Brandon Scholten - Defining and Reaching Your Target Clients

if you ever come across a point in time where you don't have somebody that's ready to step up as a senior property manager, it's a really hard position to hire for because you really need like some level of somewhat relevant experience, or it would just be a very long, robust training process, you know. So we wanted a progression where you could bring in someone entry-level who knows very little about any of this, and you could kind of have them start as the maintenance coordinator move up to an assistant property manager. But even from there, it was such a leap to go to a senior property manager. So that's why we created the solo role of sometimes just having a smaller amount of accounts for a period of time helps them really see kind of all the different duties there. And, and we can, yeah, we, we've just found like you can't go too quickly to all of a sudden they have a team reporting to them and are in charge of the success of this whole portfolio.

Welcome to season 2 of Owner Occupied on the business of property management. Owner Occupied is a show about property management in the real world. I'm your host, Peter Lohmann, co-founder and CEO of RL Property Management. For season 2, I have a different guest each week and we go deep into conversation about what actually works when trying to build and scale your property management business. Thanks for listening. Now let's go. Welcome back to Owner Occupied. I'm so excited today to introduce Brandon Scholten. Brandon is a great friend of mine. He owns an awesome property management company out in Denver. He and I hiked across the Grand Canyon together last year and have really developed a pretty good friendship as kind of peers in the industry. I've learned a lot from him., and I'm excited to kind of share his experience with you. So let's jump right in, Brandon, if you wouldn't mind, just take maybe 1 to 2 minutes and give a little bit of your background and sort of where you're at today.

Yeah, sure thing. I think it's the 1-year anniversary of our grand—

I think it is.

Yeah.

Excursion too. Yeah.

Oh, great. I got into property management. I was thinking today, like, I kind of feel like I went in the back door, but so did everyone else. So that, That's not all that interesting. So I was working for a little investment group that was flipping properties. And they, they were buying properties at the foreclosure sale. And they, one of the guys noticed that an apartment building would come through the auction, and it'd be, it'd sell for about $80,000 a door for like one-bedroom units. And then the next property would be a rundown condo similar specs, though, one-bedroom condo, and it would sell for $20,000. So this investor had the idea of what if I just bought up like 100 of these kind of rundown condos and had what he called like a virtual apartment complex. So I was doing some other work for them. And when they had this idea, they said, hey, will you figure out how to manage property for us for, and at least get us to the point we could hire a full-time property manager. So I said, sure. They were buying up a couple of these a week, and I'd help rehab them and get them rented. And that was kind of my way in. They, we, they started growing that portfolio of properties, and they never looked back and never hired a full-time property manager. I think I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. And it became the, like, enough, enough properties that it was my main income. Yeah, so did that for a couple years. At some point that, that started to have— I could see there was a life cycle to what they were doing. They were going to start selling off the properties and wasn't, wasn't enjoying working for them all that much at that point. So I'd started, I'd set up a little side business managing just a few properties and decided to kind of go all in there and join the Keyrenter franchise and basically just started growing it on my own till I could stop working for the investors and then Yeah, now that, that was 7 years ago, just over 7 years that I launched this, this company. And now we manage about 900 properties.

Fantastic. So 900, very serious portfolio there. And if I remember right, you were like one of the founding or one of the early franchisees with Keyrenter. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. So I don't think I was the first one to sign like the FDD. I might have been the third or something like that. But then all— there were 4 of us that all went to training together, first ever training class they did, and we were all kind of launching about the same time.

And you're the first guest I've had who's been a part of a franchise, and I think people are naturally curious about franchises. Can you share a little bit about why you chose to go that route and sort of what have been the advantages or disadvantages, you know, in retrospect?

Yeah, sure. So initially, when I, when I decided to go with the franchise, basically, I had determined I was going to try to start a property management company on my own. I had a little, again, I had a little side business with a few properties, but I really wanted to go all in and give it a try. And so I was going to do that on my own. And so the franchising was just something I looked at, like, oh, maybe I should at least explore that and see if it would make any sense. And yeah, I think where I was at, at the time, I had never hired an employee, managed anyone, been at a management level in any company. I had very little experience in that regard. I knew how to manage property. I had no idea how to market the business or anything else there too. So it, it felt to me like a good match where it was, it was early in the franchising kind of endeavor for Keyrenter, but I didn't feel like I needed like a business in a box, like a complete A to Z package. I don't know if that even exists anywhere, but kind of felt like I knew what I was doing, but I really could use the support on just as I learned to hire and come up with workflows. And it just seemed like it really would shorten the learning curve and allow me to do what I enjoyed doing and not, not just have like a much longer trial and error process through, through development.

And that's the promise of a franchise, right? That's what they're supposed to deliver on, like You sign on with us, you pay some money up front, but you're going to shortcut years and years of grinding and figuring it out because we have some branding, we have some marketing, we have some standard operating procedures, we've got some help with legal. So I could totally see how that would be of great value. Now that you're, you know, you've been in it for a while, and I think we may have talked about this briefly, and I know you probably don't want to, you know, say anything bad about your franchisor, but You feel like you're still getting value from them. I mean, obviously, you're still with them. Is this a route that you would recommend to someone who was maybe either brand new and it was literally had nothing and they, but they wanted to start a property management company, or maybe they just have a small handful of units?

Yeah, I think it really depends. I knew even when I was signing on, I knew like, it hurt a little bit to sign that initial check for the franchise fee. But I knew a day would come when that was tiny compared to what I was paying out every year in royalties. And so, yeah, I think I came in with a good headspace of knowing probably early on I'll get the most value when I'm actually paying the least in. And then later on, it'll probably come a day where it's a little painful. So, yeah, do I still get value? I would say yes. It looks very different than it did initially. I'm the For a long time, I was the largest operation by revenue and doors and all that. Now there is one other guy who's grown larger than me, at least indoors, and probably not— it won't be too long before revenue is larger. So, so just being like, sometimes I feel like I'm out ahead of the rest of the system on just the things I'm trying to solve. And so there's— I'm not expecting a bunch of resources from the franchise to solve those new challenges, but I think they create a really infrastructure of having coaches and mastermind groups. And I think like the camaraderie of the franchisees is different than what I get just in other networking or through NARPM affiliations or like the Profit Coach. There's just a level of transparency and kind of feeling like you're on the same team that I think is— that's probably where I get the most value now. So yeah, I think, I think you have to evaluate your own personality, and there's some people who just really want to blaze a trail themselves, and you should do that if that's how you're wired. I kind of felt like there was a bunch of stuff early on that just seemed painful and complicated, and I felt like I would avoid some mistakes and pitfalls, and I think that it's panned out for me in the way that I'd hoped.

So one of the things I love about talking with you, Brandon, is that you and I will often kind of get into a great discussion that's a blend of strategy and tactics. We kind of move between, hey, how are you getting more Google reviews, to the next minute we're talking about like, what kind of properties do you think you're going to be managing 5 years from now, and big picture stuff. So I'm hoping we can kind of tease out some of that on today's show because I think it'd be cool to kind of give the audience like a behind the scenes on how we think and talk through this stuff as operators in the space. One of the things we spent a lot of time talking about and got a lot of value out of, I think, was kind of like a pair of books that almost go together. The Goal, which is all about the theory of constraints, that's by Eli something.

Yeah, I don't know how to say his name real well. What is it? I don't remember.

Elliott or— We'll look it up. Someone's yelling at their radio right now. And then the other one, which is kind of like an updated version of it almost, is The Machine by Justin Roth Marsh. I kind of view those as like of a kind. And I know you went really deep with Justin Roth Marsh in particular. I think maybe you did some training with him or something or through his program. You forwarded me a couple really interesting newsletters. What did you get out of that and how do you think that applies to property management?

Yeah, I think, I think he had a way to look at kind of business functions that was new to me. And the goal really provided a framework kind of in the manufacturing world for understanding how work is done in this, like, on an assembly line and how things move through it and this idea of identifying the constraints and then kind of optimizing around those constraint points. So I don't know if that synopsis does it justice, but what then—

I think it was something like the way that factories used to be run was like every individual area was just running at maximum speed all the time. And so stuff like literal material would be piling up.

At like the queue in front of the one machine.

Yeah, from whatever one came before. And so he, he had this idea of like going in and figuring out what was the bottleneck, fixing that, then going to the next one, fixing that. I'm probably doing a gross oversimplification here, but it was—

yeah, I don't know that fixing it is the right word because sometimes you just have to respect the bottleneck is what it is and it, it may be running at full capacity right now. But yeah, like your example is you may have a machine that is it's just the slowest point at which, you know, inventory moves through the process to production. And so there's no— it's actually worse if up the line you're producing more than that, you know, at a faster rate than it can go through there. So you slow down production upstream, but make sure that that constraint, that machine is running as much as it possibly can with always full staff.

Got it. That makes more sense.

To translate that to then what Justin Rothmarsh did is kind of applied that to the sales function in that he sort of saw how we had optimized business in the West around constraints and there'd been all this forward progress there, but then we still were treating the sales function as if it's just the voodoo arts where we can't possibly quantify what it takes to talk to customers and turn them into clients and create differentiation and specialization of roles and all that because, yeah, again, it was just this— there's overall been this view of we got to get out of the way and just let people build relationships and work their voodoo and we can't tell them how to do that work. So I think that was, yeah, something we spent a lot of time on thinking through how to optimize and it kind of led to, yeah, having sales functions that are more around trying to optimize for repeated tasks. And one of the big things was like inside versus outside selling has very different priorities, right? So it's hard to be outside doing, you know, going to properties, meeting owners, doing rent analysis, and also being hyper-responsive to phone calls and emails and getting, you know, making sure there's no delays in the onboarding process and nothing falls through the cracks on that end. So for instance, that's one in our current organization. We have two, two BDMs, as the industry would call them, but one spends most of his time out of the office and the other spends most of his time in the office. So they divide duties among even the same clients as they kind of go through the sales process.

Beautiful. I think that was a great explanation. And one thing that really sticks out to me, well, first of all, Justin Rothmarsh appeared on Jordan's podcast, The Profitable Property Management Podcast. It's an old episode, you got to go back, but it's really, really good. And I actually listened through it. I listened to it twice in a row. I remember when I first heard it, and he's actually kind of funny, Justin.

Yeah, I find him very funny. He's kind of cynical about things. And I didn't go through his specific training. It's really geared towards, you know, large kind of manufacturing companies and that kind of thing. But I did read a lot, read his book and some of his newsletter and blogs and that kind of thing. And so that it was just sort of a self-implementation of his ideas.

Yeah. And one of the things that sticks out for me there is like the old way is sort of the salesperson does everything. The new way that he describes is let the salesperson spend all their time doing what they're most effective at, their highest value activity, which is probably getting on the phone to close customers and hire, hire other folks to deal with the scheduling and the CRM and the prospecting and all this other stuff so that like your rainmaker can spend more time making it rain and not dialing for dollars.

Yeah, exactly. If you have somebody who's trying to, again, be responsive on the phone, they're handling paperwork through the onboarding process, If they really like have the gift of gab and are natural networkers and that kind of thing, it's probably what you're already frustrated about with them, right? They're getting people upset because they forgot to follow up on some detail or let, let the leasing team know about something before it got listed or whatever it might be. But just, it just creates some delineation and roles where, yeah, again, people can optimize around and you can hire for a specific skill set. Depending on what part of the stage they're in of the sales process.

Yeah. One of the things that I've always found scary about owning a small business is that it feels extremely vulnerable, especially when you're 5, 10, 15 employees. If any one person leaves, you're suddenly in a lurch. You're immediately behind because even if you got the job listing up that same day, it's going to be 3 weeks to a month optimistically before you get help. And that doesn't even include the time that it takes to train that person. And especially around the sales function, you feel powerless, right? Because if you do find a salesperson who's effective, they run off and they do their thing and you have no clue really what they're doing or how they're doing it or what's working. And so if you take Justin's advice here, he's going to have you not only segment the activities of what the salesperson is doing, but also take a much more prescriptive approach to, here's how we have these conversations, here's when we send this document, here's how, you know, it all gets lined out. And I know RentScale, who's a great vendor in our space that does sales training and that we're a customer of, they also kind of take this similar approach where they're not going to have you bring on somebody who is just going to go do it their way, they're going to help you design the sales process and then bring in somebody who fits into that box and can be coached and is comfortable taking an existing process and working within it. And that makes me feel better as a small business owner. I feel like I've got a little bit more control and a little bit more ability to replace someone, quite frankly, if they leave or it doesn't work out or whatever the case may be.

Yeah, I think there's a natural progression that happens as you grow. Initially, you're— I mean, at least from my experience, I was floundering at every level for quite a while, right? Like, you're always crazy busy and feeling like behind on something and or multiple things. And yeah, just any given day you have to leave the office and head home with a list of things you're embarrassed you haven't finished yet, right?

That resonates.

And you may, you know, some of them may result in the lost client or a lawsuit, or, you know, you're like, I still need to update that HR policy to be in compliance with something, you know. So I think it's the tendency early on is like, let me hire the expert who can come in with experience and just take some function of the business over from me and help me in this, you know, feeling drowned, like I'm drowning right now. So, so again, with sales, it's no different, right? Early on, I hear from people regularly who are like, hey, I had this person reach out and they've been, you know, they were a real estate agent forever and are super well connected. And I think they could just come in and crush it in sales. And yeah, they haven't taken the time to outline any of the processes or even be clear of like, what does the sales function look like? What does success look like there? What's the process that works? And I can't blame them, right? Like, you probably made a couple of those hires. You're You're probably more disciplined than I am, but early on I remember making a couple hires where I'm like, I just need somebody to solve a problem and all—

Well, there's a paradox here, which is that I just read the book Who Not How, and it's a fantastic book. I wish I'd read a long time ago. I can't recommend it highly enough. And it's all about whenever you find yourself asking a question, how do I do this? You should reframe it as, who can I get to do this? Basically, it's all about hiring experts and let them do their thing, which that's all well and good when you're a $10 million company and you can afford to bring in the expert and you actually do get incredible value out of them because you pay them a high salary, but it's like a 10x return. You have almost no involvement. They know everything. They know everyone. They go make it happen. But The problem is when you're small, you can't afford that. You can't afford a 6-figure salary. You can't afford to bring in the expert. So you're kind of in this weird limbo where you got to sort of figure it out yourself and then bring someone in and train them. So you end up having to become an expert in all these different things like sales and marketing and HR and all these things that are just like outside the core of what you really want to be focusing on. But the good news is if you can make it through that slog, and you can get big enough, you can actually— like in the sales function example, I think you still would be making a mistake to hire a rainmaker salesperson. But what you really should do is hire a killer sales manager who has experience building sales teams. That person can then come in, set up the sales process, document it, and then go out and hire their first few salespeople. And that is the dream, right? And we're not there yet, but that would be unbelievable.

And RentScale, I think, fits perfectly in between those two spots, right? You're at a point you can afford to invest a little bit more, but yeah, you're not there where you're going to hire the experienced sales manager to really create this highly dynamic sales function.

So speaking of great vendors in our space, I'm curious if you have any other vendors that you're getting very high value out of right now, maybe especially if it's one that not everyone's heard of. I know everyone, property management has a lot of different vendors offering a lot of different solutions, and it's always interesting to see another thoughtful owner test out this option or this solution and see how it goes.

Yeah, great question. I don't know that I think of a lot that are maybe specific to our space.

Or maybe if they're not specific.

One thing that comes to mind, I worked with a guy, his name was Zach, with his company was called Mission Driven Impact, and he helped us kind of revamp our marketing strategy, and I found him to be just incredibly insightful, and it was kind of a consulting package where we went through like a I don't know, 8 or 10 week course that kind of systematically helped us identify like who's our target client. Let's really drill down on what's important to them. Where do they hang out? What are they listening to? What are their problems? We work through like the StoryBrand process of—

Oh yeah, I like StoryBrand a lot.

Yeah. Telling the customer journey and figuring out where we fit in that. Yeah. So that was a good one. Again, I think you could probably just Google it. It was Mission Driven Impact. I was the first property management client he'd ever had, so it certainly wasn't a specialty, but he mostly works with like kind of nonprofits and stuff like that. But I found I had a good connection with him.

I always think it's funny when someone in our space discovers a new vendor like that's a great example where it's like a valuable service or product that no one in the industry is using and then someone discovers them. And the vendor's like, "Oh, I've never worked with a property manager before." It's like, "Well, you're about to work with a whole bunch more of them if this works out." RentScale started that exact same way. And I keep trying to talk my Predictive Index sales rep into making a big investment in our space. And I think he did actually go to one of the conferences recently, but I feel like Predictive Index and Culture Index are the two really good personality profiling. They'll probably get mad that I call it that because they say it's not what it is, but whatever. And I feel like one of them is going to end up being dominant, and I like Predictive Index.

But anyway, I could also add— this one isn't as sexy, but we've adopted the LeadSimple workflows, and it's been a long process. I think we're probably a year and a half into since we kind of turned it on and went through their initial development of some different processes and Really, for us, it took a few kind of iterations. We had an acquisition kind of plopped in the middle of that, and I think that slowed down a lot of things. And so it took a while, but, but we're finally, you know, these last like few months are at a place where the whole team is using the workflow and we can clearly see where people are at in their assigned tasks. And it seems like it's showing up that a lot Fewer balls are getting dropped. People have an easier time kind of keeping track of everything.

That's awesome. We're in the middle of onboarding LeadSimple Process right now, and I'm very excited about their new inbox product, which is like a ticketing solution. As soon as we're all set with Process, we're going to do ticketing because as I've talked about before on the show, I'm a big believer in separating the customer service function from the people who are actually doing the work. And I'm hoping that's going to help us be able to do that. I want to take a moment and thank the FoundGen for sponsoring this episode. Some of you may know James Shulman from Twitter. He's pretty active on there and he's a great follow if you're not following him already. James and I met through Twitter about a year ago, and I've been working with James and his team at the FoundGen for just about a year. So you can think of them as a fractional CMO and marketing department. Department. So James and his team handle a ton of marketing work for our business. Let me just give you some of the capabilities that they have. And this is all the work that they're doing for us. They're handling content creation. So they're writing in-depth detailed articles that get published through our email newsletter, as well as our website on our blog. And You can check that out at rlpmg.com/blog if you want to get an example of content that they write. So it's not just fluff, you know, someone Googled for a few minutes and wrote a few sentences and, and, and fleshed it out into a full article. These are legitimate content pieces that I feel comfortable publishing on my website. They also handle social media posting, podcast publishing, email marketing, which I just mentioned, webinars, any graphic and design work that we need. They're really just a full marketing department for us. Knowing that my marketing is being handled by professionals takes a huge weight off my back. It lets me focus on the business instead of working in the business. Contact The FoundGen and they will conduct a marketing audit for your business. You can learn more at thefoundgen.com. Now let's get back to it. And thanks for sponsoring the show. So StoryBrand, StoryBrand famously walks you through like the hero's journey for your customer. And the idea is like your customer's the hero and you're the guide and you're gonna help them get to the promised land basically. And so your marketing is all about the customer and their problems and the solutions you're gonna deliver that's gonna empower them and make them successful. And I contrast that with another approach to marketing that I still hear quite a bit, which is like, We're going to find what makes your company unique and we're going to talk all about that. And we're also going to tell your story. We're going to tell the story of your company and we're going to maybe tell the founder story and what makes your company different and unique.

I think there's some Start With Why undergirding there. I don't think you can overstate how impactful Start With Why was to the business community at large, right? Like, that— it's so woven itself into what we do. But yeah, it's kind of— they feel almost in tension, like, because that one is like, you need to exude who you are at your core and what, what your values are and all this stuff, which doesn't— in some ways doesn't have anything to do with the customer yet.

But so what's your take here? Does it— do you feel like one or the other of these is correct, or they're they could apply differently to different sizes or approaches? Yeah, that's a great question.

For me, I feel like StoryBrand is more relevant for who we are, how we fit in with our customers. I think it's been a really helpful framework in just drilling down with like, what is it that our customers are trying to accomplish? How do they see us in that journey? How can we position ourselves? In a way that I think the tendency is to be a little delusional that they're like, we're going to be this expert to them that's like guiding them to this real estate fortune. And really, they see us like as just a link in the chain, you know, certainly, you don't want to screw it up, they were, they may recognize there's a bad version of property management. But I think it helps to kind of get more realistic about the actual place you hold in their in your customer's idea of their success.

That is so true. And the unfortunate reality is that we're just an expense line item on their pro formas right next to insurance and utilities and the other items that they're evaluating when they're deciding to make an investment. And Justin Roethmarsch, to go back, has a great line about this in his podcast with Jordan where he talks about— I think he uses the example of banking where bankers get this idea that they're going to forge this special relationship with their customers, retail bankers, And the customers couldn't care less about who their banker is and their history. And, you know, as a banking customer, you just want to go in and deposit your check, or you don't even want to go in. You just want to do it online. You don't want to have anything to do with getting to know your banker and where does he do in the summer and how are his kids like? No, sorry, it's not that type of a relationship. And I think there's some truth to the idea that that's how it is in property management.

Yeah, I think he even had a funny story in there where he got to a certain asset level at his bank or something and was now assigned a banker, but it actually was like a roadblock where he no longer could do something online because it needed to go through this guy he had no interest in getting to know or navigating through. So that's awesome. So I think, I think there's work to be done in, in becoming a bigger a more trusted advisor to your client. But I think maybe the first helpful step is to understand that that's not the default setting, right? You have to earn that and you may have to actually, you're gonna have to convince them that you have value to that end, right?

Show me, yeah.

And they're not gonna ask you, right? Like you're gonna have to initiate this endeavor.

I love what you said there. You have to earn it, right? You can't just say, we're your trusted advisor, we're here to help you build wealth for real estate. And the guy on the other end of the line's like, okay, great, when's my disbursement? Like, you know, you, you gotta— you can't just say that, right? You have to somehow actually provide value. Yeah.

And I think it's hard to do as I've built the company. Like, I can't— I mean, I at least haven't been able to hire entirely a staff of people who own rental property and can, you know, put together pro formas and understand. So what does that look like when, you know, we're just trying to make sure we get the details right of not screwing anything up in the property management function, yet we're pretending that we're this expert advisor to the client. And so, yeah, I don't know, I wouldn't say I've fully solved that yet or anything. But I think maybe there's room as you grow to have certain positions in the company that you really empower to have that level of relationship with your clients. Maybe that's in the form of a real estate agent who has a ton of experience with rental property and they can kind of create a pocket listing program and create relationships with some of those clients who are actively still wanting to expand their portfolio. And then I think that shifts, right? Like the customer's going to be open-minded if you can provide deals, for instance, and they'll start seeing you in a more elevated way. But yeah, you've got to earn that.

Yeah. And I think that you're so clear-eyed about this. The customers, you can't just take a random office employee, plop them on the phone with a client, and expect them to be seen as a trusted advisor. And I think there's an implicit question in the mind of every prospect or every customer of ours, which is like, if you guys are so great at property management, why don't you own a bunch of properties? Like, that's kind of like what I'm automatically thinking, even though I'm in the business. I even asked that about myself. So you have to overcome that and, and show them like, how you can provide a differentiated and unique perspective or guidance that they can't just get by going on BiggerPockets or something.

So I think it's one of the things that was eye-opening for me that we dug into early on, or as we were kind of revamping our marketing is When we look at our— let's, let's strip it down to like our best clients. So the ones who bought from us quickly, they didn't negotiate price, they, they see the value in what we do, they're happy with how we deliver the service, right? We kind of narrowed it down. We did this exercise with the team where they brought their best clients they work with, and so we took team members from different functions of the organization and had them bring a list, and then we started comparing like, what are these What do the best clients of ours have in common? How do they view us? And one of the things we did is then, like, now that you have that list of clients who love what you do and appreciate and see the value, then start thinking about what was their alternative if they didn't hire you. And I think that helps you see, like, what value you hold, like, where you are positioned in their mind, right? Some— for some of them, I think, are— for us, our natural inclination is to think it's our closest competitors, the people that seem to be doing a similar service to us. But for a lot of these clients, as I would ask them, it was us or it was them doing it themselves. Or, you know, maybe they have their professional in some other realm and they have an assistant who— that's how they were doing it before. They were just kind of having their assistant take some of the tasks that they didn't feel like doing. Or it might be, yeah, their underemployed friend who is willing to like take the maintenance calls and cut the yard once a week or so. So yeah, it just— that matters, right? That's how we're positioned in their mind. And again, like, when we're— we can't assume we're this— they hired us because they think we're an expert on all things real estate and property management, and they couldn't have lived without our expertise.

You and I talked about a marketing campaign that you did a couple years ago now. Where you looked at rental listings. I'm sorry, you looked at for sale listings of realtors in the areas that you wanted to manage. So anytime a new for sale listing came up, you would see who the realtor was. And I might be remembering this wrong, but then I think you emailed that realtor and said, hey, we're a professional property manager. We manage properties in this neighborhood where you just got a listing. By the way, congratulations on your home listing, we'd love to be a resource for you and your clients. We can provide rent comps, we can provide, you know, maybe fill in what I'm missing here. And are you guys still doing that? What, how did that work out for you guys?

Yeah, so what we would do is we had like a, just an MLS search, and we kind of picked our, you know, these target areas we really like to manage property in. And yeah, like you said, we'd see the new listings pop up, we'd send that agent a we'd actually send them a rent range report. And just the first thing we'd say is, yeah, congrats on the listing. If you do get any interest from investors, I thought this might be a helpful tool where you could show them, you know, an idea of what the property would rent for. We'd love to be a resource for you. And then, yeah, we kind of gave our perks of, and, you know, and if you refer somebody to us, we'll get them back to you if they want to sell the property, pay a referral fee, whatever. So Yeah, and then we had like a kind of follow-up drip, but sometimes you'd get responses to that that were very positive, right, of just, oh my gosh, that's great. Like, I don't— I haven't gotten any interest on this one, but I work with this other guy and we should get coffee, you know. So then from there it was just paying attention to what emerged and kind of pursuing those relationships. I would say this reverts back to hiring when you're small and you just have something, some problem you want to go away by hiring the right person. This is an area where it worked out well for me. I just— well, it did and it didn't, right? So I hired someone who really just had a knack for this kind of thing and, and would build stuff like this and pursue it and did a great job and built a lot of relationships. And it was all going well until it wasn't. And she decided to take another job and I couldn't talk her out of it. And then I realized I had no I didn't have the bandwidth myself or even the roadmap for how to keep doing this. So we stopped doing it, not because it wasn't working, but because we just got busy and didn't end up filling that role in the exact same way.

So, so we're going to come back to marketing, but I want to take a detour. I can't go on without asking you about the skateboarding video that you sent me prior to the show. And I think I saw somewhere on there that you were sort of like a professional skateboarder in your past. Share, like, what? Oh gosh.

No, that wasn't it. I was trying to come up with anything. You asked me if I'd been on other podcasts. I hadn't. So I was trying to come up with what— is there any presence I have online or anything that you could learn about me? So yeah, I sent you a skate video I was in. This was back in like 2006, I think that came out or something like that. So a long time ago. But yeah, there was probably a 10-year period where all I ate, drank, and slept was skateboarding. That's all I cared about. But no, I was never professional. I got a lot of free gear and that kind of thing. But there was also an article written at one point that called me a professional skateboarder. So I was totally embarrassed by that. It's not accurate.

But were you in that business in some way? Were you selling something or? You're just skating nonstop.

Yeah, I just loved it. And, um, it was just a hobby, passion, I guess, that slowly faded as I got older and started getting hurt.

And yeah, so do you ever jump on a skateboard anymore?

Not a ton anymore. Last summer I broke my elbow, and that kind of, yeah, felt to me like the last straw on really trying to push it at all.

So you broke it while you were skateboarding? Yeah. Oh man. Yeah. How about your kids? You gonna try and get them into it at all?

I haven't pushed it at all. I, I don't know.

You got to show them the video.

They've seen, they've seen me.

Yeah. Oh man, this— I almost didn't even recognize you because like the clothing and the hair and it was a whole different vibe back then.

Yeah, totally. Having grown up, you know, hanging out at the skate park, I don't know that it's a place I want my kids hanging out, so I haven't pushed it too hard for that reason.

Yeah, you turned out all right.

It was a rough spot. Yeah, I did. Not, not everybody that was hanging out there.

Oh, that's fair. That's true. Let's take a minute to thank this week's sponsor, Appfolio. Some of you may not know this, but Appfolio has a podcast. It's called The Top Floor, and season 3 of The Top Floor launches in June, which means if you're listening to this episode, the first episode from their new show is out now. So Search for The Top Floor in your favorite podcast player, go ahead and subscribe, and while you're at it, you can check out their back catalog. Seasons 1 and 2 include many episodes on very relevant topics such as employee hiring and retention, maintenance best practices, single-family rental management, and many other topics. I, I want to take a minute and also highlight the extremely high production quality for The Top Floor as well as the quality and the level of the guests that they're able to bring on the show. You're able to hear from folks that you don't hear on the other property management podcasts and topics that are highly relevant but not often discussed. So if you go to appfolio.com/the-top-floor, that's appfolio.com/the-top-floor, you can easily search and access all of the old episodes. You can discover bonus content like research reports. Articles featuring their guests, and you can subscribe there as well. So thank you again to AppFolio for sponsoring the show. Go check out their podcast, The Top Floor, season 3 launching now. Thank you again to AppFolio. Okay, so let's kind of move back to property management. I want to ask you how you guys are structured. I can't remember off the— I can't remember. So are you guys in squads? Are you departmental, portfolio? How are you guys set up?

Yeah, we're pretty much departmental, though. We have kind of a marketing sales department, we have a leasing department. And so we do assign a leasing agent, we have two, I guess, two leasing agents. So they each take the lead as like the owner point of contact through the leasing process, they split up the properties between them. And then once it gets to the kind of property management lifecycle of tenants now moving in and all that, then they'll The owner is assigned to one of one portfolio. So we have some solo property managers who then do take a, you know, just a group of accounts, and they're the owner's point of contact and the tenant and all that. And then so we have like maybe 3 of those, and then we have 3, I think, 3 property management teams where it's a senior. So it's kind of a little squad, a senior assistant property manager and a maintenance coordinator that work in conjunction. So there is a level of account management at that end. It's not totally departmental, but It's not your kind of classic, like, A to Z, one person doing all the functions.

Okay. So that's like, sounds like a hybrid between departmental and squad. Very interesting. Yeah. The squad model is getting more and more interesting to me as, as we get bigger. I think one of the challenges we run into is that every time we grow, we have to shear off job functions from somebody. And either create a new function or redistribute them. Because what, what one person was able to do at 500 units is suddenly no longer feasible at 700 units, but it's like not enough for a whole other person dedicated to that function. So it's just every time we turn around, we're having to create a brand new job description and move us, move around, you know, roles and responsibilities. And, but the squad model is great because you could just spin up a new team Once you get to a certain level, take some properties off of the existing— there's— it's just a— like, once you write the job description for the senior property manager in a 3-person squad, you never have to return to that. You've got the job description, you've got the metrics, and you just rinse and repeat.

Sure. Yeah, I could, I could share a few of my own challenges through what we've developed and What one of the things that's hard is if you ever come across a point in time where you don't have somebody that's ready to step up as a senior property manager, it's a really hard position to hire for because you really need like some level of somewhat relevant experience, or it would just be a very long, robust training process, you know. So we wanted a progression where you could bring in someone entry level who knows very little about any of this, and you could kind of have them start as the maintenance coordinator. Move up to an assistant property manager. But even from there, it was such a leap to go to a senior property manager. So that's why we created the solo role of sometimes just having a smaller amount of accounts for a period of time helps them really see kind of all the different duties there. And, and we can— yeah, we've just found like you can't go too quickly to all of a sudden they have a team reporting to them. And are in charge of the success of this whole portfolio. So that's where we've ended up. I think it's working pretty well for us. Yeah, I'm happy with it, but every model is going to have its challenges and tricky aspects. One other thing I'd add is we found that some of the senior property managers were very effective leaders who are developing their team, and other people are not, right? They're do not have an inclination to see and communicate vision for their team or to, you know, identify areas where they could help them grow or that kind of thing. So, so that's been where we've focused more lately on trying to coach kind of that mid-level management up on being developers. And, and some, some people we just identified, like, you're, you're really not— you don't have that skill set in you, or you don't have the talents kind of that would translate to developing that. So, so we find some people just park at the solo property manager, and they're best served just being a little bit of a lone wolf.

Yeah, I think that can— sounds like that's working well for you guys. You mentioned training, and that's an area of focus and interest for me right now. I feel like it's definitely a weakness in our company. How are you handling training? And I don't mean like, of course, you're doing some pretty intense training when you onboard a new employee. But in terms of ongoing training, what do you do there? Do you run your senior people through any type of a, like, a leadership development training or anything along these lines?

Yeah, so this has been something we've focused a lot on probably over the last maybe close to a year. I had an internal person that we kind of created a new role for as an HR director, so she really has taken the initiative here and done a lot of work. But yeah, I mean, I think everybody who's grown it from the ground up can, you know, there was a progression where at one point the training was, hey, pull up a chair and I'll kind of explain what I'm up to, and at some point you'll be able to take a few of these tasks. And, and you kind of realize that's not optimal, and so you start developing out, okay, I need to have an onboarding process where they're going through some tutorials and And yeah, maybe we're recording videos of how some function happens, that kind of thing. I think the biggest— what felt like the next step forward for us was, okay, now we've got our kind of crash course of a couple weeks of video content and all this, and, you know, hopefully some kind of reference library where they can refer back to things as they're doing these functions. But also just like, what does training look like over the first 60 to 90 days?. And there's a lot of things that you could, you could jam into that first 2 weeks, but it's actually more appropriate a little later in the process. So we've, we've spent a lot of time and energy just, just trying to tease out what are those, where are the gaps that we see in people as they're getting to 30, 60, 90 days? How can we insert things along the way that, that develop both the tactical as well as like the soft skills, some Things even like fundamentals of customer service, like we've seen it be very helpful to train on those. I don't know, it's easy to assume that if you just hire good people, they don't need that kind of thing. But even people who are inclined towards being good at customer service, you know, they might even take to that training more than those who aren't inclined toward it, right, and improve. So, and even, even beyond 90 days, we're trying to do more of that, like we have kind of a learning management system where we're just sourcing helpful kind of videos or whatever, TED Talks or those kind of things that are helping on some aspect of leadership development.

I was really inspired listening to an episode of the 300 to 3,000 podcast with Matthew Whitaker. He described something called the 25K Club that they have there at Evernest. I guess initially it started as a leadership group that would meet once a week or every other week or something. It would just be the leaders and managers. They would read through books together and they would watch videos, or Matthew would prepare some comments based on what he was seeing or things that he was learning about how to be a manager, how to do one-on-ones, how to develop your people. Then I guess eventually he realized, "Hey, why don't we just open this up to anybody?" 'Who wants it?' And so now it's publicly available for anyone at the company to join by Zoom. I thought that was really cool, and I'd love to do that because you're right, a lot of things I come across online, I consume it and it helps me, but that doesn't really help anyone on my team. Why not have a more formal way of communicating that throughout the organization?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's That's a great point. We, we do do like a quarterly— a quarter— we come up with a quarterly theme and then we come up with a book that kind of ties in with that. And we make— we just do like an optional book club. But it is— it's— I think it's helpful to have those options for employees where there's no pressure to do it, but it helps you kind of identify who's wanting to level up. And yeah, like, it helps you identify who's worth investing in because they're clearly hungry for it and Yeah, that's a great point.

And run it. Yeah. Well, let's talk about one more book. You recommended a series of podcasts about the Dream 100 strategy, and this was on Russell Brunson's show, and that led me to his books. And I'm halfway through reading this book called Traffic Secrets, which I'm getting a lot out of right now. And I was chatting with Jordan about this and he He sort of felt like this was done to death years ago, but it was new to me, some of these strategies and ideas, even though they seem kind of obvious once you understand them. What were you taking away from some of these materials? And how do you feel like it's relevant? Or how could we apply some of this in property management?

Yeah, I think the basic— maybe you can help me here because I haven't actually read the book. I've listened to a bunch of podcasts and read some blogs and that kind of thing. But basically Dream 100, fundamental ideas like who are the 100 sort of people, books, podcasts, places that your target clients hang out. And then it's, it's sort of asking like, how do I work my way into that, that group? How do I get exposure there? And that kind of thing. I think one thing that, that it identified for me is I just probably spend too much time hanging out and caring about my world of fill in the blank, like maybe there's some different spheres I'm in. But even like property management, I hang out a lot in the Facebook groups and the, and the podcasts. And I, I'm just very interested in solving this puzzle. So I always love good conversations and topics around how to develop this business and all that. But ultimately, that doesn't serve me well in terms of like marketing or creating a name for myself with who actually— who my customers are. So at one point it occurred to me— you, you said this recently too, I don't think we talked about it, so maybe we both came to this conclusion on our own— but both Jeremy Pound and Jordan Wailer are great examples of people who feel like peers to us, right? They feel like experts in our world. They show up all over the place. They're always providing helpful content. They're— so it's just an example of someone who's done it effectively, right? So then Yeah, for us, it's— for me, it was like, how— like, let me get clear on my target client. And then how do I become that expert that people just think of as like— it doesn't mean they're going to hire me for sure and never talk to anyone else or consider alternatives. But it would be for my target client, how do I just hang out around where they're hanging out enough that when they, when they come to a point in life, when they say I need a property manager, they're going, I got to talk to those guys. You know, I might poke around somewhere else, but like, in the same way, if you were going to, if you want to develop your sales process, there's no way you could miss at least having a conversation with RentScale because they're in our face all over the place providing value and clearly have good insights on sales and for property management.

I think you perfectly articulated that. And you also nailed the problem that we both have. You said you have it, I have it even, even worse, which is I just want to hang out with other property management company owners. I want to help them solve their problems. I want to make content for them. I want to go to the bar with them. But really, I should be hanging out with real estate investors because those are my clients, at least at the property management business. I mean, it would be the equivalent of like if Jordan and Jeremy were like always hanging out with the other vendors, you know, and they were like scheming and like hanging out with them in the groups and like hanging out with them at the vendor trade shows and barely even talk to you and I. And it would be like, I'm sure that would be fun for them, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't help their business much to talk to another— they can go chat with the Buildium people, but they're not going to sell their product to Buildium. I mean, I guess they do have like a partnership now, but you get what I'm saying.

That might even be a step better than what we're doing because we're hanging out with property managers who are selling in different markets and there's not even an overlap of clients. It's not like we could send each other referrals or anything. So it was a mindset shift for me, and I don't know that I've nailed it yet, but I'm certainly spending a lot more time trying to think about who are the influencers in this space, how do I rub shoulders with them, how do I make sure I'm sponsoring the right events. So yeah, it hasn't totally come to bear yet on paying off, but I think I'm starting to see that we're just getting more interest from— we're getting out ahead, out in front of more of our target audience.

I love that. And I think something I've always found challenging about our industry is that our customers, like what you're describing, they're very hard to identify. They're hard to find, in my opinion, because they don't— they're not putting the fact that they own a duplex on LinkedIn in the same way that you could target like vendors in our space have it kind of easy because they can just go right on LinkedIn and they can look at anyone who has the title CEO or founder at a property management company. Boom, there's their target list and they can take that and run with it. We don't have something like that, at least not that easy. Now, there are your local county auditor may have lists of property owners and maybe a mailing address if you're lucky, but that's usually outdated and you don't have a phone number, you don't have an email address. So it can be really difficult to actually track down these property management or these property owners. Now you can try and do some inbound stuff like webinars and Facebook groups, and that can build solely over time, but there's no way to like reach out easily. Now we've got something going with this rent magazine that we're producing, and we, we put together a list from the Otter site like I was talking about, but it's really hard. How have you— how are you approaching this? How are you finding where your target audience is hanging out? And how are you getting to them?

Yeah, that's been something we've thought a lot about. I think I have been able to identify, especially like self-managing landlords do tend to find, you know, they hang out at investor clubs a little bit, or maybe Facebook groups where they're asking questions and sharing ideas and that kind of thing. But it's also, like you said, it's just tricky. They're not— it's not obvious, right? It's not easy to identify all of them and have some strategic approach. So I think some of it too is just producing the content that is going to be attractive to people who have questions about, you know, that would identify that they own rental property and, and are having challenges with it, right? So this is nothing new. I mean, this is, this is because has existed in our space for some time. But yeah, writing really good articles on how does an eviction work in Colorado, or we have— we wrote a blog at one point. I don't know if this is a great example, but it's just kind of funny, but it's something around does marijuana smoke stay inside, stay in a unit, right? Does it damage, damage a home or something like that? We get— that is one of our most visited sites on our page month in, month out. Like, we currently rank number one on online or on Google or something if you type in, does dab smoke stain the walls or something like that. So I don't know that that's our target client. But, but yeah, that is a strategy of some of those more specific search terms. There's sometimes— it's a long game with SEO work of you're trying to get people people's eyeballs who potentially are your target audience who will say, man, that was really helpful. What else do you have? Trying to get them to sign up for a newsletter or something where, you know, I think my ultimate goal is that everyone who— basically, people would say, if they ask their friend, hey, I'm about to buy a rental property, like, do you have any recommendations for me? They would say, you gotta follow, you gotta get on this newsletter. This is the most relevant, helpful stuff as you'll navigate the challenges there. I think if we can do that, then there's a huge group of potential clients there that, that will slowly kind of bring down through the funnel.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I've experienced that myself, not at my property management company, but with my own sort of personal brand, like really this podcast and my Twitter and my email newsletter, specifically those three things. I'm just out here talking about what's working for me, what's interesting. I'm sharing things that are valuable and people are attracted to it and they're signing up and they're downloading the show. And now you've kind of got me thinking, if I had invested this much effort in reaching people who own rental property in Columbus as I have in reaching people who are interested in learning about property management companies, where would we be? That's an interesting question, but I can't help but follow my own passion. And unfortunately, my passion for real estate investing and for chatting with somebody else who owns a duplex, that was really interesting to me circa 2010. And I've, for better or worse, kind of moved on from that phase of my life. And I just can't get excited about writing an article about How to handle grass cutting at a fourplex. Now we've got some great marketing folks who do write articles about that and they do a really great job at it, but I have to wonder like if I injected the energy and enthusiasm that everyone's hearing through their speaker right now into that side of the business, I wonder where we'd be. But maybe that just means I need to continue on the path that's working for me and, and maybe it'll lead to really great things. Or maybe it means I just lack self-discipline.

I'm not sure. Well, I could give up my interest in baseball. Had I done that 10 years ago, I could speak 3 other languages if I'd inserted that. At some point, you have to evaluate just what makes your day-to-day interesting for you and what's fun to pursue. I think that's a tricky part of it. But I've asked myself the same question because I have the same problem of especially like when it comes to realtors, like with all due respect, I just, I don't enjoy talking to them about what, what they're interested in or that kind of thing all that much. So yeah, it's like trying to come up with where is the overlap then of my target clients are hanging out there and I can get excited about having a discussion or providing good content or something like that.

So it's tricky. Yeah. And if I think about this through like a who, not how, lens. I'm like, "Would it be possible to hire somebody who fits that profile and could be or already is an influencer," quote unquote, "in Columbus real estate investing? Could I bring them on my team and then they would be that?" I don't know. That seems like a stretch because I feel like that's almost the whole enchilada. That's you as the founder. If you ain't got it, no one's going to come in and do that for you because they got their own thing going on.

I don't know. Yeah, maybe there's ways too that you don't have to— it doesn't have to be where you're passionate and hanging out all the time, but maybe just the right strategic sponsorships, or could be writing good blog articles for your eviction attorney that, yeah, you're not even writing them. But I think there's other ways in than full-time in-house investing in all the podcasts and deep content creation and all that.

Awesome. Well, this has been great, Brandon. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I always enjoy talking with you. If folks want to learn more about you or kind of follow along on your journey, where can they— or learn more about your, your property management company, where can they do that?

Yeah, I don't, I don't make a huge effort towards creating a brand, a personal brand, or there's not an obvious way to follow me in that sense.

But yeah, anybody I mean, they could come with you on a hike across the Grand Canyon and get a lot of time to chat with you. But that's a bit of an investment.

That's true. That's a good way. If anyone wants to email me, brandon@keyrenterdenver.com. If you go to our website, keyrenterdenver.com, you can— I think you'll get a little pop-up to subscribe to our newsletter. If you want to see some of the marketing work we're doing there.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Brandon. This has been great. And have a good week. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Owner Occupied. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLohmann and subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, peterlohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week.