How To Run A $3M+ Property Management Company In 2 Hours Per Week

My property management company does about $3 million a year, including our maintenance operation, but I spend less than 2 hours a week running it. I've also taken June completely off for the last 4 years. Now, the first year I did this, there was a couple hiccups. There was a health insurance issue. When I got back, I fixed the problem, and the last 3 years have been issue-free. No email, no Slack, and no phone calls. This only works because I built a leadership structure that can operate without me. I gave them a clear operating cadence and stopped jumping in every time something looked imperfect. So I wanna show you how the company actually runs, what my team owns, what still stays with me, and the uncomfortable part of delegation that most property management business owners avoid. So when other property management business owners hear how little I actually work in the business, which again is 2 to 5 hours a week or less on most weeks, and I disappear for a month every year, a lot of them think, oh, well, you must have sold most of the business Or you're just, you know, you've completely abdicated your responsibility as a business owner. And that's not true. The way I've set this up, I am still the final authority on the things that are actually important. There's some stuff that escalates to me, and we're gonna talk about exactly what those things are. But the majority, the vast majority of the day-to-day decisions I've delegated, I've put in place a leadership team. We'll talk about that. And I've empowered my team. That's a key part of this, to make the majority of those decisions without me. The goal I had in mind was to make the company capable of running without me for the majority of normal circumstances that happen in the cadence of an operating business. So if something is happening once a month, that's a pretty regular occurrence, let alone if it's happening every week. I shouldn't need to jump in on something that happens every month, like owner disbursements, for example. That's a process that we can document. We can put a process in place, and then I can hand that off to somebody and let them handle it. And they can raise their hand and grab me if there's an exception or an unusual problem. But anything that's happening more than once a month, I just don't need to be involved with. The first step here is giving day-to-day execution to one person, meaning you make one person accountable for what's happening at the company. Up until now, that's been you, and that's where most business owners are comfortable. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's what got us where we are. But if you wanna get to the next level, you need to take the next step in delegation. And that means you find somebody at your business or you bring somebody in who you're comfortable handing the keys off to and saying, listen, you're now accountable for the performance of this business. I'm gonna set the vision. I'm going to give you some guidelines, but this is on you now. So for me, that's Brennan. He's my number 2 guy and everyone at the company rolls up and reports to him and then he reports to me. That means I've got one direct report for my property management business and I run a few different businesses. So that's really important. I can't have a whole bunch of one-on-one meetings every week with people from all over the company. And then the people who report to Brennan are themselves managers. So our director of accounts who handles all the property managers reports to Brennan. All the techs and the maintenance coordinators report to our director of maintenance. Who reports to Brennan. Our marketing manager reports to Brennan. Our sales BDM, our business development manager, reports to Brennan. So he is really over this group of people. These functions all interact every day. It just doesn't go through me. So I first hired someone into sort of a COO or VP role in 2021. And that person's name was Kathy. I brought her in and I, first thing I did was I made everyone who was reporting to me now report to her. That was A huge load off, both in terms of time commitment, but really it gave my brain a little bit of a rest from being responsible for all these people. I was no longer carrying every open loop at the company. You're not going to be able to really step away from your business if you still have 6 or 7 people reporting to you. The business is simply going to grind to a halt while everyone's awaiting your decision on multiple matters per week. That's not realistic. So what you really need is an operating leader, whether you give that person a COO title or a VP of Ops or a president, something like that. And in EOS parlance, they sometimes refer to this person as an integrator. And that's really what they are. They're integrating the functions of the business, the different departments, and sort of making sure that everything is operating smoothly and continuing to get better and better. They're solving problems, they're resolving conflicts, they're being involved, very involved with key hires at the business. They're operating the business. That's why the first hire I made, Kathy, I gave her the title COO. So the key to making this work is you can't just give somebody the title and the direct reports. This— and this is the uncomfortable part— you have to also give them a pretty big leash. And what I mean by that is you can't jump in every time you see them doing something a little differently than you would have done it. This was hard for me, honestly, and I think it's hard for most people I speak to in property management, is they love the idea of only working 5 hours a week in their business and being able to take a month off. Who wouldn't love that? But when it really comes down to brass tacks, they are uncomfortable, at least initially, with fully delegating their power and authority to somebody else because that means that person is going to do things a little bit And they're gonna make mistakes. And it's difficult as a business owner to see mistakes go out into the world with your name on the door of the business that's making them. Whether that's work product like property management agreements, leases, letters, notices, eviction notices, anything that's written that's going out through the door, you're used to having a hand in that and making sure that it's right every time. Or whether it's relationships, key relationships you may have with property owners, vendors, even tenants or software providers. These are things that you may need to start giving up. And releasing to your leadership team and especially to your number 2 person. And that can be very uncomfortable and very difficult. So if you want to be successful here, it's not enough to just, well, let me just bring in somebody and give them the title and make everyone report to them. You also have to empower them and give them a shard of your authority that you have as the business owner. And that may mean things like not going to every meeting, not being copied on every email, not participating in every Slack thread or every Slack channel. And I know some of you are hearing this and you're like, ooh, you're already kind of starting to feel like I'm not sure about that. And I hear you, it is uncomfortable and it's a new thing to do if you haven't done it before. But on the other side of this hard decision and these new motions for you is freedom, time freedom, real freedom, which is why we got into business for ourselves in the first place. We didn't start a business to have a job. We started a business to have time freedom and be able to spend more time with our families and more time with our kids and go on vacations and try new things or start new businesses. So that's why I'm really passionate about this, because, you know, it is a difficult thing to do your first time as a business owner to say, yeah, I'm just going to like turn over all my power and authority to this other person and they're going to make mistakes and clients are going to be mad and we're going to miss payments. Like there's going to be strange health insurance problems that would have never happened if I was in charge. That's true. But that's where the freedom comes from, is empowering other people to make these decisions. And the beautiful thing about it is the more you do this, The faster they learn. If you always are jumping in and kind of firefighting and saving the day and preventing problems before they happen, your team is not going to learn from those problems. It's kind of like the toddler with their hand on the stove. No matter how many times you tell them until they actually hurt their hand a little bit, it doesn't really sink in. And it's the same thing with your team. You're actually robbing them of learning opportunities by constantly jumping in front of them and preventing them from making mistakes. Now I get it. No one wants to see mistakes go out the door as a business owner. But you have to allow some of that, not business-ending mistakes, not lose your largest client mistakes, but some significant mistakes are going to need to happen in order for your team to both feel empowered and learn from those mistakes. And then they won't happen again and you won't have to keep jumping in front of them. So that's the discomfort that I really encourage you to push through. And I can tell you from firsthand experience, on the other side of that discomfort is the freedom you've always wanted. So another component of making this person successful in the role is Delegating decision-making. So when you think about delegation, there's really 2 parts to it. There's delegating tasks and then there's delegating decisions. So delegating tasks is looking at everything you're doing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. What's in my inbox? What's on my desk? What do I have to do personally still? And you find new people to do those things, right? And so a lot of these things you're going to hand off to that number 2 person at the company. You're going to say, well, you know, every month here's how I do disbursements and you document the whole thing, you give it to them and then they're going to do disbursements. Great. Now that's really important and you got to do that. And you need to do that for almost everything at the business in order to kind of get to this next level that we're talking about. However, you also need to think about decisions, right? Decisions are not tasks, not exactly. So decisions are distinct from tasks, at least in the way that I think about them. So what's going to happen is your leadership team and especially your number 2 person, they likely are coming to you multiple times a day to make a decision on something important. Should we evict this tenant even though their daughter's sick, blah, blah, blah? Should we terminate this client? Should we take on this new account even though it's short-term rentals and we don't really do short-term rentals? But this is a client we really like and we think it'd be great, right? So you get the idea. There's a million of these things that come across your plate every day. As the business owner, as the leader, you have to figure out how to delegate those decisions. They're not tasks, they're decisions. Again, this can be uncomfortable because you're used to being the one holding the sort of cultural boundaries or the operational boundaries for the business. You're the one who should be able to say no to things. to decide these things. And you certainly can't. But if you want to get to the point where you're only working a few hours a week in the business, it's not enough to just delegate the tasks. You have to delegate the decisions. So the first thing you need to do is like, what are actually these decisions I'm making every day, every week, every month? If you have to start a list, pull up a Google Doc, pull up a notepad and paper and just start writing them down. This morning I was asked to make a decision on are we going to allow a dog at this rental property? This morning my maintenance operations leader came to me and asked me if we can replace the garbage disposal even though we can't reach the owner for approval. Those are all great examples. So write them all down. And what you're going to find is there's categories of decisions that you're being asked to make. You can start to group them into buckets. And once you've done that, you can start to document your decision-making process. You can start to come up with policies that capture these decisions that you're being asked to make, and then you can introduce those policies to your team. So over time, you're going to want to start to reduce the number of decisions you're being asked to make on a weekly, daily, monthly basis. I'll give you another tip on how to start making less decisions and getting other people to make these decisions for you. Stop being so responsive. Okay? And I know that like immediately some of you are getting shivers like, well, what do you mean be less responsive? I thought that's my whole job. As you know, I'm a responsible person. I'm a responsive person. That's actually part of my identity is people know they get an answer from me when they need it. When they need me, I'm there for my team. You know, I'm there for my team. That's who I am. I get it. And I'm not saying don't be there for your team. But what if it was the case that by being continuously available for your team, you're actually robbing them of some of their most important growth opportunities of their career? People need space and time to make their own decisions, and they need to learn from mistakes that they make with those decisions. And so if you want to make fewer decisions, stop responding to every Slack message as soon as you see it. Turn off notifications on your phone for new emails. And just let questions go unanswered for a couple days, even weeks. You will be amazed at how people will figure it out and just make a decision, usually the right one if you've set up a great culture with clear core values. So, you know, this again, this is one of these things where people are like, what? That's crazy. What do you mean? Like ignore my team? Yeah, kind of ignore them a little bit on things that just aren't that important, right? Whether you collect a late fee for this tenant or that tenant or replace a garbage disposal or not, let the team figure that out. Let them make those decisions. And now if you're seeing a consistent pattern of, hey, they're making the wrong decision every time on maintenance requests, or we're always waiving late fees, yeah, you step in and you're like, hey, I've been taking a look here. We really need to adjust course on this moving forward. Great. Your team wants to hear that. They want to know what you want them to do. What you don't want to be for your team is an answer dispenser. That's not your role as the leader. Your team is resourceful. They have connections to NARPM. They read newsletters. There's podcasts. They probably have some type of a knowledge base, like a Notion they can look at. They can email or Slack their other team members. They can email or Slack other people in the industry. How did you figure this all out the first time? There's no handbook. You figured it out. You got resourceful. That's what you want to train your team to do too. And they're just as capable as you are, especially in their area of responsibility. We run my company on EOS. If you haven't heard of it before, that stands for Entrepreneurial Operating System. It's basically an operating system for small to medium-sized businesses like mine. And it starts with a 3-year vision. So you as the leader of the business, you set out your 3-year vision like, hey, here's what I want to have happen in my business over the next 3 years. And it's best if you write this down and you really get detailed with it. You turn that over to your leadership team and now they have in their mind, okay, this is what this guy or gal wants to have happen at the property management company for the next 3 years. That's where it starts. And that 3-year vivid vision is actually documented in EOS. on a singular piece of paper. It's part of the VTO, Vision Traction Organizer. So you have a 3-year vision. And then from that 3-year vision, you and your leadership team are going to develop a 1-year plan. What do we need to get done this year in order to achieve our 3-year vision? And you may do an offsite retreat. Typically, people who run on EOS often take a 2-day annual retreat with their leadership team. Ours is coming up here in about a week. And they spend time together looking at that 3-year vision and picking the new goals for the next 1-year cadence. And then from that 1-year set of goals, you then develop what are called rocks. And rocks are quarterly targets, specific targets, specific, measurable. You ever hear the SMART thing? Specific, measurable, actionable. Can't remember what R and T stand for, but you get the idea. You set rocks. These are like big, hard, important goals for specific people at your company or specific metrics. So once you have your rocks, your leadership team meets weekly during what's called a level 10 meeting or L10 meeting. You may have heard people talk about Oh yeah, I got my L10 meeting today. That's what that is. It's just they're meeting with their leadership team. They're reviewing their progress on the quarterly rocks. They're looking at their scorecard to see how are we doing on our key metrics. And they're taking a glance at the 1-year goal for the company and just kind of making sure that they're on track. Another big part of that meeting is issues solving. So throughout the week in every small business, there are issues that come up. There's problems, there's roadblocks, there's difficult people or difficult problems. You write all those down and then you solve them together as a leadership team during the L10 meeting. Now, a couple important things about this meeting. First, every issue that you identify needs to go through an IDS process, identify, discuss, solve. You're looking to tackle the root cause of the issue, not just how do we make this problem go away, but why did this happen in the first place and how can we prevent it from happening again? That's the most important part of the IDS portion of the meeting. One of the things that's gonna come out of this meeting is to-dos. You may, in the process of solving the issue, you may come up with like, oh, we need Jeff to go talk to this customer and reset our expectations for working together. Great. That gets documented on the to-do list. And really important here that it has one person's name next to the item. Same thing with rocks. You need one throat to choke. Okay. And I know it's a little bit of a vivid saying here, but it's important that you only have one person accountable for things like rocks and issues and to-dos on your weekly L10s. If you have 2 people responsible, now suddenly, well, I thought you were gonna do it. No, I thought you were gonna do it, right? Now it doesn't mean that the person whose name is next to it needs to actually do that work, but they are accountable for it. So they may Now, they may decide to delegate that to somebody else, or they may check in and collaborate with somebody. But at the end of the day, it's their name on the scorecard and they're the one responsible. Now, what's really cool is once you get your business to a certain point, you don't necessarily need to attend all of these L10 meetings. So I actually stopped attending the leadership L10 meetings earlier this year. And guess what? They're running fine without me because we have a great team in place. This is just another step in getting to the point where you're fully delegating and you're fully empowering your leadership team and your VP of Ops or your COO to the point where the business can run the normal weekly functions without you. All right, so what actually do I still do in my business, right? It sounds like I've kind of fully delegated everything. So what the heck am I even still doing in my own company? Well, I'll tell you a little bit about what is still on my plate. I'll kind of list them off here. Leadership hires. Anyone on the leadership team who's being hired, fired, or promoted, I want to hear about it. I want to know what's going on. Why are we doing this? What's the compensation? You get it, that type of thing. So my number 2 guy, Brennan, he and I will sit down and discuss those matters whenever they come up and make a decision together. Now, often he'll come with a recommendation, that's what I want. But ultimately it's my business. I'm the one accountable and responsible for what's happening. And so I'll kind of make the final decision. There's like some weird legal and tax stuff that ends up working its way up to me. You know what I'm talking about if you're a business owner. You get a strange letter from the IRS, you get some odd invoice at a company you've never heard of. It turns out it's like your benefits manager or something, right? So that stuff makes its way onto my desk and I handle those. It's not a lot. Another area that I maintain control is banking, the money, right? So the banking relationships that you have as a business owner are very important. Whether you're working with like a specialty bank that knows how to deal with property managers and trust accounts like Enterprise Bank, or whether you're working with a larger bank that's just kind of handling your corporate accounts like Chase. We use Chase. That relationship you have with your bank is very, very important. You need to make sure that the bank is happy with however you're operating your business and whatever they need from you. And you are going to need to be the one to reach out to the bank if you need a new account, if you need a new credit card, things like that. So you're also going to be interfacing with them on anything having to do with a loan you may need to take out, real estate you may be purchasing, anything like that. So you need to maintain those relationships. That's not something I'm comfortable yet delegating to anyone else on my team. Another big one here is vendors. So the vendors we work with as property managers are extremely important, from our main property management software to the showing and listing software if you're doing self-showings, to the maintenance coordination software, workflow software. We work with a lot of great vendor partners, but the decisions around when it's time to select a new vendor or switch, whether it's time to expand the services that we're purchasing from a specific vendor, those are decisions that I think really still belong with the business owner and I still have a hand in them. So, you know, I'm out and about at conferences all the time. I'm talking to these vendors a lot. A lot of them sponsor things like my newsletter, sometimes these videos. So I tend to be in touch with what's out there in the marketplace for property managers. They're always telling me, hey, did you hear about this new thing we're launching? Hey, did you hear about this new vendor? Hey, I'm new to the industry. I want you to know about my product or That's great. And I love informing my newsletter subscribers about those things. But I'm also internally kind of thinking, hey, is this something we could use at RL Property Management? Does it make sense for us to switch to a new maintenance coordination software? Should we use the built-in function from our main property accounting software to handle things like rental applications and showings because they just launched a new part of the product and we're paying separately for that right now? So these are very important strategic decisions and they're not just important because of the finances. Like, yes, it's, you know, another monthly bill added to your credit card from the software provider is not always great, although in many cases it's worth it. But even more than the dollar amount is like, how does this impact the workflow of the team? How many tools are we asking them to use on a daily basis? And how do those tools work together? Are they having to enter the same data in multiple places? That's not great. These are things that only you have the 30,000-foot view needed to make the best decision, right? So most of your team, they're operating in silos or departments, and so they see what affects them, and they're always gonna advocate for the best possible software to use for themselves on a daily basis. But you as a business owner, you have the whole picture. You know how the whole business works together and what is gonna be in the best long-term interest of the company as it relates to software and integrations and SaaS partners and vendors. So you need to take that long-term big picture view in making these decisions and explain that to your team when you make a decision like, hey, you know what, we're rolling out PropertyMeld, here's why we're doing it, blah, blah, blah. And give them the full picture because no one likes change, whether you're adding a software or taking one away. No one likes change, and you're gonna have to help them through that change management. Again, that's something you want to use your credibility as the business owner to help the organization through. Now, if you've never done this before, building out the structure of your business and your leadership team to the point where you can work 5 hours or less in your business can be incredibly daunting. It can be a little scary. That's one of the reasons that I run a paid private community for property management business owners called Crane. If you manage at least 150 doors and you want to work with peers, other people who are this same journey to time freedom at their property management company would encourage you to check out Crane. We only open up for new members twice a year, once in the spring for about 2 weeks and once in the fall for about 2 weeks. So take a look at our website and see if applications are open right now. If we're not open for new members right now, join the waitlist and you'll be first to know when we open the doors to new members. Go to joincrane.co to learn more about the Crane community of property managers. Let's talk about some of the harder parts of stepping away from your business. And I like to use a phrase here, and that goes like this: you need to decide what fires to let burn. One of the most challenging parts of being a business owner and a leader is deciding what fires to let burn. If you've never heard that expression, it's a little vivid, but it paints a great picture of the real trade-offs that you need to make as a business owner. I think you already know you can't fix everything, right? We go, we wake up every day, we come to the office, we try to solve every problem, we try to put out every fire, we kind of drive ourselves crazy because a lot of us are perfectionists and we don't want to see any problems in our business ever. However, if you want to achieve time freedom, if you want to work 5 hours or less in your business, you really do need to decide what fires to let burn. This was one of the hardest things for me because I have an engineering background. I really like things to be exactly right. I don't like mistakes. And so I really had to adopt a new mindset here and get comfortable with letting some stuff slide. Another way I sometimes put this is I had to get I'll give you a specific example. So here I'm at our property management office right now, and out here we have a warehouse. We have like a 4,000 square foot warehouse where we keep things like air filters, smoke detectors, and a bunch of other stuff that our team uses to run the property management business, especially the maintenance side of things. Now, if you walk out in that warehouse right now, it's pretty messy, and I don't love that. Like, if, if I had my way, I would get everyone in the office. I would say, everyone out to the warehouse. We're going to organize the warehouse today because I don't like that disorder. I don't like how messy it looks. That is not what I want for my life. Solving a customer problem. That is not going to help us make more money. That is not going to reduce risk. There's no real business purpose to that, or it's a very small business purpose. And so I had to make the decision that, you know what, this is a fire I'm going to let burn. I'm going to let this warehouse be messy and I'm going to see it every day and not like it. But it's the price I pay for my freedom of time is letting some stuff slide. Another tough example for me, and tell me if you relate to this, if you own a property management business, once in a while I still get a property owner that contacts me directly. They reach out to me and they say, Peter, I'm having a real problem with your team here. I've been working with them to try to get this resolved and it's still not fixed. And some of you may disagree with how I handle this. I pull up that email, I move my mouse over to the forward button and I click and I type Brennan's name and I click send. And that email is now Brennan's problem. And Brennan reaches out to that property owner. Hey, this is Brennan. I'm number 2 here at the company. I hear you've been having some problems. I want to talk to you about it. That was not an easy thing to do the first time because a lot of these folks I know personally, they're in my community. I may see them at church or somewhere else. You know, I may see them around town. To hand off that responsibility of solving difficult customer problems was one of the last things that I let go of, and it was hard to do. But this comes back to what I was talking about earlier. You have to empower your team. You have to let them see what's really going on. You have to close the loop for them, the feedback loop of here's how we're operating and here are the results that it's producing. Good, bad, indifferent, whatever it is. If I'm constantly jumping in and saving our key accounts, that is not doing right by the business. It's not doing right by the team. I might be doing right by that one customer that one time, but I'm not actually doing right by all the future customers that are then going to encounter the same exact problems because I jumped in and saved the day and the team didn't make the changes necessary to prevent those problems from happening in the first place. And again, I know this is going to be the most controversial advice probably in this video. I don't think you should continue talking to rental owners. Once you get to the point where you have a great team, let the team handle those rental owners. Let them solve the difficult problems for you. Now, this doesn't mean I've abdicated my responsibility as the business owner. If there is a matter of safety, if there is a matter of our ability to continue operating as a property management business, such as something that's threatening our license, our real estate license with the Division of Real Estate, if there is some type of fraud happening or criminal negligence, if we are making people in their rental homes unsafe, unsafe or unhealthy, absolutely, I'm going to jump in. Those are not fires that I'm going to let burn. So there are limits here to what you can hand off as a business owner. Sometimes when I get a difficult email from a client, think about it for 10 seconds, forward it to Brennan, and then I drive home, have a drink, and play with my kids. And that's a decision I get to make as a business owner. That's why we decided to start a company and take on the risk and the stress and the incredible time commitment that comes in those early years, especially of starting a business. Give yourself a little permission to reap the rewards. Like, that's why we did this in the first place at all, is to have time freedom and to be able to make choices like that. So I don't feel guilty about it at all, and I don't think you should either. So for the last 4 years, I've taken the month of June off completely. I step away from the business. As mentioned, no phone calls, no emails, no Slack. And on my way out the door, here's what I tell Brennan. I say, listen, I don't want a call from you. And Unless the building burns down, you quit, or something is preventing us from being able to operate as a business, like our license is being revoked by the Division of Real Estate. Everything else can wait until I'm back on July 1st. Now, that doesn't mean everything was perfect. There were issues, especially that first year. So there was a major health insurance renewal that happened in the middle of June, which I sort of forgot about. I needed to jump in and sign some documents to make sure that our employees didn't lose health insurance coverage while I was gone. Of course, you need to somewhat be flexible and understand that there are problems that may require you to jump in. However, the more you do this, the better you'll get at it. So you may want to start with a 1-week full disconnect. By the way, we call these crane breaks in the crane community. Start with a 1-week crane break, work your way up to a 2-week crane break, and then get into the full month off. And the more you do this, the more you step away, the easier it gets because your team gets used to it. You begin to fully offload any lingering tasks or decisions, and then before you know it, you're able to take that full month away. And every time you come back from one of these breaks, really do a debrief with your leadership team and figure out what broke, what happened, what went wrong. Go through your inbox, go through the mail, go through your issues list and figure out what could I have done ahead of time or how can we set up the business and the systems so that next time I'm away, this doesn't happen. And if you build a system in this way, your business is going to get stronger and stronger. And that's what I love about this is it's not just for you to take a vacation. The better your business can operate without you as the business owner, the more valuable it is and the more engaging and fulfilling it is for your team to work at as well. What you really want to do is give your team an opportunity to build their judgment. If you make all the decisions for them, they never get that chance. Your team wants to excel and thrive, and they want you actually, believe it or not, they want you to be able to take time away. In fact, they may be happy when you tell them, hey, I'm taking 2 weeks off. They might be like, great, can it be 3 weeks? You'd be surprised. And giving them the time and space to exercise that judgment is one of the best things you can do for you, for them and for your business. If you want to see the systems that support this structure, I recorded a video called Property Management Is Hard Until You Build Systems Like This. You can find the link in the description. Check that video out if you want to know more about how we actually do this.