Property Management Growth with DoorGrow

Is your property management business growing, but somehow becoming harder to run?

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason and Sarah Hull discuss the difference between the chaos property managers solve for their clients and the chaos happening inside their own businesses. While handling the challenges of rental properties creates an opportunity to serve owners, internal chaos can leave business owners dealing with team conflict, unclear expectations, and constant frustration.

Jason and Sarah explore why so many property management companies hit a wall as they grow, especially when their company culture hasn't been clearly defined. They talk about the importance of establishing core values, hiring people who align with those values, addressing gossip and conflict directly, and taking ownership of the standards you allow in your business.

If your business feels more chaotic with every door you add, this conversation will help you understand where that chaos may be coming from and what needs to change before you grow further.

You'll Learn

[00:38] Why Chaos Requires Strong Leadership [02:13] External Chaos vs. Internal Business Chaos [03:58] How Unclear Culture Creates Team Problems [06:08] Office Politics, Gossip, and Employee Conflict [07:12] There Are No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders [11:06] Why Gossip Is Theft in Your Business [11:53] Defining the Culture and Values You Want [14:10] Your Company Culture Is the Real Product [18:02] Reducing Chaos and Building a Scalable Business

Quotables

"And chaos when there's chaos, what really needs to happen is leadership. And leadership provides clarity." — Jason Hull

"When we're not clear on what we want, it's really difficult to get what you want." — Jason Hull

"Culture is the foundation because culture is the actual foundation of the business." — Jason Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:01)

Five, four, three, two, one. Hey everybody. Welcome to the DoorGrow Show. I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO. This is Sarah, the COO of DoorGrow and co-owner. We are the owners of DoorGrow and we are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For 18, almost 18 years.

We have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. 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. Now let's get into the show. Okay. All right. So our topic today is chaos. Wow. Chaos.

Personified by Sarah. All right. Chaos. Injecting chaos. All right. So who doesn't like a little bit of chaos? I actually think chaos is kind of fun. But I do well in chaos. Some people do not thrive in chaos. But chaos to me is opportunity and it's a way to make money and it's a way to help people. And chaos when there's chaos, what really needs to happen is leadership. And leadership provides clarity.

And so when there's chaos, that is just an opportunity for you to help everybody get some clarity and to take leadership. See, see? See? Do you see? Wow. Well, you were loud enough screaming chaos. I'm sure they heard you. Now you can hear me. There you go. All right. I'm sure they heard you before anyway. All right. So chaos. All right. So yeah, like I was saying.

The it needs leadership. And w we see a lot of businesses, especially in the two to three hundred door range, they've got a lot of chaos going on. And they've got an entire team and there's difficulty. But if there is the greater the level of chaos, the more assuredly we will find a greater lack of leadership. And so taking ownership and and leading and setting rules and boundaries and guidelines is imperative. It's it it's

really, really critical. And this is what yeah, I was coaching a client on this today. This is what was lacking in the business. And when there's a lack of clarity of culture, there's going to be greater levels of chaos and yeah, and problems. So what should we talk about about chaos? Well, what would cause a severe amount of chaos that is not usually opportunity? Because what we mean by chaos is opportunity is when there's

Chaos externally. External chaos is usually opportunity. Internal chaos is not fun. I mean it's still an opportunity to improve or to grow. There is opportunity there. There's always opportunity when there's chaos. But it's not like wow, I have such a great opportunity in the market because my whole business is chaos and it's a disaster and everything is broken. Wow, what an amazing

Opportunity I've got here. Yeah. So there there's a great opportunity for cleanup. Sure. Then, but I j I just do want to make sure there's that distinction between internal chaos and external chaos. So external chaos, that's usually why property managers exist in the first place. It's because managing rentals and doing everything by yourself, dealing with tenants and maintenance and evictions and rent collection and

Showings and screenings and all the things, that can be chaos. Yeah. That is where property managers thrive. Is hey we just handle the chaos for you, so Yeah. You don't even have to think about it. We do the the the work. We do all of this so you don't have to think about it or worry about it. You don't have a headache. We do the work for you. Yay. But internal chaos in your business is different. So internal chaos in your business is is not

Such a a great place to be. Right. And that's that's kind of the the difference. So I don't want you to go, well, wow, my business is chaos. That's that's great. Jason said it was a an amazing opportunity to make money. It definitely means there's margin for improvement. So which is an opportunity to have more profit, to make more money, to have a better experience, right? To have more freedom as a business owner.

There's lots of opportunity if you've you have chaos in your business. So you can look at it at the glass half empty or half full, either way. So So what are some of the things that cause chaos internally in in business? I mean, one of the biggest is just a lack of clarity in the business. So the biggest lack of clarity that we'll see the most chaos I think created by is a lack of clarity around culture.

So if culture isn't clear and culture isn't defined, then we bring in team members that don't fit the culture, which means you as a business owner won't feel comfortable with them. They'll be doing things that or getting away with stuff that is making you uncomfortable. And you maybe you feel like you you're you're trying to be nice to people on the team. And but you know, I was talking with a business owner today and he's got a team member that is

He thinks going to be his salesperson or BDM, but this person also has their own property management company on the side. And I was like, Well, isn't that a conflict of interest? And he was like, Well, yeah, I was thinking that too. And I was like, Yeah, my it sounds like it. So, yeah. And so that's the challenge when we don't when we're not clear on what we want, it's really difficult to get what you want. And that's not his ideal scenario. That's not what he wants. But

I think that a lot of times we just don't have clarity. And when we culture is defined, I think, by having clarity of the company values so that you can make sure that you have team members that match those values. Because it's really difficult to look at team members and go, Do they fit in here? Are they a good fit? When you don't have culture defined. And it's really difficult for your team members to know what the culture is if you don't have it defined and to protect that culture. Cause at DorGro, if we bring in a new team member,

And they're injecting chaos. It's a bad thing. And they're causing harm or damage or it's against our company core values. It's against our client centric the, you know, mission statement and the outcomes that we want to create with clients. Everybody on the team is going to probably bring it up to us. They're going to say, This is a problem. I'm noticing this. So the team protect the culture once culture is clear and it's defined. And so culture gets protected. But when you don't have clarity of culture, what you will notice is the side effects of a lack of culture.

Which he's noticing. What you're going to start to notice is politics. Office politics. You're going to start noticing gossip. You're going to start noticing backstabbing and complaints. Like this gentleman has a team member that was like, she was unwilling to come to Daily Huddle if this other team member shows up because they're they've got a little tiff or some sort. And so I'm like, that's a problem. There's like this needs to be nipped in the bud. This needs to be healed or fixed. There's a cultural problem in the business. And

If the culture if culture's a problem, then there's a lack of leadership. Because leadership creates the culture of the business. there's a great book. we've listened to the audio. It's it's called Extreme Ownership. And their subsequent book is really good as well. Yeah, Jocko Willock and and Leaf something. But the their subsequent book I think is even better because it really clarifies it.

The dichotomy of leadership of leadership, yeah. And so that's the the challenge is if there's a lack of culture, there's a lack of leadership. And one of the principles they teach that they talk about with the I guess the Navy SIELS or the Marines is that there's no bad teams, there's only bad leaders. And you might think, well, that's not true. There's bad team members. Yeah, but you pick them, you're the business owner, you allowed them to be around. You set the standard. So

Yeah, and so they're your team. So yeah, there really is there's no bad teams, there's just bad leaders is the principle, which means you have to take ownership of the team. And if somebody's bad, you either make sure they're good or they're out. And so, yeah.

So we've not

Yeah. I mean I

two and he's like I it it's really hard because she's been part of the team for so long. Mm-hmm.

with people or maybe to have to let someone go who's really been part of our team for so long. Yeah, you're right. It's not it's not fun and it's not always easy. And that's why the entrepreneur has the hardest job. Yeah. Yeah, if you're s as an entrepreneur, I think inherently we are willing to do things that most people are not willing to do. We're willing to do we're willing to take risks that other people would never even

dream of taking. We're willing to make hard decisions. We're willing to make sacrifices. We're, you know, we just do things a little bit differently. And that's why we are entrepreneurs. We are wired differently than people who are not business owners and entrepreneurial. And that that's okay. It's not that one is better than another. It's just that we're we're different. And that is why being the entrepreneur and the business owner, it really is.

Hardest job in the entire business. And this is part of it. Yeah. It also means that you get to build things the way that you want to. And you're ultimately the one who gets to decide what kind of business you have. That's great. Because in a job, if you go work for someone else, you don't get to control that. You don't get to control who works here. You don't get to control who's part of the team. You don't get to control how things are done.

You just kind of show up and you're given your job and you're told what to do and how to do it. And you might be able to, you know, inject your two cents in every once in a while. But when you own the business, you that's all up to you. It's all on our shoulders. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you'll have team members that complain, that gripe about things, that complain about other team members. and that causes, you know, that's gossip. It causes problems in the business. It's basically putting problems and weight on other people's shoulders that can't solve or resolve the problem. So

know, if this particular team member has a problem with another team member, she either needs to take it to that team member and resolve it or go to the business owner or whoever the supervisor or superior is and say, I'm having this issue until it's resolved. But I don't think it's appropriate to say, I'm just not gonna come to meetings or I'm just not gonna be around this person. So I and I think that it could very well be done, maybe she means it well.

Right. Maybe she means by it. Like, hey, I I I don't I don't like how things are being done by this team member or I don't agree with certain things, you know, this this team member is doing. And I think that's that's probably good. I like I ask my team, you know, let us let us know what you're seeing and what you're experiencing. They're doing part you know, tasks and roles that we aren't part of anymore. So I do want to hear that.

What I don't want though is them to say, Hey, there's a problem, not tell me about it, not do anything to address it, and just try to avoid it. Yeah. Go, well, I'm not gonna fix it. I'm also not going to tell anyone about it who can fix it. I'm just not gonna talk to that person. Well, that isn't really an option. Yeah.

If they just go and complain, they're just causing waste in the company because then they're putting problems on the shoulders of people that can't solve the problem. And they're eating up mental resources and stressing about a problem that they have no ability to resolve. That's what gossip is. It's theft. So I think either way, if you have two team members that aren't getting along, most likely there's a lack of leadership or a lack of clarity in culture. And one of them is misaligned.

Towards the values is most likely the case. And now if the values are defined, then we it's easy for the team to all point out or to realize hey, this is out of alignment with the company values. This is not how we do things. But if values aren't clear, then everybody feels like, well, I think it should be done this way, and this person thinks I think it should be done this way, and they disagree, then there's a conflict. And there's no real way of settling that, especially if the leader doesn't step in and

And make sure that they get them together and figure out the problem. So it starts by first defining the culture in the business. If just like any religion, you can't have a religion without beliefs. There has to be some sort of written-down, you know, articles of faith or determination of what the rules are or how this works or what our beliefs are. And your business needs this as well. We need an agreed upon set of guidelines, rules.

values, goals, and people either choose into that or they don't. And this needs to be determined by the business owner. This is not something we abdicate to the team because ultimately the team and the business should be built around the person that owns it. Your job in life is not to try and build a team and a business that make you stressed out that you have to try and please all the time. You are who you are.

God made you a certain way. And if it's your business and you're running it, you need to build the right team and the right values and the right systems around you. So you have more and more freedom and feel more and more comfortable. That's going to allow you to have team members that also feel more and more comfortable and more and more free and feel like they're part of something bigger that they believe in. But it's really difficult to believe in a starving king, for example, and the king has to eat first or queen.

has to be first because nobody wants follow a starving queen, right? You you need to make make sure that you figure out what you want first. And that's the business and the team that you build around you. And a lot of business owners are trying to build the business around their team members or build their their day to day around what the business wants out of them. And then your business ends up I sometimes joke, your business sometimes is a high chair tyrant flinging food in your face.

Anybody that's been a parent knows that that's not the that's not the ideal parenting situation where the kids in charge and flinging food in your face saying, I don't like this. I don't I want I want it different. Give me cake, you know, or whatever. Somebody has to be somebody has to be the parent. Somebody has to be daddy and somebody has to be mommy. Somebody has to like set the rules. And if you it's your business, you need to be displaying that leadership.

And that starts by defining the culture. It's super important. It's the the I would argue that the culture you define in your business is your actual product. The actual product you're selling is your your unique set of skills, ideas, values, beliefs. This is the product. And a lot of you are trying to sell property management, which is the outcome of what you do, but people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it.

And then by how you do it. And why you do what you do is related to you personally and your values. And how you go about doing it as a team is related to the company core values, is how they go about doing everything. Because you you can do property management in lots of different ways. And this outcomes could, on the surface, seem somewhat similar. Like, hey, we both do maintenance coordination, we both do leasing, but hey, this one's shady and doesn't have values.

And this one has integrity. Or this one hires X Cons. This one hires X Cons. They can wrench on some things. We'll send we'll send them into some vacant units. What could good what could possibly go wrong? Yeah. So that was random. Chaos. Chaos. Thanks. All right. Excons. What what? So yeah. Anyway, so that's the idea. Is we want we want to make sure that we get really strong cultural clarity and

Now a lot of I've seen lot of businesses, maybe under 200, maybe even under 400 doors, they think culture is fluffy, woo-woo, BS. They don't see the value of it. They think, well, this sounds like kumbaya, blah, blah, blah. I just need work done. And here's the thing that having seen, I've seen more than probably anyone listening to this podcast. I probably have. Sarah's probably seen inside more businesses than a lot of you. And she's been how long have you been with DoorGrow?

Now. Six years? Yeah, long time. A lot like probably talked to hundreds. Yeah. And so what we've seen inside businesses, I've seen inside thousands of companies. What we've seen is we've seen the pattern that it's almost impossible, I think, to break five hundred units with bad culture. It just doesn't really happen. And if you do, I've seen it once where a client had six hundred doors, but he was making zero dollars of profit. And there wasn't great culture.

Right. He eventually fired 250 units. He fired half his team. Then he was making money. And that was because of coaching. But yeah, we need to make sure we have culture defined. Culture is what determines the type of team members you have. Culture is what determines or attracts or like scares off, you know, good or bad team members. Culture is what helps you get good or bad clients. It determines whether or not you are a doormat that is just bleeding profitability.

Or you have a highly profitable business that's hitting 50% profit margin, like some of our clients. So a lot of people are just hemorrhaging money and they don't see culture as a problem. But then they start hitting this weird wall. And if you look at our door grow code roadmap, it's almost like they're trying to grow, they're trying to get to the next level in the door grow code, they're trying to move forward. There's this weird tether, this rubber band. And the further they get towards 500 doors.

The more pressure there is to be pulled back and the more chaos comes in and the more their team starts screwing up and they think they need more processes. But the thing holding them back is the one box on our Dorgo code that's several stages earlier that says you need to get culture defined. And if they get that defined, that rubber band is snipped and they can just keep on growing and scaling because they're able to attract good people. They have a good product, they have a good team.

Culture is the foundation because culture is the actual foundation of the business. It is the product. It is what you're selling to people. It is what your team members are buying into and trading their time for in order to get a paycheck. So if you would like less chaos, there's two things that you can do. One is make sure that you have

Defined. If you don't know how to do that, you might want to reach out. We're pretty good at helping people with this. The second thing that you can do to reduce chaos is figure out how to deal with all that pesky maintenance. Heck, here's an idea. If you're working with us, you know that you're growing doors, and that means that you're going to have to keep figuring out how to keep up with all that maintenance. Instead of doing that, we recommend using Venderoo to have maintenance figured out for you. With AI, a vendoroo.

Brings the best practices, workflows, and AI intelligence. They've developed across hundreds of property management operations and they put it to work in your business. It's an AI that answers the phone, troubleshoots with residents, coordinates with vendors, follows up, and drives the work order all the way to completion. So as you add doors, you don't have to keep reinventing maintenance. Yay, let Vendoroo build your maintenance for you. Like so many of our DoorGrow community members have already done. You focus on growing the doors.

And then build an AI first maintenance department that will scale with you forever. Isn't that nice? Use Venderoo. All right. Little word. Is it doorgrow.com slash Vendaroo? Or is it Venderoo.com slash doorgrow? It's one of those. I don't know. There's a little word from our sponsor. So all right. So get culture defined. It's gonna dramatically transform your business. If you would like some help getting this defined in a way that is gonna help you make more money.

Get clarity, reach out to us and learn about our rapid revamp where we clean up your business. We help you clean up your front end, we help improve your pricing, improve your branding, improve your website, improve your sales pitch, improve your culture stuff, get all of this stuff dialed in so that you have less leaks. If you're missing out on one door annually and you make maybe two grand a year off of a door, and you could keep that door on for maybe five years, that means that door is worth 10 grand.

In future ROI or lifetime value, you are missing out on maybe 10 of these situations every month. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars for some of you that you're missing out on every month because you don't have all these leaks short up in your pipeline. And meanwhile, you're like, I need more leaks, and you're just spending money on marketing and doing stuff to try and grow this. And you're basically turning on the hose more, but the hose has six major holes in it.

Get the hose dialed in and the leaks short up first. Stop the bleeding first before you just start throwing more at it. And we can help you with that. We can help you save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity cost. And our program is an absolute steal. It's maybe worth like only would cost you one door that you're missing out on. And we can help you stop losing out on 10 of them every month, right? So take a look at that. Check us out. Talk to us about the rapid revamp. We'll help you get your culture dialed in. We'll help you get

All this, it's kind of like we're bar rescue for property managers. We'll help you get all of your business dialed in. We've been doing this for a long time. We're the best in the world at this. We've probably rebranded over, I think, 400 companies. So if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take things to the next level, reach out to us at DoorGrow. if you'd like a free training on how to get unlimited leads for free, text the word leads to 512-648-4608.

Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners by going to DoorGrowClub.com. And subscribe to our newsletter by going to DoorGrow.com slash subscribe. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. Until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.

Could the way you're marketing your rental properties be costing you weeks of vacancy? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason Hull sits down with Kori Covrigaru, co-founder of PlanOmatic, to discuss how professional listing media can help property management companies lease properties faster, reduce vacancy costs, and attract more owners. Kori shares what he's learned from more than two decades in real estate photography, including why professional photos, floor plans, and 3D tours can make such a difference in today's competitive rental market. They also discuss how outsourcing photography can save your team hours of driving and administrative work, allowing you to grow your portfolio without adding unnecessary overhead. If you're looking for ways to fill vacancies faster, improve your property management brand, and give your team more time to focus on growing the business, this episode is worth a listen.

You'll Learn

[02:14] Kori Covrigaru's Story and PlanOmatic [04:18] Why Professional Photos Help Properties Lease Faster [06:36] How Better Listings Attract Property Owners [10:03] Scaling Your Business Without Adding Overhead [12:28] How PlanOmatic Works and Integrates With Your Software [15:30] Photography Pricing and Who Pays for It [17:36] How AI Virtual Staging Improves Rental Listings [23:58] Providing Photography Services Across Different Markets [28:31] Building a Client-Focused Business Through Communication

Quotables

"But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described as properties with professional photos lease faster." — Kori Covrigaru Pasted "You attract who you are." — Jason Hull

"It's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know that something is happening." — Kori Covrigaru

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:01)

Five, four, three, two, one. All right, we're live. Hey everybody, I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. We are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. We've been doing this for over 18 years, roughly about now, and we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry.

We are on a mission here at DoorGo to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the BS or eliminate the BS, transform the industry, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, help the best property management entrepreneurs win. And we're particularly genius at three key things: rehabbing property management companies so they make more money, optimizing their growth engines so they add more doors without having to waste money on digital marketing. And we help them figure out and get their ops dialed in so they get more freedom.

Now let's get into the show. Alright, today's guest hanging out with me here is Cory. And Corey, say your last name for me. I'm gonna try it. Kavrigaru. That is an A. Really? What how do you say it? It's Kovrigaru. Kovrigaru. It could be Kovrigaro. It's Roman.

Kori Covrigaru (01:07)

That is an A. You got an A. Yeah, it's covrigaro. But you know what? It could be covrigaro. It's Romanian.

I don't speak Romanian. My father and his family were born in Romania. Means bagel maker in Romanian. Yeah, you nailed it. We're off to a good start.

Jason Hull (01:21)

Interesting. Okay. He's runs bagel you know, meets bagel maker in Romanian. Okay. All right. Very cool.

Yeah, my brother Bryant actually he runs a property management business. He actually was a Mormon missionary in Romania. So he speaks Romanian. So

Kori Covrigaru (01:37)

Wow.

Buona di miniatso. That means good morning. That's about, yeah, the count of 10. We can do it again. That's...

Jason Hull (01:40)

There you go. That's more than I ever knew. So now everybody knows. Thank you. All right, cool. So

so Corey is the the co founder of Plan O Matic. And

Kori Covrigaru (01:54)

Yes.

Jason Hull (01:55)

we're gonna discuss today how high quality listing media can help properties lease faster, reduce vacancy costs, and create a better experience for both owners and prospective residents.

Corey's going to share insights for more than two decades of building one of the nation's largest real estate photography companies and what today's property manager should know about standing out in a competitive rental market. And it has gotten tough to get leasing handled in some markets right now. They've got a lot of inventory, the market shifted, it can be difficult. So we're going to get into that. All right, cool. So

Corey, give us a little background on you so those that are listening can understand what how did you get into entrepreneurism and decide to be crazy like the rest of us and start a business? And like how did this lead to Planomatic? I think it was the short answer is by necessity. I realized early.

Kori Covrigaru (02:48)

I think it was the short answer is by necessity. I realized early on

that it was unemployable and in order to provide an income for myself and eventually my family, had to figure

Jason Hull (02:56)

And eventually my family.

Kori Covrigaru (02:58)

out how to start a business. So I got into Planomatic. I was an entrepreneur major at the first school. I attended SUNY Buffalo my freshman year. played soccer there and transferring to Western Michigan. They didn't have an entrepreneurship major there, but I kind of continued upon that path for myself. And then at some point,

Jason Hull (03:05)

Buffalo, my freshman year, I played soccer there, I ended up transferring to Western Michigan. They didn't have an entrepreneurship major there, but I kind of continued upon that path for myself. And then at some

point in college I met someone who had written software or decreased work plans quickly on site, started helping him with his business, and then eventually licensed that software, started my own business, brought my co-founders on board, and then eventually we started using other software, of course. That's how I kind of got into it.

Kori Covrigaru (03:17)

In college, I met someone who had written software to create floor plans quickly on site, started helping him with his business, and then eventually licensed that software, started my own business, brought my co-founders on board. And then eventually we started using other software, of course, but that's how I kind of got into it by happenstance.

Jason Hull (03:34)

I knew that you know A O B was probably not for

Kori Covrigaru (03:34)

But I knew that, know, J-O-B was probably not for me. And

that's what led me to the path I'm on. 22 years.

Jason Hull (03:42)

Twenty

two years planomatic. Very cool. Very cool. So cool. So what is Planomatic? Yeah. So Planomatic provides professional photography, floor plans, three D scans, AI virtual staging, and more services to the single family rental property management industry nationwide at speed and at scale. So that's kind of like

Kori Covrigaru (03:50)

Yeah. So Plan-O-Matic provides professional photography, floor plans, 3D scans, AI virtual staging, and more services to the single family rental property management industry nationwide at speed and at scale. So that's kind of like our...

you know, if you're familiar with EOS or traction, that's our, that's our elevator pitch. We provide professional photography floor plan, 3D scans, AI virtual for single family rental specifically. We did use to service the for sale by agent space or the traditional real estate agent that sells homes. And we actually pivoted a hundred percent to the single family rental property management industry in

Jason Hull (04:09)

You know, if you're familiar with EOS or traction, that's our that's our elevator pitch. We provide photography floor technology scans for single family rentals specifically. We did use to service the for sale by agent space or the traditional real estate agent that sells homes and we actually pivoted a hundred percent to the single family rental, property management industry.

Kori Covrigaru (04:32)

2020, 21, sort of around that time.

Jason Hull (04:36)

Okay, okay, got it. So three D scans, pro photography, speed, scale. So for property managers, why is it important to do this stuff well? Why can't they just send out one of their team members that's got an iPhone and just sort of wing it? Okay. Well there's there's a lot are a lot of reasons why that's not the optimal solution.

Kori Covrigaru (04:57)

Well, there's a lot. There are a lot of reasons why that's not the optimal solution. Now, look,

I'm not going to say that, you know, it's the same for every property manager and every price range and every market across the U.S. That's not the case. But generally speaking, windshield time is what really cuts into profits.

Jason Hull (05:05)

same for every property manager and every price range and every market across the US. But generally speaking, windshield time is is what really cuts into

Kori Covrigaru (05:18)

And so what we're able to do is reduce that windshield time. That saves money and makes you more efficient.

We also save a lot of the back office having to download, upload photos, color correct them, download them, sort them, upload them to that folio, build them, rent, find wherever your PMS is. And so we save a ton of time by being integrated with your property management software. But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described as properties with professional photos lease faster.

Jason Hull (05:31)

Upload photos, color correct them, download them, sort them, upload them, tab folio, building, random, wherever your PMS is. And so we save a ton of time by being integrated with your property management software. But the biggest reason why it actually makes sense and there's a high ROI for our customers to use us versus what you described is properties with professional photos leads

faster.

Kori Covrigaru (05:55)

So

we're

able to get out to your property often same day or next day and deliver those assets the day later. So that's like an average of two and a half days from order to delivery when you can have professional leasing photos up on the Zillow platform, up on apartments.com or wherever else you

Jason Hull (05:56)

Yeah. We're able to get out to your property often the same day or next day and deliver those assets the day later. So that's like an average of two and a half days from order to delivery and then you can have professional leasing photos up on the Zillow platform, up on Parliament.com, or where

Kori Covrigaru (06:11)

may advertise your single family rentals. so by reducing the windshield time and the time it actually takes to get those photos on, we can reduce the time by about 14 days.

Jason Hull (06:12)

else you may advertise your scene family rentals. And so by reducing the the windshield time and the time it actually takes to get those photos up, we can reduce the time by about 14 days

and lease that property about 10 days faster once it hits the market with those pro photos.

Kori Covrigaru (06:22)

and lease that property about 10 days faster once it hits the market with those pro photos.

Jason Hull (06:27)

So two weeks two weeks less. Two weeks less. On average it takes about two weeks from rent ready to get professional listing photos up on the portal. We can do that for you in two to two and half days.

Kori Covrigaru (06:30)

Two weeks less on average, takes about two weeks from rent ready to get professional listing photos up on the portal. We can do that for you in two to two and a half days. And

then we can also save your team time so that they're not dealing with going out to

Jason Hull (06:39)

And you can also save your team time so that they're not dealing with

Kori Covrigaru (06:42)

a property and taking photos and uploading them in the background and doing all that stuff. They can focus on tenants or maintenance issues or communicating with owners or just not have to grow your staff as fast as you grow your business.

Jason Hull (06:47)

tenants or maintenance or or communicating with owners or just not have to grow your staff as fast as you grow business.

Got it. So it this gives you leverage, especially during times where leasing gets heavy like the summer and there's an increase in workload and workflow happening, then you can just outsource this piece and get people get really somebody else handling this, which is planomatic, get get photos handled, you know, quickly and get things, you know

Get the property leased a lot faster. Leased a lot faster. I mean it's really at this point it's table sticks, right? In this environment especially.

Kori Covrigaru (07:17)

Lease a lot faster. I mean, it's really at this point, it's table stakes, right? In this environment, especially where everything

is so competitive, it's taking a lot more to lease a property. You actually, you need professional

Jason Hull (07:25)

Yeah,

Kori Covrigaru (07:28)

photos to compete out there. And I really, didn't even mention there is another layer to why it's important to market your properties professionally. That's because that's the first impression that potential owners that may want to hire you see online. I mean, you're dirty laundries out there, right? Like they see how you treat your existing portfolio, your existing.

Jason Hull (07:30)

And I I really I didn't even mention there there is another layer to why it's important to market your properties professionally, and that's because that's the first impression that potential owners that may want to hire you see online. Your your very laundry's out there, right? Like they see how you treat your existing portfolio, your existing

Kori Covrigaru (07:47)

and the doors that you manage, and they're going to envision their property being in that same spot on your listing page or on your website. And so

Jason Hull (07:47)

clients and the doors that you manage, and they're gonna envision their property being in that same spot on your listing page or on your website. Right.

Kori Covrigaru (07:55)

you can really elevate your brand and brand yourself professionally by hiring a professional to do your professional property manager. It's like the same reason why you wouldn't recommend an owner or manage their own property. It could work, but it doesn't make sense as far as your time value and what you value, like what's your full-time job.

Jason Hull (07:56)

you know, you can really elevate your brand and and and bring yourself professionally by hiring a professional to do the your professional property manager. It's like the same reason why you wouldn't recommend an owner or manage your own property. It could work, you know, it but but it doesn't make sense as far as your time value and what you got you know what's your what's your full time job, right? Let a professional go let them

do it better. That's kind of the way we see it.

Kori Covrigaru (08:16)

Let a professional do let them do it better. That's kind of the way we see it.

Jason Hull (08:20)

I I think that's a really good point. If you're a property manager listening to this and you're thinking, Well I could just do that myself

You are exactly the problem that frustrates you. These are the investors that are like, I'll just do it myself. You have to have a mindset that it makes sense to outsource to get a better quality product, that it makes sense to get an expert brought in to do expert work. And I love the idea because either you're at the top of your market and you're positioning yourself as the best and you're the best branded and you have the best photos and everything you do is the best, or you got to be the cheapest because in the middle is where you die.

Kori Covrigaru (08:56)

Exactly.

Jason Hull (08:56)

And that playing the game of being the cheapest and trying to do everything low cost is a great way to have a business that makes you miserable, that isn't fun to run, and isn't very attractive to the best clients. It's gonna attract cheapos. You attract who you are. And so if you want to position yourself mentally, and I coach a lot of clients on this, and if you want to position yourself mentally, you got to get graduate from being a cheapo to maybe a more normal type of buyer. And then you got to graduate from being a normal type of buyer to a premium buyer. And then you can attract everything that you want.

But if you have enough premium buyers, normal buyers, you may turn down or fire a lot of the cheapos and not even work with them. Because the people that care about having nice photos and things looking good also care about things being done well and they probably have more money to spend. They're not

Kori Covrigaru (09:41)

Exactly.

Jason Hull (09:41)

looking for the cheapest, ugliest option to just get it done. You don't want to be cheap. especially in an area that kind of reverberates across

Kori Covrigaru (09:45)

So, yep, I agree. You don't want to be cheap. And especially in an area that kind of reverberates across the

internet that everybody can see your existing clients as well as potential clients. You just don't want that to be your brand's thing. It's like,

Jason Hull (09:54)

the internet that everybody can see your existing, you know, clients as well as potential clients. You just don't want that to be your brand's thing.

Kori Covrigaru (10:03)

I'm going to cut corners when it comes to marketing your properties, for example. So that's just like the elevate your brand, kind of keep your existing owners, attract new owners. That's one component of the reason why.

Jason Hull (10:07)

So that's that's just like to elevate your brand, kind of keep your existing owners, attract new owners. That's one component why.

Yeah, I love it. I mean, nicer photos is nice, but I think for me the benefit as a business owner really is freeing up my team to focus on higher level tasks. They're not being sent out to go be a half ass photographer. So it because it's drive time, going out to do things, they could be getting stuff done, helping onboard new clients, getting the

things done in the office rather than just driving around taking photos. And if they're not really great at it, let an expert do it. So seems to be a no brainer. I'm a business owner

Kori Covrigaru (10:43)

And again, I'm a business owner too.

Jason Hull (10:45)

too.

Kori Covrigaru (10:46)

You might be able to, again, not scale your people as you scale your business. I mean, that's every entrepreneur's dream, right? It's how do I keep my overhead the same as it relates to the revenue, but increase that top line in order to generate more

Jason Hull (10:49)

scale your people as you scale your business. I mean, that's every entrepreneur's dream, right? So how do I keep my overhead the same as it relates to revenue, but increase that top line in order to

Kori Covrigaru (11:00)

profits, right? So not having that, that, overhead, that permanent W2 employee that's driving around, insured, buying gas while they're, you know, could be doing other things.

Jason Hull (11:02)

Not having that that overhead, that permanent W two that's driving around insured, buying gas while they're you know

doing other things, not doing anything at all is is

Kori Covrigaru (11:12)

doing anything at all is a high cost.

Jason Hull (11:14)

high costs. Yeah. yeah, yeah. You know, like our cars are often just sitting in the driveway, right? Not really doing a whole lot for us, and then we use it occasionally. And but in business you don't want team members, they're just sitting like a car in the driveway. You want them

be productive, getting stuff done and focus on the right things. And so yeah, if you have seasonal work, if photos are just something that happens occasionally, you know, or even pretty regularly, you want to be able to scale without having to just go out and hire. Hiring is one of the most costly things you will ever do. One bad hire usually costs business owners, I find, when we really dig into it, minimum 10 grand. It's 10 grand in opportunity cost, 10 grand in loss

money that's been spent on this team member for about three months before you figure out they're just not going to cut it. And so the less you have to get involved in the hiring piece and you can use a system with experts just when you need it, that is a lot more ideal. Even if it's more expensive to get that thing done, there you don't have that sunk cost of having a team member all the time that you're paying. Exactly. Keep it variable if you can cool. Business in general you can keep

Kori Covrigaru (12:20)

Exactly. Keep it variable if you can. In business in general, if you can keep it variable, keep it variable.

Jason Hull (12:24)

it variable

Yeah, you you mentioned table sticks. You're talking about the game where the it's who grabs the sticks first? No, it's kind of

Kori Covrigaru (12:32)

No, it's kind of like poker,

you know, like required to pay if you're to play the game.

Jason Hull (12:37)

Pay if

you're gonna play the game. Okay. Got it. Okay.

Kori Covrigaru (12:41)

You up. It's not, you know, if you're playing poker, you have to

ante up. If you're in property management, you have to treat your listing.

Jason Hull (12:47)

Got it. I'm obviously

a really seasoned poker pr player. Just kidding. So right, actually, you can tell me if I say it aloud, so I'm looking

Kori Covrigaru (12:51)

I hope I get that right. Actually, you put me totally, I say it a lot. So I'm going to look that one up afterwards.

Jason Hull (12:56)

at it. All right, cool. So yes, I missed the reference. All right. So very cool. So I I these are some of the benefits. How does Planomatic work? How does this how does this work? G paint the picture. Somebody signs up with you. What's the process? How are they able to leverage you and use you? How does this go?

Kori Covrigaru (13:17)

There are a number of ways we are integrated with AppFolio, Buildium, and RentFine. So I integrated what I mean is you register as a Planomatic client, and then you integrate with your property management software. Your portfolio then syncs with our system so you can see

Jason Hull (13:22)

Build DM and Redfine. So by integrating what I mean is you register as a priomatic client and then you integrate with your property management software. Your portfolio then syncs with our system.

Kori Covrigaru (13:33)

your properties in our system, see what's for rent, what's not for rent, what has professional photos, what doesn't, and make your buying decisions that way with one click. Order photos, order photos, order photos.

Jason Hull (13:36)

Rent what has professional photos, what doesn't, make your buying decisions that way with one click, order photos, order photos, order

photos. Yeah. We either dispatch our photography either same day or next day, go out, capture the content, have that content processed and photoshopped, etc., by our team and some tools that we use, and then we sync those assets back with your property management software so you can go ahead and with one click syndicate that property.

Kori Covrigaru (13:43)

We then dispatch our photographer either same day or next day, go out, capture the content, have that content processed and photoshopped, et cetera, by our team and some tools that we use. And then we sync those assets back with your property management software so that you can go ahead and with one click syndicate that property as far

as the marketing photos are concerned. They appear in your account ready to go, right sort order with the right captions, the right size.

Jason Hull (14:04)

Far as the marketing photos are concerned, they're appear in your account, ready to go, right? Sort order with the right captions, the right

size, etc. And so that entire process from order to delivery is average, you know, averages about two and a half days. and you don't have to download a single thing, like everything just kind of like goes the way it goes. There is another that we've just launched. Actually, this is kind of big news for us, but we've launched the ability to receive work orders now through either property meld or

Kori Covrigaru (14:11)

Etc. And so that entire process from order to delivery is average, know, averages about two and a half days. And you don't have to download a single thing. Like everything is kind of like goes the way it goes. There is another way that we've just launched. Actually, this is kind of big news for us, but we've launched the ability to receive work orders now through either property meld or, or

at folio ability and rent finds. So we can actually receive work orders from our customers, just like you order a plumber.

Jason Hull (14:33)

Folio ability of our device. We can actually receive work orders from our customers. Just like you order

a plumber to come out to the property, you order Planomatic to shoot photos, we receive that work order, we digest that order automatically, and then two to two and a half days later, you'll find those assets synced with your property management software ready to syndicate in the most ways that we work with our customers. And we do have larger owner operator customers that own their their rentals as well as manage them and those

Kori Covrigaru (14:38)

to come out to the property, order PlanoMatic to shoot photos, we receive that work order, we digest that order automatically, and then two to two and a half days later, you'll find those assets synced with your property management software, ready to syndicate immediately. Those are the most organized that we work with our customers. And we do have larger owner operator customers that own their rentals as well as manage them. And those are kind of like we call

them enterprise clients, institutional investors.

Jason Hull (15:04)

Clients, institutional investors,

Kori Covrigaru (15:06)

They integrate with us in a bit of a unique way. They directly integrate with our platform versus going through property management software because they're typically on either Salesforce or Yardi or some sort of proprietary platform. So those customers have a more direct integration with us. That's pretty much, it's really easy. Just register and go ahead and integrate. You don't have to integrate. You can also just go out and place an order and we'll be there.

Jason Hull (15:07)

they integrate with us in a bit of a unique way. They directly integrate with our platform versus going through property management software because we typically want either Salesforce or ERB or some sort of proprietary platform. Okay. Just register and go ahead and integrate. You don't have to integrate the just go out and place an order. Okay. Very cool. And

so if they place an order and you go out there and maybe the tenant

left something or wasn't quite ready. like there's a trash bag in the kitchen or there's something's missing or whatever. The Photoshop guys can kind of get it s that weird thing out or take care of that. It's just AI the thing and it's gone. We don't charge for something like that. We charge for object

Kori Covrigaru (15:44)

But as we know today, that's kind of a lasso situation. You just kind of lasso that item. We get rid of those items, and we don't charge for something like that. We charge for object removal that's

bigger. Like if there's a car in the driveway for some reason, or there's a big trash bin, we may charge a little extra

Jason Hull (16:00)

Yeah.

Kori Covrigaru (16:00)

for that, because that's a little more heavy. But as long as the is vacant, we can take the photos. We can clean up a little bit of a mess.

Jason Hull (16:03)

Got it. Okay.

Kori Covrigaru (16:07)

It's no big deal. We can do a lot more. can AI virtual stage images, too, but declutter.

Jason Hull (16:12)

Okay.

Cool. Got it. I I'm sure people listening to this are like, this sounds great. This sounds really cool, but what is the cost? Is that something you can tell talk about? Yeah, the cost in and right now we we do have a membership program, so it it does impact that and we do have a prepay and save, but Okay. But the cost is a la carte. You don't have to pay like this, you know, per month subscription. It's like literally you have an

Kori Covrigaru (16:23)

Yeah, the cost in right now, we do have a membership program, so it does impact that, and we do have a prepay and save, but the cost is a la carte. You don't have to pay like this per door per month subscription. It's like literally you have an order to place with

us. Great. Go on, place one order for photography only. Our minimum there is 10 photos. You can also place an order for photos and 3D tour and a floor plan.

Jason Hull (16:40)

place with us, great. Go on place one order for photography only. Our minimum there is ten photos. you can also place an order for photos and three D tour and a floor plan.

Kori Covrigaru (16:50)

I believe that photos, know, everything's like for, for 15 photos, a 3d tour and a 2d floor plan. We're talking under 300 bucks per property setting. 270. It's like off the rack, 15 photos, 3d.

Jason Hull (16:51)

Okay. I believe that photos, you know, everything's like for f for fifteen photos, a three D tour and a two D floor plan, we're talking under three hundred bucks. Okay. Awesome. Two seventy it's like off the rack.

Yeah, that's great. And this would be easily be something that you could

offer as part of your packages or your offerings and have the owner pay for as part of the leasing process. I was gonna backtrack and say it's free. Right. Right. You should be tweaking your owner and you should be probably marking that up for all the coordination just that you do. I mean it's transparent, but we don't really support the kickbacks or or charging more and saying, you know, tell them it was more or whatever it is, but

Kori Covrigaru (17:19)

I was going to backtrack and say it's free. It's free to the property manager, right? Because you should be choosing your owner and you should be probably marking that up for all the coordination, just like you would mark up in the work that you do. mean, of course, transparently, we don't really support kickbacks or charging more and saying, you know, tell them it was more or whatever it is. But yeah, this

is something that most property managers that we work for are starting to change their process, change their owner agreement to make sure that that owner

Jason Hull (17:40)

Yeah, this is something that most property managers that we work for are starting to change their process, change their owner agreement to make sure that that owner

Kori Covrigaru (17:49)

pays for those marketing photos and it makes sense, right? Because once that owner picks up and leaves and takes their door with them, those photos are then obsolete, right? for the property manager. it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of owners are like, yeah, of course we need professional photos to market my property.

Jason Hull (17:50)

pays for those marketing photos and it makes sense, right? Because once that owner picks up and leaves and takes a vote with them, those photos are then obsolete, right? So for the for the property managers. So it makes a lot of sense. And a lot of owners are are like, Yeah, of course we need fashion for this.

Kori Covrigaru (18:04)

It's my property.

Jason Hull (18:04)

Yeah, obviously.

And then if they can explain everything you just explained about the benefits of this, then to their clients, the then the owners will say, Yeah, no brainer. I should do this. I'll pay the extra money.

I'll pay and mute.

Kori Covrigaru (18:16)

That should be in the agreement. mean, that's something, yeah.

Jason Hull (18:20)

Got it. Okay, very cool. What else do people typically ask about Planomatic or what what else are am I are we missing? Those that are listening that might usually be curious about.

Kori Covrigaru (18:30)

I you know, I don't want to call it a silver bullet because I don't

know that I believe necessarily in silver bullets. Are you, are you with me on the silver bullet thing? All right, good. Just making sure. So AI virtual staging has, has provided us with significant data that shows that it works almost like a silver bullet. mean, properties with AI virtual staging just lease faster. get more showings, more, more.

Jason Hull (18:35)

Silver bullets? Are you are you with me on a silver bullet thing? Yeah, yeah. So AI virtual staging has has provided us with significant data that shows that it works almost like a silver bullet. I mean, yeah. Properties with AI virtual staging just lease faster. They get more showings, more

more applications, and it's been kind of wild.

Kori Covrigaru (18:59)

and it's been kind of wilder.

That's something that we've seen from our institutional folks. They take a lot more time to research ROI on specific products that we offer. one of the...

Jason Hull (19:02)

That's something that we've seen from our institutional folks. They take a lot more time

to research on RLI on specific products that we offer. So everybody knows kind of what staging is, right? If you're selling a home and it's usually a more expensive home, you call a company a staging company and they'll bring a big U-Haul with a bunch of furniture and they'll come and they'll drop it off and they'll put it in, and then you'll have your listing photos taken, right? Because listing photos look so much better.

Kori Covrigaru (19:12)

Yeah. So everybody knows kind of what staging is, right? If you're selling a home and it's usually a more expensive home, you call a company, a staging company, and they'll bring a big U-Haul with a bunch of furniture and they'll come and they'll drop it off and they'll put it in. And then you'll have your listing photos taken, right? Because listing photos look so much better with

furniture. Well, for the longest time, we've been able to virtually stage real estate photos. We've had to do it with a human being and that costs a lot. You know, that costs a lot.

Jason Hull (19:32)

furniture, well for the longest time we've been able to virtually stage real estate photos. We've had to do it with a human being and that's cost a lot, you know, that

costs a lot more money. But today the advances of AI and we see it all you know commercials on TV and everything, we can virtually stage and by virtual stage I mean s like take a a photo of a vacant room. Yeah. Go go to our staging vendor, a software company, click a button, choose

Kori Covrigaru (19:42)

But today, with the advances of AI and we see it all over commercials on TV and everything, we can virtually stage. And by virtually stage, mean, take a photo of a vacant room, go to our staging vendor, a software company, click a button, choose between

Jason Hull (20:00)

between various different styles for staging. Okay. And then it actually places that furniture in the image and and you and it looks like s it's scary how real

Kori Covrigaru (20:00)

various different styles for staging. And then it actually places that furniture in the image and it looks like it's scary how real it looks.

Jason Hull (20:09)

it looks. Right, yeah. And so when you have when they have properties that are are staged or virtually staged, and we label them virtually staged just

Kori Covrigaru (20:11)

And so when you have, when you have properties that are staged or virtually staged and we label them virtually staged just to make sure that.

Jason Hull (20:18)

to make sure that you've got the virtual staging in the photos. Does this show up in the three D tour or stuff like that? It doesn't show up in the three D tour. It does however show

Kori Covrigaru (20:25)

doesn't show up in the 3d tour. does, however, show up

in the photography carousel, of course. And we typically have like a before and after. It allows for the potential renter to envision their lives in that, versus seeing it as an empty box. So naturally there's been more, we've all looked for real estate before and we've clicked through properties and when the photos are bad, it's you kind of move on. Cause like you don't stuff in that mess, right?

Jason Hull (20:31)

Got it. I mean we have like a before and after. It it it allows for the potential renter to envision their lives. Right, they can imagine it. Versus seeing it as an empty box. So naturally they're gonna spend more we all looked for real estate before and we've clicked through properties and photos of that it's you kinda move on. Yeah, yeah. You don't withten that mess,

right? When it's nicer photos you stop and and so the the furniture really helps the potential rent to stop spending more time

Kori Covrigaru (20:53)

When it's nicer photos, you stop. so the furniture really helps the potential renter stop, spend more time on that listing

and eventually get more showings and more applications.

Jason Hull (21:02)

Sure. Yeah. I've moved into places and you know, seeing how they had it decorated before or seeing photos how they decorate it gave me an idea of, we could do something like this, or here's what I want to change. Because you're not starting with just this blank slate and trying to be creative. And so yeah, I think it helps people's imagination so they can picture their life in there. Okay,

Kori Covrigaru (21:23)

Yep. It just cause you to stop, you know.

Jason Hull (21:25)

cool. And there's you you were citing there's evidence.

that virtual staging significantly increases the results as well. So not just having good photos, but also good photos that are virtually staged, you're now maximizing the the return on this. And the and the virtual staging that that's

Kori Covrigaru (21:41)

And the virtual staging, that's really inexpensive.

I think it's 36 bucks for three rooms, if I'm not mistaken.

Jason Hull (21:46)

It's thirty six bucks for three rooms. Yeah.

Kori Covrigaru (21:49)

So it's like a huge ROI

Jason Hull (21:51)

Cool.

Kori Covrigaru (21:52)

to order virtual staging on top of your professional photo.

Jason Hull (21:54)

Sure, a lot cheaper than real staging.

Kori Covrigaru (21:58)

Where'd you go?

Jason Hull (21:59)

So yeah, got it. Very cool. anything else that we're missing about Planomatic? Sounds very cool. Yeah.

Kori Covrigaru (22:05)

Yeah, no, I mean, I'm again, been an

entrepreneur for about 22 years. We have a high focus on, on client communication and client support. So that's one thing that's like paramount for me. I always tell my team, it's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know something is happening, meaning keep the customer updated. You know, even if we don't have the resolution yet for you, like we'll figure it out or we're working on it. So when you work with us, you really understand those, that's part of our core values. really.

Jason Hull (22:10)

we have a high focus on on client communication and client support. So that's one thing that's like paramount for me. I always tell my team it's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know something is happening. Meaning keep the customer updated. Yeah. You know, even if we don't have the resolution yet for you, like we'll figure it out or we're working on it. So what when you work with us, you really understand those that's part of our core values. It

really emulates through the entire organization. So that's really important to us. Our integration, of course, is is really important and allows for

Kori Covrigaru (22:30)

emulates through the entire organization. So that's really important to us. Our integration, of course, is really important and allows for our customers to

be able to transact with us. Again, business 101, make it as easy as possible for your customers to transact with you. So we've tried to make that a reality. And then, know, we're business owners, we're a small business, just like you all are, you know, just like you are, Jason, just like our property management clients are. And we just want to...

Jason Hull (22:39)

To be able to transact with us, make our business one on one, make it as easy as possible for your customers to transact with you. So we've tried to make that a reality. and then you know, we're we're business owners, we're small business just like just like you all are. We're not just like you are, Jason, just like our our our property management clients are. and

we just wanna be successful in helping our clients make more money and and gain more market share, and and that's what we strive for every day. So we have the same

Kori Covrigaru (22:59)

be successful in helping our clients make more money and gain more market share. And that's what we strive for every day. So we have the same struggles,

but same successes that every business owner does. We're not PE-backed or VC-backed.

Jason Hull (23:08)

Same struggles, but same successes does with the RP backed or PC backed on P back back.

Got it. So I know there's a lot of people listening that are gonna think, because I hear this all the time, even with with what we do at DoorGrow, will this work in my market? I'm in a big city, will this work in my market? I'm in a small town. How do you source photographers? So before you answer that, I'm gonna share a quick word from our sponsor. So our sponsor today is Vendoroo. So if you're working with

Door grow, you're growing doors, right? And that means you have to keep figuring out how to keep up with the maintenance. So instead of doing that, we recommend that you use Vendoroo to have maintenance figured out for you with AI. Some of our clients are getting 85%, 95% of their maintenance coordination handled by Vendoroo, which is amazing. Vendoroo brings the best practices, workflows, and AI intelligence. They've developed across hundreds of property management operations and puts it into work, into your business.

It's an AI that answers the phone. It troubleshoots with residents. It coordinates vendors. It does follow-up. It drives the work order all the way to completion. It could probably work with Plan O Matic, right? So as you add doors, you don't have to keep reinventing maintenance. Let Vendoroo build your maintenance for you. Like so many of our DoorGrow community members have already done. You focus on growing your doors. Build an AI-first maintenance department that will scale with you forever.

Use Vendoro. Cool. All right. So tell us how do you handle photographers? Because some people are thinking, well, this might be hard in my town. They who do they know in, you know, Podunksville, you know, wherever I'm at, you know. Or they might think I'm in a really big city and maybe photographers, there's challenges with getting good ones and they're so expensive or w whatnot.

Kori Covrigaru (25:01)

You hire a team to, you know, to

Jason Hull (25:02)

You hire a team to to you know.

Kori Covrigaru (25:04)

onboard, to hire, to onboard, maintain these contract photographers nationwide. That's kind of what we've

Jason Hull (25:09)

Yeah.

Kori Covrigaru (25:09)

done. we've perfected that, almost perfected that. I think one really important thing to note about us is we try to make it as simple as possible for our photographers to work with us from all the software. And it hasn't historically been that way and we're getting closer to it, but what software do they have to download and register for on our system?

Jason Hull (25:13)

Almost almost perfected that. Yeah. One really important thing to note about us is we try to make it as simple as possible for our photographers to work with us from all the software and and and it hasn't historically been that way. We'll get any closer to it, but what software do they have to download and register for on our system?

Yeah. what specifics, like how are the instructions given out? What about access to to you know these doors and and I'm not talking about just one method. It's like there are so many different methods.

Kori Covrigaru (25:30)

What specifics, like how are the instructions given out? What about access to these doors? And we're not talking about just one method. It's like there are so many different methods. I'm trying to key

box, so there's a key hidden. There's this, there's that. Call this number, get this code, right? So it's just a lot. I mean, we've been doing this since 2004. We've been in the SFR space since 2012, handling hundreds of shoots a day.

Jason Hull (25:41)

trying to key box so there's a key hidden there's this there's that call this number get this code right so it's just a lot I mean we've been doing this since 2004 we've been in the SFR space since 2012 handling hundreds of shoots a

day for larger companies and smaller companies and so there's a lot a lot of its experience of just like okay here are all the you know here are all the edge cases this is what you do in this case and also just being available for them to pay them of course enough to make it make sense but we have

Kori Covrigaru (25:56)

for larger companies and smaller companies. And so there's a lot of experience of just like, okay, here are all the edge cases. This is what you do in this case. And also just being available for them. You have to pay them, of course, enough to make it make sense, but we have to pay them enough

for the business to operate, right? So it's a very delicate, it's the hardest thing that we do is find quality photographers, educate them, onboard them, maintain them, and then keep them happy.

Jason Hull (26:11)

good enough for the business to operate, right? So it's a very delicate it's a har it's the hardest thing that we do is is find quality photographers, educate them, onboard them, maintain them and keep them happy. Yeah. it's

Kori Covrigaru (26:25)

It's as tough as it sounds. And it doesn't matter if it's a small market or a huge market. Huge markets with a lot of people have their own challenges. There's traffic, there's cost of living, it's higher. Small markets, you don't have all that, know, it's to find quality people

Jason Hull (26:26)

it's as tough as it sounds and and it doesn't matter if it's the small market or a or a huge market, but you huge markets with a lot of people have their own challenges. There's traffic, there's cost of living to hire small markets, you know, have all that you know, hardly fine

Kori Covrigaru (26:41)

in the specific industry. it's just, hire the right people to take care of our great network of planet tech.

Jason Hull (26:40)

quality people in the specific industry. So it's just hire the right people our great network with planetary. Yeah.

This is some of the magic that you've spent a lot of time dealing with. And I'm sure people that have tried going and getting a photographer, tried doing it themselves, tried editing photos, like that is just so time intensive, so much work. And if you're a business owner doing this stuff, that's the dumbest trade you could ever make. You should offload that, get that off your plate because the speed of you is the speed of the business and the team.

And you should calculate your time as worth the the top line revenue of the company and what that comes out to per hour. And so you should not be doing this stuff. So now another challenge that people deal with, and I don't know if there's a way your system addresses this, but there's been a lot of challenges with scammers stealing photos from people's listings, putting up other listings elsewhere, tricking people into giving money. Is there any way we can combat that through

Kori Covrigaru (27:37)

No.

Jason Hull (27:38)

the photography?

Kori Covrigaru (27:39)

You know, I think with general awareness around how sort of the internet works and how, and the general awareness of what AI

Jason Hull (27:40)

But I think with general awareness around how sort of the internet works and how to t and and the general awareness

Kori Covrigaru (27:46)

is capable of, I think people are more skeptical these days. I don't think everybody's just sending out checks and routing numbers and checking numbers. Cause we hear, I'll be honest, we hear less noise about it lately. And I think it's around the awareness. Historically, you know, we, we watermark photos. can watermark photos, however you, you know, property

Jason Hull (27:48)

skeptical these days, right? Yeah. Everybody's just sending out checks and routing numbers and 'cause we hear we hear less noise about it lately and I think it's awareness. historically, you know, we we watermark photos, we can watermark photos

Kori Covrigaru (28:05)

manager wants to watermark photos.

AI today, you can get rid of those watermarks in like a half a second, Free AI account. So man, it's changing rapidly right now. I don't have a recommendation that will just solve all of those problems. think that you have to be very careful. I would still watermark. You have to be careful where you put your images. There are applications out there like...

Jason Hull (28:08)

Photos with AI today, you can give rid of those watermarks. Yeah. Yeah. So man, it's it's it's changing rapidly right now. I don't have a a a recommendation that will just solve all of those problems. I think that I mean you have to be very careful. I s I would still watermark, you have to be careful where you put your images. there are there are applications out there like

Kori Covrigaru (28:34)

invisible watermarks that you can kind of track across.

Jason Hull (28:35)

invisible watermarks and you can add it. Yeah,

I've heard about the invisible watermarks lately. Claude and some of these tools

Kori Covrigaru (28:40)

Yeah.

Jason Hull (28:40)

are adding invisible watermarks to stuff, to text, to images, to things that are created. So people will go, this was created by AI. Here's where it came from. I think it's a matter of educating your your potential renters. I think it's a lot a lot it's you know still

Kori Covrigaru (28:48)

Yeah. I think it's a matter of educating your potential renters. think it's a lot of it's, know, Zillow has to make it,

has to educate their users, right, to make sure that people aren't just going and sending random checks out and putting it all over the listing media and all over your brochure and description. I think it's really important. If you're a renter, don't go on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. Stick to the internet listing services that are, you know, tried and true, I think.

Jason Hull (29:11)

stick to the listing services that are you know tried and true.

Kori Covrigaru (29:19)

I think that's the most important thing is like just watch where you put your listings, make sure it's reputable.

Jason Hull (29:20)

Think that's the most important thing. It's like just watch where you put your listings, make sure it's reputable. Very cool. Love

it. So, Corey, tell us a little bit about the philosophy that you try to instill with your company, with the people that are in your business, like maybe the values that that you guys espouse. Give people a feel for what the culture is like at Planomatic. We are exceptionally client for meaning, I don't like to say no.

Kori Covrigaru (29:41)

We are exceptionally client forward, meaning I don't like to say no to clients. I like to ask

more questions and I don't like giving an update without a resolution that's coming up. And I get copied on a lot. I drive my team nuts, Jason. I mean, I drive work because I'll reply to a random support ticket or response from our team. I'll just, I'll.

Jason Hull (30:00)

Yeah. I'll reply to a random support ticket or or response from our team and I'll just

Kori Covrigaru (30:08)

I'll reach out to that team member and I think there's a better way we could have handled this reply. And if I'm the customer, like, when are you getting back to me?

Jason Hull (30:08)

I'll I'll reach out to that team member and say, hey, I think there's a better way we could have handled this reply. If I'm the if one of the customers are like, when are you getting back to me?

Kori Covrigaru (30:15)

Right. And I think that's like most important again, it's, better to know, like everybody hears it from me. It's better to know that nothing is happening than to not know that something is happening. And so we have this, we have this phrase we use, we hold the client at the center of the organization, no matter what. one thing I haven't talked about recently, but I think it's really cool. And it's something that we've kind of put in place in 2020 or 2021 is we have personas.

Jason Hull (30:17)

And I think that's like the most important. Again, it's it's better to know like everybody hears it from better to know that nothing to not know that something is happening. So we have this we have this phrase we use, we hold the client at the center of the organization no matter what. one thing I haven't talked about recently, but I think it's really cool and it's something that we've we kind of put in place in twenty twenty twenty or twenty twenty-one is

Kori Covrigaru (30:37)

our customers, they're real names, right? So we started out with Emma. Emma is our enterprise client. Emma is typically a

Jason Hull (30:37)

percent of our customers. They're real names, right? So we start out with Emma. Emma is our enterprise client. Emma is typically

Kori Covrigaru (30:46)

single family rental owner operator. Emma raises money through institutional capital, whether that be publicly traded on Wall Street or private equity money or pension plans.

Jason Hull (30:47)

A single family rental owner operator. Emma raises money through institutional capital, whether that be publicly traded on Wall Street or private equity money or pension plans.

Emma is usually a customer that uses his own software and integrates directly with our platform. Emma has this National Rental Home Council, Emma Emma. So

Kori Covrigaru (30:57)

Emma is usually a customer that uses her own software and integrates directly with our platform. Emma has this National Rental Home Council, Emma, Emma, Emma. And then we have Paul.

Jason Hull (31:09)

these are your customer, you've got customer avatars so that when you are building out your products and services.

you are have them in mind and you know these categories of clients or buyers of your services will, you know, maybe perceive it a certain way and the product's geared towards these personalities. That's exactly right. And we we

Kori Covrigaru (31:27)

That's exactly right. And we, we talk about

Emma and Paul all day long. It's just natural. Like I'll, I'll be talking to. So Paul, Paul is when we got into,

Jason Hull (31:33)

Tell us about Paul. Who's Paul?

Kori Covrigaru (31:37)

servicing the third party property manager that manages,

Jason Hull (31:40)

Well you're breaking up a little bit. Say that again.

Kori Covrigaru (31:43)

when we, when we started servicing the third party property manager, you know, a smaller business that, that manages 50 to up to, you know, a thousand doors.

Jason Hull (31:45)

When we when we started servicing the third party property manager, you know, a a smaller business that that manages fifty to up to you know a thousand

doors, that persona was so different, and we named that persona Paul, Paul the property manager. Okay. Paul uses folio or building arm or or rent client or rent manager, right? Paul doesn't own their properties, they have clients. Paul's typically smaller, Paul's usually regional. Paul goes to the n national rental.

Kori Covrigaru (31:55)

that persona was so different and we named that persona Paul, Paul the property manager. So Paul uses Azzolio or Bildium or Rentvine or Rent Manager, right? Paul doesn't own their properties, they have clients. Paul's typically smaller, Paul's usually regional. Paul goes to National

Association of Residential Property Management conferences, NARPAM.

Jason Hull (32:15)

National Association of Residential Property Management Conferences. Not that

and and so those are important to like know what each customer wants. The real value is that we've like humanized our clients. Yeah. It's no longer client or or you know ACE property management company wants this. No, it's it's Paul. It's it's it like we have these personas, we have these images of what Paul might look like and what Emma might look like. And so it really helps the team

Kori Covrigaru (32:19)

And so those are important to know what each customer wants, but the real value is that we've humanized our clients. It's no longer the client or Ace property management company wants this. No, it's Paul. We have these personas, we have these images of what Paul might look like and what Emma might look like. And so it really helps the team

humanize the customer and realize that we're talking to human beings.

Jason Hull (32:44)

humanize the customer and and realize that we're we're talking

to human beings. These are real people not just folks behind the screen or whatever it is. Yeah, I love it. Every every small small examples of things that we've done, one of our core values is we create genuine relationships, right? Our customers. We love we love that core value. So everything that we do, it's just like the longer you're in a business, the more you realize that communication and support, how you

Kori Covrigaru (32:48)

real people, they're not just folks behind the screen or whatever it is. And so every small examples of things that we've done, one of our core values is we create genuine relationships, right? With our customers. We love that core value. So everything that we do, it's just like the longer you're in business, the more you realize that communication and support and how you, it's not how you

treat the customer when things are going well, it's how you.

Jason Hull (33:13)

It's not how you treat the customer when things are

going well, it's how you treat the customer, communicate to the customer when things aren't ideal. How you get back on track. Get the client to say, you know what? That got screwed up really, but they took such good care of me so quickly and they gave me this and they got out back for property that. That's what brings customers back more and more. It's not it's not, you know I I believe. Actually that's what keeps me buying from the same, you know, vendor or from the same board is if I'm treated.

Kori Covrigaru (33:16)

treat the customer and communicate to customer when things aren't ideal. How do you get back on track? You get the client to say, you know what, that got screwed up royally, but they took such good care of me so quickly and they gave me this and they got out back to the property that, that's what brings customers back more and more. It's not, it's not, you know, I believe actually that's what keeps me buying from the same, you know, vendor or from the same, or as if I'm treated

with respect and communicated with respect and that's what

Jason Hull (33:45)

Yeah, I love that. I think that's a great tip for those listening to map out your ideal customer profile or your ideal client profile. Map out the avatars that you tend to serve. There's usually a small category of clients that are the ones you're really going after that you're serving. this is true in any business. And the more clear and the more you humanize them and the more you realize what their strengths, what their challenges are, what their pains, their frustrations, their concerns are.

And you map this out, the better you're going to be able to do marketing, target them, create your sales presentation, scripts, pitches, whatever you're doing to be more effective and to teach your team about them so they understand these different avatars. And so yeah, we've done the same thing at DoorGro. We have very clear avatars that we target and that we focus on. And yeah, and we gear our products towards directly towards those avatars and what their challenges are. So love that. It's a great tip to share.

and I love the the I the the focus on relationships, which I think is is paramount. So cool. Well Corey, great stuff. Really appreciate you coming on, telling us about Planomatic. How can people find Planomatic and how can they get started? the easiest way is just planomatic.com, just like it's spelled. you can

Kori Covrigaru (34:59)

The easiest way is just planomatic.com, just like it's spelled. You can email me always

at k-o-r-i at planomatic.com. You can also find us in the marketplace on Atfolio's marketplace, Buildium's marketplace as well. We're all over Narpoem, so if you come to our show, come find us. We're usually in one of the bigger booths because we're preferred partners with Narpoem. So it's not too hard to find us. Go to our website, check us out, reach out to me. Always happy to hear from classic.

Jason Hull (35:13)

in this marketplace as well. We're all over Narbum. So if you come to a show, come find us. we're usually in one of the bigger booths because we're for partners with Narbum. So it's not too hard to find us. Go to our website, check us out, reach out to me.

Always happy to hear from class prospects as well as existing clients. Any feedback anybody has that's another things we ask for.

Kori Covrigaru (35:27)

Prospects as well as existing clients any feedback anybody has that's another things we ask for a hell of a lot of feedback often

too much But yeah easy to find and we welcome everybody

Jason Hull (35:36)

But yeah, easy to find. Cool,

awesome. Tell them that you heard about them from the DoorGro Show podcast if you see this.

Kori Covrigaru (35:42)

Talon, DoorGro, I've got a special coupon if you tell me you heard about us

from the DoorGro show. I'll hook it up.

Jason Hull (35:49)

Cool.

Awesome. We appreciate that. So that he'll give you a special deal. All right. Very cool. Well, Corey, thanks for being here. Appreciate you coming on the DoorGrow show. For those that are enjoying this or watch our show, if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your property management business to that next level. You've been hitting a wall. You've been frustrated for a while. You've tried different marketing channels. You feel like you're just getting sold a bill of goods sometimes. You're just you're frustrated.

Reach out to us at doorgrow.com, we can help. So for a free training on how to get unlimited free leads, text the word leads to 512-648-4608. Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners by going to doorgrowclub.com. You can also join that by going to getting our DoorGrow Hub app that is in the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.

And if you want tips, tricks, or ideas and to learn about our offer, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com/slash subscribe. And if you found this episode even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. It helps us out. Until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone, all by yourself. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.

Your reputation is being built with every client, every interaction, and every decision you make, but are you actually managing it?

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason and Sarah Hull talk about the impact reputation has on the growth of a property management business and why trust needs to be at the center of the relationships you build.

They discuss how questionable sales tactics can damage trust before a relationship even begins, why choosing the wrong clients can lead to bigger reputation problems, and how word of mouth can quickly influence the way people see your company.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Introduction and why reputation matters [02:18] Building business relationships on trust [04:17] How the wrong clients hurt your reputation [07:20] Why reputation impacts word-of-mouth growth [10:38] Managing your reputation intentionally [12:58] Making the invisible work visible [16:49] Taking ownership as a business owner [19:44] How leadership shapes company culture [22:01] Rebuilding trust after reputation damage [25:10] Protecting your reputation for long-term growth

Quotables

"Relationships are built on trust." — Jason Hull

"The product you're selling is trust." — Jason Hull

"If you're the business owner, the buck stops with you." — Jason Hull

"If you shatter your reputation, like you don't have anything left." — Sarah Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:02)

All right, five, four, three, two, one. Hello everybody. I'm Jason Hull. This is Sarah Hull, founder and CEO of DoorGro, and owner and COO of DoorGrow. And we are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. We've been doing this for 18 years and we would love to help you grow your business. All right, so let's get into the show. I'm shortening it up today. It's a little long.

I keep getting shorter. Maybe next time it'll just be like, hey, we're door grow and let's get into it. All right. So today what came up on one of our coaching calls, we were talking about what maybe we should talk about. And one of the group coaching calls where clients get on and they ask questions and they share their wins. Somebody was asking about a residence benefits package and they were saying they were talking to two different companies. And then everybody started chiming in negatively.

on one of those companies when he had mentioned the two companies. This because it's a mastermind. So people are like, yeah, this vendor, they have a bad reputation, they're negative, this sort of thing. And it really made me think. So so what we're going to talk about today is reputation and how important it is to manage your reputation, how important that is to impacting or affecting word of mouth and growth of your company and all of that sort of stuff. So

Cool. All right. And this isn't the th so there was this instance. There was also we got a client on recently and they came to us. They were from a had come from a BDM supplier, a BDM business development manager, which is for those that don't know, a salesperson for property management. They'd come from one of these BDM sort of coaching consulting companies that does placement. That's in the in in the ni industry. And they had

They were on their fourth BDM from this company. And they had had a pretty bad experience. And so they were talking negatively about this other company. actually, I got two clients on recently that had similar experience with this BDM coaching company, and they said similar things. So let's go back to the mass rank call. So they were talking about the resident benefits package.

And talking bad about one vendor. And then they s they were everybody started talking positively about the other vendor. And these are kind of two big competitors. One's been in the industry a long a long time, has a good reputation, and they've been sponsors at our events, and the other one is maybe a newer kid on the block and is resorting to some interesting tactics to get clients. So what have you heard that they're doing to get clients? I think you heard.

That they were, weren't they calling and pretending to be an investor? Yeah, something for property manager. Something like this, some sort of shady tactic of calling up, pretending to be somebody interested in property management so they could get in contact with the business owner who often is acting as the BDM or salesperson. You know, it's a clever tactic. Can it work? Yes. What's the challenge with this? Well

Relationships are built on trust. If you're going to use a vendor, if somebody's going to use you as a property manager, the product you're selling is trust. They don't really care about property management. They wanted somebody they can trust that's going to have their interests in mind and take care of their property that they can trust to do the right thing. Because they're giving you control and you can do a lot of things that are not the right thing or that are unethical.

And it's not a real ethical strategy to trick or manipulate the people you're trying to sell to to start the relationship. So going back to the BDM companies, when I asked the the BDMs of these these two coaching clients we took on, and we were g they want me to help them get their BDMs up to speed and give them good strategy, I said, What strategies were they giving you to do? And they said, Well, it was mostly just

sales role play in learning sales. I'm like, what about growth? And they said, Well, they had us cold calling or calling, you know, and pretending to be tenants or be interested in the rental property. And then we would flip it. And I'm like, So you're starting it out you're starting a relationship of trust by first being untrustworthy and like destroying trust and and the BDM, the gal, she said, Yeah, I didn't I didn't really like it either.

Now maybe they have better strategies than this. Maybe these BDMs weren't doing a good job. We'll find out as they're in our programs, see if they're gonna put in the work, do the things we teach them and tell them to do, which is not that because we believe in trust. But but th similar sort of issue. You can't start a relationship out that is going to be founded and based on trust with by destroying the very thing it should be founded on and then expect you're gonna have a good relationship or that they're gonna wanna buy from you. So

That's my quick two cents on that. Why didn't this deal close? I don't understand. Yeah. Why why am I not getting business why is my business struggling to grow? Well, what are you doing? Lying to people? well. Talking to them. Yeah. Like we start out strong. So, you know, we I I've been at this for like eighteen years. Door girls existed for a long time. You know, and

There's been people that have complained about us. And so the other f side of the coin of this is that you have to be really careful about the clients that you take on. Cause if you take on bad clients or cheap clients or clients with a really broken mindset or that are really negative active, as I would call it, meaning they're constantly looking to destroy everything. They're always looking to find fault in everything. You know those kind of clients. Though they're really difficult for you to deal with.

If you don't qualify your your clientele and you bring on anybody, you're going to have some crappy clients like that. And if you have crappy clients, they're going to give you bad reviews and they're going to be negative about everything and they're going to find fault. Are we perfect to DoorGro? Absolutely not. However, all of our stuff is proven. We have clients that have gotten great results on every single growth engine strategy that we teach, but we've had clients in the past that we didn't do a good job qualifying them, brought them in and

They didn't even for some reason pay attention to what we told them they were buying. And then they thought, well, I paid 10 grand for a website and didn't get a result, which the website was like a minor piece that we threw in as part of the process. And they just didn't do any of the work to get the doors. And it was about teaching them strategies to get doors and helping them optimize the front end of the business. And so you have to be careful about the clients that you take on because the clients that you take on.

d eventually determine the the reputation you're going to have and the reviews that you're going to get. Like a lot of property management companies have negative reviews. The number one way to prevent negative reviews is don't work with certain tenants and certain owners. That's it. Like the that's the easiest way to filter out negative reviews is to filter out bad clo customers. And a lot of times we don't pay attention to that. That's been a mistake that I've made in the past. We've gotten better at that.

Yeah. In general we have really good clients. I think our biggest frustration with some of our clients is really they just sometimes don't do the work. That's probably it. Like we generally attract really good clients, but sometimes they just really don't want to do the work to go outdoors or do the work to to grow. And sometimes it takes them a f several months to figure out that they're not a salesperson or that they just aren't really gonna do the work. And that's where we have a little

conversation with them about maybe stepping into one of our other offers where we place a salesperson for them or where w we ought become their salesperson for them because they realize they don't really like sales. We can hear do you hear your dog? We can hear my my dog is outside my office. You can't probably hear it, but he's groaning and whining. My dog loves me. He can't like be without me for like what, a few minutes?

Hans, you're okay. Relax. I'm the Poor baby. Okay. Now he's barking. He's just gonna get louder and louder. We're gonna have to end this soon. I know quite a few of our videos. He can hear us talking. He's like, Why are they not paying attention to me?

So reputation is king, right? It it it matters a lot. It ha impacts word of mouth. It you know, just like on today's well, yesterday's coaching call, with clients, this business that's trying to get customers, they're gonna have a hard time because everybody on that call heard negative things about this company and said, Steer clear. And I know there's bad actors.

That are competitors of mine that like to say negative things about me and about DoorGrow. And sometimes not usually about me though. No.

Which is fascinating. They they sometimes act like you don't exist. I don't I know, it's really funny. They don't want to attack a woman. Maybe that's it, 'cause they're Muslimer dudes. But

I have in the past, but it doesn't work out well anyway. It doesn't really have a good impact. It's funny. But yeah, there's a lot of people that will say negative things about your business. The other thing is you have to be able you have to be willing to put yourself out there. You have to put out content, you have to put out testimonials, you have to show evidence that these what these people are saying is not true. If it isn't. And maybe some of the companies that I mentioned, I didn't mention their names, but that I alluded to on this call.

Maybe they're good business. Maybe they do have good growth engines and good ways to scale a business for BDMs. Maybe they do have a good residence benefits package program, but they aren't managing their reputation well. They're taking certain actions. Maybe sometimes it's our onboarding isn't good enough and clients have a bad experience and then don't get the results. Sometimes we don't do a good good enough job on the hiring piece or filtering out people that we bring in, just like the BDM company had.

probably hired three bad BDMs for this company. The fourth one that they have now, I vetted and I think they did a good job with. But the other ones were probably not the personality fit based on what they had said. Like one of them quit and got a job as an operator in a company and it's a whole different personality type than sales. And so yeah, so you know, part of it's developing your skill set, improving, r reducing things like churn and all these different things that

Com compound and have impact. And then I think the biggest, even for us, is we got to make sure you bring on good clients. Like if you bring on bad clients, they will always complain and get bad results and they will blame you and they will go tell other people about it because these are people that are not accountable, they don't take ownership, and they're not going to blame themselves. And so you got to be careful of that. So you know the ones that are, you know, it's your fault that something broke at the property. It's like, I didn't realize.

that I was in charge of things breaking or not. I didn't know I had that power. Well why did you allow that to break? I'm sorry, what? I had no idea I could control that. News to me. But no matter what, you know, they're they're just they're not happy. It's it's it's almost like there's not a way to make them happy. And they just like being miserable and they like complaining about things.

No matter what. No matter what, you can call them and tell them great news and you're like, This is really good. I finally have some good news to deliver to them and they will still find a way to be upset about something. Yeah. And you know, it could be that even the clients that I brought on recently that were complaining about other companies, we could be the next company they complain about. Sometimes it's the common denominator is the client. And so that could be the case. So we'll find out. Like if they do the work, they get the results. Our stuff's proven.

But sometimes people just want somebody else to be at fault and want to blame somebody else and they don't really want to put in the work or take action. So I think we did it. Or fix their property. Yeah. Take care of things. Yeah. I don't want to have to do that. I can't believe you're asking me to They don't want to do it. Yeah. So so be intentional about managing your reputation. Be intentional about

PR, like public relations, make sure you're putting out a good message into the marketplace because if you leave it up to the most motivated people to dictate the what your reputation looks like online and publicly, usually it's gonna be the no it noisiest, which are usually the angriest or the worst. They've got a vendetta, they've got a grudge, they had a they had a bad day, maybe it wasn't even about you, but they need somebody to take it out on. You become

Scapegoat, you become the the company they want to attack and they want to get their frustrations out on you. And so then, yeah. And so you've got to have evidence, you've got to have ways to manage this. So, you know, if if somebody came at me and attacked me in the past, I was very willing to s to reply to that comment. And I would just say, here's what we told them to do. They didn't never they did not do this. Here's what they actually bought. They only use this part. Like, you know, so.

And then they can decide whether they want to keep that review up because it makes their company look bad, right? So yeah, so you gotta be careful about who you take on, be careful about how you manage your customers. And then you gotta be careful about managing your reputation so you make sure that you're constantly putting out a good message. The other thing we talk about a lot with clients is the principle of making the invisible visible. Do you wanna chat about that just real quick? You can. Okay.

All right, I'll talk about it. You can't here here's I don't know. I d I think sometimes people go too much here. They do too much on the They do they you they do like my clients never knew anything that was going on and they were perfectly happy but Yeah because I didn't bother them on anything. I wasn't They trusted you, they knew you were in control. Yeah, yeah. You hear from me, it's like not great news.

The only time really that they would kind of get an update almost or hear that kind of stuff was on some sort of like portfolio review call. Yes. Where I was intentional about making sure that they knew, you know, hey, here's here's what we're doing. I would say probably the biggest for me anyway, the biggest time that this was really happening was COVID. Okay. That was like the loudest that I ever was with my clients.

Yeah. There was a lot of panic. Yeah, a lot of anxiety. And man, and especially in my market, it was bad. Like we already had a hard time getting tenants to pay. Yeah. And then they had a real legitimate reason to not pay. Yeah. And I I mean, I was nervous about it. I knew my clients were nervous about it. And there were most tenants just did what they were supposed to do. Some tenants took advantage of it and some were just kind of, you know, caught in

bad situation because of it. But in COVID it like I had I felt like I had to let people know like here's what we are doing and here's what we're not doing and you know if we're you know changing like we're not even allowed to at one point we weren't even allowed to do an inspection on properties. Yeah which is weird. We also weren't allowed to do any maintenance. Like they stopped maintenance. Yeah that's crazy. Like what? How does that work?

So it was really weird, but if if if the state makes it so that you cannot send a contractor out to a property, and whether it's a contractor or the owner or a handyman, it doesn't matter who it is, but cannot send somebody out to a property to make a repair. That was the law. And I had to tell my clients that.

For right now, here's the situation. we'll see how that pans out, I guess, and hopefully there's no repairs that need to be done that are major. So like little repairs, you know, we're holding off on those and major repairs, I guess we'll tackle that if and when we come to it. So that was probably the time that I was really the the loudest about making sure everyone knew what I was actually doing. Yeah, my general policy has always been if if somebody has a problem

You want to go as deep as possible. So it's like communicate with them as direct as possible as a client, which means usually pick up the phone rather than just text them, you know, something that's gonna cause drama. But I think that's an email blast. But well, with something like that where it's everybody, yeah, just you can do an email blast. But but the the principle of making them visible visible is a lot of what you do as a property manager manager is invisible. So the assumption is you're doing nothing. So

And doing an annual review with your clients is a great opportunity to point out all the good that you've done for them. Maybe right after you've onboarded a client and the first rent check's been deposited and they've got that in their bank account, that'd be a great time to do your first owner review. And that's an opportunity to point out all the good that you've done for them, point out the work that you've been involved in, everything that you've handled, all the phone calls you've handled, all this kind of stuff that they have not had to deal with.

So that they now can see, there's value here that you're providing, rather than just expecting them to somehow know. and then, yeah, setting really strong boundaries so they trust you and they're not just communicating with you all the time is also something we talk about a lot. so that's another way that you can manage expectations and manage your perception and your reputation with the people that you're dealing with. So this is just

Something that came to mind from our coaching call this week. And so we wanted to pass it along to you, is make sure you're managing your reputation. You know, I've got one other example. So we've had some clients, occasionally clients sometimes have a hard time paying us. They have financial issues. And there's sometimes there's those clients that just repeatedly have financial problems. They're just they're not putting in the work to figure out how to grow their business.

They want to do it. They're paying us to teach them how to do it, but they just don't actually put in the time or the hours to do it because they probably really don't want to. They don't really think it's fun. I don't know. And so they're avoiding it. And so, and then they aren't making the money. And then it becomes kind of a financial burden because our program's not cheap. And so then they're trying to pay for the program. So then they have payment problems. Now, if people continually have problems paying us and things like this, it's frustrating because then our team have to get involved. We have to shell out money.

And so then our team starts to have a perception about this business owner, like, hey, what's going on with them? They're not doing the work, they're not making the money, and they're not paying us. And then it gets frustrating for us as a team because we want our clients to win and we love our clients and we want to see them succeed. But when we get in a situation like this, we're now instead of like supporting them, coaching them, we're having to follow up, trying to get payment and see how they're doing and they're not they're ignoring us or avoiding our emails or

not responding to things, either they're bad at managing their emails and or they are seeing our emails requesting payment and they're just ignoring us, which I guess is even worse when it comes to integrity. But if you're out of state of integrity, which means you're not being honest with yourself, like you sign up for a program to get coaching, but you and they give you actions to take and you don't do the actions. You're out of integrity with yourself. You're like, I know I should do this.

Just like I should go work out, but I don't do it. Then I feel guilty or beat myself up or I'm out of integrity with myself, right? You got to be real and honest with yourself. And then you end up not paying people. Now there's you're creating a perception issue. And maybe this goes into other areas of their business. Maybe they struggle paying vendors. Maybe they struggle paying other people. And this is going to impact your reputation in the marketplace. So you want to make sure that you're taking care of things and you're putting in the work to get stuff done.

There's there's if you're the business owner, the buck stops with you. If you're the business owner, it's your responsibility. Nobody else on your team unless you can delegate effectively. And if you can't, it's your fault. It's always on your shoulders. And so you have to take ownership of that. There's a great book on the subject by I think Patrick Lincioni called The Motive. And it's about the different two different motives of a CEO. There's the one where you think, well, I'm so above it all, everybody else should do stuff.

And there's the one that realizes the true role of the CEO is to do whatever it takes. If you own a McDonald's and you're the franchise owner and somebody didn't show up to flip burgers, if you can't fill this spot, you're flipping burgers. That's the responsibility of the CEO. You're doing whatever needs to be done to make the business work. And there's a lot of different things that Sarah and I have to step into to take care of sometimes. That's what business owners do in your own business. And so

If you aren't the one stepping in to do things, you're going to end up also sometimes with a bad reputation. Now, we want to create a, you know, a lifeboat. We want to escape from that. We don't want to be doing all the frontline work. That's why we build teams. But you can't build a team if you can't even lead yourself and be have integrity with yourself and do the things that you know you should be doing. Your team are going to pick up on that and go, that's the culture here. We just sort of half ass stuff. We just, we sort of pay vendors and people on time.

We don't take care of things the way we should. We're told to do actions and we'll do some of them. That's not the kind of culture that you want to build. So ultimately the culture you create is going to be based on who you show up as and who you are and the type of team you allow to be in your business. Another factor to consider. Aaron Stokes used to talk about that. Do you remember his story? What story? Was building his his business and he was getting pretty successful.

And I think it was a team member stole from him like a lot of money. Not just like, yeah, it was like a hundred bucks or a thousand dollars. It was a lot of money. Like thousands, thousands, many, multiple thousands of dollars. And that obviously really messed things up. he had he didn't have funds to pay

Some of the vendors that they had worked with. Yeah. He didn't have funds to pay some of his loans that he had taken out, like rent or mortgage on buildings that he had, or you know, and it really it was even like I don't know if I can pay my team at that point. Yeah. It was I mean it was He could have declared bankruptcy he had mentioned. He I think he almost did because it was it was well over it was six figures. It's not just like a little

amount of money, it was a lot of money and it was not by his own doing. Yeah. Like he didn't mess it up. Yeah. but he allowed someone onto his team and gave them access and didn't pay attention. And therefore he admitted fault for it. He's like, I didn't do it, but it's on me. Yeah. He owned it. And he knew this was gonna sink him.

And it it just about did. Yeah. And he worked really, really, really hard for a very long time to rebuild things. Yeah. And clean things up. But the problem is once once they burn those bridges, like it's very hard to, you know, restore things. It's not impossible. It's just hard. and he worked for a very long time and up until the day he died, he would pay the invoice as soon as he got it.

Yeah. It didn't matter. And he said, I I I don't care. Like if today is August sixth and it's due on the 30th, but you sent it to me today, I'm paying it. So he just created this mentality then of we we pay things early. We don't we don't wait. We never pay late. We always pay early. When we get it, we pay it, and that's it. And I don't care where the money comes from, we're we're paying it early. And he said, Because I'm never, never

gonna have my reputation on the line like that again. He said that did so much damage. He said there the the the damage to the business and the team and the finances and you know the the the assets, that's that's all one thing. But it's a relatively simple mess to clean up. What you can't really clean up as easily is the bad reputation that now you have. Because now you're the guy that defaults on loans.

Now you're the guy that says you're gonna pay somebody and you don't. Now you're the guy that doesn't pay your team who worked for you. Now you're the guy who takes out a loan and you're not even good for it. So that was devastating to him. And he worked up until the day he died to make sure that his reputation he wanted people to know we are good for the money. And we will always be good for the money. And I don't care what we have to do, we will

Figure it out and we will be good for the money. So they paid invoices as soon as they got them. They wanted to pay them early. And they knew they were on top of everything. That's why I think he was so deep in he did a very deep dive into his finances and he understood a PL probably with the best accountants on this planet. He could go toe-to-toe and line by line. And if something was off by a few cents, he would go, that's

That's not right. There's something wrong here. And he did that all because of that experience. But it damaged his reputation so badly that he had to work so hard to get that back. And it was hard to get that back. It's hard once you mess it up like that to get trust back from people. But once you get that trust back from someone, you can never, never, never break it again. So he had to be very diligent and make sure that he was really on top of everything because he said if you

If you shatter your reputation, like you don't have anything left. Yeah. You can build any business you want to, but not on a bad reputation. Yeah. When we were in that mass run with Aaron Soakes and Sharon Shrivatsa, you know, Sharon would say fame is the most efficient business model. And the opposite of that would be having a bad reputation. And so it's the least efficient business model is to have a bad reputation in the marketplace.

So yeah, Aaron worked really hard. He also negotiated with all the vendors. He let them know the situation. He said, This is what I can do. He made payment plans. Like he kept he communicated with all of them and he sorted it out with them. he didn't just ghost them. He didn't like avoid them. He didn't, you know, like we've had happen to us. Yeah. Yeah. He did he did do the right thing and contact everyone and he did what he could. And I I he did pay off everything.

Yeah, you got it all paid off. Never declare bankruptcy. Everybody was taken care of. They paid his motto was pay everything early. Cool. So there's some ideas. I think this is a good place to to wrap up. If you are interested in growing your property management business, you're struggling

You don't have really high profit margin. You're like 10% or worse, 20% or worse. And you would like to get really good margins in your business. You would like to get your team and systems really well dialed in. You would like to get adding more doors and get your growth engines installed and growing. Reach out to us at DoorGrow. I think we're the best in the world at helping people do this. We would love to help you. and that being said, to our mutual growth. I hope everybody wins and has success. And until next time, bye everyone.

All right. Baby Hans. He's whining. Bye everyone.

What if some of the people you see as competitors could actually help you grow your property management business? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason and Sarah Hull talk about collaboration over competition and why a scarcity mindset can cause property management business owners to overlook opportunities sitting right in front of them. They break down why clients aren't necessarily choosing a property manager because of a secret strategy, service, or sales pitch, and why trying to protect everything you do from your competitors may be doing more harm than good. If you've been treating the property managers around you strictly as competition, this episode may change the way you look at them.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Introduction and industry overview [00:58] False scarcity and competition myths [03:19] Clients choose you for your uniqueness, not secret sauce [05:16] The industry benefits from collaboration, not isolation [06:15] Debunking false assumptions about growth and scarcity [08:39] Lead generation is easier than perceived [09:06] The abundance of property management opportunities [11:51] Overcoming fear and false evidence [12:52] Collaboration over competition explained [16:16] The neighbor strategy for referrals

Quotables

"They work with you because they like you. Because you're unique, because you are uniquely you." — Sarah Hull

"People don't want to buy property management. They want to buy you." — Jason Hull

"Some of your neighbors could become one of your best friends and best assets." — Jason Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

All right, five, four, three, two, one. Hey everybody, I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. This is Sarah Hull, owner of DoorGro and the COO. We are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry.

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. Now let's get into the show. All right, so today we're going to be talking about collaboration over competition in the property management industry. And the reason for this is because a lot of you are dealing with a lot of false scarcity.

false competition and you're not leveraging some of the people that could be feeding you business, maybe even in your own neighborhood. And so let's get into this. All right, let's talk about it. So if you've ever thought, no, I don't want my competitors

registers to know about doorgrow. I don't want them to work with door grow. I only want to do this or I only want to have the best stuff or I only want to do, you know, the whatever strategy or you know, I want all the connections. And I think a lot of times that's really based in a a scarcity mindset and in a fear-based mindset. Yeah. If you find something that's good and then you go, I'm gonna keep this little secret to myself. I I don't want to tell anyone else about it.

I only want it for me. And maybe it's a website or maybe it's, you know, a special pricing tool, or maybe it's your sales process, or, you know, maybe it's a referral source. Maybe it's what do they call it at KFC? Like the the secret ingredients. Eleven secret eleven herbs and spices. Like I can't I can't let anybody else know what I do or how I do it or why. I don't want them to know anything about me. Then a lot of times I I know it feels like hey, I'm protecting

my assets and I'm protecting my my business and I'm making sure that you know not everyone can copy me. And what it usually boils down to though is A property management is just inherently not that different. Like what one property manager does is really similar to what another property manager does. Are there slight nuances and differences between two companies? Yes, of course there are. How they do things is different.

Of course. But the product itself, what you're actually doing, is not very different from company to company to company. So you're really not saving yourself what you think like what you think you're doing is, I'm not telling anybody. I'm keeping this to myself. I don't want anyone to copy me. It it's it's all the same product. And usually people don't decide to work with you because you have the secret sauce.

They work with you because they like you. Because you're unique, because you are uniquely you. So your competitor and you might do the exact same thing in the exact same area, in the exact same market, targeting the exact same properties and clients. You do everything the same. Your pricing might be the same, the website might look similar, your sales pitches often pretty similar. That's why when you call property management companies, you kind of have deja vu and you hear the same thing again and again and again and again.

Unless you talk with one of our clients and then the conversation sounds slightly different. But it's it's all it all boils down to the same thing. And people aren't working with you because you said the magic words like, they said this one thing and now I have to work with them because no other company does that. No other company is like that. That usually is not the case. Because the product and the service is what it is. It's it's the same. But you're different.

And they like you. And that's why someone will work with you. And guess what? Your competitors probably unless unless you're maybe really mean to them, your competitors probably like you too as a person. They, you know, there's probably maybe some friendly competition there. But they probably like you too. And if you got to know them, you might find that you like them as well. And I think that

looking at this as a collaboration instead of no, it's it's all me, it has to be me, I'm the only one, I'm the best one, and nobody else in this market, everybody else is like this or like that. I'm the only one. Well, all right. I I just don't know how that really serves the industry. I don't know how that really serves the community. Well let's take a step back because I think a lot of business owners

And until your own basic needs are met, you don't care about the community. Let's be real. Like if you're you and your family are hungry and starving, you need money, you need to pay rent, you need to pay your bills, you you want to get your business going. You don't care about the community. You don't care about the industry. You care about yourself, which is fine. So let me help you see how you by being selfish and looking at yourself, you have probably some false assumptions that are causing you to not grow. And that's why you're in this that that

That camp and why you're struggling. So, first of all, like Sarah said, you may have this false scarcity mindset. So, first of all, there is, let's let's kill some assumptions. First, why do you have the assumption that there's a it's hard to grow your business? Or the assumption that there's there's only a small amount of business to go around, or the false assumption that maybe it's difficult to grow your property management business.

What if none of this was even true? These are all false assumptions you have based on bad data and bad information because you've had bad ideas or bad strategy. So, first of all, most property management companies suck in most markets. Why do they suck? Because they're stuck in a lot of this bad mindset stuff. They didn't wake up in the morning saying, I want to start a bad business today. And if you're struggling and customer service is kind of, you know, falling apart, or you've got clients leaving, or people are frustrated.

Or you're super stressed out and you're not loving your business, you didn't wake up in the morning one day and say, This is, I want to start a crappy business today. But that's the default of where you end up when you make certain decisions with certain assumptions because you have blind spots. So let's see if we can destroy a few blind spots for you right now. First, is property management, does everybody sell the same thing? Like Sarah said, no, because why? Property management isn't even the product that people want to buy from you.

They're the right owners that you want. So they're looking for a property management business owner they can partner with that they trust to take over their property. They're not just looking for the cheapest person. But when you commoditize yourself, so by having the wrong offer, you turn yourself into a commodity. You're now and because you're selling the wrong product. And if you're selling the wrong product to the wrong audience, you have the wrong offer that's optimized for the wrong people.

And so then you have the wrong clients, and then your business is really operationally expensive. Your operational costs are really high, really difficult clients to deal with because you have bad channels, the wrong channels, wrong product, wrong offer, wrong clients, right? So we, if we want to counter this and get out of the cycle of suck, one, you have to start firing bad clients. You have to start filtering the cloud clients that you bring on. You need better channels of opportunity that feed you.

Healthier business, healthier property owners, healthier clients, people that trust you, people that are not going to try to micromanage you. The operational costs are lower. They're healthier investors. And then you can sell the right product to them. And then you can have the right offer that's attractive to that type of buyer. And so then everything gets a lot easier. The other thing is Legion is hard. Let's let's attack that. Legion is not hard.

At least half of all rental properties out there are being managed by somebody that doesn't enjoy doing it or that sucks at doing it. Maybe most of them are managed by somebody that doesn't enjoy doing it because a lot of your the lot of half are probably professionally managed or less. And a lot of them are miserable or aren't even good at it. That might be you listening to this right now. And we could help you with that. But most property management companies suck. Most people.

though are not using property manager. So there's a lot of self managing people. They don't enjoy doing it. And rarely have you ever run into a vessor that says, Yeah, I'm gonna I'm doing it myself and I love it. It's my favorite thing. I love managing property. I love showing the property. I love doing inspections and leasing and maintenance coordination. They don't th it's not a hard sell.

Right. So I don't think it's hard to sell property management. I don't think it's hard to get leads. There's tons of available business out there. When scarcity happens is when your channels suck. So if you're focused on SEO, pay-per-click, like Google Ads, pay per lead, like all property management.com, social media marketing, content marketing. Here's where there's a lot of scarcity because there's very little internet or search volume.

looking for property management. And so there's a lot more scarcity there. And there are people winning at this game. But this is kind of like there's there are people winning in Vegas when they're gambling. There are winners. And you see these winners and you're like, they're winning. The lottery. They're like number one on Google. They've been there for a decade. Yeah, they're winning. And everybody else, like second place on Google, gets like a dramatically less traffic, less leads, less business. And that's

It's a hard game to play. So if you're going after Goliath and you are David, but you tr decide to do the same things, you're making really bad moves. So we've got to get you focused on better, more effective lead gen strategies where you're not do focus on digital marketing and you're able to reach these investors and owners that would love your help. They're just not looking for a property manager actively. That doesn't mean they wouldn't buy it. That doesn't mean they don't need it. That doesn't mean they would they would

like give up all that extra freedom and time that they would love to have that you could give to them. You can sell them on this. This is not hard to sell. They don't even like doing it. And you can take it off their plate. And it might even be free for them if they haven't raised rent in the last two years. You just like they might be 10% below market rate on rent. They might be dealing with mol like lots of vacancy.

If you can decrease their vacancy significantly over the course of a year, you probably could pay for your management services just by doing that. So here we are we want to destroy all these false assumptions because fear, they say that is an acronym that stands for false evidence appearing real. So if you're you're in the state of fear or in the state of false scarcity or you have the scarcity mindset.

Every decision you make from that place, from that mindset, is going to be not true or is going to be false or is going to be skewed or is going to be ineffective. And so a lot of you are making decisions from a place of scarcity, which isn't even accurate. There's tons of business out there. Tons of business. There's lots of different growth engines, lots of different strategies and vehicles you could implement on how to grow your business. If you get on a sales call with us, our team will

Give you those strategies for free. So you will be convinced we could help you and you'll know how we could help you and what we could coach you on. So reach out and set up a call with DoorGrow. We are great at this. We've been doing this for almost 18 years. So that's what I would say about that, to destroy some of those false assumptions. And so we believe in a doorgrow. We teach our clients. We believe in collaboration over competition. Right? What does that mean?

That means instead of going, I can't let my competitors know what I'm doing. I don't want to talk to my competitors. I don't want them to know what I'm doing. I would love if I knew what they were doing, but I don't want them to know what I'm doing. I don't wanna talk with them. I don't wanna work with them. I don't wanna look at them. I don't wanna have a relationship with them. I don't wanna put my pricing on my website because then they'll see it and then they'll copy me and they'll they'll do the same thing that I'm doing and they'll have the same thing because

We're the same, you know, we're doing the same thing. Yeah. And and it's that it's that fear. It's that fear and it's that scarcity and it's that well no. Yeah. There's only there's maybe two big companies or three big companies in your market and you're going, Well, I need to be one of them. So I'm I'm I'm gonna just distance myself from my competitors. And if you look at things through the lens of, hey, this is my competitor. Mm-hmm.

then it's really hard for you to want to work with or have a relationship with someone who's your competitor. So you need to be able to look at things different and realize, yeah, you might be in the same market. Yeah, you might do the same thing. Yeah, you might serve the same audience and you might have the same target and you really might have similar goals. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you can't collaborate. Yeah.

And the thing is, people don't want to buy property management. They want to buy you. And you're different than all of your competitors. You have a different philosophy. And hopefully you have a healthy mindset because really what they're buying from you as a partner partially is your mindset. It is your belief system. And if you are coming from a place of scarcity, you also are not going to be very attractive to the healthiest clients. You're not going to be attractive to the best investors. And if you're walking around going, why are all the owners in my market are cheap? You know what that tells me about you?

Yeah, we talk about this in our pricing secrets training and how to figure that out. Like you might be a cheap owner or a cheap O, as I call it, a cheap investor or cheap mindset person, right? So we gotta shift your mindset and that then you start attracting people like you, healthier people. All right, let's do a quick word from our sponsor. We'll get back into this. So our sponsor is second nature. We're talking about collaboration. Yeah.

He's been steamrolling me all day today. okay. Are we segueing into this? Go ahead. Do you want to do it? No, no, you take it. Go ahead. You just you do it. Well go ahead. To be fair, I pointed at it. I know. I didn't think she was gonna lead into it. Okay. Good. Speaking of collaboration and how to partner with someone who's really great so that there's a less of this

You know, scarcity and fear set. mind this fear-based mindset and how to focus on collaboration. Sometimes the people you want to partner with are also in your industry, but they're not direct competitors. Like Second Nature. So let's talk about second nature and then i after this I'm gonna tell you about the neighbor strategy, how you can y actually get neighboring property managers.

To give you business instead of thinking they're taking it from you. Okay. All right, second nature. So the resident experience is broken and it starts with the lease. Leases are getting longer and attention spans are getting shorter. The result is that residents don't read the lease, and PMs know all too well that just it's just a ticking time bomb. Second nature believes it doesn't have to be this way. Introducing resident onboarding.

So, Second Nature's new onboarding guide offers transparency, choice, and convenience to residents all while taking the work off your plate. Lease responsibilities and expectations are made clear and unskippable in a simplified digital signing flow. Residents can customize their living experience, whether they're selecting insurance coverage, upgrading their air filters, or choosing more expense or more extensive pest control coverage, and with group rate internet.

They get gig speed service right in their lease. Best of all, it's fully managed by Second Nature. So there's no extra work for you. This could help. It's kind of like a sounds like an onboarding wizard that they go through to bring them into a better experience. Visit secondnature.com slash affiliate dash doorgrow. So affiliate is A double F I one L I A T E dash Dorgrow.

To start revolutionizing your resident experience. Okay. Cool.

Would you like to explain the neighbor strategy? in two minutes, yes. Cool. So back when I did property management, this was one of the things that I actually really enjoyed doing. I like staying in my lane and not trying to expand into properties, areas and territories that I really wasn't interested in covering, but that I could cover because the right opportunity comes up. We all know how that goes. So

I was actually introduced to a property manager that was a neighboring property manager and I did not cover her area and she did not cover my area. But a lot of times we would talk with investors, both of us would talk with investors to go, hey, do you do this area? And I would go, Absolutely not, I won't touch that with a 10 foot pole. But I have someone who's great to talk with her and she will take good care of you. And she would do the same for me. And we would be able to send each other leads back and forth.

So that I could just cover the area that I was really great at covering and that I wanted to cover and she could do the same thing. And instead of then going, nope, don't cover that area, see you later, bye. Then I would go, well, I don't, but I know someone that can help you. And she's great. Let me get you connected with her. And that became a lead for her. And I got a lot of business from her. And I would send her a lot of business and it was really great. because some people would look at that and go, no, I have no time for that.

And it was a really great relationship that we were able to maintain and grow our businesses together collaboratively. Awesome. So if you you could be a vendor in this industry, you could be a property manager in this industry. If you think that your competitors are your enemies and you think that there's no way to collaborate with them, maybe you're not looking hard enough. And there are some big opportunities for deals to be had, for relationships to be created. And just like Sarah talked about the neighbor strategy.

There's we've had clients with short-term rental companies in the exact same city as long term rental company clients working with each other, feeding each other business. There might be a way to work out. maybe there's different types of properties, whatever, but some of your neighbors could become one of your best friends and best assets. All right. So if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your property management business to the next level. You're dealing with some difficulties and growing, you're you're dealing with difficulties with your mindset, whatever.

Reach out to us at doorgrow.com. Let's help you change things and start making a lot more money. And for a free training on how to get unlimited leads for free, text the word leads to 512-648-4608. Also join our free community online just for property management business owners by going to doorgrowclub.com. And if you want tips, tricks, and ideas to learn about our offers, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com/slash subscribe.

And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. Until next time, remember, the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone. Wait a few so it doesn't off at the end. Five, four, three, two, one. Okay, bye.

Hiring is building a business that gives you more freedom instead of making you more dependent on it.

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason and Sarah Hull break down one of the most expensive mistakes property management business owners make: hiring based solely on what the business appears to need instead of what the owner actually needs. They explain why this common approach leaves entrepreneurs overwhelmed, wearing the wrong hats, and trapped inside businesses they no longer enjoy running.

You'll learn how a simple time study can reveal where your energy, focus, and profitability are being lost, why every new hire should solve both a business problem and an owner problem, and how reallocating your time toward high-value activities creates sustainable growth.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Why Freedom Is the Foundation of Entrepreneurship [05:12] Building a Business That Creates More Freedom [09:45] Helping Your Team Thrive Through Autonomy [15:08] Why Property Managers Really Sell Freedom [20:14] Trust, Leadership, and Better Client Relationships [26:10] Creating Freedom at Every Level of Your Business [31:35] Escaping the Business Owner's Cage [36:42] DoorGrow's Framework for Business Freedom

Quotables

"Money flows towards freedom." Jason Hull

"Trust creates freedom." Jason Hull

"We mistakenly think we want more money. But what we really want is what we think money will give us, which is more freedom." Jason Hull

"The product that you should be selling is not really property management. It should be freedom." Jason Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

We are Jason and Sarah Hull, the founder and CEO and COO of DoorGrow, and we are the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry.

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. Now let's get into the show. All right, so today,

we're talking about freedom. Freedom. All right, we just celebrated the

Fourth of July, Independence Day. It's it's it's called Independence Day, and the reason that they're shifting it to Fourth of July is to get people to be less focused on their independence because that's what it is. It's independence day. Okay. Well yes, so let's recap. The the United States came about because a group of really awesome entrepreneurial people decided that they did not want

to be beholden to Britain and they declared their independence, which was, you know, basically declaring war. And this small little group of colonies decided to go to war with the biggest, most established military in the world at the time. And we won. We we were able to achieve our independence. So okay

Now, why was America able to win? Well, my theory or belief is that f anytime you are moving with the river instead of swimming upstream of freedom, the river of freedom, you have momentum and yeah, at your back. You have the wind in your sails. You are headed in the direction, and

everything moves towards greater freedom.

And I think then you will be more likely to have success if you're moving towards freedom. And so I think the USA is a big macrocosmic sort of example of the microcosmic. And so we're gonna talk about how money flows towards freedom today is kind of the idea. So why do people start businesses, Sarah?

That's like one of the biggest reasons is they go, Hey, I I want to do things my way. I see a need in the marketplace and the way that other people are doing things is maybe it's not good or maybe you think you have, you know, some better ideas. Maybe there's this this need for a product or service that doesn't yet exist.

And they go, hey, I have the freedom and the ability to create this product or service and meet this need in the marketplace. And a lot of times, entrepreneurs, we think that we can do things better than other people can do it. And a lot of times we're right. And that's why businesses start to exist and and grow and expand, is they see a need and they

Fill said need. So we have the the choice really to be able to say, hey, I'm I'm gonna step up and be the one who meets that need. All right. Yeah. So I think if we're going along with this momentum, this river of freedom, and you're headed in that direction, what could be more powerful than starting a business in a nation that values freedom with people?

That value, they were raised celebrating Independence Day every year. They're celebrating freedom. We value freedom. And you're a business owner that values getting more and more freedom and creating freedom. And then you create a business like property management where you are creating freedom for others. You're giving other people freedom from things they don't enjoy dealing with.

Is you all of this can if if aligned creates a massive amount of momentum. It can create a lot of success if you're selling the right thing, the right thing,

and this is what we do at DoorGroup. Our goal is to help business owners get more freedom from doing the day-to-day work, from being the property manager to being more of the business owner, the visionary, the entrepreneur. So, yes, the business owner.

as business owners, we value freedom. Usually we mistakenly think we want more money. But what we really want is what we think money will give us, which is more freedom if we do it the right way. But we make more and more money eventually realizing we have less and less freedom the more money we make because we're doing it the wrong way. And then we're like, why am I even doing this? yeah, I want freedom. I don't just want more money. Because once you get more money, but you have less freedom, you realize this isn't the trade I wanted.

And so we want to make sure we're focused on getting yourself more freedom. You got to build the right business. If you build it wrong, your business can't scale, it can't grow. And you, if you're because you're moving upstream, you're in conflict with freedom. And so, as a business owner, if you start building a business that's giving you less and less freedom, even though you're trying to help others get freedom, you're going to be out of integrity. People are going to feel that. It's going to be harder to sell it. You're going to, you know, to others and convince them to become your client.

And you're going to just experience a massive amount of friction and unconsciously you're going to sabotage.

Once you have more freedom, then you probably also want to give your team more freedom. How do we give our team more freedom?

Consistently shifting them into more of the things that they do enjoy, and by making sure that they can really specialize in what they enjoy and what they're good at. So usually when a business starts, unless there's a lot of resources and capital, businesses typically tend to start with one person, maybe two people, and then that one or

Two people, they end up doing everything. So they they are the entirety of the business. Every role, every task, every department is filled by that person or those, you know, small handful of people. And then as the business grows, then some shifts are able to be made where those people no longer have to handle every single thing because they can bring on the right.

resources and sometimes that might be software, sometimes that might be people, sometimes that might be an AI tool. But they can start to shift some of those responsibilities to other people or tools and that allows them to focus more on the things that they really do enjoy doing and they're they're good at. And the same then kind of trickles downstream to the team.

where the team kind of gets to experience that same thing. Usually when especially your first team member, that team member ends up doing a little bit of multiple pieces of roles. Even to the best of our ability we try. We're like, hey, this is gonna be the role that you do and then the someone's getting roped, either the business owner or that team member is getting roped into all of these other pieces. So to give our team more and more freedom

really allows them to become an expert and a specialist in what they enjoy and in what they're good at. And that usually looks like expansion. Hmm. Okay. And that's a good segue to mentioning our sponsor for today's episode. It is because they give you freedom through ooh software. So ring ring, who's there? Ha, not property managers. Over half don't even answer their phones during

Business hours. Hot leads are calling you directly and they're going straight to missed calls. They're going right to voicemail. So if you're spending time and money on growth, you need to actually capture that growth. And that is where super comes in. Super's AI receptionist sounds lifelike. It answers 24-7 and it's trained on property management. It even makes follow-up calls to leads that you might have missed. Go to higher super.com slash doorgrow.

And stop missing revenue to miss calls. Okay.

Most business owners make the mistake. They think if I control my team more, I'll get better output.

And that's not the case. You that means you need better people. If you have great people, they will lead themselves. If you have better people, and you move them into what feels like more freedom for them, which means they have more autonomy, more ability to make choices and decisions, more time spent doing things that give them fulfillment that they enjoy doing. Like Sarah was talking about, you will get maybe two times the output, maybe three times the output from team members that are in that momentum.

flowing the right way down the down the river towards freedom, right? So we got to get the business owner in alignment. Now we got to get the team in alignment and help expand that freedom to our team members. We do that by helping having our clients give their team members time studies to figure out where their plus and minus signs are energetically, which things do they enjoy, which things are taking away from their joy so that we can hire additional staff, get additional support, get additional technology

That helps take the minus signs off their plate and allows them to spend more time in the plus signs, which is the freedom zone, right? And then also our businesses can't exist if we aren't benefiting our clients. And so property management is about really the product that you should be selling is not really property management. It should be freedom. You're giving your clients freedom from their rental property. But a lot of property management management business owners mess this up. How do they mess this up?

Because they really just involve their clients and everything. They instead of being decisive and being the one who's the leader and in control, they will just kind of defer to the property owner. Or maybe they're not deferring completely, but they're just involving that property owner. Hey Bob, what do you think about this kind of flooring?

We have to do the floors. Do you do you want do you want carpet or do you want L V P? And he's like, I don't know. Like now I have to think about that.

you take ownership, control, you dominate the situation, you lead. They can

relax and let go of that stuff, then you're actually doing the job of a property manager. You are giving them freedom from the burden of having to stress or worry about or to manage anybody. They should not be managing the manager to manage their property. Right? That's not freedom for them. It's freedom from a bad property management situation, maybe if you're a mediocre manager, but if you're a great property manager,

most clients, most investors will pay more to have a really good property manager once they've experienced one where they're hands off and not having to stress and be involved and micromanage and overlook, look over your shoulder and see where you're spending their money because they don't trust you. So trust creates freedom. If your team trusts you,

They will follow you. You'll be creating more freedom. If your clients trust your team and you, that will give them more freedom. Okay, now let's take a look at markets. Markets and and and businesses, money tends to flow where there is more freedom. That's where businesses thrive. USA is a market where a lot of money thrives. but there's areas in the US where money tends to flow and to thrive.

you want to make sure like if you are you wanna maximize freedom, notice that money is always moving towards where there's greatest greatest the greatest autonomy, the greatest ability to make decisions and to choose, where there's less government involvement, less government control, more ability for people to make choices. And I really believe the power of freedom is also in that there is also this this this idea that

The law is this universal principle, the law of dominating good. And the law of dominating good is I believe that good generally wins in almost every situation, that the majority of people will choose the good. And roughly people will say maybe about a third will choose the wrong path, and two thirds will choose the right path, the right. So there's generally a strong majority that will choose good when they have good information.

So, how do people control people and get them to do things that they want them to do that may be out of alignment with their own freedom? They have to control the information. They have to manipulate. They have to lie. They have to control the media. And a lot of people are waking up realizing, hey, we've been lied to by the media. Voting we're seeing in California right now is like largely been manipulated and is fake. And so all this stuff's been getting exposed. So the more we align with freedom,

The more we're gonna win in the long run. So don't play the short game of trying to manipulate, steal, be unethical, whatever, to get business, because in the long run, that doesn't play out well. It doesn't work. You need to be on the side of freedom. Freedom is what wins. Dictatorships are not gonna last, right? That's true in your own business. That's true in your market. That's true in your state. That's true in your nation.

Everything good flows towards where there is the greatest ability for people to choose freedom and when people are good and they choose the right things. And so I believe you give people on your you find the best people on your team, you find the best clients, you help educate them the best, and then you are constantly going to be moving in alignment with freedom. And that's gonna help you thrive. So how can DoorGrow help people with

Freedom, Sarah. I think we're great at helping clients get freedom from the burden of their property management business. That's kind of one of the things that we specialize in because a lot of times when people start a business they do so with the intention of creating more freedom for themselves. Yeah. And they might even think, I you know, I don't want a nine to five job and I don't think I can

You know, be locked in an office all day or, you know, like I glued to my desk or my phone or or my computer. So what I'll do is I'll create this business and I'll start this business. And sometimes unless you have a really great system in place, y you you get freedom from the nine to five, but sometimes you build a different cage for yourself, which is sometimes like a seven AM to

eight PM and then you get a seven to eight and you didn't really expect that. So there's certain shifts in your business and with your team and with your clients and with your structure and your systems and your software and your processes that you that's I think one of the great things about running a business is you get to choose what you do and how you do it and who you work with and who's on your team.

So one of the things that we're really good at helping clients with is restructuring things. Or if you're newer and starting out, structuring things the right way right from the beginning so that you don't end up hoping for freedom but ending up with this cage and prison that you've built yourself that traps you in a

sixteen hour work day.

all right. So if you're looking for freedom from the struggle, you're you're a smaller company, you're trying to figure out how do we just get more doors? And you want freedom from

manipulative marketers that are trying to sell you coldly digital marketing. You want freedom from wasting money on digital marketing, then we have our growth accelerator program that is designed to help you figure out the right strategies to grow and do it for way less money. So if you're wanting freedom from doing the sales yourself, you don't want to even focus on that. You want someone else to add the doors for you. We have our new program, the Door Machine.

We had the doors, you manage them. You want to get freedom and gradually move yourself out of having to be involved in the front end of the business of bringing in new business. Because, you know, doing sales to you does not feel like freedom. You just hate doing that piece. Some of you love it. I don't want to take that away from you, but it's some of and so gross accelerator. We'll teach you how to do it if you want to do it. If you don't like doing that piece, let's get you out of it. If you want freedom from operations.

A lot of you in the two to four hundred door range get trapped here. And you just you're mired in answering everybody's questions on your team, and you're you're not really the entrepreneur anymore. You're still somehow doing every job in the business. You want freedom from property management itself. That's our super system. Maybe you want freedom from both. The super system is included, people in the door machine as well. You get access to that. But you you're wanting to you're wanting freedom.

In your property management business. There's this ascension of going from doing all the work initially in the beginning to building a team to getting out of the different pieces and getting more and more freedom means doing more, doing less things, but doing more of those less things. And it's the ones you enjoy. It's the ones you love doing. That's really what freedom feels like is that you get to spend your day doing stuff that you love doing. Then you don't need to try and escape your business anymore because you're

You're focused on the pieces that really give you fulfillment and freedom. And that's our goal at Dorgros to help you find some freedom. So let's stack all these different levels of freedom, all the way down from the grand old United States. We're grateful to be part of freedom and focus on where we can layer freedom at every level down to to getting ourselves the maximum level of freedom, our team, our clients, the business, and watch the money flow.

So much easier when you're in alignment and not in conflict with how I believe the world was designed. It was designed for choice and for freedom and autonomy. And we would love to help you get there. All right. Well, if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant and you want to take your property management business to the next level, reach out to us at dorgo.com. We would love to help you for a free training on how to get unlimited leads for free. Freedom.

Text the word leads to 512-648-4608. Also, you can join our free online community just for property management business owners by going to doorgrowclub.com. And if you want tips, tricks, or ideas, or to learn more about our offers, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com/slash subscribe. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it.

And until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.

In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason and Sarah Hull break down one of the most expensive mistakes property management business owners make: hiring based solely on what the business appears to need instead of what the owner actually needs. They explain why this common approach leaves entrepreneurs overwhelmed, wearing the wrong hats, and trapped inside businesses they no longer enjoy running.

You'll learn how a simple time study can reveal where your energy, focus, and profitability are being lost, why every new hire should solve both a business problem and an owner problem, and how reallocating your time toward high-value activities creates sustainable growth.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Why Most Property Managers Hire the Wrong Way [03:18] The Hidden Cost of Bad Hiring Decisions [08:25] Using a Time Study to Find Your Next Hire [13:05] Balancing Your Needs With the Business's Needs [18:12] Why Every Business Owner Needs an Assistant [22:20] Stop Doing Low-Value Work [26:15] Freeing Yourself to Focus on Revenue Growth [29:10] Building a Team That Creates Freedom

Quotables

"One bad hiring mistake is usually a 10 grand minimum mistake." Jason Hull

"You cannot build the right team around the wrong person." Jason Hull

"Every team member should be born out of a time study." Jason Hull

"The point of having a business is you should get more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution, more support." Jason Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

Okay, we are Jason and Sarah Hull, the owners of DoorGro, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGro, 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. Now, let's get into the show. All right. So today's topic, we're going to talk about how to make the decision as a property management business owner to hire. How to effectively decide it's time to hire and how not to screw this up. So we're not going to get into the whole hiring process. We've talked about that a bit on some other

Episodes. If you'd like to hear more about that, reach out to us or check out our other episodes. But today we're going to talk about how to make the right decision of who to get and when to hire and who you need in the business. Cool.

one bad hiring mistake is usually a 10 grand minimum mistake. And anybody that's gone through hiring a lot of team members, you know. Like I've hired lots over the years, and it's been some of them can be pretty painful when you make a bad move. So you want to make sure you make good decisions. So

So here's how most people do it, which is wrong. How most people do it is they look, what does the business need? And they're like, the business needs a maintenance coordinator, or the business needs this. And they just continually keep giving the business what it needs. And so this I call kind of the solopreneur way of hiring hiring. They think the way a solopreneur thinks, they think I do everything. Now I need to hire somebody to do these other pieces that the business needs. And they start building a team based around.

What the business wants.

every team member, should exist if they are taking something off of your plate because you do everything initially. Now, sort of, they're like, well, you know, I'm doing the maintenance stuff, so I need a maintenance coordinator. And that's kind of works. But the problem is if you continually build your team based on what the business seems to be asking for and what it needs, and you're not taking care of yourself, you end up with an entire team.

And you're still miserable in your own business. And this is pretty much most business owners at NARPAM. This is most of the people in the two to 400 door range. So I'm calling you out. So if you are a member of NARPAM and you have between two to 400 units and you are still wearing hats you don't enjoy in your business, I promise you you have the wrong team. Why? Because I know for a fact you cannot build the right team around the wrong person. And so if you're still wearing hats you don't enjoy,

Meaning you are showing up as the wrong person in the business, doing stuff that you don't like doing, that's not your favorite thing, and you've built an entire team around you, you have the wrong team. All right. So how do we fix this? Well, first you have to know that that is your case. So sometimes you talk to people and they have no idea. They don't realize. They go, no, I have a great team. My team is awesome. I I really

So it's hard to fix a problem if you don't recognize that it's the problem. It's almost like when you have a plumbing leak. It's hard to fix that leak if you're not sure where the leak is coming from. So we need to identify where the issue is and then rip the walls open. If we just start ripping the walls open and looking for the leak, it's

just

pretty expensive and inefficient. So we need to recognize, hey, there's a problem leak here. And then we need to identify where is the leak and what is the actual problem. So I'd say that's the very first thing. And sometimes that's also really hard for people to do. Especially when they're attached to their teams. Like, no, I love my team. How many times have we heard that? I love my team. I have to my team's great. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So but they might be great. You might have great people, but they are not

Your ideal team because you're still involved in stuff. So usually what we do is we have them do a time study. This is how we figure out five different currencies: time, energy, focus, cash, and effort. These are the five things that you have to invest in the business that the business has to invest. These are your resources and

In order to hire a new team member or bring somebody else in, you have to make sure that if you're going to reallocate these resources, you've got to do it in a way that's really effective. Otherwise, this could be dangerous. So a lot of times I'll share the analogy so people understand how important this is. if you've ever seen Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, Indiana Jones, he's running from this giant boulder. He's carrying this gold statue. He's trying to like

Get out of there, and this boulder's rolling down the hill at him, and he's trying to get out of there as quick as possible. Otherwise, squish, Indiana dies, right? So, this is a great analogy for business. So here's how I look at this. Imagine this picture. There is an entrepreneur running from the boulder. What is the boulder? Expenses. It's always moving, it's always coming after you. And sometimes that boulder picks up speed or grows as the business grows.

And so that's expenses. Indiana Jones running, that's sales and revenue generation and generating cash like for the business. The gap in between Indiana Jones running and the boulder, which is expenses, is cash flow. If the business runs out of cash flow, the business is essentially dead. The business dies. Or it goes into debt, which it's just eventually going to die. So we want to make sure that we are.

Constantly generating revenue. The speed, the slope of this path is the speed of which the business grows. And so if we want to grow really fast, we spend a lot more money. There's a lot more expenses. Everything's moving a lot faster.

And so this is where hiring can cause some big problems, or rolling out new tech can cause big problems because we get distracted and we're no longer focused on revenue generation and that has to stay the main thing. So you've got to keep running and you can't stop and unless you're able to somehow dramatically reduce expenses. So it slows down or it's less scary. But you've got to keep running. So we do a time study, and this helps us figure out time, energy, focus, cash, and effort.

Where am I currently investing all this? And is it giving me what I want? Is this according to my highest priorities and what I need? So this is the lens we look at for you. So imagine a Venn diagram with two circles. Circle on the left is you. Circle on the right is the business. Most entrepreneurs build their team, build their systems, build the business, only focusing on the business. And so they end up neglected and they end up more and more miserable. And they end up with a business that becomes like almost like a

master to them. You're like a slave. If you ever felt like a waking up and you're a slave to your own business, you've put too much attention on the business and not enough on yourself.

What happens if your expenses catch up to Indiana Jones? Squished. Right? He gets squished. And as a business owner, it's not a great thing to feel squished. But there is something that probably should be squished. And that's pests. Yuck. So moving into a new place is exciting, but setting up utilities, that's a big pest, isn't it? Yep.

That's where Utility Profit comes in. It's a free tool that property managers share with their tenants during move-in, and it completely takes a headache out of getting the utilities set up. So it's less stressful for you and for them. So here's how it works: tenants get a personalized page with their utility options that are already mapped out for their specific address. Things like internet, electric, gas, you name it, they pick what they need, they set everything up, and it's all in one place.

No Googling, no back and forth with landlords saying, hey, who's the electric company here again? Never heard that one. And for property managers, it's white labeled, so it feels like part of your own onboarding process. You get notified once your tenants' utilities are set up. It's one less thing for you to follow up on on your probably never-ending list of things to follow up on. It's completely free for everyone. There's no contracts and it takes only minutes to get started. So check out

Utility Profit because movement day should feel like a win, not a checklist nightmare with a big pest. Perfect. All right. Thanks to Utility Profit for sponsoring today's episode. All right. And check them out at DorGro Live. That's coming up in October. Yeah. In Austin, the ninth and tenth. So if you're interested in checking out Utility Profit, you can just do a quick search. They should come right up, Utility Profit, or you can see them at

Dorboro Live. Okay. So getting back to what we were just chatting about, Venn diagram, you, the business, we need to shift the attention to you. We have to make sure every new hire is taking something off of your plate because you are doing everything in the business in the beginning. And so if you do a time study, you'll be able to see where am I investing time? What is that time worth financially? Where is my focus currently? Is this helping me reach my goals?

And then we look through a lens for the business, which is the six core functions, which is lead gen, nurture, conversion, delivery, lifetime value, and financial. And so then we're looking what does the business need most? So what does the business need most and what do you need most? And the overlap is where you make your best decisions. So every team member should be born out of a time study.

Basically, when we have our clients do a time study, one of the big factors is energy. It's like, is this a plus sign for you or a minus sign? Does it give you life or energy, or is it taking it away? And if it is a minus sign, we need to find somebody that this would be a plus sign for them and bring them in. And so you're able to give your minus signs to somebody else that enjoys doing it. And this is how we free you up from the business and how we make sure we're hiring somebody that makes sense. And this person

should be helping the business improve your cash flow situation, which means if you're the revenue generator, you're the salesperson or you are your own BDM, that means we're freeing up your time doing minus signs that are also financially draining and getting you to spend time doing revenue generating activities. And that's a really awesome trade. You're basically trading and giving up a little bit of money to go be able to make more money.

And then it's a smart decision to make because that's what the business maybe needs as well, is more lead gen, more nurture, conversion. Those first three functions are sales. So this is how we make the decision to hire. So every new hire, I think, should be born out of a time study. Every new tech or new system you roll out should be born out of a time study. Because otherwise you're just adding expense, you're just adding stuff, you're just adding people, and it's not actually giving you more fulfillment, more freedom, more contribution.

More support. And this is the point of having a business is you should get more of what I call the four reasons:

Usually the first person that we recommend that people hire is what? An assistant. Which is wild because a lot of times we'll see a business owner with an entire team and what don't they have? An assistant. And sometimes they'll even have team members. Yeah and he doesn't have an assistant. And I went, Ew, why? What's what's really funny is a lot of times as business owners, because we're hiring and getting what the business needs and not taking care of ourselves.

We will even see team members that have assistance. we have a property manager and an assistant property manager. And yet the business owner is still involved in a lot of things and doing really low level financially ineffective tasks that are like low level, that your time probably as a business owner should be calculated based on what the top line revenue of the company is, divided by like 40 hours a week, divided by, you know.

50 weeks in the year. So basically divide it by 2000, your your annual revenue. That's what your hourly rate should be sort of judged by. And so, you know, if you're a million-dollar business owner, your hourly rate is like probably like 500 bucks an hour or something like this. And you might as well just double it, just for perspective. But you the goal is to get you to a place where you are worth that amount of money. And you're not doing five dollar an hour tasks that maybe or even less that maybe AI could do.

Maybe $10 an hour tasks that a good VA in a foreign country could do that's really seasoned. Maybe $20, $25 an hour tasks that a decent US-based team member could do. And so you want to make sure that you are doing stuff that makes sense for your business. Otherwise, you are losing money.

it's it's hard to argue when you go, Well, you're spending 70% of your time doing tasks that cost twenty dollars or less. And then they go, it's kind of hard to argue with that. Then it starts to become very, very clear that yeah, we need to make some shifts in the business. Yeah. If if I ever hear hear a business owner and I ask, Who's your main salesperson? Who does the business development? And they're like, That's me.

Cool, what are you spending most of your time doing? If they don't say that thing, there's a problem. Because sales is the lifeblood of the business. They're like, I want to grow. Cool. Who's your salesperson? Me. Cool. What are you spending your time doing? Maintenance, coordination, leasing, inspections, well, like posting notices. Cool. So if you're great at doing sales or you have a team member that's great at doing sales, your whole job is to free up that person's time. If it's you, free up your time.

To allow you to spend more time doing sales. Otherwise, that's kinda like buying a Ferrari, paying for it, and then you're using it to plow a field, as I usually say. That does not make sense. It doesn't make sense at all. Literally does not make financial sense.

All right. Cool. So that's today's episode. So if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant and you want to take your property management business to the next level, reach out to us at doorgo.com for a free training on how to get unlimited free leads. Text the word leads to 512-648-4608.

Also join our free Facebook community just for property management business owners by going to doorgrowclub.com. And if you want tips, tricks, ideas to learn about DoorGro's offers, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com slash subscribe. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on wherever you saw this. We'd really appreciate it. Until next time, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.

AI is everywhere, but are property management companies asking the right questions before implementing it? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason Hull sits down with Mo Hussain to discuss why successful AI adoption has far less to do with technology and far more to do with operational clarity. Instead of chasing the latest AI tools, Mo introduces his Measure, Map, Automate framework to identify operational bottlenecks, uncover hidden profit leaks, and build workflows that actually improve business performance.

Together, they explore why clean data is the foundation of automation, how undocumented processes create costly inefficiencies, and why AI should enhance human decision-making rather than replace it.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Meet Mo Hussain and the Measure, Map, Automate Framework [03:20] Why Most Companies Ask the Wrong AI Questions [08:10] The Role of Clean Data in AI Success [12:45] Mapping Workflows Before Automating Them [15:30] The Process Myth and Better Operational Systems [21:10] Building Accountability Into AI Workflows [25:15] Designing AI Agents That Actually Perform [27:45] Turning Operational Data Into Business Growth [29:15] Final Advice for Property Management Leaders

Quotables

"AI value really truly is workflow value." Mo Hussain

"AI depends on trusted operational data." Mo Hussain

"The winners are not gonna be the companies that have the most amount of data, but they're the ones that can convert data into consistent operating actions." Mo Hussain

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

welcome everybody. I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry.

At DoorGro, 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. Now let's get into the show. And my guest today is Mo Hussain, and we're going to be talking about how property management companies can stop drowning in data and start turning it into real operational growth. In this episode,

Mo is breaking down the measure, map, and automate framework that he has built and approach an approach to uncovering hidden margins, reducing manual oversight, and getting more value out of every door in your portfolio.

right.

is Mo Hussain. Mo, welcome to the show.

Mo Hussein (01:01)

Hey Jason, happy to be here.

Jason Hull (01:03)

So today we're going to be chatting a little bit about how property management companies can stop drowning in data and start turning it into real operational growth. And Mo's going to break down the measure, map, and automate framework, his approach for uncovering hidden margins, reducing manual oversight, and getting more value out of every door in your portfolio. So cool, measuring is important. We'll get into that. So before we get into that, Mo,

Can you give people a little bit of background on yourself? How did you get into entrepreneurism? How did you get connected to property management? And help everybody understand who Mo is. Yeah.

Mo Hussein (01:42)

Yeah.

great question. So I I've been in this industry now for probably coming up on 20 years at this point. I I worked at some of the prop tech and software providers that are prevalent in the space. Namely, I worked at both YARTI App Folio, which are both kind of headquartered in in Santa Barbara. and a little bit over ten years ago, I started a consultancy and accounting CPA practice that specifically focuses on

Jason Hull (01:56)

Namely, I worked at both YARDIE and at Folio, which are both kind of headquartered in in Santa Barbara. a little bit over ten years ago, I started a consultancy and accounting TPA practice that specifically focuses

on prop tech and real estate. So we offer consultations with implementations, custom reporting, operationalizing around technology, which is which is now the buzz around kind of AI and automation at this point.

Mo Hussein (02:11)

Prop tech and real estate. So we offer consultations with implementations, custom reporting, operationalizing around technology, which is which is now the buzz around kind of AI and automation at this point. and then

we've also built products for the space to help with automations, help with you know accounting compliance and bringing visibility and custom reporting capabilities to operators. So kind of leveraging all the experience.

Jason Hull (02:25)

And then we've also built products for the space to help with automations, help with you know, accounting compliance and bringing visibility and custom reporting capabilities to operators. So kind of leveraging all the experience

Mo Hussein (02:40)

from working as a consultant and also as an accountant and even working as some of these tech providers now being a actual supplier in the industry.

Jason Hull (02:41)

from working as a consultant and also as an accountant and even working as some of these tech providers now being a aqua supplier in the industry. Very cool. Very cool. So you're a little bit nerdy.

Mo Hussein (02:52)

A little bit. Data. I love data. Right.

Jason Hull (02:53)

Okay, so am I. So am I. All right. So

cool. So let's talk nerdy to me, Mo. All right. So let's let's chat about this. So let's get into it. So t tell us about this. Wha why is this wh how'd you come up with this framework? Why is this important? I love frameworks because frameworks are usually where we take something that we notice a pattern in, there's some complexity involved, and we make it simple. So explain to us.

Mo Hussein (02:59)

Yeah.

Jason Hull (03:18)

Where does the measure map and automate framework kind of come from?

Mo Hussein (03:22)

Right, right. And this is this kind of stems from a conversation you probably have with plenty of your your clients and even prospects when you start engaging, you know, the the the very popular question now of how do we use AI? I want to streamline and automate. And it's a very loaded, it's a very loaded, fairly ambiguous question, right? How do we use AI? We want to implement AI into our operations, right?

Jason Hull (03:23)

And this is this kind of stems from a conversation you probably have with plenty of your

You know, the the the the very popular question now, how do we use AI? It's a very loaded, fairly ambiguous question, right? How do we use AI? We want to implement AI more.

Mo Hussein (03:48)

when conversely, like you know, operators and property managers should be starting with a different qu set of questions, right? Like how like where are we losing things like NOI, margin, time, control, or even consistency, right? AI really only matters when it connects and automation really only matters when it connects to a to a revenue lever or some type of a cost lever or productivity gain or or risk reduction, right?

Jason Hull (03:50)

Conversely, like you know, operators, property managers should be starting with a different set of questions, right? Like how like where are we losing things like NOI, margin, time, control, or even consistency, right? AI really only matters when it connects in automation really only matters when it connects to a to a revenue lever or some type of a cost lever, productivity gain or or risk reduction,

right? Yeah. there's there's a couple

Mo Hussein (04:14)

and there's there's a couple of key components

Jason Hull (04:16)

key components in even conversations that you've probably even had with with property managers today is that firstly like you know operators today they already have a lot of data. They probably have access to a lot of different data sets across, you know, operations, but it's probably, you know, disconnected and disjointed and different reports and disconnected systems, hidden in spreadsheets and and dashboards that probably don't drive much much action, right? and everybody wants

Mo Hussein (04:17)

in even conversations that you've probably even had with with property managers today is that firstly, like, you know, operators today, they already have a lot of data. They probably have access to a lot of different data sets across, you know, operations, but it's probably, you know, disconnected and disjointed and different reports and disconnected systems hidden in spreadsheets and and dashboards that probably don't drive much much action, right? and everybody wants to

Jason Hull (04:43)

to automate and execute

Mo Hussein (04:43)

automate and execute an

operational kind of workflow. But the hard part is not whether, you know, AI can really do something, but the hard part is whether a company even knows where value is leaking and who owns that action and and whether these workflows are even clear enough to to be able to automate. And that's kind of the premise of this framework is to kind of measure what that pain is, you know, map that workflow, automate that repetitive work and manage

Jason Hull (04:45)

an operational kind of workflow. The hard part is not whether you know AI can really do something, but the hard part is whether a a company even knows where value is leaking and who owns that action and and whether these workflows are even clear enough to to be able to automate. And that's kind of the premise of this framework is to kind of measure what that pain is, you know, map that workflow, automate that repetitive work, and

manage ideally performance through some type of closed loop accountability. We just put an actual word to it, right? A framework to it, I'm sure

Mo Hussein (05:07)

ideally performance through some type of a closed loop accountability. We just put an actual word to it and a framework to it, but I'm sure very

similarly to the conversations that you're probably having also even with customers.

Jason Hull (05:15)

Very similarly to the conversations that you're probably having also with customers.

Yeah, yeah, got it. Yeah. it's interesting because we're now seeing a lot of these tech companies or tech forward companies that are kind of backtracking on AI a little bit. They were giving out basically blank checks to use AI as much as they could. Some were even creating sort of a contest internally, incentivizing like who could use the most tokens.

Mo Hussein (05:29)

Mm.

Right.

You're right.

Jason Hull (05:41)

Which is a little bit insane

to just give people a blank check as if that always the more tokens you burn, the more productivity is being created, right?

Mo Hussein (05:51)

Right, right, right. And we're seeing, yeah, and you know, as we're seeing these newer models that are coming out, whether it's, you know, through Cloud, Anthropic or even these other these other LLMs, the token utilization is becoming more and more expensive, especially with these newer models. And so now the question of just like, hey, how is that utilization actually translating to actual business value? Right. And this was a question that eventually would have been would have been pushed, right?

Jason Hull (05:54)

Yeah and you know.

Of just like, hey, how's that utilization actually translating to actual business value? Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Like how to use AI. Yeah. Bad question. A better question is how do we actually make sure we're creating more profit? How do we actually make sure we are lowering costs? Like

And that's the the idea, they think, well, AI must be so much cheaper than people. And what's interesting, I've also seen some reports lately showing the amount of money these different LLMs are losing right now. They're spending a massive amount of money to deliver AI to us at a super cheap price right now. And but they're losing money. Every time we're chatting, they're losing money.

Mo Hussein (06:47)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Right.

Jason Hull (07:01)

And that's that's a wild business model. They're obviously hoping to win some sort of AI race. They're hoping to get us maybe in the future. And there's a lot of talk lately as well of people thinking we gotta shift to local models. Like we gotta I gotta run this AI stuff on my own computer and not be giving all my money to anthropic or open AI you know, open AI or whatever. So okay.

Mo Hussein (07:15)

Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

Right.

Jason Hull (07:26)

Cool. So let's continue on. Me measure, map and automate. Yeah. Yeah.

Mo Hussein (07:29)

Yeah. Yeah. And

by the way, going on your point, Jason, it's you know, you you also, you know, creating automation and leveraging these models locally, it there's definitely value in that. But you know, now more than ever, f you know, teams are kind of distributed, right? And so ideally, if you've built automations and leveraging these L LMs and

Jason Hull (07:35)

Yeah, y you also you know

Locally it is definitely that

Teams are kind of distributed, right? Yeah. Ideally, if you've built automations and leveraging these LLMs

and

Mo Hussein (07:52)

And things of that sort.

You probably want to have like some type of an interface that's like cloud based, right? Or for folks to be able to kind of collaborate in some type of a ideally like a safe environment, right? and so measure, map and and automate. So you know, there's there's kind of those three components to be able to actually fully ideally leverage leverage AI. But

Jason Hull (07:55)

some type of a an interface that's like cloud based, right? Or for folks to be able to kind of collaborate in some type of a ideally like a safe environment, right? yeah. So measure, map and and automate. So you know there's there's kind of those three components to be able to actually fully ideally leverage leverage AI but

there's there's a couple like kind of key core components that feel like

Mo Hussein (08:20)

There's there's a couple of like kind of key core components that I feel like

is very important for folks to to really understand before they can they they can even take advantage of of AI, right? so one is you know AI, AI value really truly is workflow value. And so like the most the biggest opportunities when it comes to automation leveraging AI is things that are repetitive.

Jason Hull (08:25)

is very important for folks to to really understand before they can they they can take advantage of of AI, right? so one is, you know, a AI AI value really truly is a workflow value. And so like the most

automation leveraging AI as things that are

repetitive, you know, judgment heavy, ideally high volume workflows. Think about things like you know, leasing follow-up, delinquency, turns, maintenance, triage, variance explanations. another another key thing to understand is you know AI depends on trusted ideal operational data. And so if you don't have accurate or clean property unit, resident, vendor,

Mo Hussein (08:44)

you know, judgment heavy, ideally high volume workflows. Think about things like you know, leasing follow-up, d delinquency, terms, maintenance triage, variance explanations. another another key thing to understand is, you know, AI depends on trusted ideally operational data. And so if you don't have accurate or clean property unit, resident vendor

payment data and it's and it's inconsistent, you know, AI just

Jason Hull (09:10)

payment data and it's and it's inconsistent, you know,

AI just helps accelerate the wrong answer, right? This notion of like hallucinations also kind of exist. and you know insights without ownership is is just is really just theater. And so although AI may identify a problem and recommend an action, things need to be routed, right? And asci you know action needs to be assigned, there needs to be some accountability that gets created there and then a measurement of of of

Mo Hussein (09:13)

helps accelerate r the wrong answer, right? And the this notion of like hallucinations also kind of exist. and you know insights without ownership is is just is really just theater. And so although AI may identify a problem and recommend an action, things need to be routed, right? And as I you know action needs to be assigned. There needs to be some accountability that gets created there and then a measurement of of of a

of of a of a result.

Jason Hull (09:40)

of of a of a

result. and then lastly like humans humans control still matters, right? Things that have a very high potential opportunity cost. you know, operators should be very careful on how they utilize AI. So, you know, things around fair housing, sensitive sensitive decisions like screenings, evictions, legal communication, you know, employee decisions and maybe even large payment loopholes and so

Mo Hussein (09:42)

and then lastly like humans, humans control still matters, right? Things that have a very high potential opportunity cost. you know, operators should be very careful on how they utilize AI. So, you know, things around fair housing, sensitive sensitive decisions like screenings, evictions, legal communication, you know, employee decisions and maybe even large payment approvals. And so

Once we

have these kind of these table stake table stake items, if you will, kind of address, then you know we can move on to kind of you know the our framework of kind of measure, map, and automate. And so in each of these different components have different purposes, you know. The whole point of the measure step is is to quantify where pain exists and to validate kind of being buying versus buy like building. And so you want to ask things like where

Jason Hull (10:09)

Once we have these kind of these table stakes stakeheads, if you will, kind of addressed, then you know, we can move on to kind of, you know, the our framework of kind of measure, map, and automate. And so and each of these different components have different purposes, you know. The whole point of the measure step is is to quantify where pain exists and to validate kind of being buying versus buy like building. And so you want to ask things

like where

Mo Hussein (10:36)

where

time, where margin, where service quality or accountability is lost today, right? Examples can be things like, you know, days vacant, you know, delinquency rate, maintenance response times. These would be kind of like outputs like invoice coding time, reporting hours, renewal conversions, right?

Jason Hull (10:37)

Where time, where margin, where service quality or accountability is lost today, right? Examples can be things like, you know, days vacant, you know, delinquency rate, maintenance response times. These would be kind of like outputs like invoice coding time, reporting hours, renewal conversions, right?

Yeah. Got it. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. So you've got to be you have to have good data.

Which the crux of th where their data is all probably housed is inside of their property management software.

Mo Hussein (11:06)

Right.

Jason Hull (11:07)

And so hopefully that software is kinda tracking some of this stuff. But, you know, everybody's had a CRM that the team didn't put enough notes in. And then it becomes kind of useless, right? So you're like, what happened with Fred on that call earlier, you know, or previously? I I think I think we talked about this. Can't remember. Why aren't you putting in notes? And so then the flaw becomes the human in the loop in a lot of instances. But then you're saying, you know, also humans matter. Like

Mo Hussein (11:14)

Right.

Right.

Jason Hull (11:34)

Related to fair housing. We've got to have the human in the loop making decisions. I don't think it would go fair very well to be standing in front of a judge and say, Well, the AI messed this up. It wasn't me.

Mo Hussein (11:43)

Right. Right.

Right. Yeah, that's very that's very correct. the the the other thing is is that you know software is a tool, right? So they you know, for like that example that you just gave of like, hey, you know, I had a conversation with Freddie or an owner or what have you, and you know, the notes weren't captured. And so if there's if if if if there's there needs to be also a cultural

Jason Hull (11:46)

Yeah, that's very that's very

Yeah, they you know, put like that example that you just gave of like, Hey, you know, I had a conversation

And you know, the notes weren't captured. And so if there's if if if if there's there needs to be also

Mo Hussein (12:06)

shift within the organization to become more performance kind of driven, right? And using, you know, places of truth. You know, I, you know, we use Salesforce in our own internal kind of CRM and you know, there's this old ad like this old saying of just, you know, hey, if it didn't happen to Salesforce, it didn't happen at all. In other words, if your system of record hasn't been updated and things haven't been added to it

Jason Hull (12:06)

cultural shift within the organization to become more performance kind of driven, right? And using, you know, places of truth. You know, I you know, we use Salesforce in our own internal kind of CRM and you know, there's this this old like this old thing of just, you know, hey, if it didn't happen in Salesforce, it didn't happen at all. Right.

Mo Hussein (12:29)

to to ensure that it is correct and accurate and up to date, then

Jason Hull (12:29)

to it to to ensure that it is correct and accurate and up

to date, then the organization sees it as, you know, as it didn't happen. And somebody, you know, using anecdotal feedback like, well I did this, but I just didn't update this. And so that's it's very important that, you know, whatever system you're using to kind of measure different KPIs and metrics, that that, you know, that behaviors within the organization are shifting towards that. And it's it's something it's a cultural shift that needs to also

Mo Hussein (12:32)

the organization sees it as you know as it didn't happen. And somebody, you know, using anecdotal feedback of like, well I did this, but I just didn't update this, it means it didn't happen. And so that's it's very important that, you know, whatever system you're using to kind of measure different KPIs and metrics, that that, you know, that behaviors within the organization are shifting towards that. And it's it's some it's a cultural shift that needs to also cascade

also from from leadership down as well.

Jason Hull (12:57)

Cascade also from leadership down.

Yeah, the advantage we have nowadays with all the AI stuff that's come out is now pretty much everything gets transcribed everywhere. So calls get transcribed, notes can be created automatically. You can also go back and ha check the transcription on a call or a zoom call or recording, figure out what happened. So that you know, not leaving notes in the CRM is a little bit less of a problem than it was in the past.

So we've so we've chatted a bit about measure. What is what's important about mapping or map? Yeah. So this is this goes back to my previous point about like you know AI value being it it is workflow value. Yeah so you know you've measured you've identified you know your measurements and KPIs. So whatever those KPIs may be. Next what you need to do is map what the actual

Mo Hussein (13:30)

The mapping. Yeah. So this is this goes back to my previous point about like, you know, AI value being it is workflow value. And so, you know, you've measured, you've identified, you know, your measurements and KPIs, you know, days vacant, delinquency, whatever those KPIs may be. Next, what you need to do is map what the actual what

the actual workflows that are happening, not how leadership or staff thinks it's happening.

Jason Hull (13:53)

what the actual workflows are happening, not how leadership or staff thinks it's

happening. There's a very key kind of a distinction is that, you know, a lot of operators and teams kind of assume, hey, you know, we have a set process, but it may not be happening the way that they are envisioning or the way that they're assuming that this is happening. Yeah. And and map that entire workflow end to end.

Mo Hussein (13:59)

The very key kind of distinction is that, you know, a lot of operators and teams kind of assume, hey, you know, we have a set process, but it may not be happening the way that they are envisioning or the way that they're assuming that this is happening. And and map that entire workflow end to end.

identify what systems are involved, where handoffs occur, where approvals are required.

Jason Hull (14:21)

identify what systems are involved, where handoffs occur, where approvals are required,

Mo Hussein (14:27)

where judgment calls are are are are kind of made. And so, you know, every company has, you know, things like experienced managers and accountants and maintenance folks and and they usually know what good looks like versus what bad looks like. And so AI here is to help kind of convert that tribal knowledge ideally into a repeatable operating model. And so examples of how that mapping

Jason Hull (14:28)

where judgment calls are kind of made. And so every company has you know things like experienced managers and accountants and maintenance folks, and and they usually know what good looks like versus what bad looks like. And so AI here helped kind of convert that tribal knowledge ideally into an overviewable operative model. So examples of

that mapping would be is you know, hey, what is the entire need to lease workflow?

Mo Hussein (14:50)

would be is, you know, hey, what is the entire lead to lease workflow? You know,

Jason Hull (14:54)

You know, what is the work order to completion, you know? what is our renewal offer to sign and executed actual renewal? And so and actually and again documenting that, a a lot of organizations have some notion of what that workflow kinda looks like. but

Mo Hussein (14:54)

What is the work order to completion? You know? what is our renewal offer to signed and executed actual renewal? And so and actually, and again, documenting that. A a lot of organizations have some notion of what that workflow kind of looks like. but you know, they

haven't actually done they may not have documented, or if they did, it's not updated and they have an out of date SOP or a process diagram.

Jason Hull (15:12)

you know, they haven't actually gotten any INOT documents in or if they did, it's not updated and they have an out of data so P or a process diagram.

Mo Hussein (15:22)

And that's that's and that's that's that's a very important kind of key aspect of kind of this process.

Jason Hull (15:22)

and that's that's and that's that's that's a very important kind of key aspect of kind of this process. Yeah, yeah. Well I a lot of times I end up talking with clients and I've noticed kind of this pattern or trend in the industry of I call it the process myth where everybody thinks if we just had better processes

all of our hopes and dreams would come true when it comes to the off side of the business and we would be more profitable. And especially see this in the two to four hundred door range in single family or small multi-residential property management. And so the challenge there is th that it's impossible to create enough processes, KPIs, and systems to make mediocre people be great. But they pe that doesn't stop business owners from trying. They they're like

Mo Hussein (15:59)

Right.

Right.

Jason Hull (16:04)

They they they wake up in the morning, they're like, I want to play an impossible game today. And they they still try. And I call it the process myth because if you have really great people, even if your processes are garbage, that I've seen these businesses still perform well. But the reverse is not true. You have mediocre people, you could have insane amounts of systems and processes and stuff, and the business still has a lot of headaches and problems.

Mo Hussein (16:16)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Hull (16:29)

And so I've kind of noticed this pattern. I call it the three levels of process. And level one is documentation. It's just like writing stuff out. But that's kind of like the owner's manual in the glove box of the car. Nobody looks at it, it doesn't get updated. You know, it's like it's it's it's gathering dust, and people don't actually, that's not actually how the processes are run. And over time, things gravitate towards ease or grace or what the flows best for the person doing the job.

Mo Hussein (16:39)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Jason Hull (16:57)

Not for what's best for the job sometimes. And so it gravitates a little bit towards chaos or being worse. Then there's this level two, which is checklists. This is where people are using things like Asana or Process Street or Lead Simple or they some sort of checklist space system where now they're verifying the works getting done in a certain way. But checklist has its own problems in that it's very linear and not every process is linear.

Mo Hussein (16:59)

Right, right.

Read simple. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jason Hull (17:24)

There's decisions

and splits and merges and sting things happening concurrently in property management. And so the challenge with checklist also it can tend to slow things down. It's not as efficient. So the next level and the problem I had with checklist, we used to use process street, is that it it if anytime a process got complicated, I had to build logic and you know, if-then sort of situations into it.

And it usually got to the point where I didn't even understand it. Like a year later, I'm looking at a process. I'm like, I had to retranslate this back into something that made sense to my brain. And I always, and the nerd had to be the one that did all the updates on it because nobody else could understand it. So then we eventually graduated to level three. So level three is visual workflow. This is for humans.

Mo Hussein (18:01)

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Jason Hull (18:13)

And so, and with with this, my tip to everybody listening, if you have a system, whether it's checklist or it's any of these three levels, you know, documentation, checklist, or visual workflow, that you your first two processes you make as an operator or as a business owner is how to create a process in this system is number one. And number two, how to QA.

Mo Hussein (18:26)

Did

Jason Hull (18:37)

A process that is made in the system to know it's actually a good one. If you just make those two, you don't have to do any of the other stuff. Everybody else can do it. You just make those two. That's my tip for all you business owners. And now with AI, you can start adding AI. Once you have things visually mapped out, it's you've got the map like you're talking about. Now you can figure out all right, where can AI take over some of this stuff? And where do we still need the human in the loop? Right. So yeah.

Mo Hussein (18:43)

Mm.

And automation. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah.

Right,

Jason Hull (19:05)

So any tips for those listening to this that are already geeking out with AI, they're doing a little bit of this measuring and mapping and automating. What are some of the biggest challenges you've noticed where this kind of breaks down or people are making mistakes?

Mo Hussein (19:19)

It's it's honestly it's the it's the you know, AI value. it's it's a lot of the small individual decisions that are made in a in a repetitive fashion and that that are made a lot that really are gonna unlock like true value for for any operator. And so like, you know, having very clean data, standardized, you know, systems of truth by what we mean by that is that, you know, hey, you know.

Jason Hull (19:20)

It's it's honestly it's the it's the you know, AI value it's it's

like true value for for any op

clean data, standardized, you know, systems of truth. But what we mean by that is that, you know, hey,

you know, you know, whatever work order system that you're using, for example, has accurate, you know, work order data. People, you know, you're making a segment for actually closing out the work order when they complete it. Hey, the end of the week, I'm gonna now try to remember what I did earlier in the week.

Mo Hussein (19:47)

you know, whatever work order systems that you're using, for example, has accurate, you know, work order data. People, you know, your maintenance technicians are actually closing out the work order when they complete it. Not just, hey, the end the week, I'm gonna now try to remember what I did earlier in the week.

Close it out. So the data is

the data can't be trusted, then AI is just going

Jason Hull (20:04)

data the be trusted and AI

Mo Hussein (20:07)

to cause additional kind of confusion. And so having accurate systems of record. And I gave that example of of of a work order when a technician kind of closes that, right? the process map, I think the you know, the three buckets are like three level that you kind of gave, I think is a great, great.

Jason Hull (20:20)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

yeah.

level that you kinda gave I think it's a great,

great anecdote and framing of how processes should be kind of looked at. And and I think one thing that a lot of operators usually tend to overlook or assume is you know how things are being done versus how they actually are being done within the schemes, right? So an owner somebody at some point said, okay hey this is a process we're gonna take and then over time that just kind of got changed.

Mo Hussein (20:29)

anecdote and framing of how processes should be kind of looked at. And and I think one thing that a lot of operators usually tend to overlook or assume is you know how things are being done versus how they actually are being done within the teams, right? It's an owner, somebody at some point said, okay, hey, this is the process we're gonna take. And then over time that just kind of got changed. And there

may be, you know, two different property managers

Jason Hull (20:55)

And there may be, you know, two different property managers

Mo Hussein (20:58)

operating in two different regions in the same company that are doing leasing renewal differently, right? That going back to that point that you mentioned about systematizing and having accountability loops and task base or like checklist items and ensuring that those things are actually done in that same quality and that same fashion is very, very key. And so getting data, like getting the right data, accurate data,

Jason Hull (20:58)

operating in two different regions in the same company that are doing these things renewal differently. Right. That point that you mentioned about synthesizing and having accountability loops and task based or like checklist items and ensuring that those things are actually done in that same quality, in that same fashion is very, very key. And so getting data, getting the right data, accurate data

Mo Hussein (21:23)

and then also like your process mapping and your

Jason Hull (21:24)

And then also like your process mapping

and your processes kind of documented. I think I think the visual representation is a great way to have that. And those are the two key things that ninety percent of folks that are trying to leverage AI and automation and even the folks that are starting to try to jump into this space and try to automate and use AI for these things like usually we're like where where they're really struggling with. got it. Yeah, I think

Mo Hussein (21:26)

processes kind of documented. I think I think the visual representation is a great way to have that. Those are the two key things that ninety percent of folks that are trying to leverage AI and automation and even the folks that are starting to try to jump into this space and trying to automate and use AI for these things like usually we're like we're where they're really struggling with.

Jason Hull (21:50)

I was just on a webinar recently and they were talking about building AI agents and they were talking about if you want to make really effective AI agents, you need to give them a really good job description, just like a human. And what what's really funny is if you we coach clients on this a lot, but if we tell the clients to to go, we coach clients on

Creating job descriptions. We call our version of them R docs because each section starts with an R, like role, responsibility, et cetera, all the typical stuff. But then we have some additional sections that we found really paramount. So what we'll tell them to do is go ask your team members, give them this framework, and have them create their own R Doc. And then you take a look at this and see if that's what you would have created. Because it's never like what they think their job is. It's usually very different than what the business owner thinks their job is.

Mo Hussein (22:25)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Jason Hull (22:36)

And maybe even different what the manager, the ops person thinks the job is, but then you can actually literally get on the same page with them. You can be like negotiate this and be like, this is what we think your priorities should be, and what your outcomes should be, and what we want you to be able to accomplish. And this is helpful for them to know what they're aiming for so that they can please you because your team members want to please you if they're good. But usually there's a big disconnect, like you're saying, between what

Mo Hussein (23:00)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jason Hull (23:05)

the the employee thinks their j role and job is versus what their manager thinks they should be doing versus what the business owner thinks everybody should be doing. And so nobody's on the same page. And then you're everybody's roles are a little messy. And then you're going, let's give them processes now to work on. And they're not even clear on what their job is or what their role is. Yeah. And so same thing if you were going to build an AI agent and you were like, I want you to try and be good at everything. And then suddenly it's like really

Mo Hussein (23:29)

Right.

Jason Hull (23:34)

Hallucinating a lot and it's messing everything up and yeah. And it's not a realistic creature, you know, just like some people give create job descriptions that are for like four different personality types. Right. And then they hire somebody that maybe can actually do all four things, and we call those really highly adaptable, weird creatures entrepreneurs. And then they wonder why that property manager left and stole all their clients.

Mo Hussein (23:34)

Horrible.

Right.

Yeah.

Jason Hull (23:57)

Instead of finding somebody that's like really good at being one thing. Right. Yeah. And that's how you should see Asia.

Mo Hussein (24:00)

Right. That that that that role clarity is very, very, very important, right? And that's how you should see agents as well, is that

like, hey, it's like a trained employee. And so you should exp you should expect the same level of, you know, investment involvement, if you will, and trying to and try to help them be the best of like, you know, whether it's a leasing agent, a maintenance coordinator, or whatever that their role may be. And I I think another aspect is and I'm curious how like how

Jason Hull (24:12)

you should expect the same level of you know investment involvement if you will and trying to and try to help them be the best of like you know whether it's a leasing agent a maintenance coordinator or whatever that their role may be and I I think another aspect is and I'm curious that

like how you know when you guys are having conversations with clients around role descriptions stuff it's the concept of ownership like hey what you know how to how to align ownership to and lining that up to hopefully the mental business

Mo Hussein (24:28)

you know, when you guys having conversations with clients around role descriptions and stuff, it's the concept of ownership. Like, hey, what, you know, how to how to align ownership to and lining that up to hopefully an eventual business outcome or KPI

or something so that, you know, their performance drives also the business performance, right? How have you guys had this conversation or how do you talk about kind of that concept? I can kind of allude to it without kind of explicitly calling it out.

Jason Hull (24:42)

Kate guy or something so that you know their performance derives also the business performance, right? Yeah. How do you talk about kind of that concept? You kind of allude to it without kind of explicitly calling

it out. Yeah, I think well, sometimes I'll just totally call a business owner out on things. But I think what I think will be interesting is people are building starting to build agents. I think that they should.

They should have an understanding of personality types. I think they should have an understanding maybe or a conversation with AI about what Myers Briggs type might be good for this agentic role. And because like somebody that's really good at like strategy and the strategist role, which would be like an INTJ in Myers Briggs, might be good at some operational stuff, but they would be really terrible at customer service.

Mo Hussein (25:19)

Mm-hmm.

Jason Hull (25:33)

Because a lot of INTJs don't even like humans, right? And so they're logical thinkers and they're really judging and they're practical and they're in you know introverted and they're really bad at understanding how the other person feels or even expressing that. And so you're you you don't want to create these try and create AI AI agents that are multiple split personality types, because I don't think they're gonna be as effective. And you can't also, just like you wouldn't want somebody building the process.

QE QA QA of the process. You don't want them both. You don't want AI to be checking itself. Right. Right. The the brain that had problems doing the messing things up, maybe, or didn't do it totally right. You don't want them checking their own work. Right. And so, yeah, so I think this is going to be interesting that people are going to be building agents and they usually think just logically here's the context it needs, here's the role, whatever. But I think also maybe give it the personality that it.

Mo Hussein (26:08)

Right, right.

Right.

Jason Hull (26:29)

What's the disc assessment for this person, this agent? What's the Myers Briggs type for this agent? And then if especially if they're communicating with humans or doing a task that you want them to be somewhat human like, they're going to be much better at doing this if you give it you create them in the right way. Just an idea.

the other thing to know as a business owner, you need to know who you are so that you can build your dream team around you. So your advisors, whether they're agentic or human, your advisors, your team members, it should be built ultimately around you thriving and being healthy in your own business so that you've got the tea the tools and the resources that fit you. But most business owners make the mistake.

Of trying to build the business around the business and then wonder why they're miserable and why they're kind of a slave to their own business. Right.

Mo Hussein (27:16)

Right. Right. Right.

Jason Hull (27:20)

So anyway, Mo, measure, map, automate, MMA. Doesn't involve fighting too much. You know, like mixed martial arts. It's a little bit on the, you know, less physical side of things. fun chatting about.

Mo Hussein (27:26)

No.

Jason Hull (27:34)

all the the AI stuff that's going. How can people anything else that you want to add to our conversation here about yeah this model? And then could you tell us a little bit about what you do and how maybe you help property managers with this stuff? Yeah. Yeah. so I guess just to put it succinct, kind of a a sandwich kind of takeaway. So yeah, operators need to wait for a perfect AI.

Mo Hussein (27:48)

Yeah. Yeah. so I guess just to put it succinctly, kind of a a a sandwich kind of takeaway. So, yeah, operators don't need to wait for a perfect AI strategy.

Start by identifying, measuring where value exists, where things are leaking, then mapping workflows and then deciding what can be safely automated and measuring whether those actions improve performance. and so

Jason Hull (28:00)

Identifying, measuring where value exists, where things are leaking, then mapping workflows, and then deciding what can be safe and automated, and measuring whether.

Mo Hussein (28:10)

like you know, over time we'll see that you know the winners are not gonna be the companies that have the most amount of most amount of data, but they're the ones that can convert data into consistent operating actions across how they've operated every door. if you we help clients with you know putting together SOPs, also mapping their technology needs, where where they're where they're having operational leaks in the business can be

Jason Hull (28:10)

So like you know over time we'll see that you know the winners are not gonna be the companies that have the most amount of most amount of data, but they're the ones that can convert data into consistent operating actions across how they've operated every door. if you we help clients with you know putting together SOPs, also mapping their technology needs, where where they're where they're having operational leaks and the business

can be optimized.

Mo Hussein (28:37)

Optimized further using

Jason Hull (28:38)

Further using technology and automation, we have a platform that we've built, Prop Strata, to actually connect and help with that automation type effort. and we're also we also do a lot of accounting and and CPA work. you can reach us at www.balanceasset solutions.com, and my emails mo at propstrata.com, or you can reach out to our team at info at balance asset.

Mo Hussein (28:39)

technology and automation. We have a platform that we've built, Prop Strata, to actually connect and and help with that automation kind of efforts. then we're also we also do a lot of accounting and and CPA work. you can reach us at www.balanceasset solutions.com and and then my email is mo at at propstrata.com or you can reach out to our team at info at balanceasset solutions.com.

Jason Hull (29:03)

Cool. So they could take a look at this at propstrata.com.

Mo Hussein (29:07)

Correct. W dot propstrata.com.

Jason Hull (29:11)

Okay, cool. Very cool. All right. yeah, check that out, everybody. It sounds interesting. All right. Well, Mo, I appreciate you coming out and hanging out with me here on the DoorGro show and sharing everything.

All right.

So if

If you have ever felt stuck or stagnant in your property management business and you want to take it to the next level, reach out to us at doorgrow.com. We are the world's best at creating high-growth property management companies in the single-family residential space or the small multi-space. And if for a free training or how to get unlimited leads for free, text the word leads to 512-648-4608. That's 512-648-4608.

Also, join our free community just for property management business owners at doorgrowclub.com. And if you want tips, tricks, and ideas to learn about our offers, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com slash subscribe. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on whatever channel you saw or heard this on. We'd really appreciate it. And until next time, remember the slowest path to growth.

is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.

What if the key to building lasting wealth is to pour wisdom? In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, Jason Hull reflects on timeless lessons from the Book of Proverbs and explores how wisdom shapes every aspect of business, leadership, and personal growth. Inspired by the legacy of mentor Aaron Stokes, Jason shares why entrepreneurs who focus on learning, serving others, and making wise decisions ultimately build stronger businesses and more fulfilling lives.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Why Jason Started Reading Proverbs [05:02] Stop Chasing Riches, Start Pursuing Wisdom [10:12] Where Real Wisdom Comes From [17:08] Why Business Is Personal Development [23:05] Humility, Service, and Lasting Success [29:18] The Power of Learning From Others [36:04] Why Entrepreneurs Need the Right Room [42:56] Turning Wisdom Into Business Growth

Quotables

"If you're struggling to get riches and you're seeking riches, maybe you need to shift your attention instead to seeking wisdom." Jason Hull

"The marketplace only rewards you if you provide value." Jason Hull

"One of the greatest gifts to yourself is service." Jason Hull

"We attract who we are." Jason Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

All right, what's up, everybody?

I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential, third-party, single-family, small, multi-property management entrepreneurs. Enough adjectives? All right. So for over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry.

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. Now, let's get into the show. All right, so today's episode: I've been reading the book of Proverbs. Why?

Well, one of my mentors, Aaron Stokes, who I've talked about on the podcast before, who passed recently, he was a gatherer of wisdom. And so I thought, you know what? Aaron built a really amazing coaching business. He built a really amazing empire. It lives on after him. And I I I wanted to s I was thinking what what

Really made him great. Why did people want to listen to him? Why did people resonate with his message? Why did he have such a well of wisdom to be able to give to other people? And my thought was he was focused on gathering wisdom. And this is something that I've done throughout my life: is I love learning. I love studying books, I love absorbing information, I love putting frameworks together, gathering ideas.

taking all the best ideas and formulating new stuff. I love doing that. And my clients appreciate it greatly. So I've been focused, how can I really, at the core, where is the most timeless wisdom that's been gathered over decades, centuries, maybe even longer? And one of those books is the book of Proverbs. So I've started reading the book of Proverbs and that's been interesting for me.

So one of the themes that I'm noticing a lot in this is the theme of trying to get riches. And God must be using riches as a bait if this book talks this much about riches. because he wants to obviously get a message across, would be my guess. And there's a constant theme of talking about riches in this book, even though a lot of it's really talking about wisdom. And so

I've thought I've thought about this as a business owner. We want to gather wealth. We want to make money. We want and we can tell ourselves it's to do good things, right? We want to be able to take care of our family and do all these noble things. But sometimes it's like we just want a nicer car or we want a nice house or this sort of thing. And so there's always this motivation that's hardwired into man to seek wealth or to seek riches.

And we almost have to like destroy that in some way to not have it. well, money's evil, or I don't want money, or we come up with reasons to not be the person looking for money because we think, that's kind of bad, sick, and wrong to be looking for money. I really believe God wants good people to be rich. And that's really what the the book really seems to say over and over again is that for the righteous, they

They they get riches. For the generous, they get riches. For those that gather wis wisdom, they get riches. But what's interesting that I think is important, because if you want money and you want money and I don't care why you want it, if you want money and you think it's going to do something beneficial for your life, you're not going to get money, according to Proverbs, according to this timeless wisdom that's been around a long time, probably tested quite a bit, probably proven to work well.

it's it's helped a lot of people over time gather wealth. It says not to seek riches. It says not to seek it. If you seek riches, you're going to end up in a bad situation, is basically the message. But it says it talks about wisdom as a lady, as a woman. And this lady wisdom, this this woman that is wisdom, it says in her right hand.

Is long life, and in her left hand is honor and riches, riches and honor. And these are the things that Lady Wisdom brings to you if you keep wisdom by your side. And it talks about how wisdom, this feminine energy or this woman wisdom, was with God when He was creating the world, creating everything. Wisdom was by his side.

And so wisdom has existed before this world was even created, is kind of the idea. Wisdom is timeless, is the idea. Wisdom's always been there. It's foundational. It's what drives things to work and drives outcomes. Wisdom is what works in the practical real world reality. I was hanging out with my barber and I was sharing a little bit about, you know, how I've been reading and this idea of wisdom and

And every man out there, I recommend you find a barber like this. Find a the most intelligent barber you can. I just did a reel on Instagram talking about this. find the most intelligent, healthy barber that you can find because barbers.

Have people sit in their chair constantly, especially if they're a higher-end barber.

So if you're sitting there with a barber, the barber is constantly putting people into his seat and gathering ideas, gathering wisdom, gathering knowledge. And this is men opening up, revealing their trials, their problems because he's curious. He asks questions, he genuinely cares, he wants to know how they're doing. And

You know, he might have a millionaire in his chair, like I'm sitting there giving him wisdom and knowledge. And he might have somebody just, you know, from the street that wants a haircut sitting in in his in his suite. But the lessons that he's able to gather through talking to all these various men that are having real-world experience and real world problems and real issues with their marriage and relationships and their kids.

And business and life. He is able to just gather wisdom. And he has a passion, he even mentioned to me for being able to help others and to facilitate and help men. He's in a position to be able to do so because he's seen what's working and what's not working. He's heard, gotten so much anecdotal feedback from everybody of what works and what doesn't work. And this is practical, grounded real world reality. This is wisdom.

This is what we're the foundation where you find truth. This is not the intellectuals that sit in their lofty towers of intellectualism that have all of their BS ideas that theoretics and stuff they've read where they think everything could be or should be a certain way, but it's not actually connected to reality, what actually works in real life. And a lot of these intellectuals hate capitalism. A lot of these intellectuals hate.

They hate business. They hate capitalism. They don't like that the marketplace rewards what actually works. This is also why a lot of these intellectuals are probably not in super great shape. They're probably not really taking care of themselves in certain ways because they're probably physically lazy and they're focusing so much on this intellectualism that they are not focused on what works in the real world. Real world practical reality.

I notice people that I follow like that have been around for a long time, like Alex Hermozy, he has become kind of this gatherer of wisdom because he's been so focused on business. And you become wise if you do what works in business. You cannot lie, cheat, steal, be unethical, be shady, and have longevity in your business or have long life in your business.

It will be short-lived. Death creeps in very quickly into any situation where there isn't wisdom. And so if you find that you're struggling to get riches and you're seeking riches, maybe you need to shift your attention instead to seeking wisdom. And where do you find wisdom? You find it by being around others that are doing what you want to do.

Like our mastermind is full of people that are winning and succeeding. And I've been kind of the barber with lots and lots, hundreds, thousands really, of property managers sitting in my chair, having conversations to figure out what's actually working out there. I've had a lot of guinea pigs to try stuff out.

So even more than just a barber, I'm able to say, well, here's an idea. Go try this. And then when it works, I get that feedback. Now like Jason, that was awesome. That worked. I'm adding doors. This is going well. I've got a great new hire. Whatever you told me to do, this is awesome. And so I'm constantly getting feedback from some of the best, most innovative people I think on the planet, which are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are willing to do things, they're willing to take risks, they're willing to take action, they're willing to seek freedom and fulfillment and contribution.

And support over just trying to play it safe and be safe all the time.

There are few things in life that will help you collapse time on gathering wisdom more than getting married.

having kids.

There's a lot of people that don't want to have kids nowadays.

children and marriage, two of the greatest personal development hacks you could undertake. The third, I would suggest, greatest personal development hack that you could do is to start a business. To start a business. Why?

Because if you start a business, you are now faced with the marketplace, the real world reality of everyone outside of yourself that you are trying to serve, that you are maybe trying to get money from, that you are trying to maybe extract value from. And the marketplace only rewards you if you provide value. Then there's an exchange of value. But if you're trying to take value without providing value, you're snake oil.

You know, and I've had thousands, I've made thousands of mistakes. Thousands of mistakes have built what DoorGrow is to this day. I've done so many different things wrong. I always had good intentions. I was always trying to do the right thing. But as business owners, we make mistakes. We have blind spots. We don't see certain things.

And so over the years, I've learned more and more what works. I've learned more and more what I need to do in order to shift people and to shift their identities and to get them to grow. And I want to share this idea with you today

gain and gather wisdom directly from those that you can trust as an authority to say, This is what I know works. And that could be from your barber. That could be from the handyman. That could be from the people that are doing real.

world stuff and they've built things that are working. And it certainly can be from the people that you follow on social media that you subscribe to their podcasts that you like follow on YouTube. It can certainly be the people that you curate that are actually gatherers of wisdom. And your soul knows this. Your soul knows deep down whether what they're offering is good or is true. This is the the

Gift of discernment that we all have wired within us. We all have this ability to recognize good versus evil. Some, it's more honed and developed than others. The more wisdom you have, the more you're able to see what is beneficial and is wisdom and have greater discernment and what is not. And so as you develop and grow in wisdom and gather wisdom, you also become more and more humble.

Because you also realize there's so much you don't know.

My goal is to benefit other people.

I get so much joy and fulfillment out of that. I love being able to do that. That's contribution. I have a certain degree of fulfillment and a certain degree of freedom already. That's fulfillment is the first of the four reasons, as I call it, my framework. Freedom is the second. And once you have fulfillment and freedom, usually then you want to benefit others. That's contribution. And my business gives me an amazing vehicle of contribution. It allows me to go.

Selfishly, like spend a lot of money on coaches and mentors and learning and growth, like six figures annually just on that. I'm incredibly blessed to be able to do that. Most people, that's more than what they make in a year. And I'm able to spend that to learn and absorb information and to grow. And then I have the blessing, the gift to be able to go and share what I learned with other people. I really believe that one of the greatest gifts to yourself is service.

It's being able to serve. Not everybody gets themselves into a position where they get to contribute and they get to serve other people. That's, I think, the ultimate goal because nothing feels better than that. That is better than riches. It is better than riches. Having a client, a client's spouse come up to you and say, Hey, you made my husband a better man. There's that's better than money. It just that feels amazing. Having somebody say, Hey, you changed my life.

That is better than money. And some of you may not get that yet. Maybe you're not there. But I know if you continue, if you continue to seek wisdom and you continue to try and extract money from the marketplace and figure out what works, you're eventually gonna figure out what works is to seek wisdom. You're eventually gonna figure out what works is to benefit humanity and benefit other people. You're gonna eventually figure out integrity and honesty.

And all of these good values that are talked about in scripture, these things are what actually build life, what build life and health in your business, what build money and the support for yourself and for your family. And that wisdom is what helps you be a better father, it helps you be a better partner, it helps you be a better friend, it helps you be a better business owner, it helps you be a better leader.

And so if you're struggling with money, then go gather wisdom. Humble yourself. Recognize that your your biggest breakthroughs are on the other side of that embarrassment of owning up or or raising your hand and saying, I'm struggling. I'm not doing so well right now in this area.

And sometimes even my clients, they don't reach out. They don't ask for help. I had a client that for some reason, even though he's paying me $2,000 a month, wasn't reaching out for five months at a BDM that wasn't working out. The salesperson was, it turns out later, was being dishonest and lying and whatever, but he was blaming himself as a business owner, saying, Maybe I'm not supporting him well enough. And they don't this BDM had only added one door in five months. I'm like, why did you wait that long? Like they should be adding doors immediately.

You can like I have team members, I told them I have team members that we put on accounts just making calls to get clients some leads and they just reached out and made calls and they got leads that day. Like that day. Like you can get leads every day just by picking up the phone. You can create leads. And so a BDM that only has one door in five months, there's something totally wrong.

But the I I what I want to say is

Get a get in the room with other people that care, other people that get get momentum by helping others. That's the type of people that we attract. Why? Because you attract who you are. That's who I am. And so I attract clients that are like that. And if you're attracting clients that you don't like, it's because of who you are and the business you created around who you are. And so you need to gather more wisdom. You need to shift your identity.

We attract who we are.

So, real quick, I want to share a quick word from our sponsor, and then I'll get into some other really cool ideas about wisdom. So this is from our sponsor Super. Really cool tool you can check out at hiresuper.comslash doorgrow. So ring ring, who's there?

Not property managers. Over half don't answer their phones during business hours. Hot leads calling you directly are going straight to missed calls. If you're spending time and money on growth, you need to actually capture it. This is true. That's where Super comes in. Super's AI receptionist sounds lifelike, answers 24/7, and is trained on property management. It even makes follow-up calls and two leads, follow-up calls, two leads.

You might have missed. Go to higher super.com/slash doorgrow and stop missing revenue to missed calls. All right. You don't want to be missing out on those sales, leads, or opportunities. So if you are wanting to gather more wisdom, one channel, shameless plug, is the DoorGrow Mastermind. It is the industry's best mastermind for property management that is focused.

Entirely on growing a business quickly. It's focused on growing the business and making it scalable operationally so you can continue to grow quickly without stopping focusing on growth to fix ops. And so we build the fastest growing businesses and we give you the tools, the engines to collapse time on growth so that you don't have to spend any money on digital marketing, SEO, pay-per-click, content marketing, social media marketing.

pay-per-lead services, any of this stuff in order to grow your business. We help you install growth engines that actually over time make your business grow faster and faster with less and less work. Once an it takes work to build an engine, but once an engine's built, you just put fuel in it and it keeps running and it keeps running. So if you are interested in maybe having a conversation with me or somebody on my team to see if we might be able to help.

You start really getting ahead, growing your business, using wisdom that's been gathered over 17 plus years that have been doing this. Aggressively focused on growing businesses. With a program that is month to month, no contract, because we're so confident in what we do, we are able to keep and retain clients without locking them into some sort of.

contract or agreement for a year like most vendors try to do in this industry because they know they can't get your results quickly or they you're not going to stick around in the long term. It's one or the other. Otherwise they would all do what I'm doing. It's month to month. And we keep clients for years because they get an ROI. And if I can help you just add 10 more units, maybe 20 more units if your margins are bad.

Our program's already paid for. If I can help you, if you have already 100 to 200 units, if I can help you add 10 more dollars of profitability per unit by optimizing your pricing structure or reducing your overhead or your operational costs or staffing costs, which is very easy to do, our program is basically paid for and free to you forever. And then we'll make you more and more money. You are probably spending.

Thousands of dollars a month on team members. Thousands and thousands of dollars a month on team members.

If you consider that hiring DoorGro coming into our mastermind is like getting several of the best property managers available to you, getting me and Sarah, my brilliant operational strategist wife, and myself, brilliant growth-minded entrepreneur, on your team, basically, as fractional helpers to your business.

We're basically the cheapest team member that you'll ever get that will make you the most money that you will ever get. And it's easy no brainer. And usually we can offset the cost of the program just by that first in-person session that you do with each new client, where we have you come out and we onboard clients in person. You come spend a day with Sarah and I in Austin. We can usually find you, find the money for the program so it's already paid for.

Just by helping you eliminate interruptions, eliminate some of the costs in the business, increase your pricing, increase your fee structure, maximize what you're doing there, and several other things that we do. this is this this is how we're able to help clients justify staying in our program, even though it's expensive. And if it's too expensive for you right now, we've created a program called the PM Launchpad that will help you.

To get your first 10 or 20 doors with two of our best growth engines. One's one of the hardest, but it always works. And then another one that's more of a long game that also works to help you get your first 10 or 20 units, and it's only $97 a month to get into the PM launch pad. So that can help you get your first 10 or 20 units.

By doing some hard work. If you want to collapse time and go a lot faster, make a lot more money a lot more quickly, then join our mastermind. But if you can't afford that, I want to be able to help you. We've created a program just for that. So we've also created a program for those that have money and you want to hire a salesperson, but you failed at this before. We will become your salesperson at DoorGroad. This is our program called the Door Machine. This is it, yes, it's expensive, but so is hiring a salesperson. It's basically the same thing.

Except we are your salesperson. And I actually hire, train, support, keep accountable a person in your local market. Maybe even we're considering adding because we're incentivized. The more doors we add, the more DoorGrow makes. It's like a partnership. we're also incentivized to perhaps also get sales setters to feed this BDM. whatever makes this business grow quickly. And so if we're having some success with growing your business in your market.

It's a win-win-win for all three parties, for the salesperson, for DoorGrow, and for you. And if we can make that work, we will throw all of our, all the gasoline at that fire that we can, Sarah and I, because we we all win together. So if any of this sounds interesting, reach out to us at DoorGrow. So let's go ahead and wrap this up. So if you've ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your business to the next level, reach out to us at DoorGrow. We can help.

And for a free training on how to get unlimited leads for free, text the word leads to 512-648-4608. Also join our free Facebook community, just for property management business owners at doorgrowclub.com. And if you want tips, tricks, ideas to and to learn about our offers, subscribe to our newsletter by going to doorgrow.com/slash subscribe. And if you and I said our Facebook community. We actually were shifting away from Facebook. So now we have our own community.

You can download the app. DoorGrowHub is the app in the app, Apple Place, Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. check that out. And like I was saying, if you want tips, tricks, ideas, learn about our offers, subscribe to our newsletter, go to doorgrow.com slash subscribe. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We'd really appreciate it. And I just launched, this is brand new. I just launched my own Substack.

I'm King Jason Hull, H U L L King Jason Hull on every platform that exists. So that's how you can find me on Substack. I just wrote my first article, kind of attacking the PM Trends report and survey in a nice way, helping to add some value to it. There's some great stuff in it. And so go check that out by going to kingjasonhull.substack.com, I believe. And then I'm also getting more and more involved on LinkedIn. And so

Make sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. You'll find me as as King Jason Hull on LinkedIn or just search for Jason Hull and look for my shiny happy face. And until next time, everybody, remember the slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together. Bye everyone.

What if the biggest obstacle to growing your property management business isn't your marketing... but who you're attracting? In this #DoorGrowShow episode, Jason Hull breaks down why traditional marketing advice is keeping property managers stuck competing for price-sensitive owners while overlooking a massive untapped market. Drawing from nearly two decades of coaching hundreds of property management entrepreneurs, he explains why warm, relationship-driven growth consistently outperforms cold digital marketing. Jason also explores the hidden operational costs of attracting the wrong clients, why communication isn't the real reason owners leave, how poor boundaries destroy profitability, and why your business should be built around trust.

You'll Learn

[00:00] Why Industry Surveys Miss Real Growth Opportunities [04:58] Understanding Cheapos, Normals, and Premium Buyers [10:43] The Blue Ocean Most Property Managers Ignore [16:40] Why Communication Isn't the Real Problem [22:08] Escaping the "Cycle of Suck" [28:18] Setting Better Boundaries with Owners [34:55] Why Offline Marketing Wins [42:06] Building Growth Engines Instead of Buying Leads [50:14] Hidden Profit Leaks Every Property Manager Has

Quotables

​​"Where you get your leads dictates the quality of the lead and how much they're willing to spend." Jason Hull

"They don't even want to buy property management. What they want to buy is a trusted advisor." Jason Hull

"Interruptions are the biggest thief in the property management business of profitability." Jason Hull

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

DoorGrow Academy

DoorGrow on YouTube

DoorGrowClub

DoorGrowLive

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:00)

Hey everybody, I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGro, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGro, 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. Now let's get to the show. Okay, so today's episode,

I'm going to share from my anecdotal experience in talking to thousands of property managers and all the feedback that I get, and all the people that are in our mastermind, what we're seeing is working. So here's what a survey can't show: a survey is basically lagging data, it's not showcasing what's

Innovating because you're not even usually asking questions about the latest innovations. So the questions inherent in this survey, my guess, are slightly flawed because they aren't asking some of the things I would ask based on all of the data and information that I get from this weird sort of fly-in-the-wall vantage point that I have in the industry.

we've always pushed this idea of three different types of buyers: cheapos, normals, and premiums.

Most cheapos self-manage. They exclude themselves from the pool of property management buyers. And then there's a small percentage that eventually go through the funnel online, and then you can capture through marketing. And these are this is what most companies base their pricing around, is based around the cheapos that they can get through internet marketing. Well, the best stuff usually comes through word of mouth or

Further out into the blue ocean. And so if you would like to see more about this, you can get my leads training by going to drgrw.com, which is doorgrow.com, or just go to doorgrow.com slash leads. So do the shortened URL or the longer URL slash leads. And you'll see our there is a clarity assessment you can do. There is a free training, and then you can book a call with our team.

And hear about some of the innovative gross strategies and stuff that we're doing with clients. So the thing to realize is that a lot of you know, it's showcasing these boomers as cheapos. And the the other thing though is it's it's saying that like 62% are represented here. And I think that the numbers of people that actually use property management is far lower than the 500 they surveyed. There's probably also a lot of people that

Aren't even aware of property management, even though they need it. There is this massive blue ocean. I think the numbers are probably more, maybe around 40-50% are self-managing versus using a property manager. And there's a lot of available potential business out there. And they're not looking on the internet. So here is some data that's not in the PM Trends report, but it's on trends.google.com. So if you go to trends.google.com.

And I just threw up an article on LinkedIn today before recording this episode. But if you go to this, go to Google Trends, backdate it to 2004 to the present, what and put in property management. And then feel free to add some other keywords like AI would be very telling, because we've seen the rise, meteoric rise lately of AI in terms of awareness and search volume. Put in real estate is another great keyword so you can kind of see.

What you'll notice is property management is such a minuscule amount of search volume, it barely registers compared to these other terms. And it spikes every summer and goes down every winter. If you remove those terms, is what you'll see. Now, in the last year, there's been a little bit of an uptick for the first time in basically two decades, which is amazing, which is awesome. That means market share is starting to maybe start to shift a little bit and grow. But there is this huge blue ocean of people that will never search the internet.

For property management. And that doesn't mean that they like doing it themselves. This survey probably isn't able to touch any of those people. And this, these are some of the people I get my clients to go after the most. Why? Because it's way cheaper. There's a huge blue ocean of people that are not looking on the internet for property management. The people that are looking on the internet are at the end of the sales cycle. These are typically the worst owners in a lot of instances.

Why? Because word of mouth captures the best stuff first and then the shitty stuff that falls off that table, the scraps that fall off the word of mouth table. Those are the people now that don't care about word of mouth or they don't care who people say is great. They think you're a commodity. They're looking for the cheapest company. And so generally there's a much higher percentage of cheapos that you're going to attract by doing digital or internet-based marketing.

YouTube. The challenge is there's a large percentage of owners that are not looking or searching for property management. They're not looking for property management stuff on YouTube. They're not looking for property management stuff on Google. They're not looking at all. They don't care about property management. Most people

That are even property managers are not usually consuming content around property management. Not very often. A lot of them self-identify as more of a real estate brokerage or real estate agent or anything else that they think is cooler. I even had a client I was coaching recently, and he said that he's really had this mental block, this mental block about wanting to tell people that he's a property manager. And I said, Don't tell people that you're a property manager.

Property managers in your market, he was in New York, are basically somebody that sits in a big building that, you know, they they help do leasing. That's kind of people's perception. You are an asset portfolio manager. You are an investment specialist. There's so many other ways you can present yourself. You are the entrepreneur that hires the property manager. I don't want my clients to identify as property managers. I want them to identify as an entrepreneur because identity limits growth.

the second thing that filters, which is perception. There's a really negative perception about property managers among real estate agents, among investors that are aware that most property managers, if I have you in a room and I say by show of hands, how many of you started your business? Because all of the other property managers in your market sucked. Usually almost everybody's hands go up. And then my joke usually is, but not yours, right?

And then they all laugh. So, but nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to start a crappy company.

So you could waste a massive amount of time trying to do a bunch of social media marketing, a bunch of YouTube videos, a bunch of content creation. And it's not generally going to get you the best clients because where you get your leads dictates the quality of the lead and how much they're willing to spend. And what we find is the clients you can connect with offline through warm lead strategies.

through direct outreach, through creating relationships, through networking, and some of the growth engine strategies we teach at DoorGrow, the conversion rate is way higher. The leads are way warmer, and which means the close rate's gonna be way higher. The trust levels higher, so you're able to get more deals on more easily. And it doesn't cost you anything. It costs you time, but it doesn't cost you any marketing or advertising dollars. And the and a lot of people like, well, I'd rather spend money and save time.

It these leads, warmer leads, take less time. They take less time in the sales cycle to convert. Cold leads take way more time because now you're a commodity and you're competing with all the other companies and now you're in this weird race to the bottom and you've attracted cheapos. Here's the other thing you won't see in this report. The other thing, it does not mention the operational cost of dealing with these different categories of owners. Cheapos, normals, and premiums. So here's the thing.

It talks about communication being the number one factor. I've heard this so many times, and I'm gonna tell you that I believe that this is a red herring or a lie. You have been made to believe by everybody the number one pre reason people leave companies is communication. But it's not because of a lack of communication, like everybody says. It is because of bad boundaries and bad expectations, so owners think.

That they need to be communicated with all the time. And then you have this huge burden of communication to fulfill. And it's very difficult to impossible when you have a whole bunch of crappy owners and a whole bunch of crappy properties and a whole bunch of crappy tenants, and you're caught in what I call the cycle of suck. So this is how the industry is caught in the cycle of suck because most property managers take on any client. So now you have bad clients. They take on any property. So now you have bad properties. And then you do tenant screening, but

You can't really filter that much because the tenants are going to be bad tenants if the property is bad or the owner is bad. Now it's a difficult situation for you to deal with, and you're basically a shit shield for a slumlord. And so now you've got these three things in the cycle suck, which leads to the fourth, which is you're gonna have a bad reputation. And this sums up the entire industry in aggregate. And this survey is based on the industry in aggregate. Okay, so.

What do we do with this? one, you need to realize that the best owners and the best clients that you they they don't want to be involved with their property. They don't want to know everything that's going on. They want somebody, what they actually want. They don't even want to buy property management. Everybody's selling the wrong product. What they want to buy is a trusted advisor, that they could actually relax into.

You have to be the dominant person in this relationship for them to be able to relax and to trust your leadership. And that reduces your operational costs significantly. This is how my wife's business at 265 or so units at its peak.

She still had 60 to 90 percent profit margin. These were C-class properties, and her owners, the boundaries were set very strongly that she is not going to talk to them. And if she calls them, they need to sit down because she's asking for money, because there's a significant problem. And they didn't call her. They they never called to like say, Hey, did you get that tenant in place yet? They just trusted her because she was so on top of things and she set very strong boundaries from the beginning.

This is something we coach our clients on heavily. Is that if you think that your business is all about communication, you've built your business the wrong way. Your business is about management. It's about leadership. And it's about allowing the owners to actually get away from their property and not have to hear from you.

And so when you suck at boundaries, communication becomes the number one factor. When you s and then you're gonna suck at communication because you're setting up an impossible game. Here's the thing: this does not talk about the level of interruptions, and interruptions are the biggest thief in a property management business of profitability. I want you to visualize this. Imagine you're writing a blank check and it says on it, steal all of my profits, and you're handing this to every client you bring on.

It says, call me whenever you want to. Email me, call me, text me whenever you want to. Here's the blank check to steal all my profits. And I will have team members and AI tools and technology and all of this stuff to communicate with you all the time and over-communicate, which just really makes you even more anxious. That makes you feel like you have to manage the manager. And that's not what they really wanted to buy from you. That's the booby prize they get by dealing with a property manager that doesn't know how to lead.

That doesn't have good boundaries.

like Sarah and I talk about this and she jokes and she's like, how many of my owners do you think knew what color we painted the walls or knew what kind of carpet we put into their property? They have no clue. They just trusted us to take care of it for them. They didn't care. They didn't want to know

Long as rent came in. They would call me surprise sometimes, she said. And they'd say, Why am I getting more rent than I was before? Why why is more coming into my bank account? She said, we raised the rent. FYI.

So here's the thing I want you to recognize.

First, there's three types of buyers: cheapos, normals, and premiums. Cheapos generally are going to opt out and self-manage because they're so cheap. But you should have three different price points and three different plans. The premium plan stuff that they mention in this report is useful. But because we've been building premium plans with our clients and helping them figure out the premium tier of their pricing, none of this stuff is a surprise. This is all stuff that's generally included in premium plans that we've been doing for over a decade.

though, you have to change your marketing to attract premium buyers. You're not going to get those by doing digital marketing and attracting the people that are now of super aware and super price sensitive that are searching on the internet. And so you're going to skew towards premium buyers more if you change your lead sources.

On some of the lowest rent properties, they have the highest operational cost. Operational cost was not factored into this report or survey. Not all owners are worth it and not all properties are worth it. And so you have to be aware of this and you need to be cleaning out your portfolio and you need to be firing the properties and the owners that are not profitable or just raising your rates on them to make sure that you make sure that this is profitable, right? Okay.

So these are some of the things that I wanted to point out in this report. I hope this is helpful for those that got this report and are looking into it. I think the the numbers are a bit skewed. It's obviously skewed a bit towards the different services, the different vendors and the different you know partners that came together to advertise and promote this and the sponsors. My recommendation is shift your marketing to offline.

This is the secondary effect of AI. Why? Because AI slop is the age we're in right now. And anyone can create anything AI-wise, digital-wise, marketing-wise. And so there's gonna be more and more digital just bloat and waste and noise. And those that are willing to pick up the phone, that are willing to go out and reach out and that create strategies that are have high leverage. We call these growth engines.

And if you would like to learn about some of the growth engines or get a free two-hour training, no fluff, that breaks down seven to nine different engines you can install in your business that are unique and different from what you're doing now. There are a lot of them are similar, for example, realtor referrals, but we have a strategy that is 10 times more effective. We call realtor intros. And so if you there's like targeting groups and simple changes like using a QR code and a booking link.

Could maximize the results of walking away from groups with leads. Stuff like this. So when you're doing presentations, so there's all these different strategies we share inside our mastermind. And we are at the forefront because we have an army of people focused on aggressive growth. Most masterminds out there in property management are nuts and bolts or operations. Ours is primarily focused on growth, and that growth drives the res the need for operational you know.

decision making operational fixes and challenges for fast growth, not just for building a bunch of AI tools and building a bunch of bloat and getting a bunch of tech and having the most efficient business. We want to optimize for growth. It doesn't matter if you have the coolest, most high tech business, if your profit margins aren't growing and your revenue isn't growing and your doors aren't growing and they're they aren't growing rapidly. And so if you want to shift out of being in survival to maybe being more

Getting having realistic goals, like 100, 200 doors a year, or even like our clients beyond that into what we call impossible goals, where you're able to come up with strategies and clever, unique ways to scale your business more quickly, then check us out at doorgrow.com. Reach out to us. This is the stuff that we have been focused on for 17 plus years now. And because we're always like we always have new, fresh ideas and

New guinea pigs and new people working on this stuff. We have accumulated, I believe, the fastest growth strategies that exist in the marketplace. And many of them cost zero dollars. In fact, I can usually grow companies faster if I convince them to turn off all the digital marketing, all the APM leads, all the Google ads, all of the SEO stuff. Stop spending money on that. And we put the time and energy towards warmer lead strategies that are out in the blue ocean.

Where there's tons of available business and very little red bloody water competition, like there is at the end of this cycle of people searching on the internet where you everybody's fighting over the coldest, shittiest, worst leads.

Okay, so if you want to go beyond what you just see in this PM trends report and you want to start innovating and being part of a community,

In person, not a bunch of Zoom calls, because growth and scaling happens in the room. Our mastermind is in person in the DoorGrow Mastermind. And yeah, it's expensive. But if I can help you offset it by adding 10 new units residually monthly, our program's paid for. And or if I can help you find another $10 per unit if you have 100 or 200 units, our program's already paid for forever. And that's why our program is there's no commitment.

It's month to month because we know we can offset the cost of the program usually within the first month or 90 days if you're willing to put in the work. If you need to add doors, if you're willing to put in the work, or if you already have a bunch of doors, if we can just find more operational costs. The three biggest levers operationally, financially, are people planning and process. And we have a system for this we call the super system. And this is where magic happens because your biggest expense besides taxes.

Which you can offset and eliminate is people staffing. And so if you can reduce those, also our program is easily worth it. Just consider that for the one, two, or three grand a month, depending on the level of the program you're in with us, we're like your cheapest team member that helps you make the most money. And it's an absolute no-brainer. So come join what hundreds of property management companies have realized. And the other thing I want to point out, what this doesn't talk about.

There's some invisible blind spots that every property management business I've ever looked at has. There's three foundational leaks. I've talked leaks I've talked about on the show previously. There are also six leaks that exist inside the pipeline. And most people are like, How do I grow? How do I turn on the leaks? And they're ignoring what comes after that. The hose. This is branding, reputation, sales pitch, pricing, all these things that will help clean up.

without even changing your current acquisition channels or lead sources, you could double the amount of deals that you're bringing on.

so if you would like to really grow your business, you want to grow quickly, you want to shore this up, you want to hear about our new door machine where we do the growth for you. I hire and train and manage a salesperson in your market. Then reach out to us at doorgrow.com and check it out. Now, today's sponsor, I want to read this message from our sponsor. We have an awesome sponsor today. It's super. If you haven't heard of Super,

You can check them out at higher super.com. Now, ring ring, who's there? Not property managers. Over half don't answer their phones during business hours. Hot leads calling you directly or going straight to missed calls. If you're spending time and money on growth, you need to actually capture it. That's where Super comes in. Super's AI receptionist sounds lifelike, answers 24-7, and is trained on property management. It even makes follow-up calls to leads you might have missed. Go to hiresuper.com/slash doorgrow and stop missing revenue.

Missed calls. Cool. So go check that out. Now, these are the key things. I again shout out to Peter and Jordan and all the cool people that were involved in putting this report together. I think this brings up a lot of the industry that pay attention to it a little closer to where we've been trying to push people over the last decade. I'm really excited to see some of the conversation that comes out of this and some of the innovation that comes out of this.

And yeah, and if you have ever felt stuck or stagnant, you want to take your business to the next level, reach us at dorgo.com for a free training on how to get unlimited free leads. Again, go to dorgo.com/slash leads or text the word leads to 512-648-4608. Also, we have a free community. We've migrated it from Facebook. It's now inside our own app. You can get the app by going to your app store right now on your phone. Do this right now.

Go to just search for DoorGrow and you'll see the DoorGrow Hub inside the App Store for iOS or the Google Play Store. Download this. There is a a space inside of this that is the new DoorGrow Club. And if you go to DoorGrowClub.com, it will take you to our new space inside of the DoorGrow Hub system that we have, our new community.

Most of the really cool places are locked down for our property management mastermind members or people that are in our PM Growth Launchpad, which is a little tool for that's really cheap, like 97 bucks a month to help some property managers get really good at cold calling and go create business right now. If you're struggling for doors, it's the most easy, consistent, I mean it's hard work, but it always works if you do it right. And growth strategy, and then in our mastermind, we have

more advanced growth strategies so you don't have to do the cold calling, that you can create leverage that once you build these growth engines, they just you keep a little fuel in them and they just keep running and they feed you more and more business. You can stack these, which is really awesome. And they really don't cost any money. It just takes time and it takes less time than doing cold lead marketing, like I told talked about earlier. So check us out, but go to DoorGrowClub.com

If you want tips, tricks, and ideas to learn about our offers and stuff like this, go to doorgo.com slash subscribe, subscribe to our newsletter, opt in. We would love to send you some cool stuff. And if you found this even a little bit helpful, don't forget to subscribe on whatever channel this is that you're listening or viewing this on and leave us a review. It helps us. We'd really appreciate it. It's a little way you could give back. Thank you. We appreciate it so much. And until next time, remember the slowest path to growth.

is to do it alone. So get a good group. Get in with a really good group of people that are focused on high paced growth. And so let's grow together. Bye everyone.