How To Create A Process People Actually Want To Use

Please help me welcome Peter Lohmann. Thank you, Brynn. I want to extend a big thank you to the whole LeadSimple team for inviting me out here and putting me on stage and giving me a chance to share a little bit about what I've learned about designing processes that people actually want to use. Okay, so it's been really exciting to see everyone file in, and, you know, what I was really thinking about as everyone was filing in the room here is these are my people. You guys love LeadSimple enough to fly here and come to a user conference. And that's— you guys are my people. I love it. I'm a LeadSimple power user, enthusiast. I live and breathe the product, and it's helped me transform my business, quite frankly. There's, there's a lot of extremely positive things that have come about in my life because of using LeadSimple, and not just in my business, but the personal connections I've made with the people who work there. And with people who use the product. Some of you are familiar that I do a lot of work with Wolfgang Kroski. I would have never met him if it wasn't for LeadSimple. So you're part of a really special group here of, of users and enthusiasts and people who are passionate about the industry. Okay, a little bit about me before we get into the heart of it. I own a property management company called RL Property Management in Columbus, Ohio. I started it 10 years ago from zero with a partner. My background prior to that was as a control systems engineer. So I worked, I have a degree in electrical engineering and I worked as a control systems engineer for about 5 years while my partner and I started buying single-family rentals in the Columbus, Ohio area. And in 2013, I quit my engineering job and started RL Property Management with zero clients and zero units. Other than the 5 single-family homes that we owned and self-managed. So it's been 10 years now. We've grown to about 650 units under management. We've got a team of about 25 people, including in-house maintenance and global talent, all the good stuff. And I live in a suburb of Columbus with a beautiful wife, 2 amazing daughters, and 1 large standard poodle. Okay, why should you listen to me, right? I mean, we all love Lead Simple. That's not enough to get up, stand up on stage, and tell you about how to design processes. Well, let me give you a couple reasons. I talked about my background in engineering. One of the things I did as an, as an engineer was design engine control systems for massive natural gas compressor stations where a mistake doesn't mean that someone doesn't get their lease renewal on time, but could literally put life and limb at risk. This is an example. This is a photo of the type of compressor station that I was designing control systems for. I was also an early user of Process Street. Our company was running processes daily within Process Street starting in June of 2014. This is long before LeadSimple had a process product. So I've been thinking about and using and tuning processes for close to a decade now within the industry. We've had a lot of time to think about what makes a good property management process. We converted from Process Street to LeadSimple over a year ago, and in that time we've run over 1,000 processes through LeadSimple Process. I had to go into my account and dig that up to make sure that was right. We run the full LeadSimple suite, including CRM, Process, and Inbox, and we've got over 15 daily active users, basically my team, inside LeadSimple. And the final thing I'll throw out as, as to why it might be worthwhile to pay attention for the next hour— I'm sorry, 40 minutes or so— is that I'm able to take a month-long vacation every year with no contact because of the processes that are built and running within, within my business. So, every June, it's actually about 5 weeks, I step away from the company for a month with no emails, no phone calls. I basically tell my team, unless this person or this person quits, don't call me. And that's only possible because of great process. So, today we're going to talk about, we're going to talk about how to design great processes And the reason I'm so passionate about this is because great processes deliver freedom for business owners. And today I want to deliver yours. Great processes deliver freedom for business owners. But there's a problem. There's two problems, actually. And I'm gonna be a little aggressive here for a minute. I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I've talked to a lot of you, I've consulted with some of you, and I see the posts on Facebook and I talk a lot with the LeadSimple team about the obstacles to their customers, i.e., you, achieving success. Two problems. First thing, you're making it too complicated. Okay, you're making it too complicated. Second problem, your team is not on board. Your team is not on board. Those two obstacles, and we're gonna talk about those, if you can break through those, everything else is details and you will be successful, wildly successful with the full suite of LeadSimple products. So the first problem, you're making it too complicated. Here's what I mean by that. LeadSimple is incredibly powerful. In fact, many of you are here and many of you signed up with LeadSimple because of the power and the flexibility. So you're probably thinking, what the heck is this guy talking about, keep it simple? I'm signed up and I'm here because I wanna make it powerful and complicated and I want it to be able to do everything for me. What I mean by that is, especially when you're starting out, you're just implementing LeadSimple or you're just creating a new process, or you're just introducing it to your team, you need to forget custom fields, you need to forget conditional logic, you need to forget Zapier, all the stuff that I love, and basically make a checklist. Make a dead simple checklist with a few stages and start using it. Start using it right away. You can add all the fun stuff, and we're going to get into a lot of that today, and, and over the next few days. You can add all that stuff later, come back to it. If you make it too complicated to start, you're gonna forget how it works, and your team is completely lost. So that leads me to my second point: your team is not on board. There's a lot of examples where a business owner, a CEO, a head of operations goes to a conference sits through a sales demo, gets super excited about LeadSimple, and then just hands it off to the next person down the line, their number 2, and says, this thing's amazing, go make it work. And maybe some of you have been on the receiving end of that. That is not how you set your team up for success. So you gotta get them on board, you gotta get them on board. And you know what this is? It's sales. Who was here for the RentScale conference yesterday? Raise your hand. Yeah, a lot of people. So, I was too, I sat through the whole day. Great content. RentScale is all about sales, and when you are trying to get your team on board, that is also sales. You're trying to get them to buy off on using a brand new piece of technology, and completely changing up how they're doing things. So you need to not just explain the features and benefits, but get their input, because in a lot of cases, these are the folks who are actually doing the work. And so they know more about you potentially when it comes to lease renewals and move-in processes and things like that. So before you're going to achieve freedom, you need to keep it simple and you need to get your team on board. Do not overlook the importance of those two things. All right, let's move forward here. All right, so the heart of the talk here is going to be 4 sections. We're going to talk about mindsets. We're going to talk about process fundamentals, kind of like the 101 stuff. Then we're going to get into a few nitty-gritty details that I think are really important, and then we'll wrap up. Okay, mindsets. So success with process is not just getting the right zap. It's not just getting your team on board. It's not getting the exact move-in process from someone who you know is successful. It starts with a mindset shift. If you, if you go into this with your mind clear and your mind right, you're gonna have great success. And if you don't think about processes in the right way, it's gonna constantly feel like you're pushing a rock uphill. So the first thing I want you to do is reset your expectations. A lot of folks come into LeadSimple with sort of predefined notions and ideas of how it should work, or how processes should run, And I want you to be open-minded. If you have a rigid or a fixed mindset around process, you're gonna have trouble. So you need to be open to doing things differently. Next thing is realistic expectations. This is a big one for your team, and this is a big one for you. You're not gonna be able to completely revamp your processes and change technologies all at the same time. Process changes are very deep when you're running a property management company. There's a great book called The Four Disciplines of Execution, and the book, if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's, it's fairly academic, but there's— I'm gonna give you the, the kind of 3-sentence takeaway, which is when you're trying to make a change within an organization such as rolling out LeadSimple Process or LeadSimple Inbox, There's two major types of changes within an organization or a small business. One of them is called a stroke of the pen change. This is when you decide to hire somebody, or you decide to switch payroll providers, or you decide to update your lease, right? These are things that are very easy to do, they're simple, you can just kind of say go and your team will do it or the vendor will do it and it's done.. You don't need to get buy-in from anybody. You don't need to get, you don't need, you don't need a behavioral change. The second type of change is called a breakthrough, and, and that's what process is. That's what building and implementing great processes is, is a breakthrough change. And this is a type of change where you need people's buy-in. You need them on board with you. It's much, much harder. And some of you have probably tried to make breakthrough changes within your organization and had it fail. So, an example of these might be, we're going to answer every phone by the second ring, every phone call by the second ring. Or, you know, we're going to start to become much more tenant-friendly here. We want to treat tenants with respect and show them how much we love them. That's not a stroke of the pen change. You can't just wave your hand and make it happen. This requires your whole team to be involved and have a major shift. And so that's why I say you need to have realistic expectations. This isn't something you're just gonna snap your fingers and see immediate results. Okay, so we're on mindsets here. Build fast and deploy, I touched on this. When you decide to make a change to a process or start a new process or start with LeadSimple, I highly encourage you to capture that momentum. That feeling and energy that you have, that positivity that you have, it doesn't last forever. And it's also very infectious. And so if you can take advantage of that and drive through the hard part, which is the actual building of the process, you can push through that and get it live as fast as possible. You're much more likely to have success. I see a lot of people get stuck in the building the process portion, and this gets back to keeping it simple. Push through and get it live. Just start using it, please. And what's nice about LeadSimple is if you're, if you're migrating from Process Street, or even if you're migrating from an old different process within LeadSimple, you can still use that. And I encourage you to run through your existing open processes with that old process or old software, the ones that are already in process, keep them going and just finish them out with the old software, but for all the new ones, use your new process you just built yesterday. Don't let this drag out. Okay, so this is huge. This is possibly one of the most important points about process. It's very broad. I want you to build for the common case. Don't build for exceptions. Don't try and capture every single edge case within your core process. I know it's possible. I know with custom fields and conditional logic and a bunch of Zaps, you can, like, for example, for a lease move-in, you know, you could build a master move-in process that covers a normal move-in, a rushed move-in, student housing, Section 8, short-term rental, like, you could do that. But it's not recommended. Instead, you need to think carefully about your policies and maybe even start to take a hard line on some of those policies and say, you know what, this is how we're doing things, and I'm not going to build for every single exception and edge case because that's going to make the process too complicated and too difficult and confusing to maintain. Because you want your team to be able to maintain these processes. You want them to be able to make changes or log into the software and intuitively understand what's supposed to be happening there. And if you build for every single weird edge case and exception that happens once a year, that's not going to be feasible. Okay, so this one, this one makes— might make some of you upset. I want you to contort your business to the tool. Contort your business to the tool. And this is beyond LeadSimple. A lot of times when you start with a new software, tell me if you relate to this, you're excited, you start digging into it, you start setting things up, and then all of a sudden you realize, oh, that's weird, why does it do it like that? That's not how we do things. And so you kind of get this, you start to doubt a little bit, and you start to be a little concerned Well, why doesn't the software let me do this? Why doesn't it let me set it up like this? This is how we've done it for years. And then you start, then you start getting on the help site, you're searching around, you're getting on the forums, you're getting on with their support, and you're like, we're really trying to do things this way, how can I do this? And you start building these, you know, weird workarounds and zaps to try and make it happen. I'm here to tell you, just change your business process to match what the software wants you to do. And it's hard, it's a hard pill to swallow, and I've tried it both ways, believe me, I'm kind of stubborn. But if you can figure out how to set your ego aside and be open-minded about doing things the way the software wants you to do, if you know what I mean by that, you're going to have much more success. Because if you're in the common case of the software you're using, Everything is just gonna kind of work, and when you call support, you're gonna get results, and you're not gonna have all these edge cases that you're trying to maintain that a year from now when you go back, you don't even understand how it works, and no one else on your team will either. So this is a big mindset thing. Contort your business to the tool. Okay, let's talk about some process fundamentals. Let's get into the 101 stuff. This is some of my favorite things to talk about. First thing you need to really get clear on is do you really need a process? You don't need a process for everything. A process is heavy. You need a process for move-ins. You need a process for new properties. You need a process for new employees. Sneak peek. But you don't need a process for everything. In fact, in a lot of cases, what you need is just a reference document or a simple checklist that isn't powered or powerful. You don't need state or status on a lot of these things. The example I always use here is, you know, there's a few things that really need to happen in my office at the end of the day. Lights need to go off, doors need to be locked, security system needs to be turned on, Blinds need to be closed. And so what we have is just a laminated 3x5 card right by the back door that has those things listed out. And so whoever's leaving at the end of the day, they just look through that list and just do those things and then they leave. We don't have a process for that in LeadSimple. Some people go really overboard and they build a process for everything. I'm gonna tease my friend Wolf here a little bit. If you know Wolfgang, You know, I do a lot of work with Wolf and we're screen sharing. All of a sudden I'll see his process, all of a sudden I'll see his LeadSimple come up and there's processes, he's scrolling, you know, all the process lists, he's still scrolling, he's still scrolling, I can't believe how many processes this guy has. It's unreal. If you look at our, if you log into our LeadSimple account right now, there's like 7. It's really simple. Now, Wolf's a genius, so I'm sure he's got that figured out. But for us mere mortals, I really encourage you to limit the number of processes that you have. Okay, make it easy. Make it easy. How to design processes people actually want to use is what we're talking about, remember? So how can we do that? Well, we need to make it fun and easy to start processes and to run processes. And if you're not familiar, LeadSimple, there's like 5 different ways you can start a process. Within LeadSimple. You can like pull up the process itself and click start. You can pull up the property and start it from there. You can even use Zaps to start processes. We've got a fully built-out Airtable that has a button, so if you want to start a lease renewal process for this unit, you just click a button, it kicks it off, pulls in a bunch of data. So the more— the easier you can make it to start processes, the more your team is going to glom onto LeadSimple Process. And you also wanna make it easy to run the process, and what makes things really hard is a bunch of custom fields at the beginning that takes you 20 minutes to fill out, and a bunch of research, you gotta log into 3 different tools just to find all the data you need just to start the process. That is not making it easy, that's making it hard. We're gonna talk a little bit about custom fields in a bit. All right, I want you to put how to do it where you do it. Put how to do it where you do it. I heard this line a year ago and it just instantly stuck in my brain. It's so good. What does this mean? Well, LeadSimple makes it really easy. How many of you are familiar with that little show instructions button in LeadSimple? So I don't know if you know this, but you can put, of course you can put text in there, you can put images, you can also embed videos, Loom videos. You can have links, of course. So what this means is when you build a process out, I want you to put the instructions of how to do every task right in the task instructions, every single one. What I don't want you to do is have a separate document somewhere with, here's how to do our lease renewal process. I'm a big Notion guy, but if you log into my Notion, you will not see instructions on how to do our processes because your instructions should be within the process itself. That's what I mean by put how to do it, where to do it, where you do it. The example I gave earlier of the back door, if you're closing up at the end of the day, that's another one. The instructions on how to lock up at the end of the day are not buried in a binder somewhere. They're laminated and taped to the back door. You can't miss it. Put how to do it where you do it. Just enough. I want you to build just enough process. Do not overengineer and try and boil the ocean with process. The bare minimum you need is what should be in your processes. This gets back to building for the common case, but it goes further than that. You should have as few steps as possible, and you should have as few stages as possible. And again, we, we all get excited, right? If you're here, you are a power user, you are an enthusiast, and you're very familiar with the software. But not everyone is. Not everyone is. And so The simpler you can make things, the more condensed and compact, eliminating steps, eliminating stages, that's your ticket to success. If you really, really, really need something, add it, of course. But the bar should be high, higher than I think most of you think it is right now for adding a step or adding a stage, just enough process. As few as possible. I want you to use as few tools and technologies as possible. This is huge. How many of you are frustrated with all the different logins and softwares and tools that you have to use on a daily basis? I see a lot of heads nodding. Your team is 5 times as frustrated. So what can we do about this? Well, what we've done is we've raised the bar for what I will allow to enter into our ecosystem of property management. We do not start with a new software product unless it integrates with what we're already using. But what's even better than that is is if you can take advantage of a tool you're already paying for and get 80 or 90% as good a result as if you're using a dedicated tool. So, as few tools and technologies as possible is your key to success with process. So, if there's a piece of software in your existing software stack, and there's overlap with another tool or process or piece of tech, Just use the one that's part of what you're already doing. Your team will thank you. You will thank future you or past you because that last 10 to 20% that a lot of people think they need, they actually don't need. And this comes back to contorting your business to the tools. Okay, involve the team. We talked about this. Your team needs to be involved. You need to get buy-in. You need to get input, and the other, it's kind of the flip side of this, is your processes, after they're built, they're up and running, you deployed quickly, as we discussed, your team needs to feel empowered to make changes. I highly encourage my team, at any time, to make changes to our processes, reword things, fix typos, reorder them, consolidate, anything that needs to happen, 'cause they're the ones using it every day. I couldn't tell you how our lease renewal process operates anymore. I haven't touched it in years, but the team does, and they know when regulation changes or when tools change or when integrations change, they know what needs to happen, and I want them to feel empowered to make those changes. I don't want them to have to run it all the way up to me and then I got to dig in. Let's just let them do it. And you know what, if it's a mistake, they'll figure it out, they'll put it back. Okay, we're on the last process fundamental: culture of task completion. Culture of task completion. You, for those of you who are the owners and CEOs in here, it starts from the top. You need to create and foster a culture of task completion within your organization. What does that mean? What that means is at the end of every day, if you log into LeadSimple and you pull up that view that says all tasks, There really shouldn't be anything that's overdue in there. So I'm wondering how many of you, if you were to do that on a break here, you pull up LeadSimple, you look at all tasks, how many are there that are overdue there? 5 or 6? Okay, that's fine. Maybe someone was sick today. But if you've got dozens and dozens and dozens and you're scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, that's a problem. Now, what I think a lot of people wanna do, or what they think I mean by that is, oh, I need to get on my team "My team isn't keeping up, they're not using the tool." Maybe, but what's more often the case is that the process itself isn't set up right. What I mean by that is the due date, or the length of time before this task starts, and this one is a 2-day delay from this one, or the due date that's assigned to the various tasks, usually there's a problem with that logic somewhere. And if you get with your team and you say, I noticed that you have like 25 past due tasks. Totally get it. What I'm trying to understand is why. And they'll probably be like, oh yeah, because like when we start the lease renewal, it like, all this stuff shows as overdue, but I can't even do that yet. Yep. And so you say, okay, and then you dig into it together and you figure out how to set up the logic and the due dates so that that's not happening anymore. So that's usually the primary thing. Now, there may be a little bit of your team just kind of isn't getting their stuff done. There may be some of that. And it doesn't take much from the owner of the business to just say, hey, I'm seeing some overdue tasks here. Do you think you can get those done by the end of the day? Just takes a little bit. One thing you can do is you can add it to, you can add it to like if you have one-on-ones and you have metrics or KPIs for your team, you can add like number of overdue tasks as a metric that you look at during a one-on-one. You have a lot of power as the owner, and you can use that to foster a culture of task completion. Okay. Triggers. You really need to be clear on what starts a process. I don't think enough attention is paid to this sort of subtle point, which is when should a process start, or what starts a process? This is really important that you get clear on, and it should be obvious from the name of the process or the first step there what that is, okay? Triggers, that's what I call what you start, what starts a process. It's a big deal, you gotta get that right. Okay, couple nitty-gritty details, then we're gonna wrap up. Standardize, so this is a nitty-gritty detail, but in your processes, I want you to standardize punctuation, capitalization, and verb tense. Punctuation, capitalization, and verb tense. So that when you pull up a process and you're looking at a stage and you're seeing all those steps, those tasks there, they should all kind of have a similar look and feel about them. So, like, you wouldn't want to go from keys collected to issue the security deposit, because it's like past tense to present tense or future tense. You want to just take a few minutes and think about how you want it to be and just make them all the same. It's kind of a subtle point, but when you're running the process, it just makes it feel a little bit nicer and a little bit more thought out and cohesive. Okay, manual entry. So this gets back to the custom field thing. The, the point I want to make here is when you are setting up your custom fields, if you're only using that custom field once within the process, You really don't need a custom field for that. It's just making it harder to start the process and more confusing and complicated. Now, there's some stuff that makes sense because you enter it once in the beginning and then it gets used 5 times throughout the completion of the process over the next 3 months. Yes, of course, use a custom field for that. But if you're just setting up custom fields because you can, that's actually just more extra work and more opportunity for error. So, just be careful with that. Conditional logic. So, we touched on this a little bit earlier, but I want to get into it a little bit more. A lot of you have probably experienced, once you've started messing around with conditional logic, you start to realize the power of that, and you start to wonder, wow, I wonder how much I should pack into this process. I wonder how many edge cases I can account for with this fancy conditional logic. Go gently with that, because the more you add, the more complicated it gets. And you reach this point where you're like, well, maybe I should have like— these two processes share 60% in common, and so right now I'm maintaining them as two separate processes, but then anytime I have to make a change to something that's in both processes, I have to go make the change in two places. Those of you who have reached that point with LeadSimple Process, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So, that's frustrating, I get it. And the temptation is, I'm going to make a master process. It's going to cover every scenario. And that way, I only have to make a change once when there's an update. And you can use conditional logic to make that happen, and it works. But I would encourage you to be conservative with that. You're usually better off with two separate processes without conditional logic, than trying to make like a master super process. Okay, don't overlap. What I mean by that is, and we're kind of back to the triggers thing, but sometimes you have processes that it's like one ends and the other starts. They almost like trigger each other, and you can actually set that up. Just be careful that your overlap is well thought out. Like, you don't want to accidentally have it so that the last task on one process is the same as the first task on the other, nor do you want to accidentally go the other way where all of a sudden there's an extra step in the middle that somehow got missed because these processes are close but not quite touching. And so, really think about when you've got processes that sort of go right up against each other. So, the classic example here is, if you run your sales process in the CRM product,, and that kicks off like a new client checklist, make sure that there's not duplication of effort there, and just think about how that handoff and transition should work. All right. Last section here, wrapping up. Process depreciation. This is a great turn of phrase. It's not mine. I forget who I heard it from. But process depreciation is real. Just like properties depreciate, assets depreciate, cars depreciate, processes depreciate. They become less valuable, less accurate, less relevant over time. And you have to invest in them, just like you have to continually reinvest and maintain a piece of rental property. You can't— this is not a build it and forget it situation. Some things in life are. This isn't one of them. So when you're done building a process, you're not actually done, but that's not a bad thing. It just means you need to come back to it once in a while. And we have a process at my company where once a quarter we'll pull up one of our core company processes on the, on a big screen, and everyone who's involved with it will sit around a table and we'll go through it. We'll kind of do like a mock run-through of the process. And we'll get feedback from everyone. Hey, is this still working? Is this the right order? Well, no, actually we don't do that anymore. Okay, great, let's delete it. That doesn't make any sense anymore, 'cause now our property management software does that part. Okay, great, we'll move it over here, right? That's actually kind of fun, right? If you're here, you probably get a kick out of that stuff. So get with your team, go through this, and reinvest in your processes, keep them relevant, keep them useful. Just be aware that this depreciation of process Even if you change nothing at your company, the environment is changing, the other softwares are changing, your clients' expectations are changing, your tenants are changing, so you need to come back and revisit these things. Eliminate and reorder at every opportunity. This is part of the depreciation maintenance schedule, right? It's like changing the tires on your process, is just thinking about how to reorder things, thinking about how to eliminate things. If you can eliminate steps from your process, that's amazing. Every step you eliminate from a process, especially if it's a commonly run process like lease renewals, you're saving minutes, hours, days over time. Last thing here, your process changes, when you do decide to make them, should be incremental, not revolutionary. Make small changes, observe the results. Small changes, observe the results. Very, very, very rarely should you make— be making a massive change to your processes. Usually, you're better off improving what you've already got. I don't know if you've seen that graph where it's like a 1% improvement every day, like slopes up into the right really fast. That's all you really need. Just come back to it frequently. If you make huge, huge changes, it's unpredictable and you're going to lose your team and you're going to kind of forget what you did. Okay, thank you everyone. Great processes deliver freedom for business owners. I hope I've helped deliver yours today. Thank you.