Deep Dive on how Peter Hires Leaders & RTMs + An Important Announcement

So by helping people build a powerful team and then giving them opportunities to step away for a little bit, see what breaks, and then coming back to the community where they can get help on like, hey, you know, I forgot that I'm the only one authorized to do payroll. How did you guys deal with adding a second signer or, you know, whatever? There's now a community of high-functioning, high-level property managers that can all chime in. And you know that these are trusted opinions, not just a random comment on Facebook that's like, well, I don't know if that person's good or not. I don't know.

Welcome to Season 4 of Peter Lohmann's Podcast. This podcast is a show about all things residential property management, from property operations to sales and marketing to growing and managing your team. I'm your host, Peter Lohmann, co-founder of RL Property Management. For season 4, I have an exciting new guest each week. We go deep into conversation about problems facing professional property managers and the best ways to overcome them. Thanks for listening. Now let's go. Welcome back to another episode of Peter Lohmann's Podcast. I don't know how I feel about the new name, by the way. So if you're listening, the show used to be called Owner Occupied. I switched the name to align the branding with the newsletter. Still getting used to it, but it's, it's starting to settle in. So today I have Wolfgang Kroski on the show. Wolf, welcome back.

Yes, thank you for having me. It's always good to be on this podcast. I love listening to the episodes and being part of that is, it's a lot of fun.

Cool. Well, I'm glad to have you back. You've been on the show once or twice before, and you and I have been, uh, busy over the last year. You know, we launched Crane about a year ago. And we may touch on that toward the end. But what I really wanted to get into with you today is a topic that is really important to me. And by the way, we're skipping all the intros and all the backgrounds. If you want to hear about Wolf, there's a million places you can find that out. So we're going to get right into the meat. So I want to talk about hiring. It's been really fresh on my mind. And by the way, this is going to be less of an interview-style episode and more of a discussion. So again, this will be a slightly different episode than what you're maybe normally used to hearing in the feed.

Or maybe I can interview you since you're the one that this is relevant to.

Yeah, we can do a little bit of that style for sure. So to set the stage, you know, you and I were chatting before the show about what, you know, what's top of mind for us right now. For me, it's hiring because I just placed 2 or 3 high-level folks in our organization. These are leadership team members who have direct reports and are super critical to the organization. So the sort of the process of hiring high-level talent executives is really fresh in my mind right now. And I've got some cool things to share about what I did differently this time around compared to when I placed a few executives at my company a couple years ago. And the other really fun thing about hiring that we get, we get to talk about today is hiring RTMs. So global talent. Frontline workers. These are the folks who are answering the phones, doing the back office stuff. Um, I think at least for me, I approach hiring those types of folks quite differently than I do leadership team members. And so I thought it would be fun for you and I to have a discussion all about hiring, interviewing, screening, onboarding, and how we do those things differently from each other, and also how we do those things differently for different types of team members. So let's jump into it. Where do you want to start?

Well, I know you talked about that you just recently hired some key positions in your company, and I think the biggest one is you just hired a second in command, a COO. And that's for those that aren't there yet that are dreaming of getting to that point of having a second command. Like, wow, he's, he's doesn't have it as a family member. You know, he's, he's hiring somebody out there. It's not a business partner. How did you get to the point where you knew, one, that you needed a COO? Let's start there and then we'll segue into what steps did you go through in making sure that you were ready to just put the job out there to post? Because I think it's easy to come up— I could ChatGPT a job description right now and just throw it out there, but it doesn't mean I'm necessarily ready for that person because what if somebody is a good fit right from the get-go? Now what am I supposed to do with them? Right. And I know onboarding a new team member, all companies have a process for that. But I think onboarding your number 2 is probably a little bit different process that we don't often talk about in our property management circle. So let's start with how did you know you needed one and then how did you get ready to hire them?

I didn't actually need one. So let me say that first and I'll to provide a little context, I hired our COO 2.5 years ago, Kathy, and she had a great run. She actually just moved into like semi-retirement. So that role came open again and I just placed a new person in that role. We actually changed the name to VP of Ops, but it's the same role. And so I've now hired for this role twice. Now back up 2.5 years ago when I first hired Kathy, I didn't actually need a number 2. I was getting along just fine and could have continued to do so. But the reason I decided to make that hire was to free up my time. I was at the point in my business, I had been owning and operating RL Property Management for about 10 years or coming up on 10 years, and I decided that I wanted to step back from the day-to-day a bit. I had some other projects that were picking up steam and it just felt right. It felt like this was the time to bring in someone who could really be over all of the day-to-day stuff. And what it really ended up doing for me after the first 6 months or so is that I was down to maybe like 5 to 10 hours a week dealing with anything having to do with RL Property Management, whether that's working on the business or in the business. So that was what it was for me. I think if I had stayed full-time with RL Property Management, 40 hours a week, I could have scaled up quite a bit further before needing to bring in that number 2. So for me, it was more of a decision that I decided to make. The company was big enough that we could sustain that salary. And so that's why I made that move. In terms of how we, you were talking about like the job description and how we prepared and onboarded. Yeah, that's really important. So everything starts with defining the role. And if you're on EOS, EOS correctly gives this a lot of focus. And the way they do this is through their accountability charts. So if you, if you haven't, I encourage you to build out an accountability chart for your company. It's different from an org chart. Accountability charts are focused on what is the work that's getting done and what's the role that's in charge of that work. It's less preoccupied with Specific names and specific job titles. The other different thing about an accountability chart is that the same name can appear multiple times throughout the accountability chart across different roles. So for example, even today at RL Property Management Group, there's a finance role, a finance function that's under our VP of Ops. It actually has my name on it because I'm still doing that, that one function, although I'm overseeing actually two different outsourced solution providers there, but at the end of the day, I still am accountable for the finance function. So start with, to begin to put together a job description, you need to have a really crystal clear understanding of what this person's going to be accountable for at your company. And you might be thinking to yourself, well, for the COO, I mean, they're just responsible for all operations. They're responsible for everything. They're my number 2. Just go make it work. I was like, okay, well, let me ask a few questions. Is this person responsible for growing the company? And by that, I mean, are they responsible for lead flow? Are they responsible for closing rate? Because that's like sales and marketing. That's your, that's your growth engine. Are you going to be mad at them if the company's not growing? And if so, like what marketing and sales resources are you giving them and what budget? Are you going to hold them accountable for the finance function? Are you going to have them hold them accountable for leasing, turns, lease renewals, like property onboarding, client onboarding? So, and the answer to a lot of those is probably yes, but you need to really outline all of that and be really clear. And that then everything's downstream of that, because that's going to define your job description. The job description is going to define the job posting, the job, you know, the actual listing on the job sites. And if you're working with a recruiter, which we'll probably talk about, it also affects that. And so that sort of definition of what they're accountable for and the specific function that they're going to be performing for your organization is the most important part, I think. And we're going to talk about the WHO method of hiring and how it fits into that. But I think that's the most important part of the whole thing.

Did you start prepping your team ahead of time? Like, hey, we're going to be bringing in a VP of Ops or COO so they would start to get comfortable with that situation? Or was it just, we hired this new person, they're a great fit, I like them, go bring your problems to them, leave me out of it. How was that? How did that transition? Because that's, I think, for this specific role is a little bit of a culture shift when everybody's gone to Peter for everything and for approvals and now it's there's somebody else kind of in that role and who's the quote unquote boss?

Yeah, so I definitely did prep them. You know, you really can't post a new job without sort of in secret because even if you're using a recruiter, it's going to be tied to your, your like company LinkedIn or Indeed or whatever. What you can hide, and I recommend you do hide, is like salary. So there's ways to get job listings up without the salary range. Definitely encourage that at a small company when you're hiring for leadership roles. So yes, I prepped them and I was like, and I was really honest with them and I said, hey, leadership team, I've been doing this coming up 10 years. I'm starting to get a little ragged around certain functions here. I don't know that I'm the best. I'm actually not sure that I'm the best person anymore for certain activities at the company. And I'm going to be looking for a number 2. Who's gonna sort of run things and I'm gonna step more into a visionary role. And they, they had read Traction, right? 'Cause we were on EOS. So I was explaining like, we're gonna be hiring an integrator. So they took that really well. And I think if someone had told me this years ago, which is that if you're a small business owner and you've got a, a great team who's worked for you for a while, they would love nothing more than to help you achieve time freedom. Believe it or not. They actually will love that for you because they've seen how hard you've worked and how much you've risked and how your nights and weekends and trying things and things don't work and you covered payroll that one time and like, they know that. Like, and they, they will be thrilled to be able to participate in a company decision or a company change that's going to help free you up. Uh, and that was true. Uh, and it surprised me because that sounded a little implausible, but actually it's true. So you can take comfort in that and report back. Let me know if you had that same experience. So yes, I prepared them and I was sort of explaining that I was going to be interviewing and eventually this person would be coming in and they'd be number 2 and these people would report to that person eventually. And yeah, it actually was all pretty smooth.

After you've hired the person and, you know, they've, they've joined the team, what were kind of those first First 7 days, first 30 days, what those look like?

Yeah, so this is getting to onboarding and training. Now, the higher level the role that you're hiring for, the less prescriptive you need to be with training and onboarding. The higher level of a person you're bringing in, the more they're going to take control. Like from the minute they start on their first day, instead of you having to like push things to them and sort of spoon-feed them and force-feed them, they're going to be clawing information out of you. They're going to be pounding down your door with questions. Hey, I need access to this. Hey, I need you to create a login so I can get this into Notion. Hey, I need— if they're not doing that, you've probably made a mistake. So it should feel easy and natural that this person is sort of self-onboarding. Now, you still need to do a lot of preparation and there's some things that you need to have set up so that when they start on their first day, you don't look like an idiot and you seem like you're prepared and you're ready to be fully invested in this. So like obviously getting them set up on payroll, getting their email set up, getting them a Slack login. Like there's some basics that you're going to need and want to have ready to go on that first morning. But unlike sort of like an assistant property manager role where you just need to have, you need to tell them everything because they don't know what they don't know. They don't know how to ask questions. They're scared. Like a leadership team member is, you know, you're ideally bringing someone in who's done this function before. And small businesses are kind of like chicken on the inside. They all sort of taste the same. So they're going to understand, okay, tell me a little. They're going to say things like, tell me how you guys get paid. How's that work? Right? And then that's going to launch a great 20-minute discussion that you're going to have with them and uncover the fact that you need to get them a QuickBooks login and all these other things are going to happen. And then like later that day, they're going to be like, okay, so like your existing customers, do they renew every year or is it a monthly thing? Or do you guys just let them— like, how does that all work? And that's going to launch a great discussion and then you're going to get them to log into your, you know, it's just going to go naturally. So I like to have sort of a rough outline of the topics I know we're going to hit over those first few weeks. I build that out in Notion and then we just, every day we'll spend a couple hours going over those topics and whatever other topics come up as we go. And the other thing is this leadership team member, they're going to know things like, oh, let me walk around and talk to all the team. Let me start to get to know these different people. Let me start to set up one-on-ones. Like, again, all of that is, should be happening without you having to invest much time and energy and thought into it. All that is different for an entry-level person. I'm talking specifically about leaders here, so.

And I wanted to tease that out because I think for those that have never hired somebody in that role, they would probably go down their normal onboarding route where it's, here's your login, here's this, I need you to watch these videos, I put together these classes. And because, well, that's how we onboard people, that's how I've always onboarded people, so I should do it the same. And it's not the case. So to ensure as best as possible that we're not hiring the wrong person for this very, very important role, because this person ultimately could sink your battleship, right? Like they're having day-to-day leadership responsibilities, they have access to information. I mean, like, life could get really bad, worse. A remote team member that's just doing lease renewals, for example, yep, they could put some egg on the company face and mess things up, but it's a, it's a quick switch. So you talked about the WHO method, and this is different than the book Who Not How, correct?

Correct. Yeah, there's two great books with the word who in them. One of them's Who Not How, and the other one is WHO, which is like a method for hiring.

So what, in 30 seconds or maybe a minute, what is the overall 10,000-foot view of the WHO method?

So the 10,000-foot view is that the author's contention is that if you follow this fairly prescriptive process for interviewing and hiring at your company, you'll have greater success than almost any other method. Or sort of ad hoc approach that you might take. And having used this method now for years in my company, I believe it's true. And the method specifically is a series of very prescribed interviews. It starts with a screening interview, which is about 10 minutes. You get on the phone with a person who you like the look of their resume, and you ask them a specific series of questions. You take notes. And then you grade the person like A, B, C, and if they're A, then they've made it to the next round. And if they're B or C, you discard and you tell them they weren't approved and you move on to the next. And then the next step of the process is like a multi-hour in-person interview where again, you're asking a prescribed series of questions throughout this whole thing and it's intentionally pretty long. To sort of tease out where it's like almost anyone can look great for 20 or 30 minutes during an interview, but after an hour and a half where you, you sort of start to get their guard down, they're getting a little more tired, they may slip up and you may start to see a little bit more of the true person emerge. And then it proceeds from there. There's another third interview if, if applicable. And then there's like a decision process. I want to talk about a couple themes from this. That are throughout the book. The first theme is you're looking for A-players, and they describe characteristics of A-players in the book. I think they do a great job. For example, one of the things they talk about is you want to look for people who are sort of pulled along from one job to another, where it's like they start this one company and then their boss left, and then 2 months later their boss recruited them, so they followed their boss, and then they were there for 4 years, and then Their brother-in-law, like, convinced them to join this other— like, you want to put together a story where you see this person is getting yanked along by people who are so desperate to have them come work for them versus someone who's just like bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing, no continuity, no story. Nobody was pulling them along. They may have actually kind of been pushed out. You can kind of read between the lines. So that's one example of like a characteristic of A players. Now, none of these are like make or break all on their own. So there's a lot more to it. Of course, another real theme with this book is just, it's like incredibly harsh grading. Like basically you, you look for any opportunity to eliminate someone from the process. Whereas I think a lot of other people or a lot of other approaches, your sort of natural human tendency is like, Well, I didn't really like this. I didn't really like this, but like, they're pretty good here. And like, I could see how that could probably work out. Like, we'll coach them up in this other areas. No, that's not for you. Trust me. You need to, if you are not like losing sleep over the fact that this candidate might not accept your offer, you don't have the right person. That's the level that you're looking for. So that's a theme through the book. And the beginning of the book, actually the most important part, which I kind of skipped over, is that before you even start any of those things, you put together this thing called a scorecard. So before, when I was talking about describing, defining the role and the accountability chart, this is all tied in with that. So the scorecard is basically what are they going to be responsible for and what are the outcomes you're looking for them to achieve within their first like 90 days on the job. And then after you interview each candidate, you grade them against the scorecard, how you think they would perform. And that's one of the things that goes into your decision on whether or not they advance to the next stage.

So just kind of a side note, do you think the WHO method, if legal, would work for screening tenants?

I think it probably would. You get to spend a lot less time with tenants.

Yeah.

Can you imagine if you had 2-hour interviews to see if you could let someone rent your apartment? Yeah, that probably would get flagged as a fair housing violation.

Yeah, but your delinquency rate probably would be zero, but you know. Yeah. Okay. So you and I, we, for Crane, we have a need that we're trying to fill for basically like a systems engineer to help with our members. And so you walk me through this scorecard component and I think the first time you do it, it can be kind of intimidating because most people, let's be honest, they just kind of, they fab up a job description, whether they actually wrote it themselves, they stole it from somewhere else, or they piece together things that they've seen on Indeed and they just kind of throw it out there. Maybe they give them a DISC assessment, but that's it, I think, for a lot of companies. And so you have to fill out this scorecard, which it really forces you to think about who the heck do I want to hire? What role? What functions are they going to serve?

What qualities are important for that role? Yeah.

So the first time you did this, How did that experience go?

Yeah, for me it felt pretty natural. I think I had been hiring for so many years and seen so many hires go bad that I was kind of hungry for something like this. It's sealed. When the student is ready, the master appears. But you're right, like it is, it is a surprising thing when the first time you do it and after it, you're afterward, it starts to seem kind of obvious. Like, oh yeah, of course that would make sense that you would like define the role and the qualities and the attributes of someone who's going to be successful in that role and all these other things. But you really nailed it. Like, I think most people, when they think about a vacancy at their company, they're just like, as fast as possible, just get something up on the listing websites and start interviewing candidates. It's very, at least for me, the way I was doing it, it was very like, it just, I felt like I needed to be busy with it and like I needed to be, just be doing things and I wasn't putting a lot of thought to it. It wasn't a priority for me. It was more like just like this problem that needed to be solved rather than an opportunity to bring in an A-player who was gonna like completely solve that part of the business forever.

I think people screen their software options better than they screen potential hires.

Yeah, you're right. Exactly. Yeah. So your example of where we're using the scorecard is great. We should talk about that a little bit more. So we just reopened Crane applications, by the way. So you and I are recording this on a Monday. I'm going to ideally get this out by Tuesday. For the next week, Crane applications are open. We only open them twice a year for about a week and a half. So Specifically, we're talking about some of the new member benefits, but what we're talking about here is you and I right now are hiring a systems integration expert, not to help us with the backend of CRANE, but to be available for our members. So every single CRANE member is going to have several hours per month, probably 4 to 8 hours per month with this person to come into their company and help them with their systems and process automation, with their workflows, with their Zapier, with their LeadSimple. We're going to train this person. You're going to train them actually, which is the best because you're an expert in this. Uh, also means I don't have to do anything. You're going to train them. And so all the fun stuff that you see Wolf and I talking about on webinars and in podcasts, we want more people to have access to some of this fun stuff, but we recognize that it just doesn't make sense for most people to hire like a full-time systems engineer for that. So we're going to hire the systems engineer ourselves and just make that person available to our members. This is one of the new benefits that I'm most excited about.

Yeah, it's, it's revolutionary in a lot of ways. And what's cool about it is we went through— we're going through a service to help us find this team member, but we gave them this information as part of the, the Who Hiring method so that they could do a better job at those initial interviews and the screening and finding them. And I will say that it is working. We've gone through a couple candidates that didn't quite, you know, float our boat, but you can tell and you can see the influence that this methodology is placed on Sagan, who's helping us find this person. You can definitely see the difference.

Yep. So the last thing I'll mention about about hiring for these high-level roles, executive talent, leadership team members, whatever you want to call it. For the first time recently, I should say for the last few hires I just made in this year, I made 3 leadership hires this year. For all 3 of those, for the first time ever, I used a recruiter. And if you've never used a recruiter before, I don't blame you. Because I didn't for 11 years and thought it was a waste of money. And you know, what, what the hell's the difference? I can get a job posting up on LinkedIn too. So that, that could be true for a lot of recruiters, but if you find a great recruiter, and this isn't like an advertisement for him, if you're interested in who I use, I'm happy to share if you message me, but the difference with working with a great recruiter and a mediocre or a poor recruiter seems to me is like night and day. This guy went and found all these candidates for these leadership roles who were not looking for a job. Most of his candidates that he put in front of me did not apply for the role. He went and found them, messaged them, explained the opportunity, and said, would you be interested in having a conversation about this? So these are like, if you picture the world of available candidates of people who are looking for a job, most of those people you really don't want. There's a reason they don't have a job. Most people who are really great A-players have a job. And so it really broadens the surface area of A-players that you're going to get in touch with if you work with a recruiter who spends half their time cold messaging these people across many platforms. Now, could you do that? Yeah, of course you could, but you don't have time. You're a business owner, you're a business operator. You don't have time to be spending 4 hours a day on recruiting. And so the value of a recruiter is not only the level of talent they're going to be putting in front of you, but also just the raw time savings.

So also the skill, because, okay, I think I get— understand how they're doing it, but yet how do you do it? Right. So they're doing LinkedIn and they're doing some type of reverse search and So there's a skill set there that most people don't have. There's the time in it. I mean, there's just, and they basically take a percent of the salary is how their fee structure works. Yeah. So if they, you don't hire somebody, then they don't get paid. So it's in their best interest to find great candidates for you. So that's a win-win as well.

Exactly. Okay, great. So I think that's a lot. That's plenty on hiring for leadership roles. Let's talk about the other end of the spectrum. Which is hiring for frontlines folks. These are people actually doing the work. Profit Coach would refer to these people as direct labor in terms of your direct labor efficiency ratio. Now, obviously a big trend lately is— not lately, it's actually been like 10 years in our industry— remote team members, RTMs, global talent, whatever you want to call it. Tell me, Wolf, like how, when did you make your first RTM hire and like how's it been going for you overall?

So I remember our first one because it was crappy and that's because of me, not because of them. And so it was probably about 8 years ago. This was hearing about this, you know, hire people in the Philippines, you know, a dollar an hour, life's going to be great. And it's like, okay, well, try it.

It was a dollar an hour back then?

I don't think it was, but it was like 2 or 3. I mean, it was, it was very low and they basically work overnight and then you wake up in the morning and things are magically done. And I realized that I just took for granted that people should know how to do certain things. And so I did not give good directions. I didn't have great documentation for our processes. A lot was still in my head and that frustrated me. And it's like, well, clearly it's their fault, not my fault. Attended, might've been a NARPM conference, I don't remember, but attended a class that talked about remote team members and what you need to do to be a good boss. And that's where the light hit me that it was my fault. You know, I just, hey, go do X, Y, and Z, but I never really gave directions. I didn't show them what success looks like. I didn't say how long it should take or, you know, all those things. And so I was, I was that typical. Employer that's just hiring talent and not really setting them up for success. And so every single hire after that has gotten better and better and better. So we just recently hired Paulina. She's in Mexico. And I think we hit it out of the park because we had not only a playbook for her of, you know, job description, what does success look like, what needs to be done every day before she clocks out, but then we built in our onboarding process, with training and, you know, had a schedule laid out of what you'll be doing and didn't try to cram too much in one day. Because I learned before, I was trying to cram, like, who sits and learns for 6 hours straight in a day? Like, that's, I wouldn't do that. Like, maybe an hour. So we did a little bit in the morning and then the rest was put it to practice and then a lot more check-ins than normal. And so we had a good 10 days of that and It's great. And so I was a better boss, but I also knew the process better. I knew what I wanted, knew what to look for. We hired direct. We didn't go through a service because you have those enough experiences that you kind of know how, how to do it. So definitely the first couple of times that you hire remote team members, I would definitely use a service. There's some really good ones out in our industry. Because, well, like, how do I pay these people? I don't give them a check. They're in a different country. What are the laws? What are the expectations? Some countries, they have their 13th month. You got to pay them during Christmas time that if you don't know about, your team member won't remind you because they don't want to be rude. They just hold a grudge against you until one day they quit and you're like, well, what happened? You never paid me my 13th month. Oh, I didn't even know that was a thing. Right? Learning all those nuances. But after you learn, you'll, it's definitely something that you can do on your own and build a process. We have a whole, from the job application form goes through LeadSimple and has all the steps as we move them along and works really well. But the, the big difference is you don't have somebody asking you all these questions about, well, how do I do this? When do we do that? They will just usually sit there politely and wait for directions. And if you don't provide that, you can only be mad at yourself.

So that was great. There's a couple of things I pulled out of that. One, the more you built up around systems and processes for this role and for the overall process of working with RTMs, the more success you had. And I want to draw a direct contrast to the leadership hires I was talking about earlier. There's big differences there, right? There's differences in seniority, but there's also difference in being co-located with that person. So my leadership hires are in office, you know, they're overhearing water cooler conversations. Literally, they are chatting with the front desk person when they walk in. They are getting lunch with people. They're getting coffee with people. They're going on a walk around the building with people. Like, they're picking up context constantly. Everything from like how many phone calls they're overhearing to just like all of the little side conversations that happen. You got to remember when someone's remote, they're not getting any of that. And so you need to overload them with context as to what's going on with this company, with their role, with their department, et cetera. So there's a lot of differences between how I think about executive hires and RTMs, which we're going to talk about. That's one of them. Another one really is that I think, so you talk, you heard me explain my big philosophy about hiring for leadership roles and A-players only and rigorous interview process and all this. I bring a complete opposite approach to working with RTMs. I think it's helpful to think of these as very low-stakes hires for a number of different reasons. One, they're contractors. They're not W-2 employees. And so all of the overhead that comes with a W-2 employee, both figuratively and literally, is not present. You don't have risk of unemployment claims. You don't have this intense, like, payroll onboarding process that you do with the W-2 employee. They're not getting enrolled in your healthcare. They're not getting enrolled in your 401(k). You know, there's just like all of these sort of messy parts about it that are not applicable because they're contractor status. So that's huge. Now I encourage you to think of them as full, full-on team members the way you do your W-2 team members, like from a cultural perspective. But the fact of the matter is that they are contractors. And so that's helpful as a business owner. To frame it as a low-stakes hire. And by that I mean, don't agonize so much on the front end over getting an A-player for every RTM. Just hire some people, right? Hire 2 at a time. Like, the value is so high that you can afford to do that. And if a few of them don't work out, that's okay. Just hire the next one and learn from your mistakes because not every one of them is going to be awesome. So, you know, you run into these people at conferences, oh yeah, I tried hiring a VA once, it didn't work out. Well, first of all, stop calling them VAs. And second of all, you may have just had bad luck. Just try again.

So— Or you're just a bad employer and didn't really have— you were trying to manage this team member via text message, right? And just doesn't work.

Yep. So that's a couple of my tips on hiring global talent. Let's talk about the mechanisms you mentioned, like direct hire versus agency. And there's a couple different types of agencies. There's a kind where you pay a flat fee up front, then there's another kind where you're sort of— they're employed through the agency and you're paying like an ongoing percentage of their salary every month, right? Mm-hmm.

I think most people are familiar with the two types where it's, I go to Company X, the team member that is assigned to me is an employee of Company X. And I pay company X $10 an hour. Of that, some of it goes, stays with the company. The rest goes as salary to that team member. That team member quits or whatever. They slap in another person in that role. And I don't really have total control. But what I do gain is I'm usually up and running a lot quicker. The process of getting, you somebody quote unquote hired is faster. You have this pool of resources. They may do training. Like, for example, we use a company that does third-party bookkeeping and they do monthly trainings for their team members on AppFolio, which I wouldn't have to do. And so there's huge benefits to going through a company like that. The downside is 100% of that salary is not going to that person. Because that company is filling a role that you don't have to fill. The other one would be more like a headhunting company where they scour the, literally the globe and try to find candidates. They do some pre-screening, some testing, verify internet speed, you know, English ability, all those things. They then present to you in one form or another, 3 candidates that you get the final interview. You make your decision, then there's some type of a handoff process where they will get them in contact with you so you can then do your hiring, and then you pay that company a fee, usually ahead of time for that service. Direct hires where you're out on Facebook, you know, work from home Nicaragua or any of these groups, and there's people out there and you're, you're just doing it cold turkey and you're screening resumes, you're doing all the interviews, you're doing all the testing, et cetera. All three of those methods have some pluses and minuses. But if I were, if I were to start right now, I've never had a team member who is not present in the office. You know, they're remote. I would probably go through the first method where it's the company's employee and then they're just contracting with you. It will help you develop your systems and processes to be a better employer. And then I would graduate to either using a fulfillment company or direct hire. There is a hybrid VPM solutions where basically they are providing like, think of Indeed. It's a whole really cool dashboard where remote team members put in their resumes. They can take classes and earn certifications and then you can filter by all these variables. You then can say, okay, I put my job posting, people apply. And they have kind of a quasi-digital matchmaking service, and then they will help you with paying your team members. So a lot of options out there when it comes to remote team members, but the long and short of it is you have to have documentation on how to do that job. You need to have expectations. You need to have all this stuff in place. You can't just assume like, oh, This person should know how to do a lease renewal, right? Like they say they've done it, they should not do a lease renewal. They should know how to collect rent. They should know how to coordinate maintenance. It just, it doesn't work that way. You have cultural differences. You have very much so things getting lost in translation, even though they are very proficient in English, it's not their primary language. And so some things don't, you know, translate. You also have especially when it comes to maintenance, you have somebody coordinating maintenance and talking about features of a house that they may have never seen in their whole life because that's not their standard of living. So having great documentation is critical for their success. Now, does that mean you need to do all of that? No, they can help you. But there's got to be a mechanism and way where you can build documentation on how to do different steps in a process, a knowledge base, whatever, but that has to be done because otherwise you're going to have this revolving door and you're going to keep blaming them and not yourself.

Got it. So Wolf, if you were to share some of the best practices that you just articulated of your documentation around this, your onboarding process, some of your best practices, where would you be able to go and share that with a broader community of property managers?

So we have inside of Crane right now, we are sharing those resources to our Crane members. I've shared my hiring process and then we both have shared stuff from our Notion. I lean heavily on Notion to fulfill our knowledge base, especially with the AI component. So we've given free access shared that. And quite frankly, a lot of our members have shared the information that they use, job descriptions, et cetera, inside of Crane. So we have this whole community sharing best practices. We have a specific area just for job descriptions and hiring to, to help people.

Love it. Great segue, Wolf. All right, so we are gonna talk about Crane here for a minute for two different reasons. One, we just had the one-year anniversary of Crane, so I wanna share an update with my audience on First of all, what is this thing if you never heard of it? Second of all, how's it going? Did anyone even sign up after we launched it?

Oh yes, they did.

Yeah. And then also we just, I mentioned at the top of the show, we reopened applications and we added a bunch of benefits. Two of those benefits have directly to do with hiring remote team members and they're actually so good. I can't even believe that we're offering it. So first, before we sort of tease that, before we get to that. It's been a year, Wolf, a year that we've been up to this. Actually, you and I were planning long before that, but it's been a year of members being active inside Crane. How many members are we at today? What's going on with the community? Is anyone even posting in there? Does anyone show up to our events? Like, is this thing working? What's going on with it?

It very much is working. So when we started this, it started with, well, maybe we should start a YouTube channel and share like tech practices. And then we—

Yeah, it evolved quite a bit from that.

Yeah, but no, there's, there's a greater need. You know, there's a need for high-performing property managers wanting to surround themselves with other high-performing property managers. So we opened up our application and literally we had no idea if we're going to be the laughingstock of the industry or what, but we did it and we had about 30 people join right off that first crack and we're like, holy cow, this is cool. And so then we started. And our members gave us great feedback on what they're looking for because, okay, a property management community, what is that, right? You know, that could be a lot of things. So we just— that feedback we took and we implemented, we took and we implemented. I mean, some of it same day.

Yeah. And when you say, when you say what is a Facebook community, that could be anything. Let me just pause on that for a second because that is a very accurate statement. If you've been part of the property management industry or even other industries, you're aware that there's a bunch of groups trying to cultivate, quote, community. And that is literally everything from a free Facebook group that lets anyone and everyone in to a high-end coaching mastermind, sell you the world for literally like $30,000 a year is some of these things cost. There's some in other industries that I'm aware of too. And so you and I, set out to figure out what do we want this to be? First of all, who's it for and what's valuable to them? And how do we price this in such a way that we are demonstrating, like members are demonstrating a level of commitment and success, but at the same time, it's like they're getting 10 times the value of what they're paying. And it's not like one of these, take out a second mortgage and sell you a course type things.

Yeah, there's no, no walking on the coals in Crane. We're, we're very, very practical and we want to make sure that the value given is just above and beyond the top because both, both Peter and I obviously are still have management companies and that's, you know, that's what we do. So we tighten things up. We then had our second round of applications and we got another 30+ people that joined. So As right now, well, it's grown a little bit because we already have onboarded new people. But before we open up the application window, we were at 64. We then have opened up the application window and we've already have 34 applications turned in within the first 48 hours, business hours. And we've already admitted some of those into the community. We go through each one of them and make sure that they're going to be a good fit because for us, Crane is about helping our property management peers, entrepreneurs obtain freedom of time. So we do a thing called Crane Breaks where you can either do 1 week, 2 week, or 4 week. And everything that we're doing inside of Crane is to help you get to the point where you can really detach, not work remotely, not work from your cell phone while you're watching your kid's baseball game. But I mean, like, detach. And we have different pins to denote what, what break that you'd be able to accomplish. But we've added even more value because we realized that there's two things needed for people to be able to detach. They got to have a solid team and then they have to have practice. So we have our crane dinners, which our goal is every member to at least be able to attend two per year. And they are throughout the US. And we're gonna have to go to Canada, Peter, because we have, we have a lot of, a lot of members coming from up north. So Those are your traditional kind of mastermind dinner. It's overnight. Usually it's going to be like a Friday night into Saturday. We want people to go to those. That's practice because you're going to have to leave your company. We then also have another practice where it's going to be an annual retreat where there's probably going to be no cell phone reception and we're going to do some, some type of an adventure. Again, forcing you away from your company. We then— you got to have a solid team. And this is where the remote team member component comes in because we've worked with a company, Sagan, and they are helping us to staff 3 things, 2 talent pools where every month we're bringing 10 candidates that our members can select from. We're putting their, their picture, their resume, their introductory video right inside of our online community. And people say, oh, I want to, I want to talk to that person. If it's a fit, they hire them. It's all included in their membership. And then we have a discounted white glove service where if you're looking for a VP of operations or an accountant or some higher level service, they will help you, but they will work with you one-on-one, customize the path and get that person hired. We then have several, you know, these conferences that we all go to. We decided, well, we should have some experiences with those. So broker-owner last year, we rented a cruise ship and we cruised around Amelia Island for NARPM National. We're doing something in Dallas that I'm really looking forward to. And then some of these other conferences, we're actually setting up a crane check-in line. So think of like CLEAR at the airport, but only for crane members. I actually bought red carpet. It arrived yesterday. So we'll have red carpet, a crane flag, and just doing a lot to really spotlight our members and to make them feel like they are part of this community. Because a lot of what we do takes place online, but there needs to be a good face-to-face component. So by helping people build a powerful team and then giving them opportunities to step away for a little bit, see what breaks, and then coming back to the community where they can get help on like, hey, you know, I forgot that I'm the only one authorized to do payroll. How did you guys deal with adding a second signer? Or you know, whatever, there's now a community of high-functioning, high-level property managers that can all chime in. And you know that these are trusted opinions, not just a random comment on Facebook that's like, well, I don't know if that person's good or not. I don't know.

So yeah, so a couple of points of clarity here. One, you have to have 100 doors minimum to join. And so the part of the application process is, you know, we verify your door count and some other factors. The other point is Wolf and I are personally reviewing and approving every single application that comes through. So these truly are handpicked individuals that we believe are going to be holding up the values of our fellow members. So this is not just anyone with a credit card gets in. It is quite a selective process, actually. A couple of things I wanted to highlight. You did a great job explaining all that. You mentioned that a couple things you need in place for a crane break is you need some great people. You also need practice. Well, the other thing you really need to have in place is great systems. And of course, you know, Wolf and I weren't going to get off the mic without talking about systems and processes a little bit. Nope. And how it's relevant here is, and this is a new thing that we're just announcing, Crane members are getting access to my Notion. And if you've seen the video or you've heard me talk about my Notion build out before, you know, I've been selling this thing retail for thousands of dollars and I've sold dozens of copies of this, because people just, they see the value of what we've built up there over years. And I kind of negotiated a licensing deal with Crane, and we're making that available to all Crane members, the full 2024 updated version of my Notion, which has never been sold, never been available before. So really excited to get that. I'm putting the final touches on it right now. We're going to upload it to the community probably by the end of this week or early next week to make available for all members. So you can just literally duplicate it and then either use that as a template in your company if you've been trying to do a Notion build out, or if you already have a Notion built out, you can go in there and grab pieces and parts of it that are relevant for you and just duplicate them right into your Notion. So hyped about that. All of these new member benefits that we're just announcing are live just over the last week or so in conjunction with both our application window reopening as well as the 1-year anniversary of Crane. And right now you and I are watching the member renewal rate kind of jump around as we're seeing members either pay their renewal for the next year or drop off. And we're seeing that the renewal rate is going to end somewhere in the like high 80s to low 90s percentage from what I've been seeing in the data there. So that to me just reiterates that the value is here for our members and we're only adding to that value over time. So I'm calling Crane a big win. I'm loving the value that members are getting. There's tons of testimonials inside Crane of people who are just loving it. They're connecting with other members. They're using the resources that we're uploading. I honestly think you and I, Wolf, have done a horrible job of marketing it. Like, there's so much good stuff happening in there that I want to just like blast out on social media every minute. But I'm sensitive. I don't want to like fatigue everybody with you know, marketing nice things. Yeah. But if you're interested in seeing some of the behind the scenes, just reach out to either one of us. We'd be happy to kind of give you a tour with a screen share or just talk to you about, you know, what's involved with membership. Anything else we wanna say about Crane? Yeah.

So, you know, a lot of the quote unquote things out there for PMs usually have a vendor component. And so Crane, we looked we spent a year because this is something that we actually put on our to-do list right from the get-go, but we just didn't really, we didn't have the answer yet is how vendors. And so we actually, one, we don't call them vendors, they're our partners because we tell them one, we hand-selected our 6. They're not allowed to sell.

Yeah, we went a year with no vendor partners with because we really wanted to let the community find its feet and just have a year to congeal and figure out what even is this thing going to be before we start introducing like another type of membership. And so, yeah, so just recently here, we, as part of the, the, the application window opening and all these new member benefits, we're bringing in, just like you said, Crane partners, hand-selected.

Yeah. And these, and we're, this isn't just like a salesperson from a company. These are the founders and owners of some of these companies.

Yeah, they're actually not the salespeople. They're like the CEOs and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Who have joined. Yeah.

And what's cool about that is now you can build a relationship, you know, with the owners of these companies and not just because like, oh, well, if I ever need tech support, I'm going to like bypass the line. That may be a side benefit, but really Each of these individuals has a wealth of knowledge from their own experience in life that they now get to bring that is usually outside of PM. So, you know, fundraising, how to go after investors, how to do sales, how to do customer appreciation, how to do customer success, all these different things that PMs, we're all operating under the same, in the same bubble. We now get to blow that bubble up and pull from all these different areas. And that's huge because, you know, I go to a NARPAM event or even inside a crane, I ask people, everybody's gonna, it's not myopic, but it is PM centered because that's who we are. But now we have somebody that has a SaaS company and they're like, well, you know, actually you should do it this way. And it's like, wow, I never thought of that. You know, so we have that knowledge. We have the ability to create relationships. We have the ability to influence product because they're going to see like these are high performing. I mean, we're not talking just because our minimum is 1,000 doors. We have people in our company or in Crane that are over 5,000 doors, 1,000 doors, 2,000 doors. So high performing companies that now can give opinions and thoughts about some of these services that we all use and help drive it to make it better. So it is It's really exciting that this is taking place, and I'm really happy that we waited the year to really flesh out how we wanted to work with these companies, because by them being partners, it's great. They're, they're inside our community. They're having back and forth dialogue with members about whatever. Right. And it's, it's pretty awesome to see it.

Yeah. Let's give them a shout out because I do want to thank our Crane partners for helping elevate the Crane experience. So again, these were really hand-selected by Wolf and I. This was not just like a take the highest bidder situation. So Appfolio, Blanket, LeadSimple, Profit Coach, PropertyMeld, RentScale, and SecondNature. I think that was alphabetical order there. I want to thank all those Crane partners very much for, for partnering with Crane and our members to help take everything to the next level. All right, Wolf. I think that was a great episode, led off by delivering value around hiring, shared exciting updates with Crane. I think we're ready to end it here. Anything else we want to touch on today?

No, I think that's it.

All right. Thanks everybody. If you got questions about Crane, you can go to joincrane.co, joincrane.co to learn more and apply. The deadline, if you're listening to this in the month of September 2024, the deadline to apply is Wednesday, September 25th. So get your application in by then if you want to be considered for membership. We are not going to be reopening applications again until well into 2025. So have a great week, everybody. 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.