDonough from True Submeter about how their product helps eliminate landlord-paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units.  Kal explains how their product is different from competitors, how it works, and why property managers should consider using it to benefit both themselves and their clients. You’ll Learn… [01:18] Introducing True Submeter [04:06] A Submeter that uses WIFI? [08:48] Tracking Usage in Multi-Family units [10:24] Warranties and Replacements [11:25] Early Warning Systems and Alerts Tweetables “True Submeter eliminates a middle ground and coordination with the tenant and the city.” "We have finally developed a significant product that is used across the country to eliminate landlord paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units." “A lot of owners are paying for their tenants' water usage.” “It also eliminates you having to kind of coordinate with the tenant, coordinate with the city. That's completely on us.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] A lot of owners are paying for their tenants' water usage. We have finally developed a significant product that is used across the country to eliminate landlord paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units. [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 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, the founder, and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:18] My guest today is Kal McDonough. Did I say it right? [00:01:22] Yes, you did. Jason, I appreciate you having me here today. [00:01:25] Glad to have you. So Kal, you are with a company called what? What's the name of the company? [00:01:32] True Submeter. [00:01:33] True Submeter. Okay. So can you explain to us a little bit of background on yourself and how you got really excited about submeters? [00:01:43] Yeah, absolutely. I'm a recent grad from the University of Minnesota and we started this company, me and my partner, in 2016 because we got interested in real estate. Now being so young, we didn't know how to start investing with nothing. We didn't have the capital to do it. So we tried to figure out a product that real estate investors would like to have, that we could make that no one is really doing. And that's how we figured out a lot of people, a lot of owners are paying for their tenants' water usage. So we wanted to create a product to eliminate that, which is our True Submeter. It's a true submeter. We started this project in 2016 and we have finally developed a significant product that is used across the country to eliminate landlord paid water usage and increase net operating income in rental units. [00:02:40] Okay. [00:02:42] Yeah, so basically we have two major products. We have our main line meter and our point of use meter. And the main line is our biggest seller, as you only need one per unit. These get attached to the plumbing to each, and it remotely tracks bills and shows live coverage of water usage for each month. So if someone were interested in purchasing our product, we set up an account for you. We send you our product, you install it, and from there on we take care of all the billing that is necessary for your tenants to receive the water bills, and then they will pay you, the landlord, and it's completely covered from there. [00:03:23] Got it. So people aren't using anything like this currently? Often? [00:03:30] So we have few competitors, however their products do not do the same thing as we do. Most of the time. If you would like to buy a submeter, you get the physical submeter and it has readings on it that you can physically take. Most people will need to hire someone to go read those. However, ours connect to wifi and automatically trans mit that to your account and to the tenants. So it eliminates a middle ground there. And it also eliminates you having to kind of coordinate with the tenant, coordinate with the city. That's completely on us. [00:04:06] Got it. How do you solve the wifi challenge, or whose wifi are these using? [00:04:12] Right, great question. So we set up our own routers and ship them with each order. These are specifically only to connect to our sub meters, so no one else can use these routers. There's special wifi, username and password that only our meters get connected to and we completely take care of the cellular payments and everything. So this has nothing to do with the landlord. You don't have to set up a new wireless connection. And it's great that we can troubleshoot it knowing that it's our own wifi. [00:04:42] Got it. Okay. So tell me, what are some of the big questions that people have about this and why should they do the extra work to get this set up and pay attention to this? Most property managers are probably thinking: how's this going to make me more money? How's this going to benefit my clients? Maybe you could go into that. [00:05:01] Yeah, absolutely. I can start off with a pretty simple example. Just saying if a landlord that owns a simple duplex is currently paying for their tenant's water bills because the property only gets one water bill. A lot of cities have a legal rule where you cannot split it down the middle because one tenant is using less. [00:05:20] Right. [00:05:20] You can't have them billed for more than what they're using. And that's one of the key reasons why our product is so great is if you're now recording the specific usage for each tenant, now you're able to bill them. A lot of people question is it worth the money? Is it worth the investment? A great thing about our product is for a lot of the people that we sell to, this is a one-time investment that now you're saving all of this monthly revenue that you don't have to pay for your tenant's water bill. I would like to get into that a little bit more as we do charge a monthly service fee, which is $5.90. Per unit. So say you have a duplex $5.90 per unit, that's $11.80 per month. However, we are able to bill this to the tenant. So this could be a one-time investment for a landlord owner or a property owner or property management company. And I think that's really what sets us apart of from any competitor that we have as well is we minimize our costs of the investment there. There is no one else that is able to accommodate the pricing of this for an original investment. Like I said, we have two main products, our mainline meters, which I touched on a little bit, and then we also have a point of use meter. Now the difference between these two products depends on the plumbing of the property. If plumbing is separated between units our mainline option is going to work fantastic for you because you only need one meter per unit. And these come at a flat price of $79 each. Now if plumbing is not separated and it flows through the entire property, we have our point of use option, which gets attached to every single point of use in the unit. [00:07:11] For example, a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, toilet washer, shower et cetera. Now, this is a little bit bigger of an investment being that you need more meters and it comes at the same price per meter, $79 each. But it does the same function. They do the exact same thing. We group these point of use meters together. They all still connect to the same wifi router and still bill monthly. Now this is another reason why we are kind of special in that we are the only people that have this point of use option. Otherwise it's completely mainline meters from our competitors. And that's really something special that we set ourselves apart from. Although we recommend if possible, our main line meter is just easier and more affordable. We can accommodate those interesting plumbing scenarios. [00:08:04] Got it. And so how difficult is it to attach the mainline meters or the point of use, meters? Is this something they need plumber to install or is this something they can typically do? [00:08:16] Yep. So we do not do installation as we're based out of Minnesota and we sell to across the country. A plumber is recommended. Although we do know a few of our customers have a maintenance team on hand if it's a property management company or whatnot. We send an installation guide that goes step by step. If someone wanted to save money and do it themselves, they would have the opportunity to do that, although we do recommend a plumber on site. [00:08:43] Right. That's probably a good idea for liability reasons. [00:08:47] Of course. [00:08:48] Alright, cool. So how do you justify this to people that have multi-unit properties and, they're low rent. How are you convincing, the property managers to do this and how are they convincing the owners to do this? Right, of course. Well, a great tool that we have, which is included on our website, is an ROI. This is a simple tool that you can plug in simple math equations and find out how much money you will be saving or how much return on the investment you will get from us. I think that's an easy way to, really show that we are worth it. And if that's not enough, then we just want to provide the simplicity of eliminating something like this for a property management company. What's nice for multi-home owners is that the account that we will set up for a personal owner, all of your properties in one are in one. It's easy to use. We, like I said before, we are very pleased with the simplicity of our website, our accounts, how they function. And along with that, I would like to offer my support and troubleshooting techniques to give any customers that we have an opportunity to connect with someone real instead of just looking up on our website and trying to find a solution. [00:10:01] So Kal, you mentioned your website several times. What's the website address? [00:10:05] It's simple. It's truesubmeter.com. [00:10:07] Okay. And there's no clever spelling with True. It's t r u e. [00:10:11] T r u e s u b m e t e r.com. [00:10:16] Got it. Great. Truesubmeter.com. Okay. What other questions might property managers be curious to know about this or concerns? [00:10:24] One question that we get quite a lot is, do we have a warranty? As our warranty is that if our meters break due to natural use, we'll replace 'em. We have a few to minimal to none replacements necessary in the time that we've been a company, which is quite impressive. We do know that some people have interesting tenants that will like to not cooperate in the ways that we would always like them to. And we offer a major discount based off of that if a meter happens to get tampered with broken due to outside circumstances. So that's one question that we get quite a bit. [00:11:02] And they can pass that along, to the tenant. They can fee the tenant for damaging. You agree? [00:11:08] Correct? Correct. We have had a couple of issues with some tenants that were not supposed to be there anymore. And we had to redo an entire project based off of that. And they weren't, they were not happy with that bill. But yes, we're very confident in our products which also I think sets us apart. And. . I'm trying to think of all-- [00:11:25] So curious, related to that, if a property is vacant, is there any sort of warning system that could be in integrated with this? Maybe in the future if somebody is flushing toilets or using the sink or something and no maintenance people and no tenants are in place like it's vacant? Absolutely. I mean, one of the key things to that is if the property is vacant and there is usage going. You will get a monthly bill saying there's usage. Obviously unless we know from the landlord that the property is vacant and there shouldn't be we're going to be assuming that it should be in usage. But otherwise-- another thing just to add on to that is our leak detection system where if we get weekly usage rates that show us if there's a abnormally large amount of usage at a property which will trigger us to contact the landlord and say, Hey, there's quite a bit of usage here. There could possibly be a leak. We know sometimes tenants do use this amount of water, but if not, this should get checked on. And then that's saving the landlord numerous amount of money as well. They don't have to pay the city for all the leaking. [00:12:34] Got it. Okay. Yeah. Very cool. All right. Did we miss anything? [00:12:40] Not off the top of my head. I think we kind of covered everything. Very cool. Leak detection. If it's vacant, you'll be alerted by the monthly bill. Like, Hey, what's going on here? You've got the main benefit. Why don't you sum up the main sort of benefit here and we'll wrap up. [00:12:56] Right. I mean, like we've stated a couple times here, the main benefit of our product is to eliminate landlord paid water utilities. I mean, that's the main goal of our company. It's a small investment to a large return. And I think that's why people should look into our company and partner with us going forward. [00:13:15] Cool. And this can be a profit center for property managers. [00:13:20] That is a good question. This cannot be a profit center for property managers. As there is strict rules with how much tenants get billed for usage and utilities we make sure that they are only getting billed for what the city bills them. And that is due to legal terms. [00:13:36] Got it. But they can charge a monthly fee for the use of this tool or service? [00:13:42] Correct. That is correct. [00:13:44] Okay. [00:13:44] And this monthly fee is from True Submeter ourselves. [00:13:49] Yeah. Can they mark that up? [00:13:51] We have had a few customers in the past mark this up to combat the investment, and that is allowed. However, we don't recommend it as tenants most likely would not like to pay higher bills for, probably for something that they might not have wanted in the first place. [00:14:09] Sure. Okay. But at least they don't have to pay the water bill for their neighbor. [00:14:15] Correct. Correct. [00:14:17] Okay. Very cool. All right, well Kal appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this. Everybody, check out truesubmeter.com. And thanks for being on the DoorGrowShow. [00:14:27] Jason, I appreciate you being-- letting me be on here. Thank you. [00:14:31] Awesome. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, you want to scale your operations, you're tired of being frustrated with your team, then reach out. We would love to see if we could help you grow and scale your business, get the right team in place. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and we hope to hear from you soon. [00:14:54] Bye everyone. [00:14:55] 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! [00:15:21] 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.

Do you use a pitch deck when you’re selling to potential property management clients? If not, you might be missing out on more deals than you realize… Join property management growth expert Jason Hull as he dives into the reason why property management entrepreneurs should have a pitch deck/visual aid when selling to potential clients. You’ll Learn… [01:53] Why use a visual aid? [06:49] What needs to be in a pitch deck? [08:32] Creating a visual roadmap for clients [11:52] 10 tips for creating a pitch deck [17:09] More tips for sales in property management Tweetables “Businesses can't grow unless you're working on them instead of just in them.” “Now, in using visual aids, like in a pitch deck, having things that people can see, it will definitely help you increase your close rates” “You offer a really great service and you solve their problem, and if they don't understand that, they need to be educated on that.” “Your product really is your business. It's not property management. Your product really is your team. It's your service. It's your philosophy. It's your values as a company.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] It doesn't matter if you're selling to somebody and they just forget everything instantly. And so if they can retain the information that you share and they learn, that education that you give them during the sales process increases the likelihood that they're going to work with you.  [00:00:15] 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, the founder, and CEO of DoorGrow.  [00:01:12] Now let's get into the show. So at the time of this recording, we are in kind of the no man's land in between Christmas and New Year's. This time period I see a lot of entrepreneurs put their head down and they get a little bit bored and they start to focus on working on their business sometimes for the first time in a long time because there's a lot of business owners. A lot of y'all are working in your business constantly, and you're not working on your business, and businesses can't grow unless you're working on them instead of just in them, right? I call that strategic time instead of just daily tactical time doing the work. So today's topic that I wanted to talk about... I've been working with my sales team on helping to create better visual materials. So one thing that I've noticed is I've started using an app called Notability, and I draw a lot on my iPad with my Apple pencil and I've been doing a lot of drawings in educating, teaching clients, and I just notice that at the end of our group coaching calls and stuff, I have way less questions. There's much higher retention rate, people absorb the information better, and it's really helped me to understand the power in visuals. Not only that, but we've bought into several high ticket programs and masterminds, and I've noticed that some of the ones that we closed very easily with, they had a very nice pitch deck. [00:02:44] And so I wanted to share an idea with all of you that you should have a pitch deck for your property management business in selling. This is something that I coach clients on, and so I wanted to just touch on, kind of sell you on the idea of having a pitch deck. Now, I know, ironically, I do not have a pitch deck to show you right now to sell you on the idea of having a pitch deck. That would be really cool, right? But this is a podcast, so not everybody is going to see anything anyway. [00:03:17] But I'm going to go over some topics and if you saw my previous episode on ChatGBT, I actually had ChatGBT do some of the research for me. So AI helped me create this podcast episode. So one of the things that makes Pitch Decks really effective is there's this power in visual storytelling. Visuals help convey complex ideas really quickly. They help people get the idea and see it and absorb it a lot faster. Not only that, but it's engaging and it gives somebody something they can remember in association with it. So I think also with having something like that, you know, if it's designed even marginally well, it doesn't have to be amazing, but it helps build credibility and it shows a better first impression that you've thought through some of these concepts. So, I share frameworks, but I like to share them in a visual way so that people can absorb and learn these frameworks. We use these during our sales pitch, during the sales process.  [00:04:19] Now, in using visual aids, like in a pitch deck, having things that people can see, it will definitely help you increase your close rates because if people are absorbing information faster and if people can see the information and they're visual learners and they're not just auditory learners, then they'll be able to absorb it a lot more quickly. And some people are kinesthetic learners. They have to kind of see and feel. And so visuals help them to kind of imagine how these things could work, especially if you're using sort of visual analogies or pictures that involve people touching, doing, acting right? For those kinesthetic learners out there. I mentioned that retention is a lot higher, so it doesn't matter if you're selling to somebody and they just forget everything instantly. And so if they can retain the information that you share and they learn that education that you give them during the sales process increases the likelihood that they're going to work with you because the only reason they would not work with you is because they aren't educated enough, right? Because you offer a really great service and you solve their problem. And if they don't understand that, they need to be educated on that.  [00:05:30] So let's talk about the benefits of having a pitch deck, right? So, we talked about how it can visually help showcase the value proposition of your product or service. The pitch deck also can help the sales team if you have a sales team. This helps them to actually sell the way that you would want them to. It helps keep them on track during a presentation, and it helps them be more organized. It creates consistency because-- how many of you have created a sales script. Many of you probably don't have one, which really sucks, but how many of you created a sales script and then you listen to a call and your team don't follow it? And so the visuals kind of force them to go down a similar path to what you would want them to. And you can build the script into the pitch deck. If they're doing it digitally, they can be the notes on the slides. And so they have to talk about what they're showing visually, right? Pitch deck also can help establish and build credibility and it is kind of set you as a leader in your space because a lot of your competition probably don't have one. [00:06:31] I'll be honest, like most property managers' sales process is just hope somebody calles in and then just wing it and answer whatever questions they have, and hopefully, maybe they'll want to sign up, and that's like really ridiculous, right? It's not a very effective sales strategy. So we teach a lot more effective ways of building a sales process through multiple interactions, spread out over time, and using effective language, how to deal with objections and building the ultimate pitch using our golden bridge for phase selling and et cetera. So you want to build this out to be really effective. The pitch deck also can help your sales team anticipate and address the objections or questions from potential customers. So the pitch deck that I'm building out right now for my sales team has all of the most common objections and the ways to deal with those objections built into it. Now, they don't have to use every slide, like if they went through and used every slide that we have that I've put in the pitch deck and talked about them all and shared every framework, it'd probably be like a two hour conversation. It'd be really long. They don't need to. One of the early slides in the pitch deck is to triage and identify what their challenges are, and then later we have slides to deal with those challenges. You don't need to talk about anything else, right? You don't need to talk about stuff that you can solve for them that they're not dealing with if they're potential client, they care about the problems they have, right? And so that is another tool or another way that a pitch check can help is that it can help address objections or these questions and get them thinking about how you can help them solve this. Pitch deck can also help future pace people, so you can showcase a roadmap or a path that includes you in the future, and really this is why people work with you, is they imagine a different future than they've been experiencing in the present or in the past.  [00:08:32] They imagine there's a different outcome or a different result in the future that includes you and it allows you to visually showcase here's the journey that you're going to go on. Which is why it's important to have maybe a roadmap or a journey. And if you haven't seen our roadmap for property managers, which is the DoorGrow Code, we've cracked the code on the process for growing and scaling your business from zero to a thousand plus doors in a relatively short period of time, and this roadmap it creates a lot of clarity for our clients and for our potential clients very quickly. They can see, oh, this is the problem I should be working on instead of this, and here's where I'm at and here's what I need to do to get to the next level. So they don't waste a lot of time doing the wrong stuff. Right? If you set up a call with our team, you'll definitely see that this is how we triage clients now. It's how we help them see the future of how we can help them. So the pitch deck also will help the, your sales team-- or yourself if you're selling-- persuade the potential customers because it'll highlight the key features, benefits of the product and service. You can showcase these. So if it's property management, you can showcase in your pitch deck through your slides, like the benefits of using a property manager over what other alternate vehicles they might have been thinking about doing, like doing it themselves or getting their realtor to do it, or whatever, right?   [00:09:55] A pitch deck also can help your sales team close deals, by providing a clear call to action, and then outlining what happens after that, right? So you can have a clear call to action, which one of the biggest challenges I've noticed with sales teams is that they just don't ask. They don't go for the close. So you build that in and they will ask every time. And you need to ask for the close-- I teach my sales team-- you need to ask for the close, even if you know they won't do it yet , but because it brings out the objections. It allows those objections to come out or come to the foreground. It kind of shakes the gold out of the dirt, so to speak. It allows you to see the real objections in what you need to deal with, and if you don't ask, a lot of times you don't get to the objection, and she's like, "well, do you think you might do this?" "Yeah, maybe." "Cool, okay, well, you know, I'll follow up with you after you've taken a look at some things." "Okay." right. That's not very effective. But if you say, "Hey, is there anything that would prevent you from signing up or getting started with us today?" And, you know, "are you ready to do this?" They're going to say yes or no. They might say yes, right? And they might say, "well, no, I need to do this." Or you'll hear some typical objections like, "well, I need to talk to my spouse first, or I need, you know, I need to get the funds together," or whatever it might be. They're going to bring up some sort of objection. "Well, I'm working on this with the property first and I need to do this." Okay, cool. So now you know what the objection is, and you can say, "well, we can help you with that thing," or "We solve that problem, by the way," or "that's included" or "here's why you probably don't want to go down that path and do that. Instead, have us do this," right? So you can now solve that objection that's preventing them from signing up with you right now.  [00:11:43] All right. So let's talk about some things to include in a good pitch deck. So this is what ChatGPT says. So here's some ideas, right? So it should have a clear and compelling value proposition. This should be the main focus of the pitch deck and should be communicated in a way that resonates with the audience, right? There needs to be value, right? How is this going to benefit me? Is what your prospect's thinking. Number two, a strong visual design. Use clean professional design elements to make the pitch deck visually appealing and easy to follow. You want it to be very visual, not text heavy. That's PowerPoint. Death by PowerPoint is you just include everything that you're going to say text-wise and then it's really annoying. It's almost insulting. You're like, "well, I'm going to read you what's on the screen right now." right? You don't want to do that. Use visuals that back up what you're going to say and have what you're going to say in the hidden notes on your desktop or on your screen, or in front of you, right? Where are we at?  [00:12:43] Number three, detailed product or service information. So provide detailed information about the product or service being pitched, including key features and benefits. Now, if people get too caught up on the features and benefits, it's often because they don't trust you a lot of times. So just be aware of that. If they trust you, then the features and benefits can help move them towards the close. Number four, customer testimonials. So make sure you include quotes or video testimonials from satisfied customers to build credibility and trust. They need social proof. This is a risk for them to trust you, and so you need a showcase or have some stories, some success stories to share and showcase real people-- faces. They need to see faces of humans that say, "you should work with this property management company." Number five, a solid business model. Outline the company's business model and how the product or service fits into that model. So you think that your business, actual product, your product really is your business. It's not property management.  [00:13:51] Your product really is your team. It's your service. It's your philosophy, it's your values as a company. And so I think it's important to showcase that. Number six, market analysis. You could provide data and research to demonstrate the size and potential of the target market. So I think this could be helpful in property management because one of the big challenges or objections people will have if you're trying to convert them maybe from an accidental investor to a long-term buy and hold for example or something. They might have concerns about external factors related to the real estate industry, the market as a whole. "Should I even keep this property?" And that could be very relevant to have some data about the market and why it's good to invest there and why it's good to hold onto the investment, et cetera. Number seven, marketing and sales strategy. Outline the marketing sales strategy for the product or service, including details on target audience, pricing, distribution channels. So you will be marketing these properties. And so they're going to want to see some of that stuff. Like, "here's how we're going to help you get this thing rented out. Here's how we're going to market. Here's our process. Here's how we're going to make a video of the property and how we're going to put it out there and how we're going to get you the best tenants" and stuff like this. [00:15:10] Number eight, team and leadership. So introduce the team and leadership behind the company highlighting the relevant expertise and experience. So I think that's very helpful to showcase that it's not just a one man show if you can, and to showcase that your team have knowledge and experience and to showcase your expertise. A lot of times you aren't talking enough about yourself and like, "here's why I'm an expert." So for example I would say, "I've spoken to thousands of property managers. I've helped hundreds. We have hundreds of clients. We have about 90 businesses in our Mastermind right now, paying us thousands of dollars a month, right?" so I want to showcase my expertise. Right. So you need to be willing to toot your own horn and showcase that you're an expert. Otherwise, why should they trust you? Right? They don't care how much you know or what you know until they know that you are an expert and are safe and they can trust you, right? [00:16:08] Then they'll start to listen to you. I usually recommend you qualify yourself early in your pitch deck and early in the conversation. Okay. What else? We've got number nine, financial projections. So providing financial projections, including revenue and profitability estimates to show the potential return on the investment for the product or service. So that can be a little bit dangerous, I think, legally. You need to be careful. You can't make certain promises, but I think with their rental property, you could show a performance. You could show some projections of the future of what they could be doing versus where they're at now, which creates a pain gap between the results you can get them and where they're currently sitting. You could showcase rent range reports and what their property should rent for. You could have comps, stuff like this. And then number 10, a clear call to action. So of course at the end, you should end with a clear call to action and outline the next steps, right?  [00:17:09] So that is the idea of creating a pitch deck. Now I have a lot of psychology and science that I put into pitch decks. I don't have the time to go into all of that here on a podcast episode. We go deep. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can add into your pitch and into your pitch deck. As part of our rapid revamp program, I spend two weeks, two of our calls are spent just focusing on how to create the ultimate pitch, and then we have a whole training in DoorGrow Academy in Sales Secrets, how to build the ultimate sales pipeline and process. And then how sales language that you can use, which is based on neurolinguistic programming to psychologically shift people's attention towards the things they should be focused on to deal with objections, stuff like this. And then we get into my four phase Golden Bridge selling, which I think is the most authentic way to sell to create trust, which is about transparently sharing your real motivation besides just getting money from them and sharing, connecting it to their motivation and showcasing how your business is a vehicle for you to get what you want. So you can go back and listen to my episode on the Four Reasons for starting a Business. So it gets into that a bit and then connecting it. So if they understand your motive, the business motive, and it connects to their motive, everybody's in alignment and you know there's going to be a win-win win between all three entities here, right? So the business gives you what you want and helps give them what they want, and that's the golden bridge. [00:18:42] The business is the bridge between both of you getting and connecting with your desires, connecting to each other, right? And it's the most authentic, easiest way to create trust and to sell. And we get into the four phases of that in our selling process, and then we get into what I call the three dominoes that you need to knock over in order to have the ultimate pitch, which is during phase three is the pitch part. So, if you're curious about learning this, you want to increase your close rate, you want to close more deals, you want to get more clients, reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you out, and our clients are crushing it. We had our growth accelerator call today with our group coaching clients. One of our clients just added 37 doors in the last month. So kudos to that client. And he just broke the hundred door barrier. He knows how to get doors, doesn't have to spend any money on advertising. And he's like, "it's becoming painful." And that's exactly what we define at that stage in our DoorGrow Code. You break the hundred doors, and it's going to start to become painful because you now are a promoter and you know how to grow your business. Adding doors is not hard. So we solved that problem. So now he needs our super system. He needs to start building out the back end of the business operations, et cetera. [00:19:58] And if you're already beyond hundred doors, you're probably making some of the most typical mistakes. You're thinking, "I need more processes. I need to micromanage my team more, I need more KPIs." These are very typical thinking of entrepreneurs that are stuck and will never break 600 doors because they are focused on the wrong problem. It's not that you need to micromanage more. You need a better team that you don't have to micromanage. And so we can share all of that with you during our sales call. We have slides for this that I think you'll real will blow your mind. So reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you grow and scale your business. Reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. Book a call with our team and we're going to help you make a lot more money, but get more fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support in your business. [00:20:43] And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  [00:20:46] 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! [00:21:13] 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. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

“Are you a property management business owner looking to stay ahead of the curve? Don't miss our latest episode where we revealed the top 10 ways AI is set to revolutionize the industry and how you can leverage it to improve your business.  From automated customer service to predictive maintenance, we've got you covered. Tune in now to learn more.”- This is a teaser written by AI for a podcast episode about AI… also written by AI. Phew! Join property management growth expert Jason Hull to learn more about AI like ChatGPT and how it could potentially impact the property management industry. You’ll Learn… [01:52] This episode about AI was written by AI [02:43] 10 ways AI and chatbots could impact property management [04:53] How I used AI to write this episode [08:36] AI assessment for HIRING [11:27] 10 ways AI can help single-family residential PMs [14:47] The future and impact of AI Tweetables “Could AI take over the world and is it the most dangerous thing since nuclear weapons? The answer is probably yes.” “Business owners that are able to leverage AI and leverage it early on will have a competitive advantage over those that are late adopters.” “AI is a lot cheaper than people.” “The future is getting crazy. So the creative stuff is going first. Eventually, maybe manual labor and some of the human, like real-time personal tasks will get taken.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] I asked, "What is a good intro to lead into the above list for introducing the topic on a podcast. So here's the intro:   [00:00:07] "Hello and welcome to our latest episode where we'll be exploring the exciting world of artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the property management industry. With the rise of chatbots and other AI powered tools, it's clear that this technology is poised to have a major impact on how property managers do business. In today's episode, we'll be sharing our top 10 list of the ways that AI is set to revolutionize property management, from automated customer service to predictive maintenance and beyond. Whether you're a property management business owner or just interested in the future of the industry, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in."   [00:00:46] It wrote this for me. It wrote this!    [00:00:49] 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're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high-trust, gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.   [00:01:28] 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.    [00:01:51] So today's show is going to be very relevant to what's going on right now. So I don't know if you've seen what's going on right now, but what's going on right now is ChatGPT. You've probably heard of it if you're on social media. Everybody's going crazy. Why are they going crazy? And if you haven't heard about this, you should check this out. You can go to chat.openai.com. And what this is, is this is an AI tool. Like you're talking to a robot. You can type like you're chatting to a human and it will give you whatever information that you asked for back. It can write software. It can create stuff. It's pretty wild. And right now it's free. It's ridiculous. So I put in a prompt, I'm going to read this to you. I said, "can you give me the list of the top 10 ways AI like ChatGBT will impact property management in the future?" Within seconds, it spit this out:   [00:02:43] "Here are 10 potential ways that AI and chatbots like GPT could impact property management in the future:   [00:02:49] 1. Automated customer service. Chatbots can handle basic customer inquiries and requests, freeing up property managers to focus on more complex tasks.    [00:02:59] 2. Tenant screening. AI can analyze tenant data to help property managers make informed decisions about who to rent to.    [00:03:07] 3. Maintenance requests. Chatbots can handle maintenance requests from tenants, triaging and routing them to the appropriate team member."   [00:03:16] This is cool stuff, right? Very cool stuff. So where was I at?   [00:03:21] " 4. Lease management. AI can assist with tasks such as lease renewals and rent collections. Predictive maintenance is number five. Using machine learning, AI can analyze maintenance data to predict when equipment is likely to fail, allowing property managers to proactively address issues before they become problems."   [00:03:43] There's companies already doing some of this, right?   [00:03:45] "6. Energy management. AI can help optimize energy usage in buildings by predicting and adjusting energy demand in real time."   [00:03:56] This is getting into maybe more commercial management or multi-family, right?   [00:04:00] " 7. Marketing. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify potential tenants and tailor their marketing efforts to specific audience segments." I imagine the AI doesn't understand most of you want clients, so it also probably could be used for that-- not probably-- it could be, right?    [00:04:19] "8. Space utilization. AI can help optimize the use of shared spaces within a building, such as conference rooms or common areas by analyzing usage data and making recommendations for scheduling and utilization. Tenant engagement is number eight (He meant #9) Chatbots can help facilitate communication between property managers and tenants, improving the overall tenant experience.    [00:04:39] 10. risk assessment. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify and mitigate potential risks, such as detecting patterns of suspicious activity or identifying areas of a building that may be prone to accidents."   [00:04:52] Now to get you interested, I asked it, "What would a good teaser for this-- if I used this list in a podcast episode to get property management business owners to listen? So here's the teaser:    [00:05:03] "Are you a property management business owner looking to stay ahead of the curve? Don't miss our latest episode where we revealed the top 10 ways AI is set to revolutionize the industry and how you can leverage it to improve your business. From automated customer service to predictive maintenance, we've got you covered. Tune in now to learn more."   [00:05:22] I didn't write that and I didn't just make it up A robot just made that up, right? Or ai. So, "What is a good intro? I then asked, "What is a good intro to lead into the above list for introducing the topic on a podcast. So here's the intro. Here's the intro that I could have said at the beginning of this, right? This is all happening in reverse here, but here's intro:   [00:05:45] "Hello and welcome to our latest episode where we'll be exploring the exciting world of artificial intelligence and its potential to transform the property management industry. With the rise of chatbots and other AI powered tools, it's clear that this technology is poised to have a major impact on how property managers do business. In today's episode, we'll be sharing our top 10 list of the ways that AI is set to revolutionize property management, from automated customer service to predictive maintenance and beyond. Whether you're a property management business owner or just interested in the future of the industry, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in."   [00:06:24] It wrote this for me. It wrote this. So I can put in here, "The first list you gave me seems geared a bit towards multi-family or commercial property management. Could you change it for those that primarily focus? on third party property management for owners of single family homes in the residential space? Note that they want to get more owners as clients." I'll put "more property owners as clients." Let's see what it comes back with here. So now I also asked-- while it's doing that-- it's actually typing it out. Like you see it typing out. It's pretty wild-- so then I asked, um, before I did just that, I asked, "could you also create a list of the top 10 ways AI can improve or benefit small business owners or service-based businesses?"   [00:07:41] So the list has some similarities, like "1. Automated customer 2. Marketing. 3. Personalization." So AI can help personalize interactions with customers, improving the overall customer experience, which is cool. "4. Predictive analytics. AI can analyze data to help business owners make informed decisions about operations and strategies. 5. Process optimization. AI can help business owners to identify inefficiencies in their processes and suggest ways to streamline them. 6. Project management. AI can assist with tasks such as scheduling and task assignments, helping business owners stay organized and on track. 7. Risk assessment. Identifying potential risks, looking at suspicious patterns, et cetera. 8. Talent acquisition," so hiring. Now it says, "AI can assist with tasks such as resume screening and candidate matching, helping business owners find the best candidates for their open positions."   [00:08:35] Now at DoorGrow, we've already, for our clients, partnered with an AI hiring assessment platform. And so what's really cool about this, we can take our ultimate job descriptions, which we call R Docs, which is a very strategic way of doing a job description that actually gets you the right culture fit, personality fit, and skill fit for a team member. We call it the three fits, and we can feed that into the AI tool and it will then change a whole bunch of levers on the screen and tell you like, these are the attributes you likely are looking for in a candidate. And then you can send out an assessment for this, and it will give you results and grade them based on the attributes that are selected, and you can even tweak the attributes. You're like, "Well, I actually want them to be more like this instead of this," so you can pick which attributes are most relevant. It's really cool and it's been really accurate. It's how I got my awesome assistant. We used the AI assessment to get hire other people on our team as well. And I also vetted all of my team members with this. And it grades them on a scale for the role between, you know, zero to a hundred. And anyone above 50 is a good potential candidate. Most of my team are like 70% or higher for the role, which shows they're a good culture fit, good skill fit, good personality fit for the role. We've had a very good hiring process. This has really collapsed time on all the other things we used to use like Wonder Lick and DISC and Myers Briggs and human design and like all these different things.   [00:10:00] Some of them are the equivalent of looking at tea leaves, trying to figure out is this person going to be good or not, and trying to guess and predict the future. This has been really accurate, and the number one indicator according to the AI Assessment Company they said is intelligence, and it can assess people's intelligence through just chatting and completing the assessment, which is like, kind of like a chat. Pretty cool. So we're using that with clients and it's getting us great results. We've even used it on our clients, and some of our clients thought they were the operator personality type for their business and had to control the operations and based on putting them through the assessment in the operator role, they didn't do well, and it helps them see, "I'm not really the person that should be doing this thing." and then they were able to go and find somebody better, right? So, really cool. So talent acquisition for sure. We're already doing that at DoorGrow with our clients.    [00:10:56] 9. it says, "upselling and cross-selling." AI can analyze customer data to help business owners identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. 10. voice and language recognition. AI can help business owners handle customer inquiries and requests through voice and language recognition technology, improving the overall customer experience. All right. So very cool stuff, right? So now I had put that question in previously it spit out the 10 things. So we'll go to that and we'll see what it's changed.   [00:11:26] So we'll go through the 10 again just for kicks. " Certainly. Here are 10 potential ways AI could benefit small business owners, who specialized in third party property management for single family homes in the residential space." Oh, so combined both lists and made it very specific. So let's see how this is different from the first two lists that I gave you.    [00:11:46] 1. automated customer service. AI can handle basic customer inquiries and requests, freeing up property managers to focus on other tasks." Awesome. "2. tenant screening. AI can analyze tenant data to help property managers make informed decisions about who to rent to. 3. Marketing. AI can analyze data to help property managers identify potential clients and tailor their marketing efforts to specific audience segments." Awesome. "4. lease management. AI can assist with tasks such as lease renewals and rent collections. 5. predictive maintenance. Using machine learning, AI can analyze maintenance data to predict when equipment is likely to fail, allowing property managers to proactively address issues before they become problems." Magic. Right? What's better than than retroactive maintenance, right? That's typical is proactive maintenance, right?    [00:12:35] "6. Energy management. AI can help optimize energy usage in buildings and predicting and adjusting energy demand in real time." So that might be the case on maybe split units or multi-family units where they are sharing, you know, a boiler or, you know, some of these kind of things. "7. space utilization. AI can help optimize the use of shared spaces within a building, such as conference rooms." So they kept that in, I don't know that's relevant to homes. 8. Tenant engagement. Chatbots can help facilitate communication between property managers and tenants, improving the overall tenant experience." Cool. AI eventually could replace probably a lot of the tools for maintenance coordination and different things or become the new tool, and there are already AI appointment setting things. There's lots of AI stuff coming out. It's really, really a cool time. "9. Risk assessment." We talked about that one before. And then "10. property acquisition. AI can assist with task tasks such as property valuation and market analysis, helping property managers identify opportunities for expanding their portfolio." That's if they're an owner operator, but you can utilize maybe AI for assessing rent amounts or rent range reports or you know, these kind of things of figuring out what a property should rent for.    [00:13:54] Really cool. So this whole episode, I didn't even have to think. I just went into chat AI and asked some questions and it gave me this, which is really, really interesting and really cool. So I highly recommend you check it out. It's going to revolutionize content creation. And one of the most interesting things I heard about ai, this is from the founder of I believe of ChatGBT and OpenAI, or one of the CEOs of an AI company-- but basically he said everybody thought AI when it comes, would take all the menial low level jobs, manual labor work, stuff like that. Robots would replace and then it would gradually and eventually maybe get-- but it'd be really difficult-- to get to the creative. What we're actually seeing, he says, is the exact opposite, the reverse. Ai...   [00:14:46] I have a picture on my fireplace mantle right now of two lion's faces, and it was generated by ai. I used an AI app. I told it the colors I wanted for my living room and I said I wanted a lion and it made two faces and one looks kind of scared and one looks very bold. And I named the picture from fear to focus cuz that's kind of the two energies I saw. And I liked that. And it's really cool. So I had it printed, they shipped it out framed and everything and it's on my fireplace mantle. Really cool. And it was made by AI and it's art. It looks like a painting. You're seeing lots of people with the Lensa app right now. Go and create and have the ai-- you upload a bunch of pictures of your face from different angles, and then it will spit out art. Of paintings and pictures of you that are better than a lot of artists could ever generate. Some of them look really like, really like me, and there's a few that look not so like me. It's a little bit off, just a little bit off. It's like maybe they're related to me, you know? But it's really fascinating.   [00:15:51] So AI is actually taking those top end creative jobs like article writing and blog posts. And here, my podcast episode and can generate that. There's even tools that can mimic your voice. You can upload your voice. There's a tool, we actually use this for our podcast editing, but there's a tool called Descript, and you can actually record a bunch of audio of your voice and feed in recordings, and the AI will learn your voice. And then you can literally just type words in and it will speak it out or play the audio as if you're saying it like naturally. They've used this to like mimic Joe Rogan and mimic Steve Jobs having a conversation and neither of them really did the conversation. So pretty wild. So you can generate scripts and things like that. You can use video AI people. So there's a company called Synthesia and you can actually just upload text in that you just had, maybe ChatGPT create over at chat.openai.com. And you can say, "create a script for somebody that talks about, you know, these things" and you upload the script in or any text in, and this video person will read it.   [00:17:06] There's people creating deep fakes of different actors and different people that AI is generating and it could be anybody. So this, the future is getting crazy. So the creative stuff is going first. Eventually, maybe manual labor and some of the human, like real-time personal tasks will get taken, but it's actually going in the reverse order. So some of the creative stuff is actually being handled and taken off our plate first. Pretty wild times, right? So yeah. Could AI take over the world and is it the most dangerous thing since nuclear weapons? The answer is probably yes. Right? Elon Musk says it's the most dangerous thing for humanity, one of the most dangerous threats. And so I don't know. It'll be really interesting to see, but I do think business owners that are able to leverage AI and leverage it early on will have a competitive advantage over those that are late adopters and don't do it. And AI is a lot cheaper than people and there's a lot of really cool AI tools out there.   [00:18:11] So, maybe as we uncover some of the coolest tools, we'll be sharing those with everybody. But I think it'd be really cool to start hearing from all of you, like, are you leveraging AI in your business? And if so, how? Let us know. I'd be really curious. So feel free to comment on our videos on YouTube when this goes up on YouTube or other channels where we post this. We would love to hear what your thoughts are about the future of ai. So, all right, so that's our episode for today and I hope you have some fun playing around with chat GBT. While they have it open and in beta and you can play around with it while they have their free research preview and you'll probably see that it's locked up sometimes because they have too much usage. It's really popular right now, but people are creating some really cool stuff with it. So anyway, until next time to our mutual growth. Make sure to check us out DoorGrow.com. And if you want to join our free online community in our Facebook group, go to DoorGrowclub.com, answer the questions, and join us and you'll get some free gifts. If you give us your email, we'll send you some free gifts like the Fee Bible and some other cool stuff, and you'll even be able to set up a call with our team and we can help you figure out how to grow.   [00:19:25] And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.    [00:19:28] 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!    [00:19:56] 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.

Too many property management entrepreneurs fail to realize the potential for technology to increase the operating margin in their property management business.  Property management growth expert Jason Hull invites Lindsay Liu to discuss how property management entrepreneurs can utilize technology to make their lives (and the lives of their tenants and owners) WAY easier by automating administrative tasks. You’ll Learn… [01:39] Meet Linday Liu, the Technology and Real Estate Investing Expert [03:42] The Ultimate Software for Multi-Family and Governance [08:13] Diving into the Features of Super [17:19] The Biggest Challenge in Property Management: TIME [22:00] How is Super different from Other Software? Tweetables “When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging… time is your biggest premium.” “And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things.” “It's better to be extremely good at a small number of things than it is to be mediocre at a wide range of things.” “The amount of care that needs to go into maintaining a healthy building is just inherently more complex when you have more stakeholders and parties in a multifamily set up.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Lindsay: When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging, it really is time is your biggest premium, right? It is a very manual and people oriented set of tasks, right, that need to be done. And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things, right? And so where can we come in? We can come in and help them with all of the other type of administrative, repetitive work that is not as high value from a people perspective, but is definitely very high value from an operational perspective. [00:00:29] 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'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. [00:01:07] 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.  [00:01:31] All right, today my guest is Lindsay Liu. Lindsay, welcome to The DoorGrow Show.  [00:01:37] Lindsay: Thanks so much for having me today.  [00:01:39] Jason: So give us a little bit of background on yourself for those that don't know Lindsay, which is me as well. So tell us a little bit about you and then maybe how you sort of got connected to your business, and then we'll go into your business.  [00:01:52] Lindsay: Great. Yeah, I can go back in time a bit. So professionally, I've been in the technology space for almost 15 years now. So building, launching digital products on behalf of and with companies. So I've done that for folks like Google, Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, the MBA. And then I've also been part of growing the businesses that I've been on that side of, right, really thinking about finding product market fit, creating value propositions that make sense through the lens of technology. And then more recently ventured into the startup world. So I was at a FinTech startup for a bit, actually launched a whole new stock exchange and a software platform around that. And then it finally felt like time to build my own thing out. And the reason that I got into the property management space is that kind of alongside that professional track of work. I'd also been investing in real estate and properties. So I have everything from short-term rentals-- so I've been kind of Airbnb, vacation homes-- to long-term leases and tenants to having done some flips over time. And the common thread with that for me was really just that when you are dealing with the maintenance, when you are dealing with an investment and you're really looking to make that place a home. And a home that's going to grow in value over time. There was just a lot left to be desired in the technology space. And so I thought, why not bring these two passions together? Right? My expertise in technology, alongside my passion in real estate, and start to solve some problems for the space.  [00:03:24] Jason: Awesome. And being passionate about real estate is one thing, but also being super technologically savvy and into technology is a whole different thing. And so that's cool that you're able to merge these two things together and why don't you tell everybody what you came up with?  [00:03:42] Lindsay: Yeah, so I'm the co-founder of Super. Super is a software platform really geared for property management and what we're building is for the multi-family residential space.  [00:03:54] Jason: Okay. [00:03:54] Lindsay: So we're really looking to build tools that help with efficiency, productivity, streamlining communication, and transparency across all of the different players that exist in the ecosystem of maintaining a healthy building. So we have tools for property managers and their management teams. We have tools for sponsors and developers as well. And obviously for board members, owners, and residents of those buildings as well.  [00:04:19] Jason: Got it. So what makes this particular to multifamily instead of other niches in property management?    [00:04:27] Lindsay: Yeah, I think, you know, in my experience anyway, multifamily is a really unique situation, right? You have a group of people that are paying in for the shared maintenance and so things like repairing a roof, that decision becomes really difficult and more complicated when you're dealing with 50 or a hundred people that are part of making that decision and funding that. And so the governance and the amount of care that needs to go into maintaining a healthy building is just inherently more complex when you have more stakeholders and parties in a multifamily set up versus single family. And so we thought we would start with that pain point first. We definitely have big ambitions to continue to grow to support other types of real estate. But the multi-family space felt really like the place where we could solve some immediate pain points for folks.  [00:05:13] Jason: Got it. So when you talk about governance, this manages a little bit of the association sort of situation as well. [00:05:20] Lindsay: Exactly. Yep. So homeowners associations, condos, co-ops, really thinking about the types of tools that are needed to help accelerate decision making and help gain alignment as. Okay, cool. Random questions then. Would this work for HOAs that are not multifamily? Absolutely. We have built the tool with that in mind, knowing that we would need to expand into that. In the case of, you know, for instance, homeowners associations, I think that the level of types of challenges really depends on that community and how healthy it is on its own, right? So the number of shared amenities that you might have, the amount that you're paying in for that shared maintenance and for your common charges. And so, you know, I think if it's just you're paying in for lawn maintenance, that's a different type of responsibility set than if you have, let's say a pool with you know, many common areas that need to be maintained for that homeowner's association as well.  [00:06:17] Jason: Now, is this a tool that a property management company that already has some sort of property management software, they have rent manager or they have Resonant or you know, some sort, is this something that they would use in conjunction or is this replacing that? [00:06:33] Lindsay: I think we've really intentionally built the product to play very well and to play nice and be complimentary to whatever other suite. I think I deeply recognize that each management company already is going to have its own tech stack, right? Whether that's as simple as: we use email and we have a phone service and we use some out-of-the-box tools like, you know, maybe Slack or Trello or Basecamps, something like that. All the way to: we're using Yardi or we're using, you know, a number of other different types of software. I think our perspective on that is one of the challenges for management teams is how siloed a lot of these different solutions are, and the ability to really pull some of that data together and have that play nicely is pretty powerful on its own. [00:07:17] Jason: Yeah, I think integrations are going to be a big deal here in the future for property management. I feel like that's a space that's kind of lagged and there's a lot of companies that will integrate with vendors' property management software. But the challenge is trying to get the entire tech stack integrated can be a mess. [00:07:33] Lindsay: And I think that's exactly where I stand is from what we're trying to build the reason I've been pretty specific around that group that we're building for today, right? We're an early stage startup, is it's better to be extremely good at a small number of things than it is to be mediocre at a wide range of things as well. Right? So we really want to figure out what is the core that we're solving for? What are the biggest pain points that we should be building against, and be the experts in that. And then where we aren't, we want to make sure that we are playing nicely with the people that are the experts in that field.  [00:08:03] Jason: I agree. So tell us what Super does. Tell us about it. Tell us about the features... [00:08:09] Lindsay: mm-hmm.  [00:08:09] Jason: ...and how you can use it and what problems does this solve?  [00:08:12] Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely. So at the core, I would say first thing is to really think about us from the lens of a productivity tool, right? So it's software that is supposed to help you save time, save money, and be more efficient. So from a property manager perspective, really this is about increasing your operational efficiency and therefore your operating margin, right? You'll be able to do more things in less time. And so to enable that, we built what we call like an operating core for sets of features and functionality that allow for that. So one of the main things that we're solving for right now is communication. And I think that is the piece that again, and again and again keeps coming up. When you talk to management teams and the residents it's a pain point on both sides, right? Where maybe a request is coming in and the resident is wondering "what happened with that? What is the status of it? Did it ever get done?" And then on the other end, the management team is saying, "I'm so busy getting the thing done. I just forgot to update you on that." Right? And so there's a lot of this unnecessary friction that is happening that we think is a great opportunity for technology to automate.  [00:09:19] And the other thing that we're doing quite differently is we believe that consumers today are quite tired of having to download another app or to learn a whole new experience in order to use something. And what we've realized is we should remove all of that friction and just use the tools that people like to use today and that frankly do work for that baseline communication. So people like to email, and they like to text. So we've built our entire platform around enabling communication around email and text. And what happens is our system is going to parse all of that information and give the managers a really nice dashboard that says "We recognize who this person is, they emailed in, and we're going to make that task automatically for you." So we're really kind of short-cutting some of those steps between if someone emails you today, you have to go look it up. Right? Which property they're in, who they're with, their history, and then you have to go and create that ticket. We do all of that automatically.  [00:10:11] Jason: Got it. So maybe to showcase this audibly, why don't you walk us through an example scenario involving all the parties and how it's facilitating the communication. [00:10:22] Lindsay: Sure. Let's take a really common one. Someone's got a leak, right? And they think it's the most urgent thing in the world, right? So what they would do if they are using Super, is the resident would either email or text the dedicated phone number that property has. So let's say, you know, I don't know, 1 23 HOA , right? Is going to email and say, "I have a leak in my unit." They don't even have to say, "I'm in unit one A or whatever." We recognize who that user is and we're automatically going to create the task in Super. For the resident, what's going to happen is because they emailed it in, we will automatically send them the confirmation, acknowledging receipt as well, and say, "Hey, we got this," and it will automatically be assigned to the property manager that is responsible for that. That property manager, right, will then get notified that they have a new task that's been assigned to them and they can go in and they can say, "okay, maybe I need to reassign this to the Super that's on staff, right, to go and take a look at this. Or maybe I need to bring in an external vendor, right? I maybe I need the plumbing company to come by and see if this is happening from something that we knew was happening with the toilet upstairs, above that unit," right? [00:11:29] So they can then bring in the appropriate parties and liaise with all of them within the platform. They can also update the resident within there. So they could just write back and kind of say, "Hey, we're on this. Don't worry, I'm going to send somebody out right now." And that resident's going to get an immediate paper trail of all of that communication. As soon as this issue is resolved, if the management team marks it as done, the resident's going to get feedback saying, this task has been marked as complete. So we're really closing those feedback loops, making sure that that communication, right, any of those gaps where we can automate with technology, we're using technology to do that. So it's just going to save you those minutes every single day on those repetitive types of emails and communication that have to be made so that you can just move on to doing something else with your day. [00:12:14] Jason: Okay, now what you described is like a really cool maintenance coordination tool. Right? So it's helping to coordinate maintenance. Does Super go beyond maintenance coordination, or is that-- [00:12:25] Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely, and this is where things start to get really exciting, right? So think about in that homeowner's association example, you have a board, they have to run regular board meetings. They have the annual owners meeting. We have templates that allow them to support that governance. So think about a task. There's a certain type of task, right? That is just about board meetings and owners meetings. And so what we'll do is we'll create that schedule for them. We'll set a preset agenda. They can update that at any time. They can add all of the board members to it. And then once those minutes are in there, they use that right to log the discussion that they had and next steps. That is saved, and you don't even have to go and create a separate minutes document. It's already there for you to go and look at over time. [00:13:07] For board members, we also have things like quick polling. So if you need to make a decision on something. I don't know about you, but the times that I've been on boards you're, you know, making a decision on an email thread that's already 70 emails deep, and by the time someone says, "Hey, can you all decide on this?" someone chimes in with something else, and suddenly you're talking better than a topic, and three weeks later, no decision has been made. So we're really trying to make everything very actionable and it's just, you know, it's the fact that if email is the most prevalent tool you're using, it's just not the right tool for creating actionable conversations, right? And so we're trying to build that tooling into a platform that is purpose-built for property management. We also have tools around, obviously all of your file management documentation and storage. That's I think, another challenge with email is you have turnover, you have, you know, for instance, board members that leave and all of that historical information today goes with them. [00:14:00] I'm still getting emails from boards that I was on years ago being like, "Hey, do you remember that vendor that we used for that thing? Do you happen to have that contract somewhere? You can look for it." That should never be something that happens with good governance of a building, right? So we centralize and store all of that information on behalf of the buildings. We help them keep their contact directories really nice and clean and updated. And then we have a whole finances component as well where we help them visualize these really simple real-time dashboards for what's going on with the association's health, how much are they taking in, how much are they spending every single month? You can kind of look at that throughout the year, dive into transactions, and then the next thing we'll be rolling out is the ability to accept and receive those monthly payments as well.  [00:14:45] Jason: Okay. Very cool. All right, so the two, it sounds like so far, I don't know if there's anything else, but the two big components of this are maintenance, coordination, and then the HOA governance and board meetings and documentation, storage and dashboards. [00:15:02] Lindsay: Yeah, I mean, if I think about the things that I wish I had as a board member in my previous-- and I've been on the board of three condos at this point, so I'm just pulling from those personal experiences. I wish that I had a way-- what was that?  [00:15:14] Jason: You're a brave person or a glutton for punishment. I don't know. There's a-- [00:15:18] Lindsay: I know  [00:15:19] Jason: --individual that chooses be on a board of an association.  [00:15:22] Lindsay: Well, you know, it's funny because the first time I joined, I remember a friend of mine being like, he was on the board of his co-op. He was like, "don't do it. Just don't do it. Like you're never going to have a life when you go home." And I was like, "I just feel like I'm really able to solve problems and I'm a really proactive person." then I got on and now I'm that person that tells people, I'm like, "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Like, good luck. Good luck to you," so when I think about the thing that I really wish that I had, right, it was that communication piece. I wanted more transparency and visibility into what the property manager was doing, the decisions that were being made, how things were going overall. I wanted that into our building's finances as well, right? How are we doing as far as our targets for what we wanted to be spending from an operating perspective versus how we are tracking? Do we need to think about doing things like raising the fees? Do we need to do things like leverage a special assessment, right? That type of planning. I really wish we had more visibility and transparency into that. Absolutely wish that we just had better governance around the documents, the history of the building, decisions that have been made previously, and tools to help us just operate in a healthier way as well. So we've really built around those cornerstones of what we think are the, kind of the building blocks, the foundation of what a healthy building. [00:16:36] Jason: Okay. Very cool. This sounds really great. So if people have a property management business and they're managing a large building, a multi-family building, and they're dealing with some of this drama, this would be a great tool for them to systematize things, bring the communication together, deal with some of the maintenance coordination, approvals communication transparency, and then also making sure that the meeting stuff is all held in one place. And I would imagine if property managers are implementing this, then this probably is a really great selling point for these property managers that are doing this work that they have this repository that's been built up with the association's help. [00:17:19] Lindsay: Absolutely. I think. When I think about what makes the property management industry so challenging, and I'm sure you have a point of view on this as well it really is time is your biggest premium, right? It is a very manual and people oriented set of tasks, right, that need to be done. And at the end of the day, what are people best for? Dealing with the human side of things, right? The kind of complex logic, the decisioning that needs to go into making sure that this group of people are happy and functioning. That's like totally something that you need a person to be able to manage. And so where can we come in? We can come in and help them with all of the other type of administrative, repetitive work that is not as high value from a people perspective, but is definitely very high value from an operational perspective, right? So where can we help streamline that? And I think that's a value proposition that resonates time and time again. If we say, I can save you minutes every single day on these 10 types of tasks, right? That ladders up to hours at the end of a week that you are saving and on top of that, your residents feel happier, you're going to have more stickiness and retention. These are things that will help the bottom line of a business.  [00:18:29] Jason: Now, I imagine when it comes to associations utilizing a software like this, rather than the property manager, so the property manager would just build this into their fee structure, I would imagine it's part of their services. They can say, "we have this cool tool and system." and they have an advantage because otherwise the association board members, there's always going to be the negative person that's going to try and like say, "Hey, we don't want to spend all this money on this technology or this software. Somebody can do this and we can figure it out ourselves." And how do you deal with that? [00:19:03] Lindsay: Yeah. You know what's interesting is even though we don't specifically target the individual board members in HOAs, we get a lot of inbound from them. [00:19:12] Jason: Yeah.  [00:19:12] Lindsay: People reaching out saying, "I really wish there was a better way. And so if anything, that gives me signal that the residents and the board members are looking for tools. They're looking for a better way to do things. And I think this is, when I think about technology in general and what's happening even in the enterprise space, we've been talking about this consumerization of IT, right? If I can get a Task Rabbit to come and fix a thing for me within 20 minutes and I can know every step of the way, and the payment's just settled, why can't I have that in every other aspect of my life? Why does that have to be so difficult when it comes to getting a plumbing repair done in my apartment? Right? That's the frame of reference that the resident is using is, well, I can get a card just to my door in five minutes with Uber. Like, why is this so difficult? I think more and more we're going to see that is the emerging expectation of residents. They're going to have these high expectations. They're going to expect things to just kind of feel like magic. And so the technology is a great differentiator, if anything, for these property management companies who say, "yeah we're with you on that, and we've already built that into our workflows." [00:20:16] Jason: Yeah. Got it. Cool. So I see on your website you have pricing for associations and for vendors, but really it sounds like you're just targeting people that are managing their own building. And that would be either they own the building and they are the property manager, they're an owner operator or people that are doing third party management. Is that accurate?  [00:20:37] Lindsay: Yeah, that's right, and I think, you know, we're an interesting tool for those that are more on the self-managed side of things, right? So if you're kind of on that cusp of I need some help, we don't take in enough dues to be able to support hiring a property manager. The software is a great solution for that, right? Where it can come in, it can help you take care of, again, a lot of that administrative, operational stuff give you the peace of mind that we've got your back on the main things that you have to get done. And we'll be a fraction of the price of a management company. The audience that we're really focused on building and kind of finding mutual success with, I think is the property management companies though, because at the end of the day, they are the ones that are responsible for just, you know, some of the companies that we work with and talk to, you know, thousands of units and thousands of doors, right? Where that isn't something that we can help find just even greater scale of efficiency with them. And that's great for our business as well, right? To be dealing with one core customer that's highly motivated to pull this into their business and to find the results of it. [00:21:40] Jason: Yeah. So even you would rather deal with one company instead of death by committee. [00:21:46] Lindsay: Learning from the past. We're growing and evolving here.  [00:21:49] Jason: Okay. Cool. Any other major questions that people might or usually ask about this software, about your technology that you want to make them aware of here on the podcast? [00:22:00] Lindsay: Sure. I think one thing that we hear quite a bit is: "how is this different from..." right? because there are other tools out there. I think one of the things that I would say is we're building for 2020 to 2023 even. Right? So we're really trying to bring best in class technology and engineering practices, thinking deeply about things like security, right? Like you've got information about where people live, about their roles in the building, about if they have kids and right all of their history here. That is really, really important actually, that you have a team that is thinking about the best practices for this modern age, where you've just got more and more kind of threats from a cybersecurity and digital perspective. So I would say that's kind of just one thing is just building best in class. Building from the ground up. And I think what we're also doing is we're really learning from all of those past experiences. We're learning from what has worked and we're also learning from what hasn't worked. We're trying to take a very user-centric approach there. And so even with our customers right now, I would say we are always co-creating. They have space to come and tell us what do they want in the roadmap? We feed that back to them. We kind of say, "here's the things we're thinking about," and we are shipping new things every single week. And that's like a really exciting time for us to be in where every single week there's something new to kind of go to a customer and say, "Hey, we now have this. We now have this." And it's a very rich and exciting roadmap ahead. So I think, you know, it's only going to get more exciting as we get into the next year and the beyond.  [00:23:25] Jason: Very cool. So some people might look at the pricing that might go, "you know, I don't know if we can afford this." How do you help people justify the cost? [00:23:34] Lindsay: Yep. There's a few ways, right? So one of the key offerings that we have for New York City buildings specifically, and that's where I'm based and half of our team is based out here, is there's a lot of compliance work that needs to be done. So inspections, filings, just, you know, disclosures that need to be sent. And I just think there's a level of need to stay on top of that in New York City that is just even higher than other places. Even especially, you know, there's new laws rolling up for energy efficiency standards, right? New regulation that really adds a lot of extra layers of complexity. So one of the things that we have done is we've automated those compliance workflows. So we actually can look backwards sometimes, see when you last did a certain inspection and give you a reminder automatically for the next time it's due. So that value prop is really simple. The cost of an average violation, we're probably going to be less than that. So if we can save you that money and that time and that headache dealing with it then that's a really clear one.  [00:24:29] For the property managers, I think it really does come down to we're saving you time. I talked to a boutique management company. This week and the owner operator was like, you know, "minimum wage is going up and with inflation and what's happening in the economy right now, I don't know that I can justify to my customers like they're not going to accept a rate increase, but my costs are going up, right?" I think that's a very real thing right now. And so for these teams to be able to operate with the quality of service they want to continue to maintain and to be able to do so in an environment economically where there's some constriction, there's a lot of sensitivity I think from the residents around price, right? Even on the rental side, just the cost of rent has skyrocketed. And there's just a lot of different factors there. If we can provide you with the way to be able to scale the number of customers that you can take on without having to increase headcount, that's a huge value add for your business. And so those are the types of conversations that I'm really excited to be having with management teams where there's a very clear value exchange of the ability for us to help them build their business and to be there alongside them for that. [00:25:35] Jason: Cool. So it's fair to say if somebody has a multi-unit building, they probably should talk to you guys. [00:25:42] Lindsay: Absolutely. You said it here, so thank you for that. [00:25:46] Jason: It sounds like you're doing some really innovative things, collapsing time, helping to systemize things. It sounds like it fills kind of a unique sort of gap in the marketplace between property management software and you know, what multi-unit buildings and associations over those buildings need and require. You know, the big challenge with associations though is the pet drama, like pets poop in places. Like that's the real stuff right there. That and packages, right? Those are-- [00:26:15] Lindsay: the packages... huge. Especially this time of year. That's something that I tell you, you know, I'm so glad we have such an amazing technology team. We want to figure something out there, because right now the only package scanning apps work. If you have full-time staff, right? If you have a porter there to actually scan the thing for you. So there's something interesting there that we're definitely trying to figure out. So maybe we can talk about that in the future. [00:26:36] Jason: That'll be a future episode.  [00:26:38] Lindsay: Exactly.  [00:26:39] Jason: You've got the pet poop and the packages.  [00:26:42] Lindsay: I first heard about the doggy testing kits like years ago. it was a thing in one of the condos I was on the board of, I was like, whose pet is on the stairwell--  [00:26:52] a database of dog dna, pet DNA inside of your software [00:26:57] See? That feels like priority number one. We'll get on that. [00:27:02] Jason: That's funny. Cool. Well I appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for coming and sharing this technology with the DoorGrowShow audience. And I wish you success.  [00:27:13] Lindsay: Thank you so much and thanks for having me on. Our website is hiresuper.com. H I R E S U P E R.  [00:27:22] Jason: Perfect. Cool. Check out hiresuper.com if you have a multi-family building. All right, thank you, Lindsay.  [00:27:29] Lindsay: Awesome. Thanks, Jason.  [00:27:30] Jason: All right, so everybody go check out Hire Super. And we appreciate you listening to our show. Please like and subscribe if you're following us on some channels that'll allow you to do that. And please leave us some positive feedback and review. We'd appreciate it greatly. And check us out at DoorGrow. If you're wanting to grow your business, we highly recommend if you are in the single family residential space, check out our DoorGrow Code. Talk to our team and find out about the DoorGrow Code, which is the journey for an entrepreneur going from zero to a thousand plus doors. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  [00:28:05] 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!  [00:28:32] 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.

At DoorGrow, we have made some MASSIVE changes to our coaches and programs with even more to come! In this episode, Property Management Growth Expert Jason Hull shares some recent additions and big changes in his life as well as in the business. You’ll Learn… [01:22] Personal updates from the host [06:54] Meet the DoorGrow team and what they do [15:36] The NEW coaches we’re bringing on [18:07] We cracked the code: the DoorGrow Code [23:36] PR: the new property management growth hack [27:26] The DoorGrow SUPER SYSTEM! (5+ systems in one) Tweetables “We are definitely not immune to the struggles that entrepreneurs go through.” “Sometimes there's just some stuff holding people back, and I find mindset is the best thing that I can help clients within the program.” “I want to create this community. I want to impact the industry positively.” “The property management industry has a couple of major challenges at the present. The biggest challenge is the awareness challenge.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Nobody else is doing the stuff at the level that we're doing. Nobody else has the Avengers team of coaches that we are building. We're building the best. And then we have our new DoorGrow Super System, which is all these software and coaches and all these different major systems you need to build in your business like the hiring system, the planning system, the process system, your sales system, all these systems we call Super System. [00:00:25] Jason Hull: 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'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.  [00:01:22] So before I go too far, let me just say, I'm going to share some news. So we've done some really cool things lately at DoorGrow, and I've had some personal changes in my life that I think are really awesome too. So I just got back from Mexico, and I got married while I was there. So Sarah and I-- Sarah is the COO and operator of DoorGrow. She was my fiance and now she is my wife. Right? So we got married while we were in Mexico. This was planned, by the way. This was a destination wedding in Cabo San Lucas at a resort, and it was very beautiful, but it was like stressful for us. Really stressful. Like getting married legally in Mexico is a challenge. A lot of people probably don't do that. They probably just do it in the U.S. Sarah wanted to get married legally in Mexico. And I was on board, but our wedding planner was not equipped to handle that. She normally just does the pretty stuff, ceremonially at the hotel and made the mistake of saying that they could do this and put things off and didn't listen to us, and the customer service level's really, really not there. Like poor communication, always putting us off. " I'm dealing with a bunch of events right now. I'll help you later. We have it handled. It'll be great. It was not handled, so we ended up getting the ceremony done, but legally, the whole week after that was supposed to be like honeymoon time was us dealing with the legalities and back and forth between a lawyer, a new wedding coordinator, marriage coordinator-- because the first one we basically fired-- and like a judge and all this communication, getting everything handled. You have to get a blood test to get married to Mexico, and you have to get your birth certificates translated and apostilled. I didn't even know what that meant. [00:03:19] So it was a bit dramatic and a bit stressful and we eventually got it all handled, and there was a lot of stress for Sarah and I leading up to that because we're doing cool new programs and launching new stuff at DoorGrow, and then we had some like issues with our sales team and like sales not happening because we had a problem with lead generation and stuff like this, and it was just, you know, that's business. That's part of business. We are definitely not immune to the struggles that entrepreneurs go through. [00:03:50] So, and we've been making rapid changes in the business. Lots of changes. So I recently launched the DoorGrow Code. Nobody's done this before. I highly recommend you reach out to my team and get access to one of our recordings of the DoorGrow Code webinar that we just did. It's really cool. So the DoorGrow code is basically this journey and life cycle of the property management entrepreneur, and it's how you can collapse time. We cracked the code. This is the code, and how to go from zero to a thousand dollars, if you want to, in three to five years and in as quick of time as possible, and all the different systems and things that you need to get dialed in. And so we've built our programs around this so that you can grow your business rapidly. And so our new mastermind is even better than before. It's not a fit for everybody, but our new mastermind is really awesome, so I highly recommend that you check it out. So now also it is the day before Thanksgiving as we're doing this recording right now live and, you know, I just, I'm also super grateful. So Sarah and I recently purchased a home, it's like a million dollar home in Round Rock, Texas, and so it's on a golf course. It's beautiful, really nice area. I really like this area. We're just north of Austin. The downtown area is a little bit too crazy for my taste, but this is more residential and it's a nice area. We love downtown. We like to go downtown for fun, but we're like 30 minutes away and we're out of the crazy. So, and I really like this area, so. Lots of good things. Married, new home, and we're now fostering a pit bull like a new dog. So, and Sarah's already got Parker, who's a pit bull mix. I believe pit bull with a Great Dane is what we're guessing. It's a little bit taller than a pit bull, a little bit narrower head, a little bit... beautiful dog. And now we're fostering this like maybe one, two year old. Dog that is a-- we just looked it up-- a blue nose brindle pitbull, beautiful dog named Chance. So we're going to see how that goes. Right now we can't really get them near each other. They're both kind of A type personalities and so we're trying to like, give them treats and get them near each other a little by little and get them used to each other. And so far, it's going pretty well. It's going pretty well. [00:06:15] There hasn't been any major (growling noises), you know, fights or bites or anything like that, so there hasn't been any of that yet. So that's good. But they're a little bit nervous around each other, and they're both like kind of high energy dogs. So, so that's, that's kind of the stuff that's going on. So, Thanksgiving tomorrow, I don't have my kids this Thanksgiving, so it's a little weird having holidays without the kids. [00:06:38] I feel like that's just strange. But I wanted like to talk about just a little bit on this call, just kind of let you know like, what's going on in my world and let you know that I'm grateful. So I'm really grateful. Life's good. I've got a lot of really awesome blessings. I've got an amazing team in the business. [00:06:57] We've got, you know, Ashlee and Giselle over client success. They're really taking care of our clients, holding their hands, getting them access to all of our different resources and materials. That's a huge load off my plate. We've really put a lot of time and attention into client success. Those that aren't familiar with client success, it's not the same as customer support or customer service, which we have a team doing that. Client success is basically in coaching programs, this is the team that keeps track of which clients are doing really well, which ones aren't showing up to calls, which ones aren't doing as well, you know, and how can we facilitate things and help them, you know, do well, is the idea. So we've also put a lot of attention into optimizing and improving the fulfillment side. For my fulfillment team, which is run by Adam, he's been with me for... I mean, it's got to be coming close to a decade now. I don't know. But Adam's an amazing team member. He knows how to do just about everything in the business I do to some degree on the technical side and in our billing software and stuff like that. And Adam's been-- he's phenomenal. And he's always traveling somewhere else in the world. Super grateful for Ashlee and our new team member, Giselle in client success. Also super grateful for Adam and the entire fulfillment team that he oversees. We've got two logo designers. Grateful for you two. They're a husband and wife team actually. So we ended up bringing one on, and then we brought in the other's partner, and we're the world's leading property management branding and design agency. And it's because we have really great people that handle that. And so, amazing logos. We've done so many rebrands and so many logos. Nobody else has done anything like this in the industry. It's just nobody else has done this. And so, we've rebranded hundreds of companies. We are the world's leading property management branding agency without question. And we do a great job.  [00:08:52] And related to that, we also do their websites. We do their print collateral, like the business card designs and yard signs and mailer postcards for direct mail and like all this kind of stuff. And so, really appreciate our design team. We also have web designers. Mike's been with us for a while. He's our head developer, coder guy and helps with support and we've got Morgan, who's-- two different Morgans on my team: sales Morgan and support Morgan. Support Morgan is male and Canadian, and our sales Morgan is female and here in the US right? Canadian Morgan's been with me for a long time. Really appreciate him and the support that he is able to provide our clients and he helps with getting, gather, kudos, stuff set up. He helps with support tickets and website changes and things like that. Gosh, and I know I'll probably leave somebody out, but I'm just really grateful for everybody on my team. We have an amazing team. [00:09:52] Super grateful for Sarah. Of course. She's really shifted things throughout the whole business. Operationally, she can see things that I can't see. She is intuitive. Super intuitive. She just knows things are off either in an area financially and I'm able to bounce all my ideas off of her. She's really sharp. She's an INTJ for those that are into Myers Briggs. So she's a brilliant strategist. And so I really a appreciate having her, of course, in the business as well as romantically and personally, right. So gosh who... I'm going to pull up my team so I just don't forget anybody that I want to point out here. We've got an amazing team at DoorGrow and we are expanding beyond our core team. We're also bringing in coaches, so I'll tell you a little bit about that. So it's no longer just the Jason and Sarah show, where Sarah's kind of coaching more on the operational side. So that took a big load off my plate with helping property managers implement DoorGrow OS, which is better than EOS and better than Traction and better than all that kind of stuff that's floating around out there. So she's really taken ownership of that and helping that. Also, our hiring system is amazing. So we've got DoorGrow ATS and DoorGrow Hiring. ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System, which is a system that I built out for getting really good team members. So that you don't waste time on people that are not a skill fit, culture fit and personality fit, you need all three fits. So we've really made a lot of improvements in our systems and in our program and in how we keep track of clients and where they're at in the process and making sure they're clear on where they're at in the process. [00:11:32] And we've got roadmaps and we've got checklists and like it's-- we've just made so many improvements this year, so I'm just super grateful for the team that supports me and all the stuff that we have going on. I want to point out, you know, my gratitude today. [00:11:47] Oh man, I'm also really grateful for Madilyn. She goes by Madi now, but Madi's my daughter and she creates most of the stuff that you see on my social media personally and at DoorGrow on any of our social channels. She creates the video, she edits all our case studies and testimonials. She makes most of the videos that you see on our YouTube channel... reels all this stuff that's Madi, and she does a great job. We really appreciate her and she just keeps increasing her skillset and it's really funny, like she's able to speak in a voice-- I did a podcast episode with Madi previously, which some of you all might enjoy. If you're curious, what's it like working with dad? You know, she shares her perspective about me on that podcast episode. That was fun. And, who have I not mentioned? Brittany. Brittany was originally my assistant. Now she just helps with like podcast setups and like some billing stuff and things like this because she wanted to focus on being more of a mom and adopting kids. Still appreciate Britney, she operates, you know, kind of quietly in the background, just consistently getting stuff done. [00:12:50] We've also got Kyle. I'm grateful for the marketing ideas and lead generation ideas that he's brought to the table that's really helped move us to the level that we're at now. And we are also bringing on a new kind of fractional director over marketing that's really sharp named Amara. So Amara, you know, shout out to you. We appreciate you as well. We're really excited to see the new stuff that you're helping us implement and getting us shifted into. And we're getting set up on HubSpot, y'all. So we're getting that set up and so we have better tracking internally, but I don't recommend that for property managers. There's better like CRMs I think for property managers, one of which we're developing, which is coming, which is DoorGrow CRM. Pretty awesome. Really excited about that. Has like landing pages and text message automation and like voicemail drops and all sorts of cool stuff that you're just not experiencing with any other CRM in the property management space right now. And we will be building out and optimizing stuff so that we have some preset stuff that's really going to help you grow your business. So we brought in a coach that's helping us with that, John Chin, who's one of our clients, but he actually took some of the stuff that we're doing that we teach related to getting partners that refer and introduce you to investors. He's put that on steroids with leveraging these systems, and so we're really excited to have him help out with coaching clients now as well. So anyway, I get excited about our offer and our product but.  [00:14:25] Grateful for Vin. He's our web designer. He does great work creating our SeedSites. We still call them SeedSites, our designs. And I mentioned our logo designers, that's Grace and Raymond. So really appreciate them. Raymond does amazing work and we're really excited that we now have brought Grace on board. And then, who else have I not mentioned by name? I mentioned Giselle. She's brand new, really helping out Ashlee and client success, and Ashlee's having a baby. So congrats to Ashlee on the team. So really appreciate Ashlee. Brought her home for client success. She used to work in like a convalescent hospital, I think, or nursing home-- nursing homes or whatever. And she'd set up programs and create community and connection. We're like, you'd be perfect for this. And she really was. She's been a great fit. So we've just got such an awesome team. Really appreciate everybody on the team. We've also got Jane and Justin. They're our setters. So they do a lot of the follow up and outreach and nurture and stuff like that.  [00:15:25] Key point or like what I'm trying to share, I guess, is that I'm really grateful, super grateful for our team. I'm also really excited and grateful for the extension to our team. Now we're bringing in experts, people that have been really seasoned experts in the industry. We've got experts that have come from channels like Home River Group, and they're really amazing at acquisitions. We've got experts coming in that, like Errol Allen, who is going to be working with our clients on process documentation. He's kind of the expert at this. We've got Jo Olivery, who's in Australia, expert at systems and is Disney certified, which I guess is a big deal in operations. So we've got her coming on board as a coach and we've got Roya Mattis. She's a really brilliant, amazing, intuitive mindset coach. Really helping people deal with issues that are holding them back. Sometimes there's just some stuff holding people back, and I find mindset is the best thing that I can help clients with in the program. And usually all the coaching and stuff that we do, whether it comes to operations or sales or whatever-- When I ask clients, "what's the best thing you've gotten out of the program?" a lot of times I would hear "mindset." And I always thought that was so weird. It's the mindset. Really mindset-- it's throughout everything that we do, and we brought in a mindset coach who's really like helped us identify some cool things. She works with me personally, works with Sarah personally. [00:16:51] She just did an amazing training on the basic needs, and I realized my basic need is like, love and belonging. That's why I do what I do. I want to like benefit people. I want to create this community. I want to impact the industry positively. Sarah's basic need is power and achievement. She wants to accomplish stuff and get stuff done, and that works really great having an operator that helps facilitate that stuff in the business. She's always looking for how can we like level up clients and level up things. And so we both have this drive and motivation to benefit our clients from different perspectives. Right. Which is really helpful. Anyway, and I know there's, there's probably some, there's other coaches that we're bringing on that I'm probably missing, but yeah, we're always adding more coaches. And if you're listening, if you feel like you're like one of the best in the industry, we want the best. If you feel like you're one of the best, you want to be part of this mastermind and, you know, get paid well to invest some of your time towards DoorGrow and work with some of the best clients, really the best people in the industry. Our clients are so growth-minded, like positive mindset, like they're high functioning, like we have some amazing clients ranging through our DoorGrow code from white belts up to black belts. We've got these different belts and black belts are like a thousand door plus. And then white belts are they've got their first door, right? So. We also launched the DoorGrow Code, which I mentioned. The DoorGrow Code shows these different stages. It helps you know exactly like what's that secret question that you have in the back of your head that's holding you back and like, what are the problems you're dealing with right now? [00:18:20] What do you need to stop doing in order to get to that next belt level or that next level of growth? This really is a mindset shift for people when they just see this. You can identify quickly where you're at, how many doors you're at, what your revenue is, and very clearly see what you need to do, and you can even look at previous stages and go, "oh, I didn't do those things. That's why I can't move forward. I'm kind of tethered to this belt level way back here that I didn't solve that problem. That's why I'm so frustrated with my team or why I'm so frustrated and I can't get to that next level. That's why I'm stuck at 50 or 60 doors and can't break that a hundred door barrier. That's why I'm stuck in the 200 to 400 door range, and I'll never be able to break that 600 door barrier and get to being that red belt." Right? So I recommend: reach out to our team and check out our new programs. I think it's really awesome.  [00:19:11] This is a lot more of an informal episode, if you can't tell. I just wanted to share gratitude, tell you kind of what we're up to at DoorGrow. We're going to be launching a DoorGrow process software. It's very different than what else is in the industry, so it's going to be very visual, like Vizio or like a flow chart. And Errol Allen's going to be helping me, you know, build out some of these processes, but I said, "how do you usually build out processes?" "Like I build it out in this sort of Vizio like software. It's very visual, and then I have to translate it or help clients translate this into something like Process Street where it's linear," which is what our team's been using. Or "then I have to translate it into like Lead Simple or some sort of process system. But the challenge with those systems is that you can create maybe context sensitive stuff, but in a linear to-do sort of list, you don't have branches very easily. It becomes difficult, but on a visual flow chart, that's very easy to do. You can say: "ask a question, do they have pets?" Cool. If they have pets, we need to do all of this stuff and go down this route, and do they not have pets or are they service animals? So maybe there's like three options and you have different criteria and different things to do, but some of these might converge, right? Service animals and pets, there might be some similar things you need to do in this flow chart. So this is where processes can be really complicated and you want to map it out visually, but then you have to like take this visual map. Wouldn't it be great if you just had a visual map and that was the actual process? So that's something that we're working on as well. And I mentioned DoorGrow Flow, which is that software. I mentioned, DoorGrow CRM, and we've already got DoorGrow OS, the best operating system, strategic planning software in the industry. And we already have DoorGrow ATS best hiring process and system in the industry, completely customizable and tailorable to your business. We also have partnered with an ai assessments company. And so these AI assessments are really good at helping to identify those three fits. I mean, we used to use like disk assessments, and we used to use, Myers Briggs and like Wonder Lick and all, like some of you use predictive index and so some of these tests are cognitive, some of them are conative. All these different tests to try and figure out: are they going to be a good personality fit. Are they a skill fit? Do they have the intelligence level to be great? Are they going to be a culture fit, like with our values? And so this AI assessment tool helped us to eliminate that for all those different assessments and it's proven to be accurate. That's how we got my-- oh my gosh. I didn't mention Mar or Maricella. Mar is my assistant. Mar, I love you so much. She has taken over our event planning. Grateful for Mar, she's amazing. She like, has done our last two DoorGrow Lives and made them work and they worked really well. Clients had an amazing experience. We did one in Austin and then we did one in Vegas. We're going to continue to do them in the Austin area. But we're really excited. She's already been working on the one that we're doing in May. Y'all should be at this event. It is going to be awesome. And we've got all these new programs. Gosh, there's just so much. But anyway, we've got news, so thank you, Mar. I'm really grateful for you. She's actually the one that makes me a lot less crazy, a lot less all over the place and meets with me on a daily basis to make sure I'm being taken care of. Gets my, you know, haircut appointments scheduled, gets my float sessions booked, makes sure I'm like getting my Krav Maga like things set, you know, for martial arts. And she helps with travel and she's also our event planner for our events and she's doing a phenomenal job at all this stuff. And so we just keep adding more to her plate because she's just so good at everything.   [00:23:08] I mentioned our DoorGrow hiring system. Super cool. That's how we got Mar. We used that on our entire team. We vetted our entire team and it proved that all of them are highly intelligent. Also proves that all of them are really good for their role. And our really good culture and skill fits, and it's been proven to be very effective with some of our clients that were our initial Guinea pigs going through this. So we've coupled that with DoorGrow ATS and that's DoorGrow hiring. Really awesome system. We are also going to be bringing on a PR coach. I'm kind of cat out of the bag, but we've got three candidates that we're working on right now and they all have over a decade of experience helping local, small businesses grow and scale their businesses through public relations, which I think is going to be the next level thing for this industry. It's the new opportunity for growth. The property management industry has a couple major challenges at the present. The biggest challenge is the awareness challenge. Most people that could be working with property managers are not because they're not really aware of property management. After the awareness challenge, the next big hurdle is the perception challenge. That's what steals most of the rest of the market share away. Out of those that are aware, a lot of them believe property management and property managers are bad or not good or are shitty and it's a well deserved perception. Most property managers suck. Though there's a lot of bad property managers out there or management companies. And I don't believe they intend to be bad. I believe that's what happens when they price themselves like everybody else at 10% or less, or they do flat fees like everybody else that's not doing a percentage. [00:24:51] They have bad pricing. They're not getting paid well enough. They don't have the right culture in their business, so they don't have good team members. They are micromanaging their staff, trying to micromanage them through tasks based systems like Asana and Monday and Process Street and Lead Simple. And so they don't have amazing team members that they can trust to think and make decisions and their team members-- is in the DoorGrow code, by the way-- they're frustrated, like, "why can't my team members just do what I ask them to do? That's one of the big questions that you have in that usually around the 300 door stage. But these are the things that we help solve at DoorGrow. So PR is a new opportunity because what it does, public relations or pr-- Well, let me start with this. So just so you understand this, there are two main channels when it comes to creating awareness and we call this main awareness channel marketing. And there's two pieces to marketing. There's two pieces to marketing. You learn this in marketing 101. There's advertising and there is PR. Advertising mistakenly is used to try and grow businesses a lot of times. But really what actually has had the most success in growing companies historically is not advertising, it's PR. PR is what builds awareness and creates brands and helps them get market share while advertising historically and typically only helps them retain the market, share that PR created. Coca-Cola, for example, was built originally through pr, and PR is a lot less expensive than advertising. The first iPhone and Apple's rise to fame was all basically PR. People were talking about it. Lots of buzz. Not very expensive when it comes to advertising, but advertising is used by Coca-Cola to keep their market share aggressively in the cola industry, for example. And so most people though, in the property management space are trying to use advertising mistakenly, which allows you to target the people that are looking for property management. But the search volume is really low, and there's very few people that are actually looking for it. And so our growth strategies for clients are in the blue Ocean. We're really great at helping clients create new market share and expand the industry and build that awareness. PR is kind of that next level, so we're bringing in a PR expert, doing some cool things in the PR side of things also with DoorGrow to promote the industry and benefit the property management industry.  [00:27:21] So that's something that's coming down as well. You heard it here first, right? So these are some of the cool things that we're innovating and doing at DoorGrow. Nobody else is doing the stuff at the level that we're doing. Nobody else has the Avengers team of coaches that we are building. We're building the best. And then we have our new DoorGrow Super System, which is all these software and coaches and all these different major systems you need to build in your business like the hiring system, the planning system, the process system, your sales system, all these systems we call Super System, the DoorGrow Super System. It's the system of systems. So we're helping to build that out with clients as well. And also a growth acquisition engine for acquiring other companies. We're building the ultimate system of systems for property managers, so our clients are going to be the fastest growing in the industry, and we're taking people from small businesses to helping them grow as large as they want. And we're doing this based on my foundational principle-- you've heard me talk about this on many calls before of the Four Reasons. So we're not just growing for growth's sake, we're growing so that as you grow and scale, you do this in a way that you get more fulfillment out of your day-to-day, you feel more freedom, and you get more of a sense of contribution that you're making a difference in the world, living your best life, contributing in your best way that you were designed to do, and you're getting more support from your team. This is the four reasons for starting a business. Most people think they just want to make more money. However, what you really want are those four reasons, because that's really what you're hoping money will give you. You can make more money and not get those four things. So we are doing all of this stuff to help our entrepreneur clients not be property managers, and instead be entrepreneurs that maybe hire property managers and do property management, but getting you out of the stuff that doesn't give you freedom or fulfillment or sense of contribution and making sure that you have a business and a team that really makes you feel supported. And we are building the team and the systems that really will make you feel supported in our program. [00:29:28] And our program is less than it cost even a single team member. And you're getting access to all of this stuff. All the software included, the website, hostings included, GatherKudos, our reputation software included, all the different software tools that we are launching or that we have currently are all included as part of our mastermind. And then we also have been stacking bonuses. So I'm sure my competitors are like, listening to this, and they're like, "I got to start doing all this stuff." But one of the things that we've been doing is we've negotiated with some of the top vendors. My goal is to reach out to all the top vendors in the industry and get a best-in-class discount. I've negotiated this because our clients are high growth and they're adding doors quickly. Vendors love our clients. We've negotiated with some of the coolest tools and systems in the industry, best in class discounts. Discounts that they agreed would be better than anything else they offer to NARPM or anyone else. And some of these are stackable discounts. For example, like Tenant Turner and Easy Repair Hotline. And ourpetpolicy.com and Levo Secure, really cool software. We've got a list and I'm constantly stacking more. If you feel like you're one of the best vendors and you want access to our clients and you want a stamp of approval from DoorGrow. We want the best-in-class discount, and it's just as long as they're members of our mastermind, they leave the mastermind, they lose all these bonuses and discounts. But reach out to me if you feel like you're the best in the category. We've got Z inspector. Sorry if I'm missing you, if you're a vendor. We've got Virtually Incredible. We're getting the best of the best and stacking these bonuses and discounts for our clients. So it just makes the program a no-brainer to like be in because you're saving more money, making more money, and it's less than like a part-time team member to be part of our program on a monthly basis.  [00:31:25] So anyway I think that's about all I'm going to talk about today. So I appreciate you hanging out with me. I know this is a bit informal. You got a little bit of a picture of like what's going on at DoorGrow some of the new innovations. You've heard a little bit about my team that I'm super grateful for. I think a lot of people mistakenly think it's the Jason Show. It's definitely not the Jason show, and as soon as I can, like my goal is to exit as many pieces of the business as possible so I can really just focus on the stuff that I really, really enjoy more and more fulfillment and freedom for myself as well. And I really love getting to do what I get to do. I like innovating. I like coming up with ideas. We're in some of the best-- my team and myself are in some of the best coaching and mentoring programs that exist out there. We are in Masterminds as well, and Sarah and I are constantly taking trips to these different events, masterminds. We're in usually at least three major ones at a time. We spend at DoorGrow over six figures annually just on coaches, mentors, and programs. You get access to this knowledge that we are constantly curating and improving upon and bringing in. And that's one of my skills and genius I feel, is I'm able to take ideas from other coaches, other things, programs, I'm able to improve upon them, package them together in a better way, and then we're able to benefit our clients and so you get access to some really good stuff as part of our program.  [00:32:51] So anyway, with that, I'm going to go ahead and end today's podcast episode. Until next time to our mutual growth, everybody. Check us out at doorgrow.com. If you're new to us or not yet working with us, and you've been sitting on the fence, now's the time. And also, if anything I ever say on this podcast is helpful, please leave us a positive review or feedback or something somewhere online. It really means a lot to us. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  [00:33:20] 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!  [00:33:47] Jason Hull: 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.

Leasing is one of the hardest aspects of property management. What if you had a way to offload some or all of your tasks related to leasing? Today, property management growth expert Jason Hull chats with Ben from Sunroom. This service allows property managers to offload leasing to leasing professionals who care about property managers, owners, and tenants. You’ll Learn… [01:26] Offloading Leasing: What is Sunroom? [09:01] ShowMojo, Tenant Turner, vs. Sunroom, oh my! [016:35] Better ways to do Property Showings [020:23] How Sunroom Vets Tenants Better [24:21] Integrating with Other PM Software  [31:30] Net Promoter Scores for Property Management and Leasing [37:12] Learning to LET GO as a PM Entrepreneur Tweetables “Some of y'all entrepreneurs are control freaks. Let's be real, and you need to let go of some of this stuff and let somebody else do it a little bit better.” “We have a lot of egos as entrepreneurs. We think our way is the best way all the time, and we need to see that maybe somebody else could do this better.” “Property managers tend to do best if they just convince owners to do pets. You're going to get more tenants, you're going to get more money.” “One of the biggest time sucks for a property management company is dealing with prospective tenants.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Ben: So what we do is we partner with property management companies and become their leasing arm. So if you're a newer property management company, you're focused on growing doors and you just mainly want to focus on that, right? One of the most important things is you got to get leasing. If you don't get leasing, you're not going to lease the doors quickly, which then your owner investors are not going to be happy about that.   [00:00:22] Jason Hull: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the # DoorGrowShow. So 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'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 bebecause 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.    [00:01:19] Jason Hull: All right. Ben, welcome to the #DoorGrowShow.    [00:01:24] Ben: Thanks for having me, Jason.    [00:01:26] Jason Hull: Good to have you. So Ben, why don't we start by you giving us a little bit of your background, qualify yourself. You've done some cool stuff and I'm in the market where you did some of this cool stuff. We just realized in the green room that we're practically neighbors in Austin, market downtown, and I'm up in Round Rock. Ben, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the, I guess technology space.   [00:01:49] Ben: Yeah, sure. Yeah, definitely. First of all, I mean we-- me and my co-founder Zach, we started working on Sunroom in right around 2017. And, the way that we had originally had the idea was, just being a renter for a decade and having a lot of interesting experiences trying to look for a place to lease. But prior to starting Sunroom, Zach and I had started a company called Favor Delivery, which is a small little delivery company here in Texas that grew to become the market leader in delivery. And we sold to H-E-B in early 2018.    [00:02:27] Jason Hull: And for people that aren't familiar with H-E-B, because I moved from California just before the pandemic because I wanted to get away from California and the taxes and it's poor political culture. But anyway, so I moved here, Austin and H-E-B was all over the place. I'm like, what a weird name. What is this place? But it's one of the, like America's top grocery chains. It's consistently rated as like one of the biggest and the best. So for those that are not in Texas, they are probably not familiar with H-E-B, but H-E-B is the, like one of the leading grocery stores, and it dominates everything.    [00:03:05] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:03:06] Jason Hull: I'm sure in grocery sales, it beats out Walmart, like it beats out any of the stuff that I'd heard about before and I'd never heard of H-E-B. And they offer delivery service.    [00:03:15] Ben: Yeah. H-E-B is an impressive company. And the crazy thing is they've been around for 115 years.   [00:03:21] Ben: Wow.    [00:03:21] Ben: They are the top employer in Texas. And when they acquired us, it was the only acquisition they've ever had in their history as a company. And even crazier than that, when we combined workforces at the time, we had the largest workforce of independent contractors. We grew to, now they're at a hundred thousand delivery drivers in Texas.    [00:03:44] Ben: Oh, wow.    [00:03:44] Ben: And H-E-B had a similar amount of employees. So when we combined workforces, it just became this really massive workforce supporting grocery and delivery of all foods. So yeah, it was a cool marriage that we had there.   [00:04:00] Jason Hull: Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. That's interesting history. So I've seen the Favor name when I'm doing delivery from H-E-B, so I was like what's this relationship?    [00:04:11] Ben: Yeah. So I can elaborate a little bit more too about, how we picked Sunroom. We had, like I said, I mean my co-founder Zach and I, we're actually best friends from high school and so we go way back. I think what you were saying about you wanting to support property manager entrepreneurs, I think that's a good mission because I just tip my hat off to any entrepreneurs who get any businesses working because we definitely know how hard that is. But anyways, our journey towards Sunroom was just having a lot of, I would call interesting experiences as a renter. And then we started calling-- once we were interested in the rental space-- we started making a lot of phone calls to, different rental listings. And we started asking the agents and property managers, "Hey, why are you doing this?" "why are you doing these leases?" And, we kept hearing the same thing, which was like, "oh, we don't-- I don't really want to be doing this lease. I'm just doing this lease. I'm helping this investor client buy more homes and so now I'm looped into to renting this place." And every once in a while you'd come across a property manager who really loved leasing, but a lot of the property managers we talked to too would be like, "yeah, I'm really focused on growing my door count. And these things are just something we have to do to get more properties in the door." And Zach and I saw that as an opportunity of: wow. No wonder why the experience is not that great for renters. A lot of the folks who are doing these leasing are not that excited about doing it. And so then that's how we started working on Sunroom.    [00:05:29] Jason Hull: Cool. So let's talk about then what-- you talked about the problem that you saw in the marketplace and experience wasn't super good, but a lot of owners and maybe even property managers aren't even super excited about taking care of the tenant experience. So it's not like their highest priority. Like, "I want to get more doors, I want to have more properties managed," so they're like, "what's my competitive advantage?" So when they're picking tools and software, they're usually-- they're trying to figure out: "how do I get some sort of leg up on the competition," so to speak, or "how can this lower my operational cost?" and these kind of things. One of the biggest time sucks for a property management company is dealing with prospective tenants.    [00:06:13] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:06:14] Jason Hull: These are not people that are paying them and they call them the most, and--   [00:06:17] Jason Hull: yeah.   [00:06:18] Jason Hull: --This is like the "garbage of phone calls," I've heard one of my guests call it.   [00:06:21] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:06:22] Jason Hull: So tell me about what does Sunroom do and how does it do it, and what's the benefit.    [00:06:27] Ben: Yeah, sure. So what we do is we partner with property management companies and become their leasing arm. So if you're a newer property management company, you're focused on growing doors and you just mainly want to focus on that, right? One of the most important things is you got to get leasing. If you don't get leasing, you're not going to lease the doors quickly, which then your owner investors are not going to be happy about that. And also I would argue equally as important is that renter does have a great experience because, that is really the beginning of your relationship with them, and what we've noticed of working with a lot of different property managers is that, when the renter goes into the home and they're really happy with their experience that led up to that point, they're a lot more-- how do I put this? They're a lot more quiet when they get into the home, right? They're just happy overall, which is going to reduce your maintenance requests and honestly going to make it more likely that they renew the next year, right? because that is just really first, and I would just say first impressions are, everything in life a lot of times.    [00:07:27] Ben: And so I think, leasing really is that first impression for that property manager. To come back around to what we do, yeah, we partner with the property management companies and make it so that they don't even need to have any leasing agents on staff. And we can really do the entire process of getting the home leased. But at the same time, we give the property manager the power over key decisions, right? Things like actually approving the applications, that's still going to be up to the property manager to make sure they choose the right applicant. And obviously if they want to use their lease that they prefer, there's all different ways that we allow them to customize what they want their leasing experience to be like. But at the end of the day, we're really doing the legwork for them and we have a combination of people and tech to do that.    [00:08:12] Ben: Got it. So    [00:08:14] Jason Hull: this combination of people and tech... are you able to do this in every market or is this like a local thing that needs to be done    [00:08:21] Ben: locally?    [00:08:23] Ben: Yeah, great question.   [00:08:24] Ben: So we started out just doing this in Austin and have partnered with several different property managers here. In town. But now we're expanding across the us. And I believe we're up to seven different markets at the moment. But pretty rapidly expanding to cover more markets.   [00:08:41] Ben: Got it. What's    [00:08:42] Jason Hull: the biggest limitation in expansion for those that you don't cover yet?    [00:08:46] Ben: We call ourselves a leasing only brokerage, so we're actually-- we're a real estate brokerage in each of these states. And so that's a blocker to getting set up in a lot of these places is actually establishing our brokerage in each one of these states.   [00:08:59] Ben: Got it.    [00:09:00] Jason Hull: Okay. Cool. I think a lot of property managers, they're aware of certain pools like ShowMojo and Tenant Turner and Rently and Knock Rentals and Turbo Tenant, so how does Sunroom differentiate from all these tools and these systems are already out there?   [00:09:20] Ben: Yeah, so some of those systems and tools you mentioned, I do think those-- they do improve the renter experience and at the same time. They do make it so that it's a little less work for the property manager to lease those properties. But at the end of the day, if you're a property management owner you're still going to need a leasing agent on your team. Or you're going to have to overextend the property manager that you have in order to use those, utilize those tools. Sunroom just takes it the next step where we have similar tools and systems. Obviously I'm biased, but I would argue they're better than those, but--   [00:09:55] Ben: You should argue that.    [00:09:57] Ben: We take it a step further. You don't even really need to have a leasing agent on staff in order to really execute everything you need to do for leasing. Whereas all these other tools or systems they're definitely completely reliant on still having somebody there behind the scenes catching the errors or all all the holes in those systems. And, if anybody has tried to. Integrate those different systems and tools, what they'll find is that they were built in a way that they had a focused goal. And there's a lot of different holes in that system. And I'm sure as operators see that, I think that's a big difference with what we're building, is that what we build, we actually use to operate. And so we're able to see all the different gaps and holes that those systems leave. And really between our systems and our team, we're able to fill in the gaps that those systems leave out.   [00:10:46] Jason Hull: All right. So I think people listening by now are like, "the wheels are turning a little bit," and they're like, "okay, how's this actually play out?" So could you walk us through step by step what-- how this process works with the property manager and the tenant from beginning to    [00:11:01] Ben: finish? Yeah, sure. So it usually starts within one of the property managers, property management softwares, right?   [00:11:09] Ben: We see commonly property managers are using App Folio or Buildium, so let's use App Folio for example. You have a property manager on your team that you have a home where the renter didn't renew. And it's a property that you're going to need to get leased. At that moment, if you were partnered with us, you would open up the Sunroom portal. We would already essentially have that home synced within our system. Because we're able to really pull data from App Folio and the Buildiums of the world. From there, they just really submit the property to us and say, "Hey, this home's coming up for lease." we would normally already have all of their settings. As a part of our onboarding, we're going to get them all set up in our system. So things like knowing what their tenant criteria is. Things like knowing when is this home actually available? When would you like us to touch the property? And then as soon as they submit the property to us, we actually will go out and touch the property. So we have boots on the ground. Those boots on the ground are going to get professional photography. They're going to set up a self showing lock system if that's what the property manager would like to. And then we're going to actually install a yard sign as well. And, we take pictures to really document everything that we do there. And then, we'll take it a step further, we'll get the marketing description written and then we'll get it listed online, and we do that entire process in an average about 48 hours.    [00:12:28] Ben: Nice.    [00:12:29] Jason Hull: Awesome. Yeah, that's very cool. So you actually have people come out-- swarm of people, and they get all this stuff done, right? In the description, getting it listed, doing all this stuff. Okay.    [00:12:39] Jason Hull: Yeah,    [00:12:40] Ben: and that's where our background in Favor obviously comes into play is that, I think if you think about Favor, there's a great consumer experience where the customer can order food, but then there's all these boots on the ground that actually go get the food and make sure that all happens in a timely manner. Leasing is similar in the sense that you need to have a great consumer experience for the renter to be able to see what they're shopping for and do the things they they need to do to see if they want to, lease that property. But then you're going to need boots on the ground to actually, handle the listing side of things.   [00:13:09] Ben: Very cool.    [00:13:10] Jason Hull: So is this totally Uber-like in that you're just pulling anybody in, or I'm sure you have criteria for the photographers and for all these different people that you're bringing in to do these    [00:13:22] Ben: little pieces.    [00:13:23] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. We don't just hire any random person. I'd say it's definitely not Uber-like in that I think, we use-- it's technology enabled so that we can do those things quickly and can measure how fast we do them, right? I think just the fact that we know we get those properties set up in an average of 48 hours, I think is...    [00:13:42] Ben: Yeah.   [00:13:42] Ben: ...more than your average property manager would know, but we know that the tasks we're doing are tech enabled, but no we care a lot about those people that we choose and we try to find folks that have a lot of experience with real estate photography and then we teach them the other aspects of what we're trying to get done at that property.   [00:14:00] Jason Hull: Awesome. Yeah. Very cool. When a property is going to become vacant, are they able to leverage a system or does it have to be totally empty and rent ready and everything    [00:14:11] Ben: else?    [00:14:12] Ben: No. So yeah, no, they're able to use the system. It sounds like you're asking about pre-leasing.    [00:14:19] Ben: Yeah.   [00:14:20] Ben: Okay. Yes, pre-leasing can be really important I think in some markets. Yeah, that's definitely something we support. And let's say it's tenant occupied and we need to act and do an escorted showing, we have different agents on the ground that we partner with that are some of the most active in the area touring homes and renters. And so we'll tap into that network to do some.   [00:14:40] Jason Hull: Got it. Okay. Now what if they want get the property listed, they want to get photos, but there's a bunch of ugly furniture in there and ugly stuff. Do you guys let maybe-- BoxBrownie I've had on the show before-- digital editors and they're like, removing all this    [00:14:55] Ben: stuff?   [00:14:55] Ben: Yeah.    [00:14:56] Ben: Take the photos.   [00:14:56] Ben: Yeah, we do have digital editing in that regard, but depending on the degree of how much that home is messed up. That's also something that we do is that if we go out to a home and we think it's not show ready we'll document that and share it back with the property manager. And I think we've seen property managers really love that aspect of what we do because oftentimes they have a tough time holding the make ready folks accountable or let's say they're doing a renovation on the property. In particular, I can't tell you how many times that a property manager said, "Oh yeah, this was supposed to be done. And then when we went out there we were able to collect evidence that it wasn't right. That's also part of our system is that if the home is not actually ready to be marketed, and then, we're going to gather that information, share it back with the property manager, and then essentially remind them until that's resolved and as soon as it's resolved, then we can make the listing active. But it's a pretty valuable system and checks and balances that we have in place there.    [00:15:55] Jason Hull: Got it. So you'll communicate with them. Then the property manager can send out maintenance, get things taken care of, dealt with, and then report back to you and you're checking in with them, "Hey, is this ready yet? Is this ready yet?" And then they're like, "we got it ready." And then...    [00:16:08] Jason Hull: exactly.    [00:16:08] Jason Hull: Proceed.    [00:16:10] Jason Hull: Exactly.    [00:16:10] Jason Hull: So you've sent up the people, you've got the photos, you got like maybe a lockbox on, you got the yard sign, you've got the description. It's posted online. It's probably pushed out to multiple channels.   [00:16:19] Jason Hull: That's right.    [00:16:20] Jason Hull: Then next come the showings, right? And scheduling and all this. So how does that work and are you doing one-off showings? Are you doing open house model? What would it be found to be the most efficient? What comes next?    [00:16:35] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So what we do is we usually set these properties up with a self showing system, and then renters are able to go tour the properties seven days a week from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and, we also have, a support team available those same hours, so 84 hours, we're ready to quickly text back any renters or answer any phone calls if, folks are having a tough time actually, accessing the home for any particular reason. Our system is really good. I'd say renters have a really good experience touring homes. Like any system, we're dealing with real world stuff. Sometimes maybe it could be a really humid day and maybe the maybe the door frame swells a bit or something, right? So maybe the door gets a little stuck. So the renter needs a little help to understand how to get in. Those are all things that I think us, having support team there available to talk to them and actually pick up the phone. I think is a really important thing. So that's just one of the many ways that we support tours. But I'd say one of the most important pieces of tours is actually collecting that tour feedback and sharing it with the owner after the fact. And so we have a really great system in place for that as well where a lot of renters will leave feedback just right within the place that they tour. And then we're actually able to take that feedback and then give it to display it on a webpage where then the property manager is able to share that webpage directly with their owner so they can actually watch the tours that are coming in and the tour feedback in real time. And we white label that for them. So you can imagine as a property manager, you just share this white label page with your logo and the owner's able to get a bird's eye view of how their home is performing on the market.    [00:18:21] Ben: Got it.    [00:18:22] Jason Hull: So could this be a scenario that the owner says, "I don't need to do this," and like the property manager says, "you need to do this. Like it'll get you more rent. People will have an issue with this place if you don't fix this or change this," and the owner's like, "no." And then they say, "look at the page, here's the white label page. It's got our brand, our logo, XYZ property management, and it says like, consistently feedback. Like the floor is too gross, or whatever."   [00:18:47] Ben: Yeah, "I would rent this home, but does it come with a fridge?" Just one way I've seen owners trying to cut some costs is like not putting refrigerators in the home. And then they see, three out of the five renters that tour the home mentioned "Hey, there's no fridge."    [00:19:00] Ben: "have to buy a fridge and I'll go somewhere else."   [00:19:03] Ben: Yeah, exactly. And that page really helps the property manager make their case to the owner and also show to them like, "Hey, we really are showing this property and this really is what the renters are saying.   [00:19:14] Ben: Cool.    [00:19:15] Jason Hull: Yeah, that's really cool. I like the feedback loops. So then, what's the next steps? You're doing showings, you're doing tours. Then I guess people are being pushed to apply when they're doing these tours by the system?    [00:19:27] Ben: Yeah, so we have a system, both to pre-qualify renters and to actually have them apply. As soon as they apply we're able to display those applications to the property manager. And we use the same page that we use to display tour feedback and also tracking the tours and the leads and everything. We use that same page then to actually show the applications to the property managers and to their owners. Because I know every property manager seems to have a different deal with each owner, right? Some of 'em, they want to run the application past their owner beforehand, or sometimes they're just the ones reviewing it. But either way, we display that information there so that both the property manager and the owner, are able to review the application before they decide to approve or not.   [00:20:14] Ben: Got it. So    [00:20:14] Jason Hull: they can either show this white label page that has the list of all the applicants or could they just say, "here's the one we recommend," and show that person's information?   [00:20:22] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:20:23] Ben: Yeah. It's usually the latter. Because it's trying to make it simpler. Yeah. It's usually just showing the one that they recommend. And at that point, we would've already done all of the vetting for that application. Even the manual steps of doing a verification of rental history, for example or a verification of employment. And we've actually seen just our application processing service. We've seen that to be so popular that we actually broke that out as something that a property manager could partner with us just on application processing, and that's also cool because we have a lot of tech to catch fraudulent renters. I'm sure you've probably heard about how fraud is on the rise especially with us entering recession. And I think it's just more likely that renters are going to try to fake pay stubs. Even some go as far as trying to fake their identity in different ways to try to get approved for a home that really are beyond their means. And so we've really, we've invested a lot into our application processing system. Doing things like being able to get their pay stubs directly from their payroll provider instead of having a way for them to upload their pay stubs, which could be photoshopped or something like that.    [00:21:35] Ben: Yeah.    [00:21:35] Ben: And then let's say a renter doesn't even have a job, or let's say a renter's, a self-employed or something, we have a way of actually pulling bank statements directly from their bank, instead of just receiving those bank statements and getting it uploaded. All that tech helps to really reduce the amount of fraud. And as for property managers as well, it's less work to actually investigate all those documents.   [00:21:59] Jason Hull: That's just technology and stuff a property manager can't do directly. They don't have the ability to pull directly from the bank their pay stubs, and it's not going to say, "here, let me give you my login to my bank account," and to pull directly from the employer. They don't usually have that ability really effectively either. There needs to be technology involved.   [00:22:18] Ben: Yeah.    [00:22:19] Ben: So we--   [00:22:20] Ben: --so what    [00:22:20] Jason Hull: about--    [00:22:20] Ben: oh, go ahead.    [00:22:20] Ben: I was just going to say, yeah, we recognize that you know most of what we've been talking about here is called our full service leasing, right? Where we actually become the leasing arm. But let's say, you've got leasing agents on your team and you think they're rock stars. You're happy with what's going on with your leasing. We could plug in and just do the application processing. We call that service, we call that Sunscreen, is what we call it. The idea is the quirky tagline that I came up with is, "Don't get burned by bad renters."   [00:22:47] Jason Hull: I like it. Little bit of sunscreen.    [00:22:51] Ben: Yeah, exactly.   [00:22:52] Ben: Okay.    [00:22:53] Jason Hull: So one of the questions I think some people will be asking is, what about pets? It's like a whole nother beast. Outside, inside pets and running pets and having pets, all this kind of stuff. Property managers tend to do best if they just convince owners to do pets. You're going to get more tenants, you're going to get more money. How do you deal with the pet side of    [00:23:11] Ben: things?    [00:23:12] Ben: Yeah, so at this point I'm sure most property managers have heard of pet screening.com. I think they're a great company. And so we actually integrate their data into our system. So if you're already signed up for pet screening.com. You can provide the pet screening.com login, and then we're able to pull that information into the application packet. So it's something that the owner and the property manager can consider as a part of the overall application. And, obviously pet screening.com does a really good job verifying things like our emotional support animal documentation. Is that legit? There's fraud around ESA documents. And that's just one of the pieces that they do. But yeah, that's something that we recommend whenever anyone is accepting pets.   [00:23:57] Ben: Very    [00:23:58] Jason Hull: cool. I like pet screening.com that I've had them on the show. I had another company that may be interesting to integrate with too on the show called our pet policy.com and they take things a step further on the protection side of things after the screening. So they go step beyond. So that might be interesting for you to take a look at integrating with as well.    [00:24:20] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:24:20] Jason Hull: Ourpetpolicy.com, they seem like a good group of people over there as well. So real quick, going back, you had mentioned AppFolio, Buildium, do you integrate with Rent Manager? Do you integrate with I don't know, there's some other things and some of these tools    [00:24:35] that    [00:24:35] Ben: people are using?   [00:24:37] Ben: Yeah. Great question. So it's pretty easy for us to get key information plugged into these softwares. And the reason is when someone partners with us, if you think about it, we really need to touch that property management software right when the home is when the home's coming up for lease, right? It needs to be listed. And then once the home gets leased, that's when that information needs to get back in the property management software again. So usually the way that our structure is, it doesn't really matter too much, which property management software you're. The system would be the same, where you would essentially create a user for us.   [00:25:15] Ben: So then once the home is getting leased, we know who's signing the lease. We're going to get their information set up within whatever property management software you use and make sure that it's set up for ongoing rent payments and things like that. It essentially, if you're using a property management software, but then you're going to use someone for leasing. But then once the home gets leased, it's going to be as if you had leased it through those other systems. And it's seamless in that way.    [00:25:39] Ben: Yeah. Very cool. So    [00:25:40] Jason Hull: you're PM    [00:25:41] Ben: software agnostic.    [00:25:42] Ben: Exactly. Yes. That's a much more succinct way of saying it. Thanks.   [00:25:47] Jason Hull: So that just means I've been doing this probably a long time. All right. So you've, you mentioned your solution. You've got the sunscreen that can be, pulled out just separately or if they're using the full leasing service. You've done the pre-qualification, you've got the applicant they can send over the white label thing to the owner. If the owner's like, "I really need to see what info you got." And you've tested out their pay stubs and their bank--   [00:26:11] Jason Hull: right    [00:26:12] Jason Hull: --stuff, and you've maybe connected the pet screening.com. What happens next? You've got    [00:26:17] Ben: a good applic--    [00:26:18] Ben: Yes. Yeah, so the property manager, the owner accepts the application. And at that point, we're going to reach out to the renter, say, "congrats, you've been accepted. Please now pay the security deposit." And as soon as they pay security deposit, then the owner or the property manager is able to connect their bank account, and that money will just automatically get deposited in whatever account that you specify. And then from a lease perspective, from really from the beginning of the process, we would've asked that you provide the preferred lease that you would like for us to use. We're going to get that lease drafted up and we're going to send it over to both the renter and the property manager. For some property managers, they like to review one last time before it gets sent to the renter. So we can fulfill that ask. And then the lease is going to get signed. And as soon as the lease gets signed, we will then dispatch our people back out to the property, do one final walkthrough, and also remove our yard sign and remove any other things that we had, any lock boxes or things like that we got setup. But we do one thing where we will leave a combo lockbox out at the property so that we can facilitate the renter actually moving in. So that's really the final and last step for our system, is facilitating to the renter actually getting the keys so that they have a smooth move in. And then the last step after all of that is we're going to survey the renter and make sure they had a great experience through the whole the whole leasing process.   [00:27:51] Jason Hull: And what's-- before we move on, because I'm curious like what difference you're noticing with these surveys, but let's say they don't accept somebody. What's the process? What happens to the rejects, so to speak? The tenants that didn't pass because a lot of times they're following up and bugging the property manager, "Hey, did you accept me? What's going on?" This sort of thing. What do you do?    [00:28:11] Ben: Yeah. So first of all, we shield the property manager from having to deal with all of that stuff. And I think for the position we're in, I think the natural thing is I think we would do what any other good property manager would do. We'd see if there's any other listings within that property manager that the renter would qualify for. First and foremost, we're going to recommend that of " There are these other listings for the same property manager" or, " do you like that?" And if the renter is not interested in any of those homes, then I think we would look broader to other listings that that are amongst our partners and say, "Hey, renter, maybe it would be better if you lease this property."   [00:28:48] Jason Hull: Yeah. That helps get the other properties filled. That's great.    [00:28:53] Ben: Yeah.    [00:28:53] Ben: Okay.    [00:28:53] Ben: And the renter's really happy too, because they don't have to pay an application fee again, so they're able to reuse their application.    [00:29:00] Jason Hull: Nice. Now what if you have two property managers in the same market and you get an applicant for one, are they completely segregated from being able to apply it to the other, or if they're in the Sunroom system,    [00:29:13] Ben: they can...   [00:29:14] Ben: Great question. Yeah. So we don't want to restrict where renters can apply, right? because that just doesn't make sense. But we have come across the scenario, it's been rare where renters have applied to multiple properties. And so what's really cool about our system is that we have a little disclaimer for the property manager where they can see, "hey, this renter's actually applied for multiple properties," and that way it's clear to them of " Hey, look, this renter is serious about your property, they are, they're hedging their bets," which, that's a common scenario especially in a hot market is if property managers are collecting multiple applicants on a single property, you can bet that the renters-- they know that. And so they're also applying to multiple properties. So I think we do our best to try to mitigate those scenarios. And I think one of the best ways to mitigate those scenarios is really just processing applications quickly and then, and working to get the renter and answer quickly around if they're accepted or denied. And, in most cases, I think renters are willing to tell you which one's their first choice. And so if you're able to process the application really quickly and drive it to decision, it doesn't happen too often where the owner comes back and wants to accept the renter and they've already decided to go somewhere else. It does occasionally, we try to mitigate that.    [00:30:28] Ben: Got it.    [00:30:28] Jason Hull: Okay, cool. So going back to the other path, I'm actually drawing this all out. I've got like a flow    [00:30:34] Ben: chart going on here.    [00:30:36] Ben: Sounds good. Keep    [00:30:37] Jason Hull: track.    [00:30:38] Jason Hull: So you surveyed the renter at the end, like you've got somebody in the property.    [00:30:43] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:30:43] Jason Hull: They've got a lockbox there. I think that's very cool. They can just go and "Can I move in on this day?" "Yep, here's the lockbox. You've got a code or however it works." And they can go get in.    [00:30:52] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:30:52] Jason Hull: And you don't have to show up. They can be there with their new U-Haul when they need to be there. That's super annoying, I think for property managers sometimes. And then afterwards you survey the renter. So I'm curious about the results of this. What's been the shift that people have noticed in the experience? This is why you started this in the beginning. You weren't having a great experience. Some people probably were like, "Drive to our office and you might get a key." Some people are like, "we can meet you maybe this day." It was like a mess. So what sort of feedback are you seeing on these surveys and what sort of shift are property management companies that are working with you noticing with your process versus trying to do this on their    [00:31:30] Ben: own?   [00:31:30] Ben: Yeah, great question. We collect what I would I consider a very important metric and I'm curious if it's come up before in this podcast. It's something called a net promoter score. Yeah. Have you discussed that before? I'm happy to--   [00:31:44] Ben: we    [00:31:44] Jason Hull: haven't really focused on that. But yeah, I think a lot of people are familiar. So net promoter score is when it says "on a scale of maybe zero to 10 or one to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company?" So a lot of people see this, the quick survey on software, different things like this.    [00:32:00] Ben: Yeah, that's right. And so when the net promoter score rank actually comes out, the scale is actually a minus a hundred to a plus 100. You could Google about how that works, but you're right. As a renter, what we would be asking them is, "how likely are you to recommend leasing a property to a friend through Sunroom or through x property management company?" And what we found is we just have a really good net promoter score. So if you could google this around, but the average net promoter score amongst property managers is a seven. And that's not on the zero to 10 scale. That's on the minus a hundred to the plus 100 scale, and. For the renters who lease a property through us, we have a 52 net promoter score.    [00:32:42] Ben: Nice.    [00:32:43] Ben: Yeah. So it's like what I said at the very beginning these renters are just a lot happier when they get in the home. For the property managers, they're seeing less really noisy renters when they first move in. I think that's a common thing that property managers are used to is that when a renter first moves in, that can be when they're talking the most or they're the noisiest. And so I think just anecdotally, property managers have said that, "Hey, these renters are just happier. They're just not causing as much commotion when they first move. And some of that has to do with our process too, right? Allowing renters to even self tour homes, it's a no pressure thing where they're able to really understand what they're buying before they move in. So I believe that helps as well.    [00:33:24] Jason Hull: This is the nerd in me coming out. So there's this really book called _Innovating Analytics_. And they put out this idea, basically the idea of the next generation of net promoter. They have used a lot of data to showcase and it's a little dry, but there's a lot of data to showcase the fundamental flaws of net promoter score, which is, has advantages over doing nothing, right? But then they talk about a new sort of score, which is the word of mouth index. And so we've incorporated that a bit into our business. It basically asks a second question, "how likely are you to discourage others from utilizing that?" Because what they found, just because somebody is not a true promoter, as they categorize them on the high end, like they choose like maybe a seven, eight, or nine or something, does not mean they're actually going to go hurt your business. And so a lot of big companies, they found were spending a lot of money to try and mitigate the people and pay attention to people and help the people they thought were detractors or people that would hurt their business when most of them really wouldn't. Just because it was a two or a three. They found that does not necessarily mean they're actually going to go actively try and destroy your business or hurt you. They just aren't going to tell people about it, because some people just don't want to talk about other businesses. Right? . So then asking a secondary question, how likely are you to tell others not to use this business or whatever. Then it gives you the true people to focus on mitigating or solving challenges for. Really interesting idea, but then they talk about the challenge of mainlining, where if they answer one question one way, first question, they'll answer it the same way, but it's backwards. Because they're just in the mode of answering questions like a zombie and they'll do it the wrong way or read it the wrong way. We've even seen this, so you have to put some questions in between and so it just complicates. But it's a really interesting book. You and I can geek out sometime and show you how I built this out so that it would work effectively, but it helps us identify which people are actually detractors that we need to take care of and focus on, and which people, they never rate anything positively and they're just, but they're quiet, which is fine.    [00:35:25] Jason Hull: Oh that's    [00:35:25] Ben: fascinating. I'll have to check that out.   [00:35:28] Jason Hull: I know, it's pretty nerdy. So_ Innovating Analytics_ is by Larry Freed F R E E D which is an interesting book. Cool. We've asked a lot of questions. You've explained the process. I think we've covered how it works unless we missed anything. But what else do people, property managers coming to you, what other concerns or things could we address here on the podcast before we wrap that they might have? Or what are the big FAQ questions that they ask before they're willing to explore giving up the leasing arm their business?    [00:36:00] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of the questions just evolve around how they can still control the process. And so we've invested an incredible amount into giving them those controls, right? Like I think the key is, the way we look at it is look like we're going to be the best at doing this leasing legwork. It's all we do. And we've built technology to really hold ourselves accountable to really high standards. But at the end of the day, like we still want you to have control over who's the right tenant for this property? Or, "how would you like the that application process to go?" For example. And I think we've worked hard to streamline the areas and that, we just realized, hey, this is the best way to do this. But also we recognize that hey, these property managers, they have pride to process for a reason, right, for their particular market that might be the right thing to do. And so we've invested a lot in creating different settings and things like that, that can make it so that they get to use it the way they would like.    [00:37:03] Ben: Cool. So it's    [00:37:04] Jason Hull: really a lot of the big concerns are just about the flexibility. "Do I have to go all in and use everything that you offer?"   [00:37:10] Jason Hull: Right.   [00:37:11] Jason Hull: "Or can I do, some of this and maybe I'll give up pieces later--" because some of y'all entrepreneurs are control freaks. Let's be real.    [00:37:18] Jason Hull: Yes.    [00:37:18] Jason Hull: And you need to let go of some of this stuff and let somebody else do it a little bit better. We have a lot of egos, entrepreneurs. We think our way is the best way all the time and we need to see that maybe somebody else could do this    [00:37:31] Ben: better.    [00:37:31] Ben: But we've also, from    [00:37:32] Jason Hull: experience--   [00:37:33] Jason Hull: I'm guessing you're going to say that Sunroom probably does it better than what most property managers are doing.    [00:37:39] Ben: Better NPS scores?    [00:37:41] Ben: Yeah. I would just say that, some of the property managers that we've seen are the most excited to partner with us are definitely probably the ones listening to your podcast or it's the ones that want to grow. And, we have some great examples of that, right? There's one property manager that we started working with in Austin a couple years ago, and they started with 300 doors. And now I believe they're up to 800 doors. And so by them being able to just, focus on other things, they were able to grow pretty quickly. And because we recognize this and we're starting to set up in these new markets, we actually just this week launched a new program specifically for trying to find these property management companies that are really focused on growth. And so we actually launched this new growth program. That we just put on our website where property managers can apply for the program. And essentially this program if we accept them will actually give them-- and they partner with us-- we'll give them $10,000 to grow their business. And they can, they could use that money for-- or I'd say up to 10,000-- they can use that money for helping them grow. And really the only terms of it is that you're willing to partner with us on leasing to do that. And so we have different ideas of really how to use that money to grow. I know a lot of entrepreneurs already have those ideas and so that's why we yeah, we set up this new program.   [00:39:02] Jason Hull: Awesome. We should chat because we're really good at growing property management companies and yeah, I think there would be a good-- there. We'll chat later. We've also negotiated with most of the top vendors where we've got a hit list, but a lot of the top vendors we're negotiating best in class discounts just for our mastermind members.   [00:39:21] Ben: There you go.    [00:39:21] Jason Hull: So maybe that's something you and I can do with the Sunroom as well. So    [00:39:25] Jason Hull: Yeah .   [00:39:26] Jason Hull: If you're open, that's--   [00:39:27] Jason Hull: yeah. Cool.    [00:39:28] Jason Hull: We've got some big players on board already for some of these things, but I think it'd be really cool to see this is something new and I think it's innovative and it seems really exciting. So we'll we'll chat afterwards, cool. Is there anything else you want people to know before we go and if The last thing maybe is how do they find you? And how do they get in touch and how do they start working with Sunroom?    [00:39:49] Ben: Yeah. Just go to our website, Sunroomleasing.com. Fill out a little form. Be happy to have, someone from our sales team reach out and have a conversation and kind of explain more of these details about what we do. I'm an engineer at heart, so I think for some people, maybe I went into too much detail. But at the same time, knowing I've talked to a lot of property managers they love the details. If you want even more details yeah, go to our website, sunroomleasing.com. Reach out to us and someone from our sales team would love to dig into those details with you.    [00:40:18] Jason Hull: Perfect. I think the last big question everybody would have is be, is going to be what does it cost? Is this affordable? Can we do this? That sort of question. So--   [00:40:29] Jason Hull: yeah.   [00:40:29] Jason Hull: Anything to say about that?    [00:40:31] Ben: Yeah, so we're going to charge, similar to what I would say like other leasing agents would. So we're going to charge like a percentage of first month's rent. That percentage of first month's rent that we charge. It's going to be different depending on the market and depending on what kind of volume that you have. Normally, the way we are setting this up is that we usually make it so that the property manager can still make good money on leasing while still utilizing us for all of it. Property managers can charge a percentage of first month's rent to their owners. That could be different by market. We're usually going to charge, call it 10- 20% less than that so that they're able to still make money on the leasing, but still know that they have a best in class service for that happening. And so that's just for full service. For Sunscreen, that's actually free for property managers to use. And we just charge the renter an application fee. And so that's really the easiest way. If we said a lot of stuff today, people are like, "wow that's a little scary to adopt that big of a, have a company owning leasing." a great way to start to just build a relationship with us and start seeing what we could do would be to start utilizing our application processing system, which, really, it's going to be a really a low risk thing. Even if want to test out having us do one application on one listing or something, we'd be happy to do that.   [00:41:48] Ben: That's the    [00:41:49] Jason Hull: gateway drug. A little bit of Sunscreen, and then you're going to be like, "I want a whole room. I want the Sunroom now."   [00:41:54] Jason Hull: There you go. There you go.    [00:41:55] Jason Hull: "I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'm tired of putting the Sunscreen on. Yeah. Okay.    [00:41:59] Jason Hull: There you go.    [00:42:00] Jason Hull: Cool.    [00:42:01] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:42:01] Jason Hull: All right. Ben, it's been great having you on the show. Check out Sunroomleasing.com and then if you come up with some major developments or big shifts or changes, we'd love to have you back on the show. So thanks for being    [00:42:12] Ben: here.    [00:42:13] Ben: Thanks so much, Jason. And yeah, we'll have to meet up in Austin sometime.    [00:42:16] Ben: All right.    [00:42:18] Jason Hull: All right. Cool. Thanks, Ben.    [00:42:20] Jason Hull: Alright. Everybody, if you've been listening to this, we appreciate you listening to our podcast. We would really appreciate it if you left us a review in exchange. If you got value from this, that would mean a lot to us at DoorGrow and my team. We have been innovating and creating a lot of new stuff at DoorGrow. We've got some really cool stuff coming out. So if you have not been familiar with DoorGrow for a while, we've got some really cool things coming down that we are working on. You should get connected to do a sales call. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Reach out to us. You can reach out to us on any social media. And we would love to connect with you and share with you. We just released the DoorGrow Code, which is the first roadmap that really showcases how to go from zero to a thousand doors in as short of time period as possible. It shows you which things you need to do at which stage, at which door levels, and what questions you have, what major problems you have at each stage, and what you need to do in order to do things in the right order to get to the next level.   [00:43:22] Jason Hull: So if you've been at a similar door count for the last year or maybe two years or three years, maybe even kind feeling stuck or maybe even backsliding a little bit because of property selling off or whatever. We have clients that are adding a lot of doors. Andrew Rocha just chimed in on one of our mastermind calls. He's one of our clients. He added like 50 doors in the last month. We've got clients. One of our clients added 310 doors in a year. We've got another client that added a hundred in gosh, they've doubled their doors. Like we've got clients that are growing really rapidly and they're not spending any money on advertising. I want you to be clear, like our methods are not focused on SEO, pay per click, content marketing, pay-per-lead lead services, social media marketing. Our methods are what really work in the marketplace, and most of them are zero cost, like they cost nothing. It just costs time and effort, and it actually takes less time and less effort than doing cold lead marketing like seo, pay per click, content marketing, social media marketing, or pay per lead services that exist in the property management space. So I highly recommend you check this out if you're wanting to grow. And we are now helping really significantly. We've built out the best systems and processes and we've been stacking the best coaches in the industry. If you've heard of certain coaches in the industry, we might have them on as experts in our program. We'll be announcing more of that later, but we've got some of the best in the industry that we've brought on as coaches. So it's not the Jason Show. I've got an amazing team of people coaching and we have systems for operations. We have systems for process. We have systems for sales, and our clients are crushing it. Nobody in the marketplace is doing all that DoorGrow's doing or can compete with us. And so if you think you know DoorGrow and you've looked at us or judged us in the past, it might be time to take a new look because your competitors might be working with us or they might work with us, and you're going to wish that it had been you.   [00:45:33] Jason Hull: So until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.    [00:45:37] 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!    [00:46:05] Jason Hull: 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.

Entrepreneurship is difficult, and entrepreneurs tend to be very hard on themselves. Sometimes this stems from a lack of confidence or belief in themselves. Property management growth expert Jason Hull and Sarah Hall, COO of DoorGrow share some of the valuable nuggets of wisdom they learned from Jamie Kern Lima, the CEO of IT Cosmetics and the author of Believe It. You’ll Learn… [03:35] The Frameworks of Belief [07:35] How to Handle Rejection and “No”s [10:26] The Problem with Hiding in Plain Sight [14:32] Dealing with Criticism and Doubters [20:51] “God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called.” Tweetables “Just because it's a closed door, it's probably closed for a reason. It's not the right door. So just keep going until you find the right one because it will happen.” “So believe in yourself, believe that you're worthy.” “It's not until later in life that you realize you want to be different and you want to be weird and you don't want to fit in. You don't want to be the same as everybody else.” “Businesses go out of business. We fail as entrepreneurs, and if you're failing it's because you gave up.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Hull: One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs really is just to be able to believe in yourself. Everybody says like, "You need to like, take action and hustle and do this and live the dream," but you have to believe in yourself because if you don't believe in yourself, you don't get it.    [00:00:12] Jason Hull: All right, we are live. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. So 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'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.    [00:01:11] Jason Hull: So I have a special guest with me today, one that I happen to be madly in love with. This is Sarah hall. H-A-L-L. Different last name.    [00:01:24] Sarah Hall: For now.    [00:01:24] Jason Hull: For now. I'm working on changing that y'all. I'm working on changing that one letter in her last name. So this is Sarah. So Sarah, why don't you tell everybody about yourself?    [00:01:34] Sarah Hall: Hmm. All right. So what do you want me to get into? So, uh...   [00:01:37] Jason Hull: Tell them what you do at DoorGrow and in your background.   [00:01:41] Sarah Hall: ...and my background. Okay. Well...   [00:01:42] Jason Hull: And then we'll get into our topic.    [00:01:43] Sarah Hall: Let's see. So currently, I am the COO here at DoorGrow. And so I'm kind of over all of the operations and the financials. I kind of make sure that the wheels are turning and that the business is moving forward, and I have my hands into a lot of the little nitty gritty details. That's kind of what I do at DoorGrow. I am also been a business owner and I've done that for about five years now. About five years I think. And I'm actually I've got a small team at this point. My real background I would say is sales. So I always say I haven't sold anything a day in my life. All I do is I give people the information that they need to make educated decisions. And I think if you believe, you know, that's what you're doing is just kind of educating people, then it's not really sales. You're not really pushing anything on them that, you know, they don't want or don't need. But I have an extensive sales background. I've been working since I was 14 years old, and my first like sales gig was probably when I was about 16 or 17. And I've been doing various forms of sales and now entrepreneur opportunities and all that good stuff ever since.    [00:02:58] Jason Hull: Okay. All right. Sarah's a badass. So I just want you to . , Sarah singlehandedly has cut some of our clients with hundreds of doors like operational and staffing costs in half from a single call. She's very efficient. It's why she's able to run you know, our company at DoorGrow as an operator and COO, while running an entire property management business with hundreds of doors, like as a part-time gig really with one person that's part-time boots on the ground and she's able to like systemize her business to that level. So, She's able to help our clients out a lot in the coaching. And we've got a really awesome team. So what we're going to talk about today, Sarah and I went to a conference recently. We went to Funnel Hacking Live, which is a big marketing conference full of entrepreneurs and they had some amazing speakers. So one of the speakers there was this gal named Jamie Kern Lima, and if you haven't heard of her, you can google her. She's kind of a big deal. But she has this book called _Believe It_, and she was talking about this framework of four steps related to belief. And I thought this would be really powerful to share with our audience. So we want to take you through this briefly and share. So where should we start?   [00:04:11] Sarah Hall: Why don't you go through some of the framework stuff, or should we go into her background? Let's do a little bit about--   [00:04:18] Jason Hull: you tell about the background...   [00:04:19] Sarah Hall: I'll do the background, then we'll do the framework. Then we'll get into the nuts and bolts and nitty gritty stuff. What I found really inspiring about Jamie, is she she saw an issue really she found, ended up relevant to thousands of women all across the globe. She was suffering from a skin issue called I think she had rosacea and she was using all these different makeup brands. She tried just about everything that there was to try concealers and primers, and she's tried it all, every single brand, every single product. Nothing really worked for her. And she was at really like what she thought was the height of her career as a TV news anchor. And she had her earpiece in her ear while she's live.    [00:05:01] Sarah Hall: And her producer is going, "Your makeup is running. You're on live tv and it's running." and she's, like trying to blot. And she had blotted and wiped off almost all of her makeup. And he's going, in her ear, "it's worse now. You made it worse. It's really bad now. You have to fix this." So she finds that. No product really is working for her. So she's after tried everything, she's thinking, Hey, you know what? I need to be the one to create the solution because I know I'm not the only woman who is struggling with this problem. So this is a little bit about her journey on, you know, how she kind of found the issue figured, "Hey, it's on me, right? Nobody else is doing it. It's on me to create this solution." and then how she did it. So I think that's a little bit of her background. Why don't you get into the framework that she had?    [00:05:51] Jason Hull: Yeah. So she shared a framework and she said, you know, one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs really is just to be able to believe in yourself. Everybody says like, "You need to like, take action and hustle and do this and live the dream," but the one fundamental defining factor between those that succeed and those that don't is they have this deep sort of driving motivator or why, but really underneath all that you have to believe in yourself because if you don't believe in yourself, you don't get it. So she has this framework and her framework was number one-- if you're taking notes, go for it. Write it down-- is clarity. Number two is action. Start taking action. Number three, you have to believe it's possible, this possibility, belief. And then number four, you have to believe you are worthy. You have this worthiness belief. And she quoted Joel Ostein and said, "Our setbacks are really setups for something greater," which I loved. And so she talked about finding the why beneath the why, and she says, "If you're not getting results, or you think you have some sort of wire motivator, it's not deep enough," because a lot of times we hit walls. Businesses go out of business. We fail as entrepreneurs, and if you're failing it's because you gave up.    [00:07:02] Jason Hull: And she said you have to use unattainable aspirations. Like we have these dreams that are so big sometimes, but one of my great quotes I wrote down from her was, "Never let others' doubt about you turn into doubt about yourself." Nobody around you is going to get the vision that you feel called to do or that motivator that you have deep down. They're not going to feel at the same level. So they're going to doubt you or they're going to try and protect you and they're going to like shoot it down. And so it's about having that belief that's so deep that you're in alignment with God, universe, your purpose, whatever that you are going to push past and through any objection. She had a lot of rejection and challenges, right?    [00:07:38] Sarah Hall: Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of 'no's. So in, in my notes, it was her and her husband who created this product. And then it was her and her husband who were marketing it and trying to sell it and trying to just get it going. And they were like, "Okay, what can we do? Can we sell it ourselves? This isn't seeming to be working the way we want it to. We need to get another brand, like a larger brand to pick it up, right?" So like, sell it maybe like a L'Oreal or a Maybelline or somebody will buy it and then they can, you know, really market it to the masses. So they were doing this and they were just churning and churning and churning. Neither one of them took a paycheck for three years. So this wasn't something that was like this overnight success that just, you know, she woke up and like a rags to riches overnight story, right? This is a three year struggle. Over those three years, they heard hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of no's, and some of them were really brutal. The most brutal one. She got they-- she said it almost stopped her right then and there. But one of the notes that I wrote is that you can't listen to all of the no's, and you can only really do this as a side note, you can only not listen to the no's if you truly know your purpose and your mission.   [00:08:53] Sarah Hall: So if you don't have that really deep-seated why in you-- why do I even care enough to do this? The no's are going to affect you. But she says, "You cannot listen to the no's. When you get a 'no,' god gives you knowing. And if you end up listening to the no's, if you do succumb to that and you listen to those no's, then what you're doing is you're talking yourself out of your truth."   [00:09:19] Jason Hull: Mm. Yeah. Yeah, I wrote this down. She went to one of her heroes, one of her mentors. It was like a dream. She got an interview with them and the guy said, basically, "it's not going to work. Nobody wants to buy this product from somebody that looks like you," and this sort of thing. And it was like crushing to her. And eventually this guy was working for her, which I thought was just a great ending to her story. But she said, "he gave me a no, and it crushed me, but God gave me a knowing," and I was like, Ooh, I love that. Like you have, knowing like that this is going to work, but you're going to get rejections, you're going to get no's. And if you're not willing to take the no's, and not willing to keep going, you don't really have that knowing or a strong enough purpose, it's going carry you through that. You're going to get rejected. You're going to try and sell property management. You're trying to get clients and people are going to say "no." and you're going to feel friction and it's going to be uncomfortable.    [00:10:10] Jason Hull: And a lot of people avoid all that discomfort and have a fantasy business and they don't even get started. So, she asks this question and it's: "And I want to ask all of you listening, do you listen to the "no" or do you listen to the knowing? The no's will talk you out of your own truth," is what Sarah mentioned. She then talked about when you're hiding in plain sight, like you have big goals but at the expense of your soul, you're not raising your hand. And extroverts hide by entertaining everyone else. And introverts like hide in their own way. But are you hiding in plain sight? I thought was a really big thing. How have you been hiding in plain sight? One way is you're creating so much self doubt inside, or you're supporting others' dreams, but not your own. Or you're championing your kids, but not your own self. These kind of things. These are how we hide. What else do you remember about hiding in plain sight? I just, I thought that was really powerful.    [00:11:01] Sarah Hall: So this one, I actually have it on a different section. She spoke about it a little bit later. It was in the middle of telling her story before, like the real big kind of like turn around.   [00:11:11] Jason Hull: Mm.    [00:11:11] Sarah Hall: But her notes were: authenticity does not guarantee success.    [00:11:16] Jason Hull: Ooh, I have that written down. Authenticity may not guarantee success, but inauthenticity... oh, you were going to say it.    [00:11:23] Sarah Hall: No, you go ahead.    [00:11:24] Jason Hull: No, go ahead.    [00:11:25] Sarah Hall: You took it. Go ahead.    [00:11:27] Jason Hull: I have this... I wrote down "Authenticity may not guarantee success, but inauthenticity guarantees failure." Yeah. But I have that way later. We must have wrote in different orders. But yeah that's I don't know. How's that shown up for you in entrepreneurism? I think we've all hid.    [00:11:46] Sarah Hall: Not so much for me, I think. No.    [00:11:48] Jason Hull: I don't know for--   [00:11:49] Sarah Hall: I think for a very long time, I've just been very comfortable with, you know, who I am and how I do things, and I've always sort of known I'm a little different and I've always been okay with that. But I think that especially when you're young and you're going to school, right? And all the kids come home and they'll cry, "Oh, I don't fit in. Like, I'm not the same. I'm different and I'm weird." And you know, it's not until later in life that you realize you want to be different and you want to be weird and you don't want to fit in. You don't want to be the same as everybody else. And I think I've just always been really comfortable with that, and I've kind of always had the attitude like, "All right, well I am who I am, and there are going to be people who really enjoy that, and there are going to be people who cannot handle that, and that's okay because like if I were to come with a warning label, like I am not for everyone. I'm not, and I'm okay with that. I'm okay. I don't need to be liked by everyone. I don't need everyone to, you know, be like, "Oh, she's so great." It's okay because I know what I'm doing, and I know that I'm comfortable in who I am and in my mission and in my purpose.   [00:12:56] Jason Hull: Yeah, I think I've definitely hid in plain sight. I think I've always had, like I always felt really not confident. I had a lot of insecurity and I would overcompensate by really taking care of my clients and I really wanted to let them have success, but I didn't want to be seen, like I didn't want to do podcasts. I didn't want to be in the limelight. And tell one of my mentors or coaches like, "Jason, like if you want to see the change that you want to see in the industry, you have got to stop waiting on somebody else to do it or hoping somebody else picks up this cause and does it because you have that calling inside. You're the one that needs to do what you know and needs to be done." I had to kind of swallow that and stop because that's a lot easier, right? Sometimes it's just easy to be, stay in the background and that's self doubt. So, what else did you have on her framework or about this?    [00:13:42] Sarah Hall: Well, I think from her, my big takeaway, and it's something that we can all relate to, right? Like everyone I think has been in a situation where we really hope that, you know, we get something or we do something or something happens and then it doesn't. Right. Or, you know, we're chasing a client and we're like, "Oh man, I would love to land this client. I would love to close this deal. You know, I would love to get this promotion. I would love to, you know, have a great hire. I interviewed this person and oh wow. I really loved her. She was so perfect. She would be amazing. I really hope that she, you know, when we extend the offer, she takes it," and we've all heard "no." Right? And there's a little part of you that is so hurt by that. And instead of just taking that pain and kind of dwelling in that. Take it and hang onto it and keep on going.    [00:14:29] Jason Hull: Hmm.    [00:14:29] Sarah Hall: So one of the big turning points in her story was after hearing, you know, no paycheck for three years, hundreds of no's, no company at all would pick her up-- none-- had a really brutal you know from a company who said, "Hey, can I give you some honest feedback?" and she said, "Of course. I want the honest feedback. Tell me. Like if it's going to help me, tell me." And he said, "Well, we're just not confident that a woman that looks like is really going to be the best face for the business."   [00:15:01] Jason Hull: Mm.    [00:15:02] Sarah Hall: So, you know, she wasn't thin enough. She wasn't pretty enough. She had rosacea, which, you know, I may even have some rosacea myself, but, you know, I get very red in the face at times too. But that wasn't back then, like, A standard of beauty, right? It was you know, this one definitive thing and if you didn't fit in that mold, then you know, all these companies just didn't think that you were going to be successful. And that could have been absolutely crushing to so many of us, and she didn't let that stop her. She continued. She kept going, she kept trying. She went to, you know, trade shows and expos and the approach to the company that had already told her "no" multiple times, told her no at the trading show, when you're not supposed to leave your booth, because you can get kicked out of the trade show for leaving your booth. She went and approached, she's like, "Listen, can you watch my booth? I have got to run." She ran back over to that company and said, "I know you guys have told me 'no' before, but I just, I'm going to pitch it to you again," and she did it again, and they took a meeting with her.    [00:16:07] Sarah Hall: And then at this point, everything like all eggs in one basket. She had one shot and it was a 10 minute slot. And in that 10 minutes, like they had to create all of the products. They had to manufacture all of the products because they needed to have a certain amount. That was ready to sell just in case it sold. They also needed to ship it to this company so that if it sold, this company was ready to get it out to their consumers. So they had to spend their last like thousands of dollars just in case this would work. She went, she had about 10 minutes. 10, that was it. And there was a clock. It's not even a truly a 10 minutes because during that time there are certain intervals, and at these intervals you need to hit a certain sales goal. So if you're only two minutes in and you haven't hit sales goal yet, they pull you, you're done game over. So it was literally her last shot. They were about to close the doors and just be done because they couldn't afford to keep going. And she ended up doing it.    [00:17:11] Jason Hull: Mm-hmm.    [00:17:12] Sarah Hall: And not only did she do it, she sold it out-- completely, sold it out. She ended up then getting a buyout from one of the companies that originally told her 'no' a couple times and I believe, if I'm remembering the number correctly, it was a $1.2 billion buyout, billion with a B. That's right. The person that had originally told her 'no' and given her that awful feedback, she said, "I was so tempted to reach back out and say, 'Listen, I've got 1.2 billion reasons why you were wrong,' but instead of doing that, and instead of being like, 'Ha ha, I was right and you were wrong, and look at me, and I knew it all this whole time," she said, "You know, I had to be really thankful for all of the no's in the process."   [00:17:54] Jason Hull: Mm.    [00:17:55] Sarah Hall: Because at the time that she met with a person who just really like destroyed her, almost she, if he had offered her anything, she would've taken it. She would've given up anything.    [00:18:08] Jason Hull: Yeah. For a small amount of money.    [00:18:09] Sarah Hall: So she would've missed out on $1.2 billion because she was so desperate and you know, tired and just, it was such a long journey at that point that she was just ready. She said, "anybody could've come along and given me peanuts for this, and I would've been like, 'Great, thank you. Please take it."   [00:18:28] Jason Hull: So for her, when she went on that show, it was do or die. They were either going to declare bankruptcy because they had shelled out their last dime towards all this product, and if it didn't sell, they were like dead in the water. And so she took a risk. Everybody told her not to do this, but she got on camera and she wiped off her makeup, showed her skin, and showed how red it was and everything--   [00:18:51] Sarah Hall: which is exactly what they told her not to do.   [00:18:54] Jason Hull: Yeah. They told her, "Don't do this."   [00:18:55] Sarah Hall: "Do not do this."    [00:18:56] Jason Hull: She did it any way. And people were sold. She showcased the product and how it worked on herself. And people were amazed and that vulnerability was where she's like, "I am not going to hide in plain sight. I'm going to like do this in front of everybody. And so that's the message is how are you hiding in plain sight?"   [00:19:13] Jason Hull: What do you know deep down you should be doing, but you haven't really done it? You've just been kind of, you've got the facade, you've kind of not been doing it. She mentioned things like maybe you need to start that book you've been dreaming over. Maybe you need to take that leap that you've not done or whatever it might be. She said-- I have a couple great quotes-- one was, "The longest journey is the 18 inches from your head to your heart." I really like that one. And she also said-- I thought this was interesting because she had a lot of success afterwards. She said, "People cheer you on after you've made it" and "be so great they can't ignore you that they eventually have to pay you." So, and the guy that told her that really brutal "No, nobody wants to work with somebody that looks like you" and like this kind of thing. He eventually became on her board. He told her, "I was wrong. I was wrong." And he then was working for her and helping her build the business. And I thought that was a really powerful conversation.    [00:20:07] Jason Hull: So to recap the framework, first you need clarity. Figure out like what is it that you feel deep down that you should do and should be focused on. Take action, massive action. And number three, believe it's possible. You have to continue to believe it's possible, or you're going to give up. And then deeper than that, you have to believe you're worthy. No matter what anyone else says about you, no matter if they say you're not good looking enough or you're not smart enough, or you can't, you have to believe, because you know you have that calling deep down. You have to believe that-- one of the great quotes at the conference was, "God qualifies the call." okay. So if you feel that calling deep down, you're qualified.    [00:20:43] Sarah Hall: The best part--   [00:20:44] Jason Hull: oh, what did I miss?    [00:20:44] Sarah Hall: That's the best part.    [00:20:45] Jason Hull: Oh, then you say it. This is why I keep her around.    [00:20:47] Sarah Hall: Haha! I wrote it down because--   [00:20:49] Sarah Hall: She's got a way better memory than me.   [00:20:51] Sarah Hall: I know. But I heard it and then I heard it again a few times throughout the conference and I was like, "Oh," you know, I heard it the first time, but it didn't sink in the first time.   [00:20:58] Jason Hull: Oh.   [00:20:59] Sarah Hall: It was, "God doesn't call the qualified.    [00:21:02] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:21:03] Sarah Hall: "He qualifies called."   [00:21:05] Jason Hull: Mm-hmm. Yeah. He qualifies the called because if he gives you the call, you feel that deep, deep down or the universe or whatever you're into. If you feel that calling, you know deep down that it's the right thing for you to do, you're qualified. He will help you eventually get qualified. As long as you keep pushing towards it, you will become the person you need to become in order to do that. And Jamie Kern Lima, her thing reinforced us. So that's kind of our message for today.    [00:21:29] Sarah Hall: I've got two more great ones from her.    [00:21:30] Jason Hull: She's got two more quotes.    [00:21:31] Jason Hull: I like one liners from her that I just.   [00:21:33] Sarah Hall: My hand after this event was just done.   [00:21:36] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:21:36] Sarah Hall: It's still tight. That was weeks ago. So, in relation to when she had that opportunity and that-- well, she had what she thought was an opportunity, which ended up being another "No," right?    [00:21:47] Jason Hull: Mm-hmm.    [00:21:47] Sarah Hall: But if it had been an opportunity, she would've just sold it to get out of it and been like, "Yes, thank you. Please take it." And she would've missed out on the big deal, right. So she says, "You have to thank God for the open doors. But you also have to thank him for the closed ones." So just because it's a closed door, it's probably closed for a reason. It's not the right door. So just keep going until you find the right one because it will happen. Also, "when you change your relationship with rejection, you change your life."    [00:22:19] Jason Hull: That's a good one.    [00:22:20] Sarah Hall: So that is really big. So those are my two last little gems from her.    [00:22:23] Jason Hull: Yeah. Love it. So that's our message for today. So believe in yourself, believe that you're worthy. And if you don't have the right clarity, if you don't have know the right actions to take, but you feel deep down you should have a property management business, you feel like you should be able to grow this. We want to help you get that clarity. We want to help you take the right actions. So reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. You can also go join our free Facebook group, DoorGrowclub.com, and we would love to get connected with you, have our team connect with you, and get you on that right journey and avoid all the sand traps, avoid the common mistakes, and get your business so that it's healthy as quickly as possible. And with that, we are out. So until next time, to our mutual growth. Anything you want to say before we close?   [00:23:12] Sarah Hall: I think that's it.    [00:23:14] Jason Hull: All right. Thanks everybody. Bye. 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!    [00:23:42] Jason Hull: 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.

Are you comfortable with the number of doors you have in your property management business right now? Are you comfortable with the amount of tasks you have on your to-do list? You can be comfortable, OR you can be winning.  In this week’s podcast episode, property management growth expert Jason Hull explores the concept of the comfortable PM entrepreneur and the winning PM entrepreneur. You’ll Learn… [01:20] What does it mean to be comfortable in your business? [03:31] Growing and moving toward the Four Reasons [06:37] How to become the WINNING property manager [14:04] Making big shifts and hitting big goals [16:44] The things you will gain from being a winning entrepreneur [21:44] How to step into being uncomfortable Tweetables “You are not meant to be mediocre. You're not meant to be the comfortable property manager. You're meant to be the winning property management entrepreneur.” “You're going to need to step into the pain, step into the fear, step into all the stuff you've been avoiding, the discomfort, and take a risk.” “A business should give you more freedom, but most business owners have less freedom than employees have often.” “If there's anything that's been on your to-do list for more than a month, it's because you're not the person that should be doing it.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] You know, you're the comfortable pm, ironically, if you have a to-do list that just keeps getting bigger each month instead of smaller.I often say this: if there's anything that's been on your to-do list for more than a month, it's because you're not the person that should be doing it. [00:00:15] All right, we are live. Welcome everybody 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'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. [00:01:20] So what are we going to talk about today? I think I want to talk a little bit today about the difference between being a comfortable property management entrepreneur and a winning property management entrepreneur. So, last week I talked a little bit-- and I recommend you go check that episode out-- I talked about the drifting versus the driven, so I want to expand a little bit on that and let's talk about... you might be that comfortable property manager or that comfortable property management business owner because really you might identify right now as a property manager. You think, "I'm a property manager," and I think that's a mistake if you are the business owner, if this is your business. You are a business owner. A property manager is the technician level worker in a property management business. They do the work. Right. You might be an owner of a bakery, but if you're the baker, you are the employee. You are the key technician in that business. [00:02:13] If you are a property manager in a property management business, you are the key technician in that business doing the technical work, meaning you're not the owner. An owner has a business and they hire a property manager, right? So right now you may identify as a property manager and you may also be somewhat comfortable, and really that might mean you're comfortable being uncomfortable. Like you're in a certain level of discomfort, right? Maybe you're not getting on doors quick enough. Maybe the lead gen is not working as well as you wanted to. Maybe you're not closing as many deals as you would like and bringing on new clients. Maybe you know behind the scenes that you're delivery and fulfillment stuff and operations, it's not really well dialed in. Like it's not as good as you are selling everybody on it being and maybe your financial stuff is just not really tight.  [00:03:04] You know, you've got financial issues, financial problems. You're not bringing in enough money. Maybe you're not clear. Cash flow is an issue. Maybe it's getting really expensive to pay out your team members. You're trying to figure it out. These are all solvable problems in the business, but you're kind of comfortable, which is why it's gotten to the point that it is, and you haven't changed it yet. And until it gets painful enough, uncomfortable enough, you're probably not going to change it, and my goal as a coach in working with my clients is to either help them get so much of what they want, that it becomes uncomfortable-- so we had one of our clients, really sharp client. He's doubled his doors in his business since starting with us, and it's gotten really uncomfortable for him. It's painful. And he was talking about the pain of that on the call, and I wanted to use him as an example to other people.  [00:03:59] Like, "Hey, we can get the growth going very easily and once we get it going, it'll be uncomfortable and that's the next problem, the new problem we want all of you to experience." And I was like, "How many of you by show of raise of hands, by show of hands would love to have the problem that he's having right now? That he's got so many doors coming on that it's getting painful," and everybody's hands went up, right? So, I want all of you to experience that kind of pain and that kind of problem as well. And that's really the crux of running a business, that a business is a eternal problem worth solving. No business is ever perfect. No business is ever done. You ramp up lead gen and you ramp up sales... delivery and fulfillment will experience constraints. You start to build out that backend. You hire a bunch of people, you are maybe kind of top heavy when it comes to staffing. You now need to feed that beast more and get more sales, right? [00:04:48] And so all these functions in the business are always in flux. There's always a juggle. Your business is never done. It's never perfect. It's never finished. And it should be fun, right? We've talked about this on multiple episodes- the four reasons: fulfillment, freedom, contribution, support, and then that fifth reason of safety and certainty, and this is what all of you want. This is why we think we want money is really, we want money because it can give us those things if we use it the right way, but a lot of you make more and more money and you just make your life harder and harder and harder. You just keep doing more and more of the stuff you don't really enjoy doing in your own business. So I'm going to ask you this. Like right now, if you know you're the comfortable pm instead of the winning pm-- you're the comfortable property management entrepreneur if you don't like accounting, but you're still doing accounting-- if you don't love it-- if you don't love doing the sales and you're still doing the sales, if you don't love the operations and the details and the nitty gritty, but you're the one that that sits on the shoulders of. You know, you're the comfortable pm, ironically, if you have a to-do list that just keeps getting bigger each month instead of smaller. [00:06:05] I often say this: if there's anything that's been on your to-do list for more than a month, it's because you're not the person that should be doing it. All the fun stuff, the stuff that gives you freedom and fulfillment and the sense of contribution and support, you have already gotten those things done. It wouldn't sit on your to-do list for that long typically, but that's the leftover stuff. The stuff you really don't want to do. You're avoiding. You're procrastinating until it becomes so painful, you have to focus on it. And then you "hi-ho" over. "Woo, I'm going to solve this problem."  [00:06:37] I want this to be your old identity, this comfortable pm and I want you to destroy this. Like it has to die if you want to be the winning pm. Let's talk about the winning property manager. The winning property manager is living according to those four reasons, and they have the fifth reason, but this means that they love their day to day. They have a sense of fulfillment. They enjoy getting to do what they're doing. They would do it-- what they're doing each day for free for fun. I would do what I do for free for fun. Coaching clients, helping clients win, this kind of stuff is fun for me. Learning... the stuff that I get to do in my business is fun for me. The first is fulfillment. The second thing is freedom. Like, you want to feel free rather than feeling damned or stuck or like uncomfortable... freedom, you want freedom. A business should give you more freedom, but most business owners have less freedom than employees have often. And then if you have freedom and fulfillment, you're going to get bored if you aren't making a difference in the world. You're going to want to go out and change some lives. You're going to want to give other people that you're going to want to benefit your team. You're going to start to care about other people because you've got your own needs taken care of. You want to make a difference in the world. [00:07:52] You want to benefit your clients, you want to benefit the tenants, you want to benefit your staff and your team, you want to benefit your family. That feels like winning, right? You've got those things and that means you've got great support. So you're building support around yourself and you're able to support those around you, and that is a winning property management entrepreneur. I want you to have that identity. I want you to feel what that feels like because it feels good to be winning. It feels good to be making a difference in the world. It feels good to be able to feel good about yourself. Come on, right? You know, I've been the comfortable business owner. I've been the comfortable business owner. You know, even fairly recently in my journey, I went back into that, like I went through a divorce, which was rough. I was the one that ended the relationship. There was a lot of stuff that caused me to feel I needed to do that, and that was really hard. You know, without going into the details, you know, I was put into situations that were really painful for me. And she probably felt similarly, right? And so I ended that relationship, and that was hard. It was hard. Getting back into dating, that was kind of tough, you know, at my age, you know, figuring it out. That was hard. And then in the business for a little while, I coasted. I was like, I've got so much going on. I'm trying to figure out how to take care of my kids. I got comfortable because I wanted to explore other things like dating and like figuring out relationships again, and like all this stuff. But eventually I got bored of all that. I got bored of the dating thing. I gave up on that. [00:09:22] And then I met Sarah. We're getting married in November. We've been dating for a lengthy while and she's my fiance and we're getting married in November. And those people tend to turn up right when we're kind of fed up, and we're done looking. And and, you know, that spark reignited in focusing on my business. I'm like, "I want to revamp and change everything. I want to start doing new programs. I'm getting into working with new coaches. I felt alive again. And that's our natural state. Our natural state is to be alive. I've always been this way. I've always been reinventing myself and learning new things and absorbing new information, and I'm sure a lot of you are like that. That's the entrepreneurial visionary sort of state. That's where we feel alive is when we're in that momentum. And we're, we feel like we're growing. We're growth minded individuals, but to step into that, there's always going to be some fear. Always.  [00:10:20] You are the hero in your own story. If you're life were a movie, you are the protagonist. You're the hero in your story. The people that are watching your story, you getting to watch your story at the end of your life, like you will know you're the hero in your story. And what would that hero do? Like if you were watching this movie, what would you want them to do? You get to write this story and you don't want to sit there and watch yourself just comfortable. That comfort is poison, and I hope it gets painful enough that you decide, "Hey, I want more than this. I want to take on my life. I want to make a difference. I want to do something with myself." And you're tired of the business being mediocre. You're tired of the business having the same problems year after year. You need to get fed up with the sameness. You need to get fed up with it because I'm calling you out onto this journey, just like I did on the previous episode. I'm calling you out, like, I want you to step into your greatness and step into this journey, and I want you to absorb this key idea that you need to step into this new identity. If you had the business of your dreams, that would mean you have become the person that could run that. And so what that means is this: one of my mentors said this. He said, if you don't have the business of your dreams, it's because you're not yet the person that can run it yet. You're not that person yet. So who would you have to become in order to have the business of your dreams?  [00:11:44] You would have to become a more powerful person, a more knowledgeable person, a person that knows acquisition strategies or how to get more doors. A person that knows how to sell a person that knows how to optimize your pricing in your business. A person that knows whether or not their branding is impacting their business or not and how to optimize that. A person that knows whether their website is effective or not. We're going to take you through-- in our program, that's what we do is we first clean up all those leaks in your sales pipeline, and then we stack the acquisition strategies, and then after that, we get you into the systems that you're going to need to build out for your business. You need at least six major systems in your business in order for this business to be scale. And here's the secret, I want you to understand this, a lot of you have gotten comfortable partially because you see future pain on the horizon. You see, like, "once I get to 250 doors," or "if I got to a thousand doors" or whatever, "I know how uncomfortable I am right now," because you're in a state of comfortable discomfort. You're comfortable being uncomfortable. It's the maximum amount of discomfort you are willing to tolerate and be comfortable with. That's where you're at right now.  [00:12:50] Your perception then unconsciously, is that growth would be even more painful. "If I added twice as many doors, it would be twice as painful as it is right now." and that doesn't have to be true. The more doors you add, the more resources you add, the easier it can get, the better your life can get, the less you have to do, the less you do in the business in your role. You get to do more of the few things that you really enjoy doing. And so as you grow and scale, believe me, property managers that have a thousand doors and they build their team in business the right way, their business, their day to day is calm. They love it. They enjoy what they get to do, but you could be at 50 doors or even a hundred doors and hate your life and be miserable and not be very profitable, and it to be very uncomfortable. So at any stage, it can be painful or it can be comfortable. And so my goal is sometimes I have to get people uncomfortable in order for them to go to that next level and chase comfort again and get to that next level where they are now at a higher level as an entrepreneur. So I want to turn you into the entrepreneur that can have the business of your dreams.  [00:14:04] So we've hit kind of a milestone consistently in our monthly revenue, which places us in the stage of being a multimillion dollar company, which is awesome. Like I'm really excited about that in our company, and of course we have a lot of expenses in our business at that stage. So, you know, a multimillion dollar company doesn't mean the business owner gets millions of dollars necessarily, right? Because there's costs, and all of you that are business owners get this. But a lot of times our team members or people watching entrepreneurs go, "Ooh, they have a million dollar company, man, it must be nice to be a millionaire," and I'm sure those of you listening are laughing. You're like, "Yeah, I used to think that way, but now that I run a business, I realize it's probably not the case. In fact, million dollar businesses usually, some of the business owners are making very little, a lot of times because their operational costs are really high, especially marketing agencies or some of the people that are in circles that I'm around. We've been blessed that I have a really effective team. We're very efficient and we've got some great systems in place. I have a great operator. Sarah is our operations person, our COO, and we have a profitable, healthy business, which is great. I appreciate that and I really value my team for that, and it allows me to spend the time doing the things I really enjoy doing. [00:15:15] So I want you to get out of this pain maybe out of some of these negative emotions and understand this truth of these four reasons, plus that fifth of safety and certainty. Safety and certainty comes when you have your processes documented. You have great team members... like you feel safe in your business. Eventually you'll get to other levels of that when you get to, maybe seven figure or higher business, or you're a million dollar business you know, multimillion dollar company or whatever, you're going to start doing things like asset protection and wealth building stuff, you know, different tax strategies. This is how the ultra wealthy don't pay taxes. There's going to be levels to the safety certainty that it creates around you, and that gives us even greater freedom to go out into the marketplace and take risks and do things when we have that behind us. [00:16:03] And so I want to help you shift and if you understand this framework of the four reasons, then you can be this empowered winning property management entrepreneur, you can be somebody that is consistently moving closer and closer to that goal of your unique version of these four reasons, and you're loving your day to day. You are making a difference in the world. You feel a sense of freedom. You're free to make choices. You're free to take vacations. You're free to buy your wife some sort of nice gift or your husband some sort of nice gift, right? You're not constantly limited by some sort of stress or worry or constraint in your life. And you will start to see tangible, measurable outcomes. You will see your team members start to align with those four reasons once you have. You can have team members that are experiencing those benefits as well. They will experience more freedom and fulfillment because you're finally in alignment, which means you're not building the wrong team around this fake person, the fake business owner, the fake person that pretends that they are a leader in the business, but they're spending most of their time doing stuff they don't enjoy. That's a fake leader. It's a real business owner, but a fake leader, and people don't want to follow that person. So you're not going to have great team members if you are not happy, They're not going to be happy, and I want you to be happy. Because if you're happy and your team's happy, your owners will be happy, tenants will be more happy, and if tenants are happy and owners are happy and you're happy and your team are happy, that's a great ripple effect that's going to make a difference in the world. [00:17:38] All right, so a lot of you are thinking, "Well, Jason, this all sounds so too good to be true. If it were that easy, everybody would be doing it. " And I think it's simple. It may not be easy to figure out, but it's simple. And once I explain some of these frameworks, once I showcase things to clients, once I help them understand the secrets to all these different areas or different blind spots or different leaks, then property managers, entrepreneurs, they can see these leaks, they can see these blind spots. And then when you can see these problems, you're going to want to solve them. That's what you do as an entrepreneur. When you can see a problem, it'll annoy you. It'll bother the heck out of you, and you will get that problem solved. And so we help you see the problem, and then we give you the roadmaps for how to solve these problems. And that's the fun of running a business, is knowing which problems need to be worked on, having that clarity, and being able to move it forward and seeing the business progress and seeing it grow, you have to grow as a result. Russell Brunson at the FunnelHacking Live conference, which I mentioned on the previous episode, said, "God tricks us into benefiting people by starting a business. On the journey to making more money, he tricks us into starting a business that benefits other human beings," because a real business solves real problems in the marketplace. At first, you're probably like, "I just want to make money," or "I just want to make ends meet, then I want to make money." [00:19:01] But eventually you're like, I want to make a difference. And eventually you realize to make money and to make a difference, you have to solve real problems in the marketplace. That's a real business. You're not going to get referrals. You're not going to get new clients. You're not going to get return clients unless you are making that difference and solving real problems in the marketplace. That's what a business does. Otherwise, you're snake oil, right? You're a thief. Right? You need to solve real problems. And I'll tell you this, like solving real problems is super rewarding. It feels really good to change people's lives, to benefit people. That's why we do what we do at DoorGrow. We love that feeling. I get to hear from people on calls every week sharing their wins, sharing how we change their life. One of the clients posted this in one of our groups and said, "Thanks for putting so much gold in front of us, that it's improbable to eat it in one bite," and he said, "Words from my wife 'I wish you would've found DoorGrow two years ago.' she speaks the truth," is what one of our clients, Will Frasier said. We hear that a lot, like, "I wish we'd found DoorGrow several years ago. I wish we had found DoorGrow before," and if you haven't really found us, which means you haven't come on board as a client, you haven't really talked to our sales team, you don't really know what we could do for you. [00:20:22] You're kind of thinking, "Well, maybe it's similar to where everybody else is doing," you really should check us out. And you'll probably be that person saying, "Man, I wish I had stepped into that earlier." I wanted to share kind of this sort of journey from the comfortable PM to the winning pm and that journey is, you're going to need to step into the pain, step into the fear, step into all the stuff you've been avoiding, the discomfort, and take a risk. It's a risk. And God or the universe may have to put you in a position that becomes so painful that you're like, "I'm finally willing to do something because I'm losing too many doors right now," or "I want to take this next level," or "I'm just fed up with eating, you know, pork and beans every night, or ramen," you know, whatever it is. Like you want to get to the next level. We want to help you get there. And I want you to be the winning property manager. You are not meant to be mediocre. You're not meant to be the comfortable property manager. You're meant to be the winning property management entrepreneur. You are meant to be that. You're meant to be getting positive outcomes. You're meant to be feeling and experiencing positive emotions. You're meant to be a leader. You're meant to have a amazing team. Anybody can have an amazing team. You just need to know what people that have amazing teams know. You just need to know those frameworks. And then you can have an amazing team that doesn't frustrate you and annoy you and you don't have high turnover.  [00:21:44] So I'm inviting you, I'm challenging you to step in and experience that. And to just quickly pitch our program and our offer: we have our DoorGrow and scale Mastermind. It's an amazing program. It's the culmination of lots of stuff that we've learned. We are bringing in all sorts of experts, the best in the industry. Just, there's a lot of value in the program. But some of our major programs: we have our Rapid Revamp. So if you have any lead flow in your business whatsoever, but you've never really had taken a harsh look at your branding, your pricing, your sales process, your website, this whole sales pipeline, this is something that we are going to take you through, usually in the first 90 days of working with us in the Mastermind, that will completely transform the front end of your business. If you've ever watched Bar Rescue with Jon Taffer or The Profit with Marcus Lemonis, that's me for the property management industry. That's what I do. We transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform you, and we want to transform your business, and that's what we do. We rehab these companies or get them ready, just like you get a property rent ready. We remake, remodel, and revamp. So the Rapid Revamp is this rapid 90 day program that we take you through over the course of like 12 or so weeks, and we're tackling some major issues on a week or maybe a two week basis and getting these things really well dialed in just to clean up your sales pipeline. [00:23:14] After that, or for those who just want to add doors, we have our Growth Accelerator and right now, we have six major things we do. Each one takes about a month. These are six different acquisition vehicles you can build in your business, and none of these cost you advertising dollars. Isn't that amazing? It's not SEO. It's not pay per click like Google Ads. It's not content marketing. It's not social media marketing. It's not pay per lead services. These are all internet marketing. We're avoiding all of that because these people are at the end of the sales cycle and are the shittiest and worst clients. We're focusing on those that you can capture through word of mouth, where you can create warm leads, where you have a 90% close rate instead of a 10% close rate. It takes less time in the sales cycle and sales process, and it takes way less money, and these strategies are really brilliant. We've got our neighbor strategy, our partner strategy. We've got our group prospecting strategy and all these things are things that I've heard of people try to do, or that you may have tried to do, but you're not adding 300 doors in a year from just one strategy like some of our clients. You don't have these things dialed in the way that we psychologically dial these things in, so they're super effective. [00:24:24] And so we would love to have some of you join us in that Growth Accelerator that we're doing, and we have a monthly class where we're tackling a major growth engine in the business. And that'll be awesome. You get access to our live events. We're doing one here in October. It's already sold out. Totally sold out already. And we still have-- today's the fifth I'm recording this and it's on the 18th and 19th and it's already sold out. And usually we sell the most tickets, like just in the last week or two before an event. That's pretty typical. But we're already sold out. So we'll just have to plan for a bigger spot and bigger venue the next time. Our next one's going to be in May, people. So make sure you are ready for that and you get your tickets early for that. But we sold out. And so we've got the live in-person events. We also have organized our mastermind into tribes. These are like groups of friends where you get to connect with people. We have a monthly tribe meeting that you get in your, with your tribe and at the events you get to go out to lunch and hang out with your tribe. People love the tribes, and it's really cool. So we've got these small groups we call tribes and we named them all gemstones. We've got like tanzanite and sapphire and ruby and amethyst and whatever. We've got these different tribes for our roughly a hundred businesses. And we've divided them up into like five tribes. So we've got these tribes.  [00:25:38] Also, we have planning meetings where we're going through and doing better than EOS, DoorGrow OS-style planning, and we're building out the planning operating system cadence. We're doing your annual planning with you, quarterly planning, monthly planning, etc. and helping you to have strong momentum and clarity on your team. That alone helped me grow my business 300% in a year, people. 300% in a year, just adding that in. And I've worked with the best in the industry when it comes to that stuff, and I've built a system that I believe is the best on the market and we call it DoorGrow OS, which is a culmination of the stuff that I've learned around that. So that's just some of what we're doing. Then we have our Super System. So the Super System is for those that don't need to add doors anymore. You've built that. Like that's a very solvable and easy to solve problem, I really believe, and we can solve that for our clients and create that pain like our client I was telling you about earlier on today's call. He's had so much growth that it's painful. So the next thing is building out the systems and you need six major systems. [00:26:39] So this is our Super System. It's like the system of systems getting all these systems in place. And each system is probably going to be about a quarter, so about three months, 90 days, to build out a really solid system. We're talking a fully robust process, documentation system, a fully robust planning and accountability system in your business, and financial system in your business, etc. So we've got all these systems that we're going to be building out as part of that, and once you have these systems in place, you'll have a business that you can scale. And our goal is that over the next five years that we're building seven figure businesses that can do seven figure exits. We're building these businesses that can get seven figure exits if they want to, but hopefully because they're in alignment with their dream business and their dream role in the business, and the four reasons that they don't want to, but you have that freedom and that option because the path is the same. So this is kind of our Built to Sell or our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind that we are focused on. So those are some of the cool things that are in the program. Hopefully that gets some of you pumped up and excited. And our program is really affordable. I mean, I'm not going to say it's cheap, but it's less than it would cost you a team member. On a monthly basis, and it's more value.  [00:27:54] So our goal is to be your cheapest team member that makes you the most money. And you don't just get me. You don't just get a brilliant operator, Sarah, COO and coach, or our client success manager, Ashlee, you're also getting access to other experts in the industry that we're bringing into this mastermind, and you get access to all of other clients that are playing a different game than most property managers. They're winning property managers and you need to be hanging out with winning property managers. You need them in your tribe. You need to be in like a tribe like the Tanzanite Tribe. You need to be winning with other winning property managers, so you are not that comfortable property manager. There's a lot of comfortable property managers, and you may not even be connected to any property managers, but you need to be connected to some winning ones, definitely not the comfortable ones. [00:28:39] So if any of this is interesting to you, reach out, send me a dm. If you're seeing this on my social media, just message me and say, "Hey, Jason." I might notice it because there's a lot of social media platforms I'm on that you may see this on send me a DM. You can send me a DM on Instagram @kingjasonhull. You can send us a DM on DoorGrow, which is @DoorGrow on Instagram, DoorGrow. And you can just go to DoorGrow.com and reach out to our team through the chat or schedule a call with us, whatever it takes. You know, get on a call with us and my team and we will help you figure out if we can help you grow and become a winning property management entrepreneur in your own business. [00:29:17] That's it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  [00:29:21] 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!  [00:29:48] 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.