How To Grow A Company

Jesse Barnes is gonna talk to us about the 3 keys to growing a company in this day and age, and I wanted to tell you a little bit about Jesse before we welcome him to the stage. He is from Oregon and was recruited out of the gym to do his current job. Apparently, whatever he was doing was so impressive that I think he should probably give us all a demonstration later. He is currently the BDM for Centurion. He is a new father. And a guitar player. I don't know how he has time for that with a baby, but good for him. Since 2015, he has doubled the size of his company, so we know that what he's doing is producing results, which he's passionate about. Efficiency, teamwork, watching the things that he puts into play produce the results that he's going for— all of those are things that get him going. So please join me in welcoming to the stage Jesse Barnes.

Thank you so much.

Is this on?

Can you guys hear me?

Yeah.

All right. So thank you guys for all being here. I'm going to be going over the 3 keys to growth in this day and age regarding property management, what things have worked for us. There's many things that go into success, but I try to pick out the top 3 things that were the most pivotal that I found that were the most fruitful that produced the most ROI. From my time spent in growing the company. I've been doing this for about 45 years. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not even close to near as any of you guys as far as the savvy, the savviness that you guys manage with, the amount of experience you guys have, the doors you guys manage. It's all impressive. And I'm very humbled to be here and talk to you guys about the little that I do know. I don't know a lot, but the little I do know, I feel like I've excelled at lately. I went to school at Oregon State University, graduated with a bachelor's in speech communication marketing from Oregon State. And I've been, as she said and mentioned earlier, I've been with the company since 2015. And in 2015, we'd been in business for about 10 years and had about 10 Google reviews and 550 doors managed, small plexes, single-family homes. And today we are at, I think, 1,060, I think was the last I counted. Over 240 Google reviews. So I guess that is why you should even give me a shot, just please. First thing before we get into the first key is Google. I'm gonna tell you what you guys mostly already know, right? It's the largest search engine in the world. There's an estimated 1.2 trillion searches that were done in 2018 and an average of 3.3 billion that were done a day last year. This is a third-party site called StatsCounter, and this is just to— goes to show you the market share that Google has in the web search market share, in the search engine market share worldwide. I've never heard of Yandex nor Baidu. I have heard of Yahoo and Bing, but apparently other people don't even care about 'em, 'cause I sure as heck don't. I don't go to Yahoo or Bing. It's all about Google. I just wanted to preface that. There's going to be plenty more stats to come, but one fact I wanted to share with you guys is in 2018, in July of 2018, there was an estimated 9 million combined searches that were done for property management and real estate management in the United States, which means that each and every one of you guys has some market share, some piece of that pie. Whether you're in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, whether you're in the Salem, Oregon area like we are, we all have a share. As she mentioned, I was at the gym and I was working out and I was, I still am, but I was doing Google AdWords marketing. I was a contractor for Google, still am. And talked with this gentleman named Mendell Gosnell from Centurion Real Estate Management. And he said, "Hey, what do you do?" Got to talking. He said, come to my office tomorrow. I might want to use your services for Google AdWords. I see the importance of Google, and I want in on it. So I show up the next day. An hour and a half later, he offers me a job and says, I will pay you to keep doing your job out of my office time. I just would really love to hire you. And so I said, ah, absolutely. And I was just getting married at the time. After we came back from my honeymoon, that's when I started. And Google reviews, I'm a big proponent before, but I'm even more so now since I'm seeing it firsthand. That's a screenshot a couple months back. But referrals are great, but you can only get so many. Someone had spoken about referrals. We are always, I will preface it with, we are always actively going out there trying to be active in the community, volunteering. Chamber of Commerce is a massive, We have a really good chamber in Salem. It's one of the forerunners and the blueprints for chambers around the United States, actually. We're really fortunate. So we're really involved with that. But Google Reviews builds credibility where credibility is otherwise nonexistent. And whether you like it or not or whether you agree with it or not, it's a reflection on you and your company and the health of your company, right? You could be— the great thing about the internet is you can be whoever you want. It's kind of scary. If you're at 200 doors and your competitor is at 900 doors, but you have 3 times the amount of reviews, that Joe Schmo that's looking to have their property managed has no idea, has no idea who to go to. Realtors though know who to refer people to. That's great. That's why I'm saying that referrals are great, but you can only get so many of them, right? But when they look at the reviews, they don't know how many units you manage. They don't know how many employees you have, right? So that is a huge indicator on who they're gonna go with. Which leads me to this right here. This is another third-party website that just shows, this is for the finance industry, but it's very applicable to us as well in any service industry. 63% of Google consumers, or consumers say that they're likely to check online reviews on Google before visiting a business more than any other site, which includes Yelp, which by the way, I don't know, If anyone's a big proponent here of Yelp, I am not. I feel like they are a scam and they should be shut down. I had the— Thank you. Mendell Gosnell, one day we got a 1-star review on there. He's like, hey, Jesse, I really want you to do a blitz on Yelp because for some reason there's tenants that— for some reason tenants look at Yelp more than owners do, which I'm thankful for. He's like, we've got like only 1-star showing, but I know I know that I've gotten people to leave us reviews, 5 stars. So he's like, I want you to call them. I want you to call them and find out where they're all at. So I call them and no one could give me an answer at all. And then I said, Mendell, I know you don't like this when I come to you with no, nothing to offer, right? Don't make eye contact, right? I walked in his office, said, I don't have an answer for you. I'm sorry. They couldn't tell me why all of our 5-star reviews aren't showing. It's like they almost, you know, we're not paying. They tried to sell me, by the way. And he goes, that's it right there. And he goes, I want you to call a lawyer. I wanna sue him. That's the first thing. And then I was like, I called his lawyer and the lawyer's like, dude, I'm not even gonna take this case on. Tell Mendell to cool it, right? We want it, we wanna do that, but we just stay away from it. We even try to look for a way to shut down our Google page so we're not even existing on there. So if anyone finds out how to do that, let me know. Let's move to number 2. 53% of consumers expect businesses to respond to negative reviews within a week, but 63% say that businesses don't respond to the review. All of these points we're gonna be going over in detail here in a second. 94% say online reviews have convinced them to avoid a business. 80% of consumers say that the star ratings they trust most are 4, 4.5, and 5. By the way, if any of you guys are right now on your phones looking at your star ratings and you're at 3.9, You know that whole concept of like, "Oh, it's a dollar, but that one's 99 cents," that whole like psychological thing? This is very, very true for this too. If you're at 3.9, get that up to 4. Just break the 4. I know it's a minuscule difference, but it passes the eye test with owners. I'm telling you. So who do you ask for referrals? I mean, for reviews? You ask owners. Now, when you ask an owner, typically it's not just one owner., right? One door means it's a husband and wife, partners, an LLC, a trust. There's multiple avenues right there for that one door to get reviews. Vendors and companies that you hire, this is something that if you guys aren't writing something down, please implement. This is what I did to get an absolute blitz. I immediately, when I started this campaigning for getting reviews, I went to all of our vendors. I pulled the list of our vendors. On Appfolio, and I started leaving them reviews. Every single one of them, appreciative, genuine reviews. Hey, thank you so much for fitting us in your schedule. I know sometimes we call you out of the blue, and it's our emergency, but it's, you know, you're there to save it, and you don't, you know, your work doesn't go unnoticed. I really appreciate it. This is for the public to see. I then emailed them immediately saying the exact same thing in basically an email format, and at the end I said, I just left you a 5-star review, some of which who didn't even have reviews, so I was their first one. 1. 80%, 85%, I think, is the stat that I got back, left me. I said, I would end it saying, we'd appreciate it if you feel that we've done a good job in communicating with you and paying you on time. If you don't pay your vendors on time, skip this, okay? If we've paid you on time and you feel like we've done a great job keeping you in the loop of things, I would really appreciate a 5-star review if we've earned it. If we haven't, tell me how we can improve. We got, I think, like 40 or something, great, just an influx. Refresh the page and it would just pop up new ones. It was insane. Tenants now, please be careful about this. One of the times we asked for a tenant, which was one of the last times we did, thank you so much for coming to fix that squeaky door. A month later, changed to a 1-star after they said we didn't put granite counters in there. In their apartment. They basically use it against you, right? Don't do that. What you want to do is wait, train your billing department, your front desk, people who have the contact with the tenants person to person. Make sure that they're trained to fish out the positive experiences upon move-out, right? Hey, great job in cleaning the place. You're getting back your full deposit. That's awesome. Congratulations. We love to do that. We actually prefer not to keep them. We're glad to see that happen, and they're excited. Print out little slips that show them, tell them how to leave a Google review, and hand those slips out selectively upon their move-out paperwork. Say, "Hey, we appreciate it. Congrats on the new purchase of your home. Hate to see you go, but happy for you." Those are proactive things you guys can do to be getting reviews. Friends and family, I know you're thinking, "Well, that's unethical. You don't, you know, if you're not managing for my, that's not cool." I agree. But what you can do is say, "Hey, Uncle, Cousin Eddie," whatever, if you guys are a fan of the Chevy Chase movies. But, Cousin Eddie, I just told you a little about my job in real estate and I know that you're interested in it someday about buying a house. But if you feel like, you know, I've consulted you." I mean, if you've consulted regarding real estate management or investing to anybody, they can leave you an honest review and you can sleep good at night knowing that that review says something simple as, you know, "Jesse took his time even though I'm not paying him. He took some time to educate me on investing in real estate." Right? And if I ever get the chance to refer them, I always do. That's a truthful, honest review right there from a family member. Right? Don't forget, bad reviews will happen. 4.5. When I first started, I asked Mendell, I was like, "What's with this company 4.5?" Right? He's like, "You wanna know?" I was like, "Yeah." And he goes, "'Cause the best you'll ever do is 4.5." And I started laughing right there. And 'cause I totally saw the client base that we were dealing with, not just owners, but the tenants, right? But the key is, like we said earlier, respond to every single review, good and bad. I've closed, I think, roughly 10 to 15 doors strictly off bad reviews. Owners call me saying, "Hey, I love how you put that tenant in place. Or I mean, put him in her place. I saw that they just left you a review that said, 'These people steal their money, steal our money. Never rent from them.' And I love how you told them, 'I'm sorry to see you go. I'm sorry that we had to evict you.'" You know? Excuse me. I'm being serious too. And said, "I'm sorry, but we gave you many chances. This one really hurts, Susie, because we've really tried to work with you and we never like to evict. But if you'd like to talk with us further about this, like we told you, please contact us directly and we'll be glad to settle this matter out of the public eye." Owners see that and they're like, "Dude, they're gonna be taking care of my property. I love it." And ask, always ask. If you don't ask, you don't get. What does this mean? It means you guys have the ability to stick to your rates and not have to haggle on fees. They came to you, they see the value and the merit of your company, right? Again, even if you're a smaller to medium-sized company, more reviews will only improve the perception of the quality and size of your company and your ability to manage more effectively than your competitors. Less of a need for lead generation services. Please don't hurt me when I'm walking around out there in the expos, any vendors. We use lead generation services where they're great. But as you do this, as you get that snowball started, right? And it starts getting bigger and bigger, it starts to feed itself. It gives you a natural SEO boost. Those are some of the benefits. Brings me to point 2. I created this meme and put it on our social media a couple years ago. I want the most reliable, trustworthy, responsive, law-abiding, market-savvy, cheapest property manager. Makes no sense. I actually had an owner basically tell me that in a roundabout way. Like, he called me up and his first question was, "What are your rates?" Red flag right there for me. Immediately. Didn't ask, "What can you provide? What's your management style?" You know, my question every time when I'm prospecting owners is, So tell me about what your goals are. What are your needs? Because based on that, I'll let you know if we're the right fit. We typically manage for owners and investors that live out of town simply for the fact that we don't just collect the rent and send you the check.

Right?

We do everything from the top down, end of the year taxes, monthly reporting. Right? 24/7 emergency maintenance phone number, contracting, license and plumbing. So what do you want? Are you wanting to co-manage? Right? Do you know how to post proper notices if you want to fix that leaky faucet and save $20? By the way, are you looking for a job? Because apparently your time's not worth anything. If you do handle the leads, again, train your BDM to qualify prospective owners. I already told you about the, "What are your rates?" But another great one is, "Can you match XYZ management or whatever?" I used to be a jerk and say, "Absolutely, as long as you tell me what kind of services." their offering, I'd be glad to lower ours to meet that. Kind of a jerk move, kind of a not good customer service. So I quit doing that about a week ago. No, I'm just kidding. I quit doing that, and I simply just say, you know, I'm sorry, we won't because we see that we know the value that we bring. It's not the upfront cost, it's the end of the year ROI that you're going to be getting with us. We're not going to lower our fees. If you're wanting the cheapest bidder to manage your most valuable asset, I think I know a couple of people I can send you to. I'd be happy to give you their contact. If I do the maintenance, will you manage it for X%?

No.

We used to do that and we still actually do for a couple owners that have their contractor's license, which is the only reason why we do it. But there's a lot of liability for us. We just found owner Joe wouldn't go to— by the way, I'm using Joe a lot. I hope Joes don't feel bad about it. I don't know why I'm using Joe. Joe's on vacation for Thanksgiving. Fridge goes out. Tenants have like $400 worth of groceries ready to cook. Do you want us to wait till you get back? You know, or the opposite. Hey, I just went in and fixed it. You know, no, I was, you know, no problem. I went and fixed it within hours. I live across the street and I saw that there was a leak. I went and fixed it. Did you post a 24-hour notice? Did you notify the tenant? Were they home? No, I just saw their garage door was open. And I just fired my BDM, or my PM. Please don't fire the BDM. I just fired my PM because— that's another red flag question. Lots of the times it's warranted. I listen to them and they say, I just fired my last property manager because they were absolutely dropping the ball. I have X amount of vacancies, unacceptable in this hot market. And we can actually confirm or deny that and say, yeah, that seems about right, or yeah, you're right. That's a lot. That's way higher vacancy than normal. But I just fired my PM because they wouldn't call me every time there was something to be fixed. Well, you're not going to like us either, so you should probably go back to them. Learn to say no. Again, you are the professional. We don't tell our lawyers, our doctors how to do their jobs, yet we as an industry seem to deviate from our processes, our protocols, and the way we manage in order to cater to owners who wanna co-manage with us. And we've shifted away from that substantially. I mean, we're still trying to, it's a slow process. It's never gonna be a cold turkey mass exodus, everyone get out and then just a sigh of relief, right? For current owners, this is awesome. So for current owners who are taking up more company bandwidth than you'd like, once your company's reached an amount of units that you feel comfortable with, Have fun with it, 'kay? Plan on having a staff-wide meeting to see which owners take up the most time. You can do like a themed party, like a survivor show, like Voting Off the Island thing. And your employees are gonna love it, right? Which owners are just really giving you grief? You know, but taking the most time while not being charged enough in management fees, right? Separate those owners into two categories. Those that you would like to keep as long as you raise them to market rate, right? You've just been too kind to them. You've got a heart, but you're barely breaking even, if that. And those that you don't want to see ever again, no matter how much they're willing to pay you, right? Break those up. Write them down. Put them on paper. Okay? Keep that on the forefront of your mind because we luckily don't do this anymore. We haven't done it only because we always are staying on top of it. If there's an owner and we start to see the the winds change with the way their relationship is with our office, and we get word from our office staff that there's a little bit of friction going on, we'll have that talk where we're like, "Hey, we just want you to know this is how it is. It's not fair to our employees that we change our processes for you, but we're willing to work with you, but we're just letting you know that, again, we're the professionals." Last but not least, your employees are your greatest asset. Richard Branson's an absolute titan, as you guys all know, with Virgin Enterprises, and he is one of the biggest proponents of this. Train people well enough so that they can leave, but treat them well enough so they don't want to. Another quote from him is, clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients. Clients, right? Hiring and retaining quality employees will be what sets you apart. How many of you guys are having hiring issues? I know we are actually having some hiring issues with mostly for maintenance. It's an absolute barrier trying to keep people and find quality employees. But once you find them, don't let them go, okay? When you're not around, who are your owners, tenants, vendors interacting with at your company? Your employees and their ability to represent your company on and off the clock. Are invaluable. Hire people that you like, that you want to be around. A lot of the times, I know that I'm around the office staff sometimes more than I am my own family, okay? Which means you want to like them. You want to have a good relationship with them. You want to like them. So please make sure that you guys have a good pulse on the way your office is running regarding that. And one thing I will say is my employer, Mendell Gosnell, he's a— that's what kind of seduced me, I guess, to go to work for him. He— the second my wife and I got back from our honeymoon, he's like, hey, I know you guys aren't in financial trouble and you guys are really good with your money, but I want you guys to be proactive about your finances. And I want to share a little wisdom. Read, you know, Rich Dad Poor Dad. Here's— go through the Dave Ramsey course, even though you don't need it. You're going to be in there with people that are going bankrupt. Just Try to stay focused. He put us through, he invested in us. You know, and it meant a lot to my wife and I. And to this day, we're still very grateful. And yeah, absolutely meant a lot to us. Still do. This is me, like 90% of the time in my head, okay. Tenant says, "Congrats, you just lost yourself a customer. I'm never coming back." And inside I'm like, "See ya." Okay, invest in them though. Invest your employees. And prevent things like this, okay. About a month ago, Mendell Gosnell and I, we had an office-wide meeting for the managers only. We actually took the office and had an in-service day, rented out a room with a projector, whiteboard, sat down, locked ourselves in with food, and just sat down and said, how can we improve? Be proactive. If you proactively manage for your owners, why not do that for your company, right? So I implemented a customer service sheet on Google Sheets, so all of our office staff can log in, and there's about 15 to 20 Google video links for links to how to provide good customer service, how to defuse an argument, how to answer a telephone properly. I mean, little tiny 5-minute videos that are great, with the date they watched it, and they have to sign their name. Once a month, watch one of those videos and we'll check it. That's a proactive way to make sure that your guys' office is keeping customer service top of mind. People may, I'm not gonna say that quote, you've heard it twice this week. You guys have already heard that. People may forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. So yeah, I was spoiled twice. I saw that twice. I almost thought I'd change my slide, but it's a good quote, so I wanted to leave it. This all means healthy growth for all of us, okay? If size really mattered, then the elephant would be the king of the jungle. Okay? Unit count's not always the best indicator of a successful management company. You only see the tip of the iceberg a lot of the times, and you have no idea what dysfunctional things are going on underneath. What's their culture like, right? What's the quality of lifestyle that the employees have? Are they burnt out, right? Remember, us as management and leaders and owners, We're servants. That's essentially what we are. We're there to serve our company, serve our employees. And when things aren't going well, you can go and fire everyone you'd like, but really you should be looking at yourselves. Right? What are you doing to make sure that you hire quality employees and retain them? Okay? Constantly be— don't just hire them and say, all right, well, I offered them a good— I put a good offer sheet out there. That'll keep them. Money's not always it, you know. Once a week, just walk by. Mendell actually sometimes will just, I think he, I don't know, he's super serious about his calendar. He'll block out like 10-minute schedules. I think he actually almost blocks out time to walk around the office and asks everyone, 'cause I hear it, how you doing today? How you doing today? And then he'll go back in his office and shut the door, and he will get mad if you open it. It's weird. It's like he blocks out that time just to say hi. In closing, take all these things and set goals. Yearly goals for me sometimes can mean like how many units do you wanna be at, right? That's obviously one that we all think about. How many Google reviews are we wanting to be at? Are we wanting to increase our revenue or keep our revenue while getting rid of certain problematic owners? That's a good goal.. But more importantly for me, a lot of the times those yearly goals can seem daunting, intimidating. So what I do is I break them down and I'll implement things like, hey, each employee ask for a review when they have a positive encounter with an owner, tenant, vendor. That's every week. What we do is we do raffles. Mendell bought an absolute big roll of raffle tickets from from somewhere like a party store, and said, "Hey, every review, write the person who got the review, hand one of the tickets to them, and you keep the other one with the other number and put it in this baggie. At random, you don't know when, but I'm gonna call one of our office staffs, 'Hey everyone, pull out your tickets, we're gonna do a drawing.'" Keeping it fun, because guess what? Employees don't understand that it's the whole WIFM thing, right? What's in it for me? They don't get that the more reviews that you guys get as a company, that means the more of a raise that they're gonna get on the next check or the next review time, right? But what they do get is, hey, shorter-term things like, hey, we're gonna hand out $400 cash, right? We're gonna do the top 3. First place gets $200, second place gets whatever it is. So we do those things to keep things fun and light, but to also create a what's in it for me, because a lot of the times, You don't realize you as an owner think one way, but you have to understand your employees are not on the same wavelength as far as value, what that means for their paycheck, right? They don't understand. My job personally is to oversee. I'm a servant. My job is to serve the company, right? I look at Candice in accounting and I say, "How can I save you time?" Right? Switching that Folio back in the day was absolutely life-changing, game changer. Leasing, doing e-leasing. No more people coming in. So Karen at the front desk doesn't have to sit there every day having people who are— smells like a casino and it's in your office and they walk in and she's sitting there, has a headache and is just getting people yelling. 5 people at once answering phones. To provide better customer service, I knew I needed more bandwidth in the office. So what did I do?. I implemented a software that allowed us to do e-leasing or e-signing, right? Amber, for showings, we use ShowMojo, right? There's a lot of things that I do to save the office time and money because I know it'll help grow the company, but also help me personally. It's gonna help my paycheck. Next time I go for a review, it's gonna help me out. So I appreciate it. If you guys want a copy of this slide, I can certainly send it to you guys. Right there. And if you want to have— if there's any questions or something like that, or— Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mic?

Do you want to— I don't mind.

Yeah, so you can totally join the conversation on Slido right now if you want to ask any questions. Like we did before, go to slido.com. And I'll see the questions come in for Jesse here as they get entered in. So slido.com, and the event code is just broker-owner. Type in any questions for Jesse, and they'll pop up here, and we'll see them live here. So go ahead and get out your devices and do that. All right, not seeing any questions come in. If you're— raise your hand if you are going to type a question in. OK, so there. We'll give you another minute or two. OK, here we go. Tell us how old you really are, Jesse.

Okay. Sad story. I'm going to be out of my 20s and into my 30s this March. So pretty, pretty sad. I know. It's a milestone.

All right. We've got a lot of questions rolling in now, Kel.

If you're starting out, where would you focus your efforts? "Where would you focus your efforts to get new business?" All right, if you were just starting out, where would you focus your efforts to get new business?

Man.

Honest, I'm sorry, but I need to know more about your company. I don't know if you're well-versed in the community. If you're not, start doing that. I mean, I needed to know more about that question. If you're not plugged into your community, do it, right? You sitting behind a desk, doing something that, by the way, We're going to be hiring a VA. We have been convinced already. We're going to be hiring a VA. But find ways to create bandwidth to make your time more valuable, to move the needle, as the owner of my company would say. He says, I want to do things that'll move the needle. So have your employees start doing Google reviews. There's multiple things you can do. You don't have to focus on just one. That's the beautiful thing about my job is it's not just one thing that grows the company. There's so many ways to do this. This, and I'm just pointing out those 3 things, but caring is a good place to start, right? Caring about your employees, caring about your owners. Having someone that answers the phone. I don't know about your guys' BDMs, but I'm addicted to my phone. If I get a phone call, I think money. That's my money phone right there. Emails come in, I'm fanatical, day in, day out. I'm on vacation, I'm not on vacation, 'cause I'm answering those emails. So hire a BDM that when you're creating advertising for the community, and you have the BDM's number to contact if you're looking for management, and they're not answering the phone, you're wasting money.

Great question at the top here.

Does it really matter if you have 150 reviews versus 300? At what point does it not matter? That's a great question.

Well—

was it Brian Burdy who has like 800? Something like that? I don't know. Mendell told me. He grovels at that, by the way, Brian. He says, "We're only at 250. I need to get to 800. This isn't acceptable." So you're always reaching for bigger and better while not knowing what the mountain is. But honestly, there's no statistics on that. I don't personally know. I could like those third-party websites that showed how many people search certain things, right? Or I mean, how many people would take into account reviews. I didn't see anything for like if they had 100 versus 200 reviews. 150 to 300, but I think it's like the complete opposite point. It's kind of like what you said, Steve, the other day about giving, right? 10% tithing, like you're missing the point. You know what I mean? It's not about that, it's about the heart. And same thing about reviews. It's not about a number, it's about always looking to show your customer who you are, right? How do you want to be portrayed? Now the numbers are great, but every review that comes in is another thing that an owner can read. Ultimately what it's for. It's not, we're not really in it for like hitting milestones. I just use that milestone as far as numbers to show you what I've done to basically get people to actually talk. Because as we all know, the people that leave reviews are only the ticked off ones. So they're the only ones that will willingly leave a review unless you ask for a positive one. What AdWords things do you do to grow your business? We use just regular Google AdWords. The search, the search function and the display function, the display ads and the search ads are all we did. We didn't, you know how you go to any website, like REI or whatever, forums, and they have like weird, like, for instance, our athletic club, local athletic club always has ads that pop up on different web pages that aren't even like, I'm looking at, you know, forums or something like that, and they just do pop-up ads. I don't do that. I strictly do targeted ads. I'll give you my pitch for AdWords, 'kay? Here's what it is. If you drive by a billboard, right? Essentially that's what those are, those little random ads that pop up on different pages. If you drive by a billboard and you have property management, how many people driving by that billboard are in the market for property management or even see your sign, right? Maybe 5%, that's generous, maybe. I don't know. How many people that Google real estate management Salem, Oregon are looking for real estate managers in Salem, Oregon? 100% of them. So target your ads. Do not be, I call it either the shotgun approach where you try to just try to see what bullet hits or the sniper. You want to be pinpoint accurate, laser focused. You want to be intentional about what you're advertising on and you want to make sure that you are Choosing the right keywords, right? Property manager in Salem, Oregon, United States. It's not gonna be something. Just make sure you guys do your research. Whoever you're hiring for your Google AdWords, make sure they do their research. For instance, that graph that you saw showing 9 million in July, I was able to pull that up. From my database on Google, I'm able to go in there and say keywords in Atlanta, Georgia, property manager Atlanta, Georgia, that exact, key phrase gets Googled X amount of times a month. Here's the county that you should focus on since that's where most of your portfolio is. Here's how many people live in that county. I can, your AdWords specialist should be able to laser focus pinpoint those data points for you and help you out. So if you get a pitch from an AdWords specialist that says, here's a list of 400 keywords. I don't need 400. I need 3. Give me the top 3, that's it.

Make sure you're upvoting too. If you see a question that you like, go ahead and upvote it.

Other than push reviews, what did you do to grow doors?

Man.

Being available, like I just said. Making sure that you are available. The early bird gets the worm. The first person to answer the phone call. I wish I had that statistic in my head. I read more, pretty significant jump. It was like 40% more likely that they're gonna go with you if you're the first person to answer and get back to them. Can't tell you how many people have told me, "You're just, honestly, I don't even know who you are. You're just the first person that called me back. When do we begin? I have problems, problems, and I need you to solve them." So essentially, just making sure you're available, making sure that you care when you answer the phone, making sure your BDM's trained well to handle those. Remember, each lead that comes in is gold. You know, or it can be fool's gold. So you need your BDM to be the best sifter for the company because that BDM is either gonna bring on problematic owners for you, that's gonna bog you down and not allow you to provide good customer service to retain your good clients, right? So you gotta think of all the implications from that one owner, you know, and that starts with the BDM or whoever's answering. It might be you guys.

One more quick question for Jesse.

Do you use any reputation management software such as Grade.us? I don't know what the rules are here, like, trying to, like, promote people. But we actually just use PMW. Mitch Crichton, Abby, their whole team there has been stellar for us. And they— we rolled out the— advanced marketing platform which includes the reputation management. And pretty cool, if you go to, if you email me for the slide, I will email you back. There will be a thumbs up and a thumbs down, okay? If you click a thumbs up, it'll prompt you to leave us a 5-star review. If you click a thumbs down, it'll immediately pop up a video of me talking, 10-second clip of me saying, "Hi, if you're watching this, this means you've had a negative experience with our company in one way or another." "and that's not what we're about. If there's any way that we can resolve this, if there's somewhere we dropped the ball, please personally give me a call. I'm gonna populate my email down here," and it pops up. "Give me a call or shoot me an email, and I'd love to resolve this." Even if it's a tenant being evicted and I don't wanna talk to them, at least they feel like they're being heard, which prevents 1-star reviews. That's such a big value added for our company that they implemented. Use that. Absolutely use it. And you can use my video as an example or whatever, but yeah, talk to Abby, talk to Mitch, talk to PMW Websites. They've been great for us. Pretty streamlined. So appreciate it, guys.

Give it up for Justin.

Thank you.

Thank you. I'll pull you in here. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy your lunch. We'll see you back at 1:30.