#DoorGrowShow - Property Management Growth

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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're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.

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

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

My guests today are Zee Bhimji and Asif Hussain. I got everyone's names right, right?

Zee: You really throw up my name though.

Jason: Perfect. Let everybody know who you are and what your role is. I want to get into your background and how you got connected to the property management industry. We'll start with you, Zee.

Zee: Yeah, absolutely. Zee Bhimji. I am the co-founder of ShowingHero. I have actually been in the industry for about 10 years now. I tell people this a lot of times. I couldn't spell property management where I started. I have a property management company also (Real Property Management) in the Chicagoland area. We've been around 10 years now.

Like I said, I still couldn't spell property management when I started. I'm a finance and accounting major. It was a process. That's where ShowingHero came around, where we saw that there is a void in the market.I decided to work with my very good friend here, Asif. We decided to take down this very big challenge and a very fun project.

Jason: Cool. Asif, why don't you tell everybody about yourself?

Asif: Yeah. My background a little unique. I'm not a property manager, but I was a landlord and do-it-yourself landlord. I have managed a few properties and doors on my own. I was familiar with some of the issues and some of the pain points in the property management world—dealing with tenants, leasing, maintenance, the whole nine yards.

My background is actually in marketing and finance. I worked for Discover Financial Services. I actually went ahead and got my Masters in Education in London. I went over to mentorship and educational leadership.

Zee and I had actually met together. We were talking about some of the struggles. I actually just went up to Zee to figure out, "Hey. Either some of the struggles that I'm having with my landlords and with my tenants, what are some things that we could do?"

In exchanging ideas and learning from each other, this is where the idea of ShowingHero came from. There wasn't a solution in the market that was available to us, so that's where that spirit and that’s where it started, the beginning of our journey actually from.

Jason: Got it. Gentlemen, why don't you explain to everyone what is ShowingHero?

Zee: ShowingHero is an automation of the entire leasing process. It's the easiest way to put it. What we would say is from lead to lease. One of the biggest challenges that I face as a property manager, we managed over a thousand doors, and it's a very good problem to have. Well it’s a problem and it's hard to do. We actually received an award from the Chicago Association of Realtors back in 2015 where we were the platinum leaders in the entire Chicago land market. It's definitely something we're very proud of.

That's the time we started realizing we're facing a lot of problems and there are no solutions for them. There are piecemeal solutions. You guys have seen that. Jason, you've seen so many piecemeal solutions. I've seen that you are putting together a full solution because everyone has noticed piecemeal solutions are hard to do and customers don't prefer that.

As a property manager, one of the biggest things that I had was I don't want my employees to go to five different software to get their work done. That's where ShowingHero comes in. ShowingHero comes in and helps from the time a lead comes in to closing out the entire lease. What you want to do is you want to eliminate days in market. You want to make it more profitable. You want to avoid all the redundant stuff, all the administrative stuff. That's where ShowingHero comes in.

It will contact the lead. It'll scheduled the showing. It will use artificial intelligence or machine learning to contact people that are interested in the property, get them to schedule a showing as quickly as possible. This is something that's really cool. You can get a price drop on your property. Instead of having to go and communicate this to so many people, five minutes after you drop your price, you have people scheduled showings. That's incredible when it comes to automation coming in and doing their job. That's where ShowingHero comes in. It helps get everything done.

We come into self showings, which I would like us to talk about because that's something I'm very, very excited about. We do it differently and we do it more encompassing. Asif, I'm going to let you take the stage.

Jason: Before you get into that, I wanted to touch on this. People are really looking for a result. They're not looking for pieces. When they're looking for pieces, they're hoping to magically put together a solution to get to a result. You really focus your tool on delivering front to end the result of automating the whole leasing process. You said from lead to lease.

Most people listening to this have some solution in place. They may be using Tenant Turner. They're using Rently. I've seen Knock rentals on their ShowMojo. There's all these different tools out there. Maybe for the listeners, I'd love to hear about your processes, what you guys do, maybe how you stand out, or how you're different. Everybody listening is wondering how do you guys fit in the marketplace.

Asif: I wanted to add one thing. One of the things that separates us from the market is that the idea of customizations and the full access on the platform. One of the things that Zee had mentioned is when you look at piecemeal solutions, you're looking at being able to solve something. People don't realize the amount of hours that are dedicated into doing that.

The example that Zee had mentioned in terms of price-reduced setting. You can manually go ahead and text or email, and say, "Hey look. That's a solution that works." People aren't realizing that for those smaller solutions that they're thinking that just works, they're not just being efficient. Not being efficient had the opportunity cost that you need to be able to understand that it's not necessarily in terms of dollars but its terms of hours. That adds up, which eventually does translate to dollars.

Jason: This piecemeal idea you've mentioned a few times. Give us an example of a piecemeal process that you feel like has these gaps or is broken. Just so people are really clear on this.

Asif: I've had clients that have said, "Look. I just use Calendly to schedule my showings. It works. I put out my show times there and I'll get notified." What they're not doing is, what does the reporting look like? Do you understand how many days your properties have been on the market? Are you getting the data that you need in terms of where the lead is coming from? What happens to the lead? Has a lead been able to provide you any feedback either if it's the assisted showing? Have they been able to provide you feedback on the agent or on the property? Are you able to see have they applied on? They clicked on the application link. What is the life cycle of that prospect? Are you able to understand those different points?

You could use Calendly. You might say, "Okay. I'm able to schedule," but you're missing out on those other solutions. You might say, "Hey, look. I'm using a lockbox and I'm allowing people to enter the property." But do you understand who's entering your property? When they've entered? If they've left the property? Are you able to follow-up on all of those different missing pieces?

Sometimes these piecemeal solutions work. I had one client who said that they just text message (mass text message) to confirm a showing, which is great, but that does take an amount of time for someone to go get all those text messages, send that, see who replied, see who that person is. Those solutions work but they're not a one-stop solution. That's where ShowingHero tries to differentiate itself and say, "Look. We want you to be efficient and running on all gears."

Jason: Cool. Explain the process of how the showing side work.

Zee: One of the things to add to what Asif was saying and to clarify, we have piecemeal. The idea of piecemeal is just simply the fact that when a lead is interested in a property (we call our property management terms one, two, three, example stream), the first thing we're doing is we're saying, "Let's contact the lead." It's as simple as that. We just need to respond to them. Communicate, speak to them, pre-screen them, try to schedule time.

Schedule time really takes three or four attempts. You're going back and forth. You're leaving voicemails, you're sending emails. From there, you're scheduling your time next week, Wednesday, 1:00 PM. Sounds good. Everything is great. From there, the next thing is a diligent agent or property manager is going to call in again and remind them about their showing the day before. Then, they're going to try and confirm the showing on the day about four hours prior.

Jason: The goal behind that is to eliminate no-shows, to not waste time, to make sure that you're doing your best to get these people engaged so they show up, so you can get the property lease as quick as possible. The whole goal is just to get the place rented.

Zee: Right. All you want to do is reduce the days in market and make it profitable. Yes, you can have ten agents for ten properties. You're not going to be profitable. That's what we had. We had four agents showing eighty properties. Yes, it worked for us. It made a lot of money but it was tough.

I had a call center with three people full-time taking calls all the time. All they're doing is taking calls. That was 8:30-5:30. That's all I was making available and it wasn't enough. We're still getting a lot of calls, a lot of voicemails, a lot of emails outside of business hours. We were making it work. It was working. We pre-screen them on the phone, schedule a showing. We tried to be a little smart about it. We tried to be a little efficient about it.

That's where ShowingHero comes in. ShowingHero takes 90% of all that administrative work. All you're doing is like going to your assistant and saying, "Hey. I want to show properties in the north side of town on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 9:00-1:00. Can you please schedule a whole bunch of showings for me, but make sure that the people are pre-qualified? Then, make sure you follow-up with every single person to find out if they're going to show up on time. Remind them and confirm the showing." That's ShowingHero. ShowingHero is your personal assistant that is doing all those things but you don't have to remind them.

Jason: Okay. The situation you're describing sounds like pretty normal. The problem situation, it sounds pretty normal. Most management companies, if they're smaller, the property managers are the one handling this. They're leveraging maybe one or two tools to try and systemize things. They've got one system that's putting the properties out to the market and feed allowing the system that's handling some of the showing stuff.

That sounds pretty normal. They're going to have a handful of people that are going out or maybe themselves. They're trying to do this. At your level of scale, you started to see gaps and the problem. It sounds like for smaller guys, something like ShowingHero could allow them some freedom from the leasing side of the business that they're tied up in.

Zee: Yeah. I want to put up the 100 emoji right now because that's what it is. It's all about having a bold solution.

Jason: Okay. Let me point this out. My listeners have heard this multiple times. The most expensive thing in business is staff. It's the most expensive operational cost that we have. It is people. We're spending thousands, tens of thousands of dollars even on a team every month. If you can reduce that even slightly through some automation, through technology, through some process, through systems, through less communication needing to happen, then even eliminating phone calls being necessary between two people, or any step that is reduced adds up to a lot of cost savings. It scales once you get to 1000 doors like your size.

It's pretty obvious. It's really obvious. it's difficult for people that are at a smaller door account to pay attention to all these little leaks that exist in their business. The challenge ends up being they just feel like they're spinning their wheels and they're not moving forward. They feel like they're just living paycheck-to-paycheck. They feel like the business isn't progressing. It's because they're not dedicating time towards strategic time in working on the business. They're focused on all the tactical things they need to do in the business.

They have the business that they can do instead of the business that they should be doing, the business that they really want to have in which they're able to focus on strategic time, focus on planning on the future, on growth, on ideas. Instead they're handling leasing, maintenance, phone calls, their team, managing, trying to do accounting, and like all these kind of stuff.

The less tactical work they have on their plate, the better. If you can free up tactical work by leveraging a technology tool or system, you're going to dramatically reduce your cost. It doesn't matter if a tool is hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. Team members are thousands of dollars a month. That's where people miss the boat.

I hear people so often they say, "Oh that software is so expensive." They're starting out and they're like, "I can't get the better property management accounting solution because it's hundreds of dollars a month." I'm like, "Are you kidding?" Your first team member is going to be thousands of dollars a month. Start with the solution you can live with forever because it's gonna be painful to switch. I wanted to point that out.

Asif: Absolutely. What you were mentioning is key. People don't realize that payroll is expensive. It's one of the largest expense items out there. Doing it manually and not looking at a software solution because you think, "Oh. This upfront cost might be too much," you're not realizing how much you're spending in paying someone to do that manual because the work has to get done. It's not that you're not reaching out to these individuals. It's not that you're not following-up if somebody’s doing this and you're not realizing the cost. The other thing that's also important to think about is the prospect experience. Most prospects that we've looked at are scheduling during weeknights or weekends.

Jason: Right. That's when they're not working.

Asif: Exactly. How are you able to respond to them? I just read a stat somewhere that said when most prospects are looking at homes, they're not only looking at your listings. They're looking at multiple listings in that area. If they don't get a response within a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, and you don't get back to them, they're going to move on to the next one. They're not waiting for somebody in your office to respond back to them.

That's what's ShowingHero does. With our tenant portal, we create a richer experience. The moment that somebody is interested in a property, they get information about the property that the property management company puts out. There's the picture, the details, what schools are nearby, what's the walk score. What are the important factors that allow me to make a decision about this property and then be able to have a response to instantly say, "Hey, this is when I can schedule a showing and that am I qualified?" The pre-screening also allows us to gather more information and that creates a richer experience on both ends. Making sure that the prospect feels that they're getting responded to and that allows them to hopefully sign that lease and sign on the dotted line quicker.

Jason: You mentioned experience and you mentioned the service level that people expect. The customer experience is what I'm talking about. You get two camps of property managers. You get some that fear automation. They're like, "Oh. I can never use this AI tool or I can never use this automation because you're cutting out people." They pride themselves. It's like this badge of honor that they wear on their shirt sleeve that they're so personal. They do everything themselves. They think that that means they're providing a higher level of service.

"Oh well, I'm going to deal with every tenant directly. I want to see them, know them, taste them, and smell them. I'm doing the best thing for my owners. I'm so connected." They wear this badge of honor. It's not scalable. There's this myth that that means it's better that they're able to provide better experience.

Asif: It's not consistent. Automation doesn't take away the personal touch right. ShowingHero allows you to customize everything. I'm going to let Zee talk about how it helped his company grow with that because that was an issue that him and I discussed in detail and saying, "Are we taking away the human touch?"

Both of us thought that automation doesn't take it. It allows you to standardize and make that process simpler and more efficient. You're not going to know how your agent goes and respond to every message and email. You can't control that. You can create culture, obviously, and that takes time. But what about if I can be able to put that in an email or in a message or in my branding that then gets the same process goes out to every prospect every time?

Jason: [...]. I know that every renter that's rented at least a handful of times or even maybe once has had a bad experience in renting. They've had difficulties with showings. They've had people not calling them back. They've had difficulties and maintenance. They've all had bad experiences.

When I moved to a new area and I asked around, it's pretty obvious when you ask people. They know which management companies are good and bad. They talk about them. I don't think people realize that the tenants are screening management companies as well. A lot of them will look for a good management company because they dealt directly with an owner that was terrible, wasn't attentive, was busy working, not available, wasn't following laws, wasn't on the up-and-up on things, or was shady.

A good management company provide consistency. They follow the law. They do things in a timely fashion if they're healthy. They have good a good service experience. I know from my own experience, I appreciated not having to talk to a person in order to get things done that I wanted to do. I just wanted it done. I wanted it quick. I wanted to get in and see the property quickly. I wanted to get maintenance requests done quickly. I didn't need to talk to somebody, do all the niceties, and go through these. I just wanted stuff taken care of.

Sometimes we may focus a little bit too much on customer experience when really the experience they want is just to get [...] done fast. That's it. Get it done and let me get on with my day. "I don't need a friend right now. I need my toilet fixed. I need to see this probably because I need to find a place."

Zee: Jason, I especially agree with that because we have multiple things happening at the same time. One of the big items is if you can exaggerate something. Many people who wear this badge of honor are saying that we care about customer service. I fully agree. I don't call myself a property management company. ShowingHero doesn't call itself a tech company. We call ourselves a customer service company. It's where the customer service is required.

I'm not going to call you, Jason, and say, "Hey. I'm so sorry about your toilet not working. This is so upsetting. You want to talk about it?" No. That's not when you need a call. When you need a call is when you're frustrated. When the property owner is saying, "Hey, listen. I need to replace my sub-zero fridge. That's going to cost me $13,000. Can you guys give me a good option? Tell me something that's important." Not when it's $200, not when we need to schedule a showing. When you're trying to schedule a showing you want to automate that. Then you can focus on the things that really matter.

Customer service is where when it matters. That's what ShowingHero is allowing you to do. Just like you had mentioned, you want to scale. One thing that I got lucky (and I say this very many times) is that I was fortunate. I was able to hear from people like you, Jason, who said, "Zee, don't work in your business, work on it." That made a really big difference because at that time I was a fresh graduate. I just got out of school and I said, "I'm going to start a business."

I did really well in school and I was like, "You know what? I'm gonna try and listen to people because I know nothing about property management." I didn't come in with any of my old ways of doing things. I was like, "I just need a try." From day one.

I got to hear people like you, Jason, who said, "Listen, skill. Focus on growth. Don't focus on saving a few dollars by going and doing showings. One of the first things I did when nobody was doing it was I got epayments. I got esignatures for leasing. Many prospects would be confused and then they would call in. We would get reviews that, "Last time I signed a lease, I had to meet the person there, and we were there for three hours. This time it took 30 seconds." Now, esignatures are commonplace. Everyone is doing it.

But the guy who wears that badge that says, "Hey, listen. You know I want customer service. I want to sit there and explain the lease." No, that's not what you need. You need to be able to answer the questions that they have. Figure it out. Get the maintenance done in a timely manner. That's what's showing here does.

What we have done is also with cost. We've made it very customizable. One thing our clients do is they're saying that, “Hey. All the automation really helps us because then when we go to a showing we can focus and say, ‘Hey, which one?’ We have open houses. The prospect is going to go with it. We're going to get multiple prospects coined for one showing.” If you have six or seven people at the same time, you want to pick who is the correct person. That's where customer service comes in. I feel like that's where you should spend time.

Jason: Going back to my earlier question (because everybody listening is wondering), how does this compare or how is it different than Tenant Turner, ShowMojo, or Rently? These are the three tools that have been in the marketplace for a while. A lot of people are using it. I've heard the most about those. What do you feel is different about ShowingHero?

Asif: Zee, feel free to jump in. One of the things that I feel that we have, that is the most unique is building on our founders experience and those on our board. Zee, we also have Sean, who's also on the board, bring over almost two decades of property management experience.

Both of them have been very successful. Zee have been able to scale from where we were. I was in the beginning a few doors to 1000–1500 plus doors. I went in as part of the largest franchisee and has been able to establish himself. To be able to use that knowledge and expertise, we can all appreciate that that value is innumerable.

Using his experience allows us to understand the pain points for scalability. That's one of the leverages. Because of his network, we've been able to look at different integrations. We've been able to look at different features that we've launched and to really figure out what's the next trend. Luckily (or unluckily) for him, we also do a lot of testing on his property management company. We're like," Hey. We have this view feature. Let's push it out to him."

Jason: Zee's the guinea pig.

Zee: Yeah. In this scenario, it's a happy guinea pig because these are things that many people will come up to us and say, "Hey, we need to do this. Is this something that you guys can do?" We're looking at it and we say, "That sounds amazing." We can vet a proposal much faster because I'm looking and I'm like, "That makes perfect sense. I've dealt with that." Property managers deal with that every day. We're not fixing things. It's not a novelty solution. When we look at a problem, we're looking at it from the property manager’s eyes.

Many of our clients say that they appreciate the fact that we're a property management software that's built by property managers. We feel their pain. We understand their pain fully. I have been in the trenches (I'm still in the trenches). It makes a really big difference. One of the things that we have is the fact that we try to build a system that's customizable. We have vendor portals. We have very many features, Jason. A lot of our customers are ecstatic about the fact that we're feature-rich, but we're agile. We're an agile software which means that we can move quickly.

One of the things that I thought was a major disadvantage for us is it's obviously an advantage also but we were the new shiny product out there. How can people trust it if they have no one else that has tried it. That's where we got a little lucky. We got a little fortunate because my network of people were like, "Zee, you know what? If you've built something, we're happy to see what it's about."

Sean Kingman said, "Hey. Let's try this," and that's how it caught on fire. We just started. We're a 2017-2018 product. We've only been around for a very short time. The reason why we're many times being added to conversations is because our customers see it as client success is very important to us and we know property management. That's a very big differentiator. When it comes to features, Asif could talk for like six hours. Jason, you might get a little bored. You might think some of these things are really cool but six hours, I don't think we have.

Jason: Maybe we'll get into a few features that Asif thinks are really cool. Before we do that, I just want to touch on what you said that there's fundamentally the intention from the ground up of what a company is involved in significantly changes all of the outcomes and the product that they create. If people start a product because they think, "Hey. We're really nerdy and we're really cool tech people. Let's make something really nerdy and see if we can make some money off these property managers." That's very different than having an intention from the ground-up saying, "Hey, we need to solve this problem for ourselves. Let's see if we can do this towards scaling the business."

Your focus from the ground-up was, “How can we focus on scaling this? How can we lower operational costs? How can we systemize things and reduce time? How can we speed up the process? How can we focus on the customer service aspect so that we're getting a high level of positivity throughout the experience for the customer?” That's a very different focus than I'm just focusing on being really tech-savvy and making something really nerdy and cool, and throwing a bunch of features at it. The whole goal to grow in scale is significant.

Just like in DoorGrow, our intention, our fundamental mission (like client-centric mission statement) is that we want to change and transform this industry, and have an impact. We get to do that through hundreds of clients that we have and create that ripple effect. I really do believe that good property management can change the world.

You can have a significant impact on hundreds of thousands of families lives, home, money, property, and investments. This is fundamental to your owners and the tenants lives. That drives our mission and our vision, and we want to have a real impact with our clients. We've done things that, probably from a business standpoint, makes sense for us but it was towards our vision and our purpose. It's not always about the bottom line or about the dollar.

I'm sure with you guys, you've made little changes and little differences between what you do. Maybe some of the others isn't on squeezing a dollar out of a person or just implementing some cool piece of technology. It's just like driving down the road. It's the little adjustments that you make to the steering wheel. You end up in a very different place. You stay on the road. But if the steering was just slightly off from the very beginning and you don't adjust it or if you're flying an airplane, you will end up in a very different place. You'll be off the road. You'll be in a different city if you're flying. It's the little things that end up making a big difference especially later on down the road.

Vision and purpose is what keeps a business in alignment and keeps it moving towards benefiting the consumer and benefiting the target audience that you want to serve. You are your own target audience which is interesting.

Asif: That really does help. I was just going to add. Zee and I both agree with you on this point. one of the most important things that I've learned in this journey is to listen. To listen and understand.

Zee and I had a vision and said, "Okay, look. These are the problems that we're facing. Let's understand and how do we solve them." We've solved a solution and I said, "Look, I want to make sure that customer service is really important to me." Perhaps, it's a millennial thing. I want to get something, get it done fast, and I want to be treated well while doing it.

For Zee, it was customizations that were really important. He said, "Look. I need this but I know that someone in my network has a different profile and might not want this. I want to customize this for myself." Even though we have both of those pillars to guide us, we listen to each of our clients to understand, "What is it that you need?"

While we're driving to this destination in the car, for example, are we checking to make sure that we're headed towards that way? Are we checking our blind spots? Are we checking our biases to understand where that is? Then also, looking ahead 5-10 years, what are the integrations and technologies that we want to start implementing today to make sure that we collectively push property management to the next level?

Whether that's looking at virtual reality, whether that's looking at AI, looking at learning, looking at voice, what are these tools that we can start leveraging and using to help push property management to the next level while also understanding the realities of today? And then learning from the best practices. That's both from Zee and then from our clients. That's where that mixture has to happen and that's where that perfect blend is.

Jason: You also said you have two camps when it comes to software creation. You have those that are more of the camp of, "We're going to create things the best way and everybody else needs to do it our way. Our way is the way they need to fit their business into our model or we're just not a fit for you." Then you've got, "We're going to allow this to be flexible for their business and listen to our consumers and we're going to make adjustments for this."

I'm not saying either one is better than the other. They're just different. Somebody may create the ultimate solution and somebody may create something. It sounds like your focus is on customization. It's something that can be adapted to their business model. Can you explain some of the differences between some of your customers that might show up in your software, feature-wise?

Zee: One of the things that I could be able to say is just like you said. We have this idea of saying that we have a product it's going to help you in many ways. But we want to customize it. People run their businesses differently. We're still going to provide best practices.

We have our client success team. We have our senior consultants who are saying, "Here's how many of our customers are doing this but here are options." When we're doing customer check-ins our customers are like, "I'm thinking about doing something like this. How can you help me?"

I'll give you an example of a feature that really differentiates us but it makes us proud. I'll tell you this that many times our customers are saying, "You're giving me a lot of good data." Once you have over 300 listings, 300 properties under your portfolio, you need data to run your business, so getting a lot of data. But sometimes it's not actionable data. You want to say, "Okay. Yes, cool. I'm getting a lot of showings. I'm getting a lot of leads."

What we've started doing is because our customer came up to us, we did a beta across around 30 different customers, and said, "Is this something that you guys care for?" We were looking at and we said this is something important and it's simply performance alerts. Something that comes in, gives you actionable data, and says, "Don't tell me how many showings I have. Tell me how many properties are not getting showings."

"Instead of me going through 70 of my active listings, tell me what's actionable data." They tell me, "Here's where my problems are. This is a list of problems."

You can ask that you receive this performance alerts on a weekly basis, on a daily basis, on a monthly basis. You're getting this information that says, "Here are all your listings that have less than X number of photos. Here are all your properties that have had less than five showings." This is such simple stuff and we looked at it and we're like, "This is a no-brainer but this helps a company."

Now, we get reviews. We get thank you emails. Asif was just showing me a thank you email yesterday. He was like, "This is a customer saying that this has made their life easy because the leasing manager in the office says, “Now I don't have to go in and look for the needle in the haystack. You guys are making the needle have a halo all around it."

Jason: Yeah. It's helping them see gaps. It's helping them see blind spots in these properties that they're leasing because the more properties you have, the more common those blind spots and leaks probably occur. "Oh, no. We didn't get enough photos on this one." "These small handful of properties are not renting very quickly over in this market." These challenges. It helps you make different business decisions. You may decide not to take on properties in a certain geographic area. They're just not leasing or whatever.

Zee: Actionable insight is very important. It helps you run your business the correct way. When we're looking at something like the number of leads, yeah the number of leads are great. On average, our customers receive around 2700 leads on a monthly basis. It just might be something that you know and it's very common, but many small customers don't know this. They don't know how many leads they receive on it together because they contact the 15 leads they receive during the day. But how about the leads that came in on the weekends? How about the leads that came in via voicemail? Or missed calls? 2700 leads is a lot of leads.

The problem is that even though you're getting 2700 leads, where's the actionable insight? How do I know which property is not getting the leads? I don't need to work on all the properties and getting a lot of leads. I want to know which property I should be focusing on. That's where ShowingHero comes in.

We have a tenant portal which makes a very big difference because like Asif and you were both talking about, you want a rich experience for the customer. We want to go get prospects to move through the lead pipeline faster and make it easy for them to do this. At the same time, you don't want to have too much work for your leasing staff, calling, making phone calls, asking.

We have the prospect scheduling your showing, going and seeing the property within an hour of scheduling the showing, of submitting a lead on Zillow. That's how quick our turnaround can be. They can just go to the property, validate themselves, securely validate themselves. They're not sending a picture of themselves. They're going through a validation process. This is something that our customers find very important. They're like, "Listen. I don't want to just send pictures. I don't want to receive pictures. How do I know whose picture I received? How is that going to help me?" That's one more step.

For us, what we're doing is we're going through the validation process. The prospect goes to see the property and once they're done with the showing we're going through more validation to go and say, "Did the person leave?"

If everything is working, you're good. If the person doesn't confirm that they have left the property, we inform someone. The most important thing for a large company is to provide actionable data, actionable insight, so that people can move when they need to move. Otherwise, they can focus on other things. That's something that you know helps our clients and is our mantra for us.

Jason: Instead of people having to dig and react—they're always having to go to the data and find, they have to question, ask things, and figure it out, then they're gonna react to these things—your tool will say, “This needs to be dealt with. Somebody checked in this property. They never checked out somebody should go figure this out.” It's letting them know actionable things that they need to be doing instead of expecting the leasing manager to just dig, dig, dig, dig, dig.

Asif: Right. There is data that you can pull and then there's data that's being pushed out. To be honest, we're continuously working on that. It's an ongoing journey for us in being able to understand which data is important, when should it be sent out, how much is too much data, and which one is the most valuable.

As Zee mentioned, 2,700 leads means nothing unless you put it into context. How many properties? Where are these leads coming from? How many are qualified? How many are actually showing up to the property? How many are following through? What are my percentage over application over leads that came in? Is it coming from Zillow? Is it coming from voicemail? Is it coming through another third-party site? Data without context doesn't help. That's what Zee was trying to infer to is providing those actionable items in a context that's valuable to the end-user.

Jason: Perfect. Maybe we should start wrapping this up. Are there any features and frequently asked questions that clients ask that you want to showcase here while we have you about ShowingHero?

Asif: One of the things I do want to mention is that we have a special promotion going on where you can test out the software. I left to look at the marketing team a bit and there's like three or five active listings.

Probably, property management companies that are thinking, "I might not be able to do this," or "I'm not sure this is what it is." I understand that a switch or trying something new is difficult. I understand that there are a hundred questions that you have until we've made it where our first package is entirely free, where you get to test out the software, all of its features, and be able to see that power in being able to make sure that it's the right fit for you.

That's one of the things that we pride ourselves and saying, "We're going to make sure that ShowingHero works for you. If not, we'll try to make sure that we can try to get it there and figure out a solution." There is always a solution to be had. Let's have that conversation to figure it out. That's one thing I wanted your listeners to know that there is a free understanding of that which is low risk for them.

Also, keep in touch with ShowingHero. We're going to be launching some really, really, cool features and integrations, looking at some technology in the AI and the voice space, looking at more creative self solutions that are out there, and all of this should hopefully come to us by the end of this, or Q4, or early Q1 next year. We're continuously trying to grow and listen to the market, and hopefully, we'll be able to respond with some really great integrations.

Jason: It sounds really cool. Someday we'll have to have you come back and [...] what some of these things are.

Zee: We have some cool announcements coming up. I'm gonna add one thing to what Asif was saying. A big thing our customers are saying, customers who have signed up with us around 90 days in, we try to get some feedback and say, "How are things going? What's going on?" One thing that we're hearing from a lot of our customers is that we wish we had pulled the trigger a little earlier and that's why Asif came up with this idea of saying, "Listen. Let's make it a little easier. Let's make it a no-brainer for them."

If a customer is having a hard time making a decision because they don't know the value right away, let them try it. That's where our free tier is. We're 100% okay with, "Hey, come on in." I don't mean to brag, Jason, but I will tell you that as the new shiny product—I say this is pride, I'm going to put up the humble brags hashtag, but I will say this—one thing we're seeing is that when we're bringing these shiny objects out, setting a little bit of a trend in the industry where some of the other people you've mentioned are also adding those, we're really proud of the fact that competition is making the current product base.

I have to put my property management hat on every once in a while and I have to say, "Just when a new product comes around, that means my other offerings become better because they need to compete." I'll give you a very, very simple example, very, very simple stuff. Our pricing model is being copied across many. I don't want to say copied, but I want to say that I feel that people are noticing that property managers respond to our pricing model. Maybe we should offer a similar pricing model.

We have our property pages. We're showing extra data that may not be very easy to pull but we're pulling in the walk score, the bike score, the neighborhood score, neighborhood schools. This is all important information to prospects. Maybe it's not very easy to pull but we're doing it because we feel it's important.

Now, I have noticed that others are also trying to pull a little more information. Maybe not getting as much information as we provide, but it's cool and I like the fact that maybe we're making a little bit of an impact to the industry.

Jason: Perfect. It is fun and it's nice to be able to see the impact. At DoorGrow, I feel like we get to have an impact. I get to have it through the podcast, I get to have it indirectly through my clients, and I can see the industry changing in ways that I didn't expect, but it was our goal. I didn't expect it to happen this soon. The momentum is building and it's really exciting to see your vision come to life. I'll take a tiny bit of credit to that and you can, too, so humble brag for both of us.

Zee: Jason, I'll say this. One of your customers had come by us on in Nashville. They were just crazy about you. They're crazy about [...]. I just have to put this out there that you guys are providing information and help that is very beneficial. I would tell you guys, everyone listening is probably already a customer of yours, but when they're not, they should start talking to you very soon.

Jason: I appreciate that a lot. We have thousands of listeners. I doubt that they're all customers. We have hundreds of customers but 1000. If you're listening, listen to Zee and come talk to me.

Zee: Talk to Jason.

Jason: I love it. Alright. I appreciate you plugging my business and coming on the show. Anyway, it sounds really cool you guys are doing. I resonate with your your ideology and your philosophy behind what you're doing. I'm excited to hear feedback from some of my customers and listeners on your tool. You people can check it out for free, which is bold of you guys.

If somebody has something they can say to their leasing coordinator or to themselves, they can say, "Let's just try out one or two doors. Let’s try a handful of properties on this. Let's just see how it differs. Let's see how it works." That's where maybe you'll start to see some brilliance and maybe get really excited about working with ShowingHero. I look forward to hearing some feedback.

Those of you who are you listening, make sure you're inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group, our community for the podcast. You get to by going to doorgrowclub.com. People post really real and raw feedback in there about different services and tools. I'd love to hear it. Cool. I appreciate you guys coming on the show. How can people get in touch with ShowingHero and try this out?

Asif: We have a demo page that you can just request a demo out there and then I can share my information to you as well. They can get in touch with me directly in that way through our contact page. What I'm showing here, there's a couple of ways that you can get in touch with us. You can get through our chat box, emailing us, just checking out our website. There's a couple of mediums that you can look at.

Jason: And the website is showinghero.com?

Asif: Yup.

Jason: All right, real simple. Everybody check out showinghero.com. Asif and Zee, I appreciate you guys coming on the DoorGrow Show and contributing to our property management community.

Zee: Thank you for having us.

Asif: Thanks for the chat, appreciate it.

Jason: All right, we'll let you guys go.

There you go. Check out showinghero.com. If you guys are interested in growing your business, if you feel like you are doing it all on your own as an entrepreneur, you feel like you don't have support, you feel like nobody's in your corner, who's in your corner? Sometimes it's not even our spouse. Who's in your corner? Who do you feel is challenging you and helping you level up in what you're doing?

If you feel like you want some support like that, you want to be part of something, you are aligned with our vision of changing and transforming this industry, then connect with DoorGrow. Reach out. We would love to help you see some of the blind spots that may exist in your sales pipeline.

Our vision and purpose at DoorGrow, what we really do is we help align your business towards warm lead generation. We help align your business towards greater trust by shoring up the trust leaks that exist in your front end of your business, the sales pipeline. Because trust is what closes deals. Trust is what gets you contracts. People aren't looking to buy property management. What they buy is safety and certainty. What they're buying is trust.

We can help you showcase trust throughout your sales pipeline and we can eliminate the leaks that scare them off, or that create a lack of trust, or create less trust than maybe one of your competitors, then we can facilitate you growing and adding more doors without even changing your lead sources a lot of times.

Reach out to us. We would love to see if we could help you out show you some of the leaks that may exist in your business. If you reach out, we'll send you access to a 1 hour and 45 minute training called DoorGrow Secrets that will help you see the gaps and the problems that exist in your business. You can to that by going to doorgrow.com/opt-in. That will take you to a page, it gives you a bunch of case studies, testimonials, and it will allow you to get access to that training. Maybe you'll be a client of ours if you get really excited about what we have to offer.

Hopefully we'll be talking soon. Until next time, everybody. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

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

Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com.

Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

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Dec 24, 2019

Entrepreneurs dream about starting their own business, but they can’t afford it. How can they reach their financial goals and objectives to fund and grow their business? Most of them borrow money from their friends, parents, and/or credit cards.

Today, I am talking to Bruce Mack of Platinum Trust Group. Bruce is an avid real estate investor and licensed financial advisor. He shares seven options to fund your business and take it to the next level.

You’ll Learn...

[03:54] Option 1: Revolving Lines of Credit Program is easy to qualify for with 700+ FICO score and more than one open lines of credit; no business plan, collateral needed.

[08:55] Option 2: Installment-based Lending Platform features 25 lenders offering $1,000 to $50,000 with lower FICO score, but provable income.

[12:25] Option 3: Business Directed Retirement Account (BDRA) is rollable IRA or 401(k) where funds from previous employers are accessible for specific transactions.

[18:28] Option 4: Transactional Funding for A2B, B2C transactions, such as funds for wholesale flips.

[20:07] Option 5: Platinum Trust Group/Division offers bulletproof asset protection and ability to save passive income money to repurpose.

[24:48] Option 6: Private and Hard Money Solutions with low annual percentage rates (APRs) and 1-2 points to cash out rental property income to deploy on new projects.

[26:42] Option 7: Plug-and-Play Scenario is relationship-oriented opportunity to connect and network with partners and sponsors.

[29:17] Where to start? Typically, it takes about $75,000 to get your business started.

[32:56] Funding Mindset: If you don’t want to go into debt to do anything, it may hold you back from growing your business and generating revenue.

[35:35] Constant Lawsuits: Property managers/management companies that aren’t real estate investors are in high-risk business.

Tweetables

Donuts to Dollars: Entrepreneurs start businesses thanks to friends, family, and credit cards.

Plug-and-Play Option: You never know, who you know. Get your project going.

You’re in the wrong business, if you don’t want to go into debt to grow your business and generate revenue.

Protect your assets! Property managers/management companies that aren’t real estate investors face constant lawsuits.

Resources

Platinum Trust Group

Platinum Financing Group

Real Estate Investor Association (REIA)

DGS 109: Scaling Operations for Property Managers with Tallyfy 0

Transcript

Jason: Welcome to DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives and you are interested in growing your business and life and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and the residual income.

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

Today's guest, who I'm hanging out with, is Bruce Mack of Platinum Trust Group. Bruce, welcome to the show.

Bruce: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it and you definitely are unbelievable at your opening.

Jason: Thank you. It's built around all the challenges that we've heard in the industry and what our client-centric mission is as a company. I wanted to fold all that into our intro and I appreciate you giving us some positive feedback on it. Bruce, I'm really interested in getting into this.

Today's topic is seven options to fund your business. This is a common challenge of people not being able to afford to do work with us, being able to afford to do the things they need to do to grow their business. This is a common challenge. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that are just trying to operate just paycheck to paycheck.

In order to get ahead and grow the business, they need to find some funding, or get some money, or figure out how to make it work, or save something in order to make that work. Before we get into that, could you give everybody a bit of a background? Let's qualify you, help them understand how you got into what you're doing? Tell us, who is Bruce?

Bruce: Well, in a couple of sentences or at least a short paragraph, I am an avid real estate investor, have been in a three-year period of time. I was able to buy rehab and flipped out over 160 properties. I've been involved with over $92 million worth of real estate transactions, SFR’s, as well as commercial. I'm a licensed financial advisor, prior owner and operator of a credit repair company that was also a licensed and bonded.

I've been around the block. I love working with real estate investors. I speak to them all over the world, as well as nationally and have been at countless events helping folks just like the folks that are on this podcast, to be able to reach their financial goals and objectives, through getting them the rudimentary financing that they need so they can take their business to the next level.

Jason: Okay, great. Let's get into the seven options. I guess we're starting with number one.

Bruce: Okay, let's start with number one. One of our premiere programs that we use on a daily basis is what I call our revolving lines of credit program. Now, the nice thing is with this particular program, is that there are a lot of no's, but these are no’s that you want to hear, not no’s that you don't want to hear.

Bruce: One of the no’s is that you don't have to have a business plan. Another no is that you don't have to have collateral pledged to be able to qualify for this, so if you don't have any collateral, i.e. properties, what have you, or other hard assets, there are no collateral pledges. Another no is that you don't have to have an income verification because it's a stated program. Without a business plan, without having a stated income, without having to go through a bunch of hoops, this makes it an easy qualify program.

The key qualifiers are having a FICO score, ideally north of 700 or 700 when we put you through the program, and having more than one (ideally) open lines of credit with a credit card that would be at least $6000, $7000, $7500 worth of credit limit, and at the time that we put you through, you're ideally at 30% or lower on your utilization.

Let's just say you have a $10,000 credit card. Let's say you have a $7000 balance currently, that would be at %70 utilization. What I'm saying is that we’d like to see that that $10,000 credit card has no more than %30 utilization or that you're not currently carrying more than a $30,000 balance. Now, if you are, because there's too much month, not enough money and therefore you have higher balances, we do have a solution. We do have another funding division that will likely take a look at those balances and work with you to actually pay them down for you, so that therefore your scores will skyrocket to where we need them to be, your utilization ratios will plummet to where we need them to be, so that we get the maximum results.

The maximum results is our average client on a first round funding gets $75,000 worth of revolving lines of credit as much as $150,000 on a first round fund. When done properly and if we have a client that comes to us with longevity of accounts, no derogatory, so on and so forth, of course, that's going to get us all a better net result for the client on the back-end. Again these lines of credit are all at 0% APR for up to 21 months.

Jason: Okay, but the cruz behind this is that they've got to have good credit in place in order to do this one.

Bruce: Well, there's a couple of other if’s, and’s, and but’s, so let's talk about them briefly. Number one, because of that high utilization, we have taken people with scores as low as 620 and just by paying down those balances, they've shot their scores up within a several week period of time to well over 700 and then we can put them through. Today's present credit score may qualify you even if you're not knocking on the 700 door or higher, we need to do a consultation and see if the net effect of paying down those cards is going to get you to where we need you to be.

Secondarily, we do have a secondary program, in as much as if the client can't qualify, but they have what we call a credit partner—maybe it's a partner in their business, maybe it's a relative, a friend—we can use a credit partner to get the same results, thus being able to put them through the program and that could be a win-win. There's a number of different ways we can literally skin the cat to get to the desired result, which is to get the client funded on that program.

Jason: All right. You’re going to help them the pay down process, they can use a credit partner, there's a couple of options there. That's number one, the revolving lines of credit program.

Bruce: Number two, one of our other core programs is we have 25 lenders. We have a platform for the 25 lenders and they are offering on the platform anywhere from $1000 to $50,000. We can stack those offers, so if you were to get two $50,000 offers, obviously you pony those up and parlay them into $100,000. Now, we can take more credit-challenged folks. We have gotten people some funding with FICO’s as low as 580. The key here is that there needs to be provable income, where the income on the revolving lines of credit is stated. These will need to be proved up through either showing the last couple of pay stubs and/or from their doing account validation by showing bank statements, 1099s, a year's tax return or what have you.

Jason: Okay.

Bruce: Very, very simple program, 12 questions asked and answered online, a soft pool with instantaneous pre-approvals and funding within usually a week or a week-and-a-half. This is a secondary program that can be used. We use it all the time and it's very, very effective.

Jason: With these 25 lenders, these would be people like maybe Fundbox and some of the services out there. Would it be like those kinds of companies?

Bruce: Could be, yes. We have our own lender pool that we work with. The nice thing is, there are a number of lenders that you can apply to on the net today, tomorrow, yesterday, what have you, but that's problematic. Every time you apply, you're going to be getting an inquiry. Every inquiry's going to be anywhere from two to several points and it starts to drag down your profile. Worse than that, other creditors that your applying with, see than you’ve been applying.

The way we do it is when you access our platform with one soft inquiry, so it doesn't even show on your report, you're getting one or multiple preapprovals from multiple lenders at multiple options in terms of length anywhere from 12 months out to as long as 60 months or five years. This is an ideal way where you have no FICO hit, no negatives, only positives and you can get the pre approvals before you even press the accept button and go into what we call the final underwriting or the hard underwriting.

Jason: Got it. Anything else to know about this second option? What would you call this second option? You're 25 lenders platform or?

Bruce: Our 25 letters platform or our installment-based lending platform.

Jason: Got it, installment-based. All right, so we’re on the number three now.

Bruce: Number three. Let's talk about what we call our BDRA. Our BDRA stands for Business Directed Retirement Account. Now, many of the people that are on the podcast have a rollable IRA or 401(k). Maybe, they're even working and are aware that they have a roll-able IRA or 401(k) amount. Let's just say that you're currently working at an employer. You may have $100,000 there and your employers told you, “Well, you can't touch that, it's not rollable.” They’re may be half correct, because prior to coming to the existing employer, you worked at another employer. When you're at that other employer, guess what? You had a $50,000 IRA, which you’ve been rolled over to your present employer.

Well, I'm here to tell you some really great news. You can do what's called a carve-out, so you can take those moneys and move them from your present employer, because those were moneys that came from a previous employer and you can automatically put them into what we call our BDRA. That BDRA is a wonderful opportunity for you to be able to access those funds to do what you want and what you want with them.

Jason: That’s called what again?

Bruce: Business Directed Retirement Account.

Jason: Okay, got it.

Bruce: Now, it's not a very, very different than a self-directed normal account. Some self-directed retirement accounts have the ability to give you checkbook capability, which is great. The BDRA coincidentally also does, but many of the self-directed accounts are accounts that once you moved on from your old employer, you've moved them into a self-directed environment so that you can tell your money what you want it to do. The problem with the traditional IRA or 401(k) in a self-directed environment (which many administrators that are out there and offer these types of accounts) is that you cannot use these but for very specific types of transactions.

Let's just take a typical real estate transaction, a house costs $200,000, you have $100,000 in the self-directed retirement account. You need to come up with $100,000. Now, unfortunately, you cannot obligate a self-directed retirement account, a traditional type, not ours, but a traditional type and you cannot take on a recourse loan, because one of the exemptions is you cannot sign and obligate your IRA or your 401(k) to an external obligation.

If you can't do that whole deal inside your IRA, you're pooched. You can't do the deal. Now, there is the possibility of taking on what's called a non recourse loan where you wouldn't sign. However, there are very few and far between. They never go more than 50% of LTV and they're usually a couple of points higher for all the right reasons. You’re only having a collateralized value of the loan. With a BDRA, I've got great news, you can take recourse loans on and it's not a violation of the BDRA precepts.

Secondarily, when you have a normal IRA or 401(k), unfortunately, you're exempt from being able to do what we call inter familiar transactions because they're called a prohibited transaction. Meaning, father-sister, mother-brother, siblings what have you, you plain and simple are not allowed to invest with them because it's prohibited. That is not the case with the self-directed that we have in the BDRA environment.

Third, you can put up to $53,000 of your annual salary into this tax deferred vehicle where you cannot with a traditional IRA or 401(k) that’s self-directed. Fourth, you can use the money for any business purpose. Now, you mentioned earlier that you've got coaching programs sometimes that are $10, $20, $30, $40, $50 whatever the amount is, it makes no difference, but the flexibility of the BDRA is a beautiful thing because BDRA funds can be used for any business purpose whatsoever.

When you talk about a traditional IRA or 401(k), they're very finite, they're very linear, real estate being one of them, stocks and bonds being another, and there's a couple of others, and pretty much after that, you're out of luck. The flexibility that the BDRA brings to the table is phenomenal, and it is a great way to resource funds for enhancing your real estate business not only from the buying of the doors perspective, but from doing rehabs, for potentially using it for marketing money, to expand your net. There's many, many different ways that these moneys can be used that are all in conformity.

Jason: Okay. Alright, BDRA is number three. Number four?

Bruce: We have transactional funding. With our transactional funding, I'm sure a number of folks that are on this podcast are engaged with wholesale flips, where you're doing an A to B and B to C transaction. Well, we have transactional funding. We have $1 million on the sidelines at all time. You let us know, give us a couple of days notice. I mean, give us more notice than that, but within a couple of days, we can get the funds prepared, move them electronically to your escrow so that you can close and not have to be out of pocket if you're the wholesaler, and get the job done.

The fee cost for that is the most reasonable that I've seen in the industry. The cost for funds is only 1.75% and a $495 transaction fee or our processing fee. Call it what you will. That’s another win-win strategy if you're a wholesaler, and you don't have the funds, and you're going to a traditional escrow. This is a perfect, perfect way to make everything come together so that you can get your property sold to that new buyer.

Jason: Is that everything about transactional funding?

Bruce: That's everything about transactional funding. Short and sweet.

Jason: All right, let's look at number five.

Bruce: Let's talk about number five. Now this is an esoteric way of getting funding, but saving the dollar obviously gives you $1 as I put it, redeploy or repurpose and I'm sure we all agree with that, and saving tens of thousands of dollars or more starts to become very, very interesting, let’s tell you how.

On the other side of our business, we have our trust division. It's called platinum trust group. Platinum trust group is dedicated to bulletproof asset protection. I'll touch on that in a moment, but let me talk about the money aspect where you can redeploy. Real estate investors by the nature of who they are and what they're [...] are involved with two types in multiple streams of what we call passive income. The passive income that we're talking about would either be long or short term capital gains and/or lease and/or rental income. That is the sum and substance of what it's all about. One or the other.

With our proprietary trust which we have 58 copyrights on, we've had the trust for over 20 years, we have over 31,000 clients on this program. As a real estate investor, when the properties are sold or the rents are collected, money goes into the corpus of the trust. However, the good news is, you can use the trust for any trust-related activities which would be anything other than what we call food, fun, or fashion. Now you're doing all your business out of the trust.

Don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean you can't buy properties, you can't buy cars, that doesn't mean that you can't act in a fiduciary capacity as a trustee to do everything you would normally be doing on a daily basis. The good news is, that moneys, that long- and short-term capital gains which could be 20%, 30% depending, and/or the income from the lease and rental income, the fact that it goes into corpus and stays in the corpus, and that it’s deferred in perpetuity means you're not going to have the tax bill at the end of the year.

Now, we have many investors who have tax bills in the $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 a year and are paying quarterlies that are enough to choke a horse. We're able to defer up to 97% of that annual tax liability, including the quarterlies, and deferred out in perpetuity, which means in 21 years, after the last of the beneficiary heir’s deceased, i.e., 100, 200, 300 years from now, we now have a vehicle that nobody in your family tree is going to have the tax consequence and certainly not you, and now we've got all of this additional liquidity that we can be using for investment purposes and is a huge win for our real estate investors.

That's only one piece of the coin because the other side of that coin is the bulletproof asset protection, because you can never have a lien or judgment executed against you. It can't happen, let alone your properties because your properties are in the titanium vault of the trust. This is huge and this is a great, great income opportunity and/or savings opportunity for you. I think we're at number six or are we in number five?

Jason: We’re at number six.

Bruce: All right.

Jason: That was number five. Basically. we will call that your trust division.

Bruce: Okay, number six. We have a number of private money solutions and hard money solutions. Solutions that start as low as 4.9% on the APR and 1-2 points. Solutions for clients who have rental income properties and they want to do some cash out. We had even a blanket loan program which is available in 43 states. Again, if you've got properties, we have a solution for you to be able to access a ton of money that you are currently not able to access so that you can redeploy it on new projects. This could be huge for you by our hard end or private money funding.

Should you have ground-up projects that you're looking to get underway, these are other ways that we can access funds for you depending upon what the project looks like. There's just so many different machinations without knowing more. We would really need to sit and talk, but not only can we get you the blanket loans, not only can we get you the cash out refis, we can do multifamily, we can do SFRs, ground-up projects. It just depends on what it is that you're looking for.

Jason: Okay, great and that's number six.

Bruce: That’s number six.

Jason: Private and hard money lending solutions. Let's get into number seven.

Bruce: Number seven is really a relationship-oriented proposition. Because I lecture on a nationwide basis and know so many people, I am constantly sourcing and/or resourcing and putting folks together. I speak. I meet sponsors. Sponsors are always looking for people to act as general partners for with other people who are newer and/or what I would call green peas and vice-versa. I have green peas that are looking for sponsors. Just by nature, the fact that I love to network, love to help people out, and if people are looking for a connection, I'll give you an example.

Yesterday, I had a guy come to me in the Seattle area. He is looking to do a conversion. He’s got 93 apartments that he wants to build in one structure. He’s looking for general partners and money partners and he's got everything ready to go. He’s got the water. He’s got the utilities. He’s got all the zoning. He’s looking for money partners and he's also looking for some management help. Well, we have the perfect fit for him because we have people who are right up in the Seattle area because I've spoken recently up in the Seattle area to 800 people at one event. That’s an easy plug-and-play scenario.

Oftentimes, you just never know. I don't know where you're calling in from on a nationwide basis because I know you have callers all over the place. I'm California-centric but I travel. I was just in Boston speaking to 1000 people. You never know who you know and tell me about the situation, and if there's a possibility that we can help, we certainly can try and plug to good ends into one another so that you can make a whole and get your project going, so you can take it to the next level.

Jason: Perfect. Looking at all these different methods, let’s say I get a client that comes to me and they want to hire staff. They want us folks on marketing, maybe they want to do some coaching stuff with us, they need to get office space, these typical things to get their business going. Which channel would you push them towards first? What would be the best situation for them first?

Bruce: Well, if the need is an average of, say, $75,000 roughly, somewhere between $50,000-$150,000. I’ll kind of use that $100,000 spread. invariably, our revolving line of credit program is the sweet spot and we utilize that at promoter events all the time for that $20,000, that $30,000, $40,000 to get them off the home plate, to get them the coaching program that they need to get them also the initial marketing moneys that they need so that they can really start to get traction and move forward in the marketplace. It's very easy and they don't need to have any collateral. Again, it's a state of program. If the person fits the parameters, it's by far and away, the easiest, fastest, most effective, and cost-effective solution.

Jason: Now, what if they just wanted something smaller? They're just getting started, they're bootstrapping. Maybe they're looking for maybe $3000-$20,000, something in there. They just need to get some additional funds to get some things going in the business. Would the recommendation still be the same vehicle?

Bruce: Depending. Let's just say today the need is $3000-$20,000. Let's just say they've got $100,000 locked up at the old employer that they used to work for, General Dynamics, let's just say. They're taking that money and they're turning it in the stock market, they're getting a horrible return, and they want to take control of it. I would move all of that to self-directed environment and then parse out where you've got total control over it. Then, I would parse out whatever that amount is that you need to deploy for whatever business purpose. If they only needed $3000, $7000, or $10,000 of that $100,000, they get immediately deployed because they have total discretionary use over the funds once it's in their dominion.

Likewise, another one of our programs might be for them to engage with the 25 lender platform. In a request, only request $3000 or only request $10,000, if that's what it is they're looking for. That could be another way to go.

We really need to have a discussion. It's my best suggestion to the folks that are listening because sometimes during the course of discussion, we find a $3000, $7000, or $10,000, may not actually be the sum and substance of what you're looking for depending upon where you are, and where you want to go. Maybe it is. We will come up with based upon your credit what you bring to the table, what's going to be the most cost effective way to get you there.

Jason: Let's address the mindset of funding. I'm sure there's people listening and they want to bootstrap everything. They're thinking, "I don't want to go into debt to do anything." What would you say to that? Maybe that mindset is holding them back from being able to grow their businesses quickly and generate more revenue as fast.

Bruce: I don't mean to be pragmatic but I would say they might be thinking about being in the wrong business if they don't want to go into debt. I bought houses utilizing credit cards before. If you go to any REIA, anywhere in the United States—if you're not familiar with the term REIA, that's Real Estate Investors Association meeting—if you go to any Real Estate Investors Association meeting anywhere in the United States and you interview, take them out for coffee, talk to them after the meeting, what have you, you ask them how do they get the funds to buy some of their first properties, I can guarantee you, dollars to donuts, that they borrowed money from a friend, borrowed money from their parents, or borrowed money from their credit cards, to get their first property. Or a combination of all three coupled together to make it happen. They didn't have the money and their checking account. It was a little devoid or little depleted at that time.

Guys, this is truly a leverage play, and an arbitrage play, when you're borrowing money at X because you can make lie times X equally that new number which is the ability to compound on the amount of money that you're using to be able to get you that much bigger amount of money at the backend.

I'm a firm believer in making the right decisions and not getting these moneys for a C shed or man cave. Forget it, you don't [...] it. If that's your ultimate goal, that's not leverage. That's just sheer stupidity, a waste of time, and a waste of money. If you're looking to get these moneys to be able to deploy them in an efficacious way and to utilize them to gain the leverage to be able to get a much bigger payday down the road when you exercise your exit strategy, let's go. Let's make it happen. We're here to help and get you to your financial goal.

Jason: Plant some of these things. I know there's some property managers listening that are like, "I'm not a real estate investor." Some property managers that are running property management companies are not real estate investors. I think many of them are involved but they're thinking, "What about my business? Maybe I need funding for the business." I think the same principle applies. The idea that I want to point out is mindset-wise, I think a business is probably one of the most effective (if you do this well) investments you can invest in a period. Very few things give a return on an investment that a business can. I don't think even real estate, I think a lot of things cannot yield as high of a return as a business that is profitable, and highly effective.

If the investment is moving the business towards those things, I would imagine that it's going to far outplay a 401(k) or any other sort of investment. They might be throwing them dollars towards in the long run. An effective business can yield a huge return especially once they sell it. Or it can just be an ATM machine feeding them once they systemize the business and they step out of being involved in it.

If you're going to that, I think it's wise to say, make sure it's going towards the right thing. It's going to yield the ROI you're looking to get.

Bruce: May I ask a brief question?

Jason: Go ahead.

Bruce: About your audience. I just heard or maybe I misheard, I heard you keying in on property management, and property management companies. Is there a broad segment of your listenership that are in that space?

Jason: Yes. Most of the listeners listening are people that run property management companies. They manage properties for and on behalf of investors.

Bruce: Okay. Let me just say this about that. I'm going to go back to, I think, it was number six. It might've been number five but it was right in there. We talked and drilled down a little bit about our proprietary trust. Guys, I'm going to say it just like it is, you are in an uber high risk business. Property managers and property management companies, they play it simple, they get sued. Facts are one in three Americans get sued. Two in three, 66% of all surgeons get sued. Property managers, I don't know what the numbers are, but everytime I talk to a property management company, they're constantly getting sued.

Just recently, we put on several property management companies who have gotten the trust. Their prime motivating reason was to have the trust be the owner of the property management company so that they would not have liens or judgments that could be affixed to the company. Guys, this is something you definitely want to explore further. It's very important for you because of the high risk nature of the business that you're in.

Jason: Yeah. I agree. I have an asset protection attorney. I think it's a wise choice for everybody who has some asset protection struff going on with things in the trust and make sure the business is protected. Very cool.

We've got several people that I've spoken to even recently. They're like, "I don't have the funds to work with, Jason, but I want to work with you. We're trying to get money." Or they're trying to get their business started. Or they know there's some things they need to do and they can't just afford to do it. How can they get in touch with you? How can they reach out? What's the best way to connect with you and what you've got going on?

Bruce: If you're looking for funding, I'm going to give you a web address. That web address would be platinumfinancinggroup.com. There's a calendar on there. We will get you a complimentary consult. Please, we'll ask you, make sure that you've mentioned that you came from Jason. We always want to know where clients came from.

Jason: Mention DoorGrow and the DoorGrow Show.

Bruce: Please. Please, please, please. That'll get you the complimentary consultation now for financing. When Jason's got great programs which I've heard nothing but fabulous things about, that can be the genesis, give you the capital to be able to move your business forward, and get his programs.

Secondarily, another way to access the programs, as I've said, from the savings from the tax deferral, from the trust program, and/or talking about the trust as well as an asset protection vehicle. Because if you get wiped out, you're done. You know that. This is one way to ensure that you're not going to get wiped out. I would go to platinumtrustgroup.com. We have another calendar there.

The difference between the two, other than the information that you're going to find and the calendars that you're going to find is that the calendar times that you're going to get blocked out for are quite different. If you go to platinumtrustgroup.com, we're going to block you out for an hour. We can talk about trust. Likewise, we can also talk about funding should you have an interest in both.

If you strictly go to platinumfinancinggroup.com, you'll be directed to a calendar for 15 minute blockout. Just be aware of that. When you make the choices to where's the best entry point to get in touch with us.

Jason: If they're really looking at everything and they want to get the full kit, the best place to probably to go the platinumtrustgroup.com. You can also help them with the financing side of things as well.

Bruce: Absolutely.

Jason: Perfect. Bruce, it's been fabulous having you on the show. Thanks for taking us through all the different options. I wasn't aware that there were so many different options for funding. I appreciate all the info that you're able to share with us today.

Bruce: I certainly appreciate you're allowing me to come on your show. It's been a pleasure. I look forward to chatting with you guys. We'll get you taken care of. We'll get you the funding so that you can take your business to the next level and protected as well at the same time.

Jason: Fantastic. One thing I just thought off. A lot of our listeners run property management companies. They're all connected to investors. Do you have a sort of program or a relationship that you can make with these entrepreneurs that are working and dealing with lots of investors trying to get them into multiple properties and new properties?

Bruce: Absolutely. Not only that, we need to talk because we have an affiliate program. Give me a call, let's have that discussion. That's a whole other discussion and another income stream, potentially, for you. I'm glad you mentioned that, Jason. That was a great heads up.

Jason: Perfect. Bruce, it's great to connect and I will let you go.

Bruce: Thank you so much for the opportunity again. Have a great day, have a great weekend.

Jason: If you're a property management entrepreneur, who wants to grow your business, who wants to add doors, you're looking, you're feeling a little bit stuck, you're dealing with some of the typical challenges, you're trying to do SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, and social media marketing, you're just not getting the ROI, you're not adding the doors you're wanting to. There might be something different. There might be some things that you're missing. You might have some leaks in your business that you can't see. Reach out to DoorGrow. We'll help you shore those leaks up. We'll help you get on a trajectory of growth. I will be honored to be able to coach you through that stuff. We can certainly help you redesign your website.

If you need to go and test your shiny new website or your old website, go to doorgrow.com/quiz. See if it's got some leaks there. You could be losing tens or hundreds of thousand dollars in future ROI every month depending on how many leads or deals you are missing out on because your website isn’t upgraded. I want you to have an A+. Talk to DoorGrow and let's see if we can help you get that taken care of.

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

Download this Episode

Dec 17, 2019

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sleep at night, knowing things are done right and no tasks are falling through the cracks? Unfortunately, many businesses don't have the tools, know-how, or means to document and scale their workflows.

Today, I am talking to Amit Kothari, co-founder and CEO of Tallyfy. Small- and medium-sized property management businesses use Tallyfy to easily scale operations and document their standard operating procedures (SOPs) to improve workflow and mapping processes.

You’ll Learn...

[03:29] Purpose of Tallyfy: Pain point that had to be fixed. Tool was built to help companies document, scale, and run processes.

[05:32] Process vs. Project: A process isn’t a process unless it repeats. A project is unique every time.

[05:50] Do you have processes? What are they? Document them in a structured form.

[06:10] Collaboration for Continuous Improvement: Who looks at the processes? How are they updated? What needs to be done beyond creating a static document?

[08:10] Forget Flowcharts: Too complicated and too big. Switch to simple checklists focusing on next step in the process for specific team members.

[15:38] What’s next for Tallyfy? Chat-based interactions and plug-in for Slack.

[16:48] Property managers can sign up for a free 14-day trial. Tenant/landlord screening, onboarding, eviction, and maintenance workflow templates are available.

[18:05] Suggest Improvement/Idea: Tallyfy prompts and incentivizes documenting, reading, and making changes to improve processes.

[23:54] One interruption can cost 18 minutes of money and productivity.

Tweetables

Tallyfy: Sleep at night, knowing things are done right and no tasks are falling through the cracks.

Customer Experience: Awesome for everyone, including tenants and property managers.

To reliably and scalably grow your company, you need processes, not projects.

Functional is fine, but easy, fun, and engaging Tallyfy app makes workflow even better.

Resources

Tallyfy

Process Street

Slack

DGS 108: Reporting Rental Payments to Credit Bureaus with CredHub 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 love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

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

My guest today, I'm hanging out here with Amit of Tallyfy. Amit, welcome to the show.

Amit: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Jason.

Jason: Glad to have you. I'm going to share with the audience your intro here. Amit is the CEO of Tallyfy, a workflow software product that specializes in helping small- and medium-sized businesses scale their operations. Tallyfy enables anyone to document their process or SOP (standard operating procedures) and to launch/run it in a team of people while also being able to assign tasks to clients and people outside the company.

Amit founded Tallyfy after decades of experience and mapping processes as flowcharts and noticed that while everyone makes flowcharts, nobody actually follows them while they are working. Very true. Tallyfy is being used by various property management companies to run operations like on-boarding and off-boarding tenants and also handling complex, repeatable real estate sales processes. This sounds really cool, I had not yet heard of this. Our topic today is scaling operations for property managers. Amit, tell us how you got started with this, give us some background on you.

Amit: Yeah, sure. I'm British, first of all. I came to the US four or five years ago and I spent a while, basically, helping people improve workflows, mapping processes, things like that. It tended to be mid-sized companies, large companies. It turns out that many small companies don't really have the tools, or know-how, or the means to actually go and stop documenting and scaling all their workflows.

That's where I noticed the opportunity that what if the rest of us who were not large companies actually had a simple tool that let us go in and just document a process, scale it, run it, and basically sleep at night so that we know things are done right, none of the tasks are falling through the cracks, and the client experience, ultimately, is completely awesome for your tenants, for your clients, whatever you want. It was just that vision that it doesn't have to suck that much.

We founded Tallyfy five years ago and raised some funding from Silicon Valley so we went through a bunch of Silicon Valley accelerators, we're now based in St. Louis in Missouri and it's just growing crazy right now. It sounded like other people agreed with our vision that they want to document and scale their operations, too, so here we are. Now, we're still figuring things out but that's how we go here, that's a fairly simple story. There was a real pain, we had to fix it, so we built a product that fixed it.

Jason: Got it. Take us through how this is different than some of the other tools that might be on the market, what people are using. Let's get into the problem that exists which was mentioned in your intro, that you create these complicated processes, or maybe have none, or maybe it's just a Word doc, or you've got a flowchart, but people look at it once, maybe a few times when they first on-boarded, then they think they know it, and then they ignore it.

Amit: Let's start with the problem that's really the problem. The first problem is that you don't have any process whatsoever. That's not great. It's probably worse just sitting down for a minute and just saying, “What is it that I do? How do I do this thing? Does it vary a lot every time I do it?” because remember, a process isn’t a process unless it repeats, otherwise, it's just a project. A project is something that's just unique every time. To really grow your company reliably and scalably, what you need are processes, not projects.

The first step is, do you have processes and what are they? The problem is if you haven’t written them down, we're a great tool to begin to just start writing them down in a structured form. If you have a process which is either a Word document or a flowchart, say you have one and it looks like that, the problem is, again, like you said, who looks at it? How do you update it if you keep improving it? There are things like collaboration and so on which you need to do beyond just having a static document because the document is always changing.

For example, when I do a process, I might spot an idea like, “Hey, next time let's do it this way instead.” Now, if I don't remember that or put it down into my main process, when the next time comes around, it will be forgotten. There's this thing about documenting processes which is a problem, but there's also this problem around continuously improving and that's something that often people don’t do because once it's written, it just lies there like in a safe. It's like in a cabinet, it just sits there, dust gathers on top of it. and no one ever looks at it. Really, that's a wasted investment.

We needed you to do both, but now, here's where the problem gets really, really big. That stuff is a problem, that's great. If you're a property entrepreneur and you're on your own, you could start that way, but imagine you hired an intern, you went into business with another property entrepreneur, or you have a team of people who do things for you. Now, the problem compounds about tenfold because whatever's in your head has to be in a place, otherwise, someone else is not going to be able to read your mind, especially if they’re new.

It helps new employees see how you do things, which onboards them much faster. It makes sure that lots of people, as you hire more people and you grow or you partner with folks, they know how you do things successfully as well. The reason we don't like flowcharts is because they're just way too complicated. I've seen flowcharts that are so big that if you try to print them out, they would actually print on an A2 size paper. It's so big, it doesn't even fit on my screen right now.

Jason: I've seen some print out there of a property management flowchart processes and they had multiple sheets of paper and they taped them together.

Amit: I admire people who have the tenacity to document an amazing process like that. The trouble is are you really going to look at that seriously? If it doesn't fit on a picture frame, who's going to use it? Often, we found that just having like simple looking checklist-type things is a lot easier for people to follow. It works on phones because a lot of people are out there in the field. They're showing people houses or doing stuff like that, so it’s got to work on a phone or a tablet. A flowchart doesn't fit on a phone. It doesn't even fit on a piece of paper, so how is it going to fit on a phone?

Devices that are small require checklist and things like that. We were the first app initially that launched this. A bunch of other people came out, but we initially create the idea of conditional branching, so if-this-then-that. In other words, if the tenant is this kind of tenant, then show this task, otherwise, show this other task. You can automate all your decisions. too, which means that there's no guesswork that people are doing. It's just like, “Hey, here's a question, we hit the answer for the question,” and the next question pops up just like magic. It handles that real-time workflow for people who are bigger teams like 3 people, 5 people, and even 50 people. In fact, the more people that turn up, the more useful the app becomes.

Jason: Interesting. This is really popular right now in the property management industry, we've had Process Street on the show before, which sounds similar, there are some things that you guys have in common. What do you see is the difference between these two platforms or systems?

Amit: It's left up to whoever's listening to judge the difference there. We don't know how they work, we don't really know that much about them, to be honest. One thing we did start the company believing in and having real experience in is improving workflows and mapping workflows. I spent a decade in London just mapping workflows. That was my actual job, mapping workflows and this is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is a pain I actually had for 10 years. I think having real experience in the area is probably a really beneficial thing if you're trying to build a tool for that. If you try to build a tool for property entrepreneurs but you've never been a property entrepreneur or a landlord, it's going to be really difficult. That's one thing the whole team has right now in the space.

Then, a real UX focus. I do think that functional is fine but an app that's like Slack—we love Slack because this is such an easy app to use and it's cool and it works—we love some of the UX pieces around making things easy and just making it fun. There are a lot of checklist apps, but they look really boring, so what things can we do that does make it engaging, fun to think about the design, the experience of somebody using the app. We’re thinking very hard about that and I'd like to think we're probably at the edge when it comes to really making that happen, making it an engaging experience, if you will.

Jason: One of the biggest challenges with software is adoption, getting people to use it. Me personally, I'm a visual guy, so if the software is ugly and gross, I don't want to use it. It's a thing for me because I'm going to be living in that software and working with that software, I want it to be aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. It's a big crux of user interface and user experience design and that’s something I pay attention to.

Amit: I'll give you one example of how it's different. We don't use checklists. In the actual user interface for Tallyfy, you won't see a checklist. You're probably wondering why like, “Does that make sense?” It does make sense because if you think about it, the first thing people see when they look at a checklist is a boring bunch of tasks that they're not going to think about, they're just going to mark them done even if they didn't do them. Seriously, I’m not kidding you, a lot of people just mark a task done even though they haven't done it.

Jason: Yeah, it happens a lot. Then you have to build in these weird checks and balances to make them prove that they've completed it, put in their names or put in details so that step that you’re just created.

Amit: Exactly. To answer your question what's different about our app, we've thought through these things because we've watched people do workflows for 10 years. One of the things we do is what we call a card. A card is a rectangular shaped thing and it invites collaboration. It's not just like, “Oh, I'll just mark stuff done,” but, “Maybe I have an idea to improve it. Maybe I need to chat to my friend, Jane, about something I don't understand about this task. Or maybe I have to collect some information of that task.” It encourages more engagement, we're seeing more engagement on our app with actually doing workflows.

Honestly, if you want a checklist, you wouldn't need an app. You could just use any to-do app. It's only when you're in a team when you need to track between people where these kinds of apps become really useful. It's little touches like that which honestly needs a lot of experience to think about, things like that, those experiences that make us a little bit different from some of the others. It's just like we experience in the field of watching people do this and design thinking. That's what makes Tallyfy different.

Jason: In Tallyfy, would you say that instead of seeing a checklist, they see what is the next step that they need to be focused on? Is that the focus design-wise?

Amit: Yeah. We often found that people don't want to see anything but the one thing that they need to do right now.

Jason: What do I need to do right now. Right, yeah, what's next?

Amit: What do I need right now, yeah. Imagine if you saw a list of 55 tasks, wouldn’t that be scary? That’s just like, “Oh, my God, it’s so boring, I'm just going to mark everything done even though I haven't done it.” It's things like that that are so important that no one really thinks hard about them. They think that they can just roll out some app and like, “Oh, everyone's going to use it.” How did you know everyone did what they said they would do? These things with other things that helped solve it.

There are some other things, too, which we're adding down the road which are seriously awesome, especially chat-based interactions which we’re adding with chat tool soon. So, instead of doing tasks, you're actually talking. You’re actually speaking to people on chat while also doing tasks at the same time.

Actually, I might as well announce on your show today, we just got approved by Slack, which is like a chat application that a lot of people use. We just launched our plugin for Slack two days ago. It works beautifully with Slack, with a whole bunch of chat tools. You don't want to see a boring line of checkboxes, I don't think that's going to work out for anyone. We try to think. We're trying to move across the realm of possibility here and make it engaging, make it better for people, so that people actually love doing those workflows.

Jason: Awesome. What else should property managers know about this app?

Amit: It's free to sign up to. We have a bunch of templates which we can help you with, but we often find that most property managers already have processes or things that they already have written down. It's super easy to just move them across to Tallyfy. We could help you with that, too, but there is a bunch of sample workflows that we can also provide. Things like tenant screening, tenant onboarding, tenant eviction, maybe screening landlords, or onboarding new landlords, or even just apartment building maintenance checklists or just things like that.

We have a bunch of samples we can help with, but the thing to really start doing is just go to tallyfy.com, hit the free sign up, it's free for 14 days, and then to reach out to us if you need help because maybe you’ll need help, maybe it's that simple. There's nothing to lose by just giving us a try and we're here to help you if you need it.

Jason: Now you had mentioned that one of the things that's important is to update processes, as somebody moves through a process inside of Tallyfy, is there some prompt? How do you incentivize them, making changes to improve the process?

Amit: Firstly, there’s collaboration. If who owns the process, say it's your manager that owns it, you can just notify them using @ replies saying, “Hey, here's an idea to improve it.” Now, we’re enhancing that around down the road. What we're doing is, as you're doing a process, even if you're not tracking it, you can hit a button that says “Suggest improvement,” (that's actually coming in a couple of months) a real simple button that just says, “I'm just reading this thing, I have an idea, here's the idea.” There's a proper thing that tracks the idea all the way through to the owner and that way, you can do continuous improvement because the person doing the process often has the best idea how to improve it as well. For them, it’s super simple.

Also, I feel like people ignore this question but the reason people have Word documents now is because they don't want to literally launch a process every time, they just want to read documentation like, “This is how I do things.”

Jason: Because it's fast.

Amit: Because it's fast. You don't have to actually track every task, that's just boring. We're launching a plan. By the way, people listening to the show, if you want to trial this plan, we're happy to talk to you about it. We're launching a very cheap plan that's literally less than half the price of all the competitors on the market right now, that literally lets you document and read a process but also improve it.

Take your Word document, which you might have already right now or your Google Doc. Now, think of all the features that you wished it had but it doesn't, like this improvement button, all sorts of other things which are not there right now. Package that in a simple thing that literally costs $5 a month per user. That's what we're launching soon, the ability to just document and read while also improving workflows at the same time. That's actually something no one has really seen so far because so far, all the apps out there make you start an actual process and make you mark every tasks done.

Jason: Yeah, I’ve noticed there's a really fine balance that needs to be achieved between making every single, little, tiny step have to be done, documented, and check marked and allowing the process to be out of the way, allowing the employee or team member to just get work done. I don't go through a huge checklist every time I drive my car but I probably did the very first time I drove it. I was a little nervous, I want to make sure I was doing it right, but once you know how to drive a car, you want to get in, go, and you want to make sure things are right. But you want to get things done and you don't want to hinder your team members’ ability to get work done quickly by making the process overly cumbersome more than it needs to be.

Amit: Yes, because you get that muscle memory, you get into the habit, and you already know how to do this stuff. The last thing you need is now to update some other place to say you've done it even though you know you've done it. I think no one's really addressing that, it's a real issue. We are launching this next month or so.

We're very excited about that because it's also a lot cheaper, it's also a lot faster because you're not expecting people to literally go to their phones and go check, check, check, check, check. They're just reading stuff and as they read, if they need help, they can ask for help. Sometimes, you get stuck. In your example, you're going to start your car. But one day, your car doesn't start and you're like, “Oh, gee. I wonder why. I need help from my mechanic,” or something.

It's at that point when you need actual help because you're stuck at that task right now or you have an idea to improve it. Either one of those things. But that's the only time you have to interact. When you need help or you have an idea to improve it. That's what's coming. That is transformational because it means that you as a property manager or your staff don't sit there getting bored, seeing a boring checklist of things they have to do every day because honestly, some of your people are actually really experienced. You don't need to offend them by making them check a box every time they do some tiny thing.

Jason: Let’s connect it to money. A business owner also doesn't want to pay twice as much for a team member to do a bunch of tasks simply because they're slowing them down at half speed because they have to do something overly cumbersome.

Amit: Right, isn't that completely insane? You buy an app to speed you up and it's actually slowing you down.

Jason: Very possible.

Amit: That could be possible and if you misuse some of these apps including ours, by the way. You could actually have that scenario.

Jason: One of the biggest challenges I've noticed with slowing down team members in my own business in the past was interruptions. For example, we used Slack for a while but I found that Slack was causing so many interruptions with team members because everybody was messaging everybody constantly. The challenge also then becomes avoiding interruptions because one interruption, according to some, costs 18 minutes of productivity. If you have two team members interrupting each other, it's like 30 minutes of labor that is blowing out the door. If somebody's being interrupted once every 18 minutes, they almost feel they're spinning their wheels, so reducing interruptions is also important.

Amit: Right, and the average professional services hourly rate, fully-loaded in the US is $44 an hour. So, you've literally just thrown, was it $20, you say 30 minutes every hour, something like that?

Jason: If members interrupt each other every 18 minutes, yeah, that's almost about 30 minutes of work like you double that because [...] people, you're losing 18 minutes for each interruption. My business is built around eliminating interruptions. This is a focus that we have because the less interruptions, that means the team members need to be able to get the answers that quickly, we want to reduce them asking the same thing more than once, we want to make sure things are documented so that they don't have to keep coming back. If somebody has to say something and I have to tell them how to do it, I make sure they document it, I say, “Here's how to do it, document it, put that into our process.”

Amit: Yeah. Let me tell you one thing about chat, and then Slack, for example, is a chat tool. Chat tells you what has happened, chat doesn't tell you what's going to happen or what should be happening next, chat just tells you what's going on right now, not what's going to happen next or what should be happening next. They're two completely different worlds.

Tarryfy and processes, and Slack and chat, these are completely different things altogether. You could have the best of both worlds, we have an integration to Slack but we're doing it in a non-interrupted way the integration that I'm talking to you about. We're very conscious of that design experience because it is annoying, because everyone feels like checking their chat all day long like what messages they got and things like that.

Jason: I’ve got 20 notifications, am I going to read all of them?

Amit: Right, yeah. We don't use Slack to advertise Tallyfy, I want to put it that way. A lot of people build integrations, but they get those integrations to make people go back to their apps because they're like, “Oh, well just use Slack to make people come back to our app.” You just compounded the problem by interrupting someone every five minutes with some notification. We're definitely not going to do that.

What we're doing with Slack is quite different and chat in general. I'm really excited about our future. A lot of it is shaping up right now. If any of these interests you, especially if you're looking to get your operations into one place as a property manager, just be in touch. We're really excited to speak to you folks right now.

Jason: Very cool. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this with everybody. How can they get in touch with Tallyfy and learn more?

Amit: Visit tallyfy.com. The best thing to do is just sign-up. There's a big sign-up button on the home page. Just feel free to check it out, you have nothing to lose, it's free of cost. Once you're in and you get the basic picture of how things work, feel free to reach out, that's when we’ll be most useful to you personally. I'm the CEO and the founder and most times, I often take calls. It’s not like I’m hiding in a corner. I take calls with customers directly. It’s a pretty flat company, we love what we do, and we like being honest with you.

One thing you won't find about us is that we won't try and sell you. If we think this is not going to work for you, we'll just say it's not going to work for you. That’s the kind of fresh honesty many of these product vendors need to have. It's not just a case of pushing you a subscription plan to sell you stuff. It's got to work for you, it's got to deliver benefits, and that's what we’re interested in.

Jason: I agree. We're very similar. I had a phone call today and it was a startup property manager. I just asked, “Do you want me to convince you you should do property management or not?.” I said, “I can go either way, I'll explain to you either one,” [...] an accurate picture and don't jump into something that you’ll regret later.

I’ll wrap this up, I want to tell everybody I believe every business should have a [...]. This is one of the major systems that every business should have. They need a support system, they need an accounting system, they need several different systems. One of the systems they need is a process documentation system. You need some system to make sure the processes are also being done correctly. It's so simple. I recommend everybody check it out and I'm excited to hear feedback. Amit, I appreciate you coming on the show. I will let you go.

Amit: Yeah, thanks for the time, Jason. Much appreciated.

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

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Dec 10, 2019

Is there a way for property managers to reduce delinquent rent payments by more than 50 percent? How can residents positively or negatively impact their credit score by 20-70 points?

Today, I am talking to President Dave Haldi and CEO Steve Jarvis of CredHub, which helps property managers report on every resident, including those considered a credit risk. It reports the positive and negative, incentivising tenants to make paying on time their top priority.

You’ll Learn...

[01:47] CredHub: Name change, funding, continued growth, and creating transparency.

[02:06] CredHub’s Competition: Most companies only process and record positive payments, not negative payments on individual's credit score.

[02:28] Bolt-on Technology: CredHub connects and bolts onto rental software systems to validate positive and negative payments via rent roll system.

[02:52] How it works: Provides property managers access to an individual's credit score information reported to credit bureaus and pass-through revenue opportunity.

[03:27] RentCredit Plus includes identity theft resolution services and rental payment reporting to credit bureaus for $3.50 each month.

[04:20] Customer Support: Resolution Services as Customer Support: If there is a credit issue, CredHub takes on responsibility to work with credit bureaus.

[05:35] Doing Good Things: CredHub helps people get back their financial health and credit for payments.

[06:42] Recapitalization: Report all data at scale to achieve goal of growing CredHub.

[07:58] Lease vs. Mortgage: What’s the difference? Educate managers and residents.

[09:13] Audit Proof: Information given to credit bureaus via CreditHub must be correct.

[11:25] Collections: CredHub has credentials to create trade line for property managers.

[11:54] Implementation Process: After CredHub has signed agreement, implementation takes about six weeks.

Tweetables

Increase credit score by 20–70 points; make paying rent on time a top priority.

CredHub: Bolt-on, backend, rent roll, data pole cleansing and reporting at scale.

CredHub: Gets property managers out of credit business, and puts them in property management business.

CredHub reports the positive and negative, incentivizing tenants to pay on time.

Resources

CredHub

CredHub’s YouTube Channel

Fair Credit Reporting Act

DGS 107: Automating and Screening Rental Leads with Cliff Hayden of Show Me The Rental 0

Transcript

Dave: ...opportunity for property managers to help reduce their delinquency because we figured out a way to report the negative or late payments. The program can then help increase an individual's credit score 20–70 points on a positive perspective but it will also impact their score negatively and help reduce delinquency by over 50% encouraging an individual to pay on time and making rent their priority to pay.

It started four years ago, validated the idea, worked with some property management companies locally. We changed the name to CredHub a little about a year ago, got funded, we've had continued growth, and built an automated technology with a dashboard to create transparency of what we had learned from the marketplace. That's what created CredHub and that's where we are today.

Jason: Perfect. There's other companies in the space they that do this. Is that correct?

Dave: There are a few companies but we're a bolt-on technology. Most of the companies that we have come across are payment processors and they may process payments only allowing to record positive payments on an individual's credit score.

Our technology connects and bolts on to the back-end of rental software systems—Yardi, RealPage, Rent Manager, ResMan, et cetera. Therefore, we validate the payment that has been made because it comes out of the back-end of the rent roll system allowing us to report positive and negative.

It also gives the property manager, on-site resident manager transparency to see what information was reported to the credit bureaus once it's been uploaded and helps affect the individual's credit score. So, we're different. We also create a pass-through revenue opportunity for the property manager to make some additional revenue for their bottom line through our program.

Jason: Okay, explain how that works.

Dave: So, we have RentCredit Plus, which also includes an identity theft resolution services because identity theft is such an issue today, especially in larger properties with mail rooms, et cetera. With that, we charge $3.50 for this program that is identity theft resolution services as well as reporting the rental payments to the credit bureaus, both positive and negative, on a monthly basis.

It would be our best results or best practices or we make this program mandatory for all residents. We charge $3.50 per person on the lease including the co-signer and most of our clients charge $7. So, they make a 50% increase of what we charge for the product and for the services that we provide.

In addition to that, we also provide the resolution services, making sure that if they do have a credit issue, we take on all the responsibility to work with the credit bureaus to make sure if something was reported incorrectly, we will fix it. So, we provide that customer support from a third party's perspective, not eliminating the burden to the on-site resident manager and getting them out of the credit business because they're in the property management business.

Jason: Got it, okay. So, Steve, what's your role at CredHub then?

Steve: Yeah. So, I came in to the company about a year ago when we recapitalized the company as Dave said and renamed it to CredHub and that recapitalization was really meant to build this platform so that we could do this back-end, rent roll, data pole cleansing and reporting at scale.

My career was always in automation and travel. I worked for the likes of Expedia and built alaskaair.com for Alaska Airlines and had retired from travel, and was looking for an interesting new project that really had an element of doing good things for people that needed it which, I believe, we're doing it at CredHub. The folks that are now going to be able to get credit for their Rogers payment or are young folks that are credit-invisible or folks that need to get back in financial health back on their feet. It feels really good to be working in this market.

I'm CEO, so primarily looking at business development and strategy finance. The goal here is to really do this at scale nationally. You mentioned what makes us different and David had mentioned that the element of negative reporting of late and skipped payments and its impact on getting residents to pay on time for property managers. No one's really done that at scale.

Like Dave has said, others in the market that are doing reporting are doing almost entirely positive reporting which it's pretty easy. The hard part is this is what we do is getting all of the data reported and doing it at scale. I came in with the recapitalization, with an element to really growing this thing nationally and doing it in a big way.

Jason: Perfect. So, what questions do property managers typically want to know about CredHub?

Steve: Well, one of the things, for me, especially coming into the property management space having been to trade shows, travel, and technology, the core of what we do is really, really easy to understand, which is really compelling. When we talk to property managers, it's pretty easy to get what we do in 90 seconds. Like really, wow, you can report positive and negative to credit bureaus, reduce my delinquency, I can add a revenue stream, and my residents will like it because I'm helping them.

There aren't a lot of questions there. We do get some questions as we roll through closing clients on the legal side. We'll get a legal department and a property management company worrying about disputes from their residents but it's a fairly easy question to answer because the residents have a financial obligation. They have a contract called a lease. It's not that different than a mortgage. Property management companies who aren't being paid by the residents have every right to report that to the credit bureaus. There's an education process that I think we need to go through on that side of the sales process with property managers.

Oftentimes, we'll get questions on whether this is optional. Property management company may want to have this be an opt-in for their residents. That's not how we work. We report the entire file to the entire resident population to the credit bureaus which is what they want. Our program really only works for property managers if everybody's being reported including those that are credit risk.

Dave, do you have any other?

Dave: Yeah. I think a couple of analogies would be and it really creates this carrot with the stick, encouraging people to pay on time and because they require everybody, all of the residents to be reported the messaging is consistent for everyone. It also has helped us because of our platform being so audit-proof because the information that needs to go to the credit bureaus has to be right.

We found that we've really helped clean up the data that we're pulling out of the system because it has to be correct. We provide an error submission report and that report can go back so it's something that maybe the on-site resident manager or assistant manager can help clean up as they're going through their lease renewals or new residency. We found errors or mistakes when maybe a check has come in, it got incorrectly posted.

Because ours is third party, it helps to create checks and balances and the system is audit-proof. It provided an additional layer but easy for people to log into and make the changes. And we support them seven days a week, 24/7 if they have an issue.

I think the other questions that may come up is, "Well, how does this work?" One of the things for a property management firm who works with us, we create a trade line at the credit bureaus. We have credentials and privileges with TransUnion and Equifax so we credential them and create a trade line with the bureaus.

Therefore, if we are working with somebody and we pick a date that we report on the 10th of the month, rent is late at 30 days because we pay rent in advance. If an individual is delinquent or pays late after the 10th or they don't pay, Fair Credit Reporting Act says, "It can't be turned to collections until 90 days." If we report on the 10th, we're going to be 50 days ahead when that person can go to collections affecting their credit score, encouraging them to pay the property manager in full and not having to lose that income that could be the cost of going through collections.

That's a piece that becomes critical in what we do and a lot of questions get surrounded about that but we have all the credentials to create the trade line necessary for the property manager.

Jason: How difficult is this for a property management business owner to implement? Maybe you could talk a little bit about the process.

Dave: The process is we meet with them, we work with them on the pricing, and figure out when it would work for them to implement. Once we have a signed agreement, we try to implement it within six weeks if that works for them.

Once we've got credentials with the bureaus, then our data team connects with somebody in their office. It usually takes an hour, but once we pull the data to get it out of the system, then we go through some testing on our end making sure that the data is correct. Once we've confirmed that, we give them four weeks or a month. Let's just say, we signed a contract in August. We would give them the month of September, lay out a timeline that we work with them to educate their on-site resident managers, create a lease addendum because we know that our best practices if they sign, if they put the addendum in the lease, it gets explained to them helping that education of why it's important to pay your rent on time. Then, they sign the leases with the addendum. We have a template, but we can make changes to the addendum depending on how they want to implement it. And then we would begin reporting on the 10th of the following month or on a mutually-agreed date they want to pull it.

In some states like Washington, with just changing the 3-day evict or 14-day evict, we used to report some property management firms on the 15th but because of that change, they have asked us to report on the 5th. So, we can change the pull date and the report date helping encourage the protection of the property management company for these individuals who are playing the system or gaming the system and not paying their rent on time.

Jason: Okay. Cool. It sounds pretty simple, sounds like a really good idea, really good service. Now, can landlords listen to this, besides property managers, also implement this, or homeowner?

Dave: Yes. We work with any property type or size. If they don't have a rent roll system, we just create a spreadsheet for them, collect the necessary information, and then they can upload the spreadsheet themselves through our portal. We have a variety of ways we can connect and help very managed.

Jason: Very cool. All right. The CredHub sounds like a brilliant idea. It reports the positive, it also reports the negative, incentivizing the tenants to make sure they're paying on time. It gives them the benefit of building some credits so there's a carrot and a stick connected to this. You also have identity theft resolution they can be tied to this that can be a profit center. Ultimately, how much does this cost the homeowner or property manager? Or do they just make money doing this?

Steve: Pass-through revenue model, they make money doing this. We bolt onto their existing system, we help them do the lease addendum with the residents and they actually make money. We like to think of it as a win-win-win. It's good for the residents, it’s great for the property manager, and obviously, we're in business for profit as well.

Jason: Win, win, win. All right. Anything else that anybody should know? How can they get in touch with CredHub if somebody's listening to this and they wanted to get started, they wanted to check you guys out? How can they connect?

Steve: credhub.com would be the best place to go. We have a YouTube channel that has some really simple videos on it, you can link to those from the CredHub website. In fact, our animated “what we do” video is in the hero image right on the homepage. We have a Contact Us section and a there's a form there that property managers can sign up with the number of units they have and we'll follow-up. That's probably the best way to do it is just to come visit us at credhub.com.

Jason: Perfect. Sounds like a no-brainer, it makes sense. I think what you guys are doing is going to help out a lot of people which I resonate with and I appreciate you guys coming out on the DoorGrow Show.

Dave: Thanks for having us.

Jason: All right, we'll let you guys go. So, checkout CredHub at credhub.com. For those that are new to watching or listening to the DoorGrow Show, be sure to like and subscribe. Leave us a review somewhere that would really make a difference and check us out at doorgrow.com.

If you're wanting to grow your property management business, or you're in need of a new website, or you're just wanting to make sure that your business is growing as effectively as it could, reach out. We'd love to talk to you. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

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Dec 3, 2019

Is pre-screening tenant leads the most time-consuming part of your business? What you need is an online system that advertises, generates and pre-screens leads, automates showings, and turns leads into applications at a reasonable price.

Today, I am talking to Cliff Hayden of ShowMeTheRental, a time-saving tool for automating and screening rental leads. ShowMeTheRental handles the B.S. part of management between prospective tenants and property managers/owners.

You’ll Learn...

[03:05] From Lineman to Realtor: Longest suspension in AT&T history to do real estate.

[04:00] Poor Priorities: Money was goal. Financial success wrecked family/homelife.

[05:15] ShowMeTheRental: System put in place to automate lead screening for tenants.

[06:12] Fulfilling Family Priorities: Money is a tool, now; not a goal.

[07:25] Happy vs. Frustrated Customers: Set expectations of what you expect from them and what they expect from you via questions that filter qualified leads.

[11:25] Where is ShowMeTheRental advertised? All major Websites, including Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and HotPads.

[15:18] See something you like? Try ShowMeTheRental today to save time and money.

Tweetables

Working all the time costs you family and friends.

Money is a tool, not the goal.

You can buy time, but you can’t get your time back.

Resources

Cliff Hayden’s Email

Cliff Hayden’s Phone: 502-641-8781

ShowMeTheRental

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

CASHFLOW Game

Kentuckiana Real Estate Investors Association (KREIA)