Podcast appearances and mentions of jason good

As the property management industry continues to evolve, it's important to stay up to date on the latest innovations in technology. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with David Normand from Vendoroo to talk about AI's role in the future of property management. You'll Learn [01:29] The AI Revolution [08:47] The Importance of Empathy and Human Touch [22:21] Decreasing the Cost of Maintenance Coordination [32:29] New Features Coming to Vendoroo Quotables “As any property manager believes, we know how to do it the best.” “If you're not reading articles and studying up on this, I think that's going to catch you by surprise pretty quickly.” “Empathy is the magic lubrication that makes everything better.” “Empathetic reflection and empathy is a magical ingredient.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript [00:00:00] David: If you're not building AI tools from working with your partners, from being on the ground floor with them and using the data and building tools based upon the data and their pain points and their failures, buyer beware. If somebody's coming to you and saying, Hey, we figured this all out in the lab. [00:00:14] David: Come use it. Yeah. Right. Buyer beware. [00:00:18] Jason: All right. Welcome property management entrepreneurs to the DoorGrow Show or the Property Management Growth podcast. I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive group coaching mastermind for residential property management entrepreneurs. We've been doing this for over a decade and a half. [00:00:39] Jason: I've brought innovative strategies and optimizations to the property management industry. I have spoken to thousands of property management companies. I've coached over 600 businesses. I've rebranded over 300 companies like Bar Rescue for property managers, cleaning up their businesses, and we would love to help coach you and support you and your growth. [00:01:01] Jason: We have innovative strategies for building out growth engines, for building out your operational challenges, for helping you figure out how to get to the next level in your business and one of the cool tools that I'm excited to showcase today with my guest here, David Norman, is Vendoroo. We've had you on the show before. [00:01:19] Jason: Welcome back David.  [00:01:20] David: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It felt like years ago, it was only about, I think eight months ago since we did this, so much has changed over the time, so it's great to be back. Yeah, it's great to be back.  [00:01:29] Jason: Good to have you. I know you're in the middle of this AI revolution, which AI is just innovating and changing so rapidly. It probably does feel like years ago, so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's been crazy. You guys have made a lot of changes too, so, you even changed your brand name from the last time we had you on the show. Yeah. Which was I think Tulu. Yeah. Right. And so, yeah. So why don't you get us caught up on what's going on 'cause, you know, there's been a lot.  [00:01:55] David: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you first of all for having me here today, Jason, and from the entire Vendoroo group of us, which, you know, the team has grown 10 x over the past eight months, which has been awesome. And I just also wanted to start in thanking everybody from what we call our client partners who have jumped in into this great unknown that is AI and is going to be like, how is this going to work in our industry? And so that's really what we've been focusing on the past eight months. You know, it's been a unbelievable journey of both failures, successes learnings and insights. And ultimately we're getting excited here at the NARPM broker owner which is in Denver to unveil Vendoroo. Like this is the coming out party. And so we're super excited if you're going to be there. We have a massive booth that we have set up that we have the ai alliance with other people that are working in the AI space, and I really hope that you guys come over and check it out. I promise this. [00:02:53] David: You'll never see a booth or a display like we have set up. At the NARPM broker owner. So.  [00:02:58] Jason: Now I want to go attend it. Yeah. Just so I can see your booth.  [00:03:01] David: So, let me put it this way. You may see the robot from the Jetsons walking around the booth walking around the NARPM broker owner, so, okay. [00:03:07] David: Yeah. Rosie? Yeah. You may see something like that. So she'll be vacuuming with her apron? Yeah. She'll be doing a little social engagement. It'll be cool. So, okay. Okay.  [00:03:17] Jason: Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, so catch us up on what, like, let's get into the kind of the background and the overview for people that have never heard about Vendoroo and what you guys do and how you got into this. [00:03:29] Jason: Yeah. Give people kind of the backstory. Yeah.  [00:03:31] David: Yeah. Thank you for that. So really the backstory is that, you know, we know of this AI economy that's coming, right? And there was a few of us, you know, I've been in this industry for 18 years. You know, I've managed you know, portfolios of 40,000 doors. [00:03:47] David: I've managed them for governments. You know, I started off with our own property management. Much like you guys. We started off with 80 doors. We grew to 550 doors in four years. So it was exciting to know that technology that was coming that promised duplication because, you know, as any property manager believes, we know how to do it the best, right. [00:04:05] David: And so what we decided to do is to come together and say, Hey, if AI's coming, there's two things that we need to figure out. Number one is how is this going to help us show value in this new industry to this new generation of property owners that is here, that is coming, that has been raised in the technology world too, right? [00:04:25] David: And two, can it actually duplicate our efforts? Can it actually be an employee for us? Right? And I don't care what people are promising about ai, you don't know until you get into what we call like, you know, get into the weeds, you got to get into the trenches. And so that's what we did, right? We went out and we were the guys that grabbed the torch and we said, we are going to take all the risk. [00:04:46] David: We are going to jump into the mix. We're going to ask people to jump onto the bandwagon with us and we're going to figure this out. And oh my gosh, what an unbelievable eight months it has been in learning and insights. And I can't wait to get into all the things that we've learned about the property management industry. [00:05:01] David: But that's really what we've been focusing on here the past eight months, right? So we started off with well hey, can the AI assist the va? Can it turn them into a super va? Is that what it's going to be? And, you know, some people were like, yay. And some people were like nay, you know? And so, and you know, because that human failure still was there, right? [00:05:21] David: And you know, what happens if they left? There was that inconsistency. And then it was like, all right, well what can the AI own? Right? What can it do? What can it perfect? And you know, can AI actually be the last employee that I ever hire? Right. That's really, that's a really cool thing to do. [00:05:39] David: But the property managing community had some really specific demands that they said that if this is going to be the last employee that I've had, it has to do this. And that's what I'm excited about our new technology 'cause it's doing those things. You know? [00:05:52] Jason: Yeah. And now you guys have made some big moves. I know, like I've, I have clients that we've sent over to you and they've shared some incredible stories. Like one client, I think he had 154 units or something like under management, and he said in the first day you're of turning on Vendoroo, like it closed out like 80 something work orders. [00:06:12] Jason: Yeah, like, it was crazy. Another client, they had a little more doors. They said it was like 50 something work orders were closed out in the first day of turning it on. And so, I mean, you're creating some dramatic stuff. Like this is a very different thing than what people are used to in maintenance. [00:06:27] David: Yeah. Yeah. And really what the exciting part about this, Jason, is that maintenance is actually really easy. And I know people laugh when I say that it's managing communications that is extremely difficult. Okay. Okay. Right, because you have, you know what AI told us about our industry over the last eight months is when we dove in with it and it took a step back and it said, whoa, you guys don't have a data problem here. [00:06:51] David: You guys have a emotion problem here. There's very specific categories of emotion that are in this space, right? Like, how do you build a technology that senses something? And I know this relates with property managers, 'cause I know this for myself. A property manager can walk into their office, sit down at their desk, and their spidey senses go off and they know something's wrong. [00:07:15] David: There's no screen that's telling them anything. There's no spreadsheet. They know something's off. Right. And so the AI is like, well, the statuses really don't matter that much to me based upon the feedback that I'm seeing from the property managers. Because the status and the communication all seem to be in order, but there's a disruption somewhere. [00:07:35] David: So I need to know about people's emotions. I need to understand about is the resident happy? Does the owner feel supported? Is the vendor being directed? And does the property manager believe that I can own the outcome for this? And it was really cool to start seeing its learning and understanding and picking up on these cues where, you know, people say that this is a data-driven industry. [00:07:55] David: It's really in an emotion driven industry.  [00:07:57] Jason: Oh yeah. It's a relationship and emotion industry for sure. Yeah. Yeah, big time.  [00:08:01] David: And it's really cool to see, and it's really started happening over this past last 60 days, the amount of residents, I was actually just looking at one before I jumped on here, that are like thanking the system, right? [00:08:15] David: Imagine that, like think of all of us that actually worked with the chat bot at like Verizon. I've never thanked that chatbot at Verizon for being their customer service. Right.  [00:08:25] Jason: And how do I get a representative? Representative. Representative!  [00:08:28] David: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Versus you seeing people, you know, seeing individuals saying to the, you know, saying to the Vendoroo maintenance coordinator, Hey, I really appreciate feeling supported and how fast you acted because you know, there's empathy that's inside of its law and learning. So I don't want to get too much into the details on there. But yeah, these are some of the exciting things that we're working on.  [00:08:47] Jason: I mean, empathy is the magic lubrication that makes everything better. [00:08:52] David: Yeah,  [00:08:52] Jason: I mean they, they've done studies. Teams, even in working in warehouses, are more productive if the team has a higher level of empathy. Yeah. And doctors perform better. Yeah. If there's a higher level of empathy, there's less malpractice suits, like empathetic reflection and empathy is a magical ingredient. [00:09:10] Jason: I coach clients to add that in during sales. Yeah. 'cause their close rate goes up dramatically. Yeah. Right. So yeah. So leveraging and like getting the AI to actually be empathetic in its communication. Yeah. When that's probably not a natural skill for a lot of maintenance coordinators to be empathetic. [00:09:26] David: It's not, it's not a natural skill for a lot of people in the maintenance industry. Right? Yes. Especially when you talk about burnout. People begin developing views of the rental community, right? Like, oh my gosh, they're calling again, and that empathy meter goes lower and lower and lower. [00:09:41] David: Yeah. As people have been in the industry longer. But isn't it great that you have an employee now that knows that, yeah, it's my duty, rain or shine, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 a year to always operate at the highest level of empathy? I never have a bad day. I never take a day off. [00:09:57] David: I'm never upset. I'm never short with somebody on the phone, never tired, never like, oh my gosh, Susan is calling me again. I'm going to let the phone just ring because I'm annoyed of talking to her. And it just is constantly hitting that same level of standard. And this is what's exciting to me, is that there are people that that have played around with this and have been a part of what I call the pain phase, right? [00:10:20] David: The pain phase is that understanding the way that agentic AI works, right? It's input in output. Input, output, right? The more that you're putting into it, the better the results are that you're going to get out of it, okay? Right. It's just like training an employee. So over the last eight months, what we've seen is that the community has trained this to be the level of a person that has now been working in the industry for five years. [00:10:46] David: In eight months. It's got five years of learning in eight months. Okay. Wow. In the next six to 12 months, we're probably looking at somebody that has 10 to 15 years understanding in the next six to 12 months and understand the level of type of tasks that it can do, especially getting into estimates and getting some other work. [00:11:04] David: And again, just you know, having empathy in my own life towards the people that jumped in that are like, what is this all about? Like, how does AI fail? Like, you know, there's still people that are involved and it was like this big like momentous train of like, you know, all these people were jumping on and giving ideas and people are in the loop and now it's weeding everything out and the AI stepping in and saying. [00:11:27] David: Hey, I appreciate all the input that you've given me. Thank you for all your effort. I'm now ready to step up to the plate and to own the outcome. Right. And that's what we're seeing at the NARPM show that's coming out. There's five AI tools. There's a master agent, five AI tools. And you know, I'll give you a couple of pieces here that, you know, we had feedback from our property managers like number one across the board. [00:11:50] David: A property manager said, if I'm hiring AI as my last employee, that has to work in my system. Yeah. Okay. Right. Like I don't want another, I don't want another technology. Yeah.  [00:11:59] Jason: I don't want a new system I got to get every vendor to use or a new system I got to get my team to use or figure out. We don't need another tool to make our lives more difficult. [00:12:08] Jason: No. They've got to use our stuff.  [00:12:09] David: They got to use, we have our existing stack. Yeah. So now the AI is fully integrated into all the most common PMS systems. You know, you have a cool chrome extension that you can download and there's a little yellow kangaroo right right there. And it's actually reading the work order that you're working on, and you can literally just ask it a question now and just being like, Hey, did anybody express frustration or concern on this work order? [00:12:32] David: Right? Because that's the emotion behind the status that you need to know. And it's like, yeah, two days ago Sally said that, you know, she was actually really frustrated about the multiple reschedules by this vendor. And it's like, great, that's a person I should be reaching out to and that's what I should be knowing that a status is never going to tell you. [00:12:47] David: Right? Yeah. It's in your slack, right? So if I have, if I'm on my phone, I'm talking to my employee and I'm laying in bed and I have a panic attack as a property manager, and I'm like, oh my gosh, did we take care of John's refrigerator and the office is closed? I can't get ahold of my employee. Yeah, you can. [00:13:03] David: Your employee works 24 7 now. Hey, can you give me an update on the refrigerator replacement at John's place? Yeah, it was scheduled this day. I contacted John. Everything's good to go. You know, go to sleep. You know, like, like that's the power. Full audit. Full syncing. So it's in your platform. That's really cool. [00:13:21] David: The other thing, it's got to be branded, right? This is a thing that we really learned about, like how important branding is to the community of property managers, right? Yeah. So the communications that go out have to be from your area code that's done. The emails that go out have to have like, you know, your company name and your logo on it. [00:13:39] David: The AI is doing that as well too. So that's being sent out, which is really cool. So people are feeling like, you know, that loyalty to brand is super important. And also do you know now that the AI can ask the residents to give a Google Review and we can link to the Google reviews and give you instant Google reviews to your page through the ai, which is cool, like how it's, it will know that if the success of a Google review is high on the way that the work order was done, that it's probably best to ask this person and it will send them a little thing. [00:14:11] David: Hey, can we get a feedback from you? And we link up to your Google review. And it posts that Google review to generate those 'cause we know those are super, super valuable to property managers. So that's actually going out today. That's kind of a little teaser there. That's the emails out now. [00:14:23] Jason: Nice. We'll have to get you to also connect it to our gather kudos links for clients 'cause then people can pick which review sites. So it diversifies the review profile.  [00:14:32] David: Love it. Love that. I'm going to hook you up with our guy Dotan. He's running that. He's one of our head of product. He's, actually out of Israel. [00:14:39] David: He's a amazing guy. I'd love to get you connected with him. Yeah. Cool. Let's do it. Cool. And then the biggest one too is like, I need a single point of contact. Right. And we knew that before there was a lot of people were still involved. There was a lot of oversight that was going on there, having that confusion and single point of contact. [00:14:56] David: Now it's in your phone, it's in your Slack, it's in your phone extension. It doesn't matter what's going on. You have one point of contact. It's your employee. You ask the question, get the answer, Jason, you can even ask for a change. You can even say, Hey, I want to change a vendor on a job and you'll see that the vendor gets changed for you in the system. [00:15:17] David: You can even say to your ai, and this is the big one: hey how do you triage this work order? And I want you to do this, or I want you to do that. And you just do it right through Slack or right through your PM chat and it makes the change for you. And now you have custom triage and all property managers have the ability to train their own AI for their company. [00:15:36] David: Think how cool that is. A person with 75 doors now, and the product that's being released has their own AI agent customized for their company, right? Yeah. Like, that's what happened over the last eight months, so you can see my excitement. There's been a lot of hard work in this. [00:15:54] David: Yeah, that's amazing. But this has been all the effort and a huge thank you out to everybody who's tried us, you know, even said that this wasn't for them at that point in time because those learnings went into what's going to make this product the best product in the property management space and is going to help people leverage sales and leverage efficiencies and blow their owners' minds away in ways that, that we have never thought about. [00:16:15] David: Oh yeah.  [00:16:16] Jason: Yeah. So I know like initially when you rolled this out, a lot of people were nervous about AI and you guys had kind of a human layer in between the AI and any communication Yeah, initially. Yeah. And so there was like, they had like a reps and a lot of people associated, oh, I've got this rep. [00:16:33] Jason: Yeah. You know, Steven or whatever is my rep or Pedro and I've got Pedro and like, oh no, what if Pedro leaves? And they were associating with that while the AI is really doing the crux of the work. Right. And so you guys have shifted away from even that now the AI is directly communicating with people. [00:16:52] Jason: Correct? Yeah.  [00:16:53] David: Yeah. So let's talk about that. So, definitely, so in the beginning there was like, we all had like lack of trust. We believed what it was going to do, but it was like we had a ton of people still trying, like, you know, using qualified VAs, training them. Like, you know, like, you know, if it fails, like, you know, you have to have a person stepped in and so let's talk about that. [00:17:12] David: So, you know, it was definitely that human layer. And let's talk about where we're at today. It is very clear to us, and the one thing that separates us from everybody is we still believe that humans are super important in this process. Okay? Yeah. And where humans are very important in this process are going to be when the AI says, Hey, I need you to make a phone call to this person for me, right? [00:17:35] David: Hey, I've reached out to this vendor three times and they haven't responded yet. I need you to give a phone call to see what's going on. Right? Hey, I need you to recruit a vendor for me. I need you to reach out and do a recruitment for the vendor. For me. Hey, this owner is asking questions about this estimate. [00:17:51] David: I need you to give a call for me. So the AI is basically able, on a standard work order, the AI can handle 95% of the workflow, no problem. Work order comes in, gets assigned to the resident. It gets out to the vendor. It's under the NTE not to exceed. It's great. The work gets done, the resident uploads its photos, the AI says to the resident, are you happy? [00:18:14] David: Everyone's good. It closes the work order out. Cool. Right. And then if a human...  [00:18:19] Jason: and how is it communicating with the tenant and with the vendor typically? [00:18:24] David: Yep. So, it's very clear that and this isn't a surprise to anybody. Everybody loves text messages, right? Yeah. I mean, that's just, it's just what it is. [00:18:32] David: You literally, like, people will get a phone call and they won't pick up and the text will come back and like text back. Yeah, text me. What do you need? Yeah. Text me here. But, so here's the things that people don't see behind the scenes that we'll talk about. So the complexity that went into. [00:18:51] David: Mapping out how to allow vendors... so a vendor could have like 20 jobs, right? And we don't want to send him like a code that he has to text for every work order so that it links to the right work order. Like what guy wants to do that? Okay. Like that's not how he works. So we figured out how to allow a vendor through AI just to use his regular phone and text anything about this thing. And it's understanding it and it's mapping it, it's routing it to all those work orders because we knew that in order for this to be the last employee somebody would have to handle, it also means that the vendor has to be happy and the same for the resident. [00:19:30] David: They can just text that they have multiple work orders. It understands what work order it's going to. If it's not quite sure, I would ask them, Hey, is this question about this work order? And they say, yeah. And so there's not like, again, codes and links and things that they have to do. It has to be seamless if they're working with a person. [00:19:46] David: So yeah, text message is massive. Email is second, and then phone is third for sure.  [00:19:51] Jason: Got it. So is your AI system calling people yet or you or telling the property manager to make the phone call?  [00:19:58] David: Yeah. People are okay with. If they're calling in like our new front desk agent, which if a person calls in and they want to get information about a listing or if they want to get information about a work order or something like that, or, you know, they're okay with getting that type of information. [00:20:13] David: Yeah. But they are, it is very clear that they are not okay with AI calling them when they're asking for an update on a work order like that. Like that line in the sand very clear. Yeah. And so we have people on on the team. That are constantly monitoring into ai, giving feedback, hitting improvement. [00:20:31] David: I want everybody to know there is not a work order that is taking place that is not touched by a human at least twice.  [00:20:38] Jason: Okay.  [00:20:39] David: Okay. Right.  [00:20:40] Jason: So there's a little, there's some oversight there. There there's, you're watching this, there are humans involved  [00:20:45] David: And then the ai will when it hits certain fail points, right? [00:20:51] David: It then escalates those things up to what we call the human in the loop, right? So there's an AI assistant, we there's people now that we're training a whole new generation of people that are no longer going to be maintenance coordinators. They're AI assistants now, right? And so when the AI says, Hey, this work order is not going down the path that I think it should go to be successful. [00:21:12] David: I'm escalating this up to a human, and so now as a property manager, not only am I getting this AI agent workflow that's standardizing the empathy and the workflows and all the stuff that we talked about in the communications, I also now get a fractional employee that when the AI says, Hey, I need help, I already have an employee that it can reach out to that can make that phone call or call the vendor. [00:21:36] David: But it's also monitoring the AI for me on top of it. So yes, there is, and that's one of the big thing that separates us apart is that the platform comes with what we call a human in the loop, an expert in the loop and so we're training the first generation of AI assistants in the property management industry. [00:21:55] David: Yep.  [00:21:56] Jason: Got it. So the AI maintenance coordinator. Has human assistance. Yep. Underneath it.  [00:22:02] David: And before it was the other way around where Yeah. The AI was assisting the human right. And now the humans are assisting the ai. That's what's happened in the last...  [00:22:11] Jason: that may be the future of all of our roles. [00:22:12] Jason: So,  [00:22:13] David: If you're not reading articles and studying up on this I think that's going to catch you by surprise pretty quickly. Yeah. Learn how to write prompts. I'll tell everybody right now. Yes.  [00:22:21] Jason: Yeah. Interesting. So, now what about this, you know, there's the uncanny, you know, sort of stage where people get a little bit nervous about AI and what do they call it? The uncanny valley or something like this, or right where it gets, it's so close to human that it becomes creepy. And there's some people that have fear about this, that are concerned. You're going to have a lot of late, you know, adopters that are like resistant. "I'll never do ai." [00:22:49] Jason: What would you say to somebody when you get on a sales call and they're like, well, I'm really nervous about this AI stuff, you know, and they just, they don't get it.  [00:22:57] David: Yeah.  [00:22:58] Jason: I'm sure there's people listening right now. They're like, oh man, AI is going to kill us all and it's going to take over the world and it's going to take our jobs. [00:23:05] Jason: And they think it's evil.  [00:23:06] David: Yeah. Yeah. I, and you know, I really want to hear that fear and I want to like, again, have empathy towards that. 'cause I do understand that fear of change causes people to get... Change in general. Yes. Right. It's like, whoa, I like everything the way it's going to be. Right. And we are historically in one of those phases of like, you know, the industrial revolution, the renaissance, like the automobile from horse. [00:23:34] David: Like, this is what is taking place. This is, this will be written down in history. It's massive change. It's a massive change. Massive. So what I would say to them, and not to, not from a way of fear. But to inspire them is there are a lot of hungry entrepreneurs out there that are embracing this head on. [00:23:57] David: Yeah. That are pushing the boundaries and the limits to be able to bring insights and customer service to their clients at a much higher level. And if you want to compete in this new AI economy. I would definitely encourage you to understand and get in and start investing in yourself now. But understand that investing in AI means having some pain threshold. [00:24:21] David: Like you got to get in, like you, you need to be able to give the feedback. You need to understand that if it falls short, do you have to be able to give it the time and the energy and the reward and the payoff of what I'm seeing for property managers who've embraced that when they're sitting there and they're going, I don't touch maintenance at all anymore. Yeah, it's wild. Right? And those are the people that in the beginning of this relationship, and there's a few that come to my head, are the ones that were sending me emails constantly saying, David, this is failing me. I believe in this, but this is failing me. And as my technology partner, I know that you're going to help us get this better. [00:24:58] David: And there is, you know, I have this word down that struggle equals great con conversation, right? Like, and so they had a struggle and that opened up a great conversation and because of that, their technology and the technology is getting better. So yeah, I think that from a personal point of view in this industry, one thing that I want to solve with AI is I think that we can all say that over the past 15 years, we've probably yelled at a lot of vendors or yelled at a lot of VAs or yelled at a lot of people. Let's start yelling at the ai. And then hopefully that the AI will actually eliminate the need for us to ever have to yell at anybody again because it knows us. [00:25:36] David: Yeah. It never fails us.  [00:25:38] Jason: You know? It really is amazing. I mean, your company is creating freedom for the business owner from being involved in maintenance. Yeah. Really?  [00:25:46] David: Yeah.  [00:25:47] Jason: And it just, and they get used to that pretty quickly. Like maintenance is just running and they're like, yeah. It frees up so much head space for them to focus on growth. [00:25:56] Jason: It gives them a whole bunch of like just greater capacity. Yeah. So they feel like, yeah, we could handle adding any number of doors now and we know we can still fulfill and do a good job.  [00:26:07] David: Yeah. Fixed cost scaling. Right? That's a term that we came up with is now that you know that I have a price per door that will cover all my maintenance. So if I went in and brought on 75 doors, I know that I don't have to go out and hire another employee. The system just grows with it and I know exactly what my margin is for all those doors. Right. And as we know previous, before fixed cost scaling a property managers is like, I have enough people. [00:26:32] David: I don't have enough people. Someone quit, someone didn't quit. My profit margins are good. My profit margins are bad. Yeah. And now with these AI tools. You know, you have your front desk employee, you have your maintenance coordinator, you have these fixed cost scales, and now somebody calls you up and says, Hey, I want you to take on 25 doors, and you're like, I have the resource resources for maintenance, which is, we know is 80% of the workload already. I don't have to go out and hire another maintenance coordinator 'cause the system just grows with me, which is cool.  [00:27:00] Jason: So one of the things you shared at DoorGrow Live and you're our top sponsor for the upcoming... Can't wait for DoorGrow Live, can't wait to, so we're really excited to have you back so. [00:27:10] Jason: Everybody make sure you're at DoorGrow Live if you want. Our theme this year is innovating the future of property management. And we're bringing, we're going to be showcasing, innovating pricing structures that are different than how property managers have typically historically priced, that allow you to lower your operational costs and close more deals more easily at a higher price point. [00:27:30] Jason: We're, we'll be showcasing a three tier hybrid pricing model that we've innovated here at DoorGrow, and we've got clients using it. It's been a game changer. We're going to be sharing other cool things about the future hiring systems, et cetera. Right. So you guys will also be there showcasing the future. [00:27:46] Jason: One of the things you shared previously that really kind of struck me as you showed, you did some research and you showed the typical cost. Per unit that most companies had just to cover and deal with maintenance. Yeah. And and then what you were able to get it down to.  [00:28:03] David: Yeah.  [00:28:04] Jason: And that alone was just like a bit of a mind blowing. [00:28:07] Jason: Could you just share a little bit of numbers here?  [00:28:09] David: Yeah. So one of the first things that we had to do when we started way back in the day is figure out well. Like, like what's the impact of AI going to be us from like a cost perspective, right? Is it a huge change? And so we went out on a big survey mission and we were surveying property managers and asking them, what's your cost per door for managing maintenance? [00:28:30] David: How much do you spend every door to manage maintenance? Now the first thing is less than 1% of property managers knew what that cost was. Sure.  [00:28:37] Jason: Oh, sure. Right. Because, but then they got to figure out, oh, we got a maintenance coordinator and we've got these people doing phone calls and they cost this, and yeah, it's complicated. [00:28:45] David: It's complicated. So we built a calculator. Okay. And then people could start adding in that information out into the calculator, and the average person was around $13 and 50 cents a door.  [00:28:56] Jason: Okay. Okay.  [00:28:57] David: Wow. Right, right. So that was where the average person was, somewhere in the low twenties. Yeah. [00:29:01] David: And others were actually pretty good. Like, I'd say like, you know, some of the good ones that we saw were maybe around like, you know, 10, $11 a door or something along that line.  [00:29:09] Jason: They probably had a large portfolio would be my guess.  [00:29:12] David: Yeah. And also I think a lot of it's just like, you know, I don't know if they were still accounting for all their software and everything that they had. [00:29:19] David: Maybe they're not factoring everything. Yeah. No, I think if we really dug in, it'd be different. So now we know that, you know, the base package of what people are getting in. The average cost of what people are paying for 24 7 services that's emergencies around the clock is about $7 and 50 cents a door, right? [00:29:37] David: So right off the bat in AI's first swing, it said we cut the cost in half. Yeah. Okay. Right. So 50% reduction. I mean, to me as an owner, a 50% reduction in cost. That's like. You know, alarms and celebration going off, you know? For sure. And then, yeah.  [00:29:55] Jason: And that's, if everything just stayed the same, like it was still the same level of quality, cutting in half would be a solid win right there. [00:30:03] Jason: Yeah.  [00:30:03] David: Yeah. That's just like status quo stuff. And now what, with the release of the new Vendoroo product that, that's actually being announced here today. The email's going out to all of our existing clients of all the new features that are coming out now, we're starting to see that. You know that quality is now increasing to where if you were to go out and hire that person, you may have to be spending, you know, 55,000 or $65,000 a year. [00:30:29] David: Right? So now it's like saying, okay, if we can get as good as what these people are using for their VAs right, and we know what that cost is, and they're saying that's, you know, that's what their factors is. Well, what happens in the next six to 12 months when this is a seasoned person that you would've to pay $85,000 a year to? [00:30:45] David: Right. Yeah. And right, because they have knowledge of. Estimates and knowledge of vendor routing and knowledge of, you know, it can handle...  [00:30:53] Jason: you've invested so much time into them, so much attention. They know your properties and know your portfolio. They know the vendors. Like you've invested so much into this person that now they sort of have you by the balls so that they're like, Hey, I want 80 k or I walk.  [00:31:06] David: Yeah.  [00:31:06] Jason: You're like, you've got to come up with it.  [00:31:08] David: Yeah.  [00:31:09] Jason: Right. You've got to do it.  [00:31:10] David: Yeah.  [00:31:10] Jason: And you know, because that's not easy to create. And a lot of people, in order to have a good maintenance coordinator, they need a veteran of the industry. Veteran of industry. [00:31:19] Jason: They need somebody that's been doing this a long time.  [00:31:21] David: Yeah.  [00:31:22] Jason: And that's really hard to find.  [00:31:24] David: Yes. It's extremely hard to find as we know. One of the things that I think that we're doing for this industry is we're actually preserving knowledge that I don't think is necessary getting passed down. [00:31:33] David: Yeah. You know, there's a lot less people that I think are as handy as they once were in the Americas and so we have a lot of that knowledge. Like, you know, we know that the average age of an electrician is in the sixties, the average age of a plumber's in the sixties. And these guys, you know, they have wealth of knowledge that it can troubleshoot anything that's going on in a house. [00:31:54] David: And so to be able to try to preserve some of that, so maybe if a person does come in, you know, maybe there's some knowledge sharing along the lines. But let's take it even in another step forward Jason that in the future, you know, the AI is going to know the location of the hot water tank in that house. [00:32:10] David: It's going to then add it automatically to the system, like. It's going to know more knowledge than they will because it's going to have maps of every single property that's all currently sitting inside of, you know, that maintenance coordinator's head, right? And so it's going to, it's going to actually know more than them, you know. [00:32:26] Jason: Yeah. That's wild. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. It's the future. Cool. Well, you're rolling out a bunch of new features. You're announcing these today. You've told me a little bit, but why don't you tell the listeners what's changing, what's new, what innovations have come out? What are you guys launching? [00:32:41] David: Yeah. Exciting. Yeah. So, the biggest one I think is, which is the most exciting is, is Resiroo, which is the first one that actually handles all the communications with the resident and does the triage and troubleshooting. First one of what are you talking about? So we have our products. [00:32:57] David: So you have these AI tools, right? These agents. Right.  [00:33:00] Jason: And so, you know, every, so think of them like different sort of people?  [00:33:04] David: Skill sets. Yeah. Different person. Okay. Exactly. And so that's when you come and see our display at the NARPM conference, you'll actually will see these five agents kind of in their work desk and in their environments, kind of cool. [00:33:15] David: Okay. Able to see them right. So the coolest part about that one is we're doing a major product you know, update on that for not only the knowledge base, but we're actually turning that over to the company. We were talking about this a little bit before, and now they own their own AI agent and they can customize it into how they want it to ask questions or the type of questions and the mindsets when it's triaging stuff. [00:33:41] David: Triaging work orders for their portfolio. Like super cool. So fully customizable to your company, right?  [00:33:49] Jason: So now sometimes the more humans get involved, the more they mess stuff up.  [00:33:54] David: Yes. We make sure they don't mess it up. So everyone's going to learn how to write prompts and they'll submit it into us. [00:33:59] David: And we have a great team of AI engineers that when that knowledge base is written or what they're doing. We will ensure that it is put in so that it actually produces the desire outcome, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that's a very exciting one. The second one that I'm that I think is so cool, do you know that only 10% of all estimates get approved by the owner without one or multiple questions? [00:34:23] David: Because owners really struggle with trust when it comes to estimates. Like 10%. Like, that's a really bad number, I felt as the industry that owners only believe us one out of 10 times. Like that's the way I took that. Yeah. Right. And so, Owneroo is what I coined inside, is the estimate of the future. [00:34:41] David: That really was looking in understanding like what was, what questions was the owner asking when they were rejecting a bid that that we could proactively ask the answer for them to help guide them to understanding the value in this estimate that they're looking at in historical context of the property. [00:35:00] David: How many other people have experienced this issue? Like, like there's a whole bunch of factors that should go into an estimate and an estimate should no longer be like, here's a cost from Frank. Right? Like, like that was like, like that was...  [00:35:14] Jason: here's what Frank said it is. Yeah. Like that was like from the 1940s. [00:35:17] Jason: That's good. How do I trust that?  [00:35:18] David: How do I trust that? That was from the forties and we're still...  [00:35:21] Jason: how much went into this decision? Was this just out of the blue, like pulled out of your ass or is this like legit?  [00:35:27] David: Yeah. Yeah. What's the, you know, we live in a data-driven world, so what's the intellect behind this estimate? [00:35:33] David: And so I'm really excited about Owneroo, which is going to be the new standard for the way the estimates are created. We have the front desk agent which is coming out. So, that one is going to handle phone calls that are coming in, be able to talk about available listings, actual general questions about leases route phone calls over to property managers for you. [00:35:54] David: So again. Very human-like interaction, great AI voice. Actually. We feel it's going to be the best in the industry. So a person's calling in, just like they're calling your office able to handle all those front desk things. We, we have the PM chat, which is now the employee which is fully integrated into all of your systems. [00:36:14] David: It's in Slack. That's your employee that you get to talk to. We believe that if you're going to hire somebody, they should be inside of your communication channels. You have the Google Chrome extension that it's on right inside your AppFolio or your buildium or your Rentvine software that you can ask and talk to it. [00:36:31] David: So, yeah, so we have a lot of exciting products that have come out. And then of course the backbone of all of them in the middle is Vendoroo, which handles all the scheduling, all the communications. You know, a resident asks for an update, responds to them, an owner asks for an update, it responds to them. [00:36:48] David: And you know, it handles actually the body of the work order. So you have those five tools, we believe are what the property management industry said. If you are going to give me an employee, this is what the employee has to be. This is what makes up that employee. So we say that these tools, these agents were actually built by the property management industry. [00:37:08] David: And that excites me because if you're not building AI tools from working with your partners, from being on the ground floor with them and using the data and building tools based upon the data and their pain points and their failures, buyer beware. If somebody's coming to you and saying, Hey, we figured this all out in the lab. [00:37:25] David: Come use it. Yeah. Right. Buyer beware.  [00:37:29] Jason: Yeah. So you guys connect with Slack. They can communicate through Slack, but it slack's a paid tool. Have you guys considered Telegram? I love Telegram Messenger.  [00:37:37] Jason: Alright. Could you do that? Write it down. Telegram Messenger is like the iMessage tool that works on every device. [00:37:44] Jason: It's free. It's one of the most secure, it's not owned or controlled by Facebook. Like, WhatsApp, like, yeah. But WhatsApp might be a close second, but we use Telegram internally, so I love Telegram.  [00:37:58] David: We'll definitely take that into, into consideration for sure. Yeah, check it  [00:38:02] Jason: out. Because I, what I love is the voice message feature and I can just listen to my team and others at like high speed, but internal communications and it's free for everybody, which is great. [00:38:12] Jason: So, yeah.  [00:38:13] David: Yeah. I think a lot, for a lot of people it was like you know, who was Vendoroo in the beginning and Vendoroo was like the team of like people that were trying to figure out like how is AI going to work in this industry? [00:38:26] David: How is it going to solve the needs of our property management partners? And this is why I say to everybody, if you thought about Vendoroo, if you came in and the experience wasn't great with Vendoroo, if you're one of our existing clients that has been with us and you're and you're still moving forward, and we thank you so much for your dedication to this, the Vendoroo product, everything that we've done, everything that we worked at is being showcased at the NARPM broker owner. The email's going out today. This is who Vendoroo is. We are a team that is a technology partner for the property management industry that is helping building meaningful AI tools, specifically by demand, by our industry to help us show value and to preserve this great industry. [00:39:09] David: For the future in this new AI economy, right? Like we need to step up. We have clients that are adding doors left and right because they're showing their clients that they use an AI maintenance system and their clients are like, this is what I expect from a property management in this community. [00:39:24] David: Right? And again, Owneroo, that estimate, we believe that in the future. Like, like owners are going to say like, I'm not approving an estimate unless it's like the estimate of the future, right? Like, like that's the new standard. So you got to know what the new standards are and you got to get technology that are going to help you compete with those new standards that will be in your community and are will be in your community in the next week, the next two weeks. [00:39:46] David: And definitely some really cool products in the next six months.  [00:39:49] Jason: All right. Well, yeah, I'm really excited to see what you guys have been able to create so far. So yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah. All right. Well David, it's been awesome having you on the show. Sounds like you guys are really innovating the future. Everybody come to DoorGrow Live. David, are you going to be at that one? I will be there. All right, so you can come meet David in person. [00:40:08] Jason: We've got some amazing people that are going to be at this. We've got technology people. There's a gentleman there, one of the vendors they created another really cool tool, but he had a hundred million dollars exit, you know, in a previous business, like there's really amazing entrepreneurs and people at this event, so come to DoorGrow Live, get your tickets, and if you do, we have just decided that we're going to give out to anybody that registers. [00:40:34] Jason: You can pick from one of our free bonuses that are well worth the price of the ticket. Or coming or anything in and of itself, including our pricing secrets training that goes over a three tier hybrid pricing model or our sales secrets training, which goes over how we're helping property managers crush it and closing more deals more easily at a higher price point. [00:40:55] Jason: And reputation secrets, which are helping our clients get way more positive reviews by leveraging the psychology and the law of reciprocity and getting the majority of their tenants in order to give them positive feedback online. Maybe some others. So you'll be able to pick from these bonuses one of these that you might like and that's our free, most incredible free gift ever that we'll give to each person that registers for DoorGrow Live. [00:41:19] Jason: So.  [00:41:20] David: Cool. Awesome man. Always great to see you. Looking forward to seeing you at DoorGrow Live and love that you guys are working on pricing because AI is going to make people think different about pricing. It's going to be way more efficient, so you guys are ahead of the curve on that. Great job, Jason. [00:41:33] Jason: Awesome. All right, so how can they check out Vendoroo, David?  [00:41:36] David: Just visit, Vendoroo.ai, go to the website, request a demo with one of our great sales reps, and yeah they'd love to help you out. See all the new products, see how far it's come. And again, we thank everybody from the bottom of our hearts for all their effort, people who've tried us out. [00:41:52] David: Come back and see what you built and yeah. Come check us out at Vendoroo.  [00:41:57] Jason: Got it. Go check out Vendoroo, it's vendor. If you know how to spell that, V-E-N-D-O-R-O-O dot A-I, go check it out. All right? And if you're a property management entrepreneur, you want to add doors, you want to make your business scalable, you want to get out of the day to day, you want to increase the capacity so your company could easily handle another 200 plus doors without having to make any significant systems changes, reach out to us at DoorGrow. We will help you figure it out. So until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. 

Things don't always go as planned in life and in business. It's important for property management entrepreneurs to be able to roll with the punches. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss a recent experience where they were forced to pivot and adapt over and over again. You'll Learn [01:58] The Original Plan [05:31] How a Winter Storm Distrupted a Business and Family Trip [08:52] Moral of the Story: Be Prepared [11:08] Your Plan is Not Always the Right Plan for You Tweetables “Moral of the story is be prepared.” “This is how businesses work. Your best plan is sometimes going to fail and you're going to have to come up with a new way of doing it and you're going to have to adapt.” “There may be a reason that things are not going the way that you wanted them to go right now.” “ The only time that you won't have your breakthrough is if you quit.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Sarah: There is a bigger plan out there for you, and there may be a reason that things are not going the way that you wanted them to go right now. [00:00:09] Sarah: There may be a reason that you're not experiencing the results that you thought that you would at this stage in the game.  [00:00:17] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow property managers 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 property manager. [00:00:35] Jason: DoorGrow property managers 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. [00:00:54] Jason: 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. We're your hosts, property management growth experts, Jason Hull and Sarah Hull. Now let's get into the show. Alright. [00:01:16] Jason: So, today we are recording this episode at, what time is it now?  [00:01:22] Sarah: It is almost midnight.  [00:01:23] Jason: It is late. On Monday. And this will go live or be streamed later. And so if you're watching this, thanks for watching. And we're not actually like real time live at this moment, but it's because we had to change things up and make different plans.  [00:01:42] Sarah: Live in the moment, we're probably still in the car.  [00:01:45] Jason: Yeah, so we will be driving tomorrow during our podcast episode. So we wanted to record this episode real quick so we can get one out. And in today's topic, we're just going to share a little bit of our adventure. And, you know, the moral of the story will be things don't always go according to plan. [00:02:03] Jason: So.  [00:02:04] Sarah: Sure don't.  [00:02:05] Jason: Alright, so, where do we start?  [00:02:08] Sarah: Alright, well, let's do quick synopsis. Where are we right now? Ohio, I think? I'm pretty sure we're in Ohio.  [00:02:15] Jason: I think so.  [00:02:16] Sarah: I think it's Ohio is the right answer. So, we've been to, in the last few days, we left on Friday, we've been to Texas, we've been to two days in Tennessee, we accidentally went to Kentucky, now we're in Ohio, tomorrow we're going to Pennsylvania. [00:02:30] Sarah: So, I think that's five states. Five states in five days. It's a great time. So, we're driving from Texas to Pennsylvania. It's supposed to be a straight shot, up like this. And it's this crazy record breaking winter storm, and we're driving through some of that. We're missing the big part of it. [00:02:51] Sarah: So we had to adjust our route. So our plan, this was our plan, was to leave on Friday. We're going from Texas to Memphis, Tennessee. Then the next morning, we were going to go to Graceland. We did do that, and then we spent some time in Nashville that evening. And then from Nashville, we were going to go to Morganstown, West Virginia, and then from there, drive into Dallas, Pennsylvania. [00:03:18] Sarah: So, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we were supposed to get to Pennsylvania on Monday, which is tonight, we are not in Pennsylvania. We are, I'm pretty sure, somewhere in Ohio, past Akron. And where, what's the name of this?  [00:03:32] Jason: Youngstown.  [00:03:33] Sarah: Youngstown, near Youngstown. That's where we are, right now. And so that was our plan. And then because of this crazy storm, we were leaving Nashville. We left Nashville. Roads were fine. Then all of a sudden, a little bit of rain. That was okay. Then, snow. And that was awful. And we were trying to get from Nashville, Tennessee up to Morgantown, West Virginia. Did not happen. Not even close. So we were going to stop in Lexington, Kentucky for lunch around like 3 o'clock or 3:30. That was not the plan. We ended up staying in Kentucky because it took us so long to get to Kentucky because of the crazy storm that we then had to stay overnight in Lexington and then reroute. So we were going this way and now we're going that way.  [00:04:31] Jason: So do you want to share why we're doing a road trip? [00:04:34] Jason: Which is crazy to do.  [00:04:36] Sarah: It's crazy to do. I know, right? I could have flown there in a day. So we're driving my car that I've owned for a couple years now. I'm driving to Pennsylvania, and I'm giving the car to my mom as a gift. She has absolutely no idea.  [00:04:52] Jason: It's a surprise.  [00:04:53] Sarah: That this is happening. [00:04:54] Sarah: I don't think she watches the podcast.  [00:04:56] Jason: No. Probably not.  [00:04:56] Sarah: Hopefully it's safe. But I'm gifting the car to my mom. I want her to have a nice car, and a reliable car, and not have to worry about things. So, I'm gifting her the car. She has absolutely no idea. Coincidentally, it's also in a couple of days, my brother Jason's birthday. [00:05:14] Sarah: So, shout out to Jason. Happy early birthday. We love you. And we're going to do this little trip. We're going to see my family for a little bit. We're going to go out to dinner for my brother Jason's birthday. Give my mom a car, and then fly back home and we are running an event. So that's why we're doing all of this in the first place. [00:05:31] Sarah: The whole crazy part of the story here is when we left Nashville, we were trying to get to Morganstown. It was insane on the road. Just wildly insane. Like snow, ice, there was a mix, there was sleet. We were going like 40 miles an hour. I was just happy to be moving. We saw multiple cars that had run off the road. [00:05:58] Sarah: We saw a couple of tractor trailers that we're in accidents. We saw a few accidents. We were almost in a few accidents ourselves. And this trip is not at all going as planned. We had to move our flight, and then move our flight again, and then move our flight a third time. So then we, last night we almost gave up on this whole thing. [00:06:18] Sarah: I was going to quit and just leave my car in Cincinnati, fly home. back to Texas and then come back and finish the second leg of this trip a second time. Jason woke up this morning and he said, "I think we can do it, babe. I think we can do it." So here we are, but this is not...  [00:06:35] Jason: We were not prepared for this storm. [00:06:37] Jason: This car had pretty bald tires, which was... we were not ready.  [00:06:43] Sarah: No.  [00:06:43] Jason: Yeah. So after sliding off the road a little bit, twice, yeah, on a freeway.  [00:06:50] Sarah: On a freeway.  [00:06:51] Jason: On a highway. Yeah.  [00:06:52] Sarah: And car is supposed to be heading in this direction, and then it turned in.  [00:06:57] Jason: And we were just off to the side, so we were able to get back on the road safely both times. [00:07:02] Jason: Thank goodness. Yeah. And not get hit by a tractor trailer.  [00:07:05] Sarah: Yeah, we didn't get hit by anything. The car didn't get damaged. We are safe. And to that I can only thank God. The whole time I was praying, our fathers, I was saying Hail Mary's, our fathers, the whole time. I was just praying to God and God took care of us made sure that we were safe made sure the car is safe, made sure that we got where we were going, made sure we didn't get stranded in the car because we saw a couple people stranded.  [00:07:30] Jason: Yeah.  [00:07:31] Sarah: It was scary. [00:07:31] Sarah: It was really scary.  [00:07:32] Jason: We eventually pulled off and went and found a tire store  [00:07:36] Sarah: Yeah, we were going to continue out there for a while.  [00:07:38] Jason: Got new tires.  [00:07:39] Sarah: And something told me it might have been God telling me like "go, you need tires. Go get tires." So I said to Jason, I said, "Can you find...?"  [00:07:47] Sarah: Can you find? No.  [00:07:49] Jason: I wanted to get some better tires on that car, for sure. [00:07:51] Sarah: So, I said, "is there a tire place that's like, nearby, that's open right now, that we can go to right now?" So we did. Took a little pit stop detour, but it was very well worth it. I just don't think we would have made the rest of the trip in one piece.  [00:08:06] Jason: The first tire store we went to was closed.  [00:08:08] Sarah: Yeah. Like it wasn't even plowed to get to it. They were closed. The third one was a tread. So we got new tires. That's good. The guy at the tire store, what did he tell you? The tread level was like a four. It's real, it's really bad.  [00:08:21] Jason: Yeah.  [00:08:21] Sarah: It was real bad. Yeah. So, that was fun.  [00:08:23] Jason: So We got fresh tires. Then the car drove really well. [00:08:27] Jason: Plus we had pretty much made it through the worst of the weather, which we had planned. Because there were two ways we could go. The northern route had less weather, so.  [00:08:39] Sarah: Yep. That's why we're in Ohio.  [00:08:41] Jason: So.  [00:08:41] Sarah: And not through West Virginia.  [00:08:43] Jason: Yeah, we'd probably be in a very terrible spot if we had gone the wrong way. [00:08:47] Jason: So.  [00:08:47] Sarah: Yeah. We'd be off on the side of the road frozen like popsicles. Oh gosh. You guys would never hear from us again.  [00:08:52] Jason: So moral of the story is be prepared. Make sure you're prepared. Have a plan. And so we've done lots of plans and changing of plans and so this is part of life. And this is how businesses work. Your best plan is sometimes going to fail and you're going to have to come up with a new way of doing it and you're going to have to adapt. And so one thing entrepreneurs, we are good at is adaptability. We figure it out cause we have to, and we adapt. And so we've adapted a lot today. [00:09:23] Jason: And yesterday. The last couple days. Yeah, the last couple days.  [00:09:25] Sarah: We had a plan, we changed a plan, we changed that plan, we changed a plan again. We just keep changing it.  [00:09:30] Jason: And that causes us. We're just rolling with the punches. That causes us to have to adapt in business. So here we are recording a podcast. [00:09:36] Jason: Here we are.  [00:09:36] Sarah: At midnight.  [00:09:37] Jason: In a hotel room.  [00:09:37] Sarah: Which Jason did not want to do.  [00:09:39] Jason: No. No. I was like, we don't have to do anything that we don't want to do. We don't have to do this.  [00:09:44] Sarah: No. And I said, we are not recording a podcast live from the car because we might die. No.  [00:09:49] Jason: We're not going to do that.  [00:09:49] Sarah: We might die live on camera. [00:09:51] Sarah: Yeah, that would be...  [00:09:52] Jason: All right. So hopefully some of you got some value from this. If you do not have a good plan for your business, then that's something that we can help you with here at DoorGrow, help you come up with a plan, and help you adapt to some of the things that are getting thrown at your way. [00:10:09] Jason: This is why we mapped out the DoorGrow code, our roadmap, for some of the most common challenges and problems. So if you would like a copy of the DoorGrow code, just reach out to us. We'd be happy to give you one and tell you a little bit about how we might be able to help you and hear about your challenges. [00:10:24] Jason: So reach out to us. You can check us out at doorgrow.Com or go to our website or join our free Facebook group by going to doorgrowclub.Com. Make sure to answer the questions. We reject 60 to 70 percent of the applicants that try to join that group. So it's only for property management business owners. [00:10:44] Jason: So if you own a property management business or seriously planning on starting one, then you can request access to that group. Make sure to answer the questions. We would love to have you inside. And that's it.  [00:10:55] Sarah: No, that's not it. No.  [00:10:56] Jason: Oh, there's more.  [00:10:57] Sarah: That wasn't it. I said, what are we going to talk about this episode? [00:11:00] Sarah: I told you what we're going to talk about, then we just... So.  [00:11:03] Sarah: It's not the end of the episode. Surprise! A little bit more. But wait, there's more! [00:11:07] Jason: But wait, there's more.  [00:11:08] Sarah: So for those of you that do have a plan, and you're like, "yeah, no, I definitely have a plan. This is not applicable to me," we had a plan going into this as well. [00:11:17] Sarah: So, when you have a plan and life does not work out the way that you planned, and things don't work out the way that you thought that they would, and you're going through things and you're trying to figure out, you know, "what am I doing wrong? And why isn't this working? And like, why is this so hard? I don't understand why it's not happening the way that I wanted it to happen," and why it's just maybe not happening at all... [00:11:40] Sarah: or maybe it's happening, but it's just so slow, and it's so hard, then you just need to know that sometimes there's a bigger plan in place for you somewhere. And if you're religious, you might believe that God, or the universe, or fate, or whatever you might want to call it. There is a bigger plan out there for you, and there may be a reason that things are not going the way that you wanted them to go right now. [00:12:07] Sarah: There may be a reason that you're not experiencing the results that you thought that you would at this stage in the game. Just like when we thought we would go to West Virginia. Had we actually gotten to West Virginia, we'd be stranded there for sure, because they are getting hammered with snow right now. [00:12:22] Sarah: So the whole, like, West Virginia, D. C. area Hammered with snow, and that was our plan. So I'm grateful, although it's a little crazy, I'm grateful that we didn't end up going that way. I'm grateful that there was a bigger plan in place for us. So just trust that you do have support when you reach out to people like your mentors, and if you're in the DoorGrow Mastermind, there are so many resources for you, including property managers who are in the exact same spot that you are in. [00:12:56] Sarah: They've been there. They've done that. They've experienced everything. So leverage the resources that you have available to you. Know that there's support and know that everything is unfolding exactly the way it's supposed to for you in this exact moment. And you will have your breakthrough. The only time that you won't have your breakthrough is if you quit. [00:13:14] Sarah: See, and now we're done.  [00:13:15] Jason: Good words. Good stuff, Sarah. All right.  [00:13:18] Sarah: All right. We're going to go to bed now.  [00:13:20] Jason: Yeah. Get some sleep.  [00:13:22] Sarah: Yep.  [00:13:22] Jason: So until next time, to our mutual growth. Hope you all crush it. Bye, everyone. [00:13:27] 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!  [00:13:54] Jason: 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.

Even with all of the property management software and tools breaking onto the scene lately, it seems that some entrepreneurs are still identifying gaps they could potentially fill… In today's episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with Eric Nelsen of Walkthroo to talk about a new maintenance solution in development for property managers and vendors. You'll Learn [03:36] What is Walkthroo? [08:43] Developing Software and Utilizing AI [16:52] Getting Time Back with User-Friendly Tools [23:02] Get in Touch with Walkthroo Tweetables  ” It's a lot easier to make changes to software when you're smaller and you're getting things started and you're doing it in the right way.” “ Time is probably the biggest benefit we provide.” “ Vendors in a lot of situations end up being the eyes, ears and hands for the property manager.” “ User experience is a big deal when designing software.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: It's a lot easier to make changes to software when you're smaller and you're getting things started and you're doing it in the right way. Once it turns into a giant beast and it's old, then it's really difficult.  [00:00:11] Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. DoorGrow property managers 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. [00:01:12] Now let's get into the show. And today I'm hanging out with Eric Nelson of Walkthroo. Eric, welcome to the DoorGrow Show.  [00:01:21] Eric: Thanks, Jason. Glad to be here.  [00:01:23] Jason: So Eric I would love to first get into your background. And my wife's chiming in saying I need to remember to promote DoorGrow live today, so I'll just do that right now real quick, and then we'll get to you, Eric. So if you are a property manager and you're watching this make sure you get tickets to DoorGrow Live like this is the most contribution focused, holistic property management conference in the industry. [00:01:44] We do things very differently. "There's heart" is kind of the feedback we get from others. People cry at our events. Like it's really awesome. It's going to be at the Kalahari resort here in Round Rock, Texas. And get your tickets right now. They go up in price over time. So head on over to DoorGrowLive.Com and get your tickets and be there. We've got sponsors. We've got cool speakers. It's going to be awesome. And DoorGrow magic is there. You're going to learn about growing your business from Sarah and myself and we'll help you out. All right, cool. Shameless plug inserted. [00:02:20] Now, Eric, I would love to get into your background. [00:02:23] You know, we hung out briefly in in Austin you came out and got to know each other a little bit, but I want my audience to get to know you share a little bit about How you kind of got into entrepreneurism, how you got into this. So tell us a little bit about your background.  [00:02:37] Eric: Yeah, sure. Sure. I grew up in Houston, Texas kind of came up through the finance world. So I spent about 10, 15 years in finance, went to grad school at Rice in Houston, and I just couldn't walk down the finance hallway. I saw the entrepreneurial professors down a different hallway, really wanted to kind of do my own thing. [00:02:55] So you know, stayed in finance for a couple more years and got into the pharmacy business. And through that business, I got exposed to IT technology and building software to kind of run our pharmacies and improve our ops and, and run those companies. And then a good friend of mine in Shreveport Springs, Texas was is a general contractor and said he works with these property managers and they, he does a lot of maintenance for rentals. [00:03:20] And he said, "yeah, Eric, I want to take on more business, but I can't keep track. There's so many little jobs. There's so much communication going on, text, emails, phone calls. You've got a software background. Can you help me?" And so that's, what's really exposed me to the property management industry and kind of started me on this path. [00:03:36] Got it. All right. So let's get into talking a little bit about Walkthroo and what it is. And it's, it's "walk T-H-R-O-O. So tell us a little bit about Walkthroo and what is it? What does it do?  [00:03:52] Yeah. So Walkthroo is, it's a really kind of a mindset and approach to the business and the underlying core is as much as accounting and tenant screening and even inspections, that software, those tools have grown, you know, with technological advances and whatnot. [00:04:13] If you really look at what we think is one of the four main pillars of property management is the maintenance, that hasn't grown. I mean, if you look back 10 years ago you really couldn't get multiple bids to do any work. If you look back 10 years ago, you couldn't pull up on your screen and compare two different bids. [00:04:29] 10 years ago, you couldn't split charges on an invoice between a tenant and owner. And you look today, fast forward 10 years, and I would say You know, 90- 95 percent of the platforms, you still cannot do those things. Well, when my partner brought me into this, you know, first he wanted me to help him with his, you know, just his construction company, but we quickly realized the problem wasn't him. [00:04:52] It was the property managers he was working with and the inefficiencies that came with the way they handle maintenance. So right out of the gate within a month. We switched that mantra. We're going to work to help property managers. And so that's really been what Walkthroo's focus has been the last three years. [00:05:09] And we really just, again, within the first three months we can get multiple bidders, we can split charges. And so it just showed me right away that it's not for a lack of technology or, you know, lack of know how even. It's just when you look at these software platforms and these operating systems, they just have bigger fish to fry. [00:05:27] They, you know, they all agree we should be able to hire multiple bidders with a couple clicks, but we're going to spend time doing X. So I can't explain it, but again, within the first six months, we had all these features built. And so now we're coming up on three years. We're really looking to round out the platform and keep growing. [00:05:45] Jason: Okay. So besides doing multiple bids and splitting charges, what would you say Walkthroo is? Like, what is, what does it accomplish?  [00:05:53] Eric: So we're going to be a full operating system for property managers. We started backwards. I spoke with the former CEO of Buildium post sale to real page. [00:06:03] And he told me flat out, "we did a lot of great things." I think they were in 19 countries at the time. He's like, "but I'll be honest here. We never figured out maintenance. And so if that's where you're starting, you know, good on you. Good luck." And so we started with maintenance and we built our platform around maintenance. [00:06:18] We've recently added inspections. And so we'll keep growing. So Walkthroo will be A full suite of operating suite for property managers. Currently, we're not there yet, I'm going to go through a couple of rounds of raising money. Currently, we're a maintenance tool. People can use our platform. And we also provide maintenance services still. [00:06:39] So that's, that's, that's kind of what we do today. And the third leg, which just launched, is, and this is probably the most unique feature of what we're building, every other maintenance tool or platform or operating platform out there has property manager and they invite people in and the people have to learn how to use your system and whatnot. We actually sell our software straight to contractors. [00:07:02] So they're using it independent of property management They're using it to paint houses, do handyman jobs around around their cities, and so we're building this network where property managers will be on Walkthroo, the contractors are on Walkthroo, and it's just a simple connection and you don't have, you know, the training and, you know, as a vendor ourselves the last few years, I've been through some trainings to use different systems and I can imagine. It's can like a painter, you know, in downtown Austin that has two employees trying to figure out all these platforms and how to work with these clients. So we're, our goal is to really simplify all that for all the stakeholders.  [00:07:39] Jason: Got it. So it sounds like Walkthroo, you're building this from the ground up. [00:07:43] You're building it as a tool to support and help based on what business owners actually need in property management. You started with one of the biggest challenges, which is maintenance. You're now adding inspections, you're adding other things. And the goal, the roadmap is to make it a full suite that helps maybe a better property management back office or software solution. [00:08:05] So the next big piece is then I'm sure on the roadmap somewhere is accounting and, tenant portals, owner portals, so they can see statements and submit the maintenance request, maybe like all of this kind of stuff. And so yeah, and I don't, I think that there's, there hasn't been a lot of innovation. [00:08:23] We've seen Rentvine come out recently. And it was born kind of out of a lot of complaints people were having about Appfolio. Appfolio was kind of born out of a lot of complaints people were having about maybe Buildium and Propertyware. Right. Right. And so, you know, when software is born out of complaints, you know, of different tools, yeah, it's going to be better than that tool, but it is interesting to start from the ground up building around the needs of and supporting the property manager and the work that they're doing. It'll be very interesting to see where you guys end up and what's kind of the timeline for all of this? [00:08:55] Eric: Well, you know, it depends on fundraising, right? So it's expensive, especially, you get into the accounting engines and a lot of that. There's a lot of costs involved. So we're hoping in the next You know, 12 to 18 months, we'd have a product out of, you know, for small property managers to run their business off our platform. [00:09:12] Jason: That's pretty fast. That's really the goal right now. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And it sounds like you guys move quickly. You know. It's a lot easier to make changes to software when you're smaller and you're getting things started and you're doing it in the right way. Once it turns into a giant beast and it's old, then it's really difficult. [00:09:30] Like some of the older maintenance software companies I'm sure they're toying with the idea. Like, should we just rebuild from scratch or throw all this away? Or do we just work this until this horse dies, you know? And so that's always the challenge with software. [00:09:46] And then adoption is always a big challenge. So getting people to use something new or to change to something else. And a lot of times it's easier to get the smaller guys and the smaller companies to make changes. And the big companies are usually watching the little guys make all the mistakes or test stuff out or see. [00:10:04] And then they stand back to wait to see who the winners are. So...  [00:10:08] Eric: yeah, yeah. And thankfully I've got some experience on our side. My partner, Travis, he before he got into construction, him and his dad ran a small microscope specialized software company they sell it to universities. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but they could like take a laser and look into this, you know, the elemental makeup of a molecule. [00:10:26] It was really, really specialized, but that was exactly where he came from. He's like, yeah, you could go with Hitachi or a big Japanese brand, but you can't get them on the phone. You know, like you said, they've, they've done good. They've built so big, but now that's a hindrance. And we're in the same path. [00:10:40] You know, we didn't have splitting the owner and tenant charges, but you know, after talking to a few clients and a few property managers, that was just a common, very common thing. And I said, "well, let's just build it." Well, we're small or nimble, you know, we can, we can get away with that. [00:10:53] So we're going to take that same approach as we go through the accounting side of things, you know, and just interviewing property managers and listening to the industry and saying, Hey, my background is finance and operations. And so, you know, when I met you, something you brought up a lot was transforming lives and, you know, kind of making people enjoy their work and that's something I don't see. When we launched this tool. We decided to launch it internally two years ago. So we haven't really been selling Walkthroo, we've been using it ourselves. We currently manage Over 250 jobs in nine states. And so I talked to more maintenance coordinators and property managers every day and a lot of them could be happier. [00:11:35] So as we build this out, we want these tools to allow some sort of automation and allow people to focus on growing doors and, you know, and doing other things that are more beneficial versus banging their head against walls.  [00:11:49] Jason: Sure. Yeah. I know property management business owners would much rather spend their time focusing on scaling their business than dealing with all the the nitty gritty day to day challenges and difficulty in all the tools that they're dealing with. [00:12:04] So Eric, we're in the middle of this AI revolution and you're like right in the middle of building this tool as we're coming into this new AI revolution where there's just tons of software just coming out. And people can create tools and software a lot more easily and their AI is helping them. [00:12:22] And then everyone's trying to integrate AI. And then you see all these companies that are dinosaurs. They're trying to strap chat GPT on the side of their crazy rollercoaster. And like, you know, say now we have AI. And so how's AI kind of tie into you guys, you know, getting Walkthroo built out? [00:12:43] Eric: Yeah, great question. We've got a roadmap for it. We don't have anything integrated yet. I think it's, it's too early, but you know, my background is really improving operations efficiencies. And so once we have this tool built out, then we will again, deploy AI where it makes sense. Like you said, it's a buzzword. [00:13:03] People will say everything is aI generated. It's like, no, that's just a search function, but call it AI. And so we, you know, we know most of the data. I'm not well tuned on the accounting yet, but definitely on the maintenance side, we know what data and what decisions are being made every day because again, we've lived that life and we're living it now we're doing jobs. [00:13:24] And so we will bring in AI kind of as we roll out the full suite, you know, I'm not sure to be perfectly honest. I don't know if it's going to be a heavy lift. I mean, again, it really comes down to the operations of the business and work and we see efficiencies and you know, there's some decisions you want eyes on, you know, you want, you want human interaction and others are a little more mundane task. [00:13:45] And so we, we are definitely have that in the playbook but I, at this point, you know, our plan is not to have this fully automated AI, you know, software, it's going to be just a much cleaner, easier tool to use and AI will be obviously just a natural component of that. [00:14:01] Jason: Got it. I mean, I think that makes sense. A lot of people start, you know, thinking, Oh, let's make AI do everything. But I think, I think it probably does make a lot more sense to make sure that the tools and systems are working for humans and they're working the right way first. And then AI create some leverage now that this is working well. [00:14:21] And I think that goes for how business owners should implement technology in general is you first do the process manually, and then you start to look for points of leverage and where can I leverage tech, where could a tool like Walkthroo facilitate what I'm doing now or help move things forward? So who's your current target audience? [00:14:39] Like, who are the people listening to this podcast that you think should reach out to Walkthroo to get an assessment on their current maintenance situation?  [00:14:49] Eric: Yeah. I mean, we've talked to everyone from PMI to sole proprietors to self managers. So I would say our sweet spot is probably property managers with, you know, 200 to 500 doors. [00:15:02] Seems to be small enough where the data is not overwhelming. They're doing a lot of work, I feel from what I've seen personally, and so working with Walkthroo helps some of that. And people can work with us in different ways. We some people just use our software. You know, we, If we can, if we can manage jobs across nine states, truly, you know, we know people can manage jobs in their own town or their own state and some of them just hire us as a, they just have us on their preferred vendor list, you know, we obviously I don't have staff in nine states, so I use my tool to manage jobs and manage vendors and the third way people can access and partner with us Is we come on as your maintenance coordinator, you know, we'll use their vendors, their top vendors, let us manage it. [00:15:43] One question I always ask property managers, not surprisingly, the answer is usually similar is, you know, "have you ever logged in as a vendor to whatever system are you using?" [00:15:51] " Well, why would I do that?" It's like, well, yeah, you probably wouldn't think of it, but I recommend it because you know, it's, it's one of those tasks. It's important, but it's also been done since the dawn of property management, I give someone a job, they go do it. But if you, if you're using tools, I recommend logging in as that contractor and seeing what they're seeing. And, oh, this is why it's hard to communicate because I can't upload anything or I can't text or, you know, whatever, whatever it may be. [00:16:20] So the maintenance coordinator role is something we've been taking on more and more where it's like, yeah, you give us your favorite painters and handyman, and we'll either API into your system, or you just send your tenants our way. You know, we structured any way that works best for our clients and the, let us do the dispatching, you know, all the status checks. [00:16:39] I mean, you know, it's just a constant barrage of phone calls every Monday morning on where we're at. And of course, Sunday night we send out reports so we don't have to get those calls. Those are the three ways that property managers can work with us currently.  [00:16:52] Jason: What, what are the results that people that start working will Walkthroo tend to notice or what sort of the changes that you're creating for these business owners.  [00:17:02] Eric: It's time. Time is probably the biggest benefit we provide. You know most I just mentioned the Monday check ins or daily check ins most maintenance tools that I've seen in, by the way, the other way that we know our, our tool is is well built, it's acting and being a vendor for the last three years. [00:17:21] I've logged into all the other tools. You know, when a property manager sees Walkthroo, yeah, they say Oh, Eric, yeah, we're always looking for a new painter. Here's our login to our system. Great. So immediately we take notes and, and figure out what's, what's wrong, but the time component I would say is probably the, the most we hear back on, on the biggest benefit and then most systems will have status indicators, maybe something's in progress. [00:17:44] We've got over 20 statuses. Are we waiting on the contractor to finish the work? Are we waiting on the tenant to accept the schedule and confirm it? Are we waiting on the after pictures to come in. I mean, there's all these nuanced steps that I think historically again, bigger companies are busy, but coming from at it from fresh from outside the industry, it was like, well, this is important to know if I know that I'm waiting on the tenant to confirm a schedule, I don't need to waste my time calling the contractor, ask what's going on. [00:18:14] And so those, that's a little microcosm of. How we built our system and also just a, again, just the workflow. I mean, I was shocked. None of the systems I've used since I've been in property management, offer me a way to do a change order. Very simple, very common request. And I have to like make a phone call or send an email. [00:18:32] And it's just time, time, time. So we make all that click, click, click.  [00:18:37] Jason: For the listeners. Explain a typical change order sort of situation.  [00:18:41] Eric: Leaky faucet. We've got a leaky faucet. We want somebody to go check it out. Contractor shows up on site, looks at a leaky faucet, and says, yeah, this faucet's leaking here. [00:18:51] I can fix that. But also, it created mold and damage all behind it. All under the counter. We've got to rip all these counters out. Well, that's not what the contractor was there sent to do. It's definitely not approved without, you know, anyone signing off on that. So he's got to communicate back to the property manager, "Hey, there's a much bigger issue here." [00:19:11] And so in the industry, it's, you know, typically referred to as a change order. And so now the contractor usually sits and waits and says, okay, I'll, I'll wait for the property manager to talk to the owner. And see if they want me to rip off this cabinet and do all this extra work. You know, I'm just, you know, I'm just a contractor. [00:19:28] Can I explain what I see? So now we're in a waiting game, right? So a week later, property manager boss comes in and says, "what's going on on one, two, three Smith street?"  [00:19:36] Jason: Yeah.  [00:19:37] Eric: "Oh, well, there was a problem."  [00:19:38] "Okay. What's going on now?" [00:19:40] "I don't know. Oh, it looks like, I think we're waiting for the owner to give us the green light to do the new repairs" [00:19:46] and so you can, you can step back and realize how that can. And you add that times 50 jobs or 100 jobs and it starts, it really adds up. So again, the way we built our system was to really eliminate a lot of that excess time. And where are we in this maintenance process? And just put it on the dashboard. [00:20:03] Just like, you know, many other things in life now. Put it in front of my face, so I know where all my jobs are and all my maintenance tasks are located.  [00:20:11] Jason: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure that's a challenge, like people discovering new work when they go out to do work. And there's also the issue a vendor goes out to do work and then they notice other stuff they think the property manager should be aware of. [00:20:25] And yeah, I mean, vendors in a lot of situations end up being the eyes, ears and hands for the property manager, so.  [00:20:32] Eric: Yeah, actually that's, that's why we built our own inspection tool. You know, we see everything else that's out there, but a lot of it's not connected. It's, you know, it's separate tools. So I've got a system that does this and does that. [00:20:45] So we tell our contractors, it's in our app, which I think there might be two or three other maintenance platforms, but not many that actually have an app in the app store for the vendor. So again, I challenged property managers to log into whatever system they're using as a vendor. And you'll probably see it's not the easiest thing to use or communicate with. [00:21:05] Well, we turned that upside down and. We've got an app live in the app store. Contractors can download it. So when they're doing work for us, it's super easy. They're on their phone. So we added an inspection tool and said we're going to require you to do, if it's vacant, to do a full inspection. And we just provide that as a free service, like, hey, in case, in case you or the owner missed something, we happen to notice these other 10 items that you didn't want us to fix, but here's some pictures and a report, and so again, like, just to your point, we know we're the eyes and ears a lot of time, you know, at the property, so anything we can do to capture all that data and get it back to the property manager. [00:21:43] We think so it's a win for everyone.  [00:21:45] Jason: Yeah, I love that So, I mean historically that's been a big complaint about some of the property management maintenance coordination tools out there is that the getting vendors to use it the adoption of vendors has been like real difficult and maybe it's Just your from your experience. [00:22:02] Maybe they're just not very good for the vendors through for their experience. It's just not a great experience. So user experience is a big deal when designing software. And it sounds like you guys have kind of designed this from the ground up to make sure that the vendors are going to have a good experience using it. [00:22:17] Eric: Absolutely. You know, again, we, you know, we're, we're signed on as preferred vendor across, across nine states. And so it's, you know, it's our insurance, our butts on the line if the jobs aren't getting done. So we figured out very quickly, we cannot make this difficult for this contractor in Florida that doesn't know Eric from Dripping Springs, Texas. [00:22:36] So let's make the tool super easy. And that's exactly what we did. And so we've had... oh, I would say over three years, I think maybe three or four times we've had to coach somebody through how to use our maintenance tool.  [00:22:48] Jason: Really? Sometimes vendors are old school. [00:22:49] They're not the most tech savvy. They're, they're using physical tools, you know, but yeah. And so that says a lot that it's pretty intuitive or easy for them to figure out.  [00:22:59] Eric: Yeah, that was a big focus for us right out of the gate.  [00:23:02] Jason: Got it. Okay, cool. Well, for those that are, like, hearing about this, or a little bit interested in this, is there anything else they usually have questions about that we didn't touch on, or that they should know about Walkthroo? [00:23:14] Eric: Let's see, not really. I mean, I think we covered most of it. Again, our goal is to really provide more time. I just, we see so much wasted time, you know, in the maintenance process. Obviously, we're going to carry that on through the rest of the modules and operating software, but our goal is to eliminate that time and give it back to property managers and really allow them to, like you said, I know they'd much rather growing doors and making connections and using their time more wisely. [00:23:39] So, yeah. If we can save them hours a week that's really, really our goal.  [00:23:45] Jason: Got it. Okay. Well, it sounds like you guys focus on simplicity. You focus on making these work. How can people get in touch with Walkthroo?  [00:23:55] Eric: Yeah, you can go to our website. It's www.walkthroo.com . You can also send an email over directly to me or my team. My email is eric@thewalkthroo.com and if you want to just send it to our team, it's work orders@thewalkthroo.com.  [00:24:21] Jason: Got it. So it's 'the Walkthroo' and through is T-H-R-O-O. Okay. All right. Everyone listening, go check that out. [00:24:30] Eric, appreciate you being here on the DoorGrow show and hanging out with us. And I'm looking forward. We'll have to have you come back on once you guys have added some new features and it sounds like you guys are pretty aggressive at doing that.  [00:24:44] Eric: Absolutely. Thanks, Jason. Appreciate the time. Good seeing you.  [00:24:46] Jason: Good seeing you too. [00:24:47] All right. For those of you that are looking to grow your property management business or you're struggling, check us out at doorgrow. com. We would love to help you. We are getting amazing results with our clients. And so if you want to get from 0 to 100 doors, from maybe 100 to 200 doors, or you wanted to go from 200 to 500 doors, Or from 500 doors to a thousand doors, we can help you at each of these stages and each of these sticking points to grow and scale your business rapidly and to get the right stress free ops and systems in place so that you are able to do this without making your life worse personally. [00:25:21] And so check us out at doorgrow. com. And until next time everybody to our mutual growth, bye everybody. [00:25:28] 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!  [00:25:54] 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.

Those who listen to this show likely either manage or invest in rental properties. There are several different types of real estate to choose from, but have you ever considered self-storage units? In today's episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with the “OG” of self-storage real estate investing, Scott Meyers to talk about an opportunity to invest in real estate without the common challenges of residential properties. You'll Learn [01:22] Switching from residential investment properties to storage units [08:35] Investing in self-storage without the management [12:15] Pros and cons of self-storage [14:51] Self-storage education Tweetables “When you have just a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” “Be honest with yourself, and sometimes the best cook in the world can't fix a broken recipe.” “Once you get behind in habitational real estate and rental real estate in general, you know, it takes double the effort to get caught back up again.” “The more valuable you are to your property management business the less valuable your property management business is to everybody else.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Scott: Self-storage really found me instead of me finding self-storage. Which I just felt it's a simple, predictable business model that you can replicate over and over again without as many moving parts and that human factor.  [00:00:11] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. [00:00:28] DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. [00:01:09] Now let's get into the show. All right. So. I'm hanging out here with Scott Meyers. Welcome Scott.  [00:01:18] Scott: Thanks. And so good to see you again. How are you?  [00:01:20] Jason: Good. Good. It's good to have you. So, why don't we get into your background, how you kind of into this, but Scott, you're a self storage investment expert. Is that fair to say? [00:01:33] Scott: That's fair to say. They call me the OG in self storage now. And I guess I can step into that role.  [00:01:38] Jason: All right. The OG, the original gangsta. All right. So tell us a little bit how you got into this.  [00:01:44] Scott: So like many people got into real estate by buying one single family rental house. Of course, this is a back a little ways now back in 1993, I bought a single family house. with an assumable VA mortgage on it. So I took out a home equity loan from my own home and bought this one, no money down, just like Carleton Sheets, the other OG in the real estate space taught me how to do. And so I bought that house, we rehabbed it to refinance it, rented it out. [00:02:11] So the BRRRR method before everybody called it the BRRRR method. And then we went out and bought two more. And then that turned into four, six, eight, and my wife and I got married along the way and brought my wife into this hobby. I was working for a fortune 500 company at the time, and this was really just to supplement retirement until it kind of took on a life of its own. [00:02:29] And that was because in 1999 with the dot com crash, when all of our tenants were then able to buy a house shortly after that, because the presidential administration at the time reinstituted the Community Reinvestment Act and allowed anybody who could basically fog a mirror to buy a house while all our tenants left and they were doing so. [00:02:49] And so at that time, we were now rehabbing a second time so that we could sell our houses just to be able to keep up with what the market trend was at the time. Well that just about broke us. And so we decided then to get into multifamily and all we needed to do was get some economies of scale, work a little harder, work a little smarter, and we'll make this all happen. [00:03:08] But really what I found is that we just had more doors, we had more tenants, we had more toilets. And to be honest with you, Jason you know, we made a lot of money in residential real estate and growing that side of the business. I mean, we were very big, we got up to just shy of 450 doors. But I realized that I don't think I was cut out for this. [00:03:24] I understood the math, you know, the real estate math and everything that went into it. But I found even though we had property managers and property management companies, I was finding that I was becoming less loving of my fellow man and women, because they were destroying our properties and stealing from us, as well as our contractors and some of our staff. [00:03:40] And so at that point, I began to look around the landscape and, you know, we love real estate because of all the reasons to love real estate. It appreciates, we can depreciate it. We can borrow money to buy it. And then our clients pay down our basis. I mean, there's no other investment like that. So as I looked at the landscape and real estate, that really only left parking lots and self storage if I really didn't like the tenant and toilet business. [00:04:01] So. I looked into storage and loved what we saw in terms of the fundamentals of the historical, the track record of performance of the asset class. And it was right under my nose all the time. It's just this ugly, you know, stepchild of commercial real estate that nobody was really talking about. So I researched it and spent a lot of time understanding the nuances bought my first self storage facility in a partnership. [00:04:22] And then yeah, the light bulb went off and recognize after owning it from the operation standpoint, that It was truly what everybody had said that it was. And what we found is it was all the benefits of real estate without the hassles of tenants and toilets and trash. And so we began simultaneously selling off our houses and our apartments and then going forward into self storage. [00:04:41] And here we are today at about just shy of 5 million square feet of self storage, 28, 000 doors nationwide and growing. And then along the way, also built a sizable education and consulting and mentoring and coaching and event business that only not only teaches people how to get into the business, but also became a funnel, a conduit for a lot of partnerships and a lot of deal flow into our organization. [00:05:01] So that's either the long winded version on a podcast or the short winded version however you want to look at how we got started in the business.  [00:05:07] Jason: Yeah, love it and qualify yourself help everybody understand like where are you at right now with storage and rentals. I mean you got some impressive numbers. [00:05:17] Scott: Yeah, so we're sitting at about we've done over 5 million square feet We're sitting at about three and a half just maybe three and three quarters million square feet right now assets under management So we're right now jason, we're basically a syndication company where we're a financial services company that raises capital and layers that on top of debt and then deploys it in nothing but self storage. [00:05:37] And so many of these projects, these partnerships, these joint ventures in our funds, they have a shelf life and they expire in four to five years because that's when we can capitalize and pull our chips off the table, if you will. And we have a capital event by way of sometimes a refinance, but usually a sale of the property or properties within that fund. [00:05:55] And then we just go out and buy more. So it ebbs and flows when some are going out the door, we have more projects coming in the door as well. I only own two residential properties. One of them is an Airbnb and the other one is the one that I live in. And that's it. Everything else is 100 percent self storage at this point. [00:06:10] Jason: Got it. How many units of storage do you represent then?  [00:06:14] Scott: Yeah, so 28 to 29, 000 overall is what we've invested in and we're sitting at about 20, between 20, 000, 21, 000 right now in asset center management. Awesome.  [00:06:25] Jason: Wow. Okay. So for those listening that are in residential property management, and they're listening to you what would you say to them? [00:06:34] Like, maybe there's some of them that they're like, "man, I don't want to deal with toilets, tenants and trash anymore." And, you know, "I'm starting to love humans less. And I love real estate," but what's kind of your message?  [00:06:49] Scott: You know, in the education side of our business, Jason, of course, when there's a room full of folks interested in self storage, it's really easy to say that you know, I think everybody should have a self storage facility, one in their portfolio, if you're in real estate and, you know, all roads lead to self storage eventually, because I think everybody gets to that place where they do get frustrated and it could be just a day. [00:07:06] It could be, you know, in terms of, "wow, that was a whole lot coming at us." But it doesn't mean that, you know, my recipe is the catch all, you know, when you have just a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I'm not saying that anybody should go out and do what I have done because we made a lot of money you know, on the residential side and commercial multifamily. [00:07:21] I just found for me, that this self storage really found me instead of me finding self storage. Which I just felt it's a simple, predictable business model that you can replicate over and over again without as many moving parts and that human factor. And so for a knucklehead like me, I think it was the perfect fit to be able to go out and just master this practice and that business model and the standard operating procedures. And then just at scale and at speed go out and just make a go of it. And we grew really fast and never really get over our skis. It was just it's a manageable model as well. And so it just fit for myself. But I would say Jason, when business gets so difficult that it's just absolutely no fun anymore, and it's drudgery... I see many people doing it right now, they're just throwing good money after bad. Well, you know, be honest with yourself, and sometimes the best cook in the world can't fix a broken recipe. And if they find that is the recipe is your business model or just your business in general, then get help. [00:08:13] Or, you know, maybe it's time to take a look at some of their asset classes like self storage.  [00:08:17] Jason: So if somebody's an investor and they're wanting to get into this, there's probably a learning curve. There's probably potential pitfalls. So like, yeah, I've tried my Airbnb. That was kind of difficult. I didn't like having to mess with pricing constantly. Like maybe I should try self storage. I'm curious about what you would say to them and then, you know, if somebody's just an investor and they're just looking to just invest, but they're not wanting to really actually manage storage units, then what path would you recommend? [00:08:45] Scott: So sure. Two paths, but also some folks just take a one and end up achieving the same result. So if this is something that you're looking to do actively you know, of course, Jason, I own, you know, I run an education company. And so we're always going to tell you to get education because the cost of not, you know, you pay the dump tax. [00:09:03] And sometimes we've seen people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the dump tax. And that just means that they've gone out and they've watched a couple of videos read a book and all of a sudden they're experts in masters and this is commercial real estate. There's a lot of nuances to it, no matter what the asset class you pick within commercial real estate, but also because it's commercial real estate, there's lots of commas and zeros to profit from it, which is fantastic. [00:09:23] But also if you make a mistake. Those mistakes in underwriting and in other areas also come with commas and zeros behind them as well. And we've seen many a good investor that maybe it was a little prideful or maybe thought that, "Hey, this is an easy asset class compared to what I've been doing. You know, I can do this with one hand tied behind my back." And then they find out that this is an operating business on top of real estate. And there's more nuances to this and they need to dig in and understand what that looks like, because as you know, once you get behind in habitational real estate and rental real estate in general, you know, it takes double the effort to get caught back up again, and if that goes on for a quarter, sometimes people just can't recover. So, you know, we can go into all the reasons why and the mistakes that people have made, but I think just understanding you need to educate yourself. Now, if you're looking to do this passively, in other words, you don't want to take on the credit risk, you don't want to take on, say, the construction risk or a lease up risk of a turnaround or a development project then you can invest passively. [00:10:20] There's a number of REITs out there and we have funds and individual syndications and joint ventures that we do with folks where they come in as a limited partner. They still get equity. They still have ownership. They have a piece of ownership of this property. So they get the depreciation, they get a share of the cash flow, and then the profits upon the sale. [00:10:38] But they don't take on the lease up risk, the development risk, the risk of a project going south no matter what, and or have to go out and create a business, you know, and a team to be able to do so. And along the way, many folks, Jason, they start as passive investors either with one of our projects or others, and by, by just following along, you know, you get that education. [00:10:59] You know, we hold webinars once a quarter and we send out monthly reports and we send out updates as to what's happening with our projects. And so by def facto, our passive investors are getting an education and they earn while they learn the business.  [00:11:11] Jason: Got it. Earn while they learn. Like it. [00:11:15] And that's probably a better path to start out as is to first explore doing it passively to figure out should they jump in and do it more actively.  [00:11:24] Scott: I don't know better. That's not my decision to make. I think some folks, if they have a team in place, you know, they can make that pivot just by learning the business, but it just really depends on where they're at. [00:11:34] I would say that it's It's certainly the safest. And if you have a small amount of capital to set aside to invest in a project, that's the best way about doing it. Because once it comes time to do your own, it's going to take a larger chunk of capital to be able to do so unless you're raising private equity. [00:11:49] So you know I can say that is the best and probably is for most people, but not everybody.  [00:11:54] Jason: Got it. Yeah. Well, a lot of people listening already have some sort of business, a lot of them, they won't just throw it in, jump right into storage units, maybe. But I think a lot of them, it would resonate with them. [00:12:06] "Hey, then maybe this is another way to diversify my portfolio, another way to invest. I would love to do, try it out passively, and then maybe even get some education." for those that maybe heard the beginning of this and they're like, "Man, I don't have to deal with toilets, tenants, trash, and it's real estate. And it sounds so easy." What are some of the things that maybe they have a blind spot to? That somebody, you know, they would learn once they start doing this, it's not all, you know, stars and rainbows and roses with this as well.  [00:12:38] Scott: Right. So, you know, outside of the front end and the due diligence that needs to be done just to make sure that you've bought a solid property from an operational standpoint, which is what you're referring to, you know, what we found is that, you know, a million bucks, 5 million bucks goes a lot further, meaning you buy more doors you buy more square footage and it allows us more doors because these are metal boxes on concrete slabs and they're not, you know, multifamily that has drywall and plumbing and, you know, a lot of HVC, it just goes further. [00:13:03] So that means that there are more units to be able to keep track of. You know, the good news is there's software and we do have property management companies and property managers to handle that and a lot of it is automated, but at the end of the day, you know, it's a large amount of units and a large amount of rental tracking that needs to be done to make sure that the dollars come in the door. On the flip side of that, just because I am a bright side up, kind of guy, you know, we have the ability with our leasing structure within self storage that, you know, it's a 30 day lease automatically renewable. And so anytime that we want to raise the rates, we don't have to wait. It's not an anniversary. It's not an annual lease. It is a month. And so that means on month seven, if we see that the market is changing and the demand is higher and there's a whole lot of development going on, then we can raise the rates in seven months. [00:13:46] We can do it in four months. We can do some nuisance increases in between, you know, either way, and we're very flexible when it comes to that. But then also, the good news is even if people do fall behind in the rent, you know, we have the ability to, or we have the power behind us of the lien laws instead of habitational or versus habitational real estate in which you have tenant and toilet courts. And so when I used to walk out of there, I had a pink piece of paper and very little ability to be able to get my money back and to be able to you know, execute on getting that the money back in the door. [00:14:18] But with self storage and the lien laws. We can put a lock on their unit, lock them out and we don't have to go to court within 60 or 90 days depending upon the state, my manager or an auction company will cut the lock off and open it up for bids on the date that we have an auction and I can recoup my back rent to my late fees and, you know, we are the judge and jury so we don't have to wait. [00:14:36] I know you asked for the pitfalls but, you know, the good side is that you know, even though there's a lot of units to manage the, just because of the nature of the industry and the safeguards that we have in place, it's much, much easier and simpler to handle.  [00:14:48] Jason: Awesome. Cool. Well, yeah, this is very informative. [00:14:51] Tell us a little bit about your education company, what you do there and and maybe how people can get in touch if they're curious.  [00:14:58] Scott: So on the education side, you know, when I got into business, you know, there wasn't an education company out there. There wasn't anybody that I could go to to learn the, you know, the A to Z to the nuts and bolts of the business. [00:15:10] I could certainly go to the trade shows and some of the industry events and I can learn about doors and how to build these facilities and some of the, you know, the bolt on property management software. But there wasn't anybody teaching about the investment side of the business. And so, you know, we scraped as much as we could, you know, leaning on and building on the foundation that we had in commercial real estate already by owning multifamily and office buildings and warehouses. [00:15:30] But just digging into this business and talking to as many people as possible. And I hired a consultant to fill in the gaps and spend a day with him touring his facilities and others that he managed for other investors. And, you know, that's how we grew our you know, bank of knowledge and created our standard operating procedures, at least the foundation of it. [00:15:48] But then after we got into the business a little further down the path and buying facilities I used to run the Real Estate Investor Association here in Indianapolis. And we had 600 folks in the association. And about 300 of them wanted to know about self storage after they saw what we were doing. [00:16:04] And so we started holding workshops and then some of the agents that represent the national speakers in the industry, again, there wasn't a person speaking and experts on the industry. And so they contacted me and one of them assisted me in setting up presentations, the ability to sell tools and resources for folks, and then helped us to create a live events, and thus, our education industry was born. It was really just out of a, I guess, like any good entrepreneur, you see an opportunity in the marketplace and a hole to be filled, and we stepped in and filled that. And so it's evolved from just a home study system, which is, you know, that's such a guru, you know, term to use that what we developed, what we put together was a very extensive business plan with all the tools, the resources and links and software, you know, and everything you need to find, manage, purchase a self storage facility. And that is the name of our home study system. And then that evolved into live events, three day events, which is an immersive workshop and then also for folks that are looking for either one on one or a group coaching and mentoring, you know, begin offering that. And to this day, still offer that. And so we have you know, we're the nation's leading education company in the space. [00:17:14] We've taught more people how to get into the business and grow and scale the business and than anybody else out there in any other organization out there and still going strong at this is what we'd love to do is, you know, we love to take people from zero to 55 miles an hour in storage. [00:17:26] And then in our mastermind and in our other areas, we like to take them from 55 to a hundred and build partnerships and do syndications with them as well. Awesome.  [00:17:35] Jason: Yeah. Sounds very much like our goal here at DoorGrow for the residential space. So what's the name of your education company?  [00:17:44] Scott: Self Storage Profits is the name of the education company. [00:17:46] SelfStorageInvesting.com is the website for all the tools and the resources, a ton of free information, pull downs, white papers, a whole lot to not only just dip your toe in the water, but really to help you get started, and then anything else that you would want or need with regards to coaching, mentoring, attending our live events, it's all located on that page as well, including access to our passive investments as well. [00:18:11] Jason: Very cool. Awesome. Cool. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show, hanging out with us here on the DoorGrow show. It sounds really interesting. I think there's a lot of our clients that are involved in different types of management. And so this may be another one that everybody should maybe take a look at that could be interesting. I think it's fantastic. Or as to do management, you know directly so very cool. Scott, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you.  [00:18:39] Scott: My pleasure, Jason. Good to see you again  [00:18:41] Jason: Good to see you. All right So if you are a property management entrepreneur and you're dealing with frustrations, you can go start a storage unit business as well. So appreciate Scott for being on the show. If you would like our help in cleaning up your business so that you don't hate it and getting you out of that first level of exit of doing the frontline work and getting out of the next exit and the next exit until maybe eventually you decide to sell that business, we can help you with that because the more valuable you are to your property management business the less valuable your property management business is to everybody else. And what I find with clients is as we ascend them through these levels of exit, It becomes more and more business that they would enjoy keeping perhaps And so let's see if we can ascend you and get you past that first exit at least, maybe the next exit where you're out of managing the people in the team and you've got an operator and things are really smooth and so if you would like our help here DoorGrow reach out to us at DoorGrow.com And until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:19:45] 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!  [00:20:11] 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.

As business owners, we often mistakenly assume that micromanaging our teams will make them more effective and efficient. In today's episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert, Jason Hull sits down with award-winning real estate coach and industry influencer, Jo Oliveri to discuss how implementing automated workflows can revolutionize your property management business. You'll Learn [03:14] USA vs Australia for property management [07:03] Property management is stuck in the past [17:38] What is automation? [21:11] The importance of having good policy [31:24] Why your business needs a set of values [40:23] Implementing automated workflows and processes Tweetables “In some respects, we're struggling as an industry to change our mindset and have a fear of moving forward.” “When we use something manual, it's not logical. It becomes part of what a person feels like doing at that time.” “If you don't have your business founded on a very strong policy, then you're going to struggle when things go wrong.” “Out of policy becomes the promise that we can make, and we know that we can deliver on it.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jo: They say every leader is present even when they're not present. So you need to have that. And the only way to have it in property management is through your automated workflows that are built upon the logic that you created through your process.  [00:00:18] Jason: Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives. And you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently than you are a DoorGrow property manager. [00:00:38] DoorGrow property managers 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. [00:00:59] 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, founder and CEO of DoorGrow, Jason Hull. [00:01:18] Now let's get into the show. And my lovely guest today is Jo Oliveri. Welcome, Jo.  [00:01:25] Jo: Hello, Jason. How are you?  [00:01:28] Jason: Good. What time is it over there right now?  [00:01:30] Jo: I think it's about 7am in the morning. So we're a little ahead of you. It's Wednesday. We're in the future here.  [00:01:37] Jason: Yeah you're in the future. How's the future look? [00:01:39] Jo: The future in Brisbane is actually very bleak. It's a very wet day, which is unusual for Brisbane, but we need the rain so.  [00:01:46] Jason: Got it. Well, we're going to be chatting a little bit about about automation, about automating your team and processes a bit, but why don't you give people a little bit of background on yourself? [00:02:01] And how you kind of got into this.  [00:02:04] Jo: Yeah. Okay. Well, I've been around the industry in property management, I chose property management for 30 years, which seems like a long time when I say it, but I've been through the process of when they first introduced property management programs through to where we are today in technology. [00:02:22] And I've worked as a property manager right through to being the kind of like the creator of property management for one of the big international franchise groups until I was ready to launch my own business 15 years ago as a property management business coach and consultant and yeah, just feel blessed to be doing what I do every day because it's a great industry to be involved in.  [00:02:49] Jason: Awesome. So where do we start? [00:02:52] What do you think?  [00:02:53] Jo: Oh, well it's interesting when I say I started 30 years ago, I feel like we're still back in, you know, what we were doing 30 years ago, in some respects we're struggling as an industry to change our mindset and have a fear of moving forward. So it's quite interesting. [00:03:14] Jason: So. You've been back and forth between the United States and Australia involved in property management conferences, events. I've actually just for kicks been reading on my morning walks, the LPMA manuals or doc like books or whatever because I'm like, what do they got going on over there? And it seems like there are some notable differences. [00:03:35] It seems it's really interesting. I'm like, Oh, that's really weird. Why did they do stuff that way over there? So, but what have you noticed between the two countries, like what's kind of different in property management.  [00:03:46] Jo: It's an interesting question, because a lot of people think there is a big difference, but there's really not a lot of difference. [00:03:55] And I say that because I worked in the USA as vice president of a very large company over there in company management.  [00:04:03] Jason: Yeah. [00:04:04] Jo: And I really believe that in a lot of respects, the USA is way ahead of where we are here in Australia. But I think that probably the subtle difference is team structures. [00:04:18] We seem to focus more on property managers doing everything over here. And when I say here, I'm in Australia at the moment. Whereas in the U. S. they like to have like the breakaway roles, I call them. You know, someone focused on maintenance, someone focused on leasing. And yeah, a little bit more task orientated in the U. S.  [00:04:41] Jason: Got it. Okay. What I've noticed in my perception is that property management over there is almost always connected to a brokerage. That's the perception. Is that accurate? Or is it often that there are property management businesses that do not do real estate?  [00:05:00] Jo: Yes. I would say going back two decades, that was probably the case here. [00:05:05] But we are seeing a lot more entrepreneurial type business owners who start up as property management companies and as they grow, then what they're doing, they're losing management's to people selling. So as they grow, they're now adding in you know, like a sales service, which obviously makes sense. So yeah it has changed in the way they're doing it, but certainly when I started property management did belong to an brokerage. But you know, the, when I first started, I worked for a property management only company, which was very unusual back then.  [00:05:45] Jason: Yeah. I was particularly surprised by the growth strategies that I was reading the book. To me, it felt like they were a bit, I don't know, old school and I was like, man, why, but maybe there's just a lot more opportunity in the U S. One of the things that we have a big opportunity here is there's a lot of rental properties that are just not professionally managed. [00:06:07] Whereas it sounds like there's quite a high percentage are professionally managed in Australia.  [00:06:12] Jo: Yeah, I would say, you know, in Australia, we don't see the people who own big property portfolios, like personal property portfolios who become their own managers. So, you know, in the USA you see a lot of people who might own, you know, ten or more doors and they end up starting their own property management company, their own LLCs. [00:06:35] We don't see that In Australia you know, there's not a lot of people in Australia compared to the U. S. that have vast property, you know, holdings. We see more of the mom and dad or the mom and pop, as you would say over there, type investors in Australia that, you know, own one, maybe two properties. [00:06:57] So of course, most of those are managed through you know, a professional property management company.  [00:07:03] Jason: Got it. Yeah. Well, cool. Let's talk a little bit about the topic at hand. So we're going to talk about automated workflows in property management. And I did a webinar in the past talking about three levels of process documentation or of a process system in a property management business. [00:07:21] And my level one was just documentation. It was like google docs or something like that. Level two was checklist It was like Process St. or LeadSimple or some of these kind of tools and then level three was something like DoorGrow flow or Flussos which is It's basically the same thing. It's just Flussos, which is visual workflow. And we use that system and we've upgraded from checklist, which I've had a huge level, right? [00:07:54] First level is kind of like a Google, intranet back in the day when sites and then basically Google docs pretty much. And then and then we had some processes like in Basecamp and eventually we upgraded to Process St. And had that, and that was nice. I liked the software, but I had to do everything. [00:08:14] Like I had to always create the processes. Nobody else understood how the process were created, especially if they were complicated and now using visual workflow and using Flussos, it's been very intuitive. I don't have to create the processes. My team members all can figure it out and it's really like I jokingly say it's like Visio or flowchart software and something like Process St., like had a baby. [00:08:41] And so it really incorporates the best pieces of checklist and of documentation, but with visual workflow and it starts as a visual workflow, which is how everybody generally wants to create processes from the beginning. It's how we think process wise is like we create the boxes with the lines connecting things. [00:09:00] And so I found it to be very intuitive. So what have you noticed in companies in the U. S. and in Australia with their current process system and challenges that they're experiencing and then I'm curious about the contrast when they're switching to something like visual workflow.  [00:09:18] Jo: Yes. Yeah. And you know, there's a massive difference, but I think as a whole, the industry is still a little bit stuck in the old kind of like manual system. Whereas with automated workflow like DoorGrow Flow or Flussos, which, you know, is one in the same thing and it is the best system for property management, you create the logic in everything that we do. You know, when we use something manual, it's not logical. [00:09:46] It becomes part of what a person feels like doing at that time, or, you know, they might be focused on a task because someone is screaming the loudest to get something done. So, as a result, We're not working or focused working on the items within a task that we need to be working on at any given time. [00:10:08] So, you know, like the other thing with automated workflows is we see 24, 7, 365, all the tasks that we need to focus on exactly when we need to focus on. Whereas when you've got those paper checklists or even online checklists, we can move things around. You know, we can say, I don't feel like working on this at the moment. I'm going to go to this part of the flow. I'm going to look at that and your flow becomes illogical. Yes. So it's you know, it's interesting, the mindset that we're dealing with at the moment in the industry, because people like to do what they want to do. And they kind of like wanting to step past other steps because they don't like doing certain steps. [00:10:52] And a lot of the other workflow programs, you know, they allow people to bypass certain steps. And if you're doing that, it's not a proper workflow program. So, I think the industry is just struggling with understanding when they do a task, there is a lot of elements, a lot of actions and steps within every task. [00:11:15] And now we're seeing it. In front of us and people think, "I don't want to do that" or "I never do that," hence why we've had problems in the past  [00:11:24] Jason: Yeah, so steps get skipped, you know a lot of times in checklist systems or just project management type of systems where it's check boxes processes like the other challenges with those systems, it's always very linear it's like step one step two step three, but a lot of processes are more like: Step one, make a decision and based on the decision, go different ways and then maybe even split. So concurrently, one team is working on this and another person's working on this at the same time for efficiency is how we work in real life. [00:11:58] But in the linear checklist, we're waiting until somebody does the first steps and then it gets moves on to the next person. Or you have two people trying to attack the same checklist at the same time. So it just gets really messy. Using checklist and we would run into those issues, so then I had to create controls in my system so that my team would not skip steps. [00:12:18] So then they had to do things. And so then you have to create logic and then you have to make things show or hide based on whether it clicked. And like, there's all these, and so I had to get really nerdy to make things work really well in a checklist system. And it's still, once it got that complicated, if anything broke or was unclear, or somebody needed to alter the process. [00:12:39] I was the only person that could do it. I was the only person that understood what the process was supposed to be doing, because I built it. And if the process is old enough, I might even forget why I was doing things a certain way. So then I have to go back and kind of figure out, what was I trying to create? [00:12:57] Unless I actually created a visual map, or, you know, Visual flow chart in like Lucidchart or Visio or something and did that. And so I've loved being in Flussos. I love being able to even just create visual flows, and even if I'm not going to use them as a process, just creating the map. And i've mapped out my different growth engines for my business so I can pull it up and say, "this is how we get a customer. Here's what we do. Here's the steps. Here's one of our engines Here's another growth engine how we get customers" and so i've used it for other things as well because creating visual flows and everybody being able to see it and understand it creates a lot of clarity. And Sarah, my wife, she honestly believes technology is out to get her. [00:13:44] I don't know if there's anybody else listening to this podcast that like. She thinks technology is like trying to cause problems for her. It's confirmation bias, I'm sure. She's like, "see, look at this! The wifi is not working on my computer or this is not happening. And it's like being mean to me." [00:13:57] But she loves working inside of Flussos, like she loves being able to just drag and drop, move stuff around. She's our operator. She messes with all the processes, even though she's not generally fond of technology. That says a lot because the most difficult factor I've noticed when trying to implement or roll out new tools and things in our business or in any business with clients is adoption. Like it's really difficult to get people to adopt new tech unless it's really easy to use and really intuitive. And so that's one of the things i've really noticed is it's taken the burden off my shoulders. I create no processes. I don't do it! And I just tell my team members. They're like, "Hey, we noticed this. We need to change something". And I'm like, "cool, update the process." And they just do it. I don't have to be involved anymore, which is taking a big load off of my shoulders where I used to kind of think maybe I'm the smartest guy in the room and I'm the only guy that can do process, which is not the case. [00:14:54] I'm just nerdier than most of the people on my team, but having a tool where everybody else can create it makes it a lot easier and it's taken a big, big weight off my shoulders and it gives me that safety and certainty or security that I know because we have all of our processes in there, that if I lose somebody, we can put somebody in place right away, change the role of that person and they can start to use that process and just go through it and do it. And so it creates a lot of safety because we've had things like we've had team members like go on maternity leave. We have team members come back from maternity leave and then quit right away, you know and stuff like this and so it's nice to be able to have anybody on the team like be able to step in and just follow the flow and go through that and then while going through the flow they can see where they are In the process. [00:15:44] Jo: Yeah exactly. And, you know, like team members don't just leave, they could be away for the day. And if they're away for the day in property management, we've got timelines on everything and you create those timelines within Flussos or DoorGrow Flow. You put the timeline on when that particular action or step should be completed. [00:16:05] So, so what it means is it gives the business owner the opportunity to reassign that particular act or step to someone else, always completing the task within the given timeline and delivering on the promise that you made to your clients. There's no excuses of, "I'm sorry, Jo wasn't in this afternoon, so we didn't get it done." [00:16:28] You know? The company has a responsibility and an obligation to the clients to deliver on task as and when due, not on a person, on the company. So, yeah, you know, like when we look at checklists, I like to think of them as, you know, the old school signs and guardrails on the road, whereas our automation is like the magnificent satellite navigation that we have now. [00:16:54] It just guides you. It takes you there in the most you know, fastest, efficient way that you can get there. It gives you the opportunity as your business grows and you restructure roles that you can split those tasks and assign it to the relevant person. So there's no impact on growth as you scale up and grow the business. [00:17:17] It's just, it's the most logical thing for property management because what we do in property management is built on tasks. It's just task after task. So, you know, to me, it's the industry that, you know, really should have automated workflows. That's for sure.  [00:17:36] Jason: And by automation, there's a lot of buzzwords around this right now. [00:17:39] A lot of people think automation means that a robot's doing all the work. And so, but there's I think what we're talking about here is automating or making it so that your team members can follow the processes. And so the machine of the business becomes automated so that the team are more automated instead of doing it manually as you were talking about before. There's this myth kind of in the industry. There's maybe two myths. One I call the process myth. I've noticed this that a lot of businesses that are maybe You know 200 door +, they a lot of times fall prey to this myth that it doesn't matter what their team looks like, they can just go get the cheapest, most mediocre team members as long as they're dumb enough to follow a process, and I feel like that's not accurate like and so there's this process myth. [00:18:31] They think "I just need better processes," and a lot of times when i've dug into their businesses, I've also noticed though that companies that have amazing people and have really good teams, even if they have a lack of processes, there are processes in their heads and they care enough to make sure it's working And things work and the business works well, but i've yet to see businesses Is that are able to grow quickly, have a lot of success that overly micromanage and create endless amounts of processes and try to hire low dollar wage people to just do everything. [00:19:06] And the challenge there is that they still have to be the thinker and decision maker in a lot of instances. And so how do you look at processes versus humans making decisions? And so where's the decision making come in where you need somebody to think versus just follow a to do list and do tasks and be told what to do? [00:19:30] Jo: Yeah, well, to be able to make decisions, you have to have process because process is built on policy. So policy creates the protocol where you can make decisions. And there are things that come from left field every day in property management. And if you don't have a protocol that says "if this, then that," then people make decisions based on their own knowledge or. Perhaps fear of the situation that they're involved in and so potentially wrong decisions are made, delays are created, and so risk and mitigation is a result of that and liability. So if you don't have your business founded on a very strong policy, then you're going to struggle when things go wrong. [00:20:16] You'll struggle with growth because you start to become very reactive to everything that's going on. And when you've got policy, it provides that platform for being proactive in everything you do. There is, you know, deliberation and determination in every element of your business. And it removes that element of desperation that we see so many companies built upon. [00:20:42] You know, they feel losing a key member of staff. And I think if ever you've got that fear, then your business is not strong. You should never fear losing staff because the only constant in a business is the business owner. Everyone else will come and go. So if you fear losing any particular staff member, it means that you're not in control of your business. [00:21:05] Jason: It's job security for them, but it creates risk for you. Exactly. Exactly. Could you explain, you've spoken on this at one of our events and I thought it was really interesting, the difference between landlord tenant law and policy procedures process, like that sort of idea because I think a lot of property managers are like, "well, there's the law," but that's not always clear, right?  [00:21:30] Jo: The law is created, to me, by lawyers and therefore it's not black and white. It's gray So we have to interpret what the law says and there is some very strong guidelines in law as in, you know timelines for you know, issuing a breach or you know, notice to quit or anything like that. [00:21:51] So there is very strong timelines, but there's other things that we have to interpret legislation into our policy. And then when we've got policy, we can then create process and protocol should something happen. So an example of that is, you know, if we issue a pay or quit, and the owner is saying no, you know, like, "I don't want you to give that notice to my tenant. I want to give them a little bit of time to, you know, pay the rent." And then we're outside the guidelines of law. Then, you know, what have we got written into our policy should an owner say, "don't give my tenants you know, notice to pay or quit," or should an owner be saying, "no, I'm not going to do that maintenance on my property" when the tenancy agreement states that maintenance has to be done as does the management agreement. [00:22:44] So, you know, it's understanding all those things that do happen in property management or, you know, one that happens all the time is when managers do so much work on securing an applicant that should be approved for a property. A lot of work goes into that, showing the property, advertising the property, processing the application. And then we've got someone who is, you know, the star applicant and we can't get a hold of the owner. And what happens is property managers delay the process out of fear of making a decision because they can't get a hold of the owner, and then they lose that applicant. Now, you know, that's cost the company a lot of money and the owner has got extended periods of vacancy, whereas we should have a protocol in place that in the event that we can't contact the owner, we've had the discussion, you know, when the property is, knowing that it's going vacant to say, "if we can't contact you when we've got a an applicant that suits the criteria within that 24 hours, we will make a decision on your behalf because we know what you're looking for." But fear prevents people from making decisions. [00:24:02] And we shouldn't be like that. And the only reason why we're like that is because we don't have a strong policy. So, you know, don't build your business on legislation. You have to interpret that legislation into your policy and what you do to manage. That, you know, legislation.  [00:24:24] Jason: So it seems like there's kind of a process here, right? [00:24:27] So first people know and understand the legislation. They need to be clear on this and they need to be up and current on this. And then based on this legislation, they need to create rules internally for how we are going to go about doing business, how we're going to do things and we have these different policies in the business of how we're going to interpret the law or the legislation. Once we have these policies then we can start to create process around this so that we can follow our policies and achieve the good or desired outcomes that we're aiming for. Does this sound accurate?  [00:25:02] Jo: Absolutely spot on. Yes. Okay, exactly. Yes, right. [00:25:06] Jason: So what are some things that you notice, because you help a lot of business owners get their processes dialed in get some of these visual workflows mapped out, what's lacking a lot of times in their thinking about how to build a really good process? One of the things that really stood out to me in one of the previous calls as an example was setting expectations. Just setting expectations reduces a lot of extra unnecessary work, like, "Hey, tenant, we will let you know in a day that about this," instead of them following up multiple times asking you and then multiple phone calls and emails and stuff like this. And so just communicating clearly expectations of when you're going to communicate again seems like a really simple addition to a lot of processes that reduces a lot of extra unnecessary work and interruptions.  [00:25:55] Jo: Yeah. No, there again, you've got a business that will be proactive and not have that, you know, like, "Oh my goodness, what do we do now? This happened, the tenant won't talk to us," or "the tenants changed the locks at the property," or, you know, "we can't get a hold of the owner to get this decision." [00:26:12] So everything becomes reactive and the focus and the energy goes into whatever that situation is. And meanwhile, we've got other things that are cropping up in the business that are also going to just ignite. And then they'll take our attention. So, you know, we've got this constant hopping from one drama to another because we don't have the proper policy in place. [00:26:35] And when we say that, you know, like an automated workflow is logical. Well, logic is built on reality. You know, you can't have something that's logical if it's not created out of reality in the first place. And the reality becomes the policy that you create for your company. So I would say a lot of companies actually lack that foundation of policy. [00:27:00] It's all very much hearsay. When you talk to the teams, and I work with a lot of teams, and what I like to do is talk to each team member one on one and, you know, ask them, in the event of this, what do you do? How do you do this? And very rarely do I ever get the same response from, you know, the team, they're all based on their own experience, their own need to be valued. And the way people are valued is very personal. Whereas if you create your policy, then we create how people value what you do as well. So it's not all, you know, like, "I like this to make me feel good." You know, we do get the thank yous from the clients because we deliver on the promises we make because out of policy becomes the promise that we can make, and we know that we can deliver on it. And hence that's the expectation.  [00:28:00] Jason: So I've noticed one of the things I've noticed in some businesses, it sounds like there's kind of this issue of like, you ever played the telephone game? Where like you say something to somebody and they say it and then by the end they reveal what they think the person at the end that the beginning said and it's like totally off, right? And so it gets ridiculous because they're just passing it along and this hearsay as you mentioned, this is often how sort of the policies in a business kind of get passed around or passed on like somebody trains somebody else, somebody brings them in, they're asking questions. [00:28:33] "Hey, susie. What are we do in this?"  [00:28:35] "Oh, I just kind of do this," and so then we create this whole nebulous, cloudy, fuzzy, weird thing where everybody's kind of making decisions. And the reason why is "Susie told me, like when I first got hired because she was impatient and I was annoying her that to do it this way, and I've been doing it that way ever since, and that's what I've been telling everybody else that I've been talking to is how we do it." because it's not defined. So. That's interesting. So a lot of businesses they might have processes. I mean, almost every property management business probably has some process defined, if not, you are probably very new, but a lot of them are lacking policy being documented. [00:29:13] Jo: Yeah. Yeah. You know, a lot of them when they create the process, it's based upon, you know, what the team feel is right to, and you quite often hear property managers saying, "I never do that," or you know, "I do it this way and I've always done it that way, and I'll continue to do it that way because I feel comfortable." [00:29:31] Jason: "Manuel says this, but that seems mean or uncomfortable for me. So I've found a better way of doing it."  [00:29:39] Jo: Exactly. And "all my clients would never like it if I did that." Well, you know, when you hear that conversation, it's like, you've got a problem in your business because your business is not grounded in its policy. [00:29:52] So it's all made up as they go along. That's where we start to have that desperation. We don't have a finger on the pulse of that business. We don't know what's going on because your team is doing things the way they want to do it. And they're telling you what you want to hear. So you're hearing, "Oh, everything's great." [00:30:12] And then all of a sudden that team member is, you know, really struggling and with not coping and they leave, and we find an enormous amount of unfinished tasks of dissatisfied clients of liability sitting there.  [00:30:29] Jason: From my experience, every team member that I had that left that I thought I would just probably die if I lost them. [00:30:37] These are always the team members that you probably need to leave, I've realized. Because when they do, you think you can't lose them. It's because you don't know what they're doing. You don't have clarity on their processes. They're not documented, which creates job security for them, but it creates a lack of transparency and clarity for you. [00:30:55] And often they're doing things that are stupid or the wrong way or that don't make sense that you would change if you were aware of it. And so when I have a team member leave that I was unclear about what they were doing. We started digging into it. There's a lot of dissatisfaction, you know a lot of clients were frustrated a lot of situations where I didn't know it was being done that way, and so that's it becomes a, you know, kind of a blessing in disguise a really good opportunity to now define things and improve things. [00:31:24] So It sounds like maybe we've got the legal that impacts the policy, but it sounds like maybe also the business because different businesses have different set of values, right? So, for example, let's say one business, their maintenance value is to do things high quality as possible. Real high quality so that there's no repeat work. [00:31:48] And then another is like "our owners are cheap and we want to do things as cheap as possible." Duct tape is appropriate in plumbing. Something like this. And so there's a difference in value and maybe neither one is right or wrong. Right. There may be more repeat work, but it's cheaper and that's what the owners want or what and the values of the business owner and what they dictate. These are the values of the company. And so it sounds like maybe also going into the processes and maybe even into the policy is also there needs to be mixed in the principles or the values of the company, which should be defined.  [00:32:21] Jo: Oh, definitely. Yeah, definitely. It's about the principles and the personality of that company. [00:32:27] So what's the personality of your brand? How do you want people to see your brand when they talk about? So I always say, if you don't write your own story, people will make up your story about your brand. So you've got to write your story and tell your story about what your brand is all about. You know, is your brand, you know, filled with care and heart, or are they just, you know, a brand that's churn and burn? Just get them in. And, you know, we don't build on relationships. We get them in and, you know, do what we need to do. And it's a very interesting, a lot of that comes from one, the vision, the original vision of when that person created their business, and two, the marketplace that they're working in because you can't, you know, be a suave, sophisticated brand if you're in a marketplace where you're going through an area of the area is going through rejuvenation because what we find in those areas is a lot of the old homes that the, you know, the owners of those homes are developers. [00:33:30] And they don't want to spend money on those properties because they're just kind of like waiting until they've got the approval to knock the property down and rebuild, you know, high rise or something like that. So, you know, you've got to understand your market area and make sure that your brand aligns with your market and your message aligns with your brand. [00:33:51] And then to do that, you've got to make sure that what backs you up is your process because your process is in how you deliver on whatever that image is, that story is, that you created on your brand. Because this is where we start to see as the business grows, everyone has their own spin on your story and they it becomes their story not the brand story. So yeah, the chapters all start changing  [00:34:22] Jason: I've seen this in my own business. [00:34:24] I've seen this in our clients business and we refer to kind of that a lot of times as culture because what we've noticed is If culture is off in a business, then it seems like everything is worse. Everything gets worse. And it's, it means the business isn't really built effectively around the business owner. [00:34:41] So usually the business owner is miserable in their own business because they haven't created cultural clarity. They don't have their core values mapped out or they've got too many so they value everything and nothing all at the same time, kind of. And they don't have clarity on why they do what they do or why they're in the business. [00:35:01] And so getting clarity on the motive also when we create our processes one of my rules for creating processes for our team is It needs to state at the beginning of the process what the outcome is supposed to be, so there's clarity on exactly the best desired outcome and then why we're doing it like why is that important? So that they understand the reason because sometimes you may not achieve at the full outcome, but if as long as you're in alignment with our values or you understand why we're doing things a certain way, then you're less likely to screw it up or try to change it or be cute or be clever, right? [00:35:38] And so sometimes it you know, I really believe that transformational leadership is way more effective than transactional leadership and transactional is like "here's a task. Just do what I tell you to do. Be a robot, all of the orders" and you know, "don't think," and when we get into transformational leadership, it's more, "here's the outcome that we want. I don't care how you get there, well do it according to these values at least, but whatever steps you need to do to make sure this happens, this is the end desired goal. Here's a possible way of doing it, but get this outcome, right?" If the outcome is: we want to provide great customer service, that's going to look different in a variety of different situations. [00:36:20] But if you're like, "well, the policy is that we never give a refund for this, and we only, you know, blah, blah, blah, and tell you to go pound sand," then maybe it's not going to achieve great customer service. And so, you know, I had a support team for a while that they were getting stuff done. But their communication skills in the support tickets was like really terrible. [00:36:41] They were like, "this is done." And they like, that was their reply. And I was like wait a second. So like, we changed our why at the time, because it was to build websites or whatever back in the day. And I was like, "our why statement is to build incredibly effective relationships and websites." [00:37:00] And so the emphasis became on the relationships. And so then I was focusing on the team. So they started to, "Oh, I need to communicate in a different way." And they followed the same process to achieve closing a ticket out. But what was different is how they communicated it and whether they showed care and whether they showed, you know, had effective communication or kind communication, which is very different than just, I did this, it's done. [00:37:25] Jo: Definitely. And I agree with you. I think every task that we do and everything we do is a task in property management has to have its own objective and outcome. And then we also need to understand the clients that we serve, we need to understand their why and we become their how to their why because, you know, like they only engage us because they've got a certain goal that they want to achieve. [00:37:54] They don't know how to do that. So they call on us because we become their how and the how is then our objective and outcome for everything that we do. And it's consistent because then what we do is we break down that, you know, personality, who wants to be the hero in everything or the one who's the villain or the one who's, you know, got a split personality and they're a hero to some clients and a villain to others. [00:38:22] So, you know, that's where we start to have the schizophrenia within a brand. It's not the one personality. So, you know, like we do when we create a team is about different skills, different personality, but it all joins to actually deliver to the clients the way that we see our brand, the way that we've created our brand through the policy, the platform of policy. [00:38:47] And that's the reality of our brand, to then create the process and the protocol. And you know, you've got a good, solid brand. And I think the best example of this in the world is Disney. You know, Walt Disney he Died decades ago, but when you go into Disneyland, you feel him there. You look through the eyes of Walt Disney when you walk into Disneyland, when you watch a Disney movie, and that's what we need to do when we're creating our business. [00:39:20] We need to show what our vision is so all of our team can almost look through our eyes to see what it's going to be like. And you know, every leader, they say every leader is present even when they're not present. So you know, you need to have that. And the only way to have it in property management is through your automated workflows that are built upon, you know, the logic that you created through your process. [00:39:51] So, it's very interesting and people keep trying to shortcut it, or they think that, you know, they've hired the, you know, the next best thing since sliced bread and then they're disillusioned. They think, well, what happened to that person? And there's all the blame and justification. It's like business should not run on blame and justification. That's ignorance.  [00:40:14] Jason: That's terrible fuel for a business. Yeah, it is. So, well, I think Jo, this has been, I think very helpful. You do a lot of different things. Right. And you help people with process, you've got great systems, probably can help people with procedures, et cetera. So, how can people get in touch with you if they're needing some help with something? [00:40:39] Jo: Yes, definitely. And I would encourage, you know, everyone in the industry to invest in getting your policy and process done correctly, because once you've done it, then changing it as your business scales and grows is simple. It's just adjustments and alignments. along the way. So, you know, invest in it now. [00:41:01] And I'm more than happy, you know, we could even do group exercises, Jason. But probably the best way to contact me is I'm on social media you know, through the messenger and chats on social media or email. So, the email, it's a long one because my. My company is called E Revolution, which is Oliveri backwards. [00:41:26] So, yeah, so it's just Jo, which is simple Jo@ireviloution.Com. I R E V I L O U T I O N. Dot com. So it's super simple.  [00:41:41] Jason: All right, we'll throw that in the show notes, make sure people got it. All right Well, Jo, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you being here. And so how can people learn more that are interested about Flussos or this visual workflow tool. [00:41:58] Jo: Yeah, the easiest way there is jump on our website. [00:42:01] Sorry Flussos. com FLUSS OS dot com and Flussos is Italian for flow. So jump on there, book a demo and you'll most likely get my husband Stacey who will do the demo with you and you know, like go through the process of don't push back immediately. Yeah. Anyone who starts working on automated workflows, it's about adapting to a new mindset in the way that you do the do every day in property management. So, you know, be patient with yourself, be very deliberate and focused on going through a mindset. And I liken this to When we introduced, you know, property management platforms 30 years ago in the industry, and I was new then, so I adopted immediately, but I see all the people that have been in the industry failed to adapt, and they didn't hang around for long. [00:42:58] So we're going through that change that we did, but go in there, get help, don't do it alone. You know, it is difficult to create flows because you like engineering and architecture. So, is that a word? So yeah, go on to Flussos. com, book a demo let them know that you're, you know, with DoorGrow as well. Just say hi I'm with DoorGrow because we've got some special things for all the family at DoorGrow. So yeah. Yeah, you know, like, just do it. [00:43:27] Don't delay. Don't let fear get in the way. Don't let fear of your team not wanting it get in the way. You know, if you've got fear of your team pushing back,  [00:43:36] that's a problem. So yeah.  [00:43:38] Jason: Not sure what it sounds, but I can tell you, like, having gone through switching process software multiple times. [00:43:45] This one, we love. Like, we love being able to run processes on it. And once you figure it out, I really think it's super intuitive. At the basic level, it's drag and drop. It's really easy to use. And, yeah, there's a lot of complexity that can be added under the hood to really make things really well dialed in, but you'll get there.  [00:44:04] Stacey will help you. All right.  [00:44:06] Jo: He will.  [00:44:07] Jason: All right. Cool. Well, it's great to have you here on the show. Jo, thanks for being here on the DoorGrow show.  [00:44:13] Jo: My pleasure. Such a joy. Thanks, Jason. All right. Bye.  [00:44:17] Jason: Okay. So if you are a property management entrepreneur and you are struggling, you don't even know what the problem is, you're trying to grow your business, you're not even sure why, what is the problem? Maybe you think, "well, I just need more leads or I just need better processes or whatever it is that you believe." Get on a call with our team and we'll help you figure it out. And maybe you're not clear on what the problem is. [00:44:40] We'll help you figure it out. And maybe you're not even clear on what the solution is or where you're at currently and what your current situation is. You're like, "I know there's something off or it could be better, but I'm not even clear." We'll help you get some clarity on that and figure it out. And we're not going to try and sell you anything unless you need something. [00:44:57] And if you need something, then we're just going to try and figure out if you want it, you know, if we have something that could help you we're not we're not pushy salespeople. But we do love helping property managers. So check us out. You can go to doorgrow. com. A lot of people are like, what does DoorGrow do? [00:45:12] We grow and scale companies dramatically and quickly. And so if you would like to grow your business, you're tired of wasting time, trying to figure out what works, wasting time doing advertising, falling prey to a bunch of different marketers. And you want to figure out what is actually working to grow businesses? [00:45:29] We're helping people grow their businesses without spending money even on advertising. You're able to grow even faster by eliminating that stuff. And so we may be able to cut your ad budgets and increase the output and the ability to grow and add doors in your business. And so we do a lot of other stuff to consult property managers and helping them get things dialed in, reach out to us. [00:45:51] We would love to help you figure out how to grow your business. So you check us out at doorgrow. com. And if you are a frequent podcast follower or listener, we would appreciate it if you like subscribe and leave us some sort of review on whatever channels you're listening on. It helps us help more people and we appreciate it. [00:46:11] And that's it for today. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everybody. [00:46:15] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:46:42] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

  In this episode of the Market Call show, I sit down with Jason Meshnick, a market maker turned fintech pioneer whose intriguing career journey has taken him from the bustling trading floors of the early 2000s to the cutting edge of AI in finance. Jason recounts his winding path from a philosophy major in small-town Poughkeepsie, New York, to becoming a Wall Street trader and, later, a leader in tech for trading. We explore his transition to automated trading as floors shifted online trader jobs contracted and his move into roles in finance education and media. Jason offers a captivating look into the evolution of markets and trading strategies, from the dynamics of floor versus electronic exchanges to analyzing sentiment shifts through media platforms and tools like CNN's iconic Fear and Greed Index, which he helped develop. Across various sectors of finance, Jason's experiences highlight the human element alongside technical progress.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Jason Meshnick talks about his transition from being a market maker on Wall Street to becoming a fintech expert. We discuss the changes in trading desks from the early 2000s to the present, emphasizing the shift towards automation and a reduced number of traders. Jason describes his unconventional career path, moving from a philosophy major to a Wall Street trader, and his eventual move into fintech. Jason shares insights into the development of CNN's Fear and Greed Index, including the collaborative efforts and practical constraints faced during its creation. We explore the shift from floor trading to electronic markets and how enduring principles of market trading continue to influence career paths in finance. Jason recounts his personal and professional journey, including his move to Boulder, Colorado, and his involvement with the CFA Society. We dive into the intricacies of building decision trees for financial data analysis, comparing their transparency and reliability to large language models. Jason reflects on his editorial role at TheStreet.com and the importance of market sentiment analysis in shaping financial media platforms. We discuss the role of experience and a deep understanding of market nuances in successful investment strategies. Jason explains the seven indicators used in CNN's Fear and Greed Index and how this tool helps both sophisticated and retail investors make informed decisions.   PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are three ways I can help you prepare for retirement:  1.  Listen to the Market Call Show Podcast or Watch on Youtube One of my favorite things to do is to talk with smart people about investing, financial planning, and how to live a full life.  I share this on my podcast the Market Call Show.  To watch on Youtube  – Click here   2.  Read the Financial Freedom Blueprint:  7 Steps to Accelerate Your Path to Prosperity If you're ready to accelerate your path to prosperity, the Financial Freedom Blueprint lays out a proven system for planning and investing to secure your financial independence. You can get a personalized signed hardcover copy – Click here 3.  Work with me one-on-one If you would like to talk with me about planning and investing for your future. – Click here TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)   Louis: Jason Meshnick how are you? Jason: I'm doing great, Lewis. It's so great to see you. Louis: I know I'm so glad to finally have you on the podcast. You know, just knowing you for so many years and you know, knowing that you have so much knowledge out there with regard to investing and just your overall creativity, I had to have you on and I'm so glad that you came on. Jason: Well, and one thing as you know from from our relationship, I've always gotten so much out of talking to you and I always learn something just through our conversations, and I feel like by the time this podcast is over, I will have five new ideas to to go after and try to figure out what to do, how to make them all reality oh god, I hope so, I hope so. Louis: it's all about the ideas you know exactly. It was funny. I asked you to send me a send me your bio and I've known you for a long time and we met years and years ago at a CFA meeting I think we were both on a board for the CFA Colorado or Denver chapter and and since then we've worked together in many capacities. But I didn't know a lot of things about you that I should have known just reading your bio. I knew that you spent 20 years in the fintech world and I didn't know that you were also working on some AI investment analysis, which I'd like to learn more about, and that you really have a lot of passion for educating. And I guess your coworkers asked you to write a newsletter. I had no idea about that and you know now what is this about. Vampires are rich. Why are vampires so rich? Jason: That was one of my favorite things that I wrote. Yeah, if you want to cover that now, we can, or we can talk later. Louis: I think we'll circle back to that, but I was a little what's that about. But yeah, and now you're doing some teaching at CU Boulder, teaching finance. We've done a little bit of lecturing together at the university level DU and things like that and I've always enjoyed watching you teach because you seem to captivate the kids. Well, they're not kids, they're young adults with your style. So I'd like to learn a little bit more about what you're doing there. And you are a Wall Street trader and market maker and there's a lot of things that you know about microstructure and investor psychology that I want to kind of touch on too. So, but the big thing is understanding that you were involved with the CNN, that popular feed and fear and greed index back in 2012, I guess that was put together. So I don't know. Maybe what we could do is talk a little bit about your background. I mean, I kind of covered it a little bit, but just maybe you can tell me a little bit about you know, share with the audience, your you know how you got in this business and kind of what's been your progression in this business. Jason: Yeah, so my guess is that everybody says this, but I came to it from a slightly different path, not that not that, you know, I didn't get out of college and immediately go to Wall Street, that's. That's a pretty normal path, right? But I was a philosophy major and I'm far from a philosopher. But I think what I took away from my undergrad as a philosophy major was just sort of a way of thinking, right, as opposed to being sort of a business person thinking only about money, it's more about thinking about other kinds of things and things that drive people and being able to draw from communication and trying to understand what people think and how they think and why they think, and I think it was one of the things that really fascinated me. Also, being a child of the 80s, you know Wall Street was so important. There's so many movies about it, right from from the Wall Street movie to I don't know. It seemed like every other movie that came out was about how to make millions of dollars on Wall Street, and so, of course, I wanted to be part of that. Having grown up in sort of a backwater, poughkeepsie, new York, I always wanted to go live in the big city, yeah, so that was sort of my start, was coming at it from kind of a weird direction and I ended up immediately going to work for well, a firm that no longer exists for a couple of reasons, but it was the trading arm of a New York specialist firm. So the specialists were downstairs on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and my boss was one of their customers and he just worked upstairs in their clearing division and he was trading his own money. He had been a floor broker for 20 years, owned two seats, sold his seats, did pretty well on them, and then decided that he was just going to live the rest of his life as a trader. He brought his son in and then eventually I was working as a runner so you know fourteen thousand dollars a year and just wanted exposure, just wanted to be part of the action. Right, I love the action. I was so excited about just being there, the history I love the history of things. Um, I probably should have been a history major and so, just being in that environment, I ended up getting picked up because I was. I was pretty cheap, right, so they didn't have to pay me much and I ended up working and really falling in love with being a trader and learning about how the market worked and how floor brokers could help make these trades. We had a network of 20 floor brokers across the New York Stock Exchange and what was then called the Amex, and some of the regional exchanges too, so that we could trade and we'd strategize every morning and then make our buy and sell decisions and then, throughout the day, update them as needed. I'd like to say that we were the high frequency traders of the time, even though our frequency wasn't that fast, but we were sitting on both sides of the bid and the offer. Louis: Boy. Jason: times have changed, huh offer Boy times have changed huh yeah, I mean that's yeah, I like to say. When I, when I started in the business, there were people there who'd been on the floor in 1929. And so much of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange looked the same as it did in 19,. You know, if you, if you were to go, take Jesse Livermore and drop him, you know from 1929 and just drop him on the floor in 1992 when I started, he'd have been like I don't know what these TV things are that are all around. He wouldn't have even had that word, but otherwise he'd have been able to run into a crowd and know exactly what to do. And by the time I left in 2002, well, there wasn't even a crowd, right? I mean, everything was different about the floor of the exchange. I was a market maker on a fully electronic stock exchange, so the principles were all the same, but everything else had changed. It was so different. Louis: Oh, that's a big part of what I wanted to talk to you about that the principles are all the same. So, because I was just listening back to some of our, or looking back at some of our conversations just to prepare for this, and we've had a lot of conversations in the past where you were really outlining like I want to capture what I saw, those principles that I saw on the floor, and I want to capture them today and that's kind of driven a lot of things that you've done. So maybe maybe you can tell me like just a handful of what those principles are that you've noticed are like still the same now that probably will never change. Jason: Well, so I'll caveat this by saying I've been out of the markets for a number of years, right, so I left, I left trading in 2002. And then I was still, you know, still kind of a pretty active trader, investor for the next 10 years or so. But then life gets in the way and I'm just very busy, and so I've sort of shifted my focus in a number of ways and I'm honestly really interested in analysis now and thinking about market sentiment and what investors are doing and how investors think about the market. And I now, when I trade, it's opportunistically right, I'm not in there every day, I'm not trying to make eighths or even pennies. Louis: I guess we should probably. Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt you there. Jason: Go ahead. Louis: I was just gonna say I guess we should probably back up a little bit and talk a little bit about, like more about your career progression, because you moved into from trading into fintech and, and from fintech now to working at the streetcom for and as an editor, so, and which to me makes a hundred percent sense. Um, just from what I know from your talent, your talent stack, so maybe you can kind of finish that progression a little bit. So, to where you are now, yeah, sorry, yeah, totally. Jason: So my progression is really. I mean, there's there's a couple things that run through the entire thing and I think a big part of it is analysis and being excited about, about thinking about the markets right, about being being in some ways just part of the culture of it right. So that's been the big thing that's run through my entire career. But in 2002, my wife and I we weren't married at the time we were thinking about you know where will we end up, and we decided that we either end up in New Jersey or we could move somewhere that we wanted to live. So we did a search all around the country and decided we just sort of threw a dart at the at the wall and said Colorado seems pretty nice. So we ended up here in Colorado and it's been the best move. Louis: Man, that was a lucky dart throw. If you ask me, it's a lucky dart throw, I think. Jason: I think it was guided by my wife's hand. She may have said I'll take that dart and I'm going to place it right here just at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. So she'd been out here and visited and said Boulder is going to be the place where Jason will be happy and we'll make this happen. And so we moved out here without jobs. I quit my job as a market maker in June of 2002. And the market was changing so much at that time it was definitely becoming harder to make money, and so I was ready for a change. I was ready to do something different. You know, when I left, there were 10 traders on my desk and probably another 30, 20, 30 on our over-the-counter desk. And when I went back, seven or eight years later and I'll get to this, but when, when I was working in FinTech and I went back, visited my old trading desk, there were three people and a really large computer and, rather than taking directional bets on the market, they were doing arbitrage. And they were. They were, they were working the order flow and they were figuring out, based on the order flow, how long or short they were going to be. You know, sort of using quantitative methods to understand. If they felt the market was going up and they were going to end up being more short and more short, they would have to think about the Delta to the market and try to get long ahead of those people so they could be selling to them. So it became in some ways probably a much more intellectually engaging thing than just sitting saying, oh someone just sold me 1,000 shares, I have to get out of it now. You were thinking ahead of the market. In many ways it was really cool. I probably would have liked it a lot, but it just became a really different animal. It was much more arbitrage as opposed to directional trading, which is really what I knew. So we moved to Colorado without jobs and in doing that that's when I met you, lewis is. I was pretty engaged with the CFA Society despite not having a CFA I'll throw that out there. I'd also just finished my MBA at NYU. That counts. So, I think they let me in, but that was about it, and they let me even onto the board. Louis: Yeah, yeah, you're a very likable guy, so it was a pretty easy decision. They're like he doesn't have a CFA, but he's a pretty cool guy. We'll let him in anyway. Jason: I think he also said this is a guy that we can make do all the all the programming. We can make him call all the all the people that we don't want to call and try to organize meetings. And they thought I was an event planner, which it turns out I'm not. I'm just not a good event planner. My wife can tell you that Actually, lois, you did kind of the same. We were organizing all the CMT meetings. Louis: Oh yeah. Jason: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's, let's go call some people, um, yeah, but so so it took a while and I ended up finding this job here in boulder, uh, for a company called wall street on demand and for those who are not familiar with wall street on demand, it has a new name um, it became market, uh, no, became wall street on. It was wall street on demand. Then it became market on demand once I, once market bought us and then eventually it became market on demand once market bought us, and then eventually it became market digital, when they decided that it was really time to think more broadly than just web and think broadly across all digital formats video, et cetera, and advertising. And I stayed there for 19 years. Where, louis, you touched on the AI side of what I did and so this is one of my big jokes is that I like to say that I was the world's most widely read analyst, if not the best, and the reason why I say that is because over the 19 years that I was at that company, I built something like I don't know 200 different. I call them only because of today's terminology and the way that people talk about markets now, about technology now. I call these AI related, and they really are simple. They're very much rules-based AI, so sort of traditional AI, not these large language models that we have now that are in some ways more sophisticated but really not as good. So what I was building were these big decision trees, and these decision trees were things where you would, using your financial knowledge, you would say, okay, I'm looking at some financial data around a company. What do we need to know? Well, let's start with the valuation. Is the stock what's the PE ratio? Is it a high PE ratio or a low PE ratio? How do you define a high PE ratio? Is a high PE compared to its average for the last five years, or is it the highest in its industry? Right, you can look at things cross-sectionally or historically, right, but both ways time-based or versus peers, and so we would do things like that and we would chop up the market and try to understand. You know which stocks were good or bad, but it wasn't necessarily for an investment perspective, right? This was because what we were doing was for the Schwab's and TD Ameritrade's and all those companies. We were building the news and research portions of their website, and so I and my team were providing that research, and so a lot of the texts that you would see on that site was completely dynamically generated. So, very simple, rules-based AI. And I say it's better than large language models for AI, because large language models you never really know what you're going to get. It's a bit of a black box, right. So what we could do is I would create text that was locked down. I knew exactly what it was going to say. I didn't know what the data was that was going into it, right, I didn't know if Apple had a high PE ratio or a low PE ratio, but I had rules around defining what was high and low. And so when I would go to the compliance departments at Schwab or TD Ameritrade or Fidelity, et cetera we worked with all the US brokers, many of the Canadian brokers, australia, others I would go to the compliance departments and they would say, well, how do I know that you're not going to say something silly or that's incorrect? And I said, well, I'm going to give you the entire decision tree and you're going to be able to look at the decision tree and understand what it says. So the only way that my model can be wrong is if I have a bug and there are bugs all over the internet, so I'm as fallible as anybody else, but we're going to do our best not to have those. And then, secondly, if the data is wrong and if the data is wrong, well it's wrong all over the website too, and we're going to fix that. But generally, 99.9% of the time, for 99.9% of the stocks, what we say is going to be accurate. It's going to be correct, it is going to be as unbiased as possible, because I'm not trying to tell you, as a value investor or growth investor or whatever, what you should do. I'm just trying to describe the various aspects of the stock. I wasn't there to give you a buy, sell hold recommendation. I was purely there to help you, as a self-directed investor, understand more about the stock, about the company. You know you brought up something that's really interesting about that. Louis: I mean, I have to. You know you're talking about large language models and it's a little bit of a black box. We don't really quite know, and you're dealing with these big decision trees, or you were at that time and it was traceable, like you could trace the logic which made me think, okay, we have data and the data can be right or wrong, and then you have the logic, and the logic can be right or wrong. And I think that's one of the things that I always have a little. I'm having a little bit of an issue with with some of the AI is the logic element of it, because you like how much of it is curve, fitting what is real behind it, so we could use it. I had a tech executive tell me one time that the big thing with AI is it can help us with speed and it can help us with accuracy if we use it correctly. But it's not necessarily like you still need human thought. You still need that ultimate human element to it. That's my personal opinion on that. But the fact that you were using decision trees early on, you know that and just to get information, that way you were speeding the process for the investor, basically. Jason: Right. Louis: Like they would spend a lot of time looking for all those things. But you systematically sped it up, which is a a big thing for and we and we all have that now that's and it's, there's just like different flavors of it, um, so, uh, it's, it's that whole. It's a whole. Nother topic we can get into a little bit later. But I, I, uh, I remember you talking about that when you were doing working on those projects, um, wondering where it would go next. Um, you know, as far as that goes, but getting back to your, getting back to your, your story, let's get back to your story. Yeah, sorry, keep getting off track. Yeah, that's okay, yeah. Jason: So while I was at that job I did, I did a number of things. I mean it was really, it was really an exciting job in so many ways. But the two big things that I did were really this you know, running the natural language generation product right. This thing we called it smart text, um, and so that's that ai thing. But then the other thing that I was so excited about was doing education right and and our. So this started back in 2006 or 7, um, I started doing brown bag lunches where I would just put together a presentation and teach our developers and designers and engineers all about everything they needed to know about investing, not so they could go out and make a million dollars, but rather so that when they were building the tools that we were all using, they understood their subject matter right, that they could be engaged with the topic and identify with the end user and really understand why a PE ratio mattered or why a chart mattered. Simple thing, like in design, you'll notice that there's a lot of white space on many pages and they talk about that as being good design. It's actually a really bad design for investors and the reason is well, depending on the type of investors, but for slightly more active investors, engaged investors, what they want is information dense things, and so I would help steer our design team to create things that were a little bit more information dense, an example being a chart, a price chart. You don't want to have to scroll up and down too much to be able to read your price chart on your Schwab account. You want to be able to type in NVIDIA and load up a couple of indicators that you want to see. Put your MACD on and then MACD is a lower indicator, maybe an RSI, maybe whatever Put those things on there and be able to, in one view, understand the trend, momentum, volume and volatility from that stock right. That was another thing that we did when we rebuilt Schwab's charts. I'm kind of proud to say that Yahoo actually stole this, but we broke the indicators out. Previous big charts started this. They said indicators are either separated out as upper indicators or lower indicators, and that doesn't tell you anything, and I'll credit John Bollinger. I learned all this from him is really you know, people should understand what goes into the indicators. They should understand as much of the calculation as possible, right, what the inputs are and what it's giving, what information it's giving you, right, and then separate those out into different sort of you know I'm using the term factors very loosely but into the different factors of technical analysis. So, is it trend, is it momentum-based, is it volume, volatility you can come up with others as well but, right, where does it fit? And if you're looking, if you put a bunch of indicators on a chart and it turns out that they're all trend indicators, well, you really have one indicator and so you're not getting a full picture. So go put some momentum indicators on there to understand the speed and whether the trend is about to be exhausted or not. So it's things like that that I really wanted to help both the end user of our products as well as the the, the person who was building the products, understand so. So I ended up writing for about three or four years. So we started that in 2007, but it was. They asked me to put it on hold after a while cause it was taking away from a lot of my work. And then, in 2018, our CEO came to me and she said you know, you used to do this, these brown bag lunches. I would really like it if you would just write. Just write a newsletter for the whole company. The question of the week, so Fridays. I'd ask the question, and it might be how many? How many stocks are there in the S&P 500? And I haven't looked at the number recently, but I think the number is still 501, right, it might even be higher, but there's only 500 companies in the S&P 500. And so that's the distinction. There's 500 companies, but some companies have multiple classes of stock that may be in the S&P. It might be 505 now I can't remember. I have not looked in a long time, but that was effectively the answer, and so it became just a really fun thing to write the answer, and so it became just a really fun thing to write. Yeah, so teaching people about vampires right, became a way of telling them. Why are vampires so rich? It's simple They've been investing for hundreds of years and so they've had time to let their money compound. Assuming that Vlad the Impaler, the first vampire, he was a prince. Let's just put a number on that $10,000 in today's money. What does $10,000 grow to over 500 years? It grows to trillions of dollars. And then, if you spend 1% of that every year, how much money are vampires spending? Today, vampires are spending billions of dollars. Vampires are probably supporting our economy. Louis: They've got to be the richest people in the world. It's like puts vampires, yeah yeah, it puts elon musk to shame, I mean really so maybe elon's a vampire yeah, you never know, maybe a little similar, I don't know. That's that's wild. Well, um, so you have this creative side to you. That's that's driven that. And then how did you get um, like, was it just a natural progression for you to do what you're doing now? Jason: or maybe you should tell us a little bit about what you're doing now yeah, so so let's get to what I'm doing now, because that's important and I know that, um, they'll be watching this and they'll they'll kill me if I don't talk about what I'm doing now, because they also really like it. Um, I'm having a lot of fun. So, you know, you go through ups and downs in your career and I definitely there were times when I absolutely loved trading and absolutely hated, and that might be the same day. I might love and hate trading. Louis: In. Jason: FinTech it was. I might love a year and hate the next year and, you know, love the next year for that. It was project to project and here you know right now what we're doing. So I work for I'm currently the managing editor of the street pro and so so you are probably familiar with the street. Jim Cramer founded it back in I don't know 1997 or 1998. It was really the first, the first and best of its type where you could come and get financial news and information. And then, not long after they started the street, they brought, they created something called real money where they brought in people like Helene Meisler and and Doug Cass and they would create something that was more of a subscription product but more of a newsletter, newsletter product where Helene would write top stocks is what it became and Helene would write her brand of you know market sentiment analysis and it was really great. And Jim Cramer left about two years ago and I've never met Cramer. I've heard him speak before but I don't know Cramer, don't know a lot about him. But I'll say this is a business that was 25 years old or is 25 years old now, and it's going through a lot of change. So we're trying to figure out what will it look like in the future. And one of the big things I love this I quote it all the time but Barry Ritholtz was one of our. I believe he was a street contributor at one point. Barry Ritholtz has gone on to become a Bloomberg contributor and have his own money management firm, but earlier in his career, I'd say, he made his name at the street, as did a lot of people, and so he calls the street the Motown of Finance and he says that the Jim Cramer was sort of this I think the name is Barry Gordy character who you know sort of larger than life in many ways, and he brought people in, brought people in and he made them stars right, and so we did the same thing, or he did that at the street, and so we're in the process now of trying to do that again. We have great contributors. They're all wonderful and they provide really great perspectives on the market, and sometimes they disagree and sometimes they agree. I asked a few of them to write about GameStop recently and it was really great to see the kinds of things that I got. But we want to get back and we want to make these people, we want to make our contributors, who are such great analysts, stars again, right. So we're trying to change a lot of things that we do in the business. In the past it was really Jim Cramer. The last five years, I'd say, jim Cramer became our number one star. I want Helene and Doug and Sarge and Rev Shark and I could go through the whole list Chris Versace I want them all to be stars too, and they want to be stars and they are because they're so good. So we're working at how we can do that, how we can elevate the content, not just to make the contributor stars, but really to showcase how good they are as we go and help more investors to be self-directed investors, be more successful in their trading and investing. And I say we have two different types of products, really Our value add. If you are a trader, a self-directed trader, you might spend your time on Doug Cass's community, right? So Doug has his daily diary. Doug's a hedge fund manager. He's out there from three o'clock in the morning. He's sending us stuff. It's crazy. The editors have to be there editing and putting it up from. They start at 5.30. So the editors are in there at 5.30 in the morning putting Doug's ideas up all the way through the end of the trading day, and then in the lower half of that page is a community where we have many, many people from the community, some of which I won't say any of their names, but some of which are fairly big names in finance and investing. We know who they are. On the site they really the community ends up feeding on itself and providing great ideas just among each other. There's one guy who talks a lot about cryptocurrencies. We don't have a lot of cryptocurrency content on the site. We're working, we're going to be adding some, but this one person alone actually provides some of the best crypto content I've ever written, and he's paying us right now, at least for now us right now, at least for now. And so the other products that we have. We have where you can get trading ideas or investing ideas. We have some people who are a little bit more technical focused, some who are more fundamental focused. We have one person who does really well providing dividend ideas. Another person is really great at more fundamental, value-based ideas, but then we have a whole portfolio. You can come to us and we have Chris Versace runs our pro portfolio, where we help investors understand not only how to put together a portfolio and they can just copy this entire portfolio but, the thing I love about it most, every week Chris writes a weekly update talking about what he sees in the market, what's coming up, economic things that are happening. But then he goes through all 30 holdings. He tells you the investment thesis you know I'm big on the investment thesis, lewis right, you should have a thesis, you should know why you're investing something and you should update it frequently. Right, chris updates the investment thesis every week. And then he tells you what his target price is and his panic point, his stop right, where he's going to realize that his thesis is incorrect and he's going to re-evaluate, probably sell the position. And then he just goes through and gives you sort of a weekly update and says, yeah, here's what happened in NVIDIA. Jensen Wan was out doing whatever he did. He spoke to these people. So that's what we're doing and the product is great and we're, you know, really excited. Now we have a lot of energy around what we're doing and how we're, how we're rebuilding, um, building I keep saying rebuilding like really we're taking what we had, which was a solid product, and we're just building off of it. We have, uh, later this month this will be the first time I've kind of mentioned this Um month this will be the first time I've kind of mentioned this Our marketing team doesn't even know but later this month we're doing a roundup, or we're actually calling it the quarterly call. So this will be the end of every quarter. Now we're going to have four of our contributors come on and really just talk about what they see in the market and have kind of a little panel discussion, and so that'll be really exciting, but it's things like that that we want to do. Louis: Yeah, it's good to hear the actual real time discussion, you know, because you get more color about it. But I love what you said about the Motown or the. Who is it? Who said a Barry Ritholtz? Jason: Barry Ritholtz. Louis: Yeah, I said that. I mean I thought I had so many like visions in my head because, you know, I'm a musician too and I I'm thinking about motown. I fell in love with motown as a young kid. My parents listened to it and the first thing that I thought about was that these, a lot of these people that were, uh, involved in motown, they were, they were completely isolated from the music industry. So so you know, you can find a lot of talent outside of, people that are like right in the mainstream of the music and of the Wall Street, kind of normative Wall Street. I mean you have to do something different really to be unique like that. And sometimes I think groupthink hurts Wall Street. In fact, I was just telling my wife this morning. I got out of the shower and I said you know what, in a way, wall Street is kind of like not even a thing anymore. Like you know, it's like I don't even think of Wall Street anymore as Wall Street. I mean last time I was there it didn't even seem like Wall Street to me. I mean it's still, it's still a thing mentally, but it's not. It's like I really think it's time for Motown. Jason: I think you guys are right in the thick of what we should be doing, because there's so many great thinkers that I run into who are not anywhere near the center of Wall Street, quote, unquote. So that's, yeah, one of the things I really want to steal comes from Chicago. So Morningstar in their quant reports. So if you have a Schwab account or any of these, they pretty much all have Morningstar's reports. These aren't the quant reports, I'm sorry, it's actually the ones that are handwritten by analysts, but on page I don't know two or three they have a module that says bulls say and bears say and they go through the bullish case of a stock and the bearish case of a stock, and that's something that I want to institute everywhere. Everybody should be with everything right. You talk politics, you should have a. You know what are the positives, what are the negatives. Whoever your candidate is doesn't matter. They have positive, they have negatives, that's right. You know your friends have positive, negatives. Like everything has a positive and a negative, and you have to look at both sides of the story, especially they say you shouldn't marry your investments Right. Know what the downsides are, Know what the risks are with everything you do. Louis: Wow, there's a lot there we could go into. Jason: I know yeah, as far as the no, no, not politics. Believe me, I mean we're staying away from politics. Louis: Yeah, we're staying away from that. You know, it's more like the I keep thinking of the narrative versus the numbers debate. I always say that I'm more interested in the numbers than the narrative. Like I start with the numbers and then go for the narrative and I think the older I get and the more I've seen, the more I realize that it's not the narrative necessarily, it's just understanding as much as you possibly can about what is true. It's hard to do and so much of investing is qualitative. You know, I mean you know my background. I do a lot of quant factor stuff and all that and that's really helpful in kind of keeping you honest. But at the end of the day, when I look at the stocks that have done really, really well for me, or macro trades like futures type oriented trades, it's been because I had some piece of knowledge and understanding about something that I just knew with a high conviction that was true and I stayed with it and it made a lot of money. So that is really hard. I don't think the quant sometimes leads you there, but it may not necessarily. It's not usually the end, like the end all be all, and a lot of times if you look at the best quantitative stuff it tends to turn over a ton. Right, it's like like momentum. Well, you know, you could say like, okay, I'm going to run momentum screens on stocks and the best parameter set is going to be me like turning over quite a bit. But then after tax and reality in the real world, you're really not making that as much as you would think, whereas you might find something that's gaining momentum that no one's talking about, like I bought not to talk about. I shouldn't talk about specific names right now, but there's a particular stock that I bought where I understood what was happening. It did come up in a momentum screen. It was a very small company at the time and then it just went ballistic. That now did I know it was going to ballistic? No, not to that degree. You know, I didn't think it was going to go up. You know 500% in, you know three months. But it's one of those things where you, if you know something, there's so much more to the narrative, so you go into the Motown aspect of things. There's value in that. We, we numbers are becoming a commodity, almost right. Everybody can get all these numbers and we can, we can move things around. Anybody can go on chat, gpt and, you know, pull, you know I get certain things. So I, you know, I don't know I'm becoming more of a qualitative guy the older I get. Is that that's weird? Jason: I have a theory on that. Let me know what you think. But I think that you are able to become a qualitative guy now because you have been a quantitative guy for so long and so because everything that you do there's, you know, there's a famous saying, it comes from consulting. I think you can't manage what you can't measure, and so everything that you've done as a quantitative person has been to measure, even when you run that quant screen and you get a list of stocks and you know that this list of stocks is going to turn over at the same time. You probably know well, this is going to turn over. But let's pick on NVIDIA. Nvidia is on the list right now and, because of these other things that I know through my experience, nvidia may come off in two weeks, but it's probably going to come back on in a month. I should just hold it Right, yeah, and so I think that you've spent so much time in the markets and it comes down to the word is experience. Right and that's why you hire a financial advisor. Or you hire, or you take a subscription to the Street Pro, or you want to get the experience of other people, especially as you're learning. Louis: Yeah, yeah. Jason: So now you can be. I was just going to say one thing. One thing is you can be sort of a core satellite where you can take your core investing, and maybe you want to be self-directed and buy a portfolio of ETFs, or you want to give that money to your financial advisor, give it to you, lewis, and then, with sort of the satellite funds, play money or whatever. You use your own experience Maybe it's in your own industry or whatever it is. You're trying to add that extra bit of alpha right and have fun maybe, but but keep yourself intellectually engaged. You have, you know, sort of the core of your portfolio over here and then kind of the rest of it where you can do things with as well. Louis: Yeah, I totally, I totally agree with that. So you know, this is just kind of getting me into this the fear and greed concept. You know you got involved with the fear and greed. I'm not, I'd like to hear the story about how you got involved in and what you, what you did in that. But when I think about the fear and greed index, I always think about that fish that's in the bowl and doesn't realize that he's in water and but you know, but if he steps outside and looks at he's like wow, I'm in water, right. That's kind of what sentiment is to me. It's like we're part of the sentiment, like we are, we're the observer. It's like the Heisenberg principle, like what we look at, we change, right, and that's sentiment, and fear and greed is kind of like a great overall, you know, easy to understand way of looking at that. But I guess I want to let's start off with your story, like how did you get into the fear and? Jason: greed project and what, what. What was your progression through that? So yeah, I mean, after coming from Wall Street, I'll tell a really quick story because I think this it's in it's in the article that I wrote too. But this story is a story from business school and I can't remember if the numbers are correct, but they're approximately correct and the timing is approximately correct. I was in business school, part-time, at night. I was working as a market maker during the day and then at night I was at NYU taking a class and this class was a valuation class and they asked us we had to come up with, we had to do a discounted cashflow analysis of a stock, and each group got to select whatever stock they wanted and I proposed to my group let's pick JDS Uniphase, because it was one of. It was the NVIDIA of its day. Oh yeah, hopefully NVIDIA will have a better future than JDSU did. But my group was all they said absolutely, let's do that one. And the stock was trading at I don't remember exactly, but probably about $165. Okay, and so we sit down and we do our analysis and we're doing discounted cashflow analysis and one of the big inputs to DCF is understanding the growth metrics right and forecasting growth. And forecasting growth means looking back historically, figuring out how fast the company has been growing and just saying you know, is it going to speed up or is it going to slow down? Eventually they all slow down. It will slow down, but you have to figure out how long that's going to take. So we did the analysis and we figured out it would slow down, I don't know, over 10 years or something. Something pretty reasonable, probably pretty generous as well, and we came up with a value Again. Remember the stock's trading at $165. We came up with a value of $2.25. And we looked at it and we said can't be, can't be. We learned in our last class the market's efficient, this is all wrong. I don't know. We did something wrong and so we went back and we now this time we went crazy. We're like this stock's going to speed up its growth. It's going to, instead of growing at 50% per year like it has been, it's going to grow at 100% forever. And we came up with a value of $225, right, and so the stock gets added to the S&P or maybe it was when they confirmed that it would be and the stock jumps to $225. It jumps to $235, I think was the high I sell my stock at like $225. Louis: And so we were right, that was a good trade. Jason: Good trade. And then we go and we present our research to our professor. And this is where it's really funny. The professor, who was so outrageously smart, could do any math problem in his head. But he's looking at us, he's laughing at us. He's like really, you think this thing is worth $2.20? We're like, yeah, here's the research, here's what we did. And he's just laughing at us. And then he says how could this company possibly be worth more than Apple? And Apple at the time was trading at $19, which, split adjusted, is probably something like negative 10 cents. And he said Apple has $16 in cash on its books and, whatever he's like, Apple is definitely worth more than JDS, Unipay. And, of course, this guy's probably retired on a private island somewhere. But what I took away from this whole story oh, and the other thing is we were right on both sides. We were right with $225 call because the stock traded to $235. And within two years the stock was trading at something like $2. So we were right on both ends. And so what I took from that was I'm not a great analyst and I'm not a great forecaster. I'm especially not a good forecaster. Okay, but what I can do is I can look at data and I can back into things and I can understand well, if I look at, if I calculate, if I back into, how do I get to $165 or $200 for JDS Uniphase? I look and I say, well, the market has really high expectations of this company and those expectations are nothing but sentiment. Nobody knows. Louis: I think that's all you need, though, jason, I actually don't think you need to be a great forecast Like that's really all you need. So, cause, if you know those extremes, you avoid mistakes, because the more I do this, the more I realize that's what it's about. You know, if you're going to put X number of units, and risk units if you will, in your portfolio, if you don't make a lot of mistakes and you compound reasonably, you're going to do great. It's just like reading. You know Warren Buffett always talks about read chapter eight and chapter 20 of the intelligent investor, which everyone should do, by the way. In fact, I'm set I send that book to clients and just say read this. You know that's what all it is about. I mean, that's basically what it's about what you just talked about right there. You don't really need to be a great forecaster. You just need to avoid a lot of mistakes and have a reasonable amount of diversification, not too much. And yeah, I mean you hear about people that have made like great calls consistently, and then the more you learn about them, the more you realize that there was something else part of the story. You know what I'm saying. There was another part of the story that you didn't really hear about, and a lot of it boils down to not avoiding mistakes, having discipline, risk management, things like that, but anyway, I got you off your topic. Jason: It's all risk. Yeah no, yeah, no, no, yeah, and it's. It's important to cut me off too, because I can. I can talk about certain things for too long, but I'll just. I'll just cut right to your question, which was fear and greed, yeah, yeah. And so how did I get to that? Literally, I, from that point in about 2000,. You know, I got much more interested in technical analysis and and, and I started thinking I'm not so much like a stock picker and I'm not so much into, you know, the MACD and the RSI. I'm much more quantitative. That's my interest in technicals. Technicals really helped me become more quantitative and more interested in looking at the big picture, understanding how to measure the big picture, and so I started looking at indicators and things that people like Ned Davis was doing. Right, I, I a big fan of Ned Davis, ned Davis's work. There's some other providers that were like that, sentiment traders Another one. I like all those, I like what they do and I started trying to replicate. You know, you don't know what their secret sauce is, although actually Ned Davis has a really good book. I'm looking at my bookshelf somewhere out there when Ned Davis's book is being right or making money. But then his chief strategist wrote another book where they actually go in and they tell you how to build a, build their, one of their sentiment indicators that has nine components to it. I was messing around with that, trying to figure out, trying to understand these indicators and understand the signals that they gave. And I hadn't around. That same time, cnn was one of our clients at what was then Wall Street On Demand and our CEO was out talking to them and he was talking to Lex Harris, who was their editor in chief, and Lex said you know, I don't know what this is, but I want to build something called the Fear and Greed Index. Can you help me? And Jim, our CEO, came back and he came to my team and he said so CNN has this kind of crazy idea. They want to build something called the Fear and Greed Index. What do you think has this kind of crazy idea? They want to build something called the fear and greed index? What do you think? And everyone on the team pushed away from the table. They're like what a bad idea. And I was left sitting there going they thought it was a bad idea. Yeah, they just you know they didn't get it. It wasn't what they do. I thought you were going to say mic drop. Louis: I literally thought you were going to say mic drop. Everybody said that's a great idea, let's jump on it. That surprises me. They looked at it. Jason: Yeah, they were like well, and they didn't know how to do it right. It wasn't what they were interested in. The team all had very different kinds of backgrounds, and I was the only one that had that more market-related background. The others were really more analysts Smart guys, great guys, but much more like. They could probably pick a stock better than I can, but they cannot tell you if we're in a bull market or a bear market. So I'm sitting there saying this is the greatest opportunity ever. And so they got me on the phone with CNN, with Lex, a day or two later, and we just started putting together ideas and Lex basically said look, I don't know what this thing is. You kind of know what I want to do. I just want something that really represents that quote that Warren Buffett says, which is you should be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. So what, what is that? What does that look like? And so I just went and built it. Luckily, they gave me Jim. Our CEO's son was also a statistics major at Yale, and so for his summer internship that year, he sat with me and we went through and took all the indicators that I had put together and we did a principal component analysis, which is really important because you want to make sure, just like we said earlier, when you're looking at a stock chart, you want to make sure that your indicators aren't all trend indicators or all momentum indicators. The same thing, we want to make sure that each of the indicators, within fear and greed, didn't step on one another right, that they weren't saying the same thing, or really just that they worked well together, that they were each complementary, right? There were a couple indicators that I wanted to include that just didn't make it for budget reasons. Cnn is a media company. Media companies don't have huge budgets these days, so I couldn't do things like market valuation, s&p 500 valuation, or we wanted to use the, because by this point, market had bought us, and so I wanted to use the credit default swap index and I could only get end of day CVS data, not intraday, and so it just didn't fit with what we were doing. Um, so there were, there were some indicators that we left out that really would have been perfect and, um, you know, later on I got I got to use for other purposes, but not for the fear and greed index. But I got to use for other purposes, but not for the fear and greed index. But yeah, right now you know the fear and greed index, the seven indicators that are there, we selected one that is purely just the S&P 500, right, normalized. So we understand if it's sort of fear, you know, fearful or greedy. But then we have two that are breadth indicators. So how broad is the advance or decline? And is that moving in concert with the market or against the market? Then we have two that are options related the put-call ratio and the VIX. And then we have two that are bond market related One that compares the spread and yields between low-quality junk bonds and high-quality investment-grade bonds, as that spread is tightening. You see that investors are, you know they're more, they're seeking out risk because they think that they can get better returns. And then the last one is where we compare the returns on stocks to the return on bonds over a 20-day rolling period, total return as well. So for all these underlying indicators we're using ETFs. So this is actually something that can be replicated by anybody, but there are a lot of mechanics and calculations that go into it on the back end which make it. You know, if you are going to calculate it yourself, you got to be pretty sophisticated and be and have a pretty decent data feed. Yeah. Louis: Well, I love that. You know that was put in a scale that made sense and a categorization that made sense. It almost kind of makes sense the way that you did. It is like extreme fear, fear, neutral greed, extreme greed. These are things that we can understand and this is, I think, one of your biggest talents, actually. I think one of your biggest talents actually. You know, like you had said, we were looking for, we did principal component analysis, but we were looking for things that worked well together and complementary. As a quant geek, I would have just said non-correlated, you know or not. I would have used like big, long names of there's some statistical names that are you know to describe, that are like really long and stupid, sounding like to make no sense. I love the fact that you like that, you, you that's the. That is a great skill and I think to be able to take something that is complicated and make it accessible was one of the biggest, I guess, wins from this and it also helps people understand themselves, in my opinion, like if somebody goes and they look at this and they say, okay, right now I'm looking at the website. It says I'm on cnncom markets, fear and greed. It says it's got a number 48 and it says we're neutral but kind of tilting towards fear. So tell me a little bit about, like, how you would interpret this. I'm an investor right now. Let's say I have a reasonably good sized portfolio. I want to grow my wealth, but I also want to manage my risk. How would I? What would I use this for? How would I think about this? For like, really, like practically, how would I use this? Jason: Okay. So what does neutral mean? And neutral is really that center zone of I don't know what it is right. So the first thing I'll ask you to do and I know users or people who are watching or listening can't see this, but in the upper right corner you can see where it says overview and timeline. So the first thing I want you to do is click on timeline, okay, and what you'll see is a chart of the fear and greed index for the last two years. And especially when we are in this neutral area and we don't really know what the overarching sentiment is, it's important to look back over historically, just like we said with the PE ratio. Right, you can look back and compare to peers, or you can say how is it versus history, and so what we see is this 48 is an increase over where it has been. But, more importantly, we're sort of in this weird consolidation period. Fear and greed is just kind of ticking up and down, up and down. It's not really doing much of anything. So, however, we have dropped from a level of greed right Back before April and I'm going to pat myself on the back. I don't write much about fear and greed. I'm going to start, but I don't write much about fear and greed on our site. I did post in one of our little communities. I said, look, hey, just so you guys know. You don't really know me, but I built the Fear and Greed Index and here's what I've been watching Fear and Greed. It has just broken down. I think the market's going to break down with it, and you know my timing was amazing and the next day the market broke down. So, yeah, good for me, blind squirrel. But so what I like to do is I like to look and see and look for patterns and try to understand what is it doing and how does it compare to the market. So a few things, all right. What really matters is fear tends to be good. What happens when the indicator goes into fear or extreme fear? What we see is that standard deviation of returns. So the volatility of the market increases, and I think we're talking about forward volatility too, not like a month out, but days out if you want to measure it each day and sort of see what's happening. Volatility is just high when we are in extreme fear and fear because investors are nervous. What happens when investors are nervous? Good time to buy, right. The other thing is greed happens a lot. Okay, and greed is not necessarily a bad thing. Extreme greed is oftentimes a good thing. Okay, extreme greed tends to have. There's two times that extreme greed happens and one time is a great time and the other time is a high risk time. Okay, the great time is when we have been at extreme fear. The market has fallen maybe the market fell by 10% or something and we're starting to see a rebound and what you'll see oftentimes is the components of the fear and greed index spike and everything spikes, everything jumps up and we get to extreme greed because we've gone from a low level and all of a sudden, investors are committing new capital to the money. Investors are getting excited and we see extreme greed. Extreme greed is almost always good, except when, if we were in some kind of an uptrend okay, we've been, we're in an established uptrend, something good happens, the market kind of spikes. We don't. It's rare that we really see extreme greed during an uptrend, but let's say it happens. Well, that tends to be a period where probably just don't want to commit new capital right now. I probably want to take a breather, wait, because risk is higher. You know it's extreme fear to extreme greed, but really it's low risk to high risk. Louis: But sometimes, as you know, sometimes that greed can be really good too. The other thing yeah, go ahead, sorry, no, no, I was just going to say that reminds me of like the traditional technical interpretation of momentum is after you've had a bear market, you always get to an overbought situation. That doesn't mean the trend's over, it just means the trend's beginning, and it's almost the same concept. It seems like to me to some degree like you're looking for the extremes, but sometimes you have to interpret it the opposite way after a certain condition, after a bear market or after you've had really a lot of fear, and then it pops back up to greed, well, that doesn't mean the trend's over, that means we're just starting to go up again. Exactly yeah, and you have a continuation of the trend. Jason: Right, yeah, yeah, completely. And so with anything, with any indicator, you have to look at it in context right. Everything from an economic indicator, cpi, et cetera. Everything has to be looked at within context. And with that, I think you have to look at the context within the fear and greed index, and that's why there are the seven components, and I actually feel that the seven components are more valuable than that headline number, than the speed dial, right. So we start with and CNN came up with these names and I love it that they did that, because they are so much better at explaining things than I am and they really they said well, you know, here's who our user base is. We want this to be something that is a sophisticated trader can use it. And, as you know, as we heard Katie Stockton tell us several years ago, lots of hedge funds use the fear and greed index, right, they use it as one of their marks to understand what investors are doing. But they want it to be understandable by retail investors, by my dad hundred versus 125 day moving average just to see how far like what is the momentum right. Use that word, it's completely accurate. What is the momentum Is it? Is it so high that it's potentially exhaustive right now? It's so high that it's potentially exhaustive right when we and we normalize it both over the last six months. But then we also go back and we normalize it again over two years to say is that six month number that higher, low that we have? How does that compare where we've really been over a longer period of time? And then we look at, as I mentioned, two measures of stock price strength and stock price breadth. So market breadth we're looking at both 52 week highs and lows on the New York Stock Exchange and then the McClellan Volume Summation Index. So really is money flowing into stocks going up or money flowing into stocks going down? Louis: And what we see is both of those numbers are sitting at extreme fear. Because, those are great indicators. They're such great indicators. Yeah, I mean, I remember back in the day doing a ton of backtesting and those were some of the most robust indicators, all three of them, especially on the new highs it's actually new lows is actually more valuable, in my opinion, based on the research years ago, than the new highs, but just because it showed that extreme capitulation. But those are great and they are complimentary. One is like the number of stocks hitting highs or lows, and then the other one is more. The McClellan summation is also very valuable and it can be manipulated in so many different ways. So and I love that you have three dimensions to that and while you were telling me about this, what struck me is I always try to put things in perspective for the individual investor and for the. You know how they can think about these things and make it useful for them. And I think one of the things that could be useful with this, or is useful for this, is understanding how you're feeling. Like you know, if you've just gone through a period of angst with your portfolio and then you notice that this thing is at fear, right, well, everybody's being fearful and like it's like what are you going to do in your portfolio during that period, right? Well, everybody's being fearful and like it's like what. What are you going to do in your portfolio during that period of time? Jason: Exactly. Louis: You know what how? are just you know how you're feeling, like if you can step away like that fish in the fishbowl with in the water, you know and say, yeah, I'm in the water and you know, and, and this is what's happening, and what am I going to do? And stay level headed. I always talk about like staying level headed is the most important thing as an investor. It's like if I'm overly optimistic, I need to bring myself down and if I'm overly pessimistic, I need to bring myself up. Tom Basso mentioned that to me years ago, who was one of the market wizards. Jason: Right. Louis: Talking about doing that, and I've really that's been probably one of the market wizards, right, talking about doing that, and I've really that's been probably one of the most helpful things for me personally and for advising clients as well and managing money. Just it's. It's it sounds so simple. It's like oh yeah, I know that, but yeah, but do you do it? Jason: Exactly, and that's where it's important to have something that's quantitative and unbiased, right, and I'll tell you a story about that that confirms what you just said. But when we first, a few years after we launched Fear and Greed, I was talking with a financial advisor and he said, oh, I use this thing all the time with my clients and I love it. He said how do you use it? And he said, well, I introduced them all to it. And then, when they call me, when the market is down, wanting to sell their positions, wanting to reduce risk the market's already fallen by 10% or 20% and now they want to reduce risk he says, ok, hang on a sec, go to CNN Markets, fear and Greed. What do you see? And they say extreme fear. And he says, ok, what does that mean? And the client always says, okay, what does that mean? And and the client always says, oh, yeah, everybody's afraid right now. Yes, and what does that mean? That means I shouldn't panic. And hey, let me write you a check because this is a good time to invest. Louis: There you go. So one thing I noticed that's not on here is valuation, which is so hard to time valuation. So this is, you know, valuation. So if you put this in context with valuation, then I think you have a powerhouse, really, because absolutely yeah. Yeah, because then you have that long-term

Humility is above all the other virtues.” Living in the truth allows for the most important thing to emerge in a person's life – repentance. When we see and acknowledge the nature of our actions and our thoughts and we bring them before God, it is then that He can heal us and make us whole.  The struggle to do this, however, can be great. There's always part of us that wants to hold on to the illusion of creating our own dignity and identity. Humility compels us to acknowledge that all things begin and end with God. We certainly have our role to play in the Divine drama; however, one can have all the virtues and appear to be saintly, yet if they are lacking the virtue of humility, none of these virtues will bear fruit. If an individual is like the publican coming to the temple beating his breast and realizing that there is no virtue in him at all immediately he is justified in the eyes of God. He's let go of the lie of the Evil One.  We cannot take for ourselves what belongs to God alone. He is life and love and truth, and it is his mercy that allows us to participate in this reality. To be humble, to see ourselves as nothing of note, cost very little but promises everything in return. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:08:27 FrDavid Abernethy: page 387   00:08:31 FrDavid Abernethy: no. 7   00:12:07 Jason: Good evening Fr and everyone   00:34:42 sharonfisher: But doesn't opening with “How's your prayer life?” seem like a pre-judgment that they aren't attentive enough? “How are you doing?” can be sincere, but also allow individuals to share at their own comfort level. (Not trying to be contrary, but I maintain my own faith and am wary of coming across as holier-than-thou. Sorry, late comment to last segment.)   00:36:14 sharonfisher: I see - thank you!   01:03:43 alexandramucerino: We cannot forgive we do not first accept the injustice   01:05:26 Fr Marty, ND, 480-292-3381: Sometimes I'm quick to jump into problem-solving or project management in my life or ministry or others' lives. I'm wondering if the practice of humility would recommend that I stop and ask first, is this where God is working? It seems that I've been noticing God at work in subtle ways in my or others' lives, but not necessarily in what I think is more important or expedient. I'm wondering about humility here.   01:15:41 Lorraine Green: Thank you   01:15:46 sharonfisher: And to your spirit! Thank you !   01:15:50 Fr Marty, ND, 480-292-3381: thank you   01:15:52 Rebecca Thérèse: Thank you

Come analyze and walkthrough an investment property with Garrett, the CEO of Max It Out. Garrett shares his business plan for a property he has under contract and tells us his plans to split a single-family house into two units and add an ADU to get an extra unit for a return. He plans to add a new three-story structure to connect with the house and add eight more units. The estimated cost of the renovation is around $2.5 million and the expected value of the 11 units is around $6 million. Garrett also discusses the rules for adding ADUs and the benefits of attaching structures.

To Celebrate our 50th Show we did a live show featuring an in studio performance from Moonlight Drive's Clint Bowman, and Jason Good, and we groove out to new music from The Grym Sims

The Appalachian Soul Man, Aristotle Jones, meets the Appalachian Hurricane, Bo McMillion and grooves out to music from 18 Strings, Craig Phillip, and the Jason Good Blues Band

Jason Swett is the author of the Complete Guide to Rails Testing. We covered Jason's experience with testing while building relatively small Ruby on Rails applications. Our conversation applies to just about any language or framework so don't worry if you aren't familiar with Rails.A few topics covered:- Listen to advice but be aware of its context. Something good for a large project may not apply to a small one- Fast feedback loops help us work quicker and tests are great for this- If you don't involve things like the database in any of your tests your application may not work at all despite your tests passing- You may not need to worry about scaling at the start for smaller or internal applications - Try to break features into the smallest pieces possible so they can be checked in and reviewed quickly- Jason doesn't remember the difference between a stub and a mock because he rarely uses themRelated Links:- Code with Jason- The Complete Guide to Rails Testing- Code With Jason PodcastTranscript:[00:00:00] Jeremy: today I'm talking to Jason Swett, he's the author of the complete guide to rails testing, a frequent trainer and conference speaker. And he's the host of the code with Jason podcast. So Jason, welcome to software sessions. [00:00:13] Jason: Thanks for having me. [00:00:15] Jeremy: from listening to your podcast, I get a sense that the size of the projects you work on they're, they're relatively modest.Like they're not like a super huge thing. There, there may be something that you can fit all within your head. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit to that first, so that we kind of get where your perspective is and the types of projects you work on are.[00:00:40] Jason: Yeah. Good question. So that is true. Most of my jobs have been at small companies and I think that's probably typical of the typical developer because most businesses in the world are small businesses. You know, there's, there's a whole bunch of small businesses for every large business. And so most of the code bases I've worked on have been not particularly huge.And most of the teams I've worked on have been relatively small And sometimes so small that it's just me. I'm the only person working on the application. I, don't really know any different. So I can't really compare it to working on a larger application. I have worked at, I worked at AT&T so that was a big place, but I was at, AT&T just working on my own solo project so that wasn't a big code base either.So yeah, that's been what my experience has been like.[00:01:36] Jeremy: Yeah. And I, I think that's interesting that you mentioned most people work in that space as well, because that's basically where I fall as well. So when I listened to your podcast and I hear you talking about like, oh, I have a, I have a rails project where I just have a single server and you know, I have a database and rails, and maybe I have nginx in front, maybe redis it's sort of the scale that I'm familiar with versus when I hear podcasts or articles, you know, I'm reading where they're talking about, oh, we have 500 microservices or we have 200 instances of the application.That's, that's not a space that I've, I've worked in. So I, I found it helpful to, to hear, you know, from you on your show that like, Hey, you know, not everybody is working on these gigantic projects.[00:02:28] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. It's not terribly relatable when you hear about those huge projects.And obviously, sometimes, maybe people earlier in their career can get the wrong idea about what's applicable to their situation. I feel like one of the most dangerous kinds of advice is advice that's good advice, but it's good advice for somebody else.And then I've, I've. Been victim of that, where I get some advice and maybe it's genuinely good advice, but it's not good advice for me where I am doing what I'm doing. And so, I apply the advice, but it's not the right thing. And so it doesn't work out for me. So I'm always careful to like asterisk a lot of the things I say where it's like, Hey, this is, this is good advice if you're in this particular situation, but maybe not for everybody.And really the truth is I, I try not to give advice these days because like advice is dangerous stuff for that very reason.[00:03:28] Jeremy: so, so when you mentioned you try not to give advice and you have this book, the complete guide to rails testing, would you not describe what's in the book as advice? I'm kind of curious what the distinction is there.[00:03:42] Jason: Yeah, Jeremy, right after I said that, I'm like, what am I talking about? I give all kinds of advice. So forget, I said that I totally give advice. But maybe not in certain things like like business advice or anything like that. I do give a lot of advice around testing and various programming things.So, yeah, ignore that part of what I said.[00:04:03] Jeremy: something that I found a little bit unique about rails testing was that a lot of the tests are centered around I guess you could call it like a full integration test, right? Because I noticed when working with rails, if I write a test, a lot of times it's talking to the database, it's talking to if, if I.Have an API or I have a website it's actually talking to the API. So it's actually going through all the layers and spinning up a database and all that. And I wonder if you, you knew how that work, like each time you run a test, is it creating a new database? So that each test is isolated or how does all that stuff actually work?[00:04:51] Jason: Yeah, good question. First. I want to mention something about terminology. So I think one of the most important things for somebody who's new to testing to learn is that in our industry, we don't have a consensus around terminology. So what you call an integration test might be different from what I call an integration test.The thing you just described as an integration test, I might call an acceptance test. Although I happen to also call it an integration test cause I use that terminology too, but I just wanted to give that little asterisk for the listener, because if they're like, wait, I thought an integration test was this.And not that anyway, you asked how does that work? So. It is true that with those types of rails tests, and just to add more terminology into the mix, they call those system tests or system specs, depending on what framework you're using. But those are the tests that actually instantiate a browser and simulating user input, exercise, the UI of the application.And those are the kinds of tests that like show you that everything works together. And mechanically how that works. One layer of it is that each test runs in a database transaction. So when you, you know, in order to run a certain test, maybe you need certain records like a user. And then I don't know if it's a scheduling test, you might need to create an appointment and whatever. All those records that you create specifically for that test that's happening inside of a database transaction. And then at the end of the test, the transaction is aborted. So that none of the data you create during the test actually gets persisted to the database. then regarding the whole database, it's not actually like creating a new database instance at the start of each test and then blowing it away.It's still the same database instance is just the data inside of each test is not being persisted at. [00:07:05] Jeremy: Okay. So when you run. What you would call, I guess you called it an acceptance test, right? Where it's going, it's opening up your website, it's clicking through the website, creating records, things like that. That's happening in a database instance that's created for, I guess, for all your tests that all your tests get to reuse and rails is automatically wrapping your test in a transaction.So even if you're doing five or 10 database queries at the end of all, that they all get rolled back because they're all within the same transaction.[00:07:46] Jason: Exactly. And the reason why we want to do that. Is because of a testing principle that you want your tests to be runnable in any order. And the key thing is you want your tests to be deterministic. So deterministic means that the starting state determines the in-state and it's the same every time, no matter what.So if you have tests a, B and C, it shouldn't be the case that you can run them in the order, ABC, and they all pass. But if you do it CBA, then test a fails because it should only fail. If something's actually wrong, it shouldn't fail for some other reason, like the order in which you run the tests. And so to ensure that property of deterministic newness we need to make it so that each test doesn't leak into the other tests.Cause imagine if that. Database transaction. thing didn't happen. And it's, it's only incidental that that's achieved via database transactions. It could conceivably be achieved some other way. That's just how this happens to work in this particular case. But imagine if no measure was taken to clean up afterward and I, I ran a test and it generated an appointment.And then the test that runs after that does some tests that involves like doing a count of appointments or something like that. And maybe like, coincidentally, my second test passes because I've always run the tests in a certain order. and so unbeknownst to me, test B only passes because of what I did in test a that's bad because now the thing that's happening is different from what I think is happening.And then if it flipped and when we ran it, test B and then test a. It wouldn't work anymore. So that's why we make each test isolated. So it can be deterministic.[00:09:51] Jeremy: and I wonder if you've worked with any other frameworks or any other languages, and if you found that the approaches and those frameworks or languages is similar to rails, like where it creates these, the transaction for you, does the rollback for you and all of that.[00:10:08] Jason: Good question. I have to plead ignorance. I've dabbled a little bit in testing and some other languages or frameworks, but not enough to be able to say anything smart about it. [00:10:22] Jeremy: Yeah, I mean in my experience and of course there are many different frameworks that I'm not familiar with, but in a lot of cases, I I've seen that they don't have this kind of behavior built in, like, they'll provide you a way to test your application, but it's up to you if you want to write code that will wrap everything in a transaction or create a new database instance per test, things like that.That's all left up to you. so I, I think it's interesting that that rails makes that decision for you and makes it to where you don't really have to think about that or make that decision. And for me personally, I found that really helpful.[00:11:09] Jason: Yeah, it's really nice. It's a decision that not everybody is going to be on board with. And by that decision, I mean the general decision of rails to make a lot of decisions for you. And it may not be the case that I agree with every single decision that rails has made, but I do appreciate that that the rails team or DHH, or whoever has decided that rails is just going to have all these sensible defaults.And that's what you get. And if you want to go tweak that stuff, I guess you can, but you get all this stuff this way. Cause we decided what we think is the best way to do it. And that is how most people use their, their rails apps. I think it's great. It eliminates a lot of overhead and then. Use some other technologies, I've done some JavaScript stuff and it's just astonishing how much boiler plate and how many, how much energy I have to expend on decisions that don't really matter.And maybe frankly, decisions that I'm not all that equipped to make, because I don't have the requisite knowledge to be able to make those decisions. And usually I'd rather just have somebody else make those decisions for me. [00:12:27] Jeremy: we've been talking about the more high level tests, the acceptance tests, the integration tests. And when you're choosing on how to test something, how do you decide whether it should be tested that, that level, or if it should be more of a unit level tests, something, something smaller[00:12:49] Jason: Good question. So I want to zoom out just a little bit in order to answer that question and come at it from a distance. So I recently conducted some interviews for a programmer job. I interviewed about 25 candidates, most of those candidates. Okay. And the first step of the interview was this technical coding exercise. most of the candidates did not pass. And maybe, I don't know. Five or six or seven of the candidates out of those 25 did pass. I thought it was really interesting. The ones who failed all failed in the same way and the ones who passed all passed in the same way. And I thought about what exactly is the difference.And the difference was that the programmers who passed, they coded in feedback loops. So I'll say that a different way, the ones who failed, they tried to write their whole program at once and they would spend 15, 20 minutes carefully writing the program. And then at the end of that 20 minutes, they would try to run it.And unsurprisingly to me the program would fail like on line 2 of 30, because nobody's smart enough to write that much code and have the whole thing work. And then the ones who did well. They would write maybe one line of code, run it, observe what happens, compare what they observed to what they expected to see, and if any corrections were needed, they made those corrections and ran it again.And then only once their expectations were satisfied, did they go and write a second line and they would re repeat that process again, that workflow of programming and feedback loops I think is super important. And I think it's what distinguishes, Hmm. I don't exactly want to say successful programmers from unsuccessful programmers, but there's certainly a lot to do with speed.like, think about how much slower it is to try to write your whole program, run it and see that it fails. And then try to find the needle in the haystack. It's like, okay, I just wrote 30 lines. There's a problem somewhere. I don't know where, and now I have to dig through and find it It's so much harder than if you just write one line and you see a problem and you know, that, that problem lines in that line, you just wrote.So I say all that, because testing is just feedback loops automated. So rather than writing a line and then manually running your program and using your own judgment to compare what you observed to what you expected to see you write a test that exercises your code and says, I expect to see this when this happens.And so the kind of test you write now to answer your question will depend first on the nature of the thing you're writing. But for like, if we take kind of the like typical case of, let's say I'm building a form that will allow me to create a customer in a system. And I put in the first name, last name and email address of the customer. that's a really basic like crud functionality thing. There's not a lot of complexity there. And so I am, to be honest, I might just not write a test at all and we can get into how I decide when to write a test and when not to, but I probably would write a test. And if I did, I would write a system spec to use the rails are spec terminology that spins up a browser.I would fill in the first name field with a first name, fill in the last name field with the last name, email, with email click, the submit button. And then I would assert that on the subsequent page, I see some indicator of success. And then if we think about something that. Maybe more involved, like I'm thinking about some of the complicated stuff I've been working on recently regarding um, coming up with a patient's balance in the medical system that I work on.That's a case where I'm not going to spin up a browser to check the correctness of a number. Cause that feels like a mismatch. I'm going to work at a lower level and maybe create some database records and say, when I, when I created this charge and when I create this payment, I expect the remaining balance to be such and such.So the type of test I write depends highly on the kind of functionality.[00:17:36] Jeremy: So it sounds like in the case of something that's more straight forward, you might write a high level test, I guess, where you were saying I just click this button and I see if the thing I expected to be created is there on the next page. And you might create that test from the start and then just start filling in the code and continually running that test you know, until it passes.But you also mentioned that in the case of something simple like that, you might actually. Choose to forego the tests and just take a look you know, visually you open the app and you click that same button and you can see the same result. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you decide, like, yeah, I'm going to write this test or no, I'm just going to inspect a visually[00:18:28] Jason: Yeah. So real quick before I answer that, I want to say that it's, it's not one of the tests is straightforward or the feature is straightforward that determines which kind of test I write, because sometimes the acceptance test that I write, which spins up a browser and everything. Sometimes that might be quite an involved test and in complicated feature, or sometimes I might write a lower level test and it's a trivially simple one.It has more to do with um, What's, what's the thing that I care about. Like, is it primarily like a UI based feature that, that is like the meat of it? Or is it like a, a lower level, like calculation type thing or something like that? That's kind of what determines which kind of right. But you asked when would I decide not to write a test.So the reason I write tests is because it's just like cost prohibitive to manually perform testing, not just in monetary terms, but like in emotional pain and mental energy and stuff like that. I don't want to go back and manually test everything to make sure that it's still working. And so the ROI on writing automated tests is almost always positive, but sometimes it's not a positive ROI.And so when I don't write it down, It's if these conditions are true, if the cost of that feature braking is extremely low. And if the I'll put that if, if the consequences of the feature breaking are really small and the frequency of the usage is low and the cost of writing the test is high, then I probably won't write a test.For example, if there's some report that somebody looks at once every six months and it's like some like maybe a front desk person who uses the feature and if it doesn't work, then it means they have to instead go get the answer manually. And instead of getting the answer in 30 seconds, it takes them five.Extremely low cost to the failure. And it's like, okay, so I'm costing somebody, maybe 20 bucks once every six months, if this feature breaks. And let's say this test is one that would take like an hour for me to write. Clearly it's better just to accept the risk of that feature breaking once in a while, which it's probably not going to anyway. So those are the questions I ask when I decide and, and to, to be clear, it's not like I run through all those questions for every single test I write in the vast, vast majority of cases. I just write the test because it's a no-brainer that it's, that it's better to write the test, but sometimes my instincts tell me like, Hey, is this really actually important to write a test for?And when I find myself asking that, then I say, okay, what's the consequences of the breakage? How hard is this test to write all that. [00:21:46] Jeremy: So you talked about the consequences being low, but you also talked about maybe the time to write the test being high. What are the types of tasks that, that take a long time to write?[00:21:58] Jason: Usually ones that involve a lot of setup. So pretty much every test requires some data to be in place data, either meaning database, data, or like some object structure or something like that. Sometimes it's really easy sometimes to set up is extremely complicated. and that's usually where the cost comes in.And then sometimes, sometimes you encounter like a technical challenge, like, oh, how do I like download this file? And then like inspect the contents of this file. Like sometimes you just encounter something that's like technically tricky to achieve. But more frequently when a test is hard to write it's because of the setup is hard.[00:22:49] Jeremy: and you're talking about set up being, you need to insert a whole bunch of different rows into your database or different things that interact with one, another things like that.[00:23:02] Jason: Exactly. [00:23:03] Jeremy: when you're testing a system and you create a database that has all these items in it for you to work with, I'm assuming that what's in your test database is much smaller than what's in the real database. So how do you get something that's representative so that if you only have 10 things in your tasks, but in production, there's thousands of them that you can catch that, Hey, this isn't going to work well, once it gets to production,[00:23:35] Jason: Yeah. that's a really interesting question. And the answers that I don't like, I usually don't try to make the test beta test database representative of the production database in terms of scale, obviously like the right data has to be there in order to exercise the test that it has to be true. But I don't, for example, in production at this moment I know there's some tens of thousands of appointments in the database, but locally at any given time, there are between zero and three or, or So appointments in any particular test, that's obviously nowhere near realistic, but it's only becomes relevant in a great, great minority of cases with, with regard to that stuff, the way I approach that is rather to So I'm thinking about some of those through the, for the first time right now, but obviously with performance in general premature optimization is usually not a profitable endeavor. And so I'll write features without any thought toward performance. And then once things are out there and perform it in production observe the bottlenecks and then fix the bottlenecks, starting with what's the highest ROI.And usually tests haven't come into the picture for me. It's cause like, okay. The reason for tests again is, so you don't have to go back and do that manual testing, but with these performance improvements, instead of tests, we have like application performance monitoring tools, and that's what tells me whether something needs an issue or people just say like, Hey, this certain page is slow or whatever.And so tests would be like redundant to those other measures that we have that tell us if there's performance.[00:25:38] Jeremy: Yeah. So that sorta touches on what you described before, where let's say you were writing some kind of report or adding a report and when you were testing it locally, it worked great generated the report. Uh, Then you pushed it out to production. Somebody went to run it and maybe because of an indexing problem or some other issue It times out, or it doesn't complete takes a long time, but I guess what you're saying is in a lot of cases, the, the consequences of that are not all that high.Like the person will try it. They'll see like, Hey, it doesn't work. Either you'll get a notification or they'll let you know, and then that's when you go in and go like, okay, now, now we can fix this.[00:26:30] Jason: Yeah. And I think like the distinction is the performance aspect of it. Because like with a lot of stuff, you know, if you don't have any tests in your application at all, there's a high potential for like silent failure. And so with the performance stuff, we have other ways of ensuring that there won't be silent failure.So that's how I think about that particular.[00:26:56] Jeremy: I guess another thing about tests is when you build an application, a lot of times you're not just interacting with your own database, you're interacting with third-party APIs. You may even be connecting to different pieces of hardware, things like that. So when you're writing a test, how do you choose to approach that?[00:27:23] Jason: yeah, good question. This is an area where I don't have a lot of personal experience, but I do have some there's another principle in testing that is part of the determinism principle where you don't want to involve external HTTP requests and stuff like that in your tests. Because imagine if I run my test today, And it passes, but then I run my test tomorrow and this third-party API is down and my test fails the behavior of my program didn't change. The only thing that's different is this external API is down right now. And so what I do for, for those is I'll capture the response that I get from the API. And I'll usually somehow um, get my hands on a success response and a failure response and whatever kind of response I want to account for.And then I'll insert those captured responses into my tests. So that then on every subsequent run, I can be using these canned values rather than hitting the real API.[00:28:37] Jeremy: I think in your um, the description of your book, you mentioned a section on, on stubs and mocks, and I wonder what you're describing here, which of those two things, is it? And what's the difference?[00:28:53] Jason: Yeah. it's such a tricky concept And I don't even trust myself to say it right every time that I want to remind myself of the difference between mocks and stubs. I have to go back to my own blog posts that I wrote on it and remind myself, okay, what is the difference between a mock and a stub? And I'll just say, I don't remember.Because this isn't something that I find myself dealing with very frequently. It's something that people always want to know about at least in the rails world. But I'll speak for myself at least. I don't find myself having to use or wanting to use mocks and stubs very much.I will say that both mocks and stubs are a form of a testable. So a mock is a testable and a stub is a testable and a testable. It's like a play on stunt double instead of using a real object or whatever it is, you have this fake object. And sometimes that can be used to like trick your program into behaving a certain way or it can be used to um, gain visibility into an area that you otherwise wouldn't have visibility into.And kind of my main use case for mocks and stubs when I do use them, is that when you're testing a particular thing, You want to test the thing you're interested in testing. You don't want to have to involve all the dependencies of the thing you're testing. And so I will like stub out the dependencies.So, okay. Here's an example. I have a rare usage of stubs in my, in my uh, test suite and dear listener. I'm going to use the word stub. Don't give too much credence to that. Maybe. I mean, mock, I don't remember. But anyway, I have this area where we determine a patient's eligibility to get a certain kind of medicine and there's a ton that goes into it and there's all these, like, there's, there's these four different, like coarse-grained determinations and they all have to be a yes in order for it to overall be a yes.That they can get this medicine. It has to do with mostly insurance. And then each one of those four core course grain determinations has some number of fine grain determinations that determines whether it is a yes or a no. If I weren't using mocks and stubs in these tests, then in order to test one determination, I would have to set up the conditions.This goes back to the setup, work stuff we talked about. I'd have to set up all the conditions for the medicine to be a yes. In addition to, to the thing I'm actually interested in. And so that's a waste because that stuff is all irrelevant to my current concern. Let me try to speak a little bit more concretely.So let's say I have determinations ABC. When I'm interested in determination, a I don't want to have to do all the setup work for determinations, B, C, and D. And so what I'll do is I'll mock the determinations for B, C and D. And I'll say for B, just have the function returned true for C same thing, just return true for D return.True. So it'd like short circuits, all that stuff and bypasses the actual logic that gives me the yes, no determination. And it just always gives me a yes. That way. There's no setup work for B, C, and D. And I can focus only on.[00:32:48] Jeremy: And I think it may be hard to say in this example, but would you, would you still have at least one test that would run through and do all the setup, do the checks for ABC and D and then when you're doing more specific things start to put in doubles for the others, or would you actually just never have a full test that actually did the complete setup?[00:33:14] Jason: well, here's how I'm doing this one. I described the scenario where I'm like thoroughly testing a under many different conditions, but stubbing out B, C and D. They don't have another set of tests where I thoroughly test B and stub out a C and D. And so on. I have one thorough set for, for each of those. If you're asking whether I have one that like exercises, all four of them, No.I just have ones for each of the four individually, which is maybe kind of a trade off. Cause it's arguable that I don't have complete confidence because I'm never testing the four together. But in the like trade off of like setup?work and all that, that's necessary to get that complete con confidence and the value of that, like additional, because really it's just like a tiny bit of additional con confidence that I would get from testing all those things together.In that particular case, my judgment was that that was not worth [00:34:19] Jeremy: yeah. Cause I was thinking from their perspective of sometimes I hear that people will have a acceptance test that covers sometimes you hear people call it the happy path, right. Where they everything lines up. It's like a very straightforward case of a feature. But then all the different ways that you can test that feature, they don't necessarily write tests for those, but they just write one for the, the base case.And then, like you said, you actually drill down into more specifics and maybe only test a, a smaller part there, but it sounds like in this case, maybe you made the decision that, Hey, doing a test, that's going to test all four of these things, even in the simplest case is going to involve so much setup and so much work that, that maybe it's not, not worth it in this case.[00:35:13] Jason: Yeah. And I'd have to go back and refresh my memory as to like what exactly this scenario is for those tasks. Because in general, I'm a proponent of having integration tests that makes sure multiple things work together. Okay. You might've seen that Gif where it says like um, two unit tests, zero integration tests, and there's like a cabinet with two doors.Each door can open on its own or, or maybe it's drawers. Each drawer can open on its own, but you can't open both drawers at the same time. And so I think that's not smart to have only unit tests and no integration tests. And so I don't remember exactly why I chose to do that eligibility test with the ABC and D the way I did.Maybe it was just cost-prohibitive to do it altogether. Um, One thing that I want to want to comment on regarding mocks and stubs, there's a mistake that's made kind of frequently where people overdo it with mocks and stuff. They misunderstand the purpose. The purpose again is that you want to test the thing you're testing, not the dependencies of the thing.But sometimes people step out the very thing they're testing. And so they'll like assert that a certain method will return such and such value, but they'll stub the method they're testing so that the method is guaranteed to return the same value and that doesn't actually test anything. So I just wanted to make, mention that as a common mistake to avoid [00:36:47] Jeremy: I wonder if you could maybe give an example of when you, you have a certain feature and the thought process you're going through where you decide like, yes, this is the part that I should have a stub or a mock for. And this is the part where I definitely need to make sure I run the code.[00:37:07] Jason: Well, again, it's very rare that I will use a mocker stub and it's not common that I'll even consider it for better or worse. Like we're talking about. The nature of rails tests is that we spin up actual database records and, and test our models with database data and stuff like that. In other ecosystems, maybe the testing culture is different and there's more mocks and stubs.I know when I was doing some coding with angular, there was a lot more mocking and stubbing. But with rails, it's kind of like everything's available all the time and we use the database a lot during testing. And so mocks and stubs don't really come into the picture too much. [00:37:56] Jeremy: Yeah. It's, it's interesting that you, you mentioned that because like I work with some projects that use C-sharp and asp.net, and you'll a lot of times you'll see people say like you should not be talking to the database in your tests. And you know, they go through all this work to probably the equivalent of a mock or a stub.But then, you know, when I, when I think about that, then I go like, well, but I'm not really testing how the database is going to react. You know, are my, are my queries actually valid. Things like that, because all this stuff is, is just not being run. in some other communities, maybe they're they have different ideas, I guess, about, about how to run tests.[00:38:44] Jason: Yeah, And it's always interesting to hear expressions. Like you should do this or you shouldn't do that, or it's good to do this. It's bad to do that. And I think maybe that's not quite the right way to think about it. It's more like, well, if I do this, what are the costs and benefits of doing this? Cause it's like, nothing exactly is a good thing to do or a bad thing to do.It's just, if you do this, this will happen as a consequence. And if you don't this won't and all that stuff. So people who don't want to talk to the database in their tests, why is that? What, what are the bad things they think will happen if you do that? The drawbacks is it appears to me are it's slow to use the database in any performance problem.Usually the culprit is the database. That's always the first thing I look at. And if you're involving the database and all of your tests, your tests are going to be much slower than if you don't use the database, but the costs of not talking to the database are exactly what you said, where you're like, you're not exercising your real application, you're missing an entire layer and maybe that's fine.I've never tried approaching testing in that way. And I would love to like, get some experience like working with some people who do it that way. Cause I can't say that I know for an absolute fact that that doesn't work out. But to me it just makes sense to exercise everything that you're actually using when the app runs.[00:40:18] Jeremy: what's challenging probably for a lot of people is that if you look online for how to do testing in lots of different frameworks, you'll get different answers. Right. And it's not clear what's gonna fit your situation right? And you know, to, to give an example of, we've been talking about how rails will it, it predominantly focuses on tests that, that talks to the database and it wraps everything in a transaction as we talked about before, so that you can reset the state and things like that.I've also seen in other frameworks where they'll say like, oh, you can run a database test, but you use this in-memory version of the database instead of actually talking to a real MySQL or Postgres instance, or they'll say, oh, for this test we're going to use SQLite in place of the Postgres database you're actually using in production.And it, it makes the, the setup, I suppose, easier. Um, And maybe it makes the tests run quicker, but then it's also no longer the same as what you're really running. So there's like a lot of different approaches that, that people describe and take. And I think it can be hard for, for people to know, like what, what makes sense for me.[00:41:42] Jason: Yeah. And this is another area where I have to plead ignorance because again, I don't have experience doing it the other way. Logically, I feel like my way makes sense, but I don't have empirical experience doing it the other way. [00:41:57] Jeremy: we've talked a little bit about how there's cases where you'll say I'm not going to do this thing because it's going to take a lot of time and I've weighed the benefits. And I wonder if you could give some examples of things where you spent a lot of time on something, and then in hindsight, you, you realize like this really wasn't worth it.[00:42:18] Jason: I don't think I have any examples of that because I don't think it tends to happen very much. I really can't emphasize enough how old, the case where I choose not to write a test for something is like a one in 5,000 kind of thing. It's really not something I do frequently. The mistake is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.Like somebody may, maybe I will get lazy and I'll skip a test and then I'll realize, oh yeah, This is why I write tests because it actually makes everything easier. And uh, we get pain as as a consequence when we skip tests. So that's usually the mistake I make is not writing a test when I should, rather than writing a test when I should not have [00:43:08] Jeremy: So since then, in general, you, you said that not writing it is, is the, the mistake. How do you get people in the habit of. Of writing the tests where they feel like it's not this thing that's slowing them down or is in the way, but is rather something that's helping them with that feedback loop and is something that they actively want to do.[00:43:33] Jason: Yeah. So to me, it's all about a mindset. So there's a common perception that tests are something extra. Like I've heard stories about, like somebody gives a quote for a project and then the prospective client asks like, well, how much, if we skip tests, how much less would that be? And it's like, oh, it wouldn't be less.It'd be like five times more because tests are a time saver. So I want to try to dispel with that notion. But even so it can be hard to bring oneself, to write task because it feels like something that takes discipline. But in my case, I don't feel like it takes discipline. Because I remind myself of a true fact that it's actually the lazy and easy way to code is to code using tests.And it's the harder, more laborious way to write code. Not using tests because think about what's, what's the alternative to not writing tests. Like we said earlier, the alternative is to manually test everything. And that's just so painful, especially when it's some feature where like, I'm sure you have experience with this, Jeremy, you, you make a code change.And then in order to verify that the thing still works, you have to go through like nine different steps in the browser. And only on that last step, do you get that answer you're after. That's just so painful. And if you write a test, you can automate that. Some things that might present friction in that process, or just like a lack of familiarity with how to write tests and maybe a um, a lack of an easy process for writing tests.And just to briefly touch on that, I think something that can help reduce that. Is to write tests in the same way that I write code in feedback loops. So we talked about writing one line, checking, writing, another line, checking that kind of thing. I write my tests in the same way. First I'll write the shell of the test and then I'll run just the shell, even though it seems kind of dumb to just run the shell cause you know, it doesn't do anything. I do that just to demonstrate to myself that I didn't like make some typo or something like that. I'm starting from like a clean baseline. And then I'll write one line of my test. Maybe if I'm writing a system spec, I'll write a line that creates a user of rum that I know that nothing's going to happen when I run the test, but I'll run it just to see it run and make sure there's no errors.And then I'll add a line that says, log the user in and then I'll run that. And so on just one line at a time. There's this principle that I think is really useful when working, which is to separate the deciding what to do from the actually doing it. I think a lot of developers mixed those two jobs of deciding what to do and doing it in the same step.But if, if you separate those, so you'd like, decide what you're going to have your tests do. And then after that, so like maybe I'll open my test and I'll write in comments what I want to achieve, not in technical terms necessarily, but I'll just write a comment that says, create a user, right? Another comment that says, log in another comment that says, click on such and such.And then once I have those, there, I'll go back to that first line and convert that to code. Okay. My comment that says, create a user, I'll change that to the syntax that actually creates a user and again, using the feedback loop. So I'll run that so that I can, you know, once I'm, once I'm done writing all those comments that say what the test does, I'm now free to forget about it.And I don't have to hold that in my mental Ram anymore. And I can clear my mental RAM. Now all my mental RAM is available to bring, to bear on the task of converting my steps that I already decided into working syntax. If you try to do both those things at the same time, it's more than twice as hard. And so that's why I try to separate.[00:48:04] Jeremy: So that's interesting. So it's like you're designing, I guess, the feature, what you want to build in the context of the test first it's would that be accurate?[00:48:19] Jason: that certainly can be the case. So much of this is context dependent. I very regularly give my self permission to be undisciplined and to go on exploratory spikes. And so if I have like very, if I have a really vague idea about what shape a feature is going to take, I give myself permission to forget about tests and I just write some code and I feel cause there's two reasons to write code.You know, a code is not only a work product code is also a thinking. so I would let go into a different mode, I'll say, okay, I'm not trying to create a work product right now. I'm just using code as a thinking medium, to figure out what I'm even going to do. So that's what I'll do in that case. And then maybe I'll write the test afterward, but if it's very clear, what the thing is that I'm going to write, then I'll often write the test first again, in those two phases of deciding what it's going to be and the deciding how it works.And I won't do a thing where, where, like I write 10 test cases and then I go through one by one and write code to make them pass. Usually I'll write one test, make a pass, write a second test, make it pass and so on. [00:49:38] Jeremy: okay. So the more exploratory aspect, I guess, would be when. You're either doing something that you haven't done before, or it's not clear to you what the features should be is, is that right?[00:49:58] Jason: Yeah, like maybe it's a feature that involves a lot of details. There's like a lot of room for discretion. It could be implemented in more than one way. Like how would I write a test for that? If I don't even know what form it's going to take? Like there's decisions to be made, like, what is the, the route going to be that I visit for this feature?What am I even going to call like this entity and that entity and stuff like that. And I think that goes back to my desire to not juggle and manage. Multiple jobs at the same time. I don't want to, I don't want to overly mix the design job with the testing job. Cause testing can help with design, but design in like a code structure sense.I usually don't want to mix testing with like UI design and not even UI design, like, like design in the highest sense. Meaning like what even is this thing? How does it work? Big picture wise and stuff like that. That's not the kind of design that testing helps with in my mind of the kind of design that testing helps with again, is the code structure.So I want to have my big picture design out of the way before I start writing my test. [00:51:21] Jeremy: and in terms of the big picture design, is that something that you keep all in your head or are you writing that down somewhere? I'm just wondering what your process is.[00:51:34] Jason: Yeah, it can work a number of different ways in the past. I've done usability testing where I will do some uh, pen and paper prototypes and then do some usability testing with, with users. And then I will um, convert those pen and paper prototypes to something on the computer. The idea being pen and paper prototypes are the cheapest to create and change.And then the more you cement it, the more expensive it gets to change. So only once I'm fairly certain that the pen and paper prototypes are right. Will I put it into something that's more of a formal mock. And then once I have my formal mock-up and that's been through whatever scrutiny I want to put it through, then I will do the even more expensive step of implementing that as a working feature.Now having said all that, I very rarely do I go through all that ceremony. Sometimes a feature, usually a feature is sufficiently small, that all that stuff would be silly to do. So sometimes I'll start straight with the the mock-up on the computer and then I'll work off of that. Sometimes it's small enough that I'll just make a few notes in a note-taking program and then work off of that.What is usually true is that our tickets in our ticketing system have a bulleted list of acceptance criteria. So we want to make it very black and white. Very yes, no. Whether a particular thing is done and that's super helpful because again, it goes back to the mixing of jobs and separating of jobs.If we've decided in advance that this feature needs to do these four things. And if it does those four things it's done and it doesn't need to do anything more and if it doesn't meet those four criteria, then it's not done then building the thing is just a matter of following the instructions. Very little thinking is involved.[00:53:45] Jeremy: depending on the scope of the feature, depending on how much information you have uh, you could either do something elaborate, I suppose, where, you know, you were talking about doing prototypes or sketches and, and so on before you even look at code or there could be something that's not quite that complicated where you have an idea of what it is and you might even play with code a little bit to get a sense of where it should go and how it should work.But it's all sort of in service of getting to the point where you know enough about how you're going to do the implementation and you know enough about what the actual feature is to where you're comfortable starting to write steps in the test about like, these are the things that are going to happen.[00:54:35] Jason: Yeah. And another key thing that might not be obvious is that all these things are small. So I never work well, I shouldn't say never, but in general, I, don't work in a feature. That's going to be like a week long feature or something like that. We try to break them down into features that are at most like half.And so that makes all that stuff a lot easier. Like I use the number four as an example of how many acceptance criteria there might be. And that's a pretty representative example. We don't have tickets where there's 16 acceptance criteria because the bigger something is the more opportunity there is for the conceive design to turn out, not to be viable.And the more decisions that can't be made, because you don't know the later step until the earlier decision is made and all that kind of stuff. So the small size of everything helps a lot.[00:55:36] Jeremy: but I, I would imagine if you're breaking things into that small of a piece, then would there be parts that. You build and you tasked and you deploy, but to the user, they actually don't see anything. Is that the appraoch?[00:55:52] Jason: definitely, we use feature flags. Like for example, there's this feature we're working on right now, where we have a page where you can see a long list of items. The items are of several different types right now. You just see all of them all the time, but depending on who you are and what your role is in the organization, you're not going to be interested in all those things.And so we want people to be able to have check boxes for each of those types to show or hide those things. Whereas checkbox feature is actually really big and difficult to add. And so the first thing that I chose to do was to have us add just one single check box for one type. And even that one, single checkbox is sufficiently hard that we're not even giving people that yet.We coded it so that you get the check boxes and that one checkbox is selected by default. When you uncheck it, the thing goes away, but it's selected by default so that we can feature flag that. So the checkbox UI is hidden. Everything looks just the way it did before. And now we can wait until this feature is totally done before we actually surface it to users.So it's the idea of making a distinction between deployment and release. Cause if we try to do this whole big thing, it's, it's gonna take weeks. If we try to do the whole thing, that's just too much risk for something to go wrong. And then like, we're going to deploy like three weeks of work at once.That's like asking for trouble. So I'm a huge fan of feature flags. [00:57:35] Jeremy: Interesting. So it's like the, it's almost like the foundation of the feature is going in. And if you were to show it to the user well, I guess in this case, it actually did have a function right at you. You could filter by that one category. [00:57:52] Jason: oh, I was just going to say you're exactly right. It wouldn't be a particularly impressive or useful feature, but what we have is complete it's it's not finished, but it is complete. [00:58:06] Jeremy: I'm not sure if you have any examples of this, but I imagine that there are changes that are large enough that I'm not sure how you would split it up until you, you mentioned like half a days worth of time. And I, I wonder if either have examples of features like that or a general sense of how, what do you do if you, you can't figure out a way to split it up that small.[00:58:34] Jason: I have yet to encounter a feature that we haven't been able to break up into pieces that are that small. So, unfortunately, I can't really say anything more than that because I just don't have any examples of exceptions [00:58:49] Jeremy: For, for people listening, maybe that should be a goal at least like, see if you can make everything smaller, see if you can ship as little as possible, you know, maybe you don't hit that half a day mark, but at least give it a, give it a try and see what you can do.[00:59:10] Jason: yeah. And the way I care would characterize it, maybe wouldn't be to ship as little as possible at a time, but to give a certain limit that you try not to go over. And it's, it's a skill that I think can be improved with practice. You learn certain techniques that you can use over and over. Like for example, one way that I split things up sometimes is we will add the database tables in one chunk. And we'll just deploy that, cause that presents a certain amount of risk, you know, when you're adding database tables or columns or anything like that, like it's always risky when you're messing with the structure of the database. So I like to do just that by itself. And it's kind of tidy most of the time because because it's not something that's like naturally visible to the user is just a structural change.So that's an example of the kind of thing that you learn as you gain practice, breaking bigger things up into smaller pieces. [01:00:16] Jeremy: so, and, and that example, in terms of whatever issue tracking system you use, what, what would you call that? Would you just call that setting up schema for X future features, or I'm just kinda curious how you characterize that.[01:00:35] Jason: yeah, something like that. Those particular tickets don't have great names because ideally each ticket has some amount of value that's visible to the user and that one totally doesn't, it's a purely nuts and bolts kind of thing. So that's just a case where the name's not going to be great, but what's the alternative can't think of anything better. So we do it like that. [01:01:02] Jeremy: you feel like that's, that's lower risk shipping something that's not user-facing first. Then it is to wait until you have at least like one small thing that, you know, is connected to that change.[01:01:19] Jason: Yeah. I had a boss in the past who had a certain conception of the reason to do deployments. And, and her belief was that the reason that you deploy is to deliver value to the user which is of course true, but there's another really good reason to deploy, which is to mitigate risk. The further production and development are able to diverge from one another, the greater, the risk.When you do a deployment. I remember one particular time at that job, I was made to deploy like three months of work at once and it was a disaster and I got the blame because I was the one who did the work. And quite frankly, I was really resentful that that had. And that's part of what informs my preference for deploying small amounts of work at a time.I think it's best if things can be deployed serially, like rather than deploying in patches, just finish one thing, deploy it, verify it, finish the next thing, deploy it, verify it. I have the saying that it's better to be a hundred percent done with half your work than halfway done with a hundred percent of your work. For, for the hopefully obvious reason that like, if, if you have 15 things that are each halfway in progress, now you have to juggle 15 balls in your head. Whereas, if you have 15 things you have to do, and then you finish seven of them, then you can completely forget about those seven things that you finished and deployed and verified and all that.And your mental bandwidth is freed up just to focus on the remaining work. [01:03:10] Jeremy: yeah, that, that makes sense. And, and also if you are putting things out bit by bit, And something goes wrong, then at least it's not all 15 things you have to figure out, which was it. It's just the last thing he pushed out.[01:03:26] Jason: Exactly. Yeah. It's never fun when you deploy a big delta and something goes wrong and it's a mystery. What introduced the problem? It's obviously never good if you deploy something that turns out to be a problem, but if you deployed just one thing and something goes wrong, at least you can. Roll it back or at the very least have a pretty decent idea of where the problem lies. So you can address it quickly. [01:03:56] Jeremy: for sure. Well I think that's probably a good place to leave it off on, but is there anything else about testing or just software in general that you, you thought we should've brought up?[01:04:09] Jason: Well, maybe if I can leave the listener with one thing um, I want to emphasize the importance of programming and feedback loops. It was a real eye-opener for me when I was interviewing these candidates to notice the distinct difference between programmers, who didn't program and feedback loops and programmers, who do I have a post about it?I'm just, it's just called how to program and feedback loops. I believe if anybody's interested in the details. Cause I have like. It's like seven steps to that feedback loop. First, you write a line of code, then you do this. I don't remember all seven steps off the top of my head, but it's all there in the blog post.Anyway, if I could give just one piece of advice to anybody who's getting into programming, it's a program in feedback loops. [01:05:00] Jeremy: yeah, I think that's been the, the common thread, I suppose, throughout this conversation is that whether it's. Writing the features you want them to be as small as possible. So you get that feedback of it being done. And like you said, taking it off of your plate. Then there's the being able to have the tests there as you write the features so that you get that immediate feedback, that this is not doing what the test says it should be doing.So yeah, it makes it, it makes a lot of sense that basically in everything we do try to get to a point where we get a thumbs up, we get at, this is complete. The faster we can do that, the better we'll we'll all be off. Right.[01:05:46] Jason: exactly. Exactly. [01:05:50] Jeremy: if people want to check out your book, check out your podcast, I think you even have a, a conference coming up, right? Uh, where, w where can they learn about that.[01:06:02] Jason: So the hub for everything is code with jason.com. So that's where I always. Send people, you can find my blog, my podcast, my book there. And yeah, my conference it's called sin city ruby. It's a Ruby conference. This will only be applicable dear listener, if you're listening before March 24th, 2022. But yeah, it's, it's happening in Las Vegas.It's going to be just a small intimate conference and it's a whole different story, but I kind of put on this conference accidentally. I didn't intend to do a conference. I just kind of uh, stumbled into it, but I think it will be a lot of fun. But yeah, that's, that's another thing that I have going on. [01:06:49] Jeremy: What, what was it that I guess. Got you into deciding this is, this is what I want to do. I want to make a conference. [01:06:58] Jason: Well, it started off as I was going to put on a class, but then nobody bought a ticket. And so I had to pivot. And so I'm like, okay, I didn't sell any tickets to this class. Maybe I can sell some tickets to a conference. And luckily for me, it turns out I was right because I was financially obligated to a hotel where I had reserved space for the class.So I couldn't just cancel it. I had to move forward somehow. So that's where the conference came. [01:07:28] Jeremy: interesting. yeah, I'm, I'm always kind of curious. How people decide what they want to attend, I guess, like, you know, you said how you didn't get enough signups for your class, but you get signups for a conference. And you know, the people who are signing up and want to go, I wonder to to them, what is, what is it about the going to a conference that is so much more appealing than, than going to a class?[01:07:54] Jason: Oh, well, I think in order to go to a class, the topic has to be of interest to you. You have to be in like a specific time and place. The price point for that kind of thing is usually much higher than for, for a conference. Whereas with a conference it's affordable to individuals, you don't have to get your boss's permission necessarily, at least not for the money. It's more of like a, you don't have to be a specific kind of person in a specific scenario in order to benefit from it. It's a much more general interest. So that's why I think I've had an easier time selling tickets to that. [01:08:31] Jeremy: Mm, mm. Yeah, it's, it's more of a I wanna get into a room with a bunch of people and just learn a bunch of cool stuff and not necessarily have a specific specific thing you're looking to get out of it, I guess.[01:08:46] Jason: Yeah. There's no specific outcome or anything like that. Honestly, it's mostly just to have a good time. That's the main thing I'm hoping to get out of it. And I think that is the main draw for people they want to, they want to see their friends in the Ruby community form relationships and stuff like that. [01:09:07] Jeremy: Very cool. Jason good luck with the conference and thank you so much for coming on software software sessions.[01:09:13] Jason: Thanks a lot. And uh, thanks for having me. 

This week, Gerard spoke with Jason Good from Bass Coast Landcare Network about his role as Pest Animal Co-ordinator in and around Bass Coast and South Gippsland. The converstaion commenes with his work on Dream Island, one of the Barrier Islands north of Wilson's Prom and then moves to Phillip Island and Jason's work there to eradicate foxes. Impressive stuff. There is also a frightening anecdote about just how clever and mischevous domestic cats can be! Links mentioned in this episode: https://www.basscoastlandcare.org.au/ https://www.wgcma.vic.gov.au/getting-involved/landcare This podcast is hosted by ZenCast.fm

Groove out with Appalachian Soul Man, Aristotle Jones, as he takes a listen to "Memory" by Maria Lynne featuring Last Year's Model, and "Yesterday" by Ben McChesney. Then interviews Feature Artist of the Week Jason Good about his connection with the Blues and journey to find his mentors, and plays his new single "Marmalade" from his latest album "Blues You Can Use"

On today's episode, Dooner and The Dude are talking about moving freight 145 million years in the making: dinosaurs. Find out how velociraptors for one of the most popular film franchises on Earth, “Jurassic Park,” are moved.Plus, pulling tugs, moving wine and an inside look at the world of hauling unusual freight. Scale raised $7 billion and announced a partnership with Flexport to make manual logistics paperwork easier to execute and more accurate. What it means to engineer your supply chain for autonomous trucking and why it's a valuable move to make today.They're joined by special guests Glynn Spangenberg, chief commercial officer, Locomation; Robert Bussey, national account manager, BWS Logistics; Jason Good, brokerage director, Tranco National; and Melisa Tokmak, head of document products, Scale. Visit our sponsorSubscribe to the WTT newsletterApple PodcastsSpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts

On today's episode, Dooner and The Dude are talking about moving freight 145 million years in the making: dinosaurs. Find out how velociraptors for one of the most popular film franchises on Earth, “Jurassic Park,” are moved.Plus, pulling tugs, moving wine and an inside look at the world of hauling unusual freight. Scale raised $7 billion and announced a partnership with Flexport to make manual logistics paperwork easier to execute and more accurate. What it means to engineer your supply chain for autonomous trucking and why it's a valuable move to make today.They're joined by special guests Glynn Spangenberg, chief commercial officer, Locomation; Robert Bussey, national account manager, BWS Logistics; Jason Good, brokerage director, Tranco National; and Melisa Tokmak, head of document products, Scale. Visit our sponsorSubscribe to the WTT newsletterApple PodcastsSpotifyMore FreightWaves Podcasts

Accepting Crypto To Fly Private? We talk Jets with Jason Good, Yachts, Life style, Health with JC and our New segment Healthynaire. IG: @ Buythedipshits Twitter: Buythedipshits (Jason Good IG: @Jetsonly_) @Healthynaire Twitter: Healthynaire Lock in Your Crypto Domain name Now!!!!! at "Unstoppable Domain" Link Below https://unstoppabledomains.com/r/589a31673384465 Buy The Dipshits DISCORD link https://discord.gg/8NhGAYQear https://anchor.fm/buythedipshits/support --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/buythedipshits/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/buythedipshits/support

We were happy to extend our education episodes into a 2nd part. And we were fortunate to do it with the perspective of Jason Good. He has a masters in Educational Technology, teaches in Bonita Vista High's IB program, and has many other accolades including being Alyssa's big brother! It's a short, but in depth, conversation and provides some really important insight into the changes so many of our students and teachers have endured since the end of last school year. We want to thank Jason for taking time away from his well-deserved Spring Break to talk with us. We also want to thank our sponsors! This episode is brought to you by YourInsurancePlace.com, The Film Hub, Vista Chamber of Commerce, HomeStart, North County Daily Star, the San Marcos Chamber of Commerce, and StarFox Media. Thank you all for your support! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/samebizpod/support

Business Asset Protection with Jason Popelier Josh: G’day everyone out there in podcast land. I've got a fantastic guest, he’s going to be talking about asset protection and how to change the model of your business to make sure that you are considering things you have between the items that are bringing you in money, the items that are costing you money are definitely separated, as well as not just from the accounting perspective, but also from a bit of a twist on it, bringing in insurance and all sorts of other things into it. So, I’ve have Jason here from FWO Chartered Accountants. So, Jason, what is the number one reason that you'd want to make sure that you are considering when reviewing the model of your business or making sure that you get a change? When do you go from sole trader to company to then having several companies or a Trust Company to make sure that you have asset protection? How do you know, when's that aha moment? Learn more about business asset protection at dorksdelivered.com.au Jason: Good question. The thing that I always start with any of my clients or new clients or potential clients are their goals. To start with, I don't really care what their structure is currently, I start with what they’re trying to achieve? And their current business structure (makeup) currently enable them to achieve that? I ignore what's been set up in the past because there's a lot of businesses out there who have the wrong entities, or have the right entities but they’ve structured it in the wrong way as well. Imagine a business that has higher risks, let's say the construction industry. Even though most of my clients are professional services, I have quite a few construction clients and they have millions of dollars' worth of equipment. There's a lot of businesses out there who look at the costs of setting up or maintaining two entities and decide to hold all assets all under the same entity, they want to save costs, technically the do but at a cost of increased risk. Realistically, it's not that much more to set up a new entity, especially when you consider the cost if you actually lose everything. These businesses have to maintain a minimum asset level for the licensing rules and the minimum assets are set on their turnover. But you can imagine that if something went wrong, and the business essentially got tanked, and it was out of their control, because they were a subcontractor to a bigger guy who deliberately withheld cash flow, it happens a lot, especially in the construction industry. if withheld for five months, they will essentially have to go into either voluntary liquidation or forced liquidation because they can't pay some of their subcontractors or staff as well. They will lose everything. And the other person just goes, great, one less creditor to pay. If they had structured the situation a little bit differently, let's just say they had a warehouse that held the equipment, they could have that in a separate entity, which is its own legal entity. Those separated assets can be protected in that sense. To cover costs and replacements, the trading entity can have, in normal terms, a cross charge for leasing of those assets and facilities. The difference now is those same assets are not subject to the same risks of the trading business, even if they’re ultimately still commonly owned. Looking at the types of structures, the reason you would have a proprietary limited (company) scenario versus a sole trader or partnership structure scenario is a sole trader (and partners) are liable to their share or the entire project, depending if they're partners default. Limited, by itself means that there's a limitation on liability. You automatically have less exposure than operating by yourself or in partnership. Then if you use multiple structures that are limited in their own rights, then there might be a further set of layers for protection. I went on a bit of a tangent around protection after what goals they're trying to achieve. Reviewing a client goals and objectives. If a client wants to retire at 50, actually let's go up to the new norm, retired at 60 because you probably realize the same as myself, by the time we get to retirement age, we'll probably be 75 or 80, so let's be realistic. Josh: If doctors can increase it, the amount of time we can live, the retirement age would just be 10 years prior to that. Pretty much. Jason: E xactly, and people will work longer, there's technology we can utilise as well in addition to medical advances. So, it might be a little bit later, but let's just say the goal instead of retiring at 50, is now 60. Because the 60 is the new 50 in terms of retirement age. To get there, we need to decide what that looks like and there is a combination of superannuation in there. We need to protect that in some sense, this may be around your investment strategy, to not be too aggressive or to have a balanced fund, depending, and the closer we get to retirement, the less risk we put into our investments. Talking about risk and protecting that, one of the greatest assets for business owner is the business itself. And it has the highest potential to create the most value out of any asset they are other than themselves, right? So why don’t business owners give more consideration to risks? We forget that we, as a person are our own greatest asset. No one else can replace us. And a lot of people forget that. You can actually insure that as well. But if you're in control of your own business (instead of being an employee), it's co-related. So there has to be an element of your business, essentially making up that retirement age, and that goal. And we look at that and go, okay, what is your business look like? And how can we de-risk that particular business or set of businesses, as people might have a portfolio of multiple. Referencing an example ... there was client I worked with a couple of years ago. They had about 26 entities that were trading, so you can imagine if they trade in over 26, we're talking the group that was 100 plus entities. Little bit complicated. We had to slice and dice and put appropriate levels of protection while grouping into pools because of those 26 trading entities, only about six or seven of them were actually making real decent money, but you got to look at each business in its own right, not as a big pool. Breaking down a business, you look as each and challenge, how can we achieve these goals? Start with an element that you've got to focus. Look at what products you have and how you have an advantage in the market, why people want to come and work with you. And this could be around branding and protecting that. Also consider elements through technology, and how do you protect those items or services? This is when cyber security would come into place. Josh: For me to understand, I guess any of our listeners, I guess that would mean like, if you have a house and you chuck security cameras on the house, and an alarm system is going to reduce your premiums. And similarly, if you have a business that has a bunch of IT equipment, and then you decided to make sure that you had someone else that was taking a level of accountability. Like for instance for us, we charge a set price per month, and then we guarantee their uptime. If they go down, we pay them while they're down. So we guarantee they're up. Now, so that in a sense kind of sounds like an insurance policy, but we make sure they have certain levels of protection, they have certain types of antivirus, they have certain types of networking monitoring. So if you have any of that sort of stuff, that would have to reduce the premium sound when you're looking at cyber insurance, is that right? Jason: Exactly, there's always an element. But yeah, it's a contributing factor. And if its contributing factor is significantly more, the more risks you have, and the more people you have in your business the change in risks you have to consider. So, you can imagine the risk that are reduced down for a 10-person practice or whatever it might be, versus 100 would be significantly less. And it also depends on the nature of the business and everything else as most insurances would factor in. Josh: If we look at like toll, toll recently, and in Australia was under a bit of heat with their hack and it came through a phishing email, for anyone out there that doesn't know what that is, is when someone sends an email pretending, they look like someone else. And then they asked for some coin and they sometimes do it, it might not be like, hey, send money to this Bitcoin address, I have your nudes. That's a very common one, but a lot of the time be more like, congratulations, you've just qualified for a business bonus, as long as you just fill out this form, and it comes from your director, your KPIs had being met appropriately, or whatever it is, and it looks quite legitimate if they've been doing something that's been a targeted attack. With toll hack, what could they have done differently? And what can we learn from that? From your perspective, what could they have done differently to remove the immediate problem as well as the overall not being hacked? Or at least having something there to fall back on? Jason: Good question, and what I’ll do is give you an example for part of that using what I do myself in my own business, because it's easy to explain how you've mitigated your own risks. A lot of businesses aren't taking cyber threats too seriously and that's just ridiculous. Australia is at a high risk in Cyber because of this. In my practice, we started with a quarterly, it's about biannual now, review of the cyber risks and everything that's involved. We've got a cyber risk manual and what's expected. And we also run systematic tests that we don't tell the staff. Josh: Phishing simulators and stuff like that? Jason: Exactly, phishing simulators. Exactly. We essentially have sporadic phishing emails sent to staff just to see what they do. And it's disappointing that I would say a high percentage maybe 10% - 20% would actually fail sent phishing but what that enables is a conversation with that person and identifies that they need further education around these risks. Josh: Do you give training and stuff like that after that's been found? Like you're obviously analyzing and have the data to be able to see this person could done whatever they didn't from there, yeah? Jason: Exactly. I might do part of the training myself. Some of my team will do part of it. I also educate my staff to obverse how I sound in my communication. If it doesn't sound like how I communicate in my words, isn’t logical in what I'm asking, is what I’m asking out of the business norm and if it is then don’t respond etc. Worst case, if they’re unsure, get on the phone and speak to me or speak to the Practice Manager. And it's about that education. It's about how many steps we can put in place to make sure it doesn't break or fail. So that's something that a larger organization definitely needs to do, they definitely need to assume that their staff will make mistakes because they are human, and test those mistakes to see who is making mistakes and at what levels and where you might need to educate. Because you can imagine a phishing simulator around cyber can globally be applied at a very low cost, at a very low cost compared to the impact. Josh: Sent to thousands of emails. Jason: Exactly, exactly. Compared to the impact that that one failure could potentially make. Using a recent example with TOLL. Their huge mistake cost millions upon millions upon millions of dollars. So that would be one of the key cyber takeaways that just gobsmacked me that, a dozen, a dozen major cyber hacks, right, it gobsmacked me actually that an organization like TOLL hasn't implemented something like that. But at the same time, it doesn't surprise me because the larger the organization, the more things get lost and the slower things move. There's also an element of embarrassment as well as it goes up the chain. This kind of embarrassment is actually not as bad as some of the Scandinavian countries which are very chain of command minded where they want to follow suit from the top, and they're not encouraged to identify errors and mistakes, which is why Volkswagen got themselves in a bit of a heat and it's also on. Josh: This is on the carbon monoxide output on the vehicles. Jason: Exactly. Which they actually knew about years ago but no one ever explained it because it was going against what the top dog wanted to do. You can even trace this type of mentality to why Nokia phones failed. Josh: I'm pissed off, I can't change my phone cover anymore. It sucks! Jason: T he good old Nokia phone that you could throw against the wall and pick it up and put it back together and it still works. Josh: And last five days on a battery. Jason: Exactly. But going back to the issues, there's an element that you have to address from a culture perspective. You have to encourage reporting if there are breakages to report. This means people don't get penalized for reporting, if they are then they won't report. that's a key thing. From a cultural perspective, TOLL could have done better. From a systems and operations, TOLL could have done better. How you handle the media, also TOLL could have done better. So, to de-risk a situation, there are specialists who organisations deal with and predominantly PR, but they might have a mix or organisations who help you identify risks of certain conversations and everything else. You know, one of the scenarios that we saw that was highly impacted in Queensland, especially southeast Queensland, was Dreamworld with the impact caused by a lack of maintenance and then everything else that followed. Josh: You're talking about like three years ago. Yeah, yep. Yep. So anyone else that's listening in overseas that happens to be here, Dreamworld, local theme park that had a bit of an issue with a lack of maintenance and some of the processes, it might have just been a few series of unfortunate events paired with lack of maintenance and lack of training, but there was a rough River Rapids ride that flipped over and it killed four parents, wasn't it? Is that right? Jason: Yeah, i t killed four people. There was a brother and sister you know, a mother or something and a father. It shouldn't have happened. The ride flip diver and essentially crushed them and it was a very tragic event. Looking back and reflecting from a risk point of view, there were risks everywhere in that scenario. We're talking about a listed company here too. There was a risk where the head of group was essentially bleeding cash out of the business from a daily basis that maintenace wasn’t allowed/maintained. They should have just cut off the couple of failed businesses. They weren't even treating the business itself as a separate business unit. In relation to the media, I know for a fact the PR company that they initially engaged resigned because they (Dreamworld) wouldn't follow their advice. And this is the same risk that TOLL made with the media. They actually engaged but they chose not to listen, and then their PR company decided to eject as fast as they possibly can, because it's a reflection on them as well. And there was a number of highly critical issues when speaking with the media about certain aspects. Giving themselves a bonus of millions of dollars a week later from the incident, just a bunch of really … really bad decision making. For you and me speaking, Joshua, and all the listeners would just go what? How stupid can you be … and this comes down to a bit of greed. So, there's a range of different factors. Josh: Do you think they had like a certain level of god-factor like they've put themselves above what they think is the rules and the law and they've sort of put them into god mode? Why do you think that they made the decisions? Because that way in our boat at some stage, if you at the theme part, I don’t know most of our listeners don't know the theme park, but they must have had some level of normalcy in their life, most people to go okay, how do I look at this and understand that it's going to turn to this. Surely, there's got to be a certain time or a spot where you think, okay, this is your shit decision. What happens? Like what do you think through that hit? Obviously, this isn't obviously what you do. You're not a psychologist, but like, what do you think happened? Jason: I could probably draw on some of my education as well as some of my consulting from corporate finance days where I actually put a value on who (people) to keep in the business from a culture perspective, and this comes back to the business norms. A culture is set by business norms. You (as an owner) might say this is our culture, these are our values, but if you don't practice them, then the people inside the business set business norms. And although we might be very highly surprised these sorts of decisions are made, to them (the culprits), it's only a little incremental difference compared to what their normal it might be. It can explain a lot of things with, you know, some of the famous collapses and really corrupt things in the finance world that occur, including Enron in the US. We kind of look at Enron and go ‘how the hell were these people able to essentially destroy people's lives’ and hold a state (in the USA) ransom for their electricity? This comes back to what their business norms are. If you get encouraged or rewarded for making decisions, that sets a new norm. Heading back to the Dreamworld accident and lack of any maintenance program. They cut the maintenance program to save some cash. The person who just created some extra cash as a reward, the board gives them some of that cash back and as an addition to this reward, they also get promoted. This now sets a shift in the expectations of the business. And the more this type of action occurs, the more normalised it becomes. And when something serious happens, the review the normal in their heads and say ... well, this is the normal, this is what is expected in my world. Everyone else is in my world. So, the impact is not going to be that great. And then they get surprised that the community essentially smashes them for their behavior. And they're like, but I'm just doing what I've been doing for the last however many years, and I'm entitled to that money. And it's just because these business norms that the culture is so disconnected from the community. Taking another slight side tangent, as business owners, we need to engage in the community. There's almost an element of obligation, not just for Australian owned businesses, but for businesses and across the globe as well. Businesses actually survive because we (the people) allow them to participate in the business community for particular cultures. We need to make sure that those types of cultures are engaged with the community and that they’re giving back to the community. The more that you (as a business) shut that window and just focus purely on a couple of variables around money and greed, and other things as well, the more disconnected you’re going to be and the higher risks that will bottle within the business. And that applies across the board. I've seen these issue sit in start-up businesses and they actually have a higher impact on culture and the community when compared to a larger business. If the culture is bad, is actually easier to transform larger businesses culture than a smaller business. And the mid-range businesses have the greatest impact because they're still somewhat nimble, but they can transform. This is just an element of risk in a business itself, and cybersecurity is just another component, while key person risk is another element. Josh: It’s a big one for me actually. When I first started my business, I was the key person, and getting key person insurance for yourself as a business owner as a fuzzy income, let's call it a fuzzy income. If you're reinvesting your money, you could be earning $10 or $10 million. But if you're reinvesting the whole load into your business, and you have no income, then what are you worth and where do you sit with your insurance, and so it becomes a bit of a fuzzy income. And the key person, you can't really get key person, you can correct me, but you can't really get key person for yourself when you're doing this with your income because you're investing into something that you can see as someone who's going to be working. Jason: You can actually insure the key person if they are the business owner; you just have to understand what impact they have and what price this equates to. It’s the same for anyone in a business, you can insure any key person … it’s just a matter of cost. Josh: Okay. So see if I ran a business and I was like a Pty Ltd registered and set up myself as the employee, and I'm just making up a scenario now, but let's say I earned $85,000 a year $80,000 a year just underneath the next tax, that’s $70,000-ish. I mean, I tell everyone, I don't know if that's exactly right now and if you're listening in the future, it might be changed. Anyway so $90,000, if I'm under the $90,000, I say I'm earning that, I'm paying the tax on that but I'm earning nothing, okay, I'm actually earning nothing I'm just able to pay the tax. And then I have some big issue where … and the key person in the business collapses. If the business never actually turned over but paid the tax what is the insurance yet? Jason: Well, you have essentially lied on your application. In this case you're not actually insured, even though you're paying for insurance, and best case they might just refund you. Josh: So the insurance is against the money that comes, not the money that you've paid tax on. Jason: No, no. You have to be truthful on an insurance policy. And if you're not truthful, they can deny the policy itself. if you're not actually earning that, and the business can't pay that about, then your key person insured amount and what you've actually said is a lie. There's an element that if you're taking out insurance, you got to be truthful, because if you're not truthful, they can deny the insurance, and there's no point of taking out insurance in the first place. That's a key thing for the listeners. Separate to that, you've got to define what type of insurance and what risks you're trying to alleviate. Josh: Yeah, of course. Jason: Looking at it, there's business disruption insurance, which is if something outside of the norm that disrupts the business, but you've still maintained all the key people, that's business disruption, noting this excludes pandemics. But that's when the government would step in. And we're lucky in Australia that we have a government that can support us versus other countries. . Josh: Bloody Oath, Mate. Jason: That's it. That's it. We're just lucky to be Australians. But separate to that, a key person insurance is if … let's just say, Josh, you run an IT business, right? You run at least at an IT business. You also have other businesses, but let's just focus on your IT business. Your family essentially owns that business with you, right? Josh: Yep. My emotions are impacted, and their emotions are impacted by my business. So absolutely, we're all together in this. Jason: That's correct. But there's an element that your family owns that business. What happens tomorrow if you were in a car crash, and you died, unfortunately, what would happen to your family? If you've got life insurance, they'll get the life insurance, but nothing else. That’s a risk in itself, right. Hopefully your insurance will cover everything your family needs to survive without you to some degree. They can't replace you, but they can at least financially survive without you. Josh: If I'm a workaholic. That's all I am, anyway. So, it's fine. Jason: Yeah, well that's it, that's it. Imagine now there are other people in the business, right. We’re now talking about other livelihoods, not just yourself, you're just the owner. You could be an employee, but you're the owner. What happens to them? They essentially lose their job. Josh: Our business right now have 12 employees, for instance. Jason: Exactly. So, all 12 employees are pretty much stuffed, right? Josh: Absolutely. Jason: To some degree, the business will just completely explode. If you had key person insurance, an element maybe protected depending on how its shaped. The business could survive because it’s protected. But then the issue shifts to who owns the business after. Does the executor of your estate get involved? if it's a sole owner situation, the insurance proceeds inject into the business may help the business survive until they are able to find someone who has similar skill sets. The business may not be able to survive in the same sense, but it has the ability to survive. Now, imagine the same situation but with two partners. So key person insurance is more to insure the person and business disruption is more to insure for the outside of norm that might happen that's not a pandemic or force of nature or something like that, right? Which is highly unlikely. Except in Australia, apparently, we've had floods, fires, droughts, and Corona Virus. Exactly. All in the last decade. Josh: Jump into the Old Testament and look at what's going next and read it forward. It's just crazy, isn't it? Jason: Exactly, exactly. Jason: I’ve seen in situations after the fact. Not in my case, because I always made sure my clients actually got these sorts of things lined up or else, they won't be clients for too long. And that's just, you know, you either want to follow my advice or you don't. Josh: You’re there for a reason. If no one's listening, what's the point? It's the same as me, like, people aren't listening to the advice we're giving. What's the point of having us here? Jason: I’m there for a reason. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So where I'm going to lead into is by selling insurance. Let's just say you're still in the business but you bring on another partner, and you are 50∕50. Something happened to that partner, and it's worth money in the business and they're 50%, but their estate essentially holds a 50 percent ownership of the business and you can't legally make decisions to some or some decisions because you need voting rights and there's an equal voting right to make a decision on some instances. Day to day you might be able to still operate, but you might be subject to being shackled for bigger decisions or essentially shaping the business where it needs to go or just continuing to operate. I've seen a scenario where an ex-wife from six years ago and I got involved after the fact of essentially- Josh: Divorced for six years, done, legally done. Jason: Legally done. I got involved to essentially sort it out. I'm sorry, I apologise to the listeners, the shit fight that essentially unfolded. An ex-wife who should have been removed from the estate, challenged the estate and essentially tried to control the business to get as much money as she could. If they had proper buy-sell agreements in place, what would happen is the business would be valued at arm's length, then a chunk of money would exit to the estate and the business would just operate without that partner as if they just got ejected from the business. In this scenario, the business could survive, and that is an element of risk when you have business partner, or multi partners. Think about whether something happened to your fellow partner/s, what would the impact be on the business, would it survive? This is your asset as well as their family's asset. Josh: I can say comfortably, my business has been running, when you pointed it out, it has been running for 13 years. And over the 13 years, I had a partner for a while and then not to my want, that all felt fell apart, as a lot of our listeners already know. And when that happened, did that impact the serviceability of our clients? Absolutely. Did it impact the quality of the return on work? Absolutely. Now, would I have been a better person had it then not happened? Absolutely. It all comes down to what are you doing in your life and how does your life affect the business and when you are a business owner, they can absolutely affect. If you guys have been interested in this and you've loved it, make sure to jump across to iTunes and leave us some reviews and we'll speak to you soon. Stay good.

Today, we talk with Jason Yelowitz and his client, David Wolf. David could best be described as a “serial entrepreneur”. We discuss the sale of David's business and Jason's role therein. Tune in to hear our discussion about David's successful sale, knowing when it's the right time to sell, and business in the time of the CoronaVirus.   Episode Highlights The efficiency of the marketplace. Why cash is king. Incentives for having payroll employees. Why Dave decided to sell. Knowing when it's right to sell. Is selling at a loss the wrong move? If the pandemic has slowed down or changed deals. Is this a good market for first time buyers? How to keep your business stocked and afloat during the pandemic. Transcription Mark: All right this week we don't have Joe with us. We have Jason Yellowitz with us because Jason had one of his previous clients, Dave Wolf, on the podcast to talk about the sale of his business and some of the lessons and looking back on how that sale went. I always find these conversations interesting because after you sell a business, you have the chance to finally be somewhat introspective into what that process was like and maybe what you would do differently. Jason, I know you have Dave Wolf on who you work with for quite a while. You guys had I think two different LOIs that you had to work through in order to get to a closing. How did that conversation go? Jason: Yeah, it was really interesting to catch up with Dave. We got his business sold. I want to say it was around August of 2019, so it's been a while. He feels happy that it was sold. It was a very; at least to me it looked like a very good business. It had a general manager in place that was running the day to day. In his case, it really wasn't taking up his time but there's always that bit of mental focus that you can't let go of. And Dave has his fingers in so many different businesses that I think for him he needed to let up on the mental focus and then I think also he reallocated some of the capital. He really ends up buying a fair number of distressed kind of assets and for that kind of thing, you need cash in your pocket typically. Mark: Yeah, I know. Absolutely. I know you guys went through two different offers on this and I'm sure you'll get into that a little bit on the podcast. Did you guys discuss what happened with that first one that didn't go through? Jason: I don't know if you got that into it on the podcast, but it is an interesting sort of lesson for potential sellers. When we had first listed the business, we got multiple offers. And like most people, the seller gravitated towards the one that had the highest headline price. The challenge that sellers should remember is the market is pretty efficient. A lot of times if someone is bidding more than others, the reason they're doing it is because they're already aware that they are less likely to get the financing necessary to close the deal, and therefore they're willing to bid it up a little bit. Whereas someone that comes in in the middle of the pack might have a much higher chance of closing, but they know it and they're not going to pay up as much. So what it comes down to I think is don't get wooed simply by the headline number. You have to think of it holistically if you're a seller of what's most important to me; hitting a certain dollar amount or walking away versus a higher likelihood of closing. And there's not a right or wrong answer but the lesson is, don't deceive yourself into thinking you can have it all. There's usually some sort of tradeoff. Mark: Absolutely. Now the market is strikingly honest. It's always very, very honest, very direct, and you can't really fool it so I think that's a good lesson. Well, let's get into the episode and I can't wait to listen to this one. Jason: Hey everybody, this is Jason Yellowitz from Quiet Light Brokerage and for today's Quiet Light podcast, our special guest is David Wolfe. David is a serial entrepreneur. He's got his hands in all sorts of businesses. And it was probably about six months ago that I represented him in the sale of an online e-commerce business he had. Dave, welcome, how are you doing? Dave: Hey Jason, how are you doing? I'm pretty good. Jason: Good. So are you sitting there in some tropical location, I can see palm trees blowing in the background. Dave: I wish. I wish I was. Unfortunately, it's just a cool background trick for Zoom video because I'm sitting at my house quarantined like everybody else. Jason: Yeah, well, you mentioned quarantine. Obviously, we are in the heart of the COVID-19 coronavirus situation so if you don't mind, maybe you can just tell viewers just quickly what are the businesses that you're running and what impacts positive, negative, neutral have you seen from the coronavirus? Dave: Well there's definitely a lopsided negative for this; for what we're dealing with right now. I'm in several different industries. So we are in some direct to consumer automotive space online. I have recently, after the purchase that you represented for, I got into some brick and mortar stuff doing fencing installation and some manufacturing of fencing products; vinyl privacy fence. And then we're also in real estate lending and a few other places. And it's pretty drastic across all industries. From what I can tell the online businesses are faring just immensely better than just about anything else. So some of the brick and mortars, we're dealing with a; when I get off this call, I've got to deal with one of my managers needs to self-quarantine. So he's showing symptoms. He's not in a terrible situation. But now we're looking at we're already planning on going down to a minimal staff while this was blowing over. And so now we've got to see okay well, now it's zero because we can't have him at the shop at all. So these are just normal things. On the plus side, I think as most people I've talked to; as I'm sure you have a lot of different business owners in a lot of different industries just because of what I do. And because of the people that weren't in a good position, there is, unfortunately, going to be some business fatalities from this. I talked to a bankruptcy attorney the other day that was representing me in purchasing some assets and he was just the ground is already starting to rumble with the volume of business that's going to be occurring from that. And so I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities for people that; everything is going to work itself out but the reality is if you know how to run a business if you have sound principles in operating businesses, there is going to be a lot of opportunities. It's going to totally switch from a seller's market to a buyer's market. It was basically overnight I feel like. I think you would agree when you were working with me we had talked about it. For the most part, it's kind of a seller's market. There's a lot of capital out there. It's easy to get. And now we had; the institutional lenders aren't even lending on in our hard money lending business, which would be considered about us. We've dabbled and had conversations about that space. It's a very secure asset. Even they're holding off on buying more assets. So what that tells me is cash is king, right? So if you have money to buy a business and I would say you have the bandwidth and you can afford to wait, you don't need the cash flow right away, I think there's going to be some unbelievable opportunities in the next few months. Jason: Okay, that's a pretty interesting perspective. From our end what we've seen is the economic; obviously, there's the human and health toll. And I feel sorry; I've got a lot of empathy for your manager who is showing symptoms. On our end what we're seeing is the economic impact is really hitting different businesses differently. Some of them are way down. Others are way up. We've got a number of online businesses where their sales literally doubled versus the previous year in the past 12 months. What's not clear is whether it's a temporary blip or if there is long term enduring changes in customer behavior. For instance, I've got a client who sells a security device on the internet. His sales have doubled and his theory is more people are staying home and they want to feel safe at home. And without a crystal ball, that sounds as plausible to me as anything. So let me ask you this question. You mentioned that you believe there's going to be some golden opportunities for buyers, especially cash buyers. I think as of about an hour ago, I read a lot of headlines that Congress and the president were very close to passing a historic stimulus bill. And my understanding is that's inaudible[00:09:56.6] to fund a lot of money to the Small Business Administration. Do you think that that money will get to people that want to buy businesses or is it mostly going to be used to shore up existing businesses or do you have no opinion? Dave: Well, one of the things I think is going to happen. I think that you're going to see and I guess you can't quote me on this, but you're recording this so I guess you're going to. So normally and you think; I don't know if you've had this conversation, but typically the kind of par for the course for purchases of at least smaller businesses is an asset purchase agreement where you wipe out and start again. Well, there might be some people willing to take on some of the risks of a previous business if it means that by having the established business in place all of a sudden it makes it tremendously easier to be able to get capital from some of the pipelines that's going to be coming through. I mean, I think they're probably just going to be throwing; it's either they're going to be difficult to get because it gets bogged down in bureaucracy and that's going to be a disaster for the country or it's going to be they're just writing checks and throwing money at people that have a business and primarily a business with payroll employees. I guess that's one of the things that we've kind of; a lot of company shy away from that and try to stay lean and online. But there's going to be a lot more incentives for having a payroll more than likely. Jason: Yeah, that's what it sounds like. It sounds like most of the incidents are tied to maintaining a payroll. So maybe we can; let's go back in time six months, you had sold a business, what month did we close; was it October? Dave: August is when we closed; very end of August I think. Jason: What was going through your mind at the time? Why did you choose to sell and are you happy that you made the decision that you did? Dave: Yeah, well, so I definitely am very happy that I made the decision I did. I wish I would have just had all the money sitting at a bank account. But like an entrepreneur, we put a lot of it back to work afterwards. But, yeah I'm very happy that we sold. We would just kind of look at it as I wasn't focused 100% on that business and I knew that there was some opportunity in it but I needed somebody that looked at it the way that I did when I bought it five years before that could take it to how do I 3x this business and it was. It was a solid business. And I knew it was because you have had several side conversations with me where I was like do I really want to let this go? And in talking with them that business is one that's kind of about where it was, they haven't really been too badly negatively affected by the issues that we're dealing with right now even after a slowdown, which is good for them. But it allowed me to free up my time and focus on new things and kind of you had said like I was able to find plenty of things to focus on to grow. And I was reinvigorated by having that newness to it again where I was kind of tired. It wasn't that there's anything necessarily fundamentally wrong with that business it's just that I was seeing opportunities or make investments to grow it and it just didn't excite me. I wasn't doing it. I wasn't pushing like I was. And so a new owner came in and he has that same; it's new to him so he's making changes and making moves and improving the business and I think they're doing a good job. And I'm taking that renewed energy and I'm putting it toward something totally new and so I think that's a real win. So I'm definitely happy. I have no remorse for selling the business whatsoever. Jason: That's a really interesting point that you bring up, because at this point I've been brokering for 10 years and what I've acknowledged is a lot of times when I meet a seller, their first instinct is how do I get the absolute most money out of the business? And the obvious answer is grow it to its utmost potential and then that'll translate into cash flows and you'll get a multiple on those increased cash flows. The reality I find is usually when people want to sell it's not specifically for the cashout. The cash out most people consider that's the fair market value of what their business is worth today. So the decision comes down a lot more to personal things. Most of my sellers, there's a personal reason; marriage, divorce, buying a house, I have to move, I have to support my in-laws, anything like that. And then on the business front, it usually boils down to some version of what you just said, which is I know how to grow this business I just find that I knew how to grow it six months ago and I didn't. Clearly, I'm lacking the motivation and the sort of excitement that comes from new business ownership so maybe I'll hand it off to someone else who's got that level of motivation and excitement. So the way I think of it is each party takes the business to whatever is the highest level while counterbalancing all the other things going on in their life and how much attention they can put to one versus the other. What would you recommend to someone who wants to sell their business now? We are probably at a peak uncertainty. We don't know if the coronavirus is going to infect millions or hundreds of thousands in the US. We don't know if it's going to make another round around the globe. I mean, the truth is, we just don't know. What we do know with some confidence is the central bank and the US government is putting a lot of firepower into trying to keep the economy going. But we don't know what the facts are so what advice would you have for someone who they had their plan, they were going to sell this year in 2020; maybe in June, maybe in October, and then boom, coronavirus. Dave: Well, I mean first it has to be a scenario where you have a willing and able buyer. So if you don't have a buyer already then it's a totally different story. And it really depends on what your consequences are of not selling I would say. I mean I have a lot of assets that I have for sale in the market right now that aren't business-related. And this could totally be; I mean I don't know when you're going to publish this podcast; a week from now this might be irrelevant. But in this very particular instance while we are quarantined in the house and just I'll give you the; I'll let down my guard here so that you guys, you know, it's a this is just for inaudible[00:16:36.4] the house. Jason: They're not quite as nice as the beach. Dave: Yeah, right. I'll go back to the beach. I think that it's obviously not the best time to be in a transition flow for the assets. Now, that doesn't mean that it's a bad time to sell. It depends on what does not selling mean. I mean in some cases, even selling; I mean I'm going to go to the extreme, even if you had to sell at a 50% discount to what your business would be worth a month from now, if not selling is going to cause you even more financial damage because of the foreclosure on a large property or something like that, it may still be worthwhile. It's kind of the lesser of two evils to sell your business. Jason: You know what's interesting to me about your statement was you said a week from now this might all be irrelevant. It was about a week ago we had an all-hands meeting at Quiet Light to say what are we seeing in the market and I was taking the same point of view that you're taking today, which is the values are going to come down. It's going to be all distressed sales. Strangely, in the last week and a half, we have gotten reports of a number; I think we've closed four deals in the last week. None of them were significantly different to my understanding from what the letters of intent said. And as I mentioned in the beginning, we've seen some businesses that have really; their financials have really gone down. And for those sellers, I would say if that's where it is you need to decide for yourself are sales coming back or are they permanently down? If they're permanently down you need to get very real very quick with what the market will bear. If you think they're going to be back, your best bet is to wait until that happens. But then the other side of the coin which Dave this is really surprising, some of the businesses are going off the hook up and those are the ones where I think the sales are closing and the buyers at least it seems; I've gotten this mostly second hand, it seems to me the buyers are feeling that their golden opportunity is that with behavioral changes worldwide more is shifting possibly to online, possibly to certain sectors and they want to get in on that now so that they want to close. So it feels like the market is changing but not necessarily in the static way that many of us would have predicted. Dave: Yeah, I mean a good example is I think that this is going to accelerate the move from traditional brick and mortar businesses to online. People that have never done insta-corridor like Amazon Prime delivery and stuff like that are now ordering their groceries and they're using Zoom video to chat. I mean this accelerated technology, the adaptation or adoption two, three years easy. I mean the stuff that we're seeing, people that have never used that technology are figuring out how to do those kinds of things. They're ordering food, they're doing; so day to day habits that typically don't change that fast have completely changed. I just bought a set of gymnastic rings to work out at home because I usually go to the gym. I like to go to the gym but I can't go to the gym so I was like, all right, well, I'm going to buy something and my routine just totally changed. I might continue with that. I actually really liked that so I'm looking at doing some other upgrades that go along with that. Maybe like putting some bars up in my back yard and doing a couple of other things. So that's happening across the board and I think I'm starting to see some adaptation from businesses as well changing and pivoting. But I think that's pretty simple as if it's just I guess as a buyer or a seller you really have to categorize yourself in are you a person that buys off of past success or are you comfortable being a little more speculative and focusing on future potential speculation like you said in a sense that I had a letter of intent on a project and I saw the sales skyrocket and because of this I'm more than happy to close. It's obvious that the effect of this has already impacted that business in how it's more than likely going to in the short term so you're not really too concerned about that. And then again the same thing I would be very worried if I was in LOI and the business fell off a cliff in the short term or had to shut down entirely and you have to start with a terrible cash flow. And then how is that going to affect the annual cash flows on the back end of that? I think there's ways around that. I personally; I mean like you said, most of these LOIs fast purchase is 30 to 45 days. I don't necessarily think it's a bad time to be shopping for businesses if you don't have to spend all your time focusing on making sure that yours isn't on fire because if you go into LOI you have plenty of time to do the due diligence on before you have to close to make sure that you do, in fact, want to go through with it. Jason: Do you think this is a market for first-time buyers? Let me give you an example. Let's say we've got somebody in their mid-30s who has worked in corporate America for the last 12 years, risen up the ranks to middle management, is not excited about their day job but as of today, they still have it and they want the excitement of being an entrepreneur but they've never thought or run their own business. They've been part of a much bigger organization. Is this the time for them or do you think it's only the time for more experienced buyers with the larger risk appetite, a larger balance sheet, and a better ability to forecast or better confidence in their ability to forecast? Dave: I actually think it's a great time for a first-time buyer to come into the marketplace. I mean in contrary with the right outlook you have to be able to have a long term outlook and you have to have enough cash to be able to weather an uncertain future for at least a few months, if not a little bit more. Because the reality is that if you can get a good value like I think there's going to be opportunities for lower valuations out there which allows somebody to get into a business that couldn't otherwise get into. I mean people say like, oh, well, it's a bad time to buy a business because this stuff is happening but you could get the same business that potentially four months ago would have cost you 1.5 million. If they have cash flow issues and they have a bunch of other stuff, there might be one out there that is 750. It's really the same business. Maybe it needs $60,000 in cash infusion to survive what's going on or $50,000 in additional cash to survive what's going on for the current process but I think for most businesses, this is a temporary liquidity issue and not necessarily a fundamental the business is just completely destroyed. Jason: So going to your example, I mean, you just gave an example of a business where because of what's happening hopefully temporarily; obviously, none of us has a crystal ball. In your example, the business value dropped in half. It kind of seems to me that if you're going to buy in that environment, you have to kind of know yourself. How did I react in 2008 when I saw my 401k drop in half temporarily that kind of thing? It feels like it's more of a risk tolerance question as opposed to a more simple decision. You have to know yourself, how you react, how you're going to sleep at night. Would you agree with that? Dave: Oh yeah, definitely and that's there's so many caveats. I mean, you'd have to pick a much more specific type of business and I would imagine if I've never been an entrepreneur and I've had a regular middle management or upper management job and I'm just going into entrepreneurship this would be; it's going to take some cohunes to pull the trigger on something right now in this environment just because of how many unknowns we're going into as to if it is in quick recovery, what's the long term economic impacts from a potential but hopefully not recession and some of the other things or we could come out booming. I mean, there's going to be a lot of pent up demand for every service after this is done. Jason: I was thinking there's going to be a line around the block at your barbershop. Dave: That's funny, I actually did; I did okay do I get myself a haircut. Yes. Jason: No, it's nice. Dave: I'm going to show you the back. That's a little; but yeah, I actually talked to a salon owner today that I used to do marketing for and I was telling her; she was like what do I do? She's got a good business but I pay everybody and lose 25,000 and then pay my rent when we're closed. And so she's in a much better position. She's got plenty of money laying around and she had no debt. And we had a conversation and I said look, if I was you, you've got these lines of credit that aren't used, the bank may close those down soon because I have talked to several banks; smaller banks that are concerned about not necessarily lending on new businesses, but really more they're concerned about liquidity without this stuff coming down from the federal government where they can't do; I have a loan for a new primary residence I'm doing and the guy was on it's a portfolio loan, which if you guys don't know what that is, it means that the bank is going to hold the note versus handing it off to Fannie or Freddie Mac because my taxes are very difficult to do because I have seven or eight businesses and all these different things. And they said they're not doing any portfolio loans because they have 60 million dollars in commercial credit lines that have not been pulled down yet that if those were pulled, they have to have enough cash to be able to provide that liquidity to those commercial lines and so that's affecting them. Jason: That's pretty interesting. I was looking at online savings accounts yesterday and I was expecting that the interest that they pay savers would have dropped down to a couple of basis points. In fact, it was still up in the 1 ½ to 1.7 range. Dave: That's the reason why. The reason why is because they need depositors because they were concerned about whatever happens. A lot of commercial credit lines were closed in this type of environment because really the banks aren't afraid of everybody; every customer defaulting. What they're afraid of is every customer maxing out their line at once and taking all the liquidity from the bank. So that's one of those issues and so I personally had some large, large lines that I just pulled out all and put it in a checking account. And I'm happy to pay the interest on the short term so that I have access to capital, particularly because I do plan on; even though I'm pretty busy I do plan on being a buyer of business assets here in the next couple of months. I don't know what they're going to be. I just know that if you do have cash, if you were fortunate enough to have money sitting on the sidelines due to just serendipity or it just being the right time and place, there's just going to be some unbelievable opportunities. And I mean you can see them everywhere. I told my friend that was a salon manager; I said, look there's going to be a lot of salons that are closing down or people that just need cash and they pay their day to day bills with that money. Call them and see if you can buy all their color product that they have sitting in their salon that's not being used for like 10 cents on the dollar. Jason: That's a pretty interesting idea. One thing I've heard with those small local service businesses that have been put into a shock so hard is to reach out to their regular customers and ask if you'd be willing to prepay for the next haircut or the next meal. I think there's a lot of community spirit of none of us wants to see the small businesses in our town collapse so many of us who have the means are willing to prepay just as a sign of good faith. So as always, anytime I talk to you it's a fascinating conversation, as kind of that final piece I would love it if you could give a synopsis right now; let's see today is March 25th, so with the caveat that at today's speed of news cycle. Dave: 1:35 PM. Jason: Yeah, anything can change. So at 1:35 PM Eastern on March 25th, 2020 in the middle of the coronavirus I would love to get just your little quick snippet advice for buyers, advice for sellers, and final thoughts. Dave: Okay, so let's start with the advice. I would say, advice for buyers go ahead and go out and look; I would say go out and look as if nothing has happened. Remember that when you're putting LOIs out, you're doing your underwriting afterwards. So if you're looking at a business, you say I like this business in normal times let me go ahead and look at this and place the offer with a condition of you can stipulate obviously always you understand, hey, I'm kind of concerned about what's currently going on, but let's go ahead and get this going. So remember that doing an LOI doesn't mean that you can't do your due diligence and confirm the underlying fundamentals because this month's cash flow is probably more than likely either going to be significantly better or significantly worse than it was last March or last April. And I suggest you just got to have to understand that. It doesn't mean you got to close right away. As far as sellers are concerned that would be my number one piece of advice is to keep moving forward up to the point where you do have to make the commitments. You can still try to get the SBA financing, get all your ducks in a row, and then once you have everything in place, you can decide to make the final decision based on where things are at that time. Because by the time; like you said in 30 or 45 days we could be in a drastically different economy. But you might have started a deal when nobody else was bold enough to put out the LOI. You might have an exceptional value on a business that's right back to being extremely healthy. And as far as sellers are concerned, it's really just assessing. Maybe it's possible if you have to sell, you really need to determine what your best alternative to a non-agreement is. Are you willing to go back and run this business for a year inaudible[00:31:29.8] or mentally are you done? You don't necessarily have to tell the buyer that. But if mentally you're done and you have an offer that comes to the table that's lower than what you're expecting, you're really going to have to grapple with the decision of are you going to stick this out and do the work to make sure that this business is healthy again so that you can get your higher valuation or is it time to just accept a lower offer and realize that they're not gouging you? That it's just most of the buyers are buying off of the cash flows of that business and significant disruption in cash flow is a very reasonable thing to reduce the purchase price of a business. I mean, I saw that when I sold mine. I won't get in the numbers, but I had a higher number and then we had a small hiccup because we lost one contract and still very healthy business but it had a material impact on what our future cash flows for expected without having to make changes. And I totally understand that. In principle, we agreed to a multiple which just unfortunately for me it's a lower purchase price when you use the same multiple if you lose $5,000 in monthly cash flow. And so it happens but again, on the other side of that, being somebody that had a higher offer that then wasn't able to for whatever reason didn't go through; there's no fault of my own and then going to another offer that was lowered because of something had happened. I think we were dealing with the China tariffs and all that stuff during that time which looks like a child's play now with what we're dealing with. I resulted; I ultimately made the decision to still sell at a lower purchase price and looking at it now, I don't regret the decision. So if you're just looking for what; instead of me giving you empty advice as a seller all I can do is tell you that of what I did and what I decided to do. And now looking forward, I don't regret making the decision to accept an offer that was lower than what I originally wanted for the business. Jason: Are there any brokers and brokerage that you personally recommend? Dave: Anybody with Jason. Jason: Anybody but me, okay I got it. Dave: I'm very happy; I was very happy with Jason's advice. I think it was spot on and yeah he was just a very level head with a lot of experience on how to get a deal done. And really without railroading you, I think one of the really comforting things is Jason is going to be one of those guys that will tell you, look, if this doesn't feel right, just don't do the deal. You probably won't get to pry out his financing, but I can tell you that he does not need the check from your sale to survive. So he's my; yeah, I don't want to like let the cat out of the bag there but he's not going to push you into a sale specifically to get a commission check and that's something that is very nice to see in a broker. He does this because he likes it and because he's very good at it and likes the transactions of the business. And I was very, very happy with the work that I got done at Quiet Light. I can definitely see; from a DIY-er, I have no problems with the commission brokerage that I paid with Quiet Light at the end of the day. I think it was well earned and I would be happy to do it again Jason inaudible[00:34:48.8]. Jason: Wow, well that's ridic; I have to end it with an endorsement so I think with that I'm going to say thank you so much for your time and your thoughts, you're obviously a very experienced entrepreneur. You've bought, you've sold, you've built, you've experienced setbacks, and here you are with the beautiful fake background of a beach. It's phenomenal. So thank you for your time, everyone. This was Dave Wolf. He owns too many businesses to list. But obviously, he knows what he's stocked up. Thank you, Dave. Resources: Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com

This episode, we’re talking about people who are coming to Pittsburgh, whether it’s for work or just visiting.We’ll break down a report that suggests the city might be a better fit for tech workers than the mecca of the digital economy, Silicon Valley (gotta love our standard of living). We’re also talking about a recent article that probes the need for a new hotel at the convention center. (Hint: The answer isn’t very simple.)In between, we welcome the Breaking Brews Podcast’s host Jason Cercone for a chat about the business of beer and Pittsburgh’s place in the industry.This episode is sponsored by WordWrite:Centuries before cellphones and social media, human connections were made around fires, as we shared the stories that shaped our world. Today, stories are still the most powerful way to move hearts, minds and inspire action.At WordWrite, Pittsburgh’s largest independent public relations agency, we understand that before you had a brand before you sold any product or service, you had a story.WordWrite helps clients to uncover their own Capital S Story – the reason someone would want to buy, work, invest or partner with you through our patented StoryCrafting process. Visit wordwritepr.com to uncover your Capital S story.Logan:You are listening to the P100 podcast, the bi-weekly companion piece to the Pittsburgh 100, bringing you Pittsburgh news, culture, and more. Because sometimes 100 words just isn't enough for a great story. Logan:Hello, and welcome to a brand new episode of the P100 podcast. You're here with myself, Logan Armstrong, and co-hosts Dan Stefano and Paul Furiga. Guys, how are you doing?Paul:Great, Logan.Dan:Emphasis on the co-host there. You're the host with the mostest there.Logan:I try to be. I do what I can, but-Paul:Yes he does and he does it well.Logan:I get my mostest from the people I'm surrounded with. On today's episode, we're going to be examining tech jobs in Pittsburgh, and there have been a few recent articles for some vying to leave and some vying to stay that you may have seen. So we're going to be talking about that and seeing how Pittsburgh ranks compared with cities and metros around the country in tech jobs.Logan:Then we're going to bring in our good friend Jason Cercone from the Breaking Brews podcast. He takes a drink from breaking, excuse me. He takes a break from drinking beer and talks about the business side of it.Paul:Wait a minute, that wasn't in this segment. There was no beer drinking?Logan:Unfortunately no.Logan:We asked him about it and he said that he'd be happy to rejoin us.Dan:Logan, let's remember we're talking to the CEO of our company within the office, so no. There's no-Paul:Well that's fine. Let's chat.Dan:We don't have a video of this, but if you could see the winking eye. No, there is no-Logan:No beer during this segment.Dan:Drinking during this segment.Paul:Of course not.Logan:Okay, and then finally we're going to wrap up with what's missing from downtown.Paul:Oh.Logan:Indeed, mysterious.Paul:Question.Logan:That's right. You'll have to stick around to see what we're talking about, but we're in for a great episode so we hope you stick around.Dan:I hope it's not my car or anything.Paul:Okay guys, time to do one of our favorite things on the podcast. Talk about Pittsburgh getting another great national ranking.Dan:Another list, right?Paul:We're on another list.Dan:Yeah.Paul:This one's a good one. Although, if you're in the Silicon Valley area, maybe not so good.Dan:Right.Paul:A couple of weeks ago, Wallet Hub, which is an online service provider that looks at financial things, very popular with millennials.Dan:They make many lists.Paul:They make many lists of many different things. Top places to live in the country for tech workers. Pittsburgh, number five. Silicon Valley, not so high, which caused the San Jose Mercury News, which San Jose's a community that's smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, to write sort of a cheeky little article. Pittsburgh is better for tech workers than Silicon Valley? Question mark. Well, yes, if you want to live affordably, apparently it actually is.Dan:That's completely accurate. Yeah. The Bay Area, it's got to be one of the highest costs of living-Paul:It is actually.Dan:In the country.Paul:It has the highest cost of living in the country. And Logan, you were looking inside some of the rankings, and Pittsburgh ranked in the top 15 in a number of categories, right?Logan:Yes. So the three categories were professional opportunities, STEM friendliness, and quality of life. And Pittsburgh ranked 13th, 14th, and 11th in those, respectively. And some of the reasons that places like San Francisco and the Bay Area didn't rank so highly is that they would rank very high in one or two of these categories. So for example, San Francisco ranked third in both professional opportunities and STEM friendliness but then ranked 63rd in quality of life for reasons we were alluding to earlier. So it's good to see that Pittsburgh ranked in these lists as being as an all around. Maybe it's not top five or the best in STEM friendliness or professional opportunities, but it's well-rounded and our quality of life here is, according to this list, far better than some of our counterparts.Paul:And certainly as the community here has continued to transform, and I'm thinking now of Uber, and Apptive, and Apple's got a good presence in the city. Facebook's virtual reality company, Oculus, is wholly sited here in the Pittsburgh region. We're trying to attract more tech workers and we've got these great university programs, CMU and Pitt at the head of the pack, but others as well, where we're building this tech community. And I guess it does still surprise people in the more traditional communities, but it's legit. There's something going on here.Dan:Right. For better or worse, Pittsburgh will always kind of bring that blue collar atmosphere, that blue collar mentality, a bit rough around the edges. I talk about it all the time, but my wife's family, who, they grew up in California, they all lived in California for a while. They came to Pittsburgh here and they said, "Wow, I had no idea it was this green." So there's always going to be a bit of a stigma that the city carries around, but I think these lists show that to that the news is catching on here. And Pittsburgh is basically known now for the meds and eds and now tech. The reputation is definitely growing here and starting to overcome that stigma.Paul:That perception.Dan:Yeah. But there's ... Well, not to be Debbie Downer or play devil's advocate here, there are still the legacies of that history here that carries on, especially in our environment.Paul:Yeah. We still have work to do, that's for sure. I can remember when I first moved back to this region from the Washington DC area. I had a job in the south side and what is now South Side Works was still a working steel mill, and as I would drive across the Birmingham Bridge every morning, the smell of burning coke was my appetizer before breakfast.Logan:Morning coffee.Dan:That'll wake you.Paul:And there's been plenty of coverage, and legitimately so, that we still have environmental problems in the region. And certainly one of the reasons why the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, is disadvantaged on a list like this, is because there's such a huge economic disparity there. It's the most expensive metropolitan area in the country. Ours is not. Part of the reason Pittsburgh's so affordable, the collapse of the steel industry and heavy industry. So there's all this housing stock and we didn't have the kind of inflation maybe that a place on the coast like San Francisco has had, but we have economic disparity too, and that's something that we have to work on too.Dan:Right. I think that's being recognized now. We talked about a couple episodes ago here, that the city is starting to take a hard look at itself, especially in terms of the racial inequalities that exist here.Paul:Yes.Dan:Again, the three of us aren't the best people to speak to this. We don't live the same experiences that a lot of people do in this city, but we can play a role by listening and being active and playing a part in recognizing that. And trying to create opportunities, being part of the solutions here. It's going to take a long time for Pittsburgh to completely shrug off some of the legacies that came from the 20th century here, some of the stuff that might be dragging down the city, but we can do it.Paul:We absolutely can. And if we can, we'll put in the show notes, there have been a couple of interesting public source articles that have dug into some of these issues, and I was reading-Dan:Quite a battle in tech, here.Paul:It was a battle in tech, and there's one written by a fellow named Noah Theriault, I believe that's how his name is pronounced, and he's at CMU. And the conclusion of this article, which you found, Dan, I thought was really interesting. He said "Here many of us who come here for opportunities in the city's universities, hospitals, and tech firms, do so in a state of willful ignorance. We take advantage of the low cost of living, we relish the walkability of the neighborhoods. We gentrify. Many of us smugly believe that we are the city's rebirth, the salvation from rust and blight. Too few of us learn about the historical and ongoing realities that make it most livable." And I think that's something that's really at the heart of what we need to remember. It's great to be on lists like this, but really there is no Nirvana -Dan:Right?Paul:That exists among places to live in this country. We have work to do too.Dan:It's hard to put a number on somebody's personal experiences here. I think that's the crux of what you were talking about there.Paul:Exactly. Exactly.Dan:All right. We're here with Jason Cercone. He's the chief brand officer at Breaking Brews, also the founder there and they're a content network and digital resource platform for people in the beer industry. Not only that, he hosts the Breaking Brews podcast, which takes a pretty unique look at the beer industry. They focus a lot on the business side of things. So Jason, thanks for being here.Jason:Thanks for having me guys.Dan:Awesome. Okay. As we mentioned, what you like to do with Breaking Brews your podcast and kind of spins off of your business. You look at a pretty different side of things in the spirits industry, in the alcohol industry there, that people don't think of all the time and that's actually selling the stuff and getting it out there, right? Yeah.Jason:Yeah. What I discovered was there are a lot of podcasts dedicated to drinking beer and reviewing and having fun and those podcasts are all great, but I wanted to bring something different to the podcast world. And I started looking at the fact that we don't have a ton of podcasts that are dedicated to the business side. Which talks about sales and marketing and distribution, all those different facets that are very important and very critical to the beer world. That was where it really started to ... or where I really started to make it take off. And I talked to a lot of industry professionals that felt the same way. They said when they're cleaning kegs and doing some of the horrible work that goes on in the brew houses that they want to put on a good podcast and listen to something that they can learn from, and that was the resource I wanted to put out there for them.Dan:Right, well the industry's really exploded as far as the craft production or the craft beer segment goes. I think ... I'm just looking at some facts here from the Brewer's Association, retail sale dollars of craft beer in 2018, I think the most recent year of stats was $27.6 billion. You said you've seen that since you started the Breaking Brews podcast yourself, you started about four years ago, or is that just your business?Jason:Breaking Brews itself started back in 2014. This is actually my third iteration of a podcast. I actually did one, like I was saying before, where we just sat around and drank beer, and that got old after a while.Dan:Why aren't we doing that right now?Jason:That's a very good question. I know. I was quizzed on that when I walked in the door, why I didn't bring beer and I'm starting to regret that.Dan:We'll just have our first kegger podcast, here.Logan:Yeah, well that'd make for some good conversation, that's for sure.Dan:That's a great idea.Jason:I'm always happy to come back for a second round if you guys want me to bring some-Dan:Right.Jason:Good drinks.Dan:Great idea. But yeah, as we were talking about the industry is just enormous right now. We're seeing that too in Pittsburgh, right?Jason:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean when I started things in 2014, there was probably maybe a dozen local craft breweries and now you look at the landscape, there's over 50 throughout the region. It's incredible. So many of them are doing great products and getting it out to bars around the area and also creating an awesome taproom experience too.Dan:Why do you think that is?Jason:Pittsburgh loves its beer, man.Dan:Yeah.Jason:But overall I think that ... I mean we haven't ... we hear the talk about the bubble a lot and has craft beer reached its saturation point. And I've always been a firm believer that we haven't even come close because we're not even close to the number that we had, or number of breweries we had before prohibition.Dan:Yeah.Jason:I mean we're creeping up, we're getting close, but the population of all these different cities and states across the country is so much higher. And when I go out to events and I do samplings and I talk to beer drinkers, a lot of folks still really aren't aware of what's going on in the craft beer industry. So there's still a lot of education that we can provide and that was one of the main drivers of Breaking Brews was putting some education out there so people can better understand what's going on in the industry and what's going on with these products.Logan:That's an interesting benchmark that you mentioned there that the number of brewers before the prohibition. Is that a common milestone in the craft beer business? And are there things that were happening back then that are happening now? The same way?Jason:I think it's, it's obviously changed a lot in regards to how beer is made. Brewers have pushed the envelope to the furthest degree possible and then a little bit more. You see a lot of crazy ingredients going into beers that probably pre-prohibition they weren't putting donuts into stouts and Twinkies-Logan:What were they doing?Jason:Breakfast cereal. I know it's like they weren't living their best life at all. However, a lot has changed. It's just the question of people's tastes have changed too and it's what do they want? And that's what these brewers are constantly trying to stay on top of, is what does the beer consumer want to drink today? And that's why I think you see such a variety out there in the market.Dan:Is it fair to say that it's easier to start a brewery round now or at least, somebody can be in their basement and actually trying to kickstart their own beer?Jason:That's probably the biggest misconception is that it's so easy to start a brewery because it's like any other business.Dan:Look, I've seen the Drew Carey show and he had a brewery in his basement. I know how this works .Jason:That's one of the big problems when you see some of these breweries that come out and their beer really isn't that great. They're standing around with their friends in a circle and all their friends are drinking their beer saying, "This is the best beer I've ever had. You need to start a brewery." And that's all well and good, but if they don't have a business sense that goes along with making a good product or even a subpar product, if they don't manage it properly, it's just not going to succeed. So it's just like anything else. I think that the barriers to entry are a little bit less because a lot of people have done it, but the smart thing to do would be go into it knowing that it's a business and you have to do all the things that you would normally do to run a business, or partner with somebody that can handle that end of your business for you.Logan:Partner with someone like Jason, Jason Cercone.Jason:I am for hire. I am here if anybody needs assistance. I'd be happy to help.Dan:Have you ever, you yourself, have you ever actually started ... Well maybe not started your own brewery, but have you ever brewed your own drafts?Jason:I've partnered and done some collaboration beers with a few different breweries across town. I did an event last year where I partnered with Yellow Bridge Brewing out in Delmont. I just went out and brewed with them for the day and I was able to say that I helped and I call that a collaboration. And I've done that with a couple of other breweries too. And that's fun. I mean that's the brewing side of it for me. I've always been more of a beer drinker and I like to obviously talk about it and promote it and market it. Brewing it just wasn't really something I wanted to do full time. It's a hard job. I think that's where a lot of people look at that like a glamorous thing and brewers will tell you, those are long days. It's very industrial and they work their asses off to put together a good product. End of the day, they are dog tired.Dan:Sure.Jason:So yeah, important. If you're going to be a brewer, know you'll be working hard.Dan:Right. We talk about hard work there. We're talking about having a good business sense. What do you see are some of the secrets to say these successful craft brewers and the people that maybe ... even some of these breweries that say are smaller, let's think about Southern Tier years ago, nobody knew who they were. Now they've got their own brewery on the North shore and what are some of the secrets to some of these businesses that have made it?Jason:I think it's understanding how to grow and being very deliberate about it and not trying to just shoot the moon right out of the gate. Obviously you have to establish a loyal fan base and make good product at the same time. But if you try to go too heavy, if you're a small local brewery and you try to make a statewide distribution, your number one priority, chances are you're not going to succeed because you don't have the liquid to supply the markets. So there's a lot of different aspects that you have to look at, but probably the most important is to use a popular phrase of our time, stay in your lane, and understand what it takes to build that brand from the ground up.Jason:Don't try to get too far ahead of yourself before you're ready. And then once the time comes where you've established that brand, then you can start looking at ... popular thing now other than distribution is looking at secondary spaces. We're starting to see some breweries in the Pittsburgh area open up secondary spots so they've proven that their brand is good enough to support it and we wish them the best in carrying that out.Dan:Who would you point to as some really good success stories in the Pittsburgh area then and what they've done successfully?Jason:Oh man, that list is long.Dan:Yep.Jason:Yeah. One of the breweries that I work with, the Spoonwood brewing in Bethel Park.Dan:I was there just this weekend.Jason:Awesome. What'd you think?Dan:I loved it. It was my second time there. I had a great time.Jason:Yeah, they're doing great beer. Great food. It's a great tap room atmosphere. You really can't ask for much more than that. They've been ... they're coming up on five years.Dan:Wow.Jason:And I've been working with them since pretty much the beginning and we've been building that brand and we don't do a ton of distribution, but a lot of the beer that we put out there ultimately was just to build that brand and give people an opportunity to taste it. To where they might say, "Wow, this is in Bethel Park. I'm going to go down there and see what else they have to offer." Another brewery I work with is Four Points Brewing out of Charleroi. They've ... just under two years old at this point, actually just about a year and a half now and they're killing it. They're doing some great beer and then you've got a lot of the names that people hear of all the time, like your Grist Houses and your Dancing Gnomes and Voodoos and Hitchhikers of the world. Again, we could sit here and do a whole podcast where I just rattle off the list because there's a lot of good beer happening.Dan:Well, you're in luck, our next segment, we're going to list breweries for the next 25 minutes. All right.Jason:Yeah. Close off with reading the phone book.Dan:Exactly.Jason:Riveting radio.Logan:Now you've learned a lot of these techniques and methods. You have over 20 years’ experience in marketing and sales. Did that start off in beer, or and if not, how did you navigate into the beer industry from that?Jason:That was ... I mean that was broken compasses for days, man, that was ... No, it did not start in beer. I've been working in the beer industry – counting what I did with starting Breaking Brews – for going on six years now. I sold cell phones right out of college, landed at Enterprise-Rent-a-Car for several years after that. Ran Hair Club for Men here in Pittsburgh for about four years. And with Breaking Brews, when I started it, it was ultimately just to build something that I felt was a good resource that could teach people how to gravitate to these beers in a very approachable way. Because as I learned, a lot of people just weren't aware of what was happening around them. So I was able to parlay my skillset from all my years in the professional world into a business that now I can help the breweries and help the different businesses that I work with do sales and marketing and create a good customer experience. All those good things, all things that are very important to building a good brand.Dan:Bring it back a little bit locally here to ... Pittsburgh I feel like is ... we've got a pretty special relationship to beer here. And it's some pretty big names in terms of, you think of Iron City, Duquesne, there's obviously Rolling Rock used to be around. How do you feel like the city's adopted and adapted to this craft brewing? I don't know if you could call it a Renaissance because it hasn't been around until right now, but this upsurge right now that people are ... they are doing with craft brewing.Jason:Yeah I think with the breweries now, I mean obviously as we spoke about earlier, we've got over 50 across the region now. It says a lot for the fact that people are going to go to a good brewery regardless of where they're at. It's become very neighborhood centric where you look like an old neighborhood pub, that's in some respects, being replaced by the local neighborhood brewery. You're seeing them essentially on every corner, quote unquote. And I think that helps with the fact that these guys are able to grow their brands so well because then it expands beyond their neighborhood as well. But yeah, we have a very rich history here in Pittsburgh with beer going back years and years back to ... I mean, Iron City was the beer.Jason:And I think now you're starting to see more of a shift towards the craft brands and many of them have been here for ... You look at East End, they've been here for 15 plus years now and they really were setting some good trends for what could happen and how people could gravitate towards a craft brand. Same with Penn Brewery. I believe 1986, was when they hit the scene. So a lot of good things have come along that have really helped push it forward. And now Pittsburgh is becoming one of those hot beds and I shouldn't say becoming it already is. And probably our closest rival in the state, just like everything else, is Philadelphia. And I think both of us have a tremendous beer scene that we can be proud of.Dan:Yeah. I think if you ever see a Penguins, Flyers game, it looks like more than a few people have beers.Jason:Well now, you see breweries have gotten in with the rivalries, like Grist House, and I'm forgetting the brewery that they partnered with out of Cleveland, they did a Browns, Steelers rivalry beer.Dan:Oh did they really?Jason:Rivertowne and Sly Fox had partnered up a couple of years ago for the stadium series. And they did a ... Glove Dropper was the name of the beer. And they worked together on that and sold it in both markets and worked out really well.Dan:All right Jason, well thanks so much for being here with us, for everybody at home. If you're listening, make sure to visit. If you're interested at all about starting a brewery and perhaps finding ways to market it and get it out to the world, you can go to breakingbrews.com. Look for Jason Cercone and also look for Breaking Brews podcast. You can find that on all the major platforms including Apple podcast, Stitcher, Google play, Spotify, iHeart, all the big ones where you can find us. And Jason, thanks so much for being here.Jason:Thanks again guys. Appreciate it.Logan:Sure thing.Dan:Great.Logan:Centuries before cell phones and social media, human connections are made around fires, as we shared the stories that shaped our world. Today stories are still the most powerful way to move hearts and minds and inspire action. At WordWrite, Pittsburgh's largest independent public relations agency, we understand that before you had a brand, before you sold any product or service, you had a story. WordWrite helps clients to uncover their own Capital S Story. The reason someone would want to buy, work, invest, or partner with you through our patented story crafting process, visit WordWritePR.com to uncover your Capital S Story.Paul:It's now time to talk about the biggest building that is not in the downtown skyline. We are talking about what is known in the travel trade as a headquarters hotel. In other words, if Pittsburgh were to host a very large convention, a large hotel would be designated as the headquarters hotel. In many cities, this is a large hotel that's attached to the convention center.Dan:Right.Paul:And that typically has somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand rooms.Dan:Right.Paul:Pittsburgh – yinz don't have one of those n’at.Dan:Oh, they do have a hotel connected to the convention center, right?Paul:Yes, yes. We do the Weston and actually Dan, I'm glad you mentioned that.Dan:Yeah.Paul:Because in the original plans for the convention center development, that hotel was supposed to be about twice as big as it is and if it were, it would be the size of a headquarters hotel.Dan:Sure. Well, I think that is, it's interesting that you're bringing this up and I think we rewind a little bit. The reason we're bringing this up is, on February 3rd, in the Post-Gazette, Craig Davis, who used to be the CEO of Visit Pittsburgh.Paul:Yes.Dan:Yeah. Visit Pittsburgh is the local-Paul:It's the Convention and Visitor's Bureau in part supported byPaul:Our tax funds and they promote the city to businesses like conventions.Dan:Right, yeah.Paul:But also to leisure travelers.Dan:Draw people into the city. Yeah, it's important. Yeah. This article, what it did with, again with Craig Davis here, he had a piece of parting advice for Pittsburgh is how Mark Belko, the writer introduced this and he did a really nice job with this piece. Craig wanted to build a convention center hotel.Paul:Right.Dan:And that's what we're talking about here. And there's a lot of back and forth about whether it should be done, whether ... what kind of impact it would bring on the city here. And he had some really good information about it, yourself, but a lot of people, they want to see more here. And that's what we're talking about today.Paul:Right. So in the tourism and convention industry in Pittsburgh, this is the third rail of politics. Nobody really wants to talk about it. And I look at this article in the Post-Gazette, Visit Pittsburgh, great organization. Craig Davis, very effective leader and he's been hired to run a similar organization in Dallas. Smart person. He's in Dallas now, so he can kind of say, what maybe he couldn't say before when he was in Pittsburgh. And for people in his business, his line of work, you need to have a convention center hotel. The thing is, to build that would cost about, Oh, kind of like the same amount of money to build PNC Park or Heinz Field.Dan:Right? Yeah. In this article here, they have an estimate of $350,000 to $400,000 a room to build.Paul:Or in other words-Dan:That's all.Paul:Yeah. $240 million.Dan:Right. That's for a 600-room hotel.Paul:Exactly.Dan:Yeah.Paul:It's a lot of money. And it was not easy to get PNC Park and Heinz Field built. There was actually a referendum on the ballot one year that failed. It was called the Regional Renaissance Initiative. I mean we put renaissance in the name of everything, don't we? And it was after that, that a deal was brokered. A lot of critics said behind closed doors and smoke-filled back rooms that wound up producing Heinz Field and PNC Park. There doesn't seem to be a lot of political appetite for spending that kind of money, again.Dan:Right.Paul:On something like a convention center hotel.Dan:Again here, Mark did a great job with this article here and he put it pretty succinctly here. He said, "In recent years, Davis' pitch has landed with all of the enthusiasm of a root canal."Paul:Yes.Dan:I don't know about you guys, I get too enthusiastic over root canals, but I suppose not many other people do, but the article does bring up a good point. That there's been a recent hotel building boom in the region, in the downtown area, particularly across the river. Some other smaller hotels that have cropped up here and there, the Marriotts and whatnot.Paul:Many. You could throw a rock from where we sit right now, we can hit the Monaco.Dan:Absolutely, yeah.Paul:Throw it across the way, hit the Embassy Suites. We've got the William Penn, which has been here for a long time. The Drury is in the old federal reserve building.Dan:Right and that's just a block away from the convention center. But the kind of full service hotel that, again, this is from the article here that Mr. Davis would see here, that would require huge public subsidies. And that's-Paul:Yes.Dan:I think the sticking point that it comes down to.Paul:That is the third rail part.Dan:Whether we want this here and I think it's one of those things where you balance. You say, "How much are these conventions going to be worth compared to the costs, the investments that you have to make in a city here." And it could take a while until the scales tip one way.Paul:Well, and what's very interesting about this is, there are statistics, there don't seem to be any statistics readily available to say, "Yes, Pittsburgh, you should do this." What we tend to fall back on, are a couple of really great seminal events. First was the Bassmaster Classic several years ago. And still of course people who don't know Pittsburgh want to depict it as a smoky mill town. And we had this freshwater national competition for bass fishing. And it went off really great. And that's led, as Mark Belko's article points out to Visit Pittsburgh getting into seeking sports events. And we've had, I can't believe this, I didn't even realize this number, 22 NCAA championship events have been held in Pittsburgh and we've got more coming.Dan:Yeah. Just recently they had the National Women's Volleyball championship out here.Paul:Yeah.Dan:And I think a big part of that comes down to, they now have a world-class arena to do it in.Paul:Yes.Dan:Where Civic Arena definitely showed its age after a while.Paul:Right.Dan:That plays a different part here. But certainly the downtown hotel building boom assists with that.Paul:Absolutely. Absolutely.Dan:Convention centers is ... that's a little different. And again, I think what, Craig Davis is trying to say here is, having it connected to the convention center, people love that. It's very convenient just to grab an elevator, have a little sky walk over to the convention center. It's not always a feasible immediately though, it's nice to think of these things, but it's hard to find room for it. And whether you're going to supplement what is already there or again, it takes money.Paul:Well, my point about Bassmaster, the other thing that happened of course was the G20 in 2009. Those two events put Pittsburgh, reputation-wise, on a world stage. In the article, Mark Belko talks about Milwaukee, which is a nice enough town and they have a baseball team that has a better record over the last decade of a postseason-Dan:They spend more than the Buccos, but that's a-Paul:They do.Dan:That's a whole other podcast.Paul:However, in terms of the hotel market, not quite the same size as Pittsburgh and they're getting the Democratic convention this year.Dan:Absolutely.Paul:Why does Pittsburgh not have that sort of convention? And if we did, aside from the monetary benefits of the convention itself, what would it do for the city in terms of raising the reputation even more and bringing more convention business to Pittsburgh? It's hard to say. It's also hard to argue that it was really cool to have Bassmaster or certainly the President and world leaders for the G20. That was awesome exposure for Pittsburgh. This is kind of a question of how much is the region willing to spend? And apparently it's going to have to spend something, in order to create that kind of environment.Dan:I think what's important when you look at these national conventions, particularly in the political arena, that is strategic by the parties too.Paul:Oh yes.Dan:Wisconsin's very important in this upcoming election to the Democrats. As is Pennsylvania.Paul:Right.Dan:But they were also in Philadelphia not that long ago, so do they want to spend so much more time in Pennsylvania and look, Wisconsin, the people ... whenever they do the Monday morning quarterbacking of that election, they did not spend all the time there. So it's ... they're showing ... it's a quite a statement that they are spending the time in Milwaukee for this upcoming convention. But it also shows that if Milwaukee can host something like this, then, so can Pittsburgh.Paul:Why not Pittsburgh, yeah.Dan:I think Pittsburgh actually held the very first Republican convention that was back in the 1860s or so. And we had the hotel rooms for that one, I guess. You know.Paul:We did.Dan:Yeah.Paul:Well, country was a little smaller then.Dan:Indeed. Yeah.Paul:Might be a difference, but I think this is a topic we're going to come back to again, so we wanted to put it out there for everybody. Again, props to Mark Belko and his article and the truth speaking, shall we say, of Craig Davis. We'll have to watch the skyline and see where this one goes.Dan:Well, most importantly, just as a final coda to this, and Mark's article did describe this a bit at the end, for the leaders that want to see this kind of change, that want to see a hotel down here, they have to show their work. It has to be ... You have to come to ... with studies from respected institutions, respected people, who are proving that, "Okay, hey, when Milwaukee hosted this type of thing, if they had a hotel here, this is the impact that they would have got."Dan:There are other areas here in Louisville and Columbus that are building hotels. What will those hotels do for their ability to draw conventions? Are they stealing them from Pittsburgh? You have to come up with that information. You have to present it to the leaders, not only in our government, but the community to approve ... like, "Hey, okay, some of tax dollars should go to this."Paul:Absolutely.Dan:And if you can do that, if you can convince enough people, then maybe it happens. But that stuff takes some time too.Paul:Well, and just a final thought on this since Craig Davis left Visit Pittsburgh, they are engaged in a search for a CEO. So I would expect that once a new CEO is named, one of the first things that we should be looking for, is some thinking around this topic.Dan:Absolutely.Logan:And we are well beyond 100 words today. Thank you for listening to the P100 podcast. This has been Dan Stefano, Logan Armstrong, and Paul Furiga. If you haven't yet, please subscribe at p100podcast.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on Twitter at Pittsburgh100_ for all the latest news updates and more from the Pittsburgh 100. 

Freedom of time, money, relationships, and purpose is what we all want. Property managers, realtors, and investors help clients build wealth through real estate.  Today, I am talking to Steve Welty, owner of Good Life Property Management business and podcast. He enjoys meeting amazing people and indoctrinating listeners with his philosophies.  You’ll Learn... [03:23] Stop whining about solvable issues, such as online reviews to get warm leads.  [04:41] Steve surfs to success with Good Life Property Management.  [06:43] Podcast Passion Project: Do content for content's sake; add value to people's lives for opportunities and connections to come your way. [10:19] Don’t lose focus on why and what fires you up; limit time and effort spent on your business to achieve outcomes. [15:00] Purpose of Business: Not to make money; build a business that makes money.  [16:25] How to be happy: Create momentum for other people to gain momentum. If you wish to become great, learn to become the servant of many. [18:12] Zig when they Zag: Success outside outsource sandbox to reduce costs.  [18:55] Results-based Biz: Hire young, smart, motivated people and leave them alone.  [19:31] Big Issues, Big Success: More people can lead to more problems; paint a compelling vision to keep good people and let them do what they want to do.  [20:10] Move Out and Outwork Others: Create freedom of time and money by hiring CFO or profit first coach/accountant to offer advice, not control over finances.  [26:10] Value-add Revenue Sources: If you don't charge for it, you're doing it poorly.  [28:25] Opportunities in Other States/Markets: Pop-up shops to buy cash flow property.  [29:05] To Die List and Time Study: Procrastination problem property managers and owners experience.  [35:00] Barriers/Protections: Teach team and customers how to treat and reach you.  [37:35] Opinions vs. Observations: Co-creation/coaching is transformational and transactional superpower that changes lives.  [46:45] Give up control and allow people to fail, or you create an unsafe business.  [52:30] What Matters: Million ways to get to end results and outcomes.  [54:05] Hire and Fire: Center on core values; be reliable, positive, and go-giver (RPG). [57:10] Epiphany: Everything worthwhile lives on the other side of fear.  [1:03:05] Money is one side of it. Easiest decision to make is to be a different person.  Tweetables Do content for content's sake. Limit time in your business; achieve outcomes with least amount of effort. Add limitations or constraints to create a necessity for innovation. First key to greater time, money, and purpose is to create space for yourself. Resources Steve Welty’s Email Good Life Property Management Good Life Property Management Podcast Steve Welty on Spotify Steve Welty on Apple PM Grow Orange Tree Property Management GatherKudos National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Brad Larson Gary Vaynerchuk The 4-hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Todd Breen Making Money is Killing Your Business by Chuck Blakeman How I Built This with Guy Raz Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard  Voxer Jason Goldberg (Strategic Coach) Extreme Ownership Book E-Myth Book The Go-Giver  KingJasonHull’s Whimple on SoundCloud DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a little bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners, we want to change the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull. The founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today's guest, I’m really excited, we’re hanging out with Steve Welty. Steve, welcome to the DoorGrow show. Steve: What’s up Jason? Good to be here. Jason: Steve and I were reminiscing. I saw Steve at a broker owner conference, the very first one I went to several years ago and we were sitting at the same table and I guess I said hi to you and we were chatting it up. Steve: Yeah. It's funny, I remember that day very vividly and it's interesting because I have a very poor memory. You were the mysterious man behind me and you were dressed really nice. Jason: I don't dress nice anymore. I'm too lazy now. Steve: Yeah, you're just soaking it all, but we were talking before the show, was that really one of your first conferences? Jason: That was the first conference I'd gone to, yeah. My dad had just started property management business. He's got maybe about 200 doors now, but he had just started a property management business. He had been a hospital administrator for 30 years or something and he said, “I'm going to do what Bryan’s doing and start a property management business.” My brother has got maybe 1000 doors or something like that and he is out of Orange County. Not too far from you down San Diego. He thought, “Bryan’s doing it, maybe I could do this too.” He decided to become an entrepreneur. Caught the bug. It's been fun to watch that, but I was like, “Dad, let's go do this. I want to see what happens there. The only way I can go is if I'm with you, you're a broker owner.” I was his director of marketing and I was just the fly on the wall for Orange Tree Property Management, just checking out what goes on a broker owner. I just want to see what happened there. It was challenging for me though because the entire time I'm hearing people talk about problems, and challenges, and I'm just biting my tongue the whole time. I’m like, “I could solve that challenge. I can help with that.” I just had to sit there and be quiet. I've even got a text message from one of my clients that was sitting in the room and he said, “I'll bet this is just killing you right now,” I texted him back, “You have no idea.” It was just really funny to hear people whining about stuff that I think is solvable. Steve: What was something out of all those issues you're biting your tongue about that you can reflect on today. Jason: Now you’re interviewing me. Steve: I'm interested to hear that. Jason: I remember one of the things that really killed me was people were like, “How do you deal with your online reviews? How do you get more positive online reviews?” We have our system GatherKudos, and we have coaching material around that that we’d go through with clients to figure out how to identify peak happiness, leverage a lot of reciprocity, how to get more reviews, how to build a system in your business as part of your onboarding process with new tenants so you get more reviews. I think that's a better system to have than even most marketing systems, because that creates warm leads. I was just sitting there listening to them talk and some of the ideas were, “We're okay, we're good,” but I was like, “This is so solvable.” Steve: Reviews are still a big issue, six years later or whatever it is. Jason: Correct. Steve: People still can’t figure it out. It’s tough. I still try to figure it out on a daily basis. Jason. Yeah. Cool. Steve, you've got an awesome property management business. You've got your own podcast that you do. You've got a lot of stuff going on. Help my audience understand who you are and give us a little bit of background on Steve, your adventures in property management, and how you got into it. Steve: For sure. I graduated from San Diego State 2005 and stayed in construction for a little while. I was working with constructions in college, just bumming around, surfing, and doing whatever I was doing. Got my real estate license finally and did some deals 2006-2007. I hear a lot of stories like this, it’s like 2006-2007 sales, all of our sales, we should start a Facebook group for sales guys that flamed out, well I think it is, it’s probably called than NARPM of Facebook group. It seemed like everyone has that story. I made some nice checks in sales and I thought I was great, and then I became broke very fast. I was 26-27 and I was broke. I was applying for any job that I could get and I went to work for a French entrepreneur in Carlsbad as a personal assistant. He wanted someone to manage his property manager that had a real estate license because he didn't trust his property manager. Jason: Okay, so you were the spy that was going to monitor whether he was doing his job or not. Steve: Yeah, most managers hate it when the owner micromanages you. Imagine a realtor micromanaging you. I was like, “Yeah, I can do that,” I never managed anything in my life, but I figured it out and worked with him. He actually taught me some great business lessons looking back, but two years in, it was very stressful working for him. He was not the nicest guy, but he did teach me a lot and then I went out on my own with a business partner at the time. We decided, “Hey, let's start our own management company and just got it enough off the ground to allow me to quit my job, be on property management with my partner I think in 2008. We grew that until about 2012 and then we decided to part ways. I started Good Life in 2013 and then been doing Good Life ever since. I started the Good Life Property Management podcast which has nothing to do with clients, nothing to do with getting new customers. It was really a passion project and something I learned out of that was that I encourage people to do content for content's sake if their heart tells them to do that. A lot of times we try to figure out, “Well, how am I going to monetize that?” I remember when I asked Brad Larson, I think he was one of the first people to do a podcast that was a property manager. I was like, “What are you doing this for?” and he was like, “Oh, it's fun,” I was like, “It didn’t make any sense, you're wasting time.” When you add value, like Gary V—a lot of people have really put this in the forefront—when you add value to people's lives, opportunities come your way, connections come your way. I have so much fun doing the Good Life Property Management podcast and we serve the same community you serve which is property management entrepreneurs. I don't run ads. I have ran ads in the past, but I don't anymore. I don't necessarily get anything out of it other than just meeting cool people and getting to indoctrinate my listeners with my philosophies which are really along the same lines in a lot of ways as you, Jason. I really resonate with your manifesto in a lot of ways, so that's cool. That's it. I'm big into music. I do a lot of music. Steve Welty, I’m on Spotify and Apple, and that's my passion. I'm going more and more into that. Also, we have tried mastermind for property management entrepreneurs to max out their business and life. That's what's up for me. Jason: Cool stuff. I think we have a lot in common. Not only are we both California guys. A lot of people listening may not know this, but I had a band in college. I wrote all the music, I played guitar. I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur then. I didn't know that was in my blood, but I was the guy going door-to-door with a guitar and a clipboard pre selling CDs at girl’s dorms that I could fund to self-produce an album, and I was playing music. Steve: That’s [...]. Jason: I know, it was pretty crazy. The album is on SoundCloud if people are searching for it. Steve: Let’s check it out, what’s it called, how can we find it? Jason: My username on SoundCloud is my username everywhere, which is KingJasonHull, and the album is called Whimple, that was the name of my band. Steve: I love it. I think you told me that a while back, but I forgot, but I'm really fascinated with that because that was my story, too. I was a songwriter. That was hustle. I give you street credit like going dorm-to-dorm, playing for chicks, that's pretty cool. I thought I was going to be a rock star. That was my deal, but it's so funny looking back. I didn’t even practice. I just thought I have the natural talent and I used to drink a lot so I was probably delusional. I had this moment, this crossroads where I was like, “Okay, you're not going make it,” I'm not going to be okay being older and broke, so I'm going to go on a business route. I just gave up music completely, and then I was in a strategic coach workshop. I have given it up five or six years and I met this entrepreneur. I was telling him about my story. I was like, “I don't really play music anymore,” and he's like, “Oh, that sucks.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does suck.” Then he’s like, “Well, you have a guitar in your office don’t you?” and I was like, “No.” He’s like, “Well you’re the boss, aren’t you?” Jason: I can see it right behind you. Steve: Yeah, right now I do it. He’s like, “You’re the boss.” I’m like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Well, why don’t you try this, try just putting a guitar in your office. Just make a commitment to picking it up once a day even if it's for one second.” It really resonated with me because I had given up a part of myself that was really important because I think a lot of time as business owners, we just get so focused on like, “We got to make this company work,” and we’d lose focus of why and what fires us up on an internal level. I did that and that about two years ago, fast forward to today, I'm putting many hours a day into music, into song writing, into recording, into building my audience and it's helped my business so much because when you limit the amount of time that you're in your business, you can only do the things that you're really good at and so that's what I'm really passionate about, is figuring out how can I achieve an outcome with the least amount of effort possible. Jason: Yeah, because when we add limitation or constraint, it creates the byproduct of limitation or creating a constraint is it creates a necessity for innovation. If you have unlimited amounts of time, unlimited amounts of money, unlimited whatever, there's no innovation because it's so easy to be lazy. It's so easy to just let things unfold in a different way, but when we have some time constraints or we have some financial constraints, we have to get creative and that's where the genius starts to come out, that's where new ideas start to come out. I've noticed that even with team members, if I say “I need this done by this time,” they get creative or if I need this done under this budget, they get creative, then they start to innovate. If I say, “Yeah, do it whenever, take as much time as you want, spend as much money as you want,” there's no innovation. They're just going to go towards whatever seems easiest, which is the status quo. Steve: Yeah, you nailed it. I've been really interested in constraints. I had a son, my first child, he’s six months old, Myles, and I was encouraged by a friend of mine. He said “Take 30 days off, Steve,” he's like “It'll be the best thing you ever did for your business. Don't check in, don't do anything. Take 30 days off. Be with your son.” It was in December, so it was like the perfect time and so I did that, and man he was right. It really levelled up my business, my team got way better. They were already good, but just putting these things into place that force you to grow. That 30 days off was huge. Next year I'm planning a 60-day trip to another country that I’m really passionate about using that. I even got my operations manager. He doesn't work out of the office anymore. I moved out of my office a long time ago because when you're in the office, you are often the bottleneck for your company and everyone comes to you for the answers and the solutions. I really grabbed on to that concept and constantly looking for new ways to use constraints to my advantage. Jason: I love it. It's been awhile since I've told the client to do this, but a lot of clients will ask questions like, “How do I become a business owner instead of my own best employee?” I would tell them, “You just start doing it. You take a vacation.” If you schedule a week-long vacation, if you're not taking vacations, for those listening, you schedule week long vacation and you can't take off a week, you're going to have to figure out how to make everything not fall apart for that week. To go 30 days, that's incredible, 60 days is ridiculous, that's pretty awesome. At that point, you've arrived as owner of the company instead of being your own best employee. I noticed when I would take off time or vacation, I would be surprised by how my team would step up. I'd be surprised by the things leading up to that vacation, more would get done than would get done sometimes in months. There are so many little things that you need to get dialed in. “Oh my gosh, they’re going to be gone for a week. How are we going to live without Jason? We got to get this.” My team would say, “Hey Jason, I need this,” or, “I need to access to this,” or, “I need to know how to do this.” Suddenly everybody's rallying around this idea of taking some stuff off your plate because they need to be able to make sure things don't break and it creates the possibility for you to do that more or forever. Steve: Yeah, and I think its baby steps. I remember when I first read the four-hour work week. I thought Tim Ferriss was a god. I was like, that makes no sense. Jason: Did you almost move to Thailand? Steve: Close, but no, it was just really interesting. I guess from a personal level, having time was even more appealing than being a billionaire I guess to me personally. When I see people like Todd Breen and other people talk at NARPM that would talk about running your business from the beach or not is just very appealing to me. I wanted to grow a self-managing company and it was baby steps. There's this book called Making Money is Killing Your Business and they say it really why. It says the purpose of the business is not to make money, it's to build a business that makes money, like time and money equals wealth. Your business should throw off time and money. Now, if you want to then use that extra time to just pour more time in your business, doesn't mean you got to go live on a beach. You could do other adventures. For me, what's really worked and what I'm super blessed to have now is that it's created space in my life to actually start cultivating the other things that light me up, like music, other things. It gives you those options, but that's what I think in our industry especially in a lot of industries, we want to help people, help them anyway we can to experience that. Jason: They say, “What the world needs is people that are alive” I think as entrepreneurs that's where we feel. We want momentum. That's what we crave. The rest of the world, they're just trying to figure out how to be happy. “If I could just be happy then everything would be great.” It's whether they're happy or sad, depressed or excited, but for entrepreneurs, I feel like our two speeds are momentum or stuck, that's it. It’s momentum or overwhelm. We either feel like we're in complete overwhelm, we’re stuck, we can't move forward or we’re frustrated, or were on fire and alive. That's my version of happy or sad. I want to feel like I'm in momentum and I feel like as entrepreneurs, we get momentum when we give it away. When we create momentum for other people, whether it's our clients or the people in our family, the people around us, when we're creating momentum for other people, we get that sense of momentum, too. Steve: Yeah, and that's something I resonate with and I’ve heard you talk about it Jason. I love that message. I really think that the blue ocean is caring about people more than anyone else, like proactively putting the people in your life in the forefront, figuring out, “Who do I want to be a hero to?” and being a hero is usually used in a reactive way. Jason: Right, like there's a crisis or a problem, now you're going to be a hero. Steve: Right, as opposed to being a proactive hero like spending time and saying, “Okay, who are the most essential people or buckets or groups of people in my life and how can I serve them more deeply and impactfully today,” because the best quote of success I've ever heard is something like become a servant of many. If you wish to become great, learn to become the servant of many. I sometimes get a little jaded in certain groups because you constantly hear the feedbacks, the reduce the cost, the get it all out sourced. I use VAs, I look to reduce cost, I look to get fair fees, so I'm not knocking that, but everyone's playing in that sandbox. I'm very interested in seeing what is everyone else doing and how can I do the opposite because that's one of the ways to become successful that I've learned is that you go zig when they zag. That’s cliché. You can't do that when you're buried in tenant complaints and one-star reviews and a team you have to micromanage. I'm a big believer in hiring young, smart, motivated people and leaving them alone. We're a results-based company at Good Life. You can work from home, you could bring your dog, although actually our manager of our building said we can't anymore. I don't really care, with the exception of a couple like the front desk needs to be there in case someone walks in and things like that, but do your thing. There's a great podcast I heard yesterday on how I built this with Guy Raz where the owner of Patagonia wrote this book called “Let Them Go Surfing” and it's all about that. I think our biggest issues once we get to a certain size is people problems, and then we don't know why we can't keep good people, it’s because we don't paint it in a compelling vision. We micromanage. We don't let them do what they want to do. We try to fit corporate bureaucracies into the more entrepreneurial company that people want to be a part of these days. Would you rather follow just checklists and not have a future or would you rather be able to create your own future? Like I tell my team, “You can become anything with me. The sky's the limit wherever you want to go.” So, I think those are big parts of success. Jason: That's really what we're talking about today. The topic is freedom of time, money, and relationships through better business practices. What are some of the practices that you've implemented at Good Life that you feel like you've created more freedom of time and money? Steve: It starts with the business owner and probably a series of game changers. The first was moving out of my office. I had this epiphany and I was taught this by someone and I told the team, we had a meeting, I said, “I apologize. I've stood in the way of you guy’s future and I apologize for it. When I'm here, I'm the bottle neck. I'm stunting your growth. You can come to me for all the answers,” and the fact is as entrepreneurs if you serve 100 people and say, “Where do you do your best work?” nobody says at their office, who does the best work at their office? Why are we working out of our offices? It's just because that's how it's always been done. I kicked myself out. I don't have a desk at my office on purpose. I used to have the stereotypical nicest office in the corner with the best view, and then it freed up so much space, it helped my team grow. Once I created that space, now I work out of my home, and the first key to greater time, money, and purpose is to create space I believe, for yourself. I came from a place where three or four years ago, my dad always taught me outwork everyone else. I remember one time he came to visit me at a college and he asked me how much I was working, I said about 60 hours a week. He’s like, “60 hours? I work 60 hours, I'm retired. What the hell is wrong with you?” Jason: Step it up Steve. Steve: Yeah, and it's great. I love my dad. His work ethic was the reason I'm here today, because it got me to that. There are seasons of life. I knew there had to be a better way, so when I'd made that decision to move out of my office, I said, “Hey, you guys are going to have a bigger opportunity to move up now.” Some of the other things we did was hiring an operations manager. That was huge. That created space and that was something I look forward, and it took me probably eight or nine months to pull the trigger on that, but the operations manager was huge. Slowly but surely, I went from just being stressed out all the time, not having any space in my life. An over-scheduled entrepreneur has no time to transform. I said, “Alright, I'm going to create some space,” and then all the ideas and all the answers start bubbling to the surface because spiritually we all have all the answers inside of us, just we’re so distracted and so just going that we don't allow it. Jason: We’re preloaded, we're in fight or flight, we're up in our monkey brain, and all the great things, our greatest geniuses as an entrepreneur can't bubble up or can't come through when we're in that state. Steve: Exactly, and so that's time that just forced me to get more time because as an entrepreneur, you can make that decision. Jason: We’re buying time. Every person that we pay on our team, we’re buying time. That's what we're buying. I think the mistake we make as entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs I see, they go hire based on an org chart. They don't hire based on what they personally need in order to off load or get themselves out of the things that they don't really energetically enjoy. You getting an operations manager if you're a visionary entrepreneur is brilliant, because that's like the yin to the yang. It's the exact opposite personality type of the driven entrepreneur is to have somebody that is systems-minded, process-minded, and that can make sure everything's running. Generally, us entrepreneurs, we’re terrible managers. We think we're great at everything, but we're really terrible managers and usually the operations manager is much better at making sure everything runs smoothly. Steve: It's hard to take off or get more time initially if you don't have the money. The money component is important. I went on a Mastermind trip to Mexico a few years back with a handful of people and we looked at everyone's P&L and that was one of the biggest game changers for me was not only understanding my numbers. I think everyone needs a CFO at least part time or at least some outside eyes on the business is so important. Jason: I have a profit first coach and accountant. I'm not really a big fan of having a CFO in a business. Usually, my take on it is every story I've heard of embezzlement or of challenges it's always like the CFOs, and so they're also the crusher of all hopes and dreams. I don't want somebody making too big of decisions there personally, but I want to be coached, and I want to have input and I want to have insight from a third-party perspective, but I don't want them to have control over my stuff. Steve: Totally. I get that. I don't have a CFO, we use a profit coach. Jason: Yeah, similar thing. Steve: Right, but I found that I wasn't going to build a business I thought I was going to build because I'm a feel guy. Like I learn by doing. Does this feel right and I’ll make a decision, but I make decisions very quickly. I'm a high quick start, so I'll make 10 decisions, eight will be bad, two will be great but in the same time that someone else makes one decision. I sometimes can stay a step ahead, but I had to add some revenues and I wanted them to be value-added revenue sources where everyone was a win-win-win, so things like doing inspections better in charging for them. When you don't charge for something, you usually do them poorly. Every manager that doesn't charge for inspections, I guarantee 90% of you are behind on your inspections. Jason: Let's say that again. I like that concept. If you don't charge for it, you're probably doing it poorly. Steve: Right. I'm a believer in this. Just take inspections for example. You go survey people around NARPM or any property management group and everyone's behind on their inspections so they don't do them right. We send a letter to our clients. We said, “Hey, inspections are actually really important. This is when we identify how well the tenant is taking care of the place is when we get out in front of preventive maintenance and it needs to be done well, so we need to hire someone to do this full time and we want to invest in this X amount we charge. It’s going to probably save you three times at least that amount by getting out in front of some of this stuff,” so that was a win-win and our clients loved it. Maybe they didn't want to get charged initially, but once they saw the improved inspection, once they saw the improved communication and results, that was a big win. Then just some other ones that we added in. I think you got to keep the investor fees-friendly. The worst thing we can do as managers is fee our owners to death and they’d get out of the business. Ultimately, the freedom of time, money, relationships, and purpose is what we want, but it's a human need. It's what your clients want, too. So, we have a unique position as property managers, realtors, and investors ourselves in a lot of cases to help people build wealth through real estate. You're a manager and you make it easy, because if you don't make it easy, they burn out and they sell, but if they hold that house specially in San Diego for 30 years, that’s all you have to do and you've set your family up for life. They burn out, so we have a big position, a big part to play here. Jason: I love it, and I love that it’s like a mantra, having others build through real estate, and ultimately what property managers could be allowed towards doing. It’s not just managing a property. If your interests are in line with theirs, which that's their goal. Their goal is to build some wealth, otherwise, why would they be holding on to that property. Steve: Exactly. There's different ways to do that. Right now, we're looking at some other states to buy cash flow property and figure out how to have our owners follow us into some of these other markets. I think with technology these days, that's what all the venture people are doing, how to just pop up shops anywhere. That's something that's exciting to me right now because in San Diego it doesn't make sense to buy an $800,000 house that rents for $2800. We're sitting on some stuff when the market turns for San Diego, but yeah, there's different opportunities out there. Jason: Alright, cool. What should we talk about next? Steve: You know what I'm interested in? I actually thought of this today, and there's some things I've been thinking about doing that I procrastinate on. You know the saying… Jason: I think every business owner can say that. Steve: I know right? Jason: I call it the to-die list. We all have to do list of stuff. Just last week, I have my weekly commitments and I realized I was carrying all of these things over from week-to-week. I'm the guy that says to my clients, “If there's anything on your to do list for more than two weeks, you're not the person that should be doing it.” That's the problem. Yes, we all tend to do that as entrepreneurs. We tend to hold on to things instead of finding the right person to do them or giving it up somebody else. Steve: That’s so true. Jason: Talk about the to die list. Steve: Yeah, the to die list. I was thinking about this today. Two examples of things I have been procrastinating on. One, I don't want to answer email, anymore. I literally want to have email leave my life. I have gotten email down to just like 10 minutes a day at the end of the day, have an assistant, but literally that is still bugging me. I once got this really inspiring auto responder from this really smart cool guy, let’s see if I can find it. Jason: I don't deal with email anymore? Steve: He said, “Thank you for your message. Perhaps you are overwhelmed by email. In fact, last year I sent 43,742 emails, read and review countless more so in order to serve our stakeholders much more efficiently, I have asked my highly capable assistant that’s in New York to review, assign and reply all my email request moving forward,” and then it says some other stuff. That's something I want to do, but it's big and scary, and yeah, I know I'll probably have to respond to some emails, but I'm talking about eliminating it more. I'm like, “Why don’t I just try that? Why do I have to make this decision I procrastinate on forever? Why don't I just try that?” I think it comes back to we don't want to fail like that, we're always raised with, “There is no try, it's to do or die,” or whatever. You don't try, you either do it or you don't, but it's like, “Why can't I just try that? I have an assistant. Why don’t I run that for two or three weeks and see how it goes?” The other thing and I'm sure you've probably thought of this, Jason, is like Gary V, having maybe a semi full-time person doing vlogs, recording not just every few days, like every day. I'm just sitting on that and I'm like, “Well, why don't I just try it for like a freaking month?” I think there's so much possibility with that and I wanted to see what you thought because I'm like, “I don't have to commit to it.” There's so much stuff. Even hiring someone. I was thinking about hiring a GM or an operations manager for eight or nine months. What if I just said, “Hey, let's try it.” I mean this isn’t Canada or some other places where I don't think you can fire people. Try it, hire the person, and if it doesn't work out, let them go. Jason: Yeah. Let's go back to the email and then we can go the other thing. Here's how I identify stuff. I mentioned this on the previous episode, but I personally will do a time study probably about once a quarter and if I bring on a new team member that takes something off my plate, because how I identify what I need to get off my plate is by doing a time study. I have to be accountable. Where's my time actually going and which things are low dollar an hour work, which things are things that I don't enjoy. I actually write a plus or minus sign next to each thing that I'm doing, whether it energizes me or it drains me, and then identify the things that are tactical or strategic, things that are self-care versus family time. I have a whole system, I take clients through for doing time studies. When I do this, that helps me get clarity for what I need to get rid of. I gave up email a long time ago because I hated email. It was always a minus sign, it was always tactical, it was never like my hopes and dreams were coming true when I was writing an email. I don't even look at my email. So, if you've emailed me, I'm sorry, I don't look at it. My assistant will take care of the email. She reads it. If she has any questions, she sends me a message through a walkie talkie app, because I don't want to type to her. She'll send me a voice message through Voxer. We use Voxer and I use it with coaching clients, she will send me a Voxer voice message and say “Jason, what do you think, how should we respond to this email. They're asking this.” I say, “Just tell them this, this and this, but say it nicer than I just said.” Then she’ll take care of it, and she's asking me questions throughout the day. We also do daily huddles as a team and that's usually where she gets most of her questions in. I say, “Is anybody stuck on anything?” She's like, “Yeah, did you get my message about this?” “No, I wasn't paying attention.” “Okay, what do you need?” I answer it and she can respond to the email for me. She's gotten really good at understanding over time, she gets better and better at knowing my voice, knowing what I would say and she takes care of more and more and more. Every day she'll give me a short list, “Here are the emails I don't know what to do with. You need to take care of these,” and I begrudgingly will deal with them within a day or two. That's how it works. [...] then I’ll talk with them and move them forward, but outside of that, usually she hands it off to my team or has somebody else in the team deal with it. If it's support-related, I think most of my clients have learned that they're not getting a fast response by coming to me directly. They get their best response by emailing our support email address or system and so I think every property manager needs to do the same. Initially, when you're small you're the guy. They probably have your cell phone number. Tenants owners, everybody, and eventually you change your phone number and you create some barriers and protections, you have to educate and teach people how you want them to treat you, and you’re going to teach your customers what are the right channels and you have to teach your team what are the right channels. My days are pretty quiet. Steve: I love that. That's super inspiring. You fired me up even more and I love how you said it's tactical. It's very transactional-tactical. I want to be playing in the sandbox of transformational. I feel like I'm retired now because I do what I want and I'm blessed to say that. There's been a lot of hard work behind that, but I'm to the point to where I'm not going to do stuff that doesn't light me up and there's a small subset of tasks like creating content—podcast is one of them—that I could do all day and I have endless energy for. That's where I add the most value. So, the bigger the impact on people that I can have is going to be when I'm fired up and passionate and not dragging off of email, but I think we don't give ourselves permission to do that. You saying that, I'm all in now. I was 80% in, Jason, now I'm all in. I hope some listeners are all in to move forward. That's what I love about podcasts and other things with so much being shared these days. A lot of times we think things, or we know things internally, or we feel things a certain way, but we don't give ourselves permission to actually say that or feel that in public because sometimes we just need someone else to say it to give us the courage. I've noticed that happening so much lately that I finally got pissed, and I'm like, “You know what? I'm making a list of everything that I believe in whole-heartedly, that I think is a little off mainstream maybe.” That way I can have it in writing and I'm just going to start saying these things because I'm tired of being, “Oh yeah, and I felt that way, too,” but I never said anything. Jason: I mention this on the previous episode, too, that I've been really opinionated in the past and I've realized that I think I'm a little more humble now that I realized my way isn't always the exact right way for everyone, so I'm learning. I was just in Columbus for a week and one of the things that really hit me hard is that I've been really opinionated and I think it's important to put out things more as observations rather than gospel truth. Somebody may love email or somebody may hate doing podcast stuff. Everybody is different and I think everybody's perception is different, everybody's experiences as to what works or doesn't work in marketing could be different, their market might be different. There are so many variables involved, so I think moving forward, my content is a lot more observational because I've realized I was attracting clients or creating monsters in the industry that are hyper-opinionated and the hyper-opinionated people become like, “Oh my God, [...],” but the problem is they create a lot of negativity in the industry. They become the rampant [...] guys that are heartless, that want to crush all the hopes and dreams of every tenant on the planet. We need to be careful in any business or any industry in being too opinionated because what ends up happening is we end up attracting most opinionated people. Those are the people that turn on you. Those are the owners you don't want eventually. Those are the people that give you the negative reviews when one little thing goes wrong. I want open minded people, and these are the clients that I’ve loved the most, but I was attracting less of them per capita because of the message that was so in your face. “This is the [...], do this,” and I was just so strong willed that way and I realize now that that creates its own monster. I think it's important to share though, honestly, these little things that we have, that are weird about is or that are woo-woo that we feel like the rest of the world will judge. To say. “This is me, this is how I am, this is my experience,” and yeah I think you when we let our freak flag fly, so to speak, there are people that run with it. As long as we're not, “Hey, this is the gospel truth. This is the only way to do it,” we're not going to turn off so much so many of the people that don't resonate. They might go, “You know, Jason, that’s cool that you're into that weird stuff, but I'm more of a practical guy and I don’t resonate with that, but I like a lot of the stuff you say.” If I say, “This is the only way to do it,” I'm forcing them to make a choice to go all in and do everything my way or the highway. Steve: Your coach helped you nail that idea. I had that opposite issue. I think the issue for me was that I didn't want to ever come off as opinionated. I'm scared almost having an opinion because I'm like, “Do your thing, man,” so I’m always quick to anything I believe in. I'm quick to say, “Do what works for you. This is just my journey. Do what works for you.” I think like attracts like and that's a really cool observation that you started attracting all these opinionated people. The coaching thing, I love that you have coaches and you’re a coach yourself because the power of coaching has changed my life. Strategic coach, I work with Jason Goldberg. Every time I have a call with him, I transform. It's really crazy. If there's one thing I'm super high on right now, it's co-creation. Co-creation is the super power that nobody's talking about and I've experienced it in many ways. First through music. Although I normally do music on my own and I'll just write songs. When I get in the room with the right people, they don't even have to be a great musician, it's just that the energy. If we’re vibrating on the same frequency, things just come out so great. I played with this rapper the other day. Two of our new songs are two of my favorite songs I've recorded in the past year. Back when I had a casual mastermind that we used to do, helping each other co-create, kick this process back to you, now you kick it back to me and blah, blah, blah, everything just accelerated. So, I think outside eyes on the business, coaches, casual masterminds, paid masterminds, whatever it is, I think the more we're interacting with others and having a sounding board, the faster we're going to get to where we're going and the more transformative the experience will be. Jason: I agree. To touch on that, every single person you'll notice, everybody listening will know this is true. You can talk about it in terms of inner energy or spirituality or whatever, but every single person that you’re around brings out a different side of you. There are people that when I'm around them, I feel I'm freaking hilarious, I’m the funniest guy on the planet. They’re laughing at everything I say. It's awesome. Then there's people that I'm around that I feel I'm super mental, analytical, and logical. That's how they perceive me and that's what they bring out in me. And there are people that feel I'm this emotional sensitive person. My kids would probably say, “No, he’s Mr. Analytical.” There are different people that bring out a different side to us. This is also why I have a strong introverted side. I need space away from people to reconnect with who I am and to make I'm me. I feel when we're around other people, part of it is how they perceive and see us, brings that out in us, it allows us to be [...] energy and yes absolutely there's this connection and a certain combination of different people, or different energies, or different whatever that will create a different music. You've got the Beatles, for example. These four guys came together and they created all kinds of interesting sounds and music that had a really strong impact and all them wrote songs [...], but on their own, none of them really created as strong of a situation without the others. Just the energy between Paul McCartney and John Lennon was pretty magical. Steve: Totally, and country artists or country songwriters write typically with at least two but usually three or four people in the same room. I think there's parallels because I can speak from experience. I was constantly, with the exception of going to maybe two conferences a year, I was at the desk in my office, head down, genius with 1000 helpers, although I wasn't a genius that is just a saying I’ve heard by any stretch of the imagination. Jason: The emperor with no clothes. Steve: Right, the fool with too much control, and that’s the thing now. I'm in charge, but I'm not in control and that’s self-freeing. It's the people, my people that are awesome are in control and the cool thing now to get to the impact or the purpose part that is super firing me up these days is that I've gotten to a point now to where my job with Good Life is to take care of my team. It's to figure out how can I make their lives better. How can I figure out, what are their dangers, their opportunities, their strengths? Where do they want to be in three years? How can I cultivate that? How can I make it so all of them would run through a wall for me and take a bullet for me because if they would do that, they will treat my money like their money, my company like their company. The reason I started really researching how, I was like how does the military sail hundreds of 18-year-olds across the sea and set up forward military bases. It's just mind boggling, and I read Extreme Ownership. It’s a great book, some other books, but you talk about decentralized command. The top gives them the mission and then that leader gives them the mission and then the lieutenant, I’m butchering correct words. Jason: The hierarchy? Steve: Yeah, the hierarchy, but they are allowed to come up with the game plan and the battle plan. One of my jobs at Good Life is to make it okay to fail. To be okay to test things and screw things up and get beat up over it. Jason: Because if they're afraid to fail, guess what happens? They start hiding crap from you. Then there's all the secret stuff going on then there’s interoffice politics, there’s backbiting. People have to be allowed to fail and not feel they're going to have their head chopped off. Otherwise, you have a business that’s unsafe for you. I love the idea of you giving up control, I've given up control over my email. I don't even know what's getting sent out half the time, but I've created trust and I trust her. She's very cautious in how she does it. I've given up my schedule. I was in Vegas last week, the week before that I think it was in Columbus, a week before that I was I think in Phoenix. I don't choose anymore. My assistant, she's like, “Here’s a speaking opportunity. You're going to go speak here.” She sets up these podcast episodes, everything I've given up autonomy on my time, but I still blackout Mondays and Fridays so I can do some of the things I want and then I have my weekends, but you give up control. The higher you move up in your business, the less control you have and the more you give to the people around you. I just do what they tell me to do. I show up. My job is to support them. I love what you were saying that you've transitioned because I think as we start out as entrepreneurs and we get our first few team members. We’re always asking the question and frustrated why can't my team just do what I say. Then eventually we transition and we transform and evolve and realizing they are some of our best assets, they're supporting us, they're better at us in things that they do, they love their areas of expertise and now it's, how can I support them? How can I help them get ahead? How can I make it easier? How can I help them avoid burnout? You also threw out the words transformational and transactional, and I think those are two very different leadership styles that I think are important to point out. I think what you’ve just been describing is you're trying to create a team that is transformational. Transformational leadership is where you give them an outcome and say, “That's where I want to go,” and they say, “Great,. We'll figure it out, we'll help you get there.” Transactional leadership is, “We're going to go here and here's exactly how we’re going to do it and we’ll do it my way,” and then there's no buy-in, there’s no ownership, they don't get to fail because if they do what you tell them to do and it doesn't work, whose fault is it? It’s mine, but that means they can't win too. If they can't fail, they can never win, and you're never going to keep A players on your team that never get to win. This is why people get so frustrated by millennials, because they're dinosaur business owners, they're running their business like assholes, they're tyrants, they're trying to micromanage their team, tell everybody to do it, and it’s transactional. They're saying, “I'm giving you money, just do what I tell you to do. I paid you, do it.” Millennials don't stand for that. They value themselves more. They want something beyond just being told what to do and getting a paycheck. Believe me, I have team members on my team that would just be there to show up and [...] and get their check. They don't believe in you, they don’t believe in the company, they're hypers, and they go home and complain about you, and the job, and they live for the weekends. But if team members enjoy the work and they feel they have freedom and they have autonomy, you have their discretionary time. They're thinking about you after work. “How can we make this better?” They’re thinking about you on the weekends. They do extra stuff because they're in love with what they're doing. Steve: Totally. Now, you said that really well and I think what comes up for me as the EMyth, which was a very transformational book to use that word for me. Checklist, at certain points at Good Life, we are a results based company, but a lot of times I get pulled to these meetings it’s like this person is not… they checked the box and they didn't do it or they didn't check the box and they should have, you know I mean? What's the results? Is the days on market good? Where is his KPIs? Although they’re good, we have this back and forth. So, here's something that I want to stick my flag in the sand as something that's not conventional and goes away from my instinct which is let them figure it out. I don't care about the checklist. We're not all going to be McDonald's. Honestly, I'm not trying to scale my business across the whole country, if I was, I probably would have to make sure everybody checks that box, but I'm really interested in the small giants approach, where it's going deep with the smaller amount of people, still having a big business that makes a big impact. I say, “Hey, look at the results. Make it a results-based company because they can own it. They have more ownership in that regard.” Something else that comes to mind was, I remember I used to walk into the office when I used to go to the office every day and people would be on YouTube and I would freaking be so mad. They're watching some videos, I would stew about, I wouldn’t say anything right away. I would go in my office and fume. Then I remember I talked to a friend about it, someone I respect, a mentor. He's like, “Man, you got to let that go. If they get the results, who cares how many cat videos they're watching. You want a fun environment. If you go lay the hammer down on that, you're going to not have the team that you need to have to make your dreams come true.” Someone I respected telling me that was me letting go of a helium balloon. All this weight was just lifted and I was free. I didn't have to micromanage. Jason: I think it's interesting because sometimes usually the person or the team that gets really caught up on the checklist and everything being done a certain way, that's usually the operations person. They love that stuff, and it needs to be done this way, but I think that's our job as the visionaries to remind them it's the outcome that matters. It's the end result that matters. The end result is making sure we have a profitable business. The end result is to make sure that we're honoring our customers and we're treating people well. These sort of things, if we want to get to the outcome. How we get to that outcome, there's probably a million ways we can do it, and whether a certain box wasn't checked or certain thing didn't end up happening. Well, maybe that process is too cumbersome. Maybe it needs to be supplied, as long as getting a result. There’s always this balance. You can have a 30-point checklist that somebody has to complete, but if you can get it down to 10 steps and they can actually do it every time and it doesn't feel it’s in the way, then you're better off than the people that are operating without looking at a process document because most people don’t. They'll do it once and then just skip it. You need something that they can live with on an ongoing basis. I think that's really important to point out what you said is that it's the results, that results don't lie, it's the outcome that really matters. So, I think if you take a step back and say, “Well, what outcome are we going to achieve? Somebody's talking about checklist not being done well. What was the outcome we were trying to achieve? What's the outcome? Okay, did we achieve it? Who was responsible for it and how do we know whether it got done or not? Okay great, well then we're good, maybe we should change the process.” Steve: Exactly. Those are some things, but the exciting part is having freedom of time, money, relationships, the people you work with, the people you get to do business with, I know you talk a lot about firing the bad clients. That was an amazing experience, our profit went way up when we fired the wrong types of clients and getting really centered on our core values because then it's easy to hire and fire people and hire clients based on your core values. Ours are really simple. It’s RPG: be reliable, be positive, and be a go giver. It's based off that book, The Go Giver, and it's just simple. We used to have seven or eight, but then I couldn't even remember what they were and they felt weird, so we made it really simple. Now, my business development manager just goes down the list, like, “Are they reliable? Were they at the appointment on time? Did they send you the thing they said they were going to send you?” It just makes this compass of how to do business with the type of people that are going to make you successful. Jason: That's one of the things that coach clients through is to get clear on their three, maybe four core values because you can have a list to 10, you can have 20, but really your team aren’t going to remember all of those and you can usually boil it down to three core things. For us, ours are a little bit different. One of my core values is just transparency. That's originally why I call my company Open Potion and in just creating transparency I think in the industry has created some various significant shifts. I think also for [...] just how I operate. That's a value that is central to me and I want my team to espouse and really our companies are just extensions of us. It's my Iron Man suit that I get the strap on every day, that's my team and everything around me. It increases my capacity. It makes me feel a super human. I'm getting more done. I've got India handling my email and Adam handing fulfillment. I feel like I’m a superhuman. Steve: He’s awesome, by the way. Jason: Thank you. I think of other things I'm really big on is just eliminating constraints and looking for the big constraints that are preventing momentum, so that I can create momentum. It’s all about creating momentum for my clients and for myself. I think it's going to be different for everybody. With all the different things that we are inspired or that resonates with us and I think every business owner needs to get clear on really what their values are because you can't have it. There are only two types of team members. There are hiders we talked about that are hiding and they are living for the weekend and they show up for paycheck or there's believers. The only way you can have believers is if you have something for them to believe in. If you want believers on your team and you want clients that believe in you, you have to have values that you make transparent or clear to the marketplace or to your team so that they can they can buy in to them. It's amazing to see companies get to a large size without even having that in place. Once you get it in place, I imagine the shift is traumatic for the culture. Steve: And if there's one last thing I would leave the listeners with that’s going to be probably the most impactful thing for me in the last 24 months was, I had this epiphany that everything worthwhile lives on the other side of fear. I knew that instinctually and I've been told that before. You know how you can read a book, that's why they say re-read the books that you love because you read it four times and then you'll start to actually really get it. I knew that, but I didn't really get it and it hit me, it became crystal clear. I was like, “Okay, if I want my dreams to happen and be fulfilled and live a life that I want, I have to figure out what scares me and do that.” I have a two-part test. Does it scare me, part one. Part two, does my heart tell me to do it? If the answer to both of those is yes, you do it. I even made a wristband that says, “What scares you, do that.” I don't have it on me right now, I took it off. Just to remind me and it goes back to the try thing. All my biggest leaps came after I did something I wasn't prepared for and I was scared to do, like going to that mastermind. I couldn’t afford it, it was really expensive. Hiring my operations manager, hiring a marketing manager. I gave a talk recently at PM Grow that I thought I was going to be broke after I hired my marketing person because I didn't think I have the margin and we ended up having our best year ever. It comes back to the try thing. Figure out what scares you, do that, try it, whatever it is. I think that's where we make our biggest leaps and that's what sets people apart from living a life that they intended to having regrets, which is the number one regrets of the dying is that they didn't live a life true to themselves, instead they lived a life other people expected them to live. That's the thing that scares me more than anything in the world and so I’m passionate about sharing that message. Jason: Steve, it’s been awesome having you on the show. I'll second that. It really is that voice deep down that is that voice of truth, and also you can ask yourself deep down, “Do I really want to be doing this?” Deep down, “Should I be doing this thing?” Deep down, “Does this really resonates with me,” and if the answer isn't a, “Hell yes,” then there's a lack of congruency and I think that's where you're saying your heart is yes. I think [...] of something that isn't working is the death of something inside you. It means change, something has to die. You want to know what's really interesting? I've noticed a lot of this on [...]. The scariest thing to kill or to allow to die is the fantasy of something great. I’ll explain this, I've noticed this a lot lately with business owners. They have this fantasy of having a really healthy business, or having a business that is growing, or a business that they contribute, or they get to do great things, and that fantasy is so exciting to them and juicy to them that they don't want to take action on it, because to take action on it means they have to kill it. They have the brutally pull out the knife and slaughter their fantasy the second they start taking action towards it, because now reality sets in. Reality is never going to be at that level that the fantasy was, but it's better because it's real. I usually use the example of my friend in high school that wanted to be a rock star, which sounds like you. You had to eventually give up the fantasy of being a rock star or you have to choose into it fully. He had this fantasy of being a rock star and he would buy expensive guitars and amplifiers, and he wouldn't take guitar lessons. He won’t love the fantasy of having this fantasy of being a rock star and as long as he can buy cool guitars and keep imagining this future that would never happen, he was happy, but he didn't want to go sleep in his car and do gigs, tour round, work his butt off, and practice nine hours a day. He didn’t want to do any of that. That's reality. Reality means some work. Initially, if you're listening to this and you’re like, “This is great. Jason and Steve have these companies and making all this money, they've got their assistants. It must be so nice for them.” They're probably listening and going, “I don't get it. I'm not there.” You may have to be the person listening that you right now, it's time for you to double down. It's time for you to hustle. It's time for you to do stuff that scares you. It's time for you to get off of the fantasy of whatever you're hoping of doing or hoping of starting to really get out there and do the work, the hard work to make it happen and you listen to that voice, you get to that place. You get to that place eventually where you're now are able to focus on your team. You're able to be a coach and a mentor to people around you instead of the person trying to figure out how to get everybody to do everything. I think that transition really involves taking those scary leaps. I think every coach that I've hired was a leap. None of them were cheap. Every coach I've hired, every program or training I bought into, some of them I couldn't even afford at the time. They were risks, but I knew deep down it was a yes. I just knew it was a yes and it terrified me. I think for those that are really analytical and logical, they're like, “I don't get it Jason,” but for anybody else listening. If you have that voice deep down inside that is saying, “Hey, this is what's next for you. You've known it. You've been avoiding it and you're trying to figure out how to make it all feel safe, take the leap, and jump and do it. Worst case scenario, you're going to learn some powerful lessons.” I had lessons where I spent a lot of money and it didn't work out. A lot of money. I've probably lots of money making some bad choices, but I wouldn't trade those lessons and I've learned from them. Steve: Yeah, and money is just one side of it. Making a decision to be a different person, or to take more time off, or to go into a completely different field, that's probably the easiest one to do is scratch a check for something. Sometimes our way of being is probably what gets in the way of most of our issues because you can't solve the problem with the same mind that created it. Creating some space and getting clear always helps, getting clear on what you're trying to do and the life you're trying to live. At the end of the day, we’re the writer, director, producer of our own store and I love how you said, you kill off the fantasy because that's true. It's scary. I think that's why a lot of people don't delegate it or it takes so long to delegate because it's scary. If you give that up, what are you going to do? Then you actually might have to sit with yourself and figure out what's next and nobody wants to be alone with themselves. That's a scary place. It's through the work, it's through conquering those demons slowly over time that I've seen good results, so it's a process. Take it easy on yourself and do what's doable. I beat myself up a lot over the years and it's I think we're all pretty ambitious. Don't kill yourself. Life's too short. Just have fun with. Do what’s doable. Jason: Well, Steve, it’s been awesome having on the

Why switch from a fun, high-flying job to a stressful one? Property management is the “Golden Ticket” to finding new properties and creating value to help others. Today, I am talking to Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management about putting profitability before adding more doors. If your company isn’t profitable, than you can’t create value for the community it serves. You’ll Learn... [02:00] Property Manager with Spare Time: Shawn serves as an instructor pilot for San Juan County Sheriff’s Office.  [02:40] NARPM professional member, chapter president, and residential management professional (RMP). [04:30] Passion for Property Management: Happiness comes not from avoiding problems, but finding fun challenges. [06:02] Innovative Incentive: Competing for staff resources increases salaries, compensation, and revenue to successfully facilitate growth and manage the company. [07:35] DiSC Personality Type: Motivated by money or recognition? [10:15] What makes a business profitable? Finding perfect customer/market fit via value-ads and associated fees.  [13:42] Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort without extra pay. [14:57] Cost Savings: Implement less labor-intensive work (paper checklists) and more technology (videos). [15:55] Tools and Software: Transition from a brick-n-mortar business to remote/virtual office using G Suite, Process Street, AppFolio, and RingCentral. [18:35] Current Client Base: Push out and justify new fee structure; talk them through it. [22:15] Sense of Scarcity: Feel safer and more comfortable raising fees and rates. [24:05] People are willing to pay for good service and experiences.  Tweetables Golden Ticket: Finding new properties, and creating value for others. Property management is never dull. Some people aren’t motivated by money, but freedom. Charge fees to compensate for extra time, energy, and effort. Resources Independence Capital Property Management National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Darren Hunter G Suite Process Street AppFolio RingCentral TalkRoute DGS 7: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 1 DGS 8: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 2 DGS 9: Increasing Fees in Property Management with Darren Hunter - Part 3 DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DGS 82: Real Estate Revolution with Nat Kunes of AppFolio DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to change 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. And today, my guest is Shawn Johnson of Independence Capital Property Management. Shawn, welcome to the show. Shawn: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Glad to have you. Shawn, we’re going to be getting into the topic today of profitability before more doors. When I mentioned that before the show, you’re like, “Yes, the cart before the horse.” Let’s get into that, but first, I want to give people a little bit of background on you. I’ve got your bio here and I’m going to read this and then maybe you can come and introduce yourself. Shawn grew up in Aztec, Nex Mexico. After completion of his Associate’s Degree from Glendale Community College, Shawn began flight school in Scottsdale, Arizona. Shawn’s career as a helicopter pilot provided opportunities to fly internationally into Mexico, off-shore into the gulf of Mexico, and as an EMS helicopter pilot. Shawn currently flies for the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office as an instructor pilot in his spare time. Shawn began his career in real estate in 2013 and has been investing in real estate since 2003. Shawn is currently a professional member of the National Association of Residential Property Managers and has earned his Residential Management Professional (RMP) designation. In 2017, he served as the NARPM Albuquerque Metro Chapter President and has been elected to serve at the 2020 Chapter President. Shawn enjoys golf, baseball, hunting, and fishing. He apparently is also connected with lots of really lengthy phrases and titles including his business name. Shawn, give us a little bit of a background. Who’s Shawn and how did you get into property management, so people can understand why should they listen to this guy say anything. Shawn: How did I get into property management? It’s kind of by default. My wife pulled me into it. She was a corporate paralegal for a large investment firm in California and in that process we moved, had kids, we moved to New Mexico, and she decided, “You know what? I think there is a need here.” There is definitely a need and we’ve started a management company. I was still flying helicopters at the time but she’s like, “You know what? I can’t do it alone. You’ve got to get out of the fun job and get into the stressful job.” So, I quit flying and here I am. Jason: And you regretted it ever since, right? Shawn: No, I actually really enjoy it. Jason: Good. Shawn: Your introduction to property management is spot on. I think there’s so much gold in it and it’s just really creating value for people. I really enjoy it. Really, it’s a nice “in” to investing in properties. I love investing in properties and this is like a golden ticket to find new properties. Jason: Property managers and everyone in the industry love to joke about how hard the industry is, but there is this passion for it that everyone seems to develop. I think happiness comes not through avoiding problems and challenges. It comes through finding challenges that are exciting to work on and property management is never dull. Shawn: Yeah, that’s a fact. Jason: Never dull, right? Shawn: No. Jason: Let’s get into this topic. Why is it important to have profitability before focusing on getting more doors? Shawn: For us, it was always a mission to be profitable right at the start. Back in the day, we’re just a management fee company. Because of that, we relented in the growth. We had to find ways to make money and compensate our employees appropriately. We live in a very blue collar town that is oil- and gas-driven and the salaries are very hard to compete with. We had to find ways to compensate them nice so that they weren’t pulled away from property management into oil and gas industry. Those are the things that were important to us. If you’re not a profitable company, you can’t create value for the community that you serve. You just can’t. You have to have money to be able to grow and expand and introduce new programs into your business. That was our mission right at the beginning. Jason: Because you’re competing with oil and gas for staff resources in your market, you’ve had to probably have a higher salary base than what would be typical for most management companies in most markets. Shawn: Yeah, they sell. Jason: In order to do that, you probably had to get a little bit innovative. Anytime we have a constraint as an entrepreneur, we have a challenge like that to overcome, we have to innovate. What were some of the steps you took to create a space that you could afford to have really good team members?  Shawn: One step was to create an incentivized comp plan. Our property managers are licensed real estate brokers, but we pay them off a percentage as the whole of the portfolio, not just a management fee. Anytime they bring in a late fee or an annual inspection that’s performed on the property, then they get a portion of that fee as well. That help us increase their annual revenue as well because it hurts when they lose a property and when we get a new property on, it actually helps them gain their salary as well. Jason: Okay. You’ve basically created the natural incentive for them to help facilitate growth and help successfully manage the company. And if the company does better, they do better.  Shawn: Exactly. Jason: I find that a lot of people, especially those that on a DISC profile that are not DI, they don’t have a high economic score. They’re not super motivated by additional money. As entrepreneurs, we tend to naturally think everyone’s like us; they love money. Those individuals that are not motivated by more money are more motivated by recognition. When you pick these team members and you have this comp plan, are you looking for people that also operate somewhat in a BDM role? Are they more of a sales-driven type of person? Are they a DI DISC personality type or more on the extroverted side? Shawn: No, we actually don’t want to mix those two―BDM and a portfolio management. You’re right. A lot of people are not motivated financially like entrepreneurs are, but what we found is giving unlimited vacation time, some perks to the business, having the ability to work from home or wherever they are. Everything that we do is electronic and digital anyway, so those perks. A lot of them are young parents and if they need to pick up their kid at school at three o’clock, who am I to say? As long as your job is done and you’re doing it effectively, then we don’t put constraints on that. I think that pools in that attraction to the job. Jason: I find those to be huge incentives, similar to running our virtual teams. Being able to work virtually and work from home, having flex time, being able to set your own schedule and as long as you’re getting work done, and being able to take vacations when you need to or want to, that’s huge. People want freedom. They want autonomy and that tends to attract the more entrepreneurial people we would like in our business. To what you’re saying, yeah it makes sense. The BDM portfolio thing would be segregated. But also that allows you, in your market, to have compensation that is on par with maybe what they might be getting in the oil and gas industry or at least competitive, right? Shawn: Absolutely. I would say that our salaries, once they have a full portfolio, they’re making as much, if not more, than what they would get comped in oil and gas industry which is good. That’s what we want. Jason: Right, and in oil and gas industry, they probably don’t have some of those other perks, I would imagine? Shawn: Oh, not at all. Jason: You’ve made your business intentionally competitive to maintain good people. Let’s get deeper into the profitability aspect. Since you’re paying more money for people, how do you make sure this is profitable? Shawn: We really evaluated the things that we did as a business beyond just the normal management stuff. What are the value-adds that we do every day? If they are a true value-add, can we add an associated value-add fee to it? We kind of looked at it that way. We went through Darren Hunter’s program and it was phenomenal. It definitely revolutionized the way we thought about our fee structure, but it also helped us think about and be cautious of those clients that are cost-conscious. If they are and all they care about is the cost of the service, then they may not be the right fit. It naturally brings in that right type of clientele when you have a fee structure beyond just a flat fee and everybody else is doing the same flat fee or whatever percentage fee. So, that was huge for us. As far as profitability goes, it varies in leasing season, but in our leasing season we’re about 44% profitability. Leasing fees and lease renewal fees, those things have to happen in the property management business. But to actually gain revenue from it is extremely important. I could look at our business structure and see that we have a leasing fee and we have a lease renewal fee, but my competitors lease homes in twice the amount of time that we do and they don’t push for lease renewals. So me as an investor, I’d be upset if they didn’t try to keep my tenants in a lease especially through the winter time. Such a cyclical business, we have seasons, and you don’t want it to go vacant in December. That little fee is nothing compared to having a vacant home in those times. Jason: What other fees did you guys start to identify and add going through this process? Shawn: We did a lease administration fee for our tenants. That was pretty big. The annual inspection fees—that’s a third party vendor that’s an actual inspector and he’ll come inspect the houses on an annual basis—there’s a little upcharge for that. A year-end statement fee. We found that our controller list just spinning a ton of time preparing for the year-end stuff and making sure everything was clear to send off to our clients’ accountants, so we incorporated a fee in that. Then a maintenance coordination fee. Our maintenance coordinators, we have one and we just hired a new one so we have two now, and they’re just super busy. Coordinating maintenance is a huge task and it’s such an important one here. We do have a small fee for that. There’s probably a bunch more. I’m not in the day-to-day as much anymore, so I’m kind of not thinking of the big ones. Obviously the bulk ones were leasing fee and lease renewal. Those are big and they’re often overlooked. Jason: One of the things you did then was you identified all the different situations in which it was taking extra time, extra energy, extra effort, you weren’t getting paid anything extra, and then just systematically saying, “Hey, can we add a fee to ensure that we’re getting compensated for this additional work?” to make sure that you business is profitable. Shawn: Sure. Jason: Okay. We’ve got somebody watching says, “Can you list the fees again?” I had down a leasing fee, a lease renewal fee, lease administration fee, annual inspection fee, year-end statement fee, and a maintenance coordination fee. Shawn: Those are the big ones. Kelly, reach out to me. I will give you the list. Jason: Slow down. Kelly you can rewatch this as many times. This is being recorded and it’s also on Facebook. Also for those watching this later, we have full transcription when this comes out on iTunes and you can check that out on our blog at doorgrow.com. Let’s get into other ways in which you’ve made this profitable. So, obviously increasing fees. You weren’t able to decrease cost with staff. This allowed you to increase cost with staff. Were there any cost savings things that you were able to implement? Shawn: Probably just technology and trying to not be super labor-intensive. I would say that doing things like move-in, move-out videos instead of running through an entire list on paper and whatnot. It takes a little bit less time than doing it on paper. Those types of things. It’s just efficiencies in the office. Then we set up our team literally to work from anywhere. If you’re on vacation, you want to check on a lease or whatever, it’s possible and super helpful. Those things help with driving cost down because you’re not focusing on the, “Hey, John. Are you back at the office? Can you reach me that file?” That’s just a waste of time. Jason: What are some of the things you’ve done to enable and facilitate this transition from being a brick-and-mortar business that operates on sneakernet, where everybody is walking into each other’s offices saying, “Hey, do you have this?” to being a virtual team that they can work from basically anywhere? Shawn: The big things are softwares that enable cloud access. Our general office is on G Suite. Everything operates through there and then our processes are through Process Street which is super helpful and can be accessed anywhere again. AppFolio for our software. They are super tech savvy as far as online stuff. I wish they’d open their API, that’s my shout out to them. Jason: Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot. Shawn: I imagine you have. And then RingCentral. We have a team in Mexico and I’ve got a team member in the Philippines, and they literally can call our office in Farmington, New Mexico. Then we have another Flagstaff office as well. It’s so easy because they can pick up their phone and it acts like they’re dialing from their desk. That was a key point we had to set up six years ago which was, back then, it wasn’t really heard of. Jason: Cool. I use all of those software or have in the past except AppFolio. Shawn: You don’t need that. Jason: We’ve had Process Steet on the show. Great interview. For those listening, I recommend you check it out. G Suite were a Google Apps reseller, so if people need help with that we can certainly help you get set up. We used RingCentral for several years. We eventually switched to Talkroute because we found that most of our team weren’t doing a lot of calling on our team and if they did, they had unlimited cell phone minutes. Talkroute just allows you to auto attendant and the call routing and the extensions but they can dial through the Talkroute app out of their phone and then it just uses their cell phone minutes. It’s free basically for outbound calls. It can also receive text messages. We switched to Talkroute and probably saved ourselves about $400 or $500 a month. Shawn: That’s big. I love it. Jason: What are some other things you focused on then to facilitate profitability? You’ve got the fees. You’re paying your team well so you can compete. You’ve got your leveraging technology. You’ve set up your team to be more virtual which is scary for a lot of property managers who’ve been doing things a certain way. Anything else? Shawn: What I would say is tap into your current client base. You probably have a ton of really loyal clients. Don’t forget to just really push out your new fee structure and justify those fees. Believe in what you’re charging to those current clients. When we switched over to a new fee structure, hardly anybody left. We had 12 clients leave on our first push. We found that those 12 clients were probably 12 good clients to leave. Jason: Out of how many clients? Shawn: We were at 614 at the time, 12 left. We had a second push and we did this in phases because you have to be really sensitive to homes that are vacant. You don’t want to increase fees on somebody that has a vacant home. That’s a stressful time already. We certainly don’t want to increase feels on a client that has not been in your portfolio for less than a year. They don’t really know and trust you yet. Then I haven’t built that loyalty for you. So don’t touch those yet. Once you segment those out and you found the client base that you really want to go after, then do it. Don’t just send out an email and hope that they sign into an agreement. You have got to follow-up. If you don’t follow-up, they’re just not going to believe in what you’re trying to do. So, make sure that you follow through with all of that. I’ve heard of people, “Hey, I increased my fees and I sent out this email. I got no response,” and I’m like, “Well, did you do anything else besides that? Because you got to call them. You got to pick up the phone and just talk them through.” It’s a scary thing. I just had a fee increase from one of the vendors that we use in our business and I was like, “What the heck?” My initial reaction was, “What the heck is going on?” Then, they talked me through and I was like, “You know what? It’s all good. We’re happy with you guys. We’re going to move forward. It’s all good.” I think that’s most people. Jason:Yeah, have a conversation. If you’re looking for the process that you went through or that Darren Hunter could have outlined—we’ve had him on the show before a few times—check out the episodes with Darren Hunter. Great content. He gave a lot away here in the show. You can check that out. I just saw him actually in Phoenix. So, 12 of out 614 that’s maybe 2%. Shawn: That was the first push. We did lose more the second round. There was probably a total number of 65. I can’t remember exactly that left, but our profitability went up. Jason: You lose 10% but you’re making more money, then not such a big deal, and usually those are the worst properties in your portfolio. What tends to happen then is you increase your revenue. You lose your profit. You lose a little bit of clientele, but you’re also losing the ones that take up the most amount of time, typically. Those particular doors probably have 10 times higher operational costs than a good door. By losing that pile in your portfolio, you’re gaining room to manage a lot more and you’re gaining a lot more leverage. Your profitability probably goes up even more because your operational costs go down significantly by cutting out the most challenging, most micromanagy, and most price sensitive owners that are the most challenging properties. Hopefully, people are a little bit sold to this idea, “Hey, maybe I can increase my fees,” because I do believe that property management businesses in general are not charging enough. They really deserve to be paid well for what they do. They provide a really valuable service and I feel there’s been this false scarcity that’s been created by marketers. Focus on SEO, pay-per-click and these sort of things where it feels like it’s difficult to grow. It feels scarce but they’re 70% self-managing in single family residential. There’s tons of blue ocean, there’s tons of opportunity, the scarcity is false. It really doesn’t exist. For those listening, if you feel like things are scarce, we should have a conversation because we can get you out of that mode of scarcity so that you feel safer and more comfortable raising your fees and rates. I believe that’s a false perception that doesn’t need to exist in the industry and it creates a problem for the entire industry—this sense of scarcity. It creates this competition that I don’t think really needs to be there. Really, the industry as a whole needs to be building each other up and helping each other out. You seen that being involved in NARPM. Shawn: Yeah, that’s right. NARPM’s big on that. Jason: Shawn, this has been really helpful. Any other other takeaways or things that you’ve explored your journey to make your business more profitable to grow your company? Shawn: I think most people get a little scared because of the competition and they’re worried about raising their fees. Let me just tell you that our competitors don’t charge anything besides a tenant, whatever, management fee. I almost said the fees. I don’t know if that was against the rules or something like that. Jason: I’m not a property manager so I guess you and I can talk about it. But someone else might hear it. We’re not colluding. Shawn: We are not colluding. Just don’t be fearful of that. I think that if you’re truly creating a value for your customer and clients that that is irrelevant, that people are willing to pay for good service and good experiences. When you raise your fees, it has a natural thing that happens that you get rid of the lower-end properties. The lower end properties cost you more money, they cost you more time, they cost you more stress, and they cost you more employees. They will burn out on the low-end properties. Once you bring on nicer properties and you keep to a standard, they are willing to pay the higher fees and get better service, and it naturally increases your profits. That’s a big win for us. Jason: Awesome. Well, Shawn it sounds like you’re doing great things in Farmington, New Mexico. Did you ever think that you would just end up in Farmington, New Mexico? Shawn: That’s the thing about New Mexico. It’s the land of entrapment, but it just brings you back. I’ve lived all over the country and it’s a good place to raise a family. Jason: Awesome. Shawn, I appreciate you coming onto the show. Thanks for being here. I appreciate your insight and I wish you continued success. Shawn: Thank you, Jason. I appreciate your time. Jason: If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference then maybe we should have a conversation. So, reach out. There is a lot of opportunity in the industry to grow a property management business right now. I think we’re on the cusp of a wave. I think the industry is going to blossom and grow. There’s a lot of big and good things happening when it comes to technology, when it comes to software, when it comes to awareness. We would love to be a part of facilitating that journey with you and I would love the opportunity to be your coach in your business. Reach out to DoorGrow, let’s start with a conversation, and I will give you a free training on some of the secrets and tips. I call it DoorGrow secrets on how you can avoid some of the most common pitfalls of preventing growth. Just reach out and say, “Hey, I want DoorGrow Secrets.” You might find it so interesting and get so excited, you’ll want to work with us. That’s my hope. So, we will talk with you all soon, to everyone’s mutual growth. Bye everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Do you own single-family properties, but rent them out? Are you tired of dealing with tenants? Incompetent contractors? Why do-it-yourself (DIY)? Why waste your time? About 70% of owners self-manage their properties. You can’t and shouldn’t do it all. Help is available. Today, I am talking to Dana Dunford of Hemlane, an all-in-one rental property management solution. After being encouraged by family and friends, Dana decided to do real estate investing on the side while working at Apple. She tried self-managing her properties, only to discover how difficult that can be - even tougher than calf dressing! You’ll Learn... [02:50] Moving from self-management to hybrid solution involving experts in real estate/property management to streamline and mitigate risks. [04:15] Property Management and Technology: Taking a different approach to build communities of agents, owners, and managers to work together. [07:50] Potential for property management industry: Buying real estate is easy; property management is much more difficult, but determines the success of your investment. [10:27] Property managers have to do everything and need to be Jack-or-Jill of all trades (maintenance, lawyer, therapist, sales, marketing, etc.). [10:56] Dana’s driven toward challenge; something new happens every day in property management and risk needs to be mitigated. [11:27] Subject matter experts should provide best practice, place, and process; there’s only so much technology and robots can do. [13:05] Entrepreneurs/Gluttons for Punishment: Highly adaptable and enjoy challenges. [14:56] Turnkey: When something goes wrong, property manager gets blamed. [15:47] Hemlane: Flexible and transparent property management platform that helps property managers solve problems. [19:55] Hemlane’s Ideal Prospect: Under 200 units and wants to grow portfolio/clientele. [22:36] Hemlane offers automation of administrative tasks and competitive advantage by building relationships and services over time. [27:10] Real estate investors find out about Hemlane on social media and blogs. [31:57] Are you trained and qualified, or just pretending to be a property manager? [35:15] FAQs from Property Managers: How can I communicate with owners? Will Hemlane take my clients? How do I know if I need help? [41:07] People aren’t buying property management; but safety, certainty, and trust. [48:40] What is a hemlane? House Differentiation: Hem is house in Swedish; lane is a path that divides you from others. Tweetables Property management is challenging; something new happens every day. Whether you love or hate them, industry isn’t ready for robots to show properties. Turnkey is a terrible word; if something goes wrong, the property manager is blamed. People aren’t buying property management. They want safety, certainty, and trust. Resources Hemlane Dana Dunford’s Email Dana Dunford on LinkedIn Hemlane on Software Advice Hemlane on Capterra Hemlane on GetApp Apple Nest The Iceberg Report Industrial Calf Dressing - California Rodeo Salinas Tim Ferriss Buildium AppFolio Zillow Russell Brunson’s Value Ladder DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today's guest, I'm hanging out here with Dana Dunford of Hemlane. Dana, welcome to the show. Dana: Great. Thanks so much, Jason, for having me. Jason: I'm really excited to have you here. You have such a bright personality. I was really, I guess, curious with people. I was really biting my tongue, resisting just getting into figuring you out, and asking you questions. It was always a challenge for me. Now, I can do it. Let's get into this. Dana, why don't you share with everybody a little bit of background on you and who you are. Then, let's transition into getting into how Hemlane came to be. Dana: My background, by accident, I actually ended up at Silicon Valley. I'm just through studying here for university. My background was actually always been on technology and I've always been fascinated with that. I actually got into real estate and looking at real estate investing coming through two different people. One was my brother-in-law, who was investing in real estate and saying, "Dana, you need to get into investing as well. Do that on the side." I was working at Apple at that time doing new product introductions. Then, the second was actually who my co-founder is today, Frank, who has rental properties across the US. I haven't been on the property manager's side until we started self-managing. We ended up self-managing our properties remotely and trying to figure out how to make that work. Essentially, starting with self-management and then actually moved to a more hybrid model that worked out really well, where we were working with local managers and local real estate agents to help us with the management while we were still controlling the financials, the rent, and still be involved in it. So, a little bit of a hybrid solution which today I don't see actually in the market. It's either full service or do-it-yourself. I think do-it-yourself is really a horrible one to take because then every single person, all 43 million renter households, with 20 million people are looking for ways to essentially streamline and mitigate risks and all of that. Having property managers and experts in the industry really makes a ton of sense. That's what brought me to a more of a hybrid model. I left Apple then and went to business school at Harvard. After that, came back to Silicon Valley, was working at a company called Nest which is home technology, got me more excited about real estate technology. They were actually acquired by Google and I realized I want to actually start my own thing. Property management is one of those incredible industries where technology to date, there's a lot of players out there, a ton in the property management software space—quite frankly too many of them—but taking that model and saying how do we do it in a different approach, think about it differently, and really build communities of managers, communities of agents, communities of owners to work together because 70% of the owners, as you know, Jason—I think actually you were the first person I learned that from—self-manage, so how do you connect those 70% to get some sort of help? Right at the beginning, they're going to say, "I don't need help," but sure enough they call and they're like, "I had a nightmare of a tenant. I hate this. They're selling my portfolio," or, "I need some help." Really helping them and being there at the right time—a lot of times that right time for them—is getting involved with them even when they're self-managing. Jason: Yeah. I got the 70% stat from the Iceberg report which says, "On a single family residential, about 30% are professionally managed." I need to point out in your bio because this is the only bio I've ever seen. It says that you're an avid equestrian, paraglider, and skier. She is the first woman to win a calf-dressing championship belt buckle at the California rodeo. Are you kind of a cowgirl, then? Dana: Yeah, I did. I grew up in a farm in Salinas, California. We had horses, some cows and stuff in the backyard that really did teach me a lot of hard work. I did enter and I was the only woman. I don't why women don't enter these events. Salinas has the largest rodeo, the largest across the entire nation, largest prize pool of money, [...] and stuff they give you. I entered something called calf dressing. Actually, the huge advantage being a woman because you have to dress a cow in these Wrangler jeans. What's fantastic about it is you actually have to be able to get under the cow so you have to be small. These big burly farmer guys trying to do it and I came in with a team of two other guys. It's three people on a team and then me. I think there's a huge advantage to being small and just being able to dress it really quickly while they're holding down the cow. Anyway, we got a huge massive belt buckle, the same one that the pro bull riders win at the rodeo, which is pretty cool. Jason: This is so unrelated. This just fascinates me. You're actually putting pants on a calf, that's what's this is? Dana: Yes, that's the event. It has the same credibility as the pro bull riders that win the top belt buckle. You get the same belt buckle. It's like the best hack to getting a professional rodeo belt buckle. Jason: This is funny but it reminds me of listening to some of Tim Ferriss' stories where he just figured out how he could win some sort of a competition that was just random so that he could be a world champion. Very cool. You mentioned the property management industry and something about it got you excited which either says you're crazy or you see something maybe similar to me. What potential do you see the industry is having? In the US, I feel like it's underperforming in its potential. People just don't see it, awareness is low, perception is low. What's your perception of what the potential is for the property management industry as a whole? Dana: I think it's two things. It falls into two buckets of the potential. The first one really has to do with real estate investing in general. This happened to me when I was at Apple. Most people when you ask them, "How did you get into real estate investing?" it's usually, "Oh, someone told me. I have friend who is doing it and doing it successfully." All of these companies out there where they have these employees who have great savings and could be allocating money into real estate, they're literally going into stocks, bonds, and other things. It's sad. The biggest thing with property management was that's a biggest pain point. When I look at buying properties here in San Francisco, it didn't make sense. The numbers just didn't make sense for investment at that time. Maybe things changed. Some people want the appreciation gain that they'll invest in San Francisco, but it's really investing out of state. That’s the biggest thing is property management. I quite frankly think buying the property is the easy part of it. You put the numbers on spreadsheets, you're not emotional, you go and you purchase a property. There's not too much rocket science to that part. Where it really comes down to the success of your investment is in the property management. It's the most difficult part to be in and it's the one that you're stuck with for 20-25 years. Buying the property, it takes you maybe a year, depending on how long you're looking. Some people buy within their first month. The property management in actually being able to make sure you have that stable, steady, cash flow, is the most difficult part of it. There's no focus on it, I think, because it's the most difficult that people push it off. One of my biggest frustrations with property management is people thinking like, "Oh, maintenance is going to be so easy." That kind of stuff is really difficult to do. I always think of property managers as Jacks of all trades. They have to be good sales people. They have to be good at marketing. They have to be a lawyer because they have to know these lease contracts. They have to be a maintenance person because they have to know how to troubleshoot, push back on service professionals, and understand, "Am I getting screwed over or not?" They have to be a therapist because tenants get emotional because it's their home. One of the things I've always been driven towards this challenge, if something's not challenging and they get easy, I usually just leave the job. It's just boring. Then it’s just a nine-to-five. I think in property management it's not that. Something new happens every single day and you're constantly saying, "How do I take that and mitigate that risk?" That's really where I do think that there's just so much value to it. There's, quite frankly, not a lot of focus on it. That's where, Jason, this show's incredible because you actually bringing those people to talk about how do you mitigate that risk, how do you set it up for success, et cetera. I believe it has to be a subject matter expert that do it. There are certain things that technology can do to just say here's the best practice in place and process. Then, you also have to have the people component because you still have to talk to people. You still need someone physically there. The worst thing, I think, is when they talk about these robots showing the properties and stuff. Some people love it. I don't think the industry is there yet, go and show some of these properties. I don't think the industry is quite there for some of these stuff. That's just my own personal opinion from dealing with them, being hands on, showing properties, and doing all of these stuff. Inspections, move ins, move outs, maintenance coordination. It still needs that human component and it’s much better to say, “Here are the subject matter experts that do it,” versus every single person trying to do it. As you know, that happens with single family homes but still the majority doing the self-management themselves. Jason: Yes. I love what you said. Buying is easy, managing the property, hard. It's really simple. That's so true. When you get into real estate investing, they're hoping that they’ve got some turnkey magical easy thing, money is just going to be flowing in, and then they have to manage the property. That reality sets in. I think that's good pointing it out. Property management is the most difficult part. The other thing you pointed out is that property managers, these entrepreneurs are highly adaptable creatures. You call them Jacks of all trades or Jills of all trades. They're highly adaptable creatures as entrepreneurs. I think that's why I get excited about them because they're my type of people. What's interesting is some people maybe call entrepreneurs gluttons for punishment, but I think we love challenges. Just like I've said in the intro, we love unique challenges. I think that really we would be bored without challenges. We would [...] entrepreneurs. We want to be tested. We want to have some challenges to work on. I think the trick is finding the challenges we enjoy working on versus the ones that are kind of thrown into us that we don't want to be dealing with. There's a difference but I love that as well. I think the industry as a whole has a massive potential. You mentioned, the first one is real estate investing, that they need property management. What was the second thing? Dana: The second one, the challenges associated with it is just property management in general is such an afterthought of it. The first is real estate investing and thinking of it as stocks and bonds where you can purchase a property anywhere. But I tell people you shouldn't purchase in your backyard just so you can self manage it. You should be looking elsewhere. It's not like I say, "Okay, my neighbor rent this small little company and that's the only one I can do best in." When I'm looking at stocks, I'm like, “What stocks out there across the world should I invest in that's going to give me what I think is best return, diversification, and things like that?” It's the same with property management. The first is just that investing outside the area, but then the second is property management like you said. I think turnkey is actually a horrible word for that because when people say turnkey, it makes you think you don't have to do anything at all. It's going to be easy. The problem is that when something goes wrong, the property manager is first to get blamed. The first to get blamed. They actually don't even get credit because the word turnkey makes you think, "Oh, I'm going to get this casual." The turnkey companies put it like, "Hey, you're going to get this straight number, this is what you're going to get, and there aren't going to be any problems." What happens is you think you're going to be at the top of that and everything is going to go right. When something goes wrong, it's the property manager who gets blamed which we know there are women, tenants, out there, a bunch of different things. Those challenges and mitigating those are really that second component of it. Jason: Okay. Now, let's get into Hemlane a little bit here. Property management business owners have a lot of different pain points, challenges, and problems. There's a lot of pain points and challenges that owners, tenants, and everybody are dealing with. Businesses only exists, technically, to solve a problem. If a business exists that is not solving a problem, then it's just stealing money. Let's get into the problem that Hemlane helps solve. Tell us about the problem. I think this will help people transition into helping them understand Hemlane and what you guys do. Dana: Hemlane is a flexible and transparent property management platform. What I mean by platform is that we have software. Software, if you think of Buildium or AppFolio but for the smaller guy, not for 500+ units. It's got the software built into it where it automates things and sends reminders on what you need to do next, and it walks you through a risk-mitigated process. For example, people say, "Why don't you integrate PayPal? Why can't I pay with PayPal on Hemlane?" That's not a good process because tenants can dispute that. We're not going to flip that in there. Building the best practices in place, it's got the software. The second component of it is really saying that, “Hey, most of our clients are people who own rental properties and they don't locally.” What do they want help with? A lot of them are trying to self-manage or they're illegally using handymen to show the property and trying to haphazardly put together a process which we see a lot of the market doing especially the tail end of it. They usually do it with these B-class properties where it's not that they're having to deal with the Section 8 or much lower income, but they're saying, "Oh, I can probably manage this remotely myself." We actually come in and say, "No, if you want someone to show your property, they have to be licensed here, or managers we worked within that area, or real estate agents. They can show your property for you." That's why we call it a platform because we're not a brokerage. We're not trying to take clients from anyone. We're just looking to connect to them. There's basically two packages. Property managers and real estate agents use our software-only package because they don't really need us help connect them or do maintenance coordination. Owners will use the upgraded package, so owners of rental properties, and they'll say, "Hey, I still want to control my rent, have rent go to me but I want to pay someone a full leasing fee for them to do the leasing." Whatever it is, we don't get involved in that price negotiation. We just set them up with someone local who can provide those services for them. We have partnered with property managers and real estate agents across the nation based on where portfolios are or where the needs are. We're in all 50 states but our actual agents and managers are only in some of the major cities. We focus on certain cities. Then, what happens is when we have a real estate investor come to us, whether they purchased, they're in some group, whether they just come to us and find us online, we say, “Great. Here are the managers in the area, get on a call with them, and see what you want them to do. Whatever you want them to do, they'll just charge you for their services in the system.” It is in full service. Sometimes it does get to full service. Sometimes they just ask the manager to take over their account in our systems. It downgrades to the software-only package and then managers charges them a whole management fee. A lot of our owners are more in that category of, "Hey, we used to do it ourselves and we're looking for something else." They really fall into that do-it-yourself, that 70% category, and we're trying to push them into saying, "Hey, there are other things out there that are much more efficient than you trying to spend your time on doing your own property management." Jason: Let's make this super clear. For those that are listening, that have property management businesses, they're property management entrepreneurs, who's your ideal prospect when it comes to them? Help them self-identify if somebody that should be reaching out to Hemlane. Dana: Yeah. Great question. From that perspective, it's typically someone who has under 200 units, they're looking to grow their portfolio, and they're also open to doing a combination of multiple things for clients to expand their clientele. What I mean by expand their clientele is saying, “Hey, I'm going to offer a full service is one option and I'm going to offer some unbundled service as well, say, listing only, maintenance only, whatever it is.” When a customer comes to you, it's not saying, "I charged 10% on this. You don't want that, don't work with me." It's saying, "Hey, what do you want? What do you want me to do? Here's what I'll do. Here's what our contract says." Then, you can do everything yourself. They can jump on our platform. They don't even have to be using our software to actually get access to owners. They can create an agent manager profile for free. If we do connect them with people, we do have requirements and property management questions that we ask them to make sure that they're qualified, reference checks, things like that. Usually, it's for the smaller manager that doesn't have enough referrals yet, who's just starting out, saying, "How do I get an advantage in my market? I’m new, I'm a hustler, kind of crazy, in that sense of doing property management. I'm working around the clock, I know myself, but I'm just right now starting to grow my portfolio." In property management, there's only two ways to grow your portfolio. Starve yourself, do it slowly, and go door by door, or acquire brokerage. I have a tons of friends who just acquire property management brokerages. They just run on them, but they have capital. A lot of people don't have that capital. So, if you don’t and you're going door-to-door because your parents didn't hand down their property management business to you—doesn't happen a lot of the time—if you only have 10 doors and you're saying, "How do I get to 20?" working and partnering with companies like Hemlane makes a ton of sense to get you out there, your name out there, more referrals, et cetera. Jason: Love it. I know that we have quite a few that are under 200 doors who are listening. The fact that this could help them generate some more leads creates some more relationships and drum up some more businesses, I think is enticing. Let's focus just on the growth aspect. How does Hemlane help somebody, say they're stuck in that first sand trap, they've got 50 or 60 units under management, they're solopreneur, or maybe they just finally broken past and they wanted to get into that next level, which is that 200–400 door range I called the second sandtrap. How is Hemlane going to help them build up their book of business? Dana: There's two things. One is automation and stuff like that. Anything technology can do better that is administrative, we take off of you. Everything from a tenant just said that I’m interested in a showing and just reached out to you on Zillow, you shouldn't be manually responding to that. You should already have your calendar. You should already have your qualifications of what minimums they have, criteria to qualify. That showing calendar needs to be sent right out to them at that second. They can respond. If they don't, you can give them a personalized call. Everything from automation, so you're not focused on that and you're focused on sales and marketing of your property management business, which is the most important thing to grow at. That's number one. Number two is saying, why don't you give yourself a competitive advantage against everyone else by saying, "Hey, you know what? Everyone else has this 10% model." A lot of times these people who've been self-managing and they are saying, "Hey, I want a property manager," taking them from going to 0%–10% takes a while over time for them to do that, because they have to build trust in you, they've never worked with you. Starting them and saying, "Hey, let me just do your leasing for you. Let me just do your leasing. You can manage everything else on Hemlane." The next year, coming back and saying, "Hey, do you want me to take over this from you as well?" Letting them ease into it, it's like when you give a price. A lot of companies do 30 days free or you get those [...] and open door things. They're like, two-for-one. You try things at a low barrier to entry. Then, you're liking it, you're hooked, and you're connected to this person. Then you're like, "Hey, I trust this person. Now they can have more of my business." I think a lot of it is like, that doesn't happen today in the industry. The industry is just saying, "It's all or none." You're getting the same price quote from every property manager and you don't want to cut your prices. You don't want to say, "I'll give you everything at a lower price." You don't want a discount because then, there's quality problems there. Or when you say, "Hey, maybe I'll just takeover this little part from you." [...] with that and then, that's your biggest pain point. "Let me solve that. Now, let me solve your other ones." From that perspective, Hemlane can really help you set that up to provide your clients, new clients, and clients across the nation who may just be even looking in your area. With some sort of competitive advantage that you have, when you're trying to get new doors until you get more of them quickly, and then build those relationships and build that deal value on customer size, over time. Jason: Hemlane would also help expose this small business to investors in other markets and other areas? Dana: Yeah. They usually come to us. The investor will come to us and say, "Hey, I'm interested in this plus this." Usually, investors will come just across the nation and say, "Hey, I'm in Kansas City and I want to put my properties on Hemlane." We go, "Great! Sign-up and try us for free." Then we say, "What do you need?" They're like, "Oh, I need some advertising tools." "Great! We can provide that to you. Do you need someone to show your properties?" "No, I don't think I do." "Okay, when's your next turnover?" "In two months." "Great. We'll follow up then. Do you need someone to show you your property?" "Yeah. Actually my husband and I are going to Europe, things changed." "Great. Here's someone who can help with your leasing." From that perspective, it's capturing people at the right time because timing is everything. If you can just get your foot in the door, it makes a lot of sense. For us, because we're nationwide, we're a platform, people come in. Where our managers and agents are is where we focus on upselling them, connecting them with local professionals. Jason: Property management listings that maybe haven't heard of Hemlane, they were probably naturally inquiring or wondering how are these investors find out about Hemlane? Dana: There's a ton of places that they find out about us. The biggest ones that we actually find are actually in social media. Most of these real estate investors, I think, we have one of the best algorithms in place from this person we use from marketing. It is really social because a lot of them aren’t searching for property management software. They just don't search for that. They don't search for [...] software. A lot of it is on social. Whatever algorithms is being used is working for that. That's been huge for us. For example in the US, the top rated on Software Advice, if you look at their top products, you'll see us at the top for software solutions. They'll find us on Software Advice. They’ll find us on Capterra. They’ll find us on GetApp. The other thing is blogs and content. I write a ton of content on like, "Why is Venmo the worst way to collect rent?" "What do you need that's concrete in your lease?" A lot of times, when they're searching for something, they're not searching for a software or a manager. They're saying, "I have a problem and I need it fixed." They're searching that term. You can give them the solution in a blog post and say, "Here's some ways to get connected locally with folks in your area who do property management." A lot of times, I just set them up for a coffee. I just say, "Hey, so and so meet so and so for a coffee. I know you're self-managing, but it would be a great way for you guys just to connect locally in your city in case things change, in case your mind changes." That's a great way to start building those relationships without being too salesy. Those people come back to you and they do remember you, especially if you made that impression and you meet them for a quick coffee. Jason: You guys are pulling in traffic from Capterra, GetApp software sites, blogging all these. You got traffic coming in. For the property manager, what is the buy-in or what's the requirement for them to start working with you? Financially, what does this typically cost for them to get onboard? How much work does this take? What's your vetting process? How can those listing self-qualify to become part of the Hemlane network? Dana: Great question. In every area, we actually personally get on a call with you to understand you because if we're going to refer you out, we actually think of you more as a partner versus you created a profile. If we are going to refer you out, you actually do need to do some interviews with our team knowing who you are, asking questions, prequalifying. The minimum we've taken is someone who's done 10 doors. As long as you have 10 doors, even if they're your own doors or something like that and you're just starting your own property management, we need, as a prerequisite, that you have some experience [...] seen in property management because we're not [...] to that. Then, we ask you questions of what would you do in this situation, understanding how well do you really know property management in leasing and complex situations. We'll walk through those situations with you. The third and final thing is reference checks. We do some reference checks on you. There's two things in each area. The first is if you're using our software already, we obviously would refer people to you first before we refer it to someone who's not using our software because we don't take a cut. We don't believe in taking cuts of however how much you make so when you charge an owner for something, we don't take a cut of that. You get 100% of it. That's really important to us because we never want anyone to think, "Hey, we're working with this person because they give us 20% of their income." We don't care. That's yours. We make our money off of our software and our platform. The connections help make our software much more differentiated than others. We don't take a cut of anything that you made. That's really important to note. You build your own business, we build ours, we have the tools to help you with that. If you are using our software, we'll put you higher range assuming you fit our qualifications. Then, someone who's not using our software but just free on our program that just says, “Hey, I'm in this region.” In a lot of cities, we don't have anyone, any partner in that city. There's no one using our software that's good enough, that's qualified. Even if you're not using our software, we'll still refer you out just because we want to make sure those people are happy. That's the first things with it. What's even more important to ask to keep the business and keep traction going is asking reviews. When we refer owners out to you, we actually ask them for their opinions on you after working with you the first time. You might have done something really small for them by just saying, "Hey, let me do an annual inspection and drop by your property, you haven't been there," or we ask the owner, "How was it? What reports did they give you? This and that," because we want to make sure that you are trained and qualified. There's a ton of people out there pretending to be property managers who's like, "Gosh, if I have my property in their hands, this is a lawsuit waiting to happen." We found it's quality not quantity. It's the quality of the individuals we work with. In each city, we don't need 500 managers on our platform. "We have everyone on here." All we need is the top. The people who say they pick up their calls, they respond to emails, you don't need three weeks to respond to an owner, and they're fair with the owners. They set these owners up or the owners like, "Thank goodness I have this person on my team." They went in and did an annual inspection and saw leashes hanging and dog holes, but they're not supposed to have pets in the place. That takes us [...]. That's really where I do think the value comes in. It's really asking for reviews on that as well. You can even set it up if you use our maintenance coordination where you get reviews on how you did on maintenance coordination, how well your service professionals did. "I think, Dana's really big there," to understand how are people doing and performing because you can't do everything yourself. For us, it’s the same thing of how are our local agents performing. Sometimes we have to kick people off and say, “You know what? They're not exactly who we want our reputation to be surrounded with.” That's why it's just important if you don't have any leasing or management experience, you do need to go out and get some. We won't take someone who's a newbie and try to train them via meetings. Jason: This sounds like something ideal for probably most of our clients to get onboard with. If nothing else, you have that listing and be one of the boots-on-the-ground partners that you guys have in your database. Dana: Yeah. We would love for our team to interview you, have a call with you, and stuff like that. Like I said, it doesn't take too much time and adds free value. We don't ask you for marketing dollars. We have those inbound coming in already for our marketing. From that perspective, we'll just work directly with you and we won't take a cut. From our perspective, we’re not trying to make money off of you, we’re just trying to create a much more valuable community. Jason: We probably should have started the show saying, “If you’re a good property manager, Dana’s going to send you leads. She’s just going to send you some free business and you don’t have to pay for it,” and we probably could have just ended it right there and give in a link, and you probably would have gotten a few phone calls. Dana: That sounds good, yup. Jason: Okay, cool. What else should those listening know about Hemlane that we haven’t covered already? What are some of the most common questions that you’re feeling may be from the property management side? Dana: On the property management side, it’s really interesting. One of the things that we get most often image is with owners. When people come to us with owners of, “Hey, I’ve got too much going on, I can’t do it all, I’m stressed, I’m working around the clock, I can’t grow my doors, these owners are upset, blah, blah, blah…” One of the biggest things that I see is communication. When things go wrong, it’s usually because the owner wants to have communication and we see it on our side. When owners come to us, we say, “Why are you signing up for Hemlane?” Because I want some transparency in communication and for property managers to know that we have it in the solution wherein you can add your owners and decide what they get an access to. But you can also decide they get access to all of it but they don’t get notifications. Once the request is opened, they don’t get notifications on that but they just get a summary email once a week, once a month, depending on what you have set up. I think from the perspective of Hemlane, one of the things that we see as really valuable and the solution is having that communication. You’re not having to field 500 calls from owners everyday saying, “How many leads did I get today? How many showings did you do for my property this week?” All of that is in the system for your owner to just view and look at, and having that data and having that transparency to them it’s like, “Wow, you’re on top of what you’re doing,” and that makes them feel good. When they see an email it’s like, “We got 20 leads and 10 of them showed up for showings, and three of them completed an application,” and they go, “Okay, things are moving along.” So even if your day is back-to-back, you’re running around and you got some fire drill with plumbers, some tenants who wants to move out tomorrow, and all these other stuff going on, at least that technology is working for you. It’s one of the biggest things that we see that is really valuable on the software side. Other questions that we get from property managers is, “Well, what about if you’re going to take clients, and clients are just going to use you and not use me, and this and that?” We’ve never seen that happen. If you’re a good property manager which are the ones on our platform, that doesn’t happen. There are two types of owners. There is that 30% in the single family homes than Jason is talking about, who say, “I’m handing you the keys, I don’t want to hear about the property, take it and go with it,” and it changes based on different life events, especially when people have kids for some reason, that’s when they’re like, “Please take my properties now. I’ve got something worse than properties, I’ve got children. I’ve got something worse than properties, I can’t deal with them.” There’s these life events that happen that can signal, “Maybe I should check in with them and see if they want more full service.” For us, what we find is people really fall into different categories and they spiral into that. There are people who would say, “Take everything, I’m willing to pay for it, do everything for me, and send me my owner distribution.” There are other people in the system who want to be so hands on that quite frankly trying to do full service management with them is a nightmare. Jason, I love that you tell people to say “no” to clients. I think more property managers just need to do that, to fire clients, because they’re so hands on, they want to do everything. It’s double the work for you, then they get involved in things they shouldn’t, they mess up things, and it’s just way more for you. That’s another thing from Hemlane and what we offer and what people come to us for, what property managers ask us about is, “Hey, would you ever take our client?” we say, “No, we’re a platform.” People can use us but they sought just physically do the work and there’s still physical stuff to be done. The big question is, “Do they want you to do it, or do they want to do it themselves?” It’s based on life events and based on their personal preferences of whether they are going to do full service, whether they are going to do some hybrid, or whether they’re going to do everything themselves. I think that’s also another question that sometimes we get from managers and we just never seen that, we’ve never seen someone coming to us and say, “My property manager uses your software. Now we’d like to use it.” It’s not that, because that person doesn’t want to do it, right? Jason: Yeah. There’s a reason. Nobody generally wants to go from somebody’s taking care of something to I think I’d just be fun to start doing this on my own, when it comes to property management. Dana: Yeah, that’s true. The reverse definitely happens, and it happens in increments because they’re like, “I want someone to help me but I’m not quite sure, I don’t know if I trust this person, I’ve never worked with them.” So, it goes in increment. The only time they see someone who doesn’t work with their property manager, who isn’t someone on Hemlane but elsewhere is when something goes wrong or when they haven’t been communicated to, which honestly, if you have a really good process in place, you’re communicating with your owners everyday, you’re writing them mail, and they don’t have surprises, they shouldn’t have that. On our system, we have it set up wherein the property managers can just tell the owners on day two, “Here are your tenants who haven’t paid rent, we’re following up with them, but just as heads up, they haven’t paid rent, so we want to give you a forewarning,” so that when you call them on day six and tell them, “We’re serving a three-day notice,” they’re not saying, “Oh wait, now this is a surprise. I thought I was getting the money.” I think communication is really, really important there. Jason: Yes, you’re talking about this. A lot of times, property managers are just hoping for somebody to just get married to them like, “Let’s just get married, without the dating,” and I think people aren’t really buying property management. They don’t want just property management. What they really want is safety and certainty. That’s what they’re hoping to buy. People don’t buy property management, they’re buying trust in you as a property manager and asking somebody to turnover the keys and give you everything, for some, is just too big of a risk. I love the idea of they’re being some sort of stepping stone in leading into this safety and certainty. How much safety and certainty do they have initially? It’s pretty low and if they can just hand you a little bit or a piece of this, then it would be very easy to transition them. A major component of business is retention and upsell. If you can retain them and you can upsell to them, then you’re significantly increasing lifetime value and you have this funnel of people coming into this pipeline that you can build a relationship with over time and you can get them into something bigger. Russell Brunson, this crazy marketer that some are saying, got this concept that I’m sure he got from somewhere else called the Value Ladder. The idea of the Value Ladder is that you need these different price points that get marginally larger that you start people with, You don’t really want to start people with a really big, high-ticket item. You usually need to start with something small initially, which usually the very beginning is something free, like offering something of free value, or free content, or free information and then it incrementally builds. This gives property managers a little bit more of a Value Ladder to step people and seduce people or convince people into full management. Dana: Yeah exactly. I think you’re spot on there, Jason, in the sense of life events change where people upsells do happen. But you rarely see people say, “I’m going for full service with someone I trust” to “Now, I’m managing myself.” Once they have already committed, they’re done. The only time that happens is if you dropped the ball and what’s important for you is to have the software, have the communication, have the processes, have the team in place, build your team in order to do that. You’re right. A lot of times, I see it with property managers and I see they have a call and the owner says, “Hey, I’m looking for a property manager,” and they go, “Okay great. Well here’s all the services that we offer, we’re end-to-end, we charge one month’s rent for leasing, we charge 10% of [00:43.46] for monthly rent to do everything, and we’ll take the keys. When is the good time for me to meet you at the property to see at?” and the owner’s like, “Woah, woah, woah.” Instead, you should [...] the conversation about, “Great, thanks so much for reaching out to me. What can I help you with? What’s the one thing that you hate with your property management? Is it maintenance? Is it doing your showings? What’s the one thing that just drives you insane that you want to do?” That will change your game and differentiate you because they’re giving that same exact price quote, that same exact spiel from everyone, and it doesn’t differentiate you from that perspective. Jason: Going back to that analogy of marriage and dating, a lot of property managers are like, “Hey, you might need some help with your property?” is the equivalent of saying, “Yeah, I might be interested in, maybe, connecting with you.” “Great, I’ll be moving in tomorrow, like, we’re together.” Dana: Yup. All the way like, “Here’s my contract, sign it. It’s annual, there’s no free trial, and there’s a huge termination clause.” For an owner, it’s like, “I haven’t actually, physically worked with you.” It’s like hiring an employee. If you worked with someone in the past, you’re like, “Okay, I’m ready to go,” but if you haven’t worked with them, you’re like, “I need to do these interviews, I need to do these background checks, I need to do these,” and you’re like, “I’m not even quite sure if they’re going to work out.” There’s this much larger barrier. As much as you can, avoid and take down that barrier really will help your business. Also, it goes the other way. You’re dating now but sometimes you want to tell the client after doing just the leasing for them, “I’m so glad you’re taking over the management,” and then they reach back out to you to do the leasing next time and you’re like, “I would love to do the leasing for you but I’m completely booked,” because they were a freaking nightmare to deal with. I never want to deal with them again. Jason: “Please call our competitors down the street. They would love to help you, we’re a bit overwhelmed right now.” Dana: All of the competitors think. I think the dating goes both ways because one of the things, Jason, I love about your show what you’ve said time and time again is, a lot of these people who are really stressed in property management, it’s because they have 10% of their clients or 150% of the time they’ve spent of overworked, overwhelmed on these properties and you probably shouldn’t be doing those ones. So. I think the dating goes both ways. Jason: Yeah. I tell clients all the time that sales and deals and contracts happen at the speed of trust and it’s that simple. I love that with using Hemlane, based on what you’re saying, what this allows you to do is to start that relationship with trust. Once you build that, it becomes very easy to upsell or to get them into a more committed relationship with you of doing more stuff with you once you earned that. Once you earned that, if there’s anything that they’ll need, they’ll be happy to use you to do that and you then have more opportunities. That’s all property management entrepreneurs need is more opportunities to build trust and the more opportunities they have, the better. It sounds like Hemlane is another channel or possibility for them to do that, that they may not have considered before. Dana: Absolutely. Great way to market from that perspective. Jason: Dana, it’s been awesome having you here on the show. How can people get in touch with Hemlane? How can these property managers that are listening get started with you guys? How do they sign up? Dana: If you’re interested in our partnership program, we don’t do just regular sign ups through our partnership page. Instead of going there, you can just email me, dana@hemlane.com. I’ll send that out to our partnership team. Brad will give you a call, schedule, and find some time to go through things with you. That’s for the partnership. You can also go to www.hemlane.com and from there you can click the try us for free. You can watch our videos and see what we offer as well, features everything in there, so you can see that as well if you’re interested in using our services. If you just have some questions on property management in general and you’re in this rut or whatever and you think there is some way that potentially we can get you out of that, we’re really happy to hear about that, too, but the fastest thing to do is email me dana@hemlane.com because I’m always on my email. Jason: Cool. Maybe this is the last question so, what is a hemlane? Where does the name Hemlane come from? Dana: Great question. We wanted something that had an international feel to it. We wanted something that was easy to say, easy to pronounce. DoorGrow, really easy to say, really easy to pronounce, two syllables. We wanted something that didn’t have any branding behind it. When we looked international, we basically took multiple languages for the word ‘home,’ and we went through and looked at ‘home’ in multiple different languages. Hem is house in Swedish, and then Lane is a path that divides others from other people. When you think of a path, you’re always looking to get ahead of others and differentiate. So, we put how it’s differentiation from that perspective together. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t have rental in it, or something that didn’t really have its own branding around it. What was funny is when we started Hemlane, it sounded like a horrible pair of cut-off pants like hemline, and everyone I would go to is like, “Do you have a clothing company?” and I was like, “No, it’s not a clothing company. It’s like the opposite.” Now, when you look up, Hemlane it’s all Hemlane, it’s all property management, but before that, it was a lot of just really bad pictures of people’s cut-off pants, hemlines, and stuff like that beforehand. Jason: Good. I love branding, so I love hearing about how people come up with the name and I love that there’s this meaning behind this, so it’s interesting. Well Dana, it’s been a delight having you here on the show, always fun to hangout with like-minded business people and entrepreneurs. I love that you’re helping the industry, you’re helping growth. I think this is a great fit to have you here on the show and I’m excited to see what success you guys create. Dana: Great. Thank you so much, Jason, for having me on the show. I love your show and I love the content that you have. Jason: I appreciate that. Cool. We’ll let you go. It’s really great having Dana on, so if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to have doors, then maybe check out Hemlane, sounds like interesting channel for growth. If you’re struggling, you want to optimize your business, optimize your warm lead funnel, you’re tired of playing the game of SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing, paper lead services, it’s not working, you’re spending a lot of money, and you’re not getting the return on all that money, then you’re probably worse off than if you just not done the marketing in the first place. Those are the people that we would love to help. Reach out to us at DoorGrow and we might just blow your mind, and help you figure out how to target that 70% and grow your business. I had a really cool morning call this morning with Regis [...] one of our clients. I haven’t really connected much with him over the last year, but he dialed in our program, did what we said, and he had it over a hundred doors in just the last year, just by doing the stuff that I told him to do. All these success story were keep popping up and I probably should stay better connected but if you’re looking to add 100, 200 doors in the next year and you feel like growth, you’re losing more doors than you’re getting on right now due to the sell-off in the market, and you’re focused on cold lead advertising just trying to grow your business and it’s just not working, have a conversation with us at DoorGrow. We would love to help you out and our mission really is to transform this industry and help grow it. I believe this industry have massive potential to be as big as probably the entire real estate industry here in the US. There are a lot of rental properties and we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of growth. I’m excited to see what happens here in the future, so reach out. If you are watching us on Youtube, or you’re watching this, make sure to like and subscribe. I want to build up our Youtube channel and get our first 1000 subscribers. We’ve got, I think a few hundred there right now but I’d love to get to that thousand-dollar market subscribers and you will see these episodes first. You’ll be the first to be notified when we put these episodes out. We release them to Youtube as videos before they show up on iTunes. If you’re hearing this on iTunes, make sure to go to Youtube and subscribe to our Youtube channel to youtube.com/doorgrow. You load it from your phone right now. Do it and click subscribe. You’ll even start getting some notifications from Youtube in your browser occasionally when we pop up a new video and you’ll be excited and able to hear some of the latest and greatest material connected to property management industry and the growth. That is all for today, until next time everybody to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

Panel: Dave Kimura Eric Berry Nathan Hopkins David Richards Special Guest: Jason Swett In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Jason Swett who is a host of the podcast show, Ruby Testing! Jason also teaches Rails testing at CodeWithJason.com. He currently resides in the Michigan area and works for Ben Franklin Labs. Check-out today’s episode where the panelists and the guest discuss testing topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Sentry.IO – Advertisement! Check out the code: DEVCHAT @ Sentry.io. 1:07 – I am David Kimura and here is the panel! Tell us what is going on? 1:38 – Jason: I started my own podcast, and have been doing that for the past few months. That’s one thing. I started a new site with CodeWithJason.com. 2:04 – You released a course? 2:10 – Jason: Total flop and it doesn’t exist, but I am doing something else. 2:24 – I bet you learned a lot by creating the course? 2:34 – Jason: The endeavor of TEACHING it has helped me a lot. 2:50 – Tell us why we should drink the Koolaid? 3:02 – Jason: What IS testing? Good question. Whether is it is manual testing or automated testing. We might was well automate it. 3:25 – If we are testing our code what does that look like? 3:34 – Jason: Not sure what you mean, but I am doing tests at a fine grain vs. coarser grain. 4:00 – Show of hands who has...? 4:19 – What different tests are there? 4:20 – Jason: Good question. One term that one person uses is different to a different person. Let’s start with unit tests vs. integration tests. Jason dives into the similarities and differences between these 2 tests (see above). There are different tests, such as: featured tests, acceptance tests, etc. 5:45 – What tests are THE best? 5:50 – Jason: Good question. The kind of tests you are writing depends on what type of coverage you are going for. If I had a sign-up page for a user, I would... 7:36 – What anti-patterns are you seeing? What is your narrative in teaching people how to use them? 8:07 – Jason talks first about his background and his interaction with one of his colleagues. 8:58 – Question. 9:00 – Jason continues with his answers from 8:07. 9:32 – Jason: Feel free to chime-in. What have you done? 9:42 – I often ignore it until I feel bad and then I say: wait-a-minute I am a professional. Then I realize I ignored the problem because I was acting cowardly. 10:29 – For me it depends on the test that it is. One gem that I found is: RSpec RETRY. 11:16 – Jason: The test is flapping because of something is wrong with the database or something else. Since you asked about anti-patterns let’s talk about that! Rails and Angular are mentioned. 13:10 – Do you find that you back off of your unit testing when you are using integration? 13:22 – Jason: It depends on the context we are talking about. Jason talks about featured testing, model-level testing, and more. 13:58 – What is your view on using MOCKS or FAKES. What should we be doing there? 14:10 – Jason: Going to the Angular world I understand Mocks better than now. There was a parable that I think is applicable here about the young and the old fish. 16:23 – Jason continues talking about testing things in isolation. 16:36 – Question.  16:39 – I have been looking for an area to specialize in and I wrote an eBook. (Check out here to see the articles and books that Jason has authored.) Then I was looking around and I wanted to see what people’s issues are with Rails? They have a hard time with testing. I wanted to help them feel competent with it. 18:03 – In your course you have how to choose a framework. I know Ruby has several options on that front – how do you choose? 18:24 – Jason: There are 2 factors to consider. Jason tells us what those two factors are. Jason: Angular, React and Vue. 19:52 – Panelist: I had a conversation with a beginner and we were talking about the different tests. He said the DSL really appealed to him. The surface area of the AI made it approachable for him. 20:27 – Jason: I wished I had figured out DSL out a little better. Understanding the concept of a block. The IT is just a function and you can put parentheses in different areas and... 21:01 – That makes sense. Let’s revisit the Tweet you wrote. 21:35 – Jason: There are certain use cases where it makes sense. Where Gmail was the thing out there. At some point the Internet formed the opinion that... 22:39 – Old saying: Nobody gets fired for using Microsoft and then it was IBM. Nothing wrong with those things if that’s what you are trying to do. Sometimes we make decisions to not be criticized. We try to grab big frameworks and big codes so we are not criticized for. 23:48 – Jason: I think developers have this idea that OLD is OUTDATED. Not so. I think it’s mature, not necessarily outdated. I think it’s a pervasive idea. 24:31 – I think it suffers a bit when all the mind shares get lumped into one thing. The panelist continues... 24:53 – Jason: I don’t know if I like this analogy. 26:00 – I agree with that sentiment. It’s crazy that the complexity has become so pervasive. 26:18 – I think of SPAs as... 26:37 – Jason: Going back to the Tweet I wrote, I am pulling in JavaScript but I am preferring to sprinkle Java into Rails. 27:02 – Absolutely. I think that’s where we agree on. Late in 2017 we had the guest... “Use JavaScript sprinkles.” 27:49 – Panelist chimes-in. 28:37 – Jason: That make sense. Use your preexisting... I am afraid of committing to a single framework. I don’t have anything against JavaScript but I am afraid of using only one thing when something else becomes fashionable. 29:30 – Have you found that Java sparkle approach is easy to test? 29:38 – Jason: I think it’s easier. Client server architecture... 30:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 30:41 – Shout-out to the Rails team! What other testing frameworks are there? What if you are not the developer but you are the Quality Assurance (QA) person. They have been given the task of testing on the application. 31:30 – Jason: So someone who is not a developer and they want to test the application. I don’t want to get out of my role of expertise. I did talk to a QA engineer and I asked them: What do you do? All of his tests are manual. He does the same stuff as a Rails developer would do. 32:52 – Panelist talks about pseudo code. 34:07 – Jason: I am curious, Dave, about the non-programmer helping with tests what is the team structure? 34:23 – Dave: You will have one QA per three developers. 34:44 – Jason: If you have a QA person he is integrated within the team – that’s what has been the case for me. 35:02 – Dave: It’s a nice thing to have because we need to crank out some features and we have a good idea what is wrong with the app. We can go in there and see if our application is good, but they are combining different scenarios to do the unit tests and see what they are lacking. They are uncovering different problems that we hadn’t thought of. 36:07 – The organization has to have the right culture for that to work. 36:35 – If it’s a small team then it will help to see what everyone is doing – it’s that engagement level. If the team is too large then it could be a problem. 37:15 – Jason: Engagement between whom? 37:27 – Both. Panelist goes into detail about different engagement levels throughout the team. 38:10 – Jason: Yeah that’s a tough thing. 38:49 – It’s interesting to see the things that are being created. Testing seems to help that out. We are getting bugs in that area or se didn’t design it well there... We see that we need some flexibility and getting that input and having a way to solve the problems. 39:32 – Jason: Continuous deployment – let’s segue into this topic. 41:17 – Panelist: Do you have recommendations on how often we should be deploying in that system per day/week? 41:40 – Jason: We would deploy several times a day, which was great. The more the better because the more frequently you are deploying the fewer things will go wrong. 42:21 – More frequently the better and more people involved. 42:45 – Jason continues this conversation. 42:51 – Panelist: Continuous integration – any time you were say to forgo tests or being less rigid? 43:14 – Jason: I don’t test everything. I don’t write tests for things that have little risks. 43:56 – I think it is a good segue into how you write your code. If you write a code that is like spaghetti then it will be a mess. Making things easier to test. 44:48 – Jason: This is fresh in my mind because I am writing an app called Green Field. 46:32 – Uniqueness Validations, is mentioned by Jason. 47:00 – Anything else to add to testing a Rails application? 47:08 – Jason: Let’s talk about 2 things: walking skeleton and small stories. This book is a great resource for automated testing. Last point that I want to talk about is small stories: continues deployment and continuous delivery. If you make your stories smaller then you are making your stories crisply defined. Have some bullet points to make it really easy to answer the question. Answer the question: is this story done or not done? Someone should be able to run through the bullet points and answer that question. 50:02 – I am in favor of small stories, too. Makes you feel more productive, too. 50:14 – Work tends to lend itself to these types of stories and running a sprint. 51:22 – You don’t have to carry that burden when you go home. You might have too big of a chunk – it carries too much weight to it. 51:47 – Book the Phoenix Project. Work in progress is a bad thing. That makes sense. You want to have fewer balls in the air. 52:17 – Anything else? 52:22 – Jason: You can find me at: CodewithJason.com also Twitter!  52:45 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:01:50 – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Erlang Ruby Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular Single Page Application (SPA) RSpec – Retry Ruby Testing Podcast The Feynman Technique Model Book: Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (1st edition) Jason Swett’s Twitter Jason Swett’s LinkedIn Parable: Young Fish and Old Fish – What is Water? Jason’s articles and eBook Jason’s Website Sponsors: Sentry Get a Coder Job Course Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: David This is Water The Feynman Technique Model Nate Taking some time off Pry Test Eric Fake App Ruby Hack Conference Dave Brooks Shoes Jason The Food Lab Growing Object-Oriented Software

Panel: Dave Kimura Eric Berry Nathan Hopkins David Richards Special Guest: Jason Swett In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Jason Swett who is a host of the podcast show, Ruby Testing! Jason also teaches Rails testing at CodeWithJason.com. He currently resides in the Michigan area and works for Ben Franklin Labs. Check-out today’s episode where the panelists and the guest discuss testing topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Sentry.IO – Advertisement! Check out the code: DEVCHAT @ Sentry.io. 1:07 – I am David Kimura and here is the panel! Tell us what is going on? 1:38 – Jason: I started my own podcast, and have been doing that for the past few months. That’s one thing. I started a new site with CodeWithJason.com. 2:04 – You released a course? 2:10 – Jason: Total flop and it doesn’t exist, but I am doing something else. 2:24 – I bet you learned a lot by creating the course? 2:34 – Jason: The endeavor of TEACHING it has helped me a lot. 2:50 – Tell us why we should drink the Koolaid? 3:02 – Jason: What IS testing? Good question. Whether is it is manual testing or automated testing. We might was well automate it. 3:25 – If we are testing our code what does that look like? 3:34 – Jason: Not sure what you mean, but I am doing tests at a fine grain vs. coarser grain. 4:00 – Show of hands who has...? 4:19 – What different tests are there? 4:20 – Jason: Good question. One term that one person uses is different to a different person. Let’s start with unit tests vs. integration tests. Jason dives into the similarities and differences between these 2 tests (see above). There are different tests, such as: featured tests, acceptance tests, etc. 5:45 – What tests are THE best? 5:50 – Jason: Good question. The kind of tests you are writing depends on what type of coverage you are going for. If I had a sign-up page for a user, I would... 7:36 – What anti-patterns are you seeing? What is your narrative in teaching people how to use them? 8:07 – Jason talks first about his background and his interaction with one of his colleagues. 8:58 – Question. 9:00 – Jason continues with his answers from 8:07. 9:32 – Jason: Feel free to chime-in. What have you done? 9:42 – I often ignore it until I feel bad and then I say: wait-a-minute I am a professional. Then I realize I ignored the problem because I was acting cowardly. 10:29 – For me it depends on the test that it is. One gem that I found is: RSpec RETRY. 11:16 – Jason: The test is flapping because of something is wrong with the database or something else. Since you asked about anti-patterns let’s talk about that! Rails and Angular are mentioned. 13:10 – Do you find that you back off of your unit testing when you are using integration? 13:22 – Jason: It depends on the context we are talking about. Jason talks about featured testing, model-level testing, and more. 13:58 – What is your view on using MOCKS or FAKES. What should we be doing there? 14:10 – Jason: Going to the Angular world I understand Mocks better than now. There was a parable that I think is applicable here about the young and the old fish. 16:23 – Jason continues talking about testing things in isolation. 16:36 – Question.  16:39 – I have been looking for an area to specialize in and I wrote an eBook. (Check out here to see the articles and books that Jason has authored.) Then I was looking around and I wanted to see what people’s issues are with Rails? They have a hard time with testing. I wanted to help them feel competent with it. 18:03 – In your course you have how to choose a framework. I know Ruby has several options on that front – how do you choose? 18:24 – Jason: There are 2 factors to consider. Jason tells us what those two factors are. Jason: Angular, React and Vue. 19:52 – Panelist: I had a conversation with a beginner and we were talking about the different tests. He said the DSL really appealed to him. The surface area of the AI made it approachable for him. 20:27 – Jason: I wished I had figured out DSL out a little better. Understanding the concept of a block. The IT is just a function and you can put parentheses in different areas and... 21:01 – That makes sense. Let’s revisit the Tweet you wrote. 21:35 – Jason: There are certain use cases where it makes sense. Where Gmail was the thing out there. At some point the Internet formed the opinion that... 22:39 – Old saying: Nobody gets fired for using Microsoft and then it was IBM. Nothing wrong with those things if that’s what you are trying to do. Sometimes we make decisions to not be criticized. We try to grab big frameworks and big codes so we are not criticized for. 23:48 – Jason: I think developers have this idea that OLD is OUTDATED. Not so. I think it’s mature, not necessarily outdated. I think it’s a pervasive idea. 24:31 – I think it suffers a bit when all the mind shares get lumped into one thing. The panelist continues... 24:53 – Jason: I don’t know if I like this analogy. 26:00 – I agree with that sentiment. It’s crazy that the complexity has become so pervasive. 26:18 – I think of SPAs as... 26:37 – Jason: Going back to the Tweet I wrote, I am pulling in JavaScript but I am preferring to sprinkle Java into Rails. 27:02 – Absolutely. I think that’s where we agree on. Late in 2017 we had the guest... “Use JavaScript sprinkles.” 27:49 – Panelist chimes-in. 28:37 – Jason: That make sense. Use your preexisting... I am afraid of committing to a single framework. I don’t have anything against JavaScript but I am afraid of using only one thing when something else becomes fashionable. 29:30 – Have you found that Java sparkle approach is easy to test? 29:38 – Jason: I think it’s easier. Client server architecture... 30:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 30:41 – Shout-out to the Rails team! What other testing frameworks are there? What if you are not the developer but you are the Quality Assurance (QA) person. They have been given the task of testing on the application. 31:30 – Jason: So someone who is not a developer and they want to test the application. I don’t want to get out of my role of expertise. I did talk to a QA engineer and I asked them: What do you do? All of his tests are manual. He does the same stuff as a Rails developer would do. 32:52 – Panelist talks about pseudo code. 34:07 – Jason: I am curious, Dave, about the non-programmer helping with tests what is the team structure? 34:23 – Dave: You will have one QA per three developers. 34:44 – Jason: If you have a QA person he is integrated within the team – that’s what has been the case for me. 35:02 – Dave: It’s a nice thing to have because we need to crank out some features and we have a good idea what is wrong with the app. We can go in there and see if our application is good, but they are combining different scenarios to do the unit tests and see what they are lacking. They are uncovering different problems that we hadn’t thought of. 36:07 – The organization has to have the right culture for that to work. 36:35 – If it’s a small team then it will help to see what everyone is doing – it’s that engagement level. If the team is too large then it could be a problem. 37:15 – Jason: Engagement between whom? 37:27 – Both. Panelist goes into detail about different engagement levels throughout the team. 38:10 – Jason: Yeah that’s a tough thing. 38:49 – It’s interesting to see the things that are being created. Testing seems to help that out. We are getting bugs in that area or se didn’t design it well there... We see that we need some flexibility and getting that input and having a way to solve the problems. 39:32 – Jason: Continuous deployment – let’s segue into this topic. 41:17 – Panelist: Do you have recommendations on how often we should be deploying in that system per day/week? 41:40 – Jason: We would deploy several times a day, which was great. The more the better because the more frequently you are deploying the fewer things will go wrong. 42:21 – More frequently the better and more people involved. 42:45 – Jason continues this conversation. 42:51 – Panelist: Continuous integration – any time you were say to forgo tests or being less rigid? 43:14 – Jason: I don’t test everything. I don’t write tests for things that have little risks. 43:56 – I think it is a good segue into how you write your code. If you write a code that is like spaghetti then it will be a mess. Making things easier to test. 44:48 – Jason: This is fresh in my mind because I am writing an app called Green Field. 46:32 – Uniqueness Validations, is mentioned by Jason. 47:00 – Anything else to add to testing a Rails application? 47:08 – Jason: Let’s talk about 2 things: walking skeleton and small stories. This book is a great resource for automated testing. Last point that I want to talk about is small stories: continues deployment and continuous delivery. If you make your stories smaller then you are making your stories crisply defined. Have some bullet points to make it really easy to answer the question. Answer the question: is this story done or not done? Someone should be able to run through the bullet points and answer that question. 50:02 – I am in favor of small stories, too. Makes you feel more productive, too. 50:14 – Work tends to lend itself to these types of stories and running a sprint. 51:22 – You don’t have to carry that burden when you go home. You might have too big of a chunk – it carries too much weight to it. 51:47 – Book the Phoenix Project. Work in progress is a bad thing. That makes sense. You want to have fewer balls in the air. 52:17 – Anything else? 52:22 – Jason: You can find me at: CodewithJason.com also Twitter!  52:45 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:01:50 – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Erlang Ruby Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular Single Page Application (SPA) RSpec – Retry Ruby Testing Podcast The Feynman Technique Model Book: Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (1st edition) Jason Swett’s Twitter Jason Swett’s LinkedIn Parable: Young Fish and Old Fish – What is Water? Jason’s articles and eBook Jason’s Website Sponsors: Sentry Get a Coder Job Course Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: David This is Water The Feynman Technique Model Nate Taking some time off Pry Test Eric Fake App Ruby Hack Conference Dave Brooks Shoes Jason The Food Lab Growing Object-Oriented Software

Panel: Dave Kimura Eric Berry Nathan Hopkins David Richards Special Guest: Jason Swett In this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Jason Swett who is a host of the podcast show, Ruby Testing! Jason also teaches Rails testing at CodeWithJason.com. He currently resides in the Michigan area and works for Ben Franklin Labs. Check-out today’s episode where the panelists and the guest discuss testing topics. Show Topics: 0:00 – Sentry.IO – Advertisement! Check out the code: DEVCHAT @ Sentry.io. 1:07 – I am David Kimura and here is the panel! Tell us what is going on? 1:38 – Jason: I started my own podcast, and have been doing that for the past few months. That’s one thing. I started a new site with CodeWithJason.com. 2:04 – You released a course? 2:10 – Jason: Total flop and it doesn’t exist, but I am doing something else. 2:24 – I bet you learned a lot by creating the course? 2:34 – Jason: The endeavor of TEACHING it has helped me a lot. 2:50 – Tell us why we should drink the Koolaid? 3:02 – Jason: What IS testing? Good question. Whether is it is manual testing or automated testing. We might was well automate it. 3:25 – If we are testing our code what does that look like? 3:34 – Jason: Not sure what you mean, but I am doing tests at a fine grain vs. coarser grain. 4:00 – Show of hands who has...? 4:19 – What different tests are there? 4:20 – Jason: Good question. One term that one person uses is different to a different person. Let’s start with unit tests vs. integration tests. Jason dives into the similarities and differences between these 2 tests (see above). There are different tests, such as: featured tests, acceptance tests, etc. 5:45 – What tests are THE best? 5:50 – Jason: Good question. The kind of tests you are writing depends on what type of coverage you are going for. If I had a sign-up page for a user, I would... 7:36 – What anti-patterns are you seeing? What is your narrative in teaching people how to use them? 8:07 – Jason talks first about his background and his interaction with one of his colleagues. 8:58 – Question. 9:00 – Jason continues with his answers from 8:07. 9:32 – Jason: Feel free to chime-in. What have you done? 9:42 – I often ignore it until I feel bad and then I say: wait-a-minute I am a professional. Then I realize I ignored the problem because I was acting cowardly. 10:29 – For me it depends on the test that it is. One gem that I found is: RSpec RETRY. 11:16 – Jason: The test is flapping because of something is wrong with the database or something else. Since you asked about anti-patterns let’s talk about that! Rails and Angular are mentioned. 13:10 – Do you find that you back off of your unit testing when you are using integration? 13:22 – Jason: It depends on the context we are talking about. Jason talks about featured testing, model-level testing, and more. 13:58 – What is your view on using MOCKS or FAKES. What should we be doing there? 14:10 – Jason: Going to the Angular world I understand Mocks better than now. There was a parable that I think is applicable here about the young and the old fish. 16:23 – Jason continues talking about testing things in isolation. 16:36 – Question.  16:39 – I have been looking for an area to specialize in and I wrote an eBook. (Check out here to see the articles and books that Jason has authored.) Then I was looking around and I wanted to see what people’s issues are with Rails? They have a hard time with testing. I wanted to help them feel competent with it. 18:03 – In your course you have how to choose a framework. I know Ruby has several options on that front – how do you choose? 18:24 – Jason: There are 2 factors to consider. Jason tells us what those two factors are. Jason: Angular, React and Vue. 19:52 – Panelist: I had a conversation with a beginner and we were talking about the different tests. He said the DSL really appealed to him. The surface area of the AI made it approachable for him. 20:27 – Jason: I wished I had figured out DSL out a little better. Understanding the concept of a block. The IT is just a function and you can put parentheses in different areas and... 21:01 – That makes sense. Let’s revisit the Tweet you wrote. 21:35 – Jason: There are certain use cases where it makes sense. Where Gmail was the thing out there. At some point the Internet formed the opinion that... 22:39 – Old saying: Nobody gets fired for using Microsoft and then it was IBM. Nothing wrong with those things if that’s what you are trying to do. Sometimes we make decisions to not be criticized. We try to grab big frameworks and big codes so we are not criticized for. 23:48 – Jason: I think developers have this idea that OLD is OUTDATED. Not so. I think it’s mature, not necessarily outdated. I think it’s a pervasive idea. 24:31 – I think it suffers a bit when all the mind shares get lumped into one thing. The panelist continues... 24:53 – Jason: I don’t know if I like this analogy. 26:00 – I agree with that sentiment. It’s crazy that the complexity has become so pervasive. 26:18 – I think of SPAs as... 26:37 – Jason: Going back to the Tweet I wrote, I am pulling in JavaScript but I am preferring to sprinkle Java into Rails. 27:02 – Absolutely. I think that’s where we agree on. Late in 2017 we had the guest... “Use JavaScript sprinkles.” 27:49 – Panelist chimes-in. 28:37 – Jason: That make sense. Use your preexisting... I am afraid of committing to a single framework. I don’t have anything against JavaScript but I am afraid of using only one thing when something else becomes fashionable. 29:30 – Have you found that Java sparkle approach is easy to test? 29:38 – Jason: I think it’s easier. Client server architecture... 30:10 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 30:41 – Shout-out to the Rails team! What other testing frameworks are there? What if you are not the developer but you are the Quality Assurance (QA) person. They have been given the task of testing on the application. 31:30 – Jason: So someone who is not a developer and they want to test the application. I don’t want to get out of my role of expertise. I did talk to a QA engineer and I asked them: What do you do? All of his tests are manual. He does the same stuff as a Rails developer would do. 32:52 – Panelist talks about pseudo code. 34:07 – Jason: I am curious, Dave, about the non-programmer helping with tests what is the team structure? 34:23 – Dave: You will have one QA per three developers. 34:44 – Jason: If you have a QA person he is integrated within the team – that’s what has been the case for me. 35:02 – Dave: It’s a nice thing to have because we need to crank out some features and we have a good idea what is wrong with the app. We can go in there and see if our application is good, but they are combining different scenarios to do the unit tests and see what they are lacking. They are uncovering different problems that we hadn’t thought of. 36:07 – The organization has to have the right culture for that to work. 36:35 – If it’s a small team then it will help to see what everyone is doing – it’s that engagement level. If the team is too large then it could be a problem. 37:15 – Jason: Engagement between whom? 37:27 – Both. Panelist goes into detail about different engagement levels throughout the team. 38:10 – Jason: Yeah that’s a tough thing. 38:49 – It’s interesting to see the things that are being created. Testing seems to help that out. We are getting bugs in that area or se didn’t design it well there... We see that we need some flexibility and getting that input and having a way to solve the problems. 39:32 – Jason: Continuous deployment – let’s segue into this topic. 41:17 – Panelist: Do you have recommendations on how often we should be deploying in that system per day/week? 41:40 – Jason: We would deploy several times a day, which was great. The more the better because the more frequently you are deploying the fewer things will go wrong. 42:21 – More frequently the better and more people involved. 42:45 – Jason continues this conversation. 42:51 – Panelist: Continuous integration – any time you were say to forgo tests or being less rigid? 43:14 – Jason: I don’t test everything. I don’t write tests for things that have little risks. 43:56 – I think it is a good segue into how you write your code. If you write a code that is like spaghetti then it will be a mess. Making things easier to test. 44:48 – Jason: This is fresh in my mind because I am writing an app called Green Field. 46:32 – Uniqueness Validations, is mentioned by Jason. 47:00 – Anything else to add to testing a Rails application? 47:08 – Jason: Let’s talk about 2 things: walking skeleton and small stories. This book is a great resource for automated testing. Last point that I want to talk about is small stories: continues deployment and continuous delivery. If you make your stories smaller then you are making your stories crisply defined. Have some bullet points to make it really easy to answer the question. Answer the question: is this story done or not done? Someone should be able to run through the bullet points and answer that question. 50:02 – I am in favor of small stories, too. Makes you feel more productive, too. 50:14 – Work tends to lend itself to these types of stories and running a sprint. 51:22 – You don’t have to carry that burden when you go home. You might have too big of a chunk – it carries too much weight to it. 51:47 – Book the Phoenix Project. Work in progress is a bad thing. That makes sense. You want to have fewer balls in the air. 52:17 – Anything else? 52:22 – Jason: You can find me at: CodewithJason.com also Twitter!  52:45 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 1:01:50 – Cache Fly! Links: Get a Coder Job Course Erlang Ruby Ruby Motion Ruby on Rails Angular Single Page Application (SPA) RSpec – Retry Ruby Testing Podcast The Feynman Technique Model Book: Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (1st edition) Jason Swett’s Twitter Jason Swett’s LinkedIn Parable: Young Fish and Old Fish – What is Water? Jason’s articles and eBook Jason’s Website Sponsors: Sentry Get a Coder Job Course Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: David This is Water The Feynman Technique Model Nate Taking some time off Pry Test Eric Fake App Ruby Hack Conference Dave Brooks Shoes Jason The Food Lab Growing Object-Oriented Software

Jason and Andrew talk about the lessons they've learned around practicing magic as a way of life. They also talk about what it is like to live in community with those who don't practice. And of course Saint Cyprian gets talk about too.  Think about how much you've enjoyed the podcast and how many episodes you listened to and think consider if it is time tosupport the  Patreon You can do so here. If you want more of this in your life you can subscribe by RSS , iTunes, Stitcher, or email. You can find Jason on his website here.   Thanks for listening! If you dig this please subscribe and share with those who would like it.   Andrew   If you are interested in booking time with Andrew either in Toronto or by phone or Skype from anywhere click here.   Transcript    ANDREW: Welcome to another episode of the Hermit's Lamp podcast. I have Jason Miller back with me today. And, you know, I've been continuing to watch what Jason's been putting out into the world, and, you know, he's been on my radar to have back and continue our conversations about magic and living a magical life and, you know, and, I kind of want to talk to him more about teaching and helping people discover how to live that kind of life today.  But, you know, Jason, in case people haven't met you yet—and you should go back and listen to the previous episode with him—Who are you, Jason? What are you about?  JASON: Oh, man. I'm all about … I'm all about getting paid and laid! No, I'm kidding ... [laughs] Yeah, no, so, I'm not against getting paid and laid, but that's certainly not what I'm all about. I am about doing magic in a way that is impactful. So, I have noticed over the course of the last 30 some odd years that I've been doing magic, that a lot of people, they put a lot of effort into a ritual, and they'll get a result, and it'll be like, you know, I spent three hours summoning a goetic demon, and the next day I found a wallet in the street, isn't that amazing? I -- it had like 200 bucks in it! That's incredible! And it's like, great! Where are we going to go from there? ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: Like, you know, how is this really going to make a big difference in your life? I mean, if you're in danger of getting tossed out of your house because you're 200 bucks short on the rent, it makes a big difference. But still and all, whether it's for pure spirituality, for love, money, etc., whatever, I'm about using magic, making it meaningful, making it have a big bump in your life... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And being able to look back and measure it and say yeah, that made a difference. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: The man I am today ...  ANDREW: The man I am today! You know, it's funny, that piece about looking back is so important. I recently went through and cleaned up all my shrines and all my, like, bits and pieces of magical workings and stuff, you know, like, cause, especially as I'm running along through life and work and whatever, stuff accumulates in the corners, right? And I had done this piece of work that I was continuing to work at, to break through to the next financial level, right? And when I was cleaning it up and going through the whole thing, I forgot, that I had as part of that done one of those write a check to yourself from the universe thing, right?  JASON: Oh, yeah?  ANDREW: And I was like, huh, look at that! I'm currently making exactly that and I'm frustrated that I'm not getting past it!   JASON: [laughs] ANDREW: So, I tripled that amount, and put a new one in and then fired it up again, and I was like … And immediately everything just started escalating like crazy, right?  JASON: It's amazing, the little tweaks ...  ANDREW: So easy to lose ... JASON: Yeah. The little tweaks that we can make. I remember, a few years back I was having difficulty. Same thing again, you know, I would make more money, but somehow more expenses would show up, and they'd just eat away at that. And it was so frustrating. And it's a common enough problem, you know?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: I would sit down and one day I would ... just sat down, and I might have cleaned my altar just before that time too, because that's my go to, like when things are stuck, clean up! [laughs] You know? ANDREW: Yeah! JASON: And not only do you get just a better view, but you ... You do find those little bits and nuggets of the past that tie it all together. But I sat down in front of Saint Cyprian and I was just like, “I can't seem to fix this, man! Like, I get more money, more money needs to go out.” And Saint Cyprian said, “Okay, well, you know, this month, do the same exact magic, but ask for the amount of money that you need leftover after everything is taken care of.”  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: Duh! ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: And that's exactly what happened. All of a sudden, there was this excess that I could then put towards, you know, savings, better use, house, investments, etc., etc. ANDREW: Yeah, well and especially ... We're both family people, right?  JASON: Yes! ANDREW: And with a family, those unknown expenses, I mean, it's so easy for them to creep up and whatever. We're so lucky in Canada, you know. My daughter just had strep throat, but because of the new way things are done here, the trip to the doctor is covered, and prescriptions are covered. So. But you know? Previously, like last year, before that came in, it'd be easy to go, you know you could go drop 50 - 60 bucks for this, and a pile of money there, and you know, every time you turn around, it just adds up and adds up. Yeah, I think that the power of being clear about what the solution is, and the power of how do you pray or ask or craft your sigil or whatever you're doing to solve the problem is such an important piece, right?  JASON: What …Yeah, and you know, because we're not just praying, you know? We don't describe ourselves as religious people necessarily. I mean we might be religious people, but we're not religious in the sort of, you know, the old grandma, “I'm going to go pray and hope that this happens, and leave it up to God, and thy will be done” kind of thing.  ANDREW: Sure.  JASON: Because otherwise why bother with magic at all, right?  ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: So, we're sort of getting actively involved. And even if we're working with the same powers, the saints and gods and angels and buddhas etc., we're as sorcerers saying, you know, I'm part of this, I'm part of this chain of events here, so I'm contributing, I'm inputting, at which point, yeah, the responsibility falls on you to ask for what you need skillfully, to recognize when you've, like in your case, been given exactly what you asked for, and then moved to the next level. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: It's, yeah, it's, I don't know, it's our responsibility. But I see a lot of people turn their sovereignty over to the spirits when it comes down to stuff like that. It's like, “Well, they know what I need.” And, why are you even bothering, then, man? [laughs] ANDREW: Yeah. I think that it's … you know ... there's this thing, I was reading through your new book, The Elements of Spellcrafting, and there's this section where you were talking about caveats, right? You know? And, like, I think that for me, whether I approach the Orishas, or whether I approach the other spirits I work with, you know? Whatever element of “Thy will be done” exists in the universe, I just assume they're doing that math for me as part of it, right?  JASON: Right.  ANDREW: There are things that are just never going to happen, there are things that, you know, maybe shouldn't happen, and, you know, and there are things that are maybe part of other people's will being done, and they're going to not allow me to be interfering with that, right? In the same way that, you know, it's not the monkey paw, right? Like, you know, they're not going to kill somebody so I can get their inheritance. And then I'm going to turn around and forget to say, "Bring them back as they were, and you know, instead, live a zombie love life or something," right? JASON: [laughs] ANDREW: You know, I think that there's a degree of intelligence in these processes, right?  JASON: Yeah! ANDREW: Unless you're working with something belligerent, in which case, I tend to be like, well, why go there? What's the value of that? And you know, there are values, but, if stuff doesn't want to work with me, I don't know that I want to work with it, you know?  JASON: I -- see, I'm the same way. There are ... I guess there are some borderline cases, where there are spirits that are happy to work once they've been … In the grimoire tradition, they've been constrained ...  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And then if made offerings to and a relationship is built, but to even get their attention requires that initial like, "Will the power that blah blah..." But in general, I'm the same way, there are so many ways to do something, especially now, with just the access we have to so many, so much information, traditions, and things like that ... And also, it helps ... You know, [ringing phone] these things don't tend to happen when we are building relationships with powers ... So, of course, now my phone ... [Answering machine voice] Telemarketers, man!  ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: Sorry about that! ANDREW: They're just trying to make their money, too. You know? It's all part of ... JASON: I know, I know ... [ringing phone] ANDREW: Speaking of prolific elements, you know? [laughs] JASON: Right. We're talking about demons, the demons are like, “Hey…” ANDREW: “Hey…” JASON: “Let me talk to you about your credit card balance ...” [laughs] ANDREW: Let me talk to you about a time share ...” JASON: [laughs] So, yeah, I forgot even what I was talking about now ... ANDREW: Well, we were just talking about ... JASON: The demons erased it.  ANDREW: When you're having relationships with spirits, it's something quite different.  JASON: Oh yeah! Yeah, it's so different than looking up in a book and saying, "Well, what's the spirit that handles this, and I'm going to contact them and make a deal…"  ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: As opposed to "these are spirits that I make offerings to regularly, every day, all the time, I acknowledge special days," and, you know, you build a relationship.  ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: So then when it comes down to somebody in the Strategic Sorcery group the other day asked "Why are the spirits so literal about everything? I'm getting exactly what I ASK for, but just outside of what I intended." And I said, "Well, you know, get better at asking for stuff, but the other thing is, build up a relationship, let spirits into your life, and you can ... you ... they'll get a better window into what you need.” It's not necessarily belligerent, the assumption there is that they're all knowing, all powerful. You know? You gotta let 'em know.  ANDREW: They're not stalkers, right?  JASON: Right. They're not stalkers. ANDREW: They're not here 24/7, they're not looking at everything, they're not Santa Claus, right? JASON: Right. ANDREW: You know? Like, they don't know everything, if you don't sit down when you have their attention and tell them, right?  JASON: Yeah.  ANDREW: And here again, if you have a relationship with spirit, much of the time the solution to the problem is like, "Hey, my friend, I have this problem, I need to talk to you about it."   JASON: [laughs] ANDREW: “Blah blah blah, here's my problem, here's what it looks like, here's what I've been doing, you know, I don't know what to do next, or I just feel like I've got no luck, or like whatever you feel, and be like, hey, please help me out with this. And sometimes that can be it too, right? Just a conversation, kind of like, you know, hey, help me out, my friend, not even like, “and I'll give you this,” or whatever, right?  JASON: Absolutely. Absolutely. Cause that ... that giving, that back and forth, it's already present in the relationship. Just like with real people, you know? I use ... I always talk about borrowing 50 bucks. You know, if you accost somebody on the street, they're not giving you 50 bucks.  ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: If you ask a coworker, maybe they will, maybe they won't. But if you ask a friend, of course. They're gonna be like, “Yeah, here, do you need any more? are you good? Pay me back when you can.” Because you have a lifetime of the back and forth and it makes all the difference.  ANDREW: So, every time I tell people that you're going to be on the podcast, and some other people too, but they're always like, “So tell me about Cyprian. What about Saint Cyprian?”  JASON: [laughs] ANDREW: “What's going on with Cyprian? What do I need to know about Saint Cyprian,” right? What ... I mean, I feel like we talked about it last time, from what I remember, you know? But I'm curious. Especially because it's been a little while. Saint Cyprian seems to be growing further and further into the world these days. What do you think is up with that? Why is that happening?  JASON: Oh. [sighs heavily] Well, I'm going to go ahead and say that one of the things that's happening is that the focus is not so squarely on white European magic any more. And ... ANDREW: That's really true.  JASON: And, you know, I can ... I will thank the younger generation of millennials for some of this, that, you know, while there's certainly a lot of crap I could give the millennial generation--I'm a Gen Xer and I'm sure you are too, but--One of the good things is there's not quite as much focus on the white European magic, nor what white Europeans, especially Victorians, had to say about magic from elsewhere. So, Saint Cyprian was sort of, has been huge in Portuguese and Spanish-speaking world for many years.  ANDREW: Yeah.   JASON: You find tons of little, I have some Spanish, everything from actual books of Saint Cyprian, to little like pamphlets, trade magazines, in Spanish, that are, you know, about Saint Cyprian. And then of course you've got the Scandinavian books of Saint Cyprian in Norway. So, all this was sort of happening outside the German/English pipeline, you know?  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And, so it was already this huge presence that just needed to poke its way into the English-speaking world. And then once it did, we do what we do with everything, it explodes. And he became immensely popular. I'm super proud of having written a really halfway not even very good article surveying the cult of Cyprian, but I wrote it back in 2007 so I can pat myself on the back, and you know, get the "before it was cool" cred. [laughs] But, you know, the amazing work has been done since then, with Humberto Maggi, and José Leitão, their translations of Cyprian books, and the commentary on them is just huge. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And he's ... just a great worker. You know? People are looking at Christianity and realizing that there's a lot more to it than the evangelical anti-magical Protestant mindset. And maybe some of that is that we have a generation of people here who were not necessarily brought up in church, so they're kind of looking at the church with magical eyes rather than “Uhhhh, this is such a drag!” eyes. Which is why you're getting ... More and more people are going to Latin mass. Like young people going to Latin mass wherever it's available. So, you have this interest in Christianity, and people are looking at, "Well, where is witchcraft really preserved?" If we can let go of some of the Margaret Murray thesis of pagan cults that survived in secret, well, you know, a hell of a lot of it was that folk magic came into Christianity and the ceremonial magic, the whole grimoire tradition. So, once information about a saint of sorcerers became available, I think it was just, people wanted to take it and run, and have. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. It's a very accessible notion, right? I mean, it's in our culture, you know, North American culture, the idea of saints and what we do with them. There's a ... whether you're raised with it or not, it's around enough that I think it's not super foreign, you know?  JASON: Yeah. No. Absolutely. And it's, you know, Cyprian himself had already existed in such varied forms. You know, the emphasis in Europe is ... are on the books and spells that Cyprian himself was said to have penned, whether before or after death. And then in the New World traditions from Peru up to Mexico, the emphasis is on calling Cyprian himself as sort of a mediator between light and dark forces. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And you can see this in the mesa traditions where they have … The shamans have the two mesas laid out and Saint Cyprian right in the middle.  ANDREW: Yeah.  JASON: And so, Cyprian exists as this eternal between. He's between everything. He's between heaven and hell, he's between Christian and non-Christian, he's a … you know, he builds bridges.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And it's just brilliant. the only things that I think some people who maybe were raised with Cyprian in the non-English, you know, object to sort of, you know, white people taking it and running with it places that it never was historically. The only thing that I really see that I ever object to is when people attempt to completely deChristianize Cyprian utterly. And say, "oh, that was never really part of it," I'm always like "well, we already have Merlin and other ... ANDREW: Sure. JASON: You know? It's the very fact that he was a bishop that kind of makes it special.  ANDREW: Well and I think that that's kind of leading up to what I was going to ask you as a question, being, what's the thing people are getting wrong about this, right? Or, what's the pitfall people fall into, you know? Because, you know, I have conversations with other, you know, olochas and priests in the Orisha tradition about what people are kind of misunderstanding as they approach traditions. Right? You know? JASON: Yeah. ANDREW: So, you know, I think that, you kind of already nailed it, right? You know, like, what is Cyprian without Christianity?  JASON: Yeah. yeah. And, you know, what is Cyprian without Justina? Justina, I think, gets downplayed quite a bit in favor of Cyprian, but it's important to remember that it was her that turned back his demons with the sign of the cross. It was her that wielded the power that attracted him to Christianity in the first place. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And so, I think one of the other things, apart from the deChristianizing of Cyprian, and I get it, I mean, Christianity has, I mean, for every good thing about Christianity, there's a horrible thing about Christianity.  ANDREW: Yeah. At least one.  JASON: At least one! And some people have been really just damaged to the point where this is not a useful thing in this life for them ... ANDREW: Yeah.  JASON: To even worry about Christianity one way or the other. They left it, and good, because, you know, it was causing them a lot of pain. So, I'm not one of those people that's like, you know, “You have to be Christian.” But, you have to be, I think to work with Cyprian, you have to be comfortable, at least looking at Jesus, Christianity, and all the rest of it as a usable power, as a valid spiritual power, and it's always weird to me how people who are so open that they can embrace, sometimes, dozens of traditions at the same time, and, you know, while “Hecate, Queen of Heaven, and ...” yet, once it's Christian, because of the baggage, it's like, oh no. No. That is false, and I reject it ever.  ANDREW: Yeah. And I think, as you say, I think it's part of all of our journeys; ideally to try and resolve and free ourselves of those baggages, you know? And I think about how when I started doing misas, and sort of espiritismo, and Alan Kardek style, you know, ceremonies and stuff like that, you know, and praying for my ancestors who were Catholic, or, you know, Anglican or whatever, with the prayers that they asked for, without any attachment to that, you know, came from, you know, a number of years of deconstructing less so explicit Church history, cause I don't have much of that, but more so, negative cultural influences on that stuff that I was basically, you know what? Screw you and your son! You know? For about 19 years, right? JASON: [laughing] ANDREW: And, you know, but being free of that really allows for, has allowed me to meet spirits where they want to be met, where that feels appropriate to me, and therefore, when my grandmother was like, say the Lord's Prayer, say the Apostle's Creed, say the, you know, the Hail Marys, say this, say that, I'm like, "Cool, I'll say those prayers for you, it's fine."  JASON: Right.  ANDREW: But it's not straightforward, you know?  JASON: No. ANDREW: For many people. And definitely for me it wasn't, in the beginning, so.  JASON: Yeah. yeah. And there ... You know, my advice is always, if that is bringing trauma and discomfort, there are other powers. You don't have to work with Cyprian. And I guess that's the worry that everyone has that something becomes sort of insanely popular and people get involved only because of its popularity. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: I don't know how much of a danger that really is. I've always been one of those people that's kind of … It's like, “Is the band good or is the band not good?” How many other people like the band isn't really relevant ... ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: To my enjoyment of them. But for some people it is. They want to be in on the thing no one else was in on.  ANDREW: Well, and, you know, it's funny, so, I spent time in the Aurum Solis, which is a not very popular not very well-known ceremonial order, right?  JASON: Ogdoatic! ANDREW: Yeah. And, you know, I mean, in some ways, my time there was one of the most liberating of things, because unlike many other systems, where they gave name and form to whatever dualities and core principle and so on, they just use generic terms, and generic terms that they had set up for themselves for people within the order to work with, and so, it was always open-ended, and then if you were working Enochian or goetic or this or whatever, you shifted and you melded it to where you wanted it to be, or where it made sense to put that together, unlike in other systems, you know, like when I was into Crowley stuff, and here's your specific, you know, ordered organization and structure, and you know, in other places where it's like, well this is always this person. It's like, eh, they could be many things ...  JASON: [laughing] ANDREW: I want to know what would make sense here, you know?  JASON: Right.  ANDREW: Cause there's more of this idea of there being an archetypal or source that was putting on source as we danced with it, called it, rather than having predefined form that we were required to meld ourselves to. and in that process, I actually became very malleable, and very free from a lot of other stuff, which was pretty handy, so.  JASON: Yeah, that is. Now Aurum Solis, they went like full Christian at one point, didn't they, awhile back?  ANDREW: I left the order around 2000, 2001. I think that as far as I know they were going more in like a sort of witchcraft, European witchcraft direction when I was leaving.   JASON: Really! ANDREW: Which wasn't really my particular thing, yeah. But it's been a long time and I'm no longer involved so I couldn't actually say.  JASON: Okay. Yeah, I seem to remember something about Denning taking the order into like a, you know, reforming it as a Christian-only order, and then un-reforming it as a Christian order, just only a few years after that, when people were like, naaah, that's ... ANDREW: Yeah, it's hard to say. I don't know that part of the history. It certainly wasn't a part of my time. But, I mean, like many of those experiences, my work was mostly about my local person rather than the bigger picture of things too, right? Which is...  JASON: Yeah. ANDREW: Both a pro and a con, right? Cause it's great when everybody's on the same page, but when your local person and your international person or head of the order is doing something else, then you know, that's kind of, becomes disruptive, so.   JASON: We, in, you know, I was in the OTO for a while, and we had formed a camp, still around today in Philadelphia, Thelesis. It's now, I think, an oasis. It's ... the OTO has small camps, and then they have oases, and then they have lodges, and so on. And when we started it out, it was like a bunch of people that were disgruntled from the New York scene, and then we made all these connections in Philadelphia, which had an OTO group, and then everybody left. So, we just gathered the people that were sort of abandoned.  ANDREW: Sure.  JASON: And we were the weirdest OTO group in the order at the time, because none of us wanted to do the gnostic mass, like none of us wanted to do it.  ANDREW: Right.  JASON: None of us wanted to do Resh, the four times a day, you know, he is the Sun God, he is the Fun God, rah rah rah kind of thing every day. And so, we were just, we were essentially just a magical group, and we were using the OTO as sort of this unstructural umbrella and, that we would report to. And for years, like we had Behutet Magazine, which is still running, but we wouldn't allow any Crowley reprints, or poetry, and all the other magazines at the time were, you know, like “Here's a reprint of Crowley ...” ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: “And my poems!” And so, we were like, “nope, none of that,” and it was all about the local people and what they wanted to do and it was great. It was great. It has changed now. I think they're much more in line with the overall order than it used to be. But, it's the way things go. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Yeah, I think that there are certainly in my experience, there are the times and places where a group of people coalesce for one reason or another, you know, and those moments and times are wonderful, and you know, when I was younger I used to think they would last forever, and now I find myself ... JASON: [laughs] Yeah.  ANDREW: ... in, you know, in those moments, I just savor them, knowing that likely they'll pass at some point. You know? And may even be far and few between, so, you know, just revel in them, like, oh, how wonderful to have all these connections in this thing right now, you know?  JASON: It is, it is. And, you know, I don't know how involved you are in your local community. I live in the sticks, I live in New Jersey, but, you know, down in the pine barrens, and I do miss having a big local community, and the time, too, because between business and kids, that eats most of it up.  ANDREW: Yeah.  JASON: So. ANDREW: Yeah, I mean, local magical community, we have, we sometimes, maybe three or four times a year I have just a, call it a magically-minded social night at the shop, and just open, show up, make some tea, hang out, whatever. So those are always great. Everybody's invited, so if you're hearing this and you want to come, get in touch. And for me, it's like, because my primary work is Orisha work, right? So, it's ceremonies and stuff like that that happens, so, you know.   JASON: Right.  ANDREW: Early in the year I was down in the States helping at a birth of a priest, and, those are great, you know. But they're not so much local and they're not really ongoing, they're more periodic when they're required, so.  JASON: Right.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: Right. You know, the shops are wonderful, and the community that ... I mean ... Back when I was starting out, the shop was your only link to the community, really, ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: If you didn't know it already, if you were just interested in magic, it was like putting in time at the shop. You would just like hang out, talk with the shop owner, and … ANDREW: Mmhmm JASON: They, you guys facilitated all the introductions, so ... ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: It was really just through getting friendly with shop owners in the area that I got to know who was doing what where.  ANDREW: And for me it was because I lived in sort of small town Ontario growing up, it was, twice a year there was a psychic fair, and I would go and find stuff there, which is where I bought like, Magic in Theory and Practice when I was 12, and stuff like that. JASON: Yes. ANDREW: And then there'd be like six months of like, trying to understand what the hell is being said in those books ...  JASON: [laughing] ANDREW: What do I do with my hands? What am I supposed to say? What's going on? You know? But, that was it, because, you know, I was too young to drive, too young to get anywhere, there were no buses to the city, you know, back in the 80s and stuff like that, it was just like, that was it. You take your books, you go home, you read em a bunch, try and figure it out, realize you don't know what you're doing, and then try again, you know? So.  JASON: No YouTube videos, to ... ANDREW: No YouTube videos. JASON: To set you right. ANDREW: Yeah. For sure.  So, one of the other questions people ... somebody posted ... was, and I feel like I already know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask you anyway, so: Do you ever run into people who are disapproving of your practices? I mean we were talking about people who didn't like your books and stuff like that before we got on the call, but like, you ever just like face to face in your community, or you know that kind of stuff, run into anything, or ... ? Is that ... ? JASON: Rarely. ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: Rarely. I benefit from having not only a common name but several other famous Jason Millers. ANDREW: Uh huh. JASON: So when I have a day job, it was, it would be an odd thing for them to find out about me, even after I started publishing books, because you've got Jason Miller the playwright, Jason Miller the MMA fighter, and now you've got Jason Miller the, you know, Trump campaign dude, who I was ... Someone wrote, like, bitching about Trump to me, and it was clear they thought that I worked for his campaign. Like, “How can you, an occultist, work for Donald Trump?” I was like, “Two different people!” [laughing] ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: Like, I don't know, I don't even look like that guy. But, you know, so, it didn't happen too often, that people would find out. When they did, I have a way of explaining it or presenting it, so … It's amazing if you just drop certain words out of your vocabulary. ANDREW: Like demon? JASON: Like demon, sure! You know ... So, for instance. All right. I can go to a Buddhist ceremony and we can take a phurba and make a ritual doll, essentially a voodoo doll, a linga, and stab the shit out of it and release, liberate it, quote, and you know, essentially, hard core black magic, but if you tell somebody you're going to a Buddhist event, “Oh, the Dalai Lama is so holy, oh, that's wonderful that you're interested in Buddhism and meditation and ...” You can say, when I introduce myself to other parents at the playground, and they ask what I do, I say, "I'm a writer, so I work from home, and that's why we spend summers elsewhere,” and things like that. I can say, “Well, you know, I write on mysticism or, and meditation,” that's easy for most people. Like, they don't think too much about it. You can … If they press you can say, “Well, you know, I write about shamanism or fringe religion,” right? The moment you say magic, then it's sort of like, “Ohhhhh, I don't know,” and then if you say witchcraft, now you're introducing the language of the diabolical, of what society has called, you know, it relates, you know, I mean, and modern witchcraft willfully and knowingly took on the constellation of terms around the witch hunts, and coopted those and used those terms, and to good effect, I think. But that's why witches get hassled by Christians and Druids tend not to.  ANDREW: Hmm. JASON: Because people don't know what a Druid is. So, you're just some crunchy hippie dude.  ANDREW: Yeah.  JASON: Or, you know, witches, pagans, have trouble, but somebody who is Asatru, describes themselves that way, might not. Somebody might think they're a racist, but [laughs]. ANDREW: Yeah.  JASON: You know. They're not going to get that "Do you worship Satan?" kind of thing.  ANDREW: Mmmhmm.  JASON: So. ANDREW: I think that, it really is very much about ... For me, it's very much about how you frame it, and for me, it's such a clear given about my life and I can explain it in simple terms, you know, I explain it to my kids as they were growing up in simple terms, they get to know more and more as time goes on about my religious Orisha practices, you know, and there's so many ways in which you can sort of just frame it, and I find that for me almost without exception, when I approach the conversation where people are like, “Wait, wait, you kill chickens.” I'm like, “Yeah dude. Do you eat chicken? I see you're wearing leather shoes.”  JASON: [laughing] ANDREW: Right, like? Or whatever. And if you're grounded in it, I find that it is rarely an issue. JASON: Yeah. ANDREW: I mean, it's always possible to be an issue, but almost never, you know? I've had one person give me a hard time at the shop since I opened the store five, almost six years ago. And he's some older local dude who stood in front of my door one day blocking it, and I went to talk to him, and he was waiting for the bus, and he basically just got really mad and started swearing at me and telling me I was going to hell and whatever, and, you know, and then some woman who was waiting with her kids at the bus stop started yelling at him to stop swearing … JASON: Yeah. ANDREW:  Very quickly became the end of the conversation, and then, I see him walk past now, cause I'm still in the neighborhood, but he's just, eyes forward and ignores me completely now, you know? And one other person who no longer does this but for a long time used to leave little inspirational God pamphlets in my mailbox all the time. But that was it. Like, easily if I saw him, he'd be like "How are you today, you know, I'm going to work, here have this, here, take one of these." I'm always like, "Sure man, whatever," but never, nothing ever escalated, cause I never escalated it. You know? JASON: Yeah. I mean, I love the little pamphlets. I mean, I always thank people for them, and I just hold in my head that obviously I don't agree with them, but this person feels like they have the spiritual equivalent of the cure for cancer. So, if they think that that's true, then the moral thing to do is to spread that far and wide, right? Like, not to be like, “Shh, don't tell anyone, we have the secret keys to enlightenment and heaven.” So, I always look at, like if somebody's just sharing or they knock on the door or something like that, I always kind of assume the best ... ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: Because it's done, even though I think they're deluded in what they believe, I think their moral intention to share it is good most of the time. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's just masking their desire to persecute others. And that becomes apparent pretty quick. And, you know, thankfully, you live in Canada, and I live in the relatively for America more enlightened northeastern United States. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: There are some areas of my country where I gotta believe I'd probably get a lot more hassle than I do here. One of the reasons I don't live in some areas of the country. ANDREW: For sure, yeah. JASON: You know, in that my kids would be going to school, some parent would Google me, and now my kids would be having a hard time, and ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. Well, you would just go to your Buddhist meditation and solve it, right? [laughing] JASON: Yes, yeah. I can just, "It's just Buddhism," "Noooo, I saw the books, it's not just Buddhism!"  ANDREW: It's so many things. That's funny. Yeah, it's funny, you know, I think, probably because I spent so long in a Mohawk, and being all punked out and stuff, I just, people don't tend to argue with me too much about stuff, and I don't really tend to engage people. The minute stuff comes up I'm always like, “You know what, I think I'm gonna go now, see you later ...”  JASON: Yeah! ANDREW: You know and just opt out of those conversations too, right? So.  JASON: Yeah, you know, the times that it comes up are ... they're just few and far between, because ultimately, people aren't all that interested. If they're not interested, then they're not particularly interested, you know? It's a weird thing, but if you are able to talk about other things and hold a real conversation with people about something other than that ... ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: Which is a talent that sadly not everyone in our community has, but … ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: It goes a long way. It's like, look, you know, if you invite me over for dinner, no, I'm not going to start prattling on about religion and weirdness unless you ask.  ANDREW: Yeah. No, for sure. Yeah, back when I used to work in advertising, I discovered that there were certain places that I would end up, and there were certain kinds of conversations that went better, so like when I was going down to the print shop to talk to the guy who's running the big printing presses and do color proofs, you know,  a lot of those guys really dug sports, and so I would check the paper, see what was going on, and just prep myself to have a good conversation with them, and it didn't hurt me at all, they loved it, you know, and it made for a better relationship, you know? Showing an interest in what people are interested in gets us a long way a lot of the time, right?  JASON: Oh yeah.  ANDREW: And avoids a lot of problems, right? Because then you have that personal connection where they're like, “Well, Jason's not really that bad, I mean he takes his kids to the park all the time, how can you, he can't be evil, he's gotta be good, so whatever, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.” Right?  JASON: That's it! ANDREW: Yup. So, first of all, thank you for making time today.  JASON: Thank you for having me, man! ANDREW: Yeah.  What have you got going on? I know that you've got this book that just came out this year, The Elements of Spellcrafting, which is great, and people should definitely check that out. What else is going on? Where should people find you? What have you got coming down the line?  JASON: Well, people can find me at StrategicSorcery.net. And the big thing coming down the line is, the next cycle of Sorcery of Hecate opens up in May for a June start. This is a class that -- it got so much bigger than I ever expected it to, because it, you know, it's a hard … it's the hardest class that I do, like as far as like, people want, you want something to do that, you know, requires a commitment and will get you results but is going to ask something more from you. ANDREW:  Yeah. JASON: And is going to challenge you, like the first month or two, you're going to come to me and say, "Oh, I had this vision ..."  and I'm going to be like, "That's great, keep doing the ritual, please." You know? Like, the vision is great, but just, it doesn't mean anything. Let's get deeper. Let's go deep. Let's not settle for "I did a ritual, I had a vision," like, is it important? Is it telling you something you didn't know? If not, make a note, celebrate, have a cupcake, then get back to work.  ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: So, I never expected a program that required like that amount of effort and work and, you know, I can be challenging, and just tell people, like, "That's not important right now," [laughs]  ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: I never expected it to take off, but my god, it has. ANDREW: Well, she's a real powerhouse, right? I mean, she's another one of those ones whose presence in the world is on the rise. So, I'm going to share my vision; you can tell me it's not important afterwards.  JASON: [laughing] ANDREW: So, I haven't done your course, but years ago, when I first started reading at somebody else's store in Toronto, the person who owned the store, Hecate was their thing, they were all about that, and most of the people who worked there were about her, and sort of like, it was the anchor of that store, right? And I'd been working there for a little bit, and they were doing a big ceremony for her. And I didn't go, cause I was like, “nah, it's not my thing,” right? So, I had this dream, where she showed up, you know, infinitely dark and infinitely expansive at the same time, and she just looked at me, up and down, said, "You're not one of mine, but you're all right, you can keep working here." And that was the whole dream, and I was just like, "Perfect!" It's done! JASON: And that's, you know, that is an example of, it's got meaning, you know, it's a seal of approval, it's got an essential message ... ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: But it's not something you want to sit and like, fuss over. ANDREW: No, exactly. JASON: You can keep working there. Which is ... ANDREW: I got my approval to continue to be employed there, and that's great, cause I'm sure that if she didn't like me I would have been gone ... JASON: [laughing] ANDREW: And then that's it, and I'm like, all right! And then, the other piece which was, you don't need to get more involved in this stuff, cause it's not yours, I'm not for you.  JASON: And I've had that happen as well. Before I became involved in Buddhism, I was getting very interested in Haitian voodoo, I was trading correspondence with Max Beauvoir, I was studying anything I could get my hands on and putting together completely half-assed ceremonies of my own. ANDREW: Sure. JASON: To connect with the Orishas, as everyone did in the 90s, and I would read anything, god, I lived practically on the New Orleans Voodoo Tarot, from Louis Martinié. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And I ... there was this point where I was getting ready to go to Haiti, and Legba was kind of like, "Maybe not." ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: Maybe, like, "You and I are cool, but maybe you don't want to get involved in all this stuff." ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And I …You know, looking back later there are ... I really don't react well with tobacco, for instance.  ANDREW: Hmm. JASON: And I just both with my lungs, my senses, I get ... I don't know, maybe something happened when I was a child with cigarettes or something, you know, it just sets me off, and that would have been a big stumbling block for me, a few other commitments and taboos probably would have been a big stumbling block for me in the long run, and so it was really solid advice, and I was like, well where should I go? And it was right after I asked that, I was in upstate New York and I was talk ... did a lave tet with Louis Martinié that day, and then that evening Michelin Linden, his wife, was like, let me tell you about my experience with the Kalachakra. ANDREW: Mmmhmm. JASON: And it was really--it hit me hard. Partly because I was on three different psychedelics at the time, but it hit me hard anyway. [laughs] And, you know, I went back, and I called John Reynolds, who I had known for years already, and he was the first Westerner to be ordained as a Ngakpa, Tibetan sorcerer. I was like, “I'm in! What do I do?”  ANDREW: Yeah.  JASON: You know. Legba sent me to you! [laughing] ANDREW: Well, I mean that is a tremendous piece of wisdom, right?  JASON: Yeah. ANDREW: You know and like, in reading the shells for people, it's something that people don't expect at all, and it's like, look, you know who's got the answer? Those people. This group. Your psychiatrist has the answer. But we don't have the answer for you. You know? And that -- listening to that voice, and going and like giving up the sense of definition that we start to formulate around these things, in light of a bigger deeper truth or a more complete truth, I think is one of the best things you can ever do for yourself, to really honor that when it emerges, you know?  JASON: Amen to that. ANDREW: Yeah. JASON: Amen to that.  ANDREW: Cool. Well, so people should check out your Hecate course. It's going to be deep and challenging. And people should head over to your website. JASON: Good! ANDREW: Awesome. Perfect. Well, thanks again for making time, Jason. Lovely to chat with you as always.  JASON: Thank you for having me!

Jill Gets Miffed about Access with Jason Hartman Jason:                   It's my pleasure to welcome Jill DeWit and Jack Butala. They are the principals at the Land Academy and host of the Land Academy Contest. Was it Will Rogers that said, "Buy land, they're not making more of that." I could be misquoting, I don't know who said it, but anyway, welcome guys. I'm anxious to hear about what you do and talk to the audience about that as well. Welcome, how are you? Steve:                   We're great, Jason. Thank you so much, it's an honor to be on the show. Jason:                   Good to have you. Tell us a little bit about why land? I got to just prefix this with saying that until recently, I've never been a fan of vacant land. Like so many investors, I like cash flowing properties, but I interviewed someone on my show, another land guy recently and he kind of move the needle quite a bit I must admit. I was pretty interested and I have a feeling you're going to move it even more. Next time I get a tenant calling me saying something is broken, I'm going to think, "If I owned land, I wouldn't have any tenants." I know the model is different, it's a different strategy, so why don't you tell us about it? Steve:                   I'm happy to. This is probably the top 1, 2 or 3 questions that I've gotten for the last 15 years since I've been in this business and it's a misconception about rural vacant land that doesn't cash flow or that it's unwanted, that there's no real market for it. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite. Vacant land is a very, very asset type to retail customer who just want to get away from it all. Vacant land is incredibly inexpensive to purchase because there's a general lack of financing that's available for it, so sellers are very ... Because there's no financing associated with land, it's very easy to negotiate a very good price, if you know what I mean. Jason:                   Right. It's not really a credit based asset, when you buy it, you pay cash but when you sell it, you turn it into a credit based asset, and the old saying is, you can either have price or terms, but you can't have both. That's the strategy to increase the value was turn it into a credit based asset, right? Steve:                   Right. For the most part ... It's a little bit ironic but people who were very seasoned to real estate investors like you seem to have that opinion, and I guess it's been accumulated over years that vacant land doesn't cash flow. We purchase ton of it and we sell it on terms for years and years and years, so we have made it cash flow and it's been a great niche choice for us for more than 15 years for us Jill, right? Jill:                          We actually tested other models like doing renovations and flips and I'll tell you Jason, every time we stood there, scratched our heads going, how much time we spend on this, I could have made so much more just flipping some land. It's easy and it's fun and it's very profitable. Jason:                   Interesting. Tell us about your typical deal like ... There may not be a typical deal. First of all, how many transactions have you done in the world of land? Steve:                   I've completed 15,000 ... Almost 16,000 transactions now since 1999. Jason:                   Flocks, listeners, I have to apologize, we're talking to couple of amatures here. That's a little bit of experience for you, right? Steve:                   Yeah. Jason:                   That's a lot of deals, tell us about the typical deal, what's it look like? Steve:                   The typical transaction that we complete is, we purchase a piece of property for cash, that's anywhere between 5 and 40 acres, usually west to Mississippi, for anywhere between, I don't know 500 to 4 to $5,000 depending on the quality of the property. That's not the down payment, that's the actual total cash purchased for the property.

"This is ridiculous, this is amazing" is about as honest a description for fatherhood as there is. Equal parts terror and wonder, the life of new (and not so new) fathers is often beyond description. On today's HearSay we'll get a rundown of the triumphs and terrors of fatherhood from humorist, Jason Good, and we invite you to join us with your own stories from your adventures in fatherhood.

This week one of my best friends ever is on the show. My friend Jason grew up down the Street from me. We talk about baseball cards, skateboards, and stealing dynomite.