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Property management business owner, do you have an assistant? We've talked before about how important it is to build a team around you and get support as an entrepreneur. In today's episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts, Jason and Sarah Hull discuss why property management entrepreneurs need to hire an assistant for themselves. You'll Learn [01:14] The Most Important Hire in Your PM Business [02:41] How to Get a Really Good Assistant [04:57] Two Types of Team Members [06:42] When Should I Get an Assistant? [08:17] Benefits of Having an Assistant Tweetables “I think the very first person that somebody should hire. is an assistant.” “If you continue to build the team around the business, you will end up more and more miserable instead of helping yourself more and more, which actually makes you a lot more money.” “Nobody's good at being two or three different types of people.” “I've seen business owners have team members that they've gotten assistants for and they don't have an assistant for themselves.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: I've seen business owners have team members that they've gotten assistants for and they don't have an assistant for themselves. [00:00:07] That always just drives me crazy because it's so obvious that there's a problem there.  [00:00:13] 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. DoorGrow property managers, love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. [00:00:40] 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. We're your hosts, property management growth experts, Jason and Sarah Hull. And let's get into the show. All right.  [00:01:13] So today we're going to be talking about assistants, right? [00:01:16] Sarah: Yes. Why don't you have help yet? Okay.  [00:01:20] Jason: So one of the challenges that we've noticed with our clients and with other property managers is that a lot of times they don't have an assistant for themselves. And so they'll have some team members even, but they won't have an assistant that supports them. [00:01:36] And I think this is a common trap entrepreneurs fall into. I think the very first person that somebody should hire. is an assistant. You start getting yourself some help instead of just helping the business. And if you continue to build the team around the business, you will end up more and more miserable instead of helping yourself more and more, which actually makes you a lot more money. [00:01:58] That's like everything in a nutshell.  [00:02:00] Sarah: There you go. We're done. There we go. We can wrap up. Have a great day. So get an assistant.  [00:02:03] Jason: Goodbye. Alright.  [00:02:04] Sarah: Madi will edit this one and she'll be like, "oh wow, that was so fast."  [00:02:07] Jason: "Wow, that was the shortest one ever." Kidding! So let's talk about this. I have an assistant. [00:02:12] Giselle's sort of your assistant. I think. Somewhat. Operationally? No, you don't think so? Okay. All right.  [00:02:18] Sarah: She's really good at really anything because she asks people on the team and she's like, "Hey, is there anything you need help with this week?" She always usually messages me at the beginning of the week and she says, "Hey, is there like anything I should be aware of or any special projects that you need me to work on this week?" [00:02:34] And sometimes I can't think of anything until later. And then I go, "Oh, you can help me with this." And she's like, "great. I'm on it." [00:02:41] Jason: So how do we get people really good assistants? Well, we have them do one of our DoorGrow time studies to figure out which things are energetically their plus signs and which things are their minus signs. [00:02:51] And then we build out a job description, but it needs to be one personality type, not two or three different personalities that like that human being doesn't really exist.  [00:03:01] Sarah: And if they do, they're hard.  [00:03:03] Jason: There's people that can do everything.  [00:03:04] Sarah: They have like multiple personalities in one.  [00:03:07] Jason: Yeah.  [00:03:08] Sarah: Let's think about it if we want to hire them. [00:03:09] Jason: No, we don't. We don't want that person. We want somebody that's good. At being one person, right? Like in, because nobody's good at being two or three different types of people. Right. You're not going to have somebody that's like, "man, I'm the salesiest person ever and super salesy. And Oh yeah, I'm a really brilliant detail oriented operator." [00:03:27] Like it's just, for example, so we need to get you your ultimate assistant. We also then like to figure out your personality, figure out who you are. So when we get into our DoorGrow hiring, and if you need help with hiring, reach out to DoorGrow, we have a really great hiring system called DoorGrow hiring, and it's going to cost you a lot less money than working with a placement agency where they charge thousands of dollars and you'll probably get better results. [00:03:48] Not probably. You'll get better results typically because their job is just to get somebody into your office and get paid. But we assess people, we make sure they're the right personality fit. We help you make sure you have the right culture fit and the right skill fit, which I've talked about many times, the three fits. [00:04:06] So, I've had lots of assistants over the years. Lots. I've had some really amazing ones. I've had some okay ones. I haven't really had, well, I guess I've had a few like bad ones as well, right? So I've had lots and lots of assistants. And what I usually look for in hiring an assistant is I need somebody that I can trust their judgment and their intelligence to do things so that I don't have to do it. Right. And so my assistant Mar, she's better at several things than I would be. She has more patience. She's willing to like get frustrated at people if need be to like get things handled, whatever it takes.  [00:04:46] I think it's really important. A lot of people think, "well, I'll go get a VA and I'll go get some low dollar, low wage, cheap sort of worker in Mexico or the Philippines, and that'll be my first assistant." [00:04:57] So there's two types of people you're going to hire in your business. Some are people as process. People as process are basically like people you hired that function like a robot. Just do what I tell you to do. Don't get cute. Don't be clever. Just follow the checklist. [00:05:10] That's not a great assistant. It's not really a good assistant to have because you're going to have to do all the thinking for them and then give them tasks and you, then you're gonna have to show them exactly how to do every task and that's going to be really frustrating for you. That's not the ideal assistant. [00:05:25] So then there are people that are thinkers or decision makers that you can trust to make decisions without you and to make judgments. And so that's the type of assistant that you want. You want somebody that is intelligent. Intelligence is the big differentiator here. And you can tell when you're talking with people, are they bright? [00:05:46] Are they quick? Would you trust them to do things over you on the things that you're going to give them to do because they're better at those things? So you want to hire people that are intelligent, not people that just can follow tasks That's not going to be a really good assistant for you. Now later on if you do have some low level work or tasks in the business that you just want to offload, you can hire some people as process we have people on our team that are people as process. [00:06:11] They follow things. They do the same sort of work each time. They're not really involved in making a lot of decisions in the business. They don't come to our weekly meetings. They don't come to our monthly meeting, planning meetings, stuff like this. They're just doing their work and they're valuable and we appreciate them. [00:06:28] However, if you need somebody close to you, that's going to help you double your capacity and help you get accomplished a lot more, they need to be next level. They need to be higher level from that. So anything you would add to that?  [00:06:41] Sarah: I would say, let's talk about: when should I get an assistant? [00:06:46] Jason: Okay. When do you think they should get an assistant.  [00:06:48] Sarah: Like now? Now. Usually somewhere and it's different depending on your capacity, typically, it's somewhere in between the 50 and 100 door mark. It may be a little bit sooner depending on your market and is this your full time thing? Are you trying to run eight different businesses at once? [00:07:07] Like, what is your focus like? Really how much time are you spending in the business and willing to spend in the business? All of that will be factors in when this happens, but typically it's somewhere between the 50 and 100 doormark, which is why if you're in the DoorGrow mastermind, then the belt level requirements in order to reach the orange belt, which is your hundred doormark, you need to hire an assistant. It's one of the things on there and most people skip this step and they'll hire other positions in the business. They just don't hire an assistant. And I ran my business, that was the only person I had was an assistant and she was boots on the ground. And then that way, all of the stuff I didn't want to do, I didn't have to do because I had somebody else who could just take it off my plate and do it for me. So it was great. Without her, man, I don't know how I would have been able to do it. I would have had to work probably double or more. And I would have had multiple other positions in the company going at the same time. It just would have been really hard to do everything, especially the way that I did it without somebody there boots on the ground. [00:08:17] Jason: Yeah. So for me having an assistant has like been hugely beneficial so that I can free up my time like it's completely gotten me out of email. I don't look at my email. Do you email me? I probably won't see it, but I'll be told about it.  [00:08:33] Sarah: We closed on a property and he didn't see any of the stuff. Yeah, we were at the closing table and he's like, "hey, I got questions on this." [00:08:40] I'm like, yeah, that's all in your email. He's like, "oh, I don't look at my email." [00:08:43] Jason: Yeah. So, yeah, I don't like dealing with email, right? It's not like my favorite thing in the world. So I was able to offload email. I don't have to like worry too much about my schedule. I just show up and live and do what my calendar tells me to do. [00:08:57] So, having an assistant has just made things a lot easier so I can focus on higher level tasks and working on the stuff that I more enjoy doing and my assistant enjoys doing all those things. Those are things that drain me and my assistant loves it Like she messaged me last night saying how much she loves her job and how much she loves doing all this stuff for me And i'm like, "that's great because I would hate doing it." I just don't want to do a lot of those things that she does. So when to get an assistant? I think most property managers, yeah, certainly once you get up to 50, 60 doors, you're probably feeling a little bit overwhelmed as in that solopreneur sand trap, that's a great spot to get your first team member. They could be a part time assistant, but get somebody that can take some load off your plate. [00:09:40] Maybe you can graduate them the full time as you add more doors, but it's going to double your capacity. Getting a really good assistant can double your capacity overnight, especially if they're taking off your minus signs because you'll have so much more energy, so much more mental capacity, so much less decision fatigue. [00:09:57] You'll be able to get more juice out of the second half of your day if you can get those things offloaded. And so we've got some great resources for how to leverage an assistant that we can support you in at DoorGrow and how to know what an assistant should be doing, which is unique to you. And yeah, and how to make that relationship really effective. [00:10:17] So, so reach out to us and check us out at DoorGrow.Com if you're curious about any of that, and if you don't yet have an assistant, what I think's really wild to me is I've seen business owners that have hundreds of doors, hundreds. And they have an entire team and they're stressed out and they're frustrated. [00:10:34] And this happens a lot, especially in the two to 400 door range, they'll just be burnt out and they wonder why they can't get to the next level. They keep stopping their growth and adding doors and then focusing on trying to get their systems and processes dialed in and they don't have an assistant and they wonder why things are so stressful for them. [00:10:51] And it's cause they're not taking care of themselves. They're not taking care of the most important person in the business. The one person that should have the most support, they're not allowing that person to get support, and it's you, the business owner, like make sure you have an assistant. I've seen business owners have team members that they've gotten assistants for and they don't have an assistant for themselves. [00:11:12] That always just drives me crazy because it's so obvious that there's a problem there. And when I'm talking with them, they're like burnout, they're frustrated, they're hating their business, and, "oh yeah, my operator has an assistant or this person has an assistant or my property manager has an assistant property manager, but the business owner has no direct support." [00:11:32] I'm like, "'well, everybody in my team supports me,' but you didn't build the team around you. You built the team around the business." And so they're just burning themselves out. So this is your invitation. If you're listening and you don't have an assistant right now, and you have any other team members, this is your invitation, or maybe you don't have any team members yet. This is your invitation to go get yourself an assistant. I'm giving you permission that you can go get yourself an assistant. Not that you need it, but you deserve it. Like go get yourself an assistant. You can definitely afford it because if you were able to take half of your time off your plate of the crappy stuff you don't want to be doing, you could easily make a lot more money. [00:12:11] You can spend a lot more time doing revenue generating activities and growing the business. It's almost never an excuse that you financially can't afford an assistant. Because it just means you just have to spend the time doing the stuff that makes money, and you know how to make money and if you don't for some reason know how to add doors or know how to close more deals or know how to make money, we can help you do that dramatically and very quickly reach out to us at DoorGrow. So anything else we should say?  [00:12:37] Sarah: I don't think so  [00:12:38] Jason: Okay, so what's the core message?  [00:12:41] Sarah: Go get an assistant. Do it.  [00:12:43] Jason: All right. Do it now. That's it for today. So until next time to our mutual growth Bye everyone. Oh and get your tickets to DoorGrow live. [00:12:51] This is gonna be an awesome event So go get those you can go to DoorGrowlive. Com. Be there. It's going to be be cool [00:12:56] 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!  [00:13:23] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

If you are a property management entrepreneur, you have likely been your own salesperson or BDM at some point. Eventually, every property management business owner will need to hire a salesperson and develop different growth engines. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull talk about their BDM Bootcamp event You'll Learn [01:52] What is a BDM? [03:00] Get your BDM Ready for BDM Bootcamp [08:42] You Need a Sales Pipeline! [14:26] Benefits of In-Person Events Tweetables “It's not the growth strategy that's the problem. It's that there's multiple stages in a pipeline for each growth engine, and you are not identifying the leaks that exist in this pipeline.” “Your pipeline will literally never ever work if you don't even have one.” “If you're not working the pipeline and you don't know the different stages of a pipeline, you're just guessing, and you're just hoping.” “You need to get to the real pain and related that you need to get to the real pleasure, like what they really want. Nobody really wants property management” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: It's not the growth strategy that's the problem. It's that there's multiple stages in a pipeline for each growth engine and you are not identifying the leaks that exist in this pipeline or you're tolerating drop off at one of these stages.  [00:00:17] 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 a business and life. And you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. [00:00:36] 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. We're your hosts, Jason and Sarah Hull. [00:01:15] Now let's get into the show. All right. So today we're going to be talking about BDMs.  [00:01:24] Sarah: Yeah.  [00:01:26] Jason: In honor of this event that we have coming up, which is. Going to be super cool. I don't know that there's been anything like this. That's been as cool as this that's existed in the property management space, maybe ever. [00:01:39] There's a lot of people that talk about BDMs, but there's very few that are actually getting BDMs to get great results. And we're going to be hosting a BDM bootcamp. And so Before we go any further, every time I start talking about BDMs, as if everybody knows what it is. I just talked to a guy with, I think, 800 doors the other day. [00:02:00] He's like, "what's a BDM?" I was like, man, okay, I need to make sure I explained this. BDMs are business development managers. Sometimes they're called BDs, business developers and they're salespeople for property management. That's what people will call them, right? Business development can happen in any industry. [00:02:18] But the reason we use the phrase BDM in property management is because property management is closely connected to real estate. And whenever you mentioned sales, people get it confused with real estate brokerage sales type of stuff. And that's why. Now everybody knows what a BDM is, and we're going to be talking a little bit about that today. [00:02:37] Sarah: Okay.  [00:02:38] Jason: So anyone listening to the show, you better know what a BDM is from now on. That's it.  [00:02:43] Sarah: There's a quiz at the end.  [00:02:44] Jason: What is a BDM? Did you get it right? If not, go back and start this episode over.  [00:02:49] Sarah: Try again.  [00:02:51] Jason: Okay. All right. What do we talk...? Do you want to like tell them about the event? [00:02:56] What do we want to talk about?  [00:02:58] Sarah: Yes. Tell them about the event. So we are launching a BDM bootcamp. So there's a lot of companies that promote getting BDMs. And there's a lot of companies that promote getting BDMs and then spending a bunch of money to run ads and get leads and pay for leads and then have the BDM work the leads. [00:03:21] And then if you just want the BDM to close more deals, it's simple. All you have to do is spend more money and buy more leads. Which is really expensive and wildly ineffective. So we have strategies that BDMs use...  [00:03:35] Jason: that actually work  [00:03:37] Sarah: ...that are free, or at least very inexpensive. [00:03:40] You might have to pay for lunch. That's okay. You get something out of it too. And we've decided that we're going to launch a BDM, aka salesperson, boot camp. It's going to be a one day training. And we've never done anything like this before. For those of you that are current clients, there's some trainings on DoorGrow Academy. [00:04:01] We run every wednesday, our growth accelerator calls, but it's hard to amass all of this information that Jason and I have learned about sales over the last, what, 20 something years and put it in a course. Or talk about it on a one hour call. It's darn near impossible, right? So what we wanted to do is we wanted to take some of this information and spend one day going over all of it. [00:04:31] Now, this is very likely going to end up being a series because we can probably talk about sales and strategies and tactics and how to improve your scripts and what to say and like NLP language and filler words and all this good stuff, we can go over this for probably days on end. So what we're doing is this is very likely going to end up being a series, but we're going to launch the first one in April, so for those of you that are watching live, you all have a chance to get in on that for those of you that are watching this recording is will probably be released after the event, but don't fret because  [00:05:11] Jason: you may have missed it.  [00:05:12] Sarah: You might have missed it. Oh, man.  [00:05:15] Jason: Maybe you should get in our Facebook group and pay attention to the live streams. [00:05:19] So you don't miss stuff.  [00:05:20] Sarah: Sometimes we do some cool things that you need to know about right now.  [00:05:23] Jason: The Facebook group, go to doorgrowclub.Com apply. We reject 70 percent of the applicants, which is why the group is good.  [00:05:31] Sarah: Okay.  [00:05:32] Jason: Okay.  [00:05:32] Sarah: Anyway. So that was our shameless plug. All right. No, right. Go ahead. [00:05:36] If you've missed it. Yeah, we don't have a word from ourselves yet. That's a great idea. Who wants to sponsor this podcast? We'll plug you on every episode. Talk to me, baby. So anyway, if you've missed it. Sad for you, but don't fret because there's going to be more of these. This won't be a once and done thing. [00:05:55] So for those of you that are listening now and or hear the information before the event, then this is going to be for you. So here's the information. It will be Thursday, April 11th. So this is also open to anyone on your team who handles sales, meaning it might be you, it might be somebody else. You may have multiple people on the team who handle sales. So if you would like Jason and myself to train your salespeople for a day. This is a really great opportunity for you because that's exactly what we're doing. [00:06:33] So do you want to tell them a little bit about what we're talking about? Or do you want me to do that?  [00:06:38] Jason: I'll go ahead. So we've seen a lot of problems with businesses growing. And so if you, have a BDM or if you are the BDM, you're the business owner, you're the one that closes deals and you are not adding at least a hundred orders a year, hopefully through organic methods instead of wasting a bunch of money on advertising to get cold crappy leads, we're going to give you the strategies, we're going to focus on some different growth engines talking about those. We're going to get into specific pipeline stages because what I often identify is that it's not the growth strategy that's the problem. It's that there's multiple stages in a pipeline for each growth engine and you are not identifying the leaks that exist in this pipeline, or you're tolerating drop off at one of these stages. And not making progress and so we're going to help you identify where the leaks are if you've started building some of these growth engines, you may have started doing things like trying to do realtor referrals and it's not working very well. [00:07:39] You're not getting easily 10 doors a month from that. You might maybe you've heard of our neighbor strategy and you're not getting referrals from that. Maybe you've heard of some other of our strategies, it's not working. And if you haven't heard of these, then you might want to show up, but we're going to talk about the different stages. [00:07:55] We're going to talk about what maybe is affecting things at different stages. This will be very tailored to those that are in attendance. We want to help you move your business forward significantly. And sometimes there's very simple tweaks that could be done at each of these stages that opens the floodgates. [00:08:10] So you have a lot more flow through the pipeline, which means more deals and more money.  [00:08:15] Sarah: Yeah. So back up because you skipped to topic number two, which is cool. We can do two and then one and then three and then four, but that's fine.  [00:08:21] Jason: They're not numbered.  [00:08:22] Sarah: They're not, but they are in order on the document. [00:08:24] Jason: Okay.  [00:08:25] Sarah: Yeah. [00:08:25] Jason: So Sarah's an operator and everything has to be done a certain way. There is a right way for operators.  [00:08:32] Sarah: There's a right way to do literally every task on the planet.  [00:08:34] Jason: I'm talking to the business owners and they care most about what is interesting or different, but...  [00:08:42] Sarah: yes, and I understand, but your pipeline will literally never ever work if you don't even have one. [00:08:50] Jason: That's true.  [00:08:51] Sarah: Or you don't know the stages of a pipeline because a lot of times, and I bet this happens to you too, but it happens to me when I ask people, okay, "what does your sales process look like?" [00:09:00] " Oh, I talked to somebody." "Okay, great. And then what?" "Oh, and then I send them some information." "Great. And then what?" [00:09:05] Jason: "I wait." [00:09:06] Sarah: "Oh, then I wait." "Oh, okay. Like, do you call them again or do you check in or do you like set up another call?"  [00:09:13] Jason: "Or I follow up in a way that I look needy and creepy?"  [00:09:16] Sarah: Sometimes the answer is yes. And then sometimes the answer is no, but even if they do follow up or have another call or check in again, somehow, then my next question again is "okay, and then what?" And then they go, "oh, and then I just wait." So essentially what happens is you have no pipeline. Okay. And you don't know that you don't have a pipeline, but you don't have a pipeline. [00:09:35] And that means if you're not working the pipeline and you don't know the different stages of a pipeline, we're just guessing, and we're just hoping. We're going, "I don't know. I keep talking to all these people, but nothing seems to be closing. And I don't understand why," because you don't have pipeline stages. [00:09:49] Jason: Okay.  [00:09:49] Sarah: So you got to need a pipeline.  [00:09:51] Jason: So we'll teach you how to build out the pipeline. We'll talk about the different stages that need to exist. And then it'll be a lot more clear and we'll talk with you about how to build that out in your CRM of choice. So you'll understand the principles. [00:10:04] You can go apply this to whatever CRM you use, whether it's DoorGrow CRM or lead simple or whatever else is out there. Okay, I'll go to number three now that we're back in order. Okay. All right. Number three, [00:10:19] Uncovering your client's pain points. So superficially people think they know the pain of their target audience. So they want their property manager. They don't want to have to deal with managing the rental property. That is not the real pain that gets you to close deals that you have to go a lot deeper than that. [00:10:36] And so we're going to talk about how to disarm people, how to not come across as super salesy, how to create authentic communication and an authentic relationship where they believe that you can help them and how to get them to open up about what the real pain is, the real stress of the real emotion that might be motivating them to have a conversation with you. [00:11:00] And one of the biggest problems we see in sales is that a lot of people don't take time to identify what the real pain is. The pain often has not really anything to do with the rental property. It's something going on in their personal life. And so you need to figure out how to connect to that. [00:11:16] And for some that's like, "Whoa," that's like, "I don't know how to do that. That'd be weird or awkward," but you need to get to the real pain and related that you need to get to the real pleasure, like what they really want. Nobody really wants property management, right? Just like if you're booking a trip to Hawaii. [00:11:34] Property management is the flight to Hawaii. It's not the paradise. It's not the outcome that they're hoping for. It is property management. So we want to sell the trip. We want to sell Hawaii, not the flight there, right? Which is property management. So we'll talk about also getting towards the, not just the pain, but the pleasure. [00:11:54] Those are the 2 ingredients you really need to know and uncover in order to close the deal. And so if you're not closing deals, it's probably because somebody else is better at that than you. You're one of your competitors, or they're just going to go with the cheapest company because you haven't really created a connection. [00:12:11] And so they think you're a commodity. You do everything everyone else does. And so that we'll get into that. All right. So good?  [00:12:18] Sarah: That was good.  [00:12:19] Jason: Number four, reviewing and improving your call scripts to book more appointments and close more deals. So we want to like, take a look at what are you saying? And you may think, "I don't have scripts. [00:12:30] I'm just awesome. I just wing it every time." I guarantee 90 percent of the time, you're saying similar things, dealing with objections in similar ways. And so you have a script. It just probably isn't a very clearly defined one, which means it's probably not a very good one because you haven't taken an objective look at it to optimize or improve it. [00:12:50] And so we're going to take a look at some scripts that are effective and figure out ways to improve your scripts. And sometimes it's not even about what you're saying. It's about how you say it. And so we're going to focus on some of the magic that comes with how you communicate with people. I've got clients that are not salespeople, like no real training in sales, terrible at sales. And they're crushing it because they know how to be authentic. They are communicating in a way that's disarming and they're just being helpful. And so we're going to talk about some of that stuff. How to close more deals. Some of you that are so good at sales, you're super salesy, you like cut your teeth as a baby in real estate and like you're a shark, like we're going to help you figure out how to undo a lot of that mess so that you can create more trust and sales and deals happen at the speed of trust. [00:13:44] And so we're going to help you close more business, which will make things a lot better. Okay.  [00:13:50] Sarah: That's what we've got. All right. That's our agenda. And if this sounds interesting to you, now, our hope is that once you come to this event, you'll obviously get a lot out of it and learn a lot about sales that we just typically can't cover on a one hour call. [00:14:07] It's just, it's too much. I can talk about 1 of those things for more than an hour. Right? Once you come to this event, you'll learn a lot and you'll be able to immediately implement these things so that very quickly, you will start seeing some changes and some positive results and momentum.  [00:14:24] Jason: So why do this in person? [00:14:26] So let me talk about that. One of the things we've noticed in DoorGrow's, I'm starting to call it the real bubble. And so there's this mentality, I think, unconsciously in our brain. So when we're doing stuff on zoom calls and zoom meetings, which we do a lot of cool stuff that way DoorGrow, but we've noticed that when we get people in person for the first time they meet Sarah and I and realize we're real human beings. [00:14:48] We're not just something on video and that we're real and they can like hug us. And like we touch right? Like then something shifts in their brain that everything else they're saying is real. When they start to meet clients that they've seen on some of the Zoom calls, sharing their wins and talking about crushing it and adding doors. [00:15:07] They're like, "Oh, these are real people." And then the brain shifts and they start to connect that, "Hey, if they're real, and this is real and they're getting real results and they're like me, I'm a human, like I can do this too." And all of this stuff is actually true, impossible. And so we've noticed a shift in clients once they come to DoorGrow live, which is coming up in May, or they come to one of our in person events. [00:15:32] And so we want to do this in person because there's something magical about in person that content and information is absorbed. A lot more easily. There's also that sort of kinesthetic aspect that we're there physically but the learning is a bit more experiential. We'll be able to maybe even role play, go over some scripts, talk, like, say things. [00:15:52] It's just a bit more real than just seeing something on video or watching a video replay or something like that. And so come pierce the real veil with DoorGrow and realize the real magic that exists.  [00:16:03] Sarah: All right. Yes. And at this point you guys might be wondering all right, so this sounds pretty good. [00:16:09] I think I might be interested. What do I do? Contact me. Don't contact anybody else on the team. They're not even going to know what you're talking about. Just contact me so you can get in touch with me. It's Sarah S-A-R-A-H. If you go to our website and you end up talking with somebody else on the team, they will point you in my direction and you can get registered that way. [00:16:29] Now, tickets for this will be 1k per person. You can have as many people on your team attend as you would like. So if you have 3 BDMs and you want to send all 3. If there's just one or two, maybe that you want to send or you want to come check it out yourself, go ahead. But you'll need to let me know now spots are going to be limited. I don't even have 20 spots. I actually need to go back and confirm how many I have left because I know we had some people interested. But the price for this will be 1k per person. And I know that the price will not stay. At that rate. [00:17:03] So we're launching it and we're doing something special with the price. So for now, take us our one case. So get in while the cost is low.  [00:17:12] Jason: There you go. All right. You will easily offset the cost of doing this. For most of you, that's like getting one more deal, right? So lifetime value for most of your clients, probably a lot higher, like maybe 10 times. [00:17:27] Maybe 20 times higher if you can keep them a while, right? So this is a no brainer. This is very easy and we can get your BDM adding a lot more doors. So just like some client results, we've got clients that are easily some BDM are adding 200- 300 doors a year organically without paying for any SEO or pay per click or content marketing or social media marketing or pay per lead services like APM and they're able to grow and scale their business quickly through organic methods. [00:17:56] Sarah: And we have some clients that turn business away every single month because they just cannot.  [00:18:02] Jason: Get pickier and pickier.  [00:18:03] Sarah: Yeah, they're backlogged. And then they ask us on the calls what do I do? Like, "I don't want to say no, but then I can't take on this many." And we're like, "now you have a waiting list and you can take on X money per month." [00:18:14] And if they can't come on this month or they missed that deadline, then roll them over to the next month. If they qualify.  [00:18:20] Jason: Okay. All right. So that is BDM bootcamp. So check out BDM bootcamp, reach out to sarah@doorgrow.Com. Sarah with an H.  [00:18:28] Sarah: Yeah, if you spell my name wrong, I'm not talking to you cause I won't get it. [00:18:32] Jason: Okay. That's your punishment.  [00:18:34] Wow. Okay.  [00:18:35] Sarah: So don't forget my H because everyone does.  [00:18:38] Jason: Just email me. I'm nicer.  [00:18:40] Sarah: He never checks his email. Don't email him. That's true.  [00:18:42] Jason: My assistant does. Don't do it. All right.  [00:18:44] Sarah: You'll never hear back the black hole.  [00:18:46] Jason: No, my assistant's good. She'll take care of it. I just won't see it. [00:18:51] She'll tell me about it if it's important. All right. For those of you that are wanting to join a community, be part of something awesome, reach out to us. And so you can learn more about DoorGrow Mastermind. You get access to some of the coolest stuff and to be part of the coolest community of the most growth minded property management business owners in the industry. [00:19:11] And we can help you get your business to the next level. So whether it's scaling operations, whether it's figuring out how to grow, whether it's cleaning up the front end of your business, getting your website and your pricing, right, all this kind of stuff. So we can help you. All right. Check us out at doorgrow. com until next time to our mutual growth, everybody. Bye for now. [00:19:33] 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!  [00:19:59] 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.

Property management entrepreneurs… how many hats are you currently wearing? It's easy for business owners to get stuck doing things they don't actually enjoy doing. Property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull talk about how to get out of the roles you don't enjoy and into the roles you do. You'll Learn [03:17] The myth of wanting to clone yourself [07:51] The pros of a great hiring system [13:46] Which hat do you take off first? [17:58] Next steps Tweetables “That you need 10 people to clone yourself as an entrepreneur.” “A generalist that's good at everything is never the best.” “For every role that exists, there's always a person to fill it who actually really love doing that role.” “If you have office politics, you've got a culture problem.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Sarah: For every role that exists, there's always a person to fill it who actually really love doing that role.  [00:00:09] Jason: Welcome DoorGrowers, 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 DoorGrower. DoorGrower 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. We're your hosts, property management growth experts, Jason Hull and Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGrow. [00:01:03] Now let's get into the show. All right, so we released a funny video. So if you have not seen any of our funny videos, we put out quite a few of these. We have a whole playlist of them on YouTube. You can go to youtube.com/doorgrow and go to our playlist and look for our playlist of funny videos. Our newest funny video that we released is all about hats. [00:01:28] It's got a whole bunch of hats and it's silly, and I'm putting on different hats, and so if you want to laugh at me. Go check that out. we thought we would talk about this idea today. So what's the idea?  [00:01:40] Sarah: So the idea is are you wearing too many hats, aka are you filling too many roles in your property management business?  [00:01:50] Jason: All right, so when you first start out, you have to wear every hat, right? [00:01:55] You do everything in the business because it's all on you. You're like, "Oh, let me send that over to my maintenance coordinator... who's me. And let me get that over to my bookkeeper... who is also me. And Oh, my receptionist will answer my calls for me today because that's me." What are some of the hats that property managers are wearing. [00:02:15] Sarah: There's so many of them. Let's see. There's maintenance coordinator, a leasing agent, there's usually the bookkeeper, whoever's going to handle finances, there's of course the CEO who's going to set the vision of the company, there's the operator who's going to do things on the backend, there's the salesperson or the BDM, there's usually like a property manager, there's sometimes assistant property managers... As companies grow, they sometimes get tenant coordinators or client coordinators like just to handle like tenant or client communications. But when you start out, like all of this is usually you. [00:02:55] Jason: One of the things that I hear a lot from early stage entrepreneurs, people that are just getting started is they're like, "I just need to clone myself. I just need to find somebody else. Just like me." And so this is the big mistake that everybody makes initially in hiring. It's everybody does it like we all go and try and find somebody like ourselves. [00:03:15] That's what we think hiring is. We think hiring is cloning ourselves. The challenge with that is that the clone myth, as I call it, the reality is that you need 10 people to clone yourself as an entrepreneur. You need a different person for each hat. [00:03:32] Because if you find somebody that is as adaptable as you and that can do everything like you and is driven like you, guess what they're going to do? They're going to do what you did and they're going to leave and go start their own company. I've seen this over and over again where people hire a clone and the clone does exactly what a clone would do. They become like you and they leave and sometimes take your clients and start their own business and become your competition. And so we don't want to fall prey to the clone myth. We want to find specialists that we can give pieces of what we do or hats to that are really good at that particular hat and a generalist that's good at everything is never the best. [00:04:17] You are not the best at every role. You probably think, "nobody else could do it as good as me." This is the other belief that early stage entrepreneurs say. "Nobody else can do it as well as me. I might as well do it myself." And that's a trap. It's a trap that keeps you doing everything forever. And if you believe that, then that means you will by default be comfortable getting crappy team members that are worse than you at these hats. [00:04:42] Because if you believe that you're the best and nobody else could be better than you, then you will go hire people and you will tolerate people that are worse than you at these particular roles. And then you'll be frustrated and I have a team of people that are better at their particular roles than I would be and this gives me a lot of confidence being able to let go of stuff. Like Sarah is way better at the details way better operations way better at putting things together. Like you've significantly improved the business and she's better at all of those things than I am and there's things that I'm better at than Sarah, but that allows me to stay in those areas I get to stay in those areas where I am better at those things than Sarah and then we have different team members Adam, and Mar, and they're all better at their particular tasks than I would be. [00:05:31] Sarah: Or I would be. Yeah.  [00:05:33] Absolutely. And that's what you want, is you want someone who is better at whatever this is than you are, especially if you don't enjoy it. So if you've got things in your business that you're holding on to and you think, "oh, I'll just never find somebody who loves maintenance coordination. Like who on the world would love to do that job because it's horrible?" Somebody will love it. [00:05:59] Somebody who likes details and organization and they like having a plan and a structure and a system. There are people who function that way and they really enjoy that. And it's so funny because Jason was like, "for every role that exists, there's always a person to fill it who actually really love doing that role." And it's true. It's really true.  [00:06:22] Jason: That's a good point because early stage entrepreneurs also believe that because they hate doing something like if you hate maintenance coordination, you're like, "man, if I never have to do another maintenance escalation or talk to a tenant again, I'd be so happy." [00:06:37] A lot of times entrepreneurs believe that means nobody else would like it either. It's really a self centered, self centric view to believe that the rest of the world are like you. They're not. Like one of my mentors would say, there are people out there that like changing bedpans, you know? [00:06:52] And I've said that to some people that were nurses or something like that. And they're like, "yeah, I do. I feel like I'm helping them."  [00:06:58] And I'm like, "that's great. I wouldn't want to do that.  [00:07:00] Sarah: Like Evelyn, she says, "I don't like the changing of the bedpans, but I do like that when I do that, I know that I'm helping somebody who can't do it for themselves." [00:07:07] Jason: Yeah. And so she's happy to do it.  [00:07:10] Sarah: You can't pay me enough money in this world to change a bedpan.  [00:07:13] Jason: There is not enough money in this entire universe. That's my sister in law. And yeah that's wild. And so I want everyone listening to believe that there are people out there that can do the things that are your minus signs. [00:07:26] You can find people that's their plus signs and they will do it better than you. If you believe there are people out there that can do it better than you, there's a lot of dinosaur bosses. This is how you know you're a dinosaur boss. If you're the person that just believes everybody in the younger generation is terrible and there's no good hires out there available and nobody wants to work, then guess what you're going to find and attract when you go onto your job search? [00:07:51] There are great people out there. And if you build a really good hiring process, you can find and attract them. But the great people don't want to work for a dinosaur boss, like somebody that just believes that 'if I pay you, you should just do it and you should just like it and just suck it up.' [00:08:06] Because that's not very inspiring and people have options nowadays. They don't have to stay at a job very long. They can go work elsewhere. And the way that we retain team members is we create a culture of people that all share the same vision, same mission to transform property management, business owners. [00:08:23] And because we hire specialists and hire people that are really dialed in personality wise for that particular role that we know they can be great at it. And because each of our team members are great, it creates this sense of mutual respect on the team. Everybody on our team likes each other. Yeah. And they respect each other. [00:08:42] And in our daily huddles, they're like celebrating each other and sharing, like pointing out how awesome different team members were because they can see that these team members are really good at the things they do and it's things they're not good at or wouldn't want to have to do.  [00:08:57] Sarah: Morgan just said, I think, when she came back from leave, I was catching up with her. And then she was on some coaching calls with clients and she shared part of it with me. And I just had this conversation with one of our clients, and she said, "everybody on our team. I love them. Like I really like these people. I work with them every day, but I really enjoy working with them." And she said, "if anybody on the team came to me with any task and said, 'Hey, like I could really use your help on this.'" She says, "I would do it in a heartbeat. I wouldn't even flinch. I would do it in a heartbeat and I would want to do it because I care about these people and I want to help them."  [00:09:34] Jason: And that's because we've created a culture initially entirely around what I want. Like I as the visionary gets to set the culture of the company and I created values and everything. [00:09:47] Now, when Sarah became an owner, we took a fresh look at them. And we revisit them and then I don't think we really changed much.  [00:09:55] Sarah: No, we didn't. I gave her an opportunity to have input, but... [00:09:59] would you, if I wasn't a value match, would you have brought me into the company? You wouldn't have hired me, but nevermind ownership of the company. You don't give ownership of a company to somebody that's like not a culture.  [00:10:10] Jason: If you weren't a value match, we probably wouldn't be married. And so this is the thing. There's a lot of couples in property management. I've noticed we get a lot of couple clients, husband and wife teams. [00:10:21] And it's very typical that the husband is more visionary, sales, wild, cowboy, entrepreneur and that the wife is like stable, crusher of all hopes and dreams, just kidding, grounded, practical, make sure everything works operator personality type. Yeah.  [00:10:38] Sarah: Sometimes we do see, they're like, "we're going to do this crazy big thing!" [00:10:41] And operators were like, "we can't afford that. Cool, but that sounds really insane. So what can we actually do and how can we actually make it happen?" So like we are the ones who make sure that things happen instead of just,  [00:10:57] Jason: yeah.  [00:10:57] Sarah: We're not the crusher of the dreams. [00:10:58] We're the dream makers.  [00:11:00] Jason: They're the dream. Yeah. They bring it into reality. The "maker-happeners". ,  [00:11:04] That's good. That's really good.  [00:11:05] Sarah: It's so good. Madi's going to laugh so hard when she's editing this. She's going to go, "that's not a word."  [00:11:10] Jason: Maker-happeners.  [00:11:11] Sarah: The word now, Madi.  [00:11:13] Jason: This is my Maker-happener. [00:11:15] And yeah, we've got this mutual respect that exists on the team, and if you don't like your team, be honest. If your team increases your pressure and noise, if they stress you out, if you are frustrated at your team members, you have the wrong team and it's your fault. You created it, you allowed it, and you kept these people because you probably thought that's just how business works or that's what's available.  [00:11:40] Sarah: Even if you're like, "Oh no, I like everybody," but does everybody like everybody else? Because if your team doesn't like each other, how quick do you think they're going to be to really jump in and help the other one? Because everybody needs help at some point. [00:11:52] Like deadlines come and things happen or whatever. Like summer happens and we're like, "Oh my God! I thought like I had more time on this and all these leases are due. Can somebody help me?" There is going to be a point in which someone on your team needs help from somebody else that doesn't usually do that thing. [00:12:07] And if they don't like each other, they're not going to help each other. They're going to go, "Oh yeah, look at Susie. She can't even do her own job."  [00:12:14] Jason: Yeah. If you have office politics, you've got a culture problem. If you've got you may have team members that secretly don't even like you and you may not know it, but you can tell. You can feel it. [00:12:25] Most employees probably here in the U. S., that standard American employee doesn't really like their job. They just want safety and certainty. They want stability. They're not there because it's giving them a sense of fulfillment, freedom, contribution, support. It's like the best thing and they love it. [00:12:41] So that means they're B players. A players are what we have on our team at DoorGrow. B players are what one of my mentors called hiders. Their secret goal if they were really honest would be to do as little work as possible, get paid as much as possible, and then they go and complain about you and live for the weekend. [00:13:02] And so if they love the weekend way more than they love their day-to-day, there's probably a problem. Like you want team members that are like, "man, I'm really excited. I love getting to do what I get to do." If I didn't have the role that I have or get to do what I get to do, I would feel probably lost, depressed, and bored out of my mind. [00:13:23] I love getting to do what I get to do. And my guess is that most of the people on my team would probably feel that same way. If they just had nothing to do. So I don't know, maybe there's some that would love to just not work ever a day in their life. I don't know. But for me, that would be crazy. [00:13:39] Sarah: Not anymore.  [00:13:40] Jason: So what else can we talk about related to getting rid of these hats? Because in the beginning they're wearing every hat. How did they decide which had to get off first?  [00:13:49] Sarah: What are the things that you like? Because those are the things you should keep. [00:13:54] And not just "Oh, that's annoying," or like "it's okay, but I don't love it." The things that you really don't like, the things where, like for me it was talking to tenants, that was what it was for me, and sales. I hated sales. I hated doing sales. I was really good at it, but I just, I hated it. Look at, the things that you do and the things that you like, you tend to get them done pretty quickly. Yeah, if you like going through emails. You're going to do that and there's going to be very little friction there. [00:14:23] No one's going to have to say "Oh, did you check your email?" But if you hate going through emails and you're like, "oh my god. Like why is email even a thing? I don't even know why we have to do this," You're going to procrastinate. Yeah. It's going to build up and you're probably not the right person to be doing it. [00:14:41] Jason: Yeah. If there's anything that's been on your to do list for more than a month, it's probably because you are not the person that should be doing it. That's a pretty big clue. One of the big mistakes I see people make when getting their initial hire is they try and find team members to wear multiple hats. [00:14:57] They're like, "I'm going to get an appointment setter slash assistant."  [00:15:02] Sarah: My favorite is, "my operator is also going to do sales for me."  [00:15:05] Jason: Oh yeah.  [00:15:06] Sarah: No, they're not.  [00:15:08] Jason: And why that's a problem is these are opposite personality types. If we're picking people that are two different personality types. If we're giving them a role that's two different personality types, then we are setting them up for some sort of failure. [00:15:21] And they're not going to really do well at the one that is not their personality type. And so we need to make sure we're not throwing multiple hats onto a person. We're trying to offload multiple hats that are different personality types. It's not going to work. We need specialists that are the right personality for the role. [00:15:39] So at DoorGrow, we are experts on matching the right personality types, knowing the personality types that you need for particular roles. There's a certain personality type for a BDM, for an operator, for a receptionist, for maintenance coordinator, property manager, leasing agent. [00:15:54] There's certain personality types that are good at these. And if you hire based on skill, you will miss the personality. And so hiring based on personality and based on culture are more important for the team and for the role. So usually the first person that we recommend in our DoorGrow code that most entrepreneurs get initially to get the most leverage would be an assistant. [00:16:19] Like maybe around 50 units, you should have your own assistant. But we've got clients that come to us with hundreds of doors and they still don't even have an assistant for themselves. They just keep hiring to take care of the business while not taking care of themselves. So they're not really taking hats off or giving up stuff. [00:16:35] They're just helping the business out. And so they end up more and more stressed the bigger the team gets. So a big piece of this is you need to make sure that you are taking care of yourself and the way we help our clients get clarity on themselves in clarity on what are their minus signs versus their plus signs, what they, what drains them versus what gives them energy is by doing a time study. [00:16:57] And this gives them a lot of clarity on how do I get to the next level? How do I offload the negative things so that I can spend more time in my area of genius and wearing the hats that I want to wear? And then we build out job descriptions and et cetera. So we have this whole process for taking entrepreneurs through to give them a lot of clarity. [00:17:14] Then later. Maybe around 200 plus the most important hire that you will ever make in the business will be to get an operator. If your spouse is already an operator, then you already have the most important person that you will ever bring into the business on your team, which is amazing and awesome. This person needs to be very intelligent. [00:17:34] They need to be sharp. They need to be driven to getting systems and processes dialed in. They want to see the business succeed. They handle all the details. They make everything work and they make sure that the team makes everything work. And this allows you to spend more time in the visionary role or in the sales role or whatever it is as a visionary entrepreneur that you really enjoy. [00:17:55] All right. Anything else related to hats?  [00:17:58] Sarah: So I think if you're listening to this and you're going, "yeah, but I'm still doing all this stuff and I would like to offload that, but I don't think I have the money to offload that," because this is what we hear next is, "yeah, that would be great, but I can't afford it. I can't afford to hire, two or three or eight people."  [00:18:18] Jason: So we have processes for this, but we have to back you out of the corner. You've painted yourself into, so first we do need to get you clarity on what you do enjoy and what would make you more money because it doesn't make sense to go get somebody if you could create more leverage, right? And so sometimes it's about creating more leverage related to time right now. So we have processes for helping you get even more done. Like one of my clients did a time study and recently and said that he had found that he was spending an hour after three o'clock, he was spending an hour to get things done that took him 10 minutes in the morning. [00:18:56] And so part of it is just clarity on your circadian rhythm, your time, like your energy, whether you're getting good enough sleep. So we worked on some hacks to increase his brain's bandwidth so that he could do more later in the day and get a lot more done. This may triple the output of what he can accomplish. [00:19:15] Then we have processes like daily planning time studies. We have these different things that help you get more yield from your day. We have a training called the priorities training. It talks about how Sarah was able to run her business with over 60 percent profit margin with only one part time person up to 260 units. [00:19:34] Which is crazy. They add units too.  [00:19:36] Yeah. C class properties. Yeah. In a rough area. Yeah. And she was able to reduce a lot of the communication, a lot of the friction and systematize the business so that it could run very efficiently. And so we train clients on how to do that. We get people come to us and they're like, "I'm burnt out at 50 units." [00:19:55] Sometimes they're like, "I'm stuck at a hundred units. Like I just can't handle anymore." And you can. There's ways of making this easier.  [00:20:04] Sarah: But you can't give nothing changes, right? So if everything stays the same, you're right. You can't, but you need to make some changes probably to yourself and in your business. [00:20:15] And then all of a sudden it will allow more space and you'll be able to add on more units.  [00:20:21] Jason: This is where good coaching comes in is we can help you get more yield from your day, create more bandwidth so that you can spend more time growing the business. We give you the strategies to grow. You make more money. [00:20:32] So a lot of times clients come to us in that scenario. I'm like, "let's create some space and then let's get you focusing on revenue generating stuff. Let's get you making a lot more money. And then let's make sure we hire what you actually need most. So you can spend more time making more money because then you're making smart, strategic moves when you hire. Instead of just hiring what the business needs, which can be really expensive if you make mistakes. And if you get any bad hires, we have a really great hiring system called DoorGrow hiring. One bad hire is going to cost you minimum 10 grand because you're going to spend probably at least three months on them of pay, there's a certain amount of money they're going to cost you and you're going to lose out on because they weren't generating revenue or helping to keep revenue. So there's a lot like bad hires are one of the most expensive and costly things you can do and it eats up your time, which is the most valuable resource in the business. [00:21:24] When you're onboarding and training somebody that's never going to be good at it. And so we can help with that as well, helping you get really good team members and collapse time on hiring. We've helped companies replace entire teams, cut their staffing costs in half like overnight, she does this stuff and and build out really good hiring systems and processes so that you can get people quickly and scale quickly as you're adding doors. [00:21:49] We have the stuff to help with all of that.  [00:21:51] Sarah: We do. Cool. If you're hearing this and you're like, "man, that would be really nice, then you should reach out. Contact us. Get on a call. Go to doorgrow.Com. You can see what we're all about, what we do. You can book a call. If you're like, "hey, this is for me and I'm ready to go right now," cool. [00:22:06] Sign up. Join our mastermind and you'll have some awesome coaches to support you.  [00:22:10] Jason: Yeah. Some of you listening are feeling really stressed out. Every business owner has been there. Some of you listening have felt really stuck. [00:22:19] It's just things aren't moving forward. You can't figure out why the marketing stuff isn't working. You're not really adding doors. You're not getting ahead. You're getting stressed. You're getting burnt out. You probably cannot see yourself doing this for five more years. And you need to reach out for help. [00:22:36] One of the most difficult things for entrepreneurs to do in especially early stage entrepreneurs is to humble ourselves. To be humble and to realize we could use some help and ask for help. We just we always think we can handle it all ourselves, like we've got it. "If I just watch enough youtube videos or try and get enough free stuff I can figure out." Or "if I just work hard enough I can save a dollar and do it myself or if I read enough books..." and so our goal at DoorGrow is to help you collapse time and make a lot more money. You can probably figure it all out, and I've seen people work really hard at doing this, but it will probably take you a decade to figure it all out. Whereas we could probably help you figure it out in a small fraction of the time. We've done it over and over again. So if you're feeling stuck or frustrated, reach out to us, let us help you make it make sense financially. We will help you justify the financial expense of working with us because really, a good coaching program should be making you money, not costing you money. [00:23:40] And if you do what we tell you to do, you will be making more money. Our program pays for itself. This is why we have probably the lowest churn rate in the entire industry. We keep clients because they're winning. [00:23:52] So reach out to us at DoorGrow. We would love to help you get going.  [00:23:55] Sarah: Be open, just be open to do things a little differently. [00:23:59] And if that's the case, if you are interested at all in having your company and your business and your life, just be better and different than this might be for you.  [00:24:11] Jason: The slowest path to growth is to do it all yourself or to think you can do it all yourself. That is it for today. So until next time to our mutual growth. Make sure you join our facebook group at doorgrowclub.Com. We have a bunch of free stuff in there and reach out to us at DoorGrow at doorgrow.Com We would love to help you grow your business. Bye everyone [00:24:30] 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!  [00:24:57] 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.

Savvy property management entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for new ways to expand their services and better serve their clients and residents. In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull chat with Nick Friedman, founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk and Trash Butler. You'll Learn [02:08] Becoming an entrepreneur [09:14] Daily trash removal for multifamily communities [16:45] A butler service for trash? How does it work? [19:47] Vetting team members [27:50] Junk removal services for property managers Tweetables “Property managers are that front-line resource for all things community.” “We've got to have urgency of effort, patience for the results.” “Culture drives behavior. Behavior drives results.” “Execution is a differentiator if you can out-execute everybody else.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Nick: I have come to realize, because we're in a blue collar industry ourselves, moving furniture and picking up trash at residents' doorsteps. Execution is a differentiator if you can out execute everybody else.  [00:00:14] Jason: All right. Welcome DoorGrowers 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 a business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrower. DoorGrower property managers, love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. [00:00:39] 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. [00:00:56] 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, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow and Sarah Hull, the co owner and COO of DoorGrow. [00:01:12] Now let's get into the show. All right. And our guest today is Nick Friedman. Did I say your name right?  [00:01:20] You got it right.  [00:01:21] Cool. And Nick has two different businesses. And why don't you introduce the two businesses and then I'd love to get into your background of how you got into entrepreneurship. [00:01:30] Nick: Absolutely. So two businesses that are relevant to property management, one is a doorstep amenity for apartment complexes called Trash Butler. It helps increase revenue and net operating income for the communities while also providing an amenity for the residents and that kind of incubated out of our first company that we launched, which is a company called College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving. I'm a little more widely known for that business that I started back in college. It's a moving and bulk removal service that now has over 300 franchises across the U.S. So it's been a fun journey and a very entrepreneurial journey to say the least. [00:02:08] Jason: Awesome. So Nick, when did you first realize you were an entrepreneur that you were a little bit weird?  [00:02:13] Nick: I would have to say in retrospect, it was all the way into my early days of childhood. My sister had a lemonade stand in front of our house. She wanted to charge 25 cents for lemonade. I went out and started a competing lemonade next to hers and I wanted to charge a dollar for my lemonade because I thought my lemonade was better and I think we probably sold the same amount of cups, but I made four times the amount of money than she did because I was charging a dollar then she was charging 25 cents. So in hindsight, I think I would always do some out of the box things. My teachers would call me a little bit restless. But really our business innovation took place when we were in college. Because we had always been brought up and told to follow the more traditional career path, work hard in school, get good grades, get a job after you graduate, climb up that ladder. [00:02:56] And the summer before my senior year of college. My buddy's mom had a beat up cargo van from her furniture store and she said, "why don't you guys go do something with the van? You guys could move furniture, haul trash, you guys could be like college hunks who haul junk," and we just started laughing about it decided to put that on flyers and the phone started ringing so we were in business and realized that the name was catchy. [00:03:18] People appreciated quality service and and that was the light bulb moment for us to pursue a career of entrepreneurship and not the traditional path.  [00:03:26] Jason: There you go. So thank goodness for that truck, right? That's right. Changed your life.  [00:03:31] Nick: Totally changed our life. We credit her with the name. Yeah. [00:03:34] Jason: Competing with the sister. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think for me, it was my entrepreneurial mom who was a real estate agent. She just, she was always hustling, trying to figure out how to make money. And she would have us fold flyers for her and canvas neighborhoods.  [00:03:50] Nick: And that's really when we realized the niche for us is very much so within property management, right? [00:03:56] Because. A homeowner or business might move every couple of years, might have junk to be removed every so often, but property managers are that front line resource for all things community, whether that's residents who are moving in and out, whether that's bulk trash is being left behind and needs to get turned around for the next move in. And then that ultimately, as I mentioned, incubated our Trash Butler business, which is more of a recurring revenue model, but it produces income for the apartment complexes that we partner with. It was an evolution for us. I always tell the story when we 1st started, we were doing all the work ourselves. [00:04:29] So we went out and we bought an 800 number. And we slapped it on the back of our truck, trying to make ourselves look bigger, but it was still routed to our cell phone. And so people would call to complain about erratic driving and we'd be in the driver's seat answering the phone, pretending like we weren't, saying, "Oh yeah, we'll fire those guys when they get back on the road, yeah, they're the worst." Yeah. Yeah. "We don't condone that driving in our company." So we probably fired ourselves at least three or four times. And I'm sure, your property manager listeners can relate to that. When they first started their business, you're doing all the work yourself. [00:04:59] You're fixing the doorknobs, you're changing out the light bulbs and everything in between. And one of our mentors recommended to us that we read a book called the E Myth Revisited, it's by a guy named Michael Gerber. And in it really emphasizes the notion of working on your business, not just in your business, creating systems and processes for the business to scale, which is obviously what you're doing for folks. [00:05:20] And so I think that was the next light bulb moment for us is if we're ever going to have another truck. Let alone another location, let alone eventually a second business. We've got to start documenting how we do everything.  [00:05:31] Jason: Yeah. And is that what kind of helped it take off? [00:05:34] Nick: I describe ourselves as a 20 year overnight success because it feels like it took that long for us to get to where we are. [00:05:40] It really did. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners and leaders have a level of impatience, which is good. But I always preach to our team, we've got to have urgency of effort, patience for the results, because if we get up every day, grind it out, and then we look a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, based on that consistent grind, we're going to see long term results start to manifest. [00:06:03] And so none of it happened overnight but it was a process and it was putting systems in place, aligning ourselves with great people and just being committed to our purpose and our vision.  [00:06:14] Jason: Yeah, I love it. I think I love that. Urgency of effort, patience for the result. [00:06:18] I think as entrepreneurs, nothing's ever fast enough for us.  [00:06:22] Nick: No, and that's a good and a bad thing as a business leader and an entrepreneur is, if we weren't optimistic, we would never start the business in the first place because we believe that the business is going to be successful. [00:06:34] We may minimize how hard it's going to be. We may minimize some of the challenges that we're going to encounter along the way. And that sort of maybe, cognitive dissonance or whatever you want to call it, getting into business, I think is a good thing, but you then have to then have the grit and the resilience and the sophistication to muscle through the challenging times. [00:06:56] But I don't think I've ever met an entrepreneur that says, "I made more money faster than I expected to." It's usually longer. "I didn't make as much as I had hoped for when I first started out." And when reality sinks in, some people give up and go back to their corporate grind and other people just stick it out and keep pushing forward. [00:07:13] Jason: Yeah, I call that the fantasy stage of entrepreneurship. That's the beginning. We only see upside. It's all upside. It's going to be a success. I get property managers coming to me, potential property managers are like, I'm going to start a property management business. I'm like, "Oh yeah, how are you going to do this?" [00:07:28] And they're like, "it's going to be amazing because all the other companies in my market suck. And I'm like, "okay, what are you going to do different?" "We're going to charge less. And we're going to provide better service." I'm like, "okay, good luck with that."  [00:07:38] Nick: So yeah, that's a tough recipe. Look, I have come to realize, because we're in a blue collar industry ourselves, moving furniture and picking up trash at residents' doorsteps. And execution is a differentiator if you can out execute everybody else. It's not easy. It's not the flashy, shiny objects that entrepreneurs like to chase, but we, coming through this past year, obviously, the market has shifted its leads aren't falling from the sky like they used to, we've had to assess are we doing everything that we're supposed to with every client touch point? [00:08:09] Are we consistently delivering the service that we preach in all of our markets across all the apartment communities that we service? And that I think is something that that takes reinforcement and repetition. And sometimes it can be a little bit boring, but it matters because that does make a difference. [00:08:25] I wouldn't charge less than everybody. That's not a sustainable business strategy. But if you can consistently out execute everybody else, that is an advantage.  [00:08:34] Jason: Yeah, if you can out execute everybody else, then you can probably out price everybody else, too, the leader gets to dictate the price, I think. [00:08:41] Nick: That's right, and usually it's going to cost us more to be able to out execute everybody else, unless you've got just, these magic employees that are willing to take less money to provide a better experience for the customer so that you can charge less it becomes a difficult equation. [00:08:56] Jason: Yeah. It's not too difficult to close the deal when somebody comes to you and says, "I want the other company's price, but I want your level of service." [00:09:03] Nick: That's right. That's right. And that is hard to explain in the sales process. If they, having, don't have the relationship or don't have the trust built that, that takes time. [00:09:14] Jason: Cool. Explain how Trash Butler works for people that have multifamily communities.  [00:09:19] Nick: Yeah, so as I mentioned, it incubated out of our college hunks business. We recognize this opportunity in the apartment space, particularly in a multifamily communities where there's a long walk for the residents to take the trash out. [00:09:31] If you think about the garden style apartments, even mid rise or raps, where there's a long walk to the trash room or trash shoot. And so this industry has emerged doorstep trash service, where we've signed a contract with the apartment complex and then 5 nights a week, the resident can simply put the trash in front of their door and recyclables in some markets, and then our Butler will come by and take the trash and the recyclables to the onsite compactor, which is provided by the 3rd party hauler. So it saves the resident a trip to the dumpster or the compactor each night or every other night. There's a safety component for the residents, an amenity component for the communities and looking to try to enhance the their quality of life for the residents. [00:10:10] And then it actually becomes an income producer for the apartment complex. I know that there's some, skepticism about upcharging services in the industry right now. We're staying very close to that legislation, but let's say we charge $10 a month per door to the apartment community. [00:10:24] They have the ability to, charge anywhere from $20 to in some cases, $30, $40 a month per door to the residents. So it becomes an NOI. Producer, net operating income producer for the community, and it's an amenity for the resident, many times an expected amenity for the resident. So currently, we're the second largest provider in that industry. [00:10:41] We service about 300, 000 doors nightly. We're the national partner with Graystar, of course, the big 800 pound gorilla of property management. And we started out as a side venture has all of a sudden, blossomed into a meaningful business that we've actually brought in some private equity money to help sustain that growth. [00:10:58] Jason: Yeah, brilliant. So yeah, I've lived at a complex for a while, and I had to walk forever to go drop my trash off. I hated it. It was super annoying. So I had to have some sort of stupid cart or something just to carry all my trash and like...  [00:11:12] Nick: I used to live in an apartment complex that did not have this service, and I would put the trash either on the hood of my car or in my trunk at times to drive it to the compactor, and one day, I actually forgot that I put it in my trunk, and so I passed by the compactor and this was a hot day in Florida in the summertime. [00:11:30] So of course, when I came back to my car at the end of a long work day and realized that I had failed to take the trash bag out of the trunk, it was a direct trip to the trash compactor and then the the car dealership. Oh yeah.  [00:11:42] Sarah: And then this is a service that the tenants pay for. Yes?  [00:11:46] Nick: It is. [00:11:47] So we contract directly with the community, but the tenants pay for it through their lease. So what we do when we sign up a community is we have a what we call phase in pricing where it steps up over the 1st year of the service. And so the community is never out of pocket. It's never a cost to the community. [00:12:03] The residents are either just paying a pass through, or even an upcharge to the community so that it becomes a profit center for the community. Yes, it does become an ancillary income stream for the apartment complexes. The resident is paying for it. It's part of their lease. It's not something that's opt in, opt out, but if they haven't had it before, it'll wait till the lease renews for it to be added in. [00:12:24] And so we're not charging full rate during the first year. We're stepping it up during month one, month two, month three in order to ensure that the residents are all paying for it by the time we're fully phased.  [00:12:34] Sarah: Oh, very nice. And then is this nationwide? If someone were like, "Hey, I think that's a great idea. Can I?" [00:12:40] Nick: It is. Yeah. So we're in about 30 states right now. Usually when you have a national partnership with a company like Graystar, they point to that direction and we run in that direction. So we opened up in the Northeast, we opened up in California. Our biggest presence is in the Southeast, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Carolinas. We've got a pretty big presence in Arizona. I know that's where you guys are. We're all over. We got boots on the ground. That business is not franchised. Our college hunks business is a franchise model that we have independent operators, but our Trash Butler business is all corporately operated. [00:13:12] So we have managers and and sort of area supervisors in each market that we service.  [00:13:17] Sarah: Oh, very cool.  [00:13:18] Jason: Got it. Yeah. All right. And is there a lot of competition for Trash Butler?  [00:13:22] Nick: Trash Butler and College Hunts has a lot of competition. What I always like to say, there's low barriers to entry, but high barriers to scale. [00:13:29] So there's probably a lot of similarities with the property management business as well, right? Any mom and pop can go out, hang a sign out or get a truck and say, "I'm in business." and you can do that with one or two communities or maybe one market. But when it comes to scaling out that infrastructure and providing a consistent level of service nationwide there's only a small handful that have done it and that's because it costs a lot of money to get to that scale. You've got to have software. You've got to have great people in every market. You've got to have accountabilities in every market. And that's been good and bad. There's always the people that will come in and try to undercut what we're charging or what their competitors are charging, but they can do that on a one off community or two communities. [00:14:09] But at some point their systems are going to break because they're doing all the work themselves. Like we did when we first started.  [00:14:15] Jason: Yeah. And I'm sure occasionally you see the cheap, dumb property manager that wants to like, "Oh I'll just do this myself. And I'll just make my team members, I'll make my gal at the front office desk go haul garbage." [00:14:26] Nick: And, we all know that employee retention is one of the hardest things right now to keeping good people. And you want your good people doing high value activities. At the property management level, you don't want your good people picking up trash from, 100, 200, 300 units every single night. [00:14:42] That's a surefire way to lose your good people. We think of us as an outsourced arm of property management. We pride ourselves on being an extra set of eyes and ears because we're walking the communities in the night. Night walks and when we're doing our patrol, so we're able to report back if we see a safety hazard or we see anything, suspicious activity, we can report that back in our reporting tools. [00:15:03] And so it becomes an extension for property management, not a cost center. And that's, I think, the most important piece. And there's redundancy. We've got backup butlers if a butler misses because he's sick or, has a wedding or something, I don't know. And so we send people in their place and that redundancy is important because, the residents will let you hear it if the trash gets missed. [00:15:22] That's for sure. Yeah. And they're paying for it. So they expect it to get picked up every night that they put it out there.  [00:15:28] Jason: Yeah. If trash day gets missed, there's going to be some pretty unhappy people. It's just sitting on their porch for a week. "Do I bring this back inside? Where do I have to walk it over myself?" [00:15:37] So how small of a complex do you guys take on? Like what are your sort of limits here?  [00:15:42] Nick: To be honest with you, the sweet spot for a trash butler is really a hundred units and greater. So I know there's a lot of property managers that manage smaller facilities or single family properties. [00:15:52] Usually communities like that it's smaller communities, it's more difficult to create a scalable model for the nightly doorstep trash pickup service. But we do see a lot of partnerships with our College Hunks business and the single family rentals the smaller apartment complexes where there's tenant leave behinds, or they want to have a move in special, so they'll contract with our College Hunks location in their market to move the resident in or move the resident out because the move in and the move out are two very critical touch points of the overall living experience as it relates to a community. And so I think the property manager may, in some cases, undervalue the importance of that high touch experience, especially on the move in when they're moving out, unless they're moving to another 1 of your properties. "Have a great day. Sorry to see you go." But when they're moving in, you really want to make that a special, memorable, positive experience so that then it reinforces the positive experience they have while living there.  [00:16:45] Jason: Now, normally trash pickup by the garbage companies is weekly, but you get, you mentioned nightly that you're doing this. [00:16:52] Nick: So we're doing the butler service nightly. We're not taking the trash off property. We're taking it from the doorstep of each resident to the onsite compactor. So if you think about it, the compactor pickups are still going to be weekly but the trash can be picked up from the residents doorstep on a nightly basis, typically 5 nights a week. [00:17:09] This kind of industry standard is Sunday to Thursday night. And so that's where this is becomes a very attractive amenity because if your trash fills up, you got to take it out and you want to wait until the trash day or whatever. You can put it out five nights a week and the butler's gonna take it to the onsite compactor. [00:17:24] Jason: Nice. . Yeah, that makes it really convenient. Okay. Got it. Cool. What do property managers typically. Ask about this service that I haven't asked yet? [00:17:35] Nick: Ah, so what we like to do is we boil it down to three very simple things. What's most important in this service, the doorstep amenity is the trash going to be picked up on time? [00:17:45] Is it going to be consistent? And is it going to be clean? In other words, is the trash butler not going to leave a mess or loose trash and all those sorts of things. And so we actually have what we call A 3x guarantee of Trash Butler, where we guarantee that those 3 things are going to be 100 percent consistent. [00:18:02] If not, we're going to make it right financially by reimbursing for the night, or in some cases, the week. And so I think that's really important. Another question that we actually make sure we emphasize is that there are some companies that do this that will use independent contractors and we recommend steering away from that because there's a level of liability and also accountability that's missing if you've got independent contractors picking up the trash five nights a week on your community. And so having a W 2, uniform, background check butler that's walking the hallways, walking the breezeways, picking up the items is really critical as well. So those are usually the most consistent questions. [00:18:41] I think not a lot of not all property managers really know how to charge the residents back for the service. So we try to pride ourselves on being revenue consultants and sustainability consultants as well. Not just the doorstep vendor for picking up the trash. And so I think, creating that partnership with any of the vendors is really critical, for your listeners not just our category but anybody who they're working with is having that trust and go to relationship. [00:19:04] That they can, rely on. It's not just an invoice, it's not just a contract, but there's actually a relationship there to ensure that, stuff is getting done when it needs to get done. And again, that goes with maintenance, that goes with roofing, that goes with insurance which I know is a huge issue, with properties these days. [00:19:21] And I think that we want to be a piece of that overall equation.  [00:19:24] Jason: Yeah. One bad independent contractor story could probably destroy a property management company. It certainly could destroy a relationship with one particular multi family complex or with that particular owner, but it could destroy a business if it were serious enough. [00:19:41] So that's right. That's right. Yeah. So related to that, how do you vet your butlers?  [00:19:47] Nick: So we prided ourselves both in our college hunts hauling junk business and our trash butler business on really being a culture first team member driven organization. And what I mean by that is we want to get great people. [00:20:01] It's a blue collar industry, but we want to get people to have pride of ownership of the work that they're doing. So it starts with the recruiting, our job posting, our recruiting machine, our interview process, our background checks, our reference checks, and then our onboarding. Our onboarding and retention is all about, we say, enrolling our team members in either the Trash Butler way or the College Hunks way of doing business. [00:20:24] And so I think it's important anytime you're hiring employees that you've got a system and a process. For identifying who are the type of people you want to bring into the organization because that's going to help define the culture and we always say culture drives behavior. Behavior drives results. [00:20:38] And so if you're just picking up any body off the street to fill a hole, you might get somebody good, but chances are, they're not going to be. Aligned with the core values of the company, the purpose of the company. And so we've viewed ourselves as our secret sauce as being able to recruit a widespread labor team decentralized across the country, train them, onboard them and retain them to go out and provide a good service on a consistent basis. And so I think again, relevant to your listeners and their businesses as they think about who they're hiring or teams that they're developing having a set of core values that you would abide by having a long term vision of what you're trying to become as an organization, what you want to be recognized for as an organization. [00:21:21] And then and then work to the present, the action items that you're going to take to, to ensure that those values are upheld and that the vision is becoming a reality.  [00:21:30] Jason: Yeah, that's that's so in alignment with the stuff that we teach, you mentioned culture, behavior results. [00:21:35] And when we focus on helping clients figure out their hiring systems, we focus on what I call the three fits, which is culture first personality fit, which relates to behavior and then skill. And skill's the only one that you really can move the needle hugely on. Usually it's about finding people that match your culture, that share your values, and then finding somebody that is the right personality fit to succeed in the role, and then you can train them. [00:22:01] But most business owners do the opposite. They're like, let's just find somebody with the skill.  [00:22:05] Nick: Somebody who knows how to do it. Yeah you're 100 percent right. There's a mantra. I'm sure you've said it probably is, you hire for attitude, you train for skill. And if you can hold true to that now, look, obviously they have to be capable and competent of learning the skill. If you're providing them the tools to do the work and they still can't do it, then there's a competency gap there that's missing. And you, you have to have, we like to say results based, performance based objectives, but you also have to have good people who align with your values because, if you've got somebody who's not good at the job, but a really good person, ideally, you could train them or find a seat for them to fill. If they're a bad person, but good at their job, then you feel handcuffed and it becomes this poison seed and an apple pie that ends up making the whole thing rotten. [00:22:56] Yeah, I want a team that can perform on the field, but you've got to have a good dynamic locker room. You can't have somebody in there that's upsetting the team dynamics, and that's where leadership comes in. That's where the leader of the organization has to champion the values, has to champion the vision, has to champion the culture, has to hold people accountable, especially their fellow leaders about, what are the behaviors that we value in our organization that matter to us? [00:23:24] Jason: Yeah, love it. It's got to be pretty daunting task to run a large empire, especially in a blue collar industry of people to make sure you've got good leadership. Managing good people and a good hiring process.  [00:23:38] Nick: Yeah. It's like I said it was a 20 year overnight success for us and it never gets easier. [00:23:43] Maybe, new level kind of different devil, but it's it's a lot of fun growing a business and embracing those challenges along the way. But, you hit it on the head, having the right leadership team to help support the founder of the entrepreneur in the journey. [00:23:58] And another thing that I think your listeners probably can relate to is along the way as their business grows is sometimes you're going to outgrow your leadership team, which we've gone through, multiple layers of that. And it's not easy because somebody who helps you get from, 0 to 20 properties may not be able to take you from 20 to 100 properties or somebody who took, in our business that took us from, 0 to 50 franchises or or what have you. [00:24:22] And there's a lot of parallels between our trash Butler business and property management. And so I'm sure we're facing the same sort of things and, making sure that you've got folks that... that's probably the hardest part is when they fit the culture, but the business starts to outgrow them. [00:24:33] And so that's why leadership development is very critical and also identifying the skill sets to make sure they're built for the longterm.  [00:24:41] Jason: Yeah. It said that the number one indicator of success is actually intelligence. And if somebody has enough intelligence, they can rise to different levels of competency and improve. [00:24:53] For example, like somebody might have a good executive assistant and maybe someday they're CEO, but I've had some assistants in the past that were not capable of that. They just weren't right. And then I've had some that were able to rise to different levels of, management. [00:25:06] And I think being able to, I think it's a knack or a talent to be able to identify that light because you can't just give people intelligent tests.  [00:25:14] Nick: Although they, they do have some different tests out there. Now there's the wonder liquid, which I think is what the NFL uses. [00:25:18] We use predictive index, which has a cognitive test and then also a personality profile matching, it's not an exact science, but it definitely provides another data point. Because hiring is probably the toughest thing. Even the sports teams get it wrong half the time, they can actually see the person playing on the field and they know from the other coaches, what type of person that individual is. [00:25:40] And yet they still draft the wrong player or sign the wrong position. And we got to give us, give ourselves a little bit of a break too, because our managers and our franchise owners who view the leadership role as a blessing rather than a burden, I think are the ones that are going to see the most success because they embrace the challenges of turnover. [00:26:01] They embrace the challenge, teaching their team members or empowering their team members to tackle new obstacles. They embrace the fact that maybe certain individuals on their team might have to be layered underneath the next layer of leadership. And so I think that's I think that's something that we got to keep reminding ourselves also as entrepreneurs. [00:26:17] Jason: We've, we partnered here at DoorGrow for DoorGrow Hiring with an AI assessment company before AI was big. And it's pretty spot on and amazing at identifying people that are the right culture, personality, and intelligence level. I used to use Myers Briggs, human design, Wonderlic DISC, and I would get a pretty decent picture of a person incorporating all of these things, but I had to know all these different systems and and I can hire with pretty good accuracy. [00:26:46] And so we started testing against this AI tool and it got the right candidate every time. And it was pretty obvious in the tool. We now use it with clients and it does a really good job. So it's pretty awesome. Very cool. That's how I got my current assistant, Mar, who's awesome. And I think all of our last several team members. [00:27:03] Nick: So yeah, it's pretty cool. Are you able to share the AI tool or is that proprietary to you guys now?  [00:27:08] Jason: So we've partnered with a company called BRYQ, B R Y Q. And yeah, it's super cool. So it's usually not affordable for the small business owner.  [00:27:17] Nick: Got it. So you guys have like an enterprise platform for, because you do recruiting as well? [00:27:22] Jason: Yeah, we help property managers with the hiring and recruit recruiting piece. 'cause if you get that wrong, that's a $10,000 minimum mistake. Minimum. And plus the opportunity cost of the money that you're just not going to get because they didn't do as good of a job. And I've seen it at the multimillion dollar level, most business owners just doing Russian roulette in hiring until they finally get a good team after a decade,  [00:27:41] Nick: I've been guilty of that myself.  [00:27:42] Jason: So me too. Yeah we're the summation of our mistakes when it comes to success. Super cool to have you here on the show. What should property managers know about the College Hunks Hauling Junk? How could that benefit  [00:27:54] Nick: them? [00:27:54] Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that our college hunks business is nationwide. We have almost 300 franchise owners in that business. We're in about 40 States. And so that business is local moving as well as we call bulk trash removal. So it's not just homeowners that we're moving. [00:28:10] It's not college campuses that we're moving, but we're moving anybody that's moving from point A to point B, whether that's a business, an apartment, a resident, a homeowner. And everything in between and we also do junk removal or bulk trash removal. So we're really the only one stop solution that can do both the move and the bulk removal as one brand, one company. [00:28:30] And I think it's important for apartments and multifamily in general, because you want to know that the individuals and the companies that are coming onto your property are insured, have a reputable, accountable brand behind them. And so we've started to see a lot of traction with apartment partnerships where we've become this preferred mover for them to recommend to the residents in the moving leasing packets. So they know that, the trucks are going to be branded. The property is going to be protected. The elevators or stairways are going to be, wraps that are not damaged. The individuals are going to be properly insured, so there's no injury, no injuries, properly trained. [00:29:09] We're not going to be blocking resident cars with the moving van, which, makes everybody upset. We've got a whole national platform and local platform for partnering with property managers. To be their go to solution for moving the residents in and out as well as the tenant leave behind the bulk trash removal, clearing out, for the turns. [00:29:28] And whether that's, corporate removal or just furniture removal, we have a partnership with goodwill where we can donate anything it's reusable. So I think that's something that maybe a lot of property managers don't realize is our College Hunks Hauling Junk and moving business is a great resource for property management in general. [00:29:44] Sarah: That's awesome. That was one of the things that was so frustrating is just waiting on the junk removal. Like it's finally vacant. Go! And sometimes they're like, "yeah, I'm a week out."  [00:29:55] Nick: Yeah. And we can do same day, next day. And look, there's going to be a wide range of prices on junk removal. I know that, there's a budget consciousness and property management. [00:30:03] I get that. Anyone with the truck can come and claim to do junk removal, but he might not answer the phone the next time you call him, or he might be a week out or he might say he's coming and not come. We've got a national call center, a national booking platform, a national accounts program. [00:30:18] So we've got responsiveness and that's something else again for your listeners. Nine out of 10 service companies don't even answer the phone. And so it's something as simple as just making sure the phone gets answered when people call if you've got a property management company, making sure your phone, you have somebody, even if it's an outsourced third party, answers the phone when your residents call or answers the ticket when, the client calls. That goes a long way. It's simple and often overlooked, but it gets back to what we talked about earlier about just being able to out execute what other people aren't doing.  [00:30:48] Jason: Yeah. That's the foundation of decent customer service is accuracy and availability, according to the Gallup polls customer satisfaction pyramid that they had in one of their books. [00:30:59] And if you're perfectly accurate and perfectly available. They don't notice you like that's just default. They just assume that should be done. So it's a math that it's partnership and then advice. And so when you get to that level where you're giving advice, like you had mentioned, like helping them with their fees and helping them figure out how to make money off of this and get the NOI, that's where you're at an exceptional level is when you get to that peak of partnership and then advice. [00:31:25] Nick, this has been a really cool, appreciate you coming here on the show. How can people get connected to College Hunks Hauling Junk and a Trash Butler?  [00:31:36] Nick: So the best way for Trash Butler, really simple, TrashButler. com and for our College Hunks hauling junk and moving business, really simple, CollegeHunks. com. So TrashButler. com, CollegeHunks. com, that's for the doorstep trash and recycling amenity as well as the moving and junk removal partnership opportunity and and look, I appreciate you having me on. I think it's awesome what you're doing to help, empower and motivate and inspire and elevate the property management industry because it's a great industry. And it's one that is right for people to continue to elevate and improve upon.  [00:32:07] Jason: Awesome. Thanks, Nick. Appreciate you being here on the DoorGrow show.  [00:32:10] Nick: Thank you.  [00:32:12] Jason: Thanks for being here. All right. So if you're a property management business owner, you're wanting to grow and scale your business. [00:32:18] Reach out to us. You can check us out at DoorGrow. com or go to join our community and hang out with a bunch of property management entrepreneurs and find out if we're legit and see what everybody else is doing. Go to DoorGrow club. com, and hopefully we're talking and working together soon. Bye everyone. [00:32:36] 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!  [00:33:03] 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.

One of the biggest questions we get from property management business owners once they start building out their team is “How do I compensate and recognize my team members?” In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull discuss the different kinds of compensation structures for different personality types and roles on your team. You'll Learn [02:15] The difference between you and your team [07:56] The problem with giving out percentages [12:13] How to set up commission structures [21:23] Recognizing your team effectively [25:44] Giving out raises and job titles Tweetables “Business is a more effective vehicle than even a charity at creating lasting and impactful change.” “When you dangle the carrot in front of a great salesperson, they will jump off a freaking cliff to get it.” “Your discomfort in giving somebody a raise should be equal to their discomfort in asking for it.” “Recognition costs nothing.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: They need to be invested in like committed to helping you grow this business and helping you move it forward, otherwise they are just dead weight and you're creating a bigger and bigger monster of dead weight as the business grows.  [00:00:14] Welcome DoorGrowers 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 DoorGrower. [00:00:31] DoorGrower property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many 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. We are your hosts, property management, growth experts, Jason Hull and Sarah Hull, owners of DoorGrow. [00:01:11] That good? Now let's get into the show. All right. We were trying to change the intro right before we did it. And sometimes she's not on it. Sometimes she is. She's mostly on it now. So. Anyway, here we are. So our topic today, I'm getting a lot of questions, a lot of questions, and this has been going on for a long time, but we're getting a lot of questions about compensation. [00:01:37] This just keeps coming up and we see a lot of mistakes when it comes to compensation. So the challenge with compensation is that entrepreneurs think differently than most people that they are paying, and so they make mistakes in how they compensate people because they think it's going to help them get more of what they want and they actually create the opposite. [00:02:00] And so I want you to pay close attention to this today. If you watch this you should not ever ask if you should be giving out a commission or percent sign to somebody or whatever So let's talk about a couple of things here. So where should we start?  [00:02:15] Sarah: Well, I think the best place to start is probably from just for background. [00:02:20] What is the difference between someone who has a sales mindset or entrepreneurial mindset versus someone that may not.  [00:02:30] Jason: Cool. Let's talk about that. The two types of team members that you're going to have. There's two types of people on the planet, those that like money and those that don't. And I know you're thinking, "man, no, everybody likes money." [00:02:42] And you'd be surprised. And so if you had all of your team members take a DISC assessment, there's usually on a nice DISC assessment, a section called the values index. And one of those values is the economic or financial score. And so on the economic or financial score, what you will see is that the score is low, then they don't like money. [00:03:04] And I know that sounds weird. They're not focused on money. They're not trying to get money. Money is not a big part of their psyche. It's just not. And I know entrepreneurs, you don't get this because you like money. Sarah and I do not hate money. We don't hate money. Okay,  [00:03:20] Sarah: I need that shirt. This is the one t shirt. [00:03:22] I'll wear the capitalistic pig shirt  [00:03:24] Jason: Right and so we don't hate money. You probably don't hate money either. If you do hate money and you're an entrepreneur Then you are probably struggling to have money, right. Money is the ability to change lives, make a difference and have impact. This is why business is a more effective vehicle than even a charity at creating lasting and impactful change in my opinion. [00:03:47] Okay? Because it has healthy motivators connected to it. Right. And money is the energy and currency of what everything moves through to happen. Right. So let's talk about this. So if the economic score is low, what does that mean? I'll tell you whose economic score is high. If your economic score is high, you are probably an entrepreneur or a sales person, right? [00:04:11] Those are probably the only two personality types or people that you should be paying out more money or bonuses or commissions to incentivize better behavior. That means most people, you should not be paying bonuses, additional financial compensation to try and motivate or change behavior. Now, if you just want to be generous and it's Christmas, that's different. [00:04:36] But if you're trying to consistently compensate somebody and motivate them, the motivators need to be connected to what your outcomes are and most people are doing it incorrectly. Now, if the economic score is low, this is what this means, they would rather what they most value is recognition. They would rather be recognized. [00:04:55] And recognition costs nothing. It costs nothing. And if you don't give them recognition, but you give them bonuses, it's often the opposite, it has the opposite effect. There's another values index called the charitable score. If they have a high charitable score, which means they might want to volunteer to soup kitchen. [00:05:14] They want to like donate money. They want to give money away, not get money. They want to give money away. And then they have a low end economic score. That means if you pay them more money than what is comfortable for them. You pay them more than that. They will start to become a worse team member. They will start to self sabotage because they feel guilty. And then they're going to project that and externalize it because they have to justify it. They're taking more money. They don't want to give up the more money, but they feel guilty. If Sarah was my boss, it'd be like, "Oh, Sarah's giving me more money. Well, all right. I have to be worth this. So I'm worth this more money. And you know what? I'm entitled now. And maybe I deserve even more because I'm developing this kind of cancerous blind spot of I deserve this money because I feel guilty. So I externalize it. And I blame that uncomfortable feeling on my boss. Oh, well, my boss is like terrible and doesn't do this stuff. So I deserve that more money to compensate for it." And so they start to find fault with the boss and they start to justify them taking this more money cause they feel bad so that they can feel somewhat okay about it. And then their behavior starts to show that and they start to perform worse. [00:06:23] I know entrepreneurs, you're like, "that makes no sense." But that's how a lot of people think. Most people do not enjoy seeking money. This is not their goal.  [00:06:33] Sarah: There is a caveat team members, they have to have enough to be comfortable, right?  [00:06:38] Jason: If they're starving, broke or hurting, they're not comfortable.  [00:06:42] Sarah: In pain or like worried, like, "Oh my God, I might lose my house or I can't feed my kids." [00:06:47] Like. Yeah. We're not saying, Hey, like give them no money, they'll work for free. That's not the case at all. Right. They have to have enough to feel comfortable to make sure that their needs are met and make sure that they're able to provide for themselves and anyone else or anything else that is important to them. [00:07:02] Once they reach that level though, and I think studies have been done on this, which is really interesting to me I don't know if they just surveyed Americans. Don't know, but I think $75k was like that magic number or $65k. It was something like that somewhere in that ballpark is that's like where people feel like they have most people feel like they have enough. [00:07:25] So once they feel like they have enough money to live and be okay and make sure their needs are met and bills are paid and things are taken care of and like Johnny can do soccer and whatever they, you know, they want to do, they don't then go, "well, now I want a hundred and now I want 200." They don't keep trying to climb that ladder. [00:07:46] Once they feel comfortable and they have to make sure that their needs are met, then they're not interested. So if you take it from 75 to a hundred, they're like, "it's okay."  [00:07:55] Jason: Okay. So the other piece to this, another challenge that I see is that because business owners want people to have skin in the game and they want them to, they think everybody wants money, they hand out percent signs. [00:08:08] This is one of the most dangerous things to hand out. We even made a silly video called, what's it called?  [00:08:13] Sarah: I think it's called Percentage Breaks the Property Manager for the Property Management Business.  [00:08:19] Jason: Yeah. So you can check that out on YouTube. But the idea we're playing this, these roles and I'm a business owner and I don't have money in the beginning, so I'm going to pay her a percentage of all the doors that I get in. [00:08:29] We made it ridiculous, like 50%. Right? Which means if you're handing out a percent sign, and we see this all the time, say Sarah's my employee and I'm the boss, and I hand out 50% or whatever to a property manager.  [00:08:42] Sarah: Or even if you're like, "okay, here have 30," because like even 10, 30, 40, I still, I see the that a lot. [00:08:48] Sometimes I see 20.  [00:08:50] Jason: It doesn't matter what the percentage is, right? The challenge is in a business, some property management companies don't even make 10 percent profit margin. And so handing out percent signs is really dangerous for businesses. So what they'll do is hand out a percent sign. So let's say I give her 50%. [00:09:06] That means my 50%. My, the other half, all of the expenses have to come out of that. And usually if a business has 50 percent profit margin, that's pure expense. So then I'm broke. So what happens is she's making more and more money because she has all upside. It's pure profit. And I have all the expenses do not give a percentage to a broker. [00:09:28] Pay them a flat fee of like five, 600 bucks. Do not pay a percentage of broker. If you don't have your broker's license, don't create relationships or situations where you are giving up a percentage to a property manager. "Hey, you get like 50 percent of each door that you get on when you get a 30 percent of each door," whatever, right? [00:09:46] Because then what happens is these property managers, if they're the personality type of handling property management, instead of doing sales, they are not going to be focused on getting more business on. They're going to be focused on just helping run the business and you're giving them more and more money the more doors you get, which means you're making less and less money, right? They're making more and more money, the more doors that you get. And they will get more and more lazy and more and more comfortable because there's no incentive for them to go work harder or hunt or chase to get money. You need to make sure if you're handing out a percent sign in any capacity, that's like giving out ownership of the business and they need to be invested in like committed to helping you grow this business and helping you move it forward, otherwise they are just dead weight and you're creating a bigger and bigger monster of dead weight as the business grows. This is why a lot of people join a franchise and then regret it later on because they're paying out six to eight percent, which is a lot, of their gross revenue not of profit not of what's left over for you. And some business owners. [00:10:56] That's their whole owner payout. Yeah, that's like top one. Some business owners, that's what they take out like you're giving away that to basically to a team member that's not really adding value. I could go on and on about franchises. You can check out my YouTube video about franchises. [00:11:12] I'm obviously like not a fan of the franchise model because I believe it hurts the entire industry. There he said it. All right. So don't hand out percent signs. Do not get into a relationship with a business partner and give them a percent sign unless they are the type that wants to hustle and grow and make money. [00:11:33] The challenge is I see a lot of business partnerships are like, "here's a percent sign" when they should have just said, "here's your salary. You can be the operator." So operator personality types, for example, systems, process, whatever, they don't usually want ownership. They're not often that entrepreneurial type. [00:11:51] They just want to make sure they're getting paid enough and taking care of enough. Now there's exceptions to this, right? But you don't want to be handing out percent signs to somebody unless it's like super critical for growth. And I do not recommend. I recommend in any way possible, don't hand out any percent signs to anybody ever except to yourself and maybe a salesperson. [00:12:13] Now, let's talk about commissions, right? Let's say somebody is money motivated and they can help you make more money. So if they're money motivated, then you need to be using them to help you make more money. If you're going to pay them a percent sign, but you're not going to pay them a percent sign residually. [00:12:30] Because then you're motivating them to not do more work. What you want from a good salesperson or a BDM, a business development manager, or a BD business development person. What you want from them is what? You want results, which is more doors. You want them to add more money to the business. That's the result you want. [00:12:49] So you're going to pay for them to get more business, not keeping the business because keeping the business is the rest of the team. And that's fulfillment. So don't pay them a percentage residual. You pay them a percentage of maybe the first month or the, like some sort of commission upfront. [00:13:07] And it could be a percent, or it could just be a flat fee. Like, "Hey, we'll give you 200 bucks or 300 bucks or 500 bucks or per unit that you bring on." and give them an incentive. So that means they have an incentive every month. They stay to hunt and to chase. Now, another mistake people make with salespeople is like, "I want to get a salesperson, but I want to have zero downside and I want all the upsides. [00:13:33] So they create another unfair structure where they're like, I will pay you pure commission. And if you don't hunt and kill, you starve. And if you hunt and kill, I make money and we both make money." so I need to address this. That only makes sense if you are giving the salesperson, all of the leads, they have a great follow up and nurture system, and all they do is show up to calls and close.  [00:13:56] Sarah: Now, can you clarify what giving them the leads means? Because you're like, "Oh here's the leads. Like, here's a list of 10, 000 people."  [00:14:04] Jason: Okay. That's not what I mean.  [00:14:05] Sarah: So yeah, exactly. So let's clarify that.  [00:14:09] Jason: Okay.  [00:14:09] Sarah: So 18, 000 people in my CRM. Here's your leads. [00:14:13] Jason: If somebody is going to be paid pure commission, which means they're just paid for basically closing deals, they should not have to go find potential clients. They should not have to be hunting for potential clients. They shouldn't be spending any time doing any of that stuff. They should just be taking appointments, somebody else scheduled for them and closing deals. [00:14:33] Then they're a closer. Everything that happens before that would be handled by a setter and the setter would be cold calling, following up, like all this stuff. Setting appointments. Setting appointments, rescheduling.  [00:14:46] Sarah: Making sure people show up. They don't show up. Right. Calling them again.  [00:14:49] Jason: Feeding the closer. [00:14:51] Feeding the closer. Then the closer can be peer commissioned and the setter would be paid a base, mostly a base, plus a small percentage for each like appointment they set or some sort of results. So they're motivated to get more results and they should be a little bit money motivated, right? Now, most people are going to hire a BDM and expect them to do both. [00:15:11] And if you're going to hire a BDM and expect them to do both, you need to pay them a base. I would recommend at least maybe 20 to 30 K, something like this of a base that covers their setting activities. And then they, the rest, they should be able to make somewhere annually about maybe six figures should be possible. [00:15:30] So work it backwards, but there should be a commission structure that if they're adding 10 to 20 doors a month, they should be able to make. Some sort of six figure sort of salary would be the goal. So figure out a commission on top of that base. Because what you're doing, if you say it's pure commission, you're expecting a closer who lives or dies by whether they hunt or kill and create some money, you're expecting them to starve for at least two months, usually. Because usually three. Because it takes about 90 days to build up a sales pipeline. So they're going to have to do networking and prospecting and outreach and they're working for free and. If they're starving for 90 days, they're just going to quit. [00:16:10] I've seen so many BDMs burn out and it sounds like this great model. "Well, I'll pay you basically nothing in the beginning." And you might get somebody to agree to do that, but they might be stupid if they're willing to do that. And then they're going to be like starving and not figuring it out. And then you don't give them a good system. [00:16:26] If you plug them in to DoorGrow, we can get them making a lot of money. We have an amazing system. Like we had a client in just 10 to 15 hours. We go from zero to a hundred doors in six months. And he didn't spend any money on ads and he was a solopreneur. He was all by himself. This is absolutely possible. [00:16:44] We can help BDMs crush it. We've helped some BDMs add two- three hundred dollars in a year. That's absolutely possible to do but they need to be able to dedicate their time to that and you are not going to get that kind of result if you just pay them a commission because they will only focus on the closing type of activities or the commission generating activities, and they won't do what the leading activities that actually generates the opportunities to close. [00:17:12] And so you're putting too much attention on the wrong thing. They need more attention. Most of the attention should be on the leading activities. Phone calls, outreach, networking that leads to this and then deals will happen. They don't even have to be super amazing at closing if they're doing enough leading activities And so we want to make sure we give them a base and then we give them an incentive to move those things forward.  [00:17:35] Sarah: Okay. Now with the base, this is the big one. "Well, how much is the base supposed to be Jason? I don't know?" [00:17:41] Jason: 20 or 30 K. Maybe  [00:17:42] Sarah: You need to find an amount that would be uncomfortable if that's all you made. It needs to be comfortable enough that if that's all they made, they're not going to be starving and eating out of a dumpster. [00:17:58] And it needs to be uncomfortable enough that if that's all they made, they wouldn't be happy and they would be hungry for more.  [00:18:06] Jason: They need to be hungry. They got to be motivated. It's financial compensation is all about motivation, right?  [00:18:13] Sarah: With a salesperson, when you lay out their commission structure and you let them know like, "Hey, this is your base and I'm giving you this base because of these reasons. I don't want you to be starving. I want you to be motivated. The real money, it's over here. This other piece, I'm going to give it to you because there's things like phone calls and settings and appointments and you know, all the stupid crap that you don't want to do, but that you will do because it leads to deals." [00:18:38] And they're like "yeah, I get that. But the real money is over here. So when you close deals, that's when you start to make money." And when you dangle the carrot in front of a great salesperson, they will jump off a freaking cliff to get it. The problem is if you just give them the carrot and you're like, here, have a 50, 000 base, have 100, 000 base, have a 200, 000 base. [00:19:03] They're like "Yeah. I don't need to work that hard. I mean, if I do nothing, I still make 50k." We just at the boardroom event, we had a client whose BDM has a 50, 000 base.  [00:19:13] Jason: And then he was wondering why they weren't super motivated.  [00:19:16] Sarah: She doesn't really, she closed like two doors a month. And I'm like, well, yeah, cause she's comfortable. [00:19:22] She's super comfortable there. So she's never going to be motivated to work harder and do more and stretch herself and go above and beyond. Because she doesn't have to, you gave it to her. I have to work for it. There's a difference. And the other thing is salespeople who they love the challenge. They don't want you to give it to them. [00:19:43] They don't want it. Like they'll tell you like, "Oh, I'll take 500, 000 a year for doing nothing." But they wouldn't really be fulfilled by that. They'll probably take it because they love money. I mean, who doesn't, but they wouldn't be fulfilled by it. Yeah. If you give them 500, 000 for doing nothing versus if they make 500, 000 because of the work that they did and because of their efforts, there's a big difference. [00:20:06] They're going to feel really proud of that and they're going to want that. So they're going to chase it. So you have to dangle the carrot and make it something that's interesting enough. You have to, you, and you have to set it up so that they have the ability to make at least six figures because that's what sales people want But don't just throw it to them.  [00:20:24] Jason: And to be clear No, bdm should be making five hundred thousand dollars.  [00:20:28] Sarah: That's not accurate at all. [00:20:30] Jason: There's really great bdm. Maybe if they're helping do some acquisition deals If they're adding 500 a year, maybe all right So but if your bdm can live comfortably without adding 10 doors a month, your commission structure is wrong. They should be minimum adding about 10 doors a month as a full time BDM minimum. [00:20:52] And they should need to do 10 doors a month in order to just reach comfort. And if they're really motivated, they'll do even more than that. They'll do even more than that because then it gets exciting, right? Then it's the game, right? It's the hunt. Okay. So we talked about compensation. [00:21:08] Is there any other challenges or mistakes we see people make compensation wise?  [00:21:13] Sarah: I think those are the big ones. I think let's though, before we wrap up, let's talk a little bit more about the recognition piece and then we'll close it out. Okay. Because people are like what do you mean recognition? [00:21:25] Like, "Hey, I see you." [00:21:26] Jason: So recognition is a process of just helping the team members be seen, especially in front of other team members for doing good things or accomplishing things. So the way that we do that in DoorGrow and in our operating system, DoorGrow OS. Maybe you've heard of like EOS or traction or some of these things. [00:21:43] DoorGrow OS is better. And what we do in DoorGrow OS to increase the amount of recognition is in every meeting we share wins. So if it's our weekly commitments meeting, we're sharing what wins did we have last week and everybody adds to the list. What did we do in our monthly goal setting? [00:22:03] We share wins for everything we did the previous month. Same thing with the quarter and annually, and it's pretty awesome. Like, we're building these lists and everybody feels great. And then even in our daily huddle meeting, which is like a 15 minute, 20 minute meeting we do every morning, I guess we do ours in the afternoon, but we do with our team. [00:22:21] We do Caught Being Awesome and we allow team members to share their wins or to highlight somebody else. And so our team are highly motivated because most of them are recognition motivated. So we're recognizing them. If we do give a bonus, like say for the holidays or something like that, we do it in a way that the focus is we wanted to recognize you because of what you've done for us this last year. So it's still about recognition and appreciation. And so that will get you team members that are incredibly loyal to you, that love being part of the team, that feel a sense of belonging, and that means a lot more to most of your team members than getting more dollars. [00:23:04] Is that good?  [00:23:04] Sarah: They want to feel important and they want to feel valued and they want to know that you care about what they're doing and especially in an industry like property management because it's tough. Yeah. Everybody has those like really awful days because let's be honest, sometimes owners or tenants or vendors and sometimes life just happens, right? [00:23:27] So it's tough and sometimes it's tough. All the time or it's tough for a while. This is not an easy industry. So when you've got this pressure all the time and this like annoyance, like, "Oh, that tenant's going to call me and yell at me again, or, Oh, like, Oh, I have to have this uncomfortable conversation and tell my client that we need a $15,000 sewer repair. [00:23:50] I don't want to do this." The it's the little things that will keep your team going and make sure that they understand like, "Hey. I know it's not the most glorious thing. I know it's always not super exciting, and it's not always super easy. However, what you're doing really makes a difference. It really is important and this is like the bigger mission and vision of the business and you contribute directly to that vision and what you're doing matters." [00:24:22] So that way it's like, Oh, you know, it's not this grind and this drain and we don't have a lot of churn on our own team and burnout and you know, bad team members that are like, "Oh, I hate my job." Right. Because that's super easy. It's easy and then you make it even harder. It's easy just by itself and then you make it harder because it's property management. [00:24:43] So it's super easy in property management to have that. So let's combat that. And just by recognizing them and saying like, "Hey, I saw you took care of that thing. Like, hey, oh my god, you got all the leases done. And hey," like, and it could be the littlest things. It's things that they do. Anyway, it doesn't matter. [00:25:00] They don't have to do anything that's like spectacular. "Oh my God. You like cleaned all the bathrooms today, Sally. Thank you. That was amazing. Like you didn't have to do that." It's little things and it's things that they're going to be doing anyway, but just let them know, "Hey, I see it. And I appreciate it." [00:25:16] Jason: All right. So the other thing I'll say about recognition is you might be thinking, well, salespeople and entrepreneurs, do they like recognition? The answer is yes. They like it too. We still like it. They like it too. So if you're giving them recognition that adds more fuel to the fire, right? And so you need a system like DoorGrow OS in which everybody gets recognized for their accomplishments and everyone will perform and behave better because they feel seen by everyone. [00:25:42] And that has value, right? Now one more point I want to make is you might get somebody, an assistant, you're like a VA, you're like they're amazing. I love them so much. They're so awesome. I don't want to lose them. And then you are like, because you're hardwired to be so money focused, you're like, I'm going to pay them a whole bunch more money. [00:26:02] I see this happen so often. Be very careful about just giving out raises prematurely. Be very careful about this because what I've seen over and over again, I've been in masterminds, multimillion dollar business owners, we're hanging out together and they're like, "Hey I just got this assistant. She was super amazing. So I gave her this big raise 'cause she's so awesome. And now she's showing up late. She's not like getting things done. She seems like entitled." This is what happens when you compensate people financially, instead of giving them recognition and doing it based on how you think instead of what they want, you then sabotage their efforts or they start to sabotage their efforts. [00:26:43] So don't start paying somebody more just because you like them, right? There needs to be a justifiable reason and they need to be able to justify that reason. And so they may need to come to you and be like, "Hey, here's why I deserve more compensation." And you're checking in with them regularly and saying, "Hey, how are things going?" [00:27:01] And if you have an open communication with your team members, they're going to tell you when they feel like it's time that they deserve some more money. And it's going to be really uncomfortable for them to do it if they don't like money, it's going to be so uncomfortable to have that conversation, but it's also uncomfortable for you to spend more money. [00:27:17] Team are the biggest expense. Your discomfort in giving somebody a raise should be equal to their discomfort in asking for it. It's my thought. And so they need to be reaching out. To some degree, and you may recognize somebody deserves more pay, you know, deep down they're being paid too little. [00:27:36] So then you can give them a raise, but be careful about handing this out.  [00:27:40] Sarah: My other little tip with raises is I worked in corporate for a bit and it was like every year, you know, you're going to get a raise and how much of a raise you get depend, depend on all your stupid numbers and metrics and all, you know, call time and all that stuff. [00:27:55] So you knew you were getting a raise though, like for sure, unless for some reason they're firing you, right? But other than that, you know, like, "Oh, my annual review is coming up. How much money am I going to make now?" And then they expect it. And then you don't really appreciate it because it's expected. And it's like normal now it's like, "Oh, well I'm getting a raise now. [00:28:13] Now I'm going to raise." And then. What also happens is, "well, I'm getting a raise," and sometimes people go, "Oh, well I deserve like this much." And then they don't get that. They get less. And then they're like mad about it. They're mad because they're making more money. It's not as much money as they wanted or as I expected. [00:28:30] So one of my big rules when it comes to raises is with raise comes responsibility. Don't just throw out more money. Like, "Hey, if you want to go from here to here, I'm happy to take you there. This is what that would look like. Are you in?  [00:28:44] Jason: Okay. One last thing. Titles. Titles are heavily connected to compensation. [00:28:49] So I dealt with this week. I talked to a property manager. They had like 20 doors or something and they hired a director of operations. No. You can't afford a director of operations. So the thing is, yeah, I said, "tell them they are an operations assistant in ecrow." And said, I gave you this inflated title. [00:29:06] You're an operations assistant. Maybe then eventually they could graduate operations manager. Maybe then be the, you know, maybe eventually. The director of operations, VP of operations, COO, but titles matter. So be very careful about handing out titles. Start everybody out as a something assistant or junior  [00:29:24] Sarah: property manager, junior assistant, property manager, or you can just have levels, property manager, one property manager, two property manager, three, like. [00:29:32] There's a lot of different ways you can do it. Be careful about titles. Yeah, be super careful about  [00:29:36] Jason: titles. Because they'll go look it up on salary. com and they'll be like, "Oh I deserve this. I'm director of property management. I guess I should be getting 150k or whatever, right?"  [00:29:46] Sarah: And also, 20 doors, fun little caveat. Be careful when you're reviewing resumes with titles for the same reason. Because titles they sound really impressive sometimes and they mean they could be made up They mean nothing when I got hired at an insurance job. They were like, oh we have to make your business card And I said, "okay," and they said "well, what do you want your title to be?" [00:30:05] And I said, "I pick my own title?" And they're like, "yeah, you can put whatever you want on there." And I said, "well, aren't I a sales rep?" And they're like, "yeah, but don't put sales rep." I'm like, "oh, okay. So what should I put?" They're like, "put like account manager or account executive or like something like that." [00:30:24] So I don't remember what we came up with, but. Came up with something that sounded like I was like, "Ooh, I'm a big deal." I was a sales rep. That's it. I sell things. That's it. But the title sounded a lot more impressive. And sometimes that can go to people's head just a bit. And keep in mind, money is connected to the title. [00:30:45] It always will be. So get on. And if you're like, "well, I don't know what to," Google will help you just get on. Well, I just had this conversation, I think two weeks ago with client. " Well, I don't want to hire like the COO of the company. I can't afford that." You're right. You can't. So. [00:31:00] What are they doing? Maybe they're the team leader. Maybe they're the office manager. Maybe they're an operations assistant. Like get on, find some kind of title, get on Google and say, what are other job titles for this thing? And it will tell you and pick one of those and avoid things like manager, juror, and like VP president or like, Senior account executive, things like that. [00:31:26] Because it. It will be startling if someone. Looks at their position and realizes. "Oh, I should be making 125 and I'm only paid 55. Huh? That's odd."  [00:31:38] Jason: All right, so wrap us up. Give us a call to action. [00:31:41] Sarah: Just If you feel like you're struggling with any of this and I know there's so many of you that are like, "oh man. Yeah, that's me." [00:31:48] I might have made some of these mistakes and that's okay because we all have we've done it to Go on doorgrow. com Book a call with us. We can help you with this stuff.  [00:31:56] Jason: This is what we do. Yeah, and if you made any of these mistakes, I guarantee there's a lot of others going on in the business you can't see right now. [00:32:03] We can help you get this cleaned up and help you make a lot more money, help you grow a lot faster. All right. All right until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:32:11] 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!  [00:32:37] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Kent Hardman is a property management entrepreneur who took his property management company from zero to over 120 doors in less than a year!  In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull sit down with Kent to talk about the mindset changes and routines he implemented to kickstart and grow his property management company. You'll Learn [04:51] How your personal life impacts your business [08:23] Shifting your mindset toward growth [17:44] 10x-ing your business [24:48] Changing your life and business Tweetables “Self-care is the foundation. You've got to start there. Put your own oxygen mask on first.” “When it's somebody's doing sales and they start to get evidence, that's when magic happens because then we have our confidence.” “You've got to have that long-term vision to get through that kind of rut of a week.” “If you have more than 3 priorities in your life, you have 0.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: Self-care is the foundation. You got to start there. Put your own oxygen mask on first.  [00:00:05] Kent: Yeah. The plane's going down. You're supposed to put your mask on first. You know, how can I help my daughter if I can't even help myself  [00:00:12] Jason: All right. Welcome DoorGrowers 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 DoorGrower. DoorGrower property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. [00:00:36] 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. [00:00:52] 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, along with Sarah Hull, the Co-owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:12] And we're hanging out here with Kent Hardman. Kent, how you doing, man?  [00:01:16] Kent: I'm doing well. Glad to finally be here. [00:01:19] Jason: It's good to have you. So you've been a client for how long now?  [00:01:23] Kent: About a year.  [00:01:24] Jason: About a year. And this has been quite a journey for you. You're in a very different place you were, you know, now from a year ago. And so why don't we go back and why don't you give the listeners a little bit of your background and history so they get an idea of who you are and what got you into property management.  [00:01:40] Kent: Sure. Yeah, so I'm here in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grew up in Cincinnati. Won, the parent lottery had a pair of awesome parents, and I grew up in this old tutor and from a young age, just I was fascinated with architecture, real estate. Went to Miami University here, close to Cincinnati had what I refer to as my real job for a couple of years worked for a manufacturer. In the marketing department and I just knew it wasn't for me. [00:02:06] I always wanted to get into real estate. And you know, it was about 2006. I was networking with real estate companies. Nobody was hiring because of the economy. 2008 happened and literally I got into real estate in September of 2008, you know, people were running for the doors and I was running into a burning building. [00:02:25] And started out, I got my real estate license first, because that was the easiest thing for me to do. And did the realtor thing for a little bit, nothing against real estate agents, but I just, I had bigger ambitions than that. And got into buying rental property in Cincinnati and at the time my father retired financially, he had some cash to throw at some investments and me and my dad started buying apartment buildings and how I got into property management was just learning by doing, doing it for myself. Bought a bunch of apartment buildings, a lot of 10 families. [00:03:00] That then evolved into doing some urban development in Cincinnati. Cincinnati has recently gone through a great renaissance, so I was also in charge of doing the property management, but then also putting deals together development type deals, specifically in historic type shells that me and my dad would buy and, you know, build new on the inside. [00:03:19] And going back, so I'm 44 right now, going back two years ago, I was trying to kind of figure out what my second act is going to be, and, you know, I just identified how much I enjoy property management. Everything that you listed at the beginning of of your podcast, that's why I'm in it. And, you know, I love the flexibility, the freedom. I just enjoy the different people I meet, both from landlords to tenants.  [00:03:43] And, yeah, so then I joined DoorGrow about a year ago. And it changed it from just a thought to me actually being serious. Like, yeah, I'm actually doing this.  [00:03:53] Jason: So where were you at when you joined DoorGrow? What was going on that made you decide, "Hey, I need to get some help or I want to join a coaching program." what was going on? [00:04:02] Kent: You guys found me on Facebook. You know, some ads start popping up. I'm like, you know, "what is this?" And clicked on it. And immediately, you know, in the original video, I saw you just jumped right into mindset and I was like, "wow. Okay. This is, you know, a property management type coach with mindset." I'm like, "that's a pretty potent mix. And yeah, just at the time, personally, I was in a really rough spot that I'm happy to dive into if you like. And yeah, DoorGrow just helped me just get the momentum to start making some phone calls. You know, I was sitting there having the idea to do it, but not doing it. [00:04:37] And I was like, "well, I'm going to join this." And by doing that, it just gave me the confidence to, you know, start reaching out to people and "hey, I'll manage your property." [00:04:47] Jason: Yeah. So, well, cool. You had mentioned you know, you were struggling with some stuff. What was going on in your life at the time that you joined the program? [00:04:55] Kent: Sure. Yeah. A lot from what I remember. Yeah, so, long story short, I was in a mentally abusive relationship with somebody, and we were not married, and something happened that I was able to get her out of my life, well then, our daughter, we share a daughter together that I basically raised by myself, in the state of Ohio, women have all the rights over children. And she got at me, and I didn't see my daughter for about six months. I compare it's about the closest thing to losing a child that you can, you know, get to my sense. [00:05:26] I didn't, but it was basically on that level.  [00:05:29] Jason: There's nothing to make you value your kids like somebody taking them away from you So, my kids are what got me into entrepreneurs and that's really what drove me to be able to have the flexibility to control my day and my life and my weeks so that when I had them, I could spend time. [00:05:43] It was a big deal to me. So, but their perspective is probably "dad's always working because he's working from home," you know? Being able to be an entrepreneur and have that freedom was what really drove me to do what I do. So yeah, I remember us having some pointed conversations, like you were struggling, I think, just cognitively or mentally with everything that was going on with you. There was a lot of stress. You were dealing with a lot of stuff. And my perception, from the coach's perspective is that your confidence was kind of shot. You just like, you had the skill, you had the knowledge, and we could teach you the stuff to do, but in the beginning you really weren't believing in yourself. [00:06:23] Kent: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, you know, mentally, I'm struggling just to get out of bed. I mean, it was a challenge just to face the day, you know, and I'll never forget at the time. I went to go see somebody a therapist talk to and she said, "oh, what are you doing?" I'm like, "well, I'm trying to do this property management thing." [00:06:39] "Well, what do you do on a daily basis?" [00:06:41] "Well, I call people that don't want to, you know, hear from me" and, you know, and she's like, "probably need to get another job." I'll never forget.  [00:06:49] She said, "well, why don't tomorrow you call one person and then from there, you know, try to do better the next day." And at the same time, I reached out to a good friend of mine, probably my closest friend. [00:06:59] And I just said, "Hey, man, I'm not doing good, you know, like, what should I do?" And he said, "man, concentrate on the little things. You know, "are you taking care of yourself? You know, are you eating good? Are you sleeping? You know, are you keeping a regular routine with the sleep schedule?" I wasn't doing any of those things, you know, and so just--  [00:07:15] Jason: One day, we had a similar conversation. [00:07:17] I'm like, self care is the foundation. You got to start there. Put your own oxygen mask on first. Yeah.  [00:07:23] Kent: So, yeah, you know, exactly. Yeah. The plane's going down. You're supposed to put your mask on first. You know, how can I help my daughter if I can't even help myself and, you know, it just started just one day I got out of bed and took a shower and I'm like, wow, that's more than I've done in a couple of weeks. And then I picked up the phone and the next day I called somebody else. And then it got into a point of me just, you know, I'm not naturally a outgoing sales, salesy type person. And you know, then I just start killing it. I just enjoy the numbers game. I enjoy that I could have, I could call 50 people and it wouldn't bother me 49 of them wouldn't want to talk to me. [00:08:02] It'd be that one, you know, just that feeling of just, you know, that home run that you hit, like, man, that was worth it, you know. And that's how I started. I just started calling strangers. I have a specific geographical area that I targeted and I had a way that I hunted down their information. It was a lot of data mining, but it was just the dialing  [00:08:20] for dollars is how I got my start. Yeah.  [00:08:23] Jason: So what shifted being involved in the coaching at DoorGrow? What do you feel like really had an impact for you and how did it help you? And how many doors did you have when you started with us? Let's start over there.  [00:08:34] Kent: Zero.  [00:08:35] Jason: Okay. Zero doors. How many doors are you at right now? [00:08:38] Kent: 107.  [00:08:38] Jason: That's awesome. Yeah. That's awesome. Thank you. And so, you know, where do you think you would be if you didn't have DoorGrow? How, how did DoorGrow contribute? How would this be different?  [00:08:49] Kent: Yeah. Well, you know, the first question you asked, you know, how did DoorGrow help me? Sense of community is the first thing that came to mind. [00:08:56] The fact that I was joining forward thinking property managers. You know, I felt like I was at home because it's something that, you know, I believe in, I believe the industry is a little behind the times and a couple of different areas. Technology being one and, you know, we can dive into all the other areas, but just. [00:09:13] I felt like I was in a place where people understood what I was trying to do professionally. And, you know, that was a big thing, the community, but then another big portion of it was having somebody holding me accountable you know, I'll never forget Morgan reaching out to me, "hey, how can I help? How can I help?" I'm like, hey check in with me, you know, make sure I'm calling my 50 people a day, you know, just do that weekly, you know, because then I'm telling you, I'm doing it. If I'm not doing it you know, I feel a lot more responsible if I'm telling somebody I'm going to do what I need to do. [00:09:43] Jason: So, yeah, I think you put in the work and it's awesome to see that. You know, we can give clients the strategies. And the stuff that we give people to do works, but not everybody does it. A lot of people listening are like, all they're hearing is like, "Kent makes a bunch of phone calls." [00:09:57] They're like," I don't want to do that." You know, what's different about the strategies that you're doing with DoorGrow versus what you maybe would have tried on your own then. I would have just been kicking tires  [00:10:07] Kent: if it was just myself. You know, it still would have been idea, [00:10:10] "hey, I'm going to do this. You know, it's really just, it just gave me that confidence, you know, even jumping on the weekly calls and talking to people kind of sharing the war stories. You know, it's like, oh, you know, I'm not the only one having these struggles, and it's been great to, not that I like hearing people struggle, but it's, you know, it's nice to hear other people are going through the same thing I was, and that goes back to kind of that sense of community that I got from joining DoorGrow. [00:10:36] Jason: Did you go through the rapid revamp class? I did. Yep. And so what changes did you make to your business going through that pricing, your sales pitch, brand new website, any of these?  [00:10:48] Kent: All of them. But the one that really stands out is my pitch. You know, that was something that, like I said earlier, I'm not naturally a very confident person. [00:10:58] I'm a very empathetic he's some love type person, you know, and the idea of being a very salesy person intimidated me. But you kind of alluded to it. It was just a lack of confidence. You know, I know I can do what I need to do. It's just having that confidence and believing and yeah, just really defining my pitch, it was the biggest thing I took from that course. You know, website was an amazing, you know, pricing, all that stuff. But that was the one big thing I took from  [00:11:24] Jason: it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really is. It's pretty significant that the level of confidence that you go into in sales when you just know that what your pitches and you know why you're doing what you're doing and you know that you can benefit people. [00:11:39] And and that's what we teach. We teach authentic sales and, you know, seeing you shift from thinking you had to be a salesperson to shifting into having a solid pitch and just knowing that you could help people and being able to go out and do that. It probably made it a lot easier to just even make the phone calls and reach out to the right partners and the right people that could do some business with you. [00:12:02] Kent: Oh yeah. You know, having that confidence and you know, another big thing that I'm thinking of coming through the year with us talking here is just the the whole concept of momentum. I would call get one person, okay, let me get another person. And just that idea of just, let's keep the ball rolling. Let's do a little bit better the next day.  [00:12:18] Jason: Yeah, it starts to give you evidence. When it's somebody's doing sales and they start to get evidence, that's when magic happens because then we have our confidence. It becomes real, then we can see that we are getting results. We can see that the needles moving for, you know, in a positive direction and that can be really significant. [00:12:36] Sarah: So Kent, do you mind kind of talking about like the financial situation that you were in and kind of like your journey through all of that? Because, I think that's something that a lot of people really struggle with is like, business is not easy. And sometimes, you know, we either underestimate or really overestimate, like, what it's going to look like. [00:12:58] Very rarely, I think, are we accurate in our planning and our methodology? So if you wouldn't mind, like, you know, it's just sharing some of the. You know, the financial piece, like, what did this look like, you know, from the start to like, where you are now.? [00:13:13] Kent: Yeah. You know, what I've described to people is when I said what I do, you know, I said, "hey, you know, growing a property management company is not impossible. It's a difficult thing to do, but I did it with two, my two arms tied behind my back, you know, because I was struggling just to get out of bed," you know, is where I began. And, you know, it's just. I knew that I could do it. Once again, going back to the confidence and the routine of doing it, but yeah, you know, the, at the end of the day, I enjoy this business for multiple reasons, but from a financial piece, I enjoy the residual income that comes in. I enjoyed the flexibility that this job allows. And yeah, you know, my expectations coming in, you know, I had my spreadsheet on what it would look like and, you know, my goal was 100 doors. I'm going to be at 100 doors and I know Jason, you shared that's a lot of people when they start up their goal and I'll never forget. It was right around Christmas time last year. I'm like, "well, I got to call somebody" and, you know, I started calling people and after my first day, "I said, my goal is 100 doors by the end of the year, 1 year from now." Yeah. Well, I was able to reach that last month September 13th and it was a very good feeling that day, kind of walking on clouds, like, man, did I really just do that? You know, and just looking back yeah, I just had to put in the work. At the end of the day, it was a challenge to call that first person, but I just knew, I told myself, I'm going to have to pound these phones for six months. Is what I told myself and you know, so I'm like, all right, May, June, I should start getting some income man. It was right on the dot. I mean, literally day one of the second half of the year, client number one, client number two, you know, but it's like you got to have that long term vision to get through that kind of rut of a week of without securing anything, you know, you just got to. [00:15:07] And once again, going back to DoorGrow gave me the confidence. I mean, you know, if I didn't have DoorGrow, I'm sure I would have gave up like, yeah, this is not going anywhere.  [00:15:15] Jason: Yeah. So, I mean, it's been awesome seeing your growth and where are you at now? Like we know you've got more doors, what, but how does life feel different for you? And what I mean is in the beginning, struggling to get out of bed, like life was difficult, zero doors in the beginning. Give us some contrast, help us understand where, what's life like now for you.  [00:15:34] Kent: I mean, night and day, you know, I love the quote. [00:15:37] I don't know who said it, but "if you have more than 3 priorities in your life, you have 0," and right when I heard that, I'm like, man, what are my 3 priorities? Well, my health, because if I don't have my health my longevity, I got nothing, you know, that's the foundation. So, taking time to work out, to exercise, to bike you know, family is the second one. [00:15:57] You know, my daughter, my parents and then the third is work. And just having that focus has given me great clarity. You know, I don't have time for anything else outside of my three priorities. You know, I, you know, I'm going to, I went to bed last night about eight o'clock. I was dead tired because I busted my butt on my three priorities. [00:16:17] So, you know, to answer your question, how's it switched? It's just I'm so thankful for what I went through because it's given me extreme focus on what's important to me, what I need to do to survive and to thrive.  [00:16:28] Jason: Yeah. We had a good conversation about 10x. I remember. What did you take away from that coaching call? [00:16:36] Kent: Yeah, it's so funny. We talked when you originally and you started with health, you know, "hey, man, make sure you're working out. Make sure you're taking care of yourself. I mean, I took a lot from that, but that was the biggest thing. I wasn't taking care of myself. And I got better over this year, but I made that priority. [00:16:53] Number 1, you know, I prioritize sleep. I prioritize going to the gym and you know, the other big thing I got from it was I was kind of messing around. Like, I didn't realize how close I actually was, you know, I thought it was gonna take me forever to get where I wanted to be door count wise. And it was like, to the day, like, maybe not even a week when I went from 30 doors to 105 doors, And all that was I, you know, it was easier or what I took from the conversation. It was easier for me to, like, try to be a professional athlete than trying to be like a college athlete. You know, so what I did was I started calling people in my database with more doors. You know, I started stop messing around with the 2 families, and I was going 4 families and up and just there was things just started gushing in. [00:17:44] Jason: Yeah yeah, we chatted about that. And for those listening, the conversation was something like it's easier to do 10x and 2x, which comes from that the book with the title 10x is easier than 2x by Ben Hardy. Which is he's teaching Dan Sullivan's principles in that book. And but the idea is there's very few things that can get you, that you can do to 10x. [00:18:06] And when you think about that, and there's a lot of things, infinite things you could do to 2x your business, right to have incremental growth. So. I just, I challenged you. I said, I want you to sit with that question and think, what could I do to 10x? And when we just start exploring that question, we start to change your behaviors. [00:18:22] And you've found some ways you're like, well, I'll go after people with more doors, people with more doors secretly for those listening, the people with more units and more doors are better clients, they value you more typically, and they are easier to get on, you know, than the one offs in a lot of situations. [00:18:40] And so, you know, we can choose our ideal customer and go after them. And you started shifting your focus, which is interesting. And then you started seeing a shift in your door count significantly.  [00:18:52] Kent: And, you know, it's worth repeating what you said there, you know, the higher door count people, the more sophisticated investors are way easier than some of the mom and pops with, like, a 2 family, you know, for every reason you just mentioned right there.  [00:19:07] Jason: Yeah, they get so emotional about their property. They maybe used to live in it. They're like, "Timmy etched his height in the wall, like, since he was, you know, a little kid and like, we need to maintain it to like, it has to stay the same forever," and they don't want to treat it like a rental property. [00:19:22] Yeah. So, yeah, well, Kent, you know, we've really appreciated having you as a client. It's been great to see your growth and success. Where do you see yourself in a year from now?  [00:19:31] Kent: Yeah. So there's kind of two things going on when I'm thinking, you know, I've just seen, you know, my number one priority right now, I'm where I'm at the door number that I wanted to be you know, I want to make sure my highest priority right now is make sure I can deliver to what I told the people I can do so, yes, I have greater ambitions of growing doors, but me servicing what I already have right now is of my number 1 priority and number 2 and I've mentioned this to you, Jason. [00:20:02] I've mentioned it to a couple other people. You know, me getting up to 1000 doors. Is going to be easier than what I just went through over the past year to get to 100. And, I'm using the last part of this year to kind of button up my processes with the things that I'm servicing right now and going into the next year My goal is going to be to let me double what I did. [00:20:23] Let me try to get 200 doors, you know And just see where that goes But then I, you know, I say that it's like, wow, screw that. I'm going to go after a thousand doors. Why am I selling myself short? You know?  [00:20:35] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I think you're, you know, that's interesting. I think a lot of people listening to this might have less than a hundred doors. [00:20:42] And if you do reach out to DoorGrow, let's get your business fixed up because having less than a hundred doors is not really a profitable business. Like it's really difficult. To make money when you have like 20 doors or 30 doors, right? 50 doors. And a lot of people get stuck right there as a solopreneur. [00:20:59] And and they've already made usually a lot of mistakes related to pricing and branding and everything else. So everything feels so uphill. And then a lot of times they're losing more doors sometimes than they're getting on or about the same. So they're just, they have this high churn rate where they're losing clients every year. [00:21:13] And then getting some clients and they're like, "I'm not growing." That's a painful grind to be in. And that's way harder than if you break the hundred door barrier in a healthy way, which you did and you know how to grow, which you do. And you know how to grow independently of ads. You don't, you're not beholden to some marketer to advertising agencies. [00:21:33] Like you can just go out there and create business. And it actually takes you less time than it would to follow up on cold, crappy leads that you were buying. And so you're doing things in a smarter way than most property managers do, because most probably are listening to this going, "well, I don't want to make phone calls. [00:21:48] I'm going to go be stupid and spend a bunch of money on ads and try and do a bunch of advertising instead," because they want to avoid something that's going to actually work well and get them warmer leads that have a higher close rate that they're not competing with the low price property manager, you know, out in the market.  [00:22:05] Sarah: I think it's the perception of pain. It's all, it's not, you know, people aren't like, "Oh, I want to do this way instead." It's just that it sounds painful where it sounds a lot easier just to be like, "Oh, I'll just pay for ads. I'll pay a marketer. And then like leads will come to me." It sounds easier. [00:22:23] And it's so deceptive because it's so hard. It's so hard. But it sounds, I think when people hear like, "Oh, well, I have to talk to people and I have to make a bunch of calls and I have to reach out to a bunch of people? I have to do a bunch of work?" Then they go, "Oh, this is like this hard thing." But what they don't realize is that if you, like, if you're spending money on ads and you're advertising, like, and you're getting leads that are coming to you, you still have to make a bunch of calls. You still have to talk to a bunch of people. You still have to do a bunch of work and you're actually doing more work because these people don't know who you are and you're just spending money. Like hopefully this works! I hope it works. So, like, is that something that was like hard for you to get over that hurdle and just like start doing the work. Was that hard for you?  [00:23:07] Kent: Oh, yeah. I mean, I you know, I procrastinated forever, you know, it's you know, I spent so much time, "I'm gonna do this with you know, trying to find leads and you know," basically I was just prolonging the pain, you know, I'm then finally one day. I'm like just call somebody, you know I think the best example was it was right around Memorial Day. It was that Saturday And I got up, I'm like, all right, "I'm going to call my 50 contacts or my 50 buildings." And man, I was pacing around my computer cause I did not want to do it. You know, I came up with every excuse. [00:23:44] "Oh, it's a holiday. Nobody wants to talk to me." You know, there were some curse words that I just started saying to myself, like just trying to hype myself up, like, "man, just do it." Finally, I sat down and did and started calling and call number one. So I reached out to 50. Prospects 50 buildings call number 1 was a home run call. [00:24:03] Number 50 was a home run. Everything in the middle was a dud, but I was just like, I got off. It was so funny to have that 1st 1 and that 50th. I was like, wow, that was a lesson right there. You just don't know what's around the corner. But yeah, Sarah, yeah, definitely procrastinated to finally pick up the phone. [00:24:21] But once I, you know, talking about that momentum, once I started getting some first base hits, those then turned into double plays, and then they got a couple of home runs out of it, but you just got to start.  [00:24:32] Sarah: Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for sharing that.  [00:24:34] Jason: Cool. Well, can any parting words of wisdom for people that are, or were are right now in a similar spot to where you were when you first came to us? [00:24:44] Or maybe they're dabbling like 20, 30 doors are struggling? [00:24:48] Kent: Yeah. I mean, it's been, you know, there's been a couple of things in my life that were like moments. I'm like, man, that, that changed my course. And one was joining DoorGrow. Professionally. And, you know, the second Jason's the call that mean you had, you know, maybe a month or two ago when I shared what I went through. [00:25:05] You know, that was just 2 things that just, you just get tattooed in my brain. And I know I've said this a few times to you even, you know, I'm like, "Oh, I could have got where I am right now, but DoorGrow helped me do it quicker." I'm confident in saying I'm even going to remove that from my vocabulary. [00:25:21] I would not have been able to get to where I am right now. Yes, I did put in the work, but DoorGrow was great on showing me little tricks of the trade, some different technologies I can implement that just compress that time from a very long time into a very short time. So, yeah, you know, if anybody's on the fence about joining you guys I'm a customer for life. [00:25:44] That's good stuff. We're ending right now. That's like, that's it.  [00:25:48] Sarah: That's it. That's all we need to hear. My day is complete. Thank you. And because this is what we do. This is what we do and we like doing it. Like I'm, this like really fulfills me. This is what I'm really passionate about doing is making that change and making that impact. [00:26:03] Jason: Yeah. Can we be real? So like yesterday was a rough day for us, right? Business can be rough sometimes, like, you know, we get stressed out. We like feel overwhelmed. Things change in the business. Things change with the team. You know, sometimes you get bad news. [00:26:18] Like business is not easy. It's a new day, you pick yourself up, you get to work, and Kent, it's been awesome seeing you put in the work, get the results, and that's really what we value as coaches, we need clients that are willing to do the work required to get the result, we will just help them with the system, and when we get great people, and they have a system, they're going to win. [00:26:46] There's no question. Our system's proven. We love when we get to connect with the right people that are ready for a good system. And those of you listening, when you really want success, when you're really committed to success, and you're willing to do the work required, and you just do it, even if you're sucking at it, the system will become clear. [00:27:06] You will find the system. And that's when greatness starts to come. That's where success starts to come. So put in the work, put in the effort. And then when you're ready, reach out the DoorGrow, we've got the system and then we'll help you get going. So Kent, thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you. [00:27:20] Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for your time. We'll talk to you again soon. All right. Sounds good. See you guys. All right. So if you are a property management entrepreneur, that's wanting to add doors and make a difference in everything that we talked about, then, you know, reach out. We would love to support you. [00:27:37] Just go to doorgrow.Com. Also go to doorgrowclub.Com, join our free group and community. We give away a lot of value. Hopefully that'll get you up to the point where you can afford to work with us. And and when you're ready, we're here to help you take things to the next level. So bye everyone. Until next time to our mutual growth. [00:27:54] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:28:21] 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.

At DoorGrow, we love showing off the awesome entrepreneurial people we get to coach and work with every day. In today's episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull sit down with DoorGrow clients Jill Lyons and Alex Platt to talk about their journey in property management and with DoorGrow. You'll Learn [03:00] Starting a journey with coaching [07:26] Finding support as an entrepreneur [12:18] The path to success is hard work [16:54] Getting out of the business [19:28] The importance of good company culture [21:20] The impact of coaching Tweetables “Done is better than perfect.” “The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is.” “If you don't mind working, you don't set up boundaries.” “Just being open to the thought and the idea is enough to make it work.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. Ooh, like that one.  [00:00:07] 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'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. 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. [00:00:47] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win I'm your host, property management, growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow along with Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:13] Our guests today... we've got Jill and Alex. Jill Lyons. Alex, what's your last name? Platt. Okay. I just know he's always with Jill, Alex. So we're really glad to have you on the show. And the topic of today's episode is like, we want to talk about your journey with DoorGrow because you've been with us for a little bit. So, why don't you introduce yourself and explain like kind of how you got into property management.  [00:01:39] Jill: Well, I must've taken an insane pill along the way, but I like it. My name is Jill Lyons and I own and I'm broker of Relaxed Realty Group in Sarasota, Florida. Currently we manage about 500 homes. We have like maybe 520 now and our rent roll, we just surpassed 800,000 this month, so I'm stoked and happy and proud. And you know, I love the business. There's never a day that's not that I feel like, "Oh my gosh, it's, you know, Monday." I never feel like that. So it's every day is a joy. Not every instant is a joy, but every day is a joy.  [00:02:12] Jason: So let's Alex, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what is your role?  [00:02:17] Alex: So, my name is Alex and I've worked with Jill here just over a year and a half, or going on almost two years when I got my real estate license. My wife started with Jill, Miranda, and she's been with Jill for what, 10 years now? Started with a business with her and I do the operations here. So operations and BDM.  [00:02:38] Jason: Awesome. Okay, cool.  [00:02:41] Jill: So he came from a customer service background with T Mobile for the last 10 years. It's great. Corporate's a great, but there's a lot more opportunity here and oh my God, he's great with people. Of course He's not " to brag about himself. So I'll brag about him. So he will put on multiple hats and do everything that whatever needs to be done.  [00:03:00] Jason: Cool. Yeah, you guys make a good team. We've enjoyed having you in the program. So why don't we start with what problem problems were you dealing with when you first came to DoorGrow? Like what challenges were going on?  [00:03:14] Jill: So I would say my strengths are that I love to sell and talk to people and help people. So, you know, that was naturally there and I grew the business with success with growing doors. And I was in a kind of a comfortable, I would say position as. Having a good amount of owners and properties, but I want to start exiting the business and it was just way too 'me centered,' you know, what do we do? What do we do with people coming to me? You know, I don't mind working. Like I say, so unfortunately, if you don't mind working, you don't set up boundaries, you don't set up corporate structures. My flow, there was nothing corporate about me. [00:03:49] If I wanted to step away, which I did this year, hired the operations manager, but I'm like, now what? And now what do you do? I'm an engineer by education. All I know how to do is build a spreadsheet and show people returns. So I was looking for ...I always believed in coaches. I've been coached since day one of my business. [00:04:07] So coaching is definitely something I believe in, but the coaching company I used was really just real estate working with buyers and sellers. So I hadn't ever got the property management business aspect of it and setting up the business and the structure. So when you watched one of your podcasts and listened to your podcast, and I liked what you had to say, so I-- "let's let them get us to that next level." [00:04:32] Jason: Watch the podcast, listen to the podcast, and now you're on the podcast.  [00:04:36] Jill: I know, I'm like, what do I have to offer? That's the first thing, I'm still listening and learning.  [00:04:42] Jason: You know, there's a lot of people listening out there that would dream of having 520 doors, having an amazing operator, having the operations running smoothly and being on your journey, stepping out of the business, like this, that's a dream for a lot of property managers. [00:04:58] They're still in the thick of the mud and wondering if there's a light at the end of the tunnel.  [00:05:03] Jill: So they don't believe that I'm going to step out.  [00:05:05] Alex: She's a workaholic. So, you know, it's a little bit of yin and yang.  [00:05:09] Jason: You know, entrepreneurs, it's a tough thing. I've known a few entrepreneurs that have like exited their business and then they were bored and they started another business. It happens. So entrepreneurs, we want to stay busy and we want to do the things we really enjoy doing. So you just have to find something you maybe enjoy doing more.  [00:05:29] Jill: I don't know. Yeah, no, I'm not closed to what's next, but I don't know. I'm still here.  [00:05:35] Jason: So let's chat about, and maybe this is a question for Alex. So Alex what did you see when you first came into the business? Some of the challenges in how to like support Jill and how to get her out of the operational stuff. And what challenges did you see that DoorGrow so far been able to help with?  [00:05:54] Alex: So luckily with your program we got to revamp everything. I mean, your Rapid Revamp was amazing. I mean, we got to go from rebuilding and rebranding our logo and everything. So I really enjoyed your class, especially with the whole cycle of suck, making sure that you're not holding onto those owners that are sucking up all your time and, you know, using. A lot of your resource when it comes down to it. I would say those were the biggest things and especially your systems that you have. I mean, I think the Flow is going to help a lot for us to map out each and every one of our procedures that we have on an operational standpoint.  [00:06:33] Jason: Okay. So for those listening, DoorGrow Flow, our process software, which is pretty cool. So the Rapid Revamp, I mean, and you guys made a lot of changes. Yes. Changed your pricing.  [00:06:43] Alex: We changed our name.  [00:06:44] Jill: You changed the name. I said I would never, ever do that!  [00:06:49] Sarah: She's like " I'm not rebranding." I'm like, "okay, we don't have to rebrand." And then she's like, "I think I'm going to rebrand." I was like, "wow! All right, let's do it."  [00:06:58] Jason: Everybody says they don't want to do it. But what I love about entrepreneurs is that if you show them how to make more money, they're pretty okay with it. They're pretty okay with making more money. So, and I think the training, we do a good job in converting people into wanting to make more money. "Here's how it'll make you more money if you do the right things with your branding." So website. Did we help with that?  [00:07:23] Alex: We're almost there. We're on the tail end of that portion of it.  [00:07:26] Jason: So for those that have not been exposed to DoorGrow. Maybe they're just listening to this podcast. They're like, "I don't know if these guys are legit. Kind of looks like some sort of one of these Influencer sort of guys," or I don't know what people think before they become a client but what would you say to those that are on the other side of the paywall and maybe struggling?  [00:07:51] Jill: For me, honestly, if I would have found this 10 years ago, it would have happened faster, my growth and where I am now would have happened faster and more organized. I kind of wing it and I'm the type that, you know, I don't want to spend any money unless a bunch of sitting in the bank. And I probably, if I would have opened up the bank and gotten the coaching and the programs from a property management company versus just from, you know, where I got my assistance from, which I had when I did buying and selling, which I hate it. So I kind of kept my things rather than going into property management coaching and training. It would have definitely made it faster and less painful, and I would say that's the biggest thing that I wish I would have found you sooner, but you know, you always find people when you're supposed to find them and entrepreneurs tend not to be, in my opinion, people that go to business school because they just want to do it. They jump in head first. There's no rhyme or reason to how we do it. So the organization is usually where we struggle the most. And just networking and having the beginning, I just went to Google and figured everything out on my own, rather than reaching out to an organization like yours, that's more specific for us and NARPM, which, you know connected me to other property managers and how are they doing it? And why did I have to create the wheel and do it all my way? I didn't even know that there was anything like this.  [00:09:16] Jason: Yeah. And you had been in NARPM for a while before joining DoorGrow.  [00:09:20] Jill: Yeah. I'm heavily involved in NARPM. I'm the president of our local chapter. So that definitely has made helped my business, and the connection and they have a lot of tools that have helped me significantly realize that it is a business and with systems. But but there isn't the sales support, you know, they don't have you, Jason. It's not energetic and make me go, "yes! I'm going to do it!" With you and with everybody around! You know, it's just like the connections.  [00:09:48] Jason: Yeah. I know you have both really enjoyed the operational pieces as well, and you've attended quite a few of our scale calls on Friday that Sarah runs. What what things have you taken away from on the operational side of things? [00:10:04] Jill: So what would you say, because you deal with that more? I kind of say, go do it.  [00:10:07] Alex: So, I take a lot of the way, honestly, you guys definitely on those calls go over a lot of different systems that are in other people's companies, to be honest. And we try to take piece by piece and just kind of make it our own when it comes to this. I think it's developing more of the systems that we have. As far as like a specific system, I think we talked about maintenance heavily. And the processes over how other companies do it and what we do with our maintenance. So it's kind of getting every pieces of everybody's input on that stuff to kind of lay out what maybe we should change, you know? [00:10:45] Jill: I will say that as far as operational, we were in pretty good shape with that. It's not technicalogical. So you have DoorGrow flow. I'm just talking with Errol tomorrow. So it's been on my list of things to do this whole year to set up flow and get that going so that it's more clear how we do things because when we have a new employee, I can't just hand them, "these are our thing," we have to manually tell them or give them a checklist, which doesn't really help. So, I have to hire Errol cause it stays on my list every single month and it hasn't been done. That's what I'm going to pass the buck on versus the website. I'd like to do the marketing. So we need to finish all of this by the end of the year. That's on our list. Does it check the list? We're at the last, getting to the last quarter. So you give us the tools. It's just setting it up. That takes a lot of time and concentration time. And Errol seemed to be I met him at DoorGrow live, you know, in Texas. And yeah, he was talking about processes and creating them. Like I talked about property management, so he's going to be our guy. I'll see how it goes.  [00:11:47] Alex: We have a lot in our heads, obviously. So, that's getting it all down to where if somebody needs to know something, it's much easier.  [00:11:56] Jason: Yeah we're planning on doing some more stuff with Errol Allen, who Jill's speaking with, and he's currently playing around with our DoorGrow flow software and testing it out as well. [00:12:05] So I think it's going to be a game changer for the market. So Sarah's had a lot of interaction, I think, with the two of you. What's been your perception of why they do so well as clients?  [00:12:18] Sarah: Oh, well, so there's a few things that I'd like to kind of. Point out and give you guys like major kudos on. First is, I think you're just open. Sometimes we have people who are very resistant. They're like, " that won't work," and "I'm not going to do it like this," and "I can't do this," and "that's not in my market," right? And I think the difference is just being open to the thought and the idea is enough to make it work because if you go into something and you think, "oh, this won't work," well, you're probably right. Then it's not going to work. But you guys are very open and you also, I love this about you guys, you take action. You just come in and you're like, "this is what we're going to do," and then you take action, you implement and you get it done. I think, to date, they are the fastest people who have completed everything in the Rapid Revamp. Like, they get a medal for that. Like, every time, they're like, "yep, we're done with this," I'm like, "oh, wow, okay!" They just get it done. It's like they just put their heads down. They know what they need to do. They put in the work and they get it done and then they go, "okay, great, we did that. What do we need now? Like what's the next thing that we can do to either like build on top of that or like take us to the next level? And I think you guys are really great at that. And I think you, you work very well together. You know, you balance each other out. You like ping well back and forth, back together, and I think that gives you the ability to move things along so quickly.  [00:13:44] Alex: It's great to have ideas that we can bounce off of each other and make it a solid process and get it out of the way and move on to the next one.  [00:13:52] Jill: Well, and I love a checklist. So you have a checklist. I want to see checks on there. I don't want to see them open. So I think that myself, I can be more reactionary property management. Our phone is always ringing. Things are always happening. You know, I can easily not get anything accomplished in a day and be busy the whole day. So with the Rapid Revamp it has me be on track along with handling the things that come on you know all day but I have to get my things done  [00:14:18] Alex: And the nice thing about your dashboard was the fact that you could assign things, we would take them and split them up and be like, "okay, you're going to do these and they're assigned to you" and then I could assign ones to me so we can you know, handle what we needed to.  [00:14:30] Jason: Cool. [00:14:31] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I think that was really awesome just to see you guys because every time I check in with you, you're like, "Oh, yeah, we're done with that already." Like, okay, let's see what's the next thing for you guys? And you already knew! You were never like, "Hey, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. Like, you just like stayed the course. And sometimes it's hard for entrepreneurs to do because there's so many shiny objects. There's so many of them, right? Like, "Hey, I'm coming in, I'm doing this one thing and that's it," and then along the way, there's like some other little thing that's like, "Hey, I need your attention." [00:15:04] And it's so tempting to go, "Ooh, but I could focus on that." Like, " let me just go over here for a second," and like, you guys just stayed the course. You like stay on point. And I think that's that's something I really have to give you guys like a huge compliment on because it's hard to do that. It's really difficult to do that. And you guys do it really well.  [00:15:25] Jill: Thank you.  [00:15:26] Jason: Yeah. And so you've interacted with several of our team members, right? It's not just the Jason show or the Jason and Sarah show. And I think that's what a lot of people think. Could you just comment a little bit on DoorGrow's team? You don't have to remember everybody's names, but yeah.  [00:15:43] Jill: Well the two that I've probably enjoyed the most is Clint. He's like the coolest surfer dude in the whole wide world, but he's sharp as a tack. You know, "we're just going to buy a $5 million company." He's the exact person to teach you how to be cool and do acquisitions and whatnot. [00:16:03] And that you can see why he's so successful because he's a joy to listen to.  [00:16:07] Jason: Yeah, he's fun.  [00:16:08] Jill: And ironically considering an acquisition in the middle of all listening to him and he took his time out, sent me a lot of information and questions I should ask and what due diligence I should do. So, I mean, his wealth of all the years that he's done that, enticed in a few documents was, I could have never created that. And then Roya, she's a ball of energy and I'm all into manifesting and all that. So, I mean, not many people you can feel through a computer screen with their energy, you know, that's heard of talent that she has.  [00:16:43] Jason: Yeah, she's our dangerously powerful mindset coach. And teaches the advanced sales stuff. [00:16:51] She's yeah she's had quite an impact. Yeah.  [00:16:54] Jill: Yeah. For sure.  [00:16:56] I went to DoorGrow live, which was fantastic to connect with everybody. But thanks to DoorGrow and Alex being also trained as a DoorGrow. I'm taking my first three week vacation in 10 years.  [00:17:08] Jason: That's amazing. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Your business will be in good hands with Alex and and we've got his back. So. For sure. So awesome. Yep. Property managers, if you're listening to this and you have not taken a significant vacation in the last five years, when's your turn? Maybe it's time to reach out and let us help you take- this is one of the most common things that we hear, especially this summer. [00:17:36] Lots of our clients are taking vacations like for the first time ever, or in the first time in a long time, or it's a longer vacation than they've been able to take.  [00:17:45] Sarah: Brandon and Mark, they took off the majority of July, both of them, took off the majority of July, and they're like, "things were fine, like things were okay," I'm like, "that's great, that's how it should work," and if we set it up that way, then things can work that way.  [00:18:01] Jason: For sure. Yeah, one of our mentors had this quote, I don't know where it came from, but he said, the more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. Ooh, like that one. So Jill's working on making herself less valuable to the business. I've made DoorGrow less of the Jason show, and we've got all these amazing coaches and yeah, and that's the goal, right? We're able to provide more value and it allows us to be more free as entrepreneurs. To do the things that we really enjoy doing and eventually maybe to do nothing. If that's really the goal. I don't know. Jill, will have to find something to do. She's going to trap the world. She'll think we're not going to do nothing. Exactly. We're not going to do nothing. I don't think Jill knows what to do.  [00:18:43] Jill: We just want freedom to not always to be working.  [00:18:46] Jason: There you go. Yeah.  [00:18:48] Sarah: You can choose the things you do.  [00:18:50] Jill: Yeah.  [00:18:51] Jason: Well, we've really appreciated having you both in the program. You know, the, Sarah mentioned about you, but what I've noticed is Jill, you have this gift of positivity, it seems to rub off on everyone around you. We've really enjoyed having you in the program. Everyone's like, "Oh, we love Jill." All of our coaches and team members love Jill. And you can see Alex has like got a positive, you know, energy going on as well. And so you've created a really good culture on your team and in your business. And I don't know if it's always been that way, but I know that's something that's important to us at DoorGrow is making sure everybody has good culture with their business and with their team. So can you touch on culture just a little bit? [00:19:30] Jill: Well, I think connection and culture is the most important thing. If I don't have it here, how is a client going to want to be attracted to us? You know, how is that going to work? You know, if you don't have a positive look on the industry, the business... I mean, this is anybody that calls us is frustrated with property management and say, "here, we love to do property management." They're like, "I need you!" [00:19:51] you know, tenants and everybody gets to complain to us and we have to listen to them and, you know, do our job, but in these walls of this company, we don't have to do that. We can vent to each other. We can laugh. We don't complain. We more laugh about situations than we do complain. And I think I've been a good leader as far as that goes. But I think that also because I have that energy, I want to attract that energy. And so those people are, who are working here and stay.  [00:20:18] Jason: I love that. I mean, I think having a culture in which complaining is not the norm. I mean, it's easy to complain in property management. Right? And I'm sure there's a lot of you listening that are like, " I complain all the time. I complain every day," like reducing that complaining in the business and creating a culture where the team don't see that it's totally okay to just complain all the time. Because if you're complaining about your clients, they're going to feel that. They're not going to want to work with somebody that's, they know is just going to be complaining about them behind their back. [00:20:47] And so I think that's really powerful. And I think that there's a lot of joking in property management, and I think if you can't laugh about it, then you're just going to be hurt by it, and so...  [00:20:58] Jill: and the only way you make a lot of money is to do the things that nobody wants to do. [00:21:02] Jason: There you go. And they will pay you a pretty penny to do it. [00:21:05] Alex: Yeah, we don't have one person that dreads coming to work every day. That's for sure. Everybody's like, "oh shoot. It's monday. Let's go!"  [00:21:11] Jill: We're a little family.  [00:21:13] Jason: Awesome. Yeah, I love that. You have a good culture. So, cool well, anything else we should chat about? What are the biggest takeaways you feel like you've gotten from being part of working with DoorGrow for those listening? [00:21:28] Jill: I think first of all to make sure that I express my purpose to everybody, you know, start with the person.  [00:21:34] Jason: Has that changed your close rate? Has that changed how clients respond to you?  [00:21:39] Jill: Oh, just overall being brave enough to start with that, you know, I always assume they don't care, you know they're not calling for my me personally, but they are, you know, and some would get to know me on a personal level over time, but I never started the conversation with that. [00:21:54] I always started it with "I love property management" and I think they could feel our energy, but not deep down what my life purpose is. So, and how I could tie that back into having them become our client. But it gets a personal, it makes it a personal fit right away or not.  [00:22:11] Jason: Yeah. They either trust your motives and like them or they don't, but they, at least they know what your motives are. Otherwise they're just going to assume you just want their money.  [00:22:20] Jill: Yeah. The name change was a huge one. And then the third, I think final one for me is. When you did your stack deck and it wasn't like perfectly animated with all these designs and it looked great. And I'm fine with it. I stopped judging my marketing to have to be the caliber of Coca Cola. [00:22:40] I don't have designers out there. I don't want to spend design. So just produce it and get it out there and make it look kind of quirky and we're quirky anyway. So I don't know why I was thinking that we had to be this high level, corporate marketing program in order for it to work.  [00:22:54] Jason: I think done is better than perfect for sure. [00:22:57] That's one of my  [00:22:57] Alex: favorite things is like, no, just get it complete and then we'll move on and we'll get the next thing done.  [00:23:03] Jason: Yeah. Done makes money. And you've made a lot of changes. You've gotten a lot of things done that are going to help shore up leaks that make you a lot more money. And. Yeah. A lot of people get really caught up on things being so perfect. [00:23:14] They don't get as nearly as much done. So kudos to both of you for implementing and taking action. So, well, we appreciate you coming and hanging out with us here on the show. What do you feel like, what are some tangible results besides the brand? Revenue doors, any other shifts that you've seen in the business since joining? [00:23:33] Jill: Well, we've gotten rid of a lot of the properties. I had the guts to say to a couple owners, you know, "You have to either sell this property or find another manager because it's too much of a liability. And I'm scared to because X Y Z and so should you." And obviously it's a great time to sell last year. So this is the time get to get a better asset, 1031 exchange it, or let's you know, we need to drop it by the end of the year. I didn't, you know, say we're going to drop you on 30 days, but they, most of them, most of those as a consulting, they trust us and know us and they sold those properties. We have two that are closing this week, our last two that are closing and we had problems. Yeah, problems. So we've gotten rid of a lot of problems since the beginning and liability issues, you know, you know, liabilities. So that's that's, I think our biggest deal and it's allowed other doors to come in. [00:24:28] It's amazing what you let go just energetically things will fill its place. So door wise, I would say we're at about the same, but revenue has gone up 20%.  [00:24:38] Alex: We've been getting higher-end properties instead of, you know, things that were D class properties that we didn't want.  [00:24:44] Jason: Love it. 20 percent more revenue. Awesome, that does not suck.  [00:24:48] Sarah: And getting rid of the problem, right?  [00:24:55] Jason: Well, we appreciate you being clients and we're super excited to see your progression through the DoorGrow code, and this business I think that could easily be at a thousand doors in the next two to three years. It's totally doable, especially if you start doing some of the acquisition deals, like it's going to be really interesting once you get some of these systems in place, then you're ready to just scale like crazy. So excited to see what you do. All right. Well then we'll go ahead and wrap up. Appreciate you being on the show. [00:25:25] Thanks for hanging out with us, Alex and Jill. Thank you. Great.  [00:25:29] For those listening, if you want to be like Alex and Jill and make good decisions and grow your business in a healthy way, and maybe increase your revenue 20%. aNd clean up your portfolio and optimize your sales pipeline so you make more money, more easily reach out to DoorGrow. [00:25:45] We would love to take a look at your business and see if we can help you. The answer is: we can... most likely and see if you'd be a good fit for our program. You can check us out at doorgrow. com. There's a big pink button on the home page says "I want to grow." click that. Do the three steps there to see if you'd be a good candidate to work with us, and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone  [00:26:08] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:26:35] 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.

“We are both keeper-in-touchers,” says Jason Levin, author of the book Relationships to Infinity, which studies the art and science of keeping in touch. He and his wife Lori Mihalich-Levin first met on September 11, 2001 in France and stayed in contact as Lori built her law career and Jason built a career which includes his current role as a keynote speaker, trainer and business development coach at Ready, Set, Launch. This practice of keeping in touch has carried over into their married life as well. In a conversation at the kitchen sink, having put their two young sons to bed, Lori asked why there wasn't a program to help new parents navigate their personal and professional lives. After Jason asked her what she could do to solve the problem, she began in earnest what would become Mindful Returns, a program which guides new parents transition back to work after parental leave.    The two touch base each Saturday night by consolidating what they call the “daily detritus” into one basket in order to tackle the duties of parenthood together. This idea was inspired by Atul Gawande's “Checklist Manifesto. The two have also been inspired by Eve Rodsky's book “Fair Play,” and they discuss the importance of a balanced division of labor in a household.   Lori and Jason's support for one another is obvious. Join today's discussion to hear their advice on how to write a book or make a speech in public and find out how Jason earned the name The TicTac Guy!   Quotes   “The foundation of Relationships to Infinity is the social science behind networks, and how we think about our approach to connection and reconnection. Lori was just talking about the fact that we both are ‘keeper-in-touchers.' There's actually a lot of social science behind that.” (8:44 | Jason) “I said to my dear husband, ‘There should be a program out there, a class I can take about how to transition into working parenthood. I can take a class on how to massage my baby, puree baby food, make a birth plan. I can't take a class on how to navigate the personal and professional identity crisis I'm having as I become a working parent. And Jason said, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?' And thus, the program that I created, Mindful Return, was born.” (10:53 | Lori) “Too often when we think about building something entrepreneurial, it has to be in the garage, venture funded, all these things. But what if you take little bite sized pieces with mind numbing detail on a weekly basis and you build something?” (14:26 | Jason)  “There are so many dual career working couples these days, that this is an issue and it spills into the workplace too. Because if you have if you're doing 90% of the mental work of your household, you're just not able to focus on your job as much as someone who is doing 10% of the mental work of a household.” (21:52 | Lori)  “Parenthood made me so much of a better public speaker, because before we had kids, I would stew about the slides. And I would sit there and analyze them, and I'd memorize my script. And then we had kids, and I said, ‘I don't have time for any of that. And I just showed up as who I was, and I was much more spontaneous, and I hadn't over prepared anything, and people liked that better.” (33:14 | Lori) Links The Checklist Manifesto - Atul Gawal https://a.co/d/hppObRx Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do By Eve Rodsky https://a.co/d/6ZoaX2O Parents at Work Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/parents-at-work/id1239258343   Connect with  Lori Mihalich-Levin: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorimihalichlevin/ Mindful Return https://www.mindfulreturn.com/ Lori's book - Back to Work After Baby - https://www.mindfulreturn.com/back-work-after-baby-book/   Connect with Jason Levin: READY, SET, LAUNCH readysetlaunch.net LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonlevinspeakertrainercoach/ Jason's book - Relationships to Infinity   Connect with Chris Batz: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbatz/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theliongroupkc  Instagram: @theliongroupllc Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm  

Michael Sullivan is a property management entrepreneur who has grown his business to 275 doors. Join property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull as they chat with former DoorGrow client Michael Sullivan to learn about his experience starting and growing a property management business. You'll Learn [01:44] Getting started in the property management industry [07:49] Growing a property management business [24:01] Having support and feeling fulfilled in the business [28:13] Growing and scaling to the next level Tweetables “To go faster, you need to invest the currency of cash if you want to get more of the other currencies and to get the business to the next level.” “If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning.” “A lot of us business owners, we have a bit of ego.” “Being an entrepreneur can be one can be very lonely, and it is really important to have people in the same industry kind of in your village.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: To go faster, you need to invest the currency of cash. If you want to get more of the other currencies and to get the business to the next level. Welcome DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. 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, along with Sarah Hull, the co owner and CEO of DoorGrow. [00:01:09] Now let's get into the show and our guest today is Michael L Sullivan. Michael Sullivan is here hanging out with us. He is a client of ours and of Sullivan property management. Did I say that right? MLS ullivan property management. All right, your initials. Got it. And Michael, welcome to the show.  [00:01:33] Michael: Thank you. Thank you very much. Good to be here.  [00:01:36] Jason: We're glad to have you. So we've really enjoyed having you in our program and it's been really amazing seeing your progress. So maybe to kick things off, let's start with talking about how you got into this crazy industry of property management. Like you woke up when you were like maybe five years old and said "property management is the thing for me" maybe. [00:01:57] Michael: Yeah, like every little boy and girl, dreams about being a real estate agent or a property manager.  [00:02:03] Jason: It's right there next to veterinarian and firefighter. [00:02:06] Michael: I think that's right. That's right or professional baseball player so, I left the teaching profession in 1993 and became a real estate agent, a general brokerage real estate agent here in the Greater Research Triangle region of North Carolina, and I did very well. I, on average, sold anywhere between 5 and 15 million dollars worth of real estate when our average sale price was $150,000. Yeah, we were shifting a lot of shacks, and it was a good life. And for the 15 or so years between 1993 and the Great Recession of 2007, 2008, my biggest fear was, "what is going to happen when the market flips?" Because inevitably, real estate flips. It goes from a boom market to a bust market, a buyer's market to a seller market. And so during those years, I socked away cash. When the market crashed in 2008, I had an inventory of 40 general brokerage homes that were for sale. I had clients that were still moving to Massachusetts or Plano, Texas, or Austin, or Seattle, you know, to the other tech hubs in the United States and my clients were like, "All right, problem solver, what are you going to do because we still have to move?" And I was like, "we're going to rent them." And so with an Excel spreadsheet and time, because I had lots of time then I started managing property and in the first year, our goal was 30 homes and we had 50 and it was me and one part time assistant and an Excel spreadsheet. Well, after about 18 months, that didn't work anymore. So I went out and I found what I thought was a reasonable property management software. And then over the course of the next decade or so, we got up to 110 properties or so and things were good, you know, we were chugging along and profits were good, but I really didn't know what I didn't know, I kind of. [00:04:22] Believe that once you had an Appfolio or a Buildium on board that you had won the day and that your business was set and you know, it should be easy. And I soon discovered when I got to 115 doors and just kind of got stuck there that the business wasn't growing the way it should be. And I couldn't figure out why. I was on Facebook one day. And there was this guy, Jason Hull, talking about this company called DoorGrow. And so I did the click, click, clickety click. And then I started listening to some of his podcasts and I started researching DoorGrow and I thought, " huh, this guy knows a whole lot about this industry and maybe this is someone I need to engage with." and so that's how I came to DoorGrow about two and a half years ago, I think.  [00:05:21] Jason: And now you're on one, you're on one of the podcasts.  [00:05:24] Michael: I know.  [00:05:25] Jason: So what challenges did you start to realize you were dealing with at the time? Because generally, you've made a ton of changes in your business since working with us, and you know, it's been impressive to watch. What do you feel like were your challenges at that time? Like, what did you not know that you did not know? So  [00:05:43] Michael: I knew that there were currencies in a business, but I didn't know that there were five of them. And I knew that I was working really hard. So the currency of effort was there. Yeah, my bank account showed me that the currency of cash was there. Yeah, the currency of focus was really lacking because I was still doing a lot of general brokerage and still trying to do property management. The focus of energy was lacking. Because it was draining me kind of going in these different directions. And then there was a lack of time. I didn't have time to take off. I didn't have time to turn it off because it was me and an assistant property manager at that time, I was still doing all of the day to day operations and the round pegs in the round holes work. And figuring out those currencies and how to better divide them and focus on them was one of the things that I didn't know and that once I could put a name to it and once I could focus on fixing where there was a deficiency, then I kind of won the battle. I felt, you know, before you launched all of your different systems to help property managers, I listened to you and I went out and got Lead Simple. I went out and got Property Meld and kind of brought them into the fold. And I recognize that those tools, which you paid dearly for using these outside vendors, really bring you a wealth of time that didn't exist before. So I was able to capture that currency and by extension, the currency of effort was able to kind of tamp down because I had systems now in place to deal with the endless maintenance requests that having a practice that. Goes up over a hundred percent in growth is going to require.  [00:07:48] Jason: So let's talk about that growth. You had mentioned you'd gotten up to maybe, where were you when you started with DoorGrow?  [00:07:56] 118. [00:07:58] 118. Okay.  [00:07:59] And where are you at right now?  [00:08:01] Michael: 275.  [00:08:03] Jason: I mean, it sounds like you had pretty decent profit margin before. Well, what was that? If you don't mind sharing, what is it? [00:08:09] Michael: So, on a gross per door basis, when I joined DoorGrow, we were right at about $122 a door per month. Yeah. And today we're up. $153 and 82 cents per door per month.  [00:08:26] Jason: That's very specific. So, you know, your numbers, which is good.  [00:08:30] Michael: Well I try. Yeah. And year over year revenue increases from last year is up 58.7%.  [00:08:36] Jason: Wow. That's awesome. So money's up. So the cash currency has improved the focus currency. Have you been able to do less in the business and narrow your focus?  [00:08:48] Michael: Yes. So Saturday is my benchmark. I call it my Zen day. And if Saturday can be a Zen day for me, where I don't feel like I have tasks that I have to accomplish, that I can do the things that I want to do, still working on the business, not in the business, then I feel like the week has been a win. If I feel like there are pressing tasks that I have to work on within the business on Saturday, then I feel like the week has not been a win. So if Saturday is Zen, if I come into it feeling very kind of centered and relaxed, then I feel like things are in balance the way they should be. [00:09:34] Jason: So what percent profit margin are you operating at now?  [00:09:37] Michael: So coming into this year 2022, we were at 27 percent profit margin, but a lot of that was really underpinned by very robust general brokerage sales. I made a concerted effort this year to pour gasoline on the fire to really grow the business. The goal is to be over 300 doors by the end of the year. So we're 25 away. Nice. I'm pretty sure we're going to make that, you know, that goal. But our profit margin right now is at. 11 and a half, 11 and three quarters percent. So it's down substantially, but that was deliberate.  [00:10:14] Jason: Got it. And is deliberate because  [00:10:18] Michael: why? [00:10:18] Because we're making an investment in people. We're making an investment in systems and we're making an investment in things like vehicles and computers and marketing.  [00:10:30] Jason: Yeah. So I think that's an important thing for business owners to recognize that. To go faster, you need to invest the currency of cash if you want to get more of the other currencies and to get the business to the next level. And you can grow faster if you have thinner margins, which can feel a little more dangerous. And you know, if you're investing into the growth of the business and into the future, but you know how to add doors, so this isn't a concern for you. [00:10:57] Michael: It isn't. My bookkeeper and my accountant were a little apoplectic until I told them like, this is where we're going. And what I said to my bookkeeper was before the great depression of 1929, Ford motor company was the preeminent motor car company in the world. They had an amazing market share. Then the stock market crashed and the economy tanked and Ford circled the wagons, folded their tents and got very conservative. They scaled back. General Motors, by extension, said, "ah," and they saw it as an opportunity and they poured gasoline on the fire. And for the next 70 years, General Motors was the dominant car company in the world. And so I kind of am using that model.  [00:11:47] Jason: Yeah. So, now a lot of people listening to this might think, well, cool, I can get Property Meld, I can do something, you know, get something like Lead Simple, or we have a better tool now, which is DoorGrow Flow. " I can go and get tools and maybe I can do it on my own." Because I think this is the challenge. A lot of us business owners, we have a bit of ego. " I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and we think I can do it myself. Maybe if I watch enough YouTube videos, listen to enough podcast episodes, I can figure it all out on my own. I don't need DoorGrow or I don't need it." Like, so what would you say to people that listening to this or thinking that?  [00:12:22] Michael: So I would say to them, when I think back to me and one assistant and 115, 110 doors and good profit margins. You know, and a good life. I was in a really kind of felt very isolated and very alone I didn't have other friends or colleagues in the property management space that I could talk to. I felt like I was the only person in the world that was doing this, and once I joined DoorGrow and made very valuable, long lasting friends within the organization that I can call on off hours to discuss specific problems related to property management, that burden of feeling on my own and alone disappeared. Being an entrepreneur can be one can be very lonely, and it is really important to have people in the same industry kind of in your village. And that's why that's 1 of the benefits of joining DoorGrow is that I can call friends in Texas, Idaho, Pennsylvania, California and say, "hey, I've got this going on. What do you think?"  [00:13:40] Jason: Yeah, and I think you know, that's a testament to you is that you've been such a contributor that in the mastermind that it's allowed you to connect with all of these people, you know, there are some people that join the program and they still stay somewhat isolated. They're like, "I'm going to watch videos I'm going to learn stuff and do my own thing and they maybe don't get some of those advantages or benefits But I think that's key. [00:14:02] So yeah Yes. I mean, Sarah, when she had her property management business, I imagine you experienced some of the same sort of things of thinking it's. You know, this is, you're the only one in the world doing this. You're on your own.  [00:14:17] Sarah: Yeah, very much. And especially in the area that I was in I was always different and I just kind of do things differently and I think differently and oftentimes people are like, she's nuts, like, why would you do that? [00:14:29] Even my mom, sometimes she's like, are you sure you're going to do that? Like, are you sure? Like, I'm kind of nervous. But I've just always done things a little differently. And it's so, it is really lonely. And I think the mindset that I had back when I was in Pennsylvania versus, you know, the mindset I have now really has a lot to do with who you surround yourself with and that can. [00:14:53] I think it can just give you hope and it can show you like, Hey, like, I'm not so crazy. Like I've got it. Like I've got it figured out and I'm like doing the right thing and I'm on the right path. And you know, it feels right, but sometimes it's just, you know, you're like, Oh, is this really right? [00:15:07] Because it feels good to me, but man, everybody else is doing something so different.  [00:15:12] Michael: Yeah. And that's another benefit that DoorGrow has given me is. I now have the ability to say no. So I am the business development manager. I have someone in charge of maintenance. I have someone in charge of tenant experience. [00:15:28] I have someone in charge of ops within the office. They color within their lines and we are good. My job is to go out and build the business to work on the business, not work in the business. And until I joined DoorGrow, it didn't matter what came my way. Property wise, I was going to take it last week. I turned away more properties than we took on because they weren't the right fit. [00:15:53] And I have a very nice conversation with prospective clients about qualification and that they're qualifying us to make sure we're a good fit for them. But at the same time. I'm qualifying them, their mindset, their properties, their attitudes toward spending money, their attitudes toward maintaining their properties, and if those things don't align with what we believe here, that housing is a human right that people have the right to live in nice homes that are maintained and maintained properly, then We're not going to accept the business. [00:16:30] We're also not going to accept people that are rude, mean and abusive. Because I've learned since kind of letting the stress of being a general brokerage real estate agent. Slip away that there is plenty of good business out there and that it's more important to have the Philosophical fits with the business than it is to take just any property no matter what the cost  [00:16:57] Jason: Yeah, your ability to say no in business Gives you a business that you feel you can easily say yes to each  [00:17:03] Michael: day. [00:17:04] That's right.  [00:17:05] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. It's nice to not have to wake up and go, man, I really don't want to do this today. And that's because we're setting boundaries for ourselves and that boundary in those containers allow us to create a business that we really like to be inside.  [00:17:20] Michael: Right. That's correct. Yeah. Now,  [00:17:22] Jason: when you came. [00:17:23] To us DoorGrow initially. I remember like you really had this mindset that you, and now you're doing business development, you had mentioned, you really believed you were the operator. It all was on your shoulders to operate the business, do operations, and you were good at it, but you believe that was your primary gift, I think, to the business and what your contribution needed to be. [00:17:45] And and I know you had some conversations with Sarah and some shifts in that, so could you touch on that a bit?  [00:17:51] Michael: Yeah well, control freak and always have been a control freak. I know one of those. You know, own it. And to a certain degree, I still, I observe. I trust and verify, but I don't get involved. [00:18:07] My number two said it best the other day. He said, yeah, with you. I only have to come to you if I know it's a problem that I can't solve. So I have kind of empowered the people who work with me to color in their lines. And when they are in trouble, come here and ask and we'll figure it out. I have also given them permission to make mistakes because if you're not making mistakes, you're not learning. You're static, and I let them see that I make mistakes and that I admit when I make a mistakes above all else. I expect complete honesty here. We make mistakes. We admit our mistakes. You know, if we have to eat it because it's a financial error that we've made well, then by golly, we're going to eat it because it was our mistake. And we come by it honestly the empowerment of becoming a business development manager is I don't have to worry that the books are balanced every week because I know that there is someone who I've paid good money to who has balanced the books and they can't hide because the system has been created where I can see that it's been uploaded into the accounting software and that the books are in balance. [00:19:25] I can verify that the financial piece of the puzzle in the business is running properly because I get a report monthly from my accountant and my bookkeeper that says, "this is where we are. This is your cash flow. This is your profit. This is where you're spending a lot of money. Are you okay with that?" and I pay them good money to do those things. I have a maintenance coordinator who deals with maintenance and on the Property Meld dashboard, which I log into every morning. I can see the tasks picking off or I can see things progressing and I can see that we're handling our maintenance requests in 3 to 4 days on average and that's fine. I've also told him to maintain his sanity because he's a bit of a control freak. If it's after hours and it's a garbage disposal in a dishwasher and it's after 5 o'clock, you don't need to deal with that today. If it's a leak and we have a catastrophe, then you deal with that after five o'clock, but the small stuff can wait until tomorrow. [00:20:26] It's still important. It's important to get it done and move it off our plates, but you don't have to deal with it when you need to be spending time with your children at soccer camp or baseball practice or whatever he does in the evening with his four kids. And then my other teammates, I can see that they are moving their tasks forward and that I don't have to worry about the job that they're doing. And that's empowered me to go out and find the right properties to bring into the practice for us to manage.  [00:20:56] Jason: You know, one of the gifts that I see in you, which I think really sets you apart, Michael, is coming into the program you're really intelligent. You know this. You're an intelligent guy. I think everybody can pick that up just by hearing you and listening to you. But even though you're intelligent, you have humility about, you know, and this openness to learning. And you've come into the program and you just started to do stuff. Like you tried it out. You experimented, and you allowed yourself the time to prove whether or not it would work or not. And some of the times we get clients that are intelligent, but they're not humble and they're usually the biggest stumbling block to themselves. So I just wanted to point that out. I'm curious what Sarah's experience has been of you as well, because she worked closely with you on like reviewing some of the systems, reviewing your team assessing you and some of this kind of stuff. [00:21:54] Sarah: So, yeah, I think I definitely agree with what you just said about being open to learning and trying things just a bit differently. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, we do things differently. We're okay with that. But sometimes if it's not our idea, then we're like "I don't know if I want to do it because I didn't think of it." right. So, I think Michael is, he's open to thinking differently. He's open to trying things out and implementing a system. He'll do the research. He doesn't just, you know, blindly jump and he's like, well, Jason said to do this, so I'm going to do it, but he'll do the research and he's very thorough. And I really appreciate that about Michael. He's all into the details and he knows exactly what's going on in his business. He's not like, "Hey, I'm just going to kind of sit back and like, let the team run everything, and then I just, I'm going to cross my fingers and hope and pray that everything is going well, right?" like we know that it's going well because you're not the one who's doing it, so you've been able to get out of the hot seat in a lot of different ways and get yourself more into the things that you actually enjoy. because I remember that conversation with you about the operations and you said, "well, I really just, I love to sell" like, okay, then let's let you sell. Like if you're doing things in the business and you're just holding on to them going, "well, I have to be the one to do this." I think it's really common for us to think that like, " well, I own the business, so I have to do this piece or I own this. And it has to be me. It doesn't always have to be you." do you have to know what's going on? Absolutely. Do you have to have the right people on your team? Absolutely. And do you have to set it up so that things can run smoothly? Absolutely. But do you have to be the one who's actually like doing the work? Right. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts that I've seen in you is that you're able to say, okay I don't have to do this part and I don't want to do this part. [00:23:54] This is where I want to be. So I'm going to move closer to this and I'm going to figure out how to get these pieces kind of offloaded.  [00:24:01] Michael: Yeah. Yeah. When you taught me how to write R docs and after I had a disastrous hire two years ago, disaster, and I had to fire someone, something I'd never had to do, but it was my fault. There was nothing wrong with the person I hired. She was just the wrong fit for the job. And then we sat down, we wrote R docs. With detailed job descriptions and parameters and that made bringing on the next person who is now in that role a dream because she fit the culture. We knew what her profile was before she even interviewed with us. We knew who the person was and then she walked through the door and poof, there she was. And that's one thing I didn't know. I just thought you could teach someone into a position. Well, you can teach skills, but you can't teach the human touch. And that's what I had missed with the disaster, the mistake that I made.  [00:25:02] Jason: Yeah. You'd learn some concepts from us, like the three fits , mapping out R docs. One of you explain what R docs are for those of us. This is DoorGrow speak here.  [00:25:11] Sarah: I know it is. So an R doc, it's just basically a fancy word for job description. We call it R doc because every section on it starts with 'R.' [00:25:20] Jason: There you go. So the ultimate job descriptions. Awesome. So, yeah, so all of these little pieces and systems and mindsets that you've installed in your business have really, I think, primed your business for a lot of growth. Like, where do you see the business going in the future?  [00:25:37] Michael: Oh, so that's another thing I learned. And it was at, I think, Austin at the Austin meeting. And it was you said it in the first like two minutes and I got my nugget and I was like, okay, I can go home. I got it. You said, don't limit your growth. And I had constantly said 200 doors, 200 doors. That's where I'm going. That's where I'm going. And you already passed that now. Yeah, you said that. And I was like. " Why would I create like this false ceiling that I'm going to just bump into and stop at?" Yeah. So, ultimately, and I'd like to retire in the next 10 to 12, 15 years, maybe. We're realistically thinking in the neighborhood of 1,000-2,000 doors. Yeah, people have started to come a calling about, "Hey, do you want to sell your business?" And the time is not right. Some of the financial offers that have been made already are very intriguing. Yeah. But then I'm like, " what will I do with myself?" You know, "what's the next iteration?" And I think until I figure that out, we're going to just stay the course. [00:26:47] Jason: Yeah, I think that's one of the key things that I think a lot of people realize in the program that if it was just about money, then maybe you'd cash out, but it's not just about money, right? There's other things we want out of our experience here on this planet. And that's something else you got a lot of clarity on is what really personally drives you, which allowed you to build the business and the team around you so that you really could move into those plus signs and out of those minus signs. [00:27:13] Michael: Yeah, so the key is I went to the Netherlands in May to see art because it's my thing. Cool. And a little ostentatious to fly to Europe to see Vermeer, but I did it. And I was gone for a good long time and things here chugged right along and it was beautiful. And I knew then that we were doing things right, that I could leave and not be here for 10 days, and the business continued to operate. I continued to watch and check in. But they didn't need me.  [00:27:49] Jason: And how's that different from before you came to DoorGrow?  [00:27:53] Michael: Oh my God. Like the first meeting in Austin that I came to, I had I came really close to not coming because I was like "I can't leave. I just can't leave. I can't leave them." I was wrong. I was wrong and I went to Austin and I went to Vegas and you know, things were good. Yeah.  [00:28:12] Jason: Yeah. So awesome. Well, it's been really cool to see your progress. We really appreciate. Seeing your growth and yeah, there's no question in my mind. A lot of people hear you say, Oh, maybe a thousand, 2000 doors. And they probably think: this guy is ridiculously off his rocker that he could just believe that and the audacity to have that mindset. And I'm sure when you first came to DoorGrow, a thousand doors was like, probably magic, some magic, like pipe dream in the ethers that you would never even consider. I don't know, but. [00:28:40] Michael: 300 seemed unimaginable.  [00:28:43] Jason: Yeah, but now it seems very doable. And you're aware of the DoorGrow code and like we've got clients breaking a thousand doors. We've got clients doing it. And there's no question in my mind. You could easily do this in the next two to three years. If you really wanted to easily.  [00:28:57] Michael: Yeah, I work my golden 100. That's another thing I learned at DoorGrow. To have people that are valuable people that I love and care about that. I have to touch every 30 days because they love and care about me and buy it. So they send business. They ask questions and we share information. Yeah. And for that, I'm indebted to you.  [00:29:19] Jason: Not at all. Well, great. Well, yeah we, it's been really awesome seeing your growth. So cool. Anything else we should ask Michael? We've got him hanging out here with us. What's next for you, Michael? What's next?  [00:29:31] Michael: Well, once we go over 300, then the double it again. [00:29:34] Jason: Yeah. So what I see next for you is you've got some of the systems installed. And then I think what it will be next is to level up your three key systems of. People, process, and planning and maybe starting to build out even a little bit more of that executive team. I think you've got a good team going now and I think then what would be next would be maybe starting to acquire you'll be the one eating up some of these other companies. And I think, maybe working with us on acquisitions, and I think that'll be the quick pace to grow. And that also bring you really great people too, if you want. So [00:30:07] Michael: we're working on two. They're on a slow simmer because companies that I'm looking at have some. Bookkeeping issues. We'll just put it at that.  [00:30:17] Jason: It's an opportunity. Yeah. Always do.  [00:30:20] Michael: So we may be able to fix the problem. Definitely.  [00:30:24] Jason: You'll be able to fix the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Well, I'm excited to see what you do in the future. I know like, I've seen companies hit all these different stages. I know. We know the challenges that you're going to hit at these different stages in growth. We're here to support you. And for those listening here on the DoorGrowShow if you are struggling, you're hitting some of these sticking points, these milestones, you're stuck in your mindset, whatever. Be like Michael, be like Mike, not Mike, but all the reference, be like Michael and you know, talk to us and let us map things out with you and see if we could help you out. We'll be sure with you. So, well, Michael, appreciate you coming on the show. We appreciate having you as a client and grateful for you.  [00:31:09] Michael: Thank you. Thanks. I appreciate it. Have a good day.  [00:31:12] Jason: All right. Cool. So, if you're wanting to get into our free community of property management entrepreneurs on Facebook, go to DoorGrowClub.Com. We have some free gifts that we want to give to you. You'll provide your email as you join the group, we'll give you an, a drip, an email drip of some free gifts, including a fee Bible and some vendors that you can use and some different tools just to help you help yourself and help the industry level up. [00:31:42] And we, and if you provide your info, we will also reach out to see if you'd like to have a conversation with us and see if we could help you grow your business, which the answer usually is. Yes, we can. So we would love to support you and help you out. And if you're wanting to test out your website, which you think might be amazing, go to doorgrowcom/quiz and test your website. A lot of times, this is a great gateway to realizing that you have some blind spots in your business. When you see that your website is leaking lots of money. Which is something we can help you out with. There's a lot of other leaks you can't see, and this might crack your mind open, get you to be open minded like Michael and allow us to be able to help you and support you and make a lot more money, have a lot more freedom and make a bigger difference out there in the marketplace. [00:32:34] We appreciate you listening to our show. If you could do us a favor and leave us a good testimonial on, if you're hearing us on iTunes or like, or comment all of these things help us out and help us get the message out to enact our vision and our mission for this industry of helping it level up. [00:32:50] And until next time to our mutual growth, everybody, bye everyone.  [00:32:54] 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!  [00:33:21] 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.

Today's guest is Jason Fudin.   Jason Fudin is the CEO and Co-Founder of Placemakr, a mixed-use multifamily operator.   Show summary: In this podcast episode, Jason Fudin, CEO and co-founder of PlaceMaker, discusses their unique business model that blends different asset classes to create value in real estate. They offer a hospitality living or flex living model, similar to private student housing, and a pop-up hotel model where they partner with developers to run a subsection of new apartment buildings as furnished units during the lease-up period. Jason explains their transition from pop-ups to permanently flexible buildings and the challenges they faced along the way. He also shares his belief that blending real estate and higher utilization will become the norm, increasing the value of real estate.   -------------------------------------------------------------- Introl [00:00:00]   Jason Fudin's Background and Journey in Real Estate [00:01:12]   Spinning PlaceMaker Out and the Opportunity for Growth [00:03:30]   The Flex Living Model [00:09:37]   The Pop Up Hotel Model [00:10:46]   Building a Blended Asset Class Company [00:11:46]   The blending of real estate and higher utilization [00:18:44]   The transformative impact of the company's model on real estate [00:19:36]   Attracting good people to the team [00:20:23]   -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Jason:  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-fudin-16613ba/ Web: https://www.placemakr.com/   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Jason Fudin (00:00:00) - Let's say we're going to go build that 300 unit apartment building, brand new. Well, when you deliver it, the whole thing is empty, right? You got 300 empty, brand new apartment. What we do for partners that build new buildings is we come in and say, Hey, give us 100 units the day you open and we'll run a subsection of your building as an apartment hotel as you lease up. So if you're leasing 20 units a month, it'll take you 15 months to lease up an apartment building. For 12 of those 15 months, we'll run 100 or so units furnished where people can stay. And so we monetize that vacancy during lease up in a temporary way so that if the lease up takes a little bit longer, the developers make additional cash flow and if it goes faster, they make a little less. But it's an insurance policy that's paying them. And then for residents, they get, you know, an on site hotel, they get hospitality services for free. So we blend the asset classes.   Jason Fudin (00:00:49) - We're in the business of making real estate more valuable by blending the asset classes.   Sam Wilson (00:00:52) - Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big. Jason Fudan is the CEO and co-founder of Place Maker, a mixed use multifamily operator. Jason, welcome to the show.   Jason Fudin (00:01:12) - Thanks for having me, Sam.   Sam Wilson (00:01:13) - Absolutely. The pleasure is mine. Jason There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Where did you start? Where are you now and how did you get there?   Jason Fudin (00:01:22) - I started growing it up up in upstate New York. Uh, I went to college in Canada as an engineer, decided I wanted to be in real estate and not an engineer because real estate blends the community analytical challenges and money. And so found my way into real estate development. Started as a secretary. I worked my way up to running a couple of billion dollars in development and then eventually started my own company.   Jason Fudin (00:01:46) - And I'm building something for myself and my team.   Sam Wilson (00:01:48) - That is crazy. So the you said it so fast, I missed it. You started as a 90s.   Jason Fudin (00:01:56) - You kept me quick, you know?   Sam Wilson (00:01:58) - No, no, that was great, man. I love it. I love it. Sometimes you're like, you asked for 90s and it's like 900 seconds. You're like, Wait, that was 90, not 900. So no, you did good. I appreciate that. But the you started as a secretary and then you started running a couple billion dollars. You worked with running a $2 billion real estate development company.   Jason Fudin (00:02:15) - A pipeline. So I worked for a senior vice president at Vornado Realty. And at the time, the Vornado office was focused a lot of focus on office and I worked on the residential side, so there wasn't as much focus there. And I got this awesome boss who said he showed up was like, I'm running all these projects, how do you want me to hand them off? And he goes, Look, you seem like a brilliant kid that's going to work your ___ off.   Jason Fudin (00:02:39) - Like, let me know if you're drowning. So I just I worked an ungodly amount, learn the industry from some amazing colleagues. And when I left that role, yeah, I was responsible for about 2 billion of development between master plans, individual ground up developments. Um, and then then went over to a regional developer and ended up working with my now co-founder and we bought land and capitalized deals and did regulatory, you know, buildings, condos, apartments, retail, you name it, and then just continue to work my way up till eventually went back to that big company. He was an executive there, ran their innovation division, which was novel seven, eight years ago for a big public REIT and then built what is now place maker within the organization and spun it out. And we're about six years old now.   Sam Wilson (00:03:30) - Wow, that's really cool. When you decided to spin Place Maker out of that organization, what was the opportunity you saw in going off and doing your own thing that maybe wasn't there when that company was inside of the other business?   Jason Fudin (00:03:43) - So I always expected to go build my own company.   Jason Fudin (00:03:45) - And the reason I chose real estate development is it was $1 trillion asset class and I figured there had to be a niche space where smart person could go build something that they were passionate. And so I kind of bided my time. You know, I built a lot of real estate for other people, made them a lot of money. And then when I saw the opportunity to make real estate more valuable, real estate is just a set of cash flows. People become really like emotional about it, but really it's a set of cash flows. And so what became really obvious to me is if you could increase those cash flows in a predictable, nonvolatile way, you'd make real estate more valuable and saw the opportunity to do that. And I started doing that. And a big company, that company is a REIT, so they're precluded from having a hospitality operation in house and so they were unable to own the business I was building. So spun it out. Uh, asked my now co-founder to join me, raised a few million dollars of capital and and off we went.   Sam Wilson (00:04:38) - Got it. So you guys spun that out and now we talked about this before we started recording and I'd love to hear kind of what and again, I'm talking out of my league here quite a bit, so I'm going to have to rely.   Jason Fudin (00:04:49) - I doubt that, but I appreciate it.   Sam Wilson (00:04:51) - No, no, you're you're not too dumb it down for for somebody like me to understand. But you guys and I think the words that you use, you are you said we are a tech enabled operator, which means you guys are a venture. Lincoln said venture capital backed, tech enabled operator. Is that the way the way you said that?   Jason Fudin (00:05:09) - Yeah, I said it all jargony, but that's true. I'll dumb it down for you. So basically, a bunch of folks that invest in high growth operating companies have invested north of $70 million in our operating company under the premise that it will become a large public company over time. And so there's two major innovations in our operating business. One is blending multiple real estate asset classes to create higher yield, more viable real estate, the commingling of real estate.   Jason Fudin (00:05:42) - The second innovation is operating that co-mingled real estate in a way that depends largely on software and other technology tools in order to maintain lower expense ratios. And so off a more cash flow, more profit on the property base. And so we are those two things. As an operating company, we're pioneers in the blending of asset class classes and were the forefront of using technology to operate those assets efficiently.   Sam Wilson (00:06:08) - Can you give me a case, a case study on that?   Jason Fudin (00:06:11) - Yeah, sure. So we and we also buy buildings, so I'll put it all in one. There's a building we bought in Nashville, I think you're in Tennessee, right?   Sam Wilson (00:06:19) - Am Yes.   Jason Fudin (00:06:20) - We bought a building that in. Asheville and the sober neighborhood just off Broadway, its 300 or so units. The cost us about $140 million, $150 million. And so we acquired that with an outside investor. We we bought that asset with the with the plan of blending hospitality and multifamily. So that 313 unit asset has about 200 furnished units today, just over 100 unfurnished units, a single onsite operating team that's probably about a third the size that you'd see at a hotel, the same at the same size.   Jason Fudin (00:06:51) - And something like 80% of our arrivals are contact list. And so a lot of that like concierge check and stuff that needs to happen at a traditional hotel doesn't happen for us. All the locks are automated in our backend system. The same if you booked with us the day before, you'd get an automated code to get into your room, you can turn your phone into your key. And so that entire experience happens with a lot less kind of hand-holding. Think about like ordering an Uber today versus calling up a cab ten years ago. So we've automated a lot of that. In addition, we've blended a global workforce with an onsite team, so a lot of things that traditionally would be handled on site at, you know, all hours of the night or whatever else we handle out of, we call it off site supports team in other states, at other properties or in other countries. And that allows us to continue to maintain a pretty low cost of goods sold on the expense side. So that particular asset runs just shy of a 50% margin.   Jason Fudin (00:07:47) - Um, and an average hotel runs at a 25% margin and service maybe at 30. So we're, we're doing almost twice as good as pure play hospitality, um, because of technology.   Sam Wilson (00:08:01) - Now in that building was a it is a hotel or it is a yeah this.   Jason Fudin (00:08:09) - That's like saying like that's like saying on your phone is that the storefront that you went to or it's not that was probably not the right ways to frame it. Right? Our customers fall into four categories folks that rent with us for 12 or more months where they bring their own furniture. It's their home, they sign up for the internet, everything else. Yep. Um, and they have access to hospitality services. So, you know, you could opt in for cleaning or linen service or whatever, you know, it's just. It's a more experiential home. Sure. Um, that's about a third of that building. The other two thirds is furnished. And we have three types of furnished guests. We have long stay furnished. So think like your company is moving you to Nashville.   Jason Fudin (00:08:48) - You know, they're like, Hey, for six months, we'll pay for your housing. They just. They just rent a one bedroom apartment for six months. The next is we call it interim housing. Think like two weeks to six weeks. You're a doctor on residency, you're traveling nurse, whatever. You're reloading, you're getting your house renovated. It's too long to be living out of a hotel, but too short to actually sign a traditional lease. Right. Um, and then our last set of customers are transient. You're coming to Nashville Thursday through Monday because you're going to go down to Broadway and hopefully behave a little bit. Um, you're working Monday through Thursday in town on projects on a regular basis. You're a consultant. Um, and so that's kind of the core set of customers we have. And any particular property.   Sam Wilson (00:09:30) - And this is the same model you guys like you said, any particular property, It's the same model you guys are carrying to each.   Jason Fudin (00:09:37) - Yeah. So, yeah. So we do that in Nashville, we do that in New York City, we do that in Washington, D.C. We optimize like that particular asset will have more than doubled the cash flow from when we bought it within 24 months.   Jason Fudin (00:09:49) - So it'll be 24 months here in December, we'll have more than double the in-place cash flow. So that's obviously material for an asset like that. So it's not a hotel per se, it's not an apartment building per se. It's structurally an apartment building with an operating model that leads to higher cash flow. Think one of the easier analogies is to think of private student housing, where they're building essentially apartments. But they're, you know, they're they're structured around a specific set of customers where they can drive more cash flow than a pure play apartment building in that same city. We're like that on steroids. On steroids. Right? Like we're that times a lot more. So that's that's called our hospitality. Living or flex living model. That's about 80% of our inventory. The other 20% we run is that kind of a unique little model we call a pop up hotel. And so let's say you were going to go build that 300 unit apartment building, brand new. Well, when you deliver it, the whole thing is empty, right? You got 300 empty, brand new apartment.   Jason Fudin (00:10:46) - What we do for partners that build new buildings is we come in and say, Hey, give us 100 units the day you open and we'll run a subsection of your building as an apartment hotel as you lease up. So if you're leasing 20 units a month, it'll take you 15 months to lease up an apartment building. For 12 of those 15 months, we'll run 100 or so units furnished where people can stay. And so we monetize that vacancy during lease up in a temporary way so that if the lease up takes a little bit longer, the developers make additional cash flow and if it goes faster, they make a little less. But it's an insurance policy that's paying them. And then for residents, they get, you know, an on site hotel, they get hospitality services for free. So we blend the asset classes. We're in the business of making real estate more valuable by blending the asset classes.   Sam Wilson (00:11:28) - That's really, really genius. Where did I mean, I've had, I don't know, what's this 800 and something episodes that we've put out on this show.   Sam Wilson (00:11:37) - And I've not heard anyone doing this model. Where did you cook this up? Was this your own home cooking or was this a model you've copied from somewhere else? How did you come up with this?   Jason Fudin (00:11:46) - I would say own cooking. Um, so when I was at Vornado running their innovation group, it's been a bunch of time looking at how do you make real estate more valuable? And one of one of the there's basically two ways to make real estate more valuable. There's more, but like there's two big ways you take existing assets. One is you get more assets through the door, higher utilization. The other is you sell to the highest paying customer at any point in time, which is commingling uses. And if you think about real estate as a, you know, an evolution of a bond, a fixed income asset, your goal is to throw off more cash flow in a predictable way. And so by doing those two things, you know, the the high utilization is like co-living co-working, shared conferencing.   Jason Fudin (00:12:26) - The co-mingling is something like what we do or what a convene does in the office conferencing space. And yeah, it just was really obvious to me. And so I sat down with my analyst at the time, me and her in a room and we were like, What is the easiest way to blend asset classes, to create value? And we're like, Well, what is more wasteful than a brand new empty apartment building? Like is crazy? They were like, Well, if we can there's a there's a duration mismatch between the timing of how you lease up a building correctly, um, and how quickly someone could use it in the interim. They're like, oh, we'll just pair those two things to go build an operating company that blends the asset classes where it's free money, and then once we get good at that, we move to the permanent model. So our business plan originally was start with pop ups until you understand and get good and build the tech stack and, you know, understand customer, customer funnel and OpEx ratios and all that crap.   Jason Fudin (00:13:18) - And then once we get good enough, it's no longer free money. We make it the core business. And that's that evolution that we evolved to. We started the company in 17 and my partner and by 2021, so within four years we were buying and rolling out permanently flexible buildings. And today we have a couple thousand units of this stuff.   Sam Wilson (00:13:35) - That is really cool. Tell me about some of the operational challenges that you face and how you overcome them.   Jason Fudin (00:13:44) - I mean, operations is messy in anyone that anyone that's in the operating business knows that you designed your best set of procedures and structure. You hire super talented people that are empathetic and then you learn by doing. And so every time you make a mistake, you figure out why you made it. You make a right, you make it better. And that's kind of been our iterative process. I'd say we've accelerated it by using technology. We've accelerated by bringing a bunch of veterans on that run, billions of dollars of assets or, you know, hundreds of stores or whatever.   Jason Fudin (00:14:19) - We blend. Leadership generally is a mix of people from the multifamily world in the hotel world, so each can take their best habits hopefully, and try to cancel out each other's worst. And I'd say one of the biggest mistakes we made early on when we started the company is we didn't appreciate the value of building the right culture and talent. You know, as developers were kind of like, Oh, we just, you know, you build a building like any bricks need windows, whatever. Like a company's not like that. It's like a living organism. And so one of the biggest mistakes we made at first was not appreciating how critical it was to build that culture, that set of norms. And, you know, we had like core values that couldn't even tell you what they were. So it was total crap. Um, but today, you know, we have three norms of the company. We own it, we make it better, we treat people right. Everyone rallies around that and they know that if they ____ up, but they do it in, you know, an effort for one of those norms that they're going to get some grace.   Jason Fudin (00:15:11) - And that's helped us build a foundation of a high quality team. And then people that do a great job, we promote them fast and often and give them more and more responsibility. And so and then we offer people where we feel like they're not a fit. We don't just wait it out as some big company.   Sam Wilson (00:15:26) - Oh, no. I think that's that's really, really great. And that was going to kind of be my next my next question behind this because there's you know, I look at what you're doing and obviously don't understand it in a comprehensive way, but it's like getting something like this off the ground. You got to find that multifamily building that that was just built that's empty. Then you got to find that model. How are we going to set up the pop up hotel? And we got to find all the services, all the people to plug in. I mean, that's a lot of things to get all moving in a common direction and get it working out of the gate to where the first one works.   Sam Wilson (00:15:59) - Then you can go out and do it like you've done across the country. I mean, that just sounds like a monumental undertaking.   Jason Fudin (00:16:05) - Yes. Yes. I mean, that's the business. You know, certain innovations are kind of like blue ocean, like AI or something else where basically, you know, human technology has never, you know, cross that chasm. And so it's a very different kind of innovation. You know, like you fundamentally change the way something works, like when the world went from like pulleys for lifting weights to hydraulics, you know, like it was just a pure technological change. In our case, the reason I called it a tech enabled operation is that's exactly what it is, is we're solving thousands of little problems in a cohesive way so that the outcome leads to higher profitability, effective, you know, customers, a customer product. Our Net Promoter score is close to the Ritz-Carlton, even though we're at that much lower. So, yeah, we had to solve a million problems and we have another 10 million to solve, but that's what makes the operating company valuable.   Jason Fudin (00:16:58) - It was just a small little like jump leap, whatever. No one would pay us the money. They pay us on a contracted multi-year basis to increase the value of the real estate.   Sam Wilson (00:17:09) - Right, Right. Yeah. No, I like that. Yeah. There are thousands of problems to solve. Do you feel like what you guys are doing? I mean, feel like it's you're on the you're on the front end of this kind of model? I mean, do you see other operators beginning to copy your, your kind of.   Jason Fudin (00:17:27) - Yeah, we've seen people do pieces of it. So to your point, every piece that we do is complicated. So we've seen people run furnished apartments like a hotel where they sign leases and have to deal with the management contracts and the structure. We've seen people run apartments this 30 day plus corporate housing. We've seen people buy the stuff and bring another operators. We've seen we've seen every version of we've seen folks in the hotel space just try to use technology to make them more efficient operators.   Jason Fudin (00:17:51) - So we've seen like all of the pieces of our business, I would say that no one effectively like we does. We do bring it all together and to bring it all together is where the real value is created. It's the flexibility, you know, building in the optionality into the real estate. But yeah, we've seen a lot of people touch around the edges and then there's a number of buyers and developers that pursue just the real estate strategy and they bring us in as their partner. We either power their stuff or we operate their stuff or whatever. Um, the company today is on a trajectory to be worth a couple billion dollars over the next few years as kind of a niche player. So if you think about, again, private student housing, that's a small market relative to real estate United States, but there's multibillion dollar players in that space. And like if our view of the world is wrong and what we're doing is niche, we become a couple of billion dollar company, we create a few billion dollars of creation of value in real estate and.   Jason Fudin (00:18:44) - Pondered. We go. My belief, my strong belief is that the blending of real estate and the higher utilization of real estate will become the norm for new projects because it's more valuable, right? And that will be reflected in land pricing. And as soon as land trades at a price that reflects a higher and better use. Developers won't have a choice but to build versions of our model as a physical asset, right? And when that happens, we're not a couple of billion dollar company. We're competing with the biggest hotel companies in the world, the biggest public companies in the world. And we're powering a new generation of real estate assets and corporate markets.   Sam Wilson (00:19:19) - I love it. No, I absolutely love it. This is this is an episode I'm probably going to kind of mentally catalog or putting my my, my brain bank and say, okay, you know what? We're going to we're going to go back to this 1 in 7 years like a what do they call those? One of those things we did as kids, whether you'd like.   Jason Fudin (00:19:34) - Right time the time capsule. Yeah. There you go.   Sam Wilson (00:19:36) - The time capsule, You know. You know, first grade. I want to be a firefighter someday. Like, okay, open this in 20 years. So I'm going to come back in about seven years and say, okay, where did Jason and his company go and how his real estate really shifted? Because you're absolutely right. Like the highest and best use with what you guys are doing is transformative in the way that these buildings are operated and owned. And I think this is this is really, really cool. I got one final question for you here, Jason, before we sign off. And it really comes down to bringing good people on your team, what would you say? Because I know you mentioned this there. You said, hey, you know, we've brought on some of the brightest and best that we could. How did you attract them to what you were doing and make it an attractive place for them to come come to work.   Jason Fudin (00:20:23) - I think actions speak louder than words. And so if you see the way me and my partner run the business, we run it in the way that we'd want to be treated as employees. We've built a culture of transparency, of hard truths and a, you know, the best answer wins, not the most senior person. And I think that that attracts a players and they bring in their other friends and people they've worked with. And it's kind of contagious in that way. I think also structurally we've made ourselves accessible to a bigger pool of talent. So we on the corporate side are remote first, and that means that we have team members in some 30 states. That means that anyone in America that has access to high speed Internet can work on the corporate team. In fact, that means anywhere, anyone, anywhere in the world technically could if we structure their contract correctly. Right. Um, and that's been, that's been huge on the non property side is there's a lot of overlooked, highly talented people, whether they're new moms or otherwise, want to live in places that don't lend themselves to a corporate office.   Jason Fudin (00:21:23) - So we've, we've, you know, dipped into that largely. And then on property, you can move up within our within an organization so much more quickly than you can like pick a big apartment operator hotel where it's like, well you do two years at the front desk and you do like, ___ that, man. Like if you're doing exceptional work and you're having an impact, we're going to give you more and more. And so for our property team members, they're able to move up quickly and get that responsibility. Everyone gets stuck in the company from our cleaners through the executives, and we built the company where hopefully we all went together.   Sam Wilson (00:21:53) - That's awesome. That's awesome. Jason, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. This has been awesome. Learned so much from you and love the model you guys are bringing to the market. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you and your firm, what is the best way to do that?   Jason Fudin (00:22:07) - Yeah, just shoot me a note on LinkedIn.   Jason Fudin (00:22:08) - I do a pretty okay job of checking it. I'll get back to you. And then we always have positions open, so please apply for them. You can mention you heard me on this podcast and come stay with us as a guest.   Sam Wilson (00:22:19) - Sounds great. Jason, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Certainly appreciate it.   Jason Fudin (00:22:23) - Thanks, Sam. Thanks for having me.   Sam Wilson (00:22:25) - Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.  

Thor: “What kind of authority, if any, is needed to become an independent dispatcher?” Jacqueline: “How do I become a dispatcher?” Jason: “There's an issue in the expedite industry with unlicensed sprinter van owners making non-binding agreements with brokers, leaving them unprotected. This widespread practice, especially in the Bosnian and Russian communities, seems unpunished and affects competition. Have you heard of it?" H&K Logistics: “If you could change one thing about the trucking industry, what would it be, and why?” Ciera: “Just a quick question. I'm new to being a freight broker and our company is already established and we have 1 place we are getting loads from. Looking to try to build our company but struggling to get more loads. Does anyone have any tips on how to try to bid on loads or websites I can utilize to build off of?”

Even though a vacancy can be painful for an investor, leasing doesn't have to be the biggest hat a property manager has to wear. Join property management growth expert Jason Hull to talk about the topic of the property management Summer busy season with Tim and Larry from Tenant Turner.  You'll Learn [02:55] When is the right time to automate? [07:52] Why being cheap leads to bad clients [14:34] Staying competitive in the slow season [18:04] The multifamily market oversupply [22:13] Lockboxes and self-showings Tweetables “The most important currency related to growth is not cash, it's focus.” “It's really stupid, in contrast, to hold onto the moldy peanuts in the monkey trap because you don't want to let go and not get your hand out because you just want to be cheap.” “I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses.” “Even if you only have, you know, one door, eight doors, 10 doors, any vacancy is painful.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, "well, I'm being cheap and I'm being frugal, and that's smart." It's not smart when it comes to business, and it's not smart when it comes to growth.  [00:00:17] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate, think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, along with Sarah Hull, the COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show, and our guests today are Tim Wallace and Larry Hancock of Tenant Turner. Welcome you two.  [00:01:27] Tim: Thanks for having us.  [00:01:28] Larry: Yeah, thanks for having us.  [00:01:29] Jason: So does everybody there have red hair now? Is this the thing? [00:01:32] Tim: We're slowly taking over the world.  [00:01:34] Larry: Like it's just-- gingers unite-- job application requirement. [00:01:37] Jason: That sounds like a really good t-shirt.  [00:01:40] Sarah: I like it. Yeah. "Are you willing to dye your hair?" [00:01:43] Jason: That'd be the strangest thing. Yeah. "It's part of the, it's part of the uniform." All right. Awesome. Well, it's good to have you both and you know, we really appreciate you being a sponsor for our DoorGrow events and doing some cool stuff with us. And Tim, you actually sold Sarah Tenant Turner previously. Oh, Larry did. Larry sold Sarah Tenant Turner. Yeah. You can't have the credit, Tim. Sorry. It's Larry. Larry did this. He closed the deal in Sarah's property management business that she's since sold, but they're still using Tenant Turner.  [00:02:17] Sarah: They do use tenant turner. [00:02:19] Jason: There you go. So awesome. So our topic today is scaling up your leasing process during the busy season, which is right now, right? It's summer, things heat up. And what's interesting, if you do go onto Google Trends, trends.google.com and look at the keyword "property management" and you backdate it for like a decade and you'll see these, it just spikes. It doesn't go up like it's not growing in search volume, but property management spikes every summer and goes down in the winter. And that's probably how leasing works as well in property management. So what, where should we start with scaling up your leasing process during the busy season? [00:02:59] Larry: So what's interesting is it's almost like a catch 22 for our customers. So for folks that aren't using any kind of automation, they're like, "I really need your services, but I'm just too darn busy to even consider it." I'm like, "ah! Why didn't you talk to us just a few months earlier?" And then you got the opposite side where some customers are like, "I'm not busy enough to consider your services." so we're always trying to, you know, have these conversation with these people why automation's beneficial for them. Whether they're in a stage where they're just, you know, drinking from a fire hydrant and they're just trying to just figure things out while they're in the busy leasing season. Or maybe you are using automation and it's just a matter of creating efficiencies. So that way you can continually grow your business. So, typically that's how we'll start our conversation is kind of where are you at right now? Are you kind of just struggling to stay afloat and you need to add some automation into your life, or do you have the automation and it's just creating those efficiencies in your business? [00:03:53] Jason: So how do you help people that say they're not busy enough justify leveraging and getting tenure turner?  [00:04:02] Larry: Yeah. So from there it's really. Trying to get them more in the head space of like, "I understand that for now. But let's figure out how we can create value here." So maybe I'm getting them in a place of, you know, let's build the building blocks. "We're not going to create your account just yet, but in a perfect world, when you are busy and need our services, let's kind of back out what the steps are to get there." Sometimes maybe their portfolio isn't large enough. So then that would be a time when I would recommend to someone like you, Jason, where it's like, "Hey, you need to be a part of a program where you can, you know, grow your portfolio because he's going to help you grow your portfolio and then you're going to need us because you're only one person." so I'll try to get them in that kind of head space. But it's really almost building their tech stack. So while we're an important piece to that whole thing there's other moving parts to the entire system. So that's usually how I start. It's really more playing a consolidative role. [00:04:55] So I'm trying to consult them, figure out where they're at in the process. And if they're not a good fit for us that day, that's okay. Maybe they will be. And then I'm going to set a reminder to reach out before they're busy losing season basically.  [00:05:07] Jason: So where is that kind of cutoff point to where they've achieved, you know, Tenant Turner readiness status? [00:05:17] Larry: So sometimes people will view it from like a portfolio size. I think it's really more about the entrepreneurial mindset. I met some people where they have just one door and they're like, "Hey Larry, I'm going to be a hundred units by the end of the year." I'm like, "that's awesome man. You know, it's great you're kind of trying to build this plane before you're trying to take off," where sometimes I talk to customers, they're like, "Hey, We're flying this plane. The wings are about to fall off. And I just don't know what to do." I'm like, "okay--" [00:05:42] Jason: I'm going to build it in the air. I'm working on it.  [00:05:45] Larry: I know. It's like, "all right, well I appreciate you, you know, diving ahead first, but you're probably really stressed out right now." So, typically in our world, our pricing model, month to month, no contracts. So one to 50 units you're fine. We're going to talk to you. We're not going to be like, "oh you're too small for us, man. Like, I just can't talk to you." We have a great culture in that way. We try to be that partner with them. But typically our general rule of thumb is if you expect to have any vacancy, whether it's one throughout the entire year, you should at least consider us. Even if it's only one month out of the entire year we'll still talk to you.  [00:06:16] Jason: Yeah.  [00:06:17] Sarah: Yeah. And I think something that people don't always realize is even if you're like, I don't need it right now, I'm not ready, I don't have enough. It's going to make it so much easier if you have systems in place already, so that you can scale so that when you scale, you're not now in massive amounts of pain. And even if you only have, you know, one door, eight doors, 10 doors, any vacancy is painful. Yeah, any vacancy is painful and it's going to help you massively, not only just in your time and your effort, but it will make your clients happier. Like when I implemented Tenant Turner, my vacancy rate like took a nosedive. Now, not that I had a high vacancy rate. But like just trying to like market and figure out where to put these things and answering all the messages and doing a gazillion showings for people that might not even qualify. You know, it was taking sometimes like weeks to fill a vacancy. And when I implemented that, it went down dramatically. So clients are much, much happier and you and your staff are going to be much, much happier because now it's a lot less work for you.  [00:07:28] Larry: Yeah and kind of building on that, Sarah, we kind of find our solution is almost like a an aspirin approach. So people are kind of taking that aspirin when they have a headache in the form of vacancy. And there is a time and place to pop the aspirin, but usually what's a lot better is kind of plan ahead of, "oh, I know I could have headaches during this time of the year, so I'm going to be a little bit more you know, I'm going to prepare, I'm going to be more proactive." where I see people have the right mindset in regards to software is usually what they'll do is they'll annualize the cost and then figure out how to generate enough ROI. So if I'm able to save. Five hours per week, you know, and I annual analyze the software in such a way I don't need to worry about it because I've looked at the 12 month period and I know I'm going to get my value that way. It's a little bit harder when you're trying to convince people when they're kind of penny pitching and it's like you're wasting all this time on that part and that time worrying about it, you just wasted where you could be attracting new owners. So the mindset really is kind of analyzing the software, but trying to build the ROI into that. [00:08:31] Sarah: I have to say like I was hesitant for a while because I was like, "well, this is easy and like I have this streamlined process" and really, I said this to you. I was like, "I just don't spend that much time." I had 200 and like some odd units, like 260 I think at my highest. And when I was talking with you, I was like, "you know, I just don't spend that much time doing it. So is there a benefit to it? Yes, but how much time am I really going to save? Because I feel like it's already something that is simple for me." And even though I had this streamlined and I had processes to find and I maybe was spending a couple hours a week doing, you know, messaging and email and confirmations and stuff like that. [00:09:14] I was still spending time doing it. When I implemented Tenant Turner, then I was like, "oh, I don't have anything to do." Like every once in a while I have to just pop in and you have to like manually approve somebody. And then once, like I updated my showing schedule once a week. So once a week I had to go in and update the showing schedule for the upcoming week, which took all of maybe four minutes. And other than that, I was just popping in and kind of like manually approving people. And I was spending, I went from maybe a few hours a week, which I still didn't think was a lot to minutes per week. And I was like, "oh wow. Okay. I see it now. I see it." But sometimes they think you have to experience it to see it. Because I was like, "I just don't know!" And I was really glad that I did it because it really like, it took so much. And sometimes when you make a change like that, then you realize how much work you are actually doing. Because we rationalize, we're like, "it's not that hard. It doesn't take me that long. Like I just send a couple emails," and then when you realize, "oh, I don't have to do any of that anymore." it was like mind blowing to me. I was like, "oh, like this literally takes me like 10 minutes a week and that's it." So all my leasing was done in 10 minutes.  [00:10:33] Jason: I think that's one of my favorite ways to justify an expense is you have to look at the opportunity cost because if you're just looking, you're like, "okay, well it costs me this much money and if I do it myself, then it's free. But your time is the most valuable resource you have in a business-- not free-- and the most important currency related to growth is not cash. It's focus. And if your focus is diluted as a business owner away from what can generate more revenue, then the opportunity cost is huge in two to three hours you could be closing deals that are worth tens of thousands of dollars over that year. So it's really stupid in contrast to like hold onto the moldy peanuts in the monkey trap because you don't want to let go and not get your hand out because you just want to be cheap. [00:11:22] And so I find that cheap business owners attract cheap clients and they don't grow and scale their businesses. And so if you're listening to this and you're like, "well, I'm being cheap and I'm being frugal, and that's smart." It's not smart when it comes to business, and it's not smart when it comes to growth. You need to let go of those moldy peanuts. There's bananas in reach and the farmer's going to come along and chop off your head. And this is why most businesses fail. Most businesses fail in the-- or they get stuck-- first year or the first five years. A lot fail and property management is tough. And I see, I see a lot.  [00:11:55] Sarah: They get, they just get stuck and they're trapped. "I don't have more time. I can't do anything else. Like, I don't know what else I can do in making these little changes." Like I'm going to be honest with you, I like, I bought into the product and I still wasn't like, "ah, I think that's going to be amazing." I was like, "it'll help me." And it helped way more than I thought it was going to help me. I would say this is like 1. Was implementing a property management software and 2. Was implementing tenant Turner. Those are the two things that like made a massive shift in my business for me. [00:12:28] Jason: Nice.  [00:12:29] Sarah: And I almost wish I could have told myself like, "Hey, remember when you had 260 units and you were doing it all yourself? You should have been talking to Tenant Turner.  [00:12:37] Jason: There was some guy that had mentioned these things to you. [00:12:40] Sarah: I know! [00:12:40] Jason: He's pretty smart.  [00:12:41] Tim: I think even if you are in that cheap mindset, like at the end of the day, like vacancy is what's going to cost your owners the most money down the road too. Like one day on the market can cost them anywhere from what, 50 to $200 depending on what they're paying for their mortgage and everything. Like those costs add up and it's as property managers, it's your fiduciary duty to help them recoup that money. And if you're spending too much time on those types of things, even if you're focused on your business and spending time on that, you could still be losing that money by having those extra days on market without this type of system. [00:13:11] Sarah: Absolutely, and I think the conversation that I have with people over and over again is you need to figure out what this particular task is worth in dollars. So if this is like a $10 an hour task, a $20 an hour task, Is it something that you, as a business owner need to be doing? Is your time worth more than 10 or $20 an hour? And if the answer to that question is yes, then you need to not be the one who's doing this.  [00:13:35] Jason: Yeah. If a business owner, and a lot of business owners are the BDM, they are the business development manager. They are the person that's doing sales and generating revenue and growing the business. And if you do not as a business owner, have a full-time BDM. [00:13:49] You have somebody focused on this and it's on your shoulders, then you're a shitty part-time salesperson. You're maybe investing, I find one, maybe two hours a day. That's like 10 hours a week focusing on growing the business. And so everything else other than that should be offloaded that you can everything else. Give up the leasing stuff as much as you can, give up the maintenance stuff as much as you can, like you need to be focused on generating revenue until you can offload that piece and focus. Otherwise, you're not going to grow. And if any business owner is listening to this in property management, if you haven't grown significantly over the last year or two or three, it's because you are doing the wrong things as a business owner in the business. Plain and simple, there's no way around that. So we chatted about justifying it for those that are already, they have lots of doors and they're, you know, how do we deal with making things scalable during the busy season? And then things really for leasing tend to really cool down in the winter months. And so what are you typically seeing with clients that come to you that are maybe at a 200 plus doors or it's obvious that you can serve them. [00:15:02] Tim: I mean, even if you do have 200 doors sure, summertime's going to be the busiest, where generally speaking, you could have anywhere from what, five to 12% vacancy rates and whatnot with turnovers and whatnot. During the wintertime, there still might be one or two that hit every month. And what we're noticing with customers that size is that throughout the year we kind of keep things with that month to month rate really low for everyone. [00:15:24] It's based on portfolio size for us. And so most people are keeping that active because even one listing, like you're saying, if you're working on one listing, spending two or three hours on that one listing, even getting to go back and forth with the messages, the emails and everything like that could still be costing you more than what your monthly rate for subscription might be. So a lot of people do keep us going year round and have the lock boxes and things like that in service for vendors and stuff that might need to come and go for properties as well. So, there's lots of different little solutions that we provide there too that kind of help keep the business flowing smoothly, but generally speaking, we're there when they need us and any spot in the road where if it's crazy or if it's just a little bit, we try to keep the system smooth all year for them.  [00:16:10] Larry: I guess to add to that so typically when things are slow, usually people are saying, "I'm not getting enough leads." really what they mean is they're not getting enough leads from, you know, Zillow, Trulia, the big networks. And when they come to us and say, "Hey, what do I do? What can Tenant Turner provide?" That's usually when I tell them like, "you're really going to hunker down and how are you going to be different than your competition?" and that's also times when like, you know, "let's look at your website. You know, are you being an industry leader in your market?" So maybe they're not going to the Zillows, but when they search, or, you know, what is your web, your presence in your market? Automation's great and you definitely should automate, but then there's also times to be that personalized touch. So when things are slow, what aren't your competitors doing? If they're leaning really heavy where they can't talk to a person at all maybe you should go to what we call the 'take request model,' where we're automating things, we're pre-qualifying, and then we're setting, you know, a couple days and times. But before an appointment's approved, you get to talk to that lead. And really what you're doing, you're leveraging yourself. You introduce yourself, you say why you're great and you're market maybe some key differentiators. And then you schedule an appointment. And you do a couple things. What I like to say is you're doing what's called a vibes test just to make sure both of you are, you know, a good fit, rather to rent the property and that type of stuff. And also you're making sure they have a heartbeat. Making sure, you know, if you're using self-guided tours, it's another security layer to everything. Because at the end of the day, I'm a big fan of it's the, a book called Rework by the guys who created Basecamp. And the whole philosophy is that it's not that in a world where people saying, "I need more of this," whether it's "I need more leads" or "I need more tools," it's more utilizing the tools that you already have more efficiently. So when we look at things like lead flow, maybe it's not necessarily a top of the funnel problem, it's more of a bottom of the funnel conversion problem. And then when you use personalization to a lot of interesting ways, like I mentioned. [00:18:04] Jason: So one of the things that I think is happening a bit throughout the US and I've had some podcast guests touch on this, is that in some markets-- and I've heard some some property managers anecdotally share this with me as well-- they're having a difficulty getting tenants because the inventory as a result of the pandemic just went up, skyrocketed. A lot of people are like, "Hey, let's build, let's create a bunch of investments." Now there's a surplus of inventory and that creates a scarcity of tenants, and so they're having to get a little bit more aggressive. What strategies Have you guys seen, or you know, because you're connected to a lot of people that are doing leasing, how are they becoming more attractive to tenants than their competition? [00:18:48] Tim: You want to start or? So there's a lot of different things out there, like different solutions, whether it's providing something like a benefits package to your residents, things like that really making your listings stand out. If it's better photography, if it's better marketing in general for stuff. But generally speaking, we are kind of seeing that trend as well, where days on market are expanding a little bit. It's kind of a trend that's-- we were kind of in a goldlock zone for the last couple of years with rentals. Like it's been amazing and pre covid it wasn't ever really like that either. Like that we're kind of seeing the ebbs and flows of the market, and that's just natural in real estate. So, we're coming back to the time where people are like, kind of hunkering down and making sure that their properties are as good as they can be to really attract the best tenants for them. So while there might be a few extra days on market, there's a couple things you can do around there. Like Larry's saying, adding those personal touches in there. Setting up notifications so that as soon as someone gets to the property, you can still have that personal touch by making a phone call as soon as you can see they got into the property. Or if maybe some people are doing a few more in-person showings, if that's the case. Generally speaking, that's putting more time on the property as well, which, like we talked about, costs opportunity costs.  [00:20:00] If you got the team to do that, and that's kind of their role as a leasing agent or whatnot, great. They can have that personal touch and then go a little bit further with them. But if you're also focused on self showings having that additional personal touch, some additional marketing on the property or whatnot, I can kind of help draw that process out a little bit sooner. And really with our system, it. We really try to provide as much immediacy as possible. So when someone sees a listing on a site like Zillow, for instance they're clicking request information. We're sending them an email right away that they have the opportunity to come into Tenant Turner and click a link and schedule a tour right away. If they're calling into us, they're not going to a voicemail. They're going to be sitting there waiting three days for someone to respond to. I know that's a trend of the industry. A lot of people have massively filled inbox inboxes that they just can't handle. So tenant leads never hear back from anyone because they kind of pick and choose. We're responding to every single one of those leads as they come in and making sure that immediacy is really driving that engagement.  [00:20:59] So if we keep that engagement up for everyone the goal is that, generally speaking, that alone will really help drive. What's, I think there's a statistic out there? If you respond within five minutes, generally speaking, you're going to get 80% more acceptance in terms of a conversation. Yeah. There's that click or an actual phone call, things like that, like providing that immediacy is a massive, and it goes a long way for impressing tenant leads on the consumer side, but also in, in business. We all know B two B sales and even BDMs like calling their owners. As soon as you see a click on a website, you want to call them. So we want to keep that trend going on our side as well.  [00:21:33] Jason: Yeah, this is the TikTok generation man. They have attention spans of like two minutes, you know, it's like really short. So I love these ideas. So pushing owners to improve the property I think is a great strategy. Increasing your availability and your responsiveness and that immediacy, quick, beat, slow for sure in business. Increasing the ease Tenent Turner helps with. And then making sure that you are able to be super responsive within the first five minutes. So yeah. Love it. All right, cool. What else should we chat about related to scaling up your process during the busy season? Did we miss anything?  [00:22:12] Larry: We got it. I know typically the elephant in the room, so a lot of times, you know, self-guided tours is the golden child of, you know, why you should consider it and how it's helpful, whether it's busy or slow and this, that, and the other. But one of the things that we had is for people that aren't using it and it's like, "I would never consider that or I'm scared to use this or I can never get owner buy-in." And that's kind of always the elephant in the room. I know Tim, you have some very interesting data of, you know, while, you know, like anything in business there are inherent risks, but as business owners every day we are willing to kind of, you know, improve or, you know, try to tackle these risks. And there's usually a pot-- not all the time, but you know, a pot of gold can be waiting for you. So was there any data that you wanted to share, Tim?  [00:22:56] Jason: Before we get into that, let's kill that objection real quick. because I hear this all the time too. So I say, "Hey, maybe you should be using Tenant Turner or something like this," and they say, "well, I don't want to do lock boxes." And my response is, "you don't have to." like, there's a lot of benefits besides that piece. In fact, there's plenty of benefits besides that piece. And so maybe you can address that real quick and then we can talk about is that even really a valid concern or not? And are there markets that are better for lockbox versus others? Some are like, "I can never do that in my market. I'll have squatters all over the place." you know, they're concerned. So let's address that, that elephant in the room.  [00:23:34] Tim: Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you guys know your properties best. You're going to know which areas might have a high potential for negativity happening. Whether it's someone coming in and stealing wires, the horror stories of people stealing appliances and stuff like that. At the end of the day, if someone wants to do something bad, A lockbox or a keyless lock isn't necessarily going to stop someone in that scenario, right? We all know areas where people aren't afraid to break a window and get in, steal a refrigerator. Like the fact that a property isn't known to be vacant is a big enough red flag alone that most people that want to do something nefarious will go ahead and do it. But at the same time on our side of things, if we can block as many of those instances as possible with our abilities to kind of keep track of known scammers and squatters and things like that. We've got some stuff built into our system, but really at the end of the day, if someone wants to do something bad, it's going to happen. But generally speaking, most people that are doing showings, that type of scenario, if you're, you know, your area, if you're doing your own kind of awareness inspections periodically and you're on top of the property yourself, we barely hear of any instances of negativity happening with those scenarios. Like self showings, we can come up with the horror stories, but at the end of the day, in our experience, they are really few and far between and we're not having major issues, at least more than what you would on average. See, with any property that's being marketed, it's vacant. Like that's, it's going to happen.  [00:24:56] Jason: And there's some serious advantages because, I would imagine the best defense, period, against all of those type of problems is just getting it leased out as quick as possible. Yep. It's decreasing vacancy, and so if a lockbox can help them get into it right away, get a showing right away, whatever, decreasing the vacancy time is probably your best, you know, defense.  [00:25:18] Sarah: Yeah. The other thing I'll add to this too, is if there are people who are kind of scoping out the property and they notice, hey, like every Tuesday at six o'clock people come and then that's it. They're not going to come at Tuesday at six o'clock. They're going to come at other times. Yeah. So if we do have a lockbox on it, and now we don't really know, like when people are going to come because they're coming whenever is like convenient for them. So it might be earlier in the morning or in the afternoon or late at night. We don't know for sure. There's not so much predictability in the schedule. So I think that's something that would help as well is if there's someone who's " Hey, that house over there is vacant. Let's like check that out." But they consistently see people in and out of it, that is a little bit of a deterrent as well, because you never know, like, "Hey, if I go over there because I want to steal that refrigerator, am I walking into someone who's already there? [00:26:14] Jason: Now you can not have a big old sign on the property out front that says, "Hey, this is vacant right now. Do you want to see this?" You know, but you can still market it online without like giving out the address until they're ready to do a showing probably.  [00:26:29] Larry: Yeah, so there's some kind of tips and tricks that we've found. So one thing is not advertising it as a self-guided tour. If you're going to use verbiage in the marketing description, use contactless showing. Because that could mean virtual tours, it could mean other things. But really for us, I like to describe ourselves as a closed loop system. because usually leads are only interacting with our platform if they find out through your website or through a syndication site. So it makes it much more harder to shop for homes because they really don't know, you know, but if they inquire, then that's when the automation will engage. Some interesting things, you know, kind of like Sarah said, one thing deterrent is they see activity, but you know, we find that a lead isn't going to put a government Id answer some questions and go through this process. Why would they do that when they could just go to the front door? You could go to YouTube and learn how to pick a lock and under five minutes, and then no one's going to know I'm on the radar. It's so much easier to do that. Especially in the age of TikTok. I'm sure there's a TikTok, within two minutes or less you'll learn how to pick a lock or pop open a lockbox or something like that too. [00:27:34] Sarah: Or break a window.  [00:27:35] Larry: Or break a window.  [00:27:37] Jason: Yeah, it's a little bit quicker probably. All right, cool. So, how can people get in touch with Tenant Turner and reach out to you guys?  [00:27:48] Larry: Yeah, so obviously if they want to learn a little bit about our services, tenantturner.com. My name's Larry, larry@tenantturner.com. Feel free to email me directly. I kind of deem myself as a software nerd so you know, any questions about whether you use this or not, that's fine. You know, I'm always happy to share tips and tricks of how to automate your process, so that's kind of how you learn some more.  [00:28:12] Tim: So Larry's on the sales side of things for tenant Turner. I'm on the marketing side too, so if you ever need any additional materials or data and statistics around the self showings, if you want to help market to your owners and whatnot, if you've already signed up with Tenant Turner, happy to kind of jump on that side of things. You can email me at tim@tenantturner.com. [00:28:26] Jason: Awesome. I'm sure that's a big part of it is really if they understand how to sell it to their clients, then that's probably the biggest hurdle. Is just being able to confidently say, here's why this is a good idea and how it's going to benefit you and to sell them on it. So, awesome. Well it's been great having you both here on the show. We appreciate Tenant Turner. We get great feedback on tenant Turner from our clients, so we've always felt very confident pushing our clients towards you as one part of their growth strategy and and I hope you guys have an awesome week.  [00:28:59] Larry: Thanks. You as well. We appreciate you guys and thanks for including us. [00:29:02] Jason: All right. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that is wanting to grow your business, reach out to Tenant Turner and make sure you reach out to DoorGrow. We are really good at helping our clients scale if you feel like you need more doors to be able to afford Tenant Turner or to be able to justify tenant Turner. We're really good at helping people do that. Anything else we should add? I don't think so. Let's tell them to join our Facebook group. Join our Facebook group.  [00:29:28] There you go. DoorGrow club.com. Join our Facebook group community. We have some free stuff in there. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  [00:29:37] Jason Hull: 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!  [00:30:04] 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.

Jason talks to Ryan George, CMO of Docupace. It is a platform for paperless tools basically designed to automate your back office or the financial advisors back office that, eliminate a lot of the heavy lifting and pain that we go through daily.Episode Highlights:03:07: Ryan is working with and working for people who are sometimes in the background of the business, whether it's connecting to the CRM and having a wireframe into that business or another level of deep integration.05:56: As per Ryan, in the early 2000s, they sort of had the mainframe systems where everything was a locked technology ecosystem, and in terms of what it was able to do and what happened, that led to this explosion of innovation.11:01: As per Ryan industry average is around between 25 to 27% of the NIGO rate for large enterprises, which sounds extremely high because it is on Docupace, it's below 3% for their clients.12:00: As per Ryan, APIs are a big part of their integrations and a big part of their systems. 18:26 Ryan discusses how the pandemic drove growth in digital data gathering.24:37: Sometimes, your clients will lead you down the path to destruction. It's a matter of knowing where to draw the line and saying this is what's good for us.28:01: As per Ryan, there is a need to pivot, and we need to change things in order to get to where we are trying to do what we are trying to move, move faster, be more agile, be more innovative, serve customers in a different way.30:42: As per Ryan, they are not at the level of creativity to where people are coming up with creative solutions to solve because they don't know what the problem is yet.3 Key Points:Ryan shares a case study of someone he has dealt with who didn't have the interconnectivity, what kind of experience change they see within their company, and what type of productivity gains they get from this.Docupace provides tracking in the dashboards where if paperwork gets submitted, somebody must call and say, hey, where's Joe and sell his application.Ryan shares what are the new features of Docupace that they are going to implement in the coming years.Tweetable Quotes:"We want to be a cohesive glue that helps connect your financial planning software, custodian, and systems together as you integrate throughout the technology stack that you have at your firm." – Ryan"Often, it's not the technology, it's the humans that become the inefficiency in the system, and we are trying to find that." - Ryan"Do you have the people in management or middle management with the vision for how this all comes together, which is a is and it's a very difficult thing to fill because it's a Venn diagram." - Jason"People who understand the digital realm as to what's possible and being able to tie that all together. Those are the single most valuable people in our enterprises these days." - Jason"There are so many uses for being able for one person to get data from another person, and that is never going to go away in this business." - RyanResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInLinkedIn - Ryan George Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At times it may seem the more troubling features of our collective cultural experience — polarization, conflict, isolation — appear so intractable they are now to be expected as almost normalized behaviors of modern community life. They're not.Each one of us has the natural intelligence and creativity to transcend polarities with a greater perspective, transform the energy of conflict into resolution, and live an authentic life true to our self - chosen path, beliefs and values. At any time we can make a conscious decision that can alter our life, relationships and community.Fortunately, we also have tools and insights available to help explore the practice of what is known as authentic relating and creating deeper human connections. In this conversation, Aviv Shahar is joined by Jason Digges , artist, philosopher, teacher and author of Conflict = Energy. Jason is a global leader of the authentic relating movement.Aviv and Jason take a closer look at its origins and central ideas, and the many revealing stories in Jason's personal and professional journeys. Among their insights:Our empowerment comes from our ability to see the context that we're in and make a conscious decision: Do I want to do this? Do I want to play this game?When we come together and there is friction, we bump up against one another ― there's so much to learn. We need authe nticity and courage to lean into it.The foundation of authentic relating is taking multiple perspectives. We have a polarity of dignity, or my voice matters, and humility — listening to others. If either goes offline, we end up in posture or collapse.The se are simply tools you can use in every situation — to help you get in touch with yourself and create a space with others. That's why it's called authentic relating.The first person you need to become authentic with is yourself, or there isn't really any thing else.Capitalism is killing us; we don't need to abolish capitalism as an economic system, but stop capitalizing on people; stop looking at people as commodities.This conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcom ing special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES “You know, our interiors and the human potential movement were so interesting, and then, you know, psychedelics were outlawed, and there was this big swing back to the right in America in the 80s, and a much more conservative atmosphere.” (Jason)“The way I think of leadership is, I have a friend who does Equine Assisted Therapy on horses. Their energetic and emotional systems are so interesting because their hearts are five times bigger than ours. If you take your fist and like your heart is about this big, well their heart is five times as big as that and then the energetic field is actually that big and that strong and so horses are so energetically sensitive and if y ou have a talented equine therapist they can bring you into the paddy with, you know, this fenced in grassy area with a group of horses and they can point out these different dynamics and they can actually show you your own consciousness and your own energ y happening out there in their fields because they're so energetically sensitive.” (Jason)“There were 3000 groups happening in America that were all relational groups. They were all groups based on developing your authenticity and relational practice, li ke working it out together. Because when we come together and there is friction and we bump up against one another, there's so much to learn and what we need is authenticity and courage to lean into it, and then you know that relationship or the relational field of a group can teach us so much about how we're making meaning and doing developmental work, like, is there a higher way to make meaning? Right? So, relational practice really can accelerate development. It accelerates our emotional and social devel opment.” (Jason)“I believe that the foundation of authentically relating to you is taking multiple perspectives and polarity. So we have a polarity that we call dignity and humility, and dignity is my voice matters, and humility is the ability to listen to another person, and if either one of these things goes offline, we end up in posture or collapse.” (Jason)“You know that saying thank you and nice job is called politeness. It's called being cordial. It's actually not really investing in the relationship. They call it the relational capital between us, right? Saying thank you and nice job is like putting pennies in the piggy bank; it doesn't actually do much. But if you can notice a unique quality that this person is bringing to the community and acknowledge them for it, and even one step better, acknowledge them in front of the other people and now all of a sudden, what I'm doing is I'm taking this warmth in heart energy and I'm just spreading it around and I'm acknowledging you in a way that feels specific and unique.” (Jason) RESOURCES MENTIONED Portals of Perception WebsiteAviv's LinkedIn Aviv's TwitterAviv's Website

In today's 250th episode we have guest host, Guy Anderson to interview Jason Pereira. Guy asks Jason what he has learned till now and where he is going from this point. Episode Highlights2.08: There are a lot of integrations in the US market, but Jason would actually refer to a lot of those integrations as borderline superficial.3.25: As per Jason there are a couple of ways to look at big trends. We can contrast the US market versus elsewhere because in US market everybody got baseline technology.4.35: If you went too far and just focused on digitizing and optimizing your process without focusing on how you can provide deeper, greater value to a client, you didn't do yourself a service in that regard, says Jason.5.24: In the developing markets, Jason is seeing a lot of unique and interesting ways of trying to get more people access to financial services, which is enormously important.8.40: The longer you depend on a system the more likely you are to depend on it for a longer period of time, says Jason.9.23: One of the single biggest bottlenecks with old systems is the inability to get the data open and out and then put into something elsewhere.11.28: Netflix and all that were big examples of technology uptake during COVID where people were using streaming systems. Jason explains whether he saw an uptake in Fintech adoption during COVID or not. 16.54: Flow charts technology to basically make a decision or to basically confirm that the planning solution you make is solid, that is foundationally found fantastic nudge.21.55: To monetize open banking, they're going to figure out a way to monetize it through the companies that are giving it to you, which is going to basically come back to you through fees, says Jason.23.31: When Jason started four and half years ago, Fintech was new term and we were in a big hype cycle at the time and he was seeing solutions left, right and center, novel things and different ideas but that's slowed down because the industry had hit maturity plateau at this point.28.33: Jason sees a world where money or decisions with money are going to be minute and the challenge is that this is a cognitive burden on humanity. 31.45: Google basically gives you every financial service for free and monetizing out the data and that should be scared to every sector of finance. 3 Key PointsJason talks about the challenges that he has seen in the sector that perhaps are limiting the advance of some of the Fintech companies. When it comes to how to digitally transform businesses, many institutions don't have internal people that can think at higher level and nor the incentives designed to do that, says Jason.In Canada Jason had released the paper on open banking framework and when he started reading it, he stopped reading it very quickly because timeline set out was completely unrealistic.Tweetable Quotes"There is a lack of surprisingly digital on-boarding systems that exist in any country." – Jason"There is no way that we are going to meet the demand for developers in the future." – Jason"It's hard to teach an old dog new tricks sometimes." - JasonResources MentionedFacebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At DoorGrow, we have some of the savviest property entrepreneurs on the planet in our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind. Brannon Potts is a property management business owner in North Texas, who joined DoorGrow with only 71 doors. In only 3 months, Brannon was able to grow his business to over 100 doors with 70 more on the way! Join property management growth expert, Jason Hull, as he interviews Brannon Potts, a DoorGrow client. Brannon shares his experience with DoorGrow and how he has seen it make a beneficial impact on his business. You'll Learn… [01:12] Meet DoorGrow client Brannon Potts [04:42] Investing in Yourself and Your Business with Coaching [07:27] What Makes Jason and DoorGrow Different? [13:09] DoorGrow's Two Key Ideas… [20:07] Finding Fulfillment by Growing and Scaling the Business [22:49] How Brannon used DoorGrow's Script to Add Doors [27:08] How You can Grow and Scale Your Business  Tweetables “We have these moments as coaches where we feel like-- it's similar to as being a dad and seeing your kid get an award or do something.” “As you've been building your business, it could get uglier and more painful, but we always try to make sure that the client understands that's the wrong way to do it.” “Good, coaching or good marketing or good anything that you're going to pay for should give you an ROI, right? That means it's a good investment.” “A lot of people are thinking ‘I'd rather just spend money. I'd rather just spend money because it would save me time,' That's a cost. That's not an investment.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: For those that are on the fence, thinking about DoorGrow maybe they've heard about DoorGrow, what would you say?  [00:00:05] Brannon: You might not like this, but I think it's so good, sometimes I wouldn't want to tell anybody cause it's so good for people.  [00:00:12] Jason: All right. Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, And you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:00:49] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management, business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:12] And my guest today is one of my clients, Brannon Potts. Brannon, welcome to the show.  [00:01:19] Brannon: Thank you. Thank  [00:01:20] Jason: you.  [00:01:21] So it's good to have you. So Brannon, you're a client that I really enjoy working with. 1. Because you just do what I tell you to do, and it works and you're doing the right things. So I appreciate you as a client because that's always fun for me is to have clients that like, believe in what we're doing, and get it. And do it. You know, starting out, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about how you got into property management in the first place?  [00:01:47] Brannon: Sure. I think it was back-- late 2016. We were actually doing well in our sales business but had a friend give us some advice about getting into property management and you say it, even in the intro: at first, I didn't have just a great perception of property management, but I said, okay, I'm going to get into this business, learn it. I didn't know it very much. I didn't know it really much at all. And we began to grow. And over these years, we just, we grew a little bit and happened to see one of your ads and started investigating and just said, you know what? I want to join this coaching. And I did. I just said, "I really don't know very much about the property management business, and you have a background in coaching this. I'm just going to follow what he says, not question it, and just do it."  [00:02:46] And then I was going to hold your feet to the fire because you promised it and committed that if I did, you would refund my money, and I began to do that and I still have so much more to go because in your coaching, the depth of that coaching that you give, I think I'm only maybe touching on 10% of it right now. And I'm looking forward to actually many years to come of getting deeper and deeper in implementing all the things that you provide in coaching because I've been coached before. I've been actually a coach myself for the sales side. And what we've always been taught is when you teach people, typically only 10% implement what you're teaching. And I said, man, "I don't want to be that 90% that doesn't. I want to be the 10% that does. And let the chips fall where they may and begin doing exactly what you said, trying to follow it as closely as I could." [00:03:44] And what do you know? It happens. We grow, we have probably at this point, we're either from the initial investment of the coaching-- I bet you we're-- I'm trying to think-- three, four times, maybe five times now the dollars that we're generating from the coaching. So it was a great investment. [00:04:04] Jason: You mean on a monthly basis?  [00:04:06] On a monthly basis. [00:04:07] Yeah. So you've got way more residual income than what the program costs. So it's a no-brainer. And that's one of our initial goals with clients. Like we want to get them paid and make sure the program's double paid for within hopefully the first 30 to 60 days is the goal so that they can justify the expense and keep going. And then I guess you could say it's paying you now, to be part of the program.  [00:04:27] Brannon: It's-- I've made money off of this coaching and that's what everybody wants.  [00:04:32] Jason: That's what good, coaching or good marketing or good anything that you're going to pay for should give you an ROI, right? That means it's a good investment. So I'm glad that you're getting a good return on your investment. That's our goal. So you brought up something that I think it's interesting that you've worked with a lot of coaches. I've worked with a lot of coaches too. You know, I think one thing that's a little bit different from me than maybe other coaches in the industry, but there's a lot of coaches out there that don't have coaches. And they don't get coached themselves. And I think that's one of my competitive advantages, which is really simple is that I pay for really expensive coaching and masterminds and high ticket things to be involved in so that I can turn around and have value to give to my clients.  [00:05:16] Like I just came back from a mastermind, I pay a lot of money to be in it, and I shared an idea today with the group that you thought was pretty cool. We were talking about not focusing on referrals instead of referring to them, as in asking for– what did I say? I'll let you say it... [00:05:32] Brannon: an introduction. And that is an extra benefit is not just taking the wisdom you already have. You're still pouring into yourself so that you have something to pour out. [00:05:45] Cause I think a lot of people stop getting things poured into them and the great people, great leaders, and great entrepreneurs need something poured into them so that they can pour out to others. We need that relationship to continue. And that's what I appreciate of your coaching. It's your coaching, but you're still getting coached and I'm getting the benefit of your expense of coaching and you're handing extra value to us. [00:06:14] Jason: Yeah. I'm not even going to say how much I spend on coaching a year right now, but it's a lot, it's a lot. I'm in two really high-ticket masterminds, but for me, I love it because I get to hang out with the best. Like I'm talking business owners that are doing millions and millions of dollars. I was hanging out with people that are doing millions a month in business. Some are hitting a million a month or more. And these are the kind of people I get to hang out with. And I love to be able to learn. It's fun for me. And having a program in which I get to share that stuff. That's just even more fun for me. Cause I love to share what I'm learning. That's just fun for me. So...  [00:06:51] Brannon: As soon as you brought that up, I went out and shared that with my team, the ones that were here at the moment, and then I'm going to share that again on another meeting of not asking for the referral, but asking for the introduction. There's just many layers to that, of how good it is.  [00:07:09] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And we chatted about that on our group coaching call today. And for those that are not in our group, you're missing out. So Brannon what have you noticed since joining the program? I mean, You talked about some of the concerns you had coming in and some of the challenges you were dealing with, and you mentioned that you've made your money back, you've gotten some results. How does this compare or differ or relate to all the other coaching stuff that you've been involved in the past? [00:07:34] Brannon: Jason, I don't want you to get a big head, but it has been the best coaching I've had. And I talk about it all the time. I've been through several different coaches, both in the real estate side, and just some life coaches, and the value you bring is multiple layers and genuinely appreciate that, because that's what you teach us is bringing value to people and you do. And I would share this with anyone. This is not a sales pitch. This is true value. You bring on so many different layers and that's why I've shared in the past, and I've shared it even with my wife. I said, "I see myself. I've only scratched the surface of the value you've already brought. And I see this for many years to come that I plan to be a part of this. Cause it's not a cost, it's been an investment," and yes, we're talking about growing doors, but there's many other layers to the coaching of growing the business and how you do that from operations to people who you hire, what their duties are. This was exactly what I was looking for 'cause I did not have that knowledge. Though I've succeeded it at higher levels in a lot of ways in the real estate industry, these were the parts I didn't know. And I feel like I've still got so much more to learn. [00:09:01] Jason: I really appreciate that. That's-- that means a lot to me. I appreciate it. So for me, it's interesting to me because I've been in this business-- I founded it, and we had some tough times starting this business out and like me building a team I've gone through the entrepreneurial life cycle and journey that I coach clients on. And DoorGrow, our company has made so many changes, even in the last quarter. Like the slew of things that we get done that are on our list for quarterly planning is just amazing to me that we're able to accomplish. DoorGrow's not even the same company it was a year ago. Not even close. And some clients maybe worked with us in the past or knew about us in the past, or maybe we just did a website a long time ago. And DoorGrow is not even close to the same company. Some people are probably hearing you going "operations?" And like "this?" And like "coaching." And they're like, what? And it's funny because people, I think judge me and DoorGrow sometimes by who I was maybe five years ago or two years ago, or even a year ago. [00:10:06] And my personal development aggression, I guess you could say, or my drive and the level of the team members that I have and the drive of the team and how quickly we're able to make changes and implement is I mean, I'm obviously biased, but I think it's pretty amazing. So yeah. And I think people could give us a chance that haven't been with us for a while. Our new mastermind is just really awesome and I think people are really crushing it, which is really fun to see.  [00:10:32] Brannon: And the connections you make in that coaching group. There's several people that I've made connections with that will be valuable for the future and just collaborating or, "Hey, I'm having this struggle. How have you handled it?" There's just, there's so much value and I agree it's even in-- what is it? Five months now I've been in the program it's changed and added more layers to it. But that's because of your growth. You didn't stay stagnant. You're still growing yourself and have something to pour out. [00:11:07] Jason: I'd feel guilty if I took even the majority of the credit, like my operator, Sarah, also my fiance, she's moved the needle significantly in this business, Adam, over fulfillment, Ashlee who's over a client success-- like we've got some amazing people on my team and they're moving most of the objectives forward that we have each quarter, and it's been just awesome to see. And that's part of the DoorGrow OS planning system that we've got and that sort of thing. We've got 90 members in the mastermind, so I appreciate that you brought up community cause that's a big focus of ours moving forward this quarter is we're really trying to focus on improving the community aspect. A lot of people joined for the content in DoorGrow Academy and the material that we have and the ideas, and then the people win because of the coaching. But people generally in a program will stay because of the community and the connection and the benefits of having that comradery, 'cause you know, being an entrepreneur can be a lonely journey without being connected to others, so we're really focused on that, improving that, in fact, we've got about 90 members in the mastermind, 90 businesses. We probably have on average about two people per business. So we've got probably about somewhere close to 200 people in the program I think that are actively involved. [00:12:17] We haven't really grown honestly for the last, maybe two, three months, which is weird, but we've been filtering a lot of people out. We've been really trying to make sure people are active and engaged and shaking the tree, so to speak and some of the people that weren't really engaged or active in our outreach and stuff have dropped off while we've been adding people, but we've cleaned that up. So like the program's really clean. And so I'm really excited about the community aspect because most of the people now are all pretty much engaged. And in at least on one of the calls and doing their check-ins and moving forward. So I think even though the group is still about the same size it's been for a little while, it's a lot mightier, so we're really excited about that. And now that it's cleaned out, now we're going to be adding, I think a lot of people that are going to be staying in the program a lot longer and it'll be, even we're going to be growing for sure. Yeah. So Brannon, what do you feel like are some of the most significant things that you've got out of it so far? Because a lot of people, they hear you probably saying, "Hey, DoorGrow's great. Coaching's great." And you mentioned you're making more money. What are some of the key things that really have stood out to you that you're like, "Hey, like this is different or this is interesting," or that you've really valued? [00:13:29] Brannon: I think a couple of things. There are multiple layers, so I can talk about this for a while, but the key things initially were: how to lead generate that didn't cost money. And sometimes you hear that and you think, "oh, this is just a sales pitch." It was very genuine, and it was very good. And I implemented that. So the only cost was my time and following through with what the coaching did and that added the doors very quickly. The second was helping design a pricing plan and how to put that together. I implemented one of the plans, the hybrid plan that you discuss and implemented that and began to sell that. And through selling it, I've shared this in our mastermind, how I sell that. And I'm seeing how it resonates with owners and just those two things alone, those two changes that we made alone made money. Those are just the two things initially. And then you offer other things that we're beginning to tap into and  [00:14:40] there's so much there, the content, I can only absorb so much at the moment and I'm trying to fully implement those well, but that also gives me a path for several years to come things that I'll be able to dive deeper into different sections of what all you offer and implement those. So I see a path, but those two things alone were the big key movers, which you steer people to. Doing that lead generation first and then begin some pricing and other things. So those two are the big steps that made it an investment and made us money.  [00:15:17] Jason: Yeah, if any of my competitors are listening and they want to figure out how to steal some of the magic from DoorGrow, we focus on two main things with clients and you can probably feel this. I don't think you've heard me mention this Brannon, but one of our big goals within the first 30 to 60 days is we want to make sure clients have really strong clarity on what the future holds for them, like what direction to go in. So we have our clarity assessments we take you through, so you know clearly which path. We have three different paths we take people down depending on which thing is the biggest problem in the business right now. And we focus on pain first. So we get them clarity on what they want and where the pain is and then results. So we want to get them as quickly and as effortlessly as possible to the results. So we're giving you the scripts, the language, the outreach, like all the different things to do. And you mentioned lead gen without spending money, and I know a lot of people are thinking "I'd rather just spend money. I'd rather just spend money because it would save me time," is what they think. What would you say to that?  [00:16:18] Brannon: Yeah, boy, that's a cost. That's not an investment. This is a deeper level of long-term residual lead generation so that what you teach in the coaching pays dividends, not just now, but in the future, it continues to pay residual dividends and you haven't spent any money on it because the big thing in starting a property management company or starting any company is to generate revenue before expenses and it fit with the principles of that is, is generating that revenue before you have any hard costs, which help you get profitable better and faster, then you can have money to do other things to grow it even faster.  [00:17:04] Jason: Yeah there's several things we focus on with clients. We want to decrease the expenses in the business. So we talk about how a lot of property managers, we mentioned this on today's call, right? Like a lot of property managers... it's not about what they need to do more of, or add more of in the business. It's about some of the things they need to eliminate that they are doing. And then we get into, the lead gen piece. A lot of people mistakenly think that they can generate more leads by doing advertising or paid advertising, but that actually are colder leads that take more time. So we've actually decreased your time investment into lead generation and we've zeroed out the costs. [00:17:43] Brannon: And usually it's a better quality person--  [00:17:45] Jason: --and it's an absolutely better quality lead, right? The conversion rate's way higher because we're focusing on warmer lead generation. And the other thing that I think is a secret is that you're creating market share while other property managers are fighting over the small amount of existing market share that exists. They're all in the red water. It's ugly and bloody, and there's a lot of scarcity. And I'm guessing you don't really feel much scarcity in growing your property management business?  [00:18:11] Brannon: Not at all. It's doing so well, there's moments we have to just pause for a few minutes to absorb all the new clients coming on board so that we handle them, you know? It's not from lack of business coming in now from this lead gen source, it's making sure that we handle them effectively. And we talk about this in the coaching too, of how to handle the operations when all this business comes and how to handle it effectively and efficiently. [00:18:38] Jason: That's one of my favorite problems to do is make the growth become so uncomfortable and painful. And then we shift to solving that problem. Everybody wants that problem, but we want to create that problem for our clients that they're having so much growth that it's gotten uncomfortable and they have to start hiring and scaling their systems, so. And then yeah, pricing strategy. We talk about-- like you mentioned the hybrid pricing. Initially, I got the idea from Scott Brady. He's really sharp entrepreneur. And then we've put our own nuance and spin to it to make sure that people do it effectively. So it's psychologically really effective and that's been really really great for our clients that are starting to implement that. [00:19:16] So, yeah, you're right. There's a lot more in the program. I'm excited for you to get into some of the other stuff and get through it. Because I love seeing clients get all these different pieces dialed in because the speed at which the company moves forward is rapid. Now, a lot of people, a lot of property managers are already burnt out. They're already burnt out in their business. They're not enjoying it, which I would normally say, they're just doing it wrong, but that's, I think also one of the key things that we focus on at DoorGrow is not just building a business that just gets more crazy and more hectic and moves fast, that you enjoy less and less, which is typical. Most get to 200 to 400 doors and they're burnt out. They're micromanaging their team. They hate their day-to-day.  [00:19:56] Brannon: You talk about both growing with quantity, but also growing with quality and creating a quality of life too.  [00:20:05] Jason: Yeah, it's a big deal. So our primary focus is on, I call it the four reasons. I've done a previous podcast episode on that. For those listening, you can go back and listen to that. That's our primary goal is to move people towards the four reasons of more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, and more support. And as you've been building your business, it could get uglier and more painful, but we always try to make sure that the client understands that's the wrong way to do it. Like we can get you more support and make it more fun and you do less and less in the business.  [00:20:36] Brannon: I like to learn and listen as it scales, how to scale it, and you share this in the coaching, how to scale it properly so that you don't get burnout. So I'm aware of that and want to make sure that happens not just for me, but y'all also share how to do that for your team too. The positions and the different times to hire and how to do that effectively. So it's not just for the owner, but it's how to create quality for everyone.  [00:21:06] Jason: So you've seen some results in the program. What do you feel like your team's perspective of all this movement and change has been, and maybe even your spouse, like how is this kind of rippling out around you? Is this creating some pain and problems for people around you? Or how did they feel about all this?  [00:21:24] Brannon: Jason, you'll appreciate that I use a lot of your quotes at home. But, when you're hearing good things, you want to share it. So I would say we're growing and I think the team, I know the team is all on board and they're excited about the growth, but as any good growth, there is stretching and you have to go through that stretching process that makes you better, but you've provided several good things that help the team that I'm using to help them get through the stretching with the growth that we're having. And we'll take this problem of growth, as we all remember the great recession and we were begging to be busy. I keep mindful of that, of being grateful that we are and would not take the other side of that of not being busy. I keep that in mind and I encourage the team, and they're encouraged by the growth too. They're very excited. Even our sales team notices it and they're like, "man, maybe I should be on that side of the business." They get really excited about it.  [00:22:25] Jason: What's one thing you feel like you could share maybe with the audience, people that aren't in the program that might benefit them, that is maybe something you learned in the program or, maybe just a mindset shift or a takeaway or something that might be helpful to those that are listening? [00:22:41] Brannon: Boy. That's there's so many... [00:22:43] Jason: There are those that are struggling. What feedback or idea would you want to share with them?  [00:22:49] Brannon: I think, you know, looking for referrals from agents that are working in the multi-family or property industry that are selling investments that has helped us quite a bit, but what's been beneficial in the coaching is you've given a great template of a script of how to do it that is genuine, that really flows well and is right in line with building high trust with clients and with agents. That's been the number one benefit of the coaching is not just that idea, but then even giving a practical script that really works. We've been in coaching. We've all been in different programs where we'll see a script that is just not realistic because that person doesn't do it. Your script is genuinely realistic, and it works. I tested it. It worked. I went line by line, even had the script in front of me as I'm going through it, and it really flowed genuine and real and generated referrals that day. [00:23:58] Jason: That was actually one of those moments. We have these moments as coaches where we feel like-- it's similar to as being a dad and seeing your kid get an award or do something, but one of those moments for me was when you sent me your call recording, and you just followed the script. Because I get a lot of call recordings from clients and they don't follow the script. They either don't feel confident doing it that way, or they say it different or they think they're trying to be cute or clever. And then I'm coaching them like, "stop saying 'um' and stop saying 'kinda' and 'maybe' like show confidence." you just followed the script, and it went so beautifully, and that was just really rewarding to me to be able to hear that and go " yes! It worked." And hear that result like real-time is really cool.  [00:24:43] Brannon: I think I came into the coaching with the mindset and I thought of that 90-10 principle, and I said, "I'm going to be the 10%. Sink or swim, I'm going to be the 10% and I'm just going to follow it" and let it go where it went. But the beauty of it is, it went well. And it would for anyone that followed because we all know as we coach or teach, the ones that just say, "Hey, I'm going to be humble and I'm just going to do what you say, and let's see what happens." it generally works.  [00:25:16] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to tell clients like, "Hey, it's proven. If Brannon can do it, anybody else can do it too. Brannon's not any smarter or cooler than anybody else in our program, other than the fact that he does the work and he does what we tell them to do. And that makes you, I think, pretty smart and pretty cool. So I appreciate you, Brannon. So, um, Cool. I, appreciate you coming and taking some time out of your day to be here on the #DoorGrowShow and on the podcast. For those that are. On the fence, thinking about DoorGrow maybe they've heard about DoorGrow, a year ago or five years ago or in the past. What would you say to them now? You're on the other side of the paywall. You see what's going on in the community. What would you say?  [00:25:57] Brannon: Well, You might not like this, but I think it's so good, sometimes I wouldn't want to tell anybody 'cause it's so good for people.  [00:26:06] Jason: I've heard that. I've heard that quite a bit, which is really funny. Like "I want everyone to do it except my competition." [00:26:12] Brannon: That's it. [00:26:13] Jason: So which market are you in?  [00:26:16] Brannon: We're in north Texas.  [00:26:17] Jason: All right. So if you're in north Texas, Brannon says, do not do the DoorGrow thing. It's not going to work out for you probably, but everybody else should totally join this program. Does that sound accurate?  [00:26:30] Brannon: North Texas property managers and there's plenty of business for all of us. [00:26:35] Jason: There is. That's something, I think that we're really big on the program. You're not in the red water feeling scarcity fighting with other property managers. There's 70% are self-managing, there's tons of available potential business out there, and you've been able to tap into that tap and you're getting plenty from it and yeah, there's plenty of business out there. Very cool. Brannon appreciate you being a client. Appreciate you taking time out. And anything you wanna say before we wrap this up?  [00:27:03] Brannon: No, I think I've covered quite a bit myself.  [00:27:05] Jason: All right. Awesome. Thanks, Brannon. All right. So for those that have been listening to this and you're curious or interested in DoorGrow, you can reach out to us. And if you want to test the waters a little bit and get familiar with this, because this may be the first time you've heard about us for some reason, join our Facebook group, go to doorgrowclub.com. Videos like this get pushed into the group. I do live streams multiple times a week now. I'm sharing concepts and ideas. My goal and job is to prove to you that we have some value to offer to you. Once you get beyond the paywall, there's even more. And so join the DoorGrowClub. You can go to doorgrowclub.com to get to our Facebook group. The other thing that I would recommend is just go to doorgrow.com. [00:27:52] If you're curious and you want to set up a call and talk to my sales team, they will listen to you. I have great people on the team. They really care about our vision of helping property managers. And so if you're struggling with some issues, some challenges, bring it up to them and talk with them and they will help you see if there's a path in which we can help you deal with those challenges, whether it's you're just not enjoying your day to day, you're struggling with your team and with operations, you're struggling to figure out how to add doors and grow your business, you hate your website, you don't like your brand. Like we can help solve these problems for you and they'll help you see how we can do that. And they'll also give you access to our seven frameworks training so you can see seven different growth frameworks and really shift your mindset out of the idea that you need cold leads and you need to do advertising and you need to spend a bunch of money on marketing. [00:28:41] We'll shift you out of that and help you see why that mindset actually has been hurting your growth and will benefit you and get you moving forward. And that's it for today. So until next time, everybody to our mutual growth. Reach out to DoorGrow, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye, everyone. [00:28:55] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:29:22] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. [00:29:43] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life. 

Today's guest is Anna Malazhavaya, a tax lawyer and Advotax Law Professional Corp founder. Anna is an expert in dealing with problems involving audits. Jason and Anna are going to talk about what it means to go through an audit and what the reality of it is. Episode Highlights:· You don't need to be doing something wrong to be selected for an audit or free audit to go up really bad.· The CRA has upped their game in the last three or four years. They got a lot of money for it, and we see that money working.· Typically, in the first step for audit, you will get a brown envelope that nobody likes to receive in their mailbox, and it will identify what they are looking for.· Audits start with an auditor's letter introducing him or herself as telling a taxpayer that they are being audited. This is the period we're looking at, and these are the questions we will have for you.· Many software and resources are available for managing your financial information. Using those, the more prepared you are and the easier it is for you to survive the audit.· Communication is key, and auditors have a lot of power. We get to dispute their decision later, but it's going to cost you a lot of time and money, and it's not fun to do.· If you did something wrong, you're accountable. But auditors not going to be a big brother on every transaction we ever have because that's not how they're supposed to operate.· At the end of the day, it's meant to catch the bad guys, but at the expense of our privacy and expenses, CRA always has an opportunity to start a fishing expedition for every audit they do.· Explanatory notes to the new rules say that we have broadened the scope to provide the new realities with the digital world.· Auditors used to interview neighbors before in their defense, but the neighbors had the right to say no, we are not interested, and we're not talking to you. 3 Key Points:1. Computers don't know that you are a good and honest person. Computers may pick you up for an audit, and you will be caught, and you will have to go through the not very pleasant exercise together with people who did something wrong.2. Jason and Anna discuss that are the best practices for surviving an audit, and what other pieces of advice she would give to the listeners. 3. Auditors get to inspect personal documents or documents of any other person if they relate to a targeted person or his tax liability. Tweetable Quotes· “It's funny the level of disdain and contempt some people have for the nation's tax authority and thinking that they are not very smart people.” - Jason· “There are chances that you may not need to provide everything they ask for, which can help you in the future.” - Anna · “I think the audit in the future will be more effective, faster, and more accurate, but it's going to be invasive.” – Anna Resources Mentioned· Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook· LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn· Anna: Website | Linkedin Full Transcript See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

About JasonJason Frazier is a Software Engineering Manager at Ekata, a Mastercard Company. Jason's team is responsible for developing and maintaining Ekata's product APIs. Previously, as a developer, Jason led the investigation and migration of Ekata's Identity Graph from AWS Elasticache to Redis Enterprise Redis on Flash, which brought an average savings of $300,000/yr.Links: Ekata: https://ekata.com/ Email: jason.frazier@ekata.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonfrazier56 TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This one is a bit fun because it's a promoted episode sponsored by our friends at Redis, but my guest does not work at Redis, nor has he ever. Jason Frazier is a Software Engineering Manager at Ekata, a Mastercard company, which I feel, like, that should have some sort of, like, music backstopping into it just because, you know, large companies always have that magic sheen on it. Jason, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.Jason: Yeah. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here.Corey: So, other than the obvious assumption, based upon the fact that Redis is kind enough to be sponsoring this episode, I'm going to assume that you're a Redis customer at this point. But I'm sure we'll get there. Before we do, what is Ekata? What do you folks do?Jason: So, the whole idea behind Ekata is—I mean, if you go to our website, our mission statement is, “We want to be the global leader in online identity verification.” What that really means is, in more increasingly digital world, when anyone can put anything they want into any text field they want, especially when purchasing anything online—Corey: You really think people do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?Jason: I know. It's shocking to think that someone could lie about who they are online. But that's sort of what we're trying to solve specifically in the payment space. Like, I want to buy a new pair of shoes online, and I enter in some information. Am I really the person that I say I am when I'm trying to buy those shoes? To prevent fraudulent transactions. That's really one of the basis that our company goes on is trying to reduce fraud globally.Corey: That's fascinating just from the perspective of you take a look at cloud vendors at the space that I tend to hang out with, and a lot of their identity verification of, is this person who they claim to be, in fact, is put back onto the payment providers. Take Oracle Cloud, which I periodically beat up but also really enjoy aspects of their platform on, where you get to their always free tier, you have to provide a credit card. Now, they'll never charge you anything until you affirmatively upgrade the account, but—“So, what do you do need my card for?” “Ah, identity and fraud verification.” So, it feels like the way that everyone else handles this is, “Ah, we'll make it the payment networks' problem.” Well, you're now owned by Mastercard, so I sort of assume you are what the payment networks, in turn, use to solve that problem.Jason: Yeah, so basically, one of our flagship products and things that we return is sort of like a score, from 0 to 400, on how confident we are that this person is who they are. And it's really about helping merchants help determine whether they should either approve, or deny, or forward on a transaction to, like, a manual review agent. As well as there's also another use case that's even more popular, which is just, like, account creation. As you can imagine, there's lots of bots on everyone's [laugh] favorite app or website and things like that, or customers offer a promotion, like, “Sign up and get $10.”Well, I could probably get $10,000 if I make a thousand random accounts, and then I'll sign up with them. But, like, make sure that those accounts are legitimate accounts, that'll prevent, like, that sort of promo abuse and things like that. So, it's also not just transactions. It's also, like, account openings and stuff, make sure that you actually have real people on your platform.Corey: The thing that always annoyed me was the way that companies decide, oh, we're going to go ahead and solve that problem with a CAPTCHA on it. It's, “No, no, I don't want to solve machine learning puzzles for Google for free in order to sign up for something. I am the customer here; you're getting it wrong somewhere.” So, I assume, given the fact that I buy an awful lot of stuff online, but I don't recall ever seeing anything branded with Ekata that you do this behind the scenes; it is not something that requires human interaction, by which I mean, friction.Jason: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. It's behind the scenes. That's exactly what I was about to segue to is friction, is trying to provide a frictionless experience for users. In the US, it's not as common, but when you go into Europe or anything like that, it's fairly common to get confirmations on transactions and things like that.You may have to, I don't know text—or get a code text or enter that online to basically say, like, “Yes, I actually received this.” But, like, helping—and the reason companies do that is for that, like, extra bit of security and assurance that that's actually legitimate. And obviously, companies would like to prefer not to have to do that because, I don't know, if I'm trying to buy something, this website makes me do something extra, the site doesn't make me do anything extra, I'm probably going to go with that one because it's just more convenient for me because there's less friction there.Corey: You're obviously limited in how much you can say about this, just because it's here's a list of all the things we care about means that great, you've given me a roadmap, too, of things to wind up looking at. But you have an example or two of the sort of the data that you wind up analyzing to figure out the likelihood that I'm a human versus a robot.Jason: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's fairly common across most payment forms. So, things like you enter in your first name, your last name, your address, your phone number, your email address. Those are all identity elements that we look at. We have two data stores: We have our Identity Graph and our Identity Network.The Identity Graph is what you would probably think of it, if you think of a web of a person and their identity, like, you have a name that's linked to a telephone, and that name is also linked to an address. But that address used to have previous people living there, so on and so forth. So, the various what we just call identity elements are the various things we look at. It's fairly common on any payment form, I'm sure, like, if you buy something on Amazon versus eBay or whatever, you're probably going to be asked, what's your name? What's your address? What's your email address? What's your telephone?Corey: It's one of the most obnoxious parts of buying things online from websites I haven't been to before. It's one of the genius ideas behind Apple Pay and the other centralized payment systems. Oh, yeah. They already know who you are. Just click the button, it's done.Jason: Yeah, even something as small as that. I mean, it gets a little bit easier with, like, form autocompletes and stuff like, oh, just type J and it'll just autocomplete everything for me. That's not the worst of the world, but it is still some amount of annoyance and friction. [laugh].Corey: So, as I look through all this, it seems like one of the key things you're trying to do since it's in line with someone waiting while something is spinning in their browser, that this needs to be quick. It also strikes me that this is likely not something that you're going to hit the same people trying to identify all the time—if so, that is its own sign of fraud—so it doesn't really seem like something can be heavily cached. Yet you're using Redis, which tells me that your conception of how you're using it might be different than the mental space that I put Redis into what I'm thinking about where this ridiculous architecture diagram is the Redis part going to go?Jason: Yeah, I mean, like, whenever anyone says Redis, thinks of Redis, I mean, even before we went down this path, you always think of, oh, I need a cache, I'll just stuff in Redis. Just use Redis as a cache here and there. I don't know, some small—I don't know, a few tens, hundreds gigabytes, maybe—cache, spin that up, and you're good. But we actually use Redis as our primary data store for our Identity Graph, specifically for the speed that we can get. Because if you're trying to look for a person, like, let's say you're buying something for your brother, how do we know if that's true or not? Because you have this name, you're trying to send it to a different address, like, how does that make sense? But how do we get from Corey to an address? Like, oh, maybe used to live with your brother?Corey: It's funny, you pick that as your example; my brother just moved to Dublin, so it's the whole problem of how do I get this from me to someone, different country, different names, et cetera? And yeah, how do you wind up mapping that to figure out the likelihood that it is either credit card fraud, or somebody actually trying to be, you know, a decent brother for once in my life?Jason: [laugh]. So, I mean, how it works is how you imagine you start at some entry point, which would probably be your name, start there and say, “Can we match this to this person's address that you believe you're sending to?” And we can say, “Oh, you have a person-person relationship, like he's your brother.” So, it maps to him, which we can then get his address and say, “Oh, here's that address. That matches what you're trying to send it to. Hey, this makes sense because you have a legitimate reason to be sending something there. You're not just sending it to some random address out in the middle of nowhere, for no reason.”Corey: Or the drop-shipping scams, or brushing scams, or one of—that's the thing is every time you think you've seen it all, all you have to do is look at fraud. That's where the real innovation seems to be happening, [laugh] no matter how you slice it.Jason: Yeah, it's quite an interesting space. I always like to say it's one of those things where if you had the human element in it, it's not super easy, but it's like, generally easy to tell, like, okay, that makes sense, or, oh, no, that's just complete garbage. But trying to do it at scale very fast in, like, a general case becomes an actual substantially harder problem. [laugh]. It's one of those things that people can probably do fairly well—I mean, that's why we still have manual reviews and things like that—but trying to do it automatically or just with computers is much more difficult. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, “Hee hee, I scammed a company out of 20 bucks is not the problem you're trying to avoid for.” It's the, “Okay, I just did that ten million times and now we have a different problem.”Jason: Yeah, exactly. I mean, one of the biggest losses for a lot of companies is, like, fraudulent transactions and chargebacks. Usually, in the case on, like, e-commerce companies—or even especially like nowadays where, as you can imagine, more people are moving to a more online world and doing shopping online and things like that, so as more people move to online shopping, some companies are always going to get some amount of chargebacks on fraudulent transactions. But when it happens at scale, that's when you start seeing many losses because not only are you issuing a chargeback, you probably sent out some products, that you're now out some physical product as well. So, it's almost kind of like a double-whammy. [laugh].Corey: So, as I look through all this, I tended to always view Redis in terms of, more or less, a key-value store. Is that still accurate? Is that how you wind up working with it? Or has it evolved significantly past them to the point where you can now do relational queries against it?Jason: Yeah, so we do use Redis as a key-value store because, like, Redis is just a traditional key-value store, very fast lookups. When we first started building out Identity Graph, as you can imagine, you're trying to model people to telephones to addresses; your first thought is, “Hey, this sounds a whole lot like a graph.” That's sort of what we did quite a few years ago is, let's just put it in some graph database. But as time went on and as it became much more important to have lower and lower latency, we really started thinking about, like, we don't really need all the nice and shiny things that, like, a graph database or some sort of graph technology really offers you. All we really need to do is I need to get from point A to point B, and that's it.Corey: Yeah, [unintelligible 00:10:35] graph database, what's the first thing I need to do? Well, spend six weeks in school trying to figure out exactly what the hell of graph database is because they're challenging to wrap your head around at the best of times. Then it just always seemed overpowered for a lot of—I don't want to say simple use cases; what you're doing is not simple, but it doesn't seem to be leveraging the higher-order advantages that graph database tends to offer.Jason: Yeah, it added a lot of complexity in the system, and [laugh] me and one of our senior principal engineers who's been here for a long time, we always have a joke: If you search our GitHub repository for… we'll say kindly-worded commit messages, you can see a very large correlation of those types of commit messages to all the commits to try and use a graph database from multiple years ago. It was not fun to work with, just added too much complexity, and we just didn't need all that shiny stuff. So, that's how we really just took a step back. Like, we really need to do it this way. We ended up effectively flattening the entire graph into an adjacency list.So, a key is basically some UUID to an entity. So, Corey, you'd have some UUID associated with you and the value would be whatever your information would be, as well as other UUIDs to links to the other entities. So, from that first retrieval, I can now unpack it, and, “Oh, now I have a whole bunch of other UUIDs I can then query on to get that information, which will then have more IDs associated with it,” is more or less sort of how we do our graph traversal and query this in our graph queries.Corey: One of the fun things about doing this sort of interview dance on the podcast as long as I have is you start to pick up what people are saying by virtue of what they don't say. Earlier, you wound up mentioning that we often use Redis for things like tens, or hundreds of gigabytes, which sort of leaves in my mind the strong implication that you're talking about something significantly larger than that. Can you disclose the scale of data we're talking about her?Jason: Yeah. So, we use Redis as our primary data store for our Identity Graph, and also for—soon to be for our Identity Network, which is our other database. But specifically for our Identity Graph, scale we're talking about, we do have some compression added on there, but if you say uncompressed, it's about 12 terabytes of data that's compressed, with replication into about four.Corey: That's a relatively decent compression factor, given that I imagine we're not talking about huge datasets.Jason: Yeah, so this is actually basically driven directly by cost: If you need to store less data, then you need less memory, therefore, you need to pay for less.Corey: So, our users once again have shored up my longtime argument that when it comes to cloud, cost and architecture are in fact the same thing. Please, continue by all means.Jason: I would be lying if I said that we didn't do weekly slash monthly reviews of costs. Where are we spending costs in AWS? How can we improve costs? How can we cut down on costs? How can you store less—Corey: You are singing my song.Jason: It is a [laugh] it is a constant discussion. But yeah, so we use Zstandard compression, which was developed at Facebook, and it's a dictionary-based compression. And the reason we went for this is—I mean like if I say I want to compress, like, a Word document down, like, you can get very, very, very high level of compression. It exists. It's not that interesting, everyone does it all the time.But with this we're talking about—so in that, basically, four or so terabytes of compressed data that we have, it's something around four to four-and-a-half billion keys and values, and so in that we're talking about each key-value only really having anywhere between 50 and 100 bytes. So, we're not compressing very large pieces of information. We're compressing very small 50 to 100 byte JSON values that we have give UUID keys and JSON strings stored as values. So, we're compressing these 50 to 100 byte JSON strings with around 70, 80% compression. I mean, that's using Zstandard with a custom dictionary, which probably gave us the biggest cost savings of all, if you can [unintelligible 00:14:32] your dataset size by 60, 70%, that's huge. [laugh].Corey: Did you start off doing this on top of Redis, or was this an evolution that eventually got you there?Jason: It was an evolution over time. We were formally Whitepages. I mean, Whitepages started back in the late-90s. It really just started off as a—we just—Corey: You were a very early adopter of Redis [laugh]. Yeah, at that point, like, “We got a time machine and started using it before it existed.” Always a fun story. Recruiters seem to want that all the time.Jason: Yeah. So, when we first started, I mean, we didn't have that much data. It was basically just one provider that gave us some amount of data, so it was kind of just a—we just need to start something quick, get something going. And so, I mean, we just did what most people do just do the simplest thing: Just stuff it all in a Postgres database and call it good. Yeah, it was slow, but hey, it was back a long time ago, people were kind of okay with a little bit—Corey: The world moved a bit slower back then.Jason: Everything was a bit slower, no one really minded too much, the scale wasn't that large. But business requirements always change over time and they evolve, and so to meet those ever-evolving business requirements, we move from Postgres, and where a lot of the fun commit messages that I mentioned earlier can be found is when we started working with Cassandra and Titan. That was before my time before I had started, but from what I understand, that was a very fun time. But then from there, that's when we really kind of just took a step back and just said, like, “There's so much stuff that we just don't need here. Let's really think about this, and let's try to optimize a bit more.”Like, we know our use case, why not optimize for our use case? And that's how we ended up with the flattened graph storage stuffing into Redis. Because everyone thought of Redis as a cache, but everyone also knows that—why is it a cache? Because it's fast. [laugh]. We need something that's very fast.Corey: I still conceptualize it as an in-memory data store, just because when I turned on disk persistence model back in 2011, give or take, it suddenly started slamming the entire data store to a halt for about three seconds every time it did it. It was, “What's this piece of crap here?” And it was, “Oh, yeah. Turns out there was a regression on Zen, which is what AWS is used as a hypervisor back then.” And, “Oh, yeah.”So, fork became an expensive call, it took forever to wind up running. So oh, the obvious lesson we take from this is, oh, yeah, Redis is not designed to be used with disk persistence. Wrong lesson to take from the behavior, but did cement, in my mind at least, the idea that this is something that we tend to use only as an in-memory store. It's clear that the technology has evolved, and in fact, I'm super glad that Redis threw you my direction to talk to you about this stuff because until talking to you, I was still—I got to admit—sort of in the position of thinking of it still as an in-memory data store because the fact that Redis says otherwise because they're envisioning it being something else, well okay, marketers going to market. You're a customer; it's a lot harder for me to talk smack about your approach to this thing, when I see you doing it for, let's be serious here, what is a very important use case. If identity verification starts failing open and everyone claims to be who they say they are, that's something is visible from orbit when it comes to the macroeconomic effect.Jason: Yeah, exactly. It's actually funny because before we move to primarily just using Redis, before going to fully Redis, we did still use Redis. But we used ElastiCache, we had it loaded into ElastiCache, but we also had it loaded into DynamoDB as sort of a, I don't want this to fail because we weren't comfortable with actually using Redis as a primary database. So, we used to use ElastiCache with a fallback to DynamoDB, just in that off chance, which, you know, sometimes it happens, sometimes it didn't. But that's when we basically just went searching for new technologies, and that's actually how we landed on Redis on Flash, which is a kind of breaks the whole idea of Redis as an in-memory database to where it's Redis, but it's not just an in-memory database, you also have flashback storage.Corey: So, you'll forgive me if I combine my day job with this side project of mine, where I fixed the horrifying AWS bills for large companies. My bias, as a result, is to look at infrastructure environments primarily through the lens of AWS bill. And oh, great, go ahead and use an enterprise offering that someone else runs because, sure, it might cost more money, but it's not showing up on the AWS bill, therefore, my job is done. Yeah, it turns out that doesn't actually work or the answer to every AWS billing problem is to migrate to Azure to GCP. Turns out that doesn't actually solve the problem that you would expect.But you're obviously an enterprise customer of Redis. Does that data live in your AWS account? Is it something using as their managed service and throwing over the wall so it shows up as data transfer on your side? How is that implemented? I know they've got a few different models.Jason: There's a couple of aspects onto how we're actually bill. I mean, so like, when you have ElastiCache, you're just billed for your, I don't know, whatever nodes using, cache dot, like, r5 or whatever they are… [unintelligible 00:19:12]Corey: I wish most people were using things that modern. But please, continue.Jason: But yeah, so you basically just build for whatever last cache nodes you have, you have your hourly rate, I don't know, maybe you might reserve them. But with Redis Enterprise, the way that we're billed is there's two aspects. One is, well, the contract that we signed that basically allows us to use their technology [unintelligible 00:19:31] with a managed service, a managed solution. So, there's some amount that we pay them directly within some contract, as well as the actual nodes themselves that exist in the cluster. And so basically the way that this is set up, is we effectively have a sub-account within our AWS account that Redis Labs has—or not Redis Labs; Redis Enterprise—has access to, which they deploy directly into, and effectively using VPC peering; that's how we allow our applications to talk directly to it.So, we're built directly—or so the actual nodes of the cluster, which are i3.8x, I believe, on they basically just run EC2 instances. All of those instances, those exist on our bill. Like, we get billed for them; we pay for them. It's just basically some sub-account that they have access to that they can deploy into. So, we get billed for the instances of the cluster as well as whatever we pay for our enterprise contract. So, there's sort of two aspects to the actual billing of it.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: So, it's easy to sit here as an engineer—and believe me, having been one for most of my career, I fall subject to this bias all the time—where it's, “Oh, you're going to charge me a management fee to run this thing? Oh, that's ridiculous. I can do it myself instead,” because, at least when I was learning in my dorm room, it was always a “Well, my time is free, but money is hard to come by.” And shaking off that perspective as my career continued to evolve was always a bit of a challenge for me. Do you ever find yourself or your team drifting toward the direction of, “Well, what we're paying for Redis Enterprise for? We could just run it ourselves with the open-source version and save whatever it is that they're charging on top of that?”Jason: Before we landed on Redis on Flash, we had that same thought, like, “Why don't we just run our own Redis?” And the decision to that is, well, managing such a large cluster that's so important to the function of our business, like, you effectively would have needed to hire someone full time to just sit there and stare at the cluster the whole time just to operate it, maintain it, make sure things are running smoothly. And it's something that we made a decision that, no, we're going to go with a managed solution. It's not easy to manage and maintain clusters of that size, especially when they're so important to business continuity. [laugh]. From our eyes, it was just not worth the investment for us to try and manage it ourselves and go with the fully managed solution.Corey: But even when we talk about it, it's one of those well—it's—everyone talks about, like, the wrong side of it first, the oh, it's easier if things are down if we wind up being able to say, “Oh, we have a ticket open,” rather than, “I'm on the support forum and waiting for people to get back to me.” Like, there's a defensibility perspective. We all just sort of, like sidestep past the real truth of it of, yeah, the people who are best in the world running and building these things are right now working on the problem when there is one.Jason: Yeah, they're the best in the world at trying to solve what's going on. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, because that is what we're paying them to do. Oh, right. People don't always volunteer for for-profit entities. I keep forgetting that part of it.Jason: Yeah, I mean, we've had some very, very fun production outages that just randomly happened because to our knowledge, we would just like—I would, like… “I have no idea what's going on.” And, you know, working with their support team, their DevOps team, honestly, it was a good, like, one-week troubleshooting. When we were validating the technology, we accidentally halted the database for seemingly no reason, and we couldn't possibly figure out what's going on. We kept talking to—we were talking to their DevOps team. They're saying, “Oh, we see all these writes going on for some reason.” We're like, “We're not sending any writes. Why is there writes?”And that was the whole back and forth for almost a week, trying to figure out what the heck was going on, and it happened to be, like, a very subtle case, in terms of, like, the how the keys and values are actually stored between RAM and flash and how it might swap in and out of flash. And like, all the way down to that level where I want to say we probably talked to their DevOps team at least two to three times, like, “Could you just explain this to me?” Like, “Sure,” like, “Why does this happen? I didn't know this was a thing.” So, on and so forth. Like, there's definitely some things that are fairly difficult to try and debug, which definitely helps having that enterprise-level solution.Corey: Well, that's the most valuable thing in any sort of operational experience where, okay, I can read the documentation and all the other things, and it tells me how it works. Great. The real value of whether I trust something in production is whether or not I know how it breaks where it's—Jason: Yeah.Corey: —okay—because the one thing you want to hear when you're calling someone up is, “Oh, yeah. We've seen this before. This is what you do to fix it.” The worst thing in the world is, “Oh, that's interesting. We've never seen that before.” Because then oh, dear Lord, we're off in the mists of trying to figure out what's going on here, while production is down.Jason: Yeah kind of like, “What is this database do, like, in terms of what do we do?” Like, I mean, this is what we store our Identity Graph in. This has the graph of people's information. If we're trying to do identity verification for transactions or anything, for any of our products, I mean, we need to be able to query this database. It needs to be up.We have a certain requirement in terms of uptime, where we want it at least, like, four nines of uptime. So, we also want a solution that, hey, even if it wants to break, don't break that bad. [laugh]. There's a difference between, “Oh, a node failed and okay, like, we're good in 10, 20 seconds,” versus, “Oh, node failed. You lost data. You need to start reloading your dataset, or you can't query this anymore.” [laugh]. There's a very large difference between those two.Corey: A little bit, yeah. That's also a great story to drive things across. Like, “Really? What is this going to cost us if we pay for the enterprise version? Great. Is it going to be more than some extortionately large number because if we're down for three hours in the course of a year, that's we owe our customers back for not being able to deliver, so it seems to me this is kind of a no-brainer for things like that.”Jason: Yeah, exactly. And, like, that's part of the reason—I mean, a lot of the things we do at Ekata, we usually go with enterprise-level for a lot of things we do. And it's really for that support factor in helping reduce any potential downtime for what we have because, well, if we don't consider ourselves comfortable or expert-level in that subject, I mean, then yeah, if it goes down, that's terrible for our customers. I mean, it's needed for literally every single query that comes through us.Corey: I did want to ask you, but you keep talking about, “The database” and, “The cluster.” That seems like you have a single database or a single cluster that winds up being responsible for all of this. That feels like the blast radius of that thing going down must be enormous. Have you done any research into breaking that out into smaller databases? What is it that's driven you toward this architectural pattern?Jason: Yeah, so for right now, so we have actually three regions were deployed into. We have a copy of it in us-west in AWS, we have one an eu-central-1, and we also have one, an ap-southeast-1. So, we have a complete copy of this database in three separate regions, as well as we're spread across all the available availability zones for that region. So, we try and be as multi-AZ as we can within a specific region. So, we have thought about breaking it down, but having high availability, having multiple replication factors, having also, you know, it stored in multiple data centers, provides us at least a good level of comfortability.Specifically, in our US cluster, we actually have two. We literally also—with a lot of the cost savings that we got, we actually have two. We have one that literally sits idle 24/7 that we just call our backup and our standby where it's ready to go at a moment's notice. Thankfully, we haven't had to use it since I want to say its creation about a year-and-a-half ago, but it sits there in that doomsday scenario: “Oh, my gosh, this cluster literally cannot function anymore. Something crazy catastrophic happened,” and we can basically hot swap back into another production-ready cluster as needed, if needed.Because the really important thing is that if we broke it up into two separate databases if one of them goes down, that could still fail your entire query. Because what if that's the database that held your address? We can still query you, but we're going to try and get your address and well, there, your traversal just died because you can no longer get that. So, even trying to break it up doesn't really help us too much. We can still fail the entire traversal query.Corey: Yeah, which makes an awful lot of sense. Again, to be clear, you've obviously put thought into this goes way beyond the me hearing something in passing and saying, “Hey, you considered this thing?” Let's be very clear here. That is the sign of a terrible junior consultant. “Well, it sounds like what you built sucked. Did you consider building something that didn't suck?” “Oh, thanks, Professor. Really appreciate your pointing that out.” It's one of those useful things.Jason: It's like, “Oh, wow, we've been doing this for, I don't know, many, many years.” It's like, “Oh, wow, yeah. I haven't thought about that one yet.” [laugh].Corey: So, it sounds like you're relatively happy with how Redis has worked out for you as the primary data store. If you were doing it all again from scratch, would you make the same technology selection there or would you go in a different direction?Jason: Yeah, I think I'd make the same decision. I mean, we've been using Redis on Flash for at this point three, maybe coming up to four years at this point. There's a reason we keep renewing our contract and just keep continuing with them is because, to us, it just fits our use case so well, and we very much choose to continue going with this direction in this technology.Corey: What would you have them change as far as feature enhancements and new options being enabled there? Because remember, asking them right now in front of an audience like this puts them in a situation where they cannot possibly refuse. Please, how would you improve Redis from where it is now?Jason: I like how you think. That's [laugh] a [fair way to 00:28:42] to describe it. There's a couple of things for optimizations that can always be done. And, like, specifically with, like, Redis on Flash, there's some issue we had with storing as binary keys that to my knowledge hasn't necessarily been completed yet that basically prevents us from storing as binary, which has some amount of benefit because well, binary keys require less memory to store. When you're talking about 4 billion keys, even if you're just saving 20 bytes of key, like you're talking about potentially hundreds of gigabytes of savings once you—Corey: It adds up with the [crosstalk 00:29:13].Jason: Yeah, it adds up pretty quick. [laugh]. So, that's probably one of the big things that we've been in contact with them about fixing that hasn't gotten there yet. The other thing is, like, there's a couple of, like, random… gotchas that we had to learn along the way. It does add a little bit of complexity in our loading process.Effectively, when you first write a value into the database it'll write to RAM, but then once it gets flushed to flash, the database effectively asks itself, “Does this value already exist in flash?” Because once it's first written, it's just written to RAM, it isn't written to backing flash. And if it says, “No it's not,” the database then does a write to write it into Flash and then evict it out of RAM. That sounds pretty innocent, but if it already exists in flash when you read it, it says, “Hey, I need to evict this does it already exist in Flash?” “Yep.” “Okay, just chuck it away. It already exists, we're good.”It sounds pretty nice, but this is where we accidentally halted our database is once we started putting a huge amount of load on the cluster, our general throughput on peak day is somewhere in the order of 160 to 200,000 Redis operations per second. So, you're starting to think of, hey, you might be evicting 100,000 values per second into Flash, you're talking about added 100,000 operate or write operations per second into your cluster, and that accidentally halted our database. So, the way we actually go around this is once we write our data store, we actually basically read the whole thing once because if you read every single key, you pretty much guarantee to cycle everything into Flash, so it doesn't have to do any of those writes. For right now, there is no option to basically say that, if I write—for our use case, we do very little writes except for upfront, so it'd be super nice for our use case, if we can say, “Hey, our write operations, no, I want you to actually do a full write-through to flash.” Because, you know, that would effectively cut our entire database prep in half. We no longer had to do that read to cycle everything through. Those are probably the two big things, and one of the biggest gotchas that we ran into [laugh] that maybe it isn't, so known.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where can they find you? And I will also theorize wildly, that if you're like basically every other company out there right now, you're probably hiring on your team, too.Jason: Yeah, I very much am hiring; I'm actually hiring quite a lot right now. [laugh]. So, they can reach me, my email is simply jason.frazier@ekata.com. I unfortunately, don't have a Twitter handle. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty sure most people have LinkedIn nowadays.But yeah, and also feel free to reach out if you're also interested in learning more or opportunities, like I said, I'm hiring quite extensively. I'm specifically the team that builds our actual product APIs that we offer to customers, so a lot of the sort of latency optimizations that we do usually are kind of through my team, in coordination with all the other teams, since we need to build a new API with this requirement. How do we get that requirement? [laugh]. Like, let's go start exploring.Corey: Excellent. I will, of course, throw a link to that in the [show notes 00:32:10] as well. I want to thank you for spending the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.Jason: Yeah. I appreciate you having me on. It's been a good chat.Corey: Likewise. I'm sure we will cross paths in the future, especially as we stumble through the wide world of, you know, data stores in AWS, and this ecosystem keeps getting bigger, but somehow feels smaller all the time.Jason: Yeah, exactly. You know, we'll still be where we are hopefully, approving all of your transactions as they go through, make sure that you don't run into any friction.Corey: Thank you once again, for speaking to me, I really appreciate it.Jason: No problem. Thanks again for having me.Corey: Jason Frazier, Software Engineering Manager at Ekata. This has been a promoted episode brought to us by our friends at Redis. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment telling me that Enterprise Redis is ridiculous because you could build it yourself on a Raspberry Pi in only eight short months.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction  00:03:15 - FinOps Foundation and Multicloud  00:07:00 - Costs  00:10:40 - John's History in Reliability Engineering  00:16:30 - The Actual Cost of an Outages, Security, Etc. 00:21:30 - What John Measures  00:28:00 - What John is Up To/Latinx in Tech Links: Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/ FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org Techqueria.org: https://techqueria.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmartinez/ TranscriptJohn: I would say a tip for better monitoring, uh, would be to, uh turn it on. [laugh]. [unintelligible 00:00:07] sounds, right?Jason: Welcome to the Break Things on Purpose podcast, a show about chaos engineering and operating reliable systems. In this episode we chat with John Martinez, Director of Cloud R&D at Palo Alto Networks. John's had a long career in tech, and we discuss his new focus on FinOps and how it has been influenced by his past work in security and chaos engineering.  Jason: So, John, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where do you work? What do you do?John: Yeah. So, John Martinez. I am a director over at Palo Alto Networks. I have been in the cloud security space for the better of, I would say, seven, eight years or so. And currently, am in transition in my role at Palo Alto Networks.So, I'm heading headstrong into the FinOps world. So, turning back into the ops world to a certain degree and looking at what can we do, two things: better manage our cloud spend and gain a lot more optimization out of our usage in the cloud. So, very excited about new role.Jason: That's an interesting new role. I'd imagine that at Palo Alto Networks, you've got quite a bit of infrastructure and that's probably a massive bill.John: It can be. It can be. Yeah, [laugh] absolutely. We definitely have large amount of scale, in multi-cloud, too, so that's the added bonus to it all. FinOps is kind of a new thing for me, so I'm pretty happy to, as I dig back into the operations world, very happy to discover that the FinOps Foundation exists and it kind of—there's a lot of prescribed ways of both looking at FinOps, at optimization—specifically in the cloud, obviously—and as well as there's a whole framework that I can go adopt.So, it's not like I'm inventing the wheel, although having been in the cloud for a long time, and I haven't talked about that part of it but a lot of times, it feels like—in my early days anyway—felt like I was inventing new wheels all the time. As being an engineer, the part that I am very excited about is looking at the optimization opportunities of it. Of course, the goal, from a finance perspective, is to either reduce our spend where we can, but also to take a look at where we're investing in the cloud, and if it takes more of a shift as opposed to a straight-up just cut the bill kind of thing, it's really all about making sure that we're investing in the right places and optimizing in the right places when it comes down to it.Jason: I think one of the interesting perspectives of adopting multi-cloud is that idea of FinOps: let's save money. And the idea, if I wanted to run a serverless function, I could take a look at AWS Lambda, I could take a look at Azure Functions to say, “Which one's going to be cheaper for this particular use case,” and then go with that.John: I really liked how the FinOps Foundation has laid out the approach to the lifecycle of FinOps. So, they basically go from the crawl, walk, run approach which, in a lot of our world, is kind of like that. It's very much about setting yourself up for success. Don't expect to be cutting your bill by hundreds of thousands of dollars at the beginning. It's really all about discovering not just how much we're spending, but where we're spending it.I would categorize the pitting the cloud providers against each other to be more on the run side of things, and that eventually helps, especially in the enterprise space; it helps enterprises to approach the cloud providers with more of a data-driven negotiation, I would say [laugh] to your enterprise spend.Jason: I think that's an excellent point about the idea of that is very much a run. And I don't know any companies within my sphere and folks that I know in the engineering space that are doing that because of that price competition. I think everybody gets into the idea of multi-cloud because of this idea of reliability, and—John: Mm-hm.Jason: One of my clouds may fail. Like, what if Amazon goes down? I'd still need to survive that.John: That's the promise, right? At least that's the promise that I've been operating under for the 11 years or so that I've been in the cloud now. And obviously, in the old days, there wasn't a GCP or an Azure—I think they were in their infancy—there was AWS… and then there was AWS, right? And so I think eventually though you're right, you're absolutely right. Can I increase my availability and my reliability by adopting multiple clouds?As I talk to people, as I see how we're adopting the multiple clouds, I think realistically though what it comes down to is you adopted cloud, or teams adopt a cloud specifically for, I wouldn't say some of the foundational services, but mostly about those higher-level niche services that we like. For example, if you know large-scale data warehousing, a lot of people are adopting BigQuery and GCP because of that. If you like general purpose compute and you love the Lambdas, you're adopting AWS and so on, and so forth. And that's what I see more than anything is, I really like a cloud's particular higher level service and we go and we adopt it, we love it, and then we build our infrastructure around it. From a practical perspective, that's what I see.I'm still hopeful, though, that there is a future somewhere there where we can commoditize even the cloud providers, maybe [laugh]. And really go from Cloud A to Cloud B to Cloud C, and just adopt it based on pricing I get that's cheaper, or more performant, or whatever other dimensions that are important to me. But maybe, maybe. We'll remain hopeful. [laugh].Jason: Yeah, we're still very much in that spot where everybody, despite even the basics of if I want to a virtual machine, those are still so different between all the clouds. And I mean even last week, I was working on some Terraform and the idea of building it modularly, and in my head thinking, “Well, at some point, we might want to use one of the other clouds so let's build this module,” and thinking, “Realistically, that's probably not going to happen.”John: [laugh]. Right. I would say that there's the other hidden cost about this and it's the operational costs. I don't think we spend a whole lot of time talking about operational costs, necessarily, but what is it going to cost to retrain my DevOps team to move from AWS to GCP, as an example? What are the underlying hidden costs that are there?What traps am I going to fall into because of that? It seems cool; Terraform does a great job of getting that pain into the multiple clouds from an operations perspective. Kubernetes does a great job as well to take some of that visibility into the underlying—and I hate to use it this way but ‘hardware' [laugh] virtual hardware—that's like EC2 or Google Compute, for example. And they do great jobs, but at the end of the day we're still spending a lot of time figuring out what the foundational services are. So, what are those hidden costs?Anyway, long story short, as part of my journey into FinOps, I'm looking forward into not just uncovering the basics of FinOps, where is what are we spending? Where are we spending it? What are the optimization opportunities? But also take a look at some of the more hidden types of costs. I'm very interested in that aspect of the FinOps world as well. So, I'm excited.Jason: Those hidden costs are also interesting because I think, given your background in security—John: Mm-hm.Jason: —one of the challenges in multi-cloud is, if I'm an expert in AWS and suddenly we're multi-cloud and I have to support GCP, I don't necessarily know all of those correct settings and how to necessarily harden and build my systems. I know a model and a general framework, but I might be missing something. Talk to me a bit more about that as a security person.John: Yeah.Jason: What does that look like?John: Yeah, yeah. It's very nuanced, for sure. There are definitely some efforts within the industry to help alleviate some of that nuance and some of those hidden settings that I might not think about. For example, CIS Foundations as a community, the foundations of benchmarks that CIS produces can be pretty exhaustive—and there are benchmarks for the major clouds as well—those go a long way to try and describe at least, what are the main things I should look at from a security perspective? But obviously, there are new threats coming along every day.So, if I was advising security teams, security operations team specifically, it would be definitely to keep abreast into what are the latest and go take a look at what some of the exploit kits are looking for or doing and adopting some of those hidden checks into, for example, your security operations center, what you react to, what the incident responses are going to be to some of those emerging threats. For sure it is a challenge, and it's a challenge that the industry faces and one that we go every day. And an exploit that might be available for EC2 may be different on Google Compute or maybe different on Azure Compute.Jason: There's a nice similarity or parallel there to what we often talk about, especially in this podcast, is we talk about chaos engineering and reliability and that idea of let's look at how things fail and take what we know about one system or one service, and how can we apply that to others? From your experience doing a wide breadth of cloud engineering, tell me a bit more about your experience in the reliability space and keeping—all these great companies that you've worked for, keeping their systems up and running.John: I think I have one of the—fortunate to have one of the best experiences ever. So, I'll have to dig way back to 11 years ago, or so [laugh]. My first job in the cloud was at Netflix. I was at Netflix right around the time when we were moving applications out of the data center and into AWS. Again, fortunate; large-scale, at the cusp of everything that was happening in the cloud, back in those days.I had just helped finish—I was a systems engineer; that's where I transitioned from, systems engineering—and just a little bit of a plug there, tomorrow is Sysadmin Day, so I still am an old school sysadmin at heart so I still celebrate Sysadmin Day. [laugh]. But I was doing that transition from systems engineering into cloud engineering at Netflix, just helped move a database application out from the data center into AWS. We were also adopting in those days, very rapidly, a lot of the new services and features that AWS was rolling out. For example, we don't really think about it today anymore, but back then EBS-backed instances was the thing. [laugh].Go forth and every new EC2 instance we create is going to be EBS-backed. Okay, great. March, I believe it was March 2011, one of AWS's very first, and I believe major, EBS outages occurred. [laugh]. Yeah, lots of, lots of failure all over the place.And I believe from that a lot of what—at least in Gremlin—a lot of that Chaos Monkey and a lot of that chaos engineering really was born out of a lot of our experiences back then at Netflix, and the early days of the cloud. And have a lot of the scars still on me. But it was a very valuable lesson that I take now every day, having lived through it. I'm sure you guys at Gremlin see a lot of this with your customers and with yourselves, right, is that the best you can do is test those failure scenarios and hope that you are as resilient as possible. Could we have foreseen that there was going to be a major EBS outage in us-east-1? Probably.I think academically we thought about it, and we were definitely preaching the mantra of architect for failure, but it still bit us because it was a major cascading outage in one entire region in AWS. It started with one AZ and it kept rolling, and it kept rolling. And so I don't know necessarily in that particular scenario that we could have engineered—especially with the technology of the day—we could have engineered full-on failover to another region, but it definitely taught us and me personally a lot of lessons around how to architect for failure and resiliency in the cloud, for sure.Jason: I like that point of it's something that we knew theoretically could maybe happen, but it always seems like the odds of the major catastrophes are so small that we often overlook them and we just think, “Well, it's going to be so rare that it'll never happen, so we don't think about it.” As you've moved forward in your career, moving on from Netflix, how has that shaped how you approach reliability—this idea of we didn't think EBS could ever go down and lead to this—how do you think of catastrophic failures now, and how do you go about testing for them or architecting to withstand them?John: It's definitely stayed with me. Every ops job that I've had since, it's something that I definitely take into account in any of those roles that I have. As the opportunity came up to speak with you guys, wanted to think about reliability and chaos in terms of cloud spend, and how can I marry those two worlds together? Obviously, the security aspect of things, for sure, is there. It's expecting the unexpected and having the right types of security monitoring in place.And I think that's—kind of going back to an earlier comment that I made about these unexpected or hidden costs that are there lying dormant in our cloud adoption, just like I'm thinking about the cost of security incidents, the cost of failure, what does that look like? These are answers I don't have yet but the explorer in me is looking forward to uncovering a lot of what that's going to be. If we talk in a year from now, and I have some of that prescribed, and thought of, and discovered, and I think it'll be awesome to talk about it in a year's time and where we are. It's an area that I definitely take seriously I have applied not just to operational roles, but as I got into more customer-facing roles in the last 11 years, in between advising customers, both as a sales engineer, as head of customer success, and cloud security startup that I worked for, Evident.io, and then eventually moving here to Palo Alto Networks, it's like, how do I best advise and think about—when I talk to customers—about failure scenarios, reliability, chaos engineering? I owe it all to that time that I spent at Netflix and those experiences very early on, for sure.Jason: Coming back to those hidden costs is definitely an important thing. Especially I'm sure that as you interact with folks in the FinOps world, there's always that question of, “Why do I have so much redundancy? Why am I paying for an entire AZs worth of infrastructure that I'm never using?” There's always the comment, “Well, it's like a spare tire; you pay for an extra tire in case you have a flat.” But on some hand, there is this notion of how much are we actually spending versus what does an outage really cost me?John: Right. We thought about that question very early on at another company I worked at after Netflix and before the startup. I was fortunate again to work in another large-scale environment, at Adobe actually, working on the early days of their Creative Cloud implementation. Very different approach to doing the cloud than Netflix in many ways. One of the things that we definitely made a conscious effort to do, and we thought about it in terms of an insurance policy.So, for example, S3 replication—so replicating our data from one region to another—in those days, an expensive proposition but one that we looked at, and we intentionally went in with, “Well, no, this is our customer data. How much is that customer data worth to us?” And so we definitely made the conscious decision to invest. I don't call it ‘cost' at that point; I call that an investment. To invest in the reliability of that data, having that insurance policy there in case something happened.You know, catastrophic failure in one region, especially for a service as reliable and as resilient as S3 is very minuscule, I would say, and in practice, it has been, but we have to think about it in terms of investing. We definitely made the right types of choices, for sure. It's an insurance policy. It's there because we need it to be there because that's our most precious commodity, our customers' data.Jason: Excellent point about that being the most precious commodity. We often feel that our data isn't as valuable as we think it is and that the value for our companies is derived from all of the other things, and the products, and such. But when it comes down to it, it is that data. And it makes me think we're currently in this sort of world where ransomware has become the biggest headline, especially in the security space, and as I've talked with people about reliability, they often ask, “Well, what is Gremlin do security-wise?” And we're not a security product, but it does bring that up of, if your data systems were locked and you couldn't get at your customer information, that's pretty similar to having a catastrophic outage of losing that data store and not having a backup.John: I've thought about this, of course, in the last few weeks, obviously. A very, very public, very telling types of issues with ransomware and the underlying issues of supply chain attacks. What would we do [laugh] if something like that were to happen? Obviously, rhetorically, what would we do? And lots of companies are paying the ransom because they're being held at gunpoint, you know, “We have your data.”So yeah, I mean, a lot of it, in the situation, like the example I gave before, could not just the replication of, for example, my entire S3 bucket where my customer data is thwarted a situation like that? And then you think about, kind of like, okay, let's think about this further. If we do it in the same AWS account, as an example, if the attacker obtained my IAM credentials, then it really comes down to the same thing because, “Oh, look it, there's another bucket in that other region over there. I'm going to go and encrypt all of those objects, too. Why not, right?” [laugh].And so, it also begs the question or the design principles and decisions of, well, okay, maybe do I ship it to a different account where my security context is different, my identity context is different? And so there's a lot of areas to explore there. And it's very good question and one that we definitely do need to think about, in terms of catastrophic failure because that's the way to think about it, for sure.Jason: Yeah. So, many parallels between that security and reliability, and all comes together with that FinOps, and how much are you—how much do we pay for all of this?John: Between the reliability and the security world, there's a lot of parallels because your job is about thinking what are the worst-case scenarios? It's, what could possibly go wrong? And how bad could it be? And in many cases, how bad is it? [laugh].Especially as you uncover a lot of the bad things that do happen in the real world every day: how bad is it? How do I measure this? And so absolutely there's a lot of parallels, and I think it's a very interesting point you make. And so… yeah so, Jason, how can we marry the two worlds of chaos engineering and security together? I think that's another very exciting topic, for sure.Jason: That is, absolutely. You mentioned just briefly in that last statement, how do you measure it?John: Yep.Jason: That comes up to something that we were chatting about earlier is monitoring, and what do you measure, and ensuring that you're measuring the right things. From your experience building secure systems, talk to me about what are some of the things that you like to measure, that you like to get observability on, that maybe some folks are overlooking.John: I think the overlooking part is an interesting angle, but I think it's a little bit more basic than that even. I'll go to my time in the startup—so at Evident.io—mainly because I was in customer success and my job was to talk to our customers every day—I would say that a bunch of our customers—and they varied based on maturity level, but we were working with a lot of customers that were new in the cloud world, and I would say a lot of customers were still getting tripped up by a lot of the basic types of things. For example—what do I mean by that? Some of the basic settings that were incorrect were things just, like, EC2 security groups allowing port 22 in from the world, just the simple things like that. Or publicly accessible S3 buckets.So, I would say that a lot of our customers were still missing a lot of those steps. And I would say, in many of the cases, putting my security hat on, the first thing you go to is, well, there's an external hacker trying to do something bad in your AWS accounts, but really, the majority of the cases were all just mistakes; they were honest. I'm an engineer setting up a dev account and it's easier for me, instead of figuring out what my egress IP is for my company's VPN, it's easier for me just to set port 22 to allow all from the world. A few minutes later, there you go. [laugh]. Exploit taken, right? It's just the simple stuff; we really as an industry do still get tripped up by the simple things.I don't know if this tracks with the reliability world or the chaos engineering world, but I still see that way too much. And that just tells me that even if we are in the cloud—mature company or organization—there's still going to be scenarios where that engineer at two in the morning just decides that it's just easier to open up the firewall on EC2 than it is to do, quote-unquote, “The right thing.” Then we have an issue. So, I really do think that we can't let go of not just monitoring the basics, but also getting better as an industry to alert on the basics and when there are misconfigurations on the basics, and shortening that time to alert because that really is—especially in the security world—that really is very critical to make sure that window between when that configuration setting is made to when that same engineer who made the misconfiguration get alerted to the fact that it is a misconfiguration. So. I'll go to that: it's the basics. [laugh].Jason: I like that idea of moving the alert forward, though. Because I think a lot of times you think of alerts as something bad has happened and so we're waiting for the alert to happen when there's wrongful access to a system, right? Someone breaks in, or we're waiting for that alert to happen when a system goes down. And we're expecting that it's purely a response mechanism, whereas the idea of let's alert on misconfigurations, let's alert on things that could lead to these, or that will likely lead to these wrong outcomes. If we can alert on those, then we can head it off.John: It's all the way. And in the security world, we call it shifting left, shifting security all the way to the left, all the way to the developer. Lots of organizations are making a lot of the right moves in that direction for embedding security well into the development pipeline. So, for example, I'll name two players in the Infrastructure as Code as we call it in the security space. And I'll name the first one just because they're part of Palo Alto Networks now, so Bridgecrew; so very strong, open-source solution in that space, as well as over on the HashiCorp side where Sentinel is another example of a great developer-forward shift-left type of tool that can help thwart a lot of the simple security misconfigurations, right from your CI/CD pipelines, as opposed to the reaction time over here on the right, where you're chasing security misconfigurations.So, there's a lot of opportunity to shorten that alert window. And even, in fact, I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years—I and my team have spent a lot of time in the last couple of years thinking about what can the bots do for us, as opposed to waiting for an alert to pop up on a Slack message that says, “Hey, engineer. You've got port 22 open to the world. You should maybe think about doing something.” The right thing to do there is for something—could be something as simple as an alert making it to a Lambda function and the Lambda function closing it up for you in the middle of the night when you're not paying attention to Slack, and the bot telling you, “Hey, engineer. By the way, I closed the port up. That's why it's broken this morning for you.” [laugh]. “I broke it intentionally so that we can avoid some security problems.”So, I think there's the full gamut where we can definitely do a lot more. And that's where I believe the new world, especially in the security world, the DevSecOps world, can definitely help embed some of that security mindset with the rest of the cloud and DevOps space. It's certainly a very important function that needs to proliferate throughout our organizations, for sure.Jason: And we're seeing a lot of that in the reliability world as well, as people shift left and developers are starting to become more responsible for the operations and the running of their services and applications, and including being on call. That does bring to mind that idea, though—back to alerting on configurations and really starting to get those alerts earlier, not just saying that, “Hey, devs, you're on call so now you share a pain,” but actually trying to alleviate that pain even further to the left. Well, we're coming up close to time here. So, typically at this point, one thing that I like to do is we like to ask folks if they have anything to plug. Oftentimes that's where people can find you on social media or other things. I know that you're connected with Ana through Latinx in Tech, I would love to share more about that, too. So.John: For sure, yeah. So, my job in terms of my leadership role is definitely to promote a lot of diversity, inclusion, and equity, obviously, within the workspace. Personally, I do also feel very strongly that I should be not just preaching it, but also practicing it. So, I discovered in the last year—in fact, it's going to be about a year since I joined Techqueria—so techqueria.org—and we definitely welcome anybody and everybody.We're very inclusive, all the way from if you're a member of the Latinx community and in technology, definitely join us, and if you're an ally, we definitely welcome you with open arms, as well, to join techqueria.org. It is a very active and very vibrant community on Slack that we have. And as part of that, I and a couple of people in Techqueria are running a couple of what we call cafesitos which is the Spanish word for coffees, coffee meetings.So, it's a social time, and I'm involved in helping lead both the cybersecurity cafecito—we call it Cafecito Cibernético, which happens every other Friday. And it's security-focused, it's security-minded, we go everywhere from being very social and just talking about what's going on with people personally—so we like to celebrate personal wins, especially for those that are joining the job market or just graduating from school, et cetera, and talk about their personal wins, as well as talk about the happenings, like for example, a very popular topic of late has been supply chain attacks and ransomware attacks, so definitely very, very timely there. As well as I'm also involved—being in the cloud security space, I'm bridging, sort of, two worlds between the DevOps world and the security world; more recently, we started up the DevOps Cafecito, which is more focused on the operations side. And that's where, you know, happy to have Ana there as part of that Cafecito and helping out there. Obviously, there, it's a lot of the operations-type topics that we talk about; lots of Kubernetes talk, lots of looking at how the SRE and the DevOps jobs look in different places.And I wouldn't say I'm surprised by it, but it's very nice to see that there is also a big difference with how different organizations think about reliability and operations. And it's varied all over the place and I love it, I love the diversity of it. So anyway, so that's Techqueria, so very happy to be involved with the organization. I also recently took on the role of being the chapter co-director for the San Francisco chapter, so very happy to be involved. As we come out of the pandemic, hopefully, pretty soon here [laugh] right—as we're coming out of the pandemic, I'll say—but looking forward to that in-person connectivity and socializing again in person, so that's Techqueria.So, big plug for Techqueria. As well, I would say for those that are looking at the FinOps world, definitely check out the FinOps Foundation. Very valuable in terms of the folks that are there, the team that leads it, and the resources, if you're looking at getting into FinOps, or at least gaining more control and looking at your spend, not so much like this, but with your eyes wide open. Definitely take a look at a lot of the work that they've done for the FinOps community, and the cloud community in general, on how to take a look at your cloud cost management.Jason: Awesome. Thanks for sharing those. If folks want to follow you on social media, is that something you do?John: Absolutely. Mostly active on LinkedIn at johnmartinez on LinkedIn, so definitely hit me up on LinkedIn.Jason: Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for sharing all of your experiences and insight.John: Likewise, Jason. Glad to be here.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

In today's show, Jason is going to talk to Vieje Piauwasdy, director of equity strategy for Secfi. It is an online platform that allows employees of private companies to monetize their options and cash out before waiting for an exit from the company. Episode Highlights:00.52: At Secfi, we help employees with their stock options. The company was started just four years ago. We have worked with hundreds of thousands of employees ranging from start-ups from the seed level to pre-IPO companies, says Vieje.2.45: The education part of Vieje's mission is to help educate employees, help them understand their equity, and make the best decisions. Second, we do provide financing solutions for these employees as well. 4.10: Jason asks, “In your company if you are getting richly rewarded on in shares, and if you are not publicly traded and the timeline for exit is not known, how old you make the most of that and get out?” 5.29: Equity was a very taboo topic. It is something you don't talk with co-workers, or it is kind of like talking about your salary, says Vieje.6.41: Private company valuations are very subjective, especially in this day and age where valuation numbers are thrown out.7.30: Most people are at their first or possibly second start-up, and they don't know what their shares are worth. So here at Secifi, we really operate off, and we obviously add a financing solution to all this, but it all starts with education, says Vieje.9.28: Jason inquires, “We have got some sort of reasonable valuation on stock options, and you want to exercise them. So how do you help facilitate the exercising of this?” 11.12 Vieje explains, “The reason we are able to assume the downside in these positions is that we only work with fast growing start-ups with the reasonable means to exit.” 13.02: When it comes to rates and how we set those rates, that quite greatly depends on a company we work with, says Vieje.15.22 Vieje says that their financing is set up for individuals who want to go on their shares.16.41: If you are in a fast-growing start-up, then single-digit rates of interest are irrelevant compared to the vastly double-digit growth rates of the equity, says Jason.18.39: Vieje explains, the idea behind our rates is financing. We structure it so that individuals will have more cash in their pocket if the company has a pretty good exit. 19.24: Jason asks, “Talk to me about consumer reactions so far, and how is the adoption rate? How is the value reacting this? This is something that's a welcome change because this is not an uncommon problem in Titan Tech world.” 20.08: Vieje says everyone should have access to something. The regulatory nature of stock options makes it a pretty crappy instrument all around. 23.43: Vieje reiterates, “We take a fiduciary approach to everything that we do. Team Equity strategist work with every individual.”24.14: Jason inquires, “If you had one wish do something get changed in your company or the industry as a whole, what would it be?” 24.20: Vieje wishes he could take out every one of these bad reputations of brokers and people just looking to make a buck off you. 25.17: Jason asks, “What has been the biggest challenge in the company to where it is today?”26.17: As per Vieje, understanding an industry that brings something new out to the world. Financing stock options is a completely new industry.27.13: Jason asks, “What excites you the most about what it is you are working on keeps you getting up every morning to keep on fighting the good fight?” 27.20 As per Vieje the best part about this job is the joy and happiness you can provide to an individual that you can only imagine. 3 Key Points: Vieje says, we provide as much information to service individuals as possible, giving data we have, giving the information on our platform, and let us stop and make a decision for valuation or equity. Vieje explains both liquidity and the option exercise are structured the same way. If we gave $1,000,000 in cash and cured by the shares, this situation wouldn't be toward exercise options and taxes. Vieje highlights that Secfi is working greatly depending on where you are within the stage to company. We have no idea what the markets will look like, but if they believe in the upside of their company, then the company is going to have a good exit. Tweetable Quotes:“No matter how much you plan around equity, sometimes your company grows a little too fast.”- Vieje“A lot of people, unfortunately, don't plan properly and start talking to advisors for equity.” – Vieje“Not all employees are valued the same way just like this salary issue.” – Jason“There is a lot of risk you're taking out of the table for individuals and putting on yourself what is being taken in return.” – Jason “Sometimes financing does not make sense for everyone.” – ViejeResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – SponsorLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInVieje Piauwasdy – Website | LinkedIn Podcast Editing See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Jason and JM sit down to talk about how God has worked in Glass Canvas to bring us to this moment now where the team has shifted from being an agency to a product-based company. They talk about how God has clearly spoken and taught our team over the years and what to expect in season two of Speak the Unspoken Podcast. Previous Glass Canvas Quarterly Statements: * Open the floodgates and wait for my hand - 10/19 * Cultivate gardens - 6/19 * Be at peace - 3/ 19 * Called and anointed - 1/19 There is an entire community of ministries, individuals, families, and communities that made this journey possible that were not mentioned in this podcast. It would be a long list to name every one of them, but we do want to note that God was instrumental in bringing so many people into our lives to support us. Thank you to all. Here are a few of the partnerships we mention in the episode: * OSV Challenge: https://www.osvchallenge.com/ * Notre Dame Idea Center: https://ideacenter.nd.edu/ *Quotes: * “The theme throughout all of [this] is what ended up becoming our brand promise, is to unlock ministry potential. If we think about what's been going in the last eighteen months, that's something we wanted to stay true to.” - Jason “There was a disconnect between a really great tool for the business world and tools built within faith-based contexts that we're built as great at the outside.” - Jason “We didn't set out to be where we are today. But God had this thread that we couldn't even see but it just kept naturally progressing to the point where we are.” - JM “I grew up a missionary kid, I've been a part of different things, but still, every quarterly I get excited for the fact that it's still such an obvious way of seeing God work through multiple people and having that affirmation of what He is saying.” - JM

Mini malls, shopping centers, and large department stores all still exist and remain popular despite their digital counterparts But online marketplaces are where more and more brands are gathering to not just sell goods, but to get a better 360 view of their customers, and gain access to sell products from other big name brands that fit their marketplace niche. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I explored that idea a bit more with Jason Wyatt, the Executive Chairman at Marketplacer, a business dedicated to creating marketplaces. We dove into the various ways that Jason has seen marketplaces evolve, especially in recent years. Plus, Jason talked about some of the incredible innovation that he’s seen take place  thanks to marketplaces — including the birth of Providoor, an Australian marketplace for restaurants that was built as a reaction to COVID-19 and reached a $100 million run rate within 12 weeks. We talked about how the marketplace connections made that possible, and also how the B2B landscape can be revolutionized thanks to marketplaces. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Getting The Bigger Picture: By creating a marketplace, businesses can get a much deeper picture into the attributes of their customers, while also gaining access to inventory and products to sell from big name brands. The key to success? Curation.We Have A Connection: One of the greatest advantages of a marketplace are the connections that can be formed within them. Especially from a B2B perspective, because for so long those buyers have been left out of the ecommerce equation. They desire the same level of connection and ease that those in B2C have come to expect though, and marketplaces have provided a way to create community and engagement that has made B2B selling and buying much easier.Long Live Loyalty: Big brands have long tapped into loyalty programs as a way to earn customer trust and keep them coming back. By expanding point systems to usage within a marketplace, brands are now becoming even more trustworthy and respected in the eyes of consumers, who can all of a sudden get more bang for their buck. Additionally, the rise of wide-ranging marketplace loyalty strategies will likely become a new way for retailers to attract customers to newer marketplaces.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, I'm Stephanie Postles CEO at mission.org and your host of Up Next in Commerce. Today on the show, we have Jason Wyatt, who currently serves as the executive chairman of Marketplacer. Jason, welcome.Jason:Hi Stephanie, thanks so much for having me on the show today.Stephanie:Thanks for hopping on at 7:00 am. I think you're one of the earliest guests I've talked to over in Australia, so I appreciate you coming on and joining me for a fun chat.Jason:No worries at all. It's just a pleasure to be on the show and talk to your community.Stephanie:I was hoping we could start back in your... way back in the early days when you were 13, because I saw a fun story about what you were doing back then and a little entrepreneurial spirit that was going on, and I was hoping you can kind of share what you're doing back then so people can get to know you a bit before we dive into Marketplacer. This is all around a loan that you got from your dad if you know what I'm talking about.Jason:Well, I might, I was actually... I was a mad sports fan, as the majority of Australians are in this country. And I was playing tennis at the time, if I'm on the right track with this story. And we used to play a lot and pretty competitive. But my brother was a lot better than me, but I used to sort of grab onto his heels, but we constantly used to break racket strings. And we didn't come from this massive affluent family. We come from a family of just, the harder you work, the luckier you get. But dad, what he did do is he loaned us the money to buy our own stringing racket. He just said, "If you keep breaking these strings, well you got to fix them yourself."Jason:My brother and I took advantage of that situation. We figured we had an unfair advantage versus the other tennis players within the group. And then what we actually did is we turned that into a little tennis racket stringing business. So at the age of sort of 13 or 14, we were making a hundred bucks a racket, stringing out sort of four rackets a night and we had a little good business going on. I suppose the entrepreneurial spirit sort of started at a very, very young age where we had a problem to solve and then we solved it for other people.Stephanie:I love that. It definitely rang close to home because I was out in my neighbor's yard, raking, weeding doing anything I could just to earn $5 here and there. And I love hearing about how other people had that itch early on too, and seeing what it turned into later on in life.Stephanie:I'd love to jump into Marketplacer a bit and hear what is it? When did you create it? And what are you guys up to today?Jason:Marketplacer is probably the most fascinating business that I've ever been associated with, because it enabled so much global connection and enables people and businesses all over the world to sell things they don't own and to really supercharge commerce. And the story started back when my co-founder and I, Sam Salter, we just had a simple idea 13 years ago to make it easier for people to buy and sell bicycles. And we created a business called BikeExchange. Think of cars.com for bikes. You're buying a new bike and you want to see everything in one single destination or you're selling your bike and you want to sell it to a community that's a trusted community, has a sense of belonging behind it. And we created BikeExchange. But in doing that we had some really, really big, tough entrepreneurial problems to solve.Jason:We had to come up with a sales and marketing plan. We had to come up with a customer success program, but most importantly, the technology never existed. So, we not only have to be great salespeople, not only a great customer focused, but we had to become technologists at the same time. And we just thought, in everything, in creating a business, in creating a marketplace on a global scale it's a problem that we could help other entrepreneurs or other businesses now actually start to use a platform to enable them to be able to create it. So the story was born out of solving our own problem, out of eating our own dog food in a technology term. But now we help people all over the world in 10 countries solve that marketplace journey, of really just making it easy to connect a customer and community to make it easier for them to sell things they don't own and to supercharge commerce. And I'm sure we're going to unpick what that means in a lot more depth over the next hour or so.Stephanie:That's awesome. What's wild to me is that building a marketplace is notoriously like the hardest thing you can do in commerce. Everyone struggles with supply side, demand side, how to build which one first, and you're not only doing it once. You're replicating it, using your software and doing it with multiple industries. How do you even go about approaching it, especially if it's a new marketplace?Stephanie:You had your bike one, I know earlier you were talking about meal delivery from restaurants, how do you even think about building a new marketplace and solving for both sides of the market?Jason:It's a really good question because we always identify what we consider to be an unfair advantage when we help our clients and customers really figure out whether it's a worthwhile strategic project for them. Because it's a strategic project to go through, that marketplace journey. And the unfair advantage has really been always anchored around two core elements. The first being an existing community or audience or customer base that you know they want to buy more things from you. Or you know you can connect them up in a single destination to improve that customer experience. And the second is more often not the ability to have an in-depth knowledge of the supply base, a connectivity into that supply base and product base. You can actually really exploit the now and explore the future around connecting those two sides of those marketplace journeys.Jason:The evolution and the story of a marketplace has really evolved over time too, from the humble beginnings of a BikeExchange when we first started. It's now in 10 countries, and now we're out around the world and listed on the Australian stock exchange in January of this year.Jason:Thank you, awesome team effort by the team. To really large retailers and brands and, and all types of traditional types of business saying, "Hey, I've actually got one or probably two of those unfair advantages and how can I make it easier for me to grow and drive growth within my existing customer base, without the limits of capital and without the limits of actually producing all of the products, but enhancing my customer experience along the way?"Stephanie:How do you figure out, I mean, how I'm envisioning is that you would probably have like a lead brand who's for the bike one or for the meal delivery one you'd have to have kind a lead person who's owning that marketplace and then they're onboarding other brands as well. And other customers, is that how I'm thinking about it? Because I can't imagine having 20 BikeExchanges where every bike company is, "Well, I want my own marketplace. And I want mine." It seems once you have one, it's probably good enough and you have to be a part of that one.Jason:It's a really, really good question.Jason:There's different types of marketplaces, but the evolution that is really happening at the moment is, take SurfStitch for example. SurfStitch is actually a commerce cloud customer. They're a pure play surf wear brand. They sell hard goods, soft goods and clothing and bus fashion around it. But they've got this community, this tribal community of surfers and they're really a successful business, great growth really, really well leveraged on the commerce cloud stack. But when they looked at their business and they looked at their strategic path, they're constrained by warehouses, they're constrained by the capital, but they had in the back of their mind that they thought that, if we could have the full range of surfboards, instead of only taking 20% of the range of surfboards in all sizes, by connecting up to the wholesaler warehouses.Jason:And then to unpick that to the next layer, when you think about it, a surfer is quite a soulful person. They love the outdoors and are they only surfing? Or are they going hiking on the weekend? Are they exploring the outdoors as well? But I don't want to put a hiking gear in my warehouse. That's too risky, but I could go and connect up to Patagonia to take a full range extension from Patagonia without owning the inventory. So by taking a marketplace strategy or really a growth strategy, what they were really able to do is make it easy for them to connect that to a supplier base, to improve their customer experience and really enhance that 360 view of what that customer is trying to do. Not only from a data perspective, but a product and an experience perspective.Stephanie:Got it. That makes a lot more sense now. And it also just seems the role of curation is so important and whoever's curating the best products and not just throwing a thousand things into one marketplace, really thinking, like you said of, okay, you might be hiking, but you're probably not cooking too. Like I'm not going to put cookware in my marketplace with Patagonia stuff and surf boards. It seems like curation is huge when it comes to that. And also knowing what's trending and what their customers will like is a big part.Jason:Yeah, but it also enables this strategy, the ability to fail fast within there as well. If you put it a camping stove on there or a shower after you go for a surf, to clean yourself off, you haven't bought it. You've had a go at growing in there. It didn't work customers didn't like it. So just turn it off.Jason:With Marketplacer what we really focus on as well, is a really strong vetting engine for the sales force customer and any of our customer community so that they... it's just not a free for all, for all of the products flowing through. It's that ease of connectivity into the supplier base. And then it's the strict controls and measures that you can put in place to enable your customer experience within the marketplace strategy, not just "the everything for everyone" experience. If that makes sense?Stephanie:Yeah, it makes sense. I was going to ask when it comes to marketplaces, how do you guys think about marketplace or versus the Amazons and the eBays and Etsy's of the world that seem like they are kind of creating custom curated collections in a way too. But not as much of a niche level where I would say "Okay, we're going to be doing bikes and here's your community and your people." How do you think about the landscape of marketplaces right now?Jason:It's a very interesting landscape, because it's kind of a bit of a cross matrix at the moment, Stephanie. In that there's B to B, B to C and B to B to C plays within what we're trying to do. And then if you take the types of marketplaces the other way, so all three of those really go across all three gamuts. And then if you take the types of marketplaces, you've got the niche and the tribal based marketplaces, and we put media organizations into that bucket. If you imagine all of the great magazines, like we power lots of magazine marketplaces, where Time+Tide is a good example of a watch marketplace, where they have the beautiful content, they have the trust within the industry. They had a community of people looking to buy watches, but they didn't have that connectivity into the supply. But now they've got it. Another really great example is FishBrain, which is the world's largest fishing marketplace.Stephanie:Didn't know that existed. That's awesome.Jason:I'm not a big fishing person, but think of Strava fishing. Think of a really, really large... I think they've got over 13 million users within the United States now. They wanted that into a commerce play, but they didn't want to own inventory. They didn't have a buyership, they didn't have product developers. It was too difficult to do it. So what they did is they partnered and they connected into the world's best fishing suppliers to create a marketplace. Now that has over 60,000 products to sell that you can just buy.Stephanie:Is there ever a chance of them getting lost. When I hear 60,000 products within a fishing marketplace, how do you get found in that big marketplace?Jason:That's an interesting one. So fishing is probably the best industry to do it because what I have learned about fishing is there's lots of micro products for the local areas. So there's lots of little lures and lots of little different tackles setups, the different communities and different areas. There's lots of niche products within the niche. That one makes a ton of sense to have a really big, broad breadth of inventory within that.Jason:So if you think of the tribe, the addressable market behind people trying to take that convergence of content into commerce and contextual commerce, that space is born for a marketplace. Isn't it? It's an affiliate 4.0 where it can connect into the supply banks. Then you look at brands and retailers and franchise groups and cooperatives. If you actually look at the structure of all of those businesses... Co-operatives and franchise by default are marketplaces. They're a masthead brand their third-party inventory is owned by their franchisees groups. What we're finding in this space is we're just increasing the offering that they can have.Jason:We connect up their franchisees group into a single destination. For example, actually within Australia, we run the largest tire business called Bob Jane T-Marts and Bob Jane T-Marts are a really large franchise group. They're a $600 million business. And tires are a complicated product. They seem simple, but they're incredibly complicated because you've got to match every tire to every car to every wheel ever made, ever sold.Jason:But by creating a marketplace strategy within that, they're really famous for solving one problem. We connected up all the franchise groups via our marketplace technology. But if you think about it, what they really have is car data and car ownership data. What else could they sell a person at the BMW, other than tires and wheels that could enhance their car driving experience? You'll start to see lots of these franchise groups, not only connected in unifying their customer experience, but actually starting to think about how can they enhance their customer experience without the cost of capital burden placed that amongst their franchisees group or cooperative structures and buying groups are in the same bucket.Jason:Then if you just think of traditional retailers, whether they're a pure play or a bricks and mortar or a blend of both. Which the world has a blend of both now, right? There's no real, just pure play or bricks and mortar retailers anymore. So the problem they're trying to solve is exactly that problem we talked through with SurfStitch. How do they enhance their customer experience in store or online. Where they can range extend or category extend, to supercharge their commerce journey within that.Jason:And that last sort of bucket within that is that brand or wholesaler journey. And the brand and wholesaler journey is a really interesting one because it does really touch on those three sort of core verticals that I said at the start being B2C, B2B and B2B2C within that.Jason:The first one's pretty obvious from a B2C perspective, if you're a brand and you can see a perfectly complimentary product, why would you want them to leave your platform to buy it from another platform? Why wouldn't you just connect it up to enhance your customer experience?Jason:If you sell shoes for example, I'm going to dumb it down, but if you sold shoes, how could you connect up with a sock company that had the best brand to associate the shoes with socks without actually owning all of those imagery behind it? And we've seen lots of great examples of that. We actually power the Nokia marketplace. If you're thinking of buying the phone, what other connected product and you put in within that connected ecosystem and Google are a partner of Nokia phones globally now, and all of the Google products is going to be available on the Nokia marketplace.Jason:You can start to see this connectivity piece really, really drive home within that. And then from a B2B2C perspective is how do you not cut out your stockists? How do you find a way as a brand or a distributor in a modern world not to cut them out. Whether it's a marketplace, a unified experience, but what our marketplace platform can do is connect it all up. You can cut your retailer into these third party product sales, but without, without actually going against your traditional business model. And we're seeing a fair bit of that momentum behind it as well. Then the growth space and it's going to be really interesting, because I think that the world is saying how, from a B2B perspective, from a traditional brand, when you're selling to retailers when you're consolidating in a B2B industry, how does a marketplace make sense?Jason:There's Alibaba and then there's not much. The interesting play within there is the unfair advantages to businesses is pretty similar then than it is to a B2C perspective. Their unfair advantage is really anchored around their existing stockists or retailer base that they sell into. They've got a great community of sales representatives or sellers on the floor, who are going around and servicing them. How can they then connect up to other suppliers in other industries that could actually self to that community and we make it easier to do that. And there's a really sort of large demand at the moment behind B2B marketplaces as well. It's an interesting thing to call these things marketplaces. They're not all marketplaces, but what we're doing is we're connecting the world to enable supercharged commerce.Stephanie:I love that. I want to hear a little bit about the revenue numbers. When brands embark on this marketplace journey, what are some stories when a new company starts revising your guys' tech?Jason:It's a really interesting story and journey behind it. I'll give you one example during, during COVID, the world's a different place and we all know that, and there's not much point in delving into what's next after COVID. I think everybody's thinking about what's next after COVID but what we fundamentally know today. It's just a different world. It's a different world than it was in the past. And the power of connection during COVID in a digital sense, drove some of the greatest innovation stories that I've seen for some time. And I'll share the story of Providoor. In Australia, this is a case study we rolled out.Jason:It's nearly exactly this week, last year to the day and a great friend of mine, but a celebrity chef Shane Delia. He owns some of the best restaurants in Melbourne and he's got cooking shows on TV and big personality, vibrant, enthusiastic. Had 150 staff behind his restaurant business at four restaurants, one at the airport. The institution restaurants you know, think of Mamasita in New York. These are like famous restaurants within this country. And he emailed me and he just said, "Jason, I'm stuffed. I've got all of these people, I've got food, I'm just throwing into the bin. I've got leases that I've got to pay, but I've got this one glimmer of hope."Jason:"I've just done a trial where yeah, I'm doing ready, sort of made precut food where the customer just has to finish it off at home. So it's like they're getting the magic of a restaurant quality experience in their home."Jason:And he said, "I've done it for a couple of weeks and I'm selling like $5 to 6,000 a day." And I said, "Well, talk me through the problems that you've sold." And he said, "Well we've solved this packaging, we've figured out how to I get it to the customers with the boxes." He did this in a week, like extraordinary innovation. He's, he's sourced the products, the lined boxes, he's got the dry ice, he's fixed the packaging for this. So the tumor is sort of doing, you know, that those types of volumes in a small way. And I said, "How are you delivering them?"Jason:He said, "Well I've got no choice. My chefs are preparing it, My chef's are driving at 35K around Melbourne, to drop it off at people's doorsteps at 4:00 am in the morning." And I said, "Well, you've probably got to solve your logistics problem in a real quick way. But there's something in this, because there's a demand." You're not doing any marketing, your unfair advantage is you're... I call him a B grade celebrity, he probably thinks he's an A grader. But he's got this celebrity audience that he can tap into. He's got trust within the community. The other chefs will trust him. He's never gonna do anything wrong by that industry or community and customers just loved it. If we could solve a couple of problems, i.e, how do we make it easy for all restaurants to sell in the same way and create a marketplace around it.Jason:And then how can we make it easy for people to get the delivery experience behind it? I think you've got the bones of a really good business. Shane's a pretty good hustler. And five weeks later, we'd pulled every string in the world to get Providoor live. Where the best restaurants within the Melbourne CBD was selling to a 35 kilometer radius of the Melbourne CBD, get it delivered in two delivery slots AM and PM. They would cross stock. The trucks would drive around Melbourne pick up every box. Cross stock it into a single parcel. So you would only get a single parcel. You could order from all the restaurants in one. If you were entertaining in your home or just wanted to release from COVID, or you had a birthday party, or mum and dad couldn't get to the restaurant, then you could actually experience it. And after a 12 week period he was on a $100 million rate. Solving those capital problems.Stephanie:And this was from other restaurants as well that he onboarded onto essentially the marketplace that he created. It started with his restaurant. He brought on others as well. What does the cut look like for him versus the restaurants that are also selling on the marketplace that he essentially established?Jason:Yeah, it was again, really interesting. Shane took, I think it was a 15% slice of the pie. So he actually...Stephanie:Who decides, or you decide when you create the marketplace how much you...?Jason:Yeah.Stephanie:Nice, okay.Jason:It's part of the marketplace platform, when you create a marketplace. We solve all of those commission calculations and you choose, as running that marketplace, what each seller gets, and you can change it by product or category. Now you can do really complex commission calculations, but we also manage all of the seller payouts. You imagine that volume in that period of time, if you're cutting checks, so you're doing individual payments it's un-scalable. So that's why he had to... besides the fact that's why you needed a marketplace platform to, to scale at that rate, but it just shows you if you can leverage those couple of unfair advantages and pull it together in a really neat way and solve a problem, how big you can get quickly.Stephanie:That's crazy. It sounds like you kind of want to make sure you have an audience first or partner with someone who does already have, like you said, that tribe, who's kind of waiting that you can tap into that. How do you go about even convincing customers to come and buy on a marketplace? Are you doing anything around exclusivity where it's if you're selling your bikes or your box meals or whatever on Marketplacer, you can't also sell, I don't know, on DoorDash, do you have DoorDash in Australia? Or something similar.Stephanie:How do you think about creating that moat around the market places that are building up?Jason:I think any business, whether it's a marketplace or not a market place, you create moat. And if you could get the number one selling product of the world and get it exclusive to your business, whether you own it and send it yourself, or whether it comes direct from the supplier. I would a hundred percent recommend that every single day of the week.Jason:In Shane's situation and in Providoor's situation he solved some pretty big problems. No one else in the world, in my opinion, in a five week period could have created this marketplace. And then secondly he partnered exclusively with the logistics company that was an under utilized fruit. You imagined it was a fruit delivery business where they were delivering to corporates, their fruit boxes. And they went from a hundred percent capacity to 0% capacity, but then Shane took them back to a hundred percent capacity. So you've got to, you have to find very innovatively, underutilized, cold, refrigerated delivery network in a really short space of time. He created a couple of really, really solid moats that enabled it, nearly impossible for somebody else to do it in that period. But they were just extraordinary. But the short answer to your question, I'd always promote a moat.Stephanie:So try and make things exclusive, if possible. How do you bring... what are some of these brands methods of bringing their customers onto a new platform? Because that does kind of feel like it could be an experience that might cause a bit of friction of like, "Oh, I'm always used to either just buying directly from your website or just buying from Amazon." What kind of tactics should a brand use if they're trying to convince someone to come and buy on a new platform that maybe they haven't heard of before.Jason:You're talking from the end consumer experience when they're buying from you. It's all around trust in the process. It's in that front end customer experience or any communication around it, it's about building trust and rapport around building a marketplace community. And there's many techniques you can use around that.Jason:Some companies choose not to even say who the seller is on the marketplace. They take a really hard supplier agreement and they say, here's your SLA supplies. If you don't supply under these terms and conditions in these ways, then we're going to exclude you from our community, moving forward. Other marketplaces take the opinion of, "I'll let you rate my supply. I'll let you rate your seller." So it's going to be a customer led trust build up around it.Jason:Other marketplaces over time have put their own sort of ratings and experience... the one thing I'll say around the customer journey when you don't physically own the product is you've got to be really clever and your communicative style. The items might not appear in one parcel, items maybe sent at different times. And if you can bring your customer and community along that journey, they're very attuned to it in this world that you don't get one single parcel from one single vendor every single time and boxes can appear on different days, just as long as the communication strategy around when they're turning up. I mean, the timelines as a customer's experience is really well handled. I think it's a problem that's that's well solved in market.Stephanie:Always good to make sure you're doing it in a trustworthy way where your customers are like, of course I'll go where something's being sold and there's good curated products there. What are some best practices around developing that community and keeping your community engaged and making them want to come to your marketplace that you built up. What kind of tactics do you see happening behind the scenes that are working?Jason:We're seeing at a little bit of scale at the moment, the loyalty programs being attached back into the marketplace strategy. And I think it's a space that's going to be really interesting moving forward, whether it's loyalty or membership economies or subscription economies around it, it's something that's definitely an interesting space.Jason:Take Myer's another example within our region, but Myer's a really large department store. It's the Macy's of Australia. It's the number one department store. They've had some really challenging times, pre COVID and obviously during COVID. Big box department stores, lots of inventory, really expensive leases. And they've kind of been kicked off from every corner. Right. But what they did have is they had an incredibly loyal customer base that actually had a brand affiliation with Meyer, but most importantly had a really strong brand affiliation with the Meyer loyalty program, because it was such a good rewards program.Jason:When they launched their marketplace, they actually gave the customer base the same points that they would earn on Meyer across all third party marketplace products. And you could use your points to buy from all of the third party products.Stephanie:That's imposing.Jason:Exactly. And we won a, I can't say who, but we've won a major global airline at the moment where instead of just being able to book airfares using your airline points, now you can buy 40,000 products using your points, promote burn perspective from your airline miles. So I think what you're going to find is this community of traditional loyalty programs or earn and burn points systems, being able to tap into really broaden their range to become really big, meaningful marketplace strategy, loyalty program.Stephanie:That's super smart. The one thing that's coming to mind is thinking about data privacy and how does the sharing work, especially if you're onboarding other brands onto your platform, I'm guessing I would want access to that customer data. I'd want to be able to talk to them, especially if I'm shipping something to them, or even someone's viewing me as a person that's shipping it to them, even if I'm not really in the backend. What does the sharing of the, maybe customer information look like, in a way that's probably protected and keeps everyone safe.Jason:Say for example, we're talking to the commerce cloud community. If you're a commerce cloud customer, you're the merchant of record in that instance, aren't you? You're always controlling the customer record. You're controlling, you're receiving the funds yourself. But you do have to share the customer address and you do have to share some details of that customer because they've got to receive the items. You've really got to make sure your supplier agreements are quite stringent around data privacy. And then within the marketplace platform, there's a couple of configuration points where you can mask email address and not mask email address. So there's configuration around customer privacy settings that gets forwarded through to that end seller within there as well. But what we actually find is that the broader supplier or seller community is unbelievably respectful of the end customer because they're attuned to selling in this methodology now, and they know if they break or breach those privacy laws or those privacy policies that you set up as a marketplace operator, is that they're going to be cut off and, and they're going to lose that whole channel.Jason:We've had basically no problems of that over the journey of Marketplacer. It's something that's a very small, minimal risk.Stephanie:Amazing. Let's talk a little bit about ads. And I'm thinking about you're this big marketplace. Maybe if you're the fishing one, you've got 60,000 products, I could see you guys having an entire ad unit or the person who maybe is owning the marketplace, starting to create a demand side platform when it comes to delivering ads. And how are you guys approaching that right now with all the brands that you're onboarding?Jason:The world of relevant display and sponsored contents and contextual commerce, back in to market places is a real interesting space. Because if you can not only just send your products to a third party marketplace, but then you can buy specific media around it and launch products within it. It's super exciting. We're actually integrated into Google DMP, and all of those great ad serving systems within that. And what you'll find especially as the world moves into a headless commerce situation, is that the brands can put whatever DMP they want into the commerce cloud headless stack. They can be really quite innovative around, not only just creating traditional revenue streams for the product they own. Not only creating modern revenue streams in the fact that they can sell things they don't own, but now they can actually turn their traditional retail businesses into a media business as well, which obviously comes at a much higher gross margin than physically owning the inventory.Stephanie:Any innovative stories that you see happening around the advertising space within Marketplacer? That brands are maybe trying just new and different things because of the operating model of this new business they didn't have access to before?Jason:The obvious one that just comes to mind is actually BikeExchange. BikeExchange does exactly that every single day of the week. It connects live into all of the retailers. As part of the Marketplacer platform... because some of the problem in the marketplace scenario is how do you make it easy for your sellers to connect? How do you make sure that the inventory is accurate and live? How do you make it so that when a retailer of stock list receives the order, that they can just seamlessly process it, without having, necessarily a billion spreadsheets rolling every direction for everything they sell. We sold that in a really nice, elegant way where if you're on... and if you've got an existing POS system, so point of sale system or an existing e-commerce engine, we built pre-built connectors for the majority of them in the world.Jason:If you're a bike seller selling on BikeExchange and you're on Lightspeed and you wanna send your inventory into the BikeExchange marketplace, it takes minutes. What would typically take hours? Why is this important from a media perspective? It's because then the brands on BikeExchange or Specialized or Trek, or any of the big brands when they're launching a new product, they can actually drive the leads into stores that have stock available today. You can get very clever around your display and media allocation and where you drive the sales to. And a physical stockists level within that marketplace strategy, which is pretty cool.Stephanie:That's huge. I think about the times I try and order stuff Home Depot. And it takes me 15 minutes trying to find what store you can go to pick it up. I'm like, why is this so hard? Just don't show it to me if it's not within 20 miles of where I'm at.Jason:Exactly. And that sort of relevance posts, zip code, allocation and inventory allocation is something that comes out of that marketplace assistant, but it's all structured around live connectivity back into the source seller system. Obviously if a seller wants to connect manually and they've got a few products or they've got a CSV uploader, or they've got a great API, but it's this pre-built connector platform that's enabling our marketplace at the scale at a rapid rate.Stephanie:That's awesome, so where do you all want to be in the next two to three years? What are you planning and prepping for and building for right now, other than scaling and IPO'ing and doing all the fun, things like that.Jason:I think what really drives us at Marketplacer is we just want our customers to grow and to grow in a really sustainable way. Where they can, they can enhance their customer experience. So we've really launched hard within the United States today. We've announced that Salesforce ventures has actually bought a stake in Marketplacer and that enables us... yeah, we're so humbled by it. It's such a great experience to deal with that Salesforce community, but what that enables is any commerce cloud customer globally to now really look at Marketplacer as the way to significantly grow your business and grow your customer experience within that.Jason:It gives us deep access to the Salesforce product team. Gives us deep access to the implementation partner community. It gives us deep access to the actual Salesforce customer success team. What that really enables us to do is to help that Salesforce commerce cloud community grow and connect up to all of these great suppliers, make it easy for you to supercharge that business. And it's a core focus of ours over the next sort of 12 to 18 months, for sure.Stephanie:That's awesome. After hearing all this I'm like, why wouldn't you try this out? Why wouldn't you want to be a part of a marketplace, start a marketplace, so many opportunities and easy ways to scale that maybe it would be hard for single brands to do on their own. That's amazing. Congratulations. That's huge.Jason:No thank you so much and it's a big shout out to how the commerce cloud Salesforce, commerce cloud leadership are thinking at the moment. They're really putting that customer lens first and, and you're trying to grab those trends and you build it back within their community as well.Jason:It takes a little while for you to get your head around it. But when you dumb it down, we make it easy for you to sell products that you don't own. So you can supercharge commerce and grow. That sort of one line, and that sentence can start to really resonate with you. And maybe out of today you're not thinking this is my path, but it might just get those thought bubbles going to say, Hey, what about this supplier? What about this supplier? And if I only had those products, I'd love to try that one, but I don't want to buy it. It starts to connect it all up.Stephanie:Really good way to explain it. All right let's jump over to the lightning round. The lightning round is of course, brought to you by our friends at Salesforce commerce cloud, which they got many shout outs well-deserved throughout this interview. So that is great. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready Jason?Jason:I'm ready.Stephanie:We'll do the hard one first. What, one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Jason:I'd like to say the evolution of Marketplacer.Stephanie:That's okay. You do you. You can say whatever you want.Stephanie:What's one thing from 2020 that you hope sticks around throughout 2021?Jason:The ability to put the customer first and solve problems from a customer lens, when there was no other way to do it. And I think that transformative thinking of traditional businesses in that lens is going to put them in a really good light moving forward. We saw the acceleration of five or six years of thinking and thought, and decision-making in the space of six weeks. And just, don't let that go. Don't let that go. Let that stick with you forever. Because I think it's a unique opportunity.Stephanie:What's one thing you don't understand today, that you wish you did?Jason:French. No, I actually don't personally know how to program. I've never been a programmer and it's been to my advantage because I've never got sucked into it, but one day in life, I'd love to actually learn how it all stitches together and works.Stephanie:There you go. Well, that's a good skill to have these days. Let me know if it's hard, I'm guessing it is. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Jason:It would probably be about surfing to be honest. And it would have to be Kelly Slater.Stephanie:There you go. That's a good one. And then the last one what's up next on your reading list?Jason:It's actually interesting, because I bought it yesterday. I'm actually reading about gut health at the moment and the benefits of gut health. So I bought the CSIRO gut health book to understand how that can have benefits right throughout your life, from sleeping patterns to energy, to that holistic sort of view that the power of food and what it can do for you or, or can't do for you.Stephanie:Good, you can send me a TLDR of what I should be doing and I'll just listen to you.Jason:It doesn't mean I'm going to do it though Stephanie, this is the problem with reading. You don't always do what you should.Stephanie:We will do it. We will manifest it into our life. We will do it. All right Jason, this interview has been so fun, really a good time hearing about Marketplacer and where you guys are headed. Thank you for coming on, where can people find out more about you and Marketplacer?Jason:Traditional channels marketplacer.com and Jason White on LinkedIn and Marketplacer on LinkedIn.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much.Jason:Thanks so much Stephanie, appreciate your time.

Do you want to become a better investor? Appreciate and understand property managers—the unsung heroes that make better tenants and owners. Good property managers can change the world. Today’s guest is Bobby Sharma from BetterCapital, a portfolio measurement and management tool for real estate investors. Bobby started his real estate career in Riverside, California, and his first foray into real estate was through house hacking.  You’ll Learn... [02:14] House Hacking: Buy a house, but get roommates to pay most of your mortgage. [03:58] Bobby’s Background: Software developer that wanted to be in Silicon Valley. [04:47] 2010 Market Collapse: Bobby bought some homes that needed some work. [05:03] Meetup Group: Bobby started a real estate meetup group in the East Bay Area. [05:40] Becoming a landlord, buying out of state, and working with property managers. [06:18] BetterCapital: Management/measurement portfolio tool for real estate investors. [07:47] Measurement: Tracks deposits, loan balances, ROI, and equity growth. [09:00] Management: Stores documents, adds reminders, and runs math formulas.  [09:53] Real Estate Results: One of the best ways to invest, grow wealth, plan for future.  [10:35] Preferential Partners: Property managers/realtors project property performance.  [15:00] API/bank integration? Scrape data into systems or pool data w/API connection. [19:41] Three Ts: Tracking, training, and transaction.  [24:13] Education: Property managers should explain challenges to investors. [25:48] Property Managers: Unsung heroes that make better tenants and owners. Tweetables “I love my property managers. Without them, I wouldn't be successful. I totally get the importance of property management.” “We want people to see how much wealth they have created, or how much equity they've created because we want to encourage them to purchase real estate assets.” “If you look at it across a long period of time, it turns out that it's one of the best ways to invest, to grow your wealth, and to plan for your future.” “We want to provide education to make them a better investor. They will appreciate the role of the property manager a little bit more.” Resources Bobby Sharma’s Email BetterCapital AppFolio Cozy TenantCloud Rent Manager Buildium Propertyware Schwab Etrade Robinhood Redfin Yardi 1031 Exchange DoorGrow on Instagram DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive 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 business owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guest today is Bobby Sharma. Welcome, Bobby Sharma. Bobby: Thank you, Jason. Jason: Bobby is with a company called BetterCapital. Bobby, you have quite an extensive real estate experience. I grew up in Rancho Cucamonga, Alta Loma, California. We were touching bases for the show. You got your start in real estate somewhere in the Inland Empire. Bobby: In the Inland Empire, yeah. Riverside, California. I did what's called house hacking. Back then, there was no such term. I was 24 years old, worked in Corona, California, and lived in Riverside, California. That's how I got my start in the real estate world. Jason: Define house hacking for those that are not house hackers. Bobby: I was single. I ended up buying a house—three bedrooms, two baths—with the intention of maybe I'll get a couple of roommates, and they'll help me with the mortgage. I put an ad in the Riverside Enterprise, I don't know if you recall that newspaper. This is the late 1980s, early ‘90s. I got two roommates, great guys. They were my roommates for a long time, also single. One was a plumber, one was an X-ray tech. Long story short, they helped me pay for most of my mortgage. Not quite 100%, but most of my mortgage. Jason: Nice. All right. And that was your first foray into real estate investing. This sparks something for you. You thought of it, but your roommates, apparently, didn't. They're willing to pay rent. I lovingly refer to the Inland Empire as the armpit of California. Bobby: Absolutely. Jason: I had a good childhood growing up there. Now, I'm in Austin, Texas which I'm really enjoying. I got out just before the craziness of the pandemic, and California's gone insane. It's gone insane with all the stuff that's going on right now. Bobby, give us a little bit of history since that first experiment and give us a little background—qualify yourself. Help the audience understand your experience in real estate or surrounding the property management rental industry. Bobby: Absolutely. Thank you, Jason. Since then, I was 24 back then. Then, I had to take a break. I got married. I didn't do much in real estate. But about 10 years ago, when I saw the market really collapse—that was in 2010—I moved up to Silicon Valley. I was a software developer back in Southern California. But I always wanted to be in Silicon Valley, work for one of these technology companies that Silicon Valley is famous for. Sure enough, I worked for one of them. In 2010, I just saw the market collapse here in the Bay Area as well. I said you know what? I have some savings, so I started going out and picking up some homes that needed a little bit of work. Long story short, I also started a real estate meetup group in the Bay Area, in the East Bay. We call it the East Bay Meetup near Oakland. There weren't a lot of meetups going on, but most of them were in San Jose or San Francisco, and the people were fighting the commute. Long story short, I ended up starting a meetup in the Oakland area. Fortunately, that meetup has now become the largest real estate meetup in the Bay Area. I've got about 5000 members. We used to meet up every month. Out of that, I ended up becoming a landlord, buying out of state, and working with property managers. I love my property managers. Without them, I wouldn't be successful. I totally get the importance of property management. We own a bunch of rental properties—a lot of single-family, a lot of multifamily, but a lot of it is out of state for cash flow reasons as in cash flow in California. We ended up with several hundred doors out in the Midwest, mainly. Jason: How did BetterCapital come about, and what is it? Bobby: Just like a lot of people in my meetup group, we're active real estate investors. I have rental properties. I'm a private money lender. I have syndications. In a couple of properties out in Ohio, I do what's called seller financing. We own a bunch of rental properties, a bunch of real estate assets. I was tracking everything through Excel, but that was just not cutting it for me. You can't store documents inside of Excel. Things were scattered all over my computer, in my Gmail, and in my Dropbox—leases, insurance, tax bills, reminders, and everything. What I did was I worked with a technology partner of mine, and we put all the essential tools to track your portfolio. We're not AppFolio. We're not Cozy. We're not TenantCloud. We're not a property management software, but we talk to a bunch of property management systems. We are like a portfolio measurement and portfolio management tool for real estate investors. Jason: Explain the measurement part. Bobby: Yeah. What we do there, Jason, is if you bought a property five years ago, you're getting your checks every now and then. Your property manager is depositing the checks in your bank account. Sometimes it's not what you expected because there was a repair, or you don't know what your loan balance is on the property. What we do is we track the actual deposits in your account. We track your loan balances. We track the equity in your properties across the board, and then we give you a return on investment. What did you invest in that property, and what's your annual return on investment? What's your equity growth? The analogy I like to draw is if you log in to your Schwab, E-Trade, or Robinhood account, you can see the equity of your stocks. How much did you gain in your stock if you bought Apple five years ago? Or you bought Amazon 10 years ago, how much have you gained? We didn't have something like that for real estate investors. What we built was a tool. It has the ability to store documents. It has the ability to put reminders to track your equity growth, to see in a graphical manner how this property performed over the past year, this year, over the past five years, and then since you bought it. We have a lot of mathematical formulas that run in the background and then you can track. We want people to see how much wealth they have created, or how much equity they've created because we want to encourage them to purchase real estate assets. Jason: I would be curious if they can measure this better, and they can see the performance, do they tend to invest more? Bobby: Exactly. That's the whole idea, right? Real estate over time has so many benefits. Sometimes, especially property managers, they are so busy with day to day operations that they forget to remind the investors, the landlords, about the benefits of owning real estate. Yes, there are bumps in the road. There's going to be a turnover here and there. There's going to be an eviction here and there. But if you look at it across a long period of time, it turns out that it's one of the best ways to invest, to grow your wealth, and to plan for your future. What we want to do is we want to help property managers and realtors—those are our partners. Property management, which is your audience, as well. If we could help your current set of landlords grow their doors, maybe you bring a portfolio of new assets that they can purchase. But you can demonstrate that, look, if you bought this property with us in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in Dallas, Texas, or El Paso, Texas. If you've owned this property, here's how much equity you've gained. Here's how much your cash flow was last year. Here's how the property performed. Then, you can then have a really strong case to go back to them and say, listen, here's another similar property that is available on the market. Would you like to maybe consider adding a door or a couple of doors to your portfolio? Jason: It sounds like this is a largely effective tool for the investor. You have a way that investors can see and manage their entire portfolio. They have, say, 100 properties, or maybe they have like 20, 30 doors or something. They can see this portfolio. Then there's a way they can invite their property manager in to also see this portfolio, keep this updated, or to connect to it? Bobby: Absolutely. The property managers and realtors play a very important role. The owner can always invite their property manager to see the property in the system or communicate with that property manager. The other is that the property manager can invite the landlords to the system as well. When they upload a list of their landlords, we create what's called a preferential relationship and the exclusive preferential relationship between the property manager that loaded up the landlords in the system. That way, if you have a new portfolio that you want to maybe broadcast to your existing landlords, you can broadcast it to our platform. You can also let them know that, hey, listen. Here's a similar property that gives you the same kind of returns. It's in the same area. You may want to consider looking at purchasing this one. We want to help the property managers and the realtors have that exclusive kind of relationship with the landlords. Jason: There's this performance side of it. Maybe if an investor is looking at getting into a property, is there any forecasting that's similar? Is there a forecast inside? Like, here's a possible future roadmap of what this investment could do. Bobby: Very good question, Jason. That's on our roadmap. One of the things we want to do is forecasting or projecting the performance of a property that may be on the MLS or it may be in the portfolio of the property manager. Maybe somebody's looking to sell that portfolio. In the future, we will have what's called a forecasting calculator. You can submit that property. You can punch in all the numbers, and then the system will forecast. Within our platform, they'll be able to see the projections. We also have a way for the user to say, okay, if the application is forecasted at 3%, they can adjust that. They can say, what if it only appreciated 2%? Or if the rent appreciation was 5%, what if it was only 3%? And so on. We will give them that tool, but yes, that is on the road map. Jason: Very cool. Now, does this have an API integration? Because a lot of property managers, they are not going to want to go in and up the second system. They've got their property management back office. They're using Rent Manager, AppFolio, Buildium, or Propertyware typically. Is there a way of either scraping that data into those systems or maybe through an API connection pooling all that data in? Bobby: Very much so. We talk to the most popular property management applications out there. Most of them have APIs. If they don't have APIs, we allow the user to import an Excel file. Very easy to do. It takes about less than two minutes to set up a property in the system. Once they get really good at importing data, it takes about five minutes to import the data if they're new. But once the property is set up in the system, then it literally takes 30 seconds to update a property every month. Once a month, what are the main items that you're looking at? It's once a month, typically. Maybe sometimes twice a month. You're looking at, did your rent come in? Did you pay your mortgage? Did you pay your insurance and taxes? Did you pay your property management fees? But it's really very simple to bring that data in. We have bank integration. You can also pull the data from a bank. By the way, the property manager doesn't have to do this. The landlord can do this. The only thing the property manager has to do is load up the client list the first time and then reestablish that. The first property manager to load that landlord into the system gets the exclusive relationship. That's the first-come, first-served relationship that they have. But after that, the landlord should be able to go in and update the system. And it's very easy to do that. It's in their best interest to see the performance of their assets, right? So they do a bulk of the data entry. Jason: That exclusivity sounds really exciting (I'm sure) to the property management business owners that are listening. Because this could be something that they could upsell as a feature for their more invested investors, those that have lots of doors. It can be an upsell or a premium price point on their premium plan that they offer for the more savvy investor clients. Now, related to that—and I don't know if this is a possible future feature request or idea—but a lot of property managers love owning their brand. Would it be possible to white label this service that it's their thing if they have that? Bobby: A very good question. Our service is free to the landlords. As long as they're not over 15 or so doors, it's free. But to answer your question, we do plan for the larger property managers to have their own white-label co-branded service. Not a problem. It's available. Jason: Okay, very cool. What else can this do? Bobby: We built this platform for investors like myself. Look, I'm a big champion of real estate agents and property managers. Their jobs are often thankless. We forget how much work they do behind the scenes. Managing properties, not an easy task by any means. We are big cheerleaders and supporters of property managers, of real estate agents. At the same time, the landlords need to be able to track their system a little bit better. Our goal is, we call it the three T's. Tracking. To my meet up for the past 10 years, I've been providing education. I've been an evangelist for better real estate investing. We bring in experts on whether it's fix-and-flip, buying remote properties remotely, syndications, private money lending, asset protection for real estate investors—just about any topic that has to do with real estate. We've been teaching that in our meetup. We're going to embed that into the system. If the landlords, the property managers, and real estate agents want to become better at something, we're going to have an expert present once a month. Tracking, training, that's our second key. The third T is the transaction. If the property managers, realtors, have a deal that is what I call investor-grade that they want to send out to their members, then we want to enable transactions. We're not Redfin. We're not one of those sites. But we allow them to communicate about it. It could be a pocket listing. It could be a property manager where the landlord is retiring or doing a 1031, but he wants to sell off his portfolio without putting it on the MLS, for example. Let's figure out how to communicate within the system to the potential buyers because the people that are in the system who are happy with their performance and their relationship with their property manager, they will want to acquire more doors. Those are our three Ts—tracking, training, and transactions. Jason: It's almost like a trading platform. Is this essentially like the E-Trade for real estate investments instead of the stock portfolio? Bobby: It is. That's very much our vision. The training is there. The transaction piece is not there. But that's what we're building right now. Jason, in a nutshell, it is E-Trade for real estate because we don't compete with the AppFolios, the YardEase, the Buildiums of the world, but we partner with them. We don't want the property managers to change what they're doing. Whatever they're doing is fine. We will learn to live alongside the systems they have in place. Jason: This seems to be just such a missing piece to give investors a real tool. Most property managers are just so caught up on just at least, at the very bare minimum of giving their investors a statement or a report at the end of the month. But there's a big difference between managing as a real estate investment and just looking at the expenses for the month, the rent, and whatnot, and seeing a report. Seeing it as an actual investment, and maybe even seeing a chart to see what's actually going on. You get a sense of whether you're losing or gaining. It seems like such a simple, brilliant, missing puzzle piece in the ecosystem. Kudos to you for coming up with this. Now, are there other things like this out on the market? Bobby: I think people are finally realizing that a similar tool is needed. There are a couple of players out there. What we have done is we have taken a comprehensive approach to real estate investing. What are people interested in? They're interested, obviously, in tracking, like the performance of their assets. That's done in Excel, and it's done on a very ad hoc basis. It's not real-time, and it's a lot of keystrokes. What we want to do is we want to automate a lot of that so that once you put the property into the system, then a lot of the updates are done automatically. The other piece is nobody's providing education. I truly believe that as property managers, it's equally important to educate the investors about the challenges, right? If there are evictions, if there are turnovers, let there be some transparency. What we want to do is we want to prepare our users to become better investors. Part of that is understanding the challenges or the opportunities that property management companies and realtors face. A property manager's job is not easy at all. You have to be really thick-skinned to be a property manager. Well, let's appreciate that so that when your rent is a little bit lower than expected, or you have a turnover that's taking a little bit longer. If the investor, the landlord is better educated, maybe they won't get upset as much. They will understand, okay, you know what? This is winter in Michigan, and it's going to take a little bit longer to put a tenant into the house or the property. We want to provide education to make them a better investor. They will appreciate the role of the property manager a little bit more. Jason: That's the role of the property manager. I mean, property managers are the unsung heroes of the real estate investing category or industry. They make tenants better. They make the owners better. They hold everyone to a higher standard, and they make properties better all around. Good property managers really do change the world. I love what you're talking about how the education piece is going to improve the quality of clients. It's going to take their client from where they are now, give them a greater understanding, which most likely increases their logical need to use a property manager. They understand, oh, this is a bit more complicated than these home TV shows and reality shows made it out to be flipping a house or renting it out. This is worth touching on because I think there are some small-minded, scarcity-minded property managers. Maybe they're newer to the industry, but they're thinking, oh, no. The only reason people will need me is if they're not educated. But I think the reverse is true. The more educated a client becomes, the more they can see clearly the liabilities involved, the dangers, the potential pitfalls, the time, and they don't want to touch it. They want to let go of that piece. They want to be an investor. They don't want to be a shitty part-time property manager. Bobby: Exactly. Jason: They do that full time. Bobby: You nailed it, Jason. Your perception is right on. The better-educated, the better-informed, the landlord, the investor is, the easier it'll be to work with them versus a total newbie who thinks it's just very simple to hire a property manager. That every month, magic, a check will show up. It just doesn't work that way, especially now in the pandemic era that we're living in, it's even more challenging. This is the time when property managers need to communicate more, not less, about what's going on in the court systems, the eviction process, and so on and so forth. You're right. The members in my real estate meetup group, the ones that are well-educated about investing are the ones that are buying more rental properties. The ones that are not educated, they just bought their primary home, and they never buy a rental property. The extent of their real estate investment is their primary home. Sometimes, they outgrow that primary home. Then, they buy another home, and they keep the old one as a rental. They're not proactive in going out there and learning about rental properties and the benefits of rental properties with the tax advantages and so on. That's where our partners, real estate property managers, realtors, and educators can really come in and help out. Jason: I think the tempting mistake that a lot of software people coming into this industry is that they try to cut out the property manager. I've seen this over and over and over again. They think, well, we could replace this critical relationship and negotiation piece with software. That can't be done in the hospitality industry, it certainly can't be done in the property management industry, and it also can't really be done in the real estate industry significantly because these are relationship things. There are negotiations, there are people involved, there are feelings, there are humans, and there's a lot that software can do. But software really should be enabling and facilitating those things. Not trying to replace those things. I love that you're incorporating property managers. I think this a wise move as you're moving forward. It allows you to connect with a lot of people that have investment portfolios. And it doesn't try to cut the property manager out of that in which we end up with a whole bunch of [...] then we end up with a bunch of crappy property managers, which are just people DIY-ing their management, and not really doing a great job. Then they have software tools that are supposed to say that it makes it easy, but things have fallen through the cracks. Laws are getting broken, tenants aren't protected, owners aren't protected, and silly stuff is being done. Very cool stuff. Is there anything else you'd like the audience to know about BetterCapital before they go? If so or if not, how can they get ahold of you? And how can they try this thing out? Bobby: Thank you, Jason. First of all, it's a pleasure to be on your show. I really enjoyed it. I've watched your videos, so thank you for doing what you're doing for your community, which is your audience of property managers. You're doing a fabulous job. Thank you for that. Look, our goal is very simple. We want to serve the real estate community in general. From newbies to seasoned investors, we want to give them tools. I'll be the first one at any of my meetups. If they're buying a property remotely, they need to engage with a good property manager because it's literally a marriage between you and the property manager for the next 10, 20 years. However long you hold that asset, that's how long that relationship needs to last. It's very easy to get a hold of me. It's bobby@bettercapital.us. We couldn't get the dot-com, so we got the dot-us. It's bettercapital.us. Look, we're in what's called a beta version right now. We're coming out of the beta version. We'll go live very soon. But we'd love to get your feedback. We'd love to incorporate your feedback into our product. We'd love to make you a partner. We'd love to see the property management companies that choose to work with us, we want to see them succeed. We'll highlight them, we'll showcase them, and we'll work with them. Jason: Awesome. Property managers, if you're listening, this is your chance to help shape this tool to be something you really want. You can be the ultimate beta tester, and then you'll have the ultimate product that would really serve your needs. Take him up on that offer. Well, Bobby, I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you for your gracious words. I hope you have some success with this. Bobby: Thank you, Jason, and likewise. Hopefully, we'll stay connected. I'll keep you posted on our progress. Jason: Awesome. All right, check them out at bettercapital.us. For those that are somehow new to this show because you just stumbled upon it. I was going to say, it was interesting hearing, thank you for doing the podcast. I was thinking, sometimes it's a thankless job. But I'm like, wait a second, he's thanking me. But sometimes, it is a thankless job. I'm putting out free content. We pay a good chunk of change to have this podcast produced and to put out there. My team does social media marketing to get it out there as well. We do make money, don't get me wrong. We get paid really well to help property management businesses get paid really well. But if you want to do something to reciprocate—besides becoming one of our clients—make sure to like our stuff. Follow us. You can subscribe on YouTube and follow. Leave us a review on iTunes. We'd really appreciate it. If you're looking to grow your property management business, you are struggling or trapped in one of these growth sand traps, maybe around 50 or 60 doors. The solar [...] sand trap. You can't figure out how to get ahead. You don't have the revenue to hire your next person. You can't seem to get more doors than you're losing and you just stay stuck there. Or maybe you're in the second sand trap, 200-400 doors, and you just can't figure out how to get the right people to do what you want them to do. You're getting overwhelmed because your team is always asking you all the time, all the questions. You're feeling overwhelmed, and you realize you are the biggest bottleneck in your business. There is a roadmap out of that. Very easy to get out of. You can listen to some of the previous episodes. But reach out to us at DoorGrow. We would love to have a conversation and see if you'd be a fit, see if we could help you grow your business and be the property managers making a difference out there in the world. Until next time, everyone. To our mutual growth. Bye, everybody.

Thank you for bearing with me as I roll out podcasts. Some of you had trouble subscribing to get these podcasts in your regular player. You have a few options. The simplest way is to just add the RSS feed to your player (link). You can also find the podcast the way you find any podcast. Here is the link to the larger players: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. The “best” way to subscribe is a little more complicated. Click on the little grey link above (or here). It will give you a URL for a “private RSS feed”. If you ever subscribe to Marketing BS+ this will allow you to get the premium podcasts directly into your player (and all the non-premium ones in the meantime).Sorry for the confusion yesterday. I am figuring this stuff out as I go along. (Fun fact: The idea of public “beta” software originated with Netscape, October 13, 1994. It has been growing strong ever since.)Onto Part II. of my interview with Jason Goldlist, former head of marketing for WealthSimple. Yesterday's Part I covered Jason's career. This part of the interview dives into the (unusual) marketing channels and techniques Jason used to scale WealthSimple into the largest “roboadvisor” in Canada. I particularly like the billboard stunt. As always the entire transcript of the conversation is below, but I recommend listening through your podcast player.Transcript:Edward: This is part two of my interview with Jason Goldlist. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as Head of Marketing at Wealthsimple. First, Jason, can you describe what Wealthsimple is for those who do not understand?Jason: Wealthsimple is a leading financial technology player in Canada that helps make personal finance really simple and really powerful. It's a robo-adviser, so it helps automate investments. It's a savings platform, helps you save your cash for the future, it lets you buy and sell stocks, and even buy and sell cryptocurrency.Edward: Is it like a combination of Betterment with Robin Hood?Jason: And Coinbase.Edward: Got it, and is that a good description or is it something different? Again, if those three companies were to merge, that's Wealthsimple?Jason: Sure. Wealthsimple operates predominantly in Canada and the Canadian financial services market is totally different than in the US. What happens in Canada is you've got five big banks that completely control Canadians' finances. Wealthsimple is hoping to be that sixth alternative bank that's going to come in and shake up the entire industry. We think that there is a whole slew of financial products that consumers need, that they want, but they aren't getting from the big banks.Edward: Got it. I think that's super helpful and sets the groundwork. I want to dive into your biggest marketing channels, which I think are fairly unusual for a company of that size. Let's start with offline partnerships. What were you doing there?Jason: I was lucky enough to join Wealthsimple at a very early stage. I was the 10th employee of Wealthsimple, leading marketing, building that team essentially from scratch, and when I left Wealthsimple, it was several hundred employees managing billions of dollars with a really large, robust marketing, product, and brand team.The channels that we focused on changed throughout the evolution of Wealthsimple. You can imagine at the beginning when I joined, we had only raised, I think, less than $ 2 million Canadian. There wasn't a lot of money to go out and spend. We were really scrappy with each and every customer. At that time, adding 10 customers, adding 100 customers was a big win. Later to the end of my 10 years at Wealthsimple, of course, adding 10 or 100 customers happened in the blink of an eye. We were looking for new ways to grow customers by thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands at a time. What we looked at evolved over time, but we've always been looking at channels that aren't the easy ones. I've always had this feeling that if it was an easy channel, the return isn't going to be there. You've got to pioneer a channel in order for it to be really unique and interesting to your business. Because every business is a little bit different, I also think you want to create your own little bit different channel. Just because these big channels, whether it's traditional channels like television, Facebook, or Google work for other people, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you. I think the process of thinking deeply about what it is that makes your business and your customers different and then going out and creating your own channel for it, can make a world of difference.Edward: When you say offline partnership, what does that mean?Jason: One of the channels that we cultivated was, as you mentioned, offline partnerships. What that means to us is how could we find other brands or other organizations that had large customer bases that wanted to share those customers with us. This would be not through a platform, not through a marketplace, but actually going directly to other brands, finding, and building relationships that were win-win and mutually beneficial. As an example, one of the earliest partnerships we did was with Airbnb. We looked at the landscape of brands and said the brand that we aspire to be and that our clients aspire to use would be a brand like Airbnb. I think I went on LinkedIn and I think I just typed in Airbnb and I use the geography filter for Canada. I was like, who is running Airbnb in Canada? We traded some emails and we sort of said we think there's this opportunity. Let me understand your goals better and maybe there's something that we can do with a campaign to actually go out and help you with your goals, and at the same time raise Wealthsimple's brand awareness with our target market and also acquire new customers.They said one thing that we're really trying to do is get people to use Airbnb for the first time. I think this was in 2015. They were still growing in new markets. We said, okay, cool. Do you have a financial incentive for new customers? They said, yeah. We pay $200 to acquire new customers so we can pay that out.So I said if we were to go out and spend some money on channels and incentivize people to try Airbnb, that would be helpful for you, right? They're like, yeah. And we were able to make this channel. We're able to leverage Airbnb's brand to go to market with an offer to attract people to use Wealthsimple and it became a new Wealthsimple client that got some of that and an Airbnb client. They got some of that Airbnb money deposited directly into their Wealthsimple account. That's an example of an offline partnership that worked really well for us and not only did it work in the direct channel and that there are lots of customers that responded to campaigns that we were able to attribute to that partnership, but also in the mind of the market. We were now hanging with the Airbnb brand and it set the idea that we were an innovative company, a young company, an emerging company that had the same brand DNA as Airbnb, and opened up the floodgates of being able to partner with lots of other organizations in Canada as well.Edward: Sounds to me that there are two parts to that. There was the halo effect or the fact that your brand is getting affiliated with Airbnb, and then there's Airbnb giving you the $200 or whatever you negotiated that you could go and drop into your customer's accounts. But you still need to have a marketing channel now to go and attract that customer. It just makes it easier to make that marketing channel work now, right? Now you have $200 additional monetization for any customer that you attract.Jason: That's right. Now we've got a great concept for a campaign and the question is, how do we want that campaign to live in the world? Most of my campaigns are going to be across multiple channels. There'll be different places that I'm going to share that with the market. The first place that I'm looking to, especially with a partnership like this, is to leverage Airbnb's channels. Now, here's an opportunity for them to also incentivize their followers. Maybe it's an email list of non-converters, maybe it's their social media to go and check out Wealthsimple for this benefit. At the same time, I can also go to the market and put some money behind it. Maybe we'll even co-market it together in the sense that maybe Airbnb will chip in some marketing dollars for me to go and put this on Facebook and retarget some visitors, or put it through a social channel like Twitter in order to get more people, or run an email campaign or something in order to get people to convert. Certainly, there's a bunch of different moving parts here. I love that you brought up that there's the halo effect and there's the direct effect. I think almost all of my campaigns fall into one or the other or a combination of both. Starting with what you think success is going to be on those different dimensions can really help you make sure that the campaign from end-to-end achieves the right objective.Edward: Let's talk a little bit about that. So you're Airbnb, Airbnb has a list now of users that have not converted. What's their incentive to target that list with a Wealthsimple offer versus just saying, hey list of people who haven't converted, we'll give you $200 that you can spend on Amazon. Why partner with you on that deal?Jason: There's a bunch of different ways that the value gets created. One of them is that there is a bit of a quid pro quo when you're negotiating a partnership like this. At the time, our Canada list was a lot bigger than their Canada list. For a brand like them who's trying to build a new market, we're excited to reach their list and they were excited to reach ours. So there is a bit of a trade that happens there and it's a win-win as long as the brands are aligned and customers aren't confused as to why it's happening. You need to create a great story, a little bit of a landing page collateral to make sure that the story's well-articulated. But there are other offline partnerships that were really successful where it's even plainer the benefit. I'll give you an example of a partnership that we did together with Zipcar, Ontario.Zipcar has members and they have a specific member benefits portal. They're always looking for interesting opportunities to put into their member benefits portal that's going to reward Zipcar members in Ontario. That was an easy one where they actually have planned activities to email their entire base about new offers in their members' benefits. They're just looking for the right members' benefits to be there. We were able to approach Zipcar and show them how our audiences would overlap, and we had a really interesting and compelling on-brand offer for them to share with their mailing lists.Edward: How many of these types of partnerships did you have? Between Airbnb and Zipcar, how many of them existed at that scale?Jason: Well, in the beginning, there was the first one. Of course, we found success with them. One of the reasons that we did find early success with them is, as we were growing, we were trying to convince larger brands to use us and to partner with us. We were able to reach wide audiences without typically a cost of acquisition. Now, the cost was the hustle, originality, creativity, and the relationship-building that it takes to make this, but there wasn't an incremental cost to it, which is why we liked it. What happened is as we got bigger, first we expanded the portfolio and then we actually contracted it. The reason that we contracted it is that as we grew bigger, it was no longer so helpful to get dozens of new clients from a channel.It was only really worth our time to get larger ones, so we had to create partnerships with larger organizations that had a broader reach. Now when I think about the partnership opportunities in the landscape for Wealthsimple today, they look a lot more like large telcos, other large financial institutions that maybe aren't related, other consumer retailers like a grocer, gas, or pharmacy that really reach millions and millions of Canadians. That would be an opportunity that would get me excited today, but it just started with members' benefits of Zipcar.Edward: That makes sense because I think initially, if it's quid pro quo, if you have no email list, you don't have anything to offer a really big partner. Then, as you get bigger through leveraging, it's almost a ladder up strategy of starting with smaller partners, use that to get to scale so you can trade for bigger partners.Jason: That's exactly the strategy. What's interesting about this is that there isn't a website that you can go and log into, then just put your credit card down and get these partnerships up and running. These are partnerships that require you to go and meet with real people, create something out of nothing, and you've got to demonstrate and establish trust. You've got to follow through for your partners. You've got to do awesome tracking for them. You've got to make them feel really special. I think to my point I made earlier, they're not easy because there isn't a directory of them to take off. But I think to the point of creating new channels, I think these are the kinds of channels that I love creating. Something that didn't exist before, something that's uniquely your brands and something that's really effective for both sides.Edward: Let's talk about public relations. That was another big channel for you.Jason: It sure was. One of the things that's interesting about public relations or I call it earned media, is that similar to these partnerships, you're not paying cost per acquisition for each customer. Of course, there's an investment that you make in time or if you hire an agency and you can tie it back, but ultimately if you do it well, you're able to get low cost, ongoing inbound traffic. I remember sitting around the table with the early team, and if we would just get a mention on the national news, in Canada, it's the CBC. The phone would start ringing. It was like magic and we didn't pay anything for it. A reporter got us, we reached out to a reporter, and then suddenly we got new clients. It was always exciting to see the traffic volume spike on the website when something as boring as an article in the local newspaper came out. But I think that showed us really early on the power of doing this well.Edward: How did you do it well? PR is one of them, obviously. You can optimize page search to death and there are agencies that can optimize television spend. How do you optimize PR? How do you know you're doing it well? Jason: First we didn't do it well. I think sometimes it takes not doing a channel well first to learn a little bit more about how to do it better. The first thing that we did is we hired a firm that specialized in financial services public relations, to help us with this. I think that playbook was irrelevant to us. We paid them a retainer every month, and every month they've got to get some relationships with the journalists and they go through all their client list. At the end of the day, that wasn't differentiated, it wasn't interesting, and it didn't get us the results that we needed, but we had that early taste even before I think we were working with an agency of what PR could do. So when we set out to do a real earned media campaign, we tried to think a little bit differently. We try to think about a couple of different ways to do it. For example, you can create data and then share that data back with publications. You can capitalize on emerging news trends and then use that to get into the news cycle. There's a whole bunch of different tactics and we would think of interesting and differentiated tactics to do it. I'll give you one of my favorite stories. One of my favorite stories of an earned media tactic that worked really well for us was in Canada, there was a large tech company that had IPOed called Shopify. We, of course, in the wealth management business, love when big tech companies IPO because that means a lot of wealth is typically created. We'd like them to park their wealth with us. During the IPO, it was really hard to cut through the clutter of that news cycle and get earned media for different tech companies' IPO. What we found was there was going to be a different date that was less celebrated and it typically is never celebrated in the media, but it could be, which is the expiry of the IPO lockup period. Not a super sexy date, but nine months after the IPO, that's when the insiders can actually sell. That's when the wealth is realized, not just created. What we did is we created a campaign around the expiry of the lockup period that would educate Shopify employees on how to get a diversified portfolio out of their holdings. We created a little ebook, we made a landing page on our website, and we actually took out a billboard across the street from Shopify so that you could see both the billboard and the Shopify building in the background. We hired a photographer to take the picture, and then we shopped and pitched that story to the media. We said, hey, are you covering the Shopify lock-up period? You should be thinking about what happened nine months ago. Now is the time all this money is liquid. Oh, by the way, here's a photo, a Wealthsimple guide that we've made to help Shopify employees manage their wealth.Can you believe it? Articles were written about the story, we did the journalists' work for them, our photo ran as the photo in the article, and there was a great mention about how companies like Wealthsimple were helping employees at Shopify manage their wealth.Edward: That's fantastic. I believe that there's something to this new way of marketing, which is this combination of PR and paid media. In that example, you use paid media to presumably acquire some Shopify customers but then accelerated with PR.Jason: And the loop doesn't even end there, Ed, because once that's done, you take that article that's being published by reputable news media, then you go and you put some dollars behind it on social media to amplify it even more. That, actually, I think goes beyond that. From there, we actually got some inbound traffic. I believe Toby, the founder and CEO of Shopify, messaged us and said, "Hey, great campaign." That opened the door for us to actually get into Shopify and start managing their employees' retirement plans, which was fantastic and it involved us bringing out our wealth advisors to help manage their employees. I believe for a long time, Shopify was the number one source of clients at Wealthsimple by employer by a large margin, even though they only employed several thousand people, our percentage of Shopify employees using Wealthsimple was astronomical.Edward: If we were to break that particular campaign down into (say) four parts, which was number one, was the billboard and the marketing to get Shopify customers to come on board. Number two is the PR push around that was targeted more broadly and far more than just Shopify customers. Number three was the paid acceleration of number two and then number four, was the enterprise sale effectively that you got to Shopify. Roughly, how much impact did those four things have? Was it 25, 25, 25, 25? What's your best estimate?Jason: I love that you say best estimate because some of those things we can directly track and of course many of those things we can't, but we know they're there. If I were to do my estimates, I actually think the last one, the halo effect we got inside of Shopify's hallways, of them talking about us, of them referring their friends, of them trying us, and then bringing and consulting their wealth with us over the years was so much bigger than the direct effects of (say) having the billboard in the first campaign. I think that the fourth one is only possible if you get number two. So, you need that multiplier. I think if you have that campaign without that endorsement or thought that earned media pick up, I think that would be a failure of the campaign. But once you've got number two that allows you to unlock number three and number four (if you can), it becomes even more successful than you imagined.Edward: If you hadn't got them all, like if you'd only gotten number one or only gotten number two, would it have been ROI positive or would have been negative, and you needed those three and four in order to get it over the top? Jason: They're not really expensive ideas and the truth is, we're talking about one that works for everyone that worked. Of course, there's a whole bunch that don't work and that we don't talk about as guerrilla campaigns or earned media opportunities that didn't work out. But if you look at the direct costs of doing that, we recycled some content. We wrote some original content. We're talking about hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars. We chased down that billboard. Hard work especially because we need it on short notice, but we got it. We're talking about single digits, thousands of dollars. We're talking about a campaign that was a few thousand dollars. At the time, if that hadn't worked out, we'd be totally fine. But I think there was an ROI on that that was well beyond the five digits or maybe even six digits on it, so the percentages return on that campaign like that were fantastic.Edward: What does growth hacking mean to you?Jason: I've never described myself as a growth hacker and I don't have a stock definition. But what it makes me feel is that how do we do alternative things to drive the adoption of the product. One of the things it does sort of bring up for me are the viral loops. How do we get the customers that we have today to maybe adopt another product, increase their usage of the product, or tell others themselves about the product, too?Edward: So when you talk about growth hacking at Wealthsimple, is Shopify an example of that or is there something different?Jason: Probably in the broadest sense, but I think in the more narrow sense of how do we have a virality coefficient that supports growth without (for example) creating new campaigns or without (for example) spending money on social channels. That is sort of what growth hacking would mean to me more so. I think we are really lucky at Wealthsimple in that for whatever reason, your wealth advisor and some other financial products do tend to be products that people talk about, and especially if you do them different or better, save people money, and make their life more effective and efficient, you share it with family and friends. For a long time at Wealthsimple and hopefully to this day still, that was the number one way that people found out about us, by referring Wealthsimple to their friends and family.Edward: That's great. Hey, thanks so much for coming on today, Jason. Before we go, tell me about your “quake book”.Jason: My quake book, of course. I'm always thinking about my quake book. What did I tell you my quake book was, Ed? Edward: Fooled by Randomness. Jason: Oh, yes. Are you a fan of Nassim? Edward: Nassim has blocked me on Twitter. Jason: There you go. Well, that's all you need to know. Hopefully, he hasn't blocked you from reading his books, though. What I love about Fooled By Randomness is that sometimes we see patterns where there aren't patterns. Certainly, as an analyst starting my career, all the time I think we talked about things that maybe weren't there, but we hoped were there. I think reading that book is one of the eye-opening opportunities, along with the rest of Nassim's writing, to help you really understand the way the world works and not the way that you hope the world works.Edward: Thank you for that, Jason, and really excited to have you on the show. Jason: Thanks, Ed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

This is the first “beta” podcast for Marketing BS. I would love your feedback as I refine the interviews and the production quality. These interviews are all in two-parts. Part I covers the CMO's career - how they got their first head of marketing role, and how they have pushed their career from there. In Part II we dive into one specific business they have overseen to talk about growth levers.Transcript below:Edward: My guest today is Jason Goldlist. Today's episode dives into his career. How he got his first CMO role and beyond. University of New Brunswick, McKinsey, INSEAD, A Place for Mom operations, and then Strategy, and then Head of Marketing at Wealthsimple. Today's co-founder of TechToronto or TechTo, among other things.  Jason, we know each other quite well, but I don't think I know the story of how you got your first Head of Marketing role at Wealthsimple. I know you're working for me at APFM leading strategy, you've done some work on television, but how did you get a marketing offer to run the whole thing?Jason: Well, thanks for having me, Ed. I do owe a lot of my success as a marketer to you. You have been a manager and also a mentor to me over the course of my career. Quite a self-serving question, Ed, because the answer is going to be due to your guidance. But it comes down also to the people that I've met along the way. You mentioned McKinsey in my biography. I did start my career there and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of incredible people that have served me well over the course of my career. One of those happened to be the founder of a Canadian fintech startup called Wealthsimple. As I was working with you in Seattle, A Place for Mom, I wanted to make that transition back to Toronto, back to Canada where I'm from. I reached out to some contacts, including Mike, the founder of Wealthsimple, and told him I was coming back, and he was excited to share with me that he was looking for someone to lead marketing there. It just happened that the relationship that we'd had over many years at that point, it was a good fit for me to come on board and give it a go.Edward: Were they looking at any other people or just your personal relationship was what got you the job?Jason: At the time, they actually had an original marketer who joined the team, and that marketer didn't really have that third way about him. It was more of a traditional marketer who had come from a larger organization and didn't have that scrappy, thoughtful, counterintuitive thinking that the team really wanted. They did get rid of the first marketer and were looking for someone else. They had started a search and in fact, if I remember correctly, Mike's original way of finding me was to ask me if I had any referrals for him. He said, "Hey, we're looking for a marketer," and then he described someone that sounded a lot like me and maybe looked a lot like me and had a lot of my experience, and I said, "Oh, sounds really cool. Let me think about a couple ideas for you and then I'll bring them back to you." Then a few weeks later, we sat down and said, "Okay, I've got a couple of names for you." He goes, "Oh, yeah. I don't really want those names. I was hoping that it will be you."Edward: Obviously, he wanted you. He knew you and he trusted you. Why put you in a marketing role and not in a strategy or an operations role where you arguably had more experience?Jason: There's something that I've read from you, Ed, and that is marketing is everything. When the best leaders, the best founders are putting together their leadership teams, I think they recognize that. So my background is a little eclectic. I have done work in strategy, I have done work in operations, I have done work in product, I have done work in marketing, and especially for an early-stage company that had really big ambitions, more so than usual (I think) you had to pitch in and do everything.I think Mike recognized that was a good background for him and for what the company needed at the time and was something that I was more than eager to do, which was more than AdWords analytics, but actually anything that the company needed to grow and be successful.Edward: It was almost less of a marketing role and more of a ‘grow the business anyway you can' role.Jason: Sure. I would argue that when it comes to an early stage company, in that time the company was 10 people. It had raised under $2 million Canadian in funding, had a couple of hundred consumer clients, and had its sights set on being what it is today and beyond, which is the leading fintech company in Canada with over a million Canadians as clients, managing billions and billions of dollars with the team of over 300 people. We needed to grow. I would argue that it's actually everybody's responsibility in an organization to grow. The marketer is maybe just the one that's watching the metrics every day and making sure that all the activities that everyone's working on are adding up to the growth that we want to see of the company.Edward: You have that job, the job you came in on for a little less than 18 months before you were promoted to GM. How did your job change post the promotion? Or did it?Jason: It did change a lot and I think it changed more so with the growth of the company than it did with necessarily the kind of work that we're doing in marketing or in general management. I think what's really neat about joining a fast-growing company is that there are so many opportunities everywhere to contribute and to get impact. Something that I learned working with you is that it's much more fun to have 800% growth than just to have a 0.8% growth. Even though there are many opportunities where maybe working at one of the world's largest companies, 0.8% growth can represent a lot more dollar value than 800% growth. But in terms of a fast-growing startup, when there's that kind of growth and that kind of excitement, there's a lot of opportunity for impact. The kind of things that I would work on started at (I would say) traditional early stage startup channels, like how do we get earned media? How do we find our communities online that want to be early adopters of our technology? How do we go participate at local events and win customers one by one? That ended up turning really quickly into what new products do we need to introduce to keep our growth, sustain, and accelerate it? What are our customers telling us that we need to build and fix? As an example, what are the other skills we need to add to the team to grow and deliver the brand on the product promise that we've delivered with our brand?Edward: I want to go back a little bit. I want to talk about the path that got you to the place where you got that offer. I have a theory that the things people do when they're in junior high school ended up affecting them their whole lives. Let's go back to that time when you were in junior high. What were you passionate about back then?Jason: It's funny you mention it. When I think about my junior high experience, I was not super studious. I was not booksmart in junior high. I was the kid who was hustling his classmates in the hallways to buy from his latest venture. I remember one of the things that I built in junior high was, you'd call it today a direct-to-consumer clothing brand. Then, I just called it ugly wear and I sold very ugly sweatshirts to my friends at school. I had a paper order form that they would use to customize. I found in the Yellow Pages, a tailor that would come and actually stitch custom logos onto the blanks that I would buy in Chinatown. I think the total cost of one of my items was like $50, which was a fortune for a junior high sweatshirt, and I probably sold it at $51 or something.Edward: Why did you do that? Did you need that dollar that you're making? I can't imagine that was the motivation. What was the motivation?Jason: I thought it was cool and I think that's driven a lot of the things that I've done in my career is that I find it interesting and I want to learn more about how it's done. At the time, I think the core insight to me was everyone's wearing the same clothes, everyone's looking the same. There's got to be a way to express your personality more. Why can't we order custom clothing? That just turned into a bit of a self-directed research project to figure out how it could be done. Then once it was done, how to let others do it as well.Edward: What broader elements did you learn? You learned obviously how to make a sweatshirt. Did you learn anything that was more broad than that?Jason: I think that's one of the earliest examples that I can remember of something I kind of live my life by now, which is GTD. How do you get things done? And how do you ship product? How do you make decisions? And how do you not necessarily delegate and outsource things, but just go and do it yourself? I think that was a really important learning that I had from doing that. It wasn't like there was a turnkey provider who did it. It was every step of the way thinking through the process, finding out how these things get done in the real world, and then going out, getting driven around by your mom to go and do it.Edward: You outsource nothing except for the driving of the car? Jason: You know what? I wish we had more lax driver regulations here in Canada. I could have done it myself then. Maybe I would have Uber'd if that was around back then.Edward: Jumping ahead to your university experience. Who's unusual? Tell me a little bit about where you went to college and how that happened.Jason: Part of it is because it was cool, I think applies here, too. A part of that is also sort of thinking against the grain. For me, a lot of my classmates in high school were all going to the same colleges and studying the same things. I had been successful or interested in things that ran against the grain a little bit.I wanted to do something different and I found that at a small college in the Maritimes in Eastern Canada called the University of Brunswick, where they had a 20-person program that focused on interdisciplinary studies.It was a philosophy degree that helped you think about the world and instead of putting you in a large auditorium and giving you a multiple choice test, they sat 20 people around a piano in an old Victorian home and had discussions with the different deans of the faculties. You were sort of ranked and rated based on learning outcomes. There were no numbers involved or attached. It was really about the impact of your thinking, the quality of your discourse, how you interacted and pushed the thinking forward together with your classmates.Edward: How did you come out different from that experience than when you went in?Jason: They talked about different types of programs. One that accepts great people, there's no transformation, and they come out the same. Of course, you have the stamp of approval from the program. You've got all other programs that bring in certain people and then transform them into something different.I do think that this one was a transformational program. For me coming into it, I think I lacked perspective on how powerful those skills would be. I think I've still thought that perhaps you needed a high score in math to be successful or you needed to study engineering to know how the world works. I think what happened is when I came out of that program, I learned really the way that we interact with each other, the way that we solve problems together, and it's not just about what you know, but how to learn and how to know is more important.Edward: Do you think that your career and the kind of the rest of your life would have been different if you'd taken a different route if you'd gone to the University of Toronto? How would things have been different for the rest of your career?Jason: I think it would have been really different, actually. The reason is that I think that in any other program, if I hadn't gone against the crowd, I think I would have fallen in with the crowd. I think I would have thought the same way. I think I would have studied the same things. I think I would have coveted the same graduate roles as everybody else. By striking a little bit of an alternative path for the time, it let me think in a different way and question myself, just because other people are doing it, do I need to as well?I'll give you a great example. A very common path for people from my high school was to go in, do a college degree, go straight to a law program and practice law. Very common path for my friends, one that most of my peer group did, and those are higher-earning jobs. Those are people who have comfortable lifestyles and are able to provide for their families very well. For me, that wasn't interesting, and I think if I hadn't made that choice, I think I would have fallen into that path. For me, instead, coming out of that program, I was really interested in the world. Part of the program included sort of a domestic internship anywhere in Canada and an international internship anywhere in the world. Through my program, I was exposed to all sorts of different things. Having gone to the West Coast for an internship, a marketing internship, and then gone actually overseas, going to Switzerland and spending a summer there. I was curious about the world in a way that was different and I wanted an opportunity not to go to law school after I graduated, but to learn more about how the world worked.Edward: And yet, your first job after college was at McKinsey, which many people would argue is the epitome of the traditional path for high-performing young people.Jason: It's funny looking back at it now. It certainly looks the case and I have to agree with you. At the time, I had no idea what McKinsey was and I have to say, my family, my friends, my peer group, my school, for God's sake, do not know what McKinsey is. I did not go to a feeder school where there was on campus recruiting. I had never even heard of it. In fact, the way that I discovered it is also quite interesting. I was doing an internship in Ottawa after I graduated and I just struck up a random conversation with someone in the community and had mentioned to them that I did that internship in Switzerland. He said, "You know what? You remind me of my nephew who's actually working in Switzerland right now for a company called McKinsey. You guys should connect." In fact, I made that email to Rob Charon, who was in fact, finishing his second year as a business analyst in the Toronto office of McKinsey. He encouraged me to learn more about it and apply, helped me with the interview process, and helped me find that job.Edward: If you'd gone to University of Toronto, do you think you would have ended up McKinsey anyway, maybe even without doing the internship in between?Jason: Certainly not. I think I would have been on the path. I think I would have kept the blinders on, put my head down, and ended up following the path to the world of law or something like that.Edward: Okay, let's play another what if. Now you're at McKinsey. You don't have that lunch, and you don't find out about Rob Charron and the opportunity, and you don't go to McKinsey. What happens instead? What does your career path look like for that alternate Jason?Jason: We can play it out a few years. That could be fun. I do think I would go to law school. I do think I would start a job at a law firm. I do think that I would practice law, try to become a partner. I think that's the game that people try to play. I think that's a six- or eight-year game, which is kind of fun. Probably sometime along the way I become disillusioned with the art or the practice of law, and maybe I would feel the fallacy of sunk costs so strongly that I would leave private practice, just go in-house at a company, and keep practicing law in-house. I think it'd be sad. I think lawyers are sad.Edward: Do you think you end up being the in-house counsel for Wealthsimple?Jason: Certainly not, and the reason I say that is because the fiduciary responsibility of being the in-house counsel of a disruptive finance company is not something I want to take on, and I can't imagine that my career path would have led me to be intimately familiar with the capital market legislation in Canada. I don't think I could find that interesting. Even though we've played this what-if game where I've gone against my natural curiosity, I do think that would kick in at some point along this career path and prevent me from doing something like that.Edward: You come out of McKinsey and instead of going directly to business school, you work for the Vancouver Olympics. How many McKinsey people were you working with there?Jason: It was none when I started, but one of the cool things about working for an organizing committee (the Olympics) is that I think I joined as employee number 900 and something. By the peak of the games, I think there were 70,000 employees, contractors, and volunteers working for the games. So you need to scale up quite quickly. I think all that happens in the span of six or nine months. I had the opportunity to hire some great people to join my team, but on the other hand, it's not a professionally-managed business, for example, like the one that we joined later afterwards and A Place for Mom.Edward: What did you learn when you're at the Olympics that you wouldn't have learned if you'd done a more traditional post-McKinsey role?Jason: It's a good question because I think this goes back to part of the career arc here, which is after McKinsey, there is also a defined path that lots of people do that I also avoided at the time. It was very fashionable to go and spend a year or two at a private equity firm or a hedge fund before going to business school and coming back to the firm. For me, that also didn't sound interesting and I wanted to try something different. One of the things that I thought I had been missing from my McKinsey experience, even though I had managed teams of clients, is that I hadn't had a direct management role at McKinsey. As an analyst, I was doing tons of maybe big data insights, creating lots of decks, and trying to come up with strategic recommendations, but I hadn't really managed the team. I thought it would be cool to add that weapon to the repertoire and manage a big team. I think at the peak I was managing a hundred paid staff and volunteers to run the operations at the Games. That was the path that I took. I also thought it would be cool to be part of the Olympics. I mean, the Olympics don't come to your home country all the time. The timing had worked out and I thought it'd be really interesting to take a peek inside of that organization.Edward: Now, post-McKinsey, I hired you to come to A Place for Mom. This was the job you had before your CMO role. Why did you come work for me and what else could you have done instead?Jason: Actually, in between there. I did do my MBA in INSEAD, so that opens up a lot of job opportunities. There's a huge on-campus recruiting push. There are all sorts of post-MBA opportunities that open themselves up to you. But I think there was a transformation that I had there where before I had been guided by what I thought was cool.I thought clothing was cool. I thought that doing the small program was cool and interesting. I thought doing the Olympics was cool. I thought seeing the world with McKinsey would be cool. There was a bit of a transformation I underwent during my MBA, which was seeing a lot of other ambitious people that also thought some of those same things were cool.One of the defining factors for me of something being cool was that not a lot of people want it. It made me reflect a little bit more on what I wanted to do next and the reflection led me to this new insight, which is awesome people are cool. Instead of chasing industry, instead of chasing a brand, instead of chasing experience, how can I chase great people that I could work with who would care about me, who would invest in me, who would believe in me to take on more responsibility and grow? I made a list of people who had worked with before who I thought fit the bill and I guess you were just the first person to pick up when I called you. You told me there was a great opportunity and I think I said yes before I even asked who it was, or where it was, or what we were going to do. I just was excited about the opportunity to work with someone awesome.Edward: A lot of your career looks like jumping from success to success and sometimes fairly randomly where opportunities kind of happen and you jump at them. What were the biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?Jason: It's not always up into the right in the sense that if you wanted to use a traditional measure like salary. I certainly made much more at McKinsey than I made at the Olympics. That was a major step backwards, for example.Edward: I wouldn't call it a failure, though. Where did the failures happen? Where did things happen that at the time at least you did not expect and did not want?Jason: The human mind is probably really good at erasing a lot of those things to be consistent with your story. But there's no doubt that at each one of those points, there are things that you want specifically, like local maxima that you're optimizing for, that you don't get.You can imagine at a firm like McKinsey, there are lots of different projects to work on. I'm certain there are projects that I wanted that I didn't get, and even worse, projects that I had that I hated, and ones where I wasn't working with great people or didn't feel like I was, and it was a slog every day to learn, to try to be productive, to try to even just be happy. It's the same also at the organizing committee for the Olympics. This was sometimes tedious and not exciting work. I can remember a time where I tried to make it better. I tried to apply some of the insights I had from McKinsey to some of the processes at the Olympics. After spending weeks building this macro model in Excel to help all of the volunteers get their preferred time spots on a 24 hour calendar for 77 days, I was told that I couldn't use it. I was like, what? All that time and effort that I put into what I thought, improving the process, making it more efficient, making it more effective was sort of all wasted.I had maybe some dreams or delusions of grandeur of this product that I built, sort of being rolled out across the entire organization and maybe it would be like a legacy of the organizing committee to be passed on to the next organizing committee, the next one, and there it ended with me using it by myself.Edward: When you left Wealthsimple, you did not move on to a new marketing role. What was your plan for what to do next and where did you end up at?Jason: It's similar to the transformation that I had at business school, which was driven by a lot of reflection and seeing sort of people around me be successful in their own career paths. I think I got the chance to do that a lot again at Wealthsimple, which is to think about the people that inspired me, the people that I looked up to, see their career paths and where they were going, and see which parts of those I wanted to take for myself and which ones I wanted to leave behind. I certainly saw lots of people continue on the marketing path, chase another CMO role or level up to a bigger brand with more spending, maybe one with more followers on Instagram, or maybe one that gets treated better by Google or Facebook because of their annual ad budget. That wasn't an interesting challenge for me. The people that I looked up to, they had taken marketing skills and they had created something entirely new. I think I got pulled into more of an entrepreneurship track and thinking, how can I take some of the skills that I have and apply it to something new and different, together with the people that I want to be building with.Edward: What's next for you?Jason: We are starting all over again. If you think about my career progression, I started at a really big firm, then I went to a smaller organization. I went to an even tinier organization, then I went to a 10-person startup. I think I finally—like Benjamin Button—gotten back down to being born and starting with just myself.What's next for me is building a software business in a sustainable way that's going to help really change the way that people meet each other, that people learn together, and that people grow as one and I'm really excited about it.Edward: That's great. Well, thank you, sir. We'll continue this conversation in part two, digging into Jason's experience at Wealthsimple. This is a public episode. 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As some freedom returns to society following COVID-19, don’t miss out on potential opportunities to implement property management growth strategies. Today’s guests are Mark and Anne Lackey from HireSmart Virtual Assistants (VAs). Mark and Anne are broker-owners that manage almost 200 doors in Atlanta. You’ll Learn... [03:47] Trends: Property management pivots and changes during economic downturns. [07:10] Hire Virtually: Save money, get better employees, and increase productivity. [08:22] Wake Up: Don’t resist remote work; realize office space may be unnecessary. [11:14] DIY vs. Professionally Managed: Ramp up sales/funnels to serve customers. [15:26] Problems are always opportunities to grow business by offering solutions. [21:11] Customer Service: Don’t disconnect. Focus/follow up for retention/satisfaction. [27:02] Professionalism: Set expectations. Don’t badmouth landlords via vendors. [28:29] BDM: Do you need a business development manager? [31:33] Time, Energy, and Effort: Resources required to rent properties to tenants. {32:28] Referrals grow businesses. No referrals represents customer care problem. [35:29] Gamechanger: Save time and money to get things done or do more yourself?. [38:30] Wrong Person, Role, Tool, Time, and Money: Hire based on owner’s needs. [40:57] Off-the-Shelf vs. Customization: How to hire and build teams takes time. [46:50] Remote Challenges: Communication, operations, and management problems. [48:22] Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Get work done based on expectations. [50:15] Think, Invest, HireSmart: Know avatar to grow property management business. Tweetables Opportunities are available to make sales and buy, manage, and invest in more properties. You don’t have to have your employees in an office. You don’t even have to have an office anymore. Property managers are immune to guilt and the heroes of the rental industry. Referrals grow businesses. No referrals represent customer care problems. Resources HireSmart Virtual Assistants (VAs) DGS 69: HireSmart Virtual Assistants with Anne Lackey NARPM Lehman Brothers Airbnb DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive 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 the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. My guests today are Mark and Anne Lackey from HireSmart. Welcome you two. Anne: Hey, good to see you. It's been a while. Mark: Hey, it's good to see you. Jason: It's good to have you back. I noticed you're displaying that beautiful logo in the background. Mark: Isn't that wonderful? Anne: Yes, that is of course a DoorGrow special. They helped us with that on our website. Mark: The logo, the renaming, all of that was a DoorGrow impression that was right for us and is great for our clients. Jason: Yeah, I like it. Cool. We're going to be talking about property management growth strategies after COVID-19. This Coronavirus is just starting to clean itself up. I just rode a road trip from Pennsylvania to Austin over the course of multiple days. People were not wearing masks anymore. We were eating at restaurants. It was awesome. It was like we are back to having freedom again. Most places are open here in Austin. I went to the hardware store yesterday, though. Everyone was wearing masks and I felt like I was in trouble. I thought we were over this already, but apparently not at Home Depot. Anne: Some places are, some places aren’t. Jason: I think the national chains and the national stores have to accommodate the lowest common denominator nationally. They got rules in place for everything. What are we chatting about today? Anne: First of all, I want to make sure everybody understands we are broker-owners ourselves. We manage doors in Atlanta. Mike: Nearly 200 doors in Atlanta since 2005 for other people and for ourselves, since 2001. Anne: We've been talking a lot to our friends who are in the property management business. We are, of course, NARPM members, affiliates, and affinity partners with them. We hear a lot around the nation of different things. Just like your trip from Pennsylvania. You saw different parts of the country where things were more open than others, so we want to talk about a couple of different things as we see them. For property managers that are thinking what's the next thing. I want to back up just a little bit and talk a little bit about historical trends and changes. Mark, why don't you get us started on that? Mark: This will show my age. That's one thing if I've mentioned this. In the 70s, we had lines to get gas. Not everybody out there remembers that, but there was an oil shortage. There was a gas shortage and at that point, everybody said we're going to run out of oil in a couple of years. It was a crisis, so out of that came what? We got into solar energy, more on to hydroelectric. Things pivoted, things changed. In the 80s, the savings and loans went down. Things pivoted on how we got mortgages. The dot-com buzz, the 90s, the tech blow up. All those things and what most everybody remembers is the meltdown that we had in the economy and mortgage market that occurred just 10–12 years ago. At that point, it required pivoting and Anne and I are really good at our business about looking to see what the trends are going to be. What's going to change and how to pivot. That's what we want to talk about today. It's not the end of the world like everybody said, March 15th or whatever date it was when everybody went to hibernation. It's like, it's the end of the world. Anne: Nobody's going to pay their rent. Mark: We thought that 12 years ago when Lehman Brothers shut their doors. It all seems like it's the end of the world, but it's not. It's an opportunity. It's learning to pivot. Look at where the puck is going. Anne: We wanted to talk about some of the trends that we see and the opportunities that property managers should be looking at in their business. You obviously don't hop on every trend and everything that comes along, but it is always good to put it in perspective. Mark, let's talk about some of the trends that we've seen in real estate in general. We're going to talk about how you can take advantage of that. Mark: In the last few months, we had property managers and friends that were investors that had Airbnb. They were making 5–10 times the amount of rent I was off of a property. Suddenly, they made nothing because all the bookings shut down. They’re looking. A lot of them said hey, let's sell. Let's go long term. A lot of things changed there. Through them and through those changes of people not having as much disposable income at this point because there's a slow down in jobs, second homes aren’t popular right now. Two, with all the laws that are coming about with the changes to protect the renters that are coming out of state legislators and the national, there's a lot of change and as property managers, we keep apprise to that. But these DIY (do-it-yourself) landlords don't. So, we're going to talk about some opportunities to make sales, to get some additional properties, to manage some opportunities for investing, too, if you're into that area. Jason: When COVID hit and it was March, March was brutal for us at DoorGrow. Sales stopped. Every property manager just tightens their purse strings, freaking out, there's this cash crunch. We experienced a serious cash crunch so we had to get lean. I think a lot of businesses had to get lean and in the long run, that is a really healthy thing for business. Everyone was trimming the fat and [...] was effective. Anne: We saw that in HireSmart because now everybody is a virtual employee. This is a perfect time to write stuff. People that have been hesitant to hire virtually have been in our doors now because they are like, wow, we can save some money. We can have better employees. We can have different strategies and approaches. Now, it was no longer important because it wasn't allowed to have people come into the office. Actually for us on HireSmart, it actually expanded our business. Mark: There was resistance before from property managers that wanted to walk down the hall and lean over Joe or Joan's shoulder and see what they’re doing, see what they're working on—literally, not figuratively—to be there, to have that conversation face-to-face. They were very hesitant about working and they didn't have the resources to figure out how to work remotely. With what’s come out of COVID-19 has become the realization that you don't have to have your employees at an office. You don't even have an office anymore. Jason: I've known this for well over a decade. Interesting to see that mass transition of people realizing they can use tools like Zoom and move away from having somebody right there in their office. I did some polls online asking people during this. I asked how many people would renew their business lease at the end of the term and a lot of them said they're going to, at the very least, downsize, maybe to a smaller office base, or they may even not renew. I also did some polling on what people have noticed as a result of people working from home. Some of my clients were saying that they've noticed that they were surprised that their team members became more productive. They're getting more done. I guess because there are fewer interruptions they were saying. There are fewer distractions. Maybe they're more comfortable. But some of my team members are doing better. I have heard some people say I hate it. My kids are there all the time. I'm going crazy. But in general, I think the world has to wake up and realize when you have to get work done, you can try this. Then they tried this and they're like, hey, this works. Why are we spending so much money on this brick and mortar location that is outrageously expensive to have all these people in it when we can eliminate that crazy expense and it's unnecessary. Mike: Yeah. It was shocking, like you, we immediately drew into our shell in March, and let's save. We don't know what's going to happen. People are going to let people go. But in April and May, we had the most requests for information about our services. The most orders we've had in five years. Jason: I'll bet. Anne: Without any [...]. That's the funny part for us [...] Mike: We’re not traveling. Anne: It's been interesting and we do a lot of community teaching and speaking even online. We always have to help people understand what opportunities are there. A lot of things that we're promoting or that we're seeing right now, specifically in property management, is now’s a great time to ramp up your sales and funnels. Again, because the DIY's are so lost. We already know that there are so many DIY landlords compared to professionally managed. Mike: Eighty percent of the US are do-it-yourself landlords. That's a lot of opportunity. Anne: That's a lot of opportunity. I know you talk a lot about that, but how do you reach them? How do you engage with them? How do you attract them? Of course, they outgrow a platform, obviously, as a key component to that, which is wonderful, but you have to have the human-to-human or human automation to back it up. I think where we're coming to as a society is if you don't have a physical office where people can walk in anymore because you're closing your doors. We've had a closed-door policy for 19 years. I think people are very surprised that we've never let anybody in our office ever. Mike: We have a small office of three. Anne: We've never let anybody in our office even when we had seven people in our office, we didn't have people in our office because it's a distraction, that interruption. What happens is you need to serve your customers. You need to be talking to them. You need to be serving them. Now, the residents and owners don't just want to be served 9–5. We're seeing that they want answers seven o'clock at night, eight o'clock at night when they're online. When they have questions they would like to have some interactions with someone from your office. How do you do that cost-effectively? Of course, we have the solution. A full-time dedicated virtual employee that works as the second shift or the split shift is there to take care of chat. They're there to answer the questions and help people guide them on applications. Mike: Then guide the people that are coming in to bring you properties to manage. Anne: Right, and to talk to owners about how I work with you. Because here's what's going on in the marketplace. Again, in a lot of places, you do have people that aren't able to pay their rent right now because they have lost their jobs. Do you have owners that are concerned about what I do? How do I do this? We've had an increase in our inquiries for property management recently as well because they just don't know the rules. They don't know the laws. Mike: It's not the time to withdraw. We're all sheltered in our business in place, too, and when we withdrew that opportunity to find new business went away. The companies, the far-sighted future thunking property managers, business owners, and the brokers that are now looking at making some investments. Not just sitting on their dollars, but actually making some investments in the right people, the right tools, business development people to help grow the business, doing outreaches. One thing we were talking about just the other day was—we haven't done this yet—we should have a seminar that we invite all the DIY landlords to share with them all the fears of all the new laws that have come out. [...]. We have that seminar and some of them are going to come out and say, okay, now I can do things differently because I have information on what I can and can't do. A lot of them are going to come out and say I just can't do this anymore. I'm tired of doing it. I'm going to hire—in case—us because we've been in that seminar. Making those types of investments, and granted that those seminars aren't always live, they're maybe at this point virtual but reaching out to those. Those are the ways now to grow your business for tomorrow because over the next six months until we get to the end of this year, there's opportunity abound for forward-thinking. Jason: That's what problems do. Problems are always opportunities. Let's talk about the problem. Here are some of the things I noticed. I won't say who it is, but I got a call from one of my business coaches and he has rental properties. He was like, what do you see in the market place right now because I got a small portfolio of properties and only 50% of them are paying rent. I said at least 98% of most of the rent is being collected by my clients. That's what I'm hearing. Also, what I noticed happening is my clients are saying that their owners were calling them and saying if tenants don't want to pay rent this month, we'll let them not pay rent. They're like no, they're going to pay rent. The thing is people felt guilty. They're almost ashamed but feel guilty, but property managers, you guys are over that [...]. You guys are completely over. You've heard all the excuses. You've heard all the stories. Some residents right now, due to the unemployment benefits and stuff that are going around, are making more money, especially the low rent markets. They're making more money than when they were working. But some of them are still trying to use the excuse that they need to not pay rent or whatever. The news kind of made it look like that. It made it look like people trying to collect rent are evil, bad, sick, or wrong. A lot of homeowners are just feeling guilty. Property managers are immune to guilt. Anne: That's because we've heard it all. Jason: We've heard it all. We heard all the stories, the excuses. You know how to help people. You know what programs are available because you guys are on top of this stuff. You guys aren't having trouble collecting the rent. In general, I haven't heard anyone in the single-family residential space or even multi-family having real trouble collecting rent. Rents have gone down just a little bit. You got people that most would have heard it's the same people that we're always troubled paying rent. We just couldn't evict them, but that's coming. Mike: Your coach needs to reach out to a professional manager. You see that, but he doesn't. Seminars, webinars, something. Jason: They don’t see the problem. That's the challenge I've always experienced in DoorGrow. I'm selling a solution to a problem that most people can't see. They can't see the leaks on their website. They can't see the challenges that their branding is hurting word of mouth. I have to educate people to see the problem. The same thing is what you're talking about. If you can create the gap and show the contrast between what challenges and problems they're dealing with and what they could be experiencing, what successes your clients are having, they're going to see this gap and that gap is what creates pain. People want to solve pain. People want a pain killer, not a vitamin. People will pay even more money to get out of pain. They want a solution, but they don't know a lot of them that there's a solution out there. I do think there is a massive opportunity. There's no scarcity in property management. There's no shortage of people that are in pain or have problems or challenges they are dealing with. Not only that, but I think property managers can hold their heads up high because good property managers, I really do believe as I said before, can change the world. There are millions of renters. Even here on my own property, I'm renting (I just moved to Austin), my kids were without a water heater for two weeks. The landlord sent out two different plumbers because he didn't like the feedback that the 13-year-old water heater should be replaced even though the pilot kept going out. I didn't even know my kids were taking cold showers because they got it before me and they can't get on Xbox until they take their showers, so they 're just doing it. All they're thinking about is can I get on the Xbox now? I'm like, yes, go ahead. But then my daughter's like, I haven't taken a shower in four days because the shower's freezing. I didn't know this and the younger ones, I went to them. That doesn't make sense because they've been taking their baths and their showers. I went to my son, Hudson, and I'm like, how's the shower been lately? He's like, cold. I'm like, what? Why didn't you tell me? Mike: It’s virtually a summer, right? Jason: Then I said to my daughter, she likes taking baths, you've been taking baths? She's like, Yeah. How are your baths been? She's like, they're really cold. I'm like, what? But you guys protect families. You guys also protect owners. You guys are like the middle person that makes everything okay and you take care of people. It lowers the pressure and noise. Property managers even do things like increasing the number of pets that families are able to have because you guys recognize that usually, it’s the kids that are causing more damage than the animals. [...] to get more rent because of pets. There are so many benefits to property management that positively impact families, homes, and lives. You guys are really the heroes of the rental industry. Property managers are the heroes of the rental industry. Mike: And unlike your property manager there that evidently has trouble with customer service. Jason: He's not the property manager, technically. He's just a landlord who doesn't want to do anything. Anne: You got a DIYer. Mike: Yeah, a DIYer. Anne: Sounds like a great lead. Mike: But that gets into the consideration of customer service. As property managers, we worried over the years about customer service to our owners but we haven't worried as much about customer service to our tenants. For retention and to continue to have tenants that want to refer people in, raising your level of customer service at this time specifically because I know I ordered something that didn't come and it was then delivered to Valentine, Nebraska instead of here where I am in Georgia, so I sent a response online and I got an auto-reply that says call this number. I call the number and it says we're too busy. We're not answering phones now. Just send an email. Customer service has failed specifically right now. Anne: I'll actually tell you something that we did on our property manager which I think has really impacted our renewals and we are getting increases in rent even now. Mike: On everyone. Anne: Let's just talk about it. Again, people pay for when they feel taken care of. One of the biggest gaps that we saw, this is probably two years ago, in our business was exactly what you're talking about. Tenant isn't taken care of, it's taking too long, the contractor is giving all kinds of excuses as to why they can't get there, tenant's going here, contractors going here. There's this big disconnect. Our virtual employee, Bonnie, is charged literally with every day every work order that comes in, she's calling the vendor and saying vendor, did you get it? Because we want to make sure it didn't get— Mike: Lost. You know how emails are. Anne: That's the first thing. Then the next day, she's calling the resident and saying resident, we assigned your work order to contractor B. Have you heard from him? Well, no. What happened? Jason: That's better than being ghosted and then eventually not having your calls answered, then eventually maybe getting a text or response half a week later. Anne: She says okay, you haven't heard from contractor B. Here's contractor B's information. We have already approved them to go out. Then she calls contractor B and she says contractor B, I heard that you haven't connected. Why haven't you connected? Oh, they haven't returned my call. Okay, I just got off the phone with them. They are available. Call them and they are expecting your call. She closes that loop, that hand-off because we assume contractor B is doing his job and we assume tenants are never wrong, they never change their phone numbers or anything else. Mike: Then the contractor goes out like he did to you and assesses the work. Many times there's not a follow-up, so what does Bonnie do then? Anne: Bonnie, as soon as she gets the date it was supposed to be scheduled from either the tenant or the contractor B, she follows up the next day and says my understanding is that contractor B was supposed to be there yesterday. Did they show up? Mike: Jason, did they take care of the water heater for you. Anne: Are you satisfied with the repair. Mike: And Jason says no. Anne: No, I still have… Now, we have another feedback loop. This is a maintenance process that we never could have done without having a virtual employee do this. It's too time-intensive and we have other work to be done. Mike: Then the flag goes up to tell the owner, owner, you got to provide hot water. You want an ACH or do you want us to loan you the money at an 18% rate? Anne: Yeah, put it on a credit card, however you want to do it. The reality for us is our tenant satisfaction has gone through the roof because we showed that we care, we're not letting it go, and literally, I as the broker get the list of not only what the outstanding work orders but where they are in the process and what she's done to move it forward. If we have a resident that we haven't been able to get in touch with, the contractor hasn't been able to, we have an escalation process. I don't manage, Bonnie manages. Again, total game-changer. Mike: The benefit out of all of that, we don't get pushed back when we're raising the rent. We started with our process in the middle of March. We do it in the middle of every month with notification of our rent increases and property. Most property managers that we know said you're crazy. We're either going to hold it. We'll tell them they don't have to pay an increase. We went out there and we got resistance from one tenant over the last, March, April, May, June. We got four months into our belt of increases and we have one pushback. Anne: Of course when you have rent increases, that increases our profitability, too. The owner makes a little bit more money, we make a little bit more money. It's still very reasonable. One of the things I'll say about rental rates is we don't do it arbitrarily. We do a full competitive market analysis. We make sure it's on the market. We don't raise all the way up to market if it's a significant jump, we'll do it at the average appreciation rate. Mike: We want to stay just below the top of the market. Anne: Correct because we don't want to give them a reason to leave. Mike: But we got happy tenants that don't want to leave. They go oh, I can't rent down the street for what I'm paying here because we always stay right below that. Jason: There's another hidden killer, too, I noticed in the scenario because when these vendors came to my property here and talked to me, they were basically bad-mouthing the landlord. They were like this guy is cheap. I've told them he needs to do this. In your scenario, the vendor is going to feel like they are getting taken care of. They are going to feel like they are on your team and on your side, and they are working with you, whereas these vendors feel more loyalty to me because they know the landlord isn't' doing the right thing. Anne: That goes back to having a contract with our contractor of standards of professionalism. Our vendors actually sign a document that says these are our expectations to be a vendor for us, and one of them is to not bad mouth as part of that. Mike: All these things combined, give us opportunities to shine. We get referrals every week. People come to us and say we hear great things about you as a property manager, and we're forward-thinking. We have opportunities there where we reach out to try to bring in business. Like what we're talking about earlier, a lot of the property managers are just sitting back. They are scared. They are afraid to do anything. That's the wrong thing to do. Anne: A lot of them are looking to bring on a BDM. Remember last year was the year of the BDM. Do you need a business development manager? Okay, maybe you do, maybe you don't. We tend to be our own. Mike: We are our BDMs. Anne: But again, we are high salary people like if you are paying somebody. Our time is very valuable, but we are seeing the smart property managers are supporting that sales effort through follow-up with the virtual employee, a virtual assistant that is literally a full-time doing this grinder follow-ups because we all know in sales—I don't care what industry you're in—you have to reach out seven, eight, ten times. Sometimes, property management specifically, it's pain point-related and some of the pain points only come up once a month. Some of the pain points come up once a year. Some of the pain points only come up periodically, so if you don't have a system to reach out to them, again it can't just be an email anymore. I think people are tired of tech, tech, tech. You need to have tech. You need to have a chatbox on your thing that's manned by a live person, in my opinion, but you also need that human-to-human automation. You need somebody that actually shows that they care a little bit about not only your company but the people involved. Having that sales support, a virtual employee to do that, really allows your BDM to be their most successful self and to do the things that they like to do. People don't realize that. BDMs don't want to do a whole lot of phone calling. They want to be in relationship management. If you can get them in front of the customer more times, if you can keep prospects warm and in the hopper so that when the prospect is ripe and ready, and your BDM can come and close, you are maximizing your ROI for that person. Mark: Yeah. They actually go to our website and ask for some of our tools or some of our information. It auto delivers but then they get a phone call, I want to make sure you got 21 questions or our technical information, and when they get that phone call, they're shocked. Anne: I'll tell you one other thing where people are going to have some issues. We all know about the Zillow. Zillow and they're charging for leads. That’s always been a hot topic. Zillow is rerouting leads. They're rerouting them to their call center in some areas, not to all areas, but into some. You don't have somebody actually calling those leads proactively when you get the email because even if you syndicate them, specifically if you syndicate them, you still get the email that says so and so is interested and they give you the phone number. But if the person proactively calls, Zillow is going to try to give them to people that are paying them, not necessarily to those of us who are syndications. If we're not actually outbound calling those leads as they come in, we are missing opportunities for tenants. This has been a big change probably in the last three weeks. This is fresh information that again if you don't have somebody in your office that has the time, energy, and effort to be calling in addition to responding back via email, you are missing an opportunity to get your properties rented. Again, we have literally five properties come on the market on June 5th, all but one are occupied now. That's how quick we are to get these things done because we have a dedicated resource and our virtual assistant. Literally, that is her only job to focus on. Jason: I want to touch on a couple of things you mentioned that you threw out that I think are important. One, you were talking about referrals. This is one of the number one ways to grow any business generally. I talked to a client I think yesterday, I was coaching a client and they were like our business is so great. We’re great. We got all this process dialed in and they said, but we're not getting any referrals. If a business is not getting any referrals, it's probably not as great as you think it is. Property managers have blind spots. We all do. For those listening, if you're not getting referrals, you got some customer care problems that are likely going on. You should be getting referrals. You should be getting referrals from your vendors. You should be getting referrals from your real estate friends. You should be getting referrals from your property management clients. You should be getting, maybe referrals from some of the vendors, but people should be talking about you. If they're not, there's some sort of blind spot that needs to be shored up. The other thing you mentioned (I think) is really smart. A lot of people, yes, they're like, I need a BDM. I need somebody to do sales, but they can't afford it. A lot of people can't just go out and afford to get some high-grade wonderful salesperson. But most business owners are not willing to also acknowledge that they are a part-time shitty salesperson. The time they're willing to dedicate or have sometimes is maybe an hour or two a day. That’s part-time. it's 10, maybe 15 hours a week, maybe they can dedicate up to 20 hours, but if you really want to grow and scale your business, there probably needs to be a little bit more time or you need just business being referred to you all the time, so it's super easy. One of the easiest hacks I implemented when I was a solopreneur and was doing all the sales, the web design, branding stuff, and everything myself, I got an assistant. I had that person operate as a sales assistant and an appointment setter. It immediately multiplied, not just doubled probably, but it multiplied my capacity to close deals. All I did was show up for appointments. I just met with people and sold. I wasn't doing any of the follow-ups. I was a solopreneur and my assistant was calling—she had a British accent—and saying hello, this is Helen, the assistant to the CEO Jason Hull of DoorGrow. He was wanting to get back together with you. It also set me in the mind of the prospect as something higher than maybe I actually looked like at the time being a solopreneur, sitting at home, trying to work in my living room. There's power in having a team. A lot of people say I can't afford to hire anybody. Maybe you just need somebody to start, just somebody that you can start with and they could be full-time or part-time, but they can start doing a piece of that thing that you need help with. They don't have to be able to do everything. Maybe it's the piece that you least enjoy. Maybe doing the follow-up, the cold calls, and whatnot. Anne: That's the great thing about virtual assistants and personal employees. You're looking at less than $20,000 a year for full-time dedicated help. That's a game-changer. You can't afford not to do that. I think that that's where people get sideways. Where we really help our clients in helping them define their staffing needs, and what's the best ROI for them to bring on board first. We’re talking about trends and the things that we see, but that's one of the services that we provide, helping them figure that out because sometimes it's like you said, sometimes this is a generalist. Somebody that can do a little bit of everything. Sometimes it's a sales support person. I know I need leads. Sometimes it’s accounting, sometimes it's leasing line, sometimes it's in marketing. A virtual assistant through HireSmart, because we're full-time, dedicated, and we specifically recruit for our clients. We don't have a room full of VAs that we go, here you go. I actually go and curate the contacts for you, and then I personally work with them for 40 hours afterward like that one-week job interview to make sure that they're amazing. Anybody that has hired and day two you're like, ugh, they just aren’t amazing. I take care of that for the clients. Mark: It frees up so much time. If it frees up 10 hours a week, how many deals can you close, how many new properties can you bring on in 10 hours? You invest maybe two hours where somebody else is making all the calls, set the appointments, you got that two hours invested. Your return on that is tremendous because you're going to make an offer that’s equivalent to $100, $200, $300 an hour for your investment of time. It goes back to, you've got to make those investments. You can't not hire now, you can't put your head in the sand or pull back in your shell and say, I'm going to do it myself. Especially if you're not happy doing it because if you're not happy, you're not going to get it done. Jason: Therefore, a lot of people that have been shifting to doing more themselves. I have to lay off team members now, I'm doing everything myself. Now I'm doing stuff that I don't even want to do. Let's touch on one thing that you just mentioned. I think this is really important for everybody listening to understand. I've seen this in hundreds of property management businesses and businesses in general, but one of the most painful or dangerous things I think a business owner can do is hiring the wrong person, the wrong role, spending the wrong money at the wrong time. A lot of people hire based on what they think the business needs instead of what they need in order to create more space and eliminate the number one bottleneck in the company, which is you the business owner, it's the entrepreneur. You taking the time to figure out what they actually need to get the best ROI is huge for them because they've seen lots of people, they hire the wrong person they didn't need. Now they're spending this money, or they just hired a bad person in general which not just cost them the money they spent on that person and the time they spent to get that person, but they're now losing money in secret places. I've had team members that stole from me. I've had team members that stole time. I've had team members delete and stuff after I fired them. These are problems that entrepreneurs learn painfully over time trying to build a team. A lot of property managers are in that first trap. They're the 50–60 door mark, they don't know how they can afford to hire that first person, and this is a solution for that. This is a very obvious solution for that. You can help them figure out who they really need right now and to take the next step forward, because if they spend the money on the right person, they make more money. It makes it easier. They then can reinvest. If they spend it on the wrong person, or the wrong tool, at the wrong time, it could be the right tool but it's at the right time, or they're getting software prematurely that they didn't really have to have at that point, or whatever it might be. If you spend money at the wrong time even though it might be the right tool for the future, you're hurting your ability to get to that future. Anne: I totally agree with that. Jason: Cash flow. If you run out of cash flow, the business dies. It’s like the Indiana Jones boulder rolling after you is the cash monster trying to get to you. If the boulder catches you, the business is game over. You’ve run out of money, run out of cash, you're dead. People started to feel that in March. You have to always be outpacing that boulder. If you spend, the boulder gets bigger and faster, but you can get faster if you spend it on the right people. Anne: One of the things I tell a lot of prospects that I'm talking to is most property managers (specifically) were never trained on how to hire or how to build teams. That’s not something we learn at school, it's only by trial and fire. A lot of property managers have fallen into it. Mark: There's not a hiring 301 class in college. Anne: One of the things that I tell them is, just like you're the expert in finding the right tenant for an owner because you've seen enough applications, you've gone through the process, you've done all that, you are the expert there, we’re the experts in hiring. I know I have a profile for hiring, I know what's successful, I know what's not successful. I save my clients from hundreds of hiring mistakes because it's not that they can't do it, a DIY landlord can do it, but they can't do it as well as a property manager. I say the same thing. You can hire. It’s going to take you more time, you don't have a process, you don't do it enough, I have done thousands. Just in the last six months alone, I have evaluated over 9000 applications. You say that gave me some data points. Jason: You know the BS, you know how to spot the scammers, you know which people are gaming the system, you know which people are feeding you a story, you know what questions need to be asked. In the Philippines, you got to ask about their internet connection. You got to, you can't just trust that they have one. You got to ask about where they're working. Where are you working at? Where are you working from? That was part of the thing that I really enjoyed working with you guys. I always look at everything through a certain filter, and I'm skeptical, and I want to see how I can help people. As I went through your process, I'm like, they do this. They already do this. This is stuff I've learned over a decade in my own painful experiences hiring in India, Bangladesh, Russia, the Philippines, Bolivia, and of course the US, which ultimately most of my team are in the US now. But I have Filipino team members. I can personally vouch for your hiring process making a lot of sense. It’s solid and it works really because it's very similar to my own. There are so many similarities. Okay, they've got this down, but you have some advantages. We talked about this in the previous episode. You guys should go listen to that where we talked about their processes and some stuff they do, but you have vetting, background checks, and stuff that people don't just have access to if they're just trying to DIY this. Mark: It’s like the difference, if you're getting married, you got the bride and the groom, and the bride wants a custom-made dress, not one off the rack. The groom really wants a tux that fits them. We are the custom dress, we are the custom tux for that couple versus walking into Neiman and pulling one off the shelves, this looks good, or getting a dress off the hanger and putting it on like, this almost fits, let's go get married. Jason: It looks like your dad handed you down a suit or something. Mark: Right. That’s the difference in what we do. We are custom for our client. We are not off the rack. Anne: Right, and outside of that is it takes time. It takes us 3–4 weeks to literally curate the right people. I always say if you need to hire somebody just the first person off the street, good luck. Jason: You guys are bespoke. It’s bespoke hiring. Anne: We have a guarantee and all of those things, and we can back up what we're saying. But again, if you're trying to grow your property management business right now, you need to look at your staff. Here’s the other thing. Not all staff members are coming back. You may think they're coming back. They're not coming back. You’ve got to look at who are your top liners? Who are the ones that you’ve got to keep? You need to be investing in a relationship with those people first of all. If you're not talking to them on a regular basis, if you're not feeding them, if you're not taking care of them, you need to take care of them now. Who’s part of your med tier? The kind of people that are like, if they come back, great. If they don’t, what's the impact that’s going to happen? What are the people that you really know you just need to not have come back, and you need to deal with that pretty quickly. Mark: For our best person, we got a VA to assist that person so that they can do even better at the best that they were. That’s the important thing that people need to take away from changes that are coming out of COVID. It’s supporting your staff and letting them work at the highest and best use. Maybe that's taking away some of those phone calls and emails by hiring an assistant for them and to give you the opportunity to grow. It’s an assistant to you for the business development to make those calls and to set up those appointments, so that you can just close. Doing those things is the job that Anne enjoys so much is finding the individual to match. What does Jason need exactly? Even though Jason doesn't know exactly, she'll draw that out of you, and I'm just picking on you on that. Anne: That’s a puzzle for me. There's nothing better than when I see my clients six months in, years in, we have our clients for five years now and seeing them and they’d say, Mitch has been the best thing ever in my company. She's really allowed me to be amazing and do what I want to do. Literally, these are comments that we get when we survey our clients. It has been a game-changer. If you're open and able to change. I don't know how much time we have, but there are a couple of things that you need to look at, regardless of whether you use virtual assistants, employees, or whether you are looking at that which are some of the challenges that come from working with a remote team, because remember, even if you're planning to go back to an office, your staff is going to want to have more flexibility. Let’s just call it what it is. Not everybody wants to commute anymore. There are some that miss being in that environment, there's a lot of guys that are like… Mark: We’re happier. Jason: Yeah, why should I spend time commuting? Why should I spend time driving to this? I think there are a lot fewer people doing face-to-face appointments, and they'll just do it through Zoom or they'll do it through Google Hangouts, Meet, or whatever. Anne: Whatever works. What we're finding is it is truly illuminating management problems. It’s illuminating communication problems. If you had a communication problem in the office, now you have a tremendous communication breakdown outside of the office. Mark: If you have an operations failure in the office, boy, the failures are even bigger. Anne: As managers, we need to look at what tools do we have on our tool belt. We help our clients with some of that because we understand years ago that we needed to equip our people to be good at this so that they would keep our people. Mark: It is in software, it’s tools, it’s technology. There's a lot of different pieces that go into that. Anne: Looking at your management style and we like to manage personally using key performance indicators (KPIs) because that takes [...] work out of it. I don’t have to worry if they're working eight hours as long as the KPIs are done and they can get their job done in six, I'm happy to pay them for eight and let them do what they want to do, as long as my stuff’s getting done to a level that I expected. That's the easy button for management, if you don't know about key performance indicators, I certainly encourage you to learn what that is, and how to do that, but it’s one of the things that we teach our clients to do very easily. There are some easy methodologies to do that, but we are seeing some communication breakdowns from people that don't use us. We’re seeing some issues with management. The manager that was the nice guy, that was able to get people rah-rah-rah in the office because she was able to see them, that’s now changed. Now, work is starting to do great. Mark: They can't hide behind the curtain. Anne: They can't hide behind that personality anymore because work’s not getting done. That’s one cautionary tale that I will throw out to your listeners. Jason: Results don’t lie. Anne: They don’t, but it’s difficult to have conversations if you don't have data, and a lot of times, people don't want to track data because they think it's too difficult. We teach our clients how to do it very simply, very easily, and very quickly. That's the other thing. You’ve got to be able to get feedback daily to keep on top of it. If you wait for weeks or months, you are now in this huge hole of garbage that is very difficult to get out of. Make sense? Jason: Makes sense. It's been awesome having you here on the show. Maybe we can take just a few minutes, let's talk about some opportunities right now and ways you think property managers have an opportunity to grow after COVID. We’ve touched on maybe doing webinars, I think you threw out there, the Airbnb. I think I have one client that added 24 doors in a month just from former Airbnbs by cold calling them and reaching out. Obviously, you got to convince them probably to get the furniture out of the place, and make sure that these are good opportunities to manage, and that it’s going to rent effectively compared to what they're paying because some of them were making a lot of money. Mark: They were. You can offer a turnkey for that. I know you've got furniture and all, I'll take care of making the donation, or I'll get the local company that buys furniture and resells it. I don't know if there's a market for that right now, but I'll get it picked up by Salvation Army or the kidney people, and you'll get the receipt. I'll take care of all of that and make it easy for you to let me manage your property long-term. The property managers that think that way are the ones that will be successful. We’ve been seeing that happen in Airbnb and a lot of them are coming back out of service. Anne: One of the things we always recommend when we're consulting with clients just in general is know your avatar. If you're a short-term rental person and that’s your avatar, then you need to create a different marketing strategy around that, like how are you going to deal with that. If your avatar is long-term rentals and you want to gain business by going after short-term to convert them to long-term like Mark said, have a package, have a system, get your relationships put together. Right now interestingly enough, we have investors that are scared to death and are selling, and we have investors that are super excited and are buying. Mark: [...] sales transaction. Though the property manager doesn't have a sales component in their business, they need to have an alignment with the referral program to somebody that does sales. I mean I'm selling two houses a month this year. Anne: Without trying, without marketing. Mark: Yeah, these are my investors. They just say I want to sell, and I’ll say I want to make the commission. No problem. Anne: It's about having a strategy, being able to implement that strategy. and figuring out what are the resources that you need to create that strategy. We think using virtual employees and virtual assistants is a great way to maximize all of that because right now, it is kind of intense. If you're going to do research for short-term rentals, there's not a database you can necessarily easily pull from. You’ve got to go search for them, talk to them. Having that marketing strategy based on what it is that you want to do, having a value proposition that speaks to the pain that the person is dealing with, all are very important. Having a website that actually can capture those leads and make you look professional which is what you guys do is also part of that. You have this well-rounded marketing plan. Mark: We have our VA do all the research. Maybe it’s calling everybody that's on Craigslist or ads out there and saying, you may be tired of being a manager, you should go to this webinar we have coming up. It’s how to be a better manager and how to deal with the current [...]. We can do all those invitations to get people into our webinars that are going to show them they don't need to be doing this anymore. There's a lot of different ways that property managers can grow their business right now, but they need to think smart and make those investments. Anne: And HireSmart. Jason: And they need to HireSmart. Awesome. It's great to see you guys again. I'm glad you guys are doing well there over near Atlanta. Keep me apprised as to your next idea. Anne: We always have them. Jason: You always have them. That’s as crazy entrepreneurs. We always are coming up with new stuff. I'll let you guys go and I appreciate you guys coming on. Your website is? Anne: www.hiresmartvas.com Jason: All right. Thanks, Mark, thanks, Anne. Mark: Thank you very much. Anne: Welcome. Thank you, Jason. We appreciate you. Jason: Awesome to have them on. If you are a property management entrepreneur, and you're wanting to add doors, and you're wanting to build a business that you actually enjoy, that you love, that is built around you, this is what we do at DoorGrow. Reach out, I guarantee that we’re going to make your business better in some way, shape, or form, and you're going to love it. Even if you feel like you hate it now, maybe you're thinking you want out of it, you're feeling like it’s uncomfortable, you're probably just doing the wrong things in that business, and you may need some VAs that might be a solution for sure. We can help clean up the frontend of your business and help you get the business in alignment with you. Reach out, check us out at doorgrow.com, and make sure you join our Facebook group. We've got an awesome community there, and people that are helpers, that are givers, and you can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com. Mark and Anne are in that group. We've got lots of other really cool property management entrepreneurs that are willing to contribute and help you out. Until next time everyone. To our mutual growth. Bye, everybody. 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’ve learned and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life. April Fools Day is coming. Prank your friends opening a never ending fake update screen on their computer. Sit back and watch their reaction.

I sat down with world-renowned vegan chef and author Jason Wyrick who has co-authored a NY Times Bestseller "21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart" as well as the book "Powerfoods for the Brain" with Dr. Neal Barnard, MD. Other books he has written are "Vegan Tacos" and "Vegan Mexico". He was the food editor for "Living the Farm Sanctuary Life" with Gene Baur and Gene Stone. He's a coauthor of "Clean Protein" with Kathy Freston and Bruce Friedrich. Jason has published the world's first vegan food magazine, The Vegan Culinary Experience which is now defunct and has been featured in the NY Times, the LA Times, VegNews, and Vegetarian Times. He has traveled the world teaching cooking classes and is the first vegan instructor to teach in the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu program. We talk about being vegan, health benefits, dairy, cheese, his home delivery service of amazing vegan food called The Vegan Taste and his restaurant Casa Terra. Jason gives us such a great insight of his progression of eating like most of the population to becoming a vegetarian and finally a full out vegan. It was such an honor for me, to have such a celebrated chef and author on my show. Because I've eaten his food, this conversation had so much more of a meaning due to my various attempts of being vegan myself. I hope you enjoy this conversation and the knowledge Jason shares with us all from his heart. Jason Wyrick: Vegan Food Delivery Service: The Vegan Taste Vegan Restaurant: Casa Terra Co-authored a NY Times Bestseller: "21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart" and "Powerfoods for the Brain" with Dr. Neal Barnard, MD. Other books he has written are "Vegan Tacos" and "Vegan Mexico"He was the food editor for "Living the Farm Sanctuary Life" with Gene Baur and Gene Stone. He's a coauthor of "Clean Protein" with Kathy Freston and Bruce Friedrich. Connect with Jason: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/thevegantaste/videos Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jason.wyrick.5 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casaterrarestaurant Twitter: https://twitter.com/VeganChefJason https://youtu.be/6jzSCBvX7PA ********** Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass ********** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Subscribe, Rate & Review:I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Follow Joe: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcostelloglobal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcostelloglobal/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcostelloglobal/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZsrJsf8-1dS6ddAa9Sr1Q?view_as=subscriber Transcript Jason Wyrick: Joe: All right, welcome, Chef Jason Wyrick, this has been a long time coming for me. I have looked forward to interviewing you the moment I tasted the food that was delivered to my house. So here we are and I'm so excited to have you on the podcast and I really appreciate the time and you actually saying yes to me, so thank you so much and welcome! Jason: Well, you're welcome, I appreciate you having me on here. Joe: Yeah man this is a, the way this came about for me was I got a flyer in the mail and it was one of those things like come to this free, healthy dinner to hear some, I don't know, some sort of talk about healthy eating and nutrition. And it happened to be from a nutritionist, a company in town, like an office in town. And I went and then I, I got pulled into it, you know. The food we had was great, but it wasn't necessarily vegan, it was just healthy. But then when I got into the program, which was not cheap by the way, but I felt I was worth it. They started to say, you know, do all this blood work and then we found out my, I knew my cholesterol is always a little high. So their program is doing vegan for 30 days on their menu. And then from there, you, you know, you the hope is you stay with it or you alter it a little bit or whatever, so that's how I got into this. And the problem for me was I literally was so busy I did not have the time to prep my food. It was taking me like half days on Saturdays, half days on Sundays. And I was like, my weekend is shot and I've prepped all this food and, and I, you know, any small amount of time I had was gone. So then I really went on the hunt for trying to find healthy vegan food that I could just literally eat and not do anything with. I had already done, I think I did Sun Basket a while back. You know, all the food prep things that you know Jason: Right. Joe: of and we talk about. So that's how you and I got connected. I, I don't even know how I ended up finding you. I say it was just purely, I was so desperate doing a Google search and I found you and I was like, SOLD! You mean I can just heat it and eat it, right? That's that's your thing, it's just heart and eat. So here we are. So I want to start from wherever you want to start. I know that this was a health thing for you in combination of other things. But knowing the stories that I've read and interviews I've seen of you, that this came about more for a health reason initially for you. And then it just blew up from there and and it became your passion, which is really cool to me, because this is what I preach on this show and on my videos, is that I want people to live or fulfilled lives doing what they love. And it's cool that you went into that direction knowing some of your past, which you can talk about om how this all started for you. So take Jason: I'm Joe: It away! Jason: Sure it was a kind of a winding journey, I think I mean, it, it seems kind of straightforward when you look at it. I was unhealthy, I went vegan, I got my health back. Hurray! But that's, that's really not how it started, I mean. It's starts when I'm a little kid because, I think I didn't eat great, but I didn't eat bad for the kind of regular American diet. Which meant, you know, my mom cooked some of the meals and occasionally ordered out and I played sports all the time, I was always active. So I was a super healthy rail thin kid. And then as I got older, towards the end of high school and in college, I kept eating the same way I had been eating the last few years and last few years had changed because my mom went to work, she got busier and so our food choices changed to, "What, which one of these seven different chicken dishes do you want tonight that I know how to make? or would you like Taco Bell or Burger King or Pizza Hut or something like that?" So when I stopped playing sports all the time and was super active, the calorie and taken and honestly, like the terrible food I was eating, started to catch up with me. And so I, I probably put on 30 pounds from when I was 16 to probably 19 and just kept going up about 10 pounds a year from there. Jason: So I was already getting overweight. And then right at the end to college, I started learning how to cook. So I went to, I went to this really great Egyptian restaurant in Fort Worth where I went to college, had the ah this amazing meal with the first amazing meal I'd ever had. And I was like, "I want to learn how to eat like this!" And I'm broke because I'm in college. So I started to learn how to cook for myself. And then right after that, it was like two months after that, I went vegetarian and that was solely for ethical reasons. No real idea of the health impact or anything like that, that it has. I didn't care at the time, I was just going to keep eating food that was super tasty and not worry about the health part. So, of course, even going vegetarian, a couple gaining weight. In fact, I was kind of a stupid vegetarian, I'll just be blunt about it. I took the meat I was eating and I replaced it with blocks of cheese. So instead of these instead of like these super fatty steak fajitas loaded with sour cream and cheese that I was eating before. Now I was eating cheese lover's pizza from Pizza Hut and the additional topping was extra cheese. Exactly! [laughter] Joe: [laughter] Jason: And that was that was my dinner. I was with someone at the time, she had her own pizza. It was it was terrible. And so I became incredibly overweight. I weighed about 330 pounds and I got type two diabetes by the time I was in my mid 20s. And I was, I was faced with having to take insulin for the rest of my life and in basically starting to deteriorate even more. Like I was already deteriorating, my eyesight sucked, sleeping 10 to 12 hours a day. Everything you can think of with Type two diabetes was going wrong with me. So I was facing having to take medication and deteriorate for the rest of my life, which was probably not going to be that long at this point or changed my diet. And so it's, it's funny because I was, I've been vegetarian for five years and I had, I had heard of vegans, but I didn't really know what they were. And I even made fun of it a little bit.[laughter] Joe: Right. Right. Jason: This was back in the late 90s. And then all of a sudden it's 2001 and I'm faced with having to make this choice, do I do I give up this food that I love, which is cheese, and live a better life or just keep going with the cheese and and it's funny because even though it it sounds like a no brainer, like eat cheese and die or give up cheese and regain your health. I mean, it sounds like an obvious choice, but there is so much there's so much pain involved in a lifestyle change, that the stress of that was really bad in itself and, and going vegan in 2001 when really no one else around me was, was vegan. It meant I had to learn how to cook, I had to learn how to fend for myself, I had to completely change all these foods that I knew how to make and eat when I was growing up. And so it was super stressful at first. And so I relaxed a little bit and decided I was going to give myself a cheat day. So I was going to be a cheating vegan once a week. So every Wednesday night I'd go out and I get all you can eat enchiladas at my favorite Mexican restaurant and they bring them out in pairs they'll bring you two enchiladas at a time. And the first time I went in there, the waiter was like, "OK, yeah, whatever, it cool! He brings out enchiladas, except I eat 14 of them. Joe: Oh, my gosh. Jason: And then they come back the next week and all of a sudden the waiter's like, "Hmmmmm" because I need another 14 enchiladas. So by the third week, the waiters like "I hate you but I have to serve you anyway." Joe: You're like the, you're like that all you can eat buffet, crab, Jason: Right. [laughter] Joe: Leg guy. [laughter] Jason: It's it's probably familial in some way because I know my, my little brother would go to a Mongolian stir fry places and he take the bowl and see how much he could pack in the bowl because it was one pass through. And so he'd, he'd have the regular bowl and it only come up like three inches and then there was like the six inch pile of stuff on top Joe: Oh, Jason: Of the. [laughter] Joe: My gosh. It's. Jason: So there must be something familial about that, that buffet all you can eat thing. I, so I, but anyway, the point is, I, I did that for a few months and even then I managed to start losing weight and my symptoms went away. So I'd be vegan for the entire week, except for this one, one rather egregious cheat meal but it was still just one meal. And then it went to once every other week when I would go to this place. And then once a month. And then I remember the last time I purposely had went to this place in order cheese that I order in the enchiladas and I, it was a weird experience because I looked at them and I realized they didn't taste good to me anymore. They didn't have that, that feeling you get when you cheese that Homer Simpson like, "dooonnuuttt" like when you eat dairy, so I didn't have that anymore. They didn't taste good and I realized I was ordering them out of habit and not because I actually wanted them. So I didn't even eat the enchiladas, I pushed them away, paid the waiter, who probably sighed relief Joe: Right. Jason: that I was getting had their there and that was the last time I ever stepped foot in that place. And at that point, I was a full on vegan, which took me about eight months. And it also coincided with me completely getting rid of diabetes. Jason: And Joe: Incredible! Jason: After the first year, I dropped about 60 pounds and then when I added in some real exercise, I dropped another 60, so I dropped about 120 pounds over two years. Joe: That's incredible. And I think Jason: Yeah. Joe: What people need to understand about you, you're a big guy. Like I know Jason: Yeah. Joe: from the interviews and stuff, 6' 3", right? Yeah, I mean, that's you know, and and I think at one point you said you, you went to school and lived in San Antonio...Fort Worth, sorry. So you're like in steak town. Jason: Yeah, I mean, Joe: Right. Jason: The nickname of Fort Worth is Cowtown. Joe: Yeah, ok, so there you go! Yeah, so that must, the be, that must be hard. It's just the stigmatism with, you know, vegan and yoga and all of those kind Jason: Ok. Joe: Of things. Right. It's tough. Jason: It depends. OK, it was weird because Texas is really interesting. I mean, I grew up here in Arizona but my dad is Texan. And so I was already pretty familiar with Texas before I actually moved there for school and stayed there afterwards. And Texas has this reputation of being big and boisterous and rednecky and it is. But it also has has this huge liberal side and has this huge health side, has this huge vegan side to it. I mean, I remember when I was in college, I went to the Texas Vegetarian Chili Cookoff. And this was in the mid 90s and it was like this huge gathering of people from all over Texas doing this Chili Cookoff. Like Texas had one of the biggest vegetarian societies in the 90s, at least when I was there participating in that stuff. And so Texas is just this really cool mix of all these different things, religion and Atheism and big hair money and rebel activists and steak eaters and vegans and no one is quiet about it. Maybe that's the one thing about Texans is, you know, everybody kind of gets by in the big city but they're, they're friendly but boisterous about that stuff, which makes it really cool. Anyway, that's my tangent on Texas. Joe: No, but that's great, because it's exactly you, you saying that is exactly how it educates people to know that it's not just big hats and boisterous voices and steak and whatever, it's, I had no idea that you would think that long ago people were vegan in the state of Texas. Jason: I mean, I think, I think Fort Worth had one of the first vegan restaurants in the country, which was Spiral Diner that opened up in 2001. Joe: Yes, I don't think anybody would ever know that. So that's, that's cool. So the tangent was great. OK, so you are, this is what year now that you go full vegan? Jason: So that was the, I started the beginning in 2001 and then I was full vegan by the end of 2001. Joe: Got it. Jason: And I think, I think I might be more like a lot of other people with this, like I've, you know, I've written books with a lot of the vegan doctors and usually their message is that's all or nothing proposition. You go from zero to 60. And from a physiological standpoint, you're going to regain your health really fast that way. But if you're miserable doing it, chances are you're going to quit out. And so I think for a lot of people transitioning, as long as they have it in their mind that it is a transition, it makes it easier for people. So that's that's what I did. It took me it took me about eight months to fully transition over. And I tried to zero to 60 approach for Joe: Right. Jason: three weeks, and it, I was miserable. Joe: Yeah, and for me, the 30 day thing I did not find hard, the part I found hard about it was the meal prep and that's literally what was difficult for me. And I even heard you in some other interviews, the good thing that we have going for us these days is that it's, it's much more accepted in the world. And when you go out to a restaurant, there are options that would have never been there 10 years ago. Jason: Yeah, there are plenty of options, Joe: Right. Jason: Which has made it an interesting landscape for vegan businesses. Because I think in the past, vegan's gravitated towards vegan businesses because that was their only choice. And now at least in the Phoenix area, vegan businesses are just one amongst a bunch of other vegan options. Joe: Right, but I think the key and the reason I was so excited to have you on is what helped me get through the, the, the next 30 days that they asked me to do because they could see that my cholesterol was dropping. So Jason: Great! Joe: They were like, will you, "Are you willing to buy into doing it another 30 days? And towards the middle or end of the first, as I think when I came across your website and then it was easier for me to say yes, because I literally just could not afford the time to prep. Jason: Right. Right. Joe: But but besides that, the biggest thing for me was the taste. And I don't know, like this could be a trademark or something that I'm saying, but I didn't know vegan food could taste so good, and you can still Jason: No it's true, Joe: if you want. If it's not taken by somebody, it's all yours. But, yeah, that's what it was for me, man. When I first dug into it and the way I worked with you was that I wanted it spicy, which you were all down for. I think even when I, I got from my doctor what I needed to do, he said, OK, well, if you're gonna get this food from The Vegan Taste, just make sure, ask them if it's low and oil, right?. And it so... Joe: It everything was a yes. Like all, you know, that was when I wrote to you, Yes, you know, it's either low or minimal oil or no oil. And I can get it the way I like it, so you made it spicy, which is the way you said you liked it in email. Jason: Right. Joe: So it was like the perfect marriage. I was like sold! Jason: Yeah, I think that's, that's the key to getting people to make a change. It's about honestly, I think it's like about the in the environment that you put people in. So I know Dan Buettner, who wrote the Blue Zones by it. And one of the things that he told me that really impacted the way I thought about food and getting food to people and the way we treat people, is that the the biggest determinant for someone making choices that let them live a long time was not their willpower, was not a doctor's prescription or anything like that, it was the environment in which they lived. And so if the choices were easy to make, to go out and exercise, statistically speaking, more people would go out and exercise...that way. And so to me, food is part of the environment that you're in. And so the easier I can make it on someone to make a better choice for themselves, the bigger chance they are they're going to have to actually make that choice. And so for me, that's putting ready to eat meals in front of someone that's going to make them happy. Joe: Yeah. Jason: The less you have to worry about it, the easier it is for you to be healthy. Joe: Yeah, it's it was so nice to find the website. It was that, I could hear that sound when the heavens open, I was like "Thank you!". It's the only thing that's gonna keep me on track. Now, you know, before, before we get too deep into this, I'm not full vegan. Since doing nutrition program, I've cut out a lot of, like I would use, I would snack before dinner. I'd be so hungry I'd come home at four o'clock, whatever, and I'd pull out the the block of cheddar cheese and some Triscuits and, you know, just take the edge off. I, I stopped doing that a lot more than I use, you know, it's, it's cut way back to almost minimal, you know, to none. I don't drink, I used to drink half and half of my coffee and now all I use is either oat milk or almond milk. So I've completely switched over to that type of stuff. So while we're on the subject of, of, you know, how this has helped you, why do you think dairy is so bad? Is it just that it's like, was it not meant to be eaten or drank? Is it just like we've created this product that should not have existed? Jason: I think so. I mean, dairy's primary uses to grow a baby. And so you're you're consuming something that's meant to grow another being and as, as adults, we're not, I don't think we're supposed to be consuming foods that are continue endlessly making us grow to that scale. Like I have a five year old daughter, I watch how much she eats and sometimes as much as I do, because she, she's always out there running around and she's, like I look at her in a week later, she's taller and I'm like, oh, my God! And so calorically dense foods are good for her, I mean, that's why human mothers breastfeed and you know, all this other stuff. But then when you stop growing and you keep eating those foods, you're consuming growth hormone and all this other stuff that I don't think we're meant to be consuming. And then, you know, there are a couple other issues that go with it, which it turns out casein, which is the protein in milk seems to be carcinogenic, even, even in that milks appropriate species after their weaning, it seems it seems like the incidence of cancer goes up in that species if they continue to consume milk even from their own species after they're supposed to stop drinking it. And then, I mean, look at us where we're drinking stuff that's meant to grow a baby cow into this big monster cow compared to humans I mean a cow is pretty heavy. Jason: So, you know, there's, there's that it's, it's loaded with fat and it's all if you have cheese, it's all condensed down into this calorically dense product with all these other, all these other ingredients into it that are probably not meant for us to just get fuel. And it's all like if you take milk, milk is this big volume, take cheese and it comes down to  this little thing, all that condensed down. It's like a black hole of food. And then you're you're eating that, so, of course, no wonder you're you're getting fat, you're having arteriosclerosis as you age and all these other problems. So that's why I think the health problem is with dairy. From, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's was a good thing because you could have this nutrient dense food even in times of famine. That's, that was one of the benefits of cheese because cheese was basically shelf stable in a long period of human history when we didn't really have very many shelf stable foods, the same way that after a fashion beer, a shelf stable, just one of the reasons that beer was traded there and there are all these ways to preserve foods during times of famine and we just don't live in that anymore. Joe: Right. So on the dairy part of this, what I guess people have a hard time thinking of how they would substitute a cheese for these recipes, and I know that in you know, you have this enchilada recipe and you, there's I mean, you have a ton of different recipes. What are just some off the top of your head, some substitutes that you do use for cheese? Like, how would someone make a pizza? What would they put on it as their cheese? Jason: You know, it depends. There are a lot of nondairy commercial cheeses out there. I think from a health standpoint, they're good insofar as you're not getting casein and all these hormones that go with it, but I can't pretend that they are health food. Joe: Right. Jason: I mean, it's base, it's like cheese is solidified fat when it's dairy and the non vegan cheeses are still a solidified fat. They just have all the other junk that goes with them. So, you know, if you if you limit that look, if you're going to have a pizza and you have it once a week and you put some vegan cheese that's made out of almonds or cashews or something like that on it, you're going to be OK. If you do that every single day, you're not going to be so OK anymore. You can still be a junk food vegan. In fact, it's easier now to be a junk food vegan than it is to be a healthy vegan, because you can run over to Carl's Jr. and get a Beyond burger, that's, you know, still loaded up with all this fat and it's still a burger where as when I went vegan almost 20 years ago, if I was craving a burger, I had to make it myself. Joe: All right. Yeah, I mean, the creativity Jason: So that's. Joe: That, that you have to come up with for these recipes must be daunting. Jason: I sometimes, but only because when I do a lot of recipes, Joe: Right. Jason: I mean most, most chefs at a restaurant might do 30 recipes throughout the year. If they're really pushing themselves. I think with the delivery service, we're doing 300. Joe: WOW! Jason: Every, every year, at each year, it's different too. Joe: Ok. So you're rotating 300 recipes a year from The Vegan Taste. Jason: And we're just making about as we cook every week. Joe: It's amazing! Jason: Yeah, it's, it's, it's daunting, but it's cool. Joe: Yeah, it's. Jason: Yeah, I mean, and like back to the cheese thing, sometimes it's replacing that, that fatty mouthful, mouthfeel that cheese gives you so you can even use something like an avocado or you can use, what are my favorites is this thing called pipián verde, which is just this ah pepitas and tomatillo puree. It's it's a classic Mexican dip and I'll just use that on enchiladas or we'll make our own cheese at the restaurant, sometimes we'll make it just out of almonds and some other ingredients and we'll make our own queso fresco like that and we make our own mozzarellas and stuff. That's a little laborious, I think, for the for the home cook, it's just getting that, that creamy texture which you can get from nuts and seeds. Joe: Right. Yeah. Because even on the recipes at Casa Terra, your restaurant, I saw that there was I think you have is it brick oven pizzas or just... Jason: Yeah, Joe: Or Jason: We have worked fire Joe: Wood Jason: With Joe: Fire. Jason: Fire pizzas Joe: Right. Sorry. Wood fire. Yeah. And so and I did see one of the recipes are one of the descriptions of the you know, the pizza said mozzarella. So I was like, OK, how does he doing that? Jason: Right. It's just a, when you get to that type of cheese, that's it's a little time consuming and it's a mix of art and chemistry. Joe: Yup. It's just it's incredible. So I know we just kind of skipped over it a little bit but we talked about your daughter and, and I and I know we talked about, we didn't quite say that she's vegan, but I know that she is from based on my research about you. And I know it's tough with kids these days with all of the gluten allergies and, and everything that's going on that or used to be a lot tougher. Now, its parents are more aware there are more options and I would think that it's almost the same thing with your daughter as it is with a child that has a gluten allergy. When they go to a house for a birthday party and let's just go back to using pizza as a example, because that's how I grew up, right? That your parents would buy a bunch of pizzas, and... What does she do in that case? Or how how do you let the parents know that she's vegan and that, you know, that isn't something she would (A.) like to eat or (B.) she shouldn't eat or (C.) it might make her sick of she eats because she's not used to eating cheese. Jason: We just we tell them and ask them not to make a big deal out of it. And then we make sure our daughter has food that totally owns everybody else's. Joe: Perfect. Jason: I Joe: That's awesome! Jason: When she was in school before COVID hit, the teachers were asking if we could bring stuff for them. Joe: That is so funny. I can imagine, no I, listen, I know what it smells and tastes like. Every kid we sit there with, their pizza from Dominos going, WWO!, what are you eating? I'll trade you, I'll trade you two slices for that, that's perfect. Well good, she's totally vegan incorrect? That's amazing. So you, what is the Vcology project? Is that how you say it? Vcology Project? Jason: Vcology. Joe: Vcology. So. Jason: It's pretty much the umbrella for all the stuff that I do. Joe: That's what I thought, I just wanted to make sure. And I, because I know that you spoke about The Vegan Taste, which is the home delivery food service, Casa Terra, which is the restaurant out in Glendale, Arizona. And then I heard you speak about other things potentially coming down down the road, so I assumed that that was the umbrella where all of these things would fall under. Jason: Yeah, I mean, we're working on commercializing our cheeses on a large scale. We've already had one big vegan restaurant chain express some interest in it, which was really cool, it came out of the blue. But that was, that was a nice surprise. And Joe: Yeah. Jason: And we just want to roll out really high quality vegan cheeses onto the, onto the food service market and then retail, if we can. Joe: That's great. Jason: But if I can. I mean, if I can get, like some of the best restaurants in Phoenix using high quality of vegan cheeses, all of a sudden it opens up really great menu options for vegans around the entire town. Joe: Right. And I Jason: And Joe: Was Jason: I Joe: Thinking Jason: Think Joe: Good Jason: Go ahead. Joe: While I was sitting Jason: I think. Joe: On the dairy part of it, and I didn't even know that this underlying thing about the cheese had a broader scope or what was happening. I just I kind of chose the one thing that I know, like you, you know, it's like, how do you have ravioli? How do you have a pizza? How do you, if you you're so used to having half and half in your coffee, how do you make the move away from dairy? And I think that's, I think that's harder almost than the meat part of this or that Jason: It's way Joe: Or the Jason: Harder. Joe: Protein part of it. Right. Jason: I didn't know why until Dr. Barnard told me a few years ago that the casein in cheese is called the casomorphin and that basically means that acts like morphine. It acts like an opiate in your system. And I was like, "That makes sense!!", because one day I just gave up meat and it was like, whatever but when I gave up cheese, I had withdrawal symptoms. I was jonesing, I mean, like the hands were shaking and I had headaches and I was irritable and everything else that I had heard from people that were trying to give up cigarettes or drugs or something like that, I was going through and I'm like, "What the hell is going on?" That was, that was one way where I knew, like, I've really gotta get off this stuff, because Joe: All right. Jason: If I'm having that reaction, this is probably pretty bad for me. But it was a few years later when he told me why. And so Joe: That's Jason: Anyway, Joe: It. Jason: I think that's why cheese is so hard. Joe: That's incredible. How did the two of you get connected for that book? Your book? I wrote it down. I'm going to have it in the show Jason: Sure. Joe: Notes. Jason: The "21-day Weight Loss kickstart". So he was coming through town to do a talk and they wanted someone to do a cooking demo and I was the only one in Phoenix, doing this kind of stuff, so I just volunteered to do it. They were gonna pay me and I was like, don't worry about it, I'll just I'll just do it. And so we became friends through that and then I started teaching the cancer project classes here in Phoenix for a few years, which later became their Food for Life program. And, and during that, I just developed tons of recipes every single week. Because I think back then they were kind of in the same boat that a lot of healthy, healthy doctors are in, we're like, they're like, you have to change your diet. Here's how you do it. But they're not really experts at the here's how you do part. Joe: Right. Jason: And so, you know, their recipes were easy to do, but they weren't necessarily great. They were just like, "Ahhh". And so during that class, I just continuously develop stuff that was usually easy to make, but also really spectacular. And then because of that, we just wrote the book together. Joe: And that's really cool. It's just amazing how things, you know, you can make these connections and they just turn into something amazing like that, so, yeah. I'm trying not to skip around, there's so many things I have to ask you, I have so many notes, it's like this is, like I said, I, I was doing the meals for when I was doing the 30 day thing, basically for lunch and dinner. And then I started to do them just for lunch because my partner, Jo Ellen, we were like we were eating separate times, separate things at dinner, it felt like it wasn't this Jason: Right. Joe: Community. Jason: You loose the social part. Joe: Yeah, and so it's this balance for me. But so I thought at least at a bare minimum, and I think this is one thing that we talk about stepping stones and doing this in stages, is that it's worth at least trying to say to yourself, OK, "I'm going to eat vegan for lunch", just take a meal of the Jason: Right. Joe: day and say, this is what I'm going to do. And literally, breakfast is super easy because for me, it's, it's like a vegan smoothie, right? There's nothing and so I don't have to worry about that. It's not sausage, an egg and bacon and all this other stuff. So then you handle the vegan lunch part and you're already better than probably seventy five percent of the world in regards to how healthy you're eating. Jason: That's Joe: And Jason: What Joe: Then. Jason: I think. Joe: Right and then you just. So and that's kind of the approach I took. I don't know yet, just being honest with you, if I can completely eliminate that occasional steak or burger or Jason: Right. Joe: And I'm sure I can at some point, like for me, like you, I, I refuse to go on medication. So I'm 58 years old and I'm like, I'm not going on cholesterol medication. I don't take anything for high blood pressure. I'm not going to do any of that stuff. So if it's a, if it's food, it's going to make the difference, then that's the difference that I'll make. Go into the gym five days a week is already easy for me. But if I have to do that and get rid of the burgers and the steaks and whatever, and that's the mood that I would make. Jason: And if you could make that, did you make it fun and pleasurable, then why not? Joe: Right. That's Jason: If Joe: It. Jason: It's this chore, you know, like most people are gonna be like, ahhh screw it. I don't want to do it, Joe: Now, Jason: But. Joe: For me, it's it's talking my girlfriend into seeing if we can do it together, so that'll be the that'll be the piece we'll see. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about, oh, I also heard an interview where you said that your daughter growing up with two chefs. So is your wife also working with you at either at The Vegan Taste or Casa Terra? Jason: She she was Joe: Ok. Jason: Doing The Vegan Taste for a while. Joe: Ok. Jason: I mean, for, for years, she was with me in the kitchen. And sometimes when I was off doing other stuff, she was running at it for months at a time. Joe: Got it. Jason: But I now we're in a situation where it's hard for us to split our time like that. And so she takes care of the household and raises our daughter while I take care of the business. We tried where we were splitting it both ways and it was like, I think it's hard to multitask. Right? It's hard to be great at a bunch of different stuff at the same time. And so we just finally decided, well, I'll have to go off and kind of slug it out and be the champion for the business, while she's the champion for keeping the rest of the family sane. Joe: Which is the admirable thing for sure. So The Vegan Taste, let's talk about that really quickly. So The Vegan Taste as home delivery, vegan meals that come in these great packages that are, like you said, are the goal is to heat and eat. And Jason: Right. Joe: They I don't know. I'll let you just talk about it because I don't want to, I know I had a certain schedule and the whole thing with the coolers, but I'd like you to describe it so that the audience will know what it's all about and then they can make their decision from there. Jason: Yeah, it's it's super easy. So the menu changes every single week. It's a fixed menu. You put your order in by Friday night. My crew comes into the kitchen on the weekends, makes everything. We plate it up over the weekend. Pack it up for delivery on Monday and then my team of drivers go out every Monday and they deliver all the meals at once for your entire week, that Monday. They leave it in a cooler loaded up with ice packs so even in the middle of July, the meals will stay chilled until you can pick them up and then you put them in your fridge. I know, some of our clients will reheat them on the stovetop. They'll take the ingredients out and reheat them on the stove, top it honestly, talking to people, most of them stuff it in the microwave and they have a lunch in two minutes. Joe: Yup and those containers are microwaveable. Jason: Yes, Joe: Is that correct? Jason: Yes. Joe: Yes. I know I've done both. I've depending on what the food was, sometimes I would heat it on the stove and sometimes I would heat it in the microwave. And I think that's all, also another thing in my brain about microwaves, they know make me a little nervous thinking that maybe something's there that eventually Jason: Right. Joe: someone's going to admit to, so if I if I have enough time, I'll go to the stove. If I don't, I just use the Jason: I Joe: Microwave. Jason: Am exactly the same way. I mean, I don't even have time to cook for myself very much anymore, so so I use our delivery service for me and most of the time I just slide the contents out of the container and right to a pan. Joe: So in regards to the meals that are available, is it, are they just lunches and dinners? Are they breakfast, lunch and dinners or... Jason: It's basically lunches and dinners right now, but will add in a breakfast option and the juicing option and some desserts pretty soon. Joe: And and like me, at one point, I was getting doubles of things so that I could have something for lunch and then something completely different for dinner. So I assume you have clients across the board that are only lunch, only dinner or a combination of enough meals for, is that how many, how many Jason: Yeah, Joe: can they get? Is it Jason: So, Joe: The. Jason: Yeah, basically we do six different dishes every week and you can get a single portion of each one or you can get a double portion of each one. And the people that want to have our meals for lunch and dinner, get the double portion. Joe: Right and that's what I was doing for a time, that's, that's right. And then in my case, I said that I wanted it spicy but so you actually keep tabs of certain things that people request on a small, I assume a small level because you can't be doing personalized, you know, things across the board for everybody. Jason: Yeah, we have spice is one of the standard options we have for people. And then we have a gluten free option, soy free option, although we use pretty limited soy already anyway. And then no oil option in the meals, again, are are pretty much pretty low oil already. So we just talked to people like, do you really, really want no oil? Or is that that's that you're trying to minimize your your oil? Are you trying to minimize your soy? Are you trying to minimize gluten? Because we don't we don't use those types of ingredients heavily in the meal service. And then if there's something that we can, leave off as a garnish for someone like if someone's like, "I hate right onions." I'll tell them, you know, if it's mixed into the dish, we can't change it but if it's a garnish, we can make a note to leave it off for you. Joe: Right. Jason: I mean, most people are good about it, but then sometimes I get someone that sends me a list of like 10 different things, I can't, sorry, I can't do that. Joe: Thank God I do that I don't want to sit here and look at you in the camera and go, oh, I was one of those people. And Jason: No, not Joe: I Jason: At Joe: Think Jason: All. Joe: The only thing that I said, I everything was great for me. The only thing I request that I think was less tofu in some of my stuff only because I'm I, it's just me getting used to it, it's it, and, and it's not, I would, I wouldn't even say it's a texture thing for me because I eat oysters, right? That's about as weird of a texture as you can Jason: That's sure. Joe: get. So I don't know why I definitely have had tofu from your food service, that was amazing. And it's almost like it's firm and some of it sometimes is even like crispy, like it's it's hasn't where I've had it other times where it just, just, it's just weird. Jason: Yeah, I mean. Joe: I don't know if there's good or bad tofu, maybe there's just the quality of it, I don't know. Jason: It's the way, it's the way it's prepared. And I think it's also what you're used to growing up with. I mean, if you're used to growing up with, say, diced up firm tofu in a miso soup, you're not going to bat an eye at it. But if you're not used to that, the texture might be weird for you. And I think, when dealing with American culture where we're not used to that stuff, too many people just take tofu and throw it in a soup or a stew and they're like, "Okay, that's good enough." But it's not I mean, it's like to me that's like throwing in a raw hunk of meat and is something and being like whatever. So, Joe: Yeah, Jason: You know, it's just it's Joe: Ok. Jason: All in the preparation. Joe: Ok, good to know because I started to get to like it. And thanks to you once again, because I was definitely I grew up with, in an Italian restaurant family and my father was a chef and so all of this stuff is new to me. Jason: Right! Joe: I was eating pizza and pasta and bread and, and you name it. So I wanted to ask you about Cassa Terra. I noticed that on the website, like a lot of places, especially during this time we're living in right now with COVID-19, that the kitchen is closed for the summer, right? That's what it says on the website. Jason: Yeah, Joe: Is that true? OK. Jason: A lot of the high end restaurants, it seems, around town actually close up for the summer. Unless there are these big corporate things that can afford to take the loss that restaurants just suffer with the summer here. Joe: Is Casa Terra where you do actually all the food prep and making them? So that that kitchen is still being used for the food delivery service? Jason: Yeah, it's our Joe: It's. Jason: R&D kitchen and our delivery service kitchen. We do catering and stuff out of there, too. Joe: When does the restaurant open or when do you expect it to open back up in the fall or ? Jason: I'm not sure yet Joe: Ok. Jason: Because honest answer is for a, for the type of food that we do, our location is not that great. And so if we can find a location that's more central or on the east side, that makes more sense for us right now than trying to just reopen in Glendale. And Phoenix is a weird city, so, we have these really accessible freeways and it's actually pretty easy to get around here but I don't know if our food culture is is there yet, because if someone else to drive more than 20 minutes here for food, it's painful. And the chances are they won't do it. Joe: You know. Jason: Or if they do it, they'll come once a year. And Joe: Yeah. Jason: So it's, it's difficult that way we're compared to like Los Angeles and New York or Chicago, people will spend an hour getting to, getting to a place to have dinner. And if it's a good meal, that's just part of the it's part of the experience. That might not be a great part of the experience, but it's something you're willing to do. So. Joe: Yeah, absolutely, Jason: So Joe: Yeah. It's Jason: We Joe: Funny. Jason: Have to be, yeah, we have to be in a more central location. Joe: Yeah, because I know we're in, and I live in Arcadia and the boundary for me is pretty much like the 51. If it's on the other side of the 51, I have a hard time going that far west but I understand that. You, one of the things that I did read was that about the Le Cordon Bleu the school and it was something about you being, was it the first graduate of vegan Jason: First Joe: Or Jason: Instructor. Joe: First instructor of vegan? Jason: Remember when it was theater, 2007 or 2008 that I was teaching at the Scottsdale Culinary Institute Joe: Yeah. Jason: And right when I, right when I started teaching there, they became part of the Le Cordon Bleu program. And so I, because I became the first official vegan instructor in that program. Joe: That's really cool! Jason: There was there was cool. Joe: Yeah. There's so many things, the other thing was I remember either hearing or reading that philosophy was your major? And I think what, what struck me about it, when I when I read it and then who you are and, and I even, there was an interview about making the argument of why to go vegan, like how when someone find something like this and this is why this has been like I've wanted to talk about, even though I haven't gone full vegan, I think that the health benefits are so important and just the, the eliminating of dairy alone. I mean, I've told people when they said, oh, yeah, you know, it sucks getting old. I'm like, well, I'm 58, I agree with you, but I don't, I'm, I don't wake up feeling achy. And, and, and I never did a lot of dairy, but even cutting out what I've already done, I think the inflammation piece of this is what other, you know, is another part that people are missing. Jason: I'd, Joe: And so, Jason: Yeah, it's. Joe: You know, so getting back to the philosophy part about how you're able to convey this in a not like beating someone over the head with a club, you've got to do this, it's, it's the only way. Your approach to it is your first of all, your demeanor of how your, you know, your a 6' 3" guy who you would never think if I met you in the street, would say you're vegan. And then the way you intelligently talk about the food and then the bonus of all of it is how it tastes. And so there's just so many amazing things about this, it's why I was so excited to finally do this. Jason: Well, cool! Thank you. Joe: So the Jason: It's. Joe: Go ahead with the phil..., with the philosophy part of this, I think it's helped a lot. Jason: That that's actually what got me to go vegetarian, but also it it taught me a few things about the way people make decisions because I socially and just because of the way I was raised, I didn't want to go vegetarian because it meant changing my lifestyle. And intellectually, I've been kind of bandying it about for a couple months before I pulled the trigger on it. And I didn't do it, it was just something I had thought about it. And then I had an epiphany because I was watching, I was playing with my cat. And I, intellectually, I knew my cat is this other being with its own thoughts and her own emotions. But then there was something where I was just playing with her and I had that emotional epiphany and that's where it went off and I was like, I understood that my cat was this separate creature that was valuable and she had her own rich emotional life and because she was sitting there problem solving and she was getting excited about bringing this little bottle cap back to me and playing fetch with me. It wasn't like this, this robotic, emotionless, thinking-less, piece of matter that, that's how Descartes used to view animals and that's how he justified doing all these horrible experiments he did on them because he, you know, even though they would, they would scream and all this other stuff, he passed it off as they didn't have a soul and they weren't really conscious and all this other BS. And so you can intellectually know that, but then you have the understanding there is that connection. And within a second I was like, wait a minute, it's not ok for me to just, like, take a hammer and smash my cat apart right now, that's really jacked up, that's something serial killers do. Why? Why can't I do that to my cat but why am I paying someone to do it to a cow? And I was like, "I have to stop!" So I stopped, went vegetarian and then spent a month arguing against vegetarianism to see if any of the arguments hold up. And none of the arguments were self-consistent. And so I was like, I'm going to stay vegetarian. And that was the the rational part of that. But what I learned was I had to have that emotional epiphany to fully make that leap in my decision making. And then when I went vegan, it was even more so because I was doing it for health reasons. But then I found out about factory farming. So it's ironic because being vegetarian for a few years, I had no idea about factory farming and then all of a sudden I'm looking at it for health reasons and learning about factory farming and I know that it's what happens in a factory farming is horrible and I don't want to partake in it. But yet I'm going out and having all you can eat enchiladas once a week. Because I emotionally had that tie to the enchiladas and, and so I think for most people, decision making is ah, pain pleasure balance. And it's, it's a very immediate and very immediate decision. And it's funny because people that can make that decision for the long term, we call them wise, because in the short term, going out and jogging or lifting weights sucks for most people. But the wise people go out and do that because, you know, it's going to pay off in the long term. And so I think going through that myself, even though I was trying to be rational about it and I knew what the right decision was and not being able to make it because I had this emotional thing is what got me into food in the first place. Because I knew if I could if I could take the pain part of that calculus away for people and just give them an environment where they could make a good decision for themselves and for the planet and for the animals, then, then I had to do it. Joe: Yeah, it's, it's really cool. I mean, I learned so much more about you just doing the research that I wanted to do up front and, and I think it's important how the philosophy part of your, what your brain has done through, you know, getting that degree in school and then then I heard about the soul sucking marketing job that, you Jason: Oh, Joe: Know. Jason: It was horrible. Joe: Right. Yeah. And it's and this is it all plays, this is why this Jason: It's. Joe: is such a cool interview for me. And I don't want to keep you any longer because I know that, you know, you work really hard and but I, I would love to do more at some point, Jason: Yeah, that'll be Joe: You Jason: Fun. Joe: Know, it's just cool that you, you are doing your passion. It really means a lot to you. You're you know, you eat, sleep and breathe what you preach, but you preach it in a way that it's not preaching. The food tastes amazing! It was just a godsend for me to find it. We find out tonight as you're setting up here and give it a talk, you play the drums. It's like, what, what more of a kinship could we possibly have? And all I do is try to preach on my podcast and on my, you know, social media and all that is just people following their dream. And it's really cool to see you do this. It's, it's, it's great. And and I'm glad you're healthy. Glad you made the choice when you did. You're here Jason: Yeah. Joe: To help keep us all healthy and feed us. Jason: Well it's funny, so it's funny you brought that up, because I feel like I'm in another transition point in what I'm doing because, ah you know, I had this amazing journey where I lost all this weight, I cured my diabetes, became a chef and went and helped out other people. And in the last couple years my, my health started to decline and I was like, what's going on because I'm eating right. But there's, there's all this other stuff. So, I mean, you know, in the last couple of years, I almost got divorced. I was working 100 hours a week. I was doing all this other, other stuff. I was, you know, we went to set up to open up this restaurant, we had some guys steal about 50K from us and steal, ah... He probably cost us about 200 grand in the long term, which was almost all my family's money and almost all of my best friend's money that she had. And then we opened up this, opened up this restaurant, which you were in the restaurant business, so, you know, like it is a lot of work. And on top of that, we're doing these other businesses. Jason: And so there are all these other stressors and I realize it actually happened right wing COVID hit. Because we were thinking about like, we were really looking forward to the summer when we could shut the restaurant down for a while and get a breather. And then COVID hit and all of a sudden, oddly, my life got better. Because I was spending time with my family and I was killing myself anymore and my health started to improve. That was it, I had this very narrow focus in my life, which I was really good at but it also carried all the stress that I think, I think you have when you get a little bit older in your career and you're kind of at the, you're operating at a higher level, it's also a more stressful level. And there's a lot more at stake about point. And so when COVID hit, I had more time for my family. And then I started going on bike rides again and hiking and I started spending time playing the drums, I hadn't touched my drum set in three years. Joe: WOW! Jason: And I started playing again, which was actually cool. I have this thing where I get my, stop something for a while when I pick it up and better at it. So now I can actually play some of the Rush songs that I couldn't get through Joe: Nice. Jason: For three years. Like, where did this come from? Joe: It's awesome! Jason: You know, so that was cool. And so, so I realized, like, I'd been talking about environment with food choices. But I've been ignoring everything else that goes into being a healthy person and taking care of your mental state, taking care of your family, making sure you have time to not be insane with all this other other stuff and so I think my crew is shifting into a point where I'm going to start talking about more about holistic health and creating good environments for your, for your well-being as an adult. It's, I'm sure it's true for for kid or whatever part you're in but since I'm in my 40s and kind of went through the midlife crisis part, that's how I solved it, was figuring out that I had to create a good environment to make good choices throughout my whole life and not just with the food, because I'd just been concentrated on the food, which is one key. Joe: You. Yeah, it's amazing how many people I know, it's it's hurt a lot of people. But I personally, it's been the best three months and so long because I was running so hard. And like I said, I've gotten to do things that I want to do. I it's just it's been a good thing. And I'm glad to hear that everything is turning back around for you, too, as well. I worried about you when it happened, to be honest, because, you know, I, I know it devastated the event world for me, I mean everything just stopped. And so I was worried just purely whether or not you know how how well you would do during that time. And it's funny, speaking of, you know, COVID-19. Was there any concerns about, you know, your clients with Joe: The food delivery and any, any things that you had to do differently in order to to be, you know, follow the CDC guidelines or anything like that? Jason: We just did extra sanitation, but we were already doing that stuff anyway. Joe: Right. Jason: We were just more hardcore about it than normal. But that was it. Because I think with the food delivery, it's contactless, so our drivers just show up and Joe: Drop the Jason: They're Joe: Cooler. Jason: At their doorstep Joe: Yeah. Jason: In and head out. Joe: Yeah. Jason: So, so in a way, it didn't really affect the delivery service at all. Joe: Got Jason: It was Joe: It. Jason: horrible for the restaurant, but that ended up being a boom for us personally. Joe: Yep, yep. Well, awesome! Man. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you're here. Like I said, I was disappointed when I had a sort of postpone it last time, I just took on too much. It was one of those deals where I thought I could I forget how much time postproduction takes after I get off this thing to get it, Jason: Yeah. Joe: You know, ready for prime time. But I am super, super grateful that you said yes and you came on, I love your food and you're an amazing human being. The more I've done the research and get to know you now. And it sounds like your daughter is definitely waiting for you to put her to bed. So I'm glad, I could go on, I swear to God for another hour, there's so many questions about food and just things that you've done, but we'll do it another time for sure. Jason: Yeah, that'll be fun. I'd love to come back. Joe: I again, I can't thank you enough. It's an honor to have you on here. And I'd love to have you back again. Just for the audience sake and things like that, where's the best place to get in touch with you? And I'll put I'll do in the show notes, I'll list every, you know, your social media things but like in regards to, let's say, The Vegan Taste, what's the best way for people to reach out? Jason: Just go right to thevegantaste.com Joe: Okay, perfect. Jason: I mean, we have all the social media platforms, but it seems like, you know, Facebook changes what they want to show to people every few months and Instagram is the same way. You know, all these other ones. So just just go straight to thevegantaste.com Joe: Perfect. I'll put in all the other links, I'll take care of all of that. Again, thank you so much, I appreciate it, it's so, I look forward to actually meeting you live in person. Maybe we can sit around and jam one night. Jason: That would be awesome! Joe: I would love it. So. Jason: Cool. Joe: All right. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Jason: Hey, thank you. Have a good night. Joe: You too!

Truth You Can Act On: Have clarity. Get clear on the why, the how, and the what, the values and the traits to create the core of your culture. [00:03:38] Jason: There has to be clarity within the organization as to what the actual culture values and traits are.[00:03:45] [00:04:32] Jason: Unfortunately, we often think culture and we treat it like it's something that can just happen organically, but there has to be a clear plan with it. One of the questions I often ask is, what would it look like if you didn't have a product strategy with clarity. What if you didn't have a revenue strategy that had any clarity to it? Or how about a leadership development strategy? Without clarity, if you don't have clarity for a culture strategy, there's going to be a lot of uncertainty and expectations [00:04:57] To sustain, we have to create and implement a system to consistently execute proactive activities to drive our culture. [00:03:47] Jason: we've got to sustain. The reinforcement of those values and traits to everyone in the organization. And that's going to be through specific kinds of employee experiences that are designed around those values and traits. [00:04:01] Measure. It’s so important to have data and to regularly measure so you can look at the ways you’re evolving and find areas to hone in on. [00:04:03] Jason: we've actually got to measure what people are doing. So the things that they are learning is their transfer is their application of these things. They're learning from the experiences that are dripping with the values and traits. We've actually got to have a way to measure their growth, engagement, and activity. With those pieces of what we call culture DNA. [00:04:27] Consider a key champion to own the culture strategy for execution in your organization. [00:14:24] Jason: officer or someone not running your sales or marketing teams, if we want to get serious about culture and reap all the benefits that it has, then there has to be someone who's leading the charge with that within the organization. There has to be that ownership. That accountability and that person person that's not only leading the way, but as the key person that has their finger on the pulse of the actual metrics of how things are going. [00:14:44] Full Notes: https://gutplusscience.com/jason-cochran/ Nikki’s Book Recommendation: Brain Rules by Jason John Medina Sponsors: Ascentis –  Ascentis is a SaaS-based Human Capital Management software that offers easy-to-use HCM, HRIS, online payroll, talent management, recruiting, and timekeeping solutions. Request a complimentary review of your processes and policies at https://www.ascentis.com/gutscience

Are you a business owner who wants to get good at financial decision making and CEO-level accounting? How can you build a runway to opportunities? By navigating mindset, expenses, and cash.  Today’s guest is Tim Francis from Great Assistant and Profit Factory. Tim’s training, Know Your Numbers, shows how businesses can deal with cash crunch and cash flow. You’ll Learn... [02:48] Free Upcoming Event: Navigate the Cash Crunch. [03:20] Entrepreneurs: Like Indiana Jones, running as fast as possible from expenses. [06:00] Pre-built Spreadsheet: Adding and subtracting, red boxes and green boxes. [06:40] Beyond Profit First: In motion and cutting expenses when DoorGrow sales stop. [10:23] 3-Step Method: Navigating mindset, navigating expenses, and navigating cash. [11:29] Mistakes of sloth, and mistakes of ambition. [12:19] Step 1 - Navigating Mindset: Be good to your body, protect personal and professional relationships, and early action is crucial. [22:51] Step 2 - Navigating Expenses: Business's profit margin and bloat factor involves how many dollars to be sold at top line for $1 at bottom line to spend/buy something. [30:08] Survive and Thrive: When sales go down, create a situation where you don't have to sell as much. You can meet it at a lower sales level and still get by. [31:52] Step 3 - Navigating Cash: The Cash Flow Forecast figures out how much cash can you touch now? There's a big difference between cash and free cash. [45:38] Opportunities for Growth: If your business doesn't cash flow, it will fail. Cash flow first, then focus on growth. Cash comes from different places. Tweetables Entrepreneurs confuse revenue, sales, top line, or top of the P&L statement with cash. There's actually a way to navigate the cash crunch, even if revenue is going down. Property management industry has a massive opportunity due to big shift in the market. Panic isn't productive. It's important to be urgent, not anxious. There's a big difference between cash and free cash. Resources Navigate the Cash Crunch with Jason Hull and Timothy Francis Tim Francis on LinkedIn Great Assistant Profit Factory Know Your Numbers Keith Cunningham Verne Harnish DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator 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. I am hanging out here with Tim Francis. Tim, welcome to the show again. Tim: Good to see you Jason, again. Jason: Tim and I just started trying to do this on Crowdcast the normal platform. It didn't work out. The internet gods were not kind to us for some reason so we're starting it over. I wanted to introduce Tim to this audience again. Tim has been on the show before because he was talking about his company, Great Assistant, a fantastic company. I've hired assistants through it for US based assistants. His parent corporation, or company, or whatever you want to call it is Profit Factory. I recently went through training with him called Know Your Numbers. One of my goals for this year was to get really good at this learning financial decision making, maybe more business owner, CEO level accounting. Tim is the go to guy for this. He has a program on this that I went through. He had a really cool thing that he showed us how to deal with cash crunch and cash flow. He reached out to me and is putting this out to audiences trying to help businesses out right now. I'm excited to expose my audience to this idea of how they can navigate the cash crunch. Tim, welcome. Tim: Thank you so much for having me. Jason: We're going to do an event here in about a week. I'll just plug that now up front, just get that out of the way. It's for free and we're going to go into greater detail about these things. You're going to be sharing your screen, showing spreadsheets, helping them figure this out. But let's start with talking about the problem. What's going on with the market right now, the cash crunch, and why is this relevant? Tim: Yeah, you bet. If you think of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's this amazing boulder scene. Jason, I have to give you credit for giving me this visual of this boulder rolling behind us as entrepreneurs. We're running as fast as we possibly can, and that boulder, that's expenses. Jason, full credit to you, every time I use this analogy now I'm giving you credit. A bit of the secret here is that there's actually a simple three step method that we can actually turn this into a different Indiana Jones scene. In the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones, there's this like leap of faith scene where he's standing on the very edge and he's looking at this massive chasm between him and where he needs to go. It looks impossible, it looks impossible that he’ll possibly be able to cross this chasm, but then he gets this idea. He takes some sand, and he throws it out and it covers, and there's this hidden balance beam, it's invisible, this invisible balance beam to walk across. That's exactly the three step method that I teach as a passion to entrepreneurs. I think a lot of entrepreneurs confuse revenue, sales, top line, or just that top of the P&L statement with cash. The thing is that they’re two extremely different ideas. Yes, one can lead to the other, however they're not necessary. There's actually a way to navigate the cash crunch, even if revenue is going down. I've helped many, many companies, I think I’ve had 139 board meetings now. I've helped over 70 companies, and at least 7 of them I've helped to escape bankruptcy, including that with them following the exact process that I'm going to teach today. Whether someone despises accounting and numbers, feels pretty good about them but maybe not a pro, or even if someone's an absolute pro at numbers, I think the perspectives that we share today are going to be really, really powerful. Also just in case anyone's afraid of like oh, my god, here we go, numbers and accounting. I hate that topic. I avoid my accountant like the plague. I'll tell you what, I was rejected from Business School three times. I couldn't finish calculus. I don't know my brain wasn't wired that way, and the good news is you don't need any of that to be able to navigate the cash crunch. If you know how to add and subtract, in fact Jason, you don't even need to be able to add, subtract. If you know how to use a calculator to add, subtract, we can make this happen. The tool that I'll go more in depth with you on our webinar coming in about a week from now, everyone will actually get access to a prebuilt spreadsheet. All you got to do, it takes maybe 20 to 30 minutes to put your own info in. Literally where you see a red box is a crisis line, and where you see a green box, you're good to go. That's it. It's adding and subtracting, and red boxes and green boxes, that help you to navigate. To build your very own—personalized to your business—path to navigate the cash crunch. Jason: Before we get into this, I want to touch on and create a little transparency in this. A lot of entrepreneurs are fearful. There's a lot of shame around admitting that something doesn't look perfectly successful. There's a lot of shame around finances and money. Like oh, no, I've got debt or I've got this. I'm going to share what we're experiencing at DoorGrow. Leading up to this, one of my goals for this year was to get control of finances, really understand and get into financials, which is why I did a training with you, Tim, and I'm working with you on different things, because that's a step beyond the Profit First. I've got my Profit First coach and accountant that I work with as well. I've been doing lots of calls with her getting all these different loans that are coming out, getting everything going. I'm glad that I was already working on this stuff prior. We started cutting expenses dramatically, we started doing shifts. As I was getting control of things, I was like why are we paying for that? If we weren't in momentum already—you used the analogy of the airplane flying over the trees—we probably would have hit some trees. We probably would have crashed. We were already in motion. Sales, March just stopped. Property managers stopped buying products and services from DoorGrow because they were holding their wallets tight, they were scared, and that's about half of our revenue. We had to tighten our belt really quickly. We weren't really ready for that, we haven’t budgeted the beginning of our month to do that, so we had to get really creative. Using some of these strategies helped us to keep that plane above the tree level, navigating the cash crunch, or in my Indiana Jones analogy, outpaced the boulder so that we were able to make it through the end of the month. I'm really excited to share this property management. I'll point out that I believe the property management industry has a massive opportunity right now. There are property management companies, especially in California, Florida, and Hawaii, that they are growing. March was one of their biggest growth months in adding new doors, in acquisitions, period, simply because there is a whole big shift in the market. A lot of people are going to be needing property managers. We won't get really into that now but there's a lot of opportunity right now. Property management is a really safe place to be hedging against the market right now. Most property managers will probably have pretty good cash flow. It's only the third and we're already seeing most people are paying rent on single family residential. They're not noticing much of a difference. They've had a few people reach out for payment arrangements, but all things, I'm saying is that it's basically normal. They're a little concerned about May, so this May become even more hyper relevant in the next month or beyond. I want everyone to pay attention to this. Property managers, you guys are blessed right now, while a lot of businesses are just done. They're failing, their revenue is cut to zero, especially luxury markets, vacation markets, restaurants in a lot of situations. Businesses are closing, failing. This also is the perfect excuse for entrepreneurs that are not really committed to their business to get out, perfect excuse. A lot of people are going to take it. If you are not one of those people, and you're committed to making this work and you want to grow, reach out to DoorGrow, I want to make sure we help you capitalize on all this. Tim, let's get into these three things that we need to pay attention to. Tim: There are three things to navigate, navigating mindset, navigating expenses, and navigating cash. I don't normally share this piece, but because of what you just so wisely shared just around the shame that sometimes entrepreneurs feel around money or like oh, I'm a failure or whatnot. I'll tell you what. I think that being a leader is a lot of responsibility. Even if you're a leader of 1 or 100, it doesn't matter. It's that classic man in the arena story. It's not the critic who counts. I think that there's actually something incredibly skilled when an entrepreneur sees that things have changed, and they're ready to change with it. I think that that's actually a sign of prescience is the word, when we can see things that are coming and to act accordingly. I also think that Verne Harnish has a great expression, he says, "Growth sucks cash." If you've been spending a lot of money to grow your company, and that's why you don't have a lot of cash to show for it, there's no shame in being ambitious either. There are mistakes of sloths, and there are mistakes of ambition. Mistakes of sloths are when we make mistakes because we're sitting on the couch not going for it and life passes us by. Mistake of ambition is when we were really going for it and things didn't work out. Mistakes of ambition, it's even arguable to say that it's even a mistake at all. I just think if you're in a position where you’re a little tight on cash, or maybe a lot tight on cash, I get that the shame narrative is available and I don't know that I'd go there. First of all, it's not accurate, and secondly, it's not productive. This leads us into our whole first of our three steps mindset, navigating mindset. Before anyone decides to tune out and say mindset is going to be the secret or some law of attraction, maybe more airy type topic. I assure you, it is not. I assure you that it is not. In 2008 I had a real estate portfolio of my own, not a big portfolio, just four houses, but I ended up losing around $100,000 mostly of other people's money. Around that time, I also had a mentor who ended up being one of the two leaders of a $12 million Ponzi scheme. Didn't start as a Ponzi scheme but it became a Ponzi scheme, that's typically the way they go. His business partner is convicted in court, barred folding securities for 25 years, and ended up actually leaving the country. This is in Canada, where I'm from. It was extremely exhausting and stressful to go through all that and to see everything that was happening around me. It led to me developing an illness called Erythema nodosum. Erythema nodosum is something there's no real cure for. You just have to wait it out. It's just bed rest. Your body really swells up and becomes so painful to walk that you can't, then it becomes so painful that you stand that you can't, and you end up just lying in bed every single day. 50% of cases are stress related. There's no way to know for sure, but I'm pretty sure mine was stress related. If you think an economic collapse like 2008 is bad, or an economic collapse like 2020 is bad... I'll tell you what's even worse is having economic collapse and also having a health collapse, where you actually can't do anything about your situation because you're in bed. Thankfully, at the time, I had very, very, very few dependents, I had no teammates and so the impact, the blast radius was small, it was just on me. Had my mom not paid my mortgage for me for three months, I would have gone double bankrupt, my personal finance, my business finance. Talk about an eye opener, and I was only 28. I was only 28 at the time. When I talk about the importance of managing mindset, this is absolutely crucial that we manage stress. I'll tell you, I've been not just through economic collapse, economic plus physical collapse, and it is not a pretty situation. You do not want to go through that. Along the lines of how do we go about managing mindset, I think that there are a few important perspectives in addition to some of the obvious practices. I'll just start the obvious because it's pretty straightforward. Make sure you're getting some exercise even if it's just a walk on a treadmill, or a peloton bike, or something like that in your living room, whatever the case may be. Get some sunshine if you can, even though we're all locked indoors, that sunshine is super important. Diet, take care of that. Make sure you’re getting lots of water, maybe ease off on the booze a little bit too if you're someone who enjoys to imbibe a little bit. Be good to your body. Probably the biggest of all, for most people, is actually sleep. Sleep is something that we can lose very quickly in times of turmoil and stress. You might need to turn to things like small meditation, reading, journaling, or something before bed to help take your mind off of some of the challenges of the day. I'm telling you that it's absolutely crucial. When I look back at my sleep habits and actually have been keeping track of my sleep for years and years and years. Jason, I'd sleep for four hours and lay on the floor next to my computer, sleep. I'd work till 5:00 in the morning, I'd sleep four hours on the floor next to the computer and I would stand up, go pee, and go back to the computer and start working again. Desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures, but there is such a thing as too high a price to pay. Remember that this too shall pass. September 11th came, the world changed, and we got back to business in a new normal way. The housing crisis came, the world changed, and we got back to business in a new normal way. Jason: Tim, I'm going to touch on what you just said real quick, interject. These are really basic things but they're showing some significant correlations between COVID-19 and melatonin, and nitric oxide in your blood, vitamin D. These are the basic principles of health. I have training for our clients called health secrets and it's these basics. We talk about getting sleep, that's when melatonin starts to get produced in your brain. It's much higher in children, it gets less. You may want to supplement with that but getting good sleep, getting some sunlight, finding a way to get sunshine and sunlight on your body is going to be a big deal that releases nitric oxide from your skin into your blood, if vitamin D gets produced, these are basic. Sleep, nutrition, some physical activity, exercise, some sunshine, water and hydrate. This and all of that lowers your stress levels and it lowers our pressure and noise significantly. I love that you're sharing that. Keep your stress levels as low as possible and start physiologically. Tim: I think along with stress is this idea of engagement. I don't know if I need to share this part, but I'll say it just to be responsible. If someone is not engaged enough right now, you're not paying attention to what's going on in the world. If you're only at about a 6 or 7 out of 10 engagements, goodness gracious, it might be time to pick it up a bit. If you're also to 9 or 10 engagements it's probably too high, you're over stimulated, you're over engaged. We need that 8 out of 10 where we're focused, pupils dilated just a little bit. Eye on the prize. I always say that panic isn't productive. It's important to be urgent, not anxious, to be urgent, not anxious. Jason: I'm too Agilent right now. I'm excited and that's where I'm at. I love chaos, let's be honest. Maybe there are other entrepreneurs like that but when chaos happens, that's opportunity. That's where we get to be a light and we get to stand out, so I'm enjoying this even though it's uncomfortable. Tim: Very nice, very nice. I think that two other mindset pieces, one is that it's important to actually protect relationships. Yes, I mean the personal relationships that we have in our life because they can be such a source of security, joy, and comfort. I also mean business relationships. We're going to get to the other side of this, and unlike other past catastrophes that were measured in years, I think, yes, our economic catastrophe is going to be measured in years on this one for sure. I think that in terms of months, I think this pandemic is going to be measured in months, not years and years and years. One of my questions at each point is what is the state of the relationships of suppliers, vendors in the case of property managers, tenants, if you're managing on behalf of other people like your clients, your investors, and owners. What's the state of those relationships going to look like in three months from now, or six months from now when we're on the other side of this. You might make it through, but do you still have people that respect you? I heard a story the other day of an entrepreneur that just cancelled all their credit cards and said well, everything's just going to fail in terms of expenses and I'm going to add back one by one the few things that make sense. It's a shortcut to just cutting expenses. That's a way to go about it, but are you going to just supremely piss off everyone in the process? I think that protecting relationships is important to keep in mind. That doesn't mean that you're always bringing good news to everyone along the way, especially in the cutting expenses part of our presentation today. I think to be respected for being accountable, navigating agreements that you have with people rather than just abandoning them. My other mindset piece is that early action is crucial. If you discover that you need to get alone, act now before more businesses are closing, and possibly soaking up some lending capacity, or even just work capacity that bankers have to fill out applications and whatnot. If you discover you need to reduce a teammate's hours, tell them as early as possible so they can start making plans of their own personal and family finances. So that if a dip comes for them income-wise, they're prepared for it. If you can help them find a new opportunity elsewhere, do what you can to manage those relationships. I got an interesting perspective from someone who used to have a business helping individuals, not businesses, but individuals navigate bankruptcy. He said one of the most common patterns he saw with people going through bankruptcy is they didn't cut expenses deep enough or soon enough, deep enough or soon enough. I think that that's a very interesting perspective and maybe a usable guideline would be to say anything that's not going to help increase the profitability, and specifically cash coming into your business in the coming six months, I'd probably delay it. If you're thinking of a new website, if that's not going to immediately give you a bump in cash in the next six months, then let's put that on pause. We'll see if we can renegotiate it, put it on hold, delay it, or even cancel it. I think that's a really powerful way and maybe for you, the number isn't six months, maybe it's three months or eight months, whatever. But if we can keep an eye on what's going to bring cash in, in that timeframe, that really makes decision making a lot easier around what expenses you can continue with and which do not. This leads us to our second of the three steps of what we need to navigate and that is expenses. I think that something I'd say in my path of learning accounting and I even went and took night classes at the University of Alberta. I finally did go and take University accounting classes. It was not for credit though, they wouldn't let me into the for credit version, but they'd let me still sit in the classes and study. You know what, Jason, I got 100% of my midterm. I wanted to throw up my middle fingers as I walked into the room. I can't complete calculus, I can't get into business school, but here I'm getting 100% of my midterm. How about that? How do you like them apples? One of the big ahas that I had is that in my brain, because we all grow up thinking about personal finance. I think in personal finance, we think if I make $1, I can spend $1, and $1 in is $1 out. If I want to go buy a car, a pair of jeans, or a pair of shoes, I just need to get that amount of income to be able to pay for the shoes, the jeans, or the car. When it comes to business finance though it's a little bit different. To be able to buy $1 of expenses, we can't just make $1. It's because there's other expenses in the business. That's why we always talk about profit margin. If I have $100,000 in revenue, and I've got $50,000 in expenses, then I have $50,000 in profit. My profit margin is 50%. What that means is at the end of that year, or quarter, that month, for me to have an extra dollar to go buy something the next month, quarter or year, I don't need to make $1, I actually need to make $2 because my profit margin is only 50%. I have to make the $2 at the top, 50% gets stripped away by expenses. I'm left with $1 to now go and spend in the next month, quarter, or year. There's this idea, I invented it, it's called bloat factor. How many dollars do I have to sell at the top line to have $1 at the bottom line to be able to use and go and spend and buy something else in the coming month, quarter, or year? It's very simple math. If you're at 50% profit margin, which very few businesses are—very, very, very, very, very few businesses are—then you'd have to earn $2 to have $1 at the bottom to be able to go and spend in the coming period. If I've got a 25% profit margin, I have to make $4 at the top to have $1 to go and spend. If I'm at a 10% profit margin, which a lot of businesses around that 10% margin mark, I have to go make $10 to be able to have one at the bottom. Jason: This is super important for people to realize. A lot of us entrepreneurs, we look at our bank accounts and we think well, I've got $1 that we made. Now I can go buy this thing for $1. They think it's a one to one relationship. That's a huge mistake. Tim: Whatever your business's profit margin is, you got to figure out the bloat factor. Let's just say for example, you're at a 10% profit margin, that means you have to make $10 to keep $1, your bloat factor is 10X. If you cut $1 of expense, you now don't have to sell 10X that in revenue to be in the exact same place. For example, this is actually an extraordinary story Jason, this going to blow your mind. I talked to one of my private consulting clients here. He and I had like uh-oh, the crisis is coming call like three weeks ago. He cut $9,000 a month in recurring revenue. Does that mean that he doesn't need to sell $9,000 in the coming year? Well, of course not, because it's recurring expenses. Jason: I was going to say he lost them? Tim: No, no, no. He cut $9,000 per month of expenses. At his profit margin, his bloat factor is 8.7. $9,000 times 12 months in a year times 8.7, he does not have to sell $944,882 in the coming year. He cut the need to sell a million dollars just by cutting $9,000 a month in expenses. That is mind expanding. Jason: We have pretty healthy profit margins at DoorGrow, we’re pretty tight. We're a virtual team but we cut a ton of expenses. Maybe if we have time, I could list some of the crazy actions that we took to help make sure that we cash flowed. It makes a ton of sense to me. Tim: Big time. I'll just take a super simple example. I actually set up a calculator which we'll play with in the free webinar you and I will do. We'll play with the bloat calculator a little bit. If I have a profit margin of 10%—not uncommon for businesses—my bloat factor would be 10. If all I removed was $250 a month, that's it, $250 a month of recurring expenses, canceling subscriptions, canceling unused services, access to different websites and whatnot, I would not have to sell $30,000 in the coming year. $250 a month does not sound like that much to cut, and yet a 10X bloat factor, that's $30,000 you do not have to sell anymore. You tell me what's easier, finding $250 a month and cutting it, or going out and generating $30,000 in new revenue in the coming year? Jason: Especially right now for us. My accountant was really impressed with me. We cut $10,000 in monthly expenses, depending on what our profit margin is. That can be pretty significant for us as well in terms of how much sales we don't have to do to make it each month. That's made it breathable for us significantly. Tim: When you talk about being able to survive and thrive even when sales go down, you just created a situation for yourself where you don't have to sell as much. Even if sales go down, you can still meet it at a lower sales level and still get by which is really incredible. Jason: I met with my accountant last night and we mapped out the month with all the recurring revenue that we have coming in. If we do no sales this month, we will make it. Tim: I love that. Jason: We’ve pivoted quickly and reduced the expenses, but right now it’s a great opportunity for property managers to grow and we're offering some crazy deals. Hopefully, we'll also be doing some sales this month and making a big difference. Tim: I love that. I think you were sharing offline about how all these Airbnbs are now switching to long term rental. They got smoked out of the market and now they just want to go back to traditional long term rentals. So there's all this flood towards property managers. For a property manager that knows how to convert an Airbnb into a standard long term rental, ready to rock, and knows how to find those deals, goodness gracious, this could be a really revolutionary time. Jason: There are several channels right now for growth and each one is going to get bigger. Property managers right now, they can capitalize on it. We're pushing our clients aggressively to start taking action on these things right now. Tim: That's so exciting. There's another way that we can navigate the cash crunch even if sales go down. It's not just by managing expenses but it's also by navigating cash. Let's get into the third and final step in navigating the cash crunch. The free webinar that we're gonna do in approximately a week from now, we're actually going to do live exercises. We're actually going to share screens and you're actually going to see this spreadsheet in action. It's super simple. Anyone can do it. It can be a game changer. Of the multi-million dollar companies that I've helped save, some of them I didn't even do private consulting with. They just came, they know your numbers, or they heard me talk about just this one tool, The Cash Flow Forecast. They use it religiously when they're in a tough spot and it helps them get through. It's very exciting. There's actually two parts to this. The very first is actually understanding how much cash can I actually touch right now? There's a big difference between cash and free cash. Cash is the amount of money that's in the bank if you add up your checking and savings accounts. That's cash. Free cash on the other hand, we have to deduct some money out of that total cash to get the free cash to know what we can actually work with. From our total cash amount, we need to set aside committed costs. Committed cost is any amount of money you've promised that you're going to pay. Let's say for example a website, I've signed a legal agreement to get a new website done. If I don't manage that agreement to delay the project, I'm on the hook for it. If that's a $10,000 cash outflow that's coming up in two weeks from now, that is a committed cost. I haven't received the service yet but I've committed to receiving the service or the product for that matter. Jason: It's money that's earmarked. It's money that is going to disappear. If you can't pay it, it could cause some serious problems. Tim: Big time, getting all the way back to that whole topic about managing relationships even through the tough times. The second category that we need to earmark some cash is payables. Let's say that you already had the website built. It was finished last week. You've enjoyed the service. You've received the service or the product for that matter. You're on net 30 terms or net 60 terms and now you got to pay that person. That's a payable. Now, one of the biggest payables that is unavoidable is death is taxes. Thankfully, the payment deadline in the United States has been extended, which allows for some cash flow breathing room for entrepreneurs, which is very important right now. I would do my best to get clear and make sure that I've got a separate account for tax. I actually have a separate bank account. It's a little profit first esque or Richest Man in Babylon esque that there's a separate account for income tax and that's where I would hold my income tax. Jason: I have that too. The idea is to have it at a bank that is difficult to get into. That's completely a normal thing. Tim: You don't know the pin. You give it to someone else. Two keys to authenticate and turn to open the vault. Jason: The worst online bank ever or something like that. Tim: Or the brick and mortar bank that has no online, something like that. After committed costs and payables including income tax, we also need to remove or set aside any deposits that we've got. This is huge in property management because we have deposits from tenants. You can't really spend that money, it's not money that you've earned. It's just money that you're holding as a deposit so we got to park that on the sidelines. Then from there, whatever amount that you've got to pay in credit card debt or any other very short term, high interest debt. Most credit cards are 10% more. If you've got all kinds of rewards on your card, you probably are facing 19.99% or 21.95% interest. We really want to make sure that we're getting that paid off at the end of each month or else we're facing colossal interest rates. I would earmark that money to hold to the side as well. Then from there, there's two more. The next one is ultra-short term debt that you need to pay. Short term debt in accounting refers to any debt that's due this year. A Tim Francisism ultra-short term is in the next 30 days. If there's any portion of debt that you need to pay down in the next 30 days, I would earmark that cash as well because if you don't pay it, a lot of small business loans have liens or guarantees against your house. You might lose your house if you don't pay it, or you don't renegotiate that payment because there are some circumstances now where banks and different lenders are allowing you to skip the payment right now because of what's going on. Our last category where we need to earmark and subtract cash, I actually have a whole separate account in my bank for this particular category, is what's called Unearned Revenue. I don't think that's as big in property management candidly. For example, for someone who's offering other services, unearned revenue can be the difference between life and death to know what is earned and what's not. For example, if someone hires me for a year of consulting and they pay in a block amount of money at the start of the year, they pay the whole year in advance, I can only touch 1/12th of that with each month that goes by because it's unearned revenue until I've delivered that guidance for the year. Understanding our starting point of actual free cash is the first part of managing cash, and then the second part is to build out what we call a cash flow forecast. It's very simple. It's 13 weeks which is 90 days, just three months. We simply plot into the cash flow forecast where we've got cash coming in and cash going out. Jason, would it be appropriate for me to just show a screenshot of a cash flow forecast or should we wait until the webinar? Jason: The podcast listeners won't see it so let's get that, we’ll show it on the webinar. They'll just be listeners but it's pretty cool. I'll give you a testimonial related to this. I met with my accountant. We're mapping out all the recurring revenue that we have at DoorGrow and figuring out what expenses. We basically went through this. She started doing this manually in a spreadsheet real time, basically doing exactly what your spreadsheet does. She was figuring out which things are going to hit, what are the due dates for these. We're figuring it all out. I was like that's so funny because Tim has a thing that does this. She took me through it manually to make sure that our cash flow situation is going to be good because it's not just hey, this month we're going to make X number of dollars. We're going to have X number of expenses and we're okay. It's maybe at the beginning of the month, you have a whole bunch of things that are running and you're making that revenue later in the month or however it might work. You need to make sure it's all going to be timed perfectly. That's the brilliance of your cash flow thing because if it ever dips below zero, you're dead. It goes into the red, that's death. You have to make sure that you always know when things are going to hit and this is what your spreadsheet does, which is pretty brilliant. Tim: I agree. I totally agree. I'll tell you, when people are calling you every single day to collect money, 29 days is an extremely long time. It is an eternity. Being clear about when money is arriving, not just by the month to your point, but to the week. To be very clear about when cash is leaving to the week, and making sure that not you or anyone in your team is sending cash out the door too soon especially without other people like a bookkeeper helping or an executive assistant helping to pay different bills, if you don't direct your team on when to pay bills, people in your office or on your team, they might just pay the bills when they come in. They just might pay it exactly the same day that they open the envelope or they get the statement online. They're like oh, well, I was just doing my job. I was just paying this because it came in. You got to give your teammates leadership, guidance, vision, and direction on items like this especially in a cash crunch. People oftentimes ask me Tim, this tool is brilliant. How often should I be looking at it? I say that you look at the tool as often as you need to, relative to two factors. Number one, how low is your plane flying relative to the treetops? This is just the analogy we talked about earlier. If your wheels are clipping the tree tops and those trees might take your plane down, then you're looking at that cash flow forecast possibly every single week to make absolutely damn sure that you're getting the money in that you're expecting on that week, and you're not sending money out any earlier than you're supposed to on that week. Jason: Even daily. Tim: A hundred percent. The clients that I have that weren't had multimillion dollar businesses which can have a lot of complexity, moving parts, people, teammates, products, clients, and all the rest, they would literally have it open every single day just to make sure things were coming and going, that all the trains are running on time because there was no margin for error. The other reason why you'd want to have your cash flow forecast updated in front of mine regularly is if there's a lot of turbulence in the air. Whether you're flying close to the trees or not close to trees. If you got a lot of altitude, that's great. But if there's a lot of turbulence, that can do a lot of damage to your plane as well. Maybe you're not looking at it every single day, maybe not even every single week, but at least once a month. I hate making absolute statements because there's always an exception to the rule, but more or less 100% of entrepreneurs are in turbulence right now because of the climate that we're operating in. This is not a situation, it's limited to a city, a state, or even a country. This is worldwide. The cash flow forecast is how you make sure that you've got oxygen in your tank and that you can keep moving. Without that oxygen in the tank, doesn't matter how big and fast your flippers are to generate revenue. You got to have the cash in the oxygen tank. If you do hit any spots where you've got red on your cash flow forecast and you need to manage that crisis line, there are a lot of different strategies. Some of the more obvious strategies would be applying for some of the SBA loans. The only downside to that is we don't know when they're going to arrive. Secondly, bank lines of credit or if you've got access to them already and they're just sitting unused, that becomes an option. There's raising money from family and friends or an investor. If you wanted to, this is maybe less attractive for most entrepreneurs, we can actually sell shares in your company to raise money. There's also just the simple renegotiating if you need to pay something. Let's say it's $5,000, it's in three weeks from now, and that's when your first red square hits on the cash flow forecast, that's your crisis line. If you're going to be short just $1,000 or something, maybe you could call that person that you owe the money and say can I make it in two payments? I'll pay you in three weeks half, and then one week after that the other half. Lo and behold, just by splitting to 2 payments over 14 days instead of once, all of a sudden you've made up the difference and now all your squares are green. Now you've got not three weeks of safety, but five weeks of safety. Jason: The plane can fly through all of those and knock at the trees. Tim: Hundred percent. The thing is there's a lot of conversation out there about how we have to pivot our businesses and how we have to change our sales and our marketing. I think that is all extremely important conversation to have, absolutely crucial conversation to have. Inevitably, if we're going to pivot our offerings in any way, shape, or form, it's going to take time to roll them out. If it's going to take, say, four weeks to come up with a new offering of some special for an Airbnb owners that want to convert into long term rental, if you need to create a marketing campaign to identify those people, if you need to train up your staff to call certain Airbnb to see if they're distressed. Whether it's people, projects, processes, offers that you're rolling out, it's going to take some time. Even if you do it really quickly, it will probably still take at least a month, if not a few months, to be able to make that pivot and to make that implementation. It doesn't matter if you've got the best idea. It takes four weeks to roll out, but you only have two weeks of cash. That's like building a brand new airplane that's the world's fastest, sexiest, coolest, most comfortable, smoothest plane in the world, but if you only give it 100 yards of runway, it's not going to take off. It's just not. Jason: To boil this down real simple for those listening, all these opportunities for growth, it does not matter if your business doesn't cash flow. It's going to fail. Cash flow first and then let's get you focused on growth. Tim: Cash can come from different places. It can come from loans and other places, not just from revenue. To your point, Jason, I just think there are so many opportunities on the other side of this. We just have to make sure we have enough runway. Surprisingly, amidst this entire thing, I'd say the thesis of all of this is that the most important factors in navigating a cash crunch is actually not cash itself. It's actually time. Time is what we're playing for and cash gets us time. By getting time, we can now get out of panic. We can get back to being calm, clear because we've got a cash flow forecast. You can see what's coming down the pipe. We're confident because you know the exact steps you need to take and because we're clear, confident, and calm, now we can be creative to take advantage of the opportunities that are coming down the pipe. That is the name of the game. Those three steps, navigating mindset, navigating expenses, and navigating cash are how we build the runway that we then can launch off whatever the new opportunities are to take us into the new economy. Jason: I had Michael McCalla on the show. I've worked with Al Sharpton as a coach. One of the things Al would say is if you lower the pressure noise for an entrepreneur, that's where their brilliance and genius comes out. One of the things Michael Mccalla talked about is that when we have constraints or limitations which this market is creating, it's going to create innovation. If you give somebody the Pareto principle, if you give somebody an endless amount of time to do whatever, they don't have to innovate. We're innovating crazy inside DoorGrow. My team members are getting new ideas. We release some contractors. Our salaried staff are figuring out new ways of doing things, ways to save money, ways that are more efficient, ways that are faster. These are big opportunities right now for you and your team to give them some constraints, have them work with you on lowering expenses, solving the cash crunch crisis that you may be experiencing, and allowing innovation creativity to happen. If you can keep your presence calm, your team will be there as well. This is a step towards that. Tim: Did you want to share with folks maybe a little bit about our presentation we're doing next week? We're actually walking people through building a cash flow forecast. Jason: Yeah. Let's just touch on the details. It's going to be on Thursday, what day is that? Tim: April the 9th. Jason: It's going to be on April 9th. It's going to be 11:00. Our time, we're both in Austin, Central, which is 9:00 AM Pacific noon Eastern. What are we going to be sharing during this? What are you going to be sharing with everyone? Tim: You bet. First of all, folks, go to navigatethecashcrunch.com/doorgrow. I know podcast listeners won't be able to see this, but Jason, I'll just share my screen so you can see it. We've got Navigate the Cash Crunch with Tim Francis and Jason Hull. It's happening Thursday, April 9th, 2020 at 11:00 AM Central, which is Chicago time just like Jason just shared. In it, we'll be sharing the three step process we've talked about today. We're not going to go into as much detail into mindset because we talked about it here today already. We'll cover a few tools around expense management. The real star of the show is building your very own cash flow forecast. You can register for that webinar at navigatethecashcrunch.com/doorgrow. What you'll get is access to the training. You also get the cash flow forecast template as well, which you can just drop into your very own computer and get to work with seeing where your crisis line is. Hopefully, it's not too close and from there, seeing the exact path to navigating safely. If you happen to be listening to this podcast episode of the DoorGrow Show after the webinars already happened, so after April the 9th, 2020, no problem. You can still go back to the exact same URL. You can see the resources and the replays there so that you are not left in the dark. Jason: navigatethecashcrunch.com/doorgrow. Tim: Yes, indeed. Absolutely. Maybe you guys can throw that in the show notes or something like that for anyone listening to the podcast. Jason: Absolutely. Tim: That's that. I think that somewhat as a final thought on my end over here. It's just that deep down inside, we as entrepreneurs, we take on a lot to be great leaders. I do view property managers as entrepreneurs. I hope they do too, because they are there. They're doing the courageous things of entrepreneurs every single day. Sometimes leadership isn't easy. Sometimes it has uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes it has uncomfortable moments. I think that there's something really beautiful about getting clear on where we are. Oftentimes we talk about our goals and what's the most important to us, but we also have to be very clear about where we are. Getting to Austin, Texas is very different if you're starting in Chicago versus Waikiki. Knowing where we are right now with free cash, and then from there being able to map the path with our cash flow forecast, it really creates calm, it really creates clarity. Therefore, it really creates confidence which then creates creativity that we can now take on this new economy. Something I am very sure about is not anyone including myself could have specific data around this. I just know my gut, Jason, that the economy that we had two months ago, it's over. It's gone. I don't just mean bull versus bear. What I mean is the way we did business once upon a time is forever changed. I'm very nervous for what kind of discomfort is coming for anyone who thinks that how we used to do things is coming back to what it used to be. As we chart into these new territories, I think being able to be calm, clear, confident, and creative is the path. It takes courage and just a couple simple tools to be able to have that. I think that if we're operating from clear facts and confidence, we become lighthouses that can attract what we need to attract into our worlds, and also fend away what we need to fend away. We're not left making super emotional decisions. One of my mentors, his name is Keith Cunningham, he talks about emotion and intelligence often working inverse of one another. The more emotional we are, which is really saying the more that we're in our amygdala, the less that we're in the frontal lobe of our brain, the less our executive functioning is there and the less that we're able to make intelligent, clear, confident decisions. On the flip side, the more that we can make calm, clear, confident decisions, the less that we become really emotional about what's going on. That's not to say we're not passionate. We are so passionate about our businesses. Yes, emotion has its right place. We just don't want to get stuck making decisions or taking action that we may regret down the road. Jason: Absolutely. Tim, thanks for coming on the show. Everybody else, make sure you tune in when we do our presentation. For those listening, watch the replay. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. 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If you walked out the door for a month, would the business you started survive? Would it still operate? Do you have the right people in the right roles? Today, Jason Hull and John Ray of DoorGrow discuss the problem of premature expansion in property management. What is the best way to see consistent, comfortable growth? You’ll Learn... [03:25] Plateau vs. Premature Expansion: Buy new business, location, or expand to make more money: [04:33] Debunking New Market Myths: Easier, less work, and shortcut to growth. [07:20] Duplication: Split energy leads to struggling to successfully do double the work. [08:43] Clone Your Competitor: Takes 10 people to duplicate tasks and do them better.  [13:00] New Locations: Avoid burnout by building a team and support to be scalable. [15:21] Processes: If employee leaves, document tasks to prevent disconnect. [22:55] Expansion: Continue to grow in the same, new, or additional location? . [24:20] Systems: Plan and set monthly and annual growth targets, goals, and more. [31:15] Process Documentation: Who does what and how to do what they do. Tweetables What is the best strategy to see consistent, comfortable growth? Entrepreneurs: Build the business you want, not what you can. Success: Strive for pie in the sky dreams or a pile of manure?  Resources Rent Manager AppFolio Iceberg Report Tony Robbins Process Street DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jason: How dialed in is your business now that if you walked out the door and left for a month, would it fall apart? Would there be a problem? Would it still operate? Maybe then, if the answer is, “Yeah, it would be totally fine,” maybe then it’s time to open up a new location because that means you have things really dialed in, you’ve got the right people. 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, 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. I’m hanging out here with someone else from DoorGrow, Jon Ray. Jon: Thanks for having me, we’re a part of the DoorGrow growth hacker team. Jason: We were sitting and I’m thinking, “What can we talk about?” The topic that I wanted to talk about is a common problem that I see come up. I coined a phrase for it and I don’t know that anybody else has ever talked about this phrase, but this is just what I felt like calling it. Our topic today is premature expansion in property management. Jon: Premature expansion, tell us about it, Jason. I’ll preface it by saying I’ve been talking to a lot of our seed hackers, a lot of property managers that are a part of the Facebook group. Ultimately, everybody is trying to figure out what is the best way to seek consistent, comfortable growth. One of the things that has come up on a recurring basis on these calls is that as people are thinking about the various strategies that are available to them for growth—especially at some kind of an accelerated pace over what they’re doing—oftentimes there is a consideration if not an outward movement towards moving into another market.  As you and I were talking about that that can sometimes be a great strategy, but sometimes it can be an absolute failing strategy. Premature expansion is basically your term and how you’re packaging that concept of when that kind of expansion into another market may not be the best strategy. Can you talk about in more detail on how somebody should be thinking about whether or not they should move into another marketplace? Jason: There’s a lot that goes into deciding whether to move into a new marketplace, or premature expansion could be even buying a new business, or a new location. It's any sort of expansion. Usually, the motivation behind it is they want to grow, they want to make more money. Their challenge is that sometimes it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. The most common scenario—one of the most—is somebody will come in and they’ll say, “Hey, we want to buy another property management company in another market,” or “We’re going to open up a new office in another new market.”  Usually, when I ask them why, they feel like they’ve hit a plateau in their growth in their current market. This is usually what’s fueling this. They feel stuck. They were doing something that was working, they usually get to maybe the 200-400 door range and what I call the second sandtrap. Once they get into that space, they think, “Well, we got this far in this location. We’re hitting a limit or a plateau. Let’s just go duplicate that effort and do it somewhere else.” It makes sense on the surface. It sounds so easy like, “We did it here. Maybe we tap this out. Maybe now it’s time to go to a new market.” I think there’s a lot of myths that drive that. One myth is that it’s going to be easier in another market, in the second market it will be easier. That’s almost never, ever, ever the case. The second location is always more difficult. It’s more difficult to manage, it’s more difficult to maintain. If you have a second office, you’re going to need a second set of staff. It’s just harder. It might mean that you’re doing double the amount of work as an entrepreneur trying to run two locations. Also, they think, “What worked here,” I think that’s a myth, “What worked in our first location to get us to this point might work there.”  If they’ve been in business for maybe 10 years, and they played this pay-per-click game in the beginning, or they were doing all property management leads in the beginning, and that stuff has shifted, and it's not as easy. Things have shifted and changed, but they're thinking, “Well, we got this far. Let's just go do what we're doing now over here. Maybe it will grow just as fast.” They run into some problems because fundamentally, what used to work may not be working.  Another myth is that it's some sort of shortcut to growth, and it's not really a shortcut. There's a lot of challenges and difficulties. What's easier than opening up a new location, and then trying to add more doors, and to build out basically a whole another company, essentially, is to grow where you're at. That's far easier.  A lot of times, when I ask them, here's the golden question to ask yourself if you're a person listening to this thinking, “I want to expand. Let's open up and go into a new city.” First of all, you need to ask yourself, do you really want to be there? Do you want to drive out there? Do you want your team to be taking trips out there? Does that feel comfortable to you? Because ultimately, you can build a business that you want to have. It doesn't have to be the business that you can do. That's a big temptation we make as entrepreneurs is we build the business we can’t. “Oh, well we can do this. I can add this service. We can do that.” Then we get scattered. We end up diluting our effectiveness.  In the case of premature expansion, they open up a second market. What inevitably I see happen—almost every time—is their first primary location starts to suffer and struggle, and they start to lose those doors, and customer service levels drop, and there are challenges, and they're having a more difficult time running both. Things have to be incredibly well dialed in in order to do that, to make that work. Jon: Ultimately, what you're talking about here is this concept of duplication. We all wish that we could duplicate ourselves so that we could do twice as much work. In entrepreneurship—in order to successfully duplicate yourself—there are some certain things that have to happen. Otherwise, that duplication just looks like split energy, and then neither of the parts are getting as much as the first whole. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what it looks like to successfully duplicate yourself.  When I was running teams at Google, and when we were thinking about whether we were going to expand into a new marketplace, we wanted to make sure that we had maximized our efforts in the current city that we were in as much as humanly possible, and we wanted to make sure that we had templatized all of our processes so that the management wasn't directly involved in the success of the business. They were guiding strategy and vision, but they weren't operationally necessary other than that high-level guidance. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that would look like in a property management business, and how somebody should think about that concept of duplication. Jason: I love what you're saying about what they would do at Google. It makes a lot of sense. What I've seen is in my experience in helping hundreds—maybe even thousands of entrepreneurs—is there's always this myth that if I could just clone myself, all my hopes and dreams would come true. I know all this stuff, I can do all this stuff, and then all my hopes and dreams would come true.  Let me tell you from experience what it took to duplicate myself, because I pretty much got somebody to do every single role that I used to do in the business, and it takes probably about ten people. That's my experience. It takes about ten people to duplicate yourself. You're never going to find that one person that can do it all. If you do, they're going to become your new competitor, or they're going to go start their own business, or they're going to leave you after they realize that they can probably do stuff better than you, just like you probably figured out back when you were working for somebody. You’re like, “I could do this better.”  That's the e-myth—that's the entrepreneur myth. That's what everybody wants to do. They're like, “I could do this.” A lot of business owners that are running businesses now they used to work for somebody, and they're like. “I could do this.” Then they'd start learning that they need to become an accountant, and they need to become a graphic designer, and they need to become whatever. Whatever all the different roles are and the different hats that you wear.  Just like that in a property management business, if you're going to expand into any market, you have to realize which hats are you still wearing, which seats are you still sitting in on this bus that's the business? If you're managing, and you're acting as BDM, and you're acting as the property manager, or maintenance coordinator, or any of these operationally tactical, critical roles, then the challenge is you go into the market, your life's going to become twice as hard with another location. There's that momentum and that inertia in getting something new going.  Training one new person makes your life twice as hard. If you're going to build out a new team there, if you're going to build out maybe a satellite staff, it's still a lot more work to get that all built up. That's why if you don't have high leverage when it comes to systems, high leverage when it comes to the process—I think maybe that's a good question to ask yourself is: how dialed in is your business now that if you walked out the door and left for a month, would it fall apart? Would there be a problem? Would it still operate? Maybe then, if the answer is, “Yeah. It’d be totally fine,” maybe then it's time to open up a new location because that means you have things really well dialed in, you've got the right people.  The question is also connected to that: if you lost any single team member—think of who you think is the most critical person on your team—if they killed over and died—god forbid—or they left your business, or they went to work for a competitor, or they went to start their own property management business, how quickly would you be able to get back up to speed? Do you have all their processes defined? Do you know what they're doing? Do you know what they do on a day-to-day basis? Do you feel like somebody else could step into that role very easily because everything's documented? If not, opening up into a second location is dangerous because you're not going to have all those things dialed in.  Ultimately, overwhelm is going to set in. This is the big thing for us entrepreneurs. We operate, basically, at two speeds. It's like we're in momentum, we’re on fire, and we feel alive, or we're in a state of overwhelm feeling stuck, and frustrated, and stressed. If you're already feeling stressed, and stuck, and frustrated, that's probably not the time to go heap more on to your plate. Jon: Just playing devil's advocate because I think a lot of the people that I talk to in the property management space that are considering this move are like, “Well, that may be accurate advice for most people, but I'm better than most people. I was able to bootstrap where I'm at now, and I was able to scrap it altogether, and I didn’t document all of these processes. Why can't I do the same thing for a second location?”  Maybe you can talk a little bit to me, and explain to me why it's different from the second location? Because it is true that you can figure things out when you're physically there in person, but as you start to satellite out, it's a different kind of mentality that you have to take, and the bootstrapping method doesn't work so well. Can you talk about why that is? Jason: When you open up a business—just through sheer will of force and just personality—if somebody can sell, and somebody is driven, they can create a business. They can probably even get it up to about $1 million in revenue annually just through that. But beyond that, you have to have a team. In property management, you're going to probably need a team long before you hit that amount in revenue, and you need support. Otherwise, it's just not scalable. You're going to start to burn out really quickly. This is why we see so many people get stuck in the first sandtrap, which is about 50 or 60 units. It's the solopreneur. They'll get stuck there.  If you're at the place where you're at about 200-400 units you probably got some team members, you probably at least have a maintenance coordinator, maybe a property manager, somebody helping with showings. You got some pieces in place. You've gotten that off your plate. That doesn't mean now you could go up and open up a whole new location because still, tons of things are still relying on you. Just pay attention. If your team members are coming into your office, or texting you throughout the day, then you are a bottleneck in your business already. You will be even a bigger bottleneck.  My entire team, we're virtual. If you bring on people that are at a remote office, they're not going to be able to get their questions answered quickly, they're not going to have the support that they need, you need to live there for at least 90 days so everybody's on board with it, systems are in place, and be able to do that. That's possible to build that up, but that means you need everything really well dialed in so that stuff doesn't just gravitate towards chaos. There needs to be protections in place so that you can ensure that people are doing what needs to be done. Jon: I want to unpack that word systems and really the phrase systems and processes because I think a lot of people—at least in the calls that I'm having with property managers—when I say systems and processes they're like, “Oh, yeah. Well, we're already on that folio. We already have a rent manager.” That's actually not what you're talking about. Can you unpack that a little bit? Jason: When it comes to processes you need to have—here's the way I look at it, if somebody on your team quit, fired, or died, or whatever, that means somebody else could step in, they could read a process, they would know exactly how to do it, and they'd be able to figure it out. If all the processes exist in that person's head and your head, then I'll tell you what, there's a massive gap usually, or significant gaps between what you think they're doing, and what they think they should be doing. There always is because it's all just in their head.  We know internally at DoorGrow that this happens, and we have processes documented. There’s still a disconnect sometimes. One team member thinks, “Well, this is how I've been doing it. I think this is how it's supposed to be done.” We have it documented, which is it might even be a little bit different because sometimes people don't refer to the documentation all the time. Then there's what the visionary or the entrepreneur thinks should be done all the time, and the team's documented, or decided it's being done differently. These things are in constant negotiations that need to be brought together.  You can collapse time on that by having processes that people have to actually follow, like you have to actually mark it off and complete it. There's a checklist that they're signing off on that they're actually doing so that there's some accountability that they followed those steps. There needs to be accountability in place because most people—just like learning to drive a car, you maybe read a manual once, took a test, passed the test, maybe the first few times you drove you we're checking your mirrors all the time, and making sure nothing was going on around the car. Now you just get in and you just do it. You're probably skipping a bunch of steps you thought you needed to do in the beginning. Over time, maybe you start to skip other steps. Some drivers don't turn on their blinkers when they're changing lanes. They’re like, “People will figure it out around me.” They just don't do these things, so they're not following the process. They're breaking the law.  You have these things that you want to be followed because it keeps the business safe, it protects you from liability in the business, whatever. Your team members, they're going to gravitate towards skipping steps. They're going to gravitate towards what's easiest. If there aren't checks and balances, and accountability in place, what happens over time is everything's kind of gravitating towards some sort of ease, and some sort of chaos, and you're not really aware of it. Then somebody quits because usually when you look at what they were doing, you're like, “Oh my gosh.” It's usually the person that the entrepreneur thinks is the most critical and essential in the business.  Every time I've had that person on my team that I thought, “If they left, my whole world would fall apart. My business would crumble. It'd be the worst thing ever.” That was always the best person for me to lose. Why? Because what was happening was the reason you feel like they’re so critical is because you have so much uncertainty around what they do. You feel like they're the only one that knows how to do it, and it's their job security they love to maintain. But really, if it can be done by them, it can probably be done by just about anybody that has maybe the right demeanor, and the right personality type for that position, but you need to have those processes documented so they can step in. That’s how I gauge it. Jon: I’ll chime in with as far as efficiency goes, you can keep all the same people, but there's so much mental anguish that happens when something isn't well-defined. Even at DoorGrow, and in many of the businesses that I've worked in, when you go and ask someone what they do in their day-to-day, they feel like that's a subjective question because they feel like they're doing something different, or at least slightly different in every single moment, in every single day. There's so much time and energy that gets wasted when you're constantly having to reanalyze the entire problem, and then make a decision on what the action should be.  When you actually start to document what each person is doing on a regular basis throughout the day, and you look at that from a macro perspective, even within that subjective lens of maybe some things are approached in a different way depending on the scenario, there are very clear processes, tasks, and activities that are being done on a regular basis. If those can be defined, and then clear expectations, and processes can be attached to each of those bullet points, it allows each of your employees to have a better reference point for how to handle certain engagements in the business.  One of the things that creates turnover in a business—in my experience—is that when that level of certainty on what somebody should be doing to be successful in their role is not there, resentment starts to build towards whoever the entrepreneur, or visionary, or guiding light in the business is. That resentment ultimately gets to a boiling point where it's no longer sustainable, and then that results in somebody quitting, or throwing a fit, or making a mistake, or having an accident.  Documenting these processes is one of the best things that you can do to create a level of certainty in each of your employees’ minds so that they can be more successful and more satisfied in their position, which means that retention-wise, you're going to keep your staff longer. Jason: Let's talk about some systems that are required so that your expansion into another market or in general is not premature. Because if it is premature, your operational costs are going to go up significantly. I'll give you an example. I talked to a property management company, and they had 2000 doors. They’re on the East Coast, they had over 20 offices, but only about 2000 doors. It was split among 20 different offices. What their strategy for growth was going and buying up all these little mom-and-pop shops. They would keep those shops intact, they would keep the staff and everything. Their operational costs were ridiculous.  Then there's another client. He had 2000 doors, and he had three locations: two in Utah, one in Idaho. Eventually, became part of the HomeRiver Group. His operational costs were far lower. Same amount of doors, his market was probably even a lower rent market, but he was probably making more money because operationally among those doors, he didn't have 20 offices, 20 buildings to pay the lease, or whatever taxes on, or whatever. All the support staff that goes with each of these offices, all this duplicated stuff.  Here's what I think is essential to take a look at if you're thinking, “Hey, I want to expand into another location.” First thing you ask yourself, would I do it even if I were able to continue to grow here? If I were able to continue to have the doors in this area—where I want it—would I do it? The thing to keep in mind is, according to the Iceberg Report (the last I saw), it was 30% of rental properties are professionally managed, there's 70% in single-family residential at least, there's 70% available potential market share to be created. A lot of people think, “Well, it's impossible to do that,” but if you look at Australia, you've got 80% of single-family residential almost professionally managed. They, at some point, we're probably around where we are, and they've gotten it to 80%. We have so much opportunity there, there's so much blue ocean. Everybody's fighting in the bloody red water. We've talked about them on the show before. The idea that we've run out of options is not always true. It is true if you're playing the game everyone else is playing: SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing, pay-per-lead service. If you're doing those things, it's super competitive because that's what everybody's doing. That is focused on that small existing amount of market share. The people that are already looking for you rather than reaching out and creating new market share, which is what we help our clients focus on. That's one thing to take a look at. The systems that need to be in place. Here are some of the systems that we have in our own business at DoorGrow. One, you need a planning system. Most businesses don't have a plan, they have no planning system. That means you have annual targets, and you have quarterly goals as a company, things to implement, monthly goals. You're not just coming back from every property management conference with a list and chucking a grenade into the middle of the room after pulling the pin and saying, “Hey guys, I'm excited about this. We're going to do all these things.” Everybody goes, “How? We're already maxed out.”  You don't have a system for growth because you don't have a system of planning in the business. If you don't have a planning system, if you can't tell me a realistic annual goal that you're going to hit, if you've been operating in so you think you have a system, and if you've not hit your annual goal for the last year, or two, or three you have a b******* system. It's not real, you’re not hitting your targets. Jon: I want to pause you there and unpack that statement that you made about coming back from the conference with all of these great ideas, and then chunking the grenade in the room, because I do think that happens in every industry but especially property management. Because one, there are so many conferences, and two, it's really easy to get excited about an idea, and then just chunk it on to your staff and say, “Implement this.” When you're talking about a planning system, the way that we do it here in DoorGrow—that I think is really effective—is you're talking about how do we reverse engineer everything on that list and put it in yearly, 6-month, 90-day, monthly, and weekly commitments so that we know all of the steps that are required to achieve each bullet point on that vision list that came from the conference.  Jason: If we take it even a step back further—and you're new to the team so you've gotten to see this happen—you'll remember, we go through and we take a look at the business as a whole. Every business has five core functions in the business—something I learned from one of my business coaches, Al Sharpen. This is basically the whole pipeline of the business. The goal of the business is to make money, that's how it is successful. Then it also needs some sort of purpose besides just making money.  Those things drive everything that we do. We take a look at these five core functions, and we look at each of them, and we figure out where are we deficient, where can we be stronger? It's impossible to be solid on all of them. That's impossible because for example, if you ramp up sales, then your fulfillment side’s going to hit constraints. You’re going to have difficulties as a team. If you're closing a bunch of doors your team's going to have difficulty onboarding all these new clients, for example, so that's going to go down.  Everything's always in flux. The thing to work on is the thing that's weakest. Generally, that's earliest in the sales pipeline. We take a look at that, and we figure out, “All right, what are the things, and what could we do? Then we decide what we will do as a team? Then we figure out what is possible for us to do over the next quarter.” These will all go back to our annual goal, which we have a couple of annual goals, and it's all broken down. We reverse-engineer it from what the business actually needs. If our goal is to focus on lead gen—if we're a property management company—we're not going to go and implement a maintenance coordination software that quarter if that's already going really well. That maybe we’d do that next quarter.  The problem is, businesses don't have a planning system, they don't know how to break this down, and business owners come back. If they do come up with goals they go to some Tony Robbins event, and they're adding extra zeros to the end of everything, and they’re getting super pumped up, and that demoralizes your team because your team, all they hear is, “This is impossible,” and they're losing. There's no way you're going to hit these goals because they're pie in the sky dreams.  We get excited about them as entrepreneurs, but that's not the same for our team. Our team wants to see that we're hitting our numbers every month, not that we, “Oh, well, we missed it this month.” That idea in setting goals that a lot of people will throw out there, which I don't believe is true, is that it's better as a team to aim for the stars than a pile of manure and hit. It's better as a team to aim for the pile of manure and have success. Your team can feel what it's like to win and have momentum. Jon: I just want to make sure that we're making this actionable for people, and give people a clear way to assess whether they're prematurely expanding, or whether expansion maybe is the right step. Jason: It’s a real simple question, do you have a planning system? Can you say with certainty that you have an annual goal that you are confident that your team is going to hit financially? Do you have a quarterly goal that you know what you're doing this quarter, and that you feel pretty confident that you're going to get these quarterly targets implemented? Do you feel confident that your team can hit the 30-day goals that are going to help create those quarterly targets? Does your team know what they're doing every single week relevant to those 30-day goals? If the answer isn't yes to all of that, then you're just operating with the shotgun approach, and your team feels confused, they're concerned, they don't know where the company is going, so they can't really help you get there.  Everybody at DoorGrow is aligned towards what's going in my goal of revenue, making a difference in the industry, all these things are very clear. We talk about them during every meeting: our whole planning system, what we're doing, even what we're doing on a weekly basis that we meet as a team like we did yesterday. To go over our weekly commitments we checked in, what did you do towards these commitments that you had for last week? Did you get these done? There's this high-level of accountability. That's a planning system. That's one system the business needs. Jon: So far, to analyze whether it's too premature to expand, we’ve got: if you as the entrepreneur walked away from the business, would the business still continue to operate with success? Then we have if you could add the number of doors that you want to add in your existing marketplace without having to go to another locale would you prefer to just add them in your existing marketplace, or is there some other reason for you to want to be in another city. Then do you have a clear planning system where you've got annual, 6-month, 90-day, monthly, and weekly commitments that are all being reverse-engineered so your staff can be successful? Really, that's part of operating without you being directly involved in the operations. What else? Jason: The other thing that's essential in the business before you can expand is—we've mentioned this already—you need process documentation. You need a system in the business for finding, and storing, and updating documentation. You need a process system or documentation system in the business that includes job descriptions, org charts. There needs to be clarity as to who's supposed to be doing what and how to do things. That's absolutely critical in a business especially if it's going to scale because once you have a team, there's turnover, there's hiring. These things can derail a business if they're critical roles if you don't have these things in place. Process documentation system is really important.  The software we use is Process Street. Everyone can check out the episode that I did with the founder and CEO of Process Street. We use that as an internal documentation system, and then we also have job descriptions, org charts, these kinds of things. We're going through a process because we've got a jumble routine. When you add a new team member it screws everything up, Jon. Now, my role changes. My job description is different. You're stealing things from me, which I love. Everybody else's job changes a bit too. We're making all these adjustments.  Ashley—my ex-wife—she works for me now, and works in the business, and she's great. She's over some of our operational pieces, you're taking on sales and marketing. These are all things that I used to do, they were my role. Like I said, I used to do every single thing in the business, every single thing. Now we have at least 10 people on the team, and they're all doing something that I used to do. Pretty much all of them are better at it than me. Everyone's better at these things than I am.  Jon: I just want to speak from the perspective of an employee because anytime I've gone into a new business, if it's chaotic, and nobody knows what they're doing, and nobody has clearly defined roles, it is so uncomfortable for a new person to step into that environment. That's why there's a lot of 90-day churn and turnover for new hires because when somebody says, “Yeah, I don't feel like it's a good fit.” What they mean is, “You didn't provide me with the level of certainty that I was looking for in this role.” When everything is clearly defined and documented the way that you've done at DoorGrow, it allows me as a new hire to come in with so much certainty, and I feel like everything is teed up for me to be successful in my position which makes me want to do more in the position. Jason: You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. 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 in 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.

Not tech-savvy? Afraid to use technology to meet elevated brand standards at scale? Are you willing to manage and centralize chaos by leveraging automation and mobile functionality for those maintaining and caring for your properties?  Today, I am talking to Tucker Cohen of Breezeway, which brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space. By combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management, Breezeway makes it easy for managers to deliver the best experience for guests, tenants, and owners.  You’ll Learn... [03:05] Problems Solved: Breezeway helps property management business owners when short- or long-term tenants move out to determine condition of property.  [05:15] Breezeway Bio: Created by FlipKey founder and acquired by TripAdvisor. Breezeway uses 75+ years of industry experience to build the future of property care. [07:00] Systemize business to be more effective and save time for brand standards and rising expectations in the market.  [10:23] Conferences and Companies: What does a conference need? Everything a business needs. Company growth and expansion doesn’t always make things easier. [14:45] What are brand standards and rising expectations? People and perceptions are extensions of your brand. Trust and transparency meet standards and expectations. [21:25] Dating Analogy: Am I the person that the person I want to attract into my life or into my business, would they be interested in me? Come down to their level or level up. [23:05] Running a Business: If something isn’t working, it's your fault. Take ownership, don’t blame your team that is following your lead.  [27:20] Expectations tend to rise, but sometimes expectations are artificially wrong, unrealistic, unmanageable, and express entitlement.  [29:22] Situational Sayings: If nothing changes, then nothing changes. If you want dramatically different results, dramatic changes are required.  [30:59] Status Quo Challenge: Some people aren't ready for change. Ultimately, everyone moves toward an operations tool, like Breezeway.  [36:00] Platform Integrations: Breezeway strives to be a connected system, but wants to work with Rent Manager and others. [38:35] Three-Legged Stool: Cleaning, inspection, and maintenance of property care and operations. Tweetables Everything looks shiny and pretty, but business is tough, being an entrepreneur is tough, and the inside of companies can be tough. The main thing must stay the main thing in the business. Keeping focus is power. Expectations tend to rise, but some expectations are unrealistic and unmanageable. The sooner you can automate, the better. As you scale, you have that process in place. Resources Breezeway Tucker Cohen’s Email Tucker Cohen on Twitter Tucker Cohen on LinkedIn FlipKey TripAdvisor Todd Breen Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink Rent Manager EZ Repair Hotline Property Meld Latchel DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator 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 the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I am hanging out here with Tucker Cohen. Tucker, welcome to the show. Tucker: Thanks a lot, Jason. That was fantastic. For some reason, I thought that was recorded. I didn’t know you did that a lot. Jason: I just say it each time. Sometimes, I screw it up even though I wrote it. Tucker: It’s perfect, you nailed it. Jason: I'm reading it. I think I haven't memorized, I probably do, but I read it because even I get nervous doing my own show sometimes. Tucker, we're going to get into Breezeway and our topic today is brand standards and rising expectations in the market. Give us a little bit of background before we get into the topic at hand. Tell us a little bit about what is Breezeway and maybe we can dig in more into that as we move through the topic. Tucker: Absolutely. First of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad that we're able to reconnect since Orlando, probably like a month ago now. I’m super excited to be here. It's interesting. The topics are largely in line with what we're up to. I doubt that's much of a coincidence, but what Breezeway aims to do is allow property managers, like the ones you're talking about, the ones who aren't afraid to adopt technology, go out on a limb, and do something first, to meet those elevated brand standards at scale. The way we're doing that is through leveraging automation, through leveraging mobile functionality for folks in the field who are helping maintain and care for your properties. Without getting too much into it, I'd say that we're really in line with that brand standard piece you mentioned. Jason: Cool. I want to touch on this before we could move on, but what problems does Breezeway really solve? Property management business owners are struggling with what? They would be really interested in having a conversation with you. Tucker: I think there's a number of different ways to answer that with regards to the folks who I think are probably tuned in now. It's going to be more aligned along the lines of when someone moves out or when someone checks out of one of your properties, be it long-term or short-term, you don't necessarily know the condition that the property was in when they got there. With Breezeway, we have a system of record for every single detail down to the serial number of your appliance when someone checked in and every item into a certain room or a certain part of the house that often goes unnoticed or you have an owner coming in to check-in, I think it’s just managing the chaos would probably be the best way to describe what we're helping folks with. Jason: Now, my initial gut reaction hearing this is that sounds like a lot of work, of data entry and getting all these things, just to go around to each unit and feed all this stuff in. How do you deal with that objection that people are probably, I'm sure it's come up. That sounds like a lot of time. Tucker: Totally. With any of this type of stuff, you get what you put into it. If you're willing to go through the due diligence upfront, make sure that everything is set up right, and you have all your property information in the system, then it pays dividends down the line where you don't have to go digging through a Google Drive with hundreds of different files about your serial number on the microwave, that property number 150. That stuff is all there anyway. The only difference is that it's just buried somewhere, whether it's an email thread, a text chain with a cleaner, an inspector at your property, or a maintenance guy. You have most of this information anyway. What we're doing is we're centralizing everything in there under one hood. Jason: Got it. Now I'm going to read a little bit of that bio that we received when getting ready for the show because I think it makes you guys sound pretty credible and I want you guys to look really good. Breezeway brings operations and service optimization software to the property management space, combining deep-learning technology, robust property data, smart messaging, and mobile-first task management. We make it easy for managers to deliver the best experience of guests, tenants, and owners. We are serving a global customer base across a broad set of verticals, including short-term vacation managers, residential property managers, cleaning and maintenance providers, hospitality operators. This was created by the founder of FlipKey which was acquired by TripAdvisor. The Breezeway team is using 75-plus years of industry experience to build the future of property care. What you're working on is you are directly with the sales team. You're building the sales team inside that. This says, “Having skilled companies from series A to unicorn status in the past.” What does that mean? Explain that to me. Tucker: That's, of course, like privately-held software company jargon right there, but basically, what that means is a company that's pre-Series A, like us here at Breezeway, means we've raised a very small round of money. In the future, we may raise a Series A, which is more of an initial investment, proper venture capital raise, and then all the way up to unicorn status, which is commonly referred to in Silicon Valley as a billion-dollar valuation for the company. Jason: Okay. Let's get into the top of your hand. Brand standards and rising expectations in the market. This sounds like you guys are primed for growth. It sounds like you guys have a really cool technology in place that's going to do some stuff for property managers to help them systemize their business. I think you could answer my question better in saying that it's going to help them save time in the long run, right? It’s the bottom of the line. There's some time that it takes to get this stuff set up initially, but it's going to save you the hassle of all this time in the long run. Overall, it's not costing you time. Tucker: Yeah, you got it. Jason: There you go. Tucker: Most folks are already doing a lot of this stuff anyway. Jason: They're just doing it poorly. Tucker: Again, you said it, not me. Jason: Most things in most businesses. I get to see on the inside of hundreds of companies and everything's shiny on the outside. It could be shinier. We can help you with that, by the way, property managers. It could be shinier on the outside, but the challenges on the inside, that's like the whited sepulcher they talked about in the Bible like, “How's everything going?” “Oh, it's great,” but they're drowning. That's businesses on Instagram. Everything looks pretty and is great but really business is tough, being an entrepreneur is tough, and the inside of companies can be tough. A smart entrepreneur I’d spoken with today on a sales call said, “What's your internal organization like? How do you run your own business?” I just started telling him because us, entrepreneurs, we know what it's like to run a company. It feels like herding cats sometimes, it feels like chaos, wrapping some constraints around that and moving the business forward towards scaling towards growth takes work. You help manage some of the herding of the cats information-wise. Tucker: There you go. Absolutely. To that point, it's such an interesting timing. I actually just started listening to this other podcast called Under The Waterline. Have you heard of that one? Jason: No, but Under The Waterline? Like drowning? Tucker: It's pretty straightforward, but all about what you're saying. Everybody tells the story. When a company goes well, all you hear is the above the waterline, which is clean, beautiful, and nothing ever went wrong. I'm drawing a blank on the host. I only listened to a couple of episodes far, worth checking out. He digs and he interviews with entrepreneurs, and talks about “Tell me the honest take. What happened here? How did you do this? Was it good? Was it bad? Was it ugly?” really digging in on that under the waterline grit that it takes to successfully build a company like you're talking about. Jason: Yeah. I've made all kinds of mistakes. I jokingly tell people that DoorGrow has been built on thousands of failures, I mean really. I did a conference back in November and some of the listeners were probably at this conference. We had 150 attendees. This was our inaugural event. It was phenomenal. We had amazing food. We had great speakers. Here's the dirty secret about doing that conference. People were like, “Why aren't you doing it again this year?” I thought it'd be this great thing, our business is healthy, we're doing about $1 million in revenue, we've had 300% growth, then like, “Let's do a conference this year.” Tucker: Why not? Jason: The thing about starting a conference, property managers can compare this to—if they're in residential going into commercial, or deciding to start in a new market, deciding to do associations, or whatever it might be—some expansion and they think this will be easy. There’ll be just this other thing. This other thing was like starting a whole new company because what does a conference need? Everything a business needs: sales, marketing, branding positioning, lots and lots of organization, everything that a business needs. It was like starting another company. Guess how much growth we had the year that we were doing a conference? No growth. We had no growth for a year. We were healthy-ish but we weren't growing ironically. Our company is called DoorGrow, but it was because we were distracted because everything had to go towards this conference. Once you decide to do a conference, you're all in. You're on the hook with the hotel, you've got vendors, people sold tickets, there's no going back. There are lots of companies that have gone bankrupt just for doing a conference. I was like, “How was that possible? No.” We're [...] than that. Not me, no. That's every business owner starting company. “I'll be better than all those other property management businesses. They all suck but that won't be me.” I hear that all the time. “I'm starting a property management business because all the other companies in my market suck.” I hear that every week and they won't be that one. Tucker: What you're talking about, too, Jason is just like spending your time efficiently and effectively. If you are a small shop, you can't really afford to necessarily make mistakes like that with where you're allocating your time. In your case, it was a conference that did it. You did it, you pulled it off but someone who, like you're saying— Jason: Yeah, everybody loved it, everyone's like, “It was so great,” and I didn't love it. It was super stressful because I'm somewhat introverted. I'm an ambivert but that situation was incredibly uncomfortable for me because it was just so much pressure. But it went off well, everybody had great feedback but it cost me $2 million in opportunity cost easily. Tucker: No ROI there. Jason: I could do a conference that cost tons of money, broke even sort of thing. The conference probably cost $120,000 just to throw because we did everything great but the opportunity cost, the fact that my team were all focused on it, and everything else instead of on the main thing. I think as entrepreneurs, we need to remember in our business, the main thing is the main thing. If your business needs sales and revenue, then that's what you need to focus on, otherwise, you end up with a sales slump and then you're scrambling. The main thing has to stay the main thing in the business. That was a huge lesson that I got from that. I got to make sure the main thing always stays the main thing. Entrepreneurs, we’re always tempted by opportunity and there's always a distraction, there are always new options, opportunity, and distraction, whether it's expanding into a new market as a property manager or something. Keeping focused is power. Tell me what are brand standards? Rising expectations? Let's get into this. Tucker: I have a hot take on brand standards. I think it's a pretty lukewarm take, I think it's pretty straightforward, but it’s really like, “This is what your expectation is.” There's this sociological theory, which is that there are three versions of you. There's you as you see yourself, there's you as other people see you, and there's a version of you that you think other people see as you. It's your projection of what people's perception is. It's one thing from a personal standpoint, but from a business standpoint, you actually can control that in a lot of ways. That's what we're talking about with brand standards. You have expectations as an entrepreneur, as the CEO of your own company, you expect things to be done a certain way. How do you make sure that the people who you're trusting to impact your business, whether it's someone taking photos of your property for a posting, for listing, cleaning your property, or inspecting your property before someone checks in or moves in? Those people are extensions of your brand. You're effectively trusting them to meet those standards. A lot of times, you don't necessarily have insight into that but maybe that was a hot take. Jason: Yeah. I'll add to that. Branding is one of the main things that we have property management businesses with. I consider myself a branding expert. This is something that I dealt with in helping clean up the branding for hundreds of property management companies. We've helped some vendors even recently. We helped clean up Virtually Incredible’s branding. We helped clean up their new logo. It was designed by my team. I had some great conversation with Todd Breen on helping him focus on the main gateway that was feeding his business and recognize that other things were back-end products that came later in the sales cycle, instead of putting out the message that he did everything, which one feeds the business. I think property managers need to recognize that, too.  Property management is often the front-end gateway product even if they also do real estate. It works more effectively usually that way. I think they need to focus on that, but a lot of property management businesses in the branding are real estate companies, which scares off the people that want a specialist. They want a specialist that manage their biggest investment ever. I've helped double some property management businesses’ real estate revenue commissions by eliminating real estate from their branding, ironically, because once the property management side is healthy, it's what's feeding them the majority of the revenue that’s coming into that. It goes back again to focus. We can tie this back in, but it goes back again to focus that in order to deal with people's expectations and in order to manage the perception of your business, I think the key is that you need to align it towards what starts the process, not towards everything that you do. I'm dating now. Imagine that you're in the process of dating, you're going out, and you just vomit everything about yourself and what you do. You can't do that. You got to start with where's their interest level at. Start in that space first. “Oh, you're into music? Me too.” You have to start somewhere. There has to be a beginning. The same thing with our businesses, there has to be a beginning because you [...] what you're doing. You're trying to create a relationship and you can parallel this to dating, but you're not going to show up and try to make out with them on the front porch as soon as you meet them. That's what people try to do in sales a lot of times. They just vomit everything right on their lap, they're in a state of overwhelm, and they're like, “Okay, that's a bit much, buddy.” I think also with branding, transparency is so huge. You said something that I felt anxious just hearing you talk about the expectations with yourself, with others, and then what you think others are perceiving. That can be such a big head game that people get caught up in. They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, how are people perceiving me? Am I okay? Do they like me? Am I being right for them? Am I doing this?” Ultimately, as we get older, we learn to just not give an F. You don't care as much because you become more confident, you love yourself, you like yourself. When your business is confident, when you're confident in your business, and you're confident your business can deliver, you come from a greater space in which you can be the prize that the client is trying to get instead of thinking that they're the prize. This is called prizing in sales. I think it happens when you’re transparent because transparency creates safety, it creates trust, you don't have to try and be something. The problem is, a lot of times, the brand is not in alignment with what's on the back end, what's on the inside. It's not in alignment with the business owner. Tucker: That brings up two great points. One is you say in your personal life, you grow up and you're just like, “Yeah, I don't really care. This is who I am, take it or leave it.” What we're talking about here, unfortunately, is a place where we don't have that luxury. We're talking about the rising expectations that are taking place across every element of property management and then the brand standards. Jason: Due to increases in technology. People have iPhones. If they have iPhones, they expect more. Tucker: It's one thing to say, “Yeah, this is who I am, take it or leave it,” but if it's your business, you say that, and you provide a bad experience, that's where I think branding really comes down to is the experience that your client ends up having when they engage with you, be it at the very beginning of your relationship or throughout the lion's share of it all the way to the end. Jason: Yeah. Let's go back to the dating analogy. If I'm overweight, I'm not getting my hair cut, I'm not brushing my teeth, and I just grow my beard down to my ankles, and I just say, “Screw everybody else, this is how I am. Take it or leave it.” That's cool, I will only attract people that are interested in that. That might not be what I'm interested in. Here's the thing. I love this question, “Am I the person—that the person I want to match with, or attract into my life, or into my business—they would be interested in? Am I at that level? If not, I even need to lower my expectations or I need to make some changes.” Tucker: Right, either come down to their level or you level up. That's it. Jason: Right. Either way, I need to get in touch with reality. I need to make some changes. A great question that I've had several coaches I've seen throw out or coaches I've worked with ask is, “Who do I have to become in order to be that person? Who do I have to become? What would it take? Who do you, as a property management business owner, have to become in order to have the type of business that you want?” Here's the thing. One of my coaches said, “If you don't have the business yet that you dream of, you're not yet the person that can run it yet. Tucker: That's meta. Jason: That's meta. Right, that's really simple. If you don't have the business that you dream of, you feel like it's not right, and you're frustrated with your team, you're not the person yet that can create that. But as entrepreneurs, it's so easy for us to externalize all of that. I get many people come to me and they want to focus on their website, they want to focus on lead gen, they want to blame their team. Everything is external. The ironic thing that I found is if I can get them to focus on themselves, get clarity on who they are, what really makes them feel alive and in momentum as entrepreneur, they get really clear on their purpose, then we align the brand, the business, everything around that, everything changes. The website's going to end up changing, their messaging is going to end up changing, their sales process changes. They fire some of their team members. Their team members change. Everything changes in a business once the business owner, the entrepreneur at the helm who is the sun at the center of the solar system changes. Everything has to change by default. But what's incredibly costly, time crazy, and painful is the folks trying to change everything externally without changing yourself which is really creating all that. Tucker: Do you know Jocko Willink, the ex-Navy SEAL? Jason: Yeah, he's written some good books. Tucker: He's got the book Extreme Ownership. That’s his whole thing, it’s extreme ownership. If something's not working out, it's your fault. You got to take some ownership, it’s not the team's fault. The team is following your lead. You're the leader. Jason: I'll share an example. I was talking with somebody and they were complaining about all these different people that had come into their life. They were complaining about this guy, that guy, and this. I said, “Hey, there's one common denominator among all of this. There's one commonality.” Because they were like, “I don't know [...]. All these people are so different.” I said, “There's one thing in common. You. That’s the one thing in common.” The most dangerous thing in the world—property managers know this if they've been in the business a while—one of the biggest red flags for property manager is if somebody comes to them and says with an existing manager or they just fired their last manager and they're complaining about their previous managers. “Oh, this company was terrible.” The dumb property manager would listen to all of that and they would say, “Oh, yeah, they're terrible. We'll be way better.” The correct property manager would say, “Okay, maybe it's this person so I better ask some really good questions before I take them on because I might be the next company that's on their [...] list that's getting attacked on online reviews and negative. I don't want to be that.” That's a red flag. Another red flag is if somebody's referring a client to you. We can't really help them. I teach my clients to do that, to refer the clients they don't like to somebody else. I'm sharing this transparently, everybody. If somebody's referring a client to you, it could mean that they're a terrible client. Sometimes, though, it may just mean that they’re not a fit. One man's junk is another man's treasure when it comes to property management. Some people can deal with that difficult investor and others can't. Some difficult investors can exchange the good ones just by setting a real strong fence and a boundary that some managers aren't capable of doing. That's all they wanted in the beginning, they just wanted safety. That's another advantage you can create. Tucker: The takeaway there, do your homework always. Larry David had a good episode on that. Don't get foisted. Jason: Foisted? I don’t know that term. Tucker: I'll send you a link. Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Jason: All right. I’ll avoid getting foisted after I launch this episode. Tucker: Tough referral. Jason: Perfect. Expectations do tend to rise but sometimes, expectations are artificially wrong. I saw a post from one of my buddies who's in the restaurant industry today. This girl wrote this note on a receipt saying, “I'm not giving you a tip because I'm only a few days away from my 21st birthday and you wouldn't allow me to have alcohol.” No tip for their whole party, from the whole party of food. This just shows the entitlement that exists in some people. That's ridiculous. Sometimes some people's expectations are unrealistic. I don't think it's too much for somebody to provide good service but to break the law for somebody so that they can have alcohol because, “Hey, my birthday is only a few days away,” come on. Tucker: That's an unrealistic expectation at its finest. Jason: As long as it's in the past. Yes. Some expectations are not manageable and it's not possible for us to raise to that level of their expectation because it's without foundation, it's a pie in the sky, it's a pipe dream, it's not realistic. Now I think the challenge with property managers is there's some things that they think, “This is a status quo, this is how we’ve done it. This is how it is. It's just hard this way.” They think everything else is pie in the sky or fluffy and not possible. They exclude themselves from making those changes. It’s like the guy that's like, “Oh, all girls are just difficult. I'm just going to sit on my couch and eat Cheetos all day. They only want a rich guy or they only want whatever. They just choose out.” In business is the same thing, we can just choose out. Tucker: An all-encompassing saying for every situation you can think of is if nothing changes, then nothing changes. Jason: Right. I've also heard it said if you want dramatically different results or if you want dramatic change, it requires dramatic change. Tucker: There you go, case in point. Then, of course, another bit of jargon of rising tide lifts all ships. That’s it. Jason: I think I touched on that one on this show before of rising tide can raise all ships if the tide is already high enough, but I think the challenge in property management is that the tide is all the way down in some areas. It's low. There are some property management businesses with holes in them like you wouldn't believe and they're sitting on gravel or sand. They're there.  A rising tide is going to sink some ships in this industry, no question, and they need to sink because it's going to help the entire industry. There are property owners businesses that should not be in business or they’re going to have them patch up some holes and make things work better. Tucker: I think to that point, Jason, it's really the ones who are going to sit back and say, “This is the way we've always done it or this is status quo,” because frankly, at the end of the day, the customer has all the power. They're the ones that can make or break your business with one bad review at the end of the day. [...] natural selection, I think. You’re right. Jason: Let's apply this to Breezeway. Breezeway, what are some of the challenges that you deal with in selling your services to property managers? Some of the things that you'll typically hear from them. Tucker: That's a really straightforward one, is that status quo like, “This is where we've always done it.” It's not that big of a headache for us now. We don't think we would use it that much, or what we talked about before, it might be too much work upfront. It's okay. Some people aren't ready for change but we stand by the fact that ultimately, everyone will move towards an operations tool like Breezeway, if not Breezeway. In most cases, when people say no, they come back. We believe that's going to continue to happen as this tide continues to rise and the expectations continue to rise. If you don't have high brand standards, you don't get to be a brand any more because (like you said) the ship sinks. If you can't meet the customers expectations, you're probably not going to have any customers for much longer, so the status quo. Like we said, this isn't stuff that people aren't doing already in a lot of cases. They're just running around and managing chaos in order to effectively do it. What Breezeway allows them to do is both automate as well as ensure that it's actually happening in a way that they hope it will, meeting those brand standards. Jason: You've got customers, right? Tucker: Yeah, we have some. Jason: Okay, good, me too. Can you share an example, a case study, or maybe even some typical situation that you've seen where they've gone from not doing it, struggling, not using Breezeway, to implementing your services, and what results they've been able to achieve? Tucker: Without naming any specific clients, another big piece of pushback that we receive is, “I don't know if my service providers will actually use this,” which is fair, generally considering the fact that service providers aren't tech-savvy, what have you. But one of our clients down south were able to effectively roll this out to their service network. Each one of those service providers now uses our app to download all of their checklists offline. Before, there was no good way for them to do that until they can download the apps all offline. They had pulled them and said, “Hey, would you want to go back to the old way?” which was email, paper and pen, checklist, they’re coming into the office, “Hey, here's your assignment for the day,” or emailing them out to some of the further ones, then they had to submit them all back manually with all the photos attached, and they're like, “Absolutely not. Of course, why would I ever want to go back to the old way?” A bit of an anecdotal story there about some of those challenges that we're seeing at the onset of conversations all being overcome and Breezeway being in a spot where they know no other way now. Jason: There are a lot of tools that a lot of property managers probably shouldn't even touch until they’re maybe about 50 to 100 units, they can't even entertain the idea. They don't have cash flow, they're not ready to use a service, they're a solopreneur maybe, at what stage do you feel like Breezeway can be implemented in a business? Where do they need to be, roughly, in terms of door count, size, who do you guys generally work with? Tucker: Good question. It is on a case-by-case basis to some extent because some entrepreneurs, like you're saying, have higher bandwidth for stress and they can deal with some of those chaotic nuances that go into managing a higher door count as opposed to someone like me who I like to ensure as much automation as possible so I don't let things slip through the cracks in the first place. The sooner I can automate, the better. Then as I scale, I have that process in place. Typical door count, from a short-term perspective, we’ll work with folks in the 50 to 100 range but all the way down to 5 doors too. Again, [...] pay. They like to just automate as much as possible. In the longer-term world, we're talking about the same, range only on the higher scale. So, 50 all the way up to 500 and 1000 doors. Jason: Okay. They can get started with you guys at any point. You guys don't have like 100-door minimum, 200-door minimum, or anything like this? Tucker: No. Jason: Okay. Tucker: We're not turning people away just yet, Jason. Jason: Okay. I do but I'm picky. I'm just kidding. Tucker, this is really cool, the future sounds like technology. Does Breezeway integrate with any platforms? There are so many different tools in property management, I think a lot of people listening to my show nowadays are like, “Oh, gosh, Jason just shared another stupid tool that I'm going to have to figure out how to plug into my business that I really want,” and they've got this to-do list of tools they want to add and implement. How difficult is it to get started with Breezeway and is there any concern about connection, integration, or any of this thing that is really significant? Tucker: I understand why people get concerned with this type of thing. Of course, whenever you're introducing new technology, there's always a concern, especially because folks (like you said) have been burned in the past like, “Oh, another one of these things I have to do.” But at Breezeway, we really aim to be a connected system. From a long-term standpoint, we're working with the folks of the likes of Rent Manager and other folks like them. Then short-term, all the 20-plus of the biggest PMS systems out there. But our goal by the end of this year and the coming year 2020, we're going to just be one of the most connected systems out there, whether it's your remote locks of the world all the way to your streamlines and your rent managers of the world as well. Jason: Got it. People listening might get confused and think, “Is Breezeway a complementary tool to maintenance coordination tools or is it a replacement for these type of tools, where we have, maybe EZ Repair Hotline, Property Meld, and Latchel, these services?” Tucker: Wow, that's a loaded question, Jason. I knew you’re going to come at me with that. Jason: It’s an obvious question. Tucker: It is an obvious question. Jason: I’m just asking what I know my clients are going to be like, “What is this? How does it fit in the overall mix?” Tucker: It's true. Listen, like I was saying before, we want to play nicely with anybody who's out there so we're not going to go ahead and say that we’re a direct competitor for these folks. The other thing is we do a handful of the same stuff. You'll be hard-pressed to be using one of them for maintenance, using Breezeway for cleaning and inspections, and not using us for maintenance. There's a three-legged stool with regards to where Breezeway plays in the operations world and our aim is to supplement the PMS regardless of which one it is, we want to integrate with them. Then if they're using something else for maintenance, that's fine too. Jason: Explain the three legs, what are they just for people that are a little bit lost. Tucker: Yeah, sorry. I'm a big analogy guy. Jason: Take the analogy into reality. Tucker: Here’s the reality, you have your cleaning, inspection, and your maintenance. Those are the three legs we believe of property care and operations. Jason: Got it. What other frequently asked questions do people have when they're approaching you for interest in Breezeway or just any other questions that we haven't covered? Tucker: I don't know, it runs the gamut. We're creating a new category to speak of, property operation which is really something that people haven't heard of. We're excited about it. The main question is probably what is property operations. It's just what I'm talking about. It's really thinking about not just managing a property but actually caring for it and taking into consideration preventative maintenance and safety measures. All that stuff rolled into one in a way that you can do it as hands-off as possible. Jason: Perfect. Okay. Tucker, I think we’ve talked about brand standards, we’ve talked about rising expectations in the industry, we've talked about Breezeway. How can people get in touch with Breezeway? How can they find out more if they want to get in touch and they're interested? Tucker: We are at www.breezeway.io. If you would like to check out our integrations page, it's very simple /integrations. If you would like to meet with me, you can send me an email, tucker@breezeway.io, @CorpoTuck on Twitter, on Linkedin, Tucker F. C. I know a lot of folks are on Facebook, I'm thinking about getting on there, but that's about it. Happy to fill any questions now, it looks like we're getting some coming in on the chat. Jason: We can touch on that. Is this available for homeowners or just landlords and property managers? Tucker: Yeah. Listen, right now, it is primarily for landlords and property managers, but we do see a world where a longer term this will be used by homeowners and the connected home Internet of Things world of the future that we see everything sliding towards. Jason: Someday, Breezeway may know whether my Roomba has done its job or not. Tucker: Exactly. Your Roomba would be automatically scheduled by Breezeway. Jason: All right. Tucker, it’s been great having you on. Everybody check out, it’s breezeway.io. I appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow Show. Tucker: Yeah. Thanks so much, Jason. This is great. Glad we made it happen. Jason: All right, I'll let you go. All right, there you have it, check out breezeway.io. I'm always curious to hear your feedback on this so make sure you guys are inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group. This is our community for all those DoorGrow Hackers out there, property management, business owners, entrepreneurs. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com and that will take you to the Facebook group. Answer all the questions and we'll let you in if you're a property management entrepreneur. Get inside that group. As always, I'd love to hear feedback on what you think about different tools, different things that you're using, and ask questions to other people inside the Facebook group. We’ll give you some free gifts when you join that group, including a bible of fees that you can tack on your property management business. We have a list of really cool tools and vendors in there. You will get an email drip if you provided your email when you join the group. We will be giving you gifts to help you grow your property management business. Eventually, you'll be able to learn a little bit more about what we do at DoorGrow. Make sure you get inside that group if you're not in our community. There are amazing people in there, they're helpful, and they align with my vision of creating collaboration over competition. That's what this industry needs right now. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

00;00;14;09 [Jason]: Jason Watson with WCG Incorporated here in ColoradoSprings, we're a local tax and accounting firm. Joined by RachaelWeber and Joseph Bassett, both tax professionals for us. We'realso hosted by Axe and the Oak here in Colorado Springs, they'vebeen gracious enough to open up early for us, part of our Bourbonand Business00;00;31;29 series, podcasts and videos. We just got done wrapping up a videoand podcast on some of the bigger deductions that we see, cars,that's always a big one for most small00;00;42;29 business owners, meals and travel. We're going to talk this time or,this time around about home office and then all the other likegoofier ones, if you will.00;00;54;25 So, you know, tell me the rules, Rachael, on the home officededuction.00;01;00;04 [Rachael]: It's got to be used regularly and exclusively00;01;03;27 [Jason]: Okay.00;01;04;26 [Rachael]: In your home.00;01;05;13 [Jason]: Okay, regular and exclusive and have a business.00;01;09;01 [Rachael]: A Business purpose.00;01;09;14 [Jason]: That's probably true for every deduction on a plan, right?00;01;12;18 [Rachael]: Yeah.00;01;12;27 [Jason]: For a business deduction to be a legitimate businessdeduction it has to have a business purpose. So, use regularly andexclusively. So, can you break those words down for me? What's"regular" mean?00;01;23;15 [Rachael]: "Regular" means you would be checking your emails,invoicing your customers, doing administrative work. Okay. Meetingwith clients, holding your inventory. It could mean a whole host of00;01;37;27 [Jason]: Right.00;01;38;03 [Rachael]: of things. You're just doing that on a regular basis, notonce a month00;01;42;26 [Jason]: Right.00;01;43;14 [Rachael]: but on a regular basis.00;01;44;21 [Jason]: Yeah. And one of the words that the IRS will also use too is"continuous", right? This is regular and continuous, it's, it's, got alife, you know, it's got a cycle.00;01;53;28 [Jason]: So yeah, absolutely, regular is a big deal. We have folksthat have a rental, one rental, you know, they have a W-2 job, theyhave all those things and they're trying to say, I have a home officeto manage my rental. It's just never going to happen. Now, if wehave 10 rentals, 6 rentals, that's all you do is manage your00;02;11;02 rentals. We have some people that have 3 or 4 VRBOs or Airbnb,short term rentals and that is all they do.00;02;18;24 [Rachael]: Time consuming.00;02;18;29 [Jason]: Their working that stuff 100% so yeah, so that's regular.How about exclusive Joe? Joseph? What's exclusive?00;02;24;27 [Joseph]: So, let's say you have an extra room in the bedroomthat's you want to use for your home office and it also can't be yourtheater room. So you know, that's gotta be exclusively used forbusiness.00;02;33;20 [Jason]: What if you're a videographer and the theater is yourbusiness? I'm teasing you.00;02;38;03 [Joseph]: Well, you have an argument there. Or, or00;02;38;24 [Jason]: No, but you can't mix the use, yeah00;02;41;07 [Joseph]: Right, unless you run a daycare out of your00;02;42;13 [Jason]: Right.00;02;42;21 [Joseph]: House as well.00;02;43;05 [Jason]: Yeah, and daycare has its own special rules and this is notthe podcast for that because00;02;47;27 [Joseph]: Right.00;02;48;01 [Jason]: I don't know those rules by a memory. I look them up oncein awhile when I have to, but that's it. But right, those are some ofthe shared use stuff can be daycare. Other than that, it's regularand exclusive with a business purpose. So, tell me some of thebank, the benefits of having a home office00;03;05;25 deduction or home office reimbursement.00;03;08;10 [Rachael]: Reimbursement? Is that part of your mortgage interest?00;03;13;15 [Jason]: Okay.00;03;13;23 [Rachael]: Your real estate taxes,00;03;15;05 [Jason]: Okay.00;03;15;19 [Rachael]: Utilities.00;03;16;21 [Jason]: Okay.00;03;17;09 [Rachael]: Could become a small deduction.00;03;19;21 [Jason]: Okay.00;03;21;11 [Rachael]: For you, a business deduction.00;03;21;18 [Jason]: Yeah absolutely. And what are some of those expensesthat aren't otherwise available to be deducted? And mortgageinsurance, we say yes, right?00;03;27;29 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm00;03;28;14 [Jason]: Schedule A property taxes, we say yes, but how about theother ones?00;03;31;04 [Rachael]: Utilities, insurance00;03;33;19 [Jason]: HOA dues.00;03;34;21 [Rachael]: Yeah. Mm-hmm.00;03;35;24 [Joseph]: Repairs. Okay, so suddenly those become deductible andin a world where otherwise it wouldn't be.00;03;40;11 [Rachael]: Right.00;03;40;21 [Joseph]: Yeah.00;03;41;01 [Jason]: Okay, and how do we calculate that home officededuction?00;03;45;17 [Rachael]: Well we do it by square footage.00;03;48;07 [Jason]: Yeah, that is probably the most common, is squarefootage. You could do it at room by room, the IRS allow that, theyactually mentioned that in Publication, what? 587, or whatever it is.But I've never seen anybody do room by room.00;04;00;15 [Rachael]: No.00;04;00;20 [Jason]: It's always, usually, I shouldn't say always, but usually it'ssquare footage, yeah. So what's the basic calculation? It's thehome office space divided by00;04;09;24 [Joseph]: Total space of the house.00;04;10;26 [Jason]: Yeah, the total space of the house. What if you use yourgarage, then what do you do?00;04;15;08 [Joseph]: You include it.00;04;16;12 [Jason]: Include it where?00;04;17;08 [Joseph]: In both.00;04;18;01 [Jason]: In both numerator and denominator? Yeah, exactly. So ifwe're going to take the benefit of the garage and it's not otherwisein the denominator then we have to add it in.00;04;29;26 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;04;30;02 [Jason]: Yeah, exactly. So, that's home office. What's this 50 milerule thing? Who wants to talk about that?00;04;38;14 [Joseph]: Right, so the 50 mile rule's, you know, kind of a safeharbor if you will, that if you know, your home office is within 50miles of your tax home then you can, you know, deduct expensesassociated with00;04;50;29 commuting from the tax home to the home office.00;04;54;17 [Jason]: Yeah, exactly. It's, they want, "they" being the IRS and thetax court, they want your home office to be, there's no written ruleon this, it's more of a contrived rule.00;05;06;23 But your home office needs to be within 50 miles of your tax home.Your tax home is where you earn your revenue. So, the greatexample, in one of the tax court cases, is a surgeon had a home inPennsylvania.00;05;23;05 He drove to New York, I believe, and it was 130 miles away. He wasattempting to deduct all those commuting expenses and becausehe was like, well, I got a home office. So then my commute is frommy bedroom to the basement. And then when I hop in the car, it'sall business miles, and of course the00;05;43;06 IRS and tax court said "No." They said it's too far from your taxhome, basically. So they dis, disallowed all those expenses asdeductible expenses and00;05;54;27 consider them commuting expenses, which is normally a personalexpense.00;05;59;03 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;05;59;12 [Jason]: Non deductible. So, that's this 50 mile rule. What, youknow, talk to me about the audit rate risk for home offices and00;06;09;25 [Rachael]: [Inaudible]00;06;10;00 [Jason]: and, you've, and you've been doing taxes for a little bit oftime.00;06;14;07 [Rachael]: Just a little while.00;06;14;13 [Jason]: So tell me a little bit about the history.00;06;16;12 [Rachael]: It's kind of high. Yeah and it's, it's almost like they canwalk in and assume you're doing something wrong because they're,they're not easy rules. And you know, maybe the square footageisn't complete or they can say, Hey, what's with the day bed andyour home office?00;06;31;02 [Jason]: Right.00;06;31;13 [Rachael]: Or, and it's not just the deductions that you're getting,your utilities, your small amount of additional square footage, butit's that commuting miles00;06;42;07 [Jason]: Right.00;06;42;15 [Rachael]: That are, it's going to be pricey00;06;43;26 [Jason]: Yeah.00;06;44;04 [Rachael]: If its not done right.00;06;45;07 [Jason]: Yeah, absolutely. So, home offices, 20 years ago were notvery common, so it was a high audit rate risk.00;06;53;19 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;06;54;11 [Jason]: Today telecommuters and all that stuff is a lot higher. Butnow we're back to not being seen very often because if you're aW-2 individual working out of your home office for a company out ofCalifornia,00;07;07;05 you would have to deduct that on Form 2106.00;07;10;19 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;07;11;04 [Jason]: And those expenses, those deductions are no longerallowed. So, home office is almost been shrunk down to just forbusiness owners.00;07;18;02 [Rachael]: Yeah.00;07;18;29 [Jason]: So, how are we going to do that? Joseph, talk to, talk to usabout how we're going to do the home office from an S Corpperspective.00;07;28;20 [Joseph]: So, we'll use an accountable plan for the home office forthe S Corp and one of the reasons why we do that, so you know SCorp's are cash basis, you know, and00;07;38;07 [Jason]: Typically.00;07;38;23 [Joseph]: Typically, typically.00;07;39;14 [Jason]: Yes, small businesses enjoy using cash as their method of00;07;43;18 [Joseph]: Right. Accounting, it's simple. Depending on their grossreceipts.00;07;45;18 [Jason]: Yeah.00;07;45;27 [Joseph]: And we just, we have you record it, you know, for like, likeRachael said, your interest, taxes, insurance, and then you getreimbursed by the S Corp for your business use percentage of00;07;58;00 [Jason]: Okay.00;07;58;06 [Joseph]: Business expenses.00;07;59;18 [Jason]: So, just to back up for a viewers and listeners, anaccountable plan is the method used to reimburse people,employees for business use of their personal assets.00;08;13;03 [Jason]: Car, cell phone, home, are probably the biggest ones,right?00;08;16;05 [Joseph]: Mm-hmm.00;08;16;19 [Jason]: So, and we forgot to put cell phone down on our big list ofdeductions, but we can talk about that in a second. So, the benefitto that is we're getting reimbursed by our business. That expense iskind of tucked away on the S Corp tax return, using00;08;35;29 an S Corp in your00;08;36;29 [Joseph]: Mm-hmm.00;08;37;28 [Jason]: example as occupancy expense. Not that you can't defendit, not that we're doing anything wrong, but it certainly is not as highof an audit rate as filing Form 8829.00;08;49;29 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;08;50;06 [Jason]: Which is clearly the Office In Home worksheet.00;08;53;12 [Joseph]: Right.00;08;53;20 [Jason]: That gets tucked on or tacked onto your Schedule C, if youwere to have a business only on your 1040. So, that just shrinksdramatically, the audit rate risk, from home office perspective.00;09;07;06 [Joseph]: And too, S Corp's already face a lower audit ratethemselves.00;09;10;14 [Jason]: Yes, 0.4% given I think 2017 data00;09;14;28 [Joseph]: Mm-hmm, 2017, yeah.00;09;15;02 [Jason]: Is the latest that we have now. So the IRS takes forever tocompile00;09;19;03 [Joseph]: Yeah.00;09;19;11 [Jason]: This stuff. I mean, I guess it makes a little bit of sensebecause audits take time00;09;23;07 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;09;23;18 [Jason]: to generate and to do. But I still like to think we can live ina real time world. You know what I mean? Like we should know likeright now how many audits are happening. So, alright, let's talkabout commuting expenses. You know, you get up in the morning,you drive to WCG Inc, you know, is00;09;45;22 that an expense you can deduct?00;09;47;09 [Rachael]: No, it's not.00;09;48;01 [Jason]: Okay. Are you bummed out about that?00;09;49;20 [Rachael]: Yes, I am.00;09;50;08 [Jason]: Yeah, okay, we should write our Senators and ourCongress people. So, okay, so commute expenses? No. Even ifyou travel far, let's say you moved to Denver and you drove everyday down in the Colorado Springs, it doesn't matter, right?00;10;03;18 [Rachael]: Still personal, yeah.00;10;03;27 [Jason]: Right, so there's no like, Hey, we recognize that you'retraveling really far, we'll give you that deduction. There's nothinglike that. So, commuting expenses, parking, tolls, all that associatedwith going to00;10;16;18 your tax home if you will, are not going to be deductible. So, great,Country Club Dues, Rachel?00;10;23;14 [Rachael]: No, can't do it.00;10;24;15 [Jason]: No! Wow! Just hammered, boom.00;10;28;06 [Rachael]: Sad, yeah.00;10;29;14 [Jason]: Talk to me a little more about that. So we have someonewho has a membership somewhere, but they do entertain, shouldn'tsay that00;10;35;07 [Rachael]: Nope. Yeah.00;10;35;11 [Joseph]: Yeah, discuss business.00;10;36;08 [Jason]: They do discuss business at their country club.00;10;40;17 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;10;40;20 [Jason]: How does that work?00;10;41;29 [Rachael]: Those expenses for the country club dues are going tobe personal.00;10;46;19 [Jason]: Right.00;10;46;25 [Rachael]: It's great that they're generating business00;10;48;29 [Jason]: Yes.00;10;49;07 [Rachael]: At the country club00;10;50;14 [Jason]: Okay.00;10;50;20 [Rachael]: but the dues are not deductible.00;10;52;01 [Jason]: All right, so this same member, buys a meal. The businesspurpose is clear. They00;10;59;20 [Rachael]: Yup.00;10;59;23 [Jason]: Were there to discuss business and now this individual isbuying a meal that's going to get tacked on top of his or her dues.How's that work?00;11;07;16 [Rachael]: That meal portion is going to be 50%00;11;10;14 [Jason]: Okay. Deductible as a business meal. Just, just like we'vealways done.00;11;13;06 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;11;13;09 [Jason]: With meals. Okay, great. Talk to me a little abouteducation. Can you run education expenses through yourbusiness?00;11;20;21 [Joseph]: It depends.00;11;21;20 [Jason]: It depends, ah look just the classic accountant.00;11;24;28 [Rachael]: Yeah, maybe.00;11;26;00 [Jason]: Yeah.00;11;26;14 [Joseph]: If those education expenses are to improve your currentfield, then possibly. If they're to do something completely different,you know so if I was going to go to school to become a doctor now,which probably won't happen.00;11;37;13 [Jason]: Yeah.00;11;37;23 [Joseph]: But, those won't be deductible.00;11;40;03 [Jason]: Right, so the rule is it has to improve your current workskills. And you can even do, deducted a degree or even like, youknow, college courses, even if it leads to a degree, provided it'simproving your current00;11;57;20 work skills. So, you're absolutely correct, the other half of that is ifyou need it for certifications, like your continuing educations and allthat stuff. So, people who are CPAs have to go do all these, youknow, nauseating00;12;10;15 [Rachael]: [All laugh]00;12;11;02 [Jason]: Continuing Ed credits, you know, I'm sure we learned a lottoo, but you know, anyway, so, so that's education. How about yourchildren? Can you hire your children and consider them employeesand have the company00;12;27;10 pay for the education? Who wants to take that one?00;12;31;01 [Joseph]: I would say yes.00;12;32;07 [Jason]: I'd say no. [Laughs]00;12;34;09 [Joseph]: Like, the client advocacy in me would say Yes.00;12;38;13 [Jason]: Yeah.00;12;38;20 [Joseph]: Because of the, the relation though it will be disallowed.00;12;41;15 [Jason]: Right? Yeah, I was giving you a hard time. So section 127says if your child is 20 years or younger, they have attribution toyou as Mom and Dad being an owner of the company.00;12;54;21 If you own 5% or more of the company, you can't deduct thateducation.00;13;00;01 [Jason]: But if your child legitimately works, and is 21 or older, sowe're talking junior or senior00;13;08;24 [Rachael]: In college.00;13;08;29 [Jason]: If you're on a six year plan, you're a sophomore, right?Then the company can pay up to 5,250 a year, I think that's 2019limit. So, that might get index every year, like everything else. So,anyway that's education. How about client gifts? How do youhandle that?00;13;23;16 [Rachael]: Oh, they're $25 cap.00;13;27;08 [Jason]: Ahh $25?00;13;27;14 [Rachael]: I know, its really, yep. Mm-hmm.00;13;28;29 [Joseph]: Well they give you the $4 for gift wrapping, so00;13;31;16 [Jason]: And they give you $4 per pen or something.00;13;33;09 [Joseph]: Per pen, yeah.00;13;33;11 [Rachael]: That's advertising, yes.00;13;37;02 [Jason]: So, talk to me more about the $25 rule. Is that like all giftsor, or is it just for gifts to specific people?00;13;48;14 [Rachael]: It's gifts to a limited clientele. If you were handing giftsout to the general public and it was a lower cost, then that would beconsidered advertising.00;14;00;07 [Jason]: Okay.00;14;00;14 [Rachael]: And I think they give $4 for each advertising gift.00;14;04;21 [Jason]: Yeah.00;14;04;27 [Rachael]: Which I'm not quite sure what, you know, a pen or acalendar or something like that.00;14;08;26 [Jason]: Yeah, I don't know how much stuff like that costs either,yeah.00;14;12;12 [Rachael]: But your $75 wine basket is going to be a $25 businessgift.00;14;17;29 [Jason]: Yeah, and as I've seen it, read it maybe in Journal ofAccountancy, other things like that, but that's an individual limit. Soif you don't donate, or if you don't provide that gift to an individual, ifyou just do it to the business00;14;33;01 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;14;33;10 [Jason]: There might be different rules00;14;34;03 [Rachael]: Yes.00;14;34;13 [Jason]: allowing you to take more deduction. So if you say, DearBob, thanks for all the business00;14;39;27 [Rachael]: versus staff at.00;14;41;03 [Jason]: Yeah, exactly.00;14;42;19 [Rachael]: Yeah.00;14;43;06 [Jason]: yeah, exactly. So, and you can see why, you know, theIRS is always worried about transfer of wealth without taxation.00;14;50;02 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;14;50;12 [Jason]: Right? So if you, if you come in there with a bunch of clientgifts for one person it might look like a transfer of wealth. So, howabout professional attire? I am rocking the WCG.00;15;00;18 [Joseph]: That's true, very nice.00;15;00;29 [Jason]: On my shirt here. But tell me about professional attire.People will constantly ask you00;15;07;09 [Rachael]: Yep.00;15;07;28 [Jason]: I have to look good in my business suit, I have to have mynails and hair done, I have to rock, I have to rock this image.00;15;15;25 [Rachael]: And they're all personal.00;15;17;27 [Jason]: Yes, even though they're dead sexy, right? Even thoughthey're very good looking.00;15;21;21 [Rachael]: And necessary00;15;22;01 [Jason]: Yes.00;15;22;14 [Rachael]: Absolutely necessary. Yeah. So there's a businesspurpose behind it, but no tax deduction.00;15;26;09 [Jason]: Right. So what's the rule?00;15;28;07 [Joseph]: If it's not suitable for everyday wear00;15;30;00 [Jason]: Yes.00;15;30;11 [Joseph]: You can deduct it.00;15;30;20 [Jason]: So, if it's, yeah, so if you can, if it's suitable for everydaywear, easily convertible into everyday wear, then it's not deductible.00;15;38;08 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;15;38;25 [Jason]: Right? Business suits are, you know, clearly somethingyou can convert to everyday use. We do have some, TVpersonalities.00;15;47;10 [Joseph]: Yes.00;15;47;15 [Jason]: We do have some models, you know, and we can, we canidentify some of that attire as costumes, something that theywouldn't, you know, be caught dead in. And that's true for some ofthese models, for sure.00;16;01;26 They wear stuff and they're like, I'm never wearing that in public. Itjust, it looks good on a cover of a magazine, but that's about it.00;16;08;15 [Jason]: Those are costumes, they're not suitable for everyday use.Those are something that we can deduct. TV personalities, they'llbuy, you know, a thousand jackets and they'll give them away andso those become marketing toys00;16;20;19 [Rachael]: Yeah.00;16;20;25 [Jason]: Or ploys or whatever, so absolutely. Let's talk about, perdiem and I'll just kind of talk about this real quick. Per diems a funnything. If you own 10% or more of a corporation and, and also theremight be some00;16;38;21 attribution there, where if your brother or your sister or your Mom or00;16;42;16 [Joseph]: Spouse.00;16;43;12 [Jason]: Whatever, then you are assumed to have the same,greater than 10%. If you are in that boat, you cannot take a perdiem reimbursement. So the scenario would be like this, I'm 100%owner of a corporation. I pay myself $71 a day for every day thatI'm in San Francisco, because00;17;02;15 that's the per diem rate. Let's say using 2018 numbers, I haven'tseen them, I haven't looked at per diem in a while cause we don't,we don't see 2106 expenses anymore. But, that would not beallowed. WCG Inc says, Rachel, we need you to go to, let's sayCortez, we really00;17;18;23 didn't like you very much. I'm teasing, Cortez is lovely. But, and wesay, Hey, we're going to give you $71 per per day that you're00;17;27;08 there for meals, that would be acceptable.00;17;30;11 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;17;30;13 [Jason]: Now that will not be revenue to you. You maybe only spend$20, you know, whatever. You still get to take that $71 as tax freeincome.00;17;40;24 [Jason]: So, because you don't own 10% or more of WCG Inc.That'll change, you know, you'll own, own it all and00;17;49;07 [Rachael]: Eighty-five percent like you.00;17;50;09 [Jason]: Joseph, I'll be working for you one day, it'll be awesome.So, but that's per diem, per diem is a little tricky. There is the, themeals and incidentals component. There is the lodging component.The meals and incidentals component, as far as I know and read it,is00;18;06;24 available to Schedule C, Sole Prop, single member LLC types. Theminute you're a corporation or you act with a corporation through anS Corp election that gets tossed out the window.00;18;18;06 Lodging, regardless, is always going to be actual expenses. Youdon't get the high, low seasonal rates and all that stuff that you seein those per diem tables as a business owner. So, we ran throughhome office, all kinds of good stuff there. We ran through all kindsof other deductions that we get entertained with,00;18;38;10 quite literally, cause some people are pretty clever, right?00;18;41;22 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;18;41;29 [Jason]: With, with their deductions. The bottom line is, people askme all the time and they ask all of us all the time, how do I save ontaxes, right? And the first thing I say is, look, your job is to buildwealth, not save taxes.00;18;56;12 We can save taxes along the way, that's great. But your job in life isto build wealth. Now, if you still want to save taxes the trick is tolook at what cash you're already comfortable with leaving yourbody.00;19;10;24 [Jason]: So go through your checkbook and try to figure out if therewas one thing that you missed or maybe this expense really didhave a business connection to it and I forgot that it did, or to digdeep. So, it's to look at the money that you're already willing tospend and try00;19;28;06 to find a business connection.00;19;29;23 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;19;30;15 [Jason]: Now, I say find a business connection, like discover abusiness connection00;19;35;18 [Rachael]: Not create one.00;19;35;27 [Jason]: Not fabricate a business connection. So anyway, those,those are some of the other business deductions that we see a lotof: commuting expenses, country club dues, education, client00;19;47;20 gifts, professional attire, per diem, all that good stuff. We talkedabout home office in this segment as well. We didn't talk about cellphones. You know, cell phones, you know, folks will try to deduct100%, right?00;20;02;16 [Joseph]: Mm-hmm.00;20;02;21 [Jason]: "I use it for my business," oh, I know you use it for yourbusiness, I see that. But the minute you get a text saying, Heyhoney, you know, you're out of beer you should probably pick somemore up on the way home; and milk and eggs are low too. Nowyour cell phone's no longer 100%.00;20;17;04 [Rachael]: Mm-hmm.00;20;18;17 [Jason]: So, you know our firm-wide soft ceiling is around 80%, ifyou're a realtor, you're probably on the phone all the time. Peoplehave kicked landlines to the curb but still your phone is going tohave a high personal use and I, I believe, we believe as a firm, 20%is00;20;37;00 about the minimum there, meaning 80% is for business.00;20;40;26 [Jason]: Maybe you're a dentist, right? And you use your cell phoneoccasionally, you do have an office phone and all those otherthings, so maybe that's like 30% business use and 70% forpersonal. So, commonly we see cell phones being paid for by thebusiness and they00;20;58;19 truly are a mixed-use asset, so a mixed-use asset should be00;21;03;06 [Joseph]: Paid by you personally00;21;04;10 [Jason]: Exactly.00;21;05;00 [Joseph]: And reimbursed to you on an accountable plan.00;21;06;04 [Jason]: Yup. So, assets that you own personally should be paid forpersonally. If there's a business connection or use of that assetthen get reimbursed. No different than you working for Google andGoogle says, Hey, you know, drive down to the store, pick up some,you know, some pencils and we'll00;21;21;15 reimburse you. Well, you bring in a receipt and you're bringing inyour mileage log, and maybe you have to use your cell phone andall that stuff, and they would cut you a check for the business use ofyour personal stuff. So, anyway those are some of the common taxdeductions that we see here at WCG.00;21;36;06 My name is Jason Watson with WCG. I'm alongside Rachel Weberand Joseph Bassett. We're at the Axe and the Oak and this is a partof our Bourbon and Business series of podcasts and videos and wethank you for joining us and we'll00;21;51;00 talk to you real soon.

Have you ever played the board game, Monopoly? Were you successful at buying properties, and charging people rent? Did you go from buying and selling the little green houses to bigger houses? Did you dream about becoming a successful real estate agent, making billions, winning the game, and retiring at an early age? You’re not alone.  Today, I am talking to Pat Hiban, a real estate agent who got better over time to have an illustrious career in the real estate sales business. Pat practiced what he preached and like most agents, bought houses and then rented them out. At 46 years old, Pat retired from selling homes for commissions to living off the income he made from the real estate that he purchased.  You’ll Learn... [02:45] Labeled as Learning-Disabled: How Pat overcame it, and didn’t let it bother him. [03:35] Go Getter: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Listen and copy others to sell houses.  [04:09] Done is better than perfect: Things don’t need to be perfect, but need to get done. Hire others to make them perfect and fix problems. [05:58] Building a Billion-Dollar Business: One sale at a time, one staff member at a time, one commission at a time. Get rich quick is a slow process and takes discipline. [07:54] What holds people back from growing their business? Themselves. There's someone else that has the same goals, but there's no difference between them. [11:00] What’s going to happen? You're going to quit affirming and focusing on your goals, or they’re going to come true.  [13:25] Unwilling to Give Up: Entrepreneurs tend to have tenacity and relentlessness.  [14:31] Are they not setting goals? Or, are they setting goals and failing? If they don't have any goals, they're never going to get anywhere.  [15:30] GoBundance: Find accountability partner for positive peer pressure to set goals, create affirmations for each goal, and make sure each goal and objective gets done. [19:42] Why people fail to succeed? They give up too soon and don’t establish proper mastermind.  Tweetables Stick with Superpower: Getting business, doing business, and making money. Done is better than perfect. To get rich quick is a slow process. Get rich slowly to succeed.  Your circumstances are a direct result of your goals and how often you review them. Resources Pat Hiban on Facebook Pat Hiban on Instagram GoBundance Tribe of Millionaires Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill Robert Kiyosaki The Secret Movie Jim Rohn 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, interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunity, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and the residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. And today's guest, I'm hanging out with Pat Hiban. Pat, welcome to the show. Pat: Good to be here, Jason. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be on DoorGrow.  Jason: Give everybody a little bit of background on you and how you got involved with real estate. Help them understand who Pat is. Pat: That's a big question as far as who Pat is. It's easier to say how I got involved in real estate. I went to college and I got a degree in sociology. I was going to be a probation officer and I couldn't get a job. What happened was I became an agent, a real estate agent, a poor one in the beginning. I sold 10 house in my first year, made $13,000. Over time, I got better, and better, and better, and I went on to an illustrious career in the real estate sales business. I did practice what I preach and like most agents, I bought houses along the way and then I rented them out.  I played monopoly a little bit, sold the little greenhouses, bought bigger hotels, shopping center, lots of apartments, things like that. Then, at 46 years old, I retired from selling real estate homes for commissions, and just live off of the income from the real estate that I purchased currently. Jason: One of the things in the bio that you've mentioned is you're labeled with a learning disability at the age of eight. Maybe you could share a little bit about that and how you overcame. Pat: Basically, I was learning-disabled. It was all a label. At that point, just like anything, I didn't let it bother me. When you're 8 years old, or even 10, or even 16, you're not conscious of any of that. You're really unconscious of it until later in life when your parents tell you about it.  I got a 2.3 GPA in college. I didn't really think of myself as being really smart. I really saw myself more as a go getter. Someone who would actually be able to do whatever somebody told me to do. My office managers would tell me, "Pat, this is what you need to do to sell a house or to get a listing," I would actually listen where 99 of 100 other agents wanted to try it their own way or reinvent the wheel. That's how I grew everything in my life. It's just by copying off other people. Jason: You've had a lot of success where a lot of other agents haven't been able to experience success or they eventually folded in and just gotten out because they just couldn't make it. What do you attribute to being different? Is it just that you would listen and learn? Or do you have a little bit more tenacity and bite than most people? Pat: One of my favorite quotes is, "Perfect is the enemy of done." I never really had to have things perfect, but I always had to have things done. I think that served me in that I would get them done. If they weren't perfect and there was a problem, I would hire other people to make them perfect for me so that I could stay in my superpower, which would be getting business, doing business, making money.  It was like what Robert Kiyosaki always says, "The B students works for the C students." That's true with me, I think. I'll be able to get it done. I'll be able to come up with the idea and implement a copy of it to somebody and implement it, then just hire other people along the way to make it perfect or better. Jason: I love that idea of, "Perfect is the enemy of done," which is funny because I say to my clients of a whole training video that talking about it and getting their websites launched. I say, "Done is better than perfect," because once it's done, it can make money. It can do its job. If you're waiting for perfect, it takes forever. Let's get into the topic on hand, which is building a billion dollar business. How do you build a billion dollar business? Pat: How do you build a billion dollar business? One bite at a time. That's like an elephant [...]. It's crazy. With me, it's just one sale at a time, one staff member at a time, one commission at a time. With regards to properties and property management, it's the same thing. One unit at a time, one door at a time. You're just building on that. That would be the answer to the question.  So many people today want to get rich quick. The truth to the matter is to get rich is a slow process. You got to know how to get rich slow. If you know how to do that, you're going to succeed. About a decade ago, there's a movie out called The Secret. The whole half of the movie was talking about what you need to do to become a millionaire is to sit there and basically just tell yourself, "I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire." There's a great quote by Jim Rohn. He says, "Affirmation without discipline is delusion." What Jim meant by affirmation without discipline is delusion is you can sit all day and be like, "I am a millionaire. I am a millionaire," but at the end of the day, if you don't earn a dollar and save a dollar, you're never going to have a million. It really should be, "I save $10 a day, I save $10 a day." Or, "I earn $20 a day and save half." Whatever it is, the point is, you need to add discipline.  Jason: For those listening, they're struggling in their business or they’re wanting to grow their business, what do they need to realize that it's maybe holding them back? Pat: Themselves. The answer is themselves. There's someone else in another state, another country, that has the same goals, and aspirations as them, that's so far ahead of them already this year. There's no difference between them. As a matter of fact, that person somewhere else may be disadvantaged compared to them in some way. Meaning, they don't have the money, or they don't have the skills, or they don't have the degree, or they aren’t the right race, or the right sex, whatever the case maybe. They may be disadvantaged in many ways, but I guarantee you that there's tons of amount there that are way ahead of you with the same goals as you and there's no difference between you two. Jason: Yeah. We could hold on to our story and excuses or we can get results. We're the one creating our own blindspots. If we're the ones that creating our own blindspots, we're the ones that's holding ourselves back, then how do we see that? Pat: What you have to understand is how psychology and how people are raised, and how most people are raised. I'll speak for America or North America. The average two-year old boy hears a negative statement from his or her parents or people older than him 16 times for every one positive statement. They might tell that little boy, "Don't touch that." "You're doing it wrong." "Wipe your face, you're messy," anything that's negative. None of that is positive.  By the time you're 18 years old, your subconscious mind is conditioned to believe that you can’t do stuff because you're doing all these things wrong. The only way to reverse that effect on your subconscious mind is to work on your subconscious mind. That's where you basically take goal-setting to whole another level where you actually set goals which everybody's listening to this probably has goals set. You reduce those goals to ridiculous.  I just talked about earlier, whatever it is you want to do, let's say you want to buy a house once a year or buy a house a month, that means you need to look at 20 everyday. You set your goal to that. Then, you create an affirmation around it for your subconscious mind that says, "I analyzed 20 deals a day." If you analyzed 20 deals a day, your mind believes that you're supposed to be analyzing 20 deals a day, and your mind believes that you're supposed to be buying one house a month, then it's going to happen. You can't help it. Either one of two things are going to happen. I guarantee it. Either you're going to quit, meaning you're going to quit affirming, you're going to quit reading your goals, you’re going to quit focusing on your goals. Or number two, it's going to come true. I believed that if you focus on that goal everyday, whatever it is, buying a house, and you focus on what you need to do to get into that goal everyday, it will happen. You will actualize it. I think that's how you overcome the subconscious mind of yours that’s not believing that you’re worthy, not believing that you ever will be a millionaire. I never really had much of a doubt that I would do well, that I will be rich. I was lucky and I was naive enough. A lot of people struggle with that. They don't have that naivety. The way to work around that is reprogramming your subconscious mind but not just in glorious goals. Not just in big goals, but in how you're going to actually act to get to that big goal. Jason: I like this idea. You're saying if you have a big goal, you have to break it down into the smallest action, the action that you're going to be taking on a daily, consistent basis. Then, you create an affirmation connected to this. That affirmation is just basically that you're completing this microcommitement, this action. Like, "I'm going to cold call this many owners to see if they're out of state. To see if I can get them on for business. I'm going to do whatever." It needs to be a daily, consistent, action. I'm going to go to this many real estate network. I'm going to commit to that. Breaking down into the smallest action, "I'm going to take this many agents out for lunch and have a conversation with them. Hopefully, we meet the referrals." They need to start setting some micro commitment and creating affirmations that they're saying regarding these to affirm that they're doing it. Then they need to live with integrity and take action towards those affirmations. Pat: Absolutely. Jason: Say, somebody's doing the affirmations. They're believing in themselves. They're taking these micro commitments. Then you said they're either going to quit or it's going to come true. There's this tenacity that I sense in you, this relentlessness, that I think a lot of entrepreneurs carry, that they're just unwilling to give up. If you're unwilling to give up, eventually, the universe just got to cave to you because you're relentless. Eventually, you're going to get it. Pat: And giving up is hard. You don't want to give up on the ultimate goal, but you’re going to have to change how you get there. Things are going to pop up on your way. You're going to have to go around them. Some people would say that would be quitting but it's not really quitting. You're just doing things in a different way all the time. Jason: Right, like course correcting. Pat: Course correcting, yeah. Jason: You've worked with quite a few different entrepreneurs and business owners. What advice would you give to those listening that you would typically give out for those that are wanting to move towards goals and they're struggling to figure stuff out on their own? What would you recommend to them? Pat: Are they not setting goals? Or are they setting goals and failing? Jason: That's a good point. What if they're not setting goals? What if they don't have any goals right now? Pat: Silly. Then they don't have any goals. They're never going to get anywhere. I have goals since day one. I can't imagine life without goals, even today. Most people don't have goals. That's why they're in a situation that they are. Your circumstances are a direct result of your goals and how many times you review your goals.  Jason: Got it. First off, they've got to set some goals, then they need to review these on a regular basis.  Pat: Daily. I would add something. Maybe have an accountability partner. One of the things we do at GoBundance, The Tribe of Millionaires is we have what we call peer partners which are people in the tribe that keep each other accountable. If they're goal is to call 20 out of state owners everyday, they text them, and say, "Did you call 20 today?" Then, we have GoBuds, which are about four to five GoBros that are in The Tribe of Millionaires that meet on a bi-weekly basis to talk about their goals, talk about where they're at, what they've done, and what they haven't done, that sort of thing, and it works. The point missing would be the accountability aspect. Not only set goals, not only create a subconscious affirmation for each goal big and each goal small, meaning the act-oriented goals, the discipline-oriented goals, but bring accountability around those discipline-oriented goals to make sure that they get done. Jason: Got it. They need to be accountable with somebody. If they're accountable to one, then the likelihood of them actually it is probably none. Pat: [...] works so well. Jason: It's probably because they have a coach, right? Pat: Yeah. They have to go in and step on a scale every week or every day. They have to write down and track what they put in their mouth. If you do that and someone's looking at it, it works. But if no one's looking at it, you're not looking at it, you're not stepping on the scale, and you're not writing down what you eat, chances are you're not going to lose weight.  Jason: Yeah. I worked out with a trainer for a solid year to get in shape. He had me fill out a spreadsheet. Every time I showed up (like once a week), he was pinching me with things to measure my body fat. There was no hiding. He was like, "I could tell you didn't eat right this week," or, "I could tell you're not getting enough sleep because you're retaining water." He’s just tell these stuff. He's done these with so many people. Same thing with working with any business coach that I've worked with. There's this level of accountability, that I'm checking in with them. I know I'm going to be talking into them and say they're going to ask me, "Did you keep your commitments? Did you do what you said you're going to do?"  I think there's that positive pressure. We're so good at applying negative pressure to ourselves. I think it's rare for us as entrepreneurs to apply pressure in a lateral or a positive way among our peers or among our people that their goal is to level us up. We firmly are really good at attracting people around us to tell us that we can't do things, that it's difficult, that maybe we should get a job. We've all heard these things as entrepreneurs. We really do need to have some sort of accountability. We need friends, we need partners, we need those that are in our corner. We need a coach, we need mentors. We need people that believe and can support us in our objectives. Pat: I agree. That's why we created GoBundance. That's why we do what we do and why there are over 220 members now, why our retention is extremely high. It's just because of that accountability piece. Your life just amplifies when you put it out there in front of other people. Jason: Got it. I love the idea of adding an accountability partner. It’s a simple buddy system.  Pat, I appreciate you coming here on the DoorGrow show. Is there any other advice you'd love to share related to how people can get out of their own way, start working towards building the legacy that they want, and building the finances that they want? Pat: I'm sure everybody here has heard of the classic book, Think and Grow Rich.  Jason: You said, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? Pat: Yeah. What Napoleon Hill did is he just went around rich people. He asked them, "How did you get rich? What are your habits?" There was a newspaper article that said Napoleon Hill had to break it down into two things. He actually asked for one thing, "Why people fail to succeed?" He said, "I don't have one but I have two." He said, "The first thing is they give up too soon." They're about to hit the gold and they stop digging. He said, "The second one is they fail to establish a proper mastermind." He was the one that came up with the mastermind concept. He had a mastermind with Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. These are all big name people. They would hang out, grilled marshmallows at a fire, and share secrets.  That's how we came to write our latest book which is Tribe of Billionaires. I want to give everybody on the show an opportunity to get a copy of this if I could. You can get a free copy by going to tribeofmillionaires.com and all you've got to do is pay the shipping. It's a story of a guy who loses touch with his father. For 20 years, he doesn't see his dad. Then, his dad dies and he has to settle the estate. He sees the pallbearers of his dad's coffin. They're six guys. They're all billionaires and multimillionaires.  He scratches his head because he's like, "I thought my dad was a deadbeat. How are his pallbearers billionaires?" Then, he's lucky enough that in order to get his estate, his dad wants him to spend a week with all these rich guys. What ensues are lessons that he learned. He journals about these lessons after spending or during his weeklong time with these six pallbearers. That was what Tribe of Millionaires was all about. You can get it on Amazon for $20. You're welcome to have it for $7 or free. All you're doing is paying $7 shipping. You just go to tribeofmillonaires.com. Jason: Perfect. All right, I appreciate that. Check out tribeofmillionaires.com. It sounds like a really good story that teaches some lessons regarding money, finances, and growing your business. I appreciate you sharing that, Pat. Any other words you want to share before we let you go? Pat: Nope. I'm easy to find. Luckily, my last name is not really popular. Just type in Pat Hiban. You can find me in multiple places. Follow me on social media, Instagram, Facebook, everywhere. Jason: Perfect. Pat, thanks for coming on the DoorGrow Show.  Pat: My pleasure. Jason: There you have it. Check it out and get a free copy of the book. You said you can go to tribeofmillionaires.com.  If you're a property management entrepreneur that's wanting to grow your business, if you're looking to connect with other entrepreneurs, wanting some accountability from me as a coach, and some support, I recommend you reach out to DoorGrow. We would love to help you grow your business.  Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow hackers at doorgrowclub.com. 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.

Property management businesses always want and need products and services to be profitable and grow doors. That’s why many of them choose the user-friendly residential rental property management software for single-family properties called, Propertyware. Today, I am talking to Inaas Arabi, Vice President (VP) of Single Family Rental and General Manager (GM) of Propertyware. He understands the importance of developing new and innovative ways to help property managers attain profitability and growth. You’ll Learn... [04:37] Past and Present Perception of Propertyware: Before becoming GM, Inaas was a customer because of ability to customize system based on business models. [06:38] Who uses Propertyware? Typically, larger companies wanting to scale and grow. [07:45] Room to Grow: Never buy a solution for where your business is today; always buy a solution for where you want it to be. [09:50] Directions for Growth:  Add units by differentiating services via customization and special offers. Increase revenue per door by offering add-on products and services.  Reduce expenses via automation for manual and repetitive tasks.  [20:33] Propertyware stands behind its platform; serves as business advisor, not only technology provider, to solve pain points. [23:54] Facilitating Future Integrations: Freedom to connect with third-party tools, vendors, and services. [27:40] API Connections and Challenges: Propertyware provides two-way data exchange that’s maintained in one system. [34:50] Status of Property Management Industry: Advocate, educate, and train others on legislation and awareness to protect tenants and landlords. [45:38] Should you switch software? Break up dysfunctional system to experience freedom by having good data, building relationships, and improving processes. Tweetables Never buy software for where you’re at today; always buy software for where you want to be. Pick property management software that you can live with for the long-term to grow. Automate mundane tasks performed by property managers via software. Kiss of death is double entry and manual input. Resources Inaas Arabi on LinkedIn Propertyware HubSpot Zapier Tenant Turner Property Meld Renter, Inc. Rent Manager ShowMojo Rently Rentec AppFolio Buildium 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 the perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show. Today's guest, I'm hanging out with, Inaas Arabi. Inaas: Yes. Jason: Did I say it right? Inaas: Yes, you sure did. Thank you. Jason: All right. Inaas, I'm excited to have you on the show. We have not yet had Propertyware on the show and Inaas is from Propertyware. Inaas: Yes I am. Jason: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the space of property manager first and then let's get into maybe Propertyware a bit and talk about growth. Inaas: Awesome. I do want to first of all say that I'm a door hacker as well, so thank you for having me on, I'm excited. I came in mostly from the operational background. I started a company from scratch, operated and built it a little bit to over 1700 doors and then I sold it to a national player, then I went to work for the second largest owner and operator in the single family industry, American Homes for Rent. I worked for them for a while. I was their Midwest regional director of ops. We've done a lot of great things there. We took the company public. I left that and went to work for a company called the Altisource, which deals with banks and REITs and does a very similar thing to third party property management or property managers but on a different scale mostly for the banks and the financial industry. Operated a very large portfolio over 35 states and after that I got recruited by RealPage to be able to become the single family vice-president for them as well as general manager for Propertyware. Now, the reason why I think Propertyware would be a great choice for somebody like me and for a lot of operators is because you're able to take somebody like me with my experience and put him into the seats where we can make decisions that would actually help the property managers with their day-to-day lives. That's the difference that we're trying to go after compared to some of the other systems, is that we really want to build things that would be usable and would make an impact for people's businesses. I know we are going to talk about growth here in a little bit, but that is really the approach that we're going with Propertyware since I came in. We are building enhancements that allows people to grow in multiple different ways. They grow by adding units, which is what you talked about as far as being a door hacker. Number two, you grow by increasing your revenue by making more money per door. Then number three, you also went to grow financially by reducing expenses while keeping everything the same, so that would allow you to be able to have a much better financials or higher NOI’s for your property, since you're an owner or operator. That's really the goal. That's the approach that we're taking upon with Propertyware since I've started to them. I started Propertyware late January of this year. Jason: Okay. This is kind of new for you, the Propertyware thing. Inaas: Yes, it is. I mean, you can say it's new. I've been there since January so depending on how you take a look at it. Jason: You're halfway through… Inaas: Yeah, you're right. I'm definitely halfway through a year, yes, but I'm not new… Jason: You're 0.5 years at Propertyware right now. Inaas: Yes, it is. Jason: I mean that's two quarters. That's enough time to… Inaas: Make a change, yes. Jason: Make some changes. So, what was your perception of Propertyware before you came in versus now? Inaas: I was a customer of Propertyware when I was working with Altisource. We ran a set of very complicated and very large portfolio, a little over 10,000 units over 35 states, and we did it through Propertyware. One thing that I always appreciated about Propertyware was the ability to customize and the ability to be able to build unique or redo the system around your uniqueness as a business model. Now, I think that also causes people to be more afraid of the technology because there is not a very easy systematic streamlined way of doing things on Propertyware. You have multiple ways of doing things. It's built as such to be able to allow people the ability to customize based on the business model. Having that I've been working for Propertyware, before I found it to be a very interesting point as a customer, it was very good for me, but when I moved in to being in the seat of making changes, I didn't realize that this is an intentional thing that we're doing where we are able to keep the business and keep the platform customizable by the business model. Now, I would also say that that will make some people be very hesitant into looking into Propertyware because they're afraid of how customizable the system could be. That could also take you into a lot of what I would call rabbit holes, meaning, if you've got 20 ways to be able to do something, sometimes you give way too many options for some people that would allow you to take out the simplicity aspect of it or the easiness aspect of it. Overall, really what I appreciate the most as customization, if I want to have to sum it up down to one thing. Jason: The perception that I've always had about Propertyware is I've noticed that a lot of the larger companies, the companies that really are folks on scale, that they tend to use Propertyware. Propertyware seems to be very scalable. It seems much more of an enterprise solution than a lot of the other property management software out there. That's kind of the perception that I've noticed. I have lots of clients that have used Propertyware. I noticed usually the guys with thousands of doors are using Propertyware. Inaas: We do have people from different levels of where they're at. Now, to your point, sometimes it's very difficult and I struggle with this myself as well, it's really very difficult to be able to equate the number of units for your business to how complicated of a process you’re running. We come across some people that they maybe only running 200 units, but they have some of the most complex processes that I've seen and the opposite is very true. It's really more about how customizable are you ready to look in to be able to build for your business. The one thing that I would always say, you never buy software for where you at today, you should always be buying software to where you want to be. It's almost like when you're talking to trainers that they always say, “You don't want to be the guy or the person who's playing today. You really want to be playing to what you want yourself to look like after you win or at the winning table,” and that's really where it comes in to be. If you're thinking you want to grow and you want to have a system that grows with you, scales with you, that allows you to be able to do different things in many different ways, Propertyware certainly will be it. Now, I would also say, you do have to be willing to take on this opportunity to be able to build things that will be customizable for you, so you can get the best advantage. Jason: This is the feedback that I've noticed about Propertyware. What he says is absolutely true. If you're going to pick a property management software solution or any solution for your business, you want to pick a solution that is going to give you room to grow into for whatever size you imagine because it's not easy to switch property management software. Anybody that's done it that switched from one to the other because they thought the grass would be greener on the other side, usually regrets it and it's not been so comfortable. I agree, pick a software that you feel like you can live with in the long term. Inaas: What you're saying is absolutely true. It’s really about jumping from one system to the next is not an easy task. I do recognize that you do have to put in a lot of effort into that, but you do need to find something that would scale with you for the long term, not for where you are today. That's the beauty about finding that system and being able to grow with it as you go. We've seen a lot of great companies have grown with us over the years and have done wonderful things as far as that goes. Jason:: Let's get into growth. The topic is growth via Propertyware. How does Propertyware help somebody grow or what are we chatting about here? Inaas: Like I said, the approach for us since I've got into Propertyware is the fact that we're building enhancements that would allow people to grow in all of those three directions. I'm going to give you specific examples because I know you like that. Number one. Growth, in my opinion, is adding units. How do you add units? You help PMCs differentiate their services and do things where they can go out there and put themselves in front of the right people that they're looking for their services. As an example, I know you guys offer wonderful websites offering, which is great. One way that we can help is we do provide our clients what we call a listing widget that they can plug in anywhere on the website. This way, you as a website provider don't have to build it for them. It defeats all the information directly from the Propertyware property management software. All of the vacancies, the rent price, the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, pictures and all that are all within that listing widget. Then we make it so customizable to the point where people are able to do some awesome things with it. An awesome thing would be, for example, you can add on banners at their specific workflow. For example, you can put in a banner that says, “Only make that banner available over the weekend to make a weekend offer,” so you can say, “Come take a look at my house that I have for rent and you're going to get $100 off if you look at it between Friday and Sunday,” or “If you look at it between the 1st and the 15th.” You can do things like, “We're looking for awesome owners like yourselves. Click on this link to be able to see our offering.” You could do things like the workflow, like once a property has an approved applicant for it, then you would automatically take it off the listing so this way you don't have to do anything with that manually. You could also do it where you can add a lot of information in the description for that property and one thing I teach people to do and I'm sure you’d like that, Jason, is the fact that for every listing that you put in out there for rent at the bottom of the description for that listing, you should take a couple of lines and you should type in information about your services with the link to the website that will take people on to a full offering of those services. Because we know when people go out to look for properties, rental properties on the market, majority of them will be renters, but some are not necessarily renters. Some of them might be owners that they're looking to comp out their property to figure out what the other properties in the area are renting for or they might be asset managers that [...] ability to put yourself in front of those guys while they're searching for properties. It's very unique. It doesn't cost you any extra. It's part of the listing widget that allows you to plug and play and do it as you go. This is one example of an enhancement that does help for the unit growth. There is plenty more, I don't think I have enough time to be able to share all of them because I want to talk about other items that are important. The second element we talked about, which is adding revenue or increasing your revenue, making it where instead of making $1000 per door, you go up to $1500 per door, you go up to $2000, $3000, whatever you feel like it's the right level that you want to go to. How do we do that? We do that by offering ancillary products that could make sense for the property managers but they're also integrated within the system so this way, they don't have to do anything offsite the system. The beauty about that is you get the beauty of getting something that is offered, make some money on it without adding too much expenses on your end from an HR or an employee perspective. Some examples with that would be asset protection or our renter's insurance. I know some other software do offer that. The reason why I mentioned it is because between Propertyware and some of the other systems is the fact that we really want to make sure that it’s fully integrated within our system. The tenant will have a very seamless experience when they're selecting the process or selecting the product and they were going through it, and then also the PMC will have a very seamless experience. Last but not the least, if there is an owner involved, that owner will also have a very seamless experience. As an example of the asset protection, it's a checkbox and then you can select whether it's paid for by the owner or paid for by the tenant. You can put in whatever extra fee that you would want to add on as a PMC as your profit margin, and then you can apply either to a tenant ledger or to an owner ledger depending on who's paying for it, and you do all of that very seamlessly with a couple of clicks. If you do enough of those, you start seeing a little bit of an increase of revenue in per door that you're having. Some of the other products that were also migrating or integrating within our system would be things like utility management which is I think we're one of the only system that I know of that offer something like that. Utility management in single family has not been a revenue center for a long time, but I think that is changing with all of the legalities where it's forcing either the owner or the property management company to keep a lot of utilities in their names so you don't have any off and on for all the tenants when they leave or when you have a new tenant moving in. If you are a PMC and you're going to have to manage that for the owner, we believe you do it with ease, but you should charge a fee to be able to do that and you can apply for that again either on the tenant ledger or on the owner ledger—depending on who's paying for it—and you make a little bit of money on it. That's the examples of how do we help increase revenue for our PMCs. The last type of growth that I want to talk about which is very near and dear to my heart is the profit growth by reducing your expenses. In my opinion, you reduce your expenses by doing automation. Now automation, certainly I'm not suggesting that you exchange relationships or conversations with owners and tenants with technology, but what you do, if you take a look at a lot of repetitive elements that we do every day in property management, you should automate those or you should look into making them systematic, so this way you're not spending a lot of time doing what [...] specific example here. Since I came in to Propertyware, we sat down and we looked at all the processes that our PMCs go through. From renewals, to leasing, to signing of a lease, to maintenance, to all of the big processes. Our goal was to be able to build or educate our PMCs on the best automated way to be able to do a process from A-Z, for the best results, for the cheapest cost as far as HR, and for the highest profit margin. I can tell you, we've gotten rave reviews from our clients when they've seen what we've put together. We have what we call road shows which is more of events that we put out in some certain cities in the United States and we invite our clients and prospects to come out to see us and see what we have going and what we're working on. We share with them for example the renewal process that we build together for them. Now, the beauty about why this is important, why I talk about it, we actually talk about both sides of the spectrum here. We talk about the setup, how you can setup Propertyware for full automation, as well as the actual process of how you run it from a systematic perspective and from an operational perspective. By the time you leave, if you have been a little bit hesitant about how do I work Propertyware to my advantage, you already know how you set it up, and you already know how to work the process itself. We've had customers where they came back and they reported that their renewal rate was at 60%-70%, now they are close to 80%. As a matter of fact, I was talking to a client a little bit earlier today and they quoted 79.83% renewal rate from, I think it was close to 71% or 72%. That's a huge movement. Now, why that's important for PMCs, that's a differentiator for you as well as a service. When you go talk to owners and you say, “I am able to get 80% of people to renew, that speaks volumes to the owners and allows them to see the benefit of working with you compared to working with somebody else who does not have a high renewal rate. Did I explain it to you well as far as all the different types of growth and how we calculate what kind of enhancements we use for each one of them? Jason: Yeah, absolutely. All of these things make sense and I love the idea that you're taking a look at the challenges that the property managers are facing internally when it comes to their operations to facilitate that with the software, to make that faster, to make that more simple versus all the manual stuff. Property managers do a lot of manual stuff. Inaas: They sure do. Jason: The more that you can pull into that software, the better. A lot of people a lot of times, they're turning to lots of different systems to try and systemize their business outside of their accounting solution and that can get cumbersome at times. Inaas: Yeah and the renewal process that we put together for full automation, we've got a little over 20 contact steps, where if you're doing this manually, you would need about 20, a little bit over 20 steps to be able to go through the entire process. We're talking steps from talking to the tenants and making sure that they want to renew, then again talking to the owner is making sure you agree on pricing, making sure you come back and you talk to the tenant and you send them a lease and you follow up on the lease and you do all of that back and forth. We changed that down to the point where we're able to do the entire thing with about six or seven touches. Six to seven touches in my opinion compared to over 20, does saves you so much time and so much effort that allows you to really concentrate on building the relationship instead of losing the time doing mundane task that you should be automating. In my opinion, that's how you grow, you grow by taking all of those mundane tasks, automate them, take those out of your way, and then concentrate on building the relationship, whether it's with the owners or with tenants themselves. Jason: Yeah, makes sense. All right, cool. Is there anything else that you want people to know about Propertyware while I've got you here? Inaas: Absolutely. There is a lot of things that I want to people to know about Propertyware but few things come to mind right off the bat. One, that we do stand behind all of our clients and we do appreciate the relationships that we have with them. Also, if you can imagine, we're taking a different approach by becoming more of our business advisors to our PMCs, not just a technology provider. A lot of times, you come across a lot of great technologies, but if you don't know how to take that technology and apply it into your day-to-day operations, that technology really failed because it's not really allowing you to get what you’d want out of it. Think about text messaging when it came out, for example. If people didn't try it, didn’t perfected it, didn’t figure out what to do with it, we wouldn't have had such a great success with it today. The same effort would be with our platform. We wanted to educate people. We want to make a business partnership with them, to be able to tell him how to do it, what do they do with it, and how they can use it to be able to get best results from all the aspects that we talked about. That's one. Number two, I also want them to know that we are property managers, building stuff for property managers. We’re not technologists, we're just building things in a vacuum, and really building it from the perspective of we know where their pain points are, we've been through it, whether it's myself or somebody on my staff, we know what your folks, the people that’s hearing us today are going through and because of that, my goal is to be able to build things to solve those issues for them, to solve those pain points. Now, sometimes we have to take them in steps, but at the end of the day we are solving those pain points. For example, we rolled out our text messaging feature earlier this year and for fairness sake it was what I would call the basic features of being able to communicate back and forth via text messaging. In order for us to take that to the next level, we're also working on enhancements now that would allow us to do the multi-level, the multimedia, as well as the group texting, and things like categorize station for all of the text. This way, our PMCs could take a text and apply it toward somebody specific, whether it's an owner or tenant. They can also do group texting. They can also do multimedia, so they can send a picture, send a file, and do all of that all within one centralized communication command, if you call it that, within the system, so it's not anywhere off the system. Then, last but not least, I think we’ve talked very greatly about growth, but what I really want people to know, your listeners, is that if you're looking for a scalable system that has a lot of potential for you, that would allow you to be able to do a lot of customization for your business based on your business needs, then you should look into Propertyware and you should evaluate it as an opportunity as an option for you. Now, it may fit then that's fantastic, it may not and that's okay, but at the end of the day you should really evaluate it to figure out if it's a good fit for you or not. Jason: You're talking about what you guys are doing internally. One of the big questions I know a lot of my clients have, a lot of listeners have that's really hot on the tip of the tongue of most property managers nowadays is integrations. That’s freedom to connect with third party tools, vendors, different services. Maybe you can touch on an API, what you guys have maybe going on there, and how you guys are kind of facilitating integrations with third parties. Inaas: Yeah. That's such a fantastic point, I'm so glad that you actually brought that up. Propertyware’s current approach is that we are offering a two-way data exchange [...] an API that allows people to be able to connect to their property management software. They can connect almost anything and everything that they would like to do. In my view, we want to provide people the opportunities to make a choice or pick the right option that fits for their business model. There is a lot of great things that we offer. If it fits your business model, if it fits your needs fantastic, use it. If you have something else that you'd like to use, connect it to property management software so you don't have to double entry anything. To me, the kiss of death is double entry and the kiss of death is any manual input that you put into either your staff or yourself, because somebody's going to make a mistake with that manual entry and somebody's going to cause you havoc later, even if it's not happening today. That's as far as the API. Now, I know on other webcast, Jason, you did ask about things like I think the place was, remind me again, was HubSpot or something like that, where you're able to connect Propertyware to everything else that it's out there as far as softwares… Jason: That was Zapier. Inaas: …yes, Zapier, thank you. I appreciate that. We actually looked into that and we're talking to them now about getting our platform on their site to be able to have full integrations with everything that they've done. You could do this yourself today, meaning if you have access to the API, you can take API, you can plug it into whatever other software that you'd want to plug it into, whether it’s CRM, whether it's an inspection product, whether it's a [...] product, typically anything and everything that has got API, you can connect it to do. Jason: If you're nerdy enough or you pay enough money to get somebody nerdy enough to do it. Inaas: True. I mean, you do have to have a developer to be able to take a look at it. This is not something that's geared toward a property manager to be doing it themselves, that's for sure. Jason: That’s why there's Zapier. The Zapier is very cool because it allows a somewhat normal person—you have to be a little bit nerdy, let's be honest—to do it without having to know code. You can create connections between tools and systems, so if you guys are working on that, I'll be really excited to hear when you guys have that ready. Inaas: Yeah, absolutely. You're definitely correct, it does need a little bit of development resources to be able to do the API, that's for sure, but remember though, Jason, once you do it once, you've got it, meaning you don’t have… Jason: You don’t have to do it over again. Inaas: Exactly. You don't have to go do connection every day, meaning if you've got five products that you're working on plus your property management software, you connect them all at once and you're done. You may have to do maintenance every once in awhile like if something is changed on your property management software or if you change your business model, if you do different things, you make maintenance changes, but it's not as big of a change once you've done it once. It's really more of an initial step and once you go through that initial step, you're good to go. However, I would also say, we're also one of the very few systems that offer two-way data exchange. Some other systems would offer data out and they call that API, but that's really not an API. An API should be a two-way data exchange, where you can take data out of your system and you can put data back into your system. If you can't do that, you can't really call it API but that's again [...] view at this point. I have seen some of our customers do some awesome things with the API connections. Those API's might have where they take information out of Propertyware, they go do something else with it and then go back and feed it back into Propertyware to be able to have one system through which is Propertyware for them. At the end of the day, you would want to connect everything you're working on with your property management software, so you're not having to enter anything manually. Jason: One of the challenges with API's is that you've got two pieces a software there communicating and if either one of them makes changes it can break that connection like something happens, that's what's I think is really important for the different vendors and property management software to create relationships where somebody's maintaining this. For example, if Tenant Turner was working with Propertyware or if Property Meld was working the Propertyware, if one of these vendors a lot of people are really enjoying, if they're helping to maintain that connection, then the business owner doesn't have to keep that working or make sure that it’s working. Inaas: It’s also fair and I'm again [...] and we have a list of companies that we’re actually working with to be able to have direct integrations with, you've mentioned Property Meld for example, that's one of our success stories with the API. We have a full integration with them, they'll tell you the same thing as well. The beauty about that is somebody could do the maintenance within Property Meld and then they can make the payment out of their Propertyware system with ease without any complications. It also allows you to do back and forth between the two systems, so if you have a work order that came in from a tenant, you can feed into Property Meld and vice versa as well. Having that we have the API, that's what allowed us to be able to do that. There is a list of companies that we're going through to be able to do direct integration with. I think RentersInc is one of the people here, they're putting in chats. We've been working with them on a direct integration of the API. I think they're almost there, they're about 95% there to it. To me, it's all about providing opportunities for our PMCs to be able to take advantage of what the technology could do for them. That's what we're embarking upon. That's what we are going to do. And if you stay tuned, you’re going to get a lot of great news about us connected with a lot of different vendors that does different things for our PMCs. The idea is, again to your point, we maintain the connection, so the PMC doesn't have to. If they wanted to go elsewhere like for example somebody wants to go to a different maintenance provider Property Meld is not what they want to use, they can still use the API to be able to make the exact same connection the Property Meld is made with Propertyware, if they have an access to the API. Jason: Yeah, makes sense. I love the idea of direct integrations. I love the idea of having an open API. I love the idea of you helping them to systemize your business internally, leveraging your software. These are all powerful tools for them. One of the main things you have mentioned at the beginning, is to lower expenses and all of these things is going to lower the level of communication, which lessens the amount of time in man-hours and manual stuff that has to happen. That's the biggest expense in property management is staff, it's people, it's those resources and that allows them greater leverage so that they can get more done without having to throw money at bodies constantly in order to get everything done. Property management is not a cheap business to run for a lot of people, so margins matter quite a bit. Inaas: It was quite interesting to me once I came on to work for Propertyware because I went out and talked to a lot of clients and again I'm an operator, so I understand what people are going through and I remember when I ran my own company, it was really more throwing bodies at it all the time. The difference though in today's world that is very different than when I ran my own company, is today you have options for technologies that could fulfill those tasks that people were doing for you before. Back when I ran my own company, those options were not even available. For example, if you recall back in the day when we were doing inspections on pen and paper or via pen and paper, everybody would take a piece of paper and a list of items or questions and you just fill amount while you're going through the property doing inspection. Today, you do most of your inspections via mobile technology on mobile devices and with mobile templates. The beauty about that is that saved you the ability or the need to have someone that is actually sitting down and writing down information on a piece of paper and they're transcribing them back into your property management software. If you have the integration correctly, you go from mobile inspection tool to the inspection report directly into your property management. We're working on something that we're just actually going to roll out here tomorrow, which is enhancements for our evaluation module. It allows people to be able to do multiple inspections and then match them column by column for every time you've done inspection. Think of when you go out and you do a move in inspection, you do a midyear inspection, you do a move out inspection, and then you're seeing all of those inspections in front of you matched line item by line item, so you know what the kitchen looked like when you did the move-in, you know what the kitchen looks like when you did a midyear inspection and you absolutely you know what the kitchen looks like when somebody moved out If you can show some damages that the tenant have caused that home, there is never a question anymore about who caused it because you have such an access to data and information that is beyond anyone's ability to be able to dispute it in court. Again, that's the beauty about the technology and the use of technology in today's market compared to what was before. Jason: Yeah. Technology certainly is changing quite a bit. I think here in the US, we’re in the forefront of what's happening technologically in property management, even if we are maybe behind other countries in terms of how well-developed or how familiar people are with property management. It's exciting to see what you guys are doing. Before we wrap this up is there anything else anybody should know about Propertyware and how can they get in touch with you guys? Inaas: I appreciate that. What I would like to do though is I do want to talk a little bit about the industry in general because I want to take this platform as a way for us to be able to educate and train. I do believe that our industry and to your point earlier some other countries have this property management business defined a little bit better and it's a little bit more integrated within day in and day out lives of people, so it's looked at a very different. Jason: There's probably two things, maybe just more legislation surrounding it and maybe just more awareness in those markets. Inaas: Awareness is really a good word. Thank you. The reason why I mentioned that is I truly believe that our industry has been under attack this year and is probably going to be continuing on ongoing under attack from almost everywhere. Whether it states that they're changing the rules, whether it's businesses that they're changing the rules, whether it's somebody else is changing the rules. The problem with it is I think we're so defragmented to the point that we lost the ability to stand up for ourselves as an industry. [...] I can give you of states changing the rules on the fly and make it miserable for our PMCs to be able to operate. Not to single them out, but I'm going to make an example of the State of New York. They just rolled out a brand new law about that the tenant protection law, that's what they call it. The effect of those things that they put into the… Jason: Protecting the tenants from the big bad evil landlord. Inaas: Yes, exactly. Part of it, for example, you can't charge more than $20 for application fee. You can't even call it an application fee, you have to call it something else. If the customer or if the tenant brings you a copy of an old credit report, you typically have to accept it and not charge him anything if you're going to go screen them through your ways. You can imagine the complexity that this is putting on our PMCs in the State of New York and they're not the only state. I know some other states and they're changing things, changing rules. The reason why I say all of this is I do have an ask for all of us as property managers and the ask is, let's really get together. Let's support the organizations that support us. I don’t want to make this a pitch for any specific organizations that are very well known in our industry, that are usually a couple, two or three, but let's support them to be able to have a voice, so they can stand on our behalf against some of these things that are happening to our industry. Let's really truly do a good job making sure that we're providing the utmost best customer experience, the best customer service that we can provide, because that is the only savior for us to where the public is going to realize that we have value and what we do has value and they're going to continue on working with us and our business is going to continue to grow. That's as far as the industry. I really wanted to make sure that I put that plug in there. You asked me about Propertyware, I think we've talked… Jason: To touch on that I want to agree with you on that. Property management is really in its infancy I think here in the US in terms of awareness and perception. Every property management business owner is either an advocate for the industry or they're hurting the industry. We all need to be advocates for the industry and we also need to educate. We need to educate because I think if a lot of these laws wouldn’t exist or they would be very different if property managers had input, because they know what works in the real world. They know what needs to happen. They do want to protect the interests of the tenant and the owner. When things get skewed, when the pendulum swings all the way away from the owner’s interests or the landlord’s interest just towards what serves the needs and interests of the tenants, eventually it's not really going to end up serving the needs of the tenants. It creates some sort of imbalance that is going to hurt tenants in the long run. That's generally just always going to be true when something isn't right, or isn't fair, or isn’t just. Inaas: I totally agree 100% and I think you hit the nail on its head with the education. I do also feel that we should educate everybody that we come across with. Whether it's our tenants, whether it's our owners, whether it's somebody else that we're dealing with our vendors. One thing that I was very advocate for when I ran either of my company or other companies, is the fact that you have to have an onboarding experience for everybody you’re dealing with. An onboarding experience with your tenant, an onboarding experience with your owner, an onboarding experience for your vendor. And guess what? Also an onboarding experience for the HOAs that you're dealing with, an onboarding experience for the politicians that are responsible for your area as well because if you don't educate all of those people on what we and how we do it well, there is also not going to be something you're going to like. To your point, Jason, I think if the property managers were involved in some of these laws that they were written, I'm sure they would have been written differently. It's not because we don't want to protect the public. We actually have the utmost respect for the public, but we know what works, and we know what works well. If the idea is to make sure that a tenant has the opportunity to not being overly charged for a particular application fee or something like that, you could have written that in as a rule but a little bit differently than just making it where it’s mandated, it's one fee, and you're minimizing the ability for somebody to be able to do the right screening for their tenant and putting the right people in place. Jason: Even in contracts and everything else, we need a little bit of educated language to explain the why behind things. Inaas: Yes, absolutely, 100%. Jason: It’s like that spoonful of sugar that Mary Poppins says makes the medicine go down. There needs to be a little bit of education added to some of the stuff rather than just throwing out, “This is how we're going to do it,” and you have to just take it. Inaas: Agreed. Now, you did ask me about property. I do want to say a couple things here. It is a system that I'd like people to take a look into as an opportunity for them to understand what the system could do for them, what are we doing as far as these processes, these automations, the opportunities for the two-way API for them to be able to connect their system to everything else that they're working on. We understand that people have to have options and we're supporting that and we’re going to go with it. I just want people to take a look at what we've got to offer and if it's fitting to what they need and what their business model is, fantastic. We can work together. If it's not, it's no big deal. We will continue on staying part of the same industry and we’ll support each other, but I do feel that people are missing quite a lot by not checking out what the opportunities look like and what the options are with Propertyware. As far as connecting with us what I would recommend, if people go on to our website Propertyware.com, we've just finalized a new experience for what I'm going to call here the free trial where you can go in, login, take a look at a little bit of the system, figure out what's going on. You're certainly not going to be able to do every single thing in the system. I'm not going to allow you to be able to take a payment in the system or put a tenant in there and kind of have them pay you through it, but the beauty of that is at least, it gives you an insider look of what we have available to you. I would also invite you to have a conversation with our sales staff to really truly understand what we have to offer and then go through a demo. If it works, great. If it doesn't, no big deal. Jason: I want to point this out because I'm an advocate for the industry. I'm not a property manager. I want to see the industry shift towards more openness, more freedom. I love what you're saying. We've had other property management software on the past and the general message of one of the big players out there who I won't mention by name was just, we're going to just create everything internally. We're going to just try and give our customers everything that they need rather than giving them what they really are asking for. The general feedback I hear from everybody is they want freedom. They want freaking freedom to be able to make choices, to make the best choices for the business, to choose the best tools and vendors. They want freedom. As entrepreneurs, that's why we are doing what we are doing. We don't give up the 9-5 job so that we can work even more hours a lot of times initially and have a lot more stress and a lot more pain just because we're crazy. We do it because we want more freedom. We want to be choosing what we're doing. What you're saying I think is in alignment with entrepreneurs. It’s in alignment with entrepreneurs that are running these property management businesses. They want the freedom to be able to choose the vendors, choose the third party tools that they're going to be using, and they want that stuff to work with their property management software. I appreciate that that is a focus of what Propertyware is doing. I wanted to point that out because I think it's important to highlight those in the industry that are doing that. I see you guys doing it. I see Rent Manager doing that, the open API thing. One thing I've also always appreciated about Propertyware since we started doing websites at DoorGrow back in the day, the very first website I did were websites for Propertyware clients and customers. I've always had that really good integration for the widget. In the first, I have a JavaScript widget, it would populate the data, it wasn't just a cheesy iframe thing that we were putting into the page, and that's always been nice. It's always been nice to have that reduced double data entry. People are putting in their properties into their websites and then doing that just back in the day. We've come a long way since then, every everybody has. Now they're using tools like maybe Tenant Turner, ShowMojo, or Rently, and some of these sorts of integrations. I've always appreciated those aspects of Propertyware. Question. Most people have a property management software. I would imagine most people listening to this show are not just startups that are like, “Which software should I pick?” Say they're using AppFolio, they're using Buildium, they're using Rent Manager, they're using Rentec Direct, they're using something already. What would you say as far as switching? We mentioned already. It’s painful usually to switch. How do you help facilitate this if you're going to get customers on? They're going to have to make the switch. Right now, they're probably not even listening because they're like, “There's no way I can switch. I'm married and I'm married for eternity.” I'm going to give you an opportunity to help them break up that marriage if it's dysfunctional. Inaas: I am so appreciative of you bringing this on as well. I do want to go back though. Freedom, I love that. I'm actually going to use it because you are correct in making sure that you highlight the fact that it's all about freedom. Yes, we do have offerings. Yes, we do have products, but at the same token, I am personally a believer. In Propertyware, we're believing that we have to provide options for people. You pick whatever makes sense for you as a property management company, if you have a different vendor that is offering something that is more unique to your business model and you like to use that versus using something that we have, great. Go for it. Now as far as the implementation—obviously you can use the API two-way data exchange to be able to connect them so you don't have to double entry anything—the implementation is such an important piece. When you talk to technologist and you talk to them about implementation, they just don't realize the amount of hassles that a PMC will have to go through when they're jumping from one system to another system. To them, it's more of a 1+1=2. Once I came in to Propertyware, the first thing that I have to tackle was our implementation. What we did with it is a couple of folds. One, we broke it down to where we provide now tools for ability to be able to have clean data that gets into your system. Having clean data is half the battle for your implementation because if you have a good, clean data coming into your system, it makes your life so much easier to be able to operate. What we found, a lot of PMCs may not have realized some of the, I'm going to use the word “garbage” that they may have had in their systems. When we go through our checks, we come back to our PMCs and we say, “You told us you managed 200, 300, 1000 doors but when we're looking at your data here, we're seeing 1033, so what's going on with those additional 33 units? Are they truly for rent? Are they truly something you don't use? What's going on with them?” and they're coming back saying, “You know what? You're right. Those are people that we lost two years ago and the person who was working on the system never deactivated the units.” Having good data is half the battle. Second is the partnership between the PMCs as well as a good implementation team that allows them to go through the experience one step at a time. What that means, when they're coming in to us to be able to work with Propertyware, they're going to be assigned a particular team with one project manager who is driving the entire implementation from A-Z. They have calls, they have specific asks, there is a specific journey that they're going through step-by-step. Data is usually number one issue that we all come across. Number two would be all your accounting setups. Number three would be all you process setups. Number four would be more of your training and your customization. Number five kind of bringing it all together with KPIs, reports, and dashboards. Now, after you've done all of this implementation, then you're also going to get the training team to come in and do full training with you for all these processes. That training is part of the implementation. It's not something specific that you got to pay for. It also allows you to be able to customize to what your business model needs. Let's say you have a specific way of doing move-ins, that trainer is going to learn that from you before they come out to train you and your staff. When they come out to train you and your staff, they're training you on the system to the best business model, to the best business process that you told him you want to do for that move-in. They're not going to tell you, “Propertyware does it this way,” they're going to say, “This is how you told me you want to do move-ins and this is how you could do the same thing in Propertyware for the best of all the results, whether it's for you or for us.” Last but not the least, what I would also mention is the fact that we provide our PMCs timelines for their integration. We point it out. We basically say you have, I think the timeline is about 90 days for you to be able to be integrated. You’re not paying for the systems during those 90 days until you fully integrated. Once you are fully integrated, then you start paying for it. That allows us to both be on the same footing saying, “We're going to work with you to be able to get you implemented because you're not paying us, so we're not making any money. At the same token, it's in our best interest to help you through this process so we can get you to that finalized implementation piece so you can start using your system.” Now, what we've seen is a huge reduction in the days of implementation for Propertyware in particular. We've also seen a very high number of what I would say happy customers that they came on our new plan for implementation. We’ve also seen a lot less issues with data when data comes in through the system and we're finding a lot of ahas from our clients similar to what I described to you saying, “Hey, I didn’t know that I had 1033 units. I thought I was only managing 1000 so now I got to deal with those 33 units,” or, “I didn't know that I could do move-ins this way or move-outs that way, or do a process of secure deposit, and refunds this way to be able to make it easier for me and more streamlined.” It's less touches, less communications, less points of friction between the teams, and then obviously what gives you the best results at the end of the day. We've seen very good results from our new approach with the implementation. Jason: People are a little frustrated with their existing property management software. It sounds like you guys have made a lot of changes, as well as the API stuff you’ve been talking about, direct integrations. It's probably worth to them to take a new fresh look at Propertyware. Inaas: Absolutely, yes. If you looked at it before, I do invite you to take a look at it again. I promise you, we've made a lot of changes. And we are continually making changes. We do this every day. When I say changes, it's really more of enhancements that really makes sense for all of what we talked about. You've mentioned the listing, how easy it is. One thing we just rolled out recently is the watermarking for photos in listing widget. It's a small thing but it's an awesome thing to have. Jason: It protects the photos. Inaas: It protects the photos. Especially if you're in areas where you're hit a lot by scams. When I went operating, I'm not singling them out but just a case of the matter. Florida was one of those states that had a lot of scams. By watermarking your photos at ease without a lot of work, it helps you to be able to protect them and making sure that no one is going to steal those photos to be able to scam you or your owners out of the property. Again, we're making enhancements that make sense and we're making enhancements that is allowing people to grow. Either by adding units, increasing their revenue, and/or reducing their expenses, and increasing their profits. Jason: Cool. Inaas, I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing some ideas about Propertyware, letting us know where everything's at with it. Again, people can get in touch by going to propertyware.com and check you guys out. Inaas: I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Jason. I'm really glad that I got a chance to be on the webcast with you. Thank you very much. You guys do a fine job. Please continue on these webcasts. Please continue educating our PMCs and just know that we're going to be supporting you all the way. If there is anything we can do for you and your listeners to be able to support them in their businesses, and in their endeavors, please reach out to us. We’d love to be your business partners. Jason: Awesome. Yeah, I would love to. That would be great. It would be cool. Maybe we'll do something to your audience at some point. That will be fun. Inaas: Absolutely. We welcome that. Jason: All right, cool. I love sharing the message that we share. I'll let you go Inaas. Thanks again for being on the show. Inaas: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Jason: As everybody knows, I love sharing the message that I think property management, there is a bigger vision for property managers than just getting mired in toilets, tenants, and termites. I do believe good property management can change the world. There is a massive ripple effect. There are thousands and thousands of families that can be affected by good management. There's a lot of situations in which families should be underneath good management instead of a crappy landlord situation. I do believe good property management can have a massive ripple effect that can change the world and hopefully that all of you get a little bit inspired or excited about that. You are having an impact. You get to make a difference. I am honored that through you my listeners, through our clients that we get to work with, that we’re able to get that message out, and that we’re able to have some small impact in the industry and have a ripple effect. I appreciate Inaas pointing that out. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, then please reach out. We’d love to have you and maybe work with you, and see if you’d be a good fit for the type of client that we're looking to work with, and make a difference in this industry. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.

Are you a property manager or owner who wants to recoup financial losses when stuck with a bad tenant who stops paying rent or needs to be evicted? Lower your risk? Trust somebody else to manage your properties? Protect all parties involved?  Today, I am talking to John Higgins, co-founder and CEO of Steady Marketplace, a leading technology platform for property owners and managers. Steady’s subsidiaries offer financial products, including rent default insurance.  You’ll Learn... [02:00] Background of Big Financial Numbers: Starting with event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with billions in assets.  [06:37] Steady’s products protect property owners/managers from bad tenant outcomes.  [07:40] Rent Default Insurance: Protection against rental income loss due to tenant’s failure to pay.  [10:15] Rent Default Insurance is widely available and adopted around the world. About 70% are renters and 30% are owners. [12:38] Collaboration Over Competition: Don’t simply copy-and-paste products and policies; leads to lack of innovation. [13:55] Automate It All: Learn from online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and pricing. [15:05] Perfect Businesses are Out of Business: Entrepreneurs think they've got something perfect, only to realize they need to make it better.  [16:15] By the Book: Take regulatory issues seriously, and make sure to do it right. [17:00] Adoption is #1 challenge with any solution, software, or service.  [17:55] Competitive Advantage: Education, awareness, and understanding of product.  [20:53] FAQs: How does it work? Why does this exist? What’s the catch?  [21:55] Renter’s Insurance vs. Rent Default Insurance: What’s the difference? Tweetables Every entrepreneur should make a difference. Otherwise, they're just causing problems. When there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. Automate everything: Go slow to go fast. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Resources John Higgins’ Email Steady Marketplace Steady Marketplace FAQ John Higgins on LinkedIn SureVestor Rent Rescue National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) 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 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, I am hanging out with John Higgins of Steady Marketplace. John, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. John: It's great to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: John, you've got a really big bio and you're really impressive. Do you want me to read all of it? John: You can read whatever you want to read. I'm not that impressive. I'll say you're more impressive hosting this show and with your following in the space. I'm just a guy trying to make a difference. Jason: I appreciate it. That's what every good entrepreneur is trying to do is make a difference, at least I hope. Otherwise, they're just causing problems.  I'll read a little bit here. It says you are the co-founder and CEO of Steady Technologies Inc., a leading technology platform for property owners and property managers. Steady, through subsidiaries, offers financial products that benefit property owners and managers. Their first product is rent default insurance, offered in partnership with the top US insurance carrier that is a Fortune 100 company, rated A+ by AM Best, and S&P.  Prior to co-founding Steady, Mr. Higgins founded Nobadeer Advisors which provided business development and capital market expertise to technology-enabled lending platforms across the variety of consumers and business, lending verticals, and backed by top venture capital firms globally.  Prior to Nobadeer, Mr. Higgins spent 2.5 years at Prosper Marketplace, Inc. where he helped build the institutional loan program growing it from $0 to over $5 billion over his tenure and help scale Prosper's monthly origination volumes over 4000% during his time at the firm.  Mr. Higgins also previously served as a director at Topwater Capital, now owned by Leucadia, where he made investments between $5-$100 million to hedge fund managers across a variety of strategies via structured managed accounts.  Prior to Topwater, Mr. Higgins spent five years working for event-driven, distressed, and activist hedge fund managers with assets as large as $1.85 billion. There's a lot of big financial numbers here, John. A lot of big financial numbers. John: Want me to dive a bit deeper on it and summarize for you? Jason: Yeah. Let's dive into that and then tell us how you got into all of these. John: Sure. I can start from how I got into the hedge funds space which led me through here. I started and talk my way into an internship my junior college, totally unqualified, at the University of New Hampshire versus people that are top of their class from top business schools. Got a shot to join big hedge fund on my way up. I worked my tail off that summer and got a full time offer. I joined that firm full time after I graduated college. I was really lucky. I worked for the really brilliant entrepreneur there who would start this business with $500,000. Four years later, he grew it to almost $2 billion.  Then, left that company and went to Topwater where I was invested in hedge fund strategies via structured managed accounts, kind of cross the bench of the long, short, and distressed credit. That company was acquired by Leucadia which is now Jefferies Investment Bank; the two merged. Leucadia was at a big stake and Jefferies a long story anyway. As that transaction was transpiring, I was approached by the former management team across the marketplace who've I known from the hedge fund industry. They had great entrepreneurs that built and sold the company that served hedge funds called Merlin Securities. They're backed by Sequoia. Sold that business to Wells Fargo and decided they were going to take over Prosper.  They reached out and said, "We're looking for someone to help us build out this business as we take it over and turn it around." Really fortunate to work with tremendous entrepreneurs and the tremendous team there. During my time there, we went from about 50 employees up to about 600+ when I left. That was my first foray into more pure play technology.  We're a financial technology platform. We're offering unsecured personal loans online to end consumers. If you're thinking about going online, applying for a personal loan, no human interaction, [...] pricing, I can get you a loan in a matter of days as opposed to having to leave your house, go to a bank, et cetera, and fill up paper forms. After leaving Prosper, I was consulting for various lending platforms as you touched on in the intro. I got to work again with tremendous entrepreneurs across a bunch of different verticals. One of the people I've got to work with was doing some lending into the small landlord space. It's fix and flip lending and also rental lending. I started looking at the opportunities. I said, "This is really interesting. I know all of these products that helped multifamily owners protect them against bad tenant outcomes."  There's a lot of companies that pop up doing that, but no one's really going after single family. I started looking at the space and opportunity. As you and everyone else in the space realizes, it's actually bigger than the multifamily space. When you live in New York, everyone thinks rental properties are the big highrise. In fact, there's roughly more than 16 million single family rental units in the US, then another 8 million duplexes, triplex quads. All in all, you have about 20 million rental units in the US owned by individual investors that owned less than 10 units. These owners actually can't solve for this risk which is if the tenant goes bad. The smart owners are getting professional property managers or actually better at picking tenants at the established processes and procedures. They're getting bad tenants out. It can help manage those properties and have better outcomes. But still, when there’s a loss of rental income due to tenant default, there is no protection. In fact, my business partner and co-founder, Viken, had a property in New York City that he was renting. Person just skips town in the middle of the night. He was left with close to $20,000. It actually might have been north of $20,000 loss because the tenant just left the unit and didn't say anything. It took awhile to get it rerented. He had no coverage. If he had, it had no protection against that. If you had Steady or some of these other providers that are popping up, they could've indemnify themselves from that loss, and could've been made whole for a modest premium.  Long story short, there's a big need in the market to this type of product. What we're really excited about is working with all the property managers across the country to help ensure this is product underlying landlords and finding ways for everyone to win. Jason: Cool. Let's talk about the product specifically. Explain this to somebody that's never heard of this. They might even be an unseasoned property manager. Describe the problem that exists, that this solves for. John: Sure. When you look at it, if the tenant goes bad whether it's professionally managed or not—let’s suppose it’s some professionally managed properties; that's really who we're serving here in this podcast, and who we speak to—if their tenants goes bad, the owner's mad at them. They might've lose that door because guess what? They probably picked the tenant. They were entrusted by the landlord or the owner to find the tenant, to select the right tenant, and now the tenant's bad. So, the owner's mad, they might lose every relationship. The owner's also rental income. As a result, property managers also lost their property management fee income. Generally, they're charging based on the property management fee.  If you look globally, across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, this type of insurance product, rent default insurance, is widely available and widely adopted. The reason is that, if you look in other jurisdictions, primarily Europe, it's flipped from the US. It's about 70% renter 30% owner. As we know, post financial crisis, more and more US consumers are now choosing to rent instead of own. So, the property management space is going to be larger and the rental property market is getting larger.  As this is occuring, we think that more and more people will be in need of this insurance because we have a growing market. The insurance itself indemnifies and there's different flavors. We'll speak generally about rent default insurance and what's out there as opposed to Steady, specifically. What we want to do is educate the market on the availability of these types of products.  Rent default insurance, generally speaking, indemnifies the owner against losses as a result of the bad tenant outcome. It could be eviction, tenant skips, et cetera; different programs to different coverages. What this does is it allows the owner who can't self-insure due to the diversification to recoup losses if they are unfortunately stuck with the bad tenant that stops paying rent or needs to get evicted.  Different people had different approaches to it. Us at Steady, we've taken a lot of the learnings from the online lending space using technology to streamline processes, operations, and try to deliver a great product that are at a reasonable price to the end market.  A lot of property managers are saying, "Hey, this is great. This is a huge concern that my underlying owners have. What happens if the tenant doesn't pay rent?" They see property management companies out there that have eviction protection plans or other plans. You've got the SureVestors, the Rent Rescues, and a bunch of other great companies out here, all serving for these types of risks and helping solve these pain points. The reason for that is this huge market is a huge concern. If you've got one property, say you own a home and you move for work across the country. You can't sell your home or whatever reason you have. You put it with the professional property manager. They're managing that, but you're relying on that cash flow for maintenance, upkeep, taxes, et cetera. In many cases, to pay the mortgage. If that tenant goes bad, all of a sudden, you're break even or your cash flowing property gone upside down and now you're coming out of pocket. You now have a liability that you have to come out of the pocket for every month. That's a big pain point, a big concern, and what these types of products do is solve for those types of risk, help landlords have peace of mind, and protect against bad tenant outcomes. Jason: You name dropped some of your own competitors, which is very generous of you. How does Steady standout or differ? How do you compare, standout, or differ in the space? John: We've taken a bit of a different approach on how we can structure our products and policy. A lot of other competitors, not just in space but in insurance generally, what they do is copy and paste what other products work on their markets or other products that other people have launched, and there's not a lot of innovation. As a result, we haven't seen a huge take rate for these types of product in the US.  What we found—you might feel differently—my business partner, Viken, grew up in Paris. What works in Europe doesn't necessarily work in the US. What works in Australia doesn't necessarily work for the US. What Viken and I did when we came together is we deconstructed how these programs work globally. We took a lot of the learning from online lending to build what we believe is a better program here in the US.  One differentiation is automation. Our entire process is fully automated. We just set an email prior to this event saying, "We are now in 20 states." We've got the ability to be in all 50 states. The reason we're not in all 50 states right now is because we want to automate everything. It is going slow to go fast. As we start to take it off here and ramp because the updates have been very strong, it's continuing to go stronger daily, everything will be automated. What that will result in is more efficient processes, procedures, and better pricing.  Jason: Explain what that means so everyone understands. You're saying that automation is a differentiator and that it's fully automated. What's automated? John: A property manager or a property owner can go online to the website, inquire about rent default insurance on their own, and complete the entire process in less than two minutes. There's no human interaction necessary and they could do everything themselves. Now, newer company, newer brand, we’re lucky to be aligned with the very strong brand in the insurance space, but nothing's perfect. As you know, as an entrepreneur, you think you've got something perfect and they realize you need to make it better. That's how the process works. It's constant iteration to get better, and better, and better. Jason: The perfect businesses are out of business. John: Right. We continue to constantly push new development releases and streamlining things. What we believe is that, if you can make the process as easy as buying, say for instance, travel insurance when you're buying a flight and make it that easy, that will be a great outcome for us and for this market. The way which you can do that is through API integrations, the right product structures, the right creativity, the right business development strategies, et cetera.  If you look at our product, where our technology is our technology, our product is our product, the two weren't built separately. They're built together. They work very closely together and in tandem. Because of that, it allows us to deliver a great customer experience, a frictionless process, high scalability, and keep headcount well. Right now, our biggest expenses have been legal and engineering, as you can imagine. It's a technology company, but legal because we invest heavily in making sure that we do everything right and by the book. Also, that our partners do things right by the book. As you know, the property management space has some instances where people have more of a cavalier or cowboy type approach that works until it doesn't. For us, we have ambitions to be a very large company and we operate in a highly regulated space. It's non negotiable for us to run into issues on the regulatory front or have our partners run into those issues. We take that very seriously and focus on in making sure everything is done the right way. Jason: That makes sense. The number one challenge when it comes to any solution or software or third party service is adoption. It's how easy is it for them to adopt this and use. If adoption is a challenge, then it's not going to work. It's not going to grow. People are not going to use it or it's going to be confusing or frustrating.  I'm a big Apple fan. Apple made adoption very easy. My AirPods, I just hold them out, open them up, my phone just show them on the screen, and they connect. It was magic, it's easy, I didn’t have to fill around weird Bluetooth settings or hold down buttons. What you're saying makes a lot of sense.  You've mentioned that it's easy for the consumer or for the property manager. One challenge that I see a lot of firms run into is when you're servicing an audience that's servicing that same audience. You almost can become competitors with them. How do you negotiate that? How does the property manager still have a competitive advantage against them just working with you directly? John: I guess, education, awareness, and understanding. People [...] this in massive market. People don't even know about this product. One parallel I draw frequently is pet insurance. I’ve got a pet, I’ve got a dog who's five now. I have pet insurance that I pay $70 or $80 a month. They haven’t got a good plan because the vet at the time said, "Hey, you should consider pet insurance if there's ever an issue." To me, the asset there is the pet. A little bit different than a rental property, maybe not as emotional as a rental property would be. They said, "Maybe you should look at this." It's a similar thing as what you're seeing happening in the property management space. Property managers are the fiduciary, the trusted advisor to the asset and the asset owner, which is the landlord or the small rental property owner who's contracted the property manager for their services. If they can be introduced to this product, it's for their benefit.  We don't have a big direct push. We're not looking to go after single family rental landlords directly. Our entire business model is predicated on partnerships. Based on our analysis, there's roughly eight million rental units in the US managed professionally. We've love to see that grow larger. Those are also, for us, we believe the best risk. As I touched on earlier, we believe strongly that property managers are better at picking tenants, have an established processes and procedures in getting bad tenants out, and they can get units rented more quickly. Jason: Which lowers your risk as an insurance provider. John: Correct, which results in better outcomes from the underwriting perspective.  Jason: Okay, makes sense. Your interests are aligned directly with property managers. They're your focus.  John: Yes. They are our focus. We just did a giveaway today to property management conference for people that could enter. We view property managers as our partners. Again, the reason I mentioned some of our competitors earlier because the rising tide lifts all boats. We want to see everyone do well, we want to see landlords have access to the solution so they get better outcomes, and we want to see property managers to be able to benefit from this as well.  Jason: Yeah, I love it. I believe that too. I have said before, rising tide raises all ships, but sometimes the bar is so low in property management in some areas and in some markets, that I don't think every ship's going to rise. Some have too many holes and are going to sink, but that's okay. John: That's right. That's Darwinism. Jason: Right, survival of the fittest. What are some of the most frequently asked questions or concerns that property managers are asking you or have been asking in sales conversations? So that we can make sure we address them here on this show. John: A lot of things that a lot of property managers ask is simply how it work. We have an FAQ section on our website and we can share the link on it. "How does it work?" "Why does this exist?" "How can no one else is doing is?" As I catch on, this is the third time I'll mention SureVestor, Rent Rescue, and others. The awareness is growing and that's what the biggest challenge is for all of us in this space is awareness that these types of solutions are available. This isn't like rental insurance or pet insurance. Pet insurance, I guess, is now becoming widely adopted, but people don't know about it and don't understand it. Most of the reactions we got is, "Wow, this exists? This is great. How does it work?" "Wow, that's inexpensive. This makes a lot of sense." It all depends on the property address, the rent amount, and the pricing. Jason: For anyone that's confused, let's just explain the difference between renter's insurance and rent default insurance. John: Renter's insurance covers the renter's possessions and liability to the landlord, generally speaking. It's paid for by the renter and they're doing it, so if there's a fire in the unit, they're not covered from the landlord's policy. Their possessions are gone. The landlord gets the unit rebuild, the house rebuilt, but they don’t receive anything. Now with renter's insurance, then we get some coverage for that.  From the landlord's perspective, if the renter has renter's insurance, they have a guest over, they slip and fall, and break their leg, it protects the liability to the landlord for them getting sued from that slip and fall. That's renter's insurance. Rent default insurance, it depends on the program. Different people, different features. Generally speaking, it covers loss of rent due to tenant skips, eviction, and tenant nonpayment for whatever reason. Jason: Sometimes, we have to make sure things are at an 8 year old level so that everybody gets it.  John: I generally need things at an 8 year old level to understand.  Jason: Right. Most entrepreneurs do because we're just so damn impatient at paying attention to things sometimes.  All right. We talked about how it works, why is anyone doing this. Any other frequently asked questions that people are concerned about? John: "What's the catch?" generally. Insurance companies, for better or for worse, generally don't always have the best reputation for making it easy to make claims, et cetera. That's another thing. Some people want to see the policies and see things in that nature.  Again, the big thing is people just don't understand these types of products exists. That's why we're out there educating the market and letting people know that there are these types of coverages available and you can get the coverage to these types of risks.  Jason: Let's touch on the benefits for a property management business in having this in their repertoire of services and how this can help them sell and close more deals, give them the competitive advantage, maybe. John: What do you see is property managers are now looking at this and some are saying, "I'm just going to include it in all my plans," and say, "This makes a lot of sense.” Now, we've got a differentiator. All of my property management packages include three months of rent default insurance if the tenant goes bad. They're out there marketing and saying that it includes it. Others are saying, "This is interesting. How can we offer this and earn some B revenue?" The only way it works, as I touched on earlier with compliance, is you can't get paid for the sales, solicitation, negotiation of insurance, unless you're an insurance producer. You can do other things such as marketing fees, et cetera, but you can't make conditions on the sale, solicitation, negotiation, and insurance. That's why we spend so much to make sure that anything we do, anything our partners do in partnership with us, is fully vetted and above board. We make sure everyone stays on the right side of the rules. Jason: Do they become somewhat of an insurance agent? Or you're just laying that all together? John: No. They do not become insurance agents in any way, shape, or form unless they've got an insurance agent license. Then, they could be an insurance agent, obviously.  Jason: Okay. John, it's great to see an entrepreneur doing something that's impacting the industry. I believe these products are going to have massive ripple effect in the industry. They're going to create a lot more safety and certainty in the property management space. It's going to lower the risk. It's going to lower the pain threshold for landlords to trust somebody else to manage their properties. It's going to protect all the parties involved and that means it's going to help the industry grow. If Australians, somebody said their markets are any indicator, it seems like these types of products help these markets grow significantly in a relatively short period of time, over a decade. They've grown phenomenally. I heard stats like Australia's grown through 25% in a decade. Largely, they claimed that it was connected to that. I don't know if that's accurately or true, but if that were true and the industry—single family residential—were maybe about 30% are professionally managed, that almost be our industry doubling here in the US. I don't know that there's enough companies here in the US right now to handle that level of growth. That would mean we need to double the amount of companies or we need to double the size of every company that exists. Something in between that. John: Or let's double the size of every company that exists. That'll be a good outcome for everyone. Jason: Yeah. Regardless, I want to make sure that we've got the best. Let's raise the tide. I appreciate that you're seeking to raise the tide. I think collaboration over competition is what builds market, it's what builds the category. It's always important to build the category before you try to build the individual brand. That's Marketing 101, everybody.  Property management is in the same boat. Property management has very low awareness, in general, here in the US and right now, we've got a lot of people going around something in their chest, trying to fill their individual brand. We need to build the category first. There's a lesson for the industry to take away from what you've mentioned and what's going on in what you're doing, so I appreciate that. John: NARPM’s done a good job trying to get the industry moving in the right direction. People like you and a lot of others that are trying to educate and build awareness are very helpful as well. It's great to see everyone working together in some way, shape, or form. Jason: There's no scarcity in property management. There just really isn't. There's 70% in single family residential that are self-managing right now. That does not indicate scarcity. In certain channels of marketing, there is a lot of scarcity because everybody's doing the same stuff, there is scarcity. John, I appreciate you coming in the show. How can people get in touch with Steady and learn more about this? John: They can go to the website www.steadymarketplace.com or shoot me an email john@steadymarketplace.com. Jason: Perfect. John, I appreciate you coming on the show, I appreciate what you're doing, and I wish Steady success. John: Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. Jason: Check them out at steadymarketplace.com. If you are, for some reason, not getting the growth that you want, you're growth is good, but you want to pour a little gasoline on that fire, if you find that you're getting a lot of your business lately from word of mouth, and from the trust that you built in the marketplace, I would love to pour gasoline on that fire. That's what DoorGrow specializes in, optimizing your warmly funnel and optimizing your business for more organic growth, which is a lot less expensive than showing up tens of thousands of dollars a year towards pay per click, SEO, and everything that everybody is competing and already doing.  Like I said, I don't believe there's scarcity in the industry, but I believe there's false scarcity that's been created by marketers, and you can avoid that. For those who can't see, I'm wearing my "SEO won't save you" shirt. A lot of people are relying on SEO to save you. Don't get me wrong, SEO is great. If you have the top spot in Google, that's great to have search engine optimization. But there are things that are better than having the top spot in Google like being the most trusted company in your market. Our whole system is focused on building trust for your brand, for your business, and helping you to go after that blue ocean where there's all that business available; that 70%. I appreciate John being on the show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Property management is hard enough. As your business becomes successful, don’t always say “yes” or “no” to everything. Owners are coming to you to solve a problem. Step into potential opportunities without being pulled in multiple directions. Today, I am talking to Marc Cunningham, President of Grace Property Management, who identifies five characteristics that define successful property management companies.  You’ll Learn... [02:42] Entrepreneurial Footsteps: Marc grew up in real estate property management world working for his dad, who founded Grace Property Management in 1978.  [04:02] Doors in Denver: Grow slow and steady; from 110 to 1,000 doors.  [04:32] Mantra: Follow the opportunity. [07:15] However you define success, companies follow some of these five standards.  [07:56] #1. Filter and Qualify Owners: Don’t take every owner that comes along.  [20:04] #2. Know your numbers to know how well your business is doing.  [31:43] #3. Focus on profit, not door count. People are willing to pay for additional value. [37:20] #4. Have systems and processes in place, and follow them.  [43:50] #5. Recruit, develop, and retain talent.  [52:28] Marc’s Extra: #6. Hold weekly one-on-one meetings with each team member.  [53:15] DoorGrow Extra: #7. Invest consistently in your own development.  [56:27] DoorGrow Extra: #8. Get coaching to help grow your business.  Tweetables The more successful you get, the more opportunities come your way. Cycle of Suck: Taking on bad owners, you get bad properties, tenants, and reputation. You won’t regret firing difficult clients, despite emotional and operational costs. Track metrics regularly because numbers make a difference. Resources Grace Property Management Marc Cunningham's Email Business Health Check-up Form QuickBooks Steve Jobs FilterEasy PetScreening Process Street Basecamp Voxer Google Sheets AppFolio Help Scout Drift Intercom Traction LeadSimple DGS 25: Why Every Property Manager Should Implement Profit First DGS 80: Automating Your Business with Process Street with Vinay Patankar DoorGrown Cold Leads Calculator 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. This guest that we have today is a fantastic gentleman named Marc Cunningham. Marc, you're not a stranger to most people probably listening to the show. Welcome to the show. Marc: Thank you for having me, Jason. Jason: I'm really excited to have you here. It's strange that you haven’t been on here yet. At the beginning of the show, I was like, “Have you been on here? You're like, “No.” I said, “It's long overdue.” Marc: I’ve just been waiting for the invitation. Jason: Okay, well I'm glad we finally got you invited. I’m glad you're here and today's topic is going to be the five characteristics of successful PM companies. Before we get into that, I want you to share a little bit of your background to qualify yourself to the audience, help them understand how you got into property management and what your connection is to these five characteristics of a successful company. Marc: Absolutely. Let me start by asking you a question. What were you doing in 1978 Jason? Jason: 1978? Marc: Yeah. Jason: I was probably pooping in a diaper and drinking breast milk. Marc: Okay. That image there. Jason: I was born in 1977. Marc: Okay, so you’re one. I wasn't much older than that, but in 1978 my dad decided that he was going to quit teaching—he was a middle school teacher—and he was going to follow his entrepreneurial real estate dream. We opened up a real estate property management company Grace Property Management 1978 in Denver. I was employee number one because I was pre child labor, so my dad would have me doing all the things that kids probably shouldn’t do. He would have me showing properties, mowing lawns, collecting rents, and filling out lease, just anything that needed to be done. I grew up in that world, so it really gave me a unique view into real estate, into property management, and just in the business because that's all I knew. That’s all we did. As I got older, I’d take my summers, I’d worked for him in the summers, and again just doing whatever needed done. If I get really lucky, if it gets too hot out, I’d work in the office. When it got over 110 degrees, the deal is I get to come into the office, otherwise I’m mowing lawns. I did that for many, many years. I went to Colorado State University, I studied finance and real estate there, and I was working in Cheyenne, Wyoming doing accounting work there. My dad called me one day and he said, “Hey, I need to hire a property manager, are you interested?” Well Cheyenne Wyoming, with all due respect, isn't the most fun place to live, so I jumped to that opportunity and that was about 20 years ago, 20 some odd years ago. I joined the firm permanently at that point in time. At that time, we were relatively small, I think we had 110–120 doors and we have grown slowly and steadily over the years. Today, we do both residential and commercial. We've got just under a thousand doors that we manage. We do real estate sales, we do property management, we’re investors ourselves—I own some stuff—we flip. Our mantra is follow the opportunity. If there's an opportunity to real estate, we want to look at that, whatever that is. So, that's how we've gotten to where we are today. Jason: I was just down in Vegas speaking to a group of property managers and they were bringing up like, “How do I avoid all this distraction and move the business forward?” What I said to them is opportunity is I've noticed is what kills entrepreneurs. How do you keep following the opportunity at all times but also keeping your focus narrow enough that you're actually moving forward. Marc: That's a great question. That's a really good question and that's hard. It is really hard because we found that the bigger we get, the more successful we get, the more opportunities that are out there. At this point, we're of the belief that you've got to say no to almost everything. I think it was Steve Jobs that said, “The difference between successful people and really successful people are the really successful people say no to just about everything.” Jason: Following the opportunity as a mantra doesn't mean saying yes to every opportunity. Marc: It does not mean saying yes to everything. You need to consider everything. What I don’t like is people say, “No, we don't do that.” For many, many years, for example, we didn't do real estate sales. “Hey, will you help me sell my house?” “No, we don’t do that. We only do property management.” We didn't consider. Well then, one day we thought, “Maybe we should consider it,” and as we considered it, we realized, this is a really good opportunity that we should capitalize on. Where when an owner says, “Gosh, I want to sell my house. Would you guys be interested in buying it?” “No, we don't do that.” Well, stop saying, “No, we don't do that.” At least think about it, consider it, and I think that's the way to step into some potential opportunities. But yes, you have to be cautious or else it will get you pulled to many directions. Jason: Relevant to that, how many of these units are now in your own portfolio, are yours or your company's? Marc: I don't have a real big portfolio. I'm a pretty conservative guy, so I'm a buy-it-pay-it-off kind of guy. I've got 10–12 rental properties in my portfolio. Jason: Let's get into these five characteristics that you feel define a successful company, and you're obviously a successful company. You've helped keep it successful, right? Second generation, so let's get in number one. Marc: Yeah. I don't pretend to be a guru. I can't stand the guys that stand there, beat their chest, and say, “Do it like me, I know what I’m doing.” This is just from our perspective. We worked with a lot of companies and I didn't get this, but I do a lot of PM coaching in business stuff on the side with PM companies helping them get better, basically. We know a lot of PM companies, we've worked a lot of PM companies and there seem to be some standards, some things companies that are successful, however you define success, are going to follow some of these aspects. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list by any means, but it's the way that we gauge ourselves. Jason: This will be cool because I probably come from a very different perspective. You're in the industry, you do this in Denver and I don't have any rental properties. I don't manage. I'm not a property manager. I have largely been this nerdy fly on the wall that's been able to see inside of hundreds of companies. My perspective might be a little bit different, but I'm sure there's some alignment. Let's get into number one. Marc: Number one is successful companies don't take every owner. They don't take every owner that comes along. So you agree with that one? Jason: Totally. If anyone's heard my show, they've heard me talk about the cycle of suck, which is it starts with filtering owners. Like if take in bad owners, you have bad properties. It doesn't matter how amazing they are. If you have bad properties, you have bad tenants. It doesn't matter how much tenant screening you do. If you have bad tenants, you have a bad reputation because you have bad owners and bad tenants. Nobody's happy and this is where I think the entire industry as a whole in aggregate sits right now. It has a bad reputation because they're taking on any owner. Marc: Yeah, I would agree. The concept is this. Any PM company knows that if a tenant, a prospective tenant walks in the door, an applicant comes in and says, “Hey, I want to rent your property,” every property manager is a little bit skeptical. They raise their eyebrow. They say, “Okay, well maybe. I’m going to qualify you.” We know industry-wide that whatever the number is, call it 25%-30%, depending on the market you're in, the 25%-30% of the applicants are not going to make good tenants. Everybody would agree upon that. Well, we really believe that probably that same percentage 25%, 30%, 35% of prospective owner-clients are not going to make good owner-clients. The challenge comes, how do we filter them? Because if it's an applicant to rent a property, we have them fill out a rental application. We go in deep. That's the hardest part of the business is qualifying those folks. So, how do you qualify an owner? That’s where the challenge lies. If you called our office today as a prospective owner-client and you are talking to our new account specialist or one of our PM's, they would have a dock in front of them, a piece of paper, and a lot of this is just basic questionnaires—what's your email address, what’s the property address, tell me about the property—but at the end of that questionnaire, they have four questions. Yes or no questions that they have to check the box on yes or no. They have to discern this information during the conversation with you because it helps us qualify these owners. For example, the first one says, “Is the owner financially stable?” If during this conversation you as my prospective owner say to me, “Hey Marc, if you can’t get this property rented next week, I can’t make my mortgage payment. I've got to get this thing ready quickly.” Well, you're not financially stable, right? That's going to be a no on that box, that's the first question. Jason: “So, are you current on all your house payments?” One of my clients said that was a favorite question they would ask. If they say no, it's instant disqualification. Marc: Absolutely. Then the second question we have to ask ourselves is, is the client emotionally stable? That can be a hard one to discern. I always tell people, “Don't ask them the question verbatim, okay?” It will get you in trouble. Jason: “Are you sane?” Yeah. Marc: Exactly, but we need to be able to discern that information from the conversation. Is this somebody who's going to be stable when things go bad because at some point in time it will. Jason: Right. Sometimes, people will reveal their emotional instability pretty quickly, right? Marc: Yes. I tell my PMs, “Look. Two quick keys. If they cry on the first conversation or if they own more than two cats, they are not emotionally stable. Run away from them.” Jason: Might be a little biased against cat owners. What’s cat owners like? Marc: I know. You just lost half of your audience because of my personal bias. Jason: No, they’re cool. Marc: I am as well. Then the third question we ask is, “Can I control the situation and the client? Are they willing to give me control?” Not in a puppet master, I'm going to be the mean guy, but they have to give me control. They have to be willing to do so. Then question number four is, are they realistic in expectations? Do they think that we should be able to get $2000 a month for property that's only going for $1000? Or do they think that we should call them before we ever spend a dime on maintenance? That's just not realistic. That’s not going to happen. If we can't check the yes box on all four of those, then my PM does not have permission to work with that client. Jason: I love the idea of figuring out if they're willing to relinquish control. That's such a big thing because they're coming to you to solve a problem. I've noticed with clients that they're not willing to be strong enough of a fence for people to push against to elicit trust enough for people to relinquish that control. I think a lot of people will push. They might look like bad owners, they're trying to test the fence, and it's like in dating how girls will crap test the guy. They just want to see if they can handle them or if they're willing to be strong enough. I think a lot of times property managers will try to be nice and maybe don't have enough bite or drive and they’re really looking for somebody they can feel safe with, so they test us. I think clients will test us and then they're willing to relinquish control at times. It’s just something I've noticed during the sales process because I deal with entrepreneurs. They’re driven people and I need the same thing. They need to be willing to relinquish a certain amount of control because I'm asking to do crazy stuff, like fire doors or change your business name. I love that idea, and then are they realistic in their expectations. If somebody says, “Hey, I want to add 500 doors in the next quarter,'' then that's probably not going to be realistic. I want to make sure they're in touch with a reality that I feel I can give them or lead them towards and it's the same with our property management clients. Marc: Yup, and if we set those filters on the front-end, that's just going to make things so much easier on bringing good clients on because our business is hard enough without having difficult owner-clients. I think there’s the second aspect of that is, “Well, gosh. That's great. I wish I would have heard that before I took on Mr. Crazy,” so, what do you do then? I think the other part of that—you alluded to this—is sometimes you do need to let those clients go, and sometimes that's the best thing, because we're talking about what successful companies do. Successful companies realize that, “Hey, if we made a mistake, we brought on a bad client, we need to let that client go, whatever that looks like.” Jason: There's always going to be those mistakes. We cannot always know and perceive every person coming in and know that they are emotionally stable, or that you can control them, or that they will be realistic, but when they start to reveal those colors, we have to be willing to let them go. I've made bad decisions in bringing people in as clients and I have had to let them go. Some of them were just really like verbally abusive to my team. You’d be really amazed at some of the types of people that that can somehow leak through even if you have pretty good qualifications at the beginning. I love what you're getting at here because really anybody that studies sales in any capacity knows that qualifying a prospect is at the outset. It's really mind boggling that people would not qualify their prospects in any regard. Marc: I’m curious. You said you had to let clients go. How have you overcome the internal thought of, “Ooh, but that's money. That's a big chunk.” When do you decide? How do you decide? Is that an internal struggle for you? Jason: Sometimes. There's always a negotiation and it's a balance. It's a balance between the money aspect and the cost with the team. Ultimately, my team I want to keep forever. I want to keep them long-term. If I keep that client on, I’m saying to my team, your feelings don't matter. I don't care about you. That sends a really painful message and I've noticed this in property management companies. People wonder why there's so much turnover with their staff and I think one key reason is because you're allowing your staff, you're forcing your staff to tolerate too much. There are some of these owners that should be let go, and I've said many times to clients, “The hallmark of a seasoned property manager is that they fired some clients.” Some businesses have hundreds of doors and they've never fired a client. I know if they've never fired a client, they have some bad things in their portfolio. There's some pain in there and that's a difficult place to work. They’re not willing to let go of painful situations and there's always going to be painful situations. Marc: Yeah, and I've never talk to a PM who did let a client go who regretted it. Jason: Never. Marc: It's hard, it's scary. We face that. I remember very vividly when we were small and we had 125 doors, maybe. We had a client and had like 12 properties. I remember the guy, could see the guys face. He wasn't a bad guy, but he was just difficult and it had to be his way. He would contact us all the time. He just drove us crazy. We finally decided we needed to let the guy go. Well that was like 10% of our portfolio. That was hard. We thought about it, we don’t know what to do, and even after we did it we thought, “Oh, is that the right decision or not?” But we quickly realized it's like a load that’s been lifted. When you get rid of those people that sucked that time and energy and life out of you, it is a positive thing. Jason: The operational costs, the emotional cost when all of that falls by the wayside. I've never had a client fire something. I had one person fire half their portfolios like one big property. I had one person do that and they were terrified, but they did it. Two things happen almost every time. One, they replace the income really quickly. It always, it creates some vacuum in the universe, I don't know what you want to call it, but they always seem to replace the income really quickly with better doors. That always seems to happen. They just need to trust that's going to happen. The other thing is, is they always say to me, “I can't believe I didn’t do it sooner,” like they wished they had done it sooner. They were so afraid of doing it and then once they do it, they realize it wasn't so bad and they wish they were like, “Why didn't I do this sooner?” Marc: If one of your clients is talking to you and you're saying, “Hey, you need to fire this owner,” how do you recommend they do that like? What should they say? Should they say, “You’re fired”? Jason: You’re interviewing me now. Marc: Yeah. Jason: There's a few ways you can let them go. There are some creative ways. One of the best is just raise the fees. If [...] make it worth, just make it more expensive. Say, “Hey this property is difficult. You're a bit more challenging person to deal with, to be honest. We are willing to keep doing it, but it's going to cost X.” So, you just raise the rate, and if they keep being annoying and you feel like it's still not worth it, you keep raising the rate until they self-select themselves out. That's one easy way. Another way is to just refer them to somebody else, and if you're going to refer you might as well get a nice referral fee out of it. Go to one of your buddies and one man's junk is another man's treasure. I mean they might know how to deal with this type of person. They might be a better personality fit for this type of person than you. Don't just instantly assume that because you can't tolerate them or their difficult for you, that everybody else will. Give them to somebody else and let somebody else have a shot. Marc: I like it. We will rarely fire an owner, but we will as you just suggested bump fees up and up until they decide to fire us. I’d much rather have them fire us and leave on their terms. Jason: Right, they’ll self-select out. Are we complete on number one? Marc: I think so. Number two is successful companies know their numbers. I see this so often with PM companies. We get really good at the logistical side of we know how to lease, we know how to talk to owners, know how to collect rents, but when it comes to the numbers, the financials, we just don't know what we’re doing often times. I really am a big believer in that concept that if you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business. You don't know how well your business is doing. One question I’ll often ask of coaching clients that I work with on that side of things is also, “Okay. Now, if you, Jason own a PM company, at what point in time do you close the books for your company? Let’s say the month of June ends, right? We’re here almost until the end of June. When June closes for you, how quickly will you have your June books closed so that you know how much money your company made in the month of June?” The answers always surprise me. They're all over the board. “Well, I'm currently 90 days behind. I’m trying to catch up,” or, “I'm not much further behind in that,” or, “I might get it towards the end of the following month.” Jason: Yeah, how can they make business decisions if they’re 90 days in the rear-view mirror? Imagine trying to drive a car like that. Marc: Like I said, I've been doing this for many, many years. While we were small. like anybody else, I was everything. I was the janitor, I was the accountant, and I was everything. My favorite day of the month was always the first. Not because we collect rents, but because on the first day of the month, I go online and print out our company bank statements for the last month. I get our paper checkbook out and I’d reconcile. I’d get our ending balance and I enter it all into QuickBooks. I can look at that piece of paper and say, “Hey, how much money did we make last month?” I love that. I would wake up early to do that. I'm weird, I know, but that's how you know how well you're doing, I wouldn’t wait until the second, the third, the fourth, the twentieth, that's crazy. You can do it on the first. So, I'm a big believer in as soon as possible, which in this day and age it can be pretty much immediate. You get your books balanced, you run some numbers, you see how your company is doing it, and you’ve tracked some metrics, some internal metrics for your company to know how you're doing. Jason: I think the challenge is when property managers are holding on to something that's not in their particular wheelhouse or area of genius, but if this isn't your thing, if you're not like Marc and you don't love doing this and this isn’t like what makes you thrilled and excited is to get in your bank statements and numbers, have somebody else get everything ready for you. I've got a profit-first coach and accountant. She meets with me and goes over everything with me. I get not only my perspective, but she says, “This is what it looks like to me, Jason,” so yeah, I think it's usually helpful to do a review every month and look at your numbers. Marc: Yup, and like you just said, most folks aren’t as weird as I am as it comes to that stuff, and that's fine. But you need to find someone weird like me. You need to find someone who can go get excited about running your numbers, make sure they do it, and then you review those and you track a couple key metrics. For example, some of the metrics that we always track, are door counts proportional to owner count? Because that’s a sign of a healthy business. So for example, if your company has 100 doors, if you’ve got 100 owners for those 100 doors, that is the sign of a very healthy business because it means that you don't have any one owner with too much control versus the guy the guy called me a couple of weeks ago and he wanted to know if I was interested in buying his business. I go, “Tell me a little bit about it.” I think he had like 75 doors, “I’ve got 75 doors, I’m here in Denver and interested in selling.” One of the first questions I always ask is how many owner-clients do you have? He had 75 doors and 4. I was like, “You know what? I don’t need to know anything else. I'm not interested.” Why? Because if we took those doors on, that's four owners. That’s a lot of control. Jason: If it’s two of them, then what are you getting? Marc: It's something that you can't control, but you need to track it, that's one of the things you want to track on a regular basis. Another metric we really like to track is the percentage of our overall income that we spend on employees. Because in our industry, that again can just be all over the map on companies. Do you have a number on that that you recommend to your folks on what that number should be? Jason: It varies so wildly especially by market, but I know an owner that has 65% profit margin in his business. Marc: Wow. Jason: I know it's ridiculous. Marc: It’s a good thing I’m sitting down. Jason: I know. He has a couple of hundred doors. It varies so wildly and it depends largely on the type of owners they're taking on, the type of property, because—I’m talking about this in the cycle of suck idea very often—if you take one bad owner or one bad door property, can have 10 times, maybe even 100 times the operational cost as a good door. So, that can vary so wildly. I've had a company come to me that had 500–600 units under management and wasn't making a dime. I said, “How is this possible?” They’re like, “Well, we're doing $3 million a month in real estate,” so there was a brokerage with a cancerous tumor on the side called property management. He had twice as much staff as he needed, no technology in place. Fast forward, he fired half his team, he fired about 200 doors, maybe 300 doors, and it's now a very profitable company. So, it's not all about doors and staffing is always going to be the highest cost. If you can replace even a fraction of that or create some leverage for your team using technology, outsourcing, whatever, those are some big wins financially. A lot of times everyone's looking at, I got to get more revenue in and they're not looking at their expenses. That's why I'm a big fan of the profit-first system which says, “You take out a portion for profit and then what's left over is your expenses.” Most people are like expenses. You’re just revenue minus expenses and then whatever's left over, there's nothing left over typically in that situation. Marc: Absolutely. We have that profit is almost like an expense item that we know we’re going to take out every month and put into a savings account. We've been doing that for a long, long time from that aspect. But yes, I agree 100% with that aspect of what you're saying there. The number that we coach folks around is you don't want to go over 50% of your total revenue to staffing costs regardless of your size. The bigger you get, the more that number's going to probably creep towards that, just because you get more overhead, you get more managers, and you have more red tape, so that's a natural part of that. But if you go over 50%, that's a red alert. Something's wrong from that standpoint, so that an important to track for every company. Jason: Yeah, as a company scale, they're able to create a bit more leverage, but yeah, I could see how when you're really small and you're doing everything, your employee costs are a bit less per door because assuming your free labor or maybe if you work for your dad. Or sometimes it’s a spouse. They’ll have their spouse as their business partner, and you'll see them get to maybe 70-80 units, they’re tapped out, and they can't afford to hire their first person. Nobody's getting paid. That makes sense. All right, I like it. Anything else on number two, knowing the numbers? Marc: The other things I would just add that's worth tracking that I often find companies don't track this well enough is how many doors they’re adding and how many doors they’re losing. It’s always a surprise to me is when you ask them that, they'll say, “Well, I can dig it up, but I don't know.” A lot of the software don't track that. If we’re old school, we’ve got the spreadsheet. Every time we lose a door, we go to our spreadsheet for the year, we put it in, and it's going to keep that auto tracking. Every time we sign a new one up, put those on the spreadsheet so we can pull that up and instantly see, “Okay. As of right now, we've lost X number of doors per year and we've added X number of doors.” So, track that. Don't make that something that you've got to go dig in your software and try to pull a report. That needs to be one of those metrics that you're tracking at least on a monthly basis. Jason: Yeah. It's a pretty difficult situation and it’s a common one where you’ll see somebody adding a door and losing a door just as often. They wonder why they're not getting growth. Sometimes, the problem aren’t getting enough [...], it’s obtaining doors. They could be the type of target audience that they're going after, it could be that they are lacking some awareness around how to retain these clients or whatever it might be, but yeah, that's an important thing I think to pay attention to. Marc: Yeah, and to track the percentage of doors lost. That's all over the map as well. If you can keep your losses on an annual basis in the single digits from a percentage standpoint, that's pretty good. If you can keep it 10% or below on doors that are leaving you every year, you're in the pretty rare group of PMs. Jason: I created something for property managers called our cold leads calculator. One of the things I noticed with a lot of companies—this is more relevant to what I do—a lot of property managers are not paying attention to the amount of money that they're spending on cold lead marketing—pay per click, SCO, APM leads—all these different places at social media marketing, content marketing, that they're paying to generate business. A bulk of where most people get their deals and leads from I find in the industry is often word-of-mouth, so they just group everything together. All their warm leads from word-of-mouth, referrals, other cold lead marketing, and they're not paying attention. When you look at the numbers alone of the cold lead marketing, which everyone can check it out by going to doorgrow.com/coldleads, they can take this little questionnaire and go through it, but it'll help you calculate your cost for cold lead marketing. It also calculates and factors in the time. Time is worth money and it calculates and ask what that time is worth, like what's your hourly wage or whoever is following up on these, how much time does it take to follow up on these, to create a real aggregate or at least close aggregate cost of what one cold lead is costing you. I’ve seen numbers. I just had one come through the other day. One cold lead was costing them $5000. I've seen $11,000, I've seen a $1700 per lead or per acquisition per deal and what I love to ask them when I get them on the phone, I say, “Hey, I saw you fill out this cold lead thing. How long does it take you to recoup $5000 on a contract?” and they’re like, “Well, that's probably three years of free management or two years whatever.” Then their perspective starts to shift and we have to uncouple that. The transparency in numbers helps you make decisions as a business owner. Marc: Yup, and then review them regularly. Don't just leave it your accounts. If you're a successful PM company, you're looking at those numbers because those numbers make a difference. Jason: All right. We’re on to number three. Marc: Number three is a good lead-in as you were just talking about there. Number three will be successful companies focus on profit, not door count. You've already talked about this. This comes up so often in our industry, what's the first question any PM ask another PM? How many doors do you have? What’s your door count? How many doors are you managing? That's the measuring stick and it’s the wrong measuring stick because I know companies that are smaller, they're very profitable, and I know companies that are very large that are not profitable at all. Door count is irrelevant. The profit is what matters. What that means is practically speaking, if you've got 50 doors, I would say, “Before you say I another 50—that's fine—but you know what? Let's maximize the profit of the existing group you have.” That doesn't mean just go out and nickel-and-dime everybody, but it means what other services can you provide? What other things can you put in place to make sure that you're maximizing that income and that’ll have a dual impact in that you're going to increase your income on that 50? Then when you pick up your next 50, now you've already got some structures in place to ensure that they are profitable as well. You've got to focus on the profits, on the revenue streams to be successful. Jason: Absolutely, I don't think there's ever been a property management company that I’ve seen that is not leaving some money on the table. There's always additional services that you can offer, even if it's something little like filter easier petscreening.com. There's always some additional value that you can offer and there's always a way that you can monetize that. People are willing to pay for additional value. Marc: On the flip side of that as well, I think we need to pay attention to those expenses because what the industry right now is more difficult than it has been a long time and folks that have not been in the industry for too long, they’ll recognize this because this is normal to them, but it's a tough industry. This is a tough market to be running a property management company. When things get tough, you've got to be tight on expenses, and it’s too easy not to get tough on expenses. That's one thing we encourage folks, is to go through that profit of loss, line by line, and if there are expense items on there that are not directly relational to income coming in, you have to figure out how to cut them. You have to get rid of those wasteful expenses. That is such a good exercise to sit down and start going through that stuff and say, “Well, gosh, I’ve just been paying for the subscription service every month and I don't even know what it does. I signed up for it two years ago. All right, let's get that cancelled.” Jason: Yeah, and you’re like, “Why am I still on this?” Marc: Exactly. This is beneficial as getting on a new door, is cutting those expenses. Jason: This is why I love having a profit-first coach, because this really is built into the system. Every month is like, “Hey, what about these services you said you're going to cancel and you said you don't need this anymore?” Yes, so I think it's helpful. If you’re not like accounting-minded, I highly recommend you go back and watch my episode with Mike Michalowicz, who is the author of Profit First and check out that episode. I think it was a fantastic episode. Really cool guy, came and spoke at our conference. It covers that system like cutting down expenses, putting profit first, making sure that expenses are fitting within your existing budget and you're still getting a profit. Yeah, makes sense. Marc: What I had to do, I realized that the biggest expense item, the biggest overhead we had was my ego. The thing is that, that I wanted for me, the big desk, the big office, the nice car, and that's something everyone needs to start there because if you drive, especially in the real estate sale side, you go to any real estate sales event and what is the parking lot filled with? A lot of very expensed leased vehicles. I'm not against nice vehicles, but that’s just a suck on the income side of things. Jason: I think there's always this ratio between the amount of money that you’re going to take out of the business, and the amount of money that you're going to leave in to fund towards the growth. If we take out too much too quickly, the business growth is stagnated. I've seen some really aggressive companies put almost all of their money. I’ve seen owners try not to even take a paycheck. They’re really minimizing their take out of the business so that they could fund the growth, because they're delaying gratification for the future. They’re funding and creating a business that is growing and they’re putting their funds and their money towards that.  Sometimes, you have to double down as a business owner and to be willing to take a short-term hit because you want a long-term growth goal. And we can put too much towards growth to where it feels shaky, it feels unsafe. We're not holding anything back. There's no padding there. It really is this balance of how much I’m going to put towards growth be aggressive, how safe am I going to play it, and how stable and slow am I going to be at doing this. There's a balance there. Marc: It is a balance, it’s an absolute balance because you need to leave some in, and you need to be pulling some out every month and putting it into that savings account so that you have opportunities. We’ve purchased several companies over the years and every one of those deals worked because we were able to in essence say, “We can write a check. We’ll write a check today. We’ll get this deal done.” Why? Because we have money put away. That savings account isn't just comforting, it's an opportunity fund for things when they come up in the future. Jason: I like it. All right, is that three? Marc: That's three. Jason: All right, number four. Marc: Number four is successful companies have systems and follow them. They have systems in place and they follow. In a word, system means different things to different people. Some people think, “Well, that's just so I need a good software. What’s the system?” I really believe that probably 75%-80% of what we do on a day-to-day basis in our industry can be systematized, meaning, simply documenting your process, documenting your routine, because it plays out in so many ways. We learned this early on when we were growing and first there were two of us. My dad and I, we both did it all and we hired a third person, and then we all three did it all. Then we hired a fourth person, and by the time we hired that fourth person, we realized that, we can't all do it all. This isn't scalable, we can't all do everything. It works great at two people, it works great at three people, but when we had that number person and Mr. Tenant calls and says, “Hey, I called in with a maintenance request last week and I haven’t heard from anybody.” And I say, “Well do you know who you talked to?” “No, I don't remember.” “Well hold on, let me see if I can figure it out.” “Hey dad, did they talk to you?” “Hey, Bill did they talk to you?” “Sue did they talk to you?” “No.” “Well they talked to one of us, right?” That’s very ineffective. You've got to start specializing in your processes. We realized at that point in time that if we're going to hire someone to be our leasing person, for example, we better have a documented process for them to follow. I mean specific detailed documented. Here's what time you get to the property before showing. You open the door, you turn on the lights. Here's where you stand when they come in. Here's how you greet them, here’s what you say, here’s what you don't say, here's how you process an application. If we do that into our entire business and we break the business down into the smallest components, it simplifies things like nothing else because we’re in a complex business. If you think of a continuum in your mind, a long line going on both directions. On one side of the continuum, you have the words consistency and simplicity. On the other side, the far extreme opposite, you've got the words variation and complexity. You have to ask yourself, where am I on that continuum? We're all different places, but we hopefully will always be moving forward towards consistency and simplicity. I don't think there's a better way of doing that than through documenting your process, your system and then following it, training on it, improving it, upgrading it. It's got to be written, it's got to be documented, and it is a process. Jason: That needs to be used. People document it, they’ll give it to the team member, the team member will look at it at the first few times they do it, and then they're done. I have Process Street on as a guest once. We used Process Street internally, but it forces them to actually use the process on going. It's a checklist that has to be verified and completed. Marc: Yes, checklists are huge. We couldn’t exist without the checklist. Its old school, but it works. We still have paper checklists on some things in our office here that people say, “That wouldn’t work.” I guess just too old school. I say, “Well , we’re pretty successful. It worked for a thousand doors; I can tell you that. Will it work beyond that? I don't know, but it works to get you to a thousand.” Jason: There you go. I've noticed in businesses, I think there’s, at a minimum, probably seven systems that every business eventually has to have in a business. One, they have to have an internal communication system. For me and my team, it’s virtual, so we're using things like Basecamp, Voxer, stuff like that. But there needs to be an internal communication system that isn't just, “Hey Steve, did you do this?” So, internal communication. There needs to be process documentation system. That could just be Google Sheets, Docs, and whatever, or it could be something more complicated or cooler like Process Street or whatever, but there needs to be a process documentation system. There needs to be a billing system, of course. Property managers use maybe AppFolio or Rentec Direct, Buildium, but there needs to be some billing, accounting system. Then there needs to be a support system. A lot of property managers are starting to gravitate towards setting up Help Scout, Intercom, Drift, or one of these, but internally we use Intercom. There needs to be a support system in the business so that you can track tickets and track things. Sometimes, you'll do that through your property management software a bit. I find one system most property management businesses are lacking or missing is a planning system. You're hearing people move towards traction in some of this which I think has some fundamental flaws to be blunt, but it's a great system. It’s better than no system and there's a lot of systems out there for planning, but there needs to be a planning system in the business. Another system that's necessary is a sales CRM. This is different than your existing customer database. This is for prospects. There needs to be a sales CRM in place. A lot of property managers use LeadSimple, for example. If there were one other system you can throw in there probably be a phone system. We need some way to manage this big influx of calls or outbound calls with team members being able to be reached. These are some of the systems that I've paid attention to, that businesses need. Most businesses will have maybe two or three. Marc: Yup, and we preach what we practice as well as preach to make on the systems for individual team members to make them position-specific. We have 20-some odd people our office and every role has a position-specific system manual, so our director of accounting has a director of accounting system manual. I'm the president of the organization. I have a president system manual. Why? Because I need to be replaceable. That's one of the benefits of it. That idea that now we become less dependent upon individuals and no individual can hold us hostage to be like, “They’ve got everything in their head. What are we going to do they leave? We can't lose them.” It's a terrible place to be. We don’t have to worry about that. You're going to lose everybody at some point in time. You’ll either lose them for a good reason or a bad reason, but they need to be replaceable. Now if you have a document, if you have documented their process, then they become replaceable. I'm replaceable. If I get hit by the truck today, it’s alright. Hopefully, the company will take a little hit, hopefully they’ll need me a little bit, but we got a system manual, somebody can step in that role, and already says, “Hey, this is what Marc does.” Just do it and you'll be successful. Jason: I like it. All right, so are we on to five? Marc: Number five, the last one, successful companies recruit and develop talent. We just talked about systems and the concept that systems can make your people replaceable to some extent and they should. However, at the end of the day, the team with the best players usually wins. If you can go out there and if you can figure out how to recruit the best talent and then retain them, that is going to do more for your company than almost anything else out there. If I'm going to brag about something about our company, I’ll brag about that. We get the best people around. We've gotten good at that. It makes it so much easier to do business. I don't work harder than my competitors, I'm not smarter than my competitors, I'm not technologically savvy more than my competitors, but what we do better than a lot of our competitors is we get really good people  Now that’s hard, and it’s hard to get really good people and that's why you got to recruit. It doesn't mean you put an ad on Craig's list and read a bunch of resumes of people that can't get jobs. I mean you go out and you find people that are really good at what they do and you got to get them, you have to recruit them. That's hard because successful people aren’t looking for jobs. They are already successful. If you want to be successful, you got to go out there. I’ll tell a story and I'll give that the short version. We had to hire a leasing person not too long ago. Wwe were hiring, meaning we were just reviewing resumes and I thought this is ridiculous. We can't find anybody good. I better do what I tell myself what I should be doing. I got my car one day and I drove around to a lot of the multi-family class A properties in Denver, and I walked in as a prospect. “Hey, I’m Marc, I’m here. I just want to see what you have available. I’m looking for a buddy of mine to rent a property.” And I was usually met with the, “Okay, well here's a piece of paper. Tell your buddy to give us a call.” I say, “Okay” and left. About the fourth place I came to, I came in and met a gal there behind the front and I said, “Hi, I’m Marc. I’m just looking for a place for a buddy of mine.” She said, “Well, me about your buddy. He’s looking for one bedroom. He’s tall dark and handsome, got a cat, probably crazy,” and she's like, “You know what? I know the perfect unit for your buddy. Do you have a couple minutes? I'd love to just have you tour this property.” “Yeah, sure. Okay.” She tours me through and she's pointing out the feature benefits to offer. She was sharp. Her name is Lindsay. I said, “Lindsay, you are really good at your job. She goes, “I love leasing. I just love it. I love helping people. I love real estate. I love what I do.” I said, “That's great. Coincidently, I happen to run a property management company and we're actually looking to hire a director of leasing for residential real estate. Have you thought about doing residential?” because she’s a multifamily. She was like, “Oh no. I could never leave. I'm not a job hopper. I'm really stable. Stability is a big deal for me once I get somewhere I like to stay.” Now I'm drooling. I got to have her. I said, “Well is there anything you don't like about your job Lindsay? Well we work weekends.” I said, “Oh. That’s too bad. We don’t work weekends.” I said, “Tell you what. Why don't you come into my office sometime? Here’s my card. I'd love to just sit down and have a conversation with you. Who knows? Maybe something comes out of it, maybe something don’t, but I’d love to just connect and see if there's something there for the future.” Well long story short, we got her. We got Lindsay. And we had to go after her, we had to get her because she didn't want to leave. She's been a rock star. She's been amazing. The things that she's helped our company to do, but we would not have found her if we were just hiring. We had to go recruit her, we had to go get her. That's what you have to do in every position in your company. You have to go find stuff. I'm not saying go steal people away from your competitors, but you have to find those people out there that are successful and get them. Once you get them, you have to retain them. You have to train them well, you got to pay them well, which is one of the reasons you need to have good profit because good people aren’t cheap, but that's what's going to lead to a long-term success, and unless you take a step back out of the day-to-day stuff at the end of the day. Jason: Yeah. I think it's important to point out what you're saying is not that people are easily replaceable, that you can pop somebody else in. You're not saying that at all, and I think every business owner knows that if you have a seasoned team member that you've invested in, that you've trained, that you've developed, there's nothing as good as that, like having somebody that's been with you for years. I have team members that has been on my team for maybe six years and he's a rock star. I have a competitive advantage over most companies in that our teams are virtual, so I can source the best talent from anywhere pretty much in the world. But yeah, this can be challenging for property managers that are looking for somebody locally, they're looking for somebody nearby, they’re looking for a particular set of skills may be. But ultimately, if you find somebody good, you want to make sure you retain them and that you keep them happy. You can compare it to a wine, you can compare it to anything, but over time they just get better. If they’re good they get better, if they're not good, they get worse. Marc: That's the other side of the coin. That's where just like we talked about earlier with owners. This is what we started this whole conversation with you get a bad owner, what do you do? You need to let them go. Well if you made a hiring mistake, you need to fix that and correct that as well and let that person go, because we're going to make hirings. We are very good at this, but we make a lot of hiring mistakes. We just do, it drives me crazy. But when we do that, we correct it quickly. We're going to move that person on very quickly when we make that mistake. Why? Because the longer they're sitting there, the longer the right person isn't there. You've got to make that correction when you made a hiring mistake. Jason: I think it's amazing when you bring in a new team member, it changes the entire team. It either changes the entire team for the better or for the worse, especially if that team member that you just brought on is taking off of your plate everything. It changes your role as CEO. It changes your role as an entrepreneur, and it affects everything from you. It's pretty significant and it's important to make sure that they’re the right fit. We we're all going to make hiring mistakes. You have to kiss a few frogs and you have to suck a little bit at hiring in order to find the good people. Marc: It's an art, and a skill set to hire someone in no way translates over to property management. It's not like, “I'm a good property manager. I’ll obviously be good at hiring.” No, there's no correlation there. It's completely different. The other unfortunate thing is, the smaller your company is, the more important it is to make that first good hire. Now we've got 20 people. If we make a bad hire, we got one in 20 then who's bad. They can fly under the radar a little bit, they're not going to stick to the company. If we've got two people and then we make a bad hire for number three, so we never got 33% of our workforce that's a low performer. The smaller you are, the more important it is that you take the time to get the right person in. A lot of it is just time. You've got to slow down the hiring process. These ideas of we had a phone conversation and we interviewed him, it's not enough? Are you kidding me? No, you want to do multiple interviews. Anybody can come across as a positive person on that first interview. You want to have multiple interviews with multiple people. You have to dig, dig, dig on that before you make that job offer. Jason: I think where I've made a lot of mistakes personally in the hiring process is I love to delegate and its delegating too quickly. Some people will micromanage, they’ll control too much, and I think some people will do the opposite. They'll bring somebody on and they won't give them all the training, all the tools, all the support they need to really be the rock star they could have been. I've made both of those mistakes to be transparent. I think onboarding is a really important process to make sure you’re meeting with your new hires on a regular basis daily initially, then backing it up to weekly and so on, so that every day like where are you stuck? What do you need? What are you confused about? Often, they're not going to just volunteer all that information to you. But when you're meeting with them daily, they're going to feel supported, they're going to feel like they're invested in the team. I think onboarding is a really big deal. That's where I made mistakes. Marc: We still do one-on-one meetings every single week with every one of our team members. It doesn't matter how long they've been. I'm a huge believer in that, I guess if you wanted number six, there is number six, right? Have one-on-ones every single week, sitting down with them, even if it’s for 5 or 10 minutes, touch base, see what issues are going. Those have been critical for our people in their success. Jason: We have a bonus, number six. Marc: You got a bonus, number six, because you’re so good. What did I leave out? I’m curious. You talk to a lot of PM companies. What do you think are characteristics of success may be that we didn’t hit on? Jason: I wasn’t even thinking this, I was so into yours. I think all these things are really fantastic. I think if I were to add a seventh here that I think is absolutely critical, so imagine you have an orchard, you’re at the top, and this is like a reservoir of hopefully money and or water or whatever you want to call it. There's outflow, you're paying your team, you're spending money, things like this, and investing your team. I think where most companies are flawed is there's no inflow at the top of the orchard. There's nothing above the entrepreneur feeding into them. I think this is why it's critical. I probably spent at least six figures annually just on coaches and mentors. I have three coaches right now affecting different areas of my business. I think it's that inflow that I'm able to get that allows me to consistently have value to offer to the marketplace and to benefit my clients. It comes out in ways that I don't even expect, like a client will ask me a question or be stuck on something mindset-wise or be challenged with something, and I'm like, “I had that issue and I worked that through with my coach,” or, “I have done that in that training that I had done,” or whatever it might be. I think as entrepreneurs, we need to invest in ourselves if we're expecting other people to invest in us. When you go to prospects or clients and you say, “Hey, invest in me, spend money with my company,” and you aren't willing to invest in yourself or in your company in a similar fashion, I think there's a little lack of integrity. Energetically, something's off. If there were a seventh, I would say that's a big one is make sure that you're investing consistently in your own development, not just your team so that you have something to give. I think that's the inflow. You don't want to be a dead sea, there needs to be in flow and there needs to be outflow and that's where there's life. That's where it’s a healthy business. Marc: For the person that would say, “Hey, that sounds great, but I'm working 70 hours a week. I don't have time to invest in me. I'm just give, give, give.” What would you say to them? Jason: I would say they’re ineffective, they’re inefficient because if we're doing, doing, doing we moved out of the mode of being affected. That means most of our time is tactical instead of strategic. Any business that lacks, the business owner lacks strategic time, the business isn’t growing. There's a direct relationship between the amount of strategic time, planning, looking towards the future, coming up with ideas, or getting trained or learning new things, versus their growth. If all their time is tactical, they're dealing with maintenance, fires, leases, managing their team, emails, phone calls, if all their time is tactical, their business can’t grow. It will stay basically where it is. I think what I do with clients is I start them with a time study and we create time. Everybody is spending time doing stuff that's unnecessary, or low dollar an hour work, or silly, and it's pretty simple to start getting clarity on that first and then that helps them see what they need next. My entire foundation, my company really has been built on time studies. That's where I think fundamentally there's a huge difference between how I would coach operationally a business to run versus something like traction or a rocket fuel or these other systems where they’re saying, “Here's the magic org chart and here's the roles that you have to have.” Ultimately, a business should be built around the entrepreneur and what they actually need. The only way to really see that is to know where your time is going. Marc: Good stuff. Jason: That's my two cents. Marc: I like it. Jason: All right, so that's number eight maybe. I don't know. Marc: It’s number eight. Jason: We’d better stop before we add anymore. Marc: We’d better. I know. You’re making me think of too many things. Jason: Marc, it was really awesome hanging out here with you. This is really fun. You're welcome back anytime. Before we go, how can people get in touch with you if they're curious about some stuff that you offer for property managers or they want to learn more about your business or whatever? Marc: The best way to reach me is through our website which is propertymanagementsystem.org and we got a handful things on there, a lot of video resource things. We've got our system manuals, we talked a little bit about that, our actual system manuals, we offer those. You can download samples of those and we got packages on those. We do ancillary business training, some coaching stuff from that aspect. One thing I'm pretty excited about, we're just putting in place, we actually just put in place and I'm happy to share with any of your folks if they're interested, they can drop me an email. We put a business health checkup form where you answer some questions and it spits out a number to let you do that business health checkup. If anybody is interested in that, drop me an email, go on the website, reach out to me from there, will be happy to send it to them. Jason: Cool. All right, Marc, thanks so much for coming on the DoorGrow Show and excited to see what you do in the future. Marc: Jason, thank you, it was fun. Jason: All right ,so if you are property management entrepreneur and you are struggling, you are feeling challenged in growth, be sure to connect with us over Door Grow. I would be honored to help you out. As I said during this call, I'm a firm believer in getting coached, getting coaches, and even if it's not me, somebody like Marc, there's lots of other [...] there that can coach you. Get somebody that can give you some value, help you grow your business, help you achieve your goals, and figure things out. Until next time, everybody, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.  

Have no fear, when it comes to social media. Share your opinions and what you know. Not everyone will like what you post, but that’s ok. Personal and professional Social media opportunities let you connect with others, build relationships, and post content to attract new business. Today, I am talking to Katie Lance, CEO and co-founder of Katie Lance Consulting. She helps real estate agents and brokers use social media to grow their businesses. Also, Katie is the author of #GetSocialSmart and founder of #GetSocialSmart Academy. She was named one of the most 100 influential people in real estate by Inman News and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post.  You’ll Learn... [02:40] Marketing Nerd: Katie didn't go to school for social media because there was no Facebook when she was in college.  [06:40] Social Media Challenge: Audience doesn’t care about property management.  [07:32] Don’t be Vanilla: Be engaging, interesting, unique, and authentic voice for what’s happening in your industry and market.  [10:08] Love vs. Hate: Share your opinions, and attract your tribe through polarity.  [12:20] People don’t buy what you do (property management), but why you do it.  [13:18] Warning: Don’t outsource all your social media, or you’ll lose your voice.  [15:59] Avoid anxiety and conquer fear of social media by creating a system or strategy.  [17:27] Day-in-the-Life of You: Done is better than perfect.  [22:05] Consistency and Batch Creating Content: The more you do it, the more comfortable you get.  [26:21] Repurposing Content: One piece can be posted on multiple platforms.  [27:15] Platform of Choice: Depends on your target audience.  [28:40] Future of Social Media: Instagram TV and video is where it’s at. [31:54] Personal and Professional Social Media Opportunities: Connect with others, build relationships, and post content to attract new business.  Tweetables Be you, instead of your business on social media. Done is better than perfect. Comment, Connect, and Create Content Don’t suffer from analysis paralysis. Resources Katie Lance Consulting Katie Lance on Instagram Katie Lance on Facebook #GetSocialSmart #GetSocialSmart Academy Inman News The Huffington Post Simon Sinek National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Instagram TV TikTok 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, and today's guest, I'm hanging out with Katie Lance from Katie Lance Consulting. Hi, Katie. Katie: Hi, Jason. Thanks for having me here today. Jason: I am glad to have you. Katie, we’re going to be so social today. Katie: That would be a lot of fun. Jason: [...] social media and we're on social media right now. We're doing it. Katie, help everybody understand your background. Can I read some of your bio? Katie: Sure, go ahead.  Jason: It’s really well written. Katie is the CEO and co-founder of Katie Lance Consulting. Katie is a nationally known keynote speaker at conferences and events. For the past 10 years, Katie has been working with real estate agents and brokers to help them get smarter about how to use social media to grow their business. Her specialty is in helping real estate agents and brokers achieve big results using social media without spending a ton of time. She is also the author of the best-selling book, #GetSocialSmart and the founder of #GetSocialSmart Academy. Katie has been named one of the most 100 influential people in real estate by Inman News and is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two beautiful boys. Katie, welcome to the show. Tell us how did you get into social media? How did this come about for you?  Katie: I’ve always loved social media. I've always been a marketing nerd. I’ve always been one of those people to just really love marketing and didn't necessarily go to school for social media, and probably dating myself, but there was no Facebook when I was in college. I fell in love with social media and probably about 10 or 12 years ago. I got my first job in real estate. I was hired as a marketing director for a local real estate company and that was really when social media was starting to come to the forefront. I just remember having this epiphany and thinking this is so perfect for real estate. I had seen so many agents and brokers spending so much money on traditional marketing, which, a lot of it still works. I don't necessarily think social media replaces traditional marketing, if that's working for you, but it can be so expensive. And I thought, what a great opportunity.  That's really where I fell in love with it. I worked at that real estate company for a while, then I went to work for In The News for quite some time, ran their social media, and grew their social presence. Then about 2012 I decided, “You know? I'm going to go out on my own,” and got that entrepreneurial bug and haven't looked back since. It's been quite a journey.  Jason: What caused you to take that leap? It's a risky leap. To preface this, I didn't realize I was an entrepreneur. Even though I was the guy that started a band in college, created big events, going door-to-door pre-selling CDs so I could pay for an album at college girls dorms with a guitar and a clipboard, I didn’t realize I was an entrepreneur. I thought I needed a job, but what pushed me over the edge to jump into entrepreneurism was a divorce and needing to take care and wanting to have time with my kids. Out of necessity, I had to do it. What caused you to take the leap? That's a pretty big leap. People don’t just go, “I've got a job that’s going pretty well. I’m just going to throw it to the wind and go do something on my own.” Katie: I think there’s a couple of things. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. Any job I've ever had, I've always treated it as if it were my company. It was always very hard for me to just “work a 9–5 and turn the off button off.” I guess I always had that attitude for anywhere I've ever worked and I had a great job [...]. I've worked there for many years and for a lot of people, you get to a point in your career where you have that itchy feeling, like what's that next thing. Jason: Something more. Katie: Yeah, there's something more and quietly started to explore other options. It just became really clear to me that I don't necessarily want to work for anyone else. I want to work for myself and I want to be able to help not just one company but lots of different people, lots of different companies, lots of different organizations. And it was scary. It's a whole another ballgame. I'm happily married, we have mortgage, we have kids, so it's not necessarily the easiest leap. The hardest part was just making that decision. Then you make the decision and it was pretty much smooth sailing from there. I also had a really supportive husband, which makes a big difference, too. Jason: I was going to ask about that. If a spouse is not in support as an entrepreneur, there's a lot of friction, right? Katie: Yes.  Jason: And a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we tend to pair up with people that want safety and certainty. They're our balance and our opposite.   Katie: Yes. Actually, he ended up quitting his corporate job about 2½ years ago, so now we run our company side-by-side and it's been a great journey. Jason: So you converted him? Katie: I think I did, yes. Jason: [...] to a job, right? Katie: Yes.  Jason: Perfect, love it. Let's get into the topic at hand, which is how people can grow social media. I tend to be upfront and honest. A lot of my listeners have heard me say, probably at different times, that the challenge that property managers face with social media is that their target audience does not care about property management.  They don't care at all and when they ask me, “Should I spend a bunch of time and energy doing social media?” my general response is, “How much time are you spending time following and listening to plumbers? Plumbers want your business. They want your attention. Why aren't you subscribing to their newsletters and following them on social media?” and they're like, “Because I don't care about plumbing.” I’m like, “Your audience don't care about property management.” What should they be doing? I'm excited to get into this. Katie: I think social media is relevant for obviously a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs and whether you're in property management or you're a plumber or whatever business you're in, that is the default response. “Well, who really cares? Is this really interesting to a lot of people?” At the end of the day, one of the ways to get traction on social media is to be that unique voice, that authentic voice of what's happening in your industry, what's happening in the market. People tend to follow you and engage with you, not necessarily for just facts and information that you're spewing out there, but because they connect with who you are and your personality.  It's amazing about the management or real estate, and a lot of it's so done through word-of-mouth. A lot of it is still done through those connections that we make. That's what I think there's a lot of value in social media. It's funny you mentioned plumbers because there's actually a plumber who's killing it on YouTube, because of exactly what you said, because most people don't think like, “Oh, who's going to put out that type of content?” But his content is engaging, it's interesting, it's valuable, but it's also with his voice.  That's the thing that property management. You could talk about renting or whoever and all these different topics when it comes to property management. But you can insert your own opinion, your voice and not be afraid to just be really truly who you are. Some people won’t like it and that’s okay. Those aren’t your people. Jason: I’m going to rephrase what you just said and sum it up. It's more important on social media to be you than to be your business. Katie: Absolutely.  Jason: That's really what's going to attract and get people to resonate and connect with you as if you're willing to put it out there and be you, weirdness and all, and that's something. People follow me on social media, no. I'm putting out random stuff all the time about my life and who I am, and I figure that some people are just not gonna like me.  Katie: Yeah, and that’s okay. Jason: There are definitely people that don’t like me.  Katie: Sometimes, we try to want to be really professional and we don't offend anybody. I'm certainly not saying start offending people on social media. But there's that risk of becoming just really vanilla and really boring. If you think about as an end user, somebody uses Facebook or Instagram, what do you click like on? What do you comment on? What do you share? Typically, it's things that are funny, or poignant, or interesting, or they move you in some emotion, you get angry. There's nothing wrong with having an opinion. That's where I think in real estate and property management, really for any entrepreneur, that's where the magic is because most people are not putting up that type of content. If they are, they're not doing it on a consistent basis. That's a big thing that can make a huge difference. Jason: People should have an opinion and share their opinion on Facebook and let their freak flag fly, right?  Katie: Yes, and be comfortable with the fact when you do that, there’s going to be people that watch you and say, I don’t like that guy or girl. You have to be okay with that because with the opposite, which will happen, is that you will start to attract the people who go, “I really like that guy. He's doing a podcast? What other podcasts? I got to catch up on all of his podcast episodes.” That's what happens with video. When you start putting out especially episodic video or episodic podcast content, people start defining you. They’re like, “What else does she put out there?” and you search who attract your tribe. That's what can turn to business down the road. It just takes time just like anything else.  Jason: I’ve always thought this is very in align with what I think and feel, is that if you are not creating polarity, if there's no polarity, then you can’t be attractive. A magnet without polarity is not a magnet anymore. It's not attract anything. Nothing will be pulled towards it. Electricity without polarity doesn't exist anymore if you remove the polarity. There has to be polarity and that means you have to be willing to polarize someone there. I've probably been a little too polarizing in some instances; let's be honest. But I've noticed that when you are willing to just be you and polarize and put it out there, yes, you're going to have people that don't like you. You’re going to get flack for that, people are not going to attract you, but you now are attracting the right people. You’re attracting people that like you the way that you are. They like the way you communicate, they like the way that you coach, they like the way that you run your business, they like your philosophy.  Just like Simon Sinek said, “People don't buy what you do.” They don't buy what you do. They don’t buy property management, they don’t property management coaching/consulting from me, they don't buy what you do, they don't buy social media, whatever from you. They really buy why we do it. That's really what they're buying into is they believe in Katie, they believe in Jason, they believe in the property manager, they believe in you and they share values. What you do is really an afterthought compared to that. So, they need to create polarity. This is a great question everybody listening can ask is am I creating polarity? Have I offended anybody in the last month? And have I attracted anybody in the last month? Did anybody say, “Hell yes, I agree to that,” or, “That totally rubs me the wrong way,” but that's you, so thanks for sharing.  Katie: Absolutely. Jason: We don't want to be vanillas. What’s maybe the next thing that we should take away? Katie: Like I said, don't be vanilla. I've often said, “Lean into who you are and who you're not.” It goes hand in hand with that idea of not being vanilla. I also think a big part of your social media strategy is not outsourcing it completely. There's this feeling even still in 2019 of, “Oh, my gosh. I don’t have time to do this. It's one more thing. Who can I hire to do it?” It's a little bit of a slippery slope because I do think that there's value in hiring certain people. For example, we have a video editor on our team because my value is being on camera but I don't need to learn video editing, I really don't need it. For one or two, that's fine, but I don't have desire. Jason: That’s not your dream and goal in life is to edit videos and stare at videos on the screen for hours a day. Katie: Exactly, it’s not my dream. I’d rather put my eye out, honestly. Jason: Me neither. Katie: Similar with podcast. My value is in the content and the education I can bring, not necessarily in can I edit something. I think there's value in bringing at some point, maybe not in the beginning, people on who could help you with either editing, for example video or podcast editing, or copywriting if you enjoy writing, or something as a blogger or graphic designer, but to totally hand out who are personally is really risky and there's lots of businesses out there that are selling this idea. “You're too busy. Let us do it for you.” I would just caution anyone to be just be careful when you do that because you're handing off who you are. It's like having a dinner party with your 10 most important clients, and instead of you being there, you have your assistant run the whole thing. I just think it's a basic tip, but it's also something that is important to address because time is all we have. It's our most precious asset. I don't think you need to spend all day on social media. I'm in the business of social media and I'm certainly not on social media all day long, but it comes down to having a smart system, and making sure you're inserting yourself and your personality into what you do. I think that's really valuable.  Jason: This makes a lot of sense. I think there's so many parallels to this. There's so many situations in which we would not outsource. I wouldn't outsource to somebody to be the dad of my kids. I'm really single again after two decades, so I wouldn't outsource somebody else to use swiping on dating apps for me. They just don’t know what I’m into.  There's a lot of things we just should not outsource. And yet, being the face of our business, we will a lot of times as business owners, want to just outsource that, like some company can just come in and post a bunch of memes and garbage, and we're suddenly going to get business from it and then we wonder why it's not working. What about those business owners that are not charismatic, they don't have personality, they're better behind the scenes, they just feel really awkward putting anything out there. How do you deal with that? Some of the listeners avoid social media. Social is like an anxiety-inducing word to them.  Katie: For a lot of people who are anxious or feel a little overwhelmed with social media, I would imagine part of it is because you don't have a system for, and it feels like this thing that's out there, that you have to do, that you don't really know how to do it right, and everybody saying that you have to do it, but you don't really have a plan. It just becomes sort of the snowball. The thing is, anytime you're trying something new, especially with technology, it can feel ridiculously annoying. You feel like, “Oh, my God. What am I? How do I not know how to do this?” and it's just like anything else. We work with a lot of agents and brokers. I always say, “Imagine when you first got your real estate license. You took the test, you went through the courses, but you didn't really know what you're doing until you had your first client. And then you really learn. And then you learn again and again and again.” Part of it is just getting over and putting yourself out there. Sometimes we're so concerned with who am I, who cares what people think, I don't know, I don't like how I look or how I sound, I don't know how to do it, so I’m not going to do it. I always like to say, “Done is better than perfect.” Jason: Oh, my gosh. I [...] that, too. I love that. Katie: I’d love to say I made that up. I did not make that up. I’ve heard it somewhere and probably from you. Jason: Maybe not. I think I got it from my business coach. I’m sure he got it from somewhere, too. Katie: You just start today. So if you’re listening to this, start today. Go on Facebook and connect with three or four people at Facebook today. Don’t just like a bunch of stuff, but go on engage with a few people. Wish somebody a happy birthday. Start today. Then you can move on from there. Part of it is just getting a system together, getting a process together. One quick thing I'll mention real fast for anyone who's feeling a little bit overwhelmed, I would encourage you to think about all the things that you do on a day-to-day basis, all the questions you get asked, all the topics of conversation that come up. Get a notebook, get a pen, and just start brainstorming things that happen a day in the life of you. I would imagine you're going to come up with 10, 20, 30 different topics of things that you could potentially talk about, whether that's through video or on Facebook or whatever it might be. Just go to start. “Just do it,” like Nike says. Jason: I love the concept of done is better than perfect. I put that because a lot of times we're trying to get clients to launch their websites, we're trying to get them to take action and moving themselves forward on different things, and they just stay analyze really hard about something and they want it to be so perfect. I just iterate over and over again, done is better than perfect because once it's done, it can do its job in making money. You can go back and change it later, you can improve it later, but get something done because until you have something there, until you have the website up, or until you have this launch, or until you've done something, it's nothing to do anything for you. The other mantra that I'll share with everybody listening, if you're in that state of overwhelm, you’re feeling scared, whatever, just remember that that's how you start everything. One of my favorite mantras is, we all start at level suck. That's where you start in everything. You start at level suck. That is the level you started everything. My first YouTube video was two minutes long and had 30 uhms and and so's in it, and I had to edit them out. The video looked choppy and it was awful. It was so awful. I tried to get perfect lighting, I have my little mic clip thing, an uncomfortable shirt with a collar, and I was trying to be what I thought I needed to be in order to do a video and look good. I'd probably spent hours making a two-minute video. Here's the ironic thing for everybody listening. You think it has to be so perfect? I've made way more money by doing really crappy, shaky, jittery, selfie style videos, walking around outside, than any of those videos were I was uncomfortable behind a desk or in a shirt or whatever in front of a whiteboard.  Don't think it has to be perfect. People will crave reality nowadays because there's so much BS. They’re really craving reality. The other thing I point out to clients, is that they are talking to people all day, every day and it's really the same thing. You just look at a device and pretend you're talking to a person, you just say exactly what you would say and talk the same way. You don't have to think, “What am I going to do with my hands?” What do you do with your hands normally when you talk to people? “How’s my face supposed to like?” How does your face normally look? Just talk. You have the thing like you're talking to a person. So, just start noticing when you're talking to people and pretend they're a camera or a phone and just realize they're not that scary or awkward.  Katie: Absolutely. To your point, it doesn't have to be perfect. What a lot of people don't realize that maybe they forget is the lifetime of a post is pretty short. Let’s say you create a video, you put it on Facebook, that video will disappear in a couple hours. You put it on Twitter, tweet disappears in a matter of seconds. YouTube has a longer shelf life and certain content certainly has a longer shelf life. But generally speaking, we live in a world with so much noise, I often feel like I'm standing on the side of the freeway just watching cars fly by. If it's not your best performance, it doesn't have to be Oscar-worthy. As you said, just get it out there and especially with video, it's like a muscle. I will say the more you do it, the more comfortable you get. I don't know if I'm ever totally comfortable hearing myself and seeing myself, but what I am comfortable with are the results. That's what you have to think about. When you put yourself out there over the course of time consistently, that's when the magic happens. It's literally like a snowball and the consistency part is a huge part of it. Do you mind if I share a quick tip? Jason: Go ahead. Give us all the tips you want to. We want some free Katie Lance Consulting right now. Katie: Perfect. One of the things I always share with our GetSocialSmart Academy members is this idea of batch-creating your content. I love batch creating because for me, if I'm going to sit down, do my hair and makeup, and record one video, I might as well sit down and record four or five. We've been doing that the last couple years and that's made a huge difference. We'll set aside a couple hours once a month where I do the hair, get the camera set up, whatever. To be honest with you, the first 99 episodes were shot on my phone. So, it doesn't have to be anything fancy. This idea of getting into a system and batch-creating your content, that way you're done, you're locked and loaded. When we do that, then we're able to drip out those episodes once a week for the next month, but it gets you into that rhythm. When you're publishing at the same day and time every single week, people who start to follow you, as we talked about earlier, they start to notice that. It's just like your favorite TV show, you may not watch your favorite TV show Thursday night at 9:00 PM or Monday at 8:00 PM, but you know it's on and you set your DVR. It's the same thing with content. Once you start to put it out there regularly, if you can start doing it consistently, it can make a big difference.  Jason: Absolutely. That's one of the reasons I really like my assistant; made this show finally somewhat consistent. We're getting about two episodes done a week now. Consistency is huge because as soon as you disappear for a week or two, people are wondering if you're gone. You lose the engagement, you lose the momentum, so done is better than perfect, but consistency is better than anything, really, probably.  Katie: People wonder what's the best day. There's no best day. What day is good for you? Just pick a day. I remember when I first started sending out and email newsletters, it’s like, “Well, let's do it on a Saturday. I don't know. That sounds like a good day.” Seven years later, we're still sending our email newsletters out on Saturday, and people are like, “Oh, I love it. Get it every Saturday morning.” It's just consistency. So, pick a day. Jason: Love it. I love the idea of batching tasks, and you can apply that to so many different things. I just did a post on this on social media about this and I showed my pill case. I hate going and digging through all my supplement bottles every single meal, trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be taking. So, I got this pill case. It’s literally the size of a notebook. It's got every day of the week, four times a day, and I fill it once a week. If I travel I can take it with me. It's done, I can just take these supplements. That's how I'm able to be so sharp and so crazy all day long. No, I’m just kidding. Batching tasks reduces the decision-making that has to go into and the thought that has to go into it every day. You don't have to sit there, stress out, and “What should I talk about today? Oh, my gosh. I need to do a post. I haven't done it for a couple days,” and thinking about it. I love the idea of batch the tasks and we've got a pile of them waiting. Even with this podcast, we've got several episodes in the can. We're releasing them to iTunes and dripping them out because we want to have a little bit of padding. There's an advantage to having some things in the can, especially if you want to keep the consistency. What if you want to travel? I'm going to Austin this week to meet with my business coach. Next week, I'm going to Phoenix to talk to the NARPM Chapter in Phoenix. We’ll still be able to release some episodes while I'm gone.  Katie: That's awesome. What you're doing which is so smart is you're repurposing your content. We're streaming this live, it's getting shared on social media, but you're going to put it on YouTube, at some point, you're going to put it on iTunes. That's really where the magic can happen because instead of feeling like you have to post something every single day, why not invest in one great piece of content like this podcast you're creating.  That's what we try to do, too. It's one piece of great content, and then it can get sliced and diced a dozen different ways. You can turn it into an Instagram story or an Instagram post today and a post some two or three weeks, especially when you create content that's somewhat timeless. It's not just relevant on what's happening in the market, but it's going back to sharing things that are informative, that are really helping your audience, that have a voice, have an opinion, and that repurposing, there's a lot of magic in that. Jason: Let's talk about platform then. How do people pick? Because they're like, “Should I be on Instagram? Should I be doing LinkedIn? Should I be doing Facebook? Should I be on Twitter?” What's your recommendation when people are like, “What platform should I be on?” Katie: It depends on a couple things. Number one, where your audience is. Right now, typically, Facebook is still the number one platform for a lot of people in property management or real estate or even as an entrepreneur. But I also think that's changing as well. Instagram is growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of people have started to leave Facebook and go over to Instagram, even though Instagram is owned by Facebook, because Instagram is such an aspirational platform, lots of pretty pictures, there's not as many political posts and noise on Instagram right now. I think those are two big ones to watch.  I do think for LinkedIn, though, it's important to at least have your profile updated. Make sure that's up to date. LinkedIn is not as fun as Facebook or Instagram, but if you get googled or your company gets googled, typically, one of the first things that pops up is LinkedIn. Just making sure that's up to date, that's professional social network. Outside of LinkedIn, I do think Facebook and Instagram are two big platforms to connect with people, stay in touch with people, and then also to post relevant content and to repurpose some of the content you're creating. Jason: What do you think is coming new in social media? I'm sure you're always paying attention. What do you think coming up that's hot, that probably the teenagers are using that we’ll eventually be using? Katie: Good question. Snapchat was getting a lot of buzz a year or two ago, that a lot of folks in real estate were jumping on that. I think a lot of people realize it's still for the kids. Jason: I think the Instagram stories and Facebook stories killed it.  Katie: I agree. I think a big opportunity right now is definitely Instagram. Instagram is spending a lot of money and resources for people to stay on their platform. Especially Instagram TV right now is a big opportunity. That launched about a year or two ago. It’s doing so-so and then Instagram made some really big changes pretty recently to Instagram TV. When you're uploading a video to Instagram TV—if you don't know, you can upload a video up to 10 minutes—when you upload it to Instagram TV, you now share a one minute preview over to your newsfeed on Instagram, which shows up on your page, it shows up in your newsfeed, which is more likely that it shows up in the explore button. We found that for whatever reason, Instagram wants you to spend more time on Instagram TV. Our posts on Instagram TV are getting a much higher reach, likes, and engagement than just about any of our other posts. As of right now, as of the recording this podcast, that's definitely one to watch. It just reinforces a lot of what we're talking about with video. Jason: I will have to start doing those. When they started doing it, I was like, “This isn’t getting any attention,” but I have noticed, I have watched a few videos on Instagram, and I've hit that button that says, “Keep watching.” Katie: Yeah, it definitely keeps you engaged. We used to just beginning a couple of hundred views on our videos and now we’re consistently getting thousands of views on our videos. It's nothing really different that we've done other than just be consistent with putting up that content, sharing it over to our news feed. I think, ultimately, video is worth that. If you’re not creating original video content in your business, you’re missing a really big opportunity. Facebook even recently just came out over the last couple weeks and said, “Video has one of the highest rates in the Facebook newsfeed, original video content versus content that’s shared from somebody else.” If there was ever a time to get over, “How do I look?” or, “How do I sound?” or, “I have nothing to say,” now's the time to do it. Jason: Just do it. Nike. Katie: Just do it, yes. Jason: I'll just throw this out there because somebody is going to mention it later. If they have teenagers, I think TikTok right now is the thing. Katie: It is, yes. Jason: My teenager’s really into this TikTok thing. I don't know if that will somehow eventually translate to business, but let’s see where it gets. Katie: It might. It's fun to watch. It’s entertaining. Jason: It’s like the new Vine. It’s ridiculous. Katie: Exactly. Jason: Any other tips or takeaways we can squeeze out of Katie Lance before we let you go? Katie: If you are in real estate in any capacity or an entrepreneur, I really can't emphasize enough. There's two big opportunities with social. The personal side of it, being intentional, taking just 5 or 10 minutes a day to connect with people, wish people happy birthday, don’t just be a drive-by liker, actually be a person, connect. That relationship-building piece is so important. Then, that other piece is putting out new content, which is going to attract new business. I just would encourage anybody who's listening to really think about it. I love using techniques like time blocking where you're setting aside time, a couple of times a week, maybe it's just 15 minute blocks of time, or a couple times a month, to really get a system together. If you think about the areas of your business you’re most successful in, most likely there's some sort of system or process. Whether or not you're working with us or anybody else, that's my biggest tip. Get the system, get a process together, and don't wait. Don't suffer from analysis paralysis. Just do it. Jason: All right. Awesome. I love it. So, commenting and connecting, and then content and creation are things we need to build our social network, and we need to create social media. Two different things. Katie, if people are wanting to get a plan, get organized, figure this stuff out, be interesting, and learn social media, how can they get in touch with you? Katie: The best way is through our website, people can go to katielance.com. We have a free content grid that anyone can sign up for. It's a great planning guide. So, if you're listening to this going, “Okay, I’m stuck when it comes to putting a system together,” you can download that content grid for free right on our website. We have hundreds of free resources on our website, as well. Of course, I'm Katie Lance kon just about every social media platform. You can find me on Instagram or Facebook also. Jason: Awesome. Cool. And then anybody listening can also connect with me. I’m King Jason Hull on all social media. There we go, we were just very social, sharing ideas about social media. Katie, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks for being here. Katie: Thank you so much for having me. Jason: Really cool. Check her out at katielance.com. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, as I said in the intro, be sure to reach out, connect with DoorGrow, we would love to help you figure out how to grow your business. If you feel stuck or frustrated, you feel like you're trying to do a bunch of marketing, pay per click, SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and it's not working for some reason. You may have some blind spots. We can help you organize, sort out those blind spots, and get some clarity on the business, to help you focus on the growth side of your business. We would love to help you do that. If you want to see a big blind spot, you can start with a very public one, your website. Take our website quiz by going to doorgrow.com/quiz and grade your website. This will give you a letter grade for your website. Most websites fail going through this and this quiz will grade your website as to how effective it is at making your money, at creating conversions, at attracting leads. Go ahead and fill that out and then we'll be in touch with you.  Thanks everybody for tuning in to the DoorGrow Show. Until next time to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Are you tired of dorm food and want to avoid the mad rush of finding a place to live off campus before next semester? There’s got to be an easier way for students to rent houses and apartments. It’s a problem that many entrepreneurs have tried to solve.  Today, I am talking to Dave Spooner of Innago. There are few incentives for landlords to digitize their rentals. Landlord demand for a listing platform is low, but there definitely is high demand for better tools to effectively manage and communicate with tenants.  You’ll Learn... [02:50] Tenant Management Software: Making landlords lives easier with online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, lease signing, and tenant screening.  [04:14] Understanding Innago: Flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive software for landlords and property managers.  [06:05] Learning Curve: Competitors’ software requires expertise and certification. [07:32] Who wants to waste time adopting ugly software?  [08:58 #1 Priority: Intuitiveness in software; speed is love language. [10:20] Different portals for different people to be more productive. [12:16] Find balance, and avoid too fast feature creep. [13:14] Possible future integration with Zapier and other third-party tools? [14:22] FAQs: Access permissions and pricing for landlords and tenants. [17:25] Innago offers unique and unmatched level of support. Tweetables Innago software is flexible, effective, simple, and intuitive. You shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. Choose features that matter, and get the biggest bang for your buck.  Big believers in early success begets future success.  Resources Innago Buildium AppFolio Propertyware Rent Manager.  Jason Fried of Basecamp Zapier 1099 Form Freshdesk HubSpot Intercom DGS 62: Property Management Accounting with Taylor Hou DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to another DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the unique challenges, daily variety, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it, you think they're crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses, and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change the perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let's get into the show.  Today's guest, I'm hanging out here with Dave Spooner of Innago’s. Dave, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Dave: Hi Jason, thanks so much for having me. Jason: It's great to have you. Dave, we always like to get into our guest first, help us understand who Dave is, and how you kind of got into the space that you're in, and give us a little background. Dave: Yeah, absolutely, I'd be happy to, and thanks for the intro. I graduated from university in 2013. I kind of already had that entrepreneur spirit. Me and a couple other folks got together and we wanted to solve the problem of finding a place to live. We're not the first people to try to solve it, and I'm sure we won't be the last to try to solve it, but we want to make it easier for students to rent houses and apartments off campus. A lot of those markets are still mostly or fully offline, and there's usually a mad rush to try and find a place to live. We recognize those issues and we tried to solve them. As we were going about doing that, we kind of quickly realized that there's not a lot of incentives for landlords to digitize their portfolio. There's not a lot of incentives for landlords in student housing to really do a whole heck of a lot, but helps the students out because they're already going to fill other properties, which is really high occupancy in student housing.  We kind of pivoted, and listened to the market, and realized that there wasn't a huge demand on the landlord side for this listing platform, but there was a lot of demand for better tools to manage tenants, and better tools to manage and communicate with those tenants, and to manage their businesses. That's kind of how I got my foundation. I worked on that listing platform for a few years, learned a lot about the market, and then myself and the CTO of that company started and founded Innago in 2017, and we've been hard at work trying to make lives easier for landlords ever since. Jason: How do you make lives easier for landlords? Dave: Innago is tenant management software, and we call it tenant management software instead of property management software because we really believe that the focus should be on managing tenants, managing those relationships, and managing those personalities. Innago, of course, includes a lot of your classic property management tools like online rental payments, tracking payments, basic accounting, online lease signing, tenant screening, etcetera. But at its heart, it's a communication platform. It's something that makes it easier to interact with and manage those tenants. We believe that having that, having that foundation enables landlords to become better landlords, and property managers become better property managers. Jason: I haven't heard of the software before, is this something that there's a good amount of property managers already using? Is this geared towards landlords, or is this geared towards property management businesses? Help me and the listeners understand Innago here. Dave: Yeah, absolutely. We work with both. We work with landlords as small as one unit, and landlords in the thousands of units. The software is really flexible, it’s effective, but it's also simple and intuitive for somebody who just owns some properties on the side, works a normal nine-to-five, and then manages at nights and on weekends, and for a landlord or property manager that's fully dedicated. We work with both property managers and landlords. We predominantly work in the residential space. We do a lot of student housing landlords, given my background, and my partner's background. We also have some commercial landlords as well. It's a really powerful, and flexible tool, and we work with all sorts of different clients. Jason: Cool, that's exciting. Help people understand, because a lot of the listeners in our audience probably already have a property management software, I mean, probably likely. They're probably already with Buildium, AppFolio, Propertyware, maybe Rent Manager. They're probably with one of these guys. But nobody's ever fully happy with their property management. Dave: Right, of course. Jason: So help those listening, how can they see where you fit into the market in relation to these? Dave: Well, yeah, it's funny you say that. I was actually listening to one of your earlier podcasts with Taylor, and he has the accounting services, the consulting accounting services, and one of the things that he mentioned, they work exclusively with AppFolio users, and kind of what they said is, “We only hire people that have worked at AppFolio, and we will only work with AppFolio at this stage because that's the only thing that we're comfortable with,” because it's this monolithic behemoth that you need expertise to even navigate, right? Jason: Right. Dave: That's definitely true for AppFolio, and it's true for a lot of the other software. There's a huge learning curve there. The first time we hire somebody on Innago, we always sit them down, and we jump on LinkedIn, and we do a little exercise, or research the companies. We're not looking for employees of those companies, or even their company page, we’re actually looking for employees at property management companies that their job title, their role is like the AppFolio expert on T, because you need certification to understand how to use it. That was kind of the initial kernel Innago came out of is, you shouldn't need a certification to use property management software. It should be like picking up Gmail for the first time, or picking up iPhone for the first time. It should be intuitive, and simple, and elegant, and powerful, and flexible to work with a lot of different users in a lot of ways. That's really our difference, in the way that we're approaching the market, putting a lot of time, and thought into the features, and the way that they interact, and the way that the user interacts with those features. We're really proud of the features that we do have. It is an ongoing product, and we're constantly adding more. I think for a lot of property managers, and landlords on the higher end, they're going to find at this stage that it might not be a perfect fit, but for those folks with small to mid size portfolios, it's got a lot of really great stuff that it will work well for them. Jason: Yeah, I'm in total agreement. When it comes to software, the number one challenge tends to be adoption, and ease of use is right there. If something is intuitive, that's the biggest challenge, and hurdle. Dave: Right. Jason: I don't even like them using software that's ugly. Dave: Right. Jason: I just can't bring myself to do it. Maybe it's the designer in me. I don't know, but if I'm going to be living in something, I don't want it to be ugly. That's why I use Apple products because they just… Dave: Right, absolutely. Clean design. Jason: I was around my mom just yesterday, and she had a computer and she was like, “I clicked on Chrome, and it's not loading, and nothing's happening coming up,” and I'm like, “I don't know, that's a PC. I've never had that problem on a Mac.” I just don't have that problem. I just think it's funny. I was like, “I don't know, good luck.” Dave: Yeah absolutely, and a lot of property managers and landlords—many are very tech savvy, there's also many that aren't so tech savvy. It's equally, if not more important, to have something that's not incredibly complex, and incredibly challenging, and opaque, and difficult to enter into. Jason: I'm incredibly tech savvy, and I probably could’ve figured out my mom's computer thing, but it probably would’ve wasted an hour or two of my time and I don't want to waste time figuring out my software at every step of the turn and teaching my team members how to figure out software at every step of the turn. Intuitiveness in software is my number one priority. A lot of people build their whole set up internally in their business, trying to find one piece of software that can do everything, and it's usually really awful at everything in a lot of instances, instead of finding the easiest, and best, and fastest tools. Speed is my love language, I think in business, and I want it to be fast, and want it to be simple, and intuitive. I love that that's kind of a foundational goal with your software, because I don't believe that any of the other property management software, that was their foundational goal, ease of use, and to be intuitive. If it was, they've gotten long far away from it. Dave: Right, yeah, I think you're right. Jason: Yeah, and some are much worse than others, and some of them, they can do everything. They're like the ultimate Swiss army knife. Like I've joked in the past, you're not going to see a handy man carrying around a multi tool to try and do all this hard jobs. Dave: Right. Jason: He's going to have a nice tool box with the best tools. The software’s more intuitive, the software is really easy for people to use, and now you're saying on all parties for like the owners, they want to maybe check reports, is there an owners portal? Dave: There is. Jason: Tenants that want to pay rent, and do their stuff, there's tenant portal. And then for the property manager, they can manage and see their portfolio pretty easily, and know what's available, and vacant. Does this have marketing stuff connected to it yet for listing, and the getting the properties out there in the marketplace? Dave: Yeah, great question. We do not currently have marketing. We plan to roll that out, but as you mentioned, I think one of the problems that's happened with other software packages, the feature creep went too fast. They wanted to get all the features that any landlord could ever ask for out as quickly as possible, and that has not been our approach. We have said let's do this methodically, let's think about ways to integrate this into the way that the rest of the software works. Let's make sure that it's easy to use. We are constantly adding features but we're not necessarily rolling out everything that everybody wants, all at the same time. Market syndication is what we call it. The marketing piece is definitely on its way, but it'll probably be another three or fours months before we have that out there. Jason: Yeah, feature creep is a real issue. I'm a big fan of Jason Fried. He's the CEO of Basecamp. I got to hang out with him on a Skype call for 90 minutes. He cut my staffing costs in half overnight, no doubt. I'm a big fan of him. By saying he cut my staffing costs in half, I should say he doubled our productivity. I didn't just fire everybody. We just became that much more productive because he helped me understand how we had so many interruptions, we had so many things that weren't intuitive, and he changed how we communicate as a company. He has a similar philosophy when he talks about creating their softwares. Basecamp doesn't do a whole lot compared to a lot of other software, it’s pretty limited in its feature set, but it's consistently always at the top of the tools and resources people mention for project management even though I really don't believe Basecamp is a project management tool, I believe it's a communication platform for internal communication, that's how we use it. Everyone's going to ask for features, you have to really be picky in choosing about what are the features that are really going to matter the most and get the biggest bang for your buck and really make a difference without it becoming overly crazy, too cumbersome, unintuitive, and difficult to do. There's always that balance of managing all of the features.  Do you see that you guys will be doing any sort of Zapier integration so that people can create zaps and start connecting and integrating with third party tools? No software has come out with this yet. Dave: Yeah. That’s a really good idea. That is not our road map but I love Zapier. We use it for all sorts of other things, whether it's connecting Wordpress to HubSpot or whatever. It’s a really cool platform. That’s an interesting thought. We hadn’t gotten that far. We might still… Jason: Add it to your list and be the first. I'm waiting to see who is the first property management software the adds Zapier integration because everyone's been asking for it. All these people want it connected to their automation. They want to connect it to their process street processes, or they want to connect it to whatever. I think this would be a really cool thing. Dave: We’ll let you know when we do. Jason: I keep throwing that out usually to property management software that I have on my show and I'm waiting to see who's the first to have Zapier integration. Some people call it [zey-pier], but I think [zey-pier] is weird because it creates [zaps], people, so it’s Zapier. You're not [zey-ping] your business.  What else should people know about this software? What are some of the most common questions that a property management business owner might ask that they're concerned about? Dave: Well, one you hit on was the sub users. Enabling not just the head property manager from accessing the platform, but also giving out who has access to which permissions, who has access to which features. Maybe it's Bob, you want him to handle these categories for these properties, or you want your property owners to log in and be able to handle it themselves. Jason: There's the ability for vendors to leverage and use the system as well? Dave: Not vendors, that would be like a maintenance person that you either have on staff or you have on retainer 1099 or whatever. We do not have a vendor portal at this time. That’s a big one and then the other really common question we get is of course the pricing because of the sector that we’re in, that's at the top of our base mind. Jason: Do you want to tell pricing now? If you're planning on changing, don’t. Tell them to go to your website. Dave: No, I'd be more than happy to jump into pricing. Now it’s pretty unique, we're 100% free to use for landlords. There’s no monthly fee, yearly fee, setup fee, there’s no contract. There's absolutely no cost. Everything that I've mentioned is included. Instead, when a tenant pays rent online, we charge them $2 for an ACH transaction. We charge them $2.75 for a credit or debit card, and that's it. Jason: Totally reasonable. I've been saying for at least over a year to people who have listened to some of my older podcast episodes that free property management software will come and there will be the day that somebody's going to offer it, just like people aren't paying for Gmail, people aren't paying for this sort of stuff and it's making money. It manifested, here it is. Dave: That’s right, we did it. It's 100% free for the landlord. Some landlords see the value in an online payment, they see it so highly to pay actually choose to incur a cost and we allow them to do that if they want to, but for most landlords 90% plus, they're not paying a dime to use Innago. Jason: Very cool, that's really interesting. This would be fantastic then for startup PM's, startup property managers. A question that my team would care about is for the rental listings, the vacant properties, do you have some way of listing the vacant properties in some web based fashion? If they're putting properties into their system, is there some sort of code that we can embed on a website to show their available rentals? Dave: Again, there's nothing on the marketing side just yet. Everything is cotntained within Innago but we certainly see the value in that. Jason: Maybe in the future then. What else should people know about Innago? Anything else you want to throw out there? Dave: Well, we offer particularly in our sector where you do have some of the lower cost platforms out there or some of the simpler platforms out there I suppose. Oftentimes, they don't offer any sort of support beyond a 48-hour email window. With Innago, we’re a little different, we offer full phone support. We also have embedded videos and help section to ease landlords along in the system as they get started and learn the platform. We’re really big believers in early success begets future success. We want to make sure that we’re hand holding for your first month, two months on the platform, and ensuring that you understand how to use it. You can use it effectively and can leverage it to improve your business. Once you do that, then you're off to the races and in really good shape. We offer a unique level of support that many others can't really match. Jason: What platform are you using for support? Dave: We use Freshdesk, and we use HubSpot, and we use Zapier to connect certain things to other things. Jason: Cool. We use intercom for anyone listening, because property managers need some sort of support desk too. Dave, this sounds really neat. How could somebody demo this if they're curious to check out your software and how should they get in touch? Dave: Yeah. They can go to innago.com and they can request access to a free account. We’ll get in touch with them shortly after just to make sure they're a good fit, that we're going to solve some problems for them. We don't want them to waste any time fooling around on a platform that is really not going to work for them. If they request access, we’ll shortly be in touch, and we'll get them into the platform, and they can start playing around with it. Jason: Where does the name Innago come from? I'm a branding guy, I'm always curious. Explain Innago. Dave: We like to think of it as a strong three-syllable word, that's about the extent of it. It's really kind of like Google or Yahoo, there's not a whole lot behind it. Jason: Okay. Maybe we’ll have to make up the story sometime together about it. Dave: Yeah. We’ve thought about it, but we'll take any suggestions. Jason: When did you guys launch this? How new is this software? Dave: We launched the company in January of 2017. We had the product out in the market, kind of like an alpha stage really in March of that year. We've been coming along ever since. As far as a product, we're a little over two years now. Jason: Awesome. How many companies are using this right now? Dave: We have thousands of landlords on the platform and it's growing every day. I would nail that hard number, but it probably changes by the minute. Jason: Yeah. It's probably pretty tempting and pretty easy if it's free. I would imagine you guys will have some success and you guys are making enough money you think to stay healthy just through the transactions? Dave: Yeah. As you know, there's a lot of landlords out there. The majority of them are still self managed or not using any kind of software. There's a lot of tenants that want to pay online. Only about 30% of the market currently pays rent online. That's a huge giant blue ocean that’s ready to be captured. Jason: Yeah. There's a lot of blue ocean that are self managing. If you really want to super attract property management business owners, if you can figure out a way to help connect these self managers so that they can get that professional managers to take over stuff, and partner, maybe create some partners, I think you’ve got a winning affiliate business going on right there that’s good for your company. Dave: Absolutely. Jason: I know there's lots of people listening that would like to get connected to those that are self managing and work with them. Dave, super cool to have you on the show. I wish you lots of success. It would be cool to have you come back maybe in the future after you've come out with even more features if you’ve got something really cool to share. I wish you guys a lot of success with the free software. I've been talking about this for a while. I think it's long overdue. This is really great. Dave: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jason. I really appreciate it, my pleasure being on the show. Jason: Yeah, thanks for coming on. You heard it everybody, free property management software that is intuitive. If they are really intuitive, they're going to have a lot of natural success and growth, and if they're free, they're going to have a lot of growth. If they can make the numbers work which sounds like it would be pretty easy with all the transactions that are going to be occurring, it could be a game changer.  I think other property management software, they're a little bit greedy, and there's too much of that feature creep. I think this will be a competitor. It’d be interesting to watch. Let’s keep our eyes tuned, our eyes peeled and stay tuned to see what they do. Anyway, this is Jason Hull of the DoorGrow Show. If you are wanting to know if your property management website is leaking money because every website is probably leaking money. If you want to see that it’s leaking money because you don't want it to be leaking deals and leads anymore and you want to make more money and cash from your business, test your website out by going to doorgrow.com/quiz and take our DoorGrow Score Quiz that’s going to grade your website on how effective it is at creating conversions. Some of the questions are tricky. There's a lot of people taking the test and then make a bunch of changes to their website, some of them are false positive, so be careful if you're going to do that. Do that quiz and then maybe talk to our team and we can help you improve your website piece because I really don't believe that anybody's better at creating websites that make money than DoorGrow for property managers. Alright, we'll talk to all of you guys soon. Until next time, to our mutual growth.  

Today, I am talking to Gwenn Aspen of Anequim, which offers remote assistant, Rent Manager call center, and Rent Manager software consulting services. Also, Gwenn and her husband, Jeremy, own the Wistar Group, a property management company. You’ll Learn... [04:40] How helping a friend, helped property management companies hire employees. [05:20] Currently, 150 employees in Mexico work remotely for property management companies in the United States and Canada. [06:25] Connections and Relationships: Life is all about taking care of and looking out for those you know and love. [06:50] Internal References and Cultural Differences: Holding each other accountable results in low turnover/high retention. [08:20] Managers Managing Remotely: If you manage someone who works remotely, get to know them as a human being. [10:51] Webcam: Teams founded on trust and transparency should be seen and heard. [14:50] For better or worse, Anequim and Wistar Group are unique and original company names that could be patented to prevent being sued. [16:45] Finding a Good Fit: Anequim helps potential clients identify things that they don’t like to do and give them to someone who does. [20:51] Time vs. Energy: Avoid burnout by identifying what fills or drains your energy. [22:20] Onboarding Training: Includes four ways to not die in property management. [26:12] Vetting Team Members: Extensive process of selecting candidates for clients. [29:47] Working in Mexico: No background checks possible or databases available. [34:09] Progress, not Perfection: Help property managers move forward and feel confident in making a commitment. [38:21] Anequim Structure: Assistants, solution agents, and others handle 1,200 units. [42:36] Every business needs systems: Planning, process, documentation, and communication. Tweetables Power of the Webcam with Virtual Teams: Just be there, and be seen. Time and Attention: A manager’s most important resources; use them wisely. Word to the Wise: Keep your clothes on when training employees. Our job is to make sure people are happy with their candidates. Resources Anequim Gwenn Aspen on Facebook Gwenn Aspen’s Email Wistar Group DGS 76: Outsourcing Rules for Small, Medium and Large Companies with Todd Breen of VirtuallyinCredible First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently Zoom Myers–Briggs Type Indicator Fair Housing Act Americans with Disabilities Act Culture Index Traction by Gino Wickman SweetProcess Process Street Basecamp Help Scout Intercom Management Time: Who's Got the Monkey? 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 with the fabulous Gwenn Aspen of Anequim. Gwenn, welcome to the show. Gwenn: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Jason: I'm excited to have you. It's really fun hanging out with you in the green room and you were showing me your nerd glasses. Gwenn: That I carry around with me everywhere I go because there's always a need. They’re literally nerd glasses, you guys. They're from Hobby Lobby, I got them for an event I had to go to because we were revenge of the nerds and I bring them everywhere because that's how nerdy I really am. But we can have fun too, we can be fun nerds. Right, Jason? Jason: Yes. Maybe. It's probably possible. A lot of people think I wear all these weird, different glasses especially the orange ones. People notice I wear this orange glasses and they always come up to me and they think I'm trying to be so cool. Their like, "Why are you wearing this glasses? Are you trying to be Bono?" Which is funny because Bono wears them to block blue light, right? He's not wearing them just to be cool but he is cool. Way cooler than me. Then I go into this diatribe of why I wear them and how they block blue light and how it helps set my biorhythm patterns, helps me get good sleep, and then they’re just sorry they asked. Gwenn: Well, that's what’s in your nerd shows Jason. Jason: And then they realized they are nerd glasses, so they realize I'm a nerd. Gwenn: Yes, because they bring out your inner nerd when you wear them and people ask about them. Jason: Yeah. So, I got some less orange ones. This are my nerd glasses. This make me look a little bit smarter. Gwenn: I think they look good. I like them a lot. Jason: They're a little yellow to them but I don't have the tape. I have to get the tape and maybe add the tape at some point just to look more nerdy. Alright Gwenn, let's get into this. Give us a little bit background, so you run this company doing remote assistance from Mexico and you said they're not virtual assistance because they're not robots, right? Gwenn: Right. No. They're not. Jason: You manage Rent Manager, the property management back office. You manage Rent Manager's call center, so you have a call center for Rent Manager people. Gwenn: We do. Jason: Then you also have Wistar Group which is a property management company in Omaha, Nebraska. Gwenn: Yes. That's all true. My husband and I started Wistar Group back in 2006 so we've been doing this for a long time. In 2008, a friend of his called him from Mexico because he lived in Mexico before I knew him for five years doing something totally different, transportation and logistics. The friend called and she said, "You think the economy is bad in the United States? Well, you should come down to Mexico. Things are really bad down here and I lost my job. Is there any way I could work for you in some capacity from home?" Because it wasn't only about the economy, but it was pretty dangerous at that time and my husband is the most loyal person you'll ever meet, for better or worse. That's right when VoIP phones came out so we sent one down to her, we figured how to make it work and she started answering the calls for Wistar Group—at that time, it was called Certified Property Management. She's taking the calls and it works awesome. We love it. She loves it. It's great. Then we just started, as we grew, hiring all her friends for all the other jobs that we had. We just operated like that because it works for us for many years and then in 2016, our friends from Boutique Property Management in Denver, we were hanging out with them and they're like, "Hey, this Mexico thing is working out great for you guys. Can you hook us up with people from Mexico?" I was like, "Sure." Then I got them some employees from Mexico and they loved it. My husband and I were like, "Maybe we can help more property managers with this," and so it grown like wildfire since then and now we have almost 150 employees in Mexico working for property management companies across the U.S. and Canada. It's just a win-win for everyone and it's just so exciting and I love my job so much. Jason: Okay, great. This sounds very similar to [inaudible 00:05: 37] who we had in the show except they do the thing in the Philippines. It sounds like a very similar sort of etymology or story behind how you got into this and it really was filling your own need and starting by helping a friend and it grew into helping all these different property managers. That's the interesting thing I've heard from those that have Mexican staff is that they hire one and all of a sudden, all their family and friends start becoming team members too. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: That must be a culturally different thing, I think with Mexico versus the Philippines. I think they are both very family-oriented, but I think there's something about Mexico that they're like, "Hey, hire my brother." Or, "Hire this family member," and they're connecting people. Gwenn: Oh my gosh. Yeah, the connections that they have, don't we all love that? Isn't that what life is all about? Is connections and taking care of the people that you love, that you know. It's just yet another thing to love about all the people I know in Mexico, is just how much they care for one another and have each other's back and then also hold each other accountable. That's the other things are that we grow a lot through internal references from one employee to another. If someone has a problem and they were the one who referred them, man. They hear it from the other employee. I mean there are that many cultural differences, but that's been a fun one. It really ends up keeping the turnover really low because they are happy, our employees work from home, and they love it, that's a huge advantage. They have this great connection with each other and we have Christmas parties. We're going to have a summer picnic with everybody. It's added a lot of richness to my life, just getting to know the employees as well. Jason: I was going to bring that up. A while back, I read a book called First, Break All the Rules. I believed it's pulled up by the Gallup Organizations that does the pulling. They did a whole bunch of surveying companies trying to figure out what makes a really good team and what creates retention with the team. One of the number one indicators of retention whether somebody was going to stay in the company was whether they have a friend in the business or somebody they are connected to personally on the team. So, that makes a lot of sense. It increases retention, significantly. Gwenn: I would say that's our job. If we’re going to hire someone remotely, if we’re the managers of this person, it's imperative that you get to know them as a human being to get that retention and to get that buy-in and to get them on your same mission going in the same direction. I feel like I know you much better right now just because we are in a Zoom Conference and that doing what with cam... Jason: Now, we're totally homies because we are in Zoom. Gwenn: Yeah, now we’re homies and we have the nerd glasses together, I mean. Those little things add to the relationship so if you make a point, I only communicate with people from Mexico using webcam because we have this amazing connection then and we feel like we know each other better. If you use a webcam, I swear it makes all the difference and getting buy-in from a remote employee. Jason: I absolutely agree. I've done a lot of remote hiring in the past and there's a huge difference, but it got to a point where eventually, I have a policy in our company called the Webcam Policy and everyone is required to have a webcam to be on the team and to communicate and show up and turn on the camera when we do meetings because it ended up being, at one point I remember showing up having team meetings and there's 5-10 people without their webcams on and there's just me putting on the show. Gwenn: I love that. I don't have an official policy, but not that you said it, I'm adding it. But I also have another employee from a totally different industry, he did a lot in banking and he was told to never have his webcam on. It was such a cultural dissonance when he came on the team because we were like, "Put your camera on. I can't see you. I don't know what you're doing. I need to see you." It was hard for him. It's good if you're somebody who requires webcams and state it at the beginning because some people, it takes them a while to get used to it. Jason: Yeah. It is a part of my onboarding process that they have to review the webcam policy and read it. Do you want me to tell you some of it here? Gwenn: Yeah. I think it's so important because whether you do remote employees from Mexico, whether you have someone in the Midwest, you know a lot of people hire people from rural Nebraska to work for their company because it's a lot less expensive. Jason: Alright. I'm going to share an internal secret here. Gwenn: Understanding the power of a webcam is crucial for the relationship working in my opinion. Jason: Alright. Here's our webcam policy for those listening. We are a team founded on the values of trust and transparency. It is important in a virtual team to be able to see one another on our virtual meetings since we often can't meet directly in person. As a team, we don't care about your hair, makeup, clothes, etc.during internal meetings. Just be there. Not having a webcam during internal meetings can feel like talking with someone behind a reflective window. It causes humans to try to assume and guess too much because they lack nonverbal cues we have evolved to rely on. Why address this? And then in bullets: to promote an environment of trust and transparency, to improve the efficiency of company communications and shorten meetings by effectively communicating with the full spectrum of verbal facial expressions and nonverbal cues, to reduce multitasking, right? Because they [...], they're like, "Oh yeah. I'm listening." Gwenn: Right. Totally. Jason: To reduce the anxiety of those speaking on camera, and then having the expectation. It is expected that all team members will join OpenPotion, that's our corporation, virtual meetings on video in order to fully engage in team and one-on-one meetings, this promotes collaboration on multiple levels and it allows each individual to feel heard as they see and receive nonverbal cues from their peers. This also increases productivity and reduces anxiety as ideas are better understood when they're coupled with facial expressions, gestures, and other forms of nonverbal communication. When meeting with clients, we appreciate you doing your best to make yourself and your background presentable, but that is not required. We just want you fully present and visible. Then I have a quote and it says, "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said," Peter Drucker. Gwenn: Oh, I love it. I love it although I would push back on the not caring what you look like because I've had people show up, not very often, but I had a guy and he looked like he'd just been to the club, and just rolled out of bed, and I was like, "Man." Also, you have to know your audience. We have a screenshot and keystroke that we record of everyone that's working for us while they're working not when they're not. We had one guy who was at a webcam conference and he had his hat sideways and my assistant was like, "Is that okay?" If you live in California that might be okay, but if you're with an older team in Omaha and you have your cap on sideways, it just might not work. I was like, "No. They're in California. It's totally fine." She was like, "Oh, okay." You have got to know your audience, better know your audience. Jason: I think it all boils down to what the entrepreneur wants though too. Before the call, I'd ask you what your Myers-Briggs Type was and you're an ENTJ, so you've got that J in the end. Gwenn: So, I’m Judgy? That means I'm judgy, right? Jason: Yeah. You're judgy which means you're a planner. You want things done a certain way. This details matter to you. I'm a P so I'm all over the place. I'm a bit more open-minded and I love taking you Js and cracking you open a little bit to expose you to some things you weren't exposed to before. Gwenn: I need people like you in my life too because I can't be too in the box. It's so nice to have that fresh [...]. Jason: J from the box for sure. Ps have no box and Js look at us like we're crazy. Some of the Ps that are perceiving, that's what the P stands for, they will take in things from all different sources, all different ideas, and to most Js, that's being so open-minded, their brain is falling out. It's how Js kind of view us sometimes but we need each other. All these other different types. I definitely need Js on my team to run my email, handle my calendar, do all the planning stuff that is not fun for me. You do this virtual team thing, how does somebody start with you if they come to you and they're like, "Hey, Anequim." First, where did that name came from? What does this name mean? Gwenn: I'm going to give you the real answer. We used to be a certified property management and then [...] wanted to sue us because they were like, "We have a certified property manager distinction," or whatever. Jason: Designation. Gwenn: Designation. We were like, “Well, we wanted to rebrand anyway,” because we started from nothing and took any piece of garbage that had a roof on it and then as time went on we became more sophisticated, and wanted to take out nicer properties, but in the local market, we were the low end. We already were going to rebrand, but we didn't want to get sued or threatened of a lawsuit again, so we were like, "We have to have something that's totally unique." Well, it's very hard you guys. It's so hard to find something completely unique. My husband's a pilot for fun and so he loves this airplane called Anequim and it means mako shark in Portuguese, anyway that was like a word we could use that was unique. We got Anequim and then Wistar Group. Wistar is my middle name and they were unique enough that my best friend who is a patent attorney approved them. For better or worse we're Anequim and Wistar Group. Jason: There you go. Alright. Portuguese mako shark. Gwenn: It's also an airplane. Jason: Which has nothing to do with Mexico whatsoever. They don't even speak Spanish. Gwenn: But I'm not going to get sued for it, so you know. Jason: No, it's perfect. It's a unique and original name which is helpful in branding, right? Okay, cool. Now, how does somebody get started with you guys. Somebody comes to you and say, "Hey, I’ve got a problem." How do you know that you can help them? Because I'm sure there are clients that you don't take on and there are clients that aren’t a good fit. Gwenn: There are. In fact, there were two clients yesterday that called me and I was like, "You know what? I think you guys just need to wait for a minute." And that is my thing. We don't sell. We try to make a relationship because if I sell you and then it doesn't work for you, then it creates a lot of heartache and drama for me because I want the person in Mexico to be happy and I want the person in the United States to be happy. What happened yesterday was, this one guy was buying another company, and they already had two employees there, but he hadn't really worked with them yet. I was like, "Hmm." He was going to be managing 400 properties. I felt like his people count was good enough for 400 properties, so I said, "Just take on these two new people. Measure processes and procedures together, make sure it works, and then when you get a handle on them then call me." He was like, "Okay. That's a better idea. That's what I'm going to do." If you call me and it's not going to work for you, I might tell you to do a few things first. Then the other guy called me and I thought again that his head count was already too high. I thought you could make more efficiencies in his software because a lot of people only use 5% of the software that they have purchased. If you have five really expensive employees and 400 units, I kind of think you should work on being more efficient first with your software and then call me. Jason: Yeah, right. Gwenn: Unless, you’re going to transition things—but these were obviously, longer conversations, I'm giving you the shortened versions—so if someone calls me and they're like, "No. I need somebody. I'm working my butt off and I need some relief." Then we'll talk about a job description first because I need to find the right person for this role. I need to know what kind of tasks you want. For instance, if you want someone to be doing a lot of cold calling then that's going to be a different person than someone's who's going to be helping you associate the right invoices with the right property and the right owner, right? We have to make sure we have a good job description. Also, your training is going to be better, it’s going to be a smoother onboarding process if you are really clear about what your needs are. Now, a lot of people will call me and they are just overwhelmed and they'll just be like, "I need a personal assistant." A lot of the times I push back on the personal assistant and I say, "Why do you need a personal assistant?" And they'll be like, "I just hate taking the phone calls. " I say, "Okay. Well, let's find someone to take your phone calls." Really, if you want a personal assistant because you are overwhelmed, think about the things that you hate doing that don't bring you joy, that don't fill you up, and let's give those to someone who's a better fit for those roles, that loves doing those things. Usually, it starts with a conversation about what the pain point is and what people really need, who they already have in their team, and what software they are using. We come up with a plan that would actually help them get what they want. That's kind of my goal. It maybe me, it may not be me, but my goal because I come from the property management world is just to prevent burnout from whoever's calling me. Whatever that looks like. Jason: Yeah, so you're helping them a little bit “KonMari” their time, right? Gwenn: Yes. Jason: And you we're talking about that before. Gwenn: Oh my gosh. Well, I love that. Maybe I should use that, but you have so many things that you have to do. Some people are coaches and that's really important to them, their property managers, and their families. Your time and attention are two of your most important resources and everyone on your team needs you to be using those wisely if you’re the one steering the boat. Jason: Yeah. I'm a big fan or proponent of energy management over time management... Gwenn: Yes. Jason: ...and really identifying what energies you as an entrepreneur versus what drains you because we really afford doing the things that energizes us, we have an endless amount of energy. Like our life and our businesses fills us but if we are doing things that drain us, burnout sets in and it's inevitable, it becomes really difficult. I think it's really important for people to pay attention to their time and what really is giving them momentum. I tell property managers all the time, “Anything that's been sitting on your to-do list for more than a few weeks, you're probably not the person that should be doing it. Let's be honest.” Gwenn: Right. Absolutely. There are people like, you and I we are just talking about how our personalities are different. Find someone who you like working with. Who you enjoy spending time with because it isn't actually an employee essentially just living far away that compliments you and can do the things that you struggle doing. Our role is to help people do that and we also train them on the first day so I have very high anxiety. I take care of things that make me anxious. I always go over the four ways people can die in property management on the first day, carbon monoxide poisoning, natural gas explosion, fire, and a technician being mistaken as an intruder and getting shot, and the importance of asking permission to enter. Those are four things we go over, which is really funny because when we turn over the training to the client, my assistant will always be like, "So, what did you learn in training?" And they're like, "How not to die in property management." The clients are like, "What?" I mean, I told them that we were going to talk about that with the agents but people forget and they're caught off guard. Jason: Four ways to die. Gwenn: Four ways to die, but those are really, really important and it really does happen. And our industry, there's been a number of deaths that we're all aware of, and so it's really important whether you're going to hire someone remotely or not to really discuss what bad things can happen, and how to make sure they don't happen in on-boarding training. The other thing we cover is Fair Housing and American Disabilities Act. That really should be trained every year if that's not on people's schedules for training. Domestically, I don't do this with the remotes, but domestically at our property management company, the other one is sexual harassment prevention training. We have a 70-year-old sales guy and then we have a 21-year-old front office lady. When you have multi-generational employees especially what they think is appropriate is totally different. It's important to discuss that because people aren't trying to be jerks, and they're not trying to be bad people, and they're not trying to offend anyone, it's just that what was totally appropriate in 1950 to talk about in the workplace is different. Also, on the 21-year-old side. I mean, 21-year-old sometimes think everyone's their best friend and they’re hanging out at the bar and it's not true. Having that conversation at the beginning of a relationship with any employee is important. Jason: Okay. Fair Housing and Disabilities Act, sexual harassment training, and four ways to die in property management. Gwenn: Yeah. If you're going to be using webcam, here's another thing. I did have a client who thought that it's totally appropriate to train his new employee without any clothes on, so a word to the wise, keep your clothes on if you are going to be training somebody. People, sometimes just don't know, they just don't know. I'm sure it was hot, it was summer, maybe went out to the pool and came back. It was really not okay. It's another thing to keep in mind. Jason: Policies improve overtime. You know there's something interesting if my webcam policies say, "Don't be naked." It doesn't say that yet. We haven't had that come up yet, but if it does happen, we'll definitely have that in. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: I mean, I had no idea that's going to be an issue but... Jason: Right. You never know until it happens. I think that's how all of the property management contracts evolved over time. Like, "Oh, this one's a weird new situation. Let's avoid that in the future and write that into our contract." Gwenn: Right. Jason: Okay. Somebody comes to you, you start them with some of these things, how are you vetting these Mexican employees, these team members? What are some of the things you go through to ensure that you're getting a good match, you're finding somebody who's really a good fit for a position? Help those that are listening feel safer using Anequim to find them a team member. Gwenn: Sure. The first thing is that they have to fill out an application and upload a video of themselves speaking in English about their hobbies. You find out a lot about people when they think it's appropriate in a video to say about their hobbies and how good their English level is. It also demonstrates that they have some technological ability because they have to upload a video. Jason: Right. Gwenn: We get rid of a lot of applicants right there. If they make it through those two steps, then we have them take a personality test. We use the Culture Index, and the Culture Index indicates whether people have detail orientation or not. Generally speaking, unless I'm hiring for marketing position or outside sales or something, we are going to need detail orientation. We look for that. There are few personality types that we just don't hire at all and we also have a logic-emotional continuum. Anyone who's really low on logic also not pass to the next level. After that if the make it there then they do an initial interview and it's a pretty tough interview. Ensures they have the qualifications and the seriousness that we are looking for. Generally, the pool of candidates that we are looking for have worked previously for a large corporation. So, in the towns where we primarily source our candidates, they work for Nissan or GE or Hewlett-Packard or TATA Consulting, and there's some really big names where they've already one through a lot of the training that you wouldn't need to train a brand new person on. But they've already been through it so they know how to talk on the phone, they know how to deal with conflict in a professional manner, and they know how to write an email. We do benefit from all that corporate training many of our folks have already been through. Jason: Okay. Gwenn: If they make it through the interview then we are going to start calling their references and just make sure those show up well. After that, our clients, if they've made it through all the interviews, we’ve decided this person is worth this amount of money. We have a paying scale based on education level, work experience and we know what kind of job they would fit into then we match them with our clients we have who are looking. The clients get to look at three different candidates, and see if this is a cultural fit for them and if this is someone that's going to work on their team, and that they're going to feel comfortable with on a day to day basis. We always do the interviews in threes. Hopefully, we do our job well enough on the first three know exactly who we want, but if you want to do another round, our job is to make sure people are happy with their candidates. The one negative about working in Mexico—and this is going to be with a lot of the country that you would source from—background checks, it's not the same, there's no government database and even if there was it probably won't be accurate in the way that you and I would expect, so there's no background check policy or way to even do that if you wanted to. We rely a lot on internal references and those networks or people want to give us their best friend and then they internally hold them accountable as well. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: We haven't had any issues with it, but I would suggest with anyone working remotely, you manage your privileges and your software. Rent Manager allows me to obscure social security numbers, credit card numbers, and we have a policy that nobody working from home has access to those, and you have to be in the office if you are going to be taking credit cards or looking at social security numbers. If you have good tight privileges, you don't really have much to worry about by hiring someone remote, and it's just a good policy anyway. Jason: Yeah. Alright. That is kind of the match making process. Gwen: Mmm-hmm. Jason: Then once they pick a candidate, what's the transition like this on the onboarding sort of process and how far does Anequim gets involved? Because I know some property managers are not probably used to having a virtual team member, they are probably going to make some mistakes, they might just say, "Hey, this virtual stuff doesn't work. I don't get it." How do you ensure that the transition is going to be healthy? Gwenn: First of all, we try to get a good plan on before we even get to that place. We have documents on ideal first two weeks of training and talk to them about what that process looks like, talk to them about technology, what kind of phones do you use. We recommend that you listen to calls if you're going to have someone who's the face of your company, and you're not going to be able to overhear them when you walk in the office. Here's a form on monitoring calls and here's the portal so you can see their screenshot and their keystrokes. We try to do all of that before the commitment takes place. Talk about what that looks like, so that when the commitment like, "Yes. I want to move forward," happens they've seen in their minds, "I kind of have an idea what this looks like." We don't want for either the client or the agent to get to a place where it's the first day and they just look at each other in webcam and go, "Okay, what do I do now?" We try to avoid that situation as much as possible, which is why we’re not trying to hard sell anyone. We want someone to be committed to the process and feel somewhat confident. Obviously, you're going to be a little bit nervous if you've never done this before, but that's why we are here to hold your hand, and give you that documentation and talk you through it so that you feel more confident before it actually happens. But then, on the handover meeting you're going to get all of them setup on their computers. You're going to get them to know everybody on your office, taking the laptop around and you're going to say, "Tell us something that people don't know about you." Or, "What are you grateful for today?" You know, a little icebreaker and then you'll get into the tasks. The great thing about working with Mexico is that they're on your time zone. Do you have to be perfect? Do you have to have the perfect documentation? No. Because like any other employee that you hire, you can just say, "Okay. I'm going to show you how to do this." They know it should be written down but it's not, "But you're going to help me write it down because I never had time to do this before. Here's the software where were writing it down. Here's how you're going to get a screenshot using Snagit. I'm going to video record myself going through this process and then make it a pretty process for me and then when it's done and it's all pretty, then you're going to do it." That's possible. Some people are further along in their processes and procedures than others, but by no means you have to have things perfect to move forward to the remote assistance. Jason: Yeah. The Myers-Briggs people with Js a lot of times get really caught up to being perfect before they move forward. They're like, " I have to have every process documented before I could grow my business." Gwenn: No, that's not the real world. I would say progress not perfection, right? I mean, you have to move forward. I'm reading this great book called the Billionaire Coach or the Trillionaire Coach, I think is what’s it called. It's really good. It's on my audible right now. But the guy is like, "Okay. Once you have things down, you have to go, and you have to go fast." I think that sometimes the people who are really into perfection lose sight of go, go fast, so it's always that balancing act. If you're not good at processes and procedures then hire someone to help you do that and just show them on in a video and say, " Okay, for the next three hours you're going to write this down. Okay? Then I'll check in on you in three hours and see how you're doing." Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: That's totally okay. Jason: I like that. Progress over perfection, so what I teach clients is, "Done is better than perfect." It's very similar. Gwenn: It is. Jason: Done is better than perfect. Get it done, you can always redo it later. You can make it better the second time around but having something is better than not having it. The other thing that I'll throw out there, sometimes is that perfect businesses are out of business. So, don't try to make everything so perfect before you move forward. It's the businesses that fail, that make mistakes, that rapidly prototype, that try stuff out and see what doesn't work, they're the ones that move forward faster. Gwenn: And when you have that hard day where things really did fall apart then just go back to the values. Like, "Okay, it fell apart, but I'm suring it up as a value, as a person with values. So, what does that look like?" If you have your values strong and you’re connected to them then when you mess up, if you just go back to that, you'll be fine. Jason: Right. Gwenn: That's how I look at it at least. Jason: That's the foundation. Gwenn: Yeah. Jason: A really strong why and set of values for the business. That's what creates culture in a company. Well, cool. What are some of the questions that property managers ask you that I haven't asked yet? Some of the frequently asked questions, concerns, considerations. Gwenn: The main thing is the role. People are just like, "Okay, everyone's doing VA and I know I should be doing it because I'm just supposed to be more profitable than I am right now, but where the heck do I get started?" Usually, when people ask that, I just tell them because we've been doing this since 2008, how our company is organized because I do feel like we do remote labor as high of a level as you could. You might structure it slightly differently but just to give people an idea because the thing is in people's minds and eyes, they remember virtual assistance. They think, "I need my processes to be perfect. This is someone who can only do route activities, can't think outside the box." All of that is not true. These people from Mexico, can be, if we hire for it, highly educated. We even have some professors on the team. We have some attorneys on the team. Highly-educated people who most certainly are capable of thinking outside the box. Guadalajara, where we source a lot of the people, it's the tech capital of Mexico. When I go to the Christmas Party in Guadalajara, people are speaking Spanish, English, French, Portuguese. It's like an international gathering, like any European city that you'll be at or anything like that. Here's how we're structured. We have 1200 units that we manage. We have three customer service people residing in Mexico who take all the front line calls. We actually call them Solutions Agent instead of Customer Service Agents because they're job is to provide solutions. They don't just read from a script, but they can also talk to tenants about their statement and what it means, what's this maintenance service issue, maintenance charge is for, and help people break a lease, give them information about breaking a lease, changing roommates, tell them if they could have a puppy or not. Actually solve problems that give solutions. They also take all the maintenances services issue and troubleshoot. The great thing is that you don't have a PhoneTree when you call into our office. You just get a person which is a really good customer service. Most property management that I call have a PhoneTree and then you still can't get a hold of everybody. Thinking about what the experiences of an owner calling your main line, and what that feels like, maybe important in many of the markets that people are in. Once someone takes their phone call, any elevated issues will go to the assistant property manager. Let's just take a simple thing, it's not even elevated but like a service issue. We’ll go from customer service agent, we'll take everything from the service issue then it goes to what we call the virgin list, the assistant property manager review that—and we have three of those, by the way, one for each property manager has an assistant who's a true assistant—and they look at all the service issues that come in and decide whether our internal maintenance team can handle it or if it needs to go into a vendor. If it needs to go to a vendor then they're in charge of putting a budget on it, and based on the contract, whatever the owner wants, and then signing it to a vendor and then following up on that. If it goes to our internal team, then another woman in Mexico who's the Maintenance Dispatcher decide whose list it goes on out of the 15 maintenance people that we have. Her job is to manage those guys' schedules and make sure they're busy. Make sure they have work and make sure that they're going to a place that makes sense. Then other people that we have is accounting. We have two people in accounting and collections. They don’t just do accounting but they're also are like, "Why is this maintenance guy going to store three times in a day?" He's like actually analyzing the invoices and saying, "This price doesn't make any sense." We have two people there. We have Applications Underwriter who does the applications in Mexico as well and a marketing person in Mexico. I feel like I'm forgetting somebody. I think that's it. Jason: Anything on the sales BDM side? Gwenn: No. My market, we get a lot of business just coming in the door so we don't have a BDM. We have some sales people that are on a commission basis but we don't have an official BDM role. We actually decided not to get one this year which is weird because sales always pay for itself, but when we look at the numbers in our market, it didn't make sense to get someone at that price point. Instead we’re buying a company in another market and growing that way, but that deal's not totally done yet. Jason: Right. Gwenn: Those are the people that we have in Mexico. Internally, we have a front office lady, a leasing agent, operations manager, a maintenance manager, and right now, we only have two property managers. And then my husband runs the company and puts his finger in everything. That's pretty lean for 1200 units, it's pretty a lean shop. Jason: Yeah, that's really lean. Then you have a pretty decent process documentation, I would imagine as well. Gwenn: We use SweetProcess, where we house our processes and procedures and we’re kind of obsessed with it. We use EOS so we’re using the traction book. We've been doing that for 2 ½ years now and love it. That's how we stay organized and set our goals and priorities and make sure that we don't get lost in the day to day task and know where we’re going on a daily basis. Jason: Yeah. I think every business, eventually, as they evolve, they need a planning system which you had mentioned EOS. Every business also needs a process system, some system for documenting process and leveraging these processes. We use Process Tree internally, which works out really well. Gwenn: And I like Process Tree, but it's more expensive than SweetProcess. It depends on what your needs are, but I would recommend looking at both and determining what's better for your organization. But yeah, I like both those systems a lot. Jason: Every business needs some sort of communication system in the business as well. As a team, we use Basecamp as our communication platform to communicate internally, and then you need a client supporting communication system. A lot of people are using Help Scout or Intercom, or one of these knowledge based support systems. There's probably other systems. I'm forgetting off the top of my head, but business really need all these different systems in place. Once you have these systems in place, it facilitates and enables your team to really do well and communicate and understand where the company is headed and get in alignment with your vision and your goals. It's a big deal. Gwenn: Yes. There's a lot to take on, but again, people don't have to be perfect. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: Because when you say that it's like, "Oh my god, that's so overwhelming." But it doesn't have to. Jason: One thing at a time. Yeah. Gwenn: One thing at a time, Yeah. Jason: Cool. Cool. Gwenn: That's why I like EOS though because it takes that overwhelming. The, "Oh my god we have 10 million things we have to do this year," and it forces you to say, "Okay. How much energy do we really have and what are the priorities out of my list of million things that I'm going to do in these three months?" It actually helps you get more of that done than you would if you just look at the long list. Jason: Yeah. It has an etymology that's very similar to a lot of business planning systems and most every business planning system has annual objectives, quarterly objectives, monthly, and these things break down and the idea is, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." Gwenn: Right. Jason: It’s like these elephants, you break them down in a 90 day, 30 days, and then even weekly commitments as a team. But a lot of business don't have any sort of planning system in place, so they're hitting zero objectives because they really don't really have any, and there's no clarity around it. They’re just winging it and the entrepreneur's, they're crazy. Entrepreneurs come into the room and says changes every week, "Hey, guys. I got this great idea." And they lob a grenade in the middle of the room, pull the pin and lob this grenade and walk out. They're excited and pumped out and the team are like, "What are we going to do with this thing?" Having those systems in place can be really helpful especially if you have virtual team members because then it makes a lot of difference for everybody to be on the same page. Gwenn: People, historically, have thought like, "Oh, were going to do all these planning and then we'll tell them later what we planned." But I recommend having the virtual team members in on all of those meetings. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: Here's one tip that has really helped us. We have the three customer service agents. Every morning at 10 o'clock they meet with the Operations Manager and just say, "Oh, this person is out of the office today. They have a dentist appointment at 2:00 PM and it's whoever's birthday. Our swing thought for the day is people can hear you smile. In the call monitoring, I've noticed that there's not been so much smiling on there, so let's keep that in mind for today. Today's contest for online reviews, we’re still giving $50 certificates to anyone who gets an online review." Whatever you have going on and just touching base for 10 minutes a day makes all the difference for someone whose remote. When you have your weekly EOS meeting, include them and what you're talking about. If they feel included in the process and in your mission, people don't leave. We've had the same employees at Wistar Group for six, eight, I think, is it nine years. I think we have two employees who've been with us for nine years. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: That's the key to getting the virtual or the remote members totally immersed in your culture. Jason: Yeah. They need to be a part of it, ironically, right? Gwenn: Absolutely. Jason: Yeah. I'm a big proponent of making sure that your team members are involved in outcomes instead of being micromanaged. Give them outcomes and let them innovate and you'll be surprised with what they can come up with. It might not be the way you would do it, it might be better. A lot of times, as entrepreneurs, we think we have it all figured out. We need to tell our team members, "Here are the steps. Do this exactly this way." When it comes to goal setting, goals are outcomes. Assign an outcome to somebody, let them own it, and I think you'll be surprised at the results they can create. Getting your team all involved in it, some of those meetings have been really eye opening for me because I had my set of ideas. I thought this is how the whole world looks and then I went around and asked my team members, "Here's this outcome. What ideas you guys have that can do it?" My graphic designer has a totally different idea than I would have. My head of fulfillment has totally different ideas than I would have. They bring this perspective and all these ideas were really good. I'm like, "Yes. We should do that, maybe not that, that one's great." I think you don't want to be the emperor with no clothes running a company. That's how you do that, is by allowing your team members to have a voice and be involved in the process. Gwenn: I love that. Actually, we teach a version of that on the first day of training. Its form this article that you can get on the internet called Who's Got the Monkey. Jason: Okay. Gwen: It's the number one reprinted article from the Harvard Business Review of all time. I only came across it out of massive failure years ago. Where I took my team members out to lunch and I thought they would tell me how much they love their job and they were like, "No! We don't love it. You guys never listen to us." I was like, "What?" They're like, "Yeah. We don't even bring up ideas to you anymore because you are never going to listen to them anyway." I was like, "Oh my god. This is terrible." I found the article on the internet and we came and have a change management process. We asked our team members to own their ideas. The first steps are people come to meeting and say, "Hey, not all ideas are good ideas, but here's my idea." That allows people to save face and be vulnerable and say what they're afraid to say in the meeting. Then they have to bring everything to the meeting—the subsequent meetings—to move the idea forward... Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: ...so that the decision maker can just say yay or nay. Sometimes, there's a little homework on the decision maker’s part, but we try to make it as minimal as possible. I take it from sale, in sales people are always eternally optimistic and they think everything's going to close. My way of determining if it's going to actually close or not is, "Is your name on the prospect’s calendar for another meeting? If it's not, then your deal is dead." Just black and white. Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: If it's not there, you can revive it, but you better get a meeting out there. Same thing with ideas, "If your name in this meeting is not on anyone else's calendar, your idea’s dead." Just know that because when people feel badly about their job, when they get vulnerable, they say it and their manager is like, "Oh, that's a great idea," and then they wait three months and nothing happens to it, that really hurts morale. Giving them the honest, "Hey, it’s not moving forward if there's not a meeting" Jason: Yeah. Gwenn: And having them own that helps give them agency over their idea. Jason: Yeah, I love it. Cool. Let's wrap this up, Gwenn. I think this has been really helpful. I think we talked about some really cool ideas. I think, hopefully, some listeners are a little bit more open to having some team members that are not sitting in their physical office. How can people get in touch with you if they are interested in learning more? Gwenn: Well, I'm on Facebook. If you want to send me a message at Gwenn W. Aspen, I'd love to meet you there. Additionally, we have a website anequim.net and you can fill out a form, we'll get right back to you there, or you can email me at gaspen@anequim.net. But we love to help people, and like I said, if you just want to bounce ideas off whether this is a good idea or not, we can talk about your specific situation. Jason: Awesome. Gwenn, thank you so much for coming into this show. Gwenn: Thank you, Jason. It's been so fun. I really appreciate you having me. Jason: Alright. We'll let you go now. Alright. Bye, Gwenn. Gwenn: Bye. Jason: So, there you have it. Check them out at anequim.net. For those that are listening for the first time or checking us out, we really appreciate you subscribing. If you’re listening on YouTube or watching on YouTube or listening on iTunes, we would appreciate—if you are on iTunes—you give us your feedback. We would love to hear your real and raw feedback. Again, give us a review on there. It will be really helpful especially if you liked the show. We would love that, that gets us excited. Then make sure you get inside our community which is doorgrowclub.com. This is a Facebook group where you get to hang out with other property management entrepreneurs, all the Door Grow Hackers, connect with us, and see future episodes. We livestream these episodes into that group so you won't miss a beat. Check us out there at doorgrowclub.com. If you are interested in growing your business then reach out to us doorgrow.com. We would love to help you and see if we can help you grow your business. Until next time everybody, to our mutual growth.

In the United States, millions of residential properties are owned and rented out by individual landlords, not professional property managers. Why not protect yourself from painful experiences with tenants, have peace of mind, and leave it to the professionals? Today, I am talking to Dave Holt of SureVestor, which provides Scheer Landlord Protection. This insurance plan financially protects landlords and property managers from tenant-related risks. SureVestor is at the forefront of leading a trend that can significantly help grow the industry. You’ll Learn... [01:45] Passion for Property Management: Dave joined NARPM nearly 30 years ago and has gone through its entire chain of command. [02:51] Reasons why Scheer Landlord Protection was brought to America: Significant growth impact on property management industry in Australia Way to make, but not lose money Opportunity to turn self-managed landlords into professional property managers [05:22] Is the United States ready for similar level of growth? Whether companies grow exponentially, or at their own pace, insurance can help them get there. [07:06] Can't control what happens in people's lives; when bad things happen to good tenants, property managers experience frustration and stress. [08:05] Who’s to blame? Things happen that create a financial burden; Scheer Landlord Protection covers income loss for landlords and property managers. [09:32] Malicious Damage by Tenants: Insurance covers holes in walls, cabinets ripped off walls, sand poured down drains, etc. [09:47] Blanket of Coverage: Indirect and direct benefits create safety for all parties. [13:45] Property manager requirement helps insurance company mitigate risk. [16:33] Competition: Focusing on criteria of quantity over quality. Most property managers don’t have an insurance license; be compliant and legal to protect industry. [22:40] Tiered Pricing: Clients know the cost to be protected. [24:58] FAQs: How do I market this to my owners? How can I implement it? Follow SureVestor’s steps to success. Tweetables Scheer Landlord Protection: Grow exponentially, or at your own pace. When bad things happen to good tenants, property managers get stressed out. For most landlords, rental property is their most expensive investment. Scheer Landlord Protection: Covers malicious damage, eviction costs, and loss of rent. Resources SureVestor Dave Holt’s Email Dave Holt’s Phone Number: 612-465-0421 SureVestor’s Blog National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) California NARPM Terri Scheer Lloyd's of London The Iceberg Report U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) 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. I have a guest today named Dave Holt. Dave is here talking with me about landlord protection insurance from SureVestor. Dave, welcome to the show. Dave: Thanks, Jason. I appreciate it. Jason: I just got to see you at CALNARPM in your British soldier outfit that you had there. I want to connect with you a little bit here. Give us a little bit about background on how you got into this industry and into this space. Dave: Yeah, you bet. I've been in property management, that's really my industry. I've been in the business for over 30 years. I started managing for HUD back in the mid-80s, got introduced to property management in single-family homes, and started my fee management company in the late ‘80s. That's where I ran into a fledgling organization that was just starting out called NARPM. I got involved with NARPM early on. I actually started in 1990. I've been a member ever since and gone through the whole chain of command there. Property management is my passion. Throughout that whole process, I've met with thousands of property managers throughout the years. Like you, Jason, always looking to see how we can improve the industry and came across an opportunity. We're actually teaching over Australia. Both my partners, Kevin Knight and Todd Breen, had taught over there. We came across a product that was over Australia and had been there for 25 years. We're wondering, "Why isn't that here in the US?" Actually, long story short, joint ventured with the creator of the product from Australia, Terri Scheer, it still sells under her name over there, Terri Scheer insurance. She has since sold her business over there. Now, has joined forces with us to bring the product here to the US. Jason: Awesome. My understanding of that is that this product has significant impact on the growth of industry as a whole in Australia. Dave: Yeah, that's very true, that's one of the reasons why we wanted to bring it here, it's not just something, "Hey, here's something that we can make money doing," that really wasn't the crux of what we bought it here for, and you hit it on the head. What we look at in our industry here in the US, it's 15 times the size of Australia. When you look at the number of properties that are owned here by individual landlords, it's over 15 million single-family homes that are actually owned and rented out, a small fraction of those is handled professionally by us professional property managers. If we have an opportunity to bring a product here that can help drawing those self-managed landlords to us as professional property managers, that's what we're looking to do. Over in Australia, that actually happened. About 15%, increased in the business for professional property managers because the beauty of this product is that it's only available for landlords that are professionally managed and we did that intentionally, we did that over in Australia as well. Those self-managed landlords have to come to us as professionals in order to get this product. Hence, we're looking to be increasing the number of properties that are managed by us, professionals. Jason: Now, I have heard stats thrown around like the property management industry in Australia grew about 25% in a single decade. I don't know if that's accurate, but that sounds pretty incredible. I also have heard that they have about 80% of single-family residential is professionally managed. Dave: That's right. Jason: Here in the US, according to the [...] report, we're at about 30%. If the industry here could grow in a decade to maybe about 25%, that would mean that we would pretty much double in size. I don't think there are enough management companies in the US right now that can handle that level of growth. That would mean we either need to double the amount of companies that exist now—that's a lot—or each company would need to double in size. I think that would be incredibly painful for most business owners. Dave: Maybe, maybe not. Obviously, your DoorGrow hackers are looking to be growing that's why they're part of your endeavor. It's not that they have to grow exponentially, but they can grow at their own pace. Certainly, it's something that, if they can use the insurance to help them get there, that's what we're all about, and looking to help them do. Yes, we saw it happen over Australia, we don't see why we can't replicate that here. Jason: Let's break this down, and help people understand. Maybe we start from the point of, how do you sell this product, but let's first talk clearly of what is it. What is SureVestor? What is this insurance product? Then I would love to get into basically talking about what's in it for the homeowner? How do you sell this to them? We get into those two things, and then I think the light bulbs will start to go on, and they can start to see how this can be a facilitator of growth here in the US. Dave: You bet. It's probably better to start from my experience as a property manager. Obviously, we're all property managers. Really, the frustrations that we've experienced, as property managers over the years, is when bad things happen to our good tenants is really the situation. It's very stressful. We know that we do a professional job of screening our tenants and getting the best quality tenants for our landlords, but we can't control what happens in people's lives, whether it's a job loss, a divorce, a death in the family—things that can happen in someone's lives that create a situation of financial burden. Now, all of a sudden, if they're renting a property, they may be more inclined to skip or stay there, and not pay the rent, and now, we have to evict them as professionals. It's very painful. For a lot of us in the single-family space, those owners owned one property. If something bad happens to their tenants, and now all of a sudden they're out of three months of rent because of it, that's a lot of their income. A lot of them say, "You know what, this isn't for me." They decide to sell or worst, they blame us as the property manager because we're the ones who screen the tenants, and they say, "It's your fault that this happened. I'm going to somebody else." In either case, we've lost the business. If we had a product, which we do now, through SureVestor and sure landlord protection insurance, that covers the loss of rent for those type of things; a tenant skips, they have to be evicted, they are victims of violence—we've had that happen as well—or there's a death of a sole tenant, or murder, or suicide. I've experienced all of those over the 30 plus years of business. That rent then is not paid, and our landlord is out of money. Us, as property managers, most of us are charging our management fee based on the rents collected, and if that rent isn't collected, we're not getting paid either. This insurance covers all that. It covers it for the landlord. It covers it for the property managers as well. Then, there are some additional benefits. Malicious damage caused by the tenants, that's something that we've experienced as well. They punched holes in the walls, ripped cabinets off the walls, they pour sand on the drains, things that are malicious, there's coverage for that. There's coverage for theft and damage due to theft. There's the eviction fees and legal offense if the tenant brings it to trial. There's the covering of the sheriff cost if you have to get a writ and go through that whole process. We even have lockbox coverage for a digital lockbox. For property managers who are now doing self-showings, many times, they get some pushback from their landlord clients about doing that because of, "Well, what happens if." Now, there's some coverage for that as well and then, rekeying of the locks after those covered events happen. It's a way where we can, with the insurance, make that landlord whole and also make us whole as property managers. One other thing too, a lot of us as property managers are guaranteeing our tenants for some period of time. If something does happen to that tenant and they breach the lease, we will re-lease the property for nothing, for no charge, for our landlord. Now, when you have insurance that covers the loss of rent, the malicious damage, the eviction cost, and those types of things, you now have the security deposit available to cover your re-leasing fees among other things. Jason: There could be divorce, job loss, death of a family, violence, malicious damage, malicious damage theft. Then things like, eviction fees, legal fees, writ fees, lockbox coverage, rekeying after theft. It really creates this safety for all parties involved. Dave: Absolutely. When you think about it, for most of our landlord clients, their rental property is the most expensive investment they have. They get dwelling coverage because that's all they know. They get dwelling coverage to cover the catastrophe-type of damage, the fires, and things that can happen to the property. The things that happen more frequently are the things that we're covering—the loss of rent because a tenant skips, they maliciously damage the property and the other things that we went through. Why wouldn’t they get coverage to give them that peace of mind, so when those things happen to their tenant, now, they're protected as well? It gives them an overall blanket of coverage, that gives them that peace of mind so now, they can rent their property with confidence, and hopefully, stay with us as property managers longer because they don't have to have that fear of, "What if?" Because now they're going to have coverage for that. Hopefully, draw in more landlord clients that might have that fear. Some of them decide, they just want to sell to begin with because they go, "You know what? I can't afford a loss. I can't afford one of those situations that happen, and now I'm out of rent, and I've got a mortgage to pay." It's a way where we can keep new owners and a way where we can attract new owners as well to us. Jason: Yeah. Creating this blanket of coverage sounds really significant and important. If it's not there, then even having a rental property investment can be a risk. Maybe it's a risk that a lot of property owners are either ignoring or aren't aware of if they're actually involved in real estate investing. There's a lot of self-managing homeowners that are like, "Oh, it's easy. I just need a tenant." Famous last words. Then they start running into problems, but even for property management business owners, you don't want to be the fall guy or gal for those problems when they happen, you want your business to be healthy. Since this is so important, to have this blanket of coverage, as you call it, and it has such an impact in Australia, is this something that only property managers have access to, why don't people just go and get these policies directly and self-manage, how's this driving people towards property managers? Dave: We have purposely set it up where individual landlords have to go through a professional property manager to get this coverage. If a landlord goes on to our page and looks at the, "For landlords," it actually, guides them through the process and says, "Do you have a professional property manager?" If they don't, we actually find one for them. One of our property managers at SureVestor and we refer them to them and get them new business that way, as well. Jason: The requirement of them to have a property manager probably also helps the insurance company mitigate their own risk. Dave: You got it. Absolutely. Over in Australia, it's been around for 25 plus years. Now, it's open to individual landlords over there now because it's a more mature product. Starting out, our underwriters wanted to kind of mimic the initial process that Australia took, which was making it available only for landlords that were professionally managed, that's something that really resonated with us, not just because of the underwriting of it, but more so, to help bring in the self-managed landlords to us, as professionals, and help us grow our businesses. Jason: Alright. I'm going to give you an opportunity to throw stones at the competition a little bit. The competition is anything that people might perceive as something similar or reason not to use something like SureVestor. Are there competitors that just go direct or don't have that sort of stipulation that you have to use a property manager, and have some sort of insurance-like product? Dave: Yeah. I'm not aware of it. There are some startups that are happening now. Obviously, when something’s out in the cosmos, we're not the only ones thinking about it, there are certainly other companies out there that are starting, I know a couple of them. I'm not necessarily sure that they're going direct to the landlord or not, one might be, but that's just because my thinking would be, "They don't see the risk." But we know our business, and we’re property managers-first, and so we want to be helping our colleagues grow. One of the ways to do it is to make it only available for landlords that are professionally managed. We know that we do things professionally. A lot of self-managed landlords, they don't follow the same criteria. Some of them do, but a lot of them just do the, "You look good," the feel test. Say, "Oh, yeah. He seemed like a really nice person. Go ahead and rent my property." Then they find out it's not so safe after all. We decided not to do that. We wanted to have it available just for the landlords that are professionally managed. I can't comment on any competition that's doing it, why they do that, other than, they just want to try to get as many as they can, they're focused on the numbers. That's not our intent. Our intent first is to provide a great product to our property management colleagues that can help them retain landlord clients, and help them bring out new ones. Jason: Right. I would imagine that since you've got these different parties involved, you've got property manager, you've got renter, you've got homeowner, and then anybody else could get into the mix in any of the drama that ensues with all of these—this really reduces the risk for all parties. I imagine there's products out there that look similar on the surface, but somebody's getting the short end of the stick, I think that would be dangerous. Regardless of who that is, it's going to end up as a problem for everybody. It makes sense that you guys are doing it right, focusing on making sure that this, really is, the best option for everybody involved and that a professional manager is involved in this process. That's exactly right. We have vetted this thing over three-and-a-half years. It started from the foundation and make sure that we had everything in place to make sure that our industry is covered, and we're providing the best quality to our landlord clients. That takes a lot of work getting that together that's why we have the world-renowned, Terri Scheer, started this. This whole thing. I mean, every single company has mimicked what she's doing, if there are any copycats around because she was the first. We have Lloyd's of London as our underwriters. The first and the largest insuring entity syndicates in the world covering this type of thing. It gives us more security and backing for our landlord clients and our property managers. The thing that property managers, when they're looking out what other competition there is out there, they've got to be really careful when people are saying, "Hey, you can monetize this, you can make money as a new revenue stream," and so forth. Most property managers are not licensed in insurance. In insurance, similar to our property management industry, is very heavily regulated. If you're doing things that look and sound like insurance, for example, you have certain programs whether it's guarantees or other types of protection programs that you're making money off of, that can be construed as selling insurance. If you don't have a license that can be an issue. Everything that we're putting together is legal. The ways that we're making this available for landlord clients, and for property managers, and even starting to create processes where they can benefit better from it, that's what we're all about—to make sure we're protecting our industry. Jason: Yeah. This is a common thing. A lot of property managers, especially the more entrepreneurial ones, get really creative, and they're thinking, "Man, I got this great idea for this new gimmick or this new thing. I can sell this guarantee, this warranty, this protection." It's almost like insurance. It works almost like insurance. There are some significant red flags that they could be putting themselves into some serious legal liability. Dave: That's exactly right. Jason: They're basically, doing insurance without a license. You need to be careful. You guys help them do it the right way. Now, you had mentioned, they're doing it to generate revenue. Now with your service, property managers can make some money too, right, they're not just lowering risk? Dave: When we're saying making money, the benefits are more indirect than direct. For example, as I mentioned, when the rent isn't paid, the management isn't getting their management fee. When the insurance is covering the rent, now the rent is paid because of the insurance, the property manager collects their management fee. Yes, that's a direct benefit, that's income to them. Most of the property managers have some sort of guarantee for the tenants, as I mentioned. When something bad happens, and they have to re-lease the property, that's a lot of out of pocket for them. Now, when the insurance is covering that loss of rent, that deposit doesn't have to go those things which it typically, does. Now, you have that deposit available to pay the re-leasing fee that the tenant would otherwise owe you as a property manager. You're making money indirectly through that. Here's another idea, Jason, that a lot of property managers, including myself, we'd gone to tiered pricing. What tiered pricing is that you have different levels of pricing for your landlord clients. Usually, your first tier is leasing-only, your middle tier is your traditional management, so it's an a la carte, you're paying for whatever service you get, your management fees, your lease fees, your inspection, your evictions—all that stuff is an additional cost. Then you have your top tier and the top tier is an all-inclusive or mostly inclusive, type of tier. You can charge more for that tier. What property managers are doing is they're paying for the insurance in their top tier, and so it makes that top tier more valuable in the eyes of, obviously, of the landlord client. That landlord goes, "Well, I mean, I can pay this amount and know what all of my costs are. I can get the insurance to cover in the event of a bad thing happening to my tenant." That's a more predictable result for an investor. They know that cost, they know that they have the protection, and that gives them that peace of mind. That's a process that a lot of property managers are going to. In the top tier, even though you can't upcharge the insurance, you can charge higher to be including all of your charges, all of your fees, into one. Jason: Got it. They fold it into that. Makes sense. In that situation then it becomes an additional value add that allows them to sell their services at a higher price point. Dave: You bet. The insurance help do that and they make more money, you bet. Jason: There you go. Alright, awesome. Dave: Lastly, we are in the process of creating a way where we can legally compensate the property managers. It's something that they're not prepared at this point, to go through in detail, but I would welcome property managers to contact me. I'm more than happy to go through that process with them. Jason: Cool. Okay, great. What are some of the most common questions that you're getting from people that are maybe skeptical or concerned? What are some of the initial questions that property managers might ask about this? Dave: The first is, “How do I market this to my owners? What do I do?” Obviously, we got two parts of that: we have our current owners, and then we have new owners. What we have done is put together the steps to help them with their current owners, for one, and help them bring in new owners. As property managers ourselves, we know we're very busy. We have a hard time implementing things because we are very busy. We get sucked into the day-to-day grind of property management. It's probably what's happening right now. It's the last day of the month. Most property managers are out there doing their move out inspections, move-ins, and doing all that kind of stuff, they're busy. Trying to implement a new thing is always a challenge. We know that because we're property managers too. We've created those steps to help them do it. We've done it for them. We have all the email templates that they send to their current clients, for example. We have the schedule all laid out so that they can just send them out. We have what's called an opt-in, opt-out form. The beauty of that is it gives them a tool—a risk management tool—to use where they can send that out in the email. Just like here, "I'm opting in," and this is for the owner, their landlord client. "I'm opting into this coverage, and this is what I want." It's directing to the property manager, or it's saying, "No. I'm not interested at this time." Now, the property manager has a form. Six months later, when their tenant has to be evicted, and they've opted out with that coverage, if that landlord is coming to the property manager complaining about it, they can say, "We did our duty of care. We told you about this insurance. You opted out of it, don't blame me." We have that. We also have the disclosures and opt-ins that they use in their management agreement. Personally, even if my BDM, my Business Development Manager, who's talking to brand-new owners hasn't mentioned anything about the insurance, they see it in my management agreement. It's already laid out, and we have that addendum of it available for them and their management agreements. That's part of it. The next part is the whole part of bringing on and using it as a point of difference for their new clients. We have scripts that they can use to help in that initial conversation. Again, we have the information that they can use in their property management agreement both—if they're just doing regular pricing, and if they're doing tiered pricing—so we have both. Then we have the marketing information that they can embed, and put on their website with video clips and so forth. We've done all of that for them, so they don't have to recreate it. Our last step is on all implementation. We walk them through the steps of implementing it all. It's really quite simple. A lot of the marketing too, we have what we call a WDIFY, we-do-it-for-you process, and we can even help them do a lot of that marketing as well. Many of your DoorGrow hackers may recall Darren Hunter and Deniz Yusuf because they were at your event just last year. They have put together, since they know this insurance intimately, both of them being from Australia, they have helped put together a whole orientation for BDMs on how to be better at utilizing, not just the insurance, but utilizing tools to help draw new accounts to them. We have that on our site, on our blog site. It's a whole 45 minutes of them going through with their best practices and how to utilize the insurance as that point of difference to draw in new business for them. Jason: Cool. Dave: There are just a lot of tools that we have to make it simple for the property managers because again, we know it's challenging for them to get things implemented. Jason: The number one challenge in any new software, or any new system, or any new tool, is adoption. It sounds like you guys really helped lubricate that process, make it smooth, and make it easy. That's one of the biggest challenges, or complaints when people get into some new system or some new tool or service is, they just don't have the level of support that they need. That's one of the biggest challenges. It sounds like you guys really put a lot of energy and effort into making sure that they have what they need in order to succeed. I mean, the first challenge, making sure they've got the right vehicle, it sounds like—with the backing of Lloyd’s as an underwriter and everything—this is like the premier vehicle for this. Then the next question that a business owner would have is, "Well, can I do it? Is this possible?" It sounds like you've got the support, the tools, and the resources that they need. The last concern that people might have is what about external factors? What about the market? Could this go away? Could the government impact us? These sort of things. Are there any potential challenges there? It sounds like you guys have dealt with this stuff to make sure everything's compliant and legal. Dave: There's really no concern there. We just expect that to become more commonplace like it has been over in Australia. For those in your group that aren't familiar with Australia, we consider it almost advanced in property management. I say that because they are even more heavily regulated than we are, it just draws to making them more professional, and so they've got to do things to protect themselves and protect their owners. They're always thinking of new ways. Hence, why this insurance started 25 years ago or so. In a government, in a country that is very highly regulated, it's done nothing but expand. Over here, I don't see it going away. I see it expanding. I see it becoming more commonplace, especially as we're seeing after the global financial crisis, more and more, not just individual investors, but huge hedge funds coming in and buying real estate. Rental property, compared to homeownership, is increasing. As that continues to be the trend, more and more investors and landlords, in general, are going to want to protect themselves, and protect their investment because as I mentioned, it's the most expensive investment that a lot of them have, they want that peace of mind, they want more consistency, and predictability. When you have an insurance product like this, that they can get for as little as $1 a day, I mean, come on, it's a no brainer. We really think that this will become more commonplace. It's already in the insurance industry that's very highly regulated. The things that we go through as far as auditing and making sure that everything's done right is a continual process. We have vetted this to make sure that it is done right and protecting our landlords and protecting our property management colleagues. Jason: Love it. Most of the vendors that we handed out awards to for our DoorGrow Awards for 2018 were because they were the best in class, they were the leaders in a competitive space, that they'd gotten the most attention inside of our DoorGrow Club Facebook Group, they consistently were seen as a leader. We gave SureVestor an award, and it was for this reason because I do see this could be a game changer for the industry. We gave SureVestor, for 2018, the Game Changer Award, was what we called that award. I think, really, SureVestor's at the forefront leading a trend and a movement that I think is going to be happening here in the US, that I think can significantly help the industry, and help grow it, and help lower the risk of investors, and help bring people to the property management space. Property managers lower risk and SureVestor helps lower risk, I think combined, it really can give the property management a much better name here in the US, where people, having managed their biggest asset or investment ever—or whatever you want to call it—that they might ever be dealing with, and keep that risk low. Dave, great to have you on the show. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this. How can people get in touch with SureVestor? What's the next step for people that are listening or watching this later that are interested in finding it out more? Dave: You bet. Thank you. They can go to our website, real simple, surevestor.com. They can contact me as well, daveholt@surevestor.com or they can call me 612-465-0421. Happy to walk them through, happy to guide them through the process, and answer any questions they have. We're just looking to provide a great product to our industry. We really appreciate what you're doing as well, Jason. We think DoorGrow is really on the number. We're happy to support it anyway we can. Jason: Awesome. I appreciate it. Always fun for me to connect with other vendors and other people in the space that have a similar vision and mission for the industry, of helping it grow. Let's change it together. I appreciate you coming on, Dave. Thank you so much. I will let you go. Dave: Alright. Thanks again. Jason: That was surevestor.com. They don't pay me anything. I just think it's exciting. People probably wonder sometimes. Anyway, check them out. If you are not inside of our Facebook group, you're probably missing out on the best tools and the vendors. You're probably missing out on some great fee ideas. You're probably also not super connected to DoorGrow. We would love to help facilitate the growth in your business. I would love to be your coach. I would love to be your consultant to help you do what I've helped lots and lots of clients do which is, add easily, 100 extra doors to your business. If that sounds interesting to you, make sure you reach out to us at doorgrow.com and get inside our community, our Facebook group, community connected to this. Become a DoorGrow hacker. That is by going to doorgrowclub.com and you can join us there. 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.

Building your property management business and team can be challenging. As a business owner and entrepreneur, you are wired to fix problems. So, get out of the way, and hire people who have different skill sets to solve them. Today, I am talking Melissa Prandi of PRANDI Property Management. Everybody in the National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) knows her name. She helped establish it and has been in the property management business for 37 years. You’ll Learn... [03:13] Brand new baby, brand new company, but no bank loan. [04:23] Beginning of NARPM and best practices for property management software. [05:25] Solopreneur Sandtrap: Can only handle 50-60 doors before getting stuck. [05:48] Team Sandtrap: Bottleneck of 200-400 doors when building a team, creating a culture, and systemizing processes become painful. [06:33] How to build a team: Different personalities and skill sets. [09:15] Success comes with your willingness to change. [12:15] Good at growing the company and letting people grow or go. [14:50] End-of-the-day (EOD) Report: Rate your day, workload, challenges. [15:50] Working from home: Nobody can touch you; a physical disconnect. [16:44] Modes of Communication: Basecamp, Voxer, and email. Analyze styles to know what tools to use. [21:10] Entrepreneur’s Ego: Nobody can do it as good as me. [24:57] It’s not always about business. Something’s going on. What can I do to help? [28:42] Face-time and morning connections to catch awesomeness and say thanks. [31:30] Making mistakes and ‘aha’ moments; what did you do/should have done? [34:15] Be a student and fan of what works, and be willing to fail. Never stop learning; speak and teach. Share your knowledge because people soak it up. [38:20] Keep yourself well to be a good leader. Health is #1 thing to impact productivity. [44:40] Reach out and lean on others who have been through the same things. Tweetables Success comes with your willingness to change. Be a student and fan of what works and be willing to fail. To grow your business, you have to build a community. You can’t do everything. Listening to chipmunks all day long telling you what needs to happen. Resources Melissa Prandi PRANDI Property Management NARPM Tony Robbins: DiSC Personality Test Basecamp Voxer Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen by Steve Sims EMDR Therapy DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube 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, 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, I have a very special guest, Melissa Prandi. Melissa, welcome to the DoorGrow Show. Melissa: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Jason: Melissa, you are practically synonymous with NARPM, you helped found NARPM, you have everybody in NARPM knows you, and you have been involved in property management for how many years now? Melissa: Thirty-seven years. March 27. Jason: Thirty-seven years which is almost my entire life, right? Melissa: You have to say that, yup. Jason: Which is amazing. You have tons of experience, you are this phenomenal character and charismatic person. Everybody’s been telling me I have to get Melissa on the show. I’m really excited for you to be here. Maybe the place to start would be to why don’t you share with everybody your story? How did you get started in property management all that time ago? What crazy idea popped in your head to make you decide that [...] Melissa: There’s a lot of crazy [...]. I have to say I started in my company March 27, 1982 as a receptionist. I came in, all of my friends have gone off to college, I said, “I’m not going to afford to go to college. I’m going to work three jobs.” So, I came in, that was one of my three jobs, I was a receptionist at a property management company. I worked there 5½ years. This is great because women love this part of the story. When I went out on maternity leave on a Wednesday at five o’clock, I went grocery shopping Thursday and Friday morning I went into labor. If you know where I live, I’m in Marin County just north of San Francisco and I had to cross the Golden Gate bridge. I got to the hospital at 10 minutes to eight in the morning, I [...] 10 minutes to nine in the morning, said, “Okay, give me my [...] I have things to do with backup,” went home the same day. Jason: What? Melissa: Yeah. I had this new baby boy, Matt, many people know Matt, and Monday morning the owners of my company called and said, “We’re going to sell this company. If you don’t buy it, you’re going to be out of the job.” I didn’t take too long. I said, “Oh, you know. Hmm, I have a new baby. Hmm,” and I’m going to have two new babies. Sure enough, I made arrangements. I went to my dad and said, “Dad, I want to buy this company.” He goes, “Really?” and I said, “Yeah, I want to buy it.” He said, “All right,” and I said, “Well, I need a loan.” He goes, All right, I’ll give you $3000.” But the [...] you can’t do is go to a bank and get a loan, so I had to get very creative with this brand new baby and a brand new company. That was 37 years go. Jason: That was quite the adventure. When an entrepreneur personality type is given a challenge like this, you had a clear outcome, clear objective, you were going to get that company and you had all of this pressure. Entrepreneurs in those moments, like we, light up and something magical starts to happen, right? And it work out for you. Melissa: I guess so. [...] I’m still sitting here and [...] NARPM, still doing property management. Jason: Great. Maybe share a little backstory on how did NARPM come to be? How this this come about? Melissa: It’s an interesting story. I wasn’t one of the original 100 that were in the charter of NARPM. A handful of people got together and they were actually exchanging software challenges. [...] own a software company at the time which is no longer, and they started talking about their best practices. They all kicked in money to start NARPM. I’m 25 years in NARPM, so you can imagine that’s pretty much a part of my life. Jason: Quite a while. Our topic today is building your business and team. At your business, Brandi Property Management, I would imagine that you have a pretty awesome team after all this time. A lot of people this is a big challenge. I’ve talked about this on the show before but there’s these two sand traps I’ve noticed in property management. The first sand trap in growth is around 50 or 60 units. This is the solopreneur sand trap. That’s about as many doors as they can handle on their own and they get stuck. Sometimes, they back themselves into a financial corner, they don’t have enough revenue to hire their first person, they’re managing as much as they can handle, they’re losing doors as fast as they’re getting on, and they’re stuck. For those listening, if you’re stuck in that, talk to me. We can help you get past that. If you break past that 100 door barrier, I found that by default they end up in the next sand trap, which is the 200–400 door category. This is where it’s the team sand trap. This is where they’re not building a team, they’re trying to create culture, they’re trying to systemize processes, they’re trying to wrap their head around what they should be doing, and as they approach maybe 400–500 units it gets really painful because everybody’s asking them for everything and they start to realize they are the number one bottleneck in the entire business, that everything they got them there they have to give up. I’m excited to talk with you because you’ve dealt with this stuff and you’ve seen this. Maybe you could share your perspective of what does it really take to build a business and how does the team really play into that from your perspective. Melissa: You touched on little bit of my message is getting out of the way. I’m not the tech generation, the paperless generation. I still use paper. I still like to print and read. It doesn’t work in today’s market for everybody. I would say the number one thing as you grow is to get out of the way. Get out of the way and hire people that have different skill sets. In our company, we always do personality tests. Tony Robbins offers it for free. Jason: The DISC? Melissa: Yeah, the DISC test. It’s free on his website. We do that, find the personality styles. For example, in a bookkeeper, you want someone who is very good, very high, and procedural. You want to make sure you find that in any of your staff mates. In our chain we have a big diversity, age, and skills. You can’t remember everybody have personality when you want to be like me. I never met a stranger and I’m a visionary. I’m the person who’s up with the ideas, tell us the way I wanted results and then gets out of the way. Jason: I love it. I’m a big proponent of using the DISC as well. In fact, Tony Robbins recently switched his DISC assessment, if you’ve noticed, from the inner metrics, which I actually used to have a connection where I would get the full three-part inner metrics, which is even better than the Tony Robbins one which gives you the first two portions. But then, it started getting watered down and smaller. They just recently switched DISC providers and it changed, but I find it’s better than what it was even though it’s not as pretty. You can do that free DISC assessment. You’ve got people on you team that are high C’s, they love compliance, they are rigid, they’re probably not the best friendly communicators, you’ve got high I’s that are great communicators and really great maybe with people, maybe high S’s that are great with customer service, maybe DC’s which are like unicorns that are really great at operations, maybe high DI’s which are great at sales and closing. Understanding that gives you a lot of power in being able to understand people. Melissa: [...] when you get ready to hire, looking at that needs assessments. Looking that what diversity is in your team, but I want to go back to something you test on again because this is where [...] out, which is change. Success comes with your willingness to change. That’s what basically you’re talking about as you’re training your team and also speaking to the property managers, as you said, they reach out to you. They have to be willing to change and I’m willing to change. That’s why I take a lot of classes even after all these years. I get into classes and I think of these aha moments that’s like, “Oh, I used to do that.” I cannot just go back sometimes and do things I used to do, but I also wanted to say, “Oh, we can’t do that.” “Why not?” “Well, we tried that.” Don’t have this theory of ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it,’ because that [...] stuck. Jason: Right. Any of us who have been in business long enough, we’ve probably forgotten more than we’ve learned. There’s so much and it’s great to get those reminders. You have mentioned early on that they need to get out of the way. How does somebody consciously do that? A lot of times when we’re in the way, we can’t see it. It’s almost like telling somebody, “Look at the back of your head.” It’s how they feel. You’re saying, “Get out of the way,” and they’re like, “I don’t even know how I’m in the way. How do I do that?” How do you help [...] Melissa: I’m sitting upstairs in a private suite away from my entire staff. My son, Matt, and let me just tell you I started the way I got the business when Matt was born, right? My son used to say, “Mom, nobody grows up and wants to be a property manager. Matt just celebrated his 11th year in property management and he’s our [...] Business Development Manager. Jason: Over a decade. Melissa: Yeah. But he didn’t. He went to college. He didn’t think, “Well, that’s what I want to be when I grow up. Nor did I. I don’t [...] thought you’re going to be servicing property managers.” But Matt sits in my original office. Therefore there’s a different skill set and, guess what, I’m not in the way. I’m down there and there’s something like walking by the office to go fix it as it get me out of the way. Jason: You’ve physically have gotten yourself out of the way so you’re not hearing the auditory things that you would normally trigger a response and cause you to go into fix-it mode as an entrepreneur because we hear problems, we’re wired. We want to fix it. We also see a problem, we’re like, “I can make money solving that problem.” That’s how we think. Melissa: And I tell you, I still go down, I’ll sit there and they want to see. Remember, I’m the face of the company. I’m the visionary. So, I [...] in the morning, I start down there, good morning to everybody, “Good morning, Frank. Good morning, Christine.” I go through my good mornings, I say hello to everybody there, and that’s [...]. I find out if there’s anything they need, me but I [...] work for the first couple of hours at home. What difference does it make? It allows me to actually stay home. Let me tell you that my role, I was a property manager as I said when I started in the business. Got my license and my broker’s license, went to California State, got into real estate, and then I helped grow the company. And I’m very good at it. I really think if you want to grow your business, you have to be in community. You can’t be in community and be in the office operations and running everything. You can’t do everything. I have gone out of the way by not being physically in an office downstairs where everybody can come to me. Now, I have a really good team. Christine Goodin who has her RMP with NARPM and her MPM. That’s a Residential Property Manager. MPM is a Master Property Manager. She came to work for me 18 years ago and she didn’t even know what property management was. And she’s now the Vice-President of Operations. So, you hire right, you bring them to educational courses. Don’t stand in their way growing, either. That’s another really key factor. Don’t let them get stagnant. I say, “How do you keep somebody happy for 18 years? Give them new challenges.” You give them new roles. Let them grow right along with you. Jason: Yeah, if you find somebody that has a growth mindset. Not everybody wants to grow. There are certain personality types that love growth, they love learning. On DISC they would have a high theoretical score typically, for example, on the Tony Robbins DISC profile that we have mentioned. But if they love learning, they have a growth mindset, and that’s a priority in their life is personal development, then you got a feedback. You feed them that and you have a team member that, just like fine wine, accrues value over time. Melissa: [...] I want to go back, though, because it’s not without mistakes when you hire someone that doesn’t like the business. I think oftentimes with property managers and our groups and our friends come to me and they ask questions. I think some of the hardest thing we had was letting go. We hire someone that doesn’t fit in the team, doesn’t fit in our culture, and we hang on. I think [...] over the years. It took me a while to get there. But I can tell you that if you’re mostly have a 30-day, a 60-day, maybe a 90-day introductory period, if it’s not working in that first month, it doesn’t usually change. So, if I [...] in the States because I’m nice and I’m a fixer, then I hang on. [...] wait too long. Again, if you’re going through and adding to your team, you need to really make sure that you’re checking in. I want to give you a tip because I’m talking about that. I love to share. Jason: Yeah. Melissa: In the first 90 days of a new team member come in to work at Prandi Property Management, we do what’s called EOD, an end of the day report. They actually write down things they learned, the challenges they found that day, and just some sharing. At the end of that, they rate their day a one, a two, or a three—there could be 2.5—based on what they feel their workload, three being, “I can’t handle any more and I’m full.” I have a new employee coming on and she’s been with me, let’s say, 20 days, and she gave me a 1–1½, we’re not giving her enough work. If you’re going to bring somebody new onto your team, again I don’t have to check on them, I don’t have to call on her, I don’t have to sit with her, somebody else is handling all the training, but as the owner, the CEO, and the visionary, I need to know how I’m doing with the team’s giving her information and what she needs from me to make her the best Prandi team member. Jason: You mentioned a couple of things that I think are really important to point out. One, you mentioned that by not just having your office separate or segregated but also being able to work from home and working from home. I run a virtual team and a virtual company. Nobody can touch me and I’ve always had that advantage that there is a physical disconnect. I will probably go on saying that if my assistant could walk in every 10 minutes and say, “Hey, what should I be doing now?” I would go nuts, right? Having that, that’s another option for those that are listening, there is a trend with some people that they’re moving towards more virtual teams and digital offices and that can also create that disconnect. Melissa: I want to ask you a question so I can also [...] and teach the audience. How do you communicate best with the person since you are virtual, and we all love the virtual part of it, how are you best communicating with your team member that’s even your assistant? What’s the best way you all communicate? Jason: Our main modes of communication, we use Basecamp as a communication platform. What that allows us to do is to post messages, to think about things, to get clarity and put it, and then we allow team members to respond to those, rather than throwing it all out real-time in a meeting where everybody has to react, because I find the responses are big-time wasters and it’s not as helpful. We usually post memos or post a to-do and then people that are need to be looped in will be looped in and can comment on that. That keeps things really quiet and makes people think. It creates a very calm workplace. That’s our foundational mode of communication. For quicker communication, we use the app Voxer and that is a walkie-talkie app. I don’t like typing and texting all the time. It takes too long. I’m quick. I want to send a voice message so I hold down a button on the app and I say, “Hey, Adam. Can you check on this client? They have mentioned this and do this and blah-blah-blah.” And then he’ll take care of it. The cool thing about Voxer is if you’re really impatient as an entrepreneur, if you listen to the messages, if you’re in the chat with somebody, the messages are real time. But if you’re not, it works like voice messages, like voicemail. And you can play them at high speed so you can speed up if they’re already done talking and the recording’s there, then you can play it at high speed. So, I’m listening to chipmunks all day long, telling me what needs to happen. There’s a lot of communication even through Voxer or a situation like that that I just need the details, so I can just listen really quickly and we can consume information cognitively and auditory-wise much faster than we can speak it. We can usually do it at almost twice the pace very easily. Melissa: It brings another point of communication. A good team member and a good team lead [...]. People need to know you’re supporting them. That’s what I [...]. But I was thinking about it, we did a lot of team-building last year. We hired [...] consultants to come in, and one thing I’ve learned about myself was delivery of email. Don’t stand [...] similar. Send [...] information and what the fact is, what the need is, send it to me in a delivery form. If you have team members and that you’re on a call today and the podcast, I think it’s really important to know your style, what you want. They also said that I was sending the exact [...] that said, “Well, I send it after the company email and no one responds,” and they said, “Send me a few of those.” The guy came back and said, “You’re not asking for anything. You’re sending information but you’re not asking.” “Okay, I need this back but [...]” It’s not that we do a campaign to get you. This is where’s the call-to-action. [...] entrepreneur and you’re on the show today and you want to learn. Ask somebody from the outside to come in and analyze your style and your teams and they’ll help give you tools. I’ve done that. I’m always learning. Jason: One of the hacks that I learned when I worked at Hewlett-Packard is that we were told to have certain subject lines if we were sending emails. If we needed some sort of response, you always had to say, “ACTION REQ’D:” at the beginning of the subject line in all caps. So, we would do ACTION REQ’D: if there’s an action required, or FYI was for your information only, you don’t need to do anything on it. So, there was kind of this code with subject lines. Now, I’m beyond email. I don’t even look at my email. If anybody emails me, I’m not going to probably see it. My assistant handles all of that for me because I don’t like email. I don’t want to communicate through email. So, I set up a system in which somebody else can go with that and she just tells me the four or five emails I need to deal with and the other 100 or 200 I get a day are [...] somebody else. Melissa: She’s a very good communicator and she is very responsive. If she doesn’t get a response, she page me again, making sure and not [...] very positive way. She’s patient, when I’m really busy, I’ll be a couple of days [...] she’s right back checking in with me. You’ve got someone watching your back and helping you grow, I’m sure. Jason: Oh yeah. It’s a huge help and that’s the thing is with hiring, I think one of the big constraints of those with entrepreneurs is this myth that if I have somebody else do it, it won’t be done as well. It’s such an egotistical thing that people need to get over. This belief that nobody will be as good as me. As long as somebody believes that, it’s true. They make it true and they create a situation which they’ll never be able to offload things. But I can speak with total confidence that every single person on my team is better at what they do than myself. They’re all better at what they do. India, way better at email than me. I don’t want to deal with email. I’m short with emails, I don’t pay attention, I miss things. Email’s not my thing. Melissa: [...] going back to the strength of the team and knowing your strength as the owner/CEO of your company and knowing my strength. You put me in a room with 200 people, you put me in a room with 1000 people, I try to meet every one of them. I know that my strength in the world growing my business, is to be the face of the business, to be in the field. I was in a class this morning. I’ve been taking classes at the local university on hiring teams and developing teams. Yesterday, I took a great workshop at Dominican University from a [...] a little bit about,job descriptions, position statements, and what’s the end results. They really teach us to have things in place and what our expectation is. So I’m always taking courses to try and figure out how can I be better at things. I’m never going to be the techie person that knows how to set everything up. I hand it to my son. I don’t have to be, right? He’s 31 years old. I can hand it to Matt and say, “Matt, I don’t understand this. My phone is doing something. Here, can you just fix it?” I can hand it to Christine and she’s going to help me. So just not trying to waste time, I [...] come at me. And don’t forget, part of [...] today is also life balance. Being able to turn it off, take care of ourselves because we have a good team. Jason: I think the more that an entrepreneur focuses on self-care, the more they have to give to their team and the lower the pressure noises. One of things I’ve noticed with entrepreneurs is that when our pressure noise gets high—it can be high in property management or in any business, but we deal with a lot as business owners—all of the worst attributes you share about business owners come out. People could perceive us as controlling or angry or frustrated because we get into this preloaded state where we’re in a stress response. If you lower the pressure noise for an entrepreneur, our genius comes out. Our best attributes come out. The visionary comes out. We’re able to see the future. We’re able to make decisions about things. If an entrepreneur does not have the team that they are in love with right now, then they’re not the person yet that should be running it. That’s the sad truth. They haven’t become that person yet, that can have a team, that instead of them having feeling like they are trying to control, it’s instead a team that they’re able to just inspire. Whenever we fail to inspire, we always control and we get into that stressful place where we’re trying to manipulate and get our team to do stuff and we’re trying to force KPIs down their throat or trying to push them to do things because we feel like, “Why can’t me team just do what I need them to do?” We shift into a calm space of, “What does my team need from me in order to be as successful as possible so they can keep helping me the way that they’ve been helping me?” and that’s a much more comfortable place to be. It’s a calm, quiet workplace. Melissa: I actually have never been accused of… I don’t yell, I’m a very calm-natured person, I deal with and respect boundaries, so I’m very good about how would that person feel if they were in my seat, how are they want to be treated. I do that a lot. I know their personal. Something’s going on. You want to know if something’s going on, it’s not always about business. Those people that have lives [...] out the door. So, I’m really in-tune with that. I called someone in yesterday and said, “Look, I can tell something’s going on. You just not coming work with that bright smile. What can I do to help?” So, even though I’m not downstairs, still sense the energy and pay really good attention. I try to make sure they know that I really care and I do care. The other thing is really working with an outside business consultant. Don’t get stuck. Have somebody come in and help build your team by doing team building. We had a lot of fun doing team building last year at the end of the year in October. Last year in October, we went out and went off site, we prepared everything so we can all leave, and we had one person [...] kind of helped out while we work on all day. We worked on what I think the success in my company is very strongly if we’re not communicating with each other, and we’re not respecting, getting along, and taking our own blinders off from our busy property management day, then the outside world is getting that same message. So, if I’m not really happy doing my job as a property manager and I’m not having a good day because my team members not [...] and the other team members not doing something, that equals out to the public and that’s when one of those one-star reviews come in. You can ask the team to let them know they’re supportive with each other, give them the tools, working with that, and let them get to know each other and [...] each other, that goes out to customer service. Jason: There’s this great book by a gentleman. I believe his name is Steve Sims and the book’s called Bluefishing. He basically talks about how his whole goal with his team members or even with clients that he wants to work with is they have to pass the chug test. It’s like, “Would I want to have a beer with this person?” and it’s just a simple gut check to say, “Do I like this person? Do I enjoy being around this person? Does this person makes me feel safe? Do I feel comfortable?” because if anybody on your team doesn’t make you feel comfortable and you’re always worried about them or you’re concerned about them or there’s some sort of weird disconnect in rapport between the two of you, they’re adding to you pressure and noise. I think that it is important to like your team, to actually like them. Melissa: [...] company. Sometimes when there’s one person who’s not [...] team, they go and they grab other people. Jason: Oh yeah, they’re a cancer. Melissa: You have to be really careful with that. But I really [...] week after our last retreat work and that was they wanted. For somebody [...] it’s not the most positive [...], so we started a Positively Prandi board. We got that big board [...] coffee and our tea is, and people are [...], “Congratulations on your three-year anniversary.” We write riddles. [...] while the sun is shining now, how happy we are today. And that doesn’t cost money. It’s just a little more positivity and always share a five-star review. We always celebrate a good review, and if it’s not [...] we could get there. That’s another [...] about growing your business is really you have to work on your teams, inside the walls of your team before you can really start wanting to grow and double or triple in size. Jason: You have mentioned early on that you make sure you have this morning connection with your team. My team’s virtual and we’ve done the same thing. I felt like it’s absolutely critical that you get FaceTime with your entire team. Those that have virtual teams that are listening, or virtual team members, one of the things that we do at DoorGrow is we do a morning huddle. It’s 15 minutes, we set it at a weird hour so that people know that time matters. We set it at a weird time, like it’s not at a half-hour mark or hour mark and people have to show up for that. It’s 15 minutes, we just share stats openly in the company, here’s how much revenue we’ve made so far this month, here’s how many people on our Facebook group, all that different stats that matter, and then we do ‘caught being awesome,’ when we say, “Anybody catch anybody being awesome in the last day?” Sometimes it’s a little awkward if it’s a small huddle and not everybody showed up and people are like [...]. But I always comes up with somebody that we can point out or highlight somebody. Melissa: [...] for us at Prandi Property Management, I have a weekly team meeting. I get copies of the notes so I can look at what’s going on with the teams, and the at the very bottom it says, “Did you write a thank you note to them?” because still old-fashioned handwritten thank you notes go a long way. We have Prandi custom beautiful notes cards, it works in all industries, and who did you thank today? It’s similar to what you’re saying because a team, I like that. I want to go back and say that, “Who did you catch being awesome today?” That’s kind of we’re doing to Positively Prandi board, but in this case, acknowledging their credibility at the end of it, the weekly team meeting notes [...] really good [...] everybody’s formats is the same, so we’re looking at the same numbers, same things, and when it says, “Oh, that’s so nice,” they wrote the gardener a thank you note. They wrote the plumber a thank you note. They wrote [...] a thank you note for the inconvenience. We get a bunch of $5 Starbucks cards, we [...] and say, “Have a cup of coffee on us. Cheers to you.” Just saying thank you is really nice. Jason: I love it. In our huddle, at the very end we just go around and ask each person, “Are you stuck on anything? Really simple, is there anything you’re stuck on?” and there’s always somebody that’s stuck. When we didn’t used to do that and we would just have a weekly meeting or just throughout the day, it makes me wonder what were they doing when they were stuck all of these previous times because there’s always somebody stuck on something. “Oh yeah, this client had this question. I didn’t know how to deal with this, or this.” We can tackle those things really quickly and if it’s something that takes a lot of time, we’ll just say, “All right. Let’s schedule a meeting for that.” But we just tackle that in our huddle so everybody feels unstuck, which is also helpful. Melissa: It’s not just stuck. I myself have made mistakes in this business, that we have aha moments as well. I can say, “Well, is there anything you want to share that you have an aha moment that you might teach us how to do our job better?” [...] offers I do like I’ll start an example. I’ll say, “Matt, my son, now is the Business Development Manager, who is out there in the field. Sometimes we get three, four, five, six clients a day,” who knows how many are coming. They’re coming fast and furious because we’ve been there a long time. He’ll say, “Hey, can you take care of this duplex? The co-owner’s called in and they really wanted a response today, but I got so many things on my plate. Can you handle that?” which is okay because I know how to do it. Only, he gave it to me at 10 in the morning and I didn’t make that connection with that client until two in the afternoon and it was too late. He had already hired someone. I can use that as my team example as my aha moment. What I should have done the moment he gave it to me, I should have stopped, I should have looked at what is it important, not checking my Facebook, my email and everything else. I should have made that a priority. Because I didn’t, he signed up with another management company. I want to share that as the owner because what will happen next time is I’ll make it a priority. I try to [...] those aha moments and life lessons. What can we do, how can we have done it differently, and we had different results, because we can all [...]. Jason: We do a weekly team meeting. In our weekly team meeting, we share wins from the previous week, personal or business. That gives the team members opportunity each Monday to share, “What were your wins for last week?” so that we can point her out. As entrepreneurs, a lot of us are economically driven, so if we take a DISC profile and turn on all the insight, we’ll see that we have a pretty high economic score typically. The mistake we make is that we assume everybody else likes money as much as us. Look at that economic score in your team members, those that are listening, if the economic score is high, bonuses work great for them. If the economic score is low, they want recognition. Most of my team members, that’s all of my team members with the exception of people that are involved in sales, usually their economic score is low, which means they want recognition. So, creating opportunities in these meetings where they get to show what they’ve done the previous week, where they get to show that they’ve had wins and we look through our objectives for the week, and they get to say, “Yes, I got these all done,” this is an opportunity for them to feel recognized by the whole team. I find that that increases motivation and accountability, significantly. Melissa: And I think it’s interesting because you and I didn’t rehearse this and we didn’t talk about what was most important, but there’s a lot of similarities in what we’re doing as entrepreneurs, owners, and visionaries. I think that’s really important for the audience to hear that some of these things that we’re talking about are simple, and it can be done by anybody. Jason: What I’ve noticed in business and life is I’m just a student and a fan of what works. That’s just what I get excited about. And really, every system, all the different coaches and mentors I’ve worked with, they so many similarities because truth and/or reality is what works and everything gravitates towards that. You’ve been in business for 37 years. You’re going to have figured out a lot of things that don’t work. What that leaves less on the table is a lot of knowledge about what works. I think also I’m very willing to fail. I’ve had lots and lots of failures. I think DoorGrow’s been built on thousands of failures and that’s how we learned. I think that goes also to my team because I’ve had so many failures. I think also I’m very conscious of the fact that my team needs to be allowed to screw up and fail. They need to feel safe failing. If they don’t feel safe failing, then they’ll never be able to learn. Melissa: Or they could hide it. We don’t want them to hide it. Jason: Exactly. They become hiders. They start hiding stuff from you the first time they screw something up and they feel reprimanded or shamed or put down, they’re going to hide that from you forever. They’re going to hide everything in the future and then having team of hiders is absolutely catastrophic to the growth of the company. Melissa: That’s true. I think that always attending workshops and now we have things online, you talk about being able to teach people like you’re doing right now, that is great. I think just because you have 10 in the business or 20 years or in my case, you never stop learning. And I think it’s really important for people to use their resources. I love to read. People can share books. They can go on your website and your Facebook page, and share a good book, and share stuff they’re learning. I find that people soak it up. I love to speak and teach. I love to walk in a room and share my knowledge. There’s not one person I’ve ever said, “No, I absolutely will not share that with you.” I usually, “No problem. You want that form, let me send it to you.” You’re going to laugh, I taught a class in Palm Springs. I’m not paperless and I’m proud of it, because I’m not and people love it. They’re going to be people that still touch things like I do. Let’s give them [...] and eventually that does change. My son doesn’t print [...] anything, but I do. So, we have to have a diversity and we have to be able to give people the tools they need to be the best whatever the way it is in the year 2019 or the way we used to do it. When I first got in business, the screen was literally the size of a small [...]. We didn’t have cell phones. Technology is good. I think I’ve been able to travel, I’ve been able to leave my business. Now, I check my email but I schedule my time. I’m going to the beach because I’m sitting on a beach in Hawaii. I’ll check my information but I don’t check it like I do when I’m sitting on my desk working. Time management it important. I allow myself a lot of time because even last week, I was running hard. I was struggling early in the morning, facing the company, lots of meetings, going to Rotary, going to community events, starting the morning with my classes over at the university or whatever I’m doing, and I finish at nine o’clock at night. So, I just take it to Matt because I was going the State of the City Dinner with the Chamber of Commerce. By Thursday last week, I hit a wall and I was tired. So you have to find the balance. Everybody, not just the entrepreneur or owner, of how you’re doing with your whole life balance because you have to keep yourself well in order to be a good leader. Jason: Absolutely. My recently added for our C hackers, a health secrets training, simply because I found that health is the number one thing that impacts the productivity. An excuse that we get from entrepreneurs a lot was, “Oh, I just don’t have time.” They have almost doubled the amount of time if they’re taking care of themselves properly. Their brain is just that much more effective. Melissa: If you go to yoga for an hour, you’re not on your phone, you’re not on your email. Jason: You’re right. You’re disconnected. Melissa: You [...] can read the phone in your car. You just take your phone if you’re going out in an easy hike, if you’re going distance in that thing, but to be able to go and listen to music, too, on [...], people say sound and meditation. If you can do music meditation and it works really well. I just spent some time with a good friend in [...] and we had so much fun playing our playlist and singing the songs, and then how did we remember the words to this song? But your mind is doing so much. What music does is it kind of steals your heart and soul. If you ever are going through something, get yourself to music and let the music take you to a different [...] and property management. That happens a lot. I always tell my staff, “Get out from your desk, move or walk around the block, change your environment. Grab your iPhone, put on a song and walk around the block singing the words. It changes your whole intake of how you’re going to treat the next customer or the next co-worker. Jason: I love it. Let’s connect this to science and here is why that stuff is so effective. I’m a huge audiophile, I love music, I had a band in college, I bought [...] songs. I love music, but when you play instruments, when you play music—there’s videos on this—your entire brain lights up. Both sides of the brain are like fireworks when you’re playing an instrument or really engaged in music. When you connect your right and left hemispheres in your brain, when those sides of your brain are both firing, it significantly lower stress. In fact, I went and did EMDR therapy on the recommendation of my business coach, for a year. EMDR therapy is an eye movement therapy. The idea behind it is they use it to eliminate PTSD in soldiers and stuff like this. As entrepreneurs, my coach is saying, “You have some PTSD, Jason. Let’s be honest. You guys deal with a lot of stress. You’ve got some of this. Go get an EMDR therapy and talk about you assistant, they quit or talk about this, get this stuff taken cared of. What is cool is that EMDR therapy is based on the idea that there is bilateral stimulation, so stimulating both sides of the brain back and forth while tuned in to an idea that causes stress or PTSD or some sort of issue. I’m not making light, by the way, of those who have legit PTSD, but the stress that we have as entrepreneurs, it will tone that down and it kills that. It helps you see it with a fresh perspective and helps correct and eliminate that emotional stress response. Here’s what’s magical about walking. Walking is bilateral stimulation. Exercising increases the stress response in the body. It just does. That’s part of exercise. But walking oxygenates the body but does not increase the stress response. It actually lowers it because it’s causing bilateral stimulation. Left, right, your body keeps moving, and each step causes bilateral stimulation. So, if you have anxiety, if you have a stressful call or whatever, going for a walk until that goes down is really magical and amazing. So I go for a walk in the evenings if I had a stressful day. I start my day usually a lot of times with a walk, making sure that I walk around. It help digestion, it seriously helps cognitive function by getting your brain to lower its stress response. It’s like a serious hack and walking sounds so simple. Music more than any other thing can directly impact emotions. That’s why in movies, they’ll manipulate your emotions using the score of the movie because it makes you feel what’s going on. So, if you want to change your feeling, you can use music because different songs can help you lean into sorrow if you need to feel that sorrow, music can help you lean into positivity or shift out of... Melissa: Brings back memories. But [...], somebody having a bad day because in property management we done have all positive days. And sometimes, especially because where we are now in Northern California, we had a lot of rain. [...] when we were getting ready to set up, it’s not really our friend. Property management, rain, leaks, putting people up at hotels, you’ve got a lot coming at you and nobody wants to be displaced, especially if it’s the holiday season, we have bad weather and it rains then. So, I [...] “Okay, what have you done for a time out? What are you doing? Because you need to go have a time out. Just go.” We do fun Fridays, ice cream socials, aloha Fridays because we are actually [...] together in an office [...] downstairs, so we do see each other everyday. I may not but the staff works together [...] and works in an office. Having seen this which Christine’s been really good about it. Matt, last Friday [...] his dog is a new rescue. She’s adorable. Her name’s Mia and she’s a very [...]. She’s a very good dog and he said, “Hey, do you mind if I bring her out in the open? I don’t have any appointments.” People actually brought some really [...] good, fun Friday and made them feel really good by having a dog there. Who knew? Jason: Almost like one of those service animals. Melissa: Yeah. I was waiting for his to say, “Mom, I can bring the dog to work because this is a service animal.” I said it was okay. Jason: Yeah. I love the idea. Walk and talk is my own personal therapy. If I have something I need to talk through, I talk to somebody about it while I’m walking. I’ll just walk around. It’s magic. These are all really cool ideas. Melissa, it sounds like you have a phenomenal team. You’ve got a wealth of knowledge. For those that are listening, that maybe are struggling to achieve their growth, they’re really stuck in a rut, they’re having a difficult time maybe with their team, they’re just having trouble seeing over the weeds, so to speak, what sort of advice would you give them, maybe a first step to take, some step towards all the [...] Melissa: I would say don’t be afraid to [...]. Pick up the phone and call another property manager. Call you, check-in with you. People forget the touch of the voice, too, and someone knowing. Most people have been through the same thing. When you [...] the NARPM family or you or your users together share one thing that’s going on, it’s amazing when I see the post that goes on in your Facebook page and the solutions people are willing to offer. But sometimes picking up the phone and saying, “Look, I’m having a really hard time with this. I have a client doing it.” I’ll tell you to fire them. But if you have [...] a really hard time, then maybe you just need to [...] another professional. NARPM has over 5000 members. Don’t think you’re going to take the world on your own. If you’re going to grow, you have to be willing to change, to be willing to have a mentor, somebody you can lean on. You got to use the research that you’re offering as a national vendor and the research that you’re offering, we have to use those resources so that we can actually learn to grow because you’re going to give us tips from the outside of property management looking in at what we’re doing. You’re already doing that just sharing with me. So, if you’re willing to make the change and to reach out for growth ideas and ask how to implement because I’ve already done it. I’m willing to share. Why reinvent the wheel? Jason: I love it. You mentioned be willing to change, find mentors, reach out and get a mentor, reach out to other property managers. I think the crux of all these things, kind of energetically that you’re talking about here, underneath all of this, I think a property manager or anyone listening to the show, they need to recognize that the power being able to do these things come from vulnerability. It takes a certain amount of vulnerability as an entrepreneur to say, “I have a problem and I need support.” Whether you are reaching out to a mentor, it takes humility or vulnerability in order to be willing to go out and learn more like you’ve talked about. I think sometimes we want to put on this facade or we think we need to be the one that we’re always okay. I think it’s okay to not be okay. I think there’s power in that and I think there’s connection in that if we’re willing to be vulnerable, because I don’t have all good days. I have sent messages to my business coach or my mentors and saying, “Hey, I’m really struggling. This is hard for me dealing with this.” Sometimes, it’s all we need is just to be able to tell somebody that and acknowledge and be vulnerable, but I think when we’re vulnerable with others. Those that are inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group, I encourage you to be willing. Lots of people have been willing to share vulnerably like, “Hey, I’m dealing with the situation. I’m in over my head,” or, “I don’t know what to do with this,” or, “I’m stressed out and it’s been a really a rough day. What do you guys do or recommend?” or, “Could somebody talk to me on the phone today?” I think there are so many people that because the way we get momentum as entrepreneurs, the way we get fulfilled, is by giving it to others. Melissa: Helping others. That’s right. I was national president of NARPM. My team was sharing a vision and I’m still sharing a vision. Our visions can open up a lot of doors and windows for a lot [...]. Jason: There’s nothing that’s been more powerful for me when I’m having a rough time in business or as an entrepreneur or in life than to reach out and be able to help or support a client or help somebody else. I look for those opportunities when I’m stressed [...] somebody an opportunity to support you because you’re helping them by being vulnerable and allowing them to do that. Melissa: That works with our staff, our team members, to reach out and say, “Okay, I’m actually having a really hard time. I’m overwhelmed, I’m tired, I’m going to take [...] refill my bucket up. [...] keep that to your team. They’re only human, they understand. Jason: Absolutely. That’s the entire team’s job. My team’s job is to lower my pressure and noise. That is their whole purpose for having a job. But they can’t do that unless I’m honest. Melissa: Yeah and it’s working well. Jason: Yeah, it does. It works really well. The bigger my team gets, the bigger my company gets, the easier my life gets. I know that sounds backwards for a lot of people, especially those in the 200–400 doors sand trap because as they’re approaching the 400–500 units, their life gets crazy and hectic and it’s probably because they’ve built the team the wrong way. They built the system in which it’s transactional leadership and they’re throwing tasks at people. Everyone has to come to them for feedback instead of giving them objectives and trusting them. It’s something that takes work to shift out of. Melissa: It goes back to where we started [...]. The key to success [...] Jason: Full circle. Get out of the way. Sometimes we can’t see it. As entrepreneurs, I think no matter how evolved we are or how effective we are or how much coaching we’ve had, we always have our own blind spots and we always need that outside perspective. I need it all the time and your team can provide some of that if you ask them for honest feedback. I ask my team all the time like, “Hey, I’m thinking of sending this email out to all our clients,” and my writer, Adam, who’s very diplomatic, will say, “Let we reword that for you.” Melissa: That’s a good point. [...] I do that, too. If I’m about to send an email, or I end up firing a client or put them on a ‘this isn’t working,’ someone else on your team to say, “How does it sound as if you’re just receiving it?” That’s it. That’s a good point, too. Rely on that for that. Jason: This has been an awesome conversation. I’m sure we could talk for hours. It’s just really fun to connect with you. I appreciate you coming on the show. What takeaway do you want to leave people with and how can they get in touch with you if you like them to do that? Melissa: I would say to rely on the vendors yourself. You light up when we started the very beginning of our just getting ready for the podcast. When you started getting ready to do this, to share with your listeners, you light up. I think we need to rely on our resource with you and what you can bring to us property managers. I think that the other takeaway would be to be really in-tune with ourselves to know when we’ve had enough to take that break, and then to really take a hard look and maybe today or tomorrow, go down and really be grateful, and come within gratitude to thank the people we work with everyday. Together, I would say we can make a difference. So, keep that attitude and really respect for your team, the clients, the people you work around. Jason: Love it. How can people find out more about Melissa Prandi or get in touch? Melissa: My email probably is best. I am an emailer. It’s melissa@prandiprop.com. I’m great with [...] resources, I’ve written two books, and I love to share ideas. Let’s just keep going. Let’s keep growing and making our industry bigger, better, and more respected as we all become better at property management. Jason: Absolutely. I fully believe in the philosophy of the I mindset that the industry’s number one challenge right now is not your competition. It’s awareness. The industry’s second number one challenge is just perception of the industry as a whole. By helping your local competitors level up, you’re helping yourself. You’re helping the whole industry. Melissa: Raising the bar up to what one’s expecting the quality of what we’re providing out there, people on rental property. Jason: Absolutely and good property management can change the world. You guys get to have such a massive ripple effect. You’re impacting hundreds of thousands of tenants, homeowners and their families, and that ripple effect keeps going and that’s big. Melissa: I’ve seen how much that actually NARPM complement people, how much we give back into our community because we do that every year at charity. We’re giving back in more ways than just that. Jason: Absolutely. The ripple effect is big and I’m grateful that really awesome property managers like yourself allow me the opportunity to be part of that. That’s inspiring and exciting for me. All right, Melissa. It’s been great having you on the show and we’ll have to have you back soon. Melissa: Absolutely. See you in NAPA, the [...] NARPM conference [...]. Jason: We’ll see you in NAPA. All right. Melissa: See you soon. Thank you. Jason: Okay. Bye-bye. All right that was a phenomenal interview. Really fun to talk about that stuff, all things I’m very passionate about and Melissa is obviously very passionate about as well. If this episode was interesting or useful to you, please give us a feedback in iTunes if you’re listening there. We would love if you like and subscribe to our channel on YouTube. That would be awesome if you’re watching us there. If you’re seeing this on Facebook, then share it. We appreciate you. Make sure you get inside of our awesome community for property management entrepreneurs, which is the DoorGrow Club. You can get to that by going to doorgrowclub.com. By joining, we’re going to give you some free takeaways including The Fee Bible, a list of good vendors you should be using, that are the best in the industry, that get the best feedback in our group, and we’re going to give you some other free gifts if you provide your email when you sign up for that group. Make sure you get inside the DoorGrow Club Facebook group. At some point, you may want to reach out to our team and talk to us or myself about growing your business. If you’re feeling stagnant or stuck, or you feel like you could use some additional support, that’s where we do at DoorGrow. 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.

You just failed. Now what? How do you react? What are some methods you can use to learn from the experience? In this episode, I'm going to tie together some stories of people who learned from failure to launch themselves to success. I'm going to break down the factors at work, and how we all can use the valuable lessons we get from failure in order to blast off to a whole other level. I'll also discuss my own failure as a co-founder of a startup, and how I try to implement the lessons I see in hindsight in my work now. What were the actions I took that allowed me to build that template? What are some methods that allowed me to catch things that would otherwise fall through the cracks? 1. Acceptance. I didn't hate myself for failing. I actually was satisfied on what I managed to create in the circumstances. 2. Consistent reflection. Ask why you failed. Then ask why again a few days later. Then again after a few weeks. It takes a little while for some insights to percolate in your brain. Give it time and don't try to dump all at once. 3. Keep the artifacts. I still have all my design files from BuildingBlox. There are hundreds of screens, and a design system that I made from scratch! It serves as a good reminder that while the ultimate goal of building a successful company didn't come to fruition, the process was something to be cherished and kept for future reference. While there's ways to learn from professional failure, learning from personal failure is more important. One of my friends, Jason Lloye has reached self-described rock bottom. He failed in his personal life and failed in loving and caring for himself. Here's a clip of the conversation I've had with him: So what can we learn from Jason? There were a few main things for me. 1. Love yourself through whatever personal speed bumps you hit throughout life. That foundation of self-love sets the tone for continued progress and striving. 2. Be OK with rawness! With nuance undefined life circumstances! Sometimes people think they have control of everything, but that's far from the truth. A plan is good, but flexibility when the plan falls a part is even better. 3. Find what led to your rock bottom. Reminiscing can be very painful, but can lead to exponential growth when put into the context of learning. Other tasty treats Mark Metry - Write down failures at the end of the week Mitch Thomas - Look for the opportunities that open up when others fail

Shield FCSummary:Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, and writer, talks with Shiran Weitzman, CEO of Shield FC. Shield FC is a data aggregation platform that is enabling faster communication with clients and faster flagging of compliance issues.Show Notes:● 0:45 - Shield FC is integrating communication into a next generation compliance platform● 4:28 - The company connects electronic communication with trade communication● 6:30 - One of the biggest contributions of this platform is the regulatory aspect● 8:45 - The platform shows the importance of data aggregation and normalization● 10:38 - How the platform interacts with APIs● 11:54 - Every vendor has a proprietary format● 16:45 - The value of the data is the aggregation and correlations, not any advice per se● 18:40 - Machine learning is incorporated to tag financial compliance issues within the platform enabling a new age of financial compliance in the industry● 22:25 - How the differing country regulations change the communication platform per country● 24:46 - The software is allowing companies to avoid reputational loss and reinforce ethics● 26:09 - Why there needs to be a much more open ecosystem in finance and why collaboration needs to be encouraged by regulators3 Key Points:1. Shield FC is creating a platform that is changing the way financial compliance and thecommunication thereof takes place.2. The platform aggregates several different sources of data into once place, correlates them,flags compliance issues, and touts consumer and investor protection.3. The platform is enabling all the data to be seen in once place with machine learning tochange the compliance environment. The platform is on the edge of making the traditional manual process of compliance checks obsolete.Tweetable Quotes:- “Clients choose to communicate in whichever way is most convenient for them.” –Jason- “There is a new wave of electronic regulation right now. We [Shield FC] are addressingthis structure.” – Shiran- “Consumer protection and investment protection is a part of it.” –Shiran- “ePrivacy is GDPR on Steroids” - ShiranResources Mentioned:● The Fintech Impact Podcast● Itunes to access the podcast● Refer to Jason Pereira ́s Linkedin for Information about the Fintech event● Woodgate Financial● The Shield FC website See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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!