#DoorGrowShow - Property Management Growth

DGS 101: Take Confusion Out of Property Management with the Proper App 0

Transcript

Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.

DoorGrow hackers are those that love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show.

My guest today is Tony LeBlanc from Canada. Welcome Tony, how are you doing?

Tony: Hey man, I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me.

Jason: I'm really excited to have you on the show. You've been on before a long time ago and I was telling you in the green room before the show, but I think we resonate with a lot of similar values. I think we're both growth-minded people. I read your Doorpreneur book, which everybody should take a look at. And I think we have a similar mindset that growth doesn't happen by accident and personal growth is the gateway to business growth. I think we probably would both agree.

Tony: Absolutely.

Jason: I posted about this just the other day. I think it's the last thing that everybody wants to pay attention to in their business, is themselves. They’ll focus on everything external. “I need more leads. I need this. I need this.” Ironically, if I could change the person or get them clear on themselves, then all of those things end up changing by default, everything. Website marketing, everything into changing by default if you focus on yourself first.

Tony give people a little bit of background. Maybe those that had heard you before, bring them up-to-date. Tell us a little bit about who Tony is.

Tony: Sure, thanks Jason. I said my name's Tony LeBlanc from eastern Canada. Born and raised out here. I am a second generation property manager. It wasn't my first career of choice. I actually got into it as my second career. My first career was a 15-year stint as a software engineer with IBM which provided me an amazing experience visiting the world and working with a lot of great people in that domain.

I'm a tech geek at heart. I love technology and I don't think that'll ever go away. It’s been interesting to bring that into the property management world, because as everybody knows, technology in the property management space is still not, in my opinion, where it should be. I still think we’re 5-10 years behind some of the stuff that we should have out there available to us. I still find it very difficult to run my business with the standard property management software that they have out there.

After I left IBM, I started my management company which had been running out for about 10 years, called Ground Floor Property Management. We have been very well-received in our community. We now have three locations and I am now an author. I've basically taken everything that I've learnt from IBM, from life, and from the last 10 years of growing my property management company as well as the spin offs that we've created over the years, and that's where I am today, introducing the doorpreneur way.

Jason: Perfect. The title of the show is the Keys to Debunking the Rent Roll Paradox. What is the rent roll paradox?

Tony: The rent roll paradox is the fact that most, if not all property management companies out there, are constantly relying on getting new doors to grow their business. I believe there's a different way. I believe there is a much better way than doing that. And I say that from experience. For the first five years of running Ground Floor, my property management company, I was nothing but a door chaser. I just wanted to grow, grow, grow, grow. That's all I cared about. I just wanted to be introduced to new people, close deals, and get more doors.

We got to the point to where we reached almost 2000 doors in five years. That’s across three locations. It was fast, it was intense, and it was incredibly painful. Incredibly painful. Now that I've gotten into the second five-year phase of the management journey, I've learned a lot looking back, and I realized that as I was going through that growth phase, I'm just adding more doors, and more doors, and more doors. I was causing a lot of havoc and stress on myself and my staff, but I was leaving an incredible amount of money on the table because of inefficiencies.

If anybody's growing a property management company, when you're getting doors pouring in—we do multi-rise mostly, not just single family—it's a lot of work. We've onboarded 50, 60, 124 unit buildings, and it consumes you for a period of time. If you don't give the proper amount of space in between those growth, it becomes rough, but you don't want to take your foot off the gas if you're like me.

Jason: Yeah, so let's touch on this real quick. I tell people this all the time. If somebody calls me and they say, “I am thinking of starting a property management business,” I say, “Do you want me to talk you into it or out of it?” because I get to see inside hundreds of companies. They usually laugh, but they usually stay into it. The thing is, this property management is easily death by a thousand cuts.

Tony: Absolutely.

Jason: If you have one little problem with one door and then you have a thousand doors, you have thousands of those problems over and over again. That's why it's so critical to shore up some of these leaks early on, because if you're having problems now and you feel like it's stressful now, just adding more doors is throwing gasoline on whatever fire you have. If that fire is a bad fire, then it's just going to explode. It’s going to be worse. Customer service goes down. You have more complaints and it compounds.

Usually, they have to make significant changes just to go from 50-60 units under management to break past that first sand trap—I call 50-60 door the solopreneur sand trap—to break 100 doors. Just to do that, they have to change everything. Ironically, I’ll real estate companies that are doing property management on the side, break past that barrier artificially without making the necessary changes. They don't get technology in place, they don’t get systems in place, and it will pass it.

One of my case studies was a client that had 600 units under management, single family, and was making $0 in this business. I said, “How are you doing that?” he’s like, “I've $3 million a month in real estate every month or whatever. I'm doing real estate.” Property management can be death by a thousand cuts.

You have this pain, but you have growth and I'm sure a lot of people are like, “I would love that problem. I would love the problem to deal with, to figure out how to get 2000 doors and quit crying,” so tell us a little bit about your experience after that.

Tony: One of the big things was expanding into different territories. Our headquarters, which is my main office, we’re doing extremely well. We then split off to another city within an hour-and-a-half away, and that ended up going well. The third location came in and that started off really well, but then about a year later, we started looking at all three locations individually, and we started seeing a lot of gaps, and a lot of issues that we're struggling with.

We made a conscious effort to obviously fix a lot of those things and it made us really pull the curtain back and look at the overall business as it sat. The bigger we got and the more geographically dispersed that we became, we started seeing a lot of opportunities that we were just not taking advantage of. When I started the management company 10 years ago, I had maintenance as part of the division. That's the way my mother did it and that's the way I wanted to do it.

I always wanted to have my own maintenance guys on my payroll so that I can control that and we still do that to this day. What really became evident as we're studying and looking at our rent rolls across all three locations, was the amount of money that was being spent outside in terms of different trades, different services that were required on all these properties. To be quite honest with you, I was getting tired of chasing doors. It wasn't as enticing anymore. Don't get me wrong, we still grow, we still love getting new doors, but something had changed in me.

Then we were really started looking at what can we do beyond just getting more doors and that's really when the whole doorpreneur philosophy was born. Our first pivot into a new business that serviced our portfolios was landscaping [...] and that's where everything grew from there.

Jason: Here's an obvious question. Would you rather have two doors that are making the same amount or one door that's making the same amount as two?

Tony: Definitely one. Absolutely.

Jason: Absolutely. If the goal is revenue, the goal is profit, and it's not just about adding doors. Everyone focuses on that one multiplier, it is doors. Everyone's trying to get a deal and it's like one deal per door. What if you can get multiple doors per deal? What if you can get multiple years per door? What about duration? There's all these other factors they’re not paying attention to. There are some property managers out there that are replacing every door every year. They're usually about 50-60 units, they're getting on an accidental investor that leaves every year, they have to replace every damn door every year, and they're like, “We’re adding doors, why aren’t we growing?” It seems so obvious.

Tony: The major shift for us has been quality over quantity. I say no to more doors today than I ever have in my 10-year career running this company. It's really all about where can we take this? Where can we take that door and what can it do in the long term?

Jason: Yeah. I think a property management company’s growth will always be defined by the doors that they're willing to turn down, not the doors they're able to get on for sure. I think another thing going back to your rent roll paradox, you talked about expanding into locations. I think that's a go-to once a company hits a certain size, they're like, “We did it here, let's go here.” They just had me speak on this at the Ironman conference on a panel and I call that, premature expansion. Anything premature is generally not a good thing.

A lot of people think, “Well, we did this here, we're hitting a cap in our door account, so instead of expanding our revenue opportunities with those doors, or here, or figuring out other ways to hit different parts of the market here, let's just go find a new market. We’ll do it all over again,” they don't realize it's worse than being twice as hard in starting a new location.

Tony: 100%. The stories that I can tell you about the two locations that we can open. It all comes back to a fundamental need of chasing doors. It’s like that's all you're able to see. We got this tunnel vision. It's like, “Okay, I've grown here and I think I'm as big as I can get. Where else can I go and chase more doors?” It's fulfilling for the first little while. It's fun, it’s exciting, but there's an emptiness to it in the end.

I think I'm a little bit different than maybe probably a lot of traditional type property managers. I knew when I started Ground Floor that it was going to be something much bigger than just a property management company. I had that vision 10-15 years ago and just running after doors, it lasted for 3-4 years and then I was like, “Okay, what's next? Is this it? What else can I do in here?” That's when a lot of other things started coming along.

Jason: I think that's common for every entrepreneur in the entrepreneurial journey. If they really are an entrepreneurial-minded person, they're going to hit this stagnation or this desire for more. The desire to do more. Sometimes that goes south and they do it in negative or dysfunctional ways. I started out just doing websites. Then I go like, “Hey, I could make residual income if I'm doing the hosting for these websites. I could do this. They also need the service.”

I think as entrepreneurs, we also get distracted by opportunity. We see it everywhere and it keeps us sometimes from even achieving the goal we're working on right now. How do you find that balance between seeing all the opportunity and expanding into new areas, but making sure that you're actually getting stuff done?

Tony: I'll be honest with you. The first couple of years, I was so focused. I had my head down so bad in terms of just getting the doors and growing my local office, that it was so busy and it was all so fast that I didn't have time to look at anything else. It's when I get a little bit of breathing room that I started looking at the different locations. I don't necessarily regret it, but I probably would have thought about it a little bit longer before I need the jump.

If I look at myself now, it really comes down to being disciplined and a lot of good habits. Like I said, I say no to more business today than I ever have. I am 100% focused. Property management is my life. If it's not in property management or in my sphere, I'm not interested. I don't have time for it, I don't make time for it, and I'm very blunt with that. I have an extremely tough schedule that I follow. I do a lot of stuff for myself personally, and then that translates over to the business side. I know where I'm going.

It's kind of fun to where you'll have other guys or people that'll come in and say, “I got these cool opportunities, I got this, I got this,” I'm like, “Cool, good for you. I hope it works.” Me? I'm not interested. I got my path and I know what I'm doing.

Jason: Yeah. I did hit up for opportunities all the time. Different property management there's like, “Hey, we could do this cool thing together.” I’m like, “No, we can't.” Focus is power like with anything. You could be a flood light or you could be a laser and actually cut something out in your life and achieve something.

All right. Can we touch on your book a little bit? I read through it. I think there's some interesting ideas in there. I don't know where we should start, but you've got this book, you call it The Doorpreneur: Property Management Beyond the Rent Roll. It's a quick read. I think it's a good read. You share a little bit of your journey and some of the things you've gone through. I think we've done some similar things. I'm going to quote a part of it. It says, “We are the problem and we are the solution.”

You were talking about how property management had a bad rep because we're allowing it to. I think that's the case. Everyone who’s heard of me, if they listen to my show at all, talk about the cycle of suck. If you haven't, just google “Property Management Cycle of Suck” and you'll find an old video I did on it. I think that the industry as a whole is that's where they are. It's caught in the cycle of suck. It has a bad reputation because everyone's taking on bad owners, and they're taking on bad properties, and they're not being picky, and they feel all the scarcity. Everybody's trying to do the same stuff that's not working which creates false scarcity in the industry and there's no scarcity in property management.

You said that you believe the industry's time has come. What do you see for this industry? You say it's on the brink of change. I feel that, too. I feel like there's a shift going on right now. I'm hoping that DoorGrow is helping to push that forward. What do you see for the future of property management?

Tony: Just over the last few years, I would say probably in the last 4-5 years, I will say that you’ve had a part in this in terms of, you're starting to see a lot more people get together and talk about property management, and not just NARPM. I know that’s a big organization in the States, but in order for an industry to really take over, I believe it's got to go beyond just the regulation of the groups that are that are like that.

It's exciting to see a lot of that happening, whether if it's groups online or different organizations, all sorts of cool stuff. But I'm also seeing that the opportunities that are becoming present in all these different places are becoming much more attractive to different people. It's like you're seeing the density being built in a lot of different cities—the rise of renting out in this whole generation of millennials—in terms of it being a renter's nation. That is providing a good foundation for a lot of required property managers to come out here and start managing these properties.

The tools are getting better. They're not amazing yet, and I'm speaking in terms of technology. Those things are getting better over time. But more and more, I'm seeing the property management is getting away from the old school that started in the business 30, 40, 50 years ago, and you're seeing a new breed of property management come into the picture, which is they’re a lot more professional, they're running real businesses, it's not just a side gig from a realtor, or it's not just this big owner that owns a big portfolio and he decided to manage a few places on the side so he can make a few bucks and pay for him running his own stuff.

They're seeing legitimate people, business people coming into the space and making a run at it, and that's what we need. We need professionals coming in and we need professionally-run businesses. More than ever today, I'm seeing and talking to a lot of people that are running greater businesses and it's exciting, because I think the opportunity is huge.

But it's also at the same time somewhat limited because I know I've done this long enough. I've been around it my entire life. This business is tough. It is not for everybody. We're going to have the turnover that's going to come through and hopefully the good will stick and make the business better for everybody. Better first impression of the business, better for us working in the industry, being able to grow together, and making it all better together.

Jason: Yeah. I think that the way to change the industry is obviously to have healthy businesses. Healthy business owners in this industry, leading the way, and they have to be profitable. I think also there's a huge opportunity right now in that, millennials are the workforce largely. I think a lot of people, they’ve gotten a bad rep. A lot of people think they're lazy, they’re unmotivated, and I find that to be patently false. I think millennials are our new generation of workers that don't want to do menial work.

They don't want to do something without meaning. I think this is a huge opportunity for business owners that are not acting like dinosaurs saying, “I'm paying you to do something so just freaking do it.” Those are the dinosaur dictators that think, “Well, I give them money. Why don't they just do everything amazingly?” Millennials want purpose and I think there's an opportunity now for business owners that believe they have a purpose, that there's a greater vision for what they do.

You touched on that in your book. I talked quite a bit about that as well. People have heard me say, “I believe good property management can change the world. It can have a significant impact. We’re affecting families. We’re affecting lives.” I could have that impact through my clients, which is what gets me excited about showing up helping property management business owners lead the way and do good work. They can't do that if they're struggling.

Tony: Yeah. The biggest aha moment I've had in my career with Ground Floor, my management company, was four years ago. We had an offsite meeting with all my staff. We’re about 50 people with all 3-4 different companies. I was looking at the rent roll, I showed it to everybody on the big screen, and I'm like, “We've got 2000 apartments,” roughly it was right around there, that we're almost full all the time, “and if I take an average, we’ll probably have around 3000-3500 people that live in properties that we take care of. Guys, we matter. You cannot not look at that and how important of a role we play in day-to-day life for close to 4000 people.” I'm like, “That's pretty special.”

Like I explained in the book, we’re a part of all sorts of experiences for these people. We've seen deaths, we've seen births, we've seen marriages, we've seen plenty of divorces, we've seen it all. It happens underneath our roofs. Again, I grew up in the business, I've seen it all from a personal standpoint, and now I've seen it all from running a business. There are no ifs or ands about it. It's a special business.

Jason: All of those different situations require some activity or involvement with the property manager. I mean, even if it's just maintaining the property and doing some maintenance, it's affecting these families lives, and it's affecting these sometimes challenging moments that they're going through. Those interactions can be positive, helpful interactions, or it can deepen their words, they can cause more pain, and the ripple effect property managers have is huge. Property management is death by a thousand cuts. It also can be a ripple effect of a thousand possible positive interactions on a regular basis.

I know property management can be tough. I hear about it all the time. I know how difficult it can be to run a business. I know that. Every entrepreneur knows that. It doesn't get easier the bigger you get, often. It can sometimes get more challenging. But it makes it worth it when you have somebody that comes to you and says, “Hey, you made my life better,” or, “You had an impact,” and those little moments we don't always hear about them, but when they do come through, they do. That’s why we do what we do.

Tony: Yeah. I think a lot of property managers will be able to agree with me, that there's an old saying that the phone never rings with good news in our business. If someone’s calling, it's usually something bad on the other line. It’s either a complaint, or an issue, or something. It’s almost like you have to come into the office each day knowing that you may not get a million praises from the outside, and that's why the office environment is sacred for you and your staff, for the people running the business.

I just hired a new girl a few weeks ago and I'm very honest and transparent during our interview. I was like, “You're new to this industry and you are going to struggle. It’s going to be really tough. It’s going to test you emotionally. It’s going to test your ability to deal with a million things going on at the same time, it's going to test you in every way possible.” I asked her the other day, she’s going on her third week and she's like, “I knew it was going to be tough, but I didn't think there would be so much that I had to learn,” but the office environment is such a way that we're very much a team, we help each other out, we have each other's backs. If there's a difficult situation, other people step in. You really have to have that environment because it can really help the overall business. If not, it can get in get a little lonely.

Jason: Yeah. The turnover in property management businesses regarding staff can be pretty high. I think one way to mitigate that is what you're talking about, it's creating a really positive culture, a safe place within the business, a place in which your team members are allowed to make mistakes, they're allowed to screw up, and they're allowed to figure things out. Otherwise, they start hiding stuff.

Tony: And start costing you money. Bad mistake.

Jason: I think it's important to realize, a lot of times in any business, the people that are really attacking or really causing you grief, are hurt people. They're hurting on the inside. It's not even really usually about you. We were talking about before the show how I've been really attacked lately in some forums and some groups. I have several people messaging me privately and lots of people that message me like, “Hey Jason, you don’t deserve this, you’ve done a lot for us,” and it's ironic because in property management, we deal with this.

Everybody gets these negative reviews. They feel unjust and unfair, they didn’t give the deposit back which rightly so probably, you're being attacked, and these people have nothing better to do than just try to destroy your business. That's just part of being in business, I think. In general, you're always going to have haters. The bigger you get, the bigger the target is on your back. You just have more people that you're dealing with.

I definitely got a target. You dealing with 4000 maybe potential constituents connected to your business that you're impacting, all the owners, all the renters, everything, you have a big target, Tony, on your back.

Tony: Yeah. It's overwhelming in the best of days. That’s probably one of the, I would say, either the first or the second biggest problem overall arching in this industry is how do you deal with the overwhelm of dealing with so many different things. If we were to count all the different balls that we’re juggling in the area at any given time as an owner even as a property manager, it's a lot. That's why I've gone to the depths that I did with the book in terms of putting the importance on lifestyle, in terms of installing good habits, in terms of being healthy, working out, just simple things because if you're going to go in this industry and you're going to make a run at it, you got to be firing on all cylinders.

A big part of that is your body, your relationships at home, your relationships with your kids. You got to go into the office with a clear mindset. If not, it's going to be rough. I've walked in the holes in my office on many days after either having an argument with one of my kids or having an argument with my queen and that's like, “I can't do anything in here. I have zero patience and I just want everybody to stay away from me.” That's not a way to run a business.

Jason: That's how I would feel if I'm hungry. That's how I would feel if I didn't get enough sleep the night before. We tend to start externalizing these challenges. That's why even people coming to my program they're like, “Well, I wanted to grow my business, why are you having me focus on some of the silly stuff like drinking water?” I get picked on about some of those things but I know the impact that it's had on my own life to get the basics in place and have that foundation so that you can tackle the world. We have one vehicle in which we approach everything in life and that's our body.

Tony: Yeah, absolutely.

Jason: Our current ability distinct cognitively, to function, to be able to deal with stress, be able to see objectively, to be able to handle all the stuff that gets thrown out as a business, to be able to see alternatives and ideas, all of it has to do with our brain and being able to function on all four cylinders or however many you might have.

Tony: Absolutely. I'm a true believer. I've always been an athletic guy. 2019, I've taken it up a notch and done some other things.

Jason: I've noticed.

Tony: Yeah. It's funny because 8½ months getting ready for an Ironman, I made more money in that eight months than I probably did in the last two years by just condensing the amount of time that I had and the focus that was required to do it, and to pull it off. I still look back at it and like, “How did I do that?” and I'm still digesting it all because it’s still fairly new, but it's taught me so many lessons that I'm going to be able to take forth with the new stuff that I'm doing.

The very first video that I made to get ready for my Ironman training and it was January or February, it's like I'm doing this because I need to become somebody different in order to launch this book, to write this book, to finish this book, and to grow beyond the book. It was amazing. It was a journey like I can't explain

Jason: I’ll point out one thing that's very obvious to me because I've seen it in you, I've seen it in a hundreds of entrepreneurs. When we create constraints, when we have constraints, when we're limited in our time or limited in our attention, we innovate. That's when our brain starts to really fire and we get really, really creative.

It's the same thing with our team members. If you give them unlimited time to do something and unlimited resources and money to do something, they're going to do it in the most costly, time-sucky way possible. But when you create constraints and having a goal of doing something big like an Ironman, where you're going to put your body to some massive stress, you have to be prepared for that, and you know what it's actually going to take, then it gets really difficult and it creates constraint.

I'll point out to everybody. I've seen this in lots and lots of businesses and I've seen in my own life when we have constraints. You don’t notice, you come up with ideas when money get scarce. When you have a team member leave, all of a sudden, you're changing things that they've been doing a status quo forever. A lot of these challenges that we perceive as challenges really are opportunities for us to innovate and to grow and to change.

I'm not sure if Tony will make it back here, but I'm sure Tony would love for you guys to reach out. Tony, I'm going to plug you. He's got his book, Doorpreneur, and I recommend you check that out. You can go to doorpreneur.com You can preorder it now. Make sure you get his book. Check it out. I think there's some really great value. It's a quick read, it’s only 125 pages, and I think you'll really enjoy it. He's got some previews of the first four chapters on his site doorpreneur.com and it looks like you'll be able to get it on Amazon and in some other places.

We'll go ahead and wrap this up. So if you are property management entrepreneur, and you are wanting to add doors, and you are wanting to get your business in alignment, and you are wanting to create that space for yourself, you feel like you're the hamster on the treadmill, then reach out. You can check us out at doorgrow.com.

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Oct 22, 2019

From surfing waves to making waves by fixing exploding toilets for tenants—how an entrepreneur and creative technologist leveraged design to streamline simple solutions.

Today, I am talking to Mark Rojas, CEO and founder of the Proper app that streamlines the building repairs process. Mark has spent his career creating positive user experiences and adding value by solving problems related to efficiency and human connectivity.

You’ll Learn...

[04:40] Definition of Design: Viewing how something works in the real world and creating a corresponding experience to make your life easier and more enjoyable.

[05:34] Proper app idea originated with possibility of becoming an accidental landllord.

[07:13] Maintenance is the bain of their existence. There’s got to be a better way to fix building repairs process and problems.

[09:30] Maintenance is more than one issue. It involves many problems for many people.

[10:10] Lack of Communication: Leverage “chat room” to create efficient and effective dialogue between contractors, property managers, and tenants.

[13:07] What makes Proper different? Visibility and shared platform for centralized communication between all participating people and places.

[14:50] Building Repairs Process: Submit image, describe problem, create work order, send notifications, add contractors, diagnosis issue, complete fix, submit/pay invoice.

[19:50] Property Management Platforms: Proper’s integration and import/export plans for increased visibility for systematic way to save time and money while simplifying lives.

[22:42] Common Questions and Concerns: Is Proper app intuitive? Is training provided?

[28:15] Future Feature: Email integration and aggregation to avoid duplicate data.

Tweetables

Every elegant solution involves some element of intelligent design.

Design isn’t all about pixels. It’s applied via various mediums by viewing how something works in the real world.

Maintenance is the bain of a property manager’s existence.

First Step with Proper App: A picture is worth a 1,000 words, so describe the problem succinctly.

Resources

Proper

Mark Rojas on LinkedIn

DGS 100: Jason Hull on the Cashflow Diary 0

Transcript

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.

Today’s guest, I’m hanging out with Mark Rojas. Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark: Hey, it’s good to see you again.

Jason: Mark is coming to us from a company called Proper Chat, correct?

Mark: That’s correct.

Jason: Mark, I’ll read a little bit of your bio. It says you are the CEO and founder and it says, “While you might not think of hiring a designer to fix an exploding toilet, Mark Rojas still might be the man for the job. From starting his own surfboard manufacturing company at 16 to founding multiple tech companies focused on creating positive user experiences, Mark has spent his career working to add value by solving problems of efficiency, and human connectivity.

An entrepreneur and creative technologist from Queens, Mark is the founder and CEO of Proper, an app designed to streamline the building repairs process.

He first began befriending property managers while producing the Venice Art Crawl, a passion project that transformed vacant properties into temporary art showrooms (aka fun, free open houses). Shortly thereafter while subletting his apartment in 2017, Mark was blessed with the invigorating experience of needing to manage repairs for a bathroom explosion involving multiple tenants.”

Why don’t you take us from there?

Mark: That’s a good intro.

Jason: I’ll let you tell the rest of the story. How did you get into this from surfboards?

Mark: Surfboards was a little I went to when I was 16 years old, but that did throw me into design and ultimately product design. Right after college, my career quickly became into web development, app development, and working with a lot of startups here in the Bay Area, which is where we’re based out of, to leverage design to solve water problems. It came with the advent of mobile, really becoming this fast-growing platform, where your everyday user now is expecting this very seamless experience that is solving various problems we’re on.

That transitioned from building a product, starting a company, and then continuing to wanting to build products for others. I think one of those things that continues to be a passion of mine is finding a problem and leveraging design to simplify, streamline it, and make everyone’s life better.

Jason: I love it. That’s entrepreneurism in a nutshell. We see a problem and we’re crazy enough to think we can solve that problem. We can make money solving that problem and create a win-win. You love that you say that you focus on doing it through design because really, every elegant solution involves some sort of intelligent design, whether it’s a system, whether it’s something visual. People think design, they think it’s like graphic design or something creative.

Mark: Yeah. I don’t think of design as just pixels. There’s various mediums through which one can apply design. It’s really viewing how something works in the real world and seeing how can you create a corresponding experience that can streamline it, that can make it simpler, that can make it more delightful, more efficient, and really give you a lot of your life back, whether that’s time or even just joy.

Jason: What problem then did you really see that you’re like, “I’m going to create Proper”? Let’s try to build this problem up.

Mark: I’ve seen a lot of different thoughts to my life in being a tenant, but it really became a problem for me when I almost became an accidental landlord. I was traveling for an extended period of time, I have known my landlord for a while, and she was happy to actually let me sublet it. It’s like, “It’s okay. Go off, I trust you, and when you come back, it’s all good.”

But there’s still a level of responsibility that was pressed upon me. As I rented out my apartment, I quickly realized that I have become a landlord. So, two days into it, the subtenant called me to let me know that there was a major problem. I was like, “What? What’s going on?” It turned out that the pipe above our ceiling under our neighbor’s bathroom had burst.

To say the least, it’s quite a mess. This set up a flurry of emails, phone calls, text messages between the tenant and myself, the property owner, neighbors, contractors, plumbers, et cetera, and it was happening over phone calls, emails, text messages, WhatsApp calls, FaceTime calls. At some point, I was like, “Wow, this is rather ridiculous,” and my design mind immediately started thinking...

Jason: Broken. This is flawed. There’s got to be a better way than this.

Mark: Yeah. My wheels are just spinning and spinning and spinning, and I started designing it in my brain. Then, one day I just whipped it out of my computer, I just mocked it up, and I was like, “I’m going to build this.”

I started building it and I think one thing that’s true then and now, and even more true now, is we spend a lot of time talking to our users and our customers, and really dissecting their problems or processes. I immediately started doing calls with property managers that I already knew.

As you saw in my bio, I knew a lot of property managers. When I started the Venice Art Crawl, which is a crowd-sourced art event, we have 40 different art shows going on at the same time in Venice beach. The way I did it was I found vacant spaces, [...] the property managers and basically said, “I know I can bring high net worth individuals to these empty spaces and we can treat it almost as an open house.”

That worked not only well—I was creating value for them—they all basically love me. When I started working on this idea, they were happy to talk to me for hours at a time. What I found is that maintenance is almost the bane of their existence.

Jason: Oh yeah. We did a survey inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group—property managers listening, you should be in there if you have a property management business—and we asked—just an informal poll in the Facebook group—“What’s your number one challenge in your business?”

There were two or three items at the top of the list that were connected to maintenance. It was sourcing vendors, it was maintenance coordination. Maintenance is the biggest headache or challenge in property management.

Mark: Yeah. It’s very painful to the point that I actually thought that I was becoming a therapist. Sometimes, they would talk to me for three hours at a time just talking about it, and I was like, “Wow, this is a very real problem.”

I was able to take those learnings and turned it into a product that corresponded with it. What started off was really just a project. I didn’t think, “Oh, I’m going to become a billionaire off of this. This is my next big thing.” This is more, I was traveling, I wanted to start building a product, and I wanted it to not be something that I built in bane, but rather, to possibly solve someone’s problem.

Initially, it was my problem, and when I talked to property managers, they actually laughed at me because I was building an app already and only dealing with a monthly maintenance issue, while they’re dealing with hundreds a month, if not more.

Jason: Right. You’re building an app for one maintenance issue.

Mark: Yeah, so talking to them totally validated that this is something worth pursuing. Then, I just went deeper. I kept talking to them. I started talking to the contractors, the tenants, and I realized that this is a problem on all sides of the equation and set out to start building a solution that could solve a lot of the issues with it.

I think a lot of my history in design has been focused on communication, really making it richer and removing barriers. Essentially, a lot of friction and a lot of time wasted happens when poor communication happens. That’s why it’s proper.chat and leveraging chat as a platform to remove a lot of the bottlenecks that happen, like playing Whac-A-Mole between an email for this contractor, phone call for that tenant, and really starting to centralize everything where we could remove those bottlenecks and with the oversight of the property manager, the contractor and the tenant can speak with each other. Anything from scheduling, updates, “Hey, I got to go to Home Depot and get this part. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

In the world today, the tenant would know. Three days could pass and that creates frustration and friction for the tenant because they don’t know what’s going on, and that means another phone call to the property manager.

Jason: Right. Communication in a business, for any business, causes a challenge; internal communication. For a while, as I was growing from solopreneur to building a team, I have freelancers. I thought this was so great because I only have to pay them when there’s work. “Here’s the job, do this work.” But the challenge with that is the communication level was just not strong enough. I didn’t realize that until I started getting full-time employees. The communication level is dramatically different when you have somebody that’s dedicated because you’re reducing the number of people that you need. That person is giving more of their time.

Two people that are doing 10 hours a week versus 1 person that’s doing 20 hours a week, I would take the one person any day of the week, especially if those two have to communicate. The communication back-and-forth wastes so much time, and there’s always a percentage of loss when there’s any sort of communication. If there’s communication between two parties, there are gaps. There just always is. It could be a misread and body language. It could be somebody doesn’t understand something. Somebody’s a poor communicator. There’s some sort of flaw. The more you can reduce that, the less friction there is.

One of my recent hires was one of these unicorns that can do web development and design. The communication level is way shorter. He can get things done in such a short time. Normally, I want a specialist, but he’s able to create something so much quicker because he’s not having the communicate and negotiate between another party that doesn’t understand what they do. A developer and a designer are two different universes, right?

Mark: Absolutely, yeah.

Jason: [...] crazy guys setting you both. So, I get it. Explain how this helps reduce the communication and why is this better than the other stuff that’s out there, what other people have been doing? What’s unique about Proper that you’re noticing?

Mark: A lot of it comes down to visibility and a shared placed for everyone involved with the maintenance, to communicate with each other. Where we really differentiate is that we started on mobile. We’re a mobile-first solution. We do have a desktop and a web experience for the property manager.

In terms of being able to report, what we notice from a lot of property managers, whether they have Yardi, AppFolio, you’re still getting these maintenance requests from many different places. You’re getting from phone calls, emails, text messages. What we set out to build and we’re building right now is one place I can centralize all that. Not only centralize it but make it a more useful format. When someone writes you a three-paragraph email, a lot of it is frustration.

Jason: Right. There’s all this emotion and they want you to understand their pain. They’re like, “I got to relate this. I got to paint this picture.”

Mark: Exactly, and part of it is because they’ve waited too long to write this email. This frustration has built up and they want to write this email. With our application, which is native, you as a tenant are able to create a work order very quickly, and it’s very visual.

An image is worth a thousand words and it really is in this area. Often, these emails don’t even include images, so a tenant is able to quickly snap a photo, almost like Snapchat or Instagram. You don’t train anyone. There’s literally billions of users on these apps who know how to use this and they’re able to create a work order in under 30 seconds.

The format is not to write paragraphs and paragraphs. It’s to be succinct, 140–200 characters max and you choose a category. This gets fired off to the property manager, you get a notification on your phone or on your desktop, and then from there you have your contractors that you can add this this conversation.

The idea is that it turns into a group chat at this point, with the property manager still being involved. Instead of trying to get back and forth between scheduling, instead of the contractor having to ask questions to the property manager to then go ask the tenant to further diagnose what’s broken, the contractor’s able to immediately see what’s broken because there’s always going to be a picture. We pretty much make that almost mandatory for the tenants.

What we’ve seen from contractors is that they’re able to save time and cost by more quickly able to diagnose where the problem is, what tools to bring, what materials to bring. Everything just happens there. The property manager is still part of the process, but they don’t need to insert themselves. When they insert themselves now, it really takes up a lot of their time. Not only because they have to go back and forth, but often they’re fielding phone calls, they’re fielding emails, and then this really, really adds up.

Jason: I love that it’s prompting them to take a picture.

Mark: Yeah. The first step is to create a work order, take a picture. That’s the first thing.

Jason: And a picture’s worth a thousand words. They’re not going to have to write a thousand words in order to get it across. You can see it and you go, “Okay, you can fluff it up or make it more dramatic, but I can see it. Here it is.” Or they might do the opposite. They might say, “Hey, there’s a problem with the faucet and it’s flooding the whole bathroom.” So, you can see it. They send you a picture.

In a lot of apps, a picture’s an afterthought. They have to do some serious extra work in order to get a photo into something or to do it. I’ve had maintenance companies ask me, “Could you email me a photo?” or, “Can you take a picture so we know what to look for or what type of fixture we need?” whatever. It slows down the communication significantly.

Mark: Totally and I think there are these added benefits that currently property managers don’t have the bandwidth to do. Because of the contractors there, they can easily provide updates themselves like, “Hey, I have this question.” “Hey I have to come back.” Right now, that has to go to the property manager, the property manager then has to tell the tenant, and then often this doesn’t happen. So, you have this built-in benefits of transparency that you have with the tenant that really builds trust, but also stops them from calling you, which once again takes up a lot of your time.

The very nice thing is that at the end, the contractor is able to close up the job by providing proof that they’ve done it. So, they have to take pictures of it. Then, you have these records of the conversations that you have with everyone, the images at the beginning of the job, the images at the end, and it just creates a ton of transparency and documentation that you can have, that’s very easily searchable, filterable later on.

One thing we’re starting to work on is really reporting. You can start to really understand the volume of workers that you’re getting, the stages that they’re at, the amount of time it took to complete it, and really how much time it’s taking up for you.

Jason: It makes a lot of sense. If you can cut out one phone call, you’re probably saving your team, at a minimum, 15–18 minutes of productivity, simply because one interruption in a team member’s day, typically they say, cost about 18 minutes of productivity. Even [...] take 18 minutes, they got to rebuild the house of cards they were working on or go back to whatever project they’re trying to figure out. So, if you can cut down the phone calls significantly, even if you don’t have that large of a portfolio, it’s almost like getting a new team member on your team. It’s that significant. People are really expensive in property management businesses. It’s the highest cost in the PM business.

I know what property managers listening to this are going to be thinking. They’re going to be thinking, “Well, that sounds great, but another piece of technology. How is it going to work with my Buildium, or my AppFolio, or my Propertyware? I got these, they’ve got maintenance requests built into them. How will this work?”

Mark: In terms of the different platforms, there are ones that permit direct integrations and we’re starting to work with building some of those. Then, we’re also building a way for you to be able to easily export, search, and import this data at the end. I think the difference really is that the maintenance offerings that they have don’t create the same level of visibility and don’t save you the amount of time. Even if their integration is not there, the amount of time that we’re currently saving you and that we’re going to continue to increase, really starts to outweigh some of the cons of doing that. That’s the way we’re moving through with all these things.

Jason: Can you tell us who you’re working to start integrating with yet?

Mark: We have a couple of partners, mostly in the Los Angeles area. One has about 1000 units, another 2000 units, and we’re working with both of them. They’re both on different platforms and seeing what’s going to be the most efficient way. It’s not just integration of the maintenance, but also I think what’s really important here is their accounting.

We’re really looking at accounting and how we can start to streamline with that because there is one of the things that we’ve seen with the contractors is a lot of them don’t have a systematic way of not just keeping track of their work orders or invoices, but even just generating invoices, so it takes up a lot of their time. On the property management side, you’re getting all these different types of invoices coming in, totally different formats, and then you’re manually doing double data entry into all these different systems. It’s kind of a pain because it’s like, “Why is it formatted this way?” You have this hurdle that you’re dealing with all these messed-up invoices.

One thing that we’re seeing is there’s the ease of use of our invoice. A lot of the maintenance techs and workers are actually enjoying using it and starting to use it as a way to create a uniform way of generating invoices for their property managers. What we want to do is actually make that very easy to export so you can import so that you can import it into your accounting system.

Jason: Cool. What are the big questions that people ask about this? What are their frequently asked questions, concerns? What are the big questions that they’re asking so that we cover all the bases here?

Mark: There’s quite a few, but I think there’s this very chat-focused, very simple, clean design. There isn’t a lot of other platforms that we’ve seen in the space yet. They’re starting to show up, but really there’s very few. I think a lot of people are like, “Hey, do you provide training? How much is training going to cost?”

Jason: You’re like, “Do you know how to use instant message?”

Mark: No. We don’t want to be sending that at all. We really care about our users, so we offer like, “We’ll train you,” and then the funny thing here is that we do a demo and not for a minute we train them.

Jason: And by the way that demo was the training.

Mark: Yeah. If you know how to use iMessage or any of those things, it’s very intuitive. That’s really the core principle of the company is designing something that is not only beautiful, but it’s extremely easy to use because we don’t think that we should be paying and send somebody out to train you or that you need to hire some expert to use the software.

Jason: All right. I’m going to go to the devil’s advocate on the other side here. It’s so easy, it’s just chat, it’s so simple, why don’t I just sign-up with Intercom or Help Scout and get a chat tool and take tickets? What’s different between those solutions and something like Proper?

Mark: Proper is really geared towards maintenance. Even just the terminology, the flow, the understanding of the whole workflow of maintenance getting done, is what is unique to us. You could theoretically use text messaging to do. The reality is you can start to use that, but then very quickly it breaks down and it becomes cumbersome.

For example, Intercom. There’s no mobile app. There’s no way to really add photos into what’s going on. There’s no way to categorize it into the type of problem that might be related to maintenance. For us, we provide all those things but then, you’re also able to search, filter, and zoom in on a property and be like, “Okay, these are all the work orders. This is how we spent maintenance on this property.” As we move forward and we start to integrate with other systems, that’s something that Intercom would probably not do.

Jason: They’re going to put this chat tool probably on their website, so people coming there if they have maintenance requests, do they hide it like, “Go here for maintenance and then the chat is there”? Or is it [...] and if so, the maintenance coordination is one side, but they also have lead gen that they’re trying to do. They have sales. They’re trying to target owners and capture people with their live chat tools. How do you usually recommend they segregate that or can Proper help up with that other challenge as well?

Mark: Good question. The way the application is working right now is that the live chatting or website, if you’re using something like Intercom, that is something that we’re not providing right now. Essentially, what happens is that property managers will announce that they’re using Proper to their network, share the app, then they’re able to install it, and then start reporting through there. It comes into our web app and mobile app. As a property manager, you can use the app from anywhere, but you could also use it at your desktop. From there, is where to start to field everything.

Jason: So, Proper works more like an internal tool. When you onboard your new tenants, you can say, “Hey, get this. This is how you can communicate with us.” It’s probably not just functioning as the live chat tool that’s capturing leads on the front-end of your business, but you could always take that tool and put links into it or pre-written messages to say, “Oh, it’s a maintenance request. Go here.” [...] Intercom a button that they click, that I’m here for maintenance and it takes them to Proper to take care of that.

Mark: Yeah and one of the really interesting things is that we’re starting to build email integrations, so the initial one that we built is that if you receive an email that’s coming in from a tenant and it’s maintenance-related, we build the Chrome extension where very easily just sends it to Proper and then it turns it into actual work orders. You’re not actually trying to do double data entry there.

The next step of that is making it so that your tenants and contractors don’t have to join Proper. They can submit things via email, but then you have one place where it’s starting to aggregate everything, whether it’s submitted directly to Proper or through another channel like email. That’s one of the really exciting features for these next two months that we’re working on should be out.

Jason: So, that will be similar to Intercom, which you can have a certain email address like maintenance@businessname.com and have that forward those emails into Proper?

Mark: Yeah, it all vacuums it right up and then as it comes in, you’re able to categorize it and make it something that is not mixed with thousands of other’s emails but rather centralized and easy to find just like any of the other maintenance tickets.

Jason: It sounds like it would make sense for them to have some sort of support solution and still use Proper for the maintenance portion for the back-end, and internally with tenants. Very cool. What other questions then do people tend to ask?

Mark: One of the big ones is really that email integration that I just mentioned. That’s essentially what we’ve been doing is tons of user research and starting to find what are the biggest problems. Using that is like having it bubble up to the top and turning it into features that are usable to them.

Jason: One of the challenges in maintenance is the communication between vendor and owner is getting paid, payouts. What if the vendor starts messaging and they’re like, “Hey, property manager, when do I get paid? Here’s my invoice,” and the tenants are seeing this stuff. How do you deal with that?

Mark: I’m glad you asked that because that’s literally the feature we’re rolling out right now. We’re waiting for the upstart to approve and by the way, we’re on iOS, Android, and web. The next thing I told you, we make it really easy for your maintenance staff or techs to create invoices and generate them. We’re actually about to roll out payments where they’re able to get to pay through ACH and really it’s cut out a lot of time for the contractors to generate those invoices or even for the property managers to [...] and all these things which I still see very frequently happening.

Jason: In the app, the contractor maybe see something a little different and they can submit invoice or something like this?

Mark: Yeah. Basically, when the contractor closes up the job, they provide proof that they did it and they’re prompted to create an invoice.

Jason: And one proof would be another photo, something along these lines?

Mark: Yeah. You’re able to add multiple photos as the contractor. This then generates an invoice that the property manager receives. This is a separate view where the tenant is not part of it. They’re not anything around cost, they’re not seeing this. The property manager is actually able to pay via ACH directly to the contractor through the app. There’s no need to go elsewhere and try to cut a check, having anyone pick it up, or mail it, or anything like that.

Jason: So again, it’s reducing a lot of the friction and communication challenges between the property manager or maintenance coordinator and the vendors.

Mark: Yeah. That’s one thing that we’ve seen on both sides of the equation. A lot of property managers are still spending a lot of time just doing payments. On the contractor side, they are spending a lot of time generating invoices. They have a good support, so at the end of the week, they’re tying up all the work that they did. They don’t even necessarily have the good system to keep track of all the jobs that they did.

So, they’re often once again spending this admin time where they’re not actually getting paid to do that. What happens now is that with the invoicing feature, although it’s simple and very intuitive, it actually reduces the amount of time that they’re doing this stuff, they’re able to get paid faster, and they’re able to spend a lot less time worrying about the stuff and actually getting more work done, which means your maintenance is getting done faster, which means your tenants are happier, which means you’re happier as a property manager because you’re hearing less from them.

It’s really an interesting problem because you have these three different groups of people and you’re trying to design the simplest solution that takes into account their unique set of problems.

Jason: If you imagine, what would be the ideal situation so that all three parties could communicate the most efficiently? You would just have all three of them sitting in a room face-to-face talking like, “Hey, you’ll do this. I’ll do this.” “Okay, I’ll pay you then. I’ll do this.” “Okay, team. Ready? Great.” Everybody’s there, it would be fast, but that’s not reality, right?

Mark: Yeah.

Jason: You’re trying to run a business and so is the vendor. The tenant should hopefully has a job and making some money to pay rent. There’s all this stuff going on, we can’t just all hang out, but Proper really creates a room that they can all hang out in and communicate.

Mark: It’s great that you actually put it that way because that’s very much how I think about solving this problem. When you’re in person with sometime, it is the richest form of communication. If it’s a group of people, then the bottlenecks or the walls that exist, that is created through distance, creates all these inefficiencies.

Essentially, that is actually how we think. That is what we want to be able to create these rooms and make this very efficient, yet rich way to communicate with each other, to eliminate a lot of these barriers that are currently costing a lot of time, which includes money, and often just frustration.

One thing that I didn’t mention here is that I spent a whole year working out of a property manager’s office. You can call it extreme customer development and I really understood a lot of their operations and just so much of their time is spent on communication, but because they don’t have good tools for it, it just generates a lot of frustration on each side of it. Assuming that it’s hard to measure, the quality of life when you’re constantly doing frustration just really goes down.

Jason: Yeah. Plus there’s a lot of turn-over. Among the property managers that are working for a property management business owner, it’s very difficult.

Mark: What’s true of us as a company is to improve that quality of life because we know how gruesome the job can be, how hard it can be, how taxing it can be. If you use our app, it’s very colorful. We kind of joke around in the copy and we try to make it not just extremely efficient but fun. We want to make it [...] inject a little bit of fun into it. I don’t think that I see that very much in the space yet, which is one of the things I’m very excited about is that I want to bring that to the space.

Jason: Some of the things I’ve seen in some apps lately that people have been doing to gamify things, which is really funny, that once you complete something or you finish something, you get confetti and balloon noises and stuff like this, like this is a little celebration. So, I’m just going to throw this is a feature request that after a maintenance is completed and somebody marks complete to get […] and they get this little celebration thing. It gives them that dopamine boost to get things done and they feel good about it.

Mark: Oh yeah. That’s actually something that now that we’re starting to mature as a company and we’re getting ahead with the feature set and the road map, that’s something that we actually can bring into it. So, given my part of design background, I also know a lot of animators and illustrators. As you can see, we have a lot of illustrations. We very much want to use those opportunities. When you’ve succeeded at doing something, really just letting you know.

Jason: Even rewarding a tenant for using the system. Instead of calling you, like they submit a ticket and you’re like, “You’ve done it! Good job!” All these little things just create positivity and they add a positive feel to the property management company. The tenants are usually pretty upset if there’s a maintenance request. The vendors are having to deal with that, the property manager. Anywhere you can add a little bit of fun and gamification into an app, I think is [...] world a little bit more fun.

Mark: Yeah. There’s no reason you can’t have fun doing this job. I want to save you time, but like in this, get you to crack a smile a couple of times a day. It’s not just about saving time but it’s about being able to continue to do that job and be happy doing it.

Jason: All right, cool. Mark, I really enjoy having you on the show. One thing that might be cool, it would be after a maintenance request is submitted, if we did an integration with GatherKudos, real super easy, super simple. [...] whether they’re happy or sad.

Mark: I’m totally happy to talk about that.

Jason: All right. That would be cool. It’s really great to have you on. How can people get in touch with Proper? How can do a demo? How can they find out more?

Mark: We actually created a unique link for the show, so if you go to proper.chat/doorgrow, you can definitely learn a little bit about our products and then very easily set-up a demo with us. Again the tool is super easy to use, so we are happy to set-up a demo with you. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes. Once you start seeing the product it becomes very quickly evident how this can start saving you time and also maybe make you smile.

Jason: Awesome. All right, everybody check that out. I appreciate you setting up that link. That’s awesome. Go to proper.chat/doorgrow and check it out. You get a little special perk for being a DoorGrow Show listener. Mark, really grateful for you coming on the show. I love hearing about new technology. I think this sounds really innovative and I think it solves a problem. I think that it will really be beneficial and I’m really excited to see what you guys do in this space and start hearing some feedback from my clients on what they think.

Mark: Yeah. Thanks for giving me time and always a pleasure to talk. I look forward to checking in again soon.

Jason: Cool. Yeah, we’ll be talking again soon. All right, I’ll let Mark out. If you are a property management entrepreneur and you’re looking to add doors, you’ve been struggling, you’re wondering why does it feel like there’s scarcity in an industry and 70% are self-managing. There’s no scarcity in property management right now. There just isn’t, but they’re not looking on Google. You’re going to have some trouble if your whole goal is you have people find you through Google. There are ways to go out and create business and we’re focusing on that.

So, stay tuned with DoorGrow, keep an eye on us, and if you’re wanting to grow your business, if you want to short some of the leaks in your sales pipeline, you want to dial in trust engine, have generate more warm leads and warm business, it’s easier to close and have less conversations about price, price sensitivity, and comparison to other companies, that’s what we do. Reach out and talk to DoorGrow. We’ll be happy to help you add doors to your business, figure out how you can optimize your business for growth and creating trust.

Again, I’m Jason Hull with DoorGrow here on the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you tuning in. Please like and subscribe on whichever channel your hearing this on, whether it’s YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, whatever. Stay plugged in and make sure you get inside our DoorGrow Club Facebook group where we are putting out discontent. We have an awesome community of DoorGrow hackers like you. So, check it out doorgrowclub.com. That’s all for today, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com.

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Oct 15, 2019

To celebrate the 100th episode of the DoorGrowShow, I’m doing something a bit different. Instead of me interviewing someone, I’m the one being asked the questions.

Today, I am featuring my appearance as a guest on the Cashflow Diary (CFD) podcast hosted by J. Massey. We discuss my journey into property management and how to optimize a business through organic growth to achieve success.

You’ll Learn...

[05:00] Today’s entrepreneurs are like yesterday’s superheroes. They save lives.

[06:01] Who is Jason Hull? Someone who has never managed a property, but helps others grow and scale their property management business.

[06:48] Being an entrepreneur is in his DNA: Grew up with an entrepreneurial mother, who taught him to make more money and beat the competition.

[08:16] Failed Marriage and “Disney” Dad: Jason needed a job that offered freedom and autonomy to spend time with his kids and create clients.

[10:13] Website Design, Marketing,and Branding: How to win when competing with Goliaths and make it to the top of Google.

[11:53] Financial Decisions: Entrepreneurs like to make money, not lose it.

[15:25] Conventional to Comfortable Confidence: Do what works for you, not others, to lower pressure noise.

[20:15] Curiosity: See what others don’t and causes businesses to lose leads and deals.

[21:55] Still struggling with imposter syndrome? Hire a business coach who believes in you to rebuild confidence and effective communication to make a difference.

[28:55] Why choose property management and deal with tenants, toilets, and termites?

[32:53] Why choose Jason and DoorGrow? He helps create positive awareness and address negative perception surrounding property management.

[40:00] Cold vs. Warm Leads: Prospecting pipeline plugs leaks to grow business and get people to know, like, and trust you.

[44:56] How do good property owners find good property managers? Avoid sandtraps of solopreneurs with few doors; add doors to build a property portfolio.

[49:10] Short-term Rental Success: Get a property manager to solve revenue issues.

[52:32] Precipice of Decision: Believe in yourself, make it happen, and decide to be different by listening to your truest voice.

Tweetables

Today’s entrepreneurs and yesterday’s superheroes save lives and make the world a better place.

Entrepreneurism: Insatiable desire to learn and explore opportunities.

Entrepreneurs: Allow yourself to do what you need to do to lower the pressure noise.

Entrepreneurs create positive, uncomfortable change wherever they go.

Resources

CFD 542 – Jason Hull On How Property Management Can Change The World

Jason Hull on Facebook

Steve Jobs

6 Non-QWERTY Keyboard Layouts

Alex Charfen (Business Coach)

Momentum Podcast

DGS 99: Implementing EOS/Traction and Process Improvement at EZ Repair Hotline with Andy Shinn 0

Transcript

Jason: This is a special episode because this is our 100th episode. What I wanted to do was share something different. I've been on a lot of other people's podcasts recently and this was one that I really enjoyed, this was with J. Massey of the Cash Flow Diary podcast. He was a really great interviewer, I really enjoyed being on the show. He asked a lot of questions and it really dug into me. I'm not used to somebody really digging into hearing about me as much. I'm usually the one digging in and hearing about other people. I thought my listeners would enjoy this podcast so I asked J. Massey if we could have permission to put this on our podcast and he was glad to let us do so. You get to hear this interview of me being on this episode of the Cash Flow Diary with J. Massey. Enjoy the show.

Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.

J: All right, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of the Cash Flow Diary podcast. I'm your host, J. Massey. I'm glad that you are here today because we are going to talk about something that I know, and my guest knows, is one of the most, if not the most, critical piece for your success, not only in business but specifically, the real estate world. I know that many of us were out there. We're trying to grow our cash flow. We're trying to make things happen. Build a bigger, better business, and you're doing it and you're succeeding, and that's great.

Also at the same time, many of you are like, “Man, if I could just figure out how to take what I'm doing in business and do it in real estate too, that would be great.” Some of you are like, “Man, I just want to grow that real estate portfolio and make it a little bit bigger and better, but I'm still having some challenges in these specific areas because I can't find any good help. I can't make anybody do what I think is common sense. There's just not enough common best practices out there. How on earth, J, can I find that particular property manager?” Or maybe you are that property manager and you're going, “You know what? How on earth can I find that owner that actually knows what's up and won't drive me nuts?” I believe we have solutions for you today.

I have with me today none other than CEO, Jason Hull of DoorGrow, doorgrow.com. Some of you may actually know him from his podcast, the DoorGrow Show. What's going to be interesting today is that Jason wasn't always a property manager. We're going to get to find out the story, the journey, and most importantly, learn the lessons around entrepreneurship along the way that have allowed us the world to be able to know and love Jason the way that he is.

Here's what we're going to do, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to pay attention, we're going to make sure that, yes, I know you're walking the dog and doing the dishes, but you're going to hit that mark, you're going to bookmark those spots so that you can come back and listen to the gems that he's going to drop. Most importantly right now though, let's just welcome Jason Hull.

Jason, how are you doing?

Jason: Wow, that's a great intro. I really appreciate that.

J: Thank you. I'm glad that you were here. I'm also excited because we're going to be talking about something that I'm passionate about. Real estate's really important, but more importantly, it's the people and the teams that you hire that tend to make things go well, and sometimes, not go so well. I'm looking forward to that, but before I get down there, I have to ask you the same question I didn't ask everybody else the first time that they're here, are you ready?

Jason: Do it.

J: All right. I tend to look at today's entrepreneurs a lot like yesterday's superheroes—Batman, Robin, Hulk, Wonder Woman, you get the idea—because I think entrepreneurs and superheroes have a ton of things in common. For example, as an entrepreneur, occasionally, I can envision myself using our products and services, flying around town, and saving customers one sale at a time. Also, like a superhero, an entrepreneur has a beginning.

If you think about Spider-Man, for example, there was a time where he's just a kid going to school, doing his own thing, taking some photos, and then one day gets bit by a spider, discovers he's got a superhuman ability, and now he has to choose, “Will I use my newfound talents for good or for evil?” My question to you is as follows. Before DoorGrow, before your podcast, before your degree in marketing, your website design, before being a property manager, before everything we know you for today, what we want to know is who is Jason Hull?

Jason: That's a deep question. Let's sum up a whole person really quickly here.

J: No pressure.

Jason: Yeah, no pressure. First thing, let me just correct something real quick, I had never managed property in my life, yet I somehow am attracting property management entrepreneurs from all over the US and beyond, asking for help in growing and scaling their businesses. I'm more of a nerd that used to be secretly in the background, helping them and had to push myself out into the limelight to make a difference in an industry that I could see there was an obvious change needed to be made.

But my background growing up, I grew up with an entrepreneur mother. She is this amazing, loving, charismatic woman that is a real estate agent. She's just had hustle in her since she was a little kid. She's told me stories of she saw the other boys mowing lawns and she was doing babysitting when she was young, she was like, “They're making way more money than me.” She went around and she figured, “I could undercut them by a dollar, go door-to-door, and steal their business, and start offering to mow lawn.” She started mowing lawns to make more money. She just had that bite in her to accomplish and do things.

I didn't see myself as an entrepreneur, I didn't really know what an entrepreneur was, yet, I think it was just in my DNA. I was the guy in college that decided, “Hey, I want a band so I'm going to start one. I'm going to write all the music.” I was a guy going door-to-door, pre-selling CDs at girls’ dorms with a guitar in hand and a clipboard for an album that didn't exist so that I could pay for the recording time so I could fund an album, but I wasn't an entrepreneur.

J: Yeah. No, that’s not entrepreneurial at all.

Jason: I was thinking I needed to go get a job. I was like, “I'm going to finish college and I got to then find a job.” What thrust me into entrepreneurism is I had gotten married really young and the marriage fell apart. I had two kids and I needed to be able to have time that I could spend with them. I didn't want to just be Disney-dad. I had to create a situation in which I had freedom and autonomy. The other factor that played into it is my employer at the time got hit by the whole financial mess back in 2006–2007, I guess, and could no longer pay me. I was just doing nerdy stuff for them at the time. Then I realized, they were now a client. I started reaching out and creating clients.

One of the earliest people I had helped was my brother who was just getting started in the property management business. He had just bought a property management franchise, he was fresh out of college with his business partner, they had no doors under management, and they had this terrible website they got from corporate. He was like, “Can you just help me figure this out because you're smart? What do I need to do?” I'm like, “Add some phases to it. That'll increase conversion rates. Let's do this and that.” He's like, “Can you just do it for me? Can you please just build me a site?” I'm like, “Sure, but you're going to pay for it.” He's like, “Okay, no problem.”

I built him a website and then suddenly, all of his fellow franchisees—this franchise had maybe 200–300 franchisees in it—and I started attracting these people that had thousands of doors. They wanted what he had. They're like, “Hey, what he has is better. I want that.” Really quickly, here's me, a freelancer, web designer, starting to do websites for people with thousands of doors. Some of these are probably million-dollar-plus businesses. They had really great backlinks, so I was at the top of Google pretty quickly and started getting clients around the US within a short time. I was competing against Goliaths, just me. There we go, now then I'm an entrepreneur. I think I just have an insatiable desire to learn, I just always have, and entrepreneurship allows me to really explore and it's really exciting.

J: Got it. Now I see how I got confused about the difference between understanding what it is you do versus being a property manager. It's more you help property managers, is what it sounds like, become better versions of themselves with their marketing and advertising. Am I close?

Jason: Yeah. Over the years, I've shifted more into coaching and consulting, but we still do websites, we clean up branding. What I tell property management entrepreneurs in short when they come and ask me what I do, I’d say, “I'm not going to teach you how to do property management. I'm hoping you already know that and you're good at it. I’m going to teach you how to win, that's it.”

Basically, what we do in short is we rehab property management companies so that they cash flow effectively, so that they have revenue, they have growth. We optimize their business more for organic. We're cleaning up their branding. Probably 60% or 70% of my clients that come to me, I change their business name, which is ridiculous if you consider how painful, challenging, or scary it is for somebody to do that, but I'm really good at helping them see the principles that impact their decisions about what's going to make money or cost them money. Then it becomes just a financial decision. One thing I know about entrepreneurs is that they usually like to make money.

J: Yes, definitely, but what I like about what you've shared with us here is to some degree, you're in what I would call the reluctant entrepreneur category because you weren't even considering like, “I'm not one of those. That's not what I do,” and then over time, you start displaying these traits. Now I'm curious, did your mom ever suggest that, “Hey, son, you might be…” and you have this conversation with her like, “No, no, no, I just need to go get a job?” was that ever a thing?

Jason: I don't know if I was reluctant. It just wasn't something that anyone had ever explained to me. I don't even know if I really was clear on what technically an entrepreneur was. I think I'd always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I had a paper out as a kid, my mom would have us fold flyers to canvass neighborhoods for real estate as little kids. She would pay us a penny per fold, if we folded a piece of paper twice, we get two cents. I would fold hundreds and then she would have us go around either on roller skates, scooters, or whatever, go around neighborhoods and just canvas and put those out. She'd keep an eye on us, walk around a bit with us, and we would just canvas neighborhoods. I think I was just raised with it and no one had ever put a label on it.

J: Oh, man, this is great. I'm sure some people right now are listening like, “A penny a fold? That's nothing.” I'm sure that happens in somebody's head, but the principle was clearly laid down for you in such a way that you're like, “I'll do it. Okay, let's go,” and you didn't care, and spending time with mom is always awesome. But at the same time, this desire gets left behind and you just keep finding ways to create opportunity. That's what I hear when you talk is you just find ways to create opportunity relative to something that you're currently enjoying. I am curious though did you ever actually get the concert CD album sold? How'd that work out?

Jason: I did. We did create the album, we created the CD, I wrote all the music for it, I sang every song on it, and yeah, we got it recorded. It's a pretty decent little album for being self-produced. I was very into the Beatles at the time.

J: Okay, yes. There's something else that you're also mentioning, the thing that thrust you, I would say is the correct word, into considering something in entrepreneurship in a more realistic fashion was the combination of kids and your employer not being able to employ you, but most importantly, I hear of a deep-seated value. You’re just like, “You know what? Working for someone else can be fine, but I have two kids now and I value spending more time with them, so I'm going to become or do whatever it takes to make sure that I can do that.” I'm curious to know where that comes from.

Jason: I think at the core of people that are really entrepreneurial, they know deep down that they're unemployable. Let's be honest. I worked at HP, I worked at Verizon, I was in call centers, I did a lot of nerdy jobs, I was a nerd, and tech support, stuff like that. In every situation I was in, I think something about me is I create positive uncomfortable change everywhere I go. It's just how I'm wired. I cannot be somewhere and leave things as the status quo. I don't do anything normally. If you could see the keyboard sitting on my desk right now, it's not even in QWERTY order, I pop all the keys off and rearrange them when I get a new computer and keyboard.

J: I want a picture now that you said that, but okay.

Jason: Yes, somebody can just Google if they want to see a different keyboard layout.

J: Dvorak?

Jason: Dvorak, yeah.

J: Yeah, that's the only other thing. I was like, “What else could it be?” The only other thing I was thinking was Dvorak. But okay, that makes sense.

Jason: Yeah, because I'm the guy that my brain just says, “Why is everybody doing it this way? Is this the best way? If it's not, I don't care.” Conventional standards mean very little to me. There's a lot of quirky things about me, and I think entrepreneurs are quirky. You look at Steve Jobs or you look at different entrepreneurs, they have weird habits. Like Steve Jobs, I wear the same clothes every day. I have black t-shirts, I have black pants, I have a whole closet full of black pants and black t-shirts. I just want it simple. I don't want to have to make decisions about that. I wear black hoodies, and I put on a conference, I've been around lots of people in business suits, that's what I wear because I don't care. I just want to be comfortable and that's what I wear. I think ultimately, as entrepreneurs, we need to allow ourselves to do what we need to do to lower the pressure noise instead of trying to play everybody else's game.

For example, with the keyboard, I realized my wrists were hurting. I was typing a lot. I was getting my degree online at the time, I was also working, and I was typing a lot. I was like, “This seems stupid, this is really dumb. Why are my wrists hurting?” I did what I like to do, which is nerd out, and do some research in Google and I realized, “Oh, Dvorak has 50% less movement, it would cut my movement in half.” The home row on the left hand is all the most commonly-used vowels and the home row on the right hand is all the most commonly used consonants, so there's more back and forth between the two hands.

QWERTY’s history was that it was designed and developed to slow down typist. The keys used to be in alphabetical order and they wanted to screw them up because they were typing too fast and the typewriters couldn't handle the speed. I'm like, “Okay, why am I doing this?” It took me, maybe about a month to get used to typing in a different format. My wrist issues went away and I was a lot more comfortable.

J: I like you a lot, I like this. It’s like, “Hey, this doesn't work for me. We're going to figure out what does.” I now have this question. What was that transition moment? There's usually a moment at which, like I said earlier, the superhero recognizes. “I have something special here, and now I get to choose what I'm going to do with it.” You clearly had that moment, but that moment is often, we'll call it rocky, not as smooth, or there's usually some strong emotions around it in some way, shape, or form, or some pivotal conversation. What was it like when you realize, “My employer can't pay me. I guess they'll become a client,” and then you go, “Huh, maybe what I need to do is develop a surface around this whole thing and do my own thing?” What was that like?

Jason: I think really for me, it's been a longer journey than just right in the beginning. A lot of people see me is a really confident guy, but I really have a strong introverted side. I wasn't that confident guy. In school, I did a lot of performing, I did music, stuff like that, but I still had a strong introverted side.

I think that confidence level, part of it happened early on working with entrepreneurs and just recognizing that they couldn't see things I could see. I was like, “You can't see that this is a problem, that you’re branded as a real estate company and it's causing you to lose probably 50% of the deals and leads you should be because you're a property management business, but on the tenants as real estate. There were just things they didn't see that seems so obvious to me.

The other thing is I'm really curious. With each client I would work with, just to do a website, I would probably spend on average about six hours doing a planning and discovery process over, maybe a period of a week or two with them. Multiple sessions, getting clear on their target audience, their avatar, what needs to be included in the website, what their avatar’s pain is, what they want.

It became really clear to me that most of the websites were focused on tenants, yet they're not hunting for tenants, they don't have problems getting tenants, they want more owners to manage properties for. It just seemed obvious to me that everything was off on the websites that existed at the time.

I think I just grew in confidence that I could help people, but I still stayed heavily in the background. I was also in a rough marriage, my second marriage. I was in a marriage in which I didn't really have belief. I didn't have somebody that believed in me and that didn't help the confidence thing going.

Eventually, I signed up with a business coach. I went through several different coaches. Some I was a bad fit for, honestly, I just wasn't ready for them. Some, they were a bad fit. Some maybe were really great marketers and terrible coaches.

I eventually got a really great business coach that I've been working with for a couple of years now. I remember going down to meet with him in Austin. He has a fantastic podcast, by the way, called The Momentum Podcast. His name is Alex Charfen; a really brilliant guy. I went down and met with him and some other entrepreneurs down in Austin.

My business was struggling, we're maybe about $300,000 in revenue annually at the time. I felt like an ant in the room. I was around entrepreneurs that had multi-million dollar companies, I felt completely unworthy, my confidence just wasn't really strong, and yet when he would open up for dialogue, I would end up captivating everyone else in the room, and that was weird for me that I was able to communicate in a way that all of them wanted to know more and they were really fascinated about what I was talking about.

I had learned a lot, I just didn't have the confidence yet to put it out there. I hadn't said, “Hey, I'm going to change this entire industry. I'm the one to do it.” I was like, “Somebody else should do it. Somebody that's been a property manager. Maybe somebody that runs a big, huge property management franchise should be the one.”

My business coach was like, “Who else could do it? You're the one that you care about it, you're the one who can see what needs to change, and they’re everybody else’s competition. Why would they help everybody?” I'm like, ‘That's a good point,” but I had wicked impostor syndrome. I think that's a challenge for entrepreneurs that we have to kill is that impostor syndrome in which we don't feel like we're enough, or we're good enough, or that we qualify, or we’re worthy. We sometimes think we need to find that external validation to say that we're okay.

I think that came just in working with clients. I grew in confidence in situations in which I was able to finally place myself around other entrepreneurs because one of the most damaging things we do as entrepreneurs is that we spend too much time around non-preneurs.

J: Yeah, I believe you.

Jason: It's painful and it's difficult because we see opportunity everywhere. We see how we can change and impact the world. We want to make a difference, we want to contribute, and the rest of the world looks at us like we're crazy, we're making them uncomfortable. “Why can't you leave good enough alone?”

They hear the struggles we go through as an entrepreneur and they say, “Why don't you just get a job?” They look at us like we're crazy and then we look at them like, “Why don't I just slit my wrists now? How can you just sit there and tolerate, complaining about your boss and your job, and living for the weekend? Don't you want something bigger?” We don't understand them, but I think if we’re around non-preneurs too much, it wears us down. It breaks us a little bit. It's really hard and I hadn't really yet been around entrepreneurs.

I think as entrepreneurs are starting out in our early development when we're in the early stages of being an entrepreneur, one of the biggest things that hold us back is being lonely. That's it. We're just not around other people like us to say, “You're normal. You, as an entrepreneur, are awesome, amazing, and you can change the world. You don't have to live by everybody else's rules.”

J: Agreed. There's something that you said that I often have thought about myself. I know that there are people who are listening have had that same thought at least once. You mentioned that yes, we desire to make a difference, we want to see change, and we're not happy with the, ‘That's just not the way you do it, it should be this way.” That's just how we roll, and yet we're the ones who can see the problem.

Like your business coach is saying, why aren't we the ones who can resolve it? But more importantly or said a different way, does that come across to you when you can see an issue? Does it come across to you—I know it does for me—as a responsibility like, “Okay, it’s me, obviously. I'm the one who sees it, this is my thing. So, let me go solve this problem”? That's how it feels to me when I notice opportunity or something that's just not right that could be better.

Jason: Yeah. I think there are two sides to this. I think one, opportunity. On the negative side, I think opportunity also can kill us as entrepreneurs because we do see it everywhere. It can be incredibly distracting. There's that opportunist in all of us, and if we focus on too many opportunities, we don't really get to make any headway in anyone. That's a temptation and a challenge entrepreneurs deal with early on is struggle to focus and to niche down.

On the positive side, we see that the world can be better. We can see it. We are the change-makers. We are the people throughout history, throughout time eternal probably, that were the ones that would move society forward. We would make everyone uncomfortable, we would change something, and we would move people towards a higher and better ideal.

J: Now, let me ask you this question. You could have chosen any industry to serve. Why property managers? I've spent so much time as the one owning the property. This may sound funny to you, but I never considered that property managers had a problem finding owners. That never occurred to me because it just never occurred to me that they had that as a business problem. Obviously, it's there because you're saying it, but as an entrepreneur, you could choose to serve anybody. You could have taken this skill to any industry, so to speak, because believe me, they're not the only one with a problem. Why property management?

Jason: That's a really good point. I don't think there was a time in my life as a child that I woke up and said, “I want to help property management business owners when I grow up. I want to get into this industry that's focused on toilets, tenants, and termites, that sounds exciting to me.”

J: It's right after firemen, I understand.

Jason: Yeah, I'll either be a superhero or I will be a property management coach.

J: Yeah, absolutely, totally right.

Jason: No, that's a great question. I think I resisted it, to be honest, in the beginning. It came to me like I just started attracting them, I tried to just help every type of business though, still, I didn't niche out. It took me a while. I started my corporation, my company back in 2008, but DoorGrow as a brand was maybe only four or five years ago. It took me a little while to, I guess, choose into that niche fully. I think it was imposter syndrome like, “I've never done this so I feel like I'm not the person to do it.” For a lot of people, it's not the sexiest industry.

Here's how you fall in love with property management.If you're an entrepreneur that's a little bit nerdy, property management is like the systemizable, more tech-savvy version of the real estate industry. It's residual income instead of the hunt and the chase for the next deal as a realtor. It's a business that can be optimized over time. It's a business that can follow the theory of constraints and you can make processes around. All of that appealed to me.

What I really fell in love with was not property management. It's the people that are property managers. Do you want to talk about resilient, innovative entrepreneurs? Property management entrepreneurs. You cannot imagine the level of challenges, difficulty, and negotiating. I don't think there's any industry like it because in terms of customer interaction, it's rated third behind retail and hospitality; it's heavily a people business. In retail and hospitality, you're not negotiating really difficult situations not unlike a lawyer between two opposed parties as the middle person, but in property management that's what you end up doing.

These are really some of the sharpest people. They're just amazing entrepreneurs to be around and honestly, I just chose into doing it because I wanted to be around people that are like me. Entrepreneurs. I love my clients. I love being able to spend time with them. I do not feel weird and I really enjoy that. I have a nerdy background and a lot of the clients that are attracted to me, they like figuring out processes, systems, technology, and that sort of thing. There's just a strong resonance in the type of entrepreneur that is in that industry.

J: For the person that's listening right now that happens to be a property manager or maybe it's an owner who's currently doing his own property management in some way, shape, or form, what would you say are the top three things you tend to assist a new client with from day one? How do they know, how can they recognize, “Oh, I need Jason”? What is it that you end up doing over there at DoorGrow for them typically in that first appointment or the first solutions you guys come to the table with?

Jason: Let's go back to the question you asked me earlier about the surprising problem that exists in property management.

J: Yeah, that is still a thing in my head like, “Wow, I didn't know they had problems finding me? I didn't know that.”

Jason: Yeah, every business exists to solve a problem. If a business is not solving a problem, they're stealing money. The problem that exists in the property management industry that I could see, property management has two major challenges. The biggest challenge first is awareness, there are a lot of people that have property. In the US, in single-family residential rental properties, only about 30% are professionally managed, 70% are self managing. The first biggest hurdle is awareness, there's just a lot of people that are not aware of what a property management company would do for them. The average Joe on the street if you said, “Hey, I'm a property manager,” they would say, “Great, I guess you manage a property.” They don't really know what that means. There's a strong lack of awareness to the point where property management really is relatively, in the US, in its infancy.

Let's contrast that with Australia. In Australia, 80% of single-family residential rentals are professionally managed. There are reasons for that. There's steeper legislation there, it's more consumer-focused and a lot of that, but the word on the street is that it grew 25% in a decade, it grew massively. But in the US, property management still is this ugly cousin of real estate, it has this negative perception, especially among real estate.

The other challenge is property management is the number one source of property management-related issues like fair housing challenges, mismanagement of trust funds, or leases, all this stuff, property management is the number one source of complaints at most any board of real estate. Not real estate, property management is. So, everything property management. This is why it's perpetuated heavily among the real estate industry. Realtors say, “Oh, property management. That's gross. Don't touch that. How could you do that?”

The second hurdle that takes the next big portion of potential market share away is perception. Property management has a very negative perception among investors, among people that are aware of it. There's a negative perception that takes away the next big chunk of potential market share.

After perception takes a hit, those that are aware and they think they have a decent enough perception to think, “At least, I have to have one or I need one,” or maybe they are okay—there are some good ones—then word-of-mouth captures what's leftover. Word-of-mouth captures the best clients that property management might get.

After word-of-mouth, the scraps that fall off my client’s table, that fall off the word-of-mouth table, the coldest, crappiest, worst leads that are the most price-sensitive, that view all property managers as the same and is a commodity, that are the worst owners and properties to build a portfolio on, in which you're going to have probably an operational cost in your property management company of 10 times higher than that of having healthy good doors and owners, those are the people searching on Google. That's what's leftover.

Most property management business owners are trying to build their business on the back of Google. I'm wearing a t-shirt right now, you can't see, but it says, “SEO won't save you.” It has a hand reaching up out of the water, trying to grab a life preserver, a black t-shirt with white lettering.

This is a message I put out to the industry that they don't need to be playing the SEO lottery because, really, search volume in the property management industry has actually been on a steady decline. According to Google Trends in the US, it's been a steady decline since July of 2011. It's been going down, yet every marketer targeting the industry, every service provider, every web design company, they're shoving and pushing the concept that SEO is going to save them.

They just need the top spot on Google. They're playing into this myth, so all these property managers are spending marketing dollars, their hard-earned money, they’re trying to run Google Ads, everything to be at the top of Google, and they're not getting an ROI. They're not getting a return on that investment. It's an incredibly expensive game that has many potential points of failure.

You have to be a property management business, usually, at about 200 to 400 doors, with a business development manager. You have to be making sure that all of your phone calls are answered and you're following up on every lead within the first 10 minutes to really play that marketing game.

I found most property management business owners were not at that level. I wanted to create them, get them to that level. Originally, I was the guy doing that stuff, I was a marketing company, I was a guy helping with those type of things, and I realized really quickly that it wasn't working. They weren't even answering their phones. Why would I send them a lead that's only good for maybe about 10 minutes—that's how long an internet lead’s probably good for, maybe 15—and then 80% drop off in conversion rates if they're not going to answer their phones?

I just pivoted this company and I was thinking, “What would I do if I were going to start a property management business? What are all the most common problems that I can see even in the largest companies? Where are the biggest leaks in their sales pipeline?”

Just like the theory of constraints, I just went from the beginning of the sales pipeline, which is that awareness. It's branding. Branding was costing some of them half the amount of deals and leads they could or should be getting. Some companies do real estate and property management. By eliminating real estate from the branding, I helped double their real estate commissions, ironically, because property management is a great front-end product. Real estate is a better back-end product.

People don't wake up in the morning and say, “I want to find a realtor today. That sounds exciting to me.” No. They want property, they want to find buyers, they try to for sale by owner, but eventually, they list with an agent. The property management, if you have a constant influx of owners, investors that may get into additional properties, constant influx of renters and tenants, you have buyers and sellers. You have bodies constantly flowing into the business and this is the dream of a real estate company.

We just started addressing these big leaks from branding, reputation, which is word-of-mouth, their website wasn't built around conversions and targeting the audience, their sales process, pricing strategy played into this heavily, they were not priced effectively, they were taking too many deals at too low of a price point. Psychologically, for example, there are three types of buyers. Most of them just had one fee, serving one type of buyer, and there was no price anchoring. I just started to see all these different leaks that we could shore up through the pipeline so that we could optimize their business for organic growth.

Then the big secret is at the front end of this. Once we get all of these leaks dialed in, their sales process, they have follow-up, all these things are in place, what spigot should we turn on through this pipeline? They could go back and do cold-lead marketing, but cold leads are terrible. Conversion rates are low even if they're a bad A. I don't know what the rating is on your podcast so I'll be careful. If they're a bad A in sales, they’ll only get maybe about 30% conversion rate or close rate, but most people, say 1 out of 10 cold leads, they'll convert.

The hidden killer with cold leads in any industry or business—the secret the marketers don't want to tell you—is they can't give you contracts. Marketers cannot give you contracts. You can't hand dollars to a marketer and they will hand you written signed contracts or clients. What they can hand you at best, usually, the furthest they can push it along is usually a really cold lead. That's it. That's typically what they can give you is they give you a cold lead and this cold lead then has to be nurtured. You have to warm it up. You have to get them to know you, trust you, and like you.

Cold leads convert really poorly, usually, you'll get maybe 1 out of 10. The hidden killer though with cold leads is time. This is the hidden killer with cold leads that small business owners don't realize. Time on a cold lead is at least twice as much time as a warm lead or maybe three times as much. I found clients when I would ask them, “How much time do you spend warming these people up, calling them, meeting them at the property?” They say in total, in my sale-cycle time, three to six hours to close the deal. “How long does it take you a warm lead?” I was getting answers like 15 minutes, maybe an hour, it was like half, at least, half the amount of time.

These small business owners, if you give them 10 leads in a week and it's going to take them 2 to 3 hours to do all the follow-up necessary and they're going to get maybe 1 or 2 deals out of it, that's a full-time job. They don't have the time, as small business owners, to do that if they're also the main person doing the selling. They just didn't have the bandwidth to do it. It wasn't even possible for me to give cold leads to clients and have them win that game. They didn't have the time. They really work part-time crappy salespeople that had maybe about 10 hours a week to focus on that piece.

I had to create a system that will allow them more warm leads. Instead of the front-end of this pipeline, what I teach clients to do is to go to prospecting. There's 70% self-managing. There's so much blue ocean in property management and yet everyone's fighting over the coldest, crappiest, worst leads that fall off the word-of-mouth table, that are searching on Google in the bloody red water. It's created this false sense of scarcity that's so strong in the industry that everybody feels like the industry is scarce, yet there’s 70% self-managing and none of them are really happy doing it.

J: I have been doing real estate for over a decade and I have never even considered this concept from the property manager’s perspective in this way. I've always considered them partners. I've never wanted the lowest guy, they’re such a critical piece. Some of the things that you said, I was like, “Why would somebody bargain-basement shop for a property manager? That's just silly, you don't understand, you can't do that. That's not going to work long term,” but I've never thought about the fact that they would have trouble finding the quality owners. Just hearing you describe their world, it's like, “Oh, wow, yeah. I can see why that would be a challenge.”

I'm curious, though, when a property manager is out there and trying to make it work—I'm just going to throw it out there—how can the good owners let the good property managers know that, “Hey, yeah, I would love to have you”?

Jason: I think the biggest challenge I usually hear is that there aren't any good property managers. How do you find one that's good? Those owners feel completely unsafe. The industry has a really bad reputation as a whole. One of the concepts I teach—all these principles apply to really any industry, in any industry—branding has an impact, reputation has impact, pricing strategy has an impact. There's nothing I'm doing for this industry that is only related to this industry. I think the challenge the industry has, though, is it just has a lot less awareness, but I think that also means there's a lot more opportunity. There's a huge opportunity in property management.

If we were to grow even remotely close to how Australia's grown in a decade, that would mean the industry in the US would double. I think property management could be as big as the real estate industry here in the US. There's much potential. I don't think it's been tapped. I think property management in the US has artificially been kept small and it is really a business category that's in its infancy.

If you look at business categories that are relatively new in the US, you've got marijuana, vaping, and stuff like this, maybe Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, there's these fledgling industries. Property management's been around a long time, but it's still in its infancy. There's a huge potential there to grow.

There are a lot of bad owners. That's true, too. The accidental investors didn't really want to have a rental property, but they needed it, and they just want to get rid of it after a year. If a property manager builds their portfolio on those type of doors, which some do, they have to replace every single client every single year.

J: Yeah, that's an untenable situation that would go with that.

Jason: Yeah. You'll find property managers fall into this first sand trap of 50 units or so. One question you can ask them is, “How many doors do you have under management?” If they're in the 50 or 60 door category, then I call that the first sand trap. That's one of my key avatars that I want to help is to get them out of that first sand trap.

I call that the solopreneur sand trap where they're doing everything in the business, they've taken on too many clients at too low of a price point. And this applies to any industry. As a small business owner, you take on too many clients at too low of a price point, you back yourself into a financial corner, and you take on the worst clients because you're needy, and your operational costs with bad clients are 10 times higher than that of having good clients, easily.

One bad property or a bad owner that tries to micromanage you is easily 10 times the operational cost, time and attention, and stress as one good door or one good owner, easily. If you build a portfolio of that, you're stuck. You're backed into a financial corner, you can't afford to hire anybody, and you're losing as many doors as you’re getting on in a year. You're stuck. Sometimes, I have to tell them to do really painful stuff like fire customers in order to create space.

J: Yeah, that makes 100% sense. For those that have listened to this far and want to find out more about what you've got going on, what's going to be the best way for them to track you down?

Jason: I love connecting with other entrepreneurs and a really easy way for them to connect with me, I'm on every social channel—probably—that exists, because I'm nerdy, as @KingJasonHull. They can connect with me as @KingJasonHull on any social channel, especially Facebook. Then if they're in real estate and they're really considering getting into property management, they've managed rental properties, they feel like they know how to do it, but they want to grow that side of the business and maybe feed their real estate side, or they’re a property management entrepreneur that's been struggling at doors and they want to make a difference and grow, then they can just reach out to us at doorgrow.com.

J: Okay, I've got a question I just got to ask now. I wasn't going to do this, but I got to ask. My entire world when it comes to real estate, is all around the whole world of short-term rentals. It's what we do, it's what we teach, it's how our students have achieved success. One of the interesting things is that when we're interfacing with individuals, we often get the question, “Why don't I just get a property manager?” I'm like, “You don't understand. What we are talking about is completely different than what a property manager would typically do.”

I'm just curious if the whole idea of short-term rentals or things of that nature, because being able to add that, if property managers took that on, they'd be able to solve some of their revenue issues for sure. Is that something you're seeing happening and in any way with your clients?

Jason: Yeah, I think there is a trend of short-term rentals coming into the space. If long-term rental property management is in its infancy, I think that's even younger. There are property managers, especially in more resort-like areas where vacation rentals are more popular, I think all of them have some, they get into that, especially the larger management companies, just by nature of having a larger business and lots of different investors, they're going to have some short-term rentals. Short-term rentals make a lot of sense for them. It's a lot of turnovers, it's a lot more work, but it also can be a lot more payout for them. There is a trend shifting towards that.

J: Yeah. I just asked because, in order to do it effectively, there's just specialization that's required. That's why we just stepped up and started doing it because we can’t find the property manager that could do a good a job as we have learned to do and now teach others to do. It’s just like, “You know what? We'll just do it ourselves.” That's what's happening, but at the same time, in the back of my head, I'm like, “Man, they're missing an opportunity. If they would just understand some of these things that we're doing, I think it would work well.” I was just curious, it's been in the back of my head, I'm like, “I wonder, considering you're helping them put their services together.”

Jason: Yeah, J, be careful because that is the story that almost all of my clients tell me. You may end up in this industry. That's what they all tell me. They all come to me and they’re like, “I started this business X number of years ago and it was because we were investors and we couldn't find a property manager that was good enough to do things the way that we needed it done, so we started one. They're all bad and we're good,” I hear that almost every day.

J: Oh, man, I love it. Okay, as we wind down, I've got a final question for you because I'm really curious to hear your answer. Here's what I know. I know that individuals started the call on one spot, and now, as we’re ending, they're in a different spot. They're at what I like to call the precipice of decision. It's where they go, “You know what? That's it. I can do this. I can make this happen.” Maybe they are a property manager and, “Yeah, I should call Jason. That's exactly what I need to do. I need to track him down, figure this out.” They're drawing that proverbial line in the sand, they're saying that's it, and now they're going to be different.

Now, Jason, you know like I know that when we make those types of decisions, we often have a companion, and it's a companion that comes in the form of a voice that says things like, “You? Now, you know good and well last time you tried anything, it didn't really work out. What on earth are you thinking about? Oh, my gosh, no one's going to buy anything from you. You're not going to be able to get any clients, whatsoever, so why don't you just go back to your job?” For some people, they're related to that voice.

My question to you is as follows. Let's pretend that this time it's going to be different. This time they're going to do exactly what you suggest and they're going to do so in the next 24 to 48 hours. What would you suggest that they do?

Jason: If somebody has a voice, especially if it's an external voice, saying, “You don't have what it takes. You can't do this. You need to play it safe,” they need to find another voice. The truest voice that we all have is the voice deep down. That's never the voice that we have deep down. When somebody says, “Oh, deep down I knew it would be like this,” or, “Deep down I knew I should have done this,” or, “Deep down, I just knew it was the right move.” The voice deep down—you can call that the voice of God, you can call that your intuition, you can call it your gut—is the truest voice and that's the only voice we really should be listening to.

Let me close an open loop I left open earlier. I mentioned how I was down in Austin, I'd met with my business coach for the first time down there, I was around all the other entrepreneurs, I felt like an ant in the room, but I was sharing ideas, they were resonating with it. My business coach asked me to describe what I did and he said, “Oh, that'll never work.”

Then, I explained to how much money I was making and what I was doing, so he understood it, he looked at me and he said, “Jason, you have a $20 million company and you don't even know it.” Do you want to know what I started doing? I started crying. I had had little validation, I had much resistance from spouse, I just had no support around me in terms of being connected to entrepreneurs, I started crying in front of a room of other entrepreneurs. I needed that in that moment, badly.

Fast forward. In a year, I had 300% growth. We were a million-dollar company in about a year. I was crying and it was like a cathartic thing that somebody could see what I felt deep down and they believed in me. I don't know if there's anything more powerful than that to be seen for who you really are and I think that is the love or energy that we all need as entrepreneurs in order to grow. We need that belief.

J: 100%. I definitely appreciate the journey that you have been on. I thank you for taking the time to distill your knowledge down in such a way that you could then share it, become the person that's capable of sharing it, and influencing an industry that's very close to my own heart. At the end of the day, it's where it's been at for us for quite some time, it's where we're going to stay, but the more that you enable property managers to do what they do and find the customers that they need, the better I think it all gets for everyone. Just let me be the first to say thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge, wisdom, and insight here with us today at the Cash Flow Diary.

Jason: J, it's been an absolute pleasure. In line with what you just said, I really do believe deep down that good property management can change the world. The impact that they can have in that industry is massive. They're affecting homes, families, on the tenant and the owner’s side. They're affecting people's cash flow. They're affecting their finances. They're affecting real estate investors that got into the real estate investing with the myth that it could be turnkey. The impact is massive and I think that's what gets me excited about the industry. We're contribution-focused banks as entrepreneurs, we want to have an impact. I appreciate you allowing me to share that message and to be here on your show.

J: All right, ladies and gentlemen, you know what time it is? It's time for you to move at the speed of instruction. What does that mean? That means get over to doorgrow.com. That means go listen to his podcast. That also means connect with him. He said he wants to talk to you, it's very simple, ladies and gentlemen.

One of the things that I hope you learn from today's episode is when you see a need, it's probably your responsibility to go fill it and just figure it out along the way. You don't need to understand everything at the beginning, but over time, you can get there. But most importantly as you heard and I heard, you want to follow that path, follow that voice that is telling you there's greatness inside.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's been fun talking to you today. I look forward to talking to you soon. Until next time.

Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com.

Download this Episode

Oct 8, 2019

Property managers may not know about or haven’t tried maintenance coordination. But they are quickly discovering its value in making their jobs easier, manageable, and understandable.

Today, I am talking to Andy Shinn of EZ Repair Hotline about implementing an Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), Traction, and process improvement.

You’ll Learn...

[02:40] Maintenance Coordination: Define world-class process to run for property managers to address issues and inconsistency with performance.

[03:49] Growing and gaining Traction to create a structured operating model and take business to the next level.

[04:32] Systems that every business needs: Operating, planning, support, and phone.

[06:00] EOS predicts and creates future through annual planning for quarterly goals broken down into monthly and weekly commitments.

[08:38] Constraints around Crazy: Don’t get distracted; you can’t do everything; force yourself to limit your focus to inspire, not control your team.

[13:18] Fundamental Flaws:Take things that work well for you with Traction and EOS; leave out the other stuff.

[16:28] Accountability Chart: Visionary, integrator, leader, doer, and other roles and responsibilities depend on strengths and weaknesses. Overlap occurs until roles are filled by others.

[22:43] EZ Repair Hotline establishes values: What are we doing now? What are we aspiring toward?

[25:28] Do they share my values? If the answer is “no,” they have to go. They’re team members hurting your business, momentum, and results.

[26:18] Two Different Businesses: Do you want a business that you can have vs. a business that you want and love?

[30:08] Change people's mindset to move beyond minimum standards by motivating those who want to step up and make things happen.

[37:42] Process Piece: One of the six components of Traction by documenting processes to improve them and help others reach goals.

[40:03] Planning System Solves Internal Problems: One of three things must be missing—accountability, transparency, or clarity on outcomes.

[43:19] Property Managers: A structure helps you avoid working 80 hours a week; figure out how to handle work without having to be available all the time.

Tweetables

Every business needs an operating system.

EOS: What are you going to do with your business in the next 90 days?

EOS makes things doable, not overwhelming when growing a business.

When businesses predict and create the future through planning, that’s magic!

Resources

EZ Repair Hotline

DGS 15: EZ Repair Hotline with Andy Shinn

Traction by Gino Wickman

DGS 98: New Paradigms in Property Management with Lisa Wise of Nest DC 0

Transcript

Jason: All right, and we are live. Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker.

Today’s guest, I am hanging out with Andy. Andy, welcome to the show. This is Andy Shinn of EZ Repair Hotline. Andy, you’ve been on the show before. Welcome back.

Andy: Great. Thanks for having me back. It’s good to be here.

Jason: [...] and you’ve made a lot of changes since then and grown. I would imagine quite a bit. I’ve seen you at several conferences that we’ve both been vendors at. Tell us what’s been going on with EZ Repair Hotline.

Andy: Last time we talked we were pretty much brand new. We were maybe a couple years in, but we really hadn’t had much momentum, and we were just getting started in the industry. We’ve grown a lot over the last couple of years. We’ve learned a lot in terms of process. I hope to talk to you about some of that today and some of what we’re doing. It’s been an exciting couple of years.

I think this is an industry, maintenance coordination, that’s just taking off in the property management space. A lot of property managers don’t even maybe know this is available or some haven’t tried it yet. It’s definitely a wide open industry and we’re excited to work with a lot of property management companies who I think are seeing value with what we do.

Jason: Great. Well, let’s get into it. Where should we start? Today’s topic is implementing EOS, Traction, and process improvement at EZ Repair Hotline. Let’s get into it. Where do we start?

Andy: I guess, maybe just a little bit of history. Over the last year, we have really been working on defining a process and what our product needs to look like. Before that year, we were very customizable. As a property manager, you come in and you’d inform the process as much as we did and I think that was causing us issues, inconsistency in performance.

About a year ago, we said, “We got to define a process that’s best in class, that’s world-class, that we can run for the property manager. They’re not just buying us like a virtual assistant, they’re buying our whole process. They’re getting that whole package of what we do.” That was really important for us over the last year and we’ve made some strides in that direction. Not exactly to the end of where we want to be, but we’re moving in that direction.

Anyway, about January or so, I’d heard about Traction probably on the DoorGrow site. A lot of property managers are implementing Traction. I decided to read it but I did an audio book which I do sometimes. I read about a business book a week. Usually, I read them but for whatever reason I did this on audio. It just didn’t catch with me, so I just went on and I kept doing my thing but then I was hearing more and more about Traction. I decided to go to Barnes & Noble and pick up the physical book and see if that made a difference, and it did. It’s a kind of book you need to sit down, open up with a notepad, and really use it almost like a workbook.

I knew a few chapters into it that it was going to be that was going to be really exciting for EZ Repair because it creates a really structured operating model which is what we needed. There’s a lot of different books that’ll help you do that but I think Traction for a small–medium-sized business is the perfect way to do it. Certainly is the perfect fit for us. We’re only a couple months into that Traction piece, coming off, like I said, where we started a year ago, but Traction’s taking us to that next level. It’s really exciting.

Jason: Cool. I believe every business needs an operating system. There’s different systems that every business needs. Initially, the entrepreneur is every system when you’re first starting out, but there needs to be a planning system which is what we’re talking about. There needs to be a support system for most business. If you have customers that needs to be supported, there needs to be a support system in place. There needs to be a phone system for most business so there’s phone communication.

I think there’s five or six, maybe seven different systems that every business needs and one of the key systems is a planning system. In most business planning systems I’ve studied, the Traction and EOS stuff, scaling up—I’ve worked with Allen Scharfen who’s a brilliant operations mind—there’s a lot of different planning systems out there.

One common thread that seems to be through all of them is annual planning, having quarterly goals, being broken down into quarterly and then having goals broken down into 30 days, and then maybe even something broken down into weekly commitments that the team are working on. We don’t use EOS. In our business, I use a different system but it’s similar to what you might find in other systems, which I think all good business planning systems incorporate at least those basic elements.

Andy: It does and you mentioned taking the goals, like the quarterly goals. What EOS really tries to do is take your business into 90-day chunks. You’re really running a 90-day cycle of, “What am I going to do with the business in the next 90 days?” You’re setting longer term goals like, “Here’s what’s out here that I need to be able to hit. Here’s my stretch goal, my 5- or 10-year goal of what this company’s really going to be like.”

Then, what it does is it takes it down to just 90-day blocks where you’re setting targets that the enterprise owns but then individuals on the leadership team own. Here’s what I own for the next 90-days, what they call rocks. At the end of that 90 days, you’ve taken your business that next step and now, you plan out your next 90 days.

It really helps businesses put things in a very doable context because it can get overwhelming, as an entrepreneur, when you’ve got a lot of stuff going on, especially in a growing business—this industry is really growing—and to be able to say, “Here’s what’s going to happen in the next 90 days. Here’s what we have to do in the next 90 days. Here’s the goal for the next 90 days.” That’s a very easy way to take the business forward, rather than thinking, “Where are we going to be three years from now,” and trying to plan off of that. That’s fully difficult.

EOS for our business has been fantastic and in just about 90 days in, in taking the business into those 90-day chunks. I have a feeling, for property managers, they’d see the same kind of value. When I was a property manager, I would have seen a lot of value in this. Like you mentioned, there’s other systems, too, but being able to select a system like this is really important for companies to be successful.

Jason: I think most businesses have no planning system. They’re just winging it. The entrepreneur’s winging it. When you do implement a really sub-planning system, then what happens is you become able to predict the future. You’re creating the future in the present and eventually, it’s happening and that’s magic. That’s magic for businesses to be able to predict and create the future.

Most entrepreneurs come up with these big goals, big dreams, and these endless to-do lists. If you look back at all those things—we’ve all been there as entrepreneurs—very few of them ever end up coming to fruition, very few end up getting done. We always bite off more than we can chew. We overestimate our ability to get things done. We get distracted because we take on too many different goals and too many different things.

What I’ve noticed in having a planning system in the business is it forces me to limit the things I focus on. I’ve been doing this for several years, not just 90 days. I’ve been doing this for years and it forces me to limit the pressure that I put on my team as well because a lot of time, as entrepreneurs, we get really pumped up and excited, right?

We go to an event, conference, something. We come back to our team and we’re like, “We’re going to do all this stuff. I just got all these great ideas.” And then we get super excited, we throw out some big goal where we heard some coach or somebody say, “Write a number down that you want to make. Add a zero to it. Add another zero. Go big.” You hear these old phrases like, “It’s better to aim for the stars and miss than a pile of manure and hit.” Entrepreneurs love that. They’re like, “Yes, the stars.”

We get so pumped up and excited, then we walked out of the room and we think, “Man, my team must be pumped up.” What they see is a grenade sitting in the middle of the floor with the pin pulled. That’s their perception. They’re like, “What are we going to do with this? How are we going to that? My life’s already hard. Doesn’t he know how hard I’m already working?” They look at us like we’re kind of crazy.

I think the biggest thing I’ve noticed with planning is that it allows us to get buy in from our team because ultimately, I can’t do it all on my own. I just don’t have that capacity. You don’t as well. You cannot do everything in your business. You cannot answer every phone call at EZ Repair Hotline personally.

We really rely on our team and if we don’t get their buy-in, if there isn’t adoption into any system, or into any goal, or any outcome that we have, then we end up trying to control people. Controlling as an entrepreneur is not a very comfortable place for us to be, to be controlling our team instead of inspiring them.

Andy: That’s a great point, though, because entrepreneurs have different personalities. It is a different mindset. Most people, they want more structure. You and I are probably really comfortable just working without structure and getting things done.

Jason: I can totally live in chaos. I can totally do it because to me, it’s giving me new ideas, I have to adapt, I’m exploring. That’s fun and exciting for me. I’ve had team members quit because of that, because it makes them feel really uncomfortable and unsafe because most people [...] crazy, you have to be smart, maybe a C on the DISC profile. They want stability, they want things to be okay, they want a job where everything stays similar each day. I would probably get really bored in a situation like that. It wraps some constraints around my crazy.

An upside of constraints is that it forces innovation. It allows my team also to innovate because they have an outcome. I don’t care how they get there, as long as they live within our value system, but I don’t care what specific actions they take to do it or to get there and they can create, innovate, and come up with ideas that I never would have thought of.

Andy: That’s exactly right. You’re training structure for your team so they know what to do, what to expect, and what the goals are. Goals that they can imagine because I can imagine a five-year goal but my typical employee is not imagining a five-year goal. They want to know, “What are we doing this year? What are we doing the next three months?” It gives them something very tangible to hold on to. “What do we need to accomplish in these next three months?”

At the same time, the whole operating system relies on employees and leadership at all levels to be able to bring ideas to the table, bring process improvements to the table, and to do things to try and achieve those goals. How are we going to get there? Well, we’re not going to get there by just running the show. We’re going to get there because we’ve set these 90-day targets, what specific activities do we need to do or what do we need to change to get to these targets? It creates structure but at the same time, almost counterintuitively, it does create that innovation from employees thinking about, “How do we hit these targets?” I think it’s very effective.

I think the cool thing, too, about Traction that I like, it creates what they call a visionary role. That allows for somebody like me to still have a place in the operating model. I’m not just trying to fit into this operating model and be more structured. It allows a place for the entrepreneur to be that visionary, to be that person who’s got the ideas, and maybe he’s got the crazy goals but it tells you, “Here’s how you operate within that model as that person.” That’s been a personal help for me as well.

Jason: I’ve been really outspoken online. I don’t know if you’ve seen some of my posts but I’ve been really outspoken online somewhat against Traction and EOS. I do see the value and important pieces of it but I also think there’s a couple of fundamental flaws. Everybody I’ve talked to that does EOS, they don’t do everything. I think that’s the benefit of taking a system is you can take the things that really work well for you and leave out the other stuff.

Ultimately, if we’re really honest, EOS was built as a system to create a really nice business for the people that created EOS. You have to go hire integrators from them, you need the integrator, and the integrator is the magical, golden key to the whole puzzle.

They take on this glorified role that replaces a COO or operations manager. They take on the executive assistant role which is a critical role for an entrepreneur. They squeeze all of that as this layer in between in their accountability chart, which is an org chart, between the visionary, which is the entrepreneur, and the entire team. Which in reality would be probably the most dangerous thing to ever do with your company, ever, to give somebody that much power and control because they don’t even need you anymore. They can just chop that top piece off and the whole org chart works fine without you.

What that means, they can charge whatever they freaking want. They’ll come back to you after a year, after they know and run everything in the business, and everybody’s loyal to them and say, “I want $500,000 a year. I want a percentage of the company.” What are you going to do? Replace them? I think, ultimately, the best way to foundationally build every business is around the entrepreneur because we’re not all the quintessential or perfect visionary.

I’ve noticed in property management, there’s different roles. I’ve noticed there are some property management business owners, some entrepreneurs are more accountants. They’re more accounting-minded, they’re more on the financial side, they’re more doing things by the book. You got some that are more relationship-oriented. They’re more about people, relationships, they love. Some are more sales-oriented. Some may be should keep and retain some of the property manager type of role. Some may be should be the sales or BDM person in the business. That might be the last thing they give up. Some may be the operations person and doing systems and coordinating things.

Ultimately, the great thing about having a business is instead of building it to somebody else’s system, we can build it around ourselves and make ourselves feel like Ironman with our supersuit. We can have the business that makes us feel amazing, supported, and fulfilled that we love doing everyday. Ultimately, that’s the one fundamental, foundational piece that I would change in that system to build around it. I think everything would extend out from that.

Andy: That makes total sense. I’ll tell you how we’re doing for the accountability chart.

Jason: Yeah, I wonder how you’re using it.

Andy: First of all, we’re self-implementing so there’s nobody else in the picture but it’s working out well for us. Maybe this is probably just advantageous to us. It just so happens to be that I’m in this business with Michael, my stepson. He is the perfect integrator. He’s the perfect operations.

Jason: He’s an operations guy.

Andy: Exactly, that’s what he does. I’ve done those things but I’m not as good at that as he is. I’m more of the visionary. We’ve taken ourselves and each of us has taken that role. So, I’m the visionary, he’s the integrator. There’s still a lot of overlap so it’s maybe not as clean as what it would look like at the end of that accountability chart. It’s not like there’s one person reporting to the visionary. That’s the only contact the visionary has as you might look at it visually.

Jason: This isn’t as it perfectly claims.

Andy: No, exactly. We’re growing and in our current size, I’m actually filling a couple of the boxes that would be on the next level down like some of the financial and the CFO type roles. I’m filling that as well. I’m filling a couple of the boxes. That’s how we’re using the accountability charts, to make sure that somebody’s in each of those boxes. Even if that’s Michael or me overlapping.

As part of the process, we also added a couple of folks to our leadership team. We had one operations lead. We brought that up to three to give them very specific responsibilities within the organization. When you look at our accountability chart, you will see that visionary and integrator but it’s not quite what you described. It’s a lot different.

Then next level down, we’ve got our operations leads and then you’ve got me on a couple of the boxes at that next level down, filling those roles until we’re large enough to fill those roles with other folks. That’s how we’re using that chart. I think the risk that you brought out are very real but I think for us, and maybe it is a little unique with me and Michael being in a partnership in the business, those roles actually worked out really well for us.

Jason: Yeah. I think every visionary entrepreneur does need an operationally-minded person. They’re just the yin to the yang. They’re the opposite that we need to wrap some constraints and some managerial prowess towards what we as visionaries would not be good at. We need that person and that role in the business, so it makes a lot of sense.

I think ultimately, another key takeaway for the listeners is that it is important to have an org chart. There’s a lot of people saying, “Do away with org charts,” or they’re saying that no org chart that has to exist and you need to build towards it. I don’t believe there’s an ideal org chart or an ideal situation but I do believe that it is important to have clear levels of responsibility to understand who reports to who.

You can’t serve two masters. You can’t have somebody reporting to two people, everybody will be confused as to who their supervisor is and who they report to, and have a company that runs well. It just doesn’t tend to happen in reality. Even if you don’t create it, it starts to exist organically. People have people they trust as an authority, people that they go to, and to make it actually clear and say, “This is how it is,” makes everyone feel more at ease, makes it a lot more comfortable, and then attaching to that, their roles. What is their job description?

I think that’s where it gets really specific is everytime we add a new team member, our role changes if they are doing anything that impacts us in any way. Most of our initial hires impact us directly. Any executive team members, any assistants, they’re taking something off our plate. Our job description changes, so we need to update that. Their job description changes everytime we bring on somebody else that works with them on that team.

Businesses are a fluid thing. Everytime you hire somebody, and if you’re growing and scaling, these are always happening. That top level team is going to be in flux, initially, until that’s somewhat stable. Then the lower levels are going to have that flux and that change, all those variations, and their job descriptions need to be updated and tight.

Over time, what I’ve noticed also is every single team member, as the company grows in scales, starts to do less, not more if it’s being done well. Because as the company scales and grows, my job description gets narrower. Like my head of fulfillment, his job description gets narrower. He used to be doing all the content, content gathering, client communication, and everything. His job gets narrower and narrower as we slice pieces off and give them to new people so that he has leverage.

That’s how that pyramid grows and scales, is everyone slicing pieces off and doing less and less, but they get better at it and they’re able to focus more on what they really enjoy if you’re doing it right. Then, they’re even better at it and more excited. Over time, they get better and improve. A lot of people think you just pop somebody into a role if you got the processes documented. But I think there’s something to be said about long-term employees and keeping people as long as you possibly can. I don’t think you can beat that in a business.

Andy: Absolutely. I’ll tell you though, as you’re growing, what you just said is exactly why you want to have an operating system in place as you’re growing. It’s because you do have those changing roles. If you don’t have that built, you said something like it’s going to happen anyway, it is. It’s going to happen by itself but it’s not going to happen the way you want it to and that’s true.

If the processes is through the job roles, is through the culture in your organization, all of that stuff is happening. The only question is, are you directing it? We’ve really been trying to direct it over the years and finally, with Traction, we’ve found a way that we’ve said, “This really organizes what we’re trying to do and it’s been very helpful.”

I’ll talk a little bit about our values, if I can, which is one piece of Traction that we had a head start on. We were already working on our values. We had set up an initial set of values a few years ago when we started the company. They were just me and Michael, put them together. They were just about having fun in the workplace. That sort of thing.

I’d say they were lightweight values. They didn’t have a lot of meaning behind them and since we just put them together. The employees that had come on since didn’t have any stake in them, so to speak. Last year, last December, we brought in a team of three employees and we had them work as a committee to put together our values as an organization. We wanted them to focus on two things: (1) What are we doing now? Because we felt like we had a pretty healthy culture, and (2) What are we aspiring towards? What are we aspiring our culture to look like?

Those three went out and talked to all of our existing employees. Over the course of several months, ended up putting together our values which fit in perfectly, timing-wise, with Traction because we had that in place at the same time we’re implementing Traction. That’s so important for any company to do. Even if you're a small company, put together those values because now we’re able to look at how we deal with customers, how we interact with employees, how we do our job, how we set up processes. We can look at all of those and the context of our values. Is this consistent with what we’re trying to be as an organization, with the culture we’re trying to put together? So, that’s been really helpful. That’s a part of Traction we were sure to working on. You can do it without doing Traction, but it’s a big part of what Traction brings to the table as well. So, very important.

Jason: Touching on values, I think it’s important to have values in the business because without those, you can’t even have team members that believe what you believe, which I think is the most foundational thing in building a team. If you don’t have believers, then you have people that are just there to get paid. If they’re just there to get paid, they’re going to be B players. They’re not going to care about quality the way that you do. They’re not going to care about the results. They just care about getting the paycheck. I think it’s a very dangerous thing to not really ensure that you have values set and that your team members are aware of what those are.

I think it’s very easy once you get clarity on your own values as a company. This is one of the exercises I take clients through when we take them on, is to get clear on their values. But if you don’t have clarity in your values, then it’s impossible to have a company that displays them. It just won’t happen. Once you get that clarity, it’s very easy to look at every single team member and just ask a very simple question, “Do they share my values?”

It becomes really obvious, it’s a yes or no, you know. If you know these team members at all, you know. Do they value integrity? Do they value being on time or whatever it may be that you care about as an entrepreneur? And if the answer is a no, they have to go because they’re hurting your business, they’re hurting your momentum, and they’re hurting your results in the business.

I know when I got clear of some of my values as an organization, what my purpose was as a human being and my purpose for my businesses, over a very short period of time, I think I fired half of my team. I just let them go. I let go of contractors. I brought in new people and the entire temperature of the company leveled up because I think what we do as entrepreneurs is we often trade the business we really deep down want for the business we can have.

We have this business. We take on the properties we can, anything we can. We go out to far areas and manage properties too far where we can. We take on team members that can fill a role instead of what we really want. We’re doing the business that can be used instead of the business that we should or the business that we deserve. That’s a huge difference. Having a business that you can have versus a business that you really love are two completely different businesses.

Most businesses, especially when they get into the 200–400 door category, a lot of them at that stage had built a team, a system, and everything around them, I’ve noticed that is still with the old mindset that they had as a solopreneur and it’s painful. This is probably the most painful stage I’ve seen for entrepreneurs in the property management industry, is that 200–400 door category. Fifty–sixty door category can be quite painful, too, but they’re usually solopreneurs at that point, so the pain isn’t as widespread.

Andy: That’s right. The thing about this too, Jason, whether you’re talking about Traction, E Myth, Clockwork, or other books that’ll talk to you about, how do you pull yourself out of the business all the time? Because when you’re an entrepreneur and you’re growing, if you don’t have a structure for how that growth is going to happen and what’s your business model needs to look like, you’re going to drive yourself crazy. You’re going to be working 90 hours a week and you’re going to be on-call 24/7. You’re going to be answering the phones all the time.

That’s just part of what a lot of entrepreneurs do as they grow. If you get a system like Traction, I think that helps you pull yourself away, be the real leader of the company and not the doer of everything within the company. I think Traction’s a good way to do that. For me, I’ve been able to create this role that I think is comfortable for me, that’s not overwhelming, that it’s something that I can do, it’s the kinds of things I like to do, and at the same time, Michael’s got something he likes to do in our operations leads. They’re in roles, they’re very comfortable, and they like to do that. I think you take that all the way down your organization and if you structure that, you give everybody a piece that they’re good at, that they can do, they have the ability to do, and that they want to do, that’s going to make them very effective. That’s a lot about what Traction and other operating systems are really about.

The other thing, though, I wanted to touch on something you said a little bit about we can set minimum standards for people who work for us. A lot of people get into that mindset of, “Oh, well you’ve got to hit this minimum. If you’re not hitting it, you’re in trouble. You got to hit this minimum.” No matter what happens is people hit that minimum. But what you don’t understand is that you’re losing an extraordinary amount of discretionary effort that you could have had from that employee if they were on board with your values, if they understood the goals. They were buying to those goals, and they wanted to reach them. Now, their performance isn’t the minimum. Their performance is up here. They're not even worried about managing the minimum because everybody's onboard with their culture, everybody's onboard with their goals. Nobody's around here. It's just a matter of how much discretionary effort they're providing.

I worked in call centers for a large organization before I became a property manager, before I started EZ Repair. Call centers are the worst at this because it's about setting up these metrics around handle times or compliance.

Jason: [...] tickets, check time between how long it takes to write notes, everything.

Andy: When you took your break, you're supposed to take a 7-14 but you took a 7-17, so you're only 98% compliant. All this stuff, all you're doing is managing somebody that hit a minimum standard. That's what you're going to get.

When I came into some centers, we were able to change their whole mindset, saying, "Yeah. We've got to measure on the outside of those things, but what we really need to do is to motivate our team towards a common goal." We were able to improve service levels immediately at a very large contact center, immediately. That contact center, people thought it was understaffed, that we weren’t answering the phone quick enough, going and almost immediately just by setting targets, getting away from this minimum standards, changing people's mindset, and getting people to step up. People will give you discretionary effort if they're buying the way you're doing it. They're onboard with it.

As a small business owner, I think a lot of us missed that. We do get into the, "Okay, we've got to hit these standards," or, "It's busy. We're not getting everything done. We've got to up our standard to how many X number of widgets we're going to make or whatever our performance metrics is," and that's fine. You have to have goals and standards.

What we really need to do is to motivate people who want to step up, add a little work, and be a part of your company because they buy into your company. They decided to get up on Monday and go to work because they like what they're doing. They like what they're trying to accomplish. That's a big part of this.

Traction help us do this. I think there's a lot of other ways you can implement those types of things. Traction gives you a way to show each employee on a 90-day basis, something that is very relatable to everybody, "Here's what we're trying to accomplish over 90 days. Can you help us do that?" To a person, our teams told me in small meetings with everybody on our teams, “Yeah, we can do that. We will do that. We'll step up if we have to. We'll do that and we'll make that happen.”

I think you'd be surprised how people will respond to you when you can bring them a real visual, structured, account of what we're trying to do with the company, and get it out of the framework that we're talking about earlier where it's in my head, that I know what I want my company to do, and I got this pie in the sky.

Jason: Which [...] everyday.

Andy: Exactly. It didn't help anybody because it does seem a little scattered, it does change sometimes, and nobody can really related to these ideas I've got in my head about where business is going. Traction brings it to a level where everybody in the organization can understand the buy-in and get excited about it.

They can also put the pieces together. They can see in our five year goal, "Okay. This is what we need to do in this next 90 day chunk. If we do this and we keep doing our 90 day chunk, we're going to hit that five year target." Even though it seems like it's way out there, we're going to hit that, and we're going to hit it 90 days at a time.

If I were looking at Traction and say, "What's the biggest single thing we've got out of this?" there's a lot of things in there. It's the ability to chunk that business in 90 days, and have a very good and very solid structure.

Jason: Yeah, and really any business planning system, that is one of the most basic things. I've done Wake Up Warrior, there's a 90 day year which is a system out there that's scaling up, the Rockefeller Habits, that system. There's EOS, Traction. All of these things.

My [...], internally we call DoorGrow OS. It's our Operating System. I've taken what I feel like is the best of all the systems out there. It may, in the future—I don't want to be the vaporware guy—be the system that we share with property managers. I do have an intention to help create the ultimate system out there, but I think what you're saying is very valid.

I don't know if you know this, you and I have a little bit of a similar background. I don't have the scale that you had at AAA, but I was the head. I did all the hiring, I was the lead supervisor and head of a call center for the largest private broadband internet service provider in California. Then, I left there as a big fish in a small pond to work at Verizon in their Business and Tech Support Center for DSL and was the low guy on the totem pole, but I got paid a lot more when I went there.

I've been in the call center environment. I've been the supervisor doing the hiring. I've taken the supervisor calls as well. I've done all the low level work. The funny thing I noticed is when you have a system and you geared it towards those metrics, people figure out how to game the system. I figured out how to manipulate the system because it was all about speed in getting things done faster. I used a piece of software that could do macros that would prepopulate tickets. I noticed we're only getting about three types of tickets. We had to fill up this horrible piece of software in Verizon that was detailing everything that we did, what we said, and how to be done.

They really made four types of problems so I created this macroscript thing. It would just prepopulate the tickets. I have my tickets done and I was back on a call right away. I got really good at closing out tickets legitimately, so that we were helping people.

I then started sharing with other people that were struggling. If you're not making your metrics, you get nervous. They're afraid that you're going to get axed. Here's the funny thing. Supervisors don't like [...] people messing with the system or doing things differently, especially if it wasn't their idea. I had supervisors that wanted to challenge that or felt threatened by the fact that I optimized and make things better.

As entrepreneurs, this is what we do. We're always looking for ways to support our team or looking for ways to improve speed, improve accuracy, help them be better. If we give our team members that ability to feel entrepreneurial which is where instead of micromanaging them, we give them our values, we give them our outcomes. We give them outcomes to work towards and we let them see what they could do.

I've been really amazed when we've gone into planning sessions with my team. I say, "Here's the things that I want, what [...] you have to help us get there." My graphic designer has a completely different view and perspective from her angle of the business than I have from my top down. My head of fulfillment and the content person has a completely different view and perspective from that side than I do from the top down. Their ideas are great. I'm always amazed. We have all these brainstormed ideas. I'm like, "Yes. I didn't even think of that."

I think we also as entrepreneurs, we become the emperor with no clothes if we don't have a planning system because they're all just saying, "Yes," and they're just getting their paychecks, they're just doing what they're told. They're not innovating, they're not feeling alive, and they're not really enjoying being part of that organization. You're the boss that everyone is complaining about. On the weekend, they just leave for the weekend.

What you said earlier about discretionary time, I want team members that even on the weekends, they're thinking about how they could be better. They're thinking about the job. They're excited about what they're doing. They're studying and learning new stuff because they're excited about what they get to do in the business and they feel passionate about being able to be part of something bigger. They like that feeling and camaraderie of being on a team, and having a culture. It's a very different thing.

Andy: I’ll tell you a quick story along those lines. We're doing a lot of the process piece. One of the six components of Traction, one of those is process. We've been spending a lot of time on that. I mentioned a year ago, we want to really formalize our process where it’s consistent the same way every time for every company. You can customize things like that.

Your [...] criteria can be customized, but you couldn't customize when we follow up with the tenant after repair. We're not going to do the same for everybody. There's things in our process where we don't do the same. When we started Traction, we're also used to email then The Checklist Manifesto was a great book, as well. We talked about how we are going to document our processes in a way that our team has all the support that they need for the process.

We did that. We put some really cool documentation for our seven key processes all in checklist style but visual checklist. You don't have to fill anything up. Any team member, even new team members can immediately walk into a process and these steps to do for that, for example.

When we roll that out, almost immediately, one of the team members who does most of the work on one of our frontend processes—part of the dispatch processes—that was able to come in and say, "Look, I’ve been doing this process. It's working fine. If we did this, we've been quicker. We can get to these work-overs dispatch even quicker." We made these small changes.

Because we had a checklist listed down, he can even see what's the next stage in the process and what are they doing. He was able to put that altogether and say, "Here's the fix. Here's something that we can improve." We implemented it the same day. It definitely drives people to be more engaged in the operations. They're not just there to do your ABC work that you asked them to do. They're vying into the goals they were trying to accomplish. They're vying into the process you're rolling out. They're trying to be a part of that.

We've seen a lot of that. A lot of folks at the very frontline and in this particular case. This is an employee that has only been enlisted for a couple of months. People feeling really comfortable to be able to help us towards these goals. Now that they understand what we're trying to do and that really put an understandable 90-day blocks. Here’s what we’re trying to do and everybody's going to be more likely to be onboard, jump up, and say, "Hey, let's do this differently because that’s going to improve our operation."

Jason: Yeah. If you look at any problem internally in a business, there's one of three things that must be missing. Either there isn't a clear outcome, which a planning system help solve, there isn't accountability, it wasn't clear who was supposed to be doing it or who was responsible for the outcome, and there isn't transparency. Nobody can see who's doing what or see that people are or are not getting things done. Nobody has clarity on where the business is at financially or how it’s working.

I think having a planning system, having regular meetings, it creates this culture that allows accountability, allows transparency, allows responsibility, allows to be a clear drive towards outcomes.

Most businesses have no clear outcome. They're not working towards a clear outcome. They're just managing day to day fires and they're just shooting in the dark. That's how most small businesses operate. It financially looks that way in their business, too. There is a consistency in the financial side as well. Also, it's a financial system which is a part of planning. I'll just throw that out there which I'm a big fan of Profit First.

Andy: First of all, big plug to Profit First. Big plug to Profit First. It changed my business two years ago. Absolutely a big fan of Profit First and in Clockwork thesis. He’s written several great books for profit entrepreneurs.

For me, you were talking about how most small business owners don't do these things. I was in that same boat. Even though I come from a very structured environment from AAA, when I was a property manager, that's all I [...] property management company. I joked but it's not really a joke. I didn't make any money in my property management company until I sold it. That was the company I ran.

When we started EZ Repair, we sort of forgot to do this a little differently. We started getting into the systems and reading different books about structuring, about how to have an operating model, how to profitability. It wasn't really until, like I said, two years ago, we were at Profit First. That just transformed our finances completely. It's was amazing. And then here, I feel like Traction for us is going to be the next turning point, but a couple of years from now, I'll be talking about how we found Traction a couple of years ago.

I think it's an evolution of a small business. You learn different things as you go. But for any small business owner, even if you're just starting up, whether it's Traction or another system, you need to have an operating system in place. This would've been so much easier for us a couple of years ago if we did implement it, but that’s okay. We’re implementing it now and it's never too early. I don't care how small you are. Maybe you don't have employees yet but you plan on growing. Get it in place.

Jason: Yeah. For those listening, what do you want them to take away from this?

Andy: Hopefully, some learnings from me. What I just said from my own property management experience when I was a property manager. Hopefully, you can make some money before you decide to sell your [...] business. Hopefully, you can make money along the way. There's a lot of property managers who are. The ones who are have that structure. They have that operating system. They have that financial plan in place.

What I'm advocating for is to do that as a property manager. Implement, whether it's Traction or another operating system. Implement it. Definitely read Profit First. It will change your life, absolutely. Do that going forward. Even if you're small, even if you don't think you're there yet, even if you think, "Well, I'm just a one person show," or whatever, one or two person show, it doesn't matter. The structure is going to help you so much and it’s going to keep you from working those 80 hours a week.

I know there are PMs out there working 80 hours weeks because that was what I was doing when I was a PM. You don't need to. Even if you're not ready to hire right now, these operating systems are going to help you structure in a way that you won't be working 80 hour weeks anymore. They'll figure out how to handle the work without actually having to just be available all the time.

Hopefully, you'll determine too that there's some self-showing work that you can do, maybe some maintenance work coordination, work duty. You can do some other things. You can outsource, but you're definitely even without doing any of that, just by structuring your work and system like Traction, you're going to find your job becomes easier or manageable, and you're going to understand exactly what you need to be doing in the business everyday.

Jason: One thing I want everybody to take away from this, too, is that this is rare in businesses in the US or everywhere, really. This is rare that a business will implement a planning system, implement profit first, have these pieces in place. I think every listener should feel a lot safer with using a company if they hear that they have these pieces in place.

Andy, props to you for getting these pieces in place over EZ Repair Hotline. I'm sure those listening will feel a lot safer with using these services if they haven't considered these before. It creates more consistency in the outcomes of the business. It creates more reliability. Really, that's what people are vying from all of us—safety and uncertainty. That's what they want. They want results. It's far easier to deliver results when you have a predictable system to create that magic and to create a future.

Andy, I appreciate you coming on the show. How can they check you out?

Andy: Thanks for having me. Our website is probably the best way to start to take a look at us. It's ezrepairhotlinellc.com. They can see all our products and the easy way to set up a meeting with me or just to send us a note in the contact form. I'd love to have people follow up with us.

Jason: Perfect. I appreciate you, Andy, coming on the show. Hopefully, you have an awesome rest of your day.

Andy: Thanks, Jason. That was great. I appreciate it.

Jason: You can check them out. It is ezrepairhotlinellc.com, so check them out.

If you are a property management entrepreneur, you're feeling stressed out, you’re feeling overwhelmed, you're not getting the results that you want, you don't feel like you have consistency, you feel like things are crazy, you feel like you're on a financial rollercoaster, you may just need to start with getting clarity on yourself. This is where I start clients out when we start working with them, when we start coaching and consulting property management business. We start them with figuring themselves out first.

Andy is the center of the solar system. I'm the center of my business. If you change and help them get clarity on what they love doing, on what they should be doing, or where their time is being drained, or where their energy is being drained, we align the business around the entrepreneur.

Every business will be very different from each other. Every business will be unique. It will support you, you will feel alive, and you will feel the momentum which is what we crave as entrepreneurs. The rest of the world wants to be happy or sad. They're focused on that. We want momentum. We want to feel alive. If we don't have that, we feel unconstrained, we feel overwhelmed, we feel frustrated, we feel stressed, we feel stuck. That's hell for us as entrepreneurs. If you're stuck in a little bit of hell, maybe reach out, and we'll see if we can get you unstuck.

I'm Jason Hull, from DoorGrow. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Make sure you join our Facebook community, our Facebook group. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com.

If you feel like your property management website is a little bit outdated, it's older than 2-3 years, maybe it's 5 years old or older, it might be time to test that website, see how much money is really leaking and costing you. You can go to doorgrow.com/quiz and take our website quiz. Most websites that go through it get an F grade in terms of conversion which means you are losing deals and money right now. It's probably costing you tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually, in lost deals and lost business. So, check that out.

Again, I'm Jason Hull with the DoorGrow Show. I appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to check us out on iTunes or on YouTube. Like and subscribe. Where it's possible, leave us a testimonial or review. We'll really appreciate that. That is it. I am out.

Bye, everyone. To our mutual growth. Until next time.

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Oct 1, 2019

Everybody needs and deserves a place to live that is clean, maintained, and safe. Better yet, It makes perfect sense to get someone else to pay your mortgage by giving them a great space at a great rate and share some resources.

Today, I am talking to Lisa Wise, co-founder of Nest DC, which manages residential units throughout Washington, DC. The company is committed to customer service, quality spaces, and excellent living experiences.

You’ll Learn...

[02:23] Nest continues to experience exceptional growth and measures success by revenue and number of jobs it’s created.

[02:34] Fun Spaces: Fixing an Adobe duplex where nothing’s square and everything’s made of dirt led Lisa to love her accidental landlord role in property management.

[04:09] Non-profit Dedication: Do what you can for the community, in terms of what you want to do professionally, due to ability to manage and maintain properties.

[05:04] Origin of Nest DC: Grow one property at a time, and focus on service forward to take care of tenants, spaces, and places.

[05:56] Property managers can make a meaningful impact by helping people and families preserve a better quality of life in their homes.

[11:00] Bad Strategies for Building Relationships: Ignoring problems, letting things fall into disrepair, not paying expenses for repairing things—none of those are good..

[11:23] Property Manager Opportunities: Daily variety, unique challenges, freedom, and direct impact.

[13:32] Cycle of Suck: Bad managers control costs and fail to maintain property; if people are unhappy with where they’re living, they’re less likely to be great tenants.

[19:20] Onboarding Process: Set expectations on maintenance costs and educate them on why they need to maintain the property at the highest level to take care of tenants.

[21:28] Ways to strategically grow through painful stages: Evaluate technology, be nimble, and cherish staff.

Tweetables

Grow one property at a time, and focus on service forward to take care of tenants, spaces, and places.

It’s truly an act of trust and intimacy to be invited to manage someone’s home and personal space.

Property managers can make a meaningful and powerful impact by helping people.

If people are happy where they live, then they’re just better neighbors.

Resources

Nest DC

AppFolio

National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM)

Shark Tank

Upwork

Fiverr