#DoorGrowShow - Property Management Growth

DGS 150: The 5 Currencies for Property Management Entrepreneurs 0

Transcript

Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing 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 doing it because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.

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

Today’s topic came up on my group coaching call today. We were talking a little bit about sales, and I don’t mean real estate sales. When I talk about sales, I’m talking about closing deals for your property management business, selling people on using you for property management, just to eliminate any confusion.

My topic today is going to be how can you double your property management close rate without a BDM. A lot of people think, gosh I would need a BDM or I need a business development manager. I need somebody that’s out there hustling and acquiring business. I’m going to assume you’re doing the sales in the business or you already have a BDM or you have somebody, but you want to speed things up. You want to go a little bit faster. You want to double the close rate, double the amount of deals and business you’re getting.

I’m going to share with you a secret today, really simple. A lot of clients come to me and they’re like, gosh. I just need somebody doing sales all the time, but I can’t afford a BDM or I can’t find one. Now, there is sort of this waystation in-between, getting a full-time BDM, offloading it completely off of your plate, and doing it yourself.

If you’re doing it yourself, you’re probably doing it part-time. You’re maybe dedicating two hours a day, maybe less. But you should at least be doing two hours, five days a week, which means 10 hours a week. Somebody is doing sales or focused on that side of the business. It’s the lifeblood of the business. That means, you’re at least a [...] part-time salesperson for at least 10 hours a week in your business. You’ve got at least that going on.

Now, if you have that, this waystation in-between, really simple, you can’t afford a BDM, maybe you can’t find one, maybe you like doing it, you just want to go a little bit faster, and you want to double the amount of deals.

One of the things I did when I got overwhelmed in my own business, back when I was doing all the sales, is I got an assistant. And they were like, what do you need? Well, I could use some help with the sales follow-up. Getting a sales assistant is this secret, this little waystation in-between, that can help you double your close rate. It can help you double the amount of deals that you’re getting on.

The most challenging thing in sales a lot of times time-wise is just follow-up. It’s nurturing these leads and opportunities to get them warm enough, to where they trust you, know you, and like you enough that you can get the deal closed. Having somebody that can help to nurture these along, follow-up, and get appointments scheduled can be really powerful and effective.

What would you have this person do? A good sales assistant, really, is just an appointment setter. They’re calling these people up saying, hey, this is Jason Hull’s assistant. He just wanted to get back together. When would be a good time? Do you have some time on Wednesday at two o’clock, or would Thursday maybe at three o’clock be better? What works for you? That would be really effective.

Me, getting a sales assistant or an assistant that was facilitating this at the time back when I needed it really badly, helped me double the amount of business that I was able to acquire. My revenue doubled, my gross revenue in the business. So this could be very effective.

The thing you’re going to have is a really good sales assistant. Let’s talk about the requirements. They need to be somebody that really loves making phone calls. This is a challenge nowadays because a lot of millennials and younger do not like talking on the phone. They don’t like talking to people. There’s a lot. They opt for text messaging, they rather send an email, so they’re always trying to shift away from having a conversation, as if that’s uncomfortable.

You have to find somebody that actually enjoys talking to people. On a DiSC profile, they’re going to show up as probably a high I, they’re going to have a lot of conversational skills, they’re going to like to talk or feel comfortable talking about themselves and with other people. They enjoy connecting with people. They probably also need a certain amount of D in the DiSC profile, which means they’re somewhat driven. This is the stereotypical sales profile as a DI.

Now, they can have other attributes. They might have some S for stabilizing, which means they want to take care of people. They don’t have to be an aggressive, natural salesperson. They just need to be somebody who’s comfortable making phone calls.

If you find this person, now you need to onboard and train them. You want to make sure that this person, what are they going to do for you? They’re going to help you. One, they’re going to help you a little bit with qualifying people. They can ask qualifying questions. Hey, I’d love to get you on a call with Jason. In order to do that, he’s really careful about his time. I’ve got a couple of qualifying questions just to make sure you’re going to be a good fit. Does that sound fair? Then you say, yeah sure.

Then you have some qualifying questions that they can ask. For example, if it’s for property management instead of my business model, you would say maybe, are you current on all your house payments? Where is the property located? What’s the address? What are your long-term goals? Okay, cool. I really appreciate you giving me all this info. I think this will be a really good fit.

Give them some criteria so they can help with the prequalification question. What that does is it places you—who is going to be the closer—in a position of being kind of the sexy girl or guy at the bar. You’re the one that gets to make a choice. Instead of them being the prize, it shifts. It’s them realizing that hey, this person that I’m going to talk to—which is the business owner—is the prize. They don’t work with everybody. They’re careful about who they take on, which suggests they’re high value. Nobody wants to buy low value, so having an assistant establish you as high value.

Not only that, but assistants get a pass when it comes to follow-up because they’re not the salesperson. Just by them being able to reach out and say, hey, this is Jason’s assistant. He wanted me to reach out, it sets me on sort of a level of value that’s higher because I’m an assistant. It will make you look even more valuable.

Back when I got my first assistant helping with sales, that was almost my only team member. It was just me and I had an assistant, and I was doing pretty much everything. But people perceived me differently and they treated me differently when I would get on the phone with them.

The other thing that your sales assistant can do is to preframe. Preframing or some might call this future pacing, but is really effective, like you having a better sales call or sales pitch experience.

Preframe might look like this. Hi, this is Suzy, calling to get an appointment scheduled for Jason. I’m his assistant over at DoorGrow. He was really wanting to meet with you again to chat about X, Y, and Z. I think you’re really going to love talking to Jason. That’s a little preframe.

Now, if you schedule a time, when’s a good time? Thursday at 2:00 PM or would 3:00 PM be better? He has some time then. Which would work for you? Oh, not that? Okay, how about Friday? Giving them time is going to be more effective.

Once you book a time, cool. You schedule that time, then you can use a preframe. They’re going to say something like, Fred, you’re really going to love talking to Jason. It’s going to be an awesome experience for you. Bring your questions if you have some problems with your rental property, or in my case, your property management business. I think you’ll really love what you’re going to hear during that call.

That’s a preframe. It creates this future emotional state, they’re imagining this while you’re saying it, and they’re far more likely to experience that one when they talk to you. Make sure that they’re educated and trained in this art of preframing the call. Some sort of positive experience or outcome.

They might even let them know future pacing. Yeah, he’s going to get on a call, he’ll talk with you about this and about this, and he’ll talk all about our pricing, how things work, and what we’ll do for you. I think you’ll really be excited to hear what he has to say and how we’re different from other companies. That’s a really powerful, effective thing to do as a preframe.

Now, they also can handle all of the follow-up in your CRM. But keep your CRM tight. Make sure all the deals have good notes, follow-up with people, making text and email as you if you want them to do that. Or they can reach out and say, hey, this is the assistant, and they can follow-up. They can feed all this data into the CRM. They can keep notes. If somebody says they’re not interested, they can update that so you don’t waste time. This can eliminate the biggest time-suck in sales, which is all of the follow-up they can do. All of that follow-up for you.

Let’s talk about some requirements to really make this work. What do you need? You already have somebody else helping you do sales, assuming you’re doing this all by yourself. At the very basic level, you’re going to need a CRM. You need some sort of sales CRM to keep track of the deals, opportunities, leads, and sales.

Each of you can keep notes so that you’re not stepping on each other’s toes. You can see what communication has occurred, and you need to use it. You need to put in your notes from your calls and conversations. You need to mark this deal or opportunity at a certain stage. They know what the next stage is that they need to help move this towards, so that they can call and get an appointment scheduled, to move it to that next level. You want to be able to use this with your assistant and yourself. You need separate logins for this so that you could see who did what.

The most common recommendation in the industry is LeadSimple. You can check that out at leadsimple.com. They really should be giving me some sort of affiliate, commission, or something. I’ve sent so much business over to them, but I don’t get paid. But anyway, check out leadsimple.com. And tell them they should send me a kickback. I’m just kidding.

Check out LeadSimple. I get really positive feedback. It’s a cool CRM. It can initiate a phone call once a lead comes in to you, which makes it look like you followed it up right away, like you’re just on top of things. Leads are only good for maybe the first 10–15 minutes, and then conversion rates can drop dramatically, maybe even 80% on a lead. It helps you with that initial follow-up, and then you can build out text message, email, nurturing, campaigns, workflows, and drips.

LeadSimple also has kind of a process street, sort of clone that can facilitate some of the onboarding tenant and owner onboarding processes and checklists that you want to build in your business. So you’re going to need a sales CRM.

Another tool that I would recommend is that you have some sort of scheduling link. This makes it a lot easier to handle calendars, appointment settings, and scheduling, so get something like Calendly. I really like Calendly. You can check it out at calendly.com. They do have a free version, I believe, but you want to get Calendly set up.

You can have some different appointment times. You can have separate links for these. I have a 15-minute, 30-minute, and 1-hour appointment link. My assistant knows initial things will be 15 minutes, maybe a lengthier call after that will be 30 or an hour, depending. They know at various stages in the sales pipeline to skip the scheduled, what kind of timeframe.

You can also assign follow-up tasks in your CRM to your assistant instead of to yourself as a reminder. And it can be for the same day to (say) get them booked for a 30-minute call, or follow-up and see if they’re ready to schedule another call with me for an hour or whatever. You can book that in using a follow-up task you can assign VA your CRM. So get the Calendly link.

The other thing that I would recommend is face-to-face sales is far more effective. I would rather be on a call face-to-face on Zoom, so I would get a Zoom account set up. I believe Calendly has free Zoom integration during COVID. They set this up. I don’t know if it’s still available. You may have to have a paid account in order to connect Calendly to Zoom.

Get Zoom. I believe there is a free version of that as well. I have a paid version because I like to be able to record calls to the cloud using Zoom, for coaching, and stuff that I do for later. You can integrate Calendly and Zoom, so they can book a call. They’ll get the Zoom call details and they can show up.

People are pretty used to face-to-face. It allows you to read and see their body language. It allows them to see yours. It creates trust and relationships a lot easier by using video, so recommend you try to have video calls, if at all, possible. That could be part of the preframe and the expectation set by your sales assistant.

If you want to be able to leverage your sales assistant, somebody has to be dedicating some time through prospecting and growing the business at least 10 hours a week. A really good sales assistant, if they’re not just doing inbound and follow-up, they might be able to do some outbound.

If they are a bit more driven and they’re comfortable kind of interrupting people and doing the prospecting side, you could also give them some scripts and have them start to function in a BDM role, and they can graduate to that. You can come up with a commission structure and you can give them half of the commission. You can give them half commission if they initiate or find somebody and then you close them.

Later, you can graduate them to a full commission if they do both sides of the deal. Finding them and they close them. This allows you to use a strategy that I learned from one of my mentors, Alex Hormozi, which he called the double barrel close, where you have a setter and a closer, and it can be really effective.

Anyway, that is my tip for today. Get yourself a sales assistant. Even if you want a BDM or you’re hiring somebody as a BDM, it’s a great way for them to start to learn your sales process, to start with the follow-up, to just help you go a little bit faster initially. And eventually they can graduate to being a full-fledged BDM. So, starting them as a sales assistant.

That can be very affordable, even somebody just stepping in part-time to assist for an hour or two a day can do a lot of follow-up and probably double the amount of deals (at least) you’re getting right now.

If you need some help learning how to prospect effectively, you want us to help onboard or help you figure out your sales process, you want to help your BDM or sales assistant figure out how to prospect and help you grow your business, reach out to us. This is the stuff that we do in the DoorGrow & Scale Mastermind.

I’m your host, Jason Hull. I hope this has been helpful. And reach out to us if there’s anything that we can do for you. Let us know in doorgrowclub.com, which is our Facebook group. If you’ve gotten yourself a sales assistant and be curious, leave in the comments. As always on our iTunes, please leave us a review if these podcast episodes are effective for you. We would really appreciate it.

That’s it. Until next time, to our mutual growth. And I’m out. Bye, everyone.

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Dec 21, 2021

What is the most important currency when assessing whether or not we’re doing the right things or making really good decisions in the business? Time, energy, focus, cash, or effort? It’s not money, but time that is limited and scarce.

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the five currencies for property management entrepreneurs. It is a concept that he was taught by his mentor, Alex Charfen.

You’ll Learn...

[01:50] Five Currencies: Time, energy, focus, cash, and effort.

[02:58] #1 Currency: Time - most important commodity.

[04:44] #2 Currency: Energy - some things give us energy and others drain us.

[06:19] #3 Currency: Focus/attention - whatever you focus on tends to grow.

[08:10] #4 Currency: Cash/money - Buy back more of your time and other currencies.

[08:41] Four Reasons: Fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support.

[09:15] Six Core Functions of business. Which function is your weakest?

[09:48] #5 Currency: Effort - put in more than anyone else; your results are assured.

[11:20] Currencies: Assess and evaluate yourself related to the five currencies.

Tweetables

“We trade money in order to get back some of our own time.”

“Do less and less of the things that drain you and do more of things that give you energy. You only have so much energy in a day.”

Focused Equals Power: “The more focus you have, the more power you’ll have, which means you can go faster.”

“If we have enough cash, we can buy other people’s time and get more of our time back.”

Resources

DGS 149: 13 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Starting A Property Management Business 0

Transcript

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

My topic today is we’re going to chat about the five currencies. This is a concept that I was taught by one of my mentors, Alex Charvin. He would probably explain it differently and he has a great podcast, by the way, for entrepreneurs. It’s (I think) really validating for us as entrepreneurs. I really look up to Alex. He’s a mentor that really helped me take my life and business to another level, which is a goal I aspire to do with all my clients.

This is something that I was taught by Alex. These currencies—write them down; these are one through five—I like them in this order. This is just how I’ve always set them and how I like them. This is probably not his order but time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. Let’s get into each of these.

Let me just give you an overview. We have five different currencies that we can invest into our personal life and into our business. When assessing whether or not we’re doing the right things or making really good decisions in the business, we want to take a look at it. If I’m investing, you should be getting a return if it’s a good investment. But a lot of business owners are not making a very good decision, they are not investing correctly or well, so they’re not getting a return. If you’re not making enough money in your business, you’re not having enough growth, you’re probably not doing the right things in investing these currencies correctly. Let’s go through each of these.

Time. Time, in my opinion, is the most important commodity, is the most important currency, hands down. Why? None of us know when we’re going to die but we’re all going to die. Time is a scarce, limited resource. It’s the most important, your personal time. Now, what’s cool is you can buy the time of others. This is why we have team members, pay employees, pay people to do certain services for us and stuff like that. We trade money in order to get back some of our own time. That is the most important commodity.

When we’re young, we do crazy stuff. We work at a job, trading our time, giving up our life, chunks of our life for money. We don’t realize how valuable it is. Eventually, hopefully you’ve realized or starting to realize right now that money is not the most important currency. It’s time. You’ll realize that as you recognize that it’s the one that’s truly limited and scarce.

Related to time, you want to take a look at where’s my time going? Is it towards the things that feed me more life, or make me feel joy, or are the things that I really find fun or enjoyable? This goes back to my podcast episode about the four reasons. Make sure you check that out if you haven’t listened to that. I want to make sure that if you’re investing your time, it’s towards those things; you getting more and more of those. When it comes to time, this is why I have clients do things like time studies, and we have a very strategic way of looking at your time so you can assess that.

The next is energy. We all have things to give us energy and things that drain us. Me coaching clients energizes me. It’s fun. I woke up like 3:00 in the morning, I was super tired and just before this I got off a coaching call, and I feel bit pumped up. It just gives me life. I enjoy being able to teach. I enjoy being able to share cool stuff. I learn. That’s my why, is to inspire others to love true principles. I love being able to learn cool stuff, share with other people, and see them get it. That’s just so fulfilling for me. It gives me energy.

But there are things that drain my energy. I also run a web design agency designing logos and building websites that’s not super energizing for me. It used to be kind of fun for me, but I really did it to make money. That was a job when I was a solopreneur. All of you are doing and wearing hats that you don’t want to wear and doing things you don’t want to do.

Over time, moving towards the four reasons, I want you to do less and less of the things that drain you and do more of things that give you energy. You only have so much energy in a day. That’s a currency you can protect, you can work to be healthy, you can do some self care, you can protect yourself enough load things, but you want to pay attention to your energy levels and the things that are energizing you or the things that are draining you.

Next is focus or attention. Whatever you focus on tends to grow. Those that are into the law of attraction stuff, recognize this, but wherever they say energy flows where attention goes. If you want more of your energy to go towards more positive things, you need to place more attention on those things.

Focus is also one of the greatest secrets in business. So many business owners get diluted in their focus and their attention, and they wonder why they can’t go as fast. A good analogy is to look at light. You can have a flashlight. It’s helpful. It’s more helpful than maybe a candle in some instances, or maybe something’s really dim like a fire. And you can move it around. A flashlight’s really cool.

But if you really want to have something really powerful, and you focus that light, you then end up having a laser. A laser can cut through things. It can do really cool stuff. It can cut machinery, it can do some really powerful stuff. It can do dangerous stuff.

Focused equals power. This is a principle in the universe. The more focus you have, the more power you’ll have, which means you can go faster. In the property management business, for example, if you are diluted in your focus—you’re doing lots of different types of management while you’re small—you’re not going to be able to grow as effectively in any of them. It’s like trying to run multiple races at a time. You’re scattered, you’re diluted.

A lot of entrepreneurs lose focus and get distracted by opportunity. You want to make sure that you can determine, where’s my focus going and is it giving me more of the things that I want? More all of the other currencies maybe or more towards the four reasons?

Currency number four is cash. Cash also, like all of these, is a limited resource. But if we invest our currencies correctly, we can get more of it and we can turn that cash into more of these other currencies if we’re investing correctly. If we have enough cash, we can buy other people’s time and get more of our time back, and then we can do more of the things that energize us.

A lot of business owners, as I said on a previous podcast when I talked about the four reasons, make more and more money and they have less and less of the four reasons. Just to recap, just real quick, fulfillment, freedom, contribution, support. These are the things we want to get from our business. We want to make sure focus is tight.

A lot of business owners, the reason you’re not growing right now is because you are focused on the things that the business is already doing well and you’re not putting the majority of your focus as a leader and as a business owner on the things the business is struggling with currently. So go back and listen to my episode about the six core functions of business. That’s where you can determine where should our focus be as a company right now. Which function is our weakest.

Cash. It’s also important to recognize cash. You’ll need cash flow. You need some space and some padding there that’s going to give you a lot more ability to focus and have attention. Cash can affect all of these other functions.

The next is effort. This is the last one, number five, effort. We only have so much physical energy, physical strength that we can do. After that we can put into something. But if you’re willing to put in more effort than anyone else is willing to put in, your results are assured.

A great book on this is Grant Cardone’s book, 10X. I like the audio book because you get to hear him talk about it and share these principles. The basic principle is if you do 10 times the effort—it’s very focused on the effort attribute—you put 10 times the effort towards something, you’re going to get the result. And it’s 10 times more than what you’d typically think you’ll need, and the results are assured. There’s no way you’re not going to hit that goal.

Now, all of these five currencies will show up on a time study, except cash, really. Time study will reveal to you where your time, your energy, your focus, and your efforts are going currently, so that you can figure out how to reinvest it. It’s a cheat code to having greater productivity.

But my goal for you is not to become just more productive. I don’t need you to do more stuff if you want your company to grow. You don’t really have to do more. In fact, the ultimate goal is for you to do less things but spend more time and attention doing the things that you really enjoy doing, that give you energy.

Take a look at yourself through the lens of these five currencies—time, energy, focus, cash, and effort—and figure out where is this going. If you want to work with me as a coach, go through my proprietary time study process, to identify your plus and minus signs energetically, figure out how to reinvest and eliminate the interruptions in your business that are stealing money, focus, time, and effort, and improving that.

This is something that I coach clients and doing once a quarter. So reach out and let’s connect. We’d be glad to help you. This (I believe) is the greatest secret to offloading, figuring out how you can get out of being the biggest bottleneck in your own business, is just starting with assessing your time and seeing where these currencies are going.

Take a look at your currencies, assess yourself, evaluate yourself related to these currencies, and figure out how am I doing in each of these? Give yourself a rating. Am I deficient? Where am I weak? Am I weak on cash? Am I weak on time? Am I weak on energy? Am I weak on focus or attention? Am I weak on effort? And then start to dedicate a little bit more of those currencies towards what’s weak so that you can improve that.

If you’re weak on time, maybe you’ve got good cash. So invest some of that cash towards time. Maybe you’re weak on effort. You’re like, I’ve kind of floating and coasting right now, and I really would like some more of these other currencies. Cool, invest more time and put in some more effort towards it. More attention and focus, that if you want more cash, certainly a way to do that is invest more of those.

All right. That's what I'm going to say about the five currencies. If anybody has questions about these, feel free to hit us up in our Facebook group, doorgrowclub.com which is our free community. Make sure to apply. We don’t let everybody in. Once you’re inside, you can ask questions related to these things.

Or send me a message on Facebook or through any other social media platform. I might see it. I try to monitor them all. We’d be happy to help you move your business forward. So take a look at your currencies.

That’s it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. I hope everybody has an awesome week and success. Bye, everyone.

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Dec 14, 2021

Most property management businesses suck because they have miserable business owners, but it's not because of the industry. There are unhappy business owners in any business, in any industry, or in any business category. What would you do differently now that you run a property management business?

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about 13 common mistakes made and tips on how to avoid them when starting a property management business. These are things that you should know or wish you had known. Some are really practical and some are a bit more high-level recommendations.

You’ll Learn...

[02:23] Out of Alignment: You’re in the wrong role, doing wrong things in the business.

[04:00] Mistake #1: Not using or choosing cheapest property management software.

[05:49] Mistake #2: Don't give out your real direct cell phone number to tenants, owners.

[07:03] Mistake #3: Learn how to win the online reviews game before starting to play it.

[08:17] Mistake #4: Do not be the cheapest in your market. Price yourself at the top.

[09:51] Mistake #5: Your business name should always end with property management.

[10:50] Mistake #6: Save time and money - grow a business without paid advertising.

[12:39] Mistake #7: Cycle of Suck - don't take on shady clients or properties.

[13:57] Mistake #8: Do not hire until you’re clear on what matters - culture, values.

[16:36] Mistake #9: Everybody has a fantasy when starting a business. Kill the fantasy.

[19:20] Mistake #10: Make property management the focus, especially in startup stage.

[21:24] Mistake #11: Protect your time; offload emergency/after-hours calls, eventually.

[22:27] Mistake #12: Distraction of Opportunity - reduce variations and focus on niche.

[24:48] Mistake #13: Don’t be a know-it-all; collapse time by getting a coach, mentor.

Tweetables

“Choose property management software that you can live with forever.”

“You need to insulate, protect yourself, and not be reachable all the time by cell phone.”

“It's better to be the most expensive than the cheapest, in my opinion.”

“There's one thing that without it you don't have a business—clients.”

“When you start to value yourself and value your time, other people will start to value you and value your time.”

Resources

The Myers and Briggs Foundation

Telegram Messenger

National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM)

Transcript

All right, we are live. Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, 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 business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.

Okay. Today, what we are going to be talking about—this was prompted by a question that I saw posted on Facebook. Somebody asked a question like, what do you wish you could do differently now that you run a property management business? If you could go back in time, what would you do differently? There were lots of jokes, hahaha, from people saying I would start a pizza company or pizza place, or I'd do something else like I wouldn't do it.

It is a common joke. There's pain underneath those statements because there are a lot of property management businesses that a) suck, and that b) because they have miserable business owners. They're not happy. I just want to point out that I don't believe it's because of the industry. There are miserable business owners in any business, in any industry, or in any business category.

I think the challenge is that the business owners that are not happy out there, which there's a lot in a lot of industries, there's a lot in the property management industry. But the ones that are not happy are the ones that are not in alignment with the four reasons, which I talked about in an earlier episode. Go back and check that out. If you're out of alignment with that, the real issue is that you are doing the wrong things in the business. You are in the wrong role. So that's the challenge.

I want to talk about 13 tips that you should know if you're a startup property manager. These are probably 13 things you wish you had known or should know if you're starting a property management business. Some of these are really practical and some of these are a little bit more high level, mindset, or whatever.

I just made a list of the 13 most common mistakes that I see people make starting property management companies. I've made a pretty decent living in helping property managers either start up their businesses or most of the time, helping clean up the mistakes they made during the startup process. It's a lot of what I do at DoorGrow.

So I've talked to thousands of property managers. I've gotten to see inside a lot of businesses. I get to hear what actually goes on behind the scenes—the pain, the sorrow, the sadness, and the joy when we get things figured out and dialed in. So let's get into these. These are in no particular order or priority. These are just how they came into my head.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see, number one, is choosing property management software based on what's cheapest. That's a mistake. A lot of times, property managers either don't use the software in the beginning or choose something cheap or less expensive. My recommendation is to choose property management software that you can live with forever.

The reason being, if you can choose software that you can live with forever, that software is going to save you a lot more money in the long run. You're going to end up spending a lot of money on staffing costs instead. So if you go cheap on software in the beginning because you're like, hey, this is a lower price, those costs get translated and pushed on to staff.

Don't pick it based on what's cheapest and the same, get the most expensive software but get the software that can do the most, that's going to give you the most leverage. I typically like to recommend Rent Manager simply because I hear the most positive feedback on it. It's not an investor-backed company where their primary goal, if they're honest, is to please their financial backers. That's not their goal, some software out there.

It's not owned by some bigger conglomerate or company, as far as I know. They have one of the best property management conferences I've heard in the industry. But clients seem to just really love Rent Manager. They love that software.

I've seen it used by really large enterprises that have thousands of doors in multiple markets. I've seen it used by startups. It seems to work for a variety of different types of management. It has an open API. It connects and integrates with everything is what that means, generally. So that would be my recommendation. Don't push the cost on the staff because staff are far more expensive.

All right. Number two, don't give out your direct real cell phone number to tenants and owners. It's so easy to do early on. Real estate agents are absolute horrors with their cell phone numbers, that happens all the time. Every guy or gal in real estate just gives it out to everybody, puts it on park benches, puts it up on yard signs.

For property management, that's a whole different game. You need to insulate, protect yourself, and not be reachable all the time by cell phone. So you need to get some other service or you might get something like Talkroute, which works great with cell phones, low latency, voice over IP system that allows you to use your cell phones. It works really well and it's low cost. You can build out a phone tree, protect yourself, and route it to different services that you bring on later.

You can even go and just get some sort of phone app in the App store to get a second phone number that can allow you to do text messaging, phone calls. I've heard of some people using an app called Burner and some of these. Have a different phone number than your real cell phone number and just save that for those that you really want to be able to reach you—family, friends, not clients and customers.

Number three, learn how to win the online reviews game before you start to play it and are losing, which is the default. If you're a restaurant in the restaurant industry, this is critical. You start up a business, you're hoping that it's going to make money, you put on some investment into it, you start getting some bad reviews initially because you make some mistakes, and suddenly, it just compounds, piles on, you just get more and more bad reviews, and you're not getting good reviews. The business could die.

Now in property management, the default also is that you're going to get bad reviews from tenants and owners. They're going to be frustrated, tenants especially, if they don't get their deposit back or whatever. You need to know how to play this game.

In DoorGrow Academy, we have a training called Reputation Secrets and then teach clients how to win at this game, but you need to have a strategy for this before the reviews just start to happen. Because the default is you will lose and that is a significant impact.

A lot of people mistakenly assume they'll just get good reviews if they just do good service, and that is not the case. That's not how the review game works. So before you start to play that game, you need to know how to win that game, and it's not a hard game to win.

Number four, one of the biggest mistakes I see, my really big tip here is do not price yourself as the cheapest. Do not be the cheapest in your market. Do not price yourself at the low end of the market or at the bottom. There's already a race to the bottom.

This is a fast track to building a business. It's not sustainable, that's painful, that's uncomfortable. It helps you attract more and more of the bottom of the barrel, the worst clients, and residents. That's not the type of business that you want to get caught up in. Price yourself at the top of the market.

It's better to be the most expensive than the cheapest, in my opinion. There's a lot more nuance to that and pricing psychology and strategy that we get into in our Mastermind program that I love to coach clients on because I have not yet had a property manager come to me that had really effective pricing. It's always something we can optimize, improve, and then they can close more deals at a higher price point more easily.

That price sensitivity, that sense of scarcity that they're getting pushed back on, that price sensitivity and pain that they're dealing with with owners, there are lots of ways to mitigate that, remove it, or capture better prospects that are not like that, like the cheapos of the world. That's the default. That's what most property managers do. They try to be the cheapest or they try to charge what everybody else is charging in their market. They're all making similar mistakes.

Number five, make sure your business name ends with property management. It's one of the most common mistakes. Almost every startup seems to have real estate or realty in the name, or they choose something generic so they can do it from multiple industries like properties. They might even put rentals, which is weird.

So real simple, when it comes to branding, we've helped rebrand hundreds of companies—redoing their names, redoing their logos, hundreds. We are the world's leading property management branding and design agency. Nobody's done more rebrands than us in the property management space.

The most common mistake that we see is just not ending your name with property management. Just end your name with property management and be a property management company. Be a master of one trade instead of a jack of all trades and a master of none.

All right, number six. Learn to create a business without paid advertising and you'll never struggle with growth, and you will save a [...] ton of time and money. Cold lead advertising takes a lot of money. It wastes a lot of time because you have to nurture these leads. There are far better strategies for growth.

What do I mean by cold leads? I'm talking about SEO, pay-per-click like Google ads, content marketing, social media marketing, and pay-per-lead services. You do not have to do these things in order to grow your business. In fact, there are faster and better ways. I'm not saying don't do those.

All of those can be effective if you do the right things, but they can be costly, and that's not where you should start spending your time and energy. The number one way that almost every business owner I've talked to ever in property management, I asked, where have you gotten the majority of the doors you have now? It's always word of mouth. So figure out how to play that game, figure out a way to create it. to intentionally make it, and to be outbound about it instead of just inbound, which means waiting for stuff to just come to you.

So we have an outbound partner prospecting program that we teach in DoorGrow Academy and in Referral Secrets in our Mastermind program. This has helped some of our clients to have hundreds of doors in a year's time without spending any money on advertising. It just takes time, but it takes less time than it would be if they were just being spoon-fed a bunch of cold leads. It takes less time and they get more doors. It's a no-brainer.

The next item, number seven, don't take on shady clients or properties. I've talked over and over again about what I call the cycle of suck. Take on a shitty owner, you have a shitty property, you have a shitty tenant, you're going to get a shitty reputation in the marketplace. This is the cycle of suck.

Escape the cycle of suck, filter at each stage, and the most important is be careful about the types of owners that you take on. This is the most important thing because this starts the entire cycle. Be careful about the properties that you take on. Of course, screen the tenants—you all do that, and have a strategy in place.

We've already talked about reviews. Have a strategy in place to get more good reviews and to mitigate, filter, or prevent negative reviews. If you are able to do this, you will have significantly lower operational costs than most property management companies, which means you'll be more profitable and you'll be able to invest more into growth, into your team, and into scaling your operations. So don't take on shitty clients and properties. Really simple.

In the beginning, a lot of people think they need to take on everybody. This is one of the most common mistakes and they do it at too low of a price point. They're needy, needy is creepy, and it prevents you from getting on a better business.

All right, the next item. The next tip for startup or starting a property management business is do not hire until you are clear on your culture, which means your values, what matters to you, and you've created that in a tangible way, which means it's written, it's documented, and you are clear on what you should be doing in the business. Meaning, you are clear on the things that bring you those four reasons. You know what gives you more fulfillment, more freedom, and more contribution so that you can get more support.

You need to understand yourself. Because if you don't understand yourself, you're going to do the wrong things as a business owner. You're going to wear every hat in the beginning. The hats you need to get rid of are the ones that are minus signs for you. They are not energetic plus signs. They do not give you life and energy.

You need to strategically focus on that. I talked about time studies and things like that in our program, ways of figuring out which things energize you versus draining you. I talked about the five currencies of time, energy, effort, focus, and cash. Figuring out what is going to give me the most fulfillment and freedom. What's going to bring me more joy? You need to understand what that role is that you're going to be moving towards.

You don't have to do anything in the business in the long run. You could offload everything, but there are certain things that are going to bring you joy and fulfillment and that's why we have businesses. That's one of the main reasons. So you need to figure out what is that for you so that you can build the right team around the right person.

If you're showing up as the wrong person, you start to build a team, and you don't have the culture, and you only have yourself clear, you're going to build the wrong team. You're going to be frustrated with them, and you're going to be like most of the 200–400 door companies that the business owner is in a state of constant burnout and frustration. Just frustrated that they cannot get their team members to think and make decisions because they've set up their business the wrong way, they are annoyed, and they are micromanaging everybody even though they don't want to admit it.

So make sure you get clear on that. That's something that we help clients with. Clients give me feedback. They dial this stuff in that that was the most important training and material they went through in our Mastermind program, which is what I call Purpose Secrets and getting that clarity. It helps them build their dream team so they can have their dream business. If you don't have the business of your dreams, as one of my coaches and mentors would say, then you are not yet the person that can run it yet. That means you just don't have clarity on yourself.

All right, the next thing is number nine. Tip, starting a business. When we start a business, we all have a fantasy. It is so sexy, it is so seductive that we're willing to take a risk against the advice sometimes of family and friends, and we start a business. We spend money, we spend massive amounts of time and energy to do this, to go towards this fantasy. Everybody has a fantasy when they start up a business.

You have to be willing to kill the fantasy. So this tip is to kill the fantasy early. You know that you're delaying this death of the fantasy. What I mean by killing the fantasy is if you want a reality, if you want a real business that actually pays you, because fantasies are sexy, nice, and they make you feel good, but they don't pay you. They don't actually give you a real-life result.

The fantasy just makes your brain feel good and gives you some chemicals. But if you want to have a real business, you have to get a reality business, you have to kill the fantasy if you want that. You have to let it die. So kill it early. What I mean by this is some business owners delay this. They mentally masturbate as one of my mentors or coaches would say.

They don't take the right action and they spend a lot of time doing all the action that's safe. I'm going to work on my branding, my business card, my logo, or my website for 100 hours. They're doing all this stuff, and they're not getting clients and they're not getting paid. You don't need any of that stuff.

The only thing that you need in order to have a property management business. There's one thing that without it you don't have a business—clients. That's the one thing and you can just get clients. I've seen people have hundreds of doors without a website, without a good brand name, without a logo.

Certainly, these things can help improve things and make things go faster. But you don't need t-shirts printed, you don't need a cool brick and mortar building. You just need some tenacity, some work ethic, and to take the right action.

That's the first thing I start clients on if they're in a startup stage or they want to grow their business, we start them down to what I call the Grow Program First. It lets you add doors. Then we can clean up branding, website, and your sales pipeline, and then it'll go faster. But there's no point having something that's going to help you go faster if you're not even moving yet. Let's get you moving and making some money first.

Kill the fantasy early, do the uncomfortable hard stuff first. If it's uncomfortable, if you're avoiding it, if you don't want to do it, it's probably a sign that that's where you should go. Lean into the pain early in the business and the business will be less painful forever.

All right. What is next? Number 10, make property management the focus. At least during the startup stage. I've seen so many that have it as a side hustle. It's a side hustle for years where they sometimes come into my program, it's a side hustle, and they don't even choose to focus on it. Then after about three or four months, they realize they finally get honest and connect to reality, they're not going to do the work.

Because they don't really want to invest in that business or focus on it, and then they just give up, quit, stop the business, or just leave it where it is, and they don't make it a focus or priority. So if you want just to succeed and go fast, give it a real chance of success. If you have a baby that's born, you need to take really good care of that baby, at least for the first little while, first few years. Because otherwise, that baby is not going to be able to feed itself, change itself, take care of itself.

That's your business. Your business is this baby. You need to take care of it in the beginning. Eventually, you can build a team, you can build systems, you can offload things, you can focus on other passions or other businesses if you want to, but it needs to be a focus if you want this to work.

One of the biggest challenges I see is they don't make it a focus and they artificially keep feeding into this business from the resources, revenue, and staff in their existing healthy business. So then you end up with this cancerous tumor on the side of a healthy real estate company, for example, that's a property management business, and it's not profitable.

I had one client that had 600 doors when he first came to me and was making $0 in his business. That's painful. Too many expenses, too much staff, too many resources, and a cycle of suck. All these things were going on, lack of technology, et cetera because a healthy company would have had to make significant changes at about 100 doors or so or earlier just to break the 100 door barrier.

They were able to artificially skip past that in terms of door count because they had another business they could siphon resources from. Make sure your business can stand on its own two feet and make it the focus.

Number 11, protect your time and offload as early as possible emergency or after-hours maintenance calls. You need to value yourself and protect yourself. You could get a service like Abodia, Latchel, or EZ Repair Hotline I've heard good things about. You could sign up, eventually, once you get maybe 50–100 doors.

It might make sense to get a service like Property Meld and they work really nicely, I guess with EZ Repair Hotline under their full-service plan. I've heard great things about Property Meld service over and over again from clients. But as soon as possible, offload emergency or after our mains maintenance calls. You're the business owner and protect yourself, protect your time, and protect your time with your family.

When you start to value yourself and value your time, other people will start to value you and value your time. That means they’ll want to pay you, they’ll want to give you money because you're valuable. You have something to offer them. Don't be low value.

All right, so the next thing is the number 12 tip when starting a property management business. One of the biggest problems I see with entrepreneurs is this distraction of opportunity. We see opportunities everywhere as entrepreneurs. So my big tip is to reduce variations as soon as possible. Variation, what do I mean by that?

I mean shift your focus towards simplicity and doing as little as possible, like one thing, one main business. You will go faster. Reducing variation means having less types of management that you offer. Don't try to do commercial, residential, multifamily, trailer parks, and storage units. Pick a niche and really focus on it, reduce variation.

Don't have custom contracts that you're trying to negotiate every time. Get a lawyer, get your contract tight, determine this is what it's going to be, and improve it over time. Don't fold on it. They're looking for an expert that they can trust. Be that expert that they can trust. Don't fold. Don't cave in.

Reduce variation in the business. The more variation you have, the more side hustles you have, the more random things that you're trying to do, the more service you think might be a good idea that you're trying to incorporate, if you do those at the wrong time, it just creates speed bumps. It slows you down, so try to reduce variation.

My business, we basically have one product, one service, one sales pipeline. Our growth has skyrocketed as a result. In the beginning, I had this company called OpenPotion. It was OpenPotion Website Design and Business Solutions.

I was like, I'm going to set up computer networks, set up businesses' phones. I could do their websites, I can help with logos. I was going to do everything because I thought I could do all this stuff. Overtime, we've done less and less and less and made ourselves more and more focused.

Even focusing on a niche in becoming DoorGrow so that we can become more effective and reduce the amount of variation in the business. It allows us to go deeper, help our clients even more, and reduces the complexity so that we can service more clients more quickly and provide better service.

Number 13, do not be a know-it-all and collapse time by getting a coach. Now I know you're like Jason, you're a coach, come on. This is biased. Transparency time here. I was that guy. I tried to do everything myself in the beginning.

I tried to watch the YouTube videos and read every book. I thought, I'm so smart, I can figure anything out. I am smart enough to probably eventually figure everything out, but it takes a decade to go that route when you could collapse time in a year if you worked with somebody that already has invested a decade into this.

I started this business in 2008. I've been helping property managers since then. It's over a decade. I've also been able to incorporate knowledge, wisdom, and ideas from hundreds of clients, thousands of property managers that I've talked to, and being able to pull in the best ideas. I'm really good at piecing together various pieces, ideas, and creating new things. It's just kind of my area of genius.

As an ENTP, if you're familiar with Myers Briggs, I'm always looking for truth and looking for what works. That's kind of my skill set, but the trap in that is I always thought I could figure it out. But when I got coaches, I started actually go fast. Nothing helps you collapse more time than getting mentors or coaches that know what they're doing. They can help you move forward a lot faster.

When I started getting coaches and mentors, and I'm very careful about who I choose as mentors or coaches nowadays because I'm at a level to where a bad coach or a bad mentor could do a lot of damage. One of the things I look at is, do I want to be more like that person? Do they have a lifestyle that I would like to have more of in my life? Do I feel like they're a good person? Do they have values? That's important to me.

Do they have knowledge that they can share? Are they sharp? Get a coach, get resources around you, get mentors. It's going to help you collapse time far faster. This takes humility. It's hard for us as business owners, especially early on because we think we know a lot.

Over the years, a lot of pain, failures, and mistakes helps us learn we really have no clue. We're all just winging it. There's a lot of people that are far beyond where I'm at that I could learn from. Don't be a know-it-all. Get a coach and collapse time.

If you feel like I might be able to be that coach and might be able to help you grow and scale your business, we have over 80 businesses in our Mastermind, which means over a hundred people in our Mastermind program that we are coaching, mentoring, and helping move their business forward. You'll get access to me with one-on-ones. You'll get access to me through video, voice, text message through Telegram messenger.

We do two weekly calls each week, and we have a repository of training material I built out in doorgrowacademy.com that you get access to as well. Then you get the support and help from my team. We included a website in the program and branding. All this is just part of this mastermind experience.

My goal is to keep clients forever so that I'm adding value. It's very easy for me to help a client offset the cost of this program by double, so that this program feels like it's now paying you. Very easy, no brainer. So if you're interested in the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind, reach out to us, reach out to us, reach out to my team, check us out at doorgrow.com. Join our Facebook group at doorgrowclub.com.

We would love to talk with you and see if you might be a good fit for our culture, for our program, and for the types of clients we want to help and service. There's nothing I enjoy more really in my business than helping coach the clients. It's super fun.

It's Wednesday. I got to do one of those calls today. It's super rewarding being able to hear all the wins, people adding doors, hear the questions, and be able to support these people in growing their businesses. I'd be honored to be able to support you. It's my passion. It's what I love doing.

With that, those are the 13 tips for those that aren't in the startup stage. If I were to add a bonus one here, I would say, get around other people doing what you want to be doing. Join NARPM, get around other property managers, get to know your local competition. It's a friendly space. Create some relationships and be connected.

Don't be an island in your business. Our mastermind can be a support or channel for that as well, but make sure you're connected to people. I'll leave it at that and until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

Download this Episode

DGS 148: The 3 Dominos To Knock Over To Close More Property Management Deals 0

Dec 7, 2021

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about three dominos that you need to knock over to close more property management deals.

Jason discovered the three dominos concept in sales from Russell Brunson, a New York Times bestselling author that popularized sales funnels and co-founded ClickFunnels to help entrepreneurs get their message out to the marketplace quickly.

You’ll Learn...

[01:25] Three Dominos Concept: How to pitch property management services.

[02:19] The three dominos are the vehicle, internal beliefs, and external beliefs.

[02:39] Domino #1: The vehicle is your service to get to what people want.

[03:29] Competition: What are all the alternative vehicles for property management?

[04:55] Lead Gen: Cold leads are costly and warm leads cost time but less money.

[06:33] DIY Option: Takes much longer to do everything and get the same results.

[07:12] Domino #2: Tackle all of the customer’s internal beliefs by offering support.

[09:58] Domino #3: Deal with all external and false beliefs that concern customers.

[11:05] Logical Conclusion: Only thing left is to sign up with you and your service.

[13:45] What is sales? Helps people get what they want, and what you desire, as well.

Tweetables

“There’s three dominoes that you need to knock over in order to get somebody to buy your services and to sign up with you as a client.”

“If you knock over all three dominos, the magic that happens is the only logical conclusion they have left and decision they have left is to work with you.”

“Safety and certainty is really what these people want.”

“I’m building trust, creating relationships, and I’m helping them see reality, and really, I think that’s what sales is all about.”

Resources

DoorGrow Academy

DGS 147: The Cycle of Suck in Property Management Business 0

Transcript

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

So today's topic, I was hanging out with my coaching clients today. We had a great call, lots of people, and we had a brand new client. He was asking about, how do I pitch? Basically, the question was, how to pitch property management services? One concept or principle that I related that I would like to relate to everybody listening today is the concept of the three dominoes.

I don't think I've chatted about this before. If I have, then you can hear it again. Anyway, the three dominoes concept in sales, I got that idea from Russell Brunson. I've heard him talk about it. I just grabbed one of his books off the shelf here. In this book, he mentions it. He probably mentions it in his others, but there are three dominoes that you need to knock over in order to get somebody to buy your services and to sign up with you as a client.

These three dominoes are the vehicle, internal beliefs, and external beliefs. If you can knock over all three dominoes, the magic that happens is the only logical conclusion they have left and the decision they have left is to work with you.

Let me explain these. So the vehicle is the first domino. This is important. The vehicle is your service. Your service is the vehicle for them to get to what they want. If you're selling property management, the vehicle that you're selling or offering is your business doing their management. For me, the vehicle is our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind, that's the vehicle that we offer.

Now when looking at vehicles, if you want to knock this domino over and accomplish the goal of them recognizing it, your vehicle is the best vehicle for them to get into. You have to throw stones at all the other vehicles. You have to destroy all the other vehicles in their mind so that the only logical vehicle left standing is your vehicle.

So if you want them to use your business for property management, you have to look at what are all the alternative vehicles? Write these down, figure out what are all the alternatives. They can self-manage. They could go to a real estate agent and ask them to do it. They could go to the big box company and franchise company down the street. They could go to the small mom and pop company that competes with you that's down the street. There are lots of different vehicles.

After you've looked at what are all the possible vehicles that exist for management and you make a list of these, you have to figure out, how can I throw stones at these? Why is my vehicle better than them self-managing, than them using the big box company down the street, the small mom and pop shop down the street that I compete with, or whatever?

If you don't have a good answer to that question, then you don't have maybe the best vehicle. How can you make your vehicle better? Sometimes you just need to work on your product and improve it. So you need to have the best vehicle.

With my vehicle, the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind and the coaching program that we offer, the alternative vehicles people have for growing their management companies could be hiring some other coach, it could be doing SEO, it could be doing pay-per-click, it could be doing content marketing, it could be doing social media marketing, or it could be pay-per-lead services.

In my training that convinces people to sign up with us and work with us, I go through and explain why all of these vehicles generally are all cold lead advertising, and why cold leads are not as effective as warm leads. Why the close rate is typically 10%, or worse for most property managers with cold leads. Why cold leads are really expensive. You have to pay for these marketing services. You have to pay agencies, then you have to pay for ad spend, and it's really costly.

I contrast that to our opportunity, our vehicle, which is based on warm lead generation, which is based on things that don't really cost you money. It does cost time, but it actually takes less time than dealing with cold [...] leads and prospects that are just time wasters and tire kickers, that are at the end of the sales cycle, that are searching on Google, that are super price-sensitive, and are the worst. They're the scraps that fall off the warm lead or word-of-mouth table that my clients get to eat at.

This is how I attack the vehicle. For me, that's easy because it's true and it's obvious, I feel like. So I explain it, and then when people get it, they go, wow, that vehicle does sound better than these other vehicles and you might have written in some of these other vehicles. You might have tried them and you know from experience, they're not working really well.

In fact, most of the companies that are trying to do those other vehicles to grow their business are losing more doors than they're getting on right now due to the sell-off that's happening in the marketplace. A lot of the larger companies are down at least 200 doors over the last couple of years. That might be you. So the vehicle, so you have to know how to attack all the other vehicles.

I also have the alternate vehicle that is challenging or that I deal with, that clients will focus on which is DIY, just like you as property managers. We have people that are like, I can just read business books or I can just watch a bunch of videos on YouTube, I'll do it all myself. Awesome, I used to be that guy too. You could do that. And it will take you 10 years longer to get the same result.

I've seen it and I've been that guy. I've been that guy that thought I knew everything and could do it all on my own. Until I started getting coaches and mentors that collapsed time. So I'm attacking that vehicle. You have to figure out how do I destroy and attack all the other vehicles.

Once your vehicle is the only vehicle left standing, the next domino that needs to be knocked over in order for them to work with you is the internal beliefs. These are beliefs about their own internal self, beliefs about their own abilities to execute on this opportunity, beliefs about their concerns internally. You need to figure out what are all the internal beliefs and concerns that might prevent them from becoming a customer and from working with you, becoming a client, and signing the contract.

Any internal beliefs like, well, I don't know, maybe they have a need for price anchoring. They don't know what the price should be for property management, you've told them your pricing, and they don't feel safe. So you need to solve that challenge. Maybe they don't know what your values are or things like this, and they're nervous that they might be blind to something or missing something.

You have to figure out, what are all the internal beliefs that come up for your prospects? Make a list of these and you have to figure out, how can I throw stones and knock all of these internal beliefs down during my pitch? You've already knocked down all the external, third-party, and alternate vehicles. Now you need to deal with all those internal beliefs.

A lot of times, internal beliefs have to do with levels of support. In our program, we deal with the internal belief, concern, or challenge like maybe I can't do it. Maybe this works for others, but maybe I'm not good enough, maybe I'm not charismatic enough, maybe I'm not cool enough, maybe I'm not smart enough, or maybe I'm lazy. We have to figure out how can we attack those internal beliefs.

One of the ways is we focus on support. You get direct access to Jason. You can schedule a one on one with Jason as part of the mastermind. You're going to get telegram access to Jason so you can send him messages through Telegram—video, voice, and text throughout the week.

If you get stuck or have questions, we also have Adam, Maddie, and others on my team that are supporting you as you move through certain processes like branding, web design, or some of the things that we help clean up in a business. They're there to support you as well. What other internal beliefs?

Maybe I need to learn more. Awesome, we have DoorGrow Academy. We have a repository of training material we built up over the last decade of stuff that you can learn if you need to learn more in order to get the results. Cool, what about action? We have accountability and we have weekly check-ins that you're filling out each week to figure out whether you're doing it.

We've taken a look at all the internal beliefs that we could think of that clients had challenges with or that were preventing clients from getting results, and we figure out, how do we tackle that and how do we deal with that? We're always looking to improve in that area. Once internal beliefs are handled, there are no internal beliefs left, then people tend to go external.

So now the last domino that we need to knock over are all of their external beliefs. These are all the false beliefs they have about outside forces that could keep them from having success, things beyond their control. This could have to do with time, which keeps rolling on. It could have to do with the economy, which could be shifting. It could have to do with the real estate market at large. It could have to do with local laws and municipalities. It could have to do with the federal government.

All of these are external beliefs, COVID hitting. What if this happens? What if that? All these external things that they might have concerns about, how will this be dealt with? What will happen here? If you can tackle all the external beliefs that this investor might have and knock all of those down, you make a list, like I said, of the previous two dominoes. Make a list, figure out what all of them are, and figure out how am I going to deal with these so that I can make them feel safe.

Once you've eliminated all the external beliefs, you've thrown stones at all of those, the only logical conclusion left. They know that there's only one vehicle that makes the most sense. You've dealt with all their internal beliefs and concerns. You've dealt with all the external beliefs that they might have. The only logical conclusion left once those three dominoes are knocked over is to sign up with you, is to use you. There's nothing else that would make as much sense.

So if you build trust through this process, safety and certainty are really what these people want. This is a big secret for sales and property management. Nobody gives a shit about property management. This is not what they want.

They do not want to buy property management. They don't wake up in the morning and say property management is sexy and awesome. They don't read blogs about it and follow social media accounts about it. Unless they're property managers, they want safety and certainty. They want peace of mind. That's important for them.

So having the best vehicle, having dealt with all their internal beliefs, and dealing with all their external beliefs, they're going to have a high level of trust, safety, and certainty in you and in their ability to work with you. They know that you're going to be able to deal with all the external factors that they were concerned about. So there's nothing left to really prevent them from signing up.

Then you just say, if I can deal with all your concerns—internal beliefs and external beliefs—and I can explain why our vehicle is the best, would it be fair to say that you'd be wanting to sign up today? Is that fair? They'd say, yeah, probably.

If I can help you see how we're the best company in the market for you, how we can make sure that you feel safe and taken care of, that we can make sure that all of your external concerns are dealt with, and we have answers to those, would you be willing to sign up today? Is that fair? Then you say, yeah, that makes sense.

That's basically it. So put together your pitch. Go to the drawing board, you could write out each belief on a post-it note and get a whole list of all the internal, whole list of all the external, and figure out where all these vehicles—internal, external. Get clear on this.

You could build it out on a Trello board on trello.com and have each of these. This is how I put together my framework and my training for DoorGrow Secrets or the Seven Frameworks training that we give to potential clients for free that sells them on signing up. Some watch that training and then they just sign up.

It's like two hours long and I'm teaching a bunch of concepts, frameworks, and ideas for free, and adding value. I'm building trust, creating a relationship, and I'm helping them see reality. Really, I think that's what sales is really about. Sales isn't about manipulation. It isn't about control. It's about helping people see the real issue, the real problem, and helping them see the real path and how you can help them get what they want.

Sales really isn't about you getting what you want. It's about them being able to get what they want and you get what you want. This is that mutual thing. Your business is this magic bridge between your desires being fulfilled and their desires being fulfilled.

Hopefully this is helpful if you want to compound this. Once you have your pitch put together, add some images to it to drag this home. Don't fill it up with a lot of text, but some people have a hard time digesting all of this. So you'll notice in my training, I have slides and I have images to help people see and get these concepts quickly. So making a visual can help them understand these things quickly.

Have an image for each vehicle, have an image for each internal belief, each external belief, and you can crank right through these, explain them, and they'll get it. By the end, they'll feel like they have a lot more clarity than if you had no visual imagery. So you can put together a little slide deck or pitch based on these three dominoes. Then, of course, you can end it with a close or a call to action to solicit that.

Hopefully, this has been helpful for those listening. If you're wanting to take things to the next level, you want to become a badass at sales, you want to feel like you could close anybody that you talk to if you want them, and you want to shift from being the person that's trying to get everybody on to being the sexy guy or girl at the bar that does not feel the need to get with everybody, but you're a high value and people want to be with you.

If you want to shift that, then reach out to us at DoorGrow, and let's get you that Seven Frameworks training and our DoorGrow Secrets training and get you moving into our program hopefully. You'll be learning how to be really effective at closing more deals more quickly and doing things that are far more efficient than all those other vehicles.

I'm Jason Hull. I hope this was really helpful for those of you that are struggling during your pitch, losing deals. If you're dealing with anybody that is not a hot, warm lead, and your close rate is lower than you want it to be, then try applying this three dominoes principle to point them towards your ultimate opportunity or vehicle to help solve their problem. That's why businesses exist, to solve a real problem in the marketplace.

What if they don't have a problem? Then they don't need you. So you don't even need to pitch to them or sell to them. So identify the problem and then go into this pitch with your three dominoes. Knock them over and get some doors. I'm Jason Hull and I'm out. Bye, everybody. Until next time to our mutual growth.

You just listened to the DoorGrow show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff, SEO, PPC, Pay-Per-Lead, content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow.

At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time. Take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

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Nov 30, 2021

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull explains the cycle of suck in property management. It’s incredibly costly, stressful, and competitive.

The “cycle of suck” is a phrase and concept inspired by one of Jason’s clients that noticed as he got rid of bad doors and bad properties, he actually became more profitable. The cycle of suck concept is true, powerful, and effective. What are the four steps of the cycle of suck in property management, and how can you avoid, escape, and reverse it?

You’ll Learn...

[02:32] Step 1: You take on any client/owner or you take on a crappy client/owner.

[03:05] Step 2: You take on crappy properties, which means you have difficult tenants.

[03:37] Step 3: You have crappy tenants to manage if you have pushy property owners.

[04:44] Step 4: You have crappy reviews and a bad reputation in the marketplace.

[06:26] Don't get with everybody. Attract people you want because you are the prize.

[07:25] Protect Yourself/Team: Set standards, boundaries, limits when selecting clients.

[08:24] Sense of Scarcity: When competing based on price, it creates artificial industry.

[09:21] Reverse Cycle of Suck: Qualify clients, properties, tenants/owners, and reviews.

Tweetables

“The reality is, you don't want every client or you shouldn't want every client.”

“The owner is causing you to have more problems, more drama, more stress, and more challenges that are unnecessary simply because they're making things difficult.”

“You're going to have crappy tenants that are difficult, frustrated, and unhappy.”

“The best way to ensure that you're going to have really great tenants is to take on really great properties and really great owners.”

Resources

The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz

Transcript

At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and business 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.

All right. It was tough for me to read that intro this time for some silly reasons. I have a bunch of things going on in the background on my computer and it distracted me. All right, so let's get into this. I was trying to think about what to talk about today. I want to go back to a concept that I've talked about for a long time now. I've mentioned it in several episodes, but I don't have an episode dedicated to it that I can push people towards, and that is the cycle of suck.

This is a phrase and the concept that I put together after talking to some clients. It was inspired by one of my clients who had mentioned that he noticed that as he got rid of bad doors and bad properties that he actually became more profitable. I had clients tell me about when I started to relate this idea of the cycle of suck. People would tell me about this book called The Pumpkin Plan by Mike Michalowicz, which is a good book, and an author that's been on the podcast before.

This concept is true. It's powerful. It's really effective. Let me explain to everyone the cycle of suck in property management. If you google cycle of suck, it tends to be that my old DoorGrow article about it comes up. Let's talk about this. The cycle of suck is pretty simple. It's four steps.

The first step is you take on any client or you take on a crappy client. That's one of the big challenges. If you take on any client, the challenge then is that you're going to end up with a door. You're going to end up with bad clients. The reality is you don't want every client or you shouldn't want every client. If you're taking on every client, your operational costs are going to be a lot higher. So the very first step in the cycle of suck is crappy owners. You take on crappy owners.

The second step is that you take on crappy properties. If you take on crappy properties, you're going to have a much more difficult time. That means you're going to have much more difficult tenants. You're going to have a difficult situation. If the owner’s pushing back on things, even if the property is a nice looking property or a nice property, that property becomes a crappy property in your portfolio.

If you have crappy owners and crappy properties, which is the second step, third step in the cycle of suck is you're going to have crappy tenants. It doesn't matter how much tenant screening you do if the tenants have A-grade credit. If those owners that you are representing are pushing back on things, delaying things, and making things difficult for maintenance, coordination, and getting things taken care of in the property, these tenants are going to become bad tenants for you to be managing.

These residents will be super frustrated at you. You then end up becoming basically a [...] show for a slumlord, which means now you are in between the tenant and the owner. But the owner is causing you to have more problems, more drama, more stress, and more challenges that are unnecessary simply because they're making things difficult.

At this stage, you're in the cycle of suck. You're going to have upset and frustrated owners and difficult and challenging owners. You're going to have difficult properties, challenging properties, and sometimes just actually crappy looking and crappy maintained properties. You're going to have crappy tenants that are difficult, frustrated, and unhappy.

The fourth step is you're going to have crappy reviews. You're going to have a bad reputation in the marketplace. This kind of sums up the entire property management industry in aggregate, as a whole. There's a lot of property managers that are just taking on any client. They're trying to get on any property they can. Most people know that most property managers suck. Most come to me and they say, I'm going to start a property management business and all the other management companies in my market suck, which is why I'm going to start a property management business.

The challenge is this is the default for the industry. A lot of people fall prey or fall into this cycle of suck. The temptation is, they feel a sense of scarcity, and they feel like they need to take on every client. How do you escape this? How do you escape the cycle of suck?

To consider, the cycle suck is incredibly costly. Your operational costs on a bad property and a bad owner could take how much more time? Ten times the amount of time. Can one of your bad owners and one of your bad properties easily take 10? Maybe even it's 100 times more stressful, or 100 times more effort.

I don't know if it gets that extreme, but it can be significant. It adds up if you have multiple doors, multiple properties, and multiple owners that are part of the cycle of suck, that are not really what you deserve, what you should be managing, and what you should be dealing with. If you had the business that you wanted and the business of your dreams and types of clients you really wanted to be with and work with.

You have to recognize that you are the prize. I want all of my clients to recognize that they are the sexy girl at the bar or the sexy guy at the bar, meaning they don't get with everybody.

Here's the reality. Let's compare this to dating. If you get with everybody, you're low value. You're not going to attract the type of people that you want or the type of clients that you want in business. So don't get with everybody. Don't be that type of person. You know what they call somebody that gets with everybody, right? You don't want to be that. That's not interesting to the really great people that you want to be working with.

The cycle of suck is stressful. It's really stressful. It means you are forcing and subjecting your team—if you have a team—to really difficult people and really difficult situations. It’s a display or it's you showcasing to your team that you don't care about your team. If you really cared about your team and you protected your team, you would have standards. You would have boundaries. You would have limits. You would not take on every client.

If your team members aren't protected, if your team members don't feel supported, they're not going to stay. You will keep some team members, but they will not be the kind of team members that really can help you grow and scale your business. The type of team members that you really want to be around, these are going to be people that are willing to be walked all over or willing to take garbage and deal with difficult situations constantly.

I get that property management can be difficult, and I get that there are going to be difficult situations. But if you are artificially inflating that by taking on situations that you know deep down you shouldn't be, you're not going to be able to keep and retain team members as well.

The next thing I want to point out is how the cycle of suck is competitive. If you have a reputation online, then you compete with all the other such property management companies rather than being the standout. Because the good ones are all taking all the best clients and you're stuck getting everything at the bottom of the barrel. Then at that stage, you compete based on price. If you're competing based on price, that's not really a great place to be.

This is what drives the entire industry to feel artificial like there's a sense of scarcity. You don't want to be in a situation in which it feels like there is scarcity. Scarcity is what causes the entire industry to have pretty not great pricing, and property managers are not getting compensated well enough. It causes the entire industry to have a bad reputation. Most of the property management businesses in your market, it's why they suck.

How do you escape? If we reverse the cycle of suck, if we take this in reverse, and add each of the four stages, that means that you're going to qualify your clients. In the sales process, you're going to determine what are you willing to take on and what you’re not willing to take on. What do you really want? How do I build the business that I want to have instead of the business that I can build? Those are two very different businesses.

The second thing, the next step is you need to qualify the properties. What type of properties am I willing to take on? What situations are we willing to take on? What do I want our portfolio to look like? You need to be the sexy guy or girl at the bar that does not get with every property.

The next is qualifying tenants, so step three. Everybody tends to screen tenants. You know that even if you do all the tenant screening in the world, you're going to run into some issues, but you need to qualify tenants.

The best way to ensure that you're going to have really great tenants is to take on really great properties and really great owners. Even if the property is amazing, if you put a tenant into it that has A-grade credit, you've done all the screening in the world, and they are not able to get taken care of the way that they want.

The owner’s pushing back on things. They’re dragging their heels, things are difficult, it takes two weeks to get a water heater replaced. It takes over a week for the heater in the winter to get fixed. They're going to be upset and you're going to deal with a lot more stress and a lot more phone calls. Your team is going to be battered by this. It's going to be frustrating.

Then the fourth thing is you need to figure out how to play the game of reputation or reviews. You need a strategy in place for filtering. Each of these is filtering—filtering clients, filtering properties, and filtering tenants. You need a strategy for filtering out the negative reviews and getting more good reviews, which means capturing feedback proactively and preemptively before they get to the heightened state where they go nuclear and want to destroy your business online.

Also, by taking on really good clients, really good properties, and really good tenants, you're going to end up with a lot better reviews, by having a process in place to consistently get good positive reviews, which we talked about in our reputation secrets training that we have in DoorGrow Academy for our clients. We talk about how to implement a strategy of warm outreach to facilitate that and make sure that you're getting good reviews. Good reviews can be more effective than having the top spot on Google because it's going to feed you warm leads that have a really high close rate.

Then guess what happens. If you're getting really great reviews, and you have a good reputation in the marketplace because clients are happy with you and telling people about you, tenants are happy and telling people about you, and you have great properties, then you have a good reputation. You're going to attract more quality clients. You're going to attract more quality tenants. You're going to attract more quality properties to deal with in your portfolio.

I remember when I was living in Santa Clarita, there were two major property management companies that seemed to have all the doors there. It was very clear in talking with people in the community, they knew one company. They were talking about being really bad, and another company they were talking about being really great.

They had very different experiences. I talked to people that had dealt with one company for maintenance versus the other when they moved into a new property and how dramatically different it was for them as a resident. These kinds of things get around to owners and show up on their reputation as well.

Moving forward, if you want to get free from the cycle of suck, which means you need to come into your business and your sales process with a lot more confidence with recognizing that you have value, with recognizing that you are the prize that solves their problem, and you want to be more effective at sales, reach out to us at DoorGrow.

This is one of the foundational mindset things that I like to push into clients' heads to get them to recognize that you can have the business that you want. But you have to become the person with the right mindset, with the right thoughts, and with the right sales process that can have the business of your dreams. If you don't yet have the business of your dreams, as one of my mentors would say, then you're not the person that can run it yet.

My goal as a coach in this industry, in property management, is to help you become the entrepreneur that can have the business of your dreams. If we can support you in any way, if you would like some help with your business, reach out. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. Bye, everyone. Until next time, to our mutual growth.

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DGS 146: The 6 Core Functions of Business 0

Nov 23, 2021

Generating revenue must outpace expenses and the gap between the two is cash flow. Where are you at and what function do you need to focus on most to grow and scale your business, right now?

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the six core functions of a business. It’s a concept he has expanded based upon what he learned from his mentors, Alex Charfen and Tim Francis.

You’ll Learn...

[01:22] Core Functions: Jason took what he learned, applied it to property management.

[02:14] Rate and Rank 1-5: Assess your business through the lens of core functions.

[03:16] Function #1: Lead Generation - get contact info from potential prospects.

[03:39] Function #2: Nurture - take and follow-up on lead opportunities to build trust.

[04:30] Function #3: Conversion/Sales - deal w/ objections, convince others, close deal.

[06:36] Function #4: Delivery/Fulfillment - do property management work promised.

[10:03] Function #5: Customer Lifetime Value - increase long-term retention.

[11:08] Function #6: Finances - internal cash flow, revenue, expenses, and profits.

Tweetables

“Finances was the additional function.”

“You cannot have all of these areas be great at the same time.”

“Your ability to convert and convince people during the sales process is a skill that develops over time and gets better and better and better the more you do it.”

Resources

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

Transcript

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

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

Today, I wanted to talk about what I would call the core functions. This is a concept that I built upon that I learned from one of my mentors, Alex Scharffen, and he had what he would call the five core functions of the business.

To me, it felt a little bit incomplete for myself and so eventually in working with Tim Francis, another mentor and coach and friend of mine here in Austin, I realized there was something else missing because I was focusing on those five core functions, but still, financially, I had some challenges. That's why I was working with Tim. He's a really good financial coach. He's one of the financial mentors that I've worked with. Finance was the additional function.

I'm going to take you through these core functions and this is a way you can assess your business. As you're listening along, feel free to assess your business through the lens of the core functions, take notes, and identify each of these core functions of the business, and rate them on a scale of one to five. One being the worst, five being it's amazing.

The most important thing I think to know about the core functions of the business and recognize is that it's impossible for all six of these core functions and the six core functions to be a level five at the same time. It's impossible. You cannot have all of these areas be great at the same time. As you grow and level up the business, you're going to notice deficiencies or you're going to want to level these areas up.

There are levels to each of these six areas in which you can get better and better and better over time. That being said, when something is doing really well, other things are going to feel constrained and be a challenge.

The first function that we'll chat about is lead generation. I call it lead gen for short. With lead gen, this is getting contact info and there are lots of different ways you can get contact info of potential people that might be interested in property management or potential prospects. In general, that's lead generation, so go ahead and rate that.

The next function that you want to focus on is nurture. This is where you take these leads, these opportunities, and you nurture them, which means you warm them up or inject more trust. You create more of a relationship to warm up these leads to move them towards the next function, so go ahead and rate your nurture.

Nurture relates to follow up, it relates to your ability to warm up these leads to build trust, to build relationships, and it could relate in your business the systems and processes related to this like whether you have a sales CRM like LeadSimple or something. Whether you've got the processes built out, you've got a good sales pipeline, you've got workflow you've got follow up, maybe having a follow up assistant, or needing one relates to the nurture category.

The next category is where nurture leads them to, which is conversion or sales. This is where you're closing the deal. Number three, conversion or sales. Go ahead and rate your ability in conversion or sales. This is to deal with objections, close the deal, convince them to work with you instead of the other company they're maybe talking to or the other companies they're vetting.

Your ability to convert and convince people during the sales process is a skill that develops over time and gets better and better and better the more you do it. Go ahead and rate yourself there. These first three relate basically to the front end of the business or sales. What I will hear a lot is people say, oh, my close rate, I'm like 90%. I'm a badass at sales, but then you ask them, where are you getting your leads? And they're like, they're mostly referrals, they’re referrals. Cool.

If you have a close rate less than 90% probably and they’re warm hot referrals, you probably have a problem. That's the cool thing. If you get the right type of lead generation, nurture almost becomes unnecessary. You don't really have to warm them up. Then conversion also is largely dealt with because you're going to get the deal, you just don't screw it up.

Now, when you start dealing with colder leads and colder prospects, my goal with clients is to make sure that you are a badass at conversion or sales and that you notice if that function feels weak right now because you've started maybe focusing on colder leads, or you're just not closing as many of the conversations that you've been prospecting or working with as you want. Maybe that function is weak. We can improve that significantly.

One of the easiest ways to collapse time on these first three functions is to just focus on warmer lead opportunities instead of advertising or cold lead opportunities. Cold leads would be like SEO, PayPerClick, content marketing, social media marketing, pay per lead services like [...] et cetera. Those take a lot more time and I've talked about that in other trainings and other podcasts, I'm sure many times.

Number four, this is more shifting into the back end of the business or behind the paywall. Once they've converted into a customer, they've signed the contract, they're now a client. The next step, item four, would be delivery or fulfillment.

Delivery, fulfillment largely is connected to operations. This is everything that you said you were going to do during the sales process. This is screening tenants, working to find tenants and tenant placement. This is maintenance, coordination, everything. All the work of doing property management. That is what is included in delivery fulfillment—dealing with tenants, all that kind of stuff. Generate reports, owner payouts, all of this that's all under delivery fulfillment operations.

What I'll notice a lot in the industry—for those that are struggling to grow—is they won't have operations delivery fulfillment. They'll have number four out of five or a really high level and yet then lead gen is like a one. If lead gen is one and delivery and fulfillment is like a five, you're making a big mistake in the business because what that tells me is you consistently keep focusing on the wrong things in your business. You're doing the wrong things.

Any function that you're focused on of these six functions, which we'll finish and go through in a second, any function you’re focused on primarily and trying to maintain it to five, that is not your weakest function. That's where your time, energy, focus, attention, cash, effort, et cetera are going, you are making a mistake. That means you are distracted.

Those are distractions because what the business needs most right now is whichever of these functions is weakest, that's where your five currencies I talked about time, energy, focus, cash, and effort should be focused on. This is where all that should be going so that you can get a return and you can level that up.

The goal is to level up the weakest function, and then if that's now a strength, now your other functions will appear to be weaker in relation. Now those you’re going to rate at a lower level and you're going to want to level those up.

This is the juggle of running a company and running a business is figuring out what do I need to focus on most right now. If you are at the helm, you are the entrepreneur, you are the leader, you are the business owner, you need to provide this leadership to the business to your team. You need to help them figure out what is our weakest function to focus on.

Too often, the business owners continue to focus on the function that they're already good at, that the business already has at a five, and they try to keep it as a five. You have to be willing to let a five slip in order to get something from a one or a two, and that's okay. Get those up to a three, a four, or maybe even a five. If delivery or fulfillment, for example, operation slips to maybe a three in relation because now you're getting so much business, it's uncomfortable, you can't onboard everybody, and things are starting to slip, cool. Now it's time to shift your attention and focus to that function. If you assess this regularly on a quarterly basis and brainstorm with your team through these functions, you will be able to make really good decision-making.

The next function after delivery fulfillment or operations, number five, is the customer’s lifetime value. The customer lifetime value or CLV includes retention, it includes resell, it includes upsell, and it includes your pricing. You want to make sure that your fee structure is good. That you've got really good fees in place so you're getting paid really well for what you do. That you're maximizing the lifetime value of these clients in that way.

Also, you're able to focus on the right types of clients in your lead generation and in closing that are going to have a lengthy retention rate. You're able to retain clients long term, or you're able to convert short term property management clients, not sure short term rentals, but accidental investors, for example, into long term buy and hold investors. You have some process maybe for that.

You want to increase the customer lifetime value. If you're losing a lot of customers due to sales right now, then that's the area to focus on right now. There's a weakness maybe on your CLV, for example, or maybe you just need to increase lead generation in order to counteract that.

Number six is finances. The financial area of the business means the internal finances for you as the business owner and for the business. This means cash flow, revenue, expenses, profit, reporting, financial decision making. If you do not feel like this is your strength or this is a weakness in the business, this is something that you will need to work on.

One of the initial baby steps I like to recommend is usually implementing profit first. You can check out my previous episode with the author of the book Profit First, Mike Michalowicz. You can just search for Profit First DoorGrowShow on YouTube if you want to pull that up or on iTunes, podcast app, or whatever.

I'm a big fan of Profit First. We operate with the Profit First system. We've taken things financially beyond that to another level in working with some of the financial coaches and financial books that I've gone through. I think that's a really fantastic starting place. It gets you out of the feast and famine of cash flow cycles getting scarce, then trying to make money, and the hunt and the chase constantly of trying to escape.

The way I like to compare finances is, the analogy I like to use is Indiana Jones. Indiana Jones running from the boulder. Everybody remembers this iconic scene in Indiana Jones and I believe the Temple of Doom and he's running from the boulder. He's just taken the statue, it set some sort of booby trap off, and now this boulder is chasing after him. He's running for his life.

Indiana Jones running is generating revenue, that's revenue. Revenue has to outpace that big boulder, which is expenses. The gap in between Indiana Jones running and the boulder coming after him, that gap, is cash flow. Some of that cash is already spent so there's really just free cash is the real gap.

Some of that cash is already going to be spent, you know expenses are coming due, you have to have it set aside. Profit first is going to help you kind of get this in alignment a little bit more. It's going to help you get better cash flow and it's basic. Some of you are basically borderline accountants, so this isn't maybe as big of an issue. Maybe the finances are tight.

A lot of entrepreneurs are more visionary-oriented, they're dreamers. Sometimes they're hiring staff too quickly. They're starting to focus on some of the other functions, building up operations maybe, and they're spending more money. All of these things go hand in hand. Finances also relate to the type of lead generation that you can do, all of these things interplay with each other.

My goal for those listening to this episode is to take a look through these six lenses of your business to figure out what does the business need most right now? What does the business need most? For those that are like why does he add the six functions of finances?

One of the things that's absolutely possible in some businesses is to generate enough deals, enough sales, and enough business to where you can't deliver quick enough on it to get the return or get paid on it and you can actually run out of money by doing too much sales.

Just focusing on revenue all the time in a top-down just revenue focus goal is not always the most effective financial goal in a business. It's the most typical, but that's not always the most effective. You can actually go too fast and grow too quickly if you're not taking into account the financial aspect in relation to the other core functions.

Take a look at your business, chat with your team, go through and assess your core functions. We have a more formal brainstorming methodology that will take clients through these functions to really assess their business. At a quick easy glance at your business, you can look through and just ask yourself, where are we at in relation to these functions. You can ask your team as well to get a perspective, and you will then have some pretty good eye feedback and a pretty good idea of which function you need to focus on most in your business.

If you find that operations are a big constraint for you right now, what you'll find then is lead gen and conversion will be heavily impacted because you won't really have confidence in your product, in your service, in your offering because you lack integrity.

If you are delivering fulfillment of three or less, and you're trying to go out and create new business, you probably feel like you're lying to people by saying, hey, we're really awesome. We're the best property managers. We do a great job. When deep down you're like a two in doing a great job on a scale of one to five. All of these impact each other.

Let's figure out what's your weakest function that you need to focus on right now and where does your attention needs to go. If you could use some coaching or some help, we'd love to get you into our DoorGrow & Scale Mastermind. Reach out to us, you can check us out at doorgrow.com. You can also join our free Facebook group by going to doorgrowclub.com.

Facebook's getting a little weird lately with censorship and craziness, so we're seriously considering exploring, shifting out of the DoorGrow Club to maybe Telegram or something else. Let me know your feedback on that if that sounds interesting because I think there's going to be more outages with Facebook, more censorship, and more challenges. I'm less and less of a fan of Facebook every day.

Let us know, but currently, our internal groups are in Telegram so we're solid there because it seems to be really reliable. Anyway, reach out to us. We're happy to help you figure out how to grow your business and scale your business. We can help you with getting things in alignment on the operation side. DoorGrow OS, building these systems, building a planning cadence, helping to get operators in the business, helping to get people to take stuff off your plate and to offload. There are solutions for each of these functions that we can point you towards as we coach you and as we help you scale and level up your business, so please reach out.

That's it for today. As always, my goal is for everybody to grow. To our mutual growth, everybody. Until next time, bye.

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DGS 145: Are You Ready For A Property Management BDM? 0

Nov 16, 2021

Do you enjoy sales? If you feel like you don’t, then you’re not good at doing business development. Why not just hire someone to do it for you? You have to get good at sales to be a business owner.

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about and answers: When are you ready to get a property management business development manager (BDM)?

You’ll Learn...

[01:19] When are you ready to hire a BDM? Wait until you are ready.

[01:58] How to know when you are ready to have a BDM to gain freedom and success.

[03:08] Business Owner: Learn how to sell, close to train your BDM to be successful.

[04:04] Partnership: If you’re not willing to do it, bring in experienced and proven BDM.

[05:33] Exception: Clients with BDM invested in and values business to get results.

[07:24] Sales can be fun, once you learn how to do specific actions and get good at it.

[08:47] Level Suck: You have to do the work. You have to suck. That’s where you start.

[10:34] 4 Reasons: Live your purpose to get fulfillment, freedom, contribution, support.

[11:16] Right Type of Person: Give them your knowledge, experience to surpass you.

[12:18] Jason’s Recommendation: Do the work because there are no shortcuts.

[14:45] Sales Challenge: Figure out how to make it easy and not painful, uncomfortable.

Tweetables

“Sales is the lifeblood of the business. This is where money and revenue flow into the business.”

“Usually, we don’t want to do it because we aren’t good at it. When we’re not good at something, it’s not very fun.”

“You have to do the work, and you have to suck, and that’s where we all start.”

“I know what good looks like, and I know what great looks like, and great is better than me.”

Resources

DGS 144: 3 Magic Questions To Close More Property Management Deals 0

Transcript

One of the things I wanted to talk about is a common question I get asked and a common situation is when are you ready to hire a BDM? This question came up this week. One of my clients thinks they want to get a BDM. I've heard lots of people hire BDMs and fail. This is more common than hiring BDMs and having success. This is the default.

Anytime I hear somebody excited, they hire a BDM. BDM either quits, it doesn't work out. You may have tried to do this yourself. The challenge with this is that a lot of people tried to do this, but they weren't ready. Let's chat a little bit about how to be ready to have a BDM and how you know when you're ready to have a BDM. If you feel like you don't enjoy sales, you're not good at doing business development. BDM stands for business development manager. It's basically a salesperson in a property management business.

If you feel like you don't like doing sales, you want to bring somebody in to do this, and you're thinking, well, I suck at this. I don't want to do this. This is uncomfortable so I should just hire somebody. The challenge is sales is the lifeblood of the business. This is where money and revenue flow into the business. If you are making that mistake, you need to realize you are not ready to get a BDM because you cannot train them. You cannot onboard them. You don't have the scripts. You don't have the ability to bring them into the business in a way that they will be successful.

I probably touched on this before, even recently, but I want to reiterate that if you feel like you're not good at sales and you don't know how to do it, then your only option is to bring somebody in that is already really good and proven at this or you have to learn to do this. For most of you, that means you need to learn how to sell. You need to learn how to close. I know a lot of times there's resistance. Maybe it's that you feel like it's uncomfortable for some reason.

That discomfort is something as a business owner and entrepreneur, really, almost everything is sales in some way, shape, or form, which is just convincing people to do what's in their best interest, which is helping people and benefiting people, getting your kids to eat their food, getting your kids to do their homework. That's all sales. You have to get good at sales to be a business owner. It doesn't mean you have to be the salesperson.

But if you're not willing to do it, then you need to bring in another business owner. You're going to need to share some sort of relationship or create some sort of partnership with somebody who is a proven BDM that's added hundreds of doors to a property management business.

They will come in, but this is not going to be a cheap person that's a brand new first-time BDM who's never done this, that you can just go find somebody that knows how to do sales, bring them into the business, and they'll have success. That's not reality. You need to create a partnership. If you're really not the person to do this, you need to go find somebody that's at your level. They may want half your business if you're just starting out. If you are experienced and you have a good sizable portfolio, maybe you can bring them in some sort of percentage of the revenue or percentage of the business.

It would need to be a pretty tempting situation for them to come in. There needs to be an incentive. These are people that could probably build their own business up. I know BDMs that have added 700 doors to a business and then gone on to another business and did something similar again. These are rare unicorn people that have had the experience that has done this. If you don't know how to do this, you're not going to be able to bring somebody in that's starting from scratch and really be able to support them and convince them and tell them what to do.

Now, the only exceptions that I've seen to this, I have seen some clients come to me with a BDM. This BDM showed up and was invested in the business value, the success of the business, showed up to all coaching calls with me, got involved in the content in DoorGrow Academy, and they learned as if they were the business owner. They wanted to become good at selling, good at promoting the business, good at prospecting, good at driving revenue, and good at their job.

They were invested in it so they put in the work and the time to do it. They followed my advice and they were able to get great results. One client had, in just a short period of time, three maybe four months or less, had 300 doors, largely through creating a really good partnership with one owner that had a lot of doors, which is a dangerous situation normally.

Normally, I probably wouldn't recommend doing that. They were aggressive and they were able to start adding doors. Then they landed a partner that is going to bring to the table hundreds of doors in the long run. That's a really high level of investor.

Like I said, that can be dangerous, right? I'm sure many of you can guess why. You're putting too many eggs in one basket. That owner has a little bit too much power over you. Then later, they had to have a conversation about setting some boundaries and some clear expectations to really determine this relationship and to be willing to walk away from that relationship. They're in a position of power to be able to be a business owner instead of this person, this investor’s employee. It's possible and I've seen BDMs come in and do really great work, but it's rare. It's rare to find somebody that's willing to do and that wants to do that.

If you are wanting to go the more typical route, which means you need to learn how to sell. Usually, we don't want to do it because we aren't good at it. When we're not good at something, it's not very fun. It sucks to go play a sport like basketball if you suck at basketball. Once you get good at basketball, basketball is a lot of fun for people that play basketball.

Golf, maybe you sucked at golf, initially. If you're a golfer, once you got somewhat good at it, it'd be a lot more fun. Maybe you found a way to make it fun even though you just still suck. Here's the thing, you need to get to the place where you have put in the reps, you've done the work initially, to get good at sales, to figure out what works, what scripts to say, you have to get past that pain and that discomfort. Otherwise, you're always going to project that onto your team members.

You're never going to be able to guide them in the right way. You're never going to be able to know if they're doing a good job or not because you don't even know what a good job looks like because you haven't been able to do it.

If you're expecting to push just results on them like get these results and I'll give you a commission. You're setting them up for failure because they need specific actions. They need the scripts. They need the language. They need to understand the target audience. They need to know the objections and how to deal with those. These are the things you learn by sucking and doing the work. You have to do the work and you have to suck. That's where we all start. We all start at level suck.

If you are willing to suck, you don't suck for very long because something's uncomfortable. There's pain and you change. You change quickly. You learn and adapt. That's why you're an entrepreneur. You are an entrepreneur because you are highly adaptable. You can change quickly. You can pivot. You can learn. You may have been rejected at some point in the past. Maybe when you were young, you got your feelings hurt, somebody rejected you or made you feel small or whatever.

Now, approaching people, starting things, or initiating seems threatening and dangerous to your brain. But your brain is a liar. Your brain is lying because it's trying to protect you. But if you actually do the work, and if you do the prospecting tactics and methods that I share in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind and you do the work, then you're going to get results. It's inevitable. I’ve seen clients come in over and over and over again that were terrible at sales. They’re not good at it and didn't think they liked it. They learned. They learned how to be good at it.

The common phrasing I hear is, it's become like a game to me. It's become fun. It's fun when you have the skill and the knowledge to be able to be good at it and then it becomes fun. It's like playing. You realize it's not about being pushy or whatever beliefs you have about sales. It's not about manipulating people. It's not about bothering people, prospecting, it's not. You are offering them some benefit. You're solving people's problems. You are making a difference in the world. That's really what sales look like.

Sales become fun because it allows you to live your purpose and to make a difference and get those four reasons I've talked about before. You're getting more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, and you're making a difference and more support.

Then eventually, if you have other things that are more fun for you—they give you more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, more support in the business. What you really love and want to be doing, maybe it's on the operation side, maybe it's on the accounting side, or maybe it's just not sales.

Once you are marginally good at it, a little bit good at it, you can bring in somebody else, get them probably to your point. If they're the right personality type, the right type of person that can be good at this, you can give them your knowledge, help share with them what's working, give them your experience, and they will then surpass you. They will supersede you.

I have team members on my team and I've done every role that exists in my business. But I have team members now that are all better at what they do than me. I've done it so I know. I know what good looks like and I know what great looks like, and great is better than me.

I bring in people that are better than me at doing these things. I'm actually in this situation now that I have somebody over sales and marketing on my team. Now he is offloading and bringing on and we're training two new salespeople. I'm rebuilding my sales team, so to speak, and I'm no longer doing the sales. I've been doing the sales for the last little while as we launched a new product and service, this mastermind that we've had for the last year.

My recommendation is to put in your reps, do the work, there are really no shortcuts to this. If you're willing to experience that pain, challenge, or whatever your brain is telling you a story, I think you'll realize it's never as bad as your brain makes it out to be.

I've seen entrepreneurs in property management with hundreds of doors that are down about 200 doors due to sales over previous years, which is very typical of the larger companies right now. They’re feeling pain and worried that they're not going to be able to pay team members. They’re going to have to lay some people off and try to hire a BDM through a BDM placement company. Then that person spends time and money trying to get them into the situation, expecting another company to be able to train them, bring them in and it didn't work.

I've seen small companies hire BDMs and bring them in, and it didn't work. You have to do this. My recommendation is to tell your brain to shut up. It's trying to lie to you and protect you. Sometimes you have to do the thing that's uncomfortable, even though it feels like you don't want to. You need to be willing to say, [...] to your feelings and do it deep down, you know you should do. If this is resonating with you, you deep down know that you need to figure this out. You have to eventually figure this out. You don't have to do it forever. You don't have to be the best at it. If you're going to run a business, you have to be able to sell your business or services. You have to be able to figure out how to do that.

A lot of you are the salesperson, you are the BDM for your business. If you're doing great, awesome. If I can help pour a little gasoline on that fire, that'd be even better. I love being able to do that. I love being able to double a client's close rate, increase the amount of deals they’re closing, help them figure out how to get more deals at a higher price point to eliminate the scarcity that exists in the industry, and eliminate the race to the bottom in terms of price. I can help you do that.

If you are not that personality type and you are avoiding sales, you find it uncomfortable. You don't want to do it. My challenge to you is let's figure out how to make it easy, and it doesn't have to be uncomfortable. I'm really good at helping people figure out how can we make this easy, not painful, and help destroy those lies that your brain’s telling you that people are going to be mean to you, people are going to feel uncomfortable, people are going to reject you, or whatever it is your brains trying to scare you and tell you that's true. Those are stories.

You can either keep those stories, or you can get results, but you can't have both. You can't keep these stories that are holding you back from doing sales or being successful at sales. Then also try and offload the sales. Train somebody else that doesn't know how to do it when you aren't in a state of integrity or know how to do it yourself. Let's get you great at it. It's not that hard to do.

I really believe sales is all about creating trust. It's being real with people. It's caring about other people that have been so caught up in your own head, worried about what you think, what you sound like and look like, how they're perceiving you, and/ all that uncomfortable stuff. You really just need to start getting out of yourself, focusing on other people, and caring about other people. I can help you make that shift.

Hopefully this is helpful for those of you that are considering getting a BDM, thinking it's some gateway to freedom and success. You aren't ready for that gateway of freedom or success until you have all the ducks in a row to be able to really support this person so that if they are good, they're actually going to stay. Because if they're good and you don't give them the support they need, they're going to be out of there. I hear a lot of people complain about BDMs and fire BDMs. When I really dig deeper and ask questions, it wasn't probably the BDM’s fault.

They sounded like a typical effective, probably good salesperson who just wasn't given the proper support, wasn't given the leads, wasn't given the attention, wasn't given the scripts, and wasn't given the knowledge of how to go out and create a business. They were expected to just magically figure it all out without any real guidance.

Property management is a different industry than a lot of industries. Just because somebody was successful in sales in another industry doesn't mean they'll necessarily be successful in this. It means they have the capacity, but they also need guidance. If you don't have the guidance to give, reach out, and let's get this figured out for you.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful for those that have BDMs that aren't really performing up to speed or you haven't really gotten up to speed in your own role as a BDM. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

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Nov 2, 2021

When you're competing for a sale or deal to close, to get a property management contract, or to get a referral partner, whatever it is you're trying to do, you need to take things to a deeper level than your competition.

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about three magic questions to ask during a sales conversation. When you ask these questions, potential clients will know that you care and want to help them, and you're going to close more deals far more easily.

You’ll Learn...

[01:50] Pendulum Principle: There are two extremes when it comes to salespeople.

[02:21] Middle Ground: Find the middle to be much more effective and productive.

[04:16] Question #1: Why now, what's changed? Client identifies, explains pain point.

[06:54] Question #2: What’s the biggest challenge with your rental property right now?

[08:42] Question #3: What result would you hope to see to know this was a success?

[11:02] Default vs. Creative Future Close: Depends on what challenges clients want.

[15:39] Primary Goal: Most people seek safety and certainty as their higher priority.

Tweetables

“You have to figure out where the middle is. The middle is the greatest place of power. It's where you should be. It's the point of truth.”

“Sales and deals happen at the speed of trust.”

“A business exists to solve a problem. If they don't have a problem for you to solve, they don't need you. There's no point.”

“You are selling safety and certainty, not property management.”

Resources

DGS 143: It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy in Your Property Management Business 0

Transcript

All right, we are live. Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, 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 business 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.

In today's episode, we are going to be talking about three magic questions. I was doing my coaching call today, and yes it's a Tuesday. It's a day early because I'm going on vacation tomorrow. We did our group call a day early and one of my clients, he was talking about sales, and had some questions related to sales, and was having some challenges going into the conversation and being confident.

I talked about a principle called the Pendulum Principle which basically—a quick version of it, we could do a future episode on this maybe—if you recognize that there are two extremes. On one extreme you could be hyper-confident, maybe pushy as a salesperson, and a little bit too much. Then on the other side you could be a little bit not aggressive enough, too docile, not ask for the sale, and not try to close them that sort of thing.

You have to figure out where the middle is. The middle is the greatest place of power. It's where you should be. It's the point of truth. You need to figure out where you are and he was on the side of being a little bit too maybe nice, friendly, but not aggressive enough. He recognized it so I said, take the step into what feels like the complete opposite, being a little bit too aggressive, because if you aim for that, you'll actually hit middle and you'll be much more effective and productive.

We talked about how it doesn't have to be mean, or you don't have to be pushy or aggressive to go for the close. One of the things that he then got into were these three magic questions. I'm going to share these and we can talk about some other cool stuff related to sales maybe in a future episode. These are three magic questions that I find to be very powerful that I use during a sales conversation to take things a bit deeper.

If you want to beat out your competition, when you're competing for a sale or a deal to close a client, to get a property management contract, to get a referral partner, whatever it is you're trying to do, you need to be able to take things to a deeper level than your competition.

Things need to get a little bit more intimate, a little bit more relationship-oriented. There needs to be a little bit more connection because that's where trust exists. Sales and deals happen at the speed of trust, I often say. Here are three questions that I use in order to deepen the conversation and take things to a more real or more raw level.

Question number one that you should ask that I brought up is, why now? If somebody comes to you and they're like, hey, I've been looking to getting a property manager. I've had this property for many years, or hey, I got one of your mailers and it's from a year or two ago. A really great question to ask in the sales process.

For example, if you've been listening to my podcast for many years now, and then you get on a sales conversation, you're like, hey, now I'm interested. A great question to ask is, why now? Why now? What's changed is kind of the additional part of that. Why now, what's changed?

You've been looking at doing this for a while, or you've obviously had this property for a lengthy amount of time. What's changed recently that's caused you to be interested in property management? Or why now are you looking at getting a property manager? What's changed? Help me understand that.

That's where really deep stuff tends to come out. I've heard crazy why now responses from potential clients. I've heard things. I had one potential client say, I'm dying, I have this health issue, and I need to get this business healthy and ready quickly for other people to take ownership of it.

I've had people say that they just recently got divorced, so now they're looking to make a move, change things, and improve the business. You never know what's going to come out, but when you give them the opportunity to tell you, well, hey, something must have happened recently because things have changed. Why now?

Even just saying, why is now the time for you to do this? They shift into trying to explain, well, this is why it's important to do this now. Just understanding that is going to reveal some pain. In sales, to close deals, you need to know what pain or discomfort they want to move away from and what pleasure they want to move towards? Where's paradise for them?

If you know those two things, that's really the crux of all you need to know in order to close the deal. Can I then help move them away from that pain? Can I help them move them towards that paradise that they want, that pleasure that they want? If I can do those two things, then all I have to do is future pace them and paint this roadmap for the future in which they can do that.

The next question I love to ask that is relevant to uncovering the pain is the biggest challenge. What is your biggest challenge in dealing with this rental property that you're experiencing right now? I would usually ask, what is the biggest challenge you're experiencing in your property management business right now?

Cool, I can help you with that. I've heard it before. I've dealt with hundreds and hundreds of property management businesses, gotten to see on the inside. It's rare that I ever hear a problem that's new. You probably have heard of all the same things in property management, all the similar problems. You're probably not going to hear anything too new from an investor, so can you solve that problem? Yeah, you probably can. That's why a business exists to solve a problem. If they don't have a problem for you to solve, they don't need you. There's no point.

If I have somebody come to me and I say, well, what's the biggest challenge in your business? And they say, well, honestly, our business is really great right now and I don't have any problems. I say, cool. I'm totally open to that. I don't know how I can help you then.

Then I might ask a follow-up question, well, why are we talking? How do you think I might be able to help you? Well, I was thinking maybe you could do this and help me do this. Okay, cool. Maybe I can, depending on what they say. You need to figure out what the challenge is, the pain, or the problem. What's the biggest challenge you're dealing with right now with this rental property with your tenant, or with your investment portfolio? That's a really powerful question to ask.

The third question that can be incredibly powerful is what I call the crystal ball question. This is a question that is helpful for creating a potential future and future pacing a client that includes you. The crystal ball question usually looks something like this, usually, you're going to use the one-year timeframe. Maybe you even use three or five years, depending.

The crystal ball question would look like this, hey, Mr. Owner, let me ask you a question. Just thinking about the future, if we were to work together a year from now, looking back on this moment, if you signed up with us a year from now looking back, what would have had to have happened for you to realize this was a great decision? Or what result would you be hoping to see to know that this was a success?

Then they start to use their imagination, which is powerful. They start to imagine a future. They're imagining they signed up with you because you brought that into the conversation, and they're imagining this potential future timeline a year from now that exists with some great result. There's enough time to get to a result. They're imagining that you were a contributor to that, and so they're creating all of this in their head.

The brain's super powerful. It's an amazing supercomputer at doing this kind of thing, so they're going to imagine this and then they're going to tell you what this is, what this looks like. Which is basically saying—you're just asking—how do we know that we can help you? What does winning look like if we were to work together? What does that look like?

They might say, we're getting all of our rent collected, finally. We've got great tenants in place. The properties are all updated. Everything's going great, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can then say, that sounds awesome. I'm confident we can help you do that. Let me share some stories or examples that are similar to that we've already done so you can see this can be a reality for you. We've created this reality for other clients.

I usually call that close the default future close versus the creative future close. The default future, this is what you're going to continue to get more of—more challenging tenants, more situations like you've dealt with. You mentioned these things that are challenging.

If you do not work with us, this is probably what will happen or maybe they've had bad experiences with another property manager because there's a lot of sucky property managers out there. If they mentioned a bad experience when you're asking these questions like, why now, and what's your biggest challenge. You say, hey, well, you can continue to go down that path and choose another bad property manager and another bad one, or you could work with us, and here's how this would work out differently.

First of all, we're not going to do custom reports for you and we're not going to let you micromanage us, so we're not going to do things the way these other companies worked with you because you're trying to run them from the back seat. We are going to be in control and in the driver's seat in helping take care of this property, and that will allow you to trust us more. We're going to take ownership of this and we're going to be really good at this. This is what we do for clients that are in your situation.

They're going to go, cool, and they'll say, but I want this. You'll say, we are not going to do that custom report for you and here's why. We're not going to do that for you and here's why. Or there's a fee for this, or there's a fee for that.

Once you explain why they're going to go, oh, this person is on top of stuff. They know what they're doing. I can finally relinquish control and give up all that safety and certainty I'm trying to force to create in them. They're going to just provide it for me. I can trust them, and I can lean into their frame that they're going to do a great job and provide good service.

If you know why now, their biggest challenge, and the crystal ball, you've asked those questions, you've got those answers, if you know that, you should have a pretty deep conversation with them and really understand how you can best help them. If you connect that to other tactics I have like the golden bridge formula and other things to create trust beforehand, you ask really great qualifying questions, this should be very easy for you to create a relationship with these people, if you want it.

Anyway, that's my tip for today is to ask those three big questions. Start asking, well, why now? Very easy to ask. Why are you doing this now? Why didn't you do this a year ago? You’ve had this property for a while, why are you doing it now instead of later this year? Why is now the time to do this? Why now? You'll get really interesting answers.

Ask what's the biggest challenge that you're dealing with right now because that's going to help you understand their current immediate pain. Maybe there isn't anything really major or really immediate, but help them that you could go deeper and say, well, what challenges have you dealt with that you don't want to deal with in the future?

Then the future pacing question is a crystal ball question. Looking forward, if I had a crystal ball or you had it and you could see a year from now and you would sign up with us. We're working together and we've done a really great job, what would that look like to you? Where would you be a year from now? What would your life look like? How would that be different with us having been a part of it?

Hopefully that's helpful to all of you listening. I hope that you find those questions as useful as I've found them to be in the sales process. These were born just out of a real desire to care and take care of my clients, to really understand what they were going through, and figure out how can I help them, what do they need, and can I help them.

When you start to ask really good questions like that, they will know that you care, especially if you're coming from a space of wanting to help them and you're going to close more deals far more easily. Because a lot of companies are spending way too much time trying to sell property management and they don't give a [...] about property management. They don't care about you or your business, they care about what they need, they care about their pain, their challenges, what they want, and outcomes they want.

If you can help them see that you can help them get out of the pain and get the things that they want, they're going to want to work with you, they're going to want to sign up with you, they're going to feel safe with you, and trust you. Remember, their primary goal usually is safety and certainty. That's more important than the four reasons, which I talked about in a previous episode of fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. They want safety and certainty.

After that, then they would like those things. But for most people, safety and certainty is a higher priority. That's why they want and get a property manager. You are selling safety and certainty, not property management. Just make sure you get that.

That's it. Hopefully this has been helpful, and until next time, to our mutual growth. I'm Jason Hull of DoorGrow. Reach out if you would like some help growing and scaling your property management business.

Quickly, just got off the phone with a past client, he was like, are people losing properties like doors due to sales right now? I said yes, everywhere, but not the clients that are in my mastermind, which you should join. The clients that are in my mastermind, one of our clients has added over 200 doors since joining in November. That would be impossible by spending money, doing advertising, doing SEO, doing pay per click, doing content marketing, doing social media marketing.

We would get you doing things that actually work that are far more effective and it costs him nothing. It actually took him less time to get those doors on than it would take if you spent a whole bunch of money on cold lead marketing because then those cold leads take more time than warm leads and you get less results.

If you would like some great results and you would like to start adding doors, scaling your business, getting out of the day-to-day operations, having more fulfillment, more freedom, more fun in your business, reach out. I love helping clients get that. That's what I live for. That's what I get to do every day. I love doing it, and we would love to help you grow your property management business. All right. Bye, everyone.

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Oct 26, 2021

Does it feel like your property management business is crazy, overwhelming, or maybe too much? It doesn't matter how big or small the property management business, it can be crazy or calm. It’s your choice to make.

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about his goal to eliminate the crazy. Business owners need to be calm for their team to feel that sense of calm in the workplace.

You’ll Learn...

[02:41] Basecamp: CEO runs calm workplace by eliminating and reducing interruptions.

[04:03] Entrepreneurial Myth: Crazy work is a badge of honor, not a badge of failures.

[04:31] Adrenaline Addiction: Workplace doesn’t have to be crazy or stressful.

[05:20] Planning: Communication in business focused on high-paced growth is critical.

[06:15] Tactical vs. Strategic Leadership Role: Who has enough vision, clarity on goals?

[08:14] Don’t be involved in everything. Stay in your area of genius and offload the rest.

[10:08] Key Ingredient: Create synchronous communication system to write, think, post.

[11:24] Four Reasons: Build great team to get fulfillment, freedom, contribution, support.

Tweetables

“All this painful stuff that we go through as entrepreneurs is some sort of badge of honor. Really, it's actually a badge of failures.”

“Good planning in business actually decreases communication that's necessary. It increases the calm. It increases clarity.”

“The idea is you want to create systems in place that protect you and insulate you from immediate urgency that is unnecessary.”

“Create calm workplaces. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. It can be calm. The business really should be fun.”

Resources

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried

It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried

Transcript

Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and your 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 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.

In today's episode, we're going to be chatting a little bit about fun. I asked in my mastermind group today—we had a pretty good group turnout today—and I asked by show of hands, how many of you feel your business is crazy right now? You would categorize it as crazy, overwhelming, maybe too much, whatever. At least half the hands went up, which I can't say I'm surprised, but my goal is to get people out of crazy.

One of the things I wanted to talk about today—what I chatted about with them—is eliminating crazy in the business. One of the things to realize is that it doesn't matter how big the business is, it doesn't matter how small the business is. Your business can be crazy or it can be calm, and this really is just a choice. Is it possible to have a calm business even if it's really large? For your experience as a business owner to be calm in the business and for your team to feel that sense of calm from you and it to be a calm workplace, yes it is.

I had a business once upon a time. Same business but it used to feel a bit crazy. I hung out with the CEO of Basecamp, Jason Fried. I won't go into how we got on a call, but basically we were in some sort of chat. I was watching some live stream and I made some comments. He said he wanted to do a call with me, so we did a call together and I hung out with him.

This guy is what I perceived as a high-functioning CEO of a multimillion dollar company. He's written books on remote teams. He's got a book called Remote Work, virtual teams, software, and running companies. He hung out with me for probably about 90 minutes. He just showed me how he ran his business, how he basically ran a calm workplace, and how it was quiet. It shifted my perspective so dramatically. The biggest perspective shift I had was eliminating and reducing interruptions.

Years later, he came out with a book kind of recent. His book is called, It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. For those watching the video you can see this here, It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. It's got this on the cover. It's got crossed out 80-hour work weeks, packed schedule, super busy, endless meetings, overflowing inbox, unrealistic deadlines, can't sleep, Sunday afternoon emails, no time to think, stuck in the office, all-nighters, and chat blowing up.

There's this entrepreneurial sort of myth that it's the hustle, the grind, hard work, tenaciousness, tenacity, and all this painful stuff that we go through as entrepreneurs is some sort of badge of honor. Really, it's actually a badge of failures. It’s really what that is. It's showing that you are creating a stressful environment for your team, and you're running a stressful workplace. You probably—if you're honest—are addicted like a lot of entrepreneurs to the adrenaline and the stress.

Our body gets accustomed to things we crave and want more of whatever emotion we tend to feel a lot. We get better and better at craving it and feeling it. Our brain actually wires differently over time to experience more of that chemical reaction of whatever emotion that we're experiencing, whether it's anger, fear, stress, or whatever. It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. This is a really great book. He came out later talking about some of the stuff that he taught me on that call.

Now, I don't agree with everything in this book. The one thing I really don't agree with is eliminating meetings and what he talks about not having planning or something like that. I believe that having really good planning in business actually decreases communication that's necessary. It increases the calm. It increases clarity. Planning, I believe, is critical in a business, especially one that's focused on high-paced growth, has a lot of moving parts, and communication is really important. It actually significantly decreases your communication.

If you have an annual planning meeting, quarterly planning meeting, a monthly planning meeting where you're breaking down these things into smaller and smaller bite-sized chunks, weekly planning meeting, or maybe a 15-minute daily huddle, these are the things we talked about in DoorGrow OS. If these things, the ultimate operating system for a business, especially for a property management business, if you have these meetings, you can run your entire company in a small number of hours a year. That's all you have to do.

Anything outside of that, you are really stepping into more of a tactical role overall or you're being more like an employee in the business and doing work. But in a strategic position of leadership, if you have a really good executive team, that's all the time you would really need to be involved in. You may not even have to do that if you have really good executive team members to run things for you, and they have enough vision and clarity on the goals. They can move this business forward.

A lot of times, we have a lot of ego as entrepreneurs. We think it's all up to me. Everybody else isn't as smart as me and my team members need me to tell them what to do and to guide them. I'm so brilliant. We don't really know because we don't really involve them in the planning and communication process.

I want to point out that business should be fun, and it should be calm. One of my mentors that I'm working with currently that's a coach of mine, he talks about work being boring. He talks about how, when you have a multimillion dollar business and your business is scaling, you then eventually get to a state where you no longer have any major trauma or major glaring problems. You're insulated from these things if you built your team and systems the right way. Now you're just doing the boring work and you need to be willing to do the boring work.

His wife who really runs their company and his brilliant and brilliant operator also talks about how if you're doing the boring work and the business gets boring, that's a good sign that you're doing things right. Then it's time to just maybe get a hobby. What most business owners do is they make the mistake and go start something new, or create more drama, either in their personal life. Sometimes they're cheating on a spouse or they're starting a company, or they're burning their existing company to the ground. They create some more drama.

One of the things that we have to do is wean ourselves off the addictiveness of having to be so involved in everything, having to have so much connection to everything, thinking that we're so important in the business, and to be willing to allow calm to happen. It doesn't matter if you're just a small company with a small number of doors and you have one assistant. Your business could be calm.

Or you could have a really large team and tons and tons of doors, and your business still could be calm. If you have the support at the level that you need, you have the systems that you need, and you allow yourself to be protected from the things that create crazy, you really are able to stay in your lane and in your area of genius and offload the rest.

I do recommend this book. It's a really good book. It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work. It just is kind of a manifesto for the future of business. Businesses are often connected to analogies of war in competition and fighting, and these massively stressful situations, but calm companies are very efficient companies. They're companies in which people are able to get in the flow work state. They're able to be calm, things get really quiet.

My business is very calm now. It's very calm, especially for me. It's very calm. It's very quiet. We don't have a lot of communication that has to happen among our team. Most of our team members are in the flow of doing what they love to do each day. There are little things that pop up here and there but we tackle them maybe in our 15-minute morning huddle. Usually I just ask where they are stuck. Those things all get dealt with then and there might be a little bit of communication in our messaging app that we use each day. We don't have situations, in general, that are immediate or that are urgent.

One of the key ingredients is to create a synchronous communication system in the business, which means people can write stuff out, think about it, and post it for the rest of the team to look at later. We can send a voice message to a team member or multiple team members for them to listen to later. Unless something's immediate and urgent, we don't call the team member. We don't walk into their office. We're virtual, so we can't do that. The idea is you want to create systems in place that protect you and insulate you from immediate urgency that is unnecessary.

As a business owner, you really want to get to the place where you don't have immediacy and urgency ever bombarding you, attacking you, or disrupting your day. You should be insulated from emergency maintenance requests at three in the morning. You should be insulated and protected from an angry or upset owner as the first round. Maybe you deal with those things after somebody else but your goal eventually is to be the owner of the business, not the property manager.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful. Create calm workplaces. It doesn't have to be crazy at work. It can be calm. The business really should be fun. Like I talked about in one of my previous episodes, four reasons. You want to get more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, and more support in your business. You need to build a really good team.

It's a lot easier to get to the place of having a calm workplace in a property management business once you're in that category where you can afford to have a team, and that's usually in the 200–400 door range. Usually at that stage, you'll see business owners by then they have a team. If you do this correctly, this can be one of the calmest stages ever in your entire business. Most do not do this correctly.

I call this the second sand trap because they built their business the opposite way. They built the business around the wrong person because they are the wrong person, which means they're showing up doing the wrong things in the business. They are spending their time doing things that really are not their greatest strength or their greatest area of genius, or give them the greatest peace and calm, or the most fulfillment, freedom, joy, contribution, and support in their day to day. So they're building the wrong team around the wrong role, the wrong person, building a support system and mechanism around the wrong center, sort of the nucleus of this business, which is yourself.

They have a false perception of you that is overwhelmed, overworked, stressed, and doing the wrong things, then you're building a team to work with that person. You then have the wrong team which adds more stress, anxiety, and challenge to you. You have the wrong business that's built around them. It all starts with you getting really strong clarity in yourself, which I'm really good at helping clients get clarity on, focus on themselves, and figure out what really brings them the most joy or stresses them out, which things are they doing that are tactical versus strategic, or which things are energetic plus signs versus minus signs.

If that is a challenge for you, and you feel like your business is crazy. Maybe you're getting enough doors, maybe you're not. We can help you but maybe you're getting enough doors. Maybe your business feels crazy, and your team feels stressed and crazy. You feel stressed and crazy, and you're not having fun. You're not enjoying your day to day. That's a strong clue that you're out of alignment with those four reasons. You're doing the wrong things. You probably could use an objective perspective and get some support.

If that is the case, we will be glad to help you over at DoorGrow. Reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.com. If you feel like it's crazy at work, maybe you need to be honest and recognize there's a part of you that enjoys that. There's a part of us that tends to like the drama and the challenges that we deal with. If the majority of you don't, you don't have to live with it.

I've seen businesses dramatically change in a very short period of time. Even in a single quarter, we can have you in a very different role, very different position, way less stress. The right team members, we can reassess your team or redeploy your team in different positions. We can get you your first assistant or whatever. We can help you get into that state to where you are in a place of calm. Just remember, it doesn't have to be crazy to work.

Hopefully that's beneficial to everybody. I'm Jason Hull, and until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

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DGS 142: Growing Your Rental Business & Lowering The Cost Of Vacations With Rick Bennett 0

Oct 12, 2021

Do you wish that you could travel more often, but it’s just too expensive to find a place to stay? Investors and property managers are eager to get into the short-term and long-term rental market in popular vacation destinations. How can they grow their rental businesses and lower the cost of vacations?

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull, talks to Rick Bennett about BookingWithEase and TripAngle, which puts control back into the hands of property owners.

You’ll Learn...

[02:14] Business Plan: Why Rick wanted to make vacations more affordable for all.

[02:56] Thought Process: Lower the cost of vacations by eliminating overhead costs.

[03:08] TripAngle: Tools for owners to efficiently, easily rent properties, lower overhead.

[03:44] Systems and Services: Grow organically, save money, gain exposure for rentals.

[05:04] Differentiator: Only site that guarantees no double bookings; easy to use.

[07:10] Property Management: Fully automated, 100% customizable with parameters.

[09:42] Plug-n-Play Integrations: Change anything, anywhere with the TripAngle system.

[14:13] Why Rick prefers property management companies more than property owners.

[17:08] Software Learning Curve/Support: People know how to list their properties.

[19:22] DoorGrowShow Listeners: Try TripAngle by using representative ID code - 2167.

Tweetables

“How do we lower the cost of vacations? What we came up with is eliminating the overhead to the owners completely and lowering the cost of their travelers significantly.”

“We built tools for the owners to be able to rent their properties easier, more efficiently.”

“We’re the only site that can guarantee no double bookings because of the way we built our system. It’s just much easier to use.”

“We’re just growing everybody’s company. That’s all we care about is growing the owners’ rentals.”

Resources

DGS 141: What Should I Pay A Property Management BDM & How To Onboard Them 0

Transcript

Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, and you are interested in growing 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.

My guest today, I am hanging out with Rick Bennett. Rick, welcome.

Rick: How are you today?

Jason: I'm doing fantastic so I'm really excited to have you here. We haven't had a lot of guests talking about the short-term rental space and the vacation rental space. A lot of property managers are getting into this. It's becoming really hot. We've got shows on Netflix about it now. Everybody is abuzz with this market. Lots of investors want to get into this space. Property managers, even in the long-term space—if they are in coastal areas or have really popular destinations—have vacation rentals they are also managing and dealing with.

You've been an expert in that industry for a while. Why don't you give us a little bit of background on you, how you got started with this, and then we can hear more about Booking With Ease, TripAngle, and all these cool things that you've got going on.

Rick: The reason we started this whole business plan is because my mom passed away when I was younger. One of the last things she told me was that she wishes she could have traveled more often, but it was so expensive. The reason she mentioned that is she had a really good job, and they flew her everywhere. But to include me, her son, who she wanted to bring me to several places—she took me to Philadelphia, Boston, you name it—it would cost her the full price to bring me. Her company paid for her.

I remember pretty much every time she would tell me man, I would love to take you to Charleston. I just can't. She was very apologetic. That's one of the last things she tells me. She wishes she could have travelled more often.

Our thought process was how do we lower the cost of vacations? What we came up with is eliminating the overhead to the owners completely and lowering the cost of their travelers significantly. We came up with TripAngle. TripAngle actually merged with a company called Keys to the House that's been around for over 25 years. We've been in the industry forever.

We built it from the ground up. We have our own MailChimp, and we built tools for the owners to be able to rent their properties easier, more efficiently, and once again, lower their overhead big time.

When you rent through some of the big boys online with the vacation rental listing sites, it can be quite costly. The reason being is they keep outbidding each other to buy the top spots. What we do is we grow organically. We spread by word of mouth because everybody loves to tell everybody the money that they're saving. We work in conjunction with everybody else. It's a way to just gain more exposure for their short-term rentals.

Some of our customers use our features, some don't. We offer free accounting and scheduling for cleanings. We even have where instead of putting our business on all the receipts, you can upload your logo, and all emails sent to your customers have your logo on them. It looks more professional. It's to grow your rental business. We just grow by word of mouth, and we love saving all of our owners' and customers' money

Jason: People can white-label this. People can use your tools and services. They're going to save a lot of money versus using these systems that have been a monopoly (it seems like) to some degree. You've got Vrbo. You've got the HomeAway things. You've got Airbnb, of course. How do you stand out in this market of all these big guns? Why would property managers be inclined to leverage and use your system instead of these big networks?

Rick: They can use them in conjunction with it. It works well. It keeps the calendars in tune. We're the only site that can guarantee no double bookings because of the way we built our system. It's just much easier to use.

What happens is people will sign up with us. They'll use other people mainly. They'll use us a small percentage, but they'll use us. Once they start seeing how much money their customers have saved and how easy it does everything for them, they start transferring everything over to us.

We just had a lady sign up with us. Vrbo upped her booking fee to $470. Using our system, on average, her booking fees are about $100. What's neat about that is she makes $20 extra, meaning it's 100% customizable per property. She added the dollar amount. Some people add a percentage amount.

Jason: So you can add your own markup.

Rick: To the processing fee, right. Her customers went from Vrbo paying $470, and now, they're paying $100–$120 and she makes $20 every booking on top of that in addition to saving the customers $300 a pop. Not to mention that Vrbo also charges her to rent it out. They charge a percentage and things of that nature.

Most of our owners collect their own income, their own credit cards. If they collect, our services are 100% free.

Jason: Okay. For those listening that are property managers, they can do this and act as the owner for and on behalf of their owner-clients and do the same thing.

Rick: Absolutely. Property managers, condo complexes. We've helped a lot of people basically get out of the restraints of property management.

I spoke to a town in Texas just recently. They just signed up with us, but the woman told me that they only have the same three property management companies. They've gone through that list about five times because they'll pop somebody, get tired of it, fire them, and go to the next guy, but that's all they have access to.

Now, with our system, it does everything for them. It's fully automated. Once you set up your parameters, it's 100% customizable, meaning some of our owners collect $1 amount at the time of reservation. You can set it up per listing. Others collect a percentage of the rental. Some of them charge the remaining balance—which it does automatically through our system once you set that parameter—two days prior to a guest's arrival. Others have it 60 days prior to the guests' arrival. Just whatever it is, it'll run automatically.

Somebody lists with us. They say, put $20 down, they'll make $20 extra every reservation, and their customers are saving quite a bit of money. Another thing that they save money on is through Vrbo and Airbnb, they charge $60–$65 for $1500 worth of damage protection on their property. We sell $39 for $3000 worth of coverage. We make sure that all of our owners are covered. We built this to grow the owners' companies.

They can add as many fields as they wish. The way it works is let's say they put it in there and say, run the remaining amount 10 days prior to the arrival. Let's say they put 50% down at the time of reservation. When somebody books that, that amount will charge for 50% down. It will shoot them a receipt with their logo on the top and check-in instructions with their logo on the top. Nothing to do with us.

Ten days prior to the arrival—if that's the parameter they set—it'll run it in full, it'll schedule it to be cleaned, and it'll alert the cleaners. The cleaners even have it color-coded, knowing if there's an out and in that day. They can make notes. All those notes are sent back to the owners once they're cleaned.

Whenever it runs it in full, it'll send them all that info. Two days prior to their arrival, it will send them again that receipt showing paid and check-in instructions because some people make a booking a year ahead of time. Then, a couple of days before, they'll get reminded, this is how you check-in. Our customers can do anything they need. Sometimes, somebody will say, hey, can you send me that receipt again? All they have to do is log in to our website and send it back to them.

Another great feature is if they collect their own credit cards, more than likely, they use a company called Authorize.Net. All Authorized.Net is just an online credit card machine. That's it. Whenever people go to log in Authorize.Net, they make you change your login all the time. It can be somewhat frustrating. Through our system, they never have to log in to Authorize.Net. They can refund, they can charge extra, they can do everything through our system.

We're integrated with RemoteLock. We're integrated with Authorized.Net. We just helped integrate BookingPal, Vacasa. We've got some big tentacles out there, and we're just growing everybody's company. That's all we care about is growing the owners' rentals.

Jason: Awesome. For those listening, a lot of property managers who hear this will go, wow, that sounds really great. Maybe it'll replace me. Maybe you could touch on that. Is this something that the property managers listening to this could use for and on behalf of their owners to be really effective, have better tools, better pricing, and maybe be a better profit center for them?

Rick: We have a ton of property managers that use us. What it's done is it helped them eliminate more than half of their staff. It really helps do that. We do hate that a lot of people are getting let go, but it helps make the owners more money. That's what it's all about.

Jason: Business owners, I don't think, would be sad to hear that they can't. They don't need as much staff. Staffing is always the most expensive resource in a business generally, so every business owner would be happy to hear that they can operate with less staff.

That doesn't mean they're just going to fire everybody, but maybe it means they now can afford to spend more on acquiring more properties to manage, doing more marketing, and shifting their team members' efforts towards building the business up instead of just trying to deal with what's coming in.

Rick: We just talked to an owner in Texas that signed up with us not that long ago. This was about a year ago. I remember her specifically saying—and it blew me away—how her property management company at the time used software, meaning that if anybody made a change to a reservation or anything, she would have to go to the office to make everything. From our system, you can change it from your cell phone, tablet, or computer—you can change it from anywhere.

We've taken as much out of the owner's hands as possible. Let's say they have it where it charges 10 days prior to their arrival. It'll schedule it to be cleaned. It'll do all that stuff. Let's say somebody calls and says, hey, I want to change my dates or change my condo or home. You can change it in our system with just one click of a mouse. It'll change the cleaning for them. It'll change the calendars on both their properties. It does absolutely everything for them. It's really a simple tool to use.

Another great feature is we have search by availability for owners' websites where it will only go through their rentals. We offer rate tables, calendars, custom-built widgets for owners' websites to more efficiently run their rentals, and tape charts.

Jason: Rick, let me clarify some of this for those listening. Most of my property management clients and property management business owners refer to their clients as owners. I just want to make sure for those listening, it sounds like what you're saying is when you're saying owners, you're talking about the business owners really. It could be the property manager or the direct owner of the property, but you're talking about the business owner.

These business owners have these tools available for them to integrate your system with their website for bookings, to manage their business, to send out white-label emails with their own branding on it—all this stuff.

Rick: Yeah. Mailchimp can send specials to everybody they've been with, but as far as the clients go, property management companies love using us. They've been able to grow their businesses and like I said, cut their costs. It's a very simple tool to just plug and play. We've helped a lot of property management companies really get over the hill, so to speak.

Jason: You showed me around a bit and had me take a look at stuff. My feedback was initially, it's not the sexiest, prettiest thing, but it sounds like it does everything. It has lots of bells and whistles. You guys have put a lot more attention on the backend, on integrations, on features, and really, it's very client-centric. It sounds like your business is really taking care of your customers and making sure you're building the best product that can do a lot of cool stuff.

My feedback to those who are listening to this is give it a check out, take a look at it, and don't judge the book by its cover. Really get into the features and the benefits that could be really beneficial for your business.

Rick, what are some of the biggest questions that a property manager who has never used your system? You're selling to them, what are some of the biggest questions that they’re concerned about or they want to know?

Rick: We prefer property management companies as opposed to individual owners. We serve everybody. We have tons of different clients. But if an individual owner comes to us, they have one property, two properties, we answer those questions. Once they've asked those questions, they know how to use the system so we don't ever have to hear from them again. We prefer a property management company with 500 properties asking those 1 or 2 questions and then learning the whole system. They're off and running 500 properties as opposed to 1 or 2.

It's fully accountable. It's 100% customizable per property. If you put 10 properties on our website and you wanted all 10 properties' money to go to a different account for each rental, we have that option available to you. You can set it up per rental.

We have it to where some you charge tax, some you don't. We even have features in Florida, if they stay 180 days or longer, it's considered a homestead. If you book a rental for four months, you have to pay taxes on those four months. Those taxes are usually about 17%, 18%, 19%.

In Texas, it's 30 days. If they stay 30 days or longer, it's a homestead, so there are no taxes. Whenever they set it up with us, they could say, I want to set up city tax at 7%, hotel tax at 6%, convention center at 2%, and only charge if they stay 29 days or less. If they stay 30 days or more, don't charge taxes.

It automatically does the calculation for them. It does it all right there. They book it, they get sent their receipts, and it really helps our owners out because they see where the taxes need to go. It's all itemized right there. They can edit their spreadsheets on our system. Some pay for extra cable, and some like to add in their homeowners' dues. It's just got every feature you could think about.

Another great tool for our property management companies—I'd say 70% use the tool this way, whereas 30% use it this way. Some of them, the 30%, make it to where their owners can change things. I have an owner in Virginia that has a property in Florida. They may want to change some pictures on their listing or they may want to change the cost of the property. They can log in themselves through TripAngle, edit that one property, and it will change it on the property management company. That's about 30% of our property managers.

The 70% don't like them being able to touch anything, and that's understandable. They could show everything through there. But once again, we made our entire system 100% customizable for whatever their requests are.

Jason: Usually, with software that has so many options, features, levers, and buttons, it gets a little bit confusing. How steep is the learning curve? What's the support process like in terms of getting onboarded?

Rick: The support is we will hold your hand and walk you through everything. People know how to list their properties. They've done it on Vrbo and on Airbnb so they know how to do all these things. We get very few questions. We should probably get more questions, but people seem to figure it out pretty easily. But people will cancel their reservation. They will change.

Our system would be 100% automated if it wasn't for this, but since people do change and they'll call, we'll show them how to click a button or two on our website, and they've got it. You've got a section for all active listings.

We even have a feature if you want to set it up to approve the booking. Some people have their property listed on so many different websites. They don't even really know how much they have it listed on so they don't like to take the instant booking, which I understand because it could have already been booked and you just didn't think to put it on there.

Our calendars will stay booked. If you have it synced with Airbnb or Vrbo, it will stay in tune. But a lot of people don't like to use calendars on any of them, and they like to approve a booking. A booking will come in, and they have 24 hours to approve it. I'd say 90% of the bookings that come in are approved by our owners.

Once again, they can just make it as customizable as they want, but it's really easy to use. It's really simple. It's all about keeping it simple, stupid. We learned that a long time ago and man did we not make it easy getting to that point through professionalism and luck. We have some partners that can do anything. Our team has really been on top of the ball in just putting everything together. If there are ever any questions or any problems, we fix it within hours. We don't have any.

Jason: This sounds really great. How can people get started with this? How can they find out more? What would be the next step for those that are curious of taking this for a test drive or maybe taking a look at it?

Rick: What they can do is they can go to either one of our websites, bookingwithease.com. You can look at our features. It just answers some of your questions, the general information of every company. It gives you links to be able to click on where it'll divert you over to TripAngle and you could sign up. It's free to sign up.

Once you sign up, we recommend putting a RepID number. You had a RepID number for us because I wanted to have a RepID number in there to make sure that the people from DoorGrow get taken care of. What was that RepID number again?

Jason: Rick, had me set up an affiliate code or a RepID number. My representative number is 2167. I guess if they go in once they're going through the registration on tripangle.com, towards the bottom, there'll be a representative number. If you put in 2167, Rick's going to do some special for you, some discount or something like that.

Rick: Absolutely, yeah. We take care of all of our customers. We'd be happy to reach out to them once they put in that representative ID number. That's how we've grown our business is word of mouth. Most people like to tell others of the great deal that they found. Once they realize what they make on it, they love it. We pay 10% of what we earn. We're doing strength by numbers.

The reason our numbers are so low compared to everybody else is because they're trying to compete with each other. We're doing it organically through each other's websites and spreading by word of mouth.

As people sign up with us—let's say somebody enters in the 2167 under you, what that will do is on your dashboard, you'll be able to see who's signing up, what bookings are coming through, and all that good stuff. When you have a customer sign up through DoorGrow, they go in there, they sign up, they can agree to our affiliate program—just like you did—they'll be assigned a number, they can tell their neighbor to go sign up, and they'll get 10% of every bit of our earnings per property.

Jason: Very cool. They can go to bookingwithease.com which also links to tripangle.com where they would register. They can also just go to tripangle.com to check that out. Cool.

Rick, before we wrap this up, is there anything else you feel like a property manager should know regarding TripAngle?

Rick: They're in the process of uploading all of them, but we just signed about 3000 properties in Colorado where I know for a fact that they're offering it through an affiliate either breckenridgelodging.com or mountainskitrips.com. If you go to those websites, it'll have our link to be able to book their rentals. You can pick out their rentals, but they're offering 15% off right now for the first month. They just signed up with us.

Any properties you find in Colorado on our website should be through those companies—Breckenridge Lodging or Mountain Ski Trips. They're offering 15% off right now on top of their already lower rate.

Just to give a quick example, I spoke with a lady the other day from Airbnb. She was a traveling nurse. She asked if she could book one of our rentals. She said she could only afford $1400. If she would have booked directly through TripAngle, it was $1275. She would have booked for less. But through Airbnb, you can't really discuss information until after the reservation's made.

I went in there and I adjusted it to where she should have been at the $1400 range. I told her. I said we did the $1400. I don't know what they charge. She looked at it and she said, I'll never use them again. She wanted to book it for four months.

They were charging her $2350 a month, meaning they were making $950 a month to use our system when I'm the owner and I'm only making $1400. That doesn't seem like it's the right thing there. If they would have charged (say) $950 upfront, maybe a one-time fee, even that is too high if you ask me. But that's the point. The cost of vacations has definitely skyrocketed since Airbnb has been introduced. We're here to get owners more exposure. They use us in conjunction with Airbnb.

The one woman I just told you about from Vrbo for $470, she stopped using them quite some time ago. Airbnb can be fun. Let me tell you that. That can be exhausting at times. I feel that Airbnb has taken a lot of control out of the owners' hands—a lot of it. Our system gives owners 100% control over their listings. If they want to go in and do anything through our system, they can do it.

I had a woman who, through Airbnb, booked for September 20th because I had somebody checking out on September 20th. She let me know just now that she actually has to be here on October 18th. She thought she booked it on the 18th, so I went to the Airbnb to switch it out.

It wouldn't let me change anything. It was the most difficult process to get her. What I finally did was she agreed to pay me cash when she shows up. There shouldn't be anything like that on Airbnb. With our system, you can adjust the rate. You can adjust everything. You can offer percentages for discounts.

One thing that a customer of ours just brought to our attention that they absolutely loved is they have over 2000 rentals. They use another website, but they have to go through on all 2000 rentals to add a discount for that rental. We offer—where you can do that—a master discount so it goes immediately on all 2000 of their rentals. That's so much easier.

Jason: Yeah. Rick, I'm sure you could probably tell us features. You just spout these off the top of your head, but you could probably go on for an hour just telling us all the features and benefits of this. It sounds really awesome. Again, I recommend everybody to check it out. Go to tripangle.com or bookingwithease.com, and take a look at that.

Rick, I appreciate you coming on and sharing this with us. I think it's cool. I'm excited to expose my audience to this. They're always looking for some cool hack or something that might keep more money in their pocket. I hope your continued success against these companies.

Rick: One quick thing I do want to say—and this is all thanks to you—is I do love how you're a straight shooter. Love it. You told us that our logo on TripAngle was awful. I don't know if you know this, but I worked with your team, and they developed it.

My business partners and I were cramming, collaborating, and all over the place. What logo that we came up with doesn't even hold a candle to what you all came up with. I even gave your team specific instructions envisioning in a certain way. What they did was 100 times better. I'm so glad they really didn't listen to me because I was wrong. If you go to TripAngle right now, you can see that new logo. There's one at the top and at the bottom.

Jason: I like it.

Rick: That came from you guys.

Jason: Yeah. My team does good work. That's really cool.

Rick: They do great work.

Jason: I appreciate you being open to feedback. I'm a little rough but hey, if I see a business owner that has something cool but there's something on the surface that would be super easy to fix that would make business easier, I'm going to call it out. That's what I do. Kudos for taking some advice from me. Sometimes it's not comfortable to be told your kid's ugly, so to speak. They need plastic surgery.

Rick: Right. That's why they have braces.

Jason: Awesome. Cool. I appreciate the little plug for my brand-new team. Rick, I'll let you go. I appreciate you coming on the show. I'm excited to see what you do.

Rick: Absolutely. Thank you so much. I look forward to growing with you guys.

Jason: Awesome. If you have a crappy logo, you're not really proud of your brand or how things look, you are being perceived falsely as mainly a real estate company, but you do property management, or there's something off with your branding, let us teach you how to clean that up. Let us help you clean that up.

We've rebranded hundreds of companies. We are the world's leading property management, branding, and web design agency in existence. Nobody else has probably rebranded more companies in the property management space than us. Nobody else has designed more property management logos than we have. We've done hundreds and hundreds.

Reach out to us. We'd love to help you out. We're always excited to help clean up businesses. The level of growth they see before and after we rebrand, clean up their website, and get their pricing and everything in alignment are always far more profitable and the business comes far more easily. You don't realize what leaks you have until they're no longer there sometimes.

Reach out. Check us out at doorgrow.com. As always, if you want to join our community, it's free online. Go to doorgrowclub.com and join our Facebook community. We'd love to have you there.

If you're interested in growing your business, reach out. We have an awesome mastermind program. We've got over 70 businesses in it, and they are having phenomenal results. We're really enjoying coaching and mentoring these clients, and helping them move their business forward.

We have three paths we focus on: we focus on growth and adding doors, we focus on scaling it and figuring out operations, processes, hiring, systems, all that, and then we also have our seed program which is all about the ultimate foundation, branding, website—everything on the frontend sales pipeline of the business.

Once you have all three of these things dialed in, you'll have a very profitable company. You'll be outpacing your competition, you will look like the best in your market, and you'll probably be the best. Anyway, that's it. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

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Oct 5, 2021

What is a BDM? How do I pay a BDM? Why call them a BDM and not a salesperson in a property management business? Why do I need to make sure a BDM has the right personality type and how do I onboard them correctly?

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull, talks all about BDMs. If you do all the vetting right, then the real challenge is supporting and training them to be successful.

You’ll Learn...

[01:42] What is a BDM? It's a Business Development Manager.

[01:46] Why a BDM and not a salesperson? Sales gets convoluted or confused.

[02:00] Why? Most of you do real estate and have a brokerage side to the business.

[02:50] Mistakes: Feedback from companies that help you find/place a BDM isn’t good.

[03:24] A business owner not good at sales or onboarding doesn’t give the right support.

[05:24] How can you properly support a BDM or salesperson? Know what works.

[06:02] How to pay BDMs: If you pay on commission, offer an initial bonus structure. [08:17] How to onboard BDMs: Start them as a sales assistant to double capacity.

[10:00] Motivate BDMs: Driven salespeople like money, give them part of commission.

[13:32] What sales is/isn’t: Once you start winning deals, sales becomes fun, not pushy.

Tweetables

“BDM is really just a fancy word for somebody that's supposed to help you grow your business, supposed to come in, supposed to do sales.”

“If you are not good at sales, my recommendation is you have to figure this out. This is one of the biggest key areas of the business.”

“I love seeing that shift in clients where they have the confidence that they know they can get pretty much anybody on if they want them because they're that good at sales.”

“It doesn't make sense to pay people based on commission unless the commission payout is big.”

Resources

DGS 140: How To Attract Motivated & Inspired Team Members In Your Property Management Business 0

Transcript

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

What are we chatting about today? In continuing my series of doing this every Wednesday, we're going to be chatting today about BDMs. What is a BDM and how to pay them? This is a really common question I get, how do I pay a BDM? How should I pay them? So that I don't have to answer this question anymore, I'm going to make a podcast episode about it. Here we go.

First, what is a BDM? It's a Business Development Manager. Why do we use that term instead of a sales person in a property management business? Because a salesperson, or sales, or anything connected to that usually gets convoluted, or confused, or mixed up with brokerage because a lot of you also do real estate and have the brokerage side of your business.

I think what's happened over time is the industry has sort of adapted that a property management sales person is called a BDM. And we get that from the Australians. They seem to call them BDMs or Business Development Managers, and I think it's just so we don't get them mixed up with the real estate sales people or people that just do sales. On the real estate side, anything related to sales tends to be considered real estate. In the real estate industry, even if it's property management, it gets mixed up.

BDM is really just a fancy word for somebody that's supposed to help you grow your business, supposed to come in, supposed to do sales. There are a lot of mistakes I see people make. I have not heard good feedback on companies that help you find a BDM and place a BDM. I don't think it's those companies' fault, I don't think that it's their fault. They probably do find people with the right personality type, maybe they're on a DiSC profile, they're high D, high I, maybe they have an economic score on a value index on a DiSC, maybe they love doing sales, maybe they're good at sales.

I think what really ends up happening a lot of times is that a business owner is not good at sales which is why they're hiring them, or the business owner is not good at onboarding a sales person, which if you're not good at sales you're not going to be good on onboarding a sales person and giving them the right support that they need anyway.

Let's touch on that first. If you are not good at sales, my recommendation is you have to figure this out. This is one of the biggest key areas of the business. If you cannot generate revenue on demand, you cannot figure out how to bring in business, you need to figure that out. You don't have to do it forever, otherwise you need to bring in a partner into the business that is already an expert. Not just hiring some salesperson you're going to try to convert into a BDM. You're going to have to find somebody that successfully added hundreds of doors as a BDM into the business and partner with them or bring them in into your business. Otherwise, just getting a sales person, trying to turn them into a property management BDM is not going to be effective unless you know how to do it yourself.

My recommendation is put in the reps, take the time, become an expert at this and figure it out. If you struggle with that, I'm really good at helping people improve that area, get really good with that, and we do that in our program. It's awesome to see the transition of people going from, well, I'm not really super great at sales or my close rate isn't really high, to them saying what I typically hear is, I feel like I can get anybody on that I want so now I'm picky and I don't want everybody. That's a huge shift. I love seeing that shift in clients where they have the confidence that they know they can get pretty much everybody on if they want them because they're that good at sales.

I won't go into sales in detail on this podcast. We're not going to go into this episode into sales, but you need to make sure that you can properly support a BDM or sales person coming in. What does that mean? That means you know what works. You have successfully proven that you can bring on business, you have scripts, you have language, you have recordings of calls, you have examples to give them. They can shadow you. You know how to deal with all the different objections and challenges that tend to come up. If you have that, then maybe it's time to bring somebody else in.

There's another challenge. The other challenge is a lot of BDMs are expected to just get paid on commission. A lot of people say, how do you pay them? If you're expecting them to just get paid on commission, the challenge with that is you're basically expecting them to starve for the first onboarding period of the first 30, 60, 90 days if they're just purely commissioned.

You can have some sort of initial bonus structure that you're going to give them that they have to pay back maybe, but that puts them in the hole from the get-go and that can help them get over that hump initially. What I find is it doesn't make sense to pay people based on commission unless the commission payout is big. In real estate, it's pretty big for the amount of work that you do. That becomes really big.

You have a big payout so it's worth it to do all that work and stuff like that. In property management, commission is going to be smaller and if you're expecting the BDM to not just close, but you're expecting them to do the follow-up, the prospecting, the nurturing, and all this work, it doesn't get them paid on the front end. They only get paid when they close the deal. Then you're expecting them to just do all of this work that they don't get paid for when they really want to spend their time doing what they really get paid for.

You need to have a couple of options. If you're going to do commission only, my recommendation is they're just closers. That means you have lead generation, follow up, all that handled by somebody else. Or you bring them in and pay them a base that's based on them doing all of that follow-up, prospecting, and everything else based on that. Then there's a bonus or commissions structure, maybe a little less than if they are commission-only that's attached to the winning of a contract or getting on a client.

That is probably more ideal in most situations because then they're getting paid to do all of this work, to build up the sales pipeline, and then they do have that reward that they can get once they start getting business on and they're closing deals. That's going to be, generally in my opinion, a far more effective structure, is to have base plus salary.

Now how do you onboard them, how do you start them out, my recommendation is you take this BDM and you start them initially as a sales assistant. Just getting a sales assistant if you're currently the business owner and you're closing the deals, could double your close rate. It could double the amount of capacity that you have.

They're going to operate more like an appointment setter, then you're going to be the closer. Setter and closer allows you also to use an effective strategy that one of my mentors calls the double barrel close—which can be really effective—in which they comprise the closer, make them more important in the mind of the prospect, and help you increase the close rate. You're really going to love what Jason has to say once you get on a call with him. He'll be able to answer all the other questions, but first I need to make sure that you qualify to talk to Jason.

That's what a setter can do for you and it significantly increases your close rate, it increases your value in the mind of the prospect if they do that effectively and they can preframe some of these sales tactics; future pays, preframing, stuff like that.

Now, you start them as an appointment setter and that means they're just learning the CRM, they're doing all the follow up, they're helping you to schedule appointments, they're booking things on your Calendly, or whatever scheduling thing you do, then you can show up and close, close, close. It's going to increase your close rate. This helps them learn how the sales process works and they can eventually start shadowing you and listening in on those sales calls that they booked, being part of those, they can learn how you're doing it and they can get to the point where they then want to take those calls directly.

How do you motivate that? If they're a driven sales person and they like money, then the way that you do that is you're going to take your commission. My recommendation is you figure out a flat fee commission structure. Flat fee is generally better than a percentage for sales people, in my opinion, because it gives them something concrete. They know each door I get, I'm going to get X number of dollars.

Then you're going to take that commission structure and you're going to cut it in half maybe or even a third depending on how big that fee is going to be that you're going to pay them that commission. If you're going to pay them a half commission, for example, let's say you do 50%, they get 50% if they set and they get the other 50% if they close it.

If they're just setting, they will start out just getting a half commission. If they set them up really nicely and you're able to close the deal, then they get it. This gets them the incentive. Once they start to taste that and they get these commissions, if they are the right personality type to drip in, they like money, they're motivated by this, very quickly they will be pushing to get that second half of the commission.

What do I need to do to get that? What else do I have to learn? They're going to start asking questions. They're going to be very curious. You want them to be pulling to get more money from you and wanting to step into that. That shows that they're driven and they're the right personality type.

If you find that you're trying to push them into it and trying to move them along, hey, when are you going to be ready? It's been a few months now. You're ready to do the calls on your own? They're probably not the right personality type so maybe you didn't vet them correctly during the hiring process and looking at the DiSC profile, Myers Briggs, some of the things you might use to figure out if they're going to be the good fit naturally for this.

That's some of the stuff we chat on today's call with clients that are in my program. If you have questions about BDMs or things like that, join our program, happy to chat with you more or feel free to ask questions inside the DoorGrow Club. I'm sure a lot of people have experience in there at doorgrowclub.com about BDMs. In general, make sure they have the right personality type, make sure you are onboarding them correctly.

Now to point out, I had a client which I met today who fired a couple of his BDMs, but these were probably the first two he had hired. Usually, if a BDM isn't working out, most of the time it is because they weren't supported right. If you do all the vetting right, then the real challenge usually is because they weren't supported right. They didn't have scripts. They didn't have proven things that work. You weren't able to showcase that you knew how to do it and teach them how to close deals, be successful, deal with objections, and everything else.

They didn't really have a chance. They didn't have the right support plus the pay structure may not have been the way I described and may have not incentivized them correctly so they weren't really on boarded or supported correctly. That's what I've seen a lot of times with companies that go and hire a company to get them a BDM as the challenge.

Figure out how to do it, don't avoid it. It's something that once you get comfortable with that feels great, it doesn't feel uncomfortable anymore because once you start winning deals and getting on business, sales becomes fun.

Then you realize sales is not anything pushy. It's not anything unethical, whatever sort of mindsets you have around sales. Sales really is just about helping people see their problems accurately and then helping them see how you can help them. That's it. It's not about getting people to buy something they don't need or want. It's about getting them to buy the exact thing that they really need to help them solve their problem, and that's you. You're the solution to that.

Hopefully that's helpful. This will be a short episod today. Check out doorgrowclub.com if you want to join our Facebook free community and there are a lot of great property managers in there. They're willing to help out and answer questions.

If you want to take your business to the next level, start growing, start adding a lot of doors, having success, and you're ready to be challenged and take things to the next level, then reach out to us and we will give you access to a free training, my seven frameworks on how you can grow your property management business, and the things that are holding you back, why most companies suck in the industry, so that you are not the next sucky company, and you can be great too. Hopefully this is helpful, and until next time to our mutual growth, everyone. Bye, everybody.

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Sep 21, 2021

The most important part of hiring is to filter out and bring in the people that you truly want to attract to your business.

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull, talks about how to attract motivated and inspired team members in your property management business.

You’ll Learn...

[01:33] How do you motivate people to get them to do what you want?

[02:04] Finding Good People: It takes more than a job posting and interviews.

[02:55] Time Study: Start by figuring out where your time goes.

[03:06] Job Description: What you want somebody to take on that drains your energy.

[03:52] R Document: Responsibilities, resonate, and results.

[04:31] Cultural Fit: Bad hires don't share your values, ethics, morals, or how you care.

[05:44] Purpose Secrets: What’s your personal and business ‘why’ that motivates?

[09:34] Myers & Briggs, DiSC: Know different attributes of profiles and personality types.

[12:00] Micromanagers: Whenever we fail to inspire, we always control.

[15:17] Pleasure vs. Pain: Most people are motivated by money or recognition.

Tweetables

“A big mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they assume that if they just put up a job posting with the job requirements and they do a bunch of interviews, they're going to find good people.”

“You need a much better filter because what that formula means is you're going to end up with a lot of turnovers, a lot of team members, and have to kiss a lot of frogs.”

“You can teach people skills. You can teach people processes. You can teach people tactical things. But you cannot generally teach your team members values.”

“The result is what gets you paid. The result is what grows the business. The result is what makes it worth it for you to shell out money to have this team member. Results are the most important thing.”

Resources

DGS 139: You Are The Prize In Your Property Management Business with Jason Hull 0

Transcript

Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, and you are interested in growing 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 business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.

All right. We're continuing my weekly series of just saying whatever I want to talk about today. So today, I got a question about motivating people. We had somebody in our group that was really struggling to hire and find good people in their market. Also, we had another team member that was asking how do you motivate people to get them to do what you want. So we're going to chat about teams a little bit today and about motivating people.

What I told the lovely lady that asked the question on our group call today about finding really good people is, a big mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they assume that if they just put up a job posting with the job requirements and they do a bunch of interviews, they're going to find good people. I have found from my own experience and being connected to a lot of entrepreneurs that that is not the case.

You need a much better filter because what that formula means is you're going to end up with a lot of turnovers, a lot of team members, and have to kiss a lot of frogs by bringing them into your business, training them, wasting time, and they're going to be terrible, not really show up to work all the time. They're not going to do a great job. You're going to have to start over again.

Let's talk about the hiring process just a little bit so that you can have great people, and then we'll get into maybe some stuff related to that. If you want to bring really great people onto your team, we usually start in the DoorGrow & Scale mastermind. I usually start by having clients do a time study to really figure out where the time is going.

Based on that, we build a job description for somebody to take the minus signs, the things that are energetically draining them. They don't enjoy the things that are tactical, which are maybe more like lower-level work, or things that are just not strategic in general where you're not functioning as a business owner. You're functioning and doing the employee-level type of tasks—emailing, calling work, et cetera.

We want to shift and take the tactical minus signs off your plate, so we build a job description. What would be the ultimate next hire for you? So you can free up your time, energy, attention, focus, et cetera so you make more cash. What would it take to do that? You build out the ultimate job description. I call that an R document. I got the original idea from one of my coaches and mentors, Alex Scharffen. He had what was called a four R’s document. For me, I found that there were some R’s missing.

I'm not going to go into total detail explaining an R document, but I will say three of the R’s. Most job descriptions have one of the R's in a document, which is they have the responsibilities. This is a typical job description. They'll just have the responsibilities listed and they think, well, people will look at this and go, I could do that job. What's the pay? Okay, I could get paid to do that job. That does not mean they're going to be a cultural fit.

Usually, if you have bad hires, it's not because they can't do the job. It's usually because they don't share your values, your ethics, your morals, what you really care about, and how you care about your customer. If you bring on the wrong people, they're not going to share your values. Even if they can do the job, you're never going to trust them. They’re not going to show up, be, and act the way that you want so that you feel safe with them and safe giving up these things off of your plate and giving them to somebody else on your team.

You need them to share your values. This is more important than them having the skill to do the job. You can teach people skills. You can teach people processes. You can teach people tactical things. But you cannot generally teach your team members’ values. Those come hard-wired in. They got those from their parents. They got those from society, from their upbringing, from their religion, and from the culture they've been a part of, but they have those values. So you need to find people that are a value match for you and your business.

Your business needs to have the right cultural foundation. In our program, we have a training called Purpose Secrets. In that, we get into figuring out your personal why—what really drives and motivates you, your business why—what really motivates the business? What is your client-centric mission? This mission that you have for the business really gets you inspired and excited, and can inspire and excite your team and your potential customers.

We get into company core values. Making sure those are clear and defined, and some other stuff. This allows you to create culture. You cannot have a healthy culture in a business, bring people in, and expect them to fit your culture if you don't make that really transparent from the beginning, from the get-go.

We have—on our job application at DoorGrow—our cultural values, client-central mission statement, and these sorts of things so that people can go through this if they care, and we can attract the right fit. Otherwise, you're really playing Russian roulette, you're just gambling. Then you have to have a really good R document. You have to have a really good job description.

This goes far beyond just the responsibilities. Here's the most important part of a job description. It’s the portion in an R document, the first portion I call resonate. This is the portion where it's copywriting or sales-related language to convince people and to discuss the position in a way that they will read it and self-identify. Does it resonate as being them?

As an example, if I were hiring an executive assistant, I know the personality type that I would generally want for that. They're going to be very detail-oriented, et cetera. It could say, are you our next executive assistant with COO potential? Do you color-coordinate your closet? Are you the type of person that makes sure everything is tidy on your desk and in your house? Are you the person that really is critical of others when they get things wrong, but you really are also really critical of yourself if you make a mistake? Then you might be our next executive assistant.

You're going to describe the personality in a way that they're going to read then go, oh my gosh, that's totally me. That is me, me, me, me, me. Not oh, I could probably do that, and you could pay me to do that. You want people that read this and they go, oh my gosh, this is me. I would love to be part of that.

The second part of a job description—that's the most important part, I believe when hiring because it helps filter out people and it helps you bring the people that you really want to attract that are going to be excited about the job. They are the ones that are willing to jump through all the hoops you might put in their application or interview process that will filter out the majority of people. So you don't get a bunch of garbage applicants that are like oh, I’m applying to 10 different jobs.

You want somebody that reads this and goes, that's the job I want. I want to be part of that kind of team. They're going to read that on your application, your values and your culture. Then you'd be like, I want to be part of something like this, something bigger.

You want to attract believers, not hiders. The standard American employee that you hear about that complains about their boss, and they think it's funny and culture. These people live for the weekend. They just want to make fun of their boss and their job and be miserable. Those are hiders. Those are not believers. They do not believe in that boss. They do not believe in that company's mission. They haven't been given, sometimes often, anything to believe in.

You want to make sure that you attract believers, not hiders. It needs to be the role that they know, this is me. So you have to understand the personality type. You need to know the Myers-Briggs type. You need to know the DiSC Profile type. You need to know different attributes about what this person is really like that would be naturally inclined to do this job and that would be really good at it.

Now, here's the R in the R docs. It's the most important once you hire somebody. Once somebody is hired, the most important part is the results portion. The results portion is the portion where it talks about what they are responsible to accomplish? What are they expected to accomplish and get done? Because if they're not getting the results, it doesn't matter if they're fulfilling all of the responsibilities that you might have, which are also important to have in there. But if they're not getting the end result, it doesn't matter if they're doing all the other responsibilities if the result isn't achieved.

The result is what gets you paid. The result is what grows the business. The result is what makes it worth it for you to shell out money to have this team member. Results are the most important thing. I don't care what else is in there unless they're getting the results done. That's the most important thing in the job description once somebody is a team member.

They need to make sure they're achieving those results. Otherwise, they're not going to stay on the team. That way they know, these are the results I'm expected to accomplish on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, and on a yearly basis. These are the results. Results don't lie, right? Results reveal the truth. Results are reality and reality is god. Reality, always is what is. It's the truth.

That's kind of the beginning. If you do that, just those things alone, you will be far less likely to have difficult, crappy, and bad team members. They're going to share your values. They're going to enjoy being part of your culture. They're going to believe in you as a boss. They're going to want to please you. They're going to know how to please you because they know the results that you're looking to get. It'll be very obvious having this yardstick by which to measure their performance on a regular basis as you meet with them, and say, hey, how are the results going?

A lot of times, a business tries to micromanage and control their team members through KPIs. I'm not as big of a fan of that. I don't see that as necessary. When people really are the right role for the job, you don't have to force them. You don't have to coerce them. You don't have to micromanage them. They want to do a good job. They want to do those things if they're the right personality for that position. If they're an A-player that believes in your values, they believe in your company, they believe in you, and they're inspired to work with you, you don't have to control them.

One of my favorite adages is basically whenever we fail to inspire, we always control. If you are focused on lots of metrics, KPIs, and these sorts of things, you’ll feel that you always have to follow up with team members to find out and get information. You've built a system in your business in which you are micromanaging. You are a micromanager. That is what a micromanager is. Most people say, well, I'm not a micromanager. I don't want to micromanage my team. I hate micromanaging and I hate micromanagers.

Most people are micromanagers that say that. If you have a performance-based culture—a culture in which people are doing what they really enjoy doing—they are inspired, they want to get great results, they are going to just do it. You don't have to push them or motivate them because they're going to want to do it. That's fun for them and it feels good. They get a sense of respect and value out of doing this and a sense of status maybe. They feel recognized for doing the things that they're supposed to be doing. They love their job. They love their life. They love your business. They get better and better at it.

If the focus is on results, it doesn't matter how they go about doing to get those results as long as they do it within your values, your ethics, your morals. If they follow your values and they believe in your values, then you can trust them to get to the result in the right way.

It doesn't matter if it's different from how you would do it. It doesn't matter if it's unique. You're going to find that if they know to focus on the result, they're going to get innovative, creative, and they're going to figure out clever ways to do it in less time to get it done faster. But they're going to do it as long as they're doing it with your values at heart and they're getting those results, you're going to be very happy.

This relieves you from having that burden to think for them and make decisions for them, where you get tons of questions from them constantly. Like how do you do it? Should I do this with this person or that? Follow the values and you'll start to trust them more and more. They'll start to learn to trust themselves and their own decision-making. Then you're going to have leaders, not just followers and sheep in your business.

The other question that popped up today was, how do I motivate people? The gentleman in the group was like, how do I motivate people on the team? One of the things that I really like is DiSC assessments. I like the values index that are in some of the more detailed DiSC assessments. The values index has different values like political score, economic score, aesthetic score, charitable score, and stuff like that.

The one you want to look at when it comes to motivating people is the economic score. Now, that sounds a little weird. But all of these will help you understand somewhat what their values are and what they value. The goal to motivate somebody is you either need to know what they want to move away from or what they want to move towards, which is, what pain do they want to avoid and what pleasure do they want to experience?

Most entrepreneurs mistakenly assume most people are motivated by money. Here's why—entrepreneurs tend to have a high economic score, which means they value money. Most people on the planet though, most of our team members, do not have a high economic score. It's going to be a low economic score. That means they value recognition. Recognition is more important than just getting bonuses. Entrepreneurs and typically salespeople tend to have a high economic score.

If you see somebody having a low economic score and they have a high charitable score, actually paying them more money, excessive amounts of money, too much money, or even sometimes more money than they would normally be paid because they did better performance, a lot of times, those people will feel guilty.

Some of these people feel guilty about getting more money. They have a high charitable score. They want to help people and they care about the poor. They want to volunteer and do this sort of thing. You just throwing money at them makes them feel like you just care about money. That actually hurts performance.

One way to not motivate people is to pay them more money, give them bonuses, or incentivize things financially when their economic score is low. You need to be careful of that. If they’re motivated by money, then this is why those types of team members (salespeople) generally have part of their pay connected to performance, bonuses, commission structures, and stuff like that.

If the economic score is low, they are recognition-motivated. Just having a really good culture of accountability and a really good strategic planning system in the business. We have what we call DoorGrow OS, which I believe is better than EOS, which has some fundamental flaws I've talked about before. A lot of entrepreneurs are into us, traction, and this sort of thing. In DoorGrow OS, it’s really an entrepreneur-centric system where it's built around you instead of built around the idea of an integrator, et cetera.

I could go on talking about the flaws of EOS. But generally, our clients that come from the EOS system and implement DoorGrow OS have seen much better results. They feel a lot more calm and quiet in their business. Things get a lot less noisy. They have team members that are far more accountable. The team is part of the communication and culture and the planning process, and buy-in instead of it being very top-down.

They're a lot more motivated especially because B-players—instead of A-players—that are hiders, they do not want to be in a situation or a system in which they are accountable and everybody gets to see them.

But A-players—people that are not hiders, the believers—love to be recognized and they love to be seen. They want recognition. That's more important than them getting more money. They want to be recognized. This allows them to be seen, allows them to experience status, allows them to feel recognized, and does a good job. That kind of culture is a performance culture and it will filter out the riff-raff. It will prevent you from having bad team members.

The other thing you want to recognize when trying to figure out how to motivate people is you need to understand your team. This is why before we even interview somebody, we have them—in our application process—jump through a bunch of hoops to get them to do a bunch of different assessments. I won't go into all of the different assessments that I often do, but I usually have people do at least three assessments just to go through our application process.

If you have a really good R doc that really resonates with them, gets them really excited about the job, and really they get excited about the culture and your company, they'll be willing to do all of the work in your application, and jump through all those hoops. Most people won’t.

If they're just tire kickers, time wasters, people applying to lots and lots of different jobs, and they don't look at your job and go, I want that job. That's the job I want. I want to work for them. Then they won't go through and fill out everything on the application.

I like the DiSC. I like Myers-Briggs. I understand those systems. I've taken time to learn those. I know what sort of roles will do well, which sort of personality types will do well based on those in certain positions. I would recommend those. Then there are others that I'm into or that I like to use. Having them do assessments, you're going to know beforehand, just by looking at all applicants, that person would likely be good at this. That person may not. You may still want to interview some people based on their past experiences.

Maybe there were mistypes. Maybe they filled it out wrong or tried to answer it the way they thought you wanted them to be or to look. But that'll be really helpful for you to have assessments to be able to know these team members and to talk with these potential team members about themselves to figure out, does this resonate with you? Is this accurate about you what it says on your DiSC, what it says on your Myers-Briggs, and what it says on these other assessments? They can then chime in. A lot of times, you'll find they're like, wow, yeah, it's really spot on. Or they might say that part, no, I'm a little different than that.

This helps you to understand whether or not that personality and that person would be a good fit and really enjoy that role. That's going to prevent you from wasting a lot of time, a lot of money training, onboarding, and bringing in somebody that's a bad fit. You won't have to motivate that person because they will naturally be inclined to do that and do a good job.

That's a little bit of what we chatted about on today's call. If you're interested in joining about 70 entrepreneurs that we have in this mastermind, then reach out to DoorGrow. Check us out at doorgrow.com.

If you are enjoying this podcast and you want to be part of our free community that we have online, feel free to join the Facebook group, which is doorgrowclub.com. You can join our social media group there where you can ask questions of other property managers. There are lots of really helpful people.

That's all I have to share with all of you today. Until next time, to our mutual growth, and I hope you have a lot of success. Bye, everyone.

Download this Episode

Sep 14, 2021

Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull, talks about being the best prize to your potential clients.

A lot of times clients have this perception that you need or want to get them on as a client. Needy is creepy. Don’t fail to see and show them that you are the prize.

You’ll Learn...

[03:00] Who is the prize? You or your prospective client? You are!

[03:06] Why? If you have a legitimate business, you solve their problems.

[03:52] Three biggest complaints? Tenants, landlords, and rental properties.

[04:18] Why most property managers and property management businesses suck.

[04:48] If you do a good job, you make better tenants, landlords, and rental properties.

[05:10] Real Estate Investing: It's easy until your first challenge with a tenant.

[07:17] Cycle of Suck: Crappy clients lead to crappy properties, tenants, and reputation.

[08:01] Mike’s Pumpkin Plan: Allegory of what it takes to have prize-winning pumpkins.

[08:43] Be Picky: Get clients you want to be with, enjoy working with, and value you.

[10:10] What’s for sale? People want to buy safety, certainty, and peace of mind.

[11:45] Ideal Clients: Qualify them by figuring out - what do you really want?

[12:37] Rules of Engagement: Value self, maintain confidence, realize you’re the prize.

Tweetables

“You need to realize this—you are the prize. That means they are not the prize.”

“If you aren't able to maintain a frame of confidence, you then hurt the number one thing that people want to buy from you, which is safety and certainty.”

“The best clients are not the ones that are the cheapos.”

Resources

DGS 138: Four Reasons (For Starting a Business) by Jason Hull 0

Transcript

Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing 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.

All right, this continues these episodes where it's just me talking. I'm certainly going to be doing some interviews in the future. But this episode today, I'm going to start blocking out time each Wednesday so that I can consistently get these episodes out. I have a consistent call with clients each Wednesday and Friday currently that I enjoy doing. I'm just going to block out time every Wednesday to do a live call and talk about whatever my heart desires that day.

Something that came up on today's call with my coaching clients is just a little passing phrase that somebody had mentioned, but they had said they were talking about the week and the wins. Everybody was sharing their wins and one client mentioned they were going to be meeting with some people that are prospective clients. They said they're going to see if we will be a good fit.

I wanted to touch on this because I think there's this mindset challenge that I noticed a lot of times with clients and I say this multiple times. I've said it multiple times on my calls with clients. But a lot of times clients have this perception that they are needing or wanting to get the client on and they fail to see that you are the prize. That is what I'm titling today's episode, You are the prize. I would normally swear when I say this, but I want to make sure I get the widest reach possible, but you are the blankety blank prize.

You're the prize. You're the freaking prize. You need to realize this—you are the prize. That means they are not the prize. Your prospective client is not the prize, you're the prize. Why is that? Because if you have a legitimate business, you are the one that solves their problem.

You're not trying to get them on to solve your problem of making money or because you need more clients. Needy is creepy. You have to have the mindset and recognize that you are the prize, that you solve their problem, that they're the one with the challenges. Look at this, you solve three of the biggest problems in real estate as a property manager. You are absolute super superheroes.

Nobody seems to realize this, but nobody else does this. What am I talking about? Let's talk about what are the three most complained about things in real estate? Most likely, possibly these three things—tenants, landlords, and rental properties. Three of the most complained about things in real estate and you solve all three of those challenges as a good property manager.

I know you and I both know that most property managers suck. Most property management businesses suck. You know this. I hear this from everybody. Everybody comes to me and they're like, well, we're starting a property management business. Why? Because everybody else in my market sucks. I hear this all the time.

I'm sure you're listening right now and you're thinking, yeah, my competitors do all suck, but I'm great. Let's just agree that most property management businesses suck and we should change that because it hurts the entire industry as a whole. But if you're doing a good job, you make tenants better, you make landlords better, you make the rental properties better. You are improving the world. You really are the superheroes of the real estate investing industry.

A lot of real estate investors get into real estate investing. They hear everybody's talking about this buzz of real estate investing. It's a great place to put your money. It's so turnkey and so easy. Until they have their first challenge with a tenant, until they realize how much time it takes to place a tenant, until they realize maintenance coordination is a part-time job, even for a small portfolio.

You take all of this off their plate. On average, you get them more rent. Even if you just get them a certain percentage more rent and you're collecting rent a certain percentage more often, your fees are well covered. During the pandemic, the feedback I was getting from a lot of people that were self-managing is that their rent collection was down like 50%. I heard from some investors, only half of my tenants are paying rent. Property management clients though, I was asking them, they were maybe down like 2%, 3%, maybe 5% of the rent. They really didn't see much change.

The ones that were really smart about how they dealt with it really didn't see much change at all. It was the same people that weren't paying rent before that weren't paying rent, so they didn't really see a shift.

The smart ones were the ones that didn't proactively assume that people are going to have a hard time paying rent and put out a message to that effect. They just assumed people would keep paying rent and they didn't put out some preemptive strike to say, hey, I know you probably have problems, here are some resources. Usually, those property managers had a harder time because then those tenants thought, well, yeah, maybe it's tough and maybe I don't need to pay rent because of the pandemic.

Anyway, you solve these three big challenges. You are the prize, you're the prize. When you recognize this, you can shift your mindset in sales, in closing a property management contractor deal, and you're going to look at them, do I want this client? Do I want this property? You're going to be picky.

Many of you have heard me talk about the cycle of suck. If you want to know what that is, you can just google cycle of suck, and maybe even at DoorGrow, it should usually come up right at the top. The cycle of suck basically means you're taking on crappy clients. So you have crappy properties, then you have crappy tenants, and then you're going to have a crappy reputation. This sums up the entire industry in aggregate.

If property managers recognize that they are the prize and were pickier about the clients they take on, they would have a better business. They would have much more profit in their business. They'd be far more profitable. Their operational costs would be a lot lower. They'd be able to do a better job servicing clients. I had Mike Michalowicz come speak at a conference that we threw and he talked about The Pumpkin Plan.

He's an entrepreneur. He's been on the podcast multiple times. If you check out his book, The Pumpkin Plan, he talks about this allegory of prizewinning pumpkins and what it takes. You have to lay the right foundation. You have to have the right seed for this business. But you also have to get rid of all the rotting pumpkins in the pumpkin patch. Otherwise, the whole patch will go bad. That means you also need to not let certain things grow, fester, or come into the pumpkin patch that are going to cause problems. That's these crappy clients.

When you recognize you're the prize, another analogy I like to use with clients to really drive this home is the idea of the sexy girl at the bar or the sexy guy at the bar. Whatever you're into or whatever you want to be, either one. If you're the sexy girl at the bar, you have options, you have choices. Guys are hitting on you, people are coming and approaching you, but you get to be picky.

You don't get with every guy. You don't get with everybody. Nobody wants that person. We'll reverse this in case anybody thinks that's sexist. I want to be the sexy guy at the bar. Let's say you're the sexy guy at the bar, you're not going to get with every girl. If women know that you're getting with every girl, you're not the sexy guy at the bar. You're the garbage.

Don't be the garbage that gets with every client. You want to make sure that you're getting with just the clients that you really want to be with, that you really enjoy working with, that you really feel like they value you. When you do that, it puts out a different message in the marketplace and puts out a different perception about you and your business. Not just that, even if they don't know anybody else, your air, your demeanor, how people perceive you, and how you come across during the sales process is going to be like the sexy guy or the sexy girl at the bar.

You're going to be able to maintain a frame of confidence. If you aren't able to maintain a frame of confidence, you then hurt the number one thing that people want to buy from you, which is safety and certainty. This is really what's for sale. Nobody wants to buy property management. That's not sexy. That's not interesting. They don't care about property management. Your clients don't give a [...] about property management. They're not interested in property management. What they really want is safety and certainty. They want peace of mind.

For most people on the planet, safety and certainty are one of their highest priorities. For most entrepreneurs, I've talked about the four reasons in a previous episode, but they want fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. But for most of your clients, most people, and your team members, they're going to want safety and certainty. That's more important. If you recognize that, then that’s what you're selling is safety and certainty.

Guess one of the easiest ways to destroy safety and certainty during your sales process. That's to fold on your pricing, to cave in, to not maintain a masculine or dominant frame in which you are the trusted authority (whether or not you're male or female). They're coming to you looking for guidance, they're looking for authority, and they're looking for leadership. You have to maintain that frame that you are the sexy guy or girl at the bar. You are the prize.

That means you are going to have a conversation with them to see if they will be a good fit for your business. I want to see if your property and you would be a good fit for our portfolio, Mr. Owner or Mrs. Owner. That's the idea. You have to shift the conversation that you're qualifying. This is one of the biggest things in sales, the biggest mistakes in sales, but also the biggest factors you'll hear sales trainers or salespeople talk about. You have to qualify the prospect, which means you don't want every prospect. You don't want every client.

If you start actually qualifying them, sit down and figure out, what do I really want? What is my ideal client? Look at them through that filter. Ask them some questions. Make them qualify. Have some requirements that are essential in order for them to be allowed into your portfolio. Hey, Mr. Owner, let's have a conversation to see if you and your property would be a good fit for us to manage.

When you shift that and you turn the tables that way, it changes their perspective too. You're setting the rules of the engagement or the game to be, I'm going to see if you're a good fit. You're welcome to see if you like me as well. But I get to be picky because I recognize that I'm one of the most attractive people at the bar. I'm one of the most attractive businesses that do property management. They're going to perceive you as such because you value yourself as such.

The second you fold on your frame, which means you cave on your pricing, you come down, you use language that's not confident, or you make concessions, you shift immediately out of being the authority and the expert in their mind, which is who they want to feel safe and certain into being basically in their mind, somebody they're going to have to micromanage. You become an employee or a child to them in their mind. They're like, oh, I'm going to have to tell this property manager how to do their job. Then they're going to want custom reports, they're going to want custom concessions, and they want you to fold in your pricing and change things. They're going to want you to customize your contract.

When you maintain a frame that says, this is what we expect and you can take it or leave it. You can do things our way or you can go find another company. We're good because there's plenty of business for us out there, then you are the sexy guy or girl at the bar. You recognize you are the prize.

Help your potential clients make that decision. Make the right decision by having that safety and certainty by being certain in what you are, and that you are the best. If you lack that confidence deep down because deep down you aren't really sure if you're good, you aren't really sure if you're really providing value, then you have to start taking care of that. That's stuff that we get into in our mastermind a bit as well is talking about how to actually be the company and know that you're the company that does a really great job. That you get to be the sexy guy or girl at the bar. That's going to give you a lot more confidence.

If you are having trouble or challenges with any of this, you know you're showing up with a lack of confidence. You don't have confidence or certainty in your language. You are not able to maintain a frame that you're the expert, that you're getting a lot of really price-sensitive people or cheapos in the marketplace, you're doing something wrong. My clients are not doing these things wrong after they've been working with me for a while.

If you're struggling with these things, you may be interested in joining some of the most badass entrepreneurs in property management on the planet, which are in our mastermind. We have about 70 businesses in this mastermind. It's relatively new. We have 70 businesses in this mastermind, which is awesome.

It's amazing to hear their wins and the results each week. In fact, the ones that are having the most wins, they're not even able to show up to the calls because they're so busy, which is just awesome. There is no scarcity in the industry right now. There's plenty of business available. There's plenty of opportunities.

The best clients are not the ones that are the cheapos, that are at the end of the sales cycle, that are searching on Google trying to price shop you. Those are the worst. We don't want to build portfolios based on the worst and set your pricing in the industry. Throughout the industry, it's usually based on the worst, the cheapos of the industry, the cheapo investors. We want you to capture people earlier in the sales cycle that are better, that you really enjoy working with where you can be a lot pickier.

Cool. All right, if you're interested in that, check us out at doorgrow.com, reach out, and let's get you on a call with my team and see if we can help you grow your business. That's all I have to share today. A short little episode to share with you that you are the prize. Take some action and pay attention in your interactions throughout today and throughout the week recognizing that you are the prize. Establish yourself as the prize and maintain the frame that you are the prize and you will find that people will treat you very differently.

Just like that dating analogy, if we apply this to a real-life situation, it starts to become really obvious. Nobody wants to go get with the person that gets with everybody. Don't be that person. That's all I'm going to say for today. I am out. Until next time, everyone, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.

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Jul 27, 2021

Why should you start a company or have a business? Making money should not be an entrepreneur’s primary goal or only reason. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull, talks about four reasons for starting a company or having a business.

Many entrepreneurs mistakenly think the goal is to exit and retire early. However, if you follow my four reasons, you won't want to leave because you’ll be giving up something that's really important to you.

You’ll Learn...

[02:20] Money: Doesn’t always make a successful business owner happy but miserable.

[03:09] Four things are probably more important than money for having a business.

[03:19] Side Effects: Being a big bottleneck or cutting operational costs.

[04:36] Jason’s four reasons for starting a company.

[04:47] Reason #1: Fulfillment: It should be a vehicle to give you fulfillment in life.

[05:30] Reason #2: Freedom: It’s what you achieve, why you want to be entrepreneurs.

[08:04] Reason #3: Contribution: Businesses should solve real marketplace problems.

[10:31] Reason #4: Support: It's a vehicle to create contributions and change the world.

[10:55] Business Model: Resources, money, staff create contributions, make difference.

[12:17] Why not start a business? For most people, it’s safety and certainty.

Tweetables

“There's something more that entrepreneurs need to be focused on than just making money.”

“If you have these four things and you're in alignment with these four things, you then have a business that you love.”

“The reality is there's nothing in your business in the long run that you have to do. There's nothing. You can offload any pieces of the business that you don't enjoy.”

“Entrepreneurs—we really want to make a difference in the world. We want to contribute. We want to feel like we're adding value.”

Resources

DGS 137: Implement Leasing Automation in Your Property Management Business with ShowMojo 0

Transcript

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

I'm going to do something a little bit different. Usually, I interview people, first of all, because that makes me feel a bit more secure. It's just a comfort thing. It feels a little bit weird to just sit here and talk all by myself, but my team has been pushing me to do this for years. You need to create your own episodes just you talking, sharing some of your ideas. That's really what people want to hear, and so here it goes.

This episode may be one of the most important pieces of content or information that I've put out into the marketplace. We're going to be talking today about what I call the four reasons. These are Jason Hull's four reasons for starting a company or for having a business. This is something that is just formulated in my mind over the last decade of running a company and coaching business owners, just realizing and seeing that there's something more that entrepreneurs need to be focused on than just making money.

There's something more that's important because I've had so many. I've talked to thousands of property managers, I have hundreds of clients, I've spoken to a lot of business owners, I've been in a lot of different masterminds and programs. One of the things that I've realized is that there's something a bit deeper that a business owner needs in order to have a successful business than just making money. At some point, money is no longer really an issue, but they could still be miserable.

One of the things that I've noticed is that instead of money being the primary goal, there are four things that are probably more important than money. These are the four reasons for having a business. What I've noticed is if you have these four things and you're in alignment with these four things, you then have a business that you love. If you're out of alignment with these four things, then you have a job that makes you somewhat miserable or maybe very miserable. You then are basically the biggest bottleneck in your business, you are the most critical employee in your business, you will be more and more frustrated, and you'll want to escape.

A lot of entrepreneurs mistakenly think the goal is to exit, the goal is retirement. Here's the thing, if you have these four reasons, you don't really want to retire because then you give up something that's really important to you.

The other side effect of having these four reasons is that your operational costs when it comes to staffing is usually cut into a fraction. Usually cut maybe down to a third of what most property management companies or most businesses spend on staffing costs, which means you'll be able to get about three times the output from team members because you'll be in alignment with these four reasons. That means that they can be in alignment with these four reasons. Let's get into the four reasons for starting a company.

Reason number one, the primary reason, the most important reason to start a business has to be fulfillment. Fulfillment is the primary goal or reason for a business to exist. It should be a vehicle to give you fulfillment in life. You're going to be giving up the majority of your life on this thing. Probably the largest portion of your day goes to your business or towards your work. Probably the largest portion of your week goes towards your business or towards work. You should be getting something in return, besides just trading your life and giving your life away in exchange for dollars.

You should be getting life, you should be enjoying your life, and you should be getting fulfillment. That's primary goal number one. Primary goal number two, the second reason for having a business needs to be freedom. This is why we become entrepreneurs. We want to achieve and get more freedom. You can make more and more money as your business grows. Most businesses do, but most business owners have less freedom and less fulfillment in their day-to-day. They become more and more a slave to their own business, and the business is then their master.

As entrepreneurs, we want more freedom. That's usually why we want more money. We think, man, if I had more money, I would have more options in life and that should be true. If you have more money, it should give you more options in life, and you should then have more freedom. Most business owners usually within the first year of their business, a very short period of time, they have very little freedom and very little fulfillment.

The thing is with fulfillment, reason number one, if you're doing everything in the business wearing every hat in the business, you can't really be in a state of fulfillment. You also can't really feel like you're free because you're doing things that you really don't enjoy doing. I find a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners mistakenly think that there are certain things they have to do because they're business owners.

What's really odd is this is different for each person, but it's some sort of conditioning. Maybe it's things they learned growing up, learned their jobs, or they've just decided they can never hand off certain pieces. A lot of business owners hold on to things that they don't have to do.

For example, if you hate accounting, but you feel like I have to do all the accounting in my business. Maybe you hate sales but you're like, I have to do all the sales in my business, or I hate talking to people and connecting with people, but you are talking and connecting with people constantly. Really, the reality is there's nothing in your business in the long run that you have to do. There's nothing.

You can offload any pieces of the business that you don't enjoy. The problem is a lot of times, entrepreneurs will offload the things they do enjoy, which give them fulfillment and a sense of freedom. Then they hold on to the things that take that away, that are really minus signs in their day instead of plus signs energetically.

The third reason for having a business is contribution. The goal of a business should be that it solves a real problem in the marketplace. That's a contribution. If a business doesn't solve a real problem in the marketplace, then it's basically bullshit. It's snake oil, it's stealing people's money. I find entrepreneurs—we really want to make a difference in the world. We want to contribute, we want to feel like we're adding value.

One of the reasons I'm inspired to work with property management entrepreneurs is you have a real impact. Most property management businesses suck. I'm sure you're like, yeah, that's true. If you look at your market, you know it. You know that this is true. Most property management businesses suck. It's not because these business owners woke up in the morning and said, man, I want to have a shitty company today. I want to start a business and have it suck. We'll get back to why so many suck at least one part.

Good property management business owners, their business solves three of the biggest challenges in real estate. What are three of the most complained about things in real estate probably? Probably number one, landlords. You just hear lots of people complaining about landlords. They get a bad rep. Number two, a lot of people complain about tenants. All these renters, they're the worst and you hear people complain about them. You also hear people complain about rental properties.

Good property managers are the superheroes of the entire real estate investing industry and they make all three of those things better. Nobody else does that. DoorGrow hacker, property management entrepreneur, you deserve to get paid well if you're one of the good ones. That's a real contribution. That's why businesses exist to solve a real problem in the marketplace, and you deserve to be compensated well for that. That's reason number three.

Entrepreneurs, we want to contribute and make a difference. We feel like we're doing something good in the world, and that feels like fulfillment to us to be contributing and benefiting other people. The business is a vehicle for fulfillment, it's a vehicle for freedom, and it's a vehicle for contribution for the entrepreneur. The fourth reason is so important that if you don't have it, you can't really have the first three, at least not fully.

The fourth reason for having a business is support. Having a business, it's a vehicle to create contributions and change the world. There's probably no better vehicle that could exist. Charities aren't even as effective or as efficient. Entrepreneurs have figured out a model, which is a business, which allows them the resources, money, the staff in which they can create contributions and make a difference. In order to do this and have more freedom and have more fulfillment, you can't be wearing every hat as I talked about earlier. You need support.

Having support in the business means that you have an awesome team. It means that you are able to offload all the things and the hats that you don't want to wear. You find people that enjoy doing those things, that will be better at it than you, that you can trust, that share your values. When you're supported, then you're going to feel like Iron Man in your super suit. You're a normal person, but you have this magical increased super capability because you have a team, which gives you more time, gives you more ability. You need support.

Here's the cool thing. If you have these four reasons—you have fulfillment, you have freedom, you have a contribution, you have support—then that means that you can have team members that also have those four reasons. Looking at these four things, what's interesting to note is that most people on the planet do not care about these four things more than they care about a higher priority. A higher priority than these four things for most people is safety and certainty.

This is important to recognize, especially as a property manager. Safety and certainty are the highest priority for most people on the planet. They want to feel safe and certain. This is why they don't go start businesses. This is why they're willing to give up and not have fulfillment, freedom, a sense of contribution, or even a lack of support in their day job. This is why the standard American employee often just complains about their boss, lives for the weekend, and wants to go out and drink. They're just trying to escape their life.

If you are in alignment with these four reasons then you can build the right team around you. When I see those, a lot of entrepreneurs are not in alignment with these four things. As they expand and break past the first sand trap of maybe about 50, 60 doors, and then they get into the next sand trap of maybe 200–400 doors, where they have a team, usually they have the wrong team.

Why? Because they are not in alignment with these four reasons. They're doing the wrong things. They're showing up as the wrong person that's less happy, has less fulfillment, less freedom, less contribution. They are not going to feel supported because they're doing the wrong things. They're going to build a team of people around them that supplement their miserableness, and so these people around them are also not going to have a sense of freedom, fulfillment, contribution, and support.

The operational cost on those types of team members is usually going to be three times higher. What I mean is if you have a team member that has a sense of fulfillment in the business, they feel fulfilled in their day-to-day, they feel like they have autonomy and freedom, they feel like they're making a difference in benefiting people, they feel supported by you, and they feel like they get to support you as the entrepreneur, they are going to give you three times the output I find. A-player team members, really great team members, will give you three times the output of a typical employee, which means that's going to significantly decrease your operational costs.

This is the most expensive thing in business is staffing. That resource is the most expensive. If you want to be a profitable company, you want to be one of the good property management businesses, and not be one of the sucky ones, a lot of times the reason they're sucky is because their operational costs are too high.

They don't have a really good team because they aren't really showing up as a really great boss. They are miserable and their team is not very happy. Their customer service levels drop because they can't really support people as well because their operational costs are too expensive so they're not able to get as much done.

One of the most common questions I get is, how many staff members should I have per the number of doors? Is there a ratio that's right? There are so many variables that come into this that it's an impossible thing to answer. You need a lot less staff per door if you are in alignment with these four reasons and your team members are in alignment with these four reasons.

Hopefully, this concept of the four reasons is helpful. This is the foundation of my philosophy as a property management business coach. With my clients, this is my primary goal. I reiterate this on our coaching calls that we have each week. I reiterate this in my one-on-one with clients. My goal is to get you more and more in alignment with these four reasons. I have processes and ways of helping people do that, that maybe we'll get into on a future call.

Basically, we want to see what are the plus signs in your day-to-day, what are the minus signs? How can we become really conscious of that? I usually use time studies to do that. I have a specific process for taking clients through to identify that, how to figure out how to feel safe to offload. In order to do that, you're going to have to create the right culture so that you have people that share the values that you can trust with people, trust with your clientele, and not just people that know how to do the job. Cultural fit is more important. We can get into that more, maybe in another conversation.

Anyway, if you want to get in alignment with these four reasons, you feel like you're out of alignment with them right now, reach out to me and reach out to my team at doorgrow.com. Check us out, join our Facebook group, doorgrowclub.com. You can go to doorgrowclub.com. Apply and join our Facebook group if you are a property management entrepreneur. Let's see if we can get you more in alignment with those four reasons.

Life's too short. You should be enjoying your day-to-day life. I want you to have a job and a business that you don't want to escape and retire from. Because if you did, you would be giving up one of your main vehicles for fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support in life. You want to keep that. You then can choose how much you want to do in that business. I want you to always be able to hold on to the things that give you freedom, fulfillment, contribution, and support.

Anyway, with that, I'm out. Until next time. To our mutual growth everybody. I'm Jason Hull, and I hope that you found this beneficial. If so, leave comments, give us a review, and some feedback. I would appreciate it. Thanks.

You've just listened to the DoorGrowShow. 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/subsribe. Until next time. Take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

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Jul 13, 2021

Looking for a system that will help you automate the entire residential leasing process?

Today’s guest is Abi Wasserman from ShowMojo, a complete leasing automation platform that handles scheduling coordination and showings. Abi explains ShowMojo as automating everything that happens in the pre-leasing experience, from the moment a property is available and hits the market to the moment a prospective renter is moving forward with an application.

You’ll Learn...

[02:24] ShowMojo: What it is, what it does, and how it's different from other options.

[04:14] Touch Points: Automated communication confirms, follows up leasing process.

[05:22] Property managers fit business needs and leasing processes into one platform.

[05:50] Other Options: Some companies do showings or open houses differently.

[06:29] Independent Experience: Know calendar availability for each team member.

[07:58] COVID Pandemic Hold: Starting to get back to first normal, busy leasing season.

[08:48] Walk the Talk: What to do when renting property to somebody site unseen.

[10:21] With so many property management tools, why choose ShowMojo?

[13:30] FAQ: Focus on syndication, customers, security, and platform comparisons.

[17:00] Determining Factor: ShowMojo’s success is because of relationships.

[18:40] Pros and cons of occupant, self, and accompanied showings.

[23:54] Common Problems: Time wasting calls? Use the automated ShowMojo phone.

Tweetables

“Your platform should allow you to be able to customize your needs, stack appointments up together, calculate drive time, and take that into account in between showings.”

“That's going to turn into maintenance nightmares for you down the road or a tenant nightmare for you down the road because they haven't seen the property.”

“The first place that somebody sees a difference with the way that ShowMojo operates, is really in that prospective renter experience.”

“That prospective renter experience is important for them, but it's also important for you.”

Resources

ShowMojo

Abi Wasserman’s Email

Abi Wasserman on LinkedIn

DGS 136: Save Time and Money in Property Management with Andrew Lebaron 0

Transcript

Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing 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.

Abi: Hey Jason. How are you?

Jason: I'm fantastic. I'm doing really well. How are you?

Abi: I am good. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Jason: I've been wanting to get ShowMojo on the show forever. They've been on my hit list for a long time and I finally just gave up. Then suddenly, you showed up on my calendar, which is awesome. I’m glad you came.

Abi: I have a magic touch. It's like we have mojo or something, I don't know. It might be in our name.

Jason: Yeah, maybe. Some ShowMojo. Abi, maybe give us a little bit of background on ShowMojo, if you could. Then maybe we can chat about what it is, what it does, and how it's different from the other options on the market.

Abi: ShowMojo is the leasing automation platform. We have been around for over 10 years. My understanding of how DoorGrow got started originated out of this need for the property management industry, started from an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial mindset. Our founder and his wife who owned property management units saw this need for automation to exist in their life. To stop them from taking away from their day-to-day life and what time was getting spent with the kids or at family dinners, those tasks, those phone calls, those emails, that coordination that typically comes with the leasing process, that pre-leasing process. What was bothering them and not conducive to that family time, it ended up turning into ShowMojo and this scheduling coordination. Eventually, self show as well but the entire leasing automation platform that is ShowMojo.

Jason: Got it. I think ShowMojo really pioneered on the market the scheduling sort of aspect. Then it looks like Rently copied that. They had the lock boxes and now ShowMojo’s got the lock boxes, too. Then you've got Tenant Turner and they seem to have a similar product. Why don't you explain for people that have no idea what ShowMojo is? They aren't aware of these. What it is and then maybe we can get into the differences.

Abi: I like to explain ShowMojo as thinking about automating everything that happens in that pre-leasing experience, from the moment that a property is available and hits the market, to the moment that that prospective renter is moving forward with an application. What our platform and what ShowMojo does is it empowers that prospective renter to really self-drive their way through a prospect-driven leasing process. It allows them to really empower that process from start to finish, giving them that immediate touch, that immediate response that they crave when they're trying to schedule a showing.

Giving them that automated communication throughout the process. Making sure that they have confirmed the showings or giving them the ability to automatically reschedule a showing. Giving them automated communication on the back end of that. Following-up after a showing. Following-up with the application process after the showing. Really making sure that there are just all of those touch points, and giving property managers that customizable platform in it where they can fit it their business needs, their processes, how they do leasing and not making a property management company have to fix their processes to a platform mix, if that makes sense.

Jason: Yes. Could you give us some examples of how companies might do it a bit differently maybe?

Abi: Some property management companies, for instance, will do great showings especially as we move more out of this pandemic, there are property management companies that will do great showings or open houses. Maybe they'll do clustered individual showings where you only want to go out to a property maybe once a day and you want to cluster your showings together where you've got five back-to-back showings. Your platform should allow you to be able to customize your needs, stack appointments up together, calculate drive time and take that into account in between showings.

Know what calendar availability is there for each one of your team members, crosscheck maybe a third-party calendar like Google or Outlook, be able to send those invites back and forth between those calendars easily, and make sure that each one of your team members can also have that independent experience. If you and I were working together and you were showing a few of the properties and I was showing a few of the properties, we have independent schedules. Maybe we even both show one property and our times overlap, but the platform can still take that into account.

Jason: I love the idea of group showings because it really would collapse time for the property manager. It could put so much work on their plate, but the tenants are often willing to move around your schedule and to do things that you want them to do because they're really trying to get into a place. If you can get 10 or 20 people to show up to a particular unit, even if you're just having them—if they're pandemic-scared—go through one at a time and they're waiting outside, that allows you to increase the perception of demand, it allows you to just get a bunch of applicants right away, and then you can go through screen and figure out who we should put into this place. I know property managers that they do one open house, one showing. They get plenty of applicants and then they get the thing rented out.

Abi: And that is the case. I think one of the things that I've seen most recently as we've come out of this pandemic hold, which I think we've been in for a good 16 months of this, I don't know what's going to happen with my vacancy because of the pandemic. Now, we're coming out of that holding pattern where moratoriums are lifting and things are starting to get back to our first normal leasing season, busy leasing season. Now, what property managers are seen all over the country (I think) is that they're putting a property on the market and they are getting immediate applications, site unseen, where they will put a property on the market and they’ll get 10 applications for it.

I also have those conversations with property managers who want somebody to walk that property. You don't often want to rent to somebody that hasn't looked at that property because that's going to turn into maintenance nightmares for you down the road or a tenant nightmare for you down the road because they haven't seen the property. I didn't know that this was here. I didn't know you expected me to change my filter. I don't know where to change my filter. I never saw that. There's so many things that come up.

Even with the market being the way that it is where you've got 10 applications coming through, then how do you set up the showings so that at least you're getting your top five applicants through that property and down the line through your application process?

Jason: Right. It's Russian roulette, you're playing a dangerous game if you don't have people view the property. How does the ShowMojo compare, because I know there's a lot of tools out there. I see this question pop up in the DoorGrowClub, our Facebook group constantly. People are asking it on our mastermind all the time. Which tool are you using and why? Everybody has different opinions. How can you help people make the decision to choose ShowMojo over something like TurboTenant, Tenant Turner, Rently, all these different tools that exist out there?

Abi: You know me and you know I've been around a really long time. I've got friends that work at other companies. Whenever I'm asked these questions, whenever I’ve been asked at a different company and against a competitive company there, my goal is never to sling mud. My goal is always to just talk about the differences or where I feel we have an advantage or how we do it and I like the way you do it. I will say that the first place that somebody sees a difference with the way that ShowMojo operates, is really in that prospective renter experience.

With ShowMojo, when a prospective renter goes to schedule a showing, the experience for them whether it's on a desktop, whether it's on their mobile phone, it is all happening on one screen. They don't have to sign up for an account with ShowMojo. They don't have to pay a fee. Even if they're validating their identity with a credit or debit card, we're not charging them a fee for an account with us. They don't have to remember a username or password.

I don't say this because I think that it's a bad user experience to do that. There are a lot of sites that I will sign up for recurring business. But when I'm renting, I don't really want to do that until I’m filling out an application and logging into a portal. I don't want to give anybody but that property manager my contact, like login details. I'll give you my contact details, but I don't want to do that. That's my preference as a renter because I have been one for too long because I can't do the math right now. As I get closer to my 35th birthday, I can't do math on the spot.

I know you and I both have one coming up, if I remember that correctly about us both, we have one in I think the same week. But that prospective renter experience is important. Making it as easy for them to actually schedule that showing is critical. You also, for the property manager, if I'm a property manager, I want to own that rental lead. I don't want them signing up for an account with the service that I'm working with and then owning that data. I want to own that rental lead. I want them to be my rental lead.

I don't want them seeing properties for somebody else's company. I want them being cross marketed properties that I have on the market. If something changes within my portfolio, I want them to be notified of it. I don't want them being dripped with other properties from other property management companies. I worked very hard to get those people over to my website or to get them to my listing. I want to own that data. That prospective renter experience is important for them but it's also important for you.

Jason: I'm curious about what are some of the questions that prospective users of ShowMojo tend to have when they're coming to you during the sales conversation?

Abi: A lot of the questions will circle around the syndication network that we have, whether if they are new customers, will it compare to what I'm doing with my software provider? If they are switching over from a different platform, does it compare or does it exceed what I already have? Oftentimes, it exceeds what they already have or it is an even match for.

Jason: Let’s explain syndication for those that don't know what it means.

Abi: When we have listings through ShowMojo, what we do is we will push them out to internet listing sites. Things like apartments.com, Zillow if a customer is paying for it, rentals.com same thing as Zillow, realtor.com, Zumper, those kinds of ILS or the listing sites to get additional visibility and rental leads back in for our customers. With ShowMojo, we automatically respond to those leads pushing them over to get them to schedule a showing, but it's typically the same as or greater visibility than wherever they may have been coming from before.

Jason: Got it. One of the strengths of ShowMojo is really good syndication.

Abi: Yes and the email response and the communication afterwards.

Jason: What are some of the other questions that people have when they're curious and vetting ShowMojo as a provider for them?

Abi: I would say it probably will come in where the lock boxes and self-show is concerned and how do we handle security, how do we handle preparing for fraud because it doesn't happen frequently. It's going to happen in the property management industry. It's a factor of doing self-show and doing lock box showings. It's more of those questions of how do we prepare for it, so outside of the normal tech things that our team does by searching and preparing and preventing known scammers from being able to schedule, we don't advertise any of our listings as self-show or lock box showings.

We don't distribute codes until the showing has been confirmed with that prospect or we have the additional step where they have to actually confirm their location is at the property. They have to use location enablement on their cell phones. We also follow up after every showing to make sure that that prospective renter has locked up and left the keys at the property. If they don't then we notify our customer of that. We have multiple different checkpoints in place for our customers on that side.

Jason: Got it. Now, is that different from other providers when it comes to lock boxes?

Abi: There are some providers that are very forthright about how much self-show they do, even advertising through video the entire self-show process on their customers’ websites. I'm not sure where that checkpoints are in terms of checking back up with a prospective renter, so I'm not sure where the follow up process is necessarily with other companies.

Jason: What do you think is the determining factor for people to go with ShowMojo then? How are you closing these deals, Abi?

Abi: I would say number one, because of relationships, like I always do. At the end of the day, it is a more customizable platform to fit property managers’ needs. It is cost effective, and we have a lot more bells and whistles to really be able to, so it ties back in with that customization but we have more bells and whistles to really fit it to the existing process. Customizing it from that first moment that they interact with the listing to the moment before moving forward with an application. Without going through a full demo, it's everything from cost to benefit and that value and between.

Jason: Cool. ShowMojo sounds like a really awesome tool for property managers. Some are a little bit nervous about the lock boxes and self-showings, so what's your perception on who decides to do that and who decides not to? Because it seems like there's two solid camps there. I could never do that. It's too risky, and I love it and it's amazing. It seems very polarizing, I notice, whether or not to do lock boxes.

Abi: I would say we are definitely fans of in-person showings because there are questions that you're not going to be able to… Number one, the first thing is that you're not going to be able to show occupied units. You're never going to be able to show occupied units on a lock box showing. The obvious benefit to doing a company showing says that you can stay pre-leased, and show occupied units, get them leased before they even go vacant. You can also answer questions that you're not going to be able to answer during a self-show. You can get a feel for those prospective renters. There are a lot of benefits to an accompanied showing.

Jason: I'm curious about the pre-lease situation, how to ShowMojo handle the existing residents of the property and make sure that's communicated, because that's usually seems to be one of the most difficult sticking points with trying to do showing. Sometimes they're really resistant to having people come into their place. The communication back and forth. Then you're trying to negotiate times with them and with prospective renters. That communication gets a little cumbersome. Does ShowMojo try to facilitate that?

Abi: A couple of things. One and I've had this conversation recently, so that's why I say a couple of things. I would have ordinarily just started with showing acceptance, which is where you can put in the residence information and they have to accept the show times or reject them. But the reason I say a couple is because I've had this conversation twice in the last couple of weeks. The response from the property manager was the same. That won't work. They will reject it every time.

I said okay. Then in my brain, the way that I creatively think about this, is it goes back to the way that calendars are set up and ShowMojo. There is a way to set up a specific time window for each property. That is the only time that that property can be shown. I said, okay, well then, great. If they will reject every time, then you don't necessarily need to do showing acceptance with them. What you need to do is you need to say I will be showing your property, because you've given notice. Tell me what day of the week and what time frame will work for you for the next 60 days or 30 days or whatever notice they’ve had to give.

Block it out for that recurring week notice. Maybe it's Friday from 2:00–5:00 are their window that you are allowed to show their unit. Then that way that is the only time that the showings will get booked for that property. Either way there is an option in ShowMojo. Chances are there's a way to accommodate it. There's the showing acceptance where you can put in the residence information or the owners, if its owner occupied. You can put in the owner acceptance too. You can put in there showing acceptance or you can block out the certain time windows for the property, so either way.

Jason: Sometimes it's easier to tell people that it’s going to happen, instead of asking for permission.

Abi: Exactly.

Jason: I like that. But the showing acceptance thing, that's pretty cool. This software has been around for a while. It really was I believe the first on the market that really did the scheduled showings model. It sounds like they've been optimizing and innovating since then and adding features. I think that is the niche that it's quite customizable which I think is appealing to property managers. It sounds like you have really good syndication. You also have the lock boxes thing. Anything else anybody should know about ShowMojo?

Abi: If you've got questions, if you're thinking that it could do something, I wonder if it does this, odds are it does. We've worked with real estate listings. There's ways to do maintenance checkups. We use ShowMojo for our own demo scheduling platform. When somebody comes on our website to schedule a demo, we use ShowMojo for that. The way that it can be customized to fit whatever needs you have, it is endless. We just rolled out occupant-led showings.

If you're actually having a tenant do a showing for you, a renter, with some of the people that may have been under more lock down restrictions. I know that sometimes you move towards the things that you have to do. I can sit here and rant and rave about ShowMojo for a while.

Jason: That occupant-led showing is an interesting idea. I talked to the property manager and he had (I think) 1000 tours or more at a conference. He said that his company never did showings. He said, we just pay the occupants to show the property and we give them some sort of kickback if it gets rented. They’re incentivized to sell the place.

Abi: That's a great idea.

Jason: The biggest complaint or challenge that you hear in leasing is just the time wasting phone calls. This is just such a time suck for property managers. You have people calling up and saying what's the square footage on this listing that I'm looking at right now, that has the square footage on it. Stuff like that. Does ShowMojo facilitate phone calls or work well with the solution that does?

Abi: We do. We have our ShowMojo phone which is automated, that's included with all of the way that we do things which allows prospective renters to always get schedule a showing link or view all of the available listings and a gallery. It also will determine if somebody's running late for a showing and cancel it if they're running too late and follow up to reschedule. But we also have live answers available to our customers that are additional, but very affordable, very cost-effective.

They can turn it on or off at any time but it's with our call team and they will answer basic questions just like you mentioned if it’s something that they missed in the listing detail, they can schedule showings. If somebody calls to follow up on an application, they can answer that question. If it’s a potential owner, they can answer those questions. They can take messages and forward them over to the team. It’s something that they can turn on outside of office hours if they want to have their team handle it during office hours and have somebody else answer outside of office hours. We do have the ability to help with that.

Jason: Where's the call center team based out of?

Abi: We have virtual call centers, but they're both US and out of the US space. Odds are, if you call during daylight/evening hours, you're going to get somebody in the US and then outside of that, 2:00 AM, you may not get somebody in California.

Jason: It’s a 24-hour thing.

Abi: Yeah.

Jason: All right, any questions I missed?

Abi: I don't think so. I don't like to control the flow. I feel like we had a good chat. I feel like it was good.

Jason: Cool. How can people find out more about ShowMojo?

Abi: You can always come to showmojo.com and connect with us there. If you want to send me an email, you can also always reach me at abbey.wasserman@showmojo.com. You can reach us on our website. Find us on LinkedIn and all that fun stuff.

Jason: Cool. Well Abi, I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrowShow. We finally got ShowMojo in the books.

Abi: Thanks for having us.

Jason: Now I can point people to a podcast episode when they ask me about ShowMojo.

Abi; There we go.

Jason: All right. I appreciate you being on and I'll let you go.

Abi: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Jason: All right. Property managers, if you are a property management entrepreneur and you want to add doors, you're wanting to grow your business, reach out to DoorGrow. We've got this new mastermind that we started towards the end of last year, which has been really awesome. That's probably why you're wondering why I haven’t been doing very many podcast episodes. I've been really enjoying coaching clients and helping them grow. It's what I'm passionate about. We've got about 54 businesses in our mastermind as of today.

Our goal was to hit 50 by the end of June, so we hit our target and we've got some really awesome clients, really awesome businesses in the program. One of our clients, a really hard worker, put in 3–5 hours a day using one of the strategies that I gave them. It cost them zero dollars, it’s just time, and he's added 125 doors in six months. He was stuck at about 80 units before coming to us. He tried SEO and some other things.

We've got clients that are showing up. One of our clients in the last weekly checking call said that they're adding 100 doors from one owner. The week before that, 21 doors. We’ve got another client that's been with us in the mastermind for coming up on maybe about a year, but at a previous call checked in adding a 25-unit complex, a 35-unit complex and these are by doing zero dollars in advertising.

One thing I want to point out is if you want to grow your business fast, right now, the largest companies in property management are losing more doors than they're getting on. They're spending thousands of dollars a month on internet marketing. If you want to shift away from internet marketing, which isn't even working for the biggest companies, and getting cold leads that are time-wasters, tire-kickers, and have a low close rate, let me share with you and teach you how to grow your business rapidly by going after the blue ocean using that strategy. The 70% that are self-managing, creating warmer lead opportunities. Warm leads have a 90% close rate or higher typically for most property managers.

I'm going to teach you how to facilitate that, how to make that work really well in your favor. You have other people feeding you more business, you're getting more from online reviews, and you're able to target groups, things that are high leverage that will feed you warm leads. Check us out at DoorGrow, schedule a call with us, and chat with us about the new DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind.

Our guarantee in the mastermind is that within the first 30 days, the very latest by the end of the first 60, we will have double offset the monthly cost of the masterminds. You're making twice as much money in residual income. Otherwise, I'll continue to coach you for free.

We've not yet had to have anybody use that guarantee. That's if you're willing to keep our three commitments, which means one hour strategic time in the morning, being a business owner instead of saying I’ll work on my business tonight or on the weekend like a lot of business owners tend to do which doesn't generally happen. That's the garbage scraps of your time.

Second commitment that's required is two hours a day, a tactical time to work on growing the business and implementing the strategies that I give you. That's less time than it would take to deal with cold leads. You're going to get a much bigger return and result.

Then the third commitment is to show up to one of our two weekly group coaching calls that we have on Zoom. Those are on Wednesdays at 11:00 Central Time, noon Eastern. 9:00 Pacific, 10:00 Mountain. Those are on Wednesdays and Fridays. Wednesdays, we focus on adding doors, growth, sales, referrals, reputation, prospecting methods. We talk about websites, et cetera.

On Fridays, we get into operations DoorGrow OS, which is better than EOS retraction. We've had several come from that sort of camp. It's the ultimate operating system for property management business. We get into DoorGrow ATS—applicant tracking system and hiring system.

My goal is to build rapidly companies that can handle rapid growth, quickly hiring, off-loading in making sure that the business gets more and more in alignment for you, giving you the business owner more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, and more support so that it becomes more fun the bigger your business get. I'm really good at helping business ownership towards that. If you're frustrated, stuck in the operation side or in the growth side, talk to my team and let's get you maybe on board with the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind.

I appreciate everybody that's tuned into this or that's been paying attention to us on iTunes or on YouTube. Be sure to like, subscribe, give us positive reviews. We love all that kind of stuff if you got value from this. Until next time, everyone, to our mutual growth. Bye everybody.

Download this Episode

Jun 29, 2021

Are short-term rental businesses coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and being resurrected? Do owners love the return on investment (ROI) and income, but tired of the turnover, logistics, and moving parts? If you’re doing it all on your own, hand it over.

Today’s guest is Andrew LeBaron with BuyMoreTime, a flat-rate property management solution for short-term rentals. Andrew began his real estate journey by being the marketing director and a guest on Joe Fairless’s Best Ever Real Estate Investing Advice Show. Then, Andrew started buying, selling, wholesaling, fixing, and flipping properties and got licensed to go even further.

You’ll Learn...

[02:13] How Andrew went from greeting big-name podcast guests to becoming one.

[05:15] Hoteling 101: Managing a hotel is not time and freedom. It's a lot of work.

[05:54] Team Effort: If you don’t have a team, you will not thrive (or sleep).

[09:23] COVID: Great for short-term rentals, not for property managers or owners.

[12:40] Questions: How much could my property rent for? What needs to be inside it?

[16:23] Mistakes: Give gifts and leave notes for guests to make a big difference.

Tweetables

“Shorter rental management is big bucks.”

Hoteling 101: Owners of short-term rental properties just wanted more time and freedom, and managing a hotel is not time and freedom. It's a lot of work.

“There's so many facets to this. There's legal, there's inventory, there is coordination with cleaning and maintenance. Then, there’s guest responses. It's literally 24/7.”

“When you have a short-term rental, you're not selling a place to stay. You're selling an experience.”

Resources

The Best Short-Term Rental Management

Andrew LeBaron on Facebook

Best Ever Real Estate Investing Advice Show with Joe Fairless

JF1896: How To Grow Your Property Management Company with Jason Hull