Property management growth expert, Jason Hull, has coached and helped hundreds of property management entrepreneurs change their businesses and lives. After all this time observing the industry, he offers an outside perspective on the kinds of software every PM entrepreneur needs.
In this episode, Jason Hull describes the ultimate stack of software for property management entrepreneurs, from the back office and maintenance to process documentation and hiring.
You’ll Learn…
[03:00] The Best Back Office PM Software
[05:26] Managing Maintenence Requests
[08:11] Doing Showings with Tenant Turner, ShowMojo, and Rently
[10:00] Inspection Software and Sales CRMs
[12:08] What you Need for Processes, Task Management, and Hiring
[18:26] Why to Use the Profit First System
“I don't use property management software because I don't actually manage rental properties, right? But I have talked to thousands of property managers, and so I am kind of like the magic fly on the wall.”
“Leads are really only good for about the first five minutes.”
“I want to be able to pick the best tools because software's way cheaper than people.”
“Shift away from one-off showings to open houses. This is going to be significant in collapsing time there. It creates a sense of false scarcity.”
Resources
[00:00:00] I want to be able to pick the best tools because software's way cheaper than people, so even some of the most expensive software might only cost you maybe a thousand or 2000 bucks a month, right, if it were really expensive. People usually cost you more than a thousand or 2000 bucks a month.
[00:00:14] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and residual income.
[00:00:51] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.
[00:01:14] So we're going to talk about the ultimate property management software stack. I get this question all the time, property management software, "what's the ultimate stack?" Or "what software should I use?" Or "I've heard about this," or "we're using this, is this the best?" And I don't use property management software, right? I don't use property management software because I don't actually manage rental properties, right? But I have talked to thousands of property managers, and so I am kind of like the magic fly on the wall that's gotten more info and I don't think there's any other coach, anybody else out there that has the insight or the views or knowledge that I have. And so let me share with you just based on the feedback that I've gotten from property management business owners, my nerdiness related to software (I'm kind of nerdy.) This is what if I were starting property management company, this is the stack that I would use. And I don't think I have relationships with any of these, so they're not paying me to say this. One of the vendors might give me some sort of incentive or something if I send them business, but I don't even know if they're sending me stuff. I don't pay attention to it.
[00:02:25] So, here's kind of the ultimate stack based on what I know right now. And somebody may be watching this and they might think, "there's something better, Jason." If you know that there's something better, comment what you love and what you use and what you think is the ultimate stack. If you're a software geek, if you're a research geek, if you put in a lot of time and energy into this, I'd love to hear from you because I'm always looking for what's best for my clients and for everybody in the industry at large. So for single family, residential property management companies, which is largely the target audience that I focus on, this is the ultimate stack.
[00:03:00] So first, basic, you need some sort of back office property management software. This is going to help you with the accounting piece and keeping track of all your rental properties. This is going to be the main sort of foundational piece in your business software- wise. , Usually I would recommend rentmanager.com. So Rent Manager... I just, I hear the most positive feedback on Rent Manager. And so I recommend that you take a look at that software. Now, I know it's really hard to switch software, so if you are using AppFolio or Buildium or Rentec Direct or Propertyware, or-- gosh, what else is out there? I don't know-- any of these tools, I'm not telling you, you should go switch software. Yeah. You know, it's hard. It's really hard to switch software, and usually people spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of energy to switch software only to notice the other software is missing some things that they liked in the previous one or has some other problems.
[00:04:03] And so that's not generally super effective to do that. So the reason I like Rent Manager, let me explain this and maybe a little bit about why I don't like some of the others, right. Some of the challenges. One of the most common is AppFolio. So one of the reasons I wouldn't choose AppFolio is because AppFolio does not have an open API. Now granted, they have a lot of tools, right? So maybe you don't need it is the justification, but I like to pick the best tools. I don't want one Jack of all trades master of none, maybe master of some, maybe master of a few. I want to build the ultimate stack, and if I'm going to build the ultimate stack, that means I need to be able to pick and choose and create my ultimate Swiss army knife, my ultimate multi-tool, the ultimate thing that I want. And so I want to be able to pick the best tools because software's way cheaper than people, so if I can pick a software, even if it's more expensive or it's additional, instead of translating or transferring that cost onto the shoulders of humans and staffing costs, and I can just mitigate a little bit of staffing costs, it's totally worth it to me. So even though some of the most expensive software might only cost you maybe a thousand or 2000 bucks a month, right, if it were really expensive, people usually cost you more than a thousand or 2000 bucks a month, unless you're getting part-time people or people in the Philippines or something.
[00:05:26] Then usually you need something on the maintenance side, and this is usually maybe once you're at maybe 50 to maybe 150 doors, somewhere in that range. But at some point, you want some leverage when it comes to maintenance coordination. I hear great feedback from Property Meld. Now, these guys, when I did a podcast episode with them, we set up some sort of thing. I think it's still active. It'll send them a lead. They might give me a kickback on it. I can't remember. Property Meld, if you're listening, you should be giving me kickback for this still, but I don't even pay attention to it. But if you go to doorgrow.com/maintenance, long time ago, I set up a quiz. So if you go to this website, I set up a little quiz that you can take, and it will give you, I believe a 10% discount if you fill that out with Property Meld. But Property Meld, what's really cool about Property Meld is basically it's a three-way text message system between you, the tenant, and the vendor.
[00:06:26] And so this allows all three of you to be communicating, and it allows you to see the communication between the tenant and the vendor, which them communicating directly speeds things up like dramatically. There's that transparency that you can see how they're doing and see how it's going. So that's on the maintenance side. Now with Property Meld, they have a relationship, I believe still that if you get their full service, then also that's pairing it with EZ-- spelled E and then Z, which is sort of a cute, clever name that they probably should rebrand, but EZ Repair Hotline. I don't know if it's ezrepair.com or easyrepairhotline.com. Hopefully my team could figure that out when they do the show notes, (it's https://www.ezrepairhotlinellc.com) but EZ Repair and if you talk to Property Meld and get their full service, I guess that's who they use and that's what's included--
[00:07:18] EZ Repair is a call center service. It was founded by Andy Shin. He's been on the podcast before. He used to manage the call center for AAA, so he knows what he's doing. His team's based out of Vegas. And my understanding is they've really improved since he started the business, and they were a lot more affordable than Night Tenders, which became Super Tenders, which I think became Abodea or something like that. So my understanding is that they're are a lot more affordable, and they're comparable. They're pretty decent and pretty good at what they do, and that they made a lot of strides to get even better over time. So I would check out EZ Repair along with that, and what they do is they handle the calls. So they handle your maintenance calls. So then you'll have that for your maintenance calls, and that's going to take a load off of your plate as well. So, that's on the maintenance side.
[00:08:11] The other tool in my ultimate stack if I were making a property management business is: I would get Tenant Turner, and that is just at tenantturner.com. You've got some competitors in this space. You've got Rently, you've got ShowMojo. I've heard good feedback recently on ShowMojo from some people. It seems like they do a pretty decent job. They've also got a call center where they'll field, I think the phone calls, I don't know, related to the rental properties, but Tenant Turner is probably the tool that I would go with as of right now. I've met some of the principals at that business. I like them. I feel like they're stand up guys and ethical. I believe I've had them on my podcast, but I like Tenant Turner, and that's probably what I would go with. So, that would be on the leasing side, and the smart thing to do on the leasing side, quick bone I'll throw out to everybody there is to shift away from one-off showings to open houses.
[00:09:05] This is going to be significant in collapsing time there. It creates a sense of false scarcity, I guess, you know, lots of tenants coming at the same time. Do a 30 minute window. Just do it one weekday in the evening and one weekend day, and do it for a 30 minute window for each and everybody that wants to see that property goes to that, and Tenant Turner can help make sure people are reminded, they show, it can pre-screen, um, allows people to book that time and that sort of stuff, so I would go with Tenant Turner.
[00:09:38] Let me think if there's anything else I would use. I mean, this is kind of the core stack. You've got the main leasing side thing, which would be Tenant Turner and then you've got the maintenance, which are the two big sort of wings of the property management business or challenges. And then you've got your PM back office, which would be Rent Manager. So that would be kind of the core what I would do. Then you need some sort of inspection software. I don't get a lot of feedback on that, but I know there's zInspector I've heard good things about. There's Happy Inspector. There's Inspect & Cloud, and I'm sure all of those integrate with Rent Manager and probably all the other software out there, so I would pick one of those. I would take a look at those, and I would probably have some sort of inspection software as well. And that's going to be a pretty good stack for your business.
[00:10:27] Oh, there's one other software here I would probably recommend as of right now, that would be a sales CRM. As of right now, that would be LeadSimple. So LeadSimple is, as far as I know, the only property management sales CRM. There might be some others that can pull in leads and are okay, but LeadSimple's claim to fame is that if a lead comes in through your web form or your website, you can set up to parse the email, pull the phone number, out and initiate a phone call right away, because leads are really only good for about the first five minutes really, maybe the first 10, but you need to follow up within the first five minutes and then people are impressed. The lead's still hot, it's fresh, and it's not gone stale, to give you some other analogies here, but you want to follow up right away because otherwise, they're going to move on to the next company, and the first property manager that they talk to or that talks to them is more likely to get the deal.
[00:11:19] So, And if you're spending money on lead generation, which I don't recommend, but if you're spending money on like advertising, which I don't recommend there's better ways to grow your business, but if you're spending a bunch of money on advertising, you are wasting a massive amount of money into a leaky sales funnel if you don't have something like LeadSimple, or you aren't following up on leads within the first five to 10 minutes. So that can be effective as well. I send them so much business, they should be sending me some sort of kickback. So LeadSimple, if you hear this, you should be sending me some money, people, 'cause I send you a lot of business. All right. But yeah, I would check out LeadSimple. They have also a workflow built into their platform. That's kind of a, I guess, a competitor to Process Street. Personally, I don't know, Lead Simple's tools, so I can't recommend it, but internally we use Process Street.
[00:12:08] I really like Process Street for processes. This is their website: it's process.st. I've had them on the podcast as well, but I really like Process Street. We use it internally. It's great for creating process documentation, but also for using as a checklist to run through that process, and it records an instance for each checklist every time somebody runs through that and uses that process. And so it's like having a clipboard with check boxes they have to go through each time they do that particular task. Except it's not a clipboard, it's digital. So I like Process Street a lot. You can get really complex with it or you can get really simple. And so we use Process Street internally. I highly recommend it. I like it. Now, I'm hearing some really good feedback lately.
[00:12:55] You also need some sort of task management system just for one off tasks. So there's a lot of people that will use something like Asana. Now, some people are, instead of using Process Street, which is really robust. They'll use something that's maybe not as robust, but has similar functionality to that and Asana, and that's Monday. So I'm hearing some really great things about monday.com for basically largely task management and maybe repetitive processes. Okay, so you may want to check out monday.com for your internal processes. Asana does have repeating tasks and has templates, so you can have sort of formulas of things, but I don't think it has the functionality of people following through a process and being able to show like screen recordings and screen captures and screenshots and steps and Process Street, you can build all that stuff in.
[00:13:49] I don't know if Monday can do that also, but Monday does allow you to kind of see where things are in a stage in a workflow and have stages and stuff. So for you know, really large pools of processes that are being worked on, like maybe you have like 20 properties you're onboarding, you can have an instance of Monday of each, similar in Process Street. In Asana, you would just build out like clone templates, probably. So these are these are some of the tools that I would be taking a look at seriously. If I were to start a property management biz.
[00:14:23] And now the other thing that I would recommend that a property management business is eventually once you have a team, you're going to need some sort of planning system, and we've built what I believe is the ultimate software planning system. We call that DoorGrow OS. OS stands for 'operating systems.' So there's a lot of talk about like EOS which is from like Traction or Rocket Fuel, these books. And, these are good books. It's a good system. These are good ideas. I really feel though that the flaw in this is It's built too much around the entrepreneur is what they claim, but it's not actually built around the entrepreneur. EOS is really built around the idea of the integrator, and the integrator is like the most critical piece in this system. And an integrator really is a glorified operations person that they're also putting over and it should be running your cadence and running your planning, but they're putting over sales and marketing and usually operators should not be over sales and marketing. It's a big tactical mistake in business. And it also is a very top-down system instead of the team kind of, it's, it it plays into the ego of most entrepreneurs thinking they're the visionary and everybody has to do things that they want. And it's very top down.
[00:15:45] DoorGrow OS is more bottom up. It allows you to have your entire team focused on the goals of the business based on what the biggest needs of the business are and the biggest needs of the entrepreneur are. And so, DoorGrow OS is really entrepreneur centric, visionary centric, which it's your business, and then we build the ultimate team and planning and cadence around you so you're going to have a business that actually gives you more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, and more support the bigger it gets instead of the reverse. There's some other flaws with EOS, like I don't like their accountability chart where they've got visionary and then integrator, and then the entire team answers to the integrator. I think that's the most dangerous business model ever. You're putting somebody in a position of power in which the entire team are loyal and connected to them. And they're probably not good at being over all of these different department. They basically, if they were or could be, they don't need you. 'Cause they could just chop off that top layer off the accountability chart, which is just a fancy word for an org chart in EOS and eliminate you and they can start their own business, right, if they really are that good.
[00:16:50] So you need a really good planning system. I recommend DoorGrow OS it's really cool system. And then the other thing is you need eventually if you're really wanting to scale and grow your business and you're growing quickly, like a lot of our clients do, you will need an ATS or an applicant tracking system. And so we have our system, which is DoorGrow ATS. And so, this is the ultimate hiring system for a business. We have some really cool stuff coming related to this, but this allows you to basically get really great people and get what I call the three fits, which is having the ultimate hire where they match all three fits, where they're a culture fit, skill fit, and personality fit for your team, and usually the most important of those three is cultural fit. Most people hire just based on what the business needs and based on skill that is needed, so they get a skill fit. But they're not the right personality sometimes for the position, so they're not going to actually be great at it.
[00:17:51] They're maybe not a good culture fit, which means they don't share your values and won't do things in a way that you would feel safe with. And so you'll never fully trust them. And so right now, if you have a team member that's just not great, I guarantee, they're probably not a culture fit or they're probably not a personality fit. Skill fit or intelligence, they just, maybe they're too dumb to do it. Most likely not. They might just not be the right personality and might not be the right cultural fit. So DoorGrow ATS is another system that would need to be built out in the business. And there's several other systems I've talked about on previous episodes that a business might need in the business.
[00:18:26] And I'll throw out one other system that we use in our business that I'm a big fan of, and that is Profit First. We have some other tools like my CEO metrics and some other stuff that my team report in, but I really like, you know, as a basic level, really healthy accounting system, I like the Profit First system. I've had mike Michalowicz the author of the book Profit First on a previous podcast episode. I recommend you check that out if you're running into cashflow issues, if you're having trouble paying your team, if you've run into any of these problems that are very typical in early stage businesses or with entrepreneurs. I've been there. You've probably been there. I highly recommend implementing the Profit First system in your business. It's really simple to implement. It's just getting some additional bank accounts set up and then as money comes in, divvying it up into these different bank accounts based on percentages and making sure that you're taking out a percentage for profits so that you are profitable first and then what's left over one of those will be expenses. And so I recommend taking a look at that. So these are some of the systems that I think would help too.
[00:19:31] If I were building the ultimate stack for the ultimate problem management business, these are the things that I would take a look at. And then really, it's about getting really great people and building a really great team so that you have awesome team members. Yeah. So that's going to create the ultimate business and that we want to build the ultimate business around you. So if you're struggling or trying to figure out how to grow your business, you are running into the bottleneck where you feel like you are the biggest bottleneck in the business, you feel like you're always having to micromanage your team, you're trying to get them motivated, trying to get them to do the right things. I really think you could use our scale program in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind, and we would love to talk with you. We easily will help pay for the program just by helping you to cut costs, increase the efficiency of your team. Usually, I can get people three times the output from their team or cut their staffing costs in half or by a third, depending on what your goal is, we can increase that. And then we also want to increase your level of what I call the four reasons. You're getting more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, and more support.
[00:20:36] So we will realign the business around you and realign the team. So anyway, reach out to us at DoorGrow. Check us out at doorgrow.com and until next time everybody to our mutual growth. I hope you crush it. Take care, everyone.
[00:20:49] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:21:16] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
If you have made it to the 800-1200 door range as a property management entrepreneur, you have likely found strategies, essential connections, and executive team members that have helped your business grow and scale.
However, even at this stage, savvy entrepreneurs tend to find themselves dealing with problems. Join property management growth expert, Jason Hull, in the final addition to the DoorGrow Avatars Series as he details the common issues PM entrepreneurs face at 800-1200 doors.
You’ll Learn…
[01:19] Defining the Savvy Property Management Entrepreneur
[03:46] How to Deal with Burnout and Building an Executive Team
[05:00] Learning from Smaller Property Managers
[07:49] Implementing the Ultimate Planning System
[09:06] Transitioning to the Business of Your Dreams
“At the 800 to 1200 door range, these are savvy property management entrepreneurs. They are savvy at running a team. They're savvy in their business.”
“As you come up through this DoorGrow scale that I've been talking about of these different stages in the life cycle, you gradually are being more connected to other savvy people and mentors.”
“It's helpful for you to be around these smaller and more nimble property management businesses, because these businesses, they can implement stuff quickly.”
“One of the best tips I can have is you need to get a really efficient operating system in place.”
Resources
[00:00:00] This is better. This is going to allow your team to be involved in decision-making instead of you being so top down, trying to tell everybody what the goals are and what they should be doing right? Because that means you're dragging them up the mountain. They're like all sitting in a wagon and you're clearing the path ahead and trying to drag them up to the goal.
[00:00:17] We want to get the team pulling you in the wagon. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:55] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:19] So today we're going to be continuing on that series of these different stages in the life cycle of being a property management entrepreneur. So this might be way beyond where you can even maybe imagine your business at right now, but we've gotten to the point where we're at now that 800 to 1200 door range. So at the 800 to 1200 door range, these are savvy property management entrepreneurs. They are savvy at running a team. They're savvy in their business, so they have probably by now had mentors, coaches... they've invested in themselves, and this is something that's very unique between them and maybe a solopreneur is they've really been investing in themselves in order to get to this level. It's not really possible to get to this level without some self investment and without having really good culture defined in their business. So they have a business that has culture. They have a cohesive team. They've been in the business for a while, like a long time, maybe more than a decade, maybe more than two decades.
[00:02:24] At this stage, this might be a multi-generational family business, or maybe it was part of somebody else's business and it was purchased, right. But there's some depth in this business at this stage. They're rare at this stage. There's not a lot of businesses, especially in the single family, residential or small multi space that are at 800 to 1200 doors.
[00:02:45] Likely at this stage, if you're the entrepreneur or the business owner, you likely have little to no connection to the business in some ways. Like you just might not be super focused on it. If you are, I want to talk to you because I love those business owners. They're still engaged. They're still passionate about the business and they usually love the stuff that I teach even more than people at earlier stages because they are ready for it and they can value it. You know, a lot of the things that I learn and absorb and take in by investing in my own self in high level masterminds and coaches and books and everything that I do to learn, they love this stuff because they're ready for it.
[00:03:24] They know how useful it is, and I get the best feedback from the most high functioning people, and those are my favorite people to work with. But there's a lot at this stage, they've really checked out. Some have been completely burnt out on the business. They've put somebody else in to run it. Their whole goal has been, "how do I escape from this business, this vehicle that's uncomfortable?" So they put somebody else in place.
[00:03:46] So they have an executive team, they have hiring systems, they have a defined sales process, they have a BDM most likely. Somebody else is doing sales for them a lot of the time. Their website is usually I find outdated. They're only updating it maybe once every 10 years, maybe sometimes only once every five years, so their website's probably overdue for an upgrade. I've noticed they often have acquired multiple property management companies, at least maybe two usually, at least one or two including a significant competitor. So they've eaten somebody up, and they're possibly looking for the nearest exit to see if anybody else would be willing to do the same for them because they might be burnt out.
[00:04:27] So, they have built this really great executive team in which each member of this team takes complete ownership over a piece of the business, so they have somebody in place that's handling all of the maintenance stuff. They have somebody in place that's handling the management stuff. They have somebody in place that's handling the internal operations for the business. They have somebody in place that's handling the financials and the accounting and the bookkeeping and the reporting and all that. So they have key people. That's an executive team, so that they don't have to wear every hat or do all of these things in the business.
[00:05:00] What else about them? Something that's really important at this stage: they're now paying attention to the smaller businesses that are in the industry. They go to NARPM events and different things like this because they want to see what the little guys are doing and what innovations other people have, because they want to maybe apply this, but they don't want to be the guinea pig. They want to see what all the little guinea pigs are doing and experimenting with and whether or not it was hurtful or helpful for their business. And so they benefit by being around other property management entrepreneurs that are not at their level. Now, they do probably have connections, network, mastermind people that they hang out with that are at their level. You know, they've got some connections there 'cause you don't get to this stage without some connections and some relationships. Solopreneurs are heavily isolated, and as you come up through this DoorGrow scale that I've been talking about of these different stages in the life cycle, you gradually are being more connected to other savvy people and mentors, peers, heroes that you want to be connected to, or that you look up to so that you can get good ideas, good feedback, and that are not the emperor with no clothes sitting on top of your little micro kingdom.
[00:06:18] You recognize there's people out there that are doing better than you are that can give you good feedback. So it's helpful for you to be around these smaller and more nimble property management businesses, because these businesses, they can implement stuff quickly. They can adopt new technology rapidly, way faster than you can, right? Because for you, you have a really large ship. It's difficult to maneuver this thing and to turn it and to make changes because you have a lot of doors, you have a lot of team members, and there's a bit of friction there generally. But the advantage you have is that even small optimizations, small tweaks, small improvements at various stages of your pipeline, to your pricing, to your website, to all the things that we could facilitate or help with at DoorGrow...
[00:07:03] Small tweaks and improvements, for you, give you a big result. It makes a big difference. It can have a significant financial impact. It's very easy for us to save you a little bit of money on staffing costs or increase efficiency a little bit or to make small movements that will easily pay for any of our services or program and help you justify it. So and paying for something like DoorGrow and services is really a drop in the bucket. You waste way more money, probably on bad team members or team members that aren't as efficient as they could be. Staffing costs are really high for you at this stage. And so we want to find some efficiencies and some ways to improve some stuff. That is those at the 800 to 1200 doors.
[00:07:49] So one of the best tips I can have is you need to get a really efficient operating system in place. We call that DoorGrow OS. It's the most effective strategic planning system that I believe exists. A lot of people are getting caught up on Traction and EOS, and this. This is better. This is going to allow your team to be involved in decision-making and your team bottom up to be creating the goals and the growth of the business instead of you being so top down, trying to tell everybody what the goals are and what they should be doing and being a dictator, right? Because that means you're dragging them up the mountain. They're like all sitting in a wagon and you're clearing the path ahead and trying to drag them up to the goal.
[00:08:30] We want to get the team pulling you in the wagon. You just are sitting in it with your map and your strategy and your pen, and you're figuring out where we need to go, and they're clearing the jungle path. They're laying out the road. They're making it easy and they're pulling you along. And when you have that really good executive team and you have a really good strategic vision and plan in place that your team runs and that your operator really leads and is in control of, you will see your business grow rapidly significantly because you'll be able to focus on what the business needs most right now, instead of everybody just doing their day-to-day work.
[00:09:06] So that's something that we can help you with DoorGrow, so, that's basically, I think, about it at that stage that I want to touch on today. These are really, usually, cool business owners. They're either really cool or they're really burnt out. So hopefully you're not the burnt out one. If you are, let's transition you into the business of your dreams, and if you feel like you're close to having the business of your dreams, you just need some tweaks, talk to us at DoorGrow. We'll help you out. So that's it for today until next time, to our mutual growth, make sure to go to doorgrow.com. Schedule a call with our team, and join our free Facebook group at doorgrowclub.com. Bye, everyone.
[00:09:43] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:10:10] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
Once an entrepreneur reaches a certain level of doors in their property management business, they often seek to quit wearing so many hats and offload as much as they can. Unfortunately, even with 600-800 doors, PM entrepreneurs struggle to build an executive team, enjoy their day-to-day, and reach their business’s full potential.
In this episode, Jason shares his insight on the unique challenges that property management business owners face in the 600-800 door range.
You’ll Learn…
[01:16] The Next Property Management Entrepreneur Avatar
[02:00] What Entrepreneurs Have in The 600-800 Door Range
[03:20] A Common Mistake Entrepreneurs Make with Ads
[05:59] Expanding and Starting New Businesses
[07:00] Why PM Entrepreneurs Get Stuck at 600-800 Doors
[08:55] How to Get Support and Get Unstuck
“It's really difficult to outpace the market attrition with marketing.”
“If the main goal is the four reasons…If you do it the right way, this could be really a fun time in the business.”
“Have an executive team, trust them to implement things, paint the picture of the vision, and focus on building the right culture and investing in coaching and mentoring and supporting your team members.”
“We need a framework, a planning system, so that this is done effectively, that's led by the team, that's not top down and pushed and forced by you. This is where you really start to trust your team.”
[00:00:00] We get into this temptation where we're like, "I can just throw money at things to solve a problem." Unfortunately, this usually becomes painful as the market shifts. And at this stage, you probably are losing more doors due to the owners selling than advertising can replace.
[00:00:15] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing your business and in life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:55] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow now let's get into the show.
[00:01:16] All right. So today we're going to continue on this series of going through these different stages of the property management entrepreneur life cycle. So really brief recap: we've touched on some of these different stages, like being a pure startup in the startup stage, solopreneurs, creating a little bit of leverage. Today we're going to talk about the 600 to 800 door category. So last time, we talked about the 400 to 600 door category. And so, there's kind of a category of property management business owners in the 600 to 800 doors. And at this stage, they are actively seeking to escape the day-to-day and to get others into key positions.
[00:02:00] So usually, universally, you have a BDM by about the stage. You're probably no longer doing all the sales yourself. You might, if you really love that and you're really good at that, you may hold onto that. But a lot of times they're getting a BDM. They're no longer focused on doing the sales. Either that, or you've made it probably your full-time focus like that's probably your full-time focus and you now have somebody else handling all the operations. So you've picked one of those sides: you've either shifted to doing all the operations and kind of running the business, and you have a BDM that's doing the sales, or you've shifted into being the salesperson, and you have an operator in your company.
[00:02:39] But either way, you're likely totally out of the actual day-to-day, boots-on-the-ground-level work of operations or fulfillment in the property management business. So at this stage, you probably now believe in pulling in outside experts. You probably believe in using coaches and mentors. You probably believe in investing in yourself and in the business to move the business forward. I don't think you generally get to this stage unless you've kind of moved past that idea that "I'm going to do it all on my own, and I'm going to do it all myself" and "I have all the answers." Right? You've evolved beyond that. Because that would have held you back or held you small, you know, prior to this.
[00:03:20] So, sometimes at this stage, what I see is that they're too focused, too heavily focused or in an unhealthy way, leveraged towards doing advertising. So they're spending a lot of money on ads in order to try and get leads, to grow their business, and they lose sight of opportunities related to maybe warm leads or referrals or prospecting or networking methods that could be effective because they've gravitated towards something they feel like they can just throw money at. Cause we get into this temptation where we're like, "I can just throw money at things to solve a problem." So you might be trying to solve the problem of the lead generation by paying for ads or advertising.
[00:04:04] Unfortunately, this usually becomes painful as the market shifts. And at this stage, you probably are losing more doors due to the owners selling than advertising can replace. This happens depending on how the market is going. You'll see property managers that are highly leveraged towards advertising and are spending a lot of their money and capital towards advertising in a bad market-- or I guess I should say a hot real estate market where investors are selling. They usually find that they're losing more doors than they can replace through advertising, because it's really difficult to outpace the market attrition with marketing. Right. And so, a lot of times at this stage, I notice property managers still have branding issues, but usually at this stage, they're a little less likely to make the changes they need to. So it's really difficult. They feel pretty cemented in their name, even if it's costing them money. So sometimes, I can get them to change or fix those things and it's always worth it if there's a leak there. But they're a little bit more rigid.
[00:05:07] At this stage, they've broken through some major pain and major stress points in a business to get to this level that cause most property managers to just say, "I don't want to get too big." Most property managers feel pain in the 200 to 400 door stage, and it gets really painful as they're kind of getting just beyond that, unless they finally break down and undo and redo how they do just about everything and finally let go of control and let go of doing some things and build an effective team or an executive level team. And so at this stage, you're probably building an executive level team or have team members that you trust to kind of start to own pieces of the business a little bit. So you broken through those major things, but you've likely moved on to other opportunities and are distracted by other businesses. So this is really tempting. I see this a lot.
[00:05:59] Once you get this business somewhat healthy and you get it to this stage, a lot of these business owners decide "I'm going to go start another property management business in another city," or "I'm going to go start another business like locally," or "I'm going to do some other things." So the entrepreneurial bug of startup stage that's tempting: business gets a little bit boring for them. So then they go and kind of start to screw up their focus and their attention by focusing on other things. And so they go and start to start other businesses, do other things, and then the main business doesn't really probably reach its full potential. It struggles a little bit. They might have some key people in place and they might get a little bit disconnected from reality or from what the business needs.
[00:06:43] So at this stage, this leveraged property management entrepreneur-- we'll call them leveraged because they have some leverage-- they have some key people. They're not having to wear every hat and do everything. They've probably got a pretty decent team by now. And very few entrepreneurs get to this level. Usually I see it, the 600 to 800 door level, the business owner starts to check out. Usually if they can get to this and they do it in a healthy way-- it's rare, but if I see them get to this stage and they do it in a healthy way, they will continue to grow and get to higher levels. But there's a lot of property managers that get stuck or stop at the 600 to 800 door level, because they're really burnt out on the business. They didn't really build it the right way. They didn't build the team the right way. And they are now trying to figure out: "how can I put somebody in place so I can get out of this business?" and so I see a lot of business owners during this stage kind of check out.
[00:07:38] By this point, they've been through so much pain and trial and tribulation and suffering and struggle that they're burnt out and they're done. So they get people in place. They get somebody to manage and run the business. They get an operator, they get a BDM, and then they're like, "The only thing I'm going to do is maybe show up the broker on our conferences and talk about how many doors I have." And you'll see some people that do that even at higher level door amounts. But if the main goal is the four reasons as I've talked about on previous episodes-- of having a business. This is the primary goal is to have more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, more support. If you do it the right way, this could be really a fun time in the business... if you do it the right way, but for a lot, at this point, they have the option or the opportunity to step out and get somebody else running the majority of everything for them, and just be an actual business owner, which might be tempting.
[00:08:34] So they might then put this business up and exit it fully, put it up for sale and find a company that is willing to acquire them. But this is a difficult stage. It can be, but I think the hardest stage is probably that 200 to 400 doors. That's really tough. That's one of the most painful stages I see companies at. So that's about all I think I have to say about that. So if you are in this stage, you probably would like some support on the operational side of things. You might want to give your team members better coaching and better support, so we would bring you into our mastermind and we would support your operator and we would support your BDMs so that they can both become really exceptional in those roles, which helps the business grow a lot more quickly, and it would help you to be able to just focus on the visionary side of things in dreaming and coming up with new ideas. And it would help put your ideas into a framework that the team can help you to build. Because now you have the team that can help you build things. We need a framework, a planning system, so that this is done effectively, that's led by the team, that's not top down and pushed and forced by you.
[00:09:47] This is where you really start to trust your team. Have an executive team, trust them to implement things, paint the picture of the vision, and focus on building the right culture and investing in coaching and mentoring and supporting your team members. We can help you do that in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. So if that sounds interesting, reach out to us. You can go to doorgrow.com, or you can join our free Facebook group, which you can get to by going to doorgrowclub.com. So that's it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.
At DoorGrow, we have some of the savviest property entrepreneurs on the planet in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. Brannon Potts is a property management business owner in North Texas, who joined DoorGrow with only 71 doors. In only 3 months, Brannon was able to grow his business to over 100 doors with 70 more on the way!
Join property management growth expert, Jason Hull, as he interviews Brannon Potts, a DoorGrow client. Brannon shares his experience with DoorGrow and how he has seen it make a beneficial impact on his business.
You’ll Learn…
[01:12] Meet DoorGrow client Brannon Potts
[04:42] Investing in Yourself and Your Business with Coaching
[07:27] What Makes Jason and DoorGrow Different?
[13:09] DoorGrow’s Two Key Ideas…
[20:07] Finding Fulfillment by Growing and Scaling the Business
[22:49] How Brannon used DoorGrow’s Script to Add Doors
[27:08] How You can Grow and Scale Your Business
“We have these moments as coaches where we feel like-- it's similar to as being a dad and seeing your kid get an award or do something.”
“As you've been building your business, it could get uglier and more painful, but we always try to make sure that the client understands that's the wrong way to do it.”
“Good, coaching or good marketing or good anything that you're going to pay for should give you an ROI, right? That means it's a good investment.”
“A lot of people are thinking ‘I'd rather just spend money. I'd rather just spend money because it would save me time,’ That's a cost. That's not an investment.”
[00:00:00] Jason: For those that are on the fence, thinking about DoorGrow maybe they've heard about DoorGrow, what would you say?
[00:00:05] Brannon: You might not like this, but I think it's so good, sometimes I wouldn't want to tell anybody cause it's so good for people.
[00:00:12] Jason: All right. Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, And you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:49] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management, business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:12] And my guest today is one of my clients, Brannon Potts. Brannon, welcome to the show.
[00:01:19] Brannon: Thank you. Thank
[00:01:20] Jason: you.
[00:01:21] So it's good to have you. So Brannon, you're a client that I really enjoy working with. 1. Because you just do what I tell you to do, and it works and you're doing the right things. So I appreciate you as a client because that's always fun for me is to have clients that like, believe in what we're doing, and get it. And do it. You know, starting out, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about how you got into property management in the first place?
[00:01:47] Brannon: Sure. I think it was back-- late 2016. We were actually doing well in our sales business but had a friend give us some advice about getting into property management and you say it, even in the intro: at first, I didn't have just a great perception of property management, but I said, okay, I'm going to get into this business, learn it. I didn't know it very much. I didn't know it really much at all. And we began to grow. And over these years, we just, we grew a little bit and happened to see one of your ads and started investigating and just said, you know what? I want to join this coaching. And I did. I just said, "I really don't know very much about the property management business, and you have a background in coaching this. I'm just going to follow what he says, not question it, and just do it."
[00:02:46] And then I was going to hold your feet to the fire because you promised it and committed that if I did, you would refund my money, and I began to do that and I still have so much more to go because in your coaching, the depth of that coaching that you give, I think I'm only maybe touching on 10% of it right now. And I'm looking forward to actually many years to come of getting deeper and deeper in implementing all the things that you provide in coaching because I've been coached before. I've been actually a coach myself for the sales side. And what we've always been taught is when you teach people, typically only 10% implement what you're teaching. And I said, man, "I don't want to be that 90% that doesn't. I want to be the 10% that does. And let the chips fall where they may and begin doing exactly what you said, trying to follow it as closely as I could."
[00:03:44] And what do you know? It happens. We grow, we have probably at this point, we're either from the initial investment of the coaching-- I bet you we're-- I'm trying to think-- three, four times, maybe five times now the dollars that we're generating from the coaching. So it was a great investment.
[00:04:04] Jason: You mean on a monthly basis?
[00:04:06] On a monthly basis.
[00:04:07] Yeah. So you've got way more residual income than what the program costs. So it's a no-brainer. And that's one of our initial goals with clients. Like we want to get them paid and make sure the program's double paid for within hopefully the first 30 to 60 days is the goal so that they can justify the expense and keep going. And then I guess you could say it's paying you now, to be part of the program.
[00:04:27] Brannon: It's-- I've made money off of this coaching and that's what everybody wants.
[00:04:32] Jason: That's what good, coaching or good marketing or good anything that you're going to pay for should give you an ROI, right? That means it's a good investment. So I'm glad that you're getting a good return on your investment. That's our goal. So you brought up something that I think it's interesting that you've worked with a lot of coaches. I've worked with a lot of coaches too. You know, I think one thing that's a little bit different from me than maybe other coaches in the industry, but there's a lot of coaches out there that don't have coaches. And they don't get coached themselves. And I think that's one of my competitive advantages, which is really simple is that I pay for really expensive coaching and masterminds and high ticket things to be involved in so that I can turn around and have value to give to my clients.
[00:05:16] Like I just came back from a mastermind, I pay a lot of money to be in it, and I shared an idea today with the group that you thought was pretty cool. We were talking about not focusing on referrals instead of referring to them, as in asking for– what did I say? I'll let you say it...
[00:05:32] Brannon: an introduction. And that is an extra benefit is not just taking the wisdom you already have. You're still pouring into yourself so that you have something to pour out.
[00:05:45] Cause I think a lot of people stop getting things poured into them and the great people, great leaders, and great entrepreneurs need something poured into them so that they can pour out to others. We need that relationship to continue. And that's what I appreciate of your coaching. It's your coaching, but you're still getting coached and I'm getting the benefit of your expense of coaching and you're handing extra value to us.
[00:06:14] Jason: Yeah. I'm not even going to say how much I spend on coaching a year right now, but it's a lot, it's a lot. I'm in two really high-ticket masterminds, but for me, I love it because I get to hang out with the best. Like I'm talking business owners that are doing millions and millions of dollars. I was hanging out with people that are doing millions a month in business. Some are hitting a million a month or more. And these are the kind of people I get to hang out with. And I love to be able to learn. It's fun for me. And having a program in which I get to share that stuff. That's just even more fun for me. Cause I love to share what I'm learning. That's just fun for me. So...
[00:06:51] Brannon: As soon as you brought that up, I went out and shared that with my team, the ones that were here at the moment, and then I'm going to share that again on another meeting of not asking for the referral, but asking for the introduction. There's just many layers to that, of how good it is.
[00:07:09] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And we chatted about that on our group coaching call today. And for those that are not in our group, you're missing out. So Brannon what have you noticed since joining the program? I mean, You talked about some of the concerns you had coming in and some of the challenges you were dealing with, and you mentioned that you've made your money back, you've gotten some results. How does this compare or differ or relate to all the other coaching stuff that you've been involved in the past?
[00:07:34] Brannon: Jason, I don't want you to get a big head, but it has been the best coaching I've had. And I talk about it all the time. I've been through several different coaches, both in the real estate side, and just some life coaches, and the value you bring is multiple layers and genuinely appreciate that, because that's what you teach us is bringing value to people and you do. And I would share this with anyone. This is not a sales pitch. This is true value. You bring on so many different layers and that's why I've shared in the past, and I've shared it even with my wife. I said, "I see myself. I've only scratched the surface of the value you've already brought. And I see this for many years to come that I plan to be a part of this. Cause it's not a cost, it's been an investment," and yes, we're talking about growing doors, but there's many other layers to the coaching of growing the business and how you do that from operations to people who you hire, what their duties are. This was exactly what I was looking for 'cause I did not have that knowledge. Though I've succeeded it at higher levels in a lot of ways in the real estate industry, these were the parts I didn't know. And I feel like I've still got so much more to learn.
[00:09:01] Jason: I really appreciate that. That's-- that means a lot to me. I appreciate it. So for me, it's interesting to me because I've been in this business-- I founded it, and we had some tough times starting this business out and like me building a team I've gone through the entrepreneurial life cycle and journey that I coach clients on. And DoorGrow, our company has made so many changes, even in the last quarter. Like the slew of things that we get done that are on our list for quarterly planning is just amazing to me that we're able to accomplish. DoorGrow's not even the same company it was a year ago. Not even close. And some clients maybe worked with us in the past or knew about us in the past, or maybe we just did a website a long time ago. And DoorGrow is not even close to the same company. Some people are probably hearing you going "operations?" And like "this?" And like "coaching." And they're like, what? And it's funny because people, I think judge me and DoorGrow sometimes by who I was maybe five years ago or two years ago, or even a year ago.
[00:10:06] And my personal development aggression, I guess you could say, or my drive and the level of the team members that I have and the drive of the team and how quickly we're able to make changes and implement is I mean, I'm obviously biased, but I think it's pretty amazing. So yeah. And I think people could give us a chance that haven't been with us for a while. Our new mastermind is just really awesome and I think people are really crushing it, which is really fun to see.
[00:10:32] Brannon: And the connections you make in that coaching group. There's several people that I've made connections with that will be valuable for the future and just collaborating or, "Hey, I'm having this struggle. How have you handled it?" There's just, there's so much value and I agree it's even in-- what is it? Five months now I've been in the program it's changed and added more layers to it. But that's because of your growth. You didn't stay stagnant. You're still growing yourself and have something to pour out.
[00:11:07] Jason: I'd feel guilty if I took even the majority of the credit, like my operator, Sarah, also my fiance, she's moved the needle significantly in this business, Adam, over fulfillment, Ashlee who's over a client success-- like we've got some amazing people on my team and they're moving most of the objectives forward that we have each quarter, and it's been just awesome to see. And that's part of the DoorGrow OS planning system that we've got and that sort of thing. We've got 90 members in the mastermind, so I appreciate that you brought up community cause that's a big focus of ours moving forward this quarter is we're really trying to focus on improving the community aspect. A lot of people joined for the content in DoorGrow Academy and the material that we have and the ideas, and then the people win because of the coaching. But people generally in a program will stay because of the community and the connection and the benefits of having that comradery, 'cause you know, being an entrepreneur can be a lonely journey without being connected to others, so we're really focused on that, improving that, in fact, we've got about 90 members in the mastermind, 90 businesses. We probably have on average about two people per business. So we've got probably about somewhere close to 200 people in the program I think that are actively involved.
[00:12:17] We haven't really grown honestly for the last, maybe two, three months, which is weird, but we've been filtering a lot of people out. We've been really trying to make sure people are active and engaged and shaking the tree, so to speak and some of the people that weren't really engaged or active in our outreach and stuff have dropped off while we've been adding people, but we've cleaned that up. So like the program's really clean. And so I'm really excited about the community aspect because most of the people now are all pretty much engaged. And in at least on one of the calls and doing their check-ins and moving forward. So I think even though the group is still about the same size it's been for a little while, it's a lot mightier, so we're really excited about that. And now that it's cleaned out, now we're going to be adding, I think a lot of people that are going to be staying in the program a lot longer and it'll be, even we're going to be growing for sure. Yeah. So Brannon, what do you feel like are some of the most significant things that you've got out of it so far? Because a lot of people, they hear you probably saying, "Hey, DoorGrow's great. Coaching's great." And you mentioned you're making more money. What are some of the key things that really have stood out to you that you're like, "Hey, like this is different or this is interesting," or that you've really valued?
[00:13:29] Brannon: I think a couple of things. There are multiple layers, so I can talk about this for a while, but the key things initially were: how to lead generate that didn't cost money. And sometimes you hear that and you think, "oh, this is just a sales pitch." It was very genuine, and it was very good. And I implemented that. So the only cost was my time and following through with what the coaching did and that added the doors very quickly. The second was helping design a pricing plan and how to put that together. I implemented one of the plans, the hybrid plan that you discuss and implemented that and began to sell that. And through selling it, I've shared this in our mastermind, how I sell that. And I'm seeing how it resonates with owners and just those two things alone, those two changes that we made alone made money. Those are just the two things initially. And then you offer other things that we're beginning to tap into and
[00:14:40] there's so much there, the content, I can only absorb so much at the moment and I'm trying to fully implement those well, but that also gives me a path for several years to come things that I'll be able to dive deeper into different sections of what all you offer and implement those. So I see a path, but those two things alone were the big key movers, which you steer people to. Doing that lead generation first and then begin some pricing and other things. So those two are the big steps that made it an investment and made us money.
[00:15:17] Jason: Yeah, if any of my competitors are listening and they want to figure out how to steal some of the magic from DoorGrow, we focus on two main things with clients and you can probably feel this. I don't think you've heard me mention this Brannon, but one of our big goals within the first 30 to 60 days is we want to make sure clients have really strong clarity on what the future holds for them, like what direction to go in. So we have our clarity assessments we take you through, so you know clearly which path. We have three different paths we take people down depending on which thing is the biggest problem in the business right now. And we focus on pain first. So we get them clarity on what they want and where the pain is and then results. So we want to get them as quickly and as effortlessly as possible to the results. So we're giving you the scripts, the language, the outreach, like all the different things to do. And you mentioned lead gen without spending money, and I know a lot of people are thinking "I'd rather just spend money. I'd rather just spend money because it would save me time," is what they think. What would you say to that?
[00:16:18] Brannon: Yeah, boy, that's a cost. That's not an investment. This is a deeper level of long-term residual lead generation so that what you teach in the coaching pays dividends, not just now, but in the future, it continues to pay residual dividends and you haven't spent any money on it because the big thing in starting a property management company or starting any company is to generate revenue before expenses and it fit with the principles of that is, is generating that revenue before you have any hard costs, which help you get profitable better and faster, then you can have money to do other things to grow it even faster.
[00:17:04] Jason: Yeah there's several things we focus on with clients. We want to decrease the expenses in the business. So we talk about how a lot of property managers, we mentioned this on today's call, right? Like a lot of property managers... it's not about what they need to do more of, or add more of in the business. It's about some of the things they need to eliminate that they are doing. And then we get into, the lead gen piece. A lot of people mistakenly think that they can generate more leads by doing advertising or paid advertising, but that actually are colder leads that take more time. So we've actually decreased your time investment into lead generation and we've zeroed out the costs.
[00:17:43] Brannon: And usually it's a better quality person--
[00:17:45] Jason: --and it's an absolutely better quality lead, right? The conversion rate's way higher because we're focusing on warmer lead generation. And the other thing that I think is a secret is that you're creating market share while other property managers are fighting over the small amount of existing market share that exists. They're all in the red water. It's ugly and bloody, and there's a lot of scarcity. And I'm guessing you don't really feel much scarcity in growing your property management business?
[00:18:11] Brannon: Not at all. It's doing so well, there's moments we have to just pause for a few minutes to absorb all the new clients coming on board so that we handle them, you know? It's not from lack of business coming in now from this lead gen source, it's making sure that we handle them effectively. And we talk about this in the coaching too, of how to handle the operations when all this business comes and how to handle it effectively and efficiently.
[00:18:38] Jason: That's one of my favorite problems to do is make the growth become so uncomfortable and painful. And then we shift to solving that problem. Everybody wants that problem, but we want to create that problem for our clients that they're having so much growth that it's gotten uncomfortable and they have to start hiring and scaling their systems, so. And then yeah, pricing strategy. We talk about-- like you mentioned the hybrid pricing. Initially, I got the idea from Scott Brady. He's really sharp entrepreneur. And then we've put our own nuance and spin to it to make sure that people do it effectively. So it's psychologically really effective and that's been really really great for our clients that are starting to implement that.
[00:19:16] So, yeah, you're right. There's a lot more in the program. I'm excited for you to get into some of the other stuff and get through it. Because I love seeing clients get all these different pieces dialed in because the speed at which the company moves forward is rapid. Now, a lot of people, a lot of property managers are already burnt out. They're already burnt out in their business. They're not enjoying it, which I would normally say, they're just doing it wrong, but that's, I think also one of the key things that we focus on at DoorGrow is not just building a business that just gets more crazy and more hectic and moves fast, that you enjoy less and less, which is typical. Most get to 200 to 400 doors and they're burnt out. They're micromanaging their team. They hate their day-to-day.
[00:19:56] Brannon: You talk about both growing with quantity, but also growing with quality and creating a quality of life too.
[00:20:05] Jason: Yeah, it's a big deal. So our primary focus is on, I call it the four reasons. I've done a previous podcast episode on that. For those listening, you can go back and listen to that. That's our primary goal is to move people towards the four reasons of more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, and more support. And as you've been building your business, it could get uglier and more painful, but we always try to make sure that the client understands that's the wrong way to do it. Like we can get you more support and make it more fun and you do less and less in the business.
[00:20:36] Brannon: I like to learn and listen as it scales, how to scale it, and you share this in the coaching, how to scale it properly so that you don't get burnout. So I'm aware of that and want to make sure that happens not just for me, but y'all also share how to do that for your team too. The positions and the different times to hire and how to do that effectively. So it's not just for the owner, but it's how to create quality for everyone.
[00:21:06] Jason: So you've seen some results in the program. What do you feel like your team's perspective of all this movement and change has been, and maybe even your spouse, like how is this kind of rippling out around you? Is this creating some pain and problems for people around you? Or how did they feel about all this?
[00:21:24] Brannon: Jason, you'll appreciate that I use a lot of your quotes at home. But, when you're hearing good things, you want to share it. So I would say we're growing and I think the team, I know the team is all on board and they're excited about the growth, but as any good growth, there is stretching and you have to go through that stretching process that makes you better, but you've provided several good things that help the team that I'm using to help them get through the stretching with the growth that we're having. And we'll take this problem of growth, as we all remember the great recession and we were begging to be busy. I keep mindful of that, of being grateful that we are and would not take the other side of that of not being busy. I keep that in mind and I encourage the team, and they're encouraged by the growth too. They're very excited. Even our sales team notices it and they're like, "man, maybe I should be on that side of the business." They get really excited about it.
[00:22:25] Jason: What's one thing you feel like you could share maybe with the audience, people that aren't in the program that might benefit them, that is maybe something you learned in the program or, maybe just a mindset shift or a takeaway or something that might be helpful to those that are listening?
[00:22:41] Brannon: Boy. That's there's so many...
[00:22:43] Jason: There are those that are struggling. What feedback or idea would you want to share with them?
[00:22:49] Brannon: I think, you know, looking for referrals from agents that are working in the multi-family or property industry that are selling investments that has helped us quite a bit, but what's been beneficial in the coaching is you've given a great template of a script of how to do it that is genuine, that really flows well and is right in line with building high trust with clients and with agents. That's been the number one benefit of the coaching is not just that idea, but then even giving a practical script that really works. We've been in coaching. We've all been in different programs where we'll see a script that is just not realistic because that person doesn't do it. Your script is genuinely realistic, and it works. I tested it. It worked. I went line by line, even had the script in front of me as I'm going through it, and it really flowed genuine and real and generated referrals that day.
[00:23:58] Jason: That was actually one of those moments. We have these moments as coaches where we feel like-- it's similar to as being a dad and seeing your kid get an award or do something, but one of those moments for me was when you sent me your call recording, and you just followed the script. Because I get a lot of call recordings from clients and they don't follow the script. They either don't feel confident doing it that way, or they say it different or they think they're trying to be cute or clever. And then I'm coaching them like, "stop saying 'um' and stop saying 'kinda' and 'maybe' like show confidence." you just followed the script, and it went so beautifully, and that was just really rewarding to me to be able to hear that and go " yes! It worked." And hear that result like real-time is really cool.
[00:24:43] Brannon: I think I came into the coaching with the mindset and I thought of that 90-10 principle, and I said, "I'm going to be the 10%. Sink or swim, I'm going to be the 10% and I'm just going to follow it" and let it go where it went. But the beauty of it is, it went well. And it would for anyone that followed because we all know as we coach or teach, the ones that just say, "Hey, I'm going to be humble and I'm just going to do what you say, and let's see what happens." it generally works.
[00:25:16] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to tell clients like, "Hey, it's proven. If Brannon can do it, anybody else can do it too. Brannon's not any smarter or cooler than anybody else in our program, other than the fact that he does the work and he does what we tell them to do. And that makes you, I think, pretty smart and pretty cool. So I appreciate you, Brannon. So, um, Cool. I, appreciate you coming and taking some time out of your day to be here on the #DoorGrowShow and on the podcast. For those that are. On the fence, thinking about DoorGrow maybe they've heard about DoorGrow, a year ago or five years ago or in the past. What would you say to them now? You're on the other side of the paywall. You see what's going on in the community. What would you say?
[00:25:57] Brannon: Well, You might not like this, but I think it's so good, sometimes I wouldn't want to tell anybody 'cause it's so good for people.
[00:26:06] Jason: I've heard that. I've heard that quite a bit, which is really funny. Like "I want everyone to do it except my competition."
[00:26:12] Brannon: That's it.
[00:26:13] Jason: So which market are you in?
[00:26:16] Brannon: We're in north Texas.
[00:26:17] Jason: All right. So if you're in north Texas, Brannon says, do not do the DoorGrow thing. It's not going to work out for you probably, but everybody else should totally join this program. Does that sound accurate?
[00:26:30] Brannon: North Texas property managers and there's plenty of business for all of us.
[00:26:35] Jason: There is. That's something, I think that we're really big on the program. You're not in the red water feeling scarcity fighting with other property managers. There's 70% are self-managing, there's tons of available potential business out there, and you've been able to tap into that tap and you're getting plenty from it and yeah, there's plenty of business out there. Very cool. Brannon appreciate you being a client. Appreciate you taking time out. And anything you wanna say before we wrap this up?
[00:27:03] Brannon: No, I think I've covered quite a bit myself.
[00:27:05] Jason: All right. Awesome. Thanks, Brannon. All right. So for those that have been listening to this and you're curious or interested in DoorGrow, you can reach out to us. And if you want to test the waters a little bit and get familiar with this, because this may be the first time you've heard about us for some reason, join our Facebook group, go to doorgrowclub.com. Videos like this get pushed into the group. I do live streams multiple times a week now. I'm sharing concepts and ideas. My goal and job is to prove to you that we have some value to offer to you. Once you get beyond the paywall, there's even more. And so join the DoorGrowClub. You can go to doorgrowclub.com to get to our Facebook group. The other thing that I would recommend is just go to doorgrow.com.
[00:27:52] If you're curious and you want to set up a call and talk to my sales team, they will listen to you. I have great people on the team. They really care about our vision of helping property managers. And so if you're struggling with some issues, some challenges, bring it up to them and talk with them and they will help you see if there's a path in which we can help you deal with those challenges, whether it's you're just not enjoying your day to day, you're struggling with your team and with operations, you're struggling to figure out how to add doors and grow your business, you hate your website, you don't like your brand. Like we can help solve these problems for you and they'll help you see how we can do that. And they'll also give you access to our seven frameworks training so you can see seven different growth frameworks and really shift your mindset out of the idea that you need cold leads and you need to do advertising and you need to spend a bunch of money on marketing.
[00:28:41] We'll shift you out of that and help you see why that mindset actually has been hurting your growth and will benefit you and get you moving forward. And that's it for today. So until next time, everybody to our mutual growth. Reach out to DoorGrow, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye, everyone.
[00:28:55] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:29:22] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:29:43] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
If you are a property management entrepreneur in the 400-600 door range, you likely experience the same issues as others in this category: company culture, strategic planning, and more.
In this episode, property management growth expert, Jason Hull continues the stages of the Property Management Entrepreneurial Journey series with the 400-600 door category.
You’ll Learn…
[01:10] Recap of the Other Property Management Entrepreneur Types
[03:29] Defining the 400-600 Door Range
[04:52] Making Sure You Have Help in the Business
[06:42] How to Build Your Team and Processes
[08:23] Optimizing Your Business: Strategic Planning
[10:09] Transitioning from Transactional to Transformational Leadership
[11:20] Recap of the Other Property Management Entrepreneur Types
“So by the time you get to this 400 to 600 door stage, you are either in a massive amount of pain, it's really painful, or you finally solve some of those issues.”
“So I'm hoping if you're at this stage, business is not crazy. It's not crazy at work, and things are good. And a good book recommendation is It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried.”
“I believe most meetings are wasted time, but strategic planning, strategic meetings is one of the ways we really help scale and grow property management companies.”
“If you don't have really clear strong culture, you probably don't have a really clear, good team.”
[00:00:00] So by the time you get to this 400 to 600 door stage, you are either in a massive amount of pain, it's really painful, or you finally solve some of those issues.
[00:00:10] All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and residual income.
[00:00:46] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and the business owner. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:10] All right. So on previous episodes, we were doing this series of talking about all these different stages of property management entrepreneurs, and just to catch people up that have missed those, go back and watch those-- or listen. But what we talked about is we talked about pure startups, and then we talked about those that are kind of seekers and getting past that fantasy stage, and now they have a real business and seekers where they're kind of trying to figure stuff out, and these are all different door levels.
[00:01:36] And then we talked about the solo preneur property managers, and then we talked about those stuck property managers on one of the recordings. And then we talked about the transitioning property management entrepreneur, has broken the 100 door barrier, and they're leading into that next sand trap, which by default, they'll get to within a year or two, usually in the 200 to 400 door category. And we talked about that. I call it the standard property management entrepreneurs. So we talked about that group and category. And then during that last recording, I talked about the side biz, property management entrepreneur, cause some artificially break, the 100 door barrier and they really just have a side business. Real estate is maybe their main thing. And they artificially are stealing resources from that business.
[00:02:19] All right. That brings you to the present and you're missing a lot of good info so that you can understand where you're at in this journey and which things you should have tackled at these various stages. We're going to talk a little bit today about. That next level. This is those that break past that 200 to 400 door sand trap. Sometimes I call it the second sand trap, maybe the third sand trap. First one is usually where just getting started. That's like the hardest hurdle for a lot. And so that could be the first, the real first sand trap once you've launched your business though is about 50, 60 doors, I see a lot. I call it the solopreneur sand trap.
[00:02:53] A lot of people get stuck there. They paint themselves into a corner. They end up trapped and that's really uncomfortable for them. So it's not like working. So the next sand trap is that 200 to 400 door stage. If you break the 100 door barrier in a healthy way within a year or two, you'll be there. And that 200 to 400 door stage I've talked about on the previous recording for the podcast. If you can break through that sand trap, and this is the team sand trap, and trying to figure out how to deal with the team, you're now going to be at this next level in the 400 to 600 door category.
[00:03:29] Now, if you have achieved this level, you're at 400 to 600 doors, you may have done this through acquisition. Maybe you acquired another property management company. Maybe you got here just through grit and sheer will, and doing a lot of the sales yourself. At this stage, you probably have a pretty solid team because that 200 to 400 door stage is really painful trying to figure out your team. So now, you've got a good team. You probably like most of the people on it, and you probably aren't dealing with a ton of churn with the team. And probably at this stage, you've offloaded some of the growth oriented tasks. You may have a BDM at this stage most likely. If not, this is probably the next level for you.
[00:04:15] So you might be a closer, and you want to focus on your area of genius and you have offloaded everything else. So you're still just the closer and you're closing a lot of deals, which is cool if you're good at that and you love that. If not, at this stage, I'm guessing by now you've already got some people helping you with the sales side, because you just probably wouldn't have gotten here, but if not, you need to get a BDM or at the very least a sales assistant. That you can maybe groom to be a BDM. But a sales assistant that you can offload at least the follow-up the appointment setting, stuff like that. So you need a setter basically while you act as closer.
[00:04:52] So you've probably gotten out of the day-to-day operations at 400 to 600 doors. If you're still heavily involved in day-to-day operations, I'd be surprised, at this level. I don't see that very often. However, even at this level, you still are likely your own best employee, right? You still have your hands in quite a few things. You probably have many of your processes to find 'cause usually at that 200 to 400 door stage, that's like becomes a heavy focus because it becomes so painful. You need to get these processes defined and you realize there's a lack of consistency and you realize the team aren't doing things the way that you would want, and it becomes painful. So by the time you get to this 400 to 600 door stage, you are either in a massive amount of pain, it's really painful, or you finally solve some of those issues.
[00:05:40] So I'm hoping if you're at this stage, business is not crazy. It's not crazy at work, and things are good. And a good book recommendation is It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried. He's one of the founders, creators of Basecamp, CEO of Basecamp. Really, really great book. I got to hang out with Jason Fried years before he wrote that book. And he basically, during a 90 minute called taught me some of those principles and it was a game changer for my business in making the business more calm and more quiet and focusing on asynchronous communication, some other really cool ideas. So I highly recommend you check that out. One thing I'll disagree with Jason-- if you ever hear this is the idea of not having planning and not having meetings. I believe most meetings are wasted time, but strategic planning, strategic meetings is one of the ways we really help scale and grow property management companies. Game changer. And and that's using our system, DoorGrow OS, and I believe that that's more effective than EOS for those that are into rocket fuel and traction and all that kind of jazz.
[00:06:42] All right. Let's talk about this 400 to 600 door company and your team. So you probably have a good team. You like them. And if not, you might have one or two people you don't like, but you probably like most of your team. You probably, at this point have an operator in the business. You have somebody that's dealing with the operational side of things, because most of you are visionaries and visionary entrepreneurs probably need that in order to make it to this level. You probably have some systems and mechanisms in place. It's most likely that you do, you have probably some sort of maintenance process and system in place. You have a system for communication with clients that's working out really well. You have a task management system internally for the business, maybe Asana or Monday or some sort of tool that hands out tasks. We use Basecamp at DoorGrow for the little one-off tasks. And then we use Process Street for processes.
[00:07:38] So you may have something like AppFolio plus, which I heard good things about or Process Street or LeadSimple has a tool in their sales CRM for processes, checklists, that sort of thing. So you're going to have something for repeating processes that's connected to checking things off. Like it's a checklist, not just like an owner's manual that sits in the glove box of a car and no one looks at like standard operating procedures on a Google drive that nobody ever looks at. It's not going to be like that. Right. So you have some sort of process documentation checklist system as well. So that means you have a tactical task management system, you have a process system for repeatable processes, and you have some sort of communication system going with clients as well as probably several other systems.
[00:08:23] So you've focused on building some systems out. Now at this stage, there's a lot of optimization. You need to optimize and figure out how to do that. And so you need to figure out what you need to do next. So you need to figure out what you need to do right now in order to control the future. You need to figure out: "how can I plan and create the future with my team?" So this is where you take your team and you need to shift them into strategic planning and build a strategic system and that would be DoorGrow OS is what I would recommend, of course. So, but you need to build a strategic system where you can get the entire team moving the business forward with you.
[00:09:05] So the 200 to 400 door primary focus is really creating culture. If you don't have really clear strong culture, you probably don't have a really clear, good team and you're not going to get to the 400 to 600 door level. So you probably have a healthier level of culture. If not, this is going to be a focus. You need to develop cohesive culture. It needs to be documented. You need to develop cohesive, strategic planning for the business, and you need to develop an internal communication system for the team that doesn't involve one to everyone communication constantly like Slack or some of these tools where you're communicating one to an entire group, and everyone thinks you need to read everything. It's about building asynchronous communication, so really you need an effective culture, effective hiring system, effective planning system for strategic planning, strategic stuff, not the tactical day-to-day stuff like I just talked about, and you need an internal communication system, which goes along with that planning and a correct cadence of meetings can reduce a lot of communication and interruptions in business. So, this is how to get to the next level.
[00:10:09] So, they have many of the processes defined and operations are running fairly smoothly in the business. Now you need to get all the team members helping you innovate in the business, not just getting stuff done that you tell them, which is transactional. Now you need to transfer and move towards transformational leadership. Transactional is I give you a task. You come back and say, you did it. I pay you a dollar, give you a task and you come back and do it, and that's the transaction. Transformational is I give you an outcome and a deadline, and then I support you in moving it forward, but you get to come up with how to get this done. And this is where you now start to have team members that think for themselves and innovate and move things forward. Instead of you having to micromanage everybody on your team, through processes and checklists. So if you're spending all your time trying to create tasks and trying to tell the team what to do and answer every question, you have a broken business that needs a strategic planning system, and that's going to free you up.
[00:11:11] But in order to do that, you need really good culture, really good team members, and now you can implement a really good planning system and you need a really good operations person or an operator if that stuff isn't fun for you. If you don't love spreadsheets and checklists and process documentation and calendars and all that kind of stuff, you're probably more of a visionary entrepreneur. You're more on the sales and marketing side of the spectrum. And you're going to enjoy that a lot more. So hopefully this is helpful for those of you. If you would like some help, if you're at this level-- I love working property managers at this level. A lot property managers at this level, some of them start to get really painful. And they, if they make it to the next level, they've checked out. I want to make this easy for you, help you implement a strategic planning system in your business. We focus on this in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. It's the "Scale" portion. Really awesome. I'd love to get you on a call with our team so we can figure out if we can help you grow your business and scale faster and get your team in better alignment.
[00:12:05] And this alone can cut your staffing costs easily in half, sometimes by a third down to a third, by getting all these things really in healthy alignment and getting you in healthy alignment with your team. You're going to get way more output and that's the greatest expense in a business. So, if that's interesting to you check us out, join our Facebook group. If you're not yet ready to talk to us: doorgrowclub.com. You can go to doorgrowclub.com, join that, and we will love on you and hopefully eventually convince you to get on a call with us. Otherwise, reach out check us out at doorgrow.com and book a call. There's a little link at the top, and we'd love to talk with you and see if we can help you grow and scale your business until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth by everyone.
[00:12:47] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:13:14] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:13:35] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
A lot of property management entrepreneurs get stuck in this area between 200 and 400 doors. They’ve built the wrong team, and everything in the business feels like it’s out of alignment. These are the standard property management entrepreneurs.
Property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder/CEO of DoorGrow, shares the next avatar in this series of episodes about the different types of property management entrepreneurs.
You’ll Learn…
[01:15] The Next Avatar: The Standard Property Management Entrepreneur
[02:07] Have You Built the Wrong Team? How to Build the Right One
[05:10] Defining Your Role in the Business
[06:12] The Issues in the 200-400 Door Range
[09:50] Defining Your Company’s Culture and Hiring
[12:57] Inspiring vs. Controlling Your Team
[14:29] The Side Business Property Management Entrepreneur
“You can't have a team that's your dream team, that's awesome, that makes you feel really well-supported if you are showing up incorrectly.”
“There is nothing in the business that you have to be doing in the long run. There's nothing. You can offload any piece of the business.”
“The only reason every team member should exist is because they are taking something off your plate.”
“Tactical work just keeps businesses alive. Strategic is what really grows businesses.”
[00:00:00] So they, at this stage, you probably also have all the same leaks in your business that the smaller companies do. You have leaks in your website, you have leaks in your branding, you have leaks in your reputation, you have leaks in your pricing, you have leaks and all these different areas of your business
[00:00:13] All right. Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and in life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:52] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:15] So we are going to continue our series this week, talking about the different avatars that we target here at DoorGrow. And so we're going to talk about a group that maybe listening to my intro were thinking, "you know, I don't know about that. manifesto, Jason. I don't know about having more freedom and that property management makes me feel good." You might be feeling really stressed out and you might have a big team helping you do this. And by big, I mean maybe you have like five to 10 people even. So we're going to talk about what I call the standard property management entrepreneur. And this is the property management entrepreneur that has built a team, but it's the wrong team. And so this is usually in the 200 to 400 door category. This is where I see-- I sometimes call this the second sand trap or the third sand trap-- this is where a lot of property management business owners get stuck. And the reason they're stuck is because they've built the wrong role for themselves, and they built the wrong team around the wrong role. So they're showing up as the wrong person. And then they built a business and a team around that wrong person to support the business. And so everybody's out of alignment.
[00:02:25] You can't have a team that's your dream team, that's awesome, that makes you feel really well-supported if you are showing up incorrectly. And so usually, that's the problem is that the entrepreneur has these myths or these misconceptions or these beliefs that they're the business owner, so they should be doing X, Y, and Z. "I'm the business owner, so I have to be the one doing the sales and selling to people. "I'm the business owner, so I have to be the one doing accounting" or "I'm the business owner. I have to be running the meetings and handling the operations." Right. I just want to let you know, I'm letting you off the hook. I'm giving you permission, not that you need it from me, but you can give yourself permission. There is nothing in the business that you have to be doing in the long run. There's nothing. You can offload any piece of the business, and the ultimate goal of the business is to get those four reasons of fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. This is why we build a team. But you're probably, if you're at this stage, you're massively out of alignment with this. We talked about transitioning PM's and if you can break that a hundred door barrier, usually you're at this level within a year or two, you're in this 200 to 400 door area, and then you get stuck and it gets uncomfortable.
[00:03:31] This is where a lot of people will fall prey to thinking they need to expand into a new market. Like we built it this big, maybe if we just pick another city nearby, we can start doing it there too. And that I call that premature expansion. It's a bad idea. Usually what ends up happening is they go into this new market and then their current market is starting to suffer and struggle. And then both are not doing well because you know, it starting two businesses are running two businesses and starting one while you're running another, usually means there's less focus. And focus is the most important currency related to growth. It's the most important. And so now, you're diluting your focus even more as an entrepreneur.
[00:04:12] So, what we need to do is narrow your focus, even in your own business. The only reason every team member should exist is because they are taking something off your plate. But most business owners get to this point by building the team based on what the business needs. They're like "the business, we need more maintenance stuff, or we need more of this." instead of figuring out what does the business owner need? What do you need in order to move closer to the four reasons? Well, maybe you need an assistant, and you need to get rid of some of these things off your plate. Maybe you need a bookkeeping and accounting company because you don't really love doing the accounting and bookkeeping and you want it done well, and you need to offload that, right? So maybe you hate doing sales or that's uncomfortable, and lead-generation/ sales is really bad then probably in your business. And maybe you need to get a BDM or bring somebody in that's really good at that. Right? And so, If you focus on what does the business need most? And what does the entrepreneurial most? Then, you're going to bring in the right people.
[00:05:10] Now, in order to do that, though, you have to be in proper alignment. You have to be doing the right things in the business. You have to know what your 'why' is, what your purpose is, what you really want out of the business. Of those four reasons, what does fulfillment and freedom and contribution and support look like for me? If I had the ultimate dream team, the ultimate business, how would I be spending my day so that you can move closer and closer to that. And then each team member you add should be helping you get closer to that. So you take everything that you do. You start shaving off and slicing off pieces to give to other people, and it should be the pieces you don't like doing. Not the pieces you don't have time to do. It should be the pieces you don't like to do and the pieces that are more tactical so that you can focus more on strategic leadership. Tactical work just keeps businesses alive. Strategic is what really grows businesses. There needs to be a general in the tent, leading the army. There needs to be a king, and the king needs to eat first, or their needs to be a queen and the queen needs to eat first. Otherwise, they'll have a starving kingdom. So let's talk about this standard property management entrepreneur at 200 to 400 doors. So this is the stage where they finally have a legit business they can live off of. It has the ability to spend money on marketing, so a lot of times they make the mistake of doing that. So they start trying out marketing channels and advertising channels and wasting a lot of money there. They're also wasting, probably too much money on their team because they don't really have team members that are giving three times the output that I'll see in healthy businesses and healthy teams that are in healthy alignment around a healthy business owner usually they'll have a third, right? They'll have a fraction of the output. The team members are frustrated. And so they're a business owner, they're likely doing still most of the sales at this stage. They have a team, but they struggle to build the team they truly want. They have consistent staffing challenges and turnover because team members really that are B players are the only ones they can attract because nobody wants to follow a starving king or starving queen.
[00:07:10] They don't want to follow-- they're not inspired to have any other motivation other than to get money to follow a leader if that leader isn't really happy or enjoying their life, they're not going to be able to either. Because they're out of alignment with the four reasons. So they still feel like they're driving all the outcomes in the business as a visionary or as an entrepreneur at this stage, and they wish they could just get ahead and they're frustrated with their team. They have to answer every question, every approval. They don't have team members that can think and make decisions for themselves because this is how they've set up their business and set up the team. In the beginning, it's super tempting, right? You start bringing on people and they're asking you questions and you're like, "man, I'm so smart. It feels so good, but it wears thin pretty quick. And soon, you realize you have to drive every outcome. You have to hand out every task. You have to push everybody to do everything. And so it's not as effective.
[00:08:00] So at this stage, you probably also have all the same leaks in your business that the smaller companies do. You have leaks in your website, you have leaks in your branding, you have leaks in your reputation, you have leaks in your pricing, you have leaks and all these different areas of your business, but you're great at selling. You've probably gotten to the point where you can close deals. You're getting business on. You're getting out there, making it happen, or you found some sort of unique prospecting method that's working for you. And so you've achieved a certain level of success but, the delivery side feels frustrating because it's heavily connected to you. They often have outdated and ineffective websites. They've wasted a bunch of money on various lead sources and advertising methods. And they're usually ready to find something new that actually works, but they're gun shy and they don't believe it. Like they're scared to sign up with DoorGrow 'cause they're like, "I haven't had good experiences with this marketing firm or with this firm or with this lead gen idea or whatever." So they're cautious and they're tired of wasting money and they're wasting way too much money on their team and on resources because they just don't have the alignment they should.
[00:09:12] They don't have team members that really have complete ownership of pieces of the business and are moving it forward and innovating in it. They're the only person that innovates as a visionary, and they go to conferences, come back, and have a ton of ideas they throw at their team, and it's like pulling the pin on a grenade and lobbing it into the middle of the room. And then they're freaking out. They're like, "I've already got all my day-to-day work. How are we gonna implement this cool thing you heard about at NARPM?" You know? How does that benefit me? "I'm already stressed out." Right? So you don't really have buy-in from your team. Your team are not sold on you. They don't believe in you. They're not sold on the vision of the company because you've never really made a clear and usually the big glaring problem they can't see, the blind spot at this level is you don't have culture defined. There's no culture. Really, they don't really know or care what your company core values are. They don't know or care what your why is. And your purpose is and how this business fulfills you and gives you freedom and fulfillment. They don't know or care what the customers really want. They just don't want to deal with any more garbage or complaints. Right. And so, you have some systems in place, probably at this level, this is where you start thinking, "I need to document more processes and I need more systems and I need to micromanage my team more because I need to systematize this, so what you really need at this stage is you just need to be able to get clarity on yourself. Then build the right team around you so that you have the right culture.
[00:10:39] And in hiring, I talk about the three fits: you need a really good cultural fit. You need really personality fit for each role, make sure you have a good fit there. And then you need skill fit. You need to make sure that they can do the work and they have the right skill. So, usually at this stage, they have so many leaks in the business they can't see. You built a whole business around a whole bunch of blind spots. You can't see the problem with your branding or your website, your reputation, or your team members, or your own role in the business. And so I love working with these businesses because there's so much we can do, and they have the team and the capacity to move the needle very quickly. We can move things quickly and make a lot of changes and get them a lot of results really fast, and they have the money to spend to do this stuff and to invest in the business. Usually at this stage, they tend to be a bit more experimental. They're willing to try new ideas because they've dealt with a lot of frustrations and they already know what things are not working.
[00:11:35] So they're open-minded to the message that I share at DoorGrow that: Hey, you could grow your business without all this other stuff. You don't need SEO or pay-per-click or content marketing or social media marketing or pay-per-lead services. Like you can grow and scale your business really rapidly adding a hundred, 200, maybe even 300 doors in a year like one of our clients did in last year without spending a dime on advertising. And I know that sounds crazy to people listening, but reach out to us and we'll share with you our seven frameworks training on how you can do that. So, anyway, this is a lot of businesses I see at NARPM in the NARPM organization. When I go to speak at local chapters, I see a lot of businesses in this 200 to 400 door range. They're stuck. They have a team that's sort of engaged that they kind of like, and they like some of their team members and some not so much and they're lacking culture. And so if this is the stage you're at, you may want to join our mastermind program and get into our scale program, which we were focused on first, so that we can figure out, assess you, assess your team, start to offload the right pieces and get the right support in place.
[00:12:40] And make sure we get clarity on the company core values and client-centric mission statement and your personal 'why,' and so that we can start to build the business around you and create the right culture. Once you have the culture clear, you'll be able to see clearly whether or not your team members are buying into it or not. They're either going to have to be controlled by you, or they're going to be inspired by you. Inspired makes you a lot more money, and it's a lot more profitable, right? So the phrase that I like to repeat and say that I heard a long time ago is whenever we fail to inspire, we always by default control. Whenever we fail to inspire we always control.
[00:13:18] And so make sure your team members are inspired. And if the only thing they're really inspired by is getting paid and making money off you, then they are probably people that you have to control. And they probably are what I call hiders. You either have believers. They're inspired. They believe in you, they believe in the business.
[00:13:36] They believe in the vision and treating clients the way that you want to treat them. And they're excited, and they're engaged and they give you their discretionary time. They're thinking about how to be a better team member when they're in the shower and when they're at home, or you have hiders. Hiders complain about you. They live for the weekend. They really honestly would rather do as little as possible, hide, and get paid as much as possible. And that's kind of the standard American employee or standard employee maybe anywhere. So I want to shift you away from having just hiders in your business to having believers. And you'll get three times the output from believers than you will from hiders three times. Imagine how that would impact your profitability if you got three times the work ethic and output from really good team members. Right. It would be awesome. How would that affect your profitability? How would that lower your operational costs and increase your ability to have output?
[00:14:29] All right. So that's all we'll chat about today about that. There's another category that tends to kind of be connected to this. It might be related to others. I'll touch on that really brief... and that's the side business property manager, and maybe that'll be a future call, but these are the ones that are often brokers of a successful real estate office. Property management's a side note. They're almost like accidental property managers. Just like in this industry, a lot of you talk about accidental investors; they're accidental property managers. They often have artificially broken past that hundred door barrier, not by fixing common problems they would have had to, but by leveraging their existing real estate revenue, and team to move past it without solving the problem. And so they're leaving a lot of money on the table. They have a lot of inefficiencies everywhere. They likely secretly hate and avoid the ugly, neglected property management arm of their business. But eventually, they start to wake up and go, Hey, this could be profitable somehow. And maybe sometimes when the real estate market shifts, they're like, "well, real estate is not doing so great. I want to hedge against this. I want my property management business finally healthy. So eventually, they wake up to the fact that it can be more profitable and they also usually need help to rebrand at least the property management side of that business, so it doesn't harm the real estate side and they can be segregated and stand healthy on their own two feet.
[00:15:47] Often, these property management businesses just happen, like from natural growth from the real estate business. Like they just have investor clients. They're like, "could you manage our property?" And they're like, "okay, sure. And so they're not really even charging what they should be. It's really kind of just a service they're adding, trying to add value to keep their existing investor clients happy. But unfortunately, this growth and all the doors that they have is not effective. I had one client come to me that had 500 or 600 doors and they were making $0. They had zero profit. And this is very common with these side business property management companies, the side biz PM's. So they don't know what they don't know. They're not really focused on that business. It's kind of grown as this ugly weed and it's kind of taking over and eating resources and it's not really profitable. So it really is like a cancerous tumor on the side of a healthy real estate company. And they either should just cut that tumor off and kill it, or they need to get that thing separated, segregated, and healthy so it can stand on its own two feet, and not just be a leech of resources on your real estate company.
[00:16:54] So in order to do this, you have to shift property management, at least for a while to being the primary focus if you are the visionary. And a lot of times they want to just hand it off to somebody or give it to some operator person or some property manager or some director of property management, and they're not as big of a visionary, they're not as, you know, adaptable as the entrepreneur. And they would be able to move the needle so much faster if they just, at least for a quarter, maybe two quarters, maybe a year focused on that business and getting it really healthy. It could feed them for life. So that's all I'll say about that. So we covered standard property management entrepreneurs and the side business property manager entrepreneur, which sometimes can get up to that 200 to 400 door range as well. But they did it through kind of a back door or through a side door that wasn't as effective or efficient. And so they need to make all the changes that the early stages should have done or that others have done at earlier stages. So with that, we'll go ahead and end today.
[00:17:54] Until next time to our mutual growth everybody. Check us out at doorgrow.com and I hope you have an awesome week. Bye, everyone.
[00:18:02] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:18:29] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:18:50] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
After pure startups and solopreneurs comes another type of property management entrepreneur with its own unique challenges: the transitioning property management entrepreneur.
Property management growth expert Jason Hull shares his insight on the issues and problems that PM entrepreneurs face in the 100-200 door range.
You’ll Learn…
[01:20] The Next Avatar: the Transitioning PM Entrepreneur
[03:35] Learning to Trust Others and Building Your Team
[07:41] Moving You Toward the Four Reasons for Starting a Business
[09:13] Offloading the Tasks You Don’t Like
[09:41] Are You in This Stage? Keep Going!!
“If you add teammates and you're adding more expense to the business, you have to make sure you're doing it with the right people for the right things that the business needs most.”
“There is nothing in the business that you have to do in the long run. If there's any piece you don't enjoy, you can get somebody else to do it.”
“You can learn endlessly, but you need to be taking the right actions as quickly as possible.”
“So if you're in that stage and it's uncomfortable right now, just keep going. Double down. You will graduate.”
[00:00:00] So property management entrepreneurs, they don't stay at this level of this transitioning property management entrepreneur in the stage between zero to 200 doors. They don't stay there for very long. They either make it to the next level or they contract from struggle and attrition.
[00:00:16] All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in your business and in life and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:57] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow.
[00:01:20] Now let's get into the show. So in today's episode, we're going to continue on this sort of train of thought or the series of talking about the different avatars that we target here at DoorGrow, and basically these different stages of progression in the entrepreneurial journey of property managers. So if you've missed some of the previous episodes in which we've talked about solo, preneurs, pure startups, those that are stuck, property managers transitioning is what we're talking about today. So go back and listen to previous episodes. We talked on previous episodes about pure startups and then graduating into that solopreneur stage of, you know, going from seeker to solopreneur.
[00:02:04] And the next is transitioning. I call them transitioning property management entrepreneurs because they don't stay in the stage very long. So once you break that hundred door barrier, if you do it in a healthy way, you have basically graduated from that previous sort of sand trap, and you're going to graduate to the next sand trap.
[00:02:27] And we'll talk about that on another call or another recording, that will be the kind of the standard property management entrepreneur, where they have a legit business at 200 to 400 doors. So you break the hundred door barrier usually within a year or two, if you do it in a healthy way, breaking that a hundred door barrier, within a year or two, you're going to be in that next sort of sand trap, typically, that next sort of challenge at 200 to 400 doors, and that's one of the most painful spots to be in. And we'll talk about that in a future episode. So let's talk a little bit about this transition. So say you break a hundred doors. You know now how to add doors.
[00:03:08] Most likely you've done the work. You've did something that you can repeat. Finally, you're figuring out how to get past that first sand trap. You're figuring out how to grow and add doors. And so you've now graduated from being just at that solo preneurs sort of status. You've likely hired your first team member or two, and you're focused maybe a little bit on building processes and creating a little leverage for yourself. Maybe through assistance or other things. Going from seeker to that stage requires giving up control and trusting others, since that's really difficult for a lot of people. You probably also believe that you still are irreplaceable. You have this irreplaceable position and you probably still are lying a little bit to yourself, internally saying this sort of, kind of idea that "no one else can do what I do better than me. Nobody else could do it. It's like it's impossible. I'm so great. No one else could ever be as good as me."
[00:04:07] But you have now started to believe that at least there's other people out there that you can get and you probably are focused on some of the cheapest people. You could get, probably hiring VAs, maybe in Mexico or the Philippines. And you've started to like, let go of a little bit of that control because you're hitting a wall. Like you're hitting a limit in your capacity to focus and spend time on the business and you're maxing out. So you need some additional help and support. But if you could do it without them, you probably would 'cause you want to hold it all to yourself. Right? Because nobody's going to do it as well as you would do it because you're so great. At this stage, though, they're not good at hiring. They don't really understand how to hire. They don't understand how to build the right team. They have lots of failures when it comes to team and staffing and they sometimes wonder if they should just go back to doing it all back on their own. So you've probably thought that if you're at this stage, you've probably thought, "maybe I should just do this myself."
[00:05:09] It felt easier. I hear this all the time: "if I have to tell them to do it, I might as well just do it myself." This is what this kind of category of person says, you know, "I might as well just do it myself, so it's a waste of my time." but they believe there might be this idea, they have the seed thought that there's this idea that they could have leveraged somehow. It just, they haven't experienced it fully yet. So they don't quite believe it. So property management entrepreneurs, they don't stay at this level of this transitioning property management entrepreneur in the stage between zero to 200 doors. They don't stay there for very long. They either make it to the next level or they contract from struggle and attrition.
[00:05:52] Now, occasionally. You'll see somebody get to just, they might just break past that 200 door barrier and they figure out how to do it basically almost by themselves. They've got like maybe one assistant they've really gotten picky about their clients. They fired the bad stuff. They've got some processes kind of defined, and they figured out how they can almost stay a solopreneur with one boots on the ground part-time assistant and just have that. And you'll see people that have these businesses where they can do maybe 200 doors or so. It's rare to see them maybe break 300, but they'll be able to have a little portfolio like this and they'll be able to manage it. They're the one interacting almost entirely with most of the clients directly. They're still probably doing a lot of maintenance coordination stuff, but they've started to give up some pieces of the business to maybe one part-time or maybe full-time team member. And they really are pretty comfortable usually at that stage, some of them. Now, if you are like me, then you want to continue growing and you're going to get to that next level.
[00:07:02] So usually they'd push through this. Once they've started into the transition, they want to fully complete that transition and they move into that next stage where they actually have a whole team. So really that transitioning property management entrepreneur at this stage, really your main goal right now is to learn how to hire, how to build a team, how to get the right people, but usually they never really learned that fully. And that's the challenge they deal with. As they build a team, they usually do it through a lot of trial and error, and then they have an okay team, but they build the wrong team-- the wrong team around themselves. And we'll talk about that in a future episode.
[00:07:41] So what we do with clients early on, when they start to hire, before they hire, we have them do a time study. We figure out which things energize them and which things drain them, which things are tactical versus strategic. And then we have them offload and build out job descriptions and offload the things that are tactical and energetic drains, minus signs, so they can focus more on the strategic and the plus signs energetically. Right? So then we're getting on a team member that is taking the negatives off their plate that drain them that are not fun. So we can move them closer and closer with each new team member towards the four reasons, which is another episode we did previously.
[00:08:21] The four reasons for having a business or the main goal to build a business in building a business is to have it be a vehicle for these four reasons, which is fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support. And that means in order to have that, you have to have a team, and you have to have good team members. If you add teammates and you're adding more expense to the business, you have to make sure you're doing it with the right people, for the right things that the business needs most. And at the very early stages, it's really what you need most. If each team member you add is not moving you towards having greater fulfillment and greater freedom, greater contribution, and greater support. Then you are adding people incorrectly, or you're not adding the right people, or you're holding onto the wrong things. And a lot of times at the stage, you still probably believe you have to do certain things in the business. So if this is you right now, I'm letting you know there is nothing in the business that you have to do in the long run.
[00:09:22] If there's any piece you don't enjoy, you can get somebody else to do it. And then will probably-- if you hire the right person-- they will be better at it than you, especially if it's something you don't enjoy and they do. They will be much better at that. And so if you do hiring right, you will build the ultimate team around you.
[00:09:41] So that's kind of our topic for today is transitioning property managers. They're in this transitory sort of stage of 100 to 200 doors. I don't see very many people stay in that state for very long. It's usually maybe a year or two max, and then they're usually out of it. So if you're in that stage and it's uncomfortable right now, just keep going. Double down. You will graduate. And that graduation is building a team around you so that you are maybe in that 200 to 400 door category. And you've got maybe about five team members or more so that you can really start to hopefully graduate in fully into those four reasons. If you're like most you've done it wrong. And so we will talk about that on the next episode.
[00:10:30] So until next time, everybody to our mutual growth, and if you are looking to add doors or you're looking to figure out hiring or scale operations, and you want to collapse time dramatically, the number one thing that you can do is invest in yourself and invest in knowledge. That's going to help you collapse time. If you are trying to do it all yourself and think you're the smartest person in the room. And you're trying to read books and watch videos and just learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, you can learn endlessly, but you need to be taking the right actions as quick as possible. And my goal would be as coach to help you collapse time on that.
[00:11:08] So that's of interest to you. Reach out to DoorGrow we would love to help you out and support you. Our clients are getting phenomenal results really quickly, and it speeds up time dramatically and we've added some new trainings and some new material. We're constantly developing new stuff. So, and with that being said, we will talk to you in our next step.
[00:11:27] So bye everyone.
[00:11:28] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:11:55] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:12:16] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
I have noticed that property management entrepreneurs often try to do everything themselves. They think they can figure anything out on their own. This leads to frustration and wearing way too many hats as the business owner.
Property management growth expert Jason Hull describes the next stage in the property management entrepreneur journey, the solopreneur.
You’ll Learn…
[02:02] The Property Management Solopreneur
[04:19] The Cycle of Suck and the Solopreneur Sandtrap
[06:28] Fire Your Worst Doors!
[08:15] $100 Earned Does not Justify $100 Spent
[09:57] Don’t Undercharge
[12:14] You Are Probably Limiting Your Own Business Growth
[15:01] You Don’t Have to Do Everything Yourself
“It is absolutely possible to have the business of your dreams, to have the team of your dreams that supports you.”
“If you have a crappy reputation and you're getting crappy reviews online guess what you attract more of? More crappy owners.”
“You can't just go add another a hundred dollars expense because you're making another a hundred bucks.”
“You can either be right, or you can win. You can either keep your excuses or you can start getting results, but you can't have both.”
[00:00:00] All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, and you are interested in growing in 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.
[00:00:42] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:07] Alright, everybody. So I just got back from Mexico. My last episode was about the importance of taking a vacation and it was an awesome vacation, except for one thing. I got sick. I probably ate some food I shouldn't have, or maybe some seafood that wasn't cooked right. Or maybe I was at a bad restaurant. I don't know. Maybe-- I heard the ice sometimes, it's the ice, not what you're drinking, but it's the ice they put into it. Cause they didn't filter the ice. I don't know. So, anyway, I got sick and so I'm still feeling a little bit on the weather. I'm not feeling amazing or a hundred percent today, so you'll have to excuse me, because I am human.
[00:01:47] So, but today we're getting back into talking about these different avatars that we target here at DoorGrow in property management. And so we're going to talk a little bit about today the solo preneur property management. Last time, if you missed that episode two episodes back, we talked about seekers and then a couple of episodes before that we talked about pure startups.
[00:02:12] So if you miss those episodes, go back and listen to those, then there'll be very insightful for you to learn the entrepreneurial journey as he moved through various stages of property management. So today we're talking about solo preneur, property management entrepreneurs. And so these, I usually quickly categorize just based on door count. These are usually going to be people that are maybe you know, they're under a hundred doors. Usually they're stuck in the 50 to maybe 60, maybe 80 door range. A lot of times they'd been in business for two to five years. There is also a category of them that I call the stuck property management entrepreneurs.
[00:02:48] And they've been in business anywhere from four to 20 years. And they're still in that five 50 to maybe a hundred door range. So let's, let's first get into kind of identifying these solopreneur property managers. The reason I call them solopreneurs is they're caught in what I call the solopreneur sandtrap. This means they've been in business usually short time, maybe three to five years before they even reach out for help. I get a lot of people at that stage that reach out for help. They don't do it in the first year, first, two years, sometimes even the third year until maybe towards the end of that.
[00:03:24] Because lot of times, they think they can figure it out on their own. And they're trying. They're trying lots of different stuff. Usually they're right around 50, 60 doors, I find they might get up to maybe about 80 if they have a spouse or business partner or somebody that's kind of working for free, you know, in the business. You'll see sometimes they'll get up to maybe around 80, but that's usually about as many doors as they can handle on their own without additional team members. Or if they have a spouse or business partner. That's usually as many as they can handle dealing with, because they're caught in that cycle of suck. I've done episodes on several webinars and things over the years, I've talked about the Cycle of Suck in property management, which is you take on crappy owners, you then have crappy properties. And you take that on as well and then you have crappy tenants by default. Because they're difficult to deal with because the owner's being difficult, or the property's being difficult. And then you have a crappy reputation, and if you have a crappy reputation and you're getting crappy reviews online guess what you attract more of? More crappy owners, right.
[00:04:32] So then you're caught in this property management hell, this cycle of suck So you want to escape that cycle of suck. Now, a lot of property managers or solopreneurs, they want to get on every client. They take on anybody and they move right into that cycle of suck, and they end up trapped. They're kind of-- they've painted themselves into a corner. They can't afford to hire anybody. They don't have enough money and they can't really manage any more doors. And they're usually losing about as many doors as they're getting on every year because they've taken on a lot of accidental investors, people that are only going to stick around for maybe a year, they have a lot of attrition have to replace a lot of those. I mean, often the solo preneurs that are in this stage, they often dream. They dream. Their goal is to break that hundred door barrier. And if you've already passed that a hundred door barrier, you are rare. There's not a lot that do that. There's vast majority that have a lot less than this. There's a lot that only have a handful of doors and they're dabblers, right? The seekers.
[00:05:33] And then you've got quite a few they're stuck at this first major sand trap. This solopreneur sandtrap. Often I find they're in a worse financial situation than the pure startups. The pure startups usually know that it's going to take a little money to get the business off the ground and they have some cash on hand, but these solo preneurs have tried everything, and they're investing so much into the business and they're getting such a little return or yield from that. And they have all these new expenses. They just can't seem to make it work, and they're in a lot of pain. And so they have a harder time, sometimes-- than pure startups-- in signing up with us or working with DoorGrow. I love helping all of these different groups. Solopreneurs... One of the main things that I will generally have them do to get them out of the cycle suck, is fire some bad doors. So they usually have built a portfolio up that is maxing them out in terms of time and resources. And I know property managers that by themselves have managed 200 doors and that's absolutely possible, but it's not possible if you're caught in the cycle of suck and you have bad doors and bad owners.
[00:06:45] So you've got to get out of that. And so, right now, if you're caught in this sand trap and you know that your portfolio sucks, my recommendation is just fire your worst client. I guarantee if you do the math and you figure out your profit margin and you figure out the expenses that it costs you to manage that property based on profit margin, right?
[00:07:06] So let's say you have a 50% profit margin, which would be amazing in most, any business, right. That would mean for every dollar of expense that you have. You need $2 to offset that in sales revenue or you collecting revenue, right? It's two to one ratio. My guess is your ratio is even worse. So it doesn't make sense for you to even keep on somebody that the expense for this owner or operating costs based on what your time is worth and effort, you are giving up a lot more than just that money.
[00:07:41] And by letting go of them, it creates a lot more space. I would guarantee that these are not profitable for you to manage. The big mistake I see a lot of people in the solopreneur stage make is they don't really have a lot of financial savvy. And so you'll see people with this really unhealthy, unrealistic mindset where they'll say, "well, I'm making a hundred dollars off this door. So now that means I can now go spend a hundred dollars. That's not reality. If your profit margin were 50% that would mean you would need to make $200 in order to be able to justify a hundred dollar expense. So you can't just go add another a hundred dollars expense because you're making another a hundred bucks.
[00:08:23] For most it's way worse than that in the beginning, it might be instead of a two to one ratio, it might be a 10 to one ratio, which means you need to make $10,000 in order to justify a thousand dollar expense or by cutting a thousand dollar expense, that's $10,000 in sales revenue. You don't have the pressure of generating.
[00:08:43] You don't have to generate. So. They are usually in a worse financial situation. So right now, take a look at your portfolio. And if you have any owner or property, that's eating up a large portion of your time. It's not profitable. Let them go. If you dedicated that amount of time to grow your business or doing some strategies we teach at DoorGrow, you could easily offset that and create that space. And so you may also want to set a rule like maybe a three to one or five to one rule, in which you give yourself permission that if you can get on three good doors, you will fire that bad one. Or if you get on five good doors, you will fire your worst one until you get this portfolio cleaned up. A clean, healthy portfolio will make you money and be profitable and you'll have room to grow. If you don't have room to grow and you've backed yourself into a corner it's because you made some tactical errors in your business.
[00:09:41] So the next thing is you want to take a look at. and I can give some examples. You know, I had one of my clients came here and his name was Sterling. He was at about 60 doors. He was charging too little. So this is another challenge I see is they think getting into the industry, they need to charge less. And I've talked about that on some previous episodes, but he was charging too little on average, maybe only charging, you know, a percentage of $500-$600 rent. So he was taking on worse properties, didn't have as much margin. And I helped him double the amount of profit in his business simply by increasing his pricing. And that also filtered out some of the worst properties. He actually pretty much doubled his gross revenue because his fees were so low, right? Like if you imagine somebody taking-- let's just throw out their number-- like 10% of 500 or $600 rent. That's only 50 or $60 a door. It's not enough. It's not enough.
[00:10:40] It's certainly not enough with it doesn't give you enough space or room to grow the business or add team members. So, in six months, Sterling, after working with us and six months after we did some type of sales and did a website for him and some other stuff, he was at 300 doors and he was almost charging double. Right? So he was making a lot more money. We had a couple Will and Robin, and they built up a pretty sizeable property management business that they were focused on real estate and some other stuff. And they turned it over to a family member or somebody to run. And somehow all those doors whittled down all the way, to about 60 doors. So in about a year, we got them back up to 200 doors and they focused heavily on online reviews and some other strategies that were really effective building out a warm outreach program and some other stuff that we did with them, but they were able to build up the business really quickly and get out of that.
[00:11:39] And they were stuck, partially caught in the cycle of suck. And one of the ways to mitigate that cycle suck is to focus on the reputation piece, which is that fourth step in the cycle of suck. So getting things cleaned up is a really big deal for this stage because you've probably built the wrong portfolio. Now, there are a category of property managers at this stage that have been in business longer, like four to 20 years, like a lot longer. And what that tells me is if they're still under a hundred doors and they've been doing this longer than four years or for a long time, and this wasn't just some side hustle, they were really trying to do this... it may have just been a side hustle, which is the case a lot of times, but the reality is usually these are people that are going to stay stuck probably forever. I don't even think I can help them in a lot of situations because they are ironically really smart and they're adaptive individuals, but they appear stupid others simply because they cannot see how they're limiting their own growth by trying to control everything.
[00:12:45] So sometimes they are smarter than some of my other clients. And sometimes they just are too in their head. These are seekers basically that are stuck and stagnant. Their biggest challenge is their mindset that they can do it themselves. They just believe that it makes more sense to do it themselves and save money by doing it themselves, that it prevents them from being able to make more money and to grow.
[00:13:11] So that's the biggest challenge is that mindset. Essentially, they focus on saving money over the speed of speeding up growth and spending money to make more money. They're cheap basically. And so they waste a lot of time and energy by seeking out stuff on YouTube and trying to read a bunch of books and trying to figure out how to do it all on their own, rather than getting expert help. They sometimes have a decent amount of ego. Sometimes, they're a bit more analytical logical, and they just feel that there's so much out there that they want to do and can do if they just had more time, "if I just had more time, I'd be able to solve all of these problems." And that is probably true, but it will take a decade to do what can be done in a year if you are really caught up in trying to do it all yourself. And if you really are that know-it-all that thinks, "I am smart enough and I can figure this out on my own. I don't need anyone else to help me do this." So unfortunately they can't see this potential. They look at the expense, the potential expense of getting new team members as insurmountable unjustifiable, because they already have this discomfort of this limited profit margin and their inability to get support and help and pay for experts really is what holds them hostage. They're now a slave to this business. So they end up trying to just do more and become more productive and get more done.
[00:14:46] But everybody has a limited capacity, and they've hit their limit. And over time they build this business full of confirmation bias that relies more and more on them and reinforces the idea that no one else could possibly do what I can do. Right? They have this ego that no one else is good enough, and they view the world through this lens. So they might even try hiring a team member, and they're like, "they're so terrible." Or "they don't want to work" and they blame everybody else. And they're like, "only I can do this." And they have this ego that "I'm so amazing. I'm the guy or the gal and no one else can do what I can do." and so they make that true. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy because no savvy property manager would want to do things that way. And so they create this sort of prison for themselves, if you will. And in order to break out of that prison, it's a lot of work because they've built it up. They built up these walls.
[00:15:44] Whether they're real or not, they built up these walls and this perception that it's insurmountable, it's difficult and they believe it. And so to destroy those walls, they fight for it. What I've noticed on calls with them is I will say, "well, you need to do this." And they're like, "well, I can't do that. I don't believe you, Jason. That doesn't mean." Or "does it make sense to do that?" Or " my owners would never go for that" or "that's how they are in my market. You don't know my market. And they always fight to keep their excuses of why they suck and why they can't grow. And it's impossible. It's really, I found it really impossible to try and squeeze a new idea into their head. And the only thing I could do is say, "look, we've got clients that were in a situation similar to you, but they're getting results. It is possible," but they are unwilling to believe it. And a lot of times, these property managers, they turn on me and they want to find flaws with me and believe that there's some sort of dirty secret about DoorGrow like we're not really in a state of integrity or we don't really do what we can do, or we're just in it to take money from people or whatever they want to believe. And they will try and find validation for this and they go hunting for it and they try and find, you know, every business that has success has a little tribe of haters, especially in coaching.
[00:17:00] Right? And so they go find the other haters that all are bitter and upset that also didn't want to do the work or didn't want to make changes or thought they were smarter than me or anybody else. And weren't willing to do the work or make the changes. And they were fighting to keep their excuses. You know and I sometimes will say and I heard other coaches say, you can either be right, or you can win. You can either keep your excuses or you can start getting results, but you can't have both. You have to give something up and then if you're not willing to change your story, you're not going to be able to change your life.
[00:17:37] If you're not willing to change the story about your clients or the market or all the excuses you have for why you're not winning and see something different, you will never have a different result. So if you are at this stage, you are a solopreneur property manager, you feel like you painted yourself into a corner, reach out. If you're humble enough and open-minded enough to reach out for help, we would be glad to help and support you.
[00:18:02] We can help you figure out how to get to that next level. Hopefully you've gotten a few tips and ideas just from this call alone so that you can get to that next level and move forward. It is absolutely possible to have the business of your dreams, to have the team of your dreams that supports you and to find people that are better at each of the things you don't enjoy doing in your business. Is absolutely possible to find people that are better in each of those pieces that you aren't naturally inclined to do or don't love doing. It's possible to find people that will be better at it than you. They will surpass your ability in those things. I've seen it over and over and over again. My team are built as a team of people that are all better at things that they enjoy doing and love doing and that they are doing. They're all better at those things than I would be. Most entrepreneurs, we're highly adaptable. I used to do everything in the business. Right now, you might be doing everything in the business, but you don't love and enjoy everything. I have an episode. Previously, I talked about the four reasons. Go back and listen to that.
[00:19:08] You are heavily out of alignment with the four reasons if you really want to hold on to everything and do everything and control everything. And there's a process to feeling safe, letting go of those things and finding people that are better at it than you and making the right hiring decisions at the right time. Otherwise you'll make a tactical mistake and you get crushed or your business fails because cashflow is king and you have to have cash in the business. So you don't want to hire the wrong person. You need to hire the right person with the right job to take off the minus signs or the things that energetically destroy your dream, and that's what you need most.
[00:19:44] So I'm really good at helping business owners build the right business and the right team around them. Instead, what most do is building the business that they think that and building the team that they think the business needs instead. So, and they just build a stronger and bigger prison for themselves as they gravitate up into the 200 to 400 door range, for example. So that is solo preneur property managers and stuck property managers-- that early stage-- stuck in that early stage. So if you would like to escape that and you're, open-minded enough reach out to the DoorGrow. We'd be glad to help you. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and you can also join our Facebook group by going to doorgrowclub.com.
[00:20:26] So doorgrow.com is our business, and doorgrowclub.com is our Facebook group, our community, for those that are enjoying this podcast, and we will be glad to start you on your journey of escaping being the solopreneur. And next time we get in one of these avatars, we're going to be talking about the transitioning property management entrepreneur that is moving speedily from a hundred doors-- they've broken that a hundred door barrier into the 200 to 400 door sand trap. Right. So we'll talk about that next. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. I hope to see you winning we'll talk soon. Bye everyone.
[00:21:03] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:21:30] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:21:51] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
If you want to scale your business, you have to let go of controlling everything. How? Plan a vacation. Vacations are ESSENTIAL in owning and running a business. Yes, really.
Property management growth expert Jason Hull and DoorGrow Operator Sarah Hall explain why taking vacations is essential when running a property management business.
You’ll Learn…
[00:38] Where is Jason this Week??
[01:47] Why Should You Take a Vacation as a Property Manager?
[02:53] Schedule Your Vacation in Advance
[04:08] How to Prepare Your Team (p.s. You are Not as Important as You Think
[06:21] Making Sure Your Business is Scalable
“Vacations are essential. You've got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you'll burn out.”
“If you don't schedule time to make sure that you are healthy mentally and healthy physically and taking time to relax, the whole business will suffer.”
“It forces your team to step up and level up because they can't lean on you anymore. So by taking vacations, it actually improves your team.”
“I realized I'm not as important as I thought I was in my own business. Which is humbling.”
[00:00:00] Sarah: Vacations are essential. You've got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you'll burn out.
[00:00:05] Jason: All right. Welcome DoorGrow Hackers. So today's going to be a little bit of a different episode. I'm on vacation. And where are we?
[00:00:16] Sarah: Acapulco.
[00:00:17] Jason: Acapulco. So this is going to be a little different episode. I'm doing this from my phone. So hopefully this turns out. You're not going to-- I'm not going to read my manifesto, my normal intro. Just know that if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to grow your business and you do things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker, so. And, uh, you want to do things differently, alright? That's like the short version.
[00:00:38] All right. So, we're sitting here at the Banyan tree resort in Acapulco, which is like the number one resort. It's really nice. We are by the little pool near the bay here. This is the ocean. And, uh, what are we drinking? We've got the best mojitos that I've ever had. Which really sucks because once we leave here, I will forever feel like all other mojitos are not as good because these are the best ones I've ever had, so we'll have to come back to get a good Mojito I guess, so. They're really good.
[00:01:14] Anyway, what we want to talk about on today's episode is vacations, the importance of vacations. So one of the things I've noticed in dealing with and helping and talking to thousands of property managers is that there's a general lack of taking vacations. And this is one of the things that I coach clients on doing. So I'll let Sarah talk. So I'm here with my fiance, Sarah, who's also the operator at DoorGrow. She's amazing. She's already helped us save hundreds of thousands of dollars and figuring out things and really getting operations dialed in. So why do you think managers should commit to taking vacations? Like I'm in such a state of overwhelm, I'm completely part of the day-to-day operations. I don't have the support that I need. How am I going to take vacations?
[00:02:02] Sarah: So I'm also a property manager and vacations are essential. You've got to be able to take a vacation and relax, otherwise you'll burn out. It'll just keep going, your business. You're always going to have things to do. You're always going to have your endless to-do list and your things that need to get done and you would like to get done and things that you know is gonna happen to move your business forward. So that will never end, ever. So, if you don't schedule time for yourself, then your business will suffer. If you don't schedule time to make sure that you are healthy mentally and healthy physically and taking time to relax, the whole business will suffer. So make sure you take some time for yourself. Plan family time. Plan vacations. Plan little trips.
[00:02:53] Jason: To really make sure we drive this home. I want to point out that just scheduling a vacation. Schedule it out in advance. Give yourself plenty of time to prepare. If you haven't taken one in the last two or three years, do it right now. Sit down with your partner, your spouse, whoever, especially if they're involved in the business with you and say, "let's just schedule it." Because just by scheduling it and setting that intention, you have to figure out how to make it work. Set it out 90 days out. You can pretty much change everything significant related to this in the business in the next 90 days. Schedule a vacation schedule six months out if you feel like there's no possible way you could do this. But schedule the vacation and then do everything you need to do to get ready for it. If you have a team, even better. You can start meeting with your team and say, "Hey, look, I scheduled a vacation. It's in the next 90 days. It's on this date and we need to make sure we are ready for when I'm going to be gone because I'm going to be gone."
[00:03:52] And I want you to be gone during your vacation. Like, "I'm not going to be available. You can't hand me escalations. I can't put out fires for you. I'm not going to be able to take care of problems. Like I'm going to be off grid. You'll need to figure out how to handle this." So if you have any team members at all, then you can do that.
[00:04:08] If you need more time, get at least one one executive assistant, one team member, an operator in your business. And if you need help with that stuff, talk to me, talk to our team at DoorGrow. We can get you in a place where you're ready for that and figure out how to build out a really good hiring system. But if you set that intention, you can figure it out. You can figure out with your team, "what processes do we need for me to be gone for a week? What systems do we need to have in place for me to be gone for a week? Who needs to know how to do what in order for me to be gone for a week?
[00:04:42] And so if you set that intention to do that, what I found was when I finally just started scheduling vacations, a couple of things happened. One, I realized I'm not as important as I thought I was in my own business. Which is humbling. Like my team actually stepped up and could handle stuff without me. And it forces your team to step up and level up because they can't lean on you anymore. So by taking vacations, it actually improves your team. The other thing I noticed was that leading up to the vacation, we got a shit ton of stuff done. Like we got a massive amount of things done: processes documented, things figured out, things changed. All this stuff that was on my plate, I had to start figuring out how to give this up in order to be prepared for it. So we had massive momentum and a massive amount of changes in the weeks leading up to the vacation Because stuff got real, and they knew I wouldn't be available, and everybody started to freak out a little bit including myself. So I started making a lot of changes. So this is an intentional way of forcing yourself to get out of the business, which is what you want. You want to have more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, more support. And in order to do that, you need to be able to lean on your team, and by forcing and setting an intention of a vacation, this will allow you to have a vacation. This will allow you to create distance from the business and be able to have a business that can run without you for at least a week. Very few things can really get completely destroyed or damaged in a week, right? You aren't going to lose clients in just one week.
[00:06:10] So set the intention, schedule a vacation, especially if you haven't done it in the last year or two. All right. My phone is saying we're on low power mode, so that means it's time to get back to vacation. So anything else we should add?
[00:06:21] Sarah: Yeah. We also want to make sure you and your business are in a position to scale. If everything is on your plate and you can't offload anything and you can't trust your team and you don't have any processes or any systems or anyone you can rely on you can't scale. You can only handle so much. Every person can only handle so much. So, if you want more out of life and you want more out of your business, and most of us do, you've got to be able to figure out what to do to get yourself out of the business.
[00:06:52] Jason: Yeah, you're not as important as you think you are. Like, that's one of the humbling things us CEOs or entrepreneurs need to realize and learn. And the more you are out of the business and less you're involved in it, and the more you're able to lean on your team, the better the business actually does. And I've heard this repeatedly from multiple business owners and entrepreneurs I've helped over the years that the business and the team are happier and things are better because usually us as entrepreneurs, we're not really good managers. Most of us are visionaries and we're not good operators. So anyway, that's all we're going to do for today here for those that want some FOMO and you can see here what we're hanging out and dealing with here in Acapulco. And until next time to our mutual growth, everybody. Check us out at doorgrow.com.
[00:07:35] We want to help support you and grow you in your business and help you have the business and the life of your dreams. And that's what we at Doorgrow all get a thrill of doing, to support our clients. And we want you to be able to experience more of this. All right, bye everybody. Until next time, to our mutual growth.
[00:07:52] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:08:19] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:08:40] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
After getting past the pure startup phase, property management entrepreneurs begin to face new challenges. Whether you have 1 door or 50 doors, you probably experience similar problems and fall victim to common mistakes.
Property management growth expert Jason Hull explains the common pitfalls and challenges that “seekers” face in the property management industry.
You’ll Learn…
[01:12] Seekers: the Next Phase of Being a Property Management Entrepreneur
[03:14] Falling Victim to Franchises
[04:34] Learning the Ropes: Product Research Interviews
[07:16] Getting that First 50 Doors
[08:11] Becoming an Expert in Your Field
[11:47] How to Collapse Time and Avoid Wasting Tens of Thousands of Dollars
[12:32] Getting the Right Kind of Leads
“One of the big challenges: you don't know yet what you don't know at this stage.”
“Get educated because the more educated you are, the more of authority you are”
“If you are a decent human being, you will experience imposter syndrome. Every entrepreneur goes through this state.”
“Remember, nobody wants to buy property management from you. What they really want to buy from you is peace of mind or safety and certainty.”
[00:00:00] Remember, nobody wants to buy property management from you. What they really want to buy from you is peace of mind 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 than you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and residual income.
[00:00:48] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and the business owner. 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 am your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:12] So on a previous episode, we started talking about this journey that the entrepreneur or the property management entrepreneur business owner goes through. And we started with the pure startup. The zero door crowd. So today we're going to get into the next level. It's barely beyond that. It's like one door beyond that. Like they've actually started. And these, I call seekers. Why? Because they are seeking a lot. They're seeking a lot of knowledge. They don't know a lot. They're trying to figure out like what they need to do. They're trying to get over all sorts of challenges. So when you first start taking action, that's a big leap. It's difficult. So a lot of times these might be-- and if this is you, you're likely a realtor, maybe with a few rental investment properties of your own. Maybe you have a little bit of experience managing properties for yourself, or maybe a little bit for others.
[00:02:14] These seekers are not yet even aware of how painful and tough it can be until they mature into kind of that next level we'll get into in a future episode. They are now wanting to start a property management business, and they are easy prey to making many common mistakes. They fall prey to a lot of potential pitfalls, such as selecting poor branding. Choosing poor branding that costs them a lot of leads, getting a website that doesn't convert and capture leads well, not pricing themselves effectively... like trying to be the cheapest in the market, no strategy for online review gathering and they start quickly earning a negative reputation just from their first few interactions taking on bad clients that costs them 10 times good ones. We talked about the cycle of suck on a previous episode. I recommend you review that if you're in this stage or any stage, really. And so that is a challenge. They're caught in the cycle of suck.
[00:03:14] A lot of times in this seeker stage, they fall prey to expensive franchises. And so, you know, you can check out DoorGrow, and just Google DoorGrow and "property management franchise alternative." and we have a whole page about the potential pitfalls of choosing into a property management franchise and all the limitations that that creates and why it may not be a good fit for almost anyone so. Paying for expensive and ineffective marketing channels, which franchises generally push you towards such as SEO, pay-per-click content marketing, social media marketing, pay per lead services, and you end up getting really poor results. So it's really costly, takes a lot more time, and you get way less results. A lot of times at this stage, they're seeking a broker. Uh, that's an issue with pure startups. A lot of times they're seeking a broker. They're working on getting their brokers license. They may be working underneath the broker instead of having their own brokers license, and they're just seeking a lot of tools and resources and ideas. And there's so many shiny objects, so many pieces of software, so many tools, and a lot of times they go down this rabbit hole of just playing around with all this stuff and not actually taking action and moving forward.
[00:04:34] So. I've seen a lot of clients come to me that were kind of at this level and at this stage, and one of the big challenges: you don't know yet what you don't know at this stage. You haven't learned yet how difficult certain pieces of the business can be. So there's a lot of decisions that need to be made. So one of the things that I teach clients just to throw a bone out is an idea or strategy called product research interviews. And without giving away too much awesome stuff just on our free podcast-- but I want to always give value-- is product research interviews are going to be a great tool for the seeker and for the pure startups to get ideas and to learn what they need to do to please investors. It helps them learn what objections, what challenges. So do some product research interviews. If you are going to create something new, a new product or service. Such as starting a property management business and offering a suite of services for property management, my recommendation is you do some product research interviews because you may not really know. You know maybe what you need as an investor, but you're one limited avenue for information. And so my recommendation is that you talk to at least minimum 20 or 30 investors. And ask them about their concerns, why they haven't used a property manager in the past, if they have, what challenges have they had.
[00:06:06] So you get connected to reality in terms of how the investor thinks, what their mindset is, what challenges they see, what their objections are. Once you've done this with about 20 or 30, you'll probably be almost as savvy as a lot of property managers that have been doing this for at least a handful of years, because they never did that, so they just waited until they had 20 or 30 solid opportunities. And then eventually they actually got wise enough to start asking really healthy questions to get feedback, which might've been, you know, a hundred people in after talking to a lot of investors. So I want to collapse time for you. Start doing some product research interviews. Real simple. Go out to some sort of real estate investor group. Start connecting and meeting people and just say, "Hey, I'm starting a property management business. It looks like you're doing some cool stuff in the industry or that you're an investor. I would love to take you out to lunch, pick your brain. I could really use some feedback on what I was looking at doing and offering to clients." And the secret that we talk about, even in more detail in our program is these are awesome leads. This is a really easy side door to get some leads for your business to get things started.
[00:07:16] So getting that first 50 doors. A seeker, may be like one to 50 doors, right. And this stage you are just learning. You're just learning, like "how should I handle a lease?" And like, "how should I handle contracts?" And like, "how should I like get property management software in place?" And like, you're just focused on some really basic stuff to get the business healthy and going, and you might get caught up on stuff that you don't really need to spend a ton of time on yet. Like if it's just, you, you don't really need to be spending a ton of time documenting processes or worrying about VAs or, you know, some of this kind of stuff. That's probably once you have 50 doors, then it's time to start maybe focusing on "how can I offload a little bit?" "how can I start creating some leverage?" Maybe there's some software and some tools, and then we'll get into that on a subsequent podcast episode.
[00:08:11] So if you are a seeker and you are figuring this stuff out, I mentioned this for the pure startups, but a lot of seekers need to hear this too. Make sure you really learn the laws and the rules in landlord tenant law, and get really connected to the local real estate board and just really be aware of what you can and cannot do or should and should not do in your market. Get educated because the more educated you are, the more of authority you are and the more you're going to kill what every seeker feels, which is imposter syndrome. Seekers have stepped beyond the fantasy and they're in reality and reality is uncomfortable. And the pain you will experience, if you are a decent human being, you will experience imposter syndrome. Every entrepreneur goes through this state. You suck during this stage, you're going to experience a lot of pain and a lot of people avoid the suck. You have to just start sucking to get over it. You have to lean into the suck and you have to be willing to look stupid sometimes and ask dumb questions.
[00:09:16] Cause you're not going to learn otherwise. And you need to be willing to experience that discomfort of imposter syndrome. And figure out how to overcome it, so you don't feel like a fake or phony or are worried whether or not they're going to know whether you know or don't know something. It's okay to admit that you're new. It's okay to admit that you might not know something, but that you will figure it out. You could easily say, "you know what? I don't actually-- I'm not totally clear on that, but that's a great question. Let me do a little bit more research and I will come back to you and let you know what I find out. You know, I have some connections with my lawyer. I have connections with my trade organization. I have connections with some of my investor clients. Let me ask around and find out a really solid answer for you on that."
[00:10:06] You don't have to know everything immediately. They want to know that you can figure out problems and solve problems for them. And you don't have to be the expert on everything, but I want you to become the expert. Like become the expert that they can lean on and trust because that puts you in much higher category in their mind of trust. And they will want to do business with you if they feel safe with you. Remember, nobody wants to buy property management from you. What they really want to buy from you is peace of mind or safety and certainty, as I've talked about before. I talked about on a previous episode, the four reasons for entrepreneurs to start a business. The fifth reason for people in motivation of why they are involved in businesses or that you need to focus on a business. That fifth reason is safety and certainty. And so that's really what people want to buy from you. So make sure you know how to offer safety and certainty to them instead of just offering a bunch of products and services and things about managing their property that will maybe create safety and certainty. Help them become certain in you that you're going to create safety and certainty and they will care a lot less about all the details and features and benefits and trying to micromanage you and trying to ask way too many questions. That's usually a clue they're not feeling safe with you and they are uncomfortable and they don't feel like there's a high level of trust or safety and certainty. And remember, sales and deals happen at the speed of trust. So the faster you can create authentic, real trust, the faster you're going to get results, so.
[00:11:47] If you are a seeker and you're struggling with some of this stuff and you're trying to figure it out and you don't want to make a ton of mistakes and you want to collapse time and you don't want to waste tens of thousands of dollars on marketing and signing contracts with marketing agencies, and you want to get some real solid wins, you want to grow your business without spending a dime on marketing and just investing time, but actually less time than it would take if you got leads through marketing-- which takes more time, by the way, than the warm lead strategies that we focus on at DoorGrow. If you want to spend less time and less money and get more doors more quickly, then reach out. One of my clients-- just had a call with him just the other day-- he's added 300 doors in the last year in working with us, about 300 doors.
[00:12:32] That would be impossible if you were focused on any lead gen channel or advertising channel, you know, if you were doing marketing or paying for SEO or pay-per-click or content marketing or social media marketing or any internet marketing, that would be impossible because those leads would have been colder. He wouldn't have had the time. He wouldn't have had the time to be closing that many deals and that many doors, but when deals come to you hot or warm and you're getting warm leads and referrals, and you've really optimized that sales pipeline for that, you built up really good partner programs and some of the stuff we talked about, this can go really, really fast because. The close rate on warm leads is super high. It's like 80, 90% typically. And the sales cycle time to close them is way shorter, so you're spending way less time selling. So if you want to get this business off the ground, build the right engine from the get-go. And then once it's built like this client, he's just injecting a little bit of fuel into this engine. He doesn't have to invest all the hours that he was putting in, and he was putting in like probably 20, 25 hours a week, I think, into this strategy. It is like a part-time job just to focus on sales and grow the business.
[00:13:45] But now, it just takes a little bit of fuel to keep that engine going now that he has really good connections, really good partners. He's built that. And there's some really easy, low hanging fruit that can get you a lot more doors than any of the really expensive cold lead marketing strategies. Some of them are so obvious, such a no brainer when I point it out to our new clients, they're just, they're just winning. It's just wins. We started doing in our mastermind, a new client call cause we had so many new clients that are in the early stage. And we started doing that on Tuesdays. And a lot of these are in this seeker category.
[00:14:19] They've started the business, but they're in this difficult sort of stage and they have to build the engine. And the call that we just had, the first two calls we did on Tuesdays were just sharing strategies. Right? But this last call yesterday was just wins. It was just really awesome. It was lots of wins. Everyone's sharing wins and they just couldn't believe-- like they're batting a thousand. They're making calls and they're getting zero on some of the calls that they're doing. They're getting no one saying "no" in building up these referral relationships. And I know that sounds crazy and ridiculous, and you probably don't believe me, but join the program and then you'll be like, "oh yeah, that makes sense." and "that is so easy." And "I can't believe, I didn't think of doing that. I would never say no to that either." Right. So, anyway, if you're interested in growing your business, you are a seeker, check us out at doorgrow.com. Schedule a call with my team and let's get you into the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind.
[00:15:18] And our first goal with all of these seekers is to get them paid. We want to get them making double what the monthly cost of the mastermind is within the first 30 days, so that they're making enough money to justify the expense. Double the cost of the expense. They're making double that. So, and that's not too difficult to do. For most property managers, it's maybe like 10, maybe to 20 doors, depending on how much money they make per door, which later in our program, we will optimize and improve because everybody comes in with bad pricing.
[00:15:50] So, all right. So that's it for today. For those of those seekers out there, keep seeking, and you will find right. This is what the Bible says anyway. So it keeps seeking, you'll find it. And hopefully in your hunt or in your seeking, you find DoorGrow. We would love to help you out. And until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.
[00:16:10] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:16:37] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:16:58] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
How many times have you considered going into short term rentals as a property manager? Short-term and vacation rentals are enticing, but they can also be an intimidating niche for newcomers.
Today’s guest is Alex Jarbo, short-term rental developer and manager and CEO of Sargon Investments.He is the host of the Youtube Channel called Alex Builds where he teaches the ins and outs of short-term development and management.
You’ll Learn…
[01:08] Starting out in the Short-Term Rental World
[08:04] Useful Tools for Managing Short-Term Rentals
[12:13] Virtual Guidebooks: Providing a Unique Experience to Guests
[15:42] Dealing with Common Issues in Short-Term Rentals
[18:32] Some Extra Tips from Pro Short-Term Rental Manager Alex
[23:06] The Shifts in the Industry Since COVID
[25:34] Where to go to Learn More!
“And anytime I talk to someone they're like, "I don't know where to start investing." I was like, just start in your backyard.”
“It's easier to rent out these unique properties compared to, say, something like a normal condo or something.”
“I like the property to be an experience in itself on top of the city that the people are visiting for the attraction.”
“I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? Like, no. It's not. Invest and manage both.”
[00:00:00] Alex: I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? Like, no, it's not. Invest and manage both.
[00:00:06] Jason: Alright, welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow! If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing 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.
[00:00:44] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and the 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.
[00:01:08] And today's guest is Alex, Alex Jarbo. Am I saying your last name right?
[00:01:13] Alex: Yup.
[00:01:14] Jason: I did? Okay. I didn't know if it was like a soft, "h" sounding 'j' or something. So Alex, welcome to the show. You have a company called Sargon investments. You do a lot of cool Airbnb stuff. So I'm really excited to have you on as a guest. I think the Airbnb market is of interest to a lot of my clients and a lot of property managers. It's heating up. There's more interest growing. So, maybe to get started: tell us a little bit about your background and how you kind of got into dealing with rental properties.
[00:01:48] Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So I was originally, I served about four and a half years in the Marine Corps. And then I had gotten to a point where I just wanted to branch out and sort of do my own thing outside of the military. So, got out, and then the day I got out of the military, I actually moved down to where I live here in Asheville. Prior to that, I spent a couple months trying to figure out like where I wanted to move. I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan. And I wanted to get into short-term rentals. That was sort of the niche that I had chosen inside real estate. So when I moved here, got my real estate license, helped some people purchase and sell properties, but I saw a lot of people purchasing short term rentals that would just come to me.
[00:02:26] So I decided to purchase my first one or at least start to purchase my first one. And I originally wanted to use my VA loan and purchase like a duplex or a triplex, live in one, and rent the other couple out on Airbnb. But what I realized really quickly was that like it was just very difficult, even back then in 2017 to find good, cash flowing short-term rentals that weren't completely out of my budget at the time. So after maybe like three months of looking and getting outbid a lot, I decided to build my first short-term rental. And on top of a building I decided to take over the, uh, management. So that's where I decided to both start a development company and start a management company. And that one property turned into two, two turned into four that we're developing, and now we're developing 10 and then working on like a boutique resort.
[00:03:13] But yeah, that's the sort of the short of where I'm at now is just focusing on putting together these like boutique resort developments. And then we self manage in house.
[00:03:24] Jason: Awesome. So a lot of property managers listening might think "I would like to be an investor and maybe get some of my own." I know some of my clients dabble a little bit just in their own investments. Even if they manage long-term rentals, they want to get more into AirBNB. So why don't we approach that topic first? Like getting into it, you do some things that are a little bit different than the typical Airbnb investor. And one of which being cabins. So I'm really curious about this idea of: why cabins?
[00:03:59] Alex: So this is prior to COVID. My whole idea was like-- right now we invest in mountain communities, but every market has their own little area. And anytime I talk to someone they're like, "I don't know where to start investing." I was like, just start in your backyard. If you live in a Metro area, like a lot of areas, you're going to be renting out, like say condos, or you're going to be renting out apartments or something just cause you're in a busy metro city. I like to ask them like "where in your city or the market that you live in-- where do people like to take weekend vacations, maybe an hour to two away from you driving wise?
[00:04:29] And that's sort of the market that I recommend people sort of go into. People are fine with driving say like 15- 20 minutes away from like a Metro city up to an hour in some cases. So like a good example of that is like people in New York, like New York city are going to travel maybe two hours. They're used to traveling two hours north to vacation, same thing with, say like in California on the west coast. People in San Diego are pretty used to going up to Big Bear Lake and taking that drive. Land prices are going to be cheaper.
[00:04:59] You can also host some like, not parties, but like bigger-- you can host more people in some of these larger cabins and you have more control on the design and that's sort of the thing we really focus on is focusing on developing unique cabins, whether it be a frames, really nice log cabins... we're, we're dabbling in like tree houses. It's just difficult to find like financing on those right now. The reason we gravitated towards cabins over something like purchasing a condo in a Metro city is we have more control over the design, which just plays into the marketing. It's easier to rent out these unique properties compared to say like something like a normal condo or something where it's a little bit more difficult to differentiate yourself to like the condo next door or something.
[00:05:41] Jason: So it sounds like some of the key things you look at is proximity: like pick an area that's nearby. It needs to be something kind of where people take vacations and then novelty seems to be an aspect to this. Like cabins are a novel thing in the mountain area and making it somehow unique or different or stand out.
[00:05:59] Alex: Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, what I always like to say is: say, if you're not developing the property and you're coming into it, you want something unique about the property. I like the property to be an experience in itself on top of the city that the people are visiting for the attraction. So like, if you're looking at a market that has its attractions, but at the same time, it's like you sort of get rid of the seasonality part of it a little bit when the property itself is an experience in itself,
[00:06:24] Jason: Mmm, yeah, good point. The property kind of needs to be its own event or its own thing. Yeah. Cool. So let's shift gears and talk about property managers that might want to get into this game of targeting people. Like you have a portfolio or a small portfolio of investments that they can maybe get on as clients and what that might look like. And then maybe one of the things I think you're really good at is the technology. And so we could chat maybe a little bit about that.
[00:06:55] Alex: Yeah, for managers who are looking, before this, we were talking about like a lot of long-term managers are sort of starting to dabble in the short-term rental game. It sounds intimidating, but it's not as intimidating as it sounds. There's a lot of technology out there right now, plugins and then also CRMs that make the process pretty seamless. Depending on how many properties you have in the portfolio, you really don't need boots on the ground. It might in terms of like having a property manager in an area. Again, I would focus on one market at a time.
[00:07:25] But you can get away with a part-time maintenance person. The most important part is probably going to be your cleaning crew, and that's going to be up to you. There's pros and cons to either hiring your own, like managing the cleaning in-house or teaming up with a local cleaning crew in the area that can handle the cleaning stuff. Which again, the cleaning is definitely like-- I look at my cleaning crew as almost the manager of the properties themselves, because they're there at least twice a week or at least once a week, depending on what the booking looks like. So they see what needs to be replaced, what's damaged. If anything is damaged, they send me a picture directly, which I send directly to either Airbnb, VRBO, or wherever the property's listed.
[00:08:04] So the technology piece is going to be huge. And it, again, it's all dependent on how big you are. If you have 10 cabins, you can probably get away with, there are messaging plugins where it's like, I would say 80% of your messaging is automated. And then you can hire virtual assistants to sort of take over the other 20% of the messaging where it's like specific questions that are asked or say, if they're calling or something.
[00:08:26] Jason: So the cleaning crew is almost your inspection crew. Like they're doing somewhat of an inspection as well, not just coming in and cleaning. So they're identifying issues, submitting things to your maintenance team or your system for maintenance. And then you need people that are managing that. And then you've got VAs that can help facilitate some of these things happening right?
[00:08:48] Alex: Right.
[00:08:49] Jason: What are some of the actual technological tools that you utilize that help you to systemize the business and make things simple for yourself?
[00:08:58] Alex: The first one is-- and I'll talk about maybe four or five tools here. The first one is going to be a tool and a company called StayFi. And I've talked about this tool so much now that I've recommended it to anyone looking to get into short-term rentals. StayFi is essentially a little disk that plugs in the back of the router. And what that does, is it email captures any guests that's using your internet. That 1. Protects you from if the guest is doing anything illegal on your internet, which might happen. But 2. It captures everyone's email in the cabin.
[00:09:29] So, you're essentially taking digital marketing principles and applying it to brick and mortar business, which is the short-term rental stuff. Which is a little difficult to do, but if you can master that part, you can essentially capture your customers. So StayFi. Imagine like you're walking into a Starbucks, you walk into an airport and you have to enter in your email address to be able to get access to the wifi. It's the same idea here, but it's geared towards short-term rentals.
[00:09:52] So from there we use MailChimp to push out marketing emails, but we push out maybe seasonal emails, like three or four emails a year just saying, "Hey," like "this season's coming up" or "Valentine's day is coming up. Would you like to book with us?"
[00:10:04] Originally, when you're starting off, you can just put your Airbnb link directly in there. But as a manager who wants to build a bigger short-term rental business, you can use this to sort of take people off of Airbnb, VRBO where they book initially with the short-term rental sites, but then you can build a platform on the backend to sort of capture direct bookings where you're not paying both. The guest is not paying the processing fees. And then same thing with the host. You're saving money on that end where you're sort of-- you have more control over the guests, which is what we realized is very important.
[00:10:38] Jason: Yeah. So you're shifting from just traffic that's fed to you by Airbnb and you're taking that traffic so that it doesn't always have to come back through that and creating your own traffic. It's traffic you own now.
[00:10:50] And for those emails that you capture, do you have any, like, even anecdotal data or information on how many rebook at the same property? Is that common?
[00:11:00] Alex: It is pretty common. I don't have exact numbers on that. But we do see a boost in booking say like a couple days after we've pushed the email out. Right now we're still working on building out the backend platform.
[00:11:13] We're just pushing them directly back through Airbnb right now. But like, companies like Airbnb and VRBO have metrics that show like, "Hey, this person has rebooked with you this many times." And then people who are looking to get into more of an advanced system, we use Streamline, or we're going to be using Streamline. vacation, rental software is top of the line where you can syndicate all the top short-term rental sites, and then it sort of syndicates all the messaging too that comes from the different sites. So you have one platform which I really recommend doing. Like, if someone is coming up to a manager and saying, "Hey, I want to take over your property. What can you do for me?" The first thing I recommend is always: are they just on one platform? If they're just on Airbnb, if they're just on VRBO, there's already room for growth there by just putting it on a couple other platforms or putting more eyes on your property.
[00:12:00] Jason: Yeah. Very cool. So Streamline for syndication is one of the things. You mentioned MailChimp for getting emails out periodically do your list or some sort of newsletter. What other tools are you using to kind of simplify the business?
[00:12:13] Alex: Right now, a digital guidebook is very effective. We like to essentially plan-- I sort of stole this idea. My wife and I had a vacation in Taloon beach on a resort. And when we arrived, the resort had practically planned our trip for us, where it's like, "Hey, if you want to do a cave diving trip, this is this. If you want it, this is what your day would look like. If you wanted to go visit the pyramids, this is what your day is going to look like. If you just want a chill day and just want to go visit restaurants, this is what your day could look like."
[00:12:43] So we did the same thing there where we plan maybe three to four days. Like here we have like over a hundred breweries in the city, so we do like a brewery day. We do a hiking day. We do a waterfall chasing day, and it's like all that's in the digital guidebook where you could put links to different things in the digital guidebook. And it's just sent out. The link is sent out with the check-in instructions. Same thing with you can get with local restaurants or local providers and be like, "Hey, can you give me like a 10% discount, and then I'll put it in my digital guide book where the guests can use almost like a QR code where you can just generate a QR code. Yeah.
[00:13:15] Jason: So for the digital guidebook, is this just like a Google document or is this like..?
[00:13:21] Alex: We use a company called Hostfully. And Hostfully is specifically a short-term rental, digital guidebook.
[00:13:28] Jason: Host fully?
[00:13:30] Alex: Yeah, Hostfully. Host and then F U L L Y. Yeah.
[00:13:33] Jason: Okay. Great.
[00:13:34] Alex: Pretty cheap too, man. It's like, I think it's like 15, $20 a month per property.
[00:13:38] Jason: Got it. And so what advantages does Hostfully give you over just throwing it in a Google document, for example?
[00:13:45] Alex: The templates are super easy to use. You can also track like how many people are actually looking at it. I mean, I would say the templates, and then also, Hostfully does have a backend system just like Streamline. So. Streamline I believe it's a minimum of 15 properties if you're just starting off. Hostfully I believe is like $25 a month per property. Where it's the same type of syndication CRM, where it pushes out to the other short-term rental sites. So you can sync those two together.
[00:14:11] Jason: Got it. Yeah. I had a software company on one of my previous episodes. They were showcasing TripAngle. Tripangle.com. And he was talking about how they like reduce all the fees, connected Airbnb and all this stuff. So. Pretty cool. It might be worth listeners checking out that and checking out tripangle.com. I think he had mentioned something about Streamline the last time I talked to this gentleman too. So, some connections.
[00:14:37] Alex: Streamline's a company standard. It's been around before Airbnb. Before VRBO blew up too. People forget like short-term rentals is not a new idea. It's just the access Airbnb has made it so much easier and VRBO too. Short-term rentals have been around for a very long time where people have to pick up a phone and book So like, I mean, people aren't missing the boat on that. I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals?
[00:15:04] Like, no, it's not. Invest and manage both. It's continuing to grow, especially with COVID like people sort of stepped away from hotels a little bit, and they're more comfortable driving out a little further out where it's like, would you rather pay an extra $1500 to stay an actual house compared to a hotel? And same thing with like some of the larger properties that we manage. It's like we have families instead of booking, maybe two or three hotel rooms, they're just going to book one house and it almost comes out to be the same price.
[00:15:31] Jason: Nice. Yeah. For large groups it's hard to beat, you know, if you're doing a family reunion or something like that. It's pretty difficult. You're talking a whole bunch of hotel rooms or you get a 10 bedroom house. So,
[00:15:42] Alex: One thing going back to the tools that just came to mind. This has helped us a lot when it comes to-- cause we are in a very strict short-term rental market in terms of like laws and zoning and everything. And one of the things that's helped us a lot. And this can help a lot of the managers who are looking to get into the space is using a company called NoiseAware and stacking that with a company called Party Squasher. And we mainly use NoiseAware compared to Party Squasher. You can combine the two but NoiseAware sort of, it hears-- it doesn't listen to everything. It doesn't listen into conversations, but it monitors the decibel level inside of the property.
[00:16:17] So if the guests are being way too loud or screaming since you get their phone number at booking, even if it's through Airbnb or VRBO, they get an immediate text message "Hey, you're being too loud. Could you please like quiet down?" Or something like that. Maybe a little bit more tactful than that. But that's been a very powerful tool for us and especially approaching the county. It's like the biggest thing neighbors think about is like, oh my God, when they think Airbnb they think like, oh my God, there's gonna be just parties next door all the time. So.
[00:16:44] Jason: Right. Destroy the neighborhood.
[00:16:46] Alex: Right.
[00:16:47] Jason: So, yeah, that's pretty interesting. So they get a text message. Do they reply to this and do you see their messages? Or like, what the hell? You know,
[00:16:55] Alex: But what we do, there's like a whole list of things. So Stayfi, what I mentioned earlier also allows you to see how many devices are connected to the wifi. So.
[00:17:06] Jason: Right, so if there's like a thousand, you know there's some rager going on.
[00:17:09] Alex: Granted, you might have your laptop. Like one guest will have a phone, a laptop, So two, three devices, maybe an iPad too, a tablet. But if like the property sleeps six people and there's 30 people attached to the wifi.
[00:17:21] We also have like an outdoor facing camera just at the driveway too. So say if we do get a say, cause we can set it up to where we get the noise notification as well. So from there, we just look at our cameras and say, oh, okay. There's 50 cars in the parking lot, and this place sleeps six people. And then from there, we can either text "Hey, like you're not supposed to have..." or we can reach out to Airbnb directly. We've never really dealt with that issue, but the systems are in place just to make sure.
[00:17:48] Jason: And it's largely probably the screening process at the outset that you have in place to prevent that. Right. So you mentioned NoiseAware you couple it sometimes with Party Squasher, is that what you said?
[00:17:59] Alex: I personally haven't used it, but some other guests have recommended it to me. I haven't-- I have almost no experience in that, but I've seen it a lot mentioned on different short term rental podcasts and some of the books that I've read too.
[00:18:10] Jason: Okay. Cool.
[00:18:11] Alex: I Don't know what it does on the backend but...
[00:18:13] Jason: Yeah, I don't either. Okay, cool. But it probably prevents parties, which is probably a big concern, like, parties happening, the NoiseAware and the Party Squasher. All right. Cool. Any other tools or systems that you utilize in managing your rentals to make sure things go smoothly.
[00:18:32] Alex: Going back to the cleaning crew just a good line of communication is very important. Making sure that you are choosing a cleaning crew or cleaning company that can grow with you. A lot of the time, you don't want to be teaching your cleaning crew how to clean short-term rentals because what I realized initially, and just with the labor shortage that's happening right now is a lot of people, like my cleaning crew stopped taking on new clients, not new properties, just new clients.
[00:18:58] It's difficult to try to switch the mindset of approaching a cleaner that takes care of properties. Say for just cleaning people's properties like our property manager or our cleaning crew specifically deals in short-term rentals, a company that is used to turning a property two, three times a week if need be.
[00:19:17] Another thing I'd recommend is-- it might affect your bottom line a little bit, but it might outweigh the amount of time that you put on a specific property. Because of COVID, we stopped taking on one day bookings, which we were taking a lot of, one day bookings prior to COVID and that sort of just came out of my cleaning crew couldn't handle the work from the one day bookings, but what I realized is looking back, we've been doing that for four or five months since we stopped taking one day bookings, a lot of our problems, a lot of our questions, a lot of our bandwidth was taken up by one day guests. And I sorta understand it's like a lot of the times they were just coming in at like, say 8, 9, 10 PM. And they have to check in at 10:00 AM the next day. They don't really get to enjoy the property too much. You get those late night texts a lot too, from the one day guests compared to a guest staying 3, 4, 5, sometimes a week with you.
[00:20:10] Sometimes those are the quietest guests where you don't hear anything from them. Maybe a couple of questions here and there. But what I saw was a lot of my issues, a lot of my people requesting refunds or whatever was coming from one day guests. So for people who are already in the short-term rental space, I'd play around to see. And what I also realized too, was like, sometimes that one day guest will book in the center of the week on the Wednesday, which blocks someone from booking that entire week. So if someone's in the short term rental space play around with seeing, maybe just do it with one property and see how the property is affected.
[00:20:42] You might get a better tenant in there which is what we saw a better tenant by booking two, three days minimum compared to a one day. And what I also saw with if you're booking on Airbnb or VRBO, is the algorithm sort of adjusts based off that request of only accepting two or three-day bookings. They'll try to play with your schedule to show it to people who are only trying to book three days and sort of, like for most of our properties are fully booked up with no one day gaps in the schedule right now, after we've switched over from not taking one day bookings.
[00:21:16] Jason: Yeah, that's interesting. I would imagine that would be really effective. Plus if you're able to get two and three day bookings to fill it up for the most part, you probably rather than a bunch of one days, you're probably between a one day and a three day. For example, you probably have similar operational costs.
[00:21:34] Alex: That's been huge. And that's sort of just came that we discovered that by accident. Also, one of my mentors had told me, like we were operating for the first year, we were operating at like a hundred percent occupancy and he's like, "your prices aren't high enough. You shouldn't be at a hundred percent occupancy." And that rings true for any type of real estate asset. It's like, if you're at a hundred percent occupancy or hundred percent booked...
[00:21:53] Jason: yeah. You haven't hit the limit yet on what you could get.
[00:21:55] Alex: Right.
[00:21:56] Jason: If you're at a hundred percent,
[00:21:57] Alex: If it's multi family, self storage, whatever. It's like, if you're at a hundred percent, you got to raise your prices.
[00:22:01] Jason: Yeah what's the occupancy rate you go for now instead of aiming for a hundred percent.
[00:22:07] Alex: So we raised our rates by 30%, if we can stick to the 85%, which is, I mean, if you look at like companies that look at like what to price your property as like rdna.co is probably another good a good tool for the audience that sort of helps you price out what the short-term rental will rent for rdna.co they look at if a property is anything over 75% that's looked at, like you're in a higher percentile compared to anything below that.
[00:22:35] This is getting on the development side when we develop our properties, we underwrite them as long-term rentals. Just in case, if the zoning ever changed in the city, that it's an extra fail safe, it's an exit. That's worst case scenarios. If we have to book it out, has a long-term rental. It can cover the debt service and the expenses. If we need it.
[00:22:54] Jason: Smart. Yeah. I know when COVID hit, the short-term rental game got pretty damaged in the short term, right? And there was a lot of people like trying to shift and shuffle and get their properties into the long-term space.
[00:23:06] Alex: What I saw too is I had talked to someone. I realized that this was different. We use the term vacation rental and short-term rental pretty interchangeably, but sometimes people look at that as differently. If you're looking at the definitions of what I'm about to explain right now, vacation rentals is what I'm in right now. Sometimes short-term rentals can be looked at like 30 day plus stays, but not over six months. During COVID a lot of people were renting out to traveling nurses and they're still doing that is they're renting out to traveling nurses. Say you're not in a market where you have all these properties. You might be close to a very large hospital.
[00:23:40] If you're close to a large hospital, you can go. There are short-term rental sites that are specifically geared towards nurses. And that's a lot of hosts sort of pivoted towards that during, when they weren't allowed to do short-term rentals. But the 30 day plus stay is a gray area. Almost all cities and counties cannot regulate short-term rentals for 30 days plus which is interesting. A lot of people are making good money just on that route.
[00:24:06] Jason: Yeah. I've talked to some property managers. One property manager mentioned that they do a lot of that extended stay it's in the short term sort of space, but they get a lot of people from overseas that are coming over that need a place to stay in the interim or they're coming for some sort of work thing, you know, they might be maybe from India coming to work for a tech firm or some of these things, and they need an extended place to stay for a few months while they're doing some sort of training, you know, things like that. And so, yeah, that can be a very profitable business. They're getting a lot more money than the standard rate on a property.
[00:24:43] Alex: And you had mentioned COVID. It'll be interesting to-- I've seen different projections on like once international travel really starts to pick up again. Prices or occupancy might drop, but it's going to be interesting to see, every market's going to be different, how that plays out because a lot of people did start using. They picked up Airbnb and VRBO during COVID where it's like, instead of staying in a hotel, they decided to book through Airbnb and VRBO for the first time. So it'd be interesting to see if those people, if the occupancy and the rates sort of stay the same once, international travel picks back up.
[00:25:16] Jason: Yeah, that will be interesting. Well, cool. This has been really insightful and I'm sure those that are kind of dabbling or just getting into the short-term rental game will have picked up some cool ideas and some cool tips. Anything else that you think they might be interested in or that we could point out to property managers?
[00:25:34] Alex: Yeah. I talk a lot about this stuff on my YouTube channel too. Alex Builds it's a little logo of a blue tree house. If they want to sort of dive deeper into the management side of it and the tool side they can check that out. And then also my website, Sargoninvestments.com they can, if they can't find that YouTube channel, they could find it through there too.
[00:25:51] Jason: Awesome. Cool, Alex, I appreciate you coming on the show and thanks for sharing so many of your knowledge and insights, and I wish you continued success in your short-term game.
[00:26:03] Alex: Perfect. Thanks, Jason.
[00:26:04] Jason: You bet. All right. Cool. Check him out on YouTube. He's got a cool little YouTube channel you know, going over investments short-term rentals. He talks about some cool ideas. Lending loans like how to play the game of short-term rentals. So check him out on YouTube. And for those that are interested in growing their property management business, be sure to check us out at doorgrow.com we're here to support you and your growth. We're especially really good at helping you not just add a bunch of doors without spending a bunch of money on marketing.
[00:26:34] And we are helping. We have short-term rental clients, you know, in our program. Long-term rental clients are our most common target audience that we're helping build out their portfolio. But we also are helping on the operational side to be able to streamline the business and to become the entrepreneur that can run and have a team that makes your life easier so that you have more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, which means you're making a difference and doing things you really feel good about, and more support. And so if you feel like you're kind of scarce on those things, I call those the four reasons and you're really frustrated and you're banging your head against the wall with your team, then reach out. We can support you and help you in that.
[00:27:17] You might be a really good candidate for our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind which is really awesome. So anyway, check this out. And for those that are listening to this on iTunes or on YouTube, be sure to also join our free Facebook community, which you can get to by going to doorgrowclub.com and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.
[00:27:42] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:28:09] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:28:30] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
If you own a property management company, you know how difficult it is to get solid leads and add doors. It’s even harder to get started when you have no doors, no experience, and you are focused on the wrong things.
Property management startups often make a lot of the same mistakes. Property management growth expert Jason Hull addresses common myths and misconceptions about starting a property management business and adding doors.
You’ll Learn…
[01:14] The DoorGrow Avatars: Pure Startups
[04:20] The Myth of Growing a Business by Stealing Prospects
[06:57] The Myth of Being the Cheapest Option
[08:36] Fantasy vs Reality in Business
[10:17] Embracing the Suck
[14:16] Become an Expert + Tenant Landlord Law
[17:26] Get Help and Resources!
[19:28] Branding and Website Mistakes
[24:52] More Helpful Resources to Check Out
“The biggest hurdle to overcome is they have decided they're going to start a business, but they haven't actually started it yet.”
“Every entrepreneur goes through this journey of learning through difficulty and pain.”
“Going with an unknown disrupts safety and certainty, which is the number one thing that owners want to get from a property manager.”
“There's no reason to charge less than what the typical or most common market rate is. You're just making your life harder.”
[00:00:00] Alright? Nobody wants to suck, but the biggest secret I can tell a pure startup... the biggest secret is: you need to get the 'suck' out of the way. You have to suck.
[00:00:10] 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.
[00:00:28] DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income
[00:00:47] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:14] So I'm thinking what I want to do with the next few episodes-- and I may change my mind-- is go over the different avatars that I recognize in the industry, or basically the different target audiences that we target as DoorGrow. So, this is something that, uh, we just brought on a new team member recently, and I was helping them to understand the property management industry.
[00:01:37] And we have this document that I've created once to give to marketers to help them understand who we're targeting. We didn't have much success with outside marketing firms. So it's all in-house now, but I still have this document. So I wanted to talk a little bit today about startups and some of the challenges and what I'm talking about are pure startups.
[00:02:00] Pure startups are those that have zero doors right now. They have no doors. And I think I may have talked about the idea of fantasy versus reality, but I'll touch on that again today. But pure startups are those-- when they come through our funnel, their number of doors is zero. And the number of years is zero. So we know they're a pure startup.
[00:02:19] And the biggest challenge I noticed with pure startups, the biggest hurdle to overcome is they have decided they're going to start a business, but they haven't actually started it yet. And so the biggest hurdle is just taking that first step. It's a huge step. They don't realize how huge it is. So what they usually do as a first initial step is they build this fantasy business in their mind. And some of us remember those days. We had this big "pie in the sky," huge vision and idea of how amazing our business would be and how rich we would be and how awesome things would be. I don't know, maybe.
[00:02:56] This fantasy initially is how a business starts out. It's not connected to reality because there's a lot you don't know. Like those of you that have been in this industry or in business or an entrepreneur for a while, know that there is a lot that you have learned. A lot of hard lessons, a lot of well fought lessons, a lot of painful lessons that you have absorbed or figured out. And some of these things were really challenging. Some of these things kept you up at night. Some of these things required legal battles and that was the tuition you paid to learn these lessons. Some of these cost you money. Sometimes there were refunds, right? And so every entrepreneur goes through this journey of learning through difficulty and pain.
[00:03:40] So pure startups: this fantasy is so seductive. It's sexy, it's delicious. And in their mind, what I hear from all the pure startups is every property manager in their market sucks. They all suck. And so they're going to start one that doesn't suck. So that's the first challenge and they think that they're going to be somehow magically different than all the other companies who have a lot more experience and a lot more knowledge. And the other weird thing I see really common with startups, pure startups is when I talked to them about their business plan, their idea, they usually have a couple of myths that they believe.
[00:04:20] One myth they believe is that they're going to win and grow their business by stealing other property managers' clients. They think that this is how they're going to grow their business. So that's one of the myths I have to destroy with them is they don't realize how difficult it is to get somebody to switch companies. Going with an unknown disrupts safety and certainty, which is the number one thing that owners want to get from a property manager. They want peace of mind, safety and certainty. They're not going to give up what little peace of mind and safety and certainty they have, even if it's not super great to go with an unknown.
[00:04:53] I usually like to use the analogy of a cow. He may see that there's greener pastures over the fence, but how likely is it for that cow to jump over the fence? Not very likely. Could the cow do it? Maybe. Maybe the cow could do it ,and maybe the cow would do it if there was a raging fire or a rattlesnake coming after them or something that was really scary to the cow. It might jump into that other pasture, but it's not generally going to happen.
[00:05:22] And what I've seen is people that make that their strategy and their goal and go try and reach out and target people, it doesn't work. I've even heard property managers that are more seasoned when they're meeting somebody new that's competing with them in their market, say to them, " Good luck," you know like, "go for it. If you can get any of my clients on..." you know, "good luck."
[00:05:44] Why? Because they know how hard it is. They know that it's not likely to work. And it generally doesn't work. And if anybody has had really amazing success in stealing business from somebody else, hit me up. I'd be super curious to hear about how you're doing this. But in general, they have to be a really, really bad company. The only time I've heard people leaving or being able to get clients from other property managers is when they found out that property manager was stealing from them or doing something really gross or unethical, and then they were able to get them to switch companies. And if you ever talk to anybody, that's worked with lots of property management companies and talks about how bad they all are. The red flag isn't the property management companies usually. The real red flag you should be paying attention to. Is that prospective client. They're the common denominator in all of these situations. So before you just believe that all of these companies are so horrible, you may want to take a really close look at what their expectations are and make sure you're setting really healthy boundaries with this prospective client, because the likelihood is they're the actual problem or bad egg or whatever.
[00:06:57] All right. So that's one of the things, the other common myth that I see with startups: they believe they're going to win business and be more successful by charging less money. This is so common. I always kill this very quickly. If I talk to a pure startup, I'm like, what's your plan?
[00:07:17] They're like, "we're going to go around. And all the other companies suck, so we're going to like take those clients away from them. We're going to get their clients and we're going to do it by being cheaper." First of all by having lower prices than your competition, you're just making your own life harder.
[00:07:36] There's no reason to charge less than what the typical or most common market rate is. You're just making your life harder. You're not going to make as much money. You're going to have much higher operational costs in the beginning because you're taking on worse clients and you're making a lot of mistakes in the clients you take on, and then you're going to have less revenue, so you're gonna have less profit than some of these companies. And then you're going to be the next sucky property management company that you thought you were going to be competing with and helping people avoid. So do not just come into the market, playing the game of "we're just going to be cheaper. And that's how we're going to get business on."
[00:08:15] That's not a very effective strategy. Most businesses that tried to do that generally end up failing. Can you build a really big portfolio really quickly by being super dirt cheap in the market? Maybe. But you're going to be miserable and it's not going to be very effective, and you're not going to make much money and the business is gonna fail.
[00:08:36] So, the next thing that I notice is that we've got to get them past this hurdle of fantasy versus reality. So they often spend, at the pure startup stage, too much time preparing, too much time planning, too much time scheming. They don't just implement and take action. They think they need a website in order to look legit and have a real business.
[00:09:03] They think they need business cards. They think they need a flashy logo. They think they need a whole host of things. And there's really only one thing that you need in order to have a real property management company. You can have a business that has none of those things. It doesn't have a cool name.
[00:09:22] It doesn't have a cool logo. It doesn't have a website. Like you can have a business that functions without any of that. You don't even have to have property management software. You can just do everything in spreadsheets. I've seen that done. The one thing that you do need in order to have a legitimate, real property management business though, is clients. That's it.
[00:09:42] And sometimes they focus on all these trappings and getting all these ducks in a row and all these things that they think they need. Meanwhile, they've got-- sometimes they'll tell me, "oh, I've got all these investors I know. And I've got all these connections and I've got some investors are saying they're ready to work with me as soon as I'm ready."
[00:09:58] And then, the property manager is spending a hundred hours building their own website on Wix or they're like trying to do something that isn't even in their skillset. Why do we tend to avoid as entrepreneurs getting started? Because the fantasy has to die. And the second we take a step into reality world, like we start saying, "Hey, I'm ready to take on your property."
[00:10:21] There's so many pieces that you don't have that you realize that actually matter. You need a contract. You need to know landlord tenant law. You need to know how to onboard this property. You need to know how to get the property rented out. And these are all things in your brain, you didn't have at a really specific detail level of how to do these things. So you're going to have to figure it out. And what that means is you're going to suck.
[00:10:47] This is the next thing I want to point out is most pure startups, most property managers that are just getting started, no doors... they're afraid to suck. Nobody wants to suck, but the biggest secret I can tell a pure startup... the biggest secret is: you need to get the 'suck' out of the way. You have to suck. You need to be willing to suck. We all start at 'level suck' in anything that we do that is new, and you have to be willing to do it. If you're unwilling to suck then you're going to just get caught up in your head in mental loops. You're going to mentally just keep going over and over and over things, trying to figure things out. You're going to do tons of research. You're going to watch tons of videos and read tons of books, and you're going to waste so much time. You want to know who learns fast? Those that are willing to suck that just do the work. They just go out and do the work and they suck and they learn really fast because sucking is painful.
[00:11:44] And as entrepreneurs, when we suck at something, we get good at it very quickly because we're highly adaptable creatures. We adapt very quickly. We figure out how to not suck really fast. So the analogy I like to use for those that are stuck in this loop of preparation and trying to get everything ready and trying to look really a certain way is: driving.
[00:12:09] So I like to ask them, how many videos and books and things could you watch and go through to get ready to drive that would make you ultimately just be an amazing driver without driving a car? And they're like, you could watch endless videos and books, and you're not going to be a great driver. Right? You have to just drive the car. You have to start driving the car. You have to suck at driving the car.
[00:12:36] I just taught my daughter Hailey how to drive and made her learn to drive in my suburban. Right? This is what she learned in. And we just helped her buy her first car, which was an SUV, but not a suburban, not that big. But she learned it's something that was difficult and challenging. And she sucked in the beginning. She was really bad and she got better and better and better. And she was willing to suck. And I had to put pressure on her, like, "Hey, we need to go driving. We need to get your time in. We need to get all the hours that are required here in the state of Texas."
[00:13:08] And so, we got her to the point where she was ready to take her driving test and get her license, and she aced her driving test. She had to go do a driving test in a car that was not a suburban and much easier to navigate and much easier for her to drive. And she felt like she did great. And she did. She did really well. And I feel a lot safer with her driving her vehicle because she learned in a situation where it was difficult and she sucked.
[00:13:35] So don't choose out of the discomfort. Don't choose out of sucking. Don't avoid that because you need to do that. And a lot of startups just avoid that. You have to just choose into it. You have to step into sucking. You have to start sucking. And this is relevant to anybody listening to this. There's always something that we know deep down we should do, and we probably could be great at it if we were just willing to step into it and just suck for awhile. And it doesn't take very long. Sometimes even 20 hours of putting some work into one thing, you're better at it than most of the people on the planet that are avoiding doing that thing. So just start sucking.
[00:14:16] The other thing that pure startups have that's a challenge is they have no real knowledge of what investors generally really need, want, what their objections are, what the challenges are... They don't know. This is where I coach clients on a strategy called product research interviews to collapse time on that without going into a whole lot of detail on this recording about that, it's basically, you need to do some market research. You need to talk to people that are the type of people you're going to be targeting.
[00:14:46] You need to get familiar with what their needs and their desires are and their challenges and why they aren't working with a property manager. And that knowledge is usually earned by talking to lots of investors over time. Property managers that have been at this for 20 years, they know right away like all the challenges, all the objections. They know how to form their pitch to include all of these potential hurdles and challenges.
[00:15:13] You're going to pitch, you're going to talk, if you're a pure startup, to somebody and you're going to leave out all of these things that they're concerned about internally. You're not going to hit those and target those effectively because you don't even know what they are. And so you need to do some research by talking to a lot of investors. Just ask some investors, go to some investor groups, talk to people there and just say, "Hey, I'm looking at starting a property management business. Do you work with one?" And they might say "no." and then ask them, "why haven't you worked with one yet? Like what's preventing you from doing that? Do you see that there'd be any advantages? What's your perception of property management companies? What would make you need one or think that you want one? What challenges are you dealing with with your properties currently? Right. You need to understand your audience. And the better you understand your audience, the better you're going to be able to sell.
[00:16:06] The other thing pure startups also lack that hurts their ability to sell or confidence is they don't know landlord tenant law. And that varies by location, city, state. You need to be the expert at this. So actually read the laws. Just go find all the laws. Look for tenant laws, look for things related to properties, owners, and read the actual laws and get to know this stuff. Get familiar with this so that you're aware of what the laws say. And then maybe even talk to some of the city officials, some of the people that are connected to this industry, some of the people that enforce these laws and ask, how does this actually play out in reality?
[00:16:51] You need to be educated. This is some preparation that would be worth doing, because if you're going to step into this industry, nobody in this industry wants more shitty property managers. Everybody wants some really good people that really know what they're doing and are giving really real, good advice. You may want to talk to an attorney or a lawyer, somebody that deals with landlord tenant law and challenges and ask, how does the law actually play out in reality? What happens here locally? How do evictions actually work or end up happening right now with COVID and everything else that's happened?
[00:17:26] Right. So figure out that, that piece. Um, another challenge that pure startups deal with is they don't get enough resources around them. They think they can figure it all out on their own. They think they're so smart. Like, "I'll figure it out on my own. Oh, this is going to be easy. I can read a book or I can watch videos..." or whatever. Get a mentor, get coaches, get connected to other property managers. That's all going to help you collapse time because there's so many things you don't know that you don't know yet. And you're going to make a lot of mistakes.
[00:18:03] Another big mistake that pure startups make is their growth strategy they think is to do SEO or some sort of internet marketing. They think this is their gateway to happiness and money and revenue and freedom. And this is a really expensive belief to have, a really expensive mistake to make. They usually think they're going to just somehow get to the top spot of Google through SEO. They're going to focus on pay-per-click and do Google ads or Facebook ads.
[00:18:31] They're going to do content marketing, do a ton of social media marketing. Or they're going to find some sort of pay per lead service, like allpropertymanagement.com or managemyproperty.com and they're going to buy leads and they don't realize how difficult this game is and how it just helps you get cold leads.
[00:18:53] So if you are a property management startup and you're a pure startup, and you're thinking about starting this business, or you've already started to dabble with some of this stuff and realize how difficult it is, then I highly recommend that you get into our mastermind program so we can help you collapse time dramatically, make a lot more money. The program pays for itself very quickly. That's our initial first milestone actually in the program is to make sure the program is paid for. And our goal with clients is get them to do that within 30 days. So it's a no brainer to stay in the mastermind.
[00:19:28] So the other thing that startups do is they make a lot of mistakes on their branding. The most common is they brand themselves as something generic like "properties" or brand themselves as a real estate company, the most common, which is super detrimental to word of mouth and to getting referral partners in the industry and can cause a lot of challenges.
[00:19:50] The other big mistake is they make a lot of mistakes with their website. They just go and get some sort of website maybe from their property management software company. And they do some sort of website there, and they spend way too much money on this. We include in our mastermind, by the way, a website for free. They're included as part of the program now.
[00:20:12] So as long as you're a mastermind member, we will work on developing and building a website with you, however long that takes whether it's a month or two months or whatever it takes to get you to gather all the content and get everything up. We will build a website for you. We even have like 50 predesigned styles and we give you market exclusivity on that design.
[00:20:33] So that means nobody else in your state in the U.S. or your province in Canada, will get to have the same design or style as you. And we're going to match the colors to it, put your brand on it. We also are the world's leading branding agency. We help you avoid all the common potential pitfalls in your brand.
[00:20:53] We have training material on how to choose and pick a really effective name and branding, help you avoid common mistakes that really could cost you about 50% of the leads and deals you could or should be getting. We're gonna help you avoid that. And we've rebranded hundreds of companies over the years. Nobody else has done anything close to what we have done for clients in the branding space or at the level or the amount that we have done.
[00:21:18] We've rebranded hundreds of companies. And anytime we help clients rebrand or help them redo their websites, they tend to get more flow of whatever their acquisition strategy is for getting new clients on. We also have really good strategies for you getting acquisition or acquiring new clients. So that costs $0. They just take time and they actually take less time than SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing, or pay per lead services. It takes less time than those because those are cold leads, and cold leads take a lot of time to nurture, a lot of time to follow up. We're going to focus on warm leads, strategies, and we're not going to fight over the existing market share, which is small and try and compete with other companies that are probably a lot larger than you spending thousands of dollars to employ those strategies. We're going to sidestep all of that. And we're going to capture people earlier in the sales cycle where there's less price sensitivity. There's a much higher close rate. They're warmer leads, and you can charge more money on average.
[00:22:22] And then you're creating new market share. We call this the blue ocean strategy. Instead of fighting in the red ugly water with every other property manager, especially the big ones that are spending two, three grand a month on all of those channels, maybe even five grand a month and already have the top spot on Google, right?
[00:22:39] So we're going to get you focused on something that's more efficient, more effective. The biggest companies right now, most of them are down about 200 doors I've noticed over the last year or two, just due to sales and the sell-off. Investors are selling properties, so they're losing more doors than they're getting on, and they are spending a ton of money on marketing and it's not even helping them offset that. But we've got clients they've added 100, 200 doors easily in the last year and they didn't spend a dime on SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, or social media marketing, or pay per lead. Nothing. No advertising costs. They did invest time into using our strategies, but they invested less time than it would have taken if they had gotten a huge pile of cold leads. And they've got a much better output.
[00:23:25] All right. So hopefully that gets you a little bit excited about talking to us at DoorGrow. A lot of people wonder if we're legit. We're legit. This has been proven. We've helped a lot of clients do this. And if you're willing to put in the work, you're going to get great results. That's the bottom line. There's no system out there that's just going to work for you and do the job for you.
[00:23:45] We're also gonna help you increase your close rate and help you be better at selling. And then the operational piece, which becomes the next big hurdle. We're going to help you solve that, how to scale your team and your business so that your life and business gets easier the bigger it gets instead of harder, which most listening, if you've had a business for a while, your business probably feels really hard and you probably feel pretty stuck and you probably recognize you're the biggest bottleneck in the company.
[00:24:11] And you're probably frustrated at your team and in a state of overwhelm and wish they would all just think and make decisions for and on your behalf. We can help you solve that problem, probably within the first 90 days of working with this. We call that the scale program. And anyway.
[00:24:28] So we talked today about pure startups. Just get started, start taking action, don't try to avoid sucking, and kill that fantasy as soon as possible by taking action and make sure you're educated on the legalities of your industry. And I hope that this has been really helpful for those that are looking to start a property management business.
[00:24:52] The last piece is if you do not know how to manage rental properties, which is not something I personally teach anybody. If you need the nuts and bolts like the basics join. The National Association of Residential Property Managers. They have great training and resources. Check out rentlikeapro.com and Rent Like a Pro's YouTube channel. They've put out some great content. There are books about running a property management business, things like that. So check out some of those resources we do have in our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. Just go to doorgrowclub.com. If you join that and give us your email address, you will get some really cool tools, including a list of really cool software tools and vendor tools and stuff that you can use to build your business.
[00:25:40] We'll also send a gift, which is a fee Bible. So how you can make more money, which is put out by Rent Like a Pro. The fourth edition of that is given to you for free. If you join the DoorGrow Club Facebook group, you will also get a email. We have like five different gifts that you're going to get, a tool of how to grade your website in terms of getting business and some other things. So check that out. Get those free resources. We do have in the Facebook group, in the file, section a document for startups, with some of the things that I mentioned that can help you kind of get started.
[00:26:12] So I hope this has been helpful. And until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.
[00:26:19] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:26:46] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:27:07] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
At DoorGrow, we love highlighting client success and wins. The Schmitts are a great example of clients who put in the work and get the results. Since joining the program, they have DOUBLED their PM portfolio!
In this episode, property management growth expert Jason Hull interviews Jon and Sonia Schmitt from True Patriot Property Management in Florida and gains their valuable perspective on adding doors, growing a PM business, and being a part of the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind.
You’ll Learn…
[01:06] Today’s Guests: Jon and Sonia Schmitt of True Patriot
[02:30] Discovering and Getting Started with DoorGrow
[04:39] The Results and Major Lessons: What Has Changed Since DoorGrow?
[07:28] Your Personal and Business ‘Why’
[12:29] Finding Clarity in Your Business
[14:17] What’s Next for the Schmitts?
[22:04] Where Would Jon and Sonia be Without DoorGrow?
[026:55] Wrapping up: How to Grow Your PM Business like Jon and Sonia
“The business exists to serve you.”
“Everything has to start with the sales and going after the right clientele that we want in our niche.”
“I find entrepreneurs, we have two speeds. We feel stuck or we feel like we're in momentum, and in momentum feels like life to us.”
“If you don't have the business of your dreams and the team of your dreams yet, you're not the person that can run it yet.”
[00:00:00] Jon Schmitt: You definitely changed me. You definitely did. Thinking, my focus, everything. I mean the name, just everything.
[00:00:07] Jason Hull: All right. 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.
[00:00:27] DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:46] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow.
[00:01:06] Now, let's get into the show. And today's guests, I have two guests here today hanging out with me and it's the Schmitts, right? So I've got Jon and Sonia Schmitt, and they are clients in our mastermind program. And why don't I let you two kind of introduce yourself?
[00:01:27] Jon Schmitt: I'm Jon.
[00:01:30] Sonia Schmitt: I'm Sonia.
[00:01:31] Jason Hull: Awesome. So why don't you give people a little bit of background on yourselves, like getting into property management and what you've got going on currently.
[00:01:39] Jon Schmitt: All right. Well, getting into property management, you know, just all started when I started buying properties back, you know, 28 years ago. Just driving around in a station wagon with my lawn mower, cutting grass, that kind of stuff.
[00:01:52] And then, uh, you know, became a real estate agent a couple of years later started managing properties for some other out-of-state people 'cause the company I worked for allowed that. And I figured, you know, it's income without having to do any deals. So struggling to be a real estate agent, property management was a paycheck every single month. So that's how I got started. And then Sonia, she has been a landlord as well from way back. And once we met, I already had an established business, which was dwindling away. Then she came on board, and we kind of held steady and we weren't growing, and then here we are with you. So that's pretty much our background.
[00:02:39] Jason Hull: How'd you hear about DoorGrow?
[00:02:41] Jon Schmitt: I seen you on Facebook.
[00:02:43] Jason Hull: Okay. And so you saw some Facebook and then... what's that?
[00:02:47] Sonia Schmitt: I was saying, I think he seen you on Facebook for a long period of time.
[00:02:51] Jon Schmitt: I was stalking you.
[00:02:52] Sonia Schmitt: He was a stalker.
[00:02:54] Jason Hull: Yeah. Okay, cool. I like stalkers 'cause they're like nurturing themselves over time. And then when they come to us, they're really excited. I mean, you're not just going to sign up right away, right? So you saw us on Facebook, and how many doors did you have at the time you decided to start with us and what challenges were you dealing with then?
[00:03:14] Jon Schmitt: I think we had about, um, forty or so. Most of our business was from foreclosures, from homeowners associations, and condo associations. I made a contact with a couple of attorneys and they were just throwing it at me and throwing out the owners that weren't paying their fees, getting foreclosed on.
[00:03:35] And then I was turning the properties around, getting them rented and collecting rents and doing the maintenance because the homeowners associations and their managers, their management companies, are not landlords. So, I established myself as a landlord. So that's what they needed. And I exploded from there.
[00:03:54] But then when the banks were taking over and I was losing business, right at that time, Sonia came into the picture. We kind of stabilized, but then we needed to grow. And I said, "Hey, Sonia, look at this guy on Facebook." and here we are today.
[00:04:10] Jason Hull: What'd you think Sonia, like, who is this cat?
[00:04:13] Sonia Schmitt: Oh, I thought you were phenomenal from the-- from the moment-- from the moment I heard you first speak and I was intrigued and excited. You brought excitement back and direction.
[00:04:27] Jon Schmitt: I should leave you two alone.
[00:04:29] Sonia Schmitt: He's a card. He's always a card. You never know what's going to come out of his mouth.
[00:04:39] Jason Hull: So we love having Jon on the calls because Jon is so funny. Like you just, you say the funniest things. So John, Sonia, you started at that level of doors and you had some challenges. What's changed? Like what's been happening in the business since then?
[00:04:56] Jon Schmitt: Well, since we hooked up with you, you totally changed our direction. You change the way we think. You're changing the way we operate. You've changed our brand. We kind of did that immediately. I mean, you really pointed out a lot of my own personal flaws, which, you said one thing where I was beside myself. You called me low value. I couldn't believe it.
[00:05:23] Jason Hull: Did I call you low value?
[00:05:24] Jon Schmitt: You called me low value! Hence the TalkRoute. And now I don't like it, but I'm going to go back to low value, but I'll figure that out at a later time.
[00:05:33] Jason Hull: I don't, I don't know that I called you low value. I want you to be high-value.
[00:05:38] Jon Schmitt: And I want to be that. And when you did my son, Alex was laughing, and he keeps teasing me. He's like, "You're low value." And you'll love that.
[00:05:49] Jason Hull: You tell him to watch it. You tell him to watch it.
[00:05:51] Jon Schmitt: Oh yeah.
[00:05:52] Jason Hull: He needs to respect his elders.
[00:05:55] Jon Schmitt: You've changed our direction. You really made an impact and changed our direction, and it seems to be working. We have to do the work. You have the ideas. You tell us the ideas, we do the work, and we're starting to get results. Hence, Alex landed a deal through a realtor. And the lady went with our premium services. And that was Alex. He's very proud of himself.
[00:06:16] Sonia Schmitt: Yeah.
[00:06:17] Jason Hull: Awesome. Yeah. We revamped your pricing.
[00:06:20] Jon Schmitt: Yes, yes.
[00:06:22] Jason Hull: Right. So you're making on average more money per deal. You have more offerings that are a better fit for different types of clients.
[00:06:31] So how many doors are you at right now?
[00:06:33] Jon Schmitt: What do we have? Like 80?
[00:06:35] Sonia Schmitt: 79.
[00:06:36] Jon Schmitt: 79 doors.
[00:06:39] Jason Hull: Yeah. I mean we're getting close to doubling, right? What- what'd you start with? What'd you say?
[00:06:45] Jon Schmitt: Like 40.
[00:06:46] Jason Hull: I mean, we're just right there.
[00:06:48] Jon Schmitt: Right. When we met you, we kicked a couple of sisters to the curb. You know, we were talking about firing them and then after talking to you, we said, "You know what?" Sonia said, "We're done." Fired. They were a little pissed off, you know, when we gave him 30 days notice and they couldn't believe it, but we needed to do it. And it was probably-- yeah, it was like almost 20 doors. So we took a hit, but we were okay with the hit. We're better now.
[00:07:15] Jason Hull: Yeah. So you had 40. I told you to get rid of 20. So you were at 20 and now you're at 79. You're almost at 80.
[00:07:26] Jon Schmitt: Right.
[00:07:28] Jason Hull: And so that's incredible. So that's awesome. What do you feel like for those that haven't been in the program, what do you feel like is the most significant thing that you've been getting out of this?
[00:07:40] Sonia Schmitt: Oh, I mean, for me and Jon handles most of the sales as of right now, but for me it was developing your 'why.' Why are you doing this? It's the weekly meetings that we have. We get ideas from you. We get ideas from other property managers that are located throughout the United States on things that are working, things that are not working. And it's the focus. I think, you know, you talked about the "5 currencies" and focus. And I think the focus has-- it's now laser sharp versus before it was very dull. Okay. So now we have focus. We're a little bit scattered because we're trying to do multiple different things, but we're laser focused in on the how and the why.
[00:08:37] And I also think accountability. Conversations. Where are you at? Tell me what you're struggling with. You know, what, what is your direction? I think that you come up with innovative ideas, which I think that is at the top of the game of different things that are gonna make us be able to succeed, make more money in collapsed time. And that's the one thing that I am working on is collapsing time so I can be more effective, more efficient. And I think with Jon, just-- gosh, it's the motivation behind it all. And like I said, being laser focused on what you're going after, why you're going after it. And you know, Alex and I went to a property and it's like, 'oh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure.' And I ended up and I liked it, but when I first seen him and I met him kind of like the location, and I didn't know what the inside looked like I just looked at him and I said, "I don't know if I'm going to take this or not." I said, "just be prepared," you know? But again, we don't want all properties. We want to know and go after our client health. And we want that to be narrowed in and focused on, which is going to give us the most bang for our buck.
[00:09:57] Jason Hull: Yeah. Yeah. Some of the stuff for people that are not in the program might sound a little fluffy and woo woo, right? Like "we figured out our 'why,' and like collapsing time... and you know, people in the program, they get it. So what would you say to those people that are not in this? Like, how has figuring out what your motivation or your 'why?' How has that shifted what happens in the business?
[00:10:21] Sonia Schmitt: We're just not going for anybody any longer. We're not taking on clients because those clients end up taking a lot of our time. You know, you don't want a homeowner, right? Or a landlord. You want a specific landlord within a certain location that takes care of their properties that cares about their tenants. So it becomes more focused. So, you know, and you then can drive your business with more focus in that direction.
[00:10:51] Jason Hull: Yeah. So you've got a lot more clarity on the avatar that you're kind of targeting and going after now. And so, surprise, you're getting more of that type of person as a client, right?
[00:11:02] Sonia Schmitt: Yes. Yes.
[00:11:04] Jason Hull: And really at the core, for those that are watching or listening to this now or later, understanding the 'why' may sound like fluffy sort of weird stuff, but understanding why you started as a business and the motivation behind it and what type of clients you want to be working with.
[00:11:21] I mean, the business exists to serve you. And I'm sure that it's starting to feel a bit more like that, like that instead of you serving the business, which doesn't feel very fun, now you're starting to shift into "the business is serving us and our needs and desires." Does that sound accurate?
[00:11:40] Sonia Schmitt: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:11:42] I think we were very scattered before all over the place. Now we are focused in on-- we have different buckets that we're going after. And we may not have everything checked off, but it brings clarity with the mastermind group of what needs to be done first. It's kind of like, yeah, I may handle the operations and the accounting, but without the sales, there is no operations or accounting. There is no maintenance. There is none of that. Everything has to start with the sales and going after the right clientele that we want in our niche.
[00:12:20] Jason Hull: Now I'm sure. Before you signed up, there was no shortage of a to-do list of things you felt needed to be done in the business, right?
[00:12:28] Jon Schmitt: Right.
[00:12:29] Jason Hull: I mean, every business we have endless to do lists. It's like a "to-die" list for us as entrepreneurs. So coming into the program, it sounds like just really helped you get clarity. And we talk about this a lot in the program, like really focusing on where's the biggest pain first and assessing things. I talk about going through the core functions of the business and figuring out which things are the weakest. Did you realize going through some of this and coming into the program, that you were focusing too much on some things that were already working well, and then maybe shifting to things that needed more attention?
[00:13:05] Jon Schmitt: Yeah, we were all over the board. Okay. We still are a little bit. But the things that need attention is new business at this point. The accounting is functioning good, bookkeeping's spot on, the maintenance? We're okay with that. You know, it's the sales. So I had a couple people that were referring me business, but you know, that kind of has gone away.
[00:13:29] Not that they don't like us anymore. They just won't throw us business. However, the type of business we had, the foreclosures, have dried up. So now we're just laser focused on the real estate agents, some other attorneys, CPAs, and insurance brokers. Alex and I are doing calls, you know, I have my calendar blocked from 9:00 to like 11:00-11:30. That's all I'm doing. Okay. And we do it nonstop one call after another. Some calls last 10 minutes, some calls last 30 seconds. So I want to try to make at least 30 calls a day. And Alex also, and that's our focus first thing in the morning. And then I'll take care of maintenance and everything like that afterwards, as it needs to happen.
[00:14:17] Jason Hull: Yeah. Awesome. So what are you excited about in the future? Because you're in a state of momentum. You can see the things are positively changing and shifting in the business. I mean a lot of property managers right now are losing more doors than they're getting on. They're like going down because the sell off that's happening in the marketplace. The market's generally hot throughout the U.S. Lots of investors are getting out and I'm sure you felt some of that as well. I doubt your market's immune to that totally. Correct me if I'm wrong. But you're growing and outpacing that attrition that's naturally happening with growth. So what would you say to those that are like thinking about working with DoorGrow? Because I'm sure a lot of people see my social media. They see the things that we put out and they think, 'yeah, who is this guy? Like this-- another guru out there who's trying to get money from people.' So what's your perception of me since you're on the inside, behind the paywall and we've had one-on-one conversations and you've been on our group things and you've been into the material. What's your perception of me, my motivation, and DoorGrow and the team? I'm curious. And you can be as honest as possible.
[00:15:32] Jon Schmitt: Oh, I'll be honest. I think you're a very interesting guy. Me personally, I'm not a woowoo type guy, but she's a woowoo girl and her friends are all woowoo. Um, you know, I think you're very interesting. You're very creative. And just your techniques that you pitched to us and your ideas and your way of doing things, I think it's spot on. I think that you know, people that aren't doing it the way you say to do it, it's kind of like they're old school and you know what? We're into like a new era, a new way of doing things. And you have to change with the times. If you don't change, you're going to die.
[00:16:12] The way we used to do it, you know, I would cold call landlords, I would send out mass fly postcards and stuff like that. I mean, I tell you I'd send out 10,000. It'd be 10,000, we'd get one call. Okay. You see what I'm saying? I mean, that's just like an old school way of doing it. And before we hooked up with you, I mean, I was printing out tax records of all out of state owners and just looking them up, calling them up, "Hey, Jason, you know, I see you've got these two duplexes over here. How's your management work and start talking to him and you'd get 'click.' Right? So I'm getting away from that, so people that are not in your group, I'm sure they're just old school and the ones that are losing business, aren't keeping up with the pace and the times and changing their ways.
[00:17:00] Sonia Schmitt: Hmm. I think you're very authentic. And I think that you have a lot of direction in many years of helping property managers throughout the United States. And I think what DoorGrow does is it brings focus whereas we could be all over the board trying to get new clientele from single family homes to quad quadplexes, triplexes, for sale by owners, property managers, people are getting rentals. You know, you'd go after the rentals and after all of that. But the nice thing is, is you establish relationships and trust with real estate agents. You have a big focus with that, right? Because that's your honey hole. I love that word. But anyways I think that having focus and going after certain groups. Real estate agents, CPAs... and you can take it out further and further. I mean, in Palm beach county alone, and in Florida, I believe we have the second largest or third largest real estate realtors associations.
[00:18:13] So I think that you're cutting edge. You stay on top of things. You're trying new things out. What works. You've tried it. Either you like it, you don't like it. If you'd like it, you pass it onto the group and then other people explore. So I think that adds a lot of value.
[00:18:33] Jason Hull: Cool. Yeah. I'm just wired that I love to learn and I love sharing good ideas that I learn. And I guess that kind of just is what we do. Well, I really appreciate both of you being the program. Oh, I wanted to touch on your son, Alex. So as part, like in this journey, in working with you at some point, you're like, "Hey, let's bring our son in on this."
[00:18:55] And by son, you know, some people might think it's some little kid. He's an adult, but he's come into the business and it's been rewarding for me to see him come in and be learning and stepping into new roles and doing things and getting success too. He shared a win on the call today.
[00:19:12] Now, Jon. Jon was chiming in from the background, making sure he said some of the right things being dad.
[00:19:19] Jon Schmitt: We received these doors this week from a realtor referral. So I was saying to him, "Alex, tell 'em--
[00:19:28] Jason Hull: Give credit!
[00:19:28] Jon Schmitt: Got them from where? And then he yells at me and says, "they're not realtors." I'm like, I'm not meaning what they are. I'm meaning how you got the doors, right? So he brought one in. The lady signed up for premium. And then I brought the other one in that Sonia and Alex closed the guy. Okay. I met him through another realtor referral. And then the other appointment that I was on, I was on actually two appointments that day.
[00:19:56] And they came off of people searching us and liking the new name.
[00:20:03] Sonia Schmitt: Rebranding
[00:20:04] Jon Schmitt: Right, they loved it, you know, the way we were branded. So that's why they called us.
[00:20:09] Jason Hull: Yeah. We've made a lot of changes in your business already. So in the fruit of all of those changes is going to start to really start to show up. You're just at the beginning of all of this, like the rebrand, the pricing, like all this. And as you build that brand in your market, and as you build that clout up, I'm really excited to see what you guys do. I mean, over the next year, I think you guys are going to be crushing it because once you really get into a groove with this... I mean, the sky's the limit. With the growth you've had, you could easily be adding a hundred to 200 doors a year, I would imagine.
[00:20:39] Jon Schmitt: You know, if we stay consistent, and that's what's going to happen, there's no other way to go. If we stay consistent, what we're doing and just keep doing what we're doing. I see that as well.
[00:20:50] Jason Hull: Does that sound crazy to you? Like if Jon pre-DoorGrow could listen to Jon now say that, would that sound a little crazy to that guy?
[00:21:00] Jon Schmitt: Yes.
[00:21:01] Jason Hull: Like impossible? Like there's no fricking way, you know?
[00:21:05] Jon Schmitt: You definitely changed me. You definitely did. Thinking, my focus, everything. I mean the name, just everything. Calendly the TalkRoute, which I'm getting rid of. I don't like it.
[00:21:16] Jason Hull: You don't like TalkRoute. Alright.
[00:21:20] Jon Schmitt: We'll find something that works for us.
[00:21:22] Jason Hull: Yeah. Right, right. I mean, you're old school sometimes. Right. So maybe just get a second phone. Right. Just get another phone, like the private phone and the public phone. Right? I don't know, but yeah. Yeah. So, well, it's been really great having you in the program, excited to see what you guys accomplish. Anything else you think people should know about door grow or about y'all before we wrap this up?
[00:21:49] Jon Schmitt: You're definitely a good coach. And we're happy with you and, um, we're looking forward to hearing about the invitation to the in-person meeting.
[00:21:58] Jason Hull: Ooh. Yeah.
[00:21:59] Jon Schmitt: We're looking forward to coming over to Texas.
[00:22:02] Jason Hull: Yeah? Alright. That'll be cool.
[00:22:04] Sonia Schmitt: We wouldn't be where we are today, if it wasn't for you and if it wasn't for DoorGrow. That I can tell you and our business is growing exponentially and we're very appreciative and grateful to be a part of your team.
[00:22:21] Jason Hull: Well, I appreciate that. Where do you think you would be? Where do you think things would be right now?
[00:22:27] Jon Schmitt: We would probably be-- we have a lot of investment properties of our own, so we would just be going off of that. And we would do some real estate sales and we would just, we'd probably get business here and there and we'd still be just old school, throwing out some mails every quarter. And you know, that's probably what we'd be doing.
[00:22:47] Jason Hull: I mean, that doesn't sound so bad. So on the personal side, what do you feel like has kind of changed like in your life? ' Cause I mean, really there's a reason behind this business, right? It's so you can have the life you want.
[00:22:59] Jon Schmitt: Right. My life basically changed. I've got new fire in me. I feel like I just came into the business again. So, you know, when you have something new? You're very excited about it. So I'm very excited every single day to see what I'm going to make happen. Okay. Sometimes the day before follows into the next day, but there's always something new now popping up. So that has been created again. It's like, I'm just, you know, the second week in.
[00:23:30] Jason Hull: Yeah. So you feel alive again. You know, I find entrepreneurs, we have two speeds. We feel stuck or we feel like we're in momentum, and in momentum feels like life to us. We're not so worried about whether we're happy or sad. That's everybody else on the planet, but for us as entrepreneurs, it's like, "am I in momentum? Do I feel alive and on fire and inspired? Or do I feel stuck or frustrated?" So Sonia, what's it been like seeing the shift in Jon, like with this?
[00:23:58] Sonia Schmitt: It's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. I'll tell ya, you know, for couple of years. I think that he was burned out at work, tired. It was pretty much on my shoulders. And, um, you have made a difference in his life and like you said, he has a new spark. He has direction. He knows what he's going to do. And he has his plan. He's scheduled. There's a little bit of everything that you've spoken about and taught that he has implemented into his daily routine. And you can see a difference.
[00:24:37] He would say that he called people before, he didn't call nobody. You know, he didn't make connections if they call him that's great. He'd take it, but he was just kinda, I think he was burnt out. And you brought the spark back and we see the momentum, we see it making the bottom line difference in our lives, and we're able to expand, looking to hire somebody. So it's been a positive all around.
[00:25:04] Jason Hull: You know, property management can be a grind. It can be really hard. I mean I've never done it. Right. But, the feedback I've heard from hundreds, thousands of property managers is that this is not an easy business. It can be really difficult. It's as difficult as you allow it to be. Right. And business in general is hard. Running a business is hard. Entrepreneurs are under no illusion-- if they've run a business for even a year that it's not an easy thing. So I think every entrepreneur has gotten to that point.
[00:25:35] I know I have where I'm burnt out. I'm done. I wake up and I'm like, basically "fuck it." I'm watching Netflix today. Like, that's all I'm doing. Like, I don't want to do it. Like I've had those moments and I feel like I'm living a dream right now that I get to do what I get to do, because it's in alignment with my 'why.' and that's what I want for all of my clients. I want them to have that clarity because we're all unique, and we all have a different purpose in life and a different thing we really want that gives us the maximum level of the four reasons as I've talked about on a previous episode of fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support, and that's different for everybody.
[00:26:13] And I get to experience that in my business and in my day-to-day. And I want all my clients to experience that because I also want their team members to experience that. And ultimately you're helping your clients to experience a taste of that as well. And so I think the ripple effect that I get to have through amazing clients, like you is really inspiring to me and it really motivates me to keep going. And just having clients that do what I tell them to do and get results is like super rewarding to me. So, you know I appreciate that greatly so. Well, I appreciate you being here on the #DoorGrowShow and I'm excited to see your continued success.
[00:26:52] Jon Schmitt: Thanks, Jason.
[00:26:53] Sonia Schmitt: Thank you very much.
[00:26:55] Jason Hull: All right. So we'll go ahead and wrap up this episode. I really appreciate them taking some time out of the day to come help me plug DoorGrow so to speak. But I wanted to just share if you are property management entrepreneur that is struggling to either add doors or maybe you have hundreds of doors, but you're really struggling to dial in the operations piece. You're just banging your head against the wall. Why can't my team members just think for themselves? Why do I have to micromanage them? Why can't they just do what I need them to do? The hard truth is you are not yet the entrepreneur that can run the business of your dreams, right? If you don't have the business of your dreams and the team of your dreams yet, you're not the person that can run it yet.
[00:27:34] That's what one of my mentors said to me once, and that hit me hard. And so I want to turn you into the entrepreneur that can have the business of his or her dreams and can grow it and can have that fire and have that excitement in your day to day, because you are aligned with the things you really enjoy doing. And you have direction on how to get what you really want to be doing. And you're not stuck because being stuck sucks for entrepreneurs. It's really uncomfortable. It's frustrating. So if that sounds interesting to you, that you're dealing with-- maybe your business it isn't in alignment, which is like branding is off and maybe your pricing isn't optimized and your website isn't optimized, or maybe you're just not getting the growth that you want.
[00:28:20] And you want to know how to add doors without having to spend any money on advertising or doing SEO or pay-per-click or content marketing or social media marketing. And you could still outpace all the companies that are spending tons of money to do all of this. Or you want to just scale your operations, get out of the day-to-day, have more energy, more fun, more focus, more freedom, and figure out how to get a team that really supports you.
[00:28:48] I want to help you build that business and I want to help you become the entrepreneur that can have that business. So reach out to us. You can find us at doorgrow.com, and until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.
[00:29:00] Jason: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:29:27] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:29:48] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have your own kid work with you in your business? Here at DoorGrow, one of our team members is the founder/CEO’s daughter!
Property management growth expert Jason Hull interviews his own daughter AND team member, Madi Sleight. Madi gives a unique perspective on Jason, DoorGrow, social media, and more. If you ever wondered what Jason is really like personally, this episode is for you.
You’ll Learn…
[01:15] Meet today’s guest: Madilyn Sleight with DoorGrow
[05:16] What does Jason even do? Madi’s perspective as a kid and as Jason’s daughter.
[07:45] Joining the team at DoorGrow and Madi’s role on the team.
[05:16] What does Jason even do? Madi’s perspective as a kid and as Jason’s daughter.
[17:45] The program is not a miracle cure… then who is the program for?
[22:15] Jason’s personality according to his daughter and how Jason’s “out there” beliefs benefit the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind
[27:40] What’s next for Madi?
[32:01] More about Madi and her relationship with her dad
[38:25] Madi learned to mimic Jason’s voice on socials + how she does social media
“I love those clients. I love the ones that just show up to everything and they do everything that we say and they just get the best results.”
“For me, it's super rewarding to see clients winning and succeeding. Like it's worth more than money and getting paid to do what I do.”
“It's crazy that I get paid to just help people win, which is really awesome.”
“I think the first thing that people who are skeptical or unsure need to realize is you're not selling a magical cure.”
[00:00:00] Madi Sleight: You know, you've always kind of been out there in your beliefs or like what you're interested in. Like, And I mean this in the best way possible, you're kind of like a nutjob.
[00:00:11] Jason Hull: All right, welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow! If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, and you're interested in growing 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.
[00:00:50] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
[00:01:15] All right, everybody, so today's interview guest that I have with me is Madilyn Marie Hull, my daughter who goes by Madi.
[00:01:28] Madi Sleight: It's also Sleight now.
[00:01:31] Jason Hull: Oh, oh, that's right. She's married now. So it's Madilyn Marie Sleight. So... no? Madi Sleight?
[00:01:40] Madi Sleight: You didn't have to put in the middle name in there, come on.
[00:01:43] Jason Hull: I know, but like I named you, and I gave you that name, so. Cool. So yeah, gosh, that's a old habit. Yeah, Madi Sleight. I got to get used to that last name. I'm still not used to it. So Madi Sleight... I wanted to have her on the show. I want to have my daughter-- she's my oldest-- and I wanted to have her on the show partially because her birthday is tomorrow. We're recording this here on February 1st and she was born February 2nd. And it's her birthday tomorrow.
[00:02:10] But Madi also has been working with me. How long have you been working with me?
[00:02:17] Madi Sleight: It'll be two years in I think July-- June or July.
[00:02:22] Jason Hull: Yeah. So she's been going to school, going to college, and doing work with DoorGrow. And so, she's become a critical part of the team. And so, I wanted to have her on the show because I think it would be really cool for those that listened to the podcast. Those that wonder who Jason Hull is and what's he really like, you know? I'm also a father, and I am a boss and Madi's gotten to experience both sides of those things the good and the bad. And I thought it'd be cool to have you on the show just to help people understand maybe a little bit more about me and that sort of thing.
[00:02:59] So Madi, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell people with the right name, since I screwed that up already and tell everybody what it is that you do at DoorGrow.
[00:03:10] Madi Sleight: Okay. Well, my name is Madi Sleight. Nobody calls me Madilyn, except for you apparently. But, I am our social media manager here at DoorGrow, and I also just do a couple other little things like I video edit and I create case studies/ testimonials of our clients, showcase their wins, post those to YouTube, and I hand those over to Kyle as well, our kind of marketing guy. And he makes those into these awesome Facebook ads that are our lead gen source right now.
[00:03:40] I sit in on all the weekly calls, the weekly coaching calls with our clients and I take notes and I capture their wins, so I kind of get to know all of our clients on maybe more of a surface level, but it's still really cool. I get to know their names and faces and backgrounds of their businesses. How many doors they add each call. And it's very insightful. I've tried a lot of different things in the last year and a half of being at DoorGrow. I tried sales followup for a little bit, tried a little bit of client success here and there. I've gotten to learn a lot of things, and I am an advertising major at the university of Idaho.
[00:04:17] And so it's kind of been cool learning, you know, things in lecture about advertising, SEO, sales, marketing, stuff like that. Being able to use that knowledge at DoorGrow. But then also learning things at DoorGrow and being able to put that towards my degree and use that in my classes.
[00:04:38] Jason Hull: Yeah. And I think it's really cool.
[00:04:40] So, I think the most important thing that I want that you do is more testimonial videos because it's proof, it's evidence that we're getting results and you get to see this stuff firsthand. You're not just behind the paywall and seeing what goes on, but you get to see the inner workings of the business. And so, maybe you could share with people what you thought I did in the business and what you thought I did before you became a team member of the business, what your perspective was and then maybe how that shifted, because I'm sure that was quite a bit different once you got in.
[00:05:16] Madi Sleight: I don't even know what I thought you did cause for a while, when I was a little kid, you were the website guy. And I thought, "oh, how cool," you know, "my dad made a website for Mr. Gas in my hometown." And I was like, "wow!" You know.
[00:05:30] Jason Hull: Wow, that's a long time ago.
[00:05:32] Madi Sleight: I know! And I remember that. And so, when you started making that transition into coaching, you know-- and it was kind of a subtle, smooth transition. You started in with your brother. You've got family members who are into this kind of stuff, but it wasn't something that you necessarily shared with me and my siblings all the time. You kind of just would disappear and turn on your busy sign, your neon, sign outside your door of your office. And we were like, "Yeah, he's working," you know, "he's doing what he's doing."
[00:06:02] And it was only until I think two summers before I started working at DoorGrow, when you came to me and were like, "Hey, you should try out making a couple social media posts for us." And I did 'cause I was into design stuff. Only then I was like, what is DoorGrow? What is-- what does that even mean?
[00:06:22] That is such a weird term doors and growing? Is it like a plant business? I got really into it. Like I was really curious and I actually like begged him for the remainder of those two years. Like, "dude, I'll do your social media. It's a travesty. I will fix it for you"
[00:06:40] Jason Hull: "Let me do it, dad."
[00:06:42] Madi Sleight: Seriously! I was like begging him. And even like my sister-- I would be texting my sister and I'd be like, "man, you know, he still hasn't gotten back to me on this." And she's like, "oh, I'll go talk to him. Hailey did. Hailey and I would text behind your back and be like, man.
[00:06:58] And that was one of the first things when I, was graduating high school and going off to college, your social media was still-- it was still not great. it was very inconsistent. You guys were probably posting... you posted mostly about the podcast episodes, which I still do. But other than that, you were posting maybe once a month or less, not consistently.
[00:07:19] And the branding, the designs and branding were kind of off and it almost made you look sketchy from a social media standpoint, and I honestly, when I was applying to work for DoorGrow, I still wasn't completely sure what you did. I knew that you've coached businesses to like become better businesses. And that's kinda what I told people like, "yeah, he's a business guy who makes other business guys do better."
[00:07:45] But it wasn't until I actually-- I was just desperate for a job at that point, but I applied to DoorGrow and you made me jump through all these hoops, personality tests. I was like, "this is so my dad." Cause you had made me take these personality tests before. You had, you know, human design stuff. This was stuff that he would make my siblings and I do, but I took them again and I was like, "he makes his applicants do this?"
[00:08:10] I was like, that is such a thing that my dad would do, but I'm going through. I do all the things. And as I was going, I just started getting more and more excited. I was like, "man, this a lot of hoops to jump through." I feel like if I get past all of this, I must be a really cool person.
[00:08:27] Like it started making me more excited to work for you guys, because it was like qualifying me as someone you were hiring. And then I made the little introduction video, and I tried to have fun with it and get like my personality involved. And I remember being so nervous. I was like, "Why am I so nervous? It's my dad. I'm trying to work with my dad." But I was so nervous all of a sudden. I was so excited. And I remember-- we had different team members at the time like Jon Ray-- and you were sending me messages that you had gotten from the team. Like, "Man, I love her video!" And I got so excited, and going through the trainings that you sent me-- you sent me like the company mission statement and the core values-- I went through those and I read it and I got to learn like what you do and what you stand for. And not only was it cool' cause I got to know you a little bit better on the business side. That was something me and my siblings never really got to experience when we were little, but I also got to know the business.
[00:09:25] And first of all, I learned you were not a scam because I wasn't sure. It's an expensive program. You know? Like are people getting value out of it? But people were, and the more like I dove into the client testimonials and I watched, I remember some of my family members at the time being like, "what are you doing?"
[00:09:44] And they're like, "come take a break and hang out with us." I'm like, "no, I'm watching all these videos." I was like watching them in the background while doing other things. I was watching them and I really got to know the business. And then I got even more excited and I was like, "you know, this company doesn't really need me for social media right now. I mean, you did, you needed some social media help, but also you guys were doing just fine. The value was there and people noticed that even without flashy visuals or a really well set up socials page. Although, and I can get into this later, but I do think the social media is helping from what I've seen now. I can get into that later if you want, but...
[00:10:23] Jason Hull: I don't, I don't have to mess with it now, which is really nice. It just gets done. So, yeah. And I don't really have to spend time on Facebook. I don't have to spend time on Instagram. So that really did add value. My favorite thing that you do though, is get testimonial videos. I love those and you do a really great job on editing those. So you had mentioned just seeing me work from, you know, I was working from home. Right? And most people, if they have a dad that works, which I guess most people probably do, their dad usually takes off, like leaves and comes back. Like they just disappear, but I was always there and working from home. What do you think that was like for you? Is that different than you think other people's experience? Was it weird?.
[00:11:05] Madi Sleight: Yeah, it was weird. I mean, when we were really little, and I mean like second grade, eight years old, you had an office for OpenPotion downtown, you know, and even then when you would go to work sometimes--
[00:11:19] Jason Hull: I forgot about that.
[00:11:21] Madi Sleight: Sometimes even then when you would go to work, you'd take me and my sister along with you. And we would like to play around--
[00:11:27] Jason Hull: Yeah, I did for a little while. In the beginning, I did have an office, yeah.
[00:11:30] Madi Sleight: And we would play around in the back with your workout equipment while you were working. Even when you had an office. It wasn't like, like a day job, like a cubicle. We were around. We would play in the shop windows, you know.
[00:11:44] Jason Hull: You have such a good memory. It's really wild.
[00:11:49] Madi Sleight: I really do. Well, I wasn't that young. I was like eight years old. That was when I was missing my two front teeth, you know? Yeah, no, I remember. You had the Roomba going around the office. We would tape stuff to it. Anyway, I'm getting off track.
[00:12:04] Jason Hull: I had a robot cleaning for me. So coming in from the outside and then seeing-- cause you get to see-- you're on pretty much every coaching call, I think every coaching call, right? And you take show notes and then you give those to the group in the Mastermind and everybody else. How would you describe what we do now? And like, what's your perspective seeing what goes on in the business?
[00:12:30] Madi Sleight: Even in just the last year and a half, and I know like we've really sped up the process of getting things organized with Sarah coming on, but even in just the last year and a half, like from when I started versus now-- The program has been polished and cleaned up the value and the coaching, modules themselves were always there, but now we're really like getting to polish and refine them and you get to work on making all the fine adjustments and tunings that you want to.
[00:13:00] And it's really cool seeing that happen because as we're growing and adding more clients, I also see our clients getting more excited. When we made changes to certain documents a couple of weeks ago clients went crazy for it. They were like excited with us over this nerdy formatting change or like changing the order of the program around. The clients get excited, and I've gotten messages from clients being like, "Hey, can you send me the link to this document? I'm excited to restart it or like to do it over again. I want the newest updated version." And so, it's not just something that benefits us on like a organization level...
[00:13:37] Jason Hull: You're talking about the Roadmaps roadmaps or the new scripts, or?
[00:13:39] Madi Sleight: I didn't know if I was supposed to like, go into details on the podcast.
[00:13:43] I don't know what I'm supposed reveal to the public.
[00:13:44] Jason Hull: Like it's a proprietary secret? Nah.
[00:13:48] Madi Sleight: It's a secret. It's for clients only. I don't know. But no, the clients love the updated grow roadmap. They really did. They found a lot more clarity. And I remember when I was reaching out, you know, "Hey, you're in this program, we updated this."
[00:14:03] They're like, "man, can you send me the notes for that call? I missed it." Or I get notes all the time because I've turned into like the weekly coaching call and note taker. People will message me like, "oh man, I'm so upset. I missed today's call." You know, they'll be on every other call like, "man, what did I miss? Can you send me the summary directly so I can like study it and take notes? I'm like, wow. Some of our clients get really invested and find a lot of value in just the weekly coaching calls. And some of our clients-- like we've got a group of them that show up to every single one.
[00:14:36] Jason Hull: Oh, I love those clients. I love the ones that they just, they show up to everything and they do everything that we say and they just get, they get the best results. They're like... they're the best. Like if I could just have all those kinds of clients, I would just have those and everybody would be rich. We would make tons of money. They would make tons of money. But yeah, I love clients that just do what I say.
[00:15:03] Madi Sleight: No, it's true. And it's nice to watch them, especially like from beginning to end. Sometimes they come in a little bit skeptical, like Jon Schmitt. I remember in the beginning he seemed a little stubborn. I dunno, he was intimidatingat first. But when I got on that interview with him last-- or a couple of weeks ago, he was the most excited and he was just going on and on about how much value he got out of the program and how he just decided to do what you said. And so he got the results and he's now like one of our biggest cheerleaders, he and Sonia and Alex come on the call and Alex as well, his son, Alex is always mentioning how much he's learning. He takes notes and he's learning and he wants to quit his day job and start taking over the property management business.
[00:15:47] And that's really cool to watch because I've been on and I've been able to watch a lot of the clients' journeys from beginning to now.
[00:15:58] Jason Hull: Yeah, you have, and you have a perspective or a lens through which you get to see the business that nobody else has because you're watching these videos over and over again, probably while you're editing them and piecing together, and you're like keeping track of different clips where they share wins on different calls, and then you're taking these together. So you get to see their entire journey in collapsed time. And so that's interesting.
[00:16:24] Madi Sleight: Well, I almost get like emotionally attached to these people that I've never met. You know, I've seen through a Zoom screen every week and I'm just quietly sitting there not talking back and I'm just recording them. Sometimes when I'm watching them and piecing together, putting music to their story and cutting out some "ums" or "and yeah"s or "and so"s and like putting together this really impactful video, sometimes I get emotional. I'm like, "wow, I'm so proud of them." You know, they came so far and it's so cool because I almost feel like I get to know these people on a personal level.
[00:17:00] Jason Hull: Yeah, I mean for me, it's super rewarding to see clients winning and succeeding. Like it's worth more than money and getting paid to do what I do and to be just even a guide and seeing all the success in their journeys. It's like really, I mean, it's really amazing. I think it's really amazing that I get to have this job. It's crazy that I get paid to just help people win, which is really awesome. So we like any coach or any business, I've had haters. There's people that just don't believe like we're real or think we just, maybe could be snake oil salesman or something like that. Maybe you could share with people what are you noticing clients are doing?
[00:17:44] Madi Sleight: I think the first thing that people who are skeptical or unsure need to realize is you're not selling a magical cure. You know, they're not going to go through the program and immediately they're going to have knocks on their door being like, "Here, take my properties." That's not how it works. And you know, at first I thought when I first joined the business, I was like, "How can you make that guarantee? How does this work? You know, are you helping them with SEO, helping them get referrals, but really the program benefits those who put in the work.
[00:18:15] It's not for people who are just going to watch the videos and then not do anything about it. In fact, most of the program is doing the work. The videos are almost just helpful content to get you going. The program is not the videos, but I feel like some clients come in and that's what they think, but our most successful clients, our most excited, our most-- I don't know-- just our best clients, the ones that get the best wins and successes. They just come in, they dive right into the content, they keep their three commitments. They put in as many hours of prospecting they can a week. They get right into it. They just do what you say. They attend the weekly coaching calls. They ask lots of questions. That is something that I've noticed is our best, most rewarded clients. They ask a lot of questions. They come on and ask where they're stuck. They ask really good, insightful questions.
[00:19:07] And sometimes they'll take up half the coaching call some of these questions, like 30 whole minutes or 40 minutes. We've been going over time a lot lately because we've been getting really good questions. And then they take what they learned from those calls and they just go implement it.
[00:19:26] Jason Hull: Yeah, it's true. Yeah, we spend a lot of time on those calls sometimes. And I love them asking questions. If they're doing the work, they always have questions. And I see my goal as mentor or as coach to just help them collapse time, point them in the right direction, give them enough information to get them moving forward in the right direction and then kind of get out of their way. So the training material in DoorGrow Academy helps them collapse time, especially because it helps them avoid doing the wrong things. Most people are just doing the wrong things or they're spending-- every business owner is spending tons of time in their business, but they're just focused on the wrong things. And so I think one of the greatest things I think that I provide is just clarity and helping them collapse time. So they don't waste so much time doing the stuff that isn't working.
[00:20:15] So they actually spend less time on the phones and less time talking to people overall. In relation to the amount of doors they're acquiring than they would, if they were focused on SEO or pay-per-click or content marketing or social media marketing, or pay per lead services. This is all the stuff that people try to do. And then they come to us and we say, don't spend any money on any of that stuff. In fact, you don't even need to spend money, and we'll get you growing faster, but it takes work. All of those channels take work. They all take time.
[00:20:48] But none of them could help somebody like John Babiarz add, you know, how many doors has he added in what period?
[00:20:58] Madi Sleight: Right now, our most updated testimonial, which is already out of date because you just had a call with him. He had hit around 200 in under a year of being in the program.
[00:21:10] Jason Hull: 10 months, I think you put on the video?
[00:21:11] Madi Sleight: 10 or 11 months.
[00:21:13] Jason Hull: Yeah, that would be impossible with focusing on lead gen, typical internet based lead generation, like SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing. How many doors did he start at? I can't remember.
[00:21:25] Madi Sleight: He said he started at 60 or 70. And so about six months into the program. I think he had doubled his portfolio.
[00:21:35] Jason Hull: Yeah.
[00:21:36] Madi Sleight: Don't quote me on that. Those dates could be wrong.
[00:21:38] Jason Hull: I think I remember our first video used to run ads was 60. He added 60 doors in 11 weeks is what it said. And we just got lucky that he would mention how many he had added so far in the program, which inspired us to actually start tracking with clients, like keep them conscious of that. Like how many doors total, since during the program, have you added? So that we can monitor that and speed it up.
[00:22:01] But yeah. So that's interesting. What else do you think people should know about. That don't know me from a perspective maybe as my kid or as boss, but how would you describe me to other people?
[00:22:15] Madi Sleight: I don't know. it's really interesting. You know, you've always kind of been out there in your beliefs or like what you're interested in.
[00:22:25] Like, you tend to-- and I mean this in the best way possible, you're kind of like a nutjob. Like you go out, you love to read books and learn. You're constantly on this like self-improvement grind. You're always like learning new things and that's something that you always, you've always been that way. You've always wanted to learn and try new things to figure out like, what's the best way to do this? What's the best diet to eat? What's the best workouts? You've always kind of got that like innovative mindset in a way. You're willing to try like out there experimental things if it's working.
[00:23:00] And I think that also translates into business. Like I wouldn't say that what we're doing is crazy here at DoorGrow. I think what we're doing is just something that helps businesses in general to thrive and to grow. But I don't think anyone else is really doing it like DoorGrow is. I don't think so.
[00:23:19] Maybe you would know better.
[00:23:20] Jason Hull: Probably not.
[00:23:20] I don't think anybody's doing anything the way that we do it. Not, not exactly. That's why all my trainings and with "secrets." We've got special, unique ways that I've come up with of doing things they're similar to what other people might do, but those little differences are where all the magic happens, I think.
[00:23:38] Madi Sleight: And I think in a way, you know, those kind of out there techniques in your personal life and in business, that's something that benefits DoorGrow and is kind of what this whole thing is riding on is your unique perspective and take on these processes that help property managers add doors and scale their businesses.
[00:23:59] It all kind of comes back to you being just a little bit crazy, just a little bit.
[00:24:03] Jason Hull: A learning nut job. So yeah, I think one of the most common things I heard you and the kids say to me growing up is, "you're weird" to me.
[00:24:17] Madi Sleight: You are! And you were, you really were.
[00:24:21] Jason Hull: So, what else would you describe about my personality? And then we'll probably talk a little bit about you.
[00:24:26] Madi Sleight: Well, another thing that I think kind of lends itself to the program and to DoorGrow, but it's totally your personality is you're very logical in thinking. You're very like process oriented. And so you take that crazy and you mix it with this nerd. And then you get this person who can not only come up with these crazy ideas, but can implement them. Like you spend hours in AirTable, creating spreadsheets and processes and crazy like interconnected, intricate spreadsheets and databases. And I don't know. I don't know if I could do that, but you're willing to figure that out. You think it's fun and it's 'cause you've kinda got that like nerdy side as well, but you're very logical oriented and I think that helps our clients as well.
[00:25:15] It's got pros and cons. You tend to think less emotionally and more logically. You don't bullshit or beat around the bush. You tell our clients what needs to get done. You push them to succeed and you're okay telling them the uncomfortable truth, even if they don't want to hear it.
[00:25:33] Jason Hull: Yeah. That's true. Do you think I'm too harsh?
[00:25:36] Madi Sleight: Um, you know, there are times where it's appropriate and times where it's not. In your personal life, sometimes I'd be like, man, you're just a robot.
[00:25:45] Jason Hull: Personally, I'm probably too harsh sometimes..
[00:25:48] Madi Sleight: Sometimes you're a little too logical. Me and my siblings come to you like, "oh my gosh, I've got this emotional problem." and you're like, "it's okay. Just read a book. Here, take this book on self-improvement. And we're like, "I just needed you to listen!" But I think your clients need to hear it, so.
[00:26:09] Jason Hull: Yeah, I think I've gotten better with that over time that, I mean, I used to be really, really analytical and logical and truth was all that mattered, you know, so. But yeah, I think the challenge of that is you're constantly bombarded by emotional challenges if you're too logical. So I had to learn how to feel things and empathize more and more over the years. So I'm up there in years now, you know.
[00:26:39] Madi Sleight: How old?
[00:26:39] Jason Hull: I think I turn 45 this year, so.
[00:26:42] Madi Sleight: You think? You don't know?
[00:26:43] Jason Hull: Yeah, no, I do. I turn 45 this year, so. All right, so that's enough about me. So let's just talk a little bit about you. So how old are you turning tomorrow?
[00:26:58] Madi Sleight: I'm turning 20.
[00:27:00] Jason Hull: 20? And your birthday's on 2/2/02. And you're turning 20 on 2/2/22.
[00:27:11] Madi Sleight: Yeah, it's also Groundhog's day.
[00:27:15] Jason Hull: Oh, okay. So what what's with the twos, Madi?
[00:27:19] Madi Sleight: I don't know. It's my lucky number. I was also married and I graduated in 2020, so.
[00:27:25] Jason Hull: Yeah, a lot of people did not like that year.
[00:27:28] Madi Sleight: You know what? It was okay I guess. I also did not like that year all the time, but hey, still the twos. Two is my lucky number.
[00:27:40] Jason Hull: Yeah. So what's next for you? Like you're going to school now. You're doing a little part-time with DoorGrow. What gets you excited about the future?
[00:27:49] Madi Sleight: I don't know. I've always been very future oriented, you know, even since I was a freshman in high school, I was getting 4.0 not because I want it to, or because anyone expected me to, but because I wanted to get scholarships for college and I accidentally became valedictorian by doing that. I was willing to give it to the other girl that was salutatorian. I literally said, she's student body president. She can have it. They said it doesn't work that way. I was like, okay. But I just wanted the scholarships. I was always very future oriented.
[00:28:23] And so I took a bunch of credits in high school, college credits. And so now I've kind of fast-tracked through college. It's only my second year, but I've got junior standing. And so I don't have a whole lot of college classes left to take, I don't have very many semesters left and at this point in my college career, I'm not taking any gen ed courses anymore. I'm taking all the fun, you know, journalism and mass media courses, taking a lot of graphic design, a lot of media ethics. And right now, I actually applied and I made it onto the school's national advertising competition team. So I'm working with a team of like nine or 10 other people right now, and we're working on a creative brief sent to us by Meta for the Meta Quest 2 VR headset.
[00:29:13] Jason Hull: Formerly known as Facebook?.
[00:29:14] Madi Sleight: Yeah, Facebook. You know, all that good stuff. And so I get to actually come up with a whole advertising campaign with this team and I was given the producer role, which basically means I get to boss everybody around, which is something I'm good at. I have been told.
[00:29:29] Jason Hull: You are. You're good at that. You used to boss around your siblings.
[00:29:32] Madi Sleight: I know, I know. And it's a little bit of a control freak. But I think this role suits me really well and I'm able to help our two presidents and I work very closely with them and they've already decided that I talk so much that I'm going to be the one presenting in person.
[00:29:51] I guess I volunteered by talking a lot in our meetings. But no, I'm excited and this is something that I feel like will benefit my future, my resume. And I was very excited to be working for DoorGrow and getting relevant experience toward the field I'm going into, the digital design space or the desktop publishing, advertising sphere.
[00:30:14] So I don't know. For a while, I feel like after I graduate, you know, Preston, my husband's still going to be in school, and so he'll still be going to school. So I'll just be sticking around and working with DoorGrow full-time and will stay.
[00:30:29] Jason Hull: Ooh, that'll be cool.
[00:30:30] Madi Sleight: I know you're excited. He keeps trying to get me to drop out by offering me a salary.
[00:30:39] Jason Hull: Yeah. 'Cause I'm obviously a huge fan of college. I went to college, but I feel like nowadays it's not really as useful as I don't really even look at applicants' college degrees. I really don't. I just look at experience and skills. Some people do, but yeah, I would love to have more Madi in the business because it's a good thing.
[00:31:03] Madi Sleight: After I graduate, I'm just going to be sticking around here, saving up money for whatever's next. We've got a good area. We're close to Washington advertising agencies and stuff like that. There's lots of internships and possibilities. So I don't know. I'm happy, you know, with what I do at DoorGrow right now, I wouldn't mind branching out and trying new things when I go full time. But for now, I'm just excited to stay within this industry of, marketing, advertising, graphic design area and I like working from home.
[00:31:34] And so that's something I've kind of gotten used to, but that's kind of what's next for me, I'm excited to keep taking classes at the university. It's a small college the journalism and mass media college, we're small. A lot of my classmates are the same in every class. A lot of my professors are the same, but they're very experienced.
[00:31:52] A lot of them are experienced journalists and advertisers, marketers, PR people, know what they're talking about, at least I think so.
[00:32:01] Jason Hull: All right. So everybody's like he's throwing her some like easy, slow balls. What do you feel like is my biggest challenges or my biggest deficiencies or whatnot?
[00:32:14] Madi Sleight: In the business or in general?
[00:32:17] Jason Hull: Oh, well either one.
[00:32:21] Madi Sleight: Well, I mean, like I said, it's something that you've been working on and something that you've improved upon, but the emotional aspect was something that I personally had an issue with growing up, especially being the oldest, being very hard-headed and stubborn and also very emotional. All of your kids are very emotional.
[00:32:39] So that's something that you're going to have...
[00:32:43] Jason Hull: Yeah, I think of all of them, you're the least emotional out of all of them.
[00:32:49] Madi Sleight: Which is funny because I've actually gotten more in tune with my emotions as I've gotten older, but I'm also just better at regulating, I think, than some of my siblings.
[00:32:59] Jason Hull: Yeah, perhaps yeah. I mean, you are the oldest. I'm also an oldest. Right. And I think there's a sort of a personality type attributed to the oldest child. But yeah, I know that the things that I've always seen in you, the gifts that I see in you is that you have a really great memory. Like you remember like history from even when you're really young, like you bring up stories and it sparks, like it helps me remember and I'm like, oh my gosh. I can't believe she remembers that. Even when you're a really young, it's really quite weird. You remember a lot of details. I think also you would always take control. If there were a group of kids playing-- we would go, I would take you to the community swimming pool, for example. And you would immediately just start meeting people and you would organize everyone into doing a game or doing something like you would immediately, you were taking charge.
[00:33:50] And it wasn't like something you were ever pushed to do, you just did it. You're just driven to do that. You're like, this is what I want. I want to have fun. And I want to be in charge and get everybody doing things and you would just do it. And every kid would then be playing and like doing what you wanted them to do. Even with your, you know, your sister right under you Hailey, you would tell her like-- You would play games, which would be like some sort of role-play like pretending to do stuff.
[00:34:15] And you would tell her what to say. You'd be like, "I will have a blah, blah, blah. And then you say blah blah blah blah..." and then she would be like, "blah blah blah blah." and she would just like, say it. Eventually, I think that wore thin.
[00:34:28] Madi Sleight: Yeah, she got sick of it real quick.
[00:34:31] Jason Hull: Eventually that wore thin. And she no longer tolerated that, but yeah, you would always like take charge. You were always really outgoing, like naturally, like talking to people and whatnot. And you were just, you were such a fun kid. You were just so fun. What was interesting about you growing up is you would just break out into song. You would make up songs while like, while we were driving or while we were doing things, you just sing about what you were seeing and what was going on. And it was really, really stinking cute.
[00:35:04] Madi Sleight: You want to know what's funny? You want to know what's really funny? So I remember that when I first came on at DoorGrow, you pulled up my DISC assessment. And you were like, "man, this is really interesting." It's something about like your natural or your taught personalities, you know?
[00:35:19] Jason Hull: Yeah. your natural score versus your--
[00:35:22] Madi Sleight: like adapted.
[00:35:24] Jason Hull: Yeah your adapted score.
[00:35:25] Madi Sleight: And you brought up something that was kind of unknown to me at the time that I was an adapted people pleaser, like my people pleasing score it was really, really high. I had been taught or expected to do that, but it was naturally pretty low. And that's, been in the back of my mind for like the last year and a half. And that's something that I've been working on. And as I've been like more myself and less worried about what people think... my poor husband. We have this inside joke. And I mentioned this when I was in Austin. The, "oh, is that your song? Is that your song?" Because I will be doing laundry or I'll be cooking and I'll be like, "it's time to do the laundry. I'm doing the laundry going to fold some socks." And like, I'll just start-- I'll just start like singing and dancing and he'll look at me and he'll go, "is that your song?"
[00:36:12] I'm like, "that's my song."
[00:36:13] Jason Hull: "That's my song."
[00:36:15] Madi Sleight: So now that I'm like getting more into like my natural personality, I'm like reverting back to how I was, singing and dancing and coming up with stupid little jingles when I was a kid, So it's really funny.
[00:36:30] Jason Hull: It's kinda like that inner child work. Like you're just, you're becoming more comfortable being that authentic version of yourself. It's funny. Cause like I wrote songs, and I would make up songs all the time, like about things. Like sometimes the kids will still, like, if they're making chicken nuggets, will sing "chicken nuggets."
[00:36:49] Madi Sleight: I do that! I do "the chicken nuggets."
[00:36:52] Jason Hull: "I want eat chicken nuggets, I like to eat chicken nuggets."
[00:36:57] Madi Sleight: I do that every time. I can't believe you remember that..
[00:36:59] Jason Hull: Yeah. I mean, as a parent, you've learned ways to get your kids inspired to do things because this is something that I learned a long time ago, but whenever we fail to inspire, we always control. And so it's hard to control people. if it were easy, everybody would do it. I'm going to control everybody and make the world around me, do what I want. But there's a lot less friction when you can inspire people to do it and song is sometimes a way to get kids to do things.
[00:37:24] So well. All right, cool. Is there anything else people should know? About you? About me? About DoorGrow?
[00:37:33] Madi Sleight: I don't know. I'm happy where I'm at. And I think as we're growing our team, you know, we just hired Ashlee and she seems like a really good fit. And I get along with everyone on the team super well. We've got a good, fun dynamic, even Adam, you know, Adam's a little more shy than Kyle.
[00:37:50] Kyle's a little rambunctious. Yeah. No, everyone like fits really well. And I get along with everybody and I like the company culture. I thought originally, you know, I kind of had this like inner fear that working with my own dad would be a nightmare.
[00:38:06] Jason Hull: Yeah.
[00:38:06] Madi Sleight: Yeah. That was something that I was worried about. But honestly, I think it's been good because I don't know how often we would get to communicate otherwise, but now we talk to each other on a daily basis. Sometimes I get sick of you. Sometimes I do. sometimes I'll be in the huddle at 7:30 in the morning and I'll be like, "I'm too tired for this," but I think it's helped us like grow together personally.
[00:38:28] And I also just learn a lot from you and from the business. And I think it's a really good opportunity for me.
[00:38:35] Jason Hull: Yeah. I love having you in the business because, you know, a lot of times parents-- I feel like I have a lot of stuff that I know that I would like to get into my kids, but there's not really a vehicle to do that, but getting your kid in business with you and in doing things because I want everyone on the team to grow, but of course I want my daughter to grow as well.
[00:38:56] And so, you know, it's being able to see you develop and grow. Is even more rewarding, you know, for me. And it's really rewarding to be able to share some of that stuff that's in me that I would love all my kids to have, which are heavily connected to values and the things that I care about.
[00:39:19] And. You know, interacting and dealing with people and what's effective and contribution and all the things that you've heard. Here's what's really genius about you that I should point out. So when you started doing social media posts, you had listened to some of my podcast and you'd listen to things. You've learned my voice, which is really weird. Like there's AI software out there now, which we now can play with a little bit that actually can learn our voice and it can speak. And it can make the sounds that sound like me, right? There's like an AI version of Joe Rogan out there. For example, it sounds exactly like them. It's like a deep fake, like, it's crazy. You can sound just like him and it's AI, people can type in words and it can spit out someone else's voice. Right.
[00:40:03] You learned to pretty much do that by just watching the videos, but in text, right. So when you're creating posts and content, every now and then I'll read something I'm like, well, that's kind of a little different than how I say it, but what's really weird is most of the time I would see posts or things that you would post and I would look at it and then I would feel like I needed to like it because I was like, that's great stuff. I love that. I mean, it's silly that I love like things you've gotten from what I say, but I didn't write it and I'm reading it going, "yeah. I resonate with this" obviously. And so it's really funny.
[00:40:40] And then I'm like, oh, that's silly. I shouldn't be liking my own stuff. That's weird, but I didn't post it, you know? So it's really awesome to see that you were able to encapsulate the voice. How are you able to do that when other people haven't?
[00:40:52] Madi Sleight: Well, the weird thing is I started out making this, like this kind of like a reservoir, like a doc of all these different quotes on all these different topics.
[00:41:00] So if I needed a caption for something about a topic, I'd look and I'd go, oh, and I'll just copy and paste it. So I really did just--
[00:41:08] Jason Hull: So you have a Jason's quotes database?
[00:41:11] Madi Sleight: I do, and I keep adding to it, but now I started off doing direct quotes and then I started like, "Hmm, I don't like the way he said that. I feel like that's inproper grammar" So I like tweak it a little bit. Yeah, no, "I feel that's not the right word. I think he meant to say this." And so I like put in little things that start tweaking it. And now what I do is I actually, like, I've gotten way more efficient and like more quick at getting social media posts out there.
[00:41:37] 'Cause I'll go into this reservoir. and I have pages and I know exactly where everything is and I'll be like, "oh, this is a good line. I'll throw that in there. This is also a good line. I'll throw that in there." you know, make something up as well to go along with it. It's almost bad because we'll be in the coaching calls and you'll be talking about something and I'll be like, "I could regurgitate this quote on this topic because you'll be trying to say it and I'll be like, "I know exactly what he's trying to say." because you've said it before. One thing that's helpful is your views on a certain topic, like let's say SEO, or referral partners or this or that, you say mostly the same things about the same topic in most of our calls. And so I kind of picked up on that.
[00:42:23] And so even if I don't have something in my beautiful reservoir, I just know what you would say. Like, I dunno.
[00:42:30] Jason Hull: You've heard me talk so much and heard me say so much, you know. I've worked with some coaches and mentors. I had one coach I worked with for like three years and it got to the point where on calls. I knew what he would say. Like, I could answer the question for people on his behalf. Yeah. So do you think you could coach clients? Do you think that's something that you could do? You'd be like, I know what Jason would say. This is like, what he would say.
[00:42:52] Madi Sleight: Well, it's funny because when I was doing like the client outreach for a little bit, you know, messaging all of our clients every week, sometimes I'd get a question and I would be able to confidently answer it. And other times, more rarely I would send them over to you but because I know your viewpoint on most of the things-- and that also helped when I was doing sales followup, because I started off and they'd ask me questions, like "how much does the program cost? What do you do?" And I couldn't confidently answer.
[00:43:17] But now I can. And I don't think I'm to the point where I could take over the weekly coaching calls yet. I think I need to go through our program kind of like what Ashlee's doing right now. And like actually go through, take notes and become more familiar with the content of the program itself. But I don't think I'm too far behind that honestly because I listen to you for an hour, twice a week, plus meetings and huddles. And I post to your personal and to our business, social medias every single day. And I'm looking at your quotes every single day. Every time I'm creating social media content, I'm going through. "Hmm. You know, what's a good topic for this post.""
[00:44:02] What's something we haven't, you know, put on social in a while." and I look at your podcast episodes and see what kind of content you put up there. And so there's a lot of information. If somebody wanted to impersonate you, I don't think it'd be that hard. There's enough information out there.
[00:44:20] Jason Hull: There's a lot out there..
[00:44:21] Madi Sleight: And the more that I consume just doing my daily tasks or weekly tasks, the better I get at, you know, mimicking your style, your voice on social media.
[00:44:32] Jason Hull: Cool. Yeah, I think it's just really kind of weird to see when I see stuff that looks like I did it, but it's actually you, but it's like I did it, which is really strange. Cause I don't remember doing it, which is the weirdest thing I'm like, "I don't remember doing that, but that sounds exactly like something I would say."
[00:44:52] Madi Sleight: Most of the time it is something you said.
[00:44:56] Jason Hull: That's why. Sometimes I don't even remember saying some things. You'll post something. I'm like, "that's really good! Did I actually say that?" Yeah. So, all right. Well, I think this has gone on long enough, and I appreciate you coming on and being willing to do this and kind of share your perspective on me.
[00:45:16] And I think it's probably fun for everyone to hear a little bit about you.
[00:45:20] Madi Sleight: I think that the people listening to this podcast should go check out our socials. You know, we don't get a ton of engagement. We've been getting higher numbers. I've checked the percentages. They've gone up. We've gained more followers, but I think our social media content is pretty good. So if you could go check it out, that'd be really great. You're gonna find a lot of regurgitated quotes from my dad, but a lot of it's good information, especially for property managers. If you're like struggling to grow doors or feel like you're stuck at a roadblock or you can't scale your business, there's a lot of little tidbits of sneak peaks of what we kind of talk about in the program on our socials, lots of short paragraphs.
[00:45:57] Little things, I take little gold nuggets from your podcast and put them on socials. So I think that's something that could be nice for someone to get into if they don't have a lot of time to listen to your podcast or to do a ton of research on DoorGrow,
[00:46:13] but also go check out our YouTube channel and our clients success videos. I'm going to be posting more this week as I get them refined to make some revisions and get them up there. We've got some really awesome client wins and people should expect a lot more client success videos in the coming year and in the next few months, especially because I've got a lot of content to get up there and to get out to people so we can show off how awesome our clients are.
[00:46:42] Jason Hull: Yeah. I just got to get you to quit college and make videos full-time so I can get more of them out of you faster.
[00:46:52] Madi Sleight: I'm too far in, at this point. I just gotta finish it. You don't have to wait that long. I promise I will work full time when I graduate.
[00:47:05] Jason Hull: Well, I'm looking forward to the time where you can go full time. Cause that'd be awesome and Madi, I love you. I adore you. A dad couldn't have had a better first kid and you were just, you've always been so fun. You always get my jokes and I really appreciate having you in the business. And thanks for coming on the podcast.
[00:47:26] Madi Sleight: Yeah. I don't know. I love working for DoorGrow and I like working with you, believe it or not.
[00:47:32] Jason Hull: I believe it. All right. And I think everybody else listening does too well, everybody else, I appreciate you hanging out with us. This is about an hour, this will be a long episode. And until next time to our mutual growth bye everyone.
[00:47:47] Jason: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:48:13] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:48:34] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
If you own a business, you are likely either a visionary or an operator. Entrepreneurs/visionary types are risk-takers. They innovate and lead a business with their ideas and vision. Operators are analytical and organized and solve problems within the business.
This important dynamic between the visionary & the operator personality types keeps a business balanced and running. Property management growth expert, Jason Hull explores the relationship between visionaries and operators and their roles in a business.
You’ll Learn…
[01:02] Intro: Visionary vs. Operator
[01:34] What is a Visionary? What Makes Them Different From an Operator?
[03:22] Visionaries Must be Allowed to Lead
[04:23] Giving Operators the Right Problems to Solve
[06:20] What if You are Both an Operator and an Entrepreneur?
[08:23] Surrounding Yourself with a Team that Supports You
[10:21] Another Type of Team Member: BDMs
[11:18] What to do in a Toxic Business Partnership
[12:28] The Visionary and the Operator Together: a Magical Pair
“Visionaries are big-picture oriented. They're dreamers, they're creative, risk-takers, innovators. Whereas operators-- operators are these really detail-oriented, meticulous people.”
“Giving the operator correct vision gives them the right problem to solve.”
“Running a business is risky. It requires innovation. It requires creativity. These are the skills of the visionary.”
“The visionary will lead with vision, and the operator in a healthy state will ensure that that vision is always going to get accomplished, which is super important.”
[00:00:00] 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.
[00:00:39] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.
[00:01:02] So today's topic everybody. We're going to be talking about visionary versus operator. So I get a lot of clients coming to me that are visionaries. And so, I want to get into this dynamic of the visionary versus the operator, and there's some important ideas to understand around this because it's a really common partnership or relationship that exists in business. It can be very symbiotic and it can be very helpful to have this relationship in a business.
[00:01:34] And so let's talk about the visionary. So what is a visionary? Visionary is the typical entrepreneur personality type. The visionary is somebody that has, you know, vision. They have these ideas of what they want to accomplish. They are usually driven. They're usually a bit more sales-oriented.
[00:01:52] They're a bit more risk-oriented than most people on the planet. They're comfortable taking on risks. They're comfortable doing the work. They're comfortable coming up with new ideas and innovating. They change quickly. They move quickly. They want to do new things. They experiment... they're driven, risk takers. You get the idea.
[00:02:13] These are the typical, stereotypical sort of entrepreneur personality type. And the operator is very different than that. Right? So, and to contrast these: visionaries are big-picture oriented. They're dreamers, they're creative, risk-takers, innovators. Whereas operators-- operators are these really detail-oriented, meticulous people.
[00:02:35] They focus on the details instead of so much the big picture. They're grounded. They focus on keeping things grounded. They're not like theoretical and big plan, this guy dreams... They're like practical and grounded. They're meticulous. They're cautious. And they are focused on implementation rather than so much innovation.
[00:02:56] And so visionaries, you need operators, right? You know, you might have them as a personal or an executive assistant. They might then graduate to being an operations assistant-- might graduate to being an operations manager-- maybe eventually director of operations-- and then maybe the VP of operations --and maybe even the COO of your company, where they may be dealing with some financials and some other things that you wouldn't trust anybody else with. Right?
[00:03:22] It's important in understanding this relationship between these two contrasting, different personality types-- and this is really important for the operator to understand, is that the visionary must be allowed to lead. The visionary has to lead because they're going to move the business forward.
[00:03:40] Running a business is risky. It requires innovation. It requires creativity. These are the skills of the visionary. but they are a dynamic duo, right? The visionary will lead with vision and the operator in a healthy state will ensure that that vision is always going to get accomplished, which is super important.
[00:03:59] A lot of times, visionaries might be trying to do it all themselves, and they wonder why things end up staying on their to-do list forever, why they feel stuck, why they have so much frustration, why they aren't able to just get stuff done. And if there's all these things you've had on your to-do list for way too long, it's probably because you're a visionary and you need badly some sort of operator in the business.
[00:04:23] Now the operator has some inherent challenges. The operator needs vision, and it's important that you give the operator the right problem to solve because if the operator doesn't have the right problem to solve, their usual default problem that they work on is how should we do this? How can we avoid this? Is this safe? Keep the business safe and keep things comfortable and make sure everything is done perfectly before we take action. And so they're always looking for the flaw, the problem they're super critical. A lot of times and they're always looking for the flaw in whatever your vision and things are.
[00:04:55] So what's important to understand, visionaries, is you need to give operators the right problem to work on. So instead of the problem of, "should we do this?" And "what's wrong with this,? And "where's the flaw?" You need to give them a different problem to work on saying, "this is the goal. How do we get this accomplished?"
[00:05:15] "How can we make this possible? How can we make this work? How can we hit this target? How can we make more money? How can we do this?" Instead of, "should we?" or "why?" Or, you know, some of these kinds of things sometimes, right?
[00:05:29] So, giving the operator correct vision gives them the right problem. ‘Cause they are really good problem solvers. They're really good at solving these problems. And if given the right problem, "how can we make this work? How could we do this?" It shifts the brain out of, "should we do this?" Or "Why?" You know-- which your goal is to get this done-- shifts them to thinking and helping you figure out how to accomplish this.
[00:05:50] Now a lot of lawyers, accountants, really detail-oriented people might have that kind of personality type. And so a lot of times you need to give them the right problem to solve, because they're going to try and keep you from doing things or tell you don't do this, or this might not be safe. And if you know that this vision and down in your intuition says, 'this is what we're going to do, this is what I want to do.'
[00:06:10] You give them: this is the problem I want you to work on. I already know I want to do this. Help them figure out how to do this... very different problem to give operators.
[00:06:20] Alright, now, forcing non entrepreneurial operators. Cause there are some of you operators out there that are also the entrepreneur and you run a business. And you're kind of a unicorn, you're a little bit unique and different, but forcing a non-entrepreneurial operator to lead and to push and to have drive is often very uncomfortable for them. And it's often very ineffective. There's going to be a lot of friction. They'll experience massive resistance to doing new things, taking risks, and they shouldn't be pushed to do sales or marketing or outreach or prospecting, or to be the face of the company in the long run.
[00:07:03] So if you are the operator personality type running your property management business, you may want to attract or get around some people. So operators should not be over sales, marketing, BDM-- business development management. They should not be over that typically because they're going to focus on conservation and conserving and doing less and spending less money and not experimenting and doing things safer typically.
[00:07:29] So your head of sales and marketing would be maybe their equal, not their subordinate. You do not want to put your operations person over them. Everybody may report metrics to the operator, but the operators should not be their boss. They should not be their supervisor or superior. If you have a head of director or head of sales and marketing or a BDM.
[00:07:50] Now, what if you are that operator entrepreneur? So let's talk about that. First, you may not actually be that person. You may just enjoy creating operational systems. I enjoy that. I love creating the systems and building out operational stuff, but I don't love doing the data entry. I don't love running those systems. I don't want to run the meetings. I don't want to run the process, but I like building out sometimes those processes or the mechanics or the mechanisms 'cause that's creative work for me. That's visionary, creative work for me.
[00:08:23] Now, if you actually are this operator personality type and you run a business, you may have struggled to grow your business because of that. So you may need to surround yourself with visionaries to get ideas. This is why some of my clients that are operator personality types, work with me as a. It helps expose them to new ideas. It helps stretch them, move them into the things that they wouldn't normally think of doing. It's kind of like, I get to be the visionary for them in some regard.
[00:08:50] Or you may need to go get a business partner or somebody that can fill that role if you really feel that that's a deficiency. So getting a visionary co-mentor can help... getting somebody else. Now you may also want to-- just a tip-- is just practice feeling, right? Because usually operators are very in their head. They're very mental. They're avoiding their feelings. They're trying to avoid feelings by using logic, which doesn't really work.
[00:09:17] The only thing you can do with a feeling is to feel that feeling. So my recommendation is don't be mentally avoiding feelings, be present, get in your body and feel those feelings because once you're comfortable feeling uncomfortable feelings... Once you can deal with that, you can move to a higher level of capacity as an entrepreneur.
[00:09:39] You will also need to learn to build the right culture and attract people that you can actually trust to let go of control to. A lot of times, you want to hold onto things and control everything and you don't feel safe letting go. They don't really share your values and you're never going to trust somebody unless they really share your values.
[00:09:58] You won't trust them to do things the way you would. You won't trust them to work with people the way you would. You won't trust your clients to talk to them. You won't trust that they'll make great decisions because they don't share your values and you cannot create values in people. It's hard wired in. They get their values from their religion, their parents, their upbringing, the culture they grew up in.
[00:10:20] They have those kinds of set. They've made decisions long ago, lots of little decisions that led to their values. So you need to find people that are good at culture fit or value fit for you. You may also want to get a BDM. So a lot of the operator entrepreneurs really struggle in the sales outreach, business development sort of category. That stuff's not fun. Like making a cold call sounds really uncomfortable for a lot of them, for example, right? They just know they're not good at it. They're not a closer, they don't have the bite, the hunger, the drive. They don't feel comfortable following up on somebody three times in the same day. They're like, "that sounds mean, or uncomfortable for them. Right?
[00:11:01] So if that's you, you may need a BDM or you may want to partner with a visionary I had mentioned before. Or at the very least, at least maybe a sales assistant that you can groom to be a BDM, which I've done a podcast episode on previously, which is a great episode. You should listen to it if that's of interest to you.
[00:11:18] All right. So what if you have an operator business partner? You're the visionary. And you're both equal partners in this business? This can be a really difficult, uncomfortable dynamic. If you want to grow and you have vision and they don't trust you, then that relationship is now toxic.
[00:11:38] If the operator doesn't trust you-- if you've destroyed trust with your experiments and your risks, and they don't trust you anymore, then to, to move the business forward, either you need to rebuild that trust or the relationship needs to end, because it's toxic. You cannot grow when you have an equal partner that's able to make decisions in the business, and they're saying, "I don't want to do experiments or do something uncomfortable or hire a coach or work with DoorGrow, or do anything that feels expensive or risky or new... I'm comfortable with where things are right now.
[00:12:11] So if you have somebody that's growth oriented and somebody that's comfort oriented and wants safety and certainty, and they're equal partners, you may have to dissolve that relationship. This is why I say the visionary must be the one that leads. This is super important that the visionary must be the one that is allowed to have leadership and to lead in this organization. They have to lead. Visionary has to be allowed to lead in this organization.
[00:12:38] So the visionary plus the operator: so if everything's working out, then you will be stronger together. This is a magical relationship. Somebody's creating the vision and somebody making sure everything gets done. It takes a huge load off the visionary entrepreneur's plate. And the operator has the right problems to solve and the right things to do, and they know what to do in order to win and what to figure out. And they're in the right role. And everybody is going to be happier in that type of business.
[00:13:10] If you're in a business that doesn't have a good operator, then a lot of things will fall through the cracks. There'll be a lot of things that aren't getting done. There'll be a lot of chaos. A lot of confusion there'll be constant changes in direction. Goals will change. Goals will be too big and unattainable. You're not connected to reality in the business and a business without vision or without a visionary will feel like it's not moving forward. It won't feel like there's growth. It won't feel exciting. It won't feel like there's something to look forward to in the business.
[00:13:40] And it will feel just safe, comfortable, and you're not gonna have a lot of growth. Right? So my hope is that those of you listening have self-identified: are you more of a visionary? Or are you more of an operator? And what do you need in order to get to the next level? And I hope this is helpful for those of you that are running property management businesses.
[00:14:00] If you want to move your business forward, if you want to grow your company, if you could use a little more vision or you could use some operational systems and to learn how to attract and build the right team, the right planning system, the right meeting structures, the right, systems in order to scale your business operationally... To support your operator or the right sales-related things to support your BDM...
[00:14:27] there is nothing better out there than the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. Our clients are crushing it with this stuff right now. And we have scripts for your BDMs. We have programs that are far more effective than what most people are doing to grow their business that are focused on generating more warm leads, more trust, more relationships that have like an 80- 90% close rate-- really effective.
[00:14:52] And we also have systems that are better than EOS or Traction or all these systems that exist out there we call DoorGrow OS. We also have a really brilliant hiring system called DoorGrow ATS so you can attract and retain and have A-players in your business and make sure everybody's on track, everybody's accountable and you have no hiders in your business.
[00:15:13] And so if you are interested in this, get on a call with our team, check us out at doorgrow.com and we'd love to support you. And we will also give you a free training with 7-- there's a couple bonus ones-- maybe 9 Frameworks, in which you can learn some of the secrets to growing and scaling your business and different lenses to view your business so that you can make your business even more effective. And we will give that training to you for free and explain the program and everything in it. And we would love to do that for you. So reach out to us at DoorGrow, and, until next time to our mutual growth.
[00:15:47] Bye everyone.
[00:15:48] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!
[00:16:14] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:16:35] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
How can you build the ultimate property management team for your business? Too many entrepreneurs build the wrong team. They have to micromanage their team, they can’t trust them, and their team members do not share the business owner’s values.
Property management growth expert, Jason Hull explains why business owners might get stuck with hires that do not share their values, how to attract the right team members with clearly defined company culture, and what to look for in the ultimate executive team.
You’ll Learn…
[01:13] Recap on the Four Reasons for Starting a Business
[02:22] Going from Solopreneur to Having the Ultimate Team
[04:24] Building a Team to Give YOU Fulfillment and Freedom
[6:19] The “Sandtrap” of Struggling to Grow Business
[7:49] Why You Might Have the Wrong Team and Company Culture
[10:26] The “Fifth Reason” for Starting a Business: Safety and Certainty
[11:05] The Key Team Members for a Property Management Team
[15:10] Creating a Core Executive Team of Thinkers
[18:48] The First Hire You Should Make and Job Descriptions
“If every team member is coming to you and asking questions on a daily basis, throughout your day, you do not have a very good team.”
“The reason you have the wrong team is because you are showing up in the business as the wrong person, and you are in the wrong role.”
“The goal is we're trying to build a core executive team that you can trust to make decisions for and on behalf of you, the business owner. Which means you need people that can think, people that share your values.”
“The very first hire that you get should be based on not what the business needs most.”
[00:00:00] If every team member is coming to you and asking questions on a daily basis, throughout your day, you do not have a very good team. You've built the wrong team.
[00:00:10] 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.
[00:00:50] 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.
[00:01:13] All right. So today, we're going to be talking about this idea of the ultimate property management team, at least the basic foundational team that you would need in order to get to that ultimate level we all want to get to where we have the highest level of the "four reasons." and if you have not listened to my episode on the "four reasons for starting a business," Then go back and check that out.
[00:01:42] So for those that have not heard that, quick recap: the four reasons for having a business are to have more fulfillment in life, to get fulfillment out of your business, to get freedom more and more freedom, and more contribution so you feel like you're making a difference, living your purpose, and support. This is why we create the vehicle of a business. So it can also give us more support and related to that, you cannot have maximum freedom, maximum fulfillment, maximum contribution, unless you have the ultimate team. So let's talk about the ultimate property management team.
[00:02:22] Now, for most business owners, you start out as a solopreneur. This is this journey you start on. The transition from solopreneur to having a team is one of the most painful and difficult transitions. I see business owners go through. This was hard for myself. It's one of the biggest challenges at even multimillion dollar companies or large companies that have been in groups or masterminds that I've been in with... it's building that team and building the right culture and the right team. In building the ultimate property management team, usually you're going to need a few key strategic ingredients, right? So the ultimate team would be basically you as a business owner-- property management business owner-- having a team that allows you to not have to do anything you don't want to do in the business.
[00:03:08] So let's say, you just want to function as a business owner and maybe just hold on to a couple of little pieces that you enjoy or love doing. So here are some of the key people. So typically you're going to need at least probably about five team members, and in order to afford that most property management businesses usually are going to need to be around 200 to 400 doors typically.
[00:03:34] I know there's this model out there. And a lot of people will bring up Steve Crossland. He's a really cool guy right here in Austin... does property management. And there is this Steve Crossland model of property management where you do everything. You do every single thing in the business.
[00:03:52] You do every single thing in the business, and if you're doing every single thing in the business, that's cool. But, you might not enjoy that. You might not enjoy every single thing. Most of us as business owners, there's certain things we're really good at, and there's a lot of things we're really bad at. There's a lot of things I'm not good at, and I don't want to do those things. I don't enjoy doing those things. Those things, those things are not fun for me. So I want other people to help me do those things. And not only that, but it becomes really difficult to try and do everything on your own.
[00:04:24] Now, is it more profitable if you can do every single thing yourself and you're willing to just dedicate all your time? Yes. You can make a lot more money maybe that way, because you have very little cost, but you have to recognize on a previous episode, I talked about the five currencies. I think I talked about that. If I didn't, I'll do it in a future episode, but these currencies are time, energy, focus, cash, and effort.
[00:04:52] So, not all of them are money, right? Cash is only one of them. You want to hold on to as much cash as possible and you're willing to give up all these other sacred currencies, like your life time, your energy, your focus, and that's fun for you? Cool. But for most that's not fun.
[00:05:10] That's not freedom. That's not fulfillment. That sounds like hell right? It's just another job. And if you want to be the guy, or gal by the way, for every maintenance request and every accounting problem and every sales call, or any leasing situation, or every showing... or every operational challenge you are not going to really--- you're not going to have freedom, you're not going to have fulfillment. You're going to be in a prison of your own creation.
[00:05:39] So what's the ultimate goal? Like, if you start this business, usually for most entrepreneurs, the ultimate goal is going to be to have a team so that you feel supported and you feel like Iron Man in that super suit. You're a normal person, but you have this team that increases your abilities, your capabilities, allows you to provide a great level of service and to do a good job and feel like you're making a difference in the world, but you don't have to do all the stuff that's uncomfortable, painful, or you don't enjoy doing.
[00:06:08] So typically, maybe about five team members in addition to yourself. And probably 200 to 400 doors so that you can afford or justify that at least minimum, somewhere in that range or more.
[00:06:19] So we need to get you to that point, and if you're having trouble with that, that's something we help clients focus on is how to get to that point. Now, most people get to this point, and I call this sometimes the "second sand trap," or maybe the third sand trap.
[00:06:33] But, there's the initial sand trap of like: "I can't get on any clients" or "I'm starting my business." That's where a lot of people get stuck. I don't know if that even counts as a sand trap because they're not even going, they have a fantasy business. Right? The next is the first real sand trap is the sand trap of the solopreneur sand trap. Just breaking that a hundred door barrier... getting stuck, maybe around between 50 to 80 doors... can't grow any more. It's too painful. You can't manage any more properties than that on your own for most people and you're struggling and you can't afford to hire anybody and you end up painted into a corner and stuck, right? First sand trap.
[00:07:09] Second sand trap is you are in that 200 to 400 door range and you have a team, but it's the wrong team. And this is where a lot of property management businesses sit stuck and stagnant. They're in that 200 to 400 door range.
[00:07:23] The business owner feels like they have to micromanage everybody on the team, which, you know you're that person if you're like, "We just need more checklists! And we need more processes!" And you're trying to control everyone. And you are the person that every single person on the team comes to and asks questions. If every team member is coming to you and asking questions on a daily basis, throughout your day, you do not have a very good team.
[00:07:49] You've built the wrong team. You don't have a team of thinkers. You don't have a team of decision makers. You have a team that you have to micromanage, and these are people as process that you have to control. And this is the initial team most people build. When they start building a team, they build a team the wrong way. They build a team that they have to micromanage and control because at first it feels really cool.
[00:08:11] There's a lot of ego and everyone's coming in asking questions and they feel like they're really smart. And they end up quickly like the Emperor or Empress with no clothes. Everybody wants to say yes to the boss. They're not giving the boss valid feedback. And so you end up with a business that is struggling.
[00:08:30] And the reason you have the wrong team is because you are showing up in the business as the wrong person. And you are in the wrong role. You've created this role, holding onto all the things that you think you have to do as a business owner. You're like, "I have to do, you know, the accounting. I have to control the finances."
[00:08:53] That's like, "I'm the business owner. That's my job." Or "I'm the only one that can do the sales. I have to do all the sales and I'm the BDM too. So I have to do all of that because nobody else is as good as me," or whatever you tell yourself. Or "I have to handle the operations because that's running the business and it's my business and I'm running it.
[00:09:11] "I have to manage the entire team and do everything." Whatever it is that you are holding on to, if it's not something you enjoy, you are showing up as the wrong person. So we want to make sure that we build the right job for you, and then we build the right team to supplement you-- the right team around you.
[00:09:31] And most business owners are stuck at the 200 to 400 door range in this industry because they have the wrong team because they've been showing up in the wrong role and they didn't understand the four reasons and they weren't moving towards that consistently. And they didn't set up the right culture.
[00:09:49] Their team has no clue really what the company's core values are. They have no clue what the company's client-centric mission is to, to benefit clients. Then, you know, none of this is clearly defined. There's a lack of culture. And the business owner has a lack of clarity on themselves and never got clear on why did they even do this? How does this give them more fulfillment and more freedom? How's this helping them be more of themselves, create more contribution. How does this help bring them more alignment towards the four reasons? That lack of clarity means you're going to have team members that also are not in alignment with those four reasons.
[00:10:26] So there's the fifth reason. And the fifth reason is safety and certainty. Your team members are just people that want safety and certainty, they just don't want to get fired. They just want to keep getting paid. They just want their job and they become hiders, not believers in your business because you haven't given them anything to believe in. There's no real culture that's clearly defined, so the culture in your business is what actually is going on in your business.
[00:10:49] So if there's office politics, if there's micro-managing, if there's laziness, if there's confusion, if there's crappy processes, that's your culture. That's the culture that you have defined by not clearly defining it.
[00:11:05] So let's talk about these key team members that you would need once you get to that 200 to 400 door range, or as you're growing and scaling, if you wanted to offload things. So in most businesses at that stage, you're going to probably need a maintenance coordinator that handles the maintenance coordination.
[00:11:23] This could be an introverted person. That's just really detail-oriented and really good at remembering stuff and can facilitate tools like Property Meld and stuff like that. That was property meld, M-E-L-D. They can facilitate tools like this for communication and nothing falls through the cracks with them because they're on top of that kind of stuff, if they're the right personality. So you have a maintenance coordinator handling maintenance, it's a big piece of the business, right?
[00:11:48] You will probably need a property manager, somebody that handles the leasing side of things, that handles the onboarding of new tenants and new owners that the salesperson hands people off to, and that is the boots-on-the-ground person that goes out into the field and does certain things related to leasing and onboarding... that sort of thing.
[00:12:08] You'll also need an operator. This is probably the most important role, second to the visionary or the entrepreneur, which would be you, those listening to this. So the operator is going to be the person that handles all the operational pieces they're going to be very different than the visionary personality type. They have all the details, make sure the team are doing what they're supposed to be doing. They make sure that meetings are being run on time.
[00:12:34] And in a certain way, they're handling the strategic planning for the company, which we have a system that we teach clients called DoorGrow OS, which I believe is better than Traction or EOS or any of that kind of stuff that most of you are dabbling with out there. There's several advantages in DoorGrow OS over that system. Maybe that'd be another podcast episode.
[00:12:55] But you have an operator and they have an operating system and they're going to make sure process documentation and systems and everything are working well and that the business runs. And they're basically the key person that's going to enact your vision and make sure your vision is coming to fruition and they will ensure that it gets done.
[00:13:12] You will probably also need a BDM. You may love doing sales. And that may be one of the last things that you give up and maybe nobody would be quite as good as you. But if that is not your personality type and you don't enjoy it, or you just have part time availability to dedicate to that, you can only really do sales and follow-up maybe 10 to 20 hours a week or less.
[00:13:34] Then you may want-- if you really want to grow and scale your business, then you will need to get a full time person. That's focused on networking, connecting, building relationships, prospecting, and growing and scaling your business... referrals... all of that kind of stuff. So that would be a BDM, which is a business development manager. Basically a sales person in your property management business.
[00:13:59] The other role that you may need is maybe you don't enjoy– or are not an expert at the financial stuff. I've worked with financial coaches and things like that, because this was something I was not naturally good at because I didn't enjoy it. But I like making money and I like winning financially. And I like knowing that the business is sound and safe financially. So I got coaches and mentors on this, but I still have people and resources and a team to help with these pieces so that it's not something I have to put a lot of time and energy into.
[00:14:33] So you'll need somebody on the accounting side or financial side, bookkeeping, accounting, that sort of thing if that's something that you are not getting a lot of freedom and fulfillment from and contribution from.
[00:14:45] Then another role that you will probably need would maybe be a receptionist, somebody to just field the onslaught of all these phone calls that you're getting from so many tenants and owners and things coming in, to triage things and get them to the right people. You'll need somebody maybe to answer the phones because those low level calls can eat up a lot of resources for these higher level team members.
[00:15:10] Now, what is the goal that we're trying to build here? The goal is we're trying to build a core executive team that you can trust to make decisions for and on behalf of you, the business owner. Which means you need people that can think, people that share your values. You will never trust your financial person to make decisions, you'll never trust your BDM to sell and bring in people the right way and attract the right clients, you'll never trust fully your operations person to do the job the right way unless you deep down know they share your values.
[00:15:48] They might be skilled and can do those jobs, and you may have a team. If you're in that 200 to 400 door range and you feel stuck it might be because you have a team of people that don't share your values, or they're not clear on your values and so there's a disconnect.
[00:16:05] So you need executive team members that are part of this executive team decision-maker/ thinkers that can run pieces of the business-- additional engines in the business-- instead of everyone just being cogs or wheels that are turned by the engine. You need other people that can take these pieces off of your plate so you don't have to make every decision. You don't have to answer every question. You don't have to do every single thing in that, and they don't have to check in with you on every single thing either-- that you're able to trust them. And the only way you'll be able to trust them is if they share your values.
[00:16:40] And if you cannot trust your team members with those things, either you haven't made your values clear to them, or you just know already, which is probably more likely they don't have the same value set as you, You cannot create enough processes and checklists and systems to force executive-level-thinker team members to be effective at implementation and taking action and taking over pieces of the business. That's impossible. There's too much going on.
[00:17:07] They need to share your values, and those values need to be clear to them and need to be related to them, and they need to buy into them and be believers in those values and believers in you and believers in the vision of the company.
[00:17:21] If they don't believe in you, and they don't believe in the values, then they're just "hiders." they're just showing up to get a paycheck. They're going to just do their job. They will do the bare minimum. They're not going to do anything extra. They're not going to think or make decisions 'cause they'll probably just make a mistake or get in trouble, so they're going to come to you and ask you to do it for them. "Make this choice for me." And then you end up just with a whole bunch of people that are eating up your time instead of taking more of your time off of your plate because they're just eating up time, asking all these questions.
[00:17:54] So that's kind of the ultimate team. Now, if you have other ideas or other team members, feel free to comment inside our Facebook group, which is the community for those that are fans of this podcast and that are fans of DoorGrow. You can go to doorgrowclub.com which is our Facebook group, and you can join that group.
[00:18:16] Let me know: what does the ultimate team look like for you? I'd be curious to see if I missed something here, but this-- these are some of the key team members that I've seen people need in their businesses in order to offload and take things off their plate. So that's that. That's about the ultimate team. So in order to have the ultimate team, you need culture, you need a lot of clarity on what you and your role should be in the business and on your purpose in life and on what your values are and what drives and motivates you so that we can build the right ultimate team around you.
[00:18:48] And the next step: the very first hire that you get should be based on not what the business needs most. It should be based on what you need most in order to get to the next level towards the four reasons. This is why I have a strategic process for clients to do a time study, to figure out: what do they need next?
[00:19:10] And then we have a specific way of doing job descriptions that I call "Rdocs" to figure out what is the ultimate job description for the next hire that I need to get in order to let go of the things that are eating up the currencies that I don't want to be giving up, which you know, things that are stealing my energy, things that are stealing my focus, things are stealing my cash, that were preventing from making more cash things. They're stealing my time.
[00:19:35] What are the things that I would want to give up most? And how can I build the right job description around that? And what is my current accurate job description? Is this what I want? Or are there things I can just highlight on that, that I could eventually put onto somebody else's job description. So these are the things we get into more in the DoorGrow OS and into the scale program that's in our mastermind.
[00:19:55] So if this stuff is interesting to you, if you got some value out of this, you might be a good fit or interested in being part of our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. So reach out to us, go to doorgrow.com, schedule a call with our team, and we will give you a free training that will help you know everything about our mastermind and help you learn some of these cool frameworks.
[00:20:20] We give this free training away that has seven-- actually, it has probably like nine or more, frameworks that are gonna help you learn how to scale and grow your business more effectively, and we hope you get really excited about that. Realize you're a great fit for it. And it will also break down why most companies are struggling to grow and why most marketing ideas and channels like SEO and pay per click, Google ads and content marketing and social media marketing and pay per lead services are BS and are not helping you grow your business.
[00:20:52] And if you've been trying this stuff and struggling, they all can work, but there's a big, massive reason why they're not working. We can reveal that to you in that training and help you do something that's not those things that cost no dollars and we'll make you a lot more money, and it takes less time than using those strategies to get on a lot of business.
[00:21:14] So anyway, check this out. Doorgrow.com and until next time, to our mutual growth. And I hope you all build the ultimate team and have the ultimate level of freedom and fulfillment in your life and contribution and support. Bye, everyone.
As a property management business owner, how many leads do you throw away? These are leads that are outside of your service area or properties that are short-term rentals when you only manage long-term rentals. Every property manager turns away potential clients and leads. Imagine if you could work with the local property managers in or outside of your area and feed each other business.
Property management growth expert Jason Hull gets into strategies for connecting with other property managers and creating a referral system that is a win-win for both parties involved.
You’ll Learn…
[01:09] Referral Partnerships Between Property Managers
[02:04] Creating Strategic, Win-Win Relationships
[04:21] Most Property Management Companies Suck
[6:24] A Tip from One of Our DoorGrow Mastermind Clients
[7:39] Assume the Close!
[8:35] Get FREE access to the Seven Frameworks Training
“Just one strategic relationship in a neighboring city could be feeding you some doors every single month, and you could be feeding them some doors, every single month.”
“I really do believe a rising tide raises all ships and it will allow you to be more connected, more aware.”
“Plant those seeds that will maybe come to fruition that will lead maybe to acquisition, maybe lead to referrals, but create some relationships and get connected with other property managers in your market.”
“There are a lot of people that property management is a side hustle for them. It's not their bread and butter. It's not their mainstay. It's not what they really want to be doing with their life.”
[00:00:00] Jason: Just one strategic relationship in a neighboring city could be feeding you some doors every single month, and you could be feeding them some doors, every single month.
[00:00:08] 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.
[00:00:29] DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income.
[00:00:47] 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.
[00:01:09] All right. So today we're going to be talking a little bit about local referral property management partners. So, what do I mean by that? So one of the things that I've noticed in property management is there is some very low hanging fruit and a lot of property managers are overly competitive and they look at all the other property managers in their local market as these competitors that they need to somehow beat or avoid.
[00:01:35] And a lot of property managers have this general lack of collaboration. And I really believe that the industry needs collaboration over competition. I really believe in this principle of collaboration over competition. So in taking a look at this one thing that I would recommend that you do is you start getting familiar with all the other property managers in your local market, especially those that you're not directly competing with that are right outside of your local market.
[00:02:04] Now, connect with these property managers and get familiar with them because. You know how often you're getting phone calls from people with properties that you just cannot manage. They might be too far outside of your service or coverage area. They might be different types of niches of property management that you do not service like commercial or associations or storage units or whatever, right.
[00:02:27] There may be other companies in your local market or just outside of your local market that you might be able to refer business out to, and you know how often you get contacted for things that you can't handle. So what do you do with that? You just tell them no, and you basically, essentially take that potential lead and you throw it in the garbage can, right?
[00:02:45] There's a lot that tends to go into these garbage cans in business. And so those things that are in the garbage can could be useful to other people. Well, think about all these other people, you could be connected to that they have their own garbage can full of stuff that they could have handed to you.
[00:03:02] Just one strategic relationship in a neighboring city could be feeding you some doors every single month, and you could be feeding them some doors, every single month.
[00:03:11] "Hey, do you manage in this area?"
[00:03:12] "Actually, no, but I know this gal, Susie, who's really great at that. She's just outside of our market and covers that area." Right?
[00:03:20] So you can then be referring business back and forth. This is obvious. It's low hanging fruit, but there's so many property managers, especially newer property managers that do not do this. So think about how often you're receiving stuff that you can't use or do anything with, you could give to other people.
[00:03:37] Well, other people have that, that they could give to you. So get connected to these other property managers. Call them up and start reaching out and creating these relationships. So you can join the local NARPM chapters. You can start a local group of property managers, but I really do believe a rising tide raises all ships and it will allow you to be more connected, more aware.
[00:04:00] And even if you view your competition as an enemy, for some reason, you know, the old adage, which is. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. So stay close to them and be aware of what they're doing anyway if you're that type of person, that's that competitive. So get connected to them because, you know, having these local referral partners, some of my clients are getting doors, you know, on a monthly basis, just from people that they're connected to and sending it. Now, here's where this gets even more awesome.
[00:04:30] So if you're connected with these other people that are doing property management, you're going to identify some people that do property management that don't like it. I know that's crazy. And I know you're really surprised at hearing that there might be people out there that don't enjoy property management.
[00:04:46] But There are. There are some people that do not enjoy property management. Most property managers out there suck. This is the reality. Most property management businesses suck. And that means most of the business owners probably are not happy. And most of the property management businesses aren't doing a great job.
[00:05:04] There are a lot of people that property management is a side hustle for them. It's not their bread and butter. It's not their mainstay. It's not what they really want to be doing with their life. They would rather be doing more real estate deals, or they would rather be doing something else, but they feel like they need to do it in order just to keep their existing clients happy or to maintain something or whatever.
[00:05:26] You can create a win-win with these people. And you can call up these companies or these people that are doing property management, and you can suggest if you create a relationship with them, you can plant that seed, thought that, "Hey, we would be willing to acquire or offer you X number of dollars per unit, and we would take over these portfolio, we would do a really great job doing it. And you won't have to deal with this anymore."
[00:05:48] And ask them, "do you love this? Or would you rather do more real estate?"
[00:05:52] And if they're honest with you, they would probably say, "I would love to just really do more real estate deals if I didn't have to do this, but I don't want to lose the real estate deals."
[00:05:58] "What if you could keep the real estate deals, keep the clients, but give up the property management, not have to do that. And any time you gave us property management we'd give you some sort of referral kickback or something, and I could help you turn them into maybe even more real estate deals?"
[00:06:12] So This is stuff that we talk about a bit more in our Referral Secrets training, but I wanted to share this idea with everybody: connect with other property managers. Plant those seeds that will maybe come to fruition that will lead maybe to acquisition, maybe lead to referrals, but create some relationships and get connected with other property managers in your market.
[00:06:34] So I don't know if there's a whole lot more I need to say about that. I think this is a pretty simple idea, pretty simple concept, but get connected with other property managers. If you want to be connected with some of the best property managers that are crushing it all over the U.S. we have over 80 businesses that are in our mastermind that are crushing it, sharing wins, getting on our calls, doing great stuff, adding lots of doors, they're sharing all kinds of tips.
[00:07:01] Just to give an example, what's a good tip that somebody shared today? One of the tips that was shared on the call today is they would call up other potential referral partners, and they would just say, "Hey, we just want to be an asset on your team for you to refer out to people. You know, you have a team of vendors that you probably refer out to people. We want to be on that team."
[00:07:23] I thought that was a pretty smart little idea. I shared a tip one of my clients on cold calls was asking if people would be interested in getting on a call with him so he could explain his program or his product or service or whatever. And I shared the tip of, don't ask for the call.
[00:07:39] Don't ask if they'd be interested. Assume they'd be interested. Sell them on being interested, and then assume that they're going to want to be on a call with you and then just give them times. So for example, instead of saying, "Hey, would you be interested in getting on a call where we can talk about..." like sounds really not confident, right?
[00:07:56] Saying, "Hey, I've got this really cool thing. I love to set up a time with you. When would be a good time? How's Thursday at two? Would that work for you? Right. Just assume they would want to and give them a time. So then they can say, "Yeah, that would work" or "No, that doesn't work for me."
[00:08:12] "Cool. How about this time?"
[00:08:13] That's going to be far more effective in closing people on things. Right? So anyway, there's lots of really cool tips. If you're interested in being part of something like this, join the DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. Reach out to us at DoorGrow.Com.
[00:08:27] We do not let everybody into this program. We have some qualifications. We have our three commitments that are required in order to be part of this program.
[00:08:35] If you would like to get free access to Seven Frameworks training in which I share seven frameworks, plus some additional ones that can be game changers for how to think about your business and how to become a better entrepreneur, and I share my top three strategies on how to grow a property management business and an overview of our program. This is basically our big sales pitch. If you want access to the Seven Frameworks training, reach out to us, we'd be happy to give you access to this for free, explain everything transparently... pricing for the program, everything's in that.
[00:09:06] And then you can apply and get on a call with our team. So just reach out to us at DoorGrow. We'd be happy to help you do that. You can find us at doorgrow.com, and that's all I have to share for today. So I hope that's helpful. And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.
[00:09:24] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow! At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe.
[00:10:12] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.
As a property management entrepreneur, your cell phone number is sacred information. Not everyone should have access to it. How can you implement and utilize phone systems in your business? Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the importance of protecting your personal cell phone number and using systems like Talkroute to make and receive business calls instead.
[01:16] The Challenge of Dealing with Phones in the Business
[04:54] The Frustrating Issue with Many Phone Systems: Latency
[09:02] Why we Like to Use Talkroute here at DoorGrow
[10:59] Why Should You Protect Your Cell Phone Number?
[15:07] Comparing Other Examples of Phone Systems You Can Utilize
“One of the first things property managers learn really quick in starting their businesses: you don't want everybody to have your cell phone number..”
“As a business owner, in order to leverage a team and have this dream of only having the four reasons, you need to have leverage.”
“One of the ways to have leverage is you can't be reachable by everybody by phone immediately, you need to have protection and support.”
“I recommend that you utilize those tools, protect and insulate yourself and get a really good phone system.”
[00:00:00] Jason: So one of the first things property managers learn really quick in starting their businesses: you don't want everybody to have your cell phone number. So if every tenant and every owner has your cell phone number, your business-- you're going to be the biggest bottleneck in your business, and it's going to be a nightmare.
[00:00:13] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others impact lives, and you're interested in growing your business and life-- and you're open to doing things a bit differently-- then you are a DoorGrow Hacker.
[00:00:31] DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and residual income.
[00:00:52] 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 the perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow now let's get into the show.
[00:01:16] Okay. So. This question came up on my Wednesday coaching call today with the group, with the mastermind group. And, um, it was right at the end, but this is such a common question. And this isn't even a growth-related question. Our Wednesday call's a growth call. We usually focus on adding doors.
[00:01:34] We had some great wins and things shared, but at the end, one of our clients is like, “Hey, I got a question. I don't know if I should wait until Friday to ask this during your Scale call, where it's operations, even though I'm focused on growth, I've got a problem that I need to deal with. And I said, “what is it about?”
[00:01:50] And it was about phones. So we're going to talk about phones today because this comes up-- I'm just surprised how often this comes up and it comes up. It's a common challenge is how do you deal with phones? Why phones are expensive. How do we do phones with our team? What phone system should we use? So I'm going to tell you a little bit about what I've used in the past, what we use currently– what I recommend to property managers that could make sense.
[00:02:17] So let's talk about phones. Okay. So the challenge is most people nowadays are using-- they don't have just a standard phone. They have a phone system, they have a cell phone and they might have some standard phones in their office, like normal office phone system. but all of these things can get really expensive.
[00:02:39] So we used at DoorGrow-- OpenPotion-- we used RingCentral for a while. So we had this voiceover IP phone system, the challenge with systems like most phone systems nowadays, even if their voiceover IP used to be, Hey, get a voiceover IP and it could be super cheap. Right? But it's not nowadays.
[00:03:01] Nowadays, it's like, you have to have a device and they sell you these devices. So you got to buy a phone, you have to have multiple phones for each desk and each person and each line. And each person usually is like $30 or sometimes $40 a seat. And so if you have a team, like, of five, you could be shelling out like $40 a person for each line then, you know, that adds up.
[00:03:26] So let's say you've got a team of five-- $40. You spend 200 bucks just on your phone system. Well, in our business, we were spending. Anywhere from two to $300 a month, something like this a month on phones. And it was really costly. And we were using RingCentral, which is a popular one. It works really well.
[00:03:45] It gives you tons of features, which is really nice, but we didn't-- we didn't need-- we had so many team members that needed to make phone calls, but not-- they weren't on the phone like 24 hours a day. They didn't need unlimited calling. They were making calls all the time. And what was really ridiculous is we all had cell phones.
[00:04:02] We had unlimited calling on our cell phones. We all have plans where we had unlimited cell phone plans. So it's just-- it felt really weird that we have unlimited cell phones that we already have, but we just didn't want everybody to have our cell phone numbers. Cause that would have been a mess, right?
[00:04:17] Having a business where everybody has their cell phone number. So one of the first things property managers learn really quick in starting their businesses: you don't want everybody to have your cell phone number. So if every tenant and every owner has your cell phone number, your business-- you're going to be the biggest bottleneck in your business, and it's going to be a nightmare.
[00:04:33] So you need to get rid of that phone number, right? You need some sort of solution. So you could port that number into a phone system like RingCentral. And then if anybody calls that number, they're going into your phone system and then you can leverage your team and whatnot, right. That's one option, but here's what we switched to.
[00:04:54] So we were using RingCentral and we switched to a system called TalkRoute, which you can get to by going to TalkRoute R-O-U-T-E .com. The reason I like TalkRoute is: I tested a lot of different phone systems. One of the biggest challenges with modern phone systems or voice over IP or VoIP or digitally based phone systems is latency.
[00:05:18] Latency means like a lag, delay. If you've ever been on a bad phone system or bad VoIP system and experienced delay, it feels like you say, “hi,” and then two seconds later, they hear it. And so then what ends up happening because of that latency, that lag of even a second, it causes you both to speak over each other.
[00:05:39] So let's say we're having a conversation. Somebody who's like, “Hey, how's it going?”And they're like, then you, if you don't hear them respond for like two seconds or a second, you're like, that's uncomfortable. It's weird. That awkwardness that's because of there's lag, there's latency, and then they're going to start talking and you might not realize they start talking.
[00:05:57] So you start talking and then you're going to end up talking over each other all the time. You'll think there's a gap and you'll start talking, but they won't realize that you didn't say anything. And so they'll continue talking and then you're talking over them and then you end up stepping on each other's toes, and it's a really awkward way to have a conversation.
[00:06:13] And so what I did when I was looking at phone systems is in testing them, I would do a trial, do a demo, do a test, and I would set up the phone system. So I could call my cell phone with that system or call the system with my cell phone and, and talk. And I would say,”hi,” and I listened to other one, I say, “hi” and listen to the other one.
[00:06:32] And I wanted to see how quick or how long it took for me to hear what I just said. How quick was it? If it's like:”Hi.” “Hi.” “Hey.” You know, that's pretty fast. That's low latency. You can have a conversation, and it's routing through the magical internet or wires or whatever, and they're getting it quick enough that you can have a conversation and it's not going to cause that delay of stepping on each other's toes.
[00:06:57] Now, very few phone systems passed what I call that delay or lag test. So that's the first thing I would recommend when you're looking at a phone system is do a test and see what the lag is. See what the delay time is. Now, sometimes their servers and your internet are gonna play a factor to this. So sometimes some phone systems were better just simply because you have better internet, you have a better router, some of these ping times or latencies or lags or whatever it could be caused simply because you have a crappy device running your internet in your office or at your home.
[00:07:34] And so you need to have a really good device that can handle a lot of connections and a really good internet connection. So sometimes it's just about getting a better router and not just using your internet modem, that's like providing the service. A lot of times, internet providers nowadays will give you a modem that has a router built into it, and it's doing everything.
[00:07:54] It's your wifi, it's a router. And it's your modem connecting you to the service for internet. And usually it's crappy. It's like, they're doing the cheapest thing. They can get all put together and it's a Jack of all trades and a master of none.
[00:08:11] And usually most homes nowadays, or offices have multiple Apple watches and iPhones and iPads and phones and, like, cameras and all sorts of things utilizing this network with the internet of things everything's connected and it's just a lot, my house has a ton of stuff. Even light bulbs are hooked on the wifi. So I can talk to my phone and tell things to turn on and off. Right. So. There's so many devices connected, usually routers, struggle to handle all the device connections and to deal with that.
[00:08:46] So it's usually just the chipset on the router is not strong enough to handle all of these devices talking at the same time and communicating, even if they're not using very much internet bandwidth. And sometimes that's a bottleneck. So first make sure you have a really good internet connection.
[00:09:02] Now, TalkRoute. Why I liked TalkRoute-- TalkRoute is a phone system, you pay one flat fee for their entire service. And then instead of them giving you a bunch of devices, they give you an app that you can install on your phone and you can make calls through your cell phone using your cell phone minutes.
[00:09:24] So if your outbound calls, cell phone calls are good and you like how they sound and they work fine, which everybody's cell phone calls generally work really well, those are great networks. That's what you're going to be using. You're just going to be making a cell phone call and there's no latency at all. Inbound calls will route through the TalkRoute system then to your cell phone, and you can choose to accept that call... if you have them route to you, right? So you can have an auto attendant. You can have unlimited extensions, you can assign extensions to every cell phone in your office, or every person in your office.
[00:09:55] Some real estate offices, for example, will use TalkRoute. And I think they give you unlimited extensions, something like this. So you can assign an extension for every available property with, and put a little Voicemail voice message on there saying, Hey, this property is really great. You should walk around in it, blah, blah, blah. Right? So you can put record messages and then you can put these extension numbers on every single property. You can just put a number up on the yard sign or on the brochure or whatever, and people will call this number, dial this extension to hear a message about this property.
[00:10:28] So you can build it out really awesome. You can port your numbers in, so if you have a cell phone that too many people have port that number in once it's ported and that number is in that system, now nobody can reach you. They can reach the system, go get yourself a better cell phone number that nobody knows, and only, only give it out to sacred, well, trusted people. Treat this number like it's sacred. Only give it out to family, maybe really good friends. Nobody else. You need to protect and insulate yourself and protect yourself from giving out your phone number to everybody.
[00:10:59] As a business owner, in order to leverage a team, and have a team, and to offload and have this dream of only having the four reasons as I've talked about on a previous episode of fulfillment, freedom, contribution, and support, where you get to do the things you want to enjoy and not do everything in the business you need to have leverage. And one of the ways to have leverage is you can't be reachable by everybody by phone immediately, you need to have protection and support.
[00:11:28] You need to protect yourself. How do you protect yourself? when it comes to phone calls, you have to set up barriers so that people can't just reach you directly. It's cool. They should be able to reach somebody directly. That's fine. Or at very least an auto attendant and it can route to people. They should not immediately all be able-- nobody should be able to just reach you directly if you want this business to scale and business to grow.
[00:11:52] So, TalkRoute has an app on your phone. You can choose a number to dial it also can-- you can get text messages at this number. You can choose which of the phone numbers you have linked to TalkRoute you want to show up on the caller ID for your outbound calling, and that's the only number they're gonna see. You initiate a phone call, it calls in via your cell phone to TalkRoute and then dials that number, initiates the call. TalkRoute knows that it's you, that you're going to be calling that number, so it just makes it all happen magically and they don't see your cell phone number, your personal cell phone number. They only see on their caller ID that they're getting a call from XYZ property management or whatever the caller ID thing that you have set up for that number. They just see that number.
[00:12:35] Your main business number, or you could even assign a phone number to each of your team members, or just assign an extension and have that outbound number always be the same number. And they call in and they can hear an auto-attendant, ”push 'one' for sales, 'two' for support,” et cetera. Right. So I recommend you check out TalkRoute.
[00:12:52] When I did testing, we've had no problems with latency. All of my team used that for phone calls, except for our sales side of the business and myself. We use our sales CRM, which has calling built into it. I use a CRM called Close, which is really expensive on a per seat basis. But for most of my team, we use TalkRoute and that's how we can get business and send business text messages. We can do phone calls through that. We have extensions. We have auto attendants. We have multiple 800 numbers for different businesses.
[00:13:28] So, all of that. Feeds into one system and it's very easy to manage through TalkRoute's web app. You just go to talkroute.com, I log in and then I can just customize everything. I can make sure everybody has their voicemails and voice messages recorded. And I have the tree structure mapped out and it's easy to record. It's really well thought out and it works really well, and the audio quality is fantastic. So highly recommend that you get TalkRoute.
[00:13:57] So TalkRoute... I think we spend-- I have a lot of phone numbers and a lot of things going on on that now for all the stuff that we have going on underneath all my OpenPotion companies and including DoorGrow-- I think our bill is like still under a hundred bucks a month. Like it's a fraction. And I think initially we were spending like maybe 70, 80 bucks, like it was really cheap. So we were saving you know, probably two, maybe even 300 bucks.
[00:14:26] I don't know. We're saving hundreds of dollars over our previous phone set up because we had a large team and everybody had to have extensions and they were charging us 30 or 40 bucks per person. And now it's a fraction of the cost. So, and most of you operate and live off your cell phones. Anyway, you just want to protect that cell phone number, and then you can make those outbound calls, but not give out your cell phone number. And you can still receive and send text messages through the TalkRoute app, if necessary. Some of you have sales CRMs that will shield and mask your phone numbers as well, maybe like lead simple. So I recommend that you utilize those tools, protect and insulate yourself and get a really good phone system.
[00:15:07] Now, there are other phones, voice-over IP systems out there. Some require more work on your end. Some are going to give you a lot more hand-holding and have really good reviews for taking care of people. There's Nextiva, which I always found had really aggressive sales tactics, but they had really high ratings.
[00:15:27] There's, um, Jive, which has really great ratings for a long time. And maybe still is number one because their customer service level is top-notch. It would really hold your hand. I didn't find they had really aggressive, annoying salespeople. And so I really liked them and they would walk people through it.
[00:15:45] And then there's RingCentral, which gives you a lot of features and benefits. they're, they're affordable, but still it's a lot more expensive than something like TalkRoute. And so TalkRoute is the winner for us because we're a virtual company. And I think any companies where you have a lot of team members on the go, everybody has cell phones, they're on the move. TalkRoute would be a great system for most property management businesses. So that is my recommendation. So nobody has to ask me about phone systems anymore. I can say, watch my episode on phone systems and protecting your cell phone number as a property manager. That is this episode.
[00:16:21] So, anyway, if you're struggling to grow your business, you are wanting to implement best practices.
[00:16:27] You're wanting to set up a business that's scalable. You want to be adding doors quickly and easily. Instead of losing doors right now, due to the sell-off that's happening, our clients are adding doors. Clients are showing up on Wednesday calls and they’re– our growth call and they're celebrating, sharing their wins.
[00:16:43] And a lot of them are only investing a part-time level of hours a week towards growth. That's it, like, my bare minimum requirement if you want to join this program is you have to be willing to block out at least 10 hours to grow your business. That's basically two hours a day. It'll take you less time doing the strategies I give you than it would take to follow up if I gave you a bunch of leads. If I gave you a bunch of leads, that would be terrible because it takes a lot of time. These are cold. You'd have to nurture them and you'll spend far more than just 10 hours a week. If I even gave you 10 leads, a follow-up in time to nurture and you probably only get one deal a week.
[00:17:21] My clients are adding multiple doors very quickly. And the bare minimum that I tell them is just do two hours a day. It's 10 hours a week using the strategies that give you to grow. And it's really effective. yeah. So anyway, reach out. If you're interested in growing and scaling your business, if you're a larger company, I love working with those.
[00:17:42] If you are in the two to 400 door range, what I call the “second sand trap.” You're trapped. You're stuck. You feel like you're the biggest bottleneck in the business. You wish just everybody would just be smart enough to do everything on your team and you're frustrated. You are the problem. I know that's the sad news.
[00:17:58] So let me help you figure out how you can become the entrepreneur that has the business of your dreams and the team of your dreams so that you can trust them. You probably have a cultural mismatch. You probably have, maybe people that know how to do a job and follow a task, but you don't trust them. You don't trust them because you don't have the right cultural foundation in your business. You don't have believers. You don't have people that you can trust to do things the way that you would do them, which is why you haven't given them more or handed things off to them or relegated or delegated or given up your decision-making in certain areas of the business. And you're holding onto it too tightly.
[00:18:33] I will teach you how you can offload those pieces, let go of those things and trust people to run your business-- pieces of your business for you, especially the areas that they would be better at than you. Because you don't really enjoy those pieces. And then we can get you closer and closer in alignment towards those four reasons so you really love your business. So
[00:18:51] if you're dealing with that, we can also help you with that in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. And so reach out, chat with us. I'd love to help you grow your business. And we're making some big changes right now. DoorGrow is just really exciting and we're going to be, we're improving our programs that we're constantly improving, but we're making some big changes to them.
[00:19:13] And clients are getting even faster momentum. And if you'd love to be part of that, you want to have a coach in your corner, you want to feel like you're not all on your own, you want to feel like it's not just you against the world and trying to get your business going, and you feel stuck. If you want some support, reach out, we'd be happy to help you. This is what we do. We love helping our clients succeed and win here at DoorGrow. So reach out and you can find us at doorgrow.com or reach out to us on any social media. Just search for DoorGrow. You'll find us. Anyway, that's it for today. So make sure you get a really good phone system in place to insulate and protect yourself and present a very presentable professional image.
[00:19:53] And until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.
[00:19:57] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the #DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC pay per lead content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow! 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. And to get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.
Take a look at your portfolio, investors, who you're targeting, and methods used to find out how they line up with the 4 Ds to revenue in property management—deals, doors, duration, and dollars. The 4 Ds is a framework/concept that helps you figure out how to grow your business and improve it. Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about the 4 doors (or numbers) that equal the gross revenue of your company when multiplied by each other.
[02:19] Why the 4 Ds are so important in your property management business.
[02:43] 4 Ds to Revenue: What are they?
[02:47] Deals: How many deals are you getting on?
[03:15] Doors per deal: How many investors are you getting that have 2 or more doors?
[04:20] Duration: How long can you keep them as a client? Connects to lifetime value.
[05:45] Dollars: Money is needed to generate revenue. Revamp pricing structure/model.
[08:00] Identify Ideal Prospects: What would their situation look like regarding the 4 Ds?
“We need some money in this equation. Otherwise, it's not going to equal revenue.”
“You want to make sure you're getting paid really well.”
“Price sensitivity is created artificially by my clients. They don't realize they're creating it and how.”
“Colder leads are going to have a much higher price sensitivity than warmer leads.”
Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, help others impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings.
Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and 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.
I had a hard time coming up with what to talk about today. We just had Christmas and New Year's is coming up. We're sort of in this time period where I think for a lot of business owners, we tend to start focusing on our business because we've got a little bit of downtime, a little bit of free time, and some quiet moments maybe. Then we're also spending a lot of time focused on family and spending time with family.
One of the things I wanted to talk about today is what I call the Four Ds to Revenue in Property Management. I also sometimes call this the Four Doors to Revenue and sometimes visually, we'll showcase four doors when I'm explaining this, or coaching clients on this, or teaching this. The Four Ds to Revenue is really four numbers that when multiplied by each other, equal the gross revenue of your company.
Just to drive this home with multiplication, each number is so important that if any one of these four numbers—metrics-wise—in your business is zero, you make $0. That's how important they are. If you move any one of these numbers, if they're a one, for example, and you move it to a two and you double it, you double your revenue. That's how important multiplication can be in generating revenue in your business.
Let's go through these Four Ds to Revenue. The first D is Deals. In looking at the revenue of your company and trying to grow your business, you want to get on clients that are bringing to the table multiple deals or deals on the regular, and you need to calculate how many deals we're getting on roughly right now. That would be some sort of number. You're getting on a certain number of deals.
The next number, the next D would be Doors per deal. The reason I separate this is a lot of clients, especially in single-family residential property management, equate these things to the same thing. They're like I get on a deal, it's a door. Now that second D, to separate that out is important. That second deal of doors means doors per deal. If you move the needle on this just from like a one to a two, you double your revenue.
For example, this could mean that you're getting on more investors that have two or more doors on average. Maybe your average moves from a one to a two, or maybe to a four. That can be a significant multiplier in your business. If you're getting on clients that are bringing on lots of deals or doing lots of real estate deals, they have multiple doors, and maybe each of their doors or each of their deals has multiple doors, then these numbers tend to add up quickly.
The third D is Duration. This is how long can you keep them as a client. This connects heavily to lifetime value. There is a 10 times difference, for example, between an accidental investor that's only going to stick with you for a year and a 10-year buy and hold. There's a 10 times difference. If somebody is going to keep their deals and the rental properties in place for a decade, that's massive.
Where I see a lot of property managers really struggling in terms of growth is that they have so much attrition that they have to replace almost every door that they get on every year, or at least half. If half of your portfolio are accidental investors, for example, or one-year shorter term that they're not going to stick with you, then you're going to have trouble growing your business because you have to replace all of those doors every year.
I've seen clients have is a majority of their portfolio when they came to us, were these accidental investors that couldn't just sell the property and they decided to rent it out just for a year until they could get it sold. Or they might have half their portfolio as this, but even still, usually the number of doors they're adding every year equates the number of doors they're losing every year and, so they end up not growing.
The last D is Dollars. We need some money in this equation, otherwise, it's not going to equal revenue. The last D is dollars and what's important to note there is you want to make sure you're getting paid really well.
One of the things I do with every client that comes through our program at some point or another, usually is to revamp their entire pricing structure and their pricing model. Most property managers only have one major fee that they charge, it's one sort of percentage, something typically like 10% or something like that in lower-end markets. In higher-end markets, it might be maybe 6%, or something along these lines, 7%, 8%, whatever.
Or they'll have a flat fee like $99 or $79 in really low rent areas where it's really tight. They'll just have one major fee though. They might also have a lease-up fee for when getting the property rented out. That's pretty typical as well, but that's about it.
If that is the case for your business and you only have one option that clients can choose from when signing up, then you're leaving a lot of money on the table. There are probably a lot of other leaks in relation to pricing as well and then there are a lot of psychological hacks to decrease price sensitivity.
If you've ever been frustrated and dealt with a potential prospect that came to you and pushed back on the price—I'm sure this has happened to you—or they ask for a discount, a lot of times that price sensitivity is created artificially by my clients. They don't realize they're creating it and how. A lot of times it's created artificially by their acquisition source, so how they're getting these leads. Colder leads are going to have a much higher price sensitivity than warmer leads.
If you want to reduce the number of people that are asking for discounts, or eliminate your temptation to fold on your pricing, cave on your pricing, and give in order to get business, my clients don't have to do that. You need to be more effective with your pricing. Dollars is really significant as well.
If we take all four of these things together—this is a secret, this is one of the secrets in property management that I teach—if you work this backward, this will help you identify your ideal prospects. It takes just as much work to get on crappy clients, maybe more, than it does to get on good clients. If you want to sit down and figure out what's my ideal client, look at these Four Ds. What would their situation look like in relation to these?
Well, ideal client, right? If they're helping you maximize deals, that means they're probably bringing multiple deals to the table, they're doing real estate deals on the regular, they are an investor, they want to do more deals in the future. Doors, they probably have multiple doors, maybe each deal they do has multiple doors, multiple doors per deal. The doors metric is high.
Duration. They are in it for the long game. They want to invest. They want to grow a portfolio, so their duration is lengthy or high. That's a high metric.
Then dollars. That means they're willing to spend money with you to make sure things are taken care of. They're not the cheapos that exist out there. They're not so price-sensitive. They want a better experience and maybe they're more of a premium type of buyer. These would be your ideal prospects.
This is one of the tools I go over with clients to help them recognize who are your ideal customers. What would they look like? Then we can work backward and figure out how do we connect with these people? What resources do they currently have? Who would be good referral partners that connect us to these people? That might already get some wheels turning.
Take a look at your portfolio, take a look at your investors, and take a look at who you're targeting and the methods you're using to target new clientele and get new business on, and see how it lines up with the Four Ds to Revenue—deals, doors, duration, and dollars. These are the four doors that you need to open to make the magic happen in order to grow your business and identify and attract really great clientele.
If you have any questions about this, feel free to comment or hit us up inside our Facebook group at doorgrowclub.com or reach out to us by going to doorgrow.com. We'd be happy to help you grow your business and maybe sit down with your team, as you're planning out things here at the end of the year.
It's almost New Year’s here as I'm recording this. I just want to let everybody know I really am grateful for our clients and grateful this holiday season for those that spend their money with us, that have allowed us to help them increase the amount of money that they're making. It's really exciting for me to show up each week on the group coaching calls that we do as a mastermind group and see clients winning and sharing their success, talking about the doors they're adding, talking about how they're closing more deals at a higher price point, talk about how they're no longer offering discounts and how they're establishing themselves as an authority and as an expert and that these clients are willing to spend and pay more money.
I love this. This is so rewarding for me. I really enjoy getting into what I do and I'm really honored and grateful that I get to do this. Those of my clients who are listening, I really appreciate you and I'm grateful for you.
Anyway, for everybody else, I appreciate you listening to this show as well and I hope that the Four Ds to Revenue is a helpful framework or concept to help you figure out how to grow your business and improve it. And that's it for today. Happy New Year, everybody. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everybody.
What can property managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners say or do when leaving a voicemail to ultimately get somebody to return their call? Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about doing and saying less to add more doors. Property managers need to work at finding opportunities and setting effective boundaries to get referrals and grow results.
[01:46] Onboarding: Revamping roadmap help clients add more doors.
[02:06] No Distractions: Stay focused and do the most important actions to add doors.
[02:41] Check-ins: Clients are still getting amazing results by setting more boundaries.
[03:03] Deciding Factor: Outbound referral partner program is a competitive advantage.
[05:29] Promotions/Opportunities: Follow criteria, attend trainings, show up, rebrand.
[06:11] Nextdoor: Pay attention to hub as a review channel and lead generation source.
[07:08] Sales Assistant/BDM Role: Hire person who will speed up the amount of deals.
[09:13] Existing Customers: Now—in real time—is the right time to target your clientele.
[09:35] Vanity Metrics: Make numbers as big as possible to highlight benefits/results.
[11:21] Voicemail: How to leave ultimate message to get somebody to return your call.
[13:09] Most Effective Messages: Leave only name/number and be emotionally honest.
“Doing less is more.”
“There is a link that you can publicly access through the web, where somebody can go to leave your review on Nextdoor, then yes, we can put that link into GatherKudos.”
“Anything that's been sitting on your to do list for too long is an indicator that you're not the person that should be doing that thing.”
“Sometimes, a little bit of mystery is more enticing and more attractive.”
Sign up for Talkroute
DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind
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, the daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings.
Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners
We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.
I was on my coaching call today. It was a great call. I love these calls. It ran longer than the normal call because I give a little bit of leeway of about a half hour after our coaching group call to just make sure that I'm taking care of clients, anybody else that wants to check in, anyone that's stuck or has questions as we go through. We have a pretty good group on our Wednesday call.
I love hearing clients that are doing the work, doing stuff. We're starting to revamp our onboarding. We just revamped our Grow program, our roadmap for how we help clients add more doors to make it even more effective. One of the things I'm noticing from that is doing less is more.
We're actually taking things out of that program so that property managers will stay more focused. These entrepreneurs will stay more focused on doing the most important actions that they need to do in order to add doors. Removing any rabbit holes or tangents out of the program that might distract them or get them focused on the wrong things, which is very tempting for business owners. We've made it even more effective and I'm really excited about it. I went over the changes with everybody.
That being said, clients—even with the old roadmap—are still getting amazing results, and we had some great check-ins today. Clients that are setting more effective boundaries, with potential clients being willing to walk away, they're actually attracting more business because of that. Clients that are focusing on our referral programs so they're creating more referrals, and how other real estate agents that also did property management, were not able to get the deals.
One of our clients said that they were one of four or five companies that a potential client was vetting. He told this client like, hey, basically set some boundaries and told them, I'm not going to do things your way and if you're interested in doing things our way, then we're here for you and you can work with us.
Surprisingly, they chose him and I want to ask, what was then the deciding factor why they chose you out of four or five different companies? He said the one big competitive advantage that he had is that he had this outbound referral partner program with the agent, and this person's agent was kind of the deciding factor.
People trust the real estate agent. These investors trust the real estate agent. They're not going to want to connect to you or talk well or make a relationship happen between themselves, their client, and a property manager that also does real estate because it doesn't feel safe.
My client also does real estate, but we've recently rebranded his company as a property management company, new logo, new website. This new perception allows people like this real estate agent that wants to protect her relationship with a client allowed her to feel safe, and allowed him to be the one that the client and the real estate agent both felt safe with, and he was selected. So because of that and because of setting boundaries.
Another cool thing is this client got an opportunity. Because he is no longer branded as a real estate company, which is one of the key things we do with a lot of clients is help rebrand and get them so they don't look like a real estate company so they can get more referrals, he with his new brand and his new website, a friend of his who runs the entire real estate association in the greater metro area that he covers, said that you are going to be our preferred partner for his business. He's going to be their preferred partner.
He's going to announce this at this black tie event at a real estate event. He's going to promote him, allow him to have a table there, and he's going to push this property management company of my clients as they go to that everybody, every real estate broker agent should be using for referring out to for property management.
That is a massive opportunity and that opportunity wouldn't have been available unless he had built out a really effective partner program based on the criteria that I teach in our referral secrets training, and been showing up to the calls, and gone through our C program process of rebranding. Awesome, awesome wins for that client. John, you know who you are, when you listen to this, kudos to you and all that you've done. I appreciate you. That's super awesome.
Another thing that came up during today's coaching call, there were other clients sharing wins, which was awesome, but one little tidbit that was really interesting is one of our clients pointed out that he's getting some decent results from next door. I wanted to point this out to listeners of podcasts. You may want to start paying attention to next door as a review channel and as a lead generation source.
He just goes on next door monitors and every now and then, he sees people on next door, the social network, posting in the neighborhoods and communities that he's active on saying, does anybody know of a property manager? Does anybody have a property manager? He then is responsive to those in that's getting him some business.
We then talked about adding next door to his review funnel, which is gatherkudos.com, which is a service we provide, and whether or not that was possible. Basically, the answer was if there is a link that you can publicly access through the web, where somebody can go to leave your review next door, then yes, we can put that link into GatherKudos.
Another client just hired somebody to step into almost a BDM role, but first, initially, as a sales assistant. This gal was very outgoing, showed up on the call, and charismatic. My client that I'm working with is not that personality type, so this is going to be a really awesome game for her. I told them to just get a sales assistant in place. This is going to speed up the amount of deals and opportunities. Maybe eventually, this client will graduate this new sales assistant to a full-fledged BDM role, which would be fantastic.
I think they would be able to add a lot more doors because the client I'm working with is more of an operations and operator personality–type, more of an introvert. The comfort level of this team member that she brought on, came on the call and she was just introducing herself, and chatting, and most people are quiet and waiting until it's their turn. She was really comfortable checking in and communicating, and she'll be great in this sales assistant/BDM role, which is exciting.
It goes back to what I've said several times in the past. If you're not the person that should be doing or anything that's been sitting on your to-do list for too long, is an indicator that you're not the person that should be doing that thing. If you're avoiding it, there's too much friction. If you have so many questions about it and you're not just taking action on something, you might not be the person that should do it.
A lot of business owners think I have to do this, I've got to learn this. I've got to figure out how to do this, even though it's really uncomfortable. As a business owner, you don't really have to be the one that does the things you really don't enjoy doing, at least not in the long run. So those were some wins.
The other cool thing we talked about on today's call was about targeting your existing clients. It's the holiday season right now. It's Christmas. I don't know when this will actually be released as an episode, but for those that are watching the live recordings or the live calls that I'm doing—I'm doing this in real time—now is a great time to target your existing clientele.
There's always some low-hanging fruit. There's definitely some gold inside your portfolio of people that would be willing to get into an additional investment, or additional properties, or maybe have some referrals they can offer you, know some friends that are investors that they're retired. You could reach out to them and point out all of the vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are where you take numbers and you make them as big as possible by coupling them all together. For example, you can reach out to an owner and say, hey, owner, I wanted to check in with you, just let you know how things are going. Over the last year, we've collected X number of dollars in rent for payouts to you. We have done X number of maintenance requests. We've been doing all these vanity metrics, these big metrics. We've done this many in aggregate over the years of you being with us. This is how much rent we've collected. This is how much we paid out to you. This is how many maintenance requests we've dealt with that you didn't have to.
It helps the invisible to become visible, so they can see what you've been doing for them, to see that there's been a benefit and there's a result, and you're highlighting this and pointing it out. That's a great time to then say, hey, would you be willing to give us a review and ask for feedback? How do you think we've been doing as you pointed out? Then they'd be likely to give you a review if you ask, you might be able to get a referral, you might be able to ask, hey, what are your long term goals? Are you wanting to get into another investment? Cool, let's get you connected to a real estate agent and get this going.
If you're a real estate agent, then cool, you have another deal (maybe) in the works. Capture that low-hanging fruit, reach out to people, and show a little care. You have an excuse. Hey, it's the end of the year. I wanted to assess things and where they're at. Or it's Merry Christmas or whatever you want to do. These are some awesome opportunities that we were chatting about on our call today.
Now, the point of today's call. One question that I keep getting asked—I want to put this out on the podcast; this is that the point of today's episode—is voicemails. I get asked this a lot. My clients are making calls to potential clients, potential referral partners doing outreach. One of the things they get is they get voicemails a lot of times. How do you deal with voicemail? What am I supposed to do with a voicemail?
What's the most effective thing? What should I say? I don't know if what I'm saying is right. When I'm working, a lot of times we tend to overthink it. Here's my response on how to leave the ultimate voicemail that's going to do the primary goal and get somebody to call you back.
This is not what you might expect. Let's talk about what could be effective. You could call up and say, hey, this is so and so, and I'm interested in managing property or I'm interested in creating a referral relationship with you. If you're going to go that really obvious direct route, then you might want to mention a story or a result really quickly.
For example, in my business, we would reach out. We did some calling and we said, hey, we helped one of our clients in the last year to add 200 doors. If that's something you might want as a result, give me a call back, I'd love to chat about that with you and see if we might be able to help you do something similar.
Mention some sort of result that they might be interested in, depending on the target of who you're going after. If it's an investor, mention something you've done for an investor that's pretty impressive, that they might be interested in. If you want to offload this property and no longer be dealing with maintenance and stuff through the holidays, give us a call back. Give me a call back, this is my number.
That's obvious and can be effective. Now, here's what I find to be the most effective way to get people to call you back. You just don't tell them anything except your name and your phone number. I know. It's really simple. Here's how that might sound and then I'll tell you how to make this even more effective.
Hey, this is Jason. Hi, Fred. Give me a call back at blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, and you hang up. They're not going to know what it's about. They're going to be a little curious to give you a call back. Leaving voicemails is frustrating and you're just trying to sound so nice. So here's my plus one on this. Here's how to really maximize getting a return call on a voicemail. Be very emotionally honest.
Voicemails are frustrating for you. This is how I would leave voicemails, and I found I would get a high rate of callback. First thing you do is you sigh. You get the beep, and it's annoying, and you hate it, and you leave a bit, you let out a big sigh of frustration. Or even a groan or a moan. I know.
This is what this might sound like. We leave a message at the beep. Beep. Hey, Fred. This is Jason. Give me a call back. My number is da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Click. They're going to listen to this and be like, oh, my gosh, obviously this person's a little frustrated. What's going on? Who is this? I don't even know what this is regarding.
They're going to call up and they're like, hi, yeah, is Jason there? We got your voicemail. Oh, hey, Fred, man, thanks for giving me a call back, man. I hate voicemails. You don't have to say that, but then you can start a conversation. Yeah, I was reaching out to see if we could build a referral program. I've got this really cool program going, blah-blah-blah or whatever you're trying to do with this person, and then you go into it. Now you have a real person you can communicate with and you've got them on the phone.
So there has to be a little bit of mystery. Sometimes, a little bit of mystery is more enticing and more attractive. Rather than giving them all the details, please leave me a message with the nature of your call, and the best times to reach you at, and blah-blah-blah. Sometimes, less is far more effective. You're getting them to play your game instead of playing the game they are telling you to leave. Do it their way in the voicemail.
Sometimes that works really, really well. Sometimes it doesn't. I've left voicemails and I'm like, hey, Fred, I'm trying to reach you. I've had a hard time getting a hold of you. Here's my number. Please give me a call back. Maybe I've called him three or four times. I can't reach this person. Sometimes I might even say, hey, I don't know if you're still alive. We've talked in the past. I'm having trouble reaching you. Hopefully, you're doing okay. I know you're busy, but give me a call back as soon as you get this.
These are honest voicemails. They say honesty is the best policy. I think when it comes to reaching out to clients and connecting with people, being really real and really honest sometimes inspires or creates a lot more curiosity, a lot more engagement, and helps you stand out from all the people that are all shiny, fluffy, and always trying to be so nice and smiley when they're making a phone call. When you're not being nice, which is a pleasing trait, when you're not trying to please people, you're often shifting into a state of power and they see you in a position of power. Like, oh, my gosh, this is the person I need to talk to.
Anyway, that is my real simple hack for leaving a really effective voicemail. Again, I had mentioned you can mention some results, you can mention a benefit of why, you could talk about something they might be able to give you back or that you might be able to give them, something you might be able to give them. If they call you, I'll help you with this or could do this or this. Potentially, a good thing could happen.
You could pre-frame them. Hey, give me a call back. Another effective strategy would be to say, give me a call back, I think you're really going to be excited about something I have to share with you. Just give me a call back, here's my number.
Try those out, try those strategies out. Let us know how it goes. You can comment inside the DoorGrow Club. Go to doorgrowclub.com, which is our Facebook group. If you're running into some issues or you're having some success with this, I'd love to hear about it from you guys. When I say guys, that's guys and gals, all y'all. Just say it like a Texan.
I appreciate everybody hanging out with me and listening to the show. Until next time to our mutual growth. I hope everybody, if you're watching this live, has a Merry Christmas, which is just coming up in a few days, and I hope you have a Happy New Year.
If you want to kick off your business this coming year, and you want to get out of that rut you've been in for the last two, three years, you want this next year not to look like last year, that's your default future. Your default future is this coming year is going to be similar, so the results you got in the last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. You know what your future looks like. You can pretty well guess.
If you want to create a different future with me, and with my team, and with DoorGrow, and have success like the clients I'm seeing on my coaching calls, and the clients that I'm working with, the 80+ businesses that we have in our mastermind, I want to help support you. I would be honored to be your trusted coach, mentor, advisor to help you scale and grow this thing.
I love doing this. It's a lot of fun for me to reach out. We would love to help you. Hopefully we're talking soon and you're my next great success story. Maybe I'm talking about you here on this podcast soon.
All right. Until next time, everyone, to our mutual growth. Bye, everybody.
What unscalable things are you doing, but none of your competitors are doing, to scale your property management business? Do the unscalable things because that’s the strategy that scales companies.
Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about doing the unscalable to help your business grow. If you want to scale your business, do the unscalable things that nobody else is willing to do but what the customers want.
[02:25] Secret to Scale: Grow your business by doing the unscalable things.
[03:00] Real World Examples: Blanketing adverstising strategies, such as PPC, SEO.
[04:06] Top Strategies: Do unscalable things to grow and add doors via referrals.
[06:25] What is unscalable? Personal one-on-one interactions to make more money.
[06:50] Referral Results: Online reviews grow your business, reputation, retention rates.
[08:25] Opposite Direction: Build relationships and scale systems to get revenue results.
[13:15] Unscalable Things: What’s the least scalable thing you can do to add doors?
“The problem is that everybody is looking for the scalable solution.”
“It’s all about creating more depth and connection on a one-on-one individual basis with potential referral partners.”
“If you do warm, personal outreach, you’re going to create a lot more reviews.”
“Do the unscalable things, and that’s what scales companies.”
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. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.
For today's topic, what I wanted to talk with you about is doing the unscalable. A lot of times in businesses, everybody's looking for what's the scalable option, which means what's the shortcut? What's the hack? What's the fast way to do this so we can just do as little work as possible? How can we just hit a whole bunch of people? Here's how that tends to look. We do that in our advertising, we do that in marketing a lot of times.
A lot of people are trying to figure out, how can they create some sort of shortcut? Let's direct mail everybody. Let's see if we can just blanket text message everybody. Let's set up automation. A lot of people come to me and they're like, what's the secret? How are you helping your clients add 100, 200, or more doors in a year?
How are they growing right now because our company is down about 200 doors over previous years because all the owners are selling because the market's hot right now? They want to get out of these properties and cash out of their investment. But the problem is that everybody's looking for a scalable solution, and here's the secret. If you want to scale your business, do the unscalable things that nobody is doing.
If you want to stand out in the marketplace, do what nobody else is willing to do that the customers really want. If you want to scale your business in sales and improve sales, do the unscalable things that nobody else is willing to do. Instead of automation, go in the complete opposite direction. How can we have more depth and connection? Let's throw out some practical, real-world examples of this.
One example that I refer to a lot is a lot of people will try to grow their business through these blanketing strategies of advertising. They want to blanket the world and just spray and pray. So they'll use strategies like let's focus on pay per click, content marketing, or SEO. Why? Because these are the things they can throw money at and have somebody else maybe do for them, they hope.
The challenge is when you try and create a system where you think you're going to have a lot of leverage, hey, we'll just throw money at this problem, the challenge is, usually, you get more work in exchange. For example, those are all cold leads. Cold leads take a lot more time to deal with. They take more nurture, they take more follow up time, there's less trust involved.
If there's less trust involved and there's more follow-up time involved, then it's actually going to take more work. It's going to take more time. Advertising is expensive, so it costs more money. One of the things that our clients do, our top strategies for growing and adding doors is to do the unscalable things. For example, something that usually people try to do to grow the business is they go and get referrals from other people, from real estate agents, for example.
They try and just say, hey, if you ever run into somebody that needs property management, refer them to me. Here's the problem. The best prospects, the people that actually might need property management, most of them are not looking for property management. They're not going to go up to a real estate agent and say, hey, I need a property manager. That just doesn't happen.
Usually, by the time they do think they need a property manager, they're in a world of hurt, they’re in a crappy situation, something you won't even want to take on. Then you're getting the garbage, so then they're connecting you to the garbage that exists in the marketplace and the biggest problems. The best clients are people that don't even yet know they need property management, capturing them way earlier in the sales cycle before they become price-sensitive, and you're the first person they've heard of or talked to related to property management. Maybe that's a better idea.
You're closer, it's going to be a lot higher. There's a lot more trust in that relationship, and that's going to be more effective than doing cold leads and spending time prospecting directly to potential investors, for example, where the close rate is typically really low like maybe 1 out of 10 or worse. Why not create an outbound prospecting program towards real estate agents?
This is one of the things that we share in our program of how to make that really effective and how to create the right incentives so that people are actually referring business to you. Without going into too much detail, it's all about creating more depth and connection on a one-on-one individual basis with potential referral partners.
Other people are like, hey, I'm going to go present to a whole real estate morning office meeting, high leverage, lots of people, and you're going to talk to all these people in pitch, and then guess what happens? They're all looking at their phones, nobody thinks about you, and you never get a referral. But hey, you got to talk to a lot of people. It sounds very scalable, high leverage.
We want to focus on what is unscalable. That would be the personal one-on-one interactions with each of those agents. That would be the goal. I would love to meet with each of you individually, let's set up a time, and connect with them and create a deep, personal, and more intimate relationship and connection, that's where you make more money because it's the thing people are not willing to do.
Let's talk about online reviews, for example, a great strategy for growing your business. A lot of people will just use something like tools like our GatherKudos tool, they'll use something like Birdeye, or some sort of system where their goal is like, hey, we'll just send out emails, text messages, or whatever. What I teach in our program, in our Training Reputation Secrets is if you do warm personal outreach, you're going to create a lot more reviews.
It's not scalable, but you get a much bigger result. Is it worth the time investment? Is it worth the additional staff and resources you might need to implement that strategy? Absolutely. And you will crush your competition. There's a lot of other stuff that I talk about in Referral Secrets of how to make that really effective, how you can set it up so it increases retention rates with your clients, et cetera.
The general principle in each of our most effective growth strategies is to do the unscalable things, and that's what scales companies. If you want to grow your business right now, take a look at what are you trying to do right now that is a scalable version, a scalable solution? Like you're trying to hit a lot of people through some sort of email newsletter where you got a list of thousands of people. Or are you trying to just go and throw out an advertisement on Facebook or Google ads where you're trying to just hit tons and tons of people and get lots of eyeballs?
What if you went in the complete opposite direction and you did something that was the most personal, the most intimate, the most connecting way of reaching out and creating relationships with people in order to achieve the same result? What if you went the complete opposite direction and then you started to build and scale your systems related to doing more of that? Which means hiring more people instead of more technology and automation.
I have a friend, one of my mentors. He has a business that does a lot in revenue—really, really big company. I believe they do like $100 million a year in their business. It's ridiculous. He has really savvy skills, is a really great marketer, great with technology, and yet, he could automate his whole sales process. He can't have a funnel, have videos, and all this stuff, yet he has a really large sales team. Why? Because that's what's most effective to get to that level of revenue.
He has a large sales team of setters and a large sales team of closers because it's the most effective. It's more effective than having a funnel, a video webinar, and trying to automate all this stuff. And you'll hear lots of people saying you're just one funnel away, you just need this marketing piece, if you just do a newsletter, or just do social media. These are all scalable solutions. They're scalable. You can get people in place, you can hit a lot of people really quickly.
Scalable solutions can be effective. Some of them can be effective. But in general, if your business isn't growing, I'm guessing you're already doing some of these "scalable things", but you're not doing the unscalable things. What are the unscalable things that none of your competitors are doing? Are they doing warm personal outreach with every new tenant and every new owner to get a review?
Are you doing warm personal outreach with every real estate agent, lender, handyman, attorney, lawyer, anyone that helps investors in your market to create a referral relationship and partnership with them? Probably not. That's not scalable. We don't want to do that. Let's go do advertising. And yet the companies that are doing advertising right now, they're usually spending about $300–-$5000 a month, and they're probably down about 200 doors over previous years.
If you have between 600–1000 doors, my guess is you've lost maybe about 200 over the last year because you're not doing the unscalable actions that are more intimate. So focus on greater depth and greater connection. That's really what property management is. It's a business of connection, depth, and relationships.
People are trying to turn it into a business of automation, technology, and tools. I do like technology, don't get me wrong. I do recommend that you use and create leverage where you can technologically, however, if you want the biggest result when it comes to getting referrals, with getting reviews, with getting on more deals, the more personal approach and the more depth is going to be the most effective strategy, and nobody else is doing it.
This allows you to create market share while everybody else is fighting over this red bloody water where everybody's trying to spray and pray and hope they're going to get some sort of return on their advertising dollars. Stop falling prey to marketers that are just selling advertising. What I teach is to do the right actions and you will spend less time than you would dealing with cold leads, and it costs you $0.
I had a client today on our coaching call, a really cool guy, Michael Sullivan. He was talking about how he added eight properties in the last 24 hours. His phone is ringing, he said, constantly. And I said, how are you doing? He's just doing the strategy that I told him to do and doing this outbound method. I said, how many thousands of dollars in marketing have you spent to get on all these doors that you're adding right now?
He looked really confused because it was a loaded question. But he looked really confused and he was like, I don't understand what you're saying. And I said, you've spent $0 in advertising, correct? And he said, oh, yeah, $0. How many of you are spending $0 and you've added eight properties just in the last 24 hours and your business is growing really fast?
Another client showed up, he had added 13 doors. Another client showed up and said he added eight doors on that call. This is a weekly call, weekly check-in. How many doors have you added this week?
If you're not adding doors as quickly as you want to, and you don't trust me enough to come into my program and let us help you, that's cool, but start just focusing on what's the least scalable thing I could do. It's probably that thing you're avoiding. Maybe it's too personal, maybe it's uncomfortable, go do that thing. What you'll find is your business will start to grow really rapidly.
Anyway, if I can help you go faster, focus on the unscalable things in business. The reason I want to talk about this today is it keeps coming up for me. I get questions all the time. Even a client today is like, how do I leverage this list I have of 4000 emails. I've got this other list of this. Again, what I taught him was to figure out what's the least scalable thing you could do.
What everybody else would do is do a newsletter. He says, I'm doing a newsletter. How often? Every week. Cool, are you using a system to do that? Yes, MailChimp. Okay, cool. In MailChimp, what are your stats on the open rate? 10%. That's email, right? It's scalable, but it's really [...] results, 10% open rate? That means 90% are not even opening the email.
The challenge there is I said, cool, what if you took all of those email addresses of different either investors or real estate agents on your list and you send out a personal email to each individual one? You did like maybe 50 a day or whatever your email system, but you do it from your personal email account, not from an email system, and just reached out to them and said, hey, how are things going with your rental properties?
Hey, do you need anything from me today? Or hey, would you be interested in getting a call to find out how I could get you some more real estate commission because I have this cool new program? These kinds of things, like if it was to a potential referral partner. Give them a Calendly link or something to schedule with you and that sort of thing. That's the kind of conversation. How can you take this thing you're trying to do that's not really working, but it's very scalable and do the unscalable thing?
Even if it's a little bit of that, you're going to get a much bigger return on that time investment, and you don't have to spend a whole bunch of time drafting up a big newsletter. Just do a little bit of outreach with a really short one-sentence email and you may start getting some real responses and initiate some conversations.
It keeps going back to this. My own mentors, every method that I tend to hear or see that works, it's always going back to what's the least scalable thing. It's not, how can I do this with less people? It's, how can I do this with more? You can sometimes double your close rate like I talked about on a previous podcast episode, just by getting a setter involved. That's adding more people.
Having a setter and a closer increases the conversion rates and increases the close rates, even though it's more people and you're spending more money on staff. But a lot of people are looking for a way, how can I decrease the need to talk to people or how can I systemize this or how can I automate it or leverage technology?
I hope this was a helpful conversation. Do the unscalable things. The unscalable things are where you show care. It's where you invest in people. It's where you're human. It's where you love people. This is where you build relationships.
I think it was Grant Cardone, he said, "The difference between a contract and a contact is the R, and that's relationships." Focus on making relationships and you're going to get a lot more contracts. This is what most business owners and businesses are unwilling to do. If you do it, you're going to have results that other businesses are unable to achieve. That's my message for today.
I hope this is helpful for those of you. If you want a little bit more help, if you want some accountability, if you want some new ideas, if you want to inject some life into your business, reach out to DoorGrow. We'd be glad to help you. This is my passion. This is what I love to do. I love coaching and supporting clients and helping them grow their companies.
My goal is to turn you into the entrepreneur that can have the business of your dreams. If you don't have the business of your dreams right now, one of my mentors would say, you're not yet the person that can run it yet. So let's turn you into that person. Reach out to us, check us out at doorgrow.com, or join our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. We'll get you to our community and that's it. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.
Business owners and entrepreneurs make mistakes and take risks that other people are unwilling to do. However, they learn from them because nobody’s perfect!
Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about one of the biggest mistakes he made in his business. He calls it his $2 million mistake, although it was probably even bigger.
[01:37] Validation: Everyone makes mistakes, even entrepreneurs are human.
[02:20] Growing Company: Be super cautious and picky when selecting clients.
[03:23] Start Small, Not Big: Conference idea requires everything a business requires.
[06:54] Lesson Learned: Big deal turned out to be a $2-million or more mistake.
[08:27] Results: Clients got the best results, but a lot of team members left business.
[09:08] Change to Grow: Focus on clients, not sales, marketing, website, or branding.
[11:00] Dilemma: What should I do? Something new? Expand? Go after shiny objects?
[11:30] Premature Problems: Why expand business into new niches, markets, or areas?
[12:29] Hand Holding: Some people are not willing to put in the effort or do the work.
[15:16] 3 Commitments: 1 hour for strategy, 2 hours to implement tactics, and show up.
[17:45] Coaching Calls: Clients access calendar to work through problems, challenges.
“I recommend you to be very picky about the clients that you take on.”
“We weren't able to focus on the main thing, which is our customer and which is our product.”
“I have fired clients. I have just refunded clients. We've let clients go. Some just quit.”
“The lessons end up always being worth the risk. So, take a risk, invest in yourself, invest in your business.”
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 businesses and business owners. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.
For today's show, I wanted to talk with all of you about what's been going on at DoorGrow. Over the years, I've made some big mistakes in business like most business owners, this is part of how we learn. We take risks that other people are unwilling to take. One of the biggest mistakes that I made in my business was, I sometimes call my $2 million mistake, but it was probably even bigger of a mistake.
A lot of people probably would not tell you their mistakes in business. But one thing that I think is super validating as an entrepreneur is to hear about some of my mentors’ challenges and some of the mistakes that others that I have worked with that they have made, it makes me feel safe. It makes me feel like they're human, I'm human. It helps entrepreneurs also to see that you're not supposed to be perfect all the time. It's not always going to be great or perfect in business.
One of the big mistakes that I made is I had really great growth in my business. Things were going really well. We were bringing out a lot of clients. We had some clients getting great results. We had some clients not getting great results.
Usually, in most coaching programs, what I've learned is that about 20% will be bad clients. They're not going to do it, they're not going to take action, they're not going to get results. No matter how hard you try or how good you do, that's generally going to be the case if you're a growing company. If you're not a growing company, then you can be super cautious, super picky, and that sort of thing. But we are in high paced growth.
One challenging factor is we had some clients that were a bad fit, and over time, we were always trying to filter, be more careful, raise our pricing, and be pickier about the clients that we take on, which is what I recommend to all of you. I recommend you to be very picky about the clients that you take on. But we had great growth. I started working with the coach. We had 300% growth in a year.
We were really moving. Things were going really fast. Things were really good. There was a lot of momentum. I built out a really awesome team, it felt really exciting, and then I had this great idea that I thought would be a great idea. I had always had this dream of doing a conference.
So I came up with this idea to do this big conference. I didn't want it to be small. I was looking at all the other conferences that were going on. I saw what they did and this has to be next level. It's got to be as good as this.
Even my coach at the time was like, hey, do something small, just start small. I'm like, no way, I'm going big, I'm going to make this awesome. We're going to have the best food, Paleo food, and gluten-free options. Even the food was going to be really nice. We're going to do this really ritzy venue. We did it at this really nice hotel.
This conference cost us well over six figures. It was, I think, $150,000 or something like that all in we spent on this conference. That's not that bad if you're a business that's doing about a million in revenue, I guess that's okay as long as you make revenue from it, if you're just doing simple math. Anybody that's done a significant event knows how challenging these are to put together.
But here's the caveat to this or the challenge is we had 300% growth in the year. Then the year we decided to do a conference, we then had to shift all of our attention towards this conference. The thing that you don't realize when you launch a conference or you get on the hook for a conference is you have to get this venue and you're on the hook with the venue, which means you owe them money. You have a contract with them.
If you don't sell enough tickets and you don't sell enough people getting there, you're not going to get enough people into rooms, you're responsible for a certain group rate and amount of people, and there's this big expense. The other thing is they usually want that money upfront, a lot of it or in big chunks, and then there's this whole racket hotel. They are a monopoly on food.
They don't allow outside food vendors or outside food to be brought in. You have to pay thousands. I think we spent like $8000 or $9000 just for coffee—it's crazy—for two days, I think it was, three days. It just gets really crazy, and then they do things like some of these venues will charge by the plate.
Say it's like $50, $60, $80 a plate, but what they do is they go around. They pick up the plates, and then people go and get another plate to get another item or another food and they're charging you per plate. There are just little things that are a little bit shady in how that industry can work sometimes. I was completely blind to a lot of this stuff.
I was really nervous about putting it together, but here's the real problem. Launching a conference like this required sales. It required marketing, it required organization. It requires everything that a business requires. It's like starting a business.
We have this business that's doing really well. We're moving really fast. It's going really rapid, 300% growth in the year, hitting about a million in revenue. We hit a million in revenue and things were moving really fast. We probably could have continued that trajectory.
Things were really good. We had a really good team in place and everything and then decided to do this conference. That year, we had no growth. We stayed flat at about a million in revenue because we did the conference. So that's why I call it my $2 million mistake because we easily could generate probably $2 million more in revenue just that year. But we also stayed flat the year after and the year after as a result.
As a result, things got really crazy because we did this crazy conference, it took a massive amount of work. All of our time and attention had to shift towards that as a team, sales, marketing, everything because we were on the hook to make this work.
The conference went well and we had some great speakers. I got great feedback, but to me, it was massively stressful. I wasn't really able to enjoy it. I have kind of an introverted side to me. It wasn't quite the dream that I thought it would be, but I'm glad that I did it as a learning experience. It was $2 million tuition for this learning opportunity.
Maybe, if I really did some math, maybe it was a $10 million mistake, hindsight being 2020. Not only that, but by shifting our focus towards this conference and so much attention having to be placed on it, we weren't able to focus on the main thing, which is our customer and which is our product. So I had to shift out of some of the coaching stuff that I was doing. We tried to go more towards just getting people to move through the program and follow the material. We had people that weren't getting as good of results.
Really, that's the piece that I enjoy the most, the one-on-one personal depth and interactions and coaching clients. Those are always the clients that get the best results. We realized that. Now, we lost a lot of team members as a result. It took a while for us to get back in momentum.
I was working with a coach at the time. I got a lot of personal growth through that time period, so it was a good time period. It caused me to wake up to a lot of things in my life that were really challenging or frustrating. I ended up ending my marriage of 13 years also. This is in the last several years and becoming single again after like two decades.
There was just a lot, a lot of change, a lot of growth. Now we're getting back into a nice growth mode in the business and I've got some really good team members building up our team back up. My focus is really just on clients. I'm not even doing sales anymore. I'm not having to do the marketing stuff. I'm not doing any of the website stuff, branding stuff.
I really just get to focus on coaching clients, which is really what I enjoy. It's the fun part for me. So I built this awesome team. What's interesting is due to these painful situations, the COVID, and all these things which were causing cash crunches or constraints, it forced us to tighten the business up.
My team is smaller than it's ever been. We're more effective than we've ever been, and our product offering is better than it's ever been. We're able to deliver more value than we've ever been able to deliver at a much lower price point. Overall, these things made us, these difficult situations, these problems, and these challenges like a conference and team members quitting and leaving as a result of, then financial challenges in the business, and divorce.
These kinds of things are the refiner’s fire that improves us as human beings if we allow it, and improves our businesses if we allow it. Now, I'm not saying you're going to go jump into problems. I'm not saying that that's a good idea either. But I am grateful for the lessons and I'm grateful to have learned those things that I've learned. I wouldn't give up those lessons in hindsight. It enables me to have conversations with clients.
This is a common entrepreneurial dilemma. Should I do this new thing? Should I expand into this thing? Should I do this cool, new idea? Should I go after the shiny object? I have this really powerful story that I get to share with clients and say, look, let me tell you about my $2 million mistake, why the main thing always needs to stay being the main thing, why focus equals power in your business, and why your attention shouldn't be diluted.
Some of the concepts that I teach and some of the ideas like premature expansion, a lot of property managers prematurely want to expand their business into new niches, new markets, or new areas. They do that prematurely, they're not really ready to do that, and they just dilute their focus, which dilutes their potency and their ability to grow and scale, for example.
There's a lot of lessons that came out of this. Personally, business-wise, that came as a result of that. There were clients that went through our processes and came on board as clients during some of these challenging time periods. We had some that got phenomenal results.
We had some great success stories, clients that just did what we told them to do, but not every client is like that. Not every client will just watch all your videos, show up to every call, invest all the time that you tell them to do, and do the work. Most need a lot more hand-holding, I've realized.
We weren't able to really hold people's hands very effectively during that. So there were people that sort of fell through the cracks, and I felt bad about that. Some became very vocal about me and my business online. But the most vocal people, ironically, that are negative about DoorGrow and about me are people that have never worked with me in a lot of instances.
They love hearing that the decision they made to never work with me is so validated by the few [...] clients that really don't like us, that didn't get a good result, or didn't put in the effort and didn't do the work. As a property manager, you're going to have these situations too. You're going to have an owner that you shouldn't have taken on. You didn't realize it.
Maybe you had pretty good qualifications and you qualified them during the sales process, but they still made their way into your business. Unbeknownst to you, maybe they're wolves in sheep's clothing or whatever, but you realized it and you fired them. I have fired clients. I have just refunded clients. We've let clients go. Some just quit.
That is a situation that comes up, and so we've gotten much better over the years at qualifying clients. We have an application people fill out just to work with us to make sure that we can help them. We're looking for certain qualities and we make them jump through some serious hoops. We give out.
We give away a two-hour training currently called The Seven Frameworks for Growth or DoorGrow Secrets that we give out of free material teaching a lot of my frameworks and the secrets that I love to share with clients. I just give that away because I know if the right people will go through this and they'll see value in it, and the wrong people will go through this and they won't find it valuable. So they sell filters, or they just won't even invest the time to do that because it's kind of a prerequisite.
If they're not willing to watch all that and do that, they're not going to really watch all the material, take action, and do the things that we tell them to do in the program either because they're lazy, so they're not going to get the result. There have been zero clients that I've had that have actually done what I've told them to do that have not won and gotten results and benefited from the program.
The one quality or one characteristic that I have to have in a client if they're going to get a result is that they're willing to do the work and take action. So now, in our program, just to become a client, not only do they have to watch a two-hour training, they have to fill out an application. We also have a requirement I call the three commitments.
This is something that I would recommend that you implement in your own business. But we have this framework we call the three commitments. The three things they have to commit to in order for us to guarantee that they're going to get results, and we offer a guarantee. If you are willing to spend one hour being a business owner of your business, this is the first commitment.
One hour of strategic time means you actually operate like a business owner. Not doing all the tactical stuff, which a team member or an employee could do—emailing, calling, or whatever. Strategic stuff: planning, scheming, watching the material that we have in DoorGrow Academy. This needs to be done early in the morning before work, before you start your day, before kids, before pets, and before your day runs away from you.
You need some quiet time for strategic time, the best time, after you've had a good night's rest and your brain is full of all the brain decision-making chemicals that it needs to think strategic time. Give you the best time. The king or queen needs it first. Otherwise, you'll always have a starving kingdom, I like to say.
The second commitment that's required is to be willing to dedicate at least two hours each workday, five days a week towards implementing tactically the strategies and tactics that I give you. Doing the work, making the calls, outreach, dialing in operations, or whatever is the big challenge that we're solving or working on.
Really, that just means, for people that want to grow that are on the growth path, because we have three different paths in our program, that means that just being a part-time salesperson for 10 hours a week. I mean, that's really a [...] salesperson. That's it. Just at least do that. Ten hours minimum a week. Track your time, be accountable, check in on our weekly check-in, and let us know how many hours you've done and at least do 10. That's it.
Third commitment is to show up to the weekly coaching call. I find that clients that don't show up to the call don't have any pressure, they're not accountable. I can't coach them. I can't check in with them on how they're doing. I can't redirect them away from some of the things they might be thinking, doing, or that are holding them back. I can't really coach them if they're not reachable by me.
Those are the three commitments. Now we give them even more support than that. We have a Telegram group. I give all my clients access to my calendar to schedule one-on-one calls. This is all I do now is coach. They can schedule one-on-one calls with me.
We work through problems, challenges, objections, things they're dealing with, or whatever, to make sure that they're in momentum and moving forward. How does that apply to your business? Could you have maybe three commitments and could you also keep your focus as I talked about on your main thing a little bit more? These are just some things that I wanted to share just in my struggles as a business owner and in my journey in developing my business.
If you are one of those clients that struggled in the past, you worked with us, you didn't get a great result, I'm perfectly willing to coach you for free. We'll do a 30-day trial between the two of us. If you're willing to commit to taking action, I'll coach you for free. We'll get you a result, and then at the end of that 30 days, we'll both have a conversation and it will be, yes, I want to do your program and I'll pay for your mastermind. I've been getting great results and I've been keeping the three commitments.
Or if you're not keeping those three commitments, then we'll part ways and I'll kick you out, but you'll probably choose that. You'll realize, hey, this isn't for me, I'm not really going to do this stuff.
We've got clients that are adding hundreds of doors to this program, and they're not spending any money on advertising. They're not having to deal with cold [...] leads, they're able to charge more money, the potential clients are less price-sensitive because we're capturing them earlier in the sales cycle. So I'm going to teach you how to do the unscalable things that actually scale your business. It's all about more depth, more personal connection, and creating more relationships, and we'll scale your business.
Most property management companies are losing doors right now. They're down. Mostly, the larger ones are down about 200 doors. A significant chunk of their portfolio is selling because the markets are high, investors are getting the itch, and they want to get out, sell, and make some money. They're cashing out.
Our clients are growing and they're adding doors. They're net positive. They're making money and building up residual income. They're not even spending money on advertising. That's my client. That's pretty powerful and it's true. It's working really well.
I'm going to teach you how to do unscalable things. SEO, Google ads, all that kind of stuff, that's scalable. It's something you can hand money and whatever. I'm going to teach you how to do the unscalable things that actually are really working in the marketplace right now to help you grow your business, so you can capture more businesses that are less price-sensitive, that are captured earlier in the sales cycle, and your close rate is infinitely higher with those warmer leads, and it is with cold leads through those other strategies.
We'll give you that free training that you can watch—our Seven Frameworks training. Just reach out, we're happy to give that to you and get you hopefully on as a client in our process. I don't know if there's anything else I should say about my $2 million mistake.
All of us as entrepreneurs are going to have experiences and challenges that we make a bad decision or business. Maybe you've never had one, but that probably means you're playing a game that's too small or you’re being too cautious. The lessons end up always being worth the risk.
So take a risk, invest in yourself, invest in your business, reach out if we can help you, and keep your business focused on your main thing, which is your property management business. Grow that thing and keep the focus tight. It's so tempting as an entrepreneur to be distracted and to go towards other things.
Let's start a roofing company. Let's start a pool cleaning company. Let's start a carpet cleaning company. Let's start a maintenance company.
There may be a place for these and maybe it will help you add some revenue. But in a lot of instances, adding more to the business ends up actually taking away from the main thing. So you have to get to the place where you've got a solid team that you can trust to make sure everything's running smoothly before you start to add additional pieces and start additional companies.
Anyway, that's it. I've had this on my agenda for a while to share my $2 million mistake. I just had other topics that were a lot more exciting for me to share, but I wanted to share this. If you have any questions, if you are a client that went through some of that stuff with us and you felt like you didn't get results, reach out to me. I want to make sure that we take care of you.
If you're bitter and upset and you're not open to that, then that's cool. Don't reach out. I know there's always some of those out there. The more successful we are, the more we attract. We build up a little group of haters because we've worked with thousands of clients, and I've talked to thousands of property managers.
We've got hundreds of clients right now. We've got 80 businesses in our mastermind right now, which is just crazy to me. It's really awesome. People are getting great results. Today's call was a really good call since I'm just kind of riffing and chatting here. I love hearing our clients get results. Yeah, it was a good call today.
Anyway, each week we start by sharing wins on our Grow call. Anyway, that's all I have today to share. Feel free to hit me up on social media if you want to check in with me. My username is @kingjasonhull. Happy to have a conversation because this is all I do.
I love coaching my clients. I really enjoy helping people grow and win in their businesses. If you want to know if I'm the real deal, set up a call with me. Let's chat.
I will say I'll point out that I'm in every property management group and every real estate group probably that exists on Facebook. There's a property management group that has a kind of a culture of negativity towards me and they don't like me, which is cool. It's not my group.
I chime in every now and then to try and be helpful. I'll admit, as a business owner, it hurts, just like it probably hurts you when you see an owner bad mouth your business or whatever. But when I see a past client maybe that really I didn't even know or they didn't really talk to me, they didn't show up to the calls, they didn't really work with me, they didn't really take action, they just signed up with us and hope the website would magically do the work for them for some reason, something like that, yeah, it hurts.
It hurts to see people complain. Especially, it's frustrating to see people that have never worked with me tell other people to work with businesses. I saw one guy mention like, somebody said, hey, should I work with DoorGrow? One of my past clients was like, yeah, we had a good experience, but he knows the culture there and was afraid of really saying too much like talking to them directly.
Then there were a bunch of people that were negative. One guy was like, hey, you, don't use them, use this other company. So I reached out to this guy directly and I said, hey, what was your experience with that other company? I'm always looking for ways to benefit my clients and they're like, oh, I've never worked with them, but the people seemed cool there.
I was like, okay, so you've never worked with me. You've never worked with this other company either, but you're telling people not to work with me and to work with this other company. To me, that is a massive lack of integrity. I'm not going to recommend somebody go do something or work with something unless they've done that themselves or gotten a lot of feedback from other clients or people that have done this so that I can share that, but that's just me.
Anyway, that made me sad. That's part of the challenge we have to deal with as business owners. You're going to have some haters and you just do what you can. That sort of inspired this episode. I hope this was helpful. I hope hearing my situation was helpful.
I hope you stay focused on the main thing and you win in business and life. If I can support you in any way, reach out. Anyway, until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.
What is the secret code to powerful communication? Be real, get raw, and stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to get results.
Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about how to deal with uncomfortable conversations In property management.
[02:10] Qualifying Questions: Do you feel uncomfortable and taken advantage of?
[03:05] Communication Code: Practice the four Rs - real, raw, relevant, and results.
[04:57] Step 1 - Real: Be honest. Tell the truth. Just don’t lie.
[06:02] Step 2 - Raw: Be vulnerable, which is powerful and not a weakness.
[07:35] Step 3 - Relevant: What matters to others, not what matters to you.
[08:49] Step 4 - Results: Know your and your communication targets’ wants and needs.
[12:41] Built-in Liar: Your brain tries to protect you from pain and problems.
“You have to tell the truth. Be honest.”
“There’s power in being vulnerable.”
“Stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to results.”
“What is your desired outcome?”
“We all have a built-in liar and that’s our brain. It’s always trying to help us avoid pain.”
Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton
The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown
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 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.
Today's topic, friends, we're going to be talking about a code of communication. During my weekly coaching call with clients today, a client got vulnerable and asked, how do you deal with an uncomfortable conversation?
The situation was this particular client of mine has a potential client that keeps calling him up and asking how they should do things. He really wants this person's doors. He really wants to get them on as a client. He's being nice. But now they're starting to say, hey, I really need a concrete vendor to do this and I need somebody.
He's being helpful and he's giving out some info. I know a lot of you listening are like, do not give out your vendors. I'm freaking out, but he doesn't want to give out anymore and he feels like he's being taken advantage of. Now I asked some qualifying questions. I said, how do you feel about this to get clarity on that? I'm guessing by bringing this up, did you feel taken advantage of? Do you feel like it's uncomfortable? His question was, how do I have this uncomfortable conversation, or how do I move them forward towards maybe becoming a client? It was kind of the question.
My feedback to my client is that you need to get really honest. When we get really vulnerable and honest, it allows other people to see that we're human beings, it allows us to have much more effective communications.
As I said, rather than tell you exactly what to say, let me share with you the principles because this is generally how I like to work. Because how he says it might be unique to him, but I said what you need to do is practice a code. I learned this years ago from a coach named Setema Gali Jr. He was part of a coaching program that I was part of. He was my coach.
I believe he's the first person that explained this to me. I've heard lots of coaches share this idea. I'm not sure where it originally got its start, but the idea is this code of communication called real, raw, relevant, and results. This is also connected to Wake Up Warrior and Garrett J. White. That's who Setema was working for at the time.
Setema, just let me tell you about this guy, a 300-pound Polynesian. He played for the New England Patriots. He has a Super Bowl ring, I believe, won a Super Bowl. He is a really big guy and a really powerful speaker. I really enjoyed working with him.
This concept I'm going to share with you is this code of communication that will improve your communication in your relationships personally. It'll improve communication between you and your potential clients. It helps you with challenging situations, challenging communication. This is the mode of how you should always approach communication. In general, this is a code for life. It's four R’s, four R words: real, raw, relevant, and results.
Let me explain this code of communication and we'll go through each of these four items. When you're communicating with somebody, the challenge is you need to be honest, and this particular client of mine had not yet been really honest with this potential client that he was speaking with about how he was feeling and what he was experiencing.
The very first thing is you have to tell the truth, be honest. That's a factual truth. This is the mental logical side of things. What you say should be factual, it should be truthful in your communication with somebody. That's step one. Just don't lie. If you're saying, oh, it's okay and it's not okay, you're lying. The very first thing is to honestly communicate, and that's just telling the truth. The first is real, be real. Be real with people. Just be real with people. Tell the truth.
Now the second is closely related. But not only is there logical, honest communication. There needs to be emotionally honest communication. This is where a lot of people fail in their communication. It's not fully honest because you're not really sharing how you feel about things. Logically, what you're saying may be true, but we're being dishonest if we're not honestly expressing how we feel about something emotionally.
The second R is raw. So be real, get raw. Most people don't want to get raw. This is what we call being vulnerable. There's power in being vulnerable. There are books written on this subject like Brene Brown, I believe, is her name. The Power of Vulnerability was a big TED Talk, YouTube videos, and whatever.
Getting vulnerable is a source of power. A lot of people see it as a weakness. But the most powerful person is the person who has the confidence to get the most raw with people and to be the most emotionally honest. It allows other people to feel safe being honest with you as well because it's at a deeper level.
The real thing is that they felt taken advantage of. That's factual, but expressing how that makes them feel would deepen that conversation like, hey, I feel uncomfortable. We've had lots of conversations, facts. I've helped given you some freebies and given you some access to some vendors that I use, facts. I'm feeling though, that I'm being taken advantage of. It makes me feel uncomfortable.
I run a business. I care about my clients. I want to take care of them. But then when I have somebody that is not paying me, asking for this information, and I'm helping them out, it makes me feel like whatever you feel. That's getting raw and expressing the honest emotional side of things.
The next is to stay relevant. Be real, get raw, stay relevant. Keeping things relevant is important. It's easy to start whining and sharing all your feelings about whatever's going on in your life, but they don't care about that. Whatever the conversation you're having—whether it's kids, spouse, potential clients, existing clients, tenants, whatever—it should be relevant to them.
If they don't care and it's irrelevant to them, they're not going to pay attention to it anyway. You're wasting your breath, you're wasting your time, and you're probably gossiping or emotionally manipulating. It's not relevant, so make sure it's relevant. The communication should be relevant to what the real situation is. It should be relevant to the feelings and thoughts that you're having around that thing that you're currently talking about, not other stuff.
It's one thing to just get really real and honest and go up to some random person or even a potential client and say, oh, yeah, how are things going? And you start blabbing your whole life story and problems to them. They don't care about that, it's not relevant. So make sure your communication is relevant.
Now the next is results. It's real, raw, relevant, and results. So be real, get raw, stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to results. If you are committed to results, that means you need to know what your communication targets, wants, and desires. You need to know what you want. You have to have that clarity. Otherwise, it's not going to be relevant. What you want are results. So if it's relevant, it's going to be focused ruthlessly on getting towards the result. What's the outcome? What is your desired outcome?
This is why on my Calendly link, it always asks the question, for appointment scheduling with me, what is your desired outcome? What's the outcome you're hoping for during this conversation? Maybe I can move towards that. What is your desired outcome?
If you're going into a conversation that's going to be uncomfortable, you need to be clear on what is true, what factually happened, what do you know for sure, how do you feel about that? You need to have that clarity of how you feel. You need to know what's relevant to them, what's relevant to the conversation, and what's relevant to you.
You need to know what you want. What results or outcomes are you hoping for? To honestly express, in this instance, this example, it would be very honest, real, and raw to express.
Let's say this potential client was named Suzie. We're talking to this potential client. Hey, Suzie, I've helped you with this, I've done this, and I'm starting to honestly feel like I'm being taken advantage of in this relationship. I want to be honest with you, my goal and being helpful in talking to you, all these multiple times we've had calls is because I want to get your business. I want to get you on as a client. So I need to know, that's what I want, is that going to happen? Is that a reality?
Do you see that you potentially will become a client, or are you just taking advantage of the fact that you know that I know some of the things you might need? If so, then maybe we need to have a different conversation. But are you interested in becoming a client or working with me for property management or letting me take over your units?
This is expressing what you want and that you might be able to express what Suzie wants. You can say, Suzie, what is it that you are wanting? My understanding is you want this property to be taken care of. You probably don't really want or enjoy dealing with finding contractors and dealing with these challenging and difficult situations. I would love to take that off your plate. I want to do that for you.
That would be much more effective communication and it'd be far more honest because the reality of the situation is this communication leading up to this point, this client of mine had not yet been honest with Suzie or whatever their name is. Had not yet been fully honest with them and hadn’t lived according to this code of communication. Everything gets better and easier if you're willing to live.
It's uncomfortable sometimes to have this communication, but it's less uncomfortable, I believe, than dealing with feeling taken advantage of, feeling misaligned internally, feeling frustrated, feeling annoyed by people. Honestly, express.
There's a really good book I'm listening to right now. I really love this book so far. It's called Radical Honesty. This guy is really refreshing to listen to. I appreciate it. It really made me take a look. I've always prided myself on being a very honest, open person. That's always how I've wanted to run my business. One of the core facets is transparency that we subscribe to in our core values. That's why I created my original business, it was called OpenPotion.
We all have a built-in liar and that's our brain. It's always trying to help us avoid pain. So if our brain is saying, well, it'll be an uncomfortable conversation that our brain lies and comes up with stories around this. Maybe they know or maybe I shouldn't bring this up. Maybe that'd be uncomfortable if I brought this up or set it this way. Maybe I need to be nicer, more diplomatic. That's our brain lying.
We have this built-in liar that is always there in the background creating stories and filtering our perspective and our view from past pain and past history trying to protect us from future pain and creating more problems in our life. We have to confront that, and we have to deal with that and get even more honest.
This is something that I remind myself of and that I hope is helpful to you is to be real, get raw, stay relevant with a ruthless commitment to results. If you focus on this mode of communication with family members, potential clients, or anybody that you care to communicate with, you're going to have a much better result.
You're more likely to get the results out of this that you want because you're communicating honestly. You're going to create more safety. You're going to create more trust, sales, and deals happen at the speed of trust. Relationships, the foundation is trust. This is going to help you build more relationships and improve your close rate. I hope this has been helpful to those listening. That is all I have to share today.
If you would like to have an objective perspective in your business because you're too close to the fire as all of us business owners are and you want a mentor, coach, or somebody that can help you move your business forward, I would be honored and happy to help you grow your business. We have clients getting fantastic results in our Mastermind program. You can check us out at doorgrow.com and set up a call with us to learn more about our DoorGrow and Scale mastermind, how we are helping grow and scale companies. That is what I will leave you with today.
I hope this has been helpful to those listening. If it has, please give us some positive feedback on the various channels in which you may be listening to this, whether it's YouTube, iTunes, or wherever, we appreciate that. It helps us get the message out to others and benefit more people in the industry, which is our mission at DoorGrow. That's it. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.
Do you need a business development manager (BDM) to double the close rate and double the amount of deals and business you get in the property management space? Maybe you can’t afford or find a BDM. Maybe you like doing it yourself or want to double the amount of deals faster.
Property management growth expert and founder/CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull talks about how to get help closing deals for your property management business and selling people on using you for property management.
[03:22] Simple Secret: Get a sales assistant to help with follow-up to close more deals.
[04:10] What would an assistant do? Schedule appointments and make calls.
[05:00] Sales Assistant Requirements:
[06:12] Onboard and Train: What are they going to do for you? Help you qualify people. [06:24] Qualifying Questions/Criteria: Where’s the property? What’s the address?
[08:26] Preframe: Creates future emotional state, positive sales call/pitch experience.
[10:25] CRM Follow-up: An assistant can take notes, make calls, and enter updates.
[11:03] CRM Requirements: Needs to sort and track deals, opportunities, leads, sales.
[11:55] LeadSimple: Initial follow-up for texts, emails, campaigns, workflows, and drips.
[12:54] Process Street: Facilitates tenant and owner onboarding processes, checklists.
[13:10] Calendly: Scheduling tool handles calendars, appointment settings, scheduling.
[14:28] Zoom: Face-to-face sales is far more effective and video sales calls create trust.
[15:37] Prospecting: Give good sales assistant scripts to start functioning in a BDM role.
[16:34] Double-Barrel Close: Someone who does both sides of deals - finds and closes.
“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.”
“Nobody wants to buy low value, so having an assistant can establish you as high value.”
“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.”
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.
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.
[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.
“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.”
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.
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.