BONUS EPISODE: I Sat Down With Mark Ainley in Chicago

Peter Lohmann Media, welcome to The Underground. Great to be here, Mark. Man, I'm super excited. And the reality of it is I haven't sat down with— I was thinking about this— I haven't sat down with anybody from the industry outside of Chicago. You know, I've had Bob Hanson on here and Pete Newbigg. Yep. Um, they— but we did Zoom. But I haven't had anyone in The Underground, uh, from the industry. So I'm pretty excited to sit down here and talk to you today.

Yeah, I mean, it's surreal to be here. I've seen the show many times and you've made a lot of waves in the industry. So it's fun to actually be at your spot and check out what you got going on.

You know what's amazing, Peter? I get questioned often about marketing, and, uh, people perceive me that I know what I'm doing. Uh, I still question that at times, but yeah, me too, actually. But you, you're, you're like a marketing genius. Like, you are like a ninja in marketing. Like, you slid in here the last 3 years and the newsletter and the profit you make from that and the community you built. Like, but you've done it in such a way that's just like so slick. Like, how did you have a marketing background? Was it people? Like, tell me a little bit about how you became this Peter Lohmann Media.

Happy to get into that. So first, I want to draw a distinction between what you're really good at, which is marketing for new owner clients and, you know, new real estate clients. We have not mastered that. We're getting better, and I've learned a lot from you. I have Andrew working for me now, and that's really leveled us up. But I turn to you when I want to understand how to market to new rental owner clients and grow our property management business. Now, what you're referring to is the newsletter, the podcast, and now Crane, and that's a completely different audience. My audience there is other property management business owners like yourself, and, you know, obviously many others in the industry. And I have no background in marketing, but I became really interested in, um, figuring out how to create content for that audience, for my peers essentially, for other people who are doing what I'm doing with RL Property Management, mostly because I really care about them. And sad to say, but I actually care a lot more about other property managers than I do rental owners. And so the short answer is I think that's why I've been so successful is because I'm going after an audience now that I relate to and that I really, really care about. And so I think at least the feedback I get is that comes through in the writing and the podcast and what we're doing with Crane. It has to start there. And one of the reasons I think we were never as successful in marketing RL Property Management as I have been with my media stuff is because I just didn't care enough. I didn't care about those people in the same way that I do the property managers. And so no matter what the checklists or the platform or the marketing plan that we would have developed, it just— the execution didn't have heart. And so I think it doesn't really matter about not having a marketing background if you find a group of people that you really care about you get creative about how to reach them and provide value to them, that's when you're going to start to see that sort of runaway success. Now, it's been a road, right? I've been working really hard at it for 3 years, and we're starting to see some really exciting success now. But, um, I think that's kind of like the core of it.

What is really the foundation of bringing it— creating a community? Because that's what you've done, and it's been super impressive. And you have people every which way chattering about how much they love Crane, and that's amazing. Any, any tips, secrets, thoughts about that that you've referenced?

So Crane is a private property manager community for, um, business owners of residential property management companies. I created that with Wolfgang Kroski about 2 and a half years ago, and it's grown. Uh, now we have hundreds of members. We've got over 250,000 units represented on the platform from all the folks who are professionally managing rental homes and apartments. The secret behind a great community. Well, back to what I said a moment ago, you really have to care about the people, obviously. If you start a community with this idea that you're going to cash a paycheck, or you have like this cynical approach that you're going to like extract, you know, value from people, I don't think that's going to be very successful for very long. It's got to start with how can we provide maximum value for members and how can we set it up so that it's not all about me, right? So Wolf and I, the early beginnings of Crane, sure, it was a lot of people who knew us by name and were peers of ours and maybe fans of ours, and they were willing to take a chance on Crane. But in order for that community to scale and grow and to have people renewing year after year, it has to go way beyond just being about me. And so a very successful community will have a life unto its own and will, and will grow and thrive with member-to-member connections. You know, I'm— I only have so much time in a day. I can't have a personal relationship with hundreds of people in a community, but they can have personal relationships with other people in the community. We spend a lot of time thinking about, of course, making the membership worth it financially, but also setting up new members who come into the community. First of all, vetting them and making sure they're a fit for what we're doing and our values, but also when they come in, trying to connect them with other people in the community and kickstart those one-to-one relationships. And we have a lot of different ways we do that from our Crane dinners that you and I are attending tonight to our big, uh, couple, uh, annual events that we do, like the Crane Jazz Cruise that we had at Broker Owner. We took CRANE to Tulum, Mexico earlier this year, and that's a way for CRANE members to get that face-to-face, belly-to-belly time that forms those personal relationships you just can't get online. Facebook groups are great. Even conferences are fun for those quick chats over the bar, but to build those deep relationships, it requires consistent engagement, and it's cemented with that real life, real world adventures, connections, education, um, that I think is the foundation of strong community.

Love it, love it. So let's go back a few years though. Yeah, we just came out of Broker Owner, uh, you know, it always reminds me of all the different relationships I, I have and, uh, you know, I've, I've, uh, kind of fostered over the years. But people know you and Wolf to be a team these days. Like, how'd you connect to Wolf and how'd that connection grow originally? What's— I've never really heard the behind the story. Yeah, you guys coming together.

So he and I kind of knew of each other just from the industry. And, you know, he's been pretty active on Facebook and LinkedIn for a while, but we had never actually connected until a LeadSimple offsite that we both went to. So he and I are pretty involved with LeadSimple. They hosted an offsite in Austin, um, 3 years ago, just a little over 3 years ago now. And that was the first time we really met face to face and, uh, we got to know each other really well over that week. Around that time is when we started the Peter and the Wolf Show, which is our monthly live podcast or live webinar that we do. That's a lot of fun. We just did a live, our first ever live show with an in-person audience. We just did at Lead Simple University this week, which was awesome. That's how we met. We both share a systems process orientation with how we think about the business. Wolf's the nicest guy ever. An amazing person. He's got 6 kids and volunteers in his community in like 6 different ways. He's way, way nicer than me actually. So you should try to get to know him. But yeah, we just really hit it off and decided that it would be cool if we could kind of team up and do something together. And we both eventually landed on the idea that became Crane.

6 kids. Wow. Yeah. Oh man, that's— I gotta— Man, that's crazy. So you guys came together. How was it that build what you have today when it comes to Crane? So I have a couple questions here. Like, yeah, how would those original conversations start? Like, the outcome is usually to fulfill a need. Like, was that the conversation? And then two, where does the Crane name come from? And then three, what other funny names were there that you guys tossed around when you guys were throwing this out there?

Yeah, I mean, we did some brainstorming on what could we do that would be of value to our peers in a way that would let us extend our reach and extend our influence. Because we both had a lot of people either paying us for consulting or emailing us or on socials asking us questions constantly about, how do you do this? How do you do that? I saw you guys are doing this. I want to get in on that. So we got to think like, how could we do something at scale that would, um, that would not just be like one-on-one consulting. So that eventually turned into what became Crane. As far as the name, we deliberately wanted to choose something that wasn't like Property Manager Mastermind. Like we didn't want it to be a sort of a generic name. We wanted it to be a name that we could pour meaning into that didn't already have a preexisting meaning. I don't know how we ended up on Crane, to be honest. It's sort of random. We were thinking about like cool animal names and tossed around a few ideas. And a big part, I think a lot of people know when you're picking a name for a business or community or anything, the domain name really matters. So if you have to have like joincranethecompany.biz, like that would've been no good right now. Obviously it would've been amazing to have crane.com, but that's been taken 20 times over. So we ended up on joincrane.co, which is decent, not great. But unfortunately, reality is all the great domain names are taken, so you end up trying to work with what you got.

All right, so it's crane, the bird?

Yeah, it's really after the bird. There's also an element of, if you think about a construction crane, it helps you build the steel structural foundation or the structure of your building. And we're trying to help property management business owners build the structure of their business so they can experience time freedom. That's really the mission of Crane is time freedom.

I was meant to be part of Crane Organization just because we got 6 cranes out in our yard. Our family loves them. If my wife could, she'd domesticate it. That's great. So the irony of that is awesome. Now, let me ask, I think the best entrepreneurs are speed to put things in play, speed to motion. You guys had these conversations and then you said, then you rolled this out. Like, what was the timeframe there?

Yeah, so we had the— well, we met in person for the first time in May of '23, and then— or no, '20— yeah, I think that's right, '23. And then we launched Train, the first cohort, which ended up being like 40 people in the fall of that year. So from the first day we met in person until launching Crane was about 6 months. Yeah.

That's awesome. That's awesome. When people— people always ask me what I learned from our podcast, it's always speed to action. Yeah. And the velocity of making decisions is usually what does that. So, you know, when I was— I was walking with you one day when we were in broker-owner and about An hour later, someone came out to me and they said, "How old is Peter?" And I said to him, I said, honestly, I said, "You know what? I don't know. But when I look at him, he could either be 24 or 52. I'm not sure.

How old are you?" Because a lot of people don't—

I'm 40. You're 40.

All right.

A lot of people don't know that. And you look great for your age.

Yeah. People say I look young. I had a guy come into the office early in the days of RL Property Management. So, I was probably 28 or 29. And I'd spoken with this guy on the phone plenty of times, but never met him in person. So, he came by the office to drop off keys to his property or something. And so I walked up, we were very small at the time, there was hardly anyone in the office. So I walked up and greeted him as he kind of came up to our reception area. Hey, how you doing? He goes, oh, hey, you know, that's so great that your dad brought you into work today, but is Peter around? I was like, no, that's me. Uh, you've been speaking with me.

That's awesome. Oh man, that's great. Um, so I gotta laugh. I had to ask that. And I guess I imagine there's other people, so now everyone knows you're 40.

So yep.

Sorry for that.

Big 4-0.

You talk a lot about AI. I mean, that's a lot of what's going— everyone's talking about. You're an industry leader in those conversations. What do you think property managers have wrong about AI right now? Or what do you think they're doing wrong when it comes to AI?

So lately I try to look at everything through the theory of constraints, which is a great way to understand where you need to be focusing your effort as a business owner. And this is the same answer I give when people ask me, you know, why haven't you switched property management softwares? I just tell them, hey, it's not the constraint right now. That's not what's keeping us from hitting 1,000 doors or whatever our goals are financially, growth-wise, profit-wise. Until that's the constraint, we're not going to change. We're not going to make a move because it's just going to be a distraction and it's not what's keeping us from our goals. And I see property managers making that same mistake with AI. And even before AI, they make that mistake with property management softwares or technology in general. And really, this goes for anyone in real estate. If it's not your constraint, in other words, if it's not the one thing that's keeping you from hitting your goals, the most important thing that if you solved would make everything else easier or irrelevant, don't worry about it. Just leave it alone. A big part of entrepreneurship is learning what fires to let burn. You can't put them all out. And I know every business owner has multiple fires burning every day. You can run yourself ragged trying to run around and put all those fires out every day, and you can mostly be successful there. But what it comes at the cost of is the most important, biggest things that you need to get done. The thing that you know you should be working on, but it's hard and scary. And so you solve the things that are easy and that you know how to fix that take 5 minutes to 5 hours instead of the thing that's going to take you 50 hours. So with AI, you know, it's the new hot thing. We're, we're playing with AI a little bit as well. We'll see, just so I can understand the capabilities. But, you know, implementing AI in your business just to do so is not the move. You should, you should apply it against your constraint. So if your constraint is lead flow and you found a way to use AI to increase lead flow, rate, I say go for it. If your constraint is your closing rate, um, maybe you need to look at hiring a BDM or hiring a new BDM. I don't know that AI is going to help you very much there. If your constraint is operations and you literally have a waitlist, or you couldn't take on 20 or 30 or 50 new doors this month because your operations would stagger under the weight of that, now it's time to get into your operations and use AI to solve problems there if it makes sense, which in a lot of cases it does because the capabilities are getting really good. Um, but if operations isn't your constraint, if I asked you, you know, could you take an extra 20, 30, 50 doors this month, and you say, yeah, we'd figure that out, that would be a great problem to have, um, then I would say, yeah, just focus on sales and marketing and don't worry as much about the AI stuff.

Um, that box right there is filled with The Goal.

It's a great book.

And my plan is— no one's going to hear this before, but my plan is for everyone at the Crane dinner, I'm going to hand it out tonight.

Oh, nice. Yeah. So The Goal is a book by Eli Goldratt, which is— he's sort of the originator of the theory of constraints. And that's awesome that you're going to do that.

So I read that book probably 5, 6 years ago and really started trying to look at my calendar in that sense.

Yes.

Is there any tips or tricks? Because it becomes very disciplined. It's very hard to work on the constraints because usually that's not easy or fun. It's hard. And entrepreneurs not having a boss or people holding them accountable often. Any tips or any way that you kind of able to stay disciplined when it comes to focusing on the constraints?

A couple thoughts on that. Um, the first thing is you want to make sure that your constraint isn't bouncing around a lot. So everything that's not the constraint should be optimized for speed. Such that it's subordinate to the constraint. So in other words, what you don't want to have happen is one month your constraint is new owners, and then the next month you onboard more owners, and now your constraint is operations, and then it bounces back to owners. Like, you need to make sure that your operations is tight such that the constraint is always new owner lead flow. That makes it much easier to regulate your business around that drumbeat of new owner leads and new owner onboardings. Um, and then it makes it much easier and more rational for you to focus exclusively on that constraint. So the first thing you need to do is make sure that your constraint is— everything that's not the constraint should be subordinate and should be optimized for speed such that your constraint always stays the same. Then you can attack that constraint. In terms of like, sounds like you're kind of asking about personal productivity or mindsets around attacking these big, hard, scary problems.

Because that was a very engineer response you just gave. Yeah.

Well, I've been kind of deep in the literature with this theory of constraints recently, uh, with John Matzner on our show Lazy Leverage. But I mean, I think you can definitely use AI to help you break down problems. So lay out the situation, tell Claude that you want to use the theory of constraints as a methodology to help you solve this problem and tell it to ask you what it needs to know to help you build out a framework for how to solve this. Um, they call that reverse prompting. It's a great way to really get the most out of AI. You, instead of just like telling it what you think it needs to know and then asking for an answer, you lay out the situation and then you say, ask me everything you, you need to know in order to give me a complete answer. And you'll get much better responses that way. Um, as far as like how I handle this, part of this is your calendar and your schedule. It's really, really important that you have at least one day every week that is open. For me, it's Thursdays. So my assistant knows, everybody knows, we don't— I don't book meetings on Thursdays so that I have the day fully open and kind of— and I have the mental space to engage with some of these larger, harder problems or opportunities that come across my plate. Now, am I perfect with it? No. Once in a while I have to book a meeting on Thursday. There's just no way around it. But for the most part, if you look at my calendar, Thursdays are free. So that's a really important part of that. Um, I also find that you mentally will avoid engaging with these hard problems if you only have an hour or two between meetings, because you're just, you're mentally going to think, ah, I don't really have time to mess with it, and you'll just check emails or whatever. So even on the days where you do have meetings scheduled and appointments and things, I try to book those all in the afternoon. Starting with the end of the day. So I have a 4 PM, and then if I have another meeting, I try to make it 3 PM, then 2 PM. So ideally, I start the day when my mind is fresh with the largest possible block of uninterrupted time. And mentally, that gets me in the right space to have a chance of attacking some of these big problems. Do I make progress on them every day, every week? No, of course not. But that's, that's like the stage is set that Um, once in a while I do make really big progress during some of these open blocks and it feels so good. Yeah, it's great.

So if anything, I try to use that as the, uh, the dopamine hit reminder of like, hey man, if you do focus for these 3 hours and you get half this done, like how good you're going to feel. And usually that creates a flywheel effect for you to continue finishing that project or man, what else can I work on today? So I definitely feel that I do do the calendar thing every Sunday now where I prompt, I reverse prompt Claude to basically tell me why I should be going to any of these things or tell me why I shouldn't be.

Yeah, I like that.

And let me try to justify it to you why I need it based on the he, she, I always call it a she, but the voice is a he, which bothers me. But I try to tell it my goals and try to get it to talk to me, sell me, tell me why I shouldn't.

So that helps. I like that. For me, I also, I do a lot of my best thinking out loud for some reason. Like talking through things brings clarity. So if I'm tackling a really tough problem, sometimes I'll just call somebody. I'll be like, hey, I need to like talk through this a little bit with you. So I've got a couple people that I can call pretty much any moment and, and they do the same for me and just kind of like talk through stuff. That's been very helpful. Nice. All right.

Stay on the AI side. Is there anything that AI's going to— is there any way AI's going to disrupt our industry that no one's talking about right now that you're thinking about?

Yeah, so I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, but I still think it's not many people are aware of this or talking about it right now. There's a lot of chatter in the industry about how AI is making, is going to make property managers more efficient, right? They can do emails, they're— you have the Agentik AI solutions, there's You know, you walk the halls of broker-owner, everyone's talking about AI and how it's going to save you time and money and you'll be able to manage more doors with fewer people. And I think that's all true. I think that's definitely coming and it's early days, but that's, that's going to be happening. However, all of those same advantages that AI brings to us as business owners are available to our clients, the property owners. Those property owners are not stupid. They're smart and resourceful, just like we are. In fact, many of us are also real estate investors, and they right now are looking at ways to replace you, the professional property manager, with AI. I just got sent a screenshot this morning from Jeremy Pound, a friend of ours. He found a website that says, fire your property manager, hire us for $15 a month. and you'll be able to manage your properties with a supercharged AI solution and a 24/7 available human to speak to if you need it. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I think over the next 2 years, there's going to be a huge wave of AI-powered, AI-native landlord solutions built for self-managing landlords that cut out the property manager completely and help the property owner with everything from tenant screening to maintenance triage, lease renewals, documents. I mean, everything, all the stuff we're using AI for, they can also use AI for. And of course, there are some boots-on-the-ground things that we take care of for property managers, and there's some peace of mind that we bring. So I'm not saying that everyone is going to do this or go this direction, but I think it's going to take a big bite out of our potential market, and it's, it's concerning. So that's something I'm really watching and trying to raise the alarm, like let's take advantage of AI, yes, but let's also be aware that we need to level up our game and maybe alter the value proposition that we provide for rental owners. Because if we're just offering documents and rent collection and tenant screening and emergency maintenance, those things are going to be solvable with AI without us. And so We need to have a conversation as an industry about what are the things that only professional property managers can provide and how do we bring that to the forefront of our conversations with our current and prospective property owners.

Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. We have to make sure we are spelling out our value, adding different value. Yeah, because if we don't, I feel the first step to what you just explained ends up becoming management fee suppression. Like, all of a sudden, management fees are just going to be compressed across the board and now all of a sudden you're going to start seeing zero management fee type companies, uh, that are just trying to compete against that. And that's, that's not gonna be good for anyone. And, uh, I, I think as, uh, this kind of goes back to what I always talk to my team about of stop calling the owner only with bad news. Like, one thing that we could build off of is the rapport and, and, uh, and them knowing that every time they see you on the caller ID or a missed call, it's not because you need $7,200. It's So some of that rapport is part of that value prop of just the, the information. And I think that's going to be super important. There'll be the rapport. People like doing business with people. And so I think that rapport and building that rapport, consistent rapport, good, bad, different, is going to be huge for our entire industry.

Yeah, we've made a pretty significant change in our business this year where we gave every single property owner a property manager, a specific person. That, that was not how we were set up before. Used to be that if you called our office, we would route you to the correct department to answer your question. Now when you call, you have the direct line of your property manager, and that is who you deal with, and that is the only person you deal with. They answer all your questions, they deal with your problems, they keep an eye on your portfolio. Now that's been a great change. Our property owners really like it, no surprise. It's had challenges on the back end of how do you actually fulfill on that promise. But, um, I think, you know, that personal relationship is going to be a key part of it because you're just counting on your company's reputation to keep that owner relationship. People don't care about, you know, if they're— if they can fire a company and hire AI, they'll do that, but they'll think twice about a specific person. Right? Like when I think about a lot of the people in this industry that I do business with, I'm actually excited for them to win. I like being a customer of theirs. Like Jeremy Pound's a great example, right? It's made me so happy that all the business we've given him and all the referrals we've made and seen like his business grow. That's awesome. And I can name a dozen others like that where I'm thrilled for their success. And that's really what you want the relationship to be with our property owners, right? You want the property owners to feel great about the property managers being successful and growing in the company and moving up. And so like, you know, there's, that doesn't exist with AI. So that's just one example. I don't know if that's actually going to be what it is, but something about that personal relationship is going to be a key part of it. And we're still in the middle of a conversation as an industry on how important those personal relationships are. There's a lot of people who still run a pure departmental organization like we used to. And swear by it. And I just, you know, I don't know. I think that's going to be a harder defend against an AI landlord solution. We'll see.

Yeah, I know what you mean by the one, the vendors win like PropertyManagement.com. They came on the scene I think last year and I signed up with them right away, paid whatever I was, whatever they asked for to pay. You could pay or get free. And so, and I just continue to get asked like, what would you do it for? And part of my answer is like, I don't know, I just want them to win. It's a good, it's a good service. It'll help us get more leads. And I can't necessarily justify why I did it, but part of it is I just want them to win and I want them to be around a year from now and I want them to have enough runway to figure out how to make this work. So yeah, I definitely, I think there's something very unique about our industry and I brag about this all the time to people outside the industry or new people to the industry about the vendor relations that we have in here and how we are all— we're all trying to help each other win.

And we're all—

and, you know, there's very small— you get to utilize some of them for advertising and stuff like that.

And—

but I know when they are an advertiser on your, your, your weekly newsletter, they just want you to win as well, too. Like, so there's such an exchange and like consideration for each other. And I just love, uh, I love that about our industry.

Totally. And you know, you run into people once in a while who don't share that perspective about our vendors.

They stick out like a sore thumb.

They really do. And it's very shocking when you hear them speak about our vendor partners. Um, and they're just— their whole orientation around vendors is, is like extractive and, and very punitive, like very unforgiving of a mistake. And I'm always just kind of like, you realize that's like 3 guys, right? Like, it's not some Fortune 500 company, it's just a couple guys. One of them used to be a property manager. Like, you know, get— cut them a little bit slack. I don't know, like, you don't have to put them on blast on social media every time, you know, they were a couple days late on whatever.

What gives you energy? What, what do you wake up in the morning that gives you energy?

Yeah, well, I mean, the shift from Focusing my attention and energy from the day-to-day of RL Property Management into Crane and the media business has been huge for me. Talked about that a little bit already, but I love writing the newsletter. I love doing podcast episodes. I love, love, love getting Crane members together for dinners or events or onboarding new Crane members. So that's really exciting. I mean, helping, helping property managers win and helping move the property management industry forward gets me really excited. And in fact, I sort of became known for taking the month of June off. I did that for 4 years in a row. We're coming up on, on year 5 now, and I'm sort of thinking about whether I'm going to be taking the whole month off again, and I think I'm not this year. And I was reflecting on like, why do I not feel that same desire to take the whole month off? This year. And it's because I'm, I'm so much more in love with what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis. When all I was doing was running the property management business, I couldn't get away fast enough. I mean, it's a hard business. It's stressful, it's risky. You're dealing with very emotional, sometimes very angry people on a day-to-day basis. And after 10, 12 years, you just need a break. So I really felt that. But these days I'm only working 5, maybe 10 hours a week in the property management company. The rest of my time is on the media and Crane. And I don't feel the need to take a month off from that. It feels like I'm winning every day and making people happy and providing value. And that's such a better feeling for me. So it just gets me really excited. I mean, people talk about the Sunday scaries. I can't wait to go back to work on Monday. I'm excited to get in there and see what's going on and check on the community, get the newsletter going. So yeah, I mean, that stuff really energizes me. Of course, I got great family, um, my wife and two little girls and our dog Oxley. Love bouncing around with them on the weekends and getting into trouble. I've been playing pickleball a lot, so we have pickleball in our office now. Oh, it's a little court set up in the warehouse, and, uh, I try and get at least a few games in every week. Um, yeah, I mean, that's really the main thing that gives me energy though, is like seeing other property managers. I mean, the, the most fulfilling thing for me professionally that I've experienced to date has been watching our Crane members take their Crane breaks, which is like 1, 2, or 4 week breaks from their business with like a full disconnect, and then coming back from that break and they'll do like a little video recap or a write-up on it, and hearing about the trips that they took and how The team grew and handled problems and they added doors. And, you know, a lot of them will say things like, I've never been able to take a week off before, but because of the community and the encouragement and the tools and resources, I was able to take 2 full weeks. I didn't get any calls. I was able to travel Spain with my family. It was something I always wanted to do. And it's just like, it's indescribable how awesome that is to have been even a small part of like making that possible for a business owner. So I love that.

I hear— so my— I get when I hear people bought their first building because they've been listening to podcasts for 2 years or they're now in their 4th building and it's only because we push them to move faster. Like, I know exactly how that feels, that, that— and that's why you're successful at building a community, because it's all about them and it's not about you, like you said earlier. So what are you doing these days that that you don't want to be doing anymore that you're working on getting rid of?

I mean, I've got a great team now in place, so I have a little bit of help writing certain parts of the newsletter with Andrew and my assistant Monica. And we also brought in— we have a great little team at Crane, which helps take some of the administrative burden off there. The property management company, still occupies a big part of my mindshare. And I find, again, to be that stressful, risky part of my professional life. So I'm always looking for ways to put things in place that reduce those things. Um, part of the reality of being a small business owner, you know, is you're always one phone call away from being right back in it. My number 2 guy could quit, or, you know, a key vendor could sue us, or a client could, you know, employee lawsuits. Like, anything could happen in the world of small business, especially like a boots-on-the-ground home services type of business. So I'm always thinking about ways to reduce risks there and put systems in place and redundancies so that I'm not that one phone call away from being right back in it. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that.

What— you know, so you were one of the first people I saw in the industry doing lives. You do it with Wolf, you do it with John. Why'd you go that route?

Yeah, there's something exciting about live, right? Um, I mean, you know, the news figured this out years ago, right? They do the broadcast, you know, we're live here on site, right? There's this element like anything could happen, right? A meteorite could strike or there could be a fire or somebody could mess up and really look foolish. So that edge, I think, makes it more exciting for the viewer. And it also brings out an edge in me and in the guests. When you know it's going out live, you're that much more keyed in. You know, there's no redos. You got to get it right. And you got to be thinking ahead about the questions to ask or how you're going to answer things. And I just enjoy that feeling. I enjoy being, um, really keyed into something like that. It fully occupies your mind and focuses you in a way that a pre-recorded event just sometimes doesn't. So I don't know, I think that's really cool. I also like the platforms themselves. This changes all the time, but they tend to promote and surface live content in a way that they don't always do the same for recorded content. So I think it's interesting to see, like, you know, we go live on LinkedIn, we go live on Facebook, Twitter, and to see like what kind of engagement you get from a live broadcast versus just a video that you, that you upload later. Um, so that, that's some of the reasons that go into it. I mean, I, I don't wanna say it's been like a smash success, like, we're lucky if we get 5 or 10 live concurrent viewers on some of these. But I still think it's worth doing and it's fun. So.

I love it. So you motivated me to start doing— I started a second— I don't know if you call it a podcast, but I do a live show now on a weekly basis with Tim Harstad, another Chicago property manager here. But I love the fact— so many people, you know this, the friction between just getting to record a video, let alone taking it from here's the video and getting it out there. That's pain points and friction, whatever you want to call it. That is one of the exciting things. Like, wow, I could do this all at once and it's on 4 different places and I don't get to do anything else. And it's actually going to stay there after I'm done. Like, it's like— it's so— I've been telling everybody, like, to just do something live. Like, if you can't— if you're too worried about editing every little piece of video, like, the easiest way is just click that button and there's no turn it back. Like you said, like, yeah, you also get—

if you're lucky, you get some Q&A going on. You get live.

Yeah.

Right then and there. So Peter and the Wolf, which, um, you know, we were talking about like the social lives, but Peter and the Wolf is a Zoom monthly show that's live. And in those, we'll get anywhere from 50 to 150 live viewers in the Zoom. And so that's great because you're getting comments in the chat continuously through the show. So it helps you understand what topics to, to stay on and, and sort of focus on because people are clearly engaged in asking questions, and which topics are just kind of like, eh, let's kind of move on. Like, no one's really saying anything, and it's clearly like not, you know, vibing with, with the audience today. So that feedback, I think, helps make the show better because you're getting real-time live feedback on the topics and the format, you know. So it's fun to experiment with like Sometimes we'll bring people up on the stage, so to speak, let them ask their question live. We've played around with different things and just presenting to a live audience at a conference, you get a read on the room and it helps inform the content and the pacing and the delivery of your subject. So I love that information that you're getting back, whereas a prerecorded thing, you're making guesses on what's going to engage the audience.

It's funny, I noticed that this week, me and Tim, we weren't at odds on something, we just had different opinions. But all of a sudden, people started commenting. They started— a couple more people were like, I don't know what it was.

Controversy.

Yeah. We went for about a 15-minute stretch of just not agreeing 100%. And also, that's the most activity we've ever had since we've been doing it for the 15 weeks. So I told him that. I'm like, man, we just have to fight more.

Totally.

And it makes so much sense. We don't watch perfect stories unless they have some sort of drama, some problem, something like that. So I mean, that's the same kind of philosophy.

Yep.

The, uh, the one thing I think— well, now I think that we're working on is there's probably a, um, you click live and it's great, it goes out there. But, you know, Wolf, I— you guys, uh, when your show— I know I see you guys marketing or promoting it for weeks ahead. We haven't— I haven't done that, or I haven't learned how to do that yet, um, well enough, I guess. So I think that's, that's what we're going to be exploring here the upcoming weeks.

So yeah, the, um, when you just kind of randomly click and go live on socials, obviously there's no way to pre-announce that or pre-register people. That is a nice thing with Zoom. And like, if you have a scheduled show, it's every Wednesday at 1 PM or whatever, is you can kind of build up that recurring audience. I know Jeremy Pound played around a lot with his weekly This Week in Property Management show, and it's, it's tough sledding. Um, but I mean, I've, I even played around years ago with, uh, with Twitch. I would get on Twitch and I would play Rocket League, which is— yeah, I was playing a lot back then. And I would announce on my Twitter when I would be going live and people would jump on and ask me property management questions while I was playing Rocket League. Because if you go on Twitch, man, there's people who stream 8 hours a day every day. They have thousands or tens of thousands of followers. They make a living doing it. There's this whole other world of live content that I think someone is going to figure that out. Someone's going to crack that code for real estate property management and is going to have thousands of concurrent live subscribers on some type of a regular cadence. I don't know about all day, every day, but I do think there is something there.

My son, for a while, that's what got me interested too. Roblox, they just go on there and play. It would be YouTube Live, but same kind of gaming. The gaming community has— they're totally comfortable being on video. Mom walking in, whatever it might be, they're totally comfortable and not worry about what they're doing. The one cool thing, and this is probably one of the most exciting things, and I don't know if it's even that meaningful, but I was listening, I was, I was listening to Lazy Leverage, uh, a couple, about, uh, 3 or 4 weeks ago. But then all of a sudden I realized I was watching it. Now iTunes has, I didn't realize that. I'm like, what am I watching? How am I watching this? Like, I looked down at my lap, I was driving and I could see you guys. I'm like, this is iTunes. Now Spotify and iTunes, and you can now put the video up there as well too. So like right away, turned around, sent the email out.

Like, what do we gotta do?

Like, let's get this going. So, Yesterday, our episode that came out yesterday was the first new episode that came out where it's actually got the video on both. So super excited. It got that from Lazy Leverage. So thank you very much for that.

That's great. Well, thanks to the Lazy Leverage producers who figured that out because I don't even think I knew we were doing that.

Oh yeah, that's awesome. So yeah, Lazy Leverage, I've grown to love that and I've grown to look forward to whenever that pops up. How, how did that come about and why? Why do you—

Yeah, it's great. So that was honestly just John. So Lazy Leverage is a show I do with John Matzner. He's the co-founder of Sagan. We have a great partnership with Sagan. They're a global recruiting company, so they'll help you find remote talent for your, for your small business, whether it's property management or otherwise. We have a partnership with them, uh, with Crane. So Crane members get access to a talent pool and, and white glove hires through Sagan. But John and I have been friends for a few years now, and we love talking about just like business topics, all kinds of different random stuff. So I don't know how we got this idea, but we got to thinking like we would get on the phone once a week for an hour or two randomly, and we got to thinking like we should just record this because this is all stuff that like we love talking about, and maybe there'll be some other people who are interested in kind of hearing us because we do a little bit of debate and stuff like that too. We go back and forth. And so Both of us, I think around that same time, were realizing that content and media is, is some of the highest leverage activity that he and I can do on a weekly basis. If you think about everything that we're doing, we think a lot in terms of leverage, hence the name Lazy Leverage. And media is, is that one-to-many infinitely leverageable activity. Um, and if you can figure out how to spend more of your week on high leverage activities you're going to reach your goals faster. So we're like, all right, let's give it a shot. So we figured out the name, which is actually just based on the name of his newsletter that he writes. And kind of like you were saying, rather than worrying about all the details of scheduling and everything, we just hit go live. We literally just jump into Riverside whenever one of us is free. We'll ask the other one and, uh, we'll go live, we'll stream it. And then eventually we brought in like professional production and you can subscribe to the all the normal podcast channels. But, um, that's really how it got started. There's very little prep that goes on for that show. It's totally different than pretty much anything else that I do, um, media-wise, because it's very informal. It's very back and forth. A lot of the appeal, I think what I'm— what I hear from people is like the dynamic between the two of us plays a big part more so than like with Wolf and I. A lot of it is like the topic, like the content. So yeah, I don't know. It's again, I'm just, I'm playing, right? I'm trying different things, see what works, what sticks, what engages. Interestingly, with Lazy Leverage, I get more feedback, more positive feedback about that show than I do my mainline podcast, which is called Peter Lohmann's Podcast. Bear in mind, Peter Lohmann's Podcast is, we're on our 6th season. I've been doing it for 5, 6 years now. Um, pouring my heart and soul into it, like booking these guests and doing all this prep. And then I just jump on the mic with John Matzner, no prep, it's barely a year old, and I'm getting like more engagement from that show. So it's just like playing around, seeing what formats, what works, what topics. I think that's a big part of, of making, uh, forward progress as an entrepreneur. You have to have a certain percentage of your, of your week or your month that you're just like randomly trying new stuff. Like you, you showed me something earlier in the basement where you're like, oh yeah, we have like this training room that we set up. We barely use it, but it was all this money to get it set up and maybe we'll get back to it. And it made me think of like, yeah, I've got like 8 different things that I similar. It's like you have this idea, you get, you spend money, you set it up, you get the team all excited and it just doesn't, it doesn't go anywhere. And, but for every 5, 8, 10 of those that don't go anywhere, you're going to have a hit, right? Like your show, which has been going on for so many hundreds of episodes is one of those things that hit and took off and has changed your life. But for every one of those, there's 10, 20, 30 things that went nowhere. And it's easy as an entrepreneur to think about those failures, the wasted money, the wasted time, and feel bad about it. But I think it's just all part of the journey, and you gotta, you gotta like have that resilience to take those hits and just keep going, keep trying the next thing.

We had a reality TV show on CNBC that I thought would be my rock retirement. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, No one even knows about it these days, but everyone knows me as the Chicago Investor Guy. So, uh, it's kind of funny, but, uh, all right, cat or dog guy?

Dog. Good. We have a standard poodle, Oxley. He's awesome. Great. I was sleeping on poodles. I had no idea poodles are amazing dogs.

Um, I got, I got a golden doodle, so I got a little guy, but great with kids.

Um, no, super smart, very eager to please and easy to train. And they do not shed at all. Zero. We've had Oxley for 4 years now. I've never, ever once found a hair anywhere in the house. Zero. Which is unbelievable. I grew up with golden retrievers.

Yeah.

You look at them and they're just hair everywhere. So yeah.

Right after you vacuumed.

Yep.

All right. You, we all have our backgrounds, your background's engineering. How has that helped you and how has that hurt you as a small business owner?

Yeah, good question. So yeah, degree in electrical engineering, worked as a control systems engineer for 5 years right out of college. And I'm very thankful for that education, even though I don't use most of those skills day to day in terms of like the technical skills of engineering. Engineering degree, if you, if you get an engineering degree, you are taught how to think in a certain way, systematically, very process-oriented. How to break problems down and solve them. And that has been immensely helpful for me throughout my career. And probably anyone who knows me very well can see it in how I manage my companies and my approach to property management. So that's huge. If, if you have kids or if you yourself are thinking about engineering, highly recommend it. You don't need to love engineering, you don't need to stick with engineering for your lifetime, but an engineering degree of any sort, mechanical, civil, whatever, will serve you very, very well for the rest of your life. I can promise you that. So highly encourage. Now, the downsides, I think, you know, spending my formative years with a lot of other engineers, you don't get a lot of social skills because engineers tend to be pretty introverted. And so socially lacking in certain ways. And so I think it took me a while out of college to acclimate to non-engineers, how to relate to them, how to connect with them, how to sell to them, how to work with them, hire them. So that's a downside, but I think that's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and very thankful for that.

You're interviewed often. Are there any questions that I didn't ask you today that you wish people would ask you?

Hmm, let's see. I mean, I love, I love talking about newsletters and I think, you know, a lot of what people know me for now is Crane, the podcast, and, you know, speaking at conferences and stuff like that. I don't think any of that would have happened if it wasn't for the newsletter. We can track 80+% of our Crane members back to the newsletter, like clicking on a link from the newsletter or mentioned it when we asked them how they heard about it. So if you'll indulge me, I'll just talk for a couple minutes about why I think they're relevant and how they could be helpful for everybody. Um, newsletters are, are the one platform these days that you actually own and you control. When you send an email to somebody, with some nuances that I can speak about, it lands in their inbox and they're going to see it. That's not true on YouTube. That's not true on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, anything. If you look at the number of followers you have on those platforms relative to the number of views that an average post gets, it's usually around 1%. So like, I have 22,000 followers on Twitter. Any random tweet I make could get 200 views and might get 2,000 if I'm lucky. And but with email, when I send an email to my list of 21,000 subscribers, any given issue north of 50%, 5-0%, and sometimes as high as 70% of subscribers open it. That is unlike anything else in the industry. The other thing is you own that. And so on YouTube or any of these other social platforms, if they change the algorithm, you may suddenly stop appearing no matter how many subscribers you have. That's not true with email. Again, there's some nuances here. If you start spamming the hell out of your list, yes, you're going to start seeing a drop in your open rates, and even some of the email service providers will start to block your emails. But if you're reasonable, it works. So I think if you have the ability to write a couple interesting things a week and link to a couple things that would be interesting to your audience, I highly encourage you to start writing a newsletter. We started one for our property owners and prospective clients at the management company. We're following kind of a similar format to my newsletter that I write for property management business owners. We're seeing great engagement with that and growth, and it's driving new owner leads into the business. So I'm extending what I found works, uh, in terms of newsletters. So yeah, I don't know, I, I've given like an hour talk before on newsletters. Um, there's a lot of nuances once you really get into the details of like how do you grow your list What platform do you use? How do you make sure that it lands in the inbox and not on the promotions tab? What's the difference between a newsletter and a promotional email? How do you segment your list? Like there's all kinds of fun stuff you can do with it. Um, if you're, you, you mentioned like at the beginning of the show, like, do I have a marketing background? I don't, but this little tiny corner of marketing, which is email marketing and email newsletters, I've gotten pretty decent at and just really enjoy doing. So.

—And I was telling somebody yesterday, you know, you're speaking to small business owners. Small business owners like that stuff. Everyone that you're talking to right now on this recording has an audience that loves real estate. Real estate is so sexy. Real estate is so sexy, especially when it's localized. And if you're able to— you know, every person that's working a 9-to-5 would love to be doing something in real estate full-time. They're probably looking at Redfin and Zillow and all that on their lunch, LoopNet, whatever they got pulled up. Like, they, they would love and any— so they take it in like it's almost a hobby to a lot of people. And for you to take your local market, which you're an expert in and you know all these little nuances about the market and you have sometimes data sets within your own management company that you could be sharing, people will not unsubscribe. Yeah, they will take it in and they will like it. Maybe they'll delete your email 5 out of 6 days a week, but that 6th day, if you, if you get them all up your email once a week, like, that's great. But We have an industry that people love, and I keep— I always call it sexy. People love to look at real estate articles.

It's, it's visual, it's local. Everyone lives in a structure of some sort. Yeah, it's tangible to them. Um, it's very aspirational. So yeah, it's definitely a gold mine in terms of content. It's a never, never-ending source of things you can write about, take pictures of, talk about, comment on. I mean, every single day there's new listings, right? New for sale or new rental listings coming up. You can compile data sets on average rents or average sale prices for specific submarkets, neighborhoods, and target people who live or work or want to buy in those areas. I mean, yeah, it's— there's an infinite number of things you can do with real estate.

The Crane Policy Tracker, it's been great. I've created so much content that's interesting that it's happening right around me that I just did not even know was happening. So shout out to your guys's, uh, that's That's one way you're adding value, right? Yep. So love that. All right, we'll wrap up here. I'm going to take the end of podcast question I do for Straight Up Chicago Investor, which usually towards, uh, Chicago. I'm gonna gear it towards you. So you ready? So I'm gonna modify these a little. All right, all right. Usually I only answer, ask half of them, so I gotta make sure I memorize them all. But, uh, what's your competitive advantage?

You're talking about like the property management business? What's your competitive advantage in small business? Um, I think it's my ability to analyze a problem, break it down, and then articulate it in a way that resonates with people.

What's one piece of advice, advice you give a property manager that's around, that's getting started, call it sub-100 doors, um, that's looking to grow?

Just be everywhere in your local market that real estate is happening. I would go to every meetup, I would go to every real estate office, I would try to meet every realtor with active listings. Just because when you're starting out like that and you're new, you have way more time than money. I remember those days for my own business. And just use the fact that you are local to your advantage because you're— a lot of your competitors aren't local, they're national, or they're too busy to show up to those events. So just run around and go to try to fill up your calendar with appointments. What do you do for fun? Pickleball. I'd like to do a little running, sailing, hiking. Like being outside, spend all day in front of a computer. So getting out when the weather's nice, at least not that often in Ohio, but— Nice.

It's not bad here today, so we'll get outside a little. Name a good book, podcast, or self-development activity you recommend to our listeners.

Let's see. So I think it's really important that every human strength train. I see a personal trainer twice a week for an hour. And, um, for a long time I knew that I should be lifting weights, but I was lazy and unmotivated. And a lot of people say like, oh, you've been seeing this personal trainer for all these years, don't you know how to work out? Yeah, of course I know how to work out. The accountability though, when you have a real person that you're paying real money waiting for you at a certain day and time every week, you're going to show up. And you're going to show up in a way, in a consistent way that you never would if you just go when you have time. So whether you're male, female, young, old, middle-aged, whatever, every human should be moving heavy things around a couple times a week. The correlation with lifespan and quality of life is like nothing else. And so that would be my one recommendation to everybody listening to this.

I pay my guy $35 just to get me in the door. You sound like a little Peter Lohmann there, you're channeling there.

Did I?

Yeah, maybe a little bit. All right, other than yourself, name a valuable resource to other property— US property managers, I guess. Yeah, that way.

Gotta give a shout out to my guy Jordan Moeller. Um, he's kind of the OG, for me anyway, in our industry in terms of educational content, thought leadership. Um, his show, The Profitable Property Management Podcast, started episode 1 and just listen to the whole back catalog. It's gold, it's timeless. And, uh, if you can make it through that content and read through some of his old blogs and courses that he made on leads and, um, answering the phone and, and content marketing, you'll be ahead of 95% of people in the industry.

Love it, love it. All right, you gave a lot of great feedback here, a lot of stuff that listeners take away from. How can the listeners find out more about you, and what can they do to provide value to you?

Yeah. So if you go to my website, peterlohmann.com, that's kind of the central hub that's got links to my podcast, newsletter, um, everything I got going on with Crane and stuff like that. And, um, yeah, if you want to provide value, just, I would say subscribe to the newsletter and give me some feedback. You know, what do you like? What do you not like? What's working for you in terms of content? And, uh, we'll use that to just make it better and better. All right, man.

I hope you enjoyed yourself here. I did.

So yeah, thanks for having me, Mark.

This is great. All right, everyone, check out Crane.