How to Become a Trusted Voice: Building Influence with Peers and Teams | From MX Summit 2025

Peter is the co-founder and CEO of RL Property Management, a residential property management company located in Columbus, Ohio. RL manages over 650 units, and together with his business partner, Peter also owns a handful of rental units as well as a small engineering company. Peter received his bachelor's in electrical engineering Shocker. And once I got to know Peter, it was like, oh, it's a lot like Ray. These engineers, they're all the same, right? And he spent 5 years in the control system engineering industry full-time before founding RL Property Management in 2013. He has developed a following for his property management process and systems expertise, including 21,000 followers on Twitter 17,000 email newsletter subscribers. He loves helping other property management companies succeed with systems and co-founded a private community for PM owners called Crane. Peter also hosts a property management podcast. Please help me welcome to the stage your next presenter, Peter Lohmann.

All right, welcome everybody. It's always tough going right after lunch, but we're gonna jump right into it. I'm thrilled to be here today speaking with all of you about how you can build influence with your peers and with your team. I'm just— I got a great introduction there, so I won't spend too much time on this. As mentioned, I own a property management company in Columbus, Ohio. We manage over 700 doors, and I've been in and around property management in the broader industry around 4 years ago and kind of poked my head up above water and decided to see if I can make an impact in the broader industry. And so over the course of those 4 years, I've been involved in a newsletter, a podcast, speaking, co-founding Crane, and just generally immersing myself in the property management world. So I live and breathe property management. It's what I think about. It's what I just am hugely passionate about. So you're here to learn about building influence, and just to give you a little bit of social proof, got some screenshots of some of my social accounts to give you a sense of my reach within the industry. As discussed, I've got about over 20,000 Twitter followers. We actually just hit 20,000 newsletter subscribers on the Property Management Newsletter, which goes out every Friday morning. And I recently started increasing my activity on LinkedIn. In the last 30 days, I've had over 230,000 impressions across all of my posts on LinkedIn. And I say that not to brag, but just to show you that this is something I've been working at for a while, and hopefully you would agree I've got some worthwhile thoughts on these topics. So 4 years ago, I was nobody. Um, you wouldn't have recognized me or known my name had you run into me at a conference, other than just a very select few of you. If you fast forward to today, um, this picture I'm really proud of. This is from an industry event with our crane community. We flew— our members flew from all over the country to have a meetup with us in Denver, and we spent a day and a half with these great fine folks who are leaders in the industry. And this picture is really meaningful for me because it shows that if you really kind of follow some of the things I'm going to talk about and stick with it, You can achieve a level of influence that people are willing to fly to hang out with something you created or hang out with people that are involved with you. And that's— for me, that's been deeply meaningful because it's having to do with property management, which is something I'm passionate about. But at heart, I'm still just an ops guy. And I'm just a nerdy property manager with an engineering degree. Who hung around the industry for long enough to figure a few things out, started sharing those things, found my voice, and that's really kind of the origin or the background. And I love this meme that I made a couple weeks ago. I'm definitely the ops team from this picture, and I do enjoy, you know, getting out and being involved with the broader industry, but I also have a deep passion for operations and I know a lot of you here are deeply integrated to the operations of your property management companies. Okay, so what are we gonna talk about today? We're gonna go through 3 main areas that I want you to think about as you're deciding how to achieve a level of influence or trust with either your peers in maybe the broader community or with your team if you're thinking about this through the lens of leading a team or starting to build influence within the company that you work at. I think as I thought through this presentation, both of those lenses are valid for what I'm going to be talking about. So you don't necessarily need to have a goal of becoming a quote influencer. Far from it. The things I'm going to discuss today are, are really useful regardless of who you're trying to communicate with. Whether that's your team, your company, or your community. And of course, if you're speaking with a broader industry as well. So actually, let me go back here. So we're going to talk about mindset first, because if you don't have your head right around this, it's going to be much harder. Then we're going to talk about the actions that you need to take. I'm going to give you some specific concrete steps you can take as you're trying to build influence and build trust. Now we're gonna talk about content. I'm not gonna be giving you content ideas, but I'm gonna be giving you ways to think about content, and ways to think about what are the types of things, and how should you talk about those things as you are working on building trust. So let's start with mindset. I really wanna get this through to everyone who's in this room today. You are worthy of being heard. And that sounds like something really basic or simple, but when I talk with other people and they start asking me questions about how— why do I see your name everywhere, and why is it that you are like a leader in this industry? And I start asking them questions about what they're doing or not doing along those lines. Sometimes I'll hear them bring up an objection of like, oh, I don't really have anything worth saying, or I just— I'm not smart I'm not smart like you, or I don't have any insights. And I believe that is false. I believe every single person brings with them unique insights, unique experiences, unique deep areas of expertise, and a lot of times those things overlap in really interesting and novel ways that the world needs to hear from you about. So if you don't believe you have anything worth sharing, or you don't believe you've done anything interesting, it's gonna be hard to convince others of that. So the first step is to really get comfortable and get confident in your own experiences and your own background so that you can step forward with confidence, um, in terms of building influence and building trust. And so I, I, I really believe like anyone you speak with has an interesting point of view or a different idea and you can learn something from them. And that's true for you as well. I really want to get that through to you because if you can internalize this idea, you're going to find it much easier to come up with content and be comfortable sharing the very interesting and novel ideas that you have. The other thing to understand here is that the people who actually matter will take you seriously. You don't need to appeal to everybody when you are starting to share content or starting to tell your story. It's completely fine and normal that the majority of people may tune you out, especially at first, and that's not— it doesn't mean you're doing something wrong and it's not a reflection on your value. It's just how this works, and the people who naturally resonate on your frequency will find you and will flock toward what you're sharing.

And that—

but that takes time, and it takes— you have to get started in order for that to start to snowball and bear fruit. So the next thing with mindset is you really need to understand your audience. The folks that you're gonna be speaking to, it helps if you can get a really specific, clear picture of who they are in your mind. And my friend Adam Lehman spoke 4 words to me, 5 words to me, about 12 years ago that I've never forgotten and really has guided a lot of my professional life and what I've decided to become involved in. And it's also very relevant here. He said, who do you want to serve? Who do you want to serve? The specific words that he used there have just been burned into my brain and have helped me choose who I engage with, what companies I start, and who the customers of those companies are going to be. And if you can get clear in your own head of who you want to serve, it will help you clarify what your message is going to be, how your voice is going to come across, and who you're gonna be speaking with. And I really encourage you to think about who would you be comfortable serving for the next 10 years. And that's the group that you wanna orient your messaging and your content and your businesses around. It's a very, very powerful concept. The other trick I like here is when you start thinking about how do I build influence, how do I find my voice, If you get specific about who you want to serve, that's the first step. The next step is think about a specific person. When I am, especially when I was really active on Twitter, a lot of my best tweets would be things I would have texted my business partner. That specific tone and level of insight really worked well in that sort of text-based social platform, and there's something about when you are communicating with another specific person in your life, especially someone you know well, there's a way that you communicate with them that is compelling, and it is succinct, and it makes assumptions about a shared level of knowledge that when you— it's not something that you would intuitively share with a broader audience, but it turns out when you do, it works really well and the people who are meant to hear what you have to say are gonna tune in right away. So this is a really powerful thing that I still use today is I'll think about a specific person in my mind and I'll create content as if I'm emailing that person or texting that person or creating a Loom video for that person. The last thing to understand here and more of a tactical item is where are these people hanging out? What platforms are they hanging out on, or where physically are they hanging out in your city if you're building more of a local, um, trying to build your influence locally. Alright, next thing on mindset is your presence and attitude. I still believe that the way you come across matters, from the way you dress to the way you speak, and specifically with your attitude. Earlier in life, I was a bit of a whiner and a complainer, and it still comes out from time to time, but I've worked hard to eliminate that as much as I can, especially when I'm speaking in a public way. Not, of course, not on stage, but in a social network or at work or at a conference in the hallways. I try to eliminate negative thinking and negative speaking. Even though that was kind of a deeply ingrained habit for me, because no one wants to follow a whiner. So if you're trying to build influence, you want to be a positive person, because those are the types of people that others want to be around. And it's kind of one of those basic things, probably something your mom told you, but I find it's highly relevant here. Some of you know, if you— especially if you've read How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is an awesome book. I read that book around the same time that I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. I highly recommend both of those books. You know, if you've read that book, that one of the best ways to make people like you is just ask them questions about themselves. If you spend 30 minutes talking to somebody and all you do is ask them intelligent, active listening-based questions about them, they will walk away from that conversation saying, That was one of the best conversations I've ever had. That person is fascinating, even though you hardly spoke at all. It's because you were taking an interest in them. And this applies at a lot of different levels, not just in a one-to-one conversation, but you should cultivate a habit of being focused on other people and how you can solve their problems or speak to their issues if you're looking to build influence and become a trusted advisor or a trusted source. Confidence is also really important here. This kind of goes back to what I said at the beginning, but if you are not confident in what you believe and in the way you carry yourself, other people are gonna have a hard time deciding to follow you or learn from you. And there's a lot of great books written and great talks you can watch about how to develop your own self-confidence, but If that's a blocker, that's something I would definitely start with. I love this quote here at the end: "There's always time to behave courteously and treat people with respect." That is something that I have to remind myself of from time to time. Okay, so we've talked about mindset. So once you have the right mindset around building influence and becoming a trusted source, what are some of the actions you should take? In order to build trust and influence, You need to be remembered. If someone doesn't remember who you are, they're not going to— you're obviously not going to become a trusted source. But in order to be remembered, you need to actually be seen. And I know this is the part that a lot of folks can get uncomfortable with, and I'm going to give you some strategies on how you can get comfortable with it. But I need to emphasize for a moment that you do need to put yourself out there if you are hoping to build any type of trust or influence within a broader set of humans. And I got some screenshots here kind of showing the different areas that I show up. You don't need to become a professional influencer here, but what you do need to do is pick a couple online or offline areas where you are comfortable and where you feel that it's easy to show up in, and do that. And find the norms of those platforms or those environments, and get involved, and talk to other people, and start sharing content. I don't encourage folks to try to tackle multiple platforms at the same time, if we're speaking about online platforms. If you are not currently active on any social media platforms, do not try to start posting on Facebook and LinkedIn and making videos on TikTok all at the same time. Pick one of those that feels the most natural for you in the format that feels most natural for you and go hard on that for a while. And you will know when it is then time to move to your second platform. So for example, I'm really comfortable with text. You may know that from my newsletter. And so I got started on Twitter because Twitter is a text-based medium. LinkedIn is also a text-based medium, but there's also— you can do video, right? You can create Shorts, or you can do long-form video on YouTube. And there's, there's a number of different mediums and platforms that all have their own unique flavor and style, and I really encourage you to try out a few of them or spend some time around a few of them and find the one that feels most at home for you and go all in on that. Once you do that, it's time to build a habit. You are not going to be remembered if you don't show up consistently. We all know that person, whether it's an old boss or a friend of yours who picked some wild new direction made an announcement about it, and 3 weeks later you never saw or heard another thing about it. That is not a way to build influence. People follow people who say what they're going to do, then do it, and then talk about how they did it. Consistency and follow-through is extremely important here if you're going to be someone who others take seriously and look to for advice. The example on the screenshot here on the screen is from my newsletter, and I share it here because you can see that the subject line has stayed consistent for 4 years now. It literally just says, "Peter Lohmann's Newsletter Issue Number X." I've never varied that subject line because there was no reason to. And because hilariously, some of my open rates are some of the best in the industry. And if you read all of the people who talk about newsletters, they spend so much time obsessing over subject lines and so much time obsessing over A/B testing different subject lines and all of the— they spend so much time on that. And I said from the beginning, I'm just going to ignore all that. And I used the default subject line that came with the first newsletter platform that I was using, and I've never changed it, and it works fine. Because the people who open my newsletter aren't doing it because of the subject line, they're doing it because of the author. They know who I am, they know what I'm about, and they know what they're gonna get when they open a newsletter from me. And that consistency over 4 years is why 20,000 people read that newsletter every Friday. So, if you're going to build— if you want to become a center of influence, you need to be known as someone who's consistent and reliable. Okay, next on actions, this is one of my favorite topics. You need to cultivate in yourself a way of speaking about situations and problems that is different from how most people talk about things. Most people, when they're speaking with others at work or at home, they use a very stream-of-consciousness way of talking, and they tend to not put a lot of context or background into what they're saying. And so if you're just talking with your friend, you're just going back and forth, and that's— there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that's appropriate for 95% of situations. But when you are looking to build influence, you want to be the person who ties everything together. And the way to do this is really, you want to— if you're not familiar with this concept of first principles thinking, it's really important here. And you can Google that phrase. There's a lot of good books and articles you can read about the idea of first principles thinking. But it's a way of explaining things from a broader perspective or from the fundamental forces that are driving the actions or the behaviors that are in question. So for example, if you're talking with your team about lease renewal rates being down, most people would say, yeah, and last week, you know, I was trying to get a hold of this tenant and then the email wouldn't go through. You know, they're getting very tactical and they're giving a specific example of what's happening with lease renewals. You wanna be the person who shows up to that meeting not talking about Susie at 123 Main Street and how the email didn't go through. You wanna be the person who says, yeah, you know, I really took a look at our lease renewal rates going back 2 years. And I got with our team and I pulled the data and I was able to track that over the months. And compared to last year, our lease renewals are actually down a little bit. But actually, when you look at September of '22, they're right on par, right? You see how that demonstrates a level of authority and a level of understanding that makes other people sit up and listen. So this is kind of hard to articulate, but this kind of 30,000-foot view or highly contextualized way of introducing a topic or speaking about a topic, I believe, has been really important in my ability to build influence, definitely within my team, but also within the broader industry. When I talk about what's happening in our industry, I will sometimes use examples from my company, but I like to tie it into a broader idea of what's going on. And so you want to get in the habit of thinking and speaking this way if you want to, you know, become a trusted voice. By the way, this isn't always appropriate. If your wife calls you because she wants you to buy a loaf of bread on your way home from work, and you start explaining, "Well, you know, our inventory system at home, we really need to tune, you know, the list I created as shared," you know, that's not always the best approach. You might want to just buy the bread and not bring it up. Okay, so on actions here, This idea of follow-through, I spoke about this, but it's super important that you do what you say you're gonna do, and you follow through on that. There's this idea of, I mean, the do what you say you're gonna do thing is trite at this point, but there's actually two parts to that short statement that I wanna unpack. The first is the obvious one, which is, hey, if you've agreed to do something, You need to follow through and actually do it. That is a surefire way to get people to listen when you speak, because they understand that you're a reliable person. The second part of this, which I think is the most important part, is you need to be really careful about agreeing to do things. I go out of my way to not agree to do a lot of things. I've got a lot going on. I've got multiple businesses. I've got young kids at home. I travel for work. And so, and anyone who's worked closely with me knows this is true. I go out of my way to not take tasks on or to tell people, no, I'm not gonna be able to get to that. That is kind of the easier way of being known as someone who does what they say they're gonna do is just agree to do less things. I think most people in this world agree to do way too many things. Because they're scared to say no. And I want to empower you to take control over the things you agree to do. Don't be afraid to push back when someone asks you to do something, within reason, and say, "Ah, my plate's full right now. Unfortunately, I can't commit to that." That person will respect you for saying that, because the next time they ask you to do something and you say you will do it, they're thinking to themselves, "Oh, okay, this is great, 'cause last time they said they couldn't do it 'cause they were too busy. Now they've agreed to do it, so—" I think it's highly likely they're gonna follow through on this. Okay, let's get into content. So we've talked about mindset, we've talked about actions. What actually do we talk about, or what do we write about, or what do we speak about? So my approach here from the very beginning, if you go all the way back, The earliest public space where I was active was on Twitter. If you were to scroll all the way back, all the way back, all the way back 4-ish years ago to some of my very first tweets, they were packed with value. I was not talking about what I had for breakfast. I was not talking about my opinions on something. I was talking about things that I did at my management company that worked. And why we did things that way, and other people were really into that. And that formula has never failed me. Value first when you are looking to create content. If you can think back, you know, going back to this idea that you have unique and interesting insights, what are those and how can you communicate them to your audience in a way that they will find maximally valuable and interesting? Gary Vaynerchuk has a great— he actually has a whole book on this topic. It's called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. The jab, jab, jab part is you providing value. The right hook is you making an ask, whether you're asking them to subscribe to your newsletter or buy some product or service that you're offering. And the person is gonna be much more receptive to that after you've provided value multiple times. That's why he calls it that jab, jab, jab, right hook. So if you can find tools or screenshots or techniques you've used, anything you can do to find things that other people will think are valuable or interesting and share them, that will get people's attention. And that formula, again, that's never failed for me. What I have found doesn't work so well is telling other people what they should do. And there's a subtle distinction here, but I run into a lot of people who have really big ideas about how other people should be running their business, or how other people should be living their personal lives, or what other people should be believing about this or that. As a human, you know that doesn't work on you. And it doesn't work on your audience either. What does work is talking about what you did and what happened. So I recently did, the screenshot here is from a webinar that I recently hosted about how we use a $300 pre-inspection to cut churn at my management company. And the line that I used is, we started charging $300 for pre-inspections and it helped our churn drop by almost half. That's me saying what we did and what happened. I didn't entitle the webinar, "Why You Should Be Doing Pre-Inspections." Again, it's a subtle distinction, but if you lay the facts out for people, they will draw their own conclusions. And by the way, you don't only need to share things that worked. Sharing things that didn't work is just as valuable. Anyone who's involved with like the scientific method and, has pursued a doctorate will understand the value of a negative outcome. So I talk all the time about things that we did in my management company that didn't work. And actually, those newsletters get some of the most responses and most engagement out of anything I've ever written. And this is something that anyone can do. Talk about what you did and what happened. It's a great sort of one-two formula., and way of creating and sharing content that is very digestible, and doesn't, it doesn't put up people's defenses. Again, you could use this at your team meetings. Hey team, for the last week, I tried adjusting the language in our maintenance autoresponder, and here's what happened to our time to schedule. Boom. Let your boss draw their own conclusions about whether that was a good idea or a bad idea. So authenticity when creating content is a superpower. Just like on the last slide, I talked about things that we did that didn't work. My ability to share that and talk about our failures has endeared me to a lot of people because I'm transparent and honest about what's going on. That authenticity is so rare in today's world on social media with Instagram, and everyone talks about how everything's going beautifully and perfectly at their company. So if you can, if you can become confident enough to talk about what's really going on, that will resonate with people in a way that nothing else does. And it's not easy, it's quite scary the first few times you do this, but it is definitely a shortcut. So on the screen here is an email that I wrote to a property owner about a year ago or so that was horrible and rude, and I shared it, I took a screenshot and shared it in a newsletter and talked about how the client fired us and it was embarrassing for me and I was setting a bad example for our team and It actually kicked off a whole big sort of kind of soul-searching on my part to understand my contribution to the negative elements of the culture at our company. But it was just a real-world thing that happened that I decided to be transparent about. So, Drea Ebauer, who's in the audience here today, was the first person to really clue me into this idea that people connect with other people, not brands. When I first started on social media, I thought, well, shouldn't I be tweeting from my RL Property Management Twitter account because I'm trying to get more customers? And Draya helped me understand that no one wants to talk to XYZ management company online. They want to talk to Mark Smith, the owner, and they want to hear what he's up to and what's going on with him and his challenges. And it's just successes and what he's doing. So this idea of people connect with other people was a real mind shift for me and a big part of my journey toward building influence and having other people actually listen to what I had to say. We all got the advice in 3rd and 4th grade of just be yourself, and it's a trite expression, but it's very relevant here.. And I think it's something that it's hard to, it's hard to understand if you're just getting started, but the longer you're involved with creating content and the more you share online, you will start to find your voice. And if you can lean into that, you will go far. People don't need to hear generic regurgitated, heard it before a million times content. They want to hear unique and interesting insights that are specific to you. And that can feel scary and vulnerable, but it is what people are looking for in today's world. So on content, you need to find a way to be memorable, I believe, and for me, So that means using a lot of data and taking kind of an engineer brain approach to problems and thinking through things. But that's just me. You're gonna be different. What I really believe though is no matter what your approach is, I think you should come across with strong opinions. And you shouldn't be afraid or shy away from those strong opinions. Raise your hand if you've never heard of Todd Oh. Okay, like 3 hands went up, maybe 6. The reason you've heard of him is because he shares his opinions strongly with strong language in a way that's very readable and relatable. Now raise your hand if you agree with everything you've ever seen or read from Todd. I'm putting my hand down. But I still read his stuff because it's interesting and he has an opinion. And just because you're reading something doesn't mean you agree with it. And in fact, some of the things— some of the people I've learned the most from have been those I've had the strongest disagreements with. So I don't want you to get this idea that everything you share online has to be like the most boring, approved by everybody, would never offend anybody, uh, sort of ChatGPT-ified language. You don't have to be like that. You can be yourself. You can have opinions. You can disagree with what most people think about this topic or that topic. That's actually a great thing to do because people will actually remember who you are. And even if they don't agree with you, if you are polite and professional in the way you communicate it, they will respect you for it. And eventually you actually may change some people's mind and sway them around to your way of thinking, which is an extremely rewarding thing to watch happen. So I really, really urge folks who are trying to build their voice and build some influence and earn the trust of their team and their community and their industry to speak authentically from the heart and don't hold back. State your real opinions 'Cause that tr— when people see that in you, it instills a level of trust that far exceeds you just sharing the most boring generic takes of all time, even if they disagree. If you can find a way to work humor in, which is difficult to do, that also helps. I've been experimenting with memes on LinkedIn and in my newsletter. It's been a lot of fun. If you can't read the text here, it says, "Back in my day, you had to actually pay the rent if you wanted to stay in the apartment." And then it says, "Sure, Grandma, let's get you back to bed." And those of you who are in California will especially resonate with this. So, you know, whether it's memes or jokes or stories from your life about your kids or what happened on the airplane, I still have people come up to me and talk about stories I told years and years ago that I completely forgot about. It's kind of off the cuff. But it was memorable. Okay, last thing on content is this idea of original thinking. A lot of folks don't really take the time to develop their own opinions on topics, and I spoke a moment ago about the importance of speaking with conviction and not being afraid to share opinions that you think others are going to disagree with. Well, if you never take time away to actually think, you will not even have those opinions. You will never develop an opinion that's different from sort of the dogma of the industry, or your community, or your company. You need to take time away and think hard about the problems, and the issues, and what's going on in order to develop a novel insight, or approach, or idea. And I just don't see people doing this enough. Of course, social media is part of the problem, ironically. It's difficult to find the time and the space and remove the distractions such that you can actually break through the noise and develop some original insights. But I just want to be a voice in our industry that's promoting folks taking time away and thinking deep thoughts. I try to get away for a couple nights around New Year's to think about the upcoming year. I go by myself. I don't bring technology. I just bring a big stack of books. And some of my best ideas have come from that time away from everything. And I think if everyone in this room was able to do something similar, just 2 nights by yourself, no technology, and think, our industry would move light-years ahead. Because you all have interesting, unique insights, but you're not giving your brain the time and space to actually coalesce those ideas together into something useful. Great quote here: "The more you seek others' approval, the more you dilute yourself until you become nothing but the product of everyone else's preferences, and in the end, you still won't have their respect." I love that quote. So, I'm gonna close with a challenge. I want you to pick a platform, and I want you to set a date, and a target. So an example would be like, I'm gonna start posting on Facebook and by December 1st I wanna have developed 5 posts that got at least 10 likes each by people I care about. Or I'm gonna start posting on LinkedIn, LinkedIn's a little easier because they give you the analytics. I'm gonna start posting on LinkedIn and by November 1st I wanna have 10,000 impressions across all my posts. I want, I want to challenge you to pick a specific day and a specific target and measure your progress as you go. And in the process, you'll start to develop your voice, and you'll start to get a feel for what type of content you want to make and who you want to create it for. And that is the first step along becoming a trusted voice and building influence. Thank you.